GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY

EDMUND GOSSE

1913

OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE

_Northern Studies_. 1879. 

_Life of Gray_. 1882. 

_Seventeenth-Century Studies_. 1883. 

_Life of Congreve_. 1888. 

_A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature_. 1889

_Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F. R. S_. 1890. 

_The Secret of Narcisse: a Romance_. 1892. 

_Questions at Issue_. 1893. 

_Critical Kit-Kats_. 1896. 

_A Short History of Modern English Literature_. 1897. 

_Life and Letters of John Donne_. 1899. 

_Hypolympia_. 1901. 

_French Profiles_. 1904. 

_Life of Jeremy Taylor_. 1904. 

_Life of Sir Thomas Browne_. 1905. 

_Father and Son_. 1907. 

_Life of Ibsen_. 1908. 

_Two Visits to Denmark_. 1911. 

_Collected Poems_. 1911. 

_Portraits and Sketches_. 1912. 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA"

A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES

A POET IN PRISON

DEATH'S DUEL

GERARD'S HERBAL

PHARAMOND

A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS

A CENSOR OF POETS

THE ROMANCE OF A DICTIONARY

LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS

AMASIA

LOVE AND BUSINESS

WHAT ANN LANG READ

CATS

SMART'S POEMS

POMPEY THE LITTLE

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNGLE

BEAU NASH

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE

PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS

THE FANCY

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS

THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS

IONICA

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

INDEX

 _O blessed Letters, that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all: By you we doe conferre with who are gone, And the dead-living unto councell call: By you th' unborne shall have communion Of what we feele, and what doth us befall_. 

_SAM. DANIEL Musophilus. 1602_. 

INTRODUCTORY

It is curious to reflect that the library, in our customary sense, is quite a modern institution. Three hundred years ago there were nopublic libraries in Europe. The Ambrosian, at Milan, dates from 1608;the Bodleian, at Oxford, from 1612. To these Angelo Rocca added his inRome, in 1620. But private collections of books always existed, andthese were the haunts of learning, the little glimmering hearths overwhich knowledge spread her cold fingers, in the darkest ages of theworld. To-day, although national and private munificence has increasedthe number of public libraries so widely that almost every reader iswithin reach of books, the private library still flourishes. Thereare men all through the civilised world to whom a book is a jewel--anindividual possession of great price. I have been asked to gossipabout my books, for I also am a bibliophile. But when I think of thegreat collections of fine books, of the libraries of the magnificent, I do not know whether I dare admit any stranger to glance at mine. The Mayor of Queenborough feels as though he were a very importantpersonage till Royalty drives through his borough without noticing hisscarf and his cocked hat; and then, for the first time, he observeshow small the Queenborough town-hall is. But if one is to gossip aboutbooks, it is, perhaps, as well that one should have some limits. Iwill leave the masters of bibliography to sing of greater matters, andwill launch upon no more daring voyage than one _autour de ma pauvrebibliothèque_. 

I have heard that the late Mr. Edward Solly, a very pious andworshipful lover of books, under several examples of whose book-plateI have lately reverently placed my own, was so anxious to fly alloutward noise that he built himself a library in his garden. I havebeen told that the books stood there in perfect order, with therose-spray flapping at the window, and great Japanese vases exhalingsuch odours as most annoy an insect-nostril. The very bees would cometo the window, and sniff, and boom indignantly away again. The silencethere was perfect. It must have been in such a secluded library thatChristian Mentzelius was at work when he heard the male book-worm flaphis wings, and crow like a cock in calling to his mate. I feel surethat even Mentzelius, a very courageous writer, would hardly pretendthat he could hear such a "shadow of all sound" elsewhere. That isthe library I should like to have. In my sleep, "where dreams aremultitude, " I sometimes fancy that one day I shall have a library ina garden. The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man--"alibrary in a garden!" It sounds like having a castle in Spain, or asheep-walk in Arcadia, and I suppose that merely to wish for it is tobe what indignant journalists call "a faddling hedonist. "

In the meanwhile, my books are scattered about in cases in differentparts of a double sitting-room, where the cats carouse on one side, and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friendof Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale greenmarble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. FrederickLocker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when hismaster's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot have cabinets ofebony and cedar, I may just as well have plain deal, with common glassdoors to keep the dust out. I detest your Persian apparatus. 

It is a curious reflection, that the ordinary private person whocollects objects of a modest luxury, has nothing about him so old ashis books. If a wave of the rod made everything around him disappearthat did not exist a century ago, he would suddenly find himself withone or two sticks of furniture, perhaps, but otherwise alone with hisbooks. Let the work of another century pass, and certainly nothingbut these little brown volumes would be left, so many caskets fullof passion and tenderness, disappointed ambition, fruitless hope, self-torturing envy, conceit aware, in maddening lucid moments, of itsown folly. I think if Mentzelius had been worth his salt, those earsof his, which heard the book-worm crow, might have caught the echo ofa sigh from beneath many a pathetic vellum cover. There is somethingawful to me, of nights, and when I am alone, in thinking of all thesouls imprisoned in the ancient books around me. Not one, I suppose, but was ushered into the world with pride and glee, with a flushedcheek and heightened pulse; not one enjoyed a career that in allpoints justified those ample hopes and flattering promises. 

The outward and visible mark of the citizenship of the book-lover ishis book-plate. There are many good bibliophiles who abide in thetrenches, and never proclaim their loyalty by a book-plate. They arewith us, but not of us; they lack the courage of their opinions; theycollect with timidity or carelessness; they have no need for themorrow. Such a man is liable to great temptations. He is brought faceto face with that enemy of his species, the borrower, and dares notspeak with him in the gate. If he had a book-plate he would say, "Oh!certainly I will lend you this volume, if it has not my book-plate init; of course, one makes a rule never to lend a book that has. " Hewould say this, and feign to look inside the volume, knowing rightwell that this safeguard against the borrower is there already. To have a book-plate gives a collector great serenity andself-confidence. We have laboured in a far more conscientious spiritsince we had ours than we did before. A learned poet, Lord De Tabley, wrote a fascinating volume on book-plates, some years ago, withcopious illustrations. There is not, however, one specimen in his bookwhich I would exchange for mine, the work and the gift of one of themost imaginative of American artists, the late Edwin A. Abbey. Itrepresents a very fine gentleman of about 1610, walking in broadsunlight in a garden, reading a little book of verses. The name iscoiled around him, with the motto, _Gravis cantantibus umbra_. I willnot presume to translate this tag of an eclogue, and I only venture tomention such an uninteresting matter, that my indulgent readers mayhave a more vivid notion of what I call my library. Mr. Abbey's fineart is there, always before me, to keep my ideal high. 

To possess few books, and those not too rich and rare for daily use, has this advantage, that the possessor can make himself master of themall, can recollect their peculiarities, and often remind himself oftheir contents. The man that has two or three thousand books can befamiliar with them all; he that has thirty thousand can hardly have aspeaking acquaintance with more than a few. The more conscientioushe is, the more he becomes like Lucian's amateur, who was so muchoccupied in rubbing the bindings of his books with sandal-wood andsaffron, that he had no time left to study the contents. After all, with every due respect paid to "states" and editions and bindings andtall copies, the inside of the volume is really the essential part ofit. 

The excuses for collecting, however, are more than satire is ready toadmit. The first edition represents the author's first thought; in itwe read his words as he sent them out to the world in his first heat, with the type he chose, and with such peculiarities of form as heselected to do most justice to his creation. We often discover littleindividual points in a first edition, which never occur again. And ifit be conceded that there is an advantage in reading a book in theform which the author originally designed for it, then all the otherrefinements of the collector become so many acts of respect paidto this first virgin apparition, touching and suitable homage ofcleanness and fit adornment. It is only when this homage becomes mereeye-service, when a book radically unworthy of such dignity is toodelicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor dilettantismcomes in between the reader and what he reads. Indeed, the best ofvolumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by abinding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal. Tothe feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, a tenpenny book in aten-pound binding, I say fie. Perhaps the ideal library, after all, isa small one, where the books are carefully selected and thoughtfullyarranged in accordance with one central code of taste, and intendedto be respectfully consulted at any moment by the master of theirdestinies. If fortune made me possessor of one book of excessivevalue, I should hasten to part with it. In a little working library, to hold a first quarto of _Hamlet_, would be like entertaining areigning monarch in a small farmhouse at harvesting. 

Much has of late been written, however, and pleasantly written, aboutthe collecting and preserving of books. It is not my intention here toadd to this department of modern literature. But I shall select fromamong my volumes some which seem less known in detail to modernreaders than they should be, and I shall give brief "retrospectivereviews" of these as though they were new discoveries. In other cases, where the personal history of a well-known book seems worth detachingfrom our critical estimate of it, that shall be the subject of mylucubration. Perhaps it may not be an unwelcome novelty to apply toold books the test we so familiarly apply to new ones. They will bearit well, for in their case there is no temptation to introduce anyelement of prejudice. Mr. Bludyer himself does not fly into a passionover a squat volume published two centuries ago, even when, as in thecase of the first edition of Harrington's _Oceana_, there is such amonstrous list of errata that the writer has to tell us, by way ofexcuse, that a spaniel has been "questing" among his papers. 

These scarce and neglected books are full of interesting things. Voltaire never made a more unfortunate observation than when hesaid that rare books were worth nothing, since, if they were worthanything, they would not be rare. We know better nowadays; we know howmuch there is in them which may appeal to only one man here and there, and yet to him with a voice like a clarion. There are books that havelain silent for a century, and then have spoken with the trumpet of aprophecy. We shall disdain nothing; we shall have a little criticism, a little anecdote, a little bibliography; and our old book shallgo back to the shelves before it has had time to be tedious in itsbabbling. 

CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA"

BRITAIN: _or a chorographical description of the most flourishingKingdomes, England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning;out of the depth of Antiquitie: beautified with Mappes of the severallShires of England; Written first in Latine by William Camden, Clarenceux K. Of A. Translated newly into English by Philémon Holland. Londini, Impensis Georgii Bishop & Joannis Norton, M. DC. X_. 

There is no more remarkable example of the difference between thereaders of our light and hurrying age and those who obeyed "Eliza andour James, " than the fact that the book we have before us at thismoment, a folio of some eleven hundred pages, adorned, like a fightingelephant, with all the weightiest panoply of learning, was one of themost popular works of its time. It went through six editions, thisvast antiquarian itinerary, before the natural demand of the vulgarreleased it from its Latin austerity; and the title-page we havequoted is that of the earliest English edition, specially translated, under the author's eye, by Dr. Philémon Holland, a laboriousschoolmaster of Coventry. Once open to the general public, althoughthen at the close of its first quarter of a century, the _Britannia_flourished with a new lease of life, and continued to bloom, like aliterary magnolia, all down the seventeenth century. It Is nowas little read as other famous books of uncompromising size. Thebookshelves of to-day are not fitted for the reception of these heroicfolios, and if we want British antiquities now, we find them in terserform and more accurately, or at least more plausibly, annotated in thewritings of later antiquaries. Giant Camden moulders at his cave'smouth, a huge and reverend form seldom disturbed by puny passers-by. But his once popular folio was the life work of a particularlyinteresting and human person; and without affecting to penetrate tothe darkest corners of the cavern, it may be instructive to stand alittle while on the threshold. 

When this first English edition of the _Britannia_ was published, Camden was one of the most famous of living English writers. For oneman of position who had heard of Shakespeare, there would be twenty, at least, who were quite familiar with the claims of the Head-masterof Westminster and Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden was in his sixtiethyear, in 1610; he had enjoyed slow success, violent detraction, andfinal triumph. His health was poor, but he continued to write history, eager, as he says, to show that "though I have been a studious admirerof venerable antiquity, yet have I not been altogether an incuriousspectator of modern occurrences. " He stood easily first among thehistorians of his time; he was respected and adored by the Court andby the Universities, and that his fame might be completed by thechrism of detraction, his popularity was assured from year to year bythe dropping fire of obloquy which the Papists scattered from theirsecret presses. It had not been without a struggle that Camden hadattained this pinnacle; and the _Britannia_ had been his alpenstock. 

This first English edition has the special interest of representingCamden's last thoughts. It is nominally a translation of the sixthLatin edition, but it has a good deal of additional matter suppliedto Philémon Holland by the author, whereas later English issuescontaining fresh material are believed to be so far spurious. The_Britannia_ grew with the life of Camden. He tells us that it waswhen he was a young man of six-and-twenty, lately started on hisprofessional career as second master in Westminster School, that thefamous Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortelius, "dealt earnestly with methat I would illustrate this isle of Britain. " This was no light taskto undertake in 1577. The authorities were few, and these in thehighest degree occasional or fragmentary. It was not a question ofcompiling a collection of topographical antiquities. The whole processhad to be gone through "from the egg. "

As a youth at Oxford, Camden had turned all his best attention to thisbranch of study, and what the ancients had written about England wasintimately known to him. Any one who looks at his book will see thatthe first 180 pages of the _Britannia_ could be written by a scholarwithout stirring from his chair at Westminster. But when it came tothe minute description of the counties there was nothing for it butpersonal travel; and accordingly Camden spent what holidays he couldsnatch from his labours as a schoolmaster in making a deliberatesurvey of the divisions of England. We possess some particulars of oneof these journeys, that which occupied 1582, in which he started bySuffolk, through Yorkshire, and returned through Lancashire. He was avery rapid worker, he spared no pains, and in 1586, nine years afterOrtelius set him going, his first draft was issued from the press. Inlater times, and when his accuracy had been cruelly impeached, he setforth his claims to attention with dignity. He said: "I have in nowise neglected such things as are most material to search and sift outthe truth. I have attained to some skill of the most ancient Britishand Anglo-Saxon tongues; I have travelled over all England for themost part, I have conferred with most skilful observers in eachcounty. .. . I have been diligent in the records of this realm. I havelooked into most libraries, registers and memorials of churches, cities and corporations, I have pored upon many an old roll andevidence . .. That the honour of verity might in no wise be impeached. "

It was no slight task to undertake such a work on such a scale. Andwhen the first Latin edition appeared, it was hailed as a first gloryin the diadem of Elizabeth. Specialists in particular counties foundthat Camden knew more about their little circle than they themselveshad taken all their lives to learn. Lombard, the great Kentishantiquary, said that he never knew Kent properly, till he read of itin the _Britannia_. But Camden was not content to rest on his laurels. Still, year by year, he made his painful journeys through the lengthand breadth of the land, and still, as new editions were called forth, the book grew from octavo into folio. Suddenly, about twelve yearsafter its first unchallenged appearance, there was issued, like a boltout of the blue, a very nasty pamphlet, called _Discovery of certainErrors Published in the much-commended Britannia_, which created afine storm in the antiquarian teapot. This attack was the work of aman who would otherwise be forgotten, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald. He had formerly been an admirer of Camden's, his "humble friend, "he called himself; but when Camden was promoted over his head to beClarenceux King-of-Arms, it seemed to Ralph Brooke that it becamehis duty to denounce the too successful antiquary as a charlatan. Heaccordingly fired off the unpleasant little gun already mentioned, and, for the moment, he hit Camden rather hard. 

The author of the _Britannia_, to justify his new advancement, hadintroduced into a fresh edition of his book a good deal of informationregarding the descent of barons and other noble families. This wasYork Herald's own subject, and he was able to convict Camden ofa startling number of negligences, and what he calls "many grossmistakings. " The worst part of it was that York Herald had privatelypointed out these blunders to Camden, and that the latter had said itwas too much trouble to alter them. This, at least, is what the enemystates in his attack, and if this be true, it can hardly be doubledthat Camden had sailed too long in fair weather, or that he needed asquall to recall him to the duties of the helm. He answered Brooke, who replied with increased contemptuous tartness. It is admitted thatCamden was indiscreet in his manner of reply, and that some genuineholes had been pricked in his heraldry. But the _Britannia_ lay highout of the reach of fatal pedantic attack, and this little cloud overthe reputation of the book passed entirely away, and is remembered nowonly as a curiosity of literature. 

In the preface the author quaintly admits that "many have found adefect in this work that maps were not adjoined, which do allure theeyes by pleasant portraitures, . .. Yet my ability could not compassit. " They must, then, have been added at the last by a generousafterthought, for this book is full of maps. The maritime ones areadorned with ships in full sail, and bold sea-monsters with curlytails; the inland ones are speckled with trees and spires andhillocks. In spite of these old-fashioned oddities, the maps areremarkably accurate. They are signed by John Norden and William Kip, the master map-makers of that reign. The book opens with an account ofthe first inhabitants of Britain, and their manners and customs; howthe Romans fared, and what antiquities they left behind, with copiousplates of Roman coins. By degrees we come down, through Saxons andNormans, to that work which was peculiarly Camden's, the topographicalantiquarianism. He begins with Cornwall, "that region which, accordingto the geographers, is the first of all Britain, " and then proceeds towhat he calls "Denshire" and we Devonshire, a county, as he remarks, "barbarous on either side. "

With page 822 he finds himself at the end of his last English county, Northumberland, looking across the Tweed to Berwick, "the strongesthold in all Britain, " where it is "no marvel that soldiers withoutother light do play here all night long at dice, considering the sidelight that the sunbeams cast all night long. " This rather exaggeratedstatement is evidently that of a man accustomed to look upon Berwickas the northernmost point of his country, as we shall all do, nodoubt, when Scotland has secured Home Rule. We are, therefore, notsurprised to find Scotland added, in a kind of hurried appendix, inspecial honour to James I and VI. The introduction to the Scottishsection is in a queer tone of banter; Camden knows little and caresless about the "commonwealth of the Scots, " and "withall will lightlypass over it. " In point of fact, he gets to Duncansby Head infifty-two pages, and not without some considerable slips ofinformation. Ireland interests him more, and he finally closes with asheet of learned gossip about the outlying islands. 

The scope of Camden's work did not give Philémon Holland muchopportunity for spreading the wings of his style. Anxious to presentCamden fairly, the translator is curiously uneven in manner, nowstately, now slipshod, weaving melodious sentences, but forgetting totie them up with a verb. He is commonly too busy with hard facts tobe a Euphuist. But here is a pretty and ingenious passage aboutCambridge, unusually popular in manner, and exceedingly handsome inthe mouth of an Oxford man:

"On this side the bridge, where standeth the greater part by far ofthe City, you have a pleasant sight everywhere to the eye, what offair streets orderly ranged, what of a number of churches, and ofsixteen colleges, sacred mansions of the Muses, wherein a number ofgreat learned men are maintained, and wherein the knowledge of thebest arts, and the skill in tongues, so flourish, that they mayrightly be counted the fountains of literature, religion and allknowledge whatsoever, who right sweetly bedew and sprinkle, with mostwholesome waters, the gardens of the Church and Commonwealth throughEngland. Nor is there wanting anything here, that a man may require ina most flourishing University, were it not that the air is somewhatunhealthful, arising as it doth out of a fenny ground hard by. Andyet, peradventure, they that first founded a University in that place, allowed of Plato's judgment. For he, being of a very excellent andstrong constitution of body, chose out the Academia, an unwholesomeplace of Attica, for to study in, and so the superfluous ranknessof body which might overlay the mind, might be kept under by thedis-temperature of the place. "

The poor scholars in the mouldering garrets of Clare, looking overwaste land to the oozy Cam, no doubt wished that their foundress hadbeen less Spartan. Very little of the domestic architecture thatCamden admired in Cambridge is now left; and yet probably it andOxford are the two places of all which he describes that it would givehim least trouble to identify if he came to life again three hundredyears after the first appearance of his famous _Britannia_. 

A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES

A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES: _being a true Chronicle Historie of theuntimely falles of such unfortunate Princes and men of note, as havehappened since the first entrance of Brute into this Iland, untillthis our latter Age. Newly enlarged with a last part, called_ A WINTERNIGHTS VISION, _being an addition of such Tragedies, especiallyfamous, as are exempted in the former Historie, with a Poem annexed, called_ ENGLAND'S ELIZA. _At London. Imprinted by Felix Kyngston_, 1610. 

This huge quarto of 875 pages, all in verse, is the final form, thoughfar from the latest impression, of a poetical miscellany which hadbeen swelling and spreading for nearly sixty years without ever losingits original character. We may obtain some imperfect notion of the_Mirror for Magistrates_ if we imagine a composite poem planned bySir Walter Scott, and contributed to by Wordsworth and Southey, beingstill issued, generation after generation, with additions by theyoungest versifiers of to-day. The _Mirror for Magistrates_ wasconceived when Mary's protomartyrs were burning at Smithfield, and itwas not finished until James I. Had been on the throne seven years. From first to last, at least sixteen writers had a finger in this pie, and the youngest of them was not born when the eldest of them died. 

It is commonly said, even by such exact critics as the late DeanChurch, that the _Mirror for Magistrates_ was planned by the mostfamous of the poets who took part in its execution, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. If a very clever man is combined in any enterprisewith people of less prominence, it is ten to one that he gets all thecredit of the adventure. But the evidence on this point goes to provethat it was not until the work was well advanced that Sackvillecontributed to it at all. The inventor of the _Mirror for Magistrates_seems, rather, to have been George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer andpolitician, who was master of the King's Pastimes at the very closeof Henry VIII. 's reign. Ferrers was ambitious to create a drama inEngland, and lacked only genius to be the British Aeschylus. The timewas not ripe, but he was evidently very anxious to set the worldtripping to his goatherd's pipe. He advertised for help in thesedesigns, and the list of persons he wanted is an amusing one; he waswilling to engage "a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, aphysician, an apothecary, a master of requests, a civilian, a clown, two gentlemen ushers, besides jugglers, tumblers, fools, friars, andsuch others, " Fortune sent him, from Oxford, one William Baldwin, whowas most of these things, especially divine and poet, and who becameFerrers' confidential factotum. The master and assistant-master ofPastimes were humming merrily on at their masques and triumphs, when, the King expired. Under Queen Mary, revels might not flourish, but thefriendship between Ferrers and Baldwin did not cease. They planned amore doleful but more durable form of entertainment, and the _Mirrorfor Magistrates_ was started. Those who claim for Sackville themain part of this invention, forget that he is not mentioned as acontributor till what was really the third edition, and that, when thefirst went to press, he was only eighteen years of age. 

Ferrers well comprehended the taste of his age when he conceived thenotion of a series of poems, in which famous kings and nobles shoulddescribe in their own persons the frailty and instability of worldlyprosperity, even in those whom Fortune seems most highly to favour. One of the most popular books of the preceding century had beenLydgate's version of Boccaccio's poems on the calamities ofillustrious men, a vast monody in nine books, all harping on thatsingle chord of the universal mutability of fortune. Lydgate's _Fallof Princes_ had, by the time that Mary ascended the throne, existedin popular esteem for a hundred years. Its language and versificationwere now so antiquated as to be obsolete; it was time that princesshould fall to a more modern measure. 

The first edition of Baldwin and Ferrers' book went to press earlyin 1555, but of this edition only one or two fragments exist. It was"hindered by the Lord Chancellor that then was, " Stephen Gardiner, andwas entirely suppressed. The leaf in the British Museum is closelyprinted in double columns, and suggests that Baldwin and Ferrers meantto make a huge volume of it. The death of Mary removed the embargo, and before Elizabeth had been Queen for many months, the second (orgenuine first) edition of the _Myrroure for Magistrates_ made itsappearance, a thin quarto, charmingly printed in two kinds of type. This contained twenty lives--Haslewood, the only critic who hasdescribed this edition, says _nineteen_, but he overlooked Ferrers'tale of "Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester"--and was the work, so Baldwintells us, of seven persons besides himself. 

The first story in the book, a story which finally appears at p. 276of the edition before us, recounts the "Fall of Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of England, and other of his fellows, for misconstruingthe laws and expounding them to serve the Prince's affections, Anno1388. " The manner in which this story is presented is a good exampleof the mode adopted throughout the miscellany. The corrupt judge andhis fellow-lawyers appear, as in a mirror, or like personages behindthe illuminated sheet at the "Chat Noir, " and lamentably recount theirwoes in chorus. The story of Tresilian was written by Ferrers, but thepersons who speak it address his companion:

 _Baldwin, we beseech thee with our names to begin_

--which support Baldwin's claim to be looked upon as the editor of thewhole book. It is very dreary doggerel, it must be confessed, but noworse than most of the poetry indited in England at that uninspiredmoment in the national history. A short example--a flower culled fromany of these promiscuous thickets--will suffice to give a generalnotion of the garden. Here is part of the lament of "The LordClifford":

 _Because my father Lord John Clifford died, Slain at St. Alban's, in his prince's aid, Against the Duke my heart for malice fired, So that I could from wreck no way be stayed, But, to avenge my father's death, assayed All means I might the Duke of York to annoy, And all his kin and friends for to destroy. 

 This made me with my bloody dagger wound His guiltless son, that never 'gainst me stored; His father's body lying dead on ground To pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword To part his neck, and with his head to board, Invested with a royal paper crown, From place to place to bear it up and down. 

 But cruelty can never 'scape the scourge Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death; Repentance self that other sins may purge Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth; Despair dissolves the tyrant's bitter breath, For sudden vengeance suddenly alights On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites_. 

The only contribution to this earliest form of the _Mirror_ which isattributed to an eminent writer, is the "Edward IV" of Skelton, andthis is one of the most tuneless of all. It reminds the ear of awhining ballad snuffled out in the street at night by some unhappyminstrel that has got no work to do. As Baldwin professes to quoteit from memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its versificationsuffered in his hands. 

This is not the place to enter minutely into the history of thebuilding up of this curious book. The next edition, that of 1563, was enriched by Sackville's splendid "Induction" and the tale of"Buckingham, " both of which are comparatively known so well, and havebeen so often reprinted separately, that I need not dwell upon themhere. They occupy pp. 255-271 and 433-455 of the volume before us. In1574 a very voluminous contributor to the constantly swelling tide ofverse appears. Thomas Blener Hasset, a soldier on service in GuernseyCastle, thought that the magisterial ladies had been neglected, andproceeded in 1578 to sing the fall of princesses. It is needless tocontinue the roll of poets, but it is worth while to point out theremarkable fact that each new candidate held up the mirror to themagistrates so precisely in the manner of his predecessors, that itis difficult to distinguish Newton from Baldwin, or Churchyard fromNiccols. 

Richard Niccols, who is responsible for the collection in its finalstate, was a person of adventure, who had fought against Cadiz in the_Ark_, and understood the noble practice of the science of artillery. By the time it came down to him, in 1610, the _Mirror for Magistrates_had attained such a size that he was obliged to omit what had formeda pleasing portion of it, the prose dialogues which knit the tales inverse together, such pleasant familiar chatter between the poets as"Ferrers, said Baldwin, take you the chronicles and mark them as theycome, " and the like. It was a pity to lose all this, but Niccols hadadditions of his own verse to make; ten new legends entitled "A WinterNight's Vision, " and a long eulogy upon Queen Elizabeth, "England'sEliza. " He would have been more than human, if he had not consideredall this far more valuable than the old prose babbling in blackletter. This copy of mine is of the greatest rarity, for it containstwo dedicatory sonnets by Richard Niccols, one addressed to LadyElizabeth Clere and the other to the Earl of Nottingham, which seem tohave been instantly suppressed, and are only known to exist in thisand, I believe, one or two other examples of the book. These are, perhaps, worth reprinting for their curiosity. The first runs asfollows:--

 _My Muse, that whilom wail'd those Briton kings, Who unto her in vision did appear, Craves leave to strengthen her night-weathered wings In the warm sunshine of your golden Clere [clear]; Where she, fair Lady, tuning her chaste lays Of England's Empress to her hymnic string For your affect, to hear that virgins praise, Makes choice of your chaste self to hear her sing, Whose royal worth, (true virtue's paragon, ) Here made me dare to engrave your worthy name. In hope that unto you the same alone Will so excuse me of presumptuous blame, That graceful entertain my Muse may find And even bear such grace in thankful mind_. 

The sonnet to the Earl of Nottingham, the famous admiral and quondamrival of Sir Walter Raleigh, is more interesting:--

 _As once that dove (true honour's aged Lord), Hovering with wearied wings about your ark, When Cadiz towers did fall beneath your sword, To rest herself did single out that bark, So my meek Muse, --from all that conquering rout, Conducted through the sea's wild wilderness By your great self, to grave their names about The Iberian pillars of Jove's Hercules, -- Most humbly craves your lordly lion's aid 'Gainst monster envy, while she tells her story Of Britain's princes, and that royall maid In whose chaste hymn her Clio sings your glory, Which if, great Lord, you grant, my Muse shall frame Mirrors most worthy your renownèd name_. 

But apparently the "great Lord" would not grant permission, and so thesonnet had to be rigorously suppressed. 

The _Mirror for Magistrates_ has ceased to be more than a curiosityand a collector's rarity, but it once assumed a very ambitiousfunction. It was a serious attempt to build up, as a cathedral isbuilt by successive architects, a great national epic, the work ofmany hands. In a gloomy season of English history, in a violent ageof tyranny, fanaticism, and legalised lawlessness, it endeavouredto present, to all whom it might concern, a solemn succession ofdiscrowned tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws they hadmade. Sometimes, in its bold and not very delicate way, the _Mirrorfor Magistrates_ is impressive still from its lofty moral tone, itsgloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read itssombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motionwhich makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it atthe next into the pit of pain and oblivion. Steadily, uniformly, theunflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royalhow "Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace, " and how "Sir AnthonyWoodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless imprisoned and cruelly wounded";how "King Kimarus was devoured by wild beasts, " and how "Sigeburt, forhis wicked life, was thrust from his throne and miserably slain by aherdsman. " It gives us a strange feeling of sympathy to realise thatthe immense popularity of this book must have been mainly due to thefact that it comforted the multitudes who groaned under a harsh andviolent despotism to be told over and over again that cruel kings andunjust judges habitually came at last to a bad end. 

A POET IN PRISON

THE SHEPHEARDS HUNTING: _being Certain Eglogues written during thetime of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey. By George Wyther, Gentleman. London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are tobe sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre_. 1615. 

If ever a man needed resuscitation in our antiquarian times it wasGeorge Wither. When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortableoblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor incotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to berecollected. He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Annepersistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessedreally by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy. Swift, in _The Battle of the Books_, brings in this poet as themeanest common trooper that he can mention in his modern army. Popespeaks of him with the utmost freedom as "wretched Withers. " It istrue that he lived too long and wrote too much--a great deal toomuch. Mr. Hazlitt gives the titles of more than one hundred of hispublications, and some of them are wonderfully unattractive. I shouldnot like to be shut up on a rainy day with his _Salt upon Salt_, whichseems to have lost its savour, nor do I yearn to blow upon his _TubaPacifica_, although it was "disposed of rather for love than money. "The truth is that good George Wither lost his poetry early, was anupright, honest, and patriotic man who unhappily developed into ascold, and got into the bad habit of pouring out "precautions, ""cautional expressions, " "prophetic phrensies, " "epistles at random, ""personal contributions to the national humiliation, " "passages, ""raptures, " and "allarums, " until he really became the greatest borein Christendom. It was Charles Lamb who swept away this whole tediousstructure of Wither's later writings and showed us what a lovely poethe was in his youth. 

When the book before us was printed, George Wither was agedtwenty-seven. He had just stepped gingerly out of the MarshalseaPrison, and his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest againsthaving been put there at all and deprecation of being put there again. Let no one waste the tear of sensibility over that shell of theMarshalsea Prison, which still, I believe, exists. The family of theDorrits languished in quite another place from the original Marshalseaof Wither's time, although that also lay across the water inSouthwark. It is said that the prison was used for the confinement ofpersons who had spoken lewdly of dignitaries about the Court. Wither, as we shall see, makes a great parade of telling us why he wasimprisoned; but his language is obscure. Perhaps he was afraid to beexplicit. In 1613 he had published a little volume of satires, called_Abuses stript and whipt_. This had been very popular, running intosix or seven editions within a short time, and some one in office, nodoubt, had fitted on the fool's cap. Five years later the poor poetwould have had a chance of being shipped straight off to Virginia, asa "debauched person"; as it was, the Marshalsea seems to have beentolerably unpleasant. We gather, however, that he enjoyed somealleviations. He could say, like Leigh Hunt, "the visits of my friendswere the bright side of my captivity; I read verses without end, andwrote almost as many. " The poems we have before us were written in theMarshalsea. The book itself is very tiny and pretty, with a sortof leafy trellis-work at the top and bottom of every page, almostsuggesting a little posy of wild-flowers thrown through the iron barsof the poet's cage, and pressed between the pages of his manuscript. Nor is there any book of Wither's which breathes more deeply of theperfume of the fields than this which was written in the noisomeseclusion of the Marshalsea. 

Although the title-page assures us that these "eglogues" were writtenduring the author's imprisonment, we may have a suspicion that thefirst three were composed just after his release. They are verydistinct from the rest in form and character. To understand them wemust remember that in 1614, just before the imprisonment, Wither hadtaken a share with his bosom friend, William Browne, of the InnerTemple, in bringing out a little volume of pastorals, called _TheShepherd's Pipe_. Browne, a poet who deserves well of all Devonshiremen, was two years younger than Wither, and had just begun to comebefore the public as the author of that charming, lazy, Virgilian poemof _Britannia's Pastorals_. There was something of Keats in Browne, anartist who let the world pass him by; something of Shelley in Wither, a prophet who longed to set his seal on human progress. In the_Shepherd's Pipe_ Willy (William Browne) and Roget (Geo-t-r) had beenthe interlocutors, and Christopher Brooke, another rhyming friend, hadwritten an eclogue under the name of Cutty. These personages reappearin _The Shepherd's Hunting_, and give us a glimpse of pleasantpersonal relations. In the first "eglogue, " Willy comes to theMarshalsea one afternoon to condole with Roget, but finds him verycheerful. The prisoner poet assures his friend that

 _This barren place yields somewhat to relieve, For I have found sufficient to content me, And more true bliss than ever freedom lent me_;

and Willy goes away, when it is growing dark, rejoiced to find that"the cage doth some birds good. " Next morning he returns and bringsCutty, or Cuddy, with him, for Cuddy has news to tell the prisonerthat all England is taking an interest in him, and that this adversityhas made him much more popular than he was before. But Willy andCuddy are extremely anxious to know what it was that caused Roget'simprisonment, and at last he agrees to tell them. Hitherto the poemhas been written in _ottava rima_, a form which is sufficientlyuncommon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to demand specialnotice in this case. In a prose postscript to this book Wither tellsus that the title, _The Shepherd's Hunting_, which he seems to feelneeds explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should say now, to the publisher. But perhaps this was an afterthought, for in theaccount he gives to Willy and Cuddy he certainly suggests the titlehimself. He represents himself as the shepherd given up to thedelights of hunting the human passions through the soul; the simileseems a little confused, because he represents these qualities notas the quarry, but as the hounds, and so the story of Actaeon isreversed; instead of the hounds pursuing their master, the masterhunts his dogs. At all events, the result is that he "dips his staffin blood, and onwards leads his thunder to the wood, " where he isignominiously captured by his Majesty's gamekeeper. But the allegoryhardly runs upon all-fours. 

The next "eglogue" represents again another visit to the prisoner, andthis time Willy and Cuddy bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis isJohn Davies, of Hereford, another contributor to _The Shepherd'sPipe_. Roget starts his allegory again, in the same mild, satiricmanner he had adopted, to his hurt, in _Abuses stript and whipt_. Wither becomes quite delightful again, when cheerfulness breaksthrough this satirical philosophy, and when he tells us:

 _But though that all the world's delight forsake me, I have a Muse, and she shall music make me; Whose aery notes, in spite of closest cages, Shall give content to me and after ages_. 

They all felt certain of immortality, these cheerful poets ofElizabeth and James, and Prince Posterity has seen proper to admit theclaim in more instances than might well have been expected. 

But the delightful part of _The Shepherd's Hunting_ has yet to come. With the fourth "eglogue" the caged bird begins to sing like a lark atHeaven's gate, and it is the prisoned man--who ought to be in dolefuldumps--that rallies his free friend Browne on his low spirits. It istime, he says, to be merry:

 _Coridon, with his bold rout, Hath already been about, For the elder shepherds' dole, And fetched in the summer pole; Whilst the rest have built a bower To defend them from a shower, Sealed so close, with boughs all green, Titan cannot pry between; Now the dairy-wenches dream Of their strawberries and cream, And each doth herself advance, To be taken in to dance_. 

What summer thoughts are these to come from a pale prisoner in the hotand putrid Marshalsea! They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, orproofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above a mortal pitch. But Willy declines to join the Lady of the May at her high junketings;he also has troubles, and prefers to whisper them through Roget's ironbars. There are those who "my Music do contemn, " who will none of thepoetry of Master William Browne of the Inner Temple. It is useless forhim to wrestle with brown shepherds for the

 _Cups of turnèd maple-root, Whereupon the skilful man Hath engraved the Loves of Pan_, or contend for the "fine napkin wrought with blue, " if those baseclowns called critics are busy with his detraction. But Rogetinstructs him that Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of atrue poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and beyond allracks of envious cloud, and that the last thing he should do isto despair. He rises to his own greatest and best work in thisencouragement of a brother-poet, and no one who reads such nobleverses as these dare question Wither's claim to a _fauteuil_ in theAcademy of Parnassus:

 _If thy Verse do bravely tower As she makes wing, she gets power, Yet the higher she doth soar, She's affronted still the more; Till she to the highest hath past, Then she rests with Fame at last. Let nought therefore thee affright, But make forward in thy flight; For if I could match thy rhyme To the very stars I'd climb, There begin again, and fly Till I reached Eternity_. 

In the fifth "eglogue" Roget and Alexis compare notes about theirearly happiness in phrases of an odd commixture. The pastoralcharacter of the poetry has to be carried out, and so we read of howRoget on a great occasion played a match at football, "having scarcetwenty Satyrs on his side, " against some of "the best tried Ruffiansin the land. " Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of Thames, and though the satyrs and their laureate leader were worsted, themoral victory, as people call it, remained with the latter. All thisis an allegory; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of innuendo allthrough _The Shepherd's Hunting_. 

The moral of the whole thing is that eternal ditty of tuneful youth:All for Verse and the World well lost. The enemy is around them onall sides, jailers of the Marshalsea and envious critics, the evilshepherds that preside over grates of steel and noisome beds of straw, but Youth has its mocking answer to all these:

 _Let them disdain and fret till they are weary! We in ourselves have that shall make us merry; Which he that wants and had the power to know it, Would give his life that he might die a poet_. 

It was no small thing to be suffering for Apollo's sake in 1614. Shakespeare might hear of it at Stratford, and talk of the prisoneras he strolled with some friend on the banks of Avon. A greater thanShakespeare--as most men thought in those days--Ben Jonson himself, might talk the matter over "at those lyric feasts, Made at the Sun, The Dog, the triple Tun"; for had not he himself languished in aworse dungeon and under a heavier charge than Wither? To beseven-and-twenty, to be in trouble with the Government about one'sverses, and to have other young poets, in a ferment of enthusiasm, clinging like swallows to the prison-bars--how delicious a torment!And to know that it will soon be over, and that the sweet, puremeadows lie just outside the reek of Southwark, that summer lingersstill and that shepherds pipe and play, that Fame is sitting by hercheerful fountain with a garland for the weary head, and that lasses, "who more excell Than the sweet-voic'd Philomel, " are ready to clusterround the Interesting captive, and lead him away in daisy-chains--whatcould be more consolatory! And we close the little dainty volume, withits delicate perfume of friendship and poetry and hope. 

DEATH'S DUEL

DEATH'S DVELL; _or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dyingLife, and living Death of the Body. Delivered in a Sermon at WhiteHall, before the King's Maiesty, in the beginning of Lent_, 1630. _Bythat late learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr. In Divinity, &Deane of S. Pauls, London. Being his last Sermon, and called by hisMaiesties houshold The Doctor's owne Funerall Sermon. London, Printedby Thomas Harper, for Richard Redmer and Benjamin Fisher, and are tobe sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders-gate street. MDCXXXII_. 

The value of this tiny quarto with the enormous title dependsentirely, so far as the collector is concerned, on whether or no itpossesses the frontispiece. So many people, not having the fear ofbooks before their eyes, have divorced the latter from the former, that a perfect copy of _Death's Duel_ is quite a capture over whichthe young bibliophile may venture to glory; but let him not fancy thathe has a prize if his copy does not possess the portrait-plate. Onehas but to glance for a moment at this frontispiece to see that thereis here something very much out of the common. It is engraved in thebest seventeenth-century style, and represents, apparently, the headand bust of a dead man wrapped in a winding-sheet. The eyes are shut, the mouth is drawn, and nothing was ever seen more ghastly. 

Yet it is not really the picture of a dead man: it represents theresult of one of the grimmest freaks that ever entered into a piousmind. In the early part of March 1630 (1631), the great Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, being desperately ill, and not likely to recover, called a wood-carver in to the Deanery, and ordered a small urn, justlarge enough to hold his feet, and a board as long as his body, to beproduced. When these articles were ready, they were brought into hisstudy, which was first warmed, and then the old man stripped off hisclothes, wrapped himself in a winding-sheet which was open only so faras to reveal the face and beard, and then stood upright in the littlewooden urn, supported by leaning against the board. His limbs werearranged like those of dead persons, and when his eyes had beenclosed, a painter was introduced into the room and desired to make afull-length and full-size picture of this terrific object, this solemntheatrical presentment of life in death. The frontispiece of _Death'sDuel_ gives a reproduction of the upper part of this picture. Itwas said to be a remarkably truthful portrait of the great poet anddivine, and it certainly agrees in all its proportions with theaccredited portrait of Donne as a young man. 

It appears (for Walton's account is not precise) that it was afterstanding for this grim picture, but before its being finished, thatthe Dean preached his last sermon, that which is here printed. He hadcome up from Essex in great physical weakness in order not to miss hisappointment to preach in his cathedral before the King on the firstFriday in Lent. He entered the pulpit with so emaciated a frame and aface so pale and haggard, and spoke with a voice so faint and hollow, that at the end the King himself turned to one of his suite, andwhispered, "The Dean has preached his own funeral sermon!" So, indeed, it proved to be; for he presently withdrew to his bed, and summonedhis friends around to take a solemn farewell. He died very graduallyafter about a fortnight, his last words being, not in distress oranguish, but as it would seem in visionary rapture: "I were miserableif I might not die. " All this fortnight and to the moment ofhis death, the terrible life-sized portrait of himself in hiswinding-sheet stood near his bedside, where it could be the "hourlyobject" of his attention. So one of the greatest Churchmen of theseventeenth century, and one of the greatest, if the most eccentric, of its lyrical poets passed away in the very pomp of death, on the31st of March, 1631. 

There was something eminently calculated to arrest and move theimagination in such an end as this, and people were eager to read thediscourse which the "sacred authority" of his Majesty himself hadstyled the Dean's funeral sermon. It was therefore printed in 1632. Assermons of the period go it is not long, yet it takes a full hour toread it slowly aloud, and we may thus estimate the strain which itmust have given to the worn-out voice and body of the Dean to deliverit. The present writer once heard a very eminent Churchman, who wasalso a great poet, preach his last sermon, at the age of ninety. Thiswas the Danish bishop Grundtvig. In that case the effort of speaking, the extraction, as it seemed, of the sepulchral voice from theshrunken and ashen face, did not last more than ten minutes. But theEnglish divines of the Jacobean age, like their Scottish brethren ofto-day, were accustomed to stupendous efforts of endurance from theirvery diaconate. 

The sermon is one of the most "creepy" fragments of theologicalliterature it would be easy to find. It takes as its text the wordsfrom the sixty-eighth Psalm: "And unto God the Lord belong the issuesof death. " In long, stern sentences of sonorous magnificence, adornedwith fine similes and gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of aking might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from no physicalhorror and no ghostly terror of the great crisis which he was himselfto be the first to pass through. "That which we call life, " he says, and our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we listen, "is but_Hebdomada mortium_, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of ourlife spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and there is an end. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youthand rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all. Nor doall these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as aPhoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as awasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake out of dung. " Wecan comprehend how an audience composed of men and women whosene'er-do-weel relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by suchtragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur would themselvessnatch a sacred pleasure from awful language of this kind in thepulpit. There is not much that we should call doctrine, no pensiveor consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense. Theeffect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for theadvent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, tolose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crookedscythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle ofdivines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible ofhis own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very lasthis powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficedto shelter him from scandal on the ground of his fantastic defence ofsuicide, was familiar with the idea of Death, and greeted him as awelcome old friend whose face he was glad to look on long and closely. 

The leaves at the end of this little book are filled up with twocopies of funeral verses on Dean Donne. These are unsigned, but weknow from other sources to whom to attribute them. Each is by aneminent man. The first was written by Dr. Henry King, then the royalchaplain, and afterward Bishop of Chichester, to whom the Dean hadleft, besides a model in gold of the Synod of Dort, that painting ofhimself in the winding-sheet of which we have already spoken. Thisportrait Dr. King put into the hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor, who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urnconcealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of whichKing was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the presentCathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as itgoes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words inwhich he refers to the appearance of the dying preacher in the pulpit:

 _Thou (like the dying Swan) didst lately sing Thy mournful dirge in audience of the King; When pale looks, and weak accents of thy breath Presented so to life that piece of death, That it was feared and prophesied by all Thou thither cam'st to preach thy funeral_. 

The other elegy is believed to have been written by a young man oftwenty-one, who was modestly and enthusiastically seeking the companyof the most famous London wits. This was Edward Hyde, thirty yearslater to become Earl of Clarendon, and finally to leave behind himmanuscripts which should prove him the first great English historian. His verses here bespeak his good intention, but no facility inrhyming. 

It was left for the riper disciples of the great divine to sing hisfunerals in more effective numbers. Of the crowd of poets who attendedhim with music to the grave, none expressed his merits in suchexcellent verses or with so much critical judgment as Thomas Carew, the king's sewer in ordinary. It is not so well known but that wequote some lines from it:

 _The fire That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir, Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath, Glow'd here awhile, lies quench'd now in thy death. The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds O'erspread, was purg'd by thee, the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted; thou disdt pay The debts of our penurious bankrupt age_. 

 * * * * *

 _Whatsoever wrong By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue, Thou hast redeem'd, and opened us a mine Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line Of masculine expression, which, had good Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood Our superstitious fools admire, and hold Their lead more precious than thy burnish'd gold, Thou hadst been their exchequer. .. . Let others carve the rest; it will suffice I on thy grave this epitaph incise:-- Here lies a King, that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit; Here lies two Flamens, and both these the best, -- Apollo's first, at last the True God's priest_. 

There was no full memoir of Dr. Donne until it was the privilege ofthe present writer, in 1900, to publish his Life and Letters in twosubstantial volumes. Since then, in 1912, his Poetical Works have beenedited and sifted, with remarkable delicacy and judgment, by ProfessorGrierson. It is now, therefore, as easy as it can be expected ever tobe to follow the career of this extraordinary man, with all its coldand hot fits, its rage of lyrical amativeness, its Roman passion, andthe high and clouded austerity of its final Anglicanism. Donne is oneof the most fascinating, in some ways one of the most inscrutable, figures in our literature, and we may contemplate him with instructionfrom his first wild escapade into the Azores down to his voluntarypenitence in the pulpit and the winding-sheet. 

GERARD'S HERBAL

THE HERBALL _or General Historie of Plantes. Gathered by John Gerarde, of London, Master in Chirurgerie. Very much enlarged and amended byThomas Johnson, citizen and apothecarye of London. London, Printed byAdam Islip, Joice Norton, and Richard Whitakers. Anno_ 1633. 

The proverb says that a door must be either open or shut. Thebibliophile is apt to think that a book should be either little orbig. For my own part, I become more and more attached to "dumpytwelves"; but that does not preclude a certain discreet fondnessfor folios. If a man collects books, his library ought to contain aHerbal; and if he has but room for one, that should be the best. The luxurious and sufficient thing, I think, is to possess whatbooksellers call "the right edition of Gerard"; that is to say, thevolume described at the head of this paper. There is no handsomer bookto be found, none more stately or imposing, than this magnificentfolio of sixteen hundred pages, with its close, elaborate letterpress, its innumerable plates, and John Payne's fine frontispiece incompartments, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one another, and the author below them, holding in his right hand the new-foundtreasure of the potato plant. 

This edition of 1633 is the final development of what had been a slowgrowth. The sixteenth century witnessed a great revival, almost acreation of the science of botany. People began to translate the great_Materia Medica_ of the Greek physician, Dioscorides of Anazarba, andto comment upon it. The Germans were the first to append woodcuts totheir botanical descriptions, and it is Otto Brunfelsius, in 1530, whohas the credit of being the originator of such figures. In 1554 therewas published the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus Dodonaeus, body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian II. , who wrote in Dutch. AnEnglish translation of this, brought out in 1578, by Henry Lyte, wasthe earliest important Herbal in our language. Five years later, in1583, a certain Dr. Priest translated all the botanical works ofDodonaeus, with much greater fulness than Lyte had done, and thisvolume was the germ of Gerard's far more famous production. JohnGerard was a Cheshire man, born in 1545, who came up to London, andpractised there as a surgeon. 

According to his editor and continuator, Thomas Johnson, who speaks ofGerard with startling freedom, this excellent man was by no means wellequipped for the task of compiling a great Herbal. He knew so littleLatin, according to this too candid friend, that he imagined LeonardFuchsius, who was a German contemporary of his own, to be one of theancients. But Johnson is a little too zealous in magnifying his ownoffice. He brings a worse accusation against Gerard, if I understandhim rightly to charge him with using Dr. Priest's manuscriptcollections after his death, without giving that physician the creditof his labours. When Johnson made this accusation, Gerard had beendead twenty-six years. In any case it seems certain that Gerard'soriginal _Herbal_, which, beyond question, surpassed all itspredecessors when it was printed in folio in 1597, was built up uponthe ground-work of Priest's translation of Dodonaeus. Nearly fortyyears later, Thomas Johnson, himself a celebrated botanist, took upthe book, and spared no pains to reissue it in perfect form. Theresult is the great volume before us, an elephant among books, thenoblest of all the English Herbals. Johnson was seventy-two years ofage when he got this gigantic work off his hands, and he lived elevenyears longer to enjoy his legitimate success. 

The great charm of this book at the present time consists in thecopious woodcuts. Of these there are more than two thousand, each acareful and original study from the plant itself. In the course of twocenturies and a half, with all the advance in appliances, we have notimproved a whit on the original artist of Gerard's and Johnson's time. The drawings are all in strong outline, with very little attempt atshading, but the characteristics of each plant are given with a truthand a simplicity which are almost Japanese. In no case is this moreextraordinary than in that of the orchids, or "satyrions, " as theywere called in the days of the old herbalist. Here, in a succession oflittle figures, each not more than six inches high, the peculiarity ofevery portion of a full-grown flowering specimen of each species isgiven with absolute perfection, without being slurred over on the onehand, or exaggerated on the other. For instance, the little varietycalled "ladies' tresses" [_Spiranthes_], which throws a spiral head ofpale green blossoms out of dry pastures, appears here with small bellshanging on a twisted stem, as accurately as the best photograph couldgive it, although the process of woodcutting, as then practisedin England, was very rude, and although almost all other Englishillustrations of the period are rough and inartistic. It is plain thatin every instance the botanist himself drew the form, with which hewas already intelligently familiar, on the block, with the livingplant lying at his side. 

The plan on which the herbalist lays out his letterpress is methodicalin the extreme. He begins by describing his plant, then gives itshabitat, then discusses its nomenclature, and ends with a medicalaccount of its nature and virtues. It is, of course, to be expectedthat we should find the line old names of plants enshrined in Gerard'spages. For instance, he gives to the deadly nightshade the name, which now only lingers in a corner of Devonshire, the "dwale. " As aninstance of his style, I may quote a passage from what he has to sayabout the virtues, or rather vices, of this plant:

"Banish it from your gardens and the use of it also, being a plant sofurious and deadly; for it bringeth such as have eaten thereof into adead sleep wherein many have died, as hath been often seen and provedby experience both in England and elsewhere. But to give you anexample hereof it shall not be amiss. It came to pass that three boysof Wisbeach, in the Isle of Ely, did eat of the pleasant and beautifulfruit hereof, two whereof died in less than eight hours after they hadeaten of them. The third child had a quantity of honey and water mixedtogether given him to drink, causing him to vomit often. God blessedthis means, and the child recovered. Banish, therefore, thesepernicious plants out of your gardens, and all places near to yourhouses where children do resort. "

Gerard has continually to stop his description that he may repeat tohis readers some anecdote which he remembers. Now it is how "MasterCartwright, a gentleman of Gray's Inn, who was grievously wounded intothe lungs, " was cured with the herb called "Saracen's Compound, " "andthat, by God's permission, in short space. " Now it is to tell us thathe has found yellow archangel growing under a sequestered hedge "onthe left hand as you go from the village of Hampstead, near London, tothe church, " or that "this amiable and pleasant kind of primrose" (asort of oxlip) was first brought to light by Mr. Hesketh, "a diligentsearcher after simples, " in a Yorkshire wood. While the groundlingswere crowding to see new plays by Shirley and Massinger, the editor ofthis volume was examining fresh varieties of auricula in "the gardensof Mr. Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie. " It is wonderful how modern thelatter statement sounds, and how ancient the former. But the gardenseems the one spot on earth where history does not assert itself, and, no doubt, when Nero was fiddling over the blaze of Rome, there wereflorists counting the petals of rival roses at Paestum as peacefullyand conscientiously as any gardeners of to-day. 

The herbalist and his editor write from personal experience, and thisgives them a great advantage in dealing with superstitions. If therewas anything which people were certain about in the early part ofthe seventeenth century, it was that the mandrake only grew under agallows, where the dead body of a man had fallen to pieces, and thatwhen it was dug up it gave a great shriek, which was fatal to thenearest living thing. Gerard contemptuously rejects all these andother tales as "old wives' dreams. " He and his servants have oftendigged up mandrakes, and are not only still alive, but listenedin vain for the dreadful scream. It might be supposed that such astatement, from so eminent an authority, would settle the point, butwe find Sir Thomas Browne, in the next generation, battling theseidentical popular errors in the pages of his _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_. In the like manner, Gerard's botanical evidence seems to have been ofno use in persuading the public that mistletoe was not generated outof birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of trees, or that itsberries were not desperately poisonous. To observe and state the truthis not enough. The ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must beready to accept it. 

Our good herbalist, however, cannot get through his sixteen hundredaccurate and solemn pages without one slip. After accompanying himdutifully so far, we double up with uncontrollable laughter on p. 1587, for here begins the chapter which treats "of the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or the Tree bearing Geese. " But even here the habit ofgenuine observation clings to him. The picture represents a group ofstalked barnacles--those shrimps fixed by their antennae, which modernscience, I believe, calls _Lepas anatifera_; by the side of thesestands a little goose, and the suggestion of course is that the latterhas slipped out of the former, although the draughtsman has been fartoo conscientious to represent the occurrence. Yet the letterpress isconfident that in the north parts of Scotland there are trees on whichgrow white shells, which ripen, and then, opening, drop little livinggeese into the waves below. Gerard himself avers that from Guernseyand Jersey he brought home with him to London shells, like limpets, containing little feathery objects, "which, _no doubt_, were the fowlscalled Barnacles. " It is almost needless to say that these objectsreally were the plumose and flexible _cirri_ which the barnaclesthrow out to catch their food with, and which lie, like a tinyfeather-brush, just within the valves of the shell, when the creatureis dead. Gerard was plainly unable to refuse credence to the mass ofevidence which presented itself to him on this subject, yet he closeswith a hint that this seems rather a "fabulous breed" of geese. 

With the Barnacle Goose Tree the Herbal proper closes, in these quaintwords:

"And thus having, through God's assistance, discoursed somewhatat large of grasses, herbs, shrubs, trees and mosses, and certainexcrescences of the earth, with other things moe, incident to thehistory thereof, we conclude, and end our present volume with thiswonder of England. For the which God's name be ever honoured andpraised. "

And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest sanction. 

PHARAMOND

PHARAMOND; or, _The History of France. A New Romance. In fourparts. Written originally in French, by the Author of Cassandra andCleopatra: and now elegantly rendered into English. London: Printed byJa: Cottrell for Samuel Speed, at the Rain-Bow in Fleetstreet, nearthe Inner Temple-Gate. (Folio_. ) 1662. 

There is no better instance of the fact that books will not live bygood works alone than is offered by the utterly neglected heroicnovels of the seventeenth century. At the opening of the reign ofLouis XIV. In France, several writers, in the general dearth of prosefiction, began to supply the public in Paris with a series of longromances, which for at least a generation absorbed the attention ofthe ladies and reigned unopposed in every boudoir. I wonder whether mylady readers have ever attempted to realise how their sisters of twohundred years ago spent their time? In an English country-house of1650, there were no magazines, no newspapers, no lawn tennis orcroquet, no afternoon-teas or glee-concerts, no mothers' meetings orzenana missions, no free social intercourse with neighbours, none ofthe thousand and one agreeable diversions with which the life of amodern girl is diversified. On the other hand, the ladies of the househad their needlework to attend to, they had to "stitch in a clout, " asit was called; they had to attend to the duties of a housekeeper, and, when the sun shone, they tended the garden. Perhaps they rodeor drove, in a stately fashion. But through long hours they sat overtheir embroidery frames or mended the solemn old tapestries whichlined their walls, and during these sedate performances they requireda long-winded, polite, unexciting, stately book that might be readaloud by turns. The heroic novel, as provided by Gombreville, Calprenède, and Mlle. De Scudéry supplied this want to perfection. 

The sentiments in these novels were of the most elevated class, andtedious as they seem nowadays to us, it was the sentiments, almostmore than the action, which fascinated contemporary opinion. Madamede Sévigné herself, the brightest and wittiest of women, confessedherself to be a fly in the spider's web of their attractions. "Thebeauty of the sentiments, " she writes, "the violence of the passions, the grandeur of the events, and the miraculous success of theirredoubtable swords, all draw me on as though I were still a littlegirl. " In these modern days of success, we may still start to learnthat the Parisian publisher of _Le Grand Cyrus_ made 100, 000 crownsby that work, from the appearance of its first volume in 1649 to itsclose in 1653. The qualities so admirably summed up by Madame deSévigné were those which appealed most directly to public feeling inFrance. There really were heroes in that day, the age of chivalricpassions had not passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions ofall kinds, were conceivable and within personal experience. When LaRochefoucauld wrote to Madame de Longueville the famous lines whichmay be thus translated:

 _To win that wonder of the world, A smile from her bright eyes, I fought my King, and would have hurled The gods out of their skies_, he was breathing the very atmosphere of the heroic novels. Theirextraordinary artificial elevation of tone was partly the spirit ofthe age; it was also partly founded on a new literary ideal, the toneof Greek romance. No book had been read in France with greater aviditythan the sixteenth-century translation of the old novel _Heliodorus_;and in the _Polexandres_ and _Clélies_ we see what this Greek spiritof romance could blossom into when grafted upon the stock of LouisXIV. 

The vogue of these heroic novels in England has been misstated, forthe whole subject has but met with neglect from successive historiansof literature. It has been asserted that they were not read in Englanduntil after the Restoration. Nothing is further from the truth. Charles I. Read _Cassandra_ in prison, while we find Dorothy Osborne, in her exquisite letters to Sir William Temple, assiduously studyingone heroic novel after another through the central years of Cromwell'srule. She reads _Le Grand Cyrus_ while she has the ague; she desiresTemple to tell her "which _amant_ you have most compassion for, whenyou have read what each one says for himself. " She and the King readthem in the original, but soon there arrived English translationsand imitations. These began to appear a good deal sooner thanbibliographers have been prepared to admit. Of the _Astrée_ ofD'Urfé--which, however, is properly a link between the _Arcadia_ ofSidney and the genuine heroic novel--there was an English versionas early as 1620. But, of the real thing, the first importation was_Polexandre_, in 1647, followed by _Cassandra_ and _Ibrahim_ in 1652, _Artamenes_ in 1653, _Cleopatra_ in 1654-8, and _Clélie_ in 1655, all, it will be observed, published in England before the close of theCommonwealth. 

Dorothy Osborne, who had studied the French originals, turned up hernose at these translations. She says that they were "so disguisedthat I, who am their old acquaintance, hardly knew them. " They had, moreover, changed their form. In France they had come out in aninfinite number of small, manageable tomes. For instance, Calprenèdepublished his _Cléopatre_ in twenty-three volumes; but the English_Cleopatra_ is all contained in one monstrous elephant folio. _Artamenes_, the English translation of _Le Grand Cyrus_, is worsestill, for it is comprised in five such folios. Many of the originalswere translated over and over again, so popular were they; and as theheroic novels of any eminence in France were limited in number, it would be easy, by patiently hunting the translations up in oldlibraries, to make a pretty complete list of them. The principalheroic novels were eight in all; of these there is but one, the_Almahide_ of Mile, de Scudéry, which we have not already mentioned, and the original publication of the whole school is confined withinless than thirty years. 

The best master in a bad class of lumbering and tiresome fictionwas the author of the book which is the text of this chapter. LaCalprenède, whose full name was nothing less than Gautier de Costes dela Calprenède, was a Gascon gentleman of the Guards, of whose personalhistory the most notorious fact is that he had the temerity to marrya woman who had already buried five husbands. Some historians relatethat she proceeded to poison number six, but this does not appear tobe certain, while it does appear that Calprenède lived in the marriedstate for fifteen years, a longer respite than the antecedents ofmadame gave him any right to anticipate. He made a great fame with histwo huge Roman novels, _Cassandra_ and _Cleopatra_, and then, someyears later, he produced a third, _Pharamond_ which was taken out ofearly French history. The translator, in the version before us, saysof this book that it "is not a romance, but a history adorned withsome excellent flourishes of language and loves, in which you maydelightfully trace the author's learned pen through all thosehistorians who wrote of the times he treats of. " In other words, whileGombreville--with his King of the Canaries, and his Vanishing Islands, and his necromancers, and his dragons--canters through pure fairyland, and while Mlle. De Scudéry elaborately builds up a romantic picture ofher own times (in _Clélie_, for instance, where the three hundred andseventy several characters introduced are said to be all acquaintancesof the author), Calprenède attempted to produce something like aproper historical novel, introducing invention, but embroidering itupon some sort of genuine framework of fact. 

To describe the plot of _Pharamond_, or of any other heroic novel, would be a desperate task. The great number of personages introducedin pairs, the intrigues of each couple forming a separate threadwound into the complex web of the plot, is alone enough to make anyfollowing of the story a great difficulty. On the fly-leaf of a copyof _Cleopatra_ which lies before me, some dear lady of the seventeenthcentury has very conscientiously written out "a list of the Pairs ofLovers, " and there are thirteen pairs. _Pharamond_ begins almost inthe same manner as a novel by the late Mr. G. P. R. James might. Whenthe book opens we discover the amorous Marcomine and the valiantGenebaud sallying forth along the bank of a river on two beautifulhorses of the best jennet-race. Throughout the book all the men arevaliant, all the ladies are passionate and chaste. The heroes enterthe lists covered with rubies, loosely embroidered over surcoatsof gold and silk tissue; their heads "shine with gold, enamel andprecious stones, with the hinder part covered with an hundred plumesof different colours. " They are mounted upon horses "whose whitenessmight outvie the purest snow upon the frozen Alps. " They pierce intowoodland dells, where they by chance discover renowned princesses, nonpareils of beauty, in imminent danger, and release them. Theyattack hordes of deadly pirates, and scatter their bodies along theshore; and yet, for all their warlike fire and force, they are asgentle as marmozets in a lady's boudoir. They are especially admirablein the putting forth of sentiments, in glozing over a subtledifficulty in love, in tying a knot of silk or fastening a lock ofhair to their bonnet. They will steal into a cabinet so softly that alady who is seated there, in a reverie, will not perceive them; theyare so adroit that they will seize a paper on which she has sketcheda couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not know whence thepoetical miracle has come. In valour, in courtesy, in magnificencethey have no rival, just as the ladies whom they court are unique inbeauty, in purity, in passion, and in self-denial. Sometimes theycorrespond at immense length; in _Pharamond_ the letters which passbetween the Princess Hunnimonde and Prince Balamir would form a smallvolume by themselves, an easy introduction to the art of politeletter-writing. Mlle. De Scudéry actually perceived this, andpublished a collection of model correspondence which was culled bodilyfrom the huge store-house of her own romances, from _Le Grand Cyrus_and _Clélie_. These interchanges of letters were kept up by theseverity of the heroines. It was not thought proper that the ladyshould yield her hand until the gentleman had exhausted the resourcesof language, and had spent years of amorous labour on her conquest. When Roger Boyle, in 1654, published his novel of _Parthenissa_, infour volumes, Dorothy Osborne objected to the ease with which the herosucceeded; she complains "the ladies are all so kind they make nosport. "

This particular 1662 translation of _Pharamond_ appears to bevery rare, if not unique. At all events I find it in none of thebibliographies, nor has the British Museum Library a copy of it. Thepreface is signed J. D. , and the version is probably therefore fromthe pen of John Davies, who helped Loveday to finish his enormoustranslation of _Cleopatra_ in 1665. In 1677 there came out anotherversion of _Pharamond_, by John Phillips, and this is common enough. Some day, perhaps, these elephantine old romances may come intofashion again, and we may obtain a precise list of them. At present nocorner of our literary history is more thoroughly neglected. [1]

[Footnote 1: Since this was written, a French critic of eminence, M. Jusserand, has made (in _The English Novel in the Time ofShakespeare_, 1890) a delightful contribution to this portion of ourliterary history. The earlier part of the last chapter of that volumemay be recommended to all readers curious about the vogue of theheroic novel. But M. Jusserand does not happen to mention _Pharamond_, nor to cover the exact ground of my little study. ]

A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS

In his _Ballad of the Book-Hunter_, Andrew Lang describes how, inbreeches baggy at the knees, the bibliophile hunts in all weathers:

 _No dismal stall escapes his eye; He turns o'er tomes of low degrees; There soiled romanticists may lie, Or Restoration comedies_. 

That speaks straight to my heart; for of all my weaknesses the weakestis that weakness of mine for Restoration plays. From 1660 down to 1710nothing in dramatic form comes amiss, and I have great schemes, likethe boards on which people play the game of solitaire, in which spaceis left for every drama needed to make this portion of my librarycomplete. It is scarcely literature, I confess; it is a sport, a longgame which I shall probably be still playing at, with three mouldy oldtragedies and one opera yet needed to complete my set, when the Reapercomes to carry me where there is no amassing nor collecting. It wouldhardly be credited how much pleasure I have drained out of thesedramas since I began to collect them judiciously in my still callowyouth. I admit only first editions; but that is not so rigorous as itsounds, since at least half of the poor old things never went into asecond. 

As long as it is Congreve and Dryden and Otway, of course it isliterature, and of a very high order; even Shadwell and Mrs. Behnand Southerne are literature; Settle and Ravenscroft may pass aslegitimate literary curiosity. But there are depths below this wherethere is no excuse but sheer collectaneomania. Plays by people whonever got into any schedule of English letters that ever was planned, dramatic nonentities, stage innocents massacred in their cradles, ifonly they were published in quarto I find room for them. I am notquite so pleased to get these anonymities, I must confess, as I am toget a clean, tall _editio princeps_ of _The Orphan_ or of _Love forLove_. But I neither reject nor despise them; each of them counts one;each serves to fill a place on my solitaire board, each hurrieson that dreadful possible time coming when my collection shall becomplete, and I shall have nothing to do but break my collecting rodand bury it fathoms deep. 

A volume has just come in which happens to have nothing in it butthose forgotten plays, whose very names are unknown to the historiansof literature. First comes _The Roman Empress_, by William Joyner, printed in 1671. Joyner was an Oxford man, a fellow of MagdalenCollege. The little that has been recorded about him makes one wish toknow more. He became persuaded of the truth of the Catholic faith, andmade a voluntary resignation of his Oxford fellowship. He had to dosomething, and so he wrote this tragedy, which he dedicated to SirCharles Sedley, the poet, and got acted at the Theatre Royal. The castcontains two good actors' names, Mohun and Kynaston, and it seems thatit enjoyed a considerable success. But doubtless the stage was toorough a field for the gentle Oxford scholar. He retired into asequestered country village, where he lingered on till 1706, when hewas nearly ninety. But Joyner was none of the worst of poets. Here isa fragment of _The Royal Empress_, which is by no means despicablyversed:

 _O thou bright, glorious morning, Thou Oriental spring-time of the day, Who with thy mixed vermilion colours paintest The sky, these hills and plains! thou dost return In thy accustom'd manner, but with thee Shall ne'er return my wonted happiness_. 

Through his Roman tragedy there runs a pensive vein of sadness, asthough the poet were thinking less of his Aurelia and his Valentiusthan of the lost common-room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no morerevisited. 

Our next play is a worse one, but much more pretentious. It is the_Usurper_, of 1668, the first of four dramas published by the Hon. Edward Howard, one of Dryden's aristocratic brothers-in-law. EdwardHoward is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his epic poemof _The British Princes_:

 _A vest as admired Vortiger had on, Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won_. 

Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representingVortiger's grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already. But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Drydenhimself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of _The British Princes_ isbefore me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainlyruns:

_Which from this island's foes his grandsire won_. 

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries. The _Usurper_ is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, "a most perfidiousvillain, " plays a mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last, much to the reader's satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R. L. Stevenson, "There's an end of that. "

But though the _Usurper_ is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddierlees of wit in the _Carnival_, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of1664. It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it bemore than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some littlething interesting to a modern student. The _Carnival_ has one suchpeculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is left alone on thestage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's _ChurchyardElegy_. This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possiblyoccurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches andcounter-marches of the Civil War. 

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play inour volume really repays us for pushing on so far. Here is a piece ofwild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke ofNewcastle's _Humorous Lovers_:

 _At curfew-time, and at the dead of night, I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright, Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo To darker caves and solitary woods, To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods; I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe, Blasted with cursèd droppings of mildew; Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans; The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty, And how thy want of love did murder me; And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near, Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear_. 

But I cannot persuade myself that his Grace of Newcastle wrote thoselines himself. Published in 1677, they were as much of a portent as aman in trunk hose and a slashed doublet. The Duke had died a month ortwo before the play was published; he had grown to be, in extreme oldage, the most venerable figure of the Restoration, and it is possiblethat the _Humorous Lovers_ may have been a relic of his Jacobeanyouth. He might very well have written it, so old was he, inShakespeare's lifetime. But the Duke of Newcastle was never a veryskilful poet, and it is known that he paid James Shirley to help himwith his plays. I feel convinced that if all men had their own, the invocation I have just quoted would fly back into the works ofShirley, and so, no doubt, would the following quaintest bit ofconceited fancy. It is part of a fantastical feast which Boldmanpromises to the Widow of his heart:

 _The twinkling stars shall to our wish Make a grand salad in a dish; Snow for our sugar shall not fail, Fine candied ice, comfits of hail; For oranges, gilt clouds will squeeze; The Milky Way we'll turn to cheese; Sunbeams we'll catch, shall stand in place Of hotter ginger, nutmegs, mace; Sun-setting clouds for roses sweet, And violet skies strewed for our feet; The spheres shall for our music play, While spirits dance the time away_. 

This is extravagant enough, but surely very picturesque. I seem to seethe supper-room of some Elizabethan castle after an elaborateroyal masque. The Duchess, who has been dancing, richly attired insky-coloured silk, with gilt wings on her shoulders, is attended tothe refreshments by the florid Duke, personating the river Thamesis, with a robe of cloth of silver around him. It seems the sort of thinga poet so habited might be expected to say between a galliard and acoranto. 

At first sight we seem to have reached a really good rhetorical playwhen we arrive at Bancroft's tragedy of _Sertorius_, published in1679, and so it would be if Dryden and Lee had never written. But itsseeming excellence is greatly lessened when we recollect that _All forLove_ and _Mithridates_, two great poems which are almost goodplays, appeared in 1678, and inspired our poor imitative Bancroft. _Sertorius_ is written in smooth and well-sustained blank verse, whichis, however, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted. I suspect thatJohn Bancroft was a very interesting man. He was a surgeon, and hispractice lay particularly In the theatrical and literary world. Heacquired, it is said, from his patients "a passion for the Muses, "and an inclination to follow in the steps of those whom he cured orkilled. The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an epilogue to _Sertorius_, inwhich he says that--

 _Our Poet to learnèd critics does submit, But scorns those little vermin of the pit, Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit_, and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional than those of theprofessional playwrights themselves. He wrote three plays, and liveduntil 1696. One fancies the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, ladenwith his secrets and his confidences. Why did he not write memoirs, and tell us what it was that drove Nat Lee mad, and how Otway reallydied, and what Dryden's habits were? Why did he not purvey magnificentindiscretions whispered under the great periwig of Wycherley, orrepeat that splendid story about Etheredge and my Lord Mulgrave? Alas!we would have given a wilderness of _Sertoriuses_ for such a series ofmemoirs. 

The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is Weston's _Amazon Queen_, of 1667, written in pompous rhymed heroics; here is _The FortuneHunters_, a comedy of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, JamesCarlile, who, being brought up an actor, preferred "to _be_ ratherthan to _personate_ a hero, " and died in gallant fight for Williamof Orange, at the battle of Aughrim; here is _Mr. Anthony_, a comedywritten by the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, and printed in1690, a piece never republished among the Earl's works, and thereforeof some special interest. But I am sure my reader is exhausted, evenif the volume is not, and I spare him any further examination ofthese obscure dramas, lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of Dr. Johnson, that I

 _Set wheels on wheels in motion--such a clatter! To force up one poor nipperkin of water; Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore_. 

I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special studentof comparative literature--namely, that it is sometimes in the minorwritings of an age, where the bias of personal genius is not stronglyfelt, that the general phenomena of the time are most clearlyobserved. _The Amazon Queen_ is in rhymed verse, because in 1667this was the fashionable form for dramatic poetry; _Sertorius_ isin regular and somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 thefashion had once more chopped round. What in Dryden or Otway might bethe force of originality may be safely taken as the drift of the agein these imitative and floating nonentities. 

A CENSOR OF POETS

The Lives of The Most Famous English Poets, _or the Honour ofParnassus; in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of above TwoHundred of them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror, to theReign of His Present Majesty King James II. Written by WilliamWinstanley. Licensed June 16, 1686. London, Printed by H. Clark, forSamuel Manship at the Sign of the Black Bull in Cornhil, _ 1687. 

A maxim which it would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up onthe walls of their workshops is this: never mind whom you praise, butbe very careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations have struckon the reef of some poet or novelist whom the great censor, in hisproud old age, has thought he might disdain with impunity. Whorecollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, acute, learned, sympathetic? To us he is merely the sore old bear, who was too stupidto perceive the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination lavishedby Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, weigh like a feather besideone sentence about Wordsworth's _Excursion_, and one tasteless sneerat Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at thewhisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiserto have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Shelley. Andthe very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose bookoccupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of therule. His literary existence has been sacrificed by a single outburstof petulant criticism, which was not even literary, but purelypolitical. 

The only passage of Winstanley's _Lives of the English Poets_ whichis ever quoted is the paragraph which refers to Milton, who, when itappeared, had been dead thirteen years. It runs thus:

"_John Milton_ was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him aplace amongst the principal of our English Poets, having writtentwo Heroick Poems and a Tragedy, namely _Paradice Lost, ParadiceRegain'd_, and _Sampson Agonista_. But his Fame is gone out like aCandle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink, which might haveever lived in honourable Repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King_Charles_ the First. "

Mr. Winstanley does not leave us in any doubt of his own politicalbias, and his mode is simply infamous. It is the roughest and mostunpardonable expression now extant of the prejudice generally feltagainst Milton in London, after the Restoration--a prejudice whicheven Dryden, who in his heart knew better, could not wholly resist. This one sentence is all that most readers of seventeenth-centuryliterature know about Winstanley, and it is not surprising that it hascreated an objection to him. I forget who it was, among the critics ofthe beginning of this century, who was accustomed to buy copies of the_Lives of the English Poets_ wherever he could pick them up, and burnthem, in piety to the angry spirit of Milton. This was certainly moresensible conduct than that of the Italian nobleman, who used to buildMSS. Of Martial into little pyres, and consume them with spices, toexpress his admiration of Catullus. But no one can wonder that theworld has not forgiven Winstanley for that atrocious phrase aboutMilton's fame having "gone out like a candle in a snuff, so that hismemory will always stink. " No, Mr. William Winstanley, it is your ownname that--smells so very unpleasantly. 

Yet I am paradoxical enough to believe that poor Winstanley neverwrote these sentences which have destroyed his fame. To support mytheory, it is needful to recount the very scanty knowledge we possessof his life. He is said to have been a barber, and to have risen byhis exertions with the razor; but, against that legend, is to be posedthe fact that on the titles of his earliest books, dedicated to publicmen who must have known, he styles himself "Gent. " The dates of hisbirth and death are, I believe, a matter of conjecture. But the _Livesof the English Poets_ is the latest of his books, and the earliest waspublished in 1660. This is his _England's Worthies_, a group of whatwe should call to-day "biographical studies. " The longest and the mostinteresting of these is one on Oliver Cromwell, the tone of which isalmost grossly laudatory, although published at the very momentof Restoration. Now, it is a curious, and, at first sight, a verydisgraceful fact, that in 1684, when the book of _England's Worthies_was re-issued, all the praise of republicans was cancelled, and abusesubstituted for it. And then, in 1687, came the _Lives of theEnglish Poets_, with its horrible attack on Milton. The character ofWinstanley seems to be as base as any on literary record. I have cometo the conclusion, however, that Winstanley was guilty, neither ofretracting what he said about Cromwell, nor of slandering Milton. Theblack woman excused her husband for not answering the bell, "'Causehe's dead, " and the excuse was considered valid. I hope that whenthese interpolations were made, poor Winstanley was dead. 

Any one who reads the _Lives of the English Poets_ carefully, will beimpressed with two facts: first, that the author had an acquaintancewith the early versifiers of Great Britain, which was quiteextraordinary, and which can hardly be found at fault by our modernknowledge; while, secondly, that he shows a sudden and unaccountableignorance of his immediate contemporaries of the younger school. Except Campion, who is a discovery of our own day, not a singleElizabethan or Jacobean rhymester of the second or third rank escapeshis notice. Among the writers of a still later generation, I miss nonames save those of Vaughan, who was very obscure in his own lifetime, and Marvell, who would be excluded by the same prejudice which mockedat Milton. But among Poets of the Restoration, men and women who werein their full fame in 1687, the omissions are quite startling. Not aword is here about Otway, Lee, or Crowne; Butler is not mentioned, northe Matchless Orinda, nor Roscommon, nor Sir Charles Sedley. A carefulexamination of the dates of works which Winstanley refers to, producesa curious result. There is not mentioned, so far as I can trace, asingle poem or play which was published later than 1675, although thedate on the title-page of the _Lives of the English Poets_ is 1687. Rather an elaborate list of Dryden's publications is given, but itstops at _Amboyna_ (1673). On this I think it is not too bold tobuild a theory, which may last until Winstanley's entry of burial isdiscovered in some country church, that he died soon after 1675. Ifthis were the case, the recantations in his _English Worthies_ of 1684would be so many posthumous outrages committed on his blameless tomb, and the infamous sentence about Milton may well have been foisted intoa posthumous volume by the same wicked hand. If we could think thatSamuel Manship, at the Sign of the Black Bull, was the obsequiousrogue who did it, that would be one more sin to be numbered againstthe sad race of publishers. 

In studying old books about the poets, it sometimes occurs to us towonder whether the readers of two hundred years ago appreciated thesame qualities in good verse which are now admired. Did the ringingand romantic cadences of Shakespeare affect their senses as they doours? We know that they praised Carew and Suckling, but was it "Ask meno more where June bestows, " and "Hast thou seen the down in the air, "which gave them pleasure? It would sometimes seem, from the phrasesthey use and the passages they quote, that if poetry was the sametwo centuries ago, its readers had very different ears from ours. OfHerrick Winstanley says that he was "one of the Scholars of Apollo ofthe middle Form, yet something above _George Withers_, in a prettyFlowry and Pastoral Gale of Fancy, in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain; which but for the interruption of othertrivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst PoetickLandskips, " and then he quotes, as a sample of Herrick, a tiresome"epigram, " in the poet's worst style. This is not delicate or acutecriticism, as we judge nowadays; but I would give a good deal to meetWinstanley at a coffee-house, and go through the _Hesperides_ withhim over a dish of chocolate. It would be wonderfully interesting todiscover which passages in Herrick really struck the contemporarymind as "flowery, " and which as "trivial. " But this is just what allseventeenth-century criticism, even Dryden's, omits to explain to us. The personal note in poetical criticism, the appeal to definite taste, to the experience of eye and ear, is not met with, even in suggestion, until we reach the pamphlets of John Dennis. 

The particular copy of Winstanley which lies before me is a valuableone; I owe it to the generosity of a friend in Chicago, who hoardsrare books, and yet has the greatness of soul sometimes to part withthem. It is interleaved, and the blank pages are rather denselyinscribed with notes in the handwriting of Dr. Thomas Percy, thepoetical Bishop of Dromore. From his hands it passed into those ofJohn Bowyer Nichols, the antiquary. Percy's notes are little more thanreferences to other authorities, memoranda for one of his own usefulcompilations, yet it is pleasant to have even a slight personal relicof so admirable a man. Mr. Rivière has bound the volume for me, andI suppose that poor rejected Winstanley exists nowhere else in soelegant a shape. 

THE ROMANCE OF A DICTIONARY

HISTOIRE DE L'ACADEMIE FRANÇOISE: _avec un Abregé des Vies du Cardinalde Richelieu, Vaugelas, Corneille, Ablancourt, Mezerai, Voiture, Patru, la Fontaine, Boileau, Racine Et autres Illustres Academiciensqui la Composent_. 

_A La Haye, MDCLXXXVIII_. 

It is not often, in these days, when the pastime of bibliography isreduced to a science, that one is rewarded, as one so often was aquarter of a century ago, by picking up an unregarded treasure on thebookstalls. But the other day I really had a pleasant little "find, "and it was the reward of virtue. It came of having a tender heart. My eye caught what Mr. Austin Dobson would call "a dear and dumpytwelve, " lying open upon other books, face downward, in the mostignominious posture. I saw at a glance, from the tooling on its fadedand half-broken back, that it was French and of the seventeenthcentury, and that somebody had prized it once. I could read thelettering _Académ. Franc_. , and I gave the pence which were wantedfor it. It proved a most rewarding little volume. It was publishedat The Hague in 1688, and it was a new edition of the _Histoire del'Académie Française_. A preface says that "for the honour of ournation" (the French, presumably, not the Dutch), the publisher hasthought it proper to issue an edition "more correct and more elegant"than has hitherto been seen, brought down to date with many new andcurious pieces. Among other things, the said publisher thinks that"the English will not be displeased to see the Panegyric" of KingLouis XIV. "admirably rendered in their language by a Person of theirNation. " But what immediately caught my attention, and filled me withdelight, was an absolutely contemporary account, written specially forthis 1688 edition, of the great quarrel between the French Academy andthe Abbé Furetière. Of this I propose to speak to-day. 

We live in an age of Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, which we lookupon as universal panaceas for culture. There was a similar rage fordictionaries in France two hundred and fifty years ago. We may veryrapidly remind ourselves that the French Academy was constituted in1634 with thirty-five members, who became the stationary and immortalForty in 1639. One of its original functions was the preparation of agreat Dictionary of the French language, under the special care ofthe eminent grammarian, Vaugelas, who had through his lifetimemade collections--"various beautiful and curious observations, " asPellisson calls them--towards a reasoned philological study of French. The poet Chapelain was appointed a sort of general editor of theprojected Dictionary, which was solemnly started early in 1638. Forthe next four years the Academicians were very active, spurred on byRichelieu, but when, in 1642, the Cardinal died, their zeal relented, and when, in 1650, Vaugelas's presence ceased to urge them forward, itflagged altogether. Vaugelas died bankrupt, and his creditors seizedhis writing-desks, the drawers of which contained a great part of theMS. Collections for the Dictionary. It was only after a lawsuit thatthe Academy recovered those papers, and Mézeray was then set tocontinue the editing of the work. Still twice a week the Academy metto consult about the Dictionary, but so languidly and with so littlefire, that Boisrobert said that not the youngest of the Forty couldhope to live to print the letter G. As a matter of fact, not one ofthose who started the Dictionary lived to see it published. 

In this slow fashion, with long Rip Van Winkle slumbers and occasionalfaint awakenings, the French Academy faltered on with fitfulpersistence towards the completion of its famous Dictionary. But, asI have said, it was a period of great enthusiasm about all suchsummaries of knowledge, and Paris was thirsting for grammars, lexicons, inventories of language and the like. The Academy insistedthat the world must wait for the approach of their vast and lumberingmachine; but meanwhile public curiosity was impatient, and all sortsof brief and imperfect dictionaries were issued to satisfy it. Thepublication of these spurious guides to knowledge infuriated theAcademy, until in 1674 the dog permanently occupied the manger byinducing the King to issue a decree "forbidding all printers andpublishers to print any new dictionary of the French language, underany title whatsoever, until the publication of that of the FrenchAcademy, or until twenty years have expired since the proclamation ofthe present decree. " This cut the ground from under the feet of allrivals, and the Academy could meet twice a week as before and mumbleits definitions with serene assurance. From this false security it wasroused by the incident which my "dumpy twelve" recounts. 

It was from the very heart of their own body that the great attackupon their privileges unexpectedly fell upon the Academicians. In 1662they had elected (in the place of De Boissat, a very obscure originalmember) the Abbé of Chalivoy, Antoine Furetière. This man, born inParis of poor parents in 1619, had raised himself to eminence as anOrientalist and grammarian, and was welcomed among the Forty as likelyto be particularly helpful to them in their Dictionary work. He wasprobably one of those men whose true character does not come out untilthey attain success. But no sooner was Furetière an Immortal than hebegan to distinguish himself in unanticipated ways. He proved himselfan adept in parody and satire, and so long as he contented himselfwith laughing at people like Charles Sorel, the author of _Francion_, who had no friends, the Academicians were calm and amused, ButFuretière was not merely the author of that extremely amusing medley, _Le Roman Bourgeois_ (1666), which still holds its place in Frenchliterature as a minor classic, but he was also a real student ofphilology, and one of those who most ardently desired to see thesettlement of the canon of French language. It incensed him beyondwords that his colleagues dawdled so endlessly over their committeesand their definitions. He began to make collections of his own, nodoubt at first with the perfectly loyal intention of adding them tothe common store. Meanwhile he lashed the rest of the Academy withhis tongue. Other Academicians did this also, such men as Patru andBoisrobert, but they had not Furetière's nasty way of putting things. One perceives that about the year 1680 the sarcasms of Furetière hadreally become something more than the rest of the Immortals could putup with. 

He delivered himself into their hands, and here my little volume takesup the tale. On the 3rd of January, 1685, the French Academy met tomourn the death of its most illustrious member, the great PierreCorneille, and to elect his younger brother to take his place. Whilethe members were chatting together their Librarian handed about amongthem copies of a "privilege" which had just been obtained by the AbbéFuretière to publish "a universal Dictionary containing generally allFrench words, old as well as modern, and the terms employed in allarts and sciences. " So declares my little book; but it would seemthat the officers of the Academy at least a week earlier had theirattention drawn to what Furetière was doing. Perhaps it was not untilthe election of Thomas Corneille that an opportunity occurred ofmaking the members generally aware of it. One wonders whetherFuretière himself was present on the 3rd of January; if so, whatputtings of periwigs together there must have been in corners, andwhat taps of gold-headed canes on lace-frilled cuffs! It was felt, asmy little volume puts it, that "Monsieur the Abbé Furetière, being oneof the Forty Academicians, ought not to have been privately busyinghimself on a work which he knew to be the principal occupation of thewhole Academy. " It is surprising, in the face of the monopoly whichthat body had secured, that Furetière was able to obtain a Privilegefor his own Dictionary, but in all probability, as he was one of theForty, the censors supposed that he was acting in concert with hiscolleagues. 

Then began a hue and cry with which the learned world of Paris rangfor months. Never was such a scandal, never such a rain of pamphletsand lampoons on one side and the other. One has only to glance at thecontemporary portraits of Furetière to see that he was not the man toyield a point; his wrinkled face looks the very mirror of sarcasticobstinacy and brilliant ill-nature. The Academy, in solemn session, appointed Regnier Desmarais, their secretary, to wait on theChancellor to demand the cancelling of Furetière's privilege. But theAbbé had powerful friends also, and by their help the Chancellor'saction was delayed, while Furetière hurried out a specimen of hiswork. He says in the preface that no author ever had a more pressingneed for the protection of a prince than he has who sees the labourof years about to be sacrificed to the envy of others. He goes on toexplain that he has never dreamed of interfering with the work of theAcademy, for which he has the greatest possible respect, but thathe only hopes to render service to the public by supplementing itslabours. The Academy, in fact, had expressly declined to include inits Dictionary the technical terms of art and science, and it isparticularly with these that Furetière is occupied. His answer tothose who accuse him of stealing from the unpublished _cahiers_ of theAcademy is the uniformity of his work from A to Z; whereas, if he hadstolen from his colleagues, he must have stopped at O-P, which was thepoint they had reached in 1684. 

The Academy was not pacified, and began to take counsel how they couldturn Furetière out of their body. There was no precedent for sucha degradation, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that theSorbonne had successfully ejected one of its most famous doctors, Arnauld. Meanwhile the suit went on, the Thirty-nine versus the One. Furetière is said to have bowed for a moment beneath the storm, offering to blend his work in the general Dictionary of the Academy, or to remove from it all words not admitted to deal technically withart and science. But passion had gone too far, and on the 22nd ofJanuary, 1685, at a general meeting, twenty Academicians beingpresent, Furetière was expelled from the body by a majority ofnineteen to one. It is believed that the one who voted for mercy wasthe most illustrious of all, Racine. Boileau and Bossuet also defendedthe Abbé, and when the matter became at last so serious that the Kinghimself was obliged to take cognisance of it, it was understood thathis sympathies also were with Furetière. 

My little volume (written, I think, in 1687) does not know anythingabout the expulsion, which was therefore probably secret. It says:"As to Monsieur Furetière, he no longer puts in an appearance atthe meetings of the Academy, but it is not known whether any otherAcademician is to be elected in his place. " As a matter of fact, thesociety hesitated to go so far as this, and the seat was left vacant. Not for long, however; the unanimous rancour of so many men ofinfluence and rank had successfully ruined the fortune and brokenthe spirit of the old piratical lexicographer. Before retiring intoprivate life, however, he poured out in his _Couches de l'Académie_a torrent of poison, which was distilled through the presses ofAmsterdam in 1687. One of his earlier colleagues at the Academysupplied the bankrupt man with the necessaries of life, until, on the14th of May, 1688, probably just as the "dumpy twelve" was passingthrough the press, he died in Paris like a rat in a hole. HisDictionary, being suppressed in France, was edited, after his death, in 1690, at The Hague and Rotterdam, and enjoyed a great success. Welearn from a letter of Racine to Boileau that in 1694 the publisherventured to offer a copy of a new edition of it to the King of France, and that it was graciously received. If the poor old man could havestruggled on a little longer he might have lived to see himself becomefashionable and successful again. 

With all his misfortunes he managed to beat the Academy, for thatbody, in spite of its superhuman efforts, did not contrive to publishits Dictionary till four years after the appearance of Furetière's. The latter is a great curiosity of lexicography, a vast storehouse ofpeculiar and rare information. It is always consulted by scholars, butnever without a recollection of the extraordinary struggle which itsauthor sustained, singlehanded, against the world, and in which hefell, overpowered by numbers, only to triumph after all in the ashesof his fame. 

LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS

MISCELLANY POEMS. _With Two Plays. By Ardelia. 

 I never list presume to Parnass hill, But piping low, in shade of lowly grove, I play to please myself, albeit ill. 

Spencer Shep. Cal. June. 

Manuscript in folio. Circa_ 1696. 

There is no other book in my library to which I feel that I possess soclear a presumptive right as to this manuscript. Other rare volumeswould more fitly adorn the collections of bibliophiles more learned, more ingenious, more elegant, than I. But if there is any person inthe two hemispheres who has so fair a claim upon the ghost of Ardelia, let that man stand forth. Ardelia was uncultivated and unsung when Iconstituted myself, years ago, her champion. With the exception of anoble fragment of laudation from Wordsworth, no discriminating praisefrom any modern critic had stirred the ashes of her name. I made itmy business to insist in many places on the talent of Ardelia. I gaveher, for the first time, a chance of challenging public taste, bypresenting to readers of Mr. Ward's _English Poets_ many pages ofextracts from her writings; and I hope it is not indiscreet to saythat, when the third volume of that compilation appeared, Mr. MatthewArnold told me that its greatest revelation to himself had been thesingular merit of this lady. Such being my claim on the considerationof Ardelia, no one will, I think, grudge me the possession of thisunknown volume of her works in manuscript. It came into my hands bya strange coincidence. In his brief life of Anne Finch, Countess ofWinchilsea--for that was Ardelia's real name--Theophilus Gibber says, "A great number of our authoress' poems still continue unpublished, in the hands of the Rev. Mr. Creake. " In 1884 I saw advertised, in anobscure book-list, a folio volume of old manuscript poetry. Somethingexcited my curiosity, and I sent for it. It proved to be a vastcollection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch. I immediatelycommunicated with the bookseller, and asked him whence it came. Hereplied that it had been sold, with furniture, pictures and books, atthe dispersing of the effects of a family of the name of Creake. Thankyou, divine Ardelia! It was well done; it was worthy of you. 

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, is not a commanding figure inhistory, but she is an isolated and a well-defined one. She is whatone of the precursors of Shakespeare calls "a diminutive excelsitude. "She was entirely out of sympathy with her age, and her talent washampered and suppressed by her conditions. She was the solitary writerof actively developed romantic tastes between Marvell and Gray, andshe was not strong enough to create an atmosphere for herself withinthe vacuum in which she languished. The facts of her life areextremely scanty, although they may now be considerably augmentedby the help of my folio. She was born about 1660, the daughter of aHampshire baronet. She was maid of honour to Mary of Modena, Duchessof York, and at Court she met Heneage Finch, who was gentleman ofthe bed-chamber to the Duke. They married in 1685, probably on theoccasion of the enthronement of their master and mistress, and whenthe crash came in 1688, they fled together to the retirement ofEastwell Park. They inhabited this mansion for the rest of theirlives, although it was not until the death of his nephew, in 1712, that Heneage Finch became fourth Earl of Winchilsea. In 1713 Anne wasat last persuaded to publish a selection of her poems, and in 1720 shedied. The Earl survived her until 1726. 

My manuscript was written, I think, in or about the year 1696--thatis to say, when Mrs. Finch was in retirement from the Court. She hasadopted the habit of writing, _Betrayed by solitude to try Amusements, which the prosperous fly_. 

But her exile from the world gives her no disquietude. It seems almostan answer to her prayer. Years before, when she was at the centre offashion in the Court of James II. , she had written in an epistle tothe Countess of Thanet:

 _Give me, O indulgent Fate, Give me yet, before I die, A sweet, but absolute retreat, 'Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high, That the world may ne'er invade, Through such windings and such shade, My unshaken liberty_. 

This was a sentiment rarely expressed and still more rarely felt byEnglish ladies at the close of the seventeenth century. What theirreal opinion usually was is clothed in crude and ready language bythe heroines of Wycherley and Shadwell. Like Lucia, in the comedy of_Epsom Wells_, to live out of London was to live in a wilderness, withbears and wolves as one's companions. Alone in that age Anne Finchtruly loved the country, for its own sake, and had an eye to observeits features. 

She had one trouble, constitutional low spirits: she was a terriblesufferer from what was then known as "The Spleen. " She wrote a longpindaric Ode on the Spleen, which was printed in a miscellany in 1701, and was her first introduction to the public. She talks much abouther melancholy in her verses, but, with singular good sense, sherecognised that it was physical, and she tried various nostrums. Neither tea, nor coffee, nor ratafia did her the least service:

 _In vain to chase thee every art I try, In vain all remedies apply, In vain the Indian leaf infuse, Or the parched eastern berry bruise, Or pass, in vain, those bounds, and nobler liquors use_. 

Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking hours, and took sleepfrom her eyelids at night:

 _How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest, To a sad mind, with cares oppress'd? By what soft means shall I invite Thy powers into my soul to-night? Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come, Such darkness shall prepare the room As thy own palace overspreads, -- Thy palace stored with peaceful beds, -- And Silence, too, shall on thee wait Deep, as in the Turkish State; Whilst, still as death, I will be found, My arms by one another bound, And my dull limbs so clos'd shall be As if already seal'd by thee_. 

She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but withoutavail. When the abhorred fit came on, the world was darkened to her. Only two things could relieve her--the soothing influence of solitudewith nature and the Muses, or the sympathetic presence of her husband. She disdained the little feminine arts of her age:

 _Nor will in fading silks compose Faintly the inimitable rose, Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint on glass The Sovereign's blurr'd and indistinguished face, The threatening angel and the speaking ass_. 

But she will wander at sundown through the exquisite woods ofEastwell, and will watch the owlets in their downy nest orthe nightingale silhouetted against the fading sky. Then herconstitutional depression passes, and she is able once more to behappy:

 _Our sighs are then but vernal air, But April-drops our tears_, as she says in delicious numbers that might be Wordsworth's own. Inthese delightful moments, released from the burden of her tyrantmalady, her eyes seem to have been touched with the herb euphrasy, and she has the gift, denied to the rest of her generation, of seeingnature and describing what she sees. In these moods, this contemporaryof Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate transcripts of countrylife as the following:

 _When the loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear; When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud: When curlews cry beneath the village-walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls_. 

In Eastwell Park there was a hill, called Parnassus, to which she wasparticularly partial, and to this she commonly turned her footsteps. 

Melancholy as she was, however, and devoted to reverie, she couldbe gay enough upon occasion, and her sprightly poems have a genuinesparkle. Here is an anacreontic--written "for my brother LeslieFinch"--which has never before been printed:

 _From the Park, and the Play, And Whitehall, come away To the Punch-bowl by far more inviting; To the fops and 'the beaux Leave those dull empty shows, And see here what is truly delighting. 

 The half globe 'tis in figure, And would it were bigger, Yet here's the whole universe floating; Here's titles and places, Rich lands, and fair faces, And all that is worthy our doting. 

 'Twas a world like to this The hot Grecian did miss, Of whom histories keep such a pother; To the bottom he sunk, And when he had drunk, Grew maudlin, and wept for another_. 

At another point, Anne Finch bore very little likeness to hernoisy sisterhood of fashion. In an age when it was the height ofill-breeding for a wife to admit a partiality for her husband, Ardeliawas not ashamed to confess that Daphnis--for so she styled theexcellent Heneage Finch--absorbed every corner of her mind that wasnot occupied by the Muses. It is a real pleasure to transcribe, forthe first time since they were written on the 2nd of April, 1685, these honest couplets:

 _This, to the crown and blessing of my life, The much-loved husband of a happy wife; To him whose constant passion found the art To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart; And to the world by tenderest proof discovers They err who say that husbands can't be lovers. With such return of passion as is due, Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue, Daphnis, my hopes, my joys are bounded all in you_!

Nearly thirty years later the same accent is audible, thinned a littleby advancing years, and subdued from passion to tenderness, yet asgenuine as at first. When at length the Earl began to suffer from thegout, his faithful family songster recorded that also in her amiableverse, and prayed that "the bad disease"

 _May you but brief unfrequent visits find To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind_. 

No one can read her sensitive verses, and not be sure that she was thesweetest and most soothing of bed-side visitants. 

It was a quiet life which Daphnis and Ardelia spent in the recesses ofEastwell Park. They saw little company and paid few visits. Therewas a stately excursion now and then, to the hospitable Thynnes atLongleat, and Anne Finch seldom omitted to leave behind her a metricaltribute to the beauties of that mansion. They seem to have kept uplittle connection with the Court or with London. There is no trace ofliterary society in this volume. Nicholas Rowe twice sent down fortheir perusal translations which he had made; and from another sourcewe learn that Lady Winchilsea had a brisk passage of compliments withPope. But these were rare incidents. We have rather to think ofthe long years spent in the seclusion of Eastwell, by these gentleimpoverished people of quality, the husband occupied with hismathematical studies, his painting, the care of his garden; the wifestudying further afield in her romantic reverie, watching the birds inwild corners of her park, carrying her Tasso, hidden in a fold of herdress, to a dell so remote that she forgets the way back, and has tobe carried home "in a Water-cart driven by one of the Underkeepers inhis green Coat, with a Hazle-bough for a Whip. " It is a littleoasis of delicate and pensive refinement in that hot close of theseventeenth century, when so many unseemly monsters were bellowing inthe social wilderness. 

AMASIA

AMASIA: _or, The Works of the Muses. A Collection of Poems. In threevolumes. By Mr. John Hopkins. London: Printed by Tho. Warren, for Bennet Banbury, at the Blue-Anchor, in the Lower-Walk of theNew-Exchange_, 1700. 

It has often been remarked that if the author of the poorestcollection of minor verse would accurately relate in his quaveringnumbers what his personal observations and adventures have been, hisbook would not be entirely without value. But ninety-nine times out ofa hundred, this is precisely what he cannot do. His rhymes carry himwhither he would not, and he is lost in a fog of imitated phrases andspurious sensations. The very odd and very rare set of three littlevolumes, which now come before us, offer a curious exception to thisrule. The author of _Amasia_ was no poet, but he possessed the facultyof writing with exactitude about himself. He prattled on in heroiccouplets from hour to hour, recording the tiny incidents of his life. At first sight, his voluble miscellany seems a mere wilderness of tameverses, but when we examine it closely a story gradually evolves. Wecome to know John Hopkins, and live in the intimacy of his circle. His poems contain a novelette in solution. So far as I can discover, nothing whatever is known of him save what he reveals of himself, andno one, I think, has ever searched his three uninviting volumes. Inthe following paragraphs I have put together his story as it is to befound in the pages of _Amasia_. 

By a single allusion to the _Epistolary Poems_ of Charles Hopkins, "very well perform'd by my Brother, " in 1694, we are able to identifythe author of _Amasia_ with certainty. He was the second son of theRight Rev. Ezekiel Hopkins, Lord Bishop of Derry. The elder brotherwhom we have mentioned, Charles, was considerably his senior; forsix years the latter occupied a tolerably prominent place in Londonliterary society, was the intimate friend of Dryden and Congreve, published three or four plays not without success, and possessed aname which is pretty frequently met with in books of the time. But toJohn Hopkins I have discovered scarcely an allusion. He does not seemto have moved in his brother's circle, and his society was probablymore courtly than literary. If we may trust his own account the authorof _Amasia_ was born, doubtless at Londonderry, on the 1st of January, 1675. He was, therefore, only twenty-five when his poems werepublished, and the exquisitely affected portrait which adorns thefirst volume must represent him as younger still, since it wasexecuted by the Dutch engraver, F. H. Van Hove, who was found murderedin October, 1698. 

Pause a moment, dear reader, and observe Mr. John Hopkins, _alias_Sylvius, set out with all the artillery of ornament to storm the heartof Amasia. Notice his embroidered silken coat, his splendid lacecravat, the languishment of his large foolish eyes, the indubitabletouch of Spanish red on those smooth cheeks. But, above allcontemplate the wonders of his vast peruke. He has a name, be sure, for every portion of that killing structure. Those sausage-shapedcurls, close to the ears, are _confidants_; those that dangle roundthe temples, _favorites_; the sparkling lock that descends alone overthe right eyebrow is the _passagère_; and, above all, the gorgeousknot that unites the curls and descends on the left breast, is aptlynamed the _meurtrière_. If he would but turn his head, we should seehis _crèves-coeur_, the two delicate curled locks at the nape of hisneck. The escutcheon below his portrait bears, very suitably, threeloaded muskets rampant. Such was Sylvius, conquering but, alas! not toconquer. 

The youth of John Hopkins was passed in the best Irish society. Hisfather, the Bishop, married--apparently in second nuptials, for Johnspeaks not of her as a man speaks of his mother--the daughter of theEarl of Radnor. Lady Araminta Hopkins seems to have been a friend ofIsabella, Duchess of Grafton, the exquisite girl who, at the age offive, had married a bridegroom of nine, and at twenty-three was lefta widow, to be the first toast in English society. The poems of JohnHopkins are dedicated to this Dowager-duchess, who, when they werepublished, had already for two years been the wife of Sir ThomasHanmer. At the age of twelve, and probably in Dublin, Hopkins met themysterious lady who animates these volumes under the name of Amasia. Who was Amasia? That, alas! even the volubility of her lover doesnot reveal. But she was Irish, the daughter of a wealthy and perhapstitled personage, and the intimate companion for many years of thebeautiful Duchess of Grafton. 

Love did not begin at first sight. Sylvius played with Amasia whenthey both were children, and neither thought of love. Later on, inearly youth, the poet was devoted only to a male friend, one Martin. To him ecstatic verses are inscribed:

 _O Martin! Martin! let the grateful sound Reach to that Heav'n which has our Friendship crown'd, And, like our endless Friendship, meet no bound_. 

But alas! one day Martin came back, after a long absence, and, although he still

 _With generous, kind, continu'd Friendship burn'd_, he found Sylvius entirely absorbed by Amasia. Martin knew better thanto show temper; he accepted the situation, and

 _the lov'd Amasia's Health flew round, Amasia's Health the Golden Goblets crown'd_. 

Now began the first and happiest portion of the story. Amasia had nosuspicion of the feelings of the poet, and he was only too happy to bepermitted to watch her movements. He records, in successive copies ofverses, the various things she did. He seems to have been on terms ofdelightful intimacy with the lady, and he calls all sorts of people ofthe highest position to witness how he suffered. To Lady Sandwich arededicated poems on "Amasia, drawing her own Picture, " on "Amasia, playing with a Clouded Fan, " on "Amasia, singing, and sticking pins ina Red Silk Pincushion. " We are told how Amasia "looked at me through aMultiplying-Glass, " how she was troubled with a redness in her eyes, how she danced before a looking-glass, how her flowered muslinnightgown (or "night-rail, " as he calls it) took fire, and how, thoughshe promised to sing, yet she never performed. We have a poem on thecircumstance that Amasia, "having prick'd me with a Pin, accidentallyscratched herself with it;" and another on her "asking me if I sleptwell after so tempestuous a night. " But perhaps the most intimate ofall is a poem "To Amasia, tickling a Gentleman. " It was no perfunctorytickling that Amasia administered:

 _While round his sides your nimble Fingers played, With pleasing softness did they swiftly rove, While, at each touch, they made his Heart-strings move. As round his Breast, his ravish'd Breast they crowd, We hear their Musick when he laughs aloud_. 

This is probably the only instance in literature in which a gentlemanhas complacently celebrated in verse the fact that his lady-love hastickled some other gentleman. 

But this generous simplicity was not long to last. In 1690 Hopkins'sfather, the Bishop, had died. We may conjecture that Lady Aramintatook charge of the boy, and that his home, in vacation time, was withher in Dublin or London. He writes like a youth who has always beenpetted; the _frou-frou_ of fine ladies' petticoats is heard in all hisverses. But he had no fortune and no prospects; he was utterly, heconfesses, without ambition. The stern papa of Amasia had no notion ofbestowing her on the penniless Sylvius, and when the latter began tocourt her in earnest, she rebuffed him. She tore up his love-letters, she teased him by sending her black page to the window when he wasogling for her in the street below, she told him he was too young forher, and although she had no objection to his addressing verses toher, she gave him no serious encouragement. She was to be married, hehints, to some one of her own rank--some rich "country booby. "

At last, early in 1698, in company with the Duchess of Grafton, andpossibly on the occasion of the second marriage of the latter, Amasiawas taken off to France, and Hopkins never saw her again. A year laterhe received news of her death, and his little romance was over. Hebecame ill, and Dr. Gibbons, the great fashionable physician of theday, was called in to attend him. The third volume closes by hissummoning the faithful and unupbraiding Martin back to his heart:

 _Love lives in Sun-Shine, or that Storm, Despair, But gentler Friendship Breathes a Mod'rate Air_. 

And so Sylvius, with all his galaxy of lovely Irish ladies, hisfashionable Muses, and his trite and tortured fancy, disappears intothin air. 

The only literary man whom he mentions as a friend is George Farquhar, himself a native of Londonderry, and about the same age as Hopkins. This playwright seems to be sometimes alluded to as Daphnis, sometimesunder his own name. Before the performance of _Love and a Bottle_, Hopkins prophesied for the author a place where

 _Congreve, Vanbrook, and Wicherley must sit, The great Triumvirate of Comick Wit_, and later on he thought that even Collier himself ought to commend the_Constant Couple, or A Trip to the Jubilee_. At the first performanceof this play, towards the close of 1699, Hopkins was greatly perturbedby the presence of a lady who reminded him of Amasia, and when hevisited the theatre next he was less pleased with the play. He had avague and infelicitous scheme for turning _Paradise Lost_ into rhyme. These are the only traces of literary bias. In other respects Hopkinsis interested in nothing more serious than a lock of Amasia's hair;the china cup she had, "round the sides of which were painted Trees, and at the bottom a Naked Woman Weeping;" her box of patches, in whichshe finds a silver penny; or the needlework embroidered on her gown. When Amasia died there was no reason why Sylvius should continue toexist, and he fades out of our vision like a ghost. 

LOVE AND BUSINESS

LOVE AND BUSINESS: _in a Collection of occasionary Verse andepistolary Prose not hitherto published. By Mr. George Farquhar_. EnOrenge il n'y a point d'oranges. _London, printed for B. Lintott, atthe Post-House, in the Middle Temple-Gate, Fleet Street_. 1702. 

There are some books, like some people, of whom we form an indulgentopinion without finding it easy to justify our liking. The young manwho went to the life-insurance office and reported that his fatherhad died of no particular disease, but just of "plain death, " wouldsympathise with the feeling I mention. Sometimes we like a book, notfor any special merit, but just because it is what it is. The rare, and yet not celebrated, miscellany of which I am about to writehas this character. It is not instructive, or very high-toned, orexceptionally clever, but if it were a man, all people that are notprigs would say that it was a very good sort of fellow. If it be, asit certainly is, a literary advantage for a nondescript collection oftrifles, to reproduce minutely the personality of its writer, then_Love and Business_ has one definite merit. Wherever we dip into itspages we may use it as a telephone, and hear a young Englishman, ofthe year 1700, talking to himself and to his friends in the mostunaffected accents. 

Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age. He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of "a splenetic and amorouscomplexion, " half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a veryhonest and gallant gentleman. He had taken to the stage kindly enough, and at twenty-one had written _Love and a Bottle_. Since then, twoother plays, _The Constant Couple_ and _Sir Harry Wildair_, had provedthat he had wit and fancy, and knew how to knit them together intoa rattling comedy. But he was poor, always in pursuit of that timidwild-fowl, the occasional guinea, and with no sort of disposition tosettle down into a heavy citizen. In order to bring down a few braceof golden game, he shovels into Lintott's hands his stray verses ofall kinds, a bundle of letters he wrote from Holland, a dignifiedessay or discourse upon Comedy, and, with questionable taste perhaps, a set of copies of the love-letters he had addressed to the ladywho became his wife. All this is not very praiseworthy, and as acontribution to literature it is slight indeed; but, then, how genuineand sincere, how guileless and picturesque is the self-revelation ofit! There is no attempt to make things better than they are, nor anypandering to a cynical taste by making them worse. Why should heconceal or falsify? The town knows what sort of a fellow GeorgeFarquhar is. Here are some letters and some verses; the beaux atWhite's may read them if they will, and then throw them away. 

As we turn the desultory pages, the figure of the author rises beforeus, good-natured, easygoing, high-coloured, not bad-looking, with anair of a gentleman in spite of his misfortunes. We do not knowthe exact details of his military honours. We may think of him asswaggering in scarlet regimentals, but we have his own word for itthat he was often in _mufti_. His mind is generally dressed, he says, like his body, in black; for though he is so brisk a spark in company, he suffers sadly from the spleen when he is alone. We can follow himpretty closely through his day. He is a queer mixture of profanity andpiety, of coarseness and loyalty, of cleverness and density; we do notbreed this kind of beau nowadays, and yet we might do worse, for thisspecimen is, with all his faults, a man. He dresses carefully in themorning, in his uniform or else in his black suit. When he wants tobe specially smart, as, for instance, when he designs a conquest at abirthday-party, he has to ferret among the pawnbrokers for scraps offinery, or secure on loan a fair, full-bottom wig. But he is not soimpoverished that he cannot on these occasions give his valet and hisbarber plenty of work to do preparing his face with razors, perfumesand washes. He would like to be Sir Fopling Flutter, if he couldafford it, and gazes a little enviously at that noble creature in hisFrench clothes, as he lounges luxuriantly past him in his coach withsix before and six behind. 

Poor Captain Farquhar begins to expect that he himself will never be"a first-rate Beau. " So, on common mornings, a little splenetic, hewanders down to the coffee-houses and reads the pamphlets, those whichfind King William glorious, and those that rail at the watery Dutch. He will even be a little Jacobitish for pure foppery, and have a flingat the Church, but in his heart he is with the Ministry. He meets afriend at White's, and they adjourn presently to the Fleece Tavern, where the drawer brings them a bottle of New French and a neat'stongue, over which they discuss the doctrine of predestination sohotly that two mackerel-vendors burst in, mistaking their liftedvoices for a cry for fish. His friend has business in the city, and soour poet strolls off to the Park, and takes a turn in the Mall withhis hat in his hand, prepared for an adventure or a chat with afriend. Then comes the play, the inevitable early play, still, evenin 1700, apt to be so rank-lipped that respectable ladies could onlyappear at it in masks. It was the transition period, and poor Comedy, who was saying good-bye to literature, was just about to consoleherself with modesty. 

However, a domino may slip aside, and Mr. George Farquhar noticesa little lady in a deep mourning mantua, whose eyes are not to beforgotten. She goes, however; it is useless to pursue her; but themusic raises his soul to such a pitch of passion that he is almostmelancholy. He strolls out into Spring Garden, but there, "withenvious eyes, I saw every Man pick up his Mate, whilst I alone walkedlike solitary Adam before the Creation of his Eve; but the place wasno Paradise to me; nothing I found entertaining but the Nightingale. "So that in those sweet summer evenings of 1700, over the laced andbrocaded couples promenading in Spring Garden, as over good Sir Rogertwelve years later, the indulgent nightingale still poured her notes. To-day you cannot hear the very bells of St. Martin's for the roar ofthe traffic. So lonely, and too easily enamoured, George has to betakehimself to the tavern, and a passable Burgundy. There is no idealismabout him. He is very fit for repentance next morning. "The searchingWine has sprung the Rheumatism in my Right Hand, my Head aches, myStomach pukes. " Our poor, good-humoured beau has no constitution forthis mode of life, and we know, though happily he dreams not of it, that he is to die before he reaches thirty. 

This picture of Farquhar's life is nowhere given in the form justrelated, but not one touch in the portrait but is to be foundsomewhere in the frank and easy pages of _Love and Business_. Thepoems are of their age and kind. There is a "Pindarick, " of course; itwas so easy to write one, and so reputable. There are compliments inverse to one of the female wits who were writing then for the stage, Mrs. Trotter, author of the _Fatal Friendship_; there are amatoryexplanations of all kinds. When he fails to keep an appointment witha lady on account of the rain--for there were no umbrellas in thosedays--he likens himself to Leander, wistful on the Sestian shore. Heis not always very discreet; Damon's thoughts when "Night's blackCurtain o'er the World was spread" were very innocent, but such as wehave decided nowadays to say nothing about. It was the fashion of thetime to be outspoken. There is no value, however, in the verse, except that it is graphic now and then. The letters are much moreinteresting. Those sent from Holland in the autumn of 1700 are verygood reading. I make bold to quote one passage from the first, describing the storm he encountered in crossing. It depicts our heroto the life, with all his inconsistencies. He says: "By a kind ofPoetical Philosophy I bore up pretty well under my Apprehensions;though never worse prepared for Death, I must confess, for I think Inever had so much Money about me at a time. We had some Ladies aboard, that were so extremely sick, that they often wished for Death, butwere damnably afraid of being drown'd. But, as the Scripture says, 'Sorrow may last for a Night, but Joy cometh in the Morning, '" and soon. The poor fellow means no harm by all this, as Hodgson once said ofcertain remarks of Byron's. 

The love-letters are very curious. It is believed that the sequel ofthem was a very unhappy marriage. Captain Farquhar was of a lovingdisposition, and as inflammable as a hay-rick. He cannot have beenmuch more than twenty-one when he described what he desired in a wife. "O could I find, " he said--

 _O could I find (Grant, Heaven, that once I may!) A Nymph fair, kind, poetical and gay Whose Love should blaze, unsullied and divine. Lighted at first by the bright Lamp of mine. Free as a Mistress, faithful as a wife. And one that lov'd a Fiddle as her Life, Free from all sordid Ends, from Interest free, For my own Sake affecting only me, What a blest Union should our Souls combine! I hers alone, and she be only mine!_

It does not seem a very exacting ideal, but the poor poet missed it. Whether Mrs. Farquhar loved a fiddle as her life is not recorded, butshe certainly was not free from all sordid ends and unworthy tricks. The little lady in the mourning mantua soon fell in love with ourgallant spark, and when he made court to her, she represented herselfas very wealthy. The deed accomplished, Mrs. Farquhar turned out to bepenniless; and the poet, like a gentleman as he was, never reproachedher, but sat down cheerfully to a double poverty. In _Love andBusiness_ the story does not proceed so far. He receives Miss PenelopeV----'s timid advances, describes himself to her, is soon as much inlove with his little lady as she with him, and is making broad demandsand rich-blooded confidences in fine style, no offence taken whereno harm is meant. In one of the letters to Penelope we get a veryinteresting glance at a famous, and, as it happens, rather obscure, event--the funeral of the great Dryden, in May 1700. Farquhar says:

"I come now from Mr. Dryden's Funeral, where we had an Ode in Horacesung, instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find that we don'tthink a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the Ceremony was akind of Rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; becausethe Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an extraordinary Man, and bury'd after an extraordinary Fashion; for I believe there wasnever such another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great andingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the Author [Dr. Garth], whosePrescriptions can restore the Living, and his Pen embalm the Dead. And so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same with hisLife, --Variety, and not of a Piece. The Quality and Mob, Farce andHeroicks, the Sublime and Ridicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra ina Hackney Coach. "

WHAT ANN LANG READ

Who was Ann Lang? Alas! I am not sure; but she flourished one hundredand sixty years ago, under his glorious Majesty, George I. , and I havebecome the happy possessor of a portion of her library. It consistsof a number of cheap novels, all published in 1723 and 1724, when AnnLang probably bought them; and each carries, written on the back ofthe title, "ann Lang book 1727, " which is doubtless the date of herlending them to some younger female friend. The letters of thisinscription are round and laboriously shaped, while the form is alwaysthe same, and never "Ann Lang, her book, " which is what one wouldexpect. It is not the hand of a person of quality: I venture toconclude that she who wrote it was a milliner's apprentice or aservant-girl. There are five novels in this little collection, anda play, and a pamphlet of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, allsigned upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, the greatEliza Haywood. 

No one who has not dabbled among old books knows how rare have becomethe strictly popular publications of a non-literary kind which ageneration of the lower middle class has read and thrown away. ElizaHaywood lives in the minds of men solely through one very coarse andcruel allusion to her made by Pope in the _Dunciad_. She was neverrecognised among people of intellectual quality; she ardently desiredto belong to literature, but her wish was never seriously gratified, even by her friend Aaron Hill. Yet she probably numbered more readers, for a year or two, than any other person in the British realm. Shepoured forth what she called "little Performances" from a tolerablyrespectable press; and the wonder is that in these days her abundantwritings are so seldom to be met with. The secret doubtless is thather large public consisted almost wholly of people like Ann Lang. Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, bybasket-women, by 'prentices of all sorts, male and female, but mostlythe latter. For girls of this sort there was no other reading of alight kind in 1724. It was Eliza Haywood or nothing. The men of thesame class read Defoe; but he, with his cynical severity, his absenceof all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards women, was notlikely to be preferred by "straggling nymphs. " The footman might read_Roxana_, and the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over _MollFlanders_; there was much in these romances to interest men. But whathad Ann Lang to do with stories so cold and harsh? She read ElizaHaywood. 

But most of her sisters, of Eliza's great _clientèle_, did not knowhow to treat a book. They read it to tatters, and they threw it away. It may be news to some readers that these early novels were verycheap. Ann Lang bought _Love in Excess_, which is quite a thickvolume, for two shillings; and the first volume of _Idalia_ (for Elizawas Ouidaesque even in her titles) only cost her eighteen-pence. Sheseems to have been a clean girl. She did not drop warm lard on theleaves. She did not tottle up her milk-scores on the bastard-title. She did not scribble in the margin "Emanuella is a foul wench. " Shedid not dog's-ear her little library, or stain it, or tear it. I oweit to that rare and fortunate circumstance of her neatness that herbeloved books have come into my possession after the passage of somany generations. It must be recollected that Eliza Haywood lived inthe very twilight of English fiction. Sixteen years were still topass, in 1724, before the British novel properly began to dawn in_Pamela_, twenty-five years before it broke in the full splendour of_Tom Jones_. Eliza Haywood simply followed where, two generationsearlier, the redoubtable Mrs. Aphra Behn had led. She preserved theold romantic manner, a kind of corruption of the splendid Scudéry andCalprenède folly of the middle of the seventeenth century. All thatdistinguished her was her vehement exuberance and the emptiness of thefield. Ann Lang was young, and instinctively attracted to the study ofthe passion of love. She must read something, and there was nothingbut Eliza Haywood for her to read. 

The heroines of these old stories were all palpitating withsensibility, although that name had not yet been invented to describetheir condition. When they received a letter beginning "To the divineLassellia, " or "To the incomparable Donna Emanuella, " they werethrown into the most violent disorder; "a thousand different Passionssucceeded one another in their turns, " and as a rule "'twas all toosudden to admit disguise. " When a lady in Eliza Haywood's novelsreceives a note from a gentleman, "all her Limbs forget theirFunction, and she sinks fainting on the Bank, in much the same postureas she was before she rais'd herself a little to take the Letter. " Iam positive that Ann Lang practised this series of attitudes in thesolitude of her garret. 

There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza's first page to herlast. The implacable Douxmoure (for such was her singular name)"continued for some time in a Condition little different from Madness;but when Reason had a little recovered its usual Sway, a deadlyMelancholy succeeded Passion. " When Bevillia tried to explain to hercousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, the young ladyswooned twice before she seized Bevillia's "cruel meaning;" andthen--ah! then--"silent the stormy Passions roll'd in her torturedBosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or complaining. It was aconsiderable time before she utter'd the least Syllable; and when shedid, she seem'd to start as from some dreadful Dream, and cry'd, 'Itis enough--in knowing one I know the whole deceiving Sex'"; and shebegan to address an imaginary Women's Rights Meeting. 

Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood greatly troubledherself. A contemporary admirer remarked, with justice:

 '_Tis Love Eliza's soft Affections fires; Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires; 'Tis Love that gives D'Elmont his manly Charms, And tears Amena from her Father's Arms_. 

These last-named persons are the hero and heroine of _Love in Excess;or The Fatal Inquiry_, which seems to have been the most popular ofthe whole series. This novel might be called _Love Through a Window_;for it almost entirely consists of a relation of how the gentlemanprowled by moonlight in a garden, while the lady, in an agitateddisorder, peeped out of her lattice in "a most charming Dishabillée. "Alas! there was a lock to the door of a garden staircase, and whilethe lady "was paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrousenough to slip the Key out of the Door unperceived. " Ann Lang!--"asudden cry of Murder, and the noise of clashing Swords, " come none toosoon to save those blushes which, we hope, you had in readiness forthe turning of the page! Eliza Haywood assures us, in _Idalia_, thather object in writing is that "the Warmth and Vigour of Youth may betemper'd by a due Consideration"; yet the moralist must complainthat she goes a strange way about it. Idalia herself was "a lovelyInconsiderate" of Venice, who escaped in a "Gondula" up "the RiverBrent, " and set all Vicenza by the ears through her "stock ofHaughtiness, which nothing could surmount. " At last, after adventureswhich can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia abruptly "remember'dto have heard of a Monastery at Verona, " and left Vicenza at break ofday, taking her "unguarded languishments" out of that city and out ofthe novel. It is true that Ann Lang, for 2s. , bought a continuation ofthe career of Idalia; but we need not follow her. 

The perusal of so many throbbing and melting romances must necessarilyhave awakened in the breast of female readers a desire to see thecreator of these tender scenes. I am happy to inform my readers thatthere is every reason to believe that Ann Lang gratified this innocentwish. At all events, there exists among her volumes the little book ofthe play sold at the doors of Drury Lane Theatre, when, in the summerof 1724, Eliza Haywood's new comedy of _A Wife to be Lett_ was actedthere, with the author performing in the part of Mrs. Graspall. Theplay itself is wretched, and tradition says that it owed what littlesuccess it enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist's readersfelt to gaze upon her features. She was about thirty years of ageat the time; but no one says that she was handsome, and she wasundoubtedly a bad actress, I think the disappointment that eveningat the Theatre Royal opened the eyes of Ann Lang. Perhaps it was theappearance of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old admirer frombuying _The Secret History of Cleomina, suppos'd dead_, which I missfrom the collection. 

If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of _Pamela_--especially ifduring the interval she had bettered her social condition--withwhat ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all itsshortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall withit in her muff, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady ofher acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novelafter another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She musthave looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive disgust. The English novel began in 1740, and after that date there was alwayssomething wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters to read. 

CATS

LES CHATS. _A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, MDCCXXVIII_. 

An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells me that she is preparingan anthology of the cat. This announcement has reminded me of one ofthe oddest and most entertaining volumes in my library. People whocollect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving whichrepresents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of agentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume. The volumeis _Les Chats_, the book before us, and the portrait is that of theauthor, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif. He wasthe son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled inParis, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier yearsis to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makesMoncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescentbubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses withthe best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the artwith which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then somuch in fashion in France. Somebody said of him, when he was famousas the laureate of the cats, that he had risen in life by neverscratching, by always having velvet paws, and by never putting up hisback, even when he was startled. Voltaire called him "my very dearSylph, " and he was the ideal of all that was noiseless, graceful, good-humoured, and well-bred. He slipped unobtrusively into the FrenchAcademy, and lived to be eighty-three, dying at last, like Anacreon, in the midst of music and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera, affecting to be a sad old rogue to the very last. 

This book on Cats, the only one by which he is now remembered, was thesole production of his lifetime which cost him any annoyance. He wasforty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered alittle frivolous, even for such a _petit conteur_ as Moncrif. Peoplecontinued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever didwas the result of one such twitting. The poet Roy made an epigramabout "cats" and "rats, " in execrable taste, no doubt; this stung ourSylph to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais Royal andbeat Roy with a stick when he came out. The poet was, perhaps, notmuch hurt; at all events, he had the presence of mind to retort, "Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet!" It was six yearsafter this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, andthen the shower of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be madehistoriographer; "Oh, nonsense, " the wits cried, "he must meanhistoriogriffe" and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met, to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots. He had theweakness to apologise for his charming book, and to withdraw it fromcirculation. His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his _Zélindors_and _Zéloïdes_ and _Erosines_, which to us seem utterly vapid andfrivolous, never gave him a moment's uneasiness. His crumpledrose-leaf was the book by which his name lives in literature. 

The book of cats is written in the form of eleven letters to Madame laMarquise de B----. The anonymous author represents himself as too muchexcited to sleep, after an evening spent in a fashionable house, where the company was abusing cats. He was unsupported; where wasthe Marquise, who would have brought a thousand arguments to hisassistance, founded on her own experience of virtuous pussies? Insteadof going to bed he will sit up and indite the panegyric of the felinerace. He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the peoplehe has just left. It culminated in the conduct of a lady who declaredthat cats were poison, and who, "when pussy appeared in the room, hadthe presence of mind to faint. " These people had rallied him on theabsurdity of his enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well knows, "how many women have a passion for cats, and how many men are women inthis respect. "

So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry, its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and itsconstant sparkle of anecdote. He is troubled to account for theexistence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that when the animalswere in the Ark, Noah gave the lion a great box on the ear, which madehim sneeze, and produce a cat out his nose. But the author questionsthis origin, and is more inclined to agree with a Turkish Minister ofReligion, sometime Ambassador to France, that the ape, "weary of asedentary life" in the Ark, paid his attentions to a very agreeableyoung lioness, whose infidelities resulted in the birth of a Tom-catand a Puss-cat, and that these, combining the qualities of theirparents, spread through the Ark _un esprit de coquetterie_--whichlasted during the whole of the sojourn there. Moncrif has nodifficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats, and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day ona point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which hisfavourite pussy was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising. 

From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributesto the "harmless, necessary cat. " I am seized with an ambition to putsome fragments of these into English verse. Most of them are highlycomplimentary. It is true that Ronsard was one of those who could notappreciate a "matou. " He sang or said:

 _There is no man now living anywhere Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I; I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare, And when I see one come, I turn and fly_. 

But among the _précieuses_ of the seventeenth century there was muchmore appreciation. Mme. Deshoulières wrote a whole series of songsand couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to her husband, referring to the attentions she herself receives from admirers, sheadds:

 _Deshoulières cares not for the smart Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hussy, But, like a mouse, her idle heart Is captured by a pussy_. 

Much better than these is the sonnet on the cat of the Duchess ofLesdiguières, with its admirable line:

 _Chatte pour tout le monde, et pour les chats tigresse_. 

A fugitive epistle by Scarron, delightfully turned, is too long to bequoted here, nor can I pause to cite the rondeau which the Duchess ofMaine addressed to her favourite. But she supplemented it as follows:

 _My pretty puss, my solace and delight, To celebrate thy loveliness aright I ought to call to life the bard who sung Of Lesbia's sparrow with so sweet a tongue; But 'tis in vain to summon here to me So famous a dead personage as he, And you must take contentedly to-day This poor rondeau that Cupid wafts your way_. 

When this cat died the Duchess was too much affected to write itsepitaph herself, and accordingly it was done for her, in the followingstyle, by La Mothe le Vayer, the author of the _Dialogues_:

 _Puss passer-by, within this simple tomb Lies one whose life fell Atropos hath shred; The happiest cat on earth hath heard her doom, And sleeps for ever in a marble bed. Alas! what long delicious days I've seen! O cats of Egypt, my illustrious sires, You who on altars, bound with garlands green, Have melted hearts, and kindled fond desires, -- Hymns in your praise were paid, and offerings too, But I'm not jealous of those rights divine. Since Ludovisa loved me, close and true, Your ancient glory was less proud than mine. To live a simple pussy by her side Was nobler far than to be deified_. 

To these and other tributes Moncrif adds idyls and romances of hisown, while regretting that it never occurred to Theocritus to write a_bergerie de chats_. He tells stories of blameless pussies belovedby Fontanelle and La Fontaine, and quotes Marot in praise of "thegreen-eyed Venus. " But he tears himself away at last from all thesehistorical reminiscences, and in his eleventh letter he deals withcats as they are. We hasten as lightly as possible over a story of thedisinterestedness of a feline Heloise, which is too pathetic for anineteenth-century ear. But we may repeat the touching anecdote ofBayle's friend, Mlle. Dupuy. This lady excelled to a surprisingdegree in playing the harp, and she attributed her excellence in thisaccomplishment to her cat, whose critical taste was only equalled byhis close attention to Mlle. Dupuy's performance. She felt that sheowed so much to this cat, under whose care her reputation for skill onthe harp had become universal, that when she died she left him, in herwill, one agreeable house in town and another in the country. To thisbequest she added a revenue sufficient to supply all the requirementsof a well-bred tom-cat, and at the same time she left pensions tocertain persons whose duty it should be to wait upon him. Her ignoblefamily contested the will, and there was a long suit. Moncrif givesa handsome double-plate illustration of this incident. Mlle. Dupuy, sadly wasted by illness, is seen in bed, with her cat in her arms, dictating her will to the family lawyer in a periwig; her physician isalso present. 

This leads me to speak of the illustrations to _Les Chats_, whichgreatly add to its value. They were engraved by Otten from originaldrawings by Coypel. In another edition the same drawings are engravedby Count Caylus. Some of them are of a charming absurdity. One, adouble plate, represents a tragedy acted by cats on the roof of afashionable house. The actors are tricked out in the most magnificentfeathers and furbelows, but the audience consists of common cats. Cupid sits above, with his bow and fluttering wings. Another plateshows the mausoleum of the Duchess of Lesdiguières' cat, with a marblepussy of heroic size, upon a marble pillow, in a grove of poplars. Another is a medal to "Chat Noir premier, né en 1725, " with the proudinscription, "Knowing to whom I belong, I am aware of my value. " Theprofile within is that of as haughty a tom as ever shook out hiswhiskers in a lady's boudoir. 

SMART'S POEMS

POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. _By Christopher Smart, A. M. , Fellow ofPembroke-Hall, Cambridge. London: Printed for the Author, by W. Strahan; And sold by J. Newbery, at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul'sChurchyard. MDCCLII_. 

The third section of Robert Browning's _Parleyings with certain Peopleof Importance in their Day_ drew attention to a Cambridge poet of whomlittle had hitherto been known, Christopher Smart, once fellow ofPembroke College. It may be interesting, therefore, to supply somesketch of the events of his life, and of the particular poem whichBrowning has aptly compared to a gorgeous chapel lying perdue ina dull old commonplace mansion. No one can afford to be entirelyindifferent to the author of verses which one of the greatest ofmodern writers has declared to be unequalled of their kind betweenMilton and Keats. 

What has hitherto been known of the facts of Smart's life has beenfounded on the anonymous biography prefixed to the two-volume Readingedition of his works, published in 1791. The copy of this editionin Trinity Library belonged to Dr. Farmer, and contains these wordsin his handwriting: "From the Editor, Francis Newbery, Esq. ; theLife by Mr. Hunter. " As this Newbery was the son of Smart'shalf-brother-in-law and literary employer, it may be taken for grantedthat the information given in these volumes is authoritative. We maytherefore believe it to be correct that Smart was born (as he himselftells us, in _The Hop Garden)_ at Shipbourne, in Kent, on the 11th ofApril 1722, that his father was steward to the nobleman who afterwardsbecame Earl of Darlington, and that he was "discerned and patronised"by the Duchess of Cleveland. This great lady, we are left in doubt forwhat reason, carried her complaisance so far as to allow the futurepoet £40 a year until her death. In a painfully fulsome ode to anothermember of the Raby Castle family, Smart records the generosity of thedead in order to stimulate that of the living, and oddly remarks that

 _dignity itself restrains By condescension's silken reins, While you the lowly Muse upraise_. 

Smart passed, already "an infant bard, " from what he calls "thesplendour in retreat" of Raby Castle, to Durham School, and in hiseighteenth year was admitted of Pembroke Hall, October 30, 1739. Hisbiographer expressly states that his allowance from home was scanty, and that his chief dependence, until he derived an income from hiscollege, was on the bounty of the Duchess of Cleveland. 

From this point I am able to supply a certain amount of informationwith regard to the poet's college life which is entirely new, andwhich is not, I think, without interest. My friend Mr. R. A. Neil hasbeen so kind as to admit me to the Treasury at Pembroke, and in hiscompany I have had the advantage of searching the contemporary recordsof the college. What we were lucky enough to discover may here bebriefly summarised. The earliest mention of Smart is dated 1740, andrefers to the rooms assigned to him as an undergraduate. In January1743, we find him taking his B. A. , and in July of the same year heis elected scholar. As is correctly stated in his Life, he becamea fellow of Pembroke on the 3rd of July 1745. That he showed noindication as yet of that disturbance of brain and instability ofcharacter which so painfully distinguished him a little later on, isproved by the fact that on the 10th of October 1745, Smart was chosento be Praelector in Philosophy, and Keeper of the Common Chest. In1746 he was re-elected to those offices, and also made Praelectorin Rhetoric. In 1747 he was not chosen to hold any such collegesituations, no doubt from the growing extravagance of his conduct. 

In November 1747, Smart was in parlous case. Gray complains of his"lies, impertinence and ingratitude, " and describes him as confined tohis room, lest his creditors should snap him up. He gives a melancholyimpression of Smart's moral and physical state, but hastens to add"not that I, nor any other mortal, pity him. " The records of theTreasury at Pembroke supply evidence that the members of the collegenow made a great effort to restore one of whose talents it is certainthey were proud. In 1748 we find Smart proposed for catechist, a proofthat he had, at all events for the moment, turned over a new leaf. Probably, but for fresh relapses, he would now have taken orders. Hisallusions to college life are singularly ungracious. He calls Pembroke

 _this servile cell, Where discipline and dulness dwell_, and commiserates a captive eagle as being doomed in the college courtsto watch

 _scholastic pride Take his precise, pedantic stride_;

words which painfully remind us of Gray's reported manner of enjoyinga constitutional. It is certain that there was considerable frictionbetween these two men of genius, and Gray roundly prophesied thatSmart would find his way to gaol or to Bedlam. Both alternatives ofthis prediction were fulfilled, and in October, 1751, Gray curtlyremarks: "Smart sets out for Bedlam. " Of this event we find curiousevidence in the Treasury. "October 12, 1751--Ordered that Mr. Smart, being obliged to be absent, there will be allowed him in lieu ofcommons for the year ended Michaelmas, 1751, the sum of £10. " Therecan be little question that Smart's conduct and condition became moreand more unsatisfactory. This particular visit to a madhouse wasprobably brief, but it was possibly not the first and was soonrepeated; for in 1749 and 1752 there are similar entries recording thefact that "Mr. Smart, being obliged to be absent, " certain allowanceswere paid by the college "in consideration of his circumstances. " Themost curious discovery, however, which we have been able to make isrecorded in the following entry:

"Nov. 27, 1753. --Ordered that the dividend assigned to Mr. Smart bedeposited in the Treasury till the Society be satisfied that he has aright to the same; it being credibly reported that he has been marriedfor some time, and that notice be sent to Mr. Smart of his dividendbeing detained. "

As a matter of fact, Smart was by this time married to a relative ofNewbery, the publisher, for whom he was doing hack work in London. Hehad, however, formed the habit of writing the Seatonian prize poem, which he had already gained four times, in 1750, 1751, 1752, and 1753. He seems to have clutched at the distinction which he brought onhis college by these poems as the last straw by which to keep hisfellowship, and, singular to say, he must have succeeded; for on the16th of January 1754, this order was recorded:

"That Mr. Smart have leave to keep his name in the college bookswithout any expense, so long as he continues to write for the premiumleft by Mr. Seaton. "

How long this inexpensive indulgence lasted does not seem to be known. Smart gained the Seatonian prize in 1755, having apparently failed in1754, and then appears no more in Pembroke records. 

The circumstance of his having made Cambridge too hot to hold himseems to have pulled Smart's loose faculties together. The next fiveyears were probably the sanest and the busiest in his life. He hadcollected his scattered odes and ballads, and published them, with hisambitious georgic, _The Hop Garden_, in the handsome quarto beforeus. Among the seven hundred subscribers to this venture we find "Mr. Voltaire, historiographer of France, " and M. Roubilliac, the greatstatuary, besides such English celebrities as Gray, Collins, Richardson, Savage, Charles Avison, Garrick, and Mason. The kindreception of this work awakened in the poet an inordinate vanity, which found expression, in 1753, in that extraordinary effusion, _TheHilliad_, an attempt to preserve Dr. John Hill in such amber as Popeheld at the command of his satiric passion. But these efforts, and anannual Seatonian, were ill adapted to support a poet who had recentlyappended a wife and family to a phenomenal appetite for strong waters, and who, moreover, had just been deprived of his stipend as a fellow. Smart descended into Grub Street, and bound himself over, hand andfoot, to be the serf of such men as the publisher Newbery, who wasnone the milder master for being his relative. It was not long after, doubtless, that Smart fell lower still, and let himself out on a leasefor ninety-nine years, to toil for a set pittance in the garrets ofGardner's shop; and it was about this time, 1754, that the Rev. T. Tyers was introduced to Smart by a friend who had more sympathy withhis frailties than Gray had, namely, Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

After a world of vicissitudes, which are very uncomfortable reading, about 1761 Smart became violently insane once more and was shut upagain in Bedlam. Dr. Johnson, commenting on this period of the poet'slife, told Dr. Burney that Smart grew fat when he was in the madhouse, where he dug in the garden, and Johnson added: "I did not think heought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. Heinsisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with KitSmart as with any one else. Another charge was that he did not loveclean linen; and I have no passion for it. " When Boswell paid Johnsonhis memorable first visit in 1763, Smart had recently been releasedfrom Bedlam, and Johnson naturally spoke of him. He said: "My poorfriend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon hisknees and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusualplace. " Gray about the same time reports that money is being collectedto help "poor Smart, " not for the first time, since in January 1759, Gray had written: "Poor Smart is not dead, as was said, and _Merope_is acted for his benefit this week, " with the _Guardian_, a farcewhich Garrick had kindly composed for that occasion. 

It was in 1763, immediately after Smart's release, that the now famous_Song to David_ was published. A long and interesting letter in thecorrespondence of Hawkesworth, dated October 1764, gives a pleasantidea of Smart restored to cheerfulness and placed "with very decentpeople in a house, most delightfully situated, with a terrace thatoverlooks St. James's Park. " But this relief was only temporary;Smart fell back presently into drunkenness and debt, and was happilyrelieved by death in 1770, in his forty-eighth year, at the close of acareer as melancholy as any recorded in the chronicles of literature. 

Save for one single lyric, that glows with all the flush and bloom ofEden, Smart would take but a poor place on the English Parnassus. His odes and ballads, his psalms and satires, his masques and hisgeorgics, are not bad, but they are mediocre. Here and there the verycareful reader may come across lines and phrases that display theconcealed author of the _Song to David_, such as the following, froman excessively tiresome ode to Dr. Webster:

 _When Israel's host, with all their stores, Passed through_ the ruby-tinctured crystal shores, The wilderness of waters and of land. 

But these are rare. His odes are founded upon those of Gray, and thebest that can be said of them is that if they do not quite rise to thefrozen elegance of Akenside, they seldom sink to the flaccidity ofMason. Never, for one consecutive stanza or stroke, do they approachCollins or Gray in delicacy or power. But the _Song to David_--thelyric in 516 lines which Smart is so absurdly fabled to have scratchedwith a key on the white-washed walls of his cell--this was a portentof beauty and originality. Strange to say, it was utterly neglectedwhen it appeared, and the editor of the 1791 edition of Smart's worksexpressly omitted to print it on the ground that it bore too many"melancholy proofs of the estrangement of Smart's mind" to be fit forrepublication. It became rare to the very verge of extinction, and isnow scarcely to be found in its entirety save in a pretty reprint of1819, itself now rare, due to the piety of a Rev. R. Harvey. 

It is obvious that Smart's contemporaries and immediate successorslooked upon the _Song to David_ as the work of a hopelessly derangedperson. In 1763 poetry had to be very sane indeed to be attended to. The year preceding had welcomed the _Shipwreck_ of Falconer, the yearto follow would welcome Goldsmith's _Traveller_ and Grainger's _SugarCane_, works of various merit, but all eminently sane. In 1763Shenstone was dying and Rogers was being born. The tidy, spruce, anddiscreet poetry of the eighteenth century was passing into its finaland most pronounced stage. The _Song to David_, with its bold mentionof unfamiliar things, its warm and highly-coloured phraseology, itsdaring adjectives and unexampled adverbs, was an outrage upon taste, and one which was best accounted for by the tap of the forefingeron the forehead. No doubt the poem presented and still may presentlegitimate difficulties. Here, for instance, is a stanza which it isnot for those who run to read:

 _Increasing days their reign exalt, Nor in the pink and mottled vault The opposing spirits tilt; And, by the coasting reader spy'd, The silverlings and crusions glide For Adoration gilt_. 

This is charming; but if it were in one of the tongues of the heathenwe should get Dr. Verrall to explain it away. Poor Mr. Harvey, theeditor of 1819, being hopelessly puzzled by "silverlings, " the onlydictionary meaning of which is "shekels, " explained "crusions" to besome other kind of money, from [Greek: krousis]. But "crusions" aregolden carp, and when I was a child the Devonshire fishermen used tocall the long white fish with argent stripes (whose proper name, Ithink, is the launce) a silverling. The "coasting reader" is thecourteous reader when walking along the coast, and what he sees aresilver fish and gold fish, adoring the Lord by the beauty of theirscales. The _Song to David_ is cryptic to a very high degree, butI think there are no lines in it which patient reflection will notsolve. On every page are stanzas the verbal splendour of which nolover of poetry will question, and lines which will always, to meat least, retain an echo of that gusto with which I have heard Mr. Browning's strong voice recite them:

 _The wealthy crops of whitening rice 'Mongst thyine woods and groves of spice, For Adoration grow; And, marshall'd in the fencèd land, The peaches and pomegranates stand, Where wild carnations blow. 

 The laurels with the winter strive; The crocus burnishes alive Upon the snow-clad earth;

 * * * * *

 For Adoration ripening canes And cocoa's purest milk detains The westering pilgrim's staff; Where rain in, clasping boughs inclos'd, And vines with oranges dispos'd, Embower the social laugh. 

 For Adoration, beyond match, The scholar bulfinch aims to catch The soft flute's ivory touch; And, careless on the hazle spray, The daring redbreast keeps at bay The damsel's greedy clutch_. 

To quote at further length from so fascinating, so divine a poem, would be "purpling too much my mere grey argument. " Browning's praiseought to send every one to the original. But here is one more stanzathat I cannot resist copying, because it seems so patheticallyapplicable to Smart himself as a man, and to the one exquisite poemwhich was "the more than Abishag of his age":

 _His muse, bright angel of his verse, Gives balm for all the thorns that pierce, For all the pangs that rage; Blest light, still gaining on the gloom, The more than Michal of his bloom, The Abishag of his age_. 

POMPEY THE LITTLE

THE HISTORY OF POMPEY THE LITTLE; _or, the Life and Adventures of aLap-Dog. London: Printed for M. Cooper, at the Globe in PaternosterRow, MDCCLI_. 

In February 1751 the town, which had been suffering from rather adreary spell since the acceptable publication of _Tom Jones_, wasrefreshed and enlivened by the simultaneous issue of two delightfullyscandalous productions, eminently well adapted to occupy the politeconversation of ladies at drums and at the card-table. Of these onewas _The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality_, so oddly foisted by Smollettinto the third volume of his _Peregrine Pickle_. This was recognisedat once as being the work of the frail and adventurous Lady Vane, about whom so many strange stories were already current in society. The other puzzled the gossips much longer, and it seems to have beenthe poet Gray who first discovered the authorship of _Pompey theLittle_. Gray wrote to tell Horace Walpole who had written theanonymous book that everybody was talking about, adding that he haddiscovered the secret through the author's own carelessness, threeof the characters being taken from a comedy shown him by a youngclergyman at Magdalen College, Cambridge. This was the Rev. FrancisCoventry, then some twenty-five years of age. The discovery of theauthorship made Coventry a nine-days' hero, while his book went intoa multitude of editions. It was one of the most successful _jeuxd'esprit_ of the eighteenth century. 

The copy of the first edition of _Pompey the Little_, which liesbefore me, contains an excellent impression of the frontispiece byLouis Boitard, the fashionable engraver-designer, whose print of theRanelagh Rotunda is so much sought after by amateurs. It representsa curtain drawn aside to reveal a velvet cushion, on which sits agraceful little Italian lap-dog with pendant silky ears and sleeksides spotted like the pard. This is Pompey the Little, whose life andadventures the book proceeds to recount. "_Pompey_, the son of _Julio_and _Phyllis_, was born A. D. 1735, at _Bologna_ in _Italy_, a placefamous for lap-dogs and sausages. " At an early age he was carriedaway from the boudoir of his Italian mistress by Hillario, an Englishgentleman illustrious for his gallantries, who brought him to London. The rest of the history is really a chain of social episodes, eachclosed by the incident that Pompey becomes the property of some freshperson. In this way we find ourselves in a dozen successive scenes, each strongly contrasted with the others. It is the art of the authorthat he knows exactly how much to tell us without wearying ourattention, and is able to make the transition to the next scene aplausible one. 

There is low life as well as high life in _Pompey the Little_, sketches after Hogarth, no less than studies _à la_ Watteau. But thehigh life is by far the better described. Francis Coventry was thecousin of the Earl of that name, he who married the beautiful andsilly Maria Gunning. When he painted the ladies of quality at theirrouts and drums, masquerades, and hurly-burlies, he knew what he wastalking about, for this was the life he himself led, when he was notat college. Even at Cambridge, he was under the dazzling influence ofhis famous and fashionable cousin, Henry Coventry, fellow of thesame college of Magdalen, author of the polite _Philémonto Hydaspes_dialogues, and the latest person who dressed well in the University. The embroidered coats of Henry Coventry, stiff with gold lace, his"most prominent Roman nose" and air of being much a gentleman, werenot lost on the younger member of the family, who seems to paint himslyly in his portrait of Mr. Williams. 

The great charm of _Pompey the Little_ to contemporaries was, ofcourse, the fact that it was supposed to be a _roman à clef_. TheCountess of Bute hastened to send out a copy of it to her mother inItaly, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did not hesitate to discover thelikenesses of various dear friends of hers. She found it impossibleto go to bed till she had finished it. She was charmed, and she tellsLady Bute, what the curious may now read with great satisfaction, thatit was "a real and exact representation of life, as it is now actedin London. " What is odd is that Lady Mary identified, with absolutecomplacency, the portrait of herself, as Mrs. Qualmsick, thathysterical lady with whom "it was not unusual for her to fancy herselfa Glass bottle, a Tea-pot, a Hay-rick, or a Field of Turnips. " Insteadof being angry, Lady Mary screamed with laughter at the satire of herown whimsies, of how "Red was too glaring for her eyes; Green put herin Mind of Willows, and made her melancholic; Blue remembered her ofher dear Sister, who had died ten Years before in a blue Bed. " Infact, all this fun seems, for the moment at least, to have cured theoriginal Mrs. Qualmsick of her whimsies, and her remarks on _Pompeythe Little_ are so good-natured that we may well forgive her for thepleasure with which she recognised Lady Townshend in Lady Tempest andthe Countess of Orford in the pedantic and deistical Lady Sophister, who rates the physicians for their theology, and will not be bled byany man who accepts the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. 

Coventry's romance does not deserve the entire neglect into which ithas fallen. It is sprightly and graceful from the first page to thelast. Not written, indeed, by a man of genius, it is yet the work of avery refined observer, who had been modern enough to catch the tone ofthe new school of novelists. The writer owes much to Fielding, whoyet does not escape without a flap from one of Pompey's silken ears. Coventry's manner may be best exemplified by one of his own brightpassages of satire. This notion of a man of quality, that no place canbe full that is not crowded with people of fashion, is not new, but itis deliciously expressed. Aurora has come back from Bath, and assuresthe Count that she has had a pleasant season there:

"'You amaze me, " cries the Count; 'Impossible, Madam! How can it be, Ladies? I had Letters from Lord _Monkeyman_ and Lady _Betty Scornful_assuring me that, except yourselves, there were not three humanCreatures in the Place. Let me see, I have Lady _Betty's_ Letter in myPocket, I believe, at this Moment. Oh no, upon Recollection, I putit this morning into my Cabinet, where I preserve all my Letters ofQuality. ' _Aurora_, smothering a Laugh as well as she could, saidshe was extremely obliged to Lord _Monkeyman_ and Lady _Betty_, forvouchsafing to rank her and her Sister in the Catalogue of humanBeings. 'But, surely, ' added she, 'they must have been asleep, bothof them, when they wrote their Letters; for the _Bath_ was extremelyfull, ' 'Full!' cries the Count, interrupting her; "Oh, Madam, that isvery possible, and yet there might be no Company--that is, none of us;Nobody that one knows. For as to all the Tramontanes that come by thecross Post, we never reckon them as anything but Monsters in humanShape, that serve to fill up the Stage of Life, like Cyphers in aplay. For Instance, you often see an awkward Girl, who has sewed aTail to a Gown, and pinned two Lappits to a Night-cap, come runningheadlong into the Rooms with a wild, frosty Face, as if she was justcome from feeding Poultry in her Father's Chicken-Yard. Or you see aBooby Squire, with a Head resembling a Stone ball over a Gate-post. Now, it would be the most ridiculous Thing in Life to call such PeopleCompany. 'Tis the Want of Titles, and not the Want of Faces, thatmakes a Place empty. '"

There are indications, which I think have escaped the notice ofGoldsmith's editors, that the author of the _Citizen of the World_condescended to take some of his ideas from _Pompey the Little_. InCount Tag, the impoverished little fop who fancies himself a manof quality, and who begs pardon of people who accost him in thePark--"but really, Lady Betty or Lady Mary is just entering theMall, "--we have the direct prototype of Beau Tibbs; while Mr. Rhymer, the starving poet, whose furniture consists of "the first Act of aComedy, a Pair of yellow Stays, two political Pamphlets, a plate ofBread-and-butter, three dirty Night-caps, and a Volume of MiscellanyPoems, " is a figure wonderfully like that of Goldsmith himself, as Dr. Percy found him eight years later, in that "wretched, dirty room, " atthe top of Breakneck Steps, Green Arbour Court. The whole conceptionof that Dickens-like scene, in which it is described how Lady Fripperyhad a drum in spite of all local difficulties, is much more in thehumour of Goldsmith than in that of any of Coventry's immediatecontemporaries. 

Strangely enough, in spite of the great success of his one book, theauthor of _Pompey the Little_ never tried to repeat it. He becameperpetual curate of Edgware, and died in the neighbouring village ofStanmore Parva a few years after the publication of his solitary book;I have, however, searched the registers of that parish in vain forany record of the fact. Francis Coventry had gifts of wit andpicturesqueness which deserved a better fate than to amuse a fewdissipated women over their citron-waters, and then to be forgotten. 

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNCLE

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNCLE, ESQ. , _containing various observations andreflections made in several parts of the world; and many extraordinaryrelations. London: Printed for J. Noon, at the White Hart inCheapside, near the Poultry, MDCCLVI_. 

[_Vol. II. London: Printed for J. Johnson and B. Davenport, at theGlobe, in Pater Noster Row, MDCCLXVI_. ]

In the year 1756, there resided in the Barbican, where the great JohnMilton had lived before him, a funny elderly personage called Mr. Thomas Amory, of whom not nearly so much is recorded as the lovers ofliterary anecdote would like to possess. He was sixty-five yearsof age; he was an Irish gentleman of means, and he was an ardentUnitarian. Some unkind people have suggested that he was out of hismind, and he had, it is certain, many peculiarities. One was, that henever left his house, or ventured into the streets, save "like abut, in the dusk of the evening. " He was, in short, what is called a"crank, " and he gloried in his eccentricity. He desired that it mightbe written on his tombstone, "Here lies an Odd Man. " For sixty yearshe had made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 1755 hehad published a sort of romance, called _Memoirs of Several Ladies ofGreat Britain_, and now he succeeded it by the truly extraordinarywork, the name of which stands at the head of this article. Ten yearslater there would appear another volume of _John Buncle_, and thenAmory disappeared again. All we know is, that he died in 1788, at thevery respectable age of ninety-seven. So little is known about him, so successfully did he hide "like a but" through the dusk of nearly acentury, that we may be glad to eke out the scanty information givenabove by a passage of autobiography from the preface of the bookbefore us:

"I was born in London, and carried an infant to Ireland, where Ilearned the Irish language, and became intimately acquainted with itsoriginal inhabitants. I was not only a lover of books from the timeI could spell them to this hour, but read with an extraordinarypleasure, before I was twenty, the works of several of the Fathers, and all the old romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain pietyand extravagance that rendered my virtues as well as my imperfectionsparticularly mine. .. . The dull, the formal, and the visionary, thehard-honest man, and the poor-liver, are a people I have had noconnection with; but have always kept company with the polite, thegenerous, the lively, the rational, and the brightest freethinkers ofthis age. Besides all this, I was in the days of my youth, one of themost active men in the world at every exercise; and to a degree ofrashness, often venturesome, when there was no necessity for runningany hazards; _in diebus illis_, I have descended headforemost, from ahigh cliff into the ocean, to swim, when I could, and ought, to havegone off a rock not a yard from the surface of the deep. I have swamnear a mile and a half out in the sea to a ship that lay off, gone onboard, got clothes from the mate of the vessel, and proceeded withthem to the next port; while my companion I left on the beachconcluded me drowned, and related my sad fate in the town. I havetaken a cool thrust over a bottle, without the least animosity oneither side, but both of us depending on our skill in the small swordfor preservation from mischief. Such things as these I now callwrong. "

If this is not a person of whom we would like to know more, I know notwhat the romance of biography is. Thomas Amory's life must have been astreak of crimson on the grey surface of the eighteenth century. It isreally a misfortune that the red is almost all washed off. 

No odder book than _John Buncle_ was published in England throughoutthe long life of Amory. Romances there were, like _Gulliver's Travels_and _Peter Wilkins_, in which the incidents were much more incredible, but there was no supposition that these would be treated as realhistory. The curious feature of _John Buncle_ is that the story istold with the strictest attention to realism and detail, and yet isembroidered all over with the impossible. There can be no doubt thatAmory, who belonged to an older school, was affected by the form ofthe new novels which were the fashion in 1756. He wished to be asparticular as Mr. Richardson, as manly as Captain Fielding, as breezyand vigorous as Dr. Smollett, the three new writers who were all thetalk of the town. But there was a twist in his brain which made hispictures of real life appear like scenes looked at through flawedglass. 

The memoirs of John Buncle take the form of an autobiography, andthere has been much discussion as to how much is, and how much is not, the personal history of Amory. I confess I cannot see why we shouldnot suppose all of it to be invented, although it certainly is odd torelate anecdotes and impressions of Dr. Swift, _à propos_ of nothingat all, unless they formed part of the author's experience. For onething, the hero is represented as being born about thirteen yearslater than Amory was--if, indeed, we possess the true date of ourworthy's birth. Buncle goes to college and becomes an earnestUnitarian. The incidents of his life are all intellectual, until one"glorious first of August, " when he sallies forth from college withhis gun and dog, and after four hours' walk discovers that he has losthis way. He is in the midst of splendid mountain scenery--which leadsus to wonder at which English University he was studying--and descendsthrough woody ravines and cliffs that overhang torrents, till hesuddenly comes in sight of a "little harmonic building that had everycharm and proportion architecture could give it. " Finding one of thegarden doors open, and being very hungry, the adventurous Bunclestrolls in, and finds himself in "a grotto or shell-house, in which apoliteness of fancy had produced and blended the greatest beauties ofnature and decoration. " (There are more grottoes in the pages of Amorythan exist in the whole of the British Islands. ) This shell-houseopened into a library, and in the library a beauteous object wassitting and reading. She was studying a Hebrew Bible, and makingphilological notes on a small desk. She raised her eyes and approachedthe stranger, "to know who I wanted" (for Buncle's style, thoughpicturesque, is not always grammatically irreproachable. )

Before he could answer, a venerable gentleman was at his side, to whomthe young sportsman confessed that he was dying of hunger and hadlost his way. Mr. Noel, a patriarchal widower of vast wealth, wasinhabiting this mansion in the sole company of his only daughter, thelovely being just referred to. Mr. Buncle was immediately "stiffenedby enchantment" at the beauty of Miss Harriot Noel, and could not beinduced to leave when he had eaten his breakfast. This difficulty wasremoved by the old gentleman asking him to stay to dinner, until thetime of which meal Miss Noel should entertain him. At about 10 A. M. Mr. Buncle offers his hand to the astonished Miss Noel, who, withgreat propriety, bids him recollect that he is an entire stranger toher. They then have a long conversation about the Chaldeans, and the"primaevity" of the Hebrew language, and the extraordinary longevityof the Antediluvians; at the close of which _(circa_ 11. 15 A. M. )Buncle proposes again. "You force me to smile (the illustrious MissNoel replied), and oblige me to call you an odd compound of a man, "and to distract his thoughts, she takes him round her famous grotto. The conversation, all repeated at length, turns on conchology and onthe philosophy of Epictetus until it is time for dinner, when Mr. Noel and young Buncle drink a bottle of old Alicant, and discuss thegallery of Verres and the poetry of Catullus. Left alone at last, Buncle still does not go away, but at 5 P. M. Proposes for the thirdtime, "over a pot of tea. " Miss Noel says that the conversationwill have to take some other turn, or she must leave the room. Theytherefore immediately "consider the miracle at Babel, " and theargument of Hutchinson on the Hebrew word _Shephah_, until, while MissNoel is in the very act of explaining that "the Aramitish was thecustomary language of the line of Shem, " young Buncle _(circa_ 7. 30)"could not help snatching this beauty to my arms, and without thinkingwhat I did, impressed on her balmy mouth half a dozen kisses. This waswrong, and gave offence, " but then papa returning, the trio sat downpeacefully to cribbage and a little music. Of course Miss Noel isultimately won, and this is a very fair specimen of the conduct of thebook. 

A fortnight before the marriage, however, "the small-pox steps in, andin seven days' time reduced the finest human frame in the universe tothe most hideous and offensive block, " and Miss Harriot Noel dies. Ifthis dismal occurrence is rather abruptly introduced, it is becauseBuncle has to be betrothed, in succession, to six other lively anddelicious young females, all of them beautiful, all of them learned, and all of them earnestly convinced Unitarians. If they did notrapidly die off, how could they be seven? Buncle mourns the decease ofeach, and then hastily forms an equally violent attachment to another. It must be admitted that he is a sad wife-waster. Azora is one ofthe most delightful of these deciduous loves. She "had an amazingcollection of the most rational philosophical ideas, and she deliveredthem in the most pleasing dress. " She resided in a grotto within aromantic dale in Yorkshire, in a "little female republic" of onehundred souls, all of them "straight, clean, handsome girls. " In thisglen there is only one man, and he a fossil. Miss Melmoth, who woulddiscuss the _paulo-post futurum_ of a Greek verb with the utmost careand politeness, and had studied "the Minerva of Sanctius and Hickes'Northern Thesaurus, " was another nice young lady, though rather freein her manner with gentlemen. But they all die, sacrificed to theinsatiable fate of Buncle. 

Here the reader may like to enjoy a sample of Buncle as a philosopher. It is a characteristic passage:

"Such was the soliloquy I spoke, as I gazed on the skeleton of JohnOrton; and just as I had ended, the boys brought in the wild turkey, which they had very ingeniously roasted, and with some of Mrs. Burcot's fine ale and bread, I had an excellent supper. The bones ofthe penitent Orton I removed to a hole I had ordered my lad to dig forthem; the skull excepted, which I kept, and still keep on my table fora _memento mori_; and that I may never forget the good lesson whichthe percipient who once resided in it had given. It is often thesubject of my meditation. When I am alone of an evening, in my closet, which is often my case, I have the skull of John Orton before me, andas I smoke a philosophic pipe, with my eyes fastened on it, I learnmore from the solemn object than I could from the most philosophicaland laboured speculations. What a wild and hot head once--how cold andstill now; poor skull, I say: and what was the end of all thy daring, frolics and gambols--thy licentiousness and impiety--a severe andbitter repentance. In piety and goodness John Orton found at last thathappiness the world could not give him. "

Hazlitt has said that "the soul of Rabelais passed into John Amory. "His name was Thomas, not John, and there is very little that isRabelaisian in his spirit. One sees what Hazlitt meant--the volubleand diffuse learning, the desultory thread of narration, the mixtureof religion and animalism. But the resemblance is very superficial, and the parallel too complimentary to Amory. It is difficult to thinkof the soul of Rabelais in connection with a pedantic and uxoriousUnitarian. To lovers of odd books, _John Buncle_ will always have agenuine attraction. Its learning would have dazzled Dr. Primrose, andis put on in glittering spars and shells, like the ornaments of themany grottoes that it describes. It is diversified by descriptions ofnatural scenery, which are often exceedingly felicitous and original, and it is quickened by the human warmth and flush of the lovepassages, which, with all their quaintness, are extremely human. It isessentially a "healthy" book, as Charles Lamb, with such a startlingresult, assured the Scotchman. Amory was a fervid admirer ofwomankind, and he favoured a rare type, the learned lady who bearsher learning lightly and can discuss "the quadrations of curvilinearspaces" without ceasing to be "a bouncing, dear, delightful girl, " andadroit in the preparation of toast and chocolate. The style of thebook is very careless and irregular, but rises in its best pages to anadmirable picturesqueness. 

BEAU NASH

THE LIFE OF RICHARD NASH, ESQ. ; _late Master of the Ceremonies atBath. Extracted principally from his Original Papers. The SecondEdition. London: J. Newbery. _ 1762. 

There are cases, not known to every collector of books, where it isnot the first which is the really desirable edition of a work, but thesecond. One of these rare examples of the exception which provesthe rule is the second edition of Goldsmith's _Life of Beau Nash_. Disappointment awaits him who possesses only the first; it is in thesecond that the best things originally appeared. The story is ratherto be divined than told as history, but we can see pretty plainlyhow the lines of it must have run. In the early part of 1762, OliverGoldsmith, at that time still undistinguished, but in the very act ofblossoming into fame, received a commission of fourteen guineas towrite for Newbery a life of the strange old beau, Mr. Nash, who haddied in 1761. On the same day, which was March 5th, he gave a receiptto the publisher for three other publications, written or to bewritten, so that very probably it was not expected that he shouldimmediately supply all the matter sold. In the summer he seems to havegone down to Bath on a short visit, and to have made friends withthe Beau's executor, Mr. George Scott. It has even been said that hecultivated the Mayor and Aldermen of Bath with such success that theypresented him with yet another fifteen guineas. But of this, in itselfhighly improbable, instance of municipal benefaction, the archives ofthe city yield no proof. At least Mr. Scott gave him access to Nash'spapers, and with these he seems to have betaken himself back toLondon. 

It is a heart-rending delusion and a cruel snare to be paid for yourwork before you accomplish it. As soon as once your work is finishedyou ought to be promptly paid; but to receive your lucre one minutebefore it is due, is to tempt Providence to make a Micawber of you. Goldsmith, of course, without any temptation being needed, wasthe very ideal Micawber of letters, and the result of paying himbeforehand was that he had, simply, to be popped into the mill byforce, and the copy ground out of him. It is evident that in the caseof the first edition of the _Life of Beau Nash_, the grinding processwas too mercifully applied, and the book when it appeared was shortmeasure. It has no dedication, no "advertisement, " and very fewnotes, while it actually omits many of the best stories. The wisebibliophile, therefore, will eschew it, and will try to get the secondedition issued a few weeks later in the same year, which Newberyevidently insisted that Goldsmith should send out to the public inproper order. 

Goldsmith treats Nash with very much the same sort of indulgent andapologetic sympathy with which the late M. Barbey d'Aurevilly treatsBrummell. He does not affect to think that the world calls for afull-length statue of such a fantastic hero; but he seems toclaim leave to execute a statuette in terracotta for a cabinet ofcuriosities. From that point of view, as a queer object of _vertu_, as a specimen of the _bric-à-brac_ of manners, both the one and theother, the King of Beaux and the Emperor of Dandies, are welcome toamateurs of the odd and the entertaining. At the head of Goldsmith'sbook stands a fine portrait of Nash, engraved by Anthony Walker, oneof the best and rarest of early English line-engravers, afteran oil-picture by William Hoare, presently to be one of thefoundation-members of the Royal Academy, and now and throughout hislong life the principal representative of the fine arts at Bath. Nashis here represented in his famous white hat--_galero albo_, as hisepitaph has it; the ensign of his rule at Bath, the more than coronetof his social sway. 

The breast of his handsome coat is copiously trimmed with rich lace, and his old, old eyes, with their wrinkles and their crow's feet, look demurely out from under an incredible wig, an umbrageous, deep-coloured ramilie of early youth. It is a wonderfullyhard-featured, serious, fatuous face, and it lives for us under thedelicate strokes of Anthony Walker's graver. The great Beau looks ashe must have looked when the Duchess of Queensberry dared to appearat the Assembly House on a ball night with a white apron on. It is apleasant story, and only told properly in our second edition. KingNash had issued an edict forbidding the wearing of aprons. The Duchessdared to disobey. Nash walked up to her and deftly snatched her apronfrom her, throwing it on to the back benches where the ladies' womensat. What a splendid moment! Imagine the excitement of all thatfashionable company--the drawn battle between the Majesty of Etiquetteand the Majesty of Beauty! The Beau remarked, with sublime calm, that"none but Abigails appeared in white aprons. " The Duchess hesitated, felt that her ground had slipped from under her, gave way with themost admirable tact, and "with great good sense and humour, begged his_Majesty's_ pardon, "

Aprons were not the only red rags to the bull of ceremony. He wasquite as unflinching an enemy to top-boots. He had already banishedswords from the assembly-room, because their clash frightened theladies, and their scabbards tore people's dresses. But boots were notso easily banished. The country squires liked to ride into the city, and, leaving their horses at a stable, walk straight into the dignityof the minuet. Nash, who had a genius for propriety, saw how hatefulthis was, and determined to put a stop to it. He slew top-boots andaprons at the same time, and with the shaft of Apollo. He indited apoem on the occasion, and a very good example of satire by irony itis. It is short enough to quote entire:

FRONTINELLA'S INVITATION TO THE ASSEMBLY. 

 _Come, one and all, To Hoyden Hall, For there's th' Assembly to-night. None but prude fools Mind manners and rules, We Hoydens do decency slight_. _Come, Trollops and Slatterns, Cocked hats and white aprons, This best our modesty suits; For why should not we In dress be as free As Hogs-Norton squires in boots?_

Why, indeed? But the Hogs-Norton squires, as is their wont, were notso easily pierced to the heart as the noble slatterns. Nash turnedAristophanes, and depicted on a little stage a play in which Mr. Punch, tinder very disgraceful circumstances, excused himself forwearing boots by quoting the practice of the pump-room beaux. Thisseems to have gone to the conscience of Hogs-Norton at last; but whatreally gave the death-blow to top-boots, as a part of evening dress, was the incident of Nash's going up to a gentleman, who had madehis appearance in the ball-room in this unpardonable costume, andremarking, "bowing in an arch manner, " that he appeared to have"forgotten his horse. "

It had not been without labour and a long struggle that Nash had risento this position of unquestioned authority at Bath. His majestic rulewas the result of more than half a century of painstaking. He had beenborn far back in the seventeenth century, so far back that, incredibleas it sounds, a love adventure of his early youth had suppliedVanbrugh, in 1695, with an episode for his comedy of _Aesop_. Butafter trying many forms of life, and weary of his own affluence, hecame to Bath just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancientcentre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb. Queen Anne hadbeen obliged to divert herself, in 1703, with a fiddle and a hautboy, and with country dances on the bowling-green. The lodgings were dingyand expensive, the pump-house had no director, the nobility hadhaughtily withdrawn from such vulgar entertainments as the city nowalone afforded. The famous and choleric physician, Dr. Radcliffe, inrevenge for some slight he had endured, had threatened to "throw atoad into King Bladud's Well, " by writing a pamphlet against themedicinal efficacy of the waters. 

The moment was critical; the greatness of Bath, which had been slowlydeclining since the days of Elizabeth, was threatened with extinctionwhen Nash came to it, wealthy, idle, patient, with a genius fororganisation, and in half a century he made it what he left it when hedied in his eighty-ninth year, the most elegant and attractive of thesmaller social resorts of Europe. Such a man, let us be certain, wasnot wholly ridiculous. There must have been something more in him thanin a mere idol of the dandies, like Brummell, or a mere irresistiblebuck and lady-killer, like Lauzun. In these latter men the forceis wholly destructive; they are animated by a feline vanity, atiger-spirit of egotism. Against the story of Nash and the Duchess ofQueensberry, so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful anecdotethat Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun's getting the hand of another duchessunder his high heel, and pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeperinto the flesh. In all the repertory of Nash's extravagances there isnot one story of this kind, not one that reveals a wicked force. Hewas fatuous, but beneficent; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt. 

Goldsmith, in this second edition at least, has taken more painswith his life of Nash than he ever took again in a biography. His_Parnell_, his _Bolingbroke_, his _Voltaire_, are not worthy of hisname and fame; not all the industry of annotators can ever make themmore than they were at first--potboilers, turned out with no care orenthusiasm, and unconscientiously prepared. But this subtle figureof a Master of Ceremonial; this queer old presentment of a pump-roomking, crowned with a white hat, waiting all day long in his best atthe bow-window of the Smyrna Coffee-House to get a bow from thatother, and alas! better accredited royalty, the Prince of Wales; thispicture, of an old beau, with his toy-shop of gold snuff-boxes, hisagate-rings, his senseless obelisk, his rattle of faded jokes andblunted stories--all this had something very attractive to Goldsmithboth in its humour and its pathos; and he has left us, in his _Life ofNash_, a study which is far too little known, but which deserves torank among the best-read productions of that infinitely sympatheticpen, which has bequeathed to posterity Mr. Tibbs and Moses Primroseand Tony Lumpkin. 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE, IN THE COUNTY OFSOUTHAMPTON; _with Engravings, and an Appendix. London: Printed byT. Bensley, for B. White and Son, at Horace's Head, Fleet Street. MDCCLXXXIX_. 

It is not always the most confidently conducted books, or thosebest preceded by blasts on the public trumpet, which are eventuallyreceived with highest honours into the palace of literature. No morecurious incident of this fact is to be found than is presented by thepersonal history of that enchanting classic, White's _Selborne_. Ifever an author hesitated and reflected, dipped his toe into the bathof publicity, and hastily withdrew it again, loitered on the brink andcould not be induced to plunge, it was the Rev. Gilbert White. Thisman of singular genius was not to be persuaded that the town wouldtolerate his lucubrations. He was ready to make a present of them toany one who would father them, he allowed his life to slip by untilhis seventieth year was reached, before he would print them, and whenthey appeared, he could not find the courage to put his name on thetitle-page. Not one of his own titlarks or sedge-warblers could bemore shy of public observation. Even the fact that his own brother wasa publisher gave him no real confidence in printers' ink. 

Gilbert White was already a middle-aged man when he was drawn intocorrespondence by Thomas Pennant, a naturalist younger than himself, who had undertaken to produce, in four volumes folio, a work on_British Zoology_ for the production of which he was radicallyunfitted. It has been severely, but justly, pointed out that whereverPennant rises superior, either in style or information, to his owndead level of pompous inexactitude, he is almost certainly quotingfrom a letter of Gilbert White's. Yet no acknowledgment of theSelborne parson is vouchsafed; "even in the account of theharvest-mouse, " says Professor Bell, "there is no mention of itsdiscoverer. " Nevertheless, so rudimentary was scientific knowledgeone hundred and thirty years ago, that Pennant's pretentious book wasreceived with acclamation. The patient man at Selborne sat and smiled, even courteously joining with mild congratulations in the rounds ofapplause. Fortunately Pennant did not remain his only correspondent. The Hon. Daines Barrington was a man of another stamp, not profound, indeed, but enthusiastic, a genuine lover of research, and a gentlemanat heart. He quoted Gilbert White in his writings, but never withoutfull acknowledgment. Other friends followed, and the recluse ofSelbourne became the correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks, of Dr. Chandler, and of many other great ones of that day now decentlyforgotten. 

Meanwhile, he was growing old. Any sharp winter might have cut himoff, as he trudged along through the deep lanes of his rustic parish. Early in 1770 Daines Barrington, tired of seeing his friend the merevalet to so many other pompous intellects, had proposed to him to"draw up an account of the animals of Selborne. " Gilbert White put thefascinating notion from him. "It is no small undertaking, " he replied, "for a man unsupported and alone to begin a natural history from hisown autopsia. " Pennant seems to have joined in the suggestion ofBarrington, for White says (in a letter, dated July 19, 1771, whichdid not see the light for more than a century after it was written):

"As to any publication in this way of my own, I look upon it withgreat diffidence, finding that I ought to have begun it twenty yearsago; but if I was to attempt anything, it should be something of aNat: history of my native parish, an _Annus historico-naturalis_, comprising a journal of one whole year, and illustrated with largenotes and observations. Such a beginning might induce more ablenaturalists to write the history of various districts, and might intime occasion the production of a work so much to be wished for, afull and compleat nat: history of these kingdoms. "

Three years later he was still thinking of doing something, butputting off the hour of action. In 1776 he was suddenly spurred todecide by the circumstance that Barrington had written to propose ajoint work on natural history. "If I publish at all, " said GilbertWhite to his nephew, "I shall come forth by myself. " In 1780 he isstill unready: "Were it not for want of a good amanuensis, I think Ishould make more progress. " He was now sixty years of age. Eight yearslater he was preparing the Index, and at last, in the autumn of 1789, the volume positively made its appearance, in the maiden author'sseventieth year. Few indeed, if any, among English writers of highdistinction, have been content to delay so long before testing thepopular estimate of their work. His book was warmly welcomed, but thedelightful author survived its publication less than four years, dyingin the parish which he was to make so famous. Gilbert White was, in avery peculiar sense, a man of one book. 

Countless as have been the reprints of _The Natural History ofSelborne_, its original form is no longer, perhaps, familiar to manyreaders. The first edition, which is now before me, is a very handsomequarto. Benjamin White, the publisher, who was the younger brother ofGilbert, issued most of the standard works on natural history whichappeared in London during the second half of the century, and hisexperience enabled him to do adequate justice to _The History ofSelborne_. The frontispiece is a large folding plate of the villagefrom the Short Lythe, an ambitious summer landscape, representing thechurch, White's own house, and a few cottages against the broad sweepof the hangar. On a terrace in the foreground are portrait figures ofthree gentlemen standing, and a lady seated. Of the former, one is aclergyman, and it has often been stated that this is Gilbert Whitehimself; erroneously, since no portrait of him was ever executed;[1]the figure is that of the Rev. Robert Yalden, vicar of Newton-Valence. The frontispiece is unsigned, and I find no record of the artist'sname. It is not to be doubted, however, that the original was paintedby Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, the Swiss water-colour draughtsman, whosketched so many topographical views in the South of England. 

[Footnote 1: That discovered in 1913 has yet to prove that itrepresents Gilbert White in any way. ]

The remaining illustrations to this first edition, are an ovallandscape vignette on the title-page, engraved by Daniel Lerpinière;a full-page plate of some fossil shells; an extra-sized plate ofthe _himantopus_ that was shot at Frensham Pond, straddling withan immense excess of shank; and four engravings, now of remarkableinterest, displaying the village as it then stood, from various pointsof view. They are engraved by Peter Mazell, after drawings of Grimm's, and give what is evidently a most accurate impression of what Selbornewas a century ago. In these days of reproductions, it is ratherstrange that no publisher has issued facsimiles of these beautifulillustrations to the original edition of what has become one of themost popular English works. For the use of book-collectors, I may goon to say that any one who is offered a copy of the edition of _TheHistory of Selborne_ of 1789, should be careful to see that not merelythe plates I have mentioned are in their places, but that the engravedsub-title, with a print of the seal of Selborne Priory, occursopposite the blank leaf which answers to page 306. 

It is impossible for a bibliographer who writes on Gilbert White toresist the pleasure of mentioning the name of his best editor andbiographer. It was unfortunate that Thomas Bell, who was born eightmonths before the death of Gilbert White, and who, quite early in lifebegan to entertain an enthusiastic reverence for that writer, didnot find an opportunity of studying Selborne on the spot until thememories of White were becoming very vague and scattered there. Ithink it was not until about 1865 that, retiring from a professionalcareer, he made Selborne--and the Wakes, the very house of GilbertWhite--his residence. Here he lived, however, for fifteen years, and here it was his delight to follow up every vestige of the greatnaturalist's sojourn in the parish. White became the passion ofProfessor Bell's existence, and I well recollect him when he waseighty-five or eighty-six years of age, and no longer strong enoughin body to quit his room with ease, sitting in his arm-chair at thebedroom window, and directing my attention to points of Whiteishinterest, as I stood in the garden below. It was as difficult for Mr. Bell to conceive that his annotations of White were complete, as ithad been for White himself to pluck up courage to publish; and it wasnot until 1877, when the author was eighty-five years of age, that hisgreat and final edition in two thick volumes was issued. He lived, however, to be nearly ninety, and died in the Wakes at last, in thevery room, and if I mistake not, the very spot in the room, where hisidol had passed away in 1793. 

As long as Professor Bell was alive the house preserved, in allessentials, the identical character which it had maintained under itsfamous tenant. Overgrown with creepers to the very chimneys, dividedby the greenest and most velvety of lawns from a many-coloured furnaceof flower-beds, scarcely parted by lush paddocks from the intensegreen wall of the coppiced hill, the Wakes has always retained for mymemory an impression of rural fecundity and summer glow absolutelyunequalled. The garden seemed to burn like a green sun, with crimsonstars and orange meteors to relieve it. All, I believe, has sincethen been altered. Selborne, they tell me, has ceased to bear anyresemblance to that rich nest in which Thomas Bell so piously guardedthe idea of Gilbert White. If it be so, we must live content with

 _The memory of what has been, And never more may be_. 

THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE. _Ipswich: Printedand sold by John Raw; sold also by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster Row, London_. 1810. 

It may be that, save by a few elderly people and certain lovers ofold _Gentleman's Magazines_, the broad anonymous quarto known as _TheDiary of a Lover of Literature_ is no longer much admired or evenrecollected. But it deserves to be recalled to memory, if only in thatit was, in some respects, the first, and in others, the last of a longseries of publications. It was the first of those diaries of personalrecord of the intellectual life, which have become more and more thefashion and have culminated at length in the ultra-refinement of Amieland the conscious self-analysis of Marie Bashkirtseff. It was lessdefinitely, perhaps, the last, or one of the last, expressions of theeighteenth century sentiment, undiluted by any tincture of romance, any suspicion that fine literature existed before Dryden, or couldtake any form unknown to Burke. 

It was under a strict incognito that _The Diary of a Lover ofLiterature_ appeared, and it was attributed by conjecture to variousfamous people. The real author, however, was not a celebrated man. Hisname was Thomas Green, and he was the grandson of a wealthy Suffolksoap-boiler, who had made a fortune during the reign of Queen Anne. The Diarist's father had been an agreeable amateur in letters, apamphleteer, and a champion of the Church of England against Dissent. Thomas Green, who was born in 1769, found himself at twenty-five inpossession of the ample family estates, a library of good books, avast amount of leisure, and a hereditary faculty for reading. Hishealth was not very solid, and he was debarred by it from sharing thepleasures of his neighbour squires. He determined to make books andmusic the occupation of his life, and in 1796, on his twenty-seventhbirthday, he began to record in a diary his impressions of what heread. He went on very quietly and luxuriantly, living among his booksin his house at Ipswich, and occasionally rolling in his post-chaiseto valetudinarian baths and "Spaws. "

When he had kept his diary for fourteen years, it seemed to apardonable vanity so amusing, that he persuaded himself to give partof it to the world. The experiment, no doubt, was a very dubious one. After much hesitation, and in an evil hour, perhaps, he wrote: "I aminduced to submit to the indulgence of the public the idlest work, probably, that ever was composed; but, I could wish to hope, notabsolutely the most unentertaining or unprofitable. " The welcome hisvolume received must speedily have reassured him, but he had pledgedhimself to print no more, and he kept his promise, though he went onwriting his Diary until he died in 1825. His MSS. Passed into thehands of John Mitford, who amused the readers of _The Gentleman'sMagazine_ with fragments of them for several years. Green has had manyadmirers in the past, amongst whom Edward FitzGerald was not the leastdistinguished. But he was always something of a local worthy, authorof one anonymous book, and of late he has been little mentionedoutside the confines of Suffolk. 

It would be difficult to find an example more striking than the _Diaryof a Lover of Literature_ of exclusive absorption in the world ofbooks. It opens in a gloomy year for British politics, but there isfound no allusion to current events. There is a victory off CapeSt. Vincent in February, 1797, but Green is attacking Bentley'sannotations on Horace. Bonaparte and his army are buried in the sandsof Egypt; our Diarist takes occasion to be buried in Shaftesbury's_Enquiry Concerning Virtue_. Europe rings with Hohenlinden, but thenews does not reach Mr. Thomas Green, nor disturb him in his perusalof Soame Jenyns' _View of Christianity_. The fragment of the _Diary_here preserved runs from September 1796 to June 1800. No one wouldguess, from any word between cover and cover, that these were nothalcyon years, an epoch of complete European tranquillity. War uponwar might wake the echoes, but the river ran softly by the Ipswichgarden of this gentle enthusiast, and not a murmur reached him throughhis lilacs and laburnums. 

I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions ofunadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment. For form's sake, theDiarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is boundedby a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden. The classics of Greeceand Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from theRestoration downwards, these are enough for him. Writing in 1800 hehas no suspicion of a new age preparing. We read these stately pages, and we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was written, Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued _Lyrical Ballads_, and Keatshimself was in the world? Almost the only touch which showsconsciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is areference to the rival translations of Burger's _Lenore_ in 1797. SirWalter Scott, as we know, was one of the anonymous translators; itwas, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor's, that Greenmentions with special approbation. 

In one hundred years a mighty change has come over the tastes andfashions of literary life. When _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop ofWorcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on thetradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As peoplenowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in thosedays about Godwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each freshincarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in theflesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and wheredisputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parraffected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. "Aflattering message from Dr. P----" sends our Diarist into ecstasiesso excessive that a reaction sets in, and the "predominant and finaleffect upon my mind has been depression rather than elevation. " Wethink of

 _The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung. And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?_

Who cares now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' censure? Yet in ourDiarist's pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds. 

Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in art than in literature. He was "particularly struck" at the Royal Academy of 1797 with a seaview by a painter called Turner:

"Fishing vessels coming in with a heavy swell in apprehension of atempest, gathering in the distance, and casting as it advances a nightof shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon theshore; the whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist, but if he proceeds as hehas begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department. "

A remarkable prophecy, and one of the earliest notices we possess ofthe effect which the youthful Turner, then but twenty-two years ofage, made on his contemporaries. 

As a rule, except when he is travelling, our Diarist almost entirelyoccupies himself with a discussion of the books he happens to bereading. His opinions are not always in concert with the currentjudgment of to-day; he admires Warburton much more than we do, andFielding much less. But he never fails to be amusing, because soindependent within the restricted bounds of his intellectual domain. He is shut up in his eighteenth century like a prisoner, but insideits wall his liberty of action is complete. Sometimes his judgmentsare sensibly in advance of his age. It was the fashion in 1798 todenounce the Letters of Lord Chesterfield as frivolous and immoral. Green takes a wider view, and in a thoughtful analysis points outtheir judicious merits and their genuine parental assiduity. WhenGreen can for a moment lift his eyes from his books, he shows asensitive quality of observation which might have been cultivated togeneral advantage. Here is a reflection which seems to be as novel asit is happy:

"Looked afterwards into the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street. Thethrilling tinkle of the little bell at the elevation of the Hostis perhaps the finest example that can be given of the sublime byassociation--nothing so poor and trivial in itself, nothing sotranscendently awful, as indicating the sudden change in theconsecrated Elements, and the instant presence of the Redeemer. "

Much of the latter part of the _Diary_, as we hold it, is occupiedwith the description of a tour in England and Wales. Here Green islucid, graceful, and refined: producing one after another littlevignettes in prose, which remind us of the simple drawings of thewater-colour masters of the age, of Girtin or Cozens or Glover. Thevolume, which opened with some remarks on Sir William Temple, closeswith a disquisition on Warton's criticism of the poets. The curtainrises for three years on a smooth stream of intellectual reflection, unruffled by outward incident, and then falls again before we areweary of the monotonous flow of undiluted criticism. _The Diary of aLover of Literature_ is at once the pleasing record of a cultivatedmind, and a monument to a species of existence that is as obsolete asnankeen breeches or a tie-wig. 

Isaac D'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors to thedust, and that he earnestly wished for a dozen volumes of _The Diary_. At Green's death material for at least so many supplements were placedin the hands of John Mitford, who did not venture to produce them. From January 1834 to May 1843, however, Mitford was incessantlycontributing to _The Gentleman's Magazine_ unpublished extracts fromthis larger _Diary_. These have never been collected, but my friend, Mr. W. Aldis Wright, possesses a very interesting volume, into whichthe whole mass of them has been carefully and consecutively pasted, with copious illustrative matter, by the hand of Edward FitzGerald, whose interest in and curiosity about Thomas Green were unflagging. 

PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS

PETER BELL: _A Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth. London: Printedby Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street: for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row_. 1819. 

None of Wordsworth's productions are better known by name than _PeterBell_, and yet few, probably, are less familiar, even to convincedWordsworthians. The poet's biographers and critics have commonlyshirked the responsibility of discussing this poem, and when thePrimrose stanza has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, there is usually no more said about _Peter Bell_. A puzzling obscurityhangs around its history. We have no positive knowledge why itspublication was so long delayed; nor, having been delayed, why it wasat length determined upon. Yet a knowledge of this poem is not merelyan important, but, to a thoughtful critic, an essential element in thecomprehension of Wordsworth's poetry. No one who examines that body ofliterature with sympathetic attention should be content to overlookthe piece in which Wordsworth's theories are pushed to their furthestextremity. 

When _Peter Bell_ was published in April 1819, the author remarkedthat it had "nearly survived its _minority_; for it saw the light inthe summer of 1798. " It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, thatplain stone house in West Somersetshire, which Dorothy and WilliamWordsworth rented for the sum of £23 for one year, the rent coveringthe use of "a large park, with seventy head of deer. "

Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also tothe peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularlyunaltered. The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep umbrageousdrive to the point where the house, the park around it, and theQuantocks above them suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day verymuch what Wordsworth's visitors saw when they trudged up from Stoweyto commune with him in 1797. The barrier of ancient beech-treesrunning up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch of fieldsand woods descending northward to the expanse of the yellow SevernChannel, the plain white façade of Alfoxden itself, with its easyright of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous pathway downto the glen, the poet's favourite parlour at the end of the house--allthis presents an impression which is probably less transformed, remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identifiedwith the early or even the middle life of the poet. That William andDorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so noble a countryproperty seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast betweenAlfoxden and Coleridge's squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can nevercease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the trustees inadmitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, "to keep the house inhabited during the minority of the owner;" it waslet to the poet on the 14th of July 1797. 

It was in this delicious place, under the shadow of "smooth Quantock'sairy ridge, " that Wordsworth's genius came of age. It was during thetwelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost the final traces of theold traditional accent of poetry. It was here that the best of the_Lyrical Ballads_ were written, and from this house the first volumeof that epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press. Among thepoems written at Alfoxden _Peter Bell_ was prominent, but we hearlittle of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworthsby Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted toread "the sibylline leaves, " and on a second had the rare pleasureof hearing Wordsworth himself chant _Peter Bell_, in his "equable, sustained, and internal" manner of recitation, under the ash-treesof Alfoxden Park. I do not know whether it has been noted that thelandscape of _Peter Bell_, although localised in Yorkshire by thebanks of the River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character. The poemwas composed, without a doubt, as the poet tramped the grassy heightsof the Quantock Hills, or descended at headlong pace, mouthing andmurmuring as he went, into one sylvan combe after another. To give itits proper place among the writings of the school, we must rememberthat it belongs to the same group as _Tintern Abbey_ and _The AncientMariner_. 

Why, then, was it not issued to the world with these? Why was itlocked up in the poet's desk for twenty-one years, and shown duringthat time, as we gather from its author's language to Southey, tofew, even of his close friends? To these questions we find no replyvouchsafed, but perhaps it is not difficult to discover one. Everyrevolutionist in literature or art produces some composition in whichhe goes further than in any other in his defiance of recognised rulesand conventions. It was Wordsworth's central theory that no subjectcan be too simple and no treatment too naked for poetic purposes. Hispoems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is mostaudacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, isquite so simple or quite so naked as _Peter Bell_. 

Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the newideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listenedto these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was "not critically norsceptically inclined. " Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. Ihave little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798, his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _PeterBell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowedthe MS. And lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter "found nothing good init. " Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ atthat time, and he was irritated at Lamb's indifference. Yet his ownopinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819)he calls it "this _unfortunate_ book. "[1] In another place (June 12, 1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the bookwas printed, to omit "the party in a parlour, " and also the banging ofthe ass's bones, but, of course, in vain. 

[Footnote 1: The word _unfortunate_ is omitted by the editor, Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth'sdescendants. ]

In 1819 much was changed. The poet was now in his fiftieth year. Theepoch of his true productiveness was closed; all his best works, except _The Prelude_, were before the public, and although Wordsworthwas by no means widely or generally recognised yet as a great poet, there was a considerable audience ready to receive with respectwhatever so interesting a person should put forward. Moreover, a newgeneration had come to the front; Scott's series of verse-romances wasclosed; Byron was in mid-career; there were young men of extraordinaryand somewhat disquieting talent--Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt--allof whom were supposed to be, although characters of a veryreprehensible and even alarming class, yet distinctly respectful intheir attitude towards Mr. Wordsworth. It seemed safe to publish_Peter Bell_. 

Accordingly, the thin octavo described at the head of this chapterduly appeared in April 1819. It was so tiny that it had to be eked outwith the Sonnets written to W. Westall's Views, and it was adornedby an engraving of Bromley's, after a drawing specially made bySir George Beaumont to illustrate the poem. A letter to Beaumont, unfortunately without a date, in which this frontispiece is discussed, seems to suggest that the engraving was a gift from the artist to thepoet; Wordsworth, "in sorrow for the sickly taste of the publicin verse, " opining that he cannot afford the expense of such afrontispiece as Sir George Beaumont suggests. In accordance with thesefears, no doubt, an edition of only 500 was published; but it achieveda success which Wordsworth had neither anticipated nor desired. Therewas a general guffaw of laughter, and all the copies were immediatelysold; within a month a ribald public received a third edition, only todiscover, with disappointment, that the funniest lines were omitted. 

No one admired _Peter Bell_. The inner circle was silent. Baron Fieldwrote on the title-page of his copy, which now belongs to Mr. J. DykesCampbell, "And his carcass was cast in the way, and the Ass stood byit. " Sir Walter Scott openly lamented that Wordsworth should exhibithimself "crawling on all fours, when God has given him so noble acountenance to lift to heaven. " Byron mocked aloud, and, worse thanall, the young men from whom so much had been expected, _lesjeunes feroces_, leaped on the poor uncomplaining Ass like so manyhunting-leopards. The air was darkened by hurtling parodies, thearrangement of which is still a standing _crux_ to the bibliographers. 

It was Keats's friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who opened the attack. His parody _(Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad_. London, Taylor and Hessey, 1819) was positively in the field before the original. It was said, atthe time, that Wordsworth, feverishly awaiting a specimen copy of hisown _Peter Bell_ from town, seized a packet which the mail broughthim, only to find that it was the spurious poem which had anticipatedSimon Pure. _The Times_ protested that the two poems must be from thesame pen. Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the genuine poem;his preface is a close imitation of Wordsworth's introduction, and thestanzaic form in which the two pieces are written is identical. On theother hand, the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poemsby Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of _PeterBell_. Reynolds's whole pamphlet--preface, text, and notes--isexcessively clever, and touches up the bard at a score of tenderpoints. It catches the sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, andit closes with this charming stanza:

 _He quits that moonlight yard of skulls, And still he feels right glad, and smiles With moral joy at that old tomb; Peter's cheek recalls its bloom, And as he creepeth by the tiles, He mutters ever--"W. W. Never more will trouble you, trouble you_. "

_Peter Bell the Second_, as it is convenient, though not strictlyaccurate, to call Reynold's "antenatal Peter, " was more popular thanthe original. By May a third edition had been called for, and thiscontained fresh stanzas and additional notes. 

Another parody, which ridiculed the affection for donkeys displayedboth by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was called _The Dead Asses: ALyrical Ballad_; and an elaborate production, the author of which Ihave not been able to discover, was published later on in the year, _Benjamin the Waggoner_ (Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1819), which, although the title suggests _The Waggoner_ of Wordsworth, is entirelytaken up with making fun of _Peter Bell_. This parody--and it iscertainly neither pointless nor unskilful--chiefly deals with thepoet's fantastic prologue. Then, no less a person than Shelley, writing to Leigh Hunt from Florence in November of the same year, enclosed a _Peter Bell the Third_ which he desired should be printed, yet in such a form as to conceal the name of the author. Perhaps Huntthought it indiscreet to publish this not very amusing skit, and itdid not see the light till long after Shelley's death. Finally, asthough the very spirit of parody danced in the company of this strangepoem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its ill-fate in a sonnet imitatedfrom Milton's defence of "Tetrachordon, " singing how, on theappearance of _Peter Bell_, _a harpy brood On Bard and Hero clamourously fell_. 

Of the poem which enjoyed so singular a fate, Lord Houghton hasquietly remarked that it could not have been written by a man with astrong sense of humour. This is true of every part of it, of the stiffand self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque prologue, both ofwhich in all probability belong to 1819, no less than of the storyitself, in its three cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxdenand 1798. The tale is not less improbable than uninteresting. In thefirst part, a very wicked potter or itinerant seller of pots, PeterBell, being lost in the woodland, comes to the borders of a river, andthinks to steal an ass which he finds pensively hanging its head overthe water; Peter Bell presently discovers that the dead body of themaster of the ass is floating in the river just below. (The poet, ashe has naively recorded, read this incident in a newspaper. ) In thesecond part Peter drags the dead man to land, and starts on the ass'sback to find the survivors. In the third part a vague spiritualchastisement falls on Peter Bell for his previous wickedness. Plotthere is no more than this, and if proof were wanted of the inherentinnocence of Wordsworth's mind, it is afforded by the artlessstruggles which he makes to paint a very wicked man. Peter Bell hashad twelve wives, he is indifferent to primroses upon a river's brim, and he beats asses when they refuse to stir. This is really all theevidence brought against one who is described, vaguely, as combiningall vices that "the cruel city breeds. "

That which close students of the genius of Wordsworth will always turnto seek in _Peter Bell_ is the sincere sentiment of nature and thestudied simplicity of language which inspire its best stanzas. Thenarrative is clumsy in the extreme, and the attempts at wit andsarcasm ludicrous. Yet _Peter Bell_ contains exquisite things. ThePrimrose stanza is known to every one; this is not so familiar:

 _The dragon's wing, the magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower. If I along that lowly way With sympathetic heart may stray And with a soul of power_. 

Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its descriptive accent of1798:

 _I see a blooming Wood-boy there, And, if I had the power to say How sorrowful the wanderer is, Your heart would be as sad as his Till you had kiss'd his tears away!

 Holding a hawthorn branch in hand, All bright with berries ripe and red; Into the cavern's mouth he peeps-- Thence back into the moonlight creeps; What seeks the boy?--the silent dead!_

It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell became aware of thedead body floating under the nose of the patient ass that Wordsworthloses himself in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, thenthe reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a coffin, a shroud, a stoneidol, a ring of fairies, a fiend. Last of all the poet makes thePotter, who is gazing at the corpse, exclaim:

 _Is it a party in a parlour? Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd-- Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all damned!_

So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, however gifted, who hasno sense of humour! This simile was too much for the gravity even ofintimate friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second editionit disappeared. 

THE FANCY

THE FANCY: _A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late PeterCorcoran, of Gray's Inn, student at law. With a brief Memoir of hislife. London: printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street_. 1820. 

The themes of the poets run in a very narrow channel. Since the oldheroic times when the Homers and the Gunnlaugs sang of battle with thesleet of lances hurtling around them, a great calm has settled downupon Parnassus. Generation after generation pipes the same tune oflove and Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philosophies;the same imagery, the same metres, meander within the same politemargins of conventional subject. Ever and anon some one attempts tobreak out of the groove. In the eighteenth century they made a valianteffort to sing of The Art of Preserving Health, and of The Fleece andof The Sugar-Cane, but the innovators lie stranded, like cumbrouswhales, on the shore of the ocean of Poesy. Flaubert's friend, LouisBouilhet, made a inartful attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to musicof the birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus and theplesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and the mastodon. But the publicwould have none of it, though ensphered in faultless verso, and thepoets fled back to their flames and darts, and to the primrose at theriver's brim. There is, however, something pathetic, and somethingthat pleasantly reminds us of the elasticity of the human intellect inthese failures; and the book before us is an amusing example of sucheccentric efforts to enlarge the sphere of the poetic activity. 

This little volume is called _The Fancy_, and it does not appear to mecertain that the virtuous American conscience know what that means. Ifthe young ladies from Wells or Wellesley inquire ingenuously, "Tell uswhere is Fancy bred?" we should have to reply, with a jingle, In thefists, not in the head. The poet himself, in a fit of unusual candour, says:

 _Fancy's a term for every blackguardism_, though this is much too severe. But rats, and they who catch them, badgers, and they who bait them, cocks, and they who fight them, and, above all, men with fists, who professionally box with them, comeunder the category of the _Fancy_. This, then, is the theme which thepoet before us, living under the genial sway of the First Gentleman ofEurope, undertook to place beneath the special patronage of Apollo. The attractions, however, of _The Learned Ring_, set all otherpleasures in the shade, and the name, Peter Corcoran, which is apseudonym, is, I suppose, chosen merely because the initials arethose of the then famous Pugilistic Club. The poet is, in short, thelaureate of the P. C. , and his book stands in the same relation to_Boxiana_ that Campbell's lyrics do to Nelson's despatches. Tounderstand the poet's position, we ought to be dressed as he was; weought

 _to wear a tough drab coat With large pearl buttons all afloat Upon the waves of plush; to tie A kerchief of the king-cup die (White-spotted with a small bird's eye) Around the neck, --and from the nape Let fall an easy> fan-like cape_, and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tomand Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so delightfully theelegiac tear. 

Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they wouldcontain this very remarkable sonnet:

ON THE NONPAREIL. 

 "_None but himself can be his parallel. "

 With marble-coloured shoulders, --and keen eyes, Protected by a forehead broad and white-- And hair cut close lest it impede the sight, And clenchèd hands, firm, and of punishing size, -- Steadily held, or motion'd wary-wise To hit or stop, --and kerchief too drawn tight O'er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight The inconstant wind, that all too often flies, -- The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o'er With joy to see a Chicken of her own. Dips her rich pen in_ claret_,