PONKAPOG PAPERS

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

TO FRANCIS BARTLETT

THESE miscellaneous notes and essays are called _Ponkapog Papers_ notsimply because they chanced, for the most part, to be written withinthe limits of the old Indian Reservation, but, rather, because there issomething typical of their unpretentiousness in the modesty with whichPonkapog assumes to being even a village. The little Massachusettssettlement, nestled under the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illusionsconcerning itself, never mistakes the cackle of the bourg for the soundthat echoes round the world, and no more thinks of rivalling greatcentres of human activity than these slight papers dream of invitingcomparison between themselves and important pieces of literature. Therefore there seems something especially appropriate in thegeographical title selected, and if the author's choice of name needfurther excuse, it is to be found in the alluring alliteration lyingready at his hand. 

REDMAN FARM, _Ponkapog_, 1903. 

CONTENTS

LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK

ASIDES

TOM FOLIO

FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES

A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"

PLOT AND CHARACTER

THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE

LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL

DECORATION DAY

WRITERS AND TALKERS

ON EARLY RISING

UN POETE MANQUE

THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD

ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION

WISHMAKERS' TOWN

HISTORICAL NOVELS

POOR YORICK

THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER

ROBERT HERRICK

LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK

IN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular fact that the natives ofthe Malayan Archipelago have an idea that something is extracted fromthem when their likenesses are taken by photography. Here is the motivefor a fantastic short story, in which the hero--an author in vogue ora popular actor--might be depicted as having all his good qualitiesgradually photographed out of him. This could well be the result oftoo prolonged indulgence in the effort to "look natural. " First the manloses his charming simplicity; then he begins to pose in intellectualattitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an asylum for incurable egotists. His death might bebrought about by a cold caught in going out bareheaded, there being, forthe moment, no hat in the market of sufficient circumference to meet hisenlarged requirement. 

THE evening we dropped anchor in the Bay of Yedo the moon was hangingdirectly over Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon, and might havebeen manufactured by any of the delicate artisans in the Hanchodoriquarter. It impressed one as being a very good imitation, but nothingmore. Nammikawa, the cloisonne-worker at Tokio, could have made a bettermoon. 

I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition of "The Two First Centuriesof Florentine Literature, " by Professor Pasquale Villari. I am notacquainted with the work in question, but I trust that Professor Villarimakes it plain to the reader how both centuries happened to be first. 

THE walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing todivide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creationof human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the timewill come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. Thebeneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books justat the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsomestride toward the longed-for millennium. 

SAVE US from our friends--our enemies we can guard against. Thewell-meaning rector of the little parish of Woodgates, England, andseveral of Robert Browning's local admirers have recently busiedthemselves in erecting a tablet to the memory of "the first knownforefather of the poet. " This lately turned up ancestor, who does notdate very far back, was also named Robert Browning, and is described onthe mural marble as "formerly footman and butler to Sir John Bankes ofCorfe Castle. " Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good right as AbouBen Adhem himself to ask to be placed on the list of those who lovetheir fellow men; but if the poet could have been consulted in thematter he probably would have preferred not to have that particularfootman exhumed. However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. SirJohn Bankes would scarcely have been heard of in our young century ifit had not been for his footman. As Robert stood day by day, sleek andsolemn, behind his master's chair in Corfe Castle, how little it enteredinto the head of Sir John that his highly respectable name would beserved up to posterity--like a cold relish--by his own butler! ByRobert!

IN the east-side slums of New York, somewhere in the picturesque Bowerydistrict, stretches a malodorous little street wholly given over tolong-bearded, bird-beaked merchants of ready-made and second-handclothing. The contents of the dingy shops seem to have revolted, andrushed pell-mell out of doors, and taken possession of the sidewalk. Onecould fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this point, and thatthose ghastly rows of complete suits strung up on either side of thedoorways were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders. But as youapproach these limp figures, each dangling and gyrating on its cord in amost suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the lapel of a coat hereand there, a strip of paper announcing the very low price at which youmay become the happy possessor. That dissipates the illusion. 

POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not any too soon. If it onlywere practicable to kill him in real life! A story--to be called ThePassing of Polonius--in which a king issues a decree condemning to deathevery long-winded, didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of rank, and is himself instantly arrested and decapitated. The man who suspectshis own tediousness is yet to be born. 

WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find myself turning automaticallyto his Bacchus. Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in mediocreverse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of ourpoets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its texture canbear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginativequality and austere richness of diction what other verse of our periodapproaches it? The day Emerson wrote Bacchus he had in him, as MichaelDrayton said of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things that the firstpoets had. "

IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting oneman. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imaginehim on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house andhearing a ring at the door-bell!

No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himselfin an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work aboutit. In spite of his candid purpose he omits necessary touches and addssuperfluous ones. At times he cannot help draping his thought, and theleast shred of drapery becomes a disguise. It is only the diarist whoaccomplishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, without any such endin view, does it unconsciously. A man cannot keep a daily record ofhis comings and goings and the little items that make up the sum of hislife, and not inadvertently betray himself at every turn. He lays barehis heart with a candor not possible to the selfconsciousness thatinevitably colors premeditated revelation. While Pepys was filling thosesmall octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he never once suspectedthat he was adding a photographic portrait of himself to the world'sgallery of immortals. We are more intimately acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner man--his little meannesses and his largegenerosities--then we are with half the persons we call our dearfriends. 

THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism isto light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors. 

IN the process of dusting my study, the other morning, the maid replacedan engraving of Philip II. Of Spain up-side down on the mantel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that undignified posture ever since. Ihave no disposition to come to his aid. My abhorrence of the wretch isas hearty as if he had not been dead and--otherwise provided forthese last three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England was nearly asmerciless, but she was sincere and uncompromising in her extirpation ofheretics. 

Philip II. , whose one recorded hearty laugh was occasioned by the newsof the St. Bartholomew massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop itfor the time being, when it seemed politic to do so. Queen Mary was amaniac; but the successor of Torquemada was the incarnation of crueltypure and simple, and I have a mind to let my counterfeit presentmentof him stand on its head for the rest of its natural life. I cordiallydislike several persons, but I hate nobody, living or dead, exceptingPhilip II. Of Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble as Charles I. Gave the amiable Mr. Dick. 

AMONG the delightful men and women whom you are certain to meet at anEnglish country house there is generally one guest who is supposed to bepreternaturally clever and amusing--"so very droll, don't you know. " Herecites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics publiccharacters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of theelementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence iscapable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The lasttime I fell in with him was on a coaching trip through Devon, and inspite of what I have said I must confess to receiving an instant ofentertainment at his hands. He was delivering a little dissertation on"the English and American languages. " As there were two Americans onthe back seat--it seems we term ourselves "Amurricans"--his choiceof subject was full of tact. It was exhilarating to get a lesson inpronunciation from a gentleman who said _boult_ for bolt, called St. John _Sin' Jun_, and did not know how to pronounce the beautiful name ofhis own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober man saying _Maudlin_for Magdalen! Perhaps the purest English spoken is that of the Englishfolk who have resided abroad ever since the Elizabethan period, orthereabouts. 

EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's _exlibris_ is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that ofindicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it isplaced. 

WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative he is apt to be the mostmatter-of-fact of mortals. He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has analert sense of humor. Yet England has produced the finest of humoristsand the greatest of poets. The humor and imagination which are diffusedthrough other peoples concentrate themselves from time to time inindividual Englishmen. 

THIS is a page of autobiography, though not written in the firstperson: Many years ago a noted Boston publisher used to keep a largememorandum-book on a table in his personal office. The volume alwayslay open, and was in no manner a private affair, being the receptacle ofnothing more important than hastily scrawled reminders to attend tothis thing or the other. It chanced one day that a very young, unfledgedauthor, passing through the city, looked in upon the publisher, who wasalso the editor of a famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy of versessecreted about his person. The publisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling that "they also serve who only stand and wait, " sat down andwaited. Presently his eye fell upon the memorandum-book, lying therespread out like a morning newspaper, and almost in spite of himself heread: "Don't forget to see the binder, " "Don't forget to mail E----- hiscontract, " "Don't forget H-----'s proofs, " etc. An inspiration seizedupon the youth; he took a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of"don't forgets" he wrote: "Don't forget to accept A 's poem. " He lefthis manuscript on the table and disappeared. That afternoon when thepublisher glanced over his memoranda, he was not a little astonished atthe last item; but his sense of humor was so strong that he did acceptthe poem (it required a strong sense of humor to do that), and sent thelad a check for it, though the verses remain to this day unprinted. Thatkindly publisher was wise as well as kind. 

FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psychological prefaces are alwayscertain to be particularly indecent. 

I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry Sandford of England, thepriggish little boy in the story of "Sandford and Merton, " has a worthyAmerican cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes througha seemingly endless succession of girls' books. I came across a nest offifteen of them the other day. This impossible female is carried frominfancy up to grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still leisurelypursuing her way down to the tomb in an ecstatic state of uninterrupteddidacticism. There are twenty-five volumes of her and the granddaughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her grandmother's own child, withthe same precocious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to herelders. An interesting instance of hereditary talent!

H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender, graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and narrow, and looks as if he might havebeen the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put together, likean ill-constructed sentence, and affects me like one. His figure isungrammatical. 

AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in thespring. Each generation has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists oncultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were to break into blossomat the present moment, would probably be left to fade upon the stem. 

Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, asis also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classedwith the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down intorich earth, and I think it will go on flowering indefinitely. 

I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal, whose plan shouldinvolve the discharge of the chief literary critic and the installmentof a fresh censor on the completion of each issue. To place a man inpermanent absolute control of a certain number of pages, in which toexpress his opinions, is to place him in a position of great personaldanger, It is almost inevitable that he should come to overratethe importance of those opinions, to take himself with far too muchseriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of his own infallibility. The liberty to summon this or that man-of-letters to a supposititiousbar of justice is apt to beget in the self-appointed judge anexaggerated sense of superiority. He becomes impatient of any rulingsnot his, and says in effect, if not in so many words: "I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no dog bark. " When the critic reaches thisexalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is gone. 

AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge andsigns it with a rainbow. 

I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When everydetail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses thedesire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm whichthe nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raisedknee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne knew how to make his lovelythought lovelier by sometimes half veiling it. 

I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a slight fancy which Herrickhas handled twice in the "Hesperides. " The fancy, however, is notHerrick's; it is as old as poetry and the exaggeration of lovers, and Ihave the same privilege as another to try my fortune with it:

UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE CHAUCER

When some hand has partly drawn The cloudy curtains of her bed, And mylady's golden head Glimmers in the dusk like dawn, Then methinks is daybegun. Later, when her dream has ceased And she softly stirs andwakes, Then it is as when the East A sudden rosy magic takes From thecloud-enfolded sun, And full day breaks!

Shakespeare, who has done so much to discourage literature byanticipating everybody, puts the whole matter into a nutshell:

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, andJuliet is the sun. 

THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I have seen quoted innumerabletimes, and never once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio, says:

Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In myheart's core, ay, in my _heart of heart_. 

The words italicized are invariably written "heart of hearts"--as if aperson possessed that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living, withthe exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more familiar with the play ofHamlet than my good friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart pluralon two occasions in his recent novel, "The Mystery of the Sea. " Mrs. Humphry Ward also twice misquotes the passage in "Lady Rose's Daughter. "

BOOKS that have become classics--books that ave had their day and nowget more praise than perusal--always remind me of venerable colonels andmajors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselvesretired upon half pay. 

WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself into a ball isa subject over which my friend John Burroughs and several brothernaturalists have lately become as heated as if the question involvedpoints of theology. Up among the Adirondacks, and in the very heartof the region of porcupines, I happen to have a modest cottage. Thisretreat is called The Porcupine, and I ought by good rights to knowsomething about the habits of the small animal from which it derivesits name. Last winter my dog Buster used to return home on an average ofthree times a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with his nosestuck full of quills, and _he_ ought to have some concrete ideas on thesubject. We two, then, are prepared to testify that the porcupine in itsmoments of relaxation occasionally contracts itself into what might betaken for a ball by persons not too difficult to please in the matterof spheres. But neither Buster nor I--being unwilling to get intotrouble--would like to assert that it is an actual ball. That it is ashape with which one had better not thoughtlessly meddle is a convictionthat my friend Buster stands ready to defend against all comers. 

WORDSWORTH'S characterization of the woman in one of his poems as "acreature not too bright or good for human nature's daily food" hasalways appeared to me too cannibalesque to be poetical. It directly setsone to thinking of the South Sea islanders. 

THOUGH Iago was not exactly the kind of person one would select as asuperintendent for a Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo waswisdom itself--"Put money in thy purse. " Whoever disparages moneydisparages every step in the progress of the human race. I listenedthe other day to a sermon in which gold was personified as a sort ofglittering devil tempting mortals to their ruin. I had an instantof natural hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed aroundimmediately afterward. Personally, I believe that the possession of goldhas ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises havebeen checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom ofpoverty the world will never know. "After the love of knowledge, " saysBuckle, "there is no one passion which has done so much good to mankindas the love of money. "

DIALECT tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communicationbetween persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not carefor anything properly said. 

DR. HOLMES had an odd liking for ingenious desk-accessories in theway of pencil-sharpeners, paper-weights, penholders, etc. The latestcontrivances in this fashion--probably dropped down to him by theinventor angling for a nibble of commendation--were always making oneanother's acquaintance on his study table. He once said to me: "I 'mwaiting for somebody to invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by anyaccident put into your inkstand. It would save me frequent moments ofhumiliation. "

THE deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs. Giddy, who figure in thepages of seventeenth and eighteenth century fiction, are not toleratedin modern novels and plays. Steal the burglar and Palette the artisthave ceased to be. A name indicating the quality or occupation of thebearer strikes us as a too transparent device. Yet there are such namesin contemporary real life. That of our worthy Adjutant-General Drummay be instanced. Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons who linger in thememory of my boyhood. Sweet the confectioner and Lamb the butcher areindividuals with whom I have had dealings. The old-time sign of Ketchum& Cheetam, Brokers, in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too good tobe true. But it was once, if it is not now, an actuality. 

I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author dies, New York immediatelybecomes a great literary centre. 

THE possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks. 

EVERY living author has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, thatgoes about in near and remote places making friends or enemies for himamong persons who never lay eyes upon the writer in the flesh. When hedies, this phantasmal personality fades away, and the author lives onlyin the impression created by his own literature. It is only then thatthe world begins to perceive what manner of man the poet, the novelist, or the historian really was. Not until he is dead, and perhaps some longtime dead, is it possible for the public to take his exact measure. Up to that point contemporary criticism has either overrated him orunderrated him, or ignored him altogether, having been misled by theeidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks with the writer temporarilyunder its dominion. It invariably represents him as either a greater ora smaller personage than he actually is. Presently the simulacrumworks no more spells, good or evil, and the deception is unveiled. Thehitherto disregarded author is recognized, and the idol of yesterday, which seemed so important, is taken down from his too large pedestal andcarted off to the dumping-ground of inadequate things. To be sure, if hechances to have been not entirely unworthy, and on cool examination isfound to possess some appreciable degree of merit, then he is set up ona new slab of appropriate dimensions. The late colossal statue shrinksto a modest bas-relief. On the other hand, some scarcely noticed bustmay suddenly become a revered full-length figure. Between the reputationof the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there isever a wide discrepancy. 

A NOT too enchanting glimpse of Tennyson is incidentally given byCharles Brookfield, the English actor, in his "Random Recollections. "Mr. Brookfield's father was, on one occasion, dining at the Oxford andCambridge Club with George Venables, Frank Lushington, Alfred Tennyson, and others. "After dinner, " relates the random recollector, "the poetinsisted upon putting his feet on the table, tilting back his chair_more Americano_. There were strangers in the room, and he wasexpostulated with for his uncouthness, but in vain. 'Do put down yourfeet!' pleaded his host. 'Why should I?' retorted Tennyson. 'I 'm verycomfortable as I am. ' 'Every one's staring at you, ' said another. 'Let 'em stare, ' replied the poet, placidly. 'Alfred, ' said my father, 'people will think you're Longfellow. ' Down went the feet. " That _moreAmericano_ of Brookfield the younger is delicious with its fine insularflavor, but the holding up of Longfellow--the soul of gentleness, theprince of courtesy--as a bugaboo of bad manners is simply inimitable. Itwill take England years and years to detect the full unconscious humorof it. 

GREAT orators who are not also great writers become very indistincthistorical shadows to the generations immediately following them. Thespell vanishes with the voice. A man's voice is almost the only part ofhim entirely obliterated by death. The violet of his native land may bemade of his ashes, but nature in her economy seems to have taken no careof his intonations, unless she perpetuates them in restless waves of airsurging about the poles. The well-graced actor who leaves no perceptiblerecord of his genius has a decided advantage over the mere orator. Thetradition of the player's method and presence is associated with worksof enduring beauty. Turning to the pages of the dramatist, we canpicture to ourselves the greatness of Garrick or Siddons in this or thatscene, in this or that character. It is not so easy to conjure upthe impassioned orator from the pages of a dry and possibly illogicalargument in favor of or against some long-ago-exploded measure ofgovernment. The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary artwither quickly. 

ALL the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end ofthe hour-glass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to doso, would I?

SHAKESPEARE is forever coming into our affairs--putting in his oar, soto speak--with some pat word or sentence. The conversation, the otherevening, had turned on the subject of watches, when one of the gentlemenpresent, the manager of a large watch-making establishment, told us arather interesting fact. The component parts of a watch are producedby different workmen, who have no concern with the complex pieceof mechanism as a whole, and possibly, as a rule, understand itimperfectly. Each worker needs to be expert in only his own specialbranch. When the watch has reached a certain advanced state, the workrequires a touch as delicate and firm as that of an oculist performingan operation. Here the most skilled and trustworthy artisans areemployed; they receive high wages, and have the benefit of a singularindulgence. In case the workman, through too continuous application, finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve demanded by his task, he is allowed without forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, inorder that his hand may recover the requisite precision of touch. AsI listened, Hamlet's courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want ofsensibility came drifting into my memory. "The hand of little employmenthath the daintier sense, " says Shakespeare, who has left nothing unsaid. 

IT was a festival in honor of Dai Butsu or some one of the auxiliarydeities that preside over the destinies of Japland. For three days andnights the streets of Tokio--where the squat little brown houses lookfor all the world as if they were mimicking the favorite sitting postureof the Japanese--were crowded with smiling holiday makers, and madegay with devices of tinted tissue paper, dolphins, devils, dragons, andmythical winged creatures which at night amiably turned themselves intolanterns. Garlands of these, arranged close together, were stretchedacross the streets from ridgepoles to ridgepole, and your jinrikishawhisked you through interminable arbors of soft illumination. Thespectacle gave one an idea of fairyland, but then all Japan does that. 

 A land not like ours, that land of strange flowers, Of daemons and spooks with mysterious powers-- Of gods who breathe ice, who cause peach-blooms and rice And manage the moonshine and turn on the showers. 

 Each day has its fair or its festival there, And life seems immune to all trouble and care-- Perhaps only seems, in that island of dreams, Sea-girdled and basking in magical air. 

 They've streets of bazaars filled with lacquers and jars, And silk stuffs, and sword-blades that tell of old wars; They've Fuji's white cone looming up, bleak and lone, As if it were trying to reach to the stars. 

 They've temples and gongs, and grim Buddhas in throngs, And pearl-powdered geisha with dances and songs: Each girl at her back has an imp, brown or black, And dresses her hair in remarkable prongs. 

 On roadside and street toddling images meet, And smirk and kotow in a way that is sweet; Their obis are tied with particular pride, Their silken kimonos hang scant to the feet. 

 With purrs like a cat they all giggle and chat, Now spreading their fans, and now holding them flat; A fan by its play whispers, "Go now!" or "Stay!" "I hate you!" "I love you!"--a fan can say that! Beneath a dwarf tree, here and there, two or three Squat coolies are sipping small cups of green tea; They sputter, and leer, and cry out, and appear Like bad little chessmen gone off on a spree. 

 At night--ah, at night the long streets are a sight, With garlands of soft-colored lanterns alight-- Blue, yellow, and red twinkling high overhead, Like thousands of butterflies taking their flight. 

 Somewhere in the gloom that no lanterns illume Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom; On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green, They offer the midnight their cups of perfume. 

 At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near, A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear; Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings The pathos that's born of a smile and a tear. 

THE difference between an English audience and a French audience at thetheatre is marked. The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the wing. The Briton pauses for it to alight and give him reasonable time fordeliberate aim. In English playhouses an appreciable number of secondsusually precede the smile or the ripple of laughter that follows afacetious turn of the least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility forthis statement of my personal observation, since it has recently beenindorsed by one of London's most eminent actors. 

AT the next table, taking his opal drops of absinthe, was a Frenchgentleman with the blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle, whichalways has the air of saying: "I have lived!"

WE often read of wonderful manifestations of memory, but they are alwaysinstances of the faculty working in some special direction. It is memoryplaying, like Paganini, on one string. No doubt the persons performingthe phenomenal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more than theyremember. To be able to repeat a hundred lines of verse after a singlereading is no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as the hundredlines go. A man might easily fail under such a test, and yet have a goodmemory; by which I mean a catholic one, and that I imagine to be nearlythe rarest of gifts. I have never met more than four or five personspossessing it. The small boy who defined memory as "the thing you forgetwith" described the faculty as it exists and works in the majority ofmen and women. 

THE survival in publishers of the imitative instinct is a strongargument in support of Mr. Darwin's theory of the descent of man. Onepublisher no sooner brings out a new style of book-cover than half adozen other publishers fall to duplicating it. 

THE cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place with a knot of violetstied to the dinted guard, there being no known grave to decorate. Formany a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrowful woman had come andfastened these flowers there. The first time she brought her offeringshe was a slender girl, as fresh as her own violets. It is a slenderfigure still, but there are threads of silver in the black hair. 

FORTUNATE was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who in early youth was taught"to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing"--especially thefine writing. Simplicity is art's last word. 

The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seventeenth century he wouldhave worn huge flintlock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, andbeen something in the seafaring line. The fellow is always smartlydressed, but where he lives and how he lives are as unknown as "whatsong the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himselfamong women. " He is a man who apparently has no appointment with hisbreakfast and whose dinner is a chance acquaintance. His probable bankeris the next person. A great city like this is the only geography forsuch a character. He would be impossible in a small country town, whereeverybody knows everybody and what everybody has for lunch. 

I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the proprietor of the sayingthat "Economy is second or third cousin to Avarice. " I went ratherconfidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not among that gentleman's lightluggage of cynical maxims. 

THERE is a popular vague impression that butchers are not allowed toserve as jurors on murder trials. This is not really the case, but itlogically might be. To a man daily familiar with the lurid incidents ofthe _abattoir_, the summary extinction of a fellow creature (whether thevictim or the criminal) can scarcely seem a circumstance of so seriousmoment as to another man engaged in less strenuous pursuits. WE do not, and cannot, read many of the novels that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor with adifference. There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. Inevery generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime music for the many. 

G----- is a man who had rather fail in a great purpose than notaccomplish it in precisely his own way. He has the courage of hisconviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed tothe death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have any oneelectrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject. 

I HAVE thought of an essay to be called "On the Art of Short-StoryWriting, " but have given it up as smacking too much of the shop. Itwould be too _intime_, since I should have to deal chiefly with my ownways, and so give myself the false air of seeming to consider them ofimportance. It would interest nobody to know that I always write thelast paragraph first, and then work directly up to that, avoiding alldigressions and side issues. Then who on earth would care to be toldabout the trouble my characters cause me by talking too much? They willtalk, and I have to let them; but when the story is finished, I go overthe dialogue and strike out four fifths of the long speeches. I fancythat makes my characters pretty mad. 

THIS is the golden age of the inventor. He is no longer looked upon asa madman or a wizard, incontinently to be made away with. Two or threecenturies ago Marconi would not have escaped a ropeless end with hiswireless telegraphy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one RobertFulton seriously entertained the luminous idea of hustling the poor maninto an asylum for the unsound before he had a chance to fire up theboiler of his tiny steamboat on the Hudson river. In olden timesthe pillory and the whipping-post were among the gentler forms ofencouragement awaiting the inventor. If a man devised an especiallypractical apple-peeler he was in imminent danger of being peeled with itby an incensed populace. To-day we hail with enthusiasm a scientific ora mechanical discovery, and stand ready to make a stock company of it. 

A MAN is known by the company his mind keeps. To live continuallywith noble books, with "high-erected thoughts seated in the heart ofcourtesy, " teaches the soul good manners. 

THE unconventional has ever a morbid attraction for a certain class ofmind. There is always a small coterie of highly intellectual men andwomen eager to give welcome to whatever is eccentric, obscure, orchaotic. Worshipers at the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with asense of tolerant superiority when they say: "Of course this is not thekind of thing _you_ would like. " Sometimes these impressionable soulsalmost seem to make a sort of reputation for their fetish. 

I HEAR that B----- directed to have himself buried on the edge of thepond where his duckstand was located, in order that flocks of migratingbirds might fly over his grave every autumn. He did not have to die, tobecome a dead shot. A comrade once said of him: "Yes, B----- is a greatsportsman. He has peppered everything from grouse in North Dakota to hisbest friend in the Maine woods. "

WHEN the novelist introduces a bore into his novel he must not let himbore the reader. The fellow must be made amusing, which he would notbe in real life. In nine cases out of ten an exact reproduction ofreal life would prove tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable, and frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art of the realisticnovelist sometimes seems akin to that of the Chinese tailor whoperpetuated the old patch on the new trousers. True art selects andparaphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation. 

THE last meeting I had with Lowell was in the north room of his house atElmwood, the sleeping-room I had occupied during a two years' tenancyof the place in his absence abroad. He was lying half propped up inbed, convalescing from one of the severe attacks that were ultimately toprove fatal. Near the bed was a chair on which stood a marine picturein aquarelle--a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky shore in theforeground, if I remember, and a vessel at anchor. The afternoonsunlight, falling through the window, cast a bloom over the picture, which was turned toward Lowell. From time to time, as he spoke, his eyesrested thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he said, had justsent it to him. It seemed to me then, and the fancy has often haunted mesince, that that ship, in the golden haze, with topsails loosened, waswaiting to bear his spirit away. 

CIVILIZATION is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades. Ifsomebody has already said that, I forgive him the mortification hecauses me. At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throwoff its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently asin the Middle Ages. 

WHAT is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of thepurist in the next. On the other hand, expressions that once were notconsidered inelegant are looked at askance in the period following. Theword "brass" was formerly an accepted synonym for money; but at present, when it takes on that significance, it is not admitted into genteelcircles of language. It may be said to have seen better days, likeanother word I have in mind--a word that has become slang, employed inthe sense which once did not exclude it from very good society. Afriend lately informed me that he had "fired" his housekeeper--thatis, dismissed her. He little dreamed that he was speaking excellentElizabethan. 

THE "Journal des Goncourt" is crowded with beautiful and hideous things, like a Japanese Museum. 

"AND she shuddered as she sat, still silent, on her seat, and he sawthat she shuddered. " This is from Anthony Trollope's novel, "Can YouForgive Her?" Can you forgive him? is the next question. 

A LITTLE thing may be perfect, but perfection is not a little thing. Possessing this quality, a trifle "no bigger than an agate-stone on theforefinger of an alderman" shall outlast the Pyramids. The world willhave forgotten all the great masterpieces of literature when it forgetsLovelace's three verses to Lucasta on his going to the wars. Moredurable than marble or bronze are the words, "I could not love thee, deare, so much, loved I not honor more. "

I CALLED on the dear old doctor this afternoon to say good-by. I shallprobably not find him here when I come back from the long voyage whichI have in front of me. He is very fragile, and looks as though a puffof wind would blow him away. He said himself, with his old-timecheerfulness, that he was attached to this earth by only a little pieceof twine. He has perceptibly failed since I saw him a month ago; buthe was full of the wise and radiant talk to which all the worldhas listened, and will miss. I found him absorbed in a newly madecard-catalogue of his library. "It was absurd of me to have it done, " heremarked. "What I really require is a little bookcase holding only twovolumes; then I could go from one to the other in alternation and alwaysfind each book as fresh as if I never had read it. " This arraignment ofhis memory was in pure jest, for the doctor's mind was to the end likean unclouded crystal. It was interesting to note how he studied himself, taking his own pulse, as it were, and diagnosing his own case in a sortof scientific, impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's case and hewere the consulting specialist. I intended to spend a quarter of an hourwith him, and he kept me three hours. I went there rather depressed, but I returned home leavened with his good spirits, which, I think, willnever desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart unwrinkled, to behopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent--that is to triumph over old age. 

THE thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. Thething that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that isthe sincere thing. I am describing the impression left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse sketch called "Father and Mother: A Mystery"--astrangely touching and imaginative piece of work, not unlike in effectto some of Maeterlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I seemed to bestanding in a shadow cast by some half-remembered experience of my ownin a previous state of existence. When I went to bed that night I had tolie awake and think it over as an event that had actually befallen me. I should call the effect _weird_, if the word had not lately been workedto death. The gloom of Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch coldfinger-tips in those three or four pages. 

FOR a character-study--a man made up entirely of limitations. Hisconservatism and negative qualities to be represented as causing him toattain success where men of conviction and real ability fail of it. 

A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table on board the steamer. During the entire run from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed noone at meal-times excepting his table steward. Seated next to him, onthe right, was a vivacious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play, spoke "an infinite deal of nothing. " He made persistent and patheticattempts to lure his silent neighbor (we had christened him "Williamthe Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable was always the poorresult--until one day. It was the last day of the voyage. We had stoppedat the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver the mails, and some fishhad been brought aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a high state ofexcitement that morning at table. "Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actuallyfresh! They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, of course. Canyou tell me, sir, " he inquired, turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what_kind_ of fish these are?" "Cork soles, " said the saturnine man, in adeep voice, and then went on with his breakfast. 

LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in General George P. Morris'sline, "Her heart and morning broke together. "

Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however, had an attack of the sameplatitude, and possibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature seems tohave its mischief-making bacilli. The late "incomparable and ingeniousDean of St. Paul's" says, "The day breaks not, it is my heart. "

I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than Morris's. Chaucer had themalady in a milder form when he wrote:

"Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye. "

The charming naivete of it!

SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the Lyceum Theatre one eveningduring that lady's temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bernhardtpicked up a crayon and wrote this pretty word on the mirror--_Dearling_, mistaking it for the word darling. The French actress lighted by chanceupon a Spenserianism now become obsolete without good reason. It is amore charming adjective than the one that has replaced it. 

A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly rights. He is scarcelyburied before old magazines and newspapers are ransacked in search ofmatters which, for reasons sufficient to him, he had carefully excludedfrom the definitive edition of his collected writings. 

 He gave the people of his best; His worst he kept, his best he gave. 

One can imagine a poet tempted to address some such appeal as this toany possible future publisher of his poems:

 Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line, Take all, take nothing--and God send thee cheer! But my anathema on thee and thine If thou add'st aught to what is printed here. 

THE claim of this country to call itself "The Land of the Free" must beheld in abeyance until every man in it, whether he belongs or does notbelong to a labor organization, shall have the right to work for hisdaily bread. 

THERE is a strain of primitive poetry running through the entire Irishrace, a fleeting lyrical emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually in connection with love of country and kindred across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it the other morning. The despot whoreigns over our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on the rearlawn. It was one of those blue and gold days which seem especially tobelong New England. "It's in County Westmeath I 'd be this day, " shesaid, looking up at me. _"I'd go cool my hands in the grass on my ouldmother's grave in the bit of churchyard foreninst the priest's house atMullingar. "_ I have seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines. 

SPEAKING of the late Major Pond, the well-known director of a lecturebureau, an old client of his remarked: "He was a most capable manager, but it always made me a little sore to have him deduct twenty-fiveper cent. Commission. " "Pond's Extract, " murmured one of the gentlemenpresent. 

EACH of our great towns has its "Little Italy, " with shops where nothingis spoken but Italian and streets in which the alien pedestrian hadbetter not linger after nightfall. The chief industry of these exoticcommunities seems to be spaghetti and stilettos. What with our LittleItalys and Chinatowns, and the like, an American need not cross theocean in order to visit foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of oldercivilizations. 

POETS are made as well as born, the proverb notwithstanding. They aremade possible by the general love of poetry and the consequent imperiousdemand for it. When this is nonexistent, poets become mute, theatmosphere stifles them. There would have been no Shakespeare had therebeen no Elizabethan audience. That was an age when, as Emerson finelyputs it, Men became Poets, for the air was fame. 

THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his carriage-stand at the corneropposite my house is constantly touching on the extremes of humanexperience, with probably not the remotest perception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers out for an airing, and now he drives theabsconding bank-teller to the railway-station. Excepting as questionof distance, the man has positively no choice between a theatre and agraveyard. I met him this morning dashing up to the portals of TrinityChurch with a bridal party, and this afternoon, as I was crossingCambridge Bridge, I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on hisway to Mount Auburn. The wedding afforded him no pleasure, and thefuneral gave him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is his odddestiny to be wholly detached from the vital part of his own acts. Ifthe carriage itself could speak! The autobiography of a public hackwritten without reservation would be dramatic reading. 

IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score or two of suggestions foressays, sketches, and poems, which I have not written, and never shallwrite. The instant I jot down an idea the desire to utilize it leavesme, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby volumehas become a sort of Potter's Field where I bury my literary intentions, good and bad, without any belief in their final resurrection. 

A STAGE DIRECTION: _exit time; enter Eternity--with a soliloquy. _

ASIDES

TOM FOLIO

IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was often to be met with abouttown, furtively haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial rooms, aman of ingratiating simplicity of manner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice, with a note of refinement in it. He was a devoutworshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant discursive essays smackingsomewhat of his master's flavor--suggesting rather than imitatingit--which he signed "Tom Folio. " I forget how he glided into myacquaintanceship; doubtless in some way too shy and elusive forremembrance. I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one did, but theintercourse between us was most cordial, and our chance meetings andbookish chats extended over a space of a dozen years. 

Tom Folio--I cling to the winning pseudonym--was sparely built and undermedium height, or maybe a slight droop of the shoulders made it seem so, with a fragile look about him and an aspect of youth that was not his. Encountering him casually on a street corner, you would, at the firstglance, have taken him for a youngish man, but the second glance leftyou doubtful. It was a figure that struck a note of singularity andwould have attracted your attention even in a crowd. 

During the first four or five years of our acquaintance, meeting himonly out of doors or in shops, I had never happened to see him with hishat off. One day he recklessly removed it, and in the twinkling of aneye he became an elderly bald-headed man. The Tom Folio I once knewhad virtually vanished. An instant earlier he was a familiar shape; aninstant later, an almost unrecognizable individual. A narrow fringe oflight-colored hair, extending from ear to ear under the rear brim ofhis hat, had perpetrated an unintentional deception by leading one tosuppose a head profusely covered with curly locks. "Tom Folio, " I said, "put on your hat and come back!" But after that day he never seemed youngto me. 

I had few or no inklings of his life disconnected with the streets andthe book-stalls, chiefly those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It ispossible I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a room somewhere atthe South End or in South Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating hiscoffee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I got from him one ortwo fortuitous hints of quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared, some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch of mince pies, twentyor thirty at least. He once spoke to me of having laid in his winterpie, just as another might speak of laying in his winter coal. Theonly fireside companion Tom Folio ever alluded to in my presence wasa Maltese cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him from time totime. I suspected those mince pies. The cat, I recollect, was named MissMowcher. 

If he had any immediate family ties beyond this I was unaware ofthem, and not curious to be enlightened on the subject. He was morepicturesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so. Other figuresintroduced into the background of the canvas would have spoiled theartistic effect. 

Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a recluse even when he allowedhimself to be jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream ofhumanity sweeping in opposite directions through Washington Street andits busy estuaries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I had so littlereal knowledge of him that I was obliged to imagine his more intimateenvironments. However wide of the mark my conjectures may have fallen, they were as satisfying to me as facts would have been. His secludedroom I could picture to myself with a sense of certainty--the couch (asofa by day), the cupboard, the writing-table with its student lamp, thelitter of pamphlets and old quartos and octavos in tattered bindings, among which were scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, andperhaps--nay, surely--an _editio princeps_ of the "Essays. "

The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower or a more loving disciplethan Tom Folio. He moved and had much of his being in the early partof the last century. To him the South-Sea House was the most importantedifice on the globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used to be, in spite of all the changes that had befallen it. It was there CharlesLamb passed the novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the EastIndia Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a slender, boyish figure was stillseated, quill in hand, behind those stately porticoes looking uponThreadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That famous first paper in the"Essays, " describing the South-Sea House and the group of human odditieswhich occupied desks within its gloomy chambers, had left an indelibleimpression upon the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean annuitant"was as familiar to Tom Folio as if he had written it himself. Strayscraps, which had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were knownto him, and it was his to unearth amid a heap of mouldy, worm-eatenmagazines, a handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men. Trifles, yes--but Charles Lamb's! "The king's chaff is as good as other people'scorn, " says Tom Folio. 

Often his talk was sweet and racy with old-fashioned phrases; the talk ofa man who loved books and drew habitual breath in an atmosphere offine thought. Next to Charles Lamb, but at a convenable distance, IzaakWalton was Tom Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope, thoughhe thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of "Cato" contained some propergood lines. Our friend was a wide reader in English classics, greatlypreferring the literature of the earlier periods to that of theVictorian age. His smiling, tenderly expressed disapprobation of variousmodern authors was enchanting. John Keats's verses were monstrouspretty, but over-ornamented. A little too much lucent syrup tinctwith cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry of Shelley might have beencomposed in the moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning person. If youwanted a sound mind in a sound metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's"Essay on Man. " There was something winsome and by-gone in the generalmake-up of Tom Folio. No man living in the world ever seemed to me tolive so much out of it, or to live more comfortably. 

At times I half suspected him of a convalescent amatory disappointment. Perhaps long before I knew him he had taken a little sentimentaljourney, the unsuccessful end of which had touched him with a gentlesadness. It was something far off and softened by memory. If Tom Foliohad any love-affair on hand in my day, it must have been of an airy, platonic sort--a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Woffington orNell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Waller's Saccharissa. 

Although Tom Folio was not a collector--that means dividends and bankbalances--he had a passion for the Past and all its belongings, witha virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan painted by Vanloo, a bit of rareNankin (he had caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china), or anundoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him delight in the handling, though he might not aspire to ownership. I believe he would willinglyhave drunk any horrible decoction from a silver teapot of Queen Anne'stime. These things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic sense;in a spiritual sense he held possession of them in fee-simple. I learnedthus much of his tastes one day during an hour we spent together in therear showroom of a dealer in antiquities. 

I have spoken of Tom Folio as lonely, but I am inclined to think thatI mis-stated it. He had hosts of friends who used to climb the rathersteep staircase leading to that modest third-story front room whichI have imagined for him--a room with Turkey-red curtains, I like tobelieve, and a rare engraving of a scene from Mr. Hogarth's excellentmoral of "The Industrious and Idle Apprentices" pinned against thechimney breast. Young Chatterton, who was not always the best ofcompany, dropped in at intervals. There Mr. Samuel Pepys had a specialchair reserved for him by the window, where he could catch a glimpse ofthe pretty housemaid over the way, chatting with the policeman at thearea railing. Dr. Johnson and the unworldly author of "The DesertedVillage" were frequent visitors, sometimes appearing togetherarm-in-arm, with James Boswell, Esq. , of Auchinleck, followingobsequiously behind. Not that Tom Folio did not have callers vastly morearistocratic, though he could have had none pleasanter or wholesomer. Sir Philip Sidney (who must have given Folio that copy of the"Arcadia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two or three others beforewhom either of these might have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain togather round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Defoe, DickSteele, Dean Swift--there was no end to them! On certain nights, whenall the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber, the narrow streetstretching beneath Tom Folio's windows must have been blocked withinvisible coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated by the visionaryglare of torches borne by shadowy linkboys hurrying hither and thither. A man so sought after and companioned cannot be described as lonely. 

My memory here recalls the fact that he had a few friends lessinsubstantial--that quaint anatomy perched on the top of a hand-organ, to whom Tom Folio was wont to give a bite of his apple; and thebrown-legged little Neapolitan who was always nearly certain of a copperwhen this multi-millionaire strolled through the slums on a Saturdayafternoon--Saturday probably being the essayist's pay-day. The witheredwoman of the peanut-stand on the corner over against Faneuil Hall Marketknew him for a friend, as did also the blind lead-pencil merchant, whomTom Folio, on occasions, safely piloted across the stormy traffic ofDock Square. _Noblesse oblige!_ He was no stranger in those purlieus. Without designing to confuse small things with great, I may say that acertain strip of pavement in North Street could be pointed out as TomFolio's Walk, just as Addison's Walk is pointed out on the banks of theCherwell at Oxford. 

I used to observe that when Tom Folio was not in quest of a print or apamphlet or some such urgent thing, but was walking for mere recreation, he instinctively avoided respectable latitudes. He liked best thesqualid, ill-kept thoroughfares shadowed by tall, smudgy tenement-housesand teeming with unprosperous, noisy life. Perhaps he had, halfconsciously, a sense of subtle kinship to the unsuccess and cheerfulresignation of it all. 

Returning home from abroad one October morning several years ago, I wastold that that simple spirit had passed on. His death had been littleheeded; but in him had passed away an intangible genuine bit of OldBoston--as genuine a bit, in its kind, as the Autocrat himself--apersonality not to be restored or replaced. Tom Folio could never happenagain!

Strolling to-day through the streets of the older section of the town, I miss many a venerable landmark submerged in the rising tide of change, but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the sight of Tom Folio enteringthe doorway of the Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking downa musty volume from its shelf at some melancholy old book-stall onCornhill. 

FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES

WHEN an English novelist does us the honor to introduce any of ourcountrymen into his fiction, he generally displays a commendabledesire to present something typical in the way of names for hisadopted characters--to give a dash of local color, as it were, with hisnomenclature. His success is seldom commensurate to the desire. He fallsinto the error of appealing to his invention, instead of consultingsome city directory, in which he would find more material than he couldexhaust in ten centuries. Charles Reade might have secured in the pagesof such a compendium a happier title than Fullalove for his Yankeesea-captain; though I doubt, on the whole, if Anthony Trollope couldhave discovered anything better than Olivia Q. Fleabody for the youngwoman from "the States" in his novel called "Is He Popenjoy?"

To christen a sprightly young female advocate of woman's rights OliviaQ. Fleabody was very happy indeed; to be candid, it was much better thanwas usual with Mr. Trollope, whose understanding of American life andmanners was not enlarged by extensive travel in this country. An Englishtourist's preconceived idea of us is a thing he brings over with him onthe steamer and carries home again intact; it is as much a part of hisindispensable impedimenta as his hatbox. But Fleabody is excellent; itwas probably suggested by Peabody, which may have struck Mr. Trollope ascomical (just as Trollope strikes _us_ as comical), or, at least, as notserious. What a capital name Veronica Trollope would be for a hoydenishyoung woman in a society novel! I fancy that all foreign names are oddto the alien. I remember that the signs above shop-doors in England andon the Continent used to amuse me often enough, when I was over there. It is a notable circumstance that extraordinary names never seemextraordinary to the persons bearing them. If a fellow-creature werebranded Ebenezer Cuttlefish he would remain to the end of his days quiteunconscious of anything out of the common. 

I am aware that many of our American names are sufficiently queer; butEnglish writers make merry over them, as if our most eccentric were notthrown into the shade by some of their own. No American, living ordead, can surpass the verbal infelicity of Knatchbull-Hugessen, forexample--if the gentleman will forgive me for conscripting him. Quite asremarkable, in a grimly significant way, is the appellation of a Britishofficer who was fighting the Boers in the Transvaal in the year ofblessed memory 1899. This young soldier, who highly distinguishedhimself on the field, was known to his brothers-in-arms as Major PineCoffin. I trust that the gallant major became a colonel later and isstill alive. It would eclipse the gayety of nations to lose a man with aname like that. 

Several years ago I read in the sober police reports of "The Pall MallGazette" an account of a young man named George F. Onions, who wasarrested (it ought to have been by "a peeler") for purloining moneyfrom his employers, Messrs. Joseph Pickles & Son, stuff merchants, ofBradford--_des noms bien idylliques!_ What mortal could have a moreludicrous name than Onions, unless it were Pickles, or Pickled Onions?And then for Onions to rob Pickles! Could there be a more incrediblecoincidence? As a coincidence it is nearly sublime. No story-writerwould dare to present that fact or those names in his fiction; neitherwould be accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Fleabody is _bentrovato_. 

A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"

THE night-scene on the battlefield of Wagram in "L'Aiglon"--an episodewhose sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagination like the pointof a rapier--bears a striking resemblance to a picturesque passage inVictor Hugo's "Les Miserables. " It is the one intense great moment inthe play, and has been widely discussed, but so far as I am aware noneof M. Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the resemblancementioned. In the master's romance it is not the field of Wagram, butthe field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled with contendingarmies of spooks, to use the grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to themind's eye. The passage occurs at the end of the sixteenth chapter inthe second part of "Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as follows:

Le champ de Waterloo aujourd'hui a le calme qui appartient a la terre, support impassible de l'homme, et il resemble a toutes les plaines. Lanuit pourtant une espece de brume visionnaire s'en degage, et si quelquevoyageur s'y promene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute, s'il reve commeVirgile dans les funestes plaines de Philippes, l'hallucination dela catastrophe le saisit. L'effrayant 18 juin revit; la faussecolline-monument s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ debataille reprend sa realite; des lignes d'infanterie ondulent dans laplaine, des galops furieux traversent l'horizon; le songeur effare voitl'eclair des sabres, l'etincelle des bayonnettes, le flamboiement desbombes, l'entre-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres; il entend, comme unrale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur vague de la bataille-fantome; cesombres, ce sont les grenadiers; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers;. . . Tout cela n'est plus et se heurte et combat encore; et les ravinss'empourprent, et les arbres frissonnent, et il y a de la furie jusquedans les nuees, et, dans les tenebres, toutes ces hauteurs farouches, Mont-Saint Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, apparaissent confusement couronnees de tourbillons de spectress'exterminant. (1)

Here is the whole battle scene in "L'Aiglon, " with scarcely a gruesomedetail omitted. The vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; theghostly squadrons hurling themselves against one another (seen onlythrough the eyes of the poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangledshapes lying motionless in various postures of death upon theblood-stained sward; the moans of the wounded rising up and sweeping bylike vague wailings of the wind--all this might be taken for an artfulappropriation of Victor Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, thoughit is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant page, read inearly youth, still lingered on the retina of M. Rostand's memory. Ifsuch were the case, it does not necessarily detract from the integrityof the conception or the playwright's presentment of it. 

 (1) The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which belongs to earth, the impassive support of man, and is like all other plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist is exhaled, and if any traveler walks there, and watches and listens, and dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The terrible June 18 relives; the artificial commemorative mound effaces itself, the lion disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by furious charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the gleam of sabres, the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of bursting shells, the clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the muffled clamor of the phantom conflict comes to him like dying moans from the tomb; these shadows are grenadiers, these lights are cuirassiers . . . All this does not really exist, yet the combat goes on; the ravines are stained with purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the clouds, and in the obscurity the sombre heights--Mont Saint-Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--ap-pear dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one another. 

The idea of repeopling old battlefields with the shades of vanishedhosts is not novel. In such tragic spots the twilight always lays a darkhand on the imagination, and prompts one to invoke the unappeased spiritof the past that haunts the place. One summer evening long ago, as I wasstanding alone by the ruined walls of Hougomont, with that sense of notbeing alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by solitude, I hada sudden vision of that desperate last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard. Marshal Ney rose from the grave and again shouted those heroic wordsto Drouet d'Erlon: "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" For aninstant a thousand sabres flashed in the air. The deathly silence thataccompanied the ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the short-liveddream. A moment later I beheld a hunched little figure mounted on awhite horse with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay slack in therider's hand; his three-cornered hat was slouched over his brows, andhis chin rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he slowly rodeaway through the twilight, and nobody cried, _Vive l'Empereur!_

The ground on which a famous battle has been fought casts a spell uponevery man's mind; and the impression made upon two men of poetic genius, like Victor Hugo and Edmond Rostand, might well be nearly identical. This sufficiently explains the likeness between the fantastic silhouettein "Les Miserables" and the battle of the ghosts in "L'Aiglon. " A museso rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need not borrow a piece ofsupernaturalness from anybody. 

PLOT AND CHARACTER

HENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony Trollope, says that if Trollope"had taken sides on the rather superficial opposition between novelsof character and novels of plot, I can imagine him to have said (exceptthat he never expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred the formerclass, inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by nomeans character. " So neat an antithesis would surely never have founditself between Mr. Trollope's lips if Mr. James had not cunninglylent it to him. Whatever theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope may havepreached, his almost invariable practice was to have a plot. He alwayshad a _story_ to tell, and a story involves beginning, middle, andend--in short, a framework of some description. 

There have been delightful books filled wholly with character-drawing;but they have not been great novels. The great novel deals with humanaction as well as with mental portraiture and analysis. That "characterin itself is plot" is true only in a limited sense. A plan, a motivewith a logical conclusion, is as necessary to a novel or a romance as itis to a drama. A group of skillfully made-up men and women lounging inthe green-room or at the wings is not the play. It is not enough to saythat this is Romeo and that Lady Macbeth. It is not enough to informus that certain passions are supposed to be embodied in such and suchpersons: these persons should be placed in situations developing thosepassions. A series of unrelated scenes and dialogues leading to nothingis inadequate. 

Mr. James's engaging epigram seems to me vulnerable at both ends--unlikeAchilles. "Plot is by no means character. " Strictly speaking, it isnot. It appears to me, however, that plot approaches nearer to beingcharacter than character does to being plot. Plot necessitates action, and it is impossible to describe a man's actions' under whateverconditions, without revealing something of his character, his way oflooking at things, his moral and mental pose. What a hero of fiction_does_ paints him better than what he _says_, and vastly better thananything his creator may say of him. Mr. James asserts that "we carewhat happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are. "I think we care very little what people are (in fiction) when we do notknow what happens to them. 

THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE

IN the process of their experiments upon the bodies of living animalssome anatomists do not, I fear, sufficiently realize that

 The poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. 

I am not for a moment challenging the necessity of vivisection, thoughdistinguished surgeons have themselves challenged it; I merely contendthat science is apt to be cold-hearted, and does not seem always totake into consideration the tortures she inflicts in her search forknowledge. 

Just now, in turning over the leaves of an old number of the "LondonLancet, " I came upon the report of a lecture on experimental physiologydelivered by Professor William Rutherford before a learned associationin London. Though the type had become antiquated and the paperyellowed in the lapse of years, the pathos of those pages was alive andpalpitating. 

The following passages from the report will illustrate not unfairly thepoint I am making. In the course of his remarks the lecturer exhibitedcertain interesting experiments on living frogs. Intellectually I govery strongly for Professor Rutherford, but I am bound to confess thatthe weight of my sympathy rests with the frogs. 

Observe this frog [said the professor], it is regarding our manoeuvreswith a somewhat lively air. Now and then it gives a jump. What theprecise object of its leaps may be I dare not pretend to say; butprobably it regards us with some apprehension, and desires to escape. 

To be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted that the frog had someslight reason for apprehension. The lecturer proceeded:

I touch one of its toes, and you see it resents the molestation in avery decided manner. Why does it so struggle to get away when I pinchits toes? Doubtless, you will say, because it feels the pinch and wouldrather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal with the aid of asharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk lies as though it were dead. Thespinal cord seems to be suffering from shock. Probably, however, itwill soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal has now_spontaneously_ drawn up its legs and arms, and it is sitting with itsneck erect just as if it had not lost its head at all. I pinch itstoes, and you see the leg is at once thrust out as if to spurn away theoffending instrument. Does it still feel? and is the motion still theresult of the volition?

That the frog did feel, and delicately hinted at the circumstance, thereseems to be no room to doubt, for Professor Rutherford related thathaving once decapitated a frog, the animal suddenly bounded from thetable, a movement that presumably indicated a kind of consciousness. Hethen returned to the subject immediately under observation, pinched itsfoot again, the frog again "resenting the stimulation. " He then thrusta needle down the spinal cord. "The limbs are now flaccid, " observed theexperimenter; "we may wait as long as we please, but a pinch of the toeswill never again cause the limbs of this animal to move. " Here iswhere congratulations can come in for _la grenouille_. That frog beingconcluded, the lecturer continued:

I take another frog. In this case I open the cranium and remove thebrain and medulla oblongata. . . . I thrust a pin through the nose andhang the animal thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendentlegs without any difficulty. . . . I gently pinch the toes. . . . Theleg of the same side is pulled up. . . . I pinch the same more severely. . . . Both legs are thrown into motion. 

Having thus satisfactorily proved that the wretched creature could stillsuffer acutely, the professor resumed:

The cutaneous nerves of the frog are extremely sensitive to acids; soI put a drop of acetic acid on the outside of one knee. This, you see, gives rise to most violent movements both of arms and legs, and noticeparticularly that the animal is using the toes of the leg on the sameside for the purpose of rubbing the irritated spot. I dip the wholeanimal into water in order to wash away the acid, and now it is allat rest again. . . . I put a drop of acid on the skin over the lumbarregion of the spine. . . . Both feet are instantly raised to theirritated spot. The animal is able to localize the seat of irritation. . . . I wash the acid from the back, and I amputate one of the feet atthe ankle. . . . I apply a drop of acid over the knee of the footlessleg. . . . Again, the animal turns the leg towards the knee, as if toreach the irritated spot with the toes; these, however, are not nowavailable. But watch the other foot. The _foot of the other leg_ is nowbeing used to rub away the acid. The animal, finding that the object isnot accomplished with the foot of the same side, uses the other one. 

I think that at least one thing will be patent to every unprejudicedreader of these excerpts, namely--that any frog (with its head on or itshead off) which happened to make the personal acquaintance of ProfessorRutherford must have found him poor company. What benefit science mayhave derived from such association I am not qualified to pronounce upon. The lecturer showed conclusively that the frog is a peculiarly sensitiveand intelligent little batrachian. I hope that the genial professor, inthe years which followed, did not frequently consider it necessary todemonstrate the fact. 

LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL

IT has recently become the fashion to speak disparagingly of Leigh Huntas a poet, to class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer toColeridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell, Hunt was not a Keats nora Shelley nor a Coleridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He wasa delightful essayist--quite unsurpassed, indeed, in his blithe, optimistic way--and as a poet deserves to rank high among the lessersingers of his time. I should place him far above Barry Cornwall, whohas not half the freshness, variety, and originality of his compeer. 

I instance Barry Cornwall because there has seemed a disposition sincehis death to praise him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck me asextremely artificial, especially in his dramatic sketches. His verses inthis line are mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a dramatistmay find it to his profit to go out of his own age and atmosphere forinspiration; but in order successfully to do so he must be a dramatist. Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the role; he got no further thanthe composing of brief disconnected scenes and scraps of soliloquies, and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for which the stage had no use. Hischief claim to recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the dramaticstudies, his attitude is nearly always affected. He studiously strivesto reproduce the form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Londoner, he naturally sings much of rural English life, but his England is theEngland of two or three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say aboutthe "falcon, " but the poor bird has the air of beating fatigued wingsagainst the bookshelves of a well-furnished library! This well-furnishedlibrary was--if I may be pardoned a mixed image--the rock on which BarryCornwall split. He did not look into his own heart, and write: he lookedinto his books. 

A poet need not confine himself to his individual experiences; the worldis all before him where to choose; but there are subjects which he hadbetter not handle unless he have some personal knowledge of them. Thesea is one of these. The man who sang, The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, _the ever free!_

(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should neverhave permitted himself to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one ofBarry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularlyvapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had everlaid eyes on any piece of water wider than the Thames at Greenwich, andin looking over Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not so muchsurprised as amused to learn that he was never out of sight of landin the whole course of his existence. It is to be said of him morepositively than the captain of the Pinafore said it of himself, that hewas hardly ever sick at sea. 

Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the ocean in all its protean moods, piping such thin feebleness as

"The blue, the fresh, the ever free!"

To do that required a man whose acquaintance with the deep was limitedto a view of it from an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. Evenfrequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign of The Ship andTurtle will not enable one to write sea poetry. 

Considering the actual facts, there is something weird in the statement, I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea! I am where I would ever be. 

The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth of an imagined sailor, but they are none the less diverting. The stanza containing the distichends with a striking piece of realism:

 If a storm should come and awake the deep, What matter? I shall ride and sleep. 

This is the course of action usually pursued by sailors during a gale. The first or second mate goes around and tucks them up comfortably, eachin his hammock, and serves them out an extra ration of grog after thestorm is over. 

Barry Cornwall must have had an exceptionally winning personality, for he drew to him the friendship of men as differently constituted asThackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. He was liked by the best ofhis time, from Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, who caught aglimpse of the aged poet in his vanishing. The personal magnetism of anauthor does not extend far beyond the orbit of his contemporaries. It isof the lyrist and not of the man I am speaking here. One could wish hehad written more prose like his admirable "Recollections of Elia. "

Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note, but when he does it isextremely sweet. That little ballad in the minor key beginning, Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide adown thy stream, was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh Hunt, though not withoutquestionable mannerisms, was rich in the inspiration that came butinfrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full of natural felicities. He also was a bookman, but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew howto mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the coinage with his own head. In "Hero and Leander" there is one line which, at my valuing, is worthany twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall has written:

 So might they now have lived, and so have died; _The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side_. 

Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane Carlyle gave him lingers oneverybody's lip. That and the rhyme of "Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel"are spice enough to embalm a man's memory. After all, it takes only ahandful. 

DECORATION DAY

HOW quickly Nature takes possession of a deserted battlefield, and goesto work repairing the ravages of man! With invisible magic hand shesmooths the rough earthworks, fills the rifle-pits with delicateflowers, and wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent draperyof tendrils. Soon the whole sharp outline of the spot is lost inunremembering grass. Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through thefoliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremulous note; and wherethe menacing shell described its curve through the air, a harmless crowflies in circles. Season after season the gentle work goes on, healingthe wounds and rents made by the merciless enginery of war, until atlast the once hotly contested battleground differs from none of itsquiet surroundings, except, perhaps, that here the flowers take a richertint and the grasses a deeper emerald. 

It is thus the battle lines may be obliterated by Time, but there areleft other and more lasting relics of the struggle. That dinted armysabre, with a bit of faded crepe knotted at its hilt, which hangs overthe mantel-piece of the "best room" of many a town and country housein these States, is one; and the graven headstone of the fallen herois another. The old swords will be treasured and handed down fromgeneration to generation as priceless heirlooms, and with them, let ustrust, will be cherished the custom of dressing with annual flowers theresting-places of those who fell during the Civil War. 

 With the tears a Land hath shed Their graves should ever be green. 

 Ever their fair, true glory Fondly should fame rehearse-- Light of legend and story, Flower of marble and verse. 

The impulse which led us to set apart a day for decorating the graves ofour soldiers sprung from the grieved heart of the nation, and in ourown time there is little chance of the rite being neglected. But thegenerations that come after us should not allow the observance to fallinto disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh love and sorrow, should be with them an acknowledgment of an incalculable debt. 

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays. Howdifferent from those sullen batteries which used to go rumbling throughour streets are the crowds of light carriages, laden with flowers andgreenery, wending their way to the neighboring cemeteries! The grimcannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel intopeach blooms. There is no hint of war in these gay baggage trains, except the presence of men in undress uniform, and perhaps here andthere an empty sleeve to remind one of what has been. Year by year thatempty sleeve is less in evidence. 

The observance of Decoration Day is unmarked by that disorder andconfusion common enough with our people in their holiday moods. Theearlier sorrow has faded out of the hour, leaving a softened solemnity. It quickly ceased to be simply a local commemoration. While thesequestered country churchyards and burial-places near our great northerncities were being hung with May garlands, the thought could not but cometo us that there were graves lying southward above which bent a grief astender and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped unseen flowers uponthose mounds. There is a beautiful significance in the fact that, twoyears after the close of the war, the women of Columbus, Mississippi, laid their offerings alike on Northern and Southern graves. When all issaid, the great Nation has but one heart. 

WRITERS AND TALKERS

AS a class, literary men do not shine in conversation. The scintillatingand playful essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the most genialand entertaining of companions, turns out to be a shy and untalkableindividual, who chills you with his reticence when you chance tomeet him. The poet whose fascinating volume you always drop into yourgripsack on your summer vacation--the poet whom you have so long desiredto know personally--is a moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman, whofails to catch your name on introduction, and seems the avatar of thecommonplace. The witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy hadpainted as a literary cannibal with a morbid appetite for tender youngpoets--the writer of those caustic and scholarly reviews which you neverneglect to read--destroys the un-lifelike portrait you had drawn byappearing before you as a personage of slender limb and deprecatingglance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself whenyou ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches, " by PopocatepetlJones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, withepigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of ashort, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkleat all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbalfireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. Fresh fromwitnessing his delightful comedy of manners, you meet him face to faceonly to discover that his own manners are anything but delightful. The play and the playwright are two very distinct entities. You growskeptical touching the truth of Buffon's assertion that the style is theman himself. Who that has encountered his favorite author in the fleshhas not sometimes been a little, if not wholly, disappointed?

After all, is it not expecting too much to expect a novelist to talkas cleverly as the clever characters in his novels? Must a dramatistnecessarily go about armed to the teeth with crisp dialogue? May not apoet be allowed to lay aside his singing-robes and put on a conventionaldress-suit when he dines out? Why is it not permissible in him to be asprosaic and tiresome as the rest of the company? He usually is. 

ON EARLY RISING

A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my acquaintance, who has devoted yearsto investigating the subject, states that he has never come across acase of remarkable longevity unaccompanied by the habit of early rising;from which testimony it might be inferred that they die early who lieabed late. But this would be getting out at the wrong station. That themajority of elderly persons are early risers is due to the simplefact that they cannot sleep mornings. After a man passes his fiftiethmilestone he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakefulness is no creditto him. As the theorist confined his observations to the aged, he easilyreached the conclusion that men live to be old because they do not sleeplate, instead of perceiving that men do not sleep late because they areold. He moreover failed to take into account the numberless young livesthat have been shortened by matutinal habits. 

The intelligent reader, and no other is supposable, need not be toldthat the early bird aphorism is a warning and not an incentive. The fateof the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so byshowing how extremely dangerous it is. I have no patience with the worm, and when I rise with the lark I am always careful to select a lark thathas overslept himself. 

The example set by this mythical bird, a mythical bird so far as NewEngland is concerned, has wrought wide-spread mischief and discomfort. It is worth noting that his method of accomplishing these ends isdirectly the reverse of that of the Caribbean insect mentionedby Lafcadio Hearn in his enchanting "Two Years in the French WestIndies"--a species of colossal cricket called the wood-kid; in thecreole tongue, _cabritt-bois_. This ingenious pest works a soothing, sleep-compelling chant from sundown until precisely half past four inthe morning, when it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens everybodyit has lulled into slumber with its insidious croon. Mr. Hearn, withstrange obtuseness to the enormity of the thing, blandly remarks: "Forthousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of itssong is the signal to get up. " I devoutly trust that none of the WestIndia islands furnishing such satanic entomological specimens willever be annexed to the United States. Some of our extreme advocates ofterritorial expansion might spend a profitable few weeks on one of thosefavored isles. A brief association with that _cabritt-bois_ would belikely to cool the enthusiasm of the most ardent imperialist. 

An incalculable amount of specious sentiment has been lavished upondaybreak, chiefly by poets who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, atmid-day. It is charitably to be said that their practice was better thantheir precept--or their poetry. Thomson, the author of "The Castle ofIndolence, " who gave birth to the depraved apostrophe, "Falsely luxurious, will not man awake, "

was one of the laziest men of his century. He customarily lay in beduntil noon meditating pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to beseen in his garden of an afternoon, with both hands in his waistcoatpockets, eating peaches from a pendent bough. Nearly all the Englishpoets who at that epoch celebrated what they called "the effulgent orbof day" were denizens of London, where pure sunshine is unknown elevenmonths out of the twelve. 

In a great city there are few incentives to early rising. What charm isthere in roof-tops and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape evenfrom a nightmare? What is more depressing than a city street before theshop-windows have lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem asleep, "as Wordsworth says, and nobody is astir but the belated burglar or themilk-and-water man or Mary washing off the front steps? Daybreak atthe seaside or up among the mountains is sometimes worth while, thoughfamiliarity with it breeds indifference. The man forced by restlessnessor occupation to drink the first vintage of the morning every day ofhis life has no right appreciation of the beverage, however much he mayprofess to relish it. It is only your habitual late riser who takes inthe full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up togo a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to thesparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him--a momentaryAdam--the world is newly created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in thesimilitude of a three-pound trout. 

In the country, then, it is well enough occasionally to dress bycandle-light and assist at the ceremony of dawn; it is well if for noother purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the professional earlyriser who, were he in a state of perfect health, would not be thewandering victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are few smallthings more exasperating than this early bird with the worm of hisconceit in his bill. 

UN POETE MANQUE

IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poetical melange is a littlepoem which needs only a slight revision of the initial stanza toentitle it to rank with some of the swallow-flights in Heine's lyricalintermezzo. I have tentatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza:

 I taste a liquor never brewed In vats upon the Rhine; No tankard ever held a draught Of alcohol like mine. 

 Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. 

 When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the Foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy caps And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun!

Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable honey-gatherer who getshimself turned out-of-doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very takingmatters. I know of more important things that interest me vastly less. This is one of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly perfect instructure as almost to warrant the reader in suspecting that MissDickinson's general disregard of form was a deliberate affectation. Theartistic finish of the following sunset-piece makes her usual quatrainsunforgivable:

 This is the land the sunset washes, These are the banks of the Yellow Sea; Where it rose, or whither it rushes, These are the western mystery!

 Night after night her purple traffic Strews the landing with opal bales; Merchantmen poise upon horizons, Dip, and vanish with fairy sails. 

The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere of a ClaudeLorraine. One instantly frames it in one's memory. Several such bits ofimpressionist landscape may be found in the portfolio. 

It is to be said, in passing, that there are few things in MissDickinson's poetry so felicitous as Mr. Higginson's characterization ofit in his preface to the volume: "In many cases these verses will seemto the reader _like poetry pulled up by the roots_, with rain and dewand earth clinging to them. " Possibly it might be objected that this isnot the best way to gather either flowers or poetry. 

Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and bizarre mind. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influencedby the mannerism of Emerson. The very gesture with which she tied herbonnet-strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like walks in her gardenat Amherst, must have had something dreamy and Emersonian in it. She hadmuch fancy of a quaint kind, but only, as it appears to me, intermittentflashes of imagination. 

That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a certain something which, for wantof a more precise name, we term _quality_, is not to be denied. Butthe incoherence and shapelessness of the greater part of her verse arefatal. On nearly every page one lights upon an unsupported exquisiteline or a lonely happy epithet; but a single happy epithet or anisolated exquisite line does not constitute a poem. What Lowell saysof Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss Dickinson: "Donne is full ofsalient verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism withtheir beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and thendelight us with the felicity of their solution; but these have not savedhim. He is exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary. "

Touching this question of mere technique Mr. Ruskin has a word to say(it appears that he said it "in his earlier and better days"), and Mr. Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution canoutweigh one grain or fragment of thought. " This is a proposition towhich one would cordially subscribe if it were not so intemperatelystated. A suggestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive dictum isfurnished by his own volume of verse. The substance of it is weightyenough, but the workmanship lacks just that touch which distinguishesthe artist from the bungler--the touch which Mr. Ruskin, except whenwriting prose, appears not much to have regarded either in his later or"in his earlier and better days. "

Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impossible rhyme, their involvedsignificance, their interrupted flute-note of birds that have nocontinuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a group of eagerlisteners. A shy New England bluebird, shifting its light load of song, has for the moment been mistaken for a stray nightingale. 

THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD

I WENT to see a play the other night, one of those good old-fashionedEnglish comedies that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen. Thepiece with its wrinkled conventionality, its archaic stiffness, and obsolete code of morals, was devoid of interest excepting as acollection of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it through. The one thing in it that held me a pleased spectator was the gracefulcostume of a certain player who looked like a fine old portrait--byVandyke or Velasquez, let us say--that had come to life and kicked offits tarnished frame. 

I do not know at what epoch of the world's history the scene of the playwas laid; possibly the author originally knew, but it was evident thatthe actors did not, for their make-ups represented quite antagonisticperiods. This circumstance, however, detracted only slightly from thespecial pleasure I took in the young person called Delorme. He wasnot in himself interesting; he was like that Major Waters in "Pepys'sDiary"--"a most amorous melancholy gentleman who is under a despayr inlove, which makes him bad company;" it was entirely Delorme's dress. 

I never saw mortal man in a dress more sensible and becoming. Thematerial was according to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of somedark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings of a deeper shade. My idea ofa doublet is so misty that I shall not venture to affirm that thegentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat of some descriptionhanging negligently from the shoulders and looped at the throat, showing a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at the wrists. Fulltrousers reaching to the tops of buckskin boots, and a low-crowned softhat--not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque shapeless head-gear, one side jauntily fastened up with a jewel--completed the essentialportions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to walk in, to ridein, to sit in. The wearer of it could not be awkward if he tried, and Iwill do Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress to some severetests. But he was graceful all the while, and made me wish that mycountrymen would throw aside their present hideous habiliments andhasten to the measuring-room of Delorme's tailor. 

In looking over the plates of an old book of fashions we smile at themonstrous attire in which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to deckthemselves. Presently it will be the turn of posterity to smile at us, for in our own way we are no less ridiculous than were our ancestorsin their knee-breeches, pig-tail and _chapeau de bras_. In fact we arereally more absurd. If a fashionably dressed man of to-day could catcha single glimpse of himself through the eyes of his descendants fouror five generations removed, he would have a strong impression of beingsomething that had escaped from somewhere. 

Whatever strides we may have made in arts and sciences, we have madeno advance in the matter of costume. That Americans do not tattoothemselves, and do go fully clad--I am speaking exclusively of my ownsex--is about all that can be said in favor of our present fashions. Iwish I had the vocabulary of Herr Teufelsdrockh with which toinveigh against the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angularswallow-tailed coat that makes a man look like a poor species of birdand gets him mistaken for the waiter. "As long as a man wears the moderncoat, " says Leigh Hunt, "he has no right to despise any dress. Whatsnips at the collar and lapels! What a mechanical and ridiculous cutabout the flaps! What buttons in front that are never meant to button, and yet are no ornament! And what an exquisitely absurd pair ofbuttons at the back! gravely regarded, nevertheless, and thought asindispensably necessary to every well-conditioned coat, as other bitsof metal or bone are to the bodies of savages whom we laugh at. There isabsolutely not one iota of sense, grace, or even economy in the moderncoat. "

Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of the period. That aChristian can go about unabashed with a shiny black cylinder on his headshows what civilization has done for us in the way of taste in personaldecoration. The scalplock of an Apache brave has more style. When anIndian squaw comes into a frontier settlement the first "marked-down"article she purchases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct as tothe eternal fitness of things tells her that its proper place is on theskull of a barbarian. 

It was while revolving these pleasing reflections in my mind, that ourfriend Delorme walked across the stage in the fourth act, and thoughthere was nothing in the situation nor in the text of the play towarrant it, I broke into tremendous applause, from which I desistedonly at the scowl of an usher--an object in a celluloid collar anda claw-hammer coat. My solitary ovation to Master Delorme was aninvoluntary and, I think, pardonable protest against the male costume ofour own time. 

ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION

EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is the age of vain fantasy, there isno accounting for the fact that young men and young women of poeticaltemperament should so frequently assume to look upon an early demisefor themselves as the most desirable thing in the world. Though one mayincidentally be tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one cannothelp wondering. That persons who are exceptionally fortunate in theirenvironment, and in private do not pretend to be otherwise, shouldopenly announce their intention of retiring at once into the familytomb, is a problem not easily solved. The public has so long listenedto these funereal solos that if a few of the poets thus impatient tobe gone were to go, their departure would perhaps be attended by thatresigned speeding which the proverb invokes on behalf of the partingguest. 

The existence of at least one magazine editor would, I know, have ashadow lifted from it. At this writing, in a small mortuary basket underhis desk are seven or eight poems of so gloomy a nature that he wouldnot be able to remain in the same room with them if he did not suspectthe integrity of their pessimism. The ring of a false coin is not morerecognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated sorrow. 

The Miss Gladys who sends a poem entitled "Forsaken, " in which sheaddresses death as her only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes. He sees, among other dissolving views, a little hoyden in magnificentspirits, perhaps one of this season's social buds, with half a score oflovers ready to pluck her from the family stem--a rose whose countlesspetals are coupons. A caramel has disagreed with her, or she would nothave written in this despondent vein. The young man who seeks to informthe world in eleven anaemic stanzas of _terze rime_ that the cup ofhappiness has been forever dashed from his lip (he appears to have butone) and darkly intimates that the end is "nigh" (rhyming affably with"sigh"), will probably be engaged a quarter of a century from now inmaking similar declarations. He is simply echoing some dysthymic poet ofthe past--reaching out with some other man's hat for the stray nickel ofyour sympathy. 

This morbidness seldom accompanies genuine poetic gifts. The case ofDavid Gray, the young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an instanceto the contrary. His lot was exceedingly sad, and the failure ofhealth just as he was on the verge of achieving something like successjustified his profound melancholy; but that he tuned this melancholy andplayed upon it, as if it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen inone of his sonnets. 

In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) "Life and Letters of John Keats"it is related that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood upon hislips after coughing, said to his friend Charles Brown: "I know the colorof that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That dropis my death-warrant. I must die. " Who that ever read the passagecould forget it? David Gray did not, for he versified the incident ashappening to himself and appropriated, as his own, Keats's comment:

 Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain, There came arterial blood, and with a sigh Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein, That drop is my death-warrant; I must die. 

The incident was likely enough a personal experience, but the commentshould have been placed in quotation marks. I know of few strangerthings in literature than this poet's dramatization of another man'spathos. Even Keats's epitaph--_Here lies one whose name_ _was writ inwater_--finds an echo in David Gray's _Below lies one whose name wastraced in sand_. Poor Gray was at least the better prophet. 

WISHMAKERS' TOWN

A LIMITED edition of this little volume of verse, which seems to mein many respects unique, was issued in 1885, and has long been out ofprint. The reissue of the book is in response to the desire off certainreaders who have not forgotten the charm which William Young's poemexercised upon them years ago, and, finding the charm still potent, would have others share it. 

The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem and not simply a series ofunrelated lyrics, is ingenious and original, and unfolds itself inmeasures at once strong and delicate. The mood of the poet and themethod of the playwright are obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town--alittle town situated in the no-man's-land of "The Tempest" and "AMidsummer Night's Dream"--is shown to us as it awakens, touched by thedawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls the townfolk to theirvarious avocations, the toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness, the miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque sequence the personagesof the Masque pass before us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers, gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd the scene, and have inturn their word of poignant speech. We mingle with the throng in thestreets; we hear the whir of looms and the din of foundries, the blareof trumpets, the whisper of lovers, the scandals of the market-place, and, in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy microcosm. A contracted stage, indeed, yet large enough for the play of manypassions, as the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the sounding of thecurfew, the town is hushed to sleep again, and the curtain falls on thismimic drama of life. 

The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. Perhaps if one couldname it, the spell were broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs anatmosphere too evasive for measurement--an atmosphere that stipulates animaginative mood on the part of the reader. The quality which pleases incertain of the lyrical episodes is less intangible. One readily explainsone's liking for so gracious a lyric as The Flower-Seller, to select anexample at random. Next to the pleasure that lies in the writing of suchexquisite verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the stanzas partlyfor my own gratification, and partly to win the reader to "Wishmakers'Town, " not knowing better how to do it. 

 Myrtle, and eglantine, For the old love and the new! And the columbine, With its cap and bells, for folly! And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth! and the rue, For melancholy! But of all the blossoms that blow, Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may, This gentle guest, Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray, Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low Upon her breast. For the orange flower Ye may buy as ye will: but the violet of the wood Is the love of maidenhood; And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour, He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream, No, never again shall he meet with a dower that shall seem So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years, At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath, The past shall arise, And his eyes shall be dim with tears, And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise Though he stand in the Shambles of death. In a different tone, but displaying the same sureness of execution, isthe cry of the lowly folk, the wretched pawns in the great game of life:

 Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame, Plot, and plunder, and disagree! O but the game is a royal game! O but your tourneys are fair to see!

 None too hopeful we found our lives; Sore was labor from day to day; Still we strove for our babes and wives-- Now, to the trumpet, we march away!

 "Why?"--For some one hath will'd it so! Nothing we know of the why or the where-- To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow-- Nothing we know, and little we care. 

 Give us to kill!--since this is the end Of love and labor in Nature's plan; Give us to kill and ravish and rend, Yea, since this is the end of man. 

 States shall perish, and states be born: Leaders, out of the throng, shall press; Some to honor, and some to scorn: We, that are little, shall yet be less. 

 Over our lines shall the vultures soar; Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry; And the dead shall be as the sands of the shore; And daily the living shall pray to die. 

 Nay, what matter!--When all is said, Prince and Bishop will plunder still: Lord and Lady must dance and wed. Pity us, pray for us, ye that will!

It is only the fear of impinging on Mr. Young's copyright that preventsme reprinting the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the prologue of TheStrollers, which reads like a page from the prelude to some Old-Worldmiracle play. The setting of these things is frequently antique, but thethought is the thought of today. I think there is a new generation ofreaders for such poetry as Mr. Young's. I venture the prophecy thatit will not lack for them later when the time comes for the inevitablerearrangement of present poetic values. 

The author of "Wishmakers' Town" is the child of his period, and has notescaped the _maladie du siecle_. The doubt and pessimism that markedthe end of the nineteenth century find a voice in the bell-like stropheswith which the volume closes. It is the dramatist rather than the poetwho speaks here. The real message of the poet to mankind is ever one ofhope. Amid the problems that perplex and discourage, it is for him tosing

 Of what the world shall be When the years have died away. 

HISTORICAL NOVELS

IN default of such an admirable piece of work as Dr. Weir Mitchell's"Hugh Wynne, " I like best those fictions which deal with kingdoms andprincipalities that exist only in the mind's eye. One's knowledge ofactual events and real personages runs no serious risk of receivingshocks in this no-man's-land. Everything that happens in an imaginaryrealm--in the realm of Ruritania, for illustration--has an air ofpossibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance. The atmosphere and localcolor, having an authenticity of their own, are not to be challenged. You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of the period in which hisnarrative is laid, since the period is as vague as the geography. He walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils that besetthe story-teller who ventures to stray beyond the bounds of themake-believe. One peril he cannot escape--that of misrepresenting humannature. 

The anachronisms of the average historical novel, pretending toreflect history, are among its minor defects. It is a thing altogetherwonderfully and fearfully made--the imbecile intrigue, the cast-ironcharacters, the plumed and armored dialogue with its lance of goryrhetoric forever at charge. The stage at its worst moments is not sounreal. Here art has broken into smithereens the mirror which she issupposed to hold up to nature. 

In this romance-world somebody is always somebody's unsuspected father, mother, or child, deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usuallythe anonymous person is the hero, to whom it is mere recreation to holdtwenty swordsmen at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of thembefore he escapes through a door that ever providentially opens directlybehind him. How tired one gets of that door! The "caitiff" in thesechronicles of when knighthood was in flower is invariably hanged from"the highest battlement"--the second highest would not do at all; orelse he is thrown into "the deepest dungeon of the castle"--the seconddeepest dungeon was never known to be used on these occasions. The herohabitually "cleaves" his foeman "to the midriff, " the "midriff"being what the properly brought up hero always has in view. A certainfictional historian of my acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim:"My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff;" but that is an exceptionallylofty flight of diction. My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and inthe course of long interviews with her lover remains unrecognized--adiaphanous literary invention that must have been old when the Pyramidswere young. The heroine's small brother, with playful archaicism called"a springald, " puts on her skirts and things and passes himself off forhis sister or anybody else he pleases. In brief, there is no puerilitythat is not at home in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen--apriest, a princess, and a young man in woman's clothes are on the scene:

 \ The princess rose to her feet and approached the priest. \ "Father, " she said swiftly, "this is not the Lady Joan, my brother's wife, but a youth marvelously like her, who hath offered himself in her place that she might escape. . . . He is the Count von Loen, a lord of Kernsburg. And I love him. We want you to marry us now, dear Father--now, without a moment's delay; for if you do not they will kill him, and I shall have to marry Prince Wasp!"

This is from "Joan of the Sword Hand, " and if ever I read a more sillyperformance I have forgotten it. 

POOR YORICK

THERE is extant in the city of New York an odd piece of bric-a-bracwhich I am sometimes tempted to wish was in my own possession. On abracket in Edwin Booth's bedroom at The Players--the apartment remainsas he left it that solemn June day ten years ago--stands a sadlydilapidated skull which the elder Booth, and afterward his son Edwin, used to soliloquize over in the graveyard at Elsinore in the fifth actof "Hamlet. "

A skull is an object that always invokes interest more or less poignant;it always has its pathetic story, whether told or untold; but this skullis especially a skull "with a past. "

In the early forties, while playing an engagement somewhere in the wildWest, Junius Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a particularlyundeserving fellow, the name of him unknown to us. The man, as itseemed, was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, and highwayman--inbrief, a miscellaneous desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sortof person likely to touch the sympathies of the half-mad player. In thecourse of nature or the law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodilydisappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist even as a reminiscence inthe florid mind of his sometime benefactor. 

As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast one morning in a hotel inLouisville, Kentucky, a negro boy entered the room bearing a small osierbasket neatly covered with a snowy napkin. It had the general appearanceof a basket of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as such itfigured for a moment in Mr. Booth's conjecture. On lifting the cloth theactor started from the chair with a genuine expression on his featuresof that terror which he was used so marvelously to simulate as RichardIII. In the midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the ghost of Banquousurped his seat at table. 

In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the head of Booth's old pensioner, which head the old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form to thetragedian, begging him henceforth to adopt it as one of the necessarystage properties in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy of"Hamlet. " "Take it away, you black imp!" thundered the actor to theequally aghast negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not prompted himto investigate the dark nature of his burden. 

Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's residuary legatee, recovering from the first shock of his surprise, fell into the grimhumor of the situation, and proceeded to carry out to the letter thetestator's whimsical request. Thus it was that the skull came to securean engagement to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B. Booth's companyof strolling players, and to continue a while longer to glimmer behindthe footlights in the hands of his famous son. 

Observing that the grave-digger in his too eager realism was damagingthe thing--the marks of his pick and spade are visible on thecranium--Edwin Booth presently replaced it with a papier-machecounterfeit manufactured in the property-room of the theatre. Duringhis subsequent wanderings in Australia and California, he carefullypreserved the relic, which finally found repose on the bracket inquestion. 

How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in that front room on the fourthfloor of the clubhouse in Gramercy Park, watching the winter or summertwilight gradually softening and blurring the sharp outline of the skulluntil it vanished uncannily into the gloom! Edwin Booth had forgotten, if ever he knew, the name of the man; but I had no need of it in orderto establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In this association I wasconscious of a deep tinge of sentiment on my own part, a circumstancenot without its queerness, considering how very distant the acquaintancereally was. 

Possibly he was a fellow of infinite jest in his day; he was soberenough now, and in no way disposed to indulge in those flashes ofmerriment "that were wont to set the table on a roar. " But I did notregret his evaporated hilarity; I liked his more befitting genialsilence, and had learned to look upon his rather open countenance withthe same friendliness as that with which I regarded the faces ofless phantasmal members of the club. He had become to me a dramaticpersonality as distinct as that of any of the Thespians I met in thegrillroom or the library. 

Yorick's feeling in regard to me was a subject upon which I frequentlyspeculated. There was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence inthose cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden remembrance of some oldexperience had illumined them. He had been a great traveler, and hadknown strange vicissitudes in life; his stage career had brought himinto contact with a varied assortment of men and women, and extendedhis horizon. His more peaceful profession of holding up mail-coaches onlonely roads had surely not been without incident. It was inconceivablethat all this had left no impressions. He must have had at least a faintrecollection of the tempestuous Junius Brutus Booth. That Yorickhad formed his estimate of me, and probably not a flattering one, issomething of which I am strongly convinced. 

At the death of Edwin Booth, poor Yorick passed out of my personalcognizance, and now lingers an incongruous shadow amid the memories ofthe precious things I lost then. 

The suite of apartments formerly occupied by Edwin Booth at The Playershas been, as I have said, kept unchanged--a shrine to which from time totime some loving heart makes silent pilgrimage. On a table in thecentre of his bedroom lies the book just where he laid it down, an ivorypaper-cutter marking the page his eyes last rested upon; and in thischamber, with its familiar pictures, pipes, and ornaments, the skullfinds its proper sanctuary. If at odd moments I wish that by chance poorYorick had fallen to my care, the wish is only halfhearted, though hadthat happened, I would have given him welcome to the choicest cornerin my study and tenderly cherished him for the sake of one who comes nomore. 

THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER

 One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade! --_King Lear. _

THE material for this paper on the autograph hunter, his ways and hismanners, has been drawn chiefly from experiences not my own. My personalrelations with him have been comparatively restricted, a circumstanceto which I owe the privilege of treating the subject with a freedom thatmight otherwise not seem becoming. 

No author is insensible to the compliment involved in a request for hisautograph, assuming the request to come from some sincere lover ofbooks and bookmen. It is an affair of different complection when he isimportuned to give time and attention to the innumerable unknown who"collect" autographs as they would collect postage stamps, with nointerest in the matter beyond the desire to accumulate as many aspossible. The average autograph hunter, with his purposeless insistence, reminds one of the queen in Stockton's story whose fad was "thebuttonholes of all nations. "

In our population of eighty millions and upward there are probably twohundred thousand persons interested more or less in what is termed theliterary world. This estimate is absurdly low, but it serves to casta sufficient side-light upon the situation. Now, any unit of these twohundred thousand is likely at any moment to indite a letter to somefavorite novelist, historian, poet, or what not. It will be seen, then, that the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable person. He has made itembarrassing work for the author fortunate or unfortunate enough tobe regarded as worth while. Every mail adds to his reproachful pileof unanswered letters. If he have a conscience, and no amanuensis, he quickly finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless and futilecorrespondence. Through policy, good nature, or vanity he is apt tobecome facile prey. 

A certain literary collector once confessed in print that he alwaysstudied the idiosyncrasies of his "subject" as carefully as anothersort of collector studies the plan of the house to which he meditatesa midnight visit. We were assured that with skillful preparation andadroit approach an autograph could be extracted from anybody. Accordingto the revelations of the writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, andMr. Gladstone had their respective point of easy access--their oneunfastened door or window, metaphorically speaking. The strongest manhas his weak side. 

Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every one who wrote to him wasperhaps not a trait characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell, forinstance, was harder-hearted and rather difficult to reach. I recall oneday in the library at Elmwood. As I was taking down a volume from theshelf a sealed letter escaped from the pages and fluttered to my feet. Ihanded it to Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the superscription. "Oh, yes, " he said, smiling, "I know 'em by instinct. " Relieved of itsenvelope, the missive turned out to be eighteen months old, and beganwith the usual amusing solecism: "As one of the most famous of Americanauthors I would like to possess your autograph. "

Each recipient of such requests has of course his own way of responding. Mr. Whittier used to be obliging; Mr. Longfellow politic; Mr. Emerson, always philosophical, dreamily confiscated the postage stamps. 

Time was when the collector contented himself with a signature on acard; but that, I am told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letteraddressed to him personally--"on any subject you please, " as an immaturescribe lately suggested to an acquaintance of mine. The ingenuousyouth purposed to flourish a letter in the faces of his less fortunatecompetitors, in order to show them that he was on familiar terms withthe celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred motive is the spur to manya collector. The stratagems he employs to compass his end areinexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note to inquire in what year youfirst published your beautiful poem entitled "A Psalm of Life. " If youare a simple soul, you hasten to assure him that you are not the authorof that poem, which he must have confused with your "Rime of theAncient Mariner"--and there you are. Another expedient is to ask if yourfather's middle name was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has probablybeen dead many years, and as perhaps he was not a public man in his day, you are naturally touched that any one should have interest in him afterthis long flight of time. In the innocence of your heart you reply bythe next mail that your father's middle name was not Hierophilus, butEpaminondas--and there you are again. It is humiliating to be caughtswinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch of one's genealogicaltree. 

Some morning you find beside your plate at breakfast an imposingparchment with a great gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. Thisdocument--I am relating an actual occurrence--announces with a flourishthat you have unanimously been elected an honorary member of TheKalamazoo International Literary Association. Possibly the honor doesnot take away your respiration; but you are bound by courtesy to makean acknowledgment, and you express your insincere thanks to the obligingsecretary of a literary organization which does not exist anywhere onearth. 

A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of the correspondent whoadvises you that he is replenishing his library and desires a detailedlist of your works, with the respective dates of their first issue, price, style of binding, etc. A bibliophile, you say to yourself. Theseinterrogations should of course have been addressed to your publisher;but they are addressed to you, with the stereotyped "thanks in advance. "The natural inference is that the correspondent, who writes in a briskcommercial vein, wishes to fill out his collection of your books, or, possibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full crushed Levant. Eight or ten months later this individual, having forgotten (or hopingyou will not remember) that he has already demanded a chronological listof your writings, forwards another application couched in the self-samewords. The length of time it takes him to "replenish" his library (withyour books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot control your emotionssufficiently to pen a reply. From a purely literary point of view thisgentleman cares nothing whatever for your holograph; from a mercantilepoint of view he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate specimens, which he disposes of to dealers in such frail merchandise. 

The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in preparing a critical andbiographical sketch of you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, someslight hitherto unnoted event in your life--a signed photograph anda copy of your bookplate are here in order--is also a character whichperiodically appears upon the scene. In this little Comedy of Deceptionsthere are as many players as men have fancies. 

A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to transfer this leaf from thebook of his experience: "Not long ago the postman brought me a letter ofa rather touching kind. The unknown writer, lately a widow, and plainlya woman of refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in the lossof her little girl. My correspondent asked me to copy for her ten or adozen lines from a poem which I had written years before on the death ofa child. The request was so shrinkingly put, with such an appealingair of doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately transcribed theentire poem, a matter of a hundred lines or so, and sent it to her. I amunable to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt or wholly amusedwhen, two months afterward, I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neatprice attached to it, in a second-hand bookshop. "

Perhaps the most distressing feature of the whole business is the verypoor health which seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No otherclass of persons in the community shows so large a percentage ofconfirmed invalids. There certainly is some mysterious connectionbetween incipient spinal trouble and the collecting of autographs. Whichsuperinduces the other is a question for pathology. It is a fact thatone out of every eight applicants for a specimen of penmanship baseshis or her claim upon the possession of some vertebral disability whichleaves him or her incapable of doing anything but write to authorsfor their autograph. Why this particular diversion should be the soleresource remains undisclosed. But so it appears to be, and the appealto one's sympathy is most direct and persuasive. Personally, however, I have my suspicions, suspicions that are shared by several men ofletters, who have come to regard this plea of invalidism, in themajority of cases, as simply the variation of a very old and familiartune. I firmly believe that the health of autograph hunters, as a class, is excellent. 

ROBERT HERRICK

I

A LITTLE over three hundred years ago England had given to her a poet ofthe very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not discover the fact formore than a hundred and fifty years afterward. The poet himself wasaware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps not too modestly, incountless quatrains and couplets, which were not read, or, if read, werenot much regarded at the moment. It has always been an incredulous worldin this matter. So many poets have announced their arrival, and notarrived!

Robert Herrick was descended in a direct line from an ancient familyin Lincolnshire, the Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which wasJohn Eyrick of Leicester, the poet's grandfather, admitted freemanin 1535, and afterward twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick orHeyricke--he spelled his name recklessly--had five sons, the second ofwhich sought a career in London, where he became a goldsmith, and inDecember, 1582, married Julian Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, asister to Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen Soame. One of themany children of this marriage was Robert Herrick. 

It is the common misfortune of the poet's biographers, though it wasthe poet's own great good fortune, that the personal interviewer was anunknown quantity at the period when Herrick played his part on the stageof life. Of that performance, in its intimate aspects, we have only theslightest record. 

Robert Herrick was born in Wood street, Cheapside, London, in 1591, andbaptized at St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that year. He hadseveral brothers and sisters, with whom we shall not concern ourselves. It would be idle to add the little we know about these persons to thelittle we know about Herrick himself. He is a sufficient problem withoutdragging in the rest of the family. 

When the future lyrist was fifteen months old his father, NicholasHerrick, made his will, and immediately fell out of an upper window. Whether or not this fall was an intended sequence to the will, the highalmoner, Dr. Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in his claim tothe estate, "all goods and chattels of suicides" becoming his by law. The circumstances were suspicious, though not conclusive, and thegood bishop, after long litigation, consented to refer the case toarbitrators, who awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds, thus leavingthe question at issue--whether or not Herrick's death had been his ownpremeditated act--still wrapped in its original mystery. This singularlaw, which had the possible effect of inducing high almoners toencourage suicide among well-to-do persons of the lower and middleclasses, was afterward rescinded. 

Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household destitute, for his estateamounted to five thousand pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousandpounds in to-day's money; but there were many mouths to feed. The poet'stwo uncles, Robert Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor, thelatter subsequently knighted (1) for his usefulness as jeweller andmoney-lender to James I. , were appointed guardians to the children. 

 (1) Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial Introduction to Herrick's poems, quotes this curious item from Win-wood's _Manorials of Affairs of State_: "On Easter Tuesday [1605], one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in Cheapside, was Knighted for making a Hole in the great Diamond the King cloth wear. The party little expected the honour, but he did his work so well as won the King to an extraordinary liking of it. "

Young Robert appears to have attended school in Westminster until hisfifteenth year, when he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had learnedthe gentle art of goldsmith from his nephew's father. Though Robert'sindentures bound him for ten years, Sir William is supposed to haveoffered no remonstrance when he was asked, long before that termexpired, to cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner at St. John's College. At the end of twoyears he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a view to economy andthe pursuit of the law--the two frequently go together. He received hisdegree of B. A. In 1617, and his M. A. In 1620, having relinquished thelaw for the arts. 

During this time he was assumed to be in receipt of a quarterlyallowance of ten pounds--a not illiberal provision, the pound being thenfive times its present value; but as the payments were eccentric, themaster of arts was in recurrent distress. If this money came from hisown share of his father's estate, as seems likely, Herrick had cause forcomplaint; if otherwise, the pith is taken out of his grievance. 

The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture is told in a fewchance-preserved letters written to his "most careful uncle, " as hecalls that evidently thrifty person. In one of these monotonous anddreary epistles, which are signed "R. Hearick, " the writer says: "Theessence of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat you to paye formy use to Mr. Arthour Johnson, bookseller, in Paule's Churchyarde, theordinarie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as much sceleritie as youmaye. " He also indulges in the natural wish that his college bills"had leaden wings and tortice feet. " This was in 1617. The young man'spatrimony, whatever it may have been, had dwindled, and he confesses to"many a throe and pinches of the purse. " For the moment, at least, hisprospects were not flattering. 

Robert Herrick's means of livelihood, when in 1620 he quitted theuniversity and went up to London, are conjectural. It is clear that hewas not without some resources, since he did not starve to death on hiswits before he discovered a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the courtcircle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but perhaps not less useful, allies in the persons of Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and MasterJohn Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through the two New Year anthems, honored by the music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty's organist atWestminster, it is more than possible that Herrick was brought to thepersonal notice of Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a promiseof success, but not success itself. It has been thought probable thatHerrick may have secured some minor office in the chapel at Whitehall. That would accord with his subsequent appointment (September, 1627, ) aschaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortunate expedition of the Isleof Rhe. 

Precisely when Herrick was invested with holy orders is notascertainable. If one may draw an inference from his poems, the life heled meanwhile was not such as his "most careful uncle" would have warmlyapproved. The literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were open to afree-lance like young Herrick, some of whose blithe measures, passingin manuscript from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to light asa poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun were not places devoted to worship, unless it were to the worship of "rare Ben Jonson, " at whose feetHerrick now sat, with the other blossoming young poets of the season. Hewas a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed many loving lyrics tothe master, of which not the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson:

 When I a verse shall make, Know I have praid thee For old religion's sake, Saint Ben, to aide me. 

 Make the way smooth for me, When I, thy Herrick, Honouring thee, on my knee Offer my lyric. 

 Candles I'll give to thee, And a new altar; And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be Writ in my Psalter. 

On September 30, 1629, Charles I. , at the recommending of the Earl ofExeter, presented Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totnes, in Devonshire. Here he was destined to pass the next nineteen years ofhis life among surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be a mile awayfrom London stone was for Herrick to be in exile. Even with railwayand telegraphic interruptions from the outside world, the dullness of aprovincial English town of today is something formidable. The dullnessof a sequestered English hamlet in the early part of the seventeenthcentury must have been appalling. One is dimly conscious of a belatedthrob of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however discontented orunhappy he may have been at first in that lonely vicarage, the world maycongratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded him there, farfrom the distractions of the town, and with no other solace than hisMuse, for there it was he wrote the greater number of the poems whichwere to make his fame. It is to this accidental banishment to Devon thatwe owe the cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obsolete ruralmanners and customs--the Christmas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the morris-dances, and the May-day festivals. 

The November following Herrick's appointment to the benefice was markedby the death of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy than "a ringeof twenty shillings. " Perhaps this was an understood arrangement betweenthem; but it is to be observed that, though Herrick was a spendthrift inepitaphs, he wasted no funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter ofverse he dealt generously with his family down to the latest nephew. One of his most charming and touching poems is entitled To His DyingBrother, Master William Herrick, a posthumous son. There appear tohave been two brothers named William. The younger, who died early, issupposed to be referred to here. 

The story of Herrick's existence at Dean Prior is as vague and bare ofdetail as the rest of the narrative. His parochial duties must havebeen irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he wore his cassocklightly. As a preparation for ecclesiastical life he forswore sack andpoetry; but presently he was with the Muse again, and his farewell tosack was in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Herrick had probably acceptedthe vicarship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in a troop ofhorse--with an eye to present emolument and future promotion. Thepromotion never came, and the emolument was nearly as scant as thatof Goldsmith's parson, who considered himself "passing rich with fortypounds a year"--a height of optimism beyond the reach of Herrick, withhis expensive town wants and habits. But fifty pounds--the salary ofhis benefice--and possible perquisites in the way of marriage and burialfees would enable him to live for the time being. It was better than apossible nothing a year in London. 

Herrick's religious convictions were assuredly not deeper than those ofthe average layman. Various writers have taken a different view of thesubject; but it is inconceivable that a clergyman with a fitting senseof his function could have written certain of the poems which Herrickafterward gave to the world--those astonishing epigrams upon his rusticenemies, and those habitual bridal compliments which, among his personalfriends, must have added a terror to matrimony. Had he written onlyin that vein, the posterity which he so often invoked with patheticconfidence would not have greatly troubled itself about him. 

It cannot positively be asserted that all the verses in question relateto the period of his incumbency, for none of his verse is dated, withthe exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace and Lydia. The date of someof the compositions may be arrived at by induction. The religious piecesgrouped under the title of Noble Numbers distinctly associate themselveswith Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very few of them are"born of the royal blood. " They lack the inspiration and magic of hissecular poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and grotesque as tostir a suspicion touching the absolute soundness of Herrick's mind atall times. The lines in which the Supreme Being is assured that he mayread Herrick's poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulnessmight have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced. "Forunconscious impiety, " remarks Mr. Edmund Gosse, (1) "this rivals thefamous passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted God to 'pause andthink. '" Elsewhere, in an apostrophe to "Heaven, " Herrick says:

 Let mercy be So kind to set me free, And I will straight Come in, or force the gate. 

In any event, the poet did not purpose to be left out!

 (1) In _Seventeenth-Century Studies_. And the general absence of arrangement in the "Hesperides, " Dr. Grosart advances the theory that the printers exercised arbitrary authority on these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick kept the epigrams and personal tributes in manuscript books separate from the rest of the work, which would have made a too slender volume by itself, and on the plea of this slender-ness was induced to trust the two collections to the publisher, "whereupon he or some un-skilled subordinate proceeded to intermix these additions with the others. That the poet him-self had nothing to do with the arrangement or disarrangement lies on the surface. " This is an amiable supposition, but merely a supposition. 

Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces, Herrick personally placedthe "copy" in the hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, andif he were over-persuaded to allow them to print unfit verses, and toobserve no method whatever in the contents of the book, the discredit isnone the less his. It is charitable to believe that Herrick's coarsenesswas not the coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that he followedthe fashion _malgre lui_. With regard to the fairy poems, they certainlyshould have been given in sequence; but if there are careless printers, there are also authors who are careless in the arrangement of theirmanuscript, a kind of task, moreover, in which Herrick was whollyunpractised, and might easily have made mistakes. The "Hesperides" washis sole publication. 

Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age. Of his personal appearanceat this time we have no description. The portrait of him prefixed to theoriginal edition of his works belongs to a much later moment. Whether ornot the bovine features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger onthat singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interesting tonote that this same Marshall engraved the head of Milton for thefirst collection of his miscellaneous poems--the precious 1645 volumecontaining Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc. The plate gave greatoffense to the serious-minded young Milton, not only because itrepresented him as an elderly person, but because of certain minutefigures of peasant lads and lassies who are very indistinctly seendancing frivolously under the trees in the background. Herrick had morereason to protest. The aggressive face bestowed upon him by the artistlends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the vicar occasionallyhurled the manuscript of his sermon at the heads of his drowsyparishioners, accompanying the missive with pregnant remarks. He has theaspect of one meditating assault and battery. 

To offset the picture there is much indirect testimony to the amiabilityof the man, aside from the evidence furnished by his own writings. He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the Bishop of Lincoln'simprisonment--a poem full of deference and tenderness for a personwho had evidently injured the writer, probably by opposing him in someaffair of church preferment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick "became muchbeloved by the gentry in these parts for his florid and witty (wise)discourses. " It appears that he was fond of animals, and had a petspaniel called Tracy, which did not get away without a couplet attachedto him:

 Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see For shape and service spaniell like to thee. 

Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a sparrow, whose elegy healso sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter'sdisadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. On the authority ofDorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick's successor atDean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he hadtaught to drink out of a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admirablyqualified to impart. Dorothy was in her ninety-ninth year when shecommunicated this fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the paper onHerrick published in the "Quarterly Review" for August, 1810, and in theBoston edition (1) of the "Hesperides" attributed to Southey. 

 (1) The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi-cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living "in habits of intimacy" with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her-rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for Jonson had been dead eleven years. 

What else do we know of the vicar? A very favorite theme with Herrickwas Herrick. Scattered through his book are no fewer than twenty-fivepieces entitled On Himself, not to mention numberless autobiographicalhints under other captions. They are merely hints, throwing casualside-lights on his likes and dislikes, and illuminating his vanity. Awhimsical personage without any very definite outlines might be evolvedfrom these fragments. I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, withperhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like theprince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections. In one placeHerrick laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in whatwould have been Pepys's manner had Pepys written verse), and in anotherplace he tells us of the loss of a finger. The quatrain treating of thislatter catastrophe is as fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's _concetti_:

 One of the five straight branches of my hand Is lopt already, and the rest but stand Expecting when to fall, which soon will be: First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree. 

With all his great show of candor Herrick really reveals as little ofhimself as ever poet did. One thing, however, is manifest--he understoodand loved music. None but a lover could have said:

 The mellow touch of musick most doth wound The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound. 

Or this to Julia:

 So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice, As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise, But listen to thee walking in thy chamber Melting melodious words to lutes of amber. 

 . . . Then let me lye Entranc'd, and lost confusedly; And by thy musick stricken mute, Die, and be turn'd into a lute. 

Herrick never married. His modest Devonshire establishment was managedby a maidservant named Prudence Baldwin. "Fate likes fine names, " saysLowell. That of Herrick's maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meetingof gentle vowels and consonants, and has had the good fortune to beembalmed in the amber of what may be called a joyous little threnody:

 In this little urne is laid Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid; From whose happy spark here let Spring the purple violet. 

Herrick addressed a number of poems to her before her death, whichseems to have deeply touched him in his loneliness. We shall not allow apleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flippancy of an old writer whosays that "Prue was but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse. " Shewas a faithful handmaid, and had the merit of causing Herrick in thisoctave to strike a note of sincerity not usual with him:

 These summer birds did with thy master stay The times of warmth, but then they flew away, Leaving their poet, being now grown old, Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold. But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide As well the winter's as the summer's tide: For which thy love, live with thy master here Not two, but all the seasons of the year. 

Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mistress Prew!

In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Deanbourn, which he calls "a ruderiver, " and his characterization of Devon folk as "a people currish, churlish as the seas, " the fullest and pleasantest days of his lifewere probably spent at Dean Prior. He was not unmindful meanwhile of thegathering political storm that was to shake England to its foundations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he watched the course of events, is attested by many of his poems. This solitude was not without itscompensation. "I confess, " he says, I ne'er invented such Ennobled numbers for the presse Than where I loath'd so much. 

A man is never wholly unhappy when he is writing verses. Herrick wasfirmly convinced that each new lyric was a stone added to the pillar ofhis fame, and perhaps his sense of relief was tinged with indefinableregret when he found himself suddenly deprived of his benefice. Theintegrity of some of his royalistic poems is doubtful; but he was notgiven the benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, which ejected thepanegyrist of young Prince Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and installed in his place the venerable John Syms, a gentleman withpronounced Cromwellian views. 

Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Puritans, discardedhis clerical habiliments, and hastened to London to pick up such as wereleft of the gay-colored threads of his old experience there. Once morehe would drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he would breathe theair breathed by such poets and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden, and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and ginger shall be hot I' the mouthtoo. " In the gladness of getting back "from the dull confines of thedrooping west, " he writes a glowing apostrophe to London--that "stonystepmother to poets. " He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proudto find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers, Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, andfell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, withjustness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential, would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistictendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere ofthe Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, butamong them was not poverty. 

The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a fewweeks following his return to London they were issued in a single volumewith the title "Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine ofRobert Herrick, Esq. "

The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of thecommonplace. The interval was come when Shakespeare himself was to liein a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and hadstrayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--a sylvan singingcreature alighting on an alien planet. "He was too natural, " says Mr. Palgrave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical; he had not the learnedpolish, the political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were then and onward demanded from poetry. " Yet it is strange thata public which had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect a poet whowas fifty times finer than Waller in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the half-century that followed the Restoration, could have writtenCorinna's Going a-Maying, or approached in kind the ineffable grace andperfection to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics?

The "Hesperides" was received with chilling indifference. None ofHerrick's great contemporaries has left a consecrating word concerningit. The book was not reprinted during the author's lifetime, and formore than a century after his death Herrick was virtually unread. In1796 the "Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of the poems, and two yearslater Dr. Nathan Drake published in his "Literary Hours" three criticalpapers on the poet, with specimens of his writings. Dr. Johnson omittedhim from the "Lives of the Poets, " though space was found for half ascore of poetasters whose names are to be found nowhere else. In 1810Dr. Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections. It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remainedfor the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him. 

In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it is now only needful thatsome wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some manwho could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunitypresents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a handfulof Herrick's college letters there is no scrap of his manuscript extant;the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tunmake no reference to him; (1) and in the wide parenthesis formed by hisbirth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discoverablein the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-two years. Here is materialfor profundity and ciphers!

 (1) With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the _Musarum Deliciae_ (1656) who mentions

 That old sack Young Herrick took to entertain The Muses in a sprightly vein. 

Herrick's second sojourn in London covered the period between 1648and 1662, curing which interim he fades from sight, excepting forthe instant when he is publishing his book. If he engaged in furtherliterary work there are no evidences of it beyond one contribution tothe "Lacrymae Musarum" in 1649. 

He seems to have had lodgings, for a while at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated inthe seats of the mighty, it was no longer the merry London of his earlymanhood. Time and war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the oldhaunts the old familiar faces were wanting. Ben Jonson was dead, Wallerbanished, and many another comrade "in disgrace with fortune and men'seyes. " As Herrick walked through crowded Cheapside or along the dingyriver-bank in those years, his thought must have turned more than onceto the little vicarage in Devonshire, and lingered tenderly. 

On the accession of Charles II. A favorable change of wind waftedHerrick back to his former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxiousSyms having been turned adrift. This occurred on August 24, 1662, theseventy-first anniversary of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's movementsafter that, tradition does not furnish even the shadow of an outline. The only notable event concerning him is recorded twelve years laterin the parish register: "Robert Herrick, vicker, was buried ye 15th dayOctober, 1674. " He was eighty-three years old. The location of his graveis unknown. In 1857 a monument to his memory was erected in Dean Church. And this is all. 

II

THE details that have come down to us touching Herrick's private lifeare as meagre as if he had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But werethey as ample as could be desired they would still be unimportantcompared with the single fact that in 1648 he gave to the worldhis "Hesperides. " The environments of the man were accidental andtransitory. The significant part of him we have, and that is enduring solong as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold a charm for mankind. 

A fine thing incomparably said instantly becomes familiar, and hashenceforth a sort of dateless excellence. Though it may have been saidthree hundred years ago, it is as modern as yesterday; though it mayhave been said yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have beenalways in our keeping. This quality of remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel to-day asthey were on the lips of a choice few of his contemporaries, who, inreading them in their freshness, must surely have been aware here andthere of the ageless grace of old idyllic poets dead and gone. 

Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message to the world, and suchmessage as he had he was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On thispoint he somewhere says:

 Let others to the printing presse run fast; Since after death comes glory, I 'll not haste. 

He had need of his patience, for he was long detained on the road bymany of those obstacles that waylay poets on their journeys to theprinter. 

Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he published the "Hesperides. "It was, I repeat, no heavy message, and the bearer was left anunconscionable time to cool his heels in the antechamber. Though hispieces had been set to music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay, andLaniers, and his court poems had naturally won favor with the Cavalierparty, Herrick cut but a small figure at the side of several of hisrhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten. It sometimes happensthat the light love-song, reaching few or no ears at its first singing, outlasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, dealing with somepassing phase of thought, social or political, gains the instantapplause of the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is somehowapt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes theyesterday's editorial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to gethold of occasional poems. That makes it hard for feeble poets laureate. 

Mr. Henry James once characterized Alphonse Daudet as "a great littlenovelist. " Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brevity of hispoems, for he wrote nothing _de longue haleine_, would place him amongthe minor singers; his workmanship places him among the masters. TheHerricks were not a family of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. Theaccurate touch of the artificer in jewels and costly metals was oneof the gifts transmitted to Robert Herrick. Much of his work is asexquisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-hilt by Cellini; theline has nearly always that vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and is never the result of anything but austere labor. The critic who, borrowing Milton's words, described these carefully wrought poems as"wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of penetration. They are fullof subtle simplicity. Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as anantique cameo--the stanza, for instance, in which the poet speaks of hislady-love's "winter face"--and there a couplet that breaks into unfadingdaffodils and violets. The art, though invisible, is always there. Hisamatory songs and catches are such poetry as Orlando would have liked tohang on the boughs in the forest of Arden. None of the work is hastilydone, not even that portion of it we could wish had not been done atall. Be the motive grave or gay, it is given that faultlessness of formwhich distinguishes everything in literature that has survived itsown period. There is no such thing as "form" alone; it is only theclose-grained material that takes the highest finish. The structureof Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is simple to the verge ofinnocence. Such rhythmic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson, andSwinburne he never dreamed of. But his manner has this perfection: itfits his matter as the cup of the acorn fits its meat. 

Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has little or none. Here areno "tears from the depth of some divine despair, " no probings into thetragic heart of man, no insight that goes much farther than the pathosof a cowslip on a maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach up tothe light, and love the warmer side of the garden wall. But the readerwho does not detect the seriousness under the lightness misreadsHerrick. Nearly all true poets have been wholesome and joyous singers. A pessimistic poet, like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sarcasms. In his own bright pastoral way Herrick must always remain unexcelled. His limitations are certainly narrow, but they leave him in thesunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his utterance is there anycomplexity; both are as pellucid as a woodland pond, content toduplicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance, the face of a girlstraying near its crystal. His is no troubled stream in which largetrout are caught. He must be accepted on his own terms. 

The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, been the most indebtedto their predecessors or to their contemporaries. It has wittily beenremarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly original. Impressionabilityis one of the conditions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind isthe only mind that invents. What the poet reads, sees, and feels, goesinto his blood, and becomes an ingredient of his originality. Thecolor of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of itsaffinities. A writer's style, if it have distinction, is the outcome ofa hundred styles. 

Though a generous borrower of the ancients, Herrick appears to have beenexceptionally free from the influence of contemporary minds. Here andthere in his work are traces of his beloved Ben Jonson, or fleetingimpressions of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct infringementon Suckling; but the sum of Herrick's obligations of this sort isinconsiderable. 

This indifference to other writers of his time, this insularity, wasdoubtless his loss. The more exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvellor Herbert might have taught him a deeper note than he sounded in hispurely devotional poems. Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart. Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the clubs and taverns whichHerrick frequented on his first going up to London, failed to lay anyappreciable spell upon him. That great name, moreover, is a jewel whichfinds no setting in Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence relative tobrother poets is extremely curious when we reflect on his penchant foraddressing four-line epics to this or that individual. They were, inthe main, obscure individuals, whose identity is scarcely worthestablishing. His London life, at two different periods, brought himinto contact with many of the celebrities of the day; but his verse hashelped to confer immortality on very few of them. That his verse had thesecret of conferring immortality was one of his unshaken convictions. Shakespeare had not a finer confidence when he wrote, Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own poetry, and he is not byany means backward in speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils. Without his Muse those nineteen years in that dull, secluded Devonshirevillage would have been unendurable. 

His poetry has the value and the defect of that seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted horizon there is great variety in Herrick'sthemes. Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has stated it:

 I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers; I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes; I write of Youth, of Love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris; I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write How roses first came red and lilies white; I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King; I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. 

Never was there so pretty a table of contents! When you open his bookthe breath of the English rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem toexhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if sprigs of tansy and lavenderhad been shut up in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense ofhawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattices halfhidden with honeysuckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, returninghome in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily on one's ear, as sounds shouldfall when fancy listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly Englishas Herrick. He painted the country life of his own time as no other haspainted it at any time. 

It is to be remarked that the majority of English poets regarded asnational have sought their chief inspiration in almost every land andperiod excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto unfooted region of the imagination, forplot and character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but the Garden of Edenand the celestial spaces, that lured Milton. It is the Ode on a GrecianUrn, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion thathave given Keats his spacious niche in the gallery of England's poets. Shelley's two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, belongrespectively to Greece and Italy. Browning's The Ring and the Book isItalian; Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the Idylls of theKing, and Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum--a narrative poem second indignity to none produced in the nineteenth century--is a Persian story. But Herrick's "golden apples" sprang from the soil in his own day, andreddened in the mist and sunshine of his native island. 

Even the fairy poems, which must be classed by themselves, are notwanting in local flavor. Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurabledistance from that of "A Midsummer Night's Dream. " Puck and Titaniaare of finer breath than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to haveDevonshire manners and to live in a miniature England of their own. Likethe magician who summons them from nowhere, they are fond of color andperfume and substantial feasts, and indulge in heavy draughts--from thecups of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they inhabit everything ismarvelously adapted to their requirement; nothing is out of proportionor out of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious people intheir winsome way, "part pagan, part papistical;" they have theirpardons and indulgences, their psalters and chapels, and

 An apple's-core is hung up dried, With rattling kernels, which is rung To call to Morn and Even-song;

and very conveniently, Hard by, I' th' shell of half a nut, The Holy-water there is put. 

It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where theimpossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648seems never very far away. 

It is only among the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of theElizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt andliquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallenfrom the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline. " This delicate epicede wouldhave fitted Imogen:

 Here a solemne fast we keepe While all beauty lyes asleepe; Husht be all things; no noyse here But the toning of a teare, Or a sigh of such as bring Cowslips for her covering. 

Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in essence; the Mad Maid's Song, for example. The lyrist may speak in character, like the dramatist. Apoet's lyrics may be, as most of Browning's are, just so many_dramatis personae_. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-direction in aseventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatizedin a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of hiscouplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances areintended presentations of himself:

 To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed-- Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste. 

In point of fact he was a whole group of imaginary lovers in one. Silvia, Anthea, Electra, Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those livelyladies ending in _a_, were doubtless, for the most part, but airyphantoms dancing--as they should not have danced--through the brain ofa sentimental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar of the Churchof England. Even with his overplus of heart it would have been quiteimpossible for him to have had enough to go round had there been sonumerous actual demands upon it. 

Thus much may be conceded to Herrick's verse: at its best it has wingsthat carry it nearly as close to heaven's gate as any of Shakespeare'slark-like interludes. The brevity of the poems and their uniformsmoothness sometimes produce the effect of monotony. The crowdedrichness of the line advises a desultory reading. But one must go backto them again and again. They bewitch the memory, having once caughtit, and insist on saying themselves over and over. Among the poets ofEngland the author of the "Hesperides" remains, and is likely to remain, unique. As Shakespeare stands alone in his vast domain, so Herrickstands alone in his scanty plot of ground. 

"Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content. "