edition of his poems, which bears no date, but is about 1520, he is
described on the title-page as ‘Mayster Skelton, Poet Laureate,’ as he
also is in the first collected edition of 1568, ‘Pithy pleasaunt and
profitable works of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate.’ This title was
the University title, and not a royal one.
Spenser is sometimes reckoned amongst the Poets Laureate; but, as a
matter of fact, he had no right to the title at all, nor did he or
his publishers ever assume it. He is, of course, one of the poetical
glories of Cambridge, but he was never laureated there, nor did Queen
Elizabeth ever appoint him her poet, though she granted him £50 a year.
The first Laureate, in the modern sense of the word, is undoubtedly
Ben Jonson, to whom Charles I. made out a patent conferring upon this
famous man £100 a year and ‘a terse of Canary Spanish wine,’ which
latter benefit the miserable Pye commuted for £27. From Jonson to
Tennyson there is no breach of continuity, for Sir William Davenant,
who was appointed in 1638, survived till the Restoration, dying in
1668. The list is a curious one, and is just worth printing: Jonson,
Davenant, Dryden, Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Rowe, the Rev. Laurence Eusden,
Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, the Rev. Thomas Warton, Henry James
Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson.
One must be charitable in these matters. Here are fourteen names
and four great ones--Jonson, Dryden, Wordsworth and Tennyson; two
distinguished ones--Nicholas Rowe and Robert Southey; two clever
names--Shadwell and Colley Cibber; two respectable names--Tate
and Warton; one interesting name--Davenant; and three unutterable
names--Eusden, Whitehead and Pye. After all, it is not so very bad.
The office was offered to Gray, and he refused it. Pope, as a Roman
Catholic, was out of the question. It would have suited Thomson well
enough, and have tickled Goldsmith’s fancy mightily. Collins died too
young.
But Eusden, Whitehead and Pye, how did they manage it? and what in the
name of wonder did they write? Eusden was of Irish extraction, but
was born the son of an English clergyman, and was like most poets a
Cambridge man. He owed his appointment in 1718 to the Duke of Newcastle
of the period, whose favour he had won by a poem addressed to him on
the occasion of his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin. But he
had also qualified for the office by verses sacred to the memory of
George I., and in praise of George II.
‘Hail, mighty monarch! whom desert alone
Would, without birthright, raise up to the throne,
Thy virtues shine peculiarly nice,
Ungloomed with a confinity to vice.’
To do Grub Street justice, it was very angry with this appointment,
and Hesiod Cooke wrote a poem called ‘The Battle of the Poets,’ in
which the new Laureate was severely but truthfully handled in verse not
conspicuously better than his own:
‘Eusden, a laurelled bard by fortune rais’d,
By very few been read--by fewer prais’d.’
Eusden is the author of ‘Verses Spoken at the Public Commencement in
Cambridge,’ published in quarto, which are said to be indecent. Our
authors refer to them as follows:
‘Those prurient lines which we dare not quote, but which the curious
may see in the library of the British Museum, were specially composed
and repeated for the edification and amusement of some of the noblest
and fairest of our great-great-grandmothers.’ Eusden took to drinking
and translating Tasso, and died at his living, for he was a parson, of
Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
Of William Whitehead you may read in Campbell’s ‘Specimens of the
British Poets.’ He was the son of a baker, was school-tutor to
Lord Lymington, and having been treated at Oxford in the shabby
way that seat of learning has ever treated poets--from Shirley to
Calverley--proceeded to Cambridge, that true nest of singing-birds,
where he obtained a Fellowship and the post of domestic tutor to the
eldest son of the Earl of Jersey. He was always fond of the theatre,
and his first effort was a little farce which was never published,
but which tempted him to compose heavy tragedies which were. Of
these tragedies it would be absurd to speak; they never enjoyed
any popularity, either on the stage or in the closet. He owed his
appointment--which he did not obtain till Gray had refused it--entirely
to his noble friends.
Campbell had the courage to reprint a longish poem of Whitehead’s
called ‘Variety: a Tale for Married People.’ It really is not very,
very, bad, but it will never be reprinted again; and so I refer ‘the
curious’ to Mr. Campbell’s seventh volume.
As for Pye, he was a scholar and a gentleman, a barrister, a member of
Parliament, and a police magistrate. On his father’s death he inherited
a large estate, which he actually sold to pay his parent’s debts,
though he was under no obligation to do so, as in those days a man’s
real estate was not liable to pay the debts he might chance to leave
undischarged at his death. To pay a dead man’s debts out of his land
was to rob his heir. Pye was not famous as a Parliamentary orator, but
he was not altogether silent, like Gibbon; for we read that in 1788
he told the House that his constituents had suffered from a scanty
hay-harvest. He was appointed Laureate in 1790, and he died in 1813.
He was always made fun of as a poet, and, unfortunately for him, there
was another poet in the House at the same time, called Charles Small
Pybus; hence the jest, ‘Pye et Parvus Pybus,’ which was in everyone’s
mouth. He was a voluminous author and diligent translator, but I do not
recollect ever seeing a single book of his in a shop, or on a stall, or
in a catalogue. As a Poet Great Pye is dead--as dead as Parvus Pybus,
M.P., but let us all try hard to remember that he paid his father’s
debts out of his own pocket.
‘Only the actions of the just,
Smell _sweet_ and blossom in their dust.’
PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES.
The best time to study at leisure the habits and manners of the
candidate for Parliament is shortly before an anticipated dissolution.
Even as once in a series of years the astronomer furbishes up his
telescope and observes the transit of a planet across the surface of
the sun, so, as a General Election approaches, and when, consequently,
candidates are numerous, the curious observer of human nature in all
its wayward manifestations hastens to some place where experience has
taught him candidates will be found gathered together.
No spot is so favourable for an investigation of this kind as the
scene of a contested by-election which takes place when a General
Election is at no great distance. The investigation cannot with
safety be postponed until a General Election. Then all is hurry and
confusion. There is a fight in every constituency. No man can help his
neighbour. Everybody is on his own war-path. There is, therefore, no
concentration of candidates. They are scattered up and down the land
and so flurried that it is almost impossible to observe their humours.
To appreciate a candidate properly takes time--a great deal of time.
But at a by-election shortly before a General Election candidates are
to be found in shoals--genuine candidates who have all gone through
the proud process of selection, who enjoy a status peculiarly their
own, who have a part to play, and play it with spirit. They hurry to
the contest from afar. With what readiness do they proffer their
services! Like sea-birds, they come screaming and flapping their
wings, and settle down at the same hotel, which for days resounds with
their cheerful cries. This is quite the best place to observe them. In
the smoking-room at night, after their oratorical labours are over,
they are very great, very proud, very happy. Their talk is of their
constituencies, as they are pleased to designate the districts which
have chosen them. They retail the anecdotes with which they are wont
to convulse their audiences. The stories are familiar, but not as they
tell them.
What a contrast do these bright, hopeful creatures present to their
taciturn, cynical companions!--sombre figures, who sit sucking at their
pipes, the actual members of Parliament, who, far from flying joyfully
to the field of battle, as the candidate has just done, have been
driven there, grunting and grumbling, by the angry crack of the party
Whips.
As you listen to the frank, exuberant speech of the candidate,
recounting the points he has made during the day, the conviction he
has brought home to the waverer, the dilemmas he has thrust upon his
opponents, the poor show made by somebody who thought to embarrass
him by an interruption, and compare it with the gloomy asides of the
member, who, however brave a figure he may have made upon the platform
an hour or two before, seems now painfully alive to the inherent
weakness of his cause, doubtful of victory anywhere, certain of defeat
where he is, it is almost impossible to believe that once upon a time
the member was himself a candidate.
Confidence is the badge of the tribe of candidates. How it is born,
where it is bred, on what it feeds save vanity, we cannot tell. Figures
cannot shake it. It is too majestical to be affected by ridicule. From
scorn and brutal jest it turns contemptuously away. When a collision
occurs between the boundless confidence of the candidate and the
bottomless world-wearied scepticism of the member, it is interesting
to note how wholly ineffectual is the latter to disturb, even for a
moment, the beautifully poised equilibrium of the former.
‘I always forget the name of the place you are trying for,’ I
lately overheard a member, during an election contest, observe at
breakfast-time to a candidate.
‘The Slowcombe Division of Mudfordshire,’ replied the candidate.
‘Oh!’ said the member, with a groan, as he savagely chipped at his
egg; ‘I thought they had given you something better than that.’
‘I wish for nothing better,’ said the candidate; ‘I’m safe enough.’
And so saying, he rose from the table, and, taking his hat, went off on
to the Parade, where he was soon joined by another candidate, and the
pair whiled away a couple of hours in delightful converse.
The politics of candidates are fierce things. In this respect the
British commodity differs materially from the American. Mr. Lowell
introduces the American candidate as saying:
‘Ez to my princerples, I glory
In hevin’ nothin’ o’ the sort.
I ain’t a Whig, I ain’t a Tory--
I’m just a Canderdate, in short.’
Our candidates--good, excellent fellows that they are--are not a bit
like Mr. Lowell’s. They have as many principles as a fish has bones;
their vision is clear. The following expressions are constantly on
their lips:
‘I can see no difficulty about it--I have explained it all to my people
over and over again, and no more can they. I and my constituency
are entirely at one in the matter. I must say our leaders are very
disappointing My people are getting a little dissatisfied, though, of
course, I tell them they must not expect everything at once, and I
think they see that’--and so on for an hour or two.
There is nothing a candidate hates more than a practical difficulty; he
feels discomfited by it. It destroys the harmony of his periods, the
sweep of his generalizations. All such things he dismisses as detail,
‘which need not now detain us, gentlemen.’
Herein, perhaps, consists the true happiness of the candidate. He is
the embodied Hope of his party. He will grapple with facts--when he
becomes one. In the meantime he floats about, cheered wherever he goes.
It is an intoxicating life.
Sometimes when candidates and members meet together--not to aid their
common cause at a by-election, but for the purpose of discussing the
prospects of their party--the situation gets a little accentuated.
Candidates have a habit of glaring around them, which is distinctly
unpleasant; whilst some members sniff the air, as if that were a
recognised method of indicating the presence of candidates. Altogether,
the less candidates and members see of one another, the better. They
are antipathetic; they harm one another.
The self-satisfaction and hopefulness of the candidate, his noisy
torrent of talk ere he is dashed below, his untiring enunciation of
platitudes and fallacies, his abuse of opponents, the weight of whose
arm he has never felt--all these things, harmless as they are, far from
displeasing in themselves, deepen the gloom of the sitting member, into
whose soul the iron of St. Stephen’s has entered, relax the tension of
his mind, unnerve his vigour, corrode his faith; whilst, on the other
hand, his demeanour and utterances, his brutal recognition of failure
on his own side, and of merit in his opponent’s, are puzzling to the
candidate.
The leaders of parties will do well if they keep members and candidates
apart. The latter should always herd together.
To do candidates justice, they are far more amusing, and much better
worth studying, than members.
THE BONÂ-FIDE TRAVELLER.
This thirsty gentleman is threatened with extinction. His Sabbatical
pint is in danger. He has been reported against by a Royal Commission.
Threatened men, I know, live long, and it is not for me to raise
false alarms, but though the end of the _bonâ-fide_ traveller may be
not yet, his glory has departed. His more than Sabbath-day journeys
in search of the liquor that he loves, extended though they are
by statute over three dreary, dusty miles of turnpike, have been
ridiculed, and, worse than that, his _bonâ-fide_ character--hitherto
his proud passport to intoxication--has been roughly condemned as
pleonastic. A pretty pleonasm, truly, which has broached many a barrel.
The Commissioners say, ‘We think it would be advisable to eliminate
the words _bonâ-fide_. No sensible person could suppose that the
Legislature in using the word “traveller” meant to include persons who
make a pretence only of being such, and are not travellers really and
in fact.’ At present there are two classes of Sunday travellers: there
is the real traveller and there is the _bonâ-fide_ traveller. It is the
latter whose existence is menaced. The sooner he dies the better, for,
in plain English, he is a drunken dog.
The Report of the Royal Commission as to the operation of the Welsh
Sunday Closing Act of 1881 has been published, and, as the phrase
runs, will repay perusal. It is full of humanity and details about
our neighbours, their habits and customs. However true it may have
been, or still may be, that one half of the world does not know how
the other half lives, it is a libel upon the curiosity of mankind to
attribute this ignorance to indifference. No facts are more popular,
than those which relate to people’s lives. Could it be discovered how
many people prefer tea without sugar, the return would be printed in
every newspaper of Great Britain, and be made the text of tens of
thousands of leading articles. We are all alike in this respect, though
some of us are ashamed to own it. We are by no means sure that the man
answered badly who, when asked which of George Eliot’s characters was
lodged most firmly in human memories, replied boldly, Mrs. Linnet.
Everybody remembers Mrs. Linnet, and grins broadly at the very mention
of her name. ‘On taking up the biography of a celebrated preacher,
she immediately turned to the end to see what disease he died of; and
if his legs swelled as her own occasionally did, she felt a stronger
interest in ascertaining any earlier facts in the history of the
dropsical divine; whether he had ever fallen off a stage-coach, whether
he had married more than one wife, and, in general, any adventures
or repartees recorded of him prior to the epoch of his conversion.
Then she glanced over the letters and diary, and wherever there was a
predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she
turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such
promising nouns as “small-pox,” “pony,” or “boots and shoes,” at once
arrested her.’ How inimitable it is! And yet Mr. Oscar Browning prefers
‘Daniel Deronda.’ It is a comforting reflection that whether you write
well or whether you write ill, you have always an audience.
But Mrs. Linnet’s deep-rooted popularity proves how fond we all are of
escaping from abstractions and predictions, and seizing hold of the
things about which we really feel ourselves entitled to an opinion.
Mrs. Linnet would have read a great part of the Report to which I
have referred with much interest. It is full of most promising nouns.
Mrs. Linnet’s opinion as to a _bonâ-fide_ traveller would be quite as
valuable as Lord Balfour of Burleigh’s.
But who is a _bonâ-fide_ traveller? He is a person who seeks drink
on Sunday during hours when by law public-houses are closed. He has
therefore to make out a special case for being supplied with drink.
The fact that he is thirsty counts for nothing. Everybody is thirsty
on Sunday. His special case is that he is not a resident, but a
traveller, and wants refreshment to enable him to go on travelling. But
here the law steps in, ‘big-wigged, voluminous-jawed,’ and adds this
qualification--that nobody shall be considered a _bonâ-fide_ traveller
who is not three miles away from his last bed. An attorney’s clerk of
three months’ standing could have foretold what has happened, namely,
that everybody who is three miles from home becomes at once and _ipso
facto_ a _bonâ fide_ traveller. You rap with your knuckles at the door
of the shut inn; it is partially opened, and the cautious publican or
his spouse inquires of you where you come from; you name a city of the
plain four miles off, and the next moment finds you comfortably seated
in the bar-parlour. Falsely to represent yourself as a _bonâ-fide_
traveller is a misdemeanor, but assuming you are three miles away
from home, how can such a representation be made falsely? We are all
pilgrims in this world. If my sole motive for walking three miles on
Sunday is to get a pint of beer at the Griffin, doubtless I am not a
_bonâ-fide_ traveler, but if my motive be to get both the walk and the
beer, who dare asperse my good faith? Should I have taken the walk but
for the beer, or should I have taken the beer but for the walk? are
questions far too nice to be made the subject of summary process.
The Commissioners cannot be accused of shirking this difficult
question. They brace up their minds to it, and deliver themselves
as follows. There is, say they, in language of almost Scriptural
simplicity, first the traveler who makes a journey either by railway
or otherwise, on business or for some other necessary cause. His case,
in the opinion of the Commissioners, is a simple one. He is entitled to
drink by the way. But next, proceed the Commissioners in language of
less merit, ‘there is the individual who leaves his place of residence
in the morning, or it may be later in the day, intending to be absent
for some hours, inclusive perhaps, but not necessarily, of his mid-day
meal, his object being primarily change of air and scene, exercise,
relaxation of some kind, a visit to friends, or some reasonable cause
other than merely to qualify for entrance into a licensed house.’
This is the mixed-motive case already hinted at. Then, thirdly, there
is the bold bad man ‘who goes from his home to a point not less than
three miles distant, either on foot or by wheeled vehicle by road or
rail, primarily if not solely to procure the drink which the Act denies
him within three miles of where he lodged the previous night.’ This
gentleman is the genuine _bonâ-fide_ traveler known to all policemen
and magistrates, and it is he who is threatened with extinction. But
how is he to be differentiated from the individual who leaves his place
of residence in the morning and goes to a place, not in search of
drink, but where, for all that, drink is? For example, it appears from
this Report that near Swansea is a place of resort called the Mumbles.
A great many people go there every Sunday, and a considerable number
return home drunk at night; but, say the Commissioners, and we entirely
believe them, ‘it is impossible for us to say what proportion of them
go for change and exercise and what proportion for the sake of drink.’
But if it be impossible, how is the distinction between the individual
who leaves his place of residence in the morning, and the bold bad man,
to be maintained?
There are those who would abolish the exemption in favour of travellers
altogether. Let him who travels on Sunday take his liquor with him in
a flask. There are others who would allow his glass to the traveller
who is not on pleasure bent, but would refuse it to everybody else. A
third party hold that a man who takes exercise for his health is as
much entitled to refreshment as the traveller who goes on business. No
one has been found bold enough to say a word for the man who travels in
order that he may drink.
The Commissioners, after the wont of such men, steer a middle course.
They agree with the Rev. Dr. Parry, Moderator of the General Assembly
of the Calvinistic Methodists of Wales, who declared that he would not
exclude from reasonable refreshment ‘a man who goes from his place
of residence on Sunday to see the country’! I confess I should like
to have both Dr. Parry’s and a Welsh collier’s opinion as to what is
reasonable refreshment. Then, again, ‘to see the country’ is a vague
phrase.
The Commissioners suggest a new clause, to run as follows:
‘No person shall be deemed to be within the exception relating to
travellers unless he proves that he was actually engaged in travelling
for some purpose other than that of obtaining intoxicating liquor,
and that he has not remained on the licensed premises longer than was
reasonably required for the transaction of his necessary business or
for the purpose of necessary rest, refreshment, or shelter from the
weather.’
This is nothing but a repeal of the three-mile limit. How is a
wayfaring man to prove that he is travelling for some purpose other
than that of obtaining intoxicating liquor? He can only assert the
fact, and unless he is a notorious drunkard, both the publican and
the magistrate are bound to believe him. Were the suggestion of the
Commissioners to be carried out, it probably would be found that our
old friend the _bonâ-fide_ traveller could get his liquor and curtail
his walk.
I should like Mrs. Linnet’s opinion; but failing hers, can only express
my own, which is that Sunday drinking is so bad a thing that if it
can be stopped it ought to be so, even though it were to follow as a
consequence that no traveller could get drink from Saturday night till
Monday morning except at the place where he spent the night.
‘HOURS IN A LIBRARY.’
In the face of the proverb about the pavement of the way to hell, I
am prepared to maintain that good intentions are better than bad, and
that evil is the wretch who is not full of good intentions and holy
plans at the beginning of each New Year. Time, like a fruitful plain,
then lies stretched before you; the eye rests on tuneful groves, cool
meadow-lands, and sedgy streams, whither you propose to wander, and
where you promise yourself many happy, well-spent hours. I speak in
metaphors, of course--pale-faced Londoner that I am--my meadows and
streams are not marked upon the map: they are (coming at once to the
point, for this is a generation which is only teased by allegory) the
old books I mean to read over again during the good year of grace
1894. Yonder stately grove is Gibbon; that thicket, Hobbes; where the
light glitters on the green surface (it is black mud below) is Sterne;
healthful but penetrating winds stir Bishop Butler’s pages and make
your naked soul shiver, as you become more and more convinced, the
longer you read, that ‘someone has blundered,’ though whether it is you
or your Maker remains, like everything else, unsolved. Each one of us
must make out his own list. It were cruelty to prolong mine, though it
is but begun.
As a grace before meat, or, if the simile be preferred, as the
_Zakuska_ or _Vorschmack_ before dinner, let me urge upon all to read
the three volumes, lately reissued and very considerably enlarged,
called ‘Hours in a Library,’ by Mr. Leslie Stephen.