This awful calamity may be traced in the fate of LELAND and COLLINS:
the one exhausted the finer faculties of his mind in the grandest
views, and sunk under gigantic tasks; the other enthusiast sacrificed
his reason and his happiness to his imagination.
LELAND, the father of our antiquaries, was an accomplished scholar,
and his ample mind had embraced the languages of antiquity, those of
his own age, and the ancient ones of his own country: thus he held all
human learning by its three vast chains. He travelled abroad; and he
cultivated poetry with the ardour he could even feel for the
acquisition of words. On his return home, among other royal favours,
he was appointed by Henry VIII. the king's antiquary, a title
honourably created for Leland; for with him it became extinct. By this
office he was empowered to search after English antiquities; to
review the libraries of all the religious institutions, and to bring
the records of antiquity "out of deadly darkness into lively light."
This extensive power fed a passion already formed by the study of our
old rude historians; his elegant taste perceived that they wanted
those graces which he could lend them.
Six years were occupied, by uninterrupted travel and study, to survey
our national antiquities; to note down everything observable for the
history of the country and the honour of the nation. What a
magnificent view has he sketched of this learned journey! In search of
knowledge, Leland wandered on the sea-coasts and in the midland;
surveyed towns and cities, and rivers, castles, cathedrals, and
monasteries; tumuli, coins, and inscriptions; collected authors;
transcribed MSS. If antiquarianism pored, genius too meditated in this
sublime industry.
Another six years were devoted to shape and to polish the immense
collections he had amassed. All this untired labour and continued
study were rewarded by Henry VIII. It is delightful, from its rarity,
to record the gratitude of a patron: Henry was worthy of Leland; and
the genius of the author was magnificent as that of the monarch who
had created it.
Nor was the gratitude of Leland silent: he seems to have been in the
habit of perpetuating his spontaneous emotions in elegant Latin verse.
Our author has fancifully expressed his gratitude to the king:--
"Sooner," he says, "shall the seas float without their silent
inhabitants; the thorny hedges cease to hide the birds; the oak to
spread its boughs; and Flora to paint the meadows with flowers;"
Quam Rex dive, tuum labatur pectore nostro
Nomen, quod studiis portus et aura meis.
Than thou, great King, my bosom cease to hail,
Who o'er my studies breath'st a favouring gale.
Leland was, indeed, alive to the kindness of his royal patron; and
among his numerous literary projects, was one of writing a history of
all the palaces of Henry, in imitation of Procopius, who described
those of the Emperor Justinian. He had already delighted the royal ear
in a beautiful effusion of fancy and antiquarianism, in his _Cygnea
Cantio_, the Song of the Swans. The swan of Leland, melodiously
floating down the Thames, from Oxford to Greenwich, chants, as she
passes along, the ancient names and honours of the towns, the castles,
and the villages.
Leland presented his "Strena, or a New Year's Gift," to the king.--It
consists of an account of his studies; and sketches, with a fervid and
vast imagination, his magnificent labour, which he had already
inscribed with the title _De Antiquitate Britannica_, and which was to
be divided into as many books as there were shires. All parts of this
address of the King's Antiquary to the king bear the stamp of his
imagination and his taste. He opens his intention of improving, by the
classical graces of composition, the rude labours of our ancestors;
for,
"Except Truth be delicately clothed in purpure, her written verytees
can scant find a reader."
Our old writers, he tells his sovereign, had, indeed,
"From time to time preserved the acts of your predecessors, and the
fortunes of your realm, with great diligence, and no less faith; would
to God with like eloquence!"
An exclamation of fine taste, when taste was yet a stranger in the
country. And when he alludes to the knowledge of British affairs
scattered among the Roman, as well as our own writers, his fervid
fancy breaks forth with an image at once simple and sublime:--
"I trust," says Leland, "so to open the window, that the light shall
be seen so long, that is to say, by the space of a whole thousand
years stopped up, and the old glory of your Britain to re-flourish
through the world."[123]