GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY
EDMUND GOSSE
1913
OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE
_Northern Studies_. 1879.
_Life of Gray_. 1882.
_Seventeenth-Century Studies_. 1883.
_Life of Congreve_. 1888.
_A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature_. 1889
_Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S_. 1890.
_The Secret of Narcisse: a Romance_. 1892.
_Questions at Issue_. 1893.
_Critical Kit-Kats_. 1896.
_A Short History of Modern English Literature_. 1897.
_Life and Letters of John Donne_. 1899.
_Hypolympia_. 1901.
_French Profiles_. 1904.
_Life of Jeremy Taylor_. 1904.
_Life of Sir Thomas Browne_. 1905.
_Father and Son_. 1907.
_Life of Ibsen_. 1908.
_Two Visits to Denmark_. 1911.
_Collected Poems_. 1911.
_Portraits and Sketches_. 1912.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA"
A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES
A POET IN PRISON
DEATH'S DUEL
GERARD'S HERBAL
PHARAMOND
A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS
A CENSOR OF POETS
THE ROMANCE OF A DICTIONARY
LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS
AMASIA
LOVE AND BUSINESS
WHAT ANN LANG READ
CATS
SMART'S POEMS
POMPEY THE LITTLE
THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNGLE
BEAU NASH
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE
THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE
PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS
THE FANCY
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS
THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS
IONICA
THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT
INDEX
_O blessed Letters, that combine in one
All ages past, and make one live with all:
By you we doe conferre with who are gone,
And the dead-living unto councell call:
By you th' unborne shall have communion
Of what we feele, and what doth us befall_.
_SAM. DANIEL Musophilus. 1602_.
INTRODUCTORY
It is curious to reflect that the library, in our customary sense,
is quite a modern institution. Three hundred years ago there were no
public libraries in Europe. The Ambrosian, at Milan, dates from 1608;
the Bodleian, at Oxford, from 1612. To these Angelo Rocca added his in
Rome, in 1620. But private collections of books always existed, and
these were the haunts of learning, the little glimmering hearths over
which knowledge spread her cold fingers, in the darkest ages of the
world. To-day, although national and private munificence has increased
the number of public libraries so widely that almost every reader is
within reach of books, the private library still flourishes. There
are men all through the civilised world to whom a book is a jewel--an
individual possession of great price. I have been asked to gossip
about my books, for I also am a bibliophile. But when I think of the
great collections of fine books, of the libraries of the magnificent,
I do not know whether I dare admit any stranger to glance at mine.
The Mayor of Queenborough feels as though he were a very important
personage till Royalty drives through his borough without noticing his
scarf and his cocked hat; and then, for the first time, he observes
how small the Queenborough town-hall is. But if one is to gossip about
books, it is, perhaps, as well that one should have some limits. I
will leave the masters of bibliography to sing of greater matters, and
will launch upon no more daring voyage than one _autour de ma pauvre
bibliothèque_.
I have heard that the late Mr. Edward Solly, a very pious and
worshipful lover of books, under several examples of whose book-plate
I have lately reverently placed my own, was so anxious to fly all
outward noise that he built himself a library in his garden. I have
been told that the books stood there in perfect order, with the
rose-spray flapping at the window, and great Japanese vases exhaling
such odours as most annoy an insect-nostril. The very bees would come
to the window, and sniff, and boom indignantly away again. The silence
there was perfect. It must have been in such a secluded library that
Christian Mentzelius was at work when he heard the male book-worm flap
his wings, and crow like a cock in calling to his mate. I feel sure
that even Mentzelius, a very courageous writer, would hardly pretend
that he could hear such a "shadow of all sound" elsewhere. That is
the library I should like to have. In my sleep, "where dreams are
multitude," I sometimes fancy that one day I shall have a library in
a garden. The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man--"a
library in a garden!" It sounds like having a castle in Spain, or a
sheep-walk in Arcadia, and I suppose that merely to wish for it is to
be what indignant journalists call "a faddling hedonist."
In the meanwhile, my books are scattered about in cases in different
parts of a double sitting-room, where the cats carouse on one side,
and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend
of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green
marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick
Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when his
master's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot have cabinets of
ebony and cedar, I may just as well have plain deal, with common glass
doors to keep the dust out. I detest your Persian apparatus.
It is a curious reflection, that the ordinary private person who
collects objects of a modest luxury, has nothing about him so old as
his books. If a wave of the rod made everything around him disappear
that did not exist a century ago, he would suddenly find himself with
one or two sticks of furniture, perhaps, but otherwise alone with his
books. Let the work of another century pass, and certainly nothing
but these little brown volumes would be left, so many caskets full
of passion and tenderness, disappointed ambition, fruitless hope,
self-torturing envy, conceit aware, in maddening lucid moments, of its
own folly. I think if Mentzelius had been worth his salt, those ears
of his, which heard the book-worm crow, might have caught the echo of
a sigh from beneath many a pathetic vellum cover. There is something
awful to me, of nights, and when I am alone, in thinking of all the
souls imprisoned in the ancient books around me. Not one, I suppose,
but was ushered into the world with pride and glee, with a flushed
cheek and heightened pulse; not one enjoyed a career that in all
points justified those ample hopes and flattering promises.
The outward and visible mark of the citizenship of the book-lover is
his book-plate. There are many good bibliophiles who abide in the
trenches, and never proclaim their loyalty by a book-plate. They are
with us, but not of us; they lack the courage of their opinions; they
collect with timidity or carelessness; they have no need for the
morrow. Such a man is liable to great temptations. He is brought face
to face with that enemy of his species, the borrower, and dares not
speak with him in the gate. If he had a book-plate he would say, "Oh!
certainly I will lend you this volume, if it has not my book-plate in
it; of course, one makes a rule never to lend a book that has." He
would say this, and feign to look inside the volume, knowing right
well that this safeguard against the borrower is there already.
To have a book-plate gives a collector great serenity and
self-confidence. We have laboured in a far more conscientious spirit
since we had ours than we did before. A learned poet, Lord De Tabley,
wrote a fascinating volume on book-plates, some years ago, with
copious illustrations. There is not, however, one specimen in his book
which I would exchange for mine, the work and the gift of one of the
most imaginative of American artists, the late Edwin A. Abbey. It
represents a very fine gentleman of about 1610, walking in broad
sunlight in a garden, reading a little book of verses. The name is
coiled around him, with the motto, _Gravis cantantibus umbra_. I will
not presume to translate this tag of an eclogue, and I only venture to
mention such an uninteresting matter, that my indulgent readers may
have a more vivid notion of what I call my library. Mr. Abbey's fine
art is there, always before me, to keep my ideal high.
To possess few books, and those not too rich and rare for daily use,
has this advantage, that the possessor can make himself master of them
all, can recollect their peculiarities, and often remind himself of
their contents. The man that has two or three thousand books can be
familiar with them all; he that has thirty thousand can hardly have a
speaking acquaintance with more than a few. The more conscientious
he is, the more he becomes like Lucian's amateur, who was so much
occupied in rubbing the bindings of his books with sandal-wood and
saffron, that he had no time left to study the contents. After all,
with every due respect paid to "states" and editions and bindings and
tall copies, the inside of the volume is really the essential part of
it.
The excuses for collecting, however, are more than satire is ready to
admit. The first edition represents the author's first thought; in it
we read his words as he sent them out to the world in his first heat,
with the type he chose, and with such peculiarities of form as he
selected to do most justice to his creation. We often discover little
individual points in a first edition, which never occur again. And if
it be conceded that there is an advantage in reading a book in the
form which the author originally designed for it, then all the other
refinements of the collector become so many acts of respect paid
to this first virgin apparition, touching and suitable homage of
cleanness and fit adornment. It is only when this homage becomes mere
eye-service, when a book radically unworthy of such dignity is too
delicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor dilettantism
comes in between the reader and what he reads. Indeed, the best of
volumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a
binding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal. To
the feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, a tenpenny book in a
ten-pound binding, I say fie. Perhaps the ideal library, after all, is
a small one, where the books are carefully selected and thoughtfully
arranged in accordance with one central code of taste, and intended
to be respectfully consulted at any moment by the master of their
destinies. If fortune made me possessor of one book of excessive
value, I should hasten to part with it. In a little working library,
to hold a first quarto of _Hamlet_, would be like entertaining a
reigning monarch in a small farmhouse at harvesting.
Much has of late been written, however, and pleasantly written, about
the collecting and preserving of books. It is not my intention here to
add to this department of modern literature. But I shall select from
among my volumes some which seem less known in detail to modern
readers than they should be, and I shall give brief "retrospective
reviews" of these as though they were new discoveries. In other cases,
where the personal history of a well-known book seems worth detaching
from our critical estimate of it, that shall be the subject of my
lucubration. Perhaps it may not be an unwelcome novelty to apply to
old books the test we so familiarly apply to new ones. They will bear
it well, for in their case there is no temptation to introduce any
element of prejudice. Mr. Bludyer himself does not fly into a passion
over a squat volume published two centuries ago, even when, as in the
case of the first edition of Harrington's _Oceana_, there is such a
monstrous list of errata that the writer has to tell us, by way of
excuse, that a spaniel has been "questing" among his papers.
These scarce and neglected books are full of interesting things.
Voltaire never made a more unfortunate observation than when he
said that rare books were worth nothing, since, if they were worth
anything, they would not be rare. We know better nowadays; we know how
much there is in them which may appeal to only one man here and there,
and yet to him with a voice like a clarion. There are books that have
lain silent for a century, and then have spoken with the trumpet of a
prophecy. We shall disdain nothing; we shall have a little criticism,
a little anecdote, a little bibliography; and our old book shall
go back to the shelves before it has had time to be tedious in its
babbling.
CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA"
BRITAIN: _or a chorographical description of the most flourishing
Kingdomes, England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning;
out of the depth of Antiquitie: beautified with Mappes of the severall
Shires of England; Written first in Latine by William Camden,
Clarenceux K. of A. Translated newly into English by Philémon Holland.
Londini, Impensis Georgii Bishop & Joannis Norton, M.DC.X_.
There is no more remarkable example of the difference between the
readers of our light and hurrying age and those who obeyed "Eliza and
our James," than the fact that the book we have before us at this
moment, a folio of some eleven hundred pages, adorned, like a fighting
elephant, with all the weightiest panoply of learning, was one of the
most popular works of its time. It went through six editions, this
vast antiquarian itinerary, before the natural demand of the vulgar
released it from its Latin austerity; and the title-page we have
quoted is that of the earliest English edition, specially translated,
under the author's eye, by Dr. Philémon Holland, a laborious
schoolmaster of Coventry. Once open to the general public, although
then at the close of its first quarter of a century, the _Britannia_
flourished with a new lease of life, and continued to bloom, like a
literary magnolia, all down the seventeenth century. It Is now
as little read as other famous books of uncompromising size. The
bookshelves of to-day are not fitted for the reception of these heroic
folios, and if we want British antiquities now, we find them in terser
form and more accurately, or at least more plausibly, annotated in the
writings of later antiquaries. Giant Camden moulders at his cave's
mouth, a huge and reverend form seldom disturbed by puny passers-by.
But his once popular folio was the life work of a particularly
interesting and human person; and without affecting to penetrate to
the darkest corners of the cavern, it may be instructive to stand a
little while on the threshold.
When this first English edition of the _Britannia_ was published,
Camden was one of the most famous of living English writers. For one
man of position who had heard of Shakespeare, there would be twenty,
at least, who were quite familiar with the claims of the Head-master
of Westminster and Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden was in his sixtieth
year, in 1610; he had enjoyed slow success, violent detraction, and
final triumph. His health was poor, but he continued to write history,
eager, as he says, to show that "though I have been a studious admirer
of venerable antiquity, yet have I not been altogether an incurious
spectator of modern occurrences." He stood easily first among the
historians of his time; he was respected and adored by the Court and
by the Universities, and that his fame might be completed by the
chrism of detraction, his popularity was assured from year to year by
the dropping fire of obloquy which the Papists scattered from their
secret presses. It had not been without a struggle that Camden had
attained this pinnacle; and the _Britannia_ had been his alpenstock.
This first English edition has the special interest of representing
Camden's last thoughts. It is nominally a translation of the sixth
Latin edition, but it has a good deal of additional matter supplied
to Philémon Holland by the author, whereas later English issues
containing fresh material are believed to be so far spurious. The
_Britannia_ grew with the life of Camden. He tells us that it was
when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, lately started on his
professional career as second master in Westminster School, that the
famous Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortelius, "dealt earnestly with me
that I would illustrate this isle of Britain." This was no light task
to undertake in 1577. The authorities were few, and these in the
highest degree occasional or fragmentary. It was not a question of
compiling a collection of topographical antiquities. The whole process
had to be gone through "from the egg."
As a youth at Oxford, Camden had turned all his best attention to this
branch of study, and what the ancients had written about England was
intimately known to him. Any one who looks at his book will see that
the first 180 pages of the _Britannia_ could be written by a scholar
without stirring from his chair at Westminster. But when it came to
the minute description of the counties there was nothing for it but
personal travel; and accordingly Camden spent what holidays he could
snatch from his labours as a schoolmaster in making a deliberate
survey of the divisions of England. We possess some particulars of one
of these journeys, that which occupied 1582, in which he started by
Suffolk, through Yorkshire, and returned through Lancashire. He was a
very rapid worker, he spared no pains, and in 1586, nine years after
Ortelius set him going, his first draft was issued from the press. In
later times, and when his accuracy had been cruelly impeached, he set
forth his claims to attention with dignity. He said: "I have in no
wise neglected such things as are most material to search and sift out
the truth. I have attained to some skill of the most ancient British
and Anglo-Saxon tongues; I have travelled over all England for the
most part, I have conferred with most skilful observers in each
county.... I have been diligent in the records of this realm. I have
looked into most libraries, registers and memorials of churches,
cities and corporations, I have pored upon many an old roll and
evidence ... that the honour of verity might in no wise be impeached."
It was no slight task to undertake such a work on such a scale. And
when the first Latin edition appeared, it was hailed as a first glory
in the diadem of Elizabeth. Specialists in particular counties found
that Camden knew more about their little circle than they themselves
had taken all their lives to learn. Lombard, the great Kentish
antiquary, said that he never knew Kent properly, till he read of it
in the _Britannia_. But Camden was not content to rest on his laurels.
Still, year by year, he made his painful journeys through the length
and breadth of the land, and still, as new editions were called forth,
the book grew from octavo into folio. Suddenly, about twelve years
after its first unchallenged appearance, there was issued, like a bolt
out of the blue, a very nasty pamphlet, called _Discovery of certain
Errors Published in the much-commended Britannia_, which created a
fine storm in the antiquarian teapot. This attack was the work of a
man who would otherwise be forgotten, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald.
He had formerly been an admirer of Camden's, his "humble friend,"
he called himself; but when Camden was promoted over his head to be
Clarenceux King-of-Arms, it seemed to Ralph Brooke that it became
his duty to denounce the too successful antiquary as a charlatan. He
accordingly fired off the unpleasant little gun already mentioned,
and, for the moment, he hit Camden rather hard.
The author of the _Britannia_, to justify his new advancement, had
introduced into a fresh edition of his book a good deal of information
regarding the descent of barons and other noble families. This was
York Herald's own subject, and he was able to convict Camden of
a startling number of negligences, and what he calls "many gross
mistakings." The worst part of it was that York Herald had privately
pointed out these blunders to Camden, and that the latter had said it
was too much trouble to alter them. This, at least, is what the enemy
states in his attack, and if this be true, it can hardly be doubled
that Camden had sailed too long in fair weather, or that he needed a
squall to recall him to the duties of the helm. He answered Brooke,
who replied with increased contemptuous tartness. It is admitted that
Camden was indiscreet in his manner of reply, and that some genuine
holes had been pricked in his heraldry. But the _Britannia_ lay high
out of the reach of fatal pedantic attack, and this little cloud over
the reputation of the book passed entirely away, and is remembered now
only as a curiosity of literature.
In the preface the author quaintly admits that "many have found a
defect in this work that maps were not adjoined, which do allure the
eyes by pleasant portraitures, ... yet my ability could not compass
it." They must, then, have been added at the last by a generous
afterthought, for this book is full of maps. The maritime ones are
adorned with ships in full sail, and bold sea-monsters with curly
tails; the inland ones are speckled with trees and spires and
hillocks. In spite of these old-fashioned oddities, the maps are
remarkably accurate. They are signed by John Norden and William Kip,
the master map-makers of that reign. The book opens with an account of
the first inhabitants of Britain, and their manners and customs; how
the Romans fared, and what antiquities they left behind, with copious
plates of Roman coins. By degrees we come down, through Saxons and
Normans, to that work which was peculiarly Camden's, the topographical
antiquarianism. He begins with Cornwall, "that region which, according
to the geographers, is the first of all Britain," and then proceeds to
what he calls "Denshire" and we Devonshire, a county, as he remarks,
"barbarous on either side."
With page 822 he finds himself at the end of his last English county,
Northumberland, looking across the Tweed to Berwick, "the strongest
hold in all Britain," where it is "no marvel that soldiers without
other light do play here all night long at dice, considering the side
light that the sunbeams cast all night long." This rather exaggerated
statement is evidently that of a man accustomed to look upon Berwick
as the northernmost point of his country, as we shall all do, no
doubt, when Scotland has secured Home Rule. We are, therefore, not
surprised to find Scotland added, in a kind of hurried appendix, in
special honour to James I and VI. The introduction to the Scottish
section is in a queer tone of banter; Camden knows little and cares
less about the "commonwealth of the Scots," and "withall will lightly
pass over it." In point of fact, he gets to Duncansby Head in
fifty-two pages, and not without some considerable slips of
information. Ireland interests him more, and he finally closes with a
sheet of learned gossip about the outlying islands.
The scope of Camden's work did not give Philémon Holland much
opportunity for spreading the wings of his style. Anxious to present
Camden fairly, the translator is curiously uneven in manner, now
stately, now slipshod, weaving melodious sentences, but forgetting to
tie them up with a verb. He is commonly too busy with hard facts to
be a Euphuist. But here is a pretty and ingenious passage about
Cambridge, unusually popular in manner, and exceedingly handsome in
the mouth of an Oxford man:
"On this side the bridge, where standeth the greater part by far of
the City, you have a pleasant sight everywhere to the eye, what of
fair streets orderly ranged, what of a number of churches, and of
sixteen colleges, sacred mansions of the Muses, wherein a number of
great learned men are maintained, and wherein the knowledge of the
best arts, and the skill in tongues, so flourish, that they may
rightly be counted the fountains of literature, religion and all
knowledge whatsoever, who right sweetly bedew and sprinkle, with most
wholesome waters, the gardens of the Church and Commonwealth through
England. Nor is there wanting anything here, that a man may require in
a most flourishing University, were it not that the air is somewhat
unhealthful, arising as it doth out of a fenny ground hard by. And
yet, peradventure, they that first founded a University in that place,
allowed of Plato's judgment. For he, being of a very excellent and
strong constitution of body, chose out the Academia, an unwholesome
place of Attica, for to study in, and so the superfluous rankness
of body which might overlay the mind, might be kept under by the
dis-temperature of the place."
The poor scholars in the mouldering garrets of Clare, looking over
waste land to the oozy Cam, no doubt wished that their foundress had
been less Spartan. Very little of the domestic architecture that
Camden admired in Cambridge is now left; and yet probably it and
Oxford are the two places of all which he describes that it would give
him least trouble to identify if he came to life again three hundred
years after the first appearance of his famous _Britannia_.
A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES
A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES: _being a true Chronicle Historie of the
untimely falles of such unfortunate Princes and men of note, as have
happened since the first entrance of Brute into this Iland, untill
this our latter Age. Newly enlarged with a last part, called_ A WINTER
NIGHTS VISION, _being an addition of such Tragedies, especially
famous, as are exempted in the former Historie, with a Poem annexed,
called_ ENGLAND'S ELIZA. _At London. Imprinted by Felix Kyngston_,
1610.
This huge quarto of 875 pages, all in verse, is the final form, though
far from the latest impression, of a poetical miscellany which had
been swelling and spreading for nearly sixty years without ever losing
its original character. We may obtain some imperfect notion of the
_Mirror for Magistrates_ if we imagine a composite poem planned by
Sir Walter Scott, and contributed to by Wordsworth and Southey, being
still issued, generation after generation, with additions by the
youngest versifiers of to-day. The _Mirror for Magistrates_ was
conceived when Mary's protomartyrs were burning at Smithfield, and it
was not finished until James I. had been on the throne seven years.
From first to last, at least sixteen writers had a finger in this pie,
and the youngest of them was not born when the eldest of them died.
It is commonly said, even by such exact critics as the late Dean
Church, that the _Mirror for Magistrates_ was planned by the most
famous of the poets who took part in its execution, Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst. If a very clever man is combined in any enterprise
with people of less prominence, it is ten to one that he gets all the
credit of the adventure. But the evidence on this point goes to prove
that it was not until the work was well advanced that Sackville
contributed to it at all. The inventor of the _Mirror for Magistrates_
seems, rather, to have been George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer and
politician, who was master of the King's Pastimes at the very close
of Henry VIII.'s reign. Ferrers was ambitious to create a drama in
England, and lacked only genius to be the British Aeschylus. The time
was not ripe, but he was evidently very anxious to set the world
tripping to his goatherd's pipe. He advertised for help in these
designs, and the list of persons he wanted is an amusing one; he was
willing to engage "a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, a
physician, an apothecary, a master of requests, a civilian, a clown,
two gentlemen ushers, besides jugglers, tumblers, fools, friars, and
such others," Fortune sent him, from Oxford, one William Baldwin, who
was most of these things, especially divine and poet, and who became
Ferrers' confidential factotum. The master and assistant-master of
Pastimes were humming merrily on at their masques and triumphs, when,
the King expired. Under Queen Mary, revels might not flourish, but the
friendship between Ferrers and Baldwin did not cease. They planned a
more doleful but more durable form of entertainment, and the _Mirror
for Magistrates_ was started. Those who claim for Sackville the
main part of this invention, forget that he is not mentioned as a
contributor till what was really the third edition, and that, when the
first went to press, he was only eighteen years of age.
Ferrers well comprehended the taste of his age when he conceived the
notion of a series of poems, in which famous kings and nobles should
describe in their own persons the frailty and instability of worldly
prosperity, even in those whom Fortune seems most highly to favour.
One of the most popular books of the preceding century had been
Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's poems on the calamities of
illustrious men, a vast monody in nine books, all harping on that
single chord of the universal mutability of fortune. Lydgate's _Fall
of Princes_ had, by the time that Mary ascended the throne, existed
in popular esteem for a hundred years. Its language and versification
were now so antiquated as to be obsolete; it was time that princes
should fall to a more modern measure.
The first edition of Baldwin and Ferrers' book went to press early
in 1555, but of this edition only one or two fragments exist. It was
"hindered by the Lord Chancellor that then was," Stephen Gardiner, and
was entirely suppressed. The leaf in the British Museum is closely
printed in double columns, and suggests that Baldwin and Ferrers meant
to make a huge volume of it. The death of Mary removed the embargo,
and before Elizabeth had been Queen for many months, the second (or
genuine first) edition of the _Myrroure for Magistrates_ made its
appearance, a thin quarto, charmingly printed in two kinds of type.
This contained twenty lives--Haslewood, the only critic who has
described this edition, says _nineteen_, but he overlooked Ferrers'
tale of "Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester"--and was the work, so Baldwin
tells us, of seven persons besides himself.
The first story in the book, a story which finally appears at p. 276
of the edition before us, recounts the "Fall of Robert Tresilian,
Chief Justice of England, and other of his fellows, for misconstruing
the laws and expounding them to serve the Prince's affections, Anno
1388." The manner in which this story is presented is a good example
of the mode adopted throughout the miscellany. The corrupt judge and
his fellow-lawyers appear, as in a mirror, or like personages behind
the illuminated sheet at the "Chat Noir," and lamentably recount their
woes in chorus. The story of Tresilian was written by Ferrers, but the
persons who speak it address his companion:
_Baldwin, we beseech thee with our names to begin_
--which support Baldwin's claim to be looked upon as the editor of the
whole book. It is very dreary doggerel, it must be confessed, but no
worse than most of the poetry indited in England at that uninspired
moment in the national history. A short example--a flower culled from
any of these promiscuous thickets--will suffice to give a general
notion of the garden. Here is part of the lament of "The Lord
Clifford":
_Because my father Lord John Clifford died,
Slain at St. Alban's, in his prince's aid,
Against the Duke my heart for malice fired,
So that I could from wreck no way be stayed,
But, to avenge my father's death, assayed
All means I might the Duke of York to annoy,
And all his kin and friends for to destroy.
This made me with my bloody dagger wound
His guiltless son, that never 'gainst me stored;
His father's body lying dead on ground
To pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword
To part his neck, and with his head to board,
Invested with a royal paper crown,
From place to place to bear it up and down.
But cruelty can never 'scape the scourge
Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death;
Repentance self that other sins may purge
Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth;
Despair dissolves the tyrant's bitter breath,
For sudden vengeance suddenly alights
On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites_.
The only contribution to this earliest form of the _Mirror_ which is
attributed to an eminent writer, is the "Edward IV" of Skelton, and
this is one of the most tuneless of all. It reminds the ear of a
whining ballad snuffled out in the street at night by some unhappy
minstrel that has got no work to do. As Baldwin professes to quote
it from memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its versification
suffered in his hands.
This is not the place to enter minutely into the history of the
building up of this curious book. The next edition, that of 1563,
was enriched by Sackville's splendid "Induction" and the tale of
"Buckingham," both of which are comparatively known so well, and have
been so often reprinted separately, that I need not dwell upon them
here. They occupy pp. 255-271 and 433-455 of the volume before us. In
1574 a very voluminous contributor to the constantly swelling tide of
verse appears. Thomas Blener Hasset, a soldier on service in Guernsey
Castle, thought that the magisterial ladies had been neglected, and
proceeded in 1578 to sing the fall of princesses. It is needless to
continue the roll of poets, but it is worth while to point out the
remarkable fact that each new candidate held up the mirror to the
magistrates so precisely in the manner of his predecessors, that it
is difficult to distinguish Newton from Baldwin, or Churchyard from
Niccols.
Richard Niccols, who is responsible for the collection in its final
state, was a person of adventure, who had fought against Cadiz in the
_Ark_, and understood the noble practice of the science of artillery.
By the time it came down to him, in 1610, the _Mirror for Magistrates_
had attained such a size that he was obliged to omit what had formed
a pleasing portion of it, the prose dialogues which knit the tales in
verse together, such pleasant familiar chatter between the poets as
"Ferrers, said Baldwin, take you the chronicles and mark them as they
come," and the like. It was a pity to lose all this, but Niccols had
additions of his own verse to make; ten new legends entitled "A Winter
Night's Vision," and a long eulogy upon Queen Elizabeth, "England's
Eliza." He would have been more than human, if he had not considered
all this far more valuable than the old prose babbling in black
letter. This copy of mine is of the greatest rarity, for it contains
two dedicatory sonnets by Richard Niccols, one addressed to Lady
Elizabeth Clere and the other to the Earl of Nottingham, which seem to
have been instantly suppressed, and are only known to exist in this
and, I believe, one or two other examples of the book. These are,
perhaps, worth reprinting for their curiosity. The first runs as
follows:--
_My Muse, that whilom wail'd those Briton kings,
Who unto her in vision did appear,
Craves leave to strengthen her night-weathered wings
In the warm sunshine of your golden Clere [clear];
Where she, fair Lady, tuning her chaste lays
Of England's Empress to her hymnic string
For your affect, to hear that virgins praise,
Makes choice of your chaste self to hear her sing,
Whose royal worth, (true virtue's paragon,)
Here made me dare to engrave your worthy name.
In hope that unto you the same alone
Will so excuse me of presumptuous blame,
That graceful entertain my Muse may find
And even bear such grace in thankful mind_.
The sonnet to the Earl of Nottingham, the famous admiral and quondam
rival of Sir Walter Raleigh, is more interesting:--
_As once that dove (true honour's aged Lord),
Hovering with wearied wings about your ark,
When Cadiz towers did fall beneath your sword,
To rest herself did single out that bark,
So my meek Muse,--from all that conquering rout,
Conducted through the sea's wild wilderness
By your great self, to grave their names about
The Iberian pillars of Jove's Hercules,--
Most humbly craves your lordly lion's aid
'Gainst monster envy, while she tells her story
Of Britain's princes, and that royall maid
In whose chaste hymn her Clio sings your glory,
Which if, great Lord, you grant, my Muse shall frame
Mirrors most worthy your renownèd name_.
But apparently the "great Lord" would not grant permission, and so the
sonnet had to be rigorously suppressed.
The _Mirror for Magistrates_ has ceased to be more than a curiosity
and a collector's rarity, but it once assumed a very ambitious
function. It was a serious attempt to build up, as a cathedral is
built by successive architects, a great national epic, the work of
many hands. In a gloomy season of English history, in a violent age
of tyranny, fanaticism, and legalised lawlessness, it endeavoured
to present, to all whom it might concern, a solemn succession of
discrowned tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws they had
made. Sometimes, in its bold and not very delicate way, the _Mirror
for Magistrates_ is impressive still from its lofty moral tone, its
gloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read its
sombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motion
which makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it at
the next into the pit of pain and oblivion. Steadily, uniformly, the
unflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royal
how "Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace," and how "Sir Anthony
Woodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless imprisoned and cruelly wounded";
how "King Kimarus was devoured by wild beasts," and how "Sigeburt, for
his wicked life, was thrust from his throne and miserably slain by a
herdsman." It gives us a strange feeling of sympathy to realise that
the immense popularity of this book must have been mainly due to the
fact that it comforted the multitudes who groaned under a harsh and
violent despotism to be told over and over again that cruel kings and
unjust judges habitually came at last to a bad end.
A POET IN PRISON
THE SHEPHEARDS HUNTING: _being Certain Eglogues written during the
time of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey. By George Wyther,
Gentleman. London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are to
be sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre_. 1615.
If ever a man needed resuscitation in our antiquarian times it was
George Wither. When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable
oblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor in
cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to be
recollected. He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne
persistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessed
really by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy.
Swift, in _The Battle of the Books_, brings in this poet as the
meanest common trooper that he can mention in his modern army. Pope
speaks of him with the utmost freedom as "wretched Withers." It is
true that he lived too long and wrote too much--a great deal too
much. Mr. Hazlitt gives the titles of more than one hundred of his
publications, and some of them are wonderfully unattractive. I should
not like to be shut up on a rainy day with his _Salt upon Salt_, which
seems to have lost its savour, nor do I yearn to blow upon his _Tuba
Pacifica_, although it was "disposed of rather for love than money."
The truth is that good George Wither lost his poetry early, was an
upright, honest, and patriotic man who unhappily developed into a
scold, and got into the bad habit of pouring out "precautions,"
"cautional expressions," "prophetic phrensies," "epistles at random,"
"personal contributions to the national humiliation," "passages,"
"raptures," and "allarums," until he really became the greatest bore
in Christendom. It was Charles Lamb who swept away this whole tedious
structure of Wither's later writings and showed us what a lovely poet
he was in his youth.
When the book before us was printed, George Wither was aged
twenty-seven. He had just stepped gingerly out of the Marshalsea
Prison, and his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest against
having been put there at all and deprecation of being put there again.
Let no one waste the tear of sensibility over that shell of the
Marshalsea Prison, which still, I believe, exists. The family of the
Dorrits languished in quite another place from the original Marshalsea
of Wither's time, although that also lay across the water in
Southwark. It is said that the prison was used for the confinement of
persons who had spoken lewdly of dignitaries about the Court. Wither,
as we shall see, makes a great parade of telling us why he was
imprisoned; but his language is obscure. Perhaps he was afraid to be
explicit. In 1613 he had published a little volume of satires, called
_Abuses stript and whipt_. This had been very popular, running into
six or seven editions within a short time, and some one in office, no
doubt, had fitted on the fool's cap. Five years later the poor poet
would have had a chance of being shipped straight off to Virginia, as
a "debauched person"; as it was, the Marshalsea seems to have been
tolerably unpleasant. We gather, however, that he enjoyed some
alleviations. He could say, like Leigh Hunt, "the visits of my friends
were the bright side of my captivity; I read verses without end, and
wrote almost as many." The poems we have before us were written in the
Marshalsea. The book itself is very tiny and pretty, with a sort
of leafy trellis-work at the top and bottom of every page, almost
suggesting a little posy of wild-flowers thrown through the iron bars
of the poet's cage, and pressed between the pages of his manuscript.
Nor is there any book of Wither's which breathes more deeply of the
perfume of the fields than this which was written in the noisome
seclusion of the Marshalsea.
Although the title-page assures us that these "eglogues" were written
during the author's imprisonment, we may have a suspicion that the
first three were composed just after his release. They are very
distinct from the rest in form and character. To understand them we
must remember that in 1614, just before the imprisonment, Wither had
taken a share with his bosom friend, William Browne, of the Inner
Temple, in bringing out a little volume of pastorals, called _The
Shepherd's Pipe_. Browne, a poet who deserves well of all Devonshire
men, was two years younger than Wither, and had just begun to come
before the public as the author of that charming, lazy, Virgilian poem
of _Britannia's Pastorals_. There was something of Keats in Browne, an
artist who let the world pass him by; something of Shelley in Wither,
a prophet who longed to set his seal on human progress. In the
_Shepherd's Pipe_ Willy (William Browne) and Roget (Geo-t-r) had been
the interlocutors, and Christopher Brooke, another rhyming friend, had
written an eclogue under the name of Cutty. These personages reappear
in _The Shepherd's Hunting_, and give us a glimpse of pleasant
personal relations. In the first "eglogue," Willy comes to the
Marshalsea one afternoon to condole with Roget, but finds him very
cheerful. The prisoner poet assures his friend that
_This barren place yields somewhat to relieve,
For I have found sufficient to content me,
And more true bliss than ever freedom lent me_;
and Willy goes away, when it is growing dark, rejoiced to find that
"the cage doth some birds good." Next morning he returns and brings
Cutty, or Cuddy, with him, for Cuddy has news to tell the prisoner
that all England is taking an interest in him, and that this adversity
has made him much more popular than he was before. But Willy and
Cuddy are extremely anxious to know what it was that caused Roget's
imprisonment, and at last he agrees to tell them. Hitherto the poem
has been written in _ottava rima_, a form which is sufficiently
uncommon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to demand special
notice in this case. In a prose postscript to this book Wither tells
us that the title, _The Shepherd's Hunting_, which he seems to feel
needs explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should say now,
to the publisher. But perhaps this was an afterthought, for in the
account he gives to Willy and Cuddy he certainly suggests the title
himself. He represents himself as the shepherd given up to the
delights of hunting the human passions through the soul; the simile
seems a little confused, because he represents these qualities not
as the quarry, but as the hounds, and so the story of Actaeon is
reversed; instead of the hounds pursuing their master, the master
hunts his dogs. At all events, the result is that he "dips his staff
in blood, and onwards leads his thunder to the wood," where he is
ignominiously captured by his Majesty's gamekeeper. But the allegory
hardly runs upon all-fours.
The next "eglogue" represents again another visit to the prisoner, and
this time Willy and Cuddy bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis is
John Davies, of Hereford, another contributor to _The Shepherd's
Pipe_. Roget starts his allegory again, in the same mild, satiric
manner he had adopted, to his hurt, in _Abuses stript and whipt_.
Wither becomes quite delightful again, when cheerfulness breaks
through this satirical philosophy, and when he tells us:
_But though that all the world's delight forsake me,
I have a Muse, and she shall music make me;
Whose aery notes, in spite of closest cages,
Shall give content to me and after ages_.
They all felt certain of immortality, these cheerful poets of
Elizabeth and James, and Prince Posterity has seen proper to admit the
claim in more instances than might well have been expected.
But the delightful part of _The Shepherd's Hunting_ has yet to come.
With the fourth "eglogue" the caged bird begins to sing like a lark at
Heaven's gate, and it is the prisoned man--who ought to be in doleful
dumps--that rallies his free friend Browne on his low spirits. It is
time, he says, to be merry:
_Coridon, with his bold rout,
Hath already been about,
For the elder shepherds' dole,
And fetched in the summer pole;
Whilst the rest have built a bower
To defend them from a shower,
Sealed so close, with boughs all green,
Titan cannot pry between;
Now the dairy-wenches dream
Of their strawberries and cream,
And each doth herself advance,
To be taken in to dance_.
What summer thoughts are these to come from a pale prisoner in the hot
and putrid Marshalsea! They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, or
proofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above a mortal pitch.
But Willy declines to join the Lady of the May at her high junketings;
he also has troubles, and prefers to whisper them through Roget's iron
bars. There are those who "my Music do contemn," who will none of the
poetry of Master William Browne of the Inner Temple. It is useless for
him to wrestle with brown shepherds for the
_Cups of turnèd maple-root,
Whereupon the skilful man
Hath engraved the Loves of Pan_,
or contend for the "fine napkin wrought with blue," if those base
clowns called critics are busy with his detraction. But Roget
instructs him that Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of a
true poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and beyond all
racks of envious cloud, and that the last thing he should do is
to despair. He rises to his own greatest and best work in this
encouragement of a brother-poet, and no one who reads such noble
verses as these dare question Wither's claim to a _fauteuil_ in the
Academy of Parnassus:
_If thy Verse do bravely tower
As she makes wing, she gets power,
Yet the higher she doth soar,
She's affronted still the more;
Till she to the highest hath past,
Then she rests with Fame at last.
Let nought therefore thee affright,
But make forward in thy flight;
For if I could match thy rhyme
To the very stars I'd climb,
There begin again, and fly
Till I reached Eternity_.
In the fifth "eglogue" Roget and Alexis compare notes about their
early happiness in phrases of an odd commixture. The pastoral
character of the poetry has to be carried out, and so we read of how
Roget on a great occasion played a match at football, "having scarce
twenty Satyrs on his side," against some of "the best tried Ruffians
in the land." Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of Thames,
and though the satyrs and their laureate leader were worsted, the
moral victory, as people call it, remained with the latter. All this
is an allegory; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of innuendo all
through _The Shepherd's Hunting_.
The moral of the whole thing is that eternal ditty of tuneful youth:
All for Verse and the World well lost. The enemy is around them on
all sides, jailers of the Marshalsea and envious critics, the evil
shepherds that preside over grates of steel and noisome beds of straw,
but Youth has its mocking answer to all these:
_Let them disdain and fret till they are weary!
We in ourselves have that shall make us merry;
Which he that wants and had the power to know it,
Would give his life that he might die a poet_.