Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some
of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear--to
mine, at least--than that of Milton or of Shakspeare? It may be, that
the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The
sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit
Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.
Much depends upon _when_ and _where_ you read a book. In the five or
six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would
think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of
Bishop Andrewes' sermons?
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before
you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens,
had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.
Winter evenings--the world shut out--with less of ceremony the gentle
Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's
Tale--
These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud--to yourself, or (as
it chances) to some single person listening. More than one--and it
degenerates into an audience.
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye
to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never
listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme
irksomeness.
A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices
it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the
clerks--who is the best scholar--to commence upon the Times, or the
Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud _pro bono publico_.
With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly
vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up,
and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery.
Another follows with _his_ selection. So the entire journal transpires
at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without
this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel
through the contents of a whole paper.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without
a feeling of disappointment.
What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the
paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, "the
Chronicle is in hand, Sir."
Coming in to an inn at night--having ordered your supper--what can be
more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time
out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest--two or three
numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing
_tête-à-tête_ pictures--"The Royal Lover and Lady G----;" "The Melting
Platonic and the old Beau,"--and such like antiquated scandal? Would
you exchange it--at that time, and in that place--for a better book?
Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the
weightier kinds of reading--the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have
_read_ to him--but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his
own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet.
I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some
cathedral alone, and reading _Candide_.
I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once
detected--by a familiar damsel--reclined at my ease upon the grass, on
Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading--_Pamela_. There was nothing in
the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she
seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company,
I could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very
sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her
taste, she got up, and--went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee
to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was
the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you
shall never get the secret.
I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my
spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be
seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street _was not_), between the
hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner.
I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I
used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts.
An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would
have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have
left me worse than indifferent to the five points.
There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate
without affection--the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy
or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls--the owner,
with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and
thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after
page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict,
and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they "snatch
a fearful joy." Martin B----, in this way, by daily fragments,
got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped
his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days)
whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no
circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the
satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess
of our day has moralised upon this subject in two very touching but
homely stanzas.
I saw a boy with eager eye
Open a book upon a stall,
And read, as he'd devour it all;
Which when the stall-man did espy,
Soon to the boy I heard him call,
"You, Sir, you never buy a book,
Therefore in one you shall not look."
The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh
He wish'd he never had been taught to read,
Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.
Of sufferings the poor have many,
Which never can the rich annoy:
I soon perceiv'd another boy,
Who look'd as if he'd not had any
Food, for that day at least--enjoy
The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.
This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder,
Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny,
Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat:
No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat.