CHAPTER XIII

I was sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gentleman, who

had been wounded in a duel,--and his wounds by unskilful treatment had

been brought to a dangerous crisis.

The uncommonness of the name, which was _Matravis_ suggested to me,

that this might possibly be no other than Allan's old enemy. Under this

apprehension, I did what I could to dissuade Allan from accompanying

me--but he seemed bent upon going, and even pleased himself with the

notion, that it might lie within his ability to do the unhappy man some

service. So he went with me.

When we came to the house, which was in Soho-Square, we discovered that

it was indeed the man--the identical Matravis, who had done all that

mischief in times past--but not in a condition to excite any other

sensation than pity in a heart more hard than Allan's.

Intense pain had brought on a delirium--we perceived this on first

entering the room--for the wretched man was raving to himself--talking

idly in mad unconnected sentences,--that yet seemed, at times, to have a

reference to _past facts_.

One while he told us his dream. "He had lost his way on a great heath,

to which there seemed no end--it was cold, cold, cold--and dark, very

dark--an old woman in leading-strings, _blind_, was groping about for a

guide"--and then he frightened me,--for he seemed disposed to be

_jocular_, and sang a song about "an old woman clothed in grey," and

said "he did not believe in a devil."

Presently he bid us "not tell Allan Clare"--Allan was hanging over him

at that very moment, sobbing.--I could not resist the impulse, but cried

out, "_this_ is Allan Clare--Allan Clare is come to see you, my dear

Sir."--The wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for he turned his

head away, and began talking of _charnel houses_, and _dead men_, and

"whether they knew anything that passed in their coffins."

Matravis died that night.

* * * * *

CURIOUS FRAGMENTS,

_Extracted from a common-place book, which belonged to Robert Burton,

the famous Author of The Anatomy of Melancholy_

(1800. FIRST PUBLISHED 1802. TEXT OF 1818)

EXTRACT I

I Democritus Junior have put my finishing pen to a tractate _De

Melancholia_, this day December 5, 1620. First, I blesse the Trinity,

which hath given me health to prosecute my worthlesse studies thus far,

and make supplication, with a _Laus Deo_, if in any case these my poor

labours may be found instrumental to weede out black melancholy, carking

cares, harte-grief, from the mind of man. _Sed hoc magis volo quam

expecto._

I turn now to my book, _i nunc liber, goe forth, my brave Anatomy, child

of my brain-sweat_, and yee, _candidi lectores_, lo! here I give him up

to you, even do with him what you please, my masters. Some, I suppose

will applaud, commend, cry him up (these are my friends) hee is a _flos

rarus_, forsooth, a none-such, a Phœnix, (concerning whom see _Plinius_

and _Mandeuille_, though _Fienus de monstris_ doubteth at large of such

a bird, whom Montaltus confuting argueth to have been a man _malæ

scrupulositatis_, of a weak and cowardlie faith: _Christopherus a Vega_

is with him in this.) Others again will blame, hiss, reprehende in many

things, cry down altogether, my collections, for crude, inept, putid,

_post cœnam scripta, Coryate could write better upon a full meal_,

verbose, inerudite, and not sufficiently abounding in authorities,

_dogmata_, sentences of learneder writers which have been before me,

when as that first named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours to bee

nothing else but a _messe of opinions_, a vortex attracting

indiscriminate, gold, pearls, hay, straw, wood, excrement, an exchange,

tavern, marte, for foreigners to congregate, Danes, Swedes, Hollanders,

Lombards, so many strange faces, dresses, salutations, languages, all

which _Wolfius_ behelde with great content upon the Venetian Rialto, as

he describes diffusedly in his book the world's Epitome, which

_Sannazar_ so bepraiseth, _e contra_ our Polydore can see nothing in

it; they call me singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in

this age, which is all too neoteric and light for my humour.

One cometh to me sighing, complaining. He expected universal remedies in

my Anatomy; so many cures as there are distemperatures among men. I have

not put his affection in my cases. Hear you his case. My fine Sir is a

lover, an _inamorato_, Pyramus, a Romeo; he walks seven years

disconsolate, moping, because he cannot enjoy his miss, _insanus amor_

is his melancholy, the man is mad; _delirat_, he dotes; all this while

his Glycera is rude, spiteful, not to be entreated, churlish, spits at

him, yet exceeding fair, gentle eyes, (which is a beauty,) hair lustrous

and _smiling_, the trope is none of mine, _Æneas Sylvius_ hath _crines

ridentes_--in conclusion she is wedded to his rival, a boore, a

_Corydon_, a rustic, _omnino ignarus, he can scarce construe Corderius_,

yet haughty, fantastic, _opiniatre_. The lover travels, goes into

foreign parts, peregrinates, _amoris ergo_, sees manners, customs, not

English, converses with pilgrims, lying travellers, monks, hermits,

those cattle, pedlars, travelling gentry, _Egyptians_, natural wonders,

unicorns (though _Aldobrandus_ will have them to be figments) satyrs,

semi-viri, apes, monkeys, baboons, curiosities artificial, _pyramides_,

Virgilius his tombe, relicks, bones, which are nothing but ivory as

_Melancthon_ judges, though _Cornutus_ leaneth to think them bones of

dogs, cats, (why not men?) which subtill priests vouch to have been

saints, martyrs, _heu Pietas_! By that time he has ended his course,

_fugit hora_, seven other years are expired, gone by, time is he should

return, he taketh ship for Britaine, much desired of his friends,

_favebant venti, Neptune is curteis_, after some weekes at sea he

landeth, rides post to town, greets his family, kinsmen, _compotores,

those jokers his friends that were wont to tipple with him at

alehouses_; these wonder now to see the change, _quantum mutatus, the

man is quite another thing_, he is disenthralled, manumitted, he wonders

what so bewitched him, he can now both see, hear, smell, handle,

converse with his mistress, single by reason of the death of his rival,

a widow having children, grown willing, prompt, amorous, shewing no such

great dislike to second nuptials, he might have her for asking, no such

thing, his mind is changed, he loathes his former meat, had liever eat

ratsbane, aconite, his humour is to die a bachelour; marke the

conclusion. In this humour of celibate seven other years are consumed

in idleness, sloth, world's pleasures, which fatigate, satiate, induce

wearinesse, vapours, _tædium vitæ_: When upon a day, behold a wonder,

_redit Amor_, the man is as sick as ever, he is commenced lover upon the

old stock, walks with his hand thrust in his bosom for negligence,

moping he leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite,

eyes sunken, _anhelus, breath wheezy and asthmatical, by reason of

overmuch sighing_: society he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what shall

he doe? all this while his mistresse is forward, coming, _amantissima,

ready to jump at once into his mouth_, her he hateth, feels disgust when

she is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, old, a painted Jesabeel, Alecto,

Megara, and Tisiphone all at once, a Corinthian Lais, a strumpet, only

not handsome; that which he affecteth so much, that which drives him

mad, distracted, phrenetic, beside himself, is no beauty which lives,

nothing in _rerum naturâ_, (so he might entertain a hope of a cure) but

something which is not, can never be, a certain _fantastic opinion_ or

_notional image_ of his mistresse, _that which she was_, and that which

hee thought her to be, in former times, how beautiful! torments him,

frets him, follows him, makes him that he wishes to die.

This Caprichio, _Sir Humourous_, hee cometh to me to be cured. I counsel

marriage with his mistresse, according to Hippocrates his method,

together with milk diet, herbs, aloes, and wild parsley, good in such

cases, though Avicenna preferreth some sorts of wild fowl, teals,

widgeons, becca ficos, which men in Sussex eat. He flies out in a

passion, ho! ho; and falls to calling me names, dizzard, ass, lunatic,

moper, Bedlamite, Pseudo-Democritus. I smile in his face, bidding him be

patient, tranquil, to no purpose, he still rages, I think this man must

fetch his remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land, Islands in the Moone, &c.

EXTRACT II

* * * * * Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst themselves, in

logomachies, subtile controversies, many dry blows given on either

side, contentions of learned men, or such as would be so thought, as

_Bodinus de Periodis_ saith of such an one, _arrident amici ridet

mundus_, in English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they

flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwile the world thinks

him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. * * * * * Philosophy

running mad, madness philosophizing, much idle-learned enquiries, what

truth is? and no issue, fruit, of all these noises, only huge books are

written, and who is the wiser? * * * * * Men sitting in the Doctor's

chair, we marvel how they got there, being _homines intellectûs

pulverulenti_, as _Trincauellius_ notes; they care not so they may raise

a dust to smother the eyes of their oppugners; _homines parvulissimi_ as

_Lemnius_, whom _Alcuin_ herein taxeth of a crude Latinism; dwarfs,

minims, the least little men, these spend their time, and it is odds but

they lose their time and wits too into the bargain, chacing of nimble

and retiring Truth: Her they prosecute, her still they worship,

_libant_, they make libations, spilling the wine, as those old Romans in

their sacrificials, _Cerealia, May-games_: Truth is the game all these

hunt after, to the extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the moistures,

_humidum radicale exsiccant_, as _Galen_, in his counsels to one oft

these wear-wits, brain-moppers, spunges, saith. * * * * and for all this

_nunquam metam attingunt_, and how should they? they bowle awry,

shooting beside the marke; whereas it should appear, that _Truth

absolute_ on this planet of ours is scarcely to be found, but in her

stede _Queene Opinion_ predominates, governs, whose shifting and ever

mutable _Lampas_, me seemeth, is man's destinie to follow, she

præcurseth, she guideth him, before his uncapable eyes she frisketh her

tender lights, which entertayne the child-man, untill what time his

sight be strong to endure the vision of _Very Truth_, which is in the

heavens, the vision beatifical, as _Anianus_ expounds in his argument

against certain mad wits which helde God to be corporeous; these were

dizzards, fools, _gothamites_. * * * * but and if _Very Truth_ be extant

indeede on earth, as some hold she it is which actuates men's deeds,

purposes, ye may in vaine look for her in the learned universities,

halls, colleges. Truth is no Doctoresse, she takes no degrees at Paris

or Oxford, amongst great clerks, disputants, subtile Aristotles, men

_nodosi ingenii, able to take Lully by the chin_, but oftentimes to

such an one as myself, an _Idiota_ or common person, _no great things_,

melancholizing in woods where waters are, quiet places by rivers,

fountains, whereas the silly man expecting no such matter, thinketh

only how best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with

_Natura_ her pleasaunt scenes, woods, water-falls, or _Art_ her

statelie gardens, parks, terraces, _Belvideres_, on a sudden the

goddesse herself _Truth_ has appeared, with a shyning lyghte, and a

sparklyng countenance, so as yee may not be able lightly to resist her

* * * * *

EXTRACT III

This morning, May 2, 1662, having first broken my fast upon eggs and

cooling salades, mellows, water-cresses, those herbes, according to

_Villanovus_ his prescription, who disallows the use of meat in a

morning as gross, fat, hebetant, _feral_, altogether fitter for wild

beasts than men, _e contra_ commendeth this herb-diete for gentle,

humane, active, conducing to contemplation in most men, I betook myselfe

to the nearest fields. (Being in London I commonly dwell in the

_suburbes_, as airiest, quietest, _loci musis propriores_, free from

noises of caroches, waggons, mechanick, and base workes, workshoppes,

also sights, pageants, spectacles of outlandlish birds, fishes,

crocodiles, _Indians_, mermaids, adde quarrels, fightings, wranglings of

the common sort, _plebs_, the rabble, duelloes with fists, _proper to

this island_, at which the stiletto'd and secrete _Italian_ laughs.)

Withdrawing myselfe from these buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a

_bezo las manos_ to the city, I begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as

horses _dilatis naribus_ snort the fresh aires, with exceeding great

delight, when suddenly there crosses me a procession sad, heavy,

dolourous, tristfull, melancholick, able to change mirth into dolour,

and overcast a clearer atmosphere than possibly the neighbourhoods of so

great a citty can afford. An old man, a poore man, deceased, is borne on

men's shoulders to a poore buriall, without solemnities of hearse,

mourners, plumes, _mutæ personæ, those personate actors that will weep

if yee skew them a piece of silver_; none of those customed civilities

of children, kinsfolk, _dependants_, following the coffin; he died a

poore man, his friends _assessores opum, those cronies of his that stuck

by him so long as he had a penny_, now leave him, forsake him, shun him,

desert him; they think it much to follow his putrid and stinking carcase

to the grave; his children, if he had any, for commonly the case stands

thus, this poore man his son dies before him, he survives, poore,

indigent, base, dejected, miserable, &c. or if he have any which survive

him, _sua negotia agunt_, they mind their own business, forsooth,

cannot, will not, find time, leisure, _inclination, extremum munus

perficere_, to follow to the pit their old indulgent father, which loved

them, stroked them, caressed them, cockering them up, _quantum potuit_,

as farre as his means extended, while they were babes, chits, _minims_,

hee may rot in his grave, lie stinking in the sun _for them_, have no

buriall at all, they care not. _O nefas!_ Chiefly I noted the coffin to

have been _without a pall_, nothing but a few planks, of cheapest wood

that could be had, _naked_, having none of the ordinary _symptomata_ of

a funerall, those _locularii_ which bare the body having on diversely

coloured coats, _and none black_: (one of these reported the deceased to

have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in the

workhouse of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to whose proper burying-ground he

was now going for interment). All which when I behelde, hardly I

refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing: "If this man

had been rich, a _Crœsus_, a _Crassus, or as rich as Whittington_, what

pompe, charge, lavish cost, expenditure, of rich buriall,

_ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies_, had been thought too

good for such an one; what store of panegyricks, elogies, funeral

orations, &c. some beggarly poetaster, worthy to be beaten for his ill

rimes, crying him up, hee was rich, generous, bountiful, polite,

learned, _a Mæcenas_, while as in very deede he was nothing lesse: what

weeping, sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining, kinsmen, friends,

relatives, fortieth cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the deceased;

hypocriticall heirs, sobbing, striking their breasts, (they care not if

he had died a year ago); so many clients, dependants, flatterers,

_parasites, cunning Gnathoes_, tramping on foot after the hearse, all

their care is, who shall stand fairest with the successour; he mean time

(like enough) spurns them from him, spits at them, treads them under his

foot, will have nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the

right: _Hæc sunt majora gravitate Heracliti. The follies are enough to

give crying Heraclitus a fit of the spleene._

* * * * *

EARLY JOURNALISM

I.--G. F. COOKE IN "RICHARD THE THIRD"

(1802)

Some few of us remember to have _seen_, and all of us have heard our

fathers tell of Quin, and Garrick, and Barry, and some faint traditional

notices are left us of their manner in particular scenes, and their

stile of delivering certain emphatic sentences. Hence our curiosity is

excited, when a _new Hamlet_ or a _new Richard_ makes his appearance, in

the first place, to inquire, how he acted in the _Closet scene_, in the

_Tent scene_; how he looked, and how he started, when the _Ghost_ came

on, and how he cried

Off with his head. So much for Buckingham.

We do not reprehend this minute spirit of comparison. On the contrary,

we consider it as a delightful artifice, by which we connect the

recreations of the past with those of the present generation, what

pleased our fathers with what pleases us. We love to witness the

obstinate attachments, the unconquerable prejudices (as they seem to

us), of the old men, our seniors, the whimsical gratification they

appear to derive from the very refusal to be gratified; to hear them

talk of the good _old_ actors, whose race is for ever extinct.

With these impressions, we attended the first appearance of Mr. Cooke,

in the character of _Richard the Third_, last winter. We thought that he

"bustled" through the scenes with at least as much spirit and effect as

any of his predecessors whom we remember in the part, and was not

deficient in the delivery of any of those rememberable speeches and

exclamations, which old prescription hath set up as _criteria_ of

comparison. Now that the grace of freshness is worn off, and Mr. Cooke

is no longer a novitiate candidate for public favour, we propose to

enter into the question--whether that popular actor is right or wrong in

his conception of the great outlines of the character; those strong

essential differences which separate _Richard_ from all the other

creations of Shakespeare. We say _of Shakespeare_; for though the Play,

which passes for _his_ upon the _Stage_, materially differs from _that_

which _he_ wrote under the same title, being in fact little better than

a compilation or a cento of passages extracted from other of his Plays,

and applied with gross violations of propriety (as we are ready at any

time to point out), besides some miserable additions, which _he_ never

could have written; all together producing an inevitable inconsistency

of character, sufficient to puzzle and confound the _best Actor; yet_,

in this chaos and perplexity, we are of opinion, that it becomes an

Actor to shew his taste, by adhering, as much as possible, to the spirit

and intention of the original Author, and to consult his _safety_ in

_steering_ by the _Light_, which Shakespeare holds out to him, as by a

great _Leading Star_. Upon these principles, we presume to censure Mr.

Cooke, while we are ready to acknowledge, that this Actor presents us

with a very original and very forcible portrait (if not of the _man

Richard_, whom Shakespeare drew, yet) of the _monster Richard_, as he

exists in the _popular idea_, in _his own exaggerated_ and _witty

self-abuse_, in the overstrained representations of the parties who were

_sufferers_ by his _ambition_; and, above all, in the impertinent and

wretched _scenes_, so absurdly foisted in by some, who have thought

themselves capable of adding to what _Shakespeare wrote_.

But of Mr. Cooke's _Richard_:

1st. _His predominant and masterly simulation._

He has a tongue can wheedle with the DEVIL.

It has been the policy of that antient and grey simulator, in all ages,

to hide his _horns_ and _claws_. The _Richard_ of Mr. Cooke perpetually

obtrudes _his_. We see the effect of his deceit uniformly _successful_,

but we do not comprehend _how_ it _succeeds_. We can put ourselves, by a

very common fiction, into the place of the individuals upon whom it

acts, and say, that, in the like case, we should not have been alike

credulous. The hypocrisy is too glaring and visible. It resembles more

the shallow cunning of a mind which is its own dupe, than the profound

and practised art of so powerful an intellect as _Richard's_. It is too

obstreperous and loud, breaking out into _triumphs_ and _plaudits_ at

its own success, like an unexercised _noviciate_ in _tricks_. It has

none of the silent confidence, and steady self-command of the

_experienced politician_; it possesses none of that _fine address_,

which was necessary to have betrayed the heart of _Lady Anne_, or even

to have imposed upon the duller wits of the _Lord Mayor_ and _Citizens_.

2dly. _His habitual jocularity_, the effect of buoyant spirits, and an

elastic mind, rejoicing in its own powers, and in the success of its

machinations. This quality of unstrained mirth accompanies _Richard_,

and is a prime feature in his character. It never leaves him; in plots,

in stratagems, and in the midst of his bloody devices, it is perpetually

driving him upon wit, and jests, and personal satire, fanciful

allusions, and quaint felicities of phrase. It is one of the chief

artifices by which the consummate master of dramatic effect has

contrived to soften the horrors of the scene, and to make us contemplate

a bloody and vicious character with delight. No where, in any of his

plays, is to be found so much of sprightly colloquial dialogue, and

soliloquies of genuine humour, as in _Richard_. This character of

unlaboured mirth Mr. Cooke seems entirely to pass over, and substitutes

in its stead the coarse, taunting humour, and clumsy merriment, of a

low-minded assassin.

3dly. _His personal deformity._--When the _Richard_ of Mr. Cooke makes

allusions to his own _form_, they seem accompanied with _unmixed

distaste_ and _pain_, like some obtrusive and _haunting_ idea--But

surely the _Richard_ of Shakespeare mingles in these allusions a

perpetual reference to his own powers and capacities, by which he is

enabled to surmount these petty objections; and the joy of a defect

_conquered_, or _turned_ into an advantage, is one cause of these very

allusions, and of the satisfaction, with which his mind recurs to them.

These allusions themselves are made in an ironical and good humoured

spirit of exaggeration--the most bitter of them are to be found in his

self-congratulating soliloquy spoken in the very moment and crisis of

joyful exultation on the success of his unheard of courtship.--No

_partial excellence_ can satisfy for this absence of a _just general

conception_--otherwise we are inclined to admit, that, in the delivery

of _single sentences_, in a _new_ and often _felicitous_ light thrown

upon _old_ and _hitherto misconstrued_ passages, no actor that we have

seen has gone beyond Mr. Cooke. He is always _alive_ to the scene before

him; and by the _fire_ and _novelty_ of his manner, he seems likely to

infuse some _warm blood_ into the _frozen declamatory stile_, into

which our theatres have for some time past been degenerating.

II.--GRAND STATE BED

Ever since an account of the Marquis of Exeter's Grand State Bed

appeared in the fashionable world, grandeur in this article of furniture

has become quite the rage. Among others the Lord Mayor feeling for the

dignity of the city of London, has petitioned the Corporation for one of

great splendour to be placed in the Mansion-house, _at the City's

expence_.

We have been favoured with a description of this magnificent state bed,

the choice of his Lordship. The body is formed by the callipee, or under

shell of a large turtle, carved in mahogany, and sufficiently capacious

to receive two well-fed people. The callipash, or upper shell, forms the

canopy. The posts are four gigantic figures richly gilt: two of them

accurate copies of Gog and Magog; the other two represent Sir William

Walworth and the last man in armour. Cupids with custards are the

supporters. The curtains are of mazarine purple, and curiously wrought

with the series of the idle and industrious apprentice from Hogarth, in

gold embroidery: but the vallens exceed description; _there_, the

various incidents in the life of Whittington are painted. The mice in

one of the compartments are done so much to the life, that his

Lordship's cat, who is an accurate judge of mice, was deceived. The

quilt is of fashionable patchwork figures, the description of which we

shall not anticipate, as, we understand, Mr. Birch has obtained a sketch

of it for his large Twelfth Cake. The whole is worthy of the taste of

the first Magistrate of the first City in the world.

III.--FABLE FOR TWELFTH DAY

Once upon a high and solemn occasion all the great _fasts_ and

_festivals_ in the year presented themselves before the throne of

_Apollo, God of Days_.--Each brought an offering in his hand, as is the

custom all over the _East_, that no man shall appear before the presence

of the King empty-handed. _Shrove-Tuesday_ was there with his

_pan-cakes_, and _Ash-Wednesday_ with his oblation of _fish_.

_Good-Friday_ brought the mystical _bun_. _Christmas-Day_ came bending

underneath an intolerable load of _turkeys_ and _mince-pies_, his

snow-white temples shaded with _holly_ and the sacred _misletoe_, and

_singing_ a _carol_ as he advanced. Next came the _Thirtieth_ of

_January_, bearing a _calf's-head_ in a charger; but _Apollo_ no sooner

understood the emblematical meaning of the offering, than the stomach of

the _God_ turned sick, and with visible indignation and abhorrence he

ordered the unfortunate _Day_ out of his presence--the contrite _Day_

returned in a little time, bearing in his hands a _Whig_ (a sort of cake

well-tempered and delicious)--the _God_ with smiles accepted the

atonement, and the happy _Day_ understood that his peace was made, he

promising never to bring such a dish into the presence of a _God_ again.

Then came the august _Fourth_ of _June_, crowned with such a crown as

British Monarchs commonly wear, leading into the presence the venerable

_Nineteenth_ of _May_--_Apollo_ welcomed the royal pair, and placed them

nearest to himself, and welcomed their noble progeny, their eldest-born

and heir, the accomplished _Twelfth_ of _August_, with all his brave

brothers and handsome sisters. Only the merry _First_ of _April_ who is

retained in the Court of _Apollo_ as _King's Jester_, made some mirth by

his reverent inquiries after the health of the _Eighteenth_ of

_January_, who, being a _kept_ mistress, had not been deemed a proper

personage to be introduced into such an assembly. _Apollo_, laughing,

rebuked the petulance of his wit; so all was mirth and good humour in

the palace--only the sorrowful _Epiphany_ stood silent and abashed--he

was _poor_, and had come before the King without an oblation. The _God_

of _Days_ perceived his confusion, and turning to the _Muses_ (who are

_nine_), and to the _Graces_, his hand-maids (who are _three_ in

number), he beckoned to them, and gave to them in charge to prepare a

_Cake_ of the richest and preciousest ingredients: they obeyed,

tempering with their fine and delicate fingers the spices of the _East_,

the bread-flour of the _West_, with the fruits of the _South_, pouring

over all the _Ices_ of the _North_. The God himself crowned the whole

with _talismanic figures_, which contained this wondrous virtue--that

whosoever ate of the _Cake_ should forthwith become _Kings_ and

_Queens_. Lastly, by his heralds, he invested the trembling and thankful

_Epiphany_ with the privilege of presenting this Cake before the King

upon an annual festival for ever. Now this Cake is called _Twelfth

Cake_ upon earth, after the _number_ of the virgins who fashioned the

same, being nine and three.

IV.--THE LONDONER

(1802. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Mr. Reflector,--I was born under the shadow of St. Dunstan's steeple,

just where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this

twofold city meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar. The

same day which gave me to the world, saw London happy in the celebration

of her great annual feast. This I cannot help looking upon as a lively

omen of the future great good will which I was destined to bear toward

the city, resembling in kind that solicitude which every Chief

Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever concerns her interests and

well being. Indeed I consider myself in some sort a speculative Lord

Mayor of London: for though circumstances unhappily preclude me from the

hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and Spital Sermon,

yet thus much will I say of myself in truth, that Whittington with his

Cat (just emblem of vigilance and a furred gown) never went beyond me in

affection, which I bear to the citizens.

I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot in me an

entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost

insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion

was never interrupted or suspended, except for a few years in the

younger part of my life, during a period in which I had set my

affections upon a charming young woman. Every man while the passion is

upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows and

purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I contracted

just familiarity enough with rural objects to understand tolerably well

ever after the _poets_, when they declaim in such passionate terms in

favor of a country life.

For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in declaring,

that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-lane

Theatre, just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer

pleasures, than I could ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep

that ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs.

This passion for crowds is no where feasted so full as in London. The

man must have a rare _recipe_ for melancholy, who can be dull in

Fleet-street. I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it

vanishes, like all other ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or

distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my

humour, till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies with

the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at

all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime.

The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from

habit do not displease me. The endless succession of shops where _Fancy

miscalled Folly_ is supplied with perpetual gauds and toys, excite in me

no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with

its proper food. The obliging customer, and the obliged

tradesman--things which live by bowing, and things which exist but for

homage--do not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive nothing but

urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover meaness: I love the

very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most familiar to my

vision. I see grand principles of honor at work in the dirty ring which

encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal

justice in the detection of a pickpocket. The salutary astonishment with

which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than a

hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man

in all ages has leaned to order and good government.

Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest incidents of a

town life, is attained by the same well-natured alchymy, with which the

Foresters of Arden, in a beautiful country,

Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

Where has spleen her food but in London? Humour, Interest, Curiosity,

suck at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated.

Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been

doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such

scenes!

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

A LONDONER.

* * * * *

CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE.

(1808. TEXT OF 1818)

When I selected for publication, in 1808, Specimens of English Dramatic

Poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of extracts which

I was anxious to give were, not so much passages of wit and humour,

though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion, sometimes

of the deepest quality, interesting situations, serious descriptions,

that which is more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic

rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I made choice of were, with

few exceptions, such as treat of human life and manners, rather than

masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their train of abstractions,

unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals--Claius, and Medorus, and

Amintas, and Amarillis. My leading design was, to illustrate what may be

called the moral sense of our ancestors. To shew in what manner they

felt, when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying

circumstances, in the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of

contending duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how

their griefs were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated: how much

of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in

his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was

also desirous to bring together some of the most admired scenes of

Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only dramatic

poets of that age entitled to be considered after Shakspeare, and, by

exhibiting them in the same volume with the more impressive scenes of

old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others, to shew what

we had slighted, while beyond all proportion we had been crying up one

or two favourite names. From the desultory criticisms which accompanied

that publication, I have selected a few which I thought would best stand

by themselves, as requiring least immediate reference to the play or

passage by which they were suggested.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

_Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen._--This tragedy is in King

Cambyses' vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; "huffing braggart

puft lines," such as the play-writers anterior to Shakspeare are full

of, and Pistol but coldly imitates.

_Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd._--The lunes of

Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnazar's are mere

modest pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian

Shepherd. He comes in, drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these

_pampered jades of Asia_ that they can _draw but twenty miles a day_.

Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was

any thing more than a pleasant burlesque of mine ancient's. But I can

assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a play, which their

ancestors took to be serious.

_Edward the Second._--In a very different style from mighty Tamburlaine

is the tragedy of Edward the Second. The reluctant pangs of abdicating

royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakspeare scarcely improved in

his Richard the Second; and the death-scene of Marlowe's king moves pity

and terror beyond any scene antient or modern with which I am

acquainted.

_The Rich Jew of Malta._--Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to

Shakspeare's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second.

Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please

the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal

machines. He is just such an exhibition as a century or two earlier

might have been played before the Londoners "by the royal command," when

a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously

resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to see a superstition wearing

out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious ancestors contemplated with so

much horror, has nothing in it now revolting. We have tamed the claws of

the beast, and pared its nails, and now we take it to our arms, fondle

it, write plays to flatter it; it is visited by princes, affects a

taste, patronizes the arts, and is the only liberal and gentlemanlike

thing in Christendom.

_Doctor Faustus._--The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene are

awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring him

nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an

agony and a fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have been tainted

with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the Trinity. To such

a genius the history of Faustus must have been delectable food: to

wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the

dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are

the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the tree of

knowledge.[2] Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings

of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects.

They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of

putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction. But the

holiest minds have sometimes not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit

impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking

her own dialect; and, themselves being armed with an unction of

self-confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that

familiarly, which would be death to others. Milton in the person of

Satan has started speculations hardier than any which the feeble armoury

of the atheist ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson

has strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling

sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which

Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester, wanted depth of libertinism enough to

have invented.

[2] Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor Adamites

may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself, and from

the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.--_Howell's Letters._

THOMAS DECKER

_Old Fortunatus._--The humour of a frantic lover, in the scene where

Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which himself,

being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamoured to frenzy of

the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as

passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He is just

such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the world are

with him

----A swarm of fools

Crowding together to be counted wise.

He talks "pure Biron and Romeo," he is almost as poetical as they, quite

as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's sectaries are

a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy,

since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health

and disease; the kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis in the

ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful

wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, valour and weakness;

the servitude above freedom; the gentle mind's religion; the liberal

superstition.

_The Honest Whore._--There is in the second part of this play, where

Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her

profession, a simple picture of honour and shame, contrasted without

violence, and expressed without immodesty, which is worth all the

_strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of

this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected,

who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest

circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. But so

near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out

sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The

same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served

but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will

serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in

other men. When Cervantes with such proficiency of fondness dwells upon

the Don's library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of books

of knight-errantry--perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of

falling into those very extravagancies which he ridiculed so happily in

his hero?

JOHN MARSTON

_Antonio and Mellida._--The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the

first part of this tragedy, where Andrugio Duke of Genoa banished his

country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the

territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but

Lucio an old nobleman, and a page--resembles that of Lear and Kent in

that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a kinglike

impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies

which he enters lists to combat, "Despair and mighty Grief and sharp

Impatience," and the forces which he brings to vanquish them, "cornets

of horse," &c. are in the boldest style of allegory. They are such a

"race of mourners" as the "infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect

might beget on some "pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue

to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic

note of preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those

old tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so highly

commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of

"intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in

without discretion corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a

preparative as the "warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse heard

cry."

_What you Will.--O I shall ne'er forget how he went cloath'd._ Act I.

Scene 1.--To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we must

advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon

habited like the merchant here described would have excited among the

flat round caps and cloth stockings upon 'Change, when those "original

arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were in fashion, not more

for thrift and usefulness than for distinction and grace." The blank

uniformity to which all professional distinctions in apparel have been

long hastening, is one instance of the decay of symbols among us, which,

whether it has contributed or not to make us a more intellectual, has

certainly made us a less imaginative people. Shakspeare knew the force

of signs: a "malignant and a turban'd Turk." This "meal-cap miller,"

says the author of God's Revenge against Murder, to express his

indignation at an atrocious outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon

the person of the fair Marieta.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

_The Merry Devil of Edmonton._--The scene in this delightful comedy, in

which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend," touches

the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader happy. Few

of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to this. They

torture and wound us abundantly. They are economists only in delight.

Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler, than the

conversation and compliments of these young men. How delicious is

Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that Jerningham has a

"Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his friend reminds him! I wish it

could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for believing, that

Michael Drayton was the author of this piece. It would add a worthy

appendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my native Earth; who has

gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the fidelity of a herald,

and the painful love of a son; who has not left a rivulet, so narrow

that it may be stept over, without honorable mention; and has animated

hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams of old

mythology.

THOMAS HEYWOOD

_A Woman Killed with Kindness._--Heywood is a sort of _prose_

Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we

miss _the poet_, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and above

the surface of _the nature_. Heywood's characters in this play, for

instance, his country gentlemen, &c. are exactly what we see, but of the

best kind of what we see, in life. Shakspeare makes us believe, while we

are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are

familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old; but we awake, and sigh

for the difference.

_The English Traveller._--Heywood's preface to this play is interesting,

as it shews the heroic indifference about the opinion of posterity,

which some of these great writers seem to have felt. There is

magnanimity in authorship as in every thing else. His ambition seems to

have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players speak his

lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever contemplated the

possibility of being read by after ages. What a slender pittance of fame

was motive sufficient to the production of such plays as the English

Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and the Woman Killed with Kindness!

Posterity is bound to take care that a writer loses nothing by such a

noble modesty.

THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY

_A Fair Quarrel._--The insipid levelling morality to which the modern

stage is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as these

scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid

infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous

passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old

dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in

the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a beauty and

truth of moral feeling, no less than in the everlastingly inculcated

duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical

meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never so absurd, never

fails of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented

on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the

play, and find a wonderful sympathy of disposition between them. We have

a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which a writer may be

supplied without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own

breast. To know the boundaries of honour, to be judiciously valiant, to

have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings

of youth, to esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a

parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious

cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and

tottering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword

which the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so

keen an edge upon but lately: to do, or to imagine this done in a

feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater

delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the

writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as

opposed to the laws of the land, or a common-place against duelling. Yet

such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far better stead than

Captain Agar and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered as

a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they

were living.

WILLIAM ROWLEY

_A New Wonder; a Woman Never Vext._--The old play-writers are

distinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition, they shew every thing

without being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune is to be exhibited, they

fairly bring us to the prison-grate and the almsbasket. A poor man on

our stage is always a gentleman, he may be known by a peculiar neatness

of apparel, and by wearing black. Our delicacy in fact forbids the

dramatizing of distress at all. It is never shewn in its essential

properties; it appears but as the adjunct of some virtue, as something

which is to be relieved, from the approbation of which relief the

spectators are to derive a certain soothing of self-referred

satisfaction. We turn away from the real essences of things to hunt

after their relative shadows, moral duties; whereas, if the truth of

things were fairly represented, the relative duties might be safely

trusted to themselves, and moral philosophy lose the name of a science.

THOMAS MIDDLETON

_The Witch._--Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms

in Macbeth, and the incantations in this play, which is supposed to have

preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much from the originality

of Shakspeare. His witches are distinguished from the witches of

Middleton by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man or

woman, plotting some dire mischief, might resort for occasional

consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to

men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is

spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the

fascination. These witches can hurt the body, those have power over the

soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of

Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended

from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence

they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are

without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They

come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all

we know of them. Except Hecate, they have no _names_; which heightens

their mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties, which the

other author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are

serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist with mirth. But, in a

lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power

too is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars, jealousies,

strifes, "like a thick scurf" over life.

WILLIAM ROWLEY,--THOMAS DECKER,--JOHN FORD, &c.

_The Witch of Edmonton._--Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs from

the hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain traditional

old woman witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and ignorant; the

terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice. That should be a

hardy sheriff, with the power of the county at his heels, that would

lay hands upon the Weird Sisters. They are of another jurisdiction. But

upon the common and received opinion, the author (or authors) have

engrafted strong fancy. There is something frightfully earnest in her

invocations to the Familiar.

CYRIL TOURNEUR

_The Revenger's Tragedy._--The reality and life of the dialogue, in

which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then threaten

her with death for consenting to the dishonour of their sister, passes

any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle,

and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I were presently

about to proclaim such malefactions of myself as the brothers here

rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like

than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such power has the passion

of shame truly personated, not only to strike guilty creatures unto the

soul, but to "appal" even those that are "free."

JOHN WEBSTER

_The Duchess of Malfy._--All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus

with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the waxen images

which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the

bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification by degrees,--are

not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the

strange character of suffering which they seem to bring upon their

victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets. As they are not like

inflictions of this life, so her language seems not of this world. She

has lived among horrors till she is become "native and endowed [indued]

unto that element." She speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue has a

smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to

touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to

wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with

mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.

Inferior geniuses may "upon horror's head horrors accumulate," but they

cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality; they terrify babes

with painted devils; but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their

terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

_The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona._--This White Devil of Italy

sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an

innocence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see that matchless beauty

of her face which inspires such gay confidence into her, and are ready

to expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very judges, her

accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as spectators, and all the

court, will rise and make proffer to defend her in spite of the utmost

conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don Quixote make proffer to

follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela, "without making any profit of

her manifest resolution made there in their hearing."

So sweet and lovely does she make the shame,

Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,

Does spot the beauty of her budding name!

I never saw any thing like the funeral dirge in this play, for the death

of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned

father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of

the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to

resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.

In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that

there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorize

us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to Hieronymo. I

suspected the agency of some more potent spirit. I thought that Webster

might have furnished them. They seemed full of that wild, solemn,

preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy.

On second consideration, I think this a hasty criticism. They are more

like the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus.

The sorrows of the Duchess set inward; if she talks, it is little more

than soliloquy imitating conversation in a kind of bravery.

JOHN FORD

_The Broken Heart._--I do not know where to find, in any play, a

catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as in this. This is

indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high actions.

The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out his bowels

till he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this

dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of the inmost mind, which

Calantha, with a holy violence against her nature, keeps closely

covered, till the last duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled.

Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake; a little bodily

suffering. These torments

On the purest spirits prey,

As on entrails, joints, and limbs,

With answerable pains, but more intense.

What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its weaknesses!

Who would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so strong? The

expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in imagination to

Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some analogy between the

scenical sufferings which we are here contemplating, and the real

agonies of that final completion to which we dare no more than hint a

reference. Ford was of the first order of poets. He sought for

sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly

where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and

sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above

mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of

Giovanni and Annabella, in the play[3] which stands at the head of the

modern collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that

fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of

beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity,

and shews hints of an improveable greatness in the lowest descents and

degradations of our nature.

[3] 'Tis Pity she is a Whore.

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE

_Alaham, Mustapha._--The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among his

poems, might with more propriety have been termed political treatises

than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make passion,

character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient to the

expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is nine parts Machiavel and

Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this writer's estimate of

the powers of the mind, the understanding must have held a most

tyrannical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his plays, or his most

passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with

intellect. The finest movements of the human heart, the utmost grandeur

of which the soul is capable, are essentially comprised in the actions

and speeches of Cælica and Camena. Shakspeare, who seems to have had a

peculiar delight in contemplating womanly perfection, whom for his many

sweet images of female excellence all women are in an especial manner

bound to love, has not raised the ideal of the female character higher

than Lord Brooke, in these two women, has done. But it requires a study

equivalent to the learning of a new language to understand their meaning

when they speak. It is indeed hard to hit:

Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day

Or seven though one should musing sit.

It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to express

the emotions of our sensitive natures. There would be all knowledge, but

sympathetic expressions would be wanting.

BEN JONSON

_The Case is Altered._--The passion for wealth has worn out much of its

grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of money

as able to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not considered

simply as a symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they introduce a

miser, make him address his gold as his mistress; as something to be

seen, felt, and hugged; as capable of satisfying two of the senses at

least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying medium in the place of

the good old tangible metal, has made avarice quite a Platonic affection

in comparison with the seeing, touching, and handling-pleasures of the

old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no more satisfy the touch of a true

sensualist in this passion, than Creusa could return her husband's

embrace in the shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spenser; Barabas's

contemplation of his wealth in the Rich Jew of Malta; Luke's raptures in

the City Madam; the idolatry and absolute gold-worship of the miser

Jaques in this early comic production of Ben Jonson's. Above all hear

Guzman, in that excellent old translation of the Spanish Rogue,

expatiate on the "ruddy cheeks of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish

pistolets, your plump and full-faced Portuguese, and your clear-skinned

pieces of eight of Castile," which he and his fellows the beggars kept

secret to themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plentiful manner.

"For to have them, to pay them away, is not to enjoy them; to enjoy

them, is to have them lying by us; having no other need of them than to

use them for the clearing of the eye-sight, and the comforting of our

senses. These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of

our doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could

handsomely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative."

_Poetaster._--This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies of

Ben in his own days and ours, who have said that he made a pedantical

use of his learning. He has here revived the whole Court of Augustus, by

a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead.

Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our own tongue more finely

and poetically than they were used to express themselves in their native

Latin. Nothing can be imagined more elegant, refined, and court-like,

than the scenes between this Louis the Fourteenth of antiquity and his

literati. The whole essence and secret of that kind of intercourse is

contained therein. The economical liberality by which greatness, seeming

to waive some part of its prerogative, takes care to lose none of the

essentials; the prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter by

commanded boldness and soothe with complimentary sincerity. These, and a

thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels, and

from those numerous court-masques and entertainments which he was in the

daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to shew the poetical fancy

and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard.

_Alchemist._--The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of

images, words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act 2,

Scene 2) confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come pouring

out like the successive falls of Nilus. They "doubly redouble strokes

upon the foe." Description outstrides proof. We are made to believe

effects before we have testimony for their causes. If there is no one

image which attains the height of the sublime, yet the confluence and

assemblage of them all produces a result equal to the grandest poetry.

The huge Zerxean army countervails against single Achilles. Epicure

Mammon is the most determined offspring of its author. It has the whole

"matter and copy of the father--eye, nose, lip, the trick of his frown."

It is just such a swaggerer as contemporaries have described old Ben to

be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host of the New Inn, have all his image and

superscription. But Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. Sir

Samson Legend, in Love for Love, is such another lying, overbearing

character, but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a "towering

bravery" there is in his sensuality! he affects no pleasure under a

Sultan. It is as if "Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury."

GEORGE CHAPMAN

_Bussy D'Ambois, Byron's Conspiracy, Byron's Tragedy, &c. &c._--Webster

has happily characterised the "full and heightened style" of Chapman,

who, of all the English play-writers, perhaps approaches nearest to

Shakspeare in the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less

purely dramatic. He could not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could

shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in

himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all forms and

modes of being. He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has

not abundantly shewn himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly

a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses re-written. The

earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems,

would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost

Greek zeal for the glory of his heroes can only be paralleled by that

fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, as if personating

one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to

paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle

to Chapman's translations being read, is their unconquerable quaintness.

He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural, and the most

violent and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever words come

first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all other must be

inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in

poetry) is every where present, raising the low, dignifying the mean,

and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers glow, weep,

tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by words, or in

spite of them, be disgusted and overcome their disgust.

FRANCIS BEAUMONT.--JOHN FLETCHER

_Maid's Tragedy._-One characteristic of the excellent old poets is,

their being able to bestow grace upon subjects which naturally do not

seem susceptible of any. I will mention two instances. Zelmane in the

Arcadia of Sidney, and Helena in the All's Well that Ends Well of

Shakspeare. What can be more unpromising at first sight, than the idea

of a young man disguising himself in woman's attire, and passing himself

off for a woman among women; and that for a long space of time? Yet Sir

Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that neither does Pryocles'

manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of Zelmane, nor is the

respect due to the princesses at all diminished when the deception comes

to be known. In the sweetly constituted mind of Sir Philip Sidney, it

seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome meditation could find a

harbour. He turned all that he touched into images of honour and virtue.

Helena in Shakspeare is a young woman seeking a man in marriage. The

ordinary rules of courtship are reversed, the habitual feelings are

crossed. Yet with such exquisite address this dangerous subject is

handled, that Helena's forwardness loses her no honour; delicacy

dispenses with its laws in her favour, and nature, in her single case,

seems content to suffer a sweet violation. Aspatia, in the Maid's

Tragedy, is a character equally difficult, with Helena, of being managed

with grace. She too is a slighted woman, refused by the man who had once

engaged to marry her. Yet it is artfully contrived, that while we pity

we respect her, and she descends without degradation. Such wonders true

poetry and passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which do not

seem capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with

Helena; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but

she suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of the

female character, which Helena never does. Her character has many

degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy; but it has weakness, which, if

we do not despise, we are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and Fletcher

were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys.

_Philaster._--The character of Bellario must have been extremely popular

in its day. For many years after the date of Philaster's first

exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be found without one of these

women pages in it, following in the train of some pre-engaged lover,

calling on the gods to bless her happy rival (his mistress), whom no

doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving rise to many pretty

_equivoques_ by the way on the confusion of sex, and either made happy

at last by some surprising turn of fate, or dismissed with the joint

pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne has a copy of verses to his

mistress, dissuading her from a resolution which she seems to have taken

up from some of these scenical representations, of following him abroad

as a page. It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in

wit, and pathos, that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future

to all such sickly fancies as he there deprecates.

JOHN FLETCHER

_Thierry and Theodoret._--The scene where Ordella offers her life a

sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have always

considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most

perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to Calantha in the

Broken Heart. She is a piece of sainted nature. Yet noble as the whole

passage is, it must be confessed that the manner of it, compared with

Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and languid. Its motion is

circular, not progressive. Each line revolves on itself in a sort of

separate orbid. They do not join into one another like a running-hand.

Fletcher's ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is

tedious, it stops at every turn; he lays line upon line, making up one

after the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see

their junctures. Shakspeare mingles every thing, runs line into line,

embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its

shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking

difference between Fletcher and Shakspeare, is the fondness of the

former for unnatural and violent situations. He seems to have thought

that nothing great could be produced in an ordinary way. The chief

incidents in some of his most admired tragedies shew this.[4] Shakspeare

had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after

violent situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which

I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of

Fletcher is excellent[5] like his serious scenes, but there is something

strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of Nature, he

always goes a little on one side of her. Shakspeare chose her without a

reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and length of days, with

her, for a dowry.

[4] Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.

[5] Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.

_Faithful Shepherdess._--If all the parts of this delightful pastoral

had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric

intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the Arcadia,

to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter

for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander. But a spot is

on the face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation could have

driven Fletcher upon mixing with this "blessedness" such an ugly

deformity as Cloe, the wanton shepherdess! If Cloe was meant to set off

Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that such weeds by

juxta-position do not set off, but kill sweet flowers.

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS DECKER

_The Virgin Martyr._--This play has some beauties of so very high an

order, that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had

poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up to them. His associate Decker,

who wrote Old Fortunatus, had poetry enough for any thing. The very

impurities which obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of this

play, like Satan among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of contrast,

a raciness, and a glow, in them, which are beyond Massinger. They are to

the religion of the rest what Caliban is to Miranda.

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS MIDDLETON.--WILLIAM ROWLEY

_Old Law._--There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making one's

eyes to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness in the

circumstances of this sweet tragi-comedy, which are unlike any thing in

the dramas which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of a subtler edge.

Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in it, had both of them finer

geniuses than their associate.

JAMES SHIRLEY

Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for any

transcendant talent in himself, as that he was the last of a great race,

all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral

feelings and notions in common. A new language, and quite a new turn of

tragic and comic interest, came in with the Restoration.

ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED

(1810. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Sir,--I am one of those unhappy persons whose misfortunes, it seems, do

not entitle them to the benefit of pure pity. All that is bestowed upon

me of that kindest alleviator of human miseries, comes dashed with a

double portion of contempt. My griefs have nothing in them that is felt

as sacred by the bystanders. Yet is my affliction in truth of the

deepest grain. The heaviest task that was ever given to mortal patience

to sustain. Time, that wears out all other sorrows, can never modify or

soften mine. Here they must continue to gnaw, as long as that fatal

mark----

Why was I ever born? Why was innocence in my person suffered to be

branded with a stain which was appointed only for the blackest guilt?

What had I done, or my parents, that a disgrace of mine should involve a

whole posterity in infamy? I am almost tempted to believe, that, in some

pre-existent state, crimes to which this sublunary life of mine hath

been as much a stranger as the babe that is newly born into it, have

drawn down upon me this vengeance, so disproportionate to my actions on

this globe.

My brain sickens, and my bosom labours to be delivered of the weight

that presses upon it, yet my conscious pen shrinks from the avowal. But

out it must----

O, Mr. Reflector! guess at the wretch's misery who now writes this to

you, when, with tears and burning blushes, he is obliged to confess,

that he has been---- HANGED----

Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from you, as your

imagination presents to you fearful images of your correspondent

unknown,--_hanged!_

Fear not, Mr. Editor. No disembodied spirit has the honour of addressing

you. I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate system of bones, muscles,

sinews, arteries, like yourself.

_Then, I presume, you mean to be pleasant--That expression of yours, Mr.

Correspondent, must be taken somehow in a metaphorical sense----_

In the plainest sense, without trope or figure--Yes, Mr. Editor! this

neck of mine has felt the fatal noose,--these hands have tremblingly

held up the corroborative prayer-book,--these lips have sucked the

moisture of the last consolatory orange,--this tongue has chaunted the

doleful cantata which no performer was ever called upon to repeat,--this

face has had the veiling nightcap drawn over it----

But for no crime of mine.--Far be it from me to arraign the justice of

my country, which, though tardy, did at length recognise my innocence.

It is not for me to reflect upon judge or jury, now that eleven years

have elapsed since the erroneous sentence was pronounced. Men will

always be fallible, and perhaps circumstances did appear at the time a

little strong----

Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes, (as the spectators

were pleased to compute it,--a man that is being strangled, I know from

experience, has altogether a different measure of time from his friends

who are breathing leisurely about him,--I suppose the minutes lengthen

as time approaches eternity, in the same manner as the miles get longer

as you travel northward--), after hanging four minutes, according to the

best calculation of the bystanders, a reprieve came, and I was cut

DOWN----

Really I am ashamed of deforming your pages with these technical

phrases--if I knew how to express my meaning shorter----

But to proceed.--My first care after I had been brought to myself by the

usual methods, (those methods that are so interesting to the operator

and his assistants, who are pretty numerous on such occasions,--but

which no patient was ever desirous of undergoing a second time for the

benefit of science), my first care was to provide myself with an

enormous stock or cravat to hide the place--you understand me;--my next

care was to procure a residence as distant as possible from that part of

the country where I had suffered. For that reason I chose the

metropolis, as the place where wounded honour (I had been told) could

lurk with the least danger of exciting enquiry, and stigmatised

innocence had the best chance of hiding her disgrace in a crowd. I

sought out a new circle of acquaintance, and my circumstances happily

enabling me to pursue my fancy in that respect, I endeavoured, by

mingling in all the pleasures which the town affords, to efface the

memory of what I had undergone.

But alas! such is the portentous and all-pervading chain of connection

which links together the head and members of this great community, my

scheme of lying perdu was defeated almost at the outset. A countryman of

mine, whom a foolish law-suit had brought to town, by chance met me, and

the secret was soon blazoned about.

In a short time, I found myself deserted by most of those who had been

my intimate friends. Not that any guilt was supposed to attach to my

character. My officious countryman, to do him justice, had been candid

enough to explain my perfect innocence. But, somehow or other, there is

a want of strong virtue in mankind. We have plenty of the softer

instincts, but the heroic character is gone. How else can I account for

it, that of all my numerous acquaintance, among whom I had the honour of

ranking sundry persons of education, talents, and worth, scarcely here

and there one or two could be found, who had the courage to associate

with a man that had been hanged.

Those few who did not desert me altogether, were persons of strong but

coarse minds; and from the absence of all delicacy in them I suffered

almost as much as from the superabundance of a false species of it in

the others. Those who stuck by me were the jokers, who thought

themselves entitled by the fidelity which they had shewn towards me to

use me with what familiarity they pleased. Many and unfeeling are the

jests that I have suffered from these rude (because faithful) Achateses.

As they past me in the streets, one would nod significantly to his

companion and say, pointing to me, smoke his cravat, and ask me if I had

got a wen, that I was so solicitous to cover my neck. Another would

enquire, What news from * * * Assizes? (which you may guess, Mr. Editor,

was the scene of my shame), and whether the sessions was like to prove a

maiden one? A third would offer to ensure me from drowning. A fourth

would teaze me with enquiries how I felt when I was swinging, whether I

had not something like a blue flame dancing before my eyes? A fifth took

a fancy never to call me anything but _Lazarus_. And an eminent

bookseller and publisher,--who, in his zeal to present the public with

new facts, had he lived in those days, I am confident, would not have

scrupled waiting upon the person himself last mentioned, at the most

critical period of his existence, to solicit a _few facts relative to

resuscitation_,--had the modesty to offer me ---- guineas per sheet, if

I would write, in his Magazine, a physiological account of my feelings

upon coming to myself.

But these were evils which a moderate fortitude might have enabled me to

struggle with. Alas! Mr. Editor, the women,--whose good graces I had

always most assiduously cultivated, from whose softer minds I had hoped

a more delicate and generous sympathy than I found in the men,--the

women begun to shun me--this was the unkindest blow of all.

But is it to be wondered at? How couldst thou imagine, wretchedest of

beings, that that tender creature Seraphina would fling her pretty arms

about that neck which previous circumstances had rendered infamous? That

she would put up with the refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord?

Or that any analogy could subsist between the knot which binds true

lovers, and the knot which ties malefactors?

I can forgive that pert baggage Flirtilla, who, when I complimented her

one day on the execution which her eyes had done, replied, that, to be

sure, Mr. * * was a judge of those things. But from thy more exalted

mind, Celestina, I expected a more unprejudiced decision.

The person whose true name I conceal under this appellation, of all the

women that I was ever acquainted with, had the most manly turn of mind,

which she had improved by reading and the best conversation. Her

understanding was not more masculine than her manners and whole

disposition were delicately and truly feminine. She was the daughter of

an officer who had fallen in the service of his country, leaving his

widow and Celestina, an only child, with a fortune sufficient to set

them above want, but not to enable them to live in splendour. I had the

mother's permission to pay my addresses to the young lady, and Celestina

seemed to approve of my suit.

Often and often have I poured out my overcharged soul in the presence of

Celestina, complaining of the hard and unfeeling prejudices of the

world, and the sweet maid has again and again declared, that no

irrational prejudice should hinder her from esteeming every man

according to his intrinsic worth. Often has she repeated the consolatory

assurance, that she could never consider as essentially ignominious an

_accident_, which was indeed to be deprecated, but which might have

happened to the most innocent of mankind. Then would she set forth some

illustrious example, which her reading easily furnished, of a Phocion or

a Socrates unjustly condemned; of a Raleigh or a Sir Thomas More, to

whom late posterity had done justice; and by soothing my fancy with some

such agreeable parallel, she would make me almost to triumph in my

disgrace, and convert my shame into glory.

In such entertaining and instructive conversations the time passed on,

till I importunately urged the mistress of my affections to name a day

for our union. To this she obligingly consented, and I thought myself

the happiest of mankind. But how was I surprised one morning on the

receipt of the following billet from my charmer:--

Sir,--You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse failing,

ingratitude, if, with anguish of heart, I feel myself compelled by

irresistible arguments to recall a vow which I fear I made with too

little consideration. I never can be yours. The reasons of my decision,

which is final, are in my own breast, and you must everlastingly remain

a stranger to them. Assure yourself that I can never cease to esteem you

as I ought.

CELESTINA.

At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to Celestina's

lodgings, where I learned, to my infinite mortification, that the mother

and daughter were set off on a journey to a distant part of the country,

to visit a relation, and were not expected to return in less than four

months.

Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage to solicit an

explanation by letter, even if I had known where they were, (for the

particular address was industriously concealed from me), I waited with

impatience the termination of the period, in the vain hope that I might

be permitted to have a chance of softening the harsh decision by a

personal interview with Celestina after her return. But before three

months were at an end, I learned from the newspapers, that my beloved

had--given her hand to another!

Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account for the

strange step which she had taken; and it was not till some years after

that I learned the true reason from a female relation of hers, to whom

it seems Celestina had confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit

of mine that had caused her to break off the match so abruptly, nor any

preference which she might feel for any other person, for she preferred

me (she was pleased to say) to all mankind; but when she came to lay the

matter closer to her heart, she found that she never should be able to

bear the sight (I give you her very words as they were detailed to me by

her relation) the sight of a man in a nightcap, who had appeared on a

public platform, it would lead to such a disagreeable association of

ideas! And to this punctilio I was sacrificed.

To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to which this

last and heaviest might well render me callous, behold me here, Mr.

Editor! in the thirty-seventh year of my existence, (the twelfth,

reckoning from my re-animation), cut off from all respectable

connections, rejected by the fairer half of the community,--who in my

case alone seem to have laid aside the characteristic pity of their sex;

punished because I was once punished unjustly; suffering for no other

reason than because I once had the misfortune to suffer without any

cause at all. In no other country, I think, but this, could a man have

been subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his innocence

had been clearly established.

Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the horrible

dungeons of the Inquisition,--had I heaved myself up from a half

bastinado in China, or been torn from the just-entering, ghastly

impaling stake in Barbary,--had I dropt alive from the knout in

Russia, or come off with a gashed neck from the half-mortal,

scarce-in-time-retracted scymeter of an executioneering slave in

Turkey,--I might have borne about the remnant of this frame (the mangled

trophy of reprieved innocence) with credit to myself, in any of those

barbarous countries. No scorn, at least, would have mingled with the

pity (small as it might be) with which what was left of me would have

been surveyed.

The singularity of my case has often led me to enquire into the reasons

of the general levity with which the subject of hanging is treated as a

topic in this country. I say as a topic: for let the very persons who

speak so lightly of the thing at a distance be brought to view the real

scene,--let the platform be bona fide exhibited, and the trembling

culprit brought forth,--the case is changed; but as a topic of

conversation, I appeal to the vulgar jokes which pass current in every

street. But why mention them, when the politest authors have agreed in

making use of this subject as a source of the ridiculous? Swift, and

Pope, and Prior, are fond of recurring to it. Gay has built an entire

drama upon this single foundation. The whole interest of the _Beggar's

Opera_ may be said to hang upon it. To such writers as Fielding and

Smollet it is a perfect _bon[ne]bouche_.--Hear the facetious Tom Brown,

in his _Comical View of London and Westminster_, describe the _Order of

the Show at one of the Tyburn Executions_ in his time:--"Mr. Ordinary

visits his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight. Doleful procession up

Holborn-hill about eleven. Men handsome and proper that were never

thought so before, which is some comfort however. Arrive at the fatal

place by twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and sabbath-breaking, repented of.

Some few penitential drops fall under the gallows. Sheriffs men, parson,

pickpockets, criminals, all very busy. The last concluding peremptory

psalm struck up. Show over by one."--In this sportive strain does this

misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so serious, which yet

he would hardly have done, if he had not known that there existed a

predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen to consider

the subject as a jest. But what shall we say to Shakspeare, who, (not

to mention the solution which the _Gravedigger_ in _Hamlet_ gives of his

fellow workman's problem), in that scene in _Measure for Measure_, where

the _Clown_ calls upon _Master Barnardine_ to get up and be hanged,

which he declines on the score of being sleepy, has actually gone out of

his way to gratify this amiable propensity in his countrymen; for it is

plain, from the use that was to be made of his head, and from

_Abhorson's_ asking, "is the axe upon the block, sirrah?" that

beheading, and not hanging, was the punishment to which _Barnardine_ was

destined. But Shakspeare knew that the axe and block were pregnant with

no ludicrous images, and therefore falsified the historic truth of his

own drama (if I may so speak) rather than he would leave out such

excellent matter for a jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in

mid air has been ever esteemed to be by Englishmen.

One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself into our

contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to be, the absurd

posture into which a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the

vulgar delight to express it, upon nothing. To see him whisking and

wavering in the air,

As the wind you know will wave a man;[6]

[6] Hieronimo in the Spanish tragedy.

to behold the vacant carcase, from which the life is newly dislodged,

shifting between earth and heaven, the sport of every gust; like a

weather-cock, serving to shew from which point the wind blows; like a

maukin, fit only to scare away birds; like a nest left to swing upon a

bough when the bird is flown: these are uses to which we cannot without

a mixture of spleen and contempt behold the human carcase reduced. We

string up dogs, foxes, bats, moles, weasels. Man surely deserves a

steadier death.

Another reason why the ludicrous associates more forcibly with this than

with any other mode of punishment, I cannot help thinking to be, the

senseless costume with which old prescription has thought fit to clothe

the exit of malefactors in this country. Let a man do what he will to

abstract from his imagination all idea of the whimsical, something of it

will come across him when he contemplates the figure of a

fellow-creature in the day-time (in however distressing a situation) in

a night cap. Whether it be that this nocturnal addition has something

discordant with day-light, or that it is the dress which we are seen in

at those times when we are "seen," as the Angel in Milton expresses it,

"least wise;" this I am afraid will always be the case; unless indeed,

as in my instance, some strong personal feeling overpower the ludicrous

altogether. To me, when I reflect upon the train of misfortunes which

have pursued me through life, owing to that accursed drapery, the cap

presents as purely frightful an object as the sleeveless yellow coat and

devil-painted mitre of the San Benitos.--An ancestor of mine, who

suffered for his loyalty in the time of the civil wars, was so sensible

of the truth of what I am here advancing, that on the morning of

execution, no intreaties could prevail upon him to submit to the odious

dishabille, as he called it, but he insisted upon wearing, and actually

suffered in, the identical flowing periwig which he is painted in, in

the gallery belonging to my uncle's seat in ----shire.

Suffer me, Mr. Editor, before I quit the subject, to say a word or two

respecting the minister of justice in this country; in plain words, I

mean the hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the mode of

inflicting capital punishments with us, there is too much of the

ministry of the human hand. The guillotine, as performing its functions

more of itself and sparing human agency, though a cruel and disgusting

exhibition, in my mind, has many ways the advantage over _our way_. In

beheading, indeed, as it was formerly practised in England, and in

whipping to death, as is sometimes practised now, the hand of man is no

doubt sufficiently busy; but there is something less repugnant in these

downright blows than in the officious barber-like ministerings of _the

other_. To have a fellow with his hangman's hands fumbling about your

collar, adjusting the thing as your valet would regulate your cravat,

valuing himself on his menial dexterity----

I never shall forget meeting my rascal,--I mean the fellow who

officiated for me,--in London last winter. I think I see him now,--in a

waistcoat that had been mine,--smirking along as if he knew me----

In some parts of Germany, that fellow's office is by law declared

infamous, and his posterity incapable of being ennobled. They have

hereditary hangmen, or had at least, in the same manner as they had

hereditary other great officers of state; and the hangmen's families of

two adjoining parishes intermarried with each other, to keep the breed

entire. I wish something of the same kind were established in England.

But it is time to quit a subject which teems with disagreeable images--

Permit me to subscribe myself, Mr. Editor,

Your unfortunate friend,

PENSILIS.

ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY; WITH A HINT

TO THOSE WHO HAVE THE FRAMING OF ADVERTISEMENTS FOR APPREHENDING

OFFENDERS

(1810. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Mr. Reflector,--There is no science in their pretensions to which

mankind are more apt to commit grievous mistakes, than in the supposed

very obvious one of physiognomy. I quarrel not with the principles of

this science, as they are laid down by learned professors; much less am

I disposed, with some people, to deny its existence altogether as any

inlet of knowledge that can be depended upon. I believe that there is,

or may be, an art to "read the mind's construction in the face." But,

then, in every species of _reading_, so much depends upon the eyes of

the reader; if they are blear, or apt to dazzle, or inattentive, or

strained with too much attention, the optic power will infallibly bring

home false reports of what it reads. How often do we say, upon a cursory

glance at a stranger, what a fine open countenance he has, who, upon

second inspection, proves to have the exact features of a knave. Nay, in

much more intimate acquaintances, how a delusion of this kind shall

continue for months, years, and then break up all at once.

Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short space of time, if

those blue eyes where, during so many years of anxious courtship, truth,

sweetness, serenity, seemed to be written in characters which could not

be misunderstood--ask him if the characters which they now convey be

exactly the same?--if for truth he does not _read_ a dull virtue (the

mimic of constancy) which changes not, only because it wants the

judgment to make a preference?--if for sweetness he does not _read_ a

stupid habit of looking pleased at every thing;--if for serenity he does

not _read_ animal tranquillity, the dead pool of the heart, which no

breeze of passion can stir into health? Alas! what is this book of the

countenance good for, which when we have read so long, and thought that

we understood its contents, there comes a countless list of

heart-breaking errata at the end!

But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I

have inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose quite

an opposite blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall, through

hate. How ugly a person looks upon whose reputation some awkward

aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his countenance clears up with his

character. I remember being persuaded of a man whom I had conceived an

ill opinion of, that he had a very bad set of teeth; which, since I have

had better opportunities of being acquainted with his face and facts, I

find to have been the very reverse of the truth. _That crooked old

woman_, I once said, speaking of an ancient gentlewoman, whose actions

did not square altogether with my notions of the rule of right. The

unanimous surprise of the company before whom I uttered these words,

soon convinced me that I had confounded mental with bodily obliquity,

and that there was nothing tortuous about the old lady but her deeds.

This humour of mankind to deny personal comeliness to those with whose

moral attributes they are dissatisfied, is very strongly shewn in those

advertisements, which stare us in the face from the walls of every

street, and, with the tempting bait which they hang forth, stimulate at

once cupidity and an abstract love of justice in the breast of every

passing peruser; I mean, the advertisements offering rewards for the

apprehension of absconded culprits, strayed apprentices, bankrupts who

have conveyed away their effects, debtors that have run away from their

bail. I observe, that in exact proportion to the indignity with which

the prosecutor, who is commonly the framer of the advertisement,

conceives he has been treated, the personal pretensions of the fugitive

are denied, and his defects exaggerated.

A fellow, whose misdeeds have been directed against the public in

general, and in whose delinquency no individual shall feel himself

particularly interested, generally meets with fair usage. A coiner or a

smuggler shall get off tolerably well. His beauty, if he has any, is not

much underrated, his deformities are not much magnified. A run-away

apprentice, who excites perhaps the next least degree of spleen in his

prosecutor, generally escapes with a pair of bandy legs; if he has taken

any thing with him in his flight, a hitch in his gait is generally

superadded. A bankrupt, who has been guilty of withdrawing his effects,

if his case be not very atrocious, commonly meets with mild usage. But a

debtor who has left his bail in jeopardy, is sure to be described in

characters of unmingled deformity. Here the personal feelings of the

bail, which may be allowed to be somewhat poignant, are admitted to

interfere; and, as wrath and revenge commonly strike in the dark, the

colours are laid on with a grossness which I am convinced must often

defeat its own purpose. The fish that casts an inky cloud about him that

his enemies may not find him, cannot more obscure himself by that device

than the blackening representations of these angry advertisers must

inevitably serve to cloak and screen the persons of those who have

injured them from detection. I have before me at this moment one of

these bills, which runs thus:--

"FIFTY POUNDS REWARD.

"Run away from his bail, John Tomkins, formerly resident in

Princes-street, Soho, but lately of Clerkenwell. Whoever shall

apprehend, or cause to be apprehended and lodged in one of his

Majesty's jails, the said John Tomkins, shall receive the above

reward. He is a thickset, sturdy man, about five foot six inches

high, halts in his left leg, with a stoop in his gait, with coarse

red hair, nose short and cocked up, with little grey eyes, one of

them bears the effect of a blow which he has lately received, with

a pot belly, speaks with a thick and disagreeable voice, goes

shabbily drest, had on when he went away a greasy shag great coat

with rusty yellow buttons."

Now, although it is not out of the compass of possibility that John

Tomkins aforesaid may comprehend in his agreeable person all the

above-mentioned aggregate of charms; yet, from my observation of the

manner in which these advertisements are usually drawn up, though I have

not the pleasure of knowing the gentleman, yet would I lay a wager, that

an advertisement to the following effect would have a much better chance

of apprehending and laying by the heels this John Tomkins than the above

description, although penned by one who, from the good services which he

appears to have done for him, has not improbably been blessed with some

years of previous intercourse with the said John. Taking, then, the

above advertisement to be true, or nearly so, down to the words "left

leg" inclusive (though I have some doubt if the blemish there implied

amount to a positive lameness, or be perceivable by any but the nearest

friends of John) I would proceed thus:--

--"Leans a little forward in his walk, his hair thick and inclining to

auburn, his nose of the middle size, a little turned up at the end,

lively hazel eyes (the contusion, as its effects are probably gone off

by this time, I judge better omitted) inclines to be corpulent, his

voice thick but pleasing, especially when he sings, had on a decent shag

great coat with yellow buttons."

Now, I would stake a considerable wager (though by no means a positive

man) that some such mitigated description would lead the beagles of the

law into a much surer track for finding this ungracious varlet, than to

set them upon a false scent after fictitious ugliness and fictitious

shabbiness; though, to do those gentlemen justice, I have no doubt their

experience has taught them in all such cases to abate a great deal of

the deformity which they are instructed to expect; and has discovered to

them, that the Devil's agents upon this earth, like their master, are

far less ugly in reality than they are painted.

I am afraid, Mr. Reflector, that I shall be thought to have gone wide of

my subject, which was to detect the practical errors of physiognomy,

properly so called; whereas I have introduced physical defects, such as

lameness, the effects of accidents upon a man's person, his wearing

apparel, &c. as circumstances on which the eye of dislike, looking

ascance, may report erroneous conclusions to the understanding. But if

we are liable, through a kind, or an unkind passion, to mistake so

grossly concerning things so exterior and palpable, how much more are

we likely to err respecting those nicer and less perceptible hints of

character in a face, whose detection constitutes the triumph of the

physiognomist.

To revert to those bestowers of unmerited deformity, the framers of

advertisements for the apprehension of delinquents, a sincere desire of

promoting the ends of public justice induces me to address a word to

them on the best means of attaining those ends. I will endeavour to lay

down a few practical, or rather negative, rules for their use, for my

ambition extends no further than to arm them with cautions against the

self-defeating of their own purposes:--

1. Imprimis, then, Mr. Advertiser! If the culprit whom you are willing

to recover be one to whom in times past you have shewn kindness, and

been disposed to think kindly of him yourself, but he has deceived your

trust, and has run away, and left you with a load of debt to answer for

him,--sit down calmly, and endeavour to behold him through the

spectacles of memory rather than of present conceit. Image to yourself,

before you pen a tittle of his description, the same plausible,

good-looking man who took you in; and try to put away from your mind

every intrusion of that deceitful spectre which perpetually obtrudes

itself in the room of your former friend's known visage. It will do you

more credit to have been deceived by such a one; and depend upon it, the

traitor will convey to the eyes of the world in general much more of

that first idea which you formed (perhaps in part erroneous) of his

physiognomy, than of that frightful substitute which you have suffered

to creep in upon your mind and usurp upon it; a creature which has no

archetype except in your own brain.

2. If you be a master that have to advertise a runaway apprentice,

though the young dog's faults are known only to you, and no doubt his

conduct has been aggravating enough, do not presently set him down as

having crooked ancles. He may have a good pair of legs, and run away

notwithstanding. Indeed, the latter does rather seem to imply the

former.

3. If the unhappy person against whom your laudable vengeance is

directed be a thief, think that a thief may have a good nose, good eyes,

good ears. It is indispensable to his profession that he be possessed of

sagacity, foresight, vigilance; it is more than probable, then, that he

is endued with the bodily types or instruments of these qualities to

some tolerable degree of perfectness.

4. If petty larceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not confound

meanness of crime with diminutiveness of stature. These things have no

connection. I have known a tall man stoop to the basest action, a short

man aspire to the height of crime, a fair man be guilty of the foulest

actions, &c.

5. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some atrocious and aggravated

murder. Here is the most difficult case of all. It is above all

requisite, that such a daring violator of the peace and safety of

society should meet with his reward, a violent and ignominious death.

But how shall we get at him? Who is there among us, that has known him

before he committed the offence, that shall take upon him to say he can

sit down coolly and pen a dispassionate description of a murderer? The

tales of our nursery,--the reading of our youth,--the ill-looking man

that was hired by the Uncle to dispatch the Children in the Wood,--the

grim ruffians who smothered the babes in the Tower,--the black and

beetle-browed assassin of Mrs. Ratcliffe,--the shag-haired villain of

Mr. Monk Lewis,--the Tarquin tread, and mill-stone dropping eyes, of

Murder in Shakspeare,--the exaggerations of picture and of poetry,--what

we have read and what we have dreamed of,--rise up and crowd in upon us

such eye-scaring portraits of the man of blood, that our pen is

absolutely forestalled; we commence poets when we should play the part

of strictest historians, and the very blackness of horror which the deed

calls up, serves as a cloud to screen the doer. The fiction is

blameless, it is accordant with those wise prejudices with which nature

has guarded our innocence, as with impassable barriers, against the

commission of such appalling crimes; but meantime, the criminal escapes;

or if,--owing to that wise abatement in their expectation of deformity,

which, as I hinted at before, the officers of pursuit never fail to

make, and no doubt in cases of this sort they make a more than ordinary

allowance,--if, owing to this or any accident, the offender is caught

and brought to his trial, who that has been led out of curiosity to

witness such a scene, has not with astonishment reflected on the

difference between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one

which he has been collecting and heightening all his life out of books,

dreams, &c. The fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with

light hair and eye-brows,--the latter by no means jutting out or like a

crag,--and with none of those marks which our fancy had pre-bestowed

upon him.

I find I am getting unawares too serious; the best way on such occasions

is, to leave off, which I shall do by generally recommending to all

prosecuting advertisers not to confound crimes with ugliness; or rather,

to distinguish between that physiognomical deformity, which I am willing

to grant always accompanies crime, and mere _physical ugliness_,--which

signifies nothing, is the exponent of nothing, and may exist in a good

or bad person indifferently.

CRITO.

ON THE AMBIGUITIES ARISING FROM PROPER NAMES

(1811)

Mr. Reflector,--How oddly it happens that the same sound shall suggest

to the minds of two persons hearing it ideas the most opposite! I was

conversing a few years since with a young friend upon the subject of

poetry, and particularly that species of it which is known by the name

of the Epithalamium. I ventured to assert, that the most perfect

specimen of it in our language was the Epithalamium of Spenser upon his

own marriage.

My young gentleman, who has a smattering of taste, and would not

willingly be thought ignorant of any thing remotely connected with the

belles lettres, expressed a degree of surprise, mixed with

mortification, that he should never have heard of this poem, Spenser

being an author with whose writings he thought himself peculiarly

conversant.

I offered to show him the poem in the fine folio copy of the poet's

works, which I have at home. He seemed pleased with the offer, though

the mention of the folio seemed again to puzzle him. But presently

after, assuming a grave look, he compassionately muttered to himself

"poor Spencer."

There was something in the tone with which he spoke these words that

struck me not a little. It was more like the accent with which a man

bemoans some recent calamity that has happened to a friend, than that

tone of sober grief with which we lament the sorrows of a person,

however excellent, and however grievous his afflictions may have been,

who has been dead more than two centuries. I had the curiosity to

enquire into the reasons of so uncommon an ejaculation. My young

gentleman, with a more solemn tone of pathos than before, repeated "poor

Spencer," and added, "he has lost his wife."

My astonishment at this assertion rose to such a height, that I began to

think the brain of my young friend must be cracked, or some

unaccountable reverie had gotten possession of it. But upon further

explanation it appeared that the word "Spenser,"--which to you or me,

Reader, in a conversation upon poetry too, would naturally have called

up the idea of an old poet in a ruff, one Edmund Spenser, that

flourished in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and wrote a poem called the

_Fairy Queen_, with the _Shepherd's Calender_, and many more verses

besides,--did in the mind of my young friend excite a very different and

quite modern idea, namely, that of the Honourable William Spencer, one

of the living ornaments, if I am not misinformed, of this present

poetical era, A.D. 1811.

X. Y. Z.

ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH; WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE

IN THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR. BARRY

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy was in the

contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the _Harlot's_ and

_Rake's Progresses_, which, along with some others, hung upon the walls

of a great hall in an old-fashioned house in ----shire, and seemed the

solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and life-deserted

apartment.

Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me, has

often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere

comic painter, as one whose chief ambition was to _raise a laugh_. To

deny that there are throughout the prints which I have mentioned

circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, would be to run

counter to the common notions of mankind; but to suppose that in their

_ruling character_ they appeal chiefly to the risible faculty, and not

first and foremost to the very heart of man, its best and most serious

feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their aim and purpose. A

set of severer Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, which they

have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less

mingled with any thing of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or

graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in

Timon of Athens.

I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book

he esteemed most in his library, answered,--"Shakspeare:" being asked

which he esteemed next best, replied,--"Hogarth." His graphic

representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful,

suggestive meaning of _words_. Other pictures we look at,--his prints we

read.

In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself with

comparing the _Timon of Athens_ of Shakspeare (which I have just

mentioned) and Hogarth's _Rake's Progress_ together. The story, the

moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and

extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the

society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other with

conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the

still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the

picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The levee of

the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is

almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the opening scene of that play.

We find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters, in both.

The concluding scene in the _Rake's Progress_ is perhaps superior to the

last scenes of _Timon_. If we seek for something of kindred excellence

in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning madness, where

the King and the Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire to produce such a

medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; where

the society of those "strange bed-fellows" which misfortunes have

brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets forth the destitute state

of the monarch, while the lunatic bans of the one, and the disjointed

sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the other, so wonderfully

sympathize with that confusion, which they seem to assist in the

production of, in the senses of that "child-changed father."

In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the _Rake's Progress_, we find

the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is

desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking

faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and

pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a

building;--and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of

faculties, which at their best of times never having been strong, we

look upon the consummation of their decay with no more of pity than is

consistent with a smile. The mad taylor, the poor driveller that has

gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great journey

to go to get past their confines) for the love of _Charming Betty

Careless_,--these half-laughable, scarce-pitiable objects take off from

the horror which the principal figure would of itself raise, at the same

time that they assist the feeling of the scene by contributing to the

general notion of its subject:--

Madness, thou chaos of the brain,

What art, that pleasure giv'st, and pain?

Tyranny of Fancy's reign!

Mechanic Fancy, that can build

Vast labyrinths and mazes wild,

With rule disjointed, shapeless measure,

Fill'd with horror, fill'd with pleasure!

Shapes of horror, that would even

Cast doubts of mercy upon heaven.

Shapes of pleasure, that, but seen,

Would split the shaking sides of spleen.[7]

[7] Lines inscribed under the plate.

Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the

poor kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad

decay, there is something analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights

rather to be called, in _Lear_,--the noblest pattern of virtue which

even Shakspeare has conceived,--who follows his royal master in

banishment, that had pronounced _his_ banishment, and forgetful at once

of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a menial,

retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the carcass, the

shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear?

In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which

we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with us to such

perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall

render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression

may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous

characters at the _Harlot's Funeral_, on a superficial inspection,

provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to

levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost

half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage of depraved

beings, who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted

minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the relics of

their departed partner in folly, but I am as much moved to sympathy from

the very want of it in them, as I should be by the finest representation

of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by real mourners, pious children,

weeping friends,--perhaps more by the very contrast. What reflexions

does it not awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the creature

(a female too) must have lived, who in death wants the accompaniment of

one genuine tear. That wretch who is removing the lid of the coffin to

gaze upon the corpse with a face which indicates a perfect negation of

all goodness or womanhood--the hypocrite parson and his demure

partner--all the fiendish group--to a thoughtful mind present a moral

emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcass had been

depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its

obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet.

It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this

picture,--incongruous objects being of the very essence of

laughter,--but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from that

thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and grotesque.

We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight of the white

cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with filial fondness towards

the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to fleece and

plunder,--we smile at the exquisite irony of the passage,--but if we are

not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling than laughter,

we are very negligent perusers of them in book or picture.

It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in

this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to

exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar

class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in

common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The quantity of

thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture, would alone

_unvulgarize_ every subject which he might choose. Let us take the

lowest of his subjects, the print called _Gin Lane_. Here is plenty of

poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view; and

accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted and

repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to bear it.

The same persons would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon

Poussin's celebrated picture of the _Plague of Athens_.[8] Disease and

Death and bewildering Terror in _Athenian garments_ are endurable, and

come, as the delicate critics express it, within the "limits of

pleasurable sensation." But the scenes of their own St. Giles's,

delineated by their own countryman, are too shocking to think of. Yet if

we could abstract our minds from the fascinating colours of the picture,

and forget the coarse execution (in some respects) of the print,

intended as it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to the poorer sort of

people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could have no

hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth,

comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of

imagination in it--that power which draws all things to one,--which

makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes,

subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve to one

effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, _tells_.

Every part is full of "strange images of death." It is perfectly amazing

and astounding to look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman

and the half-dead man, which are as terrible as any thing which Michael

Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in the print contributes to

bewilder and stupefy,--the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine

express it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunk--seem

absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of phrenzy

which goes forth over the whole composition.--To shew the poetical and

almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little circumstance may

serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed

in profusion over the proper scene of the action, he shews you what (of

a kindred nature) is passing beyond it. Close by the shell, in which, by

direction of the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an old

wall, which, partaking of the universal decay around it, is tumbling to

pieces. Through a gap in this wall are seen three figures, which appear

to make a part in some funeral procession which is passing by on the

other side of the wall, out of the sphere of the composition. This

extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only

have been conceived by a great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of

the painting of the Trojan War, in his _Tarquin and Lucrece_, has

introduced a similar device, where the painter made a part stand for the

whole:--

For much imaginary work was there,

Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,

That for Achilles' image stood his spear,

Grip'd in an armed hand; himself behind

Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind;

A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,

Stood for the whole to be imagined.

[8] At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish-square.

This he well calls _imaginary work_, where the spectator must meet the

artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence

of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser

artists shew every thing distinct and full, as they require an object to

be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it.

When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say)

sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone,

and of that rage for classification, by which, in matters of taste at

least, we are perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas,

that would make us concede to the work of Poussin above-mentioned, and

deny to this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition.

We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one

man a great historical painter, because he has taken for his subjects

kings or great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a

grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and set him down

in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, without reflecting

whether the quantity of thought shewn by the latter may not much more

than level the distinction which their mere choice of subjects may seem

to place between them; or whether, in fact, from that very common life a

great artist may not extract as deep an interest as another man from

that which we are pleased to call history.

I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds,

but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the

merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and

classifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the greatest

ornaments of England.

I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the

countenances of his _Staring_ and _Grinning Despair_, which he has given

us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be any thing

comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his

broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the _Rake's Progress_,[9]

where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play

"will not do?" Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a

mass of woe is here accumulated!--the long history of a mis-spent life

is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates

before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks which are to

freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bedposts, no

face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of

the picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice

with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it,--a final

leave taken of hope,--the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,--a

beginning alienation of mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter

for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together,--matter

to feed and fertilize the mind. It is too real to admit one thought

about the power of the artist who did it.--When we compare the

expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the

superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere

contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one case in

our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and in the other in the State Prison

of Pisa, or the bed-room of a cardinal,--or that the subject of the one

has never been authenticated, and the other is matter of history,--so

weigh down the real points of the comparison, as to induce us to rank

the artist who has chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly

inferior in that which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from

which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to make choice of

the other) with something like disgrace?[10]

[9] The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That

which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of

the debauchee in the second plate of the _Marriage Alamode_, which

lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as any thing in

Ecclesiastes.

[10] Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the

_presumption_ of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting,

by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.

Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what

he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have

expression of _some sort or other_ in them,--the _Child Moses before

Pharaoh's Daughter_, for instance: which is more than can be said of

Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Repose in Egypt_, painted for Macklin's

Bible, where for a Madona he has substituted a sleepy, insensible,

unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the

Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor

feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But indeed the

race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and

branch, at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to

give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with

reverential awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the

Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their

divine countenances inviting men to worship) contemplate the union

of the two natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant.

The _Boys under Demoniacal Possession_ of Raphael and Dominichino, by

what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the

great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake

of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is

far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen

can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost

endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by strong mental agony, the

frightful obstinate laugh of madness,--yet all so unforced and natural,

that those who never were witness to madness in real life, think they

see nothing but what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no

tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. This is

high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the

honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth

with the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same

praise for the two concluding scenes of the _Rake's Progress_, because

of the Comic Lunatics[11] which he has thrown into the one, or the

Alchymist that he has introduced in the other, who is paddling in the

coals of his furnace, keeping alive the flames of vain hope within the

very walls of the prison to which the vanity has conducted him, which

have taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to the desponding

figure who is the principal person of the scene.

[11]