If from living among simple mountaineers, from a daily intercourse with

them, not upon the footing of a patron, but in the character of an

equal, he has detected, or imagines that he has detected, through the

cloudy medium of their unlettered discourse, thoughts and apprehensions

not vulgar; traits of patience and constancy, love unwearied, and heroic

endurance, not unfit (as he may judge) to be made the subject of verse,

he will be deemed a man of perverted genius by the philanthropist who,

conceiving of the peasantry of his country only as objects of a

pecuniary sympathy, starts at finding them elevated to a level of

humanity with himself, having their own loves, enmities, cravings,

aspirations, &c., as much beyond his faculty to believe, as his

beneficence to supply.

If from a familiar observation of the ways of children, and much more

from a retrospect of his own mind when a child, he has gathered more

reverential notions of that state than fall to the lot of ordinary

observers, and, escaping from the dissonant wranglings of men, has tuned

his lyre, though but for occasional harmonies, to the milder utterance

of that soft age,--his verses shall be censured as infantile by critics

who confound poetry "having children for its subject" with poetry that

is "childish," and who, having themselves perhaps never been _children_,

never having possessed the tenderness and docility of that age, know not

what the soul of a child is--how apprehensive! how imaginative! how

religious!

We have touched upon some of the causes which we conceive to have been

unfriendly to the author's former poems. We think they do not apply in

the same force to the one before us. There is in it more of uniform

elevation, a wider scope of subject, less of manner, and it contains

none of those starts and imperfect shapings which in some of this

author's smaller pieces offended the weak, and gave scandal to the

perverse. It must indeed be approached with seriousness. It has in it

much of that quality which "draws the devout, deterring the profane."

Those who hate the Paradise Lost will not love this poem. The steps of

the great master are discernible in it; not in direct imitation or

injurious parody, but in the following of the spirit, in free homage and

generous subjection.

One objection it is impossible not to foresee. It will be asked, why put

such eloquent discourse in the mouth of a pedlar? It might be answered

that Mr. Wordsworth's plan required a character in humble life to be the

organ of his philosophy. It was in harmony with the system and scenery

of his poem. We read Piers Plowman's Creed, and the lowness of the

teacher seems to add a simple dignity to the doctrine. Besides, the poet

has bestowed an unusual share of education upon him. Is it too much to

suppose that the author, at some early period of his life, may himself

have known such a person, a man endowed with sentiments above his

situation, another Burns; and that the dignified strains which he has

attributed to the Wanderer may be no more than recollections of his

conversation, heightened only by the amplification natural to poetry, or

the lustre which imagination flings back upon the objects and companions

of our youth? After all, if there should be found readers willing to

admire the poem, who yet feel scandalized at a _name_, we would advise

them, wherever it occurs, to substitute silently the word _Palmer_, or

_Pilgrim_, or any less offensive designation, which shall connect the

notion of sobriety in heart and manners with the experience and

privileges which a wayfaring life confers.

ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS

(1814. TEXT OF 1818)

Sedet, æternumque sedebit,

Infelix Theseus. VIRGIL.

That there is a professional melancholy, if I may so express myself,

incident to the occupation of a tailor, is a fact which I think very few

will venture to dispute. I may safely appeal to my readers, whether they

ever knew one of that faculty that was not of a temperament, to say the

least, far removed from mercurial or jovial.

Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock is not more

tender, from a consciousness of his peculiar infirmity, than a gentleman

of this profession is of being known by the same infallible testimonies

of his occupation. "Walk, that I may know thee."

Do you ever see him go whistling along the foot-path like a carman, or

brush through a crowd like a baker, or go smiling to himself like a

lover? Is he forward to thrust into mobs, or to make one at the

ballad-singer's audiences? Does he not rather slink by assemblies and

meetings of the people, as one that wisely declines popular observation?

How extremely rare is a noisy tailor! a mirthful and obstreperous

tailor!

"At my nativity," says Sir Thomas Browne, "my ascendant was the earthly

sign of Scorpius; I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I

think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me." One would think that

he were anatomizing a tailor! save that to the latter's occupation,

methinks, a woollen planet would seem more consonant, and that he should

be born when the sun was in Aries.--He goes on. "I am no way facetious,

nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company." How true a type

of the whole trade! Eminently economical of his words, you shall seldom

hear a jest come from one of them. He sometimes furnishes subject for a

repartee, but rarely (I think) contributes one _ore proprio_.

Drink itself does not seem to elevate him, or at least to call out of

him any of the external indications of vanity. I cannot say that it

never causes his pride to swell, but it never breaks out. I am even

fearful that it may swell and rankle to an alarming degree inwardly. For

pride is near of kin to melancholy;--a hurtful obstruction from the

ordinary outlets of vanity being shut. It is this stoppage which

engenders proud humours. Therefore a tailor may be proud. I think he is

never vain. The display of his gaudy patterns in that book of his which

emulates the rainbow, never raises any inflations of that emotion in

him, corresponding to what the wigmaker (for instance) evinces, when he

expatiates on a curl or a bit of hair. He spreads them forth with a

sullen incapacity for pleasure, a real or affected indifference to

grandeur. Cloth of gold neither seems to elate, nor cloth of frize to

depress him--according to the beautiful motto which formed the modest

impresse of the shield worn by Charles Brandon at his marriage with the

King's sister. Nay, I doubt whether he would discover any vain-glorious

complacence in his colours, though "Iris" herself "dipt the woof."

In further corroboration of this argument--who ever saw the wedding of a

tailor announced in the newspapers, or the birth of his eldest son?

When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself a good dancer,

or to perform exquisitely on the tight rope, or to shine in any such

light and airy pastimes? to sing, or play on the violin?

Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ringing of bells,

firing of cannons, &c.?

Valiant I know they can be; but I appeal to those who were witnesses to

the exploits of Eliot's famous troop, whether in their fiercest charges

they betrayed any thing of that thoughtless oblivion of death with which

a Frenchman jigs into battle, or whether they did not shew more of the

melancholy valour of the Spaniard, upon whom they charged; that

deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary habits breathe?

Are they often great newsmongers?--I have known some few among them

arrive at the dignity of speculative politicians; but that light and

cheerful every-day interest in the affairs and goings-on of the world,

which makes the barber[33] such delightful company, I think is rarely

observable in them.

[33] Having incidentally mentioned the barber, in a comparison of

professional temperaments, I hope no other trade will take offence,

or look upon it as an incivility done to them, if I say, that in

courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces

which "gladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his.

Indeed so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful and

agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court

(where the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps at

the universities) there are seven of them to whom I am personally

known, and who never pass me without the compliment of the hat on

either side. My truly polite and urbane friend, Mr. A----m, of

Flower-de-luce-court, in Fleet-street, will forgive my mention of

him in particular. I can truly say, that I never spent a quarter of

an hour under his hands without deriving some profit from the

agreeable discussions, which are always going on there.

This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder

none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy, should

have mentioned it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all

the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of every

species of this malady, from the _hypochondriacal_ or _windy_ to the

_heroical_ or _love melancholy_, has strangely omitted it. Shakspeare

himself has overlooked it. "I have neither the scholar's melancholy

(saith Jaques) which is emulation; nor the courtier's, which is proud;

nor the soldier's, which is politick; nor the lover's, which is all

these:"--and then, when you might expect him to have brought in, "nor

the tailor's, which is so and so"--he comes to an end of his

enumeration, and falls to a defining of his own melancholy.

Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity of

bringing it in, in his _Penseroso_.

But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the

existence of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavour to

ascertain the causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant in

people of this profession above all others.

And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being

derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of

that unhappy event, a certain _seriousness_ (to say no more of it) may

in the order of things have been intended to be impressed upon the minds

of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of contriving the human

apparel has been entrusted,--to keep up the memory of the first

institution of clothes, and serve as a standing remonstrance against

those vanities, which the absurd conversion of a memorial of our shame

into an ornament of our persons was destined to produce? Correspondent

in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that the tailor sitting over a

cave or hollow place, in the cabbalistic language of his order, is said

to have _certain melancholy regions_ always open under his feet.--But

waving further enquiry into final causes, where the best of us can only

wander in the dark, let us try to discover the efficient causes of this

melancholy.

I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some

subordinate ones, viz.,

The sedentary habits of the tailor.--

Something peculiar in his diet.--

First, his _sedentary habits_.--In Dr. Norris's famous narrative of the

frenzy of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, being questioned as to the

occasion of the swelling in his legs, replies that it came "by

criticism;" to which the learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a

distemper which he had never read of, Dennis (who appears not to have

been mad upon all subjects) rejoins with some warmth, that it was no

distemper, but a noble art! that he had sat fourteen hours a day at it:

and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know that there was a

communication between the brain and the legs.

When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously,

which the critic probably practised only while he was writing his

"remarks," is no more than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance of

his art, submits to daily (Sundays excepted) throughout the year, shall

we wonder to find the brain affected, and in a manner over-clouded, from

that indissoluble sympathy between the noble and less noble parts of the

body, which Dennis hints at? The unnatural and painful manner of his

sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil, insomuch that I have

sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their boards to so many envious

Junos, _sitting cross-legged to hinder the birth of their own felicity_.

The legs transversed thus X cross-wise, or decussated, was among the

ancients the posture of malediction. The Turks, who practise it at this

day, are noted to be a melancholy people.

Secondly, his _diet_.--To which purpose I find a most remarkable passage

in Burton, in his chapter entitled "Bad diet a cause of melancholy."

"Amongst herbs to be eaten (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons,

disallowed; but especially CABBAGE. It causeth troublesome dreams, and

sends up black vapours to the brain. Galen, _loc. affect._ lib. 3, cap.

6, of all herbs condemns CABBAGE. And Isaack, lib. 2, cap. 1, _animæ

gravitatem facit_, it brings heaviness to the soul." I could not omit so

flattering a testimony from an author, who, having no theory of his own

to serve, has so unconsciously contributed to the confirmation of mine.

It is well known that this last-named vegetable has, from the earliest

periods which we can discover, constituted almost the sole food of this

extraordinary race of people.

BURTON, _Junior_.

ON NEEDLE-WORK

(BY MARY LAMB)

(1815)

_To the Editor of The British Lady's Magazine_

MR. EDITOR,--In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my

needle for a livelihood. Will you allow me to address your readers,

among whom might perhaps be found some of the kind patronesses of my

former humble labours, on a subject widely connected with female

life--the state of needlework in this country.

To lighten the heavy burthen which many ladies impose upon themselves is

one object which I have in view: but, I confess, my strongest motive is

to excite attention towards the industrious sisterhood to which I once

belonged.

From books I have been informed of the fact, upon which "The British

Lady's Magazine" chiefly founds its pretensions, namely, that women have

of late been rapidly advancing in intellectual improvement. Much may

have been gained in this way, indirectly, for that class of females for

whom I wish to plead. Needlework and intellectual improvement are

naturally in a state of warfare. But I am afraid the root of the evil

has not as yet been struck at. Workwomen of every description were never

in so much distress for want of employment.

Among the present circle of my acquaintance I am proud to rank many that

may truly be called respectable; nor do the female part of them, in

their mental attainments, at all disprove the prevailing opinion of that

intellectual progression which you have taken as the basis of your work;

yet I affirm that I know not a single family where there is not some

essential drawback to its comfort which may be traced to needle-work

_done at home_, as the phrase is for all needle-work performed in a

family by some of its own members, and for which no remuneration in

money is received or expected.

In money alone, did I say? I would appeal to all the fair votaries of

voluntary housewifery, whether, in the matter of conscience, any one of

them ever thought she had done as much needle-work as she ought to have

done. Even fancy work, the fairest of the tribe!--how delightful the

arrangement of her materials! the fixing upon her happiest pattern, how

pleasing an anxiety! how cheerful the commencement of the labour she

enjoins! But that lady must be a true lover of the art, and so

industrious a pursuer of a predetermined purpose, that it were pity her

energy should not have been directed to some wiser end, who can affirm

she neither feels weariness during the execution of a fancy piece, nor

takes more time than she had calculated for the performance.

Is it too bold an attempt to persuade your readers that it would prove

an incalculable addition to general happiness, and the domestic comfort

of both sexes, if needle-work were never practised but for a

remuneration in money? As nearly, however, as this desirable thing can

be effected, so much more nearly will women be upon an equality with

men, as far as respects the mere enjoyment of life. As far as that

goes, I believe it is every woman's opinion that the condition of men is

far superior to her own.

"They can do what they like," we say. Do not these words generally mean,

they have time to seek out whatever amusements suit their tastes? We

dare not tell them we have no time to do this; for, if they should ask

in what manner we dispose of our time, we should blush to enter upon a

detail of the minutiæ which compose the sum of a woman's daily

employment. Nay, many a lady who allows not herself one quarter of an

hour's positive leisure during her waking hours, considers her own

husband as the most industrious of men, if he steadily pursue his

occupation till the hour of dinner, and will be perpetually lamenting

her own idleness.

_Real business_ and _real leisure_ make up the portions of men's

time--two sources of happiness which we certainly partake of in a very

inferior degree. To the execution of employment, in which the faculties

of the body or mind are called into busy action, there must be a

consoling importance attached, which feminine duties (that generic term

for all our business) cannot aspire to.

In the most meritorious discharges of those duties, the highest praise

we can aim at is to be accounted the helpmates of _man_; who, in return

for all he does for us, expects, and justly expects, us to do all in our

power to soften and sweeten life.

In how many ways is a good woman employed, in thought or action, through

the day, in order that her _good man_ may be enabled to feel his leisure

hours _real substantial holyday_, and perfect respite from the cares of

business! Not the least part to be done to accomplish this end is to fit

herself self to become a conversational companion; that is to say, she

has to study and understand the subjects on which he loves to talk. This

part of our duty, if strictly performed, will be found by far our

hardest part. The disadvantages we labour under from an education

differing from a manly one make the hours in which we _sit and do

nothing_ in men's company too often any thing but a relaxation;

although, as to pleasure and instruction, time so passed may be esteemed

more or less delightful.

To make a man's home so desirable a place as to preclude his having a

wish to pass his leisure hours at any fireside in preference to his

own, I should humbly take to be the sum and substance of woman's

domestic ambition. I would appeal to our _British ladies_, who are

generally allowed to be the most zealous and successful of all women in

the pursuit of this object,--I would appeal to them who have been most

successful in the performance of this laudable service, in behalf of

father, son, husband, or brother, whether an anxious desire to perform

this duty well is not attended with enough of _mental_ exertion, at

least, to incline them to the opinion that women may be more properly

ranked among the contributors to, than the partakers of, the undisturbed

relaxation of man.

If a family be so well ordered that the master is never called in to its

direction, and yet he perceives comfort and economy well attended to,

the mistress of that family (especially if children form a part of it)

has, I apprehend, as large a share of womanly employment as ought to

satisfy her own sense of duty; even though the needle-book and

thread-case were quite laid aside, and she cheerfully contributed her

part to the slender gains of the corset-maker, the milliner, the

dress-maker, the plain-worker, the embroidress, and all the numerous

classifications of females supporting themselves by _needle-work_, that

great staple commodity which is alone appropriated to the

self-supporting part of our sex.

Much has been said and written on the subject of men engrossing to

themselves every occupation and calling. After many years of observation

and reflection, I am obliged to acquiesce in the notion that it cannot

well be ordered otherwise.

If at the birth of girls it were possible to foresee in what cases it

would be their fortune to pass a single life, we should soon find trades

wrested from their present occupiers, and transferred to the exclusive

possession of our sex. The whole mechanical business of copying writings

in the law department, for instance, might very soon be transferred with

advantage to the poorer sort of women, who with very little teaching

would soon beat their rivals of the other sex in facility and neatness.

The parents of female children, who were known to be destined from their

birth to maintain themselves through, the whole course of their lives

with like certainty as their sons are, would feel it a duty incumbent

on themselves to strengthen the minds, and even the bodily

constitutions, of their girls, so circumstanced, by an education which,

without affronting the preconceived habits of society, might enable them

to follow some occupation now considered above the capacity or too

robust for the constitution of our sex. Plenty of resources would then

lie open for single women to obtain an independent livelihood, when

every parent would be upon the alert to encroach upon some employment,

now engrossed by men, for such of their daughters as would then be

exactly in the same predicament as their sons now are. Who, for

instance, would lay by money to set up his sons in trade; give premiums,

and in part maintain them through a long apprenticeship; or, which men

of moderate incomes frequently do, strain every nerve in order to bring

them up to a learned profession; if it were in a very high degree

probable that, by the time they were twenty years of age, they would be

taken from this trade or profession, and maintained during the remainder

of their lives by the _person whom they should marry_. Yet this is

precisely the situation in which every parent, whose income does not

very much exceed the moderate, is placed with respect to his daughters.

Even where boys have gone through a laborious education, superinducing

habits of steady attention, accompanied with the entire conviction that

the business which they learn is to be the source of their future

distinction, may it not be affirmed that the persevering industry

required to accomplish this desirable end causes many a hard struggle in

the minds of young men, even of the most hopeful disposition? What then

must be the disadvantages under which a very young woman is placed who

is required to learn a trade, from which she can never expect to reap

any profit, but at the expence of losing that place in society, to the

possession of which she may reasonably look forward, inasmuch as it is

by far the most _common lot_, namely, the condition of a _happy_ English

wife?

As I desire to offer nothing to the consideration of your readers but

what, at least as far as my own observation goes, I consider as truths

confirmed by experience, I will only say that, were I to follow the bent

of my own speculative opinion, I should be inclined to persuade every

female over whom I hoped to have any influence to contribute all the

assistance in her power to those of her own sex who may need it, in the

employments they at present occupy, rather than to force them into

situations now filled wholly by men. With the mere exception of the

profits which they have a right to derive from their needle, I would

take nothing from the industry of man which he already possesses.

"A penny saved is a penny earned," is a maxim not true, unless the penny

be saved in the same time in which it might have been earned. I, who

have known what it is to work for _money earned_, have since had much

experience in working for _money saved_; and I consider, from the

closest calculation I can make, that a _penny saved_ in that way bears

about a true proportion to a _farthing earned_. I am no advocate for

women, who do not depend on themselves for a subsistence, proposing to

themselves to _earn money_. My reasons for thinking it not advisable are

too numerous to state--reasons deduced from authentic facts, and strict

observations on domestic life in its various shades of comfort. But, if

the females of a family, _nominally_ supported by the other sex, find it

necessary to add something to the common stock, why not endeavour to do

something by which they may produce money _in its true shape_?

It would be an excellent plan, attended with very little trouble, to

calculate every evening how much money has been saved by needle-work

_done in the family_, and compare the result with the daily portion of

the yearly income. Nor would it be amiss to make a memorandum of the

time passed in this way, adding also a guess as to what share it has

taken up in the thoughts and conversation. This would be an easy mode of

forming a true notion, and getting at the exact worth of this species of

_home_ industry, and perhaps might place it in a different light from

any in which it has hitherto been the fashion to consider it.

Needle-work, taken up as an amusement, may not be altogether unamusing.

We are all pretty good judges of what entertains ourselves, but it is

not so easy to pronounce upon what may contribute to the entertainment

of others. At all events, let us not confuse the motives of economy with

those of simple pastime. If _saving_ be no object, and long habit have

rendered needle-work so delightful an avocation that we cannot think of

relinquishing it, there are the good old contrivances in which our

grand-dames were used to beguile and lose their time--knitting,

knotting, netting, carpet working, and the like ingenious

pursuits--those so-often-praised but tedious works, which are so long in

the operation, that purchasing the labour has seldom been thought good

economy, yet, by a certain fascination, they have been found to chain

down the great to a self-imposed slavery, from which they considerately,

or haughtily, excuse the needy. These may be esteemed lawful and

lady-like amusements. But, if those works, more usually denominated

useful, yield greater satisfaction, it might be a laudable scruple of

conscience, and no bad test to herself of her own motive, if a lady, who

had no absolute need, were to give the money so saved to poor

needle-women belonging to those branches of employment from which she

has borrowed these shares of pleasurable labour.

SEMPRONIA.

ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER

(? 1815. TEXT OF 1818)

The poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty homeliness of

manner, and a plain moral speaking. He seems to have passed his life in

one continued act of an innocent self-pleasing. That which he calls his

_Motto_ is a continued self-eulogy of two thousand lines, yet we read it

to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost without a

consciousness that we have been listening all the while to a man

praising himself. There are none of the cold particles in it, the

hardness and self-ends which render vanity and egotism hateful. He seems

to be praising another person, under the mask of self; or rather we feel

that it was indifferent to him where he found the virtue which he

celebrates; whether another's bosom, or his own, were its chosen

receptacle. His poems are full, and this in particular is one downright

confession, of a generous self-seeking. But by self he sometimes means

a great deal,--his friends, his principles, his country, the human race.

Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of

those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or Pope,

will be grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished characters,

no nice traits of individual nature, few or no personalities. The game

run down is coarse general vice, or folly as it appears in classes. A

liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is _stript and whipt_; no Shaftesbury, no

Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously anatomized, and read upon. But to a

well-natured mind there is a charm of moral sensibility running through

them which amply compensates the want of those luxuries. Wither seems

every where bursting with a love of goodness and a hatred of all low and

base actions.--At this day it is hard to discover what parts in the poem

here particularly alluded to, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, could have

occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in High Places more

suspicious than now? had she more power; or more leisure to listen after

ill reports? That a man should be convicted of a libel when he named no

names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the

indictments in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, where Faithful is arraigned for

having "railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of

his honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and

the Lord Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy could have tempted the great

men of those days to appropriate such innocent abstractions to

themselves!

Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own

possible virtue. He is for ever anticipating persecution and martyrdom;

fingering, as it were, the flames, to try how he can bear them. Perhaps

his premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to censures, which

he would otherwise have slipped by.

The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in

the present day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from a

poet "soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and his

singing robes about him;"[34] nor is it such as he has shown in his

_Philarete_, and in some parts in his _Shepherds Hunting_. He seems to

have adopted this dress with voluntary humility, as fittest for a moral

teacher, as our divines chuse sober grey or black; but in their

humility consists their sweetness. The deepest tone of moral feeling in

them, (though all throughout is weighty, earnest and passionate) is in

those pathetic injunctions against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the

chapter entitled _Revenge_. The story of his own forbearance, which

follows, is highly interesting. While the Christian sings his own

victory over Anger, the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let

you know, that it was some higher principle than _fear_ which counselled

his forbearance.

[34] Milton.

Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems to have

abated a jot of that free spirit, which sets its mark upon his writings,

as much as a predominant feature of independence impresses every page of

our late glorious Burns; but the elder poet wraps his proof-armour

closer about him, the other wears his too much outwards; he is thinking

too much of annoying the foe, to be quite easy within; the spiritual

defences of Wither are a perpetual source of inward sunshine, the

magnanimity of the modern is not without its alloy of soreness, and a

sense of injustice, which seems perpetually to gall and irritate. Wither

was better skilled in the "sweet uses of adversity," he knew how to

extract the "precious jewel" from the head of the "toad," without

drawing any of the "ugly venom" along with it.--The prison notes of

Wither are finer than the wood notes of most of his poetical brethren.

The description in the Fourth Eglogue of his _Shepherds Hunting_ (which

was composed during his imprisonment in the Marshalsea) of the power of

the Muse to extract pleasure from common objects, has been oftener

quoted, and is more known, than any part of his writings. Indeed the

whole Eglogue is in a strain so much above not only what himself, but

almost what any other poet has written, that he himself could not help

noticing it; he remarks, that his spirits had been raised higher than

they were wont "through the love of poesy."--The praises of Poetry have

been often sung in ancient and in modern times; strange powers have been

ascribed to it of influence over animate and inanimate auditors; its

force over fascinated crowds has been acknowledged; but, before Wither,

no one ever celebrated its power _at home_, the wealth and the strength

which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too

after death, was all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves

from their art. It seems to have been left to Wither to discover, that

poetry was a present possession, as well as a rich reversion; and that

the Muse had promise of both lives, of this, and of that which was to

come.

The _Mistress of Philarete_ is in substance a panegyric protracted

through several thousand lines in the mouth of a single speaker, but

diversified, so as to produce an almost dramatic effect, by the artful

introduction of some ladies, who are rather auditors than interlocutors

in the scene; and of a boy, whose singing furnishes pretence for an

occasional change of metre: though the seven syllable line, in which the

main part of it is written, is that in which Wither has shown himself so

great a master, that I do not know that I am always thankful to him for

the exchange.

Wither has chosen to bestow upon the lady whom he commends, the name of

Arete, or Virtue; and, assuming to himself the character of Philarete,

or Lover of Virtue, there is a sort of propriety in that heaped measure

of perfections, which he attributes to this partly real, partly

allegorical, personage. Drayton before him had shadowed his mistress

under the name of Idea, or Perfect Pattern, and some of the old Italian

love-strains are couched in such religious terms as to make it doubtful,

whether it be a mistress, or Divine Grace, which the poet is addressing.

In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages of pre-eminent

merit. The first is where the lover, after a flight of rapturous

commendation, expresses his wonder why all men that are about his

mistress, even to her very servants, do not view her with the same eyes

that he does.

Sometime I do admire,

All men burn not with desire;

Nay I muse her servants are not

Pleading love; but O! they dare not.

And I therefore wonder, why

They do not grow sick and die.

Sure they would do so, but that,

By the ordinance of fate,

There is some concealed thing

So each gazer limiting,

He can see no more of merit

Than beseems his worth and spirit,

For in her a grace there shines,

That o'er-daring thoughts confines;

Making worthless men despair

To be lov'd of one so fair.

Yea the destinies agree,

Some _good judgments_ blind should be,

And not gain the power of knowing

Those rare beauties in her growing.

Reason doth as much imply:

For if every judging eye,

Which beholdeth her, should there

Find what excellencies are;

All, o'ercome by those perfections,

Would be captive to affections.

So in happiness unblest,

She for lovers should not rest.

The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties to gold, and

stars, and the most excellent things in nature; and, fearing to be

accused of hyperbole, the common charge against poets, vindicates

himself by boldly taking upon him, that these comparisons are no

hyperboles; but that the best things in nature do, in a lover's eye,

fall short of those excellencies which he adores in her.

What pearls, what rubies can

Seem so lovely fair to man,

As her lips whom he doth love,

When in sweet discourse they move,

Or her lovelier teeth, the while

She doth bless him with a smile?

Stars indeed fair creatures be;

Yet amongst us where is he

Joys not more the whilst he lies

Sunning in his mistress' eyes.

Than in all the glimmering light

Of a starry winter's night?

Note the beauty of an eye--

And if aught you praise it by

Leave such passion in your mind,

Let my reason's eye be blind.

Mark if ever red or white

Any where gave such delight,

As when they have taken place

In a worthy woman's face.

* * * * *

I must praise her as I may,

Which I do mine own rude way;

Sometime setting forth her glories

By unheard of allegories--&c.

To the measure in which these lines are written, the wits of Queen

Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby Pamby, in ridicule of

Ambrose Philips, who has used it in some instances, as in the lines on

Cuzzoni, to my feeling at least, very deliciously; but Wither, whose

darling measure it seems to have been, may shew, that in skilful hands

it is capable of expressing the subtilest movements of passion. So true

it is, which Drayton seems to have felt, that it is the poet who

modifies the metre, not the metre the poet; in his own words, that

It's possible to climb;

To kindle, or to slake;

Altho' in Skelton's rhime.[35]

[35] "A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the _Shepherds

Hunting_ take the following--

"If thy verse doth bravely tower,

_As she makes wing, she gets power_;

Yet the higher she doth soar,

She's affronted still the more,

'Till she to the high'st hath past,

Then she rests with fame at last.

what longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this! what

Alexandrine is half so long in pronouncing or expresses _labor

slowly but strongly surmounting difficulty_ with the life with which

it is done in the second of these lines? or what metre could go

beyond these, from _Philarete_--

"Her true beauty leaves behind

Apprehensions in my mind

Of more sweetness, than all art

Or inventions can impart.

_Thoughts too deep to be express'd,

And too strong to be suppress'd._"

FIVE DRAMATIC CRITICISMS

I.--MRS. GOULD (MISS BURRELL) IN "DON GIOVANNI IN LONDON"

OLYMPIC THEATRE

(1818)

This Theatre, fitted up with new and tasteful decorations, opened on

Monday with a burletta founded upon a pleasant extravagance recorded of

Wilmot the "mad Lord" of Rochester. The house, in its renovated

condition, is just what play-houses should be, and once were, from its

size admirably adapted for seeing and hearing, and only perhaps rather

too well lit up. Light is a good thing, but to preserve the eyes is

still better. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin personated a reigning wit and

beauty of the Court of Charles the Second to the life. But the charm of

the evening to us, we confess, was the acting of Mrs. T. Gould (late

Miss Burrell) in the burlesque _Don Giovanni_ which followed. This

admirable piece of foolery takes up our hero just where the legitimate

drama leaves him, on the "burning marl." We are presented with a fair

map of Tartarus, the triple-headed cur, the Furies, the Tormentors, and

the Don, prostrate, thunder-smitten. But there is an elasticity in the

original make of this _strange man_, as Richardson would have called

him. He is not one of those who change with the change of climate. He

brings with him to his new habitation _ardours_ as glowing and constant

as any which he finds there. No sooner is he recovered from his first

surprise, than he falls to his old trade, is caught "ogling

_Proserpine_," and coquets with two she devils at once, till he makes

the house _too hot to hold him_; and _Pluto_ (in whom a wise jealousy

seems to produce the effects of kindness) turns him neck and heels out

of his dominions,--much to the satisfaction of _Giovanni_, who stealing

a boat from Charon, and a pair of light heels from _Mercury_, or (as he

familiarly terms him) _Murky_, sets off with flying colours, conveying

to the world above the souls of three damsels, just eloped from Styx, to

comfort his tender and new-born spiritualities on the journey. Arrived

upon earth (with a new body, we are to suppose, but his old habits) he

lights a-propos upon a tavern in London, at the door of which three

merry weavers, widowers, are trouling a catch in triumph over their

deceased spouses--

They lie in yonder church-yard

At rest--and so are we.

Their departed partners prove to be the identical lady ghosts who have

accompanied the Don in his flight, whom he now delivers up in perfect

health and good plight, not a jot the worse for their journey, to the

infinite surprise, and consternation ill-dissembled, of their ill-fated,

twice-yoked mates. The gallantries of the Don in his second state of

probation, his meeting with _Leporello_, with _Donna Anna_, and a

countless host of injured virgins besides, doing penance in the humble

occupation of apple-women, fishwives and sausage-fryers, in the purlieus

of Billinsgate and Covent-garden, down to the period of his complete

reformation, and being made an honest man of, by marrying into a sober

English citizen's family, although infinitely pleasant in the

exhibition, would be somewhat tedious in the recital: but something must

be said of his representative.

We have seen Mrs. Jordan in male characters, and more ladies beside than

we would wish to recollect--but never any that so completely answered

the purpose for which they were so transmuted, as the Lady who enacts

the mock _Giovanni_. This part, as it is played at the Great House in

the Haymarket (Shade of Mozart, and ye living admirers of Ambrogetti,

pardon the barbarity) had always something repulsive and distasteful to

us.--We cannot sympathize with _Leporello's_ brutal display of the

_list_, and were shocked (no strait-laced moralists either) with the

applauses, with the _endurance_ we ought rather to say, which fashion

and beauty bestowed upon that disgustful insult to feminine unhappiness.

The _Leporello_ of the Olympic Theatre is not one of the most refined

order, but we can bear with an English blackguard better than with the

hard Italian. But _Giovanni_--free, fine, frank-spirited,

single-hearted creature, turning all the mischief into fun as harmless

as toys, or children's _make-believe_, what praise can we repay to you,

adequate to the pleasure which you have given us? We had better be

silent, for you have no name, and our mention will but be thought

fantastical. You have taken out the sting from the evil thing, by what

magic we know not, for there are actresses of greater mark and attribute

than you. With you and your _Giovanni_ our spirits will hold communion,

whenever sorrow or suffering shall be our lot. We have seen you triumph

over the infernal powers; and pain, and Erebus, and the powers of

darkness, are henceforth "shapes of a dream."

II.--MISS KELLY AT BATH

(1819)

Dear G.---- I was thinking yesterday of our old play-going days, of your

and my partiality to Mrs. Jordan; of our disputes as to the relative

merits of Dodd and Parsons; and whether Smith or Jack Palmer, were the

most of a Gentleman. The occasion of my falling into this train of

thinking was my learning from the newspapers that Miss Kelly is paying

the Bath Theatre a visit. (Your own Theatre, I am sorry to find, is shut

up, either from parsimonious feelings, or through the influence of ----

principles.[36]) This lady has long ranked among the most considerable

of our London performers. If there are one or two of greater name, I

must impute it to the circumstance, that she has never burst upon the

town at once in the maturity of her power; which is a great advantage to

debutantes, who have passed their probationary years in Provincial

Theatres. We do not hear them tuning their instruments. But she has been

winning her patient way from the humblest gradations to the eminence

which she has now attained, on the self same boards which supported her

first in the slender pretensions of chorus-singer. I very much wish that

you would go and see her. You will not see Mrs. Jordan, but something

else; something on the whole very little, if at all, inferior to that

lady, in her best days. I cannot hope that you will think so; I do not

even wish that you should. Our longest remembrances are the most sacred;

and I shall revere the prejudice, that shall prevent you from thinking

quite so favorably of her as I do.--I do not well know how to draw a

parallel between their distinct manners of acting. I seem to recognize

the same pleasantness and nature in both: but Mrs. Jordan's was the

carelessness of a child; her child-like spirit shook off the load of

years from her spectators; she seemed one whom care could not come near;

a privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants,

joyousness. Hence, if we had more unmixed pleasure from her

performances, we had, perhaps, less sympathy with them than with those

of her successor. This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,

escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may

use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good

and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are

visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she does

so, I am not sure that she is not greatest. She is, in truth, no

ordinary tragedian. Her Yarico is the most intense piece of acting which

I ever witnessed, the most heart-rending spectacle. To see her leaning

upon that wretched reed, her lover--the very exhibition of whose

character would be a moral offence, but for her clinging and noble

credulity--to see her lean upon that flint, and by the strong workings

of passion imagine it a god--is one of the most afflicting lessons of

the yearnings of the human heart and its sad mistakes, that ever was

read upon a stage. The whole performance is every where _African_,

fervid, glowing. Nor is this any thing more than the wonderful force of

imagination in this performer; for turn but the scene, and you shall

have her come forward in some kindly home-drawn character of an English

rustic, a Phœbe, or a Dinah Cropley, where you would swear that her

thoughts had never strayed beyond the precincts of the dairy, or the

farm; or her mind known less tranquil passions than she might have

learned among the flock, her out-of-door companions. See her again in

parts of pure fun, such as the House-maid in the Merry Mourners, where

the suspension of the broom in her hand, which she had been delightfully

twirling, on unexpectedly encountering her sweetheart in the character

of a fellow-servant, is quite equal to Mrs. Jordan's cordial inebriation

in Nell.--I do not know whether I am not speaking it to her honor, that

she does not succeed in what are called fine lady parts. Our friend C.

once observed, that no man of genius ever figured as a gentleman.

Neither did any woman, gifted with Mrs. Jordan's or Miss Kelly's

sensibilities, ever take upon herself to shine as a fine lady, the very

essence of this character consisting in the entire repression of all

genius and all feeling. To sustain a part of this kind to the life, a

performer must be haunted by a perpetual self-reference: she must be

always thinking of herself, and how she looks, and how she deports

herself in the eyes of the spectators; whereas the delight of actresses

of true feeling, and their chief power, is to elude the personal notice

of an audience, to escape into their parts, and hide themselves under

the hood of their assumed character. Their most graceful self-possession

is in fact a self-forgetfulness; an oblivion alike of self and of

spectators. For this reason your most approved epilogue-speakers have

been always ladies who have possessed least of this self-forgetting

quality; and I think I have seen the amiable actress in question

suffering some embarrassment, when she has had an address of this sort

to deliver; when she found the modest veil of personation, which had

half hid her from the audience, suddenly withdrawn, and herself brought

without any such qualifying intervention before the public.

[36] The word here omitted by the Bristol Editor, we suppose, is

_methodistical_ (Leigh Hunt in _The Examiner_).

I should apologise for the length of this letter, if I did not remember

the lively interest you used to take in theatrical performances.--I am,

&c. &c.,

* * * *.

III.--RICHARD BROME'S "JOVIAL CREW"

(1819)

The _Jovial Crew_ or the _Merry Beggars_ has been revived here [the

English Opera] after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven years.

Can it be so long (it seems but yesterday) since we saw poor LOVEGROVE

in _Justice Clack_? his childish treble still pipes in our ears: "Whip

'em, whip 'em, whip 'em." DOWTON was the representative of the Justice

the other night, and shook our ribs most incontinently. He was in

"excellent foolery," and our lungs crowed chanticleer. Yet it appears to

us, that there was a still higher strain of fatuity in his

predecessor--that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps after all

it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us

strangely.

Easy natural WRENCH was the _Springlove_; too comfortable a personage

perhaps to personify _Springlove_, in whom the voice of the bird awakens

a restless instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. Miss

STEVENSON certainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the

Lady, however agreeable, who formerly performed the part of _Meriel_.

Miss STEVENSON is a fine open-countenanced lass, with glorious girlish

manners. But the _Princess of Mumpers_, and _Lady Paramount_, of

beggarly counterfeit accents, was _she_ that played _Rachel_. Her

gabbling lachrymose petitions; her tones, such as we have heard by the

side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come peeping on one on

a sudden; with her full black locks, and a _voice_--how shall we

describe it?--a voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing but

truth and goodness, but warped by circumstance into an assurance that

she is telling us a lie--that catching twitch of the thievish

irreproveable finger--those ballad-singers' notes, so vulgar, yet so

unvulgar--that assurance, so like impudence, and yet so many countless

leagues removed from it--her jeers, which we had rather stand, than be

caressed with other ladies' compliments, a summer's day long--her face,

with a wild out-of-door's grace upon it--

Altogether, a brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our

fortune to meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sate

for "pretty Bessy," whose father was an Earl, and whose legend still

adorns the front of mine Hostess's doors at Bethnal-Green; and the other

could be no less than the "Beggar Maid" whom "King Cophetua wooed."

"What a lass that were," said a stranger who sate beside us, speaking of

Miss KELLY in _Rachel_, "to go a gipseying through the world with." We

confess we longed to drop a tester in her lap, she begged so masterly.

By the way, this is the true _Beggar's Opera_. The other should have

been called the _Mirror for Highwaymen_. We wonder the Societies for the

Suppression of Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the

putting down of this infamous protest in favour of air, and clear

liberty, and honest license, and blameless assertion of man's original

blest charter of blue skies, and vagrancy, and nothing-to-do.

* * * *.

IV.--ISAAC BICKERSTAFF'S "HYPOCRITE"

(1819)

By one of those strange perversities which actuate poor mortals in the

place of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free

agents, we presume), we had never till the other evening seen DOWTON in

_Doctor Cantwell_. By a pious fraud of Mr. ARNOLD'S, who, by a process

as simple as some of those by which MATHEWS metamorphoses his person,

has converted the play into an opera,--a conversion, by the way, for

which we are highly indebted to him,--we have been favoured with this

rich novelty at our favourite theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to

come lagging in with a posthumous testimony to the merits of a

performance of which the town has long rung, but we cannot help

remarking in Mr. DOWTON'S acting, the subtil _gradations_ of the

hypocrisy; the length to which it runs in proportion as the recipient is

capable of taking it in; the gross palpable way in which he adminsters

the dose in wholesale to old _Lady Lambert_, that rich fanatic; the

somewhat more guarded manner in which he retails it out, only so much at

a time as he can bear, to the somewhat less bitten fool her son; and the

almost absence of it, before the younger members of the family, when

nobody else is by: how the cloven foot peeps out a little and a little

more, till the diabolical nature is stung out at last into full

manifestation of its horrid self. What a grand insolence in the tone

which he assumes, when he commands _Sir John_ to quit _his_ house! and

then the tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled! It is in these

last perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing injustice not

to compare this part of the performance with, and in some respects to

give it the preference above, the acting of Mr. KEAN in a situation

nearly analogous, at the conclusion of the _City Madam_. _Cantwell_

reveals his pangs with quite as much force, and without the assistance

of those contortions which transform the detected _Luke_ into the

similitude of a mad tiger, or a foaming demon. DOWTON plays it neither

like beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, a bold bad man pushed

to extremity. Humanity is never once overstepped. Has it ever been

noticed, the exquisite modulation with which he drawls out the word

CHARLES, when he calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so

resigned. The most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew accented all

her honey devil words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The spirit of

WHITFIELD seems hovering in the air, to suck in the blessed tones, so

much like his own upon earth: Lady HUNTINGDON claps her neat white

wings, and gives it out again in heaven to the sainted ones, in

approbation.

Miss KELLY is not quite at home in _Charlotte_; she is too good for such

parts. Her cue is to be natural; she cannot put on the modes of

artificial life, and play the coquet as it is expected to be played.

There is a frankness in her tones which defeats her purposes: we could

not help wondering why her lover (Mr. PEARMAN) looked so rueful; we

forgot that she was acting airs and graces, as she seemed to forget it

herself, turning them into a playfulness which could breed no doubt for

a moment which way her inclinations ran. She is in truth not framed to

tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a hearty _Yes_ or _No_; to

yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have not the pleasure

of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she carries the

same cordial manners into private life. We have heard, too, of some

virtues which she is in the practice of; but they are of a description

which repay themselves, and with them neither we nor the public have any

thing to do.

One word about WRENCH, who played the Colonel:--Was this man never

unhappy? It seems as if care never came near him, as if the black ox

could never tread upon his foot; we want something calamitous to befal

him, to bring him down to us. It is a shame he should be suffered to go

about with his well-looking happy face and tones, insulting us thin race

of irritable and irritable-making critics.

* * * *.

V.--NEW PIECES AT THE LYCEUM

(1819)

A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some quarrel has been breeding

between the male and female performers, and the women have determined to

set up for themselves. Seven of them, _Belles without Beaux_ they call

themselves, have undertaken to get up a piece without any assistance

from the men, and in our opinion have established their point most

successfully. There is Miss CAREW with her silvery tones, and Miss

STEVENSON with her delicious mixture of the school-girl and the

waiting-maid, and Miss KELLY sure to be first in any mischief, and Mrs.

CHATTERLY with some of the best acting we have ever witnessed, and Miss

LOVE, worthy of the _name_, and Mrs. GROVE that rhymes to her, and Mrs.

RICHARDSON who might in charity have been allowed somewhat a larger

portion of the dialogue. The effect was enchanting. We mean, for once.

We do not want to encourage these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we

longed to have WRENCH bustling among them. A lady who sate near us was

observed to gape for want of variety. To us it was delicate

quintessence, an apple-pye made all of quinces. We remember poor

HOLCROFT'S last Comedy, which positively died from the opposite excess;

it was choked up with men, and perished from a redundancy of male

population. It had nine principal men characters in it, and but one

woman, and she of no very ambiguous character. Mrs. HARLOW, to do the

part justice, chose to play it in scarlet.

We did not know Mrs. CHATTERLY'S merits before; she plays, with

downright sterling good acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of

her prudery by Miss KELLY'S (we did not catch her stage-name) assumption

of the dress and character of a brother of seventeen, who makes the

prettiest unalarming Platonic approaches; and in the shyest mask of

moral battery, no one step of which you can detect, or say _this_ is

decidedly going too far, vanquishes at last the ice of her scruples,

brings her into an infinite scrape, and then with her own infinite good

humour sets all to right, and brings her safe out of it again with an

explanation. Mrs. CHATTERLY'S embarrassments were masterly. Miss

STEVENSON her maid's start, at surprising a youth in her mistress's

closet at midnight, was quite as good. Miss KELLY we do not care to say

any thing about, because we have been accused of flattering her. The

truth is, this lady puts so much intelligence and good sense into every

part which she plays, that there is no expressing an honest sense of her

merits, without incurring a suspicion of that sort. But what have we to

gain by praising Miss KELLY?

Altogether this little feminine republic, this provoking experiment,

went off most smoothly. What a nice world it would be, we sometimes

think, _all women!_ but then we are afraid we slip in a fallacy unawares

into the hypothesis; we somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as

spectators or something among them.

We saw WILKINSON after it in _Walk for a Wager_. What a picture of

Forlorn Hope! of abject orphan destitution! he seems to have no friends

in the world but his legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes

walking on like a perpetual motion. His continual ambulatory presence

performs the part of a Greek chorus. He is the walking Gentleman of the

piece; a Peripatetic that would make a Stoic laugh. He made us cry. His

_Muffincap_ in _Amateurs and Actors_ is just such another piece of

acting. We have seen charity boys, both of St. Clement's and Farringdon

without, looking just as old, ground down out of all semblance of youth,

by abject and hopeless neglect--you cannot guess their age between

fifteen and fifty. If Mr. PEAK is the author of these pieces, he has no

reason to be piqued at their reception.

We must apologize for an oversight in our last week's article. The

allusion made to Mr. KEAN'S acting of _Luke_ in the _City Madam_ was

totally inapplicable to the part and to the play. We were thinking of

his performance of the concluding scenes of the _New Way to Pay Old

Debts_. We confounded one of MASSINGER'S strange heroes with the other.

It was _Sir Giles Overreach_ we meant; nor are we sure that our remark

was just, even with this explanation. When we consider the intense tone,

in which Mr. KEAN thinks it proper (and he is quite as likely to be in

the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the temperament of that

monstrous character from the beginning, it follows but logically and

naturally, that where the wild uncontrollable man comes to be baffled of

his purpose, his passions should assume a frenzied manner, which it was

altogether absurd to expect should be the same with the manner of the

cautious and self-restraining _Cantwell_, even when he breaks loose from

all bonds in the agony of his final exposure. We never felt more

strongly the good sense of the saying,--Comparisons are odious. They

betray us not seldom into bitter errors of judgment; and sometimes, as

in the present instance, into absolute matter of fact blunders. But we

have recanted.

* * * *.

FOUR REVIEWS

(1819-1820)

I.--_FALSTAFF'S LETTERS_

(1819)

_Original Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends; now first

made public by a Gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine

MSS. which have been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four

hundred years_. London: Robinsons, 1796

A copy of this work sold at the Roxburgh sale for five guineas. We have

both before and since that time picked it up at stalls for eighteen

pence. Reader, if you shall ever light upon a copy in the same way, we

counsel you to buy it. We are deceived if there be not in it much of the

true Shakspearian stuff. We present you with a few of the Letters, which

may speak for themselves:--

FALSTAFF TO THE PRINCE

"I pr'ythee, Hal, lend me thy 'kerchief. An thy unkindness have not

started more salt gouts down my poor old cheek, than my good rapier hath

of blood from foemen's gashes in five and thirty years' service, then am

I a very senseless mummy. I squander away in drinkings monies belonging

to the soldiery! I do deny it--they have had part--the surplus is gone

in charity--accuse the parish officers--make them restore--the whoreson

wardens do now put on the cloak of supplication at the church doors,

intercepting gentlemen for charity, forsooth!--'Tis a robbery, a

villainous robbery! to come upon a gentleman reeking with piety, God's

book in his hand, brimfull of the sacrament! Thou knowest, Hal, as I am

but man, I dare in some sort leer at the plate and pass, but as I have

the body and blood of Christ within me, could I do it? An I did not make

an oblation of a matter of ten pound after the battle of Shrewsbury, in

humble gratitude for thy safety, Hal, then am I the veriest

transgressor denounced in God's code. But I'll see them damned ere I'll

be charitable again. Let 'em coin the plate--let them coin the holy

chalice...."

THE SAME TO THE SAME

"Ha! ha! ha! And dost thou think I would not offer up ten pound for

thee? yea, a hundred--more--but take heed of displeasing in thy

sacrifice. Cain did bring a kid, yea, a firstling upon the altar, and

the blaze ascended not. Abel did gather simple herbs, penny-royal, Hal,

and mustard, a fourpenny matter, and the odour was grateful. I had ten

pound for the holy offertory--mine ancient Pistol doth know it--but the

angel did arrest my hand. Could I go beyond the word?--the angel which

did stretch forth his finger, lest the good patriarch should slay his

son.--That Ned Poins hath more colours than a jay, more abuse than a

taught pie, and for wit--the cuckow's dam may be Fool of the Court to

him. I lie down at Shrewsbury out of base fear! I melt into roods, and

acres, and poles! I tell thee what, Hal, there's not a subject in the

land hath half my temperance of valour.--Did I not see thee combating

the man-queller, Hotspur; yea, in peril of subduement? Was it for me to

lose my sweet Hal without a thrust, having my rapier, my habergion, my

good self about me? I did lie down in the hope of sherking him in the

rib--four drummers and a fifer did help me to the ground:--didst thou

not mark how I did leer upon thee from beneath my buckler? That Poins

hath more scurrility than is in a whole flock of disquieted geese.

"For the rebels I did conceal, thou should'st give me laud. I did think

thou wert already encompassed with more enemies than the resources of

men could prevent overwhelming thee: yea, that thou wert the dove on the

waters of Ararat, and didst lack a resting-place. Was it for me to heap

to thy manifold disquiets? Was it for me to fret thee with the advice of

more enemies than thou didst already know of? I could not take their

lives, and therefore did I take their monies. I did fine them, lest they

should scape, Hal, thou dost understand me, without chastisement; yea, I

fined them for a punishment. They did make oath on the point of my sword

to be true men:--an the rogues forswore themselves, and joined the

Welchman, let them look to it--'tis no 'peachment of my virtue...."

AGAIN

"Oh! I am setting on a nest of the most unfledged cuckows that ever

brooded under the wing of hawk. Thou must know, Hal, I had note of a

good hale recruit or two in this neighbourhood. In other shape came I

not; look to it, Master Shallow, that in other shape I depart not. But I

know thou art ever all desire to be admitted a Fellow Commoner in a

jest. Robert Shallow, Esq. judgeth the hamlet of Cotswold. Doth not the

name of judge horribly chill thee? With Aaron's rod in his hand, he hath

the white beard of Moses on his chin. In good sooth his perpetual

countenance is not unlike what thou wouldst conceit of the momentary one

of the lunatic Jew, when he tumbled God's tables from the mount. He hath

a quick busy gait--more of this upright Judge (perpendicular as a

pikeman's weapon, Hal,) anon. I would dispatch with these Bardolph; but

the knave's hands--(I cry thee mercy) his mouth is full in preventing

desertion among my recruits. An every liver among them haven't stood me

in three and forty shilling, then am I a naughty escheator.--I tell thee

what, Hal, I'd fight against my conscience for never a Prince in

Christendom but thee.--Oh! this is a most damnable cause, and the rogues

know it--they'll drink nothing but sack of three and twopence a gallon;

and I enlist me none but tall puissant fellows that would quaff me up

Fleet-ditch, were it filled with sack--picked men, Hal--such as will

shake my Lord of York's mitre. I pray thee, sweet lad, make speed--thou

shalt see glorious deeds."

* * * * *

How say you, reader, do not these inventions smack of Eastcheap? Are

they not nimble, forgetive, evasive? Is not the humour of them

elaborate, cogitabund, fanciful? Carry they not the true image and

superscription of the father which begat them? Are they not steeped all

over in character--subtle, profound, unctuous? Is not here the very

effigies of the Knight? Could a counterfeit _Jack Falstaff_ come by

these conceits? Or are you, reader, one who delights to drench his

mirth in tears? You are, or, peradventure, have been a lover; a

"dismissed bachelor," perchance, one that is "lass-lorn." Come, then,

and weep over the dying bed of such a one as thyself. Weep with us the

death of poor _Abraham Slender_.

DAVY TO SHALLOW

"Master Abram is dead, gone, your Worship, dead! Master Abram! Oh! good,

your Worship, a's gone. A' never throve, since a' came from

Windsor--'twas his death. I called him rebel, your Worship--but a' was

all subject--a' was subject to any babe, as much as a king--a' turned,

_like as it were the latter end of a lover's lute_--a' was all peace and

resignment--a' took delight in nothing but his Book of Songs and

Sonnets--a' would go to the Stroud side under the large beech tree, and

sing, 'till 'twas quite pity of our lives to mark him; for his chin grew

as long as a muscle.--Oh! a' sung his soul and body quite away--a' was

lank as any greyhound, and had such a scent! I hid his love-songs among

your Worship's law-books; for I thought, if a' could not get at them, it

might be to his quiet; but a' snuffed them out in a moment. Good, your

Worship, have the wise woman of Brentford secured--Master Abram may have

been conjured--Peter Simple says, a' never looked up after a' sent for

the wise woman.--Marry, a' was always given to look down afore his

elders; a' might do it, a' was given to it--your Worship knows it; but

then 'twas peak and pert with him, marry, in the turn of his heel.--A'

died, your Worship, just about one, at the crow of the cock.--I thought

how it was with him; for a' talked as quick, ay, marry, as glib as your

Worship; and a' smiled, and looked at his own nose, and called 'Sweet

Ann Page.' I asked him if a' would eat--so a' bad us commend him to his

cousin Robert (a' never called your Worship so before) and bad us get

hot meat, for a' would not say 'nay' to Ann again.[37] But a' never

lived to touch it--a' began all in a moment to sing 'Lovers all, a

Madrigall.' 'Twas the only song Master Abram ever learnt out of book,

and clean by heart, your Worship--and so a' sung, and smiled, and looked

askew at his own nose, and sung, and sung on, till his breath waxed

shorter, and shorter, and shorter, and a' fell into a struggle and

died. Alice Shortcake craves, she may make his shroud...."

[37] Vide, _Merry Wives of Windsor_, latter part of 1st scene, 1st

act.

* * * * *

Should these specimens fail to rouse your curiosity to see the whole, it

may be to your loss, gentle reader, but it will give small pain to the

spirit of him that wrote this little book; my fine-tempered friend, J.

W.--for not in authorship, or the spirit of authorship, but from the

fullness of a young soul, newly kindling at the Shakspearian flame, and

bursting to be delivered of a rich exuberance of conceits,--I had almost

said _kindred with those of the full Shakspearian genius itself_,--were

these letters dictated. We remember when the inspiration came upon him;

when the plays of Henry the Fourth were first put into his hands. We

think at our recommendation he read them, rather late in life, though

still he was but a youth. He may have forgotten, but we cannot, the

pleasant evenings which ensued at the Boar's Head (as we called our

tavern, though in reality the sign was not that, nor the street

Eastcheap, for that honoured place of resort has long since passed away)

when over our pottle of Sherris he would talk you nothing but pure

_Falstaff_ the long evenings through. Like his, the wit of J. W. was

deep, recondite, imaginative, full of goodly figures and fancies. Those

evenings have long since passed away, and nothing comparable to them has

come in their stead, or can come. "We have heard the chimes at

midnight."

* * * *.

II.--CHARLES LLOYD'S POEMS

(1819)

NUGÆ CANORÆ. POEMS BY CHARLES LLOYD

The reader who shall take up these poems in the mere expectation of

deriving amusement for an idle hour, will have been grievously misled by

the title. _Nugæ_ they certainly are not, but full of weight; earnest,

passionate communings of the spirit with itself. He that reads them must

come to them in a serious mood; he should be one that has descended into

his own bosom; that has probed his own nature even to shivering; that

has indulged the deepest yearnings of affection, and has had them

strangely flung back upon him; that has built to himself a fortress out

of conscious weakness; that has cleaved to the rock of his early

religion, and through hope in it hath walked upon the uneasy waters.

We should be sorry to convey a false notion. Mr. Lloyd's religion has

little of pretence or sanctimoniousness about it; it is worn as an

armour of self-defence, not as a weapon of outward annoyance: the

believing may be drawn by it, and the unbelieving need not be deterred.

The Religionist of Nature may find some things to venerate in its mild

Christianity, when he shall discover in a volume, generally hostile to

new experiments in philosophy and morals, some of its tenderest pages

dedicated to the virtues of _Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin_.

Mr. Lloyd's poetry has not much in it that is narrative or dramatic. It

is richer in natural description; but the _imagery_ is for the most part

embodied with, and made subservient to, the _sentiment_, as in many of

the sonnets, &c. His genius is metaphysical and profound; his verses are

made up of deep feeling, accompanied with the perpetual running

commentary of his own deeper self-reflection. His affections seem to run

kindliest in domestic channels; and there some strains, commemorative of

a dead relative, which, while they do honour to the heart of the writer,

are of too sacred a nature, we think, almost to have been committed to

print at all; much less would they bear exposal among the miscellaneous

matter indispensable to a public journal. We prefer therefore giving an

extract from the fine blank verse poem, entitled _Christmas_. It is

richly embued with the meditative, introspective cast of mind, so

peculiar to this author:--

There is a time

When first sensation paints the burning cheek,

Fills the moist eye, and quickens the keen pulse,

That mystic meanings half conceiv'd invest

The simplest forms, and all doth speak, all lives

To the eager heart! At such a time to me

Thou cam'st, dear holiday! Thy twilight glooms

Mysterious thoughts awaken'd, and I mus'd

As if possest, yea felt as I had known

The dawn of inspiration. Then the days

Were sanctified by feeling, all around

Of an indwelling presence darkly spake.

Silence had borrow'd sounds to cheat the soul!

And, to the toys of life, the teeming brain,

Impregning them with its own character,

Gave preternatural import; the dull face

Was eloquent, and e'en the idle air

Most potent shapes, varying and yet the same,

Substantially express'd.

But soon my heart,

Unsatisfied with blissful shadows, felt

Achings of vacancy, and own'd the throb

Of undefin'd desire, while lays of love

Firstling and wild stole to my trem'lous tongue.

To me thy rites were mock'ry then, thy glee

Of little worth. More pleas'd I trod the waste

Sear'd with the sleety wind, and drank its blast;

Deeming thy dreary shapes most strangely sweet,

Mist-shrouded winter! in mute loneliness

I wore away the day which others hail'd

So cheerily, still usher'd in with chaunt

Of carol, and the merry ringers' peal,

Most musical to the good man that wakes

And praises God in gladness.

But soon fled

The dreams of love fantastic! Still the Friend,

The Friend, the wild roam o'er the drifted snows

Remain unsung! then when the wintry view

Objectless, mist-hidden, or in uncouth forms

Prank'd by the arrowy flake might aptly yield

New stores to shaping fantasy, I rov'd

With him my lov'd companion! Oh, 'twas sweet;

Ye who have known the swell that heaves the breast

Pregnant with loftiest poesy, declare

Is aught more soothing to the charmed soul

Than friendship's glow, the independent dream

Gathering when all the frivolous shews are fled

Of artificial life; when the wild step

Boundeth on wide existence, unbeheld,

Uncheck'd, and the heart fashioneth its hope

In Nature's school, while Nature bursts around,

Nor Man her spoiler meddles in the scene!

Farewell, dear day, much hath it sooth'd my heart

To chaunt thy frail memorial.

Now advance

The darkening years, and I do sojourn, home!

From thee afar. Where the broad-bosom'd hills,

Swept by perpetual clouds, of Scotland, rise,

Me fate compels to tarry.

Ditty quaint or custom'd carol, there my vacant ear

Ne'er blest! I thought of home and happier days!

And as I thought, my vexed spirit blam'd

That austere race, who, mindless of the glee

Of good old festival, coldly forbade

Th' observance which of mortal life relieves

The languid sameness, seeming too to bring

Sanction from hoar antiquity and years

Long past!

* * * *.

III.--BARRON FIELD'S POEMS

(1820)

"FIRST FRUITS OF AUSTRALIAN POETRY"

Sydney, New South Wales. Printed for Private Distribution

I first adventure; follow me who list;

And be the second Austral Harmonist.

Whoever thou art that hast transplanted the British wood-notes to the

far-off forest which the Kangaroo haunts--whether thou art some

involuntary exile that solaces his sad estrangement with recurrence to

his native notes, with more wisdom than those captive Hebrews of old

refused to sing their Sion songs in a strange land--or whether, as we

rather suspect, thou art that valued friend of ours, who, in thy young

time of life, together with thy faithful bride, thy newly "wedded

flower," didst, in obedience to the stern voice of duty, quit thy

friends, thy family, thy pleasing avocations, the Muses with which thou

wert as deeply smitten as any, we believe, in our age and country, to go

and administer tedious justice in inauspicious unliterary

THIEFLAND[38]--we reclaim thee for our own, and gladly would transport

thee back to thy native "fields," and studies congenial to thy habits.

[38] An elegant periphrasis for _the Bay_. Mr. Coleridge led us the

way--"CLOUDLAND, gorgeous land."

We know a merry Captain, and co-navigator with Cook, who prides himself

upon having planted the first pun in Otaheite. It was in their own

language, and the islanders first looked at him, then stared at one

another, and all at once burst out into a genial laugh. It was a

stranger, and as a stranger they gave it welcome. Many a quibble of

their own growth, we doubt not, has since sprung from that well-timed

exotic. Where puns flourish, there must be no inconsiderable advance in

civilization. The same good results we are willing to augur from this

dawn of refinement at Sydney. They were beginning to have something like

a theatrical establishment there, which we are sorry to hear has been

suppressed; for we are of opinion with those who think that a taste for

such kind of entertainments is one remove at least from profligacy, and

that Shakspeare and Gay may be as safe teachers of morality as the

ordinary treatises which assume to instil that science. We have seen one

of their play bills (while the thing was permitted to last) and were

affected by it in no ordinary degree; particularly in the omission of

the titles of honour, which in this country are condescendingly conceded

to the players. In their Dramatis Personæ _Jobson_ was played by Smith;

_Lady Loverule_, Jones; _Nell_, Wilkinson: Gentlemen and Lady Performers

alike curtailed of their fair proportions. With a little patronage, we

prophesy, that in a very few years the histrionic establishment of

Sydney would have risen in respectability; and the humble performers

would, by tacit leave, or open permission, have been allowed to use the

same encouraging affixes to their names, which dignify their prouder

brethren and sisters in the mother country. What a moral advancement,

what a lift in the scale, to a Braham or a Stephens of New South Wales,

to write themselves _Mr._ and _Miss_! The King here has it not in his

power to do so much for a Commoner, no, not though he dub him a Duke.

"The First Fruits" consist of two poems. The first celebrates the plant

_epacris grandiflora_; but we are no botanists, and perhaps there is too

much matter mixed up in it from the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, to please

some readers. The thefts are indeed so open and palpable, that we almost

recur to our first surmise, that the author must be some unfortunate

wight, sent on his travels for plagiarisms of a more serious complexion.

But the old matter and the new blend kindly together; and must, we hope,

have proved right acceptable to more than one

----Among the Fair

Of that young land of Shakspeare's tongue.

We select for our readers the second poem; and are mistaken, if it does

not relish of the graceful hyperboles of our elder writers. We can

conceive it to have been written by Andrew Marvel, supposing him to have

been banished to Botany Bay, as he did, we believe, once meditate a

voluntary exile to Bermuda. See his fine poem, "Where the remote

Bermudas ride."

* * * *.

"THE KANGAROO"

"----mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis."--VIRG., _Æn._, vi.

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!

Thou spirit of Australia,

That redeems from utter failure,

From perfect desolation,

And warrants the creation

Of this fifth part of the earth,

Which would seem an after-birth,

Not conceiv'd in the beginning

(For God bless'd his work at first,

And saw that it was good),

But emerg'd at the first sinning,

When the ground was therefore curst;--

And hence this barren wood!

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!

Tho' at first sight we should say,

In thy nature that there may

Contradiction be involv'd,

Yet, like discord well resolv'd,

It is quickly harmoniz'd.

Sphynx or mermaid realiz'd,

Or centaur unfabulous,

Would scarce be more prodigious,

[Or labyrinthine minotaur

With which great Theseus did war,]

Or Pegasus poetical,

Or hippogriff--chimeras all!

But, what Nature would compile,

Nature knows to reconcile;

And Wisdom, ever at her side,

Of all her children's justified.

She had made the squirrel fragile;

She had made the bounding hart;

But a third so strong and agile

Was beyond ev'n Nature's art.

So she join'd the former two

In thee, Kangaroo!

To describe thee, it is hard:

Converse of the camélopard,

Which beginneth camel-wise,

But endeth of the panther size,

Thy fore half, it would appear,

Had belong'd to "some small deer,"

Such as liveth in a tree;

By thy hinder, thou should'st be

A large animal of chase,

Bounding o'er the forest's space;--

Join'd by some divine mistake,

None but Nature's hand can make--

Nature, in her wisdom's play,

On Creation's holiday.

For howso'er anomalous,

Thou yet art not incongruous,

Repugnant or preposterous.

Better-proportion'd animal,

More graceful or ethereal,

Was never follow'd by the hound,

With fifty steps to thy one bound.

Thou canst not be amended: no;

Be as thou art; thou best art so.

When sooty swans are once more rare,

And duck-moles[39] the museum's care,

Be still the glory of this land,

Happiest work of finest hand!

[39] The _cygnus niger_ of Juvenal is no _rara avis_ in Australia;

and time has here given ample proof of the _ornithorynchus

paradoxus_. [Barron Field's note.]

IV.--KEATS' "LAMIA"

(1820)

LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF SAINT AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. BY JOHN KEATS.

AUTHOR OF _ENDYMION_

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,

All garlanded with carven imag'ries

Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,

And diamonded with panes of quaint device,

Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,

As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wings;

And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shield'd scutcheon blush'd with blood of Queens and Kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,

As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;

Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven [:--Porphyro grew faint,

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint

Anon his heart revives:] her vespers done,

Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,

Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,

In fancy, fair Saint Agnes in her bed,

But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,

In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,

Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd

Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;

Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;

Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;

Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;

Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,

As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

Such is the description which Mr. Keats has given us, with a delicacy

worthy of Christabel, of a high-born damsel, in one of the apartments of

a baronial castle, laying herself down devoutly to dream, on the charmed

Eve of St. Agnes; and like the radiance, which comes from those old

windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost

Chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he

touches. We have scarcely any thing like it in modern description. It

brings us back to ancient days, and

_Beauty making-beautiful old rhymes._

The finest thing in the volume is the paraphrase of Boccaccio's story of

the Pot of Basil. Two Florentines, merchants, discovering that their

sister Isabella has placed her affections upon Lorenzo, a young factor

in their employ, when they had hopes of procuring for her a noble match,

decoy Lorenzo, under pretence of a ride, into a wood, where they

suddenly stab and bury him. The anticipation of the assassination is

wonderfully conceived in one epithet, in the narration of the ride--

So the two brothers, and their _murder'd_ man,

Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream

Gurgles----

Returning to their sister, they delude her with a story of their having

sent Lorenzo abroad to look after their merchandises; but the spirit of

her lover appears to Isabella in a dream, and discovers how and where he

was stabbed, and the spot where they have buried him. To ascertain the

truth of the vision, she sets out to the place, accompanied by her old

nurse, ignorant as yet of her wild purpose. Her arrival at it, and

digging for the body, is described in the following stanzas, than which

there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and

moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser:--

She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though

One glance did fully all its secrets tell;

Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know

Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;

Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow

Like to a native lily of the dell:

Then with her knife, all sudden, she began

To dig more fervently than misers can.

Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon

Her silk had play'd in purple fantasies,

She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,

And put it in her bosom, where it dries

And freezes utterly unto the bone

Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:

Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,

But to throw back at times her veiling hair.

That old nurse stood beside her wondering,

Until her heart felt pity to the core

At sight of such a dismal labouring,

And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,

And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:

Three hours they labour'd at this travail sore;

At last they felt the kernel of the grave,

And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

To pursue the story in prose:--They find the body, and with their joint

strengths sever from it the head, which Isabella takes home, and

wrapping it in a silken scarf, entombs it in a garden-pot, covers it

with mould, and over it she plants sweet basil, which, watered with her

tears, thrives so that no other basil tufts in all Florence throve like

her basil. How her brothers, suspecting something mysterious in this

herb, which she watched day and night, at length discover the head, and

secretly convey the basil from her; and how from the day that she loses

her basil she pines away, and at last dies [--for this], we must refer

our readers to the poem, or to the divine germ of it in Boccaccio. It is

a great while ago since we read the original; and in this affecting

revival of it we do but

_Weep again a long-forgotten woe._

More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the Lamia.

It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. Her first

appearance in serpentine form--

----a beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes--

her dialogue with Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one of

these prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem

in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a

picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden

coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into woman's shape

again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful Lycius; her magic

palace, which those who knew the street, and remembered it complete from

childhood, never remembered to have seen before; the few Persian mutes,

her attendants,

----who that same year

Were seen about the markets: none knew where

They could inhabit;----

the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the

whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of

Apollonius,--are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for younger

impressibilities. To _us_ an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy;

and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of

Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we

have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in

its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to

roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the

moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair.

SIR THOMAS MORE

(1820)

Of the writings of this distinguished character little is remembered at

present beyond his _Utopia_, and some Epigrams. But there is extant a

massive folio of his Theological Works in English, partly Practical

Divinity, but for the greater part Polemic, against the grand Lutheran

Heresy, just then beginning to flower. From these I many years ago made

some extracts, rejecting only the antiquated orthography, (they being

intended only for my own amusement) except in some instances of proper

names, &c. I send them you as I find them, thinking that some of your

readers may consider them as curious. The first is from a Tract against

Tyndale, called the _Confutation of Tyndale's Answer_.[40] The author of

_Religio Medici_ somewhere says, "his conscience would give him the lye,

if she should say that he absolutely detested or hated any essence _but

the Devil_." Whether Browne was not out in his metaphysics, when he

supposed himself capable of hating, that is, _entertaining a personal

aversion to_, a being so abstracted, or such a Concrete of all

irreconcileable abstractions rather, as usually passes for the meaning

of that name, I contend not; but that the same hatred in kind, which he

professed against our great spiritual enemy, was in downright earnest

cultivated and defended by More against that portentous phenomenon in

those times, a _Heretic_, from his speeches against Luther and Tyndale

cannot for a moment be doubted. His account of poor Hytton which follows

(a reformado priest of the day) is penned with a wit and malice

hyper-satanic. It is infinitely diverting in the midst of its diabolism,

if it be not rather, what Coleridge calls,

Too wicked for a smile, too foolish for a tear.

[40] To some foregone Tract of More's, of which I have lost the

title.

----"now to the intent that ye may somewhat see what good Christian

faith Sir Thomas Hytton was of, this new saint of Tindale's

canonization, in whose burning Tindale so gaily glorieth, and which

hath his holiday so now appointed to him, that St. Polycarpus must

give him place in the Calendar, I shall somewhat show you what

wholesome heresies this holy martyr held. First ye shall understand,

that he was a priest, and falling to Luther's sect, and after that

to the sect of Friar Huskin and Zwinglius, cast off matins and mass,

and all divine service, and so became an apostle, sent to and fro,

between our English heretics beyond the sea, and such as were here

at home. Now happed it so, that after he had visited here his holy

congregations in divers corners and luskes lanes, and comforted them

in the Lord to stand stiff with the devil in their errors and

heresies, as he was going back again at Gravesend, _God considering

the great labour that he had taken already, and determining to bring

his business to his well-deserved end, gave him suddenly such a

favour and so great a grace in the visage, that every man that

beheld him took him for a thief_. For whereas there had been certain

linen clothes pilfered away that were hanging on an hedge, and Sir

Thomas Hytton was walking not far off _suspiciously in the

meditation of his heresies_: the people doubting that the beggarly

knave had stolen the clouts, fell in question with him and searched

him, and so found they certain letters secretly conveyed in his

coat, written from evangelical brethren here unto the evangelical

heretics beyond the sea. And upon those letters founden, he was with

his letters brought before the most Rev. Father in God the

Archbishop of Canterbury, and afterward as well by his Lordship as

by the Rev. Father the Bishop of Rochester examined, and after for

his abominable heresies delivered to the secular hands and burned."

What follows (from the same Tract) is _mildened_ a little by the

introduction of the name of Erasmus, More's intimate friend; though by

the sting in the rear of it, it is easy to see, that it was to a little

temporising only, and to some thin politic partitions from these

Reformers, that Erasmus owed his exemption from the bitter anathemas

More had in store for them. The _love_ almost make the _hate_ more

shocking by the contrast!

----"Then he (Tyndale) asketh me why I have not contended with

Erasmus, whom he calleth my darling, of all this long while, for

translating of this word _ecclesia_ into this word _congregatio_.

And then he cometh forth with his feat proper taunt, that I favour

him of likelihood for making of his Book of MORIA in my house. There

had he hit me, lo! save for lack of a little salt. I have not

contended with Erasmus my darling, because I found no such malicious

intent with Erasmus my darling, as I find with Tyndale. For had I

found with Erasmus my darling the shrewd intent and purpose, that I

find in Tyndale, Erasmus my darling should be no more my darling.

But I find in Erasmus my darling, that he detesteth and abhorreth

the errors and heresies, that Tyndale plainly teacheth and abideth

by, and therefore Erasmus my darling shall be my dear darling still.

And surely if Tyndale had either never taught them, or yet had the

grace to revoke them, then should Tyndale be my dear darling too.

But while he holdeth such heresies still, I cannot take for my

darling him that the devil taketh for his darling."

The next extract is from a "Dialogue concerning Heresies," and has

always struck me as a master-piece of eloquent logic, and something in

the manner of Burke, when he is stripping a sophism _sophistically_; as

he treats Paine, and others _passim_.

----"And not to be of the foolish mind that Luther is, which wished

in a sermon of his, that he had in his hand all the pieces of the

holy cross, and saith that, if he so had, he would throw them there

as never sun should shine on them. And for what worshipful reason

would the wretch do such villainy to the cross of Christ? because,

as he saith, that there is so much gold now bestowed about the

garnishing of the pieces of the cross, that there is none left for

poor folk. Is not this an high reason? as though all the gold, that

is now bestowed about the pieces of the holy cross, would not have

failed to have been given to poor men, if they had not been bestowed

about the garnishing of the cross. And as though there were nothing

lost, but that is bestowed about Christ's cross. Take all the gold,

that is spent about all the pieces of Christ's cross through

Christendom (albeit many a good Christen prince, and other goodly

people, hath honourably garnished many pieces thereof), yet, if all

the gold were gathered together, it would appear a poor portion, in

comparison of the gold that is bestowed upon cups. What speak we of

cups? in which the gold, albeit that it be not given to poor men,

yet is it saved, and may be given in alms when men will, _which they

never will_; how small a portion, ween we, were the gold about all

the pieces of Christ's cross, if it were compared with the gold that

is _quite cast away_ about the gilting of knives, swords, spurs,

arras, and painted clothes: and (as though these things could not

consume gold fast enough) the gilting of posts, and whole roofs, not

only in palaces of princes and great prelates, but also many right

mean men's houses. And yet, among all these things, could Luther spy

no gold that _grievously glittered in his bleared eyes_, but only

about the cross of Christ.--For that gold, if it were thence, the

wise man weeneth, it would be straight given to poor men, and that

where he daily see'th, that such as have their purse full of gold,

give to the poor not one piece thereof; but, if they give ought,

they ransack the bottom among all the gold, to seek out here an

halfpenny, or _in his country_ a brass penny whereof four make a

farthing: _such goodly causes find they, that pretend holiness for

the colour of their cloaked heresies_." [Book I., Chapter 2.]

I subjoin from the same "Dialogue" More's cunning defence of Miracles

done at Saints' shrines, on Pilgrimages, &c. all which he defends, as he

was bound by holy church to do, most stoutly. The _manner_ of it is arch

and surprising, and the narration infinitely naive; the _matter_ is the

old fallacy of confounding miracles (things happening out of nature)

with natural things, the grounds of which we cannot explain. In this

sense every thing is a miracle, and nothing is.

----"And first if men should tell you, that they saw before an image

of the crucifix a dead man raised to life, ye would much marvel

thereof, and so might ye well; yet could I tell you somewhat that I

have seen myself, that methinketh as great marvel, but I have no

lust to tell you, because that ye be so circumspect and ware in

belief of any miracles, that ye would not believe it for me, but

mistrust me for it.

"Nay, Sir (quod he), in good faith, if a thing seemed to me never so

far unlikely, yet if ye would earnestly say that yourself have seen

it, I neither would nor could mistrust it.

"Well (quod I), then ye may make me the bolder to tell ye. And yet

will I tell you nothing, but that I would, if need were, find you

good witness to prove it.

"It shall not need, Sir (quod he), but I beseech you let me hear it.

"Forsooth (quod I), because we speak of a man raised from death to

life. There was in the parish of St. Stephen's in Walbrook, in

London, where I dwelled before I come to Chelsith, a man and a

woman, which are yet quick and quething, and young were they both.

The eldest I am sure passeth not twenty-four. It happed them, as

doth among folk, the one to cast the mind to the other. And after

many lets, for the maiden's mother was much against it, at last they

came together, and were married in St. Stephen's church, which is

not greatly famous for any miracles, but yet yearly on St. Stephen's

day it is somewhat sought unto and visited with folk's devotion. But

now short tale to make, this young woman (as manner is in brides ye

wot well) was at night brought to bed with honest women. And then

after that went the bridegroom to bed, and every body went their

ways, and left them twain there alone. And the same night, yet abide

let me not lie, now in faith to say the truth I am not very sure of

the time, but surely as it appeared afterward, it was of likelihood

the same night, or some other time soon after, except it happened a

little before.

"No force for the time (quod he).

"Truth (quod I), and as for the matter, all the parish will testify

for truth, the woman was known for so honest. But for the

conclusion, the seed of them twain turned in the woman's body, first

into blood, and after into shape of man-child. And then waxed quick,

and she great therewith. And was within the year delivered of a fair

boy, and forsooth it was not then (for I saw it myself) passing the

length of a foot. And I am sure he has grown now an inch longer than

I.

"How long is it ago? (quod he).

"By my faith (quod I) about twenty-one years.

"Tush! (quod he), this is a worthy miracle!

"In good faith (quod I), never wist I that any man could tell that

he had any other beginning. And methinketh that this is as great a

miracle as the raising of a dead man." [Book I., Chapter 10.]

Diabolical Possession was a rag of the old abomination, which this

Contunder of Heresies thought himself obliged no less to wrap tightly

about the loins of his faith, than any of the _splendiores panni_ of the

old red Harlot. But (read with allowance for the belief of the times)

the narrative will be found affecting, particularly in what relates to

the parents of the damsel, "rich, and sore abashed."

----"Amongst which (_true miracles_) I durst boldly tell you for

one, the wonderful work of God, that was within these few years

wrought, in the house of a right worshipful knight, Sir Roger

Wentworth, upon divers of his children, and specially one of his

daughters, a very fair young gentlewoman of twelve years of age, in

marvellous manner vexed and tormented by our ghostly enemy the

devil, her mind alienated and raving with despising and blasphemy of

God, and hatred of all hallowed things, with knowledge and

perceiving of the hallowed from the unhallowed, all were she nothing

warned thereof. And after that moved in her own mind, and monished

by the will of God, to go to our Lady of Ippiswitche. In the way of

which pilgrimage, she prophesied and told many things done and said

at the same time in other places, which were proved true, and many

things said, lying in her trance, of such wisdom and learning, that

right cunning men highly marvelled to hear of so young an unlearned

maiden, when herself wist not what she said, such things uttered and

spoken, as well learned men might have missed with a long study, and

finally being brought and laid before the Image of our Blessed Lady,

was there in the sight of many worshipful people so grievously

tormented, and in face, eyen, look and countenance, so griesly

changed, and her mouth drawn aside, and her eyen laid out upon her

cheeks, that it was a terrible sight to behold. And after many

marvellous things at the same time shewed upon divers persons by the

devil through God's sufferance, as well all the remnant as the

maiden herself, in the presence of all the company, restored to

their good state perfectly cured and suddenly. And in this matter no

pretext of begging, no suspicion of feigning? no possibility of

counterfeiting, no simpleness in the seers, her father and mother

right honourable and rich, _sore abashed to see such chances in

their children_, the witnesses great number, and many of great

worship, wisdom and good experience, the maid herself too young to

feign [and the fashion itself too strange for any man to feign],

and the end of the matter virtuous, the virgin so moved in her mind

with the miracle, that she forthwith for aught her father could do,

forsook the world, and professed religion in a very good and godly

company at the Mynoresse, where she hath lived well and graciously

ever since." [Book I., Chapter 16.]

I shall trouble you with one Excerpt more, from a "Dialogue of Comfort

against Tribulation;" because the style of it is solemn and weighty; and

because it was written by More in his last imprisonment in the Tower,

preparatory to his sentence. After witnessing his treatment of Sir John

Hytton, and his brethren, we shall be inclined to mitigate some of our

remorse, that More should have suffered death himself _for conscience

sake_. The reader will not do this passage justice, if he do not read it

as part of a sermon; and as putting himself into the feelings of an

auditory of More's Creed and Times.

----"But some men now when this calling of God [any tribulation]

causeth them to be sad, they be loth to leave their sinful lusts

that hang in their hearts, and specially if they have any such kind

of living, as they must needs leave off, or fall deeper in sin: or

if they have done so many great wrongs, that they have many 'mends

to make, that must (if they follow God) 'minish much their money,

then are these folks (alas) woefully bewrapped, for God pricketh

upon them of his great goodness still, and the grief of this great

pang pincheth them at the heart, and of wickedness they wry away,

and fro this tribulation they turn to their flesh for help, and

labour to shake off this thought, and then they mend their pillow,

and lay their head softer, and assay to sleep; and when that will

not be, then they find a talk awhile with them that lie by them. If

that cannot be neither, then they lie and long for day, and then get

them forth about their worldly wretchedness, the matter of their

prosperity, the self-same sinful things with which they displease

God most, and at length with many times using this manner, God

utterly casteth them off. And then they set nought neither by God

nor Devil. * * * But alas! when death cometh, then cometh again

their sorrow, then will no soft bed serve, nor no company make him

merry, then must he leave his outward worship and comfort of his

glory, and lie panting in his bed as if he were on a pine-bank, then

cometh his fear of his evil life and his dreadful death. Then cometh

the torment, his cumbered conscience and fear of his heavy judgment.

Then the devil draweth him to despair with imagination of hell, and

suffereth him not then to take it for a fable. And yet if he do,

then findeth it the wretch no fable. * * * Some have I seen even in

their last sickness set up in their death-bed underpropped with

pillows take their play-fellows to them, and comfort themselves with

cards, and this they said did ease them well to put fantasies out of

their heads; and what fantasies trow you? such as I told you right

now of, their own lewd life and peril of their soul, of heaven and

of hell that irked them to think of, and therefore cast it out with

cards' play as long as ever thy might, till the pure pangs of death

pulled their heart fro their play, and put them in the case they

could not reckon their game. And then left them their gameners, and

slily slunk away, and long was it not ere they galped up the ghost.

And what game they came then to, that God knoweth and not I. I pray

God it were good, but I fear it very sore."

* * * *.

THE CONFESSIONS OF H. F. V. H. DELAMORE, ESQ.

(1821)

SACKVILLE-STREET, _25th March, 1821_.

Mr. Editor,--A correspondent in your last number,[41] blesses his stars,

that he was never yet in the pillory; and, with a confidence which the

uncertainty of mortal accidents but weakly justifies, goes on to predict

that he never shall be. Twelve years ago, had a Sibyl prophesied to me,

that I should live to be set in a worse place, I should have struck her

for a lying beldam. There are degradations below that which he speaks

of.

[41] Elia:--Chapter on Ears.

I come of a good stock, Mr. Editor. The Delamores are a race singularly

tenacious of their honour; men who, in the language of Edmund Burke,

feel a stain like a wound. My grand uncle died of a fit of the sullens

for the disgrace of a public whipping at Westminster. He had not then

attained his fourteenth year. Would I had died young!

For more than five centuries, the current of our blood hath flowed

unimpeachably. And must it stagnate now?

Can a family be tainted backwards?--can posterity purchase disgrace for

their progenitors?--or doth it derogate from the great Walter of our

name, who received the sword of knighthood in Cressy field, that one of

his descendants once sate * * * * * * * * * * *?

Can an honour, fairly achieved in _quinto Edwardi Tertii_, be reversed

by a slip _in quinquagesimo Georgii Tertii_?--how stands the law?--what

_dictum_ doth the college deliver?--O Clarencieux! O Norroy!

Can a reputation, gained by hard watchings on the cold ground, in a suit

of mail, be impeached by hard watchings on the cold ground in other

circumstances--was the endurance equal?--why is the guerdon so

disproportionate?

A priest mediated the ransom of the too valorous Reginald, of our house,

captived in Lord Talbot's battles. It was a clergyman, who by his

intercession abridged the period of my durance.

Have you touched at my wrongs yet, Mr. Editor?--or must I be explicit as

to my grievance?

Hush, my heedless tongue.

Something bids me--"Delamore, be ingenuous."

Once then, and only once----

Star of my nativity, hide beneath a cloud, while I reveal it!

Ancestors of Delamore, lie low in your wormy beds, that no posthumous

hearing catch a sound!

Let no eye look over thee, while thou shalt peruse it, reader!

Once----

these legs, with Kent in the play, though for far less ennobling

considerations, did wear "cruel garters."

Yet I protest it was but for a thing of nought--a fault of youth, and

warmer blood--a calendary inadvertence I may call it--or rather a

temporary obliviousness of the day of the week--timing my Saturnalia

amiss.----

Streets of Barnet, infamous for civil broils, ye saw my shame!--did not

your Red Rose rise again to dye my burning cheek?

It was but for a pair of minutes, or so--yet I feel, I feel, that the

gentry of the Delamores is extinguished for ever.----

Try to forget it, reader.----

(Signed) HENRY FRANCIS VERE HARRINGTON

DELAMORE.

THE GENTLE GIANTESS

(1822)

The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the

pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but

surely I never saw it. I take her to be lineally descended from the

maid's aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She

hath Atlantean shoulders; and, as she stoopeth in her gait--with as few

offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve's

daughters--her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the

peccadillos that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth her

waist--or what she is pleased to esteem as such--nearly up to her

shoulders, from beneath which, that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous

declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who

follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up

and riding.--But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is

indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person

is a burthen to herself, no less than to the ground which bears her. To

her mighty bone, she hath a pinguitude withal, which makes the depth of

winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer

solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August, she usually

renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth

when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday--some twenty-five

years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two

doors, in north and south direction, and two windows, fronting the

rising and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal point,

catch the contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a

quadruple draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr, that can escape her. I

owe a painful face-ach, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold

caught, sitting by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of

coolness. Her fan in ordinary resembleth a banner spread, which she

keepeth continually on the alert to detect the least breeze. She

possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally incommensurate with her

person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and

pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in her

favourite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful

ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden chair. She setteth

out with you at a fair foot gallop, which she keepeth up till you are

both well breathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is

up again, for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth--her movement, on

these sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying.

Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this

kind of relieved marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres

on these well-wooded and well-watered domains. Her delight at Oxford is

in the public walks and gardens, where, when the weather is not too

oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable time. There is a bench at

Maudlin, or rather, situated between the frontiers of that and

* * * * * *'s college--some litigation latterly, about repairs, has

vested the property of it finally in * * * * * *'s--where at the hour of

noon she is ordinarily to be found sitting--so she calls it by

courtesy--but in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her

enormous settlement; as both those Foundations, who, however, are

good-natured enough to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost.

Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the

walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here

she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a

book--blest if she can but intercept some resident Fellow (as usually

there are some of that brood left behind at these periods); or stray

Master of Arts (to most of them she is better known than their dinner

bell); with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of literature. I

have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very slight value upon

female conversation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from the length of

Maudlin grove, and warily glide off into another walk--true monks as

they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of her polished

converse, for their own perverse and uncommunicating solitariness!

Within doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental,

in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine;

but till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is for all the

world like that of a piping bulfinch, while from her size and stature

you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most

fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable

flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the

composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double

motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of the tune, and

still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when

you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and

surprising. The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul

in all respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth

withal a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick

susceptibility to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing

virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an

attenuated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her

humours and occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs--being six

foot high. She languisheth--being two feet wide. She worketh slender

sprigs upon the delicate muslin--her fingers being capable of moulding a

Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her glass daintily--her capacity

being that of a tun of Heidelburg. She goeth mincingly with those feet

of hers--whose solidity need not fear the black ox's pressure. Softest,

and largest of thy sex, adieu! by what parting attribute may I salute

thee--last and best of the Titanesses--Ogress, fed with milk instead of

blood--not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's stately

structures--Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never

properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it.

ELIA.

LETTER TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAS BEEN NEGLECTED

_To the Editor of the London Magazine_

(1823)

Dear Sir,--I send you a bantering Epistle to an Old Gentleman whose

Education is supposed to have been Neglected. Of course, it was

_suggested_ by some Letters of your admirable Opium-Eater; the

discontinuance of which has caused so much regret to myself in common

with most of your readers. You will do me injustice by supposing, that

in the remotest degree it was my intention to ridicule those Papers. The

fact is, the most serious things may give rise to an innocent burlesque;

and the more serious they are, the fitter they become for that purpose.

It is not to be supposed, that Charles Cotton did not entertain a very

high regard for Virgil, notwithstanding he travestied that Poet.

Yourself can testify the deep respect I have always held for the

profound learning and penetrating genius of our friend. Nothing upon

earth would give me greater pleasure than to find that he has not lost

sight of his entertaining and instructive purpose.

I am, dear Sir, yours and _his_ sincerely,

ELIA.

MY DEAR SIR,--The question which you have done me the honour to propose

to me, through the medium of our common friend Mr. Grierson, I shall

endeavour to answer with as much exactness as a limited observation and

experience can warrant.

You ask--or rather, Mr. Grierson in his own interesting language asks

for you--"Whether a person at the age of sixty-three, with no more

proficiency than a tolerable knowledge of most of the characters of the

English alphabet at first sight amounts to, by dint of persevering

application, and good masters,--a docile and ingenuous disposition on

the part of the pupil always pre-supposed--may hope to arrive, within a

presumable number of years, at that degree of attainments, which shall

entitle the possessor to the character, which you are on so many

accounts justly desirous of acquiring, of a _learned man_."