CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THIS BOOK IS ONE OF A COLLECTION MADE BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 AND BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVEE5ITY DATE DU DLIE mW^^^^ iSF! ? W4W ""^^^^S^ PRINTED INU.S.A. Cornell University Library PR 2976.J18S6 Shakespeare diversions second ^^^^^^ < r 3 1924 013 157 411 =«" The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013157411 SHAKSPEARE DIVERSIONS SECOND SERIES FROM DOGBERRY TO HAMLET FRANCIS JACOX B.A. AUTHOR OF 'cues from ALL QUARTERS,' 'ASPECTS OP AUTHORSHIP,' ETC. LONDON DALDY, ISBISTER, & CO. Se, LUDGATE HILL 1877 A 5" '^ o S%\ Hazcll, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury. CONTENTS. CHAPTER l.—§ISQhmTS : § I § II. Circumlocutory and Circumstantial § III. A Fellow that hath had Losses . § IV. Writ down an Ass .... PACK I 14 21 28 CHAPTER ii.—%tavdts mh §txmxoM : § I. Leontes § II. Hermione Lost and Lamented § in. Hermione Revived and Regained 43 S3 63 CHAPTER HI.— Ettir Mtshmom: § I. Othello 73 § II. Desdemona 82 § III. Othello's only Witchcraft .... 92 § IV. Othello's Story of his Life .... 107 § V. Othello's Soldierly Simplicity of Speech . 1x5 § VI. Life only in Another Life .... 121 § VII. Putting out the Light of Life ... 129 § VIII. A Loving Lie on Dying Lips . . . . 132 § IX. Penal Sentence of Life, not Death . . 139 IV CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV.— Patma '^z)m, : § I. Physicked in Vain § II, 'Throw Physic to the Dogs' . § III. Metaphysical Malady and Physical Art § IV. The Apothecary of Mantua . § V. A Deadly Doctor § VI. Dying of an Untold Disease . PAGB 147 166 175 182 189 CHAPTER N.—gmx ^mxmtt 19s CHAPTER NY.-ixm iitthtg ttptt %% to iawdttg m it: § I. Tantalizing Table-Talk 210 §11. Strange Bedfellows OF Misfortune's Making 233 § III, The Colour Test of Guilt .... 239 § IV. Dental Demonstration 247 § V. A Rope for the Drowning ; or, Reserved for the Hangman 353 259 CHAPTER VII.— IwforattS^: § I § II. Paternal Advice to Laertes .... 266 § III. Holding fast by one's old fast Friends . 275 § IV. In for a Fight, and How to Get out of it 287 § V. Character betokened by Dress . . . 294 § VI. Obtrusive Art 315 § VII. An Infallible Authority and a Plighted Head ,-j § VIII. Polonius accounted a Good Actor . . 336 CHAPTER viii.-famW: § I. The Play of Hamlet § II. The Character of Hamlet .... § III. Hamlet's Simulated Madness • ... 365 § IV. Hamlet and Ophelia . 342 348 372 CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX.— f mkt's Itttsfolfe m)s ixm\li% : PAGE § I. The Ghost 385 § II. Claudius and Gertrude 395 § III. Horatio 402 § IV. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . . . 413 CHAPTER X.— f amlet m)i i\t flanks : § 1 434 § II. 'The Play's the thing' 448 § III. The Play within the Play . . . . 451 § IV. Stage Tears for Hecuba 454 CHAPTER xi.—%xiMxx^ % aiiJr %m\zxx nff: § I. Life's Last Words cut short by Death . 473 § II. The Curtain falls upon the fallen Dead . 482 INDEX 491 FROM DOGBERRY TO HAMLET. CHAPTER I. § I- MPHILARETE CHASLES tells us, in one of the numerous references to Shakspeare scattered throughout his volunainous Etudes de Litterature Compar^e, that among the many comic personages with whom "that Moliere-^schylus " has peopled his world, he, the French critic, chiefly admires " ce magistrat subalterne, bon petit juge de paix, excellent homme, qui se nomme Dogberry." Coleridge regards the same dignitary as no creature of the day, to disappear with the day, but the representative and abstract of truth which must ever be true, and of humour which must ever be humorous. Elsewhere he remarks that as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus, so in Shakspeare all the characters are strong, — real folly and dulness being made the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being a fool to imitate a fool ; but to be, remain, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid representation of a veri- table fool, — hie labor, hoc opus est. " A drunken constable is not uncommon, nor hard to draw ; but see and examine what goes to make up a' Dogberry." Elbow, in Measure for Measure, is tarred, or painted, with I DOGBERRY AND ELBOW. the same brush ; but the master constable of Vienna comes not near him of Messina, in specific gravity and matter for mirth. He emulates him, however, in the use and abuse of big words ; as where he brings in before Angelo and Escalus, to have summary justice done upon them, " two notorious benefactors," " void of all profanation in the world that good Christians ought to have ; " and where he cites the testimony of his wife, " whom I detest before heaven and your honour," etc. ; and where he denounces the loose- living tapster, Pompey, and his belongings : " First, an it like you, the house is a respected house ; next, this is a respected fellow; and his mistress is a respected woman." Also, when this poor duke's constable is a man to warrant the ironical note of exclamation of Escalus, " Here's a wise officer ! " and his subsequent note of interrogation, " How long have you been in this place of constable 1 . . . You say seven years together ? . . . They do you wrong to put you so oft upon't. Are there not men in your ward sufficient to serve it } " " Faith, sir," replies Elbow, " few of any wit in such matters.'' Master constable knows his worth. The Dogberry dynasty are generally proficient in self-apprecia- tion. They are like Mr. Pepys's "my Lord Mayor" (in' 1663), that "bragging, buffle-headed fellow, who would be thought to have led all the City," etc., "while I am confident there is no man almost in the City cares for him, nor hath he brains to outwit any ordinary tradesman." But then was not Dogberry himself openly called, if not formally (and to his wish) written down, an ass .' Let us glance here and there at some of the stolid officials, justicers, constables, and the like, in miscellaneous literature, who, in some one point or more, remind us of Dogberry. . Such as that justice in T/ie Coxcomb of Beau- mont and Fletcher, who "has surfeited of geese, and they have put him into a fit of justice," and who opens the proceedings thoroughly in Dogberry's style ; " Accuse them, sir ; I command you to lay down accusations against these persons, in behalf of the state, and first look upon the parties to be accused, and deliver your name." Having JUSTICE AND CONSTABLE. listened to the accuser's brief statement, the worshipful magistrate exclaims, " No more ! we need no more : sirrah, be drawing Their mittimus before we hear their answer. What say you, sir ? are you guilty of this murther ? Mes. No, sir. Just. Whether you are or no, confess ; it will be the better for you." And so he goes on, in the same strain of strained justice. The " warden " of Maidenhead, before whom Thomas Elwood, Milton's reader, was taken for Sunday, or rather for Sabbath day, travelling, figures in Elwood's narrative as a British Dogberry, dogged and dogmatical : the accused pleaded that the Sabbath was the seventh day, and that Sunday, not Saturday, was at present in question. " Here the younger constable, whose name was Cherry, interposing, said, 'Mr. Warden, the gentleman is right as to that, for this is the first day oT the week, not the seventh.' This the old warden took in dudgeon, and looking severely on the constable, said, ' What ! do you take upon you to teach me .' I'll have you know I'll not be taught by you.' " Master constable junior mildly and deprecatingly rejoins that Saturday is the seventh day, and that yesterday was Saturday. " This made the warden hot and testy," — but the result was a diversion in favour of Elwood, who got off, after being heavily lectured by the mouthing magnate on the Fourth Commandment, and menaced with the stocks for his alleged breach of it. This dignitary seems to have been near of kin to the " indi- vidual" Dr. Boyd tells us of, who dispensed justice from a seedy little bench with most imposing airs and awful state — sitting upon that bench, all alone, and with never a case of the smallest importance coming before him ; yet when expressing his opinion, he never failed to state that " the Court " thought so and so. Farquhar's Justice Scale and Balance * are both tarred with the same brush. The fussy * Not forgetting Justice Scruple and the Constable. The latter is asked by Sergeant Kite, Pray, who are those honourable gentlemen upon COUNTRY CONSTABLES. importance of Foote's Heeltap resembles that of Messina's head watchman, diction included ; as for instance, " Silence ! and let us proceed, neighbours, with all the decency and confusion usual upon these occasions." " Silence there, and keep the peace : what, is there no respect paid to authority ? Am not I the returning officer ? " " Let us now open the praemunire of the thing, which I shall do briefly, with all the loquacity possible." " D'ye consider, neighbours, the weight of this office "i Why, it is a burden for the back of a porter." Hood's country constable, Master Goff, is worthy to have fraternized with Verges, Hugh Oatcake, and George Seacoal : his physique and phiz would do no dishonour to neighbour Dogberry's distinguished self,: it was certainly no superabundance of brain that made his two heavy eyes with their lids protrude from their sockets like two well- poached eggs, except that in the place of the yolks there were two globes of the dull greenish btown of a fowl's gkzard ; his nose was absolutely devoid of character or meaning, a mere mushroom-button ; while his mouA, round and open, reminded one irresistibly of a silly fish making itself up to take a minnow. " Ponder intensely as he liked, with such a face he could only appear to be going to sleep with his eyes open." That justice should be provided with such a doltish auxiliary is but con- sonant with history from the days of mythology downwards, so notorious has justice been for "playing at blindman's- buff, at which game, with a fillet before her eyes, she must take the first she can lay her hands on. . , , Thus the sagacious Peter Goff had been thrown in her way when she was groping about in the dark for a constable, — an injudicious mode of selection, by the way, almost equal to pricking for sheriffs with the eyes wide'' open." This straggler behind the march of intellect was in his own the bench ? and answers : " He in the middle is Justice Balance, he on the right is Justice Scale, and he on the left is Justice Scruple ; and I am Mr. Constable : four very honest gentlemen "—to the last of whom, what- ever Dogberry may have said, reading and writing come not by nature nor by attainment of any kind. ' BEADLEDOM. e conceit a grenadier striding at its head. But "there are no bounds to human vanity ; it is one of those features which it is impossible to caricature." The favourite theme of Goff's flourishes was his own astuteness ; and this assumption made him particularly jealous of any attempt to bestow information upon him.* Describing the England of Elizabethan times, Mr. Froude remarks, in the first chapter of his History, that in that country every unl«iown face was challenged and examined ■ — if the account given was insufficient, he was brought before the justice. " For any man found at large, and unable to give a sufficient account of himself, there were the ever- ready parish stocks or town gaol." Equally ever-ready, there was master constable Dogberry, transferred from rural England to Sicily by our Warwickshire poet. It is likely that Shakspeare in his native county, as well as in the capital city where he made a name and a fortune, had as often been more amused than awed by the local watch, the constabulary force of Seacoals and Oatcakes, as Young * Descendants in a direct line from Shakspeare's master constable, are the Bumbles of Beadledom. The Bumble of Oliver Twist is seen to " smile as men smile who are conscious of superior information." Hardly a tale or a volume of miscellanies by Dickens but has its fling at the Beadle. In one of his latest books he said of that functionary with unrelenting intolerance, that if there is anything that is not to be tole- rated on any terms, anything that is a type of jack-in-office insolence and absurdity, anything that represents in coats, waistcoats, and big sticks, our English holding-on by nonsense, after every one has found it out, it is the beadle. Swift's P. P., Clerk of the Parish, combines the functions of beadle with his own, so far as to be systematically severe in whipping forth dogs from the temple, and proceeding " even to moroseness " in tearing from " poor babes " the half-eaten apples which they privily munefaed in church. Leigh Hunt's beadle snatches an apple from such a boy, and looks blacker than ever when he finds it is a bad one. But what popular writer has not taken the popular side against the beadle ? down to Mr. Thackeray, at least, with his fling at " The beadles to whip the bad little boys Over their poor little corduroys, in service-time, when they didn't make a noise, '" DOGBERRY AND VERGES. Edinburgh used to be by the so-called "Town Rats" of Auld Reekie — the dilapidated Town Guard, with their dingy uniform, cocked hats, and Lochaber axes — ^worn-out old Highlanders for the most part, who were, ex officio, an unfailing subject of mirth to the citizens, and, testifies Dr. . Robert Chambers, "could hardly be considered as of any prac- tical utility." London's old Charlies, of watch-box renown, were about on a par with them, perhaps, as a body of police. The Cockney force could show a Verges for the Heart of Mid-Lothian's Dogberry, a southern Seacoal for a northern ■ Oatcake. Mr. Pepys, as we have seen, had once to do with a Lord Mayor of the Dogberry order ; and so had -he, in later life (1668), with a humbler specimen, more nearly of the Verges and Seacoal status : " We had like to have met with a stop for all night at the Constable's watch at Moor- gate by a pragmatical Constable " — alongside of which passage from the Diary there might be placed a parallel from \\'^ordsworth's experience, whose, and whose com- panions' "steadiness efface Was put to proof, and exercise supplied To their inventive humour, by stem looks. And questions in authoritative tone From some staid guardian of the public peace. In his suspicious wisdom." The watch at Dogberry's direction were to " comprehend all vagrom men," and to bid any man whatever stand in the prince's name. How if he would not stand .■' " Why, then take no note of hjm, but let him go ; and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave." So Dogberry disposes of the man that, by hypo- thesis, will not stand, and of the hypothesis itself as pro- pounded by one of his company. And even so is he ready to dispose of any number of similar hypotheses,^ touching contingent cases, which some of the watch, to do them justice, are equally ready to put. All the drunken men they find at the ale-houses, for instance, he has directed^ them to bid go to bed. " How if they will not .' " the same ' CONTINGENT QUERIES. Starter of hypothetical hitches and contingent cases is anxious to be informed. Another of his conditional queries is, If we know a man to be a thief, shall we not lay hands on him ? (an inquiry of undying interest in ticket-of-leave days). Another is, when Verges instructs his fellow-watch- men if they hear a child cry in the night, to call to the nurse, and bid her still it, — " How, if the nurse be asleep, and will not hear us 1 " There are people who delight in mooting points after this sort, whether or not there be a Dogberry at hand to determine them. The late Dr. Norman Macleod, during his Eastern - travels, fell in with " a most agreeable American," whose old experiences of danger and difficulty had become so familiar a habit of mind, that he could not see the extreme oddness of some of the questions he put to his reverend companion, with the utmost gravity and earnestness ; as, for example : " What would you do. Doctor, supposing that in a small room a man rose up to shoot you .' " This difficulty the Doctor confessed had never occurred to him. Or, again, after a few meditative whiffs, the questioner would suggest another query : " What would you do. Doctor, supposing you were crossing a prairie, and a villain on horseback threw his lasso at you, and fixed it, say, over your body ? Remember, he won't miss ; and if he succeeds in dragging you off your horse, and along the ground, you are a dead man.'' In vain the Glasgow divine conjectured what he, or even a Moderator of the General Assembly, or one of the Bench of Bishops, would do on such an occasion, by means of any " motion " he was likely to construct or propose. Maggie Tulliver was similarly given to start such wild hypotheses to her brother Tom, in the Mill on the Floss: "If there came a lion roaring at me " — " How can a lion come roaring at you, you silly thing } There's no lions, only in the shows." " No ; but if we were in the lion countries — I mean in Africa," — " Well, I should get a gun and shoot him." " But if you hadn't got a gun, . . . What should you do, Tom ? " Tom paused, and at last turned awa\ contemptuously, saying, "But the lion isn't coming. What's 8 IMA GINAR Y JUNCTURES. the use of talking ? " " But I like to fancy how it would be," said Maggie, following him : " Just think what you would do, Tom." "O don't bother, Maggie! you're such a silly — I shall go and see my rabbits." In the thirty-fourth number of the Examiner, Swift sati- rized those who will put wild improbable cases to show the reasonableness and necessity of resisting the legislative power in imaginary junctures ; than which nothing, he contends, could be more idle ; for he would undertake in any system of government, either speculative or practical, that was ever yet in the world, from Plato's Republic to Harrington's Oceana, to put such difficulties as cannot be answered. In his explanatory comments upon an Essay by Kant, which goes to show that, although the people have no shadow of a right to enforce their rights, yet still they have some rights, De Quincey represents the Konigsberg philoso- pher as teaching that if the monarch — be his name what it may, king or senate — will not grant these rights, then they are to tell him, " by means of a free press," that really he acts in a very disagreeable kind of way. — But what if he refuse to allow them a free press, (this being the one sole re- source conceded to the people .■') — Why, in that case, they are to wait till he takes a more transcendental view of the question. Readers of Plutarch — if there be any such old-fashioned folks still extant — may remember his story of the stranger that questioned Geradas as to the Spartan law against a certain class of criminals, and who being assured there were no such criminals in Sparta, rejoined, " But what if there should be one .' " Or again, the poser put by Titus Annius to Tiberius Gracchus, who was too much puzzled to reply. Or the persistency of Nasica in demanding to know what Blossius of Cumse would have done, if the Tiberius afore- said had ordered him to burn the capital, — every evasion of Blossius, on the plea that Tiberius would never have given him such an order, being futile ; for the importunate Nasica was not to be so put by. HYPOTHETICAL CASES. g Dr. Johnson, who, as Macaulay says, "hated to be questioned," must have been unwontedly good-humoured the day he suffered Boswell to ply him with queries starting from the standpoint, " What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby ? " Boswell was fond of propounding such questions, and often got very properly snubbed for his pains. As a rule, Johnson had no mind to play Dogberry to Bozzy's Oatcake. The Doctor preferred siding with the Judges, when they decline to lay down the law on hypothetical cases — though with them too there are historical exceptions, as when the whole twelve of them were asked a conjectural question in 1616, touching the royal prerogative, and all at once gave an afifirmative answer except Lord Coke, who only said that " when the case happened, he would do that which should become an honest and just judge." Wellington made the same sort of answer to a leading question, or series of questions, put at the Congress of Verona (1822) : "Not being in a situation to form a judgment on the hypothetical case put, it was impossible for him to answer any of the questions." It is quite absurd to put imaginary cases, and raise questions what should be done under such and such circumstances, wrote Bishop Copleston to Archbishop Whately, touching matters ecclesiastical, in 1845 : "When the time for doubt comes, then let us ascertain the doubtful point," etc. — But our illustrations are becoming as " vagrom " as the men Dogberry desired to be " comprehended," and it is more than time to have done with them. As the Frenchman said when told that his wife had given birth to twins, " We must put a stop to this." Back, then, to Dogberry, but only for the sake of a glance at his relations with the venerable Verges. Dogberry likes to have all the talk ; but Verges is fond of the sound of his own tongue too, and master constable patronizingly tolerates and apologises for that weakness on the part of his ancient friend : " Goodman Verges, sir, speaks a little off the matter : an old man, fO DOGBERRY AND VERGES. sir, and his wits are not so blunt as, God help, I would desire they were^ but, in faith, honest, as the skin between his brows. ... A good old man,' sir ; he wiU be talking ; as they say. When the age is in, the wit is out; God help us ! it is a world to see !— Well said, i' faith, neighbour Verges:— well, God's a good man; an two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind :— An honest soul, i' faith, sir; by iny troth he is, as ever broke J bread; but God is to be worshipped: All men are not alike ; alas, good neighbour ! Leonato. Indeed, neighbour, he comes too short of you. Dogberry. Gifts that God gives." Something of the like self-complacency, and the same deprecating tone of apology, characterizes Launcelot Gobbo, in the Merchant of Venice, when impatient to be heard him- self, and patronizingly patient of his aged sire's craving to be heard too, by Signer Bassanio : " In very brief, the suit is impertinent to myself, as your w^orship shall know by this honest old man; and, though I say it, though old man, yet poor man, my father." The innkeeper's wife, in Joseph Andrews, prays Mr. Pounce to pardon her husband, " who was a very nonsense man. . . . She was sure he never intended any harm ; and if it was not for that block-head of his own, the man in some things was well enough." One of Miss Broughton's novels presents to us an aged pair in a country cottage : the dame, dried and pickled into an active cleanly old mummy, — her goodman, dressed in an ancient smock-frock, and with both knotted hands clasped on the top of an old oak staff. He is evidently childish, and breaks out now and then into a feeble laugh, at the -thought, maybe, of some dead old pothouse jest. "This poor ould person is quoite aimless," says his wife with dis- passionate apology ; " but what can you expect at noinety- one >" Her own years cannot be much fewer. " He's very fatiguin' on toimes — that he is ! " she continues, eyeing him with contemplative candour. But her sense of superiority is self-supporting, and she can put up with the old man, and hopes others will do so too. Then again there is George Eliot's old parish clerk, Mr. PATRONIZING APOLOGETICS. n Macer, whom we see at the Rainbow, holding his white head on one side, and twirling his thumbs with an air of com- placency, slightly seasoned with criticism ; and whom we hear referring in terms of patronizing forbearance to the old rector, Mr. Drumlow, " poor old gentleman. I was fond on him, though he'd got a bit confused in his head," etc. Mr. Dickens' Father of the Marshalsea condescended towards his brother as an amiable, well-meaning man ; a private character, who had not arrived at distinction. We see the brothers walk up and down the College-yard together ; Mr. Dorrit "courtly, condescending, and benevolently conscious of a position ;" affably accommodating his step to the shuffle of his brother, not proud in his superiority, but considerate of that poor creature, bearing with him, and breathing toleration of his infirmities in every little puff of cigar smoke that issued from his lips. "The Father of the Marshalsea glanced at a passing Collegian with whom he was on friendly terms, as who should say, ' An enfeebled old man, this ; but he is my brother, sir, my brother, and the voice of Nature is potent.' " Even in his last illness, when too weak to raise his hand, he still "protects" his brother according to his long usage, and fifty times a day complacently says, when he sees him standing by his bed, " My good Frederick, sit down. You are very feeble indeed." Exactly the same had been his style towards his pet pensioner, old Nandy, on whose infirmities and failings he would expatiate with such a relish, as if he were a gracious keeper, making a running commentary on the decline of the harmless animal he exhibited. — Another example in another direction may be found in Codlin apologizing for his partner Short : " I ask the gentleman's pardon on your account, as a giddy chap that likes to hear himself talk, and don't much care what he talks about, so that he does talk." In the same story there is an aged sexton, whose work is done for him by a deaf man, a little his senior, but much more active ; and whenever the superior exchanges a word with the subordinate about his work, he does so with an impatient kind of pity for his infirmity, as if he were himself the strongest and heartiest 12 COMPASSIONATE SUPERIORITY. man alive.* Then again we might refer to Mr. Walden- garver, in Great Expectations, smiling at Pip, as much as to f say (of the man at his knees), " a faithful dependant— I overlook his folly." t And to Mr. Morgan, in Pendennis, f blandly and forbearingly correcting the imperfect diction of his friend Lightfoot, when the latter has just offered his "candig apinium" about Blanche Amory : "Apinion, not , apinium, Lightfoot, my good fellow," Mr. Morgan says with parental kindness. For that gentleman's gentleman is a superior person ; and ia the Caxtoniana we are told (in Lyttonian capitals) of the Superior Person, that when he speaks of a great man, it is with a delicate benignity, an exquisite indulgent compassion, that attests his own supe- riority. To him the veteran hero is " my poor old friend ; " the rising statesman is " that clever young fellow — as times go." Mr. Hardy's tranter, in Under the Greenwood Tree, * Sharp and severe were the strictures incurred by Lord Campbell, when he "discovered that Lord Denman was too old for his office" of Lord Chief Justice. "Lord Campbell urged so forcibly upon everybody the decline in his friend's powers, that people who had not perceived it before began to think it must be so." Miss Martineau, in the Daily News, reported a previous stroke of the same kind in the case of Lord Plunket, as Chancellor of Ireland, when he declined to make room for Plain John. "The ministerial newspapers then presented paragraphs about his age and infirmities." In 1849 they "began to bewail Lord Denman's weight of years," and early in 1850 his sprightly comrade succeeded him as C.J. " When the spectators who saw him take his seat for the first time remarked on the 'green old age' of the vivacious Judge, they asked one another, with mirth like his own, who would ever be able to persuade kim that he was too old for office."— Biographical Sketches by H. Martineau, pp. 244, 249, 252. t For another illustration from' another story from the same pen, take the poor little crazed old lady in Bleak House, who keeps on apologizing to her visitors for the eccentricity of her landlord, Krook: "She shook her head a great many times, and tapped her forehead with her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to excuse him ' For he is a little-you know-M- !' said the old lady, with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed." The interview ends with her seeing her visitors out, and infonning them by the way, with the toleration of a superior creature for the mfirrnities of a common mortal, that her landlord was " a little — M — , you know ! " DOGBERRY AND VERGES. 13 patronizes Thomas Leaf in presence of the parson, with a tone and in terms not unworthy of the superior of (and self- consciously so very superior to) neighbour Verges : " I hope you'll excuse 1ms looks being so very thin," says the tranter, deprecatingly, turning to the vicar ; " 'tisn't his fault, poor feller. He's rather silly by nater, and could never get fat. . . . He's very clever for a silly chap, good-now, sir. You never knowed a young feller keep his smock-frocks so clane ; very honest too. His ghastly looks is all there is against en, pore feller ; but we can't help our looks, you know, sir." Dogberry's very phrases must have been, whether vaguely or distinctly, within the author's remembrance when he penned this variation upon, if not reproduction of, them. And if the author of Far from the Madding Crowd makes us laugh at his rustics, it is with the laughter that, according to Mr. Carlyle, means sympathy ; for good laughter is not the " crackling of thorns under the pot ; " and even at stupidity and pretension Shakspeare does not laugh otherwise than genially. " Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts ; and we dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter ; but we like the poor fellows only the better for our laughter ; and hope they will get on well there, and continue Pre- sidents of the City-watch." Some experts in the art of writing fiction apparently fail to understand that the tire- someness of a bore ought to annoy only the other persons of the story, not the reader of it. Dogberry and Shallow, for example, as a shrewd critic has remarked, impress us with a strong conviction that if we were doomed to live with them, life would be a dreary burden ; but as readers or spectators we find them infinitely amusing. 14 DOGBERRY AND VERGES. §11. CIRCUMLOCUTORY AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL. Much Ado about Nothing, Act iii., Sc. S ; Act v., Sc. I. Hard work has Leonato, in one scene, and Don Pedro in a later one, to bring Dogberry to the point, and to learn his meaning or master his message. The President of the Watch is circumlocutory and circumstantial exceedingly. Leonato desiderates despatch when the deputation waits on his worship. " Brief, I pray you ; for you see, 'tis a busy time with me." Dogberry and Verges have no notion of brevity as the soul of wit, or as the salt of business. They are in no hurry. They can talk about a subject, and about it, and all round about it, to any extent. " Neighbours, you are tedious," is a rebuke that hurts- not Dogberry ; he is too pachyderma- tous for that : indeed he takes it for a compliment, for he has yet to learn what tediousness means ; and truly, for his part, if he were as tedious as a king, he could find it in his heart to bestow it all on so worshipful a man as Leonato. " I would fain know what you have to say," is Leonato's next appeal. And " I must leave you " comes soon after. " This learned constable is too cunning to be understood," the Prince says of him, after that comprehensive summarization by Dogberry of the charges against Conrade and Borachio, which from a secondarily jumps to a sixthly and lastly, thence to a thirdly, and so " to conclude." We have already cited Elbow in Measure for Measure as a duller, paler sort of Dogberry ; and he is true to the likeness as a master of arts circumlocutory and circumstantial : Escalus finds him and Pompey the tapster as egregious a pair of "tedious fools" as Leonato found Dogberry and Verges. How to tell a plain story in a few words, is a problem beyond the capacity, and perhaps below the contempt, of dignitaries like him of Messina. We may take him as a type of those who, as narrators or expositors, seem to find it equally hard to make a proper beginning and to come ever to an end. They will not be content to start from the real CIRCUMLOCUTORY AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL. 15 starting-point, but must be allowed a wide margin of prelimi- nary matter. If they know not when to stop, neither do they where to begin. They have no fancy for being denied their antediluvian licence ; to be called on to " pass on to the deluge" is at once to them a perplexity and an affront. Thomas Prince's Chronological History of New England begins 1 with Adam, and has to work down five thousand six hundred and twenty-four years before he gets to the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower. He is a representative man in that respect. Not Homer, but one of the cyclic poets derided by Horace, (Nee reditum Diomedis ab interitu Meleagri, etc.,) began an account of the Trojan war with the nativity of Helen, or the story of Leda and the eggs. " Arrive au drame," exclaims Balzac's not too good listener, Emile, when the Raphael of La Peau de Chagrin wears out his patience with proem and prelude : " Tu est ennuyeux comme un amendement qui se d^veloppe." And Raphael promises compliance with a grace, by passing over the first seventeen years of his eventful life. The Geta of Terence, in the Phormio, is a model for pro- fessors of condensed narrative when he says, " Omitto proloqui ; nam nihil ad hanc rem est, Antipho." Baron Alderson explained the secret of his getting on so fast in trying cases, to be this, — " discarding all the fudge and nonsense of the case, and coming to the real point.'' Buffon complained of Androvandus, that in writing the history of the cock and the bull, he tells you all that has ever been said of cocks and bulls ; all that the ancients have thought or imagined with regard to their virtues, character, and courage ; all the things for which they have been em- ployed ; all the tales that old women tell of them ; all the miracles that have been wrought upon or by them in dif- ferent religions ; all the superstitions regarding them ; all the comparisons that poets have made with them ; all the attributes that certain nations have accorded them ; all the representations that have been made of them by hieroglyphics or in heraldry ; in a word, all the histories and all the fables with which we are acquainted on the subject of cocks and 16 'PASSONS AU DELUGE.' bulls. At the high school of Patak, when Kazinezy (part of the time) was there, one of the professors who lectured on uni- ^^ versal history, that Hungarian scholar tells us, took eighteen'! years to make his way to the end of the third century, . Professor Dragg's History of Religion gets a chapter to itself in The Doctor, where Southey* relates how the Professor set about reading his book aloud one evening at Copet, to Madame de Stael and her circle of literati : " It began at the beginning of the world, and did not pass to the Deluge with the rapidity which Dandin required from the pleader in Racine's comedy : " age after age rolled away over the Pro- fessor's tongue, the course of which seemed to be interminable, especially to Necker's daughter, who " could tolerate nothing that was dry, except her father ; " and who looked, wistfully round, and saw upon many a face a semi-suppressed yawn, but upon that of Dumont the impress of sound sleep. The Professor, it appears, went steadily on; Dumont slept audibly; ; the Professor was deaf to every sound but that of his own voice, and Madame was in despair. The Professor . coming to the end of an eloquent chapter, declaimed with great force and vehemence the emphatic close, and prepared to begin the next. Just in that interstice of time, Dumont stirred and snorted. Madame de Stael seized the opportunity ; she clapped her hands, and ejaculated, "Mon Dieu! voyez Dumont! il a dormi pendant deux sidcles ! " Dumont opened his eyes, and Professor Dragg closed his manuscript.t * Who, by the way, some eighty chapters later in his work, particularly advises all intending readers to " begin at the beginning, or more accurately speaking, at the seventh chapter before the beginning," etc. — The Doctor chap. clx. t Mr. Peacock, in Gryll Grange, discourses feelingly on the post- prandial inflictions of long-winded bores. A great Indian reformer he describes, for instance, who began in the Punjaub, travelled to Calcut», went southward, got into the Temple of Juggernaut, went southward again, and after holding forth for more than an hour, paused for a moment —like Professor Dragg. The man who sat next him attempted to speak; but the proser clapped him on the arm, and said, "Excuse me : now I \ come to Madras." On which his neighbour jumped up and vanished, f "Another went on in the same way about currency. His first hoiH^s ANTEDILUVIAN HISTORY. 17 Ephraim Jenkinson begged pardon of the Vicar of Wake- field for straying from the question, when he had expatiated for a while on the medley of opinions broached by Sancho- niathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus, upon Ihe creation of the world ; and straying from the question he certainly was, for, says Dr. Primrose, " I could not for my life see how the creation of the world had anything to do with the business I was talking of" It is entered among the curiosities of literature that the false Berosus opens his history before the flood, the Chaldeans having, by his account, throughout preceding ages faithfully preserved their historical vouchers. " A des endroits un peu moins ant^diluviens," says Sainte-Beuve of Nodier's Elements de Linguistique, " nous nous sentirions plus d meme de prendre parti." Not every one can be expected to follow a Dubartas poetizing the Creation du Monde, and making of his poem a veritable encyclopaedia, the topics of which range from the fixed stars to the minutest insect, while it blends, with what M. Demogeot calls an " incroyable emphase," the cosmogony of the Bible with that of Ovid. Most of the earlier Chronicles being intended by their monkish compilers to be each a universal history for the instruction of the brotherhood, they rarely begin lower, observes Dean Milman, than the Creation or the Deluge. Reviewing the Eulogium Historiarum as one of a class very common in mediaeval literature, Mr. Freeman explains that a learned monk who wished to make a universal - history for the benefit of himself or his brethren, began at the Creation and went on to his own time : his account of his own times, as being a contemporary record, always had some value ; if he was an able man, and had good means of information, of course it had very great value. " But his account of earlier matters, has, in the nature of the case, no value at all." The author of the Eulogium talking carried him just through the Restriction Act of ninety-seven. As we had then more than half a century before us, I took my departure." — Gryll Grange, chap. xix. 2 i8 'PASSONS AU deluge: runs up and down, from nation to nation, and from sub- ject to subject. " He begins, to be sure, at the beginning with the Creation, and immediately debates whether the heaven or the earth were created first." And Professor __ (Daniel) Wilson, in his Prehistoric Annals of Scotland,M takes occasion to remind us that Scottish historians have not always been content to set out _ from a period as early as that presented by archaeology. Wyntoun begins with a history of the Angels before proceeding to " Mannes creationne," and only settles down to " the oryginale cro- nykill of Scotland " after reaching the " spate of Noe " in his sixth chapter. Already, more than once, we have directly referred or indirectly alluded to the celebrated injunction in Racine touching the " spate of Noe." Passons au deluge, suggested^ Darwiin, with a yawn, when L'Intimd began his oration avant la naissance du monde. Prior's metaphysical poem on the Progress of the Mind contains a reference to a certain lady who kindly talked to the poet at least three hours, — " Described bur pre-existing station Before this vile terrene creation ; And, lest I should be wearied, madam. To cut things short, came down to Adam ; From whance, as fast as she was able, She drowns the world, and builds up Babel." Manetho, says Bolingbroke, in one of his letters on the Study of History, " began his history, God knows when, from the progress of Isis, or some other as well-ascertained period." Accomplished St. John would persuade his dis' ciple to " hasten down from the broken traditions of antiquity" to ages more modern. So, again, Sir GeorgS Cornewall Lewis took a preference for the dim and indefiH: nite portions of history to imply generally a sacrifice of the interests of the reader to the reputation of the writer. Well known to fame, and by some still revered as model and example, is the erudite German who began his history of all the libraries of the worid by a lengthy and learned chapter De Bibliothecis Antediluvianis. Readers of M.', BEGINNING AT THE BEGINNING. 19 Carlyle's great history may remember a footnote reference to Wuttke's " Seizure of Silesia by Friedrich " {Besitzergrei- fung von Scklesien), and the weariful comment, or warning, "Wuttke begins at the Ci'eation of the World." Wuttke resembles the Pomeranians who, disputing the dues of their pastor, indited a memorial which began with the condition of their parish long before the introduction of Christianity. There is nothing like beginning at the beginning, even if one has to wait a very considerable time before nearing the end. But this mode of telling a story may be exhaustive in more than one sense — ex- hausting the reader, as well as the subject. Giraldus, seven hundred years back, asked, with what is nowadays deemed praiseworthy scepticism, how the Irish could have preserved the records of the events which happened in Ireland before the Flood. Mr. Fleming's work upon Animal Plagues contains one marvellous record : " B.C. 2048 (a.m. 2820) an epidemy and epizooty in Ireland;" and his reviewers sympathized with him in deploring that the chronology of the Irish epizootics up to' the Christian era is "not so well established as; one could desire." So again in the case of Dr. D. G> F. Macdonald's book on Cattle, Deer, and Sheep, critics supposed it to be vain to hope that any writer of his calibre will ever understand that the history of herds and flocks before the days of the patriarchs may be dispensed with. " Though it may not be generally known that ' the native country of the ox, reckoning from the time of the Flood, was the plain of Ararat,' most readers will forgive the omission of such archaeological information." Forgive it as readily as Mil- dred would Guendolen's intervention in Mr. Browning's tragedy, when she " work'd such prodigies as sparing hex Lord Mertoun's pedigree before the flood." According to Judge Haliburton, the lawyers- of the United States give the court no credit for knowing some- thing : their arguments assume the form of dissertations ; 20 CIRCUMLOCUTORY AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL. they begin at the beginning with fundamental principles ' that everybody knows and can dispense with hearing, and then trace the law, with all its branches, down to the point at issue, where they ought to have commenced. But it almost takes a Shakspeare to avow, as in the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida, " that our play- Leaps o'er the vaunt and firstlings of these broils, 'Ginning in the middle." Sancho's prolix and circumstantial story of the fisher- man and the goats, made Don Quixote thankful that literally it had no end, for otherwise there seemed no ending it ; and the knight's interpolated appeals to the squire to eschew irrelevant details, only tended to spin out the length of the tale. Fielding's Allworthy was fain to ' desire the elder Partridge to pretermit his own experiences in Ireland : " Well, pass that over till you return to England. . . . Pray, do not be so particular ; I have heard nothing of your son yet," — and it was of the son that Allworthy wanted to hear. Mais laissons, cher Osmin, les discours superflus, as the Grand Vizier says in Racine. So, in Moli^re, protests Silvestre to Octave, " Si vous n'abn^gez ce recit, nous en voila pour jusqu'^ demain." In Lander's imaginary conversation between Don Ferdinand and Don John-Mary-Luis, the former has repeatedly to check the impatience of the latter with such correctives as " Gently ; we are not half through it yet." After a while Don John metaphorically expresses his fear that they are still far from land, and have many tacks to make before they reach the pert; but this time the other Don's tone is encouraging: " Have courage, my brother and cousin, we are half-seas- - over." Landor's never acted, not to say never read, play of Fra Rupert, may give us a versified and diversified parallel, in the scene where Butello begins reading from the ceremonious commencement, the Pope's missive, and is interrupted by Rupert with a ^, . „ , "Well, well: That IS all phrase and froth ; dip in the spoon A FELLOW THAT HATH HAD LOSSES. 9.1 A little deeper ; we shall come at last To the sweet solids and the racy wine. Butello. Patience, good Frate, patience ! Rupert. Now, Butello, If I cried patience, wouldst thou not believe I meant delay ? So do not cry it then. Read on . . . about the middle. That will do." § HI. A FELLOW THAT HATH HAD LOSSES. Much Ado about Nothing, Act iv., Sc. 2. Sir Walter Scott somewhere remarks that when honest Dogberry sums up and recites all the claims which he had to respectabihty, and which, as he opined, ought to have exempted him from the injurious appellation con- ferred on him by Master Gentleman Conrade, it is note- worthy that he lays not more stress even upon his double gown, or upon his being " a pretty piece of flesh as any in Messina," or even upon the conclusive argument of his being " a rich fellow enough," than upon his being one that hath had losses.—" Yes, I have gained my experience," is the complacent rejoinder of Jaques to Rosalind's expres- sion of pity for him as having sold his own lands, to see other men's, — with this result, to have seen much, and to have nothing. Crabbe's decayed merchant cherishes a very present pride in past losses : "His faihng is avow'd ; He of the cause that made him poor is proud ; Proud of his greatness, of the sums he spent, And honours shown him wheresoe'er he went. . Now to the paupers who about him stand. He tells of wonders by his bounty plann'd,— Tells of his traffic, where his vessels sail'd, And what a trade he drove— before he fail'd ; Then what a failure, not a paltry sum. Like a mean trader, but for half a plum." 22 A FELLOW THAT HATH HAD LOSSES. Geoffrey Crayon's little Hallum the collector is proud, of his intimacy with a broken-down gentleman who had run through a fortune of forty thousand pounds left him by his father, and ten thousand pounds, the marriage portion of his wife : he " seemed to consider it an in- dubitable sign of gentle blood as well as of lofty spirit to be able to squander such enormous sums." Turner's early acquaintance, the imposing Mr. Tomkinson, used to boast in his retirement somewhere out of the Portland Road that he had " had losses, go to " — he had lost, in his line — pianoforte making — some thirty thousand pounds; he had lost more money in business than any one else had ever lost. Peregrine Pickle's acquaintance within the walls of the Fleet prison comprised one officer, two underwriters, three projectors, an alchymist, an attorney, a parson, a brace of poets, a baronet, and a Knight of the Bath ; and of these, no man scrupled to own the nature of the debt for which he was confined, unless it happened to be some twopenny-halfpenny affair ; but, on the contrary, boasted of the importance of the sum as a circumstance that implied his having been a person of consequence in life. " I have served Prince Florizel, and, in my time, wore three-pile (best velvet)," quoth Autolycus ; " but now I am out of service." " Let's shake our heads,", proposes Flavius, in Timon of Athens, "and say. We have seen better days." * Travellers in Spain tell us that in * Balzac's Madame Vauquer, in Le Pire Goriot, " resemblait k toutes les femmes qui ont en des malheurs:" " Oh, those dreadful women that have seen better days," groans Mrs. Oliphant's Archdeacon Beverley : " It is hard to know how to get one's self into sympathy with those faded existences." They fill him with an infinite pity ; but then what can one do ? If one tries to recall them to the past, it sounds like mockery— and ,: if one speaks of, the present, it wounds their feelings. Dickens makes his Mrs. Fielding " very genteel and patronizing indeed," on the strength of having once been better off. Hers was a family, she would tell all comers, which, although reduced in purse, had some pretensions to gentility ; and if .certain circumstances, not wholly unconnected, she would go so far as to say, with the Indigo Trade, had happened differently, she might have been in possession of wealth. Mrs. Wilfer is a more intolerable harper ^ PEOPLE WHO HAVE SEEN BETTER DAYS. 25 every town or village there at which you halt, your equipage is sure to be surrounded by silent, moody men, wrapped in striped blankets or tattered cloaks, and with shabby hats slouched over their brows, who regard you with glances that are sad, but not fierce : their aspect is thoroughly faded, but they have a quiet resigned mien, not wholly destitute of dignity. One such tatterdemahon is singled out for our notice by the author of Under the Sun, — a broken-down Castilian who seems to say : " I am destitute, but still I am a Don. Poverty is not a crime. I involve myself in my virtue, and have puffed prosperity away. I am bankrupt, but it was through being security for a fri^d. I am Don Dogberry, and have had losses. I held shares in the Filibusters' Company (limited). The Com- pany is being wound up, and another call on the contri- butories will be made the day after to-morrow. If you like to give me half a peseta, you can." The poor Chevalier de St. Louis who sold pat^s at Ver- sailles, begirt with a clean linen bib and apron, but with his croix set in gold tied by its red riband to his button-hole, won the pity of Sterne,' in his sentimental journey, and finished the scene with winning his esteem too. London- Labour and the London Poor has its pictures of an old woman who kept a street oyster-stall (before the days dawned for oysters to be dear), who " had seen better days," and liked it to be known ; and of that " young man, of superior appearance,"* the son of a captain in on the same chord, and tries even Mr. Boffin's good-nature with her acidulated droppings of reference to reduced circumstances and coming down in the world. One would think, by her grand style, she had sounded the depths of the saying in Plautus, " Miserum isthue verbum et pessimum est, Habuisse et nihil habere." * Like the Mr. Undecimus Scott of the Three Clerks, after his face became pimply and his wardrobe seedy, and his sphere of action was confined to Ems and Hamburg, where he poked his " Honourable " card in every one's way, and lugged Lord Gaberlunzie into all conversations. Perhaps the consolation presumably felt by such fast young men, who 24 A FELLOW THAT HATH HAD LOSSES. the Guards, but now a street patterer ; and again of that "clergyman of the Established Church" who now sold stereographic cards in the street. - Thackeray's Mrs. Prior, like most landladies, had seen better days: her husband had been, in happier times, an officer in the militia ; then of Diss, in Norfolk, of no pro- fession ; then of Norwich Castle, a prisoner for debt, and so on, and so on, until, swimming out of a hundred shipwrecks,, he had clambered on to a lighter, as it were, and was clerk to a coal-merchant, by the riverside. He might pair off with that other " captain " in Philip, the landlady's father in Thornhaugh Street, Captain Gunn, who, however he might have come by the rank, had borne it so long and gallantly that there was no use in any longer questioning his title to it ; and whom the wags could always, as the phrase is, " draw," by speaking of Waterloo, or of battles in general : his club was at the Admiral Byng, where he met frequently a pleasant little society, and bragged unceasingly, about his former prosperity. So again the old Sedleys, in Vanity Fair, their author thinks, were not unhappy in their fallen estate : perhaps they were a little prouder in their downfall than in their greatness. Mrs. Sedley was always a great person for her landlady, Mrs. Clapp, when she descended and passed many hours with her in the base- ment or ornamented kitchen, and edified her listener with revelations touching her former household, when she had Sambo. and a coachman, and a groom, and a footboy, and a housekeeper with a regiment of female domestics. We are credibly assured that the true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors ; and besides very great persons, the people whom Fate has specially endowed with this kindly consolation, are those who have seen what are called better days — those who have had losses. When Aunt Honey-. resemble such a slow coach as Dogberry only in having "had losses," may be best conceived by slightly parodying two lines of the laureate's, and so to make them sing or say, " 'Tis better to have lived and lost Than never to have lived at all." FOLKS WHO HAVE SEEN- BETTER DAYS. 25 man, in The Newcomes, came to have losses of money, Fortune straightway compensated her by many kindnesses which no income can supply. She made all around her feel her rank of gentlewoman ; she made them all familiar with the clerical position of her father, so much respected in his parish and so famous for his port wine* She would talk of her " misfortunes " with amusing equanimity ; as if her father's parsonage house had been a palace of splendour, and the one-horse chaise (with the lamps for evenings) from which she had descended, a noble equipage. The good lady was called the Duchess by her tradesfolk ; and, " knowing her station, she was kind to those inferior beings.'' She patronized her butcher, a man of property, who would say of her sometimes, " Law bless the old Duchess, she do make as much of a pound of veal-cutlet as some would of a score of bullocks ; but you see she's a lady born and a lady bred ; — she's seen better days, you know." It was believed by these worthy folks that her father had been a Bishop at the very least ; and the better days which she had known were supposed to signify some al- most unearthly prosperity. " Depuis le renversement de notre maison " . . . . Mademoiselle de Scuddry disait toujours ; and in such a tone, and with such an air, that the malin Tallemant des Reaux observed, " Vous diriez qu'elle parle du bouleversement de I'Empire grec." Susan Nipper's pertness provoked Mrs. Pipchin to exclaim, " How dare you talk in this way to a gentlewoman who has seen better days .■• " To which Miss Nipper rejoined that she pitied the better days that had seen Mrs. Pipchin ; and that, for her part, she considered the worst days in the year to be about that lady's mark, except that they were much too good for her. The old women in Mrs. Whitney's Hitherto, supported by charity, have a constant theme of rivalry in the number and severity of past misfortunes, this one having a tale to * Fielding's Goody Seagrim makes it her vaunt that, poor as she is, she is a gentlewoman, "thof I was obliged, as my father, who was a clergyman, died worse than nothing, to undervalue myself by marrying a poor man," Black George to wit. 26 A FELLOW THAT HATH HAD LOSSES. tell of better days, when her husband ^ sailed an India ship for rich owners, and she lived in a pretty two-storey house in a sea-coast village, '' with carpets to all the floors, and white curtains to the windows, and real china in the closet ; " and she perhaps carried the palm ; though not one of the sisterhood but would claim, we may suppose, the sort of appearance that struck Gabor in Werner — though Gabor qualifies his reflection by a sad-hearted query : " He seems To have seen better days, — as who has not Who has seen yesterday ? " Smollett's surgeon's first mate of the Thunder, in Rode- rick Random, honest Mr. Morgan, insists on being treated by the second mate with the more deference and respect ' for that " I have, in my time (look you) been a man of some weight and substance and consideration, and have kept house and home, and paid scot and lot and the king's taxes." And later in the book he addresses himself to the captain as " a shentleman porn and pred," who " has had misfortunes. Got help me, in the world." Scott's aged ex- abbot, now turned gardener, maunders about the time when he was great, and had his mule and ambling palfrey at command. His Mr. Crosbie, in Redgauntlet, makes a boast of what he has " done and suffered in the Forty-five. I reckon the Highlandmen did me damage to the amount of one hundred pounds Scots, forby all they ate and drank," He bestows his tediousness, Dogberry-like, on Alan Fairford, in resuming this strain before they part 7 " I carried arms, sir, against the Pretender, .... and I had an especial loss of a hundred pounds" — "Scots," interrupted Fairford: "You forget you told me all this before." "Scots or English, it was too much for me to lose," rejoined the Provost. — " I have been at feasts, I have even given them," brags Geofge Meredith's Jack Raikes at the cricket-club dinner — " yes, gentlemen," (sliding suddenly down the slope of anti-climax,) "you must not judge by the hat as I see one or two here do me the favour to do " and' anon we A FELLOW THAT HATH HAD LOSSES. 27 have him lapsing into a lament for the squandering of property bequeathed to him by his respected uncle. The head of the family of Mr. Lever's Daltons was listened to with wondering admiration as he told of the life he used to lead, and the style he once kept up at Mount Dalton : — These were his favourite topics ; and, as he grew older, he seemed to find a kind of consolation in contrasting all the hard rubs of present adversity with his pristine splendour. Mr. Bounderby, in Hard Times, exalts his Mrs. Sparsit as " a born lady, who has had her own marriage misfortunes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds — tens of Thousands of Pounds," he repeats with great relish. So again Mr. Pell, in an earlier work from the same deft hand, exalts Mrs. Pell as " a splendid woman — highly connected too ; her mother's brother, gentlemen, failed for eight hundred pounds, as a Law Stationer." One inhabitant of the Almshouse in Crabbe's Borough is a gaiTulous old widow, to whose poor friends 'twas now her pride to tell on what a height she stood before she fell ; " At church she points to one tall seat, and ' There We sat,' she cries, ' when my papa was Mayor.' Not quite correct in what she now relates. She alters persons, and she forges dates ; And fi-nding memory's weaker help decay'd. She boldly calls invention to her aid." Another such inmate, of the other sex, is Benbow, that boon companion, long approved by jovial sets : " Still some conceit will Benbow's mind inflate, Poor as he is, — 'tis pleasant to relate The joys he once possess'd — it soothes his present state." 28 DOGBERRY'S ASININE ASPIRATION. § IV. WRIT DOWN AN ASS. '■ Conrade. Off, coxcomb ! Dogberry. God's my life, where's the sexton? Let him write down the prince's officer, coxcomb ! — Come, bind them : — Thou naughty varlet ! Conrade. Away ! you are an ass, you are an ass. Dogberry. Dost thou not suspect my place ? Dost thou not suspect my years ?— that he were here to write me down — an ass ]— but, masters, remember, that I am an ass ; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. . . . Bring him away. that 1 had been writ down — an ass ! " Much Ado about Nothing, Act iv., Sc. 2. Asinine aspiration though it be, Dogberry is very fervent in it. He has been called an ass twice over, to his heart's content, by one of the two culprits he has just succeeded in " comprehending." But he would fain see so incredible a contempt of the prince's officer set down in black and white. Scarce can he believe his ears. He to be called an ass, — he, of all men .' Called it to his face, called it twice over, called it without qualification or reserve ? The sexton j should have been on the spot this night, of all nights in the year, with his writing capacity and his writing materials. : Why was that potential scribe out of reach, that he might then and there record the unparalleled affront, that he might then and there book it, for the prince and for posterity to read, — that he might then and there write down Dogberry an ass .^ The asinine aspiration arose out of the apprehension of Conrade and Boracchio by the watch. The young bloods thought and spoke foul scorn of the old watchmen who took hold of them. It was an antedated version of the nightly collisions in Georgian London of the veteran watch- box Charleys, of pre-Peelite days, with the night-revellers and young men about town. Dogberry had a pronouncedl fellow-feeling for those somnolent seniors in his tenderness ^1 to a sleepy temperament. Having instructed the watch to ' make no noise in the streets, — for, babbling and talking on FAST ASLEEP OLD WATCHMEN. 29 » their part, " is most tolerable and not to be endured," the sprighthest of them cordially acquiesces : " We will rather sleep than talk ; we know what belongs to a watch." "Why, you speak like an ancient and most quiet watch- man," neighbour Dogberry approvingly rejoins ; " for I cannot see how sleeping should oiifend." * It was the man * Mr. Fonblanque, in the Examiner of 1829, described London's ancient Charleys of watchbox renown, as a parochial police, which had slumbered and snored from the age of Alfred down to that of Peel. It was in vigorous defence of the scheme for a New Police that he added ; " If the thieves of Alfred had descended to us of the same dozing character as. the watch- men, we might haVe allowed the fitness of means to objects ; but few arts under Providence, have improved more wonderfully than the ancient art of thieving, which, next to the profession of the law, is exercised by the sharpest wits in the country." Wherefore he contended that the parochial police being no longer a match for the predatory adepts, it had become necessary to substitute a new and more capable organization for the public protection. Here and there an old-fashioned obstructive print stuck up for the decrepid parish watchmen as though to the strain of " Charley is my darling.'' And their Christian namesake, Charles Lamb, found it in that large Christian heart of his to say a good word, in rather stately rhyme too, for at least one member of the fore 3, — but then it was by way of translation from the Latin of Vincent Bourne, who had written compli- mentary verses addressed to David Cook, of the parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster, watchman. David was duly (or unduly) complimented on his courage, as a guardian of the peace during the witching hours of night : ' ' The tales of ghosts which old wives' ears drink up, The drunkard reeUng home from tavern cup, Nor prowhng robber, thy firm soul appal ; Arm'd with thy faithful staff, thou slight'st them all." But rare was the scribe who had a good word to say for the old watchmen who are reckoned to have gone out with oil-lamps, the Duke of Wel- lington's ministry, and the Bourbon family. " In the days of our youth," writes one living reminiscent, " we used to beat these Charleys, to appro- priate their rattles, to suspend them in mid-air, like Mahomet's coffin, in their watch-boxes.'^ Peter Pindar has his fling in more than one heroi- comic poem at the Old Police : " LuU'd was each street of London to repose. Save where it echoed to a watchman's nose ; Or where a watchman, with ear-piercing rattle, Roused his brave brothers from each box to battle ; To fall upon the Cynthias of the night,"- ■ 30 THE DOGBERRY BROTHERHOOD. who could not see this, and who was head-constable withal,- that a strayed reveller and spark like Conrade called an ass. To have had that enormity written down, — what would not Dogberry have given for that ! To see A double S booked against his name and office ! Calling him it was a picture to which a parallel might be cited from Barry Cornwall's story of a rake's progress : " Foul songs are met by fouler jibes ; mad screams by curses bold ; Till even the drowsy watchman wakes, and — claims his bribe in gold." Dr. Wolcot's Academic Ode proclaims the pride of the Old Charleys in their stentorian lungs, aided, on occasion, by a rattling obbligato, or an obbligato of the rattle : " Nay, watchmen deem their merits no way small, Proud of a loud, clear, melancholy bawl ; Nay, proud, too, of that instrument the rattle, Which draws the hobbling brotherhood to battle." Their bark was apt to be worse than their bite ; and indeed, in more than One respect (though not in being dumb dogs that cannot bark) they resembled the brotherhood denounced by the Hebrew prophet, whose " watchmen are blind ; they are all ignorant ; . . . sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.'' Death's ramble, as recounted by Thomas Hood, comprises this incident of the rambler's variegated observation : ' ' He saw a watchman fast in his box, and he gave a snore infernal ; Said Death, ' He may keep his breath, for his sleep can never be more eternal.' " And this poet's contempt of the hobbling brotherhood finds vent in' another poem, his Tale of a Trumpet, where the old woman that sets up for a witch gets no more " credit for greater might Than the powers of darkness confer at night On that other old woman, the parish Charley." Theodore Hook describes the pursuit of a presumed malefactor by " several elderly and decrepit personages," whose natural qualites for the chase were considerably improved by sundry large, long, and thick great- coats, in which their ancient bodies and limbs were completely enveloped, in order to secure them from the cold and rain, to which, as " guardians of the night," they might occasionally be exposed. Horace in London refers to them by the same title, the " guardians of night," in that Ode of his which recites a squabble with them, Horace losing his hat, but his cmopanion bearing off a lanthorn and rattle. As to their clothing, Herr Doctor Schonbein, in his Reisetagebuche eines deutschen Natur/orschers, took pains to particularize it as an envelopment of " thick, yellowish-gray gaberdines, prepared of a peculiar kind of woollen stuff, wherein they had a remarkably strange appearance." Their decrepitude might have been glanced at by Scott when he committed his old gaberlunzie, Edie Ochi!- WATCH BOXES TO SLEEP IN. 31 bad enough ; but only let him see it in writing ! Epea pteroenta : words are winged ; if not fitted with a ready- made pair, they can, like riches, make unto themselves wings and fly away. But the written word standeth and endureth for ever. Litera scripta manet. O, to be but once and for ever M'rit down an ass ! tree, to the custody of " two poor creatures, neither of them so stout as he was himself," " an aged prisoner led along by decrepit guards." In Max- well, the London " guardians of our lives and property " are depicted as " those venerable, infirm personages, who at that period slept during the night in upright boxes, and moved about occasionally in heavy great-coats, armed with lanterns and sticks for the protection and convenience of themselves.'' This was written while the new police were still new, though already the remembrance was dying out of a state of things when the protection of life and property was left to such locar constables as the parishes chose to appoint,- — each parish being expected to take care of itself, and some of them recruiting the watch from the aged paupers in the workhouse, while others did not even go through the form of appoint- ing anybody ; nor is there any reason to suppose, remarks an authority on police, that the parishes which dispensed with constables altogether were in any degree worse protected than those which provided officers of this kind, and boxes for them to sleep in. " The ' Charley ' of those days has passed into a byword for drunkenness, imbecility, and corruption. . . . His profound somnolence was his most harmless fault." In this respect they were pretty nearly on a level with the " paralysed old watchmea " described by Dickens as guarding the bodies of the dead by night in city churchyards, year by year, until at last they joined that solemn brother- hood ; and of whom he observes that, saving that they slept below the ground a sounder sleep than even they had ever known above it, and were shut up in another kind of box, their condition can hardly be said to have undergone any material change when they, in turn, were watched themselves . As long ago as when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote The Coxcomb, indictments of somnolence were rife against the city watch. " When they take a thief, I'll take Ostend again," exclaims Valentine, who further charges them with drinking opium in their ale, ' ' And then they sleep Like tops ; as for their bills, they only serve To reach down bacon to make rashers on." Good-natured Gay deals good-naturedly with them in his Trivia, or review of the streets of London. But Pope is none too friendly in his couplet in the Dunciad on ' ' A drowsy watchman, that just gives a knock. And breaks our rest, to tell us what's o'clock." 32 DOGBERRY'S ASININE ASPIRATION. The closing scene of the Merry Wives of Windsor con- strains even such a wit as Falstaff to make the avowal, "I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." * Aguecheek is quick to recognize himself in the " foolish knight " of Olivia's letter : " I knew 'twas I ; for many do call me fool ! " The Duke in Measure for Measure expatiates on Lucio's designation of him as a fool, a madman, and an ass. Bottom the weaver comes to revel in his ass's head. Dromio of Syracuse accepts as true the assertion, " If thou art changed to aught, 'tis to an ass." " 'Tis so, I am an ass." And his brother and namesake of Ephesus is equally acquiescent in the succeeding act : "Antiph. I think, thou art an ass. Dromio- Marry, so it doth appear By the wrongs I suffer, and the blows I bear. I should kick, being kick'd ; and being at that pass, You would keep from tny heels, and beware of an ass." And several scenes later again : " I am an ass indeed ; you may prove it by my long ears " — lengthened by pulling. But Dogberry is the man for our money in his asinine aspiration. And, look you, he is terribly in earnest, this man. It was no passing spasm, sharp for the moment, but soon over and forgotten, that wrung from him the cry to be writ down — we know what. It was no mere ebullition of a hot and hasty temper, — a thing for him to wonder at and be ashamed of, by next morning. It was the impassioned utterance of a great spirit stirred to its lowest depths. Reflection intensified passion in his case, not abated or deadened it. The fourth act closes with the vehement aspiration, O that he had been writ down — an ass ! And we are some way on in the fifth before Dogberry reappears ; and this is his style when he does, — appealing, after due conference with the prince and the signors, to those about him : " And, masters, do not forget to specify, when time * But then, as Mr. Dallas points out, Falstaff by thus laughing at himself, stops the laughter of others ; whereas Dogberry's anxiety to be written down an ass, proves his donkeyhood by his utter unconsciousness of it — the crucial test of an irrecoverable ass. SELF-AVOWED ASSES. 33 and place shall serve, that I am an ass." Later, again, when Leonato and Antonio have swelled the gathering, Dogberry recurs to his rankling grievance, and emphasizes in a pathetic parenthesis the lamentable lack of a competent scribe to write down the affront at the time. " Moreover, sir, (which, indeed, is not under black and white,) this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me an ass : I beseech you, let it be remembered in his punishment." Dogberry can prove by the mouths of two or three and more witnesses that he was so called, although it was not then and there writ down. His secretary, the sexton, had not been gone above a minute when the affront was perpetrated. But oh, the pity of it, that the sexton with his inkhorn was not at hand, to write it down upon the spot. Would it have consoled master constable to know that Cicero, in one celebrated letter to Atticus, wrote himself down a " regular donkey " (scio me asinum germanumfuisse) ? But then Cicero might not have taken it so well to be writ down one by anybody else, be he Atticus or who he might. The old prophet in the Hebrew scriptures would probably have been the last to appreciate the humour of the mali- ciously or ignorantly emphasized italics, " And he spake to his sons, saying. Saddle me the ass. And they saddled kim." It was the angry monks whp misnamed Erasmus Erasinus, " because he had written himself an ass.'' A proverb of the Rabbis runs, " If thy neighbour call thee ass, put a pack-saddle on thy back," — that is, go forward to meet the wrong, rather than shirk it. " You have chosen an ass," said Pope Benedict XII., whether in humility or irony, when the suffrages of the Conclave raised to the Pontificate James Fournier, Cistercian and White Abbot. The Holy Father was as outspoken as La Fontaine's miller, — ■ " Je suis 3.ne, il est vrai ; j'en conviens, je Pavoue." On the other hand,, there are two asses in a later fable of La Fontaine's, who protest against man's prostitution of their august name by applying it to stupid, stolid bipeds, — 3 34 WRIT DOWN AN ASS. " traitant d'ine, quiconque est ignorant, d'esprit lourd, idiot." One may be allowed to think of Dogberry, with all due deference to master constable, when reading that stanza or versicle in one of Lord Lytton's fables, — " An ass his feelings has. And the feelings of this ass, alas, Were wounded. He said, tossing his head, (And the scorn his speech betray'd, loud bray'd. Resounded) — " but what he said is neither here nor there, as it was not, oh, that lie were writ down one. Boileau is hypothetical on this subject — oui, d'un dne, Dont le nom seul en soi comprend une satire : " Si pour nous reformer, le ciel prudent et sage De la- parole enfin lui permettait I'usage ; Qu'il put dire tout haut ce qu'il se dit tout has, Ah, Docteur, entre nous, que ne dirait-il pas ? " But, honey is not for the mouth of an ass, was one of Sancho's pet proverbs ; and to Sancho himself the Don once said, " An ass thou art, an ass thou wilt continue to be, and an ass thou wilt die." * " I confess, dear sir," replied Sancho, with a rueful look, and even with larmes dans la voix, " that to be a cgmplete ass I want nothing but a tail, and if your worship will be pleased to put me on one, I shall deem it well placed, and will then serve you as your faithful ass all the days I have yet to live." Sancho thought too well of asses, and was too proud of his skill in braying like one, and being answered by them accordingly, to resent very bitterly the being called one to his face. Asinius Lupus, in * A German critic, Dr. Grohne, wrote a paper to show that the expres- sion Asine, addressed by Micio to ^schinus in the " Adelphi " of Terence, is a strong one ; upon which Dr. Wagner, as a Terentian editor, offers this remark— by some critics derided as puerile : " I appeal to the fathers who occasionally bestow upon their sons the epithet ' donkey,' excellence^ of temper and perfection of manners notwithstanding." ALL SORTS OF ASSES. 35 Ben Jonson, takes to himself the asinine reference in Horace's libel : ^^Lup. An ass ! I am the ass. You mean me by the ass. Mec. Prithee, leave braying then. Hor. If you will needs take it, I cannot with modesty give it from you." Asinius will write himself down an ass. The fool's cap fits him, and the long ears, and wear them he will". In a like frank spirit of epistolary confidence to that of Cicero's to Atticus, writes Alan Fairford to Darsie Latimer respecting his hooded visitor : " At length I began to stand convicted in my own mind, as an ass before the interview, for having expected too much, — an ass during the interview, for having failed to extract the lady's real purpose, — and an especial ass, now that it was over, for thinking so much about it." Smollett's enraged cynic exclaims, " Why didn't nature clap a pair of long ears and a tail upon me, that I might be a real ass, and champ thistles on some common ? " To apply, or misapply, what Menedemus says in Terence, " in me quidvis harum rerum convenit Qua sunt dicta in stultum,— caudex, stipes, asinus, plumbeus." Like the fool of Ecclesiastes that walketh by the way, he saith to every one that he is a fool. In a different spirit the Caliph Saphah claimed what, says Gibbon, he had, by his Georgian warfare, " deserved — the honourable title of the Ass of Mesopotamia;" for he had been governor of Mesopo- tamia, and the Arabic proverb praises the courage of that warlike breed of asses who never fly from an enemy. To be. written of as an ass of this breed, or anything like it, is not to be written down. Dr Thomas Brown, in one of his metaphysical discourses, presumes that few of his country- men can have refrained from smiling, " on reading the simile in which Homer compares one of the most undaunted of his warriors to that ill-used and much-enduring animal, which, by a very common aggravation of injustice, we have first oppressed, and then despised because we have oppressed." Byron shields himself behind Homer when, for rhyme if not 3 A 36 ASININE ALLUSIONS. reason, he compares his Don to the animal Dr. Brown avoids naming : " Then, like an ass — (Start not, kind reader ; since great Homer thought This simile enough for Ajax, Juan Perhaps may find it better than a new one)." Southey preserved on record in The Doctor what a certain noble Lord said of a certain county member in the course of an animated debate in the House of Commons, on a subject long since forgotten : " There stands the honourable Baronet, hesitating between two bundles of opinions." When was county member more plainly (even by Mr. John Stuart Mill) writ down an ass .' In a letter to Christopher North from one of Jiis fellow-contributors to Maga, that pleasant and successful writer, the late James White of Bonchurch, a certain number of the Nodes is warmly praised, and the letter-writer then adds : " After describing the party at ^arnegie's, who did you mean by the ass that, after braying loud enough to deafen Christopher, went braying all over the Borders .' You unconscionable monster, did you mean me } Vicar of the consolidated livings of Loxley and Bray ! I console myself with thinking it is something to be men- tioned in the ' Noctes,' though in no higher character than an ass." Parson Dak had some reason for assuming a per- sonal allusion in Dr. Riccabocca's impatient yet sententious utterance.: " Cospetto, — he who scrubs the head of an ass, wastes his soap." "If you scrubbed mine fifty times over with those enigmatical proverbs of yours," said the parson, testily, " you would not make it any the wiser." It is not every parson that is equal to the feat recorded in Evelyn's Diary, of a preacher at " St. Maries, Oxford," who " tooke his texte out of the history of Balaam : Num. 2 3. ' Am I not thine Asse.?'" jThere was what the historian of the Dutch Republic calls " whimsical petulance " in the complaint set up by President Viglius, after too faithfully serving the ends of Philip of Spain, that " the faithful servant is always, a perpetual ass." Perhaps he regarded himself as like 'SA VANS' AND ASSES. 37 Issachar, a strong ass crouching down between two or more burdens. When the counsels of his imperious wife, Bertha, led Adalbert II. of Tuscany into a premature rebellion against Lambert, then (a.d. 900) Emperor, and King of Italy, the Tuscan was defeated ignominiously, and taken prisoner while hiding in a stable. Whereupon Lambert told him, insult- ingly, " Your haughty wife Bertha prophesied that you would be a king or an ass ; lo, you are found like an ass in the stalls among the cattle." The fallen marquis or count loved not such language.* Ass grated on his ears, as a cognate epithet did on those (presumably long ones) of Bishop Foulques, in Souli6's mediaeval roman : " Le nom d'evdque imbecile sonnait incessamment a I'oreille de Foul- ques ; elle I'excitait comme la clochette attach^e a la t^te superbement stupide d'un mulet," — or, say, as the mono- syllable flung by Conrade at the head, no less superbement stupide, of Dogberry. He was not philosopher enough to herd with the old philosophers who accepted good-humouredly the disparaging terms attached to them by their enemies or rivals ; the Epicureans, for instance, as Mr. Peacock observes, acquiescing in the pig, and the Cynics in the dog, while Cleanthes was content to be called the Ass of Zeno, as being alone capable of bearing the burden of the Stoic philosophy. Napoleon in Egypt treated the philosophers who accompanied his expedition — the " scientific characters," Alison styles them — on a strictly equal footing with the asses, whenever the enemy appeared ; for the rule was, in that contingency, to huddle together savans and asses in the centre, as the only safe place ; and no sooner, according to Las Cases, were the Mameluke horse descried, than the word was given, " Form square ; artillery to the angles ; asses and * But what if he had been treated on the spot as the Turks treated the monks in Cyprus, in 1823, — for, not content with stabUng their horses in the churches, the Ottomans actually saddled and bridled some of these unhappy ecclesiastics, and, forcing them to go on all fours, rode on them in derision, and kept them going, till they — not were ready to, but did, drop down dead of fatigue. 38 ASININE AFFINITIES. savans to the centre." It became a pet jest with the soldiers to call the asses dlmi-savans. General Daumas, in his book on the horses of the Sahara, has a story of a~ man who applied to an Arab cheik to know whether he had seen an ass which he had lost. The cheik turned to his friends. " Is there any one here who knows not the pleasures of the chase ? who has not fearlessly thrown himself into the thicket to lie in wait for the beast of prey," and in going through all the other stirring incidents of Sahara life. One of his listeners replied, "Yes, /.am one who has done nothing of the kind, felt nothing of the kind." The cheik then turned to the applicant for an ass, and said, " There is the animal you are in quest of ; away with him at once." * Possibly Coleridge .might have been consigned to the same category by the cheik, for venturing _in verses addressed To a Young Ass, to fraternise with him in such terms as these : " Thou poor despised Forlorn ! I hail thee Brother — spite of the fool's scorn." Byron had something to say of Coleridge, greatly daring, in this rhyming challenge ; as perhaps, in his time, Horace too would have had, but with more good-nature, like thatl which marks the passage in his Epistola ad Asellum, — " Asinoque paternum Cognomen vertas in risum, et fabula fias." Such banter was popular with the ancients ; and Landor essayed to imitate both the matter and the manner when he slipped this epigram into one of Aspasia's letters : *' Leave me thy head when thou art dead, 'Speusippus ! Prudent farmers say An ass's skull makes plentiful The poorest soil ; and ours is clay." Both in verse and prose, indeed, Landor was fond of these asinine allusions, more or less severe. The Bishop of Ancona, during the siege, is made to complain of having had to ,pay, that very morning, three golden pieces for the head, " think you, of what } an ass ! " "The cannibal ! " is Father John's aside. A distinguished statesman equally * Les Chevaux du Sahara et les Mceurs du Desert. SELF-AVOWED ASSES. jg obnoxious to Mr. Peacock, was writ down and " writ large " an ass in the Imaginary Conversation between Landor and Southey — special stress being laid on the alleged loudness and dissonance of his voice, the wilfulness and perverseness of his disposition, and his habitude of turning round on a sudden and kicking up behind. But assuredly this was not the peer of whom a witty Premier said, when urged by a common friend to give him the vacant Thistle, — " Better not, I think ; he would eat it." A Lord Privy Seal con- temporary of his amused the French Court by his answer to the question what office he held : " Le Chancelier est le grand sceau (sot) ; moi, je suis le petit sceau d' Angleterre." * But others besides Englishmen have raised like matter for mirth. The Italian at Vienna, for example, who was telling a lady how long he had been travelling, and who, pro- nouncing French after the manner of his nation, said : " J'ai iti. un dne a Paris, et un dne a Londres, et un dm a Rome." '' Mon cher Abb6," replied the lady, " il parait que vous avez eti un ane partout." Manifest and self-convicted ass though Dogberry might be, it is easily conceivable that his bearing and diction might impose on the unwary, and impress them with a sense of sapient authority. The portentous gravity of his mien, and the magniloquent pomp of his phrases, were no doubt efficacious in securing him notice a;nd respect in Messina. He magnified his office. He must have awed some at least of the vulgar. They would descry dignity in his demeanour, and they would, in his own wording of it, " suspect " his place. O place and greatness ! " Hood an ass with reverend purple, So you can hide his two ambitious ears, And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor," says Mosca, in Ben Jonson's Volpone. One thinks of Victor Hugo's allusion to " les betes Qui port^rent jadis des * To the same Minister is attributed the apologetic idiom : "Je voudrais si je coudrais, mais je ne cannais pas." 40 ASININE EXALTATION. mitres sur leurs tetes." It has been said of the popular oriental reason that it succumbs to the fascination of solemn externals as the guaranties of truth : it reposes in the cere- monials of wisdom ; a grave countenance, a venerable beard, a priestly costume, are the tests of a correct and capable instructor. So too, nearer home, " Braid claith lends folk an unco heeze ; Males mony kail-worms butterflees ; Gies jnony a doctor his degrees, For little skaith : In short, you may be what you please, Wi' guid braid claith." Burns tells Andro Gout, " You look big, but lay by hat and wig, and ye'll hae a calf's head o' sma' value." In church history, ass was a favourite figure of speech with orthodox and heterodox alike. We are constantly light- ing upon such words as these of the Cardinal of St. Mark : " An ignorant prince or prelate is but a crowned ass." Luther loved to adorn his frontispieces with caricatures of a pope furnished with a pair of ass's ears.* It was with the connivance of certain priests that "some wretches," as Dean Milman calls them, stole into the church where Savonarola was to preach on Ascension Day (May 4, 1497), and spread an ass's skin as a pulpit-cushion ; or as some accounts have it, placed a dead ass on the preacher's seat. In the Feast of Asses, a select animal of that breed, covered with sacerdotal robes, was gravely conducted to the altar, where service was performed, and the ass supplied with drink and provender at recurrent intervals between profane prayer and praise. " Why, friend, a golden ass, A baubled fool, are sole canonical, While pale-cheek'd wisdom and lean-ribbed art Are kept in distance at the halbert's point," — * " The Papists are all asses," he comprehensively asserts in one of his diatribes, " and will always remain asses. Put them in whatever sauce you please,— -boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, hashed, etc., they are always the same asses." ^SS IN LION'S SKIN. 41 SO discourses Marston's hero in Antonio's Revenge. To another of John Marston's plays we owe the vigorous Hne, " What though in velvet cloak, yet still an ape," — which to some may recall another of Mr. Tennyson's : " Though smock'd, or furr'd and purpled, still the clown ; " while it suggests a closer parallel in that old historical drama of King Edward III., of dubious authorship : " Deck an ape In tissue, and the beauty of the robe Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast." But there are those who deem it profaneness and irrever- ence to call an ape an ape, an ass an ass, if it but wear a monk's cowl on its head, as Coleridge somewhere says. La Fontaine's charlatan has no such compunctious visitings : " Que I'on m'amtee un ine, un Ane renforcd, Je le rendre maitre pass^, Et veux qu'il porte la soutane." The same fabulist's version of the Ass in the Lion's skin, who made the world tremble, till he was found out, closes with a moral on the many folks that foitt du bmit in the world, whose attire and make-up constitute " les trois quarts de leur. vaillance." And what is the moral of that other fable of his about the ass that carried relics .-' " D'un magistrat ignorant C'est la robe qu'on salue." If certain ermines and furs be placed in a certain position we style them a judge, writes Swift in his Tale of a Tub ; nor would it have been like the Dean to omit adding, that even so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop. In Gresset's L'Abbaye, " L'ane mitr6 va se montrer." The oaf in the Country Inn is assured, on high authority, " David, you only want a great wig upon your head and a gown upon your shoulders, to make as good a proser as many that we listen to in the pulpit or on the bench."* John Eames tells Lily Dale, touching * " My lud, there is a great echo in this court," suggested a bronze- browed barrister to a certain judge, who complained that he could not hear his own voice for an overwhelming donkey in full bray just outside. 42 AN ASS'S HEAD. the head of his office, Sir Raffle Buffle, that there is some- thing imposing about such a man till you're used to it, and can see through it. " Of course it's all padding." Among the bigwigs, and bishops, and cabinet ministers, he fancies that the looking beautiful is the chief part of it. As the British Bibliographer sings : " Ha, ha, ha, ha, the world doth pass Most merrily, I'll be sworn. For many an honest Indian Ass Goes for a Unicorn." We read that an ass's head was sold for eighty pieces of silver. Swift declared, in his time, that they had lately been sold ten thousand times dearer, and yet were never more plentiful. CHAPTER II. LEONTES. UNDISCERNING readers are apt to regard Leontes as merely a white Othello. They may care for him infinitely less, and think him infinitely better off in the long run than he deserves ; but they look on him as intended to illustrate the same unhappy disposition as the Moor, and to have found it almost equally fatal. Now, on the other hand, discerning critics recognize at once in the idea of the Winter's Tale a genuine jealousy of disposition, and recommend an immediate comparison of it with Othello, which Coleridge affirms to be the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy, he observes, is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well-known and well-defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible, and, he boldly says, "not one of which marks its presence in Othello ; " — such are, for instance, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eager- ness to catch at proofs ; a grossness of Conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images ; a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and there- fore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them 44 LEONTES. — ^in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue,* and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary manner ; and once more, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a- high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty ; and con- sequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness. Elsewhere again Coleridge differentiates sharply the " solemn agony of the noble Moor," as well from the morbid suspiciousness of Leonatus, who is, in other respects, a fine character, as from what he calls " the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes." In one of the miscellaneous poems Shakspeare himself has told us that " where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel ; Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny, And in a peaceful hour doth cry, ' Kill, kiU.' " The sort of jealousy to which Leontes is a prey is stigmatized none too severely by Paulina, when she tells him — and mark the damning significance of the parenthesis ■ — she will not call him tyrant, " But this most cruel usage of your queen (Not able to produce more accusation Than your own weak-hinged fancy), something savours Of tyranny, and will ignoble make you, Yea, scandalous to the world." * For example, the babble with Mamilius — characterized by Coleridge as the king's " strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the little boy." The doting of the father is expressed with characteristic vehe- mence and effusion ; and in some degree it interests us in favour of both. One likes to read, as in one of Walter Savage Lander's imaginary scenes in yEschylus, of such a king as the king of men, Agamemnon, tossing Orestes above his joyous head, and calling him his crown ; or, in Gibbon, of Attila relaxing from his savage sternness, to greet his youngest boy, Imac, with an eager smile, aud pinch his cheek with demonstrative fohdness. The misgivings of Leontes are echoed by Schiller's Philip II., in the scene .where that suspiciously-disposed despot toys with the Infanta : ' ' No— sure she is my daughter — or can nature Thus lie like truth ? Yes, that blue eye is mine. And I am pictured in thy every feature — Child of my love ! for such thou art — I fold thee Thus to my heart — thou art my own " but even so saying, a dismal doubt overshadows the king : he fancies he OTHELLO. 45 One act later, midway in the drama, and we have Leontes moved to the renvorseful confession, " I have too much believed my own suspicion " — an avowal that saves him not from Paulina's plenitude of reproach : " Thy tyranny " — she will call him tyrant now — " together work- ing with thy jealousies, — fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle for girls of nine ! — O, think what they have done ! " Emilia can objurgate Othello in a not unlike fashion, for Emilia and Paulina are themselves not unlike in the outspoken "courage of their opinions " — but the wife of lago can never feel towards the Moor of Venice that loathing of indignant contempt which the wife of Antigonus cannot but feel towards the King of Sicily. Contrasting Leontes with Othello, we feel with La Bruyere, that " s'il y a un soupgon injuste, bizarre, et sans fondement, qu'on ait une fois appelld jalousie, cette autre jalousie . . . meriteroit un autre nom." Hermione had as much right as Desdemona to protest, in regard of her husband's jealousy, " I never gave him cause." Emilia's rejoinder is vastly more applicable to Leontes than to the Moor : " But jealous souls will not be answer'd so ; They are not ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they are jealous : 'tis a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself." * The jealousy of Leontes, says the elder Schlegel, is not, like that of Othello, developed through all its causes, symptoms, and variations ; it is brought forward at once full-grown and mature, and is portrayed as a distempered frenzy. " It is a passion with the effects of which the spectator is more concerned than with its origin, and which does not produce the catastrophe, but merely ties the knot can detect another likeness in that fair young face, and he pushes the Infanta from him, and madly bids his pet begone. * We might apply honest Caleb Garth's remark, " Pooh ! where's the use of asking for such fellows' reasons.? The soul of man when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toadstools, and no eve can see whence came the seed thsrsoU'—MiddUmarcA, chap. xl. 46 LEONTES. of the piece." There is a sort of jealousy which, as George Ehot says, needs very little fire : it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism. The argument of Coleridge in his celebrated Lectures was, that Othello is anything but jealous in his nature, and made so only by the machinations of lago, while Leorites requires no prompter but his own suspicious mind. Leontes might almost stand for Dr. Moore's picture of Zeluco, as the greatest of self-tormentors — his restless mind eternally suggesting fresh causes of disquiet to itself. Two ideas at one time were the very present plague of Zeluco — that his wife disliked him, and that she was fond of another. " There was no cure for the first, but his becoming an honest man, which was not in his nature ; and the cure of the other was nearly as difficult ; for to remove suspicions from the breast of a man given to jealousy, and prevent their returning, would be changing his nature." This passion has a tendency not only to sour the temper, but to obscure the understanding ; else how should " trifles, light as air, be to the jealous confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ '' } Philip of Orleans is told by Anne of Austria in a French historical romance, " Your jealousy is not merely a defect, it is a positive disease. And do you imagine that a complaint which exists only in your own imagination can be cured .'' You wish it to be said you are right in being jealous, when there is no ground what- ever for your jealousy."* As Alcippe says in Corneille, " La jalousie aveugle un coeur atteint, Et, sans examiner, croit tout ce qu'elle craint." More applicable still to Leontes is the remonstrance of Philinte addressed to Moli^re's misanthrope : " Peut-Stre est-ce un soupgon congu Idgferement ; Et votre esprit jaloux prend parfois des chimferes." * Dr. Holmes describes, in the case of one of his characters, how, " with that ingenuity which always accompanies jealousy," he tortured every circumstance to make it square with his belief. Monsieur de Villardin n John Marston Hall is another of the same type— designed to show hat there is never any telling to what acts of weakness, folly, or mean- ness, a suspicious nature will not reduce a man. LEONTES. 47 How characteristic of Leontes is the manner in which he suddenly resents his friend's compliance with that urgent invitation to prolong his stay, to which Hermione had been prompted by her husband. " At my request he would not ! " * And his self-torturing analysis of his sensations gives force to that passage in which — a parallel to one in Othello — he descants on the comparative blessedness of unrecognized calamity and wrong. He sighs at knowing too much. " There may be in the cup A spider steep'd, and one may drink ; depart, And yet partake no venom; for his knowledge Is not infected: but if one present The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drank, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts : — I have drank, and seen the spider." * In one of Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions, the question is put, — ' ' My lord, what would your gentle countess say, If she o'erheard her own request neglected, Until supported by a name more potent ? '' In another, the Duke of Mantua eggs on Victoria: to secure Count Basil's consent "to grace my court another day ; I shall not be offended when I see Your power surpasses mine.'' Mrs. Bertram's signs of yielding to the written appeal of Lucius Davoren arouse misgivings in her perplexed suitor : " His eloquence has more power than mine," said Geoffrey, with kindling jealousy. — It was difficult for good old Lady Margaret of Tillietudlem to forgive Claverhouse his neglect of her intercession for Henry Morton. And Major Bellenden, while upholding the supremacy of martial law, was free to own that Colonel Grahame was deficient in respect to his suppliant hostess ; nor, the rebuffed veteran adds, " am I over and above pre-eminently flattered by his granting to young Evandale (I suppose because he is a lord, and has interest with the privy-council) a request which he refused to so old a servant of the king as I am."— Mr. TroUope's Miss Mackenzie has a conscience in these matters of preferential concession. Pressed to stay by Lady Ball, and declining, she cannot, on that account, yield after- wards, as she inclines to do, when pressed by that "nice-looking, smooth- faced young fellow," Jack. She must not, by invidious compliance with the request of the grandson, giTe the grandmother the right to exclaim with bitterness, " K\.my request, she would not." 48 LEONTES. Hence these violent heavings — as of one that would be rid of the abomination too wittingly gulped down.* Leontes is hardly a whit better than that fairy-tale emperor in Valentine and Orson, whose unworthy treatment * At the inn at Terracina, Geoffrey Crayon took note at dinner-time of " what appeared to be a dish of stewed eels," of which an Englishman present ate with great relish, but "had nearly refunded them" when told that they were vipers, caught among the rocks of Terracina, and esteemed a great delicacy. Pallet, in Peregrine Pickle, was almost gluttonous over a so-called " fricassee of rabbit," and declared it to be one of the best he ever tasted. But a convulsive reaction, described in Smollett's least refined style, ensued, when Tom Piper reported the connexion of that dish with what he had seen hanging by the pantry-door, in the shape of " the skin and feet of a special ram-cat, new flayed." Such tricks are sometimes played in real life; but, as there are strong stomachs as well as queasy ones, not always with success. Sir Eardley Wilmot, in his memoirs of Mr. Assheton Smith, notes how a steak from Baronet, Sir James Musgrave's horse, was served up at Melton, and how William Cooke, after "partaking of it," was told what he had been eating, — but, instead of being disgusted, he immediately called out for another cut from the same steak. This was before hippophagy had come to be accepted as one of the triumphs of civilization. Lord Anson's crew had a pronounced dislike to seal's flesh, until they agreed together to call it lamb — and by dint of " pretending very much " that it was lamb, they came to like it well enough. Such is the power of names, or the force of imagination ! — Miss Leslie, in her Recollections of Lisbon, speaking of kids as much eaten in Portugal, remarks that it is not altogether safe to venture on one, unless you are quite sure that it is not a cat. " I am still uneasy with a misgiving, that at a table not our own, I did eat a slice of grimalkin kid ; and I can never be quite certain that I did not. I must say, however, that whether of the feline species or not, it looked and tasted well." And what more would the signora have? Could she not let good digestion wait on appetite, without fostering imaginative misgivings to spoil aU.? If the drink went down well, why should she insist on seeing the spider ? In the \-j(6vo<^a.-p.a of Erasmus, a story is told of a bachelor of divimty dying of consumption, who, from theological scruples, and though urged by his bishop to. comply, resisted all the advice of his physicians to have recourse to a diet of eggs and milk. At last, when it became evident that he would die rather than follow a prescription which would compel him to break the fasts of the church, it was determined to practise a deception upon him, and a drink was accordingly prepared of eggs and goat's milk LEONTES. 4g of his unjustly suspected empress his very courtiers cry shame on : Hermione-like, Bellisant is repudiated, together with her infant child. This is the Kitely type of jealousy that, as a pestilence, affects and infects " The houses of the brain. First it begins Solely to work upon the phantasy, Filling her seat with such pestiferous air As soon corrupts the judgment ; and from thence Sends like contagion to the memory: Still each to other giving the infection, which he eagerly swallowed. Within a few days he began to get better, and went on gaining strength until a servant-maid revealed the trick, when he immediately began to vomit up again what he had eaten. Then again in the Tischreden of Luther may be read how a rich Jew, on his death-bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratis- bon, and how his friends, to save heavy toll, packed the carcase in a barrel of wine, and how the carriers, ignorant of the solid contents,'tapped the barrel, and " swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew's pickle. How it fared with them then, you may imagine." Among the early English metrical romances is one concerning convales- cent Richard Lion-heart's violent longing for pork, after his attack of ague in the Holy Land : pork was not easily to be had in so anti-porcine a region. But an old knight was equal to the emergency : "Take a Saracen, young and fat ; In haste let the thief be slain, Open'd, and his skin off flayn ; And sodden full hastily With powder and with spicery, And with saffron of good coloir. * * * * The king ate the flesh and gnew the bones, And drank well after for the nonce. And when he had eaten enough. His folk hem turn'd away, and lough." Let them laugh. The king enjoyed his pork, and was himself again. Anon he called for the head of that swine, and fearful was the dismay of the cook. But soon the cook's terrors were dissipated, for Richard had a strong stomach, and the discovery caused him no disgust after all. Hagiology makes devout and admiring record of Saint Narbert's virtue in swallowing, without flinching, the spider he saw floating in the consecrated cup. It has been said of refinement, that, being clean itself, it supposes that others are clean also, until forcibly undeceived— indeed, resolutely prefers to trust, rather than have the imagination polluted by the repulsive 4 so JEALOUSY OF LEONTES. Which as a subtle vapour spreads itself Confusedly through every sensive part, Till not a thought or notion in the mind Be free from the black poison of suspect." A contemporary of Rare Ben's remarked that by suspecting that to be which we see not, we intimate to the world either what our own lives have been, or what our dispositions are. Feltham calls jealousy the worst kind of madness — "a gin which we set to catch serpents, which, as soon as we have caught them, sting us. Are we not mad, who, being at peace, [Leontes-like] must needs go in search of discontent- ments .■• " The author of Sayings and Doings has among his characters that of a man who, having fondly loved, begins to collate and compare a multitude of inconsiderable trifles {not unconsidered ones), all converging to the one point of undeceiving himself, and who does so with a cherished predisposition to doubt and suspect ; and no sooner has suspicion been allowed to supplant confidence, than the most innocent actions are coloured up in tints to suit his heated imagination, and glare before his eyes as so many proofs of consummate hypocrisy and duplicity, if not of actual guilt. A more noteworthy portrait, full length, is the Griffith Gaunt of Mr. Charles Reade, who is Leontes-like thus far, that he is not, as Othello, made jealous by some envious conspiring friend, or by mere misinterpreted circumstance : " jealousy in him is an inborn uncontrollable fiend ; " it is not, his critics observe, that circumstance slowly developes it ; the passion is always there, ready to seize and colour cir- . cumstance. Jeffrey objected to Joanna Baillie's Romiero, , as depicted in her play on the passion of jealousy, that ^ih him the passion appears causeless, utterly inconsistent with reason, and therefore degrading to the character : he cannot claim our sympathy, and indeed can excite little details of over-curious investigators, and would sooner swallow one spider, whether moral or physical, in ignorance, than have the gorge perpetually rising at possible spiders. To apply a couplet of Pope's, transcribed from Chaucer, — " 'Tis better, sure, when blind, deceived to ttfe. Than be deluded when a man can see." CONSTITUTIONALLY SUSPICIOUS. i^i or no interest, because we feel that such a being, " following still the changes of the moon with fresh suspicions," must be one of a naturally mean and weak character of mind ; nor is it easy to conceive that one who cherishes this vice ill the blood — this constitutional tendency towards cause- less suspicion, should retain those other nobler and re- deeming qualities with which his jealousy is here associated. Mariana, in The Wife, is spirited in self-respect when she asserts, " Could he who proved my love on ground's so broad As I have given my lord ; on grounds so mean Descend to harbour question of my love — Though broke my heart in the disseverment, He were no longer lord or aught of mine ! " But, as it happens, Mariana's husband is far above such mean suspicions, and his style to her is, " No ! — thou didtt never swerve : Truth dwells in thee — Thou art all radiant with it ! " And when the rascally tempter tells him, lago- like, " Your highness sees how hinges fact on fact," " No ! — I see nothing ! " replies Leonardo. So that, in fact, Charles Lamb made Mariana say in the Epilogue, that, as for her Othello, " to his vows more zealous, twenty lagos could not make him jealous." So remote was he from the Leontes type, characterized by the Baron in Tobin's play of The Curfew, where he assumes that Fitzharding must have observed, " For you have deeply read" the heart of man, A wayward disposition in some natures, Out of the very height of their enjoj'ments To breed their discontents ; and make, like devils, A hell of paradise." The sudden jealousy of Leontes is set down as, though not impossible, still unaccountable, by Hartley Coleridge, who traces Shakspeare throughout in a Winters Tale, but not always Shakspeare in a happy vein — the serious portion of the play, the scenes which carry on the plot, appearing to 52 JEALOUSY IN LEONTES. this fine critic not only harsh in the thought, but infelicitous in dictiori, whereas he calls the comedy parts excellent, and the pastoral exquisite. He would not deny that the ready soliciting of Hermione and the easy compliance of Polixenes might produce, in a better mind than that of the Sicilian tyrant, a momentary cloud, a wish that the request had not been made, an impatience for Polixenes' departure. " How slight a spark may cause explosion in the foul atmosphere of a despot's heart, it is hard to say. Irresponsible power is tyranny without, and moral anarchy within." It is to an Eastern despot that the lines in Racine refer : " Amant avec transport, mais jaloux sans retour, Sa haine va toujours plus loin que son amour. Ne vous assurez point sur I'amour qu'il vous porte; Sa jalouse fureur n'en sera que plus forte." We should, with Hartley Coleridge, little wonder at the con- duct of Leontes in an Eastern tale : many of the sultans in the Arabian Nights act as madly and wickedly, whom yet the inventors evidently meant for wise and gracious princes ; nay, history records abundant instances of like abjuration of reason in men not incapable of generosity or incidental greatness, to say nothing of taste and sensibility for which some of the worst of kings have been conspicuous. But it is urged that to the sternest tragedy, if fit for drama at all, should be confined the exhibition of such madness of the heart. " The grossness of Leontes' imaginations, his murderous suggestions, and inaccessibility to reason, remorse, or religion, are naturally consequent on the base passion, say rather the unclean daemon, that possesses him. It is nature such as may still be found in St. Giles's." But the question occurs, is it possible that one who had once fallen thus could ever again be worthy of a restoration to hap- piness ? And the answer is ready — in the constituted order of human progression, surely never. Remorse, it is allowed, the tyrant would feel ; but it would urge him to vengeance on the instruments of his crimes — perhaps to some superstitious rite, some self-sought atonement ; be A VICE OF THE BLOOD. S3 never, the same commentator* contends, to a heart-cleansing repentance.! Professor Dowden, who speaks of the jealous passion of Leontes as "hideously grotesque," accepts as a fact, never- theless, that the heart of the king is at length instructed and purified by anguish and remorse. He has " performed a saint-like sorrow," redeemed his faults, paid down more penitence than done trespass ; wherefore Leontes is received back without reproach into the arms of his wife, who, the critic significantly remarks, embraces him in silence, allowing the good pain of his repentance to effect its utmost work. § n. HERMIONE LOST AND LAMENTED. Addison observes in the Spectator, as one among the tor- ments produced by the passion of jealousy, that none are greater mourners than jealous men, when the person who provoked their jealousy is taken from them : then it is that * Hermione he chaiacterizes as frank and noble, rising in dignity as she falls in fortune — not unlike Marie Antoinette, whose unsuspecting levity, though it alienated not her- husband, exposed her to the slander of foul minds that had not even the excuse of jealousy — in sunshine a butterfly, in misery a martyr. t Badly as Hartley Coleridge thought of Leontes, not even in him did the critic find the odiousness of jealousy displayed in such glowing colours as in the. Leonatus Posthumus of Cymbeline, who, in plain terms, acts a villain's part. " Shakspeare wisely conceives jealousy to be a passion pre-existent to the occasions it is sure to find or seek." — Notes on Shak- speare : Essays, ii., pp. 148 sq., 190 sq. Mrs. Jameson observes that the jealousy which in Othello and Posthumus is an error of judgment, in Leontes is a vice of the blood : he suspects without cause, condemns without proof; he is without excuse,- -unless the mixture of pride, passion, and imagination, and the predisposition to jealousy with which Shakspeare has portrayed him, be considered as an excuse. 54 LEONTES AND HERMIONE. their love breaks out furiously, and throws off all the mixture of suspicion which choked and smothered it before : the beautiful parts of the character rise uppermost in the jealous husband's memory, and upbraid him with the ill- usage of so divine a creature as was once in his possession ; whilst all the little imperfections that were before so uneasy to him, wear off from his remembrance, and show themselves - no more. " How will this grieve you," exclaimed the remonstrant Hermione, when striving in vain to dispel the baseless suspicions of Leontes, or to stay his public denun- ciation of "her as disloyal, — " How will this grieve you. When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that You thus have publish'd me ! Gentle my lord, You scarce can right me throughly then, to say You did mistake." From the first, Hermione, whose clear-sightedness, says'; Professor Dowden, is equal to her courage, had perceived that her husband laboured under a delusion which was cruel and calamitous to himself: from the first she transcends all blind resentment, and has true pity for the man who wrongs her. But, as the critic goes on to show, if she has fortitude for her own uses, she also is able to accept for her husband the inevitable pain which is needful to restore him to his better mind. " She will not shorten the term of his suffer- ing, because that suffering is beneficent. And at the last her silent embrace carries with it — and justly — a portion of that truth she had uttered long before," in the lines just quoted. The calm and complete comprehension of the fact is rightly said to be a possession painful yet precious to Hermione, which lifts her above all vulgar confusion of heart or temper, and above all unjust resentment. By the time the fifth act opens, Leontes is so persistent in remorse that his councillors beseech him to forget his evil, and forgive himself Has he not paid down more penitence than done trespass .' His answer is : " Whilst I remember Her, and her virtues, I cannot forget WRONGED, LOST, AND LAMENTED. 55 My blemishes in them ; and so still think of The wrong I did myself ; which was so much, That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and Destroy'd the sweet'st companion that e'er man Bred his hopes out of." The Friar in Muck Ado about Nothing expounds and adopts the philosophy of this remorse, in the partly parallel case of Hero, unjustly aspersed and cruelly repudiated by Claudio. He plans a report of her death, as the immediate result of the foul wrong done to her ; and thus, she dying upon the instant that she was accused, shall be lamented, pitied, and excused, of every hearer: "For it so falls out, that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it ; but being lacked and lost, why then we rack the value : " So will it fare with Claudio : When he shall hear she died upon his words, The idea of her life shall sweetly creep Into his study of imagination ; And every lovely organ of her life Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit, More moving-delicate, and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of his soul. Than when she lived indeed : — then shall he mourn And wish he had not so accused her." Hermione's words of tender forecast have their echo in those of Imogen, when from afar she addresses her Leonatus, and for his sake is sorry for her own sufferings : " I grieve myself To think, when thou shalt be disedged by her That now thou tir'st on, how thy memory Will then be pang'd by me." Hermione's prevision and prediction are at one with those of Sostrata in Terence : Meque abs te immerito esse accusatam, postmodo rescisces, scio. But so too does the style of in- credulous Laches tally with that of infatuated Leontes : Te immerito "l an quicquam pro istis factis dignum te dici potest qn(g me et te et familiam dedecoras, filio luctum paras, 56 LEONTES AND HERMIONE. (applying the last clause to Mamilius, who pined to death at Hermione's disgrace). There is a line, however, by another speaker, later in the play {Hecyra), which might stand for the after remorse and self-reproach of Leontes : " Sed cum orata ejus reminiscor, nequeo quin lacrymem "miser." In a fit of jealous rage, Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, killed his wife Melissa, whom he is said to have ardently loved ; discovering her innocence, he caused her accusers to be burnt alive, while he cherished the keenest remorse for his own credulity and fatal haste.* The metrical * Instances of royal remorse, more or less analogous, might be offered in the case of Philip V. of Macedon, putting his younger son, Demetrius, to death, at the instigation of the elder, Perseus ; and himself having his days shortened by remorse and indignation consequent on the discovery of innocence ; — of Constantine's alleged anguish after putting Crispus to death, as soon as he discovered the falsehood of the accusation by which his credulity had been so fatally misled ; but Gibbon is entirely sceptical as to the emperor's repentance and remorse, whatever the stories told of his publishing it to the world, of his mourning forty days, during which he abstained from the use of the bath, and all the ordinary comforts of life ; and of his erecting, for the lasting instruction of posterity, a golden statue of Crispus, with the memorable inscription, " To my son, whom I unjustly condemned." From a later chapter of Gibbon may be cited the instance of that Sigismond who has acquired the honours of a saint and martyr, but whose hands were stained with the blood of his innocent son. " He soon discovered his error, and bewailed the irreparable loss." While Sigismond embraced the corpse, one of his attendants broke out upon him quite in the style of Paulina rating Leontes : " It is not his situation, O king ! it is thine which deserves pity and lamentation." The melancholy fate of Peter de Vinei, according to Dante the victim (as Sigismond's son had been, by stepmotherly arts) of wicked and calumnious jealousy, may well have revenged itself, as Milman says, on the stricken and desolate heart of Frederick II., if indeed the Kaiser ever really discovered its injustice. Justly admired is the account of Theodoric by Procopius as a beautiful picture of what a king and a conqueror should be ; when he had been betrayed, by false information, into one act of injustice, " the first the last," he died of grief The pathos of Beth G^lert dates from the same source : ' Vain, vain, Was all Llewelyn's woe ; ' Best of thy kind, adieu ! WRONGED, LOST, AND LAMENTED. 57 romance of Lucile offers us this strain of self-reproach on the hero's past : " ' And so,' to himself did he mutter, ' and so 'Twas to rescue my life, gentle spirit ! and, oh. For this did I doubt her ? .... a light word — a look — The mistake of a moment ! . . . . for this I forsook — For this ? Pardon, pardon, Lucile ! O Lucile ! ' Thought and memory rang, like a funeral peal, "Weary changes on one dirge-like note thro' his brain, As he stray'd down the darkness." A close resemblance of Hermione to Imogen and to Desdemona has been found in this, that all three are placed The frantic blow which laid thee low This heart shall ever rue. ' " In prose fiction we are often lighting on such words as the upbraiding, " How wiU you ever bear it when you come to your senses, and know what it is you have been doing ! " piteously addressed to her son Wilfrid by Madonna Mary. Not to fiction by any means is confined another class of these remon- strant and reproachful predictions — the utterance, namely, of fussy self- absorption and self-conceit, or of artful dissimulation and pretentious fine-ladyism. Cleopatra despatches Mardian to tell Antony that she has slain herself, speaking of him to the last ; and to bring her word how Antony takes her death. Womanish arts and affeclationi of this sort are satirized by Burns in a song that puts this piteous question and supplies this pitiless answer ; plaintive wife begins, and imperturbable husband has the last word : " ' My poor hea^t then break it must, my last hour I'm near it : When you lay me in the dust, think, think how you will bear it.' ' I will hope and trust in heaven, Nancy, Nancy ; Strength to bear it will be given, my spouse, Nancy.' " Mrs. Joe Gargery seizes on the incidental mention of the churchyard by her husband or brother, to exclaim — though only one of the two had mentioned it, — " Churchj'ard, indeed ! you may well say churchyard, you two ! You'll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you'd be without me ! " Miggs is but Mrs. Varden's spokeswoman when she upbraids that lady's husband indirectly as one of those who " never know the full value of some wines and fig- trees till they lose 'em. So much the worse, sir, for them as has the slighting of 'em on their consciences, when they're gone to be in full blow 58 HERMIONE. in situations nearly similar, and equally endowed with en- gaging qualities : they are all three gentle, beautiful, and innocent ; all three are models of conjugal submission, truth, and tenderness ; and all three are victims of the unfounded jealousy of their husbands. Critically speaking, however, the character of Hermione is held to be the most simple of the three in point of dramatic effect — that of Imogen the most varied and complex. Imogen indeed combines the best qualities of both, with others which they do not possess. What they do possess distinctively is, in Desde- mona, gentleness and refined grace ; in Hermione, magna- nimity and fortitude. Mrs. Jameson descries in the character of Hermione dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness. And on her showing, it required a Shakspeare to delineate such a character (in elsewhere." " St. Clare always laughs when I make the least allusion to my ill-health," murmurs that vapourish, languid, languishing wife of his : " I only hope the day won't come when he'll remember it ! " and she puts her handkerchief to her eyes, and of course there is a rather foolish silence in the room. Chapters later she will not see that her child Eva is ailing and indeed fading away, but insists on fanciful symptoms of heart- disease of her own, and when mildly bantered on that fancy of hers, falls back on her stock rejoinder, "Well, I only hope you wo'n't be sorry for this when it's too late ! " Mrs. Gradgrind gives Hibernian expression to a similar frame of mind when she whimpers, " I wish, yes, I really do wish that I had never had a faimily, and then you [the family] would have known what it was to do without me ! " Lady Kew, in The Newcomes, moots the idea of her " poor Pincushion," the patient Julia, wanting to get rid of her, '' which I dare say you do, for I am a dreadful plague to you, I know, and my death would be a relief to you." Then again there is the same author's Lady Baker, who was always giving warning —always fitting the halter and traversing the cart, but for ever declining to drop the handkerchief and have the business over. " I'm sure I am no to haud out for ever against this sort of going on," whimpers poor Mrs. ISertram in Guy Manneringj "but when folk's missed, then they are moaned." A vigorous rosy-cheeked young matron, it has been said, may give trouble or comfort to her husband, according to her disposition, but she can never command and control him with that perfect authority which is wielded by the sweet pale creature who is always going to faint and whose upbraidings are emphasized by the remark, " but it will soon be over," and that he will be sorry for it all when she is away. Not but HERMIONE. 59 which there enters so much of the negative) in a poetical form ; to develope it through the medium of action and dialogue, without the aid of description ; to preserve its tranquil, mild, and serious beauty, its unimpassioned dignity, and at the same time keep the strongest hold upon our sympathy and our imagination ; and out of this exterior calm, produce the most profound pathos, the most vivid impression of life and internal power. " Hermione is a queen, a matron, and a rnother : she is good and beautiful, and royally descended. A majestic sweetness, a grand and gracious simplicity, an easy, unforced, yet dignified self- possession, are in all her deportment, and in every word she utters." She is characterized by the adage, " Still waters run deep : " her passions are not vehement, but in her settled mind the sources of pain or pleasure, love or resent- that men too can adopt a similar course. Mr. Disraeli describes one who, when he died, found consolation for his death-bed in the reflection that his (imaginary) persecutors might at last feel some compunction ; and who quitted the world without a pang, because he flattered himself that his departure would cost them one. Dr. Wilmot, in the Forlorn Hope, when assured that his neglected aud misunderstood Mabel would have died rather than complain, and that in fact she had died, and made no sign, — answers suddenly and bitterly, " Yes, but she has left me this legacy, brought me by your hands, of miserable regret and vain repent- ance. She has ensured the destruction of my peace of mind ; she has taken care that mine shall be no ordinary grief, to be dispelled by time," etc. As the acute Essayist on Social Subjects remarks, when we think that others ill-use us, or are unjust towards us, or neglect us, it is a pretty universal instinct to anticipate the time when they will be sorry for it ; and it is wonderful what a weight, what a concentration of bitterness, what a heart-wringing is ascribed to this contemplated regret : so that, if we can but assure ourselves that remorse will inflict its sting some day, this conviction soothes away the ache of present resentment, and even puts us in a sort of charity with our enemy. Poor Peggotty, in David Copperfield, when unjustly accused by her misled mistress, lifted up her hands and eyes, and only answered, in a sort of paraphrase of the grace that little Mas'r Davy usually repeated after dinner, " Lord forgive you, Mrs. Copperfield, and for what you have said this minute, may you never be truly sorry ! " That was Peggotty's sort of giace after meat, hard meat, in the shape of hard words she could ill digest. 6o CHARACTER OF HERMIONE. ment, are like the "springs that feed the mountain lakes, impenetrable, unfathomable, and inexhaustible." All about her have perfect confidence in her goodness and innocence. Her distinctive composure of temper never forsakes her, yet never borders on pride or coldness : it is the fortitude of a gentle but a strong mind, conscious of its freedom from cause for blame. Mr. Grant White says of her, that the sweet and shrinking Perdita is not more purely feminine than the heroic mother Hermione, who, in her noble traits and large outlines, leaves in our memories a figure sad but grand, and like the statue that she feigned to be. The author of Characteristics of Women cannot but see that fdr Hermione to give way to tears and feminine complainfs under such a blow as her dear lord dealt her, would be quite incompatible with such a character. She is not prone to weeping, like her sex in general ; but in her heart is lodged that honourable grief which " burns worse than tears drown." Her earnest, eloquent justification of herself, and her lofty sense of female honour, are, to the finest of her critics, rendered more affecting and impressive by that chilling despair, that contempt for a life made bitter to her through unkindness, which is betrayed in every word of her speech, though so calm in the main ; and when she enumerates the unmerited insults which have been heaped upon her, it is without asperity or reproach, yet in a tone that shows how completely the iron has entered her soul. The objection started by some critics. How could Hermione have obstinately acted the recluse for sixteen years, nor been melted by her husband's repentance.' is answered by Professor Wilson with another query : How long would such critics have had her stand out } Four years } six } eight .' Shakspeare chose sixteen ; and Wilson deems him right in so choosing, if for no other reason than to bring to her mother's arms that prettiest of pastorals, Perdita. But Shakspeare had other reasons for showing how " Religion hallow'd that severe sojourn ; " for, as Mrs. Jameson argues, besides all the probability necessary for the purposes of poetry, it has all the likelihood HER SIXTEEN YEARS' SECLUSION. 6 1 it can derive from the peculiar character of Hermione, who (unlike Imogen or Desdemona) is precisely the woman who could and would have acted in such a manner : in a mind like hers, the sense of a cruel injury, inflicted by one she had loved and trusted, without awaking any violent anger, or any desire of vengeance, would sink deep — almost in- curably and lastingly deep. So far she is distinguished with a difference from Desdemona and Imogen, who are more flexible in temper, while the circumstances under which she is wronged differ materially, and are far more unpardonable* Hermione is portrayed as one not over likely either to forgive hastily or forget quickly : her strength of feeling is founded on strength of thought ; and where there is little of impulse or imagination — " the depth, but not the tumult of the soul " — there are but two influences which predominate over the will — time and religion. What then remained, but that, " wounded in heart and spirit, she should retire from the world .' — not to brood over her wrongs, but to study forgiveness, and wait the fulfilment of the oracle which had promised the termination of her sorrows^ .' " Accepting this view of her character and position, a premature reconciliation would not only have been painfully inconsistent with them, but would have deprived us of that beautiful scene in which Hermione is discovered by her husband as the statue or image of herself And here the refined author of the Characteristics perceives another instance of that admirable art with which the dramatic character is fitted to the cir- cumstances in which it is placed : that perfect command over her own feelings, that complete self-possession necessary to so extraordinary a situation, is consistent with all that we imagine of Hermione ; whereas in any other woman it might shock our every idea of probability. * But upon this last point, quA Imogen, compare the opinion of Hartley Coleridge, cited in footnote at p. S3 supri. 62 THE LIVING STATUE. § HI- HERMIONE REVIVED AND REGAINED. The same critics whom Christopher North rated for finding fault with Hermione for her obstinate and sullen seclusion of sixteen years, found a stumblingblock too in the Living Statue. Is the scene extravagant, absurd, unnatural, in- credible ? Only so, he of the crutch contends, to critics without feeling, passion, fancy, imagination, to all of which that wondrous scene appeals, and over all of which it triumphs. " The delusion is like reality, and the reality like delusion, and in dehght they both are dreadful. The sixteen years are swallowed up in that one moment. Never was the passion of joy so tragic. Had Leontes been a nobler being, it had proved mortal." The effect produced on the different persons of the drama by this living statue — an effect which at the same moment is, and is not, illusion — the manner in which the feelings of the spectators become entangled between the conviction of death and the impres- sion of life, the idea of a deception and the feeling of a reality, and the exquisite colouring of poetry and touches of natural emotion with which the whole is wrought up, — till wonder, expectation, and intense pleasure hold our pulse and breath suspended on the event, — all this may well be pronounced inimitable. The moment when Hermione descends from her pedestal to the sound of soft music, and throws herself without speaking into her husband's arms, may well be deemed one of inexpressible interest.^ To Mrs. Jameson it appears that Hermione's silence during the whole of this scene (except where she invokes a blessing on her daughter's head) is in the finest taste as a poetical beauty, besides being an admirable trait of character. "The misfortunes of Hermione, her long religious seclusion, the wonderful and almost supernatural part she had just enacted, have invested her with such a sacred and awful charm, that any words put into her mouth, must, I think, have injured the solemn and profound pathos of the situation." OFFICE OF SCULPTURE. 63 While several of Shakspeare's female characters are owned to surpass Hermione in the power they exercise over our feelings, our fancy, our understanding, perhaps not one of them, with the possible exception of Cordeha,. is constructed upon so high and pure a principle ; and it is the union of gentleness and power which constitutes the perfection of mental grace ; (as, among the ancients, the graces were also the charities, and one word signified equally strength and virtue.) This feeling, carried into the fine arts, one of the finest of art critics recognizes as the secret of the antique grace — the grace of repose ; and Shakspeare's delineation of Hermione, in which we have the old Greek largeness of conception and delicacy of execution — the same effect of suffering without passion, and grandeur without effort, is claimed to show that he felt within himself, and by intuition, what we study all our lives in the remains of ancient art. The calm, regular, classical beauty of Hermione's character is to such loving students all the more impressive from the wild and gothic accompaniments of her story, and the beautiful relief afforded by the pastoral and romantic grace which is thrown around her daughter Perdita. The classical and the romantic meet together ; the statue and the shepherdess embrace each other. When Mr. Durham, the sculptor, some years ago, pro- duced his statue of Hermione, to be placed in the Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House, critics who were fain to recognize a certain air of life piercing through the figure's monumental pose, — the bosom throbbing under the right hand, and the left thrilling to its finger-tips, — yet objected to the design itself as radically a mistake, the office of sculpture being to represent in stone a living human being, whereas it cannot, with any approach to adequacy, represent a human being who affects to be a statue ; because the simulated stoniness in the human being must merge into the mere inevitable stoniness of the sculpture, and the story remains wholly untold. " The statue is what the human being affects to be — it cannot both be itself and represent the affectation of being itself." But one can readily imagine 64 THE LIVING STATUE. how natural to minds given to "half-thinking" — perhaps those who give the commission, rather than the artist himself in any such case — may have been the notion, that a woman pretending to be a statue was the subject of subjects for sculpture: — the very thing. Unfortunately for them, the very thing which it is quite impossible to manage. The statue in real stone of a simulated statue in flesh and blood, is something too complicated for material manipulation. It would overtask the skill even of " that rare Italian master, Julio Romano," to whom Shakspeare audaciously ascribed the credit of Paulina's treasured pos- .session — that masterpiece many years in doing, by a master who, "had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape : he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione, that, they say, one would speak to her, and stand in hope of answer." As indeed Leontes does. Paulina contrives the exhibition with consummate art and patient circumspec- tion, and the result is a signal and unqualified success. " Paulina. As she lived peerless. So her dead likeness, I do well believe. Excels whatever yet you look'd upon, Or hand of man hath done ; therefore I keep it Lonely, apart. But here it is : prepare To see the life as lively mock'd, as ever Still sleep mock'd death : behold, and say 'tis well. [Paulina draws a curtain, and discovers a statue. I like your silence, it the more shows off Your wonder : but yet speak ;— first you, my liege ; Comes it not something near ? Leontes. Her natural posture ! — Chide me, dear stone, that I may say, indeed. Thou art Hermione : or rather, thou art she. In thy not chiding ; for she was as tender As infancy and grace.— But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled ; nothing So aged as this seems .... Paul. So much the more our carver's excellence Which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her As she Uved now. Leon. As. now she might have done, HERMIONE REDIVIVA. 6S So much to my good comfort, as it is Now piercing to my soul. O, thus she stood Even with such life of majesty (warm life, As now it coldly stands), when first I woo'd her ! I am ashamed : Does not the stone rebuke nje For being more stone than it ? " Perdita would kiss the hand of her sculptured mother — and that makes Paulina interpose : " O, patience, the statue is but newly fix'd, the colour's * not dry." She is for * Of course it is of material import to the vraisemblance of the entire scene, that the statue is throughout, and that repeatedly, declared to be a coloured one. Modern taste has been offended by the " crude and ignorant attempts to reproduce the polychrome of the ancients in those scandalous caricatures of colour which are to be seen at Sydenham." But even severe and exacting critics are free to hold the precedents and authorities to be so much in favour of. polychromy, that it is no longer permissible to question the expediency of reviving the art. The question rather is, how to do it — or perhaps, practically, how not to do it. John Gibson defended his practice by appealing confidently to Grecian pre- cedents ; but whoever may have originated the practice, it is evident, said objectors, that it makes a decided approach to the sensuous ; and that, except in the hand of an artist who knows exactly how far to go, and has sufficient judgment to stop there, it may easily pass into the voluptuous and meretricious. That statues were sometimes entirely painted by the Greeks, is apparent from what Plato says in the Republic, of statue- painters, that not by applying a rich or beautiful colour to any particular part, but by giving every part its local colour, is the whole made a thing of beauty. A dialogue of Lucian, on the other hand, is quoted to show that it was not the eommon practice to paint the marble entirely ; and the inference is that the Venus of Cnidus, by Praxiteles, and other cele- brated statues, were not painted, though parts may have been coloured, and the whole body covered with an encaustic varnish. But Praxiteles is believed to have employed Nicias of Athens to colour his statues for him. Modern ingenuity is at fault, however, in discovering -what the process of colouring really was. Herr Adolf Michaelis, in his treatise on Der Parthenon and its " poly- chromy," shows the temple of Athene to have been no exception to the general practice of the Greeks ; and his reviewers all but universally admit that the Pentelic marble, however lovely when fresh from the chisel, was coloured by the brush. Nor is it allowed to be surprising that no colour now remains on either architecture or sculpture : the Elgin marbles are known to have been twice " washed over with soap leys" when plaster casts were taken. The colouring of statues would 66 COLOURED ST A TUAR Y. drawing the curtain, but Leontes will not hear of that. She tells him he must cease gazing on the statue, or his fancy will think anon it moves. " Leon. Let be, let be ! Would 1 were dead, but that, methinks, already— What was he that did make it ? — See, my lord, Would you not deem it breathed? and that those veins Did verily bear blood ? Polix. Masterly done : The very life seems warm upon her lip. Leon. The fixture of her eye has motion in't As we are mock'd with art. . . . Still, methinks, There is an air comes from her : what fine chisel seem to follow as a logical consequence from the colouring of the surrounding architecture. "Mr. Gibson has done a great deal towards breaking down the phalanx of purists in sculpture," writes Miss M. Betham-Edwards : " He has proved that a Venus just warmed with the most delicate tints of life can be as lovely, as bewitching, as much of a goddess and more of a woman, than the same beautiful creation in the simple grandeur of colourless marble.'' M. BeuH {Histoire de I'Art grec avant Pericles) goes along with John Gibson in believing in the infeUi- bility of the Greeks : censors describe the argument, stripped of circum- locution, as standing thus : — All that the Greeks did was right ; they coloured architecture and sculpture ;■ therefore to colour architecture and sculpture is right. Mr. Henry Green, in his Shakspeare and the Emblem Writers, claims for the poet a knowledge of, and exquisite judgment in, works of highest art, and refers to the statue scene in proof of this claim. He infers. that Shakspeare may have accurately described some figure which he had seen in one of Julio Romano's paintings. A Saturday Reviewer would rather infer that Shakspeare had never seen any picture by Julio Romano, " otherwise he would not have fallen into the egregious blunder of caUing him a sculptor. We draw a further inference, that he had never seen any work of Italian sculpture at all. At that time the sculptors of Italy .... would have thought it barbarous to colour their statues." The reviewer holds it to be plain that Shakspeare's notion of a perfect statue was derived from the figures of alabaster or other stone, coloured in imitation of reality, which are still extant upon many an Elizabethan and Jacobean tomb: such was his own bust in the chancel of Stratford church, till whitewashed at Malone's suggestion ; and in Spain, a country so tenacious of old usage, especially in matters of religion, the images in churches are for the most part coloured still. ' ; The resemblance, to wax-work is probably the explanation and justifi- TVAX-WOJ^X yESTHETJCS. 67 Could ever yet cut breath ? Let no man mock me, For I will kiss her. Paul. Good my lord, forbear : The ruddiness upon her lip is wet ; You'll mar it, if you kiss it ; stain your own With oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain ? " No, not these twenty years, — for him. But it is time for the statue to come down from the pedestal ; and soon by touch, by sound of voice, by loving return of gaze for gaze, and greeting for greeting, Leontes knows her for his own again, and Hermione is revived and regained. Mrs. Siddons as the statuesque queen is described by the biographer of the Kembles as making, as she. stood in cation of objections to coloured statuary. And what is it that explains and justifies the instinctive objection, aesthetically felt, to wax-work itself? Coleridge moots the question why such simulations of nature as wax- work figures of men and women are "so disagreeable ;"— and his answer is, because, not finding the motion and the life which we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, — every circumstance of detail, which before induced us to be interested, making the distance from truth more palpable. You set out, he says, with a supposed reahty, and are dis- appointed and disgusted with the deception ; whereas in a work of genuine imitation, you begin with an acknowledged total difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an approximation to truth. The fundamental principle of all this he takes to be undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast. We distinguish, as F. W. Robertson somewhere Says, between illusion and delusion : we may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron or marble ; this is delusion : but you may paint a picture, in which rocks trees, and sky are never mistaken for what they seem, yet produce all the emotion which real rocks, trees, and sky would produce : — this is illusion, and this is the painter's art ; never for one moment to deceive by attempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which the feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves would create— i*/«J-, however, a gratified interest in the recognized achievements of art, as such. In the tale he called Lady Barbara, Crabbe has a passage con- veniently though collaterally pertinent to our theme : " Dreams are like portraits, and we find they please Because they are confess'd resemblances ; But those strange nightmare visions we compare To waxen figures — they too real are, Too much a very truth, and are so just To life or death, they pain us or disgust." 68 HERMIONE REDIVIVA. Paulina's chapel, "one of the noblest . statues that even Grecian taste ever invented." The figure resembled one of the muses in profile. The drapery was ample m its folds, and seemingly stony in its texture. Upon the magical words, pronounced by Paulina, "Music; awake her ; strike ; " the sudden action of the head is said to have absolutely "startled" every spectator, as though such a miracle had really vivified the marble ; and the descent from the pedestal was equally graceful and affecting. To apply Thomson's lines, " The statue seem'd to breathe, ■ And soften into flesh, beneath the touch Of forming art, imagination-flush' d." Or those again in another of his poems : '" The gazer grows enamour'd, and the stone, As if exulting in its conquest, smiles. So turn'd each limb, so swell'd with softening art. That the deluded eye the marble doubts." Etty was never better pleased than with the compliment paid him by the Italian Professor of Painting, Martini, — "If I were to prick your painting of the figure, it would bleed ; " so like flesh he thought it. Vasari said of one of Raffaelle's Madonnas that it :seemed in the head, the hands, and the feet, to be of living flesh rather than a thing of colour ; and indeed of Raffaelle's pictures generally^ that they are scarcely to be calleii pictures, hut rather the reality, for the flesh trembles, the breathing is visible, the pulses beat, and life is in its utmost force.* " Ma foi," as MoliSre's Sganarelle exclaims of another (quite another^ sort of revived statue, " voili qui est bien fait. II semble qu'il est en vie, et qu'il s'en va parler." Dante says of the sculpture described in the tenth canto of the Purgatory, "that not" there alone had Polycletus, but e'en nature's self, been shamed : '' one angel form before him seemed, " In a sweet act, so sculptured to the life, * In all young art, observes Mr. Dallas, there is the tendency to realism ; as in nearly all young criticism there is a difficulty of deciding between the truth -of imitation and the truth of reality. COLOURED STATUARY. 69 He look'd no silent image. One had sworn He had said 'Hail!'" Only to be appreciated by artists is the enthusiasm of Jules, in Mr. Browning's Pippa Passes, when exulting in his " crisp imperious steel, so sure to cut its one confided thought clean out of all the world : " But marble ! — 'neath my tools More pliable than jelly^as it were Some clear primordial creature dug from depths- In the Earth's heart, where itself breeds itself, And whence all baser substance may be work'd." In Hermione's , case, the expression used by Polixenes, " The very life seems warm upon the lip," and that again by Leontes, " warm life — the fixture of her eye has motion in't," etc., appear strangely applied to a statue, such as we usually imagine it, of the cold colourless marble ; but it is evident, by the consent of the best critics, that Her- mione here personates one of those images or effigies still to be seen in the old Gothic cathedrals, in which the stone, or marble, was coloured after nature. Mrs. Jameson recalls the start she gave when she came suddenly upon one of these effigies, either at Basle or at Fribourg : the figure was large as life ; the drapery, of crimson, powdered with stars of gold ; the face, and eyes, and hair tinted after the life, though faded by time ; it stood in a Gothic niche, over a tomb, and in a kind of dim uncertain light. It would have been very easy, she adds, for a living person to represent such an effigy, par- ticularly if it had been painted by that " rare Italian master, Julio Romano," the reputed artist of Paulina's curtained treasure. In the fairy tale of the Invisible Prince we have the princess telling Abricotina all the wonders of the " animated statue," that leaped from the ^pedestal to support her when she swooned, as much for pleasure and surprise as fear. Scott describes his Zilia, in the Surgeon's Daughter, when arrested by her husband's warning glance, in the offer to embrace her recovered son, as fixed in that attitude, as if by magic, with her beautiful head and neck somewhat advanced. 70 HERMIONE REVIVED her hands clasped together, and extended forward in the semblance of motion, but motionless, nevertheless, as a marble statue, to which the sculptor, has given all the appearance of life, yet cannot impart its powers. In . Kenilworth, again, Amy Robsart, beside an alabaster column in the twilight grotto, is taken by Queen Elizabeth for a statue, rather than a form of flesh and blood : " She stood with one foot advanced and one withdrawn, her arms, head, and hands perfectly motionless, and her cheek as pallid as the alabaster pedestal against which she leaned." Like Lamartine's " Femme changee en marbre, en ayant la paleur: Tout k coup je ne sais quel Eclair de pensee Lui remonta du coeur sur sa joue efFacde ; . Son front reprit la vie et se teignit ur peu.'' That last line recalls a passage in the Pygmalion of Lovell Beddoes, when to the artist's gaze his statue was one day perceptibly " more near to woman : " There was a fleshy pink, a dimple wrought That trembled, and the cheek was growing human ■ With the flush'd distance of a rising thought That still crept nearer." The lovely legend of Pygmalion is justly said to scarcely Exaggerate the creative force, the immanence of divinity, which are required by the man whose work is to impress itself on our eyes as "breathing marble." The Sleeping Figure of Modena moved Barry Cornwall to the note of admiration, ' " Look ! Did old Pygmahon Sculpture thus, or more prevail, When he drew the living tone From the marble pale ? " Admetus in Euripides addresses the Veiled Lady much as Leontes the statuesque Hermione : " Lady ! whoe'er thou art, thou dost in truth In height ^nd shape resemble my Alcestis," and so to see her stirs his troubled heart, and makes the fountains of his tears gush out. Hercules bids him boldly AND REGAINED. yi advance his hand and touch the stranger, and anon the cry- is heard, " Ye gods ! what shall I say ? a miracle ! Is it my wife I see, my very wife ? Or do the gods but in derision mock me With a false joy ? " Matilda asks De Tracy, in The Curfew., would he see his dead wife, revived ? " Bid the warm blood rush thro' her kindling veins, And her heart beat with new-created life ; A breathing woman shall she stand before thee. .... Survey me. i am the very substance of that form Whose apparition I do only feign. . . . Baron. Remembrance steals upon me : The look, the voice — Yes, yes ; thou art my wife ! Matilda. . . . Speak for me The silent rapture of these starting tears. These arms that eager open to enfold thee,'' and so on, with a copious elocution in significant contrast with the almost severe silence of Hermione revived and regained. Middleton's old play of No Wit like a Woman's contains a noteworthy passage descriptive of a meeting with a wife supposed to have been long since dead : " O my reviving joy ! thy quickening presence Makes the sad night of threescore and ten years Sit like a youthful spring upon my blood. I cannot make thy welcome rich enough With aU the wealth of words.'' In the Golden Supper versified (and diversified) by Mr. Tennyson from Boccaccio, Julian may be said to play the part of Paulina, in so far as he contrives and arranges the reunion of a sundered pair — assembling an expectant com- pany, and bringing Camilla down before them all, and restoring her in all her grace and beauty to the amazed and ecstatic Lionel : " And there the widower husband and dead wife Rush'd each at each with a cry that rather seem'd For some new death than for a life renew'd." 72 HERMIONE REDIVIVA. There is something to remind us of the Hermione statue scene, and the passionate expectancy of Leontes> in the closing scene of Massinger's Duke vf Milan, where Sforza laments his wrongdoing, and "a seeming breath" is evoked from the corpse of her he laments, and art makes " her veins run high too, as if they had true motion,"^and the Duke cries, " Sure, 'tis my good angel ! " "I live again in my full confidence that Marcelia may pronounce my pardon. .... "This hand seems as it was when-first I kiss'd it. These Ups invite too. I could ever feed Upon these roses ; they still keep their colour And native sweetness." So again is there in the vision of Astarte to Byron's Manfred: " Can this be death .'' there's bloom upon her cheek. ... It is the same ! Oh, God ! that I should dread to look upon the same. . . . Astarte^ my beloved ! speak to me." And so again is there, in an utterly different way, in Bertram's " Vision of a lady ! stand there silent, stand there steady ! " as pictured in one of the best known of Mrs. Browning's poems : " Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling^ And approach'd him slowly, slowly, in a gliding measured pace; With her two white hands extended, as if praying one offended, And a look of supplication, gazing earnest in his face. Said he — ' Wake me not by gesture, — sound of breath, or stir of vesture ; Let the blessed apparition melt not yet to its divine ! No approaching — hush ! no breathing ! or my heart must swoon to death in The too utter life thou bringest — O thou dream of Geraldine!'" CHAPTER III. § I. OTHELLO. JOHN KEMBLE took one exception and made one objection — but then he deemed it a fatal one — to Edmund Kean's Othello : If the justness of the con- ception, he said, had been but equal to the brilliancy of the execution, it would have been perfect ; but the whole thing was a mistake ; the fact being that " Othello was a slow man." Kemble's own biographer, Mr. Boaden, describes him as " grand, and awful, and pathetic " in the part ; adding, " But he was a European : there seemed to be philosophy in his bearing ; there was reason in his rage " — as though he took his cue from the hint, " as one not easily jealous." Now the best critics are generally agreed that the barbarian element in Othello is radically strong, and that he is not a European, in John Kemble's and James Boaden.'s sense. Schlegel even contends that the Moor's jealousy is not the jealousy of the heart, which is compatible with the tenderest feeling and adoration of the beloved object ; but of that sensual kind which, in burning climes, has led to the " disgraceful confinement of women and many other unnatural usages." The Moor, as thus interpreted, seems noble, frank, confiding, grateful for the love shown him ; and he is all this, and, moreover, a hero who spurns at danger, a worthy leader of an army, a faithful servant of the state ; but the mefe physical force of passion puts to flight in one moment all his acquired and mere habitual virtues. 74 OTHELLO THE MOOR. and gives the upper hand to the savage over the moral man. This tyranny of the blood over the will in Kemble's " slow man," betrays itself even in the expression of his desire of revenge upon Cassio ; while in his own repentance, in a "genuine tenderness for his murdered wife, and in the pre- sence of the damning" evidence of his deed, the painful feeling of annihilated honour at last bursts forth ; and in the inidst of these torturing emotions he assails himself with the rage wherewith a despot punishes a runaway slave." He is thus said to suffer as a double man ; at once in the higher and the lower sphere into which his being was divided. An ' Edinbur^ Re viewer selects him as the perfection of the inconsistent character ; a union not merely of dissimilar qualities, but of dissimilar natures : he is a civilized bar- . barian — all that we know of his birth being, that it is ' " fetched from men of royal siege." How or when he became a Christian we are not told ; but it is certain that he must have passed his childhood in a harem, acquiring with his earliest impressions the jealousy and suspicion respecting women, and the domestic despotism of a Maho- metan court. His youth and manhood are military ; and we find him, at the opening of the play, " somewhat declined into the vale of years," a grave and dignified soldier. He is " the noble Moor whom the full senate Call all-in-all sufficient — the noble nature Whom passion cannot shake ; whose solid virtue The shot of accident or dart oif chance Can neither graze nor pierce." AH the barbar ian is obliterated. His behaviour during thp farsQ ao~acts just ifies I.uc|ovtrfV^_jvraigp_- nothing can be more c alm o r more .polished . But lago's intimations " act on Othello ' like a specific poison." The suspicion thus engendered sets on fire, as Mr. Senior words it, " all the old Mahometan tendency to jealousy which a European hfe seemed to have eradicated," and the barbarian nature reappears, though at first the Moor's habits of civilization combat it, and he proposes rational inquiry before rash- NOT EASILY JEALOUS? 75 resolve. But the barbarian gets the upper hand, and Othello swallows with eager credulity lago's demonstrative fictions. He no longer thinks of inquiry, or of separation. " He is again the Arab or Bedouin of his youth ; and no conduct, except such as might fit a Bedouin or an Arab, occurs to him." His cry is for " blood, lago, blood ! " and from thence to the close the savage in him reigns triumphant : he dogsjiot^reservg^e ven the outward proprieties of his station , b ut insults and strikes his wife in th e presence of the envoy from the Senate But no sooner hashe satiated his~revenge" than ^TEFspIrrt from the desert seems to be appeased by the sacrifice, and quits him." He listen ^ 1*7 ^l^"' pg---"f° ^f Desdemona's innocence, apologizes frankly to Cassio, and si ts in^judgmernfornris' own folly and crime, ^^"re suinihg' the calm dignity of a great Venetian lea der.* He recovers the quiet dignity of his earlier attitude ; respecting which, an American critic, arguing against the vulgar notion of jealousy as Othello's distinctive fault, observes, that as if to show how imperturbable he is by the impulse of insufficient excitement and irritation, nothing can be more admirable than the unbroken calm he seems to dwell in during the first part of the play — the heroic repose of his spirit — his m ajestic self-possessi on under the reproaches heaped on him by one who is secure from his resentment. Othello a type of jealousy } Jp ^lnnqy - tr; n mmn pq^^'^inp for narrow minds ; whereas " all^ th£_pasaiaas_-a£-©tb^l©--«fe--fe«j:©ie--««id__aiag- na pimou s." Give him credit for his self-assertion at the last, as one " not easily jealous." Jealousy is defined by Coleridge a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the -temper, having certain well-known and well-defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, but not one of which, he is bold to affirm, marks its presence in * Coleridge observed, in his lectures, that the difficulty was great in imagining an expression adequate to the feelings of Othello when he first sees lago after having discovered his villany, and he thought it a master- stroke of Shakspeare to surmount it as Tie has done ■: " I look down towards his feet ; — but that's a fable. If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee." j^i OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA. Othello. It is for a Rymer to call this play " the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief"* Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, Coleridge insists, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of lago — such a con- viction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed lago's honesty as Othello did : — we, the audience, know that lago is a villain from the beginning ; but, in considering the essence of the Shakspearian Othello, we must perseveringly place ourselves in his situation, and surrounded by his circumstances. As the French duke is soothingly reminded in a widely read historical novel, a man can scarcely be considered guilty for having done what he was impelled to by the basest conspiracy to deceive him and to mislead his better judgment, and when su'ch evi- dence was adduced to make him think the innocent guilty, as might well create suspicion against an angel of heaven. But the unhappy dupe in this case accounts it sorry con- * The fall of a handkerchier is, indeed, all the machinery by means of which the plot is entangled so intricately ; biit " there's magic in the web of it ; " a sibyl in her prophetic fury sewed the work, and sad work she made of it. Shakspeare was careful to guard against homely associations of a ludicrous sort in resp&ct of this magic-woven kerchief, as though he had foreseen the fun the French would make of a dropped mouchoir, by them regarded as no better, than what English slang denominates a " wipe." The Ingoldsby Legends take the comic side of such a critical loss, on the part of Catherine of Cleves, when " In her hurry she, somehow or other, let fall A new silk Bandana she'd worn as a shawl ; She had used It for drying Her bright eyes while crying, And blowing her nose, as her beau talk'd of dying." Ducis had been shy of the handkerchief affair in his traduction, or tra- duced version, of Othello; but Alfred de Vigny had more respect for his original, and more faith in him, and when that more conscientious trans- lator's version was played at Paris in 1829, all went well with the per- formance until the mouchoir scene—" la terrible scfene ou se decide la destinde de Desddmona," when her husband demands " le mouchoir qu'a su d^rober la ruse infernale d'lago." But at the very sound of the word mouchoir, peals of laughter were heard— peals succeeding peals— then hisses, then uproar and riotous disorder : the habitues of la rue Richelieu, says M. Dsmogeot, could not endure this ill-bred Moor, who, in the THE DROPPED HANDKERCHIEF. 77 solation to know that he has been a fool, a gross and egre- gious fool. " O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a hfelong trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true ! " Charles Lamb describes a mere popular audience shedding tears at the play, " because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife;" but, of the texture of Othello's mind, he goes on to say, the inward construction marvel- lously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no more than " the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester Fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon." It is in working the Moor's noble nature height of his fury, forgot or was unable to invent an elegant periphrasis after the manner of Delille, a pretty charade " dont le mot fut un mou- choir." — As to Ducis, that indefatigable tamperer with the text and the meaning of Shakspeare was avowedly ignorant of the English language. After he had done Hamlet into French, we find him writing to Garrick, regretfully, or at least with a polite affectation of regret, " Mais pourquoi, Monsieur, ne sais-je pas votre langue ! " Sainte-Beuve styles him accord- ingly a priest who knew no Latin. Ducis had yet to learn English ; and yet, though busy next with Romeo and Juliet, then with Macbeth, and anon with Othello, the idea of learning it seems never to have occurred to him. De Quincey patriotically inveighed against " the wretched La Harpe," for complaining of the Moor's handkerchief as irretrievably mean. In the hands of a La Harpe h« could not doubt that it would have proved so. But Shakspeare has so ennobled it by the wild grandeur of its history, — " That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give," etc., — that De Quincey could no more regard it as M. La Harpe's mouchoir, than the shattered and shredded banner of a veteran regiment as an old rag. Francis Horner, while at Milan in 1814, was very much struck with the dramatic effect produced on the stage by certain graphic details of ordinary life, such as, he said, " would offend us in our opera or modern tragedy " — and he inferred the powerful aid afforded to any declamation that has strength in itself, by common trifles taken from common life ; referring, by way of illustrating and enforcing his meaning, to " those, 78 OTHELLO. up to the extremity of rage and despair, through rapid but gradual transitions, in raising passion to its height from the smallest beginnings and in spite of all obstacles, in painting the expiring conflict between love and hatred, tenderness and resentment, jealousy and remorse, in unfolding the strength and weaknesses of our nature, in uniting sublimity of thought with the anguish of the keenest woe, in putting in motion the various impulses that agitate this our mortal being, and at last blending them in that noble tide of deep and sustained passion, impetuous and majestic, which " flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb," that Shakspeare, as William Hazlitt reads him, has shown the mastery of his genius and of his power over the human heart. And the. third act of Othello is taken by this critic to be the poet's masterpiece, not of knowledge or passion separately, but of the two combined. And Walter Savage Landor, who not only preferred Shakspeare to every other poet, but thought he contains more poetry and more wisdom than all the rest put together, declared Othello to be " loftier than the citadel of Troy ; and what a Paradise," he adds, glancing next at Milton after Homer, " fell before him ! " " From Othello we must descend, whatever road we take." Nor in the whole compass of the Shakspearian pathos can Charles Knight discover anything deeper than " But yet the pity of it, lago ! Oh, lago^ the pity of it, lago ! " when the con- templated murder of Desdemona tears his heart. Overbury speaks in his poem on A Wife, of "The pangs of jealousy, when love doth find More pain to doubt her false than know her so." And there are phases of Othello's passion which seem to illustrate the paradox. He reminds us at times of what familiarities and domestic details with which Shakspeare touches his highest passages," and which offend French critics more than a little, though more than a little they deepen the interest of Englfsh ones. Schiller, said Coleritige, has the material Sublime ; to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakspeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or.greater effects follow. OTHELLO. 79 Balzac says in his Histoire des Treize, that " Aucun homme n'est assez fort pour pouvoir supporter ces changements qui font passer rapidement I'ame du plus grand bi^n a des mal- heurs suprfimes. . . . Pour la premiere fois peut-etre, dans un coeur d'homme, I'amour et la vengeance se melerent' si 6galement qu'il dtait impossible de savoir qui de I'amour, qui de la vengeance I'emporterait." The French hero is but para- phrasing the Moor's resolve, " Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men," when he warns his Desdemona, " Vous pourriez abuser d'autres coeurs aussi enfants que Test le mien, et je dois leur 6pargner ces douleurs. Vous m'avez done inspir6 une pens^e de justice. Expiez votre faute ici- bas. Dieu vous pardonnera peut-^tre, je le souhaite ; mais il est implacable, et vous frappera." With a difference might be applied to this aggrieved declaimer, or better perhaps to the Moor himself,, the resounding lines of no homicidal dupe : " ^y ell— 'tis well that I should bluster!— Hadst thou less unworthy proved — Would to God — for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved. Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit ? I will pluck it from my bosom, though my heart be at the root." A North Br itish critic regards Othello's passion as injured pride^st ruggTing to get rid of bou ndless, .and unut.toabk." affectio n, bv cutting_th e ti£..at ,Qnce-..aad-fe¥-^vef, Jealousy, hFlremai-ks, supposes doubt ; it is a transition state — a' state of struggle when the elements of strong hope, and stronger fear, contend for mastery ; and this point Shak- speare hurries over, Otheno_Ji£ing-.-very-^©on_XQn3mi£ed.~af D esdemona's worthlessne ss, and certainty is no more jealousy tharTdespair is doubt. " Othello is as indignant as if a man were to find himself, by some monstrous means, in love with an object which he knew and felt to be despicable." This, it is urged, is the feehng which spurs him to the murder : he at once loves and contemns the false one, so false and so fair. And therefore it is, that when the Moor believes himself betrayed, the occupations of his whole life " suddenly becom* burthensome and abhorred," and to him, 8o OTHELLO. the pillars of the moral world seem shaken. The struggle of "the noble Othello," Macaulay thus described : " His heart relents ; but his hand is firm. He does nought in hate, but all in honour. He kisses the. beautiful deceiver before he destroys her." Gentleman; Waife, to glorify Shakspeare's art, supposes a swart-visaged, ill-looking foreigner in the dock, and counsel opening the case, and witnesses deposing. " O, horrible wretch ! — a murderer — unmanly murderer ! — a defenceless woman smothered by caitiff hands ! Hang him 'up — rhang him up ! " Softly, whispers the Poet, and lifts the veil from the assassin's heart. It is the Moor of Venice. And "what jury now dare to find that criminal guilty } what judge now will put on the black cap .? who now says. Hang him up — hang him up f. " One might exclaim with Sophocles, TowvTov Slav Kal aruyovvr' iiroiKTlirai- And this even though we accept the account of that quasi- Anglophile, the late Philarete Chasles, that " le naif Othello devient une bete f^roce ; il rugit, il ^gorge, il rit et pleure en voyant le sang qu'il a vers^." Calderon's jealous heroes, it has been said, may act as Othello, but of how immeasur- ' ably baser earth are they made ! While Othello will charm, as by a fascination, to the end of the world, this class of tragedy in Calderon, although perhaps in it his power is most fully displayed, is only repulsive : we have none of that sunshine of human poetry, which, as Landor said, "makes the colour of blood less horrible;" we have only cruelty with ho alleviation of pathos,^ Othello's Moorish blood, but not Othello's human heart. That able German critic, Dr. Rotscher, in his Oy^us dramatischer , Charaktere, points out how in Calderon it is the stain upon the honour which fs avenged, while in Shakspeare it is the wronged love ; and attributes this difference in the treat- ment to national distinctions, — honour being made the basis of passion in the Spanish case, and in the English, love. Mr. Lewes, in his treatise on the Spanish drama, charges the German critic with here confounding the limited art of Cal- OTHELLO. deron with' the whole Spanish spirit. " It seems to me that had Calderon really been the great poet he is so often called, he would have given us a very different picture of the wronged and jealous husband. In Calderon, love has no voice ; honour is all in all ; and honour, according to the Spanish conception, so excessively objective in its tendency, is a thing external ; it depends on others : if others do not know you to be dishonoured, you are not. Gutierre, in The Physician of his own Honour, has no good grounds for his suspicion ; he has not the overwhelming proofs which drive Othello wild. Othello does not act upon the belief of another as if it were law ; he acts, as Mr. Lewes demon- strates, " only after the most damning proofs have been accumulated, and after a fearful struggle within himself." He demands proofs ; they are furtiished ; and even after the conviction of his wrong has been forced upon him, he has recurrences of doubts and tenderness. " His suffering is wholly subjective ; nothing can rid his bosom of that perilous stuff. Life is henceforth a blank ; his occupation's gone." So again with the Romiero of Joanna Baillie, skilful in developing all the mean and revolting features of the passion of jealousy, — not arising, as in Othello, in a noble, open, trustful nature, and borne in upon the mind, said Jeffrey, against its will, by villany and the force of strong circumstance, — but springing innate and ineradicable in a constitutionally suspicious mind, and, like a rank weed, over- running the whole heart. The nature of Othello, as Professor Dowden reads it, is free and open ; he looks upon men with a gaze too large and royal to suspect them of malignity and fraud ; he is a man " not easily jealous." He has, however, a sense of his own inefificiency in dealing with the complex and subtle conditions of life in his cidopted country. Where all is plain andi broad, he relies upon his own judgment and energy ; he is a master of simple, commanding action. But for curious inquiry into complex facts he has no faculty ; he loses his bearings ; " being wrought upon," he is " per- plexed in the extreme." Then, too, adds the critic, his hot 82 OTHELLO AND Mauritanian blood mounts quickly to the point of boiling. " If he be infected, the poison hurries through his veins, and he rages in his agony." Special affinities are suggested, between the soul of Othello, and the lion of his ancestral desert. Henri Beyle (De Stendhal) pronounces Voltaire's Zaire to be a mere thin and washed-out copy of the terrible Moor of Venice. Nor was Villemain prepared to deny that, of the two, Shakspeare's was here the profounder art, as well as .superiority in le naturel, I'ardeur, la v&'iti. Othello's is in kind and degree the nobler madness. TU S', m tXyhmov, ■n-poae^Tj fiavta ; as the Chorus exclaim in Sophocles ; or as m Euripides, /2 tKyjimov, w? <7ot Sva(f>op' iipyaarai ica/cd. "Not his the light war with its feeble rage Which prudent scruples with faint passions wage, But that known only to man's franker state ; In love a demigod — a fiend in hate. Him, not the reason but the instincts lead. Prompt in the impulse, ruthless in the deed." §11. DESDEMONA. Lord Shaftesbury, of the Characteristics, "can't imagine" why Shakspeare, " amongst his Greek names," should have chosen for the gentle lady wedded to the Moor " one which denoted the Lady Superstition ; " unless, indeed, " as poets are. sometimes prophets too, he should figuratively, under this dark type, have represented to us. That about a hundred years after his time, the fair sex of this island should, by other monstrous tales [like Othello's] be so seduced, as to turn their favour chiefly on the person of the tale-tellers ; and change their natural inclination for fair, candid, and courteous knights, into a passion for a mysterious race of black enchanters ; such as of old were said to creep into houses, and lead captive silly women." DESDEMONA. 83 liis lordship's drift is pretty obvious to his readers,- b.ut' we are concerned only with his mention of Desdemona, whom he contemptuously pities for listening to the Moor's " woful tale, unfit, one would think, to win a tender fair one. It's true, the poet sufificiently condemns her fancy ; and makes her (poor lady ! ) pay dearly for it, in the end." The poet himself was far too much out of Shaftesbury's line of thought, and far too high, above his level of criticism, for either Desdemona or Othello to be understood or cared for by such a critic. Byron was scarcely more flippant on. the subject, when he said, apropos of Venetian ladies: " Shakspeare described the sex in Desdemona As very fair, but yet suspect in fame. And to this day, from Venice to Verona, Such matters may be probably the same, Except that since that time there was never known a Husband whom mere suspicion could inflame To suffocate a wife no more than" twenty, Because she had a ' cavalier servente.' " There have been uncritical critics in whose eyes, apparently, Brabantio's daughter was a mere lovesick fool, bewitched as grossly as Brabantio himself would have made her out to be, as though she might almost deserve consignment to the category in, Butler's couplet, with its Hudibrastic rhyme : " Some with the dev'l himself in league grow, By's representative a. negro." One might fancy they had taken their impression of her from lago's sallies on the sex at large ; and lago, says the elder Schlegel, does not merely pretend an obdurate in- creduhty as to the. virtue of women, he actually entertains it ; and as in every thing he sees merely the hateful side, he dissolves in the rudest manner the charm which ima- gination casts over the relation between, the two sexes; and this he does for the purpose of revolting Othello's senses, whose heart might otherwise have easily convinced him of Desdemona's innocence. Schlegel's own impression as to the character of Desdemona is, that of "a sacrifice 8,4: DBSDEMONA. without blemish." She is not, he admits, a high ideal representation of sweetness and enthusiastic passion like Juliet ; but she is full of simplicity, softness, and humihty, and so innocent, that she can hardly form to herself an idea of the possibility of unfaithfulness, and thus seems calculated to make the most yielding and the tenderest of wives. " The female propensity wholly to resign oneself tO' an alien influence has led her into the one fault of her life, that of marrying without her father's consent. Her choice seems wrong ; and yet she has been gained over to Othello by that which induces woman to honour in man her protector and guide, — -admiration of his determined iieroism, and compassion for the sufferings which he had undergone." A. Quarterly Reviewer compares with her Scott's Amy Robsart \ the basis of the character is con- jugal love, and the charm consists in its purity and its devotedness, the fault springs from its undue prevalence over filial duty, while the sufferings are occasioned by the perverted passions of him to whom it is devoted. An American critic descries what he terms "a splendid con- trast " because the characters of Othello and Desdemona as developed in time of trial : he surrendering his generous and confiding spirit to the craft of a subtle intellect, and suffering himself to be betrayed out of the moral region of faith into the cold atmosphere of doubts and question- ings and proofs ; the sustaining principle of his nature has .perished, for it is against his nature that convictions have overwhelmed him : she, on the other hand, trusting tO' her own pure impulses, still clings to her faith ; and by virtue of it alone, in opposition to all that her senses and her understanding show her, she is wise as well as innocent. " She will not believe even what she sees, but with the most irresistible tenderness of conscious purity, invents excuses for her husband's violence," — something of state has vexed him, and " puddled his clear spirit." She scarcely doubts her husband being in the right, and only q/uestions her own behaviour ; and she seems to have no fear that, come what may, her love to him can be weak- .DESDEMONA. «S ened : Unkindness may do much, and his unkindaess may defeat her life, but never taint her love. She is " subdued even to the very quality of her lord." Mar- vellous, by Hazlitt's estimate, is the truth of conception; with which timidity and boldness are united in the same character. The extravagance of her resolutions, the pertinacity of her affections, he traces direct to the gentle- ness of her nature, implying as they do an unreserved reliance on the purity of her own intentions, an entire surrender of her fears to her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) to the fate of another. " Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical and headstrong, her whole character consists in having, na- will of her own, no prompter but her obedience." When lago characterizes her as " too gentle," " Nay, that's certain," assents the Moor ; nor do her resignation and angelic sweetness of temper desert her at the last. As Mrs. Jameson sees gathered around Hermione all that can render sorrow majestic, so she sees assembled round Desdemona all that can render misery heart-breaking. If the wronged but self-sustained virtue of H-ermione commands our veneration, the injured and defenceless in- nocence of Desdemona so wrings the soul, " that all for pity we could die." Not but that Desdemona displays at times a transient energy arising from- the power of affection ; but " gentleness " gives the prevailing tone to the character. Mrs. Jameson remarks that the " soft credulity" of Desdemona, whose turn for the marvellous, whose susceptible imagination had first directed- her thoughts and affections to Othello, is precisely the woman to be frightened out of her sense by such a tale as the Moor told her of magic in the web of the missing hand- kerchief, — and so to be betrayed by her fears into a momentary tergiversation. " It is most natural in such a being, and shows us that even in the sweetest natures, without moral energy, there can be no completeness and consistency." Endued with that temper which is the origin of superstition in love as in religion, — which, in 86 DESDEMONA. fact, makes love itself a religion, — she .not only does not utter an upbraiding word, but nothing that Othello does or -says, no outrage, no injustice, can tear away the charm with which her imagination had invested him, or impair her faith in his honour. In the character of Desdemona is justly said to lie the source of the pathos throughout — of that pathos which at once softens and deepens the tragic effect : — no woman differently con- stituted could have excited the same intense and painful , compassion, without losing something of that exalted charm which invests her from beginning to end, which we are apt to impute to the interest of situation, and to the poetical colouring, but which lies, in fact, in the very essence of the character. "Desdemona, with all her timid flexibility and soft acquiescence, is not weak ; for the negative alone is weak, and the mere presence of goodness and affection implies in itself a species of power ;— power without consciousness, power without effort, power with repose — that soul of grace ! " The late George Brimley declared Desdemona to be the only thoroughly charming wife whom Shakspeare re- presents. Mr. Thackeray, rather on the other hand, taking note of her apparently complacent perception of the Lieutenant's partiality for her, was free to own, parenthetically, "And I for my part believe that many more things took place in that sad affair than the worthy Moorish officer ever knew of" Vinet calls Zaire " much more virtuous " than Desdemona, " for she struggles against her love." But he admits that Desdemona is conceived' wkh an ideal grace, a poetical charm, not to be found to -the same extent in Zaire. The gentle Lady married to the Moor, — Wordsworth's famous line,— has been characterized by one of his most admiring critics as eminently character- istic of the poet's turn of thought ; for it is not the agony of passion, nor the subtle working of the insidious poison, nor the diabolic revelation of concentrated coiled malignity, that Wordsworth dwells on, as distinctive excellences of the play, but the gentleness of the victim attracts and fascinates DESDEMONA. 87 him. " In all that mighty symphony of maidenly admi- ration, of manly love, of stately age, of vigorous youth, of calm domestic peace, of ' the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war,' of boundless faith, of agonizing jealousy, of wrath, hate, fondness, and despair, all blending into one complex devouring passion, he hears but the simple melody of the flute. In that woof of death shot over with all the glorious and changing hues of life, he sees but one simple flower blooming by a grass-green grave." Mr. Grant White defends the great Dusseldorf artist's conception of Desde- mona, and denies that Hildebrandt has made her too womanly, too earnest, too passionate, too splendid. Because her father speaks of her " delicate youth," calls her a " maiden never bold, of spirit still and quiet," and says she was so opposed to marriage that she made a point of shunning the eligible bachelors of beautiful Venice, some seem to think her a " good little girl, who spoke when spoken to, said ' sir,' washed the cups and saucers after breakfast, and had serious thoughts of entering a convent." They seem to forget, what Shakspeare's Scholar is prompt to remind them of, that Desdemona was noteworthy for " high and plenteous wit and invention," — that she speaks up before the Senate, and speaks out, too, bravely, loyally, resolutely. Calm self-reHance, deep emotion, and an earnest nature, are not inconsistent with youth, modesty, a quiet spirit, and indifference to all suitors save one. The very fact that Desdemona gave her love, unasked, to a mature man, a famous captain, one rude in speech and martial in mien, is claimed to show why she shunned the wealthy, curled darlings all around her. To illustrate the maxim that " in joining contrasts lieth love's delight," the lover in^ the Hunchback surmises that " Haply for this, on Afric's swarthy neck, Hath Europe's priceless pearl been seen to hang, That makes the orient poor "— and we bethink us of Brabantio's daughter and the Moor, as well as of a " rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear." A yet more 88 OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA. popular playright of the same generation has told us in one of his metrical romances, that " Ev'n as the young Venetian loved the Moor, Pity refines to reverence in the Pure ; Touch'd with a finer sense, its eye surveys The mine, where wastes appal the common gaze : Love in such hearts, like some sweet poet, where Round it the homely d-wells, invents the fair ; To rudest forms, its own bright splendour given, It shapes the seraph and creates the heaven." Shakspeare's Scholar, already quoted, descries in Desdemona a girl of vivid imagination, quiet self-reliance, much tender- ness, and unbounded devotion, who had attained to early womanhood without the influence of a mother's counsel — :for we hear nowhere of her mother ; and being such a one, she becomes, as such women ever do, " subdued to the very quality of her lord." She shows herself, in her conduct to him, almost the very opposite of what she was to all others, and gives up for him her station, her father's love, her happiness, and finally her very life itself, almost without a question or a murmur. " Le pathetique du drame, n'est-ce pas que cette jeune fille qui a tout donn^, tout . quitt^, aim6 malgre tous les obstacles, aim^ le More de Venise, soit tu6e pas lui, comme infid^le .? " So writes Villemain, in a comparison of her with Zaire, whose digniU coquette he -contrasts with the bearing of Desdemona, a fugitive from her father's house, and following her husband now to plead before the Senate, and now to confront the stir and stress of war, — si soumise, si d^ouiSe d son amour. How Desdemona came to be smitten of the Moor, he has told us who best could tell, the Moor himself We have seen how Shaftesbury regarded the process, and might quote much more from him, equally unsympathetic with " our old Tragick Poet," as he is .pleased to designate Shakspeare, who, sarcastically says he, " hit our [national] taste in giving us a Moorish hero, full fraught with prodigy : a wondrous story- teller ! But, for the attentive part, the poet chose to give FASCINATING TALES OF HEROISM. 89 it to womankind. What passionate reader of travels, or student in the prodigious sciences, can refuse to pity that fair lady, who fell in love with the miraculous Moor ; espe- cially considering with what .suitable grace such a lover could ■ relate the most monstrous adventures, and satisfy the won- dering appetite with the most wondrous tales." But it is to be noted that Shaftesbury, to serve his purpose, quotes, not the lines which refer to Othello's personal prowess and endurance, but those only which tell of antres vast, and deserts idle, and cannibals, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders ; as though it were by Munchausenisms that Desdemona had been won, not by admiring sympathy with the soldier's feats and sufferings, which in fact are by this critic ignored. What she loved Othello for, was the dangers he had passed, and his manner of passing them. And he loved her that she did pity them, and for her way of showing it. Was not Uncle Toby even thus enamoured of the Widow Wadman, when she engaged him to fight his battles o'er again, again to take the counter- guard of St. Roche sword in hand, — and when, with tender notes playing upon his ear, that too bewitching matron, professing herself a bewitched listener, led him, all bleed- ing, by the hand, out of the trench, wiping her eyes as he was carried to his tent, why. Captain Shandy saw an angel of mercy beside him on the sofa, " his heart glowed with fire ; and had he been worth a thousand, he had lost every heart of them to Mrs. Wadman." Mr. Charles Reade shrewdly makes David Dodd, as a narrator, not merely present the bare skeletons of daring acts, but those smaller touches that are the body and soul of a story true or false, wanting which the deeds of heroes sound an almanack ; not merely tell what men acted, but what they felt, what passed in the hearts of men perisbing at sea, in sight of land, and in the hearts of the heroes that ran their boats into the surf and Death's maw to save them : " Such great acts, great feelings, great perils, and the gushes that crowned all of holy triumph, .... this seaman poured hot from his own manly heart into quick and womanly bosoms, that heaved QO FASCINATED LISTENERS. visibly and glowed with admiring sympathy and fluttered with gentle fear."* In another of this vivid writer's fictions we read of another hero and other listeners, after the challenging query, Who is so devoid of egotism as not to like to tell his own adventures to sympathizing beauty? that " He told his story in detail, ... and as he told it, their lovely eyes seemed on fire; and they were red and pale, by turns." Mrs. Gore's Emma Cromer is to be seen turning " deathly pale " at Reresby's recital of eastern travel, and laying a cold and tremulous hand on the arm of another fair listener. But it is pretty much the same with her, apparently, as with Scott's Matilda, when Redmond "knew so well o'er all to throw His spirit's wild romantic glow, That while she blamed, and while she fear'd, She loved each venturous tale she heard." Not to compare her too closely with one of whom Coleridge. ecstatically wrote, " Few sorrows hath she of her own. My hope ! my joy ! my Genevieve ! She loves me best, whene'er I sing The songs that make her grieve." In the case of M. Soulie's Victor and Julie, "Julie l'6coutait, et comme Desdemona, elle I'aimait pour ce qu'il avait souf- fert." So with Captain Kirke and Magdalen in No Name, when she led him into talking of the perils of the sea : twice he had been shipwrecked ; times innumerable he and all with him had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of the hair's breadth ; and she would sit listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories — made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them — fell, one by one, from his lips. She was enamoured * Miss Austen's readers may call to mind "the glow of Fanny's cheek," in Mansfield Park, " the brightness of her eye, the deep attention, the absorbed interest," with which she listened to the young sailor's descrip- tion of the imminent hazards and terrific scenes which his experience afloat, in war-time, could supply in satisfaction of almost any demand. DIDO AND DESDEMONA. 91 of his " noble unconsciousness of his own heroism," the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed. What though the man was no younker, and no beauty ? The author of the Parisians assures us that beauty has little to do with engaging the love of women : the air, the manner, the tone, the conversation, the something that interests, and the something to be proud of — these are the attributes of the man made to be loved. Happy the warrior that is sure of one loving listener when the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost and won. " Welcome nights of broken sleep, and days of carnage cold, Could I deem that thou would'st weep to hear my perils told." The love of Dido for Jineas has been defined as a thing of the imagination, an impulse of genuine hero-worship, owing more to the ear than to the eye : it was excited by his narrative of the sack of Troy, and his subsequent wanderings over the melancholy main. " It resembled the passion of Othello for Desdemona," says one Virgilian critic. A love born of pity speaks in the first words of the tempest- tried hero : O sola infandos Trojce miserata labores. ***** If in one sense it be taking us still further away from Othello and Desdemona, in another it may help to bring us back to them, if we apply, in conclusion, these four lines from Idylls of the King, — " However marr'd, of more than twice her years, Seam'd with an ancient swordcut on the cheek, And bruised, and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes And loved him, with that love which was her doom." 92 WAS OTHELLO A NEGRO? § HI- OTHELLO'S ONLY WITCHCRAFT. Othello, Act '\., Sc. 3. That Brabantio's daughter, a Venetian senator's only child, should become enamoured of a sooty Moor, — to what could Brabantio in his proud wrath impute it, but to the use of foul charms and chains of magic ? There was witchcraft in the case, he felt quite sure. How else could ever a maid so tender, fair, and happy, so fond of her father and her home, and " so opposite to marriage that she shunned the wealthy curled darlings " of her own nation, have run from her endeared surroundings to the " sooty bosom of such a thing " as this shady foreigner ? Nigger* was not a phrase current * Was Othello a negro ? The question has been put at divers times, and answered in sundry manners. A. W. Schlegel hails as a most "fortunate mistake" that the Moor (under which name in the original novel a baptized Saracen of the northern coast of Africa was unques- tionably meant) has been made by Shakspeare "in every respect a negro' — recognizing in him, as we are made to do, the wild nature of that glowing zone which generates the most ferocious birds of prey and the deadUest poisons — tamed only in appearance by the desire of fame, by foreign laws of honour, and by nobler and milder manners. Commenting on the term "thick-lips " as applied to him by Roderigo, Coleridge asks if it be possible to imagine Shakspeare so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, — at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves ? The rivalry of Roderigo may sufficiently account for his wilful confusion of Moor and Negro. Though no doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind, yet would it be " something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro," and would argue in her a disproportionateness, a want of balance, which Shakspeare does not appear to have in the least con- templated. So again the late Professor H. Reed rejected the " repulsive notion " that Othello was a black, a coarse-featured African, as directly at variance with the requisitions of both poetry and history : the Moor he claimed as one of that adventurous race of men who, striking out from the heart of Arabia, had made conquest of Persia and Syria, and, over- turning the ancient sovereignty of Egypt, swept in victory along the whole northern coast of Africa, and passing thence across the narrow frith of the Mediterranean, scattered the dynasty of the Goths with THE MOOR OF VENICE. ' 93 in Venetian society, high or low ; but nigger was in Bra- bantio's mind's eye when it lighted on Othello's face, and perhaps would have been on his lips had he sounded the depths of its future capacity as an expression of arrogant contempt and vituperative insult. This Moor, then, he charged before the Senate with practising on Desdemona with unlawful acts, abusing her delicate youth with drugs Roderick at their head ; who in the most fertile region of Spain built up an empire which lasted for centuries ; who preserved the literature of Greece — its philosophy and science — when Greece herself was prostrate and benighted ; and who, even after the powers of the caliphs in their several realms began to decline, were the chosen and honoured captains of the armies of Christian states. Especially, we read, was this the policy of the Venetian Republic, to lessen by the employment of mercenary com- manders the danger of domestic intrigue. How true then to his nature was it for Othello to " stand in conscious pride — the descendant of a race of kings — the representative of the Arabs who had been sovereigns in Europe — his spirit glowing with noble ancestral memories." On the other hand, it is shown to have been perfectly consistent with the debasing malignity of lago, and with the petulant disappointment of such a foppish Venetian as Roderigo, to be blind to all that ennobled and dignified the Moorish name — to see no distinction between the chivalrous Moor, the chieftain of Christian armies, and the barbarous Ethiop, the despised slave. " It was natural that vulgar words should be uttered from the lips of such men, and also that the parental frenzy of Desdemona's father should find relief in the same strain of vituperative misrepresentation — the propensity of a fresh and angry grief to magnify its injury." And such are the assignable authorities which have led to the supposition that Othello was black. If the Moor does, indeed, so speak of himself in one scene, it is when he is "changing with the poison," and the agony of doubt incites him to morbid exaggeration. For the sake of the gentle lady wedded to the Moor it is pleaded that we should by all means discard the blackamoor fallacy— lest we be tempted to think, otherwise, that so monstrous an alliance was fitly blotted out in its fearful catas- trophe. Black is a colour with a large variety of shades ; and a variety of meanings may be assigned to it, sometimes simply the converse of light- complexioned, or fair, as when Thurio, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, denies that his face is fair, and asserts it to be " black "-whereupon Sir Proteus airily repHes, " But pearls are fair ; and the old saying is, Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes," Christopher North favoured the negro notion when he argued, in the 94 THE MOOR A MAURITANIAN. or minerals, enchanting her with noxious spells and medi- cines bought of mountebanks* Let him deny it, if he " could. Deny it, Othello did. True, he had won the love of Desdemona ; true, he had married. But that was the full extent of his offending. He would tell the Senate, and in plain soldierly terms, like the plain soldier he was, how it all came about. He would tell them a round unvarnished tale of his whole course of love ; what drugs, what charms. Nodes, that Shakspeare ought to have been above taking an anomalous case of jealousy ; for "how could a black husband escape being jealous of a white wife ? There was a cause of jealousy given in his very fate." And the Ettrick Shepherd pitied, but .could scarcely respect, the white wife, — "it was a curious kind o' hankerin' after an opposite colour." With better judgment one who, in his time, contributed to the Nodes, Hartley Coleridge to wit, scouted the error which has turned Othello, the sable Mauritanian chieftain, haply descended from the vanquishers of Roderick the Goth, into a rank, wooUy-pated, thick-lipped " nigger." Kemble asked Blumenbach, who had been to see the great tragedian in Othello, " Do you think, sir, that I succeeded in accurately representing the negro Character ?" " The moral characteristics, yes ; but all my illusion was at 'an end when you opened your hands ; you wore black gloves— now the negroes have the inside of the hand flesh-colour." Every one laughed, but the ethnologist was profoundly serious . Cooper was found fault with by some American critics (ridiculed in Salmagundi) for not having made himself as black as a negro ; one objector urging that the Moor was probably an Egyptian by birth— like the donor of the too famous hand- kerchief—and has not Herodotus described the flat noses and frizzled hair of the Egyptians ? a clear proof that they were all negroes. It is one of America's best critics, that self-styled Shakspeare's Scholar, Mr. R. Grant White, who finds one fatal fault in Hildebrandt's otherwise " most fasci- nating of modern pictures," the Othello and Desdemona,— and that is, the notion of love given by such a woman to a great grinning negro with rings in his ears. What though John Quincy Adams essayed to prove Othello to be a negro, and that Retsch made him so in his outlines ? Shakspeare's Scholar falls back upon the evidence of his master that " the Moor " was a Mauritanian, and one of lofty lineage. Neither Othello nor Aaron (in the horrible Titus Andronicus) is called an Ethiopian, but both are continually spoken of as Moors. To Mr.. Grant White it seems, on the whole, that Shakspeare must have been fully aware of the distinction in grade between the two races, though his notion of their respective traits may have been neither very true nor very clear. * Compare the very words as well as the general drift of a passage in OTHELLO'S ONLY WITCHCRAFT. gj what conjuration, and -yfchat mighty magic, he won this maiden with. Brabantio might interrupt him with renewed assertions that so still and diffident a girl could never have fallen in love with what she feared to look on, unless by " practices of cunning hell ;'' and therefore he vouched again that with some mixtures powerful o'er the blood, or with some dram conjured to this effect, the Moor must needs have wrought upon her. But the Senate ruled that to vouch this, was no proof; and they encouraged the defendant in his pleading. That pleading was, that his life's history, simply told, but filled throughout with adventure and ex- citement, with records of disastrous chances and moving accidents and hair-breadth escapes, had irresistibly won the ear, and through the ear the heart, of Desdemona. " She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd ; And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used." old John Webster's best-known tragedy, where Duke Ferdinand and Bosola are discussing the infatuation of the Duchess of Malfi : "Bos. I do suspect there hath been some sorcery Used on the duchess- Ferd. Sorcery ! to what purpose ? Bos. To make her dote on some desertless fellow She shames to acknowledge. Ferd. Can your faith give way To think there's power in potions or in charms, To make us love whether we will or no ? Bos. Most certainly. Ferd. Away ! these are mere guUeries, horrid things Invented by some cheating mountebanks To abuse us. Do you think that herbs or charms Can force the will ? Some trials have been made In this foohsh practice, but the ingredients Were lenitive poisons, such as are of force To make the patient mad ; and straight the witch Swears by equivocation they are in love. The vritchcraft lies in her rank blood." Duchess of Malfi, Act iii., Sc. i. When Mistress Quickly can only account for the alleged infatuation of Mistress Ford for Sir John Falst'aff by ascribing to the fat knight the pos- session and unscrupulous exercise of "charms," " Not I, I assure thee," he complacently rephes ; " setting the attraction of my good parts aside I have no other charms." — Merry Wives of Windsor, Act ii., Sc. 2. 96 NO SORCERER, ONLY A SAGE. Othello's argument admits of a large variety of applica- tion ; and we go on — or off rather, as at a tangent — to apply it accordingly. ' Camden, in his Britannia, treating of Michael Scott and his connection with the abbey of Ulme, or Holme Cultram, in Cumberland, says of that alleged wizard, " He was a monk of this place about the year 1290, and applied himself so closely to the mathematics, and other abstruse parts of learn- ing, that he was generally looked on as a conjurer ; and a vain credulous humour has handed down I know not what miracles done by him." And in this respect Sir Michaelj is a representative man. No sorcerer, after all, it seems„ but only a savant. Many are the sages- and savants — one^ Pope at least among them — who have passed for sorcerers, Gabriel Naud6 was- not writing without cause to show for it,: when he drew up his Apologia pour les grands Personnages- faussement accuses de Magie. Referring to the skill in divination ascribed to St. Atha- nasius, Gibbon remarks, that some fortunate conjectures of future events, which impartial reasoners might impute to his experience and judgment, were attributed by his friends to heavenly inspiration, and by his enemies to infernal magic. The ascendancy acquired by Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, over the mind of the Emperor Constantine, was imputed by the pagans to the art of magic ; but the prelate might with a good conscience have replied, as Moli^re's C61ie does to Trufaldin : " Truf. Quoi ! te melerais-tu d'un peu de diablerie 1 CUie. Non, tout ce que je sais n'est que blanche magie." Strong minds have undoubtedly an ascendant over weak ones, says my Lord Chesterfield, "as Galigai Marechale d'Ancre very justly observed, when, to the disgrace and reproach of those times, she was executed for having governed Mary of Medicis by the arts of witchcraft and magic." The profound devotion of " that lofty female " as Dean Milman calls her, the Countess Matilda, to her spiritual father, Hildebrand, was attributed to magic by some by RATIONALE OF WITCHCRAFT. gy Others to as bad or worse. But, at the worst, the ascen- dency was gained " With witchcraft of his wit O wicked wit, and gifts, that have the power So to seduce ! " That only was the witchcraft he had used. So with the Platonic philosopher Apuleius, whose marriage with a rich widow, Pudentilla, provoked the lady's relations to set up a charge against him of bringing about the match by sorcery. The spirited defence he made is still extant in his Apology, or Oratio de Magia. To quote Lord Chesterfield again : " The most graceful and best-bred men, and the handsomest and genteelest women, give the most philtres, and, as I verily believe, without the least assistance of the devil."* The too-celebrated Countess of Essex, who had recourse to Simon Forman, wizard and astrologer, for certain powders to be administered to her husband and to Somerset, is said to have credulously observed with admiration the effect of them ; although, as Mr. Kemp remarks, the licentious passion of the one which she encouraged, and her coldness towards the other, were quite sufficient to fan the lawless flame on one side, and extinguish conjugal affection on the other, without the aid of the Sidrophel of Lambeth. Of Mary Stuart's infatuation for Bothwell, in 1567, — when, instead of opening her eyes to the perils of her position, she seems to have resigned herself to the influence of that one engrossing passion, — Mr. Tytler observes, that " her history at this moment hurried forward with something so like an irresistible fatality, as to make it currently reported * At the Weimar theatre, in 1805, Mr. H. Crabb Robinson saw that " wonder of the North and object of every one's idolatry here," the hereditary Princess of S axe- Weimar ; and thus he comments on the impression made upon himself by the young and fascinating lady : " I Stood by her some time, and smiled at myself at remarking the effect she had on me — since, excellent as I doubt not she is, I am still sensible that the strange sensation I felt at hearing her say common things was prin- cipally occasioned by the magic of title and name." — Diatj of Henry Crabb Robinson, vol. i., p. 210. 7 98 IMPUTED SORCERY. amongst the people that Bothwell was dealing in love- philtres, and had employed the sorceries of his old paramour, the Lady Buccleuch." But that old sorceress knew better, and so did the bold bad man by whom Mary was bewitched. When the ministers of the kirk, enjoined to proclaim the banns of the Queen's, marriage with Bothwell, peremptorily refused, and when the undaunted Craig denounced the match from the pulpit of the High Church as " odious and slander- ous to the world," the same historian remarks that " this solemn warning, with the deep and general detestation pf Bothwell, appeared to produce so little effect upon the Queen, that the people considered the whole events as strange and supernatural : the report revived of this abandoned man having employed witchcraft, no uncommon resource in that age ; and it was currently asserted that j[the marriage-day had been fixed by sorcerers.'' It is noteworthy that Queen Mary herself accused John Knox of accomplishing his seditious purposes to the preju- dice of her authority, and the disquieting of her realm, by magical arts. To this " heavy charge " Knox answered, that " the slander of practising magic — an art which he had always condemned — he could more easily bear, when he recollected that his Master had been defamed as one in league with Beelzebub." In a subsequent interview with the reformer, we find Mary telling him, in a conversation betokening,, says Dr. M'Crie, " the greatest familiarity and apparent confidence," that " Lord Ruthven had offered her a ring ; but she could not love that nobleman. She knew that he used enchantment." Knox's biographer appends to his record of the reformer's second marriage, with Margaret Stewart, an account of the splenetic reports raised at the time by " the popish writers," who envied the honours of the Scottish reformer," and who " are quite clear, too, that he gained the heart of the young lady by means of sorcery and the assistance of the devil." The fascination exercised at will by Mary herself, when long past her prime, was of a kind which set one of our foremost essayists to work out the problem. How is it that the belle of eighteen is often NATURAL MAGIC. gg deserted for the woman of forty, and that the patent witchery of youth and prettiness goes for nothing against the latent witchery of a mature siren ? What is the secret ? he asks : how is it done ? The world, even of silly girls-, has got past any belief in spells and tahsmans, such as Charle- magne's mistress wore, and yet the man's fascination seems to them quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as if it had been brought about by the black art. " If they had any analytical power, they would understand the diablerie of the mature sirens clearly enough, for it is not,so difficult to understand when one puts one's mind to it." Riper knowledge of the world, a suavity of manner and " moral flexibility, wholly wanting to the young," enlarged sympathy, and cultivated tact,, and colloquial ease and skill, — these, and such as these, are the witchcrafts the elder charmers use ; such as these, if not these only. Glancing here and there at the miscellanies of history for examples to our purpose, we think of the submission of Attila to Pope Leo, whose dauntless confidence and vene- rable aspect made so profound an impression upon him, as attributed by legend to a visible apparition of the apostles St. Peter and St.. Paul, who "menaced the trembling heathen with a speedy divine judgment if he repelled the proposals of their successor." But this materializing view, to adopt the objections of the historian of Latin Christianity, though it may have heightened the beauty of Raffaelle's painting, by the introduction of preterhuman forms, lowers the moral grandeur of the whole transaction. The simple faith in his God, which, says Dean Milman, "gave the Roman pontiff courage to " confront '' the barbarian king, " is far more christianly sublime than this unnecessarily imagined miracle." De Quincey alleges of Christianity, as the last of revelations, that it had the high prerogative of working out its victory through what is greatest in man — through his reason, his will, his affections \ but, to satisfy certain of the Fathers, it must operate like a drug — like sympathetic powders — like an amulet — or like a conjurer's charm. Applicable, again, from another point of view, is the instance of St. Dominic's 100 THE MAGIC OF THE MIND. rare power of infusing a profound and enduring devotion to one object. " Once within the magic circle, the enthralled disciple lost all desire to leave it," so potent was the master's holy art, which was believed to be miracle. So, again, with his rival saint, the founder of the Franciscan order, and to whom so many miracles are ascribed, but the moral miracle of whose self-sacrificing love is now recognized as the main- spring of success. As one of Corneille's heroes puts it, " Tout miracle est facile ou mon amour s'applique." When the Scheldt bridge was completed, in 1585, the- famous bridge of Parma, which has been advantageously compared with the celebrated Rhine bridge of Julius Caesar, the citizens of Antwerp could hardly believe that the struc- ture had been reared by human agency, but loudly protested that invisible demons had been summoned to plan and perfect this fatal and preterhuman work. " They were wrong," says Mr. Motley. "There had been but one demon - — one clear lofty intelligence, inspiring a steady and untiring hand. The demon was the intellect of Alexander Farnese;" which, however, had been assisted in its labour by the hundred devils of envy and discord rife in the ranks of his foes. It was as with the Corsair captain of the poet — that Conrad whose name appalled the fiercest of his crew, and swayed thgir souls with that commanding art which . leads and dazzles the vulgar : "What is that spell, that thus his lawless train Confess and envy, yet oppose in vain .' What should it be, that thus their faith can bind ? The power of Thought— the magic of the Mind ! " It is Mr. Motley again, who, having to treat of Lerma's influence over Philip III, says, " the people thought their monarch bewitched." But the all-grasping favourite was no wizard ; only an adventurer with his wits about him. Sorcerer he was not, nor much of a sage, but very much a shrewd man of business, with a will of his own, and tact to enforce it on one who had none. The unbounded rapacity of the Duke is the evil element in this case. Had he been a disinterested minister, his ascendency might have been as TAM O' THE COWGATE. iqi salutary to Spain as in fact it was the reverse ; and then might one have said of it, with Leontes in the statue scene, " If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating." The celebrated Thomas Hamilton, Earl of Haddington, President of the Court of Session, and Secretary of State for Scotland, was nicknamed by his sovereign, from the place of his residence, ' Tarn o' the Cowgate,' under which title he is said to be now better remembered than by any other. Him James I. visited, when in Scotland in 1617 ; and very rich tke King found the old statesman, whom, on that account, popular rumour accredited with the actual possession of the philosopher's stone ; there being '' no other feasible mode of accounting for his immense wealth, which rather seemed the effect of supernatural agency than of worldly prudence or talent." It seems that King James, was vastly tickled with the idea of the philosopher's stone and of so enviable a talisman having fallen into the hands of a Scottish judge ; so His Majesty took care to let his trusty old friend and gossip know of the rumours afloat. The Lord President, we are told, immediately invited the King, and the rest of the company present, to come and dine with him next day, when he would lay open to them the mystery of the talis- man in question.* Next day saw his Cowgate palazzo thronged with the invited guasts, all of whom his lordship gratified with a dainty repast. That over, James reminded Tam of his philosopher's stone, and declared himself to be on the tenterhooks of expectation till the mystery, should be solved. The President then addressed King and courtiers in a pithy speech, whereof the peroration explained that his whole secret lay in two simple and familiar maxims : "Never put off till to-morrow what can be done to-day ; " * The story may remind some of Crawford the successful painter, in a popular work of fiction : men came offering him monstrous bribes for the revelation of his " secret.'' He smiled at their ignorance ; he had no secret except his genius, and his mystic cabala lay in the two virtues that had made the law of his life — unremitting industry, undeviating temperance. I02 IMPUTED SORCERY. and " Never trust to another's hand what your own can execute." One of Sir Robert Walpole's most virulent critics ascribed his ascendency to " some secret magic, of which he seemed to have been a perfect master," — which magic is prosaically resolved : into his skill in finance and debate, his perspicuity of statement, and his plain good sense. French traders are said to have a proverb about English " luck," and to believe that in commerce we are specially fortunate ; nay, some of the more pious among them have been quoted as going so far as to say that, since we re- nounced the Pope, the devil has made us exceptionally " lucky," he being the prince of this world. " But our hard- working, long-sighted merchants know much better : their theory of chance is that the best ship takes merchandize the most sp,fely and most quickly, and that the best seaman- ship saves the ship from being wrecked much more than 'luck' does."" Harapha, the giant of Gath, in Samson Ag07iistes, twits the blinded hero with having gained his miraculous strength by " black enchantments, some magi- cian's art," and is thus answered : " I know no spells, use no forbidden arts ; My trust is in the living God, who gave me At my nativity this strength." Urbain Grandier, as the shrewd soldier says in Vingt Ans apr^s, was not a sorcerer; iie was a savant, and that is quite another thing. " Urbain Grandier did not foretell the future ; he was acquainted with the past, which is some- times much worse." One of the nuns who were implicated in the dismal Grandier procks, on avowing solemnly the innocence of the condemned priest, was taunted by M. de Laubordemont with speaking at the instigation of the devil. But, remorseful at her share in bringing about Grandier's condemnation, she answered that she had never been pos- sessed of any demon — as all the nuns of Loudun on their own showing were — excepting the demon of revenge, and that it was no magical compact, but her own evil thoughts,* * So when one of the gossips in Scott's Highland Widow is accusing NATURAL MAGIC. IO3 which had led to at least her demoniacal possession. When three or four students at the University of Jena were poisoned by the fumes of the charcoal they had been burn- ing in a close garden-house, while employed in their magic fumigations and charms, it was taken for granted, especially by the rabid opponents of Fr. Hoffmann's views (duly anathematized as atheistic) as to the character of carbonic acid gas (his discovery), that the young men had been destroyed by an evil spirit, of the kind they invoked — and evoked. Frederick Hoffmann admitted that it was a very bad spirit that had tempted them, the spirit of avarice and folly ; and that a very noxious spirit (gas, or Geist) was the immediate cause of their death. But he contended that this latter spirit was the spirit of charcoal, and to the horror of the medical scarcely less than of the theological faculty, he acquitted the devil of all direct concern in the business. The story may be read in the notes to Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. Fiction must not be altogether left out in this cold col- lation of scraps and sundries. The admiring Parisians, in Victor Hugo's masterpiece, see absolute magic in the mira- culous tricks of Esmeralda's goat — one of those learned animals which, in the Middle Ages, brought their instructors in peril of the stake. The sorceries of poor golden-hoofed Djali, however, are explained to be very innocent tricks, it being sufficient, in most cases, to hold the tambourine to the animal in such or such a way, to make it do what you wished. Rebecca the Jewess, in Ivanhoe, is tried for unlawful corre- spondence with mystical powers, and divers weighty charges are preferred against her, supported by circumstances either altogether fictitious or trivial, and natural in themselves, but rendered pregnant' with suspicion by the exaggerated manner in which they are told, and the sinister commentaries which Elspat of overmuch intercourse with the enemy of souls.— " Silly woman," the other answers, " thinkest thou that there is a worse fiend on earth, or beneath it, than the pride and fury of an offended woman ? " (Chapter V.) I04 CHARMS, REAL AND IMAGINARY. the witnesses add to the facts. She has bewitched the Templar, and the creduHty of the assembly greedily swallows every allegation in proof, however incredible. But when Rebecca, at the Grand Master's command, unveils, and looks on her judges with a countenance in which bashfulness con- tends with dignity, her exceeding beauty excites a murmur of surprise ; and the younger knights tell each qther, by significant glances, silently interchanged, that Sir Brian's " best apology was in the power of her real charms, rather than of her imaginary witchcraft." As another example from Scott, take the ballad-history whence he derived the plot of The Bride of Lammermoor, and portions of which he quotes in the Introduction to that tragedy of doom ; remarking at the same time that it was " needless to point out to the intelligent reader that the witchcraft of the mother consisted only in the ascendency of a powerful mind over a weak and melancholy one " — that is, in his version, of Lady Ashton over Lucy. What says Luigi Pulci, as cited by Nello in Romola, as to the magic ascribed to a certain trenchant blade? " Dombruno's sharp-cutting scimitar had the fame of being enchanted ; but," says Luigi, " I am rather of opinion that it cut sharp because it was of strongly tempered steel." It is in the same historical novel that, discussing with Tito the pledge of Fra Domenico to face the ordeal by fire, Spini exclaims, with a grimace intended to hide a certain shyness in trenching on this speculative ground, " But suppose he did get magic and the devil to help him, and walk through the fire, after all .' how do you know there's nothing in these things .? Plenty of scholars believe in them, and this Frate is bad enough for anything.'' Tito answers, with a shrug, that of course there are such things, but he has particular reasons for knowing that the Frate is not on such terms with the devil as can give him any confidence in this affair. "The only magic he relies on is his own ability." We may apply to the like purpose the changed conviction of the Hebrew outcasts, pestilent- stricken pariahs, to whose service Romola, so nobly devotes RATIONALE OF WITCHCRAFT. 105 herself : " The suspicion that Romola was a supernatural form was dissipated, but their minds were filled instead with the more effective sense that she was a human being whom God had sent over the sea to command them." The Brown Woman in Hood's Tylney Hall, an accepted fortune-teller, owes her repute to a shrewd and subtle fore- sight as to the probable course of human affairs, the con- scious result simply of her sagacity, experience, and know- ledge of the world. Her dominion is but "the power of a strong mind over weak ones ; " but her reputation invests her with respect and awe in the eyes of the vulgar, " while from servants and retainers it procured private goodwill and unbounded confidence, furnishing her with a circumstantial history of the past and present in exchange for the glimmer- ings she chose to give of the future." And these domestic confidences may be said, as in- so many other such cases, to have constituted her working capital. Trust her, and such as her, to put it out at good interest. Like la devineuse or divineresse of La Fontaine : " Sfxi fait consistait en addresse : -^ Quelques termes de Fart, beaucoup de hardiesse, Du hasard quelquefois, tout cela concourait, Tout cela bien sou vent faisait crier miracle." And devineresse takes \ht pas of devineux, sorceress of sor- cerer, witch of wizard, by prescriptive precedence of the sex in such matters. When the lacquey in Molina's Don Gil in the Green Pantaloons finds at last that his master is his mistress, he begins a form of exorcism ; but, being assured that she, Don Gil, alias Dona Juana, is only a woman, he philosophically remarks that all the mischief and mystery are accounted for : " That word explains the whole ; Ay, and if thirty worids were going mad, It would be reason good for all the uproar." Mr. Disraeli tells us, in Tancred, there are spells of social sorcery " more potent than all the necromancy of Merlin or Friar Bacon." The metamorphosis of Juliana in The Honey- moon so amazes her father that he is eager to know by what I06 OTHELLO'S ONLY WITCHCRAFT. preternatural arts and devices Duke Aranza can have wrought the change, " What spell, what cunning witchcraft Has he employ 'd ? Jul. None :,,he has simply taught me To look into myself ; his powerful rhetoric Has with strong influence impress'd my heart, And made me see at length the thing I have been. And what I am, sir.'' But the dramatic literature of all countries would embarrass us with riches of illustrative matter. Not to be further embarrassed, let us take but two citations from Schiller, of varied import : the one is where Queen Isabel taunts the soldiers with their dread of the Maid of Orleans : " She a magician ? Her sofe magic lies In your delusion and your cowardice.'' The other is where Kennedy and Mary Stuart are discussing the fatal influence over Mary of a man hke Bothwell : " That despotic man Ruled you with shameful, overbearing will. And with his philtres and his hellish arts Inflamed your passions. Mary. All the arts he used Were man's superior strength and woman's weakness. Ken. No, no, I say. The most pernicious spirits Of hell he must have summon'd to his aid, To cast this mist before your waking senses.'' Not Brabantio was more convinced of this, with regard to the Moor's alleged practices on Desdemona, than was Kennedy in the case of the bold, bad Earl's influence over her fascinated mistress. OTHELLO'S STORY OF HIS LIFE. 107 § IV. OTHELLO'S STORY OF HIS THE. Othello, Act i., Sc. 3. Brabantio had loved the Moor, and oft invited him to the home of Desdemona, " Still question'd me the story of my life. From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes, That I have pass'd. I ran it through, ev'n from my boyish days To the very moment that he bade me tell it," — and crowded was that recital with details as vivid as pic- turesque of most disastrous chances, and moving accidents by flood and field, and hair-breadth escapes, and captivity, and redemption from captivity. But no vapouring vaunter he, after the type of Don Adriano the fantastical Spaniard, as hit off by Shakspeare's King of Navarre, who, nevertheless, has something of Brabantio's relish and faculty as, that rare thing, a good listener ;j " The child of fancy [invention] that Armado hight . . . How you delight, my lords, I know not, I ; But I protest, I love to hear him lie, And I will use him for my minstrelsy," or story-telling (in a double sense). Prospero is quite ready, uninvited, to relate in full the history of his strange exile and island career ; but he must have time to tell it, and the time must be of his own choosing : " For 'tis a chronicle of day by day. Not a relation for a breakfast, nor Befitting this first meeting. . . . Sir, I invite your highness, and your train. To my poor cell, where you shall take your rest For this one night ; which (part of it) I'll waste With such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it Go quick away ; the story of my life, And the particular accidents, gone by. Since I came to this isle." If Caius Marcius be too modest, or too proud, to tell his 1 08 SPELL-BO UND LISTENERS. own story, Cominius is ready, and eager, to tell it for him, and with this promised result, that senators shall mingle tears with smiles; and "great patricians shall attend, and shrug, i' the end, admire ; " and ladies " shall be frighted, and, gladly quaked, hear more." Given a master of the art of narrative, and it need not be the doer himself of great acts that shall spell-bind an assembly. When Herodotus recited his history at the Olympic games, it was to an audience keenly sympathetic, upon whom not a phrase, scarce a word, was lost ; men who listened with delight to his tales of travel, that to them were not travellers' tales — that resembled Othello's narrative, in the matter of cannibals and giants — that told of strange beasts and birds and trees, of gods ■ whose very name it was impiety to utter/' of towns like provinces and of rivers like seas, besides all the romance as well as history of their own dear land.* But there are exceptional cases ; and the rule is for the actor to stir his listeners by a personal narrative, to thrill them by associating every incident and feat and trial with the MOI qui vous park. Odysseus, like another ancient mariner, holds fast as rapt listeners all sorts of people — a goddess herself, at one time, Circe, who sat in silence as he obeyed her commands to tell his [tale. Three days and three nights had passed since he began his story in the hearing of Eumaeus, — " Unfinish'd yet ; and yet I thirst to hear! " professed that worthy man ; while the travelled hero declared it might easily be made endless, more easily than ended : " Not the whole circle of the year would close My long narration of a life of woes." We think of Queen Dido and her fatal interest in that too fascinating story-teller, the Trojan wanderer, who told his story with eloquence so pathetic. We think of Queen * Point a'esprit critique ou moqueur, might be said of them, as of the mediseval listeners to jongleur and trouvere, the course of whose recital all were bent on following ; for follow they did in thought the imaginary conflicts and prodigious adventures described, enjoying the delicious pleasure of fighting the battles o'er again without having to endure the fatigues of them in fact ; identifying themselves with the hero, and with him dealing out swashing blows, and, if they got one in return, happily ensured against its dinting their armour, or even ruffling their tunic. RECITAL OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 109 Isabella and her ladies hanging with eager curiosity upon the story so well told by Columbus.* We think of the " faire Medina " in Spenser, beseeching Sir Guyon of courtesy to tell from whence he came through jeopardy : " ' Tell on, fayre sir,' said she, ' that doleful! tale, From which sad ruth does seeme you to restraine ; ' " and of the Redcrosse Knight in another canto, plied by his royal host and hostess with requests for a recital of his feats and toils in full : " of strange adventures and of perils sad Which in his travell him befallen had," and " Great pleasure, mixt with pitiful regard, That godly king and queen did passionate, Whyles they his pitiful adventures heard." Or, being in the sphere of fiction again, we think of the Sultan pressing Fortunatus after dinner for a detailed report of his adventures ; and of Formal egging on Brainworm (in Ben Jonson) to relate the manner of his services, and his devices in the wars : " They say they be very strange, and not like those a man reads in the Roman histories, or sees at Mile End." Or we think of Young Norval, in Douglas, attracted to the hermit's cell by the hermit's stories, " for he had been a soldier in his youth, and fought in famous battles." Recurring to real life, we think of elderly Prince Charles Edward, just forty years after the Forty-five, urged by Mr. Greathed in Rome to recount the tale of that enter- prise, and at first reluctant, however importunately jussus, renovare that ancient and only not quite infandum dolorem ; but eventually recounting it all with great animation and an even vehement energy of manner — his marches, his battles, his victories, and his defeat, his hair-breadth escapes, and the inviolable devotion of his Highland followers, remembering whom, and their sufferings, his fortitude forsook him, and he fell to the floor in a swoon. We think of Goldsmith en- * Years later, the now aged admiral had a very different kind of listener in the cold-hearted Ferdinand, to whom, by command, he gave a par- ticular account of his latest voyage ; but sadly Columbus missed the benign Queen, whose tears were ready, on occasion, as well as her ever- appreciative and approving smiles. no REMINISCENT RECITALS tranced by the magic-wove thread of Byrne's wanderings in foreign lands, and the world of campaigning stories of which that psedagogue Paddy was mostly the hero ; and in whom little Oli'^er, at that period at least, had as much faith and interest as though Byrne had been the veritable (if not veracious) old soldier of his Deserted Village, ever kindly welcome at the pastor's fireside ; for there " The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sat by his fire, and talk'd the night away ; Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done, Shoulder'd his crutch, and show'd how fields were won." And that again makes us think of both Goldsmith and John- son as listeners to General Oglethorpe's graphic tale, by the bigger doctor's particular request, of the siege of Belgrade, — told in the true veteran style, as the General poured a little wine on the table, and with a wet finger drew his lines and parallels, and described the positions of the opposing force, — to all of which Johnson at least gave the most lively heed, poring over the plans and diagrams with what Washington Irving calls "his usual purblind closeness." Washington Irving himself delighted in following the recital of a real adventurer,— Belzoni, for instance, of whom he writes : " I have been as much delighted in conversing with him, and getting from him. an account of his adven^tures and feelings, as was ever one of Sindbad's auditors." Or, say as ever were those ancient Gauls, whose greatest pleasure' next to fighting, was to crowd round the stranger at their feasts, and make him tell them tales of distant lands. Scott describes Dame Elspeth's curch as bristling with horror, and Tibb Tacket in ecstasies of interest, as they listened to the tales of Christie the Border rider "like Desdemona to Othello's." Such a listener, again, found Sir Piercie Shafton in Mysie, the Miller's maid. Major Bridge- north, in Peveril, secured an eager auditor in Julian, for his narrative of foreign travel "contained traits of interest and of wonder, such as are usually captivating to a youthful ear." Cleveland, in the Pirate, fa-scinated the fair sisters by the spirit as well as modesty with which he told of the many OF LIFE AND ADVENTURES. \\\ gallant actions he had wrought, and the many distant coun- tries he had seen : " You would think you saw the flash and heard the report of the guns," said Brenda, of his sea- fight stories ; but Minna was the sister more seriously atten- tive to his romantic records of "foreign people, and distant wars, in wild and unknown regions." In Woodstock, again, we have the disguised prince, a fugitive, and in instant peril of his life, essaying to interest Alice Lee by " such anecdotes, partly of warlike and perilous adventure, as possessed the same degree of interest- for the female ear which they have had ever since Desdemona's days." Herr Teufelsdrockh, in his description of Andreas Futteral and his wife, tells us of the latter, that " Gretchen was won, like Desdemona, by the deeds rather than the looks of her now veteran Othello;" and in a later chapter the Clothes- Philosopher explains how his young imagination was stirred up, and a historical tendency given him by the narrative habits of Father Andreas ; who, with his battle-reminiscences, and grey austere yet patriarchal aspect, could not but appear another Ulysses and Much-enduring Man. " Eagerly I hung upon his tales, when listening neighbours enlivened the hearth; from these perils and these travels, wild and far almost as Hades itself, a dim world of Adventure expanded itself within me." Charles Nodier's intimates delighted to recall how rich and expansive he was in stories of adventure and marvel, how, " il s'epanchait en abondants et naifs rdcits, et faisait revivre . . . desespoirs ardents, philtres mortels, com- plots, terreurs cr6dules, fuites errantes," and what you will, or as you like it, winter's tale, or midsummer night's dream, besides. Chateaubriand's Don Rodrigue constrained the noble Moor, Aben-Hamet, to charm his household, in which there was a Desdemona, with his merveilleux fdcits de r Orient. In his turn we have le Maure a spell-bound listener to the pic- turesque narrations of Don Carlos : " Ces r^cits enchantaient Aben-Hamet, dont la passion pour les histoires merveilleuses trahissait le sang arabe." There is a dash of Desdemona in Mr. Reade's Lucy Fountain questioning the " great traveller " Talboys with a warm and courteous curiosity, and so plying 12 - GRAPHIC RECITAL TO EAGER EARS. him that the other ladies present come gliding up one by one, serpent-like, with genuine curiosity and most seeming non- chalance. But her success is more legitimate in the instance of David Dodd, whom she drew out with all a woman's tact, and with a warmth that set him on real fire : He turned his eye, which glowed now like a live coal, towards that enticing voice, and presently, like a ship that has been hanging over the water ever so long on the last rollers, with one gallant glide he took the sea and towed them all like little cockleboats in his wake. " From sea to sea, from port to port, from tribe to tribe, from peril to peril, from feat to feat, David whirled his wonder-struck hearers, and held them panting by the quad- ruple magic of a tuneful voice, a changing eye, an ardent soul, and truth at first-hand." For above a dozen years^ man and boy, he had beat about the globe, with real eyes, real ears, and real brains ever at work. So he peopled the soft and cushioned drawing-room with twenty different tribes and varieties of man, barbarous, semi-barbarous, and civilized ; and each auditor may be presumed to have resembled the laureate's " My lady with her fingers interlock'd," when she " call'd all her vital spirits into each ear to listen "—but one among them rather that other lady in the same picture, whose " eager fancy hurried with him— Snatch'd thro' the perilous passes of his life." Or again like Balzac's Duchess in Ferragus, prompting Armand to " all his pilgrimage dilate " for her behoof: " Vos aventures en Orient me charment. Racontez-moi bien toute votre vie. J'aime k participer aux souffrances ressenties par un homme de courage, car je les ressens, vrai !" It were preposterous, perhaps, to compare this last listener to Wordsworth's simple- hearted, trustful Ruth, when there came a warrior from Georgia's shore, "and with him many tales he brought of pleasure and of fear; such tales as told to'iny maid by such a youth in the green shade, were perilous to hear." Glance we back again, then, at David Dodd enthralling his friends with his " breathing-burning histories ; " for in him were met those rare allies, heart to dare and do, yet heart to feel, and brain and tongue to tell a deed well ; and he therefore mastered SYMPATHETIC LISTENERS. "3 his hearers, and played on their breasts as David played the harp ; making the women's bosoms swell, and their eyes flash and glisten, and their cheeks flush and grow pale by turns, so that they were away in thought out of a " carpeted temple of wax, small-talk, nonentity, and nonentities, away to sea- breezes that they almost felt in their hair and round their temples as their hearts rose and fell upon a' broad swell of passions, perils, waves, male men, realities."* The disguised and nominal Philip — a Philippa by rights — of the same author's Wandering Heir, presses James Annesley, the much-enduring heir in question, to tell the whole story of his life. It took some special pressing to succeed, but at last, " Sit by me, my one friend," said Annesley, " and I'll tell it thee ; ay, ever since I was four years old." Then he told his story, (the story tells us,) but broke down once or twice ; then went manfully on, the more so that, while he was telling it, a brown but shapely hand stole into his, and was seldom idle, but ever speaking as variously as a voice, with its gentle pressure of sympathy, and sudden grasps at danger: but when he came to his being kidnapped and swooning dead away in the ship, it trembled, and Philip "turned away his head, and never looked towards him again, and by then he was flung into gaol and cast for death, the narrator discovered that Philip was crying." And all of a sudden, Philip's tears drew forth his own once more, the fijst he had shed for years ; and they did him a world of good. " Oh, my dear Philip ! " he cried, "you have saved me from despair; a cloud clears from my mind. Whilst I have one friend who will shed a tear for me, it were ungrateful to despair." We might swell the list of examples with that of the young Indian hero. Captain Gordon, giving a serio-comic version of his adventures, warding off all praise of great and gallant * Lucy's eyes are the alleged source of David's narrative enthusiasm : " I feel them shine on me like a couple of suns," he declares ; " They would make a statue pay the yarn out." In an earlier book of Mr. Reade's, an autobiographic adventurer is made to say of another en- thralled listener, " Her eyes glittered like two purple stars at a stranger with the gift of the gab, that had seen so much of hfe as I had." 8 114 'STILL QUESTION' D ME deeds by the playful tone which made peril seem a joke, and desperate valour the most commonplace quality of man ; — or Sir Jasper's tenant, after fifteen years of wandering in the wildest and loneliest regions of the earth, thrilled with novel pleasure at the sight of such a listener as he had now secured ; or Captain Arundel, fresh from his Indian campaign, answer- ing Mary Marchmont's hundred questions about midnight marches and solitary encampments, fainting camels, lurking tigers in the darkness of the jungle, intercepted supplies of provisions, stolen ammunition, and all the other details of the war. Horace Graham, back from his wanderings in South America, relates his travels and adventures to his Aunt Barbara and Cousin Madelon, and finds in Mrs. Treherne a perfect listener, sufficiently well-informed to make it worth while to tell her more, and knowing how to put intelligent questions just at the right moment. As for Madelon, she had been busily engaged on some piece of embroidery when he first began talking, but gradually her hands have dropped into her lap, and, with her eyes fixed on him in the frankest unconsciousness, she has become utterly absorbed in what he is saying. " Graham's whole heart was in his work, past and present ; and this rapt naive interest on the part of the girl at once flattered and encouraged him," especially as contrasted with the sleepy circle of apathetic listeners he has lately had to do with elsewhere. If we take yet one other example from the wide, wide world of prose fiction, let it be the ironically told instance of Thackeray's Bachelor of Beak Street, with Elizabeth Prior for sympathetic listener. " I told her my story. . . . She seemed to compassionate me. . . . She used to come to me, and she used to pity me, and I used to tell hef all, and to tell her over and over again." Sometimes the house aifairs would, as in Desde- mona's case, but of another kind,* and at Mrs. Prior's shrill * Desdemona's house affairs, contends Mr. Grant White, were not afifairs of pots and pans, as those appear to assume who object to Hilda; brandt's presentment of her as too " magnificent." In those days, ali ladies under queenly rank overlooked their households ; and Desdemona was the mistress of her father's house, her mother being dead ; and in THE STORY OF MY LIFE: nj summons, call her thence ; and, unlike Desdemona, she could not so "with haste despatch " them as to return the same day ; but the next day the good girl was sure to come again, and then there would be another repetition of Mr. Batchelor's recital. If in one Idyll of the King we have womanly interest in tales of prowess told at second-hand, — Earl Yniol speaks, and to Geraint of Devon, — "For this dear child hath often heard me praise Your feats of arms, and often when I paused _ Hath asked again, and ever loved to hear ; So gratefulls the noise of nobte deeds To noble hearts," — in another we have manly eagerness, in kind and in degree no whit inferior, where Lavaire importunes Lancelot, " ' O tell us ; for we live apart ; you know Of Arthur's glorious wars.' And Lancelot spoke And answer'd him at full, as having been; With Arthur " in the fierce fight by the Glern, and in the four wild battles by the shore of Duglas, and that on Bassa, and the war near Cahdon the forest and wherever else ; all told as became King Arthur and his knights. § V. or HELLO'S SOLDIERLY SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH: Othello, Act i., Sc. 3.. Rude in his speech, Othello claimed to be, and to have the right to be, in his address to the Senate ; for from his seventh year to the present one his life had been in the tented field superintending the establishment of a man of bis degree, she would find quite enough to occupy her, on the showing of Shakspeare's Scholar, without being called upon to soil the tips of her fingers, or hold up the train of her robe. II 6 OTHELLO'S SOLDIERLY and its surroundings ; and therefore little should he grace his cause in speaking for himself, he being no speaker, at least no orator, but a plain soldier only, conversant mainly with feats of broil and battle ; yet, being put upon his defence, he would, by the gracious patience of these most potent, grave, and reverend signors, his very noble and approved good masters, deliver a " round unvarnished tale " of his relations with Brabantio's household. Let the senators, for they could afford to do so, dispense with rhetoric on his part, and hear him in his natural style, simple, and straightforward, and truthful. A rude speaker, and a round unvarnished tale ; but a speaker that could speak home to them, and a tale that must tell. Shakspeare's Antony stops short the plain speaking of bluff Enobarbus with the curt enjoinder, " Thou art a soldier only ; speak no more." Later in the play this rough soldier is more courteously addressed by Pompey, "Enjoy thy plain- ness. It nothing ill becomes thee." Pompey's cue is to con- ciliate, but Antony knows his man. In the other great Roman tragedy in which Antony plays a leading part, he craftily disclaims before the Roman populace all pretence to oratorical arts : " I am no orator, as Bnitus is ; But as you know me all, a plain blunt man .... For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech To stir men's blood : I only speak right on." Hotspur declares for himself, in the military council, that he has not well the gift of tongue, and when interrupted by the arrival of a -messenger announcing the near approach of the King, is avowedly glad of that excuse for cutting short his speech. Coriolanus, like the Moor of Venice, has been bred in the wars since he could draw a sword, and is " ill school'd in boulted [sifted] language ; meal and bran together He throws without distinction." He is urged to conciliate the people by telling them he is their soldier, and, being bred in broils, has not the soft way that might better please them And honest old Menenius pleads with them on his behalf, SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH. II7 " Consider further, That when he speaks not like a citizen, You find him like a soldier : do not take His rougher accents for malicious sounds, But, as I say, such as become a soldier." Troilus, again, avows it to be his vice, his fault, to be simply outspoken and truthful, at all costs ; and he is content to be without those plausible arts of speech, wherein " the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant." Ovid's Ajax, with a not unlike sally of odious comparison, contrasts himself in this respect with Ulysses, when pleading against that consummate rhetorician for the arms of Achilles : Nee mihi dicere protnp- tum, Nee facer e est isti. So again is the man of action, chary of self-assertion in talk, thus characterized in Tacitus : Pluri- mum faeere, et minimum ipso de se loqui. In the sixth satire of Horace there is a passage bits of which might be made to apply to Othello before the Senate, or at least to the Moor's too modest disclaimer of anything like eloquence : " Ut veni coram, singultim pauca locutus, Infans namque pudor prohibebat plura profari ... Sed quod eram, narro." Of Cimon we are told, that, like Themistocles, he was little skilled in the graceful accomplishments of his countrymen, while devoid of that great man's smooth and artful affability; in lieu of which, however, Cimon conjoined to a certain rough- ness of manner that hearty and ingenuous frankness which ever conciliates mankind, especially in free states, and which is yet more popular when, as in his case, united to rank. A contrast to him, in very many respects, we have in the Emperor Maximian, the rusticity of whose appearance and delivery betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction : " War," says Gibbon, " was the only art which he -professed" — and Mamertinus expresses a doubt whether his hero, this-Sirmian peasant, in imitating the conduct of Hannibal and Scipio, had ever heard of their names. The arts of persuasion, so diligently cultivated by the first Caesars, were neglected, says their historian, " by the military igno- rance and Asiatic pride of their successors ; and if they con- Il8 OTHELLO'S SOLDIERLY descended to harangue the soldiers, whom they feared, they treated with silent disdaia the senators, whom they despised." The remark is made with reference to the exceptional instance of Julian, who set up for orator, not without making good his pretensions. Another exception may be cited in the instance of Valentinian, whose military life had indeed diverted his youth from pursuits of literature, and who was ignorant of Greek, and of the arts of rhetoric ; but as the mind of the orator was never disconcerted by timid perplexity, he was able, as often as the occasion prompted him, to deliver his decided sentiments with bold and ready elocution. Nor be forgotten Gibbon's description of Ali, who was eloquent speaker as well as valiant soldier.; "And every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valour." Like Beaumont and Fletcher's Alberto, " a blunt soldier May borrow so much from the oil'd-tongued courtier," as will serve his turn, if the loan can be well placed, and profitably employed. But only your born orator is likely to acquit himself well, when it comes to oratory ; and the better policy in the main -is Almada's: " 'Tis not my gift to play the orator, But in plain words to lay our state before you." When Du Molay was called on to defend the Order of his imperilled brotherhood, the Templars, he professed him- self an unlearned man, incompetent for such a task, at any rate without counsel to aid him, but he would do, and did, his best. Gerald de Caus had just two days bafore him mada a like reply, deprecatory and remonstrant : he was a simple soldier, he told the Court, without house, arms, or land : he had neither ability nor knowledge to defend the Order. Shan O'Neil was urgent with Queen Bess that Her Majesty should make every allowance for his inbred rudeness and incivility.* * Like the Highland hero of John Home's tragedy, when he tells Lady Randolph (very much as the Moor tells the Senate) : SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH. 119 " To go to our gracious Sovereign, before whom all words must be lackered over either with gilding or with sugar, is such a confectionery matter as clean baffles my poor old English brain," quoth honest Blount, in Kenilworth. Coeur de Lion in the Talisman makes this his style of apology to the assembled princes : " Richard is a soldier — his hand is ever readier than his tongue — and his tongue is but too much used to the rough language of his trade." So again the noble Constable De Lacy, in Scott's other Tale of the Crusaders : " I have been too long trained in camps and councils to express my mean- ing otherwise than simply and plainly." And that blant soldier Le Balafre, in Quentin Durward, though he could make a shift to express himself intelligibly enough to King Lewis, to whose familiarity he was habituated, breaks down altogether in his" attempt to address an assembly, — a veritable man of war, not words. In the Imaginary Conversation — not one of Walter Savage Landor's many, but Lord Macaulay's single one^between Milton and Cowley, the greater poet reproaches the lesser for assuming Cromwell to have been of a mean capacity because he was an ungraceful orator, and never said, either in public or private, anything memorable. '■ Sure this is unjust," says Milton ; and he goes on to show how many men there have been ignorant of letters, without wit, without eloquence, who yet had the wisdom to devise, and the courage to perform, that which they lacked language to explain. " Such men often, in troubled times, have worked out the deliverance of nations and their own greatness, not by logic, not by rhetoric," but by wariness in success, by calmness in danger, by fierce and stubborn resolution in all adversity. When a popular Prime Minister of a past generation sat down again after addressing the House, their general impres- " Rude lam In speech and manner ; never till tlifls hour Stood I in such a presence." But Shan O'Neil could not have gone on saying with Norval to Glenalvon, "Sir, I have been accustom' d all my days To hear and speak the plain and simple truth." 120 FIT WORDS AND FEW. sion is said to have been that it was a thousand pities a man with so good a case, and so good a head for business, should not have the art of stating it better ; but they felt that they must not allow themselves to be biassed by his mere defects in art, or to be misled by his opponent's brilliant display ; and they would go away priding themselves on their power of distinguishing solid truth from wordy show, and perhaps too on having proved themselves sympathetically anxious to help the struggle of the honest advocate of a sound cause against the disadvantages of his own oratorical defects. Addison's Goodman Fact is allowed by everybody to be a plainspoken person, and a man of very few words ; tropes and figures are his aversion ; he affirms everything roundly, without any art, rhetoric, or circumlocution ; yet so great is his natural elo- quence, that he cuts down the finest orator, and destroys the best-contrived argument, as soon as ever he gets himself to be heard. "I promise you that plain truth, clothed in plain language," says the parliamentary baronet in Self, "brings conviction to my mind, far before the finest oration, studded with classical quotations, and coloured with historical allu- sions." Never lost upon such ears are such words, fit though fewer, and perhaps the fewer the fitter, as come from one of Miles Standish's make, " a blunt old Captain, a man not of words but of actions . . . Truly a maker of war, and not a maker of phrases/' — one who, having a message to deliver, " Did not embellish the theme, nor array it in beautiful phrases, But came straight to the point, and blurted it out like a schoolboy." OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA. 121 § VI. LIFE ONLY IN ANOTHER LIFE* Othello, Act iv., Sc. 2. But that it is immeasurable, the agony of Othello at the loss of Desdemona — for in believing her false he has lost her — may best be measured by the passionate intensity of the line, "Where either I must live, or bear no life." Had it pleased Heaven to try him with affliction in any other respect, — to have rained all kinds of sores and shames on his bare head, — to have steeped him in poverty to the very lips, or given to captivity himself and his utmost hopes, he could, he would have found in some part of his soul a drop of patience. Nay, he could even have borne the being pointed at and talked about and despised as a betrayed husband. The mere thought of this last degradation made him wince and writhe, — " Yet could I bear that too ; well, very well : But there, where I have garner'd up my heart ; Where either I must live, or bear no life ; The fountain from the which my current flows. Or else dries up," — to lose this treasure was to lose all ; he lived only in that other life. He lived only for another, and that other had failed him. Live for himself he could not, would not. In Desdemona's life and love he must live, or not live at all. And she had willed it, he believed, in his desolating despair, that life for him should henceforth be no more. Not only was Othello's occupation gone, but his very life, all that made him and kept him a living soul." * The same fundamental thought has been made the ground-plot of (prave 'orts ! might Fluellen or Parson Hugh mutter) a similar super- structure of illustrations, in a previous volume. Traits of Character in Bible Story, pp. 44—56. " A Life bound up in a Life " is the title of the chapter ill question. , 122 LIFE ONLY IN ANOTHER LIFE. It is with him as with the miserable father in Victor Hugo's Le Roi s' amuse : " Non, je t'aime, Voilk tout. N'es-tu pas ma vie et mon sang mtoe ? Si je ne t'avais point, qu'est-ce que je ferais, Mon Dieu J " Or as the apprehensive lover in Terence words it. Quod si Jit, pereo funditus. Or we may take other words of Shakspeare's own, in the Sonnets : " And life no longer than thy love will stay. For it depends upon that love of thine." And he would further offer us the melancholy musings, some- what fantastical or " conceited " \yithal, of the only real Gentleman of the Two of Verona : " To die, is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her, Is self from self; a deadly banishment ! What light is light, if Silvia be not seen ? . . . She is my essence, and I leave [cease] to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster'd, illumined, cherish'd, kept alive." Florizel is none the less hearty for being less artificial in his protestations to Perdita, " I cannot be Mine own, or anything to any, if I be not thine." At the mere thought of being separated from Anzoleto, Consuelo cries, " How shall I be able to love anything when the half of my existence is taken away t " She felt, born artist though she was, that even art could not be a thing to live for, if the other love were gone. Like the lover in Luci/e, but reversing the position of the sexes, " His whole being seem'd to cling to her, as though He divined that, in some unaccountable way, His happier destinies secretly lay In the light of her dark eyes. And still, in his mind. To the anguish of losing the woman was join'd The terror of missing his life's destination. Of which, as in mystical representation, The love of the woman, whose aspect benign Guided, starlike, his soul, seem'd the symbol and sign. LIFE ONLY IN ANOTHER LIFE. 123 For he felt, if the light of that star it should miss, That there lurli'd in his nature, coneeal'd, an abyss Into which all the current of being might roll. Devastating a life, and submerging a soul." When a tender affection, remarks George Eliot, has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.* Even the self-absorbed Septimius of romance felt how- sweet it might be to have one unchangeable companion ; for, unless he strung the pearls and diamonds of life upon one unbroken affection, he sometimes thought that his Hfe would have nothing to give it unity and identity ; and so the longest life would be but an aggregate of insulated fragments, without relation to one another. And so it would be not one life, but many unconnected ones. Unless he could look into the same eyes, through the mornings of future time, opening and blessing him with the fresh gleam of love and joy; unless the same sweet voice could melt his thoughts together ; unless some sympathy of a life side by side with his could knit them into one ; looking back upon the same things ; looking forward to the same ; the long, thin thread of an individual life, stretching onwar4 and onward, would cease to be visible, cease to be felt, cease, by-and-by, to have any real bigness in proportion to its length — (length of life, be it remem- bered, preternatural length, was Septimius's craze) — and so be virtually non-existent, except in the " mere inconsiderable Now." Eugenie de Gu^rin said quaintly and picturesquely, "Mau- rice and I were bound together in our inmost souls as if by ribands of rose-colour;" and when she had lost him, "Ah," she said, " my life will be a long mourning, with a widowed heart, and without any tie of intimate union." Crabbe's Jane had risked her happiness on a less worthy object, — " On him she had reposed each worldly view. And when he fail'd, the world itself withdrew, * " And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures." — Middlemarch, chap. Ivii. 124 ^^^^ ONLY IN ANOTHER LIFE. With all its prospects. Nothing could restore To life its value ; hope would live no more." Constantine Palaeologus in the tragedy is upbraidingly asked by Valeria if he has for her in fancy shaped a world and an existence where he is not ? and falling on his neck, she ex- claims, or declaims, " Here is my world, my life, my land of refuge. And to no other will I ever flee. Here still is light and hope ; turning from this, All else is round me as a yawning tomb." In a better known drama, Clifford's heart finds itself bank- rupt, there, where most it coveted to be rich, and thought it was so. " O Julia, I have ventured for thy love, Like the bold merchant, who, for only hope Of some rich gain, all former gains will risk. Before I ask'd a portion of thy heart, I perill'd all my own ; and now, all's lost." Should Van Artevelde's cherished hope be blighted, should its blossom be coldly nipped, then were he desolate indeed ! a man whom heaven would wean from earth, with nothing left him on earth but care and quarrels, troubles and distraction, the heavy burthens and the broils of life. " And still to each, some poor, obscurest life Breathes all the bliss, or kindles all the strife. Wake up the countless dead !^ — ask every ghost Whose influence tortured or consoled the most : How each pale spectre of the host would turn From the fresh laurel and the glorious urn, To point, where rots beneath a nameless stone. Some heart iri which had ebb'd and flow'd'his own." ye respire, oh tu pulpites, is the strain, of France's, foremost living popt: " a quoi bon,. helas I^ rester Id. si tu me quittes, et vivre si tu t'en, vas ? " And again.; " II sufHt que tu t'en allies Pour qu'il ne reste plus rien. : - ^ ■ \ ' ■--■ I ' ■ • ' ■ . --' < r •,!■-'> " Tu.m'entovi^es d'aurdoles ;;,t&vpir e^tflioi)., squl^souci. , -H suffit que tufenvoles pour que je m'envole aussi , . . .j>- ■J ■" Dequ'di'puis-jeiavoir envie, de' quoi puistje avoir effroi. Que ferai-je de 1^ vie,;si. tu-n'es .plus pr^ de-aiioi i'J. <. OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA. 125 One of Lord Lytton's Two Travellers is pictured " struggling forward, maim'd In every feeling, saved, not all, indeed. But all mere life hath left when love is dead. And dead, with love, life's sense of lovely things." For there had been a crisis in his career when, with tears, he had torn " His tortured spirit from love's control, But thus left for ever behind him, lost. The finest and fairest parts of his soul. Saving the rest of himself at their cost." Almost as applicable to the Moor of Venice as to the very- different hero of whom it was written, is a fine critic's remark that through all the storm of his anger, sarcasm, contempt, denunciation, there sounds a note of unutterable tenderness which gives to the whole movement a prevailing character of pain and anguish, of moral desolation, rather than of wrath and vengeance : not only is his love uprooted, — his hope, his faith in the world have perished in that lightning flash. Or, in the Moor's instance, if his love be not uprooted, it is because he is still alive ; and living on, yet a little span, he must love on, till that little be all gone. The more intensely Othello felt that in Desdemona's love and life he must live, and move, and have his being, or else have no life at all, the more bitterly he accused himself, when it was too late, for the blinded, besotted fatuity with which, believing her false, he had with his own hands choked out the life that alone he could live in. Be the reference what it may, to Indian or Judsean, or any other varied reading of a disputed text, at least his meaning stands forth clear in the main when he speaks of himself, and asks to be spoken of, as " one, whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe." Coleridge fairly lost patience with Warburton's suggested emendation of Judsean, as referring to Herod and Mariamne this it was, he cried, for no-poets to comment on the greatest of poets, "O, how many beauties, in this one line, were 126 INDIAN OR JUDEAN? impenetrable to the ever thought-swarming but idealess War- burton!" Othello wishes to excuse himself on the score of ignorance, and yet not to excuse himself, — to excuse himself by accusing. This struggle of feeling, Coleridge takes to be finely conveyed in the word " base," which is applied to the rude Indian, not in his own character, but as the momentary representative of Othello's ; Indian meaning American, a savage in genere. Mr. Dyce quotes from Drayton's Legend of Matilda, " The wretched Indian spurns the golden Ore ; " and another commentator cites a passage from Habington, in which " the unskilful! Indian " scatters bright gems among the waves, — and one from Howard, in which " Indians .... cast away" a pearl. Nevertheless, the preponderance, both of arguments and disputants, is alleged to be largely in favour of Judaean, or " ludean," which is the folio reading, as Indian is the quarto. Mr. Grant White is entirely satisfied that the folio is right, and that Othello is meant to allude to the murder of Mariamne by Herod, the story of which was well known to the public of that day, and was made the subject of a tragedy (published in 1613) by Lady Elizabeth' Carew. Mr. Lunt lays stress on the use of the word "tribe" in Shakspeare, as one peculiarly appropriate to the Jewish people, (and very familiar in Shylock's mouth,) and so too the epithet "base," which, at that time of day, as well as long before and long after, would be popularly held to fit any Jew or all Jews. " Then, as to any special story of an individual Indian throwing ' a pearl away,' and of such a feat being popularly known, or known at all — where is it ? " The same critic suggests that "Judean" in reality means some- thing more than Jew : a Judean is, in fact, an inhabitant of Judea ; and thus, in correspondence with Shakspeare's com- mon mode of expression, the word might naturally, and with more force would refer to Herod, King of Judea, as " the Judean," par excellence,— z.s representing the state. Backing this view of the case, Shakspeare's Scholar insists that the phraseology absolutely requires an allusion to a particular story: the Moor likens himself not to the Indian who "throws" a pearl away, but to "the base Judean" who CASTAWAY PEARL. 12/ "threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe" — the reference being to some particular story, specific and unmistakable. Now the American Indians, who alone had tribes, had no pearls ; * but the story of Herod had marked affinities with Othello's position, — the base Judean Herod, who says of Mariamne, in the old play, " I had but one inestimable /^w^/ — Yet I in suddaine choler cast it downe And dasht it all to pieces." In fine, there is a good deal to be said on both sides ; but let any more of it remain unsaid. We revert from the phrase to the sentiment involved or suggested. Praising what is lost, makes the remembrance dear, the King of France says, when Lafeu describes how reckless, blinded Bertram, in his treatment of Helen, did to himself the greatest wrong of all ; for - " he lost a wife Whose beauty did astonish the survey Of richest eyes ; whose words all ears took captive ; Whose dear perfection, hearts that scorn'd to serve, Humbly called mistress." But oh, the pity of it, que de mkonnattre et de perdre le bien inestimable d'etre uniquement airnJ. " Fool ! to fling away," with Mrs. Gore's Duke of Lisborough, " the possession of a jewel he so little deserved, and which will never be vouch- safed him from any other quarter." In another of her mul- titudinous fictions we have an embittered husband the more embittered against his wife because he has come to perceive, too late, the superiority of the " gentle, unassuming Blanche he had madly thrown over for her sake — the pearl, who was proving herself a pearl of price." Reversing the position of the sexes we have one of Colonel Whyte Melville's heroines * Commenting on a couplet of Sheffield's, " Thus precious jewels among Indians grow, Who not their use nor wondrous value know," Hartley Coleridge regards it as a parallel passage to the disputed one in Othello, and, like his father, scouts the notion of a reference in the latter to Herod and Mariamne as utterly absurd. 128 CASTAWAY PEARL. disquieting herself, not in vain, with the highly plausible apprehension, " What if he should cast me off now ? What if I should find that I had all my life been neglecting the gem which I was too ignorant to appreciate ; and now, when I knew its real value, and would give my life for it, it was beyond my grasp ? " Neglecting the gem : — and Seneca tells us that turpissima est jactura qucs fit per negligentiam. But whatever the baseness, the agony is likely to be less than where hotter blood is concerned. Pride may be the fault, on the part of some too dear Lady Disdain : " A life's libation lifted up, from her proud life she dash'd untasted : There trampled lay love's costly cup, and in the dust the wine was wasted. She knew I could not pour such wine again at any other shrine." Clarendon, in the Wedding Gown, ruefully confesses, "I knew not then your worth. I was as a poor man's child, who in his play-hours finds a priceless diamond ; who, care- less, loses it, and only learns from after-knowledge that the loss has beggared him." The Lothario of Cervantes bids Anselmo beware how he tampers with such a superlatively rare diamond as he possesses in Camilla — lest, losing her, he lose all, and pass for an egregious fool. The unappreciative father of Florence Dombey is at length awakened to the consciousness that he had a happy home within his reach, has had a household spirit bending at his feet, but has over- looked it in his stiffnecked sullen arrogance, and wandered away and lost himself. The piteous plaint of Raby, in the tragedy of Percy, is, " I had but one little casket, where I lodged My precious hoard of wealth, and, like an idiot, I gave my treasure to another's keeping, Who threw away the gem, nor knew its value. But left the plunder'd owner quite a beggar." Compare the remorseful lament of Leicester in Schiller : " Do I live still ? Can I still bear to live ? . , . . Oh, what a pearl have I not cast away ! What bhss celestial madly dash'd aside ! She's gone, a spirit purged from mortal stain, And the despair of hell remains for me ! " OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA. 129 § VII. PUTTING OUT THE LIGHT OF LIFE. OthellOj Act v., Sc. 2. There is a light burning in Desdemona's chamber when the Moor enters, on murderous thoughts intent. As easy to put out the light of Desdemona's life, as that of the poor flame that flickers while she is sleeping. Easy enough, too, he bethinks him, to rekindle that bedroom light, as soon as needed or wished for again. But how with that other light, the light of a human life .' The putting out of this were but as the putting out of that ; done in an instant. But the re-lighting } " Put out the light, and then put out the light ; If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, r can again thy former hght restore, If I repent me ; — but once put out thine. Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy hght relume." Shakspeare's Moor has more compunctious visitings than Shakspeare's Cardinal, who, making use of a like figure of speech, and for a Hke purpose, but in a most unlike spirit, exclaims — meaning deadly mischief to Anne Bullen, — " This candle burns not clear : 'tis I must snuff it ; Then out it goes.'' Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster, speaks of his " oil-dried lamp, and time-bewasted light," his " inch of taper " nearly burnt and done ; and he tells the king, his nephew, " Shorten my days thou canst .... But, dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath." The harlequin says to his lamp, in a French parody of Otello : "Si j'eteins ta flamme, j'ai mon briquet, mais on n'alluine pas une femme comme une guinguette.'' Hood 9 130 PUTTING OUT THE LIGHT OF LIFE. tells us of his golden-legged Miss Kilmansegg, on the penultimate page of her strange eventful history, that " when she quench'd the taper's light, Little she thought, as the smoke took flight, That her day was done — and merged in a night Of dreams and duration uncertain — Or, along with her own, That a Hand of Bone Was closing mortality's curtain." Shelley's Giacomo apostrophizes his unreplenished lamp, whose narrow fire is shaken by the wind, and on whose edge devouring darkness hovers : " Thou small flame, Which, as a dying pulse rises and falls. Still flickerest up and down, how very soon. Did I not feed thee, would'st thou fail and be As thou hadst never been ! So wastes and sinks Even now, perhaps, the life that kindled mine : But that no power can fill with vital oil That broken lamp of flesh." Othello must have been fresh in Shelley's remembrance when, later in the scene, the prelate Orsino exclaims, "See, the lamp is out," and, after some moralizing on Giacomo's part, asks to have it relighted : " But light the lamp ; let us not talk in the dark. Giacomo {lighting the lamp). And yet, once quehch'd, I cannot thus relume My father's life." Quum. semel occideris - . . non te restituet — ^but pietas is out of the question in the Cenci case, and genus too. The Caxtonian John Burley is mystical as well as moribund when he looks wistfully at the still flame of his candle, and says, " It lives ever in the air," — meaning light. " Extinguish the light .' You cannot : fool, it vanishes from your eye, but it is still in the space." He allows, however, that the breath of a babe can put out that light, in one sense, the common sense. And in that sense, what shall restore it } We read in the Palin- genesis of a transatlantic bard, of the old belief " that in the embers Of all things their primordial form exists, PUTTING OUT THE LIGHT OF LIFE. 131 And cunning alchemists Could re-create the rose with all its members From its own ashes,'' though without the bloom, without the lost perfume. But ah ! what wonder-working occult science can restore this little life, once rounded in a last long sleep ? As the Duke muses, in Shirley's old play of The Traitor, with Amidea fainting before him, — " The phoenix, with her wings, when she is dying, Can fan her ashes into another life ; But when the breath, more sweet than all the spice. That helps the other's funeral, returns To heaven, the world must be eternal loser.',' The loss is, at least, irreparable, be it great or small. Tears choked the utterance of Lewis the Sixteenth's counsel for the defence, when they, Malesherbes, De Seze, and Tronchet, were called in to hear his doom, and urged the revocation of a decree passed by so slender a majority. " The laws, may be repealed ; but who shall recall a human life .' " " Father of mercies ! " exclaimed Coleridge, in one of his political essays, "if we pluck a wing from the back of a fly, not all the ministers and monarchs can restore it "— how much less (if there were degrees in the impossible) one little life ! Philip of Spain, in Schiller's Don Carlos^ bewails, the lost counsellor no power can restore : " O that he might But live again ! I'd give my Indies for it. Omnipotence ! thou bring'st no comfort to me : Thou canst not stretch thine arms into the grave, To rectify one little act, committed With hasty rashness, 'gainst the life of man. The dead return no more." Trust Charon for that. As Horace in, London iwords. it, — ■ " To bear poor souls to Pluto's tribe. One doit is Charon's modest gain. Ten thousand pounds will never bribe The rogue to row us back again ! " 132 DESDEMONA'S DYING FALSEHOOD. § VIII. A LOVING LIE ON DYING LIPS. Othello, Act v., Sc. 2. In coupling together, as if possibly cohesive or compatible, the almost internecine words magnanimous and untruth, is there not a seeming paradox ? (Yet to speak of seeming and. paradox together is perhaps tautological : " Seems, madam ? nay it is ; I know not seems.") Can magnanimity be in any case predicated of a thing essentially so base as a lie ? Can there ever be a tinge of redeeming dignity about an untruth ? May one • in any conceivable instance impute something of nobility to a teller of untruths,-7-or rather to a teller of some one untruth, just once in the way ? Can there be such a thing as a magnanimous liar, — that is, not a systematic and habitual Uar, but a' forger and utterer of a falsehood on this occasion only ? Before too peremptorily rejecting the possibility, glance at the death-bed of murdered Desdemona. Her husband has strangled her, " O falsely, falsely murdered ! " A guiltless death she dies. But her last words are framed to acquit the murderer. She leaves the world with a lie in her - mouth : a generous one, a magnanimous one, if magnanimous a lie can be. To Emilia, bursting in affrighted and dismayed, and piteously demanding, " O, who hath done th'is deed .' " comes from her expiring mistress the positive negation, call it sublime, call it (as the French would) adorable, or what else you will, — "Nobody; I myself ; farewell : Commend me to my kind lord ; O, farewell. 0th. Why, how should she be murdered ? Emil. Alas, who knows ? 0th. You heard her say herself, it was not I. Emil. She said so ; I must needs report the truth. 0th. She's, like a liar, gone to burning hell ; 'Twas I that killed her." In the matter of the missing handkerchief, Desdemona A LOVING LIE ON DYING LIPS. ' 133 had faltered from the truth before the terrible eye of her husband ; but here, in Professor Dowden's phrase, " she utters her dying and redeeming falsehood." If she had deceived Brabantio, as in his anger he declares, and if in this matter of the handkerchief she had swerved from the truth, she now " atones for these unveracities ; " not by acquisition of a confident candour, — such courageous dealing with difficulties is allowed to have been impossible for Desdemona, — but by one more falsehood, the "sacred lie which is murmured by her lips as they grow for ever silent." The impassioned poetry, the dramatic intensity of Shakspeare, have had, again and again, their parallel passages in the homeliest prose of our police-court chronicles, when dying wives have with their last breath essayed to deliver from doom, and absolve from blame, the brute husbands by whom they have been done to death, — unconsciously emulating the magnanimity of self-accusing Desdemona's generous lie. Splendide vtendax. Womanhood has asserted its pre- eminence in this capacity, at sundry times and in divers manners. A living poet tells us that " Men's truths are often lies, and women's lies Often the setting of a truth most tender In an unconscious poetry.'' The tenderness is commonly undeniable, whatever we may think of the truth. Fiction is founded upon fact when it offers us a Frances Dagobert fibbing to her son by the week together, in pretending to have drunk part of the wine they both require, but of all of which she leaves for him ; or Beatrice Merger's mother, keeping only a little, little piece of bread for herself, and saying that she had dined in the fields,^-" God pardoii her for the lie ! and bless her, as I am sure He did ; for, but for Him, no working man or woman could subsist upon such a wretched morsel as my dear mother took." " Heaven have mercy on me ! " exclaims quite a different sort of transgressor of the absolute law of truth : " do lies told in charity, to save 134 GENEROUSLY UNTRUTHFUL. another from misery, count like wicked, selfish, profit- seeking deceptions ? " If they do, this white liar confesses, or professes, to be deep in the angels' books. Mr. Thackeray's Caroline, to save Philip Firmin from ruin, chose to forget her marriage to his father. The poor Little Sister protested to the astounded lawyer that, if the truth must be told, she — she knew it was no marriage — " never thought it was a marriage — not for good, you know." "And I'm ready to go before the Lord Chancellor to-morrow and say so." Mr. Trollope's Kate Vavasor, being pushed violently by her brutal brother George, and falling to the ground, where he leaves her, has her arm broken. Her first thought is, how shall she mention the accident to him when they meet anon .' " Should she lie, and say that she had fallen as she came down the hill alone ? Of course he would not believe her, but -still some such excuse as that might make the matter easier for them all." A chapter later we come upon this suggestive bit of colloquy between her father and the doctor : " Is it not odd that such an accident should come from a fall whilst walking ? " asked Mr. Vavasor. The doctor shrugged his shoulders : " One can never say how anything may occur;" said he. " I know a young woman who broke the os femoris by just kicking her cat ; — at least she said she did." "Indeed! I suppose you didn't take any trouble to inquire ? " " Not much. My business was with the injury, not with the way she got it. Somebody did make the inquiry, but she stuck to her story, and nothing came of it.'' Tasso's Sophronia magnanimously plays the liar to save a doomed people. She took the image, she tells the en- raged prince ; hers the fault, be it hers to pay the penalty: " This spotless lamb thus offered up her blood To save the rest of Christ's selected fold ; O noble lie ! was ever truth so good ? Blest be the lips that such a leasing told ! " Tasso would have pleaded something more than poetical licence thus to speak, — in the teeth of the French philosQ- A LOVING LIE ON DYING LIPS. 135 pher's dictum (himself grievously given to lying, not of the magnanimous sort) that le mensonge est toiijours iniquite, by way of answer absolute to the tentative query, " Si je ne fais aucun tort a un autre en le trompant, s'ensuit-il que je ne m'en fasse point a moi-meme, et suffit-il de n'etre jamais injuste pour etre toujours innocent ? " Tasso's sympathies would be with the magnanima menzogna of Rose de Beaure- paire, in White Lies, when, to screen her sister Josephine, she answers the roar in one raging breath of Edouard and Raynal, " Whose is the child ? " with the words — not words, in effect, but electric shocks, " It is mine." And Rose, when she afterwards sees her sister's terror of discovery, is almost glad at the suicidal falsehood she has told. " Oh, these women ! " exclaims one of them ; " what will they not do, what will they not think of, when the happiness of the man they love is at stake ! " Beryl, for , instance, refusing to acknowledge herself married to George Geith.* Margaret Wilmot denying to Clement Austin that her heart is his, — a lie due to the machinations, and recorded in the strange history, of the so-called Henry Dunbar. Tolla, on her death-bed, broken-hearted Tolla, dictating these words in a last letter to Lello : " I ought to have known that one cannot with impunity play thus with health. Do not look out for any other causes of my death : it is the punishment of my imprudence. ... I tell thee this to prove to thee that thou hast no cause to reproach thyself" t The dying hos- * " Did Beryl weep ? it was for him. . . . Did she he, did the heart which was truth itself frame falsehoods, did the trembling lips utter deceit? it was for him — all, all for him." — George Geith of Fen Court, ch. xlvi. t Menico, in the same tale of modern Rome, lies worthily of Tolla herself. Witness the scene where the Count and the doctor interrogate the wounded man. " If I only knew," cries Amarella, " the wretch who fired at thee ! " " No one fired at me. I fell upon a sharp stone." " But how could you have fallen upon both temples at once ? " " That is not more difficult than to sleep on both ears." " But, unhappy man, you had a ball inside you." " Had I a ball inside me? ... I must have drunk after some dirty person or other." — Tolla, ch. v. Souls masculine can emulate the magnanimity of souls feminine in this 136 MAGNANIMOUS MENDACITY. pitaf patient, in Mr. Dickens' sketch, is warned not to persist in what she knows to be untrue, for it cannot save the brute whose hand has brought her low^ " Jack," she murmurs in reply, laying her hand upon his arm, "they shall not per- suade me' to swear your life away. He didn't do it, gentle- men ; he didn't hurt me." In The Haunted Man, again, Redlaw questions the girl whose arms he observes to be black," her face cut, and her bosom bruised : " What brutal hand has hurt you so .' " he asked. " My own : I did it myself ! " she answered quickly. " It's impossible." " I'll swear I did ! He didn't touch me. I did it myself in a passion, and threw myself down here. He wasn't near me. He never laid a hand upon me ! " And we are told of the strange interrogator of this strange sufferer, that in the white determination of her face, confronting him with this untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion of good surviving in a miserable breast, to be mendacity line. Dunois, in Quentin Durward, thus seeks to exculpate the Duke of Orleans at his own cost — avouching that the Duke had only acted in friendship to him. " Dunois," replies Crawford, " if another had told me thou hadst brought the noble Prince into this jeopardy to serve any purpose of thine own, I had told him it was false." And Crawford as good as tells Dunois himself it is false, too. William Losely, in What will He do with It ? avows his innocent self guilty of theft, to screen his guilty son. " He a dark midnight thief ! " George Morley exclaims of him ; " believe him not, though his voice may say it. To screen, perhaps, some other man, he is telling you a noble lie." (Book x., ch. v.) But fiction has no monopoly of such generous mendacities. The history of the first French Revolution and its reign of terror preserves the name of the Bruyset brothers, both imprisoned, and both men of sterling worth. The elder having signed some bills to raise funds for the defence of Lyons during the siege, the younger was brought to trial by mistake for his brother, and being shown the bill and asked if he knew the sig- nature, and if it was his own, "The signature," said he, "is that of Bruyset" — an answer that sent him straight to death. He might be deemed worthy to pair off with that Marguerite de Hijar whom the royal widow of Alfonso V., believing her to be the mother of Ferdinand his •natural son (and successor), put to death by smothering— the victim sacrificing her reputation to save that of a more illustrious person. TELLING A NOBLE LIE. 1 37 stricken with remorse that he had ever come near her. Not so unworthy, after all, perhaps, to rank with Beaumont and Fletcher's Arethusa, when prince and nobles find her wounded by Philaster in the forest : " Pkaram. The princess, gentlemen ! Where's the wound, madam? Is it dangerous? Are. He has not hurt me. Coun. V faith, she lies; he has hurt her in the breast; look else. Phar. Oh, sacred spring of innocent blood ! Dion. 'Tis above wonder ! Who should dare this ? Are. I felt it not Phar. Madam, who did it ? Are. Some dishonest wretch ; Alas ! I know him not, and do forgive him." To Romola, so chilled in her wifely affections, Bernardo says, smiling, as he moves to the door, " You are con- tented, then. Madonna Orgogliosa ? " " Assuredly," is her sharp, short, quick reply. Poor Romola ! There was one thing, we are told, that would have made the pang of dis- appointment in her husband harder to bear : it was, that any one should know he gave her cause for disappoint- ment. To simulate prosperity may sometimes be shabby swind- ling but sometimes " noble pride," says Mr. Thackeray, — who, when he sees Eugenia with her dear children exqui- sitely neat and cheerful ; not showing the slightest sem- blance of poverty, or uttering the smallest complaint ; persisting that Squanderfield, her husband, treats her well, and is good at heart ; and denying that he leaves her and her young ones in want ; admires and reverences " that noble falsehood." Mrs. Gaskell's starving Esther, with a little unreal laugh exclaims to Mary Barton, "Oh, Mary, my dear ! don't talk of eating. We've the best of every- thing, and plenty of it, for my husband is in good work. I'd such a supper before I came out. I couldn't touch a morsel if you had it." John Barton's power of endurance had been called forth when he was a little child, and had seen his mother hide her daily morsel to share it among the children, and when he, being the eldest, had " told the 138 A LOVING LIE -ON DYING LIPS. noble lie " that he was not hungry, could not eat a bit more, in order to imitate his mother's bravery, and still the sharp wail of the younger infants. Little Dorrit pretends to have been at a party, — " I could never have been of any use," she protests, " if I had not pretended a little," — she has said very little about it ; only a few words to make her father easy. What was Little Dorrit's party .' The closing paragraph of the chapter bearing that title will tell us. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital ; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night. Such was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey of a rainy morning. It is on the occasion of Tom Pinch forcing on an im- pecunious friend a piece of gold himself could so ill spare, with the assurance, " I don't want it ; indeed, I should not know what to do with it, if I had it," — that Tom's author hazards the assertion of there being some falsehoods, on which men mount, as on bright wings, toward Heaven. Some truths there are, he goes on to say, cold, bitter, taunting truths, wherein your worldly scholars are very apt and punctual, which bind men down to earth with leaden Aains. And who, he asks, would not rather have to fan him, in his dying hour, the lightest feather of a falsehood such as Tom's, than all the quills that have been plucked from the sharp porcupine, reproachful truth, since time began ! One illustration more. And that shall be from The Traitor of Shirley, when Sciarrha, in the fifth act, has stabbed Amidea, and Florio breaks open the door, and questions the dying girl, their sister : the brother that has dealt the fatal thrust addresses him that is come too late to ward it off, — ■" Look, here's our sister ! so, so ; chafe her : She may return ; there is some motion. Flor. Sister ! Sci. Speak aloud, Florio ; if her spirit is not Departed, I will seal this passage up ; PENAL SENTENCE OF LIFE, NOT DEATH. 139 I feel her breath again. — Here's Florio would Fain take his leave. — So, so, she comes ! Flor. Amidea, How came this wound? Ami. I drew the weapon to it : Heaven knows my brother loved me." § IX. PENAL SENTENCE OF LIFE, NOT DEATH. Othello, Act v., Sc. 2. When lago is brought in, a prisoner, Othello's first impulse is to look down towards his feet — though that's a fable ; and at the same time to strike him a mortal blow, cloven- footed or not, — though free to acknowledge, " If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee." In the supernatural, or pre- ternatural, sense, lago is not a devil ; and the Moor might have killed him had he but struck harder and cut deeper. " I bleed, sir ; but not killed," the wounded man says, with a seeming sneer, as Othello's sword is wrenched from him by the others. And then it occurs to the Moor that life is a heavier penal sentence to the really wretched, than ever death can be. And therefore, wishing so prodigious a villain as lago to endure the heaviest sentence that could be passed, he was content to see him live, and to know that he would live on and on, long after the abused Moor himself should have found the release he sought, a few minutes hence. Better so ; there was, after all, nothing to regret in having missed his aim at lago's life : " I am not sorry neither ; I'd have thee live ; For, in my sense, 'tis happiness to die." Shakspeare would have us understand, says Professor Dowden, that there is something more inimical to humanity than suffering — namely, an incapacity for noble pain. To die as Othello dies is indeed grievous. But " to live as 140 PENAL SENTENCE OF LIFE, NOT DEATH. lago lives, devouring the dust and stinging — this is more appalling." Romeo deprecates a gentler judgment than death as the Prince's doom upon him : " Be merciful ; say — death. For exile hath more terror in his look, Much more than death : do not say — banishment." Infuriated Antony bids Cleopatra begone, and adds, "'Tis well thou'rt gone, if it be well to live : but better 'twere thou fell'st into my fury." "A present death ha-d been more merciful" as Antigbnus murmurs, when complying with the behest of Leontes touching the fate of Perdita. Old John of Gaunt desiderates death as soon as life is for him bereft of what makes it endurable : " Convey me to my bed, then to my grave : Love they to live, that love and honour have." It is a fond father that exclaims over a swooning daughter, whom he cannot welcome back to life,^ " Do not live, Hero ; do not ope thine eyes ; For did I think thou would'st not quickly die, Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames, Myself would, on the rearward of reproaches. Strike at thy hfe." Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him, said the prophet ; but weep sore for him that goeth awaj'. " Arid death shall be chosen rather than life by all the residue that remain of this evil family." For, happier, to my mind, was he that died. Gibbon writes of that unhappy Tatian whose cruel judges compelled him to gaze on the execution of his son, that the fatal cord was fastened round his own neck : " but in the moment when he expected, and perhaps desired, the relief of a speedy death,' he was permitted to consume the miserable remnant of his old age in poverty and exile." That Sigismond of Burgundy, who is a canon- ized saint and martyr, having shed the blood of his innocent son, and then discovered his error, and bewailed the irrepa- rable loss, was sternly checked in his lamentations by an outspoken attendant : " It is not his lot, O King ! it is HAPPIER HE THAT DIED. 141 thine which calls for commiseration." Happier he that died. " For the early dead we may bow the head, And strike the breast, and weep ; But, oh, what shall be said For the living sorrow ? For the living sorrow our grief- Dumb grief — draws no relief From tears, nor yet may borrow Solace from sound, or speech ; — For the living sorrow That heaps to-morrow upon to-morrow In piled-up pain, beyond Hope's reach ! " The Athenians, after the dreadful defeat at Syracuse, were too far gone in despair to demand their dead. "And," says Plutarch, " though they had such great miseries before their eyes, they looked upon their own case as still more unhappy, since they had yet many calamfties to undergo, and were to meet the same fate at last." So the wrecked hero of the Odyssey : " Wretch that I am ! what farther fates attend This life of toils, and what my destined end ? ***** Happy, thrice happy, who, in battle slain, Press'd, in Atrides' cause, the Trojan plain ! " Shakspeare's Talbot,, retreating with his forces, before the Pucelle, envies Salisbury his death : , " O would I were to die with Salisbury! The shame hereof will make me hide my head." So York, in King Richard IT., borne down by a tide of woes : " I would to God, the king had cut my head off with my brother's." Ah ! trop cruel Arbate, d quoi m'exposez- vous ? is the upbraiding remonstrance of Racine's Monimie, when Arbate dashes the poison from her lips, and bids her, while Mithridate is dying, Vives ! Compare the style of Tullia, in Howard Payne's Brutus : " And would he I should live ? Priest. He would. Tal. Merciful villain ! . . . subtle traitor ! 142 'SAD LIFE- WORSE THAN GLAD DEATH.' I'll not taste food, though immortality Were grafted to each atom." With scorn indescribable, with inexpressible loathing- and contempt, is that wretched petitioner for the poor boon of existence, the pusillanimous Morris in Rob Roy, regarded by Helen MacGregor. " I could have bid you live," she said, " had life been to you the same weary and wasting burden that it is to me." In Rome's first Slave War, when the last stronghold of Eunus and his followers was attacked, Cleon of Agrigentum chose a soldier's death, and, sallying forth with all who breathed the same spirit as himself, he died fighting valiantly. Eunus escaped for the moment, but was after- wards taken in a cave. " He showed a pusillanimity far un- like the desperate courage of the rest " — the greater part of whom slew one another, — and his end was, to be eaten by vermin in a dungeon at Murgantia. Such was the state of the holders out of Jerusalem against Vespasian in a.d. 68, that the survivors envied the dead as released from suffering; those who were tormented in prison even thought them happy whose bodies were lying unburied in the streets. We are told of the disastrous close of the French expedi- tion in the Children's Crusade, that seven ships were dashed to pieces by a storm off the Sardinian coast, and sunk, with all their crews of at least i,ooo children. " Happier, how- ever, were those who thus perished than the 4,000 who survived to a life of shame and sorrow," sold to the Mahometans for that very purpose. " Farre better I it deeme to die with speed Than waste in woe and waylfuU miserie : Who dies, the utmost dolor doth abye ; But who that lives, is lefte to wayle his losse : So life is losse, and death fehcitie : Sad life worse than glad death." Michelet says of Philippe de Valois' son. King Jean that he took for his model, the blind John of Bohemia, who fought, fastened to his horse, at Cricy : " But he had not the happiness to be killed, like John of Bohemia." Often quoted is dying Bayard's answer to Bourbon's expression DREGS OF A DISHONOURED LIFE. 143 of pity : " It is not I who am to be pitied, for I die fight- ing for king and country : it is you who are to be pitied, for you fight against them." All too many times it hath happened, as Jeremy Taylor laments, that persons of a fair life and a clear reputation have lived to see both -impeached and impaired, so that all the world says, " better had it been this man had died sooner." Well might Mary Stuart say with tears to Randolph, that " she perceived now they were not the happiest that lived the longest." In her Narrative of the first French Revolution, Mrs. Elliott infers that had the Court arrested and put to death the Duke of Orleans and some twenty others, the Revolution might have been suppressed, and in that case, she writes, " I should now dare to regret my poor friend the Duke, who, instead of dying thus regretted, lived to be despised and execrated," and to perish on a scaffold after all. Bolingbroke says of one who might fall a victim to power, but with whom would fall truth and reason, and the cause of liberty, " And he, who is buried in their ruins, is happier than he who survives them." " He would leave the world with more honour than they who would remain in it." Of frequent applicability in history are the lines in Southey's Madoc : " Lament not him whom death may save from guilt ; For all too surely in the conqueror Thou wilt find one whom his own fears henceforth Must make to all his kin a perilous foe," and a heautontimoroumenos to himself " Yes, happier they who on the bloody field Stretch when their toil is done," muses a burdened spirit in Maturin's Bertram. The speaker is a female one ; and her mood is not so very far away from that of Rowe's Calista, when that Fair Penitent exclaims, unawed by sentence of death, " That I must die, it is my only comfort." Wordsworth apostrophizes a bereaved mother with a reference, designed to be consolatory by suggestive con- trast, to the less happy doom of a once equally innocent 144 PENAL SENTENCE OF LIFE, NOT DEATH. child, who " may now have lived tilL he could look With envy on thy nameless babe that sleeps Beside the mountain chapel, undisturb'd." For, as a sister songster, or songstress, asks: " Are they indeed the bitterest tears we shed, Those we let fall- over the silent dead ? Can our thoughts image forth no darker doom Than that which wraps us in the peaceful tomb ? " And then the tale follows — the old, old tale, so often told — of a blighted existence ; of one whose " life is one dark, fatal, deep eclipse. Lead her to the green grave where ye have laid The creature that ye mourn ;— let it be said : ' Here love, and youth, and beauty, are at rest : ' She only sadly murmurs, ' Blest, — most blest ! ' And turns from gazing, lest her misery Should make her sin, and pray to heav'n to die." To have brought back her good name to Little Em'ly, the wretched Martha protests she would have died, — and more. " To have died, would not have been much — what can I say ? — I would have lived .... Lived to be old, in the wretched streets, and to wander about, avoided, in the dark ... I would have done even that, to save her ! " Polly Oliver, in Tlu Roch Ahead, crying hard over her dying boy, is told by Squire Challoner, who speaks feelingly, as one that has felt, and that knows, — " You won't believe me, Mrs. Oliver, and it would be hard to expect you should ; but there are worse things in life than seeing your boy die." And then he goes away. He has seen a son of his degraded and debased. We may recall and apply the stances of Malherbe ; " Le peu qu'ils ont v^cu leur fut grand avantage Et le trop que je vis ne me fait que dommage, Cruelle occasion du souci qui me nuit ! Quand j'avais de ma foi I'innocence premiere Si la nuit de ma mort m'eut privd de lumifere Je n'aurais pas la peur d'une dternelle nuit." What is the doom of Lord Lytton's Lucretia, enforced ECHOES OF 'I'D HAVE THEE LIVE.' 145 _ by the author's own characteristic capitals ? " Live on ! " Death, as if spurning the carcase, stands inexorably afar off. Baffler of man's law, she has, like Varney, her accomplice, escaped with life. She is not unlikely to pass the extremest boundaries of age. Well, it is a penal sentence : " Live on ! '' So with Gabriel Varney : " Let HIM live ! " It is a charmed life, amid prison tortures. In vain he kneels, the foul tears streaming down, and cries ■ aloud, " I have broken all your laws, I will tell you all my crimes ; I ask but one sentence — hang me up, — let me die ! " Let him live, is the penal sentence. As with the passer of such another sentence in Liican, who " sensit pfenamque peti, veniamque timer! ; Vive, licet nolis, .... dixit." Vindictive Roger Chillingworth, in the Scarlet Letter, asks what better scheme of vengeance he could devise than to let Hester live — to give her medicines against all harm and peril of life — that so the scarlet letter might still blaze upon her bosom ? And such is the very method of his revenge on the fallen minister. What art could do, the malignant physician exhausted on " this miserable priest." That he still breathed, and crept about on earth, was owing all to his enemy's skill. " Better he had died at once ! " said Hester Prynne. — " Yes, woman, thou sayest truly ! " cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. " Better had he died at once ! Never did mortal man suffer what this man has suffered." But the avenger loved to have it so ; and the penal sentence imposed by his ingenuity of vindictive art, was one of life, not death. Bracciano's sentence is to the purpose, as set forth in a scene of The Dukes Laboratory : " My sentence ! For the punishment is mine, As mine the fault was. She must die . . . Die ! yes. And then my punishment begins. For I must live. There's punishment for both." And so is a passage in the last scene of Talfourd's tragedy of Glencoe, where Henry Macdonald rushes with uplifted 10 146 'VD HAVE THEE LIVE: arm to slay Glenlyon, and that arm is stopped by Lady Macdonald, with the scathing injunction, " Let him live. Glenlyon, I pray you may have life stretch'd out beyond The common span of mortals, to endure The, curse of Glencoe cleaving to your soul." A CHAPTER IV'. PBYSICKED IN VAIN:' AU's Well that Ends Well, Act i., Sc. i. KING of France, name and date unknown, is the subject of colloquy in the opening scene of All's Well that Ends Well. Long has the king been ailing, and vain hitherto has been any and all medical^ aid. So vain in the past, that there is no hope for the" future. Every resource would seem to have been exhausted, every remedy is a pro- nounced failure, every physician is at his wits' end. "What hope is there of his majesty's amendment .' " the Countess of Roussillon inquires. " He hath abandoned his phy- sicians, madam," is Lafeu's reply, "under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hopes ; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time." One cannot but recall the piteous case in the gospels of a certain woman which had an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many phy- sicians, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. And one thinks too of the prophet's burden of woe against the daughter of Egypt : " In vain shalt thou use many medicines ; for thou shalt not be cured." Were but that skilled physician^ Helena's father, yet livings the French king might cherish some hope : " If he were liying, I would try him yet ; — Lend me an arm ; — the rest have worn me out With several applications- ; — nature and sickness • Debate it at their leisure." 148 SUFFERING MANY THINGS This king and his physicians are of a mind : he, that they cannot help him ; they, that they cannot help. Is it for Helen to essay a cure ? " How shall they credit a poor unlearned virgin, when the schools, embowelled of their doctrine, have left off the danger to itself ? " Seeking relief, and finding none ; seeking it everywhere, to find it nowhere : one may apply a bit of Plautus, — Pergo ad alios ; venio ad alios ; deinde ad alios ; una res. It is all the same — go to whom one will. Una res — the same story, over and over again. , We are told of Jacob Cats, the Dutch poet, who now- adays, even by his own countrymen, is more praised than read, that after having in vain sought relief from all the medical men whom he consulted, he recovered his health by means of a powder given him by an old alchemist. What avails it .■• is the Dutch burgomaster's question and answer in one, to Margaret Brandt's offer, as a physician's daughter, to prescribe for his sick child. The learnedest leeches in all Rotterdam had all seen this patient, and bettered her not. Not one of them could master her complain-t. One skilled wight called it spleen ; another, liver ; atiother, blood ; another, stomach ; and another declared her to be possessed. Margaret replies : " Your leeches ai-e all in different stories . . . because they know not their trade.* I have heard my father say each is enamoured of some one evil, and seetH it with his bat's eye in everj'^ patient. Had they stayed at home, and ne'er seen your daughter, they had answered all the same, spleen, blood, stomach, lungs, liver, lunacy, or, as they call it, possession." — Rousseau expatiates on a painful malady from which he suffered being aggravated, instead of abated, * Otheman assures Queen Elizabeth, in 1587, of alike incompetency, metaphorically speaking, on the part of those who had for a long time past been " doctoring " the Netherlands. "I believe, madam, that this sick person has had so many diseases for twenty years, and has had so many different doctors— some without experience, and others without fidelity— that the more despairing the patient is of his own case, the more honour it will be to the one who cures him." OF MANY PHYSICIANS. 149 by the treatment of the faculty. The doctors, he declares, did him as much harm as the disease did. He saw in succession Morand, Daran, Helv^tius, Malouin, Thierry, who, all of them very learned, and all his friends, treated him each in his own way, gave him no kind of relief, and weakened his system not a little. The more strictly he followed their directions, the yellower, thinner, feebler he became. In another place Jean-Jacques thus repeats his experience in this matter : " II y avait d^ja plusieurs ann^es que je m'^tais livr6 tout-a-fait aux medecins, qui, sans all6ger mon mal, avaient ^puise mes forces et detruit men temperament." There is a crisis in the history, psychological and physio- logical, of Contarini Fleming — whose life-history is, indeed/^ expressly designated a psychological romance — when phy- sician follows physician, and surgeon surgeon, without benefit to the patient, impatient. All the doctors he describes as holding different opinions, yet none of them right ; they satirise each other in private interviews, and exchange compliments in consultations. One tells him to be quiet ; another, to exert himself ; one declares that he must be stimulated ; another, that he must be soothed. He is, in turn, to be ever on horseback, and ever on a sofa. He is bled, blistered, boiled, starved, poisoned, electrified, gal- vanized ; and at the end of a year he finds himself with exactly the same oppression on his brain,* and as far as ever from a cure. It is the same sort of story with that * Being of a sanguine temperament, he had believed every assertion, and every week expected to find himself cured. " When, however, a considerable period of time had elapsed without any amelioration, I began to rebel against these systems, which induced so much exertion and privation, and were productive of no good. I was quite desperate of cure ; and each day I felt more keenly that, if I were not cured, I could not live. I wished, therefore, to die unmolested. I discharged all my medical attendants, and laid myself down like a sick lion in his lair."-ir Contarini Fleming, Part iv., ch. vi. Such, the author affirms, are the inevitable consequences of consulting men who decide by precedents which have no resemblance, and never busy themselves about the idiosyncrasy of their patients. I50 PHYSICKED IN VAIN. told by -one of Mr. Barham's imitators, of a certain aged spinster, who had a phthisic so firmly rooted in her consti- tution, that all the physic which fifty doctors had prescribed, and she, by gallons, had imbibed, wrbught, in its force, no jot of diminution- : " But, for the golden lining of her purse, That, I confess, grew daily less, in ratio as her malady grew worse." It is observable in the case of Shakspeare's King of France that, on his own showing, the most learned doctors in his realm had given him over : " The congregated college have concluded that labouring art can never ransom nature from her inaidable estate " (Act ii., Sc. i). He therefore speaks of his complaint as a "past-cure malady," and of himself, by the doctors' own confession, as past help. In the next scene but one we hear of his majesty as entirely recovered, — no thanks to the congregated doctors, however, nor from any help in them. Lafeu is all amazement at such a restoration, after being " relinquished of the artists," " both of Galen and Paracelsus, and of all the learned and authentic fellows, — :that gave him out incurable — not to be helped — uncertain life and sure death." To apply Cowper's couplet in the Table Talk : " He thought the dying hour already come. And a complete recovery struckhim dumb." Parson Ward, the Diarist, of Shakspeare's own good town, jots down this entry to our purpose : " A physician told a father that his sonne was a dead man. The father replied, I had rather a physician called him so a hundred times, than a. judge on the bench once." Was not Descartes a dead man by the doctors' decree, for some twenty years of his life .' Captain Phoebus was a representative man when the master-chirurgeon had to deal with him as dying of his wounds ; for in his case, says his author, "as it frequently happens, notwithstanding prognostics and diagnostics, Nature amused herself in saving the patient in the teeth of the leech." One of Swift's correspondents tried to comfort the Dean in his dejection by telling him, " I have the gout sometimes. GIVEN OVER BY THE DOCTORS. ISI the asthma very, much," etc., etc., — " yet am in much better health than I was twelve years ago, when four top phy- sicians pronounced me a dead man, and sent me abroad to die." Rousseau, in his Confessions, could look back upon a time, long ago, when the celebrated Morand, who, notwith- standing his skill, and the delicacy of his touch, made Jean Jacques suffer des maux incroyables, asserted of this his patient that within six months he would be a dead man, and must be. Mrs. Edwardes makes her De Bassompierre a type of the tenacity of invalids. " Why, five years ago, every physician in Paris and London said he must go in twelve months, told him to an inch how much, or rather how little, of lung he had left, and now he writes me word he is better than ever, and talks, in the spring, of going to St. Petersburg." Readers of Carlyon's Year, again, may remember how the hero is sentenced to death by his doctor, who tells him he may die at any moment, but that he can under no circumstances live for more than a year — whence the title of the tale. But the heart disease turns out to be an imposture ; and the doomed man has the actual audacity to be, living twenty years afterwards, without any sign that he is getting nearer to his grave. When Chateaubriand was a young man, a refugee in London, his health seemed so completely broken up that his friends dragged him from physician to physician, only to get the assurance from one after another of them, " We can do nothing more for you, my dear sir." The most eminent of them thought he might last some months, or even a year longer, if he abstained from all exertion. We find Hannah More writing to Bishop Burgess in 1825, that she had been " raised up from twenty apparently mortal diseases, after having been given over." She adds, "I have been reckoning up no less than twelve physicians (and almost as many apothecaries) who have attended me at different times and places, not one of whom is alive. They taken, I left." Alluding to this, Mr. Wilberforce told her that, had she lived three centuries earlier. Dr. Carrick, her present phy- sician, would have had her burnt for a witch, lest she should 152 PLURIMA MORTIS IMAGO. kill him too. To such other instances as that of Samuel Rogers, wh© up to middle-life was regarded as one who had no business to be alive at all, on medical authority, and for the credit of the faculty ; of Pindemonte, the Veronese poet, who was another of the fore-doomed ; of Henry Howard, the R.A., who was given over in early life, and died in advanced age ; or, again, of Washington ' Irving, whose incessant cough provoked the prophecy, " He is not long for this world," from a prophet, who, thirty years later, pre- sided at a public dinner given in honour of the consumptive invalid ; to these and the like may be added the instance of Mr, Wilberforce himself, who, in the spring of 1788, when his life of labour was yet before him, fell into so low a state, from a seemingly absolute decay of the digestive organs, that a consultation of physicians being held, their announce- ment to his family was; that he had - not stamina to last a fortnight. The fortnight somehow swelled into a matter of some five-and-forty years. As early as the time of Hippocrates (born B.C. 460) medical consultations appear to have been in vogue ; in one of his treatises he says that no physician ought to be ashamed to call in the aid of another, if he finds himself at a loss in the treatment of his patient. Any such sense of shame had become obsolete long before the day when Hogarth took for the motto for his Consultation of Phy- sicians the pregnant phrase in Virgil, Plurima mortis imago, — Death in full many a form. Mosca describes with gusto the fussy doings of a medical consultation over sham-sick Volpone, in Jonson's comedy of The Fox — ^how the patient's over-zealous friends, "to seem the more officious And flattering T)f his health, . . . have had, At extreme fees, the college of physicians Consulting on him, how they might restore him ; Where one would have a cataplasm of spices, Another a flay'd ape clapp'd to his breast, A third would have it a dog, a fourth an oil. With wild cat's skins," etc. The Emperor Charles the Sixth bade the physicians who CONSULTATION OF PHYSICIANS. 153 were disputing around his death-bed concerning the nature of his malady, to cease their controversy yet awhile, yet a very little while : only let him be gone first, and then they might open his body and welcome, and so arrive at the con- clusion they were now guessing at so widely, so wildly, so unwisely, and with such waste of temper and of time. Pert Lisette in Moliere would fain know why four doctors are called in — is not one enough to kill a patient ? In vain is she snubbed with a peremptory " Hold your tongue : four to advise are worth more than one." Can't Miss manage her dying without the help of those gentry ? she asks the papa ; who snappishly rebukes her with the query, Do doctors put to death, then .' • Not a doubt of that, Lisette can assure him, — and she quotes an acquaintance who proved, by the best of good reasons, that you ought never to say. Such a person is dead of a fever or inflammation of the lungs, but, is dead of four physicians and a pair of apothecaries. In a later scene Moliere gives us a solemn consultation in due form, beginning with the doctors taking their seats, and coughing the properly pompous preliminary cough, and then launching out into irrelevant gossip to their hearts' content. Called upon to deliver their opinion as to the state of the patient they have severally examined, they egregiously differ, without agreeing to differ, and break up in most admired confusion. Dr. Davy, in his book on the Ionian Islands, describes a medical consultation which reminds his readers of Moliere; and the " Greek custom " he describes was' not so very long ago a thing common to the physicians of Europe at large. The learned Greeks in the most formal manner discussed in an ante-room the sick man's case — each in turn giving a kind of clinical lecture, in which the history of the disease was traced, the rationale of the symptoms given, the sup- posed exact nature of the malady, and its nosological place assigned, and a mode of treatment proposed, founded on the views taken. "It was an ingenious theoretical display of ability, each striving to appear to most advantage," and much better adapted to impress the audience (the assembled 154 MEDICAL CONSULTATION. family and friends) with the cleverness of the speakers, than to be of practical use to the patient. A consultation of physicians is the subject of the fourth letter in Anstey's Bath Guide, wherein Mr. Simpkin Barnard describes how, as he every day grew worse and worse, he was advised by his doctor to send for z. nurse, and the nurse was so willing his health to restore, that she begged him to send for a few doctors more ; for when any difficult work's to be done, many heads can despatch it much sooner than one : " And I find there are doctors enough in this place. If you want to consult in a dangerous case. So they all met together, and thus began talking : ' Good doctor, I'm yours — 'tis a fine day for walking — Sad news in the papers — God knows who's to blame ! The colonies seem to be all in a flame — This Stamp Act, no doubt, might be good for the crown, But I fear 'tis a pill that will never go down — What can Portugal mean ? — Is she going to stir up Convulsions and heats in the bowels of Europe ? 'Twill be fatal if England relapses again From the ill blood and humours of Bourbon and Spain.' Says I, ' My good doctors, I can't understand Why the deuce ye take so many patients in hand ; Ye've a great deal of practice, as far as I find. But since ye've come hither do pray be so kind To write me down something that's good for the wind. No doubt ye are all of ye great politicians. But at present my bowels have need of physicians ; Consider my case in the light it deserves, And pity the state of my stomach and nerves.' But a tight little doctor began a dispute About administrations, Newcastle and Bute, Talk'd much of economy, much of profuseness. — Says another — ' This case, which at first was a looseness. Is become a tenesmus, and all we can do Is to give him a gentle cathartic or two ; First get off the phlegm that adheres to Xh^ plica, Then throw in a med'cine that's pretty and spicy ; — A peppermint draught, — or a— Come, let's begone, We've another bad case to consider at one.' " DOCTORS' STUFF. 155 " THROW PHYSIC TO THE DOGS." Macbeth, Act v., Sc. 3. " Throw physic to the dogs, — I'll none of it,'' resolves Macbeth, when he feels himself past physic ; for, " what rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug " would aught avail to cleanse his stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighed upon his heart ? Martin Luther had, upon other grounds, given himself over, when he said to the lady who wished he might live forty years more, that rather than live forty years more he would give up his chance of Paradise ; adding, " I have ceased consftlting the physicians. They tell me I am to live another year [1545] — so, meantime, I shall get on as well as I may, and make myself comfortable, eating and drinking what- ever I fancy," and throwing physic to the dogs. In his table-talk Luther had already reported of himself when ill at Schmalcalden, that the physicians there made him take as much medicine as if he had been a great bull. " Alack for him that depends upon the aid of physic ! ... A sound regimen produces excellent effects. When I feel indisposed, by observing a strict diet and going to bed early, I generally manage to get round again. . . . We find Avicenna and Galen prescribing wholly different remedies for the same disorders. I won't pin my faith to any of them, ancient or modern." " I expect that exercise and change of air do more good than all their purgings and bleedings." When Doctor Lundin, in his walk to his country lodgings with Roland Graeme, comes across divers patients and non-patients, he shrewdly discriminates between the two classes as individualized by the representa- tive men he meets. Yonder fellow with the red bonnet, and the great rough baton in his hand, is by the doctor believed to have verily the strength of a tower : " He has lived fifty years in the world, and never encouraged the IS6 DOCTORS' STUFF. liberal sciences by having one pennyworth of medicaments. — ^But see you that man with the fades Hippocratica?" pointing out a thin peasant, with swelled legs, and a most cadaverous countenance : "that I call one of the worthiest men in the barony — he' breakfasts, luncheons, dines, and sups by my advice, and not without my medicine ; and, for his own single part, will go farther to clear out a moderate stock of pharmaceutics, than half the county besides." Montaigne professed for his part to think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have him, for, he thanked God, they had no traffic together. " I am of a quite contrary humour to other men, for I always despise it ; and when I am sick, instead of re- canting, or entering into composition with it, I begin yet more to hate and fear it, telling those who importune me to take physic that they must at least give me time to recover my strength and health, that I may be the better able to support and encounter the violence and danger of the potion." Madame, Mere du" Regent (Orleans), used to reject with scorn, on her arrival at the French court, every overture of medical aid, declaring that she wanted no doctor, not she, " qu'elle n'avait jamais h.\.k. ni saign^e ni purg6e, et que, quand elle se trouvait mal, elle faisait deux lieues cl pied, et qu'elle 6tait gu^rie." She would have said or sung with Crashaw, if she could, " Go, now, and with some daring drug Bait thy disease ; and, while they tug. Thou to maintain their precious strife. Spend the dear treasures of thy life. Go, take physic, dote upon Some big-named composition. The oraculous doctors' mystic bills- Certain hard words made into pills ; And what at last shalt gain by these .' Only a costlier disease. That which makes us have no need Of physic, that's physic indeed." Robert Burns was a proud father when he wrote to Mrs. 'THROW PHYSIC TO THE DOGS.' J57 Dunlop of his Ifttle fellow, "partiality apart, the finest boy I have of a long time seen," that " He is now seventeen months old, has the smallpox and measles over, has cut several teeth, and yet never had a- grain of doctors' drugs in his bowels." Whatever you do, beware of doctoring, is the stringent injunction of Lord Martindale to Miss Yonge's Violet, in Heartsease, when his grandson seems ailing ; for the old lord had seen more than enough of doctoring, and resolved that his two youngest should run wholesomely wild, and never be dosed, till they were six years old. " Throw away lessons and physic. Give him other children to play with, make him wear a brown holland pinafore, and let him grope in the dirt." So a candid physician counselled, and the counsel is believed to have saved the child's life. Not every physician is addicted to physic himself, however free in prescribing for others. There was a book recently published with the intent to familiarize the Portuguese nation with correct colloquial English, the compiler of which, in illustration of the fact that our doctors do not invariably follow their own prescriptions, has this good story to tell in his own idiomatic way, which is piquant enough : " A physician eighty years of age had enjoied of a health unalterable. Theirs friends did him of it compliments every days. ' Mister doctor,' they said to him, ' you are admirable man. What you make then for to bear you as well V 'I shall tell you it, gentlemen,' he was answered them : ' and I exhort you in same time at to follow my exemple. I live of the product of my ordering, without take any remedy who I command to my sicks.' " Stories about doctors have been said to prove, more than any others, how far one idea may be worked out with energy and perseverance ; there being only one joke which it is possible to make on the profession of medicine in the abstract, as there is but one which is to be made with propriety on that of the cure of souls. " Of the one it is traditionally humorous to remark that the medicines kill — of the other, that the sermons send to sleep." Whatever IS8 DOCTORS AND DRUGS. foundation ' there may be for the ordinary joke about sermons, it is questioned whether the attack so often made on the doctors is altogether fair ; and questioned on this ground — that statistics are wanting to show how many people drink the potions which their medical attendants provide, and how many dispose of them in clandestine ways. If the latter class are to the former in the propor- tion of three to one, it would be just to draw the inference that the drugs are not always directly fatal. And even " if there were no doctors, it is probable that people would die nearly as frequently." A celebrated physician pronounced the best practice to be that which does nothing — the next best that which does little ; and another eminent authority has declared that, in a large proportion of cases treated by ordinary doctors, the disease is cured by nature and not by them, and that in a smaller proportion of cases the disease is cured by nature in spite of them ; so, that in a majority of cases it would fare as well with patients if all remedies, especially drugs, were abandoned. General Platow's corps of Cossacks in the Eylau campaign had but one doctor ; and when the Emperor talked of employing more, the General- said, " God forbid I for the fire of the enemy is not half so fatal as a drug." A leading review discussed with some interest,, not very long ago, the practical problem raised by the Peculiar People's refusal to call in medical assistance in cases of disease, and their allowing their children to die for the want of it ; in the course of which discussion it was conceded that, as regards an adult patient, it might seem a piece of tyranny to force medicine on a man who did not believe in its efficacy — it being pronounced almost an open question whether he would not be generally right, and a delicate one whether the health of the world would be improved or deteriorated by the extermination of all doctors. The reviewer holds it for certain that in the last century Govern- ment would have enforced remedies, such as excessive bleeding, which we should now hold to be directly injurious ; and deems it not impossible that our descendants may think FLINGS AT THE FACULTY. 159 that the popularity of some remedies now in such ample demand and supply is also an illustration of our ignorance. It is a distinguished Ainerican physician who describes some "very silly people" as thinking a certain sage old doctor did not believe in medicine, because he gave less than the poor half-taught creatures in the smaller neigh- bouring towns, who took advantage of people's sickness to disgust and disturb them with all manner of ill-smelling and ill-behaving drugs. In point of fact, the older and wiser man hated to give anything noxious or loathsome to those who were uncomfortable enough already, unless he was very sure it would do good, — in which case, he never played with drugs, but gave good, honest, efficient doses. John Dryden, in the Epistle to his namesake, esquire, distinguishes between your skilled physician, like Garth, "generous as his muse," and the apothecary-tribe, as regards the dispensing of drugs : they, the former, " labouring for relief of human kind, With sharpened sight some remedies may find ; The apothecary-train is wholly blind ; From files a random recipe they take, And many deaths of one prescription make.'' In his adaptation from Chaucer of the Cock and the Fox, the same vigorous rhymester imputes to chanticleer the lines — " But neither pills nor laxatives I like. They only serve to make the well man sick : Of these his gain the sharp physician makes, And often gives a purge, but seldom takes ; They not correct, but poison all the blood, And ne'er did any but the doctors good. Their tribe, trade, trinkets, I defy them all,. With every work of 'pothecary's hall." Chaucer's Arcyte was in evil case when neither bleeding " Ne drynk of herbes may ben his helpyng. ***** And certeynly wher natur will not wirche, Farewel, phisik ; go bere the man to chirche." Cowper felt that, towards the last, when, as Hayley tells us l6o 'THROW PHYSIC TO THE DOGS.'. of him in Norfolk, medicine appeared to have little or no influence on his complaint, and his aversion at the sight of it was extreme. There was a crisis in Rousseau's physical history, when, persuaded that the doctors to whom he had wholly given himself up, had exhausted his strength and ruined his constitution, without at all alleviating his suffer- ings, he determined " de guerir ou mourir sans medecins et sans rem^des. Je leur dis adieu pour jamais."' This he wrote in Les Confessions. In a later work, Les Reveries, he professes to have never had much confidence in medicine, but a good deal too much in doctors, some of whom he esteemed, even loved, and allowed to " gouverner ma carcasse avec pleine autorite." Fifteen years' experience had taught him better, to his cost, he says ; and it was not until he threw physic to the dogs, showed his physicians to the door, and betook himself to les seules lois de la nature, that he. recovered his former health. Not Jonson's bedridden Vol- pone could be more resolute against drugs and doctors, as Mosca reports him to Corbaccio : " He will not hear of drugs. He has no faith in physic : he does think Most of your doctors are the greater danger And worse disease to escape." So Gait's west country laird is said to have nourished a dislike to the facultj', declaring that since doctors had learned to keep count like shopkeepers, " when they get a man ill they hae as natural an interest to keep him ill as the wabsters and souters in the health and. well-being of their customers." " I hae nae broo o' doctors," he angrily ex- claims, when told that one has been sent for ; " for though they may learn at the college to haggle aff a sair leg, or to howk out a rotten tooth, they ken as little about complaints in the stomach as a loch-leech, and no sae muckle ; for the leech, poor thing, has a natural knowledge o' what It's about, and seeks nae fee but a pickle saut on its neb, and a drap caller water in a bottle. Nane o' the droguery and the roguery o' doctors for me." If Roderick Random puts into his mouth the " diaphoretic boluses " brought by his Welsh 'THROW PHYSIC TO THE DOGS.' iSl friend' Morgan, it is only that, by a seeming compliance, he may not affront the blood of Caractacus by intimating a mistrust of his medical capacity — for, as soon as Morgan's back is turned, Roderick spits out the odious preparation, and washes his mouth with water-gruel, (none too palatable a tongue-cleanser, surely). Camille, in Mr. Charles Reade's French story, " never drinks a drop of his medicine ; he pours it into the ashes under the grate, I caught him in the fact," Mademoiselle Rose reports. In the same author's Hard Cash, Julia Dodd confesses to having cultivated her geraniums with all her medicines, liquid and solid ; " and only one geranium had died. In his Cloister and Hearth, the first thing Peter Brandt does when called in to a far- gone civic dignitary at Rotterdam, who had been bled and purged to nothing, is to fling a battalion of bottles out of window, and leave it open. When Mr. Snowball in The Catspaw revolts at last from the tyranny of his Doctor Pet- goose, he tells him he has swallowed so many of his Paradise Pills that he wonders he has not followed their direction ; and hardly is he rid of his tyrant's presence when this little bit of action ensues : " Snowb. I've done witli him, as I'll prove, done with him, and his Pills of Paradise, too. \Takes ^ill-box from his pocket.'\ Rose- mary, take these pills and — {Offering pill-box.'\ Rosem. Thank you, sir, — but I always refiised the Doctor himself. Snowb. Take 'em, and throw 'em into the street. Rosem. Consider, sir. Some unoffending dog may find 'em." The consideration is considerate, and delicately implies that throwing physic literally to the dogs may do them a mis- chief, however salutary the flinging feat may be to the flinger. Commodore Trunnion held out to the last, against medi- ciners, chirurgeons, leeches, and potticaries, all and sundry. " Here has been a doctor," the sick old tar told Peregrine, that wanted to stow me chock-full of physic ; but when a man's hour is come, what signifies his taking his departure with a 'pothecar/s shop in his hold .? — I told him as how I II 1 62 TOTAL ABSTAINERS FROM could slip my cable without his direction or assistance, and so he hauled off in dudgeon." Thfe sturdy old salt is a representative man in fiction of many who have made a name in fact. Biographers of Sir Edward Coke tell us of that octo- genarian Chief Justice, that up to the time of his meeting with the severe accident which resulted in his death, he had constantly refused " all dealings with doctors ; " and that he was wont to " give God solemn thanks that he never gave his body to physic, nor his heart to cruelty, nor his hand to corruption." When turned of eighty — as another octo- genarian ex-Chief Justice records of him — and his strength rapidly declining, a vigorous attempt was made to induce him to take medical advice ; of which we have a lively account in a letter from Mr. Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville:* " Sir Edward Coke being now very infirm in body, a friend of his sent him two or three doctors to regulate his health, whom he told that he had never taken physic since he was born, and would not now begin." Adding, that he had now upon him a disease which not all the drugs of Asia, the gold of Africa, or all the doctors of Europe could cure — old age. He had the grace, however, to thank them while dismissing them — with a fee, too, or solatium, of twenty pieces to each man. When Petrarch was sensibly failing, his physician Dondi told him that his diet was too cold, that he should avoid fruit and raw vegetables, etc. But Petrarch, who had written four books of invectives against the faculty, had no faith in medicine ; and if he was civil to Dondi, it was as a philosopher, not as a physician. He would have fraternized with that other Italian poet commemorated by Leigh Hunt, who wrote a whole poem in praise of straw- berries : " For my part, I confess I fairly swill And stuff myself with strawberries ; and abuse * Harleian, MSS. Quoted in Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices, Vol. I., p. 334. POWDERS, PILLS, AND POTIONS. 163 The doctors all the while, draught, powder, pill, And wonder how any sane head can choose To have their nauseous jalaps, and their bill. All which, like so much poison, I refuse. Give me a glut of strawberries ; and lo ! Sweet thro' my blood, and very bones, they go." Lucky indeed, exclaims The Doctor, were the patient who, sending for Morison's Pills, should be supplied with Tom D'Urfey's instead ; and happy man would be his dole who, when he had made up his mind in dismal resolution to a dreadful course of drastics, should find that gelastics had been substituted, not of the Sardonian kind, but composed of the most innocent and salutiferous ingredients, gently and genially alterative, mild in their operation, and safe and sure in their effects. The Spectator avows, for his part, that the only physic which had brought him safe to the confines of old age, and which he prescribed to his friends, was abstinence. "This is certainly the best physic for pre- vention, and very often the most effectual against the present distemper [17 10]. In short, my recipe is, 'Take nothing.' " Swift's journal to Stella, of the year after, contains the characteristic entry, " Fig for your physician and his advice. Madam Dingley [Stella's companion] ; if I grow warse, I will ; otherwise L will trust to temperance and exercise : your fall of the leaf; what care I when the leaves fall } I am sorry to see them fall with all my heart ; but why should I take physic because leaves fall from trees .? that won't hinder them, from falling. If a man falls from a horse, must I take physic for that 1 — I am glad at heart to hear poor Stella is better ; use exercise and walk, spend pattens and spare potions, wear out clogs and waste, claret." In his Polite Conversation, the dean makes the colonel protest that, after all, kitchen physic is the best physic ; to which my lady adds, " And the best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman." The last patronymic was of note in the faculty, a century after the dean's day. One of Moore's letters is descriptive of a recent illness he 1 64 MALADY PREFERRED TO REMEDY. had undergone, as to which, however, he really believed the apothecary to be, " as usual," nine-tenths of the disease ; " for he physicked me into such a state of debility that, when the original complaint was ^ gone, there was another, much worse, of his own manufacture, to proceed upon ; " but at last the little poet took Molidre's method of dealing withe his doctor, and became, accordingly, as well as ever : " II m'ordonne des rem^des, je ne les fais point, et je gu^ris." The Ingoldsby rhymester is frank in his avowal^ " I abominate physic, I care not who knows There's nothing on earth I detest like ' a dose ' — That yellowish-green-looking fluid, whose hue I consider extremely unpleasant to view. With its sickly appearance that trenches so near On what Homer defines the complexion of Fear ; HXiipov hios I mean, A nasty pale green, Tho' for want of some word that may better avail, I presume, our translators have rendered it ' pale.' " Honest Jacqueline was Moliere's own mouthpiece when she defied Doctor Sganarelle and all his works : " Ma fi, j^ me moque de §a, et jd ne veux point faire de mon corps une boutique d'apothicaire." So lusty a lass was not going to make a doctor's shop of her inside, at any one's bidding. Napoleon at St. Helena, when his health broke up, in the autumn of 1818, refused to take medicine, however pressing his medical advisers. When Prince Potemkin fell ill of the disease which carried him off, the Czarina despatched two of her first physicians to attend on him ; but he would give no manner of heed to them and their drugs. The Czar Alexander I., in the fatal November of 1825, when Sir James Wylie earnestly counselled the adoption of immediate remedies, replied, smiling, "I have no need of you, or of your Latin pharmacopoeia — I know how to treat myself ; " and in spite of all that could be said, he persisted in his refusal to take medicine. The malady which proved fatal to Archbishop Whately might possibly, a biographer suggests, have been checked by active remedies ; but his Grace refused to swallow any medicine, and more than once told his 'THROW PHYSIC TO THE DOGS.' 165 medical advisers " that they might throw physic to his dogs, who, however, though they dealt in bark [the archbishop was an inveterate punster], were better judges than to- drink it." His insuperable repugnance to medicine is attributed in part to " a charlatanical course of drastic drugging " to which he was subjected soon after his arrival in Ireland. Ever after this experience he is said to have limited his faith in medicine to the homoeopathic system. The last four weeks of his life were " one long torment," the pains of which might have been allayed by a " judicious administration of anodynes and opiates ; but Dr. Whately, like Fox and O'Connell, refused to swallow drugs." Urgent friends were answered with the second-hand answer, that their advice was like their physic, more agreeable to give than take.* The only medical maxim, perhaps, of which that master of maxims would have uncon- ditionally approved, might be that of the School of Health at Salerno, which bids him that is in need of doctors, take for doctors these three eligibles — a cheerful mind, relaxation from toil, and temperate diet : " Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant Hsec tria ; mens hilaris, requies, moderata diaeta." If doctors are addicted to dog Latin, it is only in keeping with the destiny of their drugs, in the case at least of those whose maxim is Macbeth's, to throw physic to the dogs. Scarcely have the consulting physicians marched off from Mr. Simpkin Barnard's bedroom, in Anstey's New Bath Guide, " each his cane at his nose," when Jenny comes in, who has heard all their prose, and she'll teach them, she vows, at their next consultation, to come and take fees for the good of the nation, (for all their talk has been of politics). So, " she seized all the stuff that the doctor had sent, And out of the window she flung it down souse, As the first pohtician went out of the house ; Decoctions and syrups around him all flew, The pill, bolus, julep, and apozem too ; * Anecdotal Memoirs of Archbishop Whately, vol. ii., pp. 259, 265. l66 'CANST THOU NOT MINISTER His wig had the luck a cathartic to meet, And squash went the gallipot under his feet. She said 'twas a shame I should swallow such stuff, When my bowels were weak; and the physic so rough." Mr. Gill, the then "eminent Cook at Bath," was more to Jenny's mind, and she would have sided with the sweet singer, sweet-toothed one at least, who invidiously compared the modes and merits respectively of Galen and of Gill : "Your spirits and your blood to stir, old Galen gives a pill ; But I the forced-meat ball prefer, prepared by Master Gill. While he so well can broil and bake, I'll promise to fulfill. No other physic e'er to take than what's prescribed by Gill." § m. METAPHYSICAL MALADY AND PHYSICAL. ART. Macbeth, Act v., Sc. 3. The Doctor had already declared Lady Macbeth's disease to be beyond his practice, when questioned by her husband, " How does your patient, Doctor > " Not so sick, is the" reply, as troubled with thick-coming fancies, that keep her from her rest ; a reply that at once stirs Macbeth to the wistful utterance, " Cure her of that,"— and to the instantly ensuing query, " Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ; Raze out the written troubles of the brain ; And, with some sweet oblivious antidote. Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart .' ^''^^'"'- Therein the patient Must minister to himself." More needs she the divine than the physician, the latter had said of the sleep-walking lady. And now if Macbeth be -such a patient as he describes, to himself must that patient minister : ke, the physician, can not minister to a TO A MIND DISEASED? 167 mind so diseased. Algazzali, the Light of Islam and Pillar of the Mosque, when stricken by that strange disease which involved loss of voice as well as loss of appetite, and entire prostration of physical energies, was declared by physicians to be beyond hope of recovery, " unless he could shake off the sadness which depressed him." Johnson seems to have approved and admired the resolve of Dr. Nichols never to attend a patient, whatever his distemper might be, if his mind was not at ease ; for he believed that no medicines would be of any avail to one thus disquieted. As Mr. Kennedy tells his wife in Phineas Finn, " I can see now what it is that makes your head ache. It is not the stomach. You are quite right there. — Dr. Macnuthrie is a learned man, but I doubt whether he can do anything for such a malady.'' " You are quite quite right, Robert ; he can do nothing." " It is a malady you must cure for yourself, Laura." Perhaps the lady, if addicted to Latin, might have applied with a note of admiration what Pamphilus in the Andria utters with a note of interrogation, Cicm egomet possim in hac re medicari mihi ! Pope's imitation of Horace makes easy work of metaphysical malady as compared with physical : " The case is easier in the mind's disease ; There all men may be cured whene'er they please." There is a chapter in Mr. John Stuart Mill's Auto- • biography called " A Crisis in my Mental History," some pages of which relate to the deep dejection which over- came him at the period in question, " a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,'' for which he sought no relief by speaking to others of what he felt. If he had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding his griefs a necessity, he should not, he says, have been in the condition described. He felt, too, that his was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress : there was nothing in it to attract sympathy. " Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts." But I68 'CANST THOU NOT MINISTER there was no one, it seems, on whom the sufferer could build the faintest hope of such assistance — not a friend, at that time, to whom he had any hope of making his condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelli- gible to himself ; and the more he dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.* Dr. Vincent shakes his head after his puzzled examination of Margaret in the story of Henry Dunbar, and tells her friends, " It is a case in which my services can be of very little avail : the young lady is suffering from some mental uneasiness which she refuses to communicate " — and there an end. What doctor can minister to such a disease 1 whose physic avail to cope with such metaphysics 1 As Spenser's hermit has it, " In vaine of me ye hope for remedie, And I likewise in vaine do salves to you applie. For in yourselfe your onely helpe doth lie. To heale yourselfe, and must proceed alone From your owne will to cure your maladie . Who can cure him that will be cured of none ? " In the opening stanza of another canto of his great poem Spenser starts the question, " What equall torment to the griefe of mind, And pyning anguish hid in gentle hart, That inly feeds itself with thoughts unkind, And nourisheth her own consuming smart ? What medicine can any leaches art Yield such a sore, that doth her grievance hide, And will to none her maladie impart ? " As Roger Chillingworth tells a too reticent patient, the heart of whose mystery he would pluck out, he to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, * " In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state ; but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general pheno- menon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner." — Autobiography of y. S. Mill, p. 140. TO A MIND DISEASED?' 1 69 but half the evil which he is called upon to cure : a bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. "Thus, a sickness, a sore place, in your spirit, hath its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily evil .' How may this be, unless you first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul .' " Mr. Merdle's skilled physician has this to say of him, that he can find nothing the matter with Mr. Merdle — that he has the con- stitution of a rhinoceros, the digestion of an ostrich, and the concentration of an oyster — that as to nerves he is , about as invulnerable as Achilles. " How such a man should suppose himself unwell without reason, you may think strange. But I have found nothing the matter with him. He may have some deep-seated recondite complaint. I can't say. I only say, that at present I have not found it out." An equally skilled physician of Lord Lytton's picturing, from the life, — described as being, what every great physician should be, a profound philosopher, though with a familiar ease of manner, and a light offhand vein of talk, which made the philosophy less sensible to the taste than any other ingredient in his pharmacopoeia, — examines Gentleman Waife all over, alone, sounds the old man's vital organs with ear and with stethoscope, talks to him now on his feelings, now on the news of the day, and then steps out to tell his friend, " Something on the heart ; I can't get at it ; perhaps you can. Take off that something, and the springs will react, and my patient will soon recover." It is the same doctor that, later in the story, is called in to Lady Montfort, and pronounces hers to be a case in which physicians can be of very little use : there is something on the mind which his prescriptions fail to reach ; worry of some sort — decidedly worry. And unless she herself can either cure that, or will make head against it, worry may bring to an abruptly fatal issue, in her case, a good chronic silent grief of some years' standing. — At the bride of Lammer- moor's flighty levity, after t:he dreadful scene at the castle, I/O 'CANST THOU NOT MINISTER — a mood chequered by. fits of deep silence and melancholy and of capricious pettishness, — Lady Ashton, we read, " be- came much alarmed, and consulted the family physicians. But as her pulse indicated no change, they could only say that the disease was on the spirits ''—and that was beyond them. There was an occasion upon which Mrs. Gamp shook her head mysteriously; pursed up her lips, and said, " There's fevers of the mind as well as body. You may take your slime draughts till you flies into the air with efferwescence ; but you won't cure that." Not to her, or the like of her, could or would or should the moody Baron in Tke Curfew apply — " Now I have heard you have a charm for this, ' And can make clean my fancy — recreate me, What once I was, a reasonable man. Full of the common feelings of my kind, Praying with unclogg'd heait ; so food shall nourish, And I shall laugh and weep like other men. And sleep refresh me, as the dews of heaven Lift up the languid blossoms." We laugh very often, says Mr. Disraeli, at the errors of medical men ; but if we would only, when we consult them, have strength of mind enough to extend to them something better than a half-confidence, we might be cured the sooner. " How often, when the unhappy disciple of .^sculapius is perplexing himself about the state of our bodies, we might throw light upon his obscure labours by simply detailing to him the state of our minds ! " His Venetia he describes as continuously in a state which to strangers might seem insen- sibility, but which her mother knew to be despair : she never moved, never sighed, never wept, took no notice of anything that occurred, sought relief in no resources : she had, apparently, no physical ailment, yet remained pale and silent, plunged in an absorbing paroxysm of overwhelming woe. " The physicians (for hopeless as Lady Annabel could not resist esteeming their interference, Venetia was now sur- rounded by physicians) shook their heads, prescribed different remedies, and gave contrary opinions." Another practised TO A MIND DISEASED?' in hand shows us Olivia Marchmont lying in a darkened chamber, and suffering under some vague illness, for which the Swampington doctor is fain to prescribe quinine, in utter unconsciousness of the real nature of the disease he is called upon to cure. Many chapters later she utters the impatient cry, " Is there no cure for this disease ? no relief but madness or death ? " The doctor's wife essays to find out from her what the doctor hiniself cannot. " These medical men," quoth that astute lady, inviting confidence, " watch us women in the agonies of hysteria ; they hear our sighs, they see our tears, and in the,ir awkwardness and ignorance they prescribe commonplace remedies out of their pharmacopoeia. ... I fear it is the mind, the mind which has been overstrained. Is it not so } " She was ill, we are told farther on ; and George Weston attended her con- tinually ; but he found it very difficult to administer to such a sickness as hers, and could only shake his head despond- ently when he felt her feeble pulse, or listened to the slow beatings of her heart. Dr. Aubertin, in White Lies, appeals to the women of the family to aid him in detecting the real cause of Camille's malady : " He puzzles me. It is not his wound that is killing him, there's something on his mind. You, Josephine, with your instincts, do help me, do pray, for pity's sake," etc. Mr. Charles Reade makes his Dr. Sampson prescribe with characteristic acumen for Julia Dodd, upon whom so much medical aid from all quarters has hitherto been quite thrown away : detecting no bodily ailment, why make her body a test-tube for poisons .■• he is for caution, and for working on the safe side of the hedge, till they are less in the dark. " Mind ye, young women at her age are kittle cattle ; they have gusts o' this, and gusts o' that, the unreasonable imps ! D'ye see these two pieces pasteboard .? They are tickets for a ball .... I prescribe them." Adverting in his " Recollections " to the absurd tyranny which Almacks' balls and their patronesses once exercised over the fashionable world. Sir Henry Holland tells us, " Even as a physician I was often witness of the effects of this dominating passion, having seen more, than 1/2 METAPHYSICAL MALADY one case, defying medicine, cured by a ticket for Almacks' opportunely obtained." Geronte demands of Sganarelle, in Moli^re, " Serait-il possible, monsieur, que vous puissiez aussi gu6rir cette maladie d'esprit ? " " Oui, laissez-moi faire," says the other, "j'ai des rem^des pour tout." In his satirical treatise on Right of Precedence between Physicians and Civilians, Dean Swift alleges the force of physic to go further than the body, and to be of use in relieving the mind under most of its disorders ; and the writer draws upon his own experience, under the direction of " my worthy parish minister, who is indeed an excellent divine, and withal an able physician ; and a good physician only to be the better divine. That good man has often quieted my conscience with an emetic, has dissipated troublesome thoughts with a cordial or exhilarating drops, has cured me of a love-fit by breathing a vein, and removed anger and revenge by the prescription of a draught, thence called bitter ; " in these and other instances convincing his patient that physic is of use to the very soul, as far as that depends on the crisis of the body. For, as Lucretius has it, " Mentem sanari corpus ut aegrum Cernimus, et flecti medicina posse videmus." One of Dr. Channing's confidential epistles begins : " The office to which your letter calls me, of ministering to a mind diseased, is, you well know, one of the most difficult, because physical maladies almost always have a large share in mental ones," as well as because inward suffering so often springs from an individuality, a peculiarity of mind, which another cannot easily comprehend. Swift makes it observable, in his Schenie for an Hospital for Incurables, that although the bodies of men be affected with an infinite variety of disorders, which elude the power of medicine, and are often foilnd to be incurable, yet their minds are also overrun with an equal variety, which no skill, no power, no medicine, can alter or amend. And this latter species of incurables, ought, he submits, principally to engage our attention and benefi- cence. Ulcera animi sananda magis quam corporis. That AND PHYSICAL ART. 173 flighty philosopher, Mr. Augustus Tomlinson, when Clifford tells him, " You jest pleasantly on your low spirits ; but I have a cause for mine," — retort's, " What then ? so much the easier is it to cure them. The mind can cure the evils that spring />-(??% the mind ; it is only a fool, and a quack, and a driveller, when it professes to heal the evils that spring from the body : — my • blue devils spring from the body ; consequently my mind wrestles not against them." The philosophy is about as serious or practical as that of Balzac's medical student, Bianchon, when he asks the cause of Rastignac's depression, and is told, "Je suis tourment^ par de mauvaises idees." " En quel genre .' (^a se gu6rit, les id^es." " Comment .'' '' " En y succombant." More to the purpose is the answer of the physician to Cordelia's tearful query in behalf of distraught Lear, " What can man's wisdom do, in the restoring his bereaved sense .' "There is means, madam : — Our foster-mirse of nature is repose. The which he lacks ; that to provoke in him, Are many simples operative, whose power Will close the eye of anguish. Cor. All bless'd secrets. All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth, Spring with my tears ! be aidant, and remediate. In the good man's distress ! " In his historical details of the malady of Charles the Sixth of France, in the last decade of the fourteenth century, Michelet tells us the royal patient had no lack of physicians, but little it was they did for him — medicine at that time of day caring for the body without taking thought of the mind, and attempting to cure the phy.sical without investigating the moral evil, " which, however, is commonly the primary, cause of the other." Earlier ages, he goes on to say, had acted on quite a contrary system, knowing little of material remedies, but being marvellously skilled to soothe, to " charm " the patient, and prepare him for the working of a cure. " The art of physic was conducted Christianly, and practised at the holy water-vessels of the churches." Fre- quently the patient was first made to confess himself, and a 174 MEDICINE FOR A TROUBLED MIND. .knowledge of his life and habits was thus arrived at. In the fourteenth century these preliminary preparations were ■ no longer understood : the body was at once and brutally attacked — put to the torture, indeed. "The king, soon sick of treatment of this kind, in a lucid interval dismissed his physicians." His courtiers persuaded him to seek his cure in amusements and festivals ; to cure madness by folly. And they fooled him to the top of his bent, or their own. Past any such remedy, supposing it even to be one, was James the Fifth of Scotland, after the Solway disaster, when shut up in his palace at Falkland, he would sit. for hours in deepest dejection without speaking a word. This could not last ; and it was soon discovered, the historians record, that a slow fever preyed upon his frame ; and having its seat in the misery of a wounded spirit, no remedy could be effectual. It is long before Sir Jasper Denison divines it is a mental anguish, and not a physical languor, under the influence of which his daughter droops and grows paler day by day. " The family medical man was sent for, and administered tonics ; " but no tonics could reach to the seat of this, disorder. Some half-dozen chapters later we find the baronet complaining to this same safe and respectable Mr. Redmond, that his daughter is not at all herself; "and I really do beg that you will make a point of seeing that she becomes herself at the earliest opportunity. She's as grey and chalky as a third-rate portrait in the Royal Academy. Can't you warm her up a little with some nice yellows — ■ tonics, I should say } " The surgeon shook his head. " There is a want of tone. Sir Jasper," he murmured ; " an evident want of tone." And the tonics fell flat in that case. As again with the broken-hearted mother in Tke Minister's Wooing ; in whose illness, we read, the shimmer- ing twilight of the sick-room fell on white napkins, spread over stands, where constantly appeared new phials, big and little, as the physician made his daily visit, and prescribed now this drug and now that, for a wound that had struck through the soul. The despairing girl in the Gordian Knot ROMEO AND THE APOTHECARY. 175 describes her despair to her kindly doctor, and asks, " Do you know anything about that, or do they put it in the doctors' books ? " Philaster's outcry of invective is against " Nature, too unkind, That made no medicine for a troubled mind." King Saul, ' in a Canadian drama praised by cisatlantic reviewers, demands of his physician a tonic for the heart, and as that official cannot gratify him, he goes on to declare, " The mind, the mind's the only worthy patient ! Were I one of thy craft, ere this I'd have Anatomized a spirit ; I'd have treated Soul wounds of my own making . . . .... Ye are impostors \ An- said, ye are impostors — fleas ! Skin deep Is deep with you : you only prick the flesh When you should probe the overwhelmed heart And lance the horny wounds of old despair." § IV. THE APOTHECARY OF MANTUA. Romeo and Juliet, Act v., Sc i. Bent on buying poison for himself, Romeo is at no loss for likely means of procuring it. What though he be in Mantua, and that Mantua's law is death to any vendor of mortal drugs .' Romes can call to mind a certain needy apothecary, upon whose need he can rely for gaining his own purpose. The miserable look of the meagre wretch had fixed the pitying gaze of the stranger ; and that look was entirely in keeping with the bare and forlorn aspect of his shop. Romeo had marked the man in the act of culling simples ; he had been moved by the sight of such tattered attire, and such " overwhelming brows." 176 ROMEO AND THE APOTHECARY. Mere than half-starved that apothecary looked ; sharp misery had worn him to the bones : " And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,* An alligator stufPd, and other skins Of ill-shaped fishes ; and about his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, -Were thinly scatter'd, to make up a show." * Joseph Warton calls this passage a glaring instance of the absurdity of introducing long and minute descriptions into tragedy ; and he appeals to those who knpw anything of the human heart, whether Romeo, in his distressful situation, could have leisure to think of the alligator, empty boxes, and bladders, and other furniture, of this beggarly shop, and to point them out so distinctly to the audience. The description itself, Warton owns to be very lively and natural ; but he complains of it as being very improperly put into the mouth of a person agitated with such passion as Romeo is represented to be. No leisure to think of the shop fittings ? answers the critic's critics : what then had Romeo leisure to do ? Had he leisure, Charles Knight, asks, to run off into declamations against fate, and into tedious apostrophes and generalizations, such as a less skilful artist than Shakspeare would have made him indulge in ? From the moment of his resolve to die with Juliet, the apothecary's shop became to Romeo an object of the keenest interest. " Great passions, when they have shaped themselves into fine resolves, attach the most distinct importance to the minutest objects con- nected with the execution of their purpose." And now that Romeo needed a poison, the apothecary's shop that he had eyed in his placid moments as an object of common curiosity, occurred with a double intensity to his vision ; nor was the shaping of the details into words a thing for the audience : it was the very cunning of nature that produced this description. " Mischief was, indeed, swift to enter into the thoughts of the desperate man : but, the mind once made up, it took a perverse pleasure in going over every item of the circumstances that had sug- gested the means of mischief." Nothing being left for Romeo but to die, all other thoughts had passed out of his mind ; and everything con- nected with the means of his death was seized upon by his imagination with an energy that could only find relief in words. It is criticism of a higher school than Dr. Warton's, which affirms it to have been the intense interest in his own resolve which made Romeo so minutely describe his apothecary. Speaking topographically, Mr. Dickens incidentally remarked in his Pictures front Italy, that if ever a man was suited to his place of resi- MANTUA'S STARVELING DRUGGIST. 177 Altogether, an apothecary to look at, and to buy poison of. So Romeo thought ; nor was he mistaken in his judgment. Noting this penury, to himself he said, " An if a man did need a poison now, whose sale is present death in Mantua, here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him." And this same thought of the Veronese outlaw's did but forerun his need ; and this same needy man must sell it him — here and now. So Romeo summons the starveling, and states his case. He holds out forty ducats to the poverty-stricken practi- tioner, and requires in return a dram of poison only ; but of poison such as will do its work perfectly and speedily; such stuff as wiir disperse itself through all the veins, that the life-weary taker may fall dead. Demurs the listener, deterred by dread of the law .'' " Art thou so base, and full of wretchedness. And fear'st to die .■■ famine is in thy cheeks, Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes, Upon thy back hangs ragged misery. The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law : The world affords no law to make thee rich ; Then be not poor, but break it, and take this." His poverty, but not his will, consents. And Romeo pays his poverty, and not his will. " Farewell ; buy food, and get thyself in flesh," is the parting salutation of the pur- chaser to the meagre druggist. Quod ut facerem, egestas me impulit, might the vendor say with Sophrona in Terence. He could not have gone on to say with Phormio in a later scene, " Heus ! quanta quanta hsec mea paupertas est, tamen Adhuc curavi unum hoc quidem, ut mi asset fides." But what would you have of one who might be described as Doctor Pinch is described in another play of Shak- speare's, as a hungry, lean-faced villain, a mere anatomy, " a needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, a living dead man." Such another in point of looks is the miserly denee, and his place of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a perfect fitness of things. 12 178 A MERE ANATOMY. schoolmaster in Quevedo, whose house was the abode of Famine, who himself was a skeleton, a mere shotten herring, or like a long slender cane with a little head upon it ; whose eyes were sunk into his head, and whose beard had lost its colour for fear of his mouth, which, being so near, seemed to threaten to eat it for sheer hunger. " His neck was as long as a crane's, with the gullet sticking out so far as if it had been compelled by necessity to start' out for sustenance." As he walked, his bones " rattled like a pair of snappers." And as for the room he occupied, there was not a cobweb in it — the spiders being all starved to death. More tragical is the style of the caitiff in Barry Cornwall, so famished, and in such frightful beggary, as to quarrel with the houseless cur " for scraps the stomach sickens at ; " one from whose bones " the lean and traitorous flesh had fled, and left a desperate skeleton." Dr. Burney declared it to be difficult to conceive the possibility of life subsisting in a form so nearly composed of mere skin and bone as that of M. de Voltaire, seen by him' at Ferney in 1776 ; and the patriarch supposed his visitor was " anxious to form an idea of the figure of one walking after death." The shrunk and shrivelled Mr. Pentweazle of fiction is pictured as looking more like those preparations which one sees in Surgeons' Hall, carefully preserved in bottles of spirits, than anything with life in it. We are reminded too of a " scarecrow of rags and bones " of Charles Kingsley's painting ; and again of the Job Trotter of Dickens, that " careworn looking man " with such deeply sunken eyes and such long lank jaws, and clad in apparel so seedy and scanty ; and of poor starved Smike, who, as Mn Crummies admiringly criticized him, would without any make-up for the part be such a representative of the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet as had never been seen before in the country.* Add from Scott the " poor Pottingar " of Perth, * The reader may remember that the manager engages Smike accord- ingly for that very part, and how unable the starveling was to get any A WALKING SKELETON. lyg Henbane Dwining, that "thin meagre figure of a man, whose diminutive person seemed assimilated to a shadow " — and whom the Gow Chrom threatens to pound in his own mortar, and to beat up his wretched carrion with flower of brimstone, the only real medicine in his booth. " Thou walking skeleton ! thou asthmatic gallipot ! thou poisoner by profession ! " — such are the armourer's terms of greeting to the " potticary." And with him may pair off in point of physique the scrivener in Nigel — that " starved anatomy " and cream-faced loon, who in rascality came not very far short of Henbane Dwining. Mr. Charles Reade gives us a "singularly gaunt,, angular, and haggard " personage, who, being, dressed in a spruce suit of glossy black, "looked like Romeo's apothecary gone to Stultz with the money." Judge Haliburton gives us a " chap as thin as a whippin' post," putting one in mind of a pair of kitchen tongs, all legs,, shaft, and head, and no belly ;_^ "a real gander-gutted Jookin critter, as holler as a bamboo walkin cane, and twice as yaller. He actilly looked as if he had been picked off a rock at sea, and dragged through a gimlet hole." Richardson's lean apothecary in Clarissa is professedly a resemblance of Otway's in Caius Marius, " as borrowed from the immortal Shakspeare," for meagre and very rueful were his looks, and misery had worn him to the bones. Of like parentage is the apothecary Lampedo in Tobin's Honeymoon, whom Balthazar rates as " thou sketch and outline of a man ! Thou thing that hast no shadow in the sun ! Thou eel in a consumption, eldest born more of the part into his head than the general idea that he was very hungry, which — perhaps from old recollections of Dotheboys Hall — he had acquired with great aptitude. In another story Mr. Dickens makes a plump doctor stigmatize Romeo and yuUet as a play which does anything but justice to " our profession.' "There is an apothecary in that drama, sir, which is a low thing ; vulgar, sir ; out of nature altogether." Saying which, Mr. Jobling pulled out his shirt full of fine linen, as if to indicate what he did call nature in a medical man, sir. l8o 'MY POVERTY JUT NOT MY WILL CONSENTS.' Of Death and Famine ! thou anatomy Of a starved pilchard ! " Or we might recall Virgil's image — made confecta supremd .... forma viri, m.iserandaque cultu. A separate section might be made up of illustrations of the apothecary's plea, that to the sale of poisoa his poverty and not his will consented. Twice in the Brussels legend of the desecrated Host in the synagogue, are the words used by our Christian historian of the Jews, — applied first to John of Louvain, " whose poverty could not resist the bribe of sixty golden coins " for stealing the pix, with its sacred contents, from the Chapel of St. Catharine ; and again to the woman selected by the Jews' to convey their treasure to Cologne, whose " poverty but not her will consented." It is virtually, if not verbally, the plea of Milton's " subtle fiend " himself, where he speaks of being urged hard " with doings, which not will But misery hath wrested from me." A quasi-apologist for Marat — that sometime practising apothecary or starved surgeon, who exchanged retail practice for wholesale, and the lancet for the guillotine — has pronounced him to be such a man as the apothe- cary of Mantua would have become in a revolution ; only Marat, instead of dealing out small doses of death to lovesick tailors and world-wearied seamstresses, cried out for eighty ' thousand heads. "Let us pity this poor vial of prussic acid," urges the special pleader, on the ground that Shak- speare had a decided penchant for the caitiff" wretch he so graphically paints, and whose shop he has advertised to the ends of the earth. Things are nearing the bitter end with Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney Carton stops in the middle of a Paris street by night, under a' glimmering lamp, and writes' with his pencil on a scrap of paper. Then traversing, with the decided step of one who remembers the way well, several dark and dirty thoroughfares, he stops at a chemist's shop which the owner is closing with his own hands: a small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a squalid quarter by a small 'A BEGGARLY ACCOUNT OF EMPTY BOXES.' i8l dim, crooked man. Confronting him at his counter, Carton lays the scrap of paper before him. " ' Whew ! ' the chemist whistled softly, as he read it. ' Hi ! hi ! hi ! ' Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said, ' For you, citizen } ' ' For me.' " And the black business is done accordingly. Paris is not Mantua, nor is Sydney Carton a Romeo ; but there is a Juliet in this case too — and an apothecary. The Doctor Leech of a ballad of the Ingoldsby school, but without the clear ring of Barham metal in either rhyme or reason, is a shadow of the shade in Shakspeare of the apothecary that Romeo drew, and bribed. As for said doctor's shop-window, "three globes of colour'd liquor graced its panes," and within it " shone drawers and jars, each with its classic label ; " But, as the drawers were shut, and jars opaque. No passenger or customer was able Whether they full or empty were to tell, Though Doctor Leech the latter knew full well. These, with some bullocks' bladders, And half a dozen adders Preserved in spirits. Beyond their merits, With «mpty phials, a prodigious host. Were all our pharmacopolist could boast. * » * * * " His fees scarce furnish'd the coarse meals he swallow' d. Or sufifer'd him to clothe his bony haunches In decent breeches. . . . Meanest slave or poorest bard Could scarcely hold his life on terms so hard. Sometimes he lived on porridge make of leeks For weeks : or toasted cheese, or boil'd grey pease. Nay, in extremity, he sometimes fed For many a cheerless day on barley bread." So again in one of Mr. Fitzgerald's fictions we have a glimpse of a dingy apothecary's shop, languid as regards business; its bottles, medicines, and apparatus showing under a delicate film of blue mould ; while the dispenser himself, as seen through a dusty pane, seemed to be suffer- ing under the same powdery mite-eaten blight. Geoffrey 1 82 A DEADLY DOCTOR. Crayon's explorations in Little Britain made us acquainted with a " tall, dry old gentleman, of the name of Skryme," who kept a small apothecary's shop ; a man of cadaverous countenance, full of cavities and projections ; of considerable repute among old women, who deem him a kind of conjuror, because he has two or three stuffed alligators hanging over his counter, and several snakes in bottles on his shelves. But the same essay-writer's better-known Ichabod Crane, of Sleepy Hollow, in the Legend of that ilk, is a more graphic personal representative of Romeo's apothecary, as regards his lank proportions ; to see whom striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes (too big for his shrunk shank and wasted waist) bagging and fluttering about him, was like seeing the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some marrowless scarecrow eloped from a corn- field. § V. A DEADLY DOCTOR. King Richard II., Act i., Sc. 4. The tidings that his uncle, old John of Gaunt, is grievous sick, suddenly taken, and hath sent post-haste, to entreat his royal nephew to visit him at Ely House, — how does King Richard meet the message, and greet its import .' With, a heartless wish that Uncle John's doctor may be a deadly one, not a healing one ; may play into the hands of death, not rescue the aged Duke out of those hands. John of Gaunt's wealth will be useful to Richard the Second. The lining of his coffers will make coats to deck the soldiers for the Irish wars. Besides, the King likes not the didactic tone, the remonstrant tendencies, of his venerable kinsman, and could well spare the counsellor, to be spared PHYSICIAN AND POISON. 183 the counsel. He will comply with the summons, and at once ; but he prays God that, making haste, he may come too late. And meanwhile there is this other prayerful pro- fanity to utter, devout in its malign aspirations : " Now put it, Heaven, in his physician's mind. To help him to his grave immediately." Kings have had such doctors at command, ere now ; 'and the physician that poisons his patient, though a monster, is not one of incredible proportions. " Would the cook were of my mind ! " wishes wicked Don John of Arragon, in view of the forthcoming feast at which kinsfolk and friends of his are to assist. For cooks and physicians are ex- ceptionally qualified, professionally, for dark work of this deadly sort ; and both classes have had members amenable to inducements thus to betray their trust, and abuse their office. Was it of malice prepense that the physician of Dionysius the elder, when fevered after a debauch, and asking for a sleeping draught, gave him one from which he never woke again ? Philippus is the honoured name of the good physician of Alexander, whom Parmenio alleged to have been bribed by Darius to poison him, and whom Alexander so little mistrusted that he gave him the accusing letter to read while himself drinking off the draught that Philippus had prepared for him — the effect of which justified that magnanimous trust. Philippus was a common name among the physicians of old — but this one, of Acarnania, is remembered above the rest. Parmenio's charge against him, however, was not, on the face of it, preposterous, as physicians and physic were accounted of in those days. Nicias is the name by which we know that very different doctor (for, how doctors differ !) who went to Fabricius, the Roman consul, and offered, for a considera- tion, to take off his royal master by poison — that master and patron being Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. The consul indignantly scouted the offer, and denounced the traitor, who came incontinently to a bad end, but was utilized for a good one, in so far as his skin was appropriated to 184 PHYSICIAN AND POISON. cover the seat of a chair. Was it an easy one ? Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ; and uneasy might well be the seat of a king with such surroundings. Dion affirms for certain that Marcus Aurelius, though sick, was actually cut off by poison, administered by the physicians in his son's interest. Dean Merivale distrusts Dion. Libanius composed what Gibbon calls a "very weak apology" to defend his hero, the Emperor Julian, from " a very absurd charge " of poisoning his wife, and rewarding her physician with his mother's jewels. Eudemus is a typical figure in the Sejanus of Ben Jonson, a physician worthy of a province for his accommodating practices — for the potions he exhibits and the sleeping draughts (without a waking) he administers, — Jonson, as usual, working assiduously in the track of Tacitus, for this as for other particulars of his minutely historical tragedies of imperial Rome. Charles the Bald's physician being a Jew, it was generally believed that the brevity of that imperial but inglorious reign was due to poison ; in the ninth century, the Jews, educated in the Arabian universities of Spain, were no doubt, as Milman says, more advanced in medical science than any others in Europe. The great emperor, Frederick II., is said, on one occasion, to have tested (unlike Alexander) the worth of a warning letter, by sternly commanding the physician to drink half of the cup presented to him. The culprit threw himself at the emperor's feet, and, as he fell, overturned the liquor — enough of which was left, however, to be administered to some criminals ; and they died in agony.* * History repeats itself. In Raikes's Diary for the year 1837 may be read how a scheme was then started by the chief physician of the Grand Signior at Constantinople to poison his master. The Sultan, having timely notice of the plot, pretended illness, and sent for his medical adviser to the palace, who prescribed a potion, and presented it with his own hand. The Sultan then ordered him to swallow the draught himself, which he positively declined doing. The sequel is that he "got the sack "—not in the slang English sense, but as they manage matters on the Bosphorus, — carefully sewing up the- full sack first. PHYSICIAN AND POISON. 185 Coictier, physician to Lewis the Eleventh, has the credit of ridding his master of our Edward the Fourth, by duly doctoring the wine presented by the French to the English monarch. When Pope Adrian the Sixth departed this life, the Romans crowned his physician with laurel, as the saviour of his country. So again (but with gold for laurel) in the instance of Clement the Seventh, for whom Curtius had fatally prescribed : " Curtius occidit Clementem : Curtius auro Donandus, per quern publica parta salus." Henry of Navarre's chief physician, De La Riviere, was for some time mainly occupied in devising antidotes to poison, which he well knew was ofFered to his master on various occasions, and in the most insidious ways. About the same time occurred the elaborate attempt of the Portuguese Jew, Dr. Lopez, on the life of Queen Elizabeth, whose physician-in-ordinary he had got to be appointed — all in the interests of Philip of Spain. The Earl of Leicester's Italian physician, Julio, was affirmed by his contemporaries to be a skilful compounder of poisons, which he applied with such frequency, that the Jesuit Parsons extols ironically the marvellous good luck of the Queen's great favourite in the opportune deaths of those who stood in the way of his wishes. Dr. Rimbault, in his memoir of Sir Thomas Overbijry, tells us of Dr. Mayerne, who had been physician to Henry the Fourth of France, and was "well experienced in the secret state poisonings of the French capital," that he was invited over to England by James the First in order to be his own physician, and with this result, if not this object, that he became the prime mover in the secret state poison- ings of the English capital. It used to be a matter of course, when a great man died, to accuse his physicians of killing him ; or to glorify them for it, as the case might be. Thus at the death of Henrietta, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and wife of our Charles I., some one wi-ote on her physician, Valot, what is thus Englished by Mr. Besant — 186 DEADLY DOCTORING. " A cruel fate, the same for each, Three of a royal race befel ; What killed the husband and the sire, The wife and daughter slew as well. Each died by an assassin's blow ; Ravaillac, Ciromwell, and Valot. Henry by stroke of traitor's knife, Charles on the scaffold lost his head ; And now the' daughter and the wife, Slain by her doctor, here lies dead." And after the death of Cardinal Mazarin, over whom the doctors wrangled, not being able to make up their minds as to his disease, the people would make way for Doctor Gu^nant in the streets, crying, " Let him pass — let him pass ! He is the doctor who killed the cardinal for us." As popular, this practitioner, as that Florentine celebrated in Boileau was the reverse : " Dans Florence jadis vivait un m^decin. Savant hftbleur, dit-on, et c6lkhre assassin. Lui seul y fit long-temps la publique misfere : Lk le fils orphelin lui redemande un phre ; Ici le frfere pleure un frfere empoisonnd : L'un meurt vide de sang, I'autre plein de s6n6 : Le rhume k son aspect se change en pleur^sie, Et par lui la migraine est bient6t fr^ri^sie. II quitte enfin la ville, en tous lieux ddtestd." One main point in the allegations of Titus Gates was that Sir George Wakeman, the Queen's physician, had engaged to poison Charles the Second, the Queen herself being privy to the scheme. From the Popish Plot to pure fiction the transit is smooth and short ; and we might fill a few pages with references accordingly to such notorieties as the Doctor Rappaccini of Hawthorne, whose patients were interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment, and who was said to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world with ; or as Scott's Alasco, who is poisoner, quacksalver, alchemist, and astrologer, all in oiie ; or again his Henbane Dwining, in the Fair Maid of Perth, DEADLY DOCTORING. 187 in whom, slight wasted anatomy though he be, Harry the Smith discerns more danger than in twenty tall men-at-arms, and who undertakes without demur the desired riddance of the heir-apparent of Scotland's crown. The Pottingar might have sat for the original of Dunbar's invective — ■ " In pottingry he wrocht great pyne ; He murdreit mony in medecyne." But of fiction there may already have been more than enough, in this chapter of instances commonly accepted as matters of fact. Recorded of other physicians besides Desgenettes is the answer made by him to Napoleon at Jaffa, when asked if it would be an act of humanity to administer opium to the invalid obstructives there : " My business is to cure, and not to kill." The Turks are not, by all accounts, the " best good Christians " in matters of this sort. Dn Oppenheim's work* on the state of medicine in Turkey throws a sickly light on the -doings of deadly doctors, when their dispensing power is in request, in the way of ministra- tions to death ; and the author himself, whose practice lay among the better classes of Turks, had, it seems, to make a hurried departure at last, since a great man, whose enemy was under treatment, proposed that the doctor should dispense poison, and when the proposal was declined, proceeded to try his own skill by attempting to poison the doctor. Mr. Nassau Senior's Journal in Turkey offers corroborative evidence, another European physician being his authority, who had declined applications of a similar kind, without however the same sequel of having to run for his life. Such applicants would seem to take literally Gulliver's report of the ways and means of British physicians in his time, and their cheap rating of life, as viewed professionally : they seldom fail in their prognostics, Captain Lemuel assured his Houyhnhnm master, — their predictions in real diseases, when at all malignant, generally portending * In German ; but some edifying excerpts from it may be seen inthe late Dr. Graves's Studies in Physiology. 1 88 PHYSICIAN AND POISON. death, "which is always in their power, when recovery is not; and therefore, upon any unexpected signs of amend- ment, after they have pronounced their sentence, rather than be accused as false prophets, they know how to approve their sagacity to the world, by a seasonable dose." A horse laugh from the four-footed listener would here per- haps have been appropriate ; but of course the Houyhnhnm was too well-bred and too inhumanly humane for that. Montesquieu's Persian Letter-writer classes together, at Venice, the two professions of physician and confessor,* and goes on to say: "Ondit que les h^ritiers s'accommodent mieux des m^decins que des confesseurs." It was a true bill of indictment, by Burns, against at least one of Doctor Hornbook's patients — no, patrons : " A countra laird had ta'en the bats. Or some curmurrin in his guts, His only son for Hornbook sets, An' pays him well. The lad; for twa guid gimmer pets. Was laird himsel." For a couple of ewes, in their second year, were this doctor's services at the son's absolute disposal, and one deadly dose was enough. * The general reader may call to niind how physician and confessor figure together, for evil purpose, in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, under the auspices of aspiring Aramis. For other reminders of deadly doctoring in fiction we may refer, in passing, to Zeluco's studied non-interference between physician and patient; to the leech of Folkestone in one of the (prose) Ingoldsby Legends ; to the significant " Je ne dis pas qu'il aida la nature et le douleur" with which Fr. Souhd connects "On fit appeler le m^decin pensionnd," in the case, so soon to terminate fatally, of Madame Destrames ; to ^but no ; space is wanting ; and we must abruptly come, like her, to a bad end. UNDIVULGED DISEASE, 189 I VI. DYING OF AN UNTOLD DISEASE. Hamlet, Act iv., Sc. i. Claudius compares his affected tolerance of Hamlet's mad goings on — ^his over-indulgence of those dangerous whims and fatal vagaries, which ought to have been checked at once, and once for all — to the mistaken pride or modesty of the sufferer from some mortal malady, which is thus allowed to run its course, undiscovered, to the bitter end. Himself the king charges, on the score of a too tender reserve and reti- cence, with letting the mischief gather to a head. He has not taken the proper steps in time, " But, like the owner of a foul disease, To keep it from divulging, let it feed Even on the pith of life." Occultare morbum funestum. We may apply alike what Ovid says on . the expediency of resisting first advances, a cure being attempted too late when through lingering hesitancy the malady has waxed strong, " Principiis obsta ; sero medicina paratur Cuiri mala per longas convaluere moras ; '' and what Horace says of the false shame of the foolish that makes them conceal their uncured, but otherwise not in- curable, wounds : "Stultorum incurata malus pudor ulcera celat." It is, in fact, historically speaking, a truism that Fitz- harding enunciates in The Curfew, where he alleges " there be patients Who, by a scant disclosure of their ills, (Either from foolish modesty or pride,]) Mock the physician's labour.'' Though by many the death of the Emperor Henry VH. so soon after receiving the eucharist from the hands of a Dominican monk, is ascribed to poison — and the particular poison named too, the juice of Napel — by others he is said igo UNDIVULGED DISEASE. to have been already attacked by a malady which he con- cealed.* Mary of Burgundy, dying within a few days of her fall from horseback, is said to have preferred death to the assumed indignity of examination by her medical attendants ; the daughter, like the father, as Michelet puts it, perishing through a point of honour. Anne of Austria seems rather to have tried to conceal, than to have succeeded in doing so, the acute suffering which was one day to have a fatal issue. More successful was Queen Caroline, consort of our George II., whom " false delicacy " induced to conceal from her attendants the malady which killed her. Her real disease being undivulged even to her physicians, they treated her complaint as gout in the stomach, and prescribed remedies which aggravated the evil (rupture). When it was at length discovered, the malady was already beyond their skill ; though one of the surgeons de- clared that, had he known it two days sooner, Her Majesty should have been walking about the next day. We may apply Horace again, with a wrench or twist of his meaning however : " Neu, si te populus sanum recteque valentem Dictitet, occultam febrem .... Dissimules, donee manibus tremor incidiat," and all through the J>udor malus, the false shame, stigmatized in the line previously quoted. The hard, proud side of this pudor is notably instanced in perhaps the most effective cha- racter-portrait ever drawn by Mrs. Gore, — the Mrs. Armytage, namely, of Female Domination, into the surmises of whose nearest friends it never entered that she was labouring under an agonizing and fatal disease. Tortured by pain, she was tortured still worse by the efforts necessary to repress its expression. To be above pain was thought manly by the Stoics, who did not see, observes Mr. Lewes, that, in this re- spect, instead of being above Humanity, they sank miserably * A carbuncle had manifested itself below the knee ; and a cold bath, which he took to calm the burning irritation, perhaps occasioned, suggests Sismondi, the Kaiser's sudden and unexpected death. UNDIVULGED DISEASE. igi below it ; for if it is a condition of our human organization to be susceptible of pain, it is only affectation to conceal the " expression " of that pain. " Could silence stifle pain, it were well ; but to stifle the cry, is not to stifle the feeling ; and to have a feeling, yet affect not to have it, is pitiful. The savage soon learns that philosophy ; but the civilized man is above it. You receive a blow, and you do not wince } So much of heroism is displayed by a stone." And stone enters largely into the composition of such a character as the one thus characterized in Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Violets — " And poor Mrs. Armytage, warning exaction, Sits arm-cHair'd for ever, a dread petrifaction." We are reminded of tim femme mourante, et qui cherche a mourir, the Phedre of Racine : " Phedre atteinte d'un mal qu'elle s'obstine a taire, Lasse enfin d'elle-meme et du jour qui I'&laire," — and of whom her closest confidante has this to allege, that " elle meurt dans mes bras d'un mal qu'elle me cache." Resolute the queen seemed to die and make no sign. In his account of the last illness and the death of his endeared friend, Froben the printer, who throughout his long life had never been laid up with sickness, Erasmus describes a serious fall he had had, six years previously, from the top of the stairs on a tiled floor,— the effects of which accident he was studious to conceal ; for Froben " was a man of such a high spirit that he was ashamed to let it be seen that he was in pain." Towards the last, two of the fingers of his right hand became paralysed, " showing that death was not far off; but this also he concealed, thinking it unmanly in any respect to give way to .disease." There may not have been much of the antique Roman in Gibbon's composition — meaning his personal or physical composition, not his com- position of the Decline and Fall, for there is plenty of antique Rome in that — but by Lord Sheffield's account he was fatally reticent in regard of the disease which carried him off. " I did not understand," writes his noble friend, "why he, who had talked with me on every other subject relative to himself 192, DYING OF AN^ UNTOLD DISEASE. and his affairs, without reserve, should never in any shape,, hint at a^ malady so troublesome ; but on speaking to his valet de chambre, he told me, Mr. Gibbon could not bear the least allusion to that subject, and never would suffer hini to notice it." " Although the disorder continued to increase gradually, and of late years very much indeed, he never men- tioned it to any person, however incredible it may appear, from 1761 to November 1793," when in effect it was too late. Yet was Edward Gibbon just the man to have appreciated to the full the spirit of Boilean's strain : " Mis^rables jouets de notre vanitd, Faisons au moins I'aveu de hotre infirmity. A quoi bon, quand la fifevre dans nos artferes brule, Faire de ajotre mal un secret ridicule .' * * * * * Quelle fausse pudeur k feindre vous oblige .■■ Qu'avez-vous .' Je n'ai rien. Mais . . . je n'ai rien, vous dis-je, Repondra ce malade d se taire obstinS, Mais cependant voili tout son corps gangrene." CHAPTER V. GERVINUS represents Friar Laurence as a kind of chorus expressing Shakspeare's own ethical ideas, and his opinions respecting the characters and action of his play. The answer to this notion is valid, that it is not Shakspeare's practice to expound the moralities of his artistic creations ; nor does he ever byjmeans of a chorus stand above and outside the men and women of his plays, who are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. " No ! Friar Laurence also is moving in the cloud, and misled by error as well as the rest." Professor Dowden forcibly contends that Shakspeare has never made the moderate, self-possessed, sedate person a final or absolute judge of the impulsive and the passionate; the one sees a side of truth which is unseen by the other ; but to neither is the whole truth visible. The Friar, we are reminded, had supposed that by virtue of his prudence, his moderation, his sage counsels, his amiable sophistries, he could guide these two young, passionate lives, and do away with the old traditions of enmity between the houses ; and there in the tomb of the Capulets is the return brought in by his investment of kindly scheming. " Shakspeare did not believe that the highest wisdom of human life was acquirable by mild, monastic meditation, and by gathering of simples in the coolness of the dawn. Friar Laurence, too, old man, had his lesson to learn." As Gervinus among the Germans, so Philarete Chasles, of the modern French school, regards the Friar as Shak- speare's ow nmouthpiece. Le vieil ermite is cited as a per- sonage " dont le seul emploi est de philosopher," and whose 13 194 FRIAR LAURENCE. voice, c'est la voix de Shakspeare, " qui apr^s avoir analyst curieusement les ames humaines, I'inanit^ de nos d^sirs et le terrible fin de nos passions consumdes par leur intensity, pousse un long et sublime gemissement."* In another of his books the French critic refers to the presence in the original story, of a mere complaisant priest, conveniently accommodating, who admits at one side of his confessional the lover, at the other his mistress, and who bestows his facile benediction on their interviews. Arthur Brooke made of this monk a facetious personage, a sort of jolly good fellow with a monomania for marriage-making. And what is he become in Shakspeare, as M. Chasles depicts him .' An aged, philosopher, whose wonder it is that the beatings of a youthful heart can stifle reason and prudence ; one whose white beard, mild visage, venerable air, and healthy lofty moral tone, accord well with his physical surroundings, t * Etudes sur le drame Espagnal, § iv. t Culling herbs, and moralizing on their several virtues, — it is plea- santly picturesque, the figure he presents in this pursuit. Foot-notes might run to seed in variegated illustration of this basketing of simples, — after the manner of Friar Laurence with his " osier cage," to be filled at daybreak with medicinal flowers. The Attendant Spirit in Comus brings to mind a certain shepherd lad, of small regard to see to, yet well skilled in every virtuous plant and healing herb that spreads her verdant leaf to the morning ray ; and this observant collector would " ope his leathern sgrip. And show me simples of a thousand names, Telling their strange and vigorous faculties." A century earlier had Thomas Tusser sung the praises of the " good hus- wife " who cultivates ' ' Cold herbs in her garden, for agues that burn, That over-strong heat to good temper may turn, '' etc. In Spenser's third book we see the aged nurse cull rue, and savine, and the flower of camphora, and calamint, and dill, — with as precise a know- ledge of their virtues as Southey's lolo could boast — " lolo, old lolo, he who knows The virtue of all herbs of mount or vale, Or greenwood shade, or quiet brooklet's bed." Latter-day critics of the " simples " by which George Herbert set so much store in his Country Parson, and the lore of which Gerarde details with such faith in his Herbal, affirm most of them to be wholly or compara- tively harmless, nay, perhaps even efficacious, if faith attend the using of FRIAR LAURENCE. i% Calm he is, for he lives with God. He neither derides human passions, nor overmuch blames them, — he is man of the world enough for that. " How prudent and how courageous he proves himself! How sensible he is that to irritate by opposition the longings and emotions, of his prot^gis is to augment their danger ! What admirable sympathy he shows with Romeo and with Juliet ! " Leur sympathie naive est a ses yeux un fragment sacre de la grande religion universelle." The father confessor is glad to be the fatherly confidant. In him the Montagues and the Capulets can alike confide, and to his counsel confi- dently resort. It is a happy function, that of playing the friendly arbiter and family referee : such as that " venerable Priest," described from the life by Scott, — " Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen, Show'd what in youth its glance had been ; them. But the faith and practice are made over mostly, nowadays, to ■' old women,'' of dubious gender. In the case of his Father Clement, as a sort of Laurentian amateur, Mr. Charles Reade shrewdly surmises that he killed nobody, for his remedies were " womanish and weak " — sage, and wormwood, hyssop, borage, spikenard, dog's-tongue, our Lady's mantle, feverfew, and Faith — and all in small quantities except the last. Sir Walter assigns a saving efficacy to the vulnerary plants and salves em- ployed by Noma of the Fitful Head. His Highland Widow too was skilful in the use of herbs, with which, knowing how to select as well as how to distil them, " she could relieve more diseases than a regular medical person could readily believe.'' And in Waverley, .3.^?i\Vi, there is an old Highlander equally expert in the collection and concoction of simples, — to whom the hero is indebted accordingly, after his accident in the stag-hunt. Mrs. Gaskell's old Alice Wilson. spends a whole day at a time in the fields, gathering, wild, herbs for drinks and medicine. Geoi^e Eliot's Silas Marner, the weaver of Raveloe, had inherited from his mother some acquaintance with medicinal herbs and their preparation, and with it a delight in roaming the fields in quest of foxglove and dandelion and coltsfoot. Hawthorne's Roger Chillingworth in his Indian captivity had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and, roots ; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own con- fidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating. Though there can be little doubt that a considerable amount of poisoning was mixed up with the witch 196 FRIAR LAURENCE. Whose doom discording neighbours sought, Content with equity unbought." Every one, according to Mr. Trollope, has some quiet, old, family, confidential friend ; a man given to silence, but of undoubted knowledge of the world, whose experience is vast, and who, though he has not risen in the world himself, is always the man to help others to do so. Sometimes one man, and none the less if he has risen in the world, plays this part of guide, philosopher, and friend to numerous clients, and is in large request as umpire, arbiter, and judicious if not judicial referee. He then approximates to the position of a Bishop Sanderson, whose " poor but contented privacy of life, his casuistical learning, peaceful moderation, and sincerity," as Izaak Walton words it, attracted so many applicants for counsel and consolation, cases of old, it is, on the other hand, says Mr. Lecky, equally certain that the witches constantly employed their knowledge of the property of herbs for the purpose of curing disease, and that they attained, in this respect, a skill which was hardly equalled by the regular practitioners. They had Friar Laurence's acquaintance ' ' With baleful weeds, and precious-juicfed flowers . . . Many for many virtues excellent, None but for some, and yet all different." Chiron, in thfe second part of Goethe's Faust, professes to have long since resigned his leech-craft "to simple-culling beldames and to friars;"— and Fuller observes that, " in all times, in the opinion of the multitude, witches, old women, and impostors have had a competition with physicians." Holy George Herbert accounted the Parson's Completeness incomplete unless a knowledge of simples were mastered and put to use — " to know what herbes may be used instead of drugs of the same nature, and to make the garden the shop. . . . For salves, his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her garden and fields before all outlandish gums. And surely nyssope, valerian, mercury, adder's tongue, yerrow, melilot, and Saint John's wort, made into a salve ; and elder, camomile, mallowes, com- phrey, and sraallage, made into a poultice, have done great and rare cures." It is the honest boast of Cooper's old Leatherstocking, to the prejudice of a more regular practitioner, — " I have "yarbs that will heal the wound quicker than all his foreign 'intments." One glance will suffice at the Costanza of Mrs. Hemans : " 'Midst leaves and flowers She dwelt, and knew all secrets of their powers. All nature's balms, wherewith her gliding tread FRIAR LAURENCE. ig^ for direction and instruction in righteousness — the way to go right, or to get back into the right path again. George Eliot submits that the middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half-passionate, and not merely contem- plative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self- despair. " Most of us, at some period in our young lives, would have welcomed a priest of that natural order in any sort of canonicals or uncanonicals."* Such an uncanonical priest Mr. Disraeli's Armine family have in Adrian Glaston- bury, whose patience, and vigilant care, and ever-ready sympathy are to them of such inestimable service. Loved as a father, he exercises over disquieted youth an almost To the sick peasant on his lowly bed Came and brought hope." Half a glance will be enough at a reverend figure in a dramatic fragment of Coleridge's, — enough at least to recall our Laurentian type : " A Friar, who gathered simples in the wood, A gray-haired man," who took as much interest in the fortunes of a young favourite, as did Shakspeare's Franciscan in those of the Veronese lovers. Taking Friar Laurence for the representative of a class, Charles Knight, in his rather too conjectural biography of Shakspeare, reminds us that the Infirmarist of a monastic house, who had charge of the sick brethren, was often in the early days of medical science their sole physician ; and as the book-knowledge and the experience of such a valuable member of a conventual body would still allow him to exercise useful functions when thrust into the world, it is suggested that the young Shakspeare may have known some kindly old man, full of axiomatic wisdom, and sufficiently confident in his own management, like the well-meaning Friar Laurence. * Maggie TuUiver is described as having, " like most of us," had to scramble upwards into all the difficulties of nineteen, without such aid. But, later in her history, Maggie has her Dr. Kenn to turn to ; and to him, as Juliet to the Friar, she resorts accordingly, with a look of childlike directness, saying, " I want to tell you everything." " Do tell me every- thing," Dr. Kenn said, with quiet kindness in his grave firm voice : " Think of me as one to whom a long experience has been granted, which may enable him to help you." — The iSIill on the Floss, Book vi., chap. ix. ; and Book vii., chap. ii. 198 FRIAR LAURENCE. irresistible influence. There is something more to remind us of Friar Laurence in what we read of his becoming the depository of painful family secrets, and placed " in a position which made equivocation on his part almost a necessity." Of another mould is that Dr. Paulus whose curiosity in other people's affairs made him so ready a mediator in them, — any new experience, any unusual incident, being to him so much raw material of sociological speculation ; who enjoyed a puzzle — especially a puzzle involving strange mental and moral conditions ; and who, understanding life thoroughly, knew how much that is mysterious, oblique, and inconsistent is mixed up with the ordinary course of existence. Cole- ridge's old friend, Mr. Peole, of Nether Stowey, is a good specimen of the plain, straightforward, practical, friendly referee, as described by De Quincey, who signalizes his entire self-dedication to the service of his humble fellow-countrymen, the hewers of wood and drawers of water in that southern part of Somersetshire ; he being for many miles round the general arbiter of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their difficulties — like William of Deloraine, good at need, — like George Eliot's ideal, that very present help in time of trouble, a natural priest, without canonicals, — like the Doctor Aston of another novelist, who had become the confidential friend of all his patients, and was sent for by them as often to allay family irritation as to heal recognized bodily ailments. Sir Arthur Helps describes his Thurston as one of those men in whom all people are prone to confide — who go through life, listening to innumerable secrets — indeed for whom there are no secrets ; who are confided in, not so much from the expectation of sympathy, as from the certainty of whatever you tell them being understood and appreciated — though perhaps there is little difference between understanding and sympathizing. To our motley gathering of confidants, casuists, family arbiters, and the like, may be added such representative men as Herr Professor Gellert, who had sheaves of letters daily, about affairs of the conscience, of the household, of the heart • and Monsieur Diderot pire, as Carlyle depicts him, of great FRIAR LAURENCE. 1 99 humanity, of great insight and discretion, " so that he was often chosen as umpire and adviser ; " and George Washing- ton too, who, long before he had made a name, '' assumed trusts at the solicitation of friends, and was in much request as an arbitrator " — even at school George had been that. And do we not read of Njal, the Burnt Njal of the Icelandic Saga, that he was " of good counsel and ready to give it ; . . . gentle and generous, he unravelled every man's knotty points who came to see him about them" ? Not wider than deep and lasting is the influence of such an authority as; Wordsworth has pictured, among the hill folk of the lakes : " To him appeal was made as to a judge ; Who, with an understanding heart allay'd The perturbation, Ustening to the plea ; Resolved the dubious point ; and sentence gave So grounded, so applied, that it was heard With soften'd spirit, even when it condemn'd." ***** There is something to remind us of Friar Laurence in the Father Clement of Scott's historical romance,^that " best and kindest man in the world," so Simon Glover charac- terizes him, " with a comfort for every man's grief, a counsel for every man's difficulty, the rich man's surest guide, and the poor man's trustiest friend." Coleridge, in his seventh lecture, made Friar Laurence his text for a homily on the different manner in which Shakspeare has treated the priestly character, as compared with other writers, — with Beaumont and Fletcher, for instance, in whose plays " priests are re- presented as a vulgar mockery," the errors of the few being mistaken for the habit of the many ; while in Shakspeare they always carry with them our love and respect. " He made no injurious abstracts ; he took no copies from the worst parts of our nature ; and, like the rest, his characters of priests are truthfully drawn from the general body." Sound critics are in the main agreed that his religion was as catholic as his genius ; for a mind so august was never yet tenanted by the sour spirit of sectarianism. Macaulay has expatiated on the remarkable manner in which the 2CX5 SHAKSPEARE'S FRIARS. greatest and most popular dramatists of the Elizabethan age treat religious subjects : they speak respectfully of the funda- mental doctrines of Christianity ; but they speak neither like Romanists nor like Protestants, but like persons who are wavering between the two systems, or who have made a system for themselves out of parts selected from both. He affirms almost every member of a religious order whom they introduce, to be a holy and venerable man, — nothing in their plays resembling the coarse ridicule with which the Roman faith and its ministers were assailed, two generations later, by dramatists who wished to please the multitude. " The partiality of Shakspeare for Friars is well known." Hartley Coleridge takes his intellect to have been not only representative of the State, but of the Church — since it was not only in just and balanced proportion (monarchical, aris- tocratical, and popular), but metaphysical too, and in some ^ort theological. - Not that he turned the theatre into a conventicle — he wrote neither sermons nor sacred dramas (so called) — nor does he abound in allusions to the religious disputes of the time. " I doubt not he was a good Protestant^ malgre the, purgatory of Hamlet's Ghost, and the very favourable specimen of monastic virtues exhibited in Friar Laurence." As a lay poet, he wisely and reverently ab- stained from frequent allusions to religion, either in comic or serious vein ; but his genius is argued to have been theo- logical, in this respect, and to this extent, that in fathoming the abyss of human ndture, he transcended nature, and ex- plored the hidden regions of the soul, — discovered instincts, prophetic yearnings, unutterable vacuities of spirit, which nothing in the sensible or intellectual world can satisfy or fulfil. This nevertheless is the poet of whom Michelet made the memorable affirmation, or negation rather, — " As far as I recollect, the name of God does not occur in Shakspeare, or, if it does, it is rarely, and by chance, and unaccompanied by the shadow of a religious sentiment." Had M. Michelet ever come across the two most celebrated soliloquies in Shakspeare, — that of Hamlet, and that of the fallen Cardinal Wolsey.' B'AS SHAKSPEARE A PROTESTANT? 201 That Shakspeare, amidst the rancour of religious parties, should take a delight in painting the condition of a monk, and should always represent his influence as beneficial, is deemed worthy of special remark by the elder Schlegel, who is thankful to find in him none of the black and knavish monks all too common in later poets. Shakspeare merely gives his monks an inclination to busy themselves in the affairs of others, after renouncing the world for themselves ; with respect, however, to pious frauds, he does not represent them as very conscientious* " II est peintre de la nature humaine au fond, sans acception ni preoccupation de culte, de dogme fixe, d'interpr6tation formelle." t Whether Shakspeare was a Protestant has been debated and answered to the satisfaction of both sections of con- tending zealots. Impartial and intelligent criticism sees and says that Shakspeare's poetry, resting upon a purely human basis, is not a rendering into art of the dogmas of either Catholicism or Protestantism. It says that Shak- speare himself, a great artistic nature, framed for manifold joy and pain, may, like other artists, have had no faculty for the attainment of certitude upon extra-mundane and superhuman matters ; of concrete moral facts he had the clearest perception, but we do not find that he was inte- rested, at least as an artist, in truths or alleged truths which transcend the limits of human experience. It says that to Shakspeare there seemed a profound significance, which might almost be called religious, in the fact that the world suggests inquiries which cannot be answered, mysteries which confront and baffle us, ignorance compassing about our knowledge, and darkness our light. But studiously as Shakspeare abstains from embodying theological dogma in his art, and tolerant as his spirit is, it is certain. Professor Dowden maintains, that the spirit of Protestantism, — of * " Such are the parts acted by the monk in Romeo and Juliet, and another in Much Ado about Nothing, and even by the Duke [in Measure for Measure], whom, contrary to the well-known proverb, the cowl seems really to make a monk." — A, W. Schlegel, Dramatic Art, xxiv. t Sainte-Beuve : Port-litt., ii. 11. 202 WAS SHAKSPEARE A PROTESTANT? Protestantism considered as portion of a great movement of humanity, — animates and breathes through his writings ; and indeed, unless he had , stood in antagonism to his time, it could not be otherwise. " Shakspeare's creed is not a series of abstract statements of truth, but a body of concrete impulses, tendencies, and habits." The spirit of his faith, it is justly urged, is not to be ascertained by bringing together little sentences from the utterances of this one of his dramatis personcB_ and of that — a method by which he might be proved (as Birch tried to prove him) an atheist.* Rather would the true student of his Mind and Art essay to dis- cover the faith by which Shakspeare lived, by noting the total issue and resultant of his art towards the fostering and sustenance of a certain type of human character. " It may be asserted, without hesitation, that the Protestant type of character, and the Protestant polity in state and nation^ is that which has received impulse and vigour from the mind of the greatest of English poets." What are the habits of thought and feeling which belong more especially to the Protestant ideal of manhood .' " Energy, devotion to the fact, self-government, tolerance, a disbelief in minute apparatus for the improvement of human character, an indifference to externals in comparison with that which is of the invisible life, and a resolution to judge all things from a human standpoint," — and these are truly alleged to grow upon us as habits of thought and feeling, as long as Shakspeare remains an influence with us in the building up of character. There are certain problems, it is elsewhere pointed out, which Shakspeare at once pronounces insoluble. " He does not, like Milton, propose to give any account of the origin of evil." Here, upon the earth, evil is — such was Shakspeare's declaration in the most emphatic accent: I ago actually exists. How lago can be, and why Cordelia lies strangled upon the breast of Lear, — it is a portion of the " severity " of Shakspeare to decline all answers to such questions as * Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakspeare, 1848. HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS DOGMA. ■203 these. " Is ignorance painful ? Well, then, it is painful. Little solutions of your large difficulties can readily be obtained from priest or philosophe. Shakspeare prefers to let you remain in the solemn presence of a mystery. He does not invite you into his little church or his little library brilliantly illuminated by philosophical or theological rush- lights. You remain in the darkness. But you remain in the open air. And the great night is overhead." So with history, its use and meaning, as expounded by Mr. Froude, who remarks that in the writings of those historians to whom the world has given the highest place, we iind nothing didactic at all ; in proportion as their perceptions are distinct, any special moral disappears out of their records ; they were content to depict what they saw in its naked simplicity, and were great because they did so. Their philosophy, if they had any, he says, was one rather of suspense than of conviction ; and in their hands, as in those of Homer or of Shakspeare, human life was an unresolved mystery, yielding many morals, but none which adequately explain it, none which leave upon the mind any certain conviction of its destiny or its nature. Mr. Lewes likens Shakspeare to Goethe in being a decided realist, — ■ content to let his pictures of life carry their own moral with them : he uttered no " moral verdict ; " he was no Chorus preaching on the text of what he pictured ; hence we cannot gather from his works what his opinions were. Schiller in early life was "indignant at his coldness." " It was insufferable to me that this poet gave me nothing of himself" * Of Shakspeare may be said what Campbell said of Homer, that, like Nature, he is fruitfuKin creating characters, and, like her, impartial in distributing and in- * Philarfete Chasles found a charm in what repelled Schiller. " II y a dans Shakspeare non pas un scepticisroe systematique, mais une absence de parti pris sur toutes choses, qui rend la lecture de ses drames fort attrayante pour nous, alors meme que nous ne comprenons ni la po^sie de ses tableaux, ni la finesse de son dessein, ni la profondeur de ses observations sur le caract^re humain.!'— £/»(/« sur h drame Espagnol, § vii. 204' SHAKSPEARE'S RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE. trusting virtues to contending parties.* Scott has been compared to him, in regard of their general and almost universal sympathies, leading to impartial and kindly views of all men and all opinions, the most remote from their own.-f To others he seems unfavourably to outdo even Claudian in what the Quarterly Review called that poet's " extraordinary religious indifference." A couplet from Dryden's prologue to the Don Sebastian might to them appear applicable to Shakspeare : " Jove was alike to Latian and to Phrygian ; And you well know, a play's of no religion.'' Or there might be preferred the scope of the last stanza in Mr. Tennyson's Palace of Art, — " I care not what the sects may brawl ; * " 11 ne prend aucun parti dans les agitations politiques de I'Angle- terre. Les puritains ont levd la tete, et il n'est pas puritain ; les catho- liques se rdvoltent et il n'est pas catholique," etc. — Chasles, Etudes sur t Antiquitd, § i. In his Marginalia on King Henry VIII., Hartley Coleridge lays stress on the great prudence with which Shakspeare avoided allusion to the reli- gious disputes of the time ; and claims for him, both as a writer and as a man, more of that unromantic quality than some people deem compatible with lofty genius :■ — we never hear of his coming in collision with the Master of the Revels, or bringing the wrath of court or city upon his pro- fession. Nor would he use the privilege of the stage to catch the popular sympathies for his likes or dislikes. Friar Laurence was no doubt inter alios in Hartley's mind when he elsewhere observes of Shakspeare, that wherever any character appears, simply as the representative of his vocation, the representative man is always endued with honour and dignity : the friar, the judge, the phy- sician, are, each in their several capacities, worthy and reverend members of society : — if individuals of any profession be held up to scorn 6t laughter, the ridicule is always so individualized and circumscribed that it cannot diffuse itself over the profession in general. t " The excrescences and superfoetations of my own church most freely do I yield up to his censure ; for while in his Abbot Boniface, his Friar Tuck, and his intriguing Rashleigh, he has justly stigmatized monastic laziness, and denounced ultramontane duplicity, he has not forgotten to exhibit the bright reverse of the Roman medal, but has done full measure of justice to the nobler inspirations of oui: cxGQA."—Religues of Father Prout. WAS SHAKSPEARE A '.SCEPTIC f 2oS I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all." Shakspeare's plays, observes an able anonymous critic, convey the general impression that the controversies of his day led him to leave on one side the restraints of definite creeds of all kinds, and to take an artistic, enjoying, sympathetic view of human life, altogether apart from theology, not to say alien to it. "There is in his writings much more nature than grace." If Mr. Carlyle once styled Dante the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism, so has he called Shak- speare the still more melodious Priest of a true Catholicism, the Universal Church of the Future and of all times. No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion. But, " I cannot call this Shakspeare a ' Sceptic,' as some do ; his indifference to the creeds and theological quarrels of his time misleading them — No ; neither unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism ; nor sceptic, though he says little about his Faith. Such ' indifference ' was the fruit of his greatness withal : his whole heart was in his grand sphere of worship (we may call- it such) ; these other controversies, vitally important to other men, were not vital to him." Elsewhere the same pen suggests as one of the similarities between Shakspeare and Goethe, the majestic calmness of both ; their perfect tolerance for all men and all things, — in either case proceed- ing from the same source, perfect clearness of vision. A discerning spirit would qualify the freedom with which we are accustomed to speak of the tenderness, the infinite tolerance of the genius of Shakspeare, by a reminder that any impartial student must surely be no less impressed by the unyielding justice of Shakspeare, his stern fidelity to fact ; and by the large demands he makes upon human character. By much of our passionate intolerance founded upon prejudice, and personal or class feeling, Shakspeare, as Professor Dowden affirms, remained wholly untouched : when we come to him, and miss our own little bitternesses and violences, and find him so large and human, we naturally describe him as tolerant. But his tolerance is shown to 206 SHAKSPEARE'S ETHICAL STANDPOINT. be nothing else but justice ; and even his humour, the humour of a man framed for abundant joy and sorrow, has in it something of severity; because he employs it to recover himself from the narrowing intensity of his enthusiasms, and to restore him to the level of every-day facts. " In the characters of the weak or the wicked whom he condemns, Shakspeare denies no beautiful or tender trait; but he condemns them without reprieve." The question is put, shall we hesitate to admit that there was a Timon in the breast of Shakspeare .'' We are accustomed, the questioner alleges, to speak of Shakspeare's gentleness and tolerance so foolishly, that we find it easier to conceive of him as indulgent towards baseness and wickedness, than as feeling measureless rage and indignation against them ■ — rage and indignation which would sometimes flash beyond their bounds, and strike at the whole wicked race of man. Certain as it confessedly is that Shakspeare's delight in human character, and his quick and penetrating sympathy with almost every variety of man, saved him from any per- sistent injustice towards the world, " it can hardly be doubted that the creator of Hamlet, of Lear, of Timon, saw clearly, and felt deeply, that there is a darker side to the world and to the soul of man." It has been said that, after all, anybody can enforce the moral view of conduct and character, while it needs both a certain faculty of poetic vision, and a very wide range of human sympathy such as we do not secure in conjunction once in a generation, to reproduce a character and to judge it, or maybe de- liberately to abstain from judging it, in all its diversified completeness. Hence, argues a dissertator on the ethical standard of character, hence the charm of the greatness of Shakspeare, who is never distinctly moral, yet whose power of attraction is infinite, because he takes character all round, high and low, austere and jocund, in every shade, and with fulness of every quality. " Above all things, he is not careful to refer character to any standard at all, but only to present it as it is ; and this is why the poet has so much greater power over mankind than the professed moralist, HIS ALL-COMPREHENDING SPIRIT. 207 though the one aims directly and urgently after the improve- ment of his fellows, and the other, when at his best, works without any such aim." So again Professor Lowell takes Shakspeare's moral to be the moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature. Cole- ridge's assertion that Shakspeare, as it were, identified himself with everything except the vicious, met with this objection on the part of his friend Crabb Robinson, — that if Shakspeare's " becoming " a character is to be determined by the truth and vivacity of his delineation, he had " become " some of the vicious characters as well as the virtuous. Balzac's glorification at the hands of M. Taine, on the ground that, by rising above moral trammels, he paints men and passions as they are, is an offence to those who believe Balzac to paint his characters as they would be if morality did not exist. If, it is argued, in the artist's 'eye every sort of infamy is merely matter of curiosity, it surely follows that the artist has a distorted and imperfect conception of human nature : a really great artist will not only show his characters correctly, but will judge them correctly, and love and hate them according to their deserts, and lead the reader to do so too, just as " Shakspeare hated Richard III. notwithstanding his great qualities, and loved Henry V. with all his faults." None the less to be distinguished • in him is what Carlyle terms " an all-comprehending spirit," — skilled, as if by personal experience, in all the modes of human passion and opinion, and therefore tolerant of all ; peaceful, collected ; fighting for no class of men or principles ; rather looking on the world, and the various battles waging in it, with the quiet eye of one already reconciled to the futility of their issues : " allowing men and things of every shape and hue to have their own free scope in his conception, as they have it in the world where Providence has placed them." Shaftesbury says of Homer, in the Characteristics, that he " censures no manners, makes no encomiums, nor gives characters himself ; but brings his actors still in view. 'Tis they who show 2o8 SHAKSPEARBS ETHICAL STANDPOINT. themselves." So an American expositor alleges of Shak- speare that he is, above all other poets, distinguished for never explaining his characters : he creates them, sets them before us in speech and action, and then leaves it to us to find them out — ^just as in real life we have to study the characters and tempers of actual men and women, and often without actually knowing them. " It is this which con- stitutes the self-forgetting intrepidity of the genuine artist, disdaining to be his own commentator." Philardte Chasles describes him as judging men with a chill indifference that desolates, and a profundity that terrifies — discovering the slightest foible in the loftiest virtue, the faintest tinge of virtue in the most criminal soul, and never at the pains to draw any conclusion from the discovery. A " lordly spectacle," Mr. Carlyle calls it, how this great soul takes in all "kinds of men and objects, sets them forth to us in their round completeness ; loving, just, the equal brother of all. " No twisted, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all' objects with its own convexities and concavities ; a perfectly level mirror ; — that is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man." In the last letter he ever wrote — it was to Sir Robert Peel — Thomas Hood did homage to that " catholic Shakspearian sympathy, which felt with king as well as peasant, and duly estimated the mortal temptations of both stations." Hazlitt declared Shakspeare to be in one sense the least moral of all writers ; since morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies ; and his genius consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. Hence, if, in one sense, Shakspeare' was no moralist at all ; in another, he was the greatest of all moralists— a moralist^in the sense in which nature is one: he taught what he had learned from her ; he showed the greatest knowledge of humanity, with the greatest fellow- feeling for it.* * In another place Hazlitt tells us that Shakspeare "never committed, himself to his characters ; " that he trifled, laughed^ or wept with them as " SHAKSPEARE?S RELIGIOUS CREED. 209 A thoughtful man must, to Archbishop Trench's thinking, be often deeply struck with the immeasurable advantage for being the great poet of all humanity, of all ages and all people, which Shakspeare possessed in being a Protestant. For although at the first blush of the matter there may be a temptation to conclude otherwise, — to fancy him at a dis- advantage, shut out, as he thus was, from the rich mythology, the gorgeous symbolism, the manifold legend, and from many other sources of interest which a poet of the Roman Catholic Church would command, — yet, whatever losses might thereby be his, whatever springs and sources of poetry might be closed to him on this account, — all this was countervailed by far greater gains. Some impartial critics, indeed, are even yet undecided whether Rome and the Vatican have not as good a right to call him son as Lambeth or Fulham. Sound English churchmen there are who own themselves not entirly convinced by Bishop Wordsworth's* vindication of him as an orthodox divine and a true member of the Anglican Church. But none of these will deny that he held in respect such forms of Christianity as presented themselves to him, and was free from the intemperate spirit of those brother playwrights who scrupled not to assail the Puritans, or to put their villains into gown and cassock. Shakspeare's genius, says one of Dr. Wordsworth's reviewers, was too universal in its complexion for theological malevolence : he has no Aminadab Holdfast, no Friar Dominic, among his dramatis personce, no tonsured sorcerers like Friar Bungay : even heathen priests, when he had need of them, are decently handled by him ; — he evidently felt that, under any garb, honest ministers of religion are not proper objects for satire. he chose ; had no prejudices for or against them ; and was seemingly indifferent whether he should be in jest or earnest. He saw both sides of a question, and was at once an actor and spectator in the scene. * Charles, of St. Andrew's ; not Christopher, of Lincoln. 14 CHAPTER VL ^jtm iittitts n^an ^xx ia iattriag on it. § I- TANTALIZING TABLE TALK. Taming of the Shrew, Act iv., Sc. 3. G RUM 10, the man, has a mind to ape Petruchio, his master, as well as to play into his master's hands, in the taming of a shrew, his mistress. Hunger is a taming influence, though it may, in excess, become a maddening one ; and Grumio amuses himself with alternately exciting and frustrating, inciting and disappointing, egging on and then thrusting back, the hungry lady's cravings. He tantalizes her to the top of his bent, — makes a very Tantalus * of her * ' ' When to the water he his lip applies, Back from his lip the treacherous water flies. Above, beneath, around his hapless head J Trees of all kinds delicious fruitage spread ; . . . . The fruit he strives to seize ; but blasts arise. Toss it on high, and whirl it to the skies." So figures Tantalus in the Stygian shades as visited by Odysseus. We are reminded of him in Dante's Adamo of Brescia, as seen in the Inferno, all fevered and athirst : the rills that glitter down the grassy slopes of Casentino, making fresh and soft the banks whereby they glide to Arno's stream, stand ever in his view ; and more the pictured semblance dries him up, than does the disease itself from which he suffers. Byron has a stirring battle-field picture, of some who " too near that rolling torrent lie, Whose waters mock the lip of those that die." Well may Horace say Quid rides? to whoso inclines to grin at his picture of Tantalus "a labris sitiens fugientia captans Flumina." Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur, he adds ; and the passage may, or must, have been in Mr. Emerson's mind when he wrote, in his essay on History, " Tantalus is DINING UPON AIR. 211 to feed his mirth with her unfed emptiness. Great expec- tations he raises in her, appetizing propositions he suggests to her, not that she may have a good dinner, but that he may have a good laugh. " Gru. What say you to a neat's foot ">. Kath. 'Tis passing good, I pr'ythee let me have it. Gru. I fear it is too choleric a meat : How say you to a fat tripe, finely broil'd ? Kath. I like it well ; good Grumio, fetch it me. Gru. I cannot tell ; I fear 'tis choleric. What say you to a piece of beef, and mustard? Kath. A dish that I do love to feed upon. Gru. Ay, but the mustard is too hot a little. Kath. Why, then the beef, and let the mustard rest. Gru. Nay, then, I will not ; you shall have the mustard, Or else you get no beef of Grumio. Kath. Then both, or one, or anything thou wilt. Gru. Why, then the mustard without the beef. Kath. Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave ; {Beats him. That feed'st me with the very name of meat." And if Katharine boxed the varlet's ears, who shall very much blame her ? Was there not a box on the ear bestowed by Schacabac on the Barmecide, at the sham feast promoted by the latter in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments .? Such but a name for you and me," — as meaning the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. Egens benignce Tantalus semper dapis, is another Horatian reference. There is a touch of him — though off at the tangent, or indeed at nothing tangible — in the love's labour lost of the Ovidian Narcissus ; the English is Addison's : — ''To the cold waters oft he joins his lips, Oft catching at the beauteous shade he dipa His arms, as often from himself he slips." It is only for a French poet in his cups to have a vision of Tantale ivre mort, dead drunk. Yet Bdranger was a water-drinker. Balzac has a vigorous simile to suggest how Delphine loved Rastignac, "autant que Tantale aurait aimd I'ange qui serait venu satisfaire sa faim, ou dtancher la soif de son gosier dessdchd." What creature ever fed worse than hoping Tantalus ? is Bosola's question in The Duchess of Malfi. Theophilus in The Virgin Martyr gloats on this among other picturesque tortures by him inflicted ; " Two hundred rammed in the earth To the 212 TANTALIZING TABLE-TALK. a box on the ear as made the Barmecide fall down, and deprecate another, which Schacabac's uplifted arm had quite ready: the result being that the long-suffering guest was treated by his tantalizing host to a profusion of the dainties, in reality, which he had been so obsequiously eating in fancy. As complaisant the ahungered visitor had been up to the moment of the soufflet, as the guests of Elia's Captain Jackson had by constraint of courtesy to be, when they sat at table with that gallant veteran, and saw with their bodily eyes Vi'hat seemed a bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented; while in the revelling inragination of their host — "the mind, the mind, Master Shallow," — whole beeves armpits, and full platters round about them. But far enough for reaching. Eat, dogs, ha ! ha ! ha ! " Mephistopheles in Faust's long gown promises (aside) the experience of Tantalus to his presuming pupil : ' ' And, as in mockery of his greedy haste, Viands shall hang his craving Hps beyond, — Vainly he'll seek refreshment, anguish-tost." Coleridge tenderly pities that selfsame experience in the Ass he " hailed brother, spite of the fool's scorn "—tethered as the poor beast was in so tantalizing a way— chained to a log within a narrow spot, where the close- eaten grass could scarce be seen, while sweet around him waved the tempting green. When in partial response to the screams for " Water ! water 1 " in the Black Hole at Calcutta some skins of the precious fluid were brought to the window, they proved too large to pass through the iron bars, and the sight of this relief, so near and yet withheld, says one historian, served only to infiiriate and wellnigh madden the miserable captives, who began to fight and trample one another down, striving for a nearer place to the window, and for a few drops of the water ; all to the amusement of the guards, who, so far from pitying, or trying to relieve the suiferers, held up hghts to the bars, with fiendish glee, to discern the ensemble, the mel^e, more clearly. As coolly these "assistants" at the performance took it, as Alcibiades m Macaulay's Athenian Revels takes, by imaginative anti- cipation, the anguish of Speusippus, when he shall " sit starved and thirsty m the midst of fruit and wine like Tantalus. Poor fellow t I think I see your face as you are springing up to the branches and missino- your aim." Legendary is the doom poetized in the Indian Fount, for him who has once gazed on those illusory waters : " Earth has no spring to quench the thirst That semblance in his soul shall wake, FANCY SAUCE AT DINNER-TIME. 213 were spread before them — hecatombs — no end appeared to the profusion. We are reminded of the blow the Barmecide got, when Ben Jonson's Fly presently follows up the line, " He shall think he sees his horse eat half a bushel," with the afterthought, " But, coz, have a care of understanding horses, Horses with angry heels." Not to every temper is it given to exercise imagination on short commons after the manner of John Baptist Cavalletto in the Marseilles prison, when he ate his bit of dry bread with a relish by the help of his fancy sauce. " I can cut my bread so — like a melon. Or so — like an omelette. Or so — like a fried fish. Or so — like Lyons sausage." Triplet, starving playwright, without design or For ever pouring thro' his dreams The gush of those untasted streams. Bright, bright in many a rocky urn The waters of our deserts lie. Yet at their source his lip shall bum, Parch'd with the fever's agony." The shipwrecked boat's crew in Mr. Charles Reade's Foul Play have their tortures aggravated by the sight of abundance. They drift over coral rocks, and can see five fathoms down, so exquisitely clear the water ; can discern small fish drifting over the bottom, upon the driving cloud of which every now and then, porpoises and dog-fish break in and take their fill. " All this they saw, and yet could not catch one of those billions for their lives. Thus they were tantalized as well as starved," One man goes mad anon ; and as his madness grows upon him, it takes a turn by no means uncommon in such cases : he sees before him sumptuous feasts, and streams of fresh water flowing. " These he began to describe with great volubility and rapture, smacking his lips, and exulting ; and so he went on tantalizing them till noon." As in Milton, ' ' of itself the water flies All taste of living wight, as once it fled The lip of Tantalus," Hardly inferior the torment described in a later book of the Paradise Zwi", of those who " greedily plucked the fruitage fair to sight," — "Oft they essayed, hunger and thirst constraining," only to fill their mouths with ashes : "Thus were they plagued and worn with famine." Nothing so tormenting, rules a divine of Milton's age, as hope snuffed off with disappointment and frustration. And were it lawful to wish an enemy completely miserable. Doctor South would wish that enemy of his might vehemently desire, and never enjoy ; if seemingly ever on the point of enjoyment, or within reach of it, so much the belter, — because, for the tantalized victim, so much the worse. 214 TANTALIZING TABLE-TALK. malice aforethought, tantalizes his wife and children by reading to them, from the manuscript, as he goes on com- posing his piece, a grand idea of a sumptuous banquet at which all his dramatis personse are present: "Music, sparkling wine, massive plate, rose-water in the hand-glasses, soup, fish, — shall I have three sorts of fish ? I will ; they are cheap in this market Ah, Fortune, you wretch, here at least I am your master, and I'll make you know it — venison [Triplet therefore goes on writing], game, pickles and provocatives in the centre of the table," etc. Even such another feast Caleb Balderstone promised, or threatened to promise, A posteriori, to the visitors at Wolf's Crag, despite the protests of his master, to whom he uttered the partly cautionary, partly defiant aside, " If ye let me gang on quietly, I'se be moderate in my banquet ; but if ye contradict me, deil but I dress ye a dinner fit for a duke!" And what. was the dinner he did dress, out of nothing, for the amused and incredulous Ashtons? "Nae muckle provision — might hae served four persons of honour, — first course, capons in white broth — roast kid — bacon with reverence — second course, roasted leveret, butter crabs, a veal florentine — third course, blackcock, . . . plumdamas, a tart, a flam, and some nonsense sweet things and comfits," etc. The peculiar determination of Caleb's manner in detailing his imaginary banquet, excited the almost Homeric laughter of the company ; but he stood his ground with a grave, angry, and scornful dignity which but increased their mirth — priding himself as he did on " a description of a dinner," as he afterwards said to Mysie, "That wad hae made a fu' mare hungry, and them to sit there laughing at it!" But some Barmecide idealists come off with a blow instead of a laugh, when it is hungry folk they are dealing with. To be let off with a broad grin, is a light sentence, compared with such a sound cuff as that of Schacabac's which felled his man. When Ludovico di Varthema was on his travels in the East, within the first decade of the sixteenth century, his position at Aden was so perilous that he pretended to be mad ; and the pretence must have been trying to his digestive DINING UPON AIR. 21 S powers, for,, says he, "these dogs brought me some pieces of marble, saying, ' Eat, this is sugar,' and some others gave me grapes filled with earth, and said that it was salt, and I ate the marbles and the grapes and everything, all together." His teeth must have beeri a miraculous set, unless the marble was chalk. Miraculous too must have been the lively Venetian's faculty of accommodating himself to his lot, and making the best of a decidedly bad one. Marble would try any one's temper as well as teeth. Organisms unendowed with a gizzard might even prefer dining with Duke Humphrey. Better a light dinner upon, say, nothing at all. Such a dinner as George Herbert suggests in the suggestive phrase, "nothing between two dishes." From another devout lyric of holy George's we may cite a stanza also to our purpose : " Hungry I was, and had no meat : I did conceit a most delicious feast ; I had it straight, and did as truly eat As ever did a welcome guest." Average mankind would incline rather, and a good deal sooner, to say with Orlando in Arden, " I can live no longer by thinking." The baser sort are of one mind, generally, with Psyllus the slave, in Lilly's Campaspe, who has no patience with counterfeits : " I serve Apelles, who feedeth me as Diogenes does Manes ; for at dinner, the one preacheth abstinence, the other commendeth counterfeiting. When I would eat meat, he paints a spit ; and when I thirst, ' Oh,' saith he, ' is not this a fair pot } ' and points to a table which contains the banquet of the gods, where are many dishes to feed the eye, but not to fill the gut." Psyllus plays on the word counterfeiting,— which (as in Hamlet) means painting ; but the word is hateful to him, as well as the thing ; he would prefer surfeit and surfeiting to counterfeit and counterfeiting. When the Rev. James Townley's High Life below Stairs was played in Dublin, Knipe the comedian, wit and bott vivant in one, feasted by anticipation on the good roast fowl and bottle of wine at supper in the last scene ; but the property-man was, like Mrs. John Gilpin, of a frugal 2 1 6- TANTALIZING TABLE-TALK. mind ; and when Knipe stuck his stage fork into the stage fowl to dissect it with a practised carver's skill, he found the creature to be a piece of painted timber * He filled his glass, as he supposed, with wine ; but coloured water was the total outcome. That he bestowed slap or smack on the property- man, does not appear ; but the bon vivant had his bon mot for the occasion, and remarked that instead of his bottle and his bird he had a fine subject for a landscape-painter, — wood, and water. His Holiness Pope Leo the Twelfth has a similar experi-- ence to recount, in his (imaginary) conversation with his valet Gigi. Three large salmons and three codfish, salted and smoked, had reached him from the Archbishop of Pisa, with directions not to open, cut to pieces, or wash them, as it would be injurious to the flavour and would damage the flg^kes. The Holy Father's mouth watered on the third day of Lent, when one of each was served up at his table, and his appetite was sharper than usual. " Maria-Fabrizzo, on applying the knife, fell at my feet and kissed them, and asked me humbly, with his eyes closed, whether it was my pleasure that it should be a miracle or not. I wondered what the man meant. He brought before me the two fishes ; a strong smell - of turpentine invaded my nostrils ; the two dainties were of pine-wood, a salmon-skin and cod-skin being drawn over * An authority upon all matters histrionic discourses eloquently upon the wooden fowls and brown paper pies on which the nobles of the stage feast richly, quaffing, meanwhile, deep potations of toast-and-water sherry, or, haply, golden goblets full of nothing at all. .Some of the goblets, he tells us, together with elaborate flasks of exhilarating empti- ness, and dishes of lovely fruit, more deceptive than Dead Sea apples (for they have not even got ashes inside them), are nailed to the festive board itself. On very great occasions, by his account, the bowl is wreathed with cotton wool, and the viands smoke with a cloud of pow- dered lime. He challenges our amused pity for some haughty Hospodar of Hungary drinking confusion to some Bold Bandit of Bulgaria in a liquorless cup, vainly thirsting, meanwhile, for a pint of mild porter from the nearest tap ; or again for those retainers of his who are seen deep in the enjoyment of warden pies and lusty capons, while their empty insides are crying dolorously for three penn'orth of cold boiled beef. FANCY FEATS AT DINNER-TIME. 217 them." For this insult, offered to him in the first instance, he understood, by "one Ahab Rigworthy of Connecticut," the Pope avows his resolve to forbid the Americans to visit Rome. In the Memorials of his own time Lord Cockburn dilates on the famine of 179S, when an eighth of the population of Edinburgh were fed by charity ; and while chemistry strained itself to extract nutriment from sapless stuff, one " ingenious sacrifice in wealthy houses was to produce an appearance of wheat at table without the reaUty. So dishes were invented which in shape and colour resembled the forbidden articles,* and the knife often struck on what seemed good pie-crust, but was only clay." Tantalizing ; but scarcely so much so as the state of things in time of war, set forth in the Biglow poems, — " When even whiskey's getting skurce, and sugar can't be found, To know that all the elleiments o' luxury abound." Rabbinical literature gives us to understand that the manna which fell in the wilderness had the faculty of accommodating itself to the palate of all such as did not murmur: it became fish, flesh, or fowl, as taste (or fancy) preferred. Satirico- sacerdotal literature inveighs against the dogma of transub- stantiation, under the guise of Peter's panegyric of a brown loaf; for bread, he instructs Martin and Jack, is the staff of life, and contains, as such, inclusively, the quintessence of beef, mutton, veal, venison, partridge, plum-pudding, and custard ; upon the strength of which argument he has the brown loaf served up at dinner with all the formalities of a city feast." "Come, brothers, fall to, and spare not; here is excellent good mutton." With great submission Brother Martin doubts there may be some mistake, as he eyes the slice on his plate : was there not a word dropped about " mutton " .■■ and if so, where is it .-' Jack, too, owns to a longing for the promised mutton ; and Peter owns to a sus- picion that both his guests are a trifle mad, or unaccountably * A public proclamation specified the exact quantity of bread which each family might consume, — about a loaf per "individual" weekly.— Memorials, p. 72. 2l8 TANTALIZING. TABLE-TALK. merry ; but if they don't like the piece he has cut for them, he will carve them another — though he must say he had given them the choice part of the whole shoulder. " What, then, my lord," quoth Martin, " it seems this is a shoulder of mutton all this while?" Martin's protest that to him it seems nothing but a crust of bread, is backed anon by Jack's avowal, that never in his life had he seen a shoulder of mutton so nearly resembling a quartern loaf. Dean Swift appears to have been not over-careful to guard against or provide for the obvious objection, that no distinction is here drawn between the sacramental theories of Luther and Calvin, and that consubstantiation is left out in the cold. That promising Prince of Wales who, unhappily, never came to be King of England, — Henry, eldest son of James the First, — was once, as a boy, entertained with his suite at a nobleman's house where parsimony was the order of the day, — parsimony so pronounced, indeed, that the prince's servants had to go, supperless to bed. The story goes that, next morning, the lady of the house coming to pay her respects, found H.R.H. turning over the leaves of a picture- book, one of which, that represented a company sitting at a banquet, he showed her. " I invite you, madam, to a feast," said the boy. " To what feast .' " asked her ladyship. " To this feast," he replied. " What ! " exclaimed his hostess, " would your Highness give me but a painted feast .' " " No better, madam, is found in this house." The elder Disraeli admires in this ingenious reproach '' a delicacy and greatness of spirit " far excelling.the wit of a child. - Sancho's mortification at table, as Governor of Barataria, when, at a sign from the officious wand-bearer, every dainty was snatched away before the great man could get a good mouthful of it, is worthy of a passing notice in a chapter of tantalizing table-talk. Be it a dish of fruit, or a plate of roasted partridges, or a mess of stewed rabbits, or a fillet of veal, or a savoury olla-podrida, — no matter, the craving governor is put oiT with wafers and marmelade, and so let digestion wait on appetite, Poor Sancho sighs from the KATHARINE AND PETRUCHIO. 219 depths of his capacious stomach for anything as substantial as a crust of bread and an onion. So with Queen Blanche in the fairy tale, — there was a physician, just like Doctor Pedro Rezio, to inspect whatever she ate or drank, and to order everything she liked off the table. In the fourth of his Moral Essays, Pope figures himself at a feast which recalls the experience of Don Quixote's squire : " So quick retires each flying course, you'd swear Sancho's dread doctor and his wand were there . . . In plenty starving, t.intalized in state, And complaisantly help'd to all I hate," etc. Petruchio plays the doctor, to tame his shrew, when he flings away the meat from before hungry Katharine, under the pretence that it is burnt, and that she would be the worse for it. He has first tantalized her by the summons to table : "Come, Kate, sit down ; I know you have a stomach;" and in the next breath, he declares all the viands to be overdone, and flings them to the floor. His Graying wife remonstrates, and he persists. He will show her who is Governor in Barataria. '" Kath. I pray you, husband, be not so disquiet ; The meat was well, if you were so contented. Petr. I tell thee, Kate, 'twas burnt and dried away ; . . . And better 'twere that both of us did fast, — Since, of ourselves, ourselves are choleric, — Than feed it [choler] with such over-roasted flesh." We may apply the pathetic lament of the slave in Terence : Crucior, bolum mihi tantum erepUim tarn desubito e faucibus. Or again what Sainte-Beuve says of those who " font venir I'eau a la bouche et qui ne d^salterent pas;" or, say, M. Loudierre's simile of one who holds out his snuff-box to you^ and withdraws it, or keeps invitingly opening and forbiddingly closing the Hd, while humming to himself: "J'ai du bon tabac dans ma tabatidre ; j'ai du bon tabac, tu n'en auras pas." We think of Sancho Panza again as we look on Queen Henrietta Maria, the day of her arrival in England, when the King performed the office of a carver for her, and plied her with venison and pheasant, the while her ghostly confessor stood 220 TANTALIZING TABLE-TALK. beside her, and warned her that this was the eve of St. John the Baptist, and to be fasted, — so let her beware. We think of him too when we read of Prince Henry — the elder brother of Charles — snubbed in his enjoyment of cold capon in cold weather, and warned by his physician against the contingent consequences of this double chill ; at another time checked by the same obtrusive authority, when eating hot and cold together. Que voulez-vous, messieurs les mMecins? It is almost as bad as hungry Sganarelle in Mohere sitting down with glee to a goodly repast, and having his pJate and his cup withdrawn abruptly and alternately by the mischievous agency of Ragotin and La Violette. Sganarelle has no fancy for such a perennial supply of clean plates. Let him clear them off himself, and take his own time. To adopt the strain of Zigranes in Beaumont and Fletcher, " Thou might'st as well Search i' the deep of winter thro' the snow For half-starved people to bring home with thee To show them fire and send them back again, As use me thus." The Lady Emily of one of Mrs. Gore's books must have been an angel to bear as smilingly as she did with the devices for her comfort hourly imflicted on her by the Earl, her father: if thirsty, she must not drink ; if hungry, she must not eat : she must always distrust her own inclinations, lest she put an ■untimely end to the hopes of his House. The maternal Lady Maria, in another of them, is not less-trying to her son Claude : he might not ride, he might not bathe, he might not swim, he might not eat or drink, save in accordance with his vigilant mother's formal sanction ; and, to one of his propensities, these restrictions soon became insupportable. " Food was a source of indigestion," with apoplexy to follow. The Spanish Queen under the surveillance of the grim Duchess in Ruy Bias, is in no worse plight : " Ne pouvoir — 6 men Dieu ! qu'est-ce que je ferai ! Ni sortir, ni jouer, ni manger k mon gr^ ! " So with the mother of Martinus Scriblerus, under the rigor- ous regimen of her husband Cornelius. The poor woman RESTRICTIVE DIETETICS. 221 never dined but he denied her some dish or other, which he deemed prejudicial to her milk — and for her eyes to light longingly on a piece of beef was enough for the old gentleman at once to snatch it away. Acting on the doctor's orders, Captain Hamilton, of H.M.S. Amphitrite, imposes a salutary restraint on the dinner-table propensities of Lord Tadcaster. There was champagne at dinner .the first day, and the noble lord began to pour out a tumbler. " Hold on ! " said the captain. " You are not to drink thatj" and he quietly removed the tumbler. "Bring him six ounces of claret." While they were weighing the claret with scientific precision, his lordship protested, but in vain. " Here's hospitality," said he. " Six ounces ! " He was bilious, and epileptical, it seems ; and was sent on a sea voyage, to be cured by diet and blue water. The author of Wholesome Fare, after giving us a good and con amove receipt for a " gratin of lobster," proceeds to dictate that no one should sit down to it without care and without the power of abstaining. And a kindred veto follows : " Don't eat sliced cucumber with hot boiled salmon, but there is no harm in having a plate of it handed round to be looked at, and to diffuse the smell." It seems, said his critics, that enjoyment is to consist in making-believe, just as the Mar- chioness in Dickens found her dry bread the better for rubbing it against the door of the room where the cheese was locked up. Mr. Delamere's Saturday Reviewer avowci that, for his part, he would rather know there was no cucumber than have it close to his nose and be sure all the while that it was not for his mouth. Matter of history is the old Duke of Burgundy's resentful outcry at table when he missed his favourite dishes, — "Do you mean to hold me in pupilage ? " he demanded of the steward he summoned in his wrath. " My lord, the leeches forbid," was the plea ; and for once the leeches were in the right, and in their right. Mr. Disraeli's first work of fiction offers this de- scription of a German Grand-Duke's dinner : " The numerous dishes are at once placed- upon the table; and when the curious eye has well examined their contents, the whole 222 INTERCEPTED DAINTIES. dinner, untouched, disappears." Not for good, however, not finally, as disappeared the viands in the house of Noma of the Fitful Head, for which the Udaller's mouth was watering, — ^when Noma, seizing upon one article after another, and well supported by the zealous activity of Pacolet, flung their whole preparations over the cliff into the ocean which raged and foamed beneath : vifda (dried beef), hams, and pickled pork, flew after each other into empty space, smoked geese were restored to the air, and cured fish to the sea, while a large leathern flask of brandy was sent to follow the rest of the supper, by the hands of Pacolet, who regarded the dis- appointed Udaller the while with a malicious grin. Magnus Troil might have done worse than copy the tactics of the old Scottish lady dear to Dean Ramsay, whose man Sandy was over-active at a dinner-party in changing her plate, and " whipped it off when he saw that she had got a piece of rich pattee upon it. His mistress not liking such rapid movements, and at the same time knowing that remonstrance was in vain, exclaimed, ' Hout, Sandie, I'm no dune/ and dabbed her fork into the pattee as it disappeared, to rescue a morsel." Which story reminds us, with a difference, of that other one of the genial old dean's, about a "full-eating laird," whose plate, after long and large service, the lady of the house desired the servant to take away, as she saw that he had at last laid down his knife and fork. To her surprise, however, he resumed his work, and she apologized to him, saying, " I thought, Mr. -, you had done." "So I had, mem ; but I just fand a doo in the redd d my plate." He had discovered a pigeon lurking amongst the bones and refuse of his plate, and could not resist finishing it. Ill were it to try on such a guest the favourite trick of EHa's James White at the Smithfield supper of chimney-sweeps, when he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some sable younker, declaring it must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating. Hood somewhere describes a dinner, the bill of fare of which he refrains from copying in print, with a circumstantial detail of all the made dishes— a custom as impertinent and IMAGINARY BILL OF FARE. 223 annoying to the reader, he submits, as for a spectator at a theatre, jammed perhaps in a hot back row of the pit, to have his eyes treated with the display of a stage banquet, and his ears with the popping of corks — whereupon some malicious actor advances close to the lights, and deliberately quaffs his sparkling champagne, iced of course, before Tantalus's face. But this is assuming the realism of stage properties. Rather are these of the ideal category of the cates in Hawthorn's fantasy-piece, where there was served up a banquet, combining, if not all the delicacies of the season, yet all the rarities which careful purveyors had met with in the flesh, fish, and vegetable markets of the land of Nowhere — the carte comprising, inter alia, a Phoenix, roasted in its own flames ; cold potted Birds of Paradise ; ice-creams from the Milky Way, and whip- syllabubs and flummery from the Paradise of Fools, whereof there was a very great consumption. The typical innkeeper of satire would readily undertake to supply all these, and more, if he did not go the length of vowing he always had them in stock or in store. At the inn which, for once, Don Quixote did not mistake for a castle, the landlord assured his guests that whatever the air, earth, and sea produced, of birds, beasts, or fish, his inn was abundantly provided with. " There is no need of all that," quoth Sancho, " roast us but a couple of chickens, and we shall be satisfied." " As for' chickens," said the host, " truly we have none, for the kites have devoured them." "Then let a pullet be roasted," said Sancho, "only see that it be tender." "A pullet ! " cried the host, " faith and troth, I sent above fifty yesterday to the city to be sold ; but, excepting pullets, ask for whatever you will." Sancho then asks accordingly for a good joint of veal or kid, for these cannot be wanting. "Veal or kid .? " resumes the landlord ; " ah, now I remember we have none in the house at present, for it is all eaten, but next week there will be enough and to spare." Sancho falls back on eggs and bacon. But the innkeeper resents the unreason- ableness of his calling for eggs, after being told there are no pullets ; and the final outcome of the magniloquent pro- logue, the mouse born of the man-mountain, is just a pair of 224 TANTALIZING TABLE-TALK. cow-heels, that may be taken for calves' feet* So with Farquhar's Boniface, in the Beaux' Stratagem : " I have every- thing in the house," he keeps on assuring the fine gentlemen, but whatever they please to name he happens to be out of, ' — " Please name something else." Well, then, has he any veal ? " Veal, sir ? we had a delicate loin of veal on Wednes- day last." Has he got any fish, or wild fowl ? " As for the fish, truly, sir, we are an inland town, and indifferently pro- vided with fish, that's the truth on't ; — but then for wild fowl," — and so forth, ever ending with a but. Caleb Balder- stone had the making of a Scottish Boniface in him, when he hedged so adroitly with Bucklaw and his master, in the * When Lady Goodbody and her companion arrive at Joanna Baillie's Country Inn, the landlady is asked what they can have for dinner, and the answer is the canonical one in such quarters, mutatis mutandis. The hostess can offer them a very nice pigeon-pie, and some very tender mutton. But she can quote a countess who came there and would dine upon nothing but a good dish of fried eggs and bacon, in spite of other dainties in the house. " I don't say, to be sure, that quality are all as fond of the same sort of victuals : but sometimes it will so happen that the pigeons will not be equally plump and delicate as at other times, let us do what we will with them ; and the mutton being fed upon old grass, my lady, will now and then be a little strong tasted or so. — O dear me, if it had not been all eaten up two days ago, I could have given you such a nice turkey ! it was to be sure as great a beauty as ever was put upon a spit. Howsomever, you may perhaps after all, ladies, prefer the eggs and bacon." And the ladies are agreed, upon the whole, that the eggs and bacon in esse of to-day, will answer their purpose better than the turkey that was finished two days ago. So again were Messrs. Prodgers and Tweak, on their travels, in a story of modern life, fain to make the best (and that not bad) of the dish of eggs and bacon in which ended their host's assurance that they could have anything whatever they pleased to order. Mrs. Gore satirizes the approved fashion innkeepers have of a,sking you what you will please to have, " though predetermined to inflict the pig and pruin sauce which your soul abhorreth." A later lady-novelist makes noteworthy the fact that there was no dish ever devised by mortal cook which the sojourner at the Reindeer could not have, according to the preliminary statement of the landlord ; yet so it was, that with whatever ambitious design the sojourner began to talk about dinner, the discussion invariably ended, somehow or other, by his ordering a chicken and tart. The roadside innkeeper Nicholas Nickleby had to do with, was pre- IMAGINARY BILL OF FARE. 225 matter of supper, — pawkily hinting, "But ye'll no be for butcher meat ? There's walth o' fat poultry ready, either for spit or brander — The fat capon, Mysie," cries Caleb, as loudly as if such a thing had been in existence. "Quite "unneces- sary," interposes Bucklaw, "if you have anything cold, or a morsel of meat." " The best of bannocks ! " exclaims Caleb, much relieved ; "and for cauld meat, a' that we hae is cauld enough, — howbeit maist of the cauld meat and paistry was given to the poor folk," * etc. Well may sharpset Bucklaw ask his entertainer next morning, " But this same breakfast. Master, — does the deer that is to make the pasty run yet cautionary in his preliminaries, and answered one question by putting another. " What can you give us for supper 1 " asked Nicholas. — " Why, — what would you like ? " the landlord replied. Nicholas suggested cold meat, but there was no cold meat ; poached eggs, but there were no eggs ; mutton chops, but there wasn't a mutton chop within three miles, though there had been more last week than they knew what to do with, and would be an extraordinary supply the day after to-morrow. As an Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens had a renewal, seemingly, of this sort of experience. Asking at the Dolphin what he could have for dinner, he was asked in return what he would like ; and as the Dolphin stood pos- sessed of nothing he did like, he was fain to yield to the suggestion of what he did not like. * There is a touch of Caleb Balderstone in Catherine, the zealous attendant at the Ibarraye auberge, when a guest of unusual culture puts her to her wits' end by asking for some books to while away the time, and she keeps putting him off with evasive answers, until it comes to the demand direct on his part, " Are there any books in the house, or not ? " " Oh, no doubt there are waggon-loads full, monsieur, only they may not be exactly what you want," says the old woman, driven to bay ; but determined, for the credit of the house, not to acknowledge that it does not contain everything a lodger can ask for. " Well, what are they ? " " My master writes in them," said Catherine, remembering her master's ledgers. Applicable after the same sort is the stereotyped apology of Mr. Pott, the circulating-library-keeper of St. Ronan's - Well. Let Lady Penelope Penfeather, for instance, ask him for what book she will, his reply takes the form of "Very sorry, my lady — quite out of copies at present — I expect some in my next monthly parcel." " Good lack, Mr. Pott, that is your never-failing answer," rejoins the lady, whose belief it is that were she to ask him for the last new edition of the Alkoran, he would .tell her it was coming down in his next monthly parcel. As to t/ia(, Mr. Pott ' IS "226 INNKEEPERS APOLOGETICS. on foot, as the ballad has it?" For a variety, again, take that Skipper of Theodore Hook's sketching, who vapoured so loftily about the stock of provisions his ship took out, with a colonial governor on board, — " Provisions — ^psha ! — hot rolls every morning ; two cows on board ; milk, pies, puddings, and preserved fruits, by pots-full ; sixty-four dozen of fowls, two hundred- and eighty ducks, the long-boat full of Southdowns, and lots of salad growing in the cabin windows," — the first experience of a too credulous listener being a basin of hot, salt, greasy, and weak soup, — and later ones involving the explanation that the cow had died of a decline at Portsmouth, and her place been filled by two goats, which, after purchase, turned out to be of the male species, — and so on, with other vanishing quantities and dissolving views in the catalogue of privileges. Dennis Bulgruddery'^s excuses, in John Bull, for the nega- tive state of the Red Cow cellars, have the charm of Irish vivacity; and even a saturnine guest might forgive his passing off sour beer for brandy — or rather instead of it, for he is ready with the landlord's trick of dating backwards, and can take his oath there was a big bottle of brandy in the house a week ago, but sorrow a drop left, — the mistress having a weakness that way. No such genial charm conciliates a guest towards the Jugby of Time Works Wonders, who is so much hurt when a cynical wayfarer declares of his wine that, drunk from a vinegar-cruet, it would pass without suspicion — for, "the heads of nobility stop here for that sherry" — and whose reply to a demand for venison is that there's none nearer than the park, and that's alive ; — for^ a rump-steak, " Only one butcher, sir ; and he doesn't kill till Saturday ; " — for a broiled fowl, then, for surely he has plenty of fowls.' " Dozens, sir ; but just now they're all sitting." What has he to offer for dinner, then .■" " I've some beautiful bacon, sir. Such pink and white. Streaked like a carnation. cannot undertake to say, as he has not seen the work advertised yet ; but he has no doubt, if it is lilcely to take, there will be copies in his next .monthly parcel. "Mr. Potfs supplies are always in the pauUo-post- futurum tense," as Mr. Chatterly remarks. HUNGRY LOOKERS-ON. 227 Ladies of title come here to eat our bacon." A later arrival of hungry guests reduces Jugby to the apologetic avowal that — ahem! — "if some bread and cheese . ., . People, sir, come twenty miles round for our bread and cheese." Later still, he suggests cake to the ladies who are clamorous for " some refreshment." Cake "i is he laughing at them } Not at all. " Countesses from London stop here to eat our cake." Of course the ladies can have tea .■' Well, " We've a great name here for our tea. . . . But the Bishop of Kilco- berry put up here yesterday, and the — the canister is out. If, however, you could be content with bread-and-milk — 'tis an excellent thing to travel on." As to his ale, — can he recom- mend it .'' " Recommend it ! The mail-cart comes six mile out of its way for our ale." But, after all, how light is the grievance of the guest who cannot get just what he asks for, compared with his who can get nothing at all. An empty purse may make this difference. Joshua Geddes is fain to put up with bread and cheese and ale, at Joe Crackenthorp's " public '' on the banks of the Solway ; but there- sits watching the comfortable Quaker a hungry gazer in the form of Peter Peebles, who licks his parched lips as he sees Joshua masticate his crust, and who sucks up his thin chops as the other applies the tankard to his own mouth.* Michelet makes it a grievance against an English king in Paris in 1421, that a famished crowd of Parisians flocked daily to, see royalty dine, to feast their eyes on the sumptuous banquet, and * Compare the sufferings of Jerry's performing dogs, at supper-time, at the Jolly Sandboys — the terrible eagerness with which they watched the turning of the savoury contents of a caldron into a tureen, standing on their hind legs, the while, and proof against various hot splashes which fell on their noses. One of the dogs is made to go entirely with- out supper, and is set on grinding the organ instead, which he does, sometimes in quick time, sometimes in slow time, but never leaving off for an instant. When the knives and forks rattled very much, or any of his fellows got an unusually large piece of fat, he accompanied the music with a short howl, but he immediately checked it on his master looking round, and applied himself with increased dihgence to the Old Hundredth. — In some sort a companion picture might be made out of Mr. Squeers and the little boys at breakfast, at the Saracen's Head, Snow Hill. 228 AT A PASTRYCOOK'S WINDOW. go away fasting. Hungry men are said, sometimes, as a lively writer observes, to lull the raging of their appetites by sniffing the hot, and, to some noses, fragrant breeze which exhales from between the gratings of an eating-house ; while to some the mere contemplation of eel pies, smoking rounds of beef, rump-steak pies, and pennyworths of pudding, all ashine in the glory of dripping, and radiant with raisins, is almost as satisfying as the absolute possession of those dainties* Other pages expatiate upon the "fairy-like realms of comestible beauty exhibited to hungry foot-passengers behind the plate- glass windows of Italian warehouses.'' A main episode in the epic of ragged vagrant little Bella's " exciting day," as narrated by Matthew Browne, is when the child watches from without the interior of a so-called Restaurant — nothing so much pleasing her to look at as the ices, for Bella had had a Penny Ice one day, and knew an ice when she saw one : " All girls are fond of ices, and especially pink ices, such as these ladies were eating, and Bella stood looking in at the door, with very large eyes and her mouth wide open," till one of the waiters came to the door and " hished " at her with a white napkin, as if she was a puppy-dog, and so she went * It is a very pleasant mental condition, the essayist opines, the being able to stare a pastrycook's window out of countenance, and to feast, in imagination, upon the rich plum-cakes, the raspberry-tarts, and the lobster-patties ; to walk up Regent Street, and wear, mentally, the ravishing bonnets and Burnouse cloaks and Llama shawls, which poverty forbids them on any other terms. It was thus Traddles and his young wife enjoyed themselves in the London streets after office-hours — looking into the glittering windows of the jewellers' shops, where he would show her which of the diamond-eyed serpents, coiled up in white satin rising grounds, he would give her if he could aiford it ; and she would show him which of the gold watches, capped, and jewelled, and engine-turned; and possessed of the horizontal lever-escape movement, she would buy for him, on the like hypothesis. " And we pick out the spoons and forks, fish-shces, butter-knives, and sugar-tongs, we should both prefer if we could afford it ; and reaUy we go away as if we had got them ! " It was in another work, and in another mood, that Dickens pictured gold- smiths' treasures, guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass from creatures with pale and pinched-up faces that hovered-about the windows,— and so with half-naked shivering figures that stop to gaze at Chinese shawls and HUNGRY OUTSIDE GAZERS. 229 away, ashamed and miserable and angry. She had but been doing, or essaying to do, what Larry O'Branigan, in Moore, writes home word of his doing in London, to his wife Judy, at MuUinafad : " Bein' hungry, God help me, and happenin' to stop, Just to dine on the shmell of a pasthrycook's shop.'' After a like sort Hawthorne imagines a hungry man to have been the painter of certain " saloon " pictures of edibles, by him described; — such as an oil-painting of a beef-steak, with such an admirable show of juicy tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron, — and such, again, as the realistic representation of a noble sirloin, and of the hind-quarters of a deer (retaining the hoofs and tawny fur), and of the head and shoulders of a salmon, a brace- of canvas-back ducks, a fine old cheese, in which you could almost discern the mites — and some sardines, on a small plate, very richly done, and looking as if oozy with the oil in which they had been smothered. Some very hungry painter Hawthorne supposes to. have wrought these subjects of still life, heightening his imagi- nation with his appetite, and earning, one would hope, the golden stuffs of India. A Saturday Reviewer likens to the small boys who flatten their noses against pastrycooks' windows, the crowd which gathers at a doorway to watch the exits and entrances of carriage company; and the comparison applies to other rapt gazers far and wide. We have Mrs. Whitney's word for it, that the Ught, and the music, and the splen- dour, and the feasting, are greater to the beggar who peeps in from the street, than to him who sits at the revel. In one of her books there is a sketch of forlorn and ragged children clustering around the confectioners' windows, and looking;, — as if one sense would take in what was denied to another. We see young Josquin Dorioz, the composer of an opera called (like Gluck's) Akestis, and the hero of an art-novel bearing the same name, — •on his arrival at the door of the Dresden opera-house, one summer evening, taking up his stand there because he has no money to enter with, and because it is the gate of his heaven ; and there he watches the happy go in to feast on the heavenly strains, while he himself remains penniless and shut out. Within, to his imagination, there were " sera- phim and cherubim, and harpers harping with their harps in divine .concord, while he remained shut out." 230 FAMISHED GAZERS privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he liked best. Homer, in the twentieth book of the Odyssey, has a telling simile of " one who long with pale-eyed famine pined, The savoury cates on glowing embers cast Incessant turns, impatient for repast." To some poor (and because poor) mortals it is given to cast incessant gaze only, on such cates, whatever their impatience for the repast. Such are the gaunt gazers through the streaming and steaming panes of cookshop windows, what time the. joints are fresh from the fire, and customers are crowding to the meal. Chateaubriand is free to own of his first sojourn in London, penniless and starving, when he used to chew grass and paper, failing other sustenance, that when- ever he passed a baker's shop, his " torments were dreadful. One severe evening in winter, I stood for two hours riveted before a shop where dried fruit and smoked meats were sold, drinking in with my eyes all that I beheld. I could have eaten, not only the edibles, but the boxes, the baskets, and the panniers which contained them." Dr. Gordon Hake, in one of his graphic little poems, tracks the wanderings of a small street-outcast, to his lingerings before houses where only a thin pane of glass divides him from the best and amplest of fare : he "watches mouths that open wide, And sees them eating through the glass. Oft his own lips he apes and shuts ; With sympathy his fancy gluts." So too there is a scene in Pendennis where the windows of Sir Francis Clavering's dining-room are open to let in the fresh air, and afford to the passers-by in the street a pleasant, or, perhaps, tantalizing view of six gentlemen in white waist- coats, with a number of decanters and a variety of fruits before them : "little boys jumped up at the area-railings, and took a peep, saying one to another, ' Mi hi, Jim, shouldn't you like to be there, and have a cut of that there pine-apple.?" But this is the funny side of the picture. Matter more serious AT COOKS HOP WINDOWS. 231 is that of Mrs. Browning's stanza, in her Song for Ragged Schools : " Healthy children, with those blue English eyes, fresh from their Maker, Fierce and ravenous, staring through At the brown loaves of the baker." One of Mr. Yates' best-known stories opens with the view of a pinched form, covered with a miserable tightly-drawn shawl, — the wearer a starving girl who, crossing Oxford Market on a rainy night, stops before the window of an eating-house, where " thick columns of steam were yet play- ing round the attenuated remains of joints, or casting a greasy halo round slabs of pudding. As the girl gazed at these wretched remnants of a wretched feast, she raised her head, her eyes glistened, her pinched nostrils dilated, and for an instant her breath came thick and fast ; then, drawing her shawl more tightly round her, . . . she hurried on." Even so has Victor Hugo described Jehan Frollo pausing in the Rue de la Huchette, to sniff the odours of roasting joints, and to cast a sheep's eye at the culinary apparatus, — then, with a deep sigh, wending his way otherwards, for his pockets are as empty as his stomach. Another favourite fiction shows us a little child — a shoeless thing of three years old — in front of a window where the viands are all cheap and nasty, but the gazer is rapt in wistful contemplation of the coarse lumps and repulsive remnants that are steaming their last. Dear to Eha was the " touching but homely " stanza of a quaint poetess of his day, who in a previous stanza had described a poor boy snubbed for reading at a bookstall, and wishing he had never learnt to read: " Of sufferings the poor have many. Which never can the rich annoy. I soon perceived another boy Who looked as if he had not any Food, for that day at least— enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy's case, then, thought I, is surely harder. Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny. Beholding choice of dainty-dressfed meat : No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learnt to eat." 232 TANTALIZING TABLE-TALK. Addison reminds us in the Spectator that it was usual for the priest, in old times, to feast upon the sacrifice, nay, the honey-cake, while the hungry lady looked upon him with great devotion ; or as " the late Lord Rochester " describes it in a lively manner, " And while the priest did eat, the people stared." Founder's Day at Charterhouse has been made the text for feeling reference (perhaps by an old Car- thusian) to the gown-boys in the gallery, who. cannot resist the dreadful fascination of looking on with watering mouths at a dinner which others consume: they impend, head and wings, over the gallery, showing just like cherubs up aloft, and eye the barleysugar ship and the elegant but too fleeting forms in which the fancy of the architect in pastry loves to revel, as if they could, like the youth potted and planted by Canidia in the Epode, inemori spectaculo. Mr. Carlyle has a ' compassionating paragraph to spare on some hungry attach^ of Tyrconnel's at Potsdam (a.d. 1752), shut but from the divine suppers and upper planetary movements, (" Tyrconnel gives splendid dinners,") and reduced to look on them from his cold hutch, in a dog-like angry and hungry manner.* Another graphic pen has sketched the sorrows of a hungry man at Lord's on a popular cricket day — envious at the sight of coarse-feeding coachmen swallowing Morel's pies and daintily contrived sandwiches, when they would far rather receive a shilling from the pocket of the hungry man and expend it on strong cheese and a rough onion ; while it is equally distressing for him to see excellent cups with the " tender fragrance of lovage and the suspicion of liqueur " rolling down the throats of grooms and stable help* who would far rather have a quart of strong ale or some Dtintzic spruce. The carriage-seat on a racecourse is a commonplace for fiction-mongers and essay-writers to associate a display of * Contrast the same historian's account of Linsenbarth, the poor curate without cure, whom Old Fritz made so welcome at Potsdam a year or two previously, " Was there ever such a lucky Barmecide ? " paren- thetically asks Mr. Carlyle, as the Candidatus goes on describing his fare, from fish and roast game, to confectionery and big black cherries and pears, and all the rest of it. DINING UPON AIR. 233 lobsters, fowls, Perigord pie, mayonnaise, champagne cup, etc., with a throng of open-eyed outsiders, who " partake " of the feast in imagination. Such tricks hath strong imagination, of the sort cultivated by Don C6sa.r de Bazan, when " pauvre, n'avant rien sous le dent," he pictured to himself " une cuisine au soupirail ardent, D'ou la vapeur des mets aux narines me monte ; Et, trompant Testomac . . . j'ai I'odeur du festin,'' etc. So with the Meditations at a Kitchen Window, of a ballad- monger of the day, who is inspired by the " taunting spirit of starvation," and watches a partridge gently wheeling round the spit, and hears the summons of " Dinner's ready," and in imagination joins the company — sets to work with heartfelt glee on callipash and callipee, victimizes venison pasty, flirts with jelly, custard, ice, like the Arab Ghoul with rice. " Day- dreams of imagination, could ye but repress starvation ! " Balzac has pictured " un de ces Tantales modernes qui vivent en margent de toutes les jouissances de leur siecle, un de ces avares sans trdsor qui jouent une mise imaginaire." In one sense they play a losing game. The feats of imagination are wondrous, but there are reaches too far for even this expansive faculty. And one of them, on Bolingbroke's show- ing, is the impossible endeavour to " cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast." §n. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS OF MISERY'S MA ICING. The Tempest, Act ii., Sc. 2. It is as a shipwrecked man, outcast on a desert island, and again overtaken by the stormy wind and tempest, that Trinculo is fain to creep for shelter under the gaberdine of Caliban's repulsive form — the form of a strange fish, a very strange fish, neither fish nor flesh (as human flesh goes), but with certainly a very ancient and fish-like smell exhaling from him. Despite 234 'MISERY ACQUAINTS A MAN the smell, Trinculo is driven to seek a share of that gaberdine which covers the monster, and will help to cover him. Not the sort of bedding or bedfellow to be chosen, were the range of choice a little larger, and circumstances more favourable. But Trinculo can see no other shelter hereabout, and he is in misery, if not at the point to die ; and " misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." Even so was Lear, discrowned and houseless King Lear, on the night of the storm upon the heath, fain to hovel him with swine, and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw. When Dante is forewarned of the bitter experiences that await him in after-life — the experience of the bitterness of a dependent lot, " how salt the savour is of other's bread ; how hard the passage, to descend and climb by other's stairs ; " — this is made the bitterest of all, the enforced companionship with objects of his disgust and abhorrence : " But that shall gall thee most, Will be the vile and worthless company With whom thou must be thrown into these straits." Mr. Carlyle points the moral of his tale of Imperial Maria Theresa, constrained to court the good offices of the Pompa- dour, with the reflection : " Oh, high Imperial Soul, with what strange bedfellows does Misery of various kinds bring us acquainted ! " But the literal bedfellowship is our present theme. As in Hazlitt's instance of a reduced friend, whose complaint of the workhouse was, not that the fare was bad, or fire and clothing amiss, but that he was forced to lie three in a bed, and one of the three was out of his mind, and de- lighted of all things, when the other two fell asleep, to tweak their noses, and otherwise ingeniously maltreat them, so that they were obliged to lie awake, and hold him down between them. One should be quite mad to bear this, as Hazlitt said. Beside such a picture of indignity in reduced circumstances — a sort of reductio ad absurdum with a vengeance, there is little to make the flesh creep in such passages as we come upon in Washington's correspondence, about his lying down before the fire "upon a little hay, straw-fodder, or a bear- skin, with man, wife, and children, like dogs and cats." With WITH STRANGE BEDFELLOWS.' 235 dogs, and cats too, in immediate proximity, might make matters worse. Honord d'Urfe was literally "stunk out of bed " by his wife Diane's too numerous, too highly-favoured, and too highly-flavoured canine pets ; and a separation came of it. As to cats, let grave John Evelyn furnish us with an illustration from his diary, what time he lay at the White Lion at Orleans, after a narrow escape from slaughterous highwaymen : " In the night a cat kitten'd on my bed, and left on it a young one having six ears, eight leggs, two bodys from the navil downwards, and two tayles. I found it dead, but warm, in the morning when I awaked." Miserable or not, Evelyn had then and there a strange bedfellow. The corpse of a new-born kitten, however, notwithstanding its abnormal organization, might to many tastes be less objec- tionable than a human* corpse. Experiences of the latter sort are recorded by General Sam Dale, the Mississippi Par- tisan ; and in Lord Anson's Voyage, of one of his sailors who lay for several nights in the same hammock with his brother's corpse, in order to conceal his death, and so to receive the dead man's allowance of provisions. To Bishop Hooper, peaking and pining for eighteen months * A night with a vile corpus of the lower orders of our fellow-lodgers, paulo post mortem, is matter of frequent record in books of travel and adventure. Captain Drayson, for instance, tells of a hunter who fainted beside the leopard he had killed, and which had all but killed him first : all night he lay there in helpless pain, disquieted once or twice by a slight pressure against his shoulder, although he well knew his spotted foe to be out-and-out dead. In the morning he found that a puff-adder had crept close to him for the sake of the warmth. More than one strange bed- fellow here. Wild Sports in the South gives us a queer story of a parson and a panther that got shut up together in a pig-pen on a dark winter night. " I've made the badger's hole my bed," is one of the misery- extorted avowals of that miserable of Crabbe's making. Sir Eustace Grey. Lord Holland's Spanish reminiscences comprised one of a man with a basket of vipers at an inn, who proclaimed their freshness and livehness to the travellers who had to share his bedroom : at night one of these was awakened by feeling something cold passing over his face ; and at the same moment the viper-vendor was heard to cry aloud in the dark, " My vipers have got loose ; but lie still, gentlemen ; let nobody stir ; if only you do not move, you'll not be hurt." 236 'MISERY ACQUAINTS A MAN and more in the Fleet Prison, the stillness of a dead com- panion would perhaps— within moderate hmits — have been preferable to the "wicked man and wicked woman" with whom, after a time, his lot waS cast, in a cell with a bed of straw and a rotten counterpane, the prison sink on one side and Fleet ditch on the other. The reduced " gentility " that, before now, has had to put up with the night associates of a low lodging-house — say in a room so crammed with sleepers that (as one expert phrases it) their breaths in the dead of night, and in the unventilated chamber, rise " in one foul, choking steam of stench," — may well lie awake, with a good deal to think of, none of it any too wholesome.* Other good things besides good manners — ■ such as good temper, or good nature, for instance — must be corrupted by evil communications such as these. When the travelled author of Under the Sun complained of the insect pests in his bedroom at El Globo, Havana, he was told that he might consider himself very lucky not to find in it such additional trifles as a cow f in one corner and a wheeled carriage in another. This he was slow to believe, and he adds that it was only later, after some wayside expe- riences in Andalusia, and having shared a room with a pedlar's donkey, and being awakened in the morning by the " hard, dry see-saw of his horrible bray," that he realized to a full extent the " strangeness of the bedfellows with which misery and a tee-totum existence make us acquainted." * Happier the outsider, even though out in the cold, after the manner of "Little Dorrit's Party," — when a Burial volume formed that young heroine's pillow, and a snoring imbecile was her sole companion through the night : the shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure, of the great capital ; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night: this, we read, in the fourteenth chapter of her history, was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first gray mist of a rainy morning. t Gerard Eliassoen at the German inn complains of Christian men being forced to lie among cattle ; and the old chamberman (not maid) replies, " Well, it is hard upon the poor beasts. They have scarce room to turn." But the cow bed-mate that during the night eats up Gerard's pillow (of hay), is far less objectionable than the drunken biped of another WITH STRANGE BEDFELLOWS.' 2?,7 Endless are the samples that might be offered of the lia- bilities (unlimited) and discomforts of bedfellowship in time of war. Such as the case of Spechbacher housed with cows for months together, and. "covered up with cow-dung and fodder," when George Zoppel hid the wounded patriot from the Bavarian dragoons. Or again Sir Robert Wilson with the Russian army at Heilsberg, passing the night with old General Platow, who rested his venerable weight on the cramped as well as cabin'd, crib'd, confined Briton, while torrents of rain were falling, and both officers got slushed in the mire. Wet through, and with the dead weight of a drowsy and damp old Russian atop of him. Sir Robert was in a poor way that night. One of the best-remembered passages in the experiences of Smollett's Count Fathom is where that hero takes shelter in a robber's hut, and is put by a withered beldame into a sleeping-room where he lights on the dead body, still warm^ of a man who had lately been stabbed and put away under straw ; and at least one modern critic admires the " intensity and power as of a tragic poet" with which are described Count Ferdinand's sensations during the night, and the sen- sational device by which he saves his life, — lifting up the dead body, and putting it in his own place in the bed, while he makes off through the forest, under the guidance of the aforesaid hag. Fiction also offers us the experiences of Christopher Staines on a raft, " alone, alone, all, all alone, night's experience — at an inn where the bedrooms were upstairs dungeons with not a scrap of furniture except the bed, and a male servant settled inexorably who should sleep with whom: neither money nor prayers would get a man a bed to himself there : " You might as well have asked to monopolize a see-saw." But this again might almost be counted luxury in comparison with the lot of the convict in one of Dickens' short stories who is chained to a Piedmontese burglar and manslayer, the touch of whose hand is horror to his companion : " How I sickened, if his breath came over me as we lay side by side at night. . . . When I needed rest he would insist on walking : when my limbs were cramped, he would lie down obstinately, and refuse to stir. He delighted to sing blasphe- mous songs, and relate hideous stories," etc. The penalty of being a Siamese twin was but a degree or two worse than this, while it lasted. 238 STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. alone on a wide wide sea.," except for a corpse to bear him com- pany ; of his little namesake Tadpole, so " uncommon afeard of the body " upstairs, as his padrone explains : " I don't think he ever see one before ; and he had to sleep next it one night, when we was full ; " — and again, of Cripps, in Dred, who, " like coarse animal men generally, had a stupid and senseless horror of death," and therefore, on finding how near it was to him, " recoiled from the lifeless form, and sprang from the bed with an expression of horror." Edgar Huntley sleeps unawares on a dead Indian : " My head had reposed on the breast of him whom I had shot in this part of his body. ... I started from this detestable pillow, and regained my feet." It is of the North American Indians that Qhateaubriand is writing when he tells us how one tribe had a law for exposing the body of a slain man on a sort of hurdle {claie) in the air, while the slayer, fastened to a stake, was compelled "a passer plusieurs jours a ce pilori de la mort." The jours include the nuits ; but the nights must have been the worst. The climax of the " strange agony " of the wounded soldier, worked up by Coleridge in his picture of a battle- field, is when all foredone with toils and wounds, death-like he dozes among heaps of dead : " The strife is o'er, the daylight fled, And the night-wind clamours hoarse. See ! the starting wretch's head Lies pillow'd on a brother's corse ! " When the Roman general, Lucius, in Cymbeline, comes upon. Fidele's form thus pillowed, he at once concludes that recumbent form to be dead, not sleeping — " For nature doth abhor to make his bed With the defunct, or sleep upon the dead." EMOTIONAL CHANGE OF COLOUR. 239 § HI. THE COLOUR TEST OF GUILT. King Richard III., Act ii., Sc. i ; Othello, Act v., Sc. I. With Gloster, in presence of royal Edward and his queen, of Hastings, Rivers, Dorset, and Grey, " marked you not " How that the guilty kindred of the queen Look'd pale, when they did hear- of Clarence' death ? " Presumed guilty, because turning pale, — the presumption is much in request. The colour test of guilt, judging by change of colour, my be a very shallow device, but is in some quarters, and to serve sortie purposes, an approved and accepted one, — enforced in season and out of season, with reason, and with- out it, or against it. At that same royal gathering, when the death of Clarence was discussed, "Look I so pale. Lord Dorset as the rest .' " had Buckingham asked ; and the answer was, " Ay, my good lord ; and no man in the presence But his red colour hath forsook his cheeks." It is for Gloster to draw or suggest his own damning conclusions. In an earlier historical play of the series, fear, not guilt, is presumed in a parallel instance ; and this presumption too is scouted by those it concerns : " No, Plantagenet," is Somerset's protest, "'tis not for fear, but anger," etc. Elsewhere, again, it is another Gloster who, when suddenly arrested, tells Suffolk, " Thou shalt not see me blush. Nor change my countenance, for this arrest ; A heart unspotted is not easily daunted." It is of Hubert, the presumed murderer of young Arthur, that Salisbury says, " O, he is bold, and blushes not at death." lago is for pressing home the colour test of guilt against Cassio's mistress : " Look you pale, mistress .■' Do you perceive the ghastness of her eye ? . . . Behold her well ; I pray you, look upon her ; Do you see, gentlemen ? nay, guiltiness will speak, Though tongues were out of use.'' Claudio is bitterly ironical at the expense of his repudiated bride, the much- wronged Hero : 240 COLOUR TEST OF GUILT. " Behold, how like a maid she blushes here . . . Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness simple virtue ? " But there is no irony in the more discerning friar's testimony in her favour, after he has marked " A thousand blushing apparitions start Into her face ; a thousand innocent shames In angel whiteness bear away those blushes." Heu ! qudm difficile est crimen non prodere vultu ! To conscious integrity alone it is given, if we may cap Ovid with Horace, null& PALLESCERE cjdpd. The Simo of Terence may be every- body's spokesman when he starts the note of interrogation, "Num ejus color pudoris signum usquam indicat?"* Mute * Juvenal hails the glowing cheelc of youth as Nature's kindest boon to the youthful : " vultumque modestum Sanguine ferventem tribuat natura benigna Larga manu," etc. Micio, in the Adelphi of Terence, deems it to be all right with his adopted son when .^schinus reddens : Erubuitj salva res est. Is there not Menander's authority for such consolatory deduc- tions ? — 'Yipv^piCiv ttSs ■xpi\(TTh% hvii. pjii Soku. On such authority might the bitterest enemies of Bismark be constrained to regard the Chancellor-Prince as a most worthy man, if all be true that newspapers' Own Correspondents allege of his inveterate trick of blushing. Who would have thought there could be such a lack of brass where there is such a fund of the proverbial blood and iron ? Dr. Johnson, in the imaginary conversation with Home Tooke, is made to redden — but it is with pleasure, at a compliment from his wily interlocutor, who triumphs in the feat : " I little expected to see, as I do, the finger of Aurora on your face" — a queer spot, that seamed, and furrowed, and forbidding visage, for i) po8oSaKTo\os to light on. Leslie tells us of President West, address- ing an assembly, that " the venerable man, when he began to speak, blushed like a young girl." Lord Cockburn lays stress on the colouring propensities of two such hide-bound, smoke-dried lawyers as RoUand and Ross : the- latter. Dean of the Faculty, " equalled his blushing brother Rolland in bashfulness," and his " blushing cheeks and cunning eyes " figure prominently in the old judge's memorial sketch of " the little short body " in his little room in Queen Street. The Ettrick Shepherd pronounces Christopher North's look "quite captivatin', quite seducin' when you blush that gate, sir." Long before, the same admirer had caught at Tickler's remark on North, " He blushes," with the assenting and approving " That he does— and I like to see the ingenuous blush o' bashfu' modesty on a wrinkled cheek." If we may take IVTrs. Whitney's word for it, a sudden glow out of the eyes " is the way a strong man A SAD TRICK OF BLUSHING. 241 confession is the subject of Barry Cornwall's picture of one whose lips are shut, — but that's no matter, — " I want no words : thou dost confess it now. There, on thy painted cheeks . . . the story's writ." But then it is so easy to read amiss. As Captain Marryat somewhere cautions us, the blush of honest indignation is as dark as the blush of guilt, and the paleness of concentrated courage as marked as that of fear. So in Shelley's apostrophe, " O white innocence, That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide Thine awful and serenest countenance From those who know thee not ! " blushes ; and it means, with all the added force of the man's nature, what a woman means when she flushes like a rose." However it may be with the strong man, poor creatures like Richard Hooker must resign themselves to unlimited liabihty to something over and above a sudden glow out of the eyes. Him " God and nature blessed," as Izaak Walton words it, " with so blessed a bashfulness," that a child could at once look him out of countenance. Sir Thomas Browne flushed at the slightest cause, or for none at all. The Anatomist of Melancholy speaks of rusticus pudor, flushing in the face, etc., as " common grievances, which much torture many melancholy men.'' Is not even Ulysses liable, — as Pope renders a passage in the fourth book of the Iliad, where "the hero's warmth o'erspread his cheek with blushes " ? Clarendon has no shame in telling in the fourteenth book of his History how " the Chancellor blushed very much ; " and in the second part of his Life he tells how Charles I. on one occasion observed Mr. Hyde "to be in Disorder, and to blush very much ; " while on another occasion it is the monarch who blushes, at losing a wager to Falkland. Rochester's tendency to blush won for him from Charles II. the title of Virgin Modesty. Pascal's complaisant P6re le Moine would, no doubt, have been as ready to write for the debauched young earl as he did write for " Delphine,'' an Eloge de la pudeur, " oii il est montrd que toutes les belles choses sont rouges, ou sujettes k rougir," — a treatise designed to console the Delphine aforesaid, " de ce qu'elle rougissait souvent." Mr. Carlyle forgets not to note of " our Friedrich Wilhelm," in his younger days at least, that he is "much given to blush withal (which is a feature of him) " — nor are incidental instances wanting, in the course of that life-history. Plato makes Hippocrates blush when questioned by Socrates. Before Socrates, even Alcibiades blushed, and before him only. Charmides too is seen in the act, at a question started by that old man eloquent. There is nothing to surprise in Trelawny's account of Shelley as "gliding in, blushing like a girl," at their first 16 242 THE COLOUR TEST OF GUILT. On the other hand, there are self-possessed culprits of the temperament of Charles de Bernard's fine lady, when "ses joues ne se colorerent pas : il est des devouements dont I'exal- tation domine les vulgaires Amotions de la pudeur." Another French novelist makes Anne of Austria deficient in those vulgar emotions, when cross-examined by her husband about her diamond studs : " The queen's paleness, if possible, in- creased ; the king perceived it, and enjoyed it with that cold cruelty which was one of the worst sides of his character." Raoul colouring when similarly cross-questioned by Athos, deprecates the inference of inveracity : " I feel that I coloured, and in spite of myself. ... I colour because I am agitated, not because I meditate a falsehood." Given an emotional temperament, and tunc nee mens, nee color certa sede manet ; but the changes of colour may be egregiously misread. Web- ster's Vittoria Corombona can promise that if, in extremity, she look palci it shall be for want of blood, not fear, while one of her assassins professes to be proud that Death cannot alter his complexion, for he shall never look pale. Plutarch meeting ; but there is in Sir George Beaumont's account of Canning, when these two first met, as absolutely blushing like any roseate girl of fifteen, although the statesman was already at the meridian of his fame, and should therefore, as De Quincey submits, have become blasi to the extremity of being absolutely seared and case-hardened against all im- pressions whatever appealing to his vanity or egotism. Many a master of arts in fiction has made a point of colouring his hero well. We see one of Mr. Charles Reade's crush his face into his two hands, round which his cheeks and neck "blushed red as blood," in the felt presence of two observant demoiselles. '"Blush t they could see the colour rush like a wave to the very roots of his hair and the tips of his fingers." Mr. Hamilton, as the Baroness Tautphoeus pictures him, is " an inveterate blusher," — of which propensity not a little is made in the opening chapters of The Initials. Colonel Hamley's Reverend Josiah, "like all nervous, studious men, had a sad trick of blushing " — and one occasion is on record upon which " the blush that overspread his face might be seen reappearing, from under his hair, on the bald part of his head, making it look so red that one might have fancied an Indian had scalped him." Add to these divers and diverse representative men the George Bertram of Mr. Anthony TroUope, "turning red in accordance with that inveterate andsstupid habit of his." Nor be forgotten old Colonel Newcome when A SAD TRICK OF BLUSHING. 243 tells us of philosophers, in their inquiries in the schools as to change of colour being an argument of cowardice, who made a point of citing the instance of Aratus, so brave and expert a commander, who yet was always subject to such facial fluctuations on the day of battle. Scott loved to watch and account for such changes on the face of beauty, — in the Z«j, for instance, " the charigeful hue of Margaret's cheek ; that lovely hue, which comes and flies, as awe and shame alternate rise." In the Lady of the Lake, the hectic strife in Ellen's face, " Where death seem'd combating with life ; For to her cheek, in feverish flood. One instant rush'd the throbbing blood ;. Then ebbing back, with sudden sway, Left its domain as wan as clay." Blushing means nothing, in some persons. Dr. Wendell Holmes can professionally assure us, while in others it betrays a profound inward agitation — a perturbation of the feelings far more trying than the passions which with many easily moved persons break forth in tears. He speaks of all Rosey advanced and put that pretty fresh cheek of hers up to his grizzled moustache, and James Binnie chuckled, " I protest I don't know which of you blushes the most," — the truth being, on their author's authority, that the old man and the young girl had both hung out those signals of amiable distress. Once and again in Mr. Ticknor's journals we light upoa a masculine blush in unexpected quarters. The American in Paris in 1837, descries in Victor, Due de Broglie, " who is above fifty," a singular mixture of pride, warm-heartedness, and modesty, which " gives him a slight air of embar- rassment, and makes him blush a little whenever he expresses a strong or decided opinion.'' Next year the American is in London, and has a parallel passage to indite concerning Mr. HaUam, who, " about sixty years old," " has a shy manner, which makes him blush, frequently, when he expresses as decided an opinion as his temperament constantly leads him to entertain.'' Professor Playfair is another of the Old World worthies whom Mr. Ticknor professes to have caught in the act : " He has a childlike simplicity of manner, a modesty which will bring a blush on his cheek like that of a boy of fifteen." This was written in 1819. And so was a like record of Walter Scott. Of later date is the " he blushes even," alleged of " honest Althorp," Earl Spencer. Ora quoque ingenuo radiant suffusa ruiore. 244 ^^^ COLOUR TEST OF GUILT. who, have observed much as being aware that some men, who have seen a good deal of life in its less chastened aspects, and are anything but modest, will blush often and easily, while there are delicate and sensitive women who can faint, or go into fits, if necessary, but are very rarely seen to betray their feelings in their cheeks, even when their expression shows that their inmost soul is blushing scarlet. The blush or the pallor, however, is more frequently misinterpreted to their prejudice, than the constitutional absence of either to their advantage. Gaze with Geraint on Enid, and watch them both: " With that he turn'd and look'd as keenly at her As careful robins do the delver's toil ; And that within her, which a wanton fool, Or hasty judger, would have call'd her guilt. Made her cheek burn and either eyelid fall." If not a wanton fool, at least a hasty judger, is he that passes judgment on Raimond's aspect, in the Vespers of Palermo : " His unaltering cheek Still vividly doth hold its natural hue, And his eye quails not. Is this innocence ? — No ! 'tis the unshrinking hardihood of crime." Eustace, in Woman's Wit, employs the subject of that play's title, when another Hero than Shakspeare's is concerned : " Remember you no case Where innocence accused hath all at once Been stricken dumb ? * . . . appearances against her, And witness for her none, but her own heart .'' Her very blood betraying her, deserting Its post upon her cheek, whence, were it bold As honest, 'fore a host 'twould ne'er give way." In an earlier drama from the same pen, guilt is, not erroneously, , imputed to one whose look betrays him : " Thy blood is gone even from thy very lips, while all beside look as they looked * Waverley, for instance, at Cairnvreckan, when the warrant against him was suddenly produced before the magistrates. " The astonishment which Waverley expressed at this communication was imputed by Major Melville to conscious guilt, while Mr. Morton was rather disposed to con- strue it into the surprise of innocence injustly suspected."— ch. xxx. A SAD TRICK OF BLUSHING. 245 before." Equally sound, for once, is Kit's appeal against Sampson Brass : " Look at him, gentlemen. See how he changes colour. Which of us looks the guilty person — he, or I \ " On the other side is to be noted Miss Edgeworth's Monsieur Pasgrave when, trembling from head to foot, though innocent, he exhibited all the signs of guilt — "the pale, conscientious, incapacitated dancing-master,'' to whom' the magistrate imputed guilt in default of colour; though it is also to be observed that when the real culprit is charged, upon Ms face too are seen " all the pallid marks of guilt." * Richardson's Clarissa is moved by a painful experience to pen the reflection that very many may, like herself, by blushing at an injurious charge, have been suspected, by those who cannot distinguish between the confusion which guilt will be attended with, and the noble consciousness that overspreads the face of a fine spirit, to be thought but capable of an imputed evil. One of Miss Broughton's high-coloured and high-colouring heroines — and yet it is not the one in J^ed as a Rose — would give ten years of her life for an unmoved complexion, when there is anything to move her, but it is of no use : struggle as she will against it, she feels that rush, that torrent of vivid scarlet, which, retiring, leaves her as white as her gown. " Oh ! it is hard, that the lying changeableness of a deceitful skin should have power to work me such hurt." Her wan look sets her companion on proposing a glass of water. No, she thanks him, she is not at all faint. " But, alas ! my words cannot undo what my false cheeks, with their meaningless red and their causeless white, have already done." In another chapter we read of her judiciously placing herself with her back to the light, so that if the exasperating flood of crimson bathe her face— and already she feels it creeping hotly up— * Another student of human nature, commenting on the practised criminal's mastery of emotion as betrayed in words, tones, and even looks, denies that he can so rule the heart that the blood will not sometimes, and of a sudden, fly back to it in alarm ; that subtle thing, whatever it is, that at times will send the warm stream of life rushing through every vein to the face, at others will cast it abruptly back to the deep well of the heart, will do this, defiant of control. 246 THE COLOUR TEST OF GUILT. it may be as little perceptible as possible. And in a later one still : " With a complexion that serves one such ill turns as mine does, one is not over-fond of /aa^^ people." Lord Lytton observes that in very young and sensitive persons, a great and sudden shock or revulsion of feeling reveals itself in the almost preternatural alteration of the countenance ; not a mere paleness — a skin-deep loss of colour ; but rather it is as if the whole bloom of youth had rushed away ; the muscles fall as in mortal illness, and a havoc, as of years, seems wrought in a moment. Schiller's Joan of Arc, in the fourth act, is so stricken, and stricken dumb withal. " Horror and astonishment impede her utterance " — and in vain is she urged to confront her accuser and repel the charge : " Collect thyself, Johanna ! innocence hath a triumphant look, whose lightning flash Strikes slander to the earth." But she can neither look up, nor speak, nor move. It is with her as with Hippolyte in Racine when so accabl^ by hideous charges "qu'ils m'dtent la parole, et m'^touffent la voix." The author of Leah imagines that most innocent men or women would look to the full as guilty as really criminal ones in the first stunned moment of an unjust accusation ; "guilty or innocent, the majority of human cheeks would certainly blanch — the majority of human nerves falter at such a moment." When Aurora Floyd, first learnt the horrible charge that rumour preferred against her, she rose suddenly from her low seat, and turned her face to the light, with a look of such blank amazement, such utter wonder and bewilderment, that had her companion hitherto believed her guilty, he must thenceforth and for ever have been firmly convinced of her innocence. Caleb Williams appeals to the magistrate : " Mr. Forester, — you are a man of pene- tration : look at me ; do you see any of the marks of guilt .' " On the other hand, Roderick Random's friend, Mr. Jackson, is so much abashed at certain remarks from the bench that he " changed colours, and remained speechless " — which confusion his worship accepted at once as a symptom of guilt. Rous- seau had ample ground for arguing " combien sont trompeurs les jugements fond6s sur I'apparence, auxquels le vulgaire DENTAL DEMONSTRATION. 247 donne tant de poids, et combien souvent I'audace et la fiertd sont du c6t6 du coupable, la honte et I'embarras du c6t^ de I'innocent." As an essayist on social subjects has .remarked, the proud bearing of conscious innocence can hardly be sustained by ordinary men under the eyes of a suspecting and condemning multitude — so strange a power have the majority of thinking of themselves as others think of them. Much nonsense, it is allowed, has been written about the boldness of innocence.. Unless gifted, as a late writer urged, with excellent nerves and muscles, unless favoured with favourable opportunity, and unless confronted with no very overwhelming adversary, Innocence is possibly the greatest coward living. § IV. DENTAL DEMONSTRATION. Love's Labour's Lost, Act v., Sc. 2. BiRON has no mercy on Boyet. He cuts him up with the trenchant gusto of a professional carver. Conscious of his power of sarcasm, he delights to exercise it on so inviting a subject. Boyet, as satirized by Biron, is a mincing courtier, who pecks up wit, as pigeons peas, and retails it pedlar-fashion wherever it is in demand ; he can carve too, and lisp ; he has kissed away his hand in courtesy; he is "the ape of form, monsieur the nice ; " playing at tables he chides the dice in honourable terms ; he sings tenor, after a sort ; and as for ushering, why, as gentleman-usher, mend him who can. The ladies call him sweet, " And consciences, that will not die in debt. Pay him the due of honey-tongued Boyet." The portraiture at large reads like one of the characters of Overbury done into rhyme. But there is one detail of aspect and character that Overbury would scarcely have missed, and that we have only reserved to the last ; and that is, Boyet's 248 A DAZZLING DISPLAY addictedness to dental demonstration,— if indeed ostentation be not a better word for it : " This is the flower that smiles on every one, To show bis teeth as white as whalfes' bone." Saunderson, the blind Professor of Mathematics, is said, once in company, to have rightly guessed that a lady present had beautiful teeth ; else, he remarked, she would not laugh so often. Says the Colonel to Miss, when she laughs, in Swift's Polite Conversation, " What, miss ! you can't laugh but you must show your teeth." What refinement, and what limitations, the teeth betray ! exclaims Mr. Emerson, in an essay on the Conduct of Life. " Beware you don't laugh," said the wise mother, " for then you show all your faults." Dr. Holmes somewhere observes that people who have one showy point are apt to betray their favouritism, — especially dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last molars. Victor Hugo's- Paquette, — poor girl, what beautiful teeth she had, and how she would laugh that she might show them ! " But a girl that laughs a great deal is in the way to cry; fine teeth spoil fine eyes" — and so La Chantefleurie found it. The Lady Mason of Mr. Trollope's painting had a mouth that was very regular, and her teeth were perfectly beautiful, but her lips were straight and thin : it would sometimes seem that she was all teeth, and yet it is certain that she never made an efibrt to show them. His Miss Van Siever, in a later work, had teeth that were "per- fect — too perfect — looking like miniature walls of carved ivory. She knew the fault of this perfection, and showed her teeth as little as she could." The D'Artagnan of Dumas greets Colbert with a laugh which disclosed to the minister thirty-two magnificent teeth, all of them seemingly ready to devour, — though the adventurous Gascon is not to be thought of in connexion with Hood's picture of " a horrible mouth, of such extent, From flapping ear to ear it went. And show'd such tusks whenever it smiled The very mouth to devour a child." Mr. Carker's set better answers that description. Molidre OF GLISTENING TEETH. 249 might have had him in view prospective, or foresight, when he penned the Hnes, suggestively feline, — "belles dents, et des propos fort doux, Mais, comma je vous dis, la griffe est Ik-dessous." The impersonation of puss is as patent here as in Mr. Dombey's manager. In one of Washington Irving's letters there is a description of the once popular prima donna Parodi, which endows her with "a countenance very expressive, in spite of her teeth, which are a little of the 'Carker' order." Our earliest introduction to Mr. Carker is to a gentleman " with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth," the regularity and whiteness of which were quite distressing : it was im- possible to escape the observation of them, for he showed them whenever he spoke, the width of his wide smile rarely extending, however, beyond the mouth. Chapter after chapter renews our familiarity with, and strengthens our distrust of, that false mouth, ever on the stretch, but never laughing. We see the man " expanding his mouth, as if it were made of India-rubber." We see him "grinning like a shark." We see him "bending his brows, without showing his teeth any the less." And we see casual gazers standing "amazed at the beauty of his teeth, and at his brilliant smile ; and as he rode away, the people took him for a dentist, such was the dazzling show he made." There is in one of Mr. Gilbert's stories a solicitor whose teeth were strongly against the chance of his being an honest man, for they were " beau- tifully white and regular," and he was fond of showing them- What connexion there exists between the whiteness of the teeth and the cunningness of the heart one of his reviewers could not pretend to say ; but that there is a connexion the critic unhesi- tatingly affirms after a long course of novel-reading — be the case one of "correlated variation," or whatever else it may. There is that James Conyers, for instance, who would not have gone three paces out of his way to serve his best friend, but who smiled and showed his handsome white teeth with equal liberality to all his acquaintance, and took credit for being a frank, generous-hearted fellow on the strength of that smik. We might apply to him in this respect what is told 250 DENTAL OSTENTATION. of him in another, that he was " dexterous in the handling of those cogged dice which have all the rattle of the honest ivories." To the same authorship is to be assigned that villanous adventurer of a dentist, Philip Sheldon, whose strong point was his teeth, the perfection of which were a fine advertisement, professionally considered, albeit the teeth were rather too large and square for a painter's or a poet's notion of beauty, and were apt to suggest an unpleasant image of some sleek brindled creature crunching human bones in an Indian jungle. But their " flashing whiteness " told on the unwary, — ^was made to tell, that is to pay. Mr. Charles Reade somewhere speaks of " the winning smile that comes of tusk in man or beast." But there is a dental demonstration like that Judge Haliburton describes in a fellow who " grinned so, he showed his corn-crackers from ear to ear* — he stripped his teeth like a catamount, he looked so all mouth." The degenerate Robert Bruce (degraded into a sordid shopkeeper) of one of Mr. George Macdonald's fictions is to be seen " grinning a smileless grin from ear to ear, like the steel clasp of a purse." Theodore Hook's Noel is ever and anon to be seen "smiling to show at once his temper and his teeth." When the same author's Man of many Friends asserts his liking for a certain Countess, because she is good-natured, one of his, many friends (himself not too good-natured) declares the good-nature to arise from her ladyship's good set of teeth : " If ever you want laughers to make up a party, study the ivory. Be sure your guests have good teeth, and they'll laugh at the worst story of a dinner-going wit, rather than not show the ' white and even.' " What do the graduates in the School for Scandal think of Miss Simper ? asks Mrs. Candour. Sir Benjamin opines that Miss has very pretty teeth. "Yes," assents Lady Teazle; "and on that account, when she is neither speaking nor laughing (which very seldom happens), she never absolutely shuts her mouth, but leaves it always on a-jar, as it were — thus. {Shows her teeth)" The Amarella of Edmond About's * So with Scott's Grigg the Grinner, in Nigel, who showed all his' teeth from ear to ear, as if he were grimacing through a horse-collar. DENTAL OSTENTATION. 251 Tolla " had a way of pretending to be highly amused, when she did not exactly know what to say, and wished to show her teeth." Theganus makes it a markworthy and praiseworthy characteristic of Louis le Debonnaire, in this respect resem- bling St. Louis, that even at festive gatherings, and when privileged jesters were setting and keeping the table in a roar, the emperor not even smiled so as to show his white teeth. To his Sicilian wayfarer at the Wayside Inn, Longfellow ascribes a face hke a summer night, all flooded with a dusky light; " his teeth shone white As sea-shells, when he smiled or spoke " * — and smiling and speaking come natural to one thus physically gifted. Readers of ^acod Faithful may remember the sea- captain whose " capacious mouth was furnished with the most splendid row of teeth that I ever beheld," — and his manner of showing them. Mrs. Gore's readers, if there be any left, may recall that plausible, silver-tongued, middle-aged tuft-hunter, Mr. Russell, whose white teeth were so very much at the service of any peer who condescended to be witty. We see him in the dread presence of a certain Lady Maria, as he stands bowing and displaying to her, from an awful distance, the double range of his pearly teeth, f But the day comes when, as Count Russell, he dandifies his grizzled head under a Brutus wig, and unintelligibly murmurs his sugared com- pliments through the " interstices of several of those ivory teeth which formed his best patrimony, but which have paid the debt of nature." Aramis has the advantage of Madame de Chevreuse, and maliciously he profits by it, when he fixes a long, ironical look upon her faded face, especially upon the * In a minor poem from the same pen we have Othere the old sea- captain staring wild and weird, then smiling, " till his shining teeth Gleam'd white from underneath His tawny quivering beard." f " Even his teeth, and white like a young flock Coeval, newly shorn, from the clear brook Recent, and blanching on the sunny rock." Prior's Solomon, Book ii. 252 DENTAL OSTENTATION. lips she keeps carefully closed over her blackened and scanty teeth : as he coolly gazes, he cruelly smiles, so as to reveal his teeth ; for his are still brilliant and dazzling. Monte Christo's count, too, is dentally demonstrative — ever and anon " laughing with that singular laugh, which displayed his sharp white teeth." Thackeray's Dr. Firmin had very white false teeth, which "grinned in the gaslight very fiercely" — his stereotyped smile being a very queer contortion of the hand- some features : he drew his lips over his teeth, causing his jaws' to wrinkle (or dimple if you will) on either side. Mr. TroUope's Blanche Robarts (unlike Lucy, whose small pearls of teeth were so seldom seen) was noted for teeth as white and regular and lofty as a new row of houses in a French city ; but then when she laughed she was all teeth. Elia the essayist was by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips he would readily presume to be a casket holding such jewels ; but he ventured to counsel the fair owners to " air " them as frugally as possible. " The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones." Yet was Elia fain to confess that from the mouth of a true sweep (as sweeps were in those days) a display, even to ostentation, of those white and shining ossifications, struck him as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It was to him like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct ; or as when "A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night." § V. A ROPE FOR THE DROWNING; OR, RESERVED FOR 7HE ■HANGMAN. The Tempest, Act i., Sc. i. The bluff boatswain, when his ship is going down in the Tempest, cares as little as the roaring waves for the name of king, when reminded that the King of Naples is aboard, to BORN TO BE HANGED. 2S3 say nothing of his son Ferdinand, his brother Sebastian, Antonio Duke of Milan, and the lords in attendance. Are they not all going down together ? He has no patience to be reasoned with or talked to. Talkers and reasoners are only an obstacle to the working the ship. Away with them and their impertinent babble. " You mar our labour ; keep your cabins ; you do assist the storm. . . . Hence ! To cabin : silence ! trouble us not." The outspoken rudeness of the mariners vexes the soul of honest old Gonzalo, Coun- sellor of Naples, who can be outspoken too, on occasion ; and the courtier seeks comfort in the persuasion that such a rascal as this must be foredoomed to the gallows, and that so the good ship will escape wreck after all. Can a man fear God, who so little honours the King } And is not a man who is destitute of either that fear or that honour, a sheer reprobate, marked out for the hangman in due time 1 Courage, then ! The ship will hardly go down, with such a gallows-bird in it ; and if the boatswain shall escape drown- ing, because he deserves hanging, surely the royal party will get safe to land, with other deserts, and for other ends. " Gonzalo. I have great comfort from this fellow : methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him ; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging ! make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage ! If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable." There is no love lost between the pair, and when they meet again, it is again to exchange compliments equally internecine. " I'll warrant him from drowning," Gonzalo reiterates, " though the ship were no stronger than a nut- shell." And later yet, after the ship's crew have rushed on, drenched and despairing, with the cry of " All lost ! to prayers, to prayers ! all lost ! " the old statesman cannot resist from baiting anew that obnoxious boatswain, the black beast of his black books : " He'll be hang'd yet : Though every drop of water swear against it, And gape at widest to glut him." There is an exultant chuckle on the veteran minister's 254 DESTINED TO A DRY DEATH. part, in the fifth act, when the wrecked company are one by onfe, and two and three together, recovered and restored, not without bewilderment on their part, and when among the rest the boatswain is " amazedly " (or all in a maze) led on by Ariel. " O look, sir, look, sir ; here are more of us ! " cries Gonzalo to the king : " I prophesied, if a gallows were on land, This fellow could not drown." A sorry receptiori ashore for the dazed and drenched sailor ; and in tone not unlike the conclusion of the barbarous people of the island called Melita, who at first indeed showed a shipwrecked apostle no little kindness, but presently spoke of him as beyond doubt a foredoomed criminal, whom, though he had escaped the sea, yet vengeance would suffer not to live. The cynical saw has other instances in Shakspeare to set its teeth on. One of the two gentlemen of Verona, Sir Proteus, banteringly dismisses the other one's varlet with the promise of Gonzalo to the Neapolitan boatswain : " Go, go, be gone, to save your ship from wreck ; Which cannot perish, having thee aboard, Being destined to a drier death on shore." Bardolph prognosticates the like fate for Falstaff's page, con- sidering the company he serves and the examples he sees: " An you do not make him hanged among you, the gallows shall have wrong." More pious in form was the deprecation touching his son and heir, the future Frederick the Great, by that stern and sturdy sire of his : " God grant it do not come true," deprecated the almost imprecating king, — " but my son won't die a natural death ; God grant he do not come into the hangman's hands yet ! " We are reminded, with a difference, of Vespasian affecting the diviner, and once, when the young Domitian expressed apprehension of some mushrooms at table, telling him to have no such fears, for he was doomed to perish by cold steel, not poison. It was after a double escape, in the course of his Highland wanderings, in perils by waters, and in perils on land, that Prince Charles Edward uttered the exultant exclamation, that he believed himself not designed to die by either weapon or water. SAFE AGAINST DROWNING. 255 In illustration of what has been called the demoralizing reflection that many naughty boys have become famous admirals, a biographer of De Ruyter quotes the answer of a friend to the mother's objection that her son would be drowned if sent to sea — and as frequent whippings had failed to reform the ne'er-do-weel little Dutchman, to be sent to sea was his doom, — " Better drowned than hanged." The candid friend evidently saw no alternative. Dean Ramsay supplies a naive practical application, during the anxiety and alarm of a storm, of the Scottish proverb, " The water will never warr [outrun] the widdie," i. e., never cheat the gallows. One of the passengers, a simple-minded minister, was sharing the affright that was felt around him, until, spying one of his parishioners, of whose ignominious end he had long felt persuaded, he uttered a joyous note of recognition and gratitude, " O, we are all safe now," — and accordingly accosted the gallows- bird presumptive with strong assurances of the great pleasure he had in seeing him on board. As Stressi mutters in Schiller's Wilhelm Tell,— " If honest men, now, had been in the ship, It had gone down with every soul on board : — Some folks are proof 'gainst fire and water both." Mat Prior made his own self-application of the adage : " Fierce robbers there are that infest the highway, So Mat may be killed, and his bones never found ; False witness at court, and fierce tempests at sea, So Mat may yet chance to be hanged, or be drowned." The proverb was just of the kind to please Dean Swift, and to afford him capital for compound interest in allusion and illustration. Of course it occurs in Polite Conversation, where Miss owns to her promise to go this evening to Hyde Park on the water, but now protests she is half afraid. " Never fear, miss," replies Tom Neverout : " you have the old proverb on your side. Naught's ne'er in danger." Whereupon the Colonel shrewdly suggests, "Why, miss, let Tom Neverout wait on you, and then, I warrant, you'll be as safe as a thief in a mill j for you know, he that's born 256 ASSURED OF A DRY DEATH. to be hanged will never be drowned." In several of the Drapier's Letters the adage is turned to sinister account. Poor Mr. William Wood the patentee is assured of a dry, death ; and if reiterations can make assurance doubly sure/ doubly sure is he of the gallows for his terminus ad quem. He is made to avow, in one of his letters, that his wife had always thought his name ominous ; and that, in consequence of her suspicious words, he had often in imagination believed himself at the gallows, with the knot under his ear, and ready to be turned off.* " While there was water between me and my accusation, I thought myself pretty secure," he writes, further on ; but now his visions are of " a cart, I am afraid, travelling to Tyburn." One correspondent promises him a fine cravat, for the good of Ireland's hempen manu- facture. Another has got hold of Mistress Wood's pro- phetic play upon words, and longs to see him expiate his offences on his namesake. Not Gonzalo with the boatswain could harp more pertinaciously on that one string — with the making of a rope in it — than the Dublin Drapier does at the cost of copper-coining W. W. Everybody declared of The. Gibber — Colley's scamp of a son Theophilus — that he was born to be hanged. But The. took everybody in, (a habit of his,) by being drowned instead. Leigh Hunt, in one chapter of his Autobiography, has to relate a narrow escape he once had from drowning, while boating in IfHey Reach, and he duly recites the various sensations he then experienced, and the rush of reflections that occupied his mind, — this one inclusive : that he was about to contradict the proverb which says that a man who Had Will Wood, brazier, been a student of Molifere, he might have been uncomfortably reminded of a scene between Sganarelle and his wife, where Martina exclaims, " Ouoi ! mon mari pendu ! Hdlas, men cher mari, est-il bien vrai qu'on te va pendre ? " And when, after some curt answers to her sharp questionings, the malgrS lui mediclner bids her be off, her conjugal attachment (after a sort) overcomes her conjugal obedi- ence, and she rejoins : " Non, je veux demeurer pour t'eucourager i la mon ; et je ne te quitterai point que je ne t'aie vu pendu."~£e Midecin malgri lui, Acta iii., Sc. ix. A ROPE FOR THE DROWNING. 257 was born to be hanged, would never be drowned ; for the sail-line, in which he felt entangled, seemed destined to perform for him both the offices.* The pettifogger in Fielding, who declares one of Tom Jones's parents to have been a fellow that was hanged for horse-stealing, goes on to assert of Tom himself, that he was dropped as an infant at Squire AUworthy's door, where one of the servants found him in a box, " so full of rain- water, that he would certainly have been drowned had he not been reserved for another fate." " Ay, ay, you need not mention it, I protest ; we understand what that fate is very well," cries Dowling, with a facetious grin. Being among the novelists again, suppose we stand with Lewis the Eleventh and Tristan I'Hermite on the banks of the Cher, as Quentin Durward essays to cross the ford, when the water is up : " He is a lost man," exclaims Tristan, proposing to stay him from the attempt in time, for the ford is impassable. " Let him make that discovery himself, gossip," quoth the king : " it may, perchance, save a rope, and break a proverb." Presently however it is seen to be another man than Lewis had imagined, and the royal command now is to aid the imperilled swimmer, though once and again the king reverts to his pet proverb : " If old saws speak truth, water will not drown him " — and, when a safe landing has been effected, " I knew water could never drown that young fellow." — In The Abbot, when Master Wingate expatiates on the Lady of Avenel's fondness for * Miss Mitford, in one of her letters, piques herself on having safely and pleasantly accomplished a pony-carriage drive, vi'ith a companion of a seem- ingly quizzical turn : " Miss James says she vs^as not at all afraid, being so assured of my being reserved to be hanged, that she would not mind going with me even in a balloon." — Letters of Mary Russell Mitford, ii. 29. The Dean who gets dipped, and comes out dripping, in Wheat and Tares, has a hke good-natured friend, who pooh-poohs the exclamation, " By Jove, I thought he'd be drowned," with the reassuring assurance, " Oh, he's not for drowning, you may depend on it ; his constellation is not a watery one."— (Chapter xvi.) 17 2S8 A ROPE FOR THE DROWNING. the lad Roland Graeme, whom she was the cause of " being saved (more's the pity) from drowning," — " I would have been his caution for a gray groat, against salt water or fresh," says Roland's adversary, Adam Woodcock the fal- coner ; " marry, if he crack not a rope for stabbing or for snatching, I will be content never to hood hawk again." In a like spirit Colonel Talbot, in Waverley, exclaims touching the Highland chieftain's footboy found dead on Clifton Moor, " Then that little limb of the devil has cheated the gallows, for cut- throat was written on his face." — When Maggie Tulliver is missing, and a terrified search for her is instituted, and her mother is hard to be persuaded the child is not in the pond, Mrs. Pullet " observed that the child might come to a worse end if she lived — there was no knowing." Guilty Jonas .Chuzzlewit, aloft on the lumbering slow night-coach, asks the guard what he is staring at } " Not at a handsome man," returned the guard : " if you want your fortune told, I'll tell you a bit of it. ' You won't be drowned. That's a consolation for you." Rogue Riderhood has a triumphant way of asserting that it's well known of him, he can't be drowned. His reason for the assertion is, that he has been brought out of drowning. Other folks agree with him in his main proposition, without accepting his logic ; one cynic even inquiring when he means to get ready to be hanged. But Riderhood not a bit the less exults in his assured immunity from a wet death. No such exultation charac- terizes the strain of the Ingoldsby reprobate : " Thou saw'st me on that fearful day, When, fruitless all attempts to save, Our pinnace foundering in the bay, The boat's-crew met a watery grave, — All, all — save one — the ravenous sea, That swallow'd all — rejected me / " CHAPTER VII. § I. BOLONIUS. CLARENDON remarks in the seventh book of his great history, that there are many men who in some one particular argument may be unskilful, in another affected, and may seem to have levity, or vanity, or pedantic formality, in ordinary and cursory conversation, (which, by the way, he deems " a very crooked rule to measure any man's abilities, as giving a better measure of the humour than of the understanding,") who, nevertheless, in regular and responsible " counsels, de- liberations, and transactions," are men of great insight and wisdom, and from whom excellent assistance may be counted upon, for state purposes, and to do the state some service. To Polonius a good deal of this will apply. The shallow fallacy has long been exploded which made of him a drivel- ling dotard, an addle-pated old ninny, merely and purely the great baby that Hamlet pictured him, not yet out of his swaddling-clouts. There are men of no remarkable abilities or requirements who attain position and influence and the deference due to wisdom, solely by the discreetness of their lives, the grave courtliness of their bearing, their composed and collected manner, and the polished preciseness of their speech, which approaches pomposity, but still stops short of it. Polonius is cited by Mr. R. G. White as an approximation to this type, — " Shakspeare's acute and high-bred courtier," bien entendu, "not the jack-a-dandy of the stage," — but he has too much affectation of subtle thought in his conversa- tion. Hartley Coleridge likens him to an emeritus professor of legerdemain, who continues to repeat his sleight-of-hand tricks when gout or palsy has deprived his hands of the 26o POLONIUS. quickness necessary to deceive. " He is a formalist in poli- tics, a precisian in courtesy.'' The same critic considers the character of Polonius, though far less abstruse and profound than that of Hamlet, to have been far more grossly misrepre- sented — at least on the stage — where he has been commonly exposed to the " gods " as a mere doodle, a drivelling carica- ture of methodical, prying, garrulous, blear-eyed, avaricious dotage ; in fact, as all that Hamlet, between real and coun- terfeit madness, describes him. The Danish Chamberlain is confessedly superannuated — a venerable ruin, haunted with the spectre of his departed abilities. Of Polonius in his prime it might be said, that " wisdom and cunning had their shares in him ; " his honour and honesty were of the courtier's measure, more of the serpent than the dove. "A cautious wisdom, never supported by high, philosophic principles, has degenerated into circuitous craftiness. Witness his notable scheme of espionage upon his son's morals at Paris." He is to be noted, moreover, as a member of the Academy of Com- pliments, a master of ceremonies, and evidently practised in the composition of set speeches and addresses, as his rhe- torical fornmlse and verbal criticisms sufficiently evince : " A foolish figure " — " A vile phrase" — " Beautified is an ill phrase" -^" That's good, mobled queen is good.^' It would seem, too, that like some other great statesmen, he has dabbled in pohte literature, so correctly he inventories the genera and species of the Drama — Tragedy, Comedy, Pastoral, Pastoral-comical, Historical-pastoral, Tragical-historical, Tragical-comical-his- torical-pastoral, Scene-undividable, or Poem-unlimited. How would Goethe, himself an expert in stage-management as well as a poet of genius and a critic of rare culture, have Polonius represented on the boards } His own Serlo is his mouthpiece in this matter. He would essay " to represent a very worthy man in a favourable light "—to portray his various characteristics in a becoming manner, his repose and confidence, his emptiness and self-importance, his pliancy and meanness, his candour and sycophancy, his sincere roguery and deceptive truth. He would paint this "gray-headed, time-serving, and patient old rogue" in the most courtly POLONIUS. 261 colours. "I will speak like a book where I am prepared, and like a simpleton when I am in good spirits. I shall be absurd enough to coincide with every one, and clever enough never to notice when I am turned into ridicule." Tieck, on the other hand, however intimately associated with Goethe's school, not contented with trying to repel the obsolete idea of Polonius being a mere buffoon, was for exalting him into a most profound, respected^ and able statesman. True, Polonius may have been, as Professor Moir allowed in his strictures on Tieck, a very excellent privy counsellor in his day — though even then no Solomon — but he is evidently "pass6;" he draws on his memory, not his judgment, for his wise saws and excellent advices to his son and daughter, which no one can doubt he is now delivering for the thousand and first time.* Now, as one of the most acute analysts of the character of Hamlet has argued, between such a personage as this prag- matical, positive old precisian, and the moody, metaphysical, impatient, open-hearted Prince, there must needs have existed an utter antipathy ; and though antipathy is not synonymous with hatred, it is on the highway to it ; where natures are entirely discordant, small provocation suffices to produce per- sonal hostility. As the confidential agent and adviser of the 1 usurping king, Polonius may be supposed to have had a hand ; in diverting the course of succession. As Ophelia's father, he ' has enjoined her to deny her company to Hamlet — " pru- ': dently enough, no doubt, but paternal prudence seldom ' escapes the resentment of the disappointed lover." That , the Danish Prince imputes to sordid and unworthy designs j the plainest dictates of parental duty on the old man's part, { Hartley Coleridge infers from the ambiguous epithet "fish- j monger," from the ironical admonition, " let her not walk i' [ the sun," etc. But above all, Polonius betrays his intention of | pumping Hamlet ; and the irritation naturally conseq-uent on * For a Prime Minister to have at command an ample supply of shrewd saws, was a recommendation in the Elizabethan age. Historians tell us that Burghley had a store of pithy apophthegms, for which he knew he could always find sympathy in the Queen's breast. 262 POLONIUS AND HAMLET. the discovery of such a purpose, is heightened by contempt for the "manoeuvring imbecility," the "tedious periphrasis" with which it is pursued, which " renders age contemptible for its weakness, and odious for its indirection." It is deemed, therefore, not unnatural, though certainly far from proper, that Hamlet should make the infirmities of the venerable lord a topic of reproach and ridicule ; and that when, in a feverish flash of vigour, he has stabbed him like a rat behind the arras, he should vent his just anger against himself upon the victim of his rashness, whom he chooses to consider as the im- pediment to his just revenge ; and, unable to speak seriously on what he cannot bear to think of, should continue to the carcase the same strain of scornful irony with which he used to throw dust in the dim prying eyes of the living counsellor. This situation is said by Franz Horn to embody one of the profoundest tragic epigrams which ever poet devised. " The poor half-honest, half-prudent, half-witty, half-foolish old man, so in love as it were with life, might have plausibly calculated on some ten or twenty years longer of existence ; and now in a moment he is hurried off, entangled in his own intrigues, detected in the 'honourable' employment of listening — an undertaking which he had volunteered merely to draw some fresh complimentary phrase from the flattering king ; " while again, in regard to Hamlet, the most energetic moment of his life is lost — since he accomplishes nothing by the only action to which he rouses himself but a miserable murder, a crime which is only productive of farther misery. " He wishes to hurl the cruel usurper from his throne; and at this moment he might have done so, for he has for the first time screwed his courage to the sticking-point ; but a ruthless fate mocks the waverer ; and he wastes the whole fulness of his strength in killing — a fly, which he might have swept away with his pocket-handkerchief." Is it the king .' Ah, no ; there is no such rat behind the arras, dead, for a ducat, dead ! It is Polonius the prince has pinked, and now pulls forth from his hiding. " Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell ! I took thee for thy better." POLONIUS AND HAMLET. 263 The king's reflection upon the " heavy deed " is quite correct, " It had been so with us, had we been there " — a reflection suggested by Gertrude's sorrowful version of the story, how Hamlet, "in his lawless fit, . " Behind the arras hearing something stir. Whips out his rapier, cries A rat ! a rat ! And, in his brainish apprehension, kills The unseen good old man." Although it was natural, argues Coleridge, that Hamlet, a j young maa of fire and genius, detesting formality, and dis- | liking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he ^ had assisted his uncle in his usurpation, should express him- self satirically, yet this must not be taken as exactly the ; poet's conception of him. " Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon." He is the ."personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed." Take his advice to | Laertes,* and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and wej shall see, said Coleridge, that he was meant to be represented i as a statesman somewhat past his faculties, — his recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human i nature, while he is weak with regard to what immediately' takes place before him. What can be put down by rule in the memory, after the fine address of a statesman's prime is gone, may easily appear to us as mere poring, maudlin, cunning,— " slyness bhnking through the watery eye of superannuation.'' Polonius is the " skeleton of his own former skill and state- craft," and we see him hunting the trail of policy " at a dead scent, supplied by the weak fever-smell in his own nostrils." But, in the main, it is to Hamlet that Polonius is meant to be contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable * Referring to Bacon as England's' one writer of apophthegms of the first order, Mr. John Morley, in his essay on Vauvenargues, pronounces the difference between Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, to be the difference between Polonius's discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of Hamlet ; Bacon's precepts relating rather to external con- duct and worldly future, than to the inner composition of character, or to the "wide, gray, lampless" depths of human destiny. And the critic finds the same national characteristics, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's oracular saws. 264 FOLONIUS. activity of movement Hamlet's mind is the logical contrary to that of the aged minister; and besides, Hamlet "dislikes the man as false to- his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown." We .are reminded of Johnson's Prince of Abyssinia and his didactic sage. The third chapter of Rasselas begins with an account of how the prince's aged instructor, imagining that he had made himself acquainted with the young man's disease of mind, was in hope of curing it by counsel, and how therefore he officiously sought an opportunity of conference, which the prince, "having long considered him as one whose intellects were exhausted," was not very willing to afford. Youth generally thinks itself wiser than age, remarks Dr. Maginn, and we wonder not to find Hamlet treating Polonius as a driveller : the old gentleman bears courteously with the incivilities of one whom he con-^ siders to be either a mere madman or a prankish jester, and, recurring to the days of his youth, excuses the prince for indulging in feelings which lead to derangement of ideas- " He is throughout the ceremonious but sagacious attacM of a palace ; and the king and queen accordingly treat him with the utmost deference, and consult him in their most critical emergencies ; " and he dies in their service, fitly practising a stratagem in perfect accordance with the morale of the circle in which he has always moved, and in which he has engaged to show his wisdom, devotion, and address. "Abstracted from his courtier-character, Polonius is a man of profound sense, and of strict and affectionate attention to his duties. A man whom his children love can never be contemptible." Grant that natural affection will do much, — yet, argues " Oliver Yorke," the buffoon of the stage never could have inspired the feelings exhibited by his children, who must have been perpetually grieved and disgraced by antic buffoonery, of which they, from their connexion Vith the court, must I have been constant witnesses : Laertes, a fine high-spirited ! young gentleman, and Ophelia, the rose of May, the grace ' and ornament of the circle in which she moved, could not ' have so deeply reverenced and bitterly deplored their father, if he had been indeed a great jbaby still in his swaddling- POLONIUS. 265 clouts. " The double of Pantaloon, whom we see tumbling about in Drury Lane, would not have roused the blood of Laertes to fury, still less led him to justify assassination in avenging his fall ; nor would his death have driven Ophelia to madness." There is something to remind us of him in the celebrated Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, that most important personage of any at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and by Peter Martyr facetiously entitled the " third king of Spain," — a man whom the king and queen kept ever by their side, in peace and war, — never taking any measure of con- sequence without consulting him ; a man of lofty and vene- rable presence, (he was archbishop of Toledo, and grand cardinal of Spain,) and held to be of ripe judgment and shrewd intellect, with a power of talk, and yet a master of despatch in matters of business. Peter Martyr's mild jest fastens on the major-domo prestige of- the man, as it might have done on that of Polonius. How to act the part of the latter has puzzled some good, and defied the bad art of many bad, actors. No wonder if few players care to play it ; for as the sometime editor of Fraser, already quoted, has taken occasion to show, custom exacts that it be represented as a comic part, and yet it wants the stimulants which cheer a comedian : there are no situations or reflections to call forth peals of laughter, or even fill the audience with ordinary merriment ; he is played as a buffoon, but the text does not affords the adjuncts of buffoonery, and so, to supply their place, antic gesture and grimace are resorted to by the puzzled performer, — puzzled, because endeavouring to do what the author never intended. That Elizabeth's austere Lord High Treasurer might have been the mark for the covert wit of the dramatist, Maginn deems highly probable ; and the enemy of Essex and Raleigh could not, he surmises, be an object of admiration in the eyes of Shakspeare. " Lord Burleigh, in his courtly demeanour, was as observant of etiquette as Polonius, and as ready in using indirections to find thereby directions out. The Queen was fond both of ceremony and statecraft ; " but upon the whole it may be doubted much that the old gentleman in Hamlet is intended 266 POLONIUS: ADVICE TO LAERTES: for anything more than a general personification of cere- monious courtiers. And it is suggested that if Lord Chester- field had designed to write a commentary upon Polonius, he could not have more completely succeeded than by writing his famous letters to his son. The author of the Shakspeare Papers is wiUing to concede some resemblance to Lord Ogleby in Polonius ; but he strenuously asserts it to be not more impossible — if degrees of impossibility be in fancy allowable — to perform the pantomimic Pantaloon seriously in the manner of King Lear, than to make the impression which Shakspeare desired to make in Polonius, if he be' exhibited in the style of the dotard of Spanish or Italian comedy, or the Sganarelle whom Moliere has borrowed from them. § n. PATERNAL ADVICE TO LAERTES. Hamlet, Act i., Sc. 3. A North British critic who declares Polonius to talk at times like another Dr. Johnson, has this detrimentally quali- fied judgment to pass on the valedictory counsel to Laertes : '' The advice of Polonius to his son is full of practical wisdom ; but, owing to the contrast with the frozen stupidity of the man from whom it comes, reminds us of a half-melted and streaming mass of ice." But the advice has sorely puzzled those wh® mistake Polonius for a senile buffoon, altogether worldly and prudential as it is, such as a worldly-wise man, says Hartley Coleridge, might derive from the stores of. ex- perience, long after he had lost the power of applying his experience in passing occasions. Polonius anticipated Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son. He struck the keynote of the valedictory counsel of the "noble kinsman," versified by the first Lord Lytton : " ' We send you second to a court, 'tis true ; Small, as befits a diplomat so new,' A MASTER OF SENTENCES. 267 Quoth my wise kinsman ; ' but requiring all Your natural gifts ; — to rise hot is to fall. And hark ye, stripling, you are handsome, young, Active, ambitious, and from statesmen sprung. Wed well — add wealth to power by me possest, And sleep on roses, — I will find the rest. But one false step, — pshaw, boy, I do not preach Of saws and morals, his own code to each, — By one false step, I mean one foolish thing, And the wax melts, my Icarus, from your wing ! Let not the heart the wretched mind betray, — Enough — no answer ! — sail the first of May.' " The advice of Polonius is demonstrably a cento of quo- tations from Lyly's Euphues, as Mr. W. L. Rushton has made clear in his Shakespearis Euphuism, where he places the precepts of Polonius and his original side by side. The significance of the advice Professor Dowden finds less in the matter than in the sententious manner. Polonius, he says, has been wise with the little wisdom of worldly pru- dence : he has been a master of indirect means of getting at the truth, "windlaces and assays of bias." In the shallow lore of life he has been learned ; of true wisdom he never had a gleam. And what Shakspeare wished to signify in this speech, the student of his Mind and Art takes to be, that wisdom of Polonius' kind consists of a set of maxims ; all such wisdom might be set down for the head-lines of copy- books ; that is to say, his wisdom is not the outflow of a rich or deep nature, but the little accumulated hoard of a long and superficial experience : this is what the sententious manner signifies.* There is a smart Polonian flavour about the advice im- parted to Demonicus by Isocrates, in a characteristic epistle, more shrewd than deep, worldly-wise rather than high-toned, yet, as a Christian critic admits, tolerably well adapted to * And very rightly, to Professor Dowden's thinking, has Shakspeare put into Polonius' mouth the noble lines beginning " To thine own self be true," to which we shall recur anon. " Yes ; Polonius has got one great truth among his copy-book maxims, but it comes in as a little bit of hard, unvital wisdom like the rest. ' Dress well, don't lend or borrow money ; to thine own self be true.'" — Shakspere : His Mind and Art, p. 142. 268 ' POLONIUS : workaday heathen life, with a faint recognition here and there of something higher and beyond. His monitory maxims ad- dressed to the young man just entering on active life are such as these : that immoderate drinking so enfeebles the mind as to make it like a driverless chariot ; that a friend should be entrusted with secrets only that are no secrets ; that it is ad- vantageous to extol absent friends, who will hear of it from your hearers, and both will th€ more admire you for your loyalty ; that a good way of worming out any one's opinions on a matter that nearly concerns you, is to put the case to them as if it were perfectly indifferent ; — concerning which last maxim a recent commentator observes, that it might need Isocratean artifice to dissemble your personal interest, and a bungling Demonicus might lay himself open to the charge of disingenuousness* To the shrewd, sensible, worldly, and yet from time to time better than worldly, wisdom which Polonius bestows on his son, now going out into life, an archiepiscopal translator of Calderon finds, not indeed a match, but a noteworthy approximation, in the counsel imparted by the Mayor of Zalamea, in the play of the same name : " Be courteous in thy manner, and liberal of thy purse," for instance ; * The Greek rhetorician's further bit of advice, not to speak but " when you are well up in your subject," or unless " when there is no help for it, but speak you must," may be compared, on the safe side-taking, however diverse the drift, with the Polonian " Give thy thoughts no tongue," — and its correlative, " Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice ; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment." Mr. Greville in his Diary declares the wisest man mentioned in history to be the vagrant in the Tuileries Gardens, in Charles the Tenth's time, who walked about with a gag on, and who, when taken up by the police and questioned why he went about in that guise, replied that he was im- prudent, and that he had adopted this precaution to prevent his saying anything to get himself into trouble. The monition in the Biglow Papers is clear and emphatic : " No, never say nothin' without you're compell'd tu, An' then don't say nothin' thet you can be held tu. ***** A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, Ef he must hev beliefs, nut to b'lieve 'em tu hard : ADVICE TO LAERTES. 269 " for 'tis the hand to the bonnet and in the pocket that make friends in this world ; of which to gain one good, all the gold the sun breeds in India, or the universal sea sucks down, were a cheap purchase. Speak no evil of women ; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves our respect ; for of women do not we all come ? Quarrel with no one but with good cause ; by the Lord, over and over again, when I see masters and schools of arms among us, I say to myself, ' This is not the' thing we want at all. How to fight, but Why to fight, that is the lesson we want to learn.' " The parting counsel to her son Bertram of the Countess in All's Well that Ends Well, offers more than one parallel passage ; for example, " Love all ; trust a few. Do wrong to none : be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use ; and keep thy friend Under thy own life's key : be check'd for silence, But never tax'd for speech." But her counsel, it has been remarked, opens and ends with motherly passion of fear and pride, in which lies enclosed her little effort at moral precept. On Christmas Day of the year 1677, John Evelyn records in his Diary : " I gave my son an office, with instructions how to govern his youth." Original Walker could not devise a better manual for the purpose than what he styles the "excellent and excellently expressed advice of Polonius to For, ez sure ez he does, he'll be blartin' 'em out 'Thout regardin' the natur' o' man more'n a spout, Nor it don't ask much gumption to pick out a flaw In a party whose leaders are loose in the jaw." The Epistle Burns addressed to a Young Friend breathes something of the same canny or pawky caution ; (previous stanzas had emulated the spirit of Polonius. in other particulars, such as, "A man may tak' a neibor's part, yet hae nae cash to spare him ; " — " But, och ! mankind are unco weak, and little to be trusted ; If self the wavering balance shake, it's rarely right adjusted," and so on, in the course of that epistle which might perhaps turn out a song, and did turn out a sermon :) " Aye" free, aff han' your story tell, when wi' a bosom crony ; But still keep something to yoursel' ye scarcely tell to ony. Conceal yoursel' as, weel's ye can frae critical dissection. But keek through every other man wi' sharpen'd, sly inspection." Robert the Rhymer was well read in Shakspeare, as well as in human nature. 270 POLONIUS: his son," in precepts " admirably adapted to form a man of the world and a gentleman, in the best sense of the terms." They have never been for worldly wisdom surpassed, afSrms Dr. Maginn, who allows the ten precepts of Lord Burleigh, addressed to his son Robert, on which the apophthegms of Polonius are supposed to be based, to be perhaps equal in shrewdness, but wanting in pithiness and condensation of verse. " Neither are they as philosophical, being drawn, to talk logically, i posteriori, while those of Shakspeare are deduced a priori" Lord Burleigh gives us but the petty details, — in Shakspeare we find the principle. The fifth maxim, for instance, on borrowing and lending money, is full of practical good sense, no doubt, as indeed is every- thing that "wise Burleigh spoke;" but it might occur to minds of smaller calibre than that of the Lord High Treasurer. Polonius takes higher ground : " Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; For loan oft loses both itself and friend ; And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry." Though a comparison of all the precepts or maxims* of the poet and the statesman would yield a similar result, nobody, remarks the author of the Shakspeare Papers, ever thought of exhibiting Burleigh, inferior as he is thus shown to be in dramatic wisdom, as an object of merriment upon the stage for many a year after he had been gathered to his fathers, * A maxim, once said Coleridge in his table-talk, is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective ; an idea, or, if you like, a principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius, he went on to say, is a man of maxims. " While he is des- canting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels,, he is admirable ; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. You see, Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him." In another paragraph, Coleridge likens a "man of maxims only" to a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. There is matter, if not manner, to remind us of Polonius in Lord Monmouth's, advice to Coningsby when the old peer sent his promising grandson to Cambridge— including the pecuniary clauses— never to borrow money, and always to confine his loans to small sums, and then only to friends of whom he wished to get rid. ADVICE TO LAERTES. 271 until it pleased Sheridan to put him forward to make his oracular nod. Glancing in other directions for illustrative parallels, we light on the parting advice bestowed on Spinella by the noble Genoese, Auria, in John Ford's play of The Lady's Trial (1639) ; containing such lines as, " Admit of visits as of physic forced, Not to procure health, but for safe prevention Against a growing siclmess ; in thy use Of time and of discourse be found so thrifty As no remembrance may impeach thy rest. Appear not in a fashion that can prompt The gazer's eye, or holla. . . . In recreations be both wise and free ; Live still at home, home to thyself, howe'er Enrich'd with noble company," etc. Pitched in another key is the maternal advice in Crabbe, of one with whom the world had dealt full hard, and who had keenly felt the usage : " Read not too much, nor write in verse or prose. For then you make the dull and foolish foes. . . . Keep your good name,'' she said ; " and that to keep, • You must not suffer vigilance to sleep. . . . And, one thing more — to free yourself from foes, Never a secret to your friend disclose. . . . Let not your heart be soften'd ; if it be. Let not the man his softening influence see. . . . But to your fortune look, on that depend For your life's comforts, comforts that attend On wealth alone — wealth gone, they have their end." This range of ethics might bring us, along or adown a gently inclined plane, to the didactic summary of Mrs. Lob- kins addressing little Paul Clifford: "Mind thy kittychism, child, and reverence old age. Never steal, 'specially when any one be in the way. Never go snacks with them as be older than you, — the older a cove be, the more he cares for his self, and the less for his partner. ... Be modest, Paul, and stick to your sitivation in life. Go not with fine tobymen, who burn out like a candle wot has a thief in it,— all flare and gone in a whiffy. Leave liquor to the aged, who can't do 2/2 POLONIUS; without it . . . Read your Bible, and talk like a pious un j people goes more by your words than your actions. If you wants what is not your own, try and do without it ; and if you cannot do without it, take it away by insinivation, not bluster." The epigrammatic caricaturist enjoyed burlesquing, and that broadly, the didactic manner as well as matter of certain formal advisers. Books of professed Advice are, as a rule, considerably open to satire. Henry Crabb Robinson made an entry in his Diary of his becoming acquainted with Osborne's Advice to his Son, on the strength of his impression that it was a favourite with Wordsworth, who had made a present of it to a friend. " But I found, on inquiry," writes the Rydal guest, "that Wordsworth likes only detached remarks, for Osborne is a mere counsellor of selfish prudence and caution. Surely there is no need to print — ' Beware lest in trying to save your friend you get drowned yourself" Polonius might not have been above saying something very like it, though he would have so point-blank-versified as to redeem it from vulgarity. Coleridge says of him, that in the great ever-occurring dangers and duties of life, where to dis- tinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, " Polonius is uniformly made respectable." No critic, indeed, and no Uncritical reader either, can fail to see much that is admirable, as well as characteristic and therefore worldly-wise, in the old statesman's counsels to his children. These are not indeed struck to the chord of the psalmist's " Come, ye children, and hearken unto me : I will teach you the fear of the Lord. . . . Keep thy tongue from evU, and thy lips, that they speak no guile. Eschew evil, and do good ; seek peace, and ensue it." But the strain we hear from the veteran minister is in a higher mood than his wont, when there falls from his lips the ennobling, elevating, magnani- gijiipusly self-respecting precept, — justly appraised by him as above all the rest : •'5' "This above all, — To thine own self be true ; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." ADVICE TO LAERTES. 273 Not that this utterance of his is inspired with the fervour of the patriot's closing couplet in King John, " Nought shall, make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true ; " * of which the Hastings of King Henry VI. supplies a but slightly varied reading : " Why, knows not Montague, that of itself, England is safe, if true within itself." But, rightly interpreted, the self-loyalty, or self-allegiance, enjoined by Polonius is worthy of all acceptation, emulation, and earnest cultivation. Many are the various readings of it that might be suggested. " Qui sibi amicus est, scito hunc amicum omnibus esse," is a sentence of sententious Seneca's. A most sententious lesson. Dr. Thomas Brown calls that line (and a bit over) of one of our old poets, which bids us con- sider what sort of a friend he is likely to prove to us, who has been the destroyer, or at least the constant disquieter, of his own happiness : " See if he be Friend to himself, who would be friend to thee.'' It is a man's inward, not his outward misfortunes, that bring him to the dust, Mr. Carlyle teaches ; " Nature fashions no creature without planting in it the strength needful for its action and duration." It is in a life of truth, and in the " inexpugnable citadel of his own soul," that a true man's strength must lie. " Nothing can bring you peace but your- self," writes Emerson, in the essay on Self-reliance. One of the Meditations of Marcus Antoninus is to this effect : Let * Calamities may be inflicted by others, but no people can be degraded except by their own acts, Mr. Buckle remarks. The foreign spoiler works mischief ; he cannot cause shame. " With nations, as with indi- viduals, none are dishonoured if they are true to themselves." — History of Civilization, vol. ii., p. 133. To apply Byron's lines : ' ' Enough — no foreign foe could quell Thy soul, till from itself it fell ; Yes ! Self-abasement paved the way To villainn-bods and despot-sway." The Giaour. 18 274 ' THIS ABOVE ALL — your choice run all one way, and be resolute for that which is best. Bon pour moi, is Rousseau's phrase, in a passage de- scriptive of his vagaries of amour-propre, which, he confesses, (for it is a part of the Confessions), began by revolting against injustice, but ended by despising it ; " en se repliant sur mon ame, il s'est content^ que je fusse bon pour moi. Alors, redevenant amour de moi-meme, il s'est rentr^ dans I'ordre de la nature, et m'a delivr6 du joug de I'opinion." Ever since which settlement, he professed to have found peace of mind, and almost happiness ; for, in whatsoever situation one is placed, it is only by being untrue to one's self that abiding wretchedness is ensured. To the hero of Gait's Entail, at the moment of leaving home, the still and stationary objects around — the protected city and the everlasting hills — seemed to bear an assurance that, however obscured the complexion of 'his fortunes might at that moment be, there was still " something within himself that ought not to suffer any change, from the evanescent circumstances of another's frown or favour." Honour's Martyr he would be, as in Emily Bronte's poem so-called, with this resolve for ultimatum : "So foes pursue, and cold allies Mistrust me, every one ; Let me be false in others' eyes, If faithful in my own." The Characteristic of an Englishman as depicted by Andrew Bourd, physician to Henry VIII., comprises this noteworthy reflection : " I had no peer if to myself I were true ; Because I am not so, diverse times do I rue." Philosophically the Countess Terzky in Schiller enjoins the law and duty of consistency on Wallenstein ; " For, by the laws of Spirit, in the right Is every individual character That acts in strict consistence with itself. Self-contradiction is the only wrong.'' The closing line of Pope's second Satire, after Horac^ runs : "Let us be fixed, and our own masters still." Professor Lowell's poems, alike the sentimental and the satirical, offer TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE.' 275 us divers available adaptations of the Polonian precept. Thus, in one of his sonnets, " Be as thou wouldst be in thy own clear sight, And so thou wilt in all the world's ere long." And elsewhere : " Knowing that I , . . have been most true to thee, And that whoso in one thing has been true Can be as true in all." While the national application of the canon crops out in the Fable for Critics : " Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age, . . . To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true. Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all." The Norbert of Mr. Browning's In a Balcony consistently and persistently enforces the maxim that " Truth is the strong thing. Let man's Life be true ! Time prove the rest ! " So again, on another page : " Let us do so — aspire to live as these In harmony with truth, ourselves being true; Take the first way, and let the second come." § HI. HOLDING FAST BY ONE'S OLD FAST FRIENDS. Hamlet, Act i., Sc. 3. All the clauses of the paternal advice given to Laertes are noteworthy enough to deserve annotation ; but only two or three may be singled out for that purpose in this and the sections next ensuing. Let one of the selected topics be that in favour of tried and therefore trustworthy old friends, to be preferred on every account, and in every sense, to 276 HOLDING FAST BY shallow though showy acquaintanceships, hastily made, and easily dropped. " The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel ; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade." It is of the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach to enjoin, " Forsake not an old friend ; for the new is not comparable to him : a new friend is as new wine ; when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure." No man who hath once tasted, and learnt the value of, old wine, straightway desireth new ; for he saith, The old is better. At any rate, as the Latin adage runs, while you cultivate new friendships, be mindful to preserve your old ones : " Novos amicos dum paras, veteres cole." For, how very much the best friend for a man is the oldest ! as some one exclaims in Plautus : '' Quam veterrimus homini optimus est amicus." As he neared his end, Dr. Johnson grappled the closer to his big heart, as with hooks of steel, the tried friends he still had. " We have now," he wrote to Bennet Langton, "been long enough acquainted to have many images in common, and therefore to have a source of con- versation which neither the learning nor the wit of a new companion can supply.'' Chamfort says that the friends we make after a certain age, and with whom we try to replace those we have lost, are, to our old friends, what glass eyes, false teeth, and wooden legs are, as compared with real seeing eyes, natural teeth, and limbs of flesh and bone. " Culti- vate kindly, reader," Mr. Thackeray wrote, " those friend- ships of your youth : it is only in that generous time that they are formed." How different, on his showing, the intimacies of after-days are, and how much weaker the grasp of your own hand after it has been shaken about in twenty years' commerce with the world, and has squeezed and dropped a thousand equally careless palms ! That is dulling the palm power of entertainment Shakspeare speaks of. "As you can seldom fashion your tongue to speak a new language after twenty, the heart refuses to receive friendship ONE'S OLD FAST FRIENDS. 277 pretty soon : it gets too hard to yield to the impression." In one of M. de Tocqueville's letters may be read an avowal that before he entered public life (and politics often sever two friends engaged in the same sphere), he set a high value upon his old and true friends ; but since that time they had risen a hundred per cent, in his estimation. If he were to lose them, he felt that he should form no other attachments. The time when such ties are contracted was now for ever past for him. " Outside the small circle of my affections, I look on men only as neutrals or as enemies ; as supporters or as adversaries ; as people to be esteemed or despised, but not as friends ; and if those whom I still [1844] possess die before me, I shall die alone ; at least 'my heart will be solitary." Horace Walpole writes to George Montagu, in 1765 : "You know, if you believe, an experience of above thirty years, that you are one of the very, very few for whom I ;really care a straw. You know how long I have been vexed at seeing so little of you. What has one to do, when one grows tired of the world, as we both do, but to draw nearer and nearer, and gently waste the remains of hfe with the friends with whom one began it ! " The paths that Ion trod with Phocion with tremulous joy when both were urchins, " Let us tread them now " again, he proposes, " And think we are but older by a day. And that the pleasant walk of yesternight We are to-night retracing." Apropos of Charles Nodier's ami d'enfance, the excellent Weiss, Sainte-Beuve asks, " Qui done n'a pas ainsi quelqu'un de ces amis purs et fiddles qui est rest^ au toit quand nous I'avons d6sert6, le pigeon casanier qui garde la tourelle .'' mais I'autre souvent ne revient pas." But here is Walpole again, writing within the same month to his namesake Mann, — ^though perhaps neither Horace may answer over- well to the dove-like image, the pigeon casanier, of the French critic : " I have no joy in new acquaintance, because I can have no confidence in them.'' Why was Sir Horace Mann then a fixture in Florence .' Were these two never to meet again \ Half a dozen years later we find Walpole 2;8 HOLDING FAST Br writing to the friend whom of all others he is believed to have been most attached to, Marshal Conway : " How few persons last, if one lives to be old, to whom one can talk without reserve. It is impossible to be intimate with the young, because they and the old cannot converse on the same common topics ; and of the old that survive, there are few one can commence a friendship with, because one has probably all one's life despised their heart or their understandings." Another lustrum has lapsed, and he is writing to Mann again : " Qld friends are the great blessing of one's latter years — half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking." He had just lost a prized old friend in Mr. Chute ; and he says of this " irreparable .loss," "I shall not seek to replace him. ... Is it possible to love younger, as one loved an habitual old friend of thirty-five years' standing } I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow old friends .'' My age forbids that." He was now on the verge of sixty. " I am very constant and sincere to friends of above forty years," he assures his clerical correspondent, William Cole, about the same time. With some of these old friends he quarrelled, sooner or later ; but, with all his frivolity, this Strawberry Hill fine gentleman was affectionate, as he claimed to be considered ; and the renewal of old friend- ships was at least as welcome to him as to the G^ronte of Gresset, when " making it up " with Ariste, in the closing lines of Le M^chant : " Et nous, mon cher ami, Qu'il ne soit plus parl^ de torts ni de querelles, Ni de gens de mode et d'amities nouvelles . . ; Je sens qu'on revient toujours aux bonnes gens." Old friends are best, quoth Selden in his table-talk : " King James used to call for his old shoes ; they were easiest for his feet." Mentivole, in Beaumont and Fletcher, waxes warm in regard of so constant and so sacred a friendship as one " of fifty winters' standing ; such a friendship. That ever did continue like the Spring, Nor saw the fall o' the ONE'S OLD FAST FRIENDS. 279 leaf." Friendship, like the clothes we wear, says Hazlitt,' becomes the easier from custom : new friendships do not sit well on old or middle age : affection is a science to which it is too late to serve an apprenticeship after a certain period of life. The friendships of boyhood, says Goethe, like relation- ship of blood, possess this important advantage, that mistakes and misunderstandings never produce irreparable injury; and the old regard after a time will always establish itself.* King James's simile of old shoes, and Hazlitt's of old clothes, are constructively conjoined in Mr. Anthony Trollope's comparison of new friends to one's best coat and polished patent-leather dress boots, intended for holiday wear, and at other times neither serviceable nor comfortable: they do not answer the required purpose, and are ill adapted to give us the ease we seek. A new coat, he remarks, has this advantage, that it will in time become old and com- fortable, which is more than can by any means be predicted with certainty of a new friend. And he utters a cry of woe to those men who go through the world with none -but new coats on their backs, with no boots but those of polished leather, with none but new friends to comfort them in adversity. Southey was in his sixtieth year when he claimed to have found out how little we know of men with whom we become acquainted after a certain age, and upon what different foundation the friendships of boyhood, of youth, and of maturity rest : the older they are, like good Rhenish wine, the finer is the relish. " Old friends are the bpst of all possessions, and there is nothing in this world which can supply their loss." So he wrote to Charles Wynn in 1821. And next year Robert the Rhymer renewed the strain. " Old friends and old books are the best things that this world affords (I like old wine also), * It is an observation of Miss Thackeray's, that misunderstandings are far more difficult things than people imagine in love or in friendship : some instinct, as she puts it, protects travellers in that strange country where all is instinct, and if they disagree it is that from some secret reason they do not belong to each other, for quarrels are nothing to those who are united in sympathy. 28o HOLDING FAST BY and in these I am richer than most men (the wine ex- cepted)." A latter-day philosopher warns us, however, against the common trick of fancying that it is impossible for a man to find a new friend without being more or less inconstant to his old ones, — countenance being lent in fact to such a notion by the conduct of a certain kind of thin- natured people, who are ever ready to set up a new idol, ceasing at the same time to pay further deference to the idols they have set up previously ; and it is agreed that there are few of the petty basenesses of life for which so little excuse can be made, or which are so thoroughly hateful, as this practice of habitually deserting the old for the new, simply because it is new. But it is urged that the later we can prolong that flexibility and openness of spirit which welcomes new friends without disparaging old ones, the more likely shall we be to postpone the drawing nigh of the evil days, and the years when men say there is no pleasure in them. It has been called the most winning circumstance of every intimacy for a man to be necessary to another where few are necessary, but this in fact implies constant personal, intercourse. All minds that need another mind to lean upon must, it is urged, be repelled, and in the end alienated, by absence : they cannot remain the same : they must change according to the new influence, and put themselves out of gear for ever again fitting into the old groove. " Only where an active intimacy is a luxury, not a necessity, the effects of separation are less conspicuous, and the re- newal of the old relations more possible." There are, on the other hand, persons whose tepid regard grows into warmth from the mere effect of absence through an uncon- genial period ; and these are said • to have a taste for what they call old friends — a certain antiquarian fidelity which leads them to like people for being old in their recollection. " Tickled by the unforeseen cordiaHty springing from sudden contact, each side eulogizes old friendships as something immeasurably more genuine and trustworthy than new " — experience showing us that almost all old , friendships owe ONE'S OLD FAST FRIENDS. 281 a good deal to absence.* Southey had the right to pique himself on being made of sounder stuff, when he assured another old friend, in 1826, "Time and distance make no change in my affections ; we shift our acquaintance as we shift our place of abode. Friendship is a different thing, and I never yet cast off a friend till he had shown himself unworthy of standing in that relation." The casting off a friend is at any time a serious matter, however brought about, and however carried out. Dear as life an endeared friend is, or should be ; and as hard to part with. "^IXov yap i(76\ov iK^akelv, L(rov Xeyta Kal Tov Trap' avrS) ^iorov, ov irXelarov (j)iKei. According to some observers, cynical more or less, there is no such breaker-up of old friendships as wedlock. The wife is supposed to be unique and supreme in her power of dis- persing and discarding the husband's best and oldest friends. La Bruy^re's maxim, " L'amour et I'amiti^ s'excluent I'un I'autre," might be taken, or mistaken, to confirm this view. There is a passage about domineering wifehood, in Juvenal's sixth satire, which has been freely, rather too freely Englished, " She deals about thy hatred and regard ; Thou must, if bid, thy oldest friends discard." Shakspe-are's Gloster complains, for himself and Clarence, to their uxorious brother, King Edward, " But in your bride you bury brotherhood."" Queen Katharine, pleading her cause before King Henry, presses upon him this question among others that ought to tell unanswerably in her favour ; " Which of your friends Have I not strove to love, although I knew He were mine enemy?" And has it not been said, that to have known a man before * Matthew Bramble writes to his dear doctor and constant crony, on the occasion of a reunion with old college chums — the happiest day he had passed these twenty years, — " You and I, Lewis, having been always together, never tasted friendship in this high ^oHi, contracted from long absence. ... It was a renovation of youth, a kind of resuscitation from the dead," etc. — Hiimphrey Clinker. 282 HOLDING FAST BY his marriage is to be the natural enemy of his wife ? Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to a newly wedded old college crony, by way of excuse for delaying a letter : " This has lingered, I believe, chiefly because I desired to add some self-intro- ducing phrase to your wife, the precise form of which was difficult ; so pray give what you think becoming an ancient ally of her husband's — best wishes — submission f For to a certain extent, even at this distance, old friends have to make their graceful withdrawal. It seems to me . * . that a wife is a sort of natural enemy to a man's friends." The closing couplet of one of Shakspeare's sonnets is not of every- day and obvious or easy application : " But here's the joy : my friend and I are one ; Sweet flattery ! then she loves but me alone." The minds of a married couple, it has been said, supposing them both to have minds of some sort, grow alike ; the germ of resemblance pushes itself on until it reaches its maturity. And most husbands " accommodate themselves to their wives in their manner of living, and in the way in which they regard and treat their neighbours and friends." It was before mar- riage that Crabbe's Counter spoke up like a man — he altered his key afterwards : " Friends I invite, and vpho shall dare t' object, Or look on them with coolness or neglect ? No ! I must ever of my house be head, And, thus obey'd, I condescend to.wed." Swift commends and congratulates one male correspondent on this ground, " that you alone of all my Irish acquaintance have found out the secret of loving your lady and children with some reserve of love for your friends." A letter of Byron's to Tom Moore, dated October 14, 18 14, begins : "An' there were anything in marriage that would make a difference between my friends and me, particularly in your case, I would ' none on't' " Washington Irving qualified his " most hearty" congratulations to his old friend Brevoort by the confession that at first the news of his marriage had rather saddened than gladdened him : " It seemed, in a manner, to divorce us for ever ; for marriage is the grave of bachelor intimacies, ONE'S OLD FAST FRIENDS. 283 and after having lived and grown together for many years, so that our habits, thoughts, and feelings were quite blended and intertwined, a separation of this kind is a serious matter." So again De Tocqueville, already a husband, in a letter to M. de Kergorlay : " You will soon be married, and I cannot help trembling lest the kind and friendly relations that would be so favourable to our intimacy should not be established between our wives ; for experience will teach you how difficult _ it is to separate oneself in anything from one's partner." Shelley asks a correspondent, in one of the most pointed passages of a metrical letter full of points, and of point, — ■ " Have you not heard When a man mar-ries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him ? " So Sir Anthony Aylmer, in Mr. Trollope's story, muses on the old days in which he had been master of a bedroom near St. James's Street, frequented by old friends whom he never saw now, and of whom he never heard except as one and another, year after year, shuffled away from their wives to that world in which there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Colonel Hamley once affirmed that none but a bachelor knows what it is to be a friend, or, perchance, to have one ; for, though you shall have been intimate with a man from his his youth upwards, and have shared together pleasures and dangers, and have bandied thoughts to and fro, like shuttle- cocks, by many a jovial, else solitary, fireside — yet, let the idol of a three days' fancy intervene, and the tried friend's image fades : let marriage ensue, and ■ the memory of those ancient times goes for nothing, strangled by this new close tie. Scott's Bucklaw promises more than he may be able to make good when he essays to reassure the drooping spirit of his dependant. Captain Craigengelt : the board shall still have a corner for him, and the corner a trencher, and the trencher a glass beside it ; " and the board-end shall be filled, and the trencher and the glass shall he replenished for thee, if all the petticoats in Lothian had sworn the contrary. — What, man ! I am not the boy to put myself into leading- strings." So again with Captain Henchman, Jack Todhunter, 2S4 HOLDING FAST BY. and the rest, in the case of Thackeray's Marquis of Farintosh, when they became a prey to misgivings respecting their patron's change in life, and could not view without anxiety the advent of a mistress who might reign over him and them, who might probably not like their company, and might exert her influence over her husband to oust these honest fellows from places in which they were very comfortable. Might not a new marchioness hate hunting, smoking, jolly parties, and toad-eaters in general, or perhaps bring into the house favourites of her own ? Olivarez warned the Infanta that if she -did not, as soon as she was married to Baby Charles, sup- press his too constant co-mate and familiar, Buckingham, she would herself be suppressed, or something like it. " We are Poins, and Nym, and Pistol," growled out George Warrington and his set, in the painting and smoking room of Clive Newcome, the newly married man : " Now Prince Hal is married, and shares the paternal throne, his Princess is ashamed of his brigand associates of old," It is for a Sir Gregory Fop to exclaim, in Beaumont and Fletcher, "Do you think I'll have any of the wits hang upon me after I am married .'" Mr. Disraeli would seem to have been penning a paradox when he wrote that women like you to enter their house as their husband's friend. A dissertator on the theme of Man and his Master, or on the Isolation of Man, more plausibly avers that when Brown meets you in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make no difference in your friendship, and that you will see as much of one another as before, you know that the phrases simply mean that your intimacy is at an end : there will be no more pleasant lounges in the morning, no more strolls in the Park, no more evenings at the Club. " Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of former friend- ships as a condition of the new married life, that hardly any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is." And therefore is it pronounced no slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an ONE'S OLD FAST FRIENDS. 285 axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. If the husband, said EHa, be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage — if you did not come in on the wife's side if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, — then, " look about you ; your tenure is precarious; before a twelvemonth shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you." Elia professed to have scarce a married friend of his acquaintance, upon whose firm faith he could rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some limitations, les femmes can endure that ; but that the goodman should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not con- sulted, though it happened before they knew him, is to them, on Charles Lamb's showing, intolerable. John Locke on his travels had a shrewd eye open to the way of the world when he thus touched on a delicate question in one of his letters to Dr. Muppletoft: "I cannot forbear to touch, en passant, 'dx^ chapter of matrimony, which methinks you are still hankering after; but if ever you should chance so to be given up as to marry, and, like other loving husbands, tell your wife who has dissuaded you, what a case shall I be in ! " Dr. Parr, in a grandis et verbosa epistola to Sir Samuel Romilly, expresses his " exquisite satisfaction " in knowing that his friends see and feel the sincerity of his regard. "Before marriage, I, with my wonted plain dealing, told Mrs. Parr that I had given certain promises, . . . and I added explicitly, that no earthly consideration should induce me to violate one pro- mise," etc. The doctor and Mrs. Parr led a cat-and-dog's life, there be liars else. But no such feline and canine con- catenation marked or marred the married life of Dr. Chalmers ; and him we find firing up at the bare notion of his old friend James Meldrum being kept away by Mrs. Meldrum from a long stay at the Kilmany Manse, because the manse had now a mistress. " This I could not submit to, and told her and Grace, that if I had conceived matrimony to be that kind of 286 HOLDING FAST BY ONE'S OLD FRIENDS. thing, which was to detach my heart from any of its old feel- ings or old friendships, I never should have entered into it. James is accordingly with us ; and the perfect cordiality with which all my friends are received and entertained by the lady of the house, has made her dearer to me than ever." When Mr. Bowker, in Land at Last, hesitates about renew- ing his intimacy with a dear old friend come to town again, because "you see there's the wife to be taken into account now," — a less mistrustful spirit replies, interrogatively, if not reproachfully, " You surely wouldn't doubt your reception by her } The mere fact of your being an old friend of her husband's would be sufficient to make you welcome." But Mr. Bowker can only bless the innocence of this amiable reasoner, and assure him, on the other hand, that to have been the friend of a man before his marriage is, ipso facto, to be on unfriendly terms with his wife. This cynic would seem to have graduated in the school of Hood's regretful Benedick, and to have learnt his ways, and his wife's, — the good lady who was for making a clean sweep of old clothes,, old hats, and old friends : " My clothes they were the queerest shape !• Such coats and hats she never met ! My ways they were the oddest ways ! My friends were such a vulgar set ! Poor Tomkinson was snubb'd and huff'd. She could not bear that Mister Blogg — What d'ye think of that, my Cat ? ■ What d'ye think of that, my Dog ? " The best spirit of the better self of Polonius informs and animates these the closing lines of one of Ben Jonson's metrical epistles : "Look if he be Friend to himself that would be friend to thee : For that is first required, a man be his own : But he that's too much that, is friend of none. Then rest, and a friend's value understand ; It is a richer purchase than of land." 'BEWARE OF ENTRANCE TO A QUARREL: 287 § IV. IN FOR A FIGHT, AND HOW TO GET OUT OF IT. " Beware Of entrance to a quarrel ; but, being in, Bear it that the opposer may beware of thee." * Hamlet, Act i., So. 3. So Laertes is counselled by his worldly-wise, experienced, shrewly-observant, cautiously circumspective, diplomatically disposed sire. Polonius is for being slow to fight, but for hitting hard when once in for it. Loath to begin, he would make the end a speedy, sharp, and sure one. He would by no means strike the first blow, but he would take good care to have the last, and to make it a caution. With good advice make war, he would say ; and the good advice will apply both to the taking action for a fight — which should be wary ; and to the taking part in it — which should be eager, energetic, and vigorously in earnest. Hard by the gates of hell is the dwelling, in Spenser, of At^, mother of strife ; it is a " darksome delve far under- ground, with thornes and barren brakes environ'd round, that none the same may easily out win; Yet many waies to enter may be found, But none to issue forth when one is in : For discord harder is to end than to begin." Men capable of great and prolonged efforts of resistance, Mr. Froude remarks, are usually slow to commence struggles of which they, better than any one, foresee the probable con- sequences. Schiller's Archbishop of Rheims, in a medley of images, implores the high contending powers to " pause with dread, Ere from its scabbard ye unsheathe the sword. The man of power lets loose the god of war. But not, obedient, as from fields of air * Under the title of " Polonius on Polemics," a previous chapter of illustrations of this Shakspearian text may be seen in the present pen- man's Recreations of a Recluse, vol. i., pp. 176 — 196, 2S8 'BEWARE OF ENTRANCE TO A QUARREL.' Returns the falcon to the sportsman's hand, Doth the wild deity obey the call Of mortal voice." And the appeal of the Maid of Orleans herself is to the same effect : " Sovereigns and kings ! disunion shun vpith dread ! Wake not contention from the murky cave Where he doth lie asleep ; for once aroused He cannot soon be quell'd : he then begets An iron brood, a ruthless progeny ; Wildly the sweeping conflagration spreads.'' The beginning of strife is said, in holy writ, to be as when one lettetli out waters. Another text in the Book of Proverbs runs, " Go not forth hastily to strive, lest thou know not what to do in the end thereof." A hasty contention, saith Jesus the son of Sirach, "kindleth a fire, and a hasty fighting sheddeth blood. If thou blow the spark, it shall burn." There is a Spanish proverb which Dr. Trench quotes as giving a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, and of violence evermore provoking its like : " Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee." Bishop Fleetwood's lament over public disorder in Marlborough's time, is praised by Earl Stanhope for its " admirable elo- quence " — where he says that God for our sins permitted the spirit of discord to go forth, and by troubling sore the camp, the city, and the country, to " spoil for a time this beautiful and pleasing prospect, and give us in its stead — I know not what." The beginnings of strife are as definite and often paltry as its progress is indefinite and its end beyond all guesswork. As to the waging of war, the text in Ecclesiasticus will apply : " Let reason go before every enterprize, and counsel before every action." And so, in the sense already indicated, will this : " Do nothing without advice ; and when thou hast once done, repent not." War once waged, on good advice, the same soundness of counsel would urge the waging it with a will, so as to ensure what Sir William Curtis pleonastically desiderated as " a speedy peace and soon." Being in for a 'WITH GOOD ADVICE MAKE WAR.' 289 quarrel, make short work of it, if you can. With good advice make war, and with stout heart carry it on. Hold off as long as ever you may ; but, once in for it, so fight that your foe be the first to cry, Hold, enough ! If it be a just and necessary war — and no other is excusable — quit you like men, be strong. To the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, the exhortation of Nehemiah was, in face of the enemy, " Be not ye afraid of them : remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses.'' The "fight" has in it the ring of the iterated and reiterated monosyllable in " Britons, strike home ! " The mighty men of Babylon who had forborne to fight, were no model for arrtied Hebrews. When a Christian apostle has to fight, it is not as one that beateth the air. Had it been the vocation of that spirited tent-maker to fight another sort of good fight of faith, as the Maccabees of old, his prowess would have won him a name among those who waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the armies of the aliens. And in that cause, too, would it have been his great right to say, " I have fought a good fight " — not uncertainly, hesitatingly, half-heartedly, or 'w? aepa hepuv — a pugilistic metaphor, which may mean beating the air either in private exercise, or as a prelude to the fight, or during the fight itself, when aiming a blow, and, by missing, spending one's strength for nought,— making a show of an encounter, but failing to hit hard, hit fast, hit home. Lord Bacon, in his essay on Delays, speaks of the helmet of Pluto as "secrecy in the council, and celerity in the execution ; " and his archiepiscopal annotator exposes the unwisdom of those " mock-wise men " who, though slow and quick just in the same degree that a really wise man is, are so in the wrong places, — making their decisions hastily, and then becoming slow in the execution ; " who unmask their battery hastily, and then think of loading their guns." Else- where Dr. Whately describes a sort of people who are "-slow and sure " — sure in cases that admit of leisurely deliberation, but utterly failing where promptitude is called for ; as again in another place he makes a study of those who "are bold 19 290 LOTH TO FIGHT, BUT FIGHTING HARD. first and prudent afterwards "—who without good advice make war, and with pitiful stint of action and energy carry it on, or let it carry on itself, and so carry them away. There is point and purpose in the proverbial maxim of New England, " Be sure you are right, and then go ahead." The hero of one, of Herr Scharling's Danish novels is meant to typify the national character : the Danish p.eople, he tells us in his preface, are exceedingly calm, slow to take any determination, and still slower to act ; hence they often become the object of scorn and ridicule to their adversaries until the extreme moment of danger arrives, when they shake off their spiritual lethargy, put out all their strength, and come off conquerors. Discussing the morale of revolutions, Edinburgh's most popular professor of moral philosophy declared them to be the very last resource of the thinking and the good, but still a resource ; and when, said he, the rare imperious cases do occur, the patriot will lift his arm with reluctance, but when it is lifted, will wield it with all the force he can command, having first "made that calculation in which his own happi- ness and his own life have scarcely been counted as elements." Before you commence anything, counsels a later,, but now a late, philosopher, provide as if all hope were against you : when you set about it, act as if there were not such a thing as fear. As with the advice in Crabbe's Tales of the Hall, " Ere yet the choice be made, no choice debate, But, having chosen, dally not with fate." The same poet's contrast of the brothers James and Robert, in another tale, is to the purpose : " They both were brave, but Robert loved to run And meet his danger — James would rather shun The dangerous trial, but, whenever tried, He all his spirit to the act applied." Professor Blunt says of Henry the Eighth, when it had come to be a question whether the King should put down the monks, or the monks the King, that he had no alternative but to try a fall with them, and accordingly, having been slow (considering his temperament) to get into- the quarrel, he still " acted as Lord Bacon would have advised, and being in it 'COCHLEA CONSILIIS, IN FACTO VOLUCRIS.' 29 1 bore himself bravely." Contrasting the characters of Francis the First and Charles the Fifth, Robertson describes the former as taking his resolutions suddenly, prosecuting them at first with warmth, and pushing them into execution with a most adventurous courage ; but being destitute of the perse- verance necessary to surmount difficulties, he often abandoned his designs, or relaxed the vigour of pursuit from impatience, and sometimes from levity. Charles, on the other hand, " deliberated long, and determined with coolness ; but having once fixed his plan, he adhered to it with inflexible obstinacy, and neither danger nor discouragement could turn him aside from the execution of it." Cochlea consiliis, in facto esto volucris, runs the Latin adage. The speaking Bridge in the Biglow Papers is clear upon the subject, and the reverse of mealy-mouthed : "We've got to fix this thing for good an' all ^ It's no use buildin' wut's agoin' to fall. . . . We've turn'd our cuffs up, but, to put her thru. We must git mad an' off with jackets, tu ; 'Twunt du to think thet killin' aint perlite, — You've gut to be in aimest, ef you fight." Mr. Froude accounts it the misfortune of Elizabeth, that while she could hesitate indefinitely when action was imme- diately necessary, the " perturbations of her mind," as Knowles called them, at other times swayed her into extremes, and she allowed sudden provocations to tempt her to the most ill- judged precipitancy. Contrast this temper of hers with Philip's of Spain : to be slow and silent, to take every precaution to ensure success, and then to deliver suddenly at last the blow which had been long vaguely impending — this was the Spanish method. Contrast it, again, with Mary Stuart's. In the summer of 1 565, for instance, while Randolph had to keep writing that "when council is once taken, nothing is so needful as speedy execution," and while Elizabeth was keeping the Congregation in suspense, Mary was all fire, energy, and resolution — so that as post after post came in from Scotland, the English queen lost her breath at the rapidity of her royal cousin's movements, and resolution on 292 PRUDENT AS WELL AS VALLANT. Elizabeth's part became more impossible as the need of it became more pressing. Yet, " so easy it would be for her to strike Mary Stuart down, if she had but half the promptitude of Mary herself." " From the moment she [Mary] had first taken the field, she had given her enemies no rest." Eliza- beth's policy with regard to the revolted Netherlands was marked by the same taint ; Mr. Motley laments that the stealthy .hut quick-darting tactics of Walsingham were not allowed to prevail over the solemn, stately, ponderous pro- ceedings of Burghley, who yet was by far too fast for his irresolute mistress — so inopportunely irresolute. Burghley himself could be earnestly eloquent in his appeals to her : was this a moment to linger.? was it wise to indulge any longer in doubtings and dreamings, and in yet a little more foldings of the arms to sleep, while that insatiable malice of the Spaniard was growing hourly more formidable, and approaching nearer and nearer .' In the troublous times for England of 1672, we find John Evelyn noting in his Diary, with sad-hearted reference to the_^ loss in sea-fight of " my Lord Sandwich," that the latter was " prudent as well as valiant," "was for deliberation and reason" before risking an encounter, whereas those who egged him on were " for action and slaughter without either." There being no help for it, and as if with a resentful sense of being mis- construed as timid, Sandwich at last " entered like a lion, and fought Jike one too," but this time with fatal issue. Hinc ilia lachrymce. The great minister, his contemporary, Colbert, had the character of being slow in conceiving his plans, and cautious in deciding upon their execution, courting and listen- ing to advice at every stage ; but when once his resolve was fixed, his will knew no obstacles, but found or made a way straight to the mark. Alberoni was all anxiety to avoid war in 171 7, but war becoming inevitable, he "bent all his energies," says a historian of it, "to its successful prosecu- tion," and showed himself no imitator of some preceding Spanish ministers, who, in diflScult circumstances, had left all for the saints to do, or their allies. Earl Stanhope has a note of admiration for the contrast between Washington's DELIBERATE BUT DETERMINED. 293 first forbearance and his subsequent determination — his re- luctance to draw the sword, and his "magnanimity in persevering." His, it has been suggested, might fitly have been the motto which Spaniards of the old time and the old type used to engrave on their Toledo blades : " Never draw me without reason ; never sheathe me without honour." He decided surely, though he deliberated slowly. Pitt was declared at the time by those who knew him best, to have been dragged into the contest with France "with as much reluctance as a man of conscientious principles into a duel ; " but when once forced into the conflict, he fought as for dear life. In no manner a man after his own heart was that prominent actor in the strife, the Duke of Brunswick, whom historians describe as bold even to rashness in the original conception of a campaign, but vacillating and irresolute when he came to carry it into execution. Pitt knew Wellington only as young Arthur Wellesley, but even as early as 1806, his last year of life, he was able to affirm that never had he met any military officer with whom it was so- satisfactory to converse. " He states every difficulty before he undertakes any service, but none after he has undertaken it," were the warm words of the dying statesman to his dear old friend Lord Wellesley, in praise of his brother Arthur. It was said by Prince Albert to be peculiar to Sir Robert Peel that, in great things, as in small, all the difficulties and objections occurred to him first : he would anxiously consider them, pause, and warn against rash resolutions ; but, having con- vinced himself, after a long and careful investigation, that a step was right to be taken, " all his caution and apparent timidity changed into courage and power of action." Happy the complete man that combines in himself what Beaumont and Fletcher's Duke is for parcelling out between himself and his generals : " Nor will we e'er be wanting in our counsels, As we doubt not your action.'' Prompt energy of action following upon sage dtliberation in counsels, is the way to win. 294 THE APPAREL OFT PROCLAIMS THE MAN. §V. CHARACTER BETOKENED BY DRESS. Hamlet, Act i., Sc. 3. POLONIUS has an eye to dress. He is observant of apparel, because he is a student of character ; and the apparel oft proclaims the man. And in this, as in other matters, the old politician finds it politic to preach up the golden mean. If the young man, his son, would get on in the world, let him pay a proper, but no improper, attention to costume. Let Laertes be careful to dress well, but never to be over- dressed. Let him pay handsomely to look handsome ; but let him avoid exaggerated or " loud " garments, not less than sordid or squalid ones. " Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy ; rich, not gaudy. For the apparel oft proclaims the man." The shrewd old Lafeu, of AWs Well that Ends Well, distrusts young Bertram's friend, Parolles, from the moment he casts eyes on him, " But I hope your lordship thinks him not a soldier ? . . , Pray you, sir, who's his tailor .■'.., Believe this of me. There can be no kernel in this light nut ; the soul of this man is his clothes : trust him not in matter of heavy consequence." Chesterfield's affinity to Polonius as a paternal counsellor is elsewhere recognized in these pages ; and to his young Laertes that pink of politeness in the peerage writes : " Your dress (as insignificant a thing as dress is in itself) is now become an object worthy of some attention ; for I confess I cannot help forming some opinion of a man's sense and character from his dress; and I believe most people do as well as myself" Any affectation what- soever in dress, his lordship takes to imply a flaw in the understanding. Most of the young fellows he observed in London society displayed, to his eye, some character or other by their dress ; some affecting the tremendous, and wearing' a big fiercely-cocked hat, an enormous sword, a short waist- coat, and a black cravat ; and these he professedly should CHARACTER BETOKENED BY DRESS. 295 be almost tempted to swear the peace against, were he not convinced of their being but meek asses in lions' skins. Others he saw going in brown frocks, leather breeches, great oaken cudgels in their hands, their hats uncocked, and their hair unpowdered, — altogether imitating grooms, stage-coach- men, and country bumpkins so well in their outsides, that he made not the least doubt of their resembling them equally in their insides. A man of sense, he repeats, care- fully avoids any particular character in his dress ; he is accurately clean for his own sake ; but all the rest is for other people's. " He dresses as well, and in the same manner, as the people of sense and fashion of the place where he is. If he dresses better, as he thinks, (that is, more) than they, he is a fop : if he dresses worse, he is unpardonably negligent." But of the two, Chesterfield would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed, because the excess on that side will wear off with a little age and reflection ; but " if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old." Evelyn admired, and cited as "witty," the expression of Malvezzi, that garments (vestimenti) in animals are infal- lible signs of their nature ; in men, of their understanding.* * Evelyn's disdain of French foppery comes out strong in his Tyraiuius ; or, the Mode J one paragraph of which treatise on the absurdities of fashion begins : " Methinks a French taylor with an ell in his hand, looks like the enchantress Circe over the companions of Ulysses, and changes them into as many formes." And another opens with a picture of " a fine silken thing which I spied walking th' other day, through Westminster Hall, that had as much ribbon about him as would have plundered six shops, and set up twenty country pedlars ; all his body was drest like a Maypole, or a Tom o' Bedlam's cap," etc. Not less hearty was this model English gentleman in his scorn, than was that German of the Germans, Jean Paul F. Richter, in his avowed " innate disgust to dandies (though quit^ con- trary was his feeling towards finely-dressed women), so that he often looked at the flugelman of dress in the Journal des Modes with the sole view of rousing his bile against them.'' There figures in one of his fictions a muscadin upon whose waistcoat — according to the then pre- vaihng fashion — was embroidered a whole menagerie, or Zimmerman's zoological map ; whose pocket-handkerchief was a great Molucca, and his two locks two little Moluccas full of perfume; while profiles, pictures, 296 CHARACTER AND DRESS. It is written in the words of Jesus the son of Sirach : " A man's attire, and excessive laughter, and gait, show what he is." Treating in the pulpit of superficial character, of persons all whose work and all whose nature is on the surface, Frederick Robertson said, " The very dress of such persons betrays the slatternly, incomplete character of their minds." To cite a fruity couplet from the Urania of Dr. O. W. Holmes, " The outward forms the inner man reveal, — We guess the pulp before we cut the peel." In making good or bad taste in dress an infallible criterion of social elegance or deformity, the elder Schlegel was careful to limit his rule to the age in which the fashion came up ; for it may sometimes be very difficult to overturn a wretched fashion even when, in other things, a better taste has long prevailed. The dresses of the ancients, he ob- serves, were more simple, and consequently less subject to change of fashion, — the male dress, in particular, being almost unchangeable. Even from the dresses alone, as we see them in the remains of antiquity, he asserts the possi- bility of forming a pretty accurate judgment of the character of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. " What we harmony do call," sings Ben Jonson, " in a body, should be there ; Well he should his clothes too wear, Yet no tailor help to make him ; Dress'd, you still for man should take him, And not think he'd eat a stake, Or were set up in a brake," whatever that last phrase may import.* " His robes sat well upon him," writes. John Marston Hall of a certain French dignitary, — "which is always a sign of a lofty stones, even beetles' wings, were all employed in the "gold-shoeing" of his beringed fingers. Jean Paul takes care to hit him hard throughout. * Besides meaning a thicket of bushes, " brake " is used for a snaiHe for horses, and for a wooden frame to restrain the legs of vicious ones while being shod ; either of which senses is more seemingly pertinent than the other accepted ones of an engine of torture, and an instrument for dressing flax. CHARACTER AND DRESi>. 297 education or of a fine mind ; for no one can feel himself perfectly at ease in all his movements, without possessing the one, or having received the other." That reminds us of another clause in the Chesterfield chapter of instructions. When once well dressed for the day, let his pupil think no more of it afterwards ; and without any fear of dis- composing his dress, let all his motions be as easy and natural as if he had no clothes on at all. Whether Philip Stanhope's every motion in that case would or could have been easy and natural, may at the least be doubted. " Each Bond Street buck conceits, unhappy elf ! He shows his clothes : alas, he shows himself ! O that they knew, these over-drest self-lovers. What hides the body, oft the mind uncovers." So wrote Coleridge in his Poets' Corner days. And Charles Kingsley, in days when the word " sacrament " was very frequently at his pen's point, pronounced dress to be a sort of sacrament, a sure sign of the wearer's character : according as any one is orderly, or modest, or tasteful, or joyous, or brilliant, those excellences, or the want of them, are sure to show themselves, in the colours they choose, and the cut of their garments. Often in the work- room used Alton Locke, tailor and poet, to amuse himself over the clothes he was making, by speculating from them on the sort of people the wearers were to be ; and he flattered himself he was not often wrong. Merle d'Aubigne is careful to tell us of Calvin, that his dress, equally remarkable for its great neatness and its perfect simplicity, indicated habits of order and native modesty. So again is Conyers Middleton to tell us of Cicero, that in his dress, " which the wise have usually considered as an index of the mind," he observed what he prescribes in his De Officiis, a " modesty and decency, adapted to his rank and character : a perpetual cleanliness, without the appearance of pains ; free from the affectation of singularity, and avoiding the extremes of a rustic negligence and foppish delicacy." Cortes was noted for dressing plainly, with exceeding neatness^ but always in the fashion of the time : rich, not 298 CHARACTER AND DRESS. gaudy, was his rule. Ill-fashioned garments, observes Hartley Coleridge, have always more or less of this fault — you can neither wear them, nor see them worn, without thinking of them : but the best and most graceful offend on the same ground, if, however well-made, they be very much out of the fashion, or any way unsuitable to the age, rank, or character of the wearer. " It is possible to dress too plain for modesty." Lamartine, who is particular in describing the dress of many of the Girondins and victims of the Terror, calls our attention to Brissot as clad with " affected simplicity," in a threadbare black cloak cut mathematically to cover the limbs of a man ; to Lasource in his plain black coat, and Gensonn^ in his elegant and carefully chosen costume, made in proscribed shape and of proscribed stuff. He would be, to the last, the gentleman, to those who had proscribed the use of any such word, and indeed the mere existence of any such being, yet in whose eyes the dress is apt to make the gentleman. Mr. Mayhew, in the course of his back-street and byway researches in London life and labour, was assured . by one informant, in regard of a " gentleman " who drove a roaring trade in the hot-eel line, in Clare Market, that, " on a Sunday, anybody would think him the first nobleman in the land, to see him dressed in his white hat, with black crape round it, and his drab paletot and mother-o'-pearl buttons, and black kid gloves, with the fingers too long for him." The Commissioner's informant would presumably have been slow to follow Mr. Trollope's description of Mr. Manylodes, whom, though every article he wore was good, and most of them such as gentlemen wear, no man alive could have mistaken for a gentleman. Hajji Baba in England was puzzled howi to judge of people by their dress, so misleading was any such criterion — those who drove the coaches in the streets, and those who stood behind them, being by far the finest dressed people he could see. " In grandfather's time," writes Jerrold's epistolary tailor, "gentle- men were known to be gentlemen by their coats. They walked about clothed and marked as superior people • there 'THE TAILOR MAKES THE MAN.' 299 was no mistake in them, and the lower orders knew their betters by their satins, their velvets, and their gold lace. Now, sir, how are we to know a gentleman ? There is no mark, no difference in him : we can only come at his gentility by his manners ; a very roundabout way, sir ; and one that has led to a great many mistakes." Mr. Stitchington would like to know as a master-tailor, how it is to be hoped that common folks are to respect the House of Lords, when he every day of his life sees a Duke pass his door to Parliament in a pepper-and-salt linsey- woolsey, duffel, flannel sort of thing, that his tailor, try as hard as he may, can't charge him more than two pounds for. It was never intended, this remonstrant argues, that the lines of society should be so finely drawn by the tailor, that you could not see them ; and because it is so, you now have, on his showing, all sorts of discontent, no stability in trade, and no real morals in gentlemen. No real wit either, he might perchance have added, if conversant with the style of his fellow-craftsman Fashioner, in Ben Jonson's Staple of News : " Believe it, sir. That clothes do much upon the wit, as weather Does on the brain ; and thence, sir, comes your proverb, ' The tailor makes the man.' I speak by experience Of my own customers. I have had gallants, Both court and country, would have fool'd you up In a new suit, with the best wits in being. And kept their speed as long as their clothes lasted Handsome and neat ; but then as they grew out At the elbows again, or had a stain or spot, They have sunk most wretchedly.'' * Autolycus had declined to fight with the Bohemian shepherd's son the other day, because that pugnaciously disposed clown was no gentleman born ; but the clown is no sooner in possession of goodly array than he asserts himself * An essayist on the theme of Outward Adornment insists not only that an ill-dressed man will never be so much at his ease as one who is well- dressed, but that he wiU. not " think " so highly or so well — to say nothing more of the mean and shabby ways that a mean and shabby appearance gives a man. 300 WELL DRESSED IN ANY DUESS. gentleman absolute on the strength of it. " See you these clothes ? say, you see them not, and think me still no gentleman born : you were best say, these robes are not gentleman born." " I know, you are now, sir, a gentle- man born," Autolycus humbly acquiesces. Petruchio scorns such vulgar logic : he and his Kate are to go visiting in their present shabby but " honest mean habiliments : " what though they both figure in " garments poor '' .? he, wilful man, at present loves to have it so : " For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich ; And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, So honour peareth in the meanest habit." The sweet look of goodness which sat upon my uncle Toby's brow assimilated everything around it so sovereignly to itself, and Nature had " wrote Gentleman with so fair a hand in every line of his countenance," that, by his nephew's account, even his tarnished gold-laced hat and huge cockade of flimsy taffety became him ; and, though not worth a button in themselves, yet " the moment my uncle Toby put them on, they became serious objects, and altogether seemed to have been i'picked up by the hand of Science to set him off to advantage."* When the tattered refugee Caius Marcius is found to be very Coriolanus, the servants' hall talk, among the retainers of Aufidius, is in this strain : " By my hand," protests one fellow, " I had thought to have strucken him with a cudgel ; and yet my mind gave me, his clothes made a false report of him." " Off, off, you lendings," is crazy Lear's style, as he begins to unstrip, after considering well the uncovered body of Poor Tom, who * Like the lassie in Burns : "And then there's something in her gait Gars ony dress look weel. " Innate nobility asserts itself through any vesture, and the man looks well in spite of the worst. As with the stranger guests in Scott's Lord of the Isles: ' ' For though the costly furs That erst had deck'd their caps were torn, And their gay robes were overworn, And soil'd their gilded spurs, 'A TAILOR MAKE A MAN?' 301 owed the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool ; and yet might be, like his prince of darkness, a gentleman. " Know'st me not by my clothes ? " is Cloten's wrathful address to that "villain base," Guiderius, when they meet and fight before the cave ; and the king's son answers the queen's son offhand, " No, nor thy tailor, rascal, Who is thy grandfather ; he made those clothes. Which, as it seems, make thee." Honest Kent, in Lear, tells that finical rogue Oswald, Goneril's steward, " A tailor made thee ! " "A tailor make a man .■' " is Cornwall's query ; and Kent re-asserts the paradox, with extra emphasis. One of Overbury's Charac- ters laughs at every man whose band sits not well, or that hath not a fair shoe-tye, and he is ashamed to be seen in any man's company that wears not his clothes well : " His very essence he placeth in his outside, and his chiefest prayer is, that his revenues may hold out for taffeta cloaks in the summer, and velvet in the winter." Another of them had rather have the whole commonwealth out of order than the " least member of his muchato, and chooses rather to lose his patrimony than to have his band ruffled." Christo- pher North professes, " My happiness is in the hands of my tailor. In a perfectly well-cut coat and faultless pair of breeches, I am in heaven — a wrinkle on my pantaloons puts me into purgatory—and a," c