CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM ;":u Siilzer Cornell University Library PS 2300.E90C V.I The writings of James Russell Lowell in 3 1924 022 026 599 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022026599 UttberjETitie €bttton THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN PROSE AND POETRY VOLUME I LITERARY ESSAYS I. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY abt iSitctiSibe fttf? d, 156 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL with the usual, " Noblest gentlemen, give me some- thing for charity." We gave her enough to pay Charon's ferriage across to her sisters, and de- parted hastily, for there was something uncanny about the place. In this climate even the finger- marks of Euin herself are indelible, and the walls were stiU blackened with Rienzi's fires. As we waited for our carrettella, I saw four or five of the lowest-looking peasants come up and read the handbiU of a tombola (a kind of lottery) which was stuck up beside the inn-door. One of them read it aloud for our benefit, and with re- markable propriety of accent and emphasis. This benefit of clergy, however, is of no great conse- quence where there is nothing to read. In Home, this morning, the walls were spattered with pla- cards condemning the works of George Sand, Eu- gene Sue, Gioberti, and others. But in Kome one may contrive to read any book he likes; and I know Italians who are famUiar with Swedenborg, and even Strauss. Our stay at the alhergo was illustrated by one other event, — a nightingale singing in a full-blos- somed elder-bush on the edge of a brook just across the road. So liquid were the notes, and so full of spring, that the twig he tilted on seemed a conductor through which the mingled magnetism of brook and blossom flowed into him and were precipitated in music. Nature understands thor- oughly the value of contrasts, and accordingly a donkey from a shed hard by, hitched and hesitated and agonized through his bray, so that we might ITALY 167 be conscious at once of the positive and negative poles of song. It was pleasant to see with what undoubting enthusiasm he went through his solo, and vindicated Providence from the imputation of weakness in making such trifles as the nightingale yonder. " Give ear, O heaven and earth ! " he seemed to say, " nor dream that good, sound com- mon-sense is extinct or out of fashion so long as / live." I suppose Nature made the donkey half ab- stractedly, while she was feeling her way up to her ideal in the horse, and that his bray is in like man- ner an experimental sketch for the neigh of her finished animal. We drove on to Palestrina, passing for some distance over an old Roman road, as carriageable as when it was built. Palestrina occupies the place of the once famous Temple of Fortune, whose ruins are perhaps a fitter monument of the fickle goddess than ever the perfect fane was. Come hither, weary ghosts that wail O'er buried Nimroud's carven walls. And ye whose nightly footsteps frail From the dread hush of Memphian halls Lead forth the whispering funerals 1 Come hither, shade of ancient pain That, mufSed sitting, hear'st the foam To death-deaf Carthage shout in vain, And thou that in the Sibyl's tome Tear-stain'st the never after Rome ! Come, Marius, Wolsey, all ye great On whom proud Fortune stamped her heel. And see herself the sport of Fate, Herself discrowned and made to feel The treason of her slippery wheel I 158 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL One climbs through a great part of the town by stone steps, passing fragments of Pelasgic wall, (for history, like geology, may be studied here in successive rocky strata,^ and at length reaches the inn, called the Cappellaro, the sign of which is a great tin cardinal's hat, swinging from a small building on the other side of the street, so that a better view of it may be had from the hostelry it- self. The landlady, a stout woman of about sixty years, welcomed us heartily, and burst forth into an eloquent eulogy on some fresh sea-fish which she had just received from Rome. She promised everything for dinner, leaAring us to choose ; but as a skilful juggler flitters the cards before you, and, while he seems to offer aU, forces upon you the one he wishes, so we found that whenever we undertook to select from her voluble bill of fare, we had in some unaccountable manner always or- dered sea-fish. Therefore, after a few vain efforts, we contented ourselves, and, while our dinner was cooking, climbed up to the top of the town. Here stands the deserted Palazzo Barberini, in which is a fine Roman mosaic pavement. It was a dreary old place. On the ceilings of some of the apart- ments were fading out the sprawling apotheoses of heroes of the family, (themselves long ago faded utterly,) who probably went through a somewhat different ceremony after their deaths from that represented here. One of the rooms on the ground-floor was still occupied, and from its huge grated windows there swelled and subsided at in- tervals a confused turmoil of voices, some talking, ITALY 159 some singing, some swearing, and some lamenting, as if a page of Dante's Inferno had become sud- denly alive under one's eye. Tliis was the prison, and in front of each window a large stone block allowed tete-h-tHe discourses between the prisoners and their friends outside as well as the passing in of food. English jails were like this in Queen Elizabeth's time and later. In Heywood's " Wo- man killed with Kindness," Acton says of his enemy Mountford, in prison for debt, — " shall we hear The music of his voice cry from the grate Meat, far the Lord's sake ? " Behind the palace rises a steep, rocky hill, with a continuation of ruined castle, the innocent fastness now of rooks and swallows. We walked down to a kind of terrace, and watched the Alban Mount (which saw the sunset for us by proxy) till the bloom trembled nearer and nearer to its summit, then went wholly out, we could not say when, and day was dead. Simultaneously we thought of din- ing, and clattered hastily down to the Cappellaro. We had to wait yet half an hour for dinner, and from where I sat I could see through the door of the dining-room a kind of large hall into which a door from the kitchen also opened. Presently I saw the landlady come out with a little hanging lamp in her hand, and seat herself amply before a row of baskets ranged upside-down along the wall. She carefully lifted the edge of one of these, and, after she had groped in it a moment, I heard that hoarse choking scream peculiar to fowls when seized by 160 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL the leg in the dark, as if their throats were in their tibiae after sunset. She took out a fine young cock and set him upon his feet before her, stupid with sleep, and blinking helplessly at the lamp, which he perhaps took for a sun in reduced circum- stances, doubtful whether to crow or cackle. She looked at him admiringly, felt of him, sighed, gazed sadly at his coral crest, and put him back again. This ceremony she repeated with live or six of the baskets, and then went back into the kitchen. I thought of Thessalian hags and Arabian enchan- tresses, and wondered if these were transformed travellers, — for travellers go through queer trans- formations sometimes. Should Storg and I be crowing and scratching to-morrow morning, instead of going to Subiaco ? Should we be Plato's men, with the feathers, instead of without them? I would probe this mystery. So, when the good woman came in to lay the table, I asked what she had been doing with the fowls. " I thought to kill one for the gentlemen's soup ; but they were so beautiful my heart failed me. Still, if the gentlemen wish it — only I thought two pigeons would be more delicate." Of course we declined to be accessory to such a murder, and she went off delighted, returning in a few minutes with our dinner. First we had soup, then a roasted kid, then boiled pigeons, (of which the soup had been made,) and last the pesci di mare, which were not quite so great a novelty to us as to our good hostess. However, hospitality, like so many other things, is reciprocal, and the guest ITALY 161 must bring his half, or it is naught. The pros- perity of a dinner lies in the heart of him that eats it, and an appetite twelve miles long enabled us to do as great justice to the fish as if we were crowd- ing all Lent into one meal. The landlady came and sat by us ; a large and serious cat, winding her great tail round her, settled herself comfortably on the table, licking her paws now and then, with a poor relation's look at the fish ; a small dog sprang into an empty chair, and a large one, with very confidential manners, would go from one to the other of us, laying his paw upon our arms as if he had an important secret to communicate, and alternately pricking and drooping his ears in hope or despondency. The albergatrice forthwith began to tell us her story, — how she was a widow, how she had borne thirteen children, twelve stiU living, and how she received a pension of sixty scudi a year, under the old Roman law, for her meritorious- ness in this respect. The portrait of the son she had lost hung over the chimney-place, and, pointing to it, she burst forth into the following droll thren- ody. The remarks in parenthesis were screamed through the kitchen-door, which stood ajar, or ad- dressed personally to us. " O my son, my son ! the doctors killed him, just as truly as if they had poisoned him ! O how beautiful he was ! beautiful ! beautiful I ! beauti- ful ! ! ! (Are not those fish done yet ?) Look, that is his likeness, — but he was handsomer. He was as big as that " (extending her arms), — "big breast, big shoulders, big sides, big legs ! (Eat 162 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL 'em, eat 'em, they won't hurt you, fresh sea-fish, fresh ! fresh 1 ! fresh ! ! !) I told them the doc- tors had murdered him, when they carried him with torches ! He had been hunting, and brought home some rabbits, I remember, for he was not one that ever came empty-handed, and got the fever, and you treated him for consumption, and killed him ! (Shall I come out there, or will you bring some more fish ?) " So she went on, talking to herself, to us, to the little serva in the kitchen, and to the medical profession in general, repeating , every epithet three times, with increasing emphasis, till her voice rose to a scream, and contriving to mix up her living children with her dead one, the fish, the doctors, the serva, and the rabbits, tUl it was hard to say whether it was the fish that had large legs, whether the doctors had killed them, or the serva had killed the doctors, and whether the hello! hello ! I hello ! ! I referred to her son or a particu- larly fine rabbit. 2bth. — Having engaged our guide and horses the night before, we set out betimes this morning for Olevano. From Palestrina to Cavi the road winds along a narrow vaUey, following the course of a stream which rustles rather than roars below Large chestnut-trees lean every way on the steep sides of the hiUs above us, and at every opening we could see great stretches of Campagna rolling away and away toward the bases of purple moun- tains streaked with snow. The sides of the road were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn and honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with in« ITALY 163 numerable nightingales that sang unseen. Over- head the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as if the frost in the air were breaking up and whirling away on the swollen currents of spring. Before long we overtook a little old man hob- bling toward Cavi, with a bag upon his back. This was the mail ! Happy country, which Hurry and Worry have not yet subjugated! Then we clattered up and down the narrow paved streets of Cavi, through the market-place, full of men dressed all alike in blue jackets, blue breeches, and white stockings, who do not stare at the strangers, and so out at the farther gate. Now oftener and oftener we meet groups of peasants in gayest dresses, rag- ged pilgrims with staff and scallop, singing (horri- bly) ; then processions with bag-pipes and pipes in front, droning and squealing (horribly) ; then strings of two- wheeled carts, eight or nine in each, and in the first the priest, book in hand, setting the stave, and all singing (horribly). This must be inquired into. Gigantic guide, who, splendid with blue sash and silver knee-buckles, has con- trived, by incessant drumming with his heels, to get his mule in front, is hailed. " Ho, Petruccio, what is the meaning of all this press of people ? " " Festa, Lordship, at Genezzano." " What Festa f " " Of the Madonna, Lordship," and touches his hat, for they are all dreadfully afraid of her for some reason or other. We are in luck, this being the great j^es^a of the 164 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL year among the mountains, — a thing which people go out of Rome to see. " Where is Genezzano ? " " Just over yonder, Lordship," and pointed to the left, where was what seemed like a monstrous crys- tallization of rock on the crown of a hill, with three or four taller crags of castle towering in the midst, and all gray, except the tiled roofs, whose wrin- kled sides were gold-washed with a bright yellow lichen, as if ripples, turned by some speU to stone, had contrived to detain the sunshine with which they were touched at the moment of transformation. The road, wherever it came into sight, burned with brilliant costumes, like an illuminated page of Froissart. Gigantic guide meanwhile shows an uncomfortable and fidgety reluctance to turn aside and enter fairyland, which is wholly unaccountable. Is the huge earthen creature an Afrite, under sa^ cred pledge to Solomon, and in danger of being sealed up again, if he venture near the festival of our Blessed Lady ? If so, that also were a cere- mony worth seeing, and we insist. He wriggles and swings his great feet with an evident impulse to begin kicking the sides of his mule again and fly. The way over the hills from Genezzano to Olevano he pronounces scomodissima, demanding of every peasant who goes by if it be not entirely impassable. This leading question, put in all the tones of plausible entreaty he can command, meets the invariable reply, " IJ scomoda, davvero ; ma per le bestie -^ eh ! " (it is bad, of a truth, but for the beasts — eh !) and then one of those indescrib- ITALY 165 able shrugs, unintelligible at first as the compass to a savage, but in which the expert can make twenty hair's-breadth distinctions between N. E. and N. N. E. Finding that destiny had written it on his fore- head, the guide at last turned and went cantering and kicking toward Genezzano, we following. Just before you reach the town, the road turns sharply to the right, and, crossing a little gorge, loses itself in the dark gateway. Outside the gate is an open space, which formicated with peasantry in every variety of costume that was not Parisian, Laugh- ing women were climbing upon their horses (which they bestride like men) ; pilgrims were chanting, and beggars (the howl of an Italian beggar in the country is something terrible) howling in discord- ant rivalry. It was a scene lively enough to make Heraclitus shed a double allowance of tears ; but our giant was still discomforted. As soon as we had entered the gate, he dodged into a little back- street, just as we were getting out of which the mystery of his unwillingness was cleared up. He had been endeavoring to avoid a creditor. But it so chanced (as Fate can hang a man with even a rope of sand) that the enemy was in position just at the end of this very lane, where it debouched into the Piazza of the town. The disputes of Italians are very droU things, and I wiU accordingly bag that which is now im- minent, as a specimen. They quarrel as unac- countably as dogs, who put their noses together, dislike each other's kind of smell, and instantly 166 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL tumble one over the other, with noise enough to draw the eyes of a whole street. So these peo- ple burst out, without apparent preliminaries, into a noise and fury and war-dance which would imply the very utmost pitch and agony of exasperation. And the subsidence is as sudden. They explode each other on mere contact, as if by a law of na- ture, like two hostile gases. They do not grow warm, but leap at once from zero to some degree of white-heat, to indicate which no Anglo-Saxon thermometer of wrath is highly enough graduated. If I were asked to name one universal character- istic of an Italian town, I should say, two men clamoring and shaking themselves to pieces at each other, and a woman leaning lazUy out of a window, and perhaps looking at something else. TiU one gets used to this kind of thing, one ex- pects some horrible catastrophe ; but during eight months in Italy I have only seen blows exchanged thrice. In the present case the explosion was of harmless gunpowder. " Why - haven't -you-paid-those-fif ty- five-bajocchi- at-the-pizzicarolo's ? " began the adversary, speak- ing with such inconceivable rapidity that he made only one word, nay, as it seemed, one monosylla- ble, of the whole sentence. Our giant, with a controversial genius which I should not have sus- pected in him, inunediately, and with great adroit- ness, changed the ground of dispute, and, instead of remaining an insolvent debtor, raised himself at once to the ethical position of a moralist, resisting an unjust demand from principle. ITALY 167 " It was only-ybriy-five," roared he. " But I s&Y fifty-&.ve" screamed the other, and shook his close-cropped head as a boy does an ap- ple on the end of a switch, as if he meant pre- sently to jerk it off at his antagonist. " Birhone ! " yelled the guide, gesticulating so furiously with every square inch of his ponderous body that I thought he would throw his mule over, the poor beast standing all the while with droop- ing head and ears while the thunders of this man- quake burst over him. So feels the tortoise that sustains the globe when earth suffers fiery convul- sions. " Birhante I " retorted the creditor, and the op- probrious epithet clattered from between his shak- ing jaws as a refractory copper is rattled out of a Jehoiadarbox by a child. " Andate vi far friggere 1 " howled giant. " Andate, ditto, ditto ! " echoed creditor, — and behold, the thing is over ! The giant promises to attend to the affair when he comes back, the cred- itor returns to his booth, and we ride on. Speaking of Italian quarrels, I am tempted to parenthesize here another which I saw at Civita Vecchia. We had been five days on our way from Leghorn in a French steamer, a voyage performed usually, I think, in about thirteen hours. It was heavy weather, blowing what a sailor would caU half a gale of wind, and the caution of our cap- tain, not to call it fear, led him to put in for shelter first at Porto Ferrajo in Elba, and then at Santo Stefano on the Italian coast. Our little black 168 LEA YES FROM MY JOURNAL water-beetle of a mail-packet was knocked about pretty well, and all the Italian passengers disap- peared in the forward cabin before we were out of port. When we were fairly at anchor within the harbor of Civita Vecehia, they crawled out again, sluggish as winter flies, their vealy faces mezzotinted with soot. One of them presently appeared in the custom-house, his only luggage being a cage closely covered with a dirty red hand- kerchief, which represented his linen. " What have you in the cage ? " asked the dogor niere. " Eh ! nothing other than a parrot." " There is a duty of one scudo and one bajoccho, then." " Santo diavolo ! but what hoggishness ! " Thereupon instant and simultaneous blowup, or rather a series of explosions, like those in honor of a Neapolitan saint's-day, lasting about ten minutes, and followed by as sudden quiet. In the course of it, the owner of the bird, playing irreverently on the first half of its name, (^pappagaHio,') hinted that it would be a high duty for his Holiness himself (JPapa). After a pause for breath, he said quietly, as if nothing had happened, "Very good, then, since I must pay, I wiU," and began fumbling for the money. "Meanwhile, do me the politeness to show me the bird," said the officer. " With all pleasure," and, lifting a corner of the handkerchief, there lay the object of dispute on his back, stone-dead, with his claws curled up help- ITALY 169 lessly on each side his breast. I believe the owner would have been pleased had it even been his grandmother who had thus evaded duty, so exqui- site is the pleasure of an Italian in escaping pay- ment of anything. "I make a present of the poor bird," said he blandly. The publican, however, seemed to feel that he had been somehow cheated, and I left them in high debate, as to whether the bird were dead when it entered the custom-house, and, if it had been, whether a dead parrot were dutiable. Do not blame me for being entertained and trying to en- tertain you with these trifles. I remember Virgil's stern " Che per pooo h ehe teco non mi risso," but Dante's journey was of more import to himself and others than mine. I am struck by the freshness and force of the passions in Europeans, and cannot help feeling as if there were something healthy in it. When I think of the versatile and accommodating habits of America, it seems like a land without thunder- storms. In proportion as man grows commercial, does he also become dispassionate and incapable of electric emotions? The driving-wheels of all-pow- erful natures are in the back of the head, and, as man is the highest type of organization, so a nation is better or worse as it advances toward the high- est type of man, or recedes from it. But it is ill with a nation when the cerebrum sucks the cerebel- lum dry, for it cannot live by intellect alone. The 170 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL broad foreheads always carry the day at last, but only when they are based on or buttressed with massive hind-heads. It would be easier to make a people great in whom the animal is vigorous, than to keep one so after it has begun to spindle into over-intellectuality. The hands that have grasped dominion and held it have been large and hard; those from which it has sHpped, dehcate, and apt for the lyre and the pencil. Moreover, brain is always to be bought, but passion never comes to market. On the whole, I am rather inclined to like this European impatience and fire, even while I laugh at it, and sometimes find myself surmising whether a people who, like the Americans, put up quietly with aU sorts of petty personal impositions and injustices, will not at length find it too great a bore to quarrel with great public wrongs. Meanwhile, I must remember that I am in Genez- zano, and not in the lecturer's desk. We walked about for an hour or two, admiring the beauty and grand bearing of the women, and the pictur- esque vivacity and ever-renewing unassuetude of the whole scene. Take six of the most party-colored dreams, break them to pieces, put them into a fantasy-kaleidoscope, and when you look through it you will see something that for strangeness, vivid- ness, and mutability looked like the little Piazza of Genezzano seen from the church porch. As we wound through the narrow streets again to the stables where we had left our horses, a branch of laurel or ilex would mark a wine-shop, and, looking till our eye cooled and toned itself down to dusky ITALY 171 sympathy with the crypt, we could see the smoky interior sprinkled with white head-cloths and scar- let bodices, with here and there a yellow spot of lettuce or the red inward gleam of a wine-flask. The head-dress is precisely of that most ancient pattern seen on Egyptian statues, and so colossal are many of the wearers, that you might almost think you saw a party of young sphinxes carousing in the sunless core of a pyramid. We remounted our beasts, and, for about a mile, cantered gayly along a fine road, and then turned into a by-path along the flank of a mountain. Here the guide's strada scomodissima began, and we were forced to dismount, and drag our horses downward for a mile or two. We crossed a small plain in the valley, and then began to climb the opposite ascent. The path was perhaps four feet broad, and was paved with irregularly shaped blocks of stone, which, having been raised and lowered, tipped, twisted, undermined, and generally capsized by the rains and frosts of centuries, presented the most diabolically ingenious traps and pitfalls. All the while the scenery was beautiful. Motmtains of every shape and hue changed their slow outlines ever as we moved, now opening, now closing round us, sometimes peering down soleninly at us over each other's shoulders, and then sinking slowly out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of the path, seeming to stride into the valley and confront us with their craggy challenge, — a challenge which the little valleys accepted, if we did not, matching their rarest tints of gray and brown, and pink and 172 LEA VES FROM MY JOURNAL purple, or that royal dye to make which all these were profusely melted together for a moment's or- nament, with as many shades of various green and yeUow. Gray towns crowded and clung on the tops of peaks that seemed inaccessible. "We owe a great deal of picturesqueness to the quarrels and thieveries of the barons of the Middle Ages. The traveller and artist should put up a prayer for their battered old souls. It was to be out of their way and that of the Saracens that people were driven to make their homes in spots so siiblime and incon- venient that the eye alone finds it pleasant to climb up to them. Nothing else but an American land- company ever managed to induce settlers upon territory of such uninhabitable quality. I have seen an insect that makes a mask for himself out of the lichens of the rock over which he crawls, contriving so to deceive the birds ; and the towns in this wild region would seem to have been buUt on the same principle. Made of the same stone with the cliffs on which they perch, it asks good eyesight to make them out at the distance of a few miles, and every wandering mountain-mist annihi- lates them for the moment. At intervals, I could hear the giant, after dig- ging at the sides of his mule with his spurless heels, growling to himself, and imprecating an apoplexy (accidente) upon the path and him who made it. This is the universal malediction here, and once it was put into rhyme for my benefit. I was coming down the rusty steps of San Gregorio one day, and having paid no heed to a stout woman ITALY 173 of thirty odd who begged somewhat obtrusively, she screamed after me, "Ah, -pi pigU un accidents, Vol che non date niente ! " Ah, may a sudden apoplexy. You who give not, come and vex ye ! Our guide could not long appease his mind with this milder type of objurgation, but soon intensi- fied it into accidentaccio, which means a selected apoplexy of uncommon size and ugliness. As the path grew worse and worse, so did the repetition of this phrase (for he was slow of invention) be- come more frequent, till at last he did nothing but kick and, curse, mentally, I have no doubt, in- cluding us in his malediction. I think it would have gratified Longinus or Fuseli (both of whom commended swearing) to have heard him. Before long we turned the flank of the hill by a little shrine of the Madonna, and there was Olevano just above us. Like the other towns in this district, it was the diadem of an abrupt peak of rock. From the midst of it jutted the ruins of an old strong- hold of the Colonna. Probably not a house has been built in it for centuries. To enter the town, we literally rode up a long flight of stone steps, and soon found ourselves in the Piazza. We stopped to buy some cigars, and the zigararo, as he roUed them up, asked if we did not want din- ner. We told him we should get it at the inn. Benissimo, he would be there before us. What he meant, we could not divine ; but it turned out that he was the landlord, and that the inn only 174 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL became such when strangers arrived, relapsing again immediately into a private dwelling. We found our host ready to receive us, and went up to a large room on the first floor. After due instruc- tions, we seated ourselves at the open windows, — Storg to sketch, and I to take a mental calotype of the view. Among the many lovely ones of the day, this was the loveliest, — or was it only that the charm of repose was added? On our right was the silent castle, and beyond it the silent moun- tains. To the left we looked down over the clus- tering houses upon a campagna-valley of peaceful cultivation, vineyards, olive-orchards, grain-fields in their earliest green, and dark stripes of new- ploughed earth, over which the cloud - shadows melted tracklessly toward the hiUs which round softly upward to Monte Cavi. When our dinner came, and with it a flask of drowsy red Aleatico, like ink with a suspicion of life-blood in it, such as one might fancy Shake- speare to have dipped his quiU in, we had our table so placed that the satisfaction of our hunger might be dissensualized by the view from the windows. Many a glutton has eaten up farms and woodlands and pastures, and so did we, a3sthetically, saucing our fnttata and flavoring our Aleatico with land- scape. It is a fine thing when we can accustom our animal appetites to good society, when body and soul (like master and servant in an Arab tent) sit down together at the same board. This thought is forced upon one very often in Italy, as one pic- nics in enchanted spots, where Imagination and ITALY 175 Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters in the fairy-story, and serve us with course after course of their ethereal dishes. Sense is satisfied with less and simpler food when sense and spirit are fed together, and the feast of the loaves and fishes is spread for us anew. If it be important for a state to educate its lower classes, so is it for us person- ally to instruct, elevate, and refine our senses, the lower classes of our private body-politic, which, if left to their own brute instincts, will disorder or destroy the whole commonwealth with flaming in- surrection. After dinner came our guide to be paid. He, too, had had his frittata and his fiasco (or two), and came back absurdly comic, reminding one of the giant who was so taken in by the little tailor. He was not in the least tipsy ; but the wine had ex- cited his poor wits, whose destiny it was (awkward servants as they were !) to trip up and tumble over each other in proportion as they became zealous. He was very anxious to do us in some way or other ; he only vaguely guessed how, but felt so gigantic- ally good-natured that he could not keep his face sober long enough. It is quite' clear why the Ital- ians have no word but recitare to express acting, for their stage is no more theatric than their street, and to exaggerate in the least would be ridiculous. We graver-tempered and -mannered Septentrions must give the pegs a screw or two to bring our spirits up to nature's concert-pitch. Storg and I sat enjoying the exhibition of our giant, as if we had no more concern in it than as a comedy. It 176 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL was nothing but a spectacle to us, at which we were present as critics, while he inveighed, expos- tulated, argued, and besought, in a breath. Find- ing aU his attempts miscarry, or resulting in noth- ing more solid than applause, he said, " Forse non capisconof" (Perhaps you don't understand?) " Capiscono pur' troppo," (They understand only too well,) replied the landlord, upon which terrcB filius burst into a laugh, and began begging for more huonamano. Failing in this, he tightened his sash, offered to kiss our lordships' hands, an act of homage which we declined, and departed, carefully avoiding Genezzano on his return, I make no doubt. We paid our bill, and after I had written in the guest-book Bere Aleatieo Mi h molto simpatico, went down to the door, where we found our guides and donkeys, the host's handsome wife and hand- somer daughter, with two of her daughters, and a crowd of women and children waiting to witness the exit of the foreigners. We made all the mothers and children happy by a discriminating largesse of copper among the little ones. They are a charming people, the natives of these out-of-the-way Italian towns, if kindness, courtesy, and good looks make people charming. Our beards and felt hats, which make us pass for artists, were our passports to the warmest welcome and the best cheer everywhere. Eeluctantly we mounted our donkeys, and trotted away, our guides (a man and a boy) running by the flank (true henchmen, haunchmen,j/?awg'Miej'S ITALY 177 or flunkeys) and inspiring the little animals with pokes in the side, or with the even more effectual ahrrrrrr ! Is there any radical affinity between this rolling fire of r'a and the word arra, which means hansel or earnest-money? The sound is the same, and has a marvellous spur-power over the donkey, who seems to understand that full payment of goad or cudgel is to follow. I have known it to move even a Sicilian mule, the least sensitive and most obstinate of creatures with ears, except a British church-warden. We wound along under a bleak hill, more deso- late than anything I had ever seen. The old gray rocks seemed not to thrust themselves out of the rusty soil, but rather to be stabbed into it, as if they had been hailed down upon it by some volcano. There was nearly as much look of design as there is in a druidical circle, and the whole looked like some graveyard in an extinguished world, the mon- ument of mortality itself, such as Bishop Wilkins might have found in the moon, if he had ever got thither. The path grew ever wilder, and Eojate, the next town we came to, grim and grizzly under a grim and grizzly sky of low-trailing clouds which had suddenly gathered, looked drearier even than the desolations we had passed. It was easy to un- derstand why rocks should like to live here well enough ; but what could have brought men hither, and then kept them here, was beyond all reason- able surmise. Barren hills stood sullenly aloof all around, incapable of any crop but lichens. We entered the gate, and found ourselves in the 178 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL midst of a group of wild-looking men gathered about the door of a wine-shop. Some of them were armed with long guns, and we saw (for the first time in situ) the tall bandit hat with ribbons wound round it, — such as one is familiar with in operas, and on the heads of those inhabitants of the Scalinata in Rome, who have a costume of their own, and placidly serve as models through the whole pictorial range of divine and human nature, from the Padre Eterno to Judas. Twenty years ago, when my notion of an Italian was divided be- tween a monk and a bravo, the first of whom did nothing but enter at secret doors and drink your health in poison, while the other lived behind cor- ners, supporting himself by the productive industry of digging your person aU. over with a stiletto, I should have looked for instant assassination from these carousing ruffians. But the only blood shed on the occasion was that of the grape. A ride over the mountains for two hours had made us thirsty, and two or three bajocchi gave a tumbler of vino asd- utto to aU four of us. "You are welcome," said one of the men, " we are all artists after a fashion ; we are aU brothers." The manners here are more republican, and the title of lordship disappears altogether. Another came up and insisted that we should drink a second flask of wine as his guests. In vain we protested ; no artist should pass through Rojate without accepting that token of good-wiU, and with the liberal help of our guides we contrived to gulp it down. He was for another ; but we pro- tested that we were entirely f uU, and that it was ITALY 179 impossible. I dare say the poor fellow would have spent a week's earnings on us, if we would have let him. We proposed to return the civility, and to leave a paul for them to drink a good journey to us after we were gone ; but they would not listen to it. Our entertainer followed us along to the Piazza, begging one of us to let him serve as donkey-driver to Subiaco. "When this was denied, he said that there was a festa here also, and that we must stop long enough to see the procession of zitelle (young girls), which would soon begin. But evening was already gathering, the clouds grew momently darker, and fierce, damp gusts, striking us with the suddenness of a blow, promised a wild night. We had still eight miles of mountain-path before us, and we struggled away. As we crossed the next summit beyond the town, a sound of chant- ing drifted by us on the wind, wavered hither and thither, now heard, now lost, then a doubtful some- thing between song and gust, and, lingering a few moments, we saw the white head-dresses, gliding two by two, across a gap between the houses. The scene and the music were both in neutral tints, a sketch, as it were, in sepia a little blurred. Before long the clouds almost brushed us 9,8 they eddied silently by, and then it began to rain, first mistily, and then in thick, hard drops. Fortu- nately there was a moon, shining placidly in the •desert heaven above all this turmoil, or we could not have found our path, which in a few moments became a roaring torrent almost knee-deep. It was a cold rain, and far above us, where the mounr 180 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL tain-peaks tore gaps in the clouds, we could see the white silence of new-fallen snow. Sometimes we had to dismount and wade, — a circumstance which did not make our saddles more comfortable when we returned to them and could hear them go crosh, crash, as the water gurgled out of them at every jolt. There was no hope of shelter nearer than Subiaco, no sign of man, and no sound but the multitudinous roar of waters on every side. Eivu- let whispered to rivulet, and water-fall shouted to water-faU, as they leaped from rock to rock, all hurrying to reinforce the main torrent below, which hummed onward toward the Anio with dilated heart. So gathered the hoarse Northern swarms to descend upon sunken Italy ; and so forever does physical and intellectual force seek its fatal equi- librium, rushing in and occupying wherever it is drawn by the attraction of a lower level. We forded large streams that had been dry beds an hour before ; and so sudden was the creation of the floods, that it gave one almost as fresh a feel- ing of water as if one had been present in Eden when the first rock gave birth to the first fountain. I had a severe cold, I was wet through from the hips downward, and yet I never enjoyed anything more in my life, — so different is the shower-bath to which we doom ourselves from that whose string is pulled by the prison-warden compulsion. After our little bearers had tottered us up and down the dusky steeps of a few more mountain-spurs, where a misstep would have sent us spinning down the fathomless black ncwhere below, we came out upon ITALY 181 the Highroad, and found it a fine one, as all the great Italian roads are. The rain broke off sud- denly, and on the left, seeming about half a mile away, sparkled the lights of Subiaco, flashing inter- mittently like a knot of fire-flies in a meadow. The town, owing to the necessary windings of the road, was still three miles off, and just as the guides had prodded and ahrred the donkeys into a brisk jog- gle, I resolved to give up my saddle to the boy, and try Tom Coryate's compasses. It was partly out of humanity to myself and partly to him, for he was tired and I was cold. The elder guide and I took the lead, and, as I looked back, I laughed to see the lolling ears of Storg's donkey thrust from under his long cloak, as if he were coming out from a black Arab tent. We soon left them be- hind, and paused at a bridge over the Anio till we heard the patter of little hoofs again. The bridge is a single arch, bent between the steep edges of a gorge through which the Anio huddled far below, showing a green gleam here and there in the strug- gling moonlight, as if a fish rolled up his burnished flank. After another mile and a half, we reached the gate, and awaited our companions. It was dreary enough, — waiting always is, — and as the snow-chilled wind whistled through the damp arch- way where we stood, my legs illustrated feelingly to me how they cool water in the East, by wrap- ping the jars with wet wooUen and setting them in a draught. At last they came ; I remounted, and we went sliding through the steep, wet streets till we had fairly passed through the whole town. Be* 182 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL fore a long building of two stories, without a symp- tom of past or future light, we stopped. " Hcco la Paletta 1 " said the guide, and began to pound furiously on the door with a large stone, which he some time before had provided for the purpose. After a long period of sullen irresponsiveness, we heard descending footsteps, light streamed through the chinks of the door, and the invariable " Chi e f " which precedes the unbarring of all portals here, came from within. " Due forestieri," an- swered the guide, and the bars rattled in hasty welcome. " Make us," we exclaimed, as we stiffly climbed down from our perches, " your biggest fire in your biggest chimney, and then we will talk of supper ! " In five minutes two great laurel-fagots were spitting and crackling in an enormous fire- place ; and Storg and I were in the costume which Don Quixote wore on the Brown Mountain. Of course there was nothing for supper but afrittata ; but there are worse things in the world than a frittata con prosciutto, and we discussed it like a society just emerging from barbarism, the upper half of our persons presenting all the essentials of an advanced civilization, while our legs skulked under the table as free from sartorial impertinences as those of the noblest savage that ever ran wild in the woods. And so eccoci finalmente arrivati ! 21th. — Nothing can be more lovely than the scenery about Subiaco. The town itself is built on a kind of cone rising from the midst of a valley abounding in olives and vines, with a superb mountain horizon around it, and the green Anio ITALY 183 cascading at its feet. As you walk to the high- perched convent of San Benedetto, you look across the river on your right just after leaving the town, to a cliff over which the ivy pours in torrents, and in which dwellings have been hollowed out. In the black doorway of every one sits a woman in scarlet bodice and white head-gear, with a dis- taff, spinning, while overhead countless nightin- gales sing at once from the fringe of shrubbery. The glorious great white clouds look over the mountain-tops into our enchanted valley, and some- times a lock of their vapory wool would be torn off, to lie for a while in some inaccessible ravine like a snow-drift ; but it seemed as if no shadow could fly over our privacy of sunshine to-day. The approach to the monastery is delicious. You pass out of the hot sun into the green shadows of ancient ilexes, leaning and twisting every way that is graceful, their branches velvety with bril- liant moss, in which grow feathery ferns, fringing them with a halo of verdure. Then comes the con- vent, with its pleasant old monks, who show their sacred vessels (one by Cellini) and their relics, among which is a finger-bone of one of the Inno- cents. Lower down is a convent of Santa Scholas- tica, where the first book was printed in Italy. But though one may have daylight tiU after twenty-four o'clock in Italy, the days are no longer than ours, and I must go back to La Paletta to see about a vettura to TivoSi. I leave Storg sketching, and walk slowly down, lingering over the ever-changeful Ariews, lingering opposite the 184 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL nightingale-cliff, but get back to Subiaco and the vetturino at last. The growl of a thunder-storm soon brought Storg home, and we leave Subiaco triumphantly, at five o'clock, in a light carriage, drawn by three gray stallions (harnessed abreast) on the full gallop. I cannot describe our drive, the mountain-towns, with their files of girls wind- ing up from the fountain with balanced water-jars of ruddy copper, or chattering round it bright- hued as parrots, the ruined castles, the green gleams of the capricious river, the one great moimtain that soaked up all the rose of sunset, and, after all else grew dim, still glowed as if with inward fires, and, later, the white spray-smoke of TivoU that drove down the valley under a clear cold moon, contrasting strangely with the red glare of the lime-furnace on the opposite hillside. It is well that we can be happy sometimes without peeping and botanizing in the materials that make us so. It is not often that we can escape the evil genius of analysis that haunts our modern day- light of self-consciousness (wir haben ja aufger- Mart /) and enjoy a day of right Chaucer. P. S. Now that I am printing this, a dear friend sends me an old letter, and says, " Slip in some- where, by way of contrast, what you wrote me of your visit to Passawampscot." It is odd, almost painful, to be confronted with your past self and your past self's doings, when you have forgotten both. But here is my bit of American scenery, such as it is. ITALY 185 While we were waiting for the boat, we had time to investigate P. a little. We wandered about with no one to molest us or make us afraid. No ci- cerone was lying in wait for us, no verger expected with funeral solemnity the more than compulsory shilling. I remember the whole population of Cor- tona gathering round me, and beseeching me not to leave their city till I had seen the lampadone, whose keeper had unhappily gone out for a walk, taking the key with him. Thank Fortune, here were no antiquities, no galleries of Pre-Raphael- ite art, every lank figure looking as if it had been stretched on a rack, before which the Anglo-Saxon writhes because he ought to like them and can- not for the soul of him. It is a pretty little vil- lage, cuddled down among the hills, the clay soil of which gives them, to a pilgrim from the parched gravelly inland, a look of almost fanatical green. The fields are broad, and wholly given up to the grazing of cattle and sheep, which dotted them thickly in the breezy sunshine. The open doors of a barn, through which the wind flowed rustling the loose locks of the mow, attracted us. Swal- lows swam in and out with level wings, or crossed each other, twittering in the dusky mouth of their hay-scented cavern. Two or three hens and a cock (none of your gawky Shanghais, long-legged as a French peasant on his stilts, but the true red cock of the ballads, full-chested, coral-combed, fountain- tailed) were inquiring for hay-seed in the back- ground. What frame in what gallery ever en- closed such a picture as is squared within the 186 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL groundsel, side - posts, and lintel of a barn-door, whether for eye or fancy ? The shining floor sug- gests the flail -beat of autumn, that pleasantest of monotonous sounds, and the later husking -bee, where the lads and lasses sit round laughingly busy under the swinging lantern. Here we found a fine, stalwart fellow shearing eheep. This was something new to us, and we watched him for some time with many questions, which he answered with off-hand good-nature. Go- ing away, I thanked him for having taught me something. He laughed, and said, " Ef you'll take off them gloves o' youm, I '11 give ye a try at the practical part on 't." He was in the right of it I never saw anything handsomer than those brown hands of his, on which the sinews stood out, as he handled his shears, tight as a drawn bowstring. How much more admirable is this tawny vigor, the badge of fruitful toil, than the crop of early muscle that heads out under the forcing-glass of the gymnasium ! Foreigners do not feel easy ia America, because there are no peasants and un- derlings here to be humble to them. The truth is, that none but those who feel themselves only arti- ficially the superiors of our sturdy yeomen see in their self-respect any uncomfortable assumption of equality. It is the last thing the yeoman is likely to think of. They do not like the "I say, ma good fellah " kind of style, and commonly contrive to snub it. They do not value condescension at the same rate that he does who vouchsafes it to them. If it be a good thing for an English duke ITALY 187 that he has no social superiors, I think it can hardly be bad for a Yankee farmer. If it be a bad thing for the duke that he meets none but inferi- ors, it cannot harm the farmer much that he never has the chance. At any rate, there was no thought of incivility in my friend Hobbinol's jibe at my kids, only a kifid of jolly superiority. But I did not like to be taken for a city gent, so I told him I was born and bred in the country as well as he. He laughed again, and said, " Wal, anyhow, I 've the advantage of ye, for you never see a sheep shore, and I 've be'n to the Opery and shore sheep myself into the bargain." He told me that there were two himdred sheep in the town, and that his father could remember when there were four times as many. The sea laps and mumbles the soft roots of the hills, and licks away an acre or two of good pasturage every season. The father, an old man of eighty, stood looking on, pleased with his son's wit, and brown as if the Passawampscot fogs were walnut-juice. "We dined at a little tavern, with a gilded ball hung out for sign, — a waif, I fancy, from some shipwreck. The landlady was a brisk, amusing little body, who soon informed us that her husband was own cousin to a Senator of the United States. A very elaborate sampler in the parlor, in which an obelisk was wept over by a somewhat costly willow in silver thread, recorded the virtues of the Senator's maternal grandfather and grandmother. After dinner, as we sat smoking our pipes on the piazza, oui good hostess brought her little daugh- 188 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL. ter, and made her repeat verses utterly unintelli- gible, but conjeeturaUy moral, and certainly de- pressing. Once set agoing, she ran down like an alarm-clock. We awaited her subsidence as that of a shower or other inevitable natural phenomenon. More refreshing was the talk of a tail returned Californian, who told us, among other things, that " he should n't mind Panahmy's bein' sunk, oilers providin' there war n't none of our folks onto it when it went down ! " Our landlady's exhibition of her daughter puts me in mind of something similar, yet oddly differ, ent, which happened to Storg and me at Palestrina. We jointly praised the beauty of our stout locan. diera's little girl. " Ah, she is nothing to her eldest sister just married," said the mother. " If you could see her/ She is beUa, bella, bella! " We thought no more of it ; but after dinner, the good creature, with no warning but a tap at the door and a humble con permesso, brought her in all her bravery, and showed her off to us as simply and naturally as if she had been a picture. The girl, who was both beautiful and modest, bore it with the dignified aplomb of a statue. She knew we admired her, and liked it, but with the indif- ference of a rose. There is something very charm- ing, I think, in this wholly unsophisticated con- sciousness, with no alloy of vanity or coquetry. A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 189 IV. A FEW BITS OF SOMAN MOSAIC. Byron hit the white, which he often shot very ■wide of in his Italian Guide Book, when he called Rome "my country." But it is a feeling which comes to one slowly, and is absorbed into one's System during a long residence. Perhaps one does not feel it till one has gone away, as things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Long- ing leans and beckons. However it be, Fancy gets a rude shock at entering Rome, which it takes her a great while to get over. She has gradually made herself believe that she is approaching a city of the dead, and has seen nothing on the road from Civita Vecehia to disturb that theory. Milestones, with " Via Am-elia " carved upon them, have confirmed it. It is eighteen hundred years ago with her, and on the dial of time the shadow has not yet trembled over the line that marks the beginning of the first century. She arrives at the gate, and a dirty, blue man, with a cocked hat and a white sword-belt, asks for her passport. Then another man, as like the first as one spoon is like its fellow, and hav- ing, like him, the look of being run in a mould, tells her that she must go to the custom-house. It is as if a ghost, who had scarcely recovered from the jar of hearing Charon say, " I 'U trouble you for your obolus, if you please," should have his 190 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL portmanteau seized by the Stygian tide-waiters to be searched. Is there anything, then, contraband of death ? asks poor Fancy of herself. But it is the misfortune (or the safeguard) of the English mind that Fancy is always an outlaw, liable to be laid by the heels wherever Constable Common Sense can catch her. She submits quietly as the postilion cries, " Yee-ip ! " cracks his whip, and the rattle over the pavement begins, strug- gles a moment when the pillars of the colonnade stalk ghostly by in the moonlight, and finally gives up all for lost when she sees Bernini's angels polk- ing on their pedestals along the sides of the Ponte Sant' Angelo with the emblems of the Passion in their arms. You are in Rome, of course ; the sbirro said so, the doganiere bowed it, and the postilion swore it ; but it is a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets, dingy caffes, cigar-smokers, and French soldiers, the manifest junior of Florence. And yet full of anachronisms, for in a little while you pass the col- umn of Antoninus, find the Dogana in an ancient temple whose furrowed piUars show through the recent plaster, and feel as if you saw the statue of Minerva in a Paris bonnet. You are driven to a hotel where all the barbarian languages are spoken in one wild conglomerate by the Commissionnaire, have your dinner whoUy in French, and wake the next morning dreaming of the Tenth Legion, to see a regiment of Chasseurs de Vincennes trotting by. For a few days one undergoes a tremendous re- coil. Other places have a distinct meaning. Lon- A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 191 don is the visible throne of King Stock ; Versailles is the apotheosis of one of Louis XIV.'s cast peri- wigs; Florence and Pisa are cities of the Middle Ages ; but Rome seems to be a parody upon itself. The ticket that admits you to see the starting of the horses at carnival has S. P. Q. E. at the top of it, and you give the custode a paul for showing you the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. The Senatus seems to be a score or so of elderly gentle- men in scarlet, and the Populusque Romanus a swarm of nasty friars. But there is something more than mere earth in the spot where great deeds have been ' done. The surveyor cannot give the true dimensions of Mara- thon or Lexington, for they are not reducible to square acres. Dead glory and greatness leave ghosts behind them, and departed empire has a metempsychosis, if nothing else has. Its spirit haunts the grave, and waits, and waits tiU at last it finds a body to its mind, slips into it, and histo- rians moralize on the fluctuation of human affairs. By and by, perhaps, enough observations will have been recorded to assure us that these recur- rences are firmamental, and historionomers will have measured accurately the sidereal years of races. "When that is once done, events wiU move with the quiet of an orrery, and nations will con- sent to their peridynamis and apodynamis with planetary composure. Be this as it may, you become gradually aware of the presence of this imperial ghost among the Roman ruins. You receive hints and startles of it 192 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL through the senses first, as the horae always shies at the apparition before the rider can see it. Then, little by little, you become assured of it, and seem to hear the brush of its mantle through some hall of Caracalla's baths, or one of those other solitudes of Rome. And those solitudes are without a par- allel ; for it is not the mere absence of man, but the sense of his departure, that makes a profound loneliness. Musing upon them, you cannot but feel the shadow of that disembodied empire, and, remembering how the foundations of the Capitol were laid where a human head was turned up, you are impelled to prophesy that the Idea of Rome ■wiU incarnate itself again as soon as an Italian brain is found large enough to hold it, and to give unity to those discordant members. But, though I intend to observe no regular pat- tern in my Roman mosaic, which will resemble more what one finds in his pockets after a walk, — a pagan cube or two from the palaces of the Cffi- sars, a few Byzantine bits, given with many shrugs of secrecy by a lay-brother at San Paolo fuori le mura, and a few more (quite as ancient) from the manufactory at the Vatican, — it seems natural to begin what one has to say of Rome with something about St. Peter's ; for the saint sits at the gate here as well as in Paradise. It is very common for people to say that they are disappointed in the first sight of St. Peter's ; and one hears much the same about Niajrara. I cannot help thinking that the fault is in them- selves; and that if the church and the cataract A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 193 were in the habit of giving away their thoughts with that rash generosity which characterizes tour- ists, they might perhaps say of their visitors, " Well, if you are those Men of whom we have heard so much, we are a little disappointed, to tell the truth ! " The refined tourist expects some- what too much when he takes it for granted that St. Peter's will at once decorate him with the order of imagination, just as Victoria knights an alder- . man when he presents an address. Or perhaps he has been getting up a little architecture on the road from Florence, and is discomfited because he does not know whether he ought to be pleased or not, which is very much as if he should wait to be told whether it was fresh water or salt which makes the exhaustless grace of Niagara's emerald curve, before he benignly consented to approve. It would be wiser, perhaps, for him to consider whether, if Michael Angelo had had the building of Mm, his own personal style would not have been more impressive. It is not to be doubted that minds are of as many different orders as cathedrals, and that the Gothic imagination is vexed and discommoded in the vain endeavor to flatten its pinnacles, and fit itself into the round Roman arches. But if it be impossible for a man to like everything, it is quite possible for him to avoid being driven mad by what does not please him; nay, it is the imperative duty of a wise man to find out what that secret is which makes a thing pleasing to another. In ap- proaching St. Peter's, one must take his Protestant 194 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL shoes off his feet, and leave them behind him, in the Piazza Eusticucci. Otherwise the great Basil- ica, with those outstretching colonnades of Bra- mante, wUl seem to be a bloated spider lying in wait for him, the poor heretic fly. As he lifts the heavy leathern flapper over the door, and is dis- charged into the interior by its impetuous recoil, let him disburthen his mind altogether of stone and mortar, and think only that he is standing before the throne of a dynasty which, even in its decay, is the most powerful the world ever saw. Mason- work is all very well in itself, but it has nothing to do with the affair at present in hand. Suppose that a man in pouring down a glass of claret could drink the South of France, that he coidd so disintegrate the wine by the force of imag- ination as to taste isKit all the clustered beauty and bloom of the grape, all the dance and song and sun- burnt jollity of the vintage. Or suppose that in eating bread he could transubstantiate it with the tender blade of spring, the gleam-flitted corn-ocean of summer, the royal autumn, •with, its golden beard, and the merry funerals of harvest. This is what the great poets do for us, we cannot tell how, with their fatally-chosen words, crowding the happy veins of language again with aU the life and meaning and music that had been dribbling away from them since Adam. And this is what the Eoman Church does for religion, feeding the soul not with the es- sential religious sentiment, not cvith a drop or two of the tincture of worship, but making us feel one by one all those original elements of which worship A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 195 is composed ; not bringing the end to us, but mak- ing us pass over and feel beneath our feet all the golden rounds of the ladder by which the climbing generations have reached that end ; not handing us drily a dead and extinguished Q. E. D., but let- ting it rather declare itself by the glory with which it interfuses the incense-clouds of wonder and aspi- ration and beauty in which it is veiled. The se- cret of her power is typified in the mystery of the Real Presence. She is the only church that has been loyal to the heart and soul of man, that has clung to her faith in the imagination, and that would not give over her symbols and images and sacred vessels to the perilous keeping of the icono- clast Understanding. She has never lost sight of the truth, that the product human nature is com- posed of the sum of flesh and spirit, and has accord- ingly regarded both this world and the next as the constituents of that other world which we possess by faith. She knows that poor Panza, the body, has his kitchen longings and visions, as well as Qui- xote, the soul, his ethereal, and has wit enough to supply him with the visible, tangible raw material ' of imagination. She Is the only poet among the churches, and, while Protestantism Is unrolling a pocket surveyor's-plan, takes her votary to the pin- nacle of her temple, and shows him meadow, up- land, and tillage, cloudy heaps of forest clasped with the river's jewelled arm, hillsides white with the perpetual snow of flocks, and, beyond all, the interminable heave of the unknown ocean. Her empire may be traced upon the map by the boun- 196 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL daries of races ; the understanding is her great foe ; and it is the people whose vocabulary was in- comijlete till they had invented the archword Hum- bug that defies her. With that leaden bullet John BuU can bring down Sentiment when she flies her highest. And the more the pity for John Bull. One of these days some one whose eyes are sharp enough will read in the Times a standing adver- tisement, " Lost, strayed, or stolen from the farm- yard of the subscriber the valuable horse Pega- sus. Probably has on him part of a new plough- harness, as that is also missing. A suitable reward, etc. J. Bull." Protestantism reverses the poetical process I have spoken of above, and gives not even the bread of life, but instead of it the alcohol, or distUled intellectual result. This was very well so long as Protestantism continued to protest ; for enthusiasm sublimates the understanding into imagination. But now that she also has become an establish- ment, she begins to perceive that she made a blunder in trusting herself to the intellect alone. She is beginning to feel her way back again, as one notices in Puseyism, and other such hints. One is put upon reflection when one sees burly Englishmen, who dine on beef and porter every day, marching proudly through St. Peter's on Palm Sunday, with those frightfully artificial palm- branches in their hands. Romanism wisely pro- vides for the childish in men. Therefore I say again, that one must lay aside his Protestantism in order to have a true feeling A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 197 of St. Peter's. Here in Rome is the laboratory of that mysterious enchantress, who has known so well how to adapt herself to all the wants, or, if you will, the weaknesses of human nature, making the retirement of the convent-cell a merit to the solitary, the scourge or the fast a piety to the as- cetic, the enjoyment of pomp and music and incense a religious act in the sensual, and furnishing for the very soul itself a confidante in that ear of the dumb confessional, where it may securely disbur- then itself of its sins and sorrows. And the dome of St. Pfeter's is the magic circle within which she works her most potent incantations. I confess that I could not enter it alone without a kind of awe. But, setting entirely aside the effect of this church upon the imagination, it is wonderful, if one consider it only materially. Michael Angelo created a new world in which everything was colos- sal, and it might seem that he built this as a fit temple for those gigantic figures with which he peopled it to worship in. Here his Moses should be high-priest, the service should be chanted by his prophets and sibyls, and those great pagans should be brought hither from San Lorenzo in Florence, to receive baptism. However unsatisfactory in other matters, statis- tics are of service here. I have seen a refined tourist who entered, Murray in hand, sternly re- solved to have St. Peter's look small, brought to terms at once by being told that the canopy over the high altar (looking very like a four-post bed- stead) was ninety-eight feet high. If he still ob- 198 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL stinates himself, he is finished by being made to measure one of the marble ^wWi, which look like rather stoutish babies, and are found to be six feet, every sculptor's son of them. This ceremony is the more interesting, as it enables him to satisfy the guide of his proficiency in the Italian tongue by calling them putty at every convenient opportunity. Otherwise both he and his assistant terrify each other into mutual unintelligibility with that lingua franca of the English-speaking traveller, which is supposed to bear some remote affinity to the French language, of which both parties are as ignorant as an American Ambassador. Murray gives all these little statistical nudges to the Anglo-Saxon imagination ; but he knows that its finest nerves are in the pocket, and accordingly ends by telling you how much the church cost. I forget how much it is ; but it cannot be more, I fancy, than the English national debt multiplied into itself three hundred and sixty-five times. If the pilgrim, honestly anxious for a sensation, will work out this little sum, he will be sure to receive aU that enlargement of the imaginative faculty which arithmetic can give him. Perhaps the most dilating fact, after all, is that this architectural world has also a separate atmosphere, distinct from that of Rome by some ten degrees, and imvarying through the year. I think that, on the whole, Jonathan gets ready to be pleased with St. Peter's sooner than BuU. Accustomed to our lath and plaster expedients for churches, the portable sentry-boxes of Zion, mere A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 199 solidity and permanence are pleasurable in them- selves ; and if lie get grandeur also, he has Gospel measure. Besides, it is easy for Jonathan to travel. He is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows where his home is to-day, but can make no guess of where it may be to-morrow. Even in a form of govern- ment he only takes lodgings for the night, and is ready to pay his bill and be o£E in the morning. He should take his motto from Bishop Golias's "JI/tAt est propositum in tdberna mori" though not in the sufistic sense of that misunderstood Churchman. But Bull can seldom be said to travel at all, since the first step of a true traveller is out of himself. He plays cricket and hunts foxes on the Campagna, makes entries in his betting-book while the Pope is giving his benediction, and points out Lord Calico to you awfully during the Sistine Miserere. If he let his beard grow, it always has a startled air, as if it suddenly remembered its treason to Sheffield, and only makes him look more English than ever. A masquerade is impossible to him, and his fancy balls are the solemnest facts in the world. Accordingly, he enters St. Peter's with the dome of St. Paul's drawn tight over his eyes, like a criminal's cap, and ready for instant execu- tion rather than confess that the English "Wren had not a stronger wing than the Italian Angel. I like this in Bull, and it renders him the pleasant- est of travelling-companions; for he makes you take England along with you, and thus you have two countries at once. And one must not forget in an Italian inn that it is to Bull he owes the clean 200 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL napkins and sheets, and the privilege of his mom- ing bath. Nor should Bull himself fail to remem- ber that he ate with his fingers till the Italian gave him a fork. Browning has given the best picture of St. Peter's on a festival-day, sketching it with a few verses in his large style. And doubtless it is the scene of the grandest spectacles which the world can see in these latter days. Those Easter pomps, where the antique world marches visibly before you in gilded mail and crimson doubtlet, refresh the eyes, and are good so long as they continue to be merely spectacle. But if one think for a moment of the servant of the servants of the Lord in cloth of gold, borne on men's shoulders, or of the children receiving the blessing of their Holy Father, with a regiment of French soldiers to protect the fa- ther from the children, it becomes a little sad. If one would feel the full meaning of those ceremo- nials, however, let him consider the coincidences between the liomish and the Buddhist forms of worship, and remembering that the Pope is the di- rect heir, through the Pontifex Maximus, of rites that were ancient when the Etruscans were mod- ern, he will look with a feeling deeper than cu- riosity upon forms which record the earliest con- quests of the Invisible, the first triumphs of mind over muscle. To me the noon silence and solitude of St. Peter's were most impressive, when the sunlight, made visible by the mist of the ever-burning lamps in which it was entangled, hovered under the dome A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 201 like the holy dove goldenly descending. Yery grand also is the twilight, when all outlines melt into mysterious vastness, and the arches expand and lose themselves in the deepening shadow. Then, standing in the desert transept, you hear the far-off vespers swell and die like low hreath- mgs of the sea on some conjectured shore. As the sky is supposed to scatter its golden star- poUen once every year in meteoric showers, so the dome of St. Peter's has its annual efflores- cence of fire. This illumination is the great show of Papal Rome. Just after sunset, I stood upon the Trinity dei Monti and saw the little drops of pale light creeping downward from the cross and trickling over the dome. Then, as the sky darkened behind, it seemed as if the setting sun had lodged upon the horizon and there burned out, the fire still clinging to his massy ribs. And when the change from the sUver to the golden illumination came, it was as if the breeze had fanned the embers into flame again. Bitten with the Anglo-Saxon gadfly that drives us all to disenchant artifice, and see the springs that fix it on, I walked down to get a nearer look. My next glimpse was from the bridge of Sant' Angelo ; but there was no time nor space for pause. Foot-passengers crowding hither and thither, as they heard the shout of Avanti! from the mile of coachmen behind, dragoon-horses curt- sying backward just where there were most women and children to be flattened, and the dome drawing all eyes and thoughts the wrong way, 202 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL made a hubbub to be got out of at any desperate hazard. Besides, one could not help feeling ner- vously hurried ; for it seemed quite plain to every- body that this starry apparition must be as mo- mentary as it was wonderful, and that we should find it vanished when we reached the piazza. But suddenly you staiid in front of it, and see the soft travertine of the front suffused with a tremulous, glooming glow, a mildened glory, as if the building breathed, and so transmuted its shadow into soft pulses of light. After wondering long enough, I went back to the Pincio, and watched it for an hour longer. But I did not wish to see it go out. It seemed better to go home and leave it stiU trembling, so that I could fancy a kind of permanence in it, and half believe I should find it there again some lucky evening. Before leaving it altogether, I went away to cool my eyes with darkness, and came back several times ; and every time it was a new toiraele, the more so that it was a human piece of faery-work. Beautiful as fire is in itself, I suspect that part of the pleasure is metaphysical, and that the sense of playing with an element which can be BO terrible adds to the zest of the spectacle. And then fire is not the least degraded by it, because it is not utilized. If beauty were in use, the factory would add a grace to the river, and we should turn from the fire-writing on the wall of heaven to look at a message printed by the magnetic telegraph. There may be a beauty in the use itself ; but utili- zation is always downward, and it is this feeling A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 203 that makes Schiller's Pegasus in yoke so univer- sally pleasing. So long as the curse of work clings M man, he will see beauty only in play. The cap- ital of the most frugal commonwealth in the world burns up five thousand dollars a year in gunpowder, and nobody murmurs. Provident Judas wished to utilize the ointment, but the Teacher would rather that it should be wasted in poem. The best lesson in aesthetics I ever got (and, like most good lessons, it fell from the lips of no regular professor) was from an Irishman on the day the Nymph Cochituate was formally intro- duced to the people of Boston. I made one with other rustics in the streets, admiring the digni- taries in coaches with as much Christian charity as is consistent with an elbow in the pit of one's stomach and a heel on that toe which is your only inheritance from two excellent grandfathers. Among other allegorical phenomena, there came along what I should have called a hay-cart, if I had not known it was a triumphal car, filled with that fairest variety of mortal grass which with us is apt to spindle so soon into a somewhat sapless womanhood. Thirty-odd young maidens in white gowns, with blue sashes and pink wreaths of French crape, represented the United States. (How shall we limit our number, by the way, if ever Utah be admitted ?) The ship, the printing-press, even the wondrous train of express-wagons, and other solid bits of civic fantasy, had left my Hibernian neigh- bor unmoved. But this brought him down. Turn- ing to me, as the most appreciative public for the 204 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL moment, with face of as much delight as if his head had been broken, he cried, " Now this is raly beautiful ! Tothally regyardless uv expinse ! " Methought my shirt-sleeved lecturer on the Beau- tiful had hit at least one nail full on the head. Voltaire but epigrammatized the same thought when he said, Le superjlu, chose tres-necessaire. As for the ceremonies of the Church, one need not waste time in seeing many of them. There is a dreary sameness in them, and one can take an hour here and an hour there, as it pleases him, just as sure of finding the same pattern as he woidd be in the first or last yard of a roU of printed cotton. For myself, I do not like to go and look with mere curiosity at what is sacred and solemn to others. To how many these Roman shows are sacred, I cannot guess ; but certainly the Romans do not value them much. I walked out to the grotto of Egeria on Easter Sunday, that I might not be tempted down to St. Peter's to see the mockery of Pio Nono's benediction. It is certainly Christian, for he blesses them that curse him, and does all the good which the waving of his fingers can do to people who would use him despitefully if they had the chance. I told an Italian servant she might have the day ; but she said she did not care for it. " But," urged I, " will you not go to receive the blessing of the Holy Father ? " "No, sir." " Do you not wish it ? " A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 205 " Not in the least : Ms blessing would do me no good. If I get the blessing of Heaven, it wiU serve my turn." There were three families of foreigners in our house, and I believe none of the Italian servants went to St. Peter's that day. Yet they commonly speak kindly of Pius. I have heard the same phrase from several Italians of the working-class. " He is a good man," they said, " but iU-led." What one sees in the streets of Eome is worth more than what one sees in the churches. The churches themselves are generally ugly. St. Peter's has crushed all the life out of architectural genius, and all the modern churches look as if they were swelling themselves in imitation of the great Basil- ica. There is a clumsy magnificence about them, and their heaviness oppresses. Their marble In- crustations look like a kind of architectural ele- phantiasis, and the parts are puffy with a dropsical want of proportion. There is none of the spring and soar which one may see even in the Lombard churches, and a Roman column standing near one of them, slim and gentlemanlike, satirizes silently their tawdry parvenmsm. Attempts at mere big- ness are ridiculous in a city where the Colosseum still yawns in crater-like ruin, and where Michael Angelo made a noble church out of a single room in Diocletian's baths. Shall I confess it? Michael Angelo seems to me, in his angry reaction' against sentimental beauty, to have mistaken bulk and brawn for the antithesis of feebleness. He is the apostle of the 206 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL exaggerated, the Victor Hugo of painting and sculpture. I have a feeling that rivalry was a, more powerful motive with him than love of art, that he had the conscious intention to be original, which seldom leads to anything better than being extravagant. The show of muscle proves strength, not power ; and force for mere force's sake in art makes one think of Milo caught in his own log. This is my second thought, and strikes me as per- haps somewhat niggardly toward one in whom you cannot help feeling there was so vast a possibility. And then his Eve, his David, his Sibyls, his Prophets, his Sonnets ! Well, I take it all back, and come round to St. Peter's again just to hint that I doubt about domes. In Rome they are so much the fashion that I felt as if they were the goitre of architecture. Generally they look heavy. Those on St. Mark's in Venice are the only light ones I ever saw, and they look almost airy, like tents puffed out with wind. I suppose one must be satisfied with the interior effect, which is cer- tainly noble in St. Peter's. But for impressive- ness both within and without there is nothing like a Gothic cathedral for me, nothing that crowns a city so nobly, or makes such an island of twilight silence in the midst of its noonday clamors. Now as to what one sees in the streets, the beg- gars are certainly the first things that draw the eye. Beggary is an institution here. The Church has sanctified it by the establishment of mendicant orders, and indeed it is the natural result of a social system where the non-producing class makes A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 207 not only the laws, but the ideas. The beggars of Home go far toward proving the diversity of origin in mankind, for on them surely the curse of Adam never fell. It is easier to fancy that Adam Vait- rien, the first tenant of the Fool's Paradise, after sucking his thumbs for a thousand years, took to wife Eve Faniente, and became the progenitor of this race, to whom also he left a calendar in which three hundred and sixty-five days in the year were made feasts, sacred from all secular labor. Ac- cordingly, they not merely do nothing, but they do it assiduously and almost with religious fervor. I have seen ancient members of this sect as constant at their accustomed street-corner as the bit of broken column on which they sat ; and when a man does this in rainy weather, as rainy weather is in Home, he has the spirit of a fanatic and martyr. It is not that the Italians are a lazy people. On the contrary, I am satisfied that they are industri- ous so far as they are allowed to be. But, as I said before, when a Roman does nothing, he does it in the high Roman fashion. A friend of mine was having one of his rooms arranged for a private theatre, and sent for a person who was said to be an expert in the business to do it for him. Aftei- a day's trial, he was satisfied that his lieutenant was rather a hindrance than a help, and resolved to dismiss him. " What is your charge for your day's services ? " " Two scudi, sir." " Two scudi ! Five pauls would be too much. You have done nothing but stand with your hands 208 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL in your pockets aud get in the way of other people." " Lordship is perfectly right ; but that is my way of working." It is impossible for a stranger to say who may not beg in Rome. It seems to be a sudden mad-> ness that may seize any one at the sight of a for- eigner. You see a very respectable-looking per- son in the street, and it is odds but, as you pass him, his hat comes off, his whole figure suddenly dilapidates itself, assuming a tremble of profes- sional weakness, and you hear the everlasting qualche cosaper carita / You are in doubt whether to drop a bajoccho into the next cardinal's hat which offers you its sacred cavity in answer to your salute. You begin to believe that the hat was in- vented for the sole purpose of ingulfing coppers, and that its highest type is the great Triregno it- self, into which the pence of Peter rattle. But you soon learn to distinguish the established beggars, and to the three professions elsewhere con- sidered liberal you add a fourth for this latitude, — mendicancy. Its professors look upon themselves as a kind of guild which ought to be protected by the government. I fell into talk with a woman who begged of me in the Colosseum. Among other things she complained that the government did not at all consider the poor. " Where is the government that does ? " I said. " Eh gia ! Excellency ; but this government lets beggars from the country come into Rome, which is a great injury to the trade of us born Romans. A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 209 There is Beppo, for example ; he is a man of prop- erty in his own town, and has a dinner of three courses every day. He has portioned two daugh- ters with three thousand scudi each, and left Rome during the time of the Republic with the rest of the nobility." At first, one is shocked and pained at the exhi- bition of deformities in the street. But by and by be comes to look upon them with little more emo- tion than is excited by seeing the tools of any other trade. The melancholy of the beggars is purely a matter of business ; and they look upon their maims as Fortunatus purses, which will al- ways give them money. A withered arm. they present to you as a highwayman would his pistol ; a goitre is a life-annuity ; a St. Vitus dance is as good as an engagement as prima hallerina at the Apollo ; and to have no legs at all is to stand on the best footing with fortune. They are a merry race, on the whole, and quick-witted, like the rest of their countrymen. I believe the regular fee for a beggar is a quattrino, about a quarter of a cent ; but they expect more of foreigners. A friend of mine once gave one of these tiny coins to an old woman ; she delicately expressed her resentment by exclaiming, " Thanks, signoria. God wiR re- ward even you ! " A begging friar came to me one day with a sub- scription for repairing his convent. " Ah, but I am a heretic," said I. " Undoubtedly," with a shrug, implying a respectful acknowledgment of a foreigner's right to choose warm and dry lodgings 210 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL in the other world as well as in this, "but your money is perfectly orthodox." Another favorite way of doing nothing is to exca- vate the Forum. I think the Fanientes like this all the better, because it seems a kind of satire upon work, as the witches parody the Christian offices of devotion at their Sabbath. A score or so of old men in voluminous cloaks shift the earth from one side of a large pit to the other, in a manner so lei- surely that it is positive repose to look at them. The most bigoted anti-Fourierist might acknow- ledge this to be attractive industry. One conscript father trails a small barrow up to another, who stands leaning on a long spade. Arriving, he fumbles for his snuff-box, and offers it deliberately to his friend. Each takes an ample pinch, and both seat themselves to await the result. If one should sneeze, he receives the Felicita ! of the other ; and, after allowing the titOlation to sub- side, he replies, Grazia ! Then follows a little conversation, and then they prepare to load. But it occurs to the barrow-driver that this is a good opportunity to fill and light his pipe ; and to do so conveniently he needs his barrow to sit upon. He draws a few whiffs, and a little more conversation takes place. The barrow is now ready ; but first the wielder of the spade wiU fill his pipe also. This done, more whiffs and more conversation. Then a spoonful of earth is thrown into the bar- row, and it starts on its return. But midway it meets an empty barrow, and both stop to go through the snuff-box ceremonial once more, and A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 211 to discuss whatever new thing has occurred in the excavation since their last encounter. And so it goes on all day. As I see more of material antiquity, I begin to suspect, that my interest in it is mostly factitious. The relations of races to the physical world (only to be studied fruitfully on the spot) do not excite in me an interest at aU proportionate to that I feel in their influence on the moral advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace in his own library as on the spot. The only useful remark I remember to have made here is, that, the situation of Eome being far less strong than that of any city of the Etruscan league, it must have been built where it is for purposes of commerce. It is the most de- fensible point near the mouth of the Tiber. It Is only as rival trades-folk that Rome and Carthage had any comprehensible cause of quarrel. It is only as a commercial people that we can under- stand the early tendency of the Romans towards democracy. As for antiquity, after reading his- tory, one is haunted by a discomforting suspicion that the names so painfully deciphered in hiero- glyphic or arrow-head inscriptions are only so many more Smiths and Browns masking it in un- known tongues. Moreover, if we Yankees are twitted with not knowing the difference between biff and ffreat, may not those of us who have learned it turn round on many a monument over here with the same reproach ? I confess I am be- ginning to sympathize with a countryman of ours 212 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL from Michigan, who asked our Minister to direct him to a specimen ruin and a specimen gallery, that he might see and be rid of them once for all. I saw three young Englishmen going through the Vatican by catalogue and number, the other day, in a fashion which John Bull is apt to consider exclusively American. " Number 300 ! " says the one with catalogue and pencil, " have you seen it?" "Yes," answer his two comrades, and, checking it off, he goes on with Number 301. Having witnessed the unavailing agonies of many Anglo-Saxons from both sides of the Atlantic in their effort to have the correct sensation before many hideous examples of antique bad taste, my heart warmed toward my business-like British cousins, who were doing their aesthetics in this thrifty auctioneer fashion. Our cart-before-horse education, which makes us more familiar with the history and literature of Greeks and Romans than with those of our own ancestry, (though there is nothing in ancient art to match Shakespeare or a Gothic minster,) makes us the gulls of what we call classical antiquity. Europe were worth visit- ing, if only to be rid of this one old man of the sea. In sculpture, to be sure, they have us on the hip. I am not ashamed to confess a singular sympathy with what are known as the Middle Ages. I can- not help thinking that few periods have left be- hind them such traces of inventiveness and power. Nothing is more tiresome than the sameness of modern cities ; and it has often struck me that this A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 213 must also have been true of those ancient ones in which Greek architecture or its derivatives pre- vailed, — true at least as respects public buildings. But mediaeval towns, especially in Italy, even when only fifty miles asunder, have an individuality of character as marked as that of trees. Nor is it merely this originality that attracts me, but like- wise the sense that, however old, they are nearer to me in being modern and Christian. Far enough away in the past to be picturesque, they are still so near through sympathies of thought and belief as to be more companionable. I find it harder to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of centuries. Apart from any difference in the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the Sasso di Dante, than at Horace's Sabine farm or by the tomb of Virgil. The latter, indeed, interested me chiefly by its association with comparatively modem le- gend ; and one of the buildings I am most glad to have seen in Rome is the Bear Inn, where Mon- taigne lodged on his arrival. I think it must have been for some such reason that I liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks, though I am vastly more contented with merely being in Rome. Florence is more noisy; indeed, I think it the noisiest town I was ever in. What with the continual jangling of its bells, the rattle of Austrian drums, and the street-cries, An- cora mi raccapriccia. The Italians are a voci- ferous people, and most so among them the Flor- entines. Walking through a back street one day, I saw an old woman higgling with a peripatetic 214 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL dealer, who, at every interval afforded him by the remarks of his veteran antagonist, would tip his head on one side, and shout, with a kind of wonder- ing enthusiasm, as if he could hardly trust the evidence of his own senses to such loveliness, O, che hellezza I che belle-e-ezza ! The two had been contending as obstinately as the Grreeks and Tro- jans over the body of Patroclus, and I was curious to know what was the object of so much desire on the one side and admiration on the other. It was a half-dozen of weazeny baked pears, beg- garly remnant of the day's traffic. Another time I stopped before a stall, debating whether to buy some fine-looking peaches. Before I had made up my mind, the vender, a stout fellow, with a voice like a prize-bull of Bashan, opened a mouth round and large as the muzzle of a blunderbuss, and let fly into my ear the following pertinent observation : '■'• Bdle pesche! telle pe^e^esche!" (crescendo.') I stared at him in stunned bewilderment ; but, seeing that he had reloaded and was about to fire again, took to my heels, the exploded syllables rattling after me like so many buckshot. A siagle turnip is argument enough with them till midnight ; nay, I have heard a rufiiaD yelling over a covered basket, which, I am convinced, was empty, and only carried as an excuse for his stupendous vocalism. It never struck me before what a quiet people Americans are. Of the pleasant places within easy walk of Rome, I prefer the garden of the Villa Albani, as being most Italian. One does not go to Italy for A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 215 examples of Price on the Picturesque. Compared with landscape-gardening, it is Eacine to Shake- speare, I grant ; but it has its own charm, neverthe- less. I like the balustraded terraces, the sun-proof laurel walks, the vases and statues. It is only in such a climate that it does not seem inhuman to thrust a naked statue out of doors. Not to speak of their incongruity, how dreary do those white figures look at Fountains Abbey in that shrewd Yorkshire atmosphere ! To put them there shows the same bad taste that led Prince Polonia, as Thackeray calls him, to build an artificial ruin within a mile of Rome. But I doubt if the Italian garden will bear transplantation. Farther north, or under a less constant sunshine, it is but half- hardy at the best. Within the city, the garden of the French Academy is my favorite retreat, because little frequented; and there is an arbor there in which I have read comfortably (sitting where the sun could reach me) in January. By the way, there is something very agreeable in the way these people have of making a kind of fireside of the sunshine. With us it is either too hot or too cool, or we are too busy. But, on the other hand, they have no such thing as a chimney-comer. Of course I haunt the collections of art faith- fully,* but my favorite gallery, after all, is the street. There I always find something entertain- ing, at least. The other day, on my way to the Colonna Palace, I passed the Fountain of Trevi, from which the water is now shut off on account of repairs to the aqueduct. A scanty rill of soap* 216 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL sudsy liquid still trickled from one of the conduits, and, seeing a crowd, I stopped to find out what nothing or other had gathered it. One charm of Eome is that nobody has anything in particular to do, or, if he has, can always stop doing it on the slightest pretext. I found that some eels had been discovered, and a very vivacious hunt was going on, the chief Nimrods being boys. I happened to be the first to see a huge eel wriggling from the mouth of a pipe, and pointed him out. Two lads at once rushed upon him. One essayed the cap- ture with his naked hands, the other, more provi- dent, had armed himself with a rag of woollen cloth with which to maintain his grip more se- curely. Hardly had this latter arrested his slip- pery prize, when a ragged rascal, watching his op- portunity, snatched it away, and instantly secured it by thrusting the head into his mouth, and clos- ing on it a set of teeth like an ivory vice. But alas for iU-got gain I Rob Eoy's " Good old plan, That lie should take who has the power, And he should keep who can," did not serve here. There is scarce a square rood in Eome without one or more stately cocked hats in it, emblems of authority and police. I saw the flash of the snow-white cross-belts, gleaming through that dingy crowd like the panache of .Henri Quatre at Ivry, I saw the mad plunge of the canvas-shielded head-piece, sacred and terrible as that of Gessler ; and while the greedy throng were dancing about the anguiUiceps, each taking his A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 21T chance twiteli at the undulating object of all wishes, the captor dodging his head hither and thither, (vulnerable, like Achilles, only in his 'eel, as a Cockney tourist would say,) a pair of broad blue shoulders parted the assailants as a ship's bows part a wave, a pair of blue arms, terminating in gloves of Berlin thread, were stretched forth, not in bene- diction, one hand grasped the slippery Briseis by the waist, the other bestowed a cuff on the jaw-bone of Achilles, which loosened (rather by its author- ity than its physical force) the hitherto refractory incisors, a snuffy bandanna was produced, the pris- oner was deposited in this temporary watch-house, and the cocked hat sailed majestically away with the property thus sequestered for the benefit of the state. " Gaudeant an^uiUse si mortuus sit homo ille, Qui, quasi morte reas, exoruolabat eas ! " If you have got through that last sentence with- out stopping for breath, you are fit to begin on the Homer of Chapman, who, both as translator and author, has the longest wind, (especially for a com- parison,) without being long-winded, of all writers I know anything of, not excepting Jeremy Taylor. KEATS 1854 There are few poets whose works contain sligliter hints of their personal history than those of Keats ; yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they have written. To write the life of a man was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circimi- stances, of those things which stood about the life and were more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so far as its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser mate- rial ; but the gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the sur- face that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much upon the shape of that, — upon the KEATS 219 knots and twists wlilch existed in it from the be- ginning. We were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough. Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a weU-outlined character, for that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as it may hap- pen then to be, endeavors to mould every one in its own image. What his temperament was we can see clearly, and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the discipline of art. John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. Lord Houghton, who seems to have had a kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet, says that he was "born in the upper ranks of the middle class." This shows a commendable tenderness for the nerves of English society, and reminds one of Northcote's story of the violin-player who, wishing to compliment his pupil, George III., divided all fiddlers into three classes, — those who could not play at all, those who played very badly, and those who played very well, — assuring his Majesty that he had made such commendable progress as to have already reached the second rank. We shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the 220 KEATS father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had told us in an earlier biography) " was employed in the estab- lishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of large livery-stables on the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a proprietor ; second, he was the proprietor of an establishment ; third, he was the proprietor of a large establishment; and fourth, this large establishment was nearly opposite Fins- bury Circus, — a name which vaguely dilates the imagination with aU sorts of potential grandeurs. It is true Leigh Hunt asserts that Keats " was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin," ^ but we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or in such of his letters as have been printed. We suspect the fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which measured genius by genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedi- gree is of the best, tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery even in the largest establishments in Moorfields. As weU as we can make out, then, the father of Keats was a groom in the service of Mr. Jennings, and married the daughter of his master. Thus, on the mother's side, at least, we find a grandfather ; on the father's there is no hint of such an ancestor, and we must charitably take him for granted. It is of more importance that the elder Keats was a man of sense and energy, and that his wife was a 1 Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed.), vol. ii. p. 36. KEATS 221 "lively and intelligent woman, who hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love of amuse- ment," bringing him into the world, a seven-months' child, on the 29th October, 1795, instead of the 29th of December, as would have been conven- tionally proper. Lord Houghton describes her as " taU, with a large oval face, and a somewhat sat- urnine demeanour." This last circumstance does not agree very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by add- ing that " she succeeded, however, in inspiring her children with the profoundest affection." This was particularly true of John, who once, when be- tween four and five years old, mounted guard at her chamber door with an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her not to be dis- turbed.^ In' 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed by a fall from his horse. His mother seems to have been ambitious for her children, and there was some talk of sending John to Harrow. "Fortunately this plan was thought too expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield with his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camperdown, was the hero of his nephews, and they went to school resolved to main- tain the family reputation for courage. John was Always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school-fellows as a strange compound of pluck and 1 Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Hongb ton's version the best. 222 KEATS sensibility. He attacked an usher who had boxed his brother's ears ; and when his mother died, in 1810, was moodUy inconsolable, hiding himself for several days in a nook under the master's desk, and refusing all comfort from teacher or friend. He was popular at school, as boys of spirit al- ways are, and impressed his companions with a sense of his power. They thought he would one day be a famous soldier. This may have been owing to the stories he told them of the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly f amoused by the boy Homer, and whom they prob- ably took for an admiral at the least, as it would have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought John would be a great man, which is the' main thing, for the public opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we will teU you what the man longs to be, however he may be repressed by neces- sity or fear of the police reports. Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats. He translated the twelve books of the ^neid, read Eobinson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but he had studied Spence's Polymetis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's Dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good com- pany perhaps for him as aorists and aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable KEATS 223 writers If their pages could suddenly have become alive under their pens with all that the young poet saw in them.^ On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, " of some eminence " in his pro- fession, as Lord Houghton takes care to assure us. The place was of more importance than the master, for its neighborhood to Enfield enabled him to keep up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr. Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the " Faerie Queene." Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Am- phion is more wonderful than this miracle of Spen- ser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice Into a great poet. Keats learned at once the secret of ^ There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of accessary after the fact in any success ; always an old woman or two, ready to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood of persons who have become distii^^ished. Ac- cordingly, » certain "Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury," assures Mr. George Keats, when he tells her that John is deter- mined to be a poet, "that this T7as very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." The early histories of heroes, like those of nations, are always more or less mythical, and I give the story for what it is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one should determine to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the matter was deter- mined earlier and by a higher disposing power. There are few children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and per- haps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs. Graftys of Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See Hay- don's Autobiography, vol. i. p. 361. 224 KEA TS his birth, and henceforward his indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the Muse defend her son. It is the old story, — the lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what is gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us " that he used sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy himself." This was perhaps a half- conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of the shortness of his own career.^ Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But Chap- man's translations had a more abiding influence on his style both for good and evil. That he read wisely, his comments on the " Paradise Lost " are enough to prove. He now also commenced poet himself, but does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession. He was a youth of energy and purpose, and, though he no doubt penned many a stanza when he should have been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable exami- nation in 1817. In the spring of this year, also, he prepared to take his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It attracted 1 "I never saw the poet Keats but once, but lie then read some lines from (I think) the 'Briatowe Tragedy' with an en- thusiasm of admiration such as could be felt only by a poet, and ■which true poetry only could have excited."— J. H. C, in Notes ^ Queries, 4th s. x. 157. KEATS 225 little attention, and the rest of this year seems to have been occupied with a journey on foot in Scot- land, and the composition of " Endymion," which was published in 1818. Milton's " Tetrachordon " was not better abused ; but Milton's assailants were unorganized, and were obliged each to print and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural laws of demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice. They might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the sentence was published, and the penalty inflicted before all England. The difference be- tween his fortune and Milton's was that between being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and being set in the pillory. In the first case, the an- noyance brushes off mostly with the mud ; in the last, there is no solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This solace, to a cer- tain extent, Keats had ; for his ambition was noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputa- tion, but to be a great poet. Haydon says that Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty purpose. It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they suspect to be good verses than what they know to be bad morals. Is it because they feel themselves incapable of the one and not of the other ? Probably a certain amount of honest loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken into account, and quite as much of the cru- elty of criticism is due to want of thought as to 226 KEATS deliberate injustice. However it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men who scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as if there were never a not in any of them, felt every sentiment of their better nature outraged by the " Lyrical Ballads." It is idle to attempt to show that Keats did not suffer keenly from the vulgari- ties of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered in proportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious of falling below it. In England, espe- cially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if you are a lord ; but to be ridiculous and an apoth- ecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly to be excommunicated. A priori, there was something absurd in poetry written by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables of Mr. Jen- nings, even though they were an establishment, and a large establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury Circus. Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the Quarterly, and Mr. Terry, the actor, ^ thought so even more distinctly in Black- wood, bidding the young apothecary " back to his gallipots ! " It is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to have the advantage of position, nor to be drenched with ditch-water, though you know it to be thrown by a scullion in a garret. Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensi- bility was excessive, could not but be galled by this treatment. He was galled the more that he was 1 Haydon {Autobiography, vol. i. p. 379) says that he "strongly suspects " Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood. KEA TS 227 also a man o£ strong sense, and capable of under- standing clearly Low hard it is to make men ac- knowledge solid value in a person whom they have once heartily laughed at. Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. To his friend Taylor he writes, " There is but one way for me. The road lies through study, ap- plication, and thought." Thrilling with the elec- tric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in vision, like Dante, that small procession of the elder poets to which only elect centuries can add another lau- relled head. Might he, too, deserve from posterity the love and reverence which he paid to those an- tique glories ? It was no unworthy ambition, but everything was against him, — birth, health, even friends, since it was partly on their account that he was sneered at. His very name stood in his way, for Fame loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like Spenserian, Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great deal in names, and when the fairies come with their gifts to the cradle of the selected child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a name for him from which well-sounding derivatives can be made, and, best of all, with a termination in on. Men judge the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are readier to take without question whatever is Platonic, Baconian, Newtonian, Johnsonian, Wash- ingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, and all the 228 KEATS rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of Keats, — the more pity, — and to say a thing is Keatsy is to contemn it. Fortune likes fine names. Haydon tells us that Keats was very much de- pressed by the fortunes of his book. This was natural enough, but he took it all in a manly way, and determined to revenge himself by writing bet- ter poetry. He knew that activity, and not de- spondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune. Haydon is sure of the change in his spirits, because he would come to the painting-room and sit silent for hours. But we rather think that the conversa- tion, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled that in a young author's first play, where the other inter- locutors are only brought in as convenient points for the hero to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon. Besides, Keats had been contin- uing his education this year, by a course of Elgin marbles and pictures by the great Italians, and might very naturally have found little to say about Mr. Haydon's extensive works, that he would have cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the other hand, in his eagerness to prove that Keats was not killed by the article in the Quarterly, is carried too far towards the opposite extreme, and more than hints that he was not even hurt by it. This would have been true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant com- panionship with mountains, had acquired some- thing of their manners, but was simply impossible to a man of Keats's temperament. On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect KEATS 229 Keats the less for having been gifted with sensibil- ity, and may even say what we believe to be true, that his health was injured by the failure of his book. A man cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves ; but so long as we do not know this, it is a very passable giant. We are not without experience of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies had no more concern in their mental doings and sufferings than a house has with the good or iU fortune of its occu- pant. But poets are not built on this plan, and espe- cially poets like Keats, in whom the moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his hands, so truly did his body, like that of Donne's Mistress Boulstred, think and remember and fore- bode. The healthiest poet of whom our civiliza- tion has been capable says that when he beholds " desert a beggar bom, And strength by litnping sway disabeled, And art made tongfue-tied by authority," alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his day, " And simple truth miscalled simplicity," as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case, " And captive Good attending Captain 111," 230 KEATS that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life seems to have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, " tired of all these," had noth- ing for it but to cry for " restful Death." Keats, to all appearance, accepted his iU fortune courageously. He certainly did not overestimate " Endymion," and perhaps a sense of humor which was not wanting in him may have served as a buf- fer against the too importunate shock of disap- pointment. " He made Ritchie promise," says Haydon, " he would carry his ' Endymion ' to the great desert of Sahara and fling it in the midst." On the 9th October, 1818, he writes to his pub- lisher, Mr. Hessey, " I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Black- wood or the Quarterly could inflict ; and also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right in regard to ' the slipshod Endymion.' That it is so is no fault of mine. No ! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written ; for it is not in my nature KEATS 231 to fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently without judgment, I may write independently and with judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own sal- vation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In ' Endymion ' I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest." This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the side which a large-minded person would display to a friend. This is what he thought, but whether it was what he felt, I think doubtful. I look upon it rather as one of the phenomena of that mul- tanimous nature of the poet, which makes him for the moment that of which he has an intellectual perception. Elsewhere he says something which seems to hint at the true state of the case. " I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man: they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a passion." One cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth, — the one altogether poet ; the other essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added, — the one shifting from form to form, and from style to style, and pour- ing his hot throbbing life into every mould ; the other remaining always the individual, producing 232 KEATS works, and not so much living in his poems as memorially recording his life in them. When Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks serenely and generously of Wordsworth the poet, as if he were an unbiassed third person, who takes up the argument merely in the interest of literature. He towers into a bald egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy was his employment ; it was Keats's very existence, and he felt the rough treat- ment of his verses as if it had been the wounding of a limb. To Wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise ; his slow pulse and imperturbable self-trust gave him assurance of a life so long that he could wait ; and when we read his poems we should never suspect the existence in him of any sense but that of observation, as if Wordsworth the poet were a half -mad land-surveyor, accompa- nied by Mr. Wordsworth the distributor of stamps as a kind of keeper. But every one of Keats's poems was a sacrifice of vitality; a virtue went away from him into every one of them ; even yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thriU our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not won- der he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly. In the mean time his younger brother languished and died, his elder seems to have been in some way unfortunate and had gone to America, and Keats himself showed symptoms of the hereditary disease which caused his death at last. It is in October, 1818, that we find the first allusion to a passion KEATS 233 which was erelong to consume him. It is plain enough beforehand that those were not moral or mental graces that should attract a man like Keats. His intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his art, bis books, and his friends. He could have com- panionship and appreciation from men ; what he craved of woman was only repose. That luxxirious nature, which would have tossed uneasily on a crumpled rose-leaf, must have something softer to rest upon than intellect, something less ethereal than culture. It was his body that needed to have its equilibrium restored, the waste of his nervous energy that must be repaired by deep draughts of the overflowing life and drowsy tropical force of an abundant and healthily poised womanhood. Writ- ing to his sister-in-law, he says of this nameless person : " She is not a Cleopatra, but is at least a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into a room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her. From habit, she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself at ease with such a woman ; the picture before me always gives me a life and ani- mation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You wiU by this time think I am in love with her, so, before I go any farther, I wiU teU you that I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's 234 KEATS. might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose life [lips] is to me a banquet. ... I like her and her like, because one has no sensation; what we both are is taken for granted. . . . She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic power. ... I believe, though, she has faults, the same as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way ; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things, — the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical ; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Bjrron, and this Charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me." It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head with such pains, while his whole body is so clearly visible, as in this extract. This lady, it seems, is not a Cleopatra, only a Charmian; but presently we find that she is imperial. He does not love her, but he would just like to be ruined by her, nothing more. This glimpse of her, with her leopardess beauty, crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically, is all we have. She seems to have been still living in 1848, and, as Lord Hough- KEATS 235 ton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred. " She is an East-Indian," Keats says, " and ought to be her grandfather's heir." Her name we do not know. It appears from DUke's " Papers of a Critic " that they were betrothed : " It is quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss . God help them. It is a bad thing for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or to speak to her." Alas, the tropical warmth became a consuming fire 1 " His passion cruel grown took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous." Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems to have worked assiduously. Of course, worldly success was of more importance than ever. He began "Hyperion," but had given it up in September, 1819, because, as he said, " there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote "Lamia" after an attentive study of Dryden's versification. This period also produced the " Eve of St. Agnes," "Isabella," and the odes to the "Nightingale" and to the "Grecian Urn." He studied Italian, read Ariosto, and wrote part of a humorous poem^ " The Cap and Bells." He tried his hand at tragedy, and Lord Houghton has pub- lished among his "Eemains," "Otho the Grreat," and all that was ever written of " King Stephen." We think he did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to show how ill his hiographee could do anything. In the •mnter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on 236 KEATS the top of a stage-coacli, and came home in a state of feverish excitement. He was persuaded to go to bed, and in getting between the cold sheets, coughed slightly. "That is blood in my mouth," he said ; " bring me the candle ; let me see this blood." It was of a brilliant red, and his medical knowledge enabled him to interpret the augury. Those narcotic odors that seem to breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager who is drifting toward the shore of the mysterious Other World, appeared to envelop him, and, looking up with sudden calmness, he said, " I know the color of that blood ; it is arterial blood ; I cannot be de- ceived in that color. That drop is my death-war- rant; I must die." There was a slight rally during the summer of that year, but toward autumn he grew worse again, and it was decided that he should go to Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend, Mr. Severn, an artist. After embarking, he wrote to his friend, Mr. Brown. We give a part of this letter, which is so deeply tragic that the sentences we take almost seem to break away from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches of Dante's lamentable wood. " I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. There is one I must mention and have donie with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this wotJd prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it ? Were I in health it would make me iU, and how KEATS 237 can I bear it in my state ? I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping, — you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would de- stroy even those pains, which are better than noth- ing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer forever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you, that you might flatter me with the best. I think, without my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be a friend to Miss when I am dead. You think she has many faults, but for my sake think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the diEEerence of my sensations with respect to Miss and my sister is amazing, — • the one seems to absorb the other to a degree in- credible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America ; the thought of leaving Miss is beyond everything horrible, — the sense of dark- ness coming over me, — I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing ; some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Went- worth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be ; we cannot be created for this sort of suffering." 238 KEATS To the same, friend he writes again from Naples, 1st November, 1820 : — " The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kiU me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have re- mained well. I can bear to die, — I cannot bear to leave her. O God ! God ! God ! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head. My imagi- nation is horribly vivid about her, — I see her, I hear her. There is nothing in the world of suf- ficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England ; I can- not reeoUect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again, — now ! — O that I could be buried near where she lives ! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her, — to see her handwriting would break my heart. Even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do ? Where can I look for consolar tion or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion woidd kill me. Indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never ceased wearing me out." The two friends went almost immediately from Naples to Rome, where Keats was treated with great kindness by the distinguished physician, Dr. KEATS 239 (^afterward Sir James) Clark.^ But there was no hope from the first. His disease was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The very fact that life might be happy deepened his despair. He might not have sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked only the blacker that they were shone upon by the signal- torch that promised safety and love and rest. It is good to know that one of Keats's last plea- sures was in hearing Severn read aloud from a volume of Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but, find- ing on the second page these lines, "Miserame! sollieTO a me non resta Altro ohe il pianto, ed il pianto 6 delitto," he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the 14th February, 1821, Severn speaks of a change that had taken place in him toward greater quiet- ness and peace. He talked much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep, in which he seemed to have happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft footfall of the angel of Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be his Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon his grave- stone : — "hekb lies one whose name was writ in water." On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. His last words were, " I am dying ; I shall 1 The lodg^g of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn's Studio is said to have been in the Caneello over the garden gate of the Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Roman home of their countryman Crawford. 240 KEATS die easy ; don't be frightened, be firm and thank God it has come ! " He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, in that part of it which is now disused and secluded from the rest. A short time before his death he told Severn that he thought his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of flowers ; and once, after lying peacefully awhile, he said, " I feel the flowers growing over me." His grave is marked by a little headstone on which are carved somewhat rudely his name and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or shrub has been planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover, crowd his small mound with a galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous than those under which he lived.^ In person, Keats was below the middle height, with a head small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders. His hair was brown and fine, fall- ing in natural ringlets about a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every feature was delicately cut ; the chin was bold, and about the mouth something of a pugnacious expres- sion. His eyes were mellow and glowing, large, dark, and 'sensitive. At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse 1 Written in 1854. irony of Time ! Ten years after the poet's death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr. Dilke, that "the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obacnrity to which circumstances had condemned him " I (Papers of a Critic, i. 11.) O Time the atoner! In 1874 I found the grave planted with shmhs and flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent American sculptor. KEATS 241 with tears, and his mouth trembled.^ Haydon says that his eyes had an inward Delphian look that was perfectly divine. The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but it should be remembered that he died at twenty- five, and that he offends by superabundance and not poverty. That he was overlanguaged at first there can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the rich that the costly plain- ness, which at once satisfies the taste and the im- agination, is attainable. Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it useful to discuss until it has been settled what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us that this merit (whatever it be) has been denied to Keats, because his poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time he wrote them. But men have their intellectual an- cestry, and the likeness of some one of them is for- ever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several gen- erations. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. It is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an action of trover against every author who used his words. It is the man behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare help himself to a ^ Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, ii. 43. 242 KEATS verse or a phrase, it is witli ears that have learned of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning. Enough that we recognize in Keats that indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we call genius. The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands of years it has built out of the same light and vapor its visionary cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night shall utterly abase and destroy. Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other, — Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, — were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensu- ousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the existing formahsm injured his earlier poems by tingeing them with something of iconoclastic ex- travagance. He was the deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet, and Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. Keats had the broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides, and he was able to understand Words- worth and judge Byron, equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one and the many littlenesses of the other, while Words- worth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jea- lous instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the most individual, accord- KEATS 248 ingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste and feeling ; and those of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he lived. Wordsworth has influ- enced most the ideas of succeeding poets ; Keats, their forms ; and Byron, interesting to men of im- agination less for his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by experience nor sup- plied with motives by the duties of life. Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these later days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he " hops about the gravel with the sparrows " ; was he morbid, he " would reject a Petrarcal coronation, — on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers." So im- pressible was he as to say that he " had no nature," meaning character. But he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, " The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream: he awoke and found it truth." He had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things, and for him they had no 244 KEATS other use. We are apt to talk of the classic re- naissance as of a phenomenon long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to think the Greeks and Ro- mans alone had the mighty magic to work such a miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is that in him we have an example of the renaissance going on almost imder our own eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him kin- dled by a purely English leaven. He had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had, but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his purpose. His delicate senses ab- sorbed culture at every pore. Of the self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in one so young) the second draft of Hyperion as compared with the first is a conclusive proof. And far in- deed is his " Lamia " from the lavish indiscrimi- nation of " Endymion." In his Odes he showed a sense of form and proportion which we seek vairily in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets (taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in our language. No doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity never- theless. Happy the young poet who has the sav- ing fault of exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty that sooner or later will amend it I As every young person goes through all the world-old experiences, fancying them something peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with every new generation, whose youth always finds its repre- sentatives in its poets. Keats rediscovered the de- KEATS 245 light and wonder that lay enchanted In the diction- ary. Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found in vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic expression than any modern English poet. And by poetic expres- sion I do not mean merely a vividness in particu- lars, but the right feeling which heightens or sub- dues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than is commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. This power of language is veiled in the old legends which make the invis- ible powers the servants of some word. As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the societies,, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the small academy of the immortals. The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry ; for, however often we may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious expression that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The lowest point 246 KEATS was indicated when there was such an utter con« founding of the common and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good poetry that could not be trans- lated into good prose, as if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles could be made of it. We find Keats at first going to the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow ; but we see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like that of the eagle balanced in incommimicable sun- shine. In him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty ; thought emancipated itself from expression without becoming in turn its tyrant ; and music and meaning floated together, accordant as swan' and shadow, on the smooth element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which underlies the senses and is the spirit of them. LIBEARY OF OLD AUTHORS* 1858-1864 Many o£ our older readers can remember the anticipation with which they looked for each suc- cessive volume of the late Dr. Young's excellent series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To most of us it was our first intro- duction to the highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Lati- mer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, FuUer, and Walton. What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us ! What a pre- cious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature ! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian amrphorm of the Past ! No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our trans- lation of the Scriptures ; to no modem is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural 1 London : John EusaeU Smith. 1856-64. 248 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS to a period when yet reviews were not ; and no later style breathes that country charm characteris- tic of days ere the metropolis had drawn all lit- erarj{ activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved thoroughfares of thought. Even the " Retrospective Eeview " continues to be good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires its bouquet by age) which pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission to the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy chooses. The years during which this review was published were altogether the most fruitful in gen- uine appreciation of old English literature. Books were prized for their imaginative and not their an- tiquarian value by young writers who sate at the feet of Lamb and Coleridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy, were sought, rather than the bar- ren scarcities of typography. But another race of men seems to have sprung up, in whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who sub- stitute archaeologic perversity for fine-nerved schol- arship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity- shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of Art. They forget, in their fanaticism for anti- LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 249 qulty, that the dust of never so many centuries is impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb mellowness of tone from age, and that a baptismal register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gath- ering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences, that have steeped them iu the sunshine of their love and appreciation;— r these quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne ; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shake- speare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb ; in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoiis and the orchards of Atlas ; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago. We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes ; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, "A book is a book" ; from the time when we made the first cat- alogue of our library, in which " Bible, large, 1 vol.," and " Bible, small, 1 vol.," asserted their al- phabetic individuality and were the sole ^s in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill up. We can^ 250 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS not breathe tie thin air of that Pepysian seK- denial, that Himalayan seleetness, which, content with one bookcase, would have no tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer new-comers by a continuous ostra- cism to the garret of present incumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull ; we live over again the author's lonely labors and tremulous hopes ; we see him, on his first appear- ance after parturition, " as well as could be ex- pected," a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, as he doubtfully enters the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of WiU or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the " Modest Enquiry into the Pre- sent State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the " Uni- ties briefly considered by PhUomusus," of which they have never heard and never will hear so much as the names ; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviAring to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete with- out ; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Eed Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the taU octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial- flowers of some passion which the churchyard LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 251 smothered ere the Stuarts were yet discrowned, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association. It is not easy to divine the rule which has gov- erned Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series. A choice of old authors should be aflorile- gium, and not a botanist's hortus siccus, to which grasses are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of anti- quarianism seems to have presided over the editing of the " Library." We should be inclined to sur- mise that the works to be reprinted had been com- monly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should be signalized on the title- pages with the suffix of Editoe. The volumes al- ready published are : Increase Mather's " Remark- able Providences " ; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden ; the " Visions of Piers Ploughman " ; the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Over- bury ; the " Hymns and Songs " and the " Hallelu- iah " of George Wither ; thp poems of Southwell ; Selden's "Table-Talk"; the "Enchiridion" of Quarles ; the dramatic works of Marston, Webster, 262 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS and Lilly; Chapman's translation of Homer; Lovelace, and four volumes of "Early English Poetry." The volimie of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same sheK with the " Magnalia " of his book-suffocated son. Cun- ningham's comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time to come the demand for Drunmiond, whose chief value to pos- terity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury's " Characters " are interesting illustra- tions of contemporary manners, and a mine of foot- notes to the works of better men, — but, with the exception of " The Fair and Happy Milkmaid," they are dull enough to have pleased James the First ; his " Wife " is a cento of far-fetched con- ceits, — here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney's game- bag, and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of royal complicity. The " Piers Ploughman " is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of Mr. Wright's former edition. It would have been very well to have republished the " Fair Virtue," and "Shepherd's Hunting" of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote ; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his " Hymns and Songs," whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incorrigible poetas- ters. If a steady course of these did not bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 253 would. Take this as a sample, hit on by opening at random : — " Rottenness my bones possest ; Trembling fear possessM me ; I that troublous day might rest : For, -when his approaches be Onward to the people made, His strong troops -wiU them invade." Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David, putting into his mouth such punning con- ceits as " fears are my feres," and in his " Saint Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that an earnest pro- test should be uttered against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious poetry, but which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun and mis- qualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Proph- ets which has the glow and wide -orbited metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired 254 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS clergymen from polemics; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be merry in their company, — to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the, Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs, — nay, to set them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul that open toward the sun's rising, is to confound piety with dulness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake from the apothecary's drawer. The " Enchiridion " of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the " Emblems," and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions, — nor a matter of heart- break, if it were. Of the dramatic works of Mars- ton and Lilly it is enough to say that they are truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor, as literature, worth the paper they blot. They seem to have been deemed worthy of republication be- cause they were the contemporaries of true poets ; and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy their plays on the same principle, the sale will be a remunerative one. It was worth while, perhaps, to reprint Lovelace, if only to show what dull verses may be written by a man who has made one lucky hit. Of the "Early English Poetry," nine tenths had better never have been printed at all, and the other tenth reprinted by an editor who had some vague suspicion, at least, of what they meant. The Homer of Chapman is so precious a LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 255 gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith's shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vast placer, full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry. Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith's reprints, we come to the closer ques- tion of Sow are they edited f Whatever the merit of the original works, the editors, whether self- elected or chosen by the publisher, should be ac- curate and scholarly. The editing of the Homer we can heartily commend ; and Dr. Eimbault, who carried the works of Overbury through the press, has done his work well ; but the other volumes of the Library are very creditable neither to English scholarship nor to English typography. The Intro- ductions to some of them are enough to make us think that we are fallen to the necessity of re- printing our old authors because the art of writ- ing correct and graceful English has been lost. WiUiam B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, Bar- rister at Law, says, for instance, in his Introduction to Southwell: "There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which] Southwell was in the habit of visiting and pirovid- ing with religious instruction when he exchanged his ordinary [ordinarily] close confinement for a purer atmosphere " (p. xxii.) Again, (p. xxii,) " He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued, with very great success, the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly terminated by his foul betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592." 256 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS We should like to have Mr. TurnhuU explain how the objects of a mission could be terminated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mission it- self. From the many eimilar flowers in the Intro- duction to Mather's " Providences," by Mr. George Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a country- man,) we select the following : " It was at this period when, [that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecution, our Pilgrim Fathers, threatened with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dan- gers of an almost unknown ocean, and threw them- selves into the arms of men called savages, who proved more beneficent than national Christians." To whom or what our Pilgrim Fathers did succumb, and what " national Christians " are, we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. Speaking of the "Providences," Mr. Offor says, that " they faithfully delineate the state of public opinion two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being an implicit faith in the power of the [in-] visible world to hold visible intercourse with man : — not the angels to bless poor erring mortals, but of de- mons imparting power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and destroy," — a sentence which we defy any witch or warlock, though he were Michael Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic aid. On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that "he was one of the first divines who discovered that very many strange events, which were con- sidered preternatural, had occurred in the course of nature or by deceitful juggling ; that the Devil LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 257 could not speak English, nor prevail with Protes- tants ; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil ; that medicine drives out Satan ! " We do not wonder that Mr. Offor put a mark of exclamation at the end of this surprising sentence, but Tve do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof- reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of the question, we find, on refer- ring to Mather's text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was -less eloquent in English than in any other language ; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (not the Devil) could not speak ; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor that medicine drives him out. Anything more helplessly inadequate than Mr. Offor's preliminary disserta- tion on Witchcraft we never read ; but we could hardly expect much from an editor whose citations from the book he is editing show that he had either not read or not understood it. Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclas- tic, — not sparing, as we have seen, even Priscian's head among the rest ; but, en revanche, Mr. Turn- bull is ultramontane beyond the editors of the Ci- pilta Oattolica. He allows himself to say, that, "after Southwell's death, one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and blamably sim- ulating heresy, wrought, with some relics of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with des- perate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the 258 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS skill of all physicians." Mr. Turnbull is, we sus- pect, a recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a lucrative prac- tice in countries full of the relics of greater saints than. even Southwell. That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmacopoeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. But what- ever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and how- ever it may gratify Mr. Turnbull's catechumen- ical enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integument of his, even at the expense of Jesuits' bark, we cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero's life, or making a toler- ably just estimate of his verses. It is possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a necktie only to heretical readers. We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. Turnbull and Offor for special animadversion be- cause they are on the whole the worst, both of them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offor in particular gives us almost no informa- tion whatever. Some of the others are not with- out grave faults, chief among which is a vague declamation, especially out of place in critical essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither's " Hallelujah," for instance, Mr. Farr in- forms us that "nearly aU the best poets of the latter half of the sixteenth century — for that was the period when the Reformation was fully es« LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 259 tablished — and the whole of the seventeenth cen- tury were sacred poets," and that " even Shake- speare and the contemporary dramatists of his age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to the songs of Zion." Comment on statements like these would be as useless as the assertions them- selves are absurd. We have quoted these examples only to justify us in saying that Mr. Smith inust select his editors with more care if he wishes that his "Library of Old Authors " should deserve the confidence and thereby gain the good word of intelligent readers, — without which such a series can neither win nor keep the patronage of the public. It is impossible that men who cannot construct an Eng- lish sentence correctly, and who do not know the value of clearness in writing, should be able to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old author's meaning; and it is more than doubtful whether they who as- sert carelessly, cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature disqualified for doing thoroughly what they undertake to do. If it were unreason- able to demand of every one who assumes to edit one ' of our early poets the critical acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading, the philologi- cal scholarship, which in combination would alone make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to expect some one of these qualifications singly, and we have the right to insist upon patience and accu racy, which are within the reach of every one, and without which all the others are wellnigh 260 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS vain. Now to this virtue of accuracy Mr. Offer specifically lays claim in one of his remarkable sentences. "We are bound to admire," he says, " the accuracy and beauty of this specimen of typography. Following in the path of my late friend WiUiam Pickering, our publisher rivals the Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been so universally admired." We should think that it was the product of those presses which had been admired, and that Mr. Smith presents a stm worthier object of admiration when he con- trives to follow a path and rival a press at the same time. But let that pass ; — it is the claim to accuracy which we dispute ; and we deliberately affirm, that, so far as we are able to judge by the volumes we have examined, no claim more unfounded was ever set up. In some cases, as we shall show presently, the blunders of the origi- nal work have been followed with painful accu- racy in the reprint ; but many others have been added by the carelessness of Mr. Smith's printers or editors. In the thirteen pages of Mr. Offor's own Introduction we have found as many as seven typographical errors, — unless some of them are to be excused on the ground that Mr. Offor's stud- ies have not yet led him into those arcana where we are taught such recondite mysteries of lan- guage as that verbs agree with their nominatives. In Mr. Farr's Introduction to the " Hymns and Songs" nine short extracts from other poems of Wither are quoted, and in these we have found no less than seven misprints or false readings LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 261 ■whieh materially affect the sense. Textual in- accuracy is a grave fault in the new edition of an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not only liable to this charge, but also to that of making blunder- ing misstatements which are calculated to mislead the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last dozen years among literary sciolists, he says, — " The language used by Wither in all his vari- ous works — whether secular or sacred — is pure Saxon." Taken literally, this assertion is mani- festly ridiculous, and, allowing it every possible limitation, it is not only untrue of Wither, but of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The translators of our Bible made use of the German version, and a poet versifying the English Scrip- tures would therefore be likely to use more words of Teutonic origin than in his original composi- tions. But no English poet can write English poetry except in English, — that is, in that com- pound of Teutonic and Romanic which derives its heartiness and strength from the one and its ca- norous elegance from the other. The Saxon lan- guage does not sing, and, though its tough mor- tar serve to hold together the less compact Latin words, porous with vowels, it is to the Latin that our verse owes majesty, harmony, variety, and the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of six lines from Wither ends at the top of the very page on which Mr. Farr lays down his extraordinary dictum, and we will let this answer him, Itali« cizing the words of Eomance derivation : — 262 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS " Her true beauty leaves behind Apprehensions in the mind, Of more sweetness than all art Or inventions can impart ; Thoughts too deep to be expressed, And too strong to be suppressed.'" Mr. Halliwell, at the close of Ms Preface to the Works of Marston, (vol. i. p. xxii,) says, " The dramas now collected together are reprinted abso- lutely from the early editions, which were placed in the hands of our printers, who thus had the ad- vantage of following them without the intervention of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as pos- sible in their original state, the only moderniza- tions attempted consisting in the alternations of the letters i and J, and u and v, the retention of which " (does Mr. HaUiweU mean the letters or the " alter- nations " ?) " would have answered no useful pur- pose, while it would have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader." This is not very clear ; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned foreign societies, and especially of the Eoyal Irish Academy, perhaps it would be unfair to demand that he should write clear English. As one of Mr. Smith's editors, it was to be expected that he should not write it id- iomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of buUs and blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Sat- urn when the Library was projected. At the top of the same page from which we have made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of " conveying a LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 263 favorable impression on modern readers." It was surely to no such phrase as this that Ensign Pistol aUuded when he said, " Convey the wise it call." A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in two ways : the orthography may in certain cases indicate the ancient proi.unciation, or it may put us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of a word among the roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not needful to undertake the re- production of all the original errors of the press ; and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in the editorial department are so glaring, that we are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratulate ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of the Elizabethan type-setters in their integrity, and without any debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying to know that there lived stupid men be- fore our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we demand absolute accuracy in the report of the phenomena in order to arrive at anything like safe statistics. For instance, we find (vol. i. p. 89) "Actus Secundus, Scena Primus," and (vol. iii. p. 174) " exit amho^^ and we are inter- ested to know that in a London printing-house, two centuries and a haK ago, there was a philanthro- pist who wished to simplify the study of the Latin language by reducing all the nouns to one gender and all the verbs to one number. Had his emanci- pated theories of grammar prevailed, how much easier would that part of boys which cherubs want have found the school-room benches ! How would birchen bark, as an educational tonic, have fallen 264 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS in repute ! How white would have been the (now blaek-and-blue) memories of Dr. Busby and so many other educational lictors, who, with their bundles of rods, heralded not alone the consuls, but all other Roman antiquities to us ! We dare not, however, indulge in the grateful vision, since there are circumstances which lead us to infer that Mr. HaUiwell himself (member though he be of so many learned societies) has those vague notions of the speech of ancient Rome which are apt to pre- vail in regions which count not the hetula in their Flora. On page xv of his Preface, he makes Drummond say that Ben Jonson " was dilated " (delated, — Gifford gives it in English, accused) " to the king by Sir James Murray," — Ben, whose corpulent person stood in so little need of that ma- licious increment ! What is Mr. Halliwell's conception of editorial Axiity ? As we read along, and the once fair com- plexion of the margin grew more and more pitted with pencil-marks, like that of a bad proof-sheet, we began to think that he was acting on the prin- ciple of every man his own washerwoman, — that he was making blunders of set purpose, (as teach- ers of languages do in their exercises,) in order that we might correct them for ourselves, and so fit us in time to be editors also, and members of various learned societies, even as Mr. Halliwell himself is. We fancied, that, magnanimously wav- ing aside the laurel with which a grateful posterity crowned General Wade, he wished us " to see these roads before they were made," and develop our in- LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 265 tellectual muscles in getting over them. But no ; Mr. Halliwell has appended notes to his edition, and among them are some which correct misprints, and therefore seem to imply that he considers that service as belonging properly to the editorial func- tion. We are obliged, then, to give up our theory that his intention was to make every reader an ed- itor, and to suppose that he wished rather to show how disgracefully a book might be edited and yet receive the commendation of professional critics who read with the ends of their fingers. If this were his intention, Marston himself never published so biting a satire. Let us look at a few of the intricate passages, to help us through which Mr. Halliwell lends us the light of his editorial lantern. In the Induction to "What you Will " occurs the striking and unusual phrase, "Now out up-pont," and Mr. Halliwell favors us with the following note: "Page 221, line 10. Up-pont. — That is, upon 't." Again in the same play we find, — " Let twattliug fame cheatd others rest, I um no dish for mmors feast." Of course, it should read, — " Let twattling [twaddling] Fame cheats others' rest, I am no dish for Bumor's feast." Mr. Halliwell comes to our assistance thus : " Page 244, line 21, [22 it should be, J lum, — a printer's error for I am." Dignus vindice nodus ! Five lines above, we have " whole " for " who '11," and four lines below, " helmeth " for " whelmeth " ; but 266 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS Mr. Halliwell vouchsafes no note. In the " Fawn " we read, "Wise neads use few words," and the editor says in a note, " a misprint for heads " ! Kind Mr. HaUiweU ! Having given a few examples of our " Editor's " corrections, we proceed to quote a passage or two which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly clear. " A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap, A button'd frizado sute, skarce eate good meate, Anchoves, caviare, but hee's satyred And term'd phantasticall. By the muddy spawne Of slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesse That which the natural! sophysters teanne Phantusia incomplexa — is a function Even of the bright immortal part of man. It is the common passe, the sacred dore, Unto the priye chamber of the sonle ; That bar'd, nought passeth past the baser court Of outward scence by it th' inamorata Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beauties Of his lov'd mistres." (Vol. i. p. 241.) In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough : — "And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn Of slimy newts" J and "... past the baser court Of outward sense " ; — but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here deserted by our Jlda compagna? Again, (vol. ii. pp. 55, 56,) we read, " This Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his signes to me, and men of LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 267 profound reach Instruct aboundantly ; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with signes," etc. This GranufEo is qualified among the "Interloc- utors" as "a silent lord," and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing. It is plain enough that the pas- sage should read, " a man of excellent discourse, and never speaks ; his signs to me and men of pro- found reach instruct abundantly," etc. In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer, — " gone before and swept the way." An edition of an English author ought to be intel- ligible to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two cen- turies lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to play the gentleman-usher. A play .written in our own tongue should not be as tough to us as ^schylus to a ten years' graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to, find (as is gen- erally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all. But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is in a speech of EricKtho, in the first scene of the fourth act of " Sophonisba," 268 LIBRARY OP OLD AUTHORS (vol. i, p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to ns in this shape : — " hardby the reverent (! ) mines Of a once glorious temple rear'd to Jove Whose very rubbish . . ■ • yet beares A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac'd, [razed,] Huxl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings, So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow. The ill-Toyc'd raven, and still chattering pye. Send out ungratef ull sounds and loathsome filth ; Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs. Where tombs and beautious umes of well dead men Stood in assured rest," etc. The last verse and a half are worthy of Chapman ; but why did not Mr. Halliwell, who explains up- pont and I um, change " Joves acts were vively limbs " to " Jove's acts were lively limned," which was unquestionably what Marston wrote ? In the " Scourge of Villanie," (vol. iii. p. 252,) there is a passage which till lately had a modern application in America, though happily archaic in England, which Mr. HaUiweU suffers to stand thus : — " Once Albion lived in such a cruel age Than man did hold by servile vilenage : Poore brats were slaves of boudmen that were borae. And marted, sold : but that rude law is tome And disannuld, as too too inhumane." This should read — " Man man did hold in servile villanage ; Poor brats were slaves (of bondmen that were bom) "; LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 239 and perhaps some American poet will one day write in the past tense similar verses of the barbarity of his forefathers. We will give one more scrap of Mr. HaUiwell's text : — " Yfaith, why then, caprichiona mirth, Skip, light moriaeoes, in our frolick blond, Flagg'd Teines, sweete, plump with fresh-infused joyesi " which Marston, doubtless, wrote thus : — " I'faith, why then, capricious Mirth, Skip light moriscoea in our frolic blood ! Flagg'd veins, swell plump with fresh-inf used joys ! " We have quoted only a few examples from among the scores that we had marked, and against such a style of " editing " we invoke the shade of Marston himself. In the Preface to the Second Edition of the " Fawn," he says, " Reader, know I have perused this coppy, to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression; yet so urgent hath been my business that some errors have styll passed, which thy discretion may amend." Literally, to be sure, Mr. HaUiweU has availed himself of the permission of the poet, in leaving all emendation to the reader ; but certainly he has been false to the spirit of it in his self-assumed office of editor. The notes to explain up-pont and / um give us a kind of standard of the highest intelligence which Mr. Halliwell dares to take for granted in the ordinary reader. Supposing this nousometer of his to be a centigrade, in what hith- erto unconceived depths of cold obstruction can he find his zero-point of entire idiocy? The expansive 270 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS force of average wits cannot be reckoned upon, as we see, to drive them up as far as the temperate degree of misprints in one syllable, and those, too, in their native tongue. A fortiori, then, Mr, Halliwell is bound to lend us the aid of his great learning wherever his author has introduced foreign words and the old printers have made pie of them. In a single case he has accepted his responsibility as dragoman, and the amount of his success is not such as to give us any poignant regret that he has everywhere else left us to our own devices. On p. 119, vol. ii., Francischina, a Dutchwoman, exclaims, " O, mine aderliver love." Here is Mr. Halli well's note : '■'■Aderliver. — This is the speak- er's error for cdder-liever, the best beloved by all." Certainly not " the speaker's error," for Marston was no such fool as intentionally to make a Dutch- woman blunder in her own language. But is it an error for alderliever ? No, but for alderliefster. Mr. Halliwell might have found it in many an old Dutch song. For example. No. 96 of Hoffmann von Fallersleben's " Niederlandische Volkslieder" begins thus : — " Mijn hert altijt heeft verlanghen Naer u, die alderliefste mijn." But does the word mean " best beloved by all " ? No such thing, of course ; but " best beloved of all," — that is, by the speaker. In " Antonio and Mellida " (vol. i. pp. 50, 61) occur some Italian verses, and here we hoped to fare better; for Mr. Halliwell (as we learn from the title-page of his Dictionary) is a member of LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 271 the " Meale Academia di Firenze." This is the Accademia della Crusca, founded for the conserva- tion of the Italian language in its purity, and it is rather a fatal symptom that Mr. HalliweU should indulge in the heresy of spelling Accademia with only one c. But let us see what our Delia Crus- can's notions of conserving are. Here is a speci- men : — " Bassiammi, cog'lier 1' aura odorata Che in sua neggia in quello dolce labra. Dammi pimpero del tuo gradit' amore." It is clear enough that we ought to read, — " Lasciami coglier, . . . Che Ha sua seggia, . . . Dammi 1' im< pero." A Delia Cruscan academician might at least have corrected by his dictionary the spelling and number of Idbra. We think that we have sustained our indictment of Mr. Halliwell's text with ample proof. The title of the book should have been, " The Works of John Marston, containing all the Misprints of the origi- nal Copies, together with a few added for the first Time in this Edition, the whole carefully let alone by James Orchard HalliweU, F. R. S., F. S. A." It occurs to us that Mr. HaUiwell may be also a Fellow of the Geological Society, and may have caught from its members the enthusiasm which leads him to attach' so extraordinary a value to every goose-track of the Elizabethan formation. It is bad enough to be, as Marston was, one of those middling poets whom neither gods nor men nor columns (Horace had never seen a newspaper) 272 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS tolerate ; but, really, even they do not deserve the frightful retribution of being reprinted by a Halli- well. We have said that we could not feel even the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the blunders of the old copies had been faithfully followed in the reprinting. We see reason for doubting whether Mr. HaUiweU ever read the proof-sheets. In his own notes we have found several mistakes. For instance, he refers to p. 159 when he means p. 153 ; he cites " I, but her life," instead of " lip " ; and he makes Spenser speak of " old Pithonus." Mar- ston is not an author of enough importance to make it desirable that we shoidd be put in possession of all the corrupted readings of his text, were such a thing possible even with the most minute pains- taking, and Mr. HaUiwell's edition loses its only claim to value the moment a doubt is cast upon the accuracy of its inaccuracies. It is a matter of special import to us (whose means of access to originals are exceedingly limited) that the English editors of our old authors should be faithful and trustworthy, and we have singled out Mr. HaUi- well's Marston for particular animadversion only because we think it on the whole the worst edition we ever saw of any author. Having exposed the condition in which our editor has left the text, we proceed to test his competency in another respect, by examining some of the em- endations and explanations of doubtful passages which he proposes. These are very few ; but had they been even fewer, they had been too many. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 273 Among the dramatis personoe. of the " Fawn," as we said before, occurs "Granuffo, a silent lord.''' He speaks only once during the play, and that iq the last scene. In Act I. Scene 2, Gonzago says, speaking to Granuffo, — " Now, sure, thou art a man Of a most learned scilence, and one whose words Have bin most pretions to me." This seems quite plain, but Mr. Halliwell anno, tatesthus: "Scilence. — Query, scierece .? The com- mon reading, silence, may, however, be what is in- tended." That the spelling should have troubled Mr. Halliwell is remarkable ; for elsewhere we find "god-boy" for "good-bye," "seace" for "cease," "bodies" for "boddice," "poUice" for "policy," " pitittying " for " pitying," " scence " for " sense," "Misenzius" for "Mezentius," "Ferazes" for " Ferrarese," — and plenty beside, equally odd. That he should have doubted the meaning is no less strange ; for on p. 41 of the same play we read, " My Lord Granuffo, you may likewise stay, for I know you'l say nothing," — on pp. 65, 56, " This Grranuffo is a right wise good lord, a man q/ excellent discourse and never speaks," — and on p. 94, we find the following dialogue : — " Gon. My Lord Granuffo, this Pawne ia an excellent fellow. "Don. Silence. " Gon. I warrant you for my lord here." In the same play (p. 44) are these lines : — " I apt for lore ? (jet lazy idlenes fild full of wine Heated with meates, high fedde with lustfull ease Goe dote on culler [color]. As for me, why, death a sence, ^ I court the ladie ? " 274 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS This is Mr. Halliwell's note : " Death a sence. — 'Earth a sense,' ed. 1633. Mr. Dilke suggests: Tor me, why, earth's as sensible.' The original is not necessarily corrupt. It may mean, — why, you might as well think Death was a sense, one of the senses. See a like phrase at p. 77." What help we should get by thinking Death one of the senses, it would demand another CEdipus to un- riddle. Mr. HaUiwell can astonish us no longer, but we are surprised at Mr. Dilke, the very com- petent editor of the " Old English Plays," 1815. From him we might have hoped for better things. " Death o' sense I " is an exclamation. Through- out these volumes we find a for o\ — as, "a clock" for " o'clock," " a the side " for " o' the side." A similar exclamation is to be found in three other places in the same play, where the sense is obvious. Mr. Halliwell refers to one of them on p. 77, — " Death a man ! is she delivered ? " The others are, — " Death a justice ! are we in Normandy? " (p. 98) ; and " Death a discretion ! if I should prove a foole now," or, as given by Mr. Halliwell, " Death, a discretion ! " Now let us apply Mr. Halliwell's explanation. " Death a man ! " you might as well think Death was a man, that is, one of the men ! — or a discretion, that is, one of the discretions ! — or a justice, that is, one of the quo- rum ! We trust Mr. Halliwell may never have the editing of Bob Acres's imprecations. " Odd's trig- gers ! " he would say, " that is, as odd as, or as strange as, triggers." Vol. iii. p. 77, "the vote-killing mandrake." LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 275 Mr. Halliwell's note is, " Yote-kiUing. — ' Voice- killing,' ed. 1613. It may well be doubted wbether eithet be tbe correct reading." He then gives a familiar citation from Browne's " Vulgar Errors." " Vote-killing " may be a mere misprint for " note- killing ; " but " voice-killing " is certainly the bet- ter reading. Either, however, makes sense. Al- though Sir Thomas Browne does not allude to the deadly property of the mandrake's shriek, yet Mr. HalliweU, who has edited Shakespeare, might have remembered the " Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan," (Second Part of Henry VI., Act III. Scene 2,) and the notes thereon in the variorum edition. In Jacob Grimm's " Deutsche Mythologie," (Vol. II. p. 1154,) under the word Alraun, may be found a full account of the superstitions concerning the mandrake. "When it is dug up, it groans and shrieks so dreadfully that the digger will surely die. One must, therefore, before sunrise on a Fri- day, having first stopped one's ears with wax or cotton- wool, take with him an entirely black dog without a white hair on him, make the sign of the cross three times over the alraun, and dig about it till the root holds only by thin fibres. Then tie these by a string to the tail of the dog, show him » piece of bread, and run away as fast as possible. The dog runs eagerly after the bread, pulls up the root, and falls stricken dead by its groan of pain." These, we believe, are the only instances in whicli Mr. HalliweU has ventured to give any opinion upon the text, except as to a palpable misprint, 276 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS here and there. Two of these we have already cited. There is one other, — " p. 46, line 10. lu- constant. — An error for inconstant." Wherever there is a real difficulty, he leaves us in the lurch. For example, in " What you Will," he prints with- out comment, — " Ha ! he mount Chirall on the wings of fame ! " (Vol. I. p. 239.) which should be " mount cheval," ^ as it is given in Mr. Dilke's edition (Old English Plays, vol. ii. p. 222). We cite this, not as the worst, but the shortest, example at hand. Some of Mr. HalliweU's notes are useful and in- teresting, — as that on " keeling the pot," and a few others, — but the greater part are utterly use- less. He thinks it necessary, for instance, to ex- plain that "to speak pu7'e foole is in sense equiva- lent to 'I vnll speak like a pure fool,'" — that " belkt up " means " belched up," — that " apre- cocks " means " apricots." He has notes also upon "meal-mouthed," " luxuriousnesse," "termagant," " fico," " estro," " a nest of goblets," which indicate either that the " general reader " is a less intelli- gent person in England than in America, or that Mr. HalliweU's standard of scholarship is very low. We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference which will explain the allu- sion to the " Scotch barnacle " much better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Gi- raldus Cambrensis, — namely, note 8, on page 179 1 " Momit our Chevalls." Dekker's Northward Ho ! Works, Si. 56. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 277 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Kamesey, court physician to Charles II. We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt's edition of Web- ster. We wish he had chosen Chapman ; for Mr. Dyce's Webster is hardly out of print, and, we be- lieve, has just gone through a second and revised edition, Webster was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chap- man's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakespeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakespeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced ; but his mind had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of dic- tion, and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent work- man, whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and expression ; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a 278 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS great poet. He had a keen and ready eye for tlie comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakespeare wrote comedy and tra- gedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakespeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the appre- hension of its thorough humanity. Kabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge ; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with Shakespeare, except Cervantes ; no man has since shown anything like an approach to it, (for Mo- liere's quality was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and perhaps Richter. Only Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was mid- way between the imagination and the understand- ing, — that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impartiality, — that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action, — that power of veri-similar conception which could take away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer, — and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 279 never, like many o£ his fellow-dramatists, con- fronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a hiunan foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as " great drama- tists," — as if Shakespeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were ; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with those faculties of percep- tion, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the lov- ing union which alone, makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakespeare wiU long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they caU " a humor " tiU it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their trage- dies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the put- ting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakespeare's stand-point as poet and artist. Webster's most famous works are " The Duch- ess of Malfy " and " Vittoria Corombona," but we 280 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS are strongly inclined to call "The Devil's Law- Case " his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the " spasmodic " school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly un- tamed, and Aristotle's admirable distinction be- tween the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the " Duchess " and " Vittoria." His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama was an El Dorado, whose micaceous sand, even, was treasured as auriferous, — and no won- der, in a generation which admired the " Botanic Garden." Webster is the Gherardo deUa Notte of his day, and himself calls his "Vittoria Corom- bona " a " night-piece." Though he had no con- ception of Nature in its large sense, as something pervading a whole character and making it consis- tent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire tragedy and makes aU the characters foils to each other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic inten- sities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. The " prithee, undo this button " of LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 281 Lear, by which Shakespeare makes us feel the swelling of the old king's heart, and that the bod- ily restilts of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all intellectual conscious- ness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own procurement : — " Cover her face : mine eyea dazzle : she died young." He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hy- draulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concettisti, and abounds in imagi- native quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples : — " Oh, if there he another world i' th' moon, As some f antastics dream, I could "wish all men, The -whole race of them, for their inconstancy, Sent thither to people that 1 " (Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first faithless lover, he adds, — " And he invented tents, unless men lie,'' — implying that he was the prototype of nomadia men.) " Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds : In the trenches, for the soldier ; in the wakeful study, For the scholar ; in the furrows of the sea. For men of our profession [merchants] ; all of which Arise and spring up honor." (" Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.) 282 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS ^. , " Poor Jolenta ! should she hear of this, She would not after the report keep fresh So long as flowers on graves." **For sin and shame are ever tied together With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun, They cannot without violence he undone." " One whose mind Appears more like a ceremonious chapel Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence." " What is death ? The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free From Fortune's gunshot." "It has ever heen my opinion That there are none love perfectly indeed, But those that hang or drown themselves for love," says Julio, anticipating Butler's " But he that drowns, or blows out 's brains, The Devil 's in him, if he feigns.' ' He also anticipated La Eocliefoucauld and Byron in tlieir apopMhegm concerning woman's last love. In " The Devil's Law-Case," Leonora says, — " For, as we love our youngest children best, So the last fruit of our affection, Wherever we bestow it, is most strong, Most violent, most unresistible ; Since 'tis, indeed, our latest harvest-home. Last merriment 'fore winter. ' ' It is worth remark that there are a greater num- ber of reminiscences, conscious or unconscious, of Shakespeare in Webster's plays than in those of any other Elizabethan dramatist. In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advan- tage (except in a single doubtful play) of a pre- LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 283 decessor in the Rev. Alexander Dyce, beyond all question the best living scholar of the literature of the times of Elizabeth and James I. If he give no proof of remarkable fitness for his task, he seems, at least, to have been diligent and painstaking. His notes are short and to the point, and — which we consider a great merit — at the foot of the page. If he had added a glossarial index, we should have been still better pleased. Mr. Hazlitt seems to have read over the text with some care, and he has had the good sense to modernize the orthography, or, as he says, has " observed the existing standard of spelling throughout." Yet — for what reason we cannot imagine — he prints " I " for " ay," taking the pains to explain it every time in a liote, and retains " banquerout " and " coram " appar- ently for the sake of telling us that they mean " bankrupt " and " quorum." He does not seem to have a quick ear for scansion, which would sometimes have assisted him to the true reading. We give an example or two : — . " The obligation wherein we all stood honnd Cannot be concealed [cancelled^ without great reproach." " The lealm, not they, Must be regarded. Be [we] strong and bold, We are the people's factors." "Shall not be o'erburdened [overburdened] in onr reign." "A merry heart And a good stomach to [a] feast are all." * Have her meat serv'd up by bawds and ruffians." [dele " np."] " Brother or father In [a] dishonest suit, shall be to me." 284 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS " What 's she in Rome your greatness cannot awe, Or your rich purse purchase ? Promises and threats." [deU the second " your."] " Through clouds of envy and disast [rons] change." " The Devil drives ; 'tis Li* H ^"^ ^^^ *° &°-" He has overlooked some strange blunders. What is the meaning of " Laugh at your misery, as foredeeming yon An idle meteor, which drawn forth, the earth Would soon be lost i' the air " ? We hardly need say that it should be " An idle meteor, which, drawn forth the earth, Would," &c. " J^orwardness " for "Jrowardness," (toI. ii. p. 87,) "tennis-balls struck and h&uded" for "ban- died" (lb. p. 275,) may be errors of the press ; but " Come, I '11 love yon wisely : That 's jealousy," has crept in by editorial oversight for "wisely, that 's jealously." So have " Ay, the great emperor of \or\ the mighty Cham "; and " This wit \vntK\ taking long journeys " ; and and ' Virginius, thou dost but supply my place, I thine : Fortune hath lift me \thee] to my chair, And thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar " ; " I '11 pour my soul into my daughter's belly, \hody,\ And with my soldier's tears embalm her wounds." We suggest that the change of an a to an r would LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 285 make sense of the following : " Come, my little punk, with thy two compositors, to this unlawful painting-house," [printing-house,] which Mr, Haz- litt awkwardly endeavors to explain by this note on the word compositors^ — " i. e. (oonjecturally), making up the composition of the picture " ! Our readers can decide for themselves ; — the passage occurs vol. i. p. 214. We think Mr. Hazlitt's notes are, in the main, good ; but we should like to know his authority for saying that pench means " the hole in a bench by which it was taken up," — that " descant " means "look askant on," — and that "I wis "is equiva- lent to " I surmise, imagine," which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is appended. On page 9, vol. i., we read in the text, " To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe," and in the note, i. e. submission. The original has awe, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here." Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a picture of the An- nunciation with ave written on the scroU proceed- ing from the bending angel's mouth ? We find the same word in vol. iii. p. 217 : — " Whose station's built on avees and applanse." Vol. iii. pp. 47, 48 : — " And then rest, gentle bones ; yet pray That when by the precise you are view'd, A supersedeas be not sued To remove you to a place more airy, That in your stead they may keep chary Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses Of sacnlege have turned graves to viler uses." 286 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS To tlie last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, " Than that of burning men's bones for fuel." There is no allusion here to burning men's bones, but simply to the desecration of graveyards by building warehouses upon them, in digging the foundations for which the bones would be thrown out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the " Churchyard of the Holy Trinity " ; — see Stow's Survey, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere, in the same play, Web- ster alludes bitterly to " begging church-land." Vol. i. p. 73, "And if he walk through the street, he ducks at the penthouses, like an ancient that dares not flourish at the oathtaking of the prsetor for fear of the signposts," Mr. HazUtt's note is, " Ancient was a standard or flag ; also an ensign, of which Skinner says it is a corruption. What the meaning of the simile is the present editor cannot suggest." We confess we find no difficulty. The meaning plainly is, that he ducks for fear of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord Mayor's day dares not flourish his stan- dard for fear of hitting the signposts. We suggest the query, whether ancient, in this sense, be not a corruption of the Italian word anziano. Want of space compels us to leave many other passages, which we had marked for comment, un- noticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see his Introduction to " Vittoria Corombona,") in un- dertaking to give us some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of Bracciano, should uni- formly spell it Brachiano. Shakespeare's Petru- chio might have put him on his guard. We should LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 287 be glad also to know in what part of Italy he places Malfi. Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies ua with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected whera Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the " Duchess " and " Vittoria " could not have been written by the same person. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet. We could almost forgive all other shortcomings of Mr. Smith's library for the great gift it brings us in the five volumes of Chapman's translations. Coleridge, sending Chapman's Homer to Words- worth, writes, " What is stupidly said of Shake- speare is really true and appropriate of Chapman ; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties. . . . It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queene ; — it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Milton- ism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet, — as Homer might have written had he lived in Eng- land in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by ahuost unexampled sweet- 288 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS ness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling." ^ From a passage of Ms Preface it would appear that Chapman had been criticised pretty sharply in his own day for amplifying his author. " And this one example I thought necessary to in- sert here to show my detractors that they have no reason to vUify my circumlocution sometimes, when their most approved Grecians, Homer's interpre- ters generally, hold him fit to be so converted. Yet how much I differ, and with what authority, let my impartial and judicial reader judge. Al- ways conceiving how pedantical and absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author (much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when (according to Horace and other best lawgivers to translators) it is the part of every knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow the number and order of words, but the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh diligently, and to clothe and adorn them with words and such a style and form of oration as are most apt for the language in which they are converted." Again in his verses To the Header, he speaks of " The ample transmigration to be shown By nature-loving Poesy," and defends his own use of " needful periphrases," \nd says that " word for word " translation is to " Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender." " For even as different a production Ask Greek and English : since, as they in sounds And letters shun one form and unison, ^ Literary Memains, vol. i. pp, 259, 260, LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 289 So have their sense and elegancy hounds In their disting^iished natures, and require Only a judgment to make hoth consent In sense and elocution.' ' There are two theories of translation, — literal paraphrase and free reproduction. At best, the translation of poetry is but an imitation of natural flowers in cambric or wax ; and however much of likeness there may be, the aroma, whose charm of indefinable suggestion in the association of ideas is so powerful, is precisely what is lost irretrievably. " The parting genius is with sighing sent " from where it lurked in the immortal verse, a pre- sence divined rather than ascertained, baffling the ear whiph it enchanted, escaping the grasp which yet it thrilled, airy, evanescent, imperishable, beck- oning the imagination with promises better than any fulfilment. The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian urn ; the reproduction, if by a man of genius, such as the late Mr. Fitzgerald, is like Keats's ode, which makes the figures move and tho leaves tremble again, if not with the old life, with a sorcery which deceives the fancy. Of all Eng- lish poets, Keats was the one to have translated Homer. In any other than a mere prose version of a great poem, we have a right to demand that it give us at least an adequate impression of force and originality. We have a right to ask, If this poem were published now for the first time, as the work of a contemporary, should we read it, not with the same, but with anything like the same conviction 290 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS of its freshness, vigor, and originality, its high level of style and its witchery of verse, that Homer, if now for the first time discovered, would infalli- bly beget in us ? Perhaps this looks like asking for a new Homer to translate the old one ; but if this be too much, it is certainly not unfair to insist that the feeling given us should be that of life, and not artifice. The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone of all English versions has this crowning merit of being, where it is most successful, thor- oughly alive. He has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer, and in so far gives us a truer idea of him. Of all trans- lators he is farthest removed from the fault with which he charges others, when he says that " our divine master's most ingenious imitating the life of things (which is the soul of a poem) is never respected nor perceived by his interpreters only standing pedantically on the grammar and words, utterly ignorant of the sense and grace of him." His mastery of English is something wonderful even in an age of masters, when the language was still a mother-tongue, and not a contrivance of ped- ants and grammarians. He had a reverential sense of " our divine Homer's depth and gravity, which will not open itself to the curious austerity of belaboring art, but only to the natural and most ingenious soul of our thrice-sacred Poesy." His task was as holy to him as a version of Scripture ; he justifies the tears of AchiUes by those of Jesus, and the eloquence of Ids horse by that of Balaam's LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 291 less noble animal. He does not always keep close to his original, but he sins no more, even in this, than any of his rivals. He is especially great in the similes. Here he rouses himself always, and if his enthusiasm sometimes lead him to heighten a little, or even to add outright, he gives us a picture full of life and action, or of the grandeur and beauty of nature, as stirring to the fancy as his original. Of all who have attempted Homer, he has the topping merit of being inspired by him. In the recent discussions of Homeric translation in England, it has always been taken for granted that we had or could have some adequate concep- tion of Homer's metre. Lord Derby, in his Pre- face, plainly assumes this. But there can be no greater fallacy. No human ears, much less Greek ones, could have endured what, with our mechan- ical knowledge of the verse, ignorance of the ac- cent, and English pronunciation, we blandly ac- cept for such music as Homer chanted. We have utterly lost the tune and cannot reproduce it. Mr. Newman conjectures it to have been something like Yankee Doodle; Mr. Arnold is sure it was the English hexameter ; and they are both partly right so' far as we may trust our reasonable impres- sions ; for, after all, an impression is all that we have. Cowper attempts to give the ring of the apyvpioio jStoio by " Dread-sounding, liounding on the silTer bow," which only too fatally recalls, the old Scottish dau' cing-tune, — 292 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS '* Amaisit I gaisit To see, led at command, A straiupant and rampant Ferss lyon in his hand." The attempt was in the right direction, however, for Homer, like Dante and Shakespeare, like all who really command language, seems fond of playing with assonances. No doubt the Homeric verse consented at will to an eager rapidity, and no doubt also its general character is that of pro- longed but unmonotonous roU. Everybody says it is like the long ridges of the sea, some overtopping their neighbors a little, each with an independent undulation of its crest, yet all driven by a common impulse, and breaking, not with the sudden snap of an unyielding material, but one after the other, with a stately curve, to slide back and mingle with those that follow. Chapman's measure (in the Iliad) has the disadvantage of an association with Sternhold and Hopkins, but it has the merit of length, and, where he is in the right mood, is free, spirited, and sonorous. Above aU, there is every- ■jvhere the movement of life and passion in it. Chapman was a master of verse, making it hurry, linger, or stop short, to suit the meaning. Like aU great versifiers he must be read with study, for the slightest change of accent loses the expression of an entire passage. His great fault as a translator is that he takes fire too easily and runs beyond his author. Perhaps he intensifies too much, though this be a fault on the right side ; he certainly some- times weakens the force of passages by crowding in LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 293 particulars which Homer had wisely omitted, for Homer's simplicity is by no means mere simplicity of thought, nor, as it is often foolishly called, of nature. It is the simplicity of consummate art, the last achievement of poets and the invariable ♦characteristic of the greatest among them. To Chapman's mind once warmed to its work, the words are onlj-- a mist, suggesting, while it hides, the divine form of the original image or thought ; and his imagination strives to body forth that, as he conceives it, in all its celestial proportions. Let us compare with Lord Derby's version, as the latest, a passage where Chapman merely intensi- fies, (Book XIII., beginning at the 86th verse in Lord Derby, the 73d of Chapman, and the 76th of Homer) : — " Whom answered thus the son of Telamon : ' My hands, too, grasp with firmer hold the spear, My spirit, like thine, is stirred ; I feel my feet Instinct with fiery life ; nor should I fear With Hector, son of Priam, in his might Alone to meet, and grapple to the death.' " Thus Lord Derby. Chapman renders : — " This Telamonius thus received : ' So, to my thoughts, my hands Bum with desire to toss my lance ; each foot beneath me stands Bare on bright fire to use his speed ; my heart is raised so high, That to encounter Hector's self I long insatiately.' " There is no question which version is the more energetic. Is Lord Derby's nearer the original in being tamer ? He has taken the " instinct with fiery life " from Chapman's hint. The original has simply " restless," or more familiarly " in a fidget." There is nothing about " grappling to the 294 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS death," and " nor should I fear " is feeble where Chapman with his "long insatiately" is literaL "We will give an example where Chapman has am- plified his original (Book XVI. v. 426 ; Derby, 494 ; Chapman, 405) : — " Down jumped he from his chariot ; down leapt his foe as light ; « And aSf on some far-looking rock, a cast of vnltures £ght, Fly on eSMjh other, strike and truss, part, meet, and then stick by, Tug both with crooked beaks and seres, cry, fight, and fight and cry, So fiercely fought these angry kings." * Lord Derby's version is nearer : — " He said, and from his car, accoutred, sprang ; Patroclus saw and he too leaped to earth. As on a lofty rock, with angry screams. Hook-beaked, with talons curred, two vultures fight, So with loud shouts these two to battle rushed." Chapman has made his first line out of two in Homer, but, granting the license, how rapid and springy is the verse ! Lord Derby's " withs " are not agreeable, his " shouts " is an ill-chosen word for a comparison with vultures, " talons curved " is feeble, and his verse is, as usual, mainly buUt up of little blocks of four syllables each. " To battle " also is vague. With whom? Homer says that they rushed each at other. We shaU not discuss how much license is loyal in a translator, but, as we think his chief aim should be to give a feeling of that life and spirit which makes the immortality of his original, and is the very breath in the nos- trils of all poetry, he has a right to adapt himself to the genius of his own language. If he woidd 1 Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this, for he cites It as a sample of his version. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 295 do justice to his author, he must make up in one passage for his unavoidable shortcomings in an- other. He may here and there take for granted certain exigencies of verse in his original which he feels in his own case. Even Dante, who boasted that no word had ever made him say what he did not wish, should have made an exception of rhym- ing ones, for these sometimes, even in so abundant a language as the Italian, have driven the most straightforward of poets into an awkward detour. We give one more passage from Chapman : — " And all in golden weeds He clothed himself ; the golden scourge most elegantly done He took and mounted to his seat ; and then the god begim To drive his chariot through the waves. From whirl-pits every way The whales exulted under him, and knew their king ; the sea For joy did open, and his horse so swift and lightly flew The under axle-tree of brass no drop of water drew." Here the first half is sluggish and inadequate, but what surging vigor, what tumult of the sea, what swiftness, in the last ! Here is Lord Derby's at- tempt : — " All clad in gold, the golden lash he grasped Of curious work, and, mounting on his car. Skimmed o'er the waves ; from all the depths below Gambolled around the monsters of the deep. Acknowledging their king ; the joyous sea Parted her waves ; swift flew the bounding steeds, Nor was the brazen axle wet with spray." Chapman here is truer to his master, and the mo- tion is in the verse itself. Lord Derby's is de- scription, and not picture. " Monsters of the deep " is an example of the hackneyed periphrases in 296 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS wliicli lie abounds, like all men to whom language is a literary tradition, and not a living gift of the Muses. "Lash" is precisely the wrong word. Chapman is always great at sea. Here is another example from the Fourteenth Book : — "And as, when with unwieldy waves the great sea/orefeds winds That hoth ways murmur, and no way her certain current finds, But pants and swells confusedly, here goes, and there will stay, Till on it air casts one firm wind, and then it rolls away." Observe how the somewhat ponderous movement o£ the first verse assists the meaning of the words. He is great, too, in single phrases and lines : — " And as, from top of some steep hill, the Lightener strips a cloud And lets a great sky out of Heaven, in whose delightsome light All prominent foreheads, forests, towers, and temples cheer the sight. " (Book XVI. v. 286.) The lion " lets his rough brows down so low they hide his eyes " ; the flames " wrastle " in the woods; "rude feet dim the day with a fog of dust ; " and so in a hundred other instances. For an example of his more restrained vigor, take the speech of Sarpedon in the Twelfth Book of the Iliad, and for poetic beauty, the whole story of Ulysses and Nausikaa, in the Odyssey. It was here that Keats made himself Grecian and learned to versify. Mr, Hooper has done his work of editing well. But he has sometimes misapprehended his author, and distorted his meaning by faulty punctuation. In one of the passages already cited, Mr. Hoop- er's text stands thus : " Lest I be prejudiced with opinion, to dissent, of ignorance, or singularity." LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 297 All the commas wliicli darken the sense should be removed. Chapman meant to say, " Lest I be condemned beforehand by people thinking I dis- sent out of ignorance or singularity." (Iliad, vol. i. p. 23.) So on the next page the want of a hy- phen makes nonsense: " And saw the round com- ing [round-coming] of this silver bow of our Phoe- bus," that is, the crescent coming to the full circle. In the translations, too, the pointing needs refor- mation now and then, but shows, on the whole, a praiseworthy fidelity. We will give a few exam- ples of what we believe to be errors on the part of Mr. Hooper, who, by the way, is weakest on points which concern the language of Chapman's day. We follow the order of the text as most convenient. " Bid " (II. i.) is explained to mean " threaten, challenge," where " offer " would be the right word. "And oast The offal of all to the deep." (II. i. 309.) Surely a slip of Chapman's pen. He must have intended to write " Of all the offal," a transversion common with him and needed here to avoid a pun- ning jingle. " So mnch I rnuat ofifinu our power exceeds th' inhabitant." (II. ji. 110.) Mr. Hooper's note is " inhabiters, viz. of Troy." " Inhabitant " is an adjective agreeing with " power." Our power without exceeds that within. " Yet all this time to stay, Ont of our judgments, for our end, and now to take onr way Without it were absurd and vile." (II. ii. 257.) A note on this passage tells us that " out of judg- 298 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS ments " means " against our inclinations." It means simply " in accordance with our good judg- ment," just as we still say " out of his wisdom." Compare II. iii. 63, " Hector, because thy sharp reproof is out of justice given, I take it well." " And as Jove, hrandishing a star which men a comet call, Hurls out his curled hair abroad, that from his brand eidials A thousand sparks." (II. iv. 85.) Mr. Hooper's note is " ' Which men a comet call ' ■ — so both the fohos. Dr. Taylor has printed ' which man a comet calls' This certainly suits the rhyme, but I adhere to Chapman's text." Both editors have misunderstood the passage. The fault is not in " call " but in " exhals," a clear misprint for "exhall," the spelling, as was com- mon, being conformed to the visible rhyme. " That " means " so that " (a frequent Elizabethan construction) and " exhall " is governed by " sparks." The meaning is, " As when Jove, brandishing a comet, hurls out its curled hair so that a thousand sparks exhale from its burning." " The evicke skipping from the rock." Mr. Hooper tells us, " It is doubtful what this word really is. Dr. Taylor suggests that it may proba- bly mean the evict, or doomed one — but ? It is possible Chapman meant to Anglicize the Greek aif J or should we read Ibex, as the ai| ifaXos was such ? " The word means the chamois, and is merely the Enghsh form of the French ibiche. Dr. Taylor's reading would amaze us were we not fa- miliar with the commentators on Shakespeare. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 299 "And now they out-ray to your fleet." (D. v. 793.) " Out-ray — spread out in array ; abbreviated from array. Dr. Taylor says ' rush out,' from the Anglo- Saxon ' rean,^ to flow ; but there seems no necessity for such an etymology." We should think not ! Chapman, like Pope, made his first sketch from the French, and corrected it by the Greek. Those who would understand Chapman's English must allow for traces of his French guide here and there. This is one of them, perhaps. The word is etymo- logically unrelated to array. It is merely the old French ouUreer, a derivative of ultra. It means " they pass beyond their gates even to your fleet." He had said just before that formerly " your foes durst not a foot address without their ports." The word occurs again, II. xxiii. 413. "When none, though many kings put on, could make his T^unt, he led Tydides to renewed assault or issued first the dike." (D. fiii. 217.) " Tydides. — He led Tydides, i. e. Tydides he led. An unusual construction." Not in the least. The old printers or authors sometimes put a comma where some connecting particle was left out. We had just now an instance where one took the place of so. Here it supplies that. " None could make his vaunt that he led (that is, was before) Tydides." We stiU use the word in the same sense, as the " leading " horse in a race. "And all did wilfully expect the silver-thioned morn." (n. via. 49T.) 300 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS " Wilfully — willingly, anxiously. " Wishfully, as elsewhere in Chapman, " And as, upon a rich man's crop of barley or of wheat, Opposed for swiftness at their work, a sort of reapers sweat." " Opposed — standing opposite to one another for expedition's sake." We hope Mr. Hooper under- stood his own note, for it baffles us utterly. The meaning is simply "pitted against each other to see which will reap most swiftly." In a note (II. xi. 417) we are told that " the etymology [of ?m- cerri] seems uncertain." It is nothing more than a corruption of the old French leucerve (loup- cervier). "I would then make-in in deed and steep My income in their bloods." (II. xvii. 481.) " Income — communication, or infusion, of courage from the Gods. The word in this sense Todd says was a favorite in Cromwell's time." A surprising note ! Income here means nothing more than "on- fall," as the context shows. " To put the best in ure. ' ' (II. xvii. 545.) "Ure — use. Skinner thinks it a contraction of usura. It is frequent in Chaucer. Todd gives ex- amples from Hooker and L'Estrange." The word is common enough, but how Mr. Hooper could seriously quote good old Skinner for such an ety- mology we cannot conceive. It does not mean " in use," but "to work," being merely the English form of en oeuvre, as " manure " is of manoeuvrer. "So troop-meal Troy pursued a while." (II. xvii. 634.) ^ Troop -meal — in troops, troop by troop. So LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 301 piece-meal. To meal was to mingle, mix together ; from the French miler. . . . The reader would do well to consult Dr. Jamieson's excellent ' Dictionary of the Scottish Language ' in voce ' melL' " No doubt the reader might profit by consulting it under any other word beginning with M, and any of them would be as much to the purpose as mell. Troop- meal, like inch-meal, piece^meal, implies separation, not mingling, and is from a Teutonic root. Mr. Hooper is always weak in his linguistic. In a note on II. xviii. 144, he informs us that " To sterve is to die ; and the sense of starve, with cold or hun- ger originated in the 17th century." We would it had! But we suspect that men had died of both these diseases earlier. What he should have said was that the restriction of meaning to that of dying with hunger was modern. E. XX. 239 we have " the God's " for « the Gods'," and a few lines below " Anchisiades' " for " Anchi- siades's"; II. xxi. 407, "press'd" for "prest." We had noted a considerable number of other slips, but we wiU mention only two more. " Treen broches " is explained to mean " branches of trees." (Hymn to Hermes, 227.) It means "wooden spits." In the Bacchus (28, 29) Mr. Hooper re- stores a corrupt reading which Mr. Singer (for a wonder) had set right He prints, — " Nay, which of all the Pow'r fiilly-diTined Esteem ye him ? " Of course it should be powerfully -divined, for otherwise we must read " Pow'rs." The five vol- umes need a very careful revision in their punctu* 302 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS ation, and in another edition we should advise Mr. Hooper to strike out every note in which he has been tempted into etymology. We come next to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's edition of Lovelace. Three short pieces of Lovelace's have lived, and deserved to live: "To Lucasta from Prison," " To Lucasta on going to the Wars," and " The Grasshopper." They are graceful, airy, and nicely finished. The last especially is a charming poem, delicate in expression, and full of quaint fancy, which only in the latter half is strained to conceit. As the verses of a gentleman they are among the best, though not of a very high order as poetry. He is to be classed with the lucky authors who, without great powers, have written one or two pieces so facile in thought and fortunate in phrase as to be carried lightly in the memory, poems in which analysis finds little, but which are charming in their frail completeness. This f acidty of hitting on the precise lilt of thought and measure that shall catch the universal ear, and make them sing them- selves in everybody's memory, is a rare gift. We have heard many ingenious persons try to explain the cling of such a poem as " The Burial of Sir John Moore," and the result of all seemed to be, that there were certain verses that were good, not because of their goodness, but because one could not forget them. They have the great merit of being portable, and we have to carry so much luggage through life that we should be thankful for what will pack easily and take up no room. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 303 All that Lovelace wrote beside these three poems is utterly worthless, mere chaff from the threshing of his wits. Take out the four pages on which they are printed, and we have two hundred and eighty- nine left of the sorriest stuff that ever spoiled paper. The poems are obscure, without anything in them to reward perseverance, dull without being moral, and full of conceits so far-fetched that we could wish the author no worse fate than to carry them back to where they came from. We are no enemies to what are commonly called conceits, but authors bear them, as heralds say, with a difference. And a terrible difference it is ! With men like Earle, Donne, Fuller, Butler, Marvell, and even Quarles, conceit means wit ; they would carve the merest cherry-stone of thought in the quaintest and delicatest fashion. But with duUer and more pain- ful writers, such as Gascoigne, Marston, Felltham, and a score of others, even with cleverer ones like Waller, Crashawe, and Suckling, where they in- sisted on being fine, their wit is conceit. Difficulty without success is perhaps the least tolerable kind of writing. Mere stupidity is a natural failing ; we skip and pardon. But the other is Dulness in a domino, that travesties its familiar figure, and lures us only to disappoint. These unhappy verses of Lovelace's had been dead and lapt in congenial lead these two hundred years; — what harm had they done Mr. Hazlitt that he should disinter them ? There is no such disenchanter of peaceable reputations as one of these resurrection-men of lit- erature, who will not let mediocrities rest in the 304 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS grave, where the kind sexton, Oblivion, had buried them, but dig them up to make a profit on their lead. Of all Mr. Smith's editors, Mr. W. Carew Haz- litt is the worst. He is at times positively incred- ible, worse even than Mr. HaUiwell, and that is saying a good deal. Worthless as Lovelace's poems were, they should have been edited correctly, if edited at all. Even dulness and dirtiness have a right to fair play and to be dull and dirty in their own fashion. Mr. Hazlitt has allowed aU. the mis- prints of the original (or by far the greater part of them) to stand, but he has ventured on many emendations of the text, and in every important instance has blundered, and that, too, even where the habitual practice of his author in the use of words might have led him right. The misappre- hension shown in some of his notes is beyond the belief of any not familiar with the way in which old books are edited in England by the job. We have brought a heavy indictment, and we proceed to our proof, choosing only cases where there can be no dispute. We should premise that Mr. Haz- litt professes to have corrected the punctuation. " And though he sees it full of wounds, Cmel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34) Here the original reads, " Cruel stUl on," and the only correction needed was a comma after " cruel." " And by the glorious light Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft, Only the jelly 's loft." (p. 41.) The original has " of which," and rightly, for LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 305 "their spheres bereft" is parenthetic, and the sense is " of which only the jelly 's left." Love- lace is speaking of the eyes of a mistress who has grown old, and his image, confused as it is, is based on the belief that stars shooting from their spheres fell to the earth as jellies, — a belief, by the way, still to be met with in New England. Lovelace, describing a cow (and it is one of the few pretty passages in the volume), says, — " She was the largest, goodliest beast That ever mead or altar blest, Round as her udder, and more white Than is the Milky- Way in night." (p. 64.) Mr. Hazlitt. changes to " Round was her udder," thus making that white instead of the cow, as Lovelace intended. On the next page we read, — " She takes her leave o' th' mournful neat, Who, by her toucht, now prizeth her life, Worthy alone the hollowed knife." Compare Chapman (Iliads, xviii. 480) : — " Slew all their white fleee'd sheep and neat" The original was " prize their life," and the use of " neat " as a singular in this way is so uncommon, if not unprecedented, and the verse as corrected so halting, that we have no doubt Lovelace so wrote it. Of course " hollowed " should be " hal- lowed," though the broader pronunciation still lin- gers in our country pulpits. " What need she other bait or charm But look ? or angle but her arm ? " (p. 65. ) So the original, which Mr. Hazlitt, missing the sense, has changed to " what hook or angle." 306 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS " Fly Joy on winga of Popinjays To courts of fools where as your plays Die laught at and forgot." (p. 67.) The original has " there." Bead, — " Fly, Joy, on wings of popinjays To courts of fools ; there, as your plays, Die," &o. " Where as," as then used, would make it the " plays " that were to die. " As he Lucasta nam'd, a groan Strangles the fainting passing tone ; But as she heard, Lucasta smiles. Posses her round ; she 's slipt meanwhiles Behind the blind of a thick bush." (p. 68.) Mr. Hazlitt's note on " posses " could hardly be matched by any member of the posse comitatus taken at random : — " This word does not appear to have any very exact meaning. See Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic Words, art. Fosse, and Worcester's Diet., ibid., &c. The con- text here requires to turn sliarply or quickly." The " ibid., &c." is delightful ; in other words, "find out the meaning of posse for yourseK." Though dark to Mr. Hazlitt, the word has not the least obscurity in it. It is only another form of push, nearer the French pousser, from Latin pul- sare, and " the context here requires " nothing more than that an editor should read a poem if he wish to understand it. The plain meaning is, — " But, as she heard Lucasta, smiles Possess her round. ' ' That is, when she heard the name Lucasta, — for thus far in the poem she has passed under the LIBRARy OF OLD AUTHORS 307 pseudonyme of Amarantha. " Possess her round " is awkward, but mildly so for Lovelace, who also spells " commandress " in the same way with a single s. Process is spelt prosses in the report of those who absented themselves from Church in Stratford. " O thou, that swing'st upon the waTing eaie, Of some -well-filled oaten beard." (p. 94.) Mr. Hazlitt, for some inscrutable reason, has changed " haire " to " eare " in the first line, pre- ferring the ear of a heard to its hair ! Mr. Hazlitt prints, — " Poor verdant f cole ! and now green ice, thy joys Large and as lasting as thy peirch of grass, Bid ns lay in 'gainst winter raine and poize Their flouds with an o'erflowing glasse.'' (p. 95.) Surely we should read : — " Poor verdant foole and now green iee, thy joys, Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass, Bid," &e. i. e. " Poor fool now frozen, the shortness of thy joys, who mad'st no provision against winter, warns us to do otherwise." " The radiant gemme was hrlghtly set In as divine a carkanet ; Of which the clearer was not knowne Her minde or her complexion.' ' (p. 101.) The original reads rightly " for which," &c., and, the passage being rightly pointed, we have, — " For which the clearer was not known, Her mind or her complexion." Of course " complexion " had not its present lim- ited meaning. 308 • LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS "... my future daring tayes Shall bow itself." (p. 107.) "We should read themselves," says Mr. Haz- litt's note authoritatively. Of course a noun end- ing in s is plural ! Not so fast. In spite of the dictionaries, hays was often used in the singu- lar. " Do plant a sprig of cypress, not of bays," says Eobert Randolph in verses prefixed to his brother's poems ; and FeUtham in " Jonsonus Vir- bins," " A greener bays shall crown Ben Jonson's name." But we will cite Mr. Bayes himself : — "And, where he took it up, resigns the bays." " But we (defend us !) are divine, [Not] female, but madam born, and come From a right-honorable wombe." (p. 115.) Here Mr. Hazlitt has ruined both sense and metre by his unhappy "not." We should read "Fe- male, but madam-born," meaning clearly enough " we are women, it is true, but of another race." " In every hand [let] a cup be found That from all hearts a health may sound." (p. 121.) Wrong again, and the inserted " let " ruinous to the measure. Is it possible that Mr. Hazlitt does not understand so common an English construction as this ? " First told thee into th' ayre, then to the ground." (p. 141.) Mr. Hazlitt inserts the " to," which is not in the original, from another version. Lovelace wrote LIBRARY OP OLD AUTHORS 309 " ayer." We have noted two other cases (pp. 203 and 248) where he makes the word a dissyllable. On the same page we have " shewe's " changed to "shew" because Mr. Hazlitt did not know it meant " show us " and not " shows." On page 170, " their " is substituted for " her," which refers to Lucasta, and could refer to nothing else. Mr. Hazlitt changes " quarrels the student Mer- cury " to " quarrels with,"' not knowing that quar- rels was once used as a transitive verb (p. 189). Wherever he chances to notice it, Mr. Hazlitt changes the verb following two or more nouns con- nected by an " and " from singular to plural. For instance : — " You, sir, alone, fame, and all conquering rhyme File tlie set teeth," &c., (p. 224) for " files." Lovelace commonly writes so ; — on p. 181, where it escaped Mr. Hazlitt's grammatical eye, we find, — "But hroken faith, and th' cause of it. All damning gold, was damned to the pit." Indeed, it was usual with writers of that day. Milton in one of his sonnets has — " Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng," — and Leigh Hunt, for the sake of the archaism, in one of his, " Patience and Gentleness is power." Weariness, and not want of matter, compels us to desist from further examples of Mr. Hazlitt's emendations. But we must also give a few speci- mens of his notes, and of the care with which he has corrected the punctuation. 310 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS In a note on " flutes of canary", (p. 76) too long to quote, Mr. Hazlitt, after citing the glossary of Nares (edition of 1859, by Wright and HalliweU, a very careless book, to speak mildly), in which Jlute is conjectured to mean cask, says that he is not satisfied, but adds, " I suspect that a flute of canary was so called from the cask having several vent-holes." But flute means simply a tall glass. Lassel, describing the glass-making at Murano, says, " For the High Dutch they have Mgh glasses called Flutes, a full yard long." So in Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-all, "bring two S.u.te-fflasses and some stools, ho ! We '11 have the ladies' health." The origin of the word, though doubtful, is prob- ably nearer to flood than flute. But conceive of two gentlemen, members of one knows not how many learned societies, like Messrs. Wright and HaUiwell, pretending to edit Nares, when they query a word which they could have found in any French or German Dictionary ! On page 93 we have, — " Hayle, holy cold ! chaste temper, hayle ! the fire Baved o'er my purer thoughts I feel t' expire." Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus : " Rav'd seems here to be equivalent to reari'd or hereav'd. Perhaps the correct reading may be ' reav'd.' See Worcester's Dictionary, art. Rave, where Menage's supposition of affinity between rave and hereave is perhaps a little too slightingly treated." The meaning of Lovelace was, " the fire that raved." But what Mr. Hazlitt would make with LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 311 " reaved o'er my purer thoughts," we cannot con- ceive. On the whole, we think he must have writ- ten the note merely to make his surprising glosso- logical suggestion. All that Worcester does for the etymology, by the way, is to cite Richardson, no safe guide. " Where now one so so spatters, t'other : no I " (p. 112..) The comma in this verse has, of course, no right there, but Mr. Hazlitt leaves the whole passage so corrupt that we cannot spend time in disinfecting- it. We quote it only for the sake of his note on " so so." It is marvellous. " An exclamation of approval when an actor made a hit. The corruption seems to be somewhat akin to the Italian, ' si, si,' a corruption of ' sia, sia.' " That the editor of an English poet need not im- derstand Italian we may grant, but that he should not know the meaning of a phrase so common in his own language as so'So is intolerable. Lovelace has been saying that a certain play might have gained applause under certain circumstances, but that everybody calls it so-so, — something very different from " an exclamation of approval," one should say. The phrase answers exactly to the Italian cost cost, while s* (not si) is derived from sic, and is analogous with the affirmative use of the German so and the Yankee Jes' so. " Oh, how he hast'ned death, burnt to be fryed 1 " (p. 141.) The note on. fryed is, — " I. e. freed. Free and fresd were sometimes pro- 312 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS nounced like fry and fryed; for Lord North, in his Forest of Varieties, 1645, has these lines : — ' Birds that long Lave lived free, Caught and cag'd, but pine and die.' Here evidently free is intended to rhyme with die." " Evidently ! " An instance of the unsaf eness of rhyme as a g^ide to pronunciation. It was die that had the sound of dee, as everybody (but Mr. Hazlitt) knows. Lovelace himself rhymes die and she on p. 269. But what shall we say to our edi- tor's not knowing iAi&tfry was used formerly where we should say hum ? Lovers used to Jry with love, whereas now they have got out of the frying- pan into the fire. In this case a martyr is repre- sented as burning (i. e. longing) to be fried (i. e. burned). " Her beams ne'er shed or change like th' hair of day." (p. 224.) Mr. Hazlitt's note is, — " Hair is here used in what has become quite an ob- solete sense. The meaning is outward form, nature, or character. The word used to be by no means uncom- mon ; but it is now, as was before remarked, out of fashion ; and indeed I do not think that it is found even in any old writer used exactly in the way in which Love- lace has employed it." We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands it ! Did he never hear of the golden hair of ApoUo, — of the intonsum Cynthium ? Don Quixote was a better scholar where he speaks of las doradas hebras de. sus hermosos cahellos. But hair never meant what Mr. Hazlitt says it does, even when used as LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 313 he supposes it to be here. It had nothing to do with " outward form, nature, or character," but had a meaning much nearer what we express by- temperament, which its color was and is thought to indicate. On p. 232 ^^vnld ink" is explained to mean " unrefined." It is a mere misprint for "vild." Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an allusion of Lovelace to the "east and west" in speaking of George Sandys, mentions Sandys's Oriental travels, but seems not to know that he translated Ovid in Virginia. Pages 251, 252 : — " And as that soldier conquest doubted not, Who but one splinter had of Castriot, But would assault ev'n death, so strongly charmed, And naked oppose rocks, with this bone armed. " Mr. Hazlitt reads his for this in the last verse, and his note on " bone " is : — "And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. (Judges xv. 15.)" Could the farce of " editing " go further ? To make a " splinter of Castriot " an ass's jawbone is a little too bad. We refer Mr. Hazlitt to " The Life of George Castriot, King of Epirus and Albania," &c., &c., (Edinburgh, 1753,) p. 32, for an explanation of this profound diificulty. He will there find that the Turkish soldiers wore relics of Scanderbeg as charms. Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt's most astounding note is on the woiApickear (p. 203). 314 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS " So -within shot she doth piokear, Now gall's [galls] the flank and now the rear." " In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to be peculiar to Lovelace. TopicJcear, or. pickeer, means to skirmish." And, pray, what other possible meaning can it have here ? Of his corrections of the press we wiU correct a few samples. Page 34, for "Love nee're his standard," read " neere." Page 82, for « faU too" read " fall to" (or, as we ought to print such words, " faU-to "). Page 83, for "star-made firmament," read "star, made firmament." Page 161, for " To look their enemies in their hearse," read, both for sense and metre, into. Page 176, for " the gods have kneeled," read had. Page 182, for " In beds they tumbled off their own," read of. Page 184, for " in mine one monument I lie," read owne. Page 212, for " Deucalion's 6ZacMung stone," read " backflung." Of the punctuation we shall give but one specimen, and that a fair average one : — " Naso to his Tihullus flung the wreath, He to CatuUus thus did each bequeath. This glorious circle, to another round, At last the temples of a god it bound. " Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this for themselves. Time brings to obscure .authors ^ an odd kind of reparation, an immortality, not of love and interest and admiration, but of curiosity merely. In pro- 1 Earlt/ Popular Foetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 315 portion as their language was uncouth, provincial, or even barbarous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pastry-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, and its name shall accordingly live forever in a note. Is not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none ? And if lit- erary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Bru- netto Latini's made him insensible for a moment to the rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors of such books as are not properly literature may stUl comfort themselves with a non omnis moriar, laying a mournful emphasis on the adjective, and feeling that they have not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo a fragmentary con- tinuance on earth. To be sure, the immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to the famous men they help to illustrate. If they escape oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they survive only in fine print at the page's foot. At the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all, perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous is to be utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a kind of definite result by living. To hang on the perilous edge of immortality by the nails, liable at any moment to drop into the fathom- less ooze of oblivion, is at best a questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the merest barnacles that have attached themselves to the stately keels of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton have an inter- est of their own by letting us know in what remote 816 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare's " dusty death " to Anthony Copley, and Milton's " back resounded Death ! " to Abraham Fraunce ? Nay, is it not Bernard de Ventadour's lark that sings forever in the diviner air of Dante's Paradise ? " Quan Tey landeta mover De joi sas alas contra'! rai, Que s'oblida e s laissa cazer Per la donssor qu 'al cor li 'n vai." " Qual lodoletta cHe in acre si spazia, Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta Dell' ultima dolcezza clie la sazia." We are not sure that Bernard's " Que s'oblida e s laissa cazer " is not sweeter than Dante's " tace contenta," but it was plainly the doussor that gave its cue to the greater poet's memory, and he has improved on it with that exquisite ultima, as his master Virgil sometimes did on Homer. But authors whose interest for us is mainly bib- liographic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone's. As literature they are oppressive ; as items of literary history they find their place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and miss- ing in the Battle of the Books. There our hearts are touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some deserted grave- yard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability ! How many a controversi- alist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 317 that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone brevity of a name and date ! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himseK and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity, — and then read " Smith J. [ohn ?] 1713 - 1784 (?). The Vision of Immor- tality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to. See Lowndes" The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom a name was valuable in proportion as it was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your title-page read after it has rounded the corner of its first century, and to enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the Libro d' oro of the onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who exist only in name. Parson Adams would be here had he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr. Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on mono- gamy. Papyrorcetes junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the name of his respectable pro- genitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least, if of nothing better, and are sons, though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here is a handy and inex- pensive substitute for the waxen imagines of the Eoman patriciate, for those must have been incon- venient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus him- self might soften in the dog-days) and not readily 318 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS salable unless to some novus homo willing to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in genealogy are said to order a family- tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Mont- morenci. Fame, it should seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he must not less be Nobody to have his iiamelessness embalmed by M. Guerard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply because of their illegibility, so there is another class driven by a like irresistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these have even a philologic value for us depends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them by the editor. For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of liter- ature out of which something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our liter- ature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent in- dustry. It would not be easy to name any work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the meaning with which words LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 319 were used during the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholarship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and conscientious in pains- taking. Between such a man and Mr. Carew Haz- litt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy than the other is by the rash conceit of that half- knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor than downright ignorance. This language is strong because it is true, though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt . alludes depreciatingly to the labors of his predecessors, — to such men as Eitson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Mad- den, his superiors in everything that goes to the making of a good editor. Most of them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and it Is not for us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness of our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps of glos- sary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the difficulties than the defects of these pioneers. How different is Mr. Hazlitt's spirit from that of the thorough and therefore modest scholar ! In the Preface to his Altengliscke Sprachproben, Matzner says of an editor, das Beste was er ist verdanht er Andern, an accidental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out of Nathan der Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting some friend to translate for him the whole para- graph in which it occurs. 320 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS We see it announced that Mr. Hazlltt is to superintend a new edition of Warton's History o£ English Poetry, and are pained to think of the treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. He tells us that " in an artistic and constructive point of view, the Mylner of Abington is superior to its predeces- sor," that predecessor being Chaucer's Heve's Tale, which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the Miller ! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a late edition of the most graceful of our lyric poets. Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right word, for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads carefully the very documents he prints. For example, in the Bio- graphical Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says (p. xvii) : " Mr. W. Perry Herrick has plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir William to his nephew were simply on account of the for- tune which belonged to Robert in right of his father, and which his uncle held in trust ; this was about ^400; and I think from allusions in the letters printed elsewhere that this view may be the correct one." May be! The poet says expressly, "I en- treat you out of my little possession to deliver to this bearer the customarye £10, without which I cannot meate [?] my ioyrney." The words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr. Hazlitt's wise-looking query after " meate " is con- LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 321 elusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he never hear of the familiar phrase " to meet the ex- pense"? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must be the condition of his mind in face of the more than Protean travesties which words underwent before they were uniformed by Johnson and Walker ? Mr. Hazlitt's mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own fog. In another of Herrick's letters we find, " For what her monie can be effected (sic) when there is diuision 'twixt the hart and hand ? " " Her monie " of course means harmonie, and effected is therefore right. What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his " (^sic~) " it were idle to inquire. We have already had occasion to examine some of Mr. Hazlitt's work, and we are sorry to say that in the four volumes before us we find no reason for changing our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never, we might say, with lights of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where none was before, and the peculiar bumptiousness of his incapacity makes it particularly offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of what we assert, our only embarrassment being in the super- abundance of our material. In the Introduction to the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt speaks of " the utter want of common care on the part of previous editors of our old poetry." Such oversights as he has remarked upon in his notes are commonly errors of the press, a point on which Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, should have been chap- 322 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS itable, for his own volumes are full of them. We call his attention to one such which is rather amus- ing. In his " additional notes " we find " line 77, wylle. Strike out the note upon this word ; but the explanation is correct. Be wroght was a mis- print, however, for he wrogTiV The error occurs in a citation of three lines in which loiher is still left for tother. The original note affords us so good an example of Mr. Hazlitt's style of editing as to be worth preserving. In the " Kyng and the Hermit " we read, — " He ne wyst wPijere that he was Ne out of the forest for to passe. And thus he rode all wylle." And here is Mr. Hazlitt's annotation on the word wylle : — " L e. evil. In a MS. of the Tale of the Basyn, supposed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be written in the Salopian dialect, are the following lines : — ' The lother hade lltull thoght, Off hushandry oowth he noght, But alle his wyves toill be wroght.' " (Vol. i. p. 16.) It is plain that he supposed will, in this very simple passage, to mean evil ! This he would seem to rectify, but at the same time takes care to tell us that " the explanation [of wylle\ is correct." He is willing to give up one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort himself withal ! Wylle is simply a rhj'ming fetch for wild, and the passage means that the king rode at random. The use of LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 323 wild with, this meaning is still common in such phrases as " he struck wild." In " Havelok " we find it in the nearly related sense of being at a loss, hnowing not what to do : — " To lincolne barf ot he yede Hwan he kam ther he was fol ml, Ke hauede he no frend to gangen til." All wylle, in short, means the kind of editing that is likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up his misinformation as he goes along. We would hint that a person must know something before he can use even a glossary with safety. In the " King and the Barker," when the tanner finds out that it is the king whom he has been treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees, Mr. Hazlitt prints, " He had bo meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell," and subjoins the follow ing note : " EadeU, or rad- dle, signifies a side of a cart ; but here, appar- ently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printed ner adell." Mr. Hazlitt's explanation of raddle, which he got from HaUiwell, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from O. .F. rastel) implies, means the side or end of a hay-caxt, in which the uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a cart to do here ? There is perhaps a touch of what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call humor, in the tanner's forgetfulness of his raiment, but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt's own notes. The tanner was on horse- back, as the roads of the period required that he 324 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS shoTild be, and good old Kitson was plainly on the right track in his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. As it was, he got one word right, and so far has the advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course, ner a dell, never a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in his collection, — " For never a dell He wyll me lore agayne." (Vol. iii. p. 2.) That adell was a misprint in Hitson is proved by the fact that the word does not appear in his glos- sary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints ! In the poem we have just quoted he gravely prints, — " Matter in dede, My sides did blede," for " mother, indede," " through ryght wysenes " for " though ryghtwisenes," " with man vnkynde " for " sith man vnkynde," " ye knowe a parte " for " ye knowe aperte," " here in " for " herein," all of which make nonsense, and all come within the first one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the short- est, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than want of care. One blunder falling within the same limits we have re- served for special comment, because it affords a good example of Mr. Hazlitt's siyle of editing : — " Tour herte souerayne Glouen in twayne By longes the blynd»." (Vol. iii. p. 7.) LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 825 Here the uninstructed reader would be as com- pletely in the dark as to what longes meant as the editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar enough, one should think, to any reader of mediaeval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt ab- solves himself for not having supplied a glossary by the plea that none is needed by the class of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentle- man who often goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters as that " shape " means "form," and that "Johan of the golden mouthe " means " St. Chrysostom," which, indeed, it does not, any more, than Johannes Baptista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt with an illustration of the passage from Bekker's Ferahras, the more willingly as it may direct his attention to a shining example of how an old poem should be edited : — " en la crotz tos pendero li f als Inzien tman, can Longis tos f eric de sa lansa trencan : el non avia vist en trastot son viTan ; lo sane li Tenc per I'asta entro al punh colan ; e [el] toqnet ne sos huelhs si vie el mantenan." Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints sang parlez for sanz parler) (vol. i. p. 265), wiU not be able to form any notion of what these verses mean, but perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from the capital L that longes \s, a proper name. The word truan at the end of the first verse of our cita- tion may also suggest to him that truant is not 326 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word trewat as he seems to think. (Vol. iv. p. 24, note.y In deference to Mr. Hazlitt's presumed familiarity with an author sometimes quoted by him in his notes, we wiU point him to another illustration : — " Ac ther cam forth a knyght, With a kene spere y-grounde Highte Longeus, as the lettre telleth, And longe hadde lore his sighte." Piers Ploughman, Wright, p. 374 Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where Old French is in question. Upon the word Osyll he favors us with the following note : " The black- bird. In East Cornwall ozell is used to signify the windpipe, and thence the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to me." (Vol. ii. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe ! The name is merely another form of O. F. oisil, and was usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest birds, just as pajaro (L. passer) in Spanish, by a similar process in the opposite direction, came to mean bird in general. On the very next page he speaks of " the Romance which is vulgarly entitled Lybeaus Disconus, i. e. Le Beau Disconnu." If he had corrected Disconus to Desconus, all had been well ; but Disconnu neither is nor ever was French at all. Where there is blundering to be done, one Stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two birds. Z/y beaus Disconus is perfectly correct old French, and another form of the adjective (bius) perhaps explains the sound we give to the first syl- LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 827 lable of hemity and Beaufort. A barrister at law, as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know anything about old English or modern French, but we might fairly expect him to have at least a smat- tering of Law French I In volume fourth, page 129, a goodman trying his wife, " Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fire And set it abooue vpon the astire." Mr. Hazlitt's note upon astire is " hearth, i. q. astre." Knowing that the modern French was atre, he too rashly inferred a form which never ex- isted except in Italian. The old French word is aistre or estre, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither old French nor new. We do not pretend to know what astire means, but a hearth that should be ahooue the pot seething over the fire would be unusual, to say the least, in our semi-civilized country. In the " Lyf e of Koberte the Deuill " (vol. i. p. 232), Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knight sentre his lance, and teUs us in a note that the " Ed. 1798 has f entered" a very easy misprint for the right word f entered. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning of sentre he has not vouchsafed to tell us. Fautre (sometimes /hZ^^-e orfeutre) means in old French the rest of a lance. Thus in the Roman du Reiiart (26517), " Et mist sa lance sor \efaidre." But it also meant a peculiar kind of rest. In Sir F. Madden's edition of Gawayne (to which Mr. Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read, 828 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS " They feutred their lances, these knyghtes good " ; and in the same editor's " William and the Wer- wolf," " With sper festened in feuter, him for to spilie." In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, " There seems no reason, however, why it [feuter] should not mean the rest attached to the armour." But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a "garniture d'une selle pour tenir la lance." A spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly weight to the blow. The " himjhr to spilie " im- plies this. So in " Merlin " (E. E. Text Soc., p. 488) : " Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and putte hem in f ewtre, and that is the grettest crew- elte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as in mortall werre." The context shows that the /"ewtre turned sport into earnest. A citation in Eaynouard's Leodqite Roman (though wrongly ex- plained by him) directed us to a passage which proves that this particular kind of rest for the lance was attached to the saddle, in order to ren- der the blow heavier : — " Lances h [lege as] arqons af entries Pour plus de dures coUes rendre." Branche des Royaux Lignages, 4514, 4515. Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long and useful career of Mr. Wright, who, if he had given us nothing more than his excellent edition of " Piers Ploughman " and the volume of " Ancient Vocabularies," would LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 829 have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our lit- erature or students of our language, does not save him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt's own has comically avenged Warton. The word prayer, it seems, had somehow substituted it- self for prayse in a citation by Warton of the title of the " Schole-House of Women." Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes occasion to charge him with often " speaking at random," and after suggesting that it might hare been the blunder of a copyist, adds, " or it is by no means impossible that Warton him- self, having been allowed to inspect the production, was guilty of this oversight." (Vol. iv. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed the fol- lowing couplet to escape his conscientious attention : " Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose That prayers and glory doth consist in eloathes." Lege, nastro periculo, peatse ! Were dear old Tom still on earth, he might light his pipe cheer- fully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt's pages, secure that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blun- ders at the least. The word prayer is an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the " Knyght and his Wyfe " (vol. ii. p. 18) he prints : — "And sayd, Syre, I rede we make In this chapel cure prayers, That God us kepe both in ferrus." Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many 330 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS things that everybody knows, give us a note upon inferruB ? It would have matched his admirable elucidation of waygose, which we shall notice pre- sently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. may have read prayere and in fere ? Prayere occurs two verses fui-ther on, and not as a rhyme. Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a question of Old English grammar, tell- ing him superciliously that can, with an infinitive, in such phrases as he can go, is used not " to de- note a past tense, but an imperfect tense." By past we suppose him to mean perfect. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in this very collection that can, in the phrases referred to, some- times not only denotes a past but a perfect tense : — " And thorow that worde y f elle in pryde ; As the aimgelle can of hevyn glyde, And with the tywnkling ^ of an eye God f or-dud alle that maystrye And so hath he done for my gylte." Now the angel here is Lucifer, and can of hevyn glyde means simjily fell from heaven, not was fall' ing. It is in the same tense as f or-dud in the next line. The fall of the angels is surely a fait accom- pli. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes " my for " to " for my," and wrongly, the my agreeing with maystrye understood. In mod- ern English we should use mine in the same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of him- self. ' The careless Bitson would have printed this twynkling. LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 331 We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt's imper- tinence to Ritson, a man of ample reading and ex- cellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from original sources. We have a foible for Ritson with his oddities of spell- ing, his acerb humor, his unconsciously deprecia- tory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy's folio manu- script. Above all, he was a most conscientious edi- tor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two poems, " The Squyr of Low Degre " and " The Knight of Curtesy," which had already been edited by Ritson. The former of these has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good ver- sifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not deal so trenchantly with verses man- ifestly lamed by the copyist as perhaps an editor should.^ Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson's text, that " it offers more than an Tiwndred departures from the original," and of the "Knight of Courtesy," that " Ritson's text is by no means accurate." Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson's emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the original reading in a foot-note with an " old ed. has " so and so, thus leaving the reader to 1 For example : — ** And in the arber was a tre A fairer in the world might none bOi*' should certainly read, " None fairer in the world might be." 832 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS infer that the corrections were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For example, he prints, *' Alas ! it tonrned to icroth her heyle," where Ritson had substituted wrotherJieyle. The measure shows that Ritson was right. Wroth her heyle, moreover, is nonsense. It should have been wrother her heyle at any rate, but the text is far too modem to admit of that archaic form. In the " Debate of the Body and the Soul " (Matzner's A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have, "Why schope thou me to wrother-hele,'' and in " Dame Siris " (Ibid., 110), " To goder hele erer came thou hider." Mr. Hazlitt prints, " For yf it may he found in thee That thou them [de] fame for ennyte." The emendation [de] is Ritson's, and is probably right, though it would require, for the metre's sake, the elision of that at the beginning of the verse. But what is enuyte f Ritson reads enmyte, which is, of course, the true reading. Mr. Hazlitt prints (as usual either without apprehending or without regarding the sense), " With hrowes bent and eyes full mery," where Ritson has hrent, and gives parallel passages in his note on the word. Mr. Haditt gives us " To here the hugles there yblow, With their bugles in that place," LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 833 though Ritson had made the proper correction to legles. Mr. Hazlitt, with ludicrous nonchalance, allows the Squire to press into the throng " With a bastard large and longe,'' and that with the right word (haslarde) staring him in the face from Eitson's text. We wonder he did not give us an illustrative quotation from Falconbridge I Both editors have allowed some gross errors to escape, such as "come not" for " come " (v. 425) ; " so leue he be " for " ye be " (v. 593) ; "vnto her chambre" for "vnto your" (v. 993) ; but in general Eitson's is the better and more intelligent text of the two. In the " Knight of Curtesy," Mr. Hazlitt has followed Eitson's text almost literatim. Indeed, it is demonstrable that he gave it to his printers as copy to set up from. The proof is this : Eitson has accented a few words ending in te. Generally he uses the grave accent, but now and then the acute. Mr. Hazlitt's text follows all these variations exactly. The main dif- ference between the two is that Eitson prints the first personal pronoun i, and Mr. Hazlitt, I. Eit- son is probably right ; for in the " Schole-House of Women" (vv. 587, 638) where the text no doubt was " i [i. e- one] deuil a woman to speak may constrain, . But all that in hel be cannot let it again," Mr. Hazlitt changes " i " to " A," and says in a note, " Old ed. has 7." That by his correction he should miss the point was only natural ; for he evi- dently conceives that the sense of a passage does i>at in the least concern an editor. An instance or 334 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS two will suffice. In the " Knyght and his Wyfe " (vol. ii. p. 17) we read, " The fynd tyl hure hade myche tene As hit was a sterfull we seme 1 " Mr. Hazlitt in a note explains tene to mean " trou- ble or sorrow " ; but if that were its meaning here, we should read made, and not hade, which would give to the word its other sense of attention. The last verse of the couplet Mr. Hazlitt seems to think perfectly intelligible as it stands. We should not be surprised to learn that he looked upon it as the one gem that gave lustre to a poem otherwise of the dreariest. We fear we shall rob it of all its charm for him by putting it into modern Eng- lish:— " As it was after full well seen." So in the " Smyth and his Dame " (vol. iii. p. 204) we read, " It were a lytele maystry To make a blynde man to se," instead of "as lytell." It might, indeed, be as easy to perform the miracle on a blind man as on Mr. Hazlitt. Again, in the same poem, a little further on, " For I tell the now trevely, Is none so wyse ne to sle, • But ever ye may som what lere," which, of course, should be, "r But ever he may sc Worse than all, Mr. Hazlitt tells us (vol. i. p. 168) "ne so sle But ever he may som what leie." LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 335 that when they bury the great Khan, they lay his body in a tabernacle, "With sheld and spere and other wede With a whit mere to gyf him in ylke." We will let Sir John Maundeville correct the last verse : " And they seyn that when he shale come into another World . . . the mare schalle gheven him mylk." Mr. Hazlitt gives us some wretched doggerel by "Piers of Fulham," and gives it swarming with blunders. We take at random a couple of specimens : — "And loveship goith ay to warke Where that presence is put a hake," (Vol. ii. pp. 13, 14,) where we should read " love's ship," " wrake," and " abake." Again, just below, " Ffor men haue seyn here to foryn, That love laughet when men be forsworn." Love should be " love." Ovid is the obscure per- son alluded to in the " men here to foryn " : "Jupiter e ccelo perjuria ridet amantum." We dare say Mr. Hazlitt, if he ever read the pas- sage, took it for granted that " to foryn " meant too foreign, and gave it up in despair. But surely Shakespeare's " At lovers' perjuries, They say, Jove laughs," is not too foreign to have put him on the right scent. Mr. Hazlitt is so particular in giving us v for u 336 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS and vice versa, that such oversights are a little annoying. Every man his own editor seems to be his theory of the way in which old poetry should be reprinted. On this plan, the more riddles you leave (or make) for the reader to solve, the more pleasure you give him. To correct the blunders in any book edited by Mr. Hazlitt would give the young student a pretty thorough training in ar- chaic English. In this sense the volumes before us might be safely recommended to colleges and schools. When Mr. Hazlitt undertakes to cor- rect, he is pretty sure to go wrong. For example, in "Doctour Doubble Ale" (vol. iii. p. 809) he amends thus : — " And sometyme niikle strife is Among the ale wyfes, [y-wis] ; " where the original is right as it stands. Just be- fore, in the same poem, we have a parallel in- stance : — " And doctours dulpatis That falsely to them pratis, And bring them to the gates." The original probably reads (or should read) wy[fis and gatis. But it is too much to expect of Mr. Hazlitt that he should remember the very poems he is editing from one page to another, nay, as we shall presently show, that he should even read them. He mil change be into ben where he should have let it alone (though his own volumes might have furnished him with such examples as " were go," " have se," " is do," and fifty more), but he ■will sternly retain bene where the rhyme requires LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 33T he, and Eitson had so printed. In " Adam Bel " the word pryme occurs (vol. ii. p. 140), and he vouchsafes us the following note : " i. e. noon. It is commonly used by early writers in this sense. In the Four P. P., by John Heywood, circa 1540, the apothecary says, ' If he taste tliis boze nye abonte tlie pryme By the masse, he is in heTen or even songe tyme.' " Let our readers admire with us the easy " it is com- monly used " of Mr. Hazlitt, as if he had store of other examples in his note-book. He could an if he would! But unhappily he borrowed this sin- gle quotation from Nares, and, as usual, it throws no scintilla of light upon the point in question, for his habit in annotation is to find by means of a glossary some passage (or passages if possi- ble) in which the word to be explained occurs, and then — why, then to give the word as an ex- planation of itself. But in this instance, Mr Haz- litt, by the time he had reached the middle of his next voliune (vol. iii. p. 281) had wholly for- gotten that pryme was "commonly used by early writers " for noon, and in a note on the following passage, " I know not whatea a clocks But by the coimtre cocke, The mone nor yet the pryme, Vntyll the soime do ahyne," he informs us that it means "six o'clock in the morning" ! Here again this editor, who taxes "Ritson with want of care, prints mone for Tione in the very verse he is annotating, and which we 338 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS may therefore presume that he had read. A man who did not know the moon till the sun showed it him is a match even for Mr. Hazlitt himself- We wish it were as easy as he seems to think it to settle exactly what pryme means when used by our " early writers," but it is at least abso- lutely certain that it did not mean noon. But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are compe- tent witnesses, knows nothing whatever about Eng- lish, old or new. In the " Mery Jest of Dane Hew " he finds the following verses, " Dame he said what shall we now doo Sir she said so mote go The munk in a comer ye shall lay " which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr. Hazlitt prints them thus, " Dame, be said, what shall we now doo ? Sir, she said, so mote [it] go. The munk," &o., and gives us a note on the locution he has in- vented to this effect, " ? so might it be managed." And the Chancellor said, I doubt! Mr. Hazlitt's query makes such a singular exception to his more natural mood of immediate inspiration that it is almost pathetic. The amended verse, as every- body (not confused by too great familiarity with our " early writers ") knows, should read, " Sir, she said, so might I go," and should be followed only by a comma, to show its connection with the next. The phrase " so mote I go," is as common as a weed in the LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 339 works of the elder poets, both French and Eng- lish ; it occurs several times in Mr. Hazlitt's own collection, and its other form, "so mote I fare," which may also be found there, explains its mean- ing. On the phrase point-device (vol. iii. p. 117) Mr. Hazlitt has a positively incredible note, of which we copy only a part : " This term, which is commonly used in early poems " [mark once more his intimacy with our earlier literature] "to sig- nify extreme exactitude, originated in the points which were marked on the astrolabe, as one of the means which the astrologers and dabblers in the black art adopted to enable them (as they pre- tended) to read the fortunes of those by whom they were consulted in the stars and planetary orbs. The excessive precision which was held to be re- quisite in the delineation of these points " [the delineation of a point is good !] " &c. on the astro- labe, led to point-device, or points-device (as it is sometimes found spelled), being used as a prover- bial expression for minute accuracy of any kind." Then follows a quotation from Gower, in which an astrolabe is spoken of " with points and cereles merveilous," and the note proceeds thus : " Shake- speare makes use of a similar figure of speech in the Tempest, I. 2, where the following dialogue takes place between Prospero and Ariel : — ' Prosp. Hast thou, spirit, Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee ? Ar. Inevery article.' " Neither the proposed etymology nor the illustra^ tion requires any remark from us. We wiU only 840 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS say that point-device is excellently explained and illustrated by Wedgwood. We wiU give a few more examples out of many to show Mr. Hazlitt's utter unfitness for the task he has undertaken. In the " Kyng and tihe Her- myt " are the following verses, " A wyld wey, I hold, it were The wey to wend, I you swere, Bot ye the dey may se," meaning simply, " I think it would be a wild thing (in you) to go on your way unless you wait for daylight." Mr. Hazlitt punctuates and amends thus : — " A wyld wey I hold it were, The wey to wend, I you swere. Ye bot [by] the dey may se." (Vol. i. p. 19.) The word hot seems a stumbling-block to Mr. Haz- litt. On page 54 of the same volume we have, " Herd I neuere bi no leuedi Hole hendinesse and curteysL" The use of the word hy as in this passage should seem familiar enough, and yet in the " Hye Way to the Spittel Hous" Mr. Hazlitt explains it as meaning he. Any boy knows that without some- times means unless (Fielding uses it often in that sense), but Mr. Hazlitt seems unaware of the fact. In his first volume (p. 224) he gravely prints : — " They trowed verelye that she shoulde dye ; With that our ladye wold her helpe and spede." The semicolon after dye shows that this is not a misprint, but that the editor saw no connection LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 341 between the first verse and the second. In the same volume (p. 133) we have the verse, " He was a grete tenement man, and ryche of londe andlede," and to lede Mr. Hazlitt appends this note : " Lede, in early English, is found in various significa- tions, but here stands as the plural of lad, a ser- vant." In what conceivable sense is it the plural of lad f And does lad necessarily mean a servant ? The Promptorium has ladde glossed by garcio, but the meaning servant, as in the parallel cases of wais, puer, garqon, and hoy, was a derivative one, and of later origin. The word means simply man (in the generic sense) and in the plural people. So in the " Squyr of Low Degre," " I will forsake both land and lede" and in the " Smyth and his Dame," " That hath both land and lyth." The word was not " used in various significations." Even so lately as " Flodden Ffeild " we find, " He was a noble leed of high degree." Connected with land it was a commonplace in German as well as in English. So in the Tristan of Godfrey of Strasburg, „er Seoat^ (in Hut tmbc fin tant Stn fines morjcalteS ^ant." Mr. Hazlitt is more nearly right than usual when he says that in the particular case cited above lede means servants. But were these of only one sex ? Does he not know that even in the middle of the last century when an English nobleman spoke of " my people," he meant simply his domestics ? 342 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS Encountering the familiar phrase No do ! (voL iv. p. 64), Mr. Hazlitt changes it to Not do ! He informs us that Goddes are (vol. i. p. 197) means "God's heir " ! He says (vol. ii. p. 146) : 'To bor- row in the sense of to take, to guard, or to protect, is so common in early English that it is unneces- sary to bring forward any illustration of its use in this way." But he relents, and presently gives us two from Ralph Roister Doister, each containing the phrase " Saint George to borrow ! " That bor- row means take, no owner of books need be told, and Mr. Hazlitt has shown great skUl in borrow- ing other people's illustrations for his notes, but the phrase he quotes has no such meaning as he gives it. Mr. Dyce in a note on Skelton explains it rightly, " St. George being my pledge or surety." We gather a few more of these flowers of expo- sition and etymology : — " The while thou sittest in chirche, thi bedys schalt thou bidde." (Vol. L p. 181.) i. e. thou shalt offer thy prayers. Mr. Hazlitt's note on bidde is, " i. e. bead. So in The Kyng and the Hermit, line 111 : — ' That herd an hermyte there -within Unto the gate he gan to wyn Bedying his prayer.' " Precisely what Mr. Hazlitt understands by beading (or indeed by anything else) we shall not presume to divine, but we should like to hear him translate " if any man bidde the worshyp," which comes a few lines further on. Now let us turn to page 191 of the same volume. " Maydenys ben loneliche and LIBRA RV OF OLD AUTHORS 343 no thing seklr." Mr. Hazlitt tells us in a note that " sekir or sicker " is a very common form of secure, and quotes in illustration from the prose Morte Arthure, " A ! said Sir Launcelot, comfort your- selfe, for it shaU bee unto us as a great honour, and much more then if we died in any other places : for of death wee be sicher." Now in the text the word means safe, and in the note it means sure. Indeed sure, which is only a shorter form of secure, is its ordinary meaning. "I mak sicker," said Kirkpatrick, a not unfitting motto for certain edi- tors, if they explained it in their usual phonetic way. In the " Frere and the Boye," when the old man has given the boy a bow, he says : — " Shote therin, whan thou good thynke ; For yf thou shote and wynke, The prycke thow shalte hytte." Mr. Hazlitt's explanation of wynke is "to close one eye in taking aim," and he quotes a passage from Gascoigne in support of it. Whatever Gas- coigne meant by the word (which is very doubt- ful), it means nothing of the kind here, and is an- other proof that Mr. Hazlitt does not think it so important to understand what he reads as St. Philip did. What the old man said was, " even if you shut both your eyes, you can't help hitting the mark." So in " Piers Ploughman " ( Whitaker's text), " Wynkyng, as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt." Again, for our editor's blunders are as endless as 844 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS the heads of an old-fashioned sermon, in the " Schole-House of Women " (vol. iv. p. 130), Mr. Hazlitt has a note on the phrase " make it nice," ("And yet alwaies they tible bable Of euery matter and make it nice,") which reads thus : " To make it pleasant or snug. I do not remember to have seen the word used in this sense very frequently. But Gascoigne has it in a precisely similar way : — ' The g^losse of gorgeous Courtes by thee did please mine eye, A stately sight me thought it was to see the braue go by, To see their feathers flaunte, to make [marke !] their straungo deuise , To lie along in ladies lappes, to lispe, and make it nice.' " To make it nice means nothing more nor less than to play the fool, or rather, to make a fool of yourself faire le niais. In old English the French nials and nice, from similarity of form and analogy of meaning, naturally fused together in the word nice, which, by an unusual luck, has been promoted from a derogatory to a respectful sense. Gas- coigne's lispe might have put Mr. Hazlitt on his guard, if he ever considered the sense of what he quotes. But he never does, nor of what he edits either. For example, in the "Smyth and his Dame " we find the following note : " Prowe, or proffe, is not at all uncommon as a form of profit. In the ' Seven Names of a Prison,' a poem printed in Heliquice Antiquce, we have, — ' Quintum nomen istius f ovesa ita probatum, A place oiproffioi man to know bothe frend and foo.' " LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 845 Now ^rq^ and prow are radically different words. Proff here means proof, and if Mr. Hazlitt had read the stanza which he quotes, he would have found (as in all the others of the same poem) the meaning repeated in Latin in the last line, proha- do amicorum. But we wish to leave our readers (if not Mr. Hazlitt) in good humor, and accordingly we have reserved two of his notes as bonnes bouches. In " Adam Bel," when the outlaws ask pardon of the king, " They kneled downe without lettyng And each helde yp his hande." To this passage (tolerably plain to those not too familiar with " our early literature " ) Mr. Hazlitt appends this solemn note: "^o hold up the hand was formerly a sign of respect or concurrence, or a mode of taking an oath ; and thirdly as a signal for mercy. In all these senses it has been em- ployed from the most ancient times ; nor is it yet out of practice, as many savage nations still testify their respect to a superior by holding their hand [either their hands or the hand, Mr. Hazlitt !] over their head. Touching the hat appears to be a ves- tige of the same custom. In the present passage the three outlaws may be understood to kneel on approaching the throne, and to hold up • each a hand as a token that they desire to ask the royal clemency or favour. In the lines which are sub- joined it [what?] implies a solemn assent to an oath : 846 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS ' This swore the dnke and all his men, And all the lordes that with him lend, And tharto to * held they np thaire hand.' " Minot's Poems, ed. 1825, p. 9. The admirable Tupper could not have done better than this, even so far as the mere English of it is concerned. Where all is so fine, we hesitate to declare a preference, but, on the whole, must give in to the passage about touching the hat, which is as good as " mobbled queen." The Americans are still among the " savage nations " who " imply a solemn assent to an oath " by holding up the hand. Mr. Hazlitt does not seem to know that the question whether to kiss the book or hold up the hand was once a serious one in English politics. But Mr. Hazlitt can do better even than this ! Our readers may be incredulous ; but we shall proceed to show that he can. In the " Scheie^ House of Women," among much other equally deli- cate satire of the other sex, (if we may venture still to caU them so,) the satirist undertakes to prove that woman was made, not of the rib of a man, but of a dog : — "And yet the rib, as I suppose, That God did take out of the man A dog yp caught, and a way gose Eat it dene ; so that as than The woork to finish that God began Could not he, as we haue said, Because the dog the rib conuaid. ' The io is, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt'a What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies even his quotations inaccurately ? LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 347 A remedy God found as yet; Out of the dog lie took a, rib." Mr. Hazlitt has a long note on way gose, of which the first sentence shall suffice us : " The origin of the term way-goose is involved in some obscurity." We should think so, to be sure ! Let us modern- ize the spelling and grammar, and correct, the punctuation, and then see how it looks : — " A dog up caught and away goes, Eats it up." We will ask Mr. Hazlitt to compare the text, as he prints it, with " Into the hall he gose." (Vol. iii. p. 67.) We shoidd have expected a note here on the " hall he-goose." Not to speak of the point of the joke, such as it is, a goose that could eat up a man's rib could only be matched by one that could swallow such a note, — or write it ! We have made but a small florilegium from Mr. Hazlitt's remarkable volumes. His editorial method seems to have been to print as the Lord would, tiU his eye was caught by some word he did not understand, and then to make the reader com- fortable by a note showing that the editor is as much in the dark as he. We are profoundly thank- ful for the omission of a glossary. It would have been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To ex- pose pretentious charlatanry is sometimes the un- pleasant duty of a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not have assumed in this case but for the impertinence with which Mr. Hazlitt has 848 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS treated dead and living scliolars, the latchets of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, and to express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be, a pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother- tongue. If he who has most to learn be the hap- piest man, Mr. Hazlitt is indeed to be envied; but we hope he wiU learn a gi'eat deal before he lays his prentice hands on Warton's " History of English Poetry," a classic in its own way. If he does not learn before, he will be likely to learn after, and in no agreeable fashion. EMERSON THE LECTURER 1861-68 It is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson Is the most steadily attractive lecturer in America. Into that somewhat cold-waterish region adventurers of the sensational kind come down now and then with a splash, to become disregarded King Logs before the next season. But Mr. Emerson always draws. A lecturer now for something like a third of a century, one of the pioneers of the lecturing sys- tem, the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its en- chanting meshes. What they do not fully under- stand they take on trust, and listen, saying to themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip Sidney, — "A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, A full aasurance given by looks, Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of gospel books." We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more remote from that than his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about a new air-tight stove than about Plato ; yet our favorite teacher's practicality is not 350 EMERSON THE LECTURER in the least of the Poor Richard variety. If he have any Buncombe constituency, it is that unreal- ized commonwealth of philosophers which Plotinus proposed to establish ; and if he were to make an almanac, his directions to farmers would be some- thing like this : " October : Indian Summer ; now is the time to get in your early Vedas." What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out- Yankees us aU? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato-disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over- soul? that, as we try aU trades, so has he tried aU cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality ? There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses, — none whom so many cannot abide. What does he mean? ask these last. Where is his system? What is the use of it aU ? What the dense have we to do with Brahma ? I do not propose to write an essay on Emerson at this time. I wiU only say that one may find grandeur and consolation in a starlit night without caring to ask what it means, save grandeur and consolation ; one may like Mon- taigne, as some ten generations before us have done, without thinking him so systematic as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent?) authors; one may think roses as good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would make a better show in the witness-box, if cross- examined as to their usefulness ; and as for Brahma, EMERSON THE LECTURER 351 why, he can take care of himseK, and won't bite us at any rate. The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to re- duce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the " Epistolae Ob- scurorum Virorum." We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has pro. duced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne, — though he does use that abominable word reliahle. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that wiU carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle ; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius. It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded with nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark and dreamy waters again. There is keen excite- 352 EMERSON THE LECTURER ment, tliougli there be no ponderable acquisition. If we carry nothing home in our baskets, there Is ample gain in dUated lungs and stimulated blood. What does he mean, quotha ? He means Inspiring hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature. No doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his peculiar audience, and yet I know none that can hold a promiscuous crowd In pleased attention so long as he. As in all original men, there Is some- thing for every palate. " Would you know," says Goethe, " the ripest cherries ? Ask the boys and the blackbirds." The announcement that such a pleasure as a new course of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as I am, is something like those forebodings of spring that prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the less novel, when It arrives, be- cause it Is familiar. We know perfectly well what we are to expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what he says always penetrates and stirs us, as Is apt to be the case with genius, in a very unlooked-for fashion. Perhaps genius Is one of the few things which we gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of the few that multiply rather than weaken the force of their Impression by iteration ? Perhaps some of us hear more than the mere words, are moved by something deeper than the thoughts ? If It be so, we are quite right, for it is thirty years and more I of " plain living and high thinking " that speak to us in this altogether unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation, EMERSON THE LECTURER 353 this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there was a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and value of Character, (and we need it sadly in these days,) we have it in this gracious and dignified presence. What an antisep- tic is a pure life ! At sixty-five (or two years be- yond his grand climacteric, as he would prefer to call it) he has that privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents him to us always the un- wasted contemporary of his own prime. I do not know if he seem old to his younger hearers, buf we who have known him so long wonder at the tenacity with which he maintains himself even in the outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of 1868 to whom we listen. For us the whole life of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every sentence, and behind each word we divine the force of a noble character, the weight of a large capital of thinking and being. We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson. Not that we perceive any falling-off in anything that ever was essential to the charm of Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of thought or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, was more disjointed even than common. It was as if, after vainly try- ing to get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had at last tried the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. The second lecture, on " Criticism and Poetry," was quite up to the level of old times, 354 EMERSON THE LECTURER full of that power of strangely-subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the mind into al- most painful attention, of those flashes of mutual understanding between speaker and hearer that are gone ere one can say it lightens. The vies, of Em- erson's criticism seems to be, that while no man is so sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less sensible than he of what makes a poem. He values the solid meaning of thought above the subtler meaning of style. He would prefer Donne, I sus- pect, to Spenser, and sometimes mistakes the queer for the original. To be young is surely the best, if the most pre- carious, gift of life ; yet there are some of us who would hardly consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our recollection of Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might say what they liked. Did our own imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into ambrosia? At any rate, he brought us life, which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it all tran- scendentalism ? magic-lantern pictures on mist ? As you will. Those, then, were just what we wanted. But it was not so. The delight and the benefit, were that he put us in communication with a larger style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more EMERSON THE LECTURER 355 pungent phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the dry husk of our New England; made us conscious of the supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any of us ; freed us, in short, from the stocks of prose in which we had sat so long that we had grown wellnigh contented in our cramps. And who that saw the audience will ever forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing to renew in him- self the half -forgotten sense of it, was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale in- tellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, .beautiful young eyes, brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished now in that other world we call the Past, or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloam- ing of memory, your light impoverishes these cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sensa- tion, as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor which always played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling around me. But would my picture be complete if I forgot that ample and vegete countenance of Mr. K of W , — how, from its regular post at the corner of the front bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to the profaner audience as if he were the inexplicably appointed fugleman of appre- ciation ? I was reminded of him by those hearty cherubs in Titian's Assumption that look at you as 356 EMERSON THE LECTURER who should say, " Did you ever see a Madonna like that ? Did you ever behold one hundred and fifty pounds of womanhood mount heavenward before like a rocket? " To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of " Chevy Chase," and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of vic- tory. Did they say he was disconnected ? So were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with that excitement, as we walked homeward with prouder stride over the creaking snow. And were they not knit together by a higher logic than our mere sense could master ? Were we enthusiasts ? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives. If asked what was left? what we carried home? we should not have been careful for an answer. It would have been enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed that way. Or we might have asked in return what one brought away from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough that he had set that ferment of wholesome discon- tent at work in us. There is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of whom are now in the frui- tion of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson gave them both the desire and the foretaste, who will always love to repeat : — EMERSON THE LECTURER 357 " Che in la mente m'6 fitta, ed or m'accnora La cara e buoua immagine paterna Di Toi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora M'insegnayaste come I'uom s'eterna." I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third lecture of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave some delightful reminiscences of the intellectual influences in whose movement he had shared. It was like hearing Goethe read some pas- sages of the " Wahrheit aus seinem Leben." Not that there was not a little Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lecturer built up so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to lift them into a promi- nence of obscurity, and seem to masthead them there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who this or that recondite great man was, in the faint hope that somebody might once have heard of him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. Let them revise their judgment in presence of this loy- alty of his that can keep warm for half a century, that never forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the man to those who know and love him. The greater part of the lecture was devoted to reminiscences of things substantial in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh from Greece and Germany ; of Channing ; of the translations of Margaret Fuller, Eipley, and Dwight ; of the Dial and Brook Farm. To what he said of the latter an undertone of good-humored irony gave special zest. But what every one of hia 358 EMERSON THE LECTURER hearers felt was that the protagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was no JEneas to bab- ble the quorum magna pars fui, and, as one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing to say how each of them was commenting the story as it went along, and filling up the necessary gaps in it from his own private store of memories. His younger hearers could not know how much they owed to the benign impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything igno- ble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man before them. But the older knew how much the country's intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teach- ing and example, how constantly he had kept burn- ing the beacon of an ideal life above our lower , region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful hero- ism that is so touching in every record of their lives. Those who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for what they feel to be most val- uable in their culture, or perhaps I should say their impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can give, and without which all doctrine is chaif. This was something like the caret which some of us older boys wished to fill up on the margin of the master's lecture. Few men have been so much to so many, and through so large a range of aptitudes and temperaments, and this simply because aU of ns value manhood beyond any or all other qualities EMERSON THE LECTURER S59 of character. We may suspect in him, here and there, a certain thinness and vagueness of quality, but let the waters go over him as they list, this masculine fibre of his will keep its lively color and its toughness of texture. I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long- studied artist in these things) does the deliberate ut- terance, that seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of thought and make us feel as If the glance of humor were a sud- den suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to .him as to us ! In that closely-filed speech of his at the Bums centenary dinner, every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over the heads of his hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. " My dainty Ariel ! " he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of ap- proval and caught another sentence from the Sibyl- line leaves that lay before him, ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought down the house, as I never saw one brought down before, — and it is not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no 860 EMERSON THE LECTURER hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was an interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables, like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found my- self caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy set me under the bema listening to him who f ulmined over Greece. I can never help applying to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon : " There happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His lan- guage was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suf- fered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he ut- tered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke." Those who heard him while their natures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of di- vine air, will never cease to feel and say : — " Was never eye did see that face, Was never ear did hear that tongae, Was never mind did mind his grace, That ever thought the travail long ; But eyea, and ears, and every thought, Were with his sweet perfections caught." THOEEAU 1866 "What contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of his life, (since Nature sets limits about her conscription for spiritual fields, as the state does in physical warfare,) will ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the " Transcendental Movement " of thirty years ago ? Apparently set astir by Carlyle's essays on the " Signs of the Times," and on " History," the final and more im- mediate impulse seemed to be given by " Sartor Eesartus." At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon on Falstaff's text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny. £Jcce nunc tempus acceptabile / was shouted on all hands with every variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable pitch, representing the three sexes of men, women, and Lady Mary Wort- ley Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed en- thusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new and fairer Cjreation was to be hatched in due time. Redeunt Saturnia regna, — so far was certain, though in what shape, or by what meth- 362 THOREA U ods, was still a matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the " feathered Mer- cury," as defined by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to a pitch that would have taken away the breath of George Fox ; and even swearing had its evangelists, who an- swered a simple inquiry after their health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that might have been honorably mentioned by Marlborough in gen- eral orders. Everybody had a mission (with a cap- ital M) to attend to everybody-else's business. No brain but had, its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. Communities were established where everything was to be common but common-sense. Men re- nounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh. Conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The.belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to all Christian men ; whether equally so to the most distant possible heathen or not was imexperi- THOREA U 363 mented, though many would have subscribed liber- ally that a fair trial might be made. It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances repro- duced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was nothing so simple that uncial letters and the style of DiphUus the Labyrinth could not turn it into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out of work added to the general misunderstanding their contribution of broken English in every most In- genious form of fracture. All stood ready at a moment's notice to reform everything but them- selves. The general motto was : — " And we '11 talk with them, too, And take upon 's the mystery of things As if we were God's spies." Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a humorous lining. I have barely hinted at the comic side of the affair, for the material was endless. This was the whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality sus- pected nothing. The word " transcendental " then was the maid of all work for those who could not think, as " Pre-Kaphaelite " has been more recently for people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that there was a much nearer metaphysi- cal relation and a much more distant aesthetic and literary relation between Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness, as they were called in New Eng- land, than has commonly been supposed. Both represented the reaction and revolt against Philis- 364 THOREAU terei, a renewal p£ the old battle begun in modem times by Erasmus and Keuchlin, and continued by Leasing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have ] been the leaders in England. It was simply a strug- Igle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken, though painted with images of saints and martyrs. Light, colored by these reverend effigies, was none the more respirable for being picturesque. There is only one thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which aU tradition takes its rise. It was this life which the reformers demanded, with more or less clearness of consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in literature, life in religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Judaea, if we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God who keeps it forever real and present ? Surely Abana and Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living faith be mixed with those waters and none with these. Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual progress was dead; New England Puritanism was in like manner dead ; in other words. Protestant- ism had made its fortune and no longer protested ; but till Carlyle spoke out in the Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had dared to pro- claim, Le roi est mort : vive le roi 1 The meaning of which proclamation was essentially this : the vital spirit has long since departed out of this form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in com- THOREAU 865 mission long enough; but meanwhile the soul of man, from which all power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in undiminished royalty; God still survives, little as you gentlemen of the Commission seem to be aware of it, — nay, will possibly outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Pres- byterianism and New England Puritanism made their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the her- alds of their formal decease, and the tendency of the one toward Authority and of the other toward Independency might have been prophesied by who- ever had studied history. The necessity was not so much in the men as in the principles they rep- resented and the traditions which overruled them. The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagina- tion of the century, the rarest in some ideal re- spects since Shakespeare ; but the Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New Eng- land what it is, and is destined to make America what it should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though holding himself aloof from all active part- nership in movements of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who has supplied a great part of their capital. The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read critic must feel at once ; and so is that of ^schylus, so is that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is that of nearly every one except Shakespeare ; but there is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of 366 THOREA U individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above all, there is the standard of genetic power, the test of the masculine as distinguished from the receptive minds. There are staminate plants in literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson's mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no man to whom our aesthetic culture owes so \ much. The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesi- astically and the Revolution politically indepen- dent, but we were stiU socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget or cease to be grate- ful for the mental and moral nudge which he received from the writings of his high-minded and brave-spirited countryman. That we agree with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is aside from the question ; but that he arouses in us something that we are the better for having awakened, whether that something be of opposi- tion or assent, that he speaks always to what is highest and least selfish in us, few Americans of the generation younger than his own would be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any former par- allel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless THOREAU 367 aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent ! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling. I said that the Transcendental Movement was the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed it. In its mo- tives, its preaching, and its results, it differed rad- ically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotch- man, with all his genius, and his humor gigan- tesque as that of Kabelais, has grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials of wrath on the head of the sturdy British Soc- rates of worldly common-sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively to self- colture and the independent development of the individual man. It seemed to many almost Py- thagorean in its voluntary seclusion from common- wealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were[ disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer sense ; and while the one, from his bias toward i the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style, — exquisite fineness of mate- rial, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression. Whatever may be said of his thought, nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his phrase. If it was ever questionable whether de- 368 THOREA U mocracy could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cynicism and his admiration of force in and for itself, has become at last positively inhuman ; Emerson, reverencing strength, seeking the highest outcome of the individual, has found that society and politics are also main elements in the attain- ment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily manward and worldward. The two men represent respectively those grand personifications in the drama of ^schylus, Bta and KpaTos. Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable ; and it is something emi- nently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are straw- berries from his own garden. A singular mix- ture of varieties, indeed, there is ; — alpine, some of them, with the flavor of rare mountain air ; others wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy openings in the forest; and not a few seed- lings, swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange books these are of his, and interesting in many ways, — instructive chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on a com- paratively narrow close of mind, and how much a man may make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it at last. I have just been renewing my recollection of Mr. Thoreau's writings, and have read through his THOREAU 869 six volumes in the order o£ their production. I shall try to give an adequate report of their impres- sion upon me both as critic and as mere reader. He seems to me to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without ques- tioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, he finds } none of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doing good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be of use was with him the most killing bait of the wily tempter Use- lessness. He had no faculty of generalization from outside of himself, or at least no experience which would supply the material of such, and he makes his own whim the law, his own range the hori- zon of the universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions he had never had the means of testing, and we recognize Ape- mantus behind the mask of Timon. He had little active imagination ; of the receptive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest quality ; his crit- ical power, from want of continuity of mind, very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superi- ority of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the historic evidence less convincing, the seiv 370 THOREAU timental melanclioly of those poems should be con- clusive of their modernness. He had none of the artistic mastery which controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression of a detached thought, senti- ment, or image. His works give one the feeling of a sky full of stars, — something impressive and exhilarating certainly, something high overhead and freckled thickly with spots of isolated bright- ness ; but whether these have any mutual rela- tion with each other, or have any concern with our mundane matters, is for the most part mat- ter of conjecture, — astrology as yet, and not as- tronomy. It is curious, considering what Thoreau after^ wards became, that he was not by nature an ob- server. He only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he did not know that the hick- ory grew in Concord. TiU he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discov- ery, though one should have thought that its gold- dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. He thought everything a discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his character, THOREAU 371 but one of his chief charms as a writer. Every- thing grows fresh under his hand. He delved in his mind and nature ; he planted them with all manner of native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not merely solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost per- suading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively his own. He complains in " Walden " that there is no one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental literature, though the man was living within two miles of his hut who had intro- duced him to it. This intellectual selfishness be- comes sometimes almost painful in reading him. He lacked that generosity of " communication " which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey teUs us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one else spoke of mountains, as if he had a pecu- liar property in them. And we can readily under- stand why it should be so : no one is satisfied with another's appreciation of his mistress. But Tho- reau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a remote one) not so much because it was good in itself as because he wished few to share it with him. It seems now and then as if he did not seek to lure others up " above our lower region of turmoil," but to leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the first climber. This itch of originality infects his thought and style. To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them. 372 THOREAU As we walk down Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Winship's dumb-bells, one of which bears an inscription testifying that it is the heaAriest ever put up at arm's length by any athlete ; and in read- ing Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling as if he sometimes invited our attention to a partic- ular sophism or paradox as the biggest yet main- tained by any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity of thought, and revives the age of concetti while he fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. "A day," he says, "passed in the society of those Greek sages, such as de- scribed in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry- vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." It is not so much the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extravagance of statement. He wishes always to trump your suit and to ruff when you least ex- pect it. Do you love Nature because she is beau- tiful ? He wiU find a better arg^ument in her ugli- ness. Are you tired of the artificial man? He instantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of his other- wise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply because he has not studied the pale-faced variety. This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot escape in thought, any more than he THOREAV 373 can in language, from the past and the present. As no one ever invents a word, and yet language somehow grows by general contribution and neces- sity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems to i me to insist in public on going back to flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket which he knows very weU how to use at a pinch. Originality consists in power of digesting and as- similating thoughts, so that they become part of our life and substance. Montaigne, for example, is one of the most original of authors, though he helped himself to ideas in every direction. But they turn to blood and coloring in his style, and give a freshness of complexion that is forever charming. In Thoreau much seems yet to be for- eign and unassimilated, showing itself in symptoms of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we now and then detect under the surly and stoic garb something of the sophist and the sentimentalizer. I am far from implying that this was conscious on his part. But it is much easier for a man to impose on himself when he measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by showing him how many fine qualities are common to the race. The radical vice of his theory of life was that he confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. A man is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their weak- nesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as ex- iled, if he refuse to share in their strength. " Soli- tude," says Cowley, "can be well fitted and set 874 THOREAU riglit but upon a very few persons. They must have enough knowledge of the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to despise all van- ity." It is a morbid self-consciousness that pro- nounces the world of men empty and worthless be- fore trying it, the instinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of it before any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind, the world is a con- ./ stant challenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have been so fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense of what the world was worth. They ordained a severe apprenticeship to law, and even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery over these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faithfulness with her were to win them at last the trUe bride of their souls. Active Life was with them the only path to the Contemplative. Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he ' was a sorry logician. Himself an artist in rheto- ric, he confounds thought with style when he un- dertakes to speak of the latter. He was forever talking of getting away from the world, but he must be always near enough to it, nay, to the Con- cord corner of it, to feel the impression he makes there. He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte- Beuve, " On touche encore a son temps et tres-fort, meme quand on le repousse." This egotism of his (B a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps THOREAU 375 him in the public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but therefore to hold one's self too sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent. There is something delightfully absurd in six vol- umes addressed to a world of such "vulgar fel- lows" as Thoreau affirmed his fellowmen to be. I once had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles be- yond all human communication, and there dwelt with his rifle as his only confidant. Compared _ with this, the shanty on Walden Pond has some- thing the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermi- tage of La Chevrette. I do not believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that of Self ; that of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man, like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as inevitably as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek to be natural implies a con- sciousness that forbids aU naturalness forever. It is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnaturalness always has its spring in a man's thinking too much about himself. " It is impossible," said Turgot, "for a vulgar man to be simple." I look upon a great deal of the modem senti- mentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver-complaint. To a man of wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough for a mood cr a vacation, but not 376 THOREAU for a habit of life. Those who have most loudly advertised their passion for seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, vmreal men, misan- thropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy sus- picion of themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They make demands on the world in advance proportioned to their inward measure of their own merit, and are angry that the world pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is true of Rousseau, the modem founder of the sect, true of Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive forest, and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. It is a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men in communities are just as true to the laws of their organization and destiny ; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but not the fool and the knave ; that would shun politics because of its dema^ gogues, and snufE up the stench of the obscene fun- gus. The divine life of Nature is more wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shake- speare gained it, or with one's own soul among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the most precious, of all. In outward nature it is still man that interests us, and we care far less for the things seen than the way in which they are seen by poetic THOREAU 377 eyes like Wordsworth's or Thoreau's, and the re- \ flections they cast there. To hear the to-do that i is often made over the simple fact that a man sees the image of himself in the outward world, one is reminded of a savage when he for the first time catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. "Venerable child of Nature," we are tempted to say, "to whose science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country for a shilling ! " If matters go on as they have done, and everybody must needs blab of all the favors that have been done him by roadside and river- brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss and teU were no longer treachery, it wiU be a positive re- freshment to meet a man who is as superbly indif- ferent to Nature as she is to him. By and by we shall have John Smith, of No. -12 -12th Street, advertising that he is not the J. S. who saw a cow- lily on Thursday last, as he never saw one in his life, would not see one if he could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day in question. Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau's character. On the contrary, his let- ters show him more cynical as he grew older. While he studied with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny of which his country was the scene, and on which 378 THOREA U the curtain had already risen. He was converting us back to a state of nature " so eloquently," as Voltaire said of Rousseau, " that he almost per- suaded us to go on all fours," while the wiser fates were making it possible for us to walk erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with his fel- lows, his sympathies would have widened with the assurance that his peculiar genius had more appre- ciation, and his writings a larger circle of readers, or at least a warmer one, than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony^ to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper, and in his books an equally irrefragable one to the rare quality of his mind. He was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has fallen everywhere in which he seems to come on the track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. We think greater compression would have done more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so much. Trifles are recorded with an over-minute punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. He registers the state of his personal thermometer thir- teen times a day. We cannot help thinking some- times of the man who "Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats To learn but cateohisms and alphabets Of unconceming things, matters of fact," and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet; ' Mr. EmersoDi in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the Excursions. THOREAU 379 that "when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole." We could readily part with some of his affectations. It was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all, " When I was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy " ; not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into " When I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria." A naive thing said over again is anything but naive. But with every exception, there is no writing com- parable with Thoreau's in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best ; where it disen- gages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds. George Sand says neatly, that "Art is not a study of positive reality," (actuality were the fitter word,) " but a seeking after ideal truth." It would be doing very inadequate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faith- fully every trip over a root, if he botanize some- what wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting crag, and brings us out ! at last into an illimitable ether, where the breath- ing is not difficult for those who have any true touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception 380 THOREAV of it goes, as an entire independency o£ mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Tho- reau's experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically ab- jured. He squatted on another man's land; he borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful one, in the direction of " plain living and high thinking." It was a practical sermon on Emerson's text that " things are in the saddle and ride mankind," an attempt to solve Carlyle's prob- lem (condensed from Johnson) of " lessening your denominator." His whole life was a rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry uphol- stery. He had " fine translunary things " in him. His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days ; his literature was extensive and recondite ; his quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore: there are sentences of his as per- fect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized ; his metaphors and images are •Iways fresh from the soil ; he had watched Nature THOREA U 881 like a detective who is to go upon the stand ; as we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had. kept a diary and become its own Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass ; compared with his, all other books of simi- lar aim, even White's " Selborne," seem dry as a country clergyman's meteorological journal in an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class who are pecu- liar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought- seed like ferns.