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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters on Literature by Andrew Lang
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+Letters on Literature
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+by Andrew Lang
+
+July, 1998  [Etext #1395]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters on Literature by Andrew Lang
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+This etext was prepared from the 1892 Longmans, Green and Co.
+edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+Letters on Literature
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+Introductory:  Of Modern English Poetry
+Of Modern English Poetry
+Fielding
+Longfellow
+A Friend of Keats
+On Virgil
+Aucassin and Nicolette
+Plotinus (A.D. 200-262)
+Lucretius
+To a Young American Book-Hunter
+Rochefoucauld
+Of Vers de Societe
+On Vers de Societe
+Richardson
+Gerard de Nerval
+On Books About Red Men
+Appendix I
+Appendix II
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+
+
+Dear Mr. Way,
+
+After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a
+short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen
+him, and only know him by his many kindnesses?  Perhaps you will add
+another to these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a
+sort experimental in English, and in prose, though Horace--in Latin
+and in verse--was successful with it long ago?
+
+Very sincerely yours,
+
+A. LANG.
+
+To W. J. Way, Esq.
+Topeka, Kansas.
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+These Letters were originally published in the Independent of New
+York.  The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had
+produced "Letters to Dead Authors."  That kind of Epistle was open
+to the objection that nobody would write so frankly to a
+correspondent about his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of
+Letters might be attempted again.  The Lettres e Emilie sur la
+Mythologie are a well-known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary
+correspondent.  The persons addressed here, on the other hand, are
+all people of fancy--the name of Lady Violet Lebas is an invention
+of Mr. Thackeray's:  gifted Hopkins is the minor poet in Dr. Oliver
+Wendell Holmes's "Guardian Angel."  The author's object has been to
+discuss a few literary topics with more freedom and personal bias
+than might be permitted in a graver kind of essay.  The Letter on
+Samuel Richardson is by a lady more frequently the author's critic
+than his collaborator.
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY:  OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY
+
+
+
+To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.
+
+Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the
+setting sun," with the flattering information that you have read my
+poor "Letters to Dead Authors."  You are kind enough to say that you
+wish I would write some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I
+fear, is out of the question,--for me.
+
+A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has already remarked that the
+great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if
+they could read them.  Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write
+till they can spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as
+incapable as was Matt's little Mistress of Quality.  But Living
+Authors are very different people, and it would be perilous, as well
+as impertinent, to direct one's comments on them literally, in the
+French phrase, "to their address."  Yet there is no reason why a
+critic should not adopt the epistolary form.
+
+Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator, were
+originally nothing but letters.  The vehicle permits a touch of
+personal taste, perhaps of personal prejudice.  So I shall write my
+"Letters on Literature," of the present and of the past, English,
+American, ancient, or modern, to you, in your distant Kansas, or to
+such other correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.
+
+Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions.  Poor Poetry!
+She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at
+banquets, though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and
+younger Muse, the lady of fiction, or even the chattering soubrette
+of journalism.  Seniores priores:  Poetry, if no longer very
+popular, is a dame of the worthiest lineage, and can boast a long
+train of gallant admirers, dead and gone.  She has been much in
+courts.  The old Greek tyrants loved her; great Rhamses seated her
+at his right hand; every prince had his singers.  Now we dwell in an
+age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned respect, more out of
+courtesy, and for old friendship's sake, than for liking.  Though so
+many write verse, as in Juvenal's time, I doubt if many read it.
+"None but minstrels list of sonneting."  The purchasing public, for
+poetry, must now consist chiefly of poets, and they are usually
+poor.
+
+Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the
+birth of so many poetical "societies"?  We have the Browning
+Society, the Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the
+Wordsworth Society--lately dead.  They all demonstrate that people
+have not the courage to study verse in solitude, and for their
+proper pleasure; men and women need confederates in this adventure.
+There is safety in numbers, and, by dint of tea-parties,
+recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr. Furnivall and
+his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of Apollo.
+They cannot raise a flame!
+
+In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable
+poets, and very little new poetry worthy of the name.  The chief
+singers have outlived, if not their genius, at all events its
+flowering time.  Hard it is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by
+our very nature, to prefer "the newest songs," as Odysseus says men
+did even during the war of Troy.  Or, following another ancient
+example, we say, like the rich niggards who neglected Theocritus,
+"Homer is enough for all."
+
+Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as
+dispassionately as we can, we still seem to read the name of
+Tennyson in the golden book of English poetry.  I cannot think that
+he will ever fall to a lower place, or be among those whom only
+curious students pore over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the
+rest.  Lovers of poetry will always read him as they will read
+Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer.  Look his defects
+in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they disappear
+before his merits!  He is the last and youngest of the mighty race,
+born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler
+generation.
+
+Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a
+touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional
+perversity, a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets ("windy" and
+"happy").  There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in
+his earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt.  You detect it in
+pieces like "Lilian" and "Eleanore," and the others of that kind and
+of that date.
+
+Let it be admitted that "In Memoriam" has certain lapses in all that
+meed of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might
+deserve (here is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some
+maiden's locks, that there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet
+now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing "because it must," now
+dares to approach questions insoluble, and again declines their
+solution.  What is all this but the changeful mood of grief?  The
+singing linnet, like the bird in the old English heathen apologue,
+dashes its light wings painfully against the walls of the chamber
+into which it has flown out of the blind night that shall again
+receive it.
+
+I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain
+of sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated
+regrets.  It is an easier if not more grateful task to note a
+certain peevish egotism of tone in the heroes of "Locksley Hall," of
+"Maud," of "Lady Clara Vere de Vere."  "You can't think how poor a
+figure you make when you tell that story, sir," said Dr. Johnson to
+some unlucky gentleman whose "figure" must certainly have been more
+respectable than that which is cut by these whining and peevish
+lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.
+
+Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like
+an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a
+wife, and a Lancelot for friend.  The "Idylls," with all their
+beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of
+talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable.  One wishes,
+at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had remained a lonely and
+flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as Sophocles.  But
+then we must have missed, with many other admirable things, the
+"Last Battle in the West."
+
+People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the
+Laureate's versatility.  He has touched so many strings, from "Will
+Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of
+"Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the
+fairy music of the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram
+which inspires the lines to Catullus and to Virgil.  He is with
+Milton for learning, with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil
+for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines, and, even in the
+latest volume of his long life, "we may tell from the straw," as
+Homer says, "what the grain has been."
+
+There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning
+as the greatest of living English poets.  For him, too, one is
+thankful as for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that
+impartial posterity will rate him with the Laureate, or that so
+large a proportion of his work will endure?  The charm of an enigma
+now attracts students who feel proud of being able to understand
+what others find obscure.  But this attraction must inevitably
+become a stumbling-block.
+
+Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer
+is that he often could not help himself.  His darkest poems may be
+made out by a person of average intelligence who will read them as
+hard as, for example, he would find it necessary to read the "Logic"
+of Hegel.  There is a story of two clever girls who set out to
+peruse "Sordello," and corresponded with each other about their
+progress.  "Somebody is dead in 'Sordello,'" one of them wrote to
+her friend.  "I don't quite know who it is, but it must make things
+a little clearer in the long run."  Alas! a copious use of the
+guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of "Sordello."  It is
+hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton Night Cap
+Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by
+posterity.  But the mass of "Men and Women," that unexampled gallery
+of portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests,
+prigs, princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive
+immortally, while civilization and literature last, while men care
+to know what is in men.
+
+No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of
+style, can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like
+them in the letters of the past, and must remain without successful
+imitators in the future.  They will last all the better for a
+certain manliness of religious faith--something sturdy and assured--
+not moved by winds of doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is
+certainly one of Mr. Browning's attractions in this fickle and
+shifting generation.  He cannot be forgotten while, as he says -
+
+
+"A sunset touch,
+A chorus ending of Euripides,"
+
+
+remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a
+thousand hopes and fears."
+
+If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise
+most that which best fits one's private moods, I suppose I should
+place Mr. Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets.
+Reason and reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one
+that he is not quite there.
+
+Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his
+versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness.  He had not
+the microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts,
+which tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the
+very heart from the victim.  We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's
+poetry has our love; his lines murmur in our memory through all the
+stress and accidents of life.  "The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann,"
+"Switzerland," the melancholy majesty of the close of "Sohrab and
+Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred graves
+beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and thunder
+of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;"
+these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest
+hour when life herself ceases to "moan round with many voices."
+
+My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too
+didactic, that he protests too much, and considers too curiously,
+that his best poems are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable
+thoughts."  It may be so; but he carries us back to "wet, bird-
+haunted English lawns;" like him "we know what white and purple
+fritillaries the grassy harvest of the river yields," with him we
+try to practise resignation, and to give ourselves over to that
+spirit
+
+
+"Whose purpose is not missed,
+While life endures, while things subsist."
+
+
+Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his
+generation.  He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when
+nature does for him what his "lutin" did for Corneille, "takes the
+pen from his hand and writes for him."  But he has none of the
+creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey."
+He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets.  He
+can give a natural and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient
+imaginings, as to "these bright and ancient snakes, that once were
+Cadmus and Harmonia."
+
+Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to
+us "breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians."  But even
+the Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and
+Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that
+beautiful song in "Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of
+sculpture and the charm of the purest colour.  It is full of the
+silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of the loch's
+dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the heather, and
+the wet tresses of the birch.
+
+Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the
+fountains of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a
+clogged and stony channel.  And who is there to succeed the two who
+are gone, or who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent?  That
+is a melancholy question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt
+and dread enough) in my next letter. {1}
+
+
+
+OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY
+
+
+
+My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an
+American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented.  The
+singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put
+forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapaest or trochee,
+or whatever it may be.  My information goes further, and declares
+that there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired
+Americans.
+
+This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very
+dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day.
+Eighteen is long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden,
+in "Old Mortality," tells us that three to one are odds as long as
+ever any warrior met victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal
+Raddlebanes.
+
+I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the
+eighteen of England or the sixty of the States.  It is enough to
+speak about three living poets, in addition to those masters treated
+of in my last letter.  Two of the three you will have guessed at--
+Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William Morris.  The third, I dare say, you do
+not know even by name.  I think he is not one of the English
+eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges.  His muse has followed the epicurean
+maxim, and chosen the shadowy path, fallentis semita vitae, where
+the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan berries droop
+in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort.  But you will find her
+all the fresher for her country ways.
+
+My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far
+away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence.  I
+remember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St.
+Andrews, looking across the bay to the sunset, while some one
+repeated "Two Red Roses across the Moon."  And I remember thinking
+that the poem was nonsense.  With Mr. Morris's other early verses,
+"The Defence of Guinevere," this song of the moon and the roses was
+published in 1858.  Probably the little book won no attention; it is
+not popular even now.  Yet the lyrics remain in memories which
+forget all but a general impression of the vast "Earthly Paradise,"
+that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men,
+and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palaces are all
+mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the
+wind of death.  They are not living and breathing people, these
+persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint,
+and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons.  But the
+characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere" are people of
+flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the
+trappings of their tabards.
+
+There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris's old
+Oxford days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him,
+with all its contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest
+desire to enjoy this life to the full in war and love, or to make
+certain of a future in which war is not, and all love is pure
+heavenly.  If one were to choose favourites from "The Defence of
+Guinevere," they would be the ballads of "Shameful Death," and of
+"The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind," which has the wind's
+wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of "Porphyria's Lover" in
+its burden.
+
+The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and
+happy.  The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the
+scarlet roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make
+the poem a vivid picture.  Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-
+rover, the slayer of his lady, in "The Wind":
+
+
+"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind
+It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the
+wind;
+On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;
+If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,
+And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar,
+And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war."
+
+
+"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some
+drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic
+manner.  Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-
+60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were
+undergraduates.  Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire
+these strange things, though "The Haystack in the Floods," with its
+tragedy, must surely appeal to all who read poetry.
+
+For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr.
+Morris's long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were
+less art than "art manufacture."  This may be an ungrateful and
+erroneous sentiment.  "The Earthly Paradise," and still more
+certainly "Jason," are full of such pleasure as only poetry can
+give.  As some one said of a contemporary politician, they are
+"good, but copious."  Even from narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long
+abstained.  He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold's parable of
+"The Progress of Poetry."
+
+
+"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."
+
+
+Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title
+seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne.  Probably few readers had
+heard his name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange
+mediaeval tale in prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in
+1865.  I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford
+Union, and being instantly led captive by the beauty and originality
+of the verse.
+
+There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem:  the writer
+seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue
+cold fields and folds of air," in all the primitive forces which
+were alive before this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle
+the planets and farthest constellations.  This quality, and his
+varied and sonorous verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of
+a Greek chorus, were the things that struck one most in Mr.
+Swinburne.  He was, above all, "a mighty-mouthed inventer of
+harmonies," and one looked eagerly for his next poems.  They came
+with disappointment and trouble.
+
+The famous "Poems and Ballads" have become so well known that people
+can hardly understand the noise they made.  I don't wonder at the
+scandal, even now.  I don't see the fun of several of the pieces,
+except the mischievous fun of shocking your audience.  However, "The
+Leper" and his company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable
+sense of the word.  They do not destroy the imperishable merit of
+the "Hymn to Proserpine" and the "Garden of Proserpine" and the
+"Triumph of Time" and "Itylus."
+
+Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one's old opinion, that
+English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and
+sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very
+young, remains an opinion unshaken.  Twenty years ago, then, he had
+enabled the world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true
+poet; he was learned too in literature as few poets have been since
+Milton, and, like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of
+the ancient world and in modern tongues.  His French songs and Greek
+elegiacs are of great excellence; probably no scholar who was not
+also a poet could match his Greek lines on Landor.
+
+What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even
+higher than that which he occupies?  Who can tell?  There is no
+science that can master this chemistry of the brain.  He is too
+copious.  "Bothwell" is long enough for six plays, and "Tristram of
+Lyonesse" is prolix beyond even mediaeval narrative.  He is too
+pertinacious; children are the joy of the world and Victor Hugo is a
+great poet; but Mr. Swinburne almost makes us excuse Herod and
+Napoleon III. by his endless odes to Hugo, and rondels to small boys
+and girls.  Ne quid nimis, that is the golden rule which he
+constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, too emphatic, and as fond of
+repeating himself as Professor Freeman.  Such are the defects of so
+noble a genius; thus perverse Nature has decided that it shall be,
+Nature which makes no ruby without a flaw.
+
+The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strange to many lovers of
+poetry who would like nothing better than to make acquaintance with
+his verse.  But his verse is not so easily found.  This poet never
+writes in magazines; his books have not appealed to the public by
+any sort of advertisement, only two or three of them have come forth
+in the regular way.  The first was "Poems, by Robert Bridges,
+Batchelor of Arts in the University of Oxford.  Parva seges satis
+est.  London:  Pickering, 1873."
+
+This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, and the author has
+distributed some portions of it in succeeding pamphlets, or in books
+printed at Mr. Daniel's private press in Oxford.  In these, as in
+all Mr. Bridges's poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent
+beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and
+the earlier lyrists.  I remember being greatly pleased with the
+"Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the Death of Her Betrothed Killed."
+
+
+"Let the priests go before, arrayed in white,
+And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slow
+Next they that bear her, honoured on this night,
+And then the maidens in a double row,
+Each singing soft and low,
+And each on high a torch upstaying:
+Unto her lover lead her forth with light,
+With music and with singing, and with praying."
+
+
+This is a stately stanza.
+
+In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeaux and triolets,
+turning his back on all these things as soon as they became popular.
+In spite of their popularity I have the audacity to like them still,
+in their humble twittering way.  Much more in his true vein were the
+lines, "Clear and Gentle Stream," and all the other verses in which,
+like a true Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames:
+
+
+"There is a hill beside the silver Thames,
+Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,
+And brilliant under foot with thousand gems
+Steeply the thickets to his floods decline.
+Straight trees in every place
+Their thick tops interlace,
+And pendent branches trail their foliage fine
+Upon his watery face.
+
+* * *
+
+A reedy island guards the sacred bower
+And hides it from the meadow, where in peace
+The lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,
+Robbing the golden market of the bees.
+And laden branches float
+By banks of myosote;
+And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lys
+Delay the loitering boat."
+
+
+I cannot say how often I have read that poem, and how delightfully
+it carries the breath of our River through the London smoke.  Nor
+less welcome are the two poems on spring, the "Invitation to the
+Country," and the "Reply."  In these, besides their verbal beauty
+and their charming pictures, is a manly philosophy of Life, which
+animates Mr. Bridges's more important pieces--his "Prometheus the
+Firebringer," and his "Nero," a tragedy remarkable for the
+representation of Nero himself, the luxurious human tiger.  From
+"Prometheus" I make a short extract, to show the quality of Mr.
+Bridges's blank verse:
+
+
+"Nor is there any spirit on earth astir,
+Nor 'neath the airy vault, nor yet beyond
+In any dweller in far-reaching space
+Nobler or dearer than the spirit of man:
+That spirit which lives in each and will not die,
+That wooeth beauty, and for all good things
+Urgeth a voice, or still in passion sigheth,
+And where he loveth, draweth the heart with him."
+
+
+Mr. Bridges's latest book is his "Eros and Psyche" (Bell & Sons, who
+publish the "Prometheus").  It is the old story very closely
+followed, and beautifully retold, with a hundred memories of ancient
+poets:  Homer, Dante, Theocritus, as well as of Apuleius.
+
+I have named Mr. Bridges here because his poems are probably all but
+unknown to readers well acquainted with many other English writers
+of late days.  On them, especially on actual contemporaries or
+juniors in age, it would be almost impertinent for me to speak to
+you; but, even at that risk, I take the chance of directing you to
+the poetry of Mr. Bridges.  I owe so much pleasure to its delicate
+air, that, if speech be impertinence, silence were ingratitude. {2}
+
+
+
+FIELDING
+
+
+
+To Mrs. Goodhart, in the Upper Mississippi Valley.
+
+Dear Madam,--Many thanks for the New York newspaper you have kindly
+sent me, with the statistics of book-buying in the Upper Mississippi
+Valley.  Those are interesting particulars which tell one so much
+about the taste of a community.
+
+So the Rev. E. P. Roe is your favourite novelist there; a thousand
+of his books are sold for every two copies of the works of Henry
+Fielding?  This appears to me to speak but oddly for taste in the
+Upper Mississippi Valley.  On Mr. Roe's works I have no criticism to
+pass, for I have not read them carefully.
+
+But I do think your neighbours lose a great deal by neglecting Henry
+Fielding.  You will tell me he is coarse (which I cannot deny); you
+will remind me of what Dr. Johnson said, rebuking Mrs. Hannah More.
+"I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once," writes that
+sainted maiden lady.  "I alluded to some witty passage in 'Tom
+Jones.'"  He replied:  "I am shocked to hear you quote from so
+vicious a book.  I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confession
+which no modest lady should ever make."
+
+You remind me of this, and that Johnson was no prude, and that his
+age was tolerant.  You add that the literary taste of the Upper
+Mississippi Valley is much more pure than the waters of her majestic
+river, and that you only wish you knew who the two culprits were
+that bought books of Fielding's.
+
+Ah, madam, how shall I answer you?  Remember that if you have
+Johnson on your side, on mine I have Mrs. More herself, a character
+purer than "the consecrated snow that lies on Dian's lap."  Again,
+we cannot believe Johnson was fair to Fielding, who had made his
+friend, the author of "Pamela," very uncomfortable by his jests.
+Johnson owned that he read all "Amelia" at one sitting.  Could so
+worthy a man have been so absorbed by an unworthy book?
+
+Once more, I am not recommending Fielding to boys and girls.  "Tom
+Jones" was one of the works that Lydia Languish hid under the sofa;
+even Miss Languish did not care to be caught with that humorous
+foundling.  "Fielding was the last of our writers who drew a man,"
+Mr. Thackeray said, "and he certainly did not study from a draped
+model."
+
+For these reasons, and because his language is often unpolished, and
+because his morality (that he is always preaching) is not for "those
+that eddy round and round," I do not desire to see Fielding popular
+among Miss Alcott's readers.  But no man who cares for books can
+neglect him, and many women are quite manly enough, have good sense
+and good taste enough, to benefit by "Amelia," by much of "Tom
+Jones."  I don't say by "Joseph Andrews."  No man ever respected
+your sex more than Henry Fielding.  What says his reformed rake, Mr.
+Wilson, in "Joseph Andrews"?
+
+"To say the Truth, I do not perceive that Inferiority of
+Understanding which the Levity of Rakes, the Dulness of Men of
+Business, and the Austerity of the Learned would persuade us of in
+Women.  As for my Wife, I declare I have found none of my own Sex
+capable of making juster Observations on Life, or of delivering them
+more agreeably, nor do I believe any one possessed of a faithfuller
+or braver Friend."
+
+He has no other voice wherein to speak of a happy marriage.  Can you
+find among our genteel writers of this age, a figure more beautiful,
+tender, devoted, and in all good ways womanly than Sophia Western's?
+"Yes," you will say; "but the man must have been a brute who could
+give her to Tom Jones, to 'that fellow who sold himself,' as Colonel
+Newcome said."  "There you have me at an avail," in the language of
+the old romancers.  There we touch the centre of Fielding's
+morality, a subject ill to discuss, a morality not for everyday
+preaching.
+
+Fielding distinctly takes himself for a moralist.  He preaches as
+continually as Thackeray.  And his moral is this:  "Let a man be
+kind, generous, charitable, tolerant, brave, honest--and we may
+pardon him vices of young blood, and the stains of adventurous
+living."  Fielding has no mercy on a seducer.  Lovelace would have
+fared worse with him than with Richardson, who, I verily believe,
+admired that infernal (excuse me) coward and villain.  The case of
+young Nightingale, in "Tom Jones," will show you what Fielding
+thought of such gallants.  Why, Tom himself preaches to Nightingale.
+"Miss Nancy's Interest alone, and not yours, ought to be your sole
+Consideration," cried Thomas, . . . "and the very best and truest
+Honour, which is Goodness, requires it of you," that is, requires
+that Nightingale shall marry Miss Nancy.
+
+How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which were perfectly
+honest, with his own astonishing lack of retenue, and with Lady
+Bellaston, is just the puzzle.  We cannot very well argue about it.
+I only ask you to let Jones in his right mind partly excuse Jones in
+a number of very delicate situations.  If you ask me whether Sophia
+had not, after her marriage, to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I
+must admit that probably it was so.  But Dr. Johnson himself thought
+little of that.
+
+I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding's morality is to
+take the best of it and leave the remainder alone.  Here I find that
+I have unconsciously agreed with that well-known philosopher, Mr.
+James Boswell, the younger, of Auchinleck:
+
+"The moral tendency of Fielding's writings . . . is ever favourable
+to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous
+affections.  He who is as good as Fielding would make him is an
+amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated
+instructions to a higher state of ethical perfection."
+
+Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his
+oddity, as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones's faults, and
+what a world of men and women it will become!  Fielding did not
+paint that unborn world, he sketched the world he knew very well.
+He found that respectable people were often perfectly blind to the
+duties of charity in every sense of the word.  He found that the
+only man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped
+and beaten by robbers was a postilion with defects in his moral
+character.  In short, he knew that respectability often practised
+none but the strictly self-regarding virtues, and that poverty and
+recklessness did not always extinguish a native goodness of heart.
+Perhaps this discovery made him leniently disposed to "characters
+and situations so wretchedly low and dirty, that I," say the author
+of "Pamela," "could not be interested for any one of them."
+
+How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding!  How jealousy,
+spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not
+taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of "those
+deplorably tedious lamentations, 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles
+Grandison,'" as Horace Walpole calls them!
+
+Fielding asks his Muse to give him "humour and good humour."  What
+novelist was ever so rich in both?  Who ever laughed at mankind with
+so much affection for mankind in his heart?  This love shines in
+every book of his.  The poor have all his good-will, and in him an
+untired advocate and friend.  What a life the poor led in the
+England of 1742!  There never before was such tyranny without a
+servile insurrection.  I remember a dreadful passage in "Joseph
+Andrews," where Lady Booby is trying to have Fanny, Joseph's
+sweetheart, locked up in prison:-
+
+"It would do a Man good," says her accomplice, Scout, "to see his
+Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to Bridewell; he takes so much
+pleasure in it.  And when once we ha' 'um there, we seldom hear any
+more o' 'um.  He's either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month's
+Time."
+
+This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like
+robber barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to
+turn from some of its ways.  I seriously do believe that, with all
+its faults, it was a better place, with a better breed of men, than
+our England of to-day.  But Fielding satirized intolerable
+injustice.
+
+He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer.  If we are to have
+nothing but "Art for Art's sake," that burly body of Harry
+Fielding's must even go to the wall.  The first Beau Didapper of a
+critic that passes can shove him aside.  He preaches like Thackeray;
+he writes "with a purpose" like Dickens--obsolete old authors.  His
+cause is judged, and into Bridewell he goes, if l'Art pour l'Art is
+all the literary law and the prophets.
+
+But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long.  His noble English, his
+sonorous voice must be heard.  There is somewhat inexpressibly
+heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding.  One seems to be
+carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting
+one's self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of
+comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water.  He
+is a scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding
+has his innocent pedantry.  He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting
+Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set
+it up correctly.  He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a
+piece of Aristotle--not hackneyed--to show you that if he is writing
+about "characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty," he is
+yet a student and a critic.
+
+Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to
+Johnson, was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth's
+conversations with the author who remarked that "Perhaps Mr. Pope
+followed the French Translations.  I observe, indeed, he talks much
+in the Notes of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius."  What knew
+Samuel of Eustathius?  I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry;
+I like it!  I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little
+pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him
+nearer to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him
+but in his faults.  They make him more human; one loves him for them
+as he loves Squire Western, with all his failings.  Delightful,
+immortal Squire!
+
+It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out "Hurray
+for old England!  Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in
+Sussex."  But it was Western that talked of "One Acton, that the
+Story Book says was turned into a Hare, and his own Dogs kill'd 'un,
+and eat 'un."  And have you forgotten the popular discussion (during
+the Forty-five) of the affairs of the Nation, which, as Squire
+Western said, "all of us understand"?  Said the Puppet-Man, "I don't
+care what Religion comes, provided the Presbyterians are not
+uppermost, for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows."  But the Puppet-
+Man had no vote in 1745.  Now, to our comfort, he can and does
+exercise the glorious privilege of the franchise.
+
+There is no room in this epistle for Fielding's glorious gallery of
+characters--for Lady Bellaston, who remains a lady in her
+debaucheries, and is therefore so unlike our modern representative
+of her class, Lady Betty, in Miss Broughton's "Doctor Cupid;" for
+Square, and Thwackum, and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady
+Booby, and Honour, that undying lady's maid, and Partridge, and
+Captain Blifil and Amelia, the fair and kind and good!
+
+It is like the whole world of that old England--the maids of the
+Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns,
+the beaux, the starveling authors--all alive; all (save the authors)
+full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a
+brotherly bout at fisticuffs.  What has become of it, the lusty old
+militant world?  What will become of us, and why do we prefer to
+Fielding--a number of meritorious moderns?  Who knows?  But do not
+let us prefer anything to our English follower of Cervantes, our
+wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, like Don
+Quixote on the paths of Spain.
+
+But I cannot convert you.  You will turn to some story about store-
+clerks and summer visitors.  Such is his fate who argues with the
+fair.
+
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+
+
+To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.
+
+My dear Mainwaring,--You are very good to ask me to come up and
+listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the
+minor characters in "Sordello;" but I think it would suit me better,
+if you didn't mind, to come up when the May races are on.  I am not
+deeply concerned about the minor characters in "Sordello," and have
+long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through
+this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello's story told in an
+intelligible manner.  Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about
+my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.
+
+What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could
+remember, and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books
+have made on him at different ages!  There is Longfellow, for
+example.  I have not read much in him for twenty years.  I take him
+up to-day, and what a flood of memories his music brings with it!
+To me it is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing
+over the empty fields, bringing the scents of October, the song of a
+belated bird, and here and there a red leaf from the tree.  There is
+that autumnal sense of things fair and far behind, in his poetry,
+or, if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges
+of the past.  Yes, it comes to one out of one's boyhood; it breathes
+of a world very vaguely realized--a world of imitative sentiments
+and forebodings of hours to come.  Perhaps Longfellow first woke me
+to that later sense of what poetry means, which comes with early
+manhood.
+
+Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his
+battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border.  Longfellow had a
+touch of reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in
+a boy's favourites, such as "Of Nelson and the North," or "Ye
+Mariners of England."
+
+His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were
+neither when one was fifteen.  To read the "Voices of the Night," in
+particular--those early pieces--is to be back at school again, on a
+Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with
+a wide prospect of gardens and fields.
+
+There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one
+first found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more
+richly and fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson.  Take, for
+example,
+
+
+"The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
+The best-beloved Night!"
+
+
+Is not that version of Euripides exquisite--does it not seem
+exquisite still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly
+from Longfellow, though you rather look to him for honest human
+matter than for an indefinable beauty of manner?
+
+I believe it is the manner, after all, of the "Psalm of Life" that
+has made it so strangely popular.  People tell us, excellent people,
+that it is "as good as a sermon," that they value it for this
+reason, that its lesson has strengthened the hearts of men in our
+difficult life.  They say so, and they think so:  but the poem is
+not nearly as good as a sermon; it is not even coherent.  But it
+really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes;
+and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that
+they are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the
+"Psalms of Life" a masterpiece.  You--my learned prosodist and
+student of Browning and Shelley--will agree with me that it is not a
+masterpiece.  But I doubt if you have enough of the experience
+brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders
+can.
+
+How many other poems of Longfellow's there are that remind us of
+youth, and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us when
+we read "The Reaper and the Flowers"!  I read again, and, as the
+poet says,
+
+
+"Then the forms of the departed
+Enter at the open door,
+The beloved, the true-hearted
+Come to visit me once more."
+
+
+Compare that simple strain, you lover of Theophile Gautier, with
+Theo's own "Chateau de Souvenir" in "Emaux et Camees," and confess
+the truth, which poet brings the break into the reader's voice?  It
+is not the dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it
+is the simpler speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a
+ballad moves you.  I find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one's
+old self of the old years.  I don't know a poem "of the affections,"
+as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that I like better than
+Thackeray's "Cane-bottomed Chair."  Well, "The Fire of Driftwood"
+and this other of Longfellow's with its absolute lack of pretence,
+its artful avoidance of art, is not less tender and true.
+
+
+"And she sits and gazes at me
+With those deep and tender eyes,
+Like the stars, so still and saintlike,
+Looking downward from the skies."
+
+
+It is from the skies that they look down, those eyes which once read
+the "Voices of the Night" from the same book with us, how long ago!
+So long ago that one was half-frightened by the legend of the
+"Beleaguered City."  I know the ballad brought the scene to me so
+vividly that I expected, any frosty night, to see how
+
+
+"The white pavilions rose and fell
+On the alarmed air;"
+
+
+and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark "Three
+Brethren's Cairn," that I half-hoped to watch when "the troubled
+army fled"--fled with battered banners of mist drifting through the
+pines, down to the Tweed and the sea.  The "Skeleton in Armour"
+comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the "Wreck of the
+Hesperus" touches one in the old, simple way after so many, many
+days of verse-reading and even verse-writing.
+
+In brief, Longfellow's qualities are so mixed with what the reader
+brings, with so many kindliest associations of memory, that one
+cannot easily criticize him in cold blood.  Even in spite of this
+friendliness and affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, of
+course, that he does moralize too much.  The first part of his
+lyrics is always the best; the part where he is dealing directly
+with his subject.  Then comes the "practical application" as
+preachers say, and I feel now that it is sometimes uncalled for,
+disenchanting, and even manufactured.
+
+Look at his "Endymion."  It is the earlier verses that win you:
+
+
+"And silver white the river gleams
+As if Diana in her dreams
+Had dropt her silver bow
+Upon the meadows low."
+
+
+That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter.
+But the moral and consolatory application is too long--too much
+dwelt on:
+
+
+"Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
+Love gives itself, but is not bought."
+
+
+Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close,
+and not only does the poet "moralize his song," but the moral is
+feeble, and fantastic, and untrue.  There are, though he denies it,
+myriads of persons now of whom it cannot be said that
+
+
+"Some heart, though unknown,
+Responds unto his own."
+
+
+If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.
+
+A poem like "My Lost Youth" is needed to remind one of what the
+author really was, "simple, sensuous, passionate."  What a lovely
+verse this is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath of
+Longfellow's favourite Finnish "Kalevala," "a verse of a Lapland
+song," like a wind over pines and salt coasts:
+
+
+"I remember the black wharves and the slips,
+And the sea-tide, tossing free,
+And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
+And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,
+And the magic of the sea."
+
+
+Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of
+language--not a Keats by any means--has often, by sheer force of
+plain sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his
+thought with music that haunts us and will not be forgotten:
+
+
+"Ye open the eastern windows,
+That look towards the sun,
+Where thoughts are singing swallows,
+And the brooks of morning run."
+
+
+There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli's, the Virgin seated with
+the Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn in
+Paradise.  This poem of Longfellow's, "The Children's Hour," seems,
+like Botticelli's painting, to open a door into the paradise of
+children, where their angels do ever behold that which is hidden
+from men--what no man hath seen at any time.
+
+Longfellow is exactly the antithesis of Poe, who, with all his
+science of verse and ghostly skill, has no humanity, or puts none of
+it into his lines.  One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the
+other is the poet of Death, and of bizarre shapes of death, from
+which Heaven deliver us!
+
+Neither of them shows any sign of being particularly American,
+though Longfellow, in "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha," and the "New
+England Tragedies," sought his topics in the history and traditions
+of the New World.
+
+To me "Hiawatha" seems by far the best of his longer efforts; it is
+quite full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, birds,
+weather, and wind and snow.  Everything lives with a human breath,
+as everything should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk,
+to whom all the world, and all in it, is personal as themselves.  Of
+course there are lapses of style in so long a piece.  It jars on us
+in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian
+Eleusinia, to be told that
+
+
+"the gentle Chibiabos
+Sang in tones of deep emotion!"
+
+
+"Tones of deep emotion" may pass in a novel, but not in this epic of
+the wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy
+record of those dim, mournful races which have left no story of
+their own, only here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the forest
+leaves.
+
+A poet's life is no affair, perhaps, of ours.  Who does not wish he
+knew as little of Burn's as of Shakespeare's?  Of Longfellow's there
+is nothing to know but good, and his poetry testifies to it--his
+poetry, the voice of the kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever
+bore.  I think there are not many things in poets' lives more
+touching than his silence, in verse, as to his own chief sorrow.  A
+stranger intermeddles not with it, and he kept secret his brief lay
+on that insuperable and incommunicable regret.  Much would have been
+lost had all poets been as reticent, yet one likes him better for it
+than if he had given us a new "Vita Nuova."
+
+What an immense long way I have wandered from "Sordello," my dear
+Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like
+those of a boy, "are long, long thoughts."  I have not written on
+Longfellow's sonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admit that
+you admire them as much as I do.
+
+
+
+A FRIEND OF KEATS
+
+
+
+To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.
+
+Dear Egerton,--Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin's new "Life of
+Keats" {3} has only one fault, it's too short.  Perhaps, also, it is
+almost too studiously free from enthusiasm.  But when one considers
+how Keats (like Shelley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is
+to gush about Keats, one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example
+of reserve.  What a good fellow Keats was!  How really manly and, in
+the best sense, moral he seems, when one compares his life and his
+letters with the vagaries of contemporary poets who lived longer
+than he, though they, too, died young, and who left more work,
+though not better, never so good, perhaps, as Keats's best.
+
+However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his
+friend, John Hamilton Reynolds.  Noscitur a sociis--a man is known
+by the company he keeps.  Reynolds, I think, must have been
+excellent company, if we may judge him by his writings.  He comes
+into Lord Houghton's "Life and Letters of Keats" very early (vol. i.
+p. 30).  We find the poet writing to him in the April of 1817, from
+the Isle of Wight.  "I shall forthwith begin my 'Endymion,' which I
+hope I shall have got some way with before you come, when we will
+read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near
+the castle."  Keats ends "your sincere friend," and a man to whom
+Keats was a sincere friend had some occasion for pride.
+
+About Reynolds's life neither time nor space permits me to say very
+much, if I knew very much, which I don't.  He was the son of a
+master in one of our large schools.  He went to the Bar.  He married
+a sister of Thomas Hood.  He wrote, like Hood, in the London
+Magazine.  With Hood for ally, he published "Odes and Addresses to
+Great People;" the third edition, which I have here, is of 1826.
+The late relations of the brothers-in-law were less happy; possibly
+the ladies of their families quarrelled; that is usually the way of
+the belligerent sex.
+
+Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial office in the Isle of
+Wight, some thirty years later than his famous friend, the author of
+"Endymion."  "It is to be lamented," says Lord Houghton, "that Mr.
+Reynolds's own remarkable verse is not better known."  Let us try to
+know it a little better.
+
+I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds's first volume of poems,
+which was published before "Endymion."  It contained some Oriental
+melodies, and won a careless good word from Byron.  The earliest
+work of his I can lay my hand on is "The Fancy, a Selection from the
+Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, Student
+at Law, with a brief memoir of his Life."  There is a motto from
+Wordsworth:
+
+
+"Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive."  {4}
+
+
+It was the old palmy time of the Ring.  Every one knows how Byron
+took lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Shelley had a fight at Eton
+in which he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how
+Christopher North whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats
+himself never had enough of fighting at school, and beat the butcher
+afterwards.  His friend Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the
+gloves.  His imaginary character, Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad,
+who becomes possessed by a passion for prize-fighting.  It seems odd
+in a poet, but "the stains are fugitive."
+
+We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and
+improving his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving
+anxious thought to the colour of his necktie.  It is a disinterested
+preference, as fighting was never my forte, any more than it was
+Artemus Ward's.  At school I was "more remarkable for what I
+suffered than for what I achieved."
+
+Peter Corcoran "fought nearly as soon as he could walk," wherein he
+resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have been
+borrowed from the author of the "Ode to the Nightingale."  Peter
+fell in love, wrote poetry, witnessed a "mill" at the Fives-Court,
+and became the Laureate of the Ring.  "He has made a good set-to
+with Eales, Tom Belcher (the monarch of the gloves!), and Turner,
+and it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand
+even of Randall himself."  "The difficult and ravaging hand"--there
+is a style for you!
+
+Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember
+that Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited
+rallies with admiration and good taste.  From his dissipation in
+cider-cellars and coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a
+sonnet that applies well enough to Reynolds's own career:
+
+
+"Were this a feather from an eagle's wing,
+And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile
+Taken from ancient Jove's majestic pile -
+And might I dip my feather in some spring,
+Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:-
+And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle
+In Heaven's blue sea--I then might with a smile
+Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!
+
+"But I am mortal:  and I cannot write
+Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.
+Silent, I look at Fame:  I cannot climb
+To where her Temple is--Not mine the might:-
+I have some glimmering of what is sublime -
+But, ah! it is a most inconstant light."
+
+
+Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.
+
+"About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he
+had witnessed to a lady."  Unlucky Peter!  "Was ever woman in this
+manner wooed?"  The lady "glanced her eye over page after page in
+hopes of meeting with something that was intelligible," and no
+wonder she did not care for a long letter "devoted to the subject of
+a mill between Belasco and the Brummagem youth."  Peter was so ill-
+advised as to appear before her with glorious scars, "two black
+eyes" in fact, and she "was inexorably cruel."  Peter did not
+survive her disdain.  "The lady still lives, and is married"!  It is
+ever thus!
+
+Peter's published works contain an American tragedy.  Peter says he
+got it from a friend, who was sending him an American copy of "Guy
+Mannering" "to present to a young lady who, strange to say, "read
+books and wore pockets," virtues unusual in the sex.  One of the
+songs (on the delights of bull-baiting) contains the most vigorous
+lines I have ever met, but they are too vigorous for our lax age.
+The tragedy ends most tragically, and the moral comes in "better
+late," says the author, "than never."  The other poems are all very
+lively, and very much out of date.  Poor Peter!
+
+Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossible to guess whether
+the poems of Peter Corcoran did or did not contain allusions to his
+own more lucky love affair.  "Upon my soul," writes Keats, "I have
+been getting more and more close to you every day, ever since I knew
+you, and now one of the first pleasures I look to is your happy
+marriage."  Reynolds was urging Keats to publish the "Pot of Basil"
+"as an answer to the attack made on me in Blackwood's Magazine and
+the Quarterly Review."
+
+Next Keats writes that he himself "never was in love, yet the voice
+and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days."  On September
+22, 1819, Keats sent Reynolds the "Ode to Autumn," than which there
+is no more perfect poem in the language of Shakespeare.  This was
+the last of his published letters to Reynolds.  He was dying,
+haunted eternally by that woman's shape and voice.
+
+Reynolds's best-known book, if any of them can be said to be known
+at all, was published under the name of John Hamilton.  It is "The
+Garden of Florence, and Other Poems " (Warren, London, 1821).  There
+is a dedication--to his young wife.
+
+"Thou hast entreated me to 'write no more,'" and he, as an elderly
+"man of twenty-four," promises to obey.  "The lily and myself
+henceforth are two," he says, implying that he and the lily have
+previously been "one," a quaint confession from the poet of Peter
+Corcoran.  There is something very pleasant in the graceful regret
+and obedience of this farewell to the Muse.  He says to Mrs.
+Reynolds:
+
+
+"I will not tell the world that thou hast chid
+My heart for worshipping the idol Muse;
+That thy dark eye has given its gentle lid
+Tears for my wanderings; I may not choose
+When thou dost speak but do as I am bid, -
+And therefore to the roses and the dews,
+Very respectfully I make my bow; -
+And turn my back upon the tulips now."
+
+
+"The chief poems in the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were to
+have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to
+have been written by a friend; but illness on his part and
+distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our
+plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated
+it for ever!"
+
+I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats's kindness, to
+the most endearing quality our nature possesses; the quality that
+was Scott's in such a winning degree, that was so marked in Moliere,
+
+"He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I ever
+possessed, and yet he was not kinder, perhaps, to me than to others.
+His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have
+done the world some service had his life been spared--but he was of
+too sensitive a nature--and thus he was destroyed!  One story he
+completed, and that is to me now the most pathetic poem in
+existence."
+
+It was "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil."
+
+The "Garden of Florence" is written in the couplets of "Endymion,"
+and is a beautiful version of the tale once more retold by Alfred de
+Musset in "Simone."  From "The Romance of Youth" let me quote one
+stanza, which applies to Keats:
+
+
+"He read and dreamt of young Endymion,
+Till his romantic fancy drank its fill;
+He saw that lovely shepherd sitting lone,
+Watching his white flocks upon Ida's hill;
+The Moon adored him--and when all was still,
+And stars were wakeful--she would earthward stray,
+And linger with her shepherd love, until
+The hooves of the steeds that bear the car of day,
+Struck silver light in the east, and then she waned away!"
+
+
+It was on Latmos, not Ida, that Endymion shepherded his flocks; but
+that is of no moment, except to schoolmasters.  There are other
+stanzas of Reynolds worthy of Keats; for example, this on the Fairy
+Queen:
+
+
+"Her bodice was a pretty sight to see;
+Ye who would know its colour,--be a thief
+Of the rose's muffled bud from off the tree;
+And for your knowledge, strip it leaf by leaf
+Spite of your own remorse or Flora's grief,
+Till ye have come unto its heart's pale hue;
+The last, last leaf, which is the queen,--the chief
+Of beautiful dim blooms:  ye shall not rue,
+At sight of that sweet leaf the mischief which ye do."
+
+
+One does not know when to leave off gathering buds in the "Garden of
+Florence."  Even after Shakespeare, and after Keats, this passage on
+wild flowers has its own charm:
+
+
+"We gathered wood flowers,--some blue as the vein
+O'er Hero's eyelid stealing, and some as white,
+In the clustering grass, as rich Europa's hand
+Nested amid the curls on Jupiter's forehead,
+What time he snatched her through the startled waves; -
+Some poppies, too, such as in Enna's meadows
+Forsook their own green homes and parent stalks,
+To kiss the fingers of Proserpina:
+And some were small as fairies' eyes, and bright
+As lovers' tears!"
+
+
+I wish I had room for three or four sonnets, the Robin Hood sonnets
+to Keats, and another on a picture of a lady.  Excuse the length of
+this letter, and read this:
+
+
+"Sorrow hath made thine eyes more dark and keen,
+And set a whiter hue upon thy cheeks, -
+And round thy pressed lips drawn anguish-streaks,
+And made thy forehead fearfully serene.
+Even in thy steady hair her work is seen,
+For its still parted darkness--till it breaks
+In heavy curls upon thy shoulders--speaks
+Like the stern wave, how hard the storm hath been!
+
+"So looked that hapless lady of the South,
+Sweet Isabella! at that dreary part
+Of all the passion'd hours of her youth;
+When her green Basil pot by brother's art
+Was stolen away; so look'd her pained mouth
+In the mute patience of a breaking heart!"
+
+
+There let us leave him, the gay rhymer of prize-fighters and eminent
+persons--let us leave him in a serious hour, and with a memory of
+Keats.  {5}
+
+
+
+ON VIRGIL
+
+
+
+To Lady Violet Lebas.
+
+Dear Lady Violet,--Who can admire too much your undefeated
+resolution to admire only the right things?  I wish I had this
+respect for authority!  But let me confess that I have always
+admired the things which nature made me prefer, and that I have no
+power of accommodating my taste to the verdict of the critical.  If
+I do not like an author, I leave him alone, however great his
+reputation.  Thus I do not care for Mr. Gibbon, except in his
+Autobiography, nor for the elegant plays of M. Racine, nor very much
+for some of Wordsworth, though his genius is undeniable, nor
+excessively for the late Prof. Amiel.  Why should we force ourselves
+into an affection for them, any more than into a relish for olives
+or claret, both of which excellent creatures I have the misfortune
+to dislike?  No spectacle annoys me more than the sight of people
+who ask if it is "right" to take pleasure in this or that work of
+art.  Their loves and hatreds will never be genuine, natural,
+spontaneous.
+
+You say that it is "right" to like Virgil, and yet you admit that
+you admire the Mantuan, as the Scotch editor joked, "wi'
+deeficulty."  I, too, must admit that my liking for much of Virgil's
+poetry is not enthusiastic, not like the admiration expressed, for
+example, by Mr. Frederic Myers, in whose "Classical Essays" you will
+find all that the advocates of the Latin singer can say for him.
+These heights I cannot reach, any more than I can equal that
+eloquence.  Yet must Virgil always appear to us one of the most
+beautiful and moving figures in the whole of literature.
+
+How sweet must have been that personality which can still win our
+affections, across eighteen hundred years of change, and through the
+mists of commentaries, and school-books, and traditions!  Does it
+touch thee at all, oh gentle spirit and serene, that we, who never
+knew thee, love thee yet, and revere thee as a saint of heathendom?
+Have the dead any delight in the religion they inspire?
+
+
+Id cinerem aut Manes credis curare sepultos?
+
+
+I half fancy I can trace the origin of this personal affection for
+Virgil, which survives in me despite the lack of a very strong love
+of parts of his poems.  When I was at school we met every morning
+for prayer, in a large circular hall, round which, on pedestals,
+were set copies of the portrait busts of great ancient writers.
+Among these was "the Ionian father of the rest," our father Homer,
+with a winning and venerable majesty.  But the bust of Virgil was, I
+think, of white marble, not a cast (so, at least, I remember it),
+and was of a singular youthful purity and beauty, sharing my
+affections with a copy of the exquisite Psyche of Naples.  It showed
+us that Virgil who was called "The Maiden" as Milton was named "The
+Lady of Christ's."  I don't know the archeology of it, perhaps it
+was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm of this image, beheld
+daily, overcame even the tedium of short scraps of the "AEneid"
+daily parsed, not without stripes and anguish.  So I retain a
+sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive the many drawbacks of
+his poetry.
+
+It is not always poetry at first hand; it is often imitative, like
+all Latin poetry, of the Greek songs that sounded at the awakening
+of the world.  This is more tolerable when Theocritus is the model,
+as in the "Eclogues," and less obvious in the "Georgics," when the
+poet is carried away into naturalness by the passion for his native
+land, by the longing for peace after cruel wars, by the joy of a
+country life.  Virgil had that love of rivers which, I think, a poet
+is rarely without; and it did not need Greece to teach him to sing
+of the fields:
+
+
+Propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus
+Mincius et tenera praetexit arundine ripas.
+
+
+"By the water-side, where mighty Mincius wanders, with links and
+loops, and fringes all the banks with the tender reed."  Not the
+Muses of Greece, but his own Casmenae, song-maidens of Italy, have
+inspired him here, and his music is blown through a reed of the
+Mincius.  In many such places he shows a temper with which we of
+England, in our late age, may closely sympathize.
+
+Do you remember that mediaeval story of the building of Parthenope,
+how it was based, by the Magician Virgilius, on an egg, and how the
+city shakes when the frail foundation chances to be stirred?  This
+too vast empire of ours is as frail in its foundation, and trembles
+at a word.  So it was with the Empire of Rome in Virgil's time:
+civic revolution muttering within it, like the subterranean thunder,
+and the forces of destruction gathering without.  In Virgil, as in
+Horace, you constantly note their anxiety, their apprehension for
+the tottering fabric of the Roman state.  This it was, I think, and
+not the contemplation of human fortunes alone, that lent Virgil his
+melancholy.  From these fears he looks for a shelter in the sylvan
+shades; he envies the ideal past of the golden world.
+
+
+Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat!
+
+
+"Oh, for the fields!  Oh, for Spercheius and Taygetus, where wander
+the Lacaenian maids!  Oh, that one would carry me to the cool
+valleys of Haemus, and cover me with the wide shadow of the boughs!
+Happy was he who came to know the causes of things, who set his foot
+on fear and on inexorable Fate, and far below him heard the roaring
+of the streams of Hell!  And happy he who knows the rural deities,
+Pan, and Sylvanus the Old, and the sisterhood of the nymphs!
+Unmoved is he by the people's favour, by the purple of kings,
+unmoved by all the perfidies of civil war, by the Dacian marching
+down from his hostile Danube; by the peril of the Roman state, and
+the Empire hurrying to its doom.  He wasteth not his heart in pity
+of the poor, he envieth not the rich, he gathereth what fruits the
+branches bear and what the kindly wilderness unasked brings forth;
+he knows not our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the
+records of the common weal"--does not read the newspapers, in fact.
+
+The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the
+Empire, the shame and dread of each day's news, we too know them;
+like Virgil we too deplore them.  We, in our reveries, long for some
+such careless paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the
+Islands of the Southern Seas.  It is in passages of this temper that
+Virgil wins us most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so
+distant, and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought,
+unborrowed and unforced, is wedded to the music of his own
+unsurpassable style.
+
+But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought,
+that style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on
+telling a story that is only of feigned and foreign interest.
+Doubtless it was the "AEneid," his artificial and unfinished epic,
+that won Virgil the favour of the Middle Aces.  To the Middle Ages,
+which knew not Greek, and knew not Homer, Virgil was the
+representative of the heroic and eternally interesting past.  But to
+us who know Homer, Virgil's epic is indeed, "like moonlight unto
+sunlight;" is a beautiful empty world, where no real life stirs, a
+world that shines with a silver lustre not its own, but borrowed
+from "the sun of Greece."
+
+Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs
+and beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion
+roamed, and of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone.  He lived
+on the marches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was
+a sea unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of
+the Sun in Elizabeth's reign.  Of all that he knew he sang, but
+Virgil could only follow and imitate, with a pale antiquarian
+interest, the things that were alive for Homer.  What could Virgil
+care for a tussle between two stout men-at-arms, for the clash of
+contending war-chariots, driven each on each, like wave against wave
+in the sea?  All that tide had passed over, all the story of the
+"AEneid" is mere borrowed antiquity, like the Middle Ages of Sir
+Walter Scott; but the borrower had none of Scott's joy in the noise
+and motion of war, none of the Homeric "delight in battle."
+
+Virgil, in writing the "AEneid," executed an imperial commission,
+and an ungrateful commission; it is the sublime of hack-work, and
+the legend may be true which declares that, on his death-bed, he
+wished his poem burned.  He could only be himself here and there, as
+in that earliest picture of romantic love, as some have called the
+story of "Dido," not remembering, perhaps, that even here Virgil had
+before his mind a Greek model, that he was thinking of Apollonius
+Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea.  He could be himself, too, in
+passages of reflection and description, as in the beautiful sixth
+book, with its picture of the under world, and its hints of mystical
+philosophy.
+
+Could we choose our own heavens, there in that Elysian world might
+Virgil be well content to dwell, in the shadow of that fragrant
+laurel grove, with them who were "priests pure of life, while life
+was theirs, and holy singers, whose songs were worthy of Apollo."
+There he might muse on his own religion and on the Divinity that
+dwells in, that breathes in, that is, all things and more than all.
+Who could wish Virgil to be one of the spirits that
+
+
+Lethaeum ad flumen Dues evocat agmine magno,
+
+
+that are called once more to the Lethean stream, and that once more,
+forgetful of their home, "into the world and wave of men depart?"
+
+There will come no other Virgil, unless his soul, in accordance with
+his own philosophy, is among us to-day, crowned with years and
+honours, the singer of "Ulysses," of the "Lotus Eaters," of
+"Tithonus," and "OEnone."
+
+So, after all, I have been enthusiastic, "maugre my head," as Malory
+says, and perhaps, Lady Violet, I have shown you why it is "right"
+to admire Virgil, and perhaps I have persuaded nobody but myself.
+
+P.S.--Mr. Coleridge was no great lover of Virgil, inconsistently.
+"If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave
+him?"  Yet Mr. Coleridge had defined poetry as "the best words, in
+the best order"--that is, "diction and metre."  He, therefore,
+proposed to take from Virgil his poetry, and then to ask what was
+left of the Poet!
+
+
+
+AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE
+
+
+
+To the Lady Violet Lebas.
+
+Dear Lady Violet,--I do not wonder that you are puzzled by the
+language of the first French novel.  The French of "Aucassin et
+Nicolette" is not French after the school of Miss Pinkerton, at
+Chiswick.  Indeed, as the little song-story has been translated into
+modern French by M. Bida, the painter (whose book is very scarce), I
+presume even the countrywomen of Aucassin find it difficult.  You
+will not expect me to write an essay on the grammar, nor would you
+read it if I did.  The chief thing is that "s" appears as the sign
+of the singular, instead of being the sign of the plural, and the
+nouns have cases.
+
+The story must be as old as the end of the twelfth century, and must
+have received its present form in Picardy.  It is written, as you
+see, in alternate snatches of verse and prose.  The verse, which was
+chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each laisse, or screed, as in
+the "Chanson de Roland," runs on the same final assonance, or vowel
+sound throughout.
+
+So much for the form.  Who is the author?  We do not know, and never
+shall know.  Apparently he mentions himself in the first lines:
+
+
+"Who would listen to the lay,
+Of the captive old and gray;"
+
+
+for this is as much sense as one can make out of del deport du viel
+caitif.
+
+The author, then, was an old fellow.  I think we might learn as much
+from the story.  An old man he was, or a man who felt old.  Do you
+know whom he reminds me of?  Why, of Mr. Bowes, of the Theatre
+Royal, Chatteris; of Mr. Bowes, that battered, old, kindly
+sentimentalist who told his tale with Mr. Arthur Pendennis.
+
+It is a love story, a story of love overmastering, without
+conscience or care of aught but the beloved.  And the viel caitif
+tells it with sympathy, and with a smile.  "Oh, folly of fondness,"
+he seems to cry; "oh, pretty fever and foolish; oh, absurd happy
+days of desolation:
+
+
+"When I was young, as you are young,
+And lutes were touched, and songs were sung!
+And love-lamps in the windows hung!"
+
+
+It is the very tone of Thackeray, when Thackeray is tender; and the
+world heard it first from this elderly nameless minstrel, strolling
+with his viol and his singing boys, a blameless D'Assoucy, from
+castle to castle in the happy poplar land.  I think I see him and
+hear him in the silver twilight, in the court of some chateau of
+Picardy, while the ladies around sit listening on silken cushions,
+and their lovers, fettered with silver chains, lie at their feet.
+They listen, and look, and do not think of the minstrel with his
+gray head, and his green heart; but we think of him.  It is an old
+man's work, and a weary man's work.  You can easily tell the places
+where he has lingered and been pleased as he wrote.
+
+The story is simple enough.  Aucassin, son of Count Garin, of
+Beaucaire, loved so well fair Nicolette, the captive girl from an
+unknown land, that he would never be dubbed knight, nor follow
+tourneys; nor even fight against his father's mortal foe, Count
+Bougars de Valence.  So Nicolette was imprisoned high in a painted
+chamber.  But the enemy were storming the town, and, for the promise
+of "one word or two with Nicolette, and one kiss," Aucassin armed
+himself and led out his men.  But he was all adream about Nicolette,
+and his horse bore him into the press of foes ere he knew it.  Then
+he heard them contriving his death, and woke out of his dream.
+
+"The damoiseau was tall and strong, and the horse whereon he sat
+fierce and great, and Aucassin laid hand to sword, and fell a-
+smiting to right and left, and smote through helm and headpiece, and
+arm and shoulder, making a murder about him, like a wild boar the
+hounds fall on in the forest.  There slew he ten knights, and smote
+down seven, and mightily and knightly he hurled through the press,
+and charged home again, sword in hand."  For that hour Aucassin
+struck like one of Mallory's men in the best of all romances.  But
+though he took Count Bougars prisoner, his father would not keep his
+word, nor let him have one word or two with Nicolette, and one kiss.
+Nay, Aucassin was thrown into prison in an old tower.  There he sang
+of Nicolette,
+
+
+"Was it not the other day
+That a pilgrim came this way?
+And a passion him possessed,
+That upon his bed he lay,
+Lay, and tossed, and knew no rest,
+In his pain discomforted.
+But thou camest by his bed,
+Holding high thine amice fine
+And thy kirtle of ermine.
+Then the beauty that is thine
+Did he look on; and it fell
+That the Pilgrim straight was well,
+Straight was hale and comforted.
+And he rose up from his bed,
+And went back to his own place
+Sound and strong, and fair of face."
+
+
+Thus Aucassin makes a Legend of his lady, as it were, assigning to
+her beauty such miracles as faith attributes to the excellence of
+the saints.
+
+Meanwhile, Nicolette had slipped from the window of her prison
+chamber, and let herself down into the garden, where she heard the
+song of the nightingales.  "Then caught she up her kirtle in both
+hands, behind and before, and flitted over the dew that lay deep on
+the grass, and fled out of the garden, and the daisy flowers bending
+below her tread seemed dark against her feet, so white was the
+maiden."  Can't you see her stealing with those "feet of ivory,"
+like Bombyca's, down the dark side of the silent moonlit streets of
+Beaucaire?
+
+Then she came where Aucassin was lamenting in his cell, and she
+whispered to him how she was fleeing for her life.  And he answered
+that without her he must die; and then this foolish pair, in the
+very mouth of peril, must needs begin a war of words as to which
+loved the other best!
+
+"Nay, fair sweet friend," saith Aucassin, "it may not be that thou
+lovest me more than I love thee.  Woman may not love man as man
+loves woman, for a woman's love lies no deeper than in the glance of
+her eye, and the blossom of her breast, and her foot's tip-toe; but
+man's love is in his heart planted, whence never can it issue forth
+and pass away."
+
+So while they speak
+
+
+"In debate as birds are,
+Hawk on bough,"
+
+
+comes the kind sentinel to warn them of a danger.  And Nicolette
+flees, and leaps into the fosse, and thence escapes into a great
+forest and lonely.  In the morning she met shepherds merry over
+their meat, and bade them tell Aucassin to hunt in that forest,
+where he should find a deer whereof one glance would cure him of his
+malady.  The shepherds are happy, laughing people, who half mock
+Nicolette, and quite mock Aucassin, when he comes that way.  But at
+first they took Nicolette for a fee, such a beauty shone so brightly
+from her, and lit up all the forest.  Aucassin they banter; and
+indeed the free talk of the peasants to their lord's son in that
+feudal age sounds curiously, and may well make us reconsider our
+notions of early feudalism.
+
+But Aucassin learns at least that Nicolette is in the wood, and he
+rides at adventure after her, till the thorns have ruined his silken
+surcoat, and the blood, dripping from his torn body, makes a visible
+track in the grass.  So, as he wept, he met a monstrous man of the
+wood, that asked him why he lamented.  And he said he was sorrowing
+for a lily-white hound that he had lost.  Then the wild man mocked
+him, and told his own tale.  He was in that estate which Achilles,
+among the ghosts, preferred to all the kingship of the dead outworn.
+He was hind and hireling to a villein, and he had lost one of the
+villein's oxen.  For that he dared not go into the town, where a
+prison awaited him.  Moreover, they had dragged the very bed from
+under his old mother, to pay the price of the ox, and she lay on
+straw; and at that the woodman wept.
+
+A curious touch, is it not, of pity for the people?  The old poet is
+serious for one moment.  "Compare," he says, "the sorrows of
+sentiment, of ladies and lovers, praised in song, with the sorrows
+of the poor, with troubles that are real and not of the heart!"
+Even Aucassin the lovelorn feels it, and gives the hind money to pay
+for his ox, and so riding on comes to a lodge that Nicolette has
+built with blossoms and boughs.  And Aucassin crept in and looked
+through a gap in the fragrant walls of the lodge, and saw the stars
+in heaven, and one that was brighter than the rest.
+
+Does one not feel it, the cool of that old summer night, the sweet
+smell of broken boughs and trodden grass and deep dew, and the
+shining of the star?
+
+
+"Star that I from far behold
+That the moon draws to her fold,
+Nicolette with thee doth dwell,
+My sweet love with locks of gold,"
+
+
+sings Aucassin.  "And when Nicolette heard Aucassin, right so came
+she unto him, and passed within the lodge, and cast her arms about
+his neck and kissed and embraced him:
+
+
+"Fair sweet friend, welcome be thou!"
+"And thou, fair sweet love, be thou welcome!"
+
+
+There the story should end, in a dream of a summer's night.  But the
+old minstrel did not end it so, or some one has continued his work
+with a heavier hand.  Aucassin rides, he cares not whither, if he
+has but his love with him.  And they come to a fantastic land of
+burlesque, such as Pantagruel's crew touched at many a time.  And
+Nicolette is taken by Carthaginian pirates, and proves to be
+daughter to the King of Carthage, and leaves his court and comes to
+Beaucaire in the disguise of a ministrel, and "journeys end in
+lovers' meeting."
+
+That is all the tale, with its gaps, its careless passages, its
+adventures that do not interest the poet.  He only cares for youth,
+love, spring, flowers, and the song of the birds; the rest, except
+the passage about the hind, is mere "business" done casually,
+because the audience expects broad jests, hard blows, misadventures,
+recognitions.  What lives is the touch of poetry, of longing, of
+tender heart, of humorous resignation.  It lives, and always must
+live, "while the nature of man is the same."  The poet hopes his
+tale will gladden sad men.  This service it did for M. Bida, he
+says, in the dreadful year of 1870-71, when he translated
+"Aucassin."  This, too, it has done for me in days not delightful.
+{6}
+
+
+
+PLOTINUS (A.D. 200-262)
+
+
+
+To the Lady Violet Lebas.
+
+Dear Lady Violet,--You are discursive and desultory enough, as a
+reader, to have pleased even the late Lord Iddesleigh.  It was
+"Aucassin and Nicolette" only a month ago, and to-day you have been
+reading Lord Lytton's "Strange Story," I am sure, for you want
+information about Plotinus!  He was born (about A.D. 200) in Wolf-
+town (Lycopolis), in Egypt, the town, you know, where the natives
+might not eat wolves, poor fellows, just as the people of Thebes
+might not eat sheep.  Probably this prohibition caused Plotinus no
+regret, for he was a consistent vegetarian.
+
+However, we are advancing too rapidly, and we must discuss Plotinus
+more in order.  His name is very dear to mystic novelists, like the
+author of "Zanoni."  They always describe their favourite hero as
+"deep in Plotinus or Iamblichus," and I venture to think that nearly
+represents the depth of their own explorations.  We do not know
+exactly when Plotinus was born.  Like many ladies he used to wrap up
+his age in a mystery, observing that these petty details about the
+body (a mere husk of flesh binding the soul) were of no importance.
+He was not weaned till he was eight years old, a singular
+circumstance.  Having a turn for philosophy, he attended the schools
+of Alexandria, concerning which Kingsley's "Hypatia" is the most
+accessible authority.
+
+All these anecdotes, I should have said, we learn from Porphyry, the
+Tyrian, who was a kind of Boswell to Plotinus.  The philosopher
+himself often reminds me of Dr. Johnson, especially as Dr. Johnson
+is described by Mr. Carlyle.  Just as the good doctor was a sound
+Churchman in the beginning of the age of new ideas, so Plotinus was
+a sound pagan in the beginning of the triumph of Christianity.
+
+Like Johnson, Plotinus was lazy and energetic and short-sighted.  He
+wrote a very large number of treatises, but he never took the
+trouble to read through them when once they were written, because
+his eyes were weak.  He was superstitious, like Dr. Johnson, yet he
+had lucid intervals of common sense, when he laughed at the
+superstitions of his disciples.  Like Dr. Johnson, he was always
+begirt by disciples, men and women, Bozzys and Thrales.  He was so
+full of honour and charity, that his house was crowded with persons
+in need of help and friendly care.  Though he lived so much in the
+clouds and among philosophical abstractions, he was an excellent man
+of business.  Though a philosopher he was pious, and was courageous,
+dreading the plague no more than the good doctor dreaded the tempest
+that fell on him when he was voyaging to Coll.
+
+You will admit that the parallel is pretty close for an historical
+parallel, despite the differences between the ascetic of Wolf-town
+and the sage of Bolt Court, hard by Fleet Street!
+
+To return to the education of Plotinus.  He was twenty-eight when he
+went up to the University of Alexandria.  For eleven years he
+diligently attended the lectures of Ammonius.  Then he went on the
+Emperor Gordian's expedition to the East, hoping to learn the
+philosophy of the Hindus.  The Upanishads would have puzzled
+Plotinus, had he reached India; but he never did.  Gordian's army
+was defeated in Mesopotamia, no "blessed word" to Gordian, and
+Plotinus hardly escaped with his life.  He must have felt like
+Stendhal on the retreat from Moscow.
+
+From Syria his friend and disciple Amelius led him to Rome, and
+here, as novelists say, "a curious thing happened."  There was in
+Rome an Egyptian priest, who offered to raise up the Demon, or
+Guardian Angel, of Plotinus in visible form.  But there was only one
+pure spot in all Rome, so said the priest, and this spot was the
+Temple of Isis.  Here the seance was held, and no demon appeared,
+but a regular God of one of the first circles.  So terrified was an
+onlooker that he crushed to death the living birds which he held in
+his hands for some ritual or magical purpose.
+
+It was a curious scene, a cosmopolitan confusion of Egypt, Rome,
+Isis, table-turning, the late Mr. Home, religion, and mummery, while
+Christian hymns of the early Church were being sung, perhaps in the
+garrets around, outside the Temple of Isis.  The discovery that he
+had a god for his guardian angel gave Plotinus plenty of confidence
+in dealing with rival philosophers.  For example, Alexandrinus
+Olympius, another mystic, tried magical arts against Plotinus.  But
+Alexandrinus, suddenly doubling up during lecture with unaffected
+agony, cried, "Great virtue hath the soul of Plotinus, for my spells
+have returned against myself."  As for Plotinus, he remarked among
+his disciples, "Now the body of Alexandrinus is collapsing like an
+empty purse."
+
+How diverting it would be, Lady Violet, if our modern
+controversialists had those accomplishments, and if Mr. Max Muller
+could, literally, "double up" Professor Whitney, or if any one could
+cause Peppmuller to collapse with his queer Homeric theory!
+Plotinus had many such arts.  A piece of jewellery was stolen from
+one of his protegees, a lady, and he detected the thief, a servant,
+by a glance.  After being flogged within an inch of his life, the
+servant (perhaps to save the remaining inch) confessed all.
+
+Once when Porphyry was at a distance, and was meditating suicide,
+Plotinus appeared at his side, saying, "This that thou schemest
+cometh not of the pure intellect, but of black humours," and so sent
+Porphyry for change of air to Sicily.  This was thoroughly good
+advice, but during the absence of the disciple the master died.
+
+Porphyry did not see the great snake that glided into the wall when
+Plotinus expired; he only heard of the circumstance.  Plotinus's
+last words were:  "I am striving to release that which is divine
+within us, and to merge it in the universally divine."  It is a
+strange mixture of philosophy and savage survival.  The Zulus still
+believe that the souls of the dead reappear, like the soul of
+Plotinus, in the form of serpents.
+
+Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians, or Gnostics.  Like
+all great men, he was accused of plagiarism.  A defence of great men
+accused of literary theft would be as valuable as Naude's work of a
+like name about magic.  On his death the Delphic Oracle, in very
+second-rate hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a demon.
+
+Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense and virtue, and so
+modest that he would not allow his portrait to be painted.  His
+character drew good men round him, his repute for supernatural
+virtues brought "fools into a circle."  What he meant by his belief
+that four times he had, "whether in the body or out of the body,"
+been united with the Spirit of the world, who knows?  What does
+Tennyson mean when he writes:
+
+
+"So word by word, and line by line,
+The dead man touch'd me from the past,
+And all at once it seem'd at last
+His living soul was flashed on mine.
+
+And mine in his was wound and whirl'd
+About empyreal heights of thought,
+And came on that which is, and caught
+The deep pulsations of the world."
+
+
+Mystery!  We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the souls of
+Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul.  They are wise with a
+wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise.
+
+In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he
+was at war with pessimism.
+
+"They that love God bear lightly the ways of the world--bear lightly
+whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement of
+things."  He believed in a rest that remains for the people of God,
+"where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand many
+things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where the
+spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned."
+The arguments by which these opinions are buttressed may be called
+metaphysical, and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the
+beauty of the language in which it is stated, remain immortal
+possessions.
+
+Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while
+Christianity offered him a sympathetic refuge, who can tell?
+Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson--
+conservatism and taste--caused his adherence to the forms at least
+of the older creeds.  There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and
+much to like.  But if you read him in hopes of material for strange
+stories, you will be disappointed.  Perhaps Lord Lytton and others
+who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord
+Beaconsfield's tale) knew his name better than his doctrine.  His
+"Enneads," even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not
+very light subjects of study.
+
+
+
+LUCRETIUS
+
+
+
+To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford.
+
+Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the
+creeds of ancient Greece and Rome" is, as you quote C. O. Muller, "a
+very curious question."  It is odd that while we have countless
+books on the philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the
+classic peoples, we hear about their religion in the modern sense
+scarcely anything from anybody.  We know very well what gods they
+worshipped, and what sacrifices they offered to the Olympians, and
+what stories they told about their deities, and about the beginnings
+of things.  We know, too, in a general way, that the gods were
+interested in morality.  They would all punish offences in their own
+department, at least when it was a case of numine laeso, when the
+god who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality,
+or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offended by
+perjury.
+
+But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods?  What hope or
+what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life?  Had he
+any sense of sin, as more than a thing that could be expiated by
+purification with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing
+the prayers and "masses," so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or
+charlatans, mentioned by Plato in the "Republic"?  About these great
+questions of the religious life--the Future and man's fortunes in
+the future, the punishment or reward of justice or iniquity--we
+really know next to nothing.
+
+That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable
+to me.  The De Rerum Natura was written for no other purpose than to
+destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men's minds
+from all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all
+dread or desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life
+of ours on earth.  For no other reason did Lucretius desire to "know
+the causes of things," except that the knowledge would bring
+"emancipation," as people call it, from the gods, to whom men had
+hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire,
+under the patria potestas or in manu patris.
+
+As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows
+that his fellow-countrymen must have gone in a constant terror about
+spiritual penalties, which we seldom associate in thought with the
+"blithe" and careless existence of the ancient peoples.  In every
+line of Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave
+just escaped from an intolerable thraldom to fear.  Nobody could
+well have believed on any other evidence that the classical people
+had a gloomy Calvinism of their own time.  True, as early as Homer,
+we hear of the shadowy existence of the souls, and of the torments
+endured by the notably wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical,
+like Sisyphus and Tantalus.  But when we read the opening books of
+the "Republic," we find the educated friends of Socrates treating
+these terrors as old-wives' fables.  They have heard, they say, that
+such notions circulate among the people, but they seem never for a
+moment to have themselves believed in a future of rewards and
+punishments.
+
+The remains of ancient funereal art, in Etruria or Attica, usually
+show us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts, or
+receiving sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt) from their
+descendants, or, perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friends
+who have just rejoined them.  But it is only in the descriptions by
+Pausanias and others of certain old wall-paintings that we hear of
+the torments of the wicked, of the demons that torture them and,
+above all, of the great chief fiend, coloured like a carrion fly.
+To judge from Lucretius, although so little remains to us of this
+creed, yet it had a very strong hold of the minds of people, in the
+century before Christ.  Perhaps the belief was reinforced by the
+teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision of Er, in the "Republic,"
+brings back, in a myth, the old popular faith in a Purgatorio, if
+not in an Inferno.
+
+In the "Phaedo," for certain, we come to the very definite account
+of a Hell, a place of eternal punishment, as well as of a Purgatory,
+whence souls are freed when their sins are expiated.  "The spirits
+beyond redemption, for the multitude of their murders or sacrileges,
+Fate hurls into Tartarus, whence they never any more come forth."
+But souls of lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus, and then drift
+out down the streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon.  Thence they reach
+the marsh of Acheron, but are not released until they have received
+the pardon of the souls whom in life they had injured.
+
+All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialogues of
+Plato's, appears to have been derived by Socrates from the popular
+unphilosophic traditions, from Folk-lore in short, and to have been
+raised by him to the rank of "pious opinion," if not of dogma.  Now,
+Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against all this dread
+of future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonic
+philosophy or by popular belief.  The latter must have been much the
+more powerful and widely diffused.  It follows that the Romans, at
+least, must have been haunted by a constant dread of judgment to
+come, from which, but for the testimony of Lucretius and his
+manifest sincerity, we might have believed them free.
+
+Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it
+did its best to ruin a great poet.  The sublimity of the language of
+Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the
+closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and
+his power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and noble
+amplitude of manner--these, with a burning sincerity, mark him above
+all others that smote the Latin lyre.  Yet these great qualities are
+half-crushed by his task, by his attempt to turn the atomic theory
+into verse, by his unsympathetic effort to destroy all faith and
+hope, because these were united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and
+Acheron.
+
+It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophy of eternal
+sleep, without dreams and without awakening.  This belief is wholly
+divorced from joy, which inspires all the best art.  This negation
+of hope has "close-lipped Patience for its only friend."
+
+In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life and Nature so large,
+so glowing, so majestic that they remind us of nothing but the "Fete
+Champetre" of Giorgione, in the Louvre.  All that life is a thing we
+must leave soon, and forever, and must be hopelessly lapped in an
+eternity of blind silence.  "I shall let men see the certain end of
+all," he cries; "then will they resist religion, and the threats of
+priests and prophets."  But this "certain end" is exactly what
+mortals do not desire to see.  To this sleep they prefer even
+tenebras Orci, vastasque lacunas.
+
+They will not be deprived of gods, "the friends of man, merciful
+gods, compassionate."  They will not turn from even a faint hope in
+those to the Lucretian deities in their endless and indifferent
+repose and divine "delight in immortal and peaceful life, far, far
+away from us and ours--life painless and fearless, needing nothing
+we can give, replete with its own wealth, unmoved by prayer and
+promise, untouched by anger."
+
+Do you remember that hymn, as one may call it, of Lucretius to
+Death, to Death which does not harm us.  "For as we knew no hurt of
+old, in ages when the Carthaginian thronged against us in war, and
+the world was shaken with the shock of fight, and dubious hung the
+empire over all things mortal by sea and land, even so careless, so
+unmoved, shall we remain, in days when we shall no more exist, when
+the bond of body and soul that makes our life is broken.  Then
+naught shall move us, nor wake a single sense, not though earth with
+sea be mingled, and sea with sky."  There is no hell, he cries, or,
+like Omar, he says, "Hell is the vision of a soul on fire."
+
+Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only the slave of
+passion and of love; your true Sisyphus (like Lord Salisbury in
+Punch) is only the politician, striving always, never attaining; the
+stone rolls down again from the hill-crest, and thunders far along
+the plain.
+
+Thus his philosophy, which gives him such a delightful sense of
+freedom, is rejected after all these years of trial by men.  They
+feel that since those remotest days
+
+
+"Quum Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum,"
+
+
+they have travelled the long, the weary way Lucretius describes to
+little avail, if they may not keep their hopes and fears.  Robbed of
+these we are robbed of all; it serves us nothing to have conquered
+the soil and fought the winds and waves, to have built cities, and
+tamed fire, if the world is to be "dispeopled of its dreams."
+Better were the old life we started from, and dreams therewith,
+better the free days -
+
+
+"Novitas tum florida mundi
+Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibus ampla;"
+
+
+than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, but one certain end
+of all before the eyes of all.
+
+Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answer Lucretius, the
+noblest Roman poet, and the least beloved, who sought, at last, by
+his own hand, they say, the doom that Virgil waited for in the
+season appointed.
+
+
+
+TO A YOUNG AMERICAN BOOK-HUNTER
+
+
+
+To Philip Dodsworth, Esq., New York.
+
+Dear Dodsworth,--Let me congratulate you on having joined the army
+of book-hunters.  "Everywhere have I sought peace and found it
+nowhere," says the blessed Thomas e Kempis, "save in a corner with a
+book."  Whether that good monk wrote the "De Imitatione Christi" or
+not, one always likes him for his love of books.  Perhaps he was the
+only book-hunter that ever wrought a miracle.  "Other signs and
+miracles which he was wont to tell as having happened at the prayer
+of an unnamed person, are believed to have been granted to his own,
+such as the sudden reappearance of a lost book in his cell."  Ah, if
+Faith, that moveth mountains, could only bring back the books we
+have lost, the books that have been borrowed from us!  But we are a
+faithless generation.
+
+From a collector so much older and better experienced in misfortune
+than yourself, you ask for some advice on the sport of book-hunting.
+Well, I will give it; but you will not take it.  No; you will hunt
+wild, like young pointers before they are properly broken.
+
+Let me suppose that you are "to middle fortune born," and that you
+cannot stroll into the great book-marts and give your orders freely
+for all that is rich and rare.  You are obliged to wait and watch an
+opportunity, to practise that maxim of the Stoic's, "Endure and
+abstain."  Then abstain from rushing at every volume, however out of
+the line of your literary interests, which seems to be a bargain.
+Probably it is not even a bargain; it can seldom be cheap to you, if
+you do not need it, and do not mean to read it.
+
+Not that any collector reads all his books.  I may have, and indeed
+do possess, an Aldine Homer and Caliergus his Theocritus; but I
+prefer to study the authors in a cheap German edition.  The old
+editions we buy mainly for their beauty, and the sentiment of their
+antiquity and their associations.
+
+But I don't take my own advice.  The shelves are crowded with books
+quite out of my line--a whole small library of tomes on the pastime
+of curling, and I don't curl; and "God's Revenge against Murther,"
+though (so far) I am not an assassin.  Probably it was for love of
+Sir Walter Scott, and his mention of this truculent treatise, that I
+purchased it.  The full title of it is "The Triumphs of God's
+Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of (willful and
+premeditated) Murther."  Or rather there is nearly a column more of
+title, which I spare you.  But the pictures are so bad as to be
+nearly worth the price.  Do not waste your money, like your foolish
+adviser, on books like that, or on "Les Sept Visions de Don
+Francisco de Quevedo," published at Cologne, in 1682.
+
+Why in the world did I purchase this, with the title-page showing
+Quevedo asleep, and all his seven visions floating round him in
+little circles like soap-bubbles?  Probably because the book was
+published by Clement Malassis, and perhaps he was a forefather of
+that whimsical Frenchman, Poulet Malassis, who published for
+Banville, and Baudelaire, and Charles Asselineau.  It was a bad
+reason.  More likely the mere cheapness attracted me.
+
+Curiosity, not cheapness, assuredly, betrayed me into another
+purchase.  If I want to read "The Pilgrim's Progress," of course I
+read it in John Bunyan's good English.  Then why must I ruin myself
+to acquire "Voyage d'un Chrestien vers l'Eternite.  Ecrit en
+Anglois, par Monsieur Bunjan, F.M., en Bedtfort, et nouvellement
+traduit en Francois.  Avec Figures.  A Amsterdam, chez Jean Boekholt
+Libraire pres de la Bourse, 1685"?  I suppose this is the oldest
+French version of the famed allegory.  Do you know an older?  Bunyan
+was still living and, indeed, had just published the second part of
+the book, about Christian's wife and children, and the deplorable
+young woman whose name was Dull.
+
+As the little volume, the Elzevir size, is bound in blue morocco, by
+Cuzin, I hope it is not wholly a foolish bargain; but what do I
+want, after all, with a French "Pilgrim's Progress"?  These are the
+errors a man is always making who does not collect books with
+system, with a conscience and an aim.
+
+Do have a specially.  Make a collection of works on few subjects,
+well chosen.  And what subjects shall they be?  That depends on
+taste.  Probably it is well to avoid the latest fashion.  For
+example, the illustrated French books of the eighteenth century are,
+at this moment, en hausse.  There is a "boom" in them.  Fifty years
+ago Brunet, the author of the great "Manuel," sneered at them.  But,
+in his, "Library Companion," Dr. Dibdin, admitted their merit.  The
+illustrations by Gravelot, Moreau, Marillier, and the rest, are
+certainly delicate, graceful, full of character, stamped with style.
+But only the proofs before letters are very much valued, and for
+these wild prices are given by competitive millionaires.  You cannot
+compete with them.
+
+It is better wholly to turn the back on these books and on any
+others at the height of the fashion, unless you meet them for
+fourpence on a stall.  Even then should a gentleman take advantage
+of a poor bookseller's ignorance?  I don't know.  I never fell into
+the temptation, because I never was tempted.  Bargains, real
+bargains, are so rare that you may hunt for a lifetime and never
+meet one.
+
+The best plan for a man who has to see that his collection is worth
+what it cost him, is probably to confine one's self to a single
+line, say, in your case, first editions of new English, French, and
+American books that are likely to rise in value.  I would try, were
+I you, to collect first editions of Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier,
+Poe, and Hawthorne.
+
+As to Poe, you probably will never have a chance.  Outside of the
+British Museum, where they have the "Tamerlane" of 1827, I have only
+seen one early example of Poe's poems.  It is "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane,
+and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe.  Baltimore:  Hatch and Dunning,
+1829, 8vo, pp. 71."  The book "came to Mr. Locker (Mr. Frederick
+Locker-Lampson), through Mr. R. H. Stoddard, the American poet."  So
+says Mr. Locker-Lampson's Catalogue.  He also has the New York
+edition of 1831.
+
+These books are extraordinarily rare; you are more likely to find
+them in some collection of twopenny rubbish than to buy them in the
+regular market.  Bryant's "Poems" (Cambridge, 1821) must also be
+very rare, and Emerson's of 1847, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's of
+1836, and Longfellow's "Voices of the Night," 1839, and Mr. Lowell's
+"A Year's Life;" none of these can be common, and all are desirable,
+as are Mr. Whittier's "Legends of New England (1831), and "Poems"
+(1838).
+
+Perhaps you may never be lucky enough to come across them cheap; no
+doubt they are greatly sought for by amateurs.  Indeed, all American
+books of a certain age or of a special interest are exorbitantly
+dear.  Men like Mr. James Lenox used to keep the market up.  One
+cannot get the Jesuit "Relations"--shabby little missionary reports
+from Canada, in dirty vellum.
+
+Cartier, Perrot, Champlain, and the other early explorers' books are
+beyond the means of a working student who needs them.  May you come
+across them in a garret of a farmhouse, or in some dusty lane of the
+city.  Why are they not reprinted, as Mr. Arber has reprinted
+"Captain John Smith's Voyages, and Reports on Virginia"?  The very
+reprints, when they have been made, are rare and hard to come by.
+
+There are certain modern books, new books, that "go up" rapidly in
+value and interest.  Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta" of 1865, the quarto
+in white cloth, is valued at twenty dollars.  Twenty years ago one
+dollar would have purchased it.  Mr. Austin Dobson's "Proverbs in
+Porcelain" is also in demand among the curious.  Nay, even I may say
+about the first edition of "Ballades in Blue China" (1880), as
+Gibbon said of his "Essay on the Study of Literature:" "The
+primitive value of half a crown has risen to the fanciful price of a
+guinea or thirty shillings," or even more.  I wish I had a copy
+myself, for old sake's sake.
+
+Certain modern books, "on large paper," are safe investments.  The
+"Badminton Library," an English series of books on sport, is at a
+huge premium already, when on "large paper."  But one should never
+buy the book unless, as in the case of Dr. John Hill Burton's "Book-
+Hunter" (first edition), it is not only on large paper, and not only
+rare (twenty-five copies), but also readable and interesting. {7}  A
+collector should have the taste to see when a new book is in itself
+valuable and charming, and when its author is likely to succeed, so
+that his early attempts (as in the case of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Lord
+Tennyson, and a few others of the moderns) are certain to become
+things of curious interest.
+
+You can hardly ever get a novel of Jane Austen's in the first
+edition.  She is rarer than Fielding or Smollett.  Some day it may
+be the same in Miss Broughton's case.  Cling to the fair and witty
+Jane, if you get a chance.  Beware of illustrated modern books in
+which "processes" are employed.  Amateurs will never really value
+mechanical reproductions, which can be copied to any extent.  The
+old French copper-plate engravings and the best English mezzo-tints
+are so valuable because good impressions are necessarily so rare.
+
+One more piece of advice.  Never (or "hardly ever") buy an imperfect
+book.  It is a constant source of regret, an eyesore.  Here have I
+Lovelace's "Lucasta," 1649, without the engraving.  It is
+deplorable, but I never had a chance of another "Lucasta."  This is
+not a case of invenies aliam.  However you fare, you will have the
+pleasure of Hope and the consolation of books quietem inveniendam in
+abditis recessibus et libellulis.
+
+
+
+ROCHEFOUCAULD
+
+
+
+To the Lady Violet Lebas.
+
+Dear Lady Violet,--I am not sure that I agree with you in your
+admiration of Rochefoucauld--of the Reflexions, ou Sentences et
+Maximes Morales, I mean.  At least, I hardly agree when I have read
+many of them at a stretch.  It is not fair to read them in that way,
+of course, for there are more than five hundred pensees, and so much
+esprit becomes fatiguing.  I doubt if people study them much.  Five
+or six of them have become known even to writers in the newspapers,
+and we all copy them from each other.
+
+Rochefoucauld says that a man may be too dull to be duped by a very
+clever person.  He himself was so clever that he was often duped,
+first by the general honest dulness of mankind, and then by his own
+acuteness.  He thought he saw more than he did see, and he said even
+more than he thought he saw.  If the true motive of all our actions
+is self-love, or vanity, no man is a better proof of the truth than
+the great maxim-maker.  His self-love took the shape of a brilliancy
+that is sometimes false.  He is tricked out in paste for diamonds,
+now and then, like a vain, provincial beauty at a ball.  "A clever
+man would frequently be much at a loss," he says, "in stupid
+company."  One has seen this embarrassment of a wit in a company of
+dullards.  It is Rochefoucauld's own position in this world of men
+and women.  We are all, in the mass, dullards compared with his
+cleverness, and so he fails to understand us, is much at a loss
+among us.  "People only praise others in hopes of being praised in
+turn," he says.  Mankind is not such a company of "log-rollers" as
+he avers.
+
+There is more truth in a line of Tennyson's about
+
+
+"The praise of those we love,
+Dearer to true young hearts than their own praise."
+
+
+I venture to think we need not be young to prefer to hear the praise
+of others rather than our own.  It is not embarrassing in the first
+place, as all praise of ourselves must be.  I doubt if any man or
+woman can flatter so discreetly as not to make us uncomfortable.
+Besides, if our own performances be lauded, we are uneasy as to
+whether the honour is deserved.  An artist has usually his own
+doubts about his own doings, or rather he has his own certainties.
+About our friends' work we need have no such misgivings.  And our
+self-love is more delicately caressed by the success of our friends
+than by our own.  It is still self-love, but it is filtered, so to
+speak, through our affection for another.
+
+What are human motives, according to Rochefoucauld?  Temperament,
+vanity, fear, indolence, self-love, and a grain of natural
+perversity, which somehow delights in evil for itself.  He neglects
+that other element, a grain of natural worth, which somehow delights
+in good for itself.  This taste, I think, is quite as innate, and as
+active in us, as that other taste for evil which causes there to be
+something not wholly displeasing in the misfortunes of our friends.
+
+There is a story which always appears to me a touching proof of this
+grain of goodness, as involuntary, as fatal as its opposite.  I do
+not remember in what book of travels I found this trait of native
+excellence.  The black fellows of Australia are very fond of sugar,
+and no wonder, if it be true that it has on them an intoxicating
+effect.  Well, a certain black fellow had a small parcel of brown
+sugar which was pilfered from his lair in the camp.  He detected the
+thief, who was condemned to be punished according to tribal law;
+that is to say, the injured man was allowed to have a whack at his
+enemy's head with a waddy, a short club of heavy hard wood.  The
+whack was duly given, and then the black who had suffered the loss
+threw down his club, burst into tears, embraced the thief and
+displayed every sign of a lively regret for his revenge.
+
+That seems to me an example of the human touch that Rochefoucauld
+never allows for, the natural goodness, pity, kindness, which can
+assert itself in contempt of the love of self, and the love of
+revenge.  This is that true clemency which is a real virtue, and not
+"the child of Vanity, Fear, Indolence, or of all three together."
+Nor is it so true that "we have all fortitude enough to endure the
+misfortunes of others."  Everybody has witnessed another's grief
+that came as near him as his own.
+
+How much more true, and how greatly poetical is that famous maxim:
+"Death and the Sun are two things not to be looked on with a steady
+eye."  This version is from the earliest English translation of
+1698.  The Maximes were first published in Paris in 1665. {8}  "Our
+tardy apish nation" took thirty-three years in finding them out and
+appropriating them.  This, too, is good:  "If we were faultless, we
+would observe with less pleasure the faults of others."  Indeed, to
+observe these with pleasure is not the least of our faults.  Again,
+"We are never so happy, nor so wretched, as we suppose."  It is our
+vanity, perhaps, that makes us think ourselves miserrimi.
+
+Do you remember--no, you don't--that meeting in "Candide" of the
+unfortunate Cunegonde and the still more unfortunate old lady who
+was the daughter of a Pope?  "You lament your fate," said the old
+lady; "alas, you have known no such sorrows as mine!"  "What! my
+good woman!" says Cunegonde.  "Unless you have been maltreated by
+two Bulgarians, received two stabs from a knife, had two of your
+castles burned over your head, seen two fathers and two mothers
+murdered before your eyes, and two of your lovers flogged at two
+autos-da-fe, I don't fancy that you can have the advantage of me.
+Besides, I was born a baroness of seventy-two quarterings, and I
+have been a cook."  But the daughter of a Pope had, indeed, been
+still more unlucky, as she proved, than Cunegonde; and the old lady
+was not a little proud of it.
+
+But can you call this true:  "There is nobody but is ashamed of
+having loved when once he loves no longer"?  If it be true at all, I
+don't think the love was much worth having or giving.  If one really
+loves once, one can never be ashamed of it; for we never cease to
+love.  However, this is the very high water of sentiment, you will
+say; but I blush no more for it than M. le Duc de Rochefoucauld for
+his own opinion.  Perhaps I am thinking of that kind of love about
+which he says:  "True love is like ghosts; which everybody talks
+about and few have seen."  "Many be the thyrsus-bearers, few the
+Mystics," as the Greek proverb runs.  "Many are called, few are
+chosen."
+
+As to friendship being "a reciprocity of interests," the saying is
+but one of those which Rochefoucauld's vanity imposed on his wit.
+Very witty it is not, and it is emphatically untrue.  "Old men
+console themselves by giving good advice for being no longer able to
+set bad examples."  Capital; but the poor old men are often good
+examples of the results of not taking their own good advice.  "Many
+an ingrate is less to blame than his benefactor."  One might add, at
+least I will, "Every man who looks for gratitude deserves to get
+none of it."  "To say that one never flirts--is flirting."  I rather
+like the old translator's version of "Il y a de bons mariages; mais
+il n'y en a point de delicieux"--"Marriage is sometimes convenient,
+but never delightful."
+
+How true is this of authors with a brief popularity:  "Il y a des
+gens qui ressemblent aux vaudevilles, qu'on ne chante qu'un certain
+temps."  Again, "to be in haste to repay a kindness is a sort of
+ingratitude," and a rather insulting sort too.  "Almost everybody
+likes to repay small favours; many people can be grateful for
+favours not too weighty, but for favours truly great there is scarce
+anything but ingratitude."  They must have been small favours that
+Wordsworth had conferred when "the gratitude of men had oftener left
+him mourning."  Indeed, the very pettiness of the aid we can
+generally render each other, makes gratitude the touching thing it
+is.  So much is repaid for so little, and few can ever have the
+chance of incurring the thanklessness that Rochefoucauld found all
+but universal.
+
+"Lovers and ladies never bore each other, because they never speak
+of anything but themselves."  Do husbands and wives often bore each
+other for the same reason?  Who said:  "To know all is to forgive
+all"?  It is rather like "On pardonne tant que l'on aime"--"As long
+as we love we can forgive," a comfortable saying, and these are rare
+in Rochefoucauld.  "Women do not quite know what flirts they are" is
+also, let us hope, not incorrect.  The maxim that "There is a love
+so excessive that it kills jealousy" is only a corollary from "as
+long as we love, we forgive."  You remember the classical example,
+Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier des Grieux; not an honourable
+precedent.
+
+"The accent of our own country dwells in our hearts as well as on
+our tongues."  Ah! never may I lose the Border accent!  "Love's
+Miracle!  To cure a coquette."  "Most honest women are tired of
+their task," says this unbeliever.  And the others?  Are they never
+aweary?  The Duke is his own best critic after all, when he says:
+"The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is going beyond the mark."
+Beyond the mark he frequently goes, but not when he says that we
+come as fresh hands to each new epoch of life, and often want
+experience for all our years.  How hard it was to begin to be
+middle-aged!  Shall we find old age easier if ever we come to its
+threshold?  Perhaps, and Death perhaps the easiest of all.  Nor let
+me forget, it will be long before you have occasion to remember,
+that "vivacity which grows with age is not far from folly."
+
+
+
+OF VERS DE SOCIETE
+
+
+
+To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.
+
+My Dear Hopkins,--The verses which you have sent me, with a request
+"to get published in some magazine," I now return to you.  If you
+are anxious that they should be published, send them to an editor
+yourself.  If he likes them he will accept them from you.  If he
+does not like them, why should he like them because they are
+forwarded by me?  His only motive would be an aversion to
+disobliging a confrere, and why should I put him in such an
+unpleasant position?
+
+But this is a very boorish way of thanking you for the premiere
+representation of your little poem.  "To Delia in Girton" you call
+it, "recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of
+the Graces and Loves."  An old-fashioned preamble, and of the
+lengthiest, and how do you go on? -
+
+
+Golden hair is fairy gold,
+Fairy gold that cannot stay,
+Turns to leaflets green and cold,
+At the ending of the day!
+Laurel-leaves the Muses may
+Twine about your golden head.
+Will the crown reward you, say,
+When the fairy gold is fled?
+
+Daphne was a maid unwise -
+Shun the laurel, seek the rose;
+Azure, lovely in the skies,
+Shines less gracious in the hose!
+
+
+Don't you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to bas-bleus, if
+not indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date?  Editors will
+think so, I fear.  Besides, I don't like "Fairy gold that cannot
+stay."  If Fairy Gold were a horse, it would be all very well to
+write that it "cannot stay."  'Tis the style of the stable, unsuited
+to songs of the salon.
+
+This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you
+whom the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy.  You
+kindly ask my opinion on vers de societe in general.  Well, I think
+them a very difficult sort of thing to write well, as one may infer
+from this, that the ancients, our masters, could hardly write them
+at all.  In Greek poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece
+which can be called a model--the AEolic verses that Theocritus wrote
+to accompany the gift of the ivory distaff.  It was a present, you
+remember, to the wife of his friend Nicias, the physician of
+Miletus.  The Greeks of that age kept their women in almost Oriental
+reserve.  One may doubt whether Nicias would have liked it if
+Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fan or a jewel.  But
+there is safety in a spinning instrument, and all the compliments to
+the lady, "the dainty-ankled Theugenis," turn on her skill, and
+industry, and housewifery.  So Louis XIV., no mean authority, called
+this piece of vers de societe "a model of honourable gallantry."
+
+I have just looked all through Pomtow's pretty little pocket volumes
+of the minor Greek poets, and found nothing more of the nature of
+the lighter verse than this of Alcman's--[Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced].  Do you remember the pretty paraphrase of it in "Love
+in Idleness"?
+
+
+"Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that breathe desire,
+Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire,
+Over the foam-flowers flying, with halcyons ever on wing,
+Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring."
+
+
+It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended, the lament for his
+limbs weary with old age--with old age sadder for the sight of the
+honey-voiced girls.
+
+The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society
+Verses," where, as Mr. Locker says, "a boudoir decorum is, or ought
+always to be, preserved, where sentiment never surges into passion,
+and where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment."  Honest
+women were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.
+
+The Romans were little more fortunate.  You cannot expect the genius
+of Catullus not to "surge into passion," even in his hours of gayer
+song, composed when
+
+
+Multum lusimus in meis tabellis,
+Ut convenerat esse delicatos,
+Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum.
+
+
+Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his
+book, are addressed to men, his friends, and thus they scarcely come
+into the category of what we call "Society Verses."  Given the
+character of Roman society, perhaps we might say that plenty of this
+kind of verse was written by Horace and by Martial.  The famous ode
+to Pyrrha does not exceed the decorum of a Roman boudoir, and, as
+far as love was concerned, it does not seem to have been in the
+nature of Horace to "surge into passion."  So his best songs in this
+kind are addressed to men, with whom he drinks a little, and talks
+of politics and literature a great deal, and muses over the
+shortness of life, and the zest that snow-clad Soracte gives to the
+wintry fire.
+
+Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered so
+prettily in a villanelle, may come within the scope of this Muse,
+for it has a playfulness mingled with its melancholy, a sadness in
+its play.  Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, these
+old French forms seem as fit vehicles as any for Latin poetry that
+was written in the exotic measures of Greece.  There is a foreign
+grace and a little technical difficulty overcome in the English
+ballade and villanelle, as in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics.  I
+would not say so much, on my own responsibility, nor trespass so far
+on the domain of scholarship, but this opinion was communicated to
+me by a learned professor of Latin.  I think, too, that some of the
+lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of Ronsard and Du Bellay,
+would be well wedded with the verse of Horace.  But perhaps no
+translator will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace every
+man must be his own translator.
+
+It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writing vers de
+societe, only he never troubles himself for a moment about the
+"decorum of the boudoir."  Do you remember the lines on the ring
+which he gave his lady?  They are the origin and pattern of all the
+verses written by lovers on that pretty metempsychosis which shall
+make them slippers, or fans, or girdles, like Waller's, and like
+that which bound "the dainty, dainty waist" of the Miller's
+Daughter.
+
+
+"Ring that shalt bind the finger fair
+Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare;
+Thou hast not any price above
+The token of her poet's love;
+Her finger may'st thou mate as she
+Is mated every wise with me!"
+
+
+And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he were this favoured,
+this fortunate jewel:
+
+
+"In vain I wish!  So, ring, depart,
+And say 'with me thou hast his heart'!"
+
+
+Once more Ovid's verses on his catholic affection for all ladies,
+the brown and the blonde, the short and the tall, may have suggested
+Cowley's humorous confession, "The Chronicle":
+
+
+"Margarita first possessed,
+If I remember well, my breast,
+Margarita, first of all;"
+
+
+and then follows a list as long as Leporello's.
+
+What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of vers de societe is not so much
+his lack of "decorum" as the monotonous singsong of his eternal
+elegiacs.  The lightest of light things, the poet of society, should
+possess more varied strains; like Horace, Martial, Thackeray, not
+like Ovid and (here is a heresy) Praed.  Inimitably well as Praed
+does his trick of antithesis, I still feel that it is a trick, and
+that most rhymers could follow him in a mere mechanic art.  But here
+the judgment of Mr. Locker would be opposed to this modest opinion,
+and there would be opposition again where Mr. Locker calls Dr. O. W.
+Holmes "perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse."
+But here we are straying among the moderns before exhausting the
+ancients, of whom I fancy that Martial, at his best, approaches most
+near the ideal.
+
+Of course it is true that many of Martial's lyrics would be thought
+disgusting in any well-regulated convict establishment.  His
+gallantry is rarely "honourable."  Scaliger used to burn a copy of
+Martial, once a year, on the altar of Catullus, who himself was far
+from prudish.  But Martial, somehow, kept his heart undepraved, and
+his taste in books was excellent.  How often he writes verses for
+the bibliophile, delighting in the details of purple and gold, the
+illustrations and ornaments for his new volume!  These pieces are
+for the few--for amateurs, but we may all be touched by his grief
+for the little lass, Erotion.  He commends her in Hades to his own
+father and mother gone before him, that the child may not be
+frightened in the dark, friendless among the shades
+
+
+"Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras
+Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis."
+
+
+There is a kind of playfulness in the sorrow, and the pity of a man
+for a child; pity that shows itself in a smile.  I try to render
+that other inscription for the tomb of little Erotion:
+
+
+Here lies the body of the little maid
+Erotion;
+From her sixth winter's snows her eager shade
+Hath fleeted on!
+Whoe'er thou be that after me shalt sway
+My scanty farm,
+To her slight shade the yearly offering pay,
+So--safe from harm -
+Shall thou and thine revere the kindly Lar,
+And this alone
+Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far,
+A mournful stone!
+
+
+Certainly he had a heart, this foul-mouthed Martial, who claimed for
+the study of his book no serious hours, but moments of mirth, when
+men are glad with wine, "in the reign of the Rose:" {9}
+
+
+"Haec hora est tua, cum furit Lyaeus,
+Cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli;
+Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones."
+
+But enough of the poets of old; another day we may turn to Carew and
+Suckling, Praed and Locker, poets of our own speech, lighter lyrists
+of our own time. {10}
+
+
+
+ON VERS DE SOCIETE
+
+
+
+To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.
+
+Dear Gifted,--If you will permit me to use your Christian, and
+prophetic, name--we improved the occasion lately with the writers of
+light verse in ancient times.  We decided that the ancients were not
+great in verses of society, because they had, properly speaking, no
+society to write verses for.  Women did not live in the Christian
+freedom and social equality with men, either in Greece or Rome--at
+least not "modest women," as Mr. Harry Foker calls them in
+"Pendennis."  About the others there is plenty of pretty verse in
+the Anthology.  What you need for verses of society is a period in
+which the social equality is recognized, and in which people are
+peaceable enough and comfortable enough to "play with light loves in
+the portal" of the Temple of Hymen, without any very definite
+intentions, on either part, of going inside and getting married.
+
+Perhaps we should not expect vers de societe from the Crusaders, who
+were not peaceable, and who were very earnest indeed, in love or
+war.  But as soon as you get a Court, and Court life, in France,
+even though the times were warlike, then ladies are lauded in artful
+strains, and the lyre is struck leviore plectro.  Charles d'Orleans,
+that captive and captivating prince, wrote thousands of rondeaux;
+even before his time a gallant company of gentlemen composed the
+Livre des Cent Ballades, one hundred ballades, practically
+unreadable by modern men.  Then came Clement Marot, with his gay and
+rather empty fluency, and Ronsard, with his mythological
+compliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and led like lambs to
+the altar of Helen or Cassandra.  A few, here and there, of his
+pieces are lighter, more pleasant, and, in a quiet way, immortal,
+such as the verses to his "fair flower of Anjou," a beauty of
+fifteen.  So they ran on, in France, till Voiture's time, and
+Sarrazin's with his merry ballade of an elopement, and Corneille's
+proud and graceful stanzas to Marquise de Gorla.
+
+But verses in the English tongue are more worthy of our attention.
+Mr. Locker begins his collection of them, Lyra Elegantiarum (no
+longer a very rare book in England), as far back as Skelton's age,
+and as Thomas Wyat's, and Sidney's; but those things, the lighter
+lyrics of that day, are rather songs than poems, and probably were
+all meant to be sung to the virginals by our musical ancestors.
+
+"Drink to me only with thine eyes," says the great Ben Jonson, or
+sings it rather.  The words, that he versified out of the Greek
+prose of Philostratus, cannot be thought of without the tune.  It is
+the same with Carew's "He that loves a rosy cheek," or with "Roses,
+their sharp spines being gone."  The lighter poetry of Carew's day
+is all powdered with gold dust, like the court ladies' hair, and is
+crowned and diapered with roses, and heavy with fabulous scents from
+the Arabian phoenix's nest.  Little Cupids flutter and twitter here
+and there among the boughs, as in that feast of Adonis which
+Ptolemy's sister gave in Alexandria, or as in Eisen's vignettes for
+Dorat's Baisers:
+
+
+"Ask me no more whither do stray
+The golden atoms of the day;
+For in pure love did Heaven prepare
+These powders to enrich your hair."
+
+
+It would be affectation, Gifted, if you rhymed in that fashion for
+the lady of your love, and presented her, as it were, with cosmical
+cosmetics, and compliments drawn from the starry spaces and deserts,
+from skies, phoenixes, and angels.  But it was a natural and pretty
+way of writing when Thomas Carew was young.  I prefer Herrick the
+inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick, that parson-pagan, with the soul
+of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!)
+in Devonshire.  His Julia is the least mortal of these "daughters of
+dreams and of stories," whom poets celebrate; she has a certain
+opulence of flesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and "rich
+eyes," like Keats's lady; no vaporous Beatrice, she; but a handsome
+English wench, with
+
+
+"A cuff neglectful and thereby
+Ribbons to flow confusedly;
+A winning wave, deserving note
+In the tempestuous petticoat."
+
+
+Then Suckling strikes up a reckless military air; a warrior he is
+who has seen many a siege of hearts--hearts that capitulated, or
+held out like Troy-town, and the impatient assailant whistles:
+
+
+"Quit, quit, for shame:  this will not move,
+This cannot take her.
+If of herself she will not love,
+Nothing can make her -
+The devil take her."
+
+
+So he rides away, curling his moustache, hiding his defeat in a big
+inimitable swagger.  It is a pleasanter piece in which Suckling,
+after a long leaguer of a lady's heart, finds that Captain honour is
+governor of the place, and surrender hopeless.  So he departs with a
+salute:
+
+
+"March, march (quoth I), the word straight give,
+Let's lose no time but leave her:
+That giant upon air will live,
+And hold it out for ever."
+
+
+Lovelace is even a better type in his rare good things of the
+military amorist and poet.  What apology of Lauzun's, or Bussy
+Rabutin's for faithlessness could equal this? -
+
+
+"Why dost thou say I am forsworn,
+Since thine I vowed to be?
+Lady, it is already morn;
+It was last night I swore to thee
+That fond impossibility."
+
+
+Has "In Memoriam" nobler numbers than the poem, from exile, to
+Lucasta? -
+
+
+"Our Faith and troth
+All time and space controls,
+Above the highest sphere we meet,
+Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet."
+
+
+How comes it that in the fierce fighting days the soldiers were so
+tuneful, and such scholars?  In the first edition of Lovelace's
+"Lucasta" there is a flock of recommendatory verses, English, Latin,
+even Greek, by the gallant Colonel's mess-mates and comrades.  What
+guardsman now writes like Lovelace, and how many of his friends
+could applaud him in Greek?  You, my Gifted, are happily of a
+pacific disposition, and tune a gentle lyre.  Is it not lucky for
+swains like you that the soldiers have quite forsworn sonneting?
+When a man was a rake, a poet, a warrior, all in one, what chance
+had a peaceful minor poet like you or me, Gifted, against his
+charms?  Sedley, when sober, must have been an invincible rival--
+invincible, above all, when he pretended constancy:
+
+
+"Why then should I seek further store,
+And still make love anew?
+When change itself can give no more
+'Tis easy to be true."
+
+
+How infinitely more delightful, musical, and captivating are those
+Cavalier singers--their numbers flowing fair, like their scented
+lovelocks--than the prudish society poets of Pope's day.  "The Rape
+of the Lock" is very witty, but through it all don't you mark the
+sneer of the contemptuous, unmanly little wit, the crooked dandy?
+He jibes among his compliments; and I do not wonder that Mistress
+Arabella Fermor was not conciliated by his long-drawn cleverness and
+polished lines.  I prefer Sackville's verses "written at sea the
+night before an engagement":
+
+
+"To all you ladies now on land
+We men at sea indite."
+
+
+They are all alike, the wits of Queen Anne; and even Matt Prior,
+when he writes of ladies occasionally, writes down to them, or at
+least glances up very saucily from his position on his knees.  But
+Prior is the best of them, and the most candid:
+
+
+"I court others in verse--but I love thee in prose;
+And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart."
+
+
+Yes, Prior is probably the greatest of all who dally with the light
+lyre which thrills to the wings of fleeting Loves--the greatest
+English writer of vers de societe; the most gay, frank, good-
+humoured, tuneful and engaging.
+
+Landor is great, too, but in another kind; the bees that hummed over
+Plato's cradle have left their honey on his lips; none but Landor,
+or a Greek, could have written this on Catullus:
+
+
+"Tell me not what too well I know
+About the Bard of Sirmio -
+Yes, in Thalia's son
+Such stains there are as when a Grace
+Sprinkles another's laughing face
+With nectar, and runs on!"
+
+
+That is poetry deserving of a place among the rarest things in the
+Anthology.  It is a sorrow to me that I cannot quite place Praed
+with Prior in my affections.  With all his gaiety and wit, he
+wearies one at last with that clever, punning antithesis.  I don't
+want to know how
+
+
+"Captain Hazard wins a bet,
+Or Beaulieu spoils a curry" -
+
+
+and I prefer his sombre "Red Fisherman," the idea of which is
+borrowed, wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian.
+
+Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comes nearer Prior in
+breadth of humour and in unaffected tenderness.  Who can equal that
+song, "Once you come to Forty Year," or the lines on the Venice
+Love-lamp, or the "Cane-bottomed Chair"?  Of living English writers
+of verse in the "familiar style," as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr.
+Locker when he is tender and not untouched with melancholy, as in
+"The Portrait of a Lady," and Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not
+flirting, but in earnest, as in the "Song of Four Seasons" and "The
+Dead Letter."  He has ingenuity, pathos, mastery of his art, and,
+though the least pedantic of poets, is "conveniently learned."
+
+Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of
+Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the
+"Heathen Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of
+children that slipped its moorings in the fog.  To me it seems that
+Mr. Bret Harte's poems have never (at least in this country) been
+sufficiently esteemed.  Mr. Lowell has written ("The Biglow Papers"
+apart) but little in this vein.  Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful
+godfather, Gifted, has written much with perhaps some loss from the
+very quantity.  A little of vers de societe, my dear Gifted, goes a
+long way, as you will think, if ever you sit down steadily to read
+right through any collection of poems in this manner.  So do not add
+too rapidly to your own store; let them be "few, but roses" all of
+them.
+
+
+
+RICHARDSON
+
+
+
+By Mrs. Andrew Lang.
+
+[This letter is excluded from this version of the eText until the
+copyright status of Mrs. Andrew Lang's work in the UK can be
+ascertained.]
+
+
+
+GERARD DE NERVAL
+
+
+
+To Miss Girton, Cambridge.
+
+Dear Miss Girton,--Yes, I fancy Gerard de Nerval is one of that
+rather select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow
+you to read.  But even if you read him, I do not think you will care
+very much for him.  He is a man's author, not a woman's; and yet one
+can hardly say why.  It is not that he offends "the delicacy of your
+sex," as Tom Jones calls it; I think it is that his sentiment,
+whereof he is full, is not of the kind you like.  Let it be admitted
+that, when his characters make love, they might do it "in a more
+human sort of way."
+
+In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nerval resembles
+Edgar Poe.  Not that his heroes are always attached to a belle morte
+in some distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the
+family sepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud-
+-no, Aurelie and Sylvie, in Les Filles de Feu, are nice and natural
+girls; but their lover is not in love with them "in a human sort of
+way."  He is in love with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly
+remind him.  He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a
+wanderer from his birth; he sees the old chateau, or the farmer's
+cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the
+daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in
+sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs,
+and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path.  Nothing can make him
+pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of
+this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy
+haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who
+rested never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding
+them true.
+
+All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man
+and his work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the
+personal influence of one who is your friend, though other people
+cannot see what you see in him.
+
+Gerard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young man of the
+young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and Gautier.
+Their gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be
+dwelt upon.  They were much of Scott's mind when he was young, and
+translated Burger, and "wished to heaven he had a skull and cross-
+bones."  Two or three of them died early, two or three subsided into
+ordinary literary gentlemen (like M. Maquet, lately deceased), two,
+nay three, became poets--Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard
+de Nerval.  It is not necessary to have heard of Gerard; even that
+queer sham, the lady of culture, admits without a blush that she
+knows not Gerard.  Yet he is worth knowing.
+
+What he will live by is his story of "Sylvie;" it is one of the
+little masterpieces of the world.  It has a Greek perfection.  One
+reads it, and however old one is, youth comes back, and April, and a
+thousand pleasant sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs,
+of brooks trotting merrily under the rustic bridges.  And this fresh
+nature is peopled by girls eternally young, natural, gay, or
+pensive, standing with eager feet on the threshold of their life,
+innocent, expectant, with the old ballads of old France on their
+lips.  For the story is full of those artless, lisping numbers of
+the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that Gerard collected
+and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl.
+
+Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on the Border, and what
+good company to you the burn is that runs beside the highway?  Just
+so companionable is the music of the ballads in that enchanted
+country of Gerard's fancy, in the land of the Valois.  All the while
+you read, you have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, you
+know that the hero cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves,
+the cottage and its shelter, are not for him.  He is only passing
+by, happy yet wistful, far untravelled horizons are alluring him,
+the great city is drawing him to herself and will slay him one day
+in her den, as Scylla slew her victims.
+
+Conceive Gerard living a wild life with wilder young men and women
+in a great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused
+themselves by decorating.  Conceive him coming home from the play,
+or rather from watching the particular actress for whom he had a
+distant, fantastic passion.  He leaves the theatre and takes up a
+newspaper, where he reads that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to
+meet the Archers of Loisy.  These were places in his native
+district, where he had been a boy.  They recalled many memories; he
+could not sleep that night; the old scenes flashed before his half-
+dreaming eyes.  This was one of the visions.
+
+"In front of a chateau of the time of Henri IV., a chateau with
+peaked lichen-covered roofs, with a facing of red brick varied by
+stonework of a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn set round with
+limes and elms, and through the leaves fell the golden rays of the
+setting sun.  Young girls were dancing in a circle on the mossy
+grass, to the sound of airs that their mothers had sung, airs with
+words so pure and natural that one felt one's self indeed in that
+old Valois land, where for a thousand years has beat the heart of
+France.
+
+"I was the only boy in the circle whither I had led my little
+friend, Sylvie, a child of a neighbouring hamlet; Sylvie, so full of
+life, so fresh, with her dark eyes, her regular profile, her
+sunburnt face.  I had loved nobody, I had seen nobody but her, till
+the daughter of the chateau, fair and tall, entered the circle of
+peasant girls.  To obtain the right to join the ring she had to
+chant a scrap of a ballad.  We sat round her, and in a fresh, clear
+voice she sang one of the old ballads of romance, full of love and
+sadness . . . As she sang, the shadow of the great trees grew
+deeper, and the broad light of the risen moon fell on her alone, she
+standing without the listening circle.  Her song was over, and no
+one dared to break the silence.  A light mist arose from the mossy
+ground, trailing over the grass.  We seemed to be in Paradise."
+
+So the boy twisted a wreath for this new enchantress, the daughter
+of a line of nobles with king's blood in her veins.  And little
+brown, deserted Sylvie cried.
+
+All this Gerard remembered, and remembering, hurried down to the old
+country place, and met Sylvie, now a woman grown, beautiful,
+unspoiled, still remembering the primitive songs and fairy tales.
+They walked together through the woods to the cottage of the aunt of
+Sylvie, an old peasant woman of the richer class.  She prepared
+dinner for them, and sent De Nerval for the girl, who had gone to
+ransack the peasant treasures in the garret.
+
+Two portraits were hanging there--one that of a young man of the
+good old times, smiling with red lips and brown eyes, a pastel in an
+oval frame.  Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, gay,
+piquante, in a bodice with ribbons fluttering, and with a bird
+perched on her finger.  It was the old aunt in her youth, and
+further search discovered her ancient festal-gown, of stiff brocade.
+Sylvie arrayed herself in this splendour; patches were found in a
+box of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of amber.
+
+The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the
+royal woods, was not far to seek, and Gerard and Sylvie appeared
+before the aunt, as her old self, and her old lover.  "My children!"
+she cried and wept, and smiled through her tears at the cruel and
+charming apparition of youth.  Presently she dried her tears, and
+only remembered the pomp and pride of her wedding.  "We joined
+hands, and sang the naive epithalamium of old France, amorous, and
+full of flowery turns, as the Song of Songs; we were the bride and
+the bridegroom all one sweet morning of summer."
+
+I translated these fragments long ago in one of the first things I
+ever tried to write.  The passages are as touching and fresh, the
+originals I mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice
+of Sylvie singing:
+
+
+"A Dammartin, l'y a trois belles filles,
+L'y en a z'une plus belle que le jour!"
+
+
+So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the "Ballad of
+Forty Years," "Adrienne's dead" in a convent.  That is all the
+story, all the idyll.  Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own
+delirium, and the proofs of it (Le Reve et la Vie) were in his
+pocket when they found him dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.
+
+Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the
+grace of his favourite old ballads.  One cannot translate things
+like this:
+
+
+"Ou sont nos amoureuses?
+Elles sont au tombeau!
+Elles sont plus heureuses
+Dans un sejour plus beau."
+
+
+But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air:
+
+
+"Neither good morn nor good night."
+
+The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone;
+Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed;
+But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn,
+And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!
+
+
+Gerard's poems are few; the best are his vision of a lady with gold
+hair and brown eyes, whom he had loved in an earlier existence, and
+his humorous little piece on a boy's love for a fair cousin, and on
+their winter walk together, and the welcome smell of roast turkey
+which greets them on the stairs, when they come home.  There are
+also poems of his madness, called Chimeres, and very beautiful in
+form.  You read and admire, and don't understand a line, yet it
+seems that if we were a little more or a little less mad we would
+understand:
+
+
+"Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron:
+Modulant tour e tour sur la lyre d'Orphee
+Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee."
+
+
+Here is an attempt to translate the untranslatable, the sonnet
+called -
+
+
+"El Desdichado."
+
+I am that dark, that disinherited,
+That all dishonoured Prince of Aquitaine,
+The Star upon my scutcheon long hath fled;
+A black sun on my lute doth yet remain!
+Oh, thou that didst console me not in vain,
+Within the tomb, among the midnight dead,
+Show me Italian seas, and blossoms wed,
+The rose, the vine-leaf, and the golden grain.
+
+Say, am I Love or Phoebus? have I been
+Or Lusignan or Biron?  By a Queen
+Caressed within the Mermaid's haunt I lay,
+And twice I crossed the unpermitted stream,
+And touched on Orpheus' lyre as in a dream,
+Sighs of a Saint, and laughter of a Fay!
+
+
+
+ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN
+
+
+
+To Richard Wilby, Esq., Eton College, Windsor.
+
+My Dear Dick,--It is very good of you, among your severe studies at
+Eton, to write to your Uncle.  I am extremely pleased to hear that
+your football is appreciated in the highest circles, and shall be
+happy to have as good an account of your skill in making Latin
+verses.
+
+I am glad you like "She," Mr. Rider Haggard's book which I sent you.
+It is "something like," as you say, and I quite agree with you, both
+in being in love with the heroine, and in thinking that she preaches
+rather too much.  But, then, as she was over two thousand years old,
+and had lived for most of that time among cannibals, who did not
+understand her, one may excuse her for "jawing," as you say, a good
+deal, when she met white men.  You want to know if "She" is a true
+story.  Of course it is!
+
+But you have read "She," and you have read all Cooper's, and
+Marryat's, and Mr. Stevenson's books, and "Tom Sawyer," and
+"Huckleberry Finn," several times.  So have I, and am quite ready to
+begin again.  But, to my mind, books about "Red Indians" have always
+seemed much the most interesting.  At your age, I remember, I bought
+a tomahawk, and, as we had also lots of spears and boomerangs from
+Australia, the poultry used to have rather a rough time of it.
+
+I never could do very much with a boomerang; but I could throw a
+spear to a hair's breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to
+discover.  When you go home for Christmas I hope you will remember
+that all this was very wrong, and that you will consider we are
+civilized people, not Mohicans, nor Pawnees.  I also made a stone
+pipe, like Hiawatha's, but I never could drill a hole in the stem,
+so it did not "draw" like a civilized pipe.
+
+By way of an awful warning to you on this score, and also, as you
+say you want a true book about Red Indians, let me recommend to you
+the best book about them I ever came across.  It is called "A
+Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, during
+Thirty Years' Residence among the Indians," and it was published at
+New York by Messrs. Carvill, in 1830.
+
+If I were an American publisher, instead of a British author (how I
+wish I was!) I'd publish "John Tanner" again, or perhaps cut a good
+deal out, and make a boy's book of it.  You are not likely to get it
+to buy, but Mr. Steevens, the American bookseller, has found me a
+copy.  If I lend you it, will you be kind enough to illustrate it on
+separate sheets of paper, and not make drawings on the pages of the
+book?  This will, in the long run, be more satisfactory to yourself,
+as you will be able to keep your pictures; for I want "John Tanner"
+back again:  and don't lend him to your fag-master.
+
+Tanner was born about 1780; he lived in Kentucky.  Don't you wish
+you had lived in Kentucky in Colonel Boone's time?  The Shawnees
+were roaming about the neighbourhood when Tanner was a little boy.
+His uncle scalped one of them.  This made bad feeling between the
+Tanners and the Shawnees; but John, like any boy of spirit, wished
+never to learn lessons, and wanted to be an Indian brave.  He soon
+had more of being a brave than he liked; but he never learned any
+more lessons, and could not even read or write.
+
+One day John's father told him not to leave the house, because from
+the movements of the horses, he knew that Indians were in the woods.
+So John seized the first chance and nipped out, and ran to a walnut
+tree in one of the fields, where he began filling his straw hat with
+walnuts.  At that very moment he was caught by two Indians, who
+spilled the nuts, put his hat on his head, and bolted with him.  One
+of the old women of the tribe had lost her son, and wanted to adopt
+a boy, and so they adopted Johnny Tanner.  They ran with him till he
+was out of breath, till they reached the Ohio, where they threw him
+into a canoe, paddled across, and set off running again.
+
+In ten days' hard marching they reached the camp, and it was worse
+than going to a new school, for all the Indians kicked John Tanner
+about, and "their dance," he says, "was brisk and cheerful, after
+the manner of the scalp dance!"  Cheerful for John!  He had to lie
+between the fire and the door of the lodge, and every one who passed
+gave him a kick.  One old man was particularly cruel.  When Tanner
+was grown up, he came back to that neighbourhood, and the first
+thing he asked was, "Where is Manito-o-geezhik?"
+
+"Dead, two months since."
+
+"It is well that he is dead," said John Tanner.  But an old female
+chief, Net-ko-kua, adopted him, and now it began to be fun.  For he
+was sent to shoot game for the family.  Could anything be more
+delightful?  His first shot was at pigeons, with a pistol.  The
+pistol knocked down Tanner; but it also knocked down the pigeon.  He
+then caught martins--and measles, which was less entertaining.  Even
+Indians have measles!  But even hunting is not altogether fun, when
+you start with no breakfast and have no chance of supper unless you
+kill game.
+
+The other Red Indian books, especially the cheap ones, don't tell
+you that very often the Indians are more than half-starved.  Then
+some one builds a magic lodge, and prays to the Great Spirit.
+Tanner often did this, and he would then dream how the Great Spirit
+appeared to him as a beautiful young man, and told him where he
+would find game, and prophesied other events in his life.  It is
+curious to see a white man taking to the Indian religion, and having
+exactly the same sort of visions as their red converts described to
+the Jesuit fathers nearly two hundred years before.
+
+Tanner saw some Indian ghosts, too, when he grew up.  On the bank of
+the Little Saskawjewun there was a capital camping-place where the
+Indians never camped.  It was called Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut--"the
+place of two Dead Men."  Two Indians of the same totem had killed
+each other there.  Now, their totem was that which Tanner bore, the
+totem of his adopted Indian mother.  The story was that if any man
+camped there, the ghosts would come out of their graves; and that
+was just what happened.  Tanner made the experiment; he camped and
+fell asleep.  "Very soon I saw the two dead men come and sit down by
+my fire opposite me.  I got up and sat opposite them by the fire,
+and in this position I awoke."  Perhaps he fell asleep again, for he
+now saw the two dead men, who sat opposite to him, and laughed and
+poked fun and sticks at him.  He could neither speak nor run away.
+One of them showed him a horse on a hill, and said, "There, my
+brother, is a horse I give you to ride on your journey home, and on
+your way you can call and leave the horse, and spend another night
+with us."  So, next morning, he found the horse and rode it, but he
+did not spend another night with the ghosts of his own totem.  He
+had seen enough of them.
+
+Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the Great Spirit, he did
+not believe in those of his Indian mother.  He thought she used to
+prowl about in the daytime, find tracks of a bear or deer, watch
+where they went to, and then say the beast's lair had been revealed
+to her in a dream.  But Tanner's own visions were "honest Injun."
+Once, in a hard winter, Tanner played a trick on the old woman.  All
+the food they had was a quart of frozen bears' grease, kept in a
+kettle with a skin fastened over it.  But Tanner caught a rabbit
+alive and popped him under the skin.  So when the old woman went for
+the bears' grease in the morning, and found it alive, she was not a
+little alarmed.
+
+But does not the notion of living on frozen pomatum rather take the
+gilt off the delight of being an Indian?  The old woman was as brave
+and resolute as a man, but in one day she sold a hundred and twenty
+beaver skins and many buffalo robes for rum.  She always entertained
+all the neighbouring Indians as long as the rum lasted, and Tanner
+had a narrow escape of growing up a drunkard.  He became such a
+savage that when an Indian girl carelessly allowed his wigwam to be
+burned, he stripped her of her blanket and turned her out for the
+night in the snow.
+
+So Tanner grew up in spite of hunger and drink.  Once, when
+starving, and without bullets, he met a buck moose.  If he killed
+the moose he would be saved, if he did not he would die.  So he took
+the screws out of the lock of his rifle, loaded with them in place
+of bullets, tied the lock on with string, fired, and killed the
+moose.
+
+Tanner was worried into marrying a young squaw (at least he says he
+did it because the girl wanted it), and this led to all his sorrows-
+-this and a quarrel with a medicine-man.  The medicine-man accused
+him of being a wizard, and his wife got another Indian to shoot him.
+Tanner was far from surgeons, and he actually hacked out the bullet
+himself with an old razor.  Another wounded Indian once amputated
+his own arm.  The ancient Spartans could not have been pluckier.
+The Indians had other virtues as well as pluck.  They were honest
+and so hospitable, before they knew white men's ways, that they
+would give poor strangers new mocassins and new buffalo cloaks.
+
+Will it bore you, my dear Dick, if I tell you of an old Indian's
+death?  It seems a pretty and touching story.  Old Pe-shau-ba was a
+friend of Tanner.  One day he fell violently ill.  He sent for
+Tanner and said to him:  "I remember before I came to live in this
+world, I was with the Great Spirit above.  I saw many good and
+desirable things, and among others a beautiful woman.  And the Great
+Spirit said:  'Pe-shau-ba, do you love the woman?'  I told him I
+did.  Then he said, 'Go down and spend a few winters on earth.  You
+cannot stay long, and you must remember to be always kind and good
+to my children whom you see below.'  So I came down, but I have
+never forgotten what was said to me.
+
+"I have always stood in the smoke between the two bands when my
+people fought with their enemies . . . I now hear the same voice
+that talked to me before I came into the world.  It tells me I can
+remain here no longer."  He then walked out, looked at the sun, the
+sky, the lake, and the distant hills; then came in, lay down
+composedly in his place, and in a few minutes ceased to breathe.
+
+If we would hardly care to live like Indians, after all (and Tanner
+tired of it and came back, an old man, to the States), we might
+desire to die like Pe-shau-ba, if, like him, we had been "good and
+kind to God's children whom we meet below."  So here is a Christmas
+moral for you, out of a Red Indian book, and I wish you a merry
+Christmas and a happy New Year.
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+
+
+Reynolds's Peter Bell.
+
+When the article on John Hamilton Reynolds ("A Friend of Keats") was
+written, I had not seen his "Peter Bell" (Taylor and Hessey, London,
+1888).  This "Lyrical Ballad" is described in a letter of Keats's
+published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in Macmillan's Magazine, August,
+1888.  The point of Reynolds's joke was to produce a parody before
+the original.  Reynolds was annoyed by what Hood called "The Betty
+Foybles" of Wordsworth, and by the demeanour of a poet who was
+serious, not only in season, but out of season.  Moreover,
+Wordsworth had damned "a pretty piece of heathenism" by Keats, with
+praise which was faint even from Wordsworth to a contemporary.  In
+the circumstances, as Wordsworth was not yet a kind of solemn shade,
+whom we see haunting the hills, and hear chanting the swan song of
+the dying England, perhaps Reynolds's parody scarce needs excuse.
+Mr. Ainger calls it "insolent," meaning that it has an unkind tone
+of personal attack.  That is, unluckily, true, but to myself the
+parody appears remarkably funny, and quite worthy of "the sneering
+brothers, the vile Smiths," as Lamb calls the authors of "Rejected
+Addresses."  Lamb wrote to tell Wordsworth that he did not see the
+fun of the parody--perhaps it is as well that we should fail to see
+the fun of jests broken on our friends.  But will any Wordsworthian
+deny to-day the humour of this? -
+
+
+"He is rurally related;
+Peter Bell hath country cousins,
+(He had once a worthy mother),
+Bells and Peters by the dozens,
+But Peter Bell he hath no brothers,
+Not a brother owneth he,
+Peter Bell he hath no brother;
+His mother had no other son,
+No other son e'er called her 'mother,'
+Peter Bell hath brother none."
+
+
+As Keats says in a review he wrote for The Examiner, "there is a
+pestilent humour in the rhymes, and an inveterate cadence in some of
+the stanzas that must be lamented."  In his review Keats tried to
+hurt neither side, but his heart was with Reynolds; "it would be
+just as well to trounce Lord Byron in the same manner."
+
+People still make an outcry over the trouncing of Keats.  It was
+bludgeonly done, but only part of a game, a kind of horseplay at
+which most men of letters of the age were playing.  Who but regrets
+that, in his "Life of Keats," Mr. Colvin should speak as if Sir
+Walter Scott had, perhaps, a guilty knowledge of the review of Keats
+in Blackwood!  There is but a tittle of published evidence to the
+truth of a theory in itself utterly detestable, and, to every one
+who understands the character of Scott, wholly beyond possibility of
+belief.  Even if Lockhart was the reviewer, and if Scott came to
+know it, was Scott responsible for what Lockhart did in 1819 or
+1820, the very time when Mrs. Shelley thought he was defending
+Shelley in Blackwood (where he had praised her Frankenstein), and
+when she spoke of Sir Walter as "the only liberal man in the
+faction"?  Unluckily Keats died, and his death was absurdly
+attributed to a pair of reviews which may have irritated him, and
+which were coarse, and cruel even for that period of robust
+reviewing.  But Keats knew very well the value of these critiques,
+and probably resented them not much more than a football player
+resents being "hacked" in the course of the game.  He was very
+willing to see Byron and Wordsworth "trounced," and as ready as
+Peter Corcoran in his friend's poem to "take punishment" himself.
+The character of Keats was plucky, and his estimate of his own
+genius was perfectly sane.  He knew that he was in the thick of a
+literary "scrimmage," and he was not the man to flinch or to repine
+at the consequences.
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+
+
+Portraits of Virgil and Lucretius.
+
+In the Letter on Virgil some remarks are made on a bust of the poet.
+It is wholly fanciful.  Our only vestiges of a portrait of Virgil
+are in two MSS.; the better of the two is in the Vatican.  The
+design represents a youth, with dark hair and a pleasant face,
+seated reading.  A desk is beside him, and a case for manuscript, in
+shape like a band-box.  (See Visconti, "Icon. Rom." i. 179, plate
+13.)  Martial tells us that portraits of Virgil were illuminated on
+copies of his "AEneid."  The Vatican MS. is of the twelfth century.
+But every one who has followed the fortunes of books knows that a
+kind of tradition often preserves the illustrations, which are
+copied and recopied without material change.  (See Mr. Jacobs's
+"Fables of Bidpai," Nutt, 1888.)  Thus the Vatican MS. may preserve
+at least a shadow of Virgil.
+
+If there be any portrait of Lucretius, it is a profile on a sard,
+published by Mr. Munro in his famous edition of the poet.  The
+letters LVCR are inscribed on the stone, and appear to be
+contemporary with the gem.  This, at least, is the opinion of Mr. A.
+S. Murray, of the late Mr. C. W. King, Braun, and Muller.  On the
+other hand, Bernouilli ("Rom. Icon." i. 247) regards this, and
+apparently most other Roman gems with inscriptions, as "apocryphal."
+The ring, which was in the Nott collection, is now in my possession.
+If Lucretius were the rather pedantic and sharp-nosed Roman of the
+gem, his wife had little reason for the jealousy which took so
+deplorable a form.  Cold this Lucretius may have been, volatile--
+never! {11}
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  This was written during the lifetime of Mr. Arnold and Mr.
+Browning.
+
+{2}  Since this was written, Mr. Bridges has made his lyrics
+accessible in "Shorter Poems."  (G. Bell and Sons:  1890)
+
+{3}  Macmillans.
+
+{4}  Reynolds was, perhaps, a little irreverent.  He anticipated
+Wordsworth's "Peter Bell" by a premature parody, "Peter Bell the
+First."
+
+{5}  Appendix on Reynolds's "Peter Bell."
+
+{6}  "Aucassin and Nicolette" has now been edited, annotated, and
+equipped with a translation by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon (Kegan Paul &
+Trench, 1887).
+
+{7}  Edinburgh, 1862.
+
+{8}  The Elzevir piracy was rather earlier.
+
+{9}  Pindar, perhaps, in one of his fragments, suggested that pretty
+Cum regnat Rosa.
+
+{10}  See next letter.
+
+{11}  Mr. Munro calls the stone "a black agate," and does not
+mention its provenance.  The engraving in his book does no justice
+to the portrait.  There is another gem representing Lucretius in the
+Vatican:  of old it belonged to Leo X.  The two gems are in all
+respects similar.  A seal with this head, or one very like it,
+belonged to Evelyn, the friend of Mr. Pepys.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText Letters on Literature, by Lang
+
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