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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters to Dead Authors by Andrew Lang
+#9 in our series by Andrew Lang
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+Letters to Dead Authors
+
+by Andrew Lang
+
+October, 1998  [Etext #1491]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters to Dead Authors by Andrew Lang
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+This etext was prepared from the 1886 Longmans, Green, and Co.
+edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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+This etext was prepared from the 1886 Longmans, Green, and Co.
+edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+Preface
+To W. M. Thackeray
+To Charles Dickens
+To Pierre de Ronsard
+To Herodotus
+Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope
+To Lucian of Samosata
+To Maitre Francoys Rabelais
+To Jane Austen
+To Master Isaak Walton
+To M. Chapelain
+To Sir John Maundeville, Kt.
+To Alexandre Dumas
+To Theocritus
+To Edgar Allan Poe
+To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
+To Eusebius of Caesarea
+To Percy Bysshe Shelley
+To Monsieur de Moliere
+To Robert Burns
+To Lord Byron
+To Omar Khayyam
+To Q. Horatius Flaccus
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+Sixteen of these Letters, which were written at the suggestion of
+the Editor of the "St. James's Gazette," appeared in that journal,
+from which they are now reprinted, by the Editor's kind permission.
+They have been somewhat emended, and a few additions have been made.
+The Letters to Horace, Byron, Isaak Walton, Chapelain, Ronsard, and
+Theocritus have not been published before.
+
+The gem on the title-page, now engraved for the first time, is a red
+cornelian in the British Museum, probably Graeco-Roman, and treated
+in an archaistic style.  It represents Hermes Psychagogos, with a
+Soul, and has some likeness to the Baptism of Our Lord, as usually
+shown in art.  Perhaps it may be post-Christian.  The gem was
+selected by Mr. A. S. Murray.
+
+It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that some of the Letters are
+written rather to suit the Correspondent than to express the
+writer's own taste or opinions.  The Epistle to Lord Byron,
+especially, is "writ in a manner which is my aversion."
+
+
+
+LETTER--To W. M. Thackeray
+
+
+
+Sir,--There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when
+he has a mind to praise the living.  He may dread the charge of
+writing rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his
+applause.  He shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the
+famous, and would not willingly be regarded as one of the many
+parasites who now advertise each movement and action of contemporary
+genius.  "Such and such men of letters are passing their summer
+holidays in the Val d'Aosta," or the Mountains of the Moon, or the
+Suliman Range, as it may happen.  So reports our literary "Court
+Circular," and all our Precieuses read the tidings with enthusiasm.
+Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world of letters, he may
+superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the abundance of
+his eulogy.  No such doubts perplex us when, with all our hearts, we
+would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond the
+reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
+commendation can bring the red.
+
+You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-
+sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who
+have survived your day.  The increase of time only mellows your
+renown, and each year that passes and brings you no successor does
+but sharpen the keenness of our sense of loss.  In what other
+novelist, since Scott was worn down by the burden of a forlorn
+endeavour, and died for honour's sake, has the world found so many
+of the fairest gifts combined?  If we may not call you a poet (for
+the first of English writers of light verse did not seek that
+crown), who that was less than a poet ever saw life with a glance so
+keen as yours, so steady, and so sane?  Your pathos was never cheap,
+your laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of
+the preacher.  Your funny people--your Costigans and Fokers--were
+not mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic
+masks.  Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again
+we were allowed to see the features of the man.
+
+Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like
+another, but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life:  a
+repeated echo of its laughter and its complaint.  Others have
+written, and not written badly, with the stolid professional
+regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the Scholar Gipsy,
+might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."
+There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few
+men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world of
+Thackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the
+sordid aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens to "take
+away her silver bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the
+termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies
+of this world.  The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with
+life, not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon
+because there are snakes in his Natural History.  Had you not
+impaled certain noxious human insects, you would have better pleased
+Mr. Ruskin; had you confined yourself to such performances, you
+would have been more dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.
+
+You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a
+doll, but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either
+of Lady Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert.  The best women can
+pardon you Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to
+forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen Pendennis.  Yet what man does not
+know in his heart that the best women--God bless them--lean, in
+their characters, either to the sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the
+sensitive and jealous affections of Helen?  'Tis Heaven, not you,
+that made them so; and they are easily pardoned, both for being a
+very little lower than the angels and for their gentle ambition to
+be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps and
+haloes.  So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces in the
+glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and Consuelo.
+Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed
+Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in the
+portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?
+
+That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a
+snarling cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a
+good woman:  these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to
+you, who were once so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend
+against.  A French critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do
+preach too much.  Did any author but yourself so frequently break
+the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his
+reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended.  But who
+that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of
+the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers
+your preaching to another's playing!
+
+Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as
+an ornament and source of fresh delight.  Like the songs of the
+Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions
+of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to
+yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes
+of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on
+the stage.  Nor, to my taste, does the mere music and melancholy
+dignity of your style in these passages of meditation fall far below
+the highest efforts of poetry.  I remember that scene where Clive,
+at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the Affections, sees
+Ethel who is lost to him.  "And the past and its dear histories, and
+youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for ever
+echoing in the heart and present in the memory--these, no doubt,
+poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time,
+and parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many
+years."
+
+FOR EVER ECHOING IN THE HEART AND PRESENT IN THE MEMORY:  who has
+not heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your
+books that, for so many years, have been his companions and
+comforters?  We have been young and old, we have been sad and merry
+with you, we have listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and
+Warrington, have stood with you beside the death-bed, have mourned
+at that yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with you have
+prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our old and immortal
+affections, e leal souvenir!  And whenever you speak for yourself,
+and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in our
+literature is the beauty of your sentences!  "I can't express the
+charm of them" (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of
+you):  "they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I
+don't know what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly
+and sadly on the ear."  Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so
+full of surprises--that style which stamps as classical your
+fragments of slang, and perpetually astonishes and delights--would
+alone give immortality to an author, even had he little to say.  But
+you, with your whole wide world of fops and fools, of good women and
+brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery adventurers:  you who
+created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and Blanches, Captain
+Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong--all that host of
+friends imperishable--you must survive with Shakespeare and
+Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Charles Dickens
+
+
+
+Sir,--It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
+Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live
+and die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic
+partiality whatever.  With more truth (though that does not imply
+very much) every Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan
+of yourself or of Mr. Thackeray.  Why should there be any
+partisanship in the matter; and why, having two such good things as
+your novels and those of your contemporary, should we not be
+silently happy in the possession?  Well, men are made so, and must
+needs fight and argue over their tastes in enjoyment.  For myself, I
+may say that in this matter I am what the Americans do NOT call a
+"Mugwump," what English politicians dub a "superior person"--that
+is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best of both.
+
+It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little
+difficult by the vigour of your special devotees.  They have ceased,
+indeed, thank Heaven! to imitate you; and even in "descriptive
+articles" the touch of Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom "we almost took for
+the true Dickens," has disappeared.  The young lions of the Press no
+longer mimic your less admirable mannerisms--do not strain so much
+after fantastic comparisons, do not (in your manner and Mr.
+Carlyle's) give people nick-names derived from their teeth, or their
+complexion; and, generally, we are spared second-hand copies of all
+that in your style was least to be commended.  But, though improved
+by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees still put on little
+conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so forth, which
+would have irritated you very much, and there survive some press men
+who seem to have read you a little (especially your later works),
+and never to have read anything else.  Now familiarity with the
+pages of "Our Mutual Friend" and "Dombey and Son" does not precisely
+constitute a liberal education, and the assumption that it does is
+apt (quite unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest
+comic genius of modern times.
+
+On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true
+admirers of Dickens from the false.  Yours, Sir, in the best sense
+of the word, is a popular success, a popular reputation.  For
+example, I know that, in a remote and even Pictish part of this
+kingdom, a rural household, humble and under the shadow of a sorrow
+inevitably approaching, has found in "David Copperfield" oblivion of
+winter, of sorrow, and of sickness.  On the other hand, people are
+now picking up heart to say that "they cannot read Dickens," and
+that they particularly detest "Pickwick."  I believe it was young
+ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in this
+respect.  "Tout sied aux belles," and the fair, in the confidence of
+youth, often venture on remarkable confessions.  In your "Natural
+History of Young Ladies" I do not remember that you describe the
+Humorous Young Lady. {1}  She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour
+generally is at a deplorably low level in England.
+
+Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it
+may be said that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with
+Irish murder and arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric
+Buddhism, and a score of other plagues, including what was once
+called AEstheticism, are all, primarily, due to want of humour.
+People discuss, with the gravest faces, matters which properly
+should only be stated as the wildest paradoxes.  It naturally
+follows that, in a period almost destitute of humour, many
+respectable persons "cannot read Dickens," and are not ashamed to
+glory in their shame.  We ought not to be angry with others for
+their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the cretins who boast that
+they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel
+Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
+
+How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour!  Is
+there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from
+consideration of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty?  A
+hundred years ago, eighty years ago--nay, fifty years ago--we were a
+cruel but also a humorous people.  We had bull-baitings, and badger-
+drawings, and hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went
+to see men hanged; the pillory and the stocks were no empty "terrors
+unto evil-doers," for there was commonly a malefactor occupying each
+of these institutions.  With all this we had a broad-blown comic
+sense.  We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and
+Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator of Tittlebat
+Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the "Noctes," and, above all, we
+had YOU.
+
+From the old giants of English fun--burly persons delighting in
+broad caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing
+blows at the more prominent and obvious human follies--from these
+you derived the splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your
+earlier works.  Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all
+the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie--these and their
+immortal companions were reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer
+of that naughty, fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England, which we
+have improved out of existence.  And these characters, assuredly,
+are your best; by them, though stupid people cannot read about them,
+you will live while there is a laugh left among us.  Perhaps that
+does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but only the future
+can show.
+
+The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for
+ever and a day.  Honest old Laughter, the true LUTIN of your
+inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though
+it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and
+plots constructed after your favourite fashion ("Great Expectations"
+and the "Tale of Two Cities" are exceptions) may go by and never be
+regretted.  Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far
+as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago?  Jeffrey, the hard-
+headed shallow critic, who declared that Wordsworth "would never
+do," cried, "wept like anything," over your Little Nell.  One still
+laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but who can cry over
+Little Nell?
+
+Ah, Sir, how could you--who knew so intimately, who remembered so
+strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood-
+-how could you "wallow naked in the pathetic," and massacre
+holocausts of the Innocents?  To draw tears by gloating over a
+child's death-bed, was it worthy of you?  Was it the kind of work
+over which our hearts should melt?  I confess that Little Nell might
+die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I
+(like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain
+unmoved.
+
+
+She was more than usual calm,
+She did not give a single dam,
+
+
+wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott.  Over
+your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual
+calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers.
+But about matter of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of
+tears, who can argue?  Where is taste? where is truth?  What tears
+are "manly, Sir, manly," as Fred Bayham has it; and of what
+lamentations ought we rather to be ashamed?   Sunt lacrymae rerum;
+one has been moved in the cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or
+by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows slew the parched Athenians
+among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome says
+Adsum, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis
+laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos.  But over Dombey
+(the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.
+
+When an author deliberately sits down and says, "Now, let us have a
+good cry," he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least
+in many breasts, the fountain of tears.  Out of "Dombey and Son"
+there is little we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots;
+just as we forget the melodramatics of "Martin Chuzzlewit."  I have
+read in that book a score of times; I never see it but I revel in
+it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans.  But what the
+plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in
+the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate,
+I have never been able to comprehend.  In the same way, one of your
+most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence of private
+conversation) that "Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;" and
+probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little
+precipitous.
+
+"Too steep:"--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius,
+carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its
+grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations.  To force the note, to
+press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the
+indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal.  To take an
+instance in little:  when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy
+thought the seedsman "a very happy man to have so many little
+drawers in his shop."  The reflection is thoroughly boyish; but then
+you add, "I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted
+of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom."  That is not
+boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
+work.
+
+"So we arraign her; but she," the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
+brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain
+of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt
+in the neighbouring fountain of tears.  How poor the world of fancy
+would be, how "dispeopled of her dreams," if, in some ruin of the
+social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger,
+and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller,
+and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with
+Menander's men and women!  We cannot think of our world without
+them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential
+than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn
+flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms.  May we not
+almost welcome "Free Education"? for every Englishman who can read,
+unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for you.
+
+P.S.--Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the
+national bias!  I have been saying things of you that I would not
+hear an enemy say.  When I read, in the criticism of an American
+novelist, about your "hysterical emotionality" (for he writes in
+American), and your "waste of verbiage," I am almost tempted to deny
+that our Dickens has a single fault, to deem you impeccable!
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Pierre de Ronsard (Prince of Poets)
+
+
+
+Master And Prince of Poets,--As we know what choice thou madest of a
+sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so
+we know well the manner of thy chosen immortality.  In the Plains
+Elysian, among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy
+Love with thee to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.
+
+
+Le du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle
+Sans eschange le suit,
+La terre sans labour, de sa grasse mamelle,
+Toute chose y produit;
+D'enbas la troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse,
+Nous honorant sur tous,
+Viendra nous saluer, s'estimant bien-heureuse
+De s'accointer de nous.
+
+
+There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of old days, with
+Belleau, and Du Bellay, and Baif, and the flower of the maidens of
+Anjou.  Surely no rumour reaches thee, in that happy place of
+reconciled affections, no rumour of the rudeness of Time, the
+despite of men, and the change which stole from thy locks, so early
+grey, the crown of laurels and of thine own roses.  How different
+from thy choice of a sepulchre have been the fortunes of thy tomb!
+
+
+I will that none should break
+The marble for my sake,
+Wishful to make more fair
+My sepulchre!
+
+
+So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet numbers run in my rude English.
+Wearied of Courts and of priories, thou didst desire a grave beside
+thine own Loire, not remote from
+
+
+The caves, the founts that fall
+From the high mountain wall,
+That fall and flash and fleet,
+With silver feet.
+
+Only a laurel tree
+Shall guard the grave of me;
+Only Apollo's bough
+Shall shade me now!
+
+
+Far other has been thy sepulchre:  not in the free air, among the
+field flowers, but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with marble for a
+monument, and no green grass to cover thee.  Restless wert thou in
+thy life; thy dust was not to be restful in thy death.  The
+Huguenots, ces nouveaux Chretiens qui la France ont pillee,
+destroyed thy tomb, and the warning of the later monument,
+
+
+ABI, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCUS HUMU< SACRA EST,
+
+
+has not scared away malicious men.  The storm that passed over
+France a hundred years ago, more terrible than the religious wars
+that thou didst weep for, has swept the column from the tomb.  The
+marble was broken by violent hands, and the shattered sepulchre of
+the Prince of Poets gained a dusty hospitality from the museum of a
+country town.  Better had been the laurel of thy desire, the
+creeping vine, and the ivy tree.
+
+Scarce more fortunate, for long, than thy monument was thy memory.
+Thou hast not encountered, Master, in the Paradise of Poets,
+Messieurs Malherbe, De Balzac, and Boileau-- Boileau who spoke of
+thee as Ce poete orgueilleux trebuche de si haut!
+
+These gallant gentlemen, I make no doubt, are happy after their own
+fashion, backbiting each other and thee in the Paradise of Critics.
+In their time they wrought thee much evil, grumbling that thou
+wrotest in Greek and Latin (of which tongues certain of them had but
+little skill), and blaming thy many lyric melodies and the free flow
+of thy lines.  What said M. de Balzac to M. Chapelain?  "M. de
+Malherbe, M. de Grasse, and yourself must be very little poets, if
+Ronsard be a great one."  Time has brought in his revenges, and
+Messieurs Chapelain and De Grasse are as well forgotten as thou art
+well remembered.  Men could not always be deaf to thy sweet old
+songs, nor blind to the beauty of thy roses and thy loves.  When
+they took the wax out of their ears that M. Boileau had given them
+lest they should hear the singing of thy Sirens, then they were deaf
+no longer, then they heard the old deaf poet singing and made answer
+to his lays.  Hast thou not heard these sounds? have they not
+reached thee, the voices and the lyres of Theophile Gautier and
+Alfred de Musset?  Methinks thou hast marked them, and been glad
+that the old notes were ringing again and the old French lyric
+measures tripping to thine ancient harmonies, echoing and replying
+to the Muses of Horace and Catullus.  Returning to Nature, poets
+returned to thee.  Thy monument has perished, but not thy music, and
+the Prince of Poets has returned to his own again in a glorious
+Restoration.
+
+Through the dust and smoke of ages, and through the centuries of
+wars we strain our eyes and try to gain a glimpse of thee, Master,
+in thy good days, when the Muses walked with thee.  We seem to mark
+thee wandering silent through some little village, or dreaming in
+the woods, or loitering among thy lonely places, or in gardens where
+the roses blossom among wilder flowers, or on river banks where the
+whispering poplars and sighing reeds make answer to the murmur of
+the waters.  Such a picture hast thou drawn of thyself in the summer
+afternoons.
+
+
+Je m'en vais pourmener tantost parmy la plaine,
+Tantost en un village, et tantost en un bois,
+Et tantost par les lieux solitaires et cois.
+J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage,
+J'aime le flot de l'eau qui gazouille au rivage.
+
+
+Still, methinks, there was a book in the hand of the grave and
+learned poet; still thou wouldst carry thy Horace, thy Catullus, thy
+Theocritus, through the gem-like weather of the Renouveau, when the
+woods were enamelled with flowers, and the young Spring was lodged,
+like a wandering prince, in his great palaces hung with green:
+
+
+Orgueilleux de ses fleurs, enfle de sa jeunesse,
+Loge comme un grand Prince en ses vertes maisons!
+
+
+Thou sawest, in these woods by Loire side, the fair shapes of old
+religion, Fauns, Nymphs, and Satyrs, and heard'st in the
+nightingale's music the plaint of Philomel.  The ancient poets came
+back in the train of thyself and of the Spring, and learning was
+scarce less dear to thee than love; and thy ladies seemed fairer for
+the names they borrowed from the beauties of forgotten days, Helen
+and Cassandra.  How sweetly didst thou sing to them thine old
+morality, and how gravely didst thou teach the lesson of the Roses!
+Well didst thou know it, well didst thou love the Rose, since thy
+nurse, carrying thee, an infant, to the holy font, let fall on thee
+the sacred water brimmed with floating blossoms of the Rose!
+
+
+Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose,
+Qui ce matin avoit desclose
+Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
+A point perdu ceste vespree
+Les plis de sa robe pourpree,
+Et son teint au votre pareil.
+
+
+And again,
+
+
+La belle Rose du Printemps,
+Aubert, admoneste les hommes
+Passer joyeusement le temps,
+Et pendant que jeunes nous sommes,
+Esbattre la fleur de nos ans.
+
+
+In the same mood, looking far down the future, thou sangest of thy
+lady's age, the most sad, the most beautiful of thy sad and
+beautiful lays; for if thy bees gathered much honey 'twas somewhat
+bitter to taste, like that of the Sardinian yews.  How clearly we
+see the great hall, the grey lady spinning and humming among her
+drowsy maids, and how they waken at the word, and she sees her
+spring in their eyes, and they forecast their winter in her face,
+when she murmurs "'Twas Ronsard sang of me."
+
+Winter, and summer, and spring, how swiftly they pass, and how early
+time brought thee his sorrows, and grief cast her dust upon thy
+head.
+
+
+Adieu ma Lyre, adieu fillettes,
+Jadis mes douces amourettes,
+Adieu, je sens venir ma fin,
+Nul passetemps de ma jeunesse
+Ne m'accompagne en la vieillesse,
+Que le feu, le lict et le vin.
+
+
+Wine, and a soft bed, and a bright fire:  to this trinity of poor
+pleasures we come soon, if, indeed, wine be left to us.  Poetry
+herself deserts us; is it not said that Bacchus never forgives a
+renegade? and most of us turn recreants to Bacchus.  Even the bright
+fire, I fear, was not always there to warm thine old blood, Master,
+or, if fire there were, the wood was not bought with thy book-
+seller's money.  When autumn was drawing in during thine early old
+age, in 1584, didst thou not write that thou hadst never received a
+sou at the hands of all the publishers who vended thy books?  And as
+thou wert about putting forth thy folio edition of 1584, thou didst
+pray Buon, the bookseller, to give thee sixty crowns to buy wood
+withal, and make thee a bright fire in winter weather, and comfort
+thine old age with thy friend Gallandius.  And if Buon will not pay,
+then to try the other booksellers, "that wish to take everything and
+give nothing."
+
+Was it knowledge of this passage, Master, or ignorance of everything
+else, that made certain of the common steadfast dunces of our days
+speak of thee as if thou hadst been a starveling, neglected
+poetaster, jealous forsooth of Maitre Francoys Rabelais?  See how
+ignorantly M. Fleury writes, who teaches French literature withal to
+them of Muscovy, and hath indited a Life of Rabelais.  "Rabelais
+etait revetu d'un emploi honorable; Ronsard etait traite en
+subalterne," quoth this wondrous professor.  What!  Pierre de
+Ronsard, a gentleman of a noble house, holding the revenue of many
+abbeys, the friend of Mary Stuart, of the Duc d'Orleans, of Charles
+IX., HE is traite en subalterne, and is jealous of a frocked or
+unfrocked manant like Maitre Francoys!  And then this amazing Fleury
+falls foul of thine epitaph on Maitre Francoys and cries, "Ronsard a
+voulu faire des vers mechants; il n'a fait que de mechants vers."
+More truly saith M. Sainte-Beuve, "If the good Rabelais had returned
+to Meudon on the day when this epitaph was made over the wine, he
+would, methinks, have laughed heartily."  But what shall be said of
+a Professor like the egregious M. Fleury, who holds that Ronsard was
+despised at Court?  Was there a party at tennis when the king would
+not fain have had thee on his side, declaring that he ever won when
+Ronsard was his partner?  Did he not give thee benefices, and many
+priories, and call thee his father in Apollo, and even, so they say,
+bid thee sit down beside him on his throne?  Away, ye scandalous
+folk, who tell us that there was strife between the Prince of Poets
+and the King of Mirth.  Naught have ye by way of proof of your
+slander but the talk of Jean Bernier, a scurrilous, starveling
+apothecary, who put forth his fables in 1697, a century and a half
+after Maitre Francoys died.  Bayle quoted this fellow in a note, and
+ye all steal the tattle one from another in your dull manner, and
+know not whence it comes, nor even that Bayle would none of it and
+mocked its author.  With so little knowledge is history written, and
+thus doth each chattering brook of a "Life" swell with its tribute
+"that great Mississippi of falsehood," Biography.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Herodotus
+
+
+
+To Herodotus of Halicarnassus, greeting.--Concerning the matters set
+forth in your histories, and the tales you tell about both Greeks
+and Barbarians, whether they be true, or whether they be false, men
+dispute not little but a great deal.  Wherefore I, being concerned
+to know the verity, did set forth to make search in every manner,
+and came in my quest even unto the ends of the earth.  For there is
+an island of the Cimmerians beyond the Straits of Heracles, some
+three days' voyage to a ship that hath a fair following wind in her
+sails; and there it is said that men know many things from of old:
+thither, then, I came in my inquiry.  Now, the island is not small,
+but large, greater than the whole of Hellas; and they call it
+Britain.  In that island the east wind blows for ten parts of the
+year, and the people know not how to cover themselves from the cold.
+But for the other two months of the year the sun shines fiercely, so
+that some of them die thereof, and others die of the frozen mixed
+drinks; for they have ice even in the summer, and this ice they put
+to their liquor.  Through the whole of this island, from the west
+even to the east, there flows a river called Thames:  a great river
+and a laborious, but not to be likened to the River of Egypt.
+
+The mouth of this river, where I stepped out from my ship, is
+exceedingly foul and of an evil savour by reason of the city on the
+banks.  Now this city is several hundred parasangs in circumference.
+Yet a man that needed not to breathe the air might go round it in
+one hour, in chariots that run under the earth; and these chariots
+are drawn by creatures that breathe smoke and sulphur, such as
+Orpheus mentions in his "Argonautica," if it be by Orpheus.  The
+people of the town, when I inquired of them concerning Herodotus of
+Halicarnassus, looked on me with amazement, and went straightway
+about their business--namely, to seek out whatsoever new thing is
+coming to pass all over the whole inhabited world, and as for things
+old, they take no keep of them.
+
+Nevertheless, by diligence I learned that he who in this land knew
+most concerning Herodotus was a priest, and dwelt in the priests'
+city on the river which is called the City of the Ford of the Ox.
+But whether Io, when she wore a cow's shape, had passed by that way
+in her wanderings, and thence comes the name of that city, I could
+not (though I asked all men I met) learn aught with certainty.  But
+to me, considering this, it seemed that Io must have come thither.
+And now farewell to Io.
+
+To the City of the Priests there are two roads:  one by land; and
+one by water, following the river.  To a well-girdled man, the land
+journey is but one day's travel; by the river it is longer but more
+pleasant.  Now that river flows, as I said, from the west to the
+east.  And there is in it a fish called chub, which they catch; but
+they do not eat it, for a certain sacred reason.  Also there is a
+fish called trout, and this is the manner of his catching.  They
+build for this purpose great dams of wood, which they call weirs.
+Having built the weir they sit upon it with rods in their hands, and
+a line on the rod, and at the end of the line a little fish.  There
+then they "sit and spin in the sun," as one of their poets says, not
+for a short time but for many days, having rods in their hands and
+eating and drinking.  In this wise they angle for the fish called
+trout; but whether they ever catch him or not, not having seen it, I
+cannot say; for it is not pleasant to me to speak things concerning
+which I know not the truth.
+
+Now, after sailing and rowing against the stream for certain days, I
+came to the City of the Ford of the Ox.  Here the river changes his
+name, and is called Isis, after the name of the goddess of the
+Egyptians.  But whether the Britons brought the name from Egypt or
+whether the Egyptians took it from the Britons, not knowing I prefer
+not to say.  But to me it seems that the Britons are a colony of the
+Egyptians, or the Egyptians a colony of the Britons.  Moreover, when
+I was in Egypt I saw certain soldiers in white helmets, who were
+certainly British.  But what they did there (as Egypt neither
+belongs to Britain nor Britain to Egypt) I know not, neither could
+they tell me.  But one of them replied to me in that line of Homer
+(if the Odyssey be Homer's), "We have come to a sorry Cyprus, and a
+sad Egypt."  Others told me that they once marched against the
+Ethiopians, and having defeated them several times, then came back
+again, leaving their property to the Ethiopians.  But as to the
+truth of this I leave it to every man to form his own opinion.
+
+Having come into the City of the Priests, I went forth into the
+street, and found a priest of the baser sort, who for a piece of
+silver led me hither and thither among the temples, discoursing of
+many things.
+
+Now it seemed to me a strange thing that the city was empty, and no
+man dwelling therein, save a few priests only, and their wives, and
+their children, who are drawn to and fro in little carriages dragged
+by women.  But the priest told me that during half the year the city
+was desolate, for that there came somewhat called "The Long," or
+"The Vac," and drave out the young priests.  And he said that these
+did no other thing but row boats, and throw balls from one to the
+other, and this they were made to do, he said, that the young
+priests might learn to be humble, for they are the proudest of men.
+But whether he spoke truth or not I know not, only I set down what
+he told me.  But to anyone considering it, this appears rather to
+jump with his story--namely, that the young priests have houses on
+the river, painted of divers colours, all of them empty.
+
+Then the priest, at my desire, brought me to one of the temples,
+that I might seek out all things concerning Herodotus the
+Halicarnassian, from one who knew.  Now this temple is not the
+fairest in the city, but less fair and goodly than the old temples,
+yet goodlier and more fair than the new temples; and over the roof
+there is the image of an eagle made of stone--no small marvel, but a
+great one, how men came to fashion him; and that temple is called
+the House of Queens.  Here they sacrifice a boar once every year;
+and concerning this they tell a certain sacred story which I know
+but will not utter.
+
+Then I was brought to the priest who had a name for knowing most
+about Egypt, and the Egyptians, and the Assyrians, and the
+Cappadocians, and all the kingdoms of the Great King.  He came out
+to me, being attired in a black robe, and wearing on his head a
+square cap.  But why the priests have square caps I know, and he who
+has been initiated into the mysteries which they call "Matric"
+knows, but I prefer not to tell.  Concerning the square cap, then,
+let this be sufficient.  Now, the priest received me courteously,
+and when I asked him, concerning Herodotus, whether he were a true
+man or not, he smiled and answered "Abu Goosh," which, in the tongue
+of the Arabians, means "The Father of Liars."  Then he went on to
+speak concerning Herodotus, and he said in his discourse that
+Herodotus not only told the thing which was not, but that he did so
+wilfully, as one knowing the truth but concealing it.  For example,
+quoth he, "Solon never went to see Croesus, as Herodotus avers; nor
+did those about Xerxes ever dream dreams; but Herodotus, out of his
+abundant wickedness, invented these things."
+
+"Now behold," he went on, "how the curse of the Gods falls upon
+Herodotus.  For he pretends that he saw Cadmeian inscriptions at
+Thebes.  Now I do not believe there were any Cadmeian inscriptions
+there:  therefore Herodotus is most manifestly lying.  Moreover,
+this Herodotus never speaks of Sophocles the Athenian, and why not?
+Because he, being a child at school, did not learn Sophocles by
+heart:  for the tragedies of Sophocles could not have been learned
+at school before they were written, nor can any man quote a poet
+whom he never learned at school.  Moreover, as all those about
+Herodotus knew Sophocles well, he could not appear to them to be
+learned by showing that he knew what they knew also."  Then I
+thought the priest was making game and sport, saying first that
+Herodotus could know no poet whom he had not learned at school, and
+then saying that all the men of his time well knew this poet, "about
+whom everyone was talking."  But the priest seemed not to know that
+Herodotus and Sophocles were friends, which is proved by this, that
+Sophocles wrote an ode in praise of Herodotus.
+
+Then he went on, and though I were to write with a hundred hands
+(like Briareus, of whom Homer makes mention) I could not tell you
+all the things that the priest said against Herodotus, speaking
+truly, or not truly, or sometimes correctly and sometimes not, as
+often befalls mortal men.  For Herodotus, he said, was chiefly
+concerned to steal the lore of those who came before him, such as
+Hecataeus, and then to escape notice as having stolen it.  Also he
+said that, being himself cunning and deceitful, Herodotus was easily
+beguiled by the cunning of others, and believed in things manifestly
+false, such as the story of the Phoenix-bird.
+
+Then I spoke, and said that Herodotus himself declared that he could
+not believe that story; but the priest regarded me not.  And he said
+that Herodotus had never caught a crocodile with cold pig, nor did
+he ever visit Assyria, nor Babylon, nor Elephantine; but, saying
+that he had been in these lands, said that which was not true.  He
+also declared that Herodotus, when he travelled, knew none of the
+Fat Ones of the Egyptians, but only those of the baser sort.  And he
+called Herodotus a thief and a beguiler, and "the same with intent
+to deceive," as one of their own poets writes.  And, to be short,
+Herodotus, I could not tell you in one day all the charges which are
+now brought against you; but concerning the truth of these things,
+YOU know, not least, but most, as to yourself being guilty or
+innocent.  Wherefore, if you have anything to show or set forth
+whereby you may be relieved from the burden of these accusations,
+now is the time.  Be no longer silent; but, whether through the
+Oracle of the Dead, or the Oracle of Branchidae, or that in Delphi,
+or Dodona, or of Amphiaraus at Oropus, speak to your friends and
+lovers (whereof I am one from of old) and let men know the very
+truth.
+
+Now, concerning the priests in the City of the Ford of the Ox, it is
+to be said that of all men whom we know they receive strangers most
+gladly, feasting them all day.  Moreover, they have many drinks,
+cunningly mixed, and of these the best is that they call Archdeacon,
+naming it from one of the priests' offices.  Truly, as Homer says
+(if the Odyssey be Homer's), "when that draught is poured into the
+bowl then it is no pleasure to refrain."
+
+Drinking of this wine, or nectar, Herodotus, I pledge you, and pour
+forth some deal on the ground, to Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in the
+House of Hades.
+
+And I wish you farewell, and good be with you.  Whether the priest
+spoke truly, or not truly, even so may such good things betide you
+as befall dead men.
+
+
+
+LETTER--Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope
+
+
+
+From mortal Gratitude, decide, my Pope,
+Have Wits Immortal more to fear or hope?
+Wits toil and travail round the Plant of Fame,
+Their Works its Garden, and its Growth their Aim,
+Then Commentators, in unwieldy Dance,
+Break down the Barriers of the trim Pleasance,
+Pursue the Poet, like Actaeon's Hounds,
+Beyond the fences of his Garden Grounds,
+Rend from the singing Robes each borrowed Gem,
+Rend from the laurel'd Brows the Diadem,
+And, if one Rag of Character they spare,
+Comes the Biographer, and strips it bare!
+
+Such, Pope, has been thy Fortune, such thy Doom.
+Swift the Ghouls gathered at the Poet's Tomb,
+With Dust of Notes to clog each lordly Line,
+Warburton, Warton, Croker, Bowles, combine!
+Collecting Cackle, Johnson condescends
+To INTERVIEW the Drudges of your Friends.
+Thus though your Courthope holds your merits high,
+And still proclaims your Poems POETRY,
+Biographers, un-Boswell-like, have sneered,
+And Dunces edit him whom Dunces feared!
+
+They say, "what say they?"  Not in vain You ask;
+To tell you what they say, behold my Task!
+"Methinks already I your Tears survey"
+As I repeat "the horrid Things they say." {2}
+
+Comes El-n first:  I fancy you'll agree
+Not frenzied Dennis smote so fell as he;
+For El-n's Introduction, crabbed and dry,
+Like Churchill's Cudgel's {3} marked with LIE, and LIE!
+
+"Too dull to know what his own System meant,
+Pope yet was skilled new Treasons to invent;
+A Snake that puffed himself and stung his Friends,
+Few Lied so frequent, for such little Ends;
+
+His mind, like Flesh inflamed, {4} was raw and sore,
+And still, the more he writhed, he stung the more!
+Oft in a Quarrel, never in the Right,
+His Spirit sank when he was called to fight.
+Pope, in the Darkness mining like a Mole,
+Forged on Himself, as from Himself he stole,
+And what for Caryll once he feigned to feel,
+Transferred, in Letters never sent, to Steele!
+Still he denied the Letters he had writ,
+And still mistook Indecency for Wit.
+His very Grammar, so De Quincey cries,
+"Detains the Reader, and at times defies!'"
+
+Fierce El-n thus:  no Line escapes his Rage,
+And furious Foot-notes growl 'neath every Page:
+See St-ph-n next take up the woful Tale,
+Prolong the Preaching, and protract the Wail!
+"Some forage Falsehoods from the North and South,
+But Pope, poor D-l, lied from Hand to Mouth; {5}
+Affected, hypocritical, and vain,
+A Book in Breeches, and a Fop in Grain;
+A Fox that found not the high Clusters sour,
+The Fanfaron of Vice beyond his power,
+Pope yet possessed"--(the Praise will make you start) -
+"Mean, morbid, vain, he yet possessed a Heart!
+And still we marvel at the Man, and still
+Admire his Finish, and applaud his Skill:
+Though, as that fabled Barque, a phantom Form,
+Eternal strains, nor rounds the Cape of Storm,
+Even so Pope strove, nor ever crossed the Line
+That from the Noble separates the Fine!"
+
+The Learned thus, and who can quite reply,
+Reverse the Judgment, and Retort the Lie?
+You reap, in armed Hates that haunt your Name,
+Reap what you sowed, the Dragon's Teeth of Fame:
+You could not write, and from unenvious Time
+Expect the Wreath that crowns the lofty Rhyme,
+You still must fight, retreat, attack, defend,
+And oft, to snatch a Laurel, lose a Friend!
+
+The Pity of it!  And the changing Taste
+Of changing Time leaves half your Work a Waste!
+My Childhood fled your Couplet's clarion tone,
+And sought for Homer in the Prose of Bohn.
+Still through the Dust of that dim Prose appears
+The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of Spears;
+Still we may trace what Hearts heroic feel,
+And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the Steel!
+But, ah, your Iliad seems a half-pretence,
+Where Wits, not Heroes, prove their Skill in Fence,
+And great Achilles' Eloquence doth show
+As if no Centaur trained him, but Boileau!
+
+Again, your Verse is orderly,--and more, -
+"The Waves behind impel the Waves before;"
+Monotonously musical they glide,
+Till Couplet unto Couplet hath replied.
+But turn to Homer!  How his Verses sweep!
+Surge answers Surge and Deep doth call on Deep;
+This Line in Foam and Thunder issues forth,
+Spurred by the West or smitten by the North,
+Sombre in all its sullen Deeps, and all
+Clear at the Crest, and foaming to the Fall,
+The next with silver Murmur dies away,
+Like Tides that falter to Calypso's Bay!
+
+Thus Time, with sordid Alchemy and dread,
+Turns half the Glory of your Gold to Lead;
+Thus Time,--at Ronsard's wreath that vainly bit, -
+Has marred the Poet to preserve the Wit,
+Who almost left on Addison a stain,
+Whose Knife cut cleanest with a poisoned pain, -
+Yet Thou (strange Fate that clings to all of Thine!)
+When most a Wit dost most a Poet shine.
+In Poetry thy Dunciad expires,
+When Wit has shot "her momentary Fires."
+'Tis Tragedy that watches by the Bed
+"Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red,"
+And Men, remembering all, can scarce deny
+To lay the Laurel where thine Ashes lie!
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Lucian of Samosata
+
+
+
+In what bower, oh Lucian, of your rediscovered Islands Fortunate are
+you now reclining; the delight of the fair, the learned, the witty,
+and the brave?  In that clear and tranquil climate, whose air
+breathes of "violet and lily, myrtle, and the flower of the vine,"
+
+
+Where the daisies are rose-scented,
+And the Rose herself has got
+Perfume which on earth is not,
+
+
+among the music of all birds, and the wind-blown notes of flutes
+hanging on the trees, methinks that your laughter sounds most
+silvery sweet, and that Helen and fair Charmides are still of your
+company.  Master of mirth, and Soul the best contented of all that
+have seen the world's ways clearly, most clear-sighted of all that
+have made tranquillity their bride, what other laughers dwell with
+you, where the crystal and fragrant waters wander round the shining
+palaces and the temples of amethyst?
+
+Heine surely is with you; if, indeed, it was not one Syrian soul
+that dwelt among alien men, Germans and Romans, in the bodily
+tabernacles of Heine and of Lucian.  But he was fallen on evil times
+and evil tongues; while Lucian, as witty as he, as bitter in
+mockery, as happily dowered with the magic of words, lived long and
+happily and honoured, imprisoned in no "mattress-grave."  Without
+Rabelais, without Voltaire, without Heine, you would find, methinks,
+even the joys of your Happy Islands lacking in zest; and, unless
+Plato came by your way, none of the ancients could meet you in the
+lists of sportive dialogue.
+
+There, among the vines that bear twelve times in the year, more
+excellent than all the vineyards of Touraine, while the song-birds
+bring you flowers from vales enchanted, and the shapes of the
+Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind-woven raiment of sunset hues;
+there, in a land that knows not age, nor winter, midnight, nor
+autumn, nor noon, where the silver twilight of summer-dawn is
+perennial, where youth does not wax spectre-pale and die; there, my
+Lucian, you are crowned the Prince of the Paradise of Mirth.
+
+Who would bring you, if he had the power, from the banquet where
+Homer sings:  Homer, who, in mockery of commentators, past and to
+come, German and Greek, informed you that he was by birth a
+Babylonian?  Yet, if you, who first wrote Dialogues of the Dead,
+could hear the prayer of an epistle wafted to "lands indiscoverable
+in the unheard-of West," you might visit once more a world so worthy
+of such a mocker, so like the world you knew so well of old.
+
+Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your sense and of your mockery!
+Here, where faith is sick and superstition is waking afresh; where
+gods come rarely, and spectres appear at five shillings an
+interview; where science is popular, and philosophy cries aloud in
+the market-place, and clamour does duty for government, and Thais
+and Lais are names of power--here, Lucian, is room and scope for
+you.  Can I not imagine a new "Auction of Philosophers," and what
+wealth might be made by him who bought these popular sages and
+lecturers at his estimate, and vended them at their own?
+
+HERMES:  Whom shall we put first up to auction?
+
+ZEUS:  That German in spectacles; he seems a highly respectable man.
+
+HERMES:  Ho, Pessimist, come down and let the public view you.
+
+ZEUS:  Go on, put him up and have done with him.
+
+HERMES:  Who bids for the Life Miserable, for extreme, complete,
+perfect, unredeemable perdition?  What offers for the universal
+extinction of the species, and the collapse of the Conscious?
+
+A PURCHASER:  He does not look at all a bad lot.  May one put him
+through his paces?
+
+HERMES:  Certainly; try your luck.
+
+PURCHASER:  What is your name?
+
+PESSIMIST:  Hartmann.
+
+PURCHASER:  What can you teach me?
+
+PESSIMIST:  That Life is not worth Living.
+
+PURCHASER:  Wonderful  Most edifying!  How much for this lot?
+
+HERMES:  Two hundred pounds.
+
+PURCHASER:  I will write you a cheque for the money.  Come home,
+Pessimist, and begin your lessons without more ado.
+
+HERMES:  Attention!  Here is a magnificent article--the Positive
+Life, the Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life.  Who bids for a
+possible place in the Calendar of the Future?
+
+PURCHASER:  What does he call himself? he has a very French air.
+
+HERMES:  Put your own questions.
+
+PURCHASER:  What's your pedigree, my Philosopher, and previous
+performances?
+
+POSITIVIST:  I am by Rousseau out of Catholicism, with a strain of
+the Evolution blood.
+
+PURCHASER:  What do you believe in?
+
+POSITIVIST:  In Man, with a large M.
+
+PURCHASER:  Not in individual Man?
+
+POSITIVIST:  By no means; not even always in Mr. Gladstone.  All
+men, all Churches, all parties, all philosophies, and even the other
+sect of our own Church, are perpetually in the wrong.  Buy me, and
+listen to me, and you will always be in the right.
+
+PURCHASER:  And, after this life, what have you to offer me?
+
+POSITIVIST:  A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible; but
+not, of course, conscious immortality.
+
+PURCHASER:  Take him away, and put up another lot.
+
+Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his
+notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion
+and Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a
+sort of a something, might all be offered with their divers wares;
+and cheaply enough, Lucian, you would value them in this auction of
+Sects.  "There is but one way to Corinth," as of old; but which that
+way may be, oh master of Hermotimus, we know no more than he did of
+old; and still we find, of all philosophies, that the Stoic route is
+most to be recommended.  But we have our Cyrenaics too, though they
+are no longer "clothed in purple, and crowned with flowers, and fond
+of drink and of female flute-players."  Ah, here too, you might
+laugh, and fail to see where the Pleasure lies, when the Cyrenaics
+are no "judges of cakes" (nor of ale, for that matter), and are
+strangers in the Courts of Princes.  "To despise all things, to make
+use of all things, in all things to follow pleasure only:" that is
+not the manner of the new, if it were the secret of the older
+Hedonism.
+
+Then, turning from the philosophers to the seekers after a sign,
+what change, Lucian, would you find in them and their ways?  None;
+they are quite unaltered.  Still our Peregrinus, and our Peregrina
+too, come to us from the East, or, if from the West, they take India
+on their way--India, that secular home of drivelling creeds, and of
+religion in its sacerdotage.  Still they prattle of Brahmins and
+Buddhism; though, unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn
+themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after the Derby.  We are not so
+fortunate in the demise of our Theosophists; and our police, less
+wise than the Hellenodicae, would probably not permit the Immolation
+of the Quack.  Like your Alexander, they deal in marvels and
+miracles, oracles and warnings.  All such bogy stories as those of
+your "Philopseudes," and the ghost of the lady who took to table-
+rapping because one of her best slippers had not been burned with
+her body, are gravely investigated by the Psychical Society.
+
+Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with us--the man without a
+tinge of letters, who buys up old manuscripts "because they are
+stained and gnawed, and who goes, for proof of valued antiquity, to
+the testimony of the book-worms."  And the rich Bibliophile now, as
+in your satire, clothes his volumes in purple morocco and gay
+dorures, while their contents are sealed to him.
+
+As to the topics of satire and gay curiosity which occupy the lady
+known as "Gyp," and M. Halevy in his "Les Petites Cardinal," if you
+had not exhausted the matter in your "Dialogues of Hetairai," you
+would be amused to find the same old traits surviving without a
+touch of change.  One reads, in Halevy's French, of Madame Cardinal,
+and, in your Greek, of the mother of Philinna, and marvels that
+eighteen hundred years have not in one single trifle altered the
+mould.  Still the old shabby light-loves, the old greed, the old
+luxury and squalor.  Still the unconquerable superstition that now
+seeks to tell fortunes by the cards, and, in your time, resorted to
+the sorceress with her magical "bull-roarer" or turndun. {6}
+
+Yes, Lucian, we are the same vain creatures of doubt and dread, of
+unbelief and credulity, of avarice and pretence, that you knew, and
+at whom you smiled.  Nay, our very "social question" is not altered.
+Do you not write, in "The Runaways," "The artisans will abandon
+their workshops, and leave their trades, when they see that, with
+all the labour that bows their bodies from dawn to dark, they make a
+petty and starveling pittance, while men that toil not nor spin are
+floating in Pactolus"?
+
+They begin to see this again as of yore; but whether the end of
+their vision will be a laughing matter, you, fortunate Lucian, do
+not need to care.  Hail to you, and farewell!
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Maitre Francoys Rabelais.  Of the coming of the
+Coqcigrues.
+
+
+
+Master,--In the Boreal and Septentrional lands, turned aside from
+the noonday and the sun, there dwelt of old (as thou knowest, and as
+Olaus voucheth) a race of men, brave, strong, nimble, and
+adventurous, who had no other care but to fight and drink.  There,
+by reason of the cold (as Virgil witnesseth), men break wine with
+axes.  To their minds, when once they were dead and gotten to
+Valhalla, or the place of their Gods, there would be no other
+pleasure but to swig, tipple, drink, and boose till the coming of
+that last darkness and Twilight, wherein they, with their deities,
+should do battle against the enemies of all mankind; which day they
+rather desired than dreaded.
+
+So chanced it also with Pantagruel and Brother John and their
+company, after they had once partaken of the secret of the Dive
+Bouteille.  Thereafter they searched no longer; but, abiding at
+their ease, were merry, frolic, jolly, gay, glad, and wise; only
+that they always and ever did expect the awful Coming of the
+Coqcigrues.  Now concerning the day of that coming, and the nature
+of them that should come, they knew nothing; and for his part
+Panurge was all the more adread, as Aristotle testifieth that men
+(and Panurge above others) most fear that which they know least.
+Now it chanced one day, as they sat at meat, with viands rare,
+dainty, and precious as ever Apicius dreamed of, that there
+fluttered on the air a faint sound as of sermons, speeches,
+orations, addresses, discourses, lectures, and the like; whereat
+Panurge, pricking up his ears, cried, "Methinks this wind bloweth
+from Midlothian," and so fell a trembling.
+
+Next, to their aural orifices, and the avenues audient of the brain,
+was borne a very melancholy sound as of harmoniums, hymns, organ-
+pianos, psalteries, and the like, all playing different airs, in a
+kind most hateful to the Muses.  Then said Panurge, as well as he
+might for the chattering of his teeth:  "May I never drink if here
+come not the Coqcigrues!" and this saying and prophecy of his was
+true and inspired.  But thereon the others began to mock, flout, and
+gird at Panurge for his cowardice.  "Here am I!" cried Brother John,
+"well-armed and ready to stand a siege; being entrenched, fortified,
+hemmed-in and surrounded with great pasties, huge pieces of salted
+beef, salads, fricassees, hams, tongues, pies, and a wilderness of
+pleasant little tarts, jellies, pastries, trifles, and fruits of all
+kinds, and I shall not thirst while I have good wells, founts,
+springs, and sources of Bordeaux wine, Burgundy, wine of the
+Champagne country, sack and Canary.  A fig for thy Coqcigrues!"
+
+But even as he spoke there ran up suddenly a whole legion, or rather
+army, of physicians, each armed with laryngoscopes, stethoscopes,
+horoscopes, microscopes, weighing machines, and such other tools,
+engines, and arms as they had who, after thy time, persecuted
+Monsieur de Pourceaugnac!  And they all, rushing on Brother John,
+cried out to him, "Abstain!  Abstain!"  And one said, "I have well
+diagnosed thee, and thou art in a fair way to have the gout."  "I
+never did better in my days," said Brother John.  "Away with thy
+meats and drinks!" they cried.  And one said, "He must to Royat;"
+and another, "Hence with him to Aix;" and a third, "Banish him to
+Wiesbaden;" and a fourth, "Hale him to Gastein;" and yet another,
+"To Barbouille with him in chains!"
+
+And while others felt his pulse and looked at his tongue, they all
+wrote prescriptions for him like men mad.  "For thy eating," cried
+he that seemed to be their leader, "No soup!"  "No soup!" quoth
+Brother John; and those cheeks of his, whereat you might have warmed
+your two hands in the winter solstice, grew white as lilies.  "Nay!
+and no salmon, nor any beef nor mutton!  A little chicken by times,
+pericolo tuo!  Nor any game, such as grouse, partridge, pheasant,
+capercailzie, wild duck; nor any cheese, nor fruit, nor pastry, nor
+coffee, nor eau de vie; and avoid all sweets.  No veal, pork, nor
+made dishes of any kind."  "Then what may I eat?" quoth the good
+Brother, whose valour had oozed out of the soles of his sandals.  "A
+little cold bacon at breakfast--no eggs," quoth the leader of the
+strange folk, "and a slice of toast without butter."  "And for thy
+drink"--("What?" gasped Brother John)--"one dessert-spoonful of
+whisky, with a pint of the water of Apollinaris at luncheon and
+dinner.  No more!"  At this Brother John fainted, falling like a
+great buttress of a hill, such as Taygetus or Erymanthus.
+
+While they were busy with him, others of the frantic folk had built
+great platforms of wood, whereon they all stood and spoke at once,
+both men and women.  And of these some wore red crosses on their
+garments, which meaneth "Salvation;" and others wore white crosses,
+with a little black button of crape, to signify "Purity;" and others
+bits of blue to mean "Abstinence."  While some of these pursued
+Panurge others did beset Pantagruel; asking him very long questions,
+whereunto he gave but short answers.  Thus they asked:-
+
+Have ye Local Option here?--Pan.:  What?
+
+May one man drink if his neighbour be not athirst?--Pan.:  Yea!
+
+Have ye Free Education?--Pan.:  What?
+
+Must they that have, pay to school them that have not?--Pan.:  Nay!
+
+Have ye free land?--Pan.:  What?
+
+Have ye taken the land from the farmer, and given it to the tailor
+out of work and the candlemaker masterless?--Pan.:  Nay!
+
+Have your women folk votes?--Pan.:  Bosh!
+
+Have ye got religion?--Pan.:  How?
+
+Do you go about the streets at night, brawling, blowing a trumpet
+before you, and making long prayers?--Pan.:  Nay!
+
+Have you manhood suffrage?--Pan.:  Eh?
+
+Is Jack as good as his master?--Pan.:  Nay!
+
+Have you joined the Arbitration Society?--Pan.:  Quoy?
+
+Will you let another kick you, and will you ask his neighbour if you
+deserve the same?--Pan.:  Nay!
+
+Do you eat what you list?--Pan.:  Ay!
+
+Do you drink when you are athirst?--Pan.:  Ay!
+
+Are you governed by the free expression of the popular will?--Pan.:
+How?
+
+Are you servants of priests, pulpits, and penny papers?--Pan.:  NO!
+
+Now, when they heard these answers of Pantagruel they all fell, some
+a weeping, some a praying, some a swearing, some an arbitrating,
+some a lecturing, some a caucussing, some a preaching, some a faith-
+healing, some a miracle-working, some a hypnotising, some a writing
+to the daily press; and while they were thus busy, like folk
+distraught, "reforming the island," Pantagruel burst out a laughing;
+whereat they were greatly dismayed; for laughter killeth the whole
+race of Coqcigrues, and they may not endure it.
+
+Then Pantagruel and his company stole aboard a barque that Panurge
+had ready in the harbour.  And having provisioned her well with
+store of meat and good drink, they set sail for the kingdom of
+Entelechy, where, having landed, they were kindly entreated; and
+there abide to this day; drinking of the sweet and eating of the
+fat, under the protection of that intellectual sphere which hath in
+all places its centre and nowhere its circumference.
+
+Such was their destiny; there was their end appointed, and thither
+the Coqcigrues can never come.  For all the air of that land is full
+of laughter, which killeth Coqcigrues; and there aboundeth the herb
+Pantagruelion.  But for thee, Master Francoys, thou art not well
+liked in this island of ours, where the Coqcigrues are abundant,
+very fierce, cruel, and tyrannical.  Yet thou hast thy friends, that
+meet and drink to thee, and wish thee well wheresoever thou hast
+found thy grand peut-etre.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Jane Austen
+
+
+
+Madam,--If to the enjoyments of your present state be lacking a view
+of the minor infirmities or foibles of men, I cannot but think (were
+the thought permitted) that your pleasures are yet incomplete.
+Moreover, it is certain that a woman of parts who has once meddled
+with literature will never wholly lose her love for the discussion
+of that delicious topic, nor cease to relish what (in the cant of
+our new age) is styled "literary shop."  For these reasons I attempt
+to convey to you some inkling of the present state of that agreeable
+art which you, madam, raised to its highest pitch of perfection.
+
+As to your own works (immortal, as I believe), I have but little
+that is wholly cheering to tell one who, among women of letters, was
+almost alone in her freedom from a lettered vanity.  You are not a
+very popular author:  your volumes are not found in gaudy covers on
+every bookstall; or, if found, are not perused with avidity by the
+Emmas and Catherines of our generation.  'Tis not long since a blow
+was dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at your character
+as an author by the publication of your familiar letters.  The
+editor of these epistles, unfortunately, did not always take your
+witticisms, and he added others which were too unmistakably his own.
+While the injudicious were disappointed by the absence of your
+exquisite style and humour, the wiser sort were the more convinced
+of your wisdom.  In your letters (knowing your correspondents) you
+gave but the small personal talk of the hour, for them sufficient;
+for your books you reserved matter and expression which are
+imperishable.  Your admirers, if not very numerous, include all
+persons of taste, who, in your favour, are apt somewhat to abate the
+rule, or shake off the habit, which commonly confines them to but
+temperate laudation.
+
+'Tis the fault of all art to seem antiquated and faded in the eyes
+of the succeeding generation.  The manners of your age were not the
+manners of to-day, and young gentlemen and ladies who think Scott
+"slow," think Miss Austen "prim" and "dreary."  Yet, even could you
+return among us, I scarcely believe that, speaking the language of
+the hour, as you might, and versed in its habits, you would win the
+general admiration.  For how tame, madam, are your characters,
+especially your favourite heroines! how limited the life which you
+knew and described! how narrow the range of your incidents! how
+correct your grammar!
+
+As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth,
+and Catherine:  women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for
+the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and
+the parish's concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and
+unacquainted with vain yearnings and interesting doubts.  Who can
+engage his fancy with their match-makings and the conduct of their
+affections, when so many daring and dazzling heroines approach and
+solicit his regard?
+
+Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden
+fleurs-de-lys --ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who
+count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and
+even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical
+importance.  With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant
+Italian musicians--maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the
+contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art
+of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more
+admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the
+inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the
+corner.  When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where
+are your Emmas and Elizabeths?  Your volumes neither excite nor
+satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific
+fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States, as
+well as in France and at home.
+
+You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open.  Knowing Lydia
+and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost
+insignificant characters?  With Lydia for a heroine you might have
+gone far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your
+time, to the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even
+now, in the circulating library.  How Lyddy, perched on a corner of
+the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he
+climbed up by a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung
+on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and
+finally eloped:  all this might have been put in the mouth of a
+jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been
+less popular than several favourites of our time.  Had you cast the
+whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over
+the thickness of Mary's legs and the softness of Kitty's cheeks, and
+the blonde fluffiness of Wickham's whiskers, you would have left a
+romance still dear to young ladies.
+
+Or, again, you might entrance fair students still, had you
+concentrated your attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henry
+Crawford.  These should have been the chief figures of "Mansfield
+Park."  But you timidly decline to tackle Passion.  "Let other
+pens," you write, "dwell on guilt and misery.  I quit such odious
+subjects as soon as I can."  Ah, THERE is the secret of your
+failure!  Need I add that the vulgarity and narrowness of the social
+circles you describe impair your popularity?  I scarce remember more
+than one lady of title, and but very few lords (and these
+unessential) in all your tales.  Now, when we all wish to be in
+society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and
+we get lords (and very queer lords) even from Republican authors,
+born in a country which in your time was not renowned for its
+literature.  I have heard a critic remark, with a decided air of
+fashion, on the brevity of the notice which your characters give
+each other when they offer invitations to dinner.  "An invitation to
+dinner next day was despatched," and this demonstrates that your
+acquaintance "went out" very little, and had but few engagements.
+How vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy "keep
+his breath to cool his porridge."  I blush for Elizabeth!  It were
+superfluous to add that your characters are debased by being
+invariably mere members of the Church of England as by law
+established.  The Dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that glides
+from Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher
+Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look for in vain among your
+studies of character.  Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown
+sound to you; so how can you help us in the stress of the soul's
+travailings?
+
+You may say that the soul's travailings are no affair of yours;
+proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the
+duty of the novelist.  I only remember one reference, in all your
+works, to that controversy which occupies the chief of our
+attention--the great controversy on Creation or Evolution.  Your
+Jane Bennet cries:  "I have no idea of there being so much Design in
+the world as some persons imagine."  Nor do you touch on our mighty
+social question, the Land Laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a
+Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty "of settling
+an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man
+whom nobody cared anything about."  There, madam, in that cruelly
+unjust performance, what a text you had for a tendenz-romanz.  Nay,
+you can allow Kitty to report that a Private had been flogged,
+without introducing a chapter on Flogging in the Army.  But you
+formally declined to stretch your matter out, here and there, "with
+solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the
+story."  No "padding" for Miss Austen! in fact, madam, as you were
+born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism,
+or Irreverence, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope
+to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed
+generation.  Your heroines are not passionate, we do not see their
+red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the manner of our frank
+young Maenads.  What says your best successor, a lady who adds fresh
+lustre to a name that in fiction equals yours?  She says of Miss
+Austen:  "Her heroines have a stamp of their own.  THEY HAVE A
+CERTAIN GENTLE SELF-RESPECT AND HUMOUR AND HARDNESS OF HEART . . .
+Love with them does not mean a passion as much as an interest, deep
+and silent."  I think one prefers them so, and that Englishwomen
+should be more like Anne Elliot than Maggie Tulliver.  "All the
+privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest when
+existence or when hope is gone," said Anne; perhaps she insisted on
+a monopoly that neither sex has all to itself.  Ah, madam, what a
+relief it is to come back to your witty volumes, and forget the
+follies of to-day in those of Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet!  How
+fine, nay, how noble is your art in its delicate reserve, never
+insisting, never forcing the note, never pushing the sketch into the
+caricature!  You worked, without thinking of it, in the spirit of
+Greece, on a labour happily limited, and exquisitely organised.
+"Dear books," we say, with Miss Thackeray--"dear books, bright,
+sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines
+charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting."
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Master Isaak Walton
+
+
+
+Father Isaac,--When I would be quiet and go angling it is my custom
+to carry in my wallet thy pretty book, "The Compleat Angler."  Here,
+methinks, if I find not trout I shall find content, and good
+company, and sweet songs, fair milkmaids, and country mirth.  For
+you are to know that trout be now scarce and whereas he was ever a
+fearful fish, he hath of late become so wary that none but the
+cunningest anglers may be even with him.
+
+It is not as it was in your time, Father, when a man might leave his
+shop in Fleet Street, of a holiday, and, when he had stretched his
+legs up Tottenham Hill, come lightly to meadows chequered with
+waterlilies and lady-smocks, and so fall to his sport.  Nay, now
+have the houses so much increased, like a spreading sore (through
+the breaking of that excellent law of the Conscientious King and
+blessed Martyr, whereby building beyond the walls was forbidden),
+that the meadows are all swallowed up in streets.  And as to the
+River Lea, wherein you took many a good trout, I read in the news
+sheets that "its bed is many inches thick in horrible filth, and the
+air for more than half a mile on each side of it is polluted with a
+horrible, sickening stench," so that we stand in dread of a new
+Plague, called the Cholera.  And so it is all about London for many
+miles, and if a man, at heavy charges, betake himself to the fields,
+lo you, folk are grown so greedy that none will suffer a stranger to
+fish in his water.
+
+So poor anglers are in sore straits.  Unless a man be rich and can
+pay great rents, he may not fish in England, and hence spring the
+discontents of the times, for the angler is full of content, if he
+do but take trout, but if he be driven from the waterside, he falls,
+perchance, into evil company, and cries out to divide the property
+of the gentle folk.  As many now do, even among Parliament-men, whom
+you loved not, Father Isaak, neither do I love them more than Reason
+and Scripture bid each of us be kindly to his neighbour.  But,
+behold, the causes of the ill content are not yet all expressed, for
+even where a man hath licence to fish, he will hardly take trout in
+our age, unless he be all the more cunning.  For the fish, harried
+this way and that by so many of your disciples, is exceeding shy and
+artful, nor will he bite at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just
+above his mouth, and floateth dry over him, for all the world like
+the natural ephemeris.  And we may no longer angle with worm for
+him, nor with penk or minnow, nor with the natural fly, as was your
+manner, but only with the artificial, for the more difficulty the
+more diversion.  For my part I may cry, like Viator in your book,
+"Master, I can neither catch with the first nor second Angle:  I
+have no fortune."
+
+So we fare in England, but somewhat better north of the Tweed, where
+trout are less wary, but for the most part small, except in the
+extreme rough north, among horrid hills and lakes.  Thither, Master,
+as methinks you may remember, went Richard Franck, that called
+himself Philanthropus, and was, as it were, the Columbus of anglers,
+discovering for them a new Hyperborean world.  But Franck,
+doubtless, is now an angler in the Lake of Darkness, with Nero and
+other tyrants, for he followed after Cromwell, the man of blood, in
+the old riding days.  How wickedly doth Franck boast of that leader
+of the giddy multitude, "when they raged, and became restless to
+find out misery for themselves and others, and the rabble would herd
+themselves together," as you said, "and endeavour to govern and act
+in spite of authority."  So you wrote; and what said Franck, that
+recreant angler?  Doth he not praise "Ireton, Vane, Nevill, and
+Martin, and the most renowned, valorous, and victorious conqueror,
+Oliver Cromwell"?  Natheless, with all his sins on his head, this
+Franck discovered Scotland for anglers, and my heart turns to him
+when he praises "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed."
+
+In those wilds of Assynt and Loch Rannoch, Father, we, thy
+followers, may yet take trout, and forget the evils of the times.
+But, to be done with Franck, how harshly he speaks of thee and thy
+book.  "For you may dedicate your opinion to what scribbling
+putationer you please; the Compleat Angler if you will, who tells
+you of a tedious fly story, extravagantly collected from antiquated
+authors, such as Gesner and Dubravius."  Again he speaks of "Isaac
+Walton, whose authority to me seems alike authentick, as is the
+general opinion of the vulgar prophet," &c.
+
+Certain I am that Franck, if a better angler than thou, was a worse
+man, who, writing his "Dialogues Piscatorial" or "Northern Memoirs"
+five years after the world welcomed thy "Compleat Angler," was
+jealous of thy favour with the people, and, may be, hated thee for
+thy loyalty and sound faith.  But, Master, like a peaceful man
+avoiding contention, thou didst never answer this blustering Franck,
+but wentest quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his roaring
+Brora and windy Assynt.  How could this noisy man know thee--and
+know thee he did, having argued with thee in Stafford--and not love
+Isaak Walton?  A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let
+him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in fishing
+for men.
+
+How often, studying in thy book, have I hummed to myself that of
+Horace -
+
+
+Laudis amore tumes?  Sunt certa piacula quae te
+Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.
+
+
+So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on
+meadows, and pure streams, and the country life.  How peaceful, men
+say, and blessed must have been the life of this old man, how lapped
+in content, and hedged about by his own humility from the world!
+They forget, who speak thus, that thy years, which were many, were
+also evil, or would have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of
+thy fortunes.  Thou wert poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for
+greed of money was thy detestation.  Thou wert of lowly rank, in an
+age when gentle blood was alone held in regard; yet thy virtues made
+thee hosts of friends, and chiefly among religious men, bishops, and
+doctors of the Church.  Thy private life was not unacquainted with
+sorrow; thy first wife and all her fair children were taken from
+thee like flowers in spring, though, in thine age, new love and new
+offspring comforted thee like "the primrose of the later year."  Thy
+private griefs might have made thee bitter, or melancholy, so might
+the sorrows of the State and of the Church, which were deprived of
+their heads by cruel men, despoiled of their wealth, the pious
+driven, like thee, from their homes; fear everywhere, everywhere
+robbery and confusion:  all this ruin might have angered another
+temper.  But thou, Father, didst bear all with so much sweetness as
+perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a firm faith, nor the love
+of angling could alone have displayed.  For we see many anglers (as
+witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, and myself,
+when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree, have come
+nigh to swear prophane.
+
+Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical, no rare thing
+in the party that professes godliness.  But neither private sorrow
+nor public grief could abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a
+religion which was not untried, but had, indeed, passed through the
+furnace like fine gold.  For if we find not Faith at all times easy,
+because of the oppositions of Science, and the searching curiosity
+of men's minds, neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day.
+For the learned and pious were greatly tossed about, like worthy Mr.
+Chillingworth, by doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the
+Reformed Church of England.  The humbler folk, also, were invited,
+now here, now there, by the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists,
+who gave themselves out to be somebody, while Atheism itself was not
+without many to witness to it.  Therefore, such a religion as thine
+was not, so to say, a mere innocence of evil in the things of our
+Belief, but a reasonable and grounded faith, strong in despite of
+oppositions.  Happy was the man in whom temper, and religion, and
+the love of the sweet country and an angler's pastime so
+conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its hand
+that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes!  Around
+thee Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded,
+and thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.
+
+Thus, by God's blessing, it befell thee
+
+
+Nec turpem senectam
+Degere, nec cithara carentem.
+
+
+I would, Father, that I could get at the verity about thy poems.
+Those recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of
+Dr. Donne and others of thy friends, redound more to the praise of
+thy kind heart than thy fancy.  But what or whose was the pastoral
+poem of "Thealma and Clearchus," which thou didst set about printing
+in 1678, and gavest to the world in 1683?  Thou gavest John
+Chalkhill for the author's name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kindred
+died at Winchester, being eighty years of his age, in 1679.  Now
+thou speakest of John Chalkhill as "a friend of Edmund Spenser's,"
+and how could this be?
+
+Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill was but a name of a
+friend, borrowed by thee out of modesty, and used as a cloak to
+cover poetry of thine own inditing?  When Mr. Flatman writes of
+Chalkhill, 'tis in words well fitted to thine own merit:
+
+
+Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows
+Except himself, who charitably shows
+The ready road to virtue and to praise,
+The road to many long and happy days.
+
+
+However it be, in that road, by quiet streams and through green
+pastures, thou didst walk all thine almost century of years, and we,
+who stray into thy path out of the highway of life, we seem to hold
+thy hand, and listen to thy cheerful voice.  If our sport be worse,
+may our content be equal, and our praise, therefore, none the less.
+Father, if Master Stoddard, the great fisher of Tweedside, be with
+thee, greet him for me, and thank him for those songs of his, and
+perchance he will troll thee a catch of our dear River.
+
+
+Tweed! winding and wild! where the heart is unbound,
+They know not, they dream not, who linger around,
+How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin
+From thee--the bliss withered within.
+
+
+Or perhaps thou wilt better love,
+
+
+The lanesome Tala and the Lyne,
+And Manor wi' its mountain rills,
+An' Etterick, whose waters twine
+Wi' Yarrow frae the forest hills;
+An' Gala, too, and Teviot bright,
+An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed,
+Their kindred valleys a' unite
+Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed!
+
+
+So, Master, may you sing against each other, you two good old
+anglers, like Peter and Corydon, that sang in your golden age.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To M. Chapelain
+
+
+
+Monsieur,--You were a popular poet, and an honourable, over-
+educated, upright gentleman.  Of the latter character you can never
+be deprived, and I doubt not it stands you in better stead where you
+are, than the laurels which flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.
+
+
+Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day,
+But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
+
+
+I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but YOUR
+laurel certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell
+where Orpheus and where Homer are.  Some other crown, some other
+Paradise, we cannot doubt it, awaited un si bon homme.  But the
+moral excellence that even Boileau admitted, la foi, l'honneur, la
+probite, do not in Parnassus avail the popular poet, and some
+luckless Glatigny or Theophile, Regnier or Gilbert, attains a kind
+of immortality denied to the man of many contemporary editions, and
+of a great commercial success.
+
+If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir,
+should have been that fortunately manufactured article.  You were,
+in matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers.  Never, since
+Adam's day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child.
+Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers
+in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and
+Jeanne Corbiere his wife with the future author of "La Pucelle."  Oh
+futile hopes of men, O pectora caeca!  All was done that education
+could do for a genius which, among other qualities, "especially
+lacked fire and imagination," and an ear for verse--sad defects
+these in a child of the Muses.  Your training in all the mechanics
+and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like
+Rasselas, "Enough!  Thou hast convinced me that no human being can
+ever be a Poet."  Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal
+Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you
+received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of
+the Cardinal's Minstrels, as M. de Treville was Captain of the
+King's Musketeers.
+
+Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were
+more richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in
+Prehistoric English, among us niggard moderns!  How I wish I knew a
+Cardinal, or even, as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise
+and pension ME; but envy be still!  Your existence was made happy
+indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the
+Hotel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and
+fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your
+yet unpublished Epic.  "Who, indeed," says a sympathetic author, M.
+Theophile Gautier, "who could expect less than a miracle from a man
+so deeply learned in the laws of art--a perfect Turk in the science
+of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the
+great?"  Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good faith to
+advertise your merits.  Hard must have been the heart that could
+resist the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc
+de Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and
+Monseigneur Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a
+genius for finance.
+
+If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers skilled in finance,
+and some critics (Menage and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), if ladies of
+birth and taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that
+you were a great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself
+seriously, and appraising yourself at the public estimate?
+
+It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops
+especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the
+testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you
+listened to the plaudits of your friends.  Nay, you ventured to
+pronounce judgment on contemporaries--whom Posterity has preferred
+to your perfections.  "Moliere," said you, "understands the genius
+of comedy, and presents it in a natural style.  The plot of his best
+pieces is borrowed, but not without judgment; his morale is fair,
+and he has only to avoid scurrility."
+
+Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!
+
+Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature,
+that your "courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work
+not absolutely good."  And yet you regarded "La Pucelle" with some
+complacency.
+
+On the "Pucelle" you were occupied during a generation of mortal
+men.  I marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a
+yearly pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no
+Alcmena, and no Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of
+creation.  First you gravely wrote out all the composition in prose:
+the task occupied you for five whole years.  Ah, why did you not
+leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium?  What says the
+Precieuse about you in Boileau's satire?
+
+
+In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
+She finds but one defect, he can't be read;
+Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden's woes,
+If only he would turn his verse to prose!
+
+
+The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have
+remained.  Yet for this precious "Pucelle," in the age when
+"Paradise Lost" was sold for five pounds, you are believed to have
+received about four thousand.  Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may
+exist (now and then), and he was a wise man who first spoke of aurea
+mediocritas.  At length the great work was achieved, a work thrice
+blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden to whom France owes all,
+and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so strangely.  In folio,
+in italics, with a score of portraits and engravings, and culs de
+lampe, the great work was given to the world, and had a success.
+Six editions in eighteen months are figures which fill the poetic
+heart with envy and admiration.  And then, alas! the bubble burst.
+A great lady, Madame de Longueville, hearing the "Pucelle" read
+aloud, murmured that it was "perfect indeed, but perfectly
+wearisome."  Then the satires began, and the satirists never left
+you till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbe at
+Menage's had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.
+
+I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the
+onslaught on your "Pucelle."  These qualities, alas! are not strange
+to literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us that "potter hates
+potter, and poet hates poet"?  But contemporary spites do not harm
+true genius.  Who suffered more than Moliere from cabals?  Yet
+neither the court nor the town ever deserted him, and he is still
+the joy of the world.  I admit that his adversaries were weaker than
+yours.  What were Boursault and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille
+and De Vise, what were they all compared to your enemy, Boileau?
+Brossette tells a story which really makes a man pity you.  You
+remember M. de Puimorin, who, to be in the fashion, laughed at your
+once popular Epic.  "It is all very well," said you, "for a man to
+laugh who cannot even read."  Whereon M. de Puimorin replied:
+"Qu'il n'avoit que trop su lire, depuis que Chapelain s'etoit avise
+de faire imprimer."  A new horror had been added to the
+accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published.  This
+repartee was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an
+epigram.  He did complete the last couplet,
+
+
+Helas! pour mes peches, je n'ai su que trop lire
+Depuis que tu fais imprimer.
+
+
+But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of
+his epigram.  Then you remember what great allies came to his
+assistance.  I almost blush to think that M. Despreaux, M. Racine,
+and M. de Moliere, the three most renowned wits of the time,
+conspired to complete the poor jest, and assail you.  Well, bubble
+as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these
+sharpest of pens to prick the bubble.  Other poets, as popular as
+you, have been annihilated by an article.  Macaulay put forth his
+hand, and "Satan Montgomery" was no more.  It did not need a
+Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow
+him into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of
+contemporary failures or successes I do not speak.
+
+I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made
+you doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false
+child of Apollo?  Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency
+of true poets has occasionally been, by doubts?  Did you expect
+posterity to reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do you
+justice?  You answered your earliest assailant, Liniere, and, by a
+few changes of words, turned his epigrams into flattery.  But I
+fancy, on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, wrapped up in
+admiration of yourself.  According to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed,
+as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you "conceived, on
+the strength of your reputation, a great and serious veneration for
+yourself and your genius."  Probably you were protected by the
+invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that
+mere jealousy dictated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain's
+real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success,
+
+
+Qu'il soit le mieux rente de tous les beaux-esprits.
+
+
+This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not
+altogether mistaken.  Yet posterity declines to read a line of
+yours, and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with
+that eternal problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry?  Burns
+was a poet:  and popular.  Byron was a popular poet, and the world
+agrees in the verdict of their own generations.  But Montgomery,
+though he sold so well, was no poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your
+verse made of the stuff of immortality.  Criticism cannot hurt what
+is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy left Chimene as fair as
+ever, and as adorable.  It is only pinchbeck that perishes under the
+acids of satire:  gold defies them.  Yet I sometimes ask myself,
+does the existence of popularity like yours justify the malignity of
+satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who takes?  Are
+poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet?  I doubt it, Sir, holding
+that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own
+nature.  Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as bad poets
+are successful, and bad poets will assuredly reflect that their
+assailants are merely envious, and (while their vogue lasts) that
+the purchasing public is the only judge.  After all, the bad poet
+who is popular and "sells" is not a whit worse than the bad poets
+who are unpopular, and who deride his songs.
+
+Monsieur,
+
+Votre tres-humble serviteur, &c.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Sir John Maundeville, Kt.  (OF THE WAYS INTO YNDE.)
+
+
+
+Sir John,--Wit you well that men holden you but light, and some
+clepen you a Liar.  And they say that you never were born in
+Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone
+through manye diverse Londes.  And there goeth an old knight at
+arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath been beyond the sea, and
+hath seen Prester John's country.  And he hath been in an Yle that
+men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded.  Now men call him
+Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great booke, Sir
+John, and he holds thee but lightly.  For he saith that ye did pill
+your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with
+shells as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that
+ye say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye
+took not his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness.
+Nevertheless, Sir John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a
+good fellow, and a merry; so now, come, let me tell you of the new
+ways into Ynde.
+
+In that Lond they have a Queen that governeth all the Lond, and all
+they ben obeyssant to her.  And she is the Queen of Englond; for
+Englishmen have taken all the Lond of Ynde.  For they were right
+good werryoures of old, and wyse, noble, and worthy.  But of late
+hath risen a new sort of Englishman very puny and fearful, and these
+men clepen Radicals.  And they go ever in fear, and they scream on
+high for dread in the streets and the houses, and they fain would
+flee away from all that their fathers gat them with the sword.  And
+this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean folk and certain of the
+baser sort hear them gladly, and they say ever that Englishmen
+should flee out of Ynde.
+
+Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by many dyverse Contreyes.  For
+Englishmen ben very stirring and nymble.  For they ben in the
+seventh climate, that is of the Moon.  And the Moon (ye have said it
+yourself, Sir John, natheless, is it true) is of lightly moving, for
+to go diverse ways, and see strange things, and other diversities of
+the Worlde.  Wherefore Englishmen be lightly moving, and far
+wandering.  And they gon to Ynde by the great Sea Ocean.  First come
+they to Gibraltar, that was the point of Spain, and builded upon a
+rock; and there ben apes, and it is so strong that no man may take
+it.  Natheless did Englishmen take it fro the Spanyard, and all to
+hold the way to Ynde.  For ye may sail all about Africa, and past
+the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way unto Ynde is long and
+the sea is weary.  Wherefore men rather go by the Midland sea, and
+Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea.
+
+For first they have taken an Yle that is clept Malta; and therein
+built they great castles, to hold it against them of Fraunce, and
+Italy, and of Spain.  And from this Ile of Malta Men gon to Cipre.
+And Cipre is right a good Yle, and a fair, and a great, and it hath
+4 principal Cytees within him.  And at Famagost is one of the
+principal Havens of the sea that is in the world, and Englishmen
+have but a lytel while gone won that Yle from the Sarazynes.  Yet
+say that sort of Englishmen where of I told you, that is puny and
+sore adread, that the Lond is poisonous and barren and of no avail,
+for that Lond is much more hotter than it is here.  Yet the
+Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, and the skill
+is that they may ben the more fresh.
+
+From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night
+he that hath a good wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie.  Now
+the Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not
+to the Lond of Egypt.  And when I say this, I do jape with words,
+and may hap ye understond me not.  Now Englishmen went in shippes to
+Alessandrie, and brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their
+soudyours warred agen the Bedoynes, and all to hold the way to Ynde.
+For it is not long past since Frenchmen let dig a dyke, through the
+narrow spit of lond, from the Midland sea to the Red sea, wherein
+was Pharaoh drowned.  So this is the shortest way to Ynde there may
+be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon by sea.
+
+But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale enchaunted; for no man
+may do his business well that goes thither, but always fares he
+evil, and therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, and the
+sepulchre of reputations.  And men say there that is one of the
+entrees of Helle.  In that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold and
+Silver, for many misbelieving men, and many Christian men also, have
+gone often time for to take of the Thresoure that there was of old,
+and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore there is none left.  And
+Englishmen have let carry thither great store of our Thresoure,
+9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they will see it agen I
+misdoubt me.  For that Vale is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes
+that men clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde is the
+Lond of Bondage.  And whatsoever Thresoure cometh into the Lond,
+these Devyls of Bondholders grabben the same.  Natheless by that
+Vale do Englishmen go unto Ynde, and they gon by Aden, even to
+Kurrachee, at the mouth of the Flood of Ynde.  Thereby they send
+their souldyours, when they are adread of them of Muscovy.
+
+For, look you, there is another way into Ynde, and thereby the men
+of Muscovy are fain to come, if the Englishmen let them not.  That
+way cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from the sea that is clept
+Caspian, even to Khiva, and so to Merv; and then come ye to Zulfikar
+and Penjdeh, and anon to Herat, that is called the Key of the Gates
+of Ynde.  Then ye win the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great
+prince and a rich, and he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, and
+stars, and coats that captains wearen, than any other man on earth.
+
+For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen maken him gifts, and he
+keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his own counsel.  For his lond
+lieth between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, wherefore both
+Englishmen and men of Muscovy would fain have him friendly, yea, and
+independent.  Wherefore they of both parties give him clocks, and
+watches, and stars, and crosses, and culverins, and now and again
+they let cut the throats of his men some deal, and pill his country.
+Thereby they both set up their rest that the Emir will be
+independent, yea, and friendly.  But his men love him not, neither
+love they the English, nor the Muscovy folk, for they are
+worshippers of Mahound, and endure not Christian men.  And they love
+not them that cut their throats, and burn their country.
+
+Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, and they ben subtle for to make a
+thing seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind.  Wherefore
+Englishmen putten no trust in them of Muscovy, save only the
+Englishmen clept Radicals, for they make as if they loved these
+Develes, out of the fear and dread of war wherein they go, and would
+be slaves sooner than fight.  But the folk of Ynde know not what
+shall befall, nor whether they of Muscovy will take the Lond, or
+Englishmen shall keep it, so that their hearts may not enduren for
+drede.  And methinks that soon shall Englishmen and Muscovy folk put
+their bodies in adventure, and war one with another, and all for the
+way to Ynde.
+
+But St. George for Englond, I say, and so enough; and may the
+Seyntes hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee
+tormenten.  But to thy Boke I list not to give no credence.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Alexandre Dumas
+
+
+
+Sir,--There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life
+as yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the
+most intrepid disposition.  In such a moment, towards the ending of
+your days, you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, "I seem to see
+myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the
+sands."  These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and
+make a foundation more solid than the rock.  As well might the
+singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the "Arabian Nights," or the
+first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their
+works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the
+creator of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" alarm himself with the thought
+that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.
+
+Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent
+force in modern letters.  To Scott, indeed, you owed the first
+impulse of your genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could
+it not accomplish?  Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a
+super-human burden; but your imaginative strength never found a task
+too great for it.  What an extraordinary vigour, what health, what
+an overflow of force was yours!  It is good, in a day of small and
+laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and
+dwell in the company of Dumas's men--so gallant, so frank, so
+indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen.  Like M. de
+Rochefort in "Vingt Ans Apres," like that prisoner of the Bastille,
+your genius "n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du grand air."
+
+There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and
+enjoyment; in that current of strength not only your characters
+live, frolic, kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators
+were animated by the virtue which went out of you.  How else can we
+explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and envious tongues have
+brought against you, in England and at home?  They say you employed
+in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of
+the studio, the "sculptor's ghost" is fabled to afford.
+
+Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint
+and impotent as "the strengthless tribes of the dead" in Homer's
+Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a
+momentary valour.  It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality
+that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and
+when they parted from you they shuddered back into their
+nothingness.  Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet
+and the rest wrote in their own strength?  They are forgotten with
+last year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket
+of the world.  You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three
+friends--from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis--"he felt that he could do
+nothing, save on the condition that each of these companions yielded
+to him, if one may so speak, a share of that electric fluid which
+was his gift from heaven."
+
+No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you;
+none gave of it more freely to all who came--to the chance associate
+of the hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded,
+who flocked from your brain.  Thus it was that you failed when you
+approached the supernatural.  Your ghosts had too much flesh and
+blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies.  A writer so
+fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked,
+could not escape the reproaches of barren envy.  Because you
+overflowed with wit, you could not be "serious;" because you created
+with a word, you were said to scamp your work; because you were
+never dull, never pedantic, incapable of greed, you were to be
+censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.
+
+A generation suffering from mental and physical anaemia--a
+generation devoted to the "chiselled phrase," to accumulated
+"documents," to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute
+and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human--may
+readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations.  Like one of
+the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the
+murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain.  To you, who can amuse
+the world--to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the
+battlefield, and the sea--the world must always return:  escaping
+gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and
+hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the
+wearisome De Goncourt.
+
+With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp
+which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a
+gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances!
+You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the
+corruptions of sense.  The passions in your tales are honourable and
+brave, the motives are clearly human.  Honour, Love, Friendship make
+the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through
+how delightful a labyrinth of adventures!  Your greatest books, I
+take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois ("La Reine
+Margot," "La Dame de Montsoreau," "Les Quarante-cinq"), and the
+Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze ("Les Trois Mousquetaires,"
+"Vingt Ans Apres," "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne"); and, beside these
+two trilogies--a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three
+pyramids--"Monte Cristo."
+
+In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn
+incense to that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your
+people worship.  You had Brantome, you had Tallemant, you had Retif,
+and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of
+voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present
+naturalistes.  From these alcoves of "Les Dames Galantes," and from
+the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting
+sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have
+turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses.  You
+had other metal to work on:  you gave us that superstitious and
+tragical true love of La Mole's, that devotion--how tender and how
+pure!--of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau.  You gave us the valour
+of D'Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of
+Athos:  Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship.  I declare your characters
+are real people to me and old friends.  I cannot bear to read the
+end of "Bragelonne," and to part with them for ever.  "Suppose
+Porthos, Athos, and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger,
+curling their moustaches."  How we would welcome them, forgiving
+D'Artagnan even his hateful fourberie in the case of Milady.  The
+brilliance of your dialogue has never been approached:  there is wit
+everywhere; repartees glitter and ring like the flash and clink of
+small-swords.  Then what duels are yours! and what inimitable
+battle-pieces!  I know four good fights of one against a multitude,
+in literature.  These are the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death
+of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the Wake, the Death of
+Bussy d'Amboise.  We can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting-
+times with those described in later days; and, upon my word, I do
+not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin,
+or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of your
+Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley's Hereward.
+
+They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you
+knew it.  La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas "after deceiving
+circle;" for the parry was not invented except by your immortal
+Chicot, a genius in advance of his time.  Even so Hamlet and Laertes
+would have fought with shields and axes, not with small swords.  But
+what matters this pedantry?  In your works we hear the Homeric Muse
+again, rejoicing in the clash of steel; and even, at times, your
+very phrases are unconsciously Homeric.
+
+Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee
+in terror from the Queen's chamber, and "find the door too narrow
+for their flight:" the very words were anticipated in a line of the
+"Odyssey" concerning the massacre of the Wooers.  And the picture of
+Catherine de Medicis, prowling "like a wolf among the bodies and the
+blood," in a passage of the Louvre--the picture is taken unwittingly
+from the "Iliad."  There was in you that reserve of primitive force,
+that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction.  This is the force
+that animates "Monte Cristo," the earlier chapters, the prison, and
+the escape.  In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop
+your wing.  Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to
+speak.  "Antony," they tell me, was "the greatest literary event of
+its time," was a restoration of the stage.  "While Victor Hugo needs
+the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the
+sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of
+Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an
+inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the
+last degree of terror and of pity."
+
+The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame--for a
+moment.  The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when
+"La Curee" and "Pot-Bouille" are more forgotten than "Le Grand
+Cyrus," men and women--and, above all, boys--will laugh and weep
+over the page of Alexandre Dumas.  Like Scott himself, you take us
+captive in our childhood.  I remember a very idle little boy who was
+busy with the "Three Musketeers" when he should have been occupied
+with "Wilkins's Latin Prose."  "Twenty years after" (alas! and more)
+he is still constant to that gallant company; and, at this very
+moment, is breathlessly wondering whether Grimaud will steal M. de
+Beaufort out of the Cardinal's prison.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Theocritus
+
+
+
+"Sweet, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree," so,
+Theocritus, with that sweet word [Greek text], didst thou begin and
+strike the keynote of thy songs.  "Sweet," and didst thou find aught
+of sweet, when thou, like thy Daphnis, didst "go down the stream,
+when the whirling wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man
+not hated of the Nymphs"?  Perchance below those waters of death
+thou didst find, like thine own Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting
+thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia with her April eyes.  In the
+House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there dwell aught that is fair, and
+can the low light on the fields of asphodel make thee forget thy
+Sicily?  Nay, methinks thou hast not forgotten, and perchance for
+poets dead there is prepared a place more beautiful than their
+dreams.  It was well for the later minstrels of another day, it was
+well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim Elysium of their own,
+where the sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of the earth,
+where the poplars are duskier, and the waters more pale than in the
+meadows of Anjou.
+
+There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from
+sword and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit
+the torch, there these learned singers would fain have wandered with
+their learned ladies, satiated with life and in love with an
+unearthly quiet.  But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow
+Land was dear, but the high suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of
+the country maidens were happiness enough.  For thee, therefore,
+methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium beneath the summer of a far-
+off system, with stars not ours and alien seasons.  There, as Bion
+prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be with thee the whole
+year through, where there is neither frost, nor is the heat so heavy
+on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things blossom, and
+evenly meted are darkness and dawn.  Space is wide, and there be
+many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had a care of
+his own.  Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of
+the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and
+sea.  Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant
+shadow of the pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or
+glades where feathered ferns make "a couch more soft than Sleep."
+The short grass of the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou
+wouldst lie, and watch, with the tunny watcher till the deep blue
+sea was broken by the burnished sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam
+with their gambols in the brine.  There the Muses met thee, and the
+Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering his old thraldom with Admetus,
+would lead once more a mortal's flocks, and listen and learn,
+Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas, "didst sweetly
+sing."
+
+There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, "reclined on deep
+beds of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript
+leaves of the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar,
+many an elm-tree, and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the
+mouth of the cavern of the nymphs."  And when night came, methinks
+thou wouldst flee from the merry company and the dancing girls, from
+the fading crowns of roses or white violets, from the cottabos, and
+the minstrelsy, and the Bibline wine, from these thou wouldst slip
+away into the summer night.  Then the beauty of life and of the
+summer would keep thee from thy couch, and wandering away from
+Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst watch the low
+cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods of reed were
+leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floated up her
+waves, and filled the waste with sound.  There didst thou see thine
+ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from their bed of dry seaweed,
+and heardst them stirring, drowsy, among their fishing gear, and
+heardst them tell their dreams.
+
+Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty feet through the ways that
+the dust makes silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were
+driven forth with the morning, came fresh to thee, and the trailing
+dewy branch of honeysuckle struck sudden on thy cheek.  Thou wouldst
+see the Dawn awake in rose and saffron across the waters, and Etna,
+grey and pale against the sky, and the setting crescent would dip
+strangely in the glow, on her way to the sea.  Then, methinks, thou
+wouldst murmur, like thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch,
+"Farewell, Selene, bright and fair; farewell, ye other stars, that
+follow the wheels of the quiet Night."  Nay, surely it was in such
+an hour that thou didst behold the girl as she burned the laurel
+leaves and the barley grain, and melted the waxen image, and called
+on Selene to bring her lover home.  Even so, even now, in the
+islands of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the prayers of
+maidens.  "Bright golden Moon, that now art near the waters, go thou
+and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me,
+saying "Never will I leave thee."  And lo, he hath left me as men
+leave a field reaped and gleaned, like a church where none cometh to
+pray, like a city desolate."
+
+So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have
+fallen, and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns
+of the god's house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to
+the old divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants.
+It is none of the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian
+shepherds of our time, "Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I
+send thee, what offering to the other world?  The apple fadeth, the
+quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose.
+I will send thee my tears shed on a napkin, and what though it
+burneth in the flame, if my tears reach thee at the last."
+
+Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these shores beneath the sun,
+where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of he-
+goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited
+belt.  Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines
+and shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise
+of Alexandria.  What love of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee
+away from the red cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water
+wreathed with maidenhair?
+
+
+The music of thy rustic flute
+Kept not for long its happy country tone;
+Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note
+Of men contention tost, of men who groan,
+Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat -
+It failed, and thou wast mute!
+
+
+What hadst thou to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and
+Princes give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean
+wine?  Thy Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not
+of tyrants and wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a
+begging errand.  "Who will open his door and gladly receive our
+Muses within his house, who is there that will not send them back
+again without a gift?  And they with naked feet and looks askance
+come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me when they have gone on a
+vain journey, and listless again in the bottom of their empty coffer
+they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly knees, where is their
+drear abode, when portionless they return."  How far happier was the
+prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar chest where the
+blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of tender
+flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!
+
+Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of
+Himera, the galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that
+dropped her cones, and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her
+feet of carven ivory.  Thou soughtest the City, and strife with
+other singers, and the learned write still on thy quarrels with
+Apollonius and Callimachus, and Antagoras of Rhodes.  So ancient are
+the hatreds of poets, envy, jealousy, and all unkindness.
+
+Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though
+all these centuries, more than two thousand years, they have
+laboured to vie with thee.  There has come no new pastoral poet,
+though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the
+buckram band of the teacup time; and all the modish swains of France
+have sung against thee, as the SOW CHALLENGED ATHENE.  They never
+knew the shepherd's life, the long winter nights on dried heather by
+the fire, the long summer days, when over the parched grass all is
+quiet, and only the insects hum, and the shrunken burn whispers a
+silver tune.  Swains in high-heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses
+in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all concerning them,
+save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy golden
+figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus!  Somewhat,
+Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought
+the shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with
+the shepherds.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Edgar Allan Poe
+
+
+
+Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and
+romances than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the
+indefatigable hatred which pursues your memory.  You, who knew the
+men, will not marvel that certain microbes of letters, the survivors
+of your own generation, still harass your name with their
+malevolence, while old women twitter out their incredible and
+unheeded slanders in the literary papers of New York.  But their
+persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain the dislike
+with which many American critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps
+the greatest literary genius, of their country.  With a commendable
+patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low; and you,
+I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost without
+honour in his own country.
+
+The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects
+admirable study of your career ("Edgar Allan Poe," by George
+Woodberry:  Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English
+readers who have forgotten it, and teaches those who never knew it,
+that you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer.  How unhappy were the
+necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a
+man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary
+criticism!  About the writers of his own generation a leader of that
+generation should hold his peace.  He should neither praise nor
+blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at the
+buzzing ephemerae of letters.  The breath of their life is in the
+columns of "Literary Gossip;" and they should be allowed to perish
+with the weekly advertisements on which they pasture.  Reviewing, of
+course, there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise
+the great who have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-
+finding.
+
+Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor;
+you vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven.  What
+"irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense
+of wrong," drove you (in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his
+pure and beneficent Muse we may never ascertain.  But Mr. Longfellow
+forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to the great.  It was
+the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not
+how to forget.  "The New Yorkers never forgave him," says your
+latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of
+their malice.  It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole
+literary class that you assailed.  "As a literary people," you
+wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug."  After that
+declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the
+vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn.  They are writhing and
+writing still.  He who knows them need not linger over the attacks
+and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on
+calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust
+which takes so long in settling above your tomb.
+
+For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your
+pen, and that in an age when the author of "To Helen" and "The Cask
+of Amontillado" was paid at the rate of a dollar a column.  When
+such poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep
+than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were
+inevitable and assured.  No man was less fortunate than you in the
+moment of his birth--infelix opportunitate vitae.  Had you lived a
+generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at
+home, would all have been yours.  Within thirty years so great a
+change has passed over the profession of letters in America; and it
+is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to
+Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of
+"Called Back."  It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in
+the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite
+unlettered scribblers.  Though not a scholar, at least you had a
+respect for scholarship.  You might still marvel over such words as
+"objectional" in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what
+is meant by such a sentence as "his connection with it had inured to
+his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself," and so forth.
+
+Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer
+of short tales that you must live.  But to discuss your few and
+elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own
+brief definition of poetry, "the rhythmic creation of the
+beautiful," exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory
+illustrated by the poems.  Natural bent, and reaction against the
+example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of
+what you call the "didactic" element in verse.  Even if morality be
+not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present
+estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for
+gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be
+the largest public.
+
+"Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry," so you
+wrote; "the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which
+should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely
+what we should aim at in poetry."  You aimed at that mark, and
+struck it again and again, notably in "Helen, thy beauty is to me,"
+in "The Haunted Palace," "The Valley of Unrest," and "The City in
+the Sea."  But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been
+foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem--"The Raven:"
+a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the
+"exaltation" (what there is of it) by no means particularly "vague."
+So a portion of the public know little of Shelley but the "Skylark,"
+and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each
+of them a poet's name, vivu' per ora virum.  Your theory of poetry,
+if accepted, would make you (after the author of "Kubla Khan") the
+foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would come
+Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote "Golden Wings," "The Blue
+Closet," and "The Sailing of the Sword;" and, close up, Mr. Lear,
+the author of "The Yongi Bongi Bo," an the lay of the "Jumblies."
+
+On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you
+consigned Moliere.  If we may judge a theory by its results, when
+compared with the deliberate verdict of the world, your aesthetic
+does not seem to hold water.  The "Odyssey" is not really inferior
+to "Ulalume," as it ought to be if your doctrine of poetry were
+correct, nor "Le Festin de Pierre" to "Undine."  Yet you deserve the
+praise of having been constant, in your poetic practice, to your
+poetic principles--principles commonly deserted by poets who, like
+Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system.  Your pieces are
+few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like Fielding, "a barren
+rascal."  But how can a writer's verses be numerous if with him, as
+with you, "poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . . which cannot
+at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations or the
+more paltry commendations of mankind!"  Of you it may be said, more
+truly than Shelley said it of himself, that "to ask you for anything
+human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton."
+
+Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of
+poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
+(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a
+single string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the
+grave.  You chose, or you were destined
+
+
+To vary from the kindly race of men;
+
+
+and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your
+reputation.
+
+For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
+highest success--the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation.
+By this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your
+translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your
+views about Mr. Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so
+energetically resisted all those ideas of "progress" which "came
+from Hell or Boston."  On this point, however, the world continues
+to differ from you and M. Baudelaire, and perhaps there is only the
+choice between our optimism and universal suicide or universal
+opium-eating.  But to discuss your ultimate ideas is perhaps a
+profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.
+
+An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described
+them as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens."  I am not aware that
+extreme orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress
+towards a predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of
+delirium.  If they be, then there is a deal of truth in the
+criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens in your style.  But
+your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of
+fancy and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which
+Mr. Hawthorne had at his command.  He was a great writer--the
+greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced.  But you
+and he have not much in common, except a certain mortuary turn of
+mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the workings of
+conscience.
+
+I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of
+American fiction.  These by no means follow in the lines which you
+laid down about brevity and the steady working to one single effect.
+Probably you would not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your
+leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your countrymen's favourite
+novelist.  He is long, he is didactic, he is eminently uninspired.
+In the works of one who is, what you were called yourself, a
+Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute observation, the
+subtlety, and the unfailing distinction.  But, destitute of humour
+as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the
+charm of "Daisy Miller."  You would admit the unity of effect
+secured in "Washington Square," though that effect is as remote as
+possible from the terror of "The House of Usher" or the vindictive
+triumph of "The Cask of Amontillado."
+
+Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit:  a genius
+tethered to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among canaille,
+a poet among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's taste without a
+scholar's training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all
+unsupported by his consolations.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
+
+
+
+Rodono, St. Mary's Loch:
+Sept. 8, 1885.
+
+Sir,--In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the
+favour of all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an
+affection for you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been
+severed from your company.  If some Circe had repeated in my case
+her favourite miracle of turning mortals into swine, and had given
+me a choice, into that fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would
+I have been converted!  You, almost alone among men of letters,
+still, like a living friend, win and charm us out of the past; and
+if one might call up a poet, as the scholiast tried to call Homer,
+from the shades, who would not, out of all the rest, demand some
+hours of your society?  Who that ever meddled with letters, what
+child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your simple
+manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that
+envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came,
+but never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained
+but the Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?
+
+Were the word "genial" not so much profaned, were it not misused in
+easy good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that
+worn old term might be applied, above all men, to "the Shirra."  But
+perhaps we scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a
+character so rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as
+that of Walter Scott.  Here, in the heart of your own country, among
+your own grey round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that
+the shadow of one falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that
+neighbour's shape), it is of you and of your works that a native of
+the Forest is most frequently brought in mind.  All the spirits of
+the river and the hill, all the dying refrains of ballad and the
+fading echoes of story, all the memory of the wild past, each legend
+of burn and loch, seem to have combined to inform your spirit, and
+to secure themselves an immortal life in your song.  It is through
+you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as in treading
+each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless you.
+
+It is not, "Sixty Years Since" the echo of Tweed among his pebbles
+fell for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how
+much is altered!  But two generations have passed; the lad who used
+to ride from Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you,
+and old, is still vending, in George Street, old books and new.  Of
+politics I have not the heart to speak.  Little joy would you have
+had in most that has befallen since the Reform Bill was passed, to
+the chivalrous cry of "burke Sir Walter."  We are still very Radical
+in the Forest, and you were taken away from many evils to come.  How
+would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed at the
+names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and many others that recall
+political cowardice or military incapacity!  On the other hand, who
+but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or wedded with immortal
+verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with Cavagnari), of the two
+Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among the bravest!  Only
+he who told how
+
+
+The stubborn spearmen still made good
+Their dark impenetrable wood
+
+
+could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at
+M'Neill's Zareba and at Abu Klea,
+
+
+Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
+As fearlessly and well.
+
+
+Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting
+classes may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows
+our fighting men might cry, with Leyden,
+
+
+My name is little Jock Elliot,
+And wha daur meddle wi' me!
+
+
+Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but
+much remains.  The little towns of your time are populous and
+excessively black with the smoke of factories--not, I fear, at
+present very flourishing.  In Galashiels you still see the little
+change-house and the cluster of cottages round the Laird's lodge,
+like the clachan of Tully Veolan.  But these plain remnants of the
+old Scotch towns are almost buried in a multitude of "smoky dwarf
+houses"--a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has found the fitting
+phrase for these dwellings, once for all.  All over the Forest the
+waters are dirty and poisoned:  I think they are filthiest below
+Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk man.  To
+keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often
+promised, I cannot see much change--for the better.  Abbotsford,
+luckily, is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of
+Selkirk, Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen.  On the other hand,
+your ill-omened later dwelling, "the unhappy palace of your race,"
+is overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their
+larches, hotels of the future.  Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange
+place.  Whisky is exiled from some of our caravanserais, and they
+have banished Sir John Barleycorn.  It seems as if the views of the
+excellent critic (who wrote your life lately, and said you had left
+no descendants, le pauvre homme!) were beginning to prevail.  This
+pious biographer was greatly shocked by that capital story about the
+keg of whisky that arrived at the Liddesdale farmer's during family
+prayers.  Your Toryism also was an offence to him.
+
+Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let
+us be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the
+Border country remains as kind and homely as ever.  I looked at
+Ashiestiel some days ago:  the house seemed just as it may have been
+when you left it for Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on
+the lawn, the hill on the opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to
+the crest with turnips, and the burn did not sing below the little
+bridge, for in this arid summer the burn was dry.  But there was
+still a grilse that rose to a big March brown in the shrunken stream
+below Elibank.  This may not interest you, who styled yourself
+
+
+No fisher,
+But a well-wisher
+To the game!
+
+
+Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have
+"grand gallops among the hills"--those grave wastes of heather and
+bent that sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered
+pastures from Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the
+Three Brethren Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen.  Yes,
+Teviotdale is pleasant still, and there is not a drop of dye in the
+water, purior electro, of Yarrow.  St. Mary's Loch lies beneath me,
+smitten with wind and rain--the St. Mary's of North and of the
+Shepherd.  Only the trout, that see a myriad of artificial flies,
+are shyer than of yore.  The Shepherd could no longer fill a cart up
+Meggat with trout so much of a size that the country people took
+them for herrings.
+
+The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated:  hard by it
+lies, within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone,
+and the graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep "Piers
+Cockburn and Marjory his wife."  Not a hundred yards off was the
+castle-door where they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad,
+and the lady that buried him rests now with her wild lord.
+
+
+Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair,
+When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair;
+Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae,
+When I turned about and went my way! {7}
+
+
+Here too hearts have broken, and there is a sacredness in the shadow
+and beneath these clustering berries of the rowan-trees.  That
+sacredness, that reverent memory of our old land, it is always and
+inextricably blended with our memories, with our thoughts, with our
+love of you.  Scotchmen, methinks, who owe so much to you, owe you
+most for the example you gave of the beauty of a life of honour,
+showing them what, by heaven's blessing, a Scotchman still might be.
+
+Words, empty and unavailing--for what words of ours can speak our
+thoughts or interpret our affections!  From you first, as we
+followed the deer with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine
+on his midnight errand, did we learn what Poetry means and all the
+happiness that is in the gift of song.  This and more than may be
+told you gave us, that are not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our
+praise be unequal to our gratitude.  Fungor inani munere!
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Eusebius of Caesarea (Concerning the gods of the heathen)
+
+
+
+Touching the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not
+ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth,
+there is great dissension.  That these feigned Deities and idols,
+the work of men's hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest;
+neither do men eat meat offered to idols.  Even as spake that last
+Oracle which murmured forth, the latest and the only true voice from
+Delphi, even so "the fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more
+hath Phoebus his home, no more his laurel-bough, nor the singing
+well of water; nay, the sweet-voiced water is silent."  The fane is
+ruinous, and the images of men's idolatry are dust.
+
+Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the
+beginnings of those sinful Gods:  such as Zeus, Athene, and
+Dionysus:  and marvel how first they won their dominion over the
+souls of the foolish peoples.  Now, concerning these things there is
+not one belief, but many; howbeit, there are two main kinds of
+opinion.  One sect of philosophers believes--as thyself, with
+heavenly learning, didst not vainly persuade--that the Gods were the
+inventions of wild and bestial folk, who, long before cities were
+builded or life was honourably ordained, fashioned forth evil
+spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the likeness of the
+very beasts that perish.  To this judgment, as it is set forth in
+thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am, do
+give my consent.  But on the other side are many and learned men,
+chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the
+whole inhabited world.  These, being unwilling to suppose that the
+Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of
+utter darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen
+philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst
+confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords
+of thy wit.
+
+Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the
+gods of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural
+creatures as the blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and
+the fire; but, as time went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their
+own speech and no longer understanding the tongue of their own
+fathers, were misled and beguiled into fashioning all those
+lamentable tales:  as that Zeus, for love of mortal women, took the
+shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an eagle, and sinned in
+such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.
+
+Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men
+argue, even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst
+confound.  For they declare the gods to have been natural elements,
+sun and sky and storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as
+thou saidst, "they are nowise at one with each other in their
+explanations."  For of old some boasted that Hera was the Air; and
+some that she signified the love of woman and man; and some that she
+was the waters above the Earth; and others that she was the Earth
+beneath the waters; and yet others that she was the Night, for that
+Night is the shadow of Earth:  as if, forsooth, the men who first
+worshipped Hera had understanding of these things!  And when Hera
+and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant (said the
+learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of the
+elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.
+
+To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely:  saying
+that Hera could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air,
+and the love of sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that
+all these opinions were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned.
+And why--thou saidst--even if the Gods were pure natural creatures,
+are such foul things told of them in the Mysteries as it is not
+fitting for me to declare.  "These wanderings, and drinkings, and
+loves, and seductions, that would be shameful in men, why," thou
+saidst, "were they attributed to the natural elements; and wherefore
+did the Gods constantly show themselves, like the sorcerers called
+werewolves, in the shape of the perishable beasts?"  But, mainly,
+thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of the heathen were
+agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the other, they
+had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.
+
+To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the
+heathen answered thee.  But, in our time, the learned men who stand
+to it that the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements,
+and that the nations, forgetting their first love and the
+significance of their own speech, became confused and were betrayed
+into foul stories about the pure Gods--these learned men, I say,
+agree no whit among themselves.  Nay, they differ one from another,
+not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and Theagenes, and the rest
+whom thou didst laugh to scorn.  Bear with me, Father, while I tell
+thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend among
+themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call "Science"!
+
+Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus,
+even as--among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou
+never knewest--goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or
+feet of their fathers.  Thou must know that what Plato, in the
+"Cratylus," made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise
+in sad earnest.  For, when they wish to explain the nature of any
+God, they first examine his name, and torment the letters thereof,
+arranging and altering them according to their will, and flying off
+to the speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, and other
+Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their turn.  How saith Socrates?
+"I bethink me of a very new and ingenious idea that occurs to me;
+and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I should be by to-
+morrow's dawn.  My notion is that we may put in and pull out letters
+at pleasure and alter the accents."
+
+Even so do the learned--not at pleasure, maybe, but according to
+certain fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they
+agree among themselves.  And I deny not that they discover many
+things true and good to be known; but, as touching the names of the
+Gods, their learning, as it standeth, is confusion.  Look, then, at
+the goddess Athene:  taking one example out of hundreds.  We have
+dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the most erudite of the doctors of
+the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed.  Concerning Athene, he
+saith that her name is none other than, in the ancient tongue of the
+Brachmanae, Ahana, which, being interpreted, means the Dawn.  "And
+that the morning light," saith he, "offers the best starting-point
+for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe, beyond
+the reach of doubt or even cavil." {8}
+
+Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his
+nation, the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of
+Athene, taken from the speech of the old Medes.  But Muellerus
+declares to us that whosoever shall examine the contention of
+Benfeius "will be bound, in common honesty, to confess that it is
+untenable."  This, Father, is "one for Benfeius," as the saying
+goes.  And as Muellerus holds that these matters "admit of almost
+mathematical precision," it would seem that Benfeius is but a
+Dummkopf, as the Alemanni say, in their own language, when they
+would be pleasant among themselves.
+
+Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of
+the facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with
+Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet
+that she is "the feminine of the Zend Thraetana athwyana."  Lo, you!
+how Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from
+Ahana and the old Brachmanae, nor athwyana and the old Medes, but
+from "the root [Greek text], whence [Greek text], the air, or [Greek
+text], whence [Greek text], a flower."  Yea, and Prellerus will have
+it that no man knows the verity of this matter.  None the less he is
+very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it that Athene
+was, from the first, "the clear pure height of the Air, which is
+exceeding pure in Attica."
+
+Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in,
+with a mighty great volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, among
+others, for his ally.  And these doctors will neither with
+Rueckertus and Hermannus, take Athene for "wisdom in person;" nor
+with Welckerus and Prellerus, for "the goddess of air;" nor even,
+with Muellerus and mathematical certainty, for "the Morning-Red:"
+but they say that Athene is the "black thunder-cloud, and the
+lightning that leapeth therefrom"!  I make no doubt that other
+Alemanni are of other minds:  quot Alemanni tot sententiae.
+
+Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, [Greek text].  Yet these
+disputes of theirs they call "Science"!  But if any man says to the
+learned:  "Best of men, you are erudite, and laborious and witty;
+but, till you are more of the same mind, your opinions cannot be
+styled knowledge.  Nay, they are at present of no avail whereon to
+found any doctrine concerning the Gods"--that man is railed at for
+his "mean" and "weak" arguments.
+
+Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee?  But I
+must still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the Gods
+were invented "when man's life was yet brutish and wandering" (as is
+the life of many tribes that even now tell like tales), and were
+maintained in honour by the later Greeks "because none dared alter
+the ancient beliefs of his ancestors."  Farewell, Father; and all
+good be with thee, wishes thy well-wisher and thy disciple.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Percy Bysshe Shelley
+
+
+
+Sir,--In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly
+curious as to what was said by "the herd of mankind," if I may quote
+your own phrase.  It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but
+did not in his less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues
+and their discretion.  Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that
+world where, as you say, we "pursue our serious folly as of old,"
+you are, one may guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of
+your writings and your reputation.  As to the first, you have
+somewhere said, in one of your letters, that the final judgment on
+your merits as a poet is in the hands of posterity, and that you
+fear the verdict will be "Guilty," and the sentence "Death."  Such
+apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent in the mind of one
+whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier flame to the
+last.  The jury of which you spoke has met:  a mixed jury and a
+merciful.  The verdict is "Well done," and the sentence Immortality
+of Fame.  There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they
+will be less and less heard as the years go on.
+
+One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true
+province, and that your letters will out-live your lays.  I know not
+whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who
+spoke of your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his
+ill-tied cravats) as "a gallery of your failures."  But the general
+voice does not echo these utterances of a too subtle intellect.  At
+a famous University (not your own) once existed a band of men known
+as "The Trinity Sniffers."  Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may
+still inspire some of the jurors who from time to time make
+themselves heard in your case.  The "Quarterly Review," I fear, is
+still unreconciled.  It regards your attempts as tainted by the
+spirit of "The Liberal Movement in English Literature;" and it is
+impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a
+Throne and Altar Tory.  At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old
+rooms where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King
+Alfred, once guilty of similar negligence?) are now shown to pious
+pilgrims.
+
+But Conservatives, 'tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions,
+and are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr.
+Keble, and, indeed, of the clergy in general.  But, in spite of all
+this, your poems, like the affections of the true lovers in
+Theocritus, are yet "in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips
+of the young."  It is in your lyrics that you live, and I do not
+mean that every one could pass an examination in the plot of
+"Prometheus Unbound."  Talking of this piece, by the way, a
+Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering after life
+in a cave--doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from cave-
+man.  Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of
+deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral,
+intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now
+agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.
+
+Fortunately you gave us "Adonais" and "Hellas" instead of this
+treatise, and we have now successfully written the natural history
+of Man for ourselves.  Science tells us that before becoming a cave-
+dweller he was a Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he
+constantly reverts to his original condition.  L'homme est un
+mechant animal, in spite of your boyish efforts to add pretty girls
+"to the list of the good, the disinterested, and the free."
+
+Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of
+Politics, were "the haunts meet for thee."  Watching the yellow bees
+in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools,
+watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and
+weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and
+music were at one, that was the task of Shelley!  "To ask you for
+anything human," you said, "was like asking for a leg of mutton at a
+gin-shop."  Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the
+Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar.
+Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread
+before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away,
+with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is
+spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled?  One, like
+Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he
+looks on the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of
+Anchises, blind with excess of light.  Let Shelley sing of what he
+saw, what none saw but Shelley!
+
+Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of
+things didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew.
+This will disappoint you, who had "a passion for reforming it."
+Kings and priests are very much where you left them.  True, we have
+a poet who assails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet
+Mr. Swinburne has never, like "kind Hunt," been in prison, nor do we
+fear for him a charge of treason.  Moreover, chemical science has
+discovered new and ingenious ways of destroying principalities and
+powers.  You would be interested in the methods, but your peaceful
+Revolutionism, which disdained physical force, would regret their
+application.
+
+Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider
+satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of
+Islam, and we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you
+recognised and described.  We have a great statesman whose methods
+and eloquence somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and
+Prince Athanase.  Alas! he is a youth of more than seventy summers;
+and not in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a
+peaceful millennium in twining buds and beams.
+
+In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been
+carried.  Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything
+else she can ask for.  I regret to say that she is still unhappy;
+her wounds unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven.  At home we have
+enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most happy results.
+Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are "our own flesh and blood," and,
+as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to
+vote.  Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse Collings (how you would have
+loved that man!) has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the
+vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums?  This may prove that last
+element in the Elixir of political happiness which we have long
+sought in vain.  Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still
+unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for Mr.
+Bradlaugh.  You should have known our Charles while you were in the
+"Queen Mab" stage.  I fear you wandered, later, from his robust
+condition of intellectual development.
+
+As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as
+much of it as possible.  Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind
+of ducdame to bring people of no very great sense into your circle.
+This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble
+folk of commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the
+tribe.  They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive
+plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun.  Men of sense and
+taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now
+disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and
+most troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral
+pyre.  These biographers fight terribly among themselves, and vainly
+prolong the memory of "old unhappy far-off things, and sorrows long
+ago."  Let us leave them and their squabbles over what is
+unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.
+
+The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who
+has produced two heavy volumes, styled by him "The Real Shelley."
+The real Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a
+worthy gentleman so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by
+the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact
+science of Comparative Mythology.  He criticises you in the spirit
+of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you "a damned
+Atheist" in the post-office at Pisa.  He finds that you had "a
+little turned-up nose," a feature no less important in his system
+than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history
+of the world.  To be in harmony with your nose, you were a
+"phenomenal" liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly insane,
+an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of self-
+approbation--in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.
+Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, "a
+bad old man."  But enough of this inopportune brawler.
+
+For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts
+extinction in a night of Frost.  The sun will grow cold, slowly--as
+slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your "Prometheus," but as surely.
+If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid
+hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged
+with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley.  So
+reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of
+those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth
+enduring.  In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and
+cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.  He
+will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that are dead,
+sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens.  In
+Shelley's poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for
+your "voice is as the voice of winds and tides," and perhaps more
+deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing
+of the human spirit.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Monsieur de Moliere, Valet de Chambre du Roi
+
+
+
+Monsieur,--With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of
+the great Moliere!  As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly
+(with his comb!) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to
+draw near your dwelling among the Immortals.  You, like the king
+who, among all his titles, has now none so proud as that of the
+friend of Moliere--you found your dominions small, humble, and
+distracted; you raised them to the dignity of an empire:  what Louis
+XIV. did for France you achieved for French comedy; and the baton of
+Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of Louis was broken at
+Blenheim.  For the King the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to
+exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame the Channel.  If
+England vanquished your country's arms, it was through you that
+France ferum victorem cepit, and restored the dynasty of Comedy to
+the land whence she had been driven.  Ever since Dryden borrowed
+"L'Etourdi," our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters
+theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.
+
+In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered.  While
+you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the
+congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic
+grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of
+Moliere.  Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to
+lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the
+cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.  But still, as has ever been our wont
+since Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your successes--still
+we pilfer the plays of France, and take our bien, as you said in
+your lordly manner, wherever we can find it.  We are the privateers
+of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a comedy pleases
+the town which has not first been "cut out" from the countrymen of
+Moliere.  Why this should be, and what "tenebriferous star" (as
+Paracelsus, your companion in the "Dialogues des Morts," would have
+believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but
+certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.
+Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor "a wilderness of
+monkeys" like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and
+restored her to Europe.
+
+While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair
+and beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to
+you that we must turn when of comedies we desire the best.  If you
+studied with daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and
+Terence, if you "let no musty bouquin escape you" (so your enemies
+declared), it was to some purpose that you laboured.  Shakespeare
+excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that
+follow, however fresh, we turn:  we turn from Regnard and
+Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron
+and Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations.  "Creations"
+one may well say, for you anticipated Nature herself:  you gave us,
+before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a
+lacquey; in a mot of Don Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and
+the watchword of Comte, l'amour de l'humanite.
+
+Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with
+humour; and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of
+a secular civilisation?  With a heart the most tender, delicate,
+loving, and generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to
+make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of
+promise, or hope, or warning from Religion.  Yes, in an age when the
+greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only
+help was in voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to hazard
+all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to
+pretend to see what you found invisible.
+
+In Religion you beheld no promise of help.  When the Jesuits and
+Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait
+of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play
+conceived that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while
+were mocking every credulous excess of Faith.  In the sermons
+preached to Agnes we surely hear your private laughter; in the
+arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet
+we listen to the eternal self-defence of superstition.  Thus,
+desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent element of life--
+precisely where Pascal recognised all that was most fleeting and
+unsubstantial--in divertissement; in the pleasure of looking on, a
+spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies
+of mankind.  Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our
+life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic
+note comes in!  What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of
+tears, as of rain in the wind!  No comedian has been so kindly and
+human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts,
+and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their
+tormentors.  Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the
+rest--our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de
+Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures.
+
+Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter
+and defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory,
+or you did not mean that they should win it.  They go off with
+laughter, and their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are
+past our youth, behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat
+of a generation.  Your sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are
+having their day; you can throw a bone or a crust to the dog that
+has had his, and has been taught that it is over and ended.
+Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy, in endurance of the
+wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and the husband of
+Celimene be untaught in that experience?), you never sided quite
+heartily, as other comedians have done, with young prosperity and
+rank and power.
+
+I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for
+just after your own death the author of "Les Dialogues des Morts"
+gave you Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of "Le Jugement
+de Pluton" made the "mighty warder" decide that "Moliere should not
+talk philosophy."  These writers, like most of us, feel that, after
+all, the comedies of the Contemplateur, of the translator of
+Lucretius, are a philosophy of life in themselves, and that in them
+we read the lessons of human experience writ small and clear.
+
+What comedian but Moliere has combined with such depths--with the
+indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy
+of Don Juan--such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such
+wit!  Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when
+so much water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so
+many trifles of contemporary mirth (cetera fluminis ritu feruntur),
+even now we never laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M.
+Jourdain tread the boards in the Maison de Moliere.  Since those
+mobile dark brows of yours ceased to make men laugh, since your
+voice denounced the "demoniac" manner of contemporary tragedians, I
+take leave to think that no player has been more worthy to wear the
+canons of Mascarille or the gown of Vadius than M. Coquelin of the
+Comedie Francaise.  In him you have a successor to your Mascarille
+so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of your date might cry,
+could they see him, that Moliere had come again.  But, with all
+respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle. Barthet, or
+Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss of the
+fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Celimene,
+Armande.  Yet had you ever so merry a soubrette as Mdme. Samary, so
+exquisite a Nicole?
+
+Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years
+ago, you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more
+servility and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than
+you may approve.  Are not the Molieristes a body who carry adoration
+to fanaticism?  Any scrap of your handwriting (so few are these),
+any anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may
+prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and
+discussed by your too minute historians.  Concerning your private
+life, these men often speak more like malicious enemies than
+friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying
+vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers.  It is
+most necessary to defend you from your friends--from such friends as
+the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious
+but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur.  Truly they seek the living among
+the dead, and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings of attorneys'
+offices.  As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and
+as I behold their trivialities--the exercises of men who neglect
+Moliere's works to gossip about Moliere's great-grand-mother's
+second-best bed--I sometimes wish that Moliere were here to write on
+his devotees a new comedy, "Les Molieristes."  How fortunate were
+they, Monsieur, who lived and worked with you, who saw you day by
+day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the kindest loyalty
+to the best and most honourable of men, the most open-handed in
+friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy!
+Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in the study,
+rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller's shop, strolling
+through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine's,
+dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls.
+Would that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry
+with Boileau, and with Racine,--not yet a traitor,--laughing over
+Chapelain, combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at
+Cotin, or talking your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes.
+Surely of all the wits none was ever so good a man, none ever made
+life so rich with humour and friendship.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Robert Burns
+
+
+
+Sir,--Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are
+some to whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there
+are others whom we admire rather than love.  By some we are won with
+our will, by others conquered against our desire.  It has been your
+peculiar fortune to capture the hearts of a whole people--a people
+not usually prone to praise, but devoted with a personal and
+patriotic loyalty to you and to your reputation.  In you every Scot
+who IS a Scot sees, admires, and compliments Himself, his ideal
+self--independent, fond of whisky, fonder of the lassies; you are
+the true representative of him and of his nation.  Next year will be
+the hundredth since the press of Kilmarnock brought to light its
+solitary masterpiece, your Poems; and next year, therefore,
+methinks, the revenue will receive a welcome accession from the
+abundance of whisky drunk in your honour.  It is a cruel thing for
+any of your countrymen to feel that, where all the rest love, he can
+only admire; where all the rest are idolators, he may not bend the
+knee; but stands apart and beats upon his breast, observing, not
+adoring--a critic.  Yet to some of us--petty souls, perhaps, and
+envious--that loud indiscriminating praise of "Robbie Burns" (for so
+they style you in their Change-house familiarity) has long been
+ungrateful; and, among the treasures of your songs, we venture to
+select and even to reject.  So it must be!  We cannot all love
+Haggis, nor "painch, tripe, and thairm," and all those rural
+dainties which you celebrate as "warm-reekin, rich!"  "Rather too
+rich," as the Young Lady said on an occasion recorded by Sam Weller.
+
+
+Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
+That jaups in luggies;
+But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer,
+Gie her a Haggis!
+
+
+You HAVE given her a Haggis, with a vengeance, and her "gratefu'
+prayer" is yours for ever.  But if even an eternity of partridge may
+pall on the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights,
+cometh satiety at last.  And yet what a glorious Haggis it is--the
+more emphatically rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse!  We
+have had many a rural bard since Theocritus "watched the visionary
+flocks," but you are the only one of them all who has spoken the
+sincere Doric.  Yours is the talk of the byre and the plough-tail;
+yours is that large utterance of the early hinds.  Even Theocritus
+minces matters, save where Lacon and Comatas quite out-do the swains
+of Ayrshire.  "But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?" you ask, and
+yourself out-match him in this wide rude region, trodden only by the
+rural Muse.  "THY rural loves are nature's sel';" and the wooer of
+Jean Armour speaks more like a true shepherd than the elegant
+Daphnis of the "Oaristys."
+
+Indeed it is with this that moral critics of your life reproach you,
+forgetting, perhaps, that in your amours you were but as other
+Scotch ploughmen and shepherds of the past and present.  Ettrick may
+still, with Afghanistan, offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle
+(your antithesis, and the complement of the Scotch character)
+supposed; but the morals of Ettrick are those of rural Sicily in old
+days, or of Mossgiel in your days.  Over these matters the Kirk,
+with all her power, and the Free Kirk too, have had absolutely no
+influence whatever.  To leave so delicate a topic, you were but as
+other swains, or, as "that Birkie ca'd a lord," Lord Byron; only you
+combined (in certain of your letters) a libertine theory with your
+practice; you poured out in song your audacious raptures, your half-
+hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn.  You spoke the truth
+about rural lives and loves.  We may like it or dislike it but we
+cannot deny the verity.
+
+Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for
+Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two
+ages and of two worlds--precisely in the moment when bookish
+literature was beginning to reach the people, and when Society was
+first learning to admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries?  Before
+you how many singers not less truly poets than yourself--though less
+versatile not less passionate, though less sensuous not less simple-
+-had been born and had died in poor men's cottages!  There abides
+not even the shadow of a name of the old Scotch song-smiths, of the
+old ballad-makers.  The authors of "Clerk Saunders," of "The Wife of
+Usher's Well," of "Fair Annie," and "Sir Patrick Spens," and "The
+Bonny Hind," are as unknown to us as Homer, whom in their directness
+and force they resemble.  They never, perhaps, gave their poems to
+writing; certainly they never gave them to the press.  On the lips
+and in the hearts of the people they have their lives; and the
+singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame,
+are forgotten.  "The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his
+Poppy."
+
+Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as
+these unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan--
+verses retained only by Memory.  You would have been but the
+minstrel of your native valley:  the wider world would not have
+known you, nor you the world.  Great thoughts of independence and
+revolt would never have burned in you; indignation would not have
+vexed you.  Society would not have given and denied her caresses.
+You would have been happy.  Your songs would have lingered in all
+"the circle of the summer hills;" and your scorn, your satire, your
+narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown.  To the world
+what a loss! and what a gain to you!  We should have possessed but a
+few of your lyrics, as
+
+
+When o'er the hill the eastern star
+Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
+And owsen frae the furrowed field,
+Return sae dowf and wearie O!
+
+
+How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek!  You found,
+oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:
+
+
+In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
+Even Sappho's flame!
+
+
+But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in
+these strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day
+[Greek text]?  Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some
+silent glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of
+all that in your songs reminds us of the Poet's Corner in the
+"Kirkcudbright Advertiser."  We should not have read how
+
+
+Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning,
+Banishes ilk darksome shade!
+
+
+Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,
+
+
+Had we never loved sae kindly,
+Had we never loved sae blindly,
+Never met--or never parted,
+We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
+
+
+But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the
+thrush would have been untaught in "the style of the Bird of
+Paradise."
+
+A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vitae, was not to be yours.
+Fate otherwise decreed it.  The touch of a lettered society, the
+strife with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride,
+neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius what it was,
+and to endow the world with "Tam o' Shanter," the "Jolly Beggars,"
+and "Holy Willie's Prayer."  Who can praise them too highly--who
+admire in them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the
+unsurpassed energy and courage?  So powerful, so commanding, is the
+movement of that Beggars' Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously
+echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet when he conceived
+the "Vision of Sin."  You shall judge for yourself.  Recall:
+
+
+Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets!
+Here's to all the wandering train!
+Here's our ragged bairns and callets!
+One and all cry out, Amen!
+
+A fig for those by law protected!
+Liberty's a glorious feast!
+Courts for cowards were erected!
+Churches built to please the priest!
+
+
+Then read this:
+
+
+Drink to lofty hopes that cool -
+Visions of a perfect state:
+Drink we, last, the public fool,
+Frantic love and frantic hate.
+
+* * *
+
+Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
+While we keep a little breath!
+Drink to heavy Ignorance,
+Hob and nob with brother Death!
+
+
+Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder
+recklessness?
+
+So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of
+so much company, good and bad.  No poet, since the Psalmist of
+Israel, ever gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a
+life more strenuous, engaged in an eternal conflict of the passions,
+and by them overcome--"mighty and mightily fallen."  When we think
+of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree
+from actual truth, and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Lord Byron
+
+
+
+My Lord,
+
+(Do you remember how Leigh Hunt
+Enraged you once by writing MY DEAR BYRON?)
+Books have their fates,--as mortals have who punt,
+And YOURS have entered on an age of iron.
+Critics there be who think your satire blunt,
+Your pathos, fudge; such perils must environ
+Poets who in their time were quite the rage,
+Though now there's not a soul to turn their page.
+Yes, there is much dispute about your worth,
+And much is said which you might like to know
+By modern poets here upon the earth,
+Where poets live, and love each other so;
+And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth
+To hear of bards that pitch your praises low,
+Though there be some that for your credit stickle,
+As--Glorious Mat,--and not inglorious Nichol.
+
+(This kind of writing is my pet aversion,
+I hate the slang, I hate the personalities,
+I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion,
+Of every rhyme that in the singer's wallet is,
+I hate it as you hated the EXCURSION,
+But, while no man a hero to his valet is,
+The hero's still the model; I indite
+The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would write.)
+
+There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot rhyme to,
+One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim.
+Of him there's much to say, if I had time to
+Concern myself in any wise with HIM.
+He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to,
+He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim,
+A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on
+Shakespeare, and Moliere, and you, and Milton.
+
+Ay, much his temper is like Vivien's mood,
+Which found not Galahad pure, nor Lancelot brave;
+Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood,
+He buries poets in an icy grave,
+His Essays--he of the Genevan hood!
+Nothing so fine, but better doth he crave.
+So stupid and so solemn in his spite
+He dares to print that Moliere could not write!
+
+Enough of these excursions; I was saying
+That half our English Bards are turned Reviewers,
+And Arnold was discussing and assaying
+The weight and value of that work of yours,
+Examining and testing it and weighing,
+And proved, the gems are pure, the gold endures.
+While Swinburne cries with an exceeding joy,
+The stones are paste, and half the gold, alloy.
+
+In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest force,
+Poetic, in this later age of ours;
+His song, a torrent from a mountain source,
+Clear as the crystal, singing with the showers,
+Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course
+Through banks o'erhung with rocks and sweet with flowers;
+None of your brooks that modestly meander,
+But swift as Awe along the Pass of Brander.
+
+And when our century has clomb its crest,
+And backward gazes o'er the plains of Time,
+And counts its harvest, yours is still the best,
+The richest garner in the field of rhyme
+(The metaphoric mixture, 'tis comfest,
+Is all my own, and is not quite sublime).
+But fame's not yours alone; you must divide all
+The plums and pudding with the Bard of Rydal!
+
+WORDSWORTH and BYRON, these the lordly names
+And these the gods to whom most incense burns.
+"Absurd!" cries Swinburne, and in anger flames,
+And in an AEschylean fury spurns
+With impious foot your altar, and exclaims
+And wreathes his laurels on the golden urns
+Where Coleridge's and Shelley's ashes lie,
+Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry.
+
+For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never woven
+One honest thread of life within his song;
+As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven
+So Byron is to Shelley  (THIS is strong!),
+And on Parnassus' peak, divinely cloven,
+He may not stand, or stands by cruel wrong;
+For Byron's rank (the examiner has reckoned)
+Is in the third class or a feeble second.
+
+"A Bernesque poet" at the very most,
+And "never earnest save in politics,"
+The Pegasus that he was wont to boast
+A blundering, floundering hackney, full of tricks,
+A beast that must be driven to the post
+By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and sticks,
+A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute,
+That any judge of Pegasi would shoot;
+
+In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone
+In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes.
+And Byron's style is "jolter-headed jargon;"
+His verse is "only bearable in prose."
+So living poets write of those that ARE gone,
+And o'er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows;
+And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began,
+By owning you "a very clever man."
+
+Or rather does not end:  he still must utter
+A quantity of the unkindest things.
+Ah! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter
+O'er such a foe the tempest of your wings?
+'Tis "rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter"
+That rend the modest air when Byron sings.
+There Swinburne stops:  a critic rather fiery.
+Animis caelestibus tantaene irae?
+
+But whether he or Arnold in the right is,
+Long is the argument, the quarrel long;
+Non nobis est to settle tantas lites;
+No poet I, to judge of right or wrong:
+But of all things I always think a fight is
+The MOST unpleasant in the lists of song;
+When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo
+Set an example which we need not follow.
+
+The fashion changes!  Maidens do not wear,
+As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets
+A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron's hair;
+"Don Juan" is not always in our pockets -
+Nay, a New Writer's readers do not care
+Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock its
+Manners and morals.  Ay, and most young ladies
+To yours prefer the "Epic" called "of Hades"!
+
+I do not blame them; I'm inclined to think
+That with the reigning taste 'tis vain to quarrel,
+And Burns might teach his votaries to drink,
+And Byron never meant to make them moral.
+You yet have lovers true, who will not shrink
+From lauding you and giving you the laurel;
+The Germans too, those men of blood and iron,
+Of all our poets chiefly swear by Byron.
+
+Farewell, thou Titan fairer than the Gods!
+Farewell, farewell, thou swift and lovely spirit,
+Thou splendid warrior with the world at odds,
+Unpraised, unpraisable, beyond thy merit;
+Chased, like Orestes, by the Furies' rods,
+Like him at length thy peace dost thou inherit;
+Beholding whom, men think how fairer far
+Than all the steadfast stars the wandering star! {9}
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Omar Khayyam
+
+
+
+Wise Omar, do the Southern Breezes fling
+Above your Grave, at ending of the Spring,
+The Snowdrift of the Petals of the Rose,
+The wild white Roses you were wont to sing?
+
+Far in the South I know a Land divine, {10}
+And there is many a Saint and many a Shrine,
+And over all the Shrines the Blossom blows
+Of Roses that were dear to you as Wine.
+
+You were a Saint of unbelieving Days,
+Liking your Life and happy in Men's Praise;
+Enough for you the Shade beneath the Bough,
+Enough to watch the wild World go its Ways.
+
+Dreadless and hopeless thou of Heaven or Hell,
+Careless of Words thou hadst not Skill to spell,
+Content to know not all thou knowest now,
+What's Death?  Doth any Pitcher dread the Well?
+
+The Pitchers we, whose Maker makes them ill,
+Shall He torment them if they chance to spill?
+Nay, like the broken Potsherds are we cast
+Forth and forgotten,--and what will be will!
+
+So still were we, before the Months began
+That rounded us and shaped us into Man.
+So still we SHALL be, surely, at the last,
+Dreamless, untouched of Blessing or of Ban!
+
+Ah, strange it seems that this thy common Thought -
+How all Things have been, ay, and shall be nought -
+Was ancient Wisdom in thine ancient East,
+In those old Days when Senlac Fight was fought,
+
+Which gave our England for a captive Land
+To pious Chiefs of a believing Band,
+A gift to the Believer from the Priest,
+Tossed from the holy to the blood-red Hand! {11}
+
+Yea, thou wert singing when that Arrow clave
+Through Helm and Brain of him who could not save
+His England, even of Harold Godwin's son;
+The high Tide murmurs by the Hero's Grave! {12}
+
+And THOU wert wreathing Roses--who can tell? -
+Or chanting for some Girl that pleased thee well,
+Or satst at Wine in Nashapur, when dun
+The twilight veiled the Field where Harold fell!
+
+The salt Sea-waves above him rage and roam!
+Along the white Walls of his guarded Home
+No Zephyr stirs the Rose, but o'er the Wave
+The wild Wind beats the Breakers into Foam!
+
+And dear to him, as Roses were to thee,
+Rings the long Roar of Onset of the Sea;
+The SWAN'S PATH of his Fathers is his Grave:
+His Sleep, methinks, is sound as thine can be.
+
+His was the Age of Faith, when all the West
+Looked to the Priest for Torment or for Rest;
+And thou wert living then, and didst not heed
+The Saint who banned thee or the Saint who blessed!
+
+Ages of Progress!  These eight hundred Years
+Hath Europe shuddered with her Hopes or Fears,
+And now!--she listens in the Wilderness
+To THEE, and half believeth what she hears!
+
+Hadst THOU THE SECRET?  Ah, and who may tell?
+"An Hour we have," thou saidst; "Ah, waste it well!"
+An Hour we have, and yet Eternity
+Looms o'er us, and the Thought of Heaven or Hell!
+
+Nay, we can never be as wise as thou,
+O idle Singer 'neath the blossomed Bough.
+Nay, and we cannot be content to die.
+WE cannot shirk the Questions "Where?" and "How?"
+
+Ah, not from learned Peace and gay Content
+Shall we of England go the way HE went -
+The Singer of the Red Wine and the Rose -
+Nay, otherwise than HIS our Day is spent!
+
+Serene he dwelt in fragrant Nashapur,
+But we must wander while the Stars endure.
+HE knew THE SECRET:  we have none that knows,
+No Man so sure as Omar once was sure!
+
+
+
+LETTER--To Q. Horatius Flaccus
+
+
+
+In what manner of Paradise are we to conceive that you, Horace, are
+dwelling, or what region of immortality can give you such pleasures
+as this life afforded?  The country and the town, nature and men,
+who knew them so well as you, or who ever so wisely made the best of
+those two worlds?  Truly here you had good things, nor do you ever,
+in all your poems, look for more delight in the life beyond; you
+never expect consolation for present sorrow, and when you once have
+shaken hands with a friend the parting seems to you eternal.
+
+
+Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
+Tam cari capitis?
+
+
+So you sing, for the dear head you mourn has sunk, for ever, beneath
+the wave.  Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch "the
+Sibyl doth to singing men allow," and might visit, as one not wholly
+without hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn.  To him
+was it permitted to see and sing "mothers and men, and the bodies
+outworn of mighty heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young men
+borne to the funeral fire before their parent's eyes."  The endless
+caravan swept past him--"many as fluttering leaves that drop and
+fall in autumn woods when the first frost begins; many as birds that
+flock landward from the great sea when now the chill year drives
+them o'er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands."  Such things
+was it given to the sacred poet to behold, and "the happy seats and
+sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger light clothes
+all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with their
+own new sun and stars before unknown."  Ah, not frustra pius was
+Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song.  In him, we
+fancy, there was a happier mood than your melancholy patience.
+"Not, though thou wert sweeter of song than Thracian Orpheus, with
+that lyre whose lay led the dancing trees, not so would the blood
+return to the empty shade of him whom once with dread wand, the
+inexorable God hath folded with his shadowy flocks; but patience
+lighteneth what heaven forbids us to undo."
+
+
+Durum, sed levius fit patietia!
+
+
+It was all your philosophy in that last sad resort to which we are
+pushed so often -
+
+
+"With close-lipped Patience for our only friend,
+Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair."
+
+
+The Epicurean is at one with the Stoic at last, and Horace with
+Marcus Aurelius.  "To go away from among men, if there are Gods, is
+not a thing to be afraid of; but if indeed they do not exist, or if
+they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live
+in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of providence?"
+
+An excellent philosophy, but easier to those for whom no Hope had
+dawned or seemed to set.  Yes! it is harder than common, Horace, for
+us to think of YOU, still glad somewhere, among rivers like Liris
+and plains and vine-clad hills, that
+
+
+Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.
+
+
+It is hard, for you looked for no such thing.
+
+
+Omnes una manet nox
+Et calcanda semel via leti.
+
+
+You could not tell Maecenas that you would meet him again; you could
+only promise to tread the dark path with him.
+
+
+Ibimus, ibimus,
+Utcunque praecedes, supremum
+Carpere iter comites parati.
+
+
+Enough, Horace, of these mortuary musings.  You loved the lesson of
+the roses, and now and again would speak somewhat like a death's
+head over your temperate cups of Sabine ordinaire.  Your melancholy
+moral was but meant to heighten the joy of your pleasant life, when
+wearied Italy, after all her wars and civic bloodshed, had won a
+peaceful haven.  The harbour might be treacherous; the prince might
+turn to the tyrant; far away on the wide Roman marches might be
+heard, as it were, the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating
+horses' hoofs and marching feet of men.  They were coming, they were
+nearing, like footsteps heard on wool; there was a sound of
+multitudes and millions of barbarians, all the North, officina
+gentium, mustering and marshalling her peoples.  But their coming
+was not to be to-day, nor to-morrow, nor to-day was the budding
+Empire to blossom into the blood-red flower of Nero.  In the lull
+between the two tempests of Republic and Empire your odes sound
+"like linnets in the pauses of the wind."
+
+What joy there is in these songs! what delight of life, what an
+exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what
+tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is
+fair in the glittering stream, the music of the waterfall, the hum
+of bees, the silvery grey of the olive woods on the hillside!  How
+human are all your verses, Horace! what a pleasure is yours in the
+straining poplars, swaying in the wind! what gladness you gain from
+the white crest of Soracte, beheld through the fluttering snowflakes
+while the logs are being piled higher on the hearth.  You sing of
+women and wine--not all wholehearted in your praise of them,
+perhaps, for passion frightens you, and 'tis pleasure more than love
+that you commend to the young.  Lydia and Glycera, and the others,
+are but passing guests of a heart at ease in itself, and happy
+enough when their facile reign is ended.  You seem to me like a man
+who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than Sophocles was to
+"flee from these hard masters" the passions.  In the fallow leisure
+of life you glance round contented, and find all very good save the
+need to leave all behind.  Even that you take with an Italian good-
+humour, as the folk of your sunny country bear poverty and hunger.
+
+
+Durum, sed levius fit patientia!
+
+
+To them, to you, the loveliness of your land is, and was, a thing to
+live for.  None of the Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil,
+seem to me to have known so well as you, Horace, how happy and
+fortunate a thing it was to be born in Italy.  You do not say so,
+like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, numbering the glories of
+the land as a lover might count the perfections of his mistress.
+But the sentiment is ever in your heart and often on your lips.
+
+
+Me nec tam patiens Lacedaemon,
+Nec tam Larissae percussit campus opimae,
+Quam domus Albuneae resonantis
+Et praeceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda
+Mobilibus pomaria rivis. {13}
+
+
+So a poet should speak, and to every singer his own land should be
+dearest.  Beautiful is Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of
+her sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities perched like
+eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding under ancient walls;
+beautiful is Italy, her seas, and her suns:  but dearer to me the
+long grey wave that bites the rock below the minster in the north;
+dearer are the barren moor and black peat-water swirling in tauny
+foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, and,
+watching over the lochs, the green round-shouldered hills.
+
+In affection for your native land, Horace, certainly the pride in
+great Romans dead and gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a
+lover of your country, your country's heroes, your country's gods.
+None but a patriot could have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as
+our own hero died on an evil day, for the honour of Rome, as Gordon
+for the honour of England.
+
+
+Fertur pudicae conjugis osculum,
+Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor,
+Ab se removisse, et virilem
+Torvus humi posuisse voltum:
+
+Donec labantes consilio patres
+Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato,
+Interque maerentes amicos
+Egregius properaret exul.
+
+Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus
+Tortor pararet:  non aliter tamen
+Dimovit obstantes propinquos,
+Et populum reditus morantem,
+
+Quam si clientum longa negotia
+Dijudicata lite relinqueret,
+Tendens Venafranos in agros
+Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. {14}
+
+
+We talk of the Greeks as your teachers.  Your teachers they were,
+but that poem could only have been written by a Roman!  The
+strength, the tenderness, the noble and monumental resolution and
+resignation--these are the gifts of the lords of human things, the
+masters of the world.
+
+Your country's heroes are dear to you, Horace, but you did not sing
+them better than your country's Gods, the pious protecting spirits
+of the hearth, the farm, the field; kindly ghosts, it may be, of
+Latin fathers dead or Gods framed in the image of these.  What you
+actually believed we know not, YOU knew not.  Who knows what he
+believes?  Parcus Deorum cultor you bowed not often, it may be, in
+the temples of the state religion and before the statues of the
+great Olympians; but the pure and pious worship of rustic tradition,
+the faith handed down by the homely elders, with THAT you never
+broke.  Clean hands and a pure heart, these, with a sacred cake and
+shining grains of salt, you could offer to the Lares.  It was a
+benignant religion, uniting old times and new, men living and men
+long dead and gone, in a kind of service and sacrifice solemn yet
+familiar.
+
+
+Te nihil attinet
+Tentare multa caede bidentium
+Parvos coronantem marino
+Rore deos fragilique myrto.
+
+Immunis aram si tetigit manus,
+Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
+Mellivit aversos Penates
+Farre pio et saliente mica, {15}
+
+
+Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise and kindly heathen; of
+mortals the most human, the friend of my friends and of so many
+generations of men,
+
+Ave atque Vale!
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  I am informed that the Natural History of Young Ladies is
+attributed, by some writers, to another philosopher, the author of
+The Art of Pluck.
+
+{2}  Rape of the Lock.
+
+{3}  In Mr. Hogarth's Caricatura.
+
+{4}  Elwin's Pope, ii. 15.
+
+{5}  "Poor Pope was always a hand-to-mouth liar."--Pope, by Leslie
+Stephen, 139.
+
+{6}  The Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], mentioned by
+Lucian and Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Australians--
+the turndun.
+
+{7}  Lord Napier and Ettrick points out to me that, unluckily, the
+tradition is erroneous.  Piers was not executed at all.  William
+Cockburn suffered in Edinburgh.  But the Border Minstrelsy overrides
+history.
+
+Criminal Trials in Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn, Esq.  Vol. i. part
+i. p. 144, A.D. 1530. 17 Jac.  V.
+
+May 16.  William Cokburne of Henderland, convicted (in presence of
+the King) of high treason committed by him in bringing Alexander
+Forestare and his son, Englishmen, to the plundering of Archibald
+Somervile; and for treasonably bringing certain Englishmen to the
+lands of Glenquhome; and for common theft, common reset of theft,
+out-putting and in-putting thereof.  Sentence.  For which causes and
+crimes he has forfeited his life, lands, and goods, movable and
+immovable; which shall be escheated to the King.  Beheaded.
+
+{8}  "The Lesson of Jupiter."--Nineteenth Century, October 1885.
+
+{9}  Mr. Swinburne's and Mr. Arnold's diverse views of Byron will be
+found in the Selections by Mr. Arnold and in the Nineteenth Century.
+
+{10}  The hills above San Remo, where rose-bushes are planted by the
+shrines.  Omar desired that his grave might be where the wind would
+scatter rose-leaves over it.
+
+{11}  Omar was contemporary with the battle of Hastings.
+
+{12} Per mandata Ducis, Rex hic, Heralde, quiescis,
+Ut custos maneas littoris et pelagi.
+
+{13}  "Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissaean plain so
+enraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong Anio, the
+grove of Tibur, the orchards watered by the wandering rills."
+
+{14}  "They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife and
+his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave face
+bowed earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel as never
+mortal gave he might strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and
+through his mourning friends go forth, a hero, into exile.  Yet well
+he knew what things were being prepared for him at the hands of the
+tormentors, who, none the less, put aside the kinsmen that barred
+his path and the people that would fain have delayed his return,
+passing through their midst as he might have done if, his retainers'
+weary business ended and the suits adjudged, he were faring to his
+Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum."
+
+{15}  "Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods with
+slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest thy tiny deities with
+myrtle rare and rosemary.  If but the hand be clean that touches the
+altar, then richest sacrifice will not more appease the angered
+Penates than the duteous cake and salt that crackles in the blaze."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters to Dead Authors by Andrew Lang
+