Gilbert White was already a middle-aged man when he was drawn into correspondence by Thomas Pennant, a naturalist younger than himself, who had undertaken to produce, in four volumes folio, a work on _British Zoology_ for the production of which he was radically unfitted. It has been severely, but justly, pointed out that wherever Pennant rises superior, either in style or information, to his own dead level of pompous inexactitude, he is almost certainly quoting from a letter of Gilbert White’s. Yet no acknowledgment of the Selborne parson is vouchsafed; “even in the account of the harvest-mouse,” says Professor Bell, “there is no mention of its discoverer.” Nevertheless, so rudimentary was scientific knowledge one hundred and thirty years ago, that Pennant’s pretentious book was received with acclamation. The patient man at Selborne sat and smiled, even courteously joining with mild congratulations in the rounds of applause. Fortunately Pennant did not remain his only correspondent. The Hon. Daines Barrington was a man of another stamp, not profound, indeed, but enthusiastic, a genuine lover of research, and a gentleman at heart. He quoted Gilbert White in his writings, but never without full acknowledgment. Other friends followed, and the recluse of Selbourne became the correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks, of Dr. Chandler, and of many other great ones of that day now decently forgotten.
Meanwhile, he was growing old. Any sharp winter might have cut him off, as he trudged along through the deep lanes of his rustic parish. Early in 1770 Daines Barrington, tired of seeing his friend the mere valet to so many other pompous intellects, had proposed to him to “draw up an account of the animals of Selborne.” Gilbert White put the fascinating notion from him. “It is no small undertaking,” he replied, “for a man unsupported and alone to begin a natural history from his own autopsia.” Pennant seems to have joined in the suggestion of Barrington, for White says (in a letter, dated July 19, 1771, which did not see the light for more than a century after it was written):
“As to any publication in this way of my own, I look upon it with great diffidence, finding that I ought to have begun it twenty years ago; but if I was to attempt anything, it should be something of a Nat: history of my native parish, an _Annus historico-naturalis_, comprising a journal of one whole year, and illustrated with large notes and observations. Such a beginning might induce more able naturalists to write the history of various districts, and might in time occasion the production of a work so much to be wished for, a full and compleat nat: history of these kingdoms.”
Three years later he was still thinking of doing something, but putting off the hour of action. In 1776 he was suddenly spurred to decide by the circumstance that Barrington had written to propose a joint work on natural history. “If I publish at all,” said Gilbert White to his nephew, “I shall come forth by myself.” In 1780 he is still unready: “Were it not for want of a good amanuensis, I think I should make more progress.” He was now sixty years of age. Eight years later he was preparing the Index, and at last, in the autumn of 1789, the volume positively made its appearance, in the maiden author’s seventieth year. Few indeed, if any, among English writers of high distinction, have been content to delay so long before testing the popular estimate of their work. His book was warmly welcomed, but the delightful author survived its publication less than four years, dying in the parish which he was to make so famous. Gilbert White was, in a very peculiar sense, a man of one book.
Countless as have been the reprints of _The Natural History of Selborne_, its original form is no longer, perhaps, familiar to many readers. The first edition, which is now before me, is a very handsome quarto. Benjamin White, the publisher, who was the younger brother of Gilbert, issued most of the standard works on natural history which appeared in London during the second half of the century, and his experience enabled him to do adequate justice to _The History of Selborne_. The frontispiece is a large folding plate of the village from the Short Lythe, an ambitious summer landscape, representing the church, White’s own house, and a few cottages against the broad sweep of the hangar. On a terrace in the foreground are portrait figures of three gentlemen standing, and a lady seated. Of the former, one is a clergyman, and it has often been stated that this is Gilbert White himself; erroneously, since no portrait of him was ever executed;[1] the figure is that of the Rev. Robert Yalden, vicar of Newton-Valence. The frontispiece is unsigned, and I find no record of the artist’s name. It is not to be doubted, however, that the original was painted by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, the Swiss water-colour draughtsman, who sketched so many topographical views in the South of England.
[Footnote 1: That discovered in 1913 has yet to prove that it represents Gilbert White in any way.]
The remaining illustrations to this first edition, are an oval landscape vignette on the title-page, engraved by Daniel Lerpiniere; a full-page plate of some fossil shells; an extra-sized plate of the _himantopus_ that was shot at Frensham Pond, straddling with an immense excess of shank; and four engravings, now of remarkable interest, displaying the village as it then stood, from various points of view. They are engraved by Peter Mazell, after drawings of Grimm’s, and give what is evidently a most accurate impression of what Selborne was a century ago. In these days of reproductions, it is rather strange that no publisher has issued facsimiles of these beautiful illustrations to the original edition of what has become one of the most popular English works. For the use of book-collectors, I may go on to say that any one who is offered a copy of the edition of _The History of Selborne_ of 1789, should be careful to see that not merely the plates I have mentioned are in their places, but that the engraved sub-title, with a print of the seal of Selborne Priory, occurs opposite the blank leaf which answers to page 306.
It is impossible for a bibliographer who writes on Gilbert White to resist the pleasure of mentioning the name of his best editor and biographer. It was unfortunate that Thomas Bell, who was born eight months before the death of Gilbert White, and who, quite early in life began to entertain an enthusiastic reverence for that writer, did not find an opportunity of studying Selborne on the spot until the memories of White were becoming very vague and scattered there. I think it was not until about 1865 that, retiring from a professional career, he made Selborne–and the Wakes, the very house of Gilbert White–his residence. Here he lived, however, for fifteen years, and here it was his delight to follow up every vestige of the great naturalist’s sojourn in the parish. White became the passion of Professor Bell’s existence, and I well recollect him when he was eighty-five or eighty-six years of age, and no longer strong enough in body to quit his room with ease, sitting in his arm-chair at the bedroom window, and directing my attention to points of Whiteish interest, as I stood in the garden below. It was as difficult for Mr. Bell to conceive that his annotations of White were complete, as it had been for White himself to pluck up courage to publish; and it was not until 1877, when the author was eighty-five years of age, that his great and final edition in two thick volumes was issued. He lived, however, to be nearly ninety, and died in the Wakes at last, in the very room, and if I mistake not, the very spot in the room, where his idol had passed away in 1793.
As long as Professor Bell was alive the house preserved, in all essentials, the identical character which it had maintained under its famous tenant. Overgrown with creepers to the very chimneys, divided by the greenest and most velvety of lawns from a many-coloured furnace of flower-beds, scarcely parted by lush paddocks from the intense green wall of the coppiced hill, the Wakes has always retained for my memory an impression of rural fecundity and summer glow absolutely unequalled. The garden seemed to burn like a green sun, with crimson stars and orange meteors to relieve it. All, I believe, has since then been altered. Selborne, they tell me, has ceased to bear any resemblance to that rich nest in which Thomas Bell so piously guarded the idea of Gilbert White. If it be so, we must live content with
_The memory of what has been,
And never more may be_.
THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE
EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE. _Ipswich: Printed and sold by John Raw; sold also by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster Row, London_. 1810.
It may be that, save by a few elderly people and certain lovers of old _Gentleman’s Magazines_, the broad anonymous quarto known as _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ is no longer much admired or even recollected. But it deserves to be recalled to memory, if only in that it was, in some respects, the first, and in others, the last of a long series of publications. It was the first of those diaries of personal record of the intellectual life, which have become more and more the fashion and have culminated at length in the ultra-refinement of Amiel and the conscious self-analysis of Marie Bashkirtseff. It was less definitely, perhaps, the last, or one of the last, expressions of the eighteenth century sentiment, undiluted by any tincture of romance, any suspicion that fine literature existed before Dryden, or could take any form unknown to Burke.
It was under a strict incognito that _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ appeared, and it was attributed by conjecture to various famous people. The real author, however, was not a celebrated man. His name was Thomas Green, and he was the grandson of a wealthy Suffolk soap-boiler, who had made a fortune during the reign of Queen Anne. The Diarist’s father had been an agreeable amateur in letters, a pamphleteer, and a champion of the Church of England against Dissent. Thomas Green, who was born in 1769, found himself at twenty-five in possession of the ample family estates, a library of good books, a vast amount of leisure, and a hereditary faculty for reading. His health was not very solid, and he was debarred by it from sharing the pleasures of his neighbour squires. He determined to make books and music the occupation of his life, and in 1796, on his twenty-seventh birthday, he began to record in a diary his impressions of what he read. He went on very quietly and luxuriantly, living among his books in his house at Ipswich, and occasionally rolling in his post-chaise to valetudinarian baths and “Spaws.”
When he had kept his diary for fourteen years, it seemed to a pardonable vanity so amusing, that he persuaded himself to give part of it to the world. The experiment, no doubt, was a very dubious one. After much hesitation, and in an evil hour, perhaps, he wrote: “I am induced to submit to the indulgence of the public the idlest work, probably, that ever was composed; but, I could wish to hope, not absolutely the most unentertaining or unprofitable.” The welcome his volume received must speedily have reassured him, but he had pledged himself to print no more, and he kept his promise, though he went on writing his Diary until he died in 1825. His MSS. passed into the hands of John Mitford, who amused the readers of _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ with fragments of them for several years. Green has had many admirers in the past, amongst whom Edward FitzGerald was not the least distinguished. But he was always something of a local worthy, author of one anonymous book, and of late he has been little mentioned outside the confines of Suffolk.
It would be difficult to find an example more striking than the _Diary of a Lover of Literature_ of exclusive absorption in the world of books. It opens in a gloomy year for British politics, but there is found no allusion to current events. There is a victory off Cape St. Vincent in February, 1797, but Green is attacking Bentley’s annotations on Horace. Bonaparte and his army are buried in the sands of Egypt; our Diarist takes occasion to be buried in Shaftesbury’s _Enquiry Concerning Virtue_. Europe rings with Hohenlinden, but the news does not reach Mr. Thomas Green, nor disturb him in his perusal of Soame Jenyns’ _View of Christianity_. The fragment of the _Diary_ here preserved runs from September 1796 to June 1800. No one would guess, from any word between cover and cover, that these were not halcyon years, an epoch of complete European tranquillity. War upon war might wake the echoes, but the river ran softly by the Ipswich garden of this gentle enthusiast, and not a murmur reached him through his lilacs and laburnums.
I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions of unadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment. For form’s sake, the Diarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is bounded by a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden. The classics of Greece and Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from the Restoration downwards, these are enough for him. Writing in 1800 he has no suspicion of a new age preparing. We read these stately pages, and we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was written, Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued _Lyrical Ballads_, and Keats himself was in the world? Almost the only touch which shows consciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is a reference to the rival translations of Burger’s _Lenore_ in 1797. Sir Walter Scott, as we know, was one of the anonymous translators; it was, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor’s, that Green mentions with special approbation.
In one hundred years a mighty change has come over the tastes and fashions of literary life. When _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those days about Godwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. “A flattering message from Dr. P—-” sends our Diarist into ecstasies so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the “predominant and final effect upon my mind has been depression rather than elevation.” We think of
_The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung. And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?_
Who cares now for Parr’s praise or Soame Jenyns’ censure? Yet in our Diarist’s pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds.
Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in art than in literature. He was “particularly struck” at the Royal Academy of 1797 with a sea view by a painter called Turner:
“Fishing vessels coming in with a heavy swell in apprehension of a tempest, gathering in the distance, and casting as it advances a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore; the whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the artist, but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department.”
A remarkable prophecy, and one of the earliest notices we possess of the effect which the youthful Turner, then but twenty-two years of age, made on his contemporaries.
As a rule, except when he is travelling, our Diarist almost entirely occupies himself with a discussion of the books he happens to be reading. His opinions are not always in concert with the current judgment of to-day; he admires Warburton much more than we do, and Fielding much less. But he never fails to be amusing, because so independent within the restricted bounds of his intellectual domain. He is shut up in his eighteenth century like a prisoner, but inside its wall his liberty of action is complete. Sometimes his judgments are sensibly in advance of his age. It was the fashion in 1798 to denounce the Letters of Lord Chesterfield as frivolous and immoral. Green takes a wider view, and in a thoughtful analysis points out their judicious merits and their genuine parental assiduity. When Green can for a moment lift his eyes from his books, he shows a sensitive quality of observation which might have been cultivated to general advantage. Here is a reflection which seems to be as novel as it is happy:
“Looked afterwards into the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street. The thrilling tinkle of the little bell at the elevation of the Host is perhaps the finest example that can be given of the sublime by association–nothing so poor and trivial in itself, nothing so transcendently awful, as indicating the sudden change in the consecrated Elements, and the instant presence of the Redeemer.”
Much of the latter part of the _Diary_, as we hold it, is occupied with the description of a tour in England and Wales. Here Green is lucid, graceful, and refined: producing one after another little vignettes in prose, which remind us of the simple drawings of the water-colour masters of the age, of Girtin or Cozens or Glover. The volume, which opened with some remarks on Sir William Temple, closes with a disquisition on Warton’s criticism of the poets. The curtain rises for three years on a smooth stream of intellectual reflection, unruffled by outward incident, and then falls again before we are weary of the monotonous flow of undiluted criticism. _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ is at once the pleasing record of a cultivated mind, and a monument to a species of existence that is as obsolete as nankeen breeches or a tie-wig.
Isaac D’Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors to the dust, and that he earnestly wished for a dozen volumes of _The Diary_. At Green’s death material for at least so many supplements were placed in the hands of John Mitford, who did not venture to produce them. From January 1834 to May 1843, however, Mitford was incessantly contributing to _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ unpublished extracts from this larger _Diary_. These have never been collected, but my friend, Mr. W. Aldis Wright, possesses a very interesting volume, into which the whole mass of them has been carefully and consecutively pasted, with copious illustrative matter, by the hand of Edward FitzGerald, whose interest in and curiosity about Thomas Green were unflagging.
PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS
PETER BELL: _A Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth. London: Printed by Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street: for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row_. 1819.
None of Wordsworth’s productions are better known by name than _Peter Bell_, and yet few, probably, are less familiar, even to convinced Wordsworthians. The poet’s biographers and critics have commonly shirked the responsibility of discussing this poem, and when the Primrose stanza has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, there is usually no more said about _Peter Bell_. A puzzling obscurity hangs around its history. We have no positive knowledge why its publication was so long delayed; nor, having been delayed, why it was at length determined upon. Yet a knowledge of this poem is not merely an important, but, to a thoughtful critic, an essential element in the comprehension of Wordsworth’s poetry. No one who examines that body of literature with sympathetic attention should be content to overlook the piece in which Wordsworth’s theories are pushed to their furthest extremity.
When _Peter Bell_ was published in April 1819, the author remarked that it had “nearly survived its _minority_; for it saw the light in the summer of 1798.” It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, that plain stone house in West Somersetshire, which Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented for the sum of L23 for one year, the rent covering the use of “a large park, with seventy head of deer.”
Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also to the peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularly unaltered. The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep umbrageous drive to the point where the house, the park around it, and the Quantocks above them suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day very much what Wordsworth’s visitors saw when they trudged up from Stowey to commune with him in 1797. The barrier of ancient beech-trees running up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch of fields and woods descending northward to the expanse of the yellow Severn Channel, the plain white facade of Alfoxden itself, with its easy right of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous pathway down to the glen, the poet’s favourite parlour at the end of the house–all this presents an impression which is probably less transformed, remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identified with the early or even the middle life of the poet. That William and Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so noble a country property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge’s squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never cease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, “to keep the house inhabited during the minority of the owner;” it was let to the poet on the 14th of July 1797.
It was in this delicious place, under the shadow of “smooth Quantock’s airy ridge,” that Wordsworth’s genius came of age. It was during the twelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost the final traces of the old traditional accent of poetry. It was here that the best of the _Lyrical Ballads_ were written, and from this house the first volume of that epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press. Among the poems written at Alfoxden _Peter Bell_ was prominent, but we hear little of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths by Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted to read “the sibylline leaves,” and on a second had the rare pleasure of hearing Wordsworth himself chant _Peter Bell_, in his “equable, sustained, and internal” manner of recitation, under the ash-trees of Alfoxden Park. I do not know whether it has been noted that the landscape of _Peter Bell_, although localised in Yorkshire by the banks of the River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character. The poem was composed, without a doubt, as the poet tramped the grassy heights of the Quantock Hills, or descended at headlong pace, mouthing and murmuring as he went, into one sylvan combe after another. To give it its proper place among the writings of the school, we must remember that it belongs to the same group as _Tintern Abbey_ and _The Ancient Mariner_.
Why, then, was it not issued to the world with these? Why was it locked up in the poet’s desk for twenty-one years, and shown during that time, as we gather from its author’s language to Southey, to few, even of his close friends? To these questions we find no reply vouchsafed, but perhaps it is not difficult to discover one. Every revolutionist in literature or art produces some composition in which he goes further than in any other in his defiance of recognised rules and conventions. It was Wordsworth’s central theory that no subject can be too simple and no treatment too naked for poetic purposes. His poems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is most audacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, is quite so simple or quite so naked as _Peter Bell_.
Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the new ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was “not critically nor sceptically inclined.” Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. I have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798, his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _Peter Bell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter “found nothing good in it.” Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ at that time, and he was irritated at Lamb’s indifference. Yet his own opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819) he calls it “this _unfortunate_ book.”[1] In another place (June 12, 1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book was printed, to omit “the party in a parlour,” and also the banging of the ass’s bones, but, of course, in vain.
[Footnote 1: The word _unfortunate_ is omitted by the editor, Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth’s descendants.]
In 1819 much was changed. The poet was now in his fiftieth year. The epoch of his true productiveness was closed; all his best works, except _The Prelude_, were before the public, and although Wordsworth was by no means widely or generally recognised yet as a great poet, there was a considerable audience ready to receive with respect whatever so interesting a person should put forward. Moreover, a new generation had come to the front; Scott’s series of verse-romances was closed; Byron was in mid-career; there were young men of extraordinary and somewhat disquieting talent–Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt–all of whom were supposed to be, although characters of a very reprehensible and even alarming class, yet distinctly respectful in their attitude towards Mr. Wordsworth. It seemed safe to publish _Peter Bell_.
Accordingly, the thin octavo described at the head of this chapter duly appeared in April 1819. It was so tiny that it had to be eked out with the Sonnets written to W. Westall’s Views, and it was adorned by an engraving of Bromley’s, after a drawing specially made by Sir George Beaumont to illustrate the poem. A letter to Beaumont, unfortunately without a date, in which this frontispiece is discussed, seems to suggest that the engraving was a gift from the artist to the poet; Wordsworth, “in sorrow for the sickly taste of the public in verse,” opining that he cannot afford the expense of such a frontispiece as Sir George Beaumont suggests. In accordance with these fears, no doubt, an edition of only 500 was published; but it achieved a success which Wordsworth had neither anticipated nor desired. There was a general guffaw of laughter, and all the copies were immediately sold; within a month a ribald public received a third edition, only to discover, with disappointment, that the funniest lines were omitted.
No one admired _Peter Bell_. The inner circle was silent. Baron Field wrote on the title-page of his copy, which now belongs to Mr. J. Dykes Campbell, “And his carcass was cast in the way, and the Ass stood by it.” Sir Walter Scott openly lamented that Wordsworth should exhibit himself “crawling on all fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to lift to heaven.” Byron mocked aloud, and, worse than all, the young men from whom so much had been expected, _les jeunes feroces_, leaped on the poor uncomplaining Ass like so many hunting-leopards. The air was darkened by hurtling parodies, the arrangement of which is still a standing _crux_ to the bibliographers.
It was Keats’s friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who opened the attack. His parody _(Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad_. London, Taylor and Hessey, 1819) was positively in the field before the original. It was said, at the time, that Wordsworth, feverishly awaiting a specimen copy of his own _Peter Bell_ from town, seized a packet which the mail brought him, only to find that it was the spurious poem which had anticipated Simon Pure. _The Times_ protested that the two poems must be from the same pen. Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the genuine poem; his preface is a close imitation of Wordsworth’s introduction, and the stanzaic form in which the two pieces are written is identical. On the other hand, the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poems by Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of _Peter Bell_. Reynolds’s whole pamphlet–preface, text, and notes–is excessively clever, and touches up the bard at a score of tender points. It catches the sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, and it closes with this charming stanza:
_He quits that moonlight yard of skulls, And still he feels right glad, and smiles With moral joy at that old tomb;
Peter’s cheek recalls its bloom,
And as he creepeth by the tiles,
He mutters ever–“W.W.
Never more will trouble you, trouble you_.”
_Peter Bell the Second_, as it is convenient, though not strictly accurate, to call Reynold’s “antenatal Peter,” was more popular than the original. By May a third edition had been called for, and this contained fresh stanzas and additional notes.
Another parody, which ridiculed the affection for donkeys displayed both by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was called _The Dead Asses: A Lyrical Ballad_; and an elaborate production, the author of which I have not been able to discover, was published later on in the year, _Benjamin the Waggoner_ (Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1819), which, although the title suggests _The Waggoner_ of Wordsworth, is entirely taken up with making fun of _Peter Bell_. This parody–and it is certainly neither pointless nor unskilful–chiefly deals with the poet’s fantastic prologue. Then, no less a person than Shelley, writing to Leigh Hunt from Florence in November of the same year, enclosed a _Peter Bell the Third_ which he desired should be printed, yet in such a form as to conceal the name of the author. Perhaps Hunt thought it indiscreet to publish this not very amusing skit, and it did not see the light till long after Shelley’s death. Finally, as though the very spirit of parody danced in the company of this strange poem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its ill-fate in a sonnet imitated from Milton’s defence of “Tetrachordon,” singing how, on the appearance of _Peter Bell_,
_a harpy brood
On Bard and Hero clamourously fell_.
Of the poem which enjoyed so singular a fate, Lord Houghton has quietly remarked that it could not have been written by a man with a strong sense of humour. This is true of every part of it, of the stiff and self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque prologue, both of which in all probability belong to 1819, no less than of the story itself, in its three cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxden and 1798. The tale is not less improbable than uninteresting. In the first part, a very wicked potter or itinerant seller of pots, Peter Bell, being lost in the woodland, comes to the borders of a river, and thinks to steal an ass which he finds pensively hanging its head over the water; Peter Bell presently discovers that the dead body of the master of the ass is floating in the river just below. (The poet, as he has naively recorded, read this incident in a newspaper.) In the second part Peter drags the dead man to land, and starts on the ass’s back to find the survivors. In the third part a vague spiritual chastisement falls on Peter Bell for his previous wickedness. Plot there is no more than this, and if proof were wanted of the inherent innocence of Wordsworth’s mind, it is afforded by the artless struggles which he makes to paint a very wicked man. Peter Bell has had twelve wives, he is indifferent to primroses upon a river’s brim, and he beats asses when they refuse to stir. This is really all the evidence brought against one who is described, vaguely, as combining all vices that “the cruel city breeds.”
That which close students of the genius of Wordsworth will always turn to seek in _Peter Bell_ is the sincere sentiment of nature and the studied simplicity of language which inspire its best stanzas. The narrative is clumsy in the extreme, and the attempts at wit and sarcasm ludicrous. Yet _Peter Bell_ contains exquisite things. The Primrose stanza is known to every one; this is not so familiar:
_The dragon’s wing, the magic ring,
I shall not covet for my dower.
If I along that lowly way
With sympathetic heart may stray
And with a soul of power_.
Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its descriptive accent of 1798:
_I see a blooming Wood-boy there,
And, if I had the power to say
How sorrowful the wanderer is,
Your heart would be as sad as his
Till you had kiss’d his tears away!
Holding a hawthorn branch in hand,
All bright with berries ripe and red; Into the cavern’s mouth he peeps–
Thence back into the moonlight creeps; What seeks the boy?–the silent dead!_
It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell became aware of the dead body floating under the nose of the patient ass that Wordsworth loses himself in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, then the reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a coffin, a shroud, a stone idol, a ring of fairies, a fiend. Last of all the poet makes the Potter, who is gazing at the corpse, exclaim:
_Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm’d just as they on earth were cramm’d– Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damned!_
So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, however gifted, who has no sense of humour! This simile was too much for the gravity even of intimate friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second edition it disappeared.
THE FANCY
THE FANCY: _A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray’s Inn, student at law. With a brief Memoir of his life. London: printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street_. 1820.
The themes of the poets run in a very narrow channel. Since the old heroic times when the Homers and the Gunnlaugs sang of battle with the sleet of lances hurtling around them, a great calm has settled down upon Parnassus. Generation after generation pipes the same tune of love and Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philosophies; the same imagery, the same metres, meander within the same polite margins of conventional subject. Ever and anon some one attempts to break out of the groove. In the eighteenth century they made a valiant effort to sing of The Art of Preserving Health, and of The Fleece and of The Sugar-Cane, but the innovators lie stranded, like cumbrous whales, on the shore of the ocean of Poesy. Flaubert’s friend, Louis Bouilhet, made a inartful attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to music of the birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and the mastodon. But the public would have none of it, though ensphered in faultless verso, and the poets fled back to their flames and darts, and to the primrose at the river’s brim. There is, however, something pathetic, and something that pleasantly reminds us of the elasticity of the human intellect in these failures; and the book before us is an amusing example of such eccentric efforts to enlarge the sphere of the poetic activity.
This little volume is called _The Fancy_, and it does not appear to me certain that the virtuous American conscience know what that means. If the young ladies from Wells or Wellesley inquire ingenuously, “Tell us where is Fancy bred?” we should have to reply, with a jingle, In the fists, not in the head. The poet himself, in a fit of unusual candour, says:
_Fancy’s a term for every blackguardism_,
though this is much too severe. But rats, and they who catch them, badgers, and they who bait them, cocks, and they who fight them, and, above all, men with fists, who professionally box with them, come under the category of the _Fancy_. This, then, is the theme which the poet before us, living under the genial sway of the First Gentleman of Europe, undertook to place beneath the special patronage of Apollo. The attractions, however, of _The Learned Ring_, set all other pleasures in the shade, and the name, Peter Corcoran, which is a pseudonym, is, I suppose, chosen merely because the initials are those of the then famous Pugilistic Club. The poet is, in short, the laureate of the P.C., and his book stands in the same relation to _Boxiana_ that Campbell’s lyrics do to Nelson’s despatches. To understand the poet’s position, we ought to be dressed as he was; we ought
_to wear a tough drab coat
With large pearl buttons all afloat Upon the waves of plush; to tie
A kerchief of the king-cup die
(White-spotted with a small bird’s eye) Around the neck,–and from the nape
Let fall an easy> fan-like cape_,
and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so delightfully the elegiac tear.
Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would contain this very remarkable sonnet:
ON THE NONPAREIL.
“_None but himself can be his parallel.”
With marble-coloured shoulders,–and keen eyes, Protected by a forehead broad and white– And hair cut close lest it impede the sight, And clenched hands, firm, and of punishing size,– Steadily held, or motion’d wary-wise
To hit or stop,–and kerchief too drawn tight O’er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight The inconstant wind, that all too often flies,– The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o’er With joy to see a Chicken of her own.
Dips her rich pen in_ claret_,
Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous reader! Virtue is well revenged by the inevitable question! “Who was John Randall?” In 1820 it was said: “Of all the great men in this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendent talent as Randall, no one who combines the finest natural powers with the most elegant and finished acquired ones.” Now, if his memory be revived for a moment, this master of science, who doubled up an opponent as if he were plucking a flower, and whose presence turned Moulsey Hurst into an Olympia, is in danger of being confounded with the last couple of drunken Irishwomen who have torn out each other’s hair in handfuls in some Whitechapel courtyard. The mighty have fallen, the stakes and ring are gone forever, and Virtue is avenged. The days of George IV. are so long, long gone past that a paradoxical creature may be forgiven for a sigh over the ashes of the glory of John Randall.
It is strange how much genuine poetry lingers in this odd collection of verses in praise of prizefighting. There are lines and phrases that recall Keats himself, though truly the tone of the book is robust enough to satisfy the most impassioned of Tory editors. As it happens, it was written by Keats’s dearest friend, by John Hamilton Reynolds, whom the great poet mentions so affectionately in the latest of all his letters. Reynolds has been treated with scant consideration by the critics. His verses, I protest, are no whit less graceful or sparkling than those of his more eminent companions, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall. His _Garden of Florence_ is worthy of the friend of Keats. We have seen how his _Peter Bell_, which was Peter Bell the First, took the wind out of Shelley’s satiric sails and fluttered the dove-cotes of the Lakeists. He was as smart as he could be, too clever to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age. In _The Fancy_, which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820, Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore’s _Tom Crib_, but if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original. He takes as his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, and persuades us
_nor need we blame the licensed joys, Though false to Nature’s quiet equipoise: Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive_.
We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian sage at seeing his words thus nimbly adapted to be an apology for prize-fighting.
The poems are feigned to be the remains of one Peter Corcoran, student at law. A simple and pathetic memoir–which deserved to be as successful as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life of the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti–introduces us to the unfortunate young Irishman, who was innocently engaged to a charming lady, when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by chance into the Fives Court, witnessed a “sparring-exhibition” by two celebrated pugilists, and was thenceforth a lost character. From that moment nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a scientific parry, and his only topic of conversation became the noble art of self-defence. To his disgusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies of the Chicken and the Nonpareil. On one occasion he appeared before her with two black eyes, for he could not resist the temptation of taking part in the boxing, and “it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself.” The attachment of the young lady had long been declining, and she took this opportunity of forbidding him her presence for the future. He felt this abandonment bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was destroying him. He fell into a decline, and at last died “without a struggle, just after writing a sonnet to _West-Country Dick_.”
The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting opera called _King Tims the First_, which is the tragedy of an emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in _ottava rima_, called _The Fields of Tothill_, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter Corcoran’s earlier days. The most characteristic and the best deal, however, with the science of fisticuffs. Here are the lines sent by the poet to his mistress on the painful occasion which we have described above, “after a casual turn up”:
_Forgive me,–and never, oh, never again, I’ll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety;[1] I’ll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain, And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan’s[2] society.
Forgive me,–and mufflers I’ll carefully pull O’er my knuckles hereafter, to make them, well-bred; To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool, And temper with leather a punch of the head_.
_And, Kate!–if you’ll fib from your forehead that frown, And spar with a lighter and prettier tone;– I’ll look,–if the swelling should ever go down, And these eyes look again,–upon you, love, alone!_
[Footnote 1: “Heavy _brown_ with a dash of _blue_ in it” was the fancy phrase for stout mixed with gin.]
[Footnote 2: The author of _Boxiana_ and _Life in London_.]
It must be confessed that a less “fancy” vocabulary would here have shown a juster sense of Peter’s position. Sometimes there is no burlesque intention apparent, but, in their curious way, the verses seem to express a genuine enthusiasm. It is neither to be expected nor to be feared that any one nowadays will seriously attempt to advocate the most barbarous of pastimes, and therefore, without conscientious scruples, we may venture to admit that these are very fine and very thrilling verses in their own unexampled class:
_Oh, it is life! to see a proud
And dauntless man step, full of hopes, Up to the P.C. stakes and ropes,
Throw in his hat, and with a spring Get gallantly within the ring;
Eye the wide crowd, and walk awhile Taking all cheerings with a smile;
To see him strip,–his well-trained form, White, glowing, muscular, and warm,
All beautiful in conscious power,
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;
His glossy and transparent frame,
In radiant plight to strive for fame! To look upon the clean-shap’d limb
In silk and flannel clothed trim;– While round the waist the kerchief tied Makes the flesh glow in richer pride.
‘Tis more than life, to watch him hold His hand forth, tremulous yet bold,
Over his second’s, and to clasp
His rival’s in a quiet grasp;
To watch the noble attitude
He takes,–the crowd in breathless mood,– And then to see, with adamant start,
The muscles set,–and the great heart Hurl a courageous, splendid light
Into the eye,–and then–the_ FIGHT.
This is like a lithograph out of one of Pierce Egan’s books, only much more spirited and picturesque, and displaying a far higher and more Hellenic sense of the beauty of athletics. Reynolds’ little volume, however, enjoyed no success. The genuine amateurs of the prize-ring did not appreciate being celebrated in good verses, and _The Fancy_ has come to be one of the rarest of literary curiosities.
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS; _a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1823: printed for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street, and 38, Tavistock Street, Covent Garden_.
If the collector of first editions requires an instance from which to justify the faith which is in him against those who cry out that bibliography is naught, Leigh Hunt is a good example to his hand. This active and often admirable writer, during a busy professional life, issued a long series of works in prose and verse which are of every variety of commonness and scarcity, but which have never been, and probably never will be, reprinted as a whole. Yet not to possess the works of Leigh Hunt is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of literary history at the beginning of the century. The original 1816 edition of _Rimini_, for instance, is of a desperate rarity, yet not to be able to refer to it in the grotesqueness of this its earliest form is to miss a most curious proof of the crude taste of the young school out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise. The scarcest of all Leigh Hunt’s poetical pamphlets, but by no means the least interesting, is that whose title stands at the head of this chapter. Of _Ultra-crepidarius_, which was “printed for John Hunt” in 1823, it is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has never been reprinted. It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere despisers of first editions may allow a special interest.
From internal evidence we find that _Ultra-crepidarius; a Satire on William Gifford_, was sent to press in the summer of 1823, from Maiano, soon after the break-up of Hunt’s household in Genoa, and Byron’s departure for Greece. The poem is the “stick” which had been recently mentioned in the third number of the _Liberal_:
_Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick, Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?_
It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the famous review in the _Quarterly_ of Keats’s _Endymion_, a fact which the biographers of Keats do not seem to have observed. Why did Hunt not immediately print it? Perhaps because to have done so would have been worse than useless in the then condition of public taste and temper. What led Hunt to break through his intention of suppressing the poem it might be difficult to discover. At all events, in the summer of 1823 he suddenly sent it home for publication; whether it was actually published is doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private to a handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends.
_Ultra-crepidarius_ is written in the same anapaestic measure as _The Feast of the Poets_, but is somewhat longer. As a satire on William Gifford it possessed the disadvantage of coming too late in the day to be of any service to anybody. At the close of 1823 Gifford, in failing health, was resigning the editorial chair of the _Quarterly_, which he had made so formidable, and was retiring into private life, to die in 1826. The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself. However narrow the circulation of _Ultra-crepidarius_ may have been, care was no doubt taken that the editor of the _Quarterly Review_ should receive one copy at his private address, and Leigh Hunt returned from Italy in time for that odd incident to take place at the Roxburgh sale, when Barron Field called his attention to the fact that “a little man, with a warped frame, and a countenance between the querulous and the angry, was gazing at me with all his might.” Hunt tells this story in the _Autobiography_, from which, however, he omits all allusion to his satire.
The latter opens with the statement that:
‘_Tis now about fifty or sixty years since (The date of a charming old boy of a Prince)–_
Mercury was in a state of rare fidget from the discovery that he had lost one of his precious winged shoes, and had in consequence dawdled away a whole week in company with Venus, not having dreamed that it was that crafty goddess herself, who, wishing for a pair of them, had sent one of Mercury’s shoes down to Ashburton for a pattern. Venus confesses her peccadillo, and offers to descend to the Devonshire borough with her lover, and see what can have become of the ethereal shoe. As they reach the ground, they meet with an ill-favoured boot of leather, which acknowledges that it has ill-treated the delicate slipper of Mercury. This boot, of course, is Gifford, who had been a shoemaker’s apprentice in Ashburton. Mercury curses this unsightly object, and part of his malediction may here be quoted.
_I hear some one say “Murrain take him, the ape!” And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller’s shape; An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry, Who’d fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself_ Murray. _Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe, For court-understrappers to congregate to; For_ Southey _to come, in his dearth of invention, And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension; For_ Croker _to lurk with his spider-like limb in, And stock his lean bag with waylaying the women; And Jove only knows for what creatures beside To shelter their envy and dust-liking pride, And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights, In the dark take their shuffles, which they call then flights; Be these the court-critics and vamp a Review. And by a poor figure, and therefore a true, For it suits with thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly Be its hue leathern, and title the_ Quarterly, _Much misconduct, and see that the others Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers; Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate, Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate, Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short, Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court_.
* * * * *
_And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical, Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical, Quarterly-scutcheon’d, great heir to each dunce, Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once_
At the end, Mercury dooms the ugly boot to take the semblance of a man, and the satire closes with its painful metamorphosis into Gifford. The poem is not without cleverness, but it is chiefly remarkable for a savage tone which is not, we think, repeated elsewhere throughout the writings of Hunt. The allusions to Gifford’s relations, nearly half a century earlier, to that Earl Grosvenor who first rescued him from poverty, the well-deserved scorn of his intolerable sneers at Perdita Robinson’s crutches:
_Hate Woman, thou block in the path of fair feet; If Fate want a hand to distress them, thine be it; When the Great, and their flourishing vices, are mention’d Say people “impute” ’em, and show thou art pension’d; But meet with a Prince’s old mistress_ discarded, _And_ then _let the world see how vice is rewarded_–
the indications of the satirist’s acquaintance with the private life of his victim, all these must have stung the editor of the _Quarterly_ to the quick, and are very little in Hunt’s usual manner, though he had examples for them in Peter Pindar and others. There is a very early allusion to “Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley,” where, “calm, up above thee, they soar and they shine.” This was written immediately after the review of _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly_.
At the close is printed an extremely vigorous onslaught of Hazlitt’s upon Gifford, which is better known than the poem which it illustrates. In itself, in its preface, and in its notes alike this very rare pamphlet presents us with a genuine curiosity of literature.
THE DUKE OF RUTLAND’S POEMS
ENGLAND’S TRUST AND OTHER POEMS. _By Lord John Manners. London: printed for J.G. & J. Rivington, St. Paul’s Church Yard, and Waterloo Place, Pall Mall_. 1841.
My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his seat last night, in the Upper House, as the Duke of Rutland. These little romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who do not find that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the course of a night. My Transatlantic readers will never have to grow accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to be hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion. So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner of my library where the _peches de jeunesse_ stand–the little books of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would destroy if they could–and I took down _England’s Trust_.
Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic democracy. They called themselves “Young England,” and the chronicle of them–is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli’s _Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_, were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he said: “Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.” It was the theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in the lower classes; that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of society, and that ballads and May-poles and quaint festivities and processions of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looks back across the half-century he sees something to smile at, but nothing to blush for.
One of the notions that Young England had got hold of was that famous saying of Fletcher of Saltoun’s friend about making the ballads of a people. So they set themselves verse-making, and a quaint little collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike at this time of day, with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack, countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently became the seventh Viscount Strangford and one of the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers, only to die bitterly lamented before the age of forty, wrote _Historic Fancies_, Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published _The Cherwell Water-Lily_, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet volume came the poems of Lord John Manners.
When _England’s Trust_ appeared, its author had just left Cambridge. Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conservative candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present known to the entire world as Mr. W.E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased excessively about a certain couplet in _England’s Trust_. I am not going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves, which, of course, I have no power to prevent their doing, they will probably exclaim:
“Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote _that?_” for if frequency of quotation is the hall-mark of popularity, his Grace must be one of the most popular of our living poets.
There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a negative distinction. The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose, equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke of Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country, through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841, thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith over all its Paynim foes. “The worst evils,” he writes, “from which we are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect of the rules of the Church.” He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through England from the common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost faces that fed the pure passion of his youth.
The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number of the poems in _England’s Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant to read:
_Dear Friend! thou askest me to sing our loves, And sing them fain would I; but I do fear To mar so soft a theme; a theme that moves My heart unto its core. O friend most dear! No light request is thine; albeit it proves Thy gentleness and love, that do appear When absent thus, and in soft looks when near. Surely, if ever two fond hearts were, twined In a most holy, mystic knot, so now
Are ours; not common are the ties that bind My soul to thine; a dear Apostle thou, I a young Neophyte that yearns to find
The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow!_
The Apostle was only twelve months older than the Neophyte, who was in his twenty-third year, but he was a somewhat better as well as stronger poet. _The Cherwell Water-Lily_ is rather a rare book now, and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber’s style. It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of Young England, there Is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and of the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly original;
_There is a well, a willow-shaded spot. Cool in the noon-tide gleam,
With rushes nodding in the little stream, And blue forget-me-not.
Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge With big bright eyes of gold;
And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold Their blossoms strange and large.
That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find Beauties so rich and rare,
Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden’s hair And dog-grass richly twined.
A sloping bank ran round it like a crown, Whereon a purple cloud
Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd, Had settled softly down.
And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells From Oxford’s holy towers
Came down the stream, and went among the flowers, And died in little swells_.
These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception of life, Faber also wrote an _England’s Trust_, before Lord John Manners published his; and in this he rejoices in the passing away of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of humility and spirituality. Alas! it never came! There was a roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells were thrown up on the shore of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractarianism was broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the mere ashes have wholly passed away. They have become spread over a wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer succeeded, where would the adventure be?
The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition into the land of verses. He published a volume of _English Ballads_; but this has not the historical interest which makes _England’s Trust_ a curiosity. He has written about Church Rates, and the Colonies, and the Importance of Literature to Men of Business, but never again of his reveries in Neville’s Court nor of his determination to emulate the virtues of King Charles the Martyr. No matter! If all our hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely be a burning question.
IONICA
IONICA. _Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill_. 1858.
Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls “deciduous trash” survive their own generation, only to be carted away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame.
These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small volume of 116 pages called _Ionica_, long ago ushered into the world so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the sea of literature. Gradually this book has become first a rarity and then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive which commands so high a price among collectors. When the library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that they had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price, for it was known that the late Librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies. But at the sale two of these copies went for three pounds fifteen and three pounds ten, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea, because it was discovered to lack the title-page and the index. (I do not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books, and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I could not have the title-page. But this is only an aside, and does not interfere with the value of _Ionica_.)
The little book has no name on the title-page, but it is known that the author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. It is understood that this gentleman was born about 1823, and died in 1892. On coming into property, as I have heard, in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, So that he is doubly concealed as a poet, the anonymous-pseudonymous. As Mr. William Cory he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author of _Ionica_. In face of the extreme rarity of his early book, friends urged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented. Probably he would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to reprint it was to draw public attention to its inequality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the collector who possesses a treasure; but I think the appreciators of _Ionica_ will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights.
Shortly after _Ionica_ appeared great developments took place in English verse. In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say that, as far as the general public was concerned, there was no Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson’s verses. They are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we became accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet Heraclitus–not to be confounded with the philosopher–was dead.
_They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take_.
No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet’s grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man’s songs, his “nightingales,” are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, in Keats’s wonderful phrase, has left “great verse unto a little clan,” the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be “unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears.” To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parnassus is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may hold his own comrade something dearer than the public. The author of _Ionica_ would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.
Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus. But the author is not very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read:
“_Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar; How nice,” cry the ladies, “looks yonder Hussar_!”
It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of _Ionica_ is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.
There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the glassy surface of this plaintive _Dirge_:
_Naiad, hid beneath the bank
By the willowy river-side,
Where Narcissus gently sank,
Where unmarried Echo died,
Unto thy serene repose
Waft the stricken Anteros.
Where the tranquil swan is borne,
Imaged in a watery glass,
Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn Stoop to catch the boats that pass,
Where the earliest orchis grows,
Bury thou fair Anteros.
On a flickering wave we gaze,
Not upon his answering eyes:
Flower and bird we scarce can praise, Having lost his sweet replies:
Cold and mute the river flows
With our tears for Anteros_.
We know well where this place of burial is to be. Not in some glade of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homelier river gushes through the swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to draw a longer breath for his passage between Eton and Windsor.
The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to this present life, a Pagan optimism which finds no fault with human existence save that it is so brief. It gains various expression in words that seem hot on a young man’s lips, and warm on the same lips even when no longer young:
_I’ll borrow life, and not grow old; And nightingales and trees
Shall keep me, though the veins be cold, As young as Sophocles_.
And again, in poignant notes:
_You promise heavens free from strife, Pure truth, and perfect change of will; But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still; Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm, kind world is all I know_.
This last quotation is from the poem called _Mimnermus in Church_. In this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life. The author of _Ionica_ seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he clung to them:
_All beauteous things for which we live By laws of time and space decay.
But oh! the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die_.
There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in _Ionica_, and this gives its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had numerous resuscitations of ancient manners and landscape in modern poetry since the days of Keats and Andre Chenier. Many of these have been so brilliantly successful that only pedantry would deny their value. But in _Ionica_ something is given which the others have not known how to give, the murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the grass of meadows dedicated to Persephone. It seems to help us to comprehend the little rites and playful superstitions of the Greeks; to see why Myro built a tomb for the grasshopper she loved and lost; why the shining hair of Lysidice, when she was drowned, should be hung up with songs of pity and reproach in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader as Christian fanatics turned inside out; for all their vehemence they can never lose the experience of their religious birth. The same thing is true of the would-be Pagans of a milder sensuous type. The Cross prevailed at their nativity, and has thrown its shadow over their conscience. But in the midst of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of the _Ionica_, the one genuine Pagan, absolutely untouched by the traditions of the Christian past. I do not commend the fact; I merely note it as giving a strange interest to these forlorn and unpopular poems.
Twenty years after the publication of _Ionica_, and when that little book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge a second part, without a title-page, and without punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection incomplete without _Ionica II_., but he must be prepared for a disappointment. There is a touch of the old skill here and there, as in such stanzas as this:
_With half a moon, and clouds rose-pink, And water-lilies just in bud,
With iris on the river-brink,
And white weed-garlands on the mud, And roses thin and pale as dreams,
And happy cygnets born in May,
No wonder if our country seems
Drest out for Freedom’s natal day_.
Or these:
_Peace lit upon a fluttering vein,
And self-forgetting on the brain;
On rifts by passion wrought again
Splashed from the sky of childhood rain, And rid of afterthought were we
And from foreboding sweetly free.
Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine, And, moved by some autumnal sign,
I who in spring was glad repine
And ache without my anodyne;
Oh! things that were! Oh! things that are! Oh! setting of my double star!_
But these are rare, and the old unique _Ionica_ of thirty years earlier is not repeated.
THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT
THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. _An Arabian Entertainment. By George Meredith. Chapman and Hall_. 1856.
It is nearly forty years since I first heard of _The Shaving of Shagpat_. I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern, that _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm Rossetti-language this did not mean that there was anything specially reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention. But at the time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ or _Love’s Labour’s Lost_. I was fully persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was rare, and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connect it with the idea of Shakespeare. But in truth _The Shaving of Shagpat_ has no other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he had been so plaguily occupied, than that it is excellent in quality and of the finest literary flavour.
The ordinary small collection of rarities has no room for three-volume novels, those signs-manual of our British dulness and crafty disdain for literature. One or two of these _simulacra_, these sham-semblances of books, I possess, because honoured friends have given them to me; even so, I would value the gift more in the decency of a single volume. The dear little duodecimos of the last century, of course, are welcome in a library. That was a happy day, when by the discovery of a _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, I completed my set of Smollett in the original fifteen volumes. But after the first generation of novelists, the sham system began to creep in. With Fanny Burney, novels grow too bulky, and it is a question whether even Scott or Jane Austen should be possessed in the original form. Of the moderns, only Thackeray is bibliographically desirable. Hence even of Mr. George Meredith’s fiction I make no effort to possess first editions; yet _The Shaving of Shagpat_ is an exception. I toiled long to secure it, and, now that I hold it, may its modest vermilion cover shine always like a lamp upon my shelves! It is not fiction to a bibliophile; it is worthy of all the honour done to verse.
Within the last ten years of his life we had the great pleasure of seeing tardy justice done at length to the genius of Mr. George Meredith. I like to think that, after a long and noble struggle against the inattention of the public, after the pouring of high music for two generations into ears whose owners seemed to have wilfully sealed them with wax, so that only the most staccato and least happy notes ever reached their dulness, George Meredith did, before the age of seventy, reap a little of his reward. I am told that the movement in favour of him began in America; if so, more praise to American readers, who had to teach us to appreciate De Quincey and Praed before we knew the value of those men. Yet is there much to do. Had George Meredith been a Frenchman, what monographs had ere this been called forth by his work; in Germany, or Italy, or Denmark even, such gifts as his would long ago have found their classic place above further discussion. But England is a Gallio, and in defiance of Mr. Le Gallienne, cares little for the things of literature.
If a final criticism of George Meredith existed, where in it would _The Shaving of Shagpat_ find its place? There is fear that in competition with the series of analytical studies of modern life that stretches from _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ to _One of our Conquerors_, it might chance to be pushed away with a few lines of praise. Now, I would not seem so paradoxical as to say that when an extravaganza is held up to me in one hand, and a masterpiece of morality like _The Egoist_ in the other, I can doubt which is the greater book; but there are moods in which I am jealous of the novels, and wish to be left alone with my _Arabian Entertainment_. Delicious in this harsh world of reality to fold a mist around us, and out of it to evolve the yellow domes and black cypresses, the silver fountains and marble pillars, of the fabulous city of Shagpat. I do not know any later book than _The Shaving_ in which an Englishman has allowed his fancy, untrammelled by any sort of moral or intellectual subterfuge, to go a-roaming by the light of the moon. We do this sort of thing no longer. We are wholly given up to realism, we are harshly pressed upon on all sides by the importunities of excess of knowledge. If we talk of gryphons, the zoologists are upon us; of Oolb or Aklis, the geographers flourish their maps at us in defiance. But the author of _The Shaving of Shagpat_, in the bloom of his happy youthful genius, defied all this pedantry. In a little address which has been suppressed in later editions he said (December 8, 1855)
“It has seemed to me that the only way to tell an Arabian Story was by imitating the style and manner of the Oriental Story-tellers. But such an attempt, whether successful or not, may read like a translation. I therefore think it better to prelude this Entertainment by an avowal that it springs from no Eastern source, and is in every respect an original Work.”
If one reader of _The Shaving of Shagpat_ were to confess the truth he would say that to him at least the other, the genuine Oriental tales, appear the imitation, and not a very good imitation. The true genius of the East breathes in Meredith’s pages, and the _Arabian Nights_, at all events in the crude literality of Sir Richard Burton, pale before them like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah! what a bottle! As we whirl along in the vast and glowing bacchanal, we cry, like Sganarelle:
_Qu’ils sont doux–
Bouteille jolie–
Qu’ils sont doux
Vos petits glou-glous;
Ah! Bouteille, ma mie;
Pourquoi vous videz-vous?_
Ah! why indeed? For _The Shaving of Shagpat_ is one of those very rare modern books of which it is certain that they are too short, and even our excitement at the Mastery of the Event is tamed by a sense that the show is closing, and that Shibli Bagarag has been too promptly successful in smiting through the Identical. But perhaps of all gifts there is none more rare than this of clearing the board and leaving the reader still hungry.
Who shall say, in dealing with such a book, what passage in it is best or worst? Either the fancy, carried away utterly captive, follows the poet whither he will, or the whole conception is a failure. Perhaps, after the elemental splendour and storm of the final scene, what clings most to the memory is how Shibli Bagarag, hard beset in the Cave of Chrysolites, touched the great lion with the broken sapphire hair of Garraveen; or again, how on the black coast of the enchanted sea, wandering by moonlight, he found the sacred Lily, and tore it up, and lo! its bulb was a palpitating heart of human flesh; or how Bhanavar called the unwilling serpents too often, and failed to win her beauty back, till, at an awful price she once more, and for the last time, contrived to call her body-guard of snakes hissing and screaming around her.
There is surely no modern book so unsullied as this is by the modern spirit, none in which the desire to teach a lesson, to refer knowingly to topics of the day, or worst of all, to be incontinently funny, interferes less with the tender magic of Oriental fancy, or with the childlike, earnest faith in what is utterly outside the limits of experience. It belongs to that infancy of the world, when the happy guileless human being still holds that somewhere there is a flower to be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or a form of words to be spoken which will reverse the humdrum laws of Nature, call up unwilling spirits bound to incredible services, and change all this brown life of ours to scarlet and azure and mother-of-pearl. Little by little, even our children are losing this happy gift of believing the incredible, and that class of writing which seems to require less effort than any other, and to be a mere spinning of gold thread out of the poet’s inner consciousness, is less and less at command, and when executed gives less and less satisfaction. The gnomes of Pope, the fays and “trilbys” of Nodier, even the fairy-world of Doyle, are breathed upon by a race that has grown up habituated to science. But even for such a race it must be long before the sumptuous glow and rich triumphant humour of _The Shaving of Shagpat_ have lost all their attraction.
INDEX
ABBEY, Edwin A.
_Abuses stript and whipt_
Akenside, Mark
d’Alembert
Alfoxden, Wordsworth at
_All for Love_, Dryden’s
_Almahide_, Mlle. de Scudery’s
_Amasia_, John Hopkins’
_Amazon Queen_, Weston’s
_Amboyna_, Dryden’s
Amory’s _Life of John Buncle_, Thomas _Anthony_, Earl of Orrery’s _Mr_.
_Arcadia_, Sidney’s
Ardelia (Lady Winchilsea)’s Poems
Arnauld, Antoine
Arnold, Matthew
_Artamenes_, La Calprenede’s
_Astree_, D’Urfe’s
d’Aurevilly, Barbey
Austen, Jane
_Autobiography_ of Leigh Hunt
Avison, Charles
BACON, Lord
Baldwin, William
_Ballad of the Book Hunter_, Lang’s Balzac, Honore de
Bancroft’s _Sertorius_
Banks, Sir Joseph
Barnacle Goose Tree, The
Barrington, Hon. Daines
Bayle
Beaumont, _Peter Bell_ and Sir George Behn, Mrs. Aphra
Bell, _Professor_ Thomas,
_Benjamin the Waggoner_
Blener Hasset, Thomas
Boccaccio
Boethius
Boileau, Nicolas,
Boisrobert, Francois
Boitard, Louis
Bossuet, Jacques
Boswell, James
Bouilhet, Louis
_Boxiana_, Egan’s
Boyle’s _Parthenissa_
Bradshaw, Library of Henry
_Britannia_, Brooke’s _Discovery of Errors in_, _Britannia_, Camden’s
_British Princes_, Howard’s
Brooke, Christopher
Brooke, Ralph
Browne, Sir Thomas
Browne, William
Browning, Robert
Brummell, Beau
Brunfelcius, Otto
_Buncle_, Amory’s _Life of John_
Burger’s _Lenore_
Burke, Edmund
Barney, Dr.
Burney, Fanny
Burton, Sir Richard
Byron
CALLIMACHUS
Calprenede, La
Cambridge described by Camden
Camden’s _Britannia_
Campbell, J. Dykes
Campion, Thomas
Carew, Thomas
Carlisle’s _Fortune Hunters_
_Carnival_, Porter’s
_Cassandra_, La Calprenede’s
Cats
Caylus, Count
Chandler, Dr.
Chapelain
Charles I.
_Cherwell Water-Lily_, Faber’s _The_ Church, Dean
Cibber, Theophilus
_Citizen of the World_, Goldsmith’s _Clelie_, La Calprenede’s
_Cleomina_, Eliza Haywood’s _Secret History of_ _Cleopatra_, La Calprenede’s
Cleveland, Duchess of
Coleridge, S.T.
Collins, William
Congreve, William
_Constant Couple_, Farquhar’s
Corcoran, Peter, _i.e_. J. H. Reynolds Corneille, Pierre
Corneille, Thomas
Cornwall, Barry
Cory, William, _see_ Johnson, William _Couches de L’Academie_, Furetiere’s
Coventry, Rev. Francis
Coventry, Henry
Coypel, Drawings by
Croker, J.W.
Cromwell, Oliver
Crowne, John
“Crusions”
_Cyrus, Le Grand_
DARLINGTON, Earl of
_David_, Smart’s _Song to_
Davies of Hereford, John
_Death’s Duel_
De Boissat
Defoe, Daniel
Dennis, John
De Quincey, Thomas
Deshoulieres, Mme.
Desmarais, Regnier
De Tabley, Lord
_Dialogues_, La Mothe le Vayer
_Diary of a Lover of Literature_, Green’s Dictionary, The Romance of a
Dioscorides of Anazarba,
D’Israeli, Isaac
D’Israeli’s _Coningsby_
Dobson, Mr. Austin
Dodonaeus, Rembertus
Donne, Dr. John
Dryden, John
Dryden, Funeral of
_Dunciad_, Pope’s
Dupuy, Mlle.
D’Urfe’s _Astree_
“Dwale” (nightshade)
EGANS’S _Boxiana_, Pierce
_Egoist_, Meredith’s _The_
_Elegy in Country Churchyard_, Gray’s _England’s Trust_, F.W. Faber’s
_England’s Trust_, Lord John Manners’ _England’s Worthies_, Winstanley’s
_English Ballads_, Lord John Manners’ _English Poets_, Winstanley’s _Lives of_ _Enquiry Concerning Virtue_, Shaftesbury’s _Epistolary Poems_ of Charles Hopkins
_Epsom Wells_, Shadwell’s
_Excursion_, Wordsworth’s
FABER, Frederick William
_Fall of Princes_, Lydgate’s
_Fancy, The_, J.H. Reynolds’
Farmer, Dr.
Farquhar, George
_Fatal Friendship_, Trotter’s
_Feast of the Poets, The_
_Ferdinand Count Fathom_, Smollett’s Ferrers, George
Field, Barron
Fielding, Henry
Finch, Heneage (Earl of Winchilsea) Finch, Poems of Anne (Lady Winchilsea)
FitzGerald, Edward
_Fortune Hunters_, Carlisle’s _The_ _Francaise, Histoire de l’Academie_
_Francion_, Sorel’s
Fuchsius, Leonard
Furetiere, Antoine
_GARDEN of Florence_, Reynolds’
Gardiner, Lord Chancellor Stephen
Garrick, David
Garth, Dr.
_Gentleman’s Magazine, The_
Gerard, John
Gibbon, Edward
Gibbons, Dr. (Physician)
Gifford, William
Gladstone, W.E.
Goldsmith, Oliver
Gombreville
Goose Tree, The
Grafton, Isabella, Duchess of
Gray, Thomas
Green, Thomas
Green’s _Diary of a Lover of Literature_ Grierson, Professor
Grundtvig, Bishop
_Gulliver’s Travels_, Swift
HANMER, Sir Thomas
Harrington’s _Oceana_
Harvey, Rev. R.
Haslewood
Hawkesworth, John
Haywood, Eliza
Hazlitt, William
_Heliodorus_
Heraclitus
_Herbal_, Gerard’s
—-, Henry Lyte’s translation of Dodonaeus’ —-, Dr. Priest’s translation of Dodonaeus’ Herrick, Robert
Hesketh (Yorkshire botanist)
_Hesperides_, Herrick’s
Hill, Aaron
Hill, Dr. John
_Hilliad_, Smart’s _The_
_Histoire de l’Academie Francaise_ (The Hague Edn.) _Historic Fancies_, Lord Strangford’s
Hoare, William
Holland, Philemon
_Hop Garden_, Smart’s _The_
Hopkins, Charles
Hopkins, Ezekiel, Bishop of Derry
Hopkins, John
Hove, F.H. Van (Engraver)
Howard, Hon. Edward
_Humorous Lovers_, Duke of Newcastle’s Hunt, Leigh
Hurd, Dr., Bishop of Worcester
Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon
_IBRAHIM_, Mlle. de Scudery’s
_Idalia_, Eliza Haywood’s
_Ionica_, William Johnson’s
JAMES I
Jeffrey, Francis
Jenyns, Soame
Johnson, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, Thomas (Botanist)
Johnson, William
Jonson, Ben
Joyner, William
Jusserand, J.J., _English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare_
KEATS, John
King, Dr. Henry
Kip, William
LAMB, Charles
Lang, Andrew
La Rochefoucauld
Lee, Nathaniel
Le Gallienne, Mr.
_Le Grand Cyrus_
_Lenore_, Burger’s
Lerpiniere, Daniel
_Les Chats_, Moncrif’s
Lesdiguieres, Duchess of
_Letters of Lord Chesterfield_
_Liberal, The_
Locker-Lampson, Frederick
Lombard (Antiquary)
Longueville, Mme. de
Louis XIV
_Love and a Bottle_, Farquhar’s
_Love and Business_, Farquhar’s
_Love in Excess_, Eliza Haywood
Loveday, Robert
Lydgate’s _Fall of Princes_
MAINE, Duchess of
Manners, Lord John (_see_ Rutland, Duke of) Manship, Samuel
Marot, Clement
Marshalsea Prison
Marvell, Andrew
Mason, William
Mazell, Peter (Engraver)
_Memoirs of a Lady of Quality_
_Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain_, Amory’s Mentzelius, Christian
Meredith’s, _The Shaving of Shagpat_ Mezeray, Francois
Milton, John
_Mimnermus in Church_, Johnson’s
_Mirror for Magistrates, A_
Mitlord, John
_Mithridates_, Lee’s
_Moll Flanders_, Defoe
Moncrif, Augustin Paradis de
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley
Moore’s _Tom Crib_, Thomas
Murray, John
_NASH, Beau_
Newbery, Francis
Newbery, John (Publisher)
Newcastle’s _Humorous Lovers_, Duke of Niccols, Richard
Nichols, John Bowyer
Nodier
Norden, John
Nottingham, Sonnet to the Earl of
_OCEANA_, Harrington’s
Orford, Countess of (_Pompey the Little_) Orrery, Earl of
Ortelius, Abraham
Osborne, Dorothy
Otten (Engraver)
Otway, Thomas
_PAMELA_, Richardson’s
_Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained_, Milton’s _Parleying_, Brownings
Parr, Dr.
_Parthenissa_, Boyle’s
Payne, John, (line-engraver)
Pellisson-Fontanier, Paul
Pennant, Thomas
Percy, Bishop of Dromore, Dr. Thomas _Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse_, Wordsworth’s _Peter Bell; A Lyrical Ballad_, Hamilton’s _Peter Bell the Third_, Shelley’s
Peter Corcoran
_Pharamond_, La Calprenede’s
_Philemon to Hydaspes_, Coventry’s Phillips, John
Pindar, Peter
Plays, A Volume of Old
_Poems_ of Anne Finch (Lady Winchilsea) _Poems_ of Christopher Smart
Poet in Prison, A (_The Shepheards Hunting_) Poets, A Censor of
_Poets_, Winstanley’s _Lives of English_ _Polexandre_, Gomberville’s
_Pompey the Little_, F. Coventry’s Pope, Alexander
Porter, Major Thomas
Praed, W. Mackworth
_Prelude_, Wordsworth’s, _The_
Priest, Dr.
_Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, Browne’s
_QUARTERLY Review, The_
Queensberry, Duchess of
RABELAIS
Racine, Jean
Radcliffe, Dr. John
Raleigh, Sir Walter
Randall, John
Ravenscroft, Edward
Reynolds’ _Peter Bell_, John Hamilton —- _The Fancy_
Richardson, Samuel
Richelieu, Cardinal
_Rimini_, Leigh Hunt’s
Robinson, Henry Crabb
Robinson, Perdita
Rochefoucauld, La
_Roman Bourgeois, Le_, Furetiere’s _Roman Empress_, Joyner’s
Ronsard
Roscommon, Earl of
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Roubillac
Rowe, Nicholas
_Roxana_, Defoe
Roy (Poet)
Rutland, Poems of Duke of
SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst, Thomas
Sadler, Thomas
Sainte-Beuve
Saint-Simon
_Sampson Agonista_, Milton’s
Sandford, Mrs.
Savage, Richard
Scarron
Scott, Sir Walter
Scudery, Mlle. de
Sedley, Sir Charles
_Selborne_, White’s _The Natural History of_ _Sertorius_, Bancroft’s
Settle, Elkanah
Sevigne, Mme. de
Shadwell, Thomas
Shaftesbury’s _Enquiry Concerning Virtue_ _Shaving of Shagpat_, George Meredith’s _The_ Shelley
_Shepheards Hunting_, Wither’s _The_ _Shipwreck_, Falconer’s _The_
Shirley, James
Sidney’s _Arcadia_
_Sir Harry Wildair_, Farquhar’s
Skelton’s Contribution to _Mirror for Magistrates_ Smart, Christopher
Smollett, Tobias
Smythe (_see_ Lord Strangford), George Percy Sydney Solly, Edward
_Song to David_, Smart’s
Sorel, Charles
Southerne, Thomas
Southey, Robert
_Spleen, Ode on the_
Stecchetti, Lorenzo
Stone, Nicholas
Strangford, Lord
Suckling, Sir John
_Sugar Cane_, Grainger’s _The_
Swift, Dean
TEMPLE, Sir William
Thackeray, W.M.
_Tom Crib_, Moore’s
_Tom Jones_, Fielding
Tooke, Horne
Tradescant, John
_Traveller_, Goldsmith’s _The_
Trotter’s _Fatal Friendship_, Catherine Turner, J.M.W.
Tyers, Thomas
_Ultra-crepidarius_, Leigh Hunt’s
_Usurper_, Howard’s
VANBRUGH, Sir John
Vanbrugh’s _Aesop_
Vaugelas
Vaughan, Henry
Vayer, La Mothe le
Verlaine, Paul
Verrall, Dr. A.W.
_View of Christianity_, Soame Jenyns’ Voltaire
_WAGGONER_, Wordsworth’s _The_
_Waggoner, Benjamin the_
Walker, Anthony (Engraver)
Walpole, Horace
Walton, Izaak
Warburton, Bishop