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GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY

EDMUND GOSSE

1913

OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE

Northern Studies. 1879.

Life of Gray. 1882.

Seventeenth-Century Studies. 1883.

Life of Congreve. 1888.

A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1889

Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. 1890.

The Secret of Narcisse: a Romance. 1892.

Questions at Issue. 1893.

Critical Kit-Kats. 1896.

A Short History of Modern English Literature. 1897.

Life and Letters of John Donne. 1899.

Hypolympia. 1901.

French Profiles. 1904.

Life of Jeremy Taylor. 1904.

Life of Sir Thomas Browne. 1905.

Father and Son. 1907.

Life of Ibsen. 1908.

Two Visits to Denmark. 1911.

Collected Poems. 1911.

Portraits and Sketches. 1912.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA"

A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES

A POET IN PRISON

DEATH'S DUEL

GERARD'S HERBAL

PHARAMOND

A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS

A CENSOR OF POETS

THE ROMANCE OF A DICTIONARY

LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS

AMASIA

LOVE AND BUSINESS

WHAT ANN LANG READ

CATS

SMART'S POEMS

POMPEY THE LITTLE

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNGLE

BEAU NASH

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE

PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS

THE FANCY

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS

THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS

IONICA

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

INDEX

O blessed Letters, that combine in one
All ages past, and make one live with all:
By you we doe conferre with who are gone,
And the dead-living unto councell call:
By you th' unborne shall have communion
Of what we feele, and what doth us befall.

SAM. DANIEL Musophilus. 1602.

INTRODUCTORY

It is curious to reflect that the library, in our customary sense, is quite a modern institution. Three hundred years ago there were no public libraries in Europe. The Ambrosian, at Milan, dates from 1608; the Bodleian, at Oxford, from 1612. To these Angelo Rocca added his in Rome, in 1620. But private collections of books always existed, and these were the haunts of learning, the little glimmering hearths over which knowledge spread her cold fingers, in the darkest ages of the world. To-day, although national and private munificence has increased the number of public libraries so widely that almost every reader is within reach of books, the private library still flourishes. There are men all through the civilised world to whom a book is a jewel—an individual possession of great price. I have been asked to gossip about my books, for I also am a bibliophile. But when I think of the great collections of fine books, of the libraries of the magnificent, I do not know whether I dare admit any stranger to glance at mine. The Mayor of Queenborough feels as though he were a very important personage till Royalty drives through his borough without noticing his scarf and his cocked hat; and then, for the first time, he observes how small the Queenborough town-hall is. But if one is to gossip about books, it is, perhaps, as well that one should have some limits. I will leave the masters of bibliography to sing of greater matters, and will launch upon no more daring voyage than one autour de ma pauvre bibliothèque.

I have heard that the late Mr. Edward Solly, a very pious and worshipful lover of books, under several examples of whose book-plate I have lately reverently placed my own, was so anxious to fly all outward noise that he built himself a library in his garden. I have been told that the books stood there in perfect order, with the rose-spray flapping at the window, and great Japanese vases exhaling such odours as most annoy an insect-nostril. The very bees would come to the window, and sniff, and boom indignantly away again. The silence there was perfect. It must have been in such a secluded library that Christian Mentzelius was at work when he heard the male book-worm flap his wings, and crow like a cock in calling to his mate. I feel sure that even Mentzelius, a very courageous writer, would hardly pretend that he could hear such a "shadow of all sound" elsewhere. That is the library I should like to have. In my sleep, "where dreams are multitude," I sometimes fancy that one day I shall have a library in a garden. The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man—"a library in a garden!" It sounds like having a castle in Spain, or a sheep-walk in Arcadia, and I suppose that merely to wish for it is to be what indignant journalists call "a faddling hedonist."

In the meanwhile, my books are scattered about in cases in different parts of a double sitting-room, where the cats carouse on one side, and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when his master's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot have cabinets of ebony and cedar, I may just as well have plain deal, with common glass doors to keep the dust out. I detest your Persian apparatus.

It is a curious reflection, that the ordinary private person who collects objects of a modest luxury, has nothing about him so old as his books. If a wave of the rod made everything around him disappear that did not exist a century ago, he would suddenly find himself with one or two sticks of furniture, perhaps, but otherwise alone with his books. Let the work of another century pass, and certainly nothing but these little brown volumes would be left, so many caskets full of passion and tenderness, disappointed ambition, fruitless hope, self-torturing envy, conceit aware, in maddening lucid moments, of its own folly. I think if Mentzelius had been worth his salt, those ears of his, which heard the book-worm crow, might have caught the echo of a sigh from beneath many a pathetic vellum cover. There is something awful to me, of nights, and when I am alone, in thinking of all the souls imprisoned in the ancient books around me. Not one, I suppose, but was ushered into the world with pride and glee, with a flushed cheek and heightened pulse; not one enjoyed a career that in all points justified those ample hopes and flattering promises.

The outward and visible mark of the citizenship of the book-lover is his book-plate. There are many good bibliophiles who abide in the trenches, and never proclaim their loyalty by a book-plate. They are with us, but not of us; they lack the courage of their opinions; they collect with timidity or carelessness; they have no need for the morrow. Such a man is liable to great temptations. He is brought face to face with that enemy of his species, the borrower, and dares not speak with him in the gate. If he had a book-plate he would say, "Oh! certainly I will lend you this volume, if it has not my book-plate in it; of course, one makes a rule never to lend a book that has." He would say this, and feign to look inside the volume, knowing right well that this safeguard against the borrower is there already. To have a book-plate gives a collector great serenity and self-confidence. We have laboured in a far more conscientious spirit since we had ours than we did before. A learned poet, Lord De Tabley, wrote a fascinating volume on book-plates, some years ago, with copious illustrations. There is not, however, one specimen in his book which I would exchange for mine, the work and the gift of one of the most imaginative of American artists, the late Edwin A. Abbey. It represents a very fine gentleman of about 1610, walking in broad sunlight in a garden, reading a little book of verses. The name is coiled around him, with the motto, Gravis cantantibus umbra. I will not presume to translate this tag of an eclogue, and I only venture to mention such an uninteresting matter, that my indulgent readers may have a more vivid notion of what I call my library. Mr. Abbey's fine art is there, always before me, to keep my ideal high.

To possess few books, and those not too rich and rare for daily use, has this advantage, that the possessor can make himself master of them all, can recollect their peculiarities, and often remind himself of their contents. The man that has two or three thousand books can be familiar with them all; he that has thirty thousand can hardly have a speaking acquaintance with more than a few. The more conscientious he is, the more he becomes like Lucian's amateur, who was so much occupied in rubbing the bindings of his books with sandal-wood and saffron, that he had no time left to study the contents. After all, with every due respect paid to "states" and editions and bindings and tall copies, the inside of the volume is really the essential part of it.

The excuses for collecting, however, are more than satire is ready to admit. The first edition represents the author's first thought; in it we read his words as he sent them out to the world in his first heat, with the type he chose, and with such peculiarities of form as he selected to do most justice to his creation. We often discover little individual points in a first edition, which never occur again. And if it be conceded that there is an advantage in reading a book in the form which the author originally designed for it, then all the other refinements of the collector become so many acts of respect paid to this first virgin apparition, touching and suitable homage of cleanness and fit adornment. It is only when this homage becomes mere eye-service, when a book radically unworthy of such dignity is too delicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor dilettantism comes in between the reader and what he reads. Indeed, the best of volumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a binding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal. To the feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, a tenpenny book in a ten-pound binding, I say fie. Perhaps the ideal library, after all, is a small one, where the books are carefully selected and thoughtfully arranged in accordance with one central code of taste, and intended to be respectfully consulted at any moment by the master of their destinies. If fortune made me possessor of one book of excessive value, I should hasten to part with it. In a little working library, to hold a first quarto of Hamlet, would be like entertaining a reigning monarch in a small farmhouse at harvesting.

Much has of late been written, however, and pleasantly written, about the collecting and preserving of books. It is not my intention here to add to this department of modern literature. But I shall select from among my volumes some which seem less known in detail to modern readers than they should be, and I shall give brief "retrospective reviews" of these as though they were new discoveries. In other cases, where the personal history of a well-known book seems worth detaching from our critical estimate of it, that shall be the subject of my lucubration. Perhaps it may not be an unwelcome novelty to apply to old books the test we so familiarly apply to new ones. They will bear it well, for in their case there is no temptation to introduce any element of prejudice. Mr. Bludyer himself does not fly into a passion over a squat volume published two centuries ago, even when, as in the case of the first edition of Harrington's Oceana, there is such a monstrous list of errata that the writer has to tell us, by way of excuse, that a spaniel has been "questing" among his papers.

These scarce and neglected books are full of interesting things. Voltaire never made a more unfortunate observation than when he said that rare books were worth nothing, since, if they were worth anything, they would not be rare. We know better nowadays; we know how much there is in them which may appeal to only one man here and there, and yet to him with a voice like a clarion. There are books that have lain silent for a century, and then have spoken with the trumpet of a prophecy. We shall disdain nothing; we shall have a little criticism, a little anecdote, a little bibliography; and our old book shall go back to the shelves before it has had time to be tedious in its babbling.

CAMDEN'S "BRITANNIA"

BRITAIN: or a chorographical description of the most flourishing
Kingdomes, England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning;
out of the depth of Antiquitie: beautified with Mappes of the severall
Shires of England; Written first in Latine by William Camden,
Clarenceux K. of A. Translated newly into English by Philémon Holland.
Londini, Impensis Georgii Bishop & Joannis Norton, M.DC.X.

There is no more remarkable example of the difference between the readers of our light and hurrying age and those who obeyed "Eliza and our James," than the fact that the book we have before us at this moment, a folio of some eleven hundred pages, adorned, like a fighting elephant, with all the weightiest panoply of learning, was one of the most popular works of its time. It went through six editions, this vast antiquarian itinerary, before the natural demand of the vulgar released it from its Latin austerity; and the title-page we have quoted is that of the earliest English edition, specially translated, under the author's eye, by Dr. Philémon Holland, a laborious schoolmaster of Coventry. Once open to the general public, although then at the close of its first quarter of a century, the Britannia flourished with a new lease of life, and continued to bloom, like a literary magnolia, all down the seventeenth century. It Is now as little read as other famous books of uncompromising size. The bookshelves of to-day are not fitted for the reception of these heroic folios, and if we want British antiquities now, we find them in terser form and more accurately, or at least more plausibly, annotated in the writings of later antiquaries. Giant Camden moulders at his cave's mouth, a huge and reverend form seldom disturbed by puny passers-by. But his once popular folio was the life work of a particularly interesting and human person; and without affecting to penetrate to the darkest corners of the cavern, it may be instructive to stand a little while on the threshold.

When this first English edition of the Britannia was published, Camden was one of the most famous of living English writers. For one man of position who had heard of Shakespeare, there would be twenty, at least, who were quite familiar with the claims of the Head-master of Westminster and Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden was in his sixtieth year, in 1610; he had enjoyed slow success, violent detraction, and final triumph. His health was poor, but he continued to write history, eager, as he says, to show that "though I have been a studious admirer of venerable antiquity, yet have I not been altogether an incurious spectator of modern occurrences." He stood easily first among the historians of his time; he was respected and adored by the Court and by the Universities, and that his fame might be completed by the chrism of detraction, his popularity was assured from year to year by the dropping fire of obloquy which the Papists scattered from their secret presses. It had not been without a struggle that Camden had attained this pinnacle; and the Britannia had been his alpenstock.

This first English edition has the special interest of representing Camden's last thoughts. It is nominally a translation of the sixth Latin edition, but it has a good deal of additional matter supplied to Philémon Holland by the author, whereas later English issues containing fresh material are believed to be so far spurious. The Britannia grew with the life of Camden. He tells us that it was when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, lately started on his professional career as second master in Westminster School, that the famous Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortelius, "dealt earnestly with me that I would illustrate this isle of Britain." This was no light task to undertake in 1577. The authorities were few, and these in the highest degree occasional or fragmentary. It was not a question of compiling a collection of topographical antiquities. The whole process had to be gone through "from the egg."

As a youth at Oxford, Camden had turned all his best attention to this branch of study, and what the ancients had written about England was intimately known to him. Any one who looks at his book will see that the first 180 pages of the Britannia could be written by a scholar without stirring from his chair at Westminster. But when it came to the minute description of the counties there was nothing for it but personal travel; and accordingly Camden spent what holidays he could snatch from his labours as a schoolmaster in making a deliberate survey of the divisions of England. We possess some particulars of one of these journeys, that which occupied 1582, in which he started by Suffolk, through Yorkshire, and returned through Lancashire. He was a very rapid worker, he spared no pains, and in 1586, nine years after Ortelius set him going, his first draft was issued from the press. In later times, and when his accuracy had been cruelly impeached, he set forth his claims to attention with dignity. He said: "I have in no wise neglected such things as are most material to search and sift out the truth. I have attained to some skill of the most ancient British and Anglo-Saxon tongues; I have travelled over all England for the most part, I have conferred with most skilful observers in each county…. I have been diligent in the records of this realm. I have looked into most libraries, registers and memorials of churches, cities and corporations, I have pored upon many an old roll and evidence … that the honour of verity might in no wise be impeached."

It was no slight task to undertake such a work on such a scale. And when the first Latin edition appeared, it was hailed as a first glory in the diadem of Elizabeth. Specialists in particular counties found that Camden knew more about their little circle than they themselves had taken all their lives to learn. Lombard, the great Kentish antiquary, said that he never knew Kent properly, till he read of it in the Britannia. But Camden was not content to rest on his laurels. Still, year by year, he made his painful journeys through the length and breadth of the land, and still, as new editions were called forth, the book grew from octavo into folio. Suddenly, about twelve years after its first unchallenged appearance, there was issued, like a bolt out of the blue, a very nasty pamphlet, called Discovery of certain Errors Published in the much-commended Britannia, which created a fine storm in the antiquarian teapot. This attack was the work of a man who would otherwise be forgotten, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald. He had formerly been an admirer of Camden's, his "humble friend," he called himself; but when Camden was promoted over his head to be Clarenceux King-of-Arms, it seemed to Ralph Brooke that it became his duty to denounce the too successful antiquary as a charlatan. He accordingly fired off the unpleasant little gun already mentioned, and, for the moment, he hit Camden rather hard.

The author of the Britannia, to justify his new advancement, had introduced into a fresh edition of his book a good deal of information regarding the descent of barons and other noble families. This was York Herald's own subject, and he was able to convict Camden of a startling number of negligences, and what he calls "many gross mistakings." The worst part of it was that York Herald had privately pointed out these blunders to Camden, and that the latter had said it was too much trouble to alter them. This, at least, is what the enemy states in his attack, and if this be true, it can hardly be doubled that Camden had sailed too long in fair weather, or that he needed a squall to recall him to the duties of the helm. He answered Brooke, who replied with increased contemptuous tartness. It is admitted that Camden was indiscreet in his manner of reply, and that some genuine holes had been pricked in his heraldry. But the Britannia lay high out of the reach of fatal pedantic attack, and this little cloud over the reputation of the book passed entirely away, and is remembered now only as a curiosity of literature.

In the preface the author quaintly admits that "many have found a defect in this work that maps were not adjoined, which do allure the eyes by pleasant portraitures, … yet my ability could not compass it." They must, then, have been added at the last by a generous afterthought, for this book is full of maps. The maritime ones are adorned with ships in full sail, and bold sea-monsters with curly tails; the inland ones are speckled with trees and spires and hillocks. In spite of these old-fashioned oddities, the maps are remarkably accurate. They are signed by John Norden and William Kip, the master map-makers of that reign. The book opens with an account of the first inhabitants of Britain, and their manners and customs; how the Romans fared, and what antiquities they left behind, with copious plates of Roman coins. By degrees we come down, through Saxons and Normans, to that work which was peculiarly Camden's, the topographical antiquarianism. He begins with Cornwall, "that region which, according to the geographers, is the first of all Britain," and then proceeds to what he calls "Denshire" and we Devonshire, a county, as he remarks, "barbarous on either side."

With page 822 he finds himself at the end of his last English county, Northumberland, looking across the Tweed to Berwick, "the strongest hold in all Britain," where it is "no marvel that soldiers without other light do play here all night long at dice, considering the side light that the sunbeams cast all night long." This rather exaggerated statement is evidently that of a man accustomed to look upon Berwick as the northernmost point of his country, as we shall all do, no doubt, when Scotland has secured Home Rule. We are, therefore, not surprised to find Scotland added, in a kind of hurried appendix, in special honour to James I and VI. The introduction to the Scottish section is in a queer tone of banter; Camden knows little and cares less about the "commonwealth of the Scots," and "withall will lightly pass over it." In point of fact, he gets to Duncansby Head in fifty-two pages, and not without some considerable slips of information. Ireland interests him more, and he finally closes with a sheet of learned gossip about the outlying islands.

The scope of Camden's work did not give Philémon Holland much opportunity for spreading the wings of his style. Anxious to present Camden fairly, the translator is curiously uneven in manner, now stately, now slipshod, weaving melodious sentences, but forgetting to tie them up with a verb. He is commonly too busy with hard facts to be a Euphuist. But here is a pretty and ingenious passage about Cambridge, unusually popular in manner, and exceedingly handsome in the mouth of an Oxford man:

"On this side the bridge, where standeth the greater part by far of the City, you have a pleasant sight everywhere to the eye, what of fair streets orderly ranged, what of a number of churches, and of sixteen colleges, sacred mansions of the Muses, wherein a number of great learned men are maintained, and wherein the knowledge of the best arts, and the skill in tongues, so flourish, that they may rightly be counted the fountains of literature, religion and all knowledge whatsoever, who right sweetly bedew and sprinkle, with most wholesome waters, the gardens of the Church and Commonwealth through England. Nor is there wanting anything here, that a man may require in a most flourishing University, were it not that the air is somewhat unhealthful, arising as it doth out of a fenny ground hard by. And yet, peradventure, they that first founded a University in that place, allowed of Plato's judgment. For he, being of a very excellent and strong constitution of body, chose out the Academia, an unwholesome place of Attica, for to study in, and so the superfluous rankness of body which might overlay the mind, might be kept under by the dis-temperature of the place."

The poor scholars in the mouldering garrets of Clare, looking over waste land to the oozy Cam, no doubt wished that their foundress had been less Spartan. Very little of the domestic architecture that Camden admired in Cambridge is now left; and yet probably it and Oxford are the two places of all which he describes that it would give him least trouble to identify if he came to life again three hundred years after the first appearance of his famous Britannia.

A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES

A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES: being a true Chronicle Historie of the untimely falles of such unfortunate Princes and men of note, as have happened since the first entrance of Brute into this Iland, untill this our latter Age. Newly enlarged with a last part, called A WINTER NIGHTS VISION, being an addition of such Tragedies, especially famous, as are exempted in the former Historie, with a Poem annexed, called ENGLAND'S ELIZA. At London. Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, 1610.

This huge quarto of 875 pages, all in verse, is the final form, though far from the latest impression, of a poetical miscellany which had been swelling and spreading for nearly sixty years without ever losing its original character. We may obtain some imperfect notion of the Mirror for Magistrates if we imagine a composite poem planned by Sir Walter Scott, and contributed to by Wordsworth and Southey, being still issued, generation after generation, with additions by the youngest versifiers of to-day. The Mirror for Magistrates was conceived when Mary's protomartyrs were burning at Smithfield, and it was not finished until James I. had been on the throne seven years. From first to last, at least sixteen writers had a finger in this pie, and the youngest of them was not born when the eldest of them died.

It is commonly said, even by such exact critics as the late Dean Church, that the Mirror for Magistrates was planned by the most famous of the poets who took part in its execution, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. If a very clever man is combined in any enterprise with people of less prominence, it is ten to one that he gets all the credit of the adventure. But the evidence on this point goes to prove that it was not until the work was well advanced that Sackville contributed to it at all. The inventor of the Mirror for Magistrates seems, rather, to have been George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer and politician, who was master of the King's Pastimes at the very close of Henry VIII.'s reign. Ferrers was ambitious to create a drama in England, and lacked only genius to be the British Aeschylus. The time was not ripe, but he was evidently very anxious to set the world tripping to his goatherd's pipe. He advertised for help in these designs, and the list of persons he wanted is an amusing one; he was willing to engage "a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, a physician, an apothecary, a master of requests, a civilian, a clown, two gentlemen ushers, besides jugglers, tumblers, fools, friars, and such others," Fortune sent him, from Oxford, one William Baldwin, who was most of these things, especially divine and poet, and who became Ferrers' confidential factotum. The master and assistant-master of Pastimes were humming merrily on at their masques and triumphs, when, the King expired. Under Queen Mary, revels might not flourish, but the friendship between Ferrers and Baldwin did not cease. They planned a more doleful but more durable form of entertainment, and the Mirror for Magistrates was started. Those who claim for Sackville the main part of this invention, forget that he is not mentioned as a contributor till what was really the third edition, and that, when the first went to press, he was only eighteen years of age.

Ferrers well comprehended the taste of his age when he conceived the notion of a series of poems, in which famous kings and nobles should describe in their own persons the frailty and instability of worldly prosperity, even in those whom Fortune seems most highly to favour. One of the most popular books of the preceding century had been Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's poems on the calamities of illustrious men, a vast monody in nine books, all harping on that single chord of the universal mutability of fortune. Lydgate's Fall of Princes had, by the time that Mary ascended the throne, existed in popular esteem for a hundred years. Its language and versification were now so antiquated as to be obsolete; it was time that princes should fall to a more modern measure.

The first edition of Baldwin and Ferrers' book went to press early in 1555, but of this edition only one or two fragments exist. It was "hindered by the Lord Chancellor that then was," Stephen Gardiner, and was entirely suppressed. The leaf in the British Museum is closely printed in double columns, and suggests that Baldwin and Ferrers meant to make a huge volume of it. The death of Mary removed the embargo, and before Elizabeth had been Queen for many months, the second (or genuine first) edition of the Myrroure for Magistrates made its appearance, a thin quarto, charmingly printed in two kinds of type. This contained twenty lives—Haslewood, the only critic who has described this edition, says nineteen, but he overlooked Ferrers' tale of "Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester"—and was the work, so Baldwin tells us, of seven persons besides himself.

The first story in the book, a story which finally appears at p. 276 of the edition before us, recounts the "Fall of Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of England, and other of his fellows, for misconstruing the laws and expounding them to serve the Prince's affections, Anno 1388." The manner in which this story is presented is a good example of the mode adopted throughout the miscellany. The corrupt judge and his fellow-lawyers appear, as in a mirror, or like personages behind the illuminated sheet at the "Chat Noir," and lamentably recount their woes in chorus. The story of Tresilian was written by Ferrers, but the persons who speak it address his companion:

Baldwin, we beseech thee with our names to begin

—which support Baldwin's claim to be looked upon as the editor of the whole book. It is very dreary doggerel, it must be confessed, but no worse than most of the poetry indited in England at that uninspired moment in the national history. A short example—a flower culled from any of these promiscuous thickets—will suffice to give a general notion of the garden. Here is part of the lament of "The Lord Clifford":

_Because my father Lord John Clifford died,
Slain at St. Alban's, in his prince's aid,
Against the Duke my heart for malice fired,
So that I could from wreck no way be stayed,
But, to avenge my father's death, assayed
All means I might the Duke of York to annoy,
And all his kin and friends for to destroy.

This made me with my bloody dagger wound
His guiltless son, that never 'gainst me stored;
His father's body lying dead on ground
To pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword
To part his neck, and with his head to board,
Invested with a royal paper crown,
From place to place to bear it up and down.

But cruelty can never 'scape the scourge
Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death;
Repentance self that other sins may purge
Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth;
Despair dissolves the tyrant's bitter breath,
For sudden vengeance suddenly alights
On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites_.

The only contribution to this earliest form of the Mirror which is attributed to an eminent writer, is the "Edward IV" of Skelton, and this is one of the most tuneless of all. It reminds the ear of a whining ballad snuffled out in the street at night by some unhappy minstrel that has got no work to do. As Baldwin professes to quote it from memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its versification suffered in his hands.

This is not the place to enter minutely into the history of the building up of this curious book. The next edition, that of 1563, was enriched by Sackville's splendid "Induction" and the tale of "Buckingham," both of which are comparatively known so well, and have been so often reprinted separately, that I need not dwell upon them here. They occupy pp. 255-271 and 433-455 of the volume before us. In 1574 a very voluminous contributor to the constantly swelling tide of verse appears. Thomas Blener Hasset, a soldier on service in Guernsey Castle, thought that the magisterial ladies had been neglected, and proceeded in 1578 to sing the fall of princesses. It is needless to continue the roll of poets, but it is worth while to point out the remarkable fact that each new candidate held up the mirror to the magistrates so precisely in the manner of his predecessors, that it is difficult to distinguish Newton from Baldwin, or Churchyard from Niccols.

Richard Niccols, who is responsible for the collection in its final state, was a person of adventure, who had fought against Cadiz in the Ark, and understood the noble practice of the science of artillery. By the time it came down to him, in 1610, the Mirror for Magistrates had attained such a size that he was obliged to omit what had formed a pleasing portion of it, the prose dialogues which knit the tales in verse together, such pleasant familiar chatter between the poets as "Ferrers, said Baldwin, take you the chronicles and mark them as they come," and the like. It was a pity to lose all this, but Niccols had additions of his own verse to make; ten new legends entitled "A Winter Night's Vision," and a long eulogy upon Queen Elizabeth, "England's Eliza." He would have been more than human, if he had not considered all this far more valuable than the old prose babbling in black letter. This copy of mine is of the greatest rarity, for it contains two dedicatory sonnets by Richard Niccols, one addressed to Lady Elizabeth Clere and the other to the Earl of Nottingham, which seem to have been instantly suppressed, and are only known to exist in this and, I believe, one or two other examples of the book. These are, perhaps, worth reprinting for their curiosity. The first runs as follows:—

My Muse, that whilom wail'd those Briton kings,
Who unto her in vision did appear,
Craves leave to strengthen her night-weathered wings
In the warm sunshine of your golden Clere [clear];
Where she, fair Lady, tuning her chaste lays
Of England's Empress to her hymnic string
For your affect, to hear that virgins praise,
Makes choice of your chaste self to hear her sing,
Whose royal worth, (true virtue's paragon,)
Here made me dare to engrave your worthy name.
In hope that unto you the same alone
Will so excuse me of presumptuous blame,
That graceful entertain my Muse may find
And even bear such grace in thankful mind.

The sonnet to the Earl of Nottingham, the famous admiral and quondam rival of Sir Walter Raleigh, is more interesting:—

As once that dove (true honour's aged Lord),
Hovering with wearied wings about your ark,
When Cadiz towers did fall beneath your sword,
To rest herself did single out that bark,
So my meek Muse,—from all that conquering rout,
Conducted through the sea's wild wilderness
By your great self, to grave their names about
The Iberian pillars of Jove's Hercules,—
Most humbly craves your lordly lion's aid
'Gainst monster envy, while she tells her story
Of Britain's princes, and that royall maid
In whose chaste hymn her Clio sings your glory,
Which if, great Lord, you grant, my Muse shall frame
Mirrors most worthy your renownèd name.

But apparently the "great Lord" would not grant permission, and so the sonnet had to be rigorously suppressed.

The Mirror for Magistrates has ceased to be more than a curiosity and a collector's rarity, but it once assumed a very ambitious function. It was a serious attempt to build up, as a cathedral is built by successive architects, a great national epic, the work of many hands. In a gloomy season of English history, in a violent age of tyranny, fanaticism, and legalised lawlessness, it endeavoured to present, to all whom it might concern, a solemn succession of discrowned tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws they had made. Sometimes, in its bold and not very delicate way, the Mirror for Magistrates is impressive still from its lofty moral tone, its gloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read its sombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motion which makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it at the next into the pit of pain and oblivion. Steadily, uniformly, the unflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royal how "Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace," and how "Sir Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless imprisoned and cruelly wounded"; how "King Kimarus was devoured by wild beasts," and how "Sigeburt, for his wicked life, was thrust from his throne and miserably slain by a herdsman." It gives us a strange feeling of sympathy to realise that the immense popularity of this book must have been mainly due to the fact that it comforted the multitudes who groaned under a harsh and violent despotism to be told over and over again that cruel kings and unjust judges habitually came at last to a bad end.

A POET IN PRISON

THE SHEPHEARDS HUNTING: being Certain Eglogues written during the time of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey. By George Wyther, Gentleman. London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are to be sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre. 1615.

If ever a man needed resuscitation in our antiquarian times it was George Wither. When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable oblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor in cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to be recollected. He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne persistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessed really by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy. Swift, in The Battle of the Books, brings in this poet as the meanest common trooper that he can mention in his modern army. Pope speaks of him with the utmost freedom as "wretched Withers." It is true that he lived too long and wrote too much—a great deal too much. Mr. Hazlitt gives the titles of more than one hundred of his publications, and some of them are wonderfully unattractive. I should not like to be shut up on a rainy day with his Salt upon Salt, which seems to have lost its savour, nor do I yearn to blow upon his Tuba Pacifica, although it was "disposed of rather for love than money." The truth is that good George Wither lost his poetry early, was an upright, honest, and patriotic man who unhappily developed into a scold, and got into the bad habit of pouring out "precautions," "cautional expressions," "prophetic phrensies," "epistles at random," "personal contributions to the national humiliation," "passages," "raptures," and "allarums," until he really became the greatest bore in Christendom. It was Charles Lamb who swept away this whole tedious structure of Wither's later writings and showed us what a lovely poet he was in his youth.

When the book before us was printed, George Wither was aged twenty-seven. He had just stepped gingerly out of the Marshalsea Prison, and his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest against having been put there at all and deprecation of being put there again. Let no one waste the tear of sensibility over that shell of the Marshalsea Prison, which still, I believe, exists. The family of the Dorrits languished in quite another place from the original Marshalsea of Wither's time, although that also lay across the water in Southwark. It is said that the prison was used for the confinement of persons who had spoken lewdly of dignitaries about the Court. Wither, as we shall see, makes a great parade of telling us why he was imprisoned; but his language is obscure. Perhaps he was afraid to be explicit. In 1613 he had published a little volume of satires, called Abuses stript and whipt. This had been very popular, running into six or seven editions within a short time, and some one in office, no doubt, had fitted on the fool's cap. Five years later the poor poet would have had a chance of being shipped straight off to Virginia, as a "debauched person"; as it was, the Marshalsea seems to have been tolerably unpleasant. We gather, however, that he enjoyed some alleviations. He could say, like Leigh Hunt, "the visits of my friends were the bright side of my captivity; I read verses without end, and wrote almost as many." The poems we have before us were written in the Marshalsea. The book itself is very tiny and pretty, with a sort of leafy trellis-work at the top and bottom of every page, almost suggesting a little posy of wild-flowers thrown through the iron bars of the poet's cage, and pressed between the pages of his manuscript. Nor is there any book of Wither's which breathes more deeply of the perfume of the fields than this which was written in the noisome seclusion of the Marshalsea.

Although the title-page assures us that these "eglogues" were written during the author's imprisonment, we may have a suspicion that the first three were composed just after his release. They are very distinct from the rest in form and character. To understand them we must remember that in 1614, just before the imprisonment, Wither had taken a share with his bosom friend, William Browne, of the Inner Temple, in bringing out a little volume of pastorals, called The Shepherd's Pipe. Browne, a poet who deserves well of all Devonshire men, was two years younger than Wither, and had just begun to come before the public as the author of that charming, lazy, Virgilian poem of Britannia's Pastorals. There was something of Keats in Browne, an artist who let the world pass him by; something of Shelley in Wither, a prophet who longed to set his seal on human progress. In the Shepherd's Pipe Willy (William Browne) and Roget (Geo-t-r) had been the interlocutors, and Christopher Brooke, another rhyming friend, had written an eclogue under the name of Cutty. These personages reappear in The Shepherd's Hunting, and give us a glimpse of pleasant personal relations. In the first "eglogue," Willy comes to the Marshalsea one afternoon to condole with Roget, but finds him very cheerful. The prisoner poet assures his friend that

This barren place yields somewhat to relieve, For I have found sufficient to content me, And more true bliss than ever freedom lent me;

and Willy goes away, when it is growing dark, rejoiced to find that "the cage doth some birds good." Next morning he returns and brings Cutty, or Cuddy, with him, for Cuddy has news to tell the prisoner that all England is taking an interest in him, and that this adversity has made him much more popular than he was before. But Willy and Cuddy are extremely anxious to know what it was that caused Roget's imprisonment, and at last he agrees to tell them. Hitherto the poem has been written in ottava rima, a form which is sufficiently uncommon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to demand special notice in this case. In a prose postscript to this book Wither tells us that the title, The Shepherd's Hunting, which he seems to feel needs explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should say now, to the publisher. But perhaps this was an afterthought, for in the account he gives to Willy and Cuddy he certainly suggests the title himself. He represents himself as the shepherd given up to the delights of hunting the human passions through the soul; the simile seems a little confused, because he represents these qualities not as the quarry, but as the hounds, and so the story of Actaeon is reversed; instead of the hounds pursuing their master, the master hunts his dogs. At all events, the result is that he "dips his staff in blood, and onwards leads his thunder to the wood," where he is ignominiously captured by his Majesty's gamekeeper. But the allegory hardly runs upon all-fours.

The next "eglogue" represents again another visit to the prisoner, and this time Willy and Cuddy bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis is John Davies, of Hereford, another contributor to The Shepherd's Pipe. Roget starts his allegory again, in the same mild, satiric manner he had adopted, to his hurt, in Abuses stript and whipt. Wither becomes quite delightful again, when cheerfulness breaks through this satirical philosophy, and when he tells us:

But though that all the world's delight forsake me,
I have a Muse, and she shall music make me;
Whose aery notes, in spite of closest cages,
Shall give content to me and after ages.

They all felt certain of immortality, these cheerful poets of Elizabeth and James, and Prince Posterity has seen proper to admit the claim in more instances than might well have been expected.

But the delightful part of The Shepherd's Hunting has yet to come. With the fourth "eglogue" the caged bird begins to sing like a lark at Heaven's gate, and it is the prisoned man—who ought to be in doleful dumps—that rallies his free friend Browne on his low spirits. It is time, he says, to be merry:

Coridon, with his bold rout,
Hath already been about,
For the elder shepherds' dole,
And fetched in the summer pole;
Whilst the rest have built a bower
To defend them from a shower,
Sealed so close, with boughs all green,
Titan cannot pry between;
Now the dairy-wenches dream
Of their strawberries and cream,
And each doth herself advance,
To be taken in to dance.

What summer thoughts are these to come from a pale prisoner in the hot and putrid Marshalsea! They are either symptoms of acute nostalgia, or proofs of a cheerfulness that lifts their author above a mortal pitch. But Willy declines to join the Lady of the May at her high junketings; he also has troubles, and prefers to whisper them through Roget's iron bars. There are those who "my Music do contemn," who will none of the poetry of Master William Browne of the Inner Temple. It is useless for him to wrestle with brown shepherds for the

Cups of turnèd maple-root, Whereupon the skilful man Hath engraved the Loves of Pan,

or contend for the "fine napkin wrought with blue," if those base clowns called critics are busy with his detraction. But Roget instructs him that Verse is its own high reward, that the songs of a true poet will naturally arise like the moon out of and beyond all racks of envious cloud, and that the last thing he should do is to despair. He rises to his own greatest and best work in this encouragement of a brother-poet, and no one who reads such noble verses as these dare question Wither's claim to a fauteuil in the Academy of Parnassus:

If thy Verse do bravely tower
As she makes wing, she gets power,
Yet the higher she doth soar,
She's affronted still the more;
Till she to the highest hath past,
Then she rests with Fame at last.
Let nought therefore thee affright,
But make forward in thy flight;
For if I could match thy rhyme
To the very stars I'd climb,
There begin again, and fly
Till I reached Eternity.

In the fifth "eglogue" Roget and Alexis compare notes about their early happiness in phrases of an odd commixture. The pastoral character of the poetry has to be carried out, and so we read of how Roget on a great occasion played a match at football, "having scarce twenty Satyrs on his side," against some of "the best tried Ruffians in the land." Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of Thames, and though the satyrs and their laureate leader were worsted, the moral victory, as people call it, remained with the latter. All this is an allegory; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of innuendo all through The Shepherd's Hunting.

The moral of the whole thing is that eternal ditty of tuneful youth: All for Verse and the World well lost. The enemy is around them on all sides, jailers of the Marshalsea and envious critics, the evil shepherds that preside over grates of steel and noisome beds of straw, but Youth has its mocking answer to all these:

Let them disdain and fret till they are weary!
We in ourselves have that shall make us merry;
Which he that wants and had the power to know it,
Would give his life that he might die a poet.

It was no small thing to be suffering for Apollo's sake in 1614. Shakespeare might hear of it at Stratford, and talk of the prisoner as he strolled with some friend on the banks of Avon. A greater than Shakespeare—as most men thought in those days—Ben Jonson himself, might talk the matter over "at those lyric feasts, Made at the Sun, The Dog, the triple Tun"; for had not he himself languished in a worse dungeon and under a heavier charge than Wither? To be seven-and-twenty, to be in trouble with the Government about one's verses, and to have other young poets, in a ferment of enthusiasm, clinging like swallows to the prison-bars—how delicious a torment! And to know that it will soon be over, and that the sweet, pure meadows lie just outside the reek of Southwark, that summer lingers still and that shepherds pipe and play, that Fame is sitting by her cheerful fountain with a garland for the weary head, and that lasses, "who more excell Than the sweet-voic'd Philomel," are ready to cluster round the Interesting captive, and lead him away in daisy-chains—what could be more consolatory! And we close the little dainty volume, with its delicate perfume of friendship and poetry and hope.

DEATH'S DUEL

DEATH'S DVELL; or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body. Delivered in a Sermon at White Hall, before the King's Maiesty, in the beginning of Lent, 1630. By that late learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, & Deane of S. Pauls, London. Being his last Sermon, and called by his Maiesties houshold The Doctor's owne Funerall Sermon. London, Printed by Thomas Harper, for Richard Redmer and Benjamin Fisher, and are to be sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders-gate street. MDCXXXII.

The value of this tiny quarto with the enormous title depends entirely, so far as the collector is concerned, on whether or no it possesses the frontispiece. So many people, not having the fear of books before their eyes, have divorced the latter from the former, that a perfect copy of Death's Duel is quite a capture over which the young bibliophile may venture to glory; but let him not fancy that he has a prize if his copy does not possess the portrait-plate. One has but to glance for a moment at this frontispiece to see that there is here something very much out of the common. It is engraved in the best seventeenth-century style, and represents, apparently, the head and bust of a dead man wrapped in a winding-sheet. The eyes are shut, the mouth is drawn, and nothing was ever seen more ghastly.

Yet it is not really the picture of a dead man: it represents the result of one of the grimmest freaks that ever entered into a pious mind. In the early part of March 1630 (1631), the great Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, being desperately ill, and not likely to recover, called a wood-carver in to the Deanery, and ordered a small urn, just large enough to hold his feet, and a board as long as his body, to be produced. When these articles were ready, they were brought into his study, which was first warmed, and then the old man stripped off his clothes, wrapped himself in a winding-sheet which was open only so far as to reveal the face and beard, and then stood upright in the little wooden urn, supported by leaning against the board. His limbs were arranged like those of dead persons, and when his eyes had been closed, a painter was introduced into the room and desired to make a full-length and full-size picture of this terrific object, this solemn theatrical presentment of life in death. The frontispiece of Death's Duel gives a reproduction of the upper part of this picture. It was said to be a remarkably truthful portrait of the great poet and divine, and it certainly agrees in all its proportions with the accredited portrait of Donne as a young man.

It appears (for Walton's account is not precise) that it was after standing for this grim picture, but before its being finished, that the Dean preached his last sermon, that which is here printed. He had come up from Essex in great physical weakness in order not to miss his appointment to preach in his cathedral before the King on the first Friday in Lent. He entered the pulpit with so emaciated a frame and a face so pale and haggard, and spoke with a voice so faint and hollow, that at the end the King himself turned to one of his suite, and whispered, "The Dean has preached his own funeral sermon!" So, indeed, it proved to be; for he presently withdrew to his bed, and summoned his friends around to take a solemn farewell. He died very gradually after about a fortnight, his last words being, not in distress or anguish, but as it would seem in visionary rapture: "I were miserable if I might not die." All this fortnight and to the moment of his death, the terrible life-sized portrait of himself in his winding-sheet stood near his bedside, where it could be the "hourly object" of his attention. So one of the greatest Churchmen of the seventeenth century, and one of the greatest, if the most eccentric, of its lyrical poets passed away in the very pomp of death, on the 31st of March, 1631.

There was something eminently calculated to arrest and move the imagination in such an end as this, and people were eager to read the discourse which the "sacred authority" of his Majesty himself had styled the Dean's funeral sermon. It was therefore printed in 1632. As sermons of the period go it is not long, yet it takes a full hour to read it slowly aloud, and we may thus estimate the strain which it must have given to the worn-out voice and body of the Dean to deliver it. The present writer once heard a very eminent Churchman, who was also a great poet, preach his last sermon, at the age of ninety. This was the Danish bishop Grundtvig. In that case the effort of speaking, the extraction, as it seemed, of the sepulchral voice from the shrunken and ashen face, did not last more than ten minutes. But the English divines of the Jacobean age, like their Scottish brethren of to-day, were accustomed to stupendous efforts of endurance from their very diaconate.

The sermon is one of the most "creepy" fragments of theological literature it would be easy to find. It takes as its text the words from the sixty-eighth Psalm: "And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death." In long, stern sentences of sonorous magnificence, adorned with fine similes and gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of a king might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from no physical horror and no ghostly terror of the great crisis which he was himself to be the first to pass through. "That which we call life," he says, and our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we listen, "is but Hebdomada mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and there is an end. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all. Nor do all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a wasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake out of dung." We can comprehend how an audience composed of men and women whose ne'er-do-weel relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by such tragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur would themselves snatch a sacred pleasure from awful language of this kind in the pulpit. There is not much that we should call doctrine, no pensive or consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense. The effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the advent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his fantastic defence of suicide, was familiar with the idea of Death, and greeted him as a welcome old friend whose face he was glad to look on long and closely.

The leaves at the end of this little book are filled up with two copies of funeral verses on Dean Donne. These are unsigned, but we know from other sources to whom to attribute them. Each is by an eminent man. The first was written by Dr. Henry King, then the royal chaplain, and afterward Bishop of Chichester, to whom the Dean had left, besides a model in gold of the Synod of Dort, that painting of himself in the winding-sheet of which we have already spoken. This portrait Dr. King put into the hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor, who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urn concealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which King was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the present Cathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as it goes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words in which he refers to the appearance of the dying preacher in the pulpit:

Thou (like the dying Swan) didst lately sing
Thy mournful dirge in audience of the King;
When pale looks, and weak accents of thy breath
Presented so to life that piece of death,
That it was feared and prophesied by all
Thou thither cam'st to preach thy funeral.

The other elegy is believed to have been written by a young man of twenty-one, who was modestly and enthusiastically seeking the company of the most famous London wits. This was Edward Hyde, thirty years later to become Earl of Clarendon, and finally to leave behind him manuscripts which should prove him the first great English historian. His verses here bespeak his good intention, but no facility in rhyming.

It was left for the riper disciples of the great divine to sing his funerals in more effective numbers. Of the crowd of poets who attended him with music to the grave, none expressed his merits in such excellent verses or with so much critical judgment as Thomas Carew, the king's sewer in ordinary. It is not so well known but that we quote some lines from it:

The fire
That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir,
Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath,
Glow'd here awhile, lies quench'd now in thy death.
The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purg'd by thee, the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted; thou disdt pay
The debts of our penurious bankrupt age.

* * * * *

Whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue,
Thou hast redeem'd, and opened us a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line
Of masculine expression, which, had good
Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood
Our superstitious fools admire, and hold
Their lead more precious than thy burnish'd gold,
Thou hadst been their exchequer….
Let others carve the rest; it will suffice
I on thy grave this epitaph incise:—
Here lies a King, that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lies two Flamens, and both these the best,—
Apollo's first, at last the True God's priest.

There was no full memoir of Dr. Donne until it was the privilege of the present writer, in 1900, to publish his Life and Letters in two substantial volumes. Since then, in 1912, his Poetical Works have been edited and sifted, with remarkable delicacy and judgment, by Professor Grierson. It is now, therefore, as easy as it can be expected ever to be to follow the career of this extraordinary man, with all its cold and hot fits, its rage of lyrical amativeness, its Roman passion, and the high and clouded austerity of its final Anglicanism. Donne is one of the most fascinating, in some ways one of the most inscrutable, figures in our literature, and we may contemplate him with instruction from his first wild escapade into the Azores down to his voluntary penitence in the pulpit and the winding-sheet.

GERARD'S HERBAL

THE HERBALL or General Historie of Plantes. Gathered by John Gerarde,
of London, Master in Chirurgerie. Very much enlarged and amended by
Thomas Johnson, citizen and apothecarye of London. London, Printed by
Adam Islip, Joice Norton, and Richard Whitakers. Anno 1633.

The proverb says that a door must be either open or shut. The bibliophile is apt to think that a book should be either little or big. For my own part, I become more and more attached to "dumpy twelves"; but that does not preclude a certain discreet fondness for folios. If a man collects books, his library ought to contain a Herbal; and if he has but room for one, that should be the best. The luxurious and sufficient thing, I think, is to possess what booksellers call "the right edition of Gerard"; that is to say, the volume described at the head of this paper. There is no handsomer book to be found, none more stately or imposing, than this magnificent folio of sixteen hundred pages, with its close, elaborate letterpress, its innumerable plates, and John Payne's fine frontispiece in compartments, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one another, and the author below them, holding in his right hand the new-found treasure of the potato plant.

This edition of 1633 is the final development of what had been a slow growth. The sixteenth century witnessed a great revival, almost a creation of the science of botany. People began to translate the great Materia Medica of the Greek physician, Dioscorides of Anazarba, and to comment upon it. The Germans were the first to append woodcuts to their botanical descriptions, and it is Otto Brunfelsius, in 1530, who has the credit of being the originator of such figures. In 1554 there was published the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus Dodonaeus, body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian II., who wrote in Dutch. An English translation of this, brought out in 1578, by Henry Lyte, was the earliest important Herbal in our language. Five years later, in 1583, a certain Dr. Priest translated all the botanical works of Dodonaeus, with much greater fulness than Lyte had done, and this volume was the germ of Gerard's far more famous production. John Gerard was a Cheshire man, born in 1545, who came up to London, and practised there as a surgeon.

According to his editor and continuator, Thomas Johnson, who speaks of Gerard with startling freedom, this excellent man was by no means well equipped for the task of compiling a great Herbal. He knew so little Latin, according to this too candid friend, that he imagined Leonard Fuchsius, who was a German contemporary of his own, to be one of the ancients. But Johnson is a little too zealous in magnifying his own office. He brings a worse accusation against Gerard, if I understand him rightly to charge him with using Dr. Priest's manuscript collections after his death, without giving that physician the credit of his labours. When Johnson made this accusation, Gerard had been dead twenty-six years. In any case it seems certain that Gerard's original Herbal, which, beyond question, surpassed all its predecessors when it was printed in folio in 1597, was built up upon the ground-work of Priest's translation of Dodonaeus. Nearly forty years later, Thomas Johnson, himself a celebrated botanist, took up the book, and spared no pains to reissue it in perfect form. The result is the great volume before us, an elephant among books, the noblest of all the English Herbals. Johnson was seventy-two years of age when he got this gigantic work off his hands, and he lived eleven years longer to enjoy his legitimate success.

The great charm of this book at the present time consists in the copious woodcuts. Of these there are more than two thousand, each a careful and original study from the plant itself. In the course of two centuries and a half, with all the advance in appliances, we have not improved a whit on the original artist of Gerard's and Johnson's time. The drawings are all in strong outline, with very little attempt at shading, but the characteristics of each plant are given with a truth and a simplicity which are almost Japanese. In no case is this more extraordinary than in that of the orchids, or "satyrions," as they were called in the days of the old herbalist. Here, in a succession of little figures, each not more than six inches high, the peculiarity of every portion of a full-grown flowering specimen of each species is given with absolute perfection, without being slurred over on the one hand, or exaggerated on the other. For instance, the little variety called "ladies' tresses" [Spiranthes], which throws a spiral head of pale green blossoms out of dry pastures, appears here with small bells hanging on a twisted stem, as accurately as the best photograph could give it, although the process of woodcutting, as then practised in England, was very rude, and although almost all other English illustrations of the period are rough and inartistic. It is plain that in every instance the botanist himself drew the form, with which he was already intelligently familiar, on the block, with the living plant lying at his side.

The plan on which the herbalist lays out his letterpress is methodical in the extreme. He begins by describing his plant, then gives its habitat, then discusses its nomenclature, and ends with a medical account of its nature and virtues. It is, of course, to be expected that we should find the line old names of plants enshrined in Gerard's pages. For instance, he gives to the deadly nightshade the name, which now only lingers in a corner of Devonshire, the "dwale." As an instance of his style, I may quote a passage from what he has to say about the virtues, or rather vices, of this plant:

"Banish it from your gardens and the use of it also, being a plant so furious and deadly; for it bringeth such as have eaten thereof into a dead sleep wherein many have died, as hath been often seen and proved by experience both in England and elsewhere. But to give you an example hereof it shall not be amiss. It came to pass that three boys of Wisbeach, in the Isle of Ely, did eat of the pleasant and beautiful fruit hereof, two whereof died in less than eight hours after they had eaten of them. The third child had a quantity of honey and water mixed together given him to drink, causing him to vomit often. God blessed this means, and the child recovered. Banish, therefore, these pernicious plants out of your gardens, and all places near to your houses where children do resort."

Gerard has continually to stop his description that he may repeat to his readers some anecdote which he remembers. Now it is how "Master Cartwright, a gentleman of Gray's Inn, who was grievously wounded into the lungs," was cured with the herb called "Saracen's Compound," "and that, by God's permission, in short space." Now it is to tell us that he has found yellow archangel growing under a sequestered hedge "on the left hand as you go from the village of Hampstead, near London, to the church," or that "this amiable and pleasant kind of primrose" (a sort of oxlip) was first brought to light by Mr. Hesketh, "a diligent searcher after simples," in a Yorkshire wood. While the groundlings were crowding to see new plays by Shirley and Massinger, the editor of this volume was examining fresh varieties of auricula in "the gardens of Mr. Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie." It is wonderful how modern the latter statement sounds, and how ancient the former. But the garden seems the one spot on earth where history does not assert itself, and, no doubt, when Nero was fiddling over the blaze of Rome, there were florists counting the petals of rival roses at Paestum as peacefully and conscientiously as any gardeners of to-day.

The herbalist and his editor write from personal experience, and this gives them a great advantage in dealing with superstitions. If there was anything which people were certain about in the early part of the seventeenth century, it was that the mandrake only grew under a gallows, where the dead body of a man had fallen to pieces, and that when it was dug up it gave a great shriek, which was fatal to the nearest living thing. Gerard contemptuously rejects all these and other tales as "old wives' dreams." He and his servants have often digged up mandrakes, and are not only still alive, but listened in vain for the dreadful scream. It might be supposed that such a statement, from so eminent an authority, would settle the point, but we find Sir Thomas Browne, in the next generation, battling these identical popular errors in the pages of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In the like manner, Gerard's botanical evidence seems to have been of no use in persuading the public that mistletoe was not generated out of birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of trees, or that its berries were not desperately poisonous. To observe and state the truth is not enough. The ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must be ready to accept it.

Our good herbalist, however, cannot get through his sixteen hundred accurate and solemn pages without one slip. After accompanying him dutifully so far, we double up with uncontrollable laughter on p. 1587, for here begins the chapter which treats "of the Goose Tree, Barnacle Tree, or the Tree bearing Geese." But even here the habit of genuine observation clings to him. The picture represents a group of stalked barnacles—those shrimps fixed by their antennae, which modern science, I believe, calls Lepas anatifera; by the side of these stands a little goose, and the suggestion of course is that the latter has slipped out of the former, although the draughtsman has been far too conscientious to represent the occurrence. Yet the letterpress is confident that in the north parts of Scotland there are trees on which grow white shells, which ripen, and then, opening, drop little living geese into the waves below. Gerard himself avers that from Guernsey and Jersey he brought home with him to London shells, like limpets, containing little feathery objects, "which, no doubt, were the fowls called Barnacles." It is almost needless to say that these objects really were the plumose and flexible cirri which the barnacles throw out to catch their food with, and which lie, like a tiny feather-brush, just within the valves of the shell, when the creature is dead. Gerard was plainly unable to refuse credence to the mass of evidence which presented itself to him on this subject, yet he closes with a hint that this seems rather a "fabulous breed" of geese.

With the Barnacle Goose Tree the Herbal proper closes, in these quaint words:

"And thus having, through God's assistance, discoursed somewhat at large of grasses, herbs, shrubs, trees and mosses, and certain excrescences of the earth, with other things moe, incident to the history thereof, we conclude, and end our present volume with this wonder of England. For the which God's name be ever honoured and praised."

And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest sanction.

PHARAMOND

PHARAMOND; or, The History of France. A New Romance. In four parts. Written originally in French, by the Author of Cassandra and Cleopatra: and now elegantly rendered into English. London: Printed by Ja: Cottrell for Samuel Speed, at the Rain-Bow in Fleetstreet, near the Inner Temple-Gate. (Folio.) 1662.

There is no better instance of the fact that books will not live by good works alone than is offered by the utterly neglected heroic novels of the seventeenth century. At the opening of the reign of Louis XIV. in France, several writers, in the general dearth of prose fiction, began to supply the public in Paris with a series of long romances, which for at least a generation absorbed the attention of the ladies and reigned unopposed in every boudoir. I wonder whether my lady readers have ever attempted to realise how their sisters of two hundred years ago spent their time? In an English country-house of 1650, there were no magazines, no newspapers, no lawn tennis or croquet, no afternoon-teas or glee-concerts, no mothers' meetings or zenana missions, no free social intercourse with neighbours, none of the thousand and one agreeable diversions with which the life of a modern girl is diversified. On the other hand, the ladies of the house had their needlework to attend to, they had to "stitch in a clout," as it was called; they had to attend to the duties of a housekeeper, and, when the sun shone, they tended the garden. Perhaps they rode or drove, in a stately fashion. But through long hours they sat over their embroidery frames or mended the solemn old tapestries which lined their walls, and during these sedate performances they required a long-winded, polite, unexciting, stately book that might be read aloud by turns. The heroic novel, as provided by Gombreville, Calprenède, and Mlle. de Scudéry supplied this want to perfection.

The sentiments in these novels were of the most elevated class, and tedious as they seem nowadays to us, it was the sentiments, almost more than the action, which fascinated contemporary opinion. Madame de Sévigné herself, the brightest and wittiest of women, confessed herself to be a fly in the spider's web of their attractions. "The beauty of the sentiments," she writes, "the violence of the passions, the grandeur of the events, and the miraculous success of their redoubtable swords, all draw me on as though I were still a little girl." In these modern days of success, we may still start to learn that the Parisian publisher of Le Grand Cyrus made 100,000 crowns by that work, from the appearance of its first volume in 1649 to its close in 1653. The qualities so admirably summed up by Madame de Sévigné were those which appealed most directly to public feeling in France. There really were heroes in that day, the age of chivalric passions had not passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions of all kinds, were conceivable and within personal experience. When La Rochefoucauld wrote to Madame de Longueville the famous lines which may be thus translated:

To win that wonder of the world,
A smile from her bright eyes,
I fought my King, and would have hurled
The gods out of their skies,

he was breathing the very atmosphere of the heroic novels. Their extraordinary artificial elevation of tone was partly the spirit of the age; it was also partly founded on a new literary ideal, the tone of Greek romance. No book had been read in France with greater avidity than the sixteenth-century translation of the old novel Heliodorus; and in the Polexandres and Clélies we see what this Greek spirit of romance could blossom into when grafted upon the stock of Louis XIV.

The vogue of these heroic novels in England has been misstated, for the whole subject has but met with neglect from successive historians of literature. It has been asserted that they were not read in England until after the Restoration. Nothing is further from the truth. Charles I. read Cassandra in prison, while we find Dorothy Osborne, in her exquisite letters to Sir William Temple, assiduously studying one heroic novel after another through the central years of Cromwell's rule. She reads Le Grand Cyrus while she has the ague; she desires Temple to tell her "which amant you have most compassion for, when you have read what each one says for himself." She and the King read them in the original, but soon there arrived English translations and imitations. These began to appear a good deal sooner than bibliographers have been prepared to admit. Of the Astrée of D'Urfé—which, however, is properly a link between the Arcadia of Sidney and the genuine heroic novel—there was an English version as early as 1620. But, of the real thing, the first importation was Polexandre, in 1647, followed by Cassandra and Ibrahim in 1652, Artamenes in 1653, Cleopatra in 1654-8, and Clélie in 1655, all, it will be observed, published in England before the close of the Commonwealth.

Dorothy Osborne, who had studied the French originals, turned up her nose at these translations. She says that they were "so disguised that I, who am their old acquaintance, hardly knew them." They had, moreover, changed their form. In France they had come out in an infinite number of small, manageable tomes. For instance, Calprenède published his Cléopatre in twenty-three volumes; but the English Cleopatra is all contained in one monstrous elephant folio. Artamenes, the English translation of Le Grand Cyrus, is worse still, for it is comprised in five such folios. Many of the originals were translated over and over again, so popular were they; and as the heroic novels of any eminence in France were limited in number, it would be easy, by patiently hunting the translations up in old libraries, to make a pretty complete list of them. The principal heroic novels were eight in all; of these there is but one, the Almahide of Mile, de Scudéry, which we have not already mentioned, and the original publication of the whole school is confined within less than thirty years.

The best master in a bad class of lumbering and tiresome fiction was the author of the book which is the text of this chapter. La Calprenède, whose full name was nothing less than Gautier de Costes de la Calprenède, was a Gascon gentleman of the Guards, of whose personal history the most notorious fact is that he had the temerity to marry a woman who had already buried five husbands. Some historians relate that she proceeded to poison number six, but this does not appear to be certain, while it does appear that Calprenède lived in the married state for fifteen years, a longer respite than the antecedents of madame gave him any right to anticipate. He made a great fame with his two huge Roman novels, Cassandra and Cleopatra, and then, some years later, he produced a third, Pharamond which was taken out of early French history. The translator, in the version before us, says of this book that it "is not a romance, but a history adorned with some excellent flourishes of language and loves, in which you may delightfully trace the author's learned pen through all those historians who wrote of the times he treats of." In other words, while Gombreville—with his King of the Canaries, and his Vanishing Islands, and his necromancers, and his dragons—canters through pure fairyland, and while Mlle. de Scudéry elaborately builds up a romantic picture of her own times (in Clélie, for instance, where the three hundred and seventy several characters introduced are said to be all acquaintances of the author), Calprenède attempted to produce something like a proper historical novel, introducing invention, but embroidering it upon some sort of genuine framework of fact.

To describe the plot of Pharamond, or of any other heroic novel, would be a desperate task. The great number of personages introduced in pairs, the intrigues of each couple forming a separate thread wound into the complex web of the plot, is alone enough to make any following of the story a great difficulty. On the fly-leaf of a copy of Cleopatra which lies before me, some dear lady of the seventeenth century has very conscientiously written out "a list of the Pairs of Lovers," and there are thirteen pairs. Pharamond begins almost in the same manner as a novel by the late Mr. G.P.R. James might. When the book opens we discover the amorous Marcomine and the valiant Genebaud sallying forth along the bank of a river on two beautiful horses of the best jennet-race. Throughout the book all the men are valiant, all the ladies are passionate and chaste. The heroes enter the lists covered with rubies, loosely embroidered over surcoats of gold and silk tissue; their heads "shine with gold, enamel and precious stones, with the hinder part covered with an hundred plumes of different colours." They are mounted upon horses "whose whiteness might outvie the purest snow upon the frozen Alps." They pierce into woodland dells, where they by chance discover renowned princesses, nonpareils of beauty, in imminent danger, and release them. They attack hordes of deadly pirates, and scatter their bodies along the shore; and yet, for all their warlike fire and force, they are as gentle as marmozets in a lady's boudoir. They are especially admirable in the putting forth of sentiments, in glozing over a subtle difficulty in love, in tying a knot of silk or fastening a lock of hair to their bonnet. They will steal into a cabinet so softly that a lady who is seated there, in a reverie, will not perceive them; they are so adroit that they will seize a paper on which she has sketched a couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not know whence the poetical miracle has come. In valour, in courtesy, in magnificence they have no rival, just as the ladies whom they court are unique in beauty, in purity, in passion, and in self-denial. Sometimes they correspond at immense length; in Pharamond the letters which pass between the Princess Hunnimonde and Prince Balamir would form a small volume by themselves, an easy introduction to the art of polite letter-writing. Mlle. de Scudéry actually perceived this, and published a collection of model correspondence which was culled bodily from the huge store-house of her own romances, from Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie. These interchanges of letters were kept up by the severity of the heroines. It was not thought proper that the lady should yield her hand until the gentleman had exhausted the resources of language, and had spent years of amorous labour on her conquest. When Roger Boyle, in 1654, published his novel of Parthenissa, in four volumes, Dorothy Osborne objected to the ease with which the hero succeeded; she complains "the ladies are all so kind they make no sport."

This particular 1662 translation of Pharamond appears to be very rare, if not unique. At all events I find it in none of the bibliographies, nor has the British Museum Library a copy of it. The preface is signed J.D., and the version is probably therefore from the pen of John Davies, who helped Loveday to finish his enormous translation of Cleopatra in 1665. In 1677 there came out another version of Pharamond, by John Phillips, and this is common enough. Some day, perhaps, these elephantine old romances may come into fashion again, and we may obtain a precise list of them. At present no corner of our literary history is more thoroughly neglected.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since this was written, a French critic of eminence, M. Jusserand, has made (in The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, 1890) a delightful contribution to this portion of our literary history. The earlier part of the last chapter of that volume may be recommended to all readers curious about the vogue of the heroic novel. But M. Jusserand does not happen to mention Pharamond, nor to cover the exact ground of my little study.]

A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS

In his Ballad of the Book-Hunter, Andrew Lang describes how, in breeches baggy at the knees, the bibliophile hunts in all weathers:

No dismal stall escapes his eye;
He turns o'er tomes of low degrees;
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies.

That speaks straight to my heart; for of all my weaknesses the weakest is that weakness of mine for Restoration plays. From 1660 down to 1710 nothing in dramatic form comes amiss, and I have great schemes, like the boards on which people play the game of solitaire, in which space is left for every drama needed to make this portion of my library complete. It is scarcely literature, I confess; it is a sport, a long game which I shall probably be still playing at, with three mouldy old tragedies and one opera yet needed to complete my set, when the Reaper comes to carry me where there is no amassing nor collecting. It would hardly be credited how much pleasure I have drained out of these dramas since I began to collect them judiciously in my still callow youth. I admit only first editions; but that is not so rigorous as it sounds, since at least half of the poor old things never went into a second.

As long as it is Congreve and Dryden and Otway, of course it is literature, and of a very high order; even Shadwell and Mrs. Behn and Southerne are literature; Settle and Ravenscroft may pass as legitimate literary curiosity. But there are depths below this where there is no excuse but sheer collectaneomania. Plays by people who never got into any schedule of English letters that ever was planned, dramatic nonentities, stage innocents massacred in their cradles, if only they were published in quarto I find room for them. I am not quite so pleased to get these anonymities, I must confess, as I am to get a clean, tall editio princeps of The Orphan or of Love for Love. But I neither reject nor despise them; each of them counts one; each serves to fill a place on my solitaire board, each hurries on that dreadful possible time coming when my collection shall be complete, and I shall have nothing to do but break my collecting rod and bury it fathoms deep.

A volume has just come in which happens to have nothing in it but those forgotten plays, whose very names are unknown to the historians of literature. First comes The Roman Empress, by William Joyner, printed in 1671. Joyner was an Oxford man, a fellow of Magdalen College. The little that has been recorded about him makes one wish to know more. He became persuaded of the truth of the Catholic faith, and made a voluntary resignation of his Oxford fellowship. He had to do something, and so he wrote this tragedy, which he dedicated to Sir Charles Sedley, the poet, and got acted at the Theatre Royal. The cast contains two good actors' names, Mohun and Kynaston, and it seems that it enjoyed a considerable success. But doubtless the stage was too rough a field for the gentle Oxford scholar. He retired into a sequestered country village, where he lingered on till 1706, when he was nearly ninety. But Joyner was none of the worst of poets. Here is a fragment of The Royal Empress, which is by no means despicably versed:

O thou bright, glorious morning,
Thou Oriental spring-time of the day,
Who with thy mixed vermilion colours paintest
The sky, these hills and plains! thou dost return
In thy accustom'd manner, but with thee
Shall ne'er return my wonted happiness.

Through his Roman tragedy there runs a pensive vein of sadness, as though the poet were thinking less of his Aurelia and his Valentius than of the lost common-room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no more revisited.

Our next play is a worse one, but much more pretentious. It is the Usurper, of 1668, the first of four dramas published by the Hon. Edward Howard, one of Dryden's aristocratic brothers-in-law. Edward Howard is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his epic poem of The British Princes:

A vest as admired Vortiger had on, Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won.

Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations for representing Vortiger's grandsire as thus having stripped one who was bare already. But this is the wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of The British Princes is before me at this moment, and the second of these lines certainly runs:

Which from this island's foes his grandsire won.

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this case for a couple of centuries. The Usurper is a tragedy, in which a Parasite, "a most perfidious villain," plays a mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last, much to the reader's satisfaction, who murmurs, in the words of R.L. Stevenson, "There's an end of that."

But though the Usurper is dull, we reach a lower depth and muddier lees of wit in the Carnival, a comedy by Major Thomas Porter, of 1664. It is odd, however, that the very worst production, if it be more than two hundred years old, is sure to contain some little thing interesting to a modern student. The Carnival has one such peculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is left alone on the stage, he begins to soliloquise in the stanza of Gray's Churchyard Elegy. This is a very quaint innovation, and one which possibly occurred to brave Major Porter in one of the marches and counter-marches of the Civil War.

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and the fourth play in our volume really repays us for pushing on so far. Here is a piece of wild and ghostly poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of Newcastle's Humorous Lovers:

At curfew-time, and at the dead of night,
I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright,
Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow
To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo
To darker caves and solitary woods,
To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods;
I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe,
Blasted with cursèd droppings of mildew;
Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans
Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans;
The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty,
And how thy want of love did murder me;
And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near,
Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear.

But I cannot persuade myself that his Grace of Newcastle wrote those lines himself. Published in 1677, they were as much of a portent as a man in trunk hose and a slashed doublet. The Duke had died a month or two before the play was published; he had grown to be, in extreme old age, the most venerable figure of the Restoration, and it is possible that the Humorous Lovers may have been a relic of his Jacobean youth. He might very well have written it, so old was he, in Shakespeare's lifetime. But the Duke of Newcastle was never a very skilful poet, and it is known that he paid James Shirley to help him with his plays. I feel convinced that if all men had their own, the invocation I have just quoted would fly back into the works of Shirley, and so, no doubt, would the following quaintest bit of conceited fancy. It is part of a fantastical feast which Boldman promises to the Widow of his heart:

The twinkling stars shall to our wish
Make a grand salad in a dish;
Snow for our sugar shall not fail,
Fine candied ice, comfits of hail;
For oranges, gilt clouds will squeeze;
The Milky Way we'll turn to cheese;
Sunbeams we'll catch, shall stand in place
Of hotter ginger, nutmegs, mace;
Sun-setting clouds for roses sweet,
And violet skies strewed for our feet;
The spheres shall for our music play,
While spirits dance the time away.

This is extravagant enough, but surely very picturesque. I seem to see the supper-room of some Elizabethan castle after an elaborate royal masque. The Duchess, who has been dancing, richly attired in sky-coloured silk, with gilt wings on her shoulders, is attended to the refreshments by the florid Duke, personating the river Thamesis, with a robe of cloth of silver around him. It seems the sort of thing a poet so habited might be expected to say between a galliard and a coranto.

At first sight we seem to have reached a really good rhetorical play when we arrive at Bancroft's tragedy of Sertorius, published in 1679, and so it would be if Dryden and Lee had never written. But its seeming excellence is greatly lessened when we recollect that All for Love and Mithridates, two great poems which are almost good plays, appeared in 1678, and inspired our poor imitative Bancroft. Sertorius is written in smooth and well-sustained blank verse, which is, however, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted. I suspect that John Bancroft was a very interesting man. He was a surgeon, and his practice lay particularly In the theatrical and literary world. He acquired, it is said, from his patients "a passion for the Muses," and an inclination to follow in the steps of those whom he cured or killed. The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an epilogue to Sertorius, in which he says that—

Our Poet to learnèd critics does submit, But scorns those little vermin of the pit, Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit,

and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional than those of the professional playwrights themselves. He wrote three plays, and lived until 1696. One fancies the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, laden with his secrets and his confidences. Why did he not write memoirs, and tell us what it was that drove Nat Lee mad, and how Otway really died, and what Dryden's habits were? Why did he not purvey magnificent indiscretions whispered under the great periwig of Wycherley, or repeat that splendid story about Etheredge and my Lord Mulgrave? Alas! we would have given a wilderness of Sertoriuses for such a series of memoirs.

The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is Weston's Amazon Queen, of 1667, written in pompous rhymed heroics; here is The Fortune Hunters, a comedy of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, James Carlile, who, being brought up an actor, preferred "to be rather than to personate a hero," and died in gallant fight for William of Orange, at the battle of Aughrim; here is Mr. Anthony, a comedy written by the Right Honourable the Earl of Orrery, and printed in 1690, a piece never republished among the Earl's works, and therefore of some special interest. But I am sure my reader is exhausted, even if the volume is not, and I spare him any further examination of these obscure dramas, lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of Dr. Johnson, that I

Set wheels on wheels in motion—such a clatter!
To force up one poor nipperkin of water;
Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore.

I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special student of comparative literature—namely, that it is sometimes in the minor writings of an age, where the bias of personal genius is not strongly felt, that the general phenomena of the time are most clearly observed. The Amazon Queen is in rhymed verse, because in 1667 this was the fashionable form for dramatic poetry; Sertorius is in regular and somewhat restrained blank verse, because in 1679 the fashion had once more chopped round. What in Dryden or Otway might be the force of originality may be safely taken as the drift of the age in these imitative and floating nonentities.

A CENSOR OF POETS

The Lives of The Most Famous English Poets, or the Honour of
Parnassus; in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of above Two
Hundred of them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror, to the
Reign of His Present Majesty King James II. Written by William
Winstanley. Licensed June 16, 1686. London, Printed by H. Clark, for
Samuel Manship at the Sign of the Black Bull in Cornhil, 1687.

A maxim which it would be well for ambitious critics to chalk up on the walls of their workshops is this: never mind whom you praise, but be very careful whom you blame. Most critical reputations have struck on the reef of some poet or novelist whom the great censor, in his proud old age, has thought he might disdain with impunity. Who recollects the admirable treatises of John Dennis, acute, learned, sympathetic? To us he is merely the sore old bear, who was too stupid to perceive the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination lavished by Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, weigh like a feather beside one sentence about Wordsworth's Excursion, and one tasteless sneer at Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at the whisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser to have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Shelley. And the very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose book occupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of the rule. His literary existence has been sacrificed by a single outburst of petulant criticism, which was not even literary, but purely political.

The only passage of Winstanley's Lives of the English Poets which is ever quoted is the paragraph which refers to Milton, who, when it appeared, had been dead thirteen years. It runs thus:

"John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English Poets, having written two Heroick Poems and a Tragedy, namely Paradice Lost, Paradice Regain'd, and Sampson Agonista. But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honourable Repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First."

Mr. Winstanley does not leave us in any doubt of his own political bias, and his mode is simply infamous. It is the roughest and most unpardonable expression now extant of the prejudice generally felt against Milton in London, after the Restoration—a prejudice which even Dryden, who in his heart knew better, could not wholly resist. This one sentence is all that most readers of seventeenth-century literature know about Winstanley, and it is not surprising that it has created an objection to him. I forget who it was, among the critics of the beginning of this century, who was accustomed to buy copies of the Lives of the English Poets wherever he could pick them up, and burn them, in piety to the angry spirit of Milton. This was certainly more sensible conduct than that of the Italian nobleman, who used to build MSS. of Martial into little pyres, and consume them with spices, to express his admiration of Catullus. But no one can wonder that the world has not forgiven Winstanley for that atrocious phrase about Milton's fame having "gone out like a candle in a snuff, so that his memory will always stink." No, Mr. William Winstanley, it is your own name that—smells so very unpleasantly.

Yet I am paradoxical enough to believe that poor Winstanley never wrote these sentences which have destroyed his fame. To support my theory, it is needful to recount the very scanty knowledge we possess of his life. He is said to have been a barber, and to have risen by his exertions with the razor; but, against that legend, is to be posed the fact that on the titles of his earliest books, dedicated to public men who must have known, he styles himself "Gent." The dates of his birth and death are, I believe, a matter of conjecture. But the Lives of the English Poets is the latest of his books, and the earliest was published in 1660. This is his England's Worthies, a group of what we should call to-day "biographical studies." The longest and the most interesting of these is one on Oliver Cromwell, the tone of which is almost grossly laudatory, although published at the very moment of Restoration. Now, it is a curious, and, at first sight, a very disgraceful fact, that in 1684, when the book of England's Worthies was re-issued, all the praise of republicans was cancelled, and abuse substituted for it. And then, in 1687, came the Lives of the English Poets, with its horrible attack on Milton. The character of Winstanley seems to be as base as any on literary record. I have come to the conclusion, however, that Winstanley was guilty, neither of retracting what he said about Cromwell, nor of slandering Milton. The black woman excused her husband for not answering the bell, "'Cause he's dead," and the excuse was considered valid. I hope that when these interpolations were made, poor Winstanley was dead.

Any one who reads the Lives of the English Poets carefully, will be impressed with two facts: first, that the author had an acquaintance with the early versifiers of Great Britain, which was quite extraordinary, and which can hardly be found at fault by our modern knowledge; while, secondly, that he shows a sudden and unaccountable ignorance of his immediate contemporaries of the younger school. Except Campion, who is a discovery of our own day, not a single Elizabethan or Jacobean rhymester of the second or third rank escapes his notice. Among the writers of a still later generation, I miss no names save those of Vaughan, who was very obscure in his own lifetime, and Marvell, who would be excluded by the same prejudice which mocked at Milton. But among Poets of the Restoration, men and women who were in their full fame in 1687, the omissions are quite startling. Not a word is here about Otway, Lee, or Crowne; Butler is not mentioned, nor the Matchless Orinda, nor Roscommon, nor Sir Charles Sedley. A careful examination of the dates of works which Winstanley refers to, produces a curious result. There is not mentioned, so far as I can trace, a single poem or play which was published later than 1675, although the date on the title-page of the Lives of the English Poets is 1687. Rather an elaborate list of Dryden's publications is given, but it stops at Amboyna (1673). On this I think it is not too bold to build a theory, which may last until Winstanley's entry of burial is discovered in some country church, that he died soon after 1675. If this were the case, the recantations in his English Worthies of 1684 would be so many posthumous outrages committed on his blameless tomb, and the infamous sentence about Milton may well have been foisted into a posthumous volume by the same wicked hand. If we could think that Samuel Manship, at the Sign of the Black Bull, was the obsequious rogue who did it, that would be one more sin to be numbered against the sad race of publishers.

In studying old books about the poets, it sometimes occurs to us to wonder whether the readers of two hundred years ago appreciated the same qualities in good verse which are now admired. Did the ringing and romantic cadences of Shakespeare affect their senses as they do ours? We know that they praised Carew and Suckling, but was it "Ask me no more where June bestows," and "Hast thou seen the down in the air," which gave them pleasure? It would sometimes seem, from the phrases they use and the passages they quote, that if poetry was the same two centuries ago, its readers had very different ears from ours. Of Herrick Winstanley says that he was "one of the Scholars of Apollo of the middle Form, yet something above George Withers, in a pretty Flowry and Pastoral Gale of Fancy, in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain; which but for the interruption of other trivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst Poetick Landskips," and then he quotes, as a sample of Herrick, a tiresome" epigram," in the poet's worst style. This is not delicate or acute criticism, as we judge nowadays; but I would give a good deal to meet Winstanley at a coffee-house, and go through the Hesperides with him over a dish of chocolate. It would be wonderfully interesting to discover which passages in Herrick really struck the contemporary mind as "flowery," and which as "trivial." But this is just what all seventeenth-century criticism, even Dryden's, omits to explain to us. The personal note in poetical criticism, the appeal to definite taste, to the experience of eye and ear, is not met with, even in suggestion, until we reach the pamphlets of John Dennis.

The particular copy of Winstanley which lies before me is a valuable one; I owe it to the generosity of a friend in Chicago, who hoards rare books, and yet has the greatness of soul sometimes to part with them. It is interleaved, and the blank pages are rather densely inscribed with notes in the handwriting of Dr. Thomas Percy, the poetical Bishop of Dromore. From his hands it passed into those of John Bowyer Nichols, the antiquary. Percy's notes are little more than references to other authorities, memoranda for one of his own useful compilations, yet it is pleasant to have even a slight personal relic of so admirable a man. Mr. Rivière has bound the volume for me, and I suppose that poor rejected Winstanley exists nowhere else in so elegant a shape.

THE ROMANCE OF A DICTIONARY

HISTOIRE DE L'ACADEMIE FRANÇOISE: avec un Abregé des Vies du Cardinal de Richelieu, Vaugelas, Corneille, Ablancourt, Mezerai, Voiture, Patru, la Fontaine, Boileau, Racine Et autres Illustres Academiciens qui la Composent.

A La Haye, MDCLXXXVIII.

It is not often, in these days, when the pastime of bibliography is reduced to a science, that one is rewarded, as one so often was a quarter of a century ago, by picking up an unregarded treasure on the bookstalls. But the other day I really had a pleasant little "find," and it was the reward of virtue. It came of having a tender heart. My eye caught what Mr. Austin Dobson would call "a dear and dumpy twelve," lying open upon other books, face downward, in the most ignominious posture. I saw at a glance, from the tooling on its faded and half-broken back, that it was French and of the seventeenth century, and that somebody had prized it once. I could read the lettering Académ. Franc., and I gave the pence which were wanted for it. It proved a most rewarding little volume. It was published at The Hague in 1688, and it was a new edition of the Histoire de l'Académie Française. A preface says that "for the honour of our nation" (the French, presumably, not the Dutch), the publisher has thought it proper to issue an edition "more correct and more elegant" than has hitherto been seen, brought down to date with many new and curious pieces. Among other things, the said publisher thinks that "the English will not be displeased to see the Panegyric" of King Louis XIV. "admirably rendered in their language by a Person of their Nation." But what immediately caught my attention, and filled me with delight, was an absolutely contemporary account, written specially for this 1688 edition, of the great quarrel between the French Academy and the Abbé Furetière. Of this I propose to speak to-day.

We live in an age of Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, which we look upon as universal panaceas for culture. There was a similar rage for dictionaries in France two hundred and fifty years ago. We may very rapidly remind ourselves that the French Academy was constituted in 1634 with thirty-five members, who became the stationary and immortal Forty in 1639. One of its original functions was the preparation of a great Dictionary of the French language, under the special care of the eminent grammarian, Vaugelas, who had through his lifetime made collections—"various beautiful and curious observations," as Pellisson calls them—towards a reasoned philological study of French. The poet Chapelain was appointed a sort of general editor of the projected Dictionary, which was solemnly started early in 1638. For the next four years the Academicians were very active, spurred on by Richelieu, but when, in 1642, the Cardinal died, their zeal relented, and when, in 1650, Vaugelas's presence ceased to urge them forward, it flagged altogether. Vaugelas died bankrupt, and his creditors seized his writing-desks, the drawers of which contained a great part of the MS. collections for the Dictionary. It was only after a lawsuit that the Academy recovered those papers, and Mézeray was then set to continue the editing of the work. Still twice a week the Academy met to consult about the Dictionary, but so languidly and with so little fire, that Boisrobert said that not the youngest of the Forty could hope to live to print the letter G. As a matter of fact, not one of those who started the Dictionary lived to see it published.

In this slow fashion, with long Rip Van Winkle slumbers and occasional faint awakenings, the French Academy faltered on with fitful persistence towards the completion of its famous Dictionary. But, as I have said, it was a period of great enthusiasm about all such summaries of knowledge, and Paris was thirsting for grammars, lexicons, inventories of language and the like. The Academy insisted that the world must wait for the approach of their vast and lumbering machine; but meanwhile public curiosity was impatient, and all sorts of brief and imperfect dictionaries were issued to satisfy it. The publication of these spurious guides to knowledge infuriated the Academy, until in 1674 the dog permanently occupied the manger by inducing the King to issue a decree "forbidding all printers and publishers to print any new dictionary of the French language, under any title whatsoever, until the publication of that of the French Academy, or until twenty years have expired since the proclamation of the present decree." This cut the ground from under the feet of all rivals, and the Academy could meet twice a week as before and mumble its definitions with serene assurance. From this false security it was roused by the incident which my "dumpy twelve" recounts.

It was from the very heart of their own body that the great attack upon their privileges unexpectedly fell upon the Academicians. In 1662 they had elected (in the place of De Boissat, a very obscure original member) the Abbé of Chalivoy, Antoine Furetière. This man, born in Paris of poor parents in 1619, had raised himself to eminence as an Orientalist and grammarian, and was welcomed among the Forty as likely to be particularly helpful to them in their Dictionary work. He was probably one of those men whose true character does not come out until they attain success. But no sooner was Furetière an Immortal than he began to distinguish himself in unanticipated ways. He proved himself an adept in parody and satire, and so long as he contented himself with laughing at people like Charles Sorel, the author of Francion, who had no friends, the Academicians were calm and amused, But Furetière was not merely the author of that extremely amusing medley, Le Roman Bourgeois (1666), which still holds its place in French literature as a minor classic, but he was also a real student of philology, and one of those who most ardently desired to see the settlement of the canon of French language. It incensed him beyond words that his colleagues dawdled so endlessly over their committees and their definitions. He began to make collections of his own, no doubt at first with the perfectly loyal intention of adding them to the common store. Meanwhile he lashed the rest of the Academy with his tongue. Other Academicians did this also, such men as Patru and Boisrobert, but they had not Furetière's nasty way of putting things. One perceives that about the year 1680 the sarcasms of Furetière had really become something more than the rest of the Immortals could put up with.

He delivered himself into their hands, and here my little volume takes up the tale. On the 3rd of January, 1685, the French Academy met to mourn the death of its most illustrious member, the great Pierre Corneille, and to elect his younger brother to take his place. While the members were chatting together their Librarian handed about among them copies of a "privilege" which had just been obtained by the Abbé Furetière to publish "a universal Dictionary containing generally all French words, old as well as modern, and the terms employed in all arts and sciences." So declares my little book; but it would seem that the officers of the Academy at least a week earlier had their attention drawn to what Furetière was doing. Perhaps it was not until the election of Thomas Corneille that an opportunity occurred of making the members generally aware of it. One wonders whether Furetière himself was present on the 3rd of January; if so, what puttings of periwigs together there must have been in corners, and what taps of gold-headed canes on lace-frilled cuffs! It was felt, as my little volume puts it, that "Monsieur the Abbé Furetière, being one of the Forty Academicians, ought not to have been privately busying himself on a work which he knew to be the principal occupation of the whole Academy." It is surprising, in the face of the monopoly which that body had secured, that Furetière was able to obtain a Privilege for his own Dictionary, but in all probability, as he was one of the Forty, the censors supposed that he was acting in concert with his colleagues.

Then began a hue and cry with which the learned world of Paris rang for months. Never was such a scandal, never such a rain of pamphlets and lampoons on one side and the other. One has only to glance at the contemporary portraits of Furetière to see that he was not the man to yield a point; his wrinkled face looks the very mirror of sarcastic obstinacy and brilliant ill-nature. The Academy, in solemn session, appointed Regnier Desmarais, their secretary, to wait on the Chancellor to demand the cancelling of Furetière's privilege. But the Abbé had powerful friends also, and by their help the Chancellor's action was delayed, while Furetière hurried out a specimen of his work. He says in the preface that no author ever had a more pressing need for the protection of a prince than he has who sees the labour of years about to be sacrificed to the envy of others. He goes on to explain that he has never dreamed of interfering with the work of the Academy, for which he has the greatest possible respect, but that he only hopes to render service to the public by supplementing its labours. The Academy, in fact, had expressly declined to include in its Dictionary the technical terms of art and science, and it is particularly with these that Furetière is occupied. His answer to those who accuse him of stealing from the unpublished cahiers of the Academy is the uniformity of his work from A to Z; whereas, if he had stolen from his colleagues, he must have stopped at O-P, which was the point they had reached in 1684.

The Academy was not pacified, and began to take counsel how they could turn Furetière out of their body. There was no precedent for such a degradation, but a parallel was sought for in the fact that the Sorbonne had successfully ejected one of its most famous doctors, Arnauld. Meanwhile the suit went on, the Thirty-nine versus the One. Furetière is said to have bowed for a moment beneath the storm, offering to blend his work in the general Dictionary of the Academy, or to remove from it all words not admitted to deal technically with art and science. But passion had gone too far, and on the 22nd of January, 1685, at a general meeting, twenty Academicians being present, Furetière was expelled from the body by a majority of nineteen to one. It is believed that the one who voted for mercy was the most illustrious of all, Racine. Boileau and Bossuet also defended the Abbé, and when the matter became at last so serious that the King himself was obliged to take cognisance of it, it was understood that his sympathies also were with Furetière.

My little volume (written, I think, in 1687) does not know anything about the expulsion, which was therefore probably secret. It says: "As to Monsieur Furetière, he no longer puts in an appearance at the meetings of the Academy, but it is not known whether any other Academician is to be elected in his place." As a matter of fact, the society hesitated to go so far as this, and the seat was left vacant. Not for long, however; the unanimous rancour of so many men of influence and rank had successfully ruined the fortune and broken the spirit of the old piratical lexicographer. Before retiring into private life, however, he poured out in his Couches de l'Académie a torrent of poison, which was distilled through the presses of Amsterdam in 1687. One of his earlier colleagues at the Academy supplied the bankrupt man with the necessaries of life, until, on the 14th of May, 1688, probably just as the "dumpy twelve" was passing through the press, he died in Paris like a rat in a hole. His Dictionary, being suppressed in France, was edited, after his death, in 1690, at The Hague and Rotterdam, and enjoyed a great success. We learn from a letter of Racine to Boileau that in 1694 the publisher ventured to offer a copy of a new edition of it to the King of France, and that it was graciously received. If the poor old man could have struggled on a little longer he might have lived to see himself become fashionable and successful again.

With all his misfortunes he managed to beat the Academy, for that body, in spite of its superhuman efforts, did not contrive to publish its Dictionary till four years after the appearance of Furetière's. The latter is a great curiosity of lexicography, a vast storehouse of peculiar and rare information. It is always consulted by scholars, but never without a recollection of the extraordinary struggle which its author sustained, singlehanded, against the world, and in which he fell, overpowered by numbers, only to triumph after all in the ashes of his fame.

LADY WINCHILSEA'S POEMS

MISCELLANY POEMS. _With Two Plays. By Ardelia.

I never list presume to Parnass hill,
But piping low, in shade of lowly grove,
I play to please myself, albeit ill.

Spencer Shep. Cal. June.

Manuscript in folio. Circa_ 1696.

There is no other book in my library to which I feel that I possess so clear a presumptive right as to this manuscript. Other rare volumes would more fitly adorn the collections of bibliophiles more learned, more ingenious, more elegant, than I. But if there is any person in the two hemispheres who has so fair a claim upon the ghost of Ardelia, let that man stand forth. Ardelia was uncultivated and unsung when I constituted myself, years ago, her champion. With the exception of a noble fragment of laudation from Wordsworth, no discriminating praise from any modern critic had stirred the ashes of her name. I made it my business to insist in many places on the talent of Ardelia. I gave her, for the first time, a chance of challenging public taste, by presenting to readers of Mr. Ward's English Poets many pages of extracts from her writings; and I hope it is not indiscreet to say that, when the third volume of that compilation appeared, Mr. Matthew Arnold told me that its greatest revelation to himself had been the singular merit of this lady. Such being my claim on the consideration of Ardelia, no one will, I think, grudge me the possession of this unknown volume of her works in manuscript. It came into my hands by a strange coincidence. In his brief life of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea—for that was Ardelia's real name—Theophilus Gibber says, "A great number of our authoress' poems still continue unpublished, in the hands of the Rev. Mr. Creake." In 1884 I saw advertised, in an obscure book-list, a folio volume of old manuscript poetry. Something excited my curiosity, and I sent for it. It proved to be a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch. I immediately communicated with the bookseller, and asked him whence it came. He replied that it had been sold, with furniture, pictures and books, at the dispersing of the effects of a family of the name of Creake. Thank you, divine Ardelia! It was well done; it was worthy of you.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, is not a commanding figure in history, but she is an isolated and a well-defined one. She is what one of the precursors of Shakespeare calls "a diminutive excelsitude." She was entirely out of sympathy with her age, and her talent was hampered and suppressed by her conditions. She was the solitary writer of actively developed romantic tastes between Marvell and Gray, and she was not strong enough to create an atmosphere for herself within the vacuum in which she languished. The facts of her life are extremely scanty, although they may now be considerably augmented by the help of my folio. She was born about 1660, the daughter of a Hampshire baronet. She was maid of honour to Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, and at Court she met Heneage Finch, who was gentleman of the bed-chamber to the Duke. They married in 1685, probably on the occasion of the enthronement of their master and mistress, and when the crash came in 1688, they fled together to the retirement of Eastwell Park. They inhabited this mansion for the rest of their lives, although it was not until the death of his nephew, in 1712, that Heneage Finch became fourth Earl of Winchilsea. In 1713 Anne was at last persuaded to publish a selection of her poems, and in 1720 she died. The Earl survived her until 1726.

My manuscript was written, I think, in or about the year 1696—that is to say, when Mrs. Finch was in retirement from the Court. She has adopted the habit of writing,

Betrayed by solitude to try Amusements, which the prosperous fly.

But her exile from the world gives her no disquietude. It seems almost an answer to her prayer. Years before, when she was at the centre of fashion in the Court of James II., she had written in an epistle to the Countess of Thanet:

Give me, O indulgent Fate,
Give me yet, before I die,
A sweet, but absolute retreat,
'Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high,
That the world may ne'er invade,
Through such windings and such shade,
My unshaken liberty.

This was a sentiment rarely expressed and still more rarely felt by English ladies at the close of the seventeenth century. What their real opinion usually was is clothed in crude and ready language by the heroines of Wycherley and Shadwell. Like Lucia, in the comedy of Epsom Wells, to live out of London was to live in a wilderness, with bears and wolves as one's companions. Alone in that age Anne Finch truly loved the country, for its own sake, and had an eye to observe its features.

She had one trouble, constitutional low spirits: she was a terrible sufferer from what was then known as "The Spleen." She wrote a long pindaric Ode on the Spleen, which was printed in a miscellany in 1701, and was her first introduction to the public. She talks much about her melancholy in her verses, but, with singular good sense, she recognised that it was physical, and she tried various nostrums. Neither tea, nor coffee, nor ratafia did her the least service:

In vain to chase thee every art I try,
In vain all remedies apply,
In vain the Indian leaf infuse,
Or the parched eastern berry bruise,
Or pass, in vain, those bounds, and nobler liquors use.

Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking hours, and took sleep from her eyelids at night:

How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest,
To a sad mind, with cares oppress'd?
By what soft means shall I invite
Thy powers into my soul to-night?
Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come,
Such darkness shall prepare the room
As thy own palace overspreads,—
Thy palace stored with peaceful beds,—
And Silence, too, shall on thee wait
Deep, as in the Turkish State;
Whilst, still as death, I will be found,
My arms by one another bound,
And my dull limbs so clos'd shall be
As if already seal'd by thee.

She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but without avail. When the abhorred fit came on, the world was darkened to her. Only two things could relieve her—the soothing influence of solitude with nature and the Muses, or the sympathetic presence of her husband. She disdained the little feminine arts of her age:

Nor will in fading silks compose
Faintly the inimitable rose,
Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint on glass
The Sovereign's blurr'd and indistinguished face,
The threatening angel and the speaking ass.

But she will wander at sundown through the exquisite woods of Eastwell, and will watch the owlets in their downy nest or the nightingale silhouetted against the fading sky. Then her constitutional depression passes, and she is able once more to be happy:

Our sighs are then but vernal air, But April-drops our tears,

as she says in delicious numbers that might be Wordsworth's own. In these delightful moments, released from the burden of her tyrant malady, her eyes seem to have been touched with the herb euphrasy, and she has the gift, denied to the rest of her generation, of seeing nature and describing what she sees. In these moods, this contemporary of Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate transcripts of country life as the following:

When the loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads,
Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear,
Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear;
When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,
And unmolested kine rechew the cud:
When curlews cry beneath the village-walls,
And to her straggling brood the partridge calls.

In Eastwell Park there was a hill, called Parnassus, to which she was particularly partial, and to this she commonly turned her footsteps.

Melancholy as she was, however, and devoted to reverie, she could be gay enough upon occasion, and her sprightly poems have a genuine sparkle. Here is an anacreontic—written "for my brother Leslie Finch"—which has never before been printed:

_From the Park, and the Play,
And Whitehall, come away
To the Punch-bowl by far more inviting;
To the fops and 'the beaux
Leave those dull empty shows,
And see here what is truly delighting.

The half globe 'tis in figure,
And would it were bigger,
Yet here's the whole universe floating;
Here's titles and places,
Rich lands, and fair faces,
And all that is worthy our doting.

'Twas a world like to this
The hot Grecian did miss,
Of whom histories keep such a pother;
To the bottom he sunk,
And when he had drunk,
Grew maudlin, and wept for another_.

At another point, Anne Finch bore very little likeness to her noisy sisterhood of fashion. In an age when it was the height of ill-breeding for a wife to admit a partiality for her husband, Ardelia was not ashamed to confess that Daphnis—for so she styled the excellent Heneage Finch—absorbed every corner of her mind that was not occupied by the Muses. It is a real pleasure to transcribe, for the first time since they were written on the 2nd of April, 1685, these honest couplets:

This, to the crown and blessing of my life,
The much-loved husband of a happy wife;
To him whose constant passion found the art
To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart;
And to the world by tenderest proof discovers
They err who say that husbands can't be lovers.
With such return of passion as is due,
Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue,
Daphnis, my hopes, my joys are bounded all in you!

Nearly thirty years later the same accent is audible, thinned a little by advancing years, and subdued from passion to tenderness, yet as genuine as at first. When at length the Earl began to suffer from the gout, his faithful family songster recorded that also in her amiable verse, and prayed that "the bad disease"

May you but brief unfrequent visits find
To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind.

No one can read her sensitive verses, and not be sure that she was the sweetest and most soothing of bed-side visitants.

It was a quiet life which Daphnis and Ardelia spent in the recesses of Eastwell Park. They saw little company and paid few visits. There was a stately excursion now and then, to the hospitable Thynnes at Longleat, and Anne Finch seldom omitted to leave behind her a metrical tribute to the beauties of that mansion. They seem to have kept up little connection with the Court or with London. There is no trace of literary society in this volume. Nicholas Rowe twice sent down for their perusal translations which he had made; and from another source we learn that Lady Winchilsea had a brisk passage of compliments with Pope. But these were rare incidents. We have rather to think of the long years spent in the seclusion of Eastwell, by these gentle impoverished people of quality, the husband occupied with his mathematical studies, his painting, the care of his garden; the wife studying further afield in her romantic reverie, watching the birds in wild corners of her park, carrying her Tasso, hidden in a fold of her dress, to a dell so remote that she forgets the way back, and has to be carried home "in a Water-cart driven by one of the Underkeepers in his green Coat, with a Hazle-bough for a Whip." It is a little oasis of delicate and pensive refinement in that hot close of the seventeenth century, when so many unseemly monsters were bellowing in the social wilderness.

AMASIA

AMASIA: or, The Works of the Muses. A Collection of Poems. In three volumes. By Mr. John Hopkins. London: Printed by Tho. Warren, for Bennet Banbury, at the Blue-Anchor, in the Lower-Walk of the New-Exchange, 1700.

It has often been remarked that if the author of the poorest collection of minor verse would accurately relate in his quavering numbers what his personal observations and adventures have been, his book would not be entirely without value. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this is precisely what he cannot do. His rhymes carry him whither he would not, and he is lost in a fog of imitated phrases and spurious sensations. The very odd and very rare set of three little volumes, which now come before us, offer a curious exception to this rule. The author of Amasia was no poet, but he possessed the faculty of writing with exactitude about himself. He prattled on in heroic couplets from hour to hour, recording the tiny incidents of his life. At first sight, his voluble miscellany seems a mere wilderness of tame verses, but when we examine it closely a story gradually evolves. We come to know John Hopkins, and live in the intimacy of his circle. His poems contain a novelette in solution. So far as I can discover, nothing whatever is known of him save what he reveals of himself, and no one, I think, has ever searched his three uninviting volumes. In the following paragraphs I have put together his story as it is to be found in the pages of Amasia.

By a single allusion to the Epistolary Poems of Charles Hopkins, "very well perform'd by my Brother," in 1694, we are able to identify the author of Amasia with certainty. He was the second son of the Right Rev. Ezekiel Hopkins, Lord Bishop of Derry. The elder brother whom we have mentioned, Charles, was considerably his senior; for six years the latter occupied a tolerably prominent place in London literary society, was the intimate friend of Dryden and Congreve, published three or four plays not without success, and possessed a name which is pretty frequently met with in books of the time. But to John Hopkins I have discovered scarcely an allusion. He does not seem to have moved in his brother's circle, and his society was probably more courtly than literary. If we may trust his own account the author of Amasia was born, doubtless at Londonderry, on the 1st of January, 1675. He was, therefore, only twenty-five when his poems were published, and the exquisitely affected portrait which adorns the first volume must represent him as younger still, since it was executed by the Dutch engraver, F.H. van Hove, who was found murdered in October, 1698.

Pause a moment, dear reader, and observe Mr. John Hopkins, alias Sylvius, set out with all the artillery of ornament to storm the heart of Amasia. Notice his embroidered silken coat, his splendid lace cravat, the languishment of his large foolish eyes, the indubitable touch of Spanish red on those smooth cheeks. But, above all contemplate the wonders of his vast peruke. He has a name, be sure, for every portion of that killing structure. Those sausage-shaped curls, close to the ears, are confidants; those that dangle round the temples, favorites; the sparkling lock that descends alone over the right eyebrow is the passagère; and, above all, the gorgeous knot that unites the curls and descends on the left breast, is aptly named the meurtrière. If he would but turn his head, we should see his crèves-coeur, the two delicate curled locks at the nape of his neck. The escutcheon below his portrait bears, very suitably, three loaded muskets rampant. Such was Sylvius, conquering but, alas! not to conquer.

The youth of John Hopkins was passed in the best Irish society. His father, the Bishop, married—apparently in second nuptials, for John speaks not of her as a man speaks of his mother—the daughter of the Earl of Radnor. Lady Araminta Hopkins seems to have been a friend of Isabella, Duchess of Grafton, the exquisite girl who, at the age of five, had married a bridegroom of nine, and at twenty-three was left a widow, to be the first toast in English society. The poems of John Hopkins are dedicated to this Dowager-duchess, who, when they were published, had already for two years been the wife of Sir Thomas Hanmer. At the age of twelve, and probably in Dublin, Hopkins met the mysterious lady who animates these volumes under the name of Amasia. Who was Amasia? That, alas! even the volubility of her lover does not reveal. But she was Irish, the daughter of a wealthy and perhaps titled personage, and the intimate companion for many years of the beautiful Duchess of Grafton.

Love did not begin at first sight. Sylvius played with Amasia when they both were children, and neither thought of love. Later on, in early youth, the poet was devoted only to a male friend, one Martin. To him ecstatic verses are inscribed:

O Martin! Martin! let the grateful sound Reach to that Heav'n which has our Friendship crown'd, And, like our endless Friendship, meet no bound.

But alas! one day Martin came back, after a long absence, and, although he still

With generous, kind, continu'd Friendship burn'd,

he found Sylvius entirely absorbed by Amasia. Martin knew better than to show temper; he accepted the situation, and

the lov'd Amasia's Health flew round,
Amasia's Health the Golden Goblets crown'd.

Now began the first and happiest portion of the story. Amasia had no suspicion of the feelings of the poet, and he was only too happy to be permitted to watch her movements. He records, in successive copies of verses, the various things she did. He seems to have been on terms of delightful intimacy with the lady, and he calls all sorts of people of the highest position to witness how he suffered. To Lady Sandwich are dedicated poems on "Amasia, drawing her own Picture," on "Amasia, playing with a Clouded Fan," on "Amasia, singing, and sticking pins in a Red Silk Pincushion." We are told how Amasia "looked at me through a Multiplying-Glass," how she was troubled with a redness in her eyes, how she danced before a looking-glass, how her flowered muslin nightgown (or "night-rail," as he calls it) took fire, and how, though she promised to sing, yet she never performed. We have a poem on the circumstance that Amasia, "having prick'd me with a Pin, accidentally scratched herself with it;" and another on her "asking me if I slept well after so tempestuous a night." But perhaps the most intimate of all is a poem "To Amasia, tickling a Gentleman." It was no perfunctory tickling that Amasia administered:

While round his sides your nimble Fingers played,
With pleasing softness did they swiftly rove,
While, at each touch, they made his Heart-strings move.
As round his Breast, his ravish'd Breast they crowd,
We hear their Musick when he laughs aloud.

This is probably the only instance in literature in which a gentleman has complacently celebrated in verse the fact that his lady-love has tickled some other gentleman.

But this generous simplicity was not long to last. In 1690 Hopkins's father, the Bishop, had died. We may conjecture that Lady Araminta took charge of the boy, and that his home, in vacation time, was with her in Dublin or London. He writes like a youth who has always been petted; the frou-frou of fine ladies' petticoats is heard in all his verses. But he had no fortune and no prospects; he was utterly, he confesses, without ambition. The stern papa of Amasia had no notion of bestowing her on the penniless Sylvius, and when the latter began to court her in earnest, she rebuffed him. She tore up his love-letters, she teased him by sending her black page to the window when he was ogling for her in the street below, she told him he was too young for her, and although she had no objection to his addressing verses to her, she gave him no serious encouragement. She was to be married, he hints, to some one of her own rank—some rich "country booby."

At last, early in 1698, in company with the Duchess of Grafton, and possibly on the occasion of the second marriage of the latter, Amasia was taken off to France, and Hopkins never saw her again. A year later he received news of her death, and his little romance was over. He became ill, and Dr. Gibbons, the great fashionable physician of the day, was called in to attend him. The third volume closes by his summoning the faithful and unupbraiding Martin back to his heart:

Love lives in Sun-Shine, or that Storm, Despair, But gentler Friendship Breathes a Mod'rate Air.

And so Sylvius, with all his galaxy of lovely Irish ladies, his fashionable Muses, and his trite and tortured fancy, disappears into thin air.

The only literary man whom he mentions as a friend is George Farquhar, himself a native of Londonderry, and about the same age as Hopkins. This playwright seems to be sometimes alluded to as Daphnis, sometimes under his own name. Before the performance of Love and a Bottle, Hopkins prophesied for the author a place where

Congreve, Vanbrook, and Wicherley must sit, The great Triumvirate of Comick Wit,

and later on he thought that even Collier himself ought to commend the Constant Couple, or A Trip to the Jubilee. At the first performance of this play, towards the close of 1699, Hopkins was greatly perturbed by the presence of a lady who reminded him of Amasia, and when he visited the theatre next he was less pleased with the play. He had a vague and infelicitous scheme for turning Paradise Lost into rhyme. These are the only traces of literary bias. In other respects Hopkins is interested in nothing more serious than a lock of Amasia's hair; the china cup she had, "round the sides of which were painted Trees, and at the bottom a Naked Woman Weeping;" her box of patches, in which she finds a silver penny; or the needlework embroidered on her gown. When Amasia died there was no reason why Sylvius should continue to exist, and he fades out of our vision like a ghost.

LOVE AND BUSINESS

LOVE AND BUSINESS: in a Collection of occasionary Verse and epistolary Prose not hitherto published. By Mr. George Farquhar. En Orenge il n'y a point d'oranges. London, printed for B. Lintott, at the Post-House, in the Middle Temple-Gate, Fleet Street. 1702.

There are some books, like some people, of whom we form an indulgent opinion without finding it easy to justify our liking. The young man who went to the life-insurance office and reported that his father had died of no particular disease, but just of "plain death," would sympathise with the feeling I mention. Sometimes we like a book, not for any special merit, but just because it is what it is. The rare, and yet not celebrated, miscellany of which I am about to write has this character. It is not instructive, or very high-toned, or exceptionally clever, but if it were a man, all people that are not prigs would say that it was a very good sort of fellow. If it be, as it certainly is, a literary advantage for a nondescript collection of trifles, to reproduce minutely the personality of its writer, then Love and Business has one definite merit. Wherever we dip into its pages we may use it as a telephone, and hear a young Englishman, of the year 1700, talking to himself and to his friends in the most unaffected accents.

Captain George Farquhar, in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age. He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of "a splenetic and amorous complexion," half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a very honest and gallant gentleman. He had taken to the stage kindly enough, and at twenty-one had written Love and a Bottle. Since then, two other plays, The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair, had proved that he had wit and fancy, and knew how to knit them together into a rattling comedy. But he was poor, always in pursuit of that timid wild-fowl, the occasional guinea, and with no sort of disposition to settle down into a heavy citizen. In order to bring down a few brace of golden game, he shovels into Lintott's hands his stray verses of all kinds, a bundle of letters he wrote from Holland, a dignified essay or discourse upon Comedy, and, with questionable taste perhaps, a set of copies of the love-letters he had addressed to the lady who became his wife. All this is not very praiseworthy, and as a contribution to literature it is slight indeed; but, then, how genuine and sincere, how guileless and picturesque is the self-revelation of it! There is no attempt to make things better than they are, nor any pandering to a cynical taste by making them worse. Why should he conceal or falsify? The town knows what sort of a fellow George Farquhar is. Here are some letters and some verses; the beaux at White's may read them if they will, and then throw them away.

As we turn the desultory pages, the figure of the author rises before us, good-natured, easygoing, high-coloured, not bad-looking, with an air of a gentleman in spite of his misfortunes. We do not know the exact details of his military honours. We may think of him as swaggering in scarlet regimentals, but we have his own word for it that he was often in mufti. His mind is generally dressed, he says, like his body, in black; for though he is so brisk a spark in company, he suffers sadly from the spleen when he is alone. We can follow him pretty closely through his day. He is a queer mixture of profanity and piety, of coarseness and loyalty, of cleverness and density; we do not breed this kind of beau nowadays, and yet we might do worse, for this specimen is, with all his faults, a man. He dresses carefully in the morning, in his uniform or else in his black suit. When he wants to be specially smart, as, for instance, when he designs a conquest at a birthday-party, he has to ferret among the pawnbrokers for scraps of finery, or secure on loan a fair, full-bottom wig. But he is not so impoverished that he cannot on these occasions give his valet and his barber plenty of work to do preparing his face with razors, perfumes and washes. He would like to be Sir Fopling Flutter, if he could afford it, and gazes a little enviously at that noble creature in his French clothes, as he lounges luxuriantly past him in his coach with six before and six behind.

Poor Captain Farquhar begins to expect that he himself will never be "a first-rate Beau." So, on common mornings, a little splenetic, he wanders down to the coffee-houses and reads the pamphlets, those which find King William glorious, and those that rail at the watery Dutch. He will even be a little Jacobitish for pure foppery, and have a fling at the Church, but in his heart he is with the Ministry. He meets a friend at White's, and they adjourn presently to the Fleece Tavern, where the drawer brings them a bottle of New French and a neat's tongue, over which they discuss the doctrine of predestination so hotly that two mackerel-vendors burst in, mistaking their lifted voices for a cry for fish. His friend has business in the city, and so our poet strolls off to the Park, and takes a turn in the Mall with his hat in his hand, prepared for an adventure or a chat with a friend. Then comes the play, the inevitable early play, still, even in 1700, apt to be so rank-lipped that respectable ladies could only appear at it in masks. It was the transition period, and poor Comedy, who was saying good-bye to literature, was just about to console herself with modesty.

However, a domino may slip aside, and Mr. George Farquhar notices a little lady in a deep mourning mantua, whose eyes are not to be forgotten. She goes, however; it is useless to pursue her; but the music raises his soul to such a pitch of passion that he is almost melancholy. He strolls out into Spring Garden, but there, "with envious eyes, I saw every Man pick up his Mate, whilst I alone walked like solitary Adam before the Creation of his Eve; but the place was no Paradise to me; nothing I found entertaining but the Nightingale." So that in those sweet summer evenings of 1700, over the laced and brocaded couples promenading in Spring Garden, as over good Sir Roger twelve years later, the indulgent nightingale still poured her notes. To-day you cannot hear the very bells of St. Martin's for the roar of the traffic. So lonely, and too easily enamoured, George has to betake himself to the tavern, and a passable Burgundy. There is no idealism about him. He is very fit for repentance next morning. "The searching Wine has sprung the Rheumatism in my Right Hand, my Head aches, my Stomach pukes." Our poor, good-humoured beau has no constitution for this mode of life, and we know, though happily he dreams not of it, that he is to die before he reaches thirty.

This picture of Farquhar's life is nowhere given in the form just related, but not one touch in the portrait but is to be found somewhere in the frank and easy pages of Love and Business. The poems are of their age and kind. There is a "Pindarick," of course; it was so easy to write one, and so reputable. There are compliments in verse to one of the female wits who were writing then for the stage, Mrs. Trotter, author of the Fatal Friendship; there are amatory explanations of all kinds. When he fails to keep an appointment with a lady on account of the rain—for there were no umbrellas in those days—he likens himself to Leander, wistful on the Sestian shore. He is not always very discreet; Damon's thoughts when "Night's black Curtain o'er the World was spread" were very innocent, but such as we have decided nowadays to say nothing about. It was the fashion of the time to be outspoken. There is no value, however, in the verse, except that it is graphic now and then. The letters are much more interesting. Those sent from Holland in the autumn of 1700 are very good reading. I make bold to quote one passage from the first, describing the storm he encountered in crossing. It depicts our hero to the life, with all his inconsistencies. He says: "By a kind of Poetical Philosophy I bore up pretty well under my Apprehensions; though never worse prepared for Death, I must confess, for I think I never had so much Money about me at a time. We had some Ladies aboard, that were so extremely sick, that they often wished for Death, but were damnably afraid of being drown'd. But, as the Scripture says, 'Sorrow may last for a Night, but Joy cometh in the Morning,'" and so on. The poor fellow means no harm by all this, as Hodgson once said of certain remarks of Byron's.

The love-letters are very curious. It is believed that the sequel of them was a very unhappy marriage. Captain Farquhar was of a loving disposition, and as inflammable as a hay-rick. He cannot have been much more than twenty-one when he described what he desired in a wife. "O could I find," he said—

O could I find (Grant, Heaven, that once I may!)
A Nymph fair, kind, poetical and gay
Whose Love should blaze, unsullied and divine.
Lighted at first by the bright Lamp of mine.
Free as a Mistress, faithful as a wife.
And one that lov'd a Fiddle as her Life,
Free from all sordid Ends, from Interest free,
For my own Sake affecting only me,
What a blest Union should our Souls combine!
I hers alone, and she be only mine!

It does not seem a very exacting ideal, but the poor poet missed it. Whether Mrs. Farquhar loved a fiddle as her life is not recorded, but she certainly was not free from all sordid ends and unworthy tricks. The little lady in the mourning mantua soon fell in love with our gallant spark, and when he made court to her, she represented herself as very wealthy. The deed accomplished, Mrs. Farquhar turned out to be penniless; and the poet, like a gentleman as he was, never reproached her, but sat down cheerfully to a double poverty. In Love and Business the story does not proceed so far. He receives Miss Penelope V——'s timid advances, describes himself to her, is soon as much in love with his little lady as she with him, and is making broad demands and rich-blooded confidences in fine style, no offence taken where no harm is meant. In one of the letters to Penelope we get a very interesting glance at a famous, and, as it happens, rather obscure, event—the funeral of the great Dryden, in May 1700. Farquhar says:

"I come now from Mr. Dryden's Funeral, where we had an Ode in Horace sung, instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find that we don't think a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the Ceremony was a kind of Rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; because the Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an extraordinary Man, and bury'd after an extraordinary Fashion; for I believe there was never such another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great and ingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the Author [Dr. Garth], whose Prescriptions can restore the Living, and his Pen embalm the Dead. And so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same with his Life,—Variety, and not of a Piece. The Quality and Mob, Farce and Heroicks, the Sublime and Ridicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra in a Hackney Coach."

WHAT ANN LANG READ

Who was Ann Lang? Alas! I am not sure; but she flourished one hundred and sixty years ago, under his glorious Majesty, George I., and I have become the happy possessor of a portion of her library. It consists of a number of cheap novels, all published in 1723 and 1724, when Ann Lang probably bought them; and each carries, written on the back of the title, "ann Lang book 1727," which is doubtless the date of her lending them to some younger female friend. The letters of this inscription are round and laboriously shaped, while the form is always the same, and never "Ann Lang, her book," which is what one would expect. It is not the hand of a person of quality: I venture to conclude that she who wrote it was a milliner's apprentice or a servant-girl. There are five novels in this little collection, and a play, and a pamphlet of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, all signed upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, the great Eliza Haywood.

No one who has not dabbled among old books knows how rare have become the strictly popular publications of a non-literary kind which a generation of the lower middle class has read and thrown away. Eliza Haywood lives in the minds of men solely through one very coarse and cruel allusion to her made by Pope in the Dunciad. She was never recognised among people of intellectual quality; she ardently desired to belong to literature, but her wish was never seriously gratified, even by her friend Aaron Hill. Yet she probably numbered more readers, for a year or two, than any other person in the British realm. She poured forth what she called "little Performances" from a tolerably respectable press; and the wonder is that in these days her abundant writings are so seldom to be met with. The secret doubtless is that her large public consisted almost wholly of people like Ann Lang. Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, by basket-women, by 'prentices of all sorts, male and female, but mostly the latter. For girls of this sort there was no other reading of a light kind in 1724. It was Eliza Haywood or nothing. The men of the same class read Defoe; but he, with his cynical severity, his absence of all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards women, was not likely to be preferred by "straggling nymphs." The footman might read Roxana, and the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over Moll Flanders; there was much in these romances to interest men. But what had Ann Lang to do with stories so cold and harsh? She read Eliza Haywood.

But most of her sisters, of Eliza's great clientèle, did not know how to treat a book. They read it to tatters, and they threw it away. It may be news to some readers that these early novels were very cheap. Ann Lang bought Love in Excess, which is quite a thick volume, for two shillings; and the first volume of Idalia (for Eliza was Ouidaesque even in her titles) only cost her eighteen-pence. She seems to have been a clean girl. She did not drop warm lard on the leaves. She did not tottle up her milk-scores on the bastard-title. She did not scribble in the margin "Emanuella is a foul wench." She did not dog's-ear her little library, or stain it, or tear it. I owe it to that rare and fortunate circumstance of her neatness that her beloved books have come into my possession after the passage of so many generations. It must be recollected that Eliza Haywood lived in the very twilight of English fiction. Sixteen years were still to pass, in 1724, before the British novel properly began to dawn in Pamela, twenty-five years before it broke in the full splendour of Tom Jones. Eliza Haywood simply followed where, two generations earlier, the redoubtable Mrs. Aphra Behn had led. She preserved the old romantic manner, a kind of corruption of the splendid Scudéry and Calprenède folly of the middle of the seventeenth century. All that distinguished her was her vehement exuberance and the emptiness of the field. Ann Lang was young, and instinctively attracted to the study of the passion of love. She must read something, and there was nothing but Eliza Haywood for her to read.

The heroines of these old stories were all palpitating with sensibility, although that name had not yet been invented to describe their condition. When they received a letter beginning "To the divine Lassellia," or "To the incomparable Donna Emanuella," they were thrown into the most violent disorder; "a thousand different Passions succeeded one another in their turns," and as a rule "'twas all too sudden to admit disguise." When a lady in Eliza Haywood's novels receives a note from a gentleman, "all her Limbs forget their Function, and she sinks fainting on the Bank, in much the same posture as she was before she rais'd herself a little to take the Letter." I am positive that Ann Lang practised this series of attitudes in the solitude of her garret.

There is no respite for the emotions from Eliza's first page to her last. The implacable Douxmoure (for such was her singular name) "continued for some time in a Condition little different from Madness; but when Reason had a little recovered its usual Sway, a deadly Melancholy succeeded Passion." When Bevillia tried to explain to her cousin that Emilius was no fit suitor for her hand, the young lady swooned twice before she seized Bevillia's "cruel meaning;" and then—ah! then—"silent the stormy Passions roll'd in her tortured Bosom, disdaining the mean Ease of raging or complaining. It was a considerable time before she utter'd the least Syllable; and when she did, she seem'd to start as from some dreadful Dream, and cry'd, 'It is enough—in knowing one I know the whole deceiving Sex'"; and she began to address an imaginary Women's Rights Meeting.

Plot was not a matter about which Eliza Haywood greatly troubled herself. A contemporary admirer remarked, with justice:

'Tis Love Eliza's soft Affections fires;
Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires;
'Tis Love that gives D'Elmont his manly Charms,
And tears Amena from her Father's Arms.

These last-named persons are the hero and heroine of Love in Excess; or The Fatal Inquiry, which seems to have been the most popular of the whole series. This novel might be called Love Through a Window; for it almost entirely consists of a relation of how the gentleman prowled by moonlight in a garden, while the lady, in an agitated disorder, peeped out of her lattice in "a most charming Dishabillée." Alas! there was a lock to the door of a garden staircase, and while the lady "was paying a Compliment to the Recluse, he was dextrous enough to slip the Key out of the Door unperceived." Ann Lang!—"a sudden cry of Murder, and the noise of clashing Swords," come none too soon to save those blushes which, we hope, you had in readiness for the turning of the page! Eliza Haywood assures us, in Idalia, that her object in writing is that "the Warmth and Vigour of Youth may be temper'd by a due Consideration"; yet the moralist must complain that she goes a strange way about it. Idalia herself was "a lovely Inconsiderate" of Venice, who escaped in a "Gondula" up "the River Brent," and set all Vicenza by the ears through her "stock of Haughtiness, which nothing could surmount." At last, after adventures which can scarcely have edified Ann Lang, Idalia abruptly "remember'd to have heard of a Monastery at Verona," and left Vicenza at break of day, taking her "unguarded languishments" out of that city and out of the novel. It is true that Ann Lang, for 2s., bought a continuation of the career of Idalia; but we need not follow her.

The perusal of so many throbbing and melting romances must necessarily have awakened in the breast of female readers a desire to see the creator of these tender scenes. I am happy to inform my readers that there is every reason to believe that Ann Lang gratified this innocent wish. At all events, there exists among her volumes the little book of the play sold at the doors of Drury Lane Theatre, when, in the summer of 1724, Eliza Haywood's new comedy of A Wife to be Lett was acted there, with the author performing in the part of Mrs. Graspall. The play itself is wretched, and tradition says that it owed what little success it enjoyed to the eager desire which the novelist's readers felt to gaze upon her features. She was about thirty years of age at the time; but no one says that she was handsome, and she was undoubtedly a bad actress, I think the disappointment that evening at the Theatre Royal opened the eyes of Ann Lang. Perhaps it was the appearance of Eliza in the flesh which prevented her old admirer from buying The Secret History of Cleomina, suppos'd dead, which I miss from the collection.

If Ann Lang lived on until the publication of Pamela—especially if during the interval she had bettered her social condition—with what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with it in her muff, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She must have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive disgust. The English novel began in 1740, and after that date there was always something wholesome for Ann Lang and her sisters to read.

CATS

LES CHATS. A Rotterdam, chez Jean Daniel Beman, MDCCXXVIII.

An accomplished lady of my acquaintance tells me that she is preparing an anthology of the cat. This announcement has reminded me of one of the oddest and most entertaining volumes in my library. People who collect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving which represents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of a gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume. The volume is Les Chats, the book before us, and the portrait is that of the author, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif. He was the son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in fashion in France. Somebody said of him, when he was famous as the laureate of the cats, that he had risen in life by never scratching, by always having velvet paws, and by never putting up his back, even when he was startled. Voltaire called him "my very dear Sylph," and he was the ideal of all that was noiseless, graceful, good-humoured, and well-bred. He slipped unobtrusively into the French Academy, and lived to be eighty-three, dying at last, like Anacreon, in the midst of music and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera, affecting to be a sad old rogue to the very last.

This book on Cats, the only one by which he is now remembered, was the sole production of his lifetime which cost him any annoyance. He was forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered a little frivolous, even for such a petit conteur as Moncrif. People continued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did was the result of one such twitting. The poet Roy made an epigram about "cats" and "rats," in execrable taste, no doubt; this stung our Sylph to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais Royal and beat Roy with a stick when he came out. The poet was, perhaps, not much hurt; at all events, he had the presence of mind to retort, "Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet!" It was six years after this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, and then the shower of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be made historiographer; "Oh, nonsense," the wits cried, "he must mean historiogriffe" and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met, to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots. He had the weakness to apologise for his charming book, and to withdraw it from circulation. His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his Zélindors and Zéloïdes and Erosines, which to us seem utterly vapid and frivolous, never gave him a moment's uneasiness. His crumpled rose-leaf was the book by which his name lives in literature.

The book of cats is written in the form of eleven letters to Madame la Marquise de B——. The anonymous author represents himself as too much excited to sleep, after an evening spent in a fashionable house, where the company was abusing cats. He was unsupported; where was the Marquise, who would have brought a thousand arguments to his assistance, founded on her own experience of virtuous pussies? Instead of going to bed he will sit up and indite the panegyric of the feline race. He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the people he has just left. It culminated in the conduct of a lady who declared that cats were poison, and who, "when pussy appeared in the room, had the presence of mind to faint." These people had rallied him on the absurdity of his enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well knows, "how many women have a passion for cats, and how many men are women in this respect."

So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry, its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and its constant sparkle of anecdote. He is troubled to account for the existence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that when the animals were in the Ark, Noah gave the lion a great box on the ear, which made him sneeze, and produce a cat out his nose. But the author questions this origin, and is more inclined to agree with a Turkish Minister of Religion, sometime Ambassador to France, that the ape, "weary of a sedentary life" in the Ark, paid his attentions to a very agreeable young lioness, whose infidelities resulted in the birth of a Tom-cat and a Puss-cat, and that these, combining the qualities of their parents, spread through the Ark un esprit de coquetterie—which lasted during the whole of the sojourn there. Moncrif has no difficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats, and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day on a point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which his favourite pussy was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising.

From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributes to the "harmless, necessary cat." I am seized with an ambition to put some fragments of these into English verse. Most of them are highly complimentary. It is true that Ronsard was one of those who could not appreciate a "matou." He sang or said:

There is no man now living anywhere
Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I;
I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare,
And when I see one come, I turn and fly.

But among the précieuses of the seventeenth century there was much more appreciation. Mme. Deshoulières wrote a whole series of songs and couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to her husband, referring to the attentions she herself receives from admirers, she adds:

Deshoulières cares not for the smart
Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hussy,
But, like a mouse, her idle heart
Is captured by a pussy.

Much better than these is the sonnet on the cat of the Duchess of
Lesdiguières, with its admirable line:

Chatte pour tout le monde, et pour les chats tigresse.

A fugitive epistle by Scarron, delightfully turned, is too long to be quoted here, nor can I pause to cite the rondeau which the Duchess of Maine addressed to her favourite. But she supplemented it as follows:

My pretty puss, my solace and delight,
To celebrate thy loveliness aright
I ought to call to life the bard who sung
Of Lesbia's sparrow with so sweet a tongue;
But 'tis in vain to summon here to me
So famous a dead personage as he,
And you must take contentedly to-day
This poor rondeau that Cupid wafts your way.