A JAR OF HONEY
FROM MOUNT HYBLA

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A JAR OF HONEY

FROM

MOUNT HYBLA

BY LEIGH HUNT

ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD DOYLE

A NEW EDITION

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1883

TO
HORACE SMITH,
WHO, THOUGH HE SUPPRESSES THE PASTORALS WHICH HE WROTE
IN HIS YOUTH,
WILL RETAIN AS LONG AS HE LIVES,
A HEART OPEN TO EVERY NATURAL AND NOBLE IMPRESSION,
THESE PAGES,
WITHOUT HIS KNOWLEDGE, BUT CONFIDING IN HIS INDULGENCE,
ARE INSCRIBED,
BY HIS EVER GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE FRIEND,
LEIGH HUNT.

CONTENTS.

OVERFLOWINGS OF THE JAR.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DESIGNED AND DRAWN ON WOOD BY RICHARD DOYLE

CHRISTMAS AND ITALY;

OR

A PREFATORY ESSAY, SHOWING THE EXTREME FITNESS
OF THIS BOOK FOR THE SEASON.

In one of the volumes of that celebrated French publication, the Almanach des Gourmands, which sounds the depth of the merit of soups, and decides on the distracting claims of the most affinitive relishes, there is a frontispiece presenting to the respectful eyes of the reader a “Jury of Tasters.” They form a board of elderly gentlemen with the most thoughtful faces, and are in the act of chewing each his mouthful, and profoundly ruminating on its pretensions. Having seen but this single volume of the work, and that only for a short time (which we mention with becoming regret), we are not qualified to report its verdicts; but one of them made an impression on us not to be forgotten. It ran as follows:—“With this sauce a man might eat his father.”

Now, far are we, in the most ambitious moments of our honey-making, from aspiring at a judgment upon us like that;—sad evidence of the excesses of imagination into which the most serious intellects may be transported, in consequence of giving way to their appetites. One of the especial parts of our vocation is to draw sweet out of bitter; and the only association of ideas which these unfilial sages brought to our mind, was that of an equally searching, but far nobler set of judges, who, when this our Honey first made its appearance at the periodical table of Mr. Ainsworth, and was thence diffused over the country, exclaimed from all quarters, after the most benignant meditation, “With this sauce a man might swallow some of the bitterest morsels of life.” “This is the condiment to sweeten every man’s daily bread.” “There is the right Christian aroma in the sacrificial part of the offering of these dulcitudes.”

We blush, of course, with the requisite modesty in repeating these approvals; and, indeed, should blush a great deal more if we thought that the contents of our Jar (as far as they originate with ourselves) had any merit beyond such as might easily be competed with by thousands throughout the land, upon the strength of their own thoughts and good-will, assisted by a little reading and cheerfulness; but the truth is, that our friends in Cornhill, having purchased the stock in consequence of those approvals, and thinking it worth their while, after it had been clarified and augmented, to put it into elegant vehicles of their own, and so qualify it to be made into Christmas presents, we are desirous to show how fit it is for that purpose; nay, how emphatically it would have been so considered in the “good old Christmas times.”

It is true, that besides the good old Christmas times, there are such things as good new Christmas times; and in respect to the great object of both, we are heartily of opinion that the latter far surpass the former, and that no literary fare for the season ever came up to the substantial as well as exquisite food set forth for us in the pages of Chimes and Christmas Carols. They are nectar and ambrosia for the spirit in the humblest shapes of the flesh. They are the sermons of the morning rescued from the dead letter of mere assent and custom, reproduced with all the allurements of wit and pathos, and made contributory to the greatest practical workings of the time. And the time has no greater glory than the fact of the conversion of satire itself to a beneficent spirit, which (with a few occasional deviations, that must be pardoned for habit’s sake) it obviously and largely possesses, and which it will complete ere long, by an impartiality towards every rank and description of men.

These exceptions to our claims being admitted, we shall grow bold on the strength of our candour; and aver, that our Jar of Honey is eminently suited to almost all other old Christmas associations (of an unvulgar order), while at the same time it does not omit, if it does not prominently put forth, this modern one of the right Christian spirit; as indeed, by the favour of the critics, has already been noticed. Christmas amusements of old were a mixture of poetry, piety, revelry, superstition, story-telling, and masquing, particularly Pagan and Arcadian masquing; and here you have them all. But they were not confined to these. At no time does talk run freer on all subjects than at Christmas, because at no time are the animal spirits set more at liberty; and hence no topic is baulked if it come uppermost, any more than it is in these pages. And as to the foreign part of our title, when Shakspeare wrote his Winter’s Tale (and a Winter’s Tale was emphatically a Christmas Tale) he laid the scene of it in the same country as that of our little Jar. Shakspeare’s Christmas Tale is a Sicilian tale, and it presents the same mixture as we do, of old Sicilian story and English pastoral. To be exclusively English was never the contemplation of any Christmas talk. No later than the other day, Coleridge wrote a play in professed imitation of the Winter’s Tale. He calls it “Zapolya, a Christmas Tale,” and the scene is laid in Illyria; which, by the way, is that of Shakspeare’s Twelfth-Night, another play of the season, for Twelfth-Night is included in Christmas. Indeed, if you would banish foreign matters from Christmas, you must banish Christmas itself. You must sweep away mince-pies, with their currants from Greece, their cloves and mace from the Spice Islands, and their peel of lemon from Sicily. You must abolish your plum-pudding, with its raisins from Malaga, your boar’s head from Germany, chestnuts from Spain and France, oranges from Portugal, wines every one of them, except British, all your hot pickles, all your teas and coffees, your very twelfth-cake with its sugar: nay, even the name of the season, to say nothing of things too reverend to be specified. You would not have a mahogany table to dine upon. Sixpence would not be left you to buy a cigar, nor a cigar to be bought; and if you wished to console yourself with singing a carol, ten to one but the tune would be taken out of your mouth, being found to belong to Pergolese or Palestrina, or some other Italian inventor of the phrases of melody.

Italian! Why, Italy will be talked about this Christmas at half the tables in England, with the Pope and Mr. Cobden at its head; and we think we see our little Blue Jar the more valued accordingly. Mr. Cobden has returned from Italy, brimful, as such a man ought to be, of its beauties and merits. He himself will talk plentifully about it; and others will talk, because he has talked already. The Duke of Devonshire has been in Italy. Lord John has an Envoy in Italy. Every reigning circle of private and public life has had its representative visitor in that country. Everybody, indeed, may be said to visit it every day in the newspapers, to see how the Pope and Reform are going on; poor Sicily has been in trouble with its “Captain Romeo” (strange link of times past and present); and Mr. Cobden has the magnanimity to express his regret that he had not made himself a master, when he was young, of the language of the beautiful peninsula.

Now, one of the great objects of the present writer, for many years past, has been to lure his readers into the love of other languages, particularly of this most beautiful of them all. It is for this reason he has scarcely ever quoted the most trivial expression from any one of them without giving a version of it; knowing well, how many intelligent men there are who would enjoy the original, if they knew it, far better than many an accidental scholar, and who are therefore willing to have the least glimpse of it afforded them. It has been well said, that “mankind will cease to quarrel with one another, when they understand one another.” Mr. Cobden, in his entertaining and instructive speech at the Manchester Athenæum, has told us how he was struck with this conviction during his tour. But he arrived at it before, by the intuition of a happy nature. Why, for his own delight, does he not make himself a master of the language he so admires? He is a reader by the fireside; and one hour’s reading, per diem, would render such a man more intimate with it in the course of a year than nine-tenths of its masters in England. But perhaps he is such. At all events, he may have become acquainted with it sufficiently for enjoyment; as much, for instance, as ourselves; more so, if he speaks it; for though we read, well enough, most of the languages that we translate, we can speak them no better than just to make our way through Italy and France. We mention this, partly that we may not seem to know more than we do, and partly to encourage others to learn. A little hearty love is better in this, as in all other cases, than a heap of indifferent knowledge. We are ashamed to say, that we know less of Greek, in one sense of the word, than we did when young, and are obliged to look out more words in the dictionary; for to a dictionary we are still forced to resort, though we love the language next to Italian, and hold it in higher admiration. But then we know our ignorance better than we did at that time; are more aware of beauties to be enjoyed, and nice meanings to be discovered; and the consequence is, that whenever we undertake to translate a passage from Greek, we take our love on one side of us, and our dictionary on the other, and before we set about it, make a point of sifting every possible meaning and root of meaning, not excepting those in words the most familiar to us, in order that not an atom of the writer’s intention may be missed. We do not say, of course, that we always succeed in detecting it; but it is not for want of painstaking.

The labour we delight in, physicks pain.

Now by a like respect for the good old maxim of “slow and sure,” and by dint of doing a little, or even a very little, every day, there is no lover of poetry and beauty who in the course of a few months might not be as deep as a bee in some of the sweetest flowers of other languages; and it is for readers of this sort that we have not only translated and commented on Greek and other passages in the book before us, but in some instances given intimations of the spirit in which we have studied them;—being anxious to allure to the study such as can find time for it, and to give some little taste of their exquisiteness to those who cannot. For all sorts of benefits lie in a knowledge of languages, both to men out of the world and men in it;—all additions to the stock of profit and pleasure,—to the certainty of knowing (as the phrase is) “what to be at” on occasions where profitable information is required; of not losing any advantage, either of relative or of positive gain; of growing superior to debasing fears and to ignorant and inhuman assumptions; and above all, of assisting the great cause of the advancement and mutual intercourse of all men, which shall put an end to narrow-minded ideas of profit and loss, and open up that moral, and intellectual, and cordial as well as commercial Free Trade, without which we should remain little better for ever than a parcel of ill-taught children, willing, if not able, to cheat one another in corners. But all this cannot be done, unless knowledge and taste go hand-in-hand; or, in other words, unless we learn to perceive the finally pleasurable, as well as the intermediately profitable; otherwise, when we come to the end of our gain, we shall be but at the beginning of a sense of our unfitness to enjoy it; and this, too, after missing a thousand graces by the way. Supposing health, for instance, and other favourable circumstances to have been on a par, which of any two men in the age of Shakspeare was the more capable of enjoying the whole round of his Christmas holidays,—he who had plenty of money to disburse for them, but no taste for their plays and pageants beyond what was shared by everybody who had eyes and ears; or he who understood all the beauties of their imagery and their allusions; who saw their colours with the eye of a painter, and heard their words with the apprehension of a poet; to whom the music was not a mere prettiness to patronise, or movement to beat time to, but an interweaving of shapes of grace and circles of harmony; to whom gods indeed descended from heaven, and nymphs brought back ages of gold; to whom terror itself was but a passing phase of the operation of good; and by, as well as for, whom, some justice, however small, was thus done to that magnificence of sight and suggestiveness with which heaven has adorned the universe, and that tendency to hope the best of all things which no seeming contradiction can do away? To feel thus is not only to be able to endure the perplexities presented to the mind by Christmas itself, its poor, and its polemics, but to pass the “flaming bounds” of telescope and microscope, and repose in serenities beyond the finite.

We have been led into an unexpected strain of enthusiasm and exaltation; but this is as natural to the season as a church-organ, or as the memory of the Sermon on the Mount. Christmas sees fair play to all reasonable moods of mind, the cheerful being predominant, as the height of reason. After church comes an interval, and after the interval dinner, which is a mixture of the serious and the lively; solid as to the beef and pudding, but light as regards the laughter and the whipped syllabub. Then ensue pastimes for a succession of days, including Twelfth-Day, with reading of books in the morning, and cards and conversation at night; the young chiefly being the players at the once courtly games of forfeits and “Bob,” and the old the performers at whist and the wine-bottle. Our modern Christmas entertainments will not bear comparison for vigour of enjoyment with those of our ancestors before Cromwell’s time, either out of doors or in. They have never recovered the blow given them by the invidious heaviness of the Puritans. But to make amends, we have refined on some of their pleasures; have multiplied others, as in the case of the theatres; and we possess an overflow of their own favourite reading, such as their poets might have envied us. Rare manuscripts have been set free in popular editions; we read the stories which our ancestors used to tell, with thousands of new novels to boot; Christmas alone brings with it a shower of gorgeous and sometimes admirable publications, as if flowers came pouring down with its snow; and in fine, beloved reader, here is our (and your) Jar of Honey, full of the sweet Paganism that was dear to the Shakspeares and Miltons, of the Pastoral which they loved also, of the right Christmas adventures of King Robert of Sicily, (which they perused under another title in the Gesta Romanorum,) of all sorts of good Italianate things, (then, as now, looked upon with wonderful curiosity and respect;) and finally, if loving wishes deceive us not, a sample and prelibation of that quintessential extract of the spirit of Christianity itself, the effect of which is to take away all doubt respecting the celestial balsam, and to make men wonder how they came to mistake for it anything containing the least taste of the fiery, the bitter, or the sour.

If the great and good Pope now reigning (for such he seems to be, in spite of some official drawbacks) has goodness enough to feel the wish, and could ever find greatness enough in him to dare to venture the act, of summoning a new Council of the Church, that should set on its altar this pure and unadulterated attraction of all hearts, instead of the unseemly manufactures of Councils of Trent and Priests of St. Januarius, he would give St. Peter’s its only final chance of continuing to be the throne of the Christian world, and of flourishing under the sweet and only desirable blossom, that shall have done some day for ever with its thorns.

But to return from these altitudes. The story of King Robert, we beg leave to say, is an especial delight of our soul, and gave us some exquisite moments in the writing. How came Shakspeare to let such a subject escape him? or Beaumont and Fletcher? or Decker? or any of the great and loving spirits that abounded in that romantic age? It was extant in manuscript; it abounded, under another name, in print; it presented the most striking dramatic points; extremes of passion were in the characters; pride and its punishment were in it; humility and its reward; a court, a chapel, an angel; pomp, music, satire, buffoonery, sublimity, tears. O Fate! give us a dozen years more life, and a lift in our faculties, immense; and let us try still if even our own verses cannot do something with it.

There is not, we will venture to say, a single portion of our Jar, which does not contain appropriate reading for Christmas.

The first chapter concerns the Arabian Nights; and every little boy knows that the Arabian Nights are reading for all seasons, particularly holidays.

The second chapter is full of the Fairy Tales of Antiquity; things which people used to relate round their fires during the ancient Saturnalia, just as our ancestors used to do at Christmas, and as boys read them still. And the Saturnalia were not only, to the ancients, what the Christmas holidays are to us, but the veritable parents and progenitors of those holidays, as every antiquary knows. It is doubtful whether Macrobius, who wrote a Saturnalia, or Christmas Holiday Book, of his time, was a Pagan or a Christian; but, at all events, his book is full of every kind of miscellaneous reading and gossiping, from Scipio’s Dream down to a scandalous anecdote and a disputed passage in Virgil. Such was the pastime, he tells us, at that season, of the best-informed circles at Rome.

Our third chapter contains, among other Saturnalian subjects, the story of the truly Christmas-like personage, Gellias, one of the wittiest and most hospitable of entertainers, a noble-hearted merchant-prince, who kept seven hundred gallons of wine in his house, and was famous for making his workmen happy.

Our fourth and fifth chapters, besides some Saturnalian stories, include an account of an ancient holiday, full of gossip, and show, and leafy boughs, together with a vast deal of Pastoral,—a summer recollection, to which Christmas has always been fond of reverting, at least in books and among the poets; probably on the principle of extremes meeting, and by a happy rule of contraries. It is observable how fond we are at Christmas of what our forefathers used to call “greens,” that is to say, boughs and flowers and everything which can force the summer, as it were, to remain with us by our firesides.

The sixth chapter is our beloved subject, the story of King Robert aforesaid.

The seventh brings us, through Italian Pastoral, to the Christmas poetical entertainments of our ancestors.

In the eighth and ninth we are in the Old English Poetical Works. In the tenth at Mount Ætna with its stories. In the eleventh with the Bees. In the twelfth with the musical services of the Church, with cheerful pieties of all sorts, and with the jovial Sicilian poet, Meli, one of the most universal of men.

Some persons have fancied that our book would be too learned! The most unlearned of such readers as we hope to possess will see what a notion this is, and to what plain English all our Greek and Latin has turned. We have the greatest contempt for learning, merely so called; together with the greatest respect for it when it sees through the dead letter of time and words into the spirit that concerns all ages and all descriptions of men. Every clever unlearned man in England, rich and poor, if we had the magic to do it, should be gifted to-morrow with all the learning that would adorn and endear his commerce to him, his agriculture, and the poorest flower-pot at his window. It would satisfy the longings that are born with such a man, and are natural to his powers; and would enable him, while he no longer envied such right parliamentary quoters of Virgil as the Minister, or Macaulay, or Sir Robert, or Brougham, or Lord Ellesmere, or Lord Morpeth, or Fox, to laugh at such educated ignoramuses as A, B, and C, who, though the classics were beaten into their heads at school, have no more real taste for what they quote, than the wall has for the pictures that are hung upon it with nail and hammer.

Spirit is everything, and letter is nothing; except inasmuch as it is a vehicle for spirit. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” A learned quotation is as ridiculous in some people’s mouths as a flower would be stuck in the mouth of a barber’s block. What would the best claret be to one that could not perceive the odour of it? or the nicest of mince-pies, or college-puddings, to a mouth that had no taste? We are but dull ourselves in such matters (the more’s the pity), and would fain share, when at table, the nicest discernments of sharp and sweet, possessed by the luckier palates around us; but we should only laugh at the poor devil of a pretender, who, with nothing but a palate of silver, and no taste at all, should affect to emulate the Almanach des Gourmands, and give his opinion of the contending sauces.

May we take, by the way, a Saturnalian liberty, and ask Members of Parliament why they quote no language but Latin, and in Latin no writers but Virgil and Horace? We believe there is an occasional venture on Lucretius, and perhaps on Juvenal. Also, two passages from Ovid, one in praise of the Fine Arts, and another about preferring wrong pursuits to right perceptions. But French has lately been thought worthy of cultivation, even at public schools; almost every man of rank speaks it, and Italian is an ordinary accomplishment. Ariosto, Berni, and others, would supply an admirable crop of new parliamentary quotations; or, if there was a fear of the delicacy of the pronunciation, what hinders us from being refreshed with something from Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, or a hundred other wits and thinkers among our gallant neighbours? New paths of quotation are due to railroads and Free Trade. There would be a sort of extension of Parliament itself into Paris and Rome, if we occasionally spoke the languages of those illustrious cities. France and Italy would be pleased; books benefited; politics smoothed; intercourse gladdened and enlarged. Even a bit of Greek might be ventured upon, if short and sweet; and Mr. Hume feel relieved in hearing (on the authority of the philosophic Hesiod) that “half” was “better than the whole” (πλέον ἥμισυ παντός).

The reverend maxim we have quoted respecting spirit and letter reminds us of a little Christmas story which has never been in print, and which, in accordance with the season, we shall take this opportunity of relating. It was brought to our recollection by meeting with the following exquisite passage from Bacon:—

“As those wines which flow from the first treading of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are not wrung into controversies and commonplaces.”

That metaphor of the “husk” is one that has haunted us (so to speak), in connexion with the subject here alluded to, for half our lives; not suggested, we beg leave to say, by the great philosopher—(qualified though he be to suggest hundreds of things to us beyond our powers of origination)—but by the greater force of the necessity of admitting evil and reconciling it to good. And in that point of view the husk we allude to is nobler than Bacon’s, or at least, than what seems to have been in his construction of the word; for we took it in the light of a necessary enclosure and safeguard of a future bud. But to drop this collateral reminiscence, and come to our story. It is entitled

THE ELIXIR AND THE VIALS.

Once on a time there was a dispute respecting the possession of a certain elixir, called by some Flower of Thorn, by others Spirit of Lily, by others Spirit of Love, and by others various other names not necessary to mention, but agreed by all to produce the most wonderful effects on the mind, of peace and benevolence. The parties who laid claim to the glory and emoluments of this possession, said it was kept in a particular kind of vial distinguishable from every other, and belonging exclusively to one single proprietor; and each claimant declared, nay swore, that he was that one. Indeed, it was remarkable, that for persons valuing themselves on the possession of an essence, or spirit, producing such gentle effects, they were, most of them, wonderfully given to swearing, not hesitating to use the most extraordinary oaths, both in assertion of their own claims, and in condemnation of those of the rest. One of these gentlemen, holding up his vial, which was a very pretty thing to look at, exclaimed that every man might be,——nay, was——(we do not like to repeat the word), who did not see plainly that that was the only spirit. Another uttered the very same threats, though he held up a vial of a totally different appearance. The case was the same with a third, a fourth, and a fifth, nay, with a fiftieth. There was nothing to be seen but a flourishing of vials, and nothing to be heard but a storm of voices. At length, from words (as might be expected of such words) they proceeded to blows; and what was very astonishing, they were so moved and provoked out of their wits as to convert their respective vials into weapons of offence, and so absolutely endeavour to fight it out with the fragile materials.

The consequences may be guessed. Not only were heads broken, but the vials also; and not only did the spirit in the vials evaporate, but by the fury of the combatants, both before and after the breakage, it became manifest that no such thing as a spirit producing the effects they pretended, had been in the vials at all.

The scene ended with the laughter of the spectators; and worse consequences might have ensued, but for the appearance of a third set of persons bringing forward another vial. It was totally unlike all the former, except in one part of it; and this part, which was of the real crystal which the others only pretended to be, was said to contain, and did absolutely contain, the veritable peace-making elixir, as was proved by a very simple but incontrovertible circumstance; namely, the peace-making itself. The proprietors neither swore, nor threatened, nor fought, nor tried to identify the vial with its contents. They proved the effect of those contents upon themselves by the friendliest behaviour towards all parties present; and though they had a long and difficult task to induce their rivals to taste it, yet no sooner had they done so, than the whole place became a scene of the most enchanting reasonableness and serenity. Everybody embraced his neighbour with the kindest words, and the combatants themselves did not scruple to wonder how they could have missed perceiving the presence of an odour so sweet, so unadulterated, so unquestionable, so tranquillizing, and so divine.

This story is not so good as Robert of Sicily, or as one that we shall relate presently; but it is not inferior to either in the conclusions that may be drawn from it; and assuredly (except from the edification to be drawn from scandals themselves) it is better than the histories of all the controversies that have agitated the schools of East and West. As to that of the Sicilian King, we are so fond of it that we cannot help taking the opportunity it affords us of thanking the young artist who has illustrated it, and who, after distinguishing himself with the public for his humour, has shown in these pages so much promise of a more serious order. He has not chosen to give his angel much bodily substance; perhaps the better to intimate the spiritual nature of the being, and give the more supernatural solemnity to his departure. But nobody can doubt the solidity which accompanies the grace of King Robert; and the royal penitent has been judiciously reinvested with the garb of his rank, the moment he resumes his personal identity. We must be allowed also to express our sense of the Poussin-like figure of Polyphemus at page 88, with his lumpish but not ungraceful shoulders (fit symbols of the heaviness of his mind); nor can we omit noticing the truly pastoral grace and simplicity of the Shepherdess at page 71, who is leading a flock full of nature and movement; and we are particularly thankful for the fidelity with which the artist has transferred to paper the sensitive and benignant profile of the Sicilian poet Meli, a cast of a medallion of whose likeness we have the good fortune to possess. Mr. Doyle, throughout his drawings, has shown great attention to costume and other such proprieties; one of the evidences of that regard for truth, without which no art of any kind can ever come to perfection.

We shall conclude this article with a brief Christmas story to which there is an allusion in the one above mentioned, and which we hold to be worth, at least, some nine hundred and forty thousand sermons. It is entitled

THE ELEVEN COMMANDMENTS.

A certain bishop who lived some hundred years ago, and who was very unlike what is reported of her Majesty’s new almoner; also very unlike the Christian bishops of old, before titles were invented for them; very unlike Fenelon too, who nevertheless had plenty of titles; very unlike St. Francis de Sales, who was for talking nothing but “roses;” very unlike St. Vincent de Paul, who founded the Sisterhood of Charity; very unlike Rundle, who “had a heart,” and Berkeley, who had “every virtue under heaven,” and that other exquisite bishop (we blush to have forgotten his name), who was grieved to find that he had a hundred pounds at his banker’s when the season had been so bad for the poor;—this highly unresembling bishop, who, nevertheless, was like too many of his brethren,—that is to say, in times past (for there is no bishop, now, at least in any quarter of England, who is not remarkable for meekness, and does not make a point of turning his right cheek to be smitten, the moment you have smitten his left);—this unepiscopal, and yet not impossible bishop, we say, was once accosted, during a severe Christmas, by a Parson Adams kind of inferior clergyman, and told a long story of the wants of certain poor people, of whose cases his lordship was unaware. What the dialogue was, which led to the remark we are about to mention, the reporters of the circumstance do not appear to have ascertained; but it seems that, the representations growing stronger and stronger on one side, and the determination to pay no attention to them acquiring proportionate vigour on the other, the clergyman was moved to tell the bishop that his lordship did not understand his “eleven commandments.”

“Eleven commandments!” cried the bishop; “why, fellow, you are drunk. Who ever heard of an eleventh commandment? Depart, or you shall be put in the stocks.”

“Put thine own pride and cruelty in the stocks,” retorted the good priest, angered beyond his Christian patience, and preparing to return to the sufferers for whom he had pleaded in vain. “I say there are eleven commandments, not ten, and that it were well for such flocks as you govern, if it were added, as it ought to be, to the others over the tables in church. Does your lordship remember—do you in fact know anything at all of Him who came on earth to do good to the poor and woeful, and who said, ‘Behold, I give unto you a new commandment, Love one another?’”

A
JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

A BLUE JAR FROM SICILY, AND A BRASS JAR FROM THE “ARABIAN NIGHTS;” AND WHAT CAME OUT OF EACH.

Passing one day by the shop of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, we beheld in the window a little blue jar, labelled, “Sicilian Honey.”—It was a jar of very humble pretensions, if estimated according to its price in the market. Perhaps it might have been worth, as a piece of ware, about threepence; and, contents and all, its price did not exceed eighteenpence. People who condescend to look at nothing but what is costly, and who, being worth a vast deal of money at their bankers’, are not aware that they are poor devils as men, would have infallibly despised it; or, at the very utmost, they would have associated it in their minds with nothing but the confectioner or the store-room. On the other hand, it might have reminded a Cavendish or a Gower of his Titians and Correggios; and a Rogers would surely have looked twice at it, for the sake of his Stothard and his Italy. And the poet and the noble dukes would have been right, not only in the spirit of their recollections, but to the very letter; for the deep beautiful blue was the same identical blue, the result of the same mineral, by which such an effect is retained in old pictures; and the shape of the jar was as classical as that of many a vase from the antique. Antiquity, indeed, possessed an abundance of precisely such jars. Furthermore, when you held the jar in the sun, a spot of insufferable radiance came in the middle of its cheek, like a very laugh of light. Then it contained honey—a thing which strikes the dullest imaginations with a sense of sweetness and the flowers; and in addition to the word “honey” outside, was the word “Sicilian”—a very musical and meminiscent word.

Now in consequence of this word “Sicilian,” by a certain magical process, not unlike that of the seal of the mighty Solomon, which could put an enormous quantity of spirit into a wonderfully small vessel, the inside of our blue jar (for be sure we bought it) became enriched, beyond its honey, to an extent which would appear incredible to any readers but such as we have the honour to address, doubtless the most intelligent of their race.

To introduce it, however, even to them, in a manner befitting their judgment, it is proper that we call to their recollection the history of a previous jar of their acquaintance, to which the foregoing paragraph contains an allusion.

They will be pleased to call to mind that eighteen hundred years after the death of Solomon, and during the reign of the King of the Black Isles, who was (literally) half petrified by the conduct of his wife, a certain fisherman, after throwing his nets to no purpose, and beginning to be in despair, succeeded in catching a jar of brass. The brass, to be sure, seemed the only valuable thing about the jar; but the fisherman thought he could, at least, sell it for old metal. Finding, however, that it was very heavy, and furthermore closed with a seal, he wisely resolved to open it first, and see what could be got out of it.

He therefore took a knife—(we quote from Mr. Torrens’s Arabian Nights, not out of disregard for that other interesting version by our excellent friend Mr. Lane, but we have lent his first volume, and Galland does not contain the whole passage; he seems to have thought it would frighten the ladies of his day)—the fisherman, therefore, “took a knife,” says Mr. Torrens, and “worked at the tin cover till he had separated it from the jar; and he put it down by his side on the ground. Then he shook the jar, to tumble out whatever might be in it, and found in it not a thing. So he marvelled with extreme amazement. But presently there came out of the jar a vapour, and it rose up towards the heavens, and reached along the face of the earth; and after this, the vapour reached its height, and condensed, and became compact, and waved tremulously, and became an Ufreet (evil spirit), his head in the clouds, and his foot on the soil, his head like a dome, his hand like a harrow, his two legs like pillars, his mouth like a pit, his teeth like large stones, and his nostrils like basins, and his eyes were two lamps, austere and louring. Now, when the fisherman saw that Ufreet, his muscles shivered, and his teeth chattered, and his palate was dried up, and he knew not where he was.”

This, by the way, is a fine horrible picture, and very like an Ufreet; as anybody must know, who is intimate with that delicate generation. We are acquainted with nothing that beats it in its way, except the description of another in the Bahar Danush, who, while sleeping on the ground, draws the pebbles towards him with his breath, and sends them back again as it goes forth; though a little further on, in the Arabian Nights, is an Ufreet of a most accomplished ugliness—namely, “the lord of all that is detestable to look at!” What a jurisdiction! And the “lord” too! Fancy a viscount of that description.

The fright and astonishment conceived by the fisherman at the taste thus given him of this highly concentrated spirit of Jinn (for such is the generic Eastern term for the order to which the Ufreet belongs) were not, however, the only things he got out of his jar. An incarceration of eighteen hundred years at the bottom of the ocean, under the seal of the mighty Solomon, had taught its prisoner a little more respect for that kind of detainder than he had been wont to exhibit; the fisherman exacted from him an oath of good treatment in the event of his being set free; and the consequence was, that after the adventures of the coloured fish, of the appearance of the lady out of the wall, and of the semi-petrifaction of the King of the Black Islands with his lonely voice, our piscatory friend is put in possession of his majesty’s throne. So here is an Ufreet as high as the clouds, fish that would have delighted Titian, (they were blue, white, yellow, and red,) a lady, full-dressed, issuing out of a kitchen wall, a king half-turned to stone by his wife, a throne given to a fisherman, and half-a-dozen other phenomena, all resulting from one poor brazen jar, into which when the fisherman first looked, he saw nothing in it.

A brass jar by the ocean’s brim,
A yellow brass jar was to him,
And it was nothing more.

Now we might have expected as little from our earthen jar, as the future monarch did from his jar of metal, had not some circumstances in our life made us acquainted with the philosophy and occult properties of jars; but such having been the case, no lover of the Arabian Nights (which is another term for a reader with a tendency to the universal) will be surprised at the quantity and magnitude of the things that arose before our eyes out of the little blue jar in the window of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason.

“Sicilian Honey.”—We had no sooner read those words, than Theocritus rose before us, with all his poetry.

Then Sicily arose—the whole island—particularly Mount Ætna. Then Mount Hybla, with its bees.

Then Rucellai (the Italian poet of the bees) and his predecessor Virgil, and Acis and Galatea, and Polyphemus, a pagan Ufreet, but mild—mitigated by love, as Theocritus has painted him.

Then the Odyssey, with the giant in his fiercer days, before he had sown his wild rocks; and the Sirens; and Scylla and Charybdis; and Ovid; and Alpheus and Arethusa; and Proserpina, and the Vale of Enna—names, which bring before us whatever is blue in skies, and beautiful in flowers or in fiction.

Then Pindar, and Plato; and Archimedes (who made enchantments real), and Cicero (who discovered his tomb), and the Arabs with their architecture, and the Normans with their gentlemen who were to found a sovereignty, and the beautiful story of King Robert and the Angel, and the Sicilian Vespers (horribly so called), and the true Sicilian Vespers, the gentle “Ave Maria,” closing every evening, as it does still, in peace instead of blood, and ascending from blue seas into blue heavens out of white-sailed boats.

Item, Bellini, and his Neapolitan neighbour Paesiello.

Item, the modern Theocritus, not undeservedly so called; to wit, the Abate Giovanni Meli, possibly of Grecian stock himself—for his name is the Greek as well as Sicilian for honey.

Then, every other sort of pastoral poetry, Italian and English, and Scotch—Tasso, and Guarini, and Fletcher, and Jonson, and William Brown, and Pope, and Allan Ramsay.

Item, earthquakes, vines, convents, palm-trees, mulberries, pomegranates, aloes, citrons, rocks, gardens, banditti, pirates, furnaces under the sea, the most romantic landscapes and vegetation above it, guitars, lovers, serenades, and the never-to-be-too-often-mentioned blue skies and blue waters, whose azure (on the concentrating Solomon-seal principle) appeared to be specially represented by our little blue jar.

Lastly, the sweetness, the melancholy, the birth, the life, the death, the fugitive evil, the constant good, the threatening Ætna making every moment of life precious, and the moment of life so precious, and breathing such a pure atmosphere, as to enable fear itself to laugh at, nay, to love the threatening Ætna, and play with it as with a great planetary lion to which it has become used.

From all this heap of things, or any portion of them, or anything which they may suggest, we propose, as from so many different flowers, to furnish our Jar of Honey, careless whether the flower be sweet or bitter, provided the result (with the help of his good-will) be not un-sweet to the reader. For honey itself is not gathered from sweet flowers only; neither can much of it be eaten without a qualification of its dulcitude with some plainer food. It can hardly be supposed to be as sweet to the bees themselves, as it is to us. Evil is so made to wait upon good in this world—to quicken it by alarm, to brighten it by contrast, and render it sympathetic by suffering—that although there is quite enough superabundance of it to incite us to its diminution (Nature herself impelling us to do so), yet tears have their delight, as well as laughter; and laughter itself is admonished by tears and pain not to be too excessive. Laughter has occasioned death:—tears have saved more than life. The readers, therefore, will not suppose that we intend (supposing even that we were able) to cloy them with sweets. We hope that they will occasionally look very grave over their honey. We should not be disconcerted, if some bright eyes even shed tears over it.

CHAPTER II.

SICILY, AND ITS MYTHOLOGY.

ISLAND OF SICILY, AND MOUNT ÆTNA.—STORIES OF TYPHŒUS, POLYPHEMUS, SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS, GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA, ALPHEUS AND ARETHUSA, THE SIRENS, AND THE RAPE OF PROSERPINE.

As it is good to have a plan and system in everything, whatever may be the miscellaneousness of its nature, we shall treat of our subjects in chronological order, beginning with the mythological times of Sicily, and ending with its latest modern poet.

Sicily is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, at the foot of Italy, about half the size of England, and inhabited by a population a fifth less than that of London. Its shape is so regularly three-cornered, that Triangle or Triple-point (Trinacria) was one of its ancient names. Mount Ætna stands on the east, in one of these angles. The coast is very rocky and romantic; the interior is a combination of rugged mountains and the loveliest plains; and the soil is so fertile in corn as well as other productions, that Sicily has been called the granary of Europe. The inhabitants are badly governed, and there is great poverty among them; but movements have taken place of late years that indicate advancement; and the Sicilians, meantime, have all those helps to endurance (perhaps too many) which result from sprightliness of character, united with complexional indolence. They are good-natured but irritable; have more independence of spirit than their neighbours the Neapolitans; and are still a pastoral people as of old, making the most of their valleys and their Mount Ætna; not by activity, but by pipe and song, and superstition.

With this link of their newest and their oldest history we shall begin our Sicilian memories from the beginning.

Did Ætna exist before the human race? Was it, for ages, a great lonely earth-monster, sitting by the sea with his rugged woody shoulders and ghastly crown; now silent and quiet for centuries, like a basking giant; now roaring to the antediluvian skies; vomiting forth fire and smoke; drivelling with lava; then silent again as before; alternately destroying and nourishing the transitory races of analogous gigantic creatures, mammoths, and mastodons, which preceded nobler humanity? Was it produced all at once by some tremendous burst of earth and ocean?—some convulsion, of which the like has never since been known,—perhaps with all Sicily hanging at its root: or did it grow, like other earthly productions, by its own energies and the accumulations of time? In whatever way it originated, and however the huge wonder may have behaved itself at any period, quietly or tremendously, nobody can doubt that the creature is a benevolent creature,—one of the securities of the peaceful and profitable existence of the far greater and more mysterious creature rolling in the shape of an orb round the sun in midst of its countless like, and carrying us all along with it in our respective busy inattentions. We do not presume to inquire how the necessity for any such evil mode of good arose. Suffice for us, that the evil itself works to a good purpose; that the earth, apparently, could not exist without it; that Nature has adorned it with beauty which is another good, with fertility which is another, with grandeur which is another, elevating the mind; and that if human beings prefer risking its neighbourhood with all its occasional calamities, to going and living elsewhere, those calamities are not of its own willing, nor of any unavoidable necessity, nor perhaps will exist always. Suppose Ætna should some day again be left to its solitude, and people resolve to be burnt and buried alive no longer? What a pilgrimage would the mountain be then! What a thought for the poet and the philosopher! What a visit for those who take delight in the borders of fear and terror, and who would love to interrogate Nature the more for the loneliness of her sanctuary!

The first modes of organized life which make their appearance in these remotest ages of Sicily, are of course fabulous modes,—fabulous, but like all fables, symbolical of truth; and what is better than mere truth, of truths poetical. The mythic portion of the history of Sicily is like its region—small, rich, lovely, and terrible. It may be said to consist wholly of the stories of Typhœus, of Polyphemus and the Cyclopes, of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Sirens, of the Rape of Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Acis and Galatea—names, which have become music in the ears of mankind.

What! is Typhœus a musical name? and Polyphemus and the Cyclopes? Yes, of the grander sort organ-like; the bass for the treble of the Sirens; the gloom and terror, along which floats away, through vine and almond, the lovely murmur of Alpheus and Arethusa.

We shall not explain away these beautiful fables into allegory, physics, or any other kind of ungrateful and half-witted prose. They may have had the dullest sources, for aught we know to the contrary, as beautiful streams may have their fountains in the dullest places, or delightful children unaccountably issue from the dullest progenitors; but there they were of old, in Sicily; and here they are among us to this day; in poets’ books; in painters’ colours; among the delights of every cultivated mind; true as anything else that is known by its effects; spiritual creatures, living and breathing in the enchanted regions of the imagination. The poets took them in hand from infancy, and made them the real and immortal things they are. We shall not deny their analogy with beautiful or grand operations in Nature, as long as the mystery and poetry of those operations are kept in mind. Typhœus, or Typhon, for instance, may, if the etymologist pleases, be the Tifoon, or Dreadful Wind, of the Eastern seas; or he may be the smoking of Mount Ætna (from τύφω to smoke); or he may comprehend both meanings in one word, derived from some primitive root; for as long as his cause remains a secret, and his effect is poetical, so long the spirit of the mystery may be embodied as imagination pleases. Suffice for us, that the thing is there, somehow. All that we object to in the natural or supernatural historians of such persons, is their stopping at mechanical and prosaical causes, and thinking they settle anything.

This said personage Typhœus is, it must be owned, a tremendous fellow to begin stories with of beautiful Sicily; to put at the head of creations containing so much loveliness. He was a monster of monsters, brought forward by Earth as a last desperate resource in the quarrel of her Giants with the Gods. His stature reached the sky; he had a hundred dragons’ heads, vomiting flames; and when it pleased him to express his dissatisfaction, there issued from these heads the roaring and shrieking of a hundred different animals! Jupiter had as hard a task to conquer him as Amadis had with the Endriago.[1] A good report of the fight is to be found in Hesiod. Heaven trembled, and earth groaned, and ocean flashed with a ghastly radiance, as they lightened and thundered at one another. The king of the gods at length collected all his deity for one tremendous effort, and leaping upon his antagonist with his whole armoury of thunders, made his foaming mouth hiss in the blaze; the mountain hollows flashed fainter where he lay smitten; the rocks dropped about him like melted lead; and Jupiter tore up the whole island of Sicily, and flung it upon him, by way of detainer for ever. One promontory acted as a presser on one hand; another on another; a third on his legs; and the crater of Mount Ætna was left him for a spiracle. There he lay in the time of Ovid, making the cities tremble as he turned; and there he lies still, for all that Brydone, or Smyth, or even Monsieur Gourbillon has proved to the contrary; though scepticism has attained to such a pitch in that quarter, that the only danger in earthquakes is now attributed to people’s not being quick enough with displaying the veil of Saint Agatha.

Compared with this cloud-capped enormity, our old friend Polyphemus (Many-voice), the ogre or Fee-Faw-Fum of antiquity, becomes a human being. He and his one-eyed Cyclopes (Round-eyes), are the primitive inhabitants of Sicily, before men ploughed and reaped. They kept sheep and goats, and had an eye to business in the cannibal line; though what it was that gave them their name, is not determined; nor is it necessary to trouble the reader with the controversies on that point. Very huge fellows they were, beating Brobdingnagians to nothing. Homer describes Polyphemus as looking like a “woody hill.” He kept Ulysses and his companions in his cave to eat them, just as his Oriental counterpart did Sinbad, or as the giants of our childhood proposed to feast on Jack; and when Ulysses put out the eye of roaring Many-voice with a firebrand, and got off to sea, the blind monster sent some rocks after the ship, which remain stuck on the coast to this day.

And yet, by the magic of love and sympathy, even Polyphemus has been rendered pathetic. Theocritus made him so with his poetry; and Handel did as much for him in his musical version of the story, especially in those exquisite caressing passages between Acis and Galatea, (“The flocks shall leave the mountains,” &c.,) which might fill the most amiable rival with torment. Acis (Acuteness) and Galatea (Milky)—(we like this fairy-tale restitution of the meanings of ancient names, the example of which was at first set, we believe, by Mr. Keightley)—forgot themselves, however, too far, when they made love before the very eyes of the rival;—not the only instance, we fear, of similar provocation given by the vanity of happy lovers. We regret this ill-breeding the more on account of the monster’s hopelessness; and considering the little patience that was to be expected of him, almost pardon the rock which he sent on their ecstatic heads.

Gay’s verses on this occasion would not have been unworthy of Theocritus:—

Acis and Galatea. [Duet.]
The flocks shall leave the mountains,
The woods the turtle-dove,
The nymphs forsake the fountains,
Ere I forsake my love.
Polyphemus. [Solo.]
Torture! fury! rage! despair!
I cannot, cannot, cannot bear.
Acis and Galatea.
Not showers to larks so pleasing,
Nor sunshine to the bee;
Not sleep to toil so easing,
As those dear smiles to me.
Polyphemus hurls the rock.
Fly swift, thou massy ruin, fly:
Die, presumptuous Acis, die.

Scylla and Charybdis, or Scylla and Glaucus rather, is a far more appalling story of jealousy. Scylla properly belongs to the opposite coast of Naples; but as she and her fellow-monster Charybdis are usually named together, and the latter tenanted the Sicilian coast, and the strait between them was very narrow, she is not to be omitted in Sicilian fable. Charybdis (quasi Chalybdis, Hiding? though some derive it from two words signifying to “gape” and “absorb”) was a personage of a very unique sort, to wit, a female freebooter; who, having stolen the oxen of Hercules, was condemned to be a whirlpool, and suck ships into its gulf. Nevertheless she was a horror not to be compared with Scylla, though the latter was thought less dangerous. Mr. Keightley has so well told this story out of Homer, that we must repeat it in his words:—

“Having escaped the Sirens, and shunned the Wandering Rocks, which Circe told him lay beyond the mead of these songsters, Odysseus (Ulysses) came to the terrific Scylla and Charybdis, between which the goddess had informed him his course lay. She said he would come to two lofty cliffs opposite each other, between which he must pass. One of these cliffs towers to such a height, that its summit is for ever enveloped in clouds; and no man, even if he had twenty hands and as many feet, could ascend it. In the middle of this cliff, she says, is a cave facing the west, but so high, that a man in a ship passing under it could not shoot up to it with a bow. In this den dwells Scylla (Bitch), whose voice sounds like that of a young whelp: she had twelve feet and six long necks, with a terrific head, and three rows of close-set teeth on each. Evermore she stretches out these necks and catches the porpoises, sea-dogs, and other large animals of the sea, which swim by, and out of every ship that passes each mouth takes a man.

“The opposite rock, the goddess informs him, is much lower, for a man could shoot over it. A wild fig-tree grows on it, stretching his branches down to the water: but beneath, ‘divine Charybdis’ three times each day absorbs and regorges the dark water. It is much more dangerous, she adds, to pass Charybdis than Scylla.

“As Odysseus sailed by, Scylla took six of his crew; and when, after he had lost his ship and companions, he was carried by wind and wave, as he floated on a part of the wreck, between the monsters, the mast by which he supported himself was sucked in by Charybdis. He held by the fig-tree, till it was thrown out again, and resumed his voyage.”—Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. Sec. edit., p. 271.

It has been thought by some, that by the word Scylla is meant the bitch of the sea-dog, or seal—a creature often found on this coast. Be this as it may (and the seal having a more human look than the dog, might suggest a more frightful image, to say nothing of its being more appropriate to the water), who was Scylla? and how came she to be this tremendous monster? From the jealousy of Circe. Scylla was originally a beautiful maiden, fond of the company of the sea-nymphs; and Glaucus (Sea-green), a god of the sea, was in love with her. She did not like him; and Glaucus applied to Circe for help, from her skill in magic. Circe fell in love with the lover, and being enraged with the attractions that made him refuse her, poisoned the water in which Scylla bathed. The result was the conversion of the beauty’s lower limbs into a set of barking dogs. The dogs became part of her; and when in her horror she thought to drive them back, she found herself “hauling” them along—one creature, says Ovid, hauling many:

Quos fugit, attrahit una.—Metam. xiv. v. 63.

This is very dreadful. Yet Homer’s creature is more so. Scylla’s proceedings, in the Odyssey, exactly resemble the accounts which mariners have given of a huge sea-polypus—a cousin of the kraken, or sea-serpent—who thrusts its gigantic feelers over the deck of an unsuspecting ship, and carries off seamen. There is a picture of it in one of the editions of Buffon. But the dog-like barking, and the terrific head and teeth, to which the imagination gives something of a human aspect, leave the advantage of the horrible still on the side of the poet.

An old English poet, Lodge, at a time when our earliest dramatists, who were university men, had set the example of a love of classical fable, wrote a poem on Glaucus and Scylla, in which there are passages of the loveliest beauty; though it was spoilt, as a whole, with conceits. In describing the nymph’s yellow hair, he makes use of a Sicilian image, very fit for our Blue Jar:—

Her hair, not truss’d, but scatter’d on her brow,
Surpassing Hybla’s honey.

We are to suppose it lying in sunny flakes. Lodge, though he was an Oxford man, or perhaps for that reason, has curiously mixed up Paganism and Christianity in Glaucus’s complaint of his mistress: but the second verse is fine, and the last truly lover-like and touching:—

Alas, sweet nymphs, my godhead’s all in vain;
For why? this breast includes immortal pain.
Scylla hath eyes, but two sweet eyes hath Scylla;
Scylla hath hands, fair hands, but coy in touching:
Scylla in wit surpasseth grave Sibylla:

(This is the Sibyl of Æneas)

Scylla hath words, but words well-stored with grutching;
Scylla, a saint in look, no saint in scorning,
Look saint-like, Scylla, lest I die with mourning.

The modulation and antithetical turn of these verses will remind the reader not only of Lodge’s friends, Peele and Greene, who had both a fine ear for music, but of Shakspeare’s first production, Venus and Adonis, in which he exhibited that fondness for classical fable which never forsook him. It is remarkable indeed, that the old English poets, and those true successors of theirs whom we have seen in our own time, have been almost more Greek in this respect than the Greeks themselves. Spenser was half made up of it; Milton could not help introducing it in Paradise Lost; and it was rescued from the degradation it underwent in the French school of poetry, with its cant about the “Paphian bower,” and its identifications of Venus and Chloe, by the inspired Muse of Keats. The young English poet has told the present story in his Endymion, though not in his best manner, except where he speaks of Circe; of the inflictions of whose sorcery he gives a scene of the finest and most appalling description:—

A sight too fearful for the feel of fear.—
In thicket hid—

(It is Glaucus who is speaking, and whom the poet represents as having been beguiled into Circe’s love)—

In thicket hid I curs’d the haggard scene—
The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen,
Seated upon an uptorn forest root,
And all around her shapes, wizard and brute,
Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpenting.
Fierce, wan,
And tyrannizing was the lady’s look,
As over them a gnarled staff she shook.

The look of a sorceress, full of bad passions, was never painted more strongly than in the meeting of those epithets, “wan and tyrannizing;” and the word “lady” makes the fierceness more shocking.

But Keats had not the heart to make the love-part of the story end unhappily, much less to endure the brutification of the lovely limbs of Scylla. He revived her to be put into a Lovers’ Elysium. So, in telling the story of Alpheus and Arethusa, he will not let Arethusa reject Alpheus willingly. He makes her lament the necessity as one of the train of Diana; and leaves us to conclude that the lovers became happy. It would hardly be necessary to tell any reader (only it is as pleasant to repeat these stories, as it is to hear beautiful old airs) that Alpheus was a river-god of Greece, who fell in love with the wood-nymph Arethuse; and that the latter, praying for help to Diana, was converted into a stream, and pursued under land and sea by the other enamoured water, as far as the island of Sicily, where the streams became united. The strangeness of the adventure, and the beauty of the names, have made everybody in love with the story. All the world knows how “divine Alpheus,” as Milton says—

Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse;

or rather they all knew the fact; but the how, or manner of it, was a puzzle, till Keats related the adventure as it was witnessed by Endymion in a grotto under the sea. The lover of the Moon suddenly heard strange distant echoes, which seemed—

The ghosts, the dying swells
Of noises far away—hist!—Hereupon
He kept an anxious ear. The humming tone
Came louder; and behold! there, as he lay,
On either side out-gush’d, with misty spray,
A copious spring; and both together dash’d
Swift, mad, fantastic round the rocks, and lash’d
Among the conchs and shells of the lofty grot,
Leaving a trickling dew.

(These are the two living streams, one in pursuit of the other.)

At last they shot
Down from the ceiling’s height, pouring a noise
As of some breathless racers, whose hopes poise
Upon the last few steps, and with spent force
Along the ground they took a winding course.
Endymion follow’d, for it seem’d that one
Ever pursued, the other strove to shun.

After a while, he hears a whispering dialogue, in which the female voice shows plainly enough, that the speaker would stay if she might; but suddenly the severe face of Diana is before her, and in an instant

Fell
Those two sad streams adown a fearful dell;

and Endymion puts up a prayer for their escape.

When the writer of the present book was in Italy, he saw on a mantelpiece a card inscribed, Le Marquis de Retuse. This was the Frenchified denomination of a Sicilian nobleman, who, strangely combining Greek and Gothic in his title, was no less a personage than the Marquis of Arethusa! He was proprietor of the spot where the fountain exists under its old name, though, according to travellers, deplorably altered; for it has become, says one of them, the public “washtub!” It is the Syracusan laundry. Divers, he informs us, are the jokes cracked on the “nymphs” that now attend it. Some critics are of opinion, that such were the “only nymphs” that ever existed; and they are very merry over the fallen condition of the once exquisite Arethusa. Poor devils! taking pains to vulgarize their perceptions, and diminish the amount of grace and joy. As if Arethusa, like themselves, were at the mercy of a homely association; or all that had been written about her was no better than their own account with the laundress! They flatter themselves. They leave her just where she was—everywhere, and immortal. It may not be very pleasant to look for a poetic fountain, and find a laundry; but the imagination is a poor one indeed, which is to be overwhelmed by it. The nymphs of minds like these could never have been very different from laundresses, if the truth were known; or, at the utmost, of little higher stock than such as laundresses and milliners are the making of.

There are two things, we confess, about the Sirens, that perplex us. In the first place, we never found anything particularly attractive in the songs attributed to them, not even by Homer; and secondly, we are too much in the secret of their deformity. We know that they were ghastly monsters, bird-harpies with women’s heads, and surrounded with human bones; and the consequence is, we can never find them in the least degree enticing. It is to no purpose that they combine stringed with wind instruments, and a voice crowning all. One of them may call herself Fair-Goddess (Leucothea), and another Fine-voice (Ligeia), and the third Maiden-face (Parthenope). We know all about them, and are not to be taken in. It would require a dream as horrible as Coleridge’s Pains of Sleep to bring our antipathy into any communication with them—to make us walk in our sleep towards their quarter:—

Desire with loathing strangely mix’d,
On wild and hateful objects fix’d;
Fantastic passions, maddening brawl,
And shame and terror over all.

When the modern poets turned the Sirens into mermaids, they vastly improved the breed. A woman, we grant, who is half a fish, is not a desideratum; but she is better than a great human-faced bird hopping about; and besides, the conformation of the creatures being thus altered, we are not so sure they will do us harm, especially as the poets treat them with comparative respect, sometimes even with tenderness. The names above mentioned acquire a double elegance in the adjurations of the Spirit in Comus:—

By Thetis’ tinsel-slipper’d feet,
And the songs of Sirens sweet,
By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb,
And fair Ligeia’s golden comb,
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks,
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.

These alluring locks come home to us. We have seen such at our elbows, and can hear the comb passing through them.

Spenser increased the number of the Sirens to five, and expressly designated them as mermaids:—

And now they nigh approached to the stead
Whereas those mermaids dwelt. It was a still
And calmy bay, on th’ one side sheltered
With the broad shadow of an hoary hill;
On th’ other side an high rock towered still,
That ’twixt them both a pleasant port they made,
And did like an half theatre fulfil.
There those five sisters had continual trade,
And used to bathe themselves in that deceiptful shade.
—Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 12.

This line is so soft and gently drawn out, and the place so sweet and natural, that when Sirens like these begin to sing, we really feel in danger. We do not wonder that the poet’s hero desired his boatman to

Row easily,
And let him hear some part of their rare melody.

We have kept the most beautiful of the Sicilian mythic stories to conclude with: for such, doubtless, is the Rape of Proserpine. It is full of the most striking contrasts of grandeur and beauty. Both heaven and hell are in it—the freshest vernal airs, with the depths of Tartarus; and the hearts of a mother and daughter beat through all. It is a tale at once of the wildest preternaturalism and the most familiar domestic tenderness. The daughter of Ceres is gathering flowers, with other damsels of her own age, in the Vale of Enna, intent upon nothing but seeing who shall get the finest. Suddenly, in the midst of the violets and jonquils, there is an earthquake: a noise is heard like the coming of a thousand chariots; the earth bursts open; and a rapid, majestic figure appears, like a swarthy Jupiter, who, sweeping by Proserpine, whirls her away with him into his car, and prepares to rush down through another opening. Of all her attendants, the nymph Cyane alone has the courage to bid him stop, and ask him why he dares take away the daughter of Ceres. He makes no answer, but, knitting his brows like thunderbolts, smites the fountain over which she presided with his iron mace, and dashes down through it with his prey. It is the King of Hell himself, tired of celibacy, and resolved to have the fairest creature on earth for his wife.

The cries of Proserpine become fainter as the earth closes over them; but they have been heard by Ceres herself, who comes, with all the speed of a divine being, to see what is the matter. She can discern nothing; the tranquillity of the scene is restored; Cyane has melted away in tears. The goddess seeks everywhere in vain. She travels by day and by night, lit by two flaming pines from Mount Ætna. At length she learns who has got her child; and, by the intervention of Jupiter, Proserpine is allowed to come to earth and see her. The mother and daughter are half drowned in tears, half absorbed in delight, and Jupiter would prevent their separation, but is not able; for Proserpine has eaten of a fatal fruit, compulsory of her continuance with Pluto; and all that can be done, is to stipulate for her being half a year with her mother, on condition of her being a good wife during the other half. Ceres makes a virtue of the necessity, seeing that her daughter is married to the brother of Jove; and Proserpine is content to divide the throne of Tartarus, and walk in gardens of her own, splendid, though subterraneous.

The ancient poets made these gardens consist of all the flowers which she had been accustomed to gather in Sicily; but modern imagination, which (with leave be it said) is still finer than theirs, and sees beauty beyond its ordinary manifestation in the fitness of things, and in the balance of good and evil, has told us, through the inspired medium of Spenser, that the garden was such a garden as might have been expected from “the grandeur of the glooms” in those lower regions:—

There mournful cypress grew in greatest store,
And trees of bitter gall, and ebon sad,
Deep-sleeping poppy, and black hellebore,
Cold coloquintida, and tetra mad,
Mortal samnitis, and cicuta bad,
With which the unjust Athenians made to die
Wise Socrates, who thereof quaffing glad
Pour’d out his life and last philosophy
To the fair Critias, his dearest belamy.
The Garden of Prosèrpina this hight;
And in the midst thereof a silver seat,
With a thick arbour goodly overdight,
In which she often used from open heat
Herself to shroud, and pleasures to entreat;
Next thereunto did grow a goodly tree,
With branches broad dispread, and body great,
Clothed with leaves, that none the fruit might see,
And loaden all with fruit as thick as it might be.
Their fruit were golden apples, glistering bright.
—Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 7.

Here we see, that Proserpine enjoyed herself in the lower regions, though among flowers of a different kind from those to which she had been accustomed. She became used to the place, and found pleasures even in Tartarus. And reasonably. First, because she needed them; and in the second place, because she knew there was good as well as evil there, and that the evil itself contained good. The hemlock was “bad,” inasmuch as it killed Socrates, but it was good, also, for many a medicinal cup. “Deep-sleeping poppy” was a very kindly fellow, if properly treated; and all the flowers, after their kind, were full of beauty. Flowers cannot help being beautiful. Then there was the Silver Seat and the Golden Tree; and it is manifest, that the summer sun used to come there through some unknown ravine, to say nothing of Wordsworth’s

Calm pleasures and majestic pains.

We do not, to be sure, see what good Tantalus’s eternal thirst could have been to him, or the everlasting wheel to Ixion; but, probably, on coming up to those gentlemen, we should have found they were visions, put there to make us “snatch a fearful joy” at thinking we were not among them in propriâ personâ.

And so we take leave of the beautiful ancient fables of Sicily, having found honey for our Jar even in the fields of Pluto.

CHAPTER III.

GLANCES AT ANCIENT SICILIAN HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

VICISSITUDES OF SICILIAN GOVERNMENT.—GLANCES AT PHALARIS, STESICHORUS, EMPEDOCLES, HIERO I., SIMONIDES, EPICHARMUS, DIONYSIUS I., DAMON AND PYTHIAS, DAMOCLES, DIONYSIUS II., DION, PLATO, AGATHOCLES, HANNIBAL, HIERO II., THEOCRITUS, ARCHIMEDES, MARCELLUS, VERRES; AND PARTICULARS RELATING TO GELLIAS.

icily being one of those small, beautiful, and abundant countries which excite the cupidity of larger ones, has had as many foreign masters as the poor Princess of Babylon in Boccaccio, who, on her way to be married to the King of Colchos, fell into the hands of nine husbands. First, in all probability, came subjugators from the Italian continent; then Phœnicians, or commercial invaders; then, undoubtedly, Greeks; then Carthaginians; then Romans, Goths, Saracens, Normans, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Gallo-Spaniards, Frenchmen again, Gallo-Spaniards again; and in the possession of these last it remains. Under the Greeks, its cities grew into powerful independent states. Syracuse was once twenty-two miles in circumference. The most prominent names in the ancient history of Sicily are touched upon in the following list.

Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum, who roasted people in a brazen bull, in which he was ultimately made to roar himself. That is to say, if the bull be true. For the reign of this prince was at so remote a period, and the excitement of exaggeration is so tempting, that the sight of the bull in after times proves no more than was proved by the brazen wolf of Romulus and Remus. The age of Phalaris was that of the Prophet Daniel.

Stesichorus, a majestic lyrical poet, in one of whose fragments is to be found the beautiful fiction of the Golden Boat of the Sun. The Sun-God sails in it, invisibly, round the Northern Sea in the night-time, so as to be ready to re-appear in the East in the morning.

Empedocles, the Pythagorean philosopher. He is accused of leaping into Ætna, in the hope of being supernaturally missed, and so taken for a god—a project betrayed by the ejection of one of his brazen sandals. But a philosopher may perish by a volcano, as Pliny did, without giving envy a right to make him a laughing-stock.

Hiero the First, of Syracuse; a bad prince, but a possessor of good horses and charioteers; for whose victories in the Olympic games his name has become celebrated by means of Pindar. Hiero is the great name in the Racing Calendar of antiquity.

Simonides, the elegiac poet. He was a native of Ceos, but lived much, and died in Sicily, where he was a great favourite. His repeated delays and final answer to Hiero, when desired to give a definition of the Deity, have been deservedly celebrated, and are a lesson to presumption for all time. He first requested a day to consider; then two more days; then doubled and redoubled the number; till the king, demanding the reason of this conduct, was told by the poet that “the longer he considered the question, the more impossible he found it to answer.”

Epicharmus, the supposed founder of comedy. He was a great philosopher as well as poet, and furnished no little matter to Plato. He died at ninety, some say at ninety-seven, a longevity attributable to the moderation of his way of life, and the serenity of his temper. He says in one of his fragments:—

A darling and a grace is Peace of Mind;
She lives next door to Temperance.

Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse (the Elder). He wrote bad verses; slept in a bed with a trench round it and a drawbridge; and, for fear of a barber, burnt away his beard with hot walnut-shells. What a razor! Dionysius had abilities enough to become the more hateful for his capricious and detestable qualities. Probably he had a spice of madness in him, which power exasperated. Ariosto has turned him to fine account in his personification of Suspicion.

Damon and Pythias, the famous friends. One of them became surety to Dionysius for the other’s appearance at the scaffold, and was not disappointed. Dionysius begged to be admitted a third in the partnership!—the most ridiculous thing, perhaps, that even the tyrant ever did.

Damocles, the courtly gentleman, who pronounced Dionysius the happiest man on earth. He was treated by his master to a “proof of the pudding” which tyrants eat. He sat crowned at the head of a luxurious banquet, in the midst of odours, music, and homage; and saw, suspended by a hair over his head, a naked sword. This, it must be confessed, was a happy thought of the royal poet—a practical epigram of the very finest point.

Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse (the Younger), who, on his ejection from the throne, is said to have become a schoolmaster at Corinth; “in order,” says Cicero, “that he might still be a scourger somehow.”

Dion, his relation, and Timoleon of Corinth, the great but unhappy fratricide; both of whom advanced the liberties of Syracuse.

Plato; who visited both the Dionysiuses, to induce them to become philosophers! He might as well have asked tigers in a sheepfold to prefer a dish of green pease.

Agathocles the Potter, tyrant of the whole island; who piqued himself on outdoing the cruelties of Phalaris. His objection to the brazen bull was, that you could not see the face of the person tortured; so he invented a hollow iron man with an open visor, in order that he might contemplate the face of the occupant, while heating over a slow fire. But let us hope the story is not true; for, though things as horrible have taken place in the world, the wicked themselves have been calumniated.

Hannibal, during the Punic wars. You see him, at this period of time, looming in the distance over every other object, and standing in Sicily like a great visiting giant. He is accounted, we believe, on military authority, the greatest captain that ever lived. So different is success in art from prosperity in fortune.

Hiero the Second, of Syracuse. A prudent and popular ally of the Romans. He showed no great favour to Theocritus. He built a huge toy-ship, in which were gardens, a wrestling-ground, rooms full of pictures and statues, floors with subjects from Homer painted in mosaic, and eight fortified towers! We should like to know what Tom Bowling would have said to it. When it was completed, it was found that there was no harbour in Sicily fit to receive it; so the king sent it as a present to Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt.

Theocritus, the great pastoral and miscellaneous poet, for pastoral was not his only, or his highest excellence. Circumstances appear to have made a present of him also, as well as the ship, to King Ptolemy; for Hiero neglected, and Philadelphus patronised him.

Archimedes, kinsman of Hiero. His wonderful mechanical inventions are among the daily instruments of utility all over the world. The Romans were obliged to suspend their operations against Syracuse, solely by the terror he occasioned them with his cranes that lifted their ships, and his glasses that burnt them. When the city was taken, orders were given to spare the great man, and bring him before the Roman general, that he might be duly honoured; but a stupid soldier unwittingly despatched him, provoked at having been requested to wait while the philosopher finished a problem. The problem part of the story is not very likely. Sir Isaac Newton carried abstraction far enough, when he forgot that he had eaten his dinner, or when he used a lady’s finger for a tobacco-stopper; but an engineer forgetting his own city while it was being taken by storm and howling about his ears, seems a little too hard a sample of it.

Marcellus, the Roman general on this occasion. His eyes are said to have filled with tears at the thought of all that was going to happen to the conquered city. He was the first successful opposer of Hannibal. When reproached for carrying off paintings and other works of art from Sicily, he said he did it to refine the minds of his countrymen. His tears render every anecdote of him precious to posterity.

Verres, one of the governors of Sicily while it was a Roman province;—infamous for the tyranny and effrontery of his extortions, even if but half of what Cicero said of him was true: for we must confess that we seldom believe more of what is told us by that illustrious talker; especially as he warns us against himself, by contradicting in one passage what he says in another. Vide his recommendations of people in his letters, and his discommendations of them in other letters, privately sent at the same time. Also, his vituperations and panegyrics of the same individuals concerned in the civil wars, just as it suited him to condemn or to court them; to say nothing of his divorces and weddings for interest’s sake. We have said the more of him in this place because he too, at one time, held the office of governor in Sicily, where he discovered the tomb of Archimedes—a memorial, alas! forgotten by the philosopher’s countrymen in less than a century and a half after his death! They wanted to “stand out” Cicero, that there was no such thing. However, they had not forgotten Theocritus. The greatest mechanical movers of the earth affect the imagination less than they ought to do, and the heart not at all. The lever and the screw, as the steam-engine will, become homely commonplaces; whereas love and song, and the beauties of Nature, are sought with transport, like holidays after business.

The names thus enumerated (for little or no interest attends the Goth and Vandal portion of the history of this island), may be said to point to all the characters of any importance in Sicilian antiquity, one only excepted. This individual we have kept to the last, though he was little more than a private person, and is not at all famous. But we have a special regard for him; far more indeed, than for most of those who have been mentioned; and we think that such of our readers as are not already acquainted with him, will have one too; for he was of that tip-top class of human beings called Good Fellows, and a very prince of the race. What renders him a still better fellow than he might otherwise have been, and doubles his heroical qualities in discerning eyes, is, that he was but an insignificant little body to look at, and not very well shaped;—a mannikin, in short, that Sir Godfrey Kneller’s nephew, the slave-trader, who rated the painter and his friend Pope at less than “ten guineas’” worth “the pair,” would probably not have valued at more than two pounds five.

The name of this great unknown was Gellias, and you must search into by-corners, even of Sicilian history, to find anything about him; but he was just the man for our Jar;—sweet as the honey that Samson found in the jaws of the lion.

Gellias was the richest man in the rich city of Agrigentum. The Agrigentines, according to a saying of their countryman Empedocles, were famous for “building as if they were to live for ever, and feasting as if they were to die next day.” But they were as good-natured and hospitable as they were festive; and Gellias, in accordance with the superiority of his circumstances, was the most good-natured and hospitable of them all. His magnificence resembled that of a Barmecide. Slaves were stationed at the gates of his noble mansion to invite strangers to enter. His cellar had three hundred reservoirs cut in the solid rock, each containing seven hundred gallons of wine at their service. One day five hundred horsemen halted at his door, who had been overtaken by a storm. He lodged and entertained them all; and, by way of dry clothes, made each man a present of a new tunic and robe.

His wit appears to have been as ready as it was pungent. He was sent ambassador on some occasion to the people of Centauripa, a place at the foot of Mount Ætna. When he rose in the assembly to address them, his poor little figure made so ridiculous a contrast with his mission, that they burst into fits of laughter. Gellias waited his time, and then requested them not to be astonished;—“for,” said he, “it is the custom with Agrigentum to suit the ambassador to his locality; to send noble-looking persons to great cities, and insignificant ones to the insignificant.”

The combined magnanimity and address of this sarcasm are not to be surpassed. Ambassadors are privileged people; but they have not always been spared by irritated multitudes; yet our hero did not hesitate to turn the ridicule of the Centauripans on themselves. He “showed up” the smallness of their pretensions, both as a community and as observers. He did not blink the fact of his own bodily insignificance—too sore a point with little people in general, notwithstanding the fact that many of the greatest spirits of the world have resided in frames as petty. He made it the very ground for exposing the still smaller pretensions of the souls and understandings of his deriders. Or, supposing that he said it with a good-humoured smile,—with an air of rebuke to their better sense,—still the address was as great, and the magnanimity as candid. He not only took the “bull by the horns,” but turned it with his mighty little hands into a weapon of triumph. Such a man, insignificant as his general exterior may have been, must, after all, have had something fine in some part of it—something great in some part of its expression; probably fine eyes, and a smile full of benignity.

Gellias proved that his soul was of the noblest order, not only by a princely life, but by the heroical nature of his death. Agrigentum lay on the coast opposite Carthage. It had been a flourishing place, partly by reason of its commerce with that city; but was at last insulted by it and subdued. Most of the inhabitants fled. Among those who remained was Gellias. He fancied that his great wealth, and his renown for hospitality, would procure him decent treatment. Finding, however, that the least to be expected of the enemy was captivity, he set fire to a temple into which he had conveyed his wealth, and perished with it in the flames; thus, says Stolberg, at once preventing “the profanation of the place, the enriching of the foe, and the disgrace of slavery.”

There ought to be a book devoted to the history of those whose reputations have not received their due. It would make a curious volume. It would be old in the materials, novel in the interest, and of equal delight and use. It is a startling reflection, that while men, such as this Gellias, must be dug up from the by-ways of history, its high-road is three-parts full of people who would never have been heard of, but for accidents of time and place. Take, for instance, the majority of the Roman emperors, of those of Germany, of the turbulent old French noblesse, and indeed of three-fourths, perhaps nine-tenths, of historical names all over the world. The reflection, nevertheless, suggests one of a more consolatory kind, namely, that genius and great qualities are not the only things to be considered in this world;—that commonplace also has its right to be heard; common affections and common wants;—ay, the more in the latter case, because they are common. The worst of it is, that commonplace in power is not fond of allowing this right to its brother commonplace out of it. The progress of knowledge, however, tends to a greater impartiality; and the consideration of this fact must be the honey, meantime, to many a bitter thought.

CHAPTER IV.

THEOCRITUS.

PASTORAL POETRY.—SPECIMENS OF THE STRENGTH AND COMIC HUMOUR OF THEOCRITUS—THE PRIZE-FIGHT BETWEEN POLLUX AND AMYCUS—THE SYRACUSAN GOSSIPS.

Pastoral poetry is supposed to have originated in Sicily, at one and the same time with comedy. At all events, it was perfected there. Comedy is understood to have been suggested by the licence with which it was the custom for peasants to rail at passengers, and at one another, during the jollity of the vintage; and pastoral poetry was at first nothing but the more rustical part of comedy. Its great master, Theocritus, arose during a period of refinement; and being a man of a universal genius, with a particular regard for the country, perfected this homelier kind of pastoral, and at the same time anticipated all the others. His single scenes are the germ of the pastoral drama. He is as clownish as Gay, as domestic as Allan Ramsay, as elegant as Virgil and Tasso, and (with the allowance for the difference between ancient and modern imagination) as poetical as Fletcher; and in passion he beats them all. In no other pastoral poetry is there anything to equal his Polyphemus.

The world has long been sensible of this superiority. But, in one respect, even the world has not yet done justice to Theocritus. The world, indeed, takes a long time, or must have a twofold blow given it as manifest and sustained as Shakspeare’s to entertain two ideas at once respecting anybody. It has been said of wit, that it indisposes people to admit a serious claim on the part of its possessor; and pastoral poetry subjects a man to the like injustice, by reason of its humble modes of life, and its gentle scenery. People suppose that he can handle nothing stronger than a crook. They should read Theocritus’s account of Hercules slaying the lion, or of the “stand-up fight,” the regular and tremendous “set-to,” between Pollux and Amycus. The best Moulsey-Hurst business was a feather to it. Theocritus was a son of Ætna—all peace and luxuriance in ordinary, all fire and wasting fury when he chose it. He was a genius equally potent and universal; and it is a thousand pities that unknown circumstances in his life hindered him from completing the gigantic fragments, which seem to have been portions of some intended great work on the deeds of Hercules, perhaps on the Argonautic Expedition. He has given us Hercules and the Serpents, Hercules and Hylas, Hercules and the Lion, and the pugilistical contest of the demigod’s kinsman with a barbarian; and the epithalamium of their relation Helen may have been designed as a portion of the same multifarious poem—an anticipation of the romance of modern times, and of the glory of Ariosto. What a loss![2]

In the poem on the Prize-fight (for such is really the subject, the prize being the vanquished man), Pollux, the demigod, one of the sons of Leda by Jupiter, goes to shore from the ship Argo, with his brother Castor, to get some water. They arrive at a beautiful fountain in a wood, by the side of which is sitting a huge overbearing-looking fellow (ἀνὴρ ὑπέροπλος, man presuming on his strength), who returns their salutation with insolence. The following, without any great violence to the letter of the ancient dialogue, may be taken as a sample of its spirit. The ruffian is addressed by Pollux:—

THE PRIZE-FIGHT BETWEEN POLLUX AND AMYCUS.

Pollux. Good day, friend. What sort of people, pray, live hereabouts?

Ruffian. I see no good day when I see strangers.

P. Don’t be disturbed. We are honest people who ask the question, and come of an honest stock.

R. I’m not disturbed at all, and don’t require to learn it from such as you.

P. You’re an ill-mannered, insolent clown.

R. I’m such as you see me. I never came meddling with you in your country.

P. (good-humouredly.) Come and meddle, and we’ll help you to a little hospitality to take home with you.

R. Keep it to yourselves: I neither give nor take.

P. (smiling.) Well, my good friend, may we have a taste of your spring?

R. Ask your throats when they’re dry.

P. Come, what’s your demand for it? What are we to pay?

R. Hands up, and man against man.

P. What, a fight; or is it to be a kicking-match?

R. A fight; and I would advise you to look about you.

P. I do, and can’t even see my antagonist.

R. Here he sits. You’ll find me no woman, I can tell you.

P. Good; and what are we to fight for? What’s the prize?

R. Submission. If you win, I’m to be at your service; and if I win, you’re to be at mine.

P. Why, those are the terms of cocks upon dunghills.

R. Cocks or lions, those are my terms, and you’ll have the water on no other.

With these words, Amycus (for it was he—a son of Neptune—and the greatest pugilist but one, then known in the world) blew a blast on a shell, and a multitude of long-haired Bebrycians (his countrymen) came pouring in about the plane-tree, under which he had been sitting. Castor went and called his brother shipmates out of the Argo, and the combatants, putting on their gauntlets, faced one another, and set to.

ROUND THE FIRST.

The contest began by trying to see which of the two should get the sun in his rear. Pollux obtained this advantage over the big man by dint of his wit (for though a demigod himself, he was less in bulk). The giant, finding the sun full on his face, pushed forward in a rage; and striking out further than he intended, laid himself open to a blow on the chin. This enraged him the more; and pushing still forward, he hung in a manner over his enemy, thinking with his huge body to bear him down. His people encouraged the project with a great shout; and the Argonauts, not to be behindhand, gave their champion another; for, in truth, they were not without apprehensions as to the result, seeing how enormous the body was. But the son of Jove slipped hither and thither, lacerating him all the while with double quick blows, and thus repulsing the endeavour. Amycus was compelled fairly to hold himself up as well as he could, for he was drunk with blows, and so he stood, vomiting blood. The noise of voices arose on all sides from the spectators, for his face was a mass of ulcers; and it was so swollen that you could hardly see his eyes. The son of Jove kept him still in a state of confusion, forcing him to waste his strength and spirits by striking out hither and thither to no purpose. At last, on seeing him about to lose his senses, he planted a final blow on the top of his nose, betwixt the eyebrows, and the giant fell at his length on the grass, with his face upwards.

ROUND THE SECOND.

Amycus rose on recovering his senses, and the fight was renewed with double fury. The dull-witted giant thought to knock the life out of his antagonist speedily, by striking heavily at his chest; but, by this proceeding, he again laid his face open, and the invincible Pollux disfigured and made it a heap of filth with unseemly blows. The flesh, which had before been so puffed up, now seemed to subside and melt away; the whole huge creature seemed to become little, while the less one assumed a greater aspect, and looked fresher for his toil.

“Say, Muse, for thou knowest,” how it was that the son of Jove finally overcame “the gluttonous”[3] giant.

“Thinking to do something great, the big Bebrycian,” leaning out of the right line, caught in his left hand the left hand of his adversary, and bringing forth from his side his own huge right one, aimed a blow, which, had it struck where it intended, would have done mischief; but the son of Jove stooped from under it, and emerging, gave his enemy such a blow on the left temple as made it spout with blood. He assisted the blow, directly, with another on the mouth, given by the hand which the giant had let drop; and crashing his teeth with the weight of it, followed it with a general clatter on the face, which mashed it a second time, and rendered resistance hopeless. Heavily fell Amycus to the ground, having no more heart, and raising his hands as he fell, in sign of throwing up the contest.

But nothing unbefitting thy worthiness, didst thou inflict, O pugilist Polydeuctes, on the conquered. Only he made him take a great oath—calling on his father Neptune out of the sea to witness it—that never more would he do anything grievous to those who sought his hospitality.

It appears to us, reader, and we think it will appear to thee, that even this prosification of a fine bit of poetry will afford no disgraceful evidence of the strength and muscle of the gentle shepherd Theocritus. The manner of the concluding passage is quite in the taste of the chivalrous poets of Italy; and forces us to repeat our regret, that the Sicilian left no larger work, to be put at the head of their romances. The Odyssey, indeed, is their leader in some respects; but to the grandeur, the wild fictions, and the domestic tenderness of the Odyssey, Theocritus would have added the gaiety and good-natured satire of Pulci and Ariosto.

Here follows a specimen (such as it is, and as far as we can pretend to represent the original) of the comic and domestic painting of Theocritus. It is a poem on the Rites of Adonis; or rather, on a couple of gossips, making holiday to enjoy the festival that formed a part of the rites. Adonis, the favourite of Venus, slain by the boar, and permitted by Jupiter to return to life every half-year and enjoy her company, was annually commemorated by the heathen world for the space of two days, the first of which was passed in mourning for his death, and the second, in feasting and merriment for his coming to life. Arsinoe, the consort of the poet’s patron, Ptolemy Philadelphus, celebrated these rites in the Egyptian capital, Alexandria; and Theocritus, in order to praise his royal friends, and at the same time give a picture of his countrywomen, introduces two women who were born in Syracuse and settled in Alexandria, making holiday on the occasion, and going to see the show. The show was that of the second day, and principally consisted of an image of Adonis laid in a bower of leaves and tapestry, and served with all the luxuries of the season, particularly flowers in pots. He was attended by flying Cupids, and eulogized by singers in hymns, much in the manner of saints and angels in a modern Catholic festival; and on the following morning, the image, with its flowers, was taken in procession to the sea-side, and committed to the waters on its way to the other world. The whole proceeding is intimated in the poem, by means of verses put into the mouth of the public singer, the Grisi or Malibran of the day; but the chief portion of it is assigned to the humours of the two gossips, who are precisely such as would be drawn at this moment on a similar occasion in any crowded city. This truth to nature, which is the constant charm of Theocritus (making it, as he does, artistical also with wit and poetry), the reader will recognise at once in the talk about the husband, the endeavours to mystify the little boy, the chatter and bustle in the crowd, and the gaping expressions of delight and amazement at the spectacle. The opening of the poem lets us into a household scene, described with all the nicety and archness of Chaucer.

THE SYRACUSAN GOSSIPS;

OR, THE FEAST OF ADONIS.

Gorgo and Praxinoe, The Gossips.
Eunoe, servant of Praxinoe.
Phrygia, her housemaid.
Little Boy, her Son.
Old Woman.
Two Men.
Scene—Alexandria in Egypt.
Gorgo. (at her friend’s door.) Praxinoe within?
Eunoe.Why, Gorgo, dear,
How late you are! Yes, she’s within.
Prax. (appearing.)What, no!
And so you’re come at last! A seat here, Eunoe;
And set a cushion.
Eunoe.There is one.
Prax.Sit down.
Gorgo. Oh, what a thing’s a spirit! Do you know,
I’ve scarcely got alive to you, Praxinoe?
There’s such a crowd—such heaps of carriages,
And horses, and fine soldiers, all full dress’d;
And then you live such an immense way off!
Prax. Why, ’twas his shabby doing. He would take
This hole that he calls house, at the world’s end.
’Twas all to spite me, and to part us two.
Gorgo. (speaking lower.) Don’t talk so of your husband, there’s a dear,
Before the little one. See how he looks at you.
Prax. (to the little boy.) There, don’t look grave, child; cheer up, Zopy, sweet;
It isn’t your papa we’re talking of.
Gorgo. (aside.) He thinks it is, though.
Prax.Oh no—nice papa!
(To Gorgo.) Well, this strange body once (let us say once,
And then he won’t know who we’re telling of),
Going to buy some washes and saltpetre,
Comes bringing salt! the great big simpleton!
Gorgo. And there’s my precious ninny, Dioclede:
He gave for five old ragged fleeces, yesterday,
Ten drachmas!—for mere dirt! trash upon trash!
But come; put on your things; button away,
Or we shall miss the show. It’s the king’s own;
And I am told the queen has made of it
A wonderful fine thing.
Prax.Ay, luck has luck.
Well, tell us all about it; for we hear
Nothing in this vile place.
Gorgo.We haven’t time.
Workers can’t throw away their holidays.
Prax. Some water, Eunoe; and then, my fine one,
To take your rest again. Puss loves good lying.
Come; move, girl, move; some water—water first.
Look how she brings it! Now, then;—hold, hold, careless;
Not quite so fast; you’re wetting all my gown.
There; that’ll do. Now, please the gods, I’m washed.
The key of the great chest—where’s that? Go fetch it.
[Exit Eunoe.
Gorgo. Praxinoe, that gown with the full skirts
Becomes you mightily. What did it cost you?
Prax. Oh, don’t remind me of it. More than one
Or two good minas, besides time and trouble.
Gorgo. All which you had forgotten.
Prax.Ah, ha! True;
That’s good. You’re quite right.
Re-enter Eunoe.
Come; my cloak, my cloak;
And parasol. There—help it on now, properly.
(To the little boy.) Child, child, you cannot go. The horse will bite it;
The Horrid Woman’s coming. Well, well, simpleton,
Cry, if you will; but you must not get lamed.
Come, Gorgo.—Phrygia, take the child, and play with him;
And call the dog indoors, and lock the gate.[They go out.
Powers, what a crowd! how shall we get along?
Why, they’re like ants! countless! innumerable!
Well, Ptolemy, you’ve done fine things, that’s certain,
Since the gods took your father. No one now-a-days
Does harm to trav’llers as they used to do,
After the Egyptian fashion, lying in wait,—
Masters of nothing but detestable tricks;
And all alike,—a set of cheats and brawlers.
Gorgo, sweet friend, what will become of us?
Here are the king’s horse-guards! Pray, my good man,
Don’t tread upon us so. See the bay horse!
Look how it rears! It’s like a great mad dog.
How you stand, Eunoe! It will throw him certainly!
How lucky that I left the child at home!
Gorgo. Courage, Praxinoe; they have pass’d us now;
They’ve gone into the court-yard.
Prax.Good! I breathe again.
I never could abide in all my life
A horse and a cold snake.
Gorgo (addressing an old woman). From court, mother?
Old Woman. Yes, child.
Gorgo.Pray, is it easy to get in?
Old Woman. The Greeks got into Troy. Everything’s done
By trying.[Exit Old Woman.
Gorgo. Bless us! How she bustles off!
Why, the old woman’s quite oracular.
But women must know everything; ev’n what Juno
Wore on her wedding-day. See now, Praxinoe,
How the gate’s crowded.
Prax.Frightfully indeed.
Give me your hand, dear Gorgo; and do you
Hold fast of Eutychis’s, Eunoe.
Don’t let her go; don’t stir an inch; and so
We’ll all squeeze in together. Stick close now.
Oh me! oh me! my veil’s torn right in two!
Do take care, my good man, and mind my cloak.
Man. ’Twas not my fault; but I’ll take care.
Prax.What heaps!
They drive like pigs!
Man.Courage, old girl! all’s safe.
Prax. Blessings upon you, sir, now and for ever,
For taking care of us—A good, kind soul.
How Eunoe squeezes us! Do, child, make way
For your own self. There; now, we’ve all got in,
As the man said, when he was put in prison.
Gorgo. Praxinoe, do look there! What lovely tapestry!
How fine and showy! One would think the gods did it.
Prax. Holy Minerva! how those artists work!
How they do paint their pictures to the life!
The figures stand so like, and move so like!
They’re quite alive, not work’d. Well, certainly,
Man’s a wise creature. See now—only look—
See—lying on the silver couch, all budding,
With the young down about his face! Adonis!
Charming Adonis—charming ev’n in Acheron!
Second Man. Do hold your tongues there; chatter, chatter, chatter.
The turtles stun one with their yawning gabble.
Gorgo. Hey-day! Whence comes the man? What is’t to you,
If we do chatter? Speak where you’ve a right.
You’re not the master here. And as for that,
Our people are from Corinth, like Bellerophon.
Our tongue’s Peloponnesiac; and we hope
It’s lawful for the Dorians to speak Doric!
Prax. We’ve but one master, by the Honey-sweet![4]
And don’t fear you, nor all your empty blows.
Gorgo. Hush, hush, Praxinoe!—there’s the Grecian girl,
A most amazing creature, going to sing
About Adonis; she that sings so well
The song of Sperchis: she’ll sing something fine,
I warrant.—See how sweetly she prepares!
THE SONG.
O Lady, who dost take delight
In Golgos and the Erycian height,
And in the Idalian dell,
Venus, ever amiable;
Lo, the long-expected Hours,
Slowest of the blessed powers,
Yet who bring us something ever,
Ceasing their soft dancing never,
Bring thee back thy beauteous one
From perennial Acheron.
Thou, they say, from earth hast given
Berenice place in heaven,
Dropping to her woman’s heart
Ambrosia; and for this kind part,
Berenice’s daughter—she
That’s Helen-like—Arsinoe,
O thou many-named and shrin’d,
Is to thy Adonis kind.
He has all the fruits that now
Hang upon the timely bough:
He has green young garden-plots,
Basketed in silver pots;
Syrian scents in alabaster,
And whate’er a curious taster
Could desire, that women make
With oil or honey, of meal cake;
And all shapes of beast or bird,
In the woods by huntsman stirr’d;
And a bower to shade his state
Heap’d with dill, an amber weight;
And about him Cupids flying,
Like young nightingales, that—trying
Their new wings—go half afraid,
Here and there, within the shade.
See the gold! The ebony see!
And the eagles in ivory,
Bearing the young Trojan up
To be filler of Jove’s cup;
And the tapestry’s purple heap,
Softer than the feel of sleep;
Artists, contradict who can,
Samian or Milesian.
But another couch there is
For Adonis, close to his;
Venus has it, and with joy
Clasps again her blooming boy
With a kiss that feels no fret,
For his lips are downy yet.
Happy with her love be she;
But to-morrow morn will we,
With our locks and garments flowing
And our bosoms gently showing,
Come and take him, in a throng,
To the sea-shore, with this song:—
Go, belov’d Adonis, go
Year by year thus to and fro;
Only privileged demigod;
There was no such open road
For Atrides; nor the great
Ajax, chief infuriate;
Nor for Hector, noblest once
Of his mother’s twenty sons;
Nor Patroclus, nor the boy
That returned from taken Troy;
Nor those older buried bones,
Lapiths and Deucalions;
Nor Pelopians, and their boldest;
Nor Pelasgians, Greece’s oldest.
Bless us then, Adonis dear,
And bring us joy another year;
Dearly hast thou come again,
And dearly shalt be welcomed then.
Gorgo. Well; if that’s not a clever creature, trust me!
Lord! what a quantity of things she knows!
And what a charming voice!—’Tis time to go, though,
For there’s my husband hasn’t had his dinner,
And you’d best come across him when he wants it!
Good-by, Adonis, darling. Come again.

CHAPTER V.

THEOCRITUS.—Concluded.

SPECIMENS OF THE PATHOS AND PASTORAL OF THEOCRITUS.—THE CYCLOPS IN LOVE.—POETICAL FEELING AMONG UNEDUCATED CLASSES IN THE SOUTH.—PASSAGES FROM THEOCRITUS’S FIRST IDYLL.—HIS VERSIFICATION AND MUSIC.—PASTORAL OF BION AND MOSCHUS.

Having seen the force and comic humour of Theocritus, let us now, if we can, give something of a taste of his pathos, and conclude with him as the Prince of Pastoral. We shall find the one leading to the other, or rather identified with it, for Polyphemus was himself a shepherd, and all his imagery and associations are drawn from pastoral life. Our English, it is to be borne in mind, is not the Greek. The poet must have all the benefit of that admission. But at any rate we have done our best not to spoil the original with such artificial modes of speech as destroy all pathos; and feeling has a common language everywhere, which he who is thoroughly moved by it, can never wholly misrepresent.

The story is that of Polyphemus under the circumstances alluded to in our second chapter. It is addressed to the poet’s friend Nicias, and is the earliest evidence of that particular personal regard for the medical profession, which is so observable in the history of men of letters; for Nicias was a physician.

THE CYCLOPS IN LOVE.
There is no other medicine against love,
My Nicias, (so at least it seems to me,)
Either to cure it or to calm, but song.
That, that indeed is balmy to men’s minds,
And sweet; but ’tis a balm rare to be found;
Though not by you, my friend, who are at once
Physician, and belov’d by all the Nine.
It was by this the Cyclops liv’d among us,
I mean that ancient shepherd, Polypheme,
Who lov’d the sea-nymph, when he budded first
About the lips and curling temples;—lov’d,
Not in the little present-making style,
With baskets of new fruit and pots of roses,
But with consuming passion. Many a time
Would his flocks go home by themselves at eve,
Leaving him wasting by the dark sea-shore;
And sunrise would behold him wasting still.
Yet ev’n a love like his found balm in verse,
For he would sit, and look along the sea,
And from his rock pipe to some strain like this:—
“O my white love, my Galatea, why
Avoid me thus? O whiter than the curd,
Gentler than any lamb, fuller of play
Than kids, yet bitterer than the bright young grape,
You come sometimes, when sweet sleep holds me fast;
You break away, when sweet sleep lets me loose;
Gone, like a lamb at sight of the grey wolf.
“Sweet, I began to love you, when you first
Came with my mother to the mountain side
To gather hyacinths. I show’d the way;
And then, and afterwards, and to this hour,
I could not cease to love you; you, who care
Nothing about my love—Great Jove! no, nothing.
“Fair one, I know why you avoid me thus:
It is because one rugged eyebrow spreads
Across my forehead, solitary and huge,
Shading this eye forlorn. My nose, too, presses
Flat tow’rds my lip. And yet, such as I am,
I feed a thousand sheep; and from them drink
Excellent milk; and never want for cheese
In summer, nor in autumn, nor dead winter,
Dairies I have, so full. I can play, too,
Upon the pipe, so as no Cyclops can,
Singing, sweet apple mine, of you and me,
Often till midnight. And I keep for you
Four bears’ whelps, and eleven fawns with collars:
Come to me then, for you shall have them all.
Let the sea rake on the dull shore. Your nights
Would be far sweeter here, well hous’d with me.
The place is beautiful with laurel-trees,
With cypresses, with ivy, and the vine,
The dulcet vine: and here, too, is a stream,
Heavenly to drink, the water is so cold.
The woody Ætna sends it down to me
Out of her pure white snows. Who could have this,
And choose to live in the wild salt-sea waves?
Perhaps, when I am talking of my trees,
You think me ruder than the trunks? more rough;
More rugged-bodied? Ah, they keep me warm;
They blaze upon my hearth; yet, I could lose
Warmth, life, and all, and burn in the same fire,
Rather than dwell beside it without you.
Nay, I could burn the eye from out my head,
Though nothing else be dearer.
“Oh, poor me!
Alas! that I was born a finless body,
And cannot dive to you, and kiss your hand;
Or, if you grudg’d me that, bring you white lilies,
And the fresh poppy with its thin red leaves.
And yet not so; for poppies grow in summer,
Lilies in spring; and so I could not, both.
But should some coaster, sweetest, in his ship
Come here to see me, I would learn to swim;
And then I might find out what joy there is
In living, as you do, in the dark deeps.
“O Galatea, that you would but come;
And having come, forget, as I do now,
Here where I sat me, to go home again!
You should keep sheep with me, and milk the dams,
And press the cheese from the sharp-tasted curd.
It is my mother that’s to blame. She never
Told you one kind, endearing thing of me,
Though she has seen me wasting day by day.
My very head and feet, for wretchedness,
Throb—and so let ’em; for I too am wretched.
O Cyclops, Cyclops, where are thy poor senses?
Go to thy basket-making; get their supper
For the young lambs. ’Twere wiser in thee, far.
Prize what thou hast, and let the lost sheep go.
Perhaps thou’lt find another Galatea,
Another, and a lovelier; for at night
Many girls call to me to come and play,
And when they find me list’ning, they all giggle
So that e’en I seem counted somebody.”
Thus Polyphemus medicined his love
With pipe and song; and found it ease him more
Than all the balms he might have bought with gold.

What say you, reader? Is not the monster touching? Do we not accord with his self-pity? feel for his throbbing pulse and his hopeless humility, and wish it were possible for a beauty to love a shepherd with one eye?—For the poet, observe, with great address, has said nothing about the giant. He has sunk the man-mountain. We may rate him at what equivocal measure we please, and consider him a respectable primæval sort of pastoral Orson. It appears to us, that there is no truer pathos of its kind in the whole circle of poetry than the passages about the sheep and wolf, the throbbing pulses just mentioned, and the lover’s humble attempt to get a little consolation of vanity out of the equivocal interest taken in him by the “giggling” damsels at the foot of his hill. The word “giggle,” which is the literal translation of the Greek word, and singularly like it in the main sound, would have been thought very bold by a conventional poet. Not so thought the poet whose truth to nature has made him immortal.

We are to fancy the Sicilian girls on a summer night (all the world is out of door there on summer nights) calling to Polyphemus up the mountain. They live at the foot of it—of Ætna. They have heard him stirring in the trees. The stir ceases. They know he is listening; and in the silence of the glen below, he hears them laughing at his attention. Such scenes take place all over the world, where there is any summer, Britain included. We doubt whether Virgil or Tasso would have ventured upon the word. But Ariosto would. Homer and Shakspeare would. So would Dante. So would Catullus, a very Greek man. And it would surely not have been avoided by the author of the Gentle Shepherd, whose perception of homely truth puts him on a par in this respect with the greatest truth poetical.

This love-story of Polyphemus is pastoral poetry in its highest passionate condition. Of pastoral, in the sense in which it is generally understood, a briefer or better specimen cannot be given than in the opening passages of our poet’s volume. You are in the circle of pastoral at once, and in one of its loveliest spots. You are in the open air under pine-trees by fountain-heads, in company with two born poets, goatherd and shepherd though they be; poets such as Burns and Allan Ramsay might have been, had they been born in Sicily.

A word, before we proceed, in respect to that interfusion of eloquent and therefore sometimes elegant expression which has been charged on one of the most natural of poets as an affectation, but which, as he treats it, is only in unison with the popular genius of the south. In Virgil it became a rhetorical mistake; an artificial flower stuck in the ground. In Theocritus it was the growth of the soil; myrtle and almond springing by the wayside.

Poetical expression in humble life is to be found all over the south. In the instances of Burns, Ramsay, and others, the north also has seen it. Indeed, it is not a little remarkable, that Scotland, which is more northern than England, and possesses not even a nightingale, has had more of it than its southern neighbour. What that is owing to, is a question; perhaps to the very restrictions of John Knox and his fellows, and Nature’s happy tendency to counteract them. Or it may have originated in the wild and uncertain habits of highlanders and borderers. Certainly, the Scotch have shown a more genial and impulsive spirit in their songs and dances than the English. We have nothing among us like the Highland Fling, or the reel of Tullochgorum, or the songs of Gaberlunzie Men, Jolly Beggars, and The gude man he cam’ hame at e’en. But extremes meet; and the Scotch, in their hardihood, their very poverty, and occasional triumphs over it in fits of excess, appear to have been driven by a jovial desperation into the vivacities inspired by the sunshine of the south. Yet the Irish are a still greater puzzle in this respect; for they are poorer; their land is in the English latitude; and nevertheless the poetical feeling is far more common and more eloquent among them, than with either of their neighbours. Their fertility of fancy and readiness of expression render them, in fact, very like a southern people; and, if a doubt, alas! did not arise that misfortune itself was their inspirer by sharpening their sensibility, would give an almost laughable corroboration to their claims of a Milesian descent. Now, the Italian peasantry to this day, particularly the Tuscan, exhibit, as they always did, a like poetical fancy, but with more elegance; and so, we doubt not, did those of Greece and Sicily. The latter, in modern times, have been checked in their faculties by unfavourable government; but in the time of Theocritus, the subjects of the overflowingly rich cities of Syracuse and Agrigentum must have been as willing and able to pour out all they felt, as so many well-fed thrushes and blackbirds; and anybody at all acquainted with the less rich, but not ill-governed, Tuscan peasantry, knows well with how much eloquence, and even refinement, it is possible for people in humble life to express themselves, when the language is favourable, and circumstances not otherwise. Mr. Stewart Rose has given some amusing instances in his Letters from the North of Italy. Asking a Florentine servant if he understood some directions given him, the man said, “Yes, for he always spoke in relief” (“Che parlava sempre scolpito”). Nothing could be better expressed than this. Another time, his good-natured master, inquiring if he was comfortable on the coach-box, the servant answered that he was very well off; for “here,” said he, “one springs it” (“che quì si molleggia”). The verb was coined for the occasion from the noun molla, a spring. Another man being asked the way to a particular house, told him to go straight forwards to the end of the street, and it would “tumble on his head.” This is very Irish. An Italian acquaintance of Mr. Rose was passing through a street in Florence at serenade time, when he beheld a dog looking up at a female of his species in a balcony, and at the same time scratching his ribs. One of the Florentine populace, who happened to be passing, stopped, and cried out, “He is in love, and playing the guitar, serenading the fair one” (“È innamorato; suona la chitarra; fà la cucchiata alla bella”). A Roman laquais de place (but he is a more sophisticate authority) once asked the same writer, on seeing him look at a wild-flower in the fields, whether it was the signor’s “pleasure that he should cull it?” (“Commanda che lo carpa?”) For our poetical word “cull,” though its meaning is different, may represent the unvernacular elegance of carpa, pluck. The laquais de place, it seems, “talked like a cardinal.” We have ourselves, however, heard a coachman’s wife, who was a Roman, pour forth a stream of elegant language that astonished us.

A neighbour of ours, near Fiesole, a fine old Tuscan peasant, who was clipping a hedge, said to us one day, as we exchanged salutation with him, “I am trimming the bush’s beard” (“Fò la barba al bosco”). But a Florentine female servant, who had the child of an acquaintance in her arms, and who, like the generality of her countrywomen, was perfectly unaffected, carried the aristocratic refinement of her style higher, perhaps, than any of the persons mentioned. Some remarks being made respecting the countenances of her master’s children, she asked us whether the one in her arms did not form an exception; whether, in fact, we did not think that it had “a kind of plebeian look” (“un certo aspetto plebeo”).

So much for the ability of the humbler orders to speak with force and delicacy, when sensibility gives them the power of expression, and animal spirits the courage to use it.

PASSAGES FROM THE FIRST IDYLL OF THEOCRITUS.

In Theocritus’s opening poem, the time of day is a hot noon, and a shepherd and goatherd appear to have been piping under their respective trees, we suppose at a reasonable distance. The shepherd goes towards the goatherd, who seems to stop playing; and on approaching him commences the dialogue by observing, that there is something extremely pleasant in the whisper of the pine under which he is sitting, but not less so was the something he was playing just now on his pipe. He declares that he is the next best player after Pan himself; and that if Pan were to have a ram for his prize, the ewe would of necessity fall to the goatherd.

Sweet sings the rustling of your pine to-day
Over the fountain-heads; and no less sweet
Upon the pipe play you.

The Greek word for rustling, or rather whispering—psithurisma—is much admired. “Whispering” is hardly strong enough, and not so long drawn out. There is the continuous whisper in psithurisma. The goatherd returns the compliment by telling the shepherd that his singing during such hot weather (for we must always keep in mind the accessories implied by good poets) is sweeter than the flowing abundance of the waterfall out of the rock. The two verses in which this is expressed are a favourite quotation, on account of the imitative beauty of the second sentence. We know not whether they would equally please every critical ear, for “doctors,” even of music, “differ.” Much of the divine writing of Beethoven seems to have been as appalling at first to the orchestral world, as olives are to most palates; and there is a passage in Mozart which to this day is a choke-pear to the scientific, albeit they acknowledge that he intended it to be written as it stands. For our parts, we have great faith in the ultra-delights perceptible in the enormities of Beethoven, Mozart, and olives; and suspect there is more music in the very hissing and clatter in the sentence in Theocritus, to say nothing of its obvious rush and leaping, than has been quite perceived by every scholar who has praised it. It is a pity that all musical people do not read Greek; for they deserve to do so; which is what cannot be said of all scholars. Perhaps some of them would be glad to see the passage, even in English characters. We remember, before we knew any others, the delight we used to take in the Greek quotations, thus printed in the novels of Smollett and Fielding, and shall make no further apology for a like bit of typography. We shall first give the measure of the original verse in corresponding English hexameters. The English language does not take kindly to the measure. The hexameter is too salient and cantering for it. But once and away the anomaly may be tolerated, especially for illustration’s sake. The passage in English words may run thus:—

Sweèter, O shèpherd, thy sìnging is, thàn the sonòrous
Gùsh from abòve of the wàterfall oùt of the ròck-stone.

There is no imitative attempt of another sort in this version. It is given simply to show a general likeness to the measure. The sound of the original, as everybody will discern, is much more to the purpose, though judges will differ perhaps as to whether it is more effective in softness or in strength, in leap or in volume. We are obliged to adapt the spelling, in one or two instances, to the necessities of the pronunciation. The literal Greek order of the words would, in English, be:—

Sweeter, O shepherd, the thy song, than the sonorous
That (or yonder) from the rock-stone much flows from above water.
Hàdion o poiman to teòn melos è to katàches
Teen appo tas pètras katalèibetai hèupsothen hèudor.

Katalèibetai (much, or strongly, or abundantly, flows), with the accent on the diphthong ei, is certainly a fine strenuous word, at once strong and liquid, and appreciable by any ear. And hèupsothen hèudor (from above water), with its two successive u’s, will be equally admitted, we think, to express the constant yearning rush of the water from inside the well.

The goatherd promises the shepherd, if he will sing to him, the gift of a huge wine-cup, adorned with figures. The following exquisite picture is among them. We give it in the version of Mr. M. J. Chapman, a living writer, not unworthy his venerable namesake, and by far the best translator of Theocritus that has appeared:—

Ἔντοσθεν δὲ γυνὰ, &c.
With flowing robe, and Lydian head-dress on,
Within, a woman to the life is done—
An exquisite design! On either side
Two men with flowing locks each other chide,
By turns contending for the woman’s love;
But not a whit her mind their pleadings move:
One while she gives to this a glance and smile,
And turns and smiles on that another while.

To the apparently formidable objection made by some critics, that no artist could make a woman look on two people one after the other, Mr. Chapman happily answers:—“Theocritus described an image that was before his mind’s eye, and for so doing he needs no defence; but the matter-of-fact critic may be able, perhaps, to obtain an approximation to the idea, by considering attentively the print of ‘Garrick divided between Tragedy and Comedy.’”[5]

This picture is followed by one of an old able-bodied fisherman at his labours, with the muscles of his neck swelling like those of a strong young man; and to this succeeds a third, as good as that of the Coquette—some will think better. It is a boy so intent upon making a trap, that he is not aware of the presence of two foxes, one of whom is meditating to abduct his breakfast.

A little boy sits by the thorn-edge trim,
To watch the grapes—two foxes watching him;

(The version of this line is original in the turn of it, and very happy.)

One through the ranges of the vine proceeds,
And on the hanging vintage slily feeds;
The other plots and vows his scrip to search,
And for his breakfast leave him in the lurch.
Meanwhile he twines, and to a rush fits well
A locust-trap, with stalks of asphodel;
And twines away with such absorbing glee,
Of scrip or vines he never thinks, not he!
Chapman, p. 8.

In the pastorals of Bion we know nothing of prominent interest, though he is eloquent and worth reading. But in those of Moschus there is a passage which has found an echo in all bosoms, like the sigh that answers a wind over a churchyard. It is in the Elegy on Bion’s death:—

Αἴ, αἶ, ταὶ μαλάχαι μέν ἐπὰν κατὰ κᾶπον ὀλώνται,
Ἤ τὰ χλωρὰ σέλινα, τὸ τ’ εὔθαλες οὖλον ἄνηθον,
Ύστερον αὖ ζώοντι, καὶ εἰσ ἔτος ἄλλο φύοντι·
Ἄμμες δ’ ὁι μεγάλοι, καὶ καρτέροι, ἠ σόφοι ἄνδρες,
Ὁππότε πρᾶτα θάνωμες, ἀνακόοι ἔν χθονὶ κοῖλα,
Εὔδομες εὐ μάλα μακρὸν, ἀτέρμονα, νήγρετον ὕπνον.
Idyll iii. v. 104.
Alas! when mallows in the garden die,
Green parsley, or the crisp luxuriant dill,
They live again, and flower another year;
But we, how great soe’er, or strong, or wise,
When once we die, sleep, in the senseless earth,
A long, an endless, unawakeable sleep.

The beautiful original of these verses, every word so natural and sincere, so well placed, and the whole so affecting, may stand by the side of any poetry, even that of the passage in the Book of Job too well known to most of us. But we confess that after such Greek verses as these, and the fresh flowers of Theocritus, we never have the heart to quote the artificial ones of Virgil, critically accomplished as they are. They are the pattern of too many others which brought the word Pastoral into disrepute; and it is not pleasant to be forced to object to a great name.

Virgil, however, appears to have been very fond of the country; and after he was settled in Rome, longed for it, like Horace, with a feeling which produced some of his most admired passages; things which other metropolitan poets and tired court gentlemen have delighted to translate. Such are the Delights of a Country Life, versified out of the Georgics by Cowley, Sir William Temple, Dryden, and others, lines of which remain for ever in the memory.

Oh happy (if his happiness he knows)
The country swain, &c.

He has no great riches, or visitors, or cares, &c., but his life

Does with substantial blessedness abound,
And the soft wings of peace cover him round.

That is Cowley, who betters his original.

In life’s cool vale let my low scene be laid;
Cover me, gods! with Tempe’s thickest shade.

So again of the shepherd:—

—In th’ evening of a fair sunny day,
With joy he sees his flocks and kids to play,
And loaded kine about his cottage stand,
Inviting with known sound the milker’s hand;
And when from wholesome labour he doth come,
With wishes to be there, and wish’d for home,
He meets at door the softest human blisses,
His chaste wife’s welcome, and dear children’s kisses.

Of a similar kind is Cowley’s translation of Claudian’s Old Man of Verona:—

Happy the man who his whole time doth bound
Within th’ enclosure of his little ground.—
Him no false distant lights, by fortune set,
Could ever into foolish wanderings get;—
No change of consuls marks to him the year:
The change of seasons is his calendar:
The cold and heat winter and summer shows;
Autumn by fruits, and spring by flow’rs, he knows:—
A neighb’ring wood born with himself he sees,
And loves his old contemporary trees.

The most original bit of Pastoral in Virgil (if it be his) is to be found in a poem of doubtful authority called the Gnat (Culex), which has been beautifully translated by Spenser. It is a true picture, combining the elegance of Claude with the minuteness of the Flemish painters:—

The fiery sun was mounted now on height
Up to the heavenly towers, and shot each where
Out of his golden charet glistering light;
And fayre Aurora, with her rosie haire,
The hatefull darkness now had put to flight;
When as the shepherd, seeing day appeare,
His little goats gan drive out of their stalls,
To feede abroad, where pasture best befalls.
To an high mountain’s top he with them went,
Where thickest grasse did cloath the open hills:
They, now amongst the woods and thicketts ment,
Now in the vallies wandring at their wills,
Spread themselves farre abroad through each descent;
Some on the soft green grasse feeding their fills;
Some, clambering through the hollow cliffes on hy,
Nibble the bushie shrubs which growe thereby.
Others the utmost boughs of trees doe crop,
And brouze the woodbine twigges that freshly bud;
This with full bit doth catch the utmost top
Of some soft willow or new-growen stud;
That with sharpe teeth the bramble leaves doth lop,
And chaw the tender prickles in her cud;
The whiles another high doth overlooke
Her own like image in a cristall brook.

This is picturesque and charming. Yet Virgil, though a country-loving, and also an agricultural poet, would have been nothing as a pastoral poet without Theocritus, and, as it was, he spoiled him. We shall see in what manner, when we come to speak of Pope.

CHAPTER VI.

NORMAN TIMES—LEGEND OF KING ROBERT.

HOW KING ROBERT OF SICILY WAS DISPOSSESSED OF HIS THRONE; AND WHO SAT UPON IT.—HIS WRATH, SUFFERINGS, AND REPENTANCE.

In the glance at the ancient history of Sicily in our third chapter, we have seen that the Greek and Roman sway was succeeded by that of the Saracens. They were masters of the island for the space of two hundred years, but have left no memorials, with the exception of a building or two, and traces of Arabic in the Sicilian tongue. The island was then conquered by a handful of Norman gentlemen, who had obtained possession of Naples, and whose history would be romantic enough to be worth repeating, if it were anything but a succession of wars. Their wonderful ascendency, and no less extraordinary personal prowess, are supposed by some, not without reason, to have given rise to much of the gigantic fable of the Orlandos and other peers of Charlemagne, who were all Frenchmen.

As an old ruin, therefore, standing in some spot surrounded by architecture of different orders, will sometimes be found to be the sole representative of a former age, we shall make the good old legend of King Robert, in this our Sicilian and Pastoral Sketch-book, stand for the whole Norman portion of its chronology. It is not military, except in the brusque self-sufficiency with which the character of King Robert sets out; but it is emphatically what we understand by Gothic; which, in modern parlance, implies the character of the interval between ancient and modern times. The Greek Sicilian poets, could they have foreseen it, would have loved it; and their successors, the pastoral writers of modern times, of whom we have afterwards to speak, unquestionably did so, whenever they met with it among their old reading. Shakspeare would have made a divine play of it, for it is very dramatic. Fancy what he would have done with the angel, and the court fool, and the pathos! Oh, that we had had but time to try even to dramatize it ourselves.

Who King Robert of Sicily may have been, in common earthly history—whether intended to shadow forth one of the aforesaid Norman chieftains who obtained possession of that island, or one of the various dukes who contend for the honour of being called Robert the Devil, or whether he was Robert of Anjou, hight Robert the Wise, the friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and father of the calumniated Joanna—we must leave to antiquaries to determine. Suffice to say, that in history angelical, and in the depths of one of the very finest kinds of truth, he was King Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urban, and of the Emperor Valemond. A like story has been told of the Emperor Jovinian (whoever that prince may have been); and we shall not dispute that something of the kind may have occurred to him also; since very strange things happen to the most haughty of princes, if we did but know their whole lives; not excepting their being taken for fools by their people. We shall avail ourselves of any light which the histories of the king and the emperor may serve to throw on each other.

Writers, then, inform us, that King Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urban and of the Emperor Valemond, was a prince of great courage and renown, but of a temper so proud and impatient, that he did not choose to bend his knee to Heaven itself, but would sit twirling his beard, and looking with something worse than indifference round about him, during the gravest services of the church.

One day, while he was present at vespers on the eve of St. John, his attention was excited to some words in the Magnificat, in consequence of a sudden dropping of the choristers’ voices. The words were these. “Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.” (“He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.”) Being far too great and warlike a prince to know anything about Latin, he asked a chaplain near him the meaning of these words; and being told what it was, observed, that such expressions were no better than an old song, since men like himself were not so easily put down, much less supplanted by poor creatures whom people call “humble.”

The chaplain, doubtless out of pure astonishment and horror, made no reply; and his majesty, partly from the heat of the weather, and partly to relieve himself from the rest of the service, fell asleep.