Chapter XVIII: Part VII (3)

_2nd Gentleman._ ... Do but stand upon the Foaming Shore,
The chidden Billow seemes to pelt the Clowds,
The wind-shaked-Surge, with high and monstrous
Maine,
Seemes to cast water on the burning Beare,
And quench the Guards of the ever-fixèd Pole.
I never did like mollestation view
On the enchafèd Flood....

Faintly shimmering, too, in the northern heavens is that other numerous starry cluster, known the world over as _Seven_--to us as the Seven Sisters or the Pleiades. A strange seven; for only six stars are now clearly visible to the naked eye, one having vanished, it would seem, within human memory. When? where?--none can tell. They play in light as close together as dewdrops in a cobweb hung from thorn to thorn. Nearby, on winter's cold breast burns the most marvellous of the constellations--the huntsman Orion, with his Rigel and Bellatrix and Betelgeuse; his dog Sirius at his heels. "Seek him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night...."

9. "LIKE A CHILD, HALF IN TENDERNESS AND MIRTH."

At a first reading, perhaps, this line will not appear to flow so smoothly as the rest. But linger an instant on the word _child_, and you will have revealed to yourself one of Shelley's, and indeed one of every poet's loveliest devices with words--to let the music of his verse accord with its meaning, and at the same time to please and charm the ear with a slight variation from the regular beat and accent of the metre. So, too, in the middle lines of the next stanza. This variation, which is called rhythm, is the very proof of its writer's sincerity. For if the sound of his verse (or of his voice) rings false, he cannot have completely realised what he was writing or saying. When a man says what he means, he says it as _if he meant it_. The _tune_ of what he says sounds right. When a man does _not_ mean what he says, he finds it all but impossible to say it as if he did. The _tune_ goes wrong.

Just so with reading. So from a gay and tiny _Compendious English Grammar_ of 1780 I have borrowed these four brief wholesome rules for reading:

(1) ... Observe well the pauses, accents and emphases; and never stop but where the sense will admit of it.

(2) Humour your voice a little, according to the subject....

(3) Do not read too fast, lest [in lip or mind] you get a habit of stammering; adding or omitting words; and be sure that your understanding keep pace with your tongue.

(4) In reading Verse, pronounce every word just as if it were prose, observing the stops with great exactness, and giving each word its proper accent; and if it be not harmonious, the Poet, and not the Reader, is to blame."

Better, perhaps, be sure of your ear before you blame the poet. But in general, if these rules are followed, there can be little danger of reading like a parrot, or like a small boy in his first breeches at a Dame's school. To _think_ while one reads; that is the main thing: so as not to be, as Sidney says,--just

... like a child that some fair book doth find,
With gilded leaves or coloured vellum plays,
Or, at the most, on some fair pictures stays,
But never heeds the fruit of writer's mind.

13. "COMES DANCING FROM THE EAST."

I found a story about this dancing in Mrs. Wright's _Rustic Speech and Folklore_. It is the story of a woman who lived in a district called Hockley, in the parish of Broseley. She said that she had heard of such "dancing" but did not believe it to be true, "till on Easter morning last, I got up early, and then I saw the sun dance, and dance, and dance, three times, and I called to my husband and said, '_Rowland, Rowland, get up and see the sun dance!_' I used," she said, "not to believe it, but now I can never doubt more." The neighbours agreed with her that the sun did dance on Easter morning, and that some of them had seen it. "Seeing," goes the old proverb, "is believing"--which is true no less of the "inward eye." I once tried to comfort a very little boy who was unhappy because there was a Bear under his bed. Candle in hand, I talked and talked, and proved that there wasn't a real bear for miles and miles around, not at any rate until we reached the Zoo, and there--black, brown, sloth, spectacled, grizzly and polar alike--all of them, poor creatures, were cabined, cribbed and shut up in barred cages. He listened, tears still shining in his eyes, his small face sharp and clear. "Why certainly, certainly _not_," I ended, "there can't be a real bear for miles around!" He smiled as if pitying me. "Ah yes, Daddie," he answered with a die-away sob, "but, you see, you's talking of _real_ bears, and mine _wasn't_ real."

14. "US IDLE WENCHES."

It was a jolly bed in sooth,
Of oak as strong as Babel.
And there slept Kit and Sall and Ruth
As sound as maids are able.

Ay--three in one--and there they dreamed,
Their bright young eyes hid under;
Nor hearkened when the tempest streamed
Nor recked the rumbling thunder.

For marvellous regions strayed they in,
Each moon-far from the other--
Ruth in her childhood, Kit in heaven,
And Sall with ghost for lover.

But soon as ever sun shone sweet,
And birds sang, Praise for rain, O--
Leapt out of bed three pair of feet
And danced on earth again, O!

17. OLD MAY SONG.

This, like No. 2, and the next song must be as old as the dew-ponds on the Downs. They were wont to be sung, I have read, by five or six men, with a fiddle, or flute, or clarionet accompaniment. When I was a boy I can remember one First of May seeing a Jack-in-the-Green in the street--a man in a kind of wicker cage hung about with flowers and leaves--with Maid Marian. Friar Tuck and the rest, dancing and singing beside him. A great friend of mine, when she was a little girl of eight, was so frightened at sight of this leafy prancing creature on her way to school that she turned about and ran for a mile without stopping.

19. THE DAISY.

There is far too little of Geoffrey Chaucer's--that most lovable, shrewd, compassionate, and natural of poets--in this book. There was much more of him, I noticed, in Mr. Nahum's Tome II. At first sight his words look a little strange; but not for long; and if every dotted letter is made a syllable of, his rhythm will flow like water over bright green waterweed.

It is a curious, though little thing, that while, among the one hundred and seventy varieties of flowers Shakespeare mentions, he has no less than fifty-seven several references to the rose, twenty-one to the green grass, eighteen to violets, and even to the serviceable but rank nettle a round dozen, he has but a scant five to Chaucer's beloved daisy. Flowers, it is true, as says Canon Ellacombe (who collected all such references into his delight-full book, _Plant-lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare_), never sweeten the Plays for their own sake alone, and there are no foxgloves, snowdrops or forget-me-nots in them at all. Still, had he loved daisies as children do, he could hardly have resisted them even for "their own sake alone." Is not bairnwort another name for the daisy?

"A yellow cup, it hath," says Pliny, "and the same is crowned, as it were with a garland, consisting of five and fifty little leaves, set round about it in manner of fine pales. These be flowers of the meadow, and most of such are of no use at all." No use at all, none--except only to make skylark of every heart whose owner has eyes in his head for a daisy's simple looks, its marvellous making, and the sheer happiness of their multitudes wide open in the sun or round-headed and adrowse in the evening twilight.

Chaucer's picture portrait is well known. So is that in his own words in the _Canterbury Tales_. But here is another, less familiar, by Robert Greene--of "Sir Jeffery Chaucer," as he calls him. Water chamlet is a rich coloured silken plush, and a whittell is a knife:

His stature was not very tall,
Leane he was, his legs were small,
Hosed within a stock of red
A buttoned bonnet on his head,
From under which did hang, I weene,
Silver haires both bright and sheene,
His beard was white, trimmèd round,
His count'nance blithe and merry found,
A Sleevelesse Iacket large and wide,
With many pleights and skirts Side,
Of water Chamlet did he weare,
A whittell by his belt he beare,
His shooes were cornèd broad before,
His Inkhorne at his side he wore,
And in his hand he bore a booke,
Thus did this auntient Poet looke.

20. "BRAVE PRICK-SONG"

--which means, I gather, that while the nightingale was--even into the dusk of dawn--yet singing her "_air_" or "_descant_," the lark joined in as if reading her notes from the daybreak stars _pricking_ the sky.

21. "CUCKOO, JUG, JUG, PU WE, TO WITTA WOO!"

Four birds, I suppose, have part in this: cuckoo, nightingale (_yoog, yoog_), green-finch (?) and owl.

I rose anon, and thought I wouldė gone
Into the woods, to hear the birdis sing,
When that the misty vapour was agone,
And cleare and fairė was the morrowing;
The dew, also, like silver in shining,
Upon the leaves, as any baumė sweet.

....

And in I went to hear the birdis song,
Which on the branches, both in plain and vale,
So loudly y-sang, that all the wood y-rang,
Like as it should shiver in pieces smale;
And as me thoughten that the nightingale
With so great might her voice began out-wrest,
Right as her heart for love would all to-brest.

JOHN LYDGATE

22. "THE JEALOUS TROUT."

Thou that desir'st to fish with line and hook,
Be it in pool, in river, or in brook,
To bless thy bait and make the fish to bite,
Lo, here's a means! if thou canst hit it right:
Take Gum of Life, fine beat, and laid in soak
In oil well drawn from that which kills the oak,
Fish where thou wilt, thou shalt have sport thy fill;
When twenty fail, thou shalt be sure to kill.

It's perfect and good,
If well understood;
Else not to be told
For silver or gold.

So advises Master Will. Lauson in the _Secrets of Angling_, which was published in 1653; the ingredients (or _ingrediments_ as I used to say when I was a child) of his "gum of life" being _Cocculus Juliæ_, _Assafoetida_, Honey, and Wheat-flour. The "that which kills the oak," I suppose, is ivy. But it looks as if there may have been a wink in his eye--to welcome the green in his reader's.

Here, on the same theme, are a few lines from a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges:

... Sometimes an angler comes, and drops his hook
Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree
Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book,
Forgetting soon his pride of fishery,
And dreams, or falls asleep,
While curious fishes peep
About his nibbled bait, or scornfully
Dart off and rise and leap....

And these are by J. Wolcot:

Why flyest thou away with fear?
Trust me there's naught of danger near,
I have no wicked hooke
All covered with a snaring bait,
Alas, to tempt thee to thy fate,
And dragge thee from the brooke....

Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish;
And when an angler for his dish,
Through gluttony's vile sin,
Attempts, a wretch, to pull thee out,
God give thee strength, O gentle trout,
To pull the raskall in!

A less common and more skilful sport than fly, hook and bait, or even "tickling" can afford is to share their watery chaos with the fish, and catch them with the hands. This needs rare skill and cunning and--a disguise! "For dyeing of your hairs," says Isaac Walton in _The Compleat Angler_, "do it thus: Take a pint of strong ale, half a pound of soot, and a little quantity of the juice of walnut-tree leaves, and an equal quantity of alum; put these together, into a pot, pan, or pipkin, and boil them half an hour; and having so done, let it cool; and being cold, put your hair into it, and there let it lie; it will turn your hair to be a kind of water or glass-colour or greenish; and the longer you let it lie, the deeper coloured it will be. You might be taught to make many other colours, but it is to little purpose; for doubtless the water-colour or glass-coloured hair is the most choice and the most useful for an angler, but let it not be too green."

"AND BIRDS HAD DRAWN THEIR VALENTINES." (line 4)

First thing in the early morning, if you go out on St. Valentine's Day, which is the 14th day of February, you will meet, if you meet anybody, your soon-to-be-loved one. So too the birds. In my young days, folks sent the daintiest pictures to their sweethearts on this day. Mr. Nahum had a drawer half full of them--with a few locks of hair and some withered flowers. And one or two of these Valentines were of beaten gold, with images of lovely things upon them, as if from another planet.

"This morning came up to my wife's bedside, I being up dressing myself, little Will Mercer to be her Valentine; and brought her name writ upon blue paper in gold letters, done by himself, very pretty...." Mr. Samuel Pepys's _Diary_.

To-morrow is S. Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a Maid at your Window
To be your Valentine!

_Ophelia's Song._

"JOAN STROKES A SILLABUB OR TWAIN."

If you would make a Lemon Sillabub (as advised by Mrs. Charlotte Mason, "a Professed Housekeeper, who from about 1740 had upwards of Thirty Years experience in Families of the First Fashion") take "a Pint of cream, a pint of white wine, the rind of two lemons grated, and the juice. Sugar to the taste. Let it stand some time; mill or whip it. Lay the froth on a sieve; put the remainder into glasses. Lay on the froth." Mr. Nahum must have had a fancy for Cookery Books; there were dozens of them in his tower room. Indeed, the next best thing to eating a good dish is to read how it is made; and somehow the old "cookbook" writers learned to write a most excellent and appetising English. Here is another recipe from _Delightes for Ladies_, of 1608--a dainty that would eat uncommonly well with a sillabub:--"_To make a marchpane._--Take two poundes of almonds being blanched, and dryed in a sieve over the fire, beate them in a stone mortar, and when they bee small mixe them with two pounde of sugar beeing finely beaten, adding two or three spoonefuls of rosewater, and that will keep your almonds from oiling: when your paste is beaten fine, drive it thin with a rowling pin, and so lay it on a bottom of wafers, then raise up a little edge on the side, and so bake it, then yce it with rosewater and sugar, then put it in the oven again, and when you see your yce is risen up and drie, then take it out of the oven and garnish it with pretie conceipts, as birdes and beasts being cast out of standing moldes. Sticke long comfits upright in it, cast biskets and carrowaies in it, and so serve it; guild it before you serve it: you may also print of this _marchpane_ paste in your molds for banqueting dishes. And of this paste our comfit makers at this day make their letters, knots, armes, escutcheons, beasts, birds, and other fancies." Also pygmy castles and suchlike, for dessert, which the guests would demolish with sugar-plums.

"Good thou, save mee a piece of Marchpane, and as thou lovest
me, let the Porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell...."

_Romeo and Juliet_

23. "THE SUN ARISING."

"What other fire could be a better image of the fire which is there, than the fire which is here? Or what other earth than this, of the earth which is there?" So said Plotinus, and "I know," said Blake, "that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.... Some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision." ... Indeed, when Blake was a child, he saw on Peckham Rye a tree, full, not of birds, but of angels; and his poems show how marvellously clear were the eyes with which he looked at the things of Nature.

In the year 1872, an old lady might have been seen driving across the Rye in her silvery carriage; and she came to where, under a flowering tree, sat a small boy--the locks of hair upon his head like sheaves of cowslips, his eyes like speedwells, and he in very bright clothes. And he was a-laughing up into the tree. She stopped her carriage and said to him almost as if she were more angry than happy, "What are you laughing at, child?" And he said, "At the sparrows, ma'am." "Mere sparrows!" says she, "but why?" "Because they were saying," says he, "here comes across the Rye a blind old horse, a blind old coachman, and a blind old woman." "But I am not blind," says she. "Nor are they not '_mere_ sparrows'," said the child. And at that the old lady was looking out of her carriage at no child, but at a small bush, in bud, of gorse.

24. "AND THANK HIM THEN"

--as does Robert Herrick's child, in his "Grace":

Here a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as Paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a Benizon to fall
On our meat, and on us all. AMEN.

A paddock is a frog or a toad, it seems. To either small cold hand there are four cold fingers and a thumb; and in old times, says Halliwell, our ancestors had distinct names for each of the five toes and for each of the five fingers. The fingers were called thumb, toucher, longman, leche-man, little-man: leche-man being the ring-finger, because in that "there is a sinew very tender and small that reaches to the heart." In Essex they used to call them (and still may)--Tom Thumbkin, Bess Bumpkin, Long Linkin, Bill Wilkin, and Little Dick. In Scotland: Thumbkin, Lickpot, Langman, Berrybarn and Pirlie Winkie.

And here are some more from Dr. Courtenay Dunn's _Natural History of the Child_--a book which is graced with as handsome a frontispiece as ever I've seen:

Thumb - Tommy Tomkins or Bill Milker.
Forefinger - Billy Wilkins " Tom Thumper.
Third finger - Long Larum " Long lazy.
Fourth finger Betsy Bedlam " Cherry Bumper.
Little finger - Little Bob " Tippity, Tippity-Town-end.

Toes:
Big toe - Tom Barker or Toe Tipe.
Toe 2 - - Long Rachel " Penny Wipe.
Toe 3 - - Minnie Wilkin " Tommy Tistle.
Toe 4 - - Milly Larkin " Billy Whistle.
Little toe - Little Dick " Tripping-go.

So (if you wish) you can secretly name not only your fingers, toes, rooms, chairs and tables, etc., but also the stars in their courses, the trees in your orchard, and have your own privy countersign for the flowers you like best. "Give a dog a bad name, and hang him," says the old proverb. Give anything a _good_ name, and it is yours for ever. There is the tale of the unhappy gardener in the Isle of Rumm who without ill intention called a snapdragon an antirrhinum. And there arose out of the hillside a Monster named Zobj--but I haven't the space for the rest. The gardener of course meant well; but when he heard the Voice counting his last moments, not in common English, but in what Wensleydale Knitters still remember of the Norse--Yahn, Jyahn, Tether, Mether, Mumph, Hither, Lither, Auver, Dauver, Die--well, he died before he was due, so to speak.

While we are on this subject, here is a Face Rhyme:

Bo Peeper
Nose Dreeper
Chin Chopper
White Lopper
Red Rag
And Little Gap.

This is another:

Here sits the Lord Mayor:
Here sit his men;
Here sits the cockadoodle;
Here sits the hen;
Here sits the little chickens;
Here they run in;
Chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper chin.

The next three are foot rhymes, very soothing at times to fractious babies. The first is common in London, etc.:

This little pig went to market;
This little pig stayed at home;
This little pig had roast beef;
This little pig had the bone;
This little pig cried _Wee-wee-wee-wee-wee_!
_All_ the way home.

The second comes from the Isle of Wight:

This gurt pig zays, I wants meat;
T'other one zays, Where'll ye hay et?
This one zays, In gramfer's barn;
T'other one zays, Week! Week! I can't get over the dreshel.

And this is from Scotland:

This ain biggit the baurn,
This ain stealt the corn,
This ain stood and saw,
This ain ran awa',
An' wee Pirlie Winkie paid for a'.

And last; here is a dance-babbie-on-knee (or This-is-the-way) rhyme; also from Scotland:

The doggies gaed to the mill,
This way and that way;
They took a lick out o' _this_ wife's poke
And they took a lick out o' _that_ wife's poke,
And a loup in the lead, and a dip in the dam,
And gaed walloping, walloping, walloping, HAME.

And no doubt came to the conclusion expressed in the sixth stanza of Robert Herrick's _Ternary of Littles, upon a Pipkin of Jelly sent to a Lady_:

A little Saint best fits a little Shrine,
A little Prop best fits a little Vine,
As my small Cruse best fits my little Wine.

A little Seed best fits a little Soyle,
A little Trade best fits a little Toyle,
As my small Jarre best fits my little Oyle.

A little Bin best fits a little Bread,
A little Garland fits a little Head,
As my small stuffe best fits my little Shed.

A little Hearth best fits a little Fire,
A little Chappell fits a little Quire,
As my small Bell best fits my little Spire.

A little streame best fits a little Boat,
A little lead best fits a little Float,
As my small Pipe best fits my little note.

A little meat best fits a little bellie,
As sweetly, Lady, give me leave to tell ye,
This little Pipkin fits this little Jellie.

And the fact that this or any other poem is printed at this end of the book instead of at the other does not mean that I am any the less thankful to have it or that Mr. Nahum left it out of his.

25. "I SING OF A MAIDEN."

Only the spelling of this lovely and ancient little carol has been slightly changed.

29. "SLEEP STAYS NOT, THOUGH A MONARCH BIDS."

(line 11).

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

_Henry IV. Part ii._

30.

For many years I read this poem as if the accents in the first line of each stanza fell on the first and third word--the two "I's." It was stupid of me, for clearly the accent should fall (lightly) on the second syllable of the "remembers." Apart from the accents or stresses in a line of verse, there is the rise and fall of the voice, a kind of tune in the _saying_ of it. If the right tune is not caught, then the difference is as much as if one sniffed a wallflower and it smelt like African mimosa. And to me, as to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, this poem is as familiar, long-endeared and refreshing as wallflower, Sweet William, or Old Man. This is the second or third time I have made remarks about the rhythm, lilt or tune of a poem; and it won't be the last. May I be forgiven, for as Chaucer wrote to his small son Louis when he was sharing with him his love of astronomy: "Soothly me seemeth betre to writen unto a child twice a good sentence, then he forget it ones." As for his elders, even thrice may be short commons.

"THOSE FLOWERS MADE OF LIGHT." (line 12)

Hold up a flower between eye and sun, or even candle-flame, and it seems little but its own waxen hue and colour. Moonlight is too pale; the petals remain opaque. In the moon's light, indeed, blueness is scarcely distinguishable from shadowiness; red darkens but yellow pales, and the fairest flowers of all wake in her beams--jasmine, convolvulus, evening-primrose--as if they not only shared her radiance but returned a glowwormlike fuminess of their own.

Once, long before I came to Thrae, having plucked for my mother a few convolvulus flowers, I remember when I was just about to give them into her hand I discovered that the beautiful cups of delight had enwreathed themselves together, and had returned as it were to the bud, never to reopen. I was but a child, and this odd little disappointment was so extreme that I burst out crying.

32.

See just above, No. 30: and for proof of the curious obedience of words to any bidden rhythm it is interesting to compare this poem with its next neighbours. Mr. Frost's colt is called "a little Morgan," because he was of a famous breed of horses of that name which are the pride of the State of Vermont.

35.

Only a single copy of the old play, _Mundus et Infans_, from which this fragment is taken, is known to be in existence. It was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1522; and was written roundabout 1500.

The lines need a slow reading to get the run and lilt of them: and even at that they jog and creak like an old farm-cart. But the boy, Dalyaunce, if one takes a little pains, will come gradually out of them as clear to the eye as if you had met him in the street to-day, on his way to "schole" for yet another "docking."

Clothes, houses, customs, food a little, thoughts a little, knowledge, too--all change as the years and centuries go by, but Dalyaunce under a thousand names lives on. It never occurred to me when I was young to think that the children in Rome talked Latin at their games, and that Solomon and Caesar, Prester John and the Grand Khan knew in their young days what it means to be homesick and none too easy to sit down. Yet there are knucklebones and dolls in London that the infant subjects of the Pharaohs played with, and at Stratford Grammar School, for all to see, is Shakespeare's school desk. As for Dalyaunce, "dockings" are not nowadays so harsh as once they were.

In proof of this, there is a passage from a book, telling of his own life as a small boy, written by Guibert de Nogent. He is speaking of his childhood, about the year when William the Conqueror landed at Hastings:

'So, after a few of the evening hours had been passed in that study, during which I had been beaten even beyond my deserts, I came and sat at my mother's knees. She, according to her wont, asked whether I had been beaten that day; and I, unwilling to betray my master, denied it; whereupon, whether I would or no, she threw back my inner garment (such as men call shirt), and found my little ribs black with the strokes of the osier, and rising everywhere into weals. Then, grieving in her inmost bowels at this punishment so excessive for my tender years, troubled and boiling with anger, and with brimming eyes, she cried, "Never now shalt thou become a clerk, nor shalt thou be thus tortured again to learn thy letters!" Whereupon, gazing upon her with all the seriousness that I could call to my face, I replied, "Nay, even though I should die under the rod, I will not desist from learning my letters and becoming a clerk!"'

Still, there were more merciful schoolmasters than Guibert de Nogent's, even in days harsh as his; as this further extract from Mr. G. G. Coulton's enticing _Medieval Garner_ shows:

'One day, when a certain Abbot, much reputed for his piety, spake with Anselm concerning divers points of Monastic Religion, and conversed among other things of the boys that were brought up in the cloister, he added: "What, pray, can we do with them? They are perverse and incorrigible; day and night we cease not to chastise them, yet they grow daily worse and worse."

Whereat Anselm marvelled, and said, "Ye cease not to beat them? And when they are grown to manhood, of what sort are they then?" "They are dull and brutish," said the other.

Then said Anselm, "With what good profit do ye expend your substance in nurturing human beings till they become brute beasts?... But I prithee tell me, for God's sake, wherefore ye are so set against them? Are they not human, sharing in the same nature as yourselves? Would ye wish to be so handled as ye handle them? Ye will say, 'Yes, if we were as they are.' So be it, then; yet is there no way but that of stripes and scourges for shaping them to good? Did ye ever see a goldsmith shape his gold or silver plate into a fair image by blows alone? I trow not. What then? That he may give the plate its proper shape, he will first press it gently and tap it with his tools; then again he will more softly raise it with discreet pressure from below, and caress it into shape. So ye also, if ye would see your boys adorned with fair manners, ye should not only beat them down with stripes, but also raise their spirits and support them with fatherly kindness and pity'...."

There was an old woodcut, hanging on Mr. Nahum's wall in his tower room, showing a boy in the middle ages being whipped in a kind of machine (something like a roasting-jack), and a schoolmaster standing by, nicely smiling, in a gown. When Coleridge was a bluecoat boy at Christ's Hospital with Charles Lamb, he seems to have had a headmaster of this kind: "'Boy!' I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day after my return after the holidays,--'Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying.' ...

"Mrs. Bowyer was no comforter, either. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us, by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in and said, 'Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!' This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, 'Away, woman, away!' and we were let off."

Coleridge tells of yet another schoolmaster, whose name, like Bowyer and birch, also began with a B.: "Busby was the father of the English public school system. He was headmaster of Westminster through the reign of Charles I., the Civil War, the Protectorate, the reign of Charles II., and the Revolution of 1688. Under him Westminster became the first school in the kingdom. When Charles II. visited the school, Busby stalked before the King with his hat upon his head, whilst his most sacred majesty meekly followed him. In private Busby explained that his conduct was due to the fact that he could not allow, for discipline's sake, the boys to imagine there could be a greater man than himself alive." Quite rightly, of course.

There is, too, the story of the little Lion that went to school to the Bear. Being, though of royal blood, a good deal of a dunce, Master Lion bore many sound cuffings from Dr. Bruin on the road to learning, and found it hot and dusty. After such administrations, he would sometimes sit in the sun under a window, learning his task and brooding on a day when he would return to the school and revenge himself upon the Doctor for having treated him so sore. But Master Lion was all this time growing up, and so many were the cares of State when he had left his books and become a Prince and Heir Apparent, that for a time he had no thought for his old school. Being, however, in the Royal Gardens one sunny morning, and seeing bees busy about their hive, he remembered an old saying on the sweetness of knowledge and wisdom, and this once more reminded him of his old Master. Bidding his servants sling upon a rod half a dozen of the hives, he set out to visit Dr. Bruin. The hives were taken into his study, and the bees, being unused to flitting within walls out of the sunshine, angrily sang and droned about the head of the old schoolmaster as he sat at his desk. Their stings were of little account against his thick hide, but their molestation was a fret, and he presently cried aloud, "Would that the Prince had kept his gifts to himself!" The Prince, who was standing outside the door, listening and smiling to himself, thereupon cried out: "Ah! Dr. Bruin, when I was under your charge, you often heavily smit and cuffed me with those long-clawed paws of yours. Now I am older, and have learned how sweet and worthy is the knowledge they instilled. This too will be your experience. My bees may fret and buzz and sting a little now, but you will think of me more kindly when you shall be tasting their rich honey in the Winter that is soon upon us." And Dr. Bruin, peering out at the Prince from amid the cloud of the bees, when he heard him thus call Tit for Tat, he couldn't help but laugh.

And last--to return to Coleridge once more, who, in the bad old days, so far as food goes, never "had a belly full" at Christ's Hospital, and whose appetite was only "damped, never satisfied,"--here is one of his earliest letters (to his elder brother George), which _may_ have an (indirect) reference to Dr. Bowyer's birch:

Dear Brother,--You will excuse me for reminding you that,
as our holidays commence next week, and I shall go out a
good deal, a good pair of breeches will be no inconsiderable
accession to my appearance. For though my present pair are
excellent for the purpose of drawing mathematical figures on
them, and though a walking thought, sonnet or epigram would
appear in them in very _splendid_ type, yet they are not
altogether so well adapted for a female eye--not to mention
that I should have the charge of vanity brought against me
for wearing a looking-glass. I hope you have got rid of your
cold--and I am

Your affectionate brother,

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

40.

This too should go to the lilt of its music, as then the accents would come clearly. I think, in the reading of it, there should be four stressed syllables to the first, second and fifth lines in each stanza: "Whâr hae ye bêen a' day, mŷ boy Tâmmy"; and "The wêe thing gie's her hând, and says, There, gâng and ask my Mâmmy." A line of verse like this resembles a piece of elastic; if you leave it very slack you will get no music out of it at all; stretch it a little too far, it snaps.

41. "ROSY APPLE, LEMON, OR PEAR."

This little jingle and Nos. 15, 16, 68, 75, etc., are Singing Game Rhymes, of which scores have been collected from the mouths of children near and far from all over the Kingdom, and are now to be found in print in Lady Gomme's two stout engrossing volumes entitled _Traditional Games_. In these more than seven hundred games are described, including Rakes and Roans, Rockety Row, Sally Go Round the Moon, Shuttlefeather, Spannims, Tods and Lambs, Whigmeleerie, Allicomgreenaie, Bob-Cherry, Oranges and Lemons, Cherry Pit, Thumble-bones, Lady on Yandor Hill, Hechefragy, and Snail Creep.

A good many of these games have singing rhymes to them. And the words of them vary in different places. For the children in each of twenty or more villages and towns may have their own particular version of the same rhyme. As for the original from which all such versions must once have come--_that_ may be centuries old. Like the Nursery Rhymes, they were most of them in the world ages before our great-great-great-grand-dams were babies in their cradles. The noble game of Hop Scotch, for instance, Lady Gomme tells us, was in favour before the year I.

The most mysterious rhymes of all are said to refer to ancient tribal customs, rites and ceremonies--betrothals, harvest-homes, sowings, reapings, well-blessings, dirges, divinations, battles, hunting, and exorcisings--before even London was else than a few hovels by its river's side. Rhymes such as these having been passed on from age to age and from one piping throat to another, have grown worn and battered of course, and become queerly changed in their words.

These from Mr. Nahum's book have their own differences too. He seems to have liked best those that make a picture, or sound uncommonly sweet and so carry the fancy away. Any little fytte or jingle or jargon of words that manages _that_ is like a charm or a talisman, and to make new ones is as hard as to spin silk out of straw, or to turn beech leaves into fairy money. When one thinks, too, of the myriad young voices that generation after generation have carolled these rhymes into the evening air, and now are still--well, it's a thought no less sorrowful for being strange, and no less strange for the fact that our own voices too will some day be as silent.

Summer's pleasures they are gone like to visions every one,
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.
I tried to call them back, but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away.
Dear heart, and can it be that such raptures meet decay?
I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay,
I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play
On its bank at "clink and bandy," "chock" and "taw" and
"ducking stone,"
Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own
Like a ruin of the past all alone....

JOHN CLARE

42. "IN PRAISE."

The loveliest and gayest song of praise and sweetness to a "young thing" I have ever seen.

"Ielofler"--gelofer, gelofre, gillofre, gelevor, gillyvor, gillofer, jerefloure, gerraflour--all these are ways of spelling Gillyflower, gelofre coming nearest to its original French: _giroflée_--meaning spiced like the clove. There were of old, I find, three kinds of gillyflowers: the clove, the stock and the wall. It was the first of these kinds that was meant in the earlier writers by the small clove carnation (or Coronation, because it was made into chaplets or garlands). Its Greek name was dianthus (the flower divine); and its twin-sister is the Pink, so called because its edges are, as it were, picked out, jagged, notched, scalloped. Country names for it are Sweet John, Pagiants, Blunket and Sops-in-Wine, for it spices what it floats in, and used to be candied for a sweetmeat. Blossoming in July, the Gillyflower suggests July-flower, and if Julia is one's sweetheart, it may also be a Julie-flower. So one name may carry many echoes. It has been truly described as a gimp and gallant flower, and, says Parkinson, who wrote _Paradisus Terrestris_, it was the chiefest of account in Tudor gardens. By 1700 indeed there were 360 kinds and four classes of clove gillyflower--the Flake, the Bizarre, the Piquette or picotee (_picotée_ or pricketed), and the Painted Lady, the last now gone. Its ancestor, the dianthus, seems to have crossed the Channel with the Normans, for it flourishes on the battlements of Falaise, the Conqueror's birthplace, and crowns the walls of many a Norman Castle--Dover, Ludlow, Rochester, Deal--to this day.

43. "PYGSNYE"

must be Piggie's eye, or, from an old word, Twinkle-eye, just as we nowadays call a child or loved-one Goosikins or Pussikins, or Lambkin Pie, or Bunch-of-Roses, or Chickabiddy, or Come-kiss-me-quick. _Minion_ means anything small, minikin, delicate, dainty, darling. Look close, for example, at the brown-green florets of a stalk of mignonette.

44. "A WORM'S LIGHT." (line 10)

Many years ago I had the curious pleasure of reading a little book--and one in small print too (Alice Meynell's lovely _Flower of the Mind_)--by _English_ glowworm light. The worm was lifting its green beam in the grasses of a cliff by the sea, and shone the clearer the while because it was during an eclipse of the moon. But see No. 93.

50. "BUT NEVER CAM' HE."

... "O wha will shoe my bonny foot?
And wha will glove my hand?
And wha will lace my middle jimp,
Wi' a lang, lang linen band?

"O who will kame my yellow hair,
With a haw bayberry kame?
And wha will be my babe's father,
Till Gregory come hame?"

"Thy father, he will shoe thy foot,
Thy brother will glove thy hand,
Thy mother will bind thy middle jimp
Wi' a lang, lang linen band!

"Thy sister will kame thy yellow hair,
Wi' a haw bayberry kame;
The Almighty will be thy babe's father,
Till Gregory come hame."...

"Haw" is an old English word meaning (?) blue or braw, and bayberry is the all-spice tree; so this sad one's yellow hair had for comb an uncommonly charming thing. In another version the comb is of "new silver," and in a third it is a red river kame, which, thinks Mr. Child, may be a corruption of red _ivory_. But give _me_ (for such hair) the bayberry kind, and let it be haw.

51. "THE ORPHAN."

"The first sense of sorrow I ever knew," wrote Richard Steele, "was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling, papa; for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces; and told me in a flood of tears, 'Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again.'"

53.

The first and third stanzas of this poem were (and are) my particular favourites, and especially the second line in each. Such poems are like wayside pools, or little well-springs of water. It does not matter how many wayfarers come thither to quench their thirst, there is abundance for all.

"THE PERISHING PLEASURES OF MAN." (line 18)

"But you mustn't imagine," said the old old Harper, "that I harp sad memories on my harp-strings because, being an ancient I am envious of my youth. Far from it. My only grief is that even if mine were the Harp that hung in Tara, I could not express the joy it is to be of years an hundred, and to remember that once I was nought--and all in the same bar."

And for yet another look behind, I cannot leave out this little rhyme from William Allingham, who made one of the happiest of all anthologies, "Nightingale Valley":

Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
What a little thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears.

Or, last, this lovely scrap from the Scots--all distance and longing for home:

O Alva hills is bonny,
Dalycoutry hills is fair,
But to think on the braes of Menstrie
It maks my heart fu' sair.

60.

Edward Thomas, who wrote this poem, knew by heart most of the villages, streams, high roads, by-roads, hills, forests, woods and dales of the southern counties of England, and came so to know them by the best of all methods. He walked through them on his feet; and, when so inclined, sat down by the wayside or leaned over a farm or field gate and gazed and mused and day-dreamed. Here is another poem of his:

If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises--
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze--
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater,--
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.

_Not_, of course, to find a blossom on furze or gorse as soon as any sun is in the year's sky, is the rare feat; and if in your wanderings over the hills and far away you should chance on secret hidden-away Pyrgo or Childerditch, sweet with its fragrance, then enquire for the beautiful, happy young Lady of the Manor. As a matter of fact, the scent of the furze-blossom is not exactly sweet, but nutlike and aromatic. This is what Edward Thomas's friend, W. H. Hudson, the great naturalist, wrote about it: "The gorse is most fragrant at noon, when the sun shines brightest and hottest. At such an hour when I approach a thicket of furze, the wind blowing from it, I am always tempted to cast myself down on the grass to lie for an hour drinking in the odour. The effect is to make me languid; to wish to lie till I sleep and live again in dreams in another world, in a vast open-air cathedral where a great festival of ceremony is perpetually in progress, and acolytes, in scores and hundreds with beautiful bright faces, in flame yellow and orange surplices, are ever and ever coming toward me, swinging their censers until I am ready to swoon in that heavenly incense!" ...

"A STOAT." (stanza 5)

It is the gentle custom of gamekeepers to slaughter at sight (though not for food) the little preying beasts and birds of the woodlands--owls, hawks, crows, jays, stoats, weasels, and such like. They then nail up their carcases to a shed side, or to a barn door, or on a field-gate, leaving them to rot in the wind for a warning to their live mates--just as in the old days the precarious English kings spiked the heads of traitors on the turrets of the Tower. Foxes you "hunt" to death.

61. "THE HOWES OF THE SILENT VANISHED RACES"

are, I suppose, the mounds, barrows, tumuli or Fairie Hills, some of them round, some of them long, some of them chambered, beneath which the ancient races of Britain, centuries before the coming of the Saxons and the Danes, buried their dead. So once slept the mummied Pharaohs beneath their enormous Pyramids. Age hangs densely over these solitary mounds, as over the Dolmens and Cromlechs--Stonehenge, the Whispering Knights--and the single gigantic Menhirs--the Tingle Stone, the Whittle Stone, the Bair-down-Man and the demoniac Hoar Stone.

These were utterly ancient and unintelligible marvels even when the monk Ranulph Higden wrote his _Polychronicon_ in 1352: The second wonder, he says, is at Stonehenge beside Salisbury. There great stones marvellously huge, be a-reared up on high, as it were gates, so that there seemeth gates to be set up upon other gates. Nevertheless it is not clearly known nor perceived how and to what end they be so a-reared up, and "so wonderlych yhonged." And yet, they are but as falling apple-blossom compared with the age of the world and the antiquity of the Universe:

_1st Gravedigger._ Come my spade; there is no ancient
Gentlemen but Gardiners, Ditchers
and Grave-makers; they hold up
_Adam_'s profession.

_2nd Gravedigger._ Was he a Gentleman?

_1st Gravedigger._ He was the first that ever bore Armes.

_Hamlet._

62. THE TWA BROTHERS

--and here is as romantic and tragic a tale of two friends:

O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,
They war twa bonnie lasses;
They biggit a bower on yon Burn-brae,
And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.

They theekit it o'er wi' rashes green,
They theekit it o'er wi' heather;
But the pest cam' frae the burrows-town,
And slew them baith thegither.

They thought to lye in Methven kirkyard,
Amang their noble kin;
But they maun lye in Stronach haugh,
To biek forenent the sin.

O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,
They war twa bonnie lasses;
They biggit a bower on yon Burn-brae,
And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.

_Biggit_ and _theekit_ means builded and thatched; and the twelfth line is "to bask beneath the sun."

64.

A tragic tale is hidden, rather than told, in this old Scottish ballad. It resembles a half ruinous house in a desolate country, dense green with briar and bramble, echoing with wild voices--its memories gone. Mr. Nahum's picture for it was of a figure in a woman's bright clothes and scarlet hood, but with what looked to me like the head of his own skeleton deep within the hood. And on a stone nearby sat a little winged boy.

66. "HER HIGH-BORN KINSMAN."

... And there was a wind in the night as they fared onward, a wind in the mid-air, playing from out the clouds. And presently after, the twain descended into the valley, the one traveller's foot stumbling as he went, against the writhen roots that jutted from between the stones of the path they followed. And it seemed that the voice of one unseen cried, Lo! And the traveller looked up from out of the valley of his journey, and, behold, a wan moon gleamed between the ravelled clouds; and the face of his companion showed for that instant clear against the sky in the shadow of its cloak. And it was the face of a nobleman; renowned for his patience; courteous and cold; whose name is Death....

68. "LONDON BRIDGE."

This is yet another singing-game rhyme. When London was nothing but a cluster of beehive huts in the hill clearings of the great Forest of Middlesex above the marshes and the Thames, there can have been no bridge. There _may_ have been a bridge, it seems, in A.D. 44, eighty-seven years after the death of Caesar; and for centuries there was certainly a ferry, Audery the Shipwight being one of its ferrymen, his oars the shape of shovels, and his boat like a young moon on her back.