Chapter VI: Part 6

though this is much too severe. But rats, and they who catch them, badgers, and they who bait them, cocks, and they who fight them, and, above all, men with fists, who professionally box with them, come under the category of the _Fancy_. This, then, is the theme which the poet before us, living under the genial sway of the First Gentleman of Europe, undertook to place beneath the special patronage of Apollo. The attractions, however, of _The Learned Ring_, set all other pleasures in the shade, and the name, Peter Corcoran, which is a pseudonym, is, I suppose, chosen merely because the initials are those of the then famous Pugilistic Club. The poet is, in short, the laureate of the P.C., and his book stands in the same relation to _Boxiana_ that Campbell's lyrics do to Nelson's despatches. To understand the poet's position, we ought to be dressed as he was; we ought

_to wear a tough drab coat
With large pearl buttons all afloat
Upon the waves of plush; to tie
A kerchief of the king-cup die
(White-spotted with a small bird's eye)
Around the neck,--and from the nape
Let fall an easy> fan-like cape_,

and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so delightfully the elegiac tear.

Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would contain this very remarkable sonnet:

ON THE NONPAREIL.

"_None but himself can be his parallel."

With marble-coloured shoulders,--and keen eyes,
Protected by a forehead broad and white--
And hair cut close lest it impede the sight,
And clenchèd hands, firm, and of punishing size,--
Steadily held, or motion'd wary-wise
To hit or stop,--and kerchief too drawn tight
O'er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight
The inconstant wind, that all too often flies,--
The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o'er
With joy to see a Chicken of her own.
Dips her rich pen in_ claret_, <and writes down
Under the letter R, first on the score,
"Randall,--John,--Irish Parents,--age not known,--
Good with both hands, and only ten stone four!_"

Be not too hard on this piece of barbarism, virtuous reader! Virtue is well revenged by the inevitable question! "Who was John Randall?" In 1820 it was said: "Of all the great men in this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendent talent as Randall, no one who combines the finest natural powers with the most elegant and finished acquired ones." Now, if his memory be revived for a moment, this master of science, who doubled up an opponent as if he were plucking a flower, and whose presence turned Moulsey Hurst into an Olympia, is in danger of being confounded with the last couple of drunken Irishwomen who have torn out each other's hair in handfuls in some Whitechapel courtyard. The mighty have fallen, the stakes and ring are gone forever, and Virtue is avenged. The days of George IV. are so long, long gone past that a paradoxical creature may be forgiven for a sigh over the ashes of the glory of John Randall.

It is strange how much genuine poetry lingers in this odd collection of verses in praise of prizefighting. There are lines and phrases that recall Keats himself, though truly the tone of the book is robust enough to satisfy the most impassioned of Tory editors. As it happens, it was written by Keats's dearest friend, by John Hamilton Reynolds, whom the great poet mentions so affectionately in the latest of all his letters. Reynolds has been treated with scant consideration by the critics. His verses, I protest, are no whit less graceful or sparkling than those of his more eminent companions, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall. His _Garden of Florence_ is worthy of the friend of Keats. We have seen how his _Peter Bell_, which was Peter Bell the First, took the wind out of Shelley's satiric sails and fluttered the dove-cotes of the Lakeists. He was as smart as he could be, too clever to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age. In _The Fancy_, which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820, Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore's _Tom Crib_, but if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original. He takes as his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, and persuades us

_nor need we blame the licensed joys,
Though false to Nature's quiet equipoise:
Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive_.

We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian sage at seeing his words thus nimbly adapted to be an apology for prize-fighting.

The poems are feigned to be the remains of one Peter Corcoran, student at law. A simple and pathetic memoir--which deserved to be as successful as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life of the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti--introduces us to the unfortunate young Irishman, who was innocently engaged to a charming lady, when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by chance into the Fives Court, witnessed a "sparring-exhibition" by two celebrated pugilists, and was thenceforth a lost character. From that moment nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a scientific parry, and his only topic of conversation became the noble art of self-defence. To his disgusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies of the Chicken and the Nonpareil. On one occasion he appeared before her with two black eyes, for he could not resist the temptation of taking part in the boxing, and "it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself." The attachment of the young lady had long been declining, and she took this opportunity of forbidding him her presence for the future. He felt this abandonment bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was destroying him. He fell into a decline, and at last died "without a struggle, just after writing a sonnet to _West-Country Dick_."

The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting opera called _King Tims the First_, which is the tragedy of an emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in _ottava rima_, called _The Fields of Tothill_, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter Corcoran's earlier days. The most characteristic and the best deal, however, with the science of fisticuffs. Here are the lines sent by the poet to his mistress on the painful occasion which we have described above, "after a casual turn up":

_Forgive me,--and never, oh, never again,
I'll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety;[1]
I'll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain,
And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan's[2] society.

Forgive me,--and mufflers I'll carefully pull
O'er my knuckles hereafter, to make them, well-bred;
To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool,
And temper with leather a punch of the head_.

_And, Kate!--if you'll fib from your forehead that frown,
And spar with a lighter and prettier tone;--
I'll look,--if the swelling should ever go down,
And these eyes look again,--upon you, love, alone!_

[Footnote 1: "Heavy _brown_ with a dash of _blue_ in it" was the fancy phrase for stout mixed with gin.]

[Footnote 2: The author of _Boxiana_ and _Life in London_.]

It must be confessed that a less "fancy" vocabulary would here have shown a juster sense of Peter's position. Sometimes there is no burlesque intention apparent, but, in their curious way, the verses seem to express a genuine enthusiasm. It is neither to be expected nor to be feared that any one nowadays will seriously attempt to advocate the most barbarous of pastimes, and therefore, without conscientious scruples, we may venture to admit that these are very fine and very thrilling verses in their own unexampled class:

_Oh, it is life! to see a proud
And dauntless man step, full of hopes,
Up to the P.C. stakes and ropes,
Throw in his hat, and with a spring
Get gallantly within the ring;
Eye the wide crowd, and walk awhile
Taking all cheerings with a smile;
To see him strip,--his well-trained form,
White, glowing, muscular, and warm,
All beautiful in conscious power,
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;
His glossy and transparent frame,
In radiant plight to strive for fame!
To look upon the clean-shap'd limb
In silk and flannel clothèd trim;--
While round the waist the kerchief tied
Makes the flesh glow in richer pride.
'Tis more than life, to watch him hold
His hand forth, tremulous yet bold,
Over his second's, and to clasp
His rival's in a quiet grasp;
To watch the noble attitude
He takes,--the crowd in breathless mood,--
And then to see, with adamant start,
The muscles set,--and the great heart
Hurl a courageous, splendid light
Into the eye,--and then--the_ FIGHT.

This is like a lithograph out of one of Pierce Egan's books, only much more spirited and picturesque, and displaying a far higher and more Hellenic sense of the beauty of athletics. Reynolds' little volume, however, enjoyed no success. The genuine amateurs of the prize-ring did not appreciate being celebrated in good verses, and _The Fancy_ has come to be one of the rarest of literary curiosities.

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS

ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS; _a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt. London, 1823: printed for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street, and 38, Tavistock Street, Covent Garden_.

If the collector of first editions requires an instance from which to justify the faith which is in him against those who cry out that bibliography is naught, Leigh Hunt is a good example to his hand. This active and often admirable writer, during a busy professional life, issued a long series of works in prose and verse which are of every variety of commonness and scarcity, but which have never been, and probably never will be, reprinted as a whole. Yet not to possess the works of Leigh Hunt is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of literary history at the beginning of the century. The original 1816 edition of _Rimini_, for instance, is of a desperate rarity, yet not to be able to refer to it in the grotesqueness of this its earliest form is to miss a most curious proof of the crude taste of the young school out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise. The scarcest of all Leigh Hunt's poetical pamphlets, but by no means the least interesting, is that whose title stands at the head of this chapter. Of _Ultra-crepidarius_, which was "printed for John Hunt" in 1823, it is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has never been reprinted. It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere despisers of first editions may allow a special interest.

From internal evidence we find that _Ultra-crepidarius; a Satire on William Gifford_, was sent to press in the summer of 1823, from Maiano, soon after the break-up of Hunt's household in Genoa, and Byron's departure for Greece. The poem is the "stick" which had been recently mentioned in the third number of the _Liberal_:

_Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick,
Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?_

It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the famous review in the _Quarterly_ of Keats's _Endymion_, a fact which the biographers of Keats do not seem to have observed. Why did Hunt not immediately print it? Perhaps because to have done so would have been worse than useless in the then condition of public taste and temper. What led Hunt to break through his intention of suppressing the poem it might be difficult to discover. At all events, in the summer of 1823 he suddenly sent it home for publication; whether it was actually published is doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private to a handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends.

_Ultra-crepidarius_ is written in the same anapaestic measure as _The Feast of the Poets_, but is somewhat longer. As a satire on William Gifford it possessed the disadvantage of coming too late in the day to be of any service to anybody. At the close of 1823 Gifford, in failing health, was resigning the editorial chair of the _Quarterly_, which he had made so formidable, and was retiring into private life, to die in 1826. The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself. However narrow the circulation of _Ultra-crepidarius_ may have been, care was no doubt taken that the editor of the _Quarterly Review_ should receive one copy at his private address, and Leigh Hunt returned from Italy in time for that odd incident to take place at the Roxburgh sale, when Barron Field called his attention to the fact that "a little man, with a warped frame, and a countenance between the querulous and the angry, was gazing at me with all his might." Hunt tells this story in the _Autobiography_, from which, however, he omits all allusion to his satire.

The latter opens with the statement that:

'_Tis now about fifty or sixty years since
(The date of a charming old boy of a Prince)--_

Mercury was in a state of rare fidget from the discovery that he had lost one of his precious winged shoes, and had in consequence dawdled away a whole week in company with Venus, not having dreamed that it was that crafty goddess herself, who, wishing for a pair of them, had sent one of Mercury's shoes down to Ashburton for a pattern. Venus confesses her peccadillo, and offers to descend to the Devonshire borough with her lover, and see what can have become of the ethereal shoe. As they reach the ground, they meet with an ill-favoured boot of leather, which acknowledges that it has ill-treated the delicate slipper of Mercury. This boot, of course, is Gifford, who had been a shoemaker's apprentice in Ashburton. Mercury curses this unsightly object, and part of his malediction may here be quoted.

_I hear some one say "Murrain take him, the ape!"
And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller's shape;
An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry,
Who'd fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself_ Murray.
_Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe,
For court-understrappers to congregate to;
For_ Southey _to come, in his dearth of invention,
And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension;
For_ Croker _to lurk with his spider-like limb in,
And stock his lean bag with waylaying the women;
And Jove only knows for what creatures beside
To shelter their envy and dust-liking pride,
And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights,
In the dark take their shuffles, which they call then flights;
Be these the court-critics and vamp a Review.
And by a poor figure, and therefore a true,
For it suits with thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly
Be its hue leathern, and title the_ Quarterly,
_Much misconduct, and see that the others
Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers;
Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate,
Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate,
Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short,
Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court_.

* * * * *

_And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical,
Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical,
Quarterly-scutcheon'd, great heir to each dunce,
Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once_

At the end, Mercury dooms the ugly boot to take the semblance of a man, and the satire closes with its painful metamorphosis into Gifford. The poem is not without cleverness, but it is chiefly remarkable for a savage tone which is not, we think, repeated elsewhere throughout the writings of Hunt. The allusions to Gifford's relations, nearly half a century earlier, to that Earl Grosvenor who first rescued him from poverty, the well-deserved scorn of his intolerable sneers at Perdita Robinson's crutches:

_Hate Woman, thou block in the path of fair feet;
If Fate want a hand to distress them, thine be it;
When the Great, and their flourishing vices, are mention'd
Say people "impute" 'em, and show thou art pension'd;
But meet with a Prince's old mistress_ discarded,
_And_ then _let the world see how vice is rewarded_--

the indications of the satirist's acquaintance with the private life of his victim, all these must have stung the editor of the _Quarterly_ to the quick, and are very little in Hunt's usual manner, though he had examples for them in Peter Pindar and others. There is a very early allusion to "Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley," where, "calm, up above thee, they soar and they shine." This was written immediately after the review of _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly_.

At the close is printed an extremely vigorous onslaught of Hazlitt's upon Gifford, which is better known than the poem which it illustrates. In itself, in its preface, and in its notes alike this very rare pamphlet presents us with a genuine curiosity of literature.

THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS

ENGLAND'S TRUST AND OTHER POEMS. _By Lord John Manners. London: printed for J.G. & J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, and Waterloo Place, Pall Mall_. 1841.

My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his seat last night, in the Upper House, as the Duke of Rutland. These little romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who do not find that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the course of a night. My Transatlantic readers will never have to grow accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to be hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion. So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner of my library where the _péchés de jeunesse_ stand--the little books of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would destroy if they could--and I took down _England's Trust_.

Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic democracy. They called themselves "Young England," and the chronicle of them--is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's _Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_, were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he said: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." It was the theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in the lower classes; that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of society, and that ballads and May-poles and quaint festivities and processions of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looks back across the half-century he sees something to smile at, but nothing to blush for.

One of the notions that Young England had got hold of was that famous saying of Fletcher of Saltoun's friend about making the ballads of a people. So they set themselves verse-making, and a quaint little collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike at this time of day, with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack, countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently became the seventh Viscount Strangford and one of the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers, only to die bitterly lamented before the age of forty, wrote _Historic Fancies_, Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published _The Cherwell Water-Lily_, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet volume came the poems of Lord John Manners.

When _England's Trust_ appeared, its author had just left Cambridge. Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conservative candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present known to the entire world as Mr. W.E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased excessively about a certain couplet in _England's Trust_. I am not going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves, which, of course, I have no power to prevent their doing, they will probably exclaim:

"Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote _that?_" for if frequency of quotation is the hall-mark of popularity, his Grace must be one of the most popular of our living poets.

There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a negative distinction. The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose, equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke of Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country, through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841, thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith over all its Paynim foes. "The worst evils," he writes, "from which we are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect of the rules of the Church." He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through England from the common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost faces that fed the pure passion of his youth.

The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number of the poems in _England's Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant to read:

_Dear Friend! thou askest me to sing our loves,
And sing them fain would I; but I do fear
To mar so soft a theme; a theme that moves
My heart unto its core. O friend most dear!
No light request is thine; albeit it proves
Thy gentleness and love, that do appear
When absent thus, and in soft looks when near.
Surely, if ever two fond hearts were, twined
In a most holy, mystic knot, so now
Are ours; not common are the ties that bind
My soul to thine; a dear Apostle thou,
I a young Neophyte that yearns to find
The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow
The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow!_

The Apostle was only twelve months older than the Neophyte, who was in his twenty-third year, but he was a somewhat better as well as stronger poet. _The Cherwell Water-Lily_ is rather a rare book now, and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber's style. It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of Young England, there Is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and of the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly original;

_There is a well, a willow-shaded spot.
Cool in the noon-tide gleam,
With rushes nodding in the little stream,
And blue forget-me-not.

Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge
With big bright eyes of gold;
And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold
Their blossoms strange and large.

That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find
Beauties so rich and rare,
Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden's hair
And dog-grass richly twined.

A sloping bank ran round it like a crown,
Whereon a purple cloud
Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd,
Had settled softly down.

And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells
From Oxford's holy towers
Came down the stream, and went among the flowers,
And died in little swells_.

These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception of life, Faber also wrote an _England's Trust_, before Lord John Manners published his; and in this he rejoices in the passing away of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of humility and spirituality. Alas! it never came! There was a roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells were thrown up on the shore of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractarianism was broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the mere ashes have wholly passed away. They have become spread over a wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer succeeded, where would the adventure be?

The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition into the land of verses. He published a volume of _English Ballads_; but this has not the historical interest which makes _England's Trust_ a curiosity. He has written about Church Rates, and the Colonies, and the Importance of Literature to Men of Business, but never again of his reveries in Neville's Court nor of his determination to emulate the virtues of King Charles the Martyr. No matter! If all our hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely be a burning question.

IONICA

IONICA. _Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill_. 1858.

Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls "deciduous trash" survive their own generation, only to be carted away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame.

These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small volume of 116 pages called _Ionica_, long ago ushered into the world so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the sea of literature. Gradually this book has become first a rarity and then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive which commands so high a price among collectors. When the library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that they had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price, for it was known that the late Librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies. But at the sale two of these copies went for three pounds fifteen and three pounds ten, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea, because it was discovered to lack the title-page and the index. (I do not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books, and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I could not have the title-page. But this is only an aside, and does not interfere with the value of _Ionica_.)

The little book has no name on the title-page, but it is known that the author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. It is understood that this gentleman was born about 1823, and died in 1892. On coming into property, as I have heard, in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, So that he is doubly concealed as a poet, the anonymous-pseudonymous. As Mr. William Cory he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author of _Ionica_. In face of the extreme rarity of his early book, friends urged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented. Probably he would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to reprint it was to draw public attention to its inequality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the collector who possesses a treasure; but I think the appreciators of _Ionica_ will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights.

Shortly after _Ionica_ appeared great developments took place in English verse. In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say that, as far as the general public was concerned, there was no Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson's verses. They are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we became accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet Heraclitus--not to be confounded with the philosopher--was dead.

_They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take_.

No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet's grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, his "nightingales," are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, has left "great verse unto a little clan," the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be "unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears." To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parnassus is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may hold his own comrade something dearer than the public. The author of _Ionica_ would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.

Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus. But the author is not very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read:

"_Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar;
How nice," cry the ladies, "looks yonder Hussar_!"

It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of _Ionica_ is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.

There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the glassy surface of this plaintive _Dirge_:

_Naiad, hid beneath the bank
By the willowy river-side,
Where Narcissus gently sank,
Where unmarried Echo died,
Unto thy serene repose
Waft the stricken Anterôs.

Where the tranquil swan is borne,
Imaged in a watery glass,
Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn
Stoop to catch the boats that pass,
Where the earliest orchis grows,
Bury thou fair Anterôs.

On a flickering wave we gaze,
Not upon his answering eyes:
Flower and bird we scarce can praise,
Having lost his sweet replies:
Cold and mute the river flows
With our tears for Anterôs_.

We know well where this place of burial is to be. Not in some glade of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homelier river gushes through the swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to draw a longer breath for his passage between Eton and Windsor.

The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to this present life, a Pagan optimism which finds no fault with human existence save that it is so brief. It gains various expression in words that seem hot on a young man's lips, and warm on the same lips even when no longer young:

_I'll borrow life, and not grow old;
And nightingales and trees
Shall keep me, though the veins be cold,
As young as Sophocles_.

And again, in poignant notes:

_You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm, kind world is all I know_.

This last quotation is from the poem called _Mimnermus in Church_. In this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life. The author of _Ionica_ seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he clung to them:

_All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh! the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die_.

There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in _Ionica_, and this gives its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had numerous resuscitations of ancient manners and landscape in modern poetry since the days of Keats and André Chenier. Many of these have been so brilliantly successful that only pedantry would deny their value. But in _Ionica_ something is given which the others have not known how to give, the murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the grass of meadows dedicated to Persephone. It seems to help us to comprehend the little rites and playful superstitions of the Greeks; to see why Myro built a tomb for the grasshopper she loved and lost; why the shining hair of Lysidice, when she was drowned, should be hung up with songs of pity and reproach in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader as Christian fanatics turned inside out; for all their vehemence they can never lose the experience of their religious birth. The same thing is true of the would-be Pagans of a milder sensuous type. The Cross prevailed at their nativity, and has thrown its shadow over their conscience. But in the midst of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of the _Ionica_, the one genuine Pagan, absolutely untouched by the traditions of the Christian past. I do not commend the fact; I merely note it as giving a strange interest to these forlorn and unpopular poems.

Twenty years after the publication of _Ionica_, and when that little book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge a second part, without a title-page, and without punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection incomplete without _Ionica II_., but he must be prepared for a disappointment. There is a touch of the old skill here and there, as in such stanzas as this:

_With half a moon, and clouds rose-pink,
And water-lilies just in bud,
With iris on the river-brink,
And white weed-garlands on the mud,
And roses thin and pale as dreams,
And happy cygnets born in May,
No wonder if our country seems
Drest out for Freedom's natal day_.

Or these:

_Peace lit upon a fluttering vein,
And self-forgetting on the brain;
On rifts by passion wrought again
Splashed from the sky of childhood rain,
And rid of afterthought were we
And from foreboding sweetly free.

Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine,
And, moved by some autumnal sign,
I who in spring was glad repine
And ache without my anodyne;
Oh! things that were! Oh! things that are!
Oh! setting of my double star!_

But these are rare, and the old unique _Ionica_ of thirty years earlier is not repeated.

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. _An Arabian Entertainment. By George Meredith. Chapman and Hall_. 1856.

It is nearly forty years since I first heard of _The Shaving of Shagpat_. I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern, that _The Shaving of Shagpat_ was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm Rossetti-language this did not mean that there was anything specially reminiscent of the Bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention. But at the time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated _Midsummer Night's Dream_ or _Love's Labour's Lost_. I was fully persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was rare, and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connect it with the idea of Shakespeare. But in truth _The Shaving of Shagpat_ has no other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he had been so plaguily occupied, than that it is excellent in quality and of the finest literary flavour.

The ordinary small collection of rarities has no room for three-volume novels, those signs-manual of our British dulness and crafty disdain for literature. One or two of these _simulacra_, these sham-semblances of books, I possess, because honoured friends have given them to me; even so, I would value the gift more in the decency of a single volume. The dear little duodecimos of the last century, of course, are welcome in a library. That was a happy day, when by the discovery of a _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, I completed my set of Smollett in the original fifteen volumes. But after the first generation of novelists, the sham system began to creep in. With Fanny Burney, novels grow too bulky, and it is a question whether even Scott or Jane Austen should be possessed in the original form. Of the moderns, only Thackeray is bibliographically desirable. Hence even of Mr. George Meredith's fiction I make no effort to possess first editions; yet _The Shaving of Shagpat_ is an exception. I toiled long to secure it, and, now that I hold it, may its modest vermilion cover shine always like a lamp upon my shelves! It is not fiction to a bibliophile; it is worthy of all the honour done to verse.

Within the last ten years of his life we had the great pleasure of seeing tardy justice done at length to the genius of Mr. George Meredith. I like to think that, after a long and noble struggle against the inattention of the public, after the pouring of high music for two generations into ears whose owners seemed to have wilfully sealed them with wax, so that only the most staccato and least happy notes ever reached their dulness, George Meredith did, before the age of seventy, reap a little of his reward. I am told that the movement in favour of him began in America; if so, more praise to American readers, who had to teach us to appreciate De Quincey and Praed before we knew the value of those men. Yet is there much to do. Had George Meredith been a Frenchman, what monographs had ere this been called forth by his work; in Germany, or Italy, or Denmark even, such gifts as his would long ago have found their classic place above further discussion. But England is a Gallio, and in defiance of Mr. Le Gallienne, cares little for the things of literature.

If a final criticism of George Meredith existed, where in it would _The Shaving of Shagpat_ find its place? There is fear that in competition with the series of analytical studies of modern life that stretches from _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ to _One of our Conquerors_, it might chance to be pushed away with a few lines of praise. Now, I would not seem so paradoxical as to say that when an extravaganza is held up to me in one hand, and a masterpiece of morality like _The Egoist_ in the other, I can doubt which is the greater book; but there are moods in which I am jealous of the novels, and wish to be left alone with my _Arabian Entertainment_. Delicious in this harsh world of reality to fold a mist around us, and out of it to evolve the yellow domes and black cypresses, the silver fountains and marble pillars, of the fabulous city of Shagpat. I do not know any later book than _The Shaving_ in which an Englishman has allowed his fancy, untrammelled by any sort of moral or intellectual subterfuge, to go a-roaming by the light of the moon. We do this sort of thing no longer. We are wholly given up to realism, we are harshly pressed upon on all sides by the importunities of excess of knowledge. If we talk of gryphons, the zoologists are upon us; of Oolb or Aklis, the geographers flourish their maps at us in defiance. But the author of _The Shaving of Shagpat_, in the bloom of his happy youthful genius, defied all this pedantry. In a little address which has been suppressed in later editions he said (December 8, 1855)

"It has seemed to me that the only way to tell an Arabian Story was by imitating the style and manner of the Oriental Story-tellers. But such an attempt, whether successful or not, may read like a translation. I therefore think it better to prelude this Entertainment by an avowal that it springs from no Eastern source, and is in every respect an original Work."

If one reader of _The Shaving of Shagpat_ were to confess the truth he would say that to him at least the other, the genuine Oriental tales, appear the imitation, and not a very good imitation. The true genius of the East breathes in Meredith's pages, and the _Arabian Nights_, at all events in the crude literality of Sir Richard Burton, pale before them like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah! what a bottle! As we whirl along in the vast and glowing bacchanal, we cry, like Sganarelle:

_Qu'ils sont doux--
Bouteille jolie--
Qu'ils sont doux
Vos petits glou-glous;
Ah! Bouteille, ma mie;
Pourquoi vous videz-vous?_

Ah! why indeed? For _The Shaving of Shagpat_ is one of those very rare modern books of which it is certain that they are too short, and even our excitement at the Mastery of the Event is tamed by a sense that the show is closing, and that Shibli Bagarag has been too promptly successful in smiting through the Identical. But perhaps of all gifts there is none more rare than this of clearing the board and leaving the reader still hungry.

Who shall say, in dealing with such a book, what passage in it is best or worst? Either the fancy, carried away utterly captive, follows the poet whither he will, or the whole conception is a failure. Perhaps, after the elemental splendour and storm of the final scene, what clings most to the memory is how Shibli Bagarag, hard beset in the Cave of Chrysolites, touched the great lion with the broken sapphire hair of Garraveen; or again, how on the black coast of the enchanted sea, wandering by moonlight, he found the sacred Lily, and tore it up, and lo! its bulb was a palpitating heart of human flesh; or how Bhanavar called the unwilling serpents too often, and failed to win her beauty back, till, at an awful price she once more, and for the last time, contrived to call her body-guard of snakes hissing and screaming around her.

There is surely no modern book so unsullied as this is by the modern spirit, none in which the desire to teach a lesson, to refer knowingly to topics of the day, or worst of all, to be incontinently funny, interferes less with the tender magic of Oriental fancy, or with the childlike, earnest faith in what is utterly outside the limits of experience. It belongs to that infancy of the world, when the happy guileless human being still holds that somewhere there is a flower to be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or a form of words to be spoken which will reverse the humdrum laws of Nature, call up unwilling spirits bound to incredible services, and change all this brown life of ours to scarlet and azure and mother-of-pearl. Little by little, even our children are losing this happy gift of believing the incredible, and that class of writing which seems to require less effort than any other, and to be a mere spinning of gold thread out of the poet's inner consciousness, is less and less at command, and when executed gives less and less satisfaction. The gnomes of Pope, the fays and "trilbys" of Nodier, even the fairy-world of Doyle, are breathed upon by a race that has grown up habituated to science. But even for such a race it must be long before the sumptuous glow and rich triumphant humour of _The Shaving of Shagpat_ have lost all their attraction.

INDEX

ABBEY, Edwin A.
_Abuses stript and whipt_
Akenside, Mark
d'Alembert
Alfoxden, Wordsworth at
_All for Love_, Dryden's
_Almahide_, Mlle. de Scudéry's
_Amasia_, John Hopkins'
_Amazon Queen_, Weston's
_Amboyna_, Dryden's
Amory's _Life of John Buncle_, Thomas
_Anthony_, Earl of Orrery's _Mr_.
_Arcadia_, Sidney's
Ardelia (Lady Winchilsea)'s Poems
Arnauld, Antoine
Arnold, Matthew
_Artamenes_, La Calprenède's
_Astrée_, D'Urfé's
d'Aurevilly, Barbey
Austen, Jane
_Autobiography_ of Leigh Hunt
Avison, Charles

BACON, Lord
Baldwin, William
_Ballad of the Book Hunter_, Lang's
Balzac, Honoré de
Bancroft's _Sertorius_
Banks, Sir Joseph
Barnacle Goose Tree, The
Barrington, Hon. Daines
Bayle
Beaumont, _Peter Bell_ and Sir George
Behn, Mrs. Aphra
Bell, _Professor_ Thomas,
_Benjamin the Waggoner_
Blener Hasset, Thomas
Boccaccio
Boethius
Boileau, Nicolas,
Boisrobert, François
Boitard, Louis
Bossuet, Jacques
Boswell, James
Bouilhet, Louis
_Boxiana_, Egan's
Boyle's _Parthenissa_
Bradshaw, Library of Henry
_Britannia_, Brooke's _Discovery of Errors in_,
_Britannia_, Camden's
_British Princes_, Howard's
Brooke, Christopher
Brooke, Ralph
Browne, Sir Thomas
Browne, William
Browning, Robert
Brummell, Beau
Brunfelcius, Otto
_Buncle_, Amory's _Life of John_
Burger's _Lenore_
Burke, Edmund
Barney, Dr.
Burney, Fanny
Burton, Sir Richard
Byron

CALLIMACHUS
Calprenède, La
Cambridge described by Camden
Camden's _Britannia_
Campbell, J. Dykes
Campion, Thomas
Carew, Thomas
Carlisle's _Fortune Hunters_
_Carnival_, Porter's
_Cassandra_, La Calprenède's
Cats
Caylus, Count
Chandler, Dr.
Chapelain
Charles I.
_Cherwell Water-Lily_, Faber's _The_
Church, Dean
Cibber, Theophilus
_Citizen of the World_, Goldsmith's
_Clélie_, La Calprenède's
_Cleomina_, Eliza Haywood's _Secret History of_
_Cleopatra_, La Calprenède's
Cleveland, Duchess of
Coleridge, S.T.
Collins, William
Congreve, William
_Constant Couple_, Farquhar's
Corcoran, Peter, _i.e_. J. H. Reynolds
Corneille, Pierre
Corneille, Thomas
Cornwall, Barry
Cory, William, _see_ Johnson, William
_Couches de L'Académie_, Furetière's
Coventry, Rev. Francis
Coventry, Henry
Coypel, Drawings by
Croker, J.W.
Cromwell, Oliver
Crowne, John
"Crusions"
_Cyrus, Le Grand_

DARLINGTON, Earl of
_David_, Smart's _Song to_
Davies of Hereford, John
_Death's Duel_
De Boissat
Defoe, Daniel
Dennis, John
De Quincey, Thomas
Deshoulières, Mme.
Desmarais, Regnier
De Tabley, Lord
_Dialogues_, La Mothe le Vayer
_Diary of a Lover of Literature_, Green's
Dictionary, The Romance of a
Dioscorides of Anazarba,
D'Israeli, Isaac
D'Israeli's _Coningsby_
Dobson, Mr. Austin
Dodonaeus, Rembertus
Donne, Dr. John
Dryden, John
Dryden, Funeral of
_Dunciad_, Pope's
Dupuy, Mlle.
D'Urfé's _Astrée_
"Dwale" (nightshade)

EGANS'S _Boxiana_, Pierce
_Egoist_, Meredith's _The_
_Elegy in Country Churchyard_, Gray's
_England's Trust_, F.W. Faber's
_England's Trust_, Lord John Manners'
_England's Worthies_, Winstanley's
_English Ballads_, Lord John Manners'
_English Poets_, Winstanley's _Lives of_
_Enquiry Concerning Virtue_, Shaftesbury's
_Epistolary Poems_ of Charles Hopkins
_Epsom Wells_, Shadwell's
_Excursion_, Wordsworth's

FABER, Frederick William
_Fall of Princes_, Lydgate's
_Fancy, The_, J.H. Reynolds'
Farmer, Dr.
Farquhar, George
_Fatal Friendship_, Trotter's
_Feast of the Poets, The_
_Ferdinand Count Fathom_, Smollett's
Ferrers, George
Field, Barron
Fielding, Henry
Finch, Heneage (Earl of Winchilsea)
Finch, Poems of Anne (Lady Winchilsea)
FitzGerald, Edward
_Fortune Hunters_, Carlisle's _The_
_Française, Histoire de l'Académie_
_Francion_, Sorel's
Fuchsius, Leonard
Furetière, Antoine

_GARDEN of Florence_, Reynolds'
Gardiner, Lord Chancellor Stephen
Garrick, David
Garth, Dr.
_Gentleman's Magazine, The_
Gerard, John
Gibbon, Edward
Gibbons, Dr. (Physician)
Gifford, William
Gladstone, W.E.
Goldsmith, Oliver
Gombreville
Goose Tree, The
Grafton, Isabella, Duchess of
Gray, Thomas
Green, Thomas
Green's _Diary of a Lover of Literature_
Grierson, Professor
Grundtvig, Bishop
_Gulliver's Travels_, Swift

HANMER, Sir Thomas
Harrington's _Oceana_
Harvey, Rev. R.
Haslewood
Hawkesworth, John
Haywood, Eliza
Hazlitt, William
_Heliodorus_
Heraclitus
_Herbal_, Gerard's
----, Henry Lyte's translation of Dodonaeus'
----, Dr. Priest's translation of Dodonaeus'
Herrick, Robert
Hesketh (Yorkshire botanist)
_Hesperides_, Herrick's
Hill, Aaron
Hill, Dr. John
_Hilliad_, Smart's _The_
_Histoire de l'Académie Française_ (The Hague Edn.)
_Historic Fancies_, Lord Strangford's
Hoare, William
Holland, Philémon
_Hop Garden_, Smart's _The_
Hopkins, Charles
Hopkins, Ezekiel, Bishop of Derry
Hopkins, John
Hove, F.H. Van (Engraver)
Howard, Hon. Edward
_Humorous Lovers_, Duke of Newcastle's
Hunt, Leigh
Hurd, Dr., Bishop of Worcester
Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon

_IBRAHIM_, Mlle. de Scudéry's
_Idalia_, Eliza Haywood's
_Ionica_, William Johnson's

JAMES I
Jeffrey, Francis
Jenyns, Soame
Johnson, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, Thomas (Botanist)
Johnson, William
Jonson, Ben
Joyner, William
Jusserand, J.J., _English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare_

KEATS, John
King, Dr. Henry
Kip, William