Chapter XIII: Part 13

All that Lovelace wrote beside these three poems is utterly worthless, mere chaff from the threshing of his wits. Take out the four pages on which they are printed, and we have two hundred and eighty-nine left of the sorriest stuff that ever spoiled paper. The poems are obscure, without anything in them to reward perseverance, dull without being moral, and full of conceits so far-fetched that we could wish the author no worse fate than to carry them back to where they came from. We are no enemies to what are commonly called conceits, but authors bear them, as heralds say, with a difference. And a terrible difference it is! With men like Earle, Donne, Fuller, Butler, Marvell, and even Quarles, conceit means wit; they would carve the merest cherry-stone of thought in the quaintest and delicatest fashion. But with duller and more painful writers, such as Gascoyne, Marston, Fe11tham, and a score of others, even with cleverer ones like Waller, Crashawe, and Suckling, where they insisted on being fine, their wit is conceit. Difficulty without success is perhaps the least tolerable kind of writing. Mere stupidity is a natural failing; we skip and pardon. But the other is Dulness in a domino, that travesties its familiar figure, and lures us only to disappoint. These unhappy verses of Lovelace’s had been dead and lapt in congenial lead these two hundred years;--what harm had they done Mr. Hazlitt that he should disinter them? There is no such disenchanter of peaceable reputations as one of these resurrectionmen of literature, who will not let mediocrities rest in the grave, where the kind sexton, Oblivion, had buried them, but dig them up to make a profit on their lead.

Of all Mr. Smith’s editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst. He is at times positively incredible, worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is saying a good deal. Worthless as Lovelace’s poems were, they should have been edited correctly, if edited at all. Even dulness and dirtiness have a right to fair play, and to be dull and dirty in their own way. Mr. Hazlitt has allowed all the misprints of the original (or by far the greater part of them) to stand, but he has ventured on many emendations of the text, and in every important instance has blundered, and that, too, even where the habitual practice of his author in the use of words might have led him right. The misapprehension shown in some of his notes is beyond the belief of any not familiar with the way in which old books are edited in England by the job. We have brought a heavy indictment, and we proceed to our proof, choosing only cases where there can be no dispute. We should premise that Mr. Hazlitt professes to have corrected the punctuation.

“And though he sees it full of wounds,
Cruel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34.)

Here the original reads, “Cruel still on,” and the only correction needed was a comma after “cruel.”

“And by the glorious light
Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft,
Only the jelly’s left.” (p. 41.)

The original has “of which,” and rightly, for “their spheres bereft” is parenthetic, and the sense is “of which only the jelly’s left.” Lovelace is speaking of the eyes of a mistress who has grown old, and his image, confused as it is, is based on the belief that stars shooting from their spheres fell to the earth as jellies,--a belief, by the way, still to be met with in New England.

Lovelace, describing a cow (and it is one of the few pretty passages in the volume), says,--

“She was the largest, goodliest beast
That ever mead or altar blest,
Round as her udder, and more white
Than is the Milky-Way in night.” (p. 64.)

Mr. Hazlitt changes to “Round was her udder,” thus making that white instead of the cow, as Lovelace intended. On the next page we read,--

“She takes her leave o’ th’ mournful neat,
Who, by her toucht, now prizeth her life,
Worthy alone the hollowed knife.”

Compare Chapman (Iliads, xviii. 480):--

“Slew all their white fleec’d sheep and _neat_.”

The original was “prize their life,” and the use of “neat” as a singular in this way is so uncommon, if not unprecedented, and the verse as corrected so halting, that we have no doubt Lovelace so wrote it. Of course “hollowed” should be “hallowed,” though the broader pronunciation still lingers in our country pulpits.

“What need she other bait or charm
But look? or angle but her arm?” (p. 65.)

So the original, which Mr. Hazlitt, missing the sense, has changed to “what hook or angle.”

“Fly Joy on wings of Popinjays
To courts of fools _where_ as your plays
Die laught at and forgot.” (p. 67.)

The original has “there.” Read,--

“Fly, Joy, on wings of popinjays
To courts of fools; there, as your plays,
Die,” &c.

“Where as,” as then used, would make it the “plays” that were to die.

“As he Lucasta nam’d, a groan
Strangles the fainting passing tone;
But as she heard, Lucasta smiles,
Posses her round; she’s slipt meanwhiles
Behind the blind of a thick bush.” (p. 68.)

Mr. Hazlitt’s note on “posses” could hardly be matched by any member of the _posse comitatus_ taken at random:--

“This word does not appear to have any very exact meaning. See
Halliwell’s _Dictionary of Archaic Words_, art. Posse, and
Worcester’s Dict., _ibid._, &c. The context here requires _to turn
sharply or quickly._”

The “_ibid._, &c.” is delightful; in other words, “find out the meaning of _posse_ for yourself.” Though dark to Mr. Hazlitt, the word has not the least obscurity in it. It is only another form of _push_, nearer the French _pousser_, from Latin _pulsare_, and “the context here requires” nothing more than that an editor should read a poem if he wish to understand it. The plain meaning is,--

“But, as she heard _Lucasta_, smiles
Possess her round.”

That is, when she heard the name _Lucasta_,--for thus far in the poem she has passed under the pseudonyme of _Amarantha_. “Possess her round” is awkward, but mildly so for Lovelace, who also spells “commandress” in the same way with a single _s_. _Process_ is spelt _prosses_ in the report of those who absented themselves from Church in Stratford.

“O thou, that swing’st upon the waving eare,
Of some well-filled oaten beard.” (p. 94.)

Mr. Hazlitt, for some inscrutable reason, has changed “haire” to “eare” in the first line, preferring the ear of a _beard_ to its hair!

Mr. Hazlitt prints,--

“Poor verdant foole! and now green ice, thy joys
Large and as lasting as thy peirch of grass,
Bid us lay in ’gainst winter raine and poize
Their flouds with an o’erflowing glasse.” (p. 95.)

Surely we should read:--

“Poor verdant foole and now green ice, thy joys,
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
_Bid_,” &c.

i. e. “Poor fool now frozen, the shortness of thy joys, who mad’st no provision against winter, warns us to do otherwise.”

“The radiant gemme was brightly set
In as divine a carkanet;
Of which the clearer was not knowne
Her minde or her complexion.” (p. 101.)

The original reads rightly “for which,” &c., and, the passage being rightly pointed, we have,--

“For which the clearer was not known,
Her mind or her complexion.”

Of course “complexion” had not its present limited meaning.

“ ... my future daring bayes
Shall bow itself.” (p. 107.)

“We should read _themselves_,” says Mr. Hazlitt’s note authoritatively. Of course a noun ending in _s_ is plural! Not so fast. In spite of the dictionaries, _bays_ was often used in the singular.

“Do plant a sprig of cypress, not of bays,”

says Robert Randolph in verses prefixed to his brother’s poems; and Fe11tham in “Jonsonus Virbius,”

“A greener bays shall crown Ben Jonson’s name.”

But we will cite Mr. Bayes himself:--

“And, where he took _it_ up, resigns the _bays_.”

“But we (defend us!) are divine,
[Not] female, but madam born, and come
From a right-honorable wombe.” (p. 115.)

Here Mr. Hazlitt has ruined both sense and metre by his unhappy “not.” We should read “Female, but madam-born,” meaning clearly enough “we are women, it is true, but of another race.”

“In every hand [let] a cup be found
That from all hearts a health may sound.” (p. 121.)

Wrong again, and the inserted “let” ruinous to the measure. Is it possible that Mr. Hazlitt does not understand so common an English construction as this?

“First told thee into th’ ayre, then to the ground.” (p. 141.)

Mr. Hazlitt inserts the “to,” which is not in the original, from another version. Lovelace wrote “ayër.” We have noted two other cases (pp. 203 and 248) where he makes the word a dissyllable. On the same page we have “shewe’s” changed to “shew” because Mr. Hazlitt did not know it meant “show us” and not “shows.” On page 170, “their” is substituted for “her,” which refers to Lucasta, and could refer to nothing else.

Mr. Hazlitt changes “quarrels _the_ student Mercury” to “quarrels _with_,” not knowing that _quarrels_ was once used as a transitive verb. (p. 189.)

Wherever he chances to notice it, Mr. Hazlitt changes the verb following two or more nouns connected by an “and” from singular to plural. For instance:--

“You, sir, alone, fame, and all conquering rhyme
File the set teeth,” &c. (p. 224.)

for “files.” Lovelace commonly writes so;--on p. 181, where it escaped Mr. Hazlitt’s grammatical eye, we find,--

“But broken faith, and th’ cause of it,
All damning gold, _was_ damned to the pit.”

Indeed, it was usual with writers of that day. Milton in one of his sonnets has,--

“Thy worth and skill _exempts_ thee from the throng,”--

and Leigh Hunt, for the sake of the archaism, in one of his, “Patience and Gentleness _is_ power.”

Weariness, and not want of matter, compels us to desist from further examples of Mr. Hazlitt’s emendations. But we must also give a few specimens of his notes, and of the care with which he has corrected the punctuation.

In a note on “flutes of canary” (p. 76) too long to quote, Mr. Hazlitt, after citing the glossary of Nares (edition of 1859, by Wright and Halliwell, a very careless book, to speak mildly), in which _flute_ is conjectured to mean _cask_, says that he is not satisfied, but adds, “I suspect that a flute _of canary_ was so called from the cask having several vent-holes.” But flute means simply a tall glass. Lassel, describing the glass-making at Murano, says, “For the High Dutch they have high glasses called _Flutes_, a full yard long.” So in Dryden’s _Sir Martin Mar-all_, “bring two flute-_glasses_ and some stools, ho! We’ll have the ladies’ health.” The origin of the word, though doubtful, is probably nearer to _flood_ than _flute_. But conceive of two gentlemen, members of one knows not how many learned societies, like Messrs. Wright and Halliwell, pretending to edit Nares, when they query a word which they could have found in any French or German dictionary!

On page 93 we have,--

“Hayle, holy cold! chaste temper, hayle! the fire
Raved o’er my purer thoughts I feel t’ expire.”

Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus: “_Rav’d_ seems here to be equivalent to _reav’d_ or _bereav’d_. Perhaps the correct reading may be ’reav’d.’ See Worcester’s _Dictionary_, art. RAVE?, where Menage’s supposition of affinity between _rave_ and _bereave_ is perhaps a little too slightingly treated.”

The meaning of Lovelace was, “the fire _that_ raved.” But what Mr. Hazlitt would make with “reaved o’er my purer thoughts,” we cannot conceive. On the whole, we think he must have written the note merely to make his surprising glossological suggestion. All that Worcester does for the etymology, by the way, is to cite Richardson, no safe guide.

“Where now one _so so_ spatters, t’other: no!” (p. 112.)

The comma in this verse has, of course, no right there, but Mr. Hazlitt leaves the whole passage so corrupt that we cannot spend time in disinfecting it. We quote it only for the sake of his note on “_so so_.” It is marvellous.

“An exclamation of approval when an actor made a hit. The
corruption seems to be somewhat akin to the Italian, ’_si, si_,’ a
corruption of ’_sia, sia_.’”

That the editor of an English poet need not understand Italian we may grant, but that he should not know the meaning of a phrase so common in his own language as _so-so_ is intolerable. Lovelace has been saying that a certain play might have gained applause under certain circumstances, but that everybody calls it _so-so_,--something very different from “an exclamation of approval,” one should say. The phrase answers exactly to the Italian _così così_, while _sì_ (not _si_) is derived from _sic_, and is analogous with the affirmative use of the German so and the Yankee _jes’ so_.

“Oh, how he hast’ned death, burnt to be fryed!” (p. 141.)

The note on _fryed_ is,--

“I. e. freed. _Free_ and _freed_ were sometimes pronounced like
_fry_ and _fryed_; for Lord North, in his _Forest of Varieties_,
1645, has these lines:--

’Birds that long have lived free,
Caught and cag’d, but pine and die.’

Here evidently _free_ is intended to rhyme with _die_.”

“Evidently!” An instance of the unsafeness of rhyme as a guide to pronunciation. It was _die_ that had the sound of _dee_, as everybody (but Mr. Hazlitt) knows. Lovelace himself rhymes _die_ and _she_ on p. 269. But what shall we say to our editor’s not knowing that _fry_ was used formerly where we should say _burn_? Lovers used to _fry_ with love, whereas now they have got out of the frying-pan into the fire. In this case a martyr is represented as burning (i. e. longing) to be fried (i. e. burned).

“Her beams ne’er shed or change like th’ hair of day.” (p. 224.)

Mr. Hazlitt’s note is,--

“_Hair_ is here used in what has become quite an obsolete sense.
The meaning is outward form, nature, or character. The word used to
be by no means uncommon; but it is now, as was before remarked, out
of fashion; and indeed I do not think that it is found even in any
old writer used exactly in the way in which Lovelace has employed
it.”

We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands it! Did he never hear of the golden hair of Apollo,--of the _intonsum Cynthium_? Don Quixote was a better scholar where he speaks of _las doradas hebras de sus hermosos cabellos_. But _hair_ never meant what Mr. Hazlitt says it does, even when used as he supposes it to be here. It had nothing to do with “outward form, nature, or character,” but had a meaning much nearer what we express by temperament, which its color was and is thought to indicate.

On p. 232 “_wild_ ink” is explained to mean “_unrefined_.” It is a mere misprint for “_vild_.”

Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an illusion of Lovelace to the “east and west” in speaking of George Sandys, mentions Sandys’s Oriental travels, but seems not to know that he translated Ovid in Virginia.

Pages 251, 252:--

“And as that soldier conquest doubted not,
Who but one splinter had of Castriot,
But would assault ev’n death, so strongly charmed,
And naked oppose rocks, with this bone armed.”

Mr. Hazlitt reads _his_ for _this_ in the last verse, and his note on “bone” is:--

“And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand and
took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. (Judges xv. 15.)”

Could the farce of “editing” go further? To make a “splinter of Castriot” an ass’s jawbone is a little too bad. We refer Mr. Hazlitt to “The Life of George Castriot, King of Epirus and Albania,” &c., &c., (Edinburgh, 1753,) p. 32, for an explanation of this profound difficulty. He will there find that the Turkish soldiers wore relics of Scanderbeg as charms.

Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt’s most astounding note is on the word _pickear_. (p. 203.)

“So within shot she doth pickear,
Now gall’s [galls] the flank and now the rear.”

“In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to be peculiar to Lovelace. _To pickear_, or _pickeer_, means _to skirmish_.” And, pray, what other possible meaning can it have here?

Of his corrections of the press we will correct a few samples.

Page 34, for “Love _nee’re_ his standard,” read “_neere_.” Page 82, for “fall _too_,” read “fall _to_” (or, as we ought to print such words, “fall-to”). Page 83, for “star-made firmament,” read “star, made firmament.” Page 161, for “To look their enemies _in_ their hearse,” read, both for sense and metre, _into_. Page 176, for “the gods _have_ kneeled,” read _had_. Page 182, for “In beds they tumbled _off_ their own,” read _of_. Page 184, for “in mine one monument I lie,” read _owne_. Page 212, for “Deucalion’s _black_flung stone,” read “backflung.” Of the punctuation we shall give but one specimen, and that a fair average one:--

“Naso to his Tibullus flung the wreath,
He to Catullus thus did each bequeath.
This glorious circle, to another round,
At last the temples of a god it bound.”

Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this for themselves.

* * * * *

Time brings to obscure authors[30] an odd kind of reparation, an immortality, not of love and interest and admiration, but of curiosity merely. In proportion as their language was uncouth, provincial, or even barbarous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pastry-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, and its name shall accordingly live forever in a note. Is not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none? And if literary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Brunetto Latini’s made him insensible for a moment to the rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors of such books as are not properly literature may still comfort themselves with a _non omnis moriar_, laying a mournful emphasis on the adjective, and feeling that they have not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo a fragmentary continuance on earth. To be sure, the immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to the famous men they help to illustrate. If they escape oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they survive only in fine print at the page’s foot. At the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all, perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous is to be utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a kind of definite result by living. To hang on the perilous edge of immortality by the nails, liable at any moment to drop into the fathomless ooze of oblivion, is at best a questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the merest barnacles that have attached themselves to the stately keels of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton have an interest of their own by letting us know in what remote waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare’s “dusty death” to Anthony Copley, and Milton’s “back resounded Death!” to Abraham Fraunce? Nay, is it not Bernard de Ventadour’s lark that sings forever in the diviner air of Dante’s Paradise?

“Quan vey laudeta mover
De joi sas alas contra’l rai,
Que s’oblida e s laissa cazer
Per la doussor qu ’al cor li ’n vai.”

“Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia,
Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
Dell’ ultima dolcezza che la sazia.”

We are not sure that Bernard’s “Que s’oblida es laissa cazer” is not sweeter than Dante’s “tace contenta,” but it was plainly the _doussor_ that gave its cue to the greater poet’s memory, and he has improved on it with that exquisite _ultima_, as his master Virgil sometimes did on Homer.

But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone’s. As literature they are oppressive; as items of literary history they find their place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of the Books. There our hearts are touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability! How many a controversialist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone brevity of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity,--and then read “Smith J. [ohn?] 1713-1784 (?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to. See _Lowndes_.” The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom a name was valuable in proportion as it was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your title-page read after it has rounded the corner of its first century, and to enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the _Libro d’oro_ of the _onymi-anonymi_, of the never-named authors who exist only in name. Parson Adams would be here had he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr. Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on monogamy. Papyrorcetes junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the name of his respectable progenitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least, if of nothing better, and are sons though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the waxen _imagines_ of the Roman patriciate, for those must have been inconvenient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus himself might soften in the dog-days) and not readily salable unless to some _novus homo_ willing to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in genealogy are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he must not less be Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Guérard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply because of their illegibility, so there is another class driven by a like irresistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these have even a philologic value for us depends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them by the editor.

For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out of which something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our literature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent industry. It would not be easy to name any work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the meaning with which words were used during the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholar ship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor than downright ignorance. This language is strong because it is true, though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly to the labors of his predecessors,--to such men as Ritson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Madden, his superiors in everything that goes to the making of a good editor. Most of them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness of our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps of glossary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the difficulties than the defects of these pioneers.

How different is Mr. Hazlitt’s spirit from that of the thorough and therefore modest scholar! In the Preface to his _Altenglische Sprachproben_, Mätzner says of an editor, _das Beste was er ist verdankt er Andern_, an accidental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out of _Nathan der Weise_. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting some friend to translate for him the whole paragraph in which it occurs.

We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superintend a new edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry, and are pained to think of the treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. He tells us that “in an artistic and constructive point of view, the _Mylner of Abington_ is superior to its predecessor,” that predecessor being Chaucer’s _Reve’s Tale_, which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the _Miller_! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a late edition of the most graceful of our lyric poets. Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right word, for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads carefully the very documents he prints. For example, in the Biographical Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says (p. xvii): “Mr. W. Perry Herrick has plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir William to his nephew were simply on account of the fortune which belonged to Robert in right of his father, and which his uncle held in trust; this was about £400; and I think from allusions in the letters printed elsewhere that this view may be the correct one.” _May_ be! The poet says expressly, “I entreat you out of _my little possession_ to deliver to this bearer the _customarye_ £10, without which I cannot meate [?] my ioyrney.” The words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr. Hazlitt’s wise-looking query after “meate” is conclusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he never hear of the familiar phrase “to _meet_ the expense”? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must be the condition of his mind in face of the more than Protean travesties which words underwent before they were uniformed by Johnson and Walker? Mr. Hazlitt’s mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own fog. In another of Herrick’s letters we find, “For what her monie can be effected (_sic_) when there is diuision ’twixt the hart and hand?” “Her monie” of course means _harmonie_, and _effected_ is therefore right. What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his “(_sic_)” it were idle to inquire.

We have already had occasion to examine some of Mr. Hazlitt’s work, and we are sorry to say that in the four volumes before us we find no reason for changing our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never, we might say, with lights of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where none was before, and the peculiar _bumptiousness_ of his incapacity makes it particularly offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of what we assert, our only embarrassment being in the superabundance of our material. In the Introduction to the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt speaks of “the utter want of common care on the part of previous editors of our old poetry.” Such oversights as he has remarked upon in his notes are commonly errors of the press, a point on which Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, should have been charitable, for his own volumes are full of them. We call his attention to one such which is rather amusing. In his “additional notes” we find “line 77, _wylle_. Strike out the note upon this word; but the explanation is correct. _Be wroght_ was a misprint, however, for _he wroght_.” The error occurs in a citation of three lines in which _lother_ is still left for _tother_. The original note affords us so good an example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing as to be worth preserving. In the “Kyng and the Hermit” we read,--

“He ne wyst w[h]ere that he was
Ne out of the forest for to passe,
And thus he rode all wylle.”

And here is Mr. Hazlitt’s annotation on the word _wylle_:--

“_i. e._ evil. In a MS. of the _Tale of the Basyn_, supposed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be written in the Salopian dialect, are the following lines:--

‘The lother hade litull thoght,
Off husbandry cowth he noght,
But alle his wyves _will_ be wroght.’” (Vol. I. p. 16.)

It is plain that he supposed _will_, in this very simple passage, to mean _evil_! This he would seem to rectify, but at the same time takes care to tell us that “the explanation [of _wylle_] is correct.” He is willing to give up one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort himself withal! _Wylle_ is simply a rhyming fetch for _wild_, and the passage means that the king rode at random. The use of _wild_ with this meaning is still common in such phrases as “he struck wild.” In “Havelok” we find it in the nearly related sense of _being at a loss, knowing not what to do_:--

“To lincolne barfot he yede
Hwan he kam ther he was ful _wil_,
Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til.”

_All wylle_, in short, means the kind of editing that is likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up his misinformation as he goes along. We would hint that a person must know _something_ before he can use even a glossary with safety.

In the “King and the Barker,” when the tanner finds out that it is the king whom he has been treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees, Mr. Hazlitt prints,

“He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell,”

and subjoins the following note: “Radell, or raddle, signifies a side of a cart; but here, apparently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printed _ner adell_.” Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation of _raddle_, which he got from Halliwell, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from O. F. _rastel_) implies, means the side or end of a _hay_-cart, in which the uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a cart to do here? There is perhaps a touch of what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call humor, in the tanner’s forgetfulness of his raiment, but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt’s own notes. The tanner was on horseback, as the roads of the period required that he should be, and good old Ritson was plainly on the right track in his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. As it was, he got _one_ word right, and so far has the advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course, _ner a dell_, never a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in his collection,--

“For _never a dell_
He wyll me love agayne.” (Vol. III. p. 2.)

That _adell_ was a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact that the word does not appear in his glossary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints! In the poem we have just quoted he gravely prints,--

“Matter in dede,
My sides did blede,”

for “mother, indede,” “through ryght wysenes” for “though ryghtwisenes,” “with man vnkynde” for “sith man vnkynde,” “ye knowe a parte” for “ye knowe aperte,” “here in” for “herein,” all of which make nonsense, and all come within the first one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the shortest, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than want of care. One blunder falling within the same limits we have reserved for special comment, because it affords a good example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing:--

“Your herte souerayne
Clouen in twayne
By longes the blynde.” (Vol. III. p. 7.)

Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in the dark as to what _longes_ meant as the editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar enough, one should think, to any reader of mediæval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt absolves himself for not having supplied a glossary by the plea that none is needed by the class of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman who often goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters as that “shape” means “form,” and that “Johan of the golden mouthe” means “St. Chrysostom,” which, indeed, it does not, any more than Johannes Baptista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt with an illustration of the passage from Bekker’s _Ferabras_, the more willingly as it may direct his attention to a shining example of how an old poem should be edited:--

“en la crotz vos pendero li fals Iuzieu truan,
can Longis vos ferie de sa lansa trencan:
el non avia vist en trastot son vivan;
lo sanc li venc per l’asta entro al punh colan;
e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vic el mantenan.”

Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints _sang parlez_ for _sanz parler_) (Vol. I. p. 265), will not be able to form any notion of what these verses mean, but perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from the capital L that _longes_ is a proper name. The word _truan_ at the end of the first verse of our citation may also suggest to him that _truant_ is not quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word _trewāt_ as he seems to think. (Vol. IV. p. 24, _note_.) In deference to Mr. Hazlitt’s presumed familiarity with an author sometimes quoted by him in his notes, we will point him to another illustration:--

“Ac ther cam forth a knyght,
With a kene spere y-grounde
Highte Longeus, as the lettre telleth,
And longe hadde lore his sighte.”
_Piers Ploughman_, Wright, p. 374.

Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where old French is in question. Upon the word _Osyll_ he favors us with the following note: “The blackbird. In East Cornwall _ozell_ is used to signify the windpipe, and thence the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to me.” (Vol. II. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe! The name is merely another form of O. F. _oisil_, and was usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest birds, just as _pajaro_ (L. _passer_) in Spanish, by a similar process in the opposite direction, came to mean bird in general. On the very next page he speaks of “the Romance which is vulgarly entitled _Lybeaus Disconus_, i. e. _Le Beau Disconnu_.” If he had corrected _Disconus_ to _Desconus_, all had been well; but _Disconnu_ neither is nor ever was French at all. Where there is blundering to be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two birds. _Ly beaus Disconus_ is perfectly correct old French, and another form of the adjective (_bius_) perhaps explains the sound we give to the first syllable of _beauty_ and _Beaufort_. A barrister at law, as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know anything about old English or modern French, but we might fairly expect him to have at least a smattering of Law French! In volume fourth, page 129, a goodman trying his wife,

“Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fire
And set it abooue vpon the astire.”

Mr. Hazlitt’s note upon _astire_ is “hearth, i. q. _astre_.” Knowing that the modern French was âtre, he too rashly inferred a form which never existed except in Italian. The old French word is _aistre_ or _estre_, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither old French nor new. We do not pretend to know what _astire_ means, but a hearth that should be _abooue_ the pot seething over the fire would be unusual, to say the least, in our semi-civilized country.

In the “Lyfe of Roberte the Deuill” (Vol. I. p. 232), Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knight _sentre_ his lance, and tells us in a note that the “Ed. 1798 has _fentered_,” a very easy misprint for the right word _feutered_. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning of _sentre_ he has not vouchsafed to tell us. _Fautre_ (sometimes _faltre_ or _feutre_) means in old French the _rest_ of a lance. Thus in the _Roman du Renart_ (26517),

“Et mist sa lance sor le _fautre_.”

But it also meant a peculiar _kind_ of rest. In Sir F. Madden’s edition of _Gawayne_ (to which Mr. Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read,

“They _feutred_ their lances, these knyghtes good”;

and in the same editor’s “William and the Werwolf,”

“With sper festened in _feuter_, him for to spille.”

In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, “There seems no reason, however, why it [feuter] should not mean the rest attached to the armour.” But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a “garniture d’une selle pour tenir la lance.” A spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly weight to the blow. The “_him for to spille_” implies this. So in “Merlin” (E. E. Text Soc., p. 488): “Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest crewelte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as in mortall werre.” The context shows that the _fewtre_ turned sport into earnest. A citation in Raynouard’s _Lexique Roman_ (though wrongly explained by him) directed us to a passage which proves that this particular kind of rest for the lance was attached to the saddle, in order to render the blow heavier:--

“Lances _à_ [lege _as_] _arçons_ afeutrées
_Pour plus de dures colées rendre._”
_Branche des Royaux Lignages_, 4514, 4515.

Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long and useful career of Mr. Wright, who, if he had given us nothing more than his excellent edition of “Piers Ploughman” and the volume of “Ancient Vocabularies,” would have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our literature or students of our language, does not save him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt’s own has comically avenged Warton. The word _prayer_, it seems, had somehow substituted itself for _prayse_ in a citation by Warton of the title of the “Schole-House of Women.” Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes occasion to charge him with often “speaking at random,” and after suggesting that it might have been the blunder of a copyist, adds, “or it is by no means impossible that Warton himself, having been allowed to inspect the production, was guilty of this oversight.” (Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed the following couplet to escape his conscientious attention:--

“Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose
That _prayers_ and glory doth consist in cloathes.”

_Lege, nostro periculo_, PRAYSE! Were dear old Tom still on earth, he might light his pipe cheerfully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt’s pages, secure that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blunders at the least. The word _prayer_ is an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the “Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 18) he prints:--

“And sayd, Syre, I rede we make
In this chapel oure prayers,
That God us kepe both in ferrus.”

Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things that everybody knows, give us a note upon _in ferrus_? It would have matched his admirable elucidation of _waygose_, which we shall notice presently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. may have read _prayere_ and _in fere_? _Prayere_ occurs two verses further on, and not as a rhyme.

Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a question of Old English grammar, telling him superciliously that _can_, with an infinitive, in such phrases as _he can go_, is used not “to denote a _past_ tense, but an _imperfect_ tense.” By _past_ we suppose him to mean _perfect_. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in this very collection that _can_, in the phrases referred to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect tense:--

“And thorow that worde y felle in pryde;
As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde,
And with the tywnkling[31] of an eye
God for-dud alle that maystrye
And so hath he done for my gylte.”

Now the angel here is Lucifer, and _can of hevyn glyde_ means simply _fell from heaven_, not _was falling_. It is in the same tense as _for-dud_ in the next line. The fall of the angels is surely a _fait accompli_. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes “my for” to “for my,” and wrongly, the _my_ agreeing with _maystrye_ understood. In modern English we should use _mine_ in the same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of himself.

We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt’s impertinence to Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from original sources. We have a _foible_ for Ritson with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his unconsciously depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy’s folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most conscientious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two poems, “The Squyr of Low Degre” and “The Knight of Curtesy,” which had already been edited by Ritson. The former of these has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the copyist as perhaps an editor should.[32] Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson’s text, that “it offers more than _an hundred_ departures from the original,” and of the “Knight of Courtesy,” that “Ritson’s text is by no means accurate.” Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson’s emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the original reading in a foot-note with an “old ed. has” so and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the corrections were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For example, he prints,

“Alas! it tourned to _wroth her heyle_,”

where Ritson had substituted _wrotherheyle_. The measure shows that Ritson was right. _Wroth her heyle_, moreover, is nonsense. It should have been _wrother her heyle_ at any rate, but the text is far too modern to admit of that archaic form. In the “Debate of the Body and the Soul” (Mätzner’s A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have,

“Why schope thou me to wrother-hele,”

and in “Dame Siris” (Ibid., 110),

“To goder hele ever came thou hider.”

Mr. Hazlitt prints,

“For yf it may be found in thee
That thou them [de] fame for enuyte.”

The emendation [de] is Ritson’s, and is probably right, though it would require, for the metre’s sake, the elision of _that_ at the beginning of the verse. But what is _enuyte_? Ritson reads _enmyte_, which is, of course, the true reading. Mr. Hazlitt prints (as usual either without apprehending or without regarding the sense),

“With browes _bent_ and eyes full mery,”

where Ritson has _brent_, and gives parallel passages in his note on the word. Mr. Hazlitt gives us

“To here the bugles there yblow,
With their _bugles_ in that place,”

though Ritson had made the proper correction to _begles_. Mr. Hazlitt, with ludicrous _nonchalance_, allows the Squire to press into the throng

“With a _bastard_ large and longe,”

and that with the right word (_baslarde_) staring him in the face from Ritson’s text. We wonder he did not give us an illustrative quotation from Falconbridge! Both editors have allowed some gross errors to escape, such as “come _not_” for “come” (v. 425); “so leue _he_ be” for “ye be” (v. 593); “vnto _her_ chambre” for “vnto your” (v. 993); but in general Ritson’s is the better and more intelligent text of the two. In the “Knight of Curtesy,” Mr. Hazlitt has followed Ritson’s text almost _literatim_. Indeed, it is demonstrable that he gave it to his printers as copy to set up from. The proof is this: Ritson has accented a few words ending in _tè_. Generally he uses the grave accent, but now and then the acute. Mr. Hazlitt’s text follows all these variations exactly. The main difference between the two is that Ritson prints the first personal pronoun _i_, and Mr. Hazlitt, I. Ritson is probably right; for in the “Scholehouse of Women” (vv. 537, 538) where the text no doubt was

“i [i. e. _one_] deuil a woman to speak may constrain,
But all that in hel be cannot let it again,”

Mr. Hazlitt changes “i” to “A,” and says in a note, “Old ed. has _I_.” That by his correction he should miss the point was only natural; for he evidently conceives that the _sense_ of a passage does not in the least concern an editor. An instance or two will suffice. In the “Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 17) we read,

“The fynd tyl hure hade myche tene
As hit was a sterfull we seme!”

Mr. Hazlitt in a note explains _tene_ to mean “trouble or sorrow”; but if that were its meaning here, we should read _made_, and not _hade_, which would give to the word its other sense of _attention_. The last verse of the couplet Mr. Hazlitt seems to think perfectly intelligible as it stands. We should not be surprised to learn that he looked upon it as the one gem that gave lustre to a poem otherwise of the dreariest. We fear we shall rob it of all its charm for him by putting it into modern English:--

“As it was after full well seen.”

So in the “Smyth and his Dame” (Vol. III. p. 204) we read,

“It were a lytele maystry
To make a blynde man to se,”

instead of “_as_ lytell.” It might, indeed, be as easy to perform the miracle on a blind man as on Mr. Hazlitt. Again, in the same poem, a little further on,

“For I tell the now trevely,
Is none so wyse ne _to_ sle,
But ever _ye_ may som what lere,”

which, of course, should be,

“ne _so_ sle
But ever _he_ may som what lere.”

Worse than all, Mr. Hazlitt tells us (Vol. I. p. 158) that when they bury the great Khan, they lay his body in a tabernacle,

“With sheld and spere and other wede
With a whit mere to gyf him in ylke.”

We will let Sir John Maundeville correct the last verse: “And they seyn that when he shale come into another World ... the mare schalle _gheven him mylk_.” Mr. Hazlitt gives us some wretched doggerel by “Piers of Fulham,” and gives it swarming with blunders. We take at random a couple of specimens:--

“And loveship goith ay to warke
Where that presence is put a bake,” (Vol. II. pp. 13, 14,)

where we should read “love’s ship,” “wrake,” and “abake.” Again, just below,

“Ffor men haue seyn here to foryn,
That love laughet when men be forsworn.”

Love should be “Iove.” Ovid is the obscure person alluded to in the “men here to foryn”:

“Jupiter e cœlo perjuria ridet amantum.”

We dare say Mr. Hazlitt, if he ever read the passage, took it for granted that “to foryn” meant _too foreign_, and gave it up in despair. But surely Shakespeare’s

“At lovers’ perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs,”

is not too foreign to have put him on the right scent.

Mr. Hazlitt is so particular in giving us _v_ for _u_ and _vice versa_, that such oversights are a little annoying. Every man his own editor seems to be his theory of the way in which old poetry should be reprinted. On this plan, the more riddles you leave (or make) for the reader to solve, the more pleasure you give him. To correct the blunders in any book edited by Mr. Hazlitt would give the young student a pretty thorough training in archaic English. In this sense the volumes before us might be safely recommended to colleges and schools. When Mr. Hazlitt undertakes to correct, he is pretty sure to go wrong. For example, in “Doctour Doubble Ale” (Vol. III. p. 309) he amends thus:--

“And sometyme mikle strife is
Among the ale wyfes, [y-wis];

where the original is right as it stands. Just before, in the same poem, we have a parallel instance:--

“And doctours dulpatis
That falsely to them pratis,
And bring them to the gates.”

The original probably reads (or should read) _wyfis_ and _gatis_. But it is too much to expect of Mr. Hazlitt that he should remember the very poems he is editing from one page to another, nay, as we shall presently show, that he should even read them. He will change _be_ into _ben_ where he should have let it alone (though his own volumes might have furnished him with such examples as “were go,” “have se,” “is do,” and fifty more), but he will sternly retain _bene_ where the rhyme requires _be_, and Ritson had so printed. In “Adam Bel” the word _pryme_ occurs (Vol. II. p. 140), and he vouchsafes us the following note: “i. e. noon. It is commonly used by early writers in this sense. In the _Four_ P. P., by John Heywood, circa 1540, the apothecary says

‘If he taste this boxe nye aboute the pryme
By the masse, he is in heven or even songe tyme.’”

Let our readers admire with us the easy “it is commonly used” of Mr. Hazlitt, as if he had store of other examples in his note-book. He could an if he would! But unhappily he borrowed this single quotation from Nares, and, as usual, it throws no scintilla of light upon the point in question, for his habit in annotation is to find by means of a glossary some passage (or passages if possible) in which the word to be explained occurs, and then--why, then to give the word as an explanation of itself. But in this instance, Mr. Hazlitt, by the time he had reached the middle of his next volume (Vol. III. p. 281) had wholly forgotten that _pryme_ was “commonly used by early writers” for _noon_, and in a note on the following passage,

“I know not whates a clocke
But by the countre cocke,
The mone nor yet the pryme,
Vntyll the sonne do shyne,”

he informs us that it means “six o’clock in the morning”! Here again this editor, who taxes Ritson with want of care, prints _mone_ for _none_ in the very verse he is annotating, and which we may therefore presume that he had read. A man who did not know the moon till the sun showed it him is a match even for Mr. Hazlitt himself. We wish it were as easy as he seems to think it to settle exactly what _pryme_ means when used by our “early writers,” but it is at least absolutely certain that it did not mean _noon_.

But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are competent witnesses, knows nothing whatever about English, old or new. In the “Mery Jest of Dane Hew” he finds the following verses,

“Dame he said what shall we now doo
Sir she said so mote go
The munk in a corner ye shall lay”