Chapter XIII (16)

I now come to the London acting edition of _Macbeth_ of the same date, 1678 (played, if I remember, by the same players, at the same house); from which I made a few rough extracts, when I visited the British Museum for the sake of selecting from the "Garrick Plays." As I can scarcely expect to be believed upon my own word, as to what our ancestors at that time were willing to accept for Shakspeare, I refer the reader to that collection to verify my report. Who the improver was in this instance, we are left to guess, for the title-page leaves us to conjecture. Possibly the players, each one separately, contributed his new reading, which was silently adopted. Flesh and blood could not at this time of day submit to a thorough perusal of the thing; but, from a glance or two of casual inspection, I am enabled to lay before the reader a few flowers. In one of the lyric parts, _Hecate_ is made to say--

----on a corner of the moon
A drop my _spectacles_ have found.
I'll catch it.

_Hecate_, the solemn president of classic enchantments, thence adopted into the romantic--the tri-form Hecate--wearing spectacles to assist old sight!--(No. 4 or No. 5, as the opticians class them, is not said)--one may as well fancy Cerberus in a bran new collar, or the "dreaded name of Demogorgon" in jack-boots. Among the "ingredients of the caldron," is enumerated, not a tiger's, but--what reader?--

----a _Dutchman's_ chawdron!

We were about that time engaged in a war with Holland.--Again, _Macduff_ being about to journey across the heath--the "blasted heath"--answers his lady, who courteously demands of him, "Are you a-foot?"--

Knowing the way to be both short and easy,
And that the _chariot_ did attend me here,
I have adventured----

From which we may infer, that the Thane of Fife lived as a nobleman ought to do, and--kept a carriage. Again, the same nobleman, on the morning after _Duncan's_ murder, says:--"Rising this morning early, I went to look out of my window. I could scarce see further than my breath." And indeed the original author informs us, that it had been a "rough night;" so that the improver does not wander far from his text. The exquisite familiarity of this prose patch was doubtlessly intended by the improver to break the tiresome monotony of Shakspeare's blank verse. In conclusion, _Lady Macbeth_ is brought in _repentant_, and counselling her husband to give up the crown for conscience sake!--_Item_, she sees a ghost, which is all the time invisible to him. Such was the _Macbeth_ which Betterton acted, and a contemporary audience took on trust for Shakspeare's.

C. L.

SATURDAY NIGHT

(1829)

There is a Saturday Night--I speak not to the admirers of Burns--erotically or theologically considered; HIS of the "Cotter's" may be a very charming picture, granting it to be but half true. Nor speak I now of the Saturday Night at Sea, which Dibdin hath dressed up with a gusto more poignant to the mere nautical palate of un-Calvanized South Britons. Nor that it is marketing night with the pretty tripping Servant-maids all over London, who, with judicious and economic eye, select the white and well-blown fillet, that the blue-aproned contunder of the calf can safely recommend as "prime veal," and which they are to be sure not to over-brown on the morrow. Nor speak I of the hard-handed Artisan, who on this night receives the pittance which is to furnish the neat Sabbatical dinner--not always reserved with Judaical rigor for that laudable purpose, but broken in upon, perchance, by inviting pot of ale, satisfactory to the present orifice. These are alleviatory, care-consoling. But the Hebdomadal Finale which I contemplate hath neither comfort nor alleviation in it; I pronounce it, from memory, altogether punitive, and to be abhorred. It is--Saturday Night to the School-boy!

Cleanliness, saith some sage man, is next to Godliness. It may be; but how it came to sit so very near, is the marvel. Methinks some of the more human virtues might have put in for a place before it. Justice--Humanity--Temperance--are positive qualities; the courtesies and little civil offices of life, had I been Master of the Ceremonies to that Court, should have sate above the salt in preference to a mere negation. I confess there is something wonderfully refreshing, in warm countries, in the act of ablution. Those Mahometan washings--how cool to the imagination! but in all these superstitions, the action itself, if not the duty, is voluntary. But to be washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and redolent of the very coarsest coarse soap, ingrained with hard beads for torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils--positively Burking you, under pretence of cleansing--substituting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of the two--making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out brighter on the Sabbath morn, for their clearness was the effect of pain more than cleanliness.--Could this be true religion?

The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. I am always disposed to add, so are those of Grandmothers. _Mine_--the Print has made her look rather too young--had never-failing pretexts of tormenting children for their good. I was a chit then; and I well remember when a fly had got into a corner of my eye, and I was complaining of it to her, the old Lady deliberately pounded two ounces or more of the finest loaf sugar that could be got, and making me hold open the eye as wide as I could--all innocent of her purpose--she blew from delicate white paper, with a full breath, the whole saccharine contents into the part afflicted, saying, "There, now the fly is out." 'Twas most true--a legion of blue-bottles, with the prince of flies at their head, must have dislodged with the torrent and deluge of tears which followed. I kept my own counsel, and my fly in my eye when I had got one, in future, without troubling her dulcet applications for the remedy. Then her medicine-case was a perfect magazine of tortures for infants. She seemed to have no notion of the comparatively tender drenches which young internals require--her potions were any thing but milk for babes. Then her sewing up of a cut finger--pricking a whitloe before it was ripe, because she could not see well,--with the aggravation of the pitying tone she did it in.

But of all her nostrums--rest her soul--nothing came up to the Saturday Night's flannel--that rude fragment of a Witney blanket--Wales spins none so coarse--thrust into the corners of a weak child's eye with soap that might have absterged an Ethiop, whitened the hands of Duncan's She-murderer, and scowered away Original Sin itself. A faint image of my penance you see in the Print--but the Artist has sunk the flannel--the Age, I suppose, is too nice to bear it: and he has faintly shadowed the expostulatory suspension of the razor-strap in the hand of my Grandfather, when my pains and clamours had waxed intolerable. Peace to the Shades of them both! and if their well-meaning souls had need of cleansing when they quitted earth, may the process of it have been milder than that of my old Purgatorial Saturday Night's path to the Sabbatical rest of the morrow!

NEPOS.

ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS

(1829)

It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendantly surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate, or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the master-piece.

Again it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse, and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus," of the same author; a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.

While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the "Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," and shall continue to do so we trust while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told, that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer--four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation. Roxana--Singleton--Moll Flanders--Colonel Jack--are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye, of every one of them! They are in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited Island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.

But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton, on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness; is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance; or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart (the worst solitude), goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it again--whom hath he there to sympathise with him? or of what sort are his associates?

The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it, beyond that of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you every where nothing but what really happened to himself. To this, the extreme _homeliness_ of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense--that which comes _home_ to the reader. The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, "I say"--"mind"--and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe, can never again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers, than that of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief--Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot--Roxana, harlot and something worse--would be startling ingredients in the bill of fare of modern literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots is _the thief_, _the harlot_, and _the pirate_ of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation, upon the rude and uninstructed soul, more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that "fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing."

CLARENCE SONGS

(1830)

_To the Editor of The Spectator_

Sir,--You have a question in your paper, what songs, and whether any of any value, were written upon Prince WILLIAM, our present Sovereign. Can it have escaped you, that the very popular song and tune of "Sweet lass of Richmond Hill" had reference to a supposed partiality of that Prince for a lass of Richmond? I have heard who she was, but now forget. I think it was a damsel of quality. I remember, when I was a schoolboy at Christ's Hospital, about eight-and-forty years since, having had my hearing stunned with the burthen (which alone I retain) of some ballad in praise and augury of the Princely Midshipman:--

"He's royal, he's noble, he's chosen by _me_,[61]
Britain's Isle to protect, and reign Lord of the Sea!"

and my old ears yet ring with it.

[61] It is Neptune who predicts this.

Allusions to the same personage were at that time rife in innumerable ballads, under the notion of a _sweet William_; but the ballads are obliterated. The song of "Sweet William Taylor, walking with his lady gay"--from the identity of names, I suppose--usually followed the Neptunian song. The late TOM SHERIDAN bears away the credit of this. But was it possible he could have been the author of it in 1782 or 1783? Perhaps he made it his own by communicating a deeper tinge of vulgarity to it, exchanging "William" for "Billy." I think the rogue snugged it in as his own, hoping it was a forgotten ditty.

C. L.

CLARENCE SONGS.--No. II

Sir,--A friend has just reminded me of a ballad made on occasion of some shipboard scrape into which our Royal Midshipman had fallen; in which, with a _romantic licence_, the rank of the young sailor is supposed to have been unknown, and a corporal infliction about to have been put into execution. This is all he can recover of it. He was

----"order'd to undress, Sir!
But very soon they did espy
The star upon his breast, Sir:
And on their knees they soon did fall,
And all for mercy soon did call."

The burden was "Long live Duke William," or something to that effect. So you see, his Majesty has enjoyed his laureats by anticipation.

C. L.

I know the town swarmed with these Clarence songs in the heyday of his young popularity. Where are they?

RECOLLECTIONS OF A LATE ROYAL ACADEMICIAN

(1831)

What Apelles was to the _Grecian Alexander_, the same to the _Russian_ was the late G---- D----. None but Apelles might attempt the lineaments of the world's conqueror; none but our Academician could have done justice to the lines of the Czar, and his Courtiers. There they hang, the labour of ten plodding years, in an endless gallery, erected for the nonce, in the heart of Imperial Petersburgh--eternal monuments of barbarian taste submitting to half-civilized cunning--four hundred fierce Half-Lengths, all male, and all military; like the pit in a French theatre, or the characters in Timon as it was last acted, with never a woman among them. Chaste sitters to Vandyke, models of grace and womanhood; and thou Dame Venetia Digby, fairest among thy fair compeers at Windsor, hide your pure pale cheeks, and cool English beauties, before this suffocating horde of Scythian riflers, this male chaos! Your cold oaken frames shall wane before the gorgeous buildings,

With Tartar faces thronged, and horrent uniforms.

One emperor contended for the monopoly of the _ancient_; two were competitors at once for the pencil of the _modern Apelles_. The Russian carried it against the Haytian by a single length. And if fate, as it was at one time nearly arranged, had wafted D. to the shores of Hayti--with the same complacency in his art, with which he persisted in daubing in, day after day, his frozen Muscovites, he would have sate down for life to smutch in upon canvass the faces of blubber-lipped sultanas, or the whole male retinue of the dingy court of Christophe. For in truth a choice of subjects was the least of D.'s care. A Goddess from Cnidus, or from the Caffre coast, was equal to him; Lot, or Lot's wife; the charming widow H., or her late husband.

My acquaintance with D. was in the outset of his art, when the graving tools, rather than the pencil, administered to his humble wants. Those implements, as is well known, are not the most favourable to the cultivation of that virtue, which is esteemed next to godliness. He might "wash his hands in innocency," and so metaphorically "approach an altar;" but his material puds were any thing but fit to be carried to church. By an ingrained economy in soap--if it was not for pictorial effect rather--he would wash (on Sundays) the inner oval, or portrait, as it may be termed, of his countenance, leaving the unwashed temples to form a natural black frame round a picture, in which a dead white was the predominant colour. This, with the addition of green spectacles, made necessary by the impairment, which his graving labours by day and night (for he was ordinarily at them for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four) had brought upon his visual faculties, gave him a singular appearance, when he took the air abroad; in so much, that I have seen a crowd of young men and boys following him along Oxford-street with admiration, not without shouts; even as the Youth of Rome, we read in Vasari, followed the steps of Raphael with acclamations for his genius, and for his beauty, when he proceeded from his work-shop to chat with Cardinals and Popes at the Vatican.

The family of D. were not at this time in affluent circumstances. His father, a clever artist, had outlived the style of art, in which he excelled most of his contemporaries. He, with the father of the celebrated Morland, worked for the shop of Carrington and Bowles, which exists still for the poorer sort of caricatures, on the North side of St. Paul's Church Yard. They did clever things in colours. At an inn in Reading a screen is still preserved, full of their labours; but the separate portions of either artist are now undistinguishable. I remember a Mother teaching her Child to read (B. Barton has a copy of it); a Laundress washing; a young Quaker, a beautiful subject. But the flower of their forgotten productions hangs still at a public house on the left hand, as thou arrivest, Reader, from the now Highgate archway, at the foot of the descent where Crouch End begins, on thy road to green Hornsey. Turn in, and look at it, for the sight is well worth a cup of excusatory cyder. In the parlour to the right you will find it--an antiquated subject--a Damsel sitting at her breakfast table in a gown of the flowered chintz of our grandmothers, with a tea-service before her of the _same pattern_. The effect is most delicate. Why have these harmonies--these _agrémens_--no place in the works of modern art?

With such niceties in his calling D. did not much trouble his head, but, after an ineffectual experiment to reconcile his eye-sight with his occupation, boldly quitted it, and dashed into the beaten road of common-place portraiture in oil. The Hopners, and the Lawrences, were his Vandykes, and his Velasquezes; and if he could make any thing like them, he insured himself immortality. With such guides he struggled on through laborious nights and days, till he reached the eminence he aimed at--of mediocrity. Having gained that summit, he sate down contented. If the features were but cognoscible, no matter whether the flesh resembled flesh, or oilskin. For the thousand tints--the grains--which in life diversify the nose, the chin, the cheek--which a Reynolds can but coarsely counterfeit--he cared nothing at all about them. He left such scrupulosities to opticians and anatomists. If the features were but there, the character of course could not be far off. A lucky hit which he made in painting the _dress_ of a very dressy lady--Mrs. W--e--, whose handsome countenance also, and tall elegance of shape, were too palpable entirely to escape under any masque of oil, with which even D. could overlay them--brought to him at once, an influx of sitters, which almost rivalled the importunate calls upon Sir Thomas. A portrait, he _did_ soon after, of the Princess Charlotte, clenched his fame. He proceeded Academician. At that memorable conjuncture of time it pleased the Allied Sovereigns to visit England.

I called upon D. to congratulate him upon a crisis so doubly eventful. His pleasant housekeeper seemed embarrassed; owned that her master was alone. But could he be spoken with? With some importunity I prevailed upon her to usher me up into his painting-room. It was in Newman-street. At his easel stood D., with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side a--live Goose. I enquired into this extraordinary combination. Under the rose he informed me, that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall, against an expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns to that place. I smiled at an engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small gains was never one of D.'s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of warriors, kings, rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The Wolga, the Don, and the Nieper, were there, or their representative River Gods; and Father Thames clubbed urns with the Vistula. Glory with her dazzling Eagle was not absent, nor Fame, nor Victory. The shade of Rubens might have evoked the mighty allegories. But what was the Goose? He was evidently _sitting_ for a something.

D. at last informed me, that having fixed upon a group of rivers, he could not introduce the Royal Thames without his _swans_. That he had enquired the price of a live swan, and it being more than he was prepared to give for it, he had bargained with the poulterer for the _next thing to it_; adding significantly, that it would do to roast, after it had served its turn to paint swans by. _Reader, this is a true story._

So entirely devoid of imagination, or any feeling for his high art, was this _Painter_, that for the few historical pictures he attempted, any sitter might sit for any character. He took once for a subject _The Infant Hercules_. Did he chuse for a model some robust antique? No. He did not even pilfer from Sir Joshua, who was nearer to his own size. But from a _show_ he hired to sit to him a child in years indeed, (though no Infant,) but in fact a precocious _Man_, or human portent, that was disgustingly exhibiting at that period; a thing to be strangled. From this he formed _his_ Infant Hercules. In a scriptural flight he next attempted a Sampson in the lap of Dalilah. A Dalilah of some sort was procureable for love or money, but who should stand for the Jewish Hercules? He hired a tolerably stout porter, with a thickish head of hair, curling in yellowish locks, but lithe--much like a wig. And these were the robust strengths of Sampson.

I once was a witness to a _family scene_ in his painting closet, which I had entered rather abruptly, and but for his encouragement, should as hastily have retreated. He stood with displeased looks eyeing a female relative--whom I had known under happier auspices--that was kneeling at his feet with a baby in her arms, with her eyes uplifted and suppliant. Though I could have previously sworn to the virtue of Miss ----, yet casual slips have been known. There are such things as families disgraced, where least you would have expected it. The child _might_ be ----; I had heard of no wedding--I was the last person to pry into family secrets--when D. relieved my uneasy cogitations by explaining, that the innocent, good-humoured creature before me (such as she ever was, and is now that she is married) with a baby borrowed from the public house, was acting Andromache to _his_ Ulysses, for the purpose of transferring upon canvas a tender situation from the Troades of Seneca.

On a subsequent occasion I knocked at D.'s door. I had chanced to have been in a dreamy humour previously. I am not one that often poetises, but I had been musing--coxcombically enough in the heart of Newman-street, Oxford Road--upon Pindus, and the Aonian Maids. The Lover of Daphne was in my mind--when, answering to my summons, the door opened, and there stood before me, laurel-crowned, the God himself, unshorn Apollo. I was beginning to mutter apologies to the Celestial Presence--when on the thumb of the right hand of the Delian (his left held the harp) I spied a pallet, such as painters carry, which immediately reconciled me to the whimsical transformation of my old acquaintance--with his own face, certainly any other than Grecianesque--into a temporary image of the oracle-giver of Delphos. To have impersonated the Ithacan was little; he had been just sitting for a God.--It would be no incurious enquiry to ascertain what the _minimum_ of the faculty of imagination, ever supposed essential to painters along with poets, is, that, in these days of complaints of want of patronage towards the fine arts, suffices to dub a man a R----l A----n.

Not only had D. no imagination to guide him in the treatment of such subjects, but he had no relish for high art in the productions of the great masters. He turned away from them as from something foreign and irrelative to him, and his calling. He knew he had neither part nor portion in them. Cozen him into the Stafford or the Angerstein Gallery, he involuntarily turned away from the Baths of Diana--the Four Ages of Guercino--the Lazarus of Piombo--to some petty piece of _modern art_ that had been inconsistently thrust into the collection through favour. On that he would dwell and pore, blind as the dead to the delicacies that surrounded him. There he might learn something. There he might pilfer a little. There was no grappling with Titian, or Angelo.

The narrowness of his domestic habits to the very last, was the consequence of his hard bringing up, and unexpected emergence into opulence. While rolling up to the ears in Russian rubles, a penny was still in his eyes the same important thing, which it had with some reason seemed to be, when a few shillings were his daily earnings. When he visited England a short time before his death, he reminded an artist of a commission, which he had executed for him in Russia, the package of which was "still unpaid." At this time he was not unreasonably supposed to have realized a sum little short of half a million sterling. What became of it was never known; what gulf, or what Arctic _vorago_, sucked it in, his acquaintance in those parts have better means of guessing, than his countrymen. It is certain that few of the latter were any thing the better for it.

It was before he expatriated himself, but subsequently to his acquisition of pictorial honours in this country, that he brought home two of his brother Academicians to dine with him. He had given no orders extraordinary to his housekeeper. He trusted, as he always did, to her providing. She was a shrewd lass, and knew, as we say, a bit of her master's mind.

It had happened that on the day before, D. passing near Clare Market by one of those open shambles, where tripe and cow-heel are exposed for sale, his eye was arrested by the sight of some tempting flesh _rolled up_. It is a part of the intestines of some animal, which my olfactory sensibilities never permitted me to stay long enough to enquire the name of. D. marked the curious involutions of the unacquainted luxury; the harmony of its colours--a _sable vert_--pleased his eye; and, warmed with the prospect of a new flavour, for a few farthings he bore it off in triumph to his housekeeper. It so happened that his day's dinner was provided, so the cooking of the novelty was for that time necessarily suspended.

Next day came. The hour of dinner approached. His visitors, with no very romantic anticipations, expected a plain meal at least; they were prepared for no new dainties; when, to the astonishment of them, and almost of D. himself, the purchase of the preceding day was served up piping hot--the cook declaring, that she did not know well what it was, for "her master always marketed." His guests were not so happy in their ignorance. They kept dogs.

I will do D. the justice to say, that on such occasions he took what happened in the best humour possible. He had no _false modesty_--though I have generally observed, that persons, who are quite deficient in that _mauvais[e] honte_, are seldom over-troubled with the quality itself, of which it is the counterfeit.

By what arts, with _his_ pretensions, D. contrived to wriggle himself into a seat in the Academy, I am not acquainted enough with the intrigues of that body (more involved than those of an Italian conclave) to pronounce. It is certain, that neither for love to him, nor out of any respect to his talents, did they elect him. Individually he was obnoxious to them all. I have heard that, in his passion for attaining this object, he went so far as to go down upon his knees to some of the members, whom he thought least favourable, and beg their suffrage with many tears.

But _death_, which extends the measure of a man's stature to appearance; and _wealth_, which men worship in life and death, which makes giants of punies, and embalms insignificance; called around the exequies of this pigmy Painter the rank, the riches, the fashion of the world. By Academic hands his pall was borne; by the carriages of nobles of the land, and of ambassadors from foreign powers, his bier was followed; and St. Paul's (O worthy casket for the shrine of such a Zeuxis) now holds--ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF G. D.

THE LATIN POEMS OF VINCENT BOURNE

(1831)

A complete translation of these poems is a desideratum in our literature. Cowper has done _one_ at least, out of the four which he has given us, with a felicity almost unapproachable. Few of our readers can be ignorant of the delightful lines beginning with:--

"There is bird, which by its coat----"

A recent writer has lately added nine more to the number; we wish he would proceed with the remainder, for of all modern Latinity, that of Vincent Bourne is the most to our taste. He is "so Latin," and yet "so English" all the while. In diction worthy of the Augustan age, he presents us with no images that are not familiar to his countrymen. His topics are even closelier drawn; they are not so properly English, as _Londonish_. From the streets, and from the alleys, of his beloved metropolis he culled his objects, which he has invested with an Hogarthian richness of colouring. No town picture by that artist can go beyond his BALLAD-SINGERS; Gay's TRIVIA alone, in verse, comes up to the life and humour of it.

Quæ septem vicos conterminat una columna,
Consistunt nymphæ Sirenum ex agmine binæ;
Stramineum capiti tegimen, collumque per omne
Ingentes electri orbes: utrique pependit
Crustato vestis cœno, limoque rigescens
Crure usque a medio calcem defluxit ad imum.
Exiguam secum pendentem ex ubere natam
Altera; venales dextrâ tulit altera chartas.
His vix dispositis, pueri innuptæque puellæ
Accurrunt: sutor primus, cui lorea vitta
Impediit crines, humili, quæ proxima stabat,
Proruit è cellâ, chartas, si forte placerent,
Empturus; namque ille etiam se carmine multo
Oblectat, longos solus quo rite labores
Diminuit, fallitque hybernæ tædia noctis.
Collecti murmur sensim increbrescere vulgi
Auditi, et excurrit nudis ancilla lacertis.
Incudem follesque et opus fabrile relinquens,
Se densæ immiscet plebi niger ora Pyracmon.
It juxta, depressum ingens cui mantica tergum
Incurvat, tardo passu; simul ille coronam
Aspectat vulgi, spe carminis arrigit aures;
Statque moræ patiens, humeris nec pondera sentit.
Sic ubi Tartareum Regem Rhodopeïus Orpheus
Threiciis studuit fidibus mulcere, laboris
Immemor, Æolides stupuit modulamina plectri,
Nec sensit funesti onera incumbentia saxi.
Sæbe interventus rhedæ crepitantis, ab illo
Vicorum, ant illo, stipantem hinc inde catervam
Dividit; at rursus coëunt, ubi transiit illa,
Ut coëunt rursus, puppis quas dividit, undæ.

Canticulæ interea narraverat argumentum
Altera Sirenum, infidi perjuria nautæ,
Deceptamque dolo nympham; tum flebile carmen
Flebilibus movit numeris, quos altera versu
Alterno excepit: patulis stant rictibus omnes:
Dextram ille acclinat, lævam ille attentius aurem,
Promissum carmen captare paratus hiatu.
Longa referre mora est, animum quâ vicerit arte
Virgineum juvenis. Jam poscunt undique chartas
Protensæ emptorum dextræ, quas illa vel illa
Distribuit, cantatque simul: neque ferreus iste
Est usquam auditor, dulcis cui lene camæna
Non adhibet tormentum, et furtivum elicit assem.
Stat medios inter baculoque innititur Irus;
Nec tamen hic loculo parcit, sed prodigus æris
Emptor adest, solvit pretium, carmenque requirit.
Fors juxta adstabat vetula iracundior æquo;
Quæ loculo ex imo invitum, longumque latentem
Depromens vix tandem obolum, Cedo, fœmina, chartam,
Inquit; ut æternum monumentum in pariete figam,
Cum laribus mansurum ipsis, quam credula nymphis
Pectora sint; fraudis quam plena, et perfida nautis.

* * * * *

Where seven fair Streets to one tall Column[62] draw,
Two Nymphs have ta'en their stand, in hats of straw;
Their yellower necks huge beads of amber grace,
And by their trade they're of the Sirens' race.
With cloak loose-pinn'd on each, that has been red,
But long with dust and dirt discoloured
Belies its hue; in mud behind, before,
From heel to middle leg becrusted o'er.
One a small infant at the breast does bear;
And one in her right hand her tuneful ware,
Which she would vend. Their station scarce is taken,
When youths and maids flock round. His stall forsaken,
Forth comes a Son of Crispin, leathern-capt,
Prepared to buy a ballad, if one apt
To move his fancy offers. Crispin's sons
Have, from uncounted time, with ale and buns
Cherish'd the gift of _Song_, which sorrow quells;
And, working single in their low-rooft cells,
Oft at the tedium of a winter's night
With anthems warbled in the Muses' spight.
Who now hath caught the alarm? The Servant Maid
Hath heard a buzz at distance; and, afraid
To miss a note, with elbows red comes out.
Leaving his forge to cool, Pyracmon stout
Thrusts in his unwash'd visage. _He_ stands by,
Who the hard trade of Porterage does ply
With stooping shoulders. What cares he? he sees
The assembled ring, nor heeds his tottering knees,
But pricks his ears up with the hopes of song.
So, while the Bard of Rhodope his wrong
Bewail'd to Proserpine on Thracian strings,
The tasks of gloomy Orcus lost their stings,
And stone-vext Sysiphus forgets his load.
Hither and thither from the sevenfold road
Some cart or wagon crosses, which divides
The close-wedged audience; but, as when the tides
To ploughing ships give way, the ship being past,
They re-unite, so these unite as fast.
The older Songstress hitherto has spent
Her elocution in the argument
Of their great Song in prose; to wit, the woes
Which Maiden true to faithless Sailor owes--
Ah "_Wandering He!_"--which now in loftier verse
Pathetic they alternately rehearse.
All gaping wait the event. This Critic opes
His right ear to the strain. The other hopes
To catch it better with his left. Long trade
It were to tell, how the deluded Maid
A victim fell. And now right greedily
All hands are stretching forth the songs to buy,
That are so tragical; which She, and She,
Deals out, and _sings the while_; nor can there be
A breast so obdurate here, that will hold back
His contribution from the gentle rack
Of Music's pleasing torture. Irus' self,
The staff-propt Beggar, his thin-gotten pelf
Brings out from pouch, where squalid farthings rest,
And boldly claims his ballad with the rest.
An old Dame only lingers. To her purse
The penny sticks. At length, with harmless curse,
"Give me," she cries--"I'll paste it on my wall,
While the wall lasts, to show what ills befal
Fond hearts, seduced from Innocency's way;
How Maidens fall, and Mariners betray."

[62] Seven Dials.

In the same style of familiar painting, and replete with the same images of town life, picturesque as it was comparatively in the days of Gay, and of Hogarth, are the various Poematia--to the "Bellman"--"Billinsgate"--the "Law Courts"--the "Licensed Victualler"--the "Quack"--the "Quaker's Meeting" _cum multis aliis_--of this most classical of Cockney Poets. In a different strain is the following piece of tenderness:--

IN STATUAM SEPULCHRALEM INFANTIS DORMIENTIS

Infans venuste, qui sacros dulces agens
In hoc sopores marmore,
Placidissimâ quiete compôstus jaces,
Et inscius culpæ et metûs,
Somno fruaris, docta quem dedit manus
Sculptoris; et somno simul,
Quem nescit artifex vel Ars effingere
Fruaris Innocentiæ.

* * * * *

Beautiful Infant, who dost keep
Thy posture here, and sleep'st a marble sleep,
May the repose unbroken be,
Which the fine Artist's hand hath lent to thee!
While thou enjoy'st along with it
That which no Art or Craft could ever hit,
Or counterfeit to moral sense,
The Heav'n-infused sleep of Innocence.

We have selected these two versions from a little volume lately published by Mr. Lamb, to which he has strangely given the misnomer of "Album Verses."

ALBUM VERSES! why, in the whole collection there are not twenty pages out of one hundred and fifty (and cast the acrostics in, to swell the amount) that have the smallest title to come under this denomination. There is a Tragic Drama, filling up more than a third of the book. The rest is composed of--Translations from V. Bourne, nine in number--just so many Verses, and no more, expressly written for Albums--and the rest might have been written any where. But Mr. L. will be wiser another time, than to stand Godfather to his own poetry. A sensible Publisher is always the best names-man on these occasions.

But if to write in Albums be a sin, Lord help Wordsworth--Coleridge--Southey--Sir Walter himself--who have not been always able to resist the solicitations of the fair owners of these modern nuisances. Southey has owned to some score, and Mr. L.'s offences in this kind, we have said, do not exceed the number of the Muses. This may be said even of them, that they are not vague verses--to the Moon, or to the Nightingale--that will fit any place--but strictly appropriate to the person that they were intended to gratify; or to the species of chronicle which they were destined to be recorded in. The Verses to a "Clergyman's Lady"--to the "Wife of a learned Serjeant"--to a "Young Quaker"--could have appeared only in an Album, and only in that particular person's Album they were composed for.

We are no friend to Albums. We early set our face against them in a short copy of verses, which we publish only for our own justification. To the question:--

WHAT IS AN ALBUM?

'Tis a Book kept by modern young Ladies for show,
Of which their plain Grandmothers nothing did know;
A Medley of Scraps, half verse, and half prose,
And some things not very like either, God knows;
Where wise folk and simple alike do combine,
And you write _your_ nonsense, that I may write _mine_.
Throw in a fine Landscape, to make it complete--
A Flower-piece--a Foreground--all tinted so neat,
As Nature herself, could she see it, would strike
With envy to think that she ne'er did the like.
Next forget not to stuff it with Autographs plenty,
All writ in a style so genteel, and so dainty,
They no more resemble folk's ord'nary writing,
Than lines, penn'd with pains, do extemp'ral enditing;
Or our every day countenance (pardon the stricture)
The faces we make when we sit for our picture.
Thus you have, dearest--, an Album complete--

We forget the rest--but seriously we deprecate with all our powers the unfeminine practice of this novel species of importunity. We have known Young Ladies--ay, and of those who have been modest and retiring enough upon other occasions--in quest of these delicacies, to besiege, and storm by violence, the closets and privatest retirements of a literary man, to whom they have had an imperfect, or, perhaps, no introduction at all. But the disease has gone forth. Like the daughters of the horseleech in the Proverbs, the requisition of every female now is, _Contribute, Contribute_. "From the Land's End to the Farthest Thule the cry has gone out, and who shall resist it? Assuming then, that Album Verses _will_ be written, where was the harm, if Mr. L. first taught us how they might be best, and most characteristically written?"

Amid the vague, dreamy, wordy, _matterless_ Poetry of this empty age, the verses of such a writer as Bourne (who was a Latin _Prior_) are invaluable. They fix upon _something_; they ally themselves to common life and objects; their good nature is a Catholicon, sanative of coxcombry, of heartlessness, and of fastidiousness. _Vale, Lepidissimum Caput._ [63]

[63] Of this writer we only know, that he was an usher some seventy
years since at Westminster School; and that Dr. Johnson (who knew
him) speaks of him always affectionately as "poor Vinny Bourne."

THE DEATH OF MUNDEN

(1832)

_To the Editor of The Athenæum_

Dear Sir,--Your communication to me of the death of Munden made me weep. Now, Sir, I am not of the melting mood. But, in these serious times, the loss of half the world's fun is no trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or _gain_ shall I call it?) in the early time of my play-going, to have missed all Munden's acting. There was only he, and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was exuberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a comic company as, I suppose, the stage never showed. Thence, in the evening of my life, I had Munden all to myself, more mellowed, richer perhaps than ever. I cannot say what his change of faces produced in me. It was not acting. He was not one of my "old actors." It might be [he was] better. His power was extravagant. I saw him one evening in three drunken characters. Three Farces were played. One part was _Dosey_--I forget the rest:--but they were so discriminated, that a stranger might have seen them all, and not have dreamed that he was seeing the same actor. I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth. He was not a Parsons or a Dodd, but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could _do_ anything. He was not an actor, but something _better_, if you please. Shall I instance _Old Foresight_, in "Love for Love," in which Parsons was at once the old man, the astrologer, &c. Munden dropped the old man, the doater--which makes the character--but he substituted for it a moon-struck character, a perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked as if he had newly come down from the planets. Now, _that_ is not what I call _acting_. It might be better. He was imaginative; he could impress upon an audience an _idea_--the low one perhaps of a leg of mutton and turnips; but such was the grandeur and singleness of his expressions, that that single expression would convey to all his auditory a notion of all the pleasures they had all received from all the legs of mutton _and turnips_ they had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not _acting_, nor do I set down Munden amongst my old actors. He was only a wonderful man, exerting his vivid impressions through the agency of the stage. In one only thing did I see him _act_--that is, support a character; it was in a wretched farce, called "Johnny Gilpin," for Dowton's benefit, in which he did a cockney; the thing ran but one night; but when I say that Liston's _Lubin Log_ was nothing to it, I say little; it was transcendant. And here, let me say of actors--_envious_ actors--that of _Munden_, Liston was used to speak, almost with the enthusiasm due to the dead, in terms of such allowed superiority to every actor on the stage, and this at a time when Munden was gone by in the world's estimation, that it convinced me that _artists_ (in which term I include poets, painters, &c.), are not so envious as the world think. I have little time, and therefore enclose a criticism on Munden's _Old Dosey_ and his general acting, by a gentleman, who attends less to these things than formerly, but whose criticism I think masterly.

C. LAMB.

THOUGHTS ON PRESENTS OF GAME, &c.

(1833)

"We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our
table _by proxy_; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles
may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us
his 'plump corpusculum;' to taste him in grouse or woodcock; to
feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter; to
concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to
have him within ourselves; to know him intimately; such
participation is methinks _unitive_, as the old theologians phrase
it."--LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA.

Elia presents his acknowledgments to his "Correspondent unknown," for a basket of prodigiously fine game. He takes for granted that so amiable a character must be a reader of the _Athenæum_. Else he had meditated a notice in _The Times_. Now if this friend had consulted the Delphic oracle for a present suited to the palate of Elia, he could not have hit upon a morsel so acceptable. The birds he is barely thankful for; pheasants are poor _fowls_ disguised in fine feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown--with gravy and melted butter!--old Mr. Chambers, the sensible clergyman in Warwickshire, whose son's acquaintance has made many hours happy in the life of Elia, used to allow a pound of Epping to every hare. Perhaps that was over-doing it. But, in spite of the note of Philomel, who, like some fine poets, that think no scorn to adopt plagiarisms from a humble brother, reiterates every spring her cuckoo cry of "Jug, Jug, Jug," Elia pronounces that a hare, to be truly palated, must be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In _our_ way it eats so "crips," as Mrs. Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not arrived at his taste, that he preferred to all luxuries a roasted Pig. But he disclaims all such green-sickness appetites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt of many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents--good, but mistaken men--in consequence of their erroneous supposition, that he had carried up into mature life the prepossessions of childhood. From the worthy Vicar of Enfield he acknowledges a tithe contribution of extraordinary sapor. The ancients must have loved hares. Else why adopt the word _lepores_ (obviously from _lepus_) but for some subtle analogy between the delicate flavour of the latter, and the finer relishes of wit in what we most poorly translate _pleasantries_. The fine madnesses of the poet are the very decoction of his diet. Thence is he hare-brained. Harum-scarum is a libellous unfounded phrase of modern usage. 'Tis true the hare is the most circumspect of animals, sleeping with her eye open. Her ears, ever erect, keep them in that wholesome exercise, which conduces them to form the very tit-bit of the admirers of this noble animal. Noble will I call her, in spite of her detractors, who from occasional demonstrations of the principle of self-preservation (common to all animals) infer in her a defect of heroism. Half a hundred horsemen with thrice the number of dogs, scour the country in pursuit of puss across three countries; and because the well-flavoured beast, weighing the odds, is willing to evade the hue and cry, with her delicate ears shrinking perchance from discord--comes the grave Naturalist, Linnæus perchance or Buffon, and gravely sets down the Hare as a--timid animal. Why, Achilles or Bully Dawson, would have declined the preposterous combat.

In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare! How tender its processes after swallowing! What chyle it promotes! How etherial! as if its living celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. The notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the Hare, than a cursory thanks to the country "good Unknown." The hare has many friends, but none sincerer than

ELIA.

TABLE-TALK BY THE LATE ELIA

(1833 and 1834)

The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it; how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence, we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man, that had any fancy at all. These I call _furniture wives_; as men buy _furniture pictures_, because they suit this or that niche in their dining parlours.

Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all, cannot have that individual charm, which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all, turned out very sorry wives? Popular repute.

It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's approbation. A little hard-heartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is almost pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray's way is perhaps the wisest. His best-loved daughter made a most imprudent match; in fact, eloped with the last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met her in the streets of Ware;--Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees faltered under her at the sight of him? "Ha! Sukey, is it you?" with that benevolent aspect, with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an angel, "come and dine with us on Sunday;" then turning away, and again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, "and Sukey, do you hear, bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she ever heard from him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for Susan than the world expected?

"We read the Paradise Lost as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike recipient. "Nobody ever wished it longer;"--nor the moon rounder, he might have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it, which makes us imagine that not a line could be added to it, or diminished from it, with advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus? Do we wish her taller?

_Lear._ Who are you?
Mine eyes are not o' the best: I'll tell you straight
... Are you not Kent?

_Kent._ The same;
Your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius?

_Lear._ He's a good fellow, I can tell you that;
He'll strike, and quickly too: he's dead and rotten.

_Kent._ No, my good Lord; I am the very man----

_Lear._ I'll see that straight----

_Kent._ That from your first of difference and decay,
Have follow'd your sad steps.

_Lear._ You are welcome hither ...

_Albany._ He knows not what he says; and vain it is
That we present us to him.

_Edgar._ Look up, my Lord.

_Kent._ Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him much.
That would upon the rack of this rough world
Stretch him out longer.