guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if
it was not in its place.  Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so
many years to hear of this College trick, I should hear it mentioned a
_second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a College youth of the
present generation.  Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and
to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these
twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

"I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
subsoil in it.  The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our
attention.  Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.

"Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all I have been
saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?  Listen, then.  The
number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the
incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in
the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the
world of outward events."

Now for the anecdote--one of Mark Twain's.

Some years ago, Mark Twain published in _Harper's Magazine_ an article on
"Mental Telegraphy."  He illustrated his meaning by a story of how he
once wrote a long letter on a complicated subject, which had popped into
his head between asleep and awake, to a friend on the other side of
America.  He did not send the letter, but, by return of post, received
one from his friend.  "Now, I'll tell you what he is going to say," said
Mark Twain, read his own unsent epistle aloud, and then, opening his
friend's despatch, proved that they were essentially identical.  This is
what he calls "Mental Telegraphy"; others call it "Telepathy," and the
term is merely descriptive.

Now, on his own showing, in our second extract, Dr. Holmes should have
explained coincidences like this as purely the work of chance, and I
rather incline to think that he would have been right.  But Mark Twain,
in his article on "Mental Telegraphy," cites Dr. Holmes for a story of
how he once, after dinner, as his letters came in, felt constrained to
tell, _a propos des bottes_, the story of the last challenge to judicial
combat in England (1817).  He then opened a newspaper directed to him
from England, the _Sporting Times_, and therein his eyes lighted on an
account of this very affair--Abraham Thornton's challenge to battle when
he was accused of murder, in 1817.  According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes
was disposed to accept "Mental Telegraphy" rather than mere chance as the
cause of this coincidence.  Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to
have been a favourite of his.  It occurs in, "The Professor," in the
fifth section.  Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably that is
why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little staggered
by the coincidence.  There was enough of Cotton Mather in the man of
science to give him pause.

The form of Dr. Holmes's best known books, the set concerned with the
breakfast-table and "Over the Teacups," is not very fortunate.  Much
conversation at breakfast is a weariness of the flesh.  We want to eat
what is necessary, and then to go about our work or play.  If American
citizens in a boarding-house could endure these long palavers, they must
have been very unlike the hasty feeders caricatured in "Martin
Chuzzlewit."  Macaulay may have monologuised thus at his breakfast
parties in the Albany; but breakfast parties are obsolete--an
unregrettable parcel of things lost.  The monologues, or dialogues, were
published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_, but they have had a
vitality and a vogue far beyond those of the magazine _causerie_.  Some
of their popularity they may owe to the description of the other
boarders, and to the kind of novel which connects the fortunes of these
personages.  But it is impossible for an Englishman to know whether these
American types are exactly drawn or not.  Their fortunes do not strongly
interest one, though the "Sculpin"--the patriotic, deformed Bostonian,
with his great-great-grandmother's ring (she was hanged for a witch)--is
a very original and singular creation.  The real interest lies in the
wit, wisdom, and learning.  The wit, now and then, seems to-day rather in
the nature of a "goak."  One might give examples, but to do so seems ill-
natured and ungrateful.

There are some very perishable puns.  The learning is not so _recherche_
as it appeared when we knew nothing of Cotton Mather and Robert Calef,
the author of a book against the persecution of witches.  Calef, of
course, was in the right, but I cannot forgive him for refusing to see a
lady, known to Mr. Mather, who floated about in the air.  That she did so
was no good reason for hanging or burning a number of parishioners; but,
did she float, and, if so, how?  Mr. Calef said it would be a miracle, so
he declined to view the performance.  His logic was thin, though of a
familiar description.  Of all old things, at all events, Dr. Holmes was
fond.  He found America scarcely aired, new and raw, devoid of history
and of associations.  "The Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to
the piers of the Pons AElius, even more full of meaning than my
well-beloved Charles, eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge."  No
doubt this is a common sentiment among Americans.

Occasionally, like Hawthorne, they sigh for an historical atmosphere, and
then, when they come to Europe and get it, they do not like it, and think
Schenectady, New York, "a better place."  It is not easy to understand
what ailed Hawthorne with Europe; he was extremely caustic in his
writings about that continent, and discontented.  Our matrons were so
stout and placid that they irritated him.  Indeed, they are a little
heavy in hand, still there are examples of agreeable slimness, even in
this poor old country.  Fond as he was of the historical past, Mr. Holmes
remained loyal to the historical present.  He was not one of those
Americans who are always censuring England, and always hankering after
her.  He had none of that irritable feeling, which made a great
contemporary of his angrily declare that _he_ could endure to hear "Ye
Mariners of England" sung, because of his own country's successes, some
time ago.  They were gallant and conspicuous victories of the American
frigates; we do not grudge them.  A fair fight should leave no rancour,
above all in the victors, and Dr. Holmes's withers would have been
unwrung by Campbell's ditty.

He visited England in youth, and fifty years later.  On the anniversary
of the American defeat at Bunker's Hill (June 17), Dr. Holmes got his
degree in the _old_ Cambridge.  He received degrees at Edinburgh and at
Oxford, in his "Hundred Days in Europe" he says very little about these
historic cities.  The men at Oxford asked, "Did he come in the 'One Hoss
Shay'?" the name of his most familiar poem in the lighter vein.  The
whole visit to England pleased and wearied him.  He likened it to the
_shass caffy_ of Mr. Henry Foker--the fillip at the end of the long
banquet of life.  He went to see the Derby, for he was fond of horses, of
racing, and, in a sportsmanlike way, of boxing.  He had the great
boldness once, _audax juventa_, to write a song in praise of that
comfortable creature--wine.  The prudery of many Americans about the
juice of the grape is a thing very astonishing to a temperate Briton.  An
admirable author, who wrote an account of the old convivial days of an
American city, found that reputable magazines could not accept such a
degrading historical record.  There was no nonsense about Dr. Holmes.  His
poems were mainly "occasional" verses for friendly meetings; or humorous,
like the celebrated "One Horse Shay."  Of his serious verses, the
"Nautilus" is probably too familiar to need quotation; a noble fancy is
nobly and tunefully "moralised."  Pleasing, cultivated, and so forth, are
adjectives not dear to poets.  To say "sublime," or "magical," or
"strenuous," of Dr. Holmes's muse, would be to exaggerate.  How far he
maintained his scholarship, I am not certain; but it is odd that, in his
preface to "The Guardian Angel," he should quote from "Jonathan Edwards
the younger," a story for which he might have cited Aristotle.

Were I to choose one character out of Dr. Holmes's creations as my
favourite, it would be "a frequent correspondent of his," and of mine--the
immortal Gifted Hopkins.  Never was minor poet more kindly and genially
portrayed.  And if one had to pick out three of his books, as the best
worth reading, they would be "The Professor," "Elsie Venner," and "The
Guardian Angel."  They have not the impeccable art and distinction of
"The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter," but they
combine fantasy with living human interest, and with humour.  With Sir
Thomas Browne, and Dr. John Brown, and--may we not add Dr. Weir
Mitchell?--Dr. Holmes excellently represents the physician in humane
letters.  He has left a blameless and most amiable memory, unspotted by
the world.  His works are full of the savour of his native soil,
naturally, without straining after "Americanism;" and they are national,
not local or provincial.  He crossed the great gulf of years, between the
central age of American literary production--the time of Hawthorne and
Poe--to our own time, and, like Nestor, he reigned among the third
generation.  As far as the world knows, the shadow of a literary quarrel
never fell on him; he was without envy or jealousy, incurious of his own
place, never vain, petulant, or severe.  He was even too good-humoured,
and the worst thing I have heard of him is that he could never say "no"
to an autograph hunter.

CHAPTER V: MR. MORRIS'S POEMS

"Enough," said the pupil of the wise Imlac, "you have convinced me that
no man can be a poet."  The study of Mr. William Morris's poems, in the
new collected edition, {5} has convinced me that no man, or, at least, no
middle-aged man, can be a critic.  I read Mr. Morris's poems (thanks to
the knightly honours conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no
ambiguity as to 'Mr. Morris'), but it is not the book only that I read.
The scroll of my youth is unfolded.  I see the dear place where first I
perused "The Blue Closet"; the old faces of old friends flock around me;
old chaff, old laughter, old happiness re-echo and revive.  St. Andrews,
Oxford, come before the mind's eye, with

      "Many a place
      That's in sad case
   Where joy was wont afore, oh!"

as Minstrel Burne sings.  These voices, faces, landscapes mingle with the
music and blur the pictures of the poet who enchanted for us certain
hours passed in the paradise of youth.  A reviewer who finds himself in
this case may as well frankly confess that he can no more criticise Mr.
Morris dispassionately than he could criticise his old self and the
friends whom he shall never see again, till he meets them

   "Beyond the sphere of time,
      And sin, and grief's control,
   Serene in changeless prime
      Of body and of soul."

To write of one's own "adventures among books" may be to provide
anecdotage more or less trivial, more or less futile, but, at least, it
is to write historically.  We know how books have affected, and do affect
ourselves, our bundle of prejudices and tastes, of old impressions and
revived sensations.  To judge books dispassionately and impersonally, is
much more difficult--indeed, it is practically impossible, for our own
tastes and experiences must, more or less, modify our verdicts, do what
we will.  However, the effort must be made, for to say that, at a certain
age, in certain circumstances, an individual took much pleasure in "The
Life and Death of Jason," the present of a college friend, is certainly
not to criticise "The Life and Death of Jason."

There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the
nineteenth century.  The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott,
and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats.  By 1822 the blossoming time was
over, and the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with young Mr.
Tennyson and Mr. Browning.  It broke forth again, in 1842 and did not
practically cease till England's greatest laureate sang of the "Crossing
of the Bar."  But while Tennyson put out his full strength in 1842, and
Mr. Browning rather later, in "Bells and Pomegranates" ("Men and Women"),
the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris's "Defence of Guenevere,"
and flowered till Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" appeared in 1865,
followed by his poems of 1866.  Mr. Rossetti's book of 1870 belonged, in
date of composition, mainly to this period.

In 1858, when "The Defence of Guenevere" came out, Mr. Morris must have
been but a year or two from his undergraduateship.  Every one has heard
enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon,
and the others of the old _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, where Mr.
Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried.  Why should they not be
revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams?  As literature, I
prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose--"The
Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!"  Mr. Morris and his friends were
active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic
revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part.  This
revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more
"earnest" than the larger and more genial, if more superficial,
restoration by Scott.  The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of
Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no
less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems.  The
fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period."  In "The
Defence of Guenevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose
narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires "The Life and
Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise."  In the early book the rugged
style of Mr. Browning has left a mark.  There are cockney rhymes, too,
such as "short" rhyming to "thought."  But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's
early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it.  In the
first poem, "The Queen's Apology," is this passage:--

   "Listen: suppose your time were come to die,
   And you were quite alone and very weak;
   Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily

   "The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
   Of river through your broad lands running well:
   Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

   "'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
   Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
   I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

   "'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!'
   Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
   At foot of your familiar bed to see

   "A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
   Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
   Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

   "Showing him well, and making his commands
   Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
   Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

   "And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,
   Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
   No man could tell the better of the two.

   "After a shivering half-hour you said,
   'God help! heaven's colour, the blue;' and he said, 'Hell.'
   Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

   "And cry to all good men that loved you well,
   'Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.'"

There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the
_bizarrerie_ of a new thing in beauty.  How far it is really beautiful
how can I tell?  How can I discount the "personal bias"?  Only I know
that it is unforgettable.  Again (Galahad speaks):--

         "I saw
   One sitting on the altar as a throne,
      Whose face no man could say he did not know,
   And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,
      With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow."

Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.

Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on his especially
sympathetic period--the gloom and sad sunset glory of the late fourteenth
century, the age of Froissart and wicked, wasteful wars.  To Froissart it
all seemed one magnificent pageant of knightly and kingly fortunes; he
only murmurs a "great pity" for the death of a knight or the massacre of
a town.  It is rather the pity of it that Mr. Morris sees: the hearts
broken in a corner, as in "Sir Peter Harpedon's End," or beside "The
Haystack in the Floods."  Here is a picture like life of what befell a
hundred times.  Lady Alice de la Barde hears of the death of her knight:--

   "ALICE

         "Can you talk faster, sir?
   Get over all this quicker? fix your eyes
   On mine, I pray you, and whate'er you see
   Still go on talking fast, unless I fall,
   Or bid you stop.

   "SQUIRE

         "I pray your pardon then,
   And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say
   I am unhappy that your knight is dead.
   Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all.
   We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
   And scant five hundred had he in that hold;
   His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
   And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;
   Yet for three days about the barriers there
   The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,
   And push'd and pull'd; the fourth our engines came;
   But still amid the crash of falling walls,
   And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,
   The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out
   St. George's banner, and the seven swords,
   And still they cried, 'St. George Guienne,' until
   Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old,
   And our rush came, and cut them from the keep."

The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in "Geffray Teste
Noire" is like that of a vision in a magic mirror or a crystal ball,
rather than like a picture suggested by printed words.  "Shameful Death"
has the same enchanted kind of presentment.  We look through a "magic
casement opening on the foam" of the old waves of war.  Poems of a pure
fantasy, unequalled out of Coleridge and Poe, are "The Wind" and "The
Blue Closet."  Each only lives in fantasy.  Motives, and facts, and
"story" are unimportant and out of view.  The pictures arise distinct,
unsummoned, spontaneous, like the faces and places which are flashed on
our eyes between sleeping and waking.  Fantastic, too, but with more of a
recognisable human setting, is "Golden Wings," which to a slight degree
reminds one of Theophile Gautier's _Chateau de Souvenir_.

   "The apples now grow green and sour
      Upon the mouldering castle wall,
      Before they ripen there they fall:
   There are no banners on the tower,

   The draggled swans most eagerly eat
      The green weeds trailing in the moat;
      Inside the rotting leaky boat
   You see a slain man's stiffen'd feet."

These, with "The Sailing of the Sword," are my own old favourites.  There
was nothing like them before, nor will be again, for Mr. Morris, after
several years of silence, abandoned his early manner.  No doubt it was
not a manner to persevere in, but happily, in a mood and a moment never
to be re-born or return, Mr. Morris did fill a fresh page in English
poetry with these imperishable fantasies.  They were absolutely neglected
by "the reading public," but they found a few staunch friends.  Indeed, I
think of "Guenevere" as FitzGerald did of Tennyson's poems before 1842.
But this, of course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capricious,
estimate.  Criticism may aver that the influence of Mr. Rossetti was
strong on Mr. Morris before 1858.  Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris
first (as the world read the "Lay" before "Christabel"), and my own
preference is for Mr. Morris.

It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr. Morris produced, in
1866 or 1867, "The Life and Death of Jason."  Young men who had read
"Guenevere" hastened to purchase it, and, of course, found themselves in
contact with something very unlike their old favourite.  Mr. Morris had
told a classical tale in decasyllabic couplets of the Chaucerian sort,
and he regarded the heroic age from a mediaeval point of view; at all
events, not from an historical and archaeological point of view.  It was
natural in Mr. Morris to "envisage" the Greek heroic age in this way, but
it would not be natural in most other writers.  The poem is not much
shorter than the "Odyssey," and long narrative poems had been out of
fashion since "The Lord of the Isles" (1814).

All this was a little disconcerting.  We read "Jason," and read it with
pleasure, but without much of the more essential pleasure which comes
from magic and distinction of style.  The peculiar qualities of Keats,
and Tennyson, and Virgil are not among the gifts of Mr. Morris.  As
people say of Scott in his long poems, so it may be said of Mr.
Morris--that he does not furnish many quotations, does not glitter in
"jewels five words long."

In "Jason" he entered on his long career as a narrator; a poet retelling
the immortal primeval stories of the human race.  In one guise or another
the legend of Jason is the most widely distributed of romances; the North
American Indians have it, and the Samoans and the Samoyeds, as well as
all Indo-European peoples.  This tale, told briefly by Pindar, and at
greater length by Apollonius Rhodius, and in the "Orphica," Mr. Morris
took up and handled in a single and objective way.  His art was always
pictorial, but, in "Jason" and later, he described more, and was less
apt, as it were, to flash a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable
way.

In the covers of the first edition were announcements of the "Earthly
Paradise": that vast collection of the world's old tales retold.  One
might almost conjecture that "Jason" had originally been intended for a
part of the "Earthly Paradise," and had outgrown its limits.  The tone is
much the same, though the "criticism of life" is less formally and
explicitly stated.

For Mr. Morris came at last to a "criticism of life."  It would not have
satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy Mr. Morris!  The
burden of these long narrative poems is _vanitas vanitatum_: the
fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the dream
"rounded by a sleep."  The lesson drawn is to make life as full and as
beautiful as may be, by love, and adventure, and art.  The hideousness of
modern industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris; that hideousness he
was doing his best to relieve and redeem, by poetry, and by all the many
arts and crafts in which he was a master.  His narrative poems are,
indeed, part of his industry in this field.  He was not born to slay
monsters, he says, "the idle singer of an empty day."  Later, he set
about slaying monsters, like Jason, or unlike Jason, scattering dragon's
teeth to raise forces which he could not lay, and could not direct.

I shall go no further into politics or agitation, and I say this much
only to prove that Mr. Morris's "criticism of life," and prolonged,
wistful dwelling on the thought of death, ceased to satisfy himself.  His
own later part, as a poet and an ally of Socialism, proved this to be
true.  It seems to follow that the peculiarly level, lifeless, decorative
effect of his narratives, which remind us rather of glorious tapestries
than of pictures, was no longer wholly satisfactory to himself.  There is
plenty of charmed and delightful reading--"Jason" and the "Earthly
Paradise" are literature for The Castle of Indolence, but we do miss a
strenuous rendering of action and passion.  These Mr. Morris had rendered
in "The Defence of Guinevere": now he gave us something different,
something beautiful, but something deficient in dramatic vigour.
Apollonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a pedant, a literary writer of
epic, in an age of Criticism.  He dealt with the tale of "Jason," and
conceivably he may have borrowed from older minstrels.  But the Medea of
Apollonius Rhodius, in her love, her tenderness, her regret for home, in
all her maiden words and ways, is undeniably a character more living,
more human, more passionate, and more sympathetic, than the Medea of Mr.
Morris.  I could almost wish that he had closely followed that classical
original, the first true love story in literature.  In the same way I
prefer Apollonius's spell for soothing the dragon, as much terser and
more somniferous than the spell put by Mr. Morris into the lips of Medea.
Scholars will find it pleasant to compare these passages of the
Alexandrine and of the London poets.  As a brick out of the vast palace
of "Jason" we may select the song of the Nereid to Hylas--Mr. Morris is
always happy with his Nymphs and Nereids:--

      "I know a little garden-close
   Set thick with lily and with rose,
   Where I would wander if I might
   From dewy dawn to dewy night,
   And have one with me wandering.
      And though within it no birds sing,
   And though no pillared house is there,
   And though the apple boughs are bare
   Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
   Her feet upon the green grass trod,
   And I beheld them as before.
      There comes a murmur from the shore,
   And in the place two fair streams are,
   Drawn from the purple hills afar,
   Drawn down unto the restless sea;
   The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
   The shore no ship has ever seen,
   Still beaten by the billows green,
   Whose murmur comes unceasingly
   Unto the place for which I cry.
      For which I cry both day and night,
   For which I let slip all delight,
   That maketh me both deaf and blind,
   Careless to win, unskilled to find,
   And quick to lose what all men seek.
      Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
   Still have I left a little breath
   To seek within the jaws of death
   An entrance to that happy place,
   To seek the unforgotten face
   Once seen, once kissed, once rest from me
   Anigh the murmuring of the sea."

"Jason" is, practically, a very long tale from the "Earthly Paradise," as
the "Earthly Paradise" is an immense treasure of shorter tales in the
manner of "Jason."  Mr. Morris reverted for an hour to his fourteenth
century, a period when London was "clean."  This is a poetic license;
many a plague found mediaeval London abominably dirty!  A Celt himself,
no doubt, with the Celt's proverbial way of being _impossibilium
cupitor_, Mr. Morris was in full sympathy with his Breton Squire, who, in
the reign of Edward III., sets forth to seek the Earthly Paradise, and
the land where Death never comes.  Much more dramatic, I venture to
think, than any passage of "Jason," is that where the dreamy seekers of
dreamland, Breton and Northman, encounter the stout King Edward III.,
whose kingdom is of this world.  Action and fantasy are met, and the
wanderers explain the nature of their quest.  One of them speaks of death
in many a form, and of the flight from death:--

      "His words nigh made me weep, but while he spoke
   I noted how a mocking smile just broke
   The thin line of the Prince's lips, and he
   Who carried the afore-named armoury
   Puffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low:
   But the King smiled, and said, 'Can it be so?
   I know not, and ye twain are such as find
   The things whereto old kings must needs be blind.
   For you the world is wide--but not for me,
   Who once had dreams of one great victory
   Wherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,
   And now, the victor in so many an one,
   Find that in Asia Alexander died
   And will not live again; the world is wide
   For you I say,--for me a narrow space
   Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.
      Poor man, why should I stay thee? live thy fill
   Of that fair life, wherein thou seest no ill
   But fear of that fair rest I hope to win
   One day, when I have purged me of my sin.
      Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king
   Shall be remembered but by this one thing,
   That on the morn before ye crossed the sea
   Ye gave and took in common talk with me;
   But with this ring keep memory with the morn,
   O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn
   Remember me, who am of Odin's blood.'"

All this encounter is a passage of high invention.  The adventures in
Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out to find
Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was not
remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl.  The tale of the wanderers was
Mr. Morris's own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race,
fairy tales coming to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the
Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland.  The whole performance is
astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks
of Parnassus are to be climbed.  Once more literature has a narrator, on
the whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir
Walter.  Humour and action are not so prominent as contemplation of a
pageant reflected in a fairy mirror.  But Mr. Morris has said himself,
about his poem, what I am trying to say:--

      "Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;
   Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
   Though still the less we knew of its intent;
   The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
   Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
   Hung round about a little room, where play
   Weeping and laughter of man's empty day."

Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength of his sympathy with
the heroic sagas of Iceland.  He had rendered one into verse, in "The
Earthly Paradise," above all, "Grettir the Strong" and "The Volsunga" he
had done into English prose.  His next great poem was "The Story of
Sigurd," a poetic rendering of the theme which is, to the North, what the
Tale of Troy is to Greece, and to all the world.  Mr. Morris took the
form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most birthmarks of its
savage origin--the version of the "Volsunga," not the German shape of the
"Nibelungenlied."  He showed extraordinary skill, especially in making
human and intelligible the story of Regin, Otter, Fafnir, and the Dwarf
Andvari's Hoard.

   "It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen old,
   And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall,
   And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call,
   And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might be
   wrought.
   Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought,
   And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never fail,
   And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.

   "But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net,
   And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the highways
   wet;
   And the foot that never resteth, while aught be left alive
   That hath cunning to match man's cunning or might with his might to
   strive.

   "And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying of
   ease?
   Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future
   sees;
   And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;
   And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart's
   desire;
   And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is never
   done;
   And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is
   won.

   "Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again;
   Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better than men.
   But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still:
   We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our will
   Into bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold;
   For belike no fixed semblance we had in the days of old,
   Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must take
   That knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make."

But when we turn to the passage of the _eclaircissement_ between Sigurd
and Brynhild, that most dramatic and most _modern_ moment in the ancient
tragedy, the moment where the clouds of savage fancy scatter in the light
of a hopeless human love, then, I must confess, I prefer the simple,
brief prose of Mr. Morris's translation of the "Volsunga" to his rather
periphrastic paraphrase.  Every student of poetry may make the comparison
for himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the new is better.
Again, in the final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but
prefer the Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the "Odyssey," or the
last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the
"Volsunga."  All these are the work of men who were war-smiths as well as
song-smiths.  Here is a passage from the "murder grim and great":--

   "So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on
   high,
   But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry
   From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel
   Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel
   Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn,
   While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne
   When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black,
   And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack?
   So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East
   As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast,
   There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his
   edges stopped;
   He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he
   lopped;
   There met him Atli's marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred;
   Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the
   dead;
   And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a
   throat he thrust,
   But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the
   ruddy dust,
   And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet:
   Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set;
   Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell;
   Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell,
   And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew,
   And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through;
   And man 'gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite,
   And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight,
   And there ran a river of death 'twixt the Niblung and his foes,
   And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose."

I admit that this does not affect me as does the figure of Odysseus
raining his darts of doom, or the courtesy of Roland when the blinded
Oliver smites him by mischance, and, indeed, the Keeping of the Stair by
Umslopogaas appeals to me more vigorously as a strenuous picture of war.
To be just to Mr. Morris, let us give his rendering of part of the
Slaying of the Wooers, from his translation of the "Odyssey":--

   "And e'en as the word he uttered, he drew his keen sword out
   Brazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shout
   Rushed on him; but Odysseus that very while let fly
   And smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by,
   And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground fell
   the sword
   From out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,
   And staggered; and whirling he fell, and the meat was scattered
   around,
   And the double cup moreover, and his forehead smote the ground;
   And his heart was wrung with torment, and with both feet spurning he
   smote
   The high-seat; and over his eyen did the cloud of darkness float.

   "And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted sword
   And fell on, making his onrush 'gainst Odysseus the glorious lord,
   If perchance he might get him out-doors: but Telemachus him forewent,
   And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith sent
   Amidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out,
   And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his forehead
   smote."

There is no need to say more of Mr. Morris's "Odysseus."  Close to the
letter of the Greek he usually keeps, but where are the surge and thunder
of Homer?  Apparently we must accent the penultimate in "Amphinomus" if
the line is to scan.  I select a passage of peaceful beauty from Book
V.:--

   "But all about that cavern there grew a blossoming wood,
   Of alder and of poplar and of cypress savouring good;
   And fowl therein wing-spreading were wont to roost and be,
   For owls were there and falcons, and long-tongued crows of the sea,
   And deeds of the sea they deal with and thereof they have a care
   But round the hollow cavern there spread and flourished fair
   A vine of garden breeding, and in its grapes was glad;
   And four wells of the white water their heads together had,
   And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get;
   And soft were the meadows blooming with parsley and violet.
   Yea, if thither indeed had come e'en one of the Deathless, e'en he
   Had wondered and gladdened his heart with all that was there to see.
   And there in sooth stood wondering the Flitter, the Argus-bane.
   But when o'er all these matters in his soul he had marvelled amain,
   Then into the wide cave went he, and Calypso, Godhead's Grace,
   Failed nowise there to know him as she looked upon his face;
   For never unknown to each other are the Deathless Gods, though they
   Apart from one another may be dwelling far away.
   But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there,
   Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wear
   His soul with grief and groaning, and weeping; yea, and he
   As the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o'er the untilled sea."

This is close enough to the Greek, but

   "_And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get_"

is not precisely musical.  Why is Hermes "The Flitter"?  But I have often
ventured to remonstrate against these archaistic peculiarities, which to
some extent mar our pleasure in Mr. Morris's translations.  In his
version of the rich Virgilian measure they are especially out of place.
The "AEneid" is rendered with a roughness which might better befit a
translation of Ennius.  Thus the reader of Mr. Morris's poetical
translations has in his hands versions of almost literal closeness, and
(what is extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet.  But his
acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has added to the poet a
strain of the philologist, and his English in the "Odyssey," still more
in the "AEneid," is occasionally more _archaic_ than the Greek of 900
B.C.  So at least it seems to a reader not unversed in attempts to fit
the classical poets with an English rendering.  But the true test is in
the appreciation of the lovers of poetry in general.

To them, as to all who desire the restoration of beauty in modern life,
Mr. Morris has been a benefactor almost without example.  Indeed, were
adequate knowledge mine, Mr. Morris's poetry should have been criticised
as only a part of the vast industry of his life in many crafts and many
arts.  His place in English life and literature is unique as it is
honourable.  He did what he desired to do--he made vast additions to
simple and stainless pleasures.

CHAPTER VI: MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS

Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her
windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and
shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out,
and leave me in darkness?  People know the name of "The Mysteries of
Udolpho;" they know that boys would say to Thackeray, at school, "Old
fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition."  But have they penetrated
into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho?  Have they shuddered
for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and masked Inquisition?  Certainly
Mrs. Radcliffe, within the memory of man, has been extremely popular.  The
thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works of the
Enchantress belongs to a public library.  It is quite the dirtiest,
greasiest, most dog's-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection.
Many of the books have remained, during the last hundred years, uncut,
even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an
author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr. Max Muller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's
edition of Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson."  But Mrs. Radcliffe has been
read diligently, and copiously annotated.

This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the sire of Evelina,
he cast her off, the daughter of Horace Walpole.  Just when King Romance
seemed as dead as Queen Anne, Walpole produced that Gothic tale, "The
Castle of Otranto," in 1764.  In that very year was born Anne Ward, who,
in 1787, married William Radcliffe, Esq., M.A., Oxon.  In 1789 she
published "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne."  The scene, she tells us,
is laid in "the most romantic part of the Highlands, the north-east coast
of Scotland."  On castles, anywhere, she doted.  Walpole, not Smollett or
Miss Burney, inspired her with a passion for these homes of old romance.
But the north-east coast of Scotland is hardly part of the Highlands at
all, and is far from being very romantic.  The period is "the dark ages"
in general.  Yet the captive Earl, when "the sweet tranquillity of
evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind . . . composed
the following sonnet, which (having committed it to paper) he the next
evening dropped upon the terrace.  He had the pleasure to observe that
the paper was taken up by the ladies, who immediately retired into the
castle."  These were not the manners of the local Mackays, of the
Sinclairs, and of "the small but fierce clan of Gunn," in the dark ages.

But this was Mrs. Radcliffe's way.  She delighted in descriptions of
scenery, the more romantic the better, and usually drawn entirely from
her inner consciousness.  Her heroines write sonnets (which never but
once _are_ sonnets) and other lyrics, on every occasion.  With his usual
generosity Scott praised her landscape and her lyrics, but, indeed, they
are, as Sir Walter said of Mrs. Hemans, "too poetical," and probably they
were skipped, even by her contemporary devotees.  "The Castles of Athlin
and Dunbayne" frankly do not permit themselves to be read, and it was not
till 1790, with "A Sicilian Romance," that Mrs. Radcliffe "found
herself," and her public.  After reading, with breathless haste, through,
"A Sicilian Romance," and "The Romance of the Forest," in a single day,
it would ill become me to speak lightly of Mrs. Radcliffe.  Like
Catherine Morland, I love this lady's tender yet terrific fancy.

Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest level, but we must
remember that her last romance, "The Italian," is by far her best.  She
had been feeling her way to this pitch of excellence, and, when she had
attained to it, she published no more.  The reason is uncertain.  She
became a Woman's Rights woman, and wrote "The Female Advocate," not a
novel!  Scott thinks that she may have been annoyed by her imitators, or
by her critics, against whom he defends her in an admirable passage, to
be cited later.  Meanwhile let us follow Mrs. Radcliffe in her upward
course.

The "Sicilian Romance" appeared in 1790, when the author's age was twenty-
six.  The book has a treble attraction, for it contains the germ of
"Northanger Abbey," and the germ of "Jane Eyre," and--the germ of Byron!
Like "Joseph Andrews," "Northanger Abbey" began as a parody (of Mrs.
Radcliffe) and developed into a real novel of character.  So too Byron's
gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere
repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni.  This is so obvious
that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note,
parallel passages from Byron's "Giaour."  Sir Walter did not mean to
mock, he merely compared two kindred spirits.  "The noble poet" "kept on
the business still," and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott,
his descriptions of miscreants borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe.

"A Sicilian Romance" has its scene in the palace of Ferdinand, fifth
Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern coast of Sicily.  The time is about
1580, but there is nothing in the manners or costume to indicate that, or
any other period.  Such "local colour" was unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, as
to Clara Reeve.  In Horace Walpole, however, a character goes so far in
the mediaeval way as to say "by my halidome."

The Marquis Mazzini had one son and two daughters by his first amiable
consort, supposed to be long dead when the story opens.  The son is the
original of Henry Tilney in "Northanger Abbey," and in General Tilney
does Catherine Morland recognise a modern Marquis of Mazzini.  But the
Marquis's wife, to be sure, is _not_ dead; like the first Mrs. Rochester
she is concealed about the back premises, and, as in "Jane Eyre," it is
her movements, and those of her gaolers, that produce mystery, and make
the reader suppose that "the place is haunted."  It is, of course, only
the mystery and the "machinery" of Mrs. Radcliffe that Miss Bronte
adapted.  These passages in "Jane Eyre" have been censured, but it is not
easy to see how the novel could do without them.  Mrs. Radcliffe's tale
entirely depends on its machinery.  Her wicked Marquis, having secretly
immured Number One, has now a new and beautiful Number Two, whose
character does not bear inspection.  This domestic position, as Number
Two, we know, was declined by the austere virtue of Jane Eyre.

"Phenomena" begin in the first chapter of "A Sicilian Romance,"
mysterious lights wander about uninhabited parts of the castle, and are
vainly investigated by young Ferdinand, son of the Marquis.  This
Hippolytus the Chaste, loved all in vain by the reigning Marchioness, is
adored by, and adores, her stepdaughter, Julia.  Jealousy and revenge are
clearly indicated.  But, in chasing mysterious lights and figures through
mouldering towers, Ferdinand gets into the very undesirable position of
David Balfour, when he climbs, in the dark, the broken turret stair in
his uncle's house of Shaws (in "Kidnapped").  Here is a _fourth_ author
indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe: her disciples are Miss Austen, Byron, Miss
Bronte, and Mr. Louis Stevenson!  Ferdinand "began the ascent.  He had
not proceeded very far, when the stones of a step which his foot had just
quitted gave way, and, dragging with them those adjoining, formed a chasm
in the staircase that terrified even Ferdinand, who was left tottering on
the suspended half of the steps, in momentary expectation of falling to
the bottom with the stone on which he rested.  In the terror which this
occasioned, he attempted to save himself by catching at a kind of beam
which suspended over the stairs, when the lamp dropped from his hand, and
he was left in total darkness."

Can anything be more "amazing horrid," above all as there are mysterious
figures in and about the tower?  Mrs. Radcliffe's lamps always fall, or
are blown out, in the nick of time, an expedient already used by Clara
Reeve in that very mild but once popular ghost story, "The Old English
Baron" (1777).  All authors have such favourite devices, and I wonder how
many fights Mr. Stanley Weyman's heroes have fought, from the cellar to
their favourite tilting ground, the roof of a strange house!

Ferdinand hung on to the beam for an hour, when the ladies came with a
light, and he scrambled back to solid earth.  In his next nocturnal
research, "a sullen groan arose from beneath where he stood," and when he
tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird doors in Mrs.
Radcliffe) "a groan was repeated, more hollow and dreadful than the
first.  His courage forsook him"--and no wonder!  Of course he could not
know that the author of the groans was, in fact, his long-lost mother,
immured by his father, the wicked Marquis.  We need not follow the
narrative through the darkling crimes and crumbling galleries of this
terrible castle on the north coast of Sicily.  Everybody is always
"gazing in silent terror," and all the locks are rusty.  "A savage and
dexterous banditti" play a prominent part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand
"did not hesitate to believe that the moans he heard came from the
restless spirit of the murdered della Campo."  No working hypothesis
could seem more plausible, but it was erroneous.  Mrs. Radcliffe does not
deal in a single avowed ghost.  She finally explains away, by normal
causes, everything that she does not forget to explain.  At the most, she
indulges herself in a premonitory dream.  On this point she is true to
common sense, without quite adopting the philosophy of David Hume.  "I do
not say that spirits have appeared," she remarks, "but if several
discreet unprejudiced persons were to assure me that they had seen one--I
should not be bold or proud enough to reply, it is impossible!"  But Hume
_was_ bold and proud enough: he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.

Scott censures Mrs. Radcliffe's employment of explanations.  He is in
favour of "boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery," or of
leaving the matter in the vague, as in the appearance of the wraith of
the dying Alice to Ravenswood.  But, in Mrs. Radcliffe's day, common
sense was so tyrannical, that the poor lady's romances would have been
excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of
her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures.  The ghost-hunt
in the castle finally brings Julia to a door, whose bolts, "strengthened
by desperation, she forced back."  There was a middle-aged lady in the
room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, "suddenly exclaimed, 'My
daughter!' and fainted away."  Julia being about seventeen, and Madame
Mazzini, her mamma, having been immured for fifteen years, we observe, in
this recognition, the force of the maternal instinct.

The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of his iniquities, who
anon stabbed herself with a poniard.  The virtuous Julia marries the
chaste Hippolytus, and, says the author, "in reviewing this story, we
perceive a singular and striking instance of moral retribution."

We also remark the futility of locking up an inconvenient wife, fabled to
be defunct, in one's own country house.  Had Mr. Rochester, in "Jane
Eyre," studied the "Sicilian Romance," he would have shunned an obsolete
system, inconvenient at best, and apt, in the long run, to be disastrous.

In the "Romance of the Forest" (1791), Mrs. Radcliffe remained true to
Mr. Stanley Weyman's favourite period, the end of the sixteenth century.
But there are no historical characters or costumes in the story, and all
the persons, as far as language and dress go, might have been alive in
1791.

The story runs thus: one de la Motte, who appears to have fallen from
dissipation to swindling, is, on the first page, discovered flying from
Paris and the law, with his wife, in a carriage.  Lost in the dark on a
moor, he follows a light, and enters an old lonely house.  He is seized
by ruffians, locked in, and expects to be murdered, which he knows that
he cannot stand, for he is timid by nature.  In fact, a ruffian puts a
pistol to La Motte's breast with one hand, while with the other he drags
along a beautiful girl of eighteen.  "Swear that you will convey this
girl where I may never see her more," exclaims the bully, and La Motte,
with the young lady, is taken back to his carriage.  "If you return
within an hour you will be welcomed with a brace of bullets," is the
ruffian's parting threat.

So La Motte, Madame La Motte, and the beautiful girl drive away, La
Motte's one desire being to find a retreat safe from the police of an
offended justice.

Is this not a very original, striking, and affecting situation;
provocative, too, of the utmost curiosity?  A fugitive from justice, in a
strange, small, dark, ancient house, is seized, threatened, and presented
with a young and lovely female stranger.  In this opening we recognise
the hand of a master genius.  There _must_ be an explanation of
proceedings so highly unconventional, and what can the reason be?  The
reader is _empoigne_ in the first page, and eagerly follows the flight of
La Motte, also of Peter, his coachman, an attached, comic, and familiar
domestic.  After a few days, the party observe, in the recesses of a
gloomy forest, the remains of a Gothic abbey.  They enter; by the light
of a flickering lamp they penetrate "horrible recesses," discover a room
handsomely provided with a trapdoor, and determine to reside in a
dwelling so congenial, though, as La Motte judiciously remarks, "not in
all respects strictly Gothic."  After a few days, La Motte finds that
somebody is inquiring for him in the nearest town.  He seeks for a hiding-
place, and explores the chambers under the trapdoor.  Here he finds, in a
large chest--what do you suppose he finds?  It was a human skeleton!  Yet
in this awful vicinity he and his wife, with Adeline (the fair stranger)
conceal themselves.  The brave Adeline, when footsteps are heard, and a
figure is beheld in the upper rooms, accosts the stranger.  His keen eye
presently detects the practicable trapdoor, he raises it, and the
cowering La Motte recognises in the dreaded visitor--his own son, who had
sought him out of filial affection.

Already Madame La Motte has become jealous of Adeline, especially as her
husband is oddly melancholy, and apt to withdraw into a glade, where he
mysteriously disappears into the recesses of a genuine Gothic sepulchre.
This, to the watchful eyes of a wife, is proof of faithlessness on the
part of a husband.  As the son, Louis, really falls in love with Adeline,
Madame La Motte becomes doubly unkind to her, and Adeline now composes
quantities of poems to Night, to Sunset, to the Nocturnal Gale, and so
on.

In this uncomfortable situation, two strangers arrive in a terrific
thunderstorm.  One is young, the other is a Marquis.  On seeing this
nobleman, "La Motte's limbs trembled, and a ghastly paleness overspread
his countenance.  The Marquis was little less agitated," and was, at
first, decidedly hostile.  La Motte implored forgiveness--for what?--and
the Marquis (who, in fact, owned the Abbey, and had a shooting lodge not
far off) was mollified.  They all became rather friendly, and Adeline
asked La Motte about the stories of hauntings, and a murder said to have
been, at some time, committed in the Abbey.  La Motte said that the
Marquis could have no connection with such fables; still, there _was_ the
skeleton.

Meanwhile, Adeline had conceived a flame for Theodore, the young officer
who accompanied his colonel, the Marquis, on their first visit to the
family.  Theodore, who returned her passion, had vaguely warned her of an
impending danger, and then had failed to keep tryst with her, one
evening, and had mysteriously disappeared.  Then unhappy Adeline dreamed
about a prisoner, a dying man, a coffin, a voice from the coffin, and the
appearance within it of the dying man, amidst torrents of blood.  The
chamber in which she saw these visions was most vividly represented.  Next
day the Marquis came to dinner, and, _though reluctantly_, consented to
pass the night: Adeline, therefore, was put in a new bedroom.  Disturbed
by the wind shaking the mouldering tapestry, she found a concealed door
behind the arras and a suite of rooms, _one of which was the chamber of
her dream_!  On the floor lay a rusty dagger!  The bedstead, being
touched, crumbled, and disclosed a small roll of manuscripts.  They were
not washing bills, like those discovered by Catherine Morland in
"Northanger Abbey."  Returning to her own chamber, Adeline heard the
Marquis professing to La Motte a passion for herself.  Conceive her
horror!  Silence then reigned, till all was sudden noise and confusion;
the Marquis flying in terror from his room, and insisting on instant
departure.  His emotion was powerfully displayed.

What had occurred?  Mrs. Radcliffe does not say, but horror, whether
caused by a conscience ill at ease, or by events of a terrific and
supernatural kind, is plainly indicated.  In daylight, the Marquis
audaciously pressed his unholy suit, and even offered marriage, a hollow
mockery, for he was well known to be already a married man.  The scenes
of Adeline's flight, capture, retention in an elegant villa of the
licentious noble, renewed flight, rescue by Theodore, with Theodore's
arrest, and wounding of the tyrannical Marquis, are all of breathless
interest.  Mrs. Radcliffe excels in narratives of romantic escapes, a
topic always thrilling when well handled.  Adeline herself is carried
back to the Abbey, but La Motte, who had rather not be a villain if he
could avoid it, enables her again to secure her freedom.  He is clearly
in the power of the Marquis, and his life has been unscrupulous, but he
retains traces of better things.  Adeline is now secretly conveyed to a
peaceful valley in Savoy, the home of the honest Peter (the coachman),
who accompanies her.  Here she learns to know and value the family of La
Luc, the kindred of her Theodore (by a romantic coincidence), and, in the
adorable scenery of Savoy, she throws many a ballad to the Moon.

La Motte, on the discovery of Adeline's flight, was cast into prison by
the revengeful Marquis, for, in fact, soon after settling in the Abbey,
it had occurred to La Motte to commence highwayman.  His very first
victim had been the Marquis, and, during his mysterious retreats to a
tomb in a glade in the forest, he had, in short, been contemplating his
booty, jewels which he could not convert into ready money.  Consequently,
when the Marquis first entered the Abbey, La Motte had every reason for
alarm, and only pacified the vindictive aristocrat by yielding to his
cruel schemes against the virtue of Adeline.

Happily for La Motte, a witness appeared at his trial, who cast a lurid
light on the character of the Marquis.  That villain, to be plain, had
murdered his elder brother (the skeleton of the Abbey), and had been
anxious to murder, it was added, his own natural daughter--that is,
Adeline!  His hired felons, however, placed her in a convent, and, later
(rather than kill her, on which the Marquis insisted), simply thrust her
into the hands of La Motte, who happened to pass by that way, as we saw
in the opening of this romance.  Thus, in making love to Adeline, his
daughter, the Marquis was, unconsciously, in an awkward position.  On
further examination of evidence, however, things proved otherwise.
Adeline was _not_ the natural daughter of the Marquis, but his niece, the
legitimate daughter and heiress of his brother (the skeleton of the
Abbey).  The MS. found by Adeline in the room of the rusty dagger added
documentary evidence, for it was a narrative of the sufferings of her
father (later the skeleton), written by him in the Abbey where he was
imprisoned and stabbed, and where his bones were discovered by La Motte.
The hasty nocturnal flight of the Marquis from the Abbey is thus
accounted for: he had probably been the victim of a terrific
hallucination representing his murdered brother; whether it was veridical
or merely subjective Mrs. Radcliffe does not decide.  Rather than face
the outraged justice of his country, the Marquis, after these
revelations, took poison.  La Motte was banished; and Adeline, now
mistress of the Abbey, removed the paternal skeleton to "the vault of his
ancestors."  Theodore and Adeline were united, and virtuously resided in
a villa on the beautiful banks of the Lake of Geneva.

Such is the "Romance of the Forest," a fiction in which character is
subordinate to plot and incident.  There is an attempt at character
drawing in La Motte, and in his wife; the hero and heroine are not
distinguishable from Julia and Hippolytus.  But Mrs. Radcliffe does not
aim at psychological niceties, and we must not blame her for withholding
what it was no part of her purpose to give.  "The Romance of the Forest"
was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling of modern English works of
fiction.  "Every reader felt the force," says Scott, "from the sage in
his study, to the family group in middle life," and nobody felt it more
than Scott himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen, who, when asked
how his time was employed, answered, "I read no Civil Law."  He did read
Mrs. Radcliffe, and, in "The Betrothed," followed her example in the
story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces the spectre attached
to her ancient family.

"The Mysteries of Udolpho," Mrs. Radcliffe's next and most celebrated
work, is not (in the judgment of this reader, at least) her masterpiece.
The booksellers paid her what Scott, erroneously, calls "the
unprecedented sum of 500 pounds" for the romance, and they must have made
a profitable bargain.  "The public," says Scott, "rushed upon it with all
the eagerness of curiosity, and rose from it with unsated appetite."  I
arise with a thoroughly sated appetite from the "Mysteries of Udolpho."
The book, as Sir Walter saw, is "The Romance of the Forest" raised to a
higher power.  We have a similar and similarly situated heroine, cruelly
detached from her young man, and immured in a howling wilderness of a
brigand castle in the Apennines.  In place of the Marquis is a miscreant
on a larger and more ferocious scale.  The usual mysteries of voices,
lights, secret passages, and innumerable doors are provided regardless of
economy.  The great question, which I shall not answer, is, _what did the
Black Veil conceal_?  _Not_ "the bones of Laurentina," as Catherine
Morland supposed.

Here is Emily's adventure with the veil.  "She paused again, and then,
with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall--perceiving
that what it had concealed was no picture, and before she could leave the
chamber she dropped senseless on the floor.  When she recovered her
recollection, . . . horror occupied her mind."  Countless mysteries
coagulate around this veil, and the reader is apt to be disappointed when
the awful curtain is withdrawn.  But he has enjoyed, for several hundred
pages, the pleasures of anticipation.  A pedantic censor may remark that,
while the date of the story is 1580, all the virtuous people live in an
idyllic fashion, like creatures of Rousseau, existing solely for
landscape and the affections, writing poetry on Nature, animate and
inanimate, including the common Bat, and drawing in water colours.  In
those elegant avocations began, and in these, after an interval of
adventures "amazing horrid," concluded the career of Emily.

Mrs. Radcliffe keeps the many entangled threads of her complex web well
in hand, and incidents which puzzle you at the beginning fall naturally
into place before the end.  The character of the heroine's silly, vain,
unkind, and unreasonable aunt is vividly designed (that Emily should
mistake the corse of a moustached bandit for that of her aunt is an
incident hard to defend).  Valancourt is not an ordinary spotless hero,
but sows his wild oats, and reaps the usual harvest; and Annette is a
good sample of the usual _soubrette_.  When one has said that the
landscapes and bandits of this romance are worthy of Poussin and Salvator
Rosa, from whom they were probably translated into words, not much
remains to be added.  Sir Walter, after repeated perusals, considered
"Udolpho" "a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe's former work, high as that had
justly advanced her."  But he admits that "persons of no mean judgment"
preferred "The Romance of the Forest."  With these amateurs I would be
ranked.  The ingenuity and originality of the "Romance" are greater: our
friend the skeleton is better than that Thing which was behind the Black
Veil, the escapes of Adeline are more thrilling than the escape of Emily,
and the "Romance" is not nearly so long, not nearly so prolix as
"Udolpho."

The roof and crown of Mrs. Radcliffe's work is "The Italian" (1797), for
which she received 800 pounds. {6}  The scene is Naples, the date about
1764; the topic is the thwarted loves of Vivaldi and Ellena; the villain
is the admirable Schedoni, the prototype of Byron's lurid characters.

"The Italian" is an excellent novel.  The Prelude, "the dark and vaulted
gateway," is not unworthy of Hawthorne, who, I suspect, had studied Mrs.
Radcliffe.  The theme is more like a theme of this world than usual.  The
parents of a young noble might well try to prevent him from marrying an
unknown and penniless girl.  The Marchese Vivaldi only adopts the
ordinary paternal measures; the Marchesa, and her confessor the
dark-souled Schedoni, go farther--as far as assassination.  The casuistry
by which Schedoni brings the lady to this pass, while representing her as
the originator of the scheme, is really subtle, and the scenes between
the pair show an extraordinary advance on Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier art.
The mysterious Monk who counteracts Schedoni remains an unsolved mystery
to me, but of that I do not complain.  He is as good as the Dweller in
the Catacombs who haunts Miriam in Hawthorne's "Marble Faun."  The
Inquisition, its cells, and its tribunals are coloured

      "As when some great painter dips
   His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."

The comic valet, Paulo, who insists on being locked up in the dungeons of
the Inquisition merely because his master is there, reminds one of Samuel
Weller, he is a Neapolitan Samivel.  The escapes are Mrs. Radcliffe's
most exciting escapes, and to say that is to say a good deal.  Poetry is
not written, or not often, by the heroine.  The scene in which Schedoni
has his dagger raised to murder Ellena, when he discovers that she is his
daughter, "is of a new, grand, and powerful character" (Scott), while it
is even more satisfactory to learn later that Ellena was _not_ Schedoni's
daughter after all.

Why Mrs. Radcliffe, having reached such a pitch of success, never again
published a novel, remains more mysterious than any of her Mysteries.
Scott justly remarks that her censors attacked her "by showing that she
does not possess the excellences proper to a style of composition totally
different from that which she has attempted."  This is the usual way of
reviewers.  Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which
possess charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the
gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be dismissed with a sneer by
people who have never read them.  Following Horace Walpole in some
degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis,
and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett
and Miss Austen.  Mrs. Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance
burning much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels, are
always blown out, in the moment of excited apprehension, by the night
wind walking in the dank corridors of haunted abbeys.  But mark the
cruelty of an intellectual parent!  Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's
father in the spirit.  Yet, on September 4, 1794, he wrote to Lady
Ossory: "I have read some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your
Ladyship says I was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe?).  "All I can say for myself is that I do not think my
concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of
anything marvellous."

CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830

The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the
happier moments in life.  Whatever we may think of life when we
contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has
sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really want
to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fashion of
collecting.  Perhaps nobody ever collected before

   THE
   DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
   A NECROMAUNT

   In Three Chimeras

   BY THOMAS T. STODDART.

   "Is't like that lead contains her?--
   It were too gross
   To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."--
   _Shakespeare_.

   EDINBURGH:
   Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,
   And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.

   MDCCCXXXI.

This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, as
will be shown.  But first of the author.  Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was
born in 1810.  He died in 1880.  Through all his pilgrimage of
three-score years and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the
Scottish version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his rod.  He
"was an angler," as he remarked when a friend asked: "Well, Tom, what are
you doing now."  He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish
fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within
hearing of the Tweed.  His memoir, published by his daughter, in
"Stoddart's Angling Songs" (Blackwood), is an admirable biography, _quo
fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_.

But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet of twenty, not with the
old angling sage, that we have to do.  Miss Stoddart has discreetly
republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being
classical in their way.  Now, as Mr. Arnold writes:--

   "Two desires toss about
      The poet's feverish blood,
   One drives him to the world without,
      And one to solitude."

The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fishing.  He began with
poetry.  "At the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal
tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked, and
with no meaner tool.  Every other dramatic form he despised."  It is
curious to think of the schoolboy, the born Romanticist, labouring at
these things, while Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile
Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also--boys of the same ambitions, and
with much the same romantic tastes.  Stoddart had, luckily, another love
besides the Muse.  "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger dipped in
gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge."  Finally, the
rod and midge prevailed.

   "Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,
   Mouse body and laverock wing."

But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing ditties, he wrote
and published the volume whose title-page we have printed, "The Death
Wake."  The lad who drove home from an angling expedition in a hearse had
an odd way of combining his amusements.  He lived among poets and critics
who were anglers--Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line,
they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey--

   "No fisher
   But a well-wisher
   To the game,"

as Scott has it--these were his companions, older or younger.  None of
these, certainly not Wilson, nor Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends of the
Romantic school, as illustrated by Keats and Shelley.  None of them
probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval, Borel, le lycanthrope, and the
other boys in that boyish movement of 1830.  It was only Stoddart,
unconsciously in sympathy with Paris, and censured by his literary
friends, who produced the one British Romantic work of 1830.  The title
itself shows that he was partly laughing at his own performance; he has
the mockery of _Les Jeunes France_ in him, as well as the wormy and
obituary joys of _La Comedie de la Mort_.  The little book came out,
inspired by "all the poetasters."  Christopher North wrote, four years
later, in _Blackwood's Magazine_, a tardy review.  He styled it "an
ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a
strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and
the strongest of Barry Cornwall."  The book "fell dead from the Press,"
far more dead than "Omar Khayyam."  Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss
Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the flames.  The
"remainder," the bulk of the edition, was returned to the poet in sheets,
and by him was deposited in a garret.  The family had a cook, one Betty,
a descendant, perhaps, of "that unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook
of Mr. Warburton, Somerset Herald," who burned, among other quartos,
Shakespeare's "Henry I.," "Henry II.," and "King Stephen."  True to her
inherited instincts, Mr. Stoddart's Betty, slowly, relentlessly, through
forty years, used "The Death Wake" for the needs and processes of her
art.  The whole of the edition, except probably a few "presentation
copies," perished in the kitchen.  As for that fell cook, let us hope
that

   "The Biblioclastic Dead
      Have diverse pains to brook,
   They break Affliction's bread
      With Betty Barnes, the Cook,"

as the author of "The Bird Bride" sings.

Miss Stoddart had just informed me of this disaster, which left one
almost hopeless of ever owning a copy of "The Death Wake," when I found a
brown paper parcel among many that contained to-day's minor poetry "with
the author's compliments," and lo, in this unpromising parcel was the
long-sought volume!  Ever since one was a small boy, reading Stoddart's
"Scottish Angler," and old _Blackwood's_, one had pined for a sight of
"The Necromaunt," and here, clean in its "pure purple mantle" of smooth
cloth, lay the desired one!

   "Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
   It gave itself, and was not bought,"

being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who fishes and studies
the Lacustrine Muses.

The copy has a peculiar interest; it once belonged to Aytoun, the writer
of "The Scottish Cavaliers," of "The Bon Gaultier Ballads," and of
"Firmilian," the scourge of the Spasmodic School.  Mr. Aytoun has adorned
the margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and cross-bones,
while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the author, and a lyric in
doggerel.  Surely this is, indeed, a literary curiosity.  The sonnet runs
thus:--

   "O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest
      Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare,
   Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest
      And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?
   Seek'st thou for maggots such as have affinity
      With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think
      That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink?
   Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity?
   Here is enough of genius to convert
      Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare,
   Then why transform the diamond into dirt,
      And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair,
   Into a medley of creations foul,
   As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?"

No doubt Mr. Stoddart's other passion for angling, in which he used a
Scottish latitude concerning bait, {7} impelled him to search for "worms
and maggots":--

   "Fire and faggots,
   Worms and maggots,"

as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of "The
Death Wake."

Then, why, some one may ask, write about "The Death Wake" at all?  Why
rouse again the nightmare of a boy of twenty?  Certainly I am not to say
that "The Death Wake" is a pearl of great price, but it does contain
passages of poetry--of poetry very curious because it is full of the new
note, the new melody which young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken.  It
anticipates Beddoes, it coincides with Gautier and _Les Chimeres_ of
Gerard, it answers the accents, then unheard in England, of Poe.  Some
American who read out of the way things, and was not too scrupulous,
recognised, and robbed, a brother in Tom Stoddart.  Eleven years after
"The Death Wake" appeared in England, it was published in _Graham's
Magazine_, as "Agatha, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras," by Louis
Fitzgerald Tasistro.  Now Poe was closely connected with _Graham's
Magazine_, and after "Arthur Gordon Pym," "Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro"
does suggest Edgar Allen Poe.  But Poe was not Tasistro.

So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.

The poem begins--Chimera I. begins:--

   "An anthem of a sister choristry!
   And, like a windward murmur of the sea,
   O'er silver shells, so solemnly it falls!"

The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers towards a bier;

         "Agathe
   Was on the lid--a name.  And who?  No more!
   'Twas only Agathe."

A solitary monk is prowling around in the moonlit cathedral; he has a
brow of stony marble, he has raven hair, and he falters out the name of
Agathe.  He has said adieu to that fair one, and to her sister Peace,
that lieth in her grave.  He has loved, and loves, the silent Agathe.  He
was the son of a Crusader,

         "And Julio had fain
   Have been a warrior, but his very brain
   Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death,
   And to be stricken with a want of breath."

On the whole he did well not to enter the service.  Mr. Aytoun has here
written--"A rum Cove for a hussar."

         "And he would say
   A curse be on their laurels.
         And anon
   Was Julio forgotten and his line--
   No wonder for this frenzied tale of mine."

How? asks Aytoun, nor has the grammatical enigma yet been unriddled.

   "Oh! he was wearied of this passing scene!
   But loved not Death; his purpose was between
   Life and the grave; and it would vibrate there
   Like a wild bird that floated far and fair
   Betwixt the sun and sea!"

So "he became monk," and was sorry he had done so, especially when he met
a pretty maid,

   "And this was Agathe, young Agathe,
   A motherless fair girl,"

whose father was a kind of Dombey, for

      "When she smiled
   He bade no father's welcome to the child,
   But even told his wish, and will'd it done,
   For her to be sad-hearted, and a nun!"

So she "took the dreary veil."

They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo:

   "They met many a time
   In the lone chapels after vesper chime,
   They met in love and fear."

Then, one day,

         "He heard it said:
   Poor Julio, thy Agathe is dead."

She died

   "Like to a star within the twilight hours
   Of morning, and she was not!  Some have thought
   The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught."

Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes "Damn her!" (the Lady Abbess, that
is) and suggests that thought must be read "thaft."

Through "the arras of the gloom" (arras is good), the pale breezes are
moaning, and Julio is wan as stars unseen for paleness.  However, he
lifts the tombstone "as it were lightsome as a summer gladness."  "A
summer gladness," remarks Mr. Aytoun, "may possibly weigh about half-an-
ounce."  Julio came on a skull, a haggard one, in the grave, and Mr.
Aytoun kindly designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying "Dust ho!"

Now go, and give your poems to your friends!

Finally Julio unburies Agathe:--

      "Thou must go,
   My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below,
   Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude,
   But where is light, and life, and one to brood
   Above thee, till thou wakest.  Ha, I fear
   Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here,
   Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.
   And Convent fathers, and a choristry
   Of sisters saying Hush!  But I will sing
   Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering
   Down on the dews to hear me; I will tune
   The instrument of the ethereal moon,
   And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall
   In harmony and beauty musical."

Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture of the distraught
priest, setting forth to sail the seas with his dead lady, not an
invention that Nanteuil might have illustrated, and the clan of
Bousingots approved?

The Second Chimera opens nobly:--

   "A curse! a curse! {8} the beautiful pale wing
   Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering,
   And, on a sunny rock beside the shore,
   It stood, the golden waters gazing o'er;
   And they were nearing a brown amber flow
   Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below!"

Julio appears with Agathe in his arms, and what ensues is excellent of
its kind:--

   "He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed,
   Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste,
   The silent ladye, and he mutter'd wild,
   Strange words about a mother and no child.
   "And I shall wed thee, Agathe! although
   Ours be no God-blest bridal--even so!"
   And from the sand he took a silver shell,
   That had been wasted by the fall and swell
   Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring--
   A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing,
   Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died
   In ages far away.  'Thou art a bride,
   Sweet Agathe!  Wake up; we must not linger!'
   He press'd the ring upon her chilly finger,
   And to the sea-bird on its sunny stone
   Shouted, 'Pale priest that liest all alone
   Upon thy ocean altar, rise, away
   To our glad bridal!' and its wings of gray
   All lazily it spread, and hover'd by
   With a wild shriek--a melancholy cry!
   Then, swooping slowly o'er the heaving breast
   Of the blue ocean, vanished in the west."

Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead maid:--

   . . .

   "A rosary of stars, love! a prayer as we glide,
   And a whisper on the wind, and a murmur on the tide,
   And we'll say a fair adieu to the flowers that are seen,
   With shells of silver sown in radiancy between.

   "A rosary of stars, love! the purest they shall be,
   Like spirits of pale pearls in the bosom of the sea;
   Now help thee, {9} Virgin Mother, with a blessing as we go,
   Upon the laughing waters that are wandering below."

One can readily believe that Poe admired this musical sad song, if,
indeed, he ever saw the poem.

One may give too many extracts, and there is scant room for the
extraordinary witchery of the midnight sea and sky, where the dead and
the distraught drift wandering,

   "And the great ocean, like the holy hall,
   Where slept a Seraph host maritimal,
   Was gorgeous with wings of diamond"--

it was a sea

   "Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald."

There follows another song--

   "'Tis light to love thee living, girl, when hope is full and fair,
   In the springtide of thy beauty, when there is no sorrow there
   No sorrow on thy brow, and no shadow on thy heart,
   When, like a floating sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art

   . . .

   "But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tide
   And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside,
   It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best,
   When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest."

We ought to distrust our own admiration of what is rare, odd, novel to
us, found by us in a sense, and especially one must distrust one's liking
for the verses of a Tweedside angler, of a poet whose forebears lie in
the green kirkyard of Yarrow.  But, allowing for all this, I cannot but
think these very musical, accomplished, and, in their place, appropriate
verses, to have been written by a boy of twenty.  Nor is it a common
imagination, though busy in this vulgar field of horrors, that lifts the
pallid bride to look upon the mirror of the sea--

   "And bids her gaze into the startled sea,
   And says, 'Thine image, from eternity,
   Hath come to meet thee, ladye!' and anon
   He bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy one
   That shook amid the waters."

The picture of the madness of thirst, allied to the disease of the brain,
is extremely powerful, the delirious monk tells the salt sea waves

   "That ye have power, and passion, and a sound
   As of the flying of an angel round
   The mighty world; that ye are one with time!"

Here, I can't but think, is imagination.

Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those passages, nor that where, in
tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked sailor swims to the strange boat, sees
the Living Love and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of the wave.
But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier approves the passage where
an isle rises above the sea, and the boat is lightly stranded on the
shore of pure and silver shells.  The horrors of corruption, in the Third
Chimera, may be left unquoted, Aytoun parodies--

   "The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses,
   And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses."

Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on
limpets, "by the mass, he feasteth well!"

There was a holy hermit on the isle,

   "I ween like other hermits, so was he."

He is Agathe's father, and he has retired to an eligible island where he
may repent his cruelty to his daughter.  Julio tells his tale, and goes
mad again.  The apostrophe to Lunacy which follows is marked "Beautiful"
by Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb's remark that madness has
pleasures unknown to the sane.

         "Thou art, thou art alone,
   A pure, pure being, but the God on high
   Is with thee ever as thou goest by."

Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes, bringing

   "A murmur far and far, of those that stirred
   Within the great encampment of the sea."

The tide sweeps the mad and the dead down the shores.  "He perished in a
dream."  As for the Hermit, he buried them, not knowing who they were,
but on a later day found and recognised the golden cross of Agathe,

   "For long ago he gave that blessed cross
   To his fair girl, and knew the relic still."

So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say, with Walton, "and I
hope the reader is sorry."

The "other poems" are vague memories of Shelley, or anticipations of Poe.
One of them is curiously styled "Her, a Statue," and contains a passage
that reminds us of a rubaiyat of Omar's,

         "She might see
   A love-wing'd Seraph glide in glory by,
   Striking the tent of its mortality.

   "But that is but a tent wherein may rest
   A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
   The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
   Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."

Most akin to Poe is the "Hymn to Orion,"

   "Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail
   Arcturus on his chariot pale,
   Leading him with a fiery flight--
   Over the hollow hill of night?"

This, then, is a hasty sketch, and incomplete, of a book which, perhaps,
is only a curiosity, but which, I venture to think, gave promise of a
poet.  Where is the lad of twenty who has written as well to-day--nay,
where is the mature person of forty?  There was a wind of poetry abroad
in 1830, blowing over the barricades of Paris, breathing by the sedges of
Cam, stirring the heather on the hills of Yarrow.  Hugo, Mr. Browning,
Lord Tennyson, caught the breeze in their sails, and were borne adown the
Tigris of romance.  But the breath that stirred the loch where Tom
Stoddart lay and mused in his boat, soon became to him merely the curl on
the waters of lone St. Mary's or Loch Skene, and he began casting over
the great uneducated trout of a happier time, forgetful of the Muse.  He
wrote another piece, with a sonorous and delightful title, "Ajalon of the
Winds."  Where is "Ajalon of the Winds"?  Miss Stoddart knows nothing of
it, but I fancy that the thrice-loathed Betty could have told a tale.

   MALIM CONVIVIS QVAM PLACVISSE COQVIS.

We need not, perhaps, regret that Mr. Stoddart withdrew from the
struggles and competitions of poetic literature.  No very high place, no
very glorious crown, one fancies, would have been his.  His would have
been anxiety, doubt of self, disappointment, or, if he succeeded, the
hatred, and envyings, and lies which even then dogged the steps of the
victor.  It was better to be quiet and go a-fishing.

   "Sorrow, sorrow speed away
      To our angler's quiet mound,
   With the old pilgrim, twilight gray,
      Enter through the holy ground;
   There he sleeps whose heart is twined
      With wild stream and wandering burn,
   Wooer of the western wind
      Watcher of the April morn!"

CHAPTER VIII: THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

My copy of the Confessions is a dark little book, "a size uncumbersome to
the nicest hand," in the format of an Elzevir, bound in black morocco,
and adorned with "blind-tooled," that is ungilt, skulls and crossbones.
It has lost the title-page with the date, but retains the frontispiece,
engraved by Huret.  Saint Augustine, in his mitre and other episcopal
array, with a quill in his hand, sits under a flood of inspiring
sunshine.  The dumpy book has been much read, was at some time the
property of Mr. John Philips, and bears one touching manuscript note, of
which more hereafter.  It is, I presume, a copy of the translation by Sir
Toby Matthew.  The author of the Preface declares, with truth, that the
translator "hath consulted so closely and earnestly with the saint that
he seemeth to have lighted his torch att his fire, and to speak in the
best and most significant English, what and how he would have done had he
understood our language."

There can be no better English version of this famous book, in which
Saint Augustine tells the story of his eager and passionate youth--a
youth tossed about by the contending tides of Love, human and divine.
Reading it to-day, with a mundane curiosity, we may half regret the space
which he gives to theological metaphysics, and his brief tantalising
glimpses of what most interests us now--the common life of men when the
Church was becoming mistress of the world, when the old Religions were
dying of allegory and moral interpretations and occult dreams.  But, even
so, Saint Augustine's interest in himself, in the very obscure origins of
each human existence, in the psychology of infancy and youth, in school
disputes, and magical pretensions; his ardent affections, his
exultations, and his faults, make his memoirs immortal among the
unveilings of the spirit.  He has studied babies, that he may know his
dark beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil.  "Then, by degrees,
I began to find where I was; and I had certain desires to declare my will
to those by whom it might be executed.  But I could not do it, . . .
therefore would I be tossing my arms, and sending out certain cryes, . . .
and when they obeyed me not . . . I would fall into a rage, and that
not against such as were my subjects or servants, but against my Elders
and my betters, and I would revenge myself upon them by crying."  He has
observed that infants "begin to laugh, first sleeping, and then shortly
waking;" a curious note, but he does not ask wherefore the sense of
humour, or the expression of it, comes to children first in their
slumber.  Of what do babies dream?  And what do the nested swallows
chirrup to each other in their sleep?

"Such have I understood that such infants are as I could know, and such
have I been told that I was by them who brought me up, though even they
may rather be accounted not to know, than to know these things."  One
thing he knows, "that even infancy is subject to sin."  From the womb we
are touched with evil.  "Myselfe have seene and observed some little
child, who could not speake; and yet he was all in an envious kind of
wrath, looking pale with a bitter countenance upon his foster-brother."
In an envious kind of wrath!  Is it not the motive of half our politics,
and too much of our criticism?  Such is man's inborn nature, not to be
cured by laws or reforms, not to be washed out of his veins, though
"blood be shed like rain, and tears like a mist."  For "an infant cannot
endure a companion to feed with him in a fountain of milk which is richly
abounding and overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute,
and can take no other food but that."  This is the Original Sin,
inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are "babes span-long" to suffer,
as the famous or infamous preacher declared.  "Where, or at what time,
was I ever innocent?" he cries, and hears no answer from "the dark
backward and abysm" of the pre-natal life.

Then the Saint describes a child's learning to speak; how he amasses
verbal tokens of things, "having tamed, and, as it were, broken my mouth
to the pronouncing of them."  "And so I began to launch out more deeply
into the tempestuous traffique and society of mankind."  Tempestuous
enough he found or made it--this child of a Pagan father and a Christian
saint, Monica, the saint of Motherhood.  The past generations had
"chalked out certain laborious ways of learning," and, perhaps, Saint
Augustine never forgave the flogging pedagogue--the _plagosus Orbilius_
of his boyhood.  Long before his day he had found out that the sorrows of
children, and their joys, are no less serious than the sorrows of mature
age.  "Is there, Lord, any man of so great a mind that he can think
lightly of those racks, and hooks, and other torments, for the avoiding
whereof men pray unto Thee with great fear from one end of the world to
the other, as that he can make sport at such as doe most sharply inflict
these things upon them, as our parents laughed at the torments which we
children susteyned at our master's hands?"  Can we suppose that Monica
laughed, or was it only the heathen father who approved of "roughing it?"
"Being yet a childe, I began to beg Thy ayde and succour; and I did
loosen the knots of my tongue in praying Thee; and I begged, being yet a
little one, with no little devotion, that I might not be beaten at the
schoole."  One is reminded of Tom Tulliver, who gave up even praying that
he might learn one part of his work: "Please make Mr. --- say that I am
not to do mathematics."

The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor wit, "but he took
delight in playing."  "The plays and toys of men are called business,
yet, when children fall unto them, the same men punish them."  Yet the
schoolmaster was "more fed upon by rage," if beaten in any little
question of learning, than the boy; "if in any match at Ball I had been
maistered by one of my playfellows."  He "aspired proudly to be
victorious in the matches which he made," and I seriously regret to say
that he would buy a match, and pay his opponent to lose when he could not
win fairly.  He liked romances also, "to have myne eares scratched with
lying fables"--a "lazy, idle boy," like him who dallied with Rebecca and
Rowena in the holidays of Charter House.

Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh,
was "The Greek Dunce."  Both of these great men, to their sorrow and
loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek.  "But what the
reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while I was taught it, being
a child, I do not yet understand."  The Saint was far from being alone in
that distaste, and he who writes loathed Greek like poison--till he came
to Homer.  Latin the Saint loved, except "when reading, writing, and
casting of accounts was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse
paynefull or penal than the very Greeke.  I wept for Dido's death, who
made herselfe away with the sword," he declares, "and even so, the saying
that two and two makes foure was an ungrateful song in mine ears; whereas
the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very
Ghost of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity."

In short, the Saint was a regular Boy--a high-spirited, clever, sportive,
and wilful creature.  He was as fond as most boys of the mythical tales,
"and for that I was accounted to be a towardly boy."  Meanwhile he does
not record that Monica disliked his learning the foolish dear old heathen
fables--"that flood of hell!"

Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of
self-accusation, there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint
Augustine was _une jeunesse orageuse_.  "And what was that wherein I took
delight but to love and to be beloved."  There was ever much sentiment
and affection in his amours, but his soul "could not distinguish the
beauty of chast love from the muddy darkness of lust.  Streams of them
did confusedly boyl in me"--in his African veins.  "With a restless kind
of weariness" he pursued that Other Self of the Platonic dream,
neglecting the Love of God:

   "Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!"

The course of his education--for the Bar, as we should say--carried him
from home to Carthage, where he rapidly forgot the pure counsels of his
mother "as old wife's consailes."  "And we delighted in doing ill, not
only for the pleasure of the fact, but even for the affection of prayse."
Even Monica, it seems, justified the saying:

   "Every woman is at heart a Rake."

Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine says, "but she
desired not even that so very much, lest the cloggs of a wife might have
hindered her hopes of me . . . In the meantime the reins were loosed to
me beyond reason."  Yet the sin which he regrets most bitterly was
nothing more dreadful than the robbery of an orchard!  Pears he had in
plenty, none the less he went, with a band of roisterers, and pillaged
another man's pear tree.  "I loved the sin, not that which I obtained by
the same, but I loved the sin itself."  There lay the sting of it!  They
were not even unusually excellent pears.  "A Peare tree ther was, neere
our vineyard, heavy loaden with fruite, which tempted not greatly either
the sight or tast.  To the shaking and robbing thereof, certaine most
wicked youthes (whereof I was one) went late at night.  We carried away
huge burthens of fruit from thence, not for our owne eating, but to be
cast before the hoggs."

Oh, moonlit night of Africa, and orchard by these wild seabanks where
once Dido stood; oh, laughter of boys among the shaken leaves, and sound
of falling fruit; how do you live alone out of so many nights that no man
remembers?  For Carthage is destroyed, indeed, and forsaken of the sea,
yet that one hour of summer is to be unforgotten while man has memory of
the story of his past.

Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the Saint, but a long
remorse for this great sin, which he earnestly analyses.  Nor is he so
penitent but that he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of his mis-
doing in the Sense of Humour!  "It was a delight and laughter which
tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we were upon the point of
deceiving them who feared no such thing from us, and who, if they had
known it, would earnestly have procured the contrary."

Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set, as people say
now--"the Depravers" or "Destroyers"; though he loved them little, "whose
actions I ever did abhor, that is, their Destruction of others, amongst
whom I yet lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness."  In short, the
"Hell-Fire Club" of that day numbered a reluctant Saint among its
members!  It was no Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which
won him from this perilous society.  "It altered my affection, and made
me address my prayers to Thee, O Lord, and gave me other desires and
purposes than I had before.  All vain hopes did instantly grow base in
myne eyes, and I did, with an incredible heat of hart, aspire towards the
Immortality of Wisdom."  Thus it was really "Saint Tully," and not the
mystic call of _Tolle_! _Lege_! that "converted" Augustine, diverting the
current of his life into the channel of Righteousness.  "How was I
kindled then, oh, my God, with a desire to fly from earthly things
towards Thee."

There now remained only the choice of a Road.  Saint Augustine dates his
own conversion from the day of his turning to the strait Christian
orthodoxy.  Even the Platonic writings, had he known Greek, would not
have satisfied his desire.  "For where was that Charity that buildeth
upon the foundation of Humility, which is Christ Jesus? . . . These
pages" (of the Platonists) "carried not in them this countenance of
piety--the tears of confession, and that sacrifice of Thine which is an
afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, the salvation of Thy
people, the Spouse, the City, the pledge of Thy Holy Spirit, the Cup of
our Redemption.  No man doth there thus express himself.  Shall not my
soul be subject to God, for of Him is my salvation?  For He is my God,
and my salvation, my protectour; I shall never be moved.  No man doth
there once call and say to him: 'Come unto me all you that labour.'"

The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint Augustine instinctively
knew he lacked--the grace of Humility, nor the Comfort that is not from
within but from without.  To these he aspired; let us follow him on the
path by which he came within their influence; but let us not forget that
the guide on the way to the City was kind, clever, wordy, vain old Marcus
Tullius Cicero.  It is to the City that all our faces should be set, if
we knew what belongs to our peace; thither we cast fond, hopeless,
backward glances, even if we be of those whom Tertullian calls "Saint
Satan's Penitents."  Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the
path--one of the few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love
which is our only rest.  It may be worth while to follow him to the
journey's end.

The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine "to the loving and
seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom
itself, wheresoever it was."  Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the
Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was
repelled by the simplicity of the style.  Without going further than Mr.
Pater's book, "Marius, the Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an
English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that
date found not too simple.  But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was
Augustine's ideal; that verbose and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as
it did the early scholars when learning revived.  Augustine had dallied a
little with the sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his
mother more than his wild life.

But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, and
met "a glorious young man," who informed her that "where she was there
should her son be also."  Curious it is to think that this very semblance
of a glorious young man haunts the magical dreams of heathen Red Indians,
advising them where they shall find game, and was beheld in such
ecstasies by John Tanner, a white man who lived with the Indians, and
adopted their religion.  The Greeks would have called this appearance
Hermes, even in this guise Odysseus met him in the oak wood of Circe's
Isle.  But Augustine was not yet in his mother's faith; he still taught
and studied rhetoric, contending for its prizes, but declining to be
aided by a certain wizard of his acquaintance.  He had entered as a
competitor for a "Tragicall poeme," but was too sportsmanlike to seek
victory by art necromantic.  Yet he followed after Astrologers, because
they used no sacrifices, and did not pretend to consult spirits.  Even
the derision of his dear friend Nebridius could not then move him from
those absurd speculations.  His friend died, and "his whole heart was
darkened;" "mine eyes would be looking for him in all places, but they
found him not, and I hated all things because they told me no news of
him."  He fell into an extreme weariness of life, and no less fear of
death.  He lived but by halves; having lost _dimidium animae suae_, and
yet dreaded death, "Lest he might chance to have wholy dyed whome I
extremely loved."  So he returned to Carthage for change, and sought
pleasure in other friendships; but "Blessed is the man that loves Thee
and his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee.  For he only never loseth
a dear friend to whom all men are dear, for His sake, who is never lost."

Here, on the margin of the old book, beside these thoughts, so beautiful
if so helpless, like all words, to console, some reader long dead has
written:--

   "Pray for your poor servant, J. M."

And again,

   "Pray for your poor friend."

Doubtless, some Catholic reader, himself bereaved, is imploring the
prayers of a dear friend dead; and sure we need their petitions more than
they need ours, who have left this world of temptation, and are at peace.

After this loss Saint Augustine went to Rome, his ambition urging him,
perhaps, but more his disgust with the violent and riotous life of
students in Carthage.  To leave his mother was difficult, but "I lyed to
my mother, yea, such a mother, and so escaped from her."  And now he had
a dangerous sickness, and afterwards betook himself to converse with the
orthodox, for example at Milan with Saint Ambrose.  In Milan his mother
would willingly have continued in the African ritual--a Pagan
survival--carrying wine and food to the graves of the dead; but this
Saint Ambrose forbade, and she obeyed him for him "she did extremely
affect for the regard of my spirituall good."

From Milan his friend Alipius preceded him to Rome, and there "was
damnably delighted" with the gladiatorial combats, being "made drunk with
a delight in blood."  Augustine followed him to Rome, and there lost the
girl of his heart, "so that my heart was wounded, as that the very blood
did follow."  The lady had made a vow of eternal chastity, "having left
me with a son by her."  But he fell to a new love as the old one was
departed, and yet the ancient wound pained him still "after a more
desperate and dogged manner."

_Haeret letalis arundo_!

By these passions his conversion was delayed, the carnal and spiritual
wills fighting against each other within him.  "Give me chastity and
continency, O Lord," he would pray, "but do not give it yet," and perhaps
this is the frankest of the confessions of Saint Augustine.  In the midst
of this war of the spirit and the flesh, "Behold I heard a voyce, as if
it had been of some boy or girl from some house not farre off, uttering
and often repeating these words in a kind of singing voice,

   "_Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege_,
   Take up and read, take up and read."

So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of
his Virgilian lots, read:--

"Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness,"
with what follows.  "Neither would I read any further, neither was there
any cause why I should."  Saint Augustine does not, perhaps, mean us to
understand (as his translator does), that he was "miraculously called."
He knew what was right perfectly well before; the text only clinched a
resolve which he has found it very hard to make.  Perhaps there was a
trifle of superstition in the matter.  We never know how superstitious we
are.  At all events, henceforth "I neither desired a wife, nor had I any
ambitious care of any worldly thing."  He told his mother, and Monica
rejoiced, believing that now her prayers were answered.

Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine.  It was the
maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred.  Much stranger stories are
told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner.  He gave up rhetoric; another man
was engaged "to sell words" to the students of Milan.  Being now
converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of
his mother's death, and of that ecstatic converse they held "she and I
alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of
our lodging at Ostia."  They

   "Came on that which is, and heard
   The vast pulsations of the world."

"And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able
to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and
we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower
of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again,
where words are begun and ended."

Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to lie
beside her husband in Africa, she said: "Lay this Body where you will.
Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, that you will
remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be."  "But upon the
ninth day of her sickness, in the six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and
the three-and-thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was
discharged from the prison of her body."

The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems, than it had been at
the death of his friend.  But he could remember how "she related with
great dearness of affection, how she never heard any harsh or unkind word
to be darted out of my mouth against her."  And to this consolation was
added who knows what of confidence and tenderness of certain hope, or a
kind of deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the pain of a heart very
often tried and inured to every pain.  For it is certain that "this green
wound" was green and grievous for a briefer time than the agony of his
earlier sorrows.  He himself, so earnest in analysing his own emotions,
is perplexed by the short date of his tears, and his sharpest grief: "Let
him read it who will, and interpret it as it pleaseth him."

So, with the death of Monica, we may leave Saint Augustine.  The most
human of books, the "Confessions," now strays into theology.  Of all
books that which it most oddly resembles, to my fancy at least, is the
poems of Catullus.  The passion and the tender heart they have in common,
and in common the war of flesh and spirit; the shameful inappeasable love
of Lesbia, or of the worldly life; so delightful and dear to the poet and
to the saint, so despised in other moods conquered and victorious again,
among the battles of the war in our members.  The very words in which the
Veronese and the Bishop of Hippo described the pleasure and gaiety of an
early friendship are almost the same, and we feel that, born four hundred
years later, the lover of Lesbia, the singer of Sirmio might actually
have found peace in religion, and exchanged the earthly for the heavenly
love.

CHAPTER IX: SMOLLETT

The great English novelists of the eighteenth century turned the course
of English Literature out of its older channel.  Her streams had
descended from the double peaks of Parnassus to irrigate the enamelled
fields and elegant parterres of poetry and the drama, as the critics of
the period might have said.  But Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
Sterne, diverted the waters, from poetry and plays, into the region of
the novel, whither they have brought down a copious alluvial deposit.
Modern authors do little but till this fertile Delta: the drama is now in
the desert, poetry is a drug, and fiction is literature.  Among the
writers who made this revolution, Smollett is, personally, the least well
known to the world, despite the great part which autobiography and
confessions play in his work.  He is always talking about himself, and
introducing his own experiences.  But there is little evidence from
without; his extant correspondence is scanty; he was not in Dr. Johnson's
circle, much less was he in that of Horace Walpole.  He was not a popular
man, and probably he has long ceased to be a popular author.  About 1780
the vendors of children's books issued abridgments of "Tom Jones" and
"Pamela," "Clarissa" and "Joseph Andrews," adapted to the needs of infant
minds.  It was a curious enterprise, certainly, but the booksellers do
not seem to have produced "Every Boy's Roderick Random," or "Peregrine
Pickle for the Young."  Smollett, in short, is less known than Fielding
and Sterne, even Thackeray says but a word about him, in the "English
Humorists," and he has no place in the series of "English Men of
Letters."

What we know of Smollett reveals a thoroughly typical Scot of his period;
a Scot of the species absolutely opposed to Sir Pertinax Macsycophant,
and rather akin to the species of Robert Burns.  "Rather akin," we may
say, for Smollett, like Burns, was a humorist, and in his humour far from
dainty; he was a personal satirist, and a satirist far from chivalrous.
Like Burns, too, he was a poet of independence; like Burns, and even more
than Burns, in a time of patronage he was recalcitrant against patrons.
But, unlike Burns, he was _farouche_ to an extreme degree; and, unlike
Burns, he carried very far his prejudices about his "gentrice," his
gentle birth.  Herein he is at the opposite pole from the great peasant
poet.

Two potent characteristics of his country were at war within him.  There
was, first, the belief in "gentrice," in a natural difference of kind
between men of coat armour and men without it.  Thus Roderick Random, the
starving cadet of a line of small lairds, accepts the almost incredible
self-denial and devotion of Strap as merely his due.  Prince Charles
could not have taken the devotion of Henry Goring, or of Neil MacEachain,
more entirely as a matter of course, involving no consideration in
return, than Roderick took the unparalleled self-sacrifice of his barber
friend and school-mate.  Scott has remarked on this contemptuous and
ungrateful selfishness, and has contrasted it with the relations of Tom
Jones and Partridge.  Of course, it is not to be assumed that Smollett
would have behaved like Roderick, when, "finding the fire in my apartment
almost extinguished, I vented my fury upon poor Strap, whose ear I
pinched with such violence that he roared hideously with pain . . . "  To
be sure Roderick presently "felt unspeakable remorse . . . foamed at the
mouth, and kicked the chairs about the room."  Now Strap had rescued
Roderick from starvation, had bestowed on him hundreds of pounds, and had
carried his baggage, and dined on his leavings.  But Strap was not gently
born!  Smollett would not, probably, have acted thus, but he did not
consider such conduct a thing out of nature.

On the other side was Smollett's Scottish spirit of independence.  As
early as 1515, James Ingles, chaplain of Margaret Tudor, wrote to Adam
Williamson, "You know the use of this country. . . . The man hath more
words than the master, and will not be content except he know the
master's counsel.  There is no order among us."  Strap had the instinct
of feudal loyalty to a descendant of a laird.  But Smollett boasts that,
being at the time about twenty, and having burdened a nobleman with his
impossible play, "The Regicide," "resolved to punish his barbarous
indifference, and actually discarded my Patron."  _He_ was not given to
"booing" (in the sense of bowing), but had, of all known Scots, the most
"canty conceit o' himsel'."  These qualities, with a violence of temper
which took the form of beating people when on his travels, cannot have
made Smollett a popular character.  He knew his faults, as he shows in
the dedication of "Ferdinand, Count Fathom," to himself.  "I have known
you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and
awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentment; and coarse and
lowly in your connections."

He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even where he had not been
wronged), and could compensate, in milder moods, for the fierce attacks
made in hours when he was "meanly jealous."  Yet, in early life at least,
he regarded his own Roderick Random as "modest and meritorious,"
struggling nobly with the difficulties which beset a "friendless orphan,"
especially from the "selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of
mankind."  Roderick himself is, in fact, the incarnation of the basest
selfishness.  In one of his adventures he is guilty of that extreme
infamy which the d'Artagnan of "The Three Musketeers" and of the
"Memoirs" committed, and for which the d'Artagnan of _Le Vicomte de
Bragelonne_ took shame to himself.  While engaged in a virtuous passion,
Roderick not only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the
meanest arts of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry any woman for
her money.  Such is the modest and meritorious orphan, and mankind now
carries its "base indifference" so far, that Smollett's biographer, Mr.
Hannay, says, "if Roderick had been hanged, I, for my part, should have
heard the tidings unmoved . . . Smollett obviously died without realising
how nearly the hero, who was in some sort a portrait of himself, came to
being a ruffian."

Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett "much of a
humorist, and not to be put out of his way."  A "humorist," here, means
an overbearingly eccentric person, such as Smollett, who lived much in a
society of literary dependants, was apt to become.  But Dr. Carlyle also
found that, though Smollett "described so well the characters of ruffians
and profligates," he did not resemble them.  Dr. Robertson, the
historian, "expressed great surprise at his polished and agreeable
manners, and the great urbanity of his conversation."  He was handsome in
person, as his portrait shows, but his "nervous system was exceedingly
irritable and subject to passion," as he says in the Latin account of his
health which, in 1763, he drew up for the physician at Montpellier.
Though, when he chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and though
he undeniably had a warm heart for his wife and daughter, he did not
always choose to behave well.  Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems
to have had few real friends during most of his career.

As to persons whom he chose to regard as his enemies, he was beyond
measure rancorous and dangerous.  From his first patron, Lord Lyttelton,
to his last, he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity.  If he did not
mean actually to draw portraits of his grandfather, his cousins, his
school-master, and the apothecary whose gallipots he attended--in
"Roderick Random,"--yet he left the originals who suggested his
characters in a very awkward situation.  For assuredly he did entertain a
spite against his grandfather: and as many of the incidents in "Roderick
Random" were autobiographical, the public readily inferred that others
were founded on fact.

The outlines of Smollett's career are familiar, though gaps in our
knowledge occur.  Perhaps they may partly be filled up by the aid of
passages in his novels, plays, and poems: in these, at all events, he
describes conditions and situations through which he himself may, or
must, have passed.

Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of Sir
James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between
Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde.  Smollett's father made an
imprudent marriage: the grandfather provided a small, but competent
provision for him and his family, during his own life.  The father,
Archibald, died; the grandfather left nothing to the mother of Tobias and
her children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by the heirs.
Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick Random: but,
later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.

In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire.  About 1710 that
gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life.  Hence we learn that _he_, in
childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as "a clog and burden," and
was neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother.  Thus Tobias
had not only his own early poverty to resent, but had a hereditary grudge
against fortune, and "the base indifference of mankind."  The old
gentleman was lodged "with very hard and penurious people," at Glasgow
University.  He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but
"had no liberty" to help to forfeit James II.  "The puir child, his son"
(James III. and VIII.), "if he was really such, was innocent, and it were
hard to do anything that would touch the son for the father's fault."  The
old gentleman, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending
the first Parliament after the Union: "I had no freedom to do it, because
I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make
laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, being
always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who had not
freedom to take them."

This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig, and our Smollett, though
no Jacobite, was in distinct and courageous sympathy with Jacobite
Scotland.  Indeed, he was as patriotic as Burns, or as his own Lismahago.
These were times, we must remember, in which Scottish patriotism was more
than a mere historical sentiment.  Scotland was inconceivably poor, and
Scots, in England, were therefore ridiculous.  The country had, so far,
gained very little by the Union, and the Union was detested even by
Scottish Whig Earls.  It is recorded by Moore that, while at the
Dumbarton Grammar School, Smollett wrote "verses to the memory of
Wallace, of whom he became an early admirer," having read "Blind Harry's
translation of the Latin poems of John Blair," chaplain to that hero.
There probably never were any such Latin poems, but Smollett began with
the same hero-worship as Burns.  He had the attachment of a Scot to his
native stream, the Leven, which later he was to celebrate.  Now if
Smollett had credited Roderick Random with these rural, poetical, and
patriotic tastes, his hero would have been much more human and amiable.
There was much good in Smollett which is absent in Random.  But for some
reason, probably because Scotland was unpopular after the Forty-Five,
Smollett merely describes the woes, ill usage, and retaliations of
Roderick.  That he suffered as Random did is to the last degree
improbable.  He had a fair knowledge of Latin, and was not destitute of
Greek, while his master, a Mr. Love, bore a good character both for
humanity and scholarship.  He must have studied the classics at Glasgow
University, where he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon.  Gordon,
again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after
days, and the odious Potion of "Roderick Random" must, like his rival,
Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and
profligacy.  Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of that "one
continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms," such as Mr. Colquhoun told
Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett used to play off on his companions, "for
which no talents could compensate."  Judging by Dr. Carlyle's Memoirs
this intolerable kind of display was not unusual in Caledonian
conversation: but it was not likely to make Tobias popular in England.

Thither he went in 1739, with very little money, "and a very large
assortment of letters of recommendation: whether his relatives intended
to compensate for the scantiness of the one by their profusion in the
other is uncertain; but he has often been heard to declare that their
liberality in the last article was prodigious."  The Smolletts were not
"kinless loons"; they had connections: but who, in Scotland, had money?
Tobias had passed his medical examinations, but he rather trusted in his
MS. tragedy, "The Regicide."  Tragical were its results for the author.
Inspired by George Buchanan's Latin history of Scotland, Smollett had
produced a play, in blank verse, on the murder of James I.  That a boy,
even a Scottish boy, should have an overweening passion for this unlucky
piece, that he should expect by such a work to climb a step on fortune's
ladder, is nowadays amazing.  For ten years he clung to it, modified it,
polished, improved it, and then published it in 1749, after the success
of "Roderick Random."  Twice he told the story of his theatrical mishaps
and disappointments, which were such as occur to every writer for the
stage.  He wailed over them in "Roderick Random," in the story of Mr.
Melopoyn; he prolonged his cry, in the preface to "The Regicide," and
probably the noble whom he "lashed" (very indecently) in his two satires
("Advice," 1746, "Reproof," 1747, and in "Roderick Random") was the
patron who could not get the tragedy acted.  First, in 1739, he had a
patron whom he "discarded."  Then he went to the West Indies, and,
returning in 1744, he lugged out his tragedy again, and fell foul again
of patrons, actors, and managers.  What befell him was the common fate.
People did not, probably, hasten to read his play: managers and
"supercilious peers" postponed that entertainment, or, at least, the
noblemen could not make the managers accept it if they did not want it.
Our taste differs so much from that of the time which admired Home's
"Douglas," and "The Regicide" was so often altered to meet objections,
that we can scarcely criticise it.  Of course it is absolutely
unhistorical; of course it is empty of character, and replete with
fustian, and ineffably tedious; but perhaps it is not much worse than
other luckier tragedies of the age.  Naturally a lover calls his wounded
lady "the bleeding fair."  Naturally she exclaims--

         "Celestial powers
   Protect my father, shower upon his--oh!"  (Dies).

Naturally her adorer answers with--

         "So may our mingling souls
   To bliss supernal wing our happy--oh!"  (Dies).

We are reminded of--

         "Alas, my Bom!"  (Dies).
   "'Bastes' he would have said!"

The piece, if presented, must have been damned.  But Smollett was so
angry with one patron, Lord Lyttelton, that he burlesqued the poor man's
dirge on the death of his wife.  He was so angry with Garrick that he
dragged him into "Roderick Random" as Marmozet.  Later, obliged by
Garrick, and forgiving Lyttelton, he wrote respectfully about both.  But,
in 1746 (in "Advice"), he had assailed the "proud lord, who smiles a
gracious lie," and "the varnished ruffians of the State."  Because
Tobias's play was unacted, people who tried to aid him were liars and
ruffians, and a great deal worse, for in his satire, as in his first
novel, Smollett charges men of high rank with the worst of unnamable
crimes.  Pollio and Lord Strutwell, whoever they may have been, were
probably recognisable then, and were undeniably libelled, though they did
not appeal to a jury.  It is improbable that Sir John Cope had ever tried
to oblige Smollett.  His ignoble attack on Cope, after that unfortunate
General had been fairly and honourably acquitted of incompetence and
cowardice, was, then, wholly disinterested.  Cope is "a courtier Ape,
appointed General."

   "Then Pug, aghast, fled faster than the wind,
   Nor deign'd, in three-score miles, to look behind;
   While every band for orders bleat in vain,
   And fall in slaughtered heaps upon the plain,"--

of Preston Pans.

Nothing could be more remote from the truth, or more unjustly cruel.
Smollett had not here even the excuse of patriotism.  Sir John Cope was
no Butcher Cumberland.  In fact the poet's friend is not wrong, when, in
"Reproof," he calls Smollett "a flagrant misanthrope."  The world was out
of joint for the cadet of Bonhill: both before and after his very trying
experiences as a ship surgeon the managers would not accept "The
Regicide."  This was reason good why Smollett should try to make a little
money and notoriety by penning satires.  They are fierce, foul-mouthed,
and pointless.  But Smollett was poor, and he was angry; he had the
examples of Pope and Swift before him; which, as far as truculence went,
he could imitate.  Above all, it was then the fixed belief of men of
letters that some peer or other ought to aid and support them; and, as no
peer did support Smollett, obviously they were "varnished ruffians."  He
erred as he would not err now, for times, and ways of going wrong, are
changed.  But, at best, how different are his angry couplets from the
lofty melancholy of Johnson's satires!

Smollett's "small sum of money" did not permit him long to push the
fortunes of his tragedy, in 1739; and as for his "very large assortment
of letters of recommendation," they only procured for him the post of
surgeon's mate in the _Cumberland_ of the line.  Here he saw enough of