THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 ERNEST CARROLL MOORE

 
 POEMS PLAYS 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS
 
 POEMS PLAYS 
 
 AND 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 
 
 OF 
 
 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY 
 
 ALFRED AINGER 
 
 Hontion 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1884
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 fie. 
 
 4-ftO 
 
 Af 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE present volume, with its predecessor the Essays of 
 Elia, contains all of Lamb's miscellaneous writings that 
 he had himself selected for preservation in a permanent 
 shape. Twice during his lifetime were issued collections 
 of his prose and verse, the Works of Charles Lamb, 
 published by the Olliers in 1818, and the Album Verses 
 issued by Edward Moxon in 1830. The volume now 
 presented is made up of the contents of these two works. 
 Nothing has been omitted, but a few additions have 
 been made, on a principle which I will explain. When 
 Lamb collected his poems in 1818, he omitted from them 
 certain pathetic verses which had been wrung from him 
 by the first and deepest sorrow of his life his mother's 
 death. These he had printed when the calamity was 
 still recent, most of them in a slender volume of blank 
 verse written jointly by Charles Lloyd and himself in 
 1802. But in later years he naturally and rightly shrank 
 from recalling to his beloved sister events in which she 
 had taken so terrible a part. Such a reason for their 
 omission has long ceased to exist, and accordingly they 
 are here restored, as nearly as possible in the order of 
 their composition. Again, after Lamb's death his literary 
 executors who had better reason than we can have for 
 knowing which of the fugitive verses written between 
 1830 and his death in 1834 Lamb most valued 
 added in the subsequent editions of his writings some 
 half a dozen pieces that had appeared in newspapers and 
 journals. These have been accordingly retained in the 
 present edition. But other occasional verses a few 
 
 1569914
 
 vi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 translations, epilogues and prologues, epigrams and 
 political squibs, which have been of late years carefully 
 gleaned by editors of Lamb, are not here included, 
 and the volume makes no claim, in their sense of the 
 word, to possess the merit of completeness. Without 
 suggesting or believing that even the lightest trifles of a 
 humorist like Lamb are not worthy of preservation, I 
 yet cherish a strong opinion that when a writer has him- 
 self chosen for the people " of his best," that best should 
 be at least kept separate from matter of less worth. 
 Acting on the same principle, I have left for a conclud- 
 ing volume (should it be called for) those slighter prose 
 essays and jeux d? esprit which have been collected of late 
 years, and entitled not, I think, very felicitously, Eliana. 
 I have arranged the poems as far as possible in chrono- 
 logical order. Lamb put so much of his personal history 
 into his verse that when so presented it forms a delightful 
 running commentary upon his life and education. In his 
 early sonnets we read of his happy holiday seasons with 
 his grandmother, Mrs. Field, at Blakesware, and the first 
 and only love romance of his life. Then we are reminded 
 of such alleviations of his sad and monotonous family 
 story as were afforded by a rare excursion to the seaside 
 or the more frequent visit to the theatre, or best of all 
 by his correspondence or occasional meetings with 
 Coleridge and Lloyd. Then, for a while, the verse be- 
 comes darkened by domestic calamity, and the sonnet 
 measure of Bowles gives place to the blank verse of 
 Oowper, whose pious example seems to have given 
 courage to Lamb's own deep sense of need to express 
 itself in verse. But as we read on, we trace mind and 
 spirit recovering from their great shock, and braced by 
 new friendships and fresh literary interests and sym- 
 pathies. A fleeting passion for Hester Savory inspires 
 his sweetest lyric, and his struggle with the seductions 
 of his " sweet enemy," Tobacco, produces the first and 
 most remarkable of those poems in which he shewed 
 himself the disciple of Wither and Jonson and the
 
 INTRODUCTION. Vll 
 
 later Elizabethans, and "sealed himself," as was said 
 in that elder time, " of the tribe of Ben." And lastly, 
 when poverty and domestic anxiety no longer press, and 
 his unique genius is gradually revealed to himself as well 
 as to others as life becomes gladdened and enriched by 
 the sympathy of admiring friends, Wordsworth and 
 Hunt, Barton and Hood, Talfourd and Crabb Robinson, 
 his verse still flows, reflecting with the same genial 
 transparency the changed condition of things. And 
 when towards the end, " genius declines with him," to 
 use his own expression, but he " grows clever " when, 
 moreover, his fame is fixed and secure and there is no 
 need to write, save for his friends' gratification, since 
 "cash at Leadenhall" means "corn in Egypt" he is 
 always ready to make happy by an acrostic or some other 
 poetical conceit all the young ladies among his friends 
 and neighbours who come round him with their albums. 
 As I have just intimated, the chronological order 
 enables us to trace the succession of literary influences 
 under which his verse was produced. Beginning, as his 
 friend Coleridge also began, from an emotional impulse 
 given by the sonnets of Bowles, he passes for a while 
 under the dominion of Cowper, but his studies in a 
 widely different poetic school begin very shortly to assert 
 themselves, and to retain control over him for the rest of 
 his life. In 1805, when he wrote his Farewell to 
 Tobacco, he confided to Wordsworth that it was George 
 Wither who had supplied him with the metre and in 
 part with the manner of his verse. And from this time 
 onward the seven -syllabled trochaic couplet of the 
 Shepherd's Hunting becomes his " darling measure," as 
 it had been Wither's. It was in fact one of the 
 commonest lyric measures of the great Elizabethans. 
 Lamb knew it well from Shakspere's " On a day (alack 
 the day)," and Beaumont's Lines on the Tombs, and many 
 a song and epigram of Fletcher and Jonson. But it was 
 exceptionally characteristic of Wither, and from the day 
 that Lamb came under its spell, it is clear that no other
 
 Vlll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 metre came so naturally to him or seemed to fit so well 
 his peculiar gift. His most distinctive verse such as 
 his lines to Thornton Hunt, or on the death of Thomas 
 Hood's infant child is henceforth composed in it. And 
 it denotes, I think, a confident assurance in Lamb of a 
 certain kinship with the Elizabethans, that he felt no mis- 
 givings that the same verdict might be passed upon him 
 as upon a despised singer of Queen Anne's day, and that 
 7m Muse might also be labelled Namby-Pamby. He 
 knew, as he has so finely said of Ambrose Philips, that 
 it is the poet who makes the metre, not " the metre the 
 poet ;" and he felt that in his degree (however modestly 
 he might estimate that degree) he possessed a faculty 
 that would make itself felt, as in Wither and Fletcher, 
 through the jingle of the short line and the rapidly re- 
 curring rhyme. In his verse, therefore, as in the best of 
 his serious prose, I still think that Lamb may be reckoned 
 as among the last of the Elizabethans. 
 
 A kind and generous reviewer of my Edition of Elia 
 has taken exception to my use of this phrase, and given 
 reasons for thinking that Lamb was as much indebted to 
 the literary influences of the eighteenth century as to 
 those of the sixteenth and seventeenth. In this opinion 
 I am quite at one with my critic, but I cannot agree 
 with him that Lamb, while having much in common 
 with the last century humorists, ever shewed himself a 
 despiser or disparager of their excellences. The careless 
 depreciation of the eighteenth century, now so common, 
 had hardly begun in Lamb's day, and if it had, he would 
 have been the last to countenance it. Although Lamb 
 had his perversenesses and prejudices as a critic, it was 
 always against individuals and never against classes or 
 schools of writers, still less against the centuries which 
 produced them. He was intimately acquainted with the 
 poets, essayists, and novelists of the last century. Pope's 
 couplets he seems to have had by heart, and was never 
 weary of quoting and applying them ; Defoe and Swift, 
 Addison and Steele, were to him dear and familiar friends.
 
 INTRODUCTION. IX 
 
 When he declares that " the pen of Yorick and none since 
 his could have drawn entire" the character of his brother, 
 James Elia, or dwells with such loving emphasis on the 
 well-worn " Circulating Library Tom Jones or Vicar of 
 Wakefield, speaking of the thousand thumbs that have 
 turned over their pages with delight," it is impossible to 
 mistake the writer's own devout affection for these master- 
 pieces of the imagination. In his earliest prose essays 
 he adopts quite naturally the form and manner of the 
 Tatler, when he sits down to address his views of men 
 and things to "Mr. Reflector." But when he is most 
 decidedly the literary successor of the great masters 
 who built the Essay upon Steele's happy venture, he 
 bears upon him no less decidedly the traits of a very 
 different ancestry. And he remains, and seems likely to 
 remain, the last of the moderns whose affinity with the 
 genius of the Elizabethan age enabled him to write, at 
 one moment, in the "soluta oratio" the "linked sweet- 
 ness long drawn out " of Jeremy Taylor ; and at another 
 with the closely-blended wit and tenderness of the later 
 Euphuists ; and in both so to write as one who was " to 
 the manner born." "Hang the age!" exclaimed Lamb 
 one day, when some Editor objected to his style as out 
 of harmony with the taste of the day " Hang the age ! 
 I will write for Antiquity !" And in a sense this re- 
 mained always his habit. Even in the lightest and hastiest 
 of his effusions some flavour of the antique, in metre or 
 in manner, always clung to him. The attraction he felt 
 for the Acrostic was clearly due to the circumstance that 
 it was a favourite amusement of the Elizabethans, and 
 it was really with a fond reminiscence of the metrical 
 conceits 
 
 " That so did take Eliza and our James," 
 
 that he was always ready to enshrine in this manner the 
 names of his young lady friends. I may be allowed to 
 quote in this place a hitherto unprinted copy of album 
 verses, kindly given me by Mrs. Augustus de Morgan,
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the daughter of Lamb's old acquaintance, the Rev. William 
 Frend. Mrs. de Morgan then Miss Sophia Frend had 
 set up an album, after the pleasant fashion of those days, 
 and had applied to Lamb to write the introductory verses. 
 The following was his response to the invitation, and I 
 copy the verses from the original manuscript : 
 
 TO THE BOOK. 
 
 Little Casket ! Storehouse rare 
 Of rich conceits to please the Fair ! 
 Happiest he of mortal men 
 (I crown him monarch of the pen) 
 To whom Sophia deigns to give 
 The flattering prerogative 
 To inscribe his name in chief, 
 On thy first and maiden Leaf. 
 When thy pages shall be full 
 With what brighter wits can cull 
 Of the Tender or Romantic 
 Creeping Prose, or Verse Gigantic 
 Which thy spaces so shall cram 
 That the Bee-like Epigram 
 (Which a two-fold tribute brings, 
 Honey gives at once, and stings) 
 Hath not room left wherewithal 
 To infix its tiny scrawl ; 
 Haply some more youthful swain, 
 Striving to describe his pain 
 And the Damsel's ear to seize 
 With more expressive lays than these, 
 When he finds his own excluded 
 And these counterfeits intruded, 
 While, loitering in the Muses' bower 
 He overstaid the eleventh hour 
 Till the Tables filled shall fret, 
 Die, or sicken with regret 
 Or into a shadow pine : 
 While this triumphant verse of mine 
 Like to some favoured stranger-guest 
 Bidden to a good man's Feast 
 Shall sit by merit less than Fate 
 In the upper Seat in State ! 
 
 A trifle, evidently thrown off in haste, and more lax in 
 the metre than is usual with him, but yet in cadence, in
 
 INTRODUCTION. XI 
 
 the use of the parenthesis, in a certain charming effect 
 of never-endingness, impregnate with the rhythm of him 
 who wrote : 
 
 Though sometime my song I raise 
 To unused heights of praise 
 (And brake forth as I shall please 
 Into strange Hyperboles) 
 'Tis to shew conceit has found 
 Worth beyond expression's bound. 
 Though her breath I do compare 
 To the sweet'st perfumes that are ; 
 Or, her eies that are so bright 
 To the morning's cheerefull light, 
 Yet I doe it not so much 
 To inferre that she is such ; 
 As to shew that being blest 
 With what merrits name of best, 
 She appeares more faire to me 
 Than all creatures else that be. 
 
 Of the Prose included in this volume I have said all 
 that seems necessary in the notes. All the Essays here 
 given were written before 1818 that is to say, before 
 any of the finest of the Elia Series. As I have elsewhere 
 pointed out, Lamb's critical faculty ripened early, and 
 the criticisms on the Elizabethan dramatists, and the 
 two Papers on Hogarth and on Shakspere's Tragedies, 
 are specimens of his faculty at its very highest. The 
 comments on Shakspere's dramatic contemporaries have 
 now been before the world since 1808, but there is much 
 for the critic to learn from them still. In these days 
 when ghastliness is the commonest resource of novelist 
 and dramatist, and is accepted by so many readers as an 
 evidence of power, it may be not unprofitable to read 
 and digest Lamb's remark upon the secret of Webster, 
 and the feebleness of would-be Websters "Inferior 
 geniuses may 'upon horror's head horrors accumulate,' 
 but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for 
 quality; they 'terrify babes with painted devils,' but 
 they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors 
 want dignity their affrightments are without decorum."
 
 Xll INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Nothing again can be finer and better worth saying than 
 his comment on Fuller's vision of Wickliffe's ashes, dis- 
 persed from the Avon to the Severn, and then into the 
 narrow seas and into the main ocean, and so "all the 
 world over": "I have seen this passage smiled at and 
 set down as a quaint conceit of old Fuller. But what is 
 not a conceit to those who read it in a temper different 
 from that in which the writer composed it 1 The most 
 pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are 
 nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. 
 When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihila- 
 tion as to royalty, cries out, 
 
 ' that I were a mockery king of snow 
 To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke. ' 
 
 "If we have been going on pace for pace with the 
 passion before, this sudden conversion of a strong-felt 
 metaphor into something to be actually realised in nature, 
 like that of Jeremiah, ' Oh ! that my head were waters, 
 and mine eye a fountain of tears,' is strictly and strikingly 
 natural ; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a con- 
 ceit ; and so is a ' head ' turned into ' waters.' " And 
 Lamb might have foreseen certain aesthetic developments 
 of seventy years later when he warned men, in his Essay 
 on Hogarth, against " that disgust at common life, that 
 tedium quotidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted 
 passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of pro- 
 ducing." Lastly, that sudden illuminating faculty, which 
 belongs to Lamb above all other critics, is shewn in such 
 a passage as that on Wither's Fourth Eclogue of the 
 Shepherd's Hunting " The praises of Poetry have been 
 often sung in ancient and in modern times ; strange 
 powers have been ascribed to it of influence over animate 
 and inanimate auditors ; its force over fascinated crowds 
 has been acknowledged ; but, before Wither, no one ever 
 celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength 
 which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, 
 and that too after death, was all which hitherto the poets
 
 INTRODUCTION. Xlll 
 
 had promised themselves from their art. It seems to 
 have been left to Wither to discover that poetry was a 
 present possession, as well as a rich reversion ; and that 
 the Muse had promise of both lives of this, and of that 
 which is to come." 
 
 It is as a critic that Lamb will be found at his best in 
 this volume. The lighter humorous papers were written 
 while yet the essay in his hands was only in process of 
 moulding. He starts, as I have said, from the models 
 freshest in his memory, the papers in the Tatler and 
 Spectator, and in seeking to preserve their forms and 
 turns of expression he is clearly hampered, though it does 
 not prevent his striking out humorous fancies of rare 
 quality. But, as yet, the humour is more that of Sterne 
 and Swift than of the genuine Elian flavour. Swift 
 might have imagined the man of enormous appetite, of 
 whom it is explained that the disease was not in his 
 family, but that his father "had a tedious custom of 
 sitting long at his meals," and his mother " swallowed 
 her victuals very fast," and that perhaps " he took after 
 both." And Yorick himself would have been delighted 
 to describe the sensations of the gentleman who had 
 been hanged and then resuscitated, on meeting some 
 years afterwards the public executioner wearing "a 
 waistcoat that had been his." 
 
 I have, as on former occasions, to thank many friends 
 for information and assistance of varied kind. To Mr. 
 A. C. Swinburne my acknowledgments are specially due 
 for having allowed me to examine Lamb's manuscript 
 annotations written in the interleaved copy of Wither, 
 now in Mr. Swinburne's possession. I have also to 
 thank Mr. W. S. Ayrton, of Saltburn-by-the-Sea, the son 
 of Lamb's old friend, Mr. William Ayrton, the eminent 
 musical critic, and (as before) the family of the late Mr. 
 Arthur Loveday, for permission to quote from unpub- 
 lished letters of Lamb's. 
 
 June 1884.
 
 Jietitcatiott 
 
 TO 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 (Prefixed to Lamb's Collected Works in 1818.) 
 
 MY DEAR COLERIDGE 
 
 You will smile to see the slender labours of 
 your friend designated by the title of Works : but such 
 was the wish of the gentlemen who have kindly under- 
 taken the trouble of collecting them, and from their 
 judgment could be no appeal. 
 
 It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but 
 yourself a volume containing the early pieces, which were 
 first published among your poems, and were fairly deri- 
 vatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself 
 came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) 
 under cover of the greater Ajax. How this association, 
 which shall always be a dear and proud recollection to 
 me, came to be broken, who snapped the threefold cord, 
 whether yourself (but I know that was not the case) 
 grew ashamed of your former companions, or whether 
 (which is by much the more probable) some ungracious 
 bookseller was author of the separation, I cannot tell ; 
 but wanting the support of your friendly elm (I speak for 
 myself), my vine has, since that time, put forth few or no 
 fruits ; the sap (if ever it had any) has become, in a 
 manner, dried up and extinct : and you will find your old 
 associate, in his second volume, dwindled into prose and 
 criticism.
 
 XVI DEDICATION. 
 
 Am I right in assuming this as the cause 1 or is it that, 
 as years come upon us (except with some more healthy- 
 happy spirits), life itself loses much of its poetry for us ? 
 we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of 
 Nature ; and, as the characters grow dim, we turn off, 
 and look another way. You yourself write no Christabels, 
 nor Ancient Mariners, now. 
 
 Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned 
 over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you 
 remembrances, which I should be sorry should be ever 
 totally extinct the memory 
 
 Of summer days and of delightful years 
 
 even so far back as to those old suppers at our old * * * * 
 Inn, when life was fresh, and topics exhaustless, and 
 you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of 
 poetry, and beauty, and kindliness 
 
 What words have I heard 
 Spoke at the Mermaid ! 
 
 The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird 
 since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or 
 my old friend is the same, who stood before me three-and- 
 twenty years ago his hair a little confessing the hand of 
 time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain, his 
 heart not altered, scarcely where it " alteration finds." 
 
 One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to pxiblish in its 
 original form, though I have heard you complain of a 
 certain over-imitation of the antique in the style. If I 
 could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without 
 rewriting it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But 
 when I wrote John Woodvil, I never proposed to myself 
 any distinct deviation from common English. I had been 
 newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists ; 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a, first 
 
 1 The Salutation and Cat, a tavern near Smithfield, where 
 Lamb and Coleridge were fond of meeting in early days.
 
 DEDICATION. XV11 
 
 love ; and from what I was so freshly conversant in, what 
 wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge 1 The 
 very time, which I had chosen for my story, that which 
 immediately followed the Restoration, seemed to require, 
 in an English play, that the English should be of rather 
 an older cast, than that of the precise year in which it 
 happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults, 
 which I can less vindicate than the language. 
 I remain, 
 
 My dear Coleridge, 
 Yours, 
 
 With unabated esteem, 
 
 C. LAMB.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 POEMS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SONNETS 
 
 ' Was it some sweet device ' . . . .1 
 
 ' When last I roved ' . . . . .1 
 
 ' The Lord of Light shakes off ' . . .2 
 
 ' A timid grace sits trembling ' . . .2 
 
 ' We were two pretty babes ' ... 3 
 
 ' Methinks how dainty sweet it were ' . .3 
 
 ' If from my lips ' . . . . .4 
 
 ' Friend of my earliest years ' ... 4 
 
 ' 0, I could laugh to hear the midnight wind ' . 5 
 
 ' As when a child ' . . . . .5 
 
 To SARA AND HER SAMUEL .... 6 
 
 To THE POET COWPER ..... 7 
 
 CHILDHOOD ...... 7 
 
 THE GRANDAME ...... 8 
 
 THE SABBATH BELLS . . . . .9 
 
 FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS . . 9 
 
 THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS . . . . .10 
 
 To CHARLES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR . .11 
 
 A VISION or REPENTANCE 13
 
 XX CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 To CHARLES LLOYD . . . . .15 
 
 WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF MY AUNT'S FUNERAL . 16 
 
 WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS . . .17 
 
 WRITTEN SOON AFTER. THE PRECEDING POEM . .19 
 
 WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1797 . . .20 
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES . . . .21 
 
 COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT . . . . .22 
 
 LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD . . .23 
 
 JOHN WOODVIL (A Tragedy in Five Acts) . . 25 
 
 THE WITCH (A Dramatic Sketch of the Seventeenth Cen- 
 tury) ....... 66 
 
 A BALLAD (Noting the difference of rich and poor) . 63 
 
 BALLAD (From the German) . . . .69 
 
 HESTER ....... 69 
 
 A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO . . . .70 
 
 LINES ON THE CELEBRATED PICTURE (By Leonardo da 
 
 Vinci) ...... 75 
 
 THE THREE FRIENDS . . . . .75 
 
 To A RIVER IN WHICH A CHILD WAS DROWNED . . . 81 
 QUEEN ORIANA'S DREAM . . . . .82 
 
 ToT. L. H. A CHILD ... .83 
 
 To Miss KELLY . . . . . .84 
 
 ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDENS . 85 
 THE FAMILY NAME . . . . .85 
 
 To JOHN LAMB, ESQ., OF THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE . 86 
 
 To MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY . . . .86 
 
 WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE ON THE IOTH AUGUST, 1819 . 87 
 To THE AUTHOR OF POEMS, PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME 
 
 OF BARRY CORNWALL . . . .87 
 
 SONNET : WORK .... 88
 
 CONTENTS. XXI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SONNET : LEISURE . . .83 
 
 To J. S. KNOWLES, ESQ. (On his Tragedy of Virginias) . 89 
 IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON . . .89 
 
 To THE EDITOR OF THE ' EVERY-DAY BOOK ' .90 
 
 THE YOUNG CATECHIST . . . . .91 
 
 ANGEL HELP . . . . . .92 
 
 ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN . . .93 
 
 THE CHRISTENING . . . . .95 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF Miss . . . .96 
 
 THE GIPSY'S MALISON . . . . .90 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN'S LADY . . 97 
 
 IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERJEANT W . 97 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY YOUNG LADY . . .98 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH TEACHER . . .98 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF Miss DAUBENY . . .99 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS . . . 100 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY . . . 100 
 
 IN MY OWN ALBUM ..... 101 
 
 To BERNARD BARTON ..... 102 
 
 SHE is GOING ...... 103 
 
 To A YOUNG FRIEND (On her twenty-first Birthday) . 103 
 To THE SAME . . . . . .104 
 
 HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS . . . .105 
 
 To A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN 'THE BLIND 
 
 BOY' . . . . . .105 
 
 To SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ. . . . 106 
 
 To CAROLINE MARIA APPLEBEE . . . .106 
 
 To CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTON .... 107 
 
 To A LADY WHO DESIRED ME TO WRITE HER EPITAPH . 108 
 ANOTHER (To her youngest Daughter) . . .108
 
 XX11 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TRANSLATIONS. Trom the Latin of Vincent Bourne 
 
 On a Sepulchral Statue of an Infant Sleeping . 109 
 
 The Rival Bells 109 
 
 Epitaph on a Dog ..... 109 
 The Ballad Singers . . . .110 
 
 To David Cook, of the Parish of St. Margaret's, 
 
 "Westminster, Watchman . . .112 
 
 On a Deaf and Dumb Artist . . . .114 
 
 Newton's Principia . . . . .114 
 
 The Housekeeper . . . . .115 
 
 The Female Orators . . . . .115 
 
 PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD-MILL . . . 116 
 EPICEDIUM (Going or Gone) .... 119 
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL ; OR, THE INTRUDING WIDOW (A 
 
 Dramatic Poem) . . . . .122 
 
 ' LIFT WITH REVERENT HAND ' . . . .150 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QUILLINAX . . ,150 
 
 To DORA WORDSWORTH . . . . .151 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY . . . 151 
 THE SELF-ENCHANTED ..... 152 
 
 To A FRIEND, ON HIS MARRIAGE . . . 152 
 
 To LOUISA M . . . .153 
 
 FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS . 154 
 
 To MARGARET W . . . . .155 
 
 PROSE. 
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY . . . . . .157 
 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS (Extracted from a Common -place 
 
 BOOK . . . . . . .197 
 
 HYPOCHONDRIACUS . 204
 
 CONTENTS. xxiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL . . . 206 
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE . . . 220 
 
 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEMPORARY 
 
 WITH SHAKSPERE ..... 241 
 
 SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER . . 262 
 
 ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH . . 272 
 
 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER . . 295 
 
 THE LONDONER . . . . . .301 
 
 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES ; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN 
 
 UNDERTAKER . . . . .304 
 
 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PER- 
 SONAL DEFORMITY . . . . .311 
 
 ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING 
 
 HANGED . . . . . .319 
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS . . . 330 
 
 HOSPITA ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE OF THE 
 
 PLEASURES OF THE PALATE .... 335 
 
 EDAX ON APPETITE . . . 339 
 
 MR. H : A Farce . . . . .348 
 
 NOTES 377
 
 POEM S. 
 
 1 
 
 WAS it some sweet device of Faery 
 
 That mock'd my steps with many a lonely glade, 
 
 And fancied wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid ? 
 
 Have these things been 1 or what rare witchery, 
 
 Impregning with delights the charmed air, 
 
 Enlighted up the semblance of a smile 
 
 In those fine eyes 1 methought they spake the while 
 
 Soft soothing things, which might enforce despair 
 
 To drop the murdering knife, and let go by 
 
 His foul resolve. And does the lonely glade 
 
 Still court the footsteps of the fair-hair'd maid 1 
 
 Still in her locks the gales of summer sigh ? 
 
 While I forlorn do wander, reckless where, 
 
 And 'mid my wanderings meet no Anna there. 
 
 1795. 
 
 2. 
 
 WHEN last I roved these winding wood-walks green, 
 Green winding walks, and shady pathways sweet, 
 Ofttimes would Anna seek the silent scene, 
 Shrouding her beauties in the lone retreat. 
 <E B
 
 POEMS. 
 
 No more I hear her footsteps in the shade : 
 
 Her image only in these pleasant ways 
 
 Meets me self-wandering, where in happier days 
 
 I held free converse with the fair-hair'd maid. 
 
 I pass'd the little cottage which she loved, 
 
 The cottage which did once my all contain ; 
 
 It spake of days which ne'er must come again, 
 
 Spake to my heart, and much my heart was moved. 
 
 "Now fair befall thee, gentle maid !" said I, 
 
 And from the cottage turn'd me with a sigh. 
 
 1795. 
 
 3. 
 
 THE Lord of Light shakes off his drowsyhed ; 
 Fresh from his couch up springs the lusty sun, 
 And girds himself his mighty race to run. 
 Meantime, by truant love of rambling led 
 I turn my back on thy detested walls, 
 Proud city, and thy sons I leave behind, 
 A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind 
 Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls. 
 I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, 
 That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, 
 Of merriest days of love and Islington, 
 Kindling anew the flames of past desire ; 
 And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, 
 To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 
 
 1795. 
 
 4. 
 
 A TIMID grace sits trembling in her eye, 
 
 As loth to meet the rudeness of men's sight, 
 
 Yet shedding a delicious lunar light, 
 
 That steeps in kind oblivious ecstasy 
 
 The care-crazed mind, like some still melody : 
 
 Speaking most plain the thoughts which do possess
 
 POEMS. 
 
 Her gentle sprite : peace, and meek quietness, 
 And innocent loves, and maiden purity : 
 A look whereof might heal the cruel smart 
 Of changed friends, or fortune's wrongs unkind ; 
 Might to sweet deeds of mercy move the heart 
 Of him who hates his brethren of mankind. 
 Turn'd are those lights from me, who fondly yet 
 Past joys, vain loves, and buried hopes regret. 
 
 1795. 
 
 5. 
 
 WE were two pretty babes, the youngest she, 
 The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween, 
 And INNOCENCE her name. The time has been, 
 We two did love each other's company ; 
 Time was, we two had wept to have been apart. 
 But when by show of seeming good beguiled, 
 I left the garb and manners of a child, 
 And my first love for man's society, 
 Defiling with the world my virgin heart 
 My loved companion dropped a tear, and fled, 
 And hid in deepest shades her awful head. 
 Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art 
 In what delicious Eden to be found 
 That I may seek thee the wide world around 1 
 
 1795. 
 
 6. 
 
 METHINKS how dainty sweet it were, reclined 
 Beneath the vast out-stretching branches high 
 Of some old wood, in careless sort to lie, 
 Nor of the busier scenes we left behind 
 Aught envying. And, Anna ! mild-eyed maid I 
 Beloved ! I were well content to play 
 With thy free tresses all a summer's day, 
 Losing the time beneath the greenwood shade.
 
 POEMS. 
 
 Or we might sit and tell some tender tale 
 Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn, 
 A tale of true love, or of friend forgot ; 
 And I would teach thee, lady, how to rail 
 In gentle sort, on those who practise not 
 Or love or pity, though of woman born. 
 
 1795. 
 
 7. 
 
 IF from my lips some angry accents fell, 
 
 Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, 
 
 'Twas but the error of a sickly mind 
 
 And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, 
 
 And waters clear of Reason ; and for me 
 
 Let this my verse the poor atonement be 
 
 My verse, which thou to praise wert ever inclined 
 
 Too highly, and with a partial eye to see 
 
 No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show 
 
 Kindest affection ; and would ofttimes lend 
 
 An ear to the desponding love-sick lay, 
 
 Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay 
 
 But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, 
 
 Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. 
 
 1795. 
 
 FRIEND of my earliest years and childish days, 
 My joys, my sorrows, thou with me hast shared, 
 Companion dear ; and we alike have fared, 
 Poor pilgrims we, through life's unequal ways. 
 It were unwisely done, should we refuse 
 To cheer our path, as featly as we may, 
 Our lonely path to cheer, as travellers use, 
 With merry song, quaint tale, or roundelay. 
 And we will sometimes talk past troubles o'er, 
 Of mercies shown, and all our sickness healed,
 
 POEMS. 
 
 And in His judgments God remembering love : 
 And we will learn to praise God evermore, 
 For these " glad tidings of great joy," revealed 
 By that sooth messenger, sent from above. 
 
 1797. 
 
 9. 
 
 WRITTEN AT MIDNIGHT, BY THE SEA-SIDE AFTER A 
 VOYAGE. 
 
 0, I could laugh to hear the midnight wind, 
 That, rushing on its way with careless sweep, 
 Scatters the ocean waves. And I could weep 
 Like to a child. For now to my raised mind 
 On wings of winds comes wild-eyed Phantasy, 
 And her rude visions give severe delight. 
 winged bark ! how swift along the night 
 Pass'd thy proud keel ; nor shall I let go by 
 Lightly of that drear hour the memory, 
 When wet and chilly on thy deck I stood, 
 Unbonneted, and gazed upon the flood, 
 Even till it seem'd a pleasant thing to die, 
 To be resolved into th' elemental wave, 
 Or take my portion with the winds that rave. 
 
 1795. 
 
 10. 
 
 As when a child on some long winter's night 
 Affrighted clinging to its grandame's knees 
 With eager wondering and perturb'd delight 
 Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees 
 Mutter'd to wretch by necromantic spell ; 
 Or of those hags, who at the witching time 
 Of murky midnight ride the air sublime, 
 And mingle foul embrace with fiends of hell : 
 Cold Horror drinks its blood ! Anon the tear
 
 POEMS. 
 
 More gentle starts, to hear the beldame tell 
 Of pretty babes, that loved each other dear, 
 Murder'd by cruel Uncle's mandate fell : 
 Even such the shivering joys thy tones impart, 
 Even so thou, SIDDONS ! meltest my sad heart ! 
 
 1794. 
 
 TO SARA AND HER SAMUEL. 
 
 WAS it so hard a thing 1 I did but ask 
 
 A fleeting holiday. One little week, 
 
 Or haply two, had bounded my request. 
 
 What if the jaded steer, who all day long 
 
 Had borne the heat and labour of the plough, 
 
 When evening came, and her sweet cooling hour, 
 
 Should seek to trespass on a neighbour copse, 
 
 Where greener herbage waved, or clearer streams 
 
 Invited him to slake his burning thirst 1 
 
 That man were crabbed, who should say him nay : 
 
 That man were churlish who should drive him thence. 
 
 A blessing light upon your heads, ye good, 
 Ye hospitable pair ! I may not come, 
 To catch on Clifden's heights the summer gale ; 
 I may not come, a pilgrim, to the banks 
 Of Avon, lucid stream, to taste the wave 
 Which Shakspeare drank, our British Helicon ! 
 Or with mine eye intent on RedclifTe towers, 
 To muse in tears on that mysterious youth, 
 Cruelly slighted, who to London walls, 
 In evil hour, shaped his disastrous course. 
 
 Complaint begone : begone, unkind reproof : 
 Take up, my song, take up a merrier strain, 
 Forget again, and lo ! from Avon's vales 
 Another " minstrel " cometh ! Youth endeared, 
 God and good angels guide thee on thy way, 
 And gentler fortunes wait the friends I love. 
 
 July 5, 1796.
 
 TO THE POET COWPER. 
 
 TO THE POET COWPER. 
 
 COWPER, I thank my God that them art healed ! 
 
 Thine was the sorest malady of all ; 
 
 And I am sad to think that it should light 
 
 Upon the worthy head ! But thou art healed, 
 
 And thou art yet, we trust, the destined man 
 
 Born to reanimate the lyre, whose chords 
 
 Have slumbered, and have idle lain so long ; 
 
 To the immortal sounding of whose strings 
 
 Did Milton frame the stately packl verse ; 
 
 Among whose wires with light finger playing, 
 
 Our elder bard, Spenser, a gentle name, 
 
 The lady Muses' dearest darling child, 
 
 Elicited the deftest tunes yet heard 
 
 In hall or bower, taking the delicate ear 
 
 Of Sidney and his peerless maiden Queen. 
 
 Thou, then, take up the mighty epic strain,' 
 Cowper, of England's Bards the wisest and the best, 
 
 1796. 
 
 CHILDHOOD. 
 
 IN my poor mind it is most sweet to muse 
 
 Upon the days gone by ; to act in thought 
 
 Past seasons o'er, and be again a child ; 
 
 To sit in fancy on the turf-clad slope 
 
 Down which the child would roll ; to pluck gay flowers, 
 
 Make posies in the sun, which the child's hand 
 
 (Childhood offended soon, soon reconciled,) 
 
 Would throw away, and straight take up again, 
 
 Then fling them to the winds, and o'er the lawn 
 
 Bound with so playful and so light a foot, 
 
 That the pressed daisy scarce declined her head.
 
 POEMS. 
 
 THE GEANDAME. 
 
 ON the green hill-top, 
 
 Hard by the house of prayer, a modest roof, 
 And not distinguish'd from its neighbour barn, 
 Save by a slender-tapering length of spire, 
 The Grandame sleeps. A plain stone barely tells 
 The name and date to the chance passenger. 
 For lowly-born was she, and long had eat, 
 Well-earn'd, the bread of service : hers was else 
 A mounting spirit, one that entertain'd 
 Scorn of base action, deed dishonourable, 
 Or aught unseemly. I remember well 
 Her reverend image : I remember, too, 
 With what a zeal she served her master's house ; 
 And how the prattling tongue of garrulous age 
 Delighted to recount the oft-told tale 
 Or anecdote domestic. Wise she was, 
 And wondrous skill'd in genealogies, 
 And could in apt and voluble terms discourse 
 Of births, of titles, and alliances ; 
 Of marriages, and intermarriages ; 
 Eelationship remote, or near of kin ; 
 Of friends offended, family disgraced, 
 Maiden high-born, but wayward, disobeying 
 Parental strict injunctions, and regardless 
 Of unmix'd blood, and ancestry remote, 
 Stooping to wed with one of low degree. 
 But these are not thy praises ; and I wrong 
 Thy honour'd memory, recording chiefly 
 Things light or trivial. Better 'twere to tell, 
 How with a nobler zeal, and warmer love, 
 She served her heavenly Master. I have seen 
 That reverend form bent down with age and pain, 
 And rankling malady. Yet not for this 
 Ceased she to praise her Maker, or withdraw 
 Her trust in Him, her faith, and humble hope ;
 
 THE SABBATH BELLS. 
 
 So meekly had she learn'd to bear her cross 
 For she had studied patience in the school 
 Of Christ ; much comfort she had thence derived, 
 And was a follower of the NAZARENE. 
 
 THE SABBATH BELLS. 
 
 THE cheerful Sabbath bells, wherever heard, 
 
 Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice 
 
 Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims 
 
 Tidings of good to Zion : chiefly when 
 
 Their piercing tones fall sudden on the ear 
 
 Of the contemplant, solitary man, 
 
 Whom thoughts abstruse or high have chanced to lure 
 
 Forth from the walks of men, revolving oft, 
 
 And oft again, hard matter, which eludes 
 
 And baffles his pursuit, thought-sick and tired 
 
 Of controversy, where no end appears, 
 
 No clue to his research, the lonely man 
 
 Half wishes for society again. 
 
 Him, thus engaged, the Sabbath bell salute 
 
 Sudden ! his heart awakes : his ears drink in 
 
 The cheering music ; his relenting soul 
 
 Yearns after all the joys of social life 
 
 And softens with the love of human kind. 
 
 FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS. 
 
 THE truant fancy was a wanderer ever, 
 
 A lone enthusiast maid. She loves to walk 
 
 In the bright visions of empyreal light, 
 
 By the green pastures, and the fragrant meads, 
 
 Where the perpetual flowers of Eden blow : 
 
 By crystal streams, and by the living waters, 
 
 Along whose margin grows the wondrous tree
 
 10 POEMS. 
 
 Whose leaves shall heal the nations ; underneath 
 Whose holy shade a refuge shall be found 
 From pain and want, and all the ills that wait 
 On mortal life, from sin and death for ever. 
 
 THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS. 
 
 (See the Tragedy of tlutt name. ) 
 
 WHEN her son, her Douglas, died, 
 To the steep rock's fearful side 
 Fast the frantic mother hied 
 
 O'er her blooming warrior dead 
 Many a tear did Scotland shed, 
 And shrieks of long and loud lament 
 From her Grampian hills she sent. 
 
 Like one awakening from a trance 
 She met the shock of Lochlin's 1 lance ; 
 On her rude invader foe 
 Return'd an hundredfold the blow, 
 Drove the taunting spoiler home ; 
 
 Mournful thence she took her way 
 To do observance at the tomb 
 
 Where the son of Douglas lay 
 
 Round about the tomb did go 
 In solemn state and order slow, 
 Silent pace, and black attire, 
 Earl or Knight, or good Esquire ; 
 Whoe'er by deeds of valour done 
 In battle had high honours won ; 
 Whoe'er in their pure veins could trace 
 The blood of Douglas' noble race. 
 
 1 Denmark.
 
 THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS. 1 1 
 
 With them the flower of minstrels came, 
 And to their cunning harps did frame 
 In doleful numbers piercing rhymes, 
 Such strains as in the older times 
 Had soothed the spirit of Fingal, 
 Echoing thro' his father's hall. 
 
 " Scottish maidens, drop a tear 
 O'er the beauteous Hero's bier ! 
 Brave youth, and comely 'bove compare, 
 All golden shone his burnish'd hair ; 
 Valour and smiling courtesy 
 Play'd in the sunbeams of his eye. 
 Closed are those eyes that shone so fair, 
 And stain'd with blood his yellow hair. 
 Scottish maidens, drop a tear 
 O'er the beauteous Hero's bier ! 
 
 "Not a tear, I charge you, shed 
 For the false Glenalvon dead ; 
 Unpitied let Glenalvon lie, 
 Foul stain to arms and chivalry ! 
 
 " Behind his back the traitor came, 
 And Douglas died without his fame. 
 Young light of Scotland early spent, 
 Thy country thee shall long lament, 
 And oft to after-times shall tell, 
 In Hope's sweet prime my Hero fell." 
 
 TO CHAELES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED 
 VISITOR. 
 
 ALONE, obscure, without a friend, 
 
 A cheerless, solitary thing, 
 Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out 1 
 
 What offering can the stranger bring
 
 12 POEMS. 
 
 Of social scenes, home-bred delights, 
 That him in aught compensate may 
 
 For Stowey's pleasant winter nights, 
 For loves and friendships far away 1 
 
 In brief oblivion to forego 
 
 Friends such as thine, so justly dear, 
 And be awhile with me content 
 
 To stay, a kindly loiterer, here. 
 
 For this a gleam of random joy 
 
 Hath flush'd my unaccustom'd cheek ; 
 
 And with an o'ercharged bursting heart, 
 I feel the thanks I cannot speak. 
 
 ! sweet are all the Muses' lays, 
 
 And sweet the charm of matin bird 
 
 'Twas long since these estranged ears 
 The sweeter voice of friend had heard. 
 
 The voice hath spoke : the pleasant sounds 
 
 In memory's ear in after-time 
 Shall live, to sometimes rouse a tear, 
 
 And sometimes prompt an honest rhyme. 
 
 For when the transient charm is fled, 
 And when the little week is o'er, 
 
 To cheerless, friendless solitude 
 When I return, as heretofore, 
 
 Long, long, within my aching heart, 
 The grateful sense shall cherish'd be ; 
 
 I'll think less meanly of myself, 
 
 That Lloyd will sometimes think on me. 
 
 Jan. 1797.
 
 A VISION OF REPENTANCE. 13 
 
 A VISION OF REPENTANCE. 
 
 I SAW a famous fountain in my dream, 
 Where shady pathways to a valley led ; 
 
 A weeping willow lay upon that stream, 
 
 And all around the fountain brink were spread 
 
 Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad, 
 Forming a doubtful twilight desolate and sad. 
 
 The place was such, that whoso enter 'd in, 
 Disrobed was of every earthly thought, 
 
 And straight became as one that knew not sin, 
 Or to the world's first innocence was brought ; 
 
 Enseem'd it now, he stood on holy ground, 
 
 In sweet and tender melancholy wrapt around. 
 
 A most strange calm stole o'er my soothed sprite : 
 Long time I stood, and longer had I staid, 
 
 When lo ! I saw, saw by the sweet moonlight, 
 Which came in silence o'er that silent shade, 
 
 Where near the fountain SOMETHING like DESPAIH 
 
 Made of that weeping willow garlands for her hair. 
 
 And eke with painful fingers she inwove 
 
 Many an uncouth stem of savage thorn 
 " The willow garland, that was for her love, 
 
 And these her bleeding temples would adorn." 
 With sighs her heart nigh burst, salt tears fast fell, 
 As mournfully she bended o'er that sacred well. 
 
 To whom when I address'd myself to speak, 
 She lifted up her eyes, and nothing said ; 
 
 The delicate red came mantling o'er her cheek, 
 And, gathering up her loose attire, she fled 
 
 To the dark covert of that woody shade, 
 
 And in her goings seem'd a timid gentle maid.
 
 14 POEMS. 
 
 Revolving in my mind what this should mean, 
 And why that lovely lady plained so ; 
 
 Perplex'd in thought at that mysterious scene, 
 And doubting if 'twere best to stay or go, 
 
 I cast mine eyes in wistful gaze around, 
 
 When from the shades came slow a small and plaintive 
 sound : 
 
 " PYSCHE l am I, who love to dwell 
 In these brown shades, this woody dell, 
 Where never busy mortal came, 
 Till now, to pry upon my shame. 
 
 "At thy feet what thou dost see 
 The waters of repentance be, 
 Which, night and day, I must augment 
 With tears, like a true penitent, 
 
 " If haply so my day of grace 
 Be not yet past ; and this lone place, 
 O'er-shadowy, dark, excludeth hence 
 All thoughts but grief and penitence." 
 
 " Why dost thou weep, thou gentle maid! 
 And wherefore in this barren shade 
 Thy hidden thoughts with sorrow feed ? 
 Can thing so fair repentance need?" 
 
 " ! I have done a deed of shame, 
 And tainted is my virgin fame, 
 And stain'd the beauteous maiden white, 
 In which my bridal robes were dight." 
 
 " And who the promised sjwuse, declare : 
 And what those bridal garments were." 
 
 " Severe and saintly righteousness 
 Composed the clear white bridal dress ; 
 
 1 The Soul.
 
 TO CHARLES LLOYD. 15 
 
 JESTJS, the son of Heaven's high King, 
 Bought with His blood the marriage-ring. 
 
 " A wretched sinful creature, I 
 Deein'd lightly of that sacred tie, 
 Gave to a treacherous WORLD my heart, 
 And play'd the foolish wanton's part. 
 
 " Soon to these murky shades I came, 
 To hide from the sun's light my shame. 
 And still I haunt this woody dell, 
 And bathe me in that healing well, 
 Whose waters clear have influence 
 From sin's foul stains the soul to cleanse ; 
 
 " And night and day I them augment 
 With tears, like a true penitent, 
 Until, due expiation made, 
 And fit atonement fully paid, 
 The Lord and Bridegroom me present, 
 Where in sweet strains of high consent, 
 God's throne before, the Seraphim 
 Shall chaunt the ecstatic marriage hymn." 
 
 " Noiv Christ restore thee soon " I said, 
 And thenceforth all my dream was fled. 
 
 1797 
 
 TO CHARLES LLOYD. 
 
 A STRANGER, and alone, I past those scenes 
 We past so late together ; and my heart 
 Felt something like desertion, when I look'd 
 Around me, and the well-known voice of friend 
 Was absent, and the cordial look was there 
 No more to smile on me. I thought on Lloyd ;
 
 16 POEMS. 
 
 All he had been to me. And now I go 
 
 Again to mingle with a world impure, 
 
 With men who make a mock of holy things 
 
 Mistaken, and of man's best hope think scorn. 
 
 The world does much to warp the heart of man, 
 
 And I may sometimes join its idiot laugh. 
 
 Of this I now complain not. Deal with me 
 
 Omniscient Father ! as thou judgest best, 
 
 And in Thy season tender Thou my heart. 
 
 I pray not for myself; I pray for him, 
 
 Whose soul is sore perplex'd : shine Thou on him, 
 
 Father of Lights ! and in the difficult paths 
 
 Make plain his way before him. His own thoughts 
 
 May he not think, his own ends not pursue ; 
 
 So shall he best perform Thy will on earth, 
 
 Greatest and Best, Thy will be ever ours ! 
 
 August 1797. 
 
 WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF MY AUNT'S 
 FUNERAL. 
 
 THOU too art dead ! very kind 
 
 Hast thou been to me in my childish days, 
 Thou best good creature. I have not forgot 
 How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet 
 A prating schoolboy : I have not forgot 
 The busy joy on that important day, 
 When, childlike, the poor wanderer was content 
 To leave the bosom of parental love, 
 His childhood's play-place, and his early home, 
 For the rude festerings of a stranger's hand, 
 Hard uncouth tasks, and schoolboy's scanty fare. 
 How did thine eye peruse him round and round, 
 And hardly know him in his yellow coats, 1 
 Ked leathern belt, and gown of russet blue ! 
 
 1 The dress of Christ's Hospital.
 
 WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS. 17 
 
 Farewell, good aunt ! 
 
 Go thou and occupy the same grave-bed 
 
 Where the dead mother lies. 
 
 Oh my dear mother, oh thou dear dead saint ! 
 
 Where's now that placid face, where oft hath sat 
 
 A mother's smile, to think her son should thrive 
 
 In this bad world when she was dead and gone ; 
 
 And where a tear hath sat (take shame, son !) 
 
 When that same child has proved himself unkind. 
 
 One parent yet is left a wretched thing, 
 
 A sad survivor of his buried wife, 
 
 A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man, 
 
 A semblance most forlorn of what he was, 
 
 A merry cheerful man. A merrier man, 
 
 A man more apt to frame matter for mirth, 
 
 Mad jokes, and antics for a Christmas eve ; 
 
 Making life social, and the laggard time 
 
 To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer 
 
 The little circle of domestic friends. 
 
 February 1797. 
 
 WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS. 
 
 ALAS ! how am I changed ! Where be the tears, 
 The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath, 
 And all the dull desertions of the heart, 
 With which I hung o'er my dead mother's corse 1 
 Where be the blest subsidings of the storm 
 Within, the sweet resignedness of hope 
 Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love, 
 In -which I bow'd me to my Father's will 1 
 My God, and my Redeemer ! keep not Thou 
 My soul in brute and sensual thanklessness 
 Seal'd up ; oblivious ever of that dear grace 
 And health restored to my long-loved friend, 
 Long-loved, and worthy known. Thou didst not leave 
 Her soul in death ! leave not now, my Lord, 
 c
 
 18 POEMS. 
 
 Thy servants in far worse, in spiritual death ! 
 And darkness blacker than those feared shadows 
 Of the valley all must tread. Lend us Thy balms, 
 Thou dear Physician of the sin-sick soul, 
 And heal our cleansed bosoms of the wounds 
 With which the world has pierced us thro' and thro'. 
 Give us new flesh, new birth. Elect of heaven 
 May we become ; in Thine election sure 
 Contain'd, and to one purpose steadfast drawn, 
 Our soul's salvation ! 
 
 Thou, and I, dear friend, 
 With filial recognition sweet, shall know 
 One day the face of our dear mother in heaven ; 
 And her remember'd looks of love shall greet 
 With looks of answering love ; her placid smiles 
 Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand 
 With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse. 
 Be witness for me, Lord, I do not ask 
 Those days of vanity to return again 
 (Nor fitting me to ask, nor Thee to give). 
 Vain loves and wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid, 
 Child of the dust as I am, who so long 
 My captive heart steep'd in idolatry 
 And creature-loves. Forgive me, my Maker ! 
 If in a mood of grief I sin almost 
 In sometimes brooding on the days long past, 
 And from the grave of time wishing them back, 
 Days of a mother's fondness to her child, 
 Her little one. 
 
 where be now those sports, 
 And infant play-games 1 where the joyous troops 
 Of children, and the haunts I did so love 1 
 
 my companions, ye loved names 
 
 Of friend or playmate dear ; gone are ye now ; 
 Gone diverse ways ; to honour and credit some, 
 And some, I fear, to ignominy and shame ! 
 
 1 only am left, with unavailing grief, 
 
 To mourn one parent dead, and see one live
 
 WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE PRECEDING POEM. 19 
 
 Of all life's joys bereft and desolate : 
 Am left with a few friends, and one, above 
 The rest, found faithful in a length of years, 
 Contented as I may, to bear me on 
 To the not unpeaceful evening of a day 
 Made black by morning storms ! 
 
 September 1797. 
 
 WRITTEN SOOX AFTER THE PRECEDING 
 POEM. 
 
 THOU should'st have longer lived, and to the grave 
 
 Have peacefully gone down in full old age ! 
 
 Thy children would have tended thy gray hairs. 
 
 We might have sat, as we have often clone, 
 
 By our fireside, and talk'd whole nights away, 
 
 Old times, old friends, and old events recalling ; 
 
 With many a circumstance, of trivial note, 
 
 To memory dear, and of importance grown. 
 
 How shall we tell them in a stranger's ear 1 
 
 A wayward son ofttimes was I to thee ; 
 
 And yet, in all our little bickerings, 
 
 Domestic jars, there was, I know not what, 
 
 Of tender feeling, that were ill exchanged 
 
 For this world's chilling friendships, and their smiles 
 
 Familiar, whom the heart calls strangers still. 
 
 A heavy lot hath he, most wretched man ! 
 
 Who lives the last of all his family ; 
 
 He looks around him, and his eye discerns 
 
 The face of the stranger, and his heart is sick. 
 
 Man of the world, what canst thou do for him 1 
 
 Wealth is a burden, which he could not bear ; 
 
 Mirth a strange crime, the which he dares not act ; 
 
 And wine no cordial, but a bitter cup. 
 
 For wounds like his Christ is the only cure, 
 
 And gospel promises are his by right,
 
 20 POEMS. 
 
 For these were given to the poor in heart. 
 Go, preach thou to him of a world to come, 
 Where friends shall meet and know each other's face. 
 Say less than this, and say it to the winds. 
 
 October 1797. 
 
 WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1797. 
 
 I AM a widow'd thing, now thou art gone ! 
 Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend, 
 Companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor ! 
 Alas ! that honoured mind, whose sweet reproof 
 And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth'd 
 The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech, 
 And made me loving to my parents old, 
 (Why is this so, ah, God ! why is this so 1) 
 That honour'd mind become a fearful blank, 
 Her senses lock'd up, and herself kept out 
 From human sight or converse, while so many 
 Of the foolish sort are left to roam a^ large, 
 Doing all acts of folly, and sin, and shame ? 
 Thy paths are mystery ! 
 
 Yet I will not think, 
 
 Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet, and live 
 In quietness, and die so, fearing God. 
 Or if not, and these false suggestions be 
 A fit of the weak nature, loth to part 
 With what it loved so long, and held so dear ; 
 If thou art to be taken, and I left 
 (More sinning, yet unpunish'd, save in thee), 
 It is the will of God, and we are clay 
 In the potter's hands ; and, at the worst, are made 
 From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace, 
 Till, His most righteous purpose wrought in us, 
 Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES. 21 
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES. 
 WHERE are they gone, the old familiar faces ? 
 
 I had a mother, but she died, and left me, 
 Died prematurely in a day of horrors 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days 
 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
 Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I loved a love once, fairest among women. 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man. 
 Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly ; 
 Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 
 
 Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood. 
 Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse, 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
 
 Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother ! 
 Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling ? 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces. 
 
 For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 And some are taken from me ; all are departed ; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 January 1798.
 
 22 POEMS. 
 
 COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT. 
 
 FROM broken visions of perturbed rest 
 I wake, and start, and fear to sleep again. 
 How total a privation of all sounds, 
 Sights, and familiar objects, man, bird, beast, 
 Herb, tree, or flower, and prodigal light of heaven ! 
 'Twere some relief to catch the drowsy cry 
 Of the mechanic watchman, or the noise 
 Of revel, reeling home from midnight cups. 
 Those are the moanings of the dying man, 
 Who lies in the upper chamber ; restless moans, 
 And interrupted only by a cough 
 Consumptive, torturing the wasted lungs. 
 So in the bitterness of death he lies, 
 And waits in anguish for the morning's light. 
 What can that do for him, or what restore 1 
 Short taste, faint sense, affecting notices, 
 And little images of pleasures past, 
 Of health, and active life (health not yet slain, 
 Nor the other grace of life, a good name, sold 
 For sin's black wages). On his tedious bed 
 He writhes, and turns him from th' accusing light, 
 And finds no comfort in the sun, but says 
 " When night comes I shall get a little rest." 
 Some few groans more, death comes, and there an end. 
 'Tis darkness and conjecture all beyond ; 
 Weak nature fears, though charity must hope, 
 And fancy, most licentious on such themes, 
 Where decent reverence well had kept her mute, 
 Hath o'er-stock'd hell with devils, and brought down 
 By her enormous fablings, and mad lies, 
 Discredit on the gospel's serious truths 
 And salutary fears. The man of parts, 
 Poet, or prose declaimer, on his couch 
 Lolling, like one indifferent, fabricates 
 A heaven of gold, where he, and such as he,
 
 LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 23 
 
 Their heads encompasskl with crowns, their heels 
 
 With fine wings garlanded, shall tread the stars, 
 
 Beneath their feet, heaven's pavement, far removed 
 
 From damned spirits, and the torturing cries 
 
 Of men, his brethren, fashion'd of the earth, 
 
 As he was, nourish'd with the self-same breath, 
 
 Belike his kindred or companions once, 
 
 Through everlasting ages now divorced, 
 
 In chains and savage torments, to repent 
 
 Short years of folly on earth. Their groans unheard 
 
 In heaven, the saint nor pity feels, nor care, 
 
 For those thus sentenced pity might disturb, 
 
 The delicate sense and most divine repose 
 
 Of spirits angelical. Blessed be God, 
 
 The measures of His judgments are not fix'd 
 
 By man's erroneous standard. He discerns 
 
 No such inordinate difference and vast 
 
 Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom 
 
 So disproportion'd fates. Compared with Him, 
 
 No man on earth is holy call'd : they best 
 
 Stand in His sight approved, who at His feet 
 
 Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield 
 
 To Him of His own works the praise, His due. 
 
 LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 MYSTERY of God ! thou brave and beauteous world, 
 
 Made fair with light and shade and stars and flowers, 
 
 Made fearful and august with woods and rocks ; 
 
 Jagg'd precipice, black mountain, sea in storms, 
 
 Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns, 
 
 But thro' Heaven's pavement rides as in despite 
 
 Or mockery of the littleness of man ! 
 
 I see a mighty arm, by man unseen, 
 
 Resistless, not to be controll'd, that guides, 
 
 In solitude of unshared energies, 
 
 All these thy ceaseless miracles, world ! 
 
 Arm of the world, I view thee, and I muse
 
 24 POEMS. 
 
 On Man, who, trusting in his mortal strength, 
 
 Leans on a shadowy staff, a staff of dreams. 
 
 We consecrate our total hopes and fears 
 
 To idols, flesh and blood, our love (heaven's due), 
 
 Our praise and admiration ; praise bestow'd 
 
 By man on man, and acts of worship done 
 
 To a kindred nature, certes do reflect 
 
 Some portion of the glory and rays oblique 
 
 Upon the politic worshipper, so man 
 
 Extracts a pride from his humility. 
 
 Some braver spirits of the modern stamp 
 
 Affect a Godhead nearer : these talk loud 
 
 Of mind, and independent intellect, 
 
 Of energies omnipotent in man ; 
 
 And man of his own fate artificer ; 
 
 Yea, of his own life lord, and of the days 
 
 Of his abode on earth, when time shall be, 
 
 That life immortal shall become an art, 
 
 Or Death, by chymic practices deceived, 
 
 Forego the scent, which for six thousand years 
 
 Like a good hound he has follow'd, or at length 
 
 More manners learning, and a decent sense 
 
 And reverence of a philosophic world, 
 
 Relent, and leave to prey on carcasses. 
 
 But these are fancies of a few : the rest, 
 
 Atheists, or Deists only in the name, 
 
 By word or deed deny a God. They eat 
 
 Their daily bread, and draw the breath of heaven 
 
 Without or thought or thanks ; heaven's roof to them 
 
 Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps, 
 
 No more, that lights them to their purposes. 
 
 They wander "loose about," they nothing see, 
 
 Themselves except, and creatures like themselves, 
 
 Short-lived, short-sighted, impotent to save. 
 
 So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late, 
 
 Destruction cometh "like an armed man," 
 
 Or like a dream of murder in the night, 
 
 Withering their mortal faculties, and breaking 
 
 The bones of all their pride. 1798.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL: 
 A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 SIR WALTER WOODVIL. 
 
 CRAY ' I P re ^ eiiae ^ friends of John, 
 SANDFORD, Sir Walter's old Steward. 
 MARGARET, Orphan Ward of Sir Walter. 
 FOUR GENTLEMEN, John's riotous companions. 
 SERVANTS. 
 
 SCENE. For the most part at Sir Walter's mansion in Devon- 
 shire; at other times in the forest of Sherwood. 
 TIME. Soon after the Restoration. 
 
 ACT THE FIEST. 
 
 SCENE. A Servants' Apartment in Woodvil Hall. 
 Servants drinking. Time, the Morning. 
 
 A Song ~by DANIEL. 
 " When the King enjoys his own again." 
 
 Peter. A delicate song. Where didst learn it, fellow ? 
 
 Daniel. Even there, where thou learnest thy oaths and 
 thy politics at our master's table. Where else should a 
 serving-man pick up his poor accomplishments 1 
 
 Martin. Well spoken, Daniel. rare Daniel ! his 
 oaths and his politics ! excellent ! 
 
 Francis. And where didst pick up thy knavery, Daniel 1 
 
 Pet. That came to him by inheritance. His family 
 have supplied the shire of Devon, time out of mind, with
 
 26 POEMS. 
 
 good thieves and bad serving-men. All of his race have 
 come into the world without their conscience. 
 
 Mar. Good thieves, and bad serving-men 1 Better and 
 better. I marvel what Daniel hath got to say in reply. 
 
 Dan. I marvel more when thou wilt say anything to 
 the purpose, thou shallow serving-man, whose swiftest 
 conceit carries thee no higher than to apprehend with 
 difficulty the stale jests of us thy compeers. When wast 
 ever known to club thy own particular jest among us 1 
 
 Mar. Most unkind Daniel, to speak such biting things 
 of me ! 
 
 Fran. See if he hath not brought tears into the poor 
 fellow's eyes with the saltness of his rebuke. 
 
 Dan. No offence, brother Martin I meant none. 
 'Tis true, Heaven gives gifts and withholds them. It 
 has been pleased to bestow upon me a nimble invention 
 to the manufacture of a jest ; and upon thee, Martin, an 
 indifferent bad capacity to understand my meaning. 
 
 Mar. Is that all 1 I am content. Here's my hand. 
 
 Fran. Well, I like a little innocent mirth myself, but 
 never could endure bawdry. 
 
 Dan. Quot homines tot sentential. 
 
 Mar. And what is that ? 
 
 Dan. 'Tis Greek, and argues difference of opinion. 
 
 Mar. I hope there is none between us. 
 
 Dan. Here's to thee, brother Martin (drinks). 
 
 Mar. And to thee, Daniel (drinks], 
 
 Fran. And to thee, Peter (drinks). 
 
 Pet. Thank you, Francis. And here's to thee (drinks). 
 
 Mar. I shall be fuddled anon. 
 
 Dan. And drunkenness I hold to be a very despicable 
 vice. 
 
 All. Oh ! a shocking vice. [They drink round. 
 
 Pet. Inasmuch as it taketh away the understanding. 
 
 Dan. And makes the eyes red. 
 
 Pet. And the tongue to stammer. 
 
 Dan. And to blab out secrets. 
 (During this conversation they continue drinking.}
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 27 
 
 Pet. Some men do not know an enemy from a friend 
 when they are drunk. 
 
 Dan, Certainly sobriety is the health of the soul. 
 
 Mar. Now I know I am going to be .drunk. 
 
 Dan. How canst tell, dry-bones 1 
 
 Mar. Because I begin to be melancholy. That's always 
 a sign. 
 
 Fran. Take care of Martin, he'll topple off his seat 
 else. [MARTIN drops asleep. 
 
 Pet. Times are greatly altered since young master took 
 upon himself the government of this household. 
 
 All. Greatly altered. 
 
 Fran. I think everything be altered for the better since 
 his Majesty's blessed restoration. 
 
 Pet. In Sir Walter's days there was no encouragement 
 given to good housekeeping. 
 
 All. None. 
 
 Dan. For instance, no possibility of getting drunk 
 before two in the afternoon. 
 
 Pet. Every man his allowance of ale at breakfast his 
 quart ! 
 
 All. A quart ! ! (in derision). 
 
 Dan. Nothing left to our own sweet discretions. 
 
 Pet. Whereby it may appear, we were treated more 
 like beasts than what we were discreet and reasonable 
 serving-men. 
 
 All. Like beasts. 
 
 Mar. (opening his eyes). Like beasts ! 
 
 Dan. To sleep, wag-tail ! 
 
 Fran. I marvel all this while where the old gentleman 
 has found means to secrete himself. It seems no man has 
 heard of him since the day of the King's return. Can any 
 tell, why our young master, being favoured by the court, 
 should not have interest to procure his father's pardon. 
 
 Dan. Marry, I think 'tis the obstinacy of the old 
 Knight, that will not .be beholden to the court for his 
 safety. 
 
 Mar. Now that is wilful.
 
 28 POEMS. 
 
 Fran. But can any tell me the place of his conceal- 
 ment 1 
 
 Pet. That cannot I ; but I have my conjectures. 
 
 Dan. Two hundred pounds, as I hear, to the man that 
 shall apprehend him. 
 
 Fran. Well, I have my suspicions. 
 
 Pet. And so have I. 
 
 Mar. And I can keep a secret. 
 
 Fran, (to PETER). Warwickshire you mean (aside"). 
 
 Pet. Perhaps not. 
 
 Fran. Nearer, perhaps. 
 
 Pet. I say nothing. 
 
 Dan. I hope there is none in this company would be 
 mean enough to betray him. 
 
 All. Lord, surely not. 
 
 [They drink to SIR WALTER'S safety. 
 
 Fran. I have often wondered how our master came to 
 be excepted by name in the late Act of Oblivion. 
 
 Dan. Shall I tell the reason ? 
 
 All. Ay, do. 
 
 Dan. Tis thought he is no great friend to the present 
 happy establishment. 
 
 All. Oh ! monstrous ! 
 
 Pet. Fellow-servants, a thought strikes me. Do we, or 
 do we not, come under the penalties of the Treason Act, 
 by reason of our being privy to this man's concealment ! 
 
 All. Truly, a sad consideration. 
 
 To them enters SANDFORD suddenly. 
 
 Sandford. You well-fed and unprofitable grooms, 
 Maintain'd for state, not use ; 
 You lazy feasters at another's cost, 
 That eat like maggots into an estate, 
 And do as little work, 
 Being indeed but foul excrescences, 
 And no just parts in a well-order'd family ; 
 You base and rascal imitators, 
 Who act up to the height your master's vices,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 29 
 
 But cannot read his virtues in your bond : 
 Which of you, as I enter'd, spake of betraying 1 
 Was it you, or you, or, thin-face, was it you 1 
 
 Mar. Whom does he call thin-face ? 
 
 Sand. No prating, loon, but tell me who he was, 
 That I may brain the villain with my staff, 
 That seeks Sir Walter's life ! 
 You miserable men, 
 
 With minds more slavish than your slave's estate, 
 Have you that noble bounty so forgot, 
 Which took you from the looms, and from the ploughs, 
 Which better had ye follow'd, fed ye, clothed ye, 
 And entertain'd ye in a worthy service, 
 Where your best wages was the world's repute, 
 That thus ye seek his life, by whom ye live 1 
 Have you forgot, too, 
 How often in old times 
 
 Your drunken mirths have stunn'd day's sober ears, 
 Carousing full cups to Sir Walter's health ? 
 Whom now ye would betray, but that he lies 
 Out of the reach of your poor treacheries. 
 This learn from me, 
 
 Our master's secret sleeps with trustier tongues, 
 Than will unlock themselves to carles like you. 
 Go, get you gone, you knaves. Who stirs ? this staff 
 Shall teach you manners else. 
 
 All. Well, we are going. 
 
 Sand. And quickly, too, ye had better, for I see 
 Young mistress Margaret coming this way. 
 
 [Exeunt all but SANDFORD. 
 
 Enter MARGARET, as in a fright, pursued by a Gentle- 
 man, ivho, seeing SANDFORD, retires muttering a curse. 
 
 SANDFORD. MARGARET. 
 
 Sand. Good-morrow to my fair mistress. 'Twas a chance 
 I saw you, lady, so intent was I 
 On chiding hence these graceless serving-men, 
 Who cannot break their fast at morning meals
 
 30 POEMS. 
 
 Without debauch and mis-timed riotings. 
 This house hath been a scene of nothing else, 
 But atheist riot and profane excess, 
 Since my old master quitted all his rights here. 
 
 Marg. Each day I endure fresh insult from the scorn 
 Of Woodvil's friends, the uncivil jests 
 And free discourses of the dissolute men 
 That haunt this mansion, making me their mirth. 
 
 Sand. Does my young master know of these affronts 1 
 
 Marg. I cannot tell. Perhaps he has not been told. 
 Perhaps he might have seen them if he would. 
 I have known him more quick-sighted. Let that pass. 
 All things seem changed, I think. I had a friend 
 (I can't but weep to think him alter'd too) 
 These things are best forgotten : but I knew 
 A man, a young man, young, and full of honour, 
 That would have pick'd a quarrel for a straw, 
 And fought it out to the extremity, 
 E'en with the dearest friend he had alive, 
 On but a bare surmise, a possibility, 
 That Margaret had suffer'd an affront. 
 Some are too tame that were too splenetic once. 
 
 Sand. 'Twere best he should be told of these affronts. 
 
 Marg. I am the daughter of his father's friend, 
 Sir Walter's orphan ward. 
 I am not his servant-maid, that I should wait 
 The opportunity of a gracious hearing, 
 Inquire the times and seasons when to put 
 My peevish prayer up at young Woodvil's feet, 
 And sue to him for slow redress, who was 
 Himself a suitor late to Margaret. 
 I am somewhat proud : and Woodvil taught me pride. 
 I was his favourite once, his playfellow in infancy, 
 And joyful mistress of his youth. 
 None once so pleasant in his eyes as Margaret. 
 His conscience, his religion Margaret was, 
 His dear heart's confessor, a heart within that heart, 
 And all dear things summ'd up in her alone.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 31 
 
 As Margaret smiled or frown'd John lived or died : 
 
 His dress, speech, gesture, studies, friendships, all 
 
 Being fashioned to her liking. 
 
 His flatteries taught me first this self-esteem, 
 
 His flatteries and caresses, while he loved. 
 
 The world esteem'd her happy, who had won 
 
 His heart, who won all hearts ; 
 
 And ladies envied me the love of Woodvil. 
 
 Sand. He doth affect the courtier's life too much, 
 Whose art is to forget, 
 
 And that has wrought this seeming change in him, 
 That was by nature noble. 
 
 'Tis these court plagues, that swarm about our house. 
 Have done the mischief, making his fancy giddy 
 With images of state preferment, place, 
 Tainting his generous spirits with ambition. 
 
 Marg. I know not how it is ; 
 A cold protector is John grown to me. 
 The mistress and presumptive wife of Woodvil 
 Can never stoop so low to supplicate 
 A man, her equal, to redress those wrongs, 
 Which he was bound first to prevent : 
 But which his own neglects have sanction'd rather, 
 Both sanction'd and provoked : a mark'd neglect, 
 And strangeness fastening bitter on his love, 
 His love which long has been upon the wane. 
 For me, I am determined what to do : 
 To leave this house this night, and lukewarm John, 
 And trust for food to the Earth and Providence. 
 
 Sand. lady, have a care 
 Of these indefinite and spleen-bred resolves. 
 You know not half the dangers that attend 
 Upon a life of wandering, which your thoughts now 
 Feeling the swellings of a lofty anger, 
 To your abused fancy, as 'tis likely, 
 Portray without its terrors, painting lies 
 And representments of fallacious liberty 
 You know not what it is to leave the roof that shelters you.
 
 32 POEMS. 
 
 Marg. I have thought on every possible event, 
 The dangers and discouragements you speak of, 
 Even till my woman's heart hath ceased to fear them, 
 And cowardice grows enamour'd of rare accidents, 
 Nor am I so unfurnish'd as you think, 
 Of practicable schemes. 
 
 Sand. Now God forbid ; think twice of this, dear lady. 
 
 Marg. I pray you spare me, Mr. Sandford, 
 And once for all believe, nothing can shake my purpose. 
 
 Sand. But what course have you thought on ? 
 
 Marg. To seek Sir Walter in the forest of Sherwood. 
 I have letters from young Simon, 
 Acquainting me with all the circumstances 
 Of their concealment, place, and manner of life, 
 And the merry hours they spend in the green haunts 
 Of Sherwood, nigh which place they have ta'en a house 
 In the town of Nottingham, and pass for foreigners, 
 Wearing the dress of Frenchmen. 
 All which I have perused with so attent 
 And childlike longings, that to my doting ears 
 Two sounds now seem like one, 
 One meaning in two words, Sherwood and Liberty. 
 And, gentle Mr. Sandford, 
 'Tis you that must provide now 
 The means of my departure, which for safety 
 Must be in boy's apparel. 
 
 Sand. Since you will have it so 
 (My careful age trembles at all may happen) 
 I will engage to furnish you. 
 I have the keys of the wardrobe, and can fit you 
 With garments to your size. 
 I know a suit 
 
 Of lively Lincoln Green, that shall much grace you 
 In the wear, being glossy fresh, and worn but seldom. 
 Young Stephen Woodvil wore them while he lived. 
 I have the keys of all this house and passages, 
 And ere day break will rise and let you forth. 
 What things soe'er you have need of I can furnish you ;
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 33 
 
 And will provide a horse and trusty guide 
 To bear you on your way to Nottingham. 
 
 Marg. That once this day and night were fairly past ! 
 For then I'll bid this house and love farewell ; 
 Farewell, sweet Devon ; farewell, lukewarm John : 
 For with the morning's light will Margaret be gone. 
 Thanks, courteous Mr. Sandforcl. [Exeunt divers ivays. 
 
 ACT THE SECOND. 
 SCENE. An Apartment in Woodvil Hall. 
 
 JOHN WOODVIL alone. 
 (Reading %>arts of a letter.} 
 
 The Letter. 
 
 "When Love grows cold, and indifference has usurped 
 upon old esteem, it is no marvel if the world begin to 
 account that dependence, which hitherto has been esteemed 
 honourable shelter. The course I have taken (in leaving 
 this house, not easily wrought thereunto) seemed to rne 
 best for the once-for-all releasing of yourself (who in times 
 past have deserved well of me) from the now daily and 
 not to be endured tribute of forced love, and ill-dissembled 
 
 reluctance of affection. ,,, r 
 
 " MARGARET. 
 
 Gone ! gone ! my girl ? so hasty, Margaret ! 
 
 And never a kiss at parting ? shallow loves, 
 
 And likings of a ten days' growth, use courtesies, 
 
 And show red eyes at parting. Who bids "farewell" 
 
 In the same tone he cries " God speed you, sir 1 ?" 
 
 Or tells of joyful victories at sea, 
 
 Where he hath ventures 1 does not rather muffle 
 
 His organs to emit a leaden sound, 
 
 To suit the melancholy dull " farewell," 
 
 Which They in Heaven not use ? 
 
 So peevish, Margaret ?
 
 34 POEMS. 
 
 But 'tis the common error of your sex, 
 
 When our idolatry slackens, or grows less, 
 
 (As who of woman born can keep his faculty, 
 
 Of Admiration, being a decaying faculty, 
 
 For ever strain'd to the pitch 1 or can at pleasure 
 
 Make it renewable, as some appetites are, 
 
 As namely, Hunger, Thirst ?) this being the case, 
 
 They tax us with neglect, and love grown cold, 
 
 Coin plainings of the perfidy of men, 
 
 Which into maxims pass, and apothegms 
 
 To be retail'd in ballads. 
 
 I know them all. 
 
 They are jealous, when our larger hearts receive 
 More guests than one. (Love in a woman's heart 
 Being all in one.) For me, I am sure I have room here 
 For more disturbers of my sleep than one. 
 Love shall have part, but Love shall not have all. 
 Ambition, Pleasure, Vanity, all by turns, 
 Shall lie in my bed, and keep me fresh and waking ; 
 Yet Love not be excluded. Foolish wench, 
 I could have loved her twenty years to come, 
 And still have kept my liking. But since 'tis so, 
 Why, fare thee well, old play-fellow ! I'll try 
 To squeeze a tear for old acquaintance' sake. 
 I shall not grudge so much. 
 
 To him enters LOVEL. 
 
 Lov. Bless us, Woodvil ! what is the matter 1 I pro- 
 test, man, I thought you had been weeping. 
 
 Wood. Nothing is the matter, only the wench has 
 forced some water into my eyes, which will quickly 
 disband. 
 
 Lov. I cannot conceive you. 
 
 Wood. Margaret is flown. 
 
 Lov. Upon what pretence 1 
 
 Wood. Neglect on my part : which it seems she has 
 had the wit to discover, maugre all my pains to conceal it. 
 
 Lov. Then you confess the charge 1
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 35 
 
 Wood. To say the truth, my love for her has of late 
 stopped short on this side idolatry. 
 
 Lov. As all good Christians should, I think. 
 
 Wood. I am sure, I could have loved her still within 
 the limits of warrantable love. 
 
 Lov. A kind of brotherly affection, I take it. 
 
 Wood. We should have made excellent man and wife 
 in time. 
 
 Lov. A good old couple, when the snows fell, to crowd 
 about a sea-coal fire, and talk over old matters. 
 
 Wood. While each should feel, what neither cared to 
 acknowledge, that stories oft repeated may at last come 
 to lose some of their grace by the repetition. 
 
 Lov. Which both of you may yet live long enough to 
 discover. For, take my word for it, Margaret is a bird, 
 that will come back to you without a lure. 
 
 Wood. Never, never, Lovel. Spite of my levity, with 
 tears I confess it, she was a lady of most confirmed honour, 
 of an unmatchable spirit, and determinate in all virtuous 
 resolutions ; not hasty to anticipate an affront, nor slow 
 to feel, where just provocation was given. 
 
 Lov. What made you neglect her, then 1 
 
 Wood. Mere levity and youth fulness of blood, a malady 
 incident to young men, physicians call it caprice. Nothing 
 else. He that slighted her knew her value : and 'tis odds, 
 but for thy sake, Margaret, John will yet go to his grave 
 a bachelor. [J. noise heard as of one drunk and singing. 
 
 Lov. Here comes one that will quickly dissipate these 
 humours. 
 
 Enter one drunk. 
 
 Drunken Man. Good-morrow to you, gentlemen. Mr. 
 Lovel, I am your humble servant. Honest Jack Woodvil, 
 I will get drunk with you to-morrow. 
 
 Wood. And why to-morrow, honest Mr. Freeman 1 
 
 Drunk. M. I scent a traitor in that question. A 
 beastly question. Is it not his Majesty's birthday ? the 
 day of all days in the year, on which King Charles the 
 Second was graciously pleased to be born. (Sings)
 
 36 POEMS. 
 
 " Great pity 'tis such days as those should come but once 
 a year." 
 
 Lov. Drunk in a morning ! foh ! how he stinks. 
 
 Drunk. M. And why not drunk in a morning ? canst 
 tell, bully ? 
 
 Wood. Because being the sweet and tender infancy of 
 the day, methinks it should ill-endure such early blightings. 
 
 Drunk. M. I grant you, 'tis in some sort the youth and 
 tender nonage of the day. Youth is bashful, and I give it 
 a cup to encourage it. (Sings) "Ale that will make 
 Grimalkin prate." At noon I drink for thirst, at night 
 for fellowship, but above all I love to usher in the bashful 
 morning under the auspices of a freshening stoup of liquor. 
 (Sings) "Ale in a Saxon rumkin then Makes valour 
 burgeon in tall men." But I crave pardon. I fear I 
 keep that gentleman from serious thoughts. There be 
 those that wait for me in the cellar. 
 
 Wood. Who are they ? 
 
 Drunk. M. Gentlemen, my good friends, Cleveland, 
 Delaval, and Truby. I know by this time they are all 
 clamorous for me. [Exit singing. 
 
 Wood. This keeping of open house acquaints a man 
 with strange companions. 
 
 Enter at another door, Three calling for 
 HARRY FREEMAK. 
 
 Harry Freeman, Harry Freeman. 
 
 He is not here. Let us go look for him. 
 
 Where is Freeman ? 
 
 Where is Harry ? 
 
 [.Exeunt the Three, calling for FREEMAN. 
 
 Wood. Did you ever see such gentry ? (laughing). 
 These are they, that fatten on ale and tobacco in a morn- 
 ing, drink burnt brandy at noon to promote digestion, and 
 piously conclude with quart bumpers after supper to prove 
 their loyalty. 
 
 Lov. Come, shall we adjourn to the Tennis Court ? 
 
 Wood. No, you shall go with me into the gallery,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 37 
 
 where I will show you the Vandyke I have purchased : 
 " The late king taking leave of his children." 
 
 Lov. I will but adjust my dress, and attend you. 
 
 [Exit LOVEL. 
 
 Wood, (alone). Now universal England getteth drunk 
 For joy that Charles, her monarch, is restored : 
 And she, that sometime wore a saintly mask, 
 The stale-grown vizor from her face doth pluck, 
 And weareth now a suit of morris bells, 
 With which she jingling goes through all her towns and 
 
 villages. 
 
 The baffled factions in their houses skulk : 
 The commonwealthsman, and state machinist, 
 The cropp'd fanatic, and fifth-monarchy-man, 
 Who heareth of these visionaries now 1 
 They and their dreams have ended. Fools do sing, 
 Where good men yield God thanks ; but politic spirits, 
 Who live by observation, note these changes 
 Of the popular mind, and thereby serve their ends. 
 Then why not I ? What's Charles to me, or Oliver, 
 But as my own advancement hangs on one of them 1 
 
 I to myself am chief. 1 know, 
 
 Some shallow mouths cry out, that I am smit 
 
 With the gauds and show of state, the point of place, 
 
 And trick of precedence, the ducks, and nods, 
 
 Which weak minds pay to rank. 'Tis not to sit 
 
 In place of worship at the royal masques, 
 
 Their pastimes, plays, and Whitehall banquetings, 
 
 For none of these, 
 
 Nor yet to be seen whispering with some great one, 
 
 Do I affect the favours of the court. 
 
 I would be great, for greatness hath great power, 
 
 And that's the fruit I reach at. 
 
 Great spirits ask great play-room. Who could sit, 
 
 With these prophetic swellings in my breast, 
 
 That prick and goad me on, and never cease, 
 
 To the fortunes something tells me I was born to 1 
 
 Who, with such monitors within to stir him,
 
 38 POEMS. 
 
 Would sit him do\vu with lazy arms across, 
 
 An unit, a thing without a name in the state, 
 
 A something to be govern'd, not to govern, 
 
 A fishing, hawking, hunting covmtry gentleman 1 [Exit. 
 
 SCENE. Sherwood Forest. 
 
 SIR WALTER WOODVIL, SIMON WOODVIL 
 
 (disguised as Frenchmen}. 
 
 Sir Wai. How fares my boy, Simon, my youngest born, 
 My hope, my pride, young Woodvil, speak to me 1 
 Some grief untold weighs heavy at thy heart : 
 I know it by thy alter'd cheer of late. 
 Thinkest thy brother plays thy father false ? 
 It is a mad and thriftless prodigal, 
 Grown proud upon the favours of the court ; 
 Court manners, and court fashions, he affects, 
 And in the heat and uncheck'd blood of youth, 
 Harbours a company of riotous men, 
 All hot, and young, court-seekers like himself, 
 Most skilful to devour a patrimony ; 
 And these have eat into my old estates, 
 And these have drain'd thy father's cellars dry ; 
 But these so common faults of youth not named, 
 (Things which themselves outgrow, left to themselves) 
 I know no quality that stains his honour. 
 My life upon his faith and noble mind, 
 Son John could never play thy father false. 
 
 Sim. I never thought but nobly of my brother, 
 Touching his honour and fidelity, 
 Still I could wish him charier of his person, 
 And of his time more frugal, than to spend 
 In riotous living, graceless society, 
 And mirth unpalatable, hours better employ'd 
 (With those persuasive graces nature lent him) 
 In fervent pleadings for a father's life. 
 
 Sir Wai. I would not owe my life to a jealous court,
 
 JOHN WOOD\ 7 IL. 39 
 
 Whose shallow policy I know it is, 
 On some reluctant acts of prudent mercy, 
 (Not voluntary, but extorted by the times, 
 In the first tremblings of new-fixed power, 
 And recollection smarting from old wounds,) 
 On these to build a spurious popularity. 
 Unknowing what free grace or mercy mean, 
 They fear to punish, therefore do they pardon. 
 For this cause have I oft forbid my son, 
 By letters, overtures, open solicitings, 
 Or closet-tamperings, by gold or fee, 
 To beg or bargain with the court for my life. 
 
 Sim. And John has ta'en you, father, at your word, 
 True to the letter of his paternal charge. 
 
 Sir Wai. Well, my good cause, and my good conscience, 
 
 boy, 
 
 Shall be for sons to me, if John prove false. 
 Men die but once, and the opportunity 
 Of a noble death is not an every-day fortune : 
 It is a gift which noble spirits pray for. 
 
 Sim. I would not wrong my brother by surmise ; 
 I know him generous, full of gentle qualities, 
 Incapable of base compliances, 
 No prodigal in his nature, but affecting 
 This show of bravery for ambitious ends. 
 He drinks, for 'tis the humour of the court, 
 And drink may one day wrest the secret from him, 
 And pluck you from your hiding-place in the sequel. 
 
 Sir Wai. Fair death shall be my doom, and foul life is. 
 Till when, we'll live as free in this green forest, 
 As yonder deer, who roam unfearing treason ; 
 Who seem the Aborigines of this place, 
 Of Sherwood theirs by tenure. 
 
 Sim. 'Tis said, that Robert Eavl of Huntingdon, 
 Men call'd him Robin Hood, an outlaw bold, 
 With a merry crew of hunters here did haunt, 
 Not sparing the king's venison. May one believe 
 The antique tale 1
 
 40 POEMS. 
 
 Sir Wai. There is much likelihood, 
 Such bandits did in England erst abound, 
 When polity was young. I have read of the pranks 
 Of that mad archer, and of the tax he levied 
 On travellers, whatever their degree, 
 Baron, or knight, whoever pass'd these woods, 
 Layman, or priest, not sparing the bishop's mitre 
 For spiritual regards ; nay once, 'tis said, 
 He robb'd the king himself. 
 
 Sim. A perilous man (smiling). 
 
 Sir Wai. How quietly we live here, 
 Unread in the world's business, 
 And take no note of all its slippery changes. 
 'Twere best we make a world among ourselves, 
 A little world, 
 
 Without the ills and falsehoods of the greater ; 
 We two being all the inhabitants of ours, 
 And kings and subjects both in one. 
 
 Sim. Only the dangerous errors, fond conceits, 
 Which make the business of that greater world, 
 Must have no place in ours : 
 As namely, riches, honours, birth, place, courtesy, 
 Good fame and bad, rumours and popular noises, 
 Books, creeds, opinions, prejudices national, 
 Humours particular, 
 
 Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good, 
 Feuds, factions, enmities, relationships, 
 Loves, hatreds, sympathies, antipathies, 
 And all the intricate stuff quarrels are made of. 
 
 MAIJGABET enters in boy's apparel. 
 
 Sir Wai. What pretty boy have we here ? 
 
 Marg. Bon jour, messieurs. Ye have handsome English 
 
 faces, 
 
 I should have ta'en you else for other two, 
 I came to seek in the forest. 
 
 Sir Wai Who are they 1 
 
 Marg. A gallant brace of Frenchmen, curl'd monsieurs,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 41 
 
 That, men say, haunt these woods, affecting privacy, 
 More than the manner of their countrymen. 
 
 Sim. We have here a wonder. 
 The face is Margaret's face. 
 
 Sir Wai. The face is Margaret's, but the dress the same 
 My Stephen sometime wore. 
 
 (To MARG.) Suppose us them ; whom do men say we are 1 
 Or know you what you seek ? 
 
 Marg. A worthy pair of exiles, 
 Two whom the politics of state revenge, 
 In final issue of long civil broils, 
 Have houseless driven from your native France 
 To wander idle in these English woods, 
 Where now ye live ; most part 
 Thinking on home, and all the joys of France, 
 Where grows the purple vine. 
 
 Sir Wai. These woods, young stranger, 
 And grassy pastures, which the slim deer loves, 
 Are they less beauteous than the land of France, 
 Where grows the purple vine ] 
 
 Marg. I cannot tell. 
 To an indifferent eye both show alike 
 'Tis not the scene, 
 
 But all familiar objects in the scene, 
 Which now ye miss, that constitute a difference. 
 Ye had a country, exiles, ye have none now ; 
 Friends had ye, and much wealth, ye now have nothing ; 
 Our manners, laws, our customs all are foreign to you, 
 I know ye loathe them, cannot learn them readily : 
 And there is reason, exiles, ye should love 
 Our English earth less than your land of France, 
 Where grows the purple vine ; where all delights grow 
 Old custom has made pleasant. 
 
 Sir Wai. You, that are read 
 So deeply in our story, what are you 1 
 
 Marg. A bare adventurer ; in brief a woman, 
 That put strange garments on, and came thus far 
 To seek an ancient friend :
 
 42 POEMS. 
 
 And having spent her stock of idle words, 
 
 And feeling some tears coming, 
 
 Hastes now to clasp Sir Walter Woodvil's kflees, 
 
 And beg a boon for Margaret, his poor ward (kneeling). 
 
 Sir Wai. Not at my feet, Margaret, not at my feet. 
 
 Marg. Yes, till her suit is answer'd. 
 
 Sir Wai. Name it. 
 
 Marg. A little boon, and yet so great a grace, 
 She fears to ask it. 
 
 Sir Wai. Some riddle, Margaret ? 
 
 Marg. No riddle, but a plain request. 
 
 Sir Wai. Name it. 
 
 Marg. Free liberty of Sherwood. 
 And leave to take her lot with you in the forest. 
 
 Sir Wai. A scant petition, Margaret, but take it, 
 Seal'd with an old man's tears. 
 Rise, daughter of Sir Rowland. 
 (Addresses them both) you most worthy, 
 You constant followers of a man proscribed, 
 Following poor misery in the throat of danger ; 
 Fast servitors to crazed and penniless poverty, 
 Serving poor poverty without hope of gain ; 
 Kind children of a sire unfortunate ; 
 Green clinging tendrils round a trunk decay'd, 
 Which needs must bring on you timeless decay ; 
 Fair living forms to a dead carcase join'd ; 
 What shall I say ] 
 
 Better the dead were gather'd to the dead, 
 Than death and life in disproportion meet. 
 Go, seek your fortunes, children. 
 
 Sim. Why, whither should we go 1 
 
 Sir Wai. You to the court, where now your brother 
 
 John 
 Commits a rape on Fortune : 
 
 Sim. Luck to John ! 
 A light-heel'd strumpet, when the sport is done. 
 
 Sir Wai. You to the sweet society of your equals, 
 Where the world's fashion smiles on youth and beauty :
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 43 
 
 Marg. Where young men's flatteries cozen young maids' 
 
 beauty, 
 
 There pride oft gets the vantage hand of duty, 
 There sweet humility withers. 
 
 Sim. Mistress Margaret, 
 How fared my brother John, when you left Devon 1 
 
 Marg. John was well, sir. 
 
 Sim. 'Tis now nine months almost, 
 Since I saw home. What new friends has John made 1 
 Or keeps he his first love 1 I did suspect 
 Some foul disloyalty. Now do I know, 
 John has proved false to her, for Margaret weeps. 
 It is a scurvy brother. 
 
 Sir Wai. Fie upon it ! 
 All men are false, I think. The date of love 
 Is out, expired, its stories all grown stale, 
 O'erpast, forgotten, like an antique tale 
 Of Hero and Leander. 
 
 Sim. I have known some men that are too general- 
 contemplative for the narrow passion. I am in some sort 
 a general lover. 
 
 Marg. In the name of the boy-god, who plays at 
 hoodman-blind with the Muses, and cares not whom he 
 catches : what is it you love ? 
 
 Sim. Simply, all things that live, 
 From the crook'd worm to man's imperial form, 
 And God-resembling likeness. The poor fly, 
 That makes short holyday in the sunbeam, 
 And dies by some child's hand. The feeble bird 
 With little wings, yet greatly venturous 
 In the upper sky. The fish in th' other element, 
 That knows no touch of eloquence. What else 1 
 Yon tall and elegant stag, 
 Who paints a dancing shadow of his horns 
 In the water, where he drinks. 
 
 Marg. I myself love all these things, yet so as with a 
 difference : for example, some animals better than others, 
 some men rather than other men ; the nightingale before
 
 44 POEMS. 
 
 the cuckoo, the swift and graceful palfrey before the slow 
 
 and asinine mule. Your humour goes to confound all 
 
 qualities. 
 
 What sports do you use in the forest 1 
 
 Sim. Not many ; some few, as thus : 
 To see the sun to bed, and to arise, 
 Like some hot amorist with glowing eyes, 
 Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him, 
 With all his fires and travelling glories round him : 
 Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest, 
 Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast, 
 And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep 
 Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep : 
 Sometimes outstretch'd, in very idleness, 
 Nought doing, saying little, thinking less, 
 To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air, 
 Go eddying round ; and small birds, how they fare, 
 When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn, 
 Filch'd from the careless Amalthea's horn ; 
 And how the woods berries and worms provide 
 Without their pains, when earth has nought beside 
 To answer their small wants : 
 To view the graceful deer come tripping by, 
 Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why, 
 Like bashful younkers in society : 
 To mark the structure of a plant or tree ; 
 And all fair things of earth, how fair they be. 
 
 Marg. (smiling"). And .afterwards them paint in 
 simile. 
 
 Sir Wai. Mistress Margaret will have need of some 
 
 refreshment. 
 Please you, we have some poor viands within 
 
 Marg. Indeed I stand in need of them. 
 
 Sir Wai. Under the shade of a thick-spreading tree, 
 Upon the grass, no better carpeting, 
 We'll eat our noon-tide meal ; and, dinner done, 
 One of us shall repair to Nottingham, 
 To seek some safe night-lodging in the town,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 45 
 
 Where you may sleep, while here with us you dwell, 
 By day, in the forest, expecting better times 
 And gentler habitations, noble Margaret. 
 
 Sim. Allans, young Frenchman 
 
 Marg. Allans, Sir Englishman. The time has been, 
 I've studied love-lays in an English tongue, 
 And been enamour'd of rare poesy : 
 Which now I must unlearn. Henceforth, 
 Sweet mother-tongue, old English speech, adieu ; 
 For Margaret has got new name and language new. 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 ACT THE THIRD. 
 
 SCENE. An Apartment of State in Woodvil Hall. 
 Cavaliers drinking. 
 
 JOHN WOODVIL, LOVEL, GEAY, and f our more. 
 
 John. More mirth, I beseech you, gentlemen 
 Mr. Gray, you are not merry. 
 
 Gray. More wine, say I, and mirth shall ensue in 
 course. What ! we have not yet above three half-pints 
 a man to answer for. Brevity is the soul of drinking, as 
 of wit. Despatch, I say. More wine. (Fills.} 
 
 1st Gent. I entreat you, let there be some order, some 
 method, in our drinkings. I love to lose my reason with 
 my eyes open, to commit the deed of drunkenness with 
 forethought and deliberation. I love to feel the fumes 
 of the liquor gathering here, like clouds. 
 
 2d Gent. And I am for plunging into madness at once. 
 Damn order, and method, and steps, and degrees, that he 
 speaks of. Let confusion have her legitimate work. 
 
 Lov. I marvel why the poets, who of all men, methinks, 
 should possess the hottest livers, and most empyreal 
 fancies, should affect to see such virtues in cold water. 
 
 Gray. Virtue in cold water ! ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 John. Because your poet born hath an internal wine,
 
 46 POEMS. 
 
 richer than Lippara or Canaries, yet uncrushed from any 
 grapes of earth, impressed in mortal wine-presses. 
 
 3d Gent. What may be the name of this wine ? 
 
 John. It hath as many names as qualities. It is de- 
 nominated indifferently, wit, conceit, invention, inspiration ; 
 but its most royal and comprehensive name is fancy. 
 
 3d Gent. And where keeps he this sovereign liquor? 
 
 John. Its cellars are in the brain, whence your true 
 poet deriveth intoxication at will ; while his animal spirits, 
 catching a pride from the quality and neighbourhood of 
 their noble relative, the brain, refuse to be sustained by 
 wines and stimuli of earth. 
 
 3d Gent. But is your poet-born always tipsy with this 
 liquor ? 
 
 John. He hath his stoopings and reposes ; but his 
 proper element is the sky, and in the suburbs of the 
 empyrean. 
 
 3d Gent. Is your wine-intellectual so exquisite 1 hence- 
 forth I, a man of plain conceit, will in all humility content 
 my mind with canaries. 
 
 4:th Gent. I am for a song or a catch. When will the 
 catches come on, the sweet wicked catches 1 
 
 John. They cannot be introduced with propriety before 
 midnight. Every man must commit his twenty bumpers 
 first. We are not yet well roused. Frank Lovel, the 
 toast stands with you. 
 
 Lov. Gentlemen, the Duke. (Fills.') 
 
 All. The Duke. (Ttiey drink] 
 
 Gray. Can any tell, why his Grace, being a Papist 
 
 John. Pshaw ! we will have no questions of state now. 
 Is not this his Majesty's birthday ? 
 
 Gray. What follows ? 
 
 John. That every man should sing, and be joyful, and 
 ask no questions. 
 
 2d Gent. Damn politics, they spoil drinking. 
 
 3d Gent. For certain, 'tis a blessed monarchy. 
 
 2d Gent. The cursed fanatic days we have seen ! The 
 times have been when swearino; was out of fashion.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 47 
 
 3d Gent. And drinking. 
 
 1st Gent. And wenching. 
 
 Gray. The cursed yeas and forsooths, which we have 
 heard uttered, when a man could not rap out an innocent 
 oath, but straight the air was thought to be infected. 
 
 Lov. 'Twas a pleasant trick of the saint, which that 
 trim puritan, Swear-not-at-all Smooth-speech used, when 
 his spouse chid him with an oath for committing with 
 his servant-maid, to cause his house to be fumigated 
 with burnt brandy, and ends of scripture, to disperse the 
 devil's breath, as he termed it. 
 
 All. Ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 Gray. But 'twas pleasanter, when the other saint, 
 Resist - the-devil - and- he - ivill -flee -from-thee Pureman was 
 overtaken in the act, to plead an illusio vis-vis, and main- 
 tain his sanctity upon a supposed power in the adversary 
 to counterfeit the shapes of things. 
 
 All. Ha! ha! ha! 
 
 John. Another round, and then let every man devise 
 what trick he can in his fancy, for the better manifesting 
 our loyalty this day. 
 
 Gray. Shall we hang a puritan 1 
 
 John. No, that has been done already in Coleman 
 Street. 
 
 2d Gent. Or fire a conventicle 1 
 
 John. That is stale too. 
 
 3d Gent. Or burn the Assembly's Catechism 1 
 
 ith Gent. Or toast the king's health, every man stand- 
 ing upon his head naked 1 
 
 John (to LOVEL). We have here some pleasant mad- 
 ness. 
 
 3d Gent, (dashing his glass down). Pshaw, damn these 
 acorn cups, they would not drench a fairy. Who shall 
 pledge me in a pint bumper, while we drink the king's 
 health upon our knees 1 
 
 Lov. Why on our knees, cavalier 1 
 
 John (smiling). For more devotion, to be sure. (To 
 a servant) Sirrah, fetch the gilt goblets.
 
 48 POEMS. 
 
 (The goblets are brought. They drink the king's health 
 kneeling. A shout of general approbation following 
 the first appearance of the goblets.} 
 
 John. We have here the unchecked virtues of the 
 grape. How the vapours curl upwards ! It were a life 
 of gods to dwell in such an element : to see, and hear, 
 and talk brave things. Now fie upon these casual pota- 
 tions. That a man's most exalted reason should depend 
 upon the ignoble fermentation of a fruit, which sparrows 
 pluck at as well as we ! 
 
 Gray (aside to LOVEL). Observe how he is ravished. 
 
 Lov. Vanity and gay thoughts of wine do meet in him 
 and engender madness. 
 ( While the rest are engaged in a wild kind of talk, JOHN 
 
 advances to the front of the stage and soliloquises.} 
 
 John. My spirits turn to fire, they mount so fast. 
 My joys are turbulent, my hopes show like fruition. 
 These high and gusty relishes of life, sure, 
 Have no allayings of mortality in them. 
 I am too hot now and o'ercapable, 
 For the tedious processes, and creeping wisdom, 
 Of human acts, and enterprises of a man. 
 I want some seasonings of adversity, 
 Some strokes of the old mortifier, Calamity, 
 To take these swellings down, divines call vanity. 
 
 1st Gent. Mr. Woodvil, Mr. Woodvil. 
 
 2d Gent. Where is Woodvil ? 
 
 Gray. Let him alone. I have seen him in these lunes 
 before. His abstractions must not taint the good mirth. 
 
 John (continuing to soliloquise). for some friend 
 
 now, 
 
 To conceal nothing from, to have no secrets. 
 How fine and noble a thing is confidence, 
 How reasonable too, and almost godlike ! 
 Fast cement of fast friends, bund of society, 
 Old natural go-between in the world's business, 
 Where civil life and order, wanting this cement, 
 Would presently rush back
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 49 
 
 Into the pristine state of singularity, 
 And each man stand alone. 
 
 A Servant enters. 
 
 Serv. Gentlemen, the fireworks are ready. 
 
 1st Gent. What be they ? 
 
 Lov. The work of London artists, which our host has 
 provided in honour of this day. 
 
 2d Gent. 'Sdeath, who would part with his wine for a 
 rocket ? 
 
 Lov. Why truly, gentlemen, as our kind host has been 
 at the pains to provide this spectacle, we can do no less 
 than be present at it. It will not take up much time. 
 Every man may return fresh and thirsting to his liquor. 
 
 3cl Gent. There is reason in what he says. 
 
 2d Gent. Charge on then, bottle in hand. There's 
 husbandry in that. 
 
 \They go out, singing. Only LOVEL remains, 
 ivho observes WOODVIL. 
 
 John (still talking to himself]. This Lovel here's of a 
 
 tough honesty, 
 
 Would put the rack to the proof. He is not of that sort. 
 Which haunt my house, snorting the liquors, 
 And, when their wisdoms are afloat with wine, 
 Spend vows as fast as vapours, which go off, 
 Even with the fumes, their fathers. He is one, 
 Whose sober morning actions 
 Shame not his o'ernight's promises ; 
 Talks little, flatters less, and makes no promises ; 
 Why this is he, whom the dark-wisdom'd fate 
 Might trust her counsels of predestination with, 
 And the world be no loser. 
 Why should I fear this man 1 
 (Seeing LOVEL.) Where is the company gone? 
 
 Lov. To see the fireworks, where you will be expected 
 
 to follow. 
 But I perceive you are better engaged. 
 
 John. I have been meditating: this half-hour
 
 50 POEMS. 
 
 On all the properties of a brave friendship, 
 The mysteries that are in it, the noble uses, 
 Its limits withal, and its nice boundaries. 
 Exempli gratia, how far a man 
 May lawfully forswear himself for his friend ; 
 What quantity of lies, some of them brave ones, 
 He may lawfully incur in a friend's behalf; 
 What oaths, blood-crimes, hereditary quarrels, 
 Night-brawls, fierce words, and duels in the morning, 
 He need not stick at, to maintain his friend's honour, or 
 his cause. 
 
 Lov. I think many men would die for their friends. 
 
 John. Death ! why 'tis nothing. We go to it for sport, 
 To gain a name, or purse, or please a sullen humour, 
 When one has worn his fortune's livery threadbare, 
 Or his spleen'd mistress frowns. Husbands will venture 
 
 on it, 
 
 To cure the hot fits and cold shakings of jealousy. 
 A friend, sir, must do more. 
 
 Lov. Can he do more than die ? 
 
 John. To serve a friend this he may do. Pray mark 
 
 me. 
 
 Having a law within (great spirits feel one) 
 He cannot, ought not to be bound by any 
 Positive laws or ordinances extern, 
 But may reject all these : by the law of friendship 
 He may do so much, be they, indifferently, 
 Penn'd statutes, or the land's unwritten usages, 
 As public fame, civil compliances, 
 Misnamed honour, trust in matter of secrets, 
 All vows and promises, the feeble mind's religion, 
 (Binding our morning knowledge to approve 
 What last night's ignorance spake) ; 
 The ties of blood withal, and prejudice of kin. 
 Sir, these weak terrors 
 
 Must never shake me. I know what belongs 
 To a worthy friendship. Come, you shall have my con- 
 fidence.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 51 
 
 Lov. I hope you think me worthy. 
 
 John. You will smile to hear now 
 Sir Walter never has been out of the island. 
 
 Lov. You amaze me. 
 
 John. That same report of his escape to France 
 Was a fine tale, forged by myself 
 Ha! ha! 
 I knew it would stagger him. 
 
 Lov. Pray, give me leave. 
 
 Where has he dwelt, how lived, how lain conceal'd 1 
 Sure I may ask so much. 
 
 John. From place to place, dwelling in no place long, 
 My brother Simon still hath borne him company, 
 (Tis a brave youth, I envy him all his virtues.) 
 Disguised in foreign garb, they pass for Frenchmen, 
 Two Protestant exiles from the Limosiu 
 Newly arrived. Their dwelling's now at Nottingham, 
 Where no soul knows them. 
 
 Lov. Can you assign any reason why a gentleman of Sir 
 Walter's known prudence should expose his person so lightly 1 
 
 John. I believe, a certain fondness, 
 A child-like cleaving to the land that gave him birth 
 Chains him like fate. 
 
 Lov. I have known some exiles thus 
 To linger out the term of the law's indulgence, 
 To the hazard of being known. 
 
 John. You may suppose sometimes, 
 They use the neighbouring Sherwood for their sport, 
 Their exercise and freer recreation. 
 I see you smile. Pray now, be careful. 
 
 Lov. I am no babbler, sir ; you need not fear me. 
 
 John. But some men have been known to talk in their 
 
 sleep, 
 And tell fine tales that way. 
 
 Lov. I have heard so much. But, to say truth, I 
 mostly sleep alone. 
 
 John. Or drink, sir ? do you never drink too freely ? 
 Some men will drink, and tell you all their secrets.
 
 52 POEMS. 
 
 Lov. Why do you question me, who know my habits 1 
 
 John. I think you are no sot, 
 No tavern-troubler, worshipper of the grape ; 
 But all men drink sometimes, 
 And veriest saints at festivals relax, 
 The marriage of a friend, or a wife's birthday. 
 
 Lov. How much, sir, may a man with safety drink ? 
 (smiling). 
 
 John. Sir, three half-pints a day is reasonable ; 
 I care not if you never exceed that qxiantity. 
 
 Lov. I shall observe it ; 
 On holidays two quarts. 
 
 John. Or stay ; you keep no wench '? 
 
 Lov. Ha ! 
 
 John. No painted mistress for your private hours 1 
 You keep no whore, sir 1 
 
 Lov. What does he mean 1 
 
 John. Who for a close embrace, a toy of sin, 
 And amorous praising of your worship's breath, 
 In rosy junction of four melting lips, 
 Can kiss out secrets from you ? 
 
 Lov. How strange this passionate behaviour shows in 
 
 you ! 
 Sure you think me some weak one. 
 
 John. Pray pardon me some fears. 
 You have now the pledge of a dear father's life. 
 I am a son would fain be thought a loving one ; 
 You may allow me some fears : do not despise me, 
 If, in a posture foreign to my spirit, 
 And by our well-knit friendship I conjure you, 
 Touch not Sir Walter's life. (Kneels.} 
 
 You see these tears. My father's an old man. 
 Pray let him live. 
 
 Lov. I must be bold to tell you, these new freedoms 
 Show most unhandsome in you. 
 
 John (rising}. Ha ! do you say so ? 
 Sure, you are not grown proud upon my secret ! 
 Ah ! now I see it plain. He would be babbling.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 53 
 
 No doubt a garrulous and hard-faced traitor 
 But I'll not give you leave. (Draws.] 
 
 Lov. What does this madman mean 1 
 
 John. Come, sir ; here is no subterfuge. 
 You must kill me, or I kill you. 
 
 Lov. (drawing}. Then self-defence plead my excuse. 
 Have at you, sir. (They fight.} 
 
 John. Stay, sir. 
 
 I hope you have made your will. 
 If not, 'tis no great matter. 
 A broken Cavalier has seldom much 
 He can bequeath : an old worn peruke, 
 A snuff-box with a picture of Prince Rupert, 
 A rusty sword he'll swear was used at Naseby, 
 Though it ne'er came within ten miles of the place ; 
 And, if he's very rich, 
 A cheap edition of the Icon Basilike, 
 Is mostly all the wealth he dies possess'd of. 
 You say few prayers, I fancy ; 
 So to it again. 
 
 (They fight again. LOVEL is disarmed.} 
 
 Lov. You had best now take my life. I guess you 
 mean it. 
 
 John (musing}. No : men will say I fear'd him, if I 
 
 kiird him. 
 
 Live still, and be a traitor in thy wish, 
 But never act thy thought, being a coward. 
 That vengeance, which thy soul shall nightly thirst for, 
 And this disgrace I've done you cry aloud for, 
 Still have the will without the power to execute. 
 So now I leave you. 
 Feeling a sweet security. No doubt 
 My secret shall remain a virgin for you ! 
 
 (Goes out, smiling in scorn.} 
 
 Lov. (rising}. For once you are mistaken in your man. 
 The deed you wot of shall forthwith be clone. 
 A bird let loose, a secret out of hand, 
 Returns not back. Why, then, 'tis baby policy
 
 54 POEMS. 
 
 To menace him who hath it in his keeping. 
 
 I will go look for Gray ; 
 
 Then Northward ho ! such tricks as we shall play 
 
 Have not been seen, I think, in merry Sherwood, 
 
 Since the days of Robin Hood, that archer good. 
 
 ACT THE FOURTH. 
 SCENE. An Apartment in Woodvil Hall. 
 
 John Woodvil (alone). A weight of wine lies heavy on 
 
 my head, 
 
 The unconcocted follies of last night. 
 Now all those jovial fancies, and bright hopes, 
 Children of wine, go off like dreams. 
 This sick vertigo here 
 Preacheth of temperance, no sermon better. 
 These black thoughts, and dull melancholy, 
 That stick like burrs to the brain, will they ne'er leave 
 
 me? 
 
 Some men are full of choler, when they are drunk ; 
 Some brawl of matter foreign to themselves ; 
 And some, the most resolved fools of all, 
 Have told their dearest secrets in their cups. 
 
 SCENE. The Forest. 
 
 SIR WALTER. SIMON. LOVEL. GRAY. 
 
 Lov. Sir, we are sorry we cannot return your French 
 salutation. 
 
 Gray. Nor otherwise consider this garb you trust to, 
 than as a poor disguise. 
 
 Lov. Nor use much ceremony with a traitor. 
 
 Gray. Therefore, without much induction of super- 
 fluous words, I attach you, Sir Walter Woodvil, of high 
 treason in the king's name.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 55 
 
 Lov. And of taking part in the great Rebellion against 
 our late lawful sovereign, Charles the First. 
 
 Sim. John has betrayed us, father. 
 
 Lov. Come, sir, you had best surrender fairly. We 
 know you, sir. 
 
 Sim. Hang ye, villains, ye are two better known than 
 trusted. I have seen those faces before. Are ye not 
 two beggarly retainers, trencher-parasites, to John ? I 
 think ye rank above his footmen. A sort of bed and 
 board-worms locusts that invest our house ; a leprosy 
 that long has hung upon its walls and princely apart- 
 ments, reaching to fill all the corners of my brother's 
 once noble heart. 
 
 Gray. We are his friends. 
 
 Sim. Fie, sir, do not weep. How these rogues will 
 triumph ! Shall I whip off their heads, father ? 
 
 (Draws.} 
 
 Lov. Come, sir, though this show handsome in you, 
 being his son, yet the law must have its course. 
 
 Sim. And if I tell you, the law shall not have its 
 course, cannot ye be content ? Courage, father ; shall 
 such things as these apprehend a man 1 Which of ye 
 will venture upon me ? Will you, Mr. Constable self- 
 elect 1 or you, sir, with a pimple on your nose, got at 
 Oxford by hard drinking, your only badge of loyalty ? 
 
 Gray. 'Tis a brave youth I cannot strike at him. 
 
 Sim. Father, why do you cover your face with your 
 hands ? Why do you fetch your breath so hard 1 See, 
 villains, his heart is burst ! 0, villains, he cannot speak. 
 One of you run for some water : quickly, ye knaves ; 
 will ye have your throats cut ? [They both slink off. 
 
 How is it with you, Sir Walter 1 Look up, sir ; the 
 villains are gone. He hears me not, and this deep dis- 
 grace of treachery in his son hath touched him even to 
 the death. most distuned and distempered world, 
 where sons talk their aged fathers into their graves ! 
 Garrulous and diseased world, and still empty, rotten, 
 and hollow talking world, where good men decay, states
 
 56 POEMS. 
 
 turn round in an endless mutability, and still for the 
 
 worse, nothing is at a stay, nothing abides, but vanity, 
 
 chaotic vanity. Brother, adieu ! 
 
 There lies the parent stock which gave us life, 
 
 Which I will see consign'd with tears to earth. 
 
 Leave thou the solemn funeral rites to me, 
 
 Grief and a true remorse abide with thee. 
 
 [Sears in the bod?/. 
 
 SCENE. Another part of the Forest. 
 
 Marg. (alone). It was an error merely, and no crime, 
 An unsuspecting openness in youth, 
 That from his lips the fatal secret drew, 
 Which should have slept like one of nature's mysteries, 
 UnveiPd by any man. 
 Well, he is dead ! 
 
 And what should Margaret do in the forest ? 
 ill-starr'd John ! 
 
 Woodvil, man enfeoffed to despair ! 
 Take thy farewell of peace. 
 never look again to see good days, 
 Or close thy lids in comfortable nights, 
 Or ever think a happy thought again, 
 If what I have heard be true. 
 Forsaken of the world must Woodvil live, 
 If he did tell these men. 
 
 No tongue must speak to him, no tongue of man 
 Salute him, when he wakes up in a morning ; 
 Or bid "good-night" to John. Who seeks to live 
 In amity with thee, must for thy sake 
 Abide the world's reproach. What then 1 
 Shall Margaret join the clamours of the world 
 Against her friend 1 undiscerning Avorld, 
 That cannot from misfortune separate guilt, 
 No, not in thought ! never, never, John. 
 Prepared to share the fortunes of her friend 
 For better or for worse thy Margaret comes,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 57 
 
 To pour into thy wounds a healing love, 
 And wake the memory of an ancient friendship. 
 And pardon me, thou spirit of Sir Walter, 
 Who, in compassion to the wretched living, 
 Have but few tears to waste upon the dead. 
 
 SCENE. Woodvil Hall. 
 
 SANDFORD and MARGARET (as from a journey). 
 
 Sand. The violence of the sudden mischance hath so 
 wrought in him, who by nature is allied to nothing less than 
 a self-debasing humour of dejection, that I have never 
 seen anything more changed and spirit -broken. He hath, 
 with a peremptory resolution, dismissed the partners of 
 his riots and late hours, denied his house and person to 
 their most earnest solicitings, and will be seen by none. 
 He keeps ever alone, and his grief (which is solitary) does 
 not so much seem to possess and govern in him, as it is 
 by him, with a wilfulness of most manifest affection, 
 entertained and cherished. 
 
 Marg. How bears he up against the common rumour 1 
 
 Sand. With a strange indifference, which whosoever 
 dives not into the niceness of his sorrow, might mistake 
 for obdurate and insensate. Yet are the wings of his 
 pride for ever dipt ; and yet a virtuous predominance of 
 filial grief is so ever uppermost, that you may discover 
 his thoughts, less troubled with conjecturing what living 
 opinions will say and judge of his deeds, than absorbed 
 and buried with the dead, whom his indiscretion made so. 
 
 Marg. I knew a greatness ever to be resident in him, 
 to which the admiring eyes of men should look up even 
 in the declining and bankrupt state of his pride. Fain 
 would I see him, fain talk with him ; but that a sense 
 of respect, which is violated, when without deliberation 
 we press into the society of the unhappy, checks and 
 holds me back. How, think you, he would bear my 
 presence ? 
 
 Sand. As of an assured friend, whom in the forgetful-
 
 58 POEMS. 
 
 ness of his fortunes he passed by. See him you must ; 
 but not to-night. The newness of the sight shall move 
 the bitterest compunction and the truest remorse ; but 
 afterwards, trust me, dear lady, the happiest effects of a 
 returning peace, and a gracious comfort, to him, to you, 
 and all of us. 
 
 Marg. I think he would not deny me. He hath ere 
 this received farewell letters from his brother, who hath 
 taken a resolution to estrange himself, for a time, from 
 country, friends, and kindred, and to seek occupation for 
 his sad thoughts in travelling in foreign places, where 
 sights remote and extern to himself may draw from him 
 kindly and not painful ruminations. 
 
 Sand. I was present at the receipt of the letter. The 
 contents seemed to affect him, for a moment, with a 
 more lively passion of grief than he has at any time out- 
 wardly shown. He wept with many tears (which I had 
 not before noted in him) and appeared to be touched with 
 a sense as of some unkindness ; but the cause of their 
 sad separation and divorce quickly recurring, he presently 
 returned to his former inwardness of suffering. 
 
 Marg. The reproach of his brother's presence at this 
 hour should have been a weight more than could be 
 sustained by his already oppressed and sinking spirit. 
 Meditating upon these intricate and wide-spread sorrows 
 hath brought a heaviness upon me, as of sleep. How 
 goes the night ? 
 
 Sand. An hour past sunset. You shall first refresh 
 your limbs (tired with travel) with meats and some 
 cordial wine, and then betake your no less wearied mind 
 to repose. 
 
 Marg. A good rest to us all. 
 
 Sand. Thanks, lady.
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 59 
 
 ACT THE FIFTH. 
 JOHN WOODVIL (dressing). 
 
 John. How beautiful (handling his mourning] 
 And comely do these mourning garments show ! 
 Sure Grief hath set his sacred impress here, 
 To claim the world's respect ! they note so feelingly 
 By outward types the serious man within. 
 Alas ! what part or portion can I claim 
 In all the decencies of virtuous sorrow, 
 Which other mourners use 1 
 This black attire, abstraction from society, 
 Good thoughts, and frequent sighs, and seldom smiles, 
 A cleaving sadness native to the brow. 
 All sweet condolements of like-grieved friends, 
 (That steal away the sense of loss almost) 
 Men's pity and good offices 
 Which enemies themselves do for us then, 
 Putting their hostile disposition off, 
 As we put off our high thoughts and proud looks. 
 
 [Pauses and observes the pictures. 
 These pictures must be taken down : 
 The portraitures of our most ancient family 
 For nigh three hundred years ! How have I listen'd, 
 To hear Sir Walter, with an old man's pride, 
 Holding me in his arms a prating boy, 
 And pointing to the pictures where they hung, 
 Repeat by course their worthy histories, 
 (As Hugh de Widville, Walter, first of the name, 
 And Anne the handsome, Stephen, and famous John : 
 Telling me, I must be his famous John) 
 But that was in old times, 
 Now, no more 
 
 Must I grow proud upon our house's pride. 
 I rather, I, by most unheard-of crimes, 
 Have backward tainted all their noble blood, 
 Eased out the memory of an ancient family,
 
 60 POEMS. 
 
 And quite reversed the honours of our house 
 Who now shall sit and tell us anecdotes 1 
 The secret history of his own times, 
 And fashions of the world when he was young : 
 How England slept out three and twenty years, 
 While Carr and Villiers ruled the baby King : 
 The costly fancies of the pedant's reign, 
 Balls, feastings, huntings, shows in allegory, 
 And Beauties of the court of James the First. 
 
 MARGARET enters. 
 
 John. Comes Margaret here to witness my disgrace 1 
 
 lady, I have suffer'd loss, 
 
 And diminution of my honour's brightness. 
 You bring some images of old times, Margaret, 
 That should be now forgotten. 
 
 Marg. Old times should never be forgotten, John. 
 
 1 came to talk about them with my friend. 
 
 John. I did refuse you, Margaret, in my pride. 
 
 Marg. If John rejected Margaret in his pride, 
 (As who does not, being splenetic, refuse 
 Sometimes old play-fellows) the spleen being gone, 
 The offence no longer lives. 
 
 Woodvil, those were happy days, 
 
 When we two first began to love. When first, 
 Under pretence of visiting my father, 
 (Being then a stripling nigh upon my age) 
 You came a-wooing to his daughter, John, 
 Do you remember, 
 
 With what a coy reserve and seldom speech, 
 (Young maidens must be chary of their speech) 
 
 1 kept the honours of my maiden pride ? 
 I was your favourite then. 
 
 John. Margaret, Margaret ! 
 These your submissions to my low estate, 
 And cleavings to the fates of sunken Woodvil, 
 Write bitter things 'gainst my unworthiness : 
 Thou perfect pattern of thy slander'd sex,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 61 
 
 Whom miseries of mine could never alienate, 
 Nor change of fortune shake ; whom injuries, 
 And slights (the worst of injuries) which moved 
 Thy nature to return scorn with like scorn, 
 Then when you left in virtuous pride this house, 
 Could not so separate, but not in this 
 My day of shame, when all the world forsake me, 
 You only visit me, love, and forgive me. 
 
 Marg. Dost yet remember the green arbour, John, 
 In the south gardens of my father's house, 
 Where we have seen the summer sun go down, 
 Exchanging true love's vows without restraint 1 
 And that old wood, you call'd your wilderness, 
 And vow'd in sport to build a chapel in it, 
 There dwell 
 
 " Like hermit poor 
 In pensive place obscure." 
 
 And tell your Ave Maries by the curls 
 
 (Dropping like golden beads) of Margaret's hair ; 
 
 And make confession seven times a day 
 
 Of every thought that stray'd from love and Margaret, 
 
 And I your saint the penance should appoint 
 
 Believe me, sir, I will not now be laid 
 
 Aside, like an old fashion. 
 
 John. lady, poor and abject are my thoughts, 
 My pride is cured, my hopes are under clouds, 
 I have no part in any good man's love, 
 In all earth's pleasures portion have I none, 
 I fade and wither in my own esteem, 
 This earth holds not alive so poor a thing as I am. 
 I was not always thus. (Weeps.) 
 
 Marg. Thou noble nature, 
 Which lion-like didst awe the inferior creatures, 
 Now trampled on by beasts of basest quality, 
 My dear heart's lord, life's pride, soul-honour'd John ; 
 Upon her knees (regard her poor request) 
 Your favourite, once-beloved Margaret, kneels.
 
 62 POEMS. 
 
 John. What wouldst thou, lady, ever-honour'd Mar- 
 garet 1 
 
 Marg. That John would think more nobly of himself, 
 More worthily of high heaven ; 
 And not for one misfortune, child of chance, 
 No crime, but unforeseen, and sent to punish 
 The less offence with image of the greater, 
 Thereby to work the soul's humility, 
 (Which end hath happily not been frustrate quite) 
 not for one offence mistrust heaven's mercy, 
 Nor quit thy hope of happy days to come 
 John yet has many happy days to live ; 
 To live and make atonement. 
 
 John. Excellent lady, 
 
 Whose suit hath drawn this softness from my eyes, 
 Not the world's scorn, nor falling off of friends 
 Could ever do. Will you go with me, Margaret ? 
 
 Marg. (rising). Go whither, John 1 
 
 John. Go in with me, 
 And pray for the peace of our unquiet minds 1 
 
 Marg. That I will, John. [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE. An inner Apartment. 
 JOHN is discovered kneeling, MARGARET standing over him. 
 
 John (rises). I cannot bear 
 To see you waste that youth and excellent beauty 
 ('Tis now the golden time of the day with you) 
 In tending such a broken wretch as I am. 
 
 Marg. John will break Margaret's heart, if he speak so. 
 sir, sir, sir, you are too melancholy, 
 And I must call it caprice. I am somewhat bold 
 Perhaps in this. But you are now my patient, 
 (You know you gave me leave to call you so) 
 And I must chide these pestilent humours from. you. 
 
 John. They are gone, 
 Mark, love, how cheerfully I speak !
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 63 
 
 I can smile too, and I almost begin 
 
 To understand what kind of creature Hope is. 
 
 Marg. Now this is better, this mirth becomes you, John. 
 
 John, Yet tell me, if I overact my mirth, 
 (Being but a novice, I may fall into that error) 
 That were a sad indecency, you know. 
 
 Marg. Nay, never fear. 
 I will be mistress of your humours, 
 And you shall frown or smile by the book. 
 And herein I shall be most peremptory, 
 Cry " This shows well, but that inclines to levity, 
 This frown has too much of the "Woodvil in it, 
 But that fine sunshine has redeem'd it quite." 
 
 John. How sweetly Margaret robs me of myself ! 
 
 Marg. To give you in your stead a better self; 
 Such as you were, when these eyes first beheld 
 You mounted on your sprightly steed, White Margery, 
 Sir Rowland, my father's gift, 
 And all my maidens gave my heart for lost. 
 I was a young thing then, being newly come 
 Home from my convent education, where 
 Seven years I had wasted in the bosom of France : 
 Returning home true Protestant, you calPd me 
 Your little heretic nun. How timid-bashful 
 Did John salute his love, being newly seen. 
 Sir Rowland term'd it a rare modesty, 
 And praised it in a youth. 
 
 John. Now Margaret weeps herself. 
 
 A noise of bells heard. 
 
 Marg. Hark the bells, John. 
 
 John. Those are the church bells of St. Mary Ottery. 
 
 Marg. I know it. 
 
 John. Saint Mary Ottery, my native village 
 In the sweet shire of Devon. 
 Those are the bells. 
 
 Marg. Wilt go to church, John 1 
 
 John. I have been there already.
 
 64 POEMS. 
 
 Marg. How canst say thou hast been there already 1 
 The bells are only now ringing for morning service, and 
 hast thou been at church already ? 
 
 John. I left my bed betimes, I could not sleep, 
 And when I rose, I look'd (as my custom is) 
 From my chamber window, where I can see the sun rise ; 
 And the first object I discern'd 
 Was the glistering spire of St. Mary Ottery. 
 
 Marg. Well, John, 
 
 John. Then I remember'd, 'twas the Sabbath day, 
 Immediately a wish arose in my mind, 
 To go to church and pray with Christian people, 
 And then I check'd myself, and said to myself, 
 " Thou hast been a heathen, John, these two years past, 
 (Not having been at church in all that time) 
 And is it fit, that now for the first time 
 Thou should'st offend the eyes of Christian people 
 With a murderer's presence in the house of prayer ? 
 Thou would'st but discompose their pious thoughts, 
 And do thyself no good : for how could'st thou pray, 
 With unwash'd hands, and lips unused to the offices '?" 
 And then I at my own presumption smiled ; 
 And then I wept that I should smile at all, 
 Having such cause of grief ! I wept outright ; 
 Tears, like a river, flooded all my face, 
 And I began to pray, and found I could pray ; 
 And still I yearn'd to say my prayers in the church. 
 " Doubtless (said I) one might find comfort in it." 
 So stealing down the stairs, like one that fear'd detection, 
 Or was about to act unlawful business 
 At that dead time of dawn, 
 
 I flew to the church, and found the doors wide open 
 (Whether by negligence I knew not, 
 Or some peculiar grace to me vouchsafed, 
 For all things felt like mystery). 
 
 Marg. Yes. 
 
 John. So entering in, not without fear, 
 I pass'd into the family pew,
 
 JOHN WOODVIL. 65 
 
 And covering up my eyes for shame, 
 
 And deep perception of umvorthiness, 
 
 Upon the little hassock knelt me down, 
 
 Where I so oft had kneel'd, 
 
 A docile infant by Sir Walter's side ; 
 
 And, thinking so, I wept a second flood 
 
 More poignant than the first ; 
 
 But afterwards was greatly comforted. 
 
 It seem'd, the guilt of blood was passing from me 
 
 Even in the act and agony of tears, 
 
 And all my sins forgiven.
 
 66 POEMS. 
 
 THE WITCH. 
 
 A DBAMATIC SKETCH OF THE SEVENTEENTH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Old Servant in the Family of SIR FRANCIS FAIRFORD. 
 STKANGER. 
 
 Servant. One summer night Sir Francis, as it chanced, 
 Was pacing to and fro in the avenue 
 That westward fronts our house, 
 Among those aged oaks, said to have been planted 
 Three hundred years ago 
 By a neighb'ring prior of the Fairford name. 
 Being o'ertask'd in thought, he heeded not 
 The importunate suit of one who stood by the gate, 
 And begg'd an alms. 
 
 Some say he shoved her rudely from the gate 
 With angry chiding ; but I can never think 
 (Our master's nature hath a sweetness in it) 
 That he could use a woman, an old woman, 
 With such discourtesy : but he refused her 
 And better had he met a lion in his path 
 Than that old woman that night ; 
 For she was one who practised the black arts, 
 And served the devil, being since burnt for witchcraft. 
 She look'd on him as one that meant to blast him, 
 And with a frightful noise 
 ('Twos partly like a woman's voice, 
 And partly like the hissing of a snake), 
 She nothing said but this : 
 (Sir Francis told the words) 
 
 A mischief, mischief, mischief, 
 
 And a nine-times-kilting curse, 
 By day and by night, to the caitiff wight, 
 Who shakes the poor like snakes from his door, 
 
 And shuts up the womb of his purse.
 
 THE WITCH. 67 
 
 And still she cried 
 A mischief, 
 
 And a nine-fold-withering curse : 
 For that shall come to thee that ivill undo thee, 
 
 Both all that tliou fearest and worse. 
 So saying she departed, 
 Leaving Sir Francis like a man, beneath 
 Whose feet a scaffolding was suddenly falling ; 
 So he described it. 
 
 Sir. A terrible curse ! What followed 1 
 
 Serv. Nothing immediate, but some two months after 
 Young Philip Fairford suddenly fell sick, 
 And none could tell what ailed him ; for he lay, 
 And pined, and pined, till all his hair fell off, 
 And he, that was full-flesh'd, became as thin 
 As a two-month's babe that has been starved in the 
 
 nursing. 
 
 And sure I think 
 
 He bore his death-wound like a little child ; 
 With such rare sweetness of dumb melancholy 
 He strove to clothe his agony in smiles, 
 Whicli he would force up in his poor pale cheeks, 
 Like ill-timed guests that had no proper dwelling there ; 
 And, when they ask'd him his complaint, he laid 
 His hand upon his heart to show the place, 
 Where Susan came to him a-uights, he said, 
 And prick'd him with a pin. - 
 And thereupon Sir Francis call'd to mind 
 The beggar-witch that stood by the gateway 
 And begged an alms. 
 
 Str. But did the witch confess ? 
 
 Serv. All this and more at her death. 
 
 Str. I do not love to credit tales of magic. 
 Heaven's music, which is Order, seems unstrung, 
 And this brave world 
 (The Mystery of God) unbeautified, 
 Disorder'd, marr'd, where such strange things are acted. 
 
 1799.
 
 68 POEMS. 
 
 A BALLAD : 
 
 NOTING THE DIFFERENCE OF RICH AND POOR, IN THE 
 WAYS OF A RICH MAN'S PALACE AND A POOR MAN'S 
 WORKHOUSE. 
 
 To the tune of the " Old and Young Courtier." 
 
 IN a costly palace Youth goes clad in gold ; 
 In a wretched workhouse Age's limbs are cold : 
 There they sit, the old men by a shivering fire, 
 Still close and closer cowering, warmth is their desire. 
 
 In a costly palace, when the brave gallants dine, 
 They have store of good venison, with old canary wine, 
 With singing and music to heighten the cheer ; 
 Coarse bits, with grudging, are the pauper's best fare. 
 
 In a costly palace, Youth is still carest 
 
 By a train of attendants which laugh at my young Lord's 
 
 jest ; 
 
 In a wretched workhouse the contrary prevails : 
 Does age begin to prattle 1 no man heark'neth to his 
 
 tales. 
 
 In a costly palace, if the child with a pin 
 
 Do but chance to prick a finger, straight the doctor is 
 
 called in ; 
 
 In a wretched workhouse, men are left to perish 
 For want of proper cordials, which their old age might 
 
 cherish. 
 
 In a costly palace, Youth enjoys his lust ; 
 In a wretched workhouse Age, in corners thrust, 
 Thinks upon the former days, when he was well to do, 
 Had children to stand by him, both friends and kinsmen 
 too. 
 
 In a costly palace, Youth his temples hides 
 
 With a new devised peruke that reaches to his sides ;
 
 HESTER. 69 
 
 In a wretched workhouse Age's crown is bare, 
 With a few thin locks, just to fence out the cold air. 
 
 In peace, as in war, 'tis our young gallants' pride 
 
 To walk, each one i' the streets, with a rapier by his 
 
 side, 
 
 That none to do them injury may have pretence ; 
 Wretched Age, in poverty, must brook offence. 
 
 1800. 
 
 BALLAD, FROM THE GERMAN. 
 
 THE clouds are blackening, the storms threatening, 
 
 And ever the forest maketh a moan ; 
 Billows are breaking, the damsel's heart aching, 
 
 Thus by herself she singeth alone 
 Weeping right plenteously. 
 
 The world is empty, the heart is dead surely, 
 
 In this world plainly all seemeth amiss ; 
 To Thy breast, Holy One, take now Thy little one, 
 I have had earnest of all earth's bliss, 
 Living right lovingly. 
 
 1800. 
 
 HESTER. 
 
 WHEN^ maidens such as Hester die, 
 Their place ye may not well supply, 
 Though ye among a thousand try, 
 With vain endeavour. 
 
 A month or more hath she been dead, 
 Yet cannot I by force be led 
 To think upon the wormy bed, 
 And her together. 
 
 A springy motion in her gait, 
 A rising step, did indicate 
 Of pride and joy no common rate, 
 That flush'd her spirit.
 
 70 POEMS. 
 
 I know not by what name beside 
 I shall it call : if 'twas not pride, 
 It was a joy to that allied, 
 She did inherit. 
 
 Her parents held the Quaker rule, 
 Which doth the human feeling cool, 
 But she was train'd in Nature's school, 
 Nature had blest her. 
 
 A waking eye, a prying mind, 
 A heart that stirs is hard to bind, 
 A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind, 
 Ye could not Hester. 
 
 My sprightly neighbour, gone before 
 To that unknown and silent shore, 
 Shall we not meet, as heretofore, 
 Some summer morning, 
 
 When from thy cheerful eyes a ray 
 Hath struck a bliss upon the day, 
 A bliss that would not go away, 
 A sweet forewarning ? 
 
 1803. 
 
 A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO. 
 
 MAY the Babylonish curse 
 
 Straight confound my stammering verse, 
 
 If I can a passage see 
 
 In this word-perplexity, 
 
 Or a fit expression find, 
 
 Or a language to my mind, 
 
 (Still the phrase is wide or scant) 
 
 To take leave of thee, GKEAT PLANT ! 
 
 Or in any terms relate 
 
 Half my love, or half my hate :
 
 A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO. 71 
 
 For I hate, yet love, thee so, 
 That, whichever thing I show, 
 The plain truth will seem to be 
 A constrain'd hyperbole, 
 And the passion to proceed 
 More from a mistress than a weed. 
 
 Sooty retainer to the vine, 
 Bacchus' black servant, negro-fine ; 
 Sorcerer, that makest us dote upon 
 Thy begrimed complexion, 
 And, for thy pernicious sake, 
 More and greater oaths to break 
 Than reclaimed lovers take 
 'Gainst women : thou thy siege dost lay 
 Much too in the female way, 
 While thou suck'st the labouring breath 
 Faster than kisses or than death. 
 
 Thou in such a cloud dost bind us, 
 
 That our worst foes cannot find us, 
 
 And ill fortune, that would thwart us, 
 
 Shoots at rovers, shooting at us ; 
 
 While each man, thro' thy heightening steam, 
 
 Does like a smoking Etna seem, 
 
 And all about us does express 
 
 (Fancy and wit in richest dress) 
 
 A Sicilian fruitfulness. 
 
 Thou through such a mist dost shew UP, 
 That our best friends do not know us, 
 And, for those allowed features, 
 Due to reasonable creatures 
 Liken'st us to fell Chimeras, 
 Monsters that, who see us, fear us ; 
 Worse than Cerberus or Geryon, 
 Or, who first loved a cloud, Ixion.
 
 72 POEMS. 
 
 Bacchus we know, and we allow 
 His tipsy rites. But what art thou, 
 That but by reflex can'st show 
 What his deity can do, 
 As the false Egyptian spell 
 Aped the true Hebrew miracle 1 
 Some few vapours thou may'st raise, 
 The weak brain may serve to amaze, 
 But to the reins and nobler heart 
 Can'st nor life nor heat impart. 
 
 Brother of Bacchus, later born, 
 The old world was sure forlorn, 
 Wanting thee, that aidest more 
 The god's victories than before 
 All his panthers, and the brawls 
 Of his piping Bacchanals. 
 These, as stale, we disallow, 
 Or judge of thee meant : only thou 
 His true Indian conquest art ; 
 And, for ivy round his dart, 
 The reformed god now weaves 
 A finer thyrsus of thy leaves. 
 
 Scent to match thy rich perfume 
 Chemic art did ne'er presume 
 Through her quaint alembic strain, 
 None so sovereign to the brain. 
 Nature, that did in thee excel, 
 Framed again no second smell. 
 Koses, violets, but toys 
 For the smaller sort of boys, 
 Or for greener damsels meant ; 
 Thou art the only manly scent. 
 
 Stinking'st of the stinking kind, 
 Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, 
 Africa, that brags her foyson, 
 Breeds no such prodigious poison,
 
 A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO. 73 
 
 Henbane, nightshade, both together, 
 Hemlock, aconite 
 
 Nay, rather, 
 
 Plant divine, of rarest virtue ; 
 Blisters on the tongue would hurt you, 
 'Twas but in a sort I blamed thee ; 
 None e'er prosper'd who defamed thee ; 
 Irony all, and feign'd abuse, 
 Such as perplex'd lovers use, 
 At a need, when, in despair 
 To paint forth their fairest fair, 
 Or in part but to express 
 That exceeding comeliness 
 Which their fancies doth so strike 
 They borrow language of dislike ; 
 And, instead of Dearest Miss, 
 Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss, 
 And those forms of old admiring, 
 Call her Cockatrice and Siren, 
 Basilisk, and all that's evil, 
 Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil, 
 Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor, 
 Monkey, Ape, and twenty more ; 
 Friendly Traitress, loving Foe,' 
 Not that she is truly so, 
 But no other way they know 
 A contentment to express, 
 Borders so upon excess, 
 That they do not rightly wot 
 Whether it be pain or not. 
 
 Or, as men, constrain'd to part 
 With what's nearest to their heart, 
 While their sorrow's at the height, 
 Lose discrimination quite, 
 And their hasty wrath let fall, 
 To appease their frantic gall,
 
 74 POEMS. 
 
 On the darling thing whatever, 
 Whence they feel it death to sever, 
 Though it be, as they, perforce, 
 Guiltless of the sad divorce. 
 
 For I must (nor let it grieve thee, 
 Friendliest of plants, that I must) leave thee. 
 For thy sake, TOBACCO, I 
 Would do anything but die, 
 And but seek to extend my days 
 Long enough to sing thy praise. 
 But, as she, who once hath been 
 A king's consort, is a queen 
 Ever after, nor will bate 
 Any tittle of her state, 
 Though a widow, or divorced, 
 So I, from thy converse forced, 
 The old name and style retain, 
 A right Katherine of Spain ; 
 And a seat, too, 'mongst the joys 
 Of the blest Tobacco Boys ; 
 Where, though I, by sour physician, 
 Am debarr'd the full fruition 
 Of thy favours, I may catch 
 Some collateral sweets, and snatch 
 Sidelong odours, that give life 
 Like glances from a neighbour's wife ; 
 And still live in the by-places 
 And the suburbs of thy graces ; 
 And in thy borders take delight, 
 An unconquer'd Canaanite. 
 
 1805.
 
 THE THREE FRIENDS. 75 
 
 LINES ON THE CELEBRATED PICTURE 
 
 BY LEONARDO DA VINCI ; CALLED THE VIRGIN OF THE 
 
 ROCKS. 
 
 WHILE young John runs to greet 
 The greater Infant's feet, 
 
 The mother standing by, with trembling passion 
 Of devout admiration, 
 
 Beholds the engaging mystic play, and pretty adoration ; 
 Nor knows as yet the full event 
 Of those so low beginnings, 
 From whence we date our winnings, 
 But wonders at the intent 
 
 Of those new rites, and what that strange child-worship 
 meant. 
 
 But at her side 
 An angel doth abide, 
 With such a perfect joy 
 As no dim doubts alloy, 
 An intuition, 
 A glory, an amenity, 
 Passing the dark condition 
 Of blind humanity, 
 As if he surely knew 
 All the blest wonders should ensue, 
 Or he had lately left the upper sphere, 
 And had read all the sovran schemes and divine riddles 
 there. 
 
 The three following from " Poetry for Children," 1809. 
 THE THREE FRIEXDS. 
 
 THREE young maids in friendship met ; 
 Mary, Martha, Margaret. 
 Margaret was tall and fair, 
 Martha shorter by a hair ;
 
 76 POEMS. 
 
 If the first excell'd in feature, 
 
 Th' other's grace and ease were greater ; 
 
 Mary, though to rival loth, 
 
 In their best gifts equall'd both. 
 
 They a due proportion kept ; 
 
 Martha mourn'd if Margaret wept ; 
 
 Margaret joy'd when any good 
 
 She of Martha understood ; 
 
 And in sympathy for either 
 
 Mary was outdone by neither. 
 
 Thus far, for a happy space, 
 
 All three ran an even race, 
 
 A most constant friendship proving, 
 
 Equally beloved and loving ; 
 
 All their wishes, joys, the same ; 
 
 Sisters only not in name. 
 
 Fortune upon each one smiled, 
 As upon a favourite child ; 
 Well to do and well to see 
 Were the parents of all three ; 
 Till on Martha's father crosses 
 Brought a flood of worldly losses, 
 And his fortunes rich and great 
 Changed at once to low estate ; 
 Under which o'erwhelming blow 
 Martha's mother was laid low; 
 She a hapless orphan left, 
 Of maternal care bereft, 
 Trouble following trouble fast, 
 Lay in a sick bed at last. 
 
 In the depth of her affliction 
 Martha now received conviction, 
 That a true and faithful friend 
 Can the surest comfort lend. 
 Night and day, with friendship tried, 
 Ever constant by her side
 
 THE THREE FRIENDS. 77 
 
 Was her gentle Mary found, 
 With a love that knew no bound ; 
 And the solace she imparted 
 Saved her dying broken-hearted. 
 
 In this scene of earthly things 
 Not one good unmixed springs. 
 That which had to Martha proved 
 A sweet consolation, moved 
 Different feelings of regret 
 In the mind of Margaret. 
 She, whose love was not less dear, 
 Nor affection less sincere 
 To her friend, was, by occasion 
 Of more distant habitation, 
 Fewer visits forced to pay her, 
 When no other caixse did stay her ; 
 And her Mary living nearer, 
 Margaret began to fear her, 
 Lest her visits day by day 
 Martha's heart should steal away. 
 That whole heart she ill could spare her, 
 Where till now she'd been a sharer. 
 From this cause with grief she pined, 
 Till at length her health declined. 
 All her cheerful spirits flew, 
 Fast as Martha gather'd new ; 
 And her sickness waxed sore, 
 Just when Martha felt no more. 
 
 Mary, who had quick suspicion 
 Of her alter'd friend's condition, 
 Seeing Martha's convalescence 
 Less demanded now her presence, 
 With a goodness, built on reason, 
 Changed her measures with the season ; 
 Turn'd her steps from Martha's door, 
 Went where she was wanted more ;
 
 78 POEMS. 
 
 All her care and thoughts were set 
 Now to tend on Margaret. 
 Mary, living 'twixt the two, 
 From her home could oftener go, 
 Either of her friends to see, 
 Than they could together be. 
 
 Truth explain'd is to suspicion 
 Evermore the best physician. 
 Soon her visits had the effect ; 
 All that Margaret did suspect, 
 From her fancy vanish'd clean ; 
 She was soon what she had been, 
 And the colour she did lack, 
 To her faded cheek came back. 
 Wounds which love had made her feel, 
 Love alone had power to heal. 
 
 Martha, who the frequent visit 
 Now had lost, and sore did miss it, 
 With impatience waxed cross, 
 Counted Margaret's gain her loss ; 
 All that Mary did confer 
 On her friend, thought due to her. 
 In her girlish bosom rise 
 Little foolish jealousies, 
 Which into such rancour wrought, 
 She one day for Margaret sought ; 
 Finding her by chance alone, 
 She began, with reasons shewn, 
 To insinuate a fear 
 Whether Mary was sincere ; 
 Wish'd that Margaret would take heed 
 Whence her actions did proceed. 
 For herself, she'd long been minded 
 Not with outsides to be blinded; 
 All that pity and compassion, 
 She believed was affectation ;
 
 THE THREE FRIENDS. 79 
 
 In her heart she doubted whether 
 
 Mary cared a pin for either. 
 
 She could keep whole weeks at distance, 
 
 And not know of their existence, 
 
 While all things remaiu'd the same ; 
 
 But when some misfortune came, 
 
 Then she made a great parade 
 
 Of her sympathy and aid, 
 
 Not that she did really grieve, 
 
 It was only make-believe, 
 
 And she cared for nothing, so 
 
 She might her fine feelings shew, 
 
 And get credit, on her part, 
 
 For a soft and tender heart. 
 
 With such speeches, smoothly made, 
 She found methods to persuade 
 Margaret (who, being sore 
 From the doubts she'd felt before, 
 Was prepared for mistrust) 
 To believe her reasons just ; 
 Quite destroy'd that comfort glad, 
 Which in Mary late she had ; 
 Made her, in experience' spite, 
 Think her friend a hypocrite, 
 And resolve, with cruel scoff, 
 To renounce and cast her off. 
 
 See how good turns are rewarded ! 
 She of both is now discarded, 
 W T ho to both had been so late 
 Their support in low estate, 
 All their comfort and their stay 
 Now of both is cast away. 
 But the league her presence cherish'd, 
 Losing its best prop, soon perish'd ; 
 She, that was a link to either, 
 To keep them and it together,
 
 80 POEMS. 
 
 Being gone, the two (no wonder) 
 That were left, soon fell asunder ; 
 Some civilities were kept, 
 But the heart of friendship slept ; 
 Love with hollow forms was fed, 
 But the life of love lay dead : 
 A cold intercourse they held 
 After Mary was expell'd. 
 
 Two long years did intervene 
 Since they'd either of them seen, 
 Or, by letter, any word 
 Of their old companion heard, 
 When, upon a day, once walking, 
 Of indifferent matters talking, 
 They a female figure met ; 
 Martha said to Margaret, 
 " That young maid in face does carry 
 A resemblance strong of Mary." 
 Margaret, at nearer sight, 
 Own'd her observation right : 
 But they did not far proceed 
 Ere they knew 'twas she indeed. 
 She but, ah ! how changed they view her 
 From that person which they knew her ; 
 Her fine face disease had scarr'd, 
 And its matchless beauty marr'd : 
 But enough was left to trace 
 Mary's sweetness Mary's grace. 
 When her eye did first behold them, 
 How they blush'd ! but, when she told them, 
 How on a sick-bed she lay 
 Months, while they had kept away, 
 And had no inquiries made 
 If she were alive or dead ; 
 How, for want of a true friend, 
 She was brought near to her end,
 
 TO A RIVER IN WHICH A CHILD WAS DROWNED. 81 
 
 And was like so to have died. 
 
 With no friend at her bed-side ; 
 
 How the constant irritation, 
 
 Caused by fruitless expectation 
 
 Of their coming, had extended 
 
 The illness, when she might have mended, 
 
 Then, then, how did reflection 
 
 Come on them with recollection ! 
 
 All that she had done for them, 
 
 How it did their fault condemn ! 
 
 But sweet Mary, still the same, 
 Kindly eased them of their shame : 
 Speek to them with accents bland, 
 Took them friendly by the hand ; 
 Bound them both with promise fast, 
 Not to speak of troubles past - } 
 Made them on the spot declare 
 A new league of friendship there ; 
 Which, without a word of strife, 
 Lasted thenceforth long as life. 
 Martha now and Margaret 
 Strove who most should pay the debt 
 Which they owed her, nor did vary 
 Ever after from their Mary. 
 
 1809. 
 
 TO A RIVER IN WHICH A CHILD WAS DROWNED. 
 
 SMILING river, smiling river, 
 
 On thy bosom sunbeams play ; 
 Though they're fleeting, and retreating, 
 
 Thou hast more deceit than they. 
 
 In thy channel, in thy channel, 
 
 Choked with ooze and gravelly stones, 
 
 Deep immersed, and unhearsed, 
 
 Lies young Edward's corse : his bones 
 G
 
 82 POEMS. 
 
 Ever whitening, ever whitening, 
 As thy waves against them dash : 
 
 What thy torrent, in the current, 
 Swallow'd, now it helps to wash. 
 
 As if senseless, as if senseless 
 Things had feeling in this case ; 
 
 What so blindly and unkindly 
 It destroy'd, it now does grace. 
 
 1809. 
 
 QUEEN ORIANA'S DREAM. 
 
 " ON a bank with roses shaded, 
 Whose sweet scent the violets aided, 
 Violets whose breath alone 
 Yields but feeble smell or none, 
 (Sweeter bed Jove ne'er reposed on 
 When his eyes Olympus closed on) 
 While o'erhead six slaves did hold 
 Canopy of cloth o' gold, 
 And two more did music keep, 
 Which might Juno lull to sleep, 
 Oriana who was queen 
 To the mighty Tamerlane, 
 That was lord of all the land 
 Between Thrace and Samarcand, 
 While the noon-tide fervour beam'd, 
 Mused herself to sleep and drearrtd." 
 
 Thus far, in magnific strain, 
 A young poet soothed his vein, 
 But he had nor prose nor numbers 
 To express a princess' slumbers. 
 Youthful Richard had strange fancies, 
 Was deep versed in old romances, 
 And could talk whole hours upon 
 The great Cham and Prester John, 
 Tell the field in which the Sophy 
 From the Tartar won a trophy
 
 TO T. L. H. A CHILD. 83 
 
 What he read with such delight of, 
 Thought he could as easily write of 
 But his over-young invention 
 Kept not pace with brave intention. 
 Twenty suns did rise and set, 
 And he could no further get ; 
 But, unable to proceed, 
 Made a virtue out of need, 
 And, his labours wiselier cleem'd of, 
 Did omit tohat the queen dream'd of. 
 
 1809. 
 
 TO T. L. H. A CHILD. 
 
 MODEL of thy parent dear, 
 Serious infant worth a fear : 
 In thy unfaltering visage well 
 Picturing forth the son of TELL, 
 When on his forehead, firm and good, 
 Motionless mark, the apple stood ; 
 Guileless traitor, rebel mild, 
 Convict unconscious, culprit child ! 
 Gates that close with iron roar 
 Have been to thee thy nursery door ; 
 Chains that chink in cheerless cells 
 Have been thy rattles and thy bells ; 
 Walls contrived for giant sin 
 Have hemm'd thy faultless weakness in ; 
 Near thy sinless bed black Guilt 
 Her discordant house hath built, 
 And fill'd it with her monstrous brood 
 Sights, by thee not understood 
 Sights of fear, and of distress, 
 That pass a harmless infant's guess ! 
 
 But the clouds, that overcast 
 Thy young morning, may not last. 
 Soon shall arrive the rescuing hour, 
 That yields thee up to Nature's power.
 
 84 POEMS. 
 
 Nature, that so late doth greet thee, 
 
 Shall in o'er-flowing measure meet thee. 
 
 She shall recompense with cost 
 
 For every lesson thou hast lost. 
 
 Then wandering up thy sire's loved hill, 1 
 
 Thou shalt take thy airy fill 
 
 Of health and pastime. Birds shall sing 
 
 For thy delight each May morning. 
 
 'Mid new-yean'd lambkins thou shalt play, 
 
 Hardly less a lamb than they. 
 
 Then thy prison's lengthen'd bound 
 
 Shall be the horizon skirting round. 
 
 And, while thou fill'st thy lap with flowers, 
 
 To make amends for wintry hours, 
 
 The breeze, the sunshine, and the place, 
 
 Shall from thy tender brow efface 
 
 Each vestige of untimely care, 
 
 That sour restraint had graven there ; 
 
 And on thy every look impress 
 
 A more excelling childishness. 
 
 So shall be thy days beguiled, 
 THOKNTON HUNT, my favourite child. 
 
 1813. 
 
 TO MISS KELLY. 
 
 You are not, Kelly, of the common strain, 
 That stoop their pride and female honour down 
 To please that many-headed beast the town, 
 And vend their lavish smiles and tricks for gain : 
 By fortune thrown amid the actors' train, 
 You keep your native dignity of thought ; 
 The plaudits that attend you come unsought, 
 As tributes due unto your natural vein. 
 Your tears have passion in them, and a grace 
 Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow ; 
 
 1 Hampstead.
 
 THE FAMILY NAME. 85 
 
 Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace, 
 That vanish and return we know not how 
 And please the better from a pensive face, 
 And thoughtful eye, and a reflecting brow. 
 
 ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON 
 
 GARDENS. 
 
 QUEEN-BIED that sittest on thy shining nest 
 And thy young cygnets without sorrow hatchest, 
 And thou, thou other royal bird, that watchest 
 Lest the white mother wandering feet molest : 
 Shrined are your offspring in a crystal cradle, 
 Brighter than Helen's ere she yet had burst 
 Her shelly prison. They shall be born at first 
 Strong, active, graceful, perfect, swan-like, able 
 To tread the land or waters with security, 
 Unlike poor human births, conceived in sin, 
 In grief brought forth, both outwardly and in 
 Confessing weakness, error, and impurity. 
 Did heavenly creatures own succession's line, 
 The births of heaven like to yours would shine. 
 
 THE FAMILY NAME. 
 
 WHAT reason first imposed thee, gentle name, 
 Name that my father bore, and his sire's sire, 
 Without reproach 1 we trace our stream no higher ; 
 And I, a childless man, may end the same. 
 Perchance some shepherd on Lincolnian plains, 
 In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks, 
 Received thee first amid the merry mocks 
 And arch allusions of his fellow swains. 
 Perchance from Salem's holier fields return'd, 
 With glory gotten on the heads abhorr'cl 
 Of faithless Saracens, some martial lord 
 Took HIS meek title, in whose zeal he burn'd. 
 Whate'er the fount whence thy beginnings came, 
 No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle name.
 
 86 POEMS. 
 
 TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ., OF THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 
 
 JOHN, you were figuring in the gay career 
 Of blooming manhood with a young man's joy, 
 When I was yet a little peevish boy 
 Though time has made the difference disappear 
 Betwixt our ages, which then seemed so great 
 And still by rightful custom you retain, 
 Much of the old authoritative strain, 
 And keep the elder brother up in state. 
 ! you do well in this. 'Tis man's worst deed 
 To let the " things that have been " run to waste, 
 And in the unmeaning present sink the past : 
 In whose dim glass even now I faintly read 
 Old buried forms, and faces long ago, 
 Which you, and I, and one more, only know. 
 
 TO MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY. 
 
 (Prefixed to the Second Volume of Lamb's Collected Works, 1818.) 
 
 FORGIVE me, BURNEY, if to thee these late 
 
 And hasty products of a critic pen, 
 
 Thyself no common judge of books and men, 
 
 In feeling of thy worth I dedicate. 
 
 My verse was offer'd to an older friend ; 
 
 The humbler prose has fallen to thy share : 
 
 Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, 
 
 What spoken in thy presence must offend. 
 
 That, set aside some few caprices wild, 
 
 Those humorous clouds, that flit o'er brightest days, 
 
 In all my threadings of this worldly maze, 
 
 (And I have watch'd thee almost from a child,) 
 
 Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, 
 
 I have not found a whiter soul than thine.
 
 TO BARRY CORNWALL. 87 
 
 WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE ON THE 
 
 15TH AUGUST, 1819. 
 
 I WAS not train'd in Academic bowers, 
 
 And to those learned streams I nothing owe 
 
 Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow ; 
 
 Mine have been anything but studious hours. 
 
 Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, 
 
 Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap ; 
 
 My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, 
 
 And I walk gowned ; feel unusual powers. 
 
 Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech, 
 
 Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain ; 
 
 And my skull teems with notions infinite. 
 
 Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach 
 
 Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen's vein, 
 
 And half had stagger'd that stout Stagirite ! 
 
 TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS, PUBLISHED UNDER 
 THE NAME OF BARRY CORNWALL. 
 
 LET hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask 
 Under the vizor of a borrow'd name ; 
 Let things eschew the light deserving blame : 
 No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task. 
 " Marcian Colonna " is a dainty book ; 
 And thy " Sicilian Tale " may boldly pass ; 
 Thy " Dream " 'bove all, in which, as in a glass, 
 On the great world's antique glories we may look. 
 No longer then, as "lowly substitute, 
 Factor, or PROCTOR, for another's gains," 
 Suffer the admiring world to be deceived ; 
 Lest thou thyself, by self of fame bereaved, 
 Lament too late the lost prize of thy pains, 
 And heavenly tunes piped through an alien flute. 
 
 1820.
 
 88 POEMS. 
 
 WORK. 
 
 WHO first invented work, and bound the free 
 
 And holyday-rejoicing spirit down 
 
 To the ever-haunting importunity 
 
 Of business in the green fields, and the town 
 
 To plough, loom, anvil, spade and oh ! most sad, 
 
 To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood ? 
 
 Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, 
 
 Sabbathless Satan ! he who his unglad 
 
 Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings, 
 
 That round and round incalculably reel 
 
 For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel 
 
 In that red realm from which are no returnings : 
 
 Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye 
 
 He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day. 
 
 LEISURE. 
 
 THEY talk of time, and of time's galling yoke, 
 That like a mill-stone on man's mind doth press, 
 Which only works and business can redress : 
 Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke, 
 Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke. 
 But might I, fed with silent meditation, 
 Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation 
 Improbus Labor, which my spirits hath broke 
 I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit . 
 Fling in more days than went to make the gem, 
 That crown'd the white top of Methusalem : 
 Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit, 
 Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky, 
 The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity. 
 
 DEUS KOBIS ILEC OTIA FECIT. 1821.
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON. 89 
 
 TO J. S. KNOWLES, ESQ. 
 ON HIS TRAGEDY OP VIEGINIUS. 
 
 TWELVE years ago I knew thee, Knowles, and then 
 
 Esteemed you a perfect specimen 
 
 Of those fine spirits warm-soul'd Ireland sends, 
 
 To teach us colder English how a friend's 
 
 Quick pulse should beat. I knew you brave, and plain, 
 
 Strong-sensed, rough -witted, above fear or gain ; 
 
 But nothing further had the gift to espy. 
 
 Sudden you re-appear. With wonder I 
 
 Hear my old friend (turn'd Shakspeare) read a scene 
 
 Only to his inferior in the clean 
 
 Passes of pathos : with such fence-like art 
 
 Ere we can see the steel, 'tis in our heart. 
 
 Almost without the aid language affords, 
 
 Your piece seems wrought. That huffing medium, words, 
 
 (Which in the modern Tamburlaines quite sway 
 
 Our shamed souls from their bias) in your play 
 
 We scarce attend to. Hastier passion draws 
 
 Our tears on credit : and we find the cause 
 
 Some two hours after, spelling o'er again 
 
 Those strange few words at ease, that wrought the pain. 
 
 Proceed, old friend ; and, as the year returns, 
 
 Still snatch some new old story from the urns 
 
 Of long-dead virtue. We, that knew before 
 
 Your worth, may admire, we cannot love you more. 
 
 1820. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON. 
 
 LITTLE Book, surnamed of ivhite, 
 Clean as yet, and fair to sight, 
 Keep thy attribution right. 
 
 Never disproportion'd scrawl ; 
 Ugly blot, that's worse than all ; 
 On thy maiden clearness fall !
 
 90 POEMS. 
 
 In each letter, here design'd, 
 Let the reader emblem'd find 
 Neatness of the owner's mind. 
 
 Gilded margins count a sin, 
 Let thy leaves attraction win 
 By the golden rules within ; 
 
 Sayings fetch'd from sages old ; 
 Laws which Holy Writ unfold, 
 Worthy to be graved in gold : 
 
 Lighter fancies not excluding ; 
 Blameless wit, with nothing rude in 
 Sometimes mildly interluding. 
 
 Amid strains of graver measure : 
 Virtue's self hath oft her pleasure 
 In sweet Muses' groves of leisure. 
 
 Riddles dark, perplexing sense ; 
 
 Darker meanings of offence ; 
 
 What but shades he banish'd hence. 
 
 Whitest thoughts in whitest dress, 
 Candid meanings, best express 
 Mind of quiet Quakeress. 
 
 1824. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE "EVERY-DAY BOOK." 
 
 I LIKE you, and your book, ingenious Hone ! 
 
 In whose capacious all-embracing leaves 
 The very marrow of tradition's shown ; 
 
 And all that history much that fiction weaves. 
 
 By every sort of taste your work is graced. 
 
 Vast stores of modern anecdote we find, 
 With good old story quaintly interlaced 
 
 The theme as various as the reader's mind.
 
 THE YOUNG CATECHIST. 91 
 
 Rome's lie-fraught legends you so truly paint 
 Yet kindly, that the half-turn'd Catholic 
 
 Scarcely forbears to smile at his own saint, 
 And cannot curse the candid heretic. 
 
 Rags, relics, witches, ghosts, fiends, crowd your page ; 
 
 Our father's mummeries we well pleased behold, 
 And, proudly conscious of a purer age, 
 
 Forgive some fopperies in the times of old. 
 
 Verse-honouring Phoebus, Father of bright Days, 
 Must needs bestow on you both good and many, 
 
 Who, building trophies of his Children's praise, 
 Run their rich Zodiac through, not missing any. 
 
 Dan Phoebus loves your book trust me, friend Hone- 
 The title only errs, he bids me say : 
 
 For while such art, wit, reading, there are shown, 
 He swears, 'tis not a work of every day. 
 
 1825. 
 
 THE YOUNG CATECHIST. 1 
 
 WHILE this tawny Ethiop prayeth, 
 
 Painter, who is she that stayeth 
 
 By, with skin of whitest lustre, 
 
 Sunny locks, a shining cluster, 
 
 Saint-like seeming to direct him 
 
 To the Power that must protect him ? 
 
 Is she of the Heaven-born Three, 
 
 Meek Hope, strong Faith, sweet Charity : 
 
 Or some Cherub 1 
 
 They you mention 
 Far transcend my weak invention. 
 'Tis a simple Christian child, 
 Missionary young and mild, 
 From her stock of Scriptural knowledge, 
 Bible-taught without a college, 
 
 1 A Picture by Henry Meyer, Esq.
 
 92 POEMS. 
 
 Which by reading she could gather, 
 Teaches him to say OUR FATHER 
 To the common Parent, who 
 Colour not respects, nor hue. 
 White and black in Him have part, 
 Who looks not to the skin, but heart. 
 
 1827. 
 
 ANGEL HELP. 1 
 
 THIS rare tablet doth include 
 
 Poverty with Sanctitude. 
 
 Past midnight this poor Maid hath spun, 
 
 And yet the work is not half done, 
 
 Which must supply from earnings scant 
 
 A feeble bed-rid parent's want. 
 
 Her sleep-charged eyes exemption ask, 
 
 And Holy hands take up the task ; 
 
 Unseen the rock and spindle ply, 
 
 And do her earthly drudgery. 
 
 Sleep, saintly poor one, sleep, sleep on ; 
 
 And, waking, find thy labours done. 
 
 Perchance she knows it by her dreams ; 
 
 Her eye hath caught the golden gleams, 
 
 Angelic presence testifying, 
 
 That round her everywhere are flying ; 
 
 Ostents from which she may presume, 
 
 That much of Heaven is in the room. 
 
 Skirting her own bright hair they run, 
 
 And to the sunny add more sun : 
 
 Now on that aged face they fix, 
 
 Streaming from the Crucifix ; 
 
 1 Suggested by a drawing in the possession of Charles Aders, 
 Esq., in which is represented the legend of a poor female saint, 
 who, having spun past midnight to maintain a bed-rid mother, 
 has fallen asleep from fatigue, and angels are finishing her work. 
 In another part of the chamber an angel is tending a lily, the 
 emblem of purity.
 
 ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN. 93 
 
 The flesh-clogg'd spirit disabusing, 
 
 Death-disarming sleeps infusing, 
 
 Prelibations, foretastes high, 
 
 And equal thoughts to live or die. 
 
 Gardener bright from Eden's bower, 
 
 Tend with care that lily flower ; 
 
 To its leaves and root infuse, 
 
 Heaven's sunshine, Heaven's dews. 
 
 'Tis a type, and 'tis a pledge, 
 
 Of a crowning privilege. 
 
 Careful as that lily flower, 
 
 This Maid must keep her precious dower ; 
 
 Live a sainted Maid, or die 
 
 Martyr to virginity. 
 
 1827. 
 
 ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN. 
 
 I SAW where in the shroud did lurk 
 
 A curious frame of Nature's work. 
 
 A flow'ret crushed in the bud, 
 
 A nameless piece of Babyhood, 
 
 Was in a cradle-coffin lying ; 
 
 Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying ; 
 
 So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb 
 
 For darker closets of the tomb ! 
 
 She did but ope an eye, and put 
 
 A clear beam forth, then straight up shut 
 
 For the long dark : ne'er more to see 
 
 Through glasses of mortality. 
 
 Riddle of destiny, who can show 
 
 What thy short visit meant, or know 
 
 What thy errand here below 1 
 
 Shall we say, that Nature blind 
 
 Check'd her hand, and changed her mind, 
 
 Just when she had exactly wrought 
 
 A fmish'd pattern without fault *? 
 
 Could she flag, or could she tire,
 
 94 POEMS. 
 
 Or lack'd she the Promethean fire 
 
 (With her nine moons' long workings sicken'd) 
 
 That should thy little limbs have quicken'd ? 
 
 Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure 
 
 Life of health, and days mature : 
 
 Woman's self in miniature ! 
 
 Limbs so fair, they might supply 
 
 (Themselves now but cold imagery) 
 
 The sculptor to make Beauty by. 
 
 Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry, 
 
 That babe, or mother, one must die ; 
 
 So in mercy left the stock, 
 
 And cut the branch ; to save the shock 
 
 Of young years widow'd ; and the pain, 
 
 When Single State comes back again 
 
 To the lone man who, 'reft of wife, 
 
 Thenceforward drags a maimed life 1 
 
 The economy of Heaven is dark : 
 
 And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, 
 
 Why Human Buds, like this, should fall, 
 
 More brief than fly ephemeral, 
 
 That has his day ; while shrivell'd crones 
 
 Stiffen with age to stocks and stones ; 
 
 And crabbed use the conscience sears 
 
 In sinners of an hundred years. 
 
 Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, 
 
 Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss. 
 
 Kites, which custom does impose, 
 
 Silver bells and baby clothes, 
 
 Coral redder than those lips, 
 
 Which pale death did late eclipse ; 
 
 Music framed for infant's glee, 
 
 Whistle never tuned for thee ; 
 
 Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them, 
 
 Loving hearts were they which gave them. 
 
 Let not one be missing ; nurse, 
 
 See them laid upon the hearse 
 
 Of infant slain by doom perverse
 
 THE CHRISTENING. 95 
 
 Why should kings and nobles have 
 Pictured trophies to their grave ; 
 And we, churls, to thee deny 
 Thy pretty toys with thee to lie, 
 A more harmless vanity 1 
 
 1828. 
 
 THE CHRISTENING. 
 
 AKRAY'D a half-angelic sight 
 
 In vests of pure Baptismal white, 
 
 The Mother to the Font doth bring 
 
 The little helpless nameless thing, 
 
 "With hushes soft and mild caressing, 
 
 At once to get a name and blessing. 
 
 Close by the Babe the Priest doth stand, 
 
 The Cleansing Water at his hand, 
 
 Which must assoil the soul within 
 
 From every stain of Adam's sin. 
 
 The Infant eyes the mystic scenes, 
 
 Nor knows what all this wonder means ; 
 
 And now he smiles, as if to say 
 " I am a Christian made this day;" 
 
 Now frighted clings to Nurse's hold, 
 
 Shrinking from the water cold, 
 
 Whose virtues, rightly understood, 
 
 Are, as Bethesda's waters, good. 
 
 Strange words the World, the Flesh, the Devil 
 
 Poor Babe, what can it know of Evil 1 
 
 But we must silently adore 
 
 Mysterious truths, and not explore. 
 
 Enough for him, in after-times, 
 
 When he shall read these artless rhymes, 
 
 If, looking back upon this day 
 
 With quiet conscience, he can say 
 " I have in part redeem'd the pledge 
 
 Of my Baptismal privilege ; 
 
 And more and more will strive to flee 
 
 All which my Sponsors kind did then renounce for me." 
 
 1829.
 
 96 POEMS. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MISS . 
 
 I. 
 
 SUCH goodness in your face doth shine, 
 With modest look, without design, 
 That I despair, poor pen of mine 
 
 Can e'er express it, 
 To give it words I feebly try ; 
 My spirits fail me to supply 
 Befitting language for't, and I 
 
 Can only bless it ! 
 
 n. 
 
 But stop, rash verse ! and don't abuse 
 A bashful Maiden's ear with news 
 Of her own virtues. She'll refuse 
 
 Praise sung so loudly. 
 Of that same goodness you admire, 
 The best part is, she don't aspire 
 To praise nor of herself desire 
 
 To think too proudly. 
 
 1829. 
 
 THE GIPSY'S MALISON. 
 
 " SUCK, baby, suck, mother's love grows by giving, 
 Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting ; 
 Black manhood comes, when riotous guilty living 
 Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting. 
 
 "Kiss, baby, kiss, mother's lips shine by kisses, 
 Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings ; 
 Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses 
 Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings. 
 
 " Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces, 
 Strain the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging ;
 
 IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERJEANT W. 97 
 
 Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses 
 Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging." 
 
 So sang a wither'd Beldam energetical, 
 
 And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical. 
 
 1829. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN'S LADY. 
 
 AN Album is a Garden, not for show 
 
 Planted, but use ; where wholesome herbs should grow. 
 
 A Cabinet of curious porcelain, where 
 
 No fancy enters, but what's rich or rare. 
 
 A Chapel, where mere ornamental things 
 
 Are pure as crowns of saints, or angels' wings. 
 
 A List of living friends : a holier Room 
 
 For names of some since mouldering in the tomb, 
 
 Whose blooming memories life's cold laws survive ; 
 
 And, dead elsewhere, they here yet speak, and live. 
 
 Such, and so tender, should an Album be ; 
 
 And, Lady, such I wish this book to thee. 
 
 IX THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. 
 SERJEANT W . 
 
 HAD I a power, Lady, to my will, 
 
 You should not want Hand Writings. I would fill 
 
 Your leaves with Autographs resplendent names 
 
 Of Knights and Squires of old, and courtly Dame?, 
 
 Kings, Emperors, Popes. Next under these should stand 
 
 The hands of famous lawyers a grave band 
 
 Who iu their Courts of Law or Equity 
 
 Have best upheld Freedom and Property. 
 
 These should moot cases in your book, and vie 
 
 To show their reading and their Serjeantry. 
 
 But I have none of these ; nor can I send 
 
 The notes by Bullen to her Tyrant penn'd
 
 98 POEMS. 
 
 In her authentic hand ; nor in soft hours 
 Lines writ by Rosamund in Clifford's bowers. 
 The lack of curious Signatures I moan, 
 And want the courage to subscribe my own. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY YOUNG LADY. 
 
 JOY to unknown Josepha who, I hear, 
 
 Of all good gifts, to Music most is given ; 
 
 Science divine, which through the enraptured ear 
 
 Enchants the soul, and lifts it nearer Heaven. 
 
 Parental smiles approvingly attend 
 
 Her pliant conduct of the trembling keys, 
 
 And listening strangers their glad suffrage lend. 
 
 Most musical is Nature. Birds and bees, 
 
 All their sweet labour sing. The moaning winds 
 
 Rehearse a lesson to attentive minds, 
 
 In louder tones "Deep unto deep doth call;" 
 
 And there is music in the waterfall. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH TEACHER. 
 
 IMPLORED for verse, I send you what I can ; 
 
 But you are so exact a Frenchwoman, 
 
 As I am told, Jemima, that I fear 
 
 To wound with English your Parisian ear, 
 
 And think I do your choice collection wrong 
 
 With lines not written in the Frenchman's tongue. 
 
 Had I a knowledge equal to my will, 
 
 With airy Chansons I your leaves would fill ; 
 
 With Fabliaux that should emulate the vein 
 
 Of sprightly Gresset, or of La Fontaine ; 
 
 Or Scenes Comiques, that should approach the air 
 
 Of your own favourite renown'd Moliere. 
 
 But at my suit the Muse of France looks sour, 
 
 And strikes me dumb ! Yet, what is in my power 
 
 To testify respect for you, I pray, 
 
 Take in plain English our rough Enfield way.
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MISS DATJBENY. 99 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MISS DAUBENY 
 
 I. 
 
 SOME poets by poetic law 
 Have beauties praised, they never saw ; 
 And sung of Kittys and of Nancys, 
 Whose charms but lived in their own fancies. 
 So I, to keep my Muse a-going, 
 That willingly would still be doing, 
 A Canzonet or two must try 
 In praise of pretty Daubeny. 
 
 ii. 
 
 But whether she indeed be comely, 
 Or only very good and homely, 
 Of my own eyes I cannot say ; 
 I trust to Emma Isola. 
 But sure I think her voice is tuneful, 
 As smoothest birds that sing in June full ; 
 For else would strangely disagree 
 The flowing name of Daubeny. 
 
 in. 
 
 I hear that she a Book hath got- 
 As what young damsel now hath not, 
 In which they scribble favourite fancies, 
 Copied from poems or romances 1 
 And prettiest draughts, of her design, 
 About the curious Album shine ; 
 And therefore she shall have for me 
 The style of tasteful Daubeny. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Thus far I have taken on believing : 
 But well I know without deceiving. 
 That in her heart she keeps alive still 
 Old school-day likings, which survive still
 
 100 POEMS. 
 
 In spite of absence worldly coldness 
 And thereon can my Muse take boldness 
 To crown her other praises three 
 With praise of friendly Daubeny. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS. 
 
 LADY Unknown, who crav'st from me Unknown 
 The trifle of a verse these leaves to grace, 
 How shall I find fit matter 1 with what face 
 Address a face that ne'er to me was shown 1 
 Thy looks, tones, gestures, manners, and what not, 
 Conjecturing, I wonder in the dark. 
 I know thee only sister to Charles Clarke ! 
 But at that name my cold Muse waxes hot, 
 And swears that thou art such a one as he, 
 Warm, laughter-loving, with a touch of madness, 
 Wild, glee-provoking, pouring oil of gladness 
 Prom frank heart, without guile. And, if thou be 
 The pure reverse of this, and I mistake 
 Demure one, I will like thee for his sake. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY. 
 
 CANADIA ! boast no more the toils 
 Of hunters for the furry spoils ; 
 Your whitest ermines are but foils 
 To brighter Catherine Orkney. 
 
 That such a flower should ever burst 
 From climes with rigorous winter curst ! 
 We bless you that so kindly nurst 
 
 This flower, this Catherine Orkney. 
 
 We envy not your proud display 
 Of lake, wood, vast Niagara : 
 Your greatest pride we've borne away, 
 How spared you Catherine Orkney 1
 
 IN MY OWN ALBUM. 101 
 
 That Wolfe on Heights of Abraham fell, 
 To your reproach no more we tell : 
 Canadia, you repaid us well 
 
 With rearing Catherine Orkney, 
 
 Britain, guard with tenderest care 
 The charge allotted to your share : 
 You've scarce a native maid so fair, 
 So good, as Catherine Orkney. 
 
 IX MY OWN ALBUM 
 
 FRESH clad from heaven in robes of white, 
 
 A young probationer of light, 
 
 Thou wert my soul, an Album bright, 
 
 A spotless leaf; but thought, and care, 
 
 And friend and foe, in foul or fair, 
 
 Have " written strange defeatures " there ; 
 
 And Time with heaviest hand of all, 
 Like that fierce writing on the wall, 
 Hath stamp'd sad dates he can't recall ; 
 
 And error gilding worst designs 
 Like speckled snake that strays and shines- 
 Betrays his path by crooked lines ; 
 
 And vice hath left his ugly blot ; 
 And good resolves, a moment hot, 
 Fairly began but fmish'd not ; 
 
 And fruitless, late remorse doth trace 
 Like Hebrew lore, a backward pace 
 Her irrecoverable race. 
 
 Disjointed numbers ; sense unknit ; 
 Huge realms of folly, shreds of wit ; 
 Compose the mingled mass of it.
 
 102 POEMS. 
 
 My scalded eyes no longer brook 
 Upon this ink-blurred thing to look 
 Go shut the leaves, and clasp the book. 
 
 TO BERNARD BARTON, 
 with a coloured print. 1 
 
 WHEN last you left your Woodbridge pretty, 
 
 To stare at sights, and see the City, 
 
 If I your meaning understood, 
 
 You wish'd a Picture, cheap, but good ; 
 
 The colouring 1 decent ; clear, not muddy ; 
 
 To suit a Poet's quiet study, 
 
 Where Books and Prints for delectation 
 
 Hang, rather than vain ostentation. 
 
 The subject 1 what I pleased, if comely ; 
 
 But something scriptural and homely : 
 
 A sober Piece, not gay or wanton, 
 
 For winter fire-sides to descant on ; 
 
 The theme so scrupulously handled, 
 
 A Quaker might look on unscandal'd ; 
 
 Such as might satisfy Ann Knight, 
 
 And classic Mitford just not fright. 
 
 Just such a one I've found, and send it ; 
 
 If liked, I give if not, but lend it. 
 
 The moral "? nothing can be sounder. 
 
 The fable ? 'tis its own expounder 
 
 A Mother teaching to her Chit 
 
 Some good book, and explaining it. 
 
 He, silly urchin, tired of lesson, 
 
 His learning lays no mighty stress on, 
 
 But seems to hear not what he hears ; 
 
 Thrusting his fingers in his ears, 
 
 Like Obstinate, that perverse funny one, 
 
 In honest parable of Bunyan. 
 
 1 From the venerable and ancient Manufactory of Carrington 
 Bowles ; some of my readers may recognise it.
 
 TO A YOUNG FRIEND. 103 
 
 His working Sister, more sedate, 
 Listens ; but in a kind of state, 
 The painter meant for steadiness, 
 But has a tinge of sullenness ; 
 And, at first sight, she seems to brook 
 As ill her needle, as he his book. 
 This is the Picture. For the Frame 
 'Tis not ill suited to the same ; 
 Oak-carved, nor gilt, for fear of falling ; 
 Old-fashion'd ; plain, yet not appalling ; 
 And sober, as the Owner's Calling. 
 
 SHE IS GOING. 
 
 FOR their elder sister's hair 
 Martha does a wreath prepare 
 Of bridal rose, ornate and gay : 
 To-morrow is the wedding day : 
 She is going. 
 
 Mary, youngest of the three, 
 Laughing idler, full of glee, 
 Arm in arm does fondly chain her, 
 Thinking, poor trifler, to detain her 
 But she's going. 
 
 Vex not, maidens, nor regret 
 Thus to part with Margaret. 
 Charms like yours can never stay 
 Long within doors ; and one day 
 You'll be going. 
 
 TO A YOUXG FRIEND. 
 
 ON HER TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY. 
 
 CROWN me a cheerful goblet, while I pray 
 
 A blessing on thy years, young Isola ; 
 
 Young, but no more a child. How swift have flown 
 
 To me thy girlish times, a woman grown
 
 104 POEMS. 
 
 Beneath my heedless eyes ! In vain I rack 
 
 My fancy to believe the almanack, 
 
 That speaks thee Twenty-One. Thou should'st have still 
 
 Remain'd a child, and at thy sovereign will 
 
 Gambol'd about our house, as in times past. 
 
 Ungrateful Emma, to grow up so fast, 
 
 Hastening to leave thy friends ! for which intent, 
 
 Fond Runagate, be this thy punishment. 
 
 After some thirty years, spent in such bliss 
 
 As this earth can afford, where still we miss 
 
 Something of joy entire, may'st thou grow old 
 
 As we whom thou hast left ! That wish was cold. 
 
 far more aged and wrinkled, till folks say, 
 
 Looking upon thee reverend in decay, 
 
 " This dame for length of days, and virtues rare, 
 With her respected Grandsire may compare." 
 Grandchild of that respected Isola, 
 Thou should'st have had about thee on this day 
 Kind looks of Parents, to congratulate 
 Their Pride grown up to woman's grave estate. 
 But they have died, and left thee, to advance 
 Thy fortunes how thou may'st, and owe to chance 
 The friends which Nature grudged. And thou wilt find, 
 Or make such, Emma, if I am not blind 
 To thee and thy deservings. That last strain 
 Had too much sorrow in it. Fill again 
 Another cheerful goblet, while I say 
 
 " Health, and twice health, to our lost Isola." 
 
 TO THE SAME. 
 
 EXTERNAL gifts of fortune, or of face, 
 Maiden, in truth, thou hast wot much to show ; 
 Much fairer damsels have I known, and know, 
 And richer may be found in every place. 
 In thy mind seek thy beauty, and thy wealth. 
 Sincereness lodgeth there, the soul's best health.
 
 TO A PERFORMER IN "THE BLIND BOY." 105 
 
 guard that treasure above gold or pearl, 
 
 Laid up secure from moths and worldly stealth 
 
 And take my benison, plain-hearted girl. 
 
 HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS. 
 
 BY Enfield lanes, and Winchmore's verdant hill, 
 Two lovely damsels cheer my lonely walk : 
 The fair Maria, as a vestal, still ; 
 And Emma brown, exuberant in talk. 
 With soft and lady speech the first applies 
 The mild correctives that to grace belong 
 To her redundant friend, who her defies 
 With jest, and mad discourse, and bursts of song. 
 differing pair, yet sweetly thus agreeing, 
 What music from your happy discord rises, 
 While your companion hearing each, and seeing, 
 Nor this, nor that, but both together, prizes ; 
 This lesson teaching, which our souls may strike, 
 That harmonies may be in things unlike ! 
 
 TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN 
 "THE BLIND BOY." 
 
 RARE artist ! who with half thy tools, or none, 
 
 Canst execute with ease thy curious art, 
 
 And press thy powerful'st meanings on the heart, 
 
 Unaided by the eye, expression's throne ! 
 
 While each blind sense, intelligential grown 
 
 Beyond its sphere, performs the effect of sight : 
 
 Those orbs alone, wanting their proper might, 
 
 All motionless and silent seem to moan 
 
 The unseemly negligence of nature's hand, 
 
 That left them so forlorn. What praise is thine, 
 
 O mistress of the passions ; artist fine ! 
 
 Who dost our souls against our sense command, 
 
 Plucking the horror from a sightless face, 
 
 Lending to blank deformity a grace.
 
 106 POEMS. 
 
 TO SAMUEL EOGERS, ESQ. 
 
 ROGERS, of all the men that I have known 
 But slightly, who have died, your Brother's loss 
 Touch'd me most sensibly. There came across 
 My mind an image of the cordial tone 
 Of your fraternal meetings, where a guest 
 I more than once have sat ; and grieve to think, 
 That of that threefold cord one precious link 
 By Death's rude hand is sever'd from the rest. 
 Of our old Gentry he appear'd a stem 
 A Magistrate who, while the evil-doer 
 He kept in terror, could respect the Poor, 
 And not for every trifle harass them, 
 As some, divine and laic, too oft do. 
 This man's a private loss, and public too. 
 
 TO CAROLINE MARIA APPLEBEE. 
 
 An Acrostic. 
 
 CAROLINE glides smooth in verse, 
 And is easy to rehearse ; 
 Runs just like some crystal river 
 O'er its pebbly bed for ever. 
 Lines as harsh and quaint as mine 
 In their close at least will shine, 
 Nor from sweetness can decline, 
 Ending but with Caroline. 
 
 Maria asks a statelier pace 
 " Ave Maria, full of grace !" 
 Romish rites before me rise, 
 Image-worship, sacrifice, 
 And well-meant but mistaken pieties. 
 
 Apple with Bee doth rougher nm. 
 Paradise was lost by one ;
 
 TO CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTON. 107 
 
 Peace of mind would we regain, 
 Let us, like the other, strain 
 Every harmless faculty, 
 Bee-like at work in our degree, 
 Ever some sweet task designing, 
 Extracting still, and still refining. 
 
 TO CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTOK 
 
 An Acrostic. 
 
 CHORAL service, solemn chanting, 
 Echoing round cathedrals holy 
 Can aught else on earth be wanting 
 In heaven's bliss to plunge us wholly 1 
 Let us great Cecilia honour 
 In the praise we give unto them, 
 And the merit be upon her. 
 
 Cold the heart that would undo them, 
 And the solemn organ banish 
 That this sainted Maid invented. 
 Holy thoughts too quickly vanish, 
 Ere the expression can be vented. 
 Raise the song to Catherine, 
 In her torments most divine ! 
 Ne'er by Christians be forgot 
 Envied be this Martyr's lot. 
 
 Laivton, who these names combinest, 
 Aim to emulate their praises ; 
 Women were they, yet divinest 
 Truths they taught ; and story raises 
 O'er their mouldering bones a Tomb, 
 Not to die till Day of Doom.
 
 108 POEMS. 
 
 TO A LADY WHO DESIRED ME TO WRITE 
 HER EPITAPH. 
 
 An Acrostic. 
 
 GRACE JOANNA here doth lie : 
 Reader, wonder not that I 
 Ante-date her hour of rest. 
 Can I thwart her wish exprest, 
 Even unseemly though the laugh 
 
 Jesting with an Epitaph ? 
 On her bones the turf lie lightly, 
 And her rise again be brightly ! 
 No dark stain be found upon her 
 No, there will not, on mine honour 
 Answer that at least I can. 
 
 Would that I, thrice happy man, 
 In as spotless garb might rise, 
 Light as she will climb the skies, 
 Leaving the dull earth behind, 
 In a car more swift than wind. 
 All her errors, all her failings, 
 (Many they were not) and ailings, 
 Sleep secure from Envy's railings. 
 
 ANOTHER, 
 
 TO HER YOUNGEST DAUGHTER. 
 
 LEAST daughter, but not least beloved, of Grace / 
 
 frown not on a stranger, who from place 
 Unknown and distant these few lines hath penn'd. 
 
 1 but report what thy Instructress Friend 
 So oft hath told us of thy gentle heart. 
 
 A pupil most affectionate thou art, 
 
 Careful to learn what elder years impart. 
 
 Louisa Clare by which name shall I call thee ?
 
 EPITAPH ON A DOG. 109 
 
 A prettier pair of names sure ne'er was found, 
 Resembling thy own sweetness in sweet sound. 
 Ever calm peace and innocence befall thee ! 
 
 TRANSLATIONS. 
 From the Latin of Vincent Bourne. 
 
 I. 
 
 ON A SEPTJLCHEAL STATUE OF AN INFANT SLEEPING. 
 
 BEAUTIFUL Infant, who dost keep 
 
 Thy posture here, and sleep'st a marble sleep, 
 
 May the repose unbroken be, 
 
 Which the fine Artist's hand hath lent to thee, 
 
 While thou enjoy'st along with it 
 
 That which no art, or craft, could ever hit 
 
 Or counterfeit to mortal sense, 
 
 The heaven-infused sleep of Innocence ! 
 
 II. 
 
 THE RIVAL BELLS. 
 
 A TUNEFUL challenge rings from either side 
 
 Of Thames' fair banks. Thy twice six Bells, Saint Bride, 
 
 Peal swift and shrill ; to which more slow reply 
 
 The deep-toned eight of Mary Overy. 
 
 Such harmony from the contention flows, 
 
 That the divided ear no preference knows ; 
 
 Betwixt them both disparting Music's State, 
 
 While one exceeds in number, one in weight. 
 
 III. 
 
 EPITAPH ON A DOG. 
 
 POOR Iras' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, 
 
 That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
 
 110 POEMS. 
 
 His guide and guard ; nor, while my service lasted, 
 
 Had he occasion for that staff, with which 
 
 He now goes picking out his path in fear 
 
 Over the highways and crossings, but would plant 
 
 Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, 
 
 A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd 
 
 His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide 
 
 Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd : 
 
 To whom with loud and passionate laments 
 
 From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd. 
 
 Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here and there, 
 
 The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. 
 
 I meantime at his feet obsequious slept ; 
 
 Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear 
 
 Prick'd up at his least motion, to receive 
 
 At his kind hand my customary crumbs, 
 
 And common portion in his feast of scraps ; 
 
 Or when night warn'd us homeward, tired and spent 
 
 With our long day, and tedious beggary. 
 
 These were my manners, this my way of life, 
 
 Till age and slow disease me overtook, 
 
 And sever'd from my sightless master's side. 
 
 But lest the grace of so good deeds should die, 
 
 Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost, 
 
 This slender tomb of turf hath Irus rear'd, 
 
 Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand, 
 
 And with short verse inscribed it, to attest, 
 
 In long and lasting union to attest, 
 
 The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE BALLAD SINGERS. 
 
 WHERE seven fair Streets to one tall Column draw, 1 
 Two Nymphs have ta'en their stand, in hats of straw 
 Their yellower necks huge beads of amber grace, 
 And by their trade they're of the Sirens' race : 
 1 Seven Dials.
 
 THE BALLAD SINGERS. Ill 
 
 With cloak loose-pinn'd on each, that has been red, 
 
 But long with dust and dirt discoloured 
 
 Belies its hue ; in mud behind, before, 
 
 From heel to middle leg becrusted o'er. 
 
 One a small infant at the breast does bear - } 
 
 And one in her right hand her tuneful ware, 
 
 Which she would vend. Their station scarce is taken, 
 
 When youths and maids flock round. His stall forsaken, 
 
 Forth comes a Son of Crispin, leathern-capt, 
 
 Prepared to buy a ballad, if one apt 
 
 To move his fancy offers. Crispin's sons 
 
 Have, from uncounted time, with ale and buns 
 
 Cherish'd the gift of Song, which sorrow quells ; 
 
 And working single in their low-roof 'd cells, 
 
 Oft cheat the tedium of a winter's night 
 
 With anthems warbled in the Muses' spight. 
 
 Who now hath caught the alarm 1 the Servant Maid 
 
 Hath heard a buzz at distance ; and, afraid 
 
 To miss a note, with elbows red comes out. 
 
 Leaving his forge to cool, Pyracmon stout 
 
 Thrusts in his unwash'd visage. He stands by, 
 
 Who the hard trade of Porterage does ply, 
 
 With stooping shoulders. What cares he ? he sees 
 
 The assembled ring, nor heeds his tottering knees, 
 
 But pricks his ears up with the hopes of song. 
 
 So, while the Bard of Rhodope his wrong 
 
 Bewail'd to Proserpine on Thracian strings, 
 
 The tasks of gloomy Orcus lost their stings, 
 
 And stone-vex'd Sysiphus forgets his load. 
 
 Hither and thither from the sevenfold road 
 
 Some cart or waggon crosses, which divides 
 
 The close-wedged audience ; but, as when the tides 
 
 To ploughing ships gave way, the ship being past, 
 
 They re-unite, so these unite as fast, 
 
 The older Songstress hitherto hath spent 
 
 Her elocution in the argument 
 
 Of their great Song in prose ; to wit, the woes 
 
 Which Maiden true to faithless Sailor owes
 
 112 POEMS. 
 
 All ! " Wandering He ! " which now in loftier verse 
 Pathetic they alternately rehearse. 
 All gaping wait the event. This Critic opes 
 His right ear to the strain. The other hopes 
 To catch it better with his left. Long trade 
 It were to tell, how the deluded Maid 
 A victim fell. And now right greedily 
 All hands are stretching forth the songs to buy, 
 That are so tragical ; which She, and She, 
 Deals out, and sings the while, nor can there be 
 A breast so obdurate here, that will hold back 
 His contribution from the gentle rack 
 Of Music's pleasing torture. Irus' self 
 The staff-propt beggar, his thin-gotten pelf 
 Brings out from pouch, where squalid farthings rest, 
 And boldly claims his ballad with the best. 
 An old Dame only lingers. To her purse 
 The penny sticks. At length, with harmless curse 
 " Give me," she cries. " I'll paste it on my wall, 
 While the wall lasts, to show what ills befall 
 Fond hearts, seduced from Innocency's way ; 
 How Maidens fall, and Mariners betray." 
 
 V. 
 
 TO DAVID COOK, OF THE PARISH OF ST. MARGARET'S, 
 WESTMINSTER, WATCHMAN. 
 
 FOR much good-natured verse received from thee, 
 A loving verse take in return from me. 
 " Good-morrow to my masters," is your cry ; 
 And to our David, " twice as good," say I. 
 Not Peter's monitor, shrill chanticleer, 
 Crows the approach of dawn in notes more clear, 
 Or tells the hours more faithfully. While night 
 Fills half the world with shadows of affright, 
 You with your lantern, partner of your round, 
 Traverse the paths of Margaret's hallow'd bound.
 
 TO DAVID COOK, WATCHMAN. 113 
 
 The tales of ghosts which old wives' ears drink up, 
 The drunkard reeling home from tavern cup, 
 Nor prowling robber, your firm soul appal ; 
 Arm'd with thy faithful staff thou slight'st them all. 
 But if the market-gardener chance to pass, 
 Bringing to town his fruit, or early grass, 
 The gentle salesman you with candour greet, 
 And with reit'rated " good-mornings " meet. 
 Announcing your approach by formal bell, 
 Of nightly weather you the changes tell ; 
 Whether the Moon shines, or her head doth steep 
 In rain-portending clouds. When mortals sleep 
 In downy rest, you brave the snows and sleet 
 Of winter ; and in alley, or in street, 
 Relieve your midnight progress with a verse. 
 What though fastidious Phcebus frown averse 
 On your didactic strain indulgent Night 
 With caution hath seal'd up both ears of Spite, 
 And critics sleep while you in staves do sound 
 The praise of long-dead Saints, whose Days abound 
 In wintry months ; but Crispin chief proclaim : 
 Who stirs not at that Prince of Cobblers' name 1 
 Profuse in loyalty some couplets shine, 
 And wish long days to all the Brunswick line ! 
 To youths and virgins they chaste lesson read ; 
 Teach wives and husbands how their lives to lead ; 
 Maids to be cleanly, footmen free from vice ; 
 How death at last all ranks cloth equalise ; 
 And, in conclusion, pray good years befall, 
 With store of wealth, your "worthy masters all." 
 For this and other tokens of good-will, 
 On boxing-day may store of shillings fill 
 Your Christmas purse ; no householder give less, 
 When at each door your blameless suit you press : 
 And what you wish to us (it is but reason) 
 Pieceive in turn the compliments o' th' season !
 
 114 POEMS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 ON A DEAF AND DUMB AETIST. l 
 
 AND hath thy blameless life become 
 
 A prey to the devouring tomb ? 
 
 A more mute silence hast thou known, 
 
 A deafness deeper than thine own, 
 
 While Time was 1 and no friendly Muse, 
 
 That mark'd thy life, and knows thy dues, 
 
 Repair with quickening verse the breach, 
 
 And write thee into light and speech 1 
 
 The Power, that made the Tongue, restrain'd 
 
 Thy lips from lies, and speeches feign'd ; 
 
 Who made the Hearing, without wrong 
 
 Did rescue thine from Siren's song. 
 
 He let thee see the ways of men, 
 
 Which thou with pencil, not with pen, 
 
 Careful Beholder, down didst note, 
 
 And all their motley actions quote, 
 
 Thyself unstain'd the while. From look 
 
 Or gesture reading, more than book, 
 
 In letter'd pride thou took'st no part, 
 
 Contented with the Silent Art, 
 
 Thyself as silent. Might I be 
 
 As speechless, deaf, and good, as He ! 
 
 VII. 
 NEWTON'S PKINCIPIA. 
 
 GREAT Newton's self, to whom the world's in debt, 
 Owed to School Mistress sage his Alphabet ; 
 But quickly wiser than his Teacher grown, 
 Discover'd properties to her unknown ; 
 Of A plus B, or minus, learn'd the use, 
 Known Quantities from unknown to educe ; 
 
 1 Benjamin Ferrers, died A.D. 1732.
 
 THE FEMALE ORATORS. 115 
 
 And made no doubt to that old dame's surprise 
 The Christ-Cross-Row his ladder to the skies. 
 Yet, whatsoe'er Geometricians say, 
 Her Lessons were his true PRINCIPIA ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE HOUSEKEEPER. 
 
 THE frugal snail, with forecast of repose, 
 Carries his house with him, where'er he goes ; 
 Peeps out and if there comes a shower of rain, 
 Retreats to his small domicile amain. 
 Touch but a tip of him, a horn 'tis well 
 He curls up in his sanctuary shell. 
 He's his own landlord, his own tenant ; stay 
 Long as he will, he dreads no Quarter-day. 
 Himself he boards and lodges ; both invites, 
 And feasts, himself ; sleeps with himself o' nights. 
 He spares the upholsterer trouble to procure 
 Chattels ; himself is his own furniture, 
 And his sole riches. Wheresoe'er he roam 
 Knock when you will he's sure to be at home. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE FEMALE ORATORS. 
 
 NIGH London's famous Bridge, a Gate more famed 
 Stands, or once stood, from old Belinus named, 
 So judged Antiquity ; and therein wrongs 
 A name, allusive strictly to two Tongues. 1 
 Her school hard by the Goddess Rhetoric opes, 
 And gratis deals to Oyster-wives her Tropes. 
 With Nereid green, green Nereid disputes, 
 Replies, rejoins, confutes, and still confutes. 
 One her coarse sense by metaphors expounds, 
 And one in literalities abounds ; 
 
 1 Billingis in the Latin.
 
 116 POEMS. 
 
 In mood and figure these keep up the din : 
 Words multiply, and every word tells in. 
 Her hundred throats here bawling Slander strains ; 
 And unclothed Venus to her tongue gives reins 
 In terms, which Demosthenic force outgo, 
 And baldest jests of foul-mouth'd Cicero. 
 Eight in the midst great Ate keeps her stand, 
 And from her sovereign station taints the land. 
 Hence Pulpits rail ; grave Senates learn to jar ; 
 Quacks scold ; and Billingsgate infects the Bar. 
 
 PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD -MILL. 
 
 INSPIRE my spirit, Spirit of De Foe, 
 
 That sang the Pillory, 
 
 In loftier strains to show 
 
 A more sublime Machine 
 
 Than that, where thou wert seen, 
 
 With neck outstretch'd and shoulders ill awry, 
 
 Courting coarse plaudits from vile crowds below- 
 
 A most unseemly show. 
 
 II. 
 
 In such a place 
 Who could expose thy face, 
 Historiographer of deathless Crusoe ! 
 That paint'st the strife 
 And all the naked ills of savage life, 
 Far above Rousseau 1 
 Rather myself had stood 
 In that ignoble wood, 
 Bare to the mob, on holy day or high day. 
 If nought else could atone 
 For waggish libel, 
 I swear on Bible, 
 
 I would have spared him for thy sake alone, 
 Man Friday !
 
 PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD -MILL. 117 
 
 III. 
 
 Our ancestors' were sour days, 
 Great Master of Eomance ! 
 A milder doom had fallen to thy chance 
 In our days : 
 Thy sole assignment 
 Some solitary confinement 
 (Not worth thy care a carrot), 
 Where in world-hidden cell 
 Thou thy own Crusoe might have acted well, 
 Only without the parrot ; 
 By sure experience taught to know, 
 Whether the qualms thou makest him feel were 
 truly such or no. 
 
 IV. 
 
 But stay ! methinks in statelier measure 
 
 A more companionable pleasure 
 
 I see thy steps the mighty Tread-Mill trace, 
 
 (The subject of my song, 
 
 Delay' d however long), 
 
 And some of thine own race, 
 
 To keepthee company, thou bring'st with thee along. 
 
 There with thee go, 
 
 Link'd in like sentence, 
 
 With regulated pace and footing slow, 
 
 Each old acquaintance, 
 
 Rogue harlot thief that live to future ages ; 
 
 Through many a laboured tome, 
 
 Rankly embalm'd in thy too natural pages. 
 
 Faith, friend De Foe, thou art quite at home ! 
 
 Not one of thy great offspring thou dost lack, 
 
 From pirate Singleton to pilfering Jack, 
 
 Here Flandrian Moll her brazen incest brags ; 
 
 Vice-stript Roxana, penitent in rags, 
 
 There points to Amy, treading equal chimes, 
 
 The faithful handmaid to her faithless crimes.
 
 118 POEMS. 
 
 V. 
 
 Incompetent my song to raise 
 
 To its just height thy praise, 
 
 Great Mill ! 
 
 That by thy motion proper 
 
 (No thanks to wind, or sail, or working rill) 
 
 Grinding that stubborn corn, the Human will, 
 
 Turn'st out men's consciences, 
 
 That were begrimed before, as clean and sweet 
 
 As flour from purest wheat, 
 
 Into thy hopper. 
 
 All reformation short of thee but nonsense is, 
 
 Or human, or divine. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Compared with thee, 
 
 What are the labours of that Jumping Sect, 
 
 Which feeble laws connive at rather than respect ? 
 
 Thou dost not bump, 
 
 Or jump, 
 
 But walk men into virtue ; betwixt crime 
 
 And slow repentance giving breathing time, 
 
 And leisure to be good ; 
 
 Instructing with discretion demi-reps 
 
 How to direct their steps. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Thou best Philosopher made out of wood ! 
 
 Not that which framed the tub, 
 
 Where sate the Cynic cub, 
 
 With nothing in his bosom sympathetic ; 
 
 But from those groves derived, I deem, 
 
 Where Plato nursed his dream 
 
 Of immortality ; 
 
 Seeing that clearly 
 
 Thy system all is merely 
 
 Peripatetic.
 
 EPICEDIUM. 119 
 
 Thou to thy pupils dost such lessons give 
 
 Of how to live 
 
 With temperance, sobriety, morality 
 
 (A new art), 
 
 That from thy school, by force of virtuous deeds, 
 
 Each Tyro now proceeds 
 
 A "Walking Stewart!" 
 
 EPICEDIUM. 
 
 GOING OR GONE. 
 
 FINE merry franions, 
 Wanton companions, 
 My days are ev'n banyans 
 
 With thinking upon ye ; 
 How Death, that last stinger, 
 Finis-writer, end-bringer, 
 Has laid his chill finger, 
 
 Or is laying on ye. 
 
 n. 
 
 There's rich Kitty Wheatley, 
 With footing it featly 
 That took me completely, 
 
 She sleeps in the Kirk House ; 
 And poor Polly Perkin, 
 Whose dad was still firking 
 The jolly ale firkin, 
 
 She's gone to the Work-house : 
 
 in. 
 
 Fine Gard'ner, Ben Carter 
 (In ten counties no smarter), 
 Has ta'en his departure 
 
 For Proserpine's orchards ;
 
 120 POEMS. 
 
 And Lily, postilion, 
 With cheeks of vermilion, 
 Is one of a million 
 
 That fill up the churchyards ; 
 
 IV. 
 
 And, lusty as Dido, 
 Fat Clemitson's widow 
 Flits now a small shadow 
 
 By Stygian hid ford ; 
 And good master Clapton 
 Has thirty years nap't on, 
 The ground he last hap't on, 
 
 Intomb'd by fair Widford ; 
 
 v. 
 
 And gallant Tom Dockwra, 
 Of Nature's finest crockery, 
 Now but thin air and mockery, 
 
 Lurks by Avernus, 
 Whose honest grasp of hand 
 Still, while his life did stand, 
 At friend's or foe's command, 
 
 Almost did burn us. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Roger de Coverley 
 
 Not more good man than he 
 
 Yet has he equally 
 
 Push'd for Cocytus, 
 With drivelling Worral, 
 And wicked old Dorrell, 
 'Gainst whom I've a quarrel, 
 
 Whose end might affright us !- 
 
 VII. 
 
 Kindly hearts have I known ; 
 Kindly hearts, they are flown ;
 
 EPICEDIUM. 121 
 
 Here and there if but one 
 
 Linger yet uneffaced, 
 Imbecile tottering elves, 
 Soon to be wreck'd on shelves, 
 These scarce are half themselves, 
 
 With age and care crazed. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 But this day Fanny Hutton 
 Her last dress has put on ; 
 Her fine lessons forgotten, 
 
 She died, as the dunce died : 
 And prim Betsy Chambers, 
 Decay'd in her members, 
 No longer remembers 
 
 Things as she once did ; 
 
 IX. 
 
 And prudent Miss Wither 
 Not in jest now doth ivither 
 And soon must go whither 
 
 Nor I well, nor you know ; 
 And flaunting Miss Waller, 
 That soon must befall her, 
 Whence none can recall her, 
 
 Though proud once as Juno !
 
 THE WIFE'S TEIAL; 
 OR, THE INTRUDING WIDOW. 
 
 & JBtatnattc 
 Founded on Mr. Crabbe's Tale of the "Confidant." 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 MR. SELBT, a Wiltshire Gentleman. 
 KATHERINE, Wife to Selby. 
 LUCY, Sister to Selby. 
 MRS. FRAMFTON, a Widow. 
 SERVANTS. 
 
 SCENO. At MR. SELBY'S House, or in the Grounds adjacent. 
 
 SCENE. A Library. MR. SELBY, KATHERINE. 
 
 Selby. Do not too far mistake me, gentlest wife ; 
 I meant to chide your virtues, not yourself, 
 And those too with allowance. I have not 
 Been blest by thy fair side with five white years 
 Of smooth and even wedlock, now to touch 
 With any strain of harshness on a string 
 Hath yielded me such music. 'Twas the quality 
 Of a too grateful nature in my Katherine, 
 That to the lame performance of some vows, 
 And common courtesies of man to wife, 
 Attributing too much, hath sometimes seem'd 
 To esteem as favours, what in that blest union 
 Are but reciprocal and trivial dues, 
 As fairly yours as mine : 'twas this I thought 
 Gently to reprehend. 
 
 Kath. In friendship's barter 
 The riches we exchange should hold some level,
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 123 
 
 And corresponding worth. Jewels for toys 
 Demand some thanks thrown in. You took me, sir, 
 To that blest haven of my peace, your bosom, 
 An orphan founder'd in the world's black storm. 
 Poor, you have made me rich ; from lonely maiden, 
 Your cherish'd and your full-accompanied wife. 
 
 Selby. But to divert the subject : Kate, too fond 
 I would not wrest your meanings ; else that word 
 Accompanied, and full-accompanied too, 
 Might raise a doubt in some men, that their wives 
 Haply did think their company too long ; 
 And over-company, we know by proof, 
 Is worse than no attendance. 
 
 Kath. I must guess, 
 You speak this of the Widow 
 
 Selby. 'Twas a bolt 
 
 At random shot ; but if it hit, believe me, 
 I am most sorry to have wounded you 
 Through a friend's side. I know not how we have swerved 
 From our first talk. I was to caution you 
 Against this fault of a too grateful nature : 
 Which, for some girlish obligations past, 
 In that relenting season of the heart, 
 When slightest favours pass for benefits 
 Of endless binding, would entail upon you 
 An iron slavery of obsequious duty 
 To the proud will of an imperious woman. 
 
 Kath. The favours are not slight to her I owe. 
 
 Selby. Slight or not slight, the tribute she exacts 
 
 Cancels all dues (A voice within.) 
 
 even now I hear her call you 
 In such a tone as lordliest mistresses 
 Expect a slave's attendance. Prithee, Kate, 
 Let her expect a brace of minutes or so. 
 Say, you are busy. Use her by degrees 
 To some less hard exactions. 
 
 Kath. I conjure you, 
 Detain me not. I will return
 
 124 POEMS. 
 
 Selby. Sweet wife, 
 Use thy own pleasure [Exit KATHERINE. 
 
 but it troubles me. 
 
 A visit of three days, as was pretended, 
 Spun to ten tedious weeks, and no hint given 
 When she will go ! I would this buxom Widow 
 Were a thought handsomer ! I'd fairly try 
 My Katherine's constancy ; make desperate love 
 In seeming earnest ; and raise up such broils, 
 That she, not I, should be the first to warn 
 The insidious guest depart. 
 
 Re-enter KATHERINE. 
 
 So soon return'd ! 
 What was our Widow's will ? 
 
 Kath. A trifle, sir. 
 
 Selby. Some toilet service to adjust her head, 
 Or help to stick a pin in the right place 
 
 Kath. Indeed 'twas none of these. 
 
 Selby. Or new vamp up 
 
 The tarnish'd cloak she came in. I have seen her 
 Demand such service from thee, as her maid, 
 Twice told to do it, would blush angry-red, 
 And pack her few clothes up. Poor fool ! fond slave ! 
 And yet my dearest Kate ! This day at least 
 (It is our wedding-day), we spend in freedom, 
 And will forget our Widow. Philip, our coach 
 Why weeps my wife ? You know, I promised you 
 An airing o'er the pleasant Hampshire downs 
 To the blest cottage on the green hill-side 
 Where first I told my love. I wonder much 
 If the crimson parlour hath exchanged its hue 
 For colours not so welcome. Faded though it be, 
 It will not show less lovely than the tinge 
 Of this faint red, contending with the pale, 
 Where once the full-flush'd health gave to this cheek 
 An apt resemblance to the fruit's warm side
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 125 
 
 That bears my Katherine's name. 
 
 Our carriage, Philip. 
 
 Enter a Servant. 
 
 Now, Robin, what make you here 1 
 
 Serv. May it please you, 
 The coachman has driven out with Mistress Frampton. 
 
 Selhy. He had no orders 
 
 Serv. None, sir, that I know of, 
 But from the lady, who expects some letters 
 At the next post town. 
 
 Selby. Go, Robin. [Exit Servant. 
 
 How is this ? 
 
 Kath. I came to tell you so, but feared your anger 
 
 Selby. It was ill done, though, of this Mistress Framp- 
 ton 
 
 This forward Widow. But a ride's poor loss 
 Imports not much. In to your chamber, love, 
 Where you with music may beguile the hour, 
 While I am tossing over dusty tomes, 
 Till our most reasonable friend returns. 
 
 Kath. I am all obedience. [Exit KATHERINE. 
 
 Selby. Too obedient, Kate, 
 And to too many masters. I can hardly, 
 On such a day as this, refrain to speak 
 My sense of this injurious friend this pest 
 This household evil this close-clinging fiend 
 In rough terms to my wife. 'Death, my own servants 
 Controll'd above me ! orders countermanded ! 
 What next 1 
 
 [Servant enters and announces the Sister. 
 
 Enter Lucy. 
 
 Sister ! I know you are come to welcome 
 This day's return. 'Twas well done. 
 
 Lucy. You seem ruffled. 
 In years gone by this day was used to be
 
 126 POEMS. 
 
 The smoothest of the year. Your honey turn'd 
 So soon to gall ? 
 
 Selby. Gall'd am I, and with cause, 
 And rid to death, yet cannot get a riddance, 
 Nay, scarce a ride, by this proud Widow's leave. 
 
 Lucy. Something you wrote me of a Mistress Frarnpton. 
 
 Selby. She came at first a meek admitted guest, 
 Pretending a short stay ; her whole deportment 
 Seem'd as of one obliged. A slender trunk, 
 The wardrobe of her scant and ancient clothing, 
 Bespoke no more. But in few days her dress, 
 Her looks, were proudly changed. And now she flaunts it 
 In jewels stolen or borrow'd from my wife ; 
 Who owes her some strange service, of what nature 
 I must be kept in ignorance. Katherine's meek 
 And gentle spirit cowers beneath her eye, 
 As spell-bound by some witch. 
 
 Lucy. Some mystery hangs on it. 
 How bears she in her carriage towards yourself 1 
 
 Selby. As one who fears, and yet not greatly cares 
 For my displeasure. Sometimes I have thought 
 A secret glance would tell me she could love, 
 If I but gave encouragement. Before me 
 She keeps some moderation ; but is never 
 Closeted with my wife, but in the end 
 I find my Katherine in briny tears. 
 From the small chamber where she first was lodged, 
 The gradual fiend, by specious wriggling arts, 
 Has now ensconced herself in the best part 
 Of this large mansion ; calls the left wing her own ; 
 Commands my servants, equipage. I hear 
 Her hated tread. What makes she back so soon 1 
 
 Enter MRS. FRAMPTON. 
 
 Mrs. F. 0, I am jolter'd, bruised, and shook to death 
 With your vile Wiltshire roads. The villain Philip 
 Chose, on my conscience, the perversest tracks 
 And stoniest hard lanes in all the county,
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 127 
 
 Till I was fain get out, and so walk back, 
 My errand unperform'd at Andover. 
 
 Lucy. And I shall love the knave for ever after (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. A friend with you ! 
 
 Selby. My eldest sister Lucy, 
 Come to congratulate this returning morn. 
 Sister, my wife's friend, Mistress Frampton. 
 
 Mrs. F. Pray, 
 
 Be seated. For your brother's sake, you are welcome. 
 I had thought this day to have spent in homely fashion 
 With the good couple, to whose hospitality 
 I stand so far indebted. But your coming 
 Makes it a feast. 
 
 Lucy. She does the honours naturally 
 
 Selby. As if she were the mistress of the house 
 
 (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. I love to be at home with loving friends. 
 To stand on ceremony with obligations, 
 Is to restrain the obliger. That old coach, though, 
 Of yours jumbles one strangely. 
 
 Selby. I shall order 
 An equipage soon, more easy to you, madam 
 
 Lucy. To drive her and her pride to Lucifer, 
 I hope he means (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. I must go trim myself; this humbled garb 
 Would shame a wedding feast. I have your leave 
 For a short absence 1 and your Katherine 
 
 Selby. You'll find her in her closet 
 
 Mrs. F. Fare you well, then. 
 
 Selby. How like you her assurance ? 
 
 Lucy. Even so well, 
 
 That if this Widow were my guest, not yours, 
 She should have coach enough, and scope to ride. 
 My merry groom should in a trice convey her 
 To Sarum Plain, and set her down at Stonehcnge, 
 To pick her path through those antiques at leisure ; 
 She should take sample of our Wiltshire flints. 
 0, be not lightly jealous ! nor surmise
 
 128 POEMS. 
 
 That to a wanton bold-faced thing like this 
 
 Your modest shrinking Katherine could impart 
 
 Secrets of any worth, especially 
 
 Secrets that touch'd your peace. If there be aught, 
 
 My life upon't, 'tis but some girlish story 
 
 Of a first love ; which even the boldest wife 
 
 Might modestly deny to a husband's ear, 
 
 Much more your timid and too sensitive Katherine. 
 
 Selby. I think it is no more ; and will dismiss 
 My further fears, if ever I have had such. 
 
 Lucy. Shall we go walk 1 I'd see your gardens, brother ; 
 And how the new trees thrive, I recommended. 
 Your Katherine is engaged now 
 
 Selby. I'll attend you. [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE. Servants' Hall. 
 
 Housekeeper, PHILIP, and others, laughing. 
 
 Houselc. Our lady's guest, since her short ride, seems 
 
 ruffled, 
 
 And somewhat in disorder. Philip, Philip, 
 I do suspect some roguery. Your mad tricks 
 Will some day cost you a good place, I warrant. 
 
 Phil. Good Mistress Jane, our serious housekeeper, 
 And sage duenna to the maids and scullions, 
 We must have leave to laugh ; our brains are younger, 
 And undisturb'd with care of keys and pantries. 
 We are wild things. 
 
 Butler. Good Philip, tell us all. 
 
 All. Ay, as you live, tell, tell 
 
 Phil. Mad fellows, you shall have it. 
 The Widow's bell rang lustily and loud- 
 
 Butl. I think that no one can mistake her ringing. 
 
 Waiting-maid. Our lady's ring is soft sweet music to it, 
 More of entreaty hath it than command. 
 
 Phil. I lose my story, if you interrupt thus. 
 The bell, I say, rang fiercely ; and a voice
 
 THE FIFE'S TRIAL. 129 
 
 More shrill than bell, call'd out for " Coachman Philip." 
 
 I straight obey'd, as 'tis my name and office. 
 
 " Drive me," quoth she, " to the next market town, 
 
 Where I have hope of letters." I made haste, 
 
 Put to the horses, saw her fairly coach'd, 
 
 And drove her 
 
 Waiting-maid. By the straight high road to 
 
 Andover, 
 I guess 
 
 Phil. Pray, warrant things within your knowledge, 
 Good Mistress Abigail ; look to your dressings, 
 And leave the skill in horses to the coachman. 
 
 Butl. He'll have his humour ; best not interrupt him. 
 
 Phil. 'Tis market-day, thought I ; and the poor beasts, 
 Meeting such droves of cattle and of people, 
 May take a fright ; so down the lane I trundled, 
 Where Goodman Dobson's crazy mare was founder'd, 
 And where the flints were biggest, and ruts widest, 
 By ups and downs, and such bone-cracking motions, 
 We flounder'd on a furlong, till my madam, 
 In policy to save the few joints left her, 
 Betook her to her feet, and there we parted. 
 
 AIL Ha! ha! ha! 
 
 Butl. Hang her ! 'tis pity such as she should ride. 
 
 Waiting-maid. I think she is a witch ; I have tired 
 
 myself out 
 With sticking pins in her pillow; still she 'scapes them. 
 
 Butl. And I witli helping her to mum for claret, 
 But never yet could cheat her dainty palate. 
 
 HouseJc. Well, well, she is the guest of our good Mistress, 
 And so should be respected. Though, I think, 
 Our Master cares not for her company, 
 He would ill brook we should express so much 
 By rude discourtesies and short attendance, 
 Being but servants. (A lell rings furiously.} 'Tis her 
 
 bell speaks now ; 
 Good, good, bestir yourselves : who knows who's wanted 1 
 
 Butl. But 'twas a merry trick of Philip Coachman. 
 
 K [Exeunt.
 
 130 POEMS. 
 
 SCENE. Mrs. Selby' s Chamber. 
 MRS. FRAMPTON, KATHERINE, working. 
 
 Mrs. F. I am thinking, child, how contrary our fates 
 Have traced our lots through life. Another needle, 
 This works untowardly. An heiress born 
 To splendid prospects, at our common school 
 I was as one above you all, not of you ; 
 Had my distinct prerogatives, my freedoms, 
 Denied to you. Pray, listen 
 
 Kath. I must hear 
 
 What you are pleased to speak ! How my heart sinks 
 here ! (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. My chamber to myself, my separate maid, 
 My coach, and so forth. Not that needle, simple one, 
 With the great staring eye fit for a Cyclops ! 
 Mine own are not so blinded with their griefs, 
 But I could make a shift to thread a smaller. 
 A cable or a camel might go through this, 
 And never strain for the passage. 
 
 Kath. I will fit you. 
 Intolerable tyranny ! (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. Quick ! quick ! 
 You were not once so slack. As I was saying, 
 Not a young thing among ye but observed me 
 Above the mistress. Who but I was sought to 
 In all your dangers, all your little difficulties, 
 Your girlish scrapes ? I was the scape-goat still, 
 To fetch you off ; kept all your secrets ; some, 
 Perhaps, since then 
 
 Kath. No more of that, for mercy, 
 If you'd not have me, sinking at your feet, 
 Cleave the cold earth for comfort (kneels). 
 
 Mrs. F. This to me ? 
 
 This posture to your friend had better suited 
 The orphan Katherine in her humble school-days, 
 To the then rich heiress, than the wife of Selby 
 Of wealthy Mr. Selby
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 131 
 
 To the poor Widow Frampton, sunk as she is. 
 Come, come, 
 
 'Twas something, or 'twas nothing, that I said ; 
 I did not mean to fright you, sweetest bed-fellow ! 
 You once were so, but Selby now engrosses you. 
 I'll make him give you up a night or so 
 In faith I will that we may lie and talk 
 Old tricks of school-days over. 
 
 Kath. Hear me, madam 
 
 Mrs. F. Not by that name. Your friend 
 
 Kath. My truest friend, 
 And saviour of my honour ! 
 
 Mrs. F. This sounds better ; 
 You still shall find me such. 
 
 Kath. That you have graced 
 Our poor house with your presence hitherto, 
 Has been my greatest comfort, the sole solace 
 Of my forlorn and hardly guess'd estate. 
 You have been pleased 
 To accept some trivial hospitalities, 
 In part of payment of a long arrear 
 I owe to you, no less than for my life. 
 
 Mrs. F. You speak my services too large. 
 
 Kath. Nay, less ; 
 
 For what an abject thing were life to me 
 Without your silence on my dreadful secret ! 
 And I would wish the league we have renew'd 
 Might be perpetual 
 
 Mrs. F. Have a care, fine madam ! (aside). 
 
 Kath. That one house still might hold us. But my 
 
 husband 
 Has shown himself of late 
 
 Mrs. F. How, Mistress Selby ? 
 
 Kath. Not, not impatient. You misconstrue him. 
 He honours, and he loves nay, he must love 
 The friend of his wife's youth. But there are moods 
 In which 
 
 Mrs. F. I understand you ; in which husbands,
 
 132 POEMS. 
 
 And wives that lore, may wish to be alone, 
 To nurse the tender fits of new-born dalliance, 
 After a five years' wedlock. 
 
 Rath. Was that well 
 Or charitably put ? do these pale cheeks 
 Proclaim a wanton blood 1 this wasting form 
 Seem a fit theatre for Levity 
 To play his love-tricks on ; and act such follies, 
 As even in Affection's first bland moon 
 Have less of grace than pardon in best wedlocks ? 
 I was about to say that there are times, 
 When the most frank and sociable man 
 May surfeit on most loved society, 
 Preferring loneliness rather 
 
 Mrs. F. To my company 
 
 Kath. Ay, yours, or mine, or any one's. Nay, take 
 Not this unto yourself. Even in the newness 
 Of our first married loves 'twas sometimes so. 
 For solitude, I have heard my Selby say, 
 Is to the mind as rest to the corporal functions ; 
 And he would call it oft, the day's soft sleep. 
 
 Mrs. F. What is your drift? and whereto tends this 
 
 speech, 
 Rhetorically labour'd ? 
 
 Kath. That you would 
 
 Abstain but from our house a month, a week : 
 I make request but for a single day. 
 
 Mrs. F. A month, a week, a day ! A single horn- 
 Is every week, and month, and the long year, 
 And all the years to come ! My footing here, 
 Slipt once, recovers never. From the state 
 Of gilded roofs, attendance, luxuries, 
 Parks, gardens, sauntering walks, or wholesome rides, 
 To the bare cottage on the withering moor, 
 Where I myself am servant to myself, 
 Or only waited on by blackest thoughts, 
 I sink, if this be so. No ; here I sit. 
 
 Kath. Then I am lost for ever ! 
 
 [Sinks at her feet curtain drops.
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 133 
 
 SCENE. An Apartment, contiguous to the last. 
 SELBY, as if listening. 
 
 Selby. The sounds have died away. What am I 
 
 changed to ? 
 
 What do I here, listening like to an abject 
 Or heartless wittol, that must hear no good, 
 If he hear aught ? "This shall to the ear of your husband." 
 It was the Widow's word. I guess'd some mystery, 
 And the solution with a vengeance comes. 
 What can my wife have left untold to me, 
 That must be told by proxy 1 I begin 
 To call in doubt the course of her life past 
 Under my very eyes. She hath not been good, 
 Not virtuous, not discreet ; she hath not outrun 
 My wishes still with prompt and meek observance. 
 Perhaps she is not fair, sweet-voiced ; her eyes 
 Not like the dove's ; all this as well may be 
 As that she should entreasure up a secret 
 In the peculiar closet of her breast, 
 And grudge it to my ear. It is my right 
 To claim the halves in any truth she owns, 
 As much as in the babe I have by her : 
 Upon whose face henceforth I fear to look, 
 Lest I should fancy in its innocent brow 
 Some strange shame written. 
 
 Enter LUCY. 
 
 Sister, an anxious word with you. 
 From out that chamber, where my wife but now 
 Held talk with her encroaching friend, I heard 
 (Not of set purpose hearkening, but by chance) 
 A voice of chiding, answer'd by a tone 
 Of replication such as the meek dove 
 Makes when the kite has clutch'd her. The high Widow 
 Was loud and stormy. I distinctly heard 
 One threat pronounced " Your husband shall know all."
 
 134 POEMS. 
 
 I am no listener, sister ; and I hold 
 
 A secret got by such unmanly shift, 
 
 The pitiful'st of thefts ; but what mine ear, 
 
 I not intending it, receives perforce, 
 
 I count my lawful prize. Some subtle meaning 
 
 Lurks in this fiend's behaviour; which, by force 
 
 Or fraud, I must make mine. 
 
 Lucy. The gentlest means 
 Are still the wisest. What if you should press 
 Your wife to a disclosure 1 
 
 Selby. I have tried 
 
 All gentler means ; thrown out low hints, which, though 
 Merely suggestions still, have never fail'd 
 To blanch her cheek with fears. Koughlier to insist 
 Would be to kill, where I but meant to heal. 
 
 Lucy. Your own description gave that Widow out 
 As one not much precise, nor over coy 
 And nice to listen to a suit of love, 
 What if you feign'd a courtship, putting on 
 (To work the secret from her easy faith), 
 For honest ends, a most dishonest seeming ? 
 
 Selby. I see your drift, and partly meet your counsel. 
 But must it not in me appear prodigious 
 To say the least, unnatural and suspicious 
 To move hot love where I have shown cool scorn, 
 And undissembled looks of blank aversion ? 
 
 Lucy. Vain woman is the dupe of her own charms, 
 And easily credits the resistless power 
 That in besieging beauty lies, to cast down 
 The slight-built fortress of a casual hate. 
 
 Selby. I am resolved 
 
 Lucy. Success attend your wooing ! 
 
 Selby. And I'll about it roundly, my wise sister. 
 
 [Exeunt.
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 135 
 
 SCENE. The Library. 
 
 MR. SELBY. MES. FRAMPTOX. 
 
 Selby. A fortunate encounter, Mistress Frampton. 
 My purpose was, if you can spare so much 
 From your sweet leisure, a few words in private. 
 
 Mrs. F. What mean his alter'd tones 1 These looks 
 
 to me, 
 
 Whose glances yet he has repell'd with coolness ? 
 Is the wind changed 1 I'll veer about with it, 
 And meet him in all fashions (aside). 
 
 All my leisure, 
 
 Feebly bestow'd upon my kind friends here, 
 Would not express a tithe of the obligements 
 I every hour incur. 
 
 Selby. No more of that. 
 I know not why my wife hath lost of late 
 Much of her cheerful spirits. 
 
 Mrs. F. It was my topic 
 To-day ; and every day, and all day long, 
 I still am chiding with her. " Child," I said, 
 And said it pretty roundly it may be 
 I was too peremptory we elder school-fellows, 
 Presuming on the advantage of a year 
 Or two, which, in that tender time, seem'd much, 
 In after years, much like to elder sisters, 
 Are prone to keep the authoritative style, 
 When time has made the difference most ridiculous. 
 
 Selby. The observation's shrewd. 
 
 Mrs. F. " Child," I was saying, 
 ' If some wives had obtain'd a lot like yours," 
 And then perhaps I sigh'd, "they would not sit 
 In corners moping, like to sullen moppets, 
 That want their will, but dry their eyes, and look 
 Their cheerful husbands in the face," perhaps 
 I said, their Selbys, " with proportiou'd looks 
 Of honest joy."
 
 136 POEMS. 
 
 Selby. You do suspect no jealousy? 
 
 Mrs. F. What is his import? Whereto tends his 
 
 speech? (aside). 
 Of whom, or what, should she be jealous, sir ? 
 
 Selby. I do not know ; but women have their fancies ; 
 And underneath a cold indifference, 
 Or show of some distaste, husbands have mask'd 
 A growing fondness for a female friend, 
 Which the wife's eye was sharp enough to see 
 Before the friend had wit to find it out. 
 You do not quit us soon ? 
 
 Mrs. F. 'Tis as I find 
 Your Katherine profits by my lesson, sir. 
 Means this man honest ? Is there no deceit ? (aside). 
 
 Selby. She cannot choose. Well, well, I have been 
 
 thinking, 
 And if the matter were to do again 
 
 Mrs. F. What matter, sir ? 
 
 Selby. This idle bond of wedlock ; 
 These sour-sweet briars, fetters of harsh silk ; 
 I might have made, I do not say a better, 
 But a more fit choice in a wife. 
 
 Mrs. F. The parch'd ground, 
 In hottest Julys, drinks not in the showers 
 More greedily than I his words ! (aside). 
 
 Selby. My humour 
 
 Is to be frank and jovial ; and that man 
 Affects me best, who most reflects me in 
 My most free temper. 
 
 Mrs. F. Were you free to choose, 
 As jestingly I'll put the supposition, 
 Without a thought reflecting on your Katherine, 
 What sort of woman would you make your choice 1 
 
 Selby. I like your humour, and will meet your jest. 
 She should be one about my Katherine's age ; 
 But not so old, by some ten years, in gravity. 
 One that would meet my mirth, sometimes outrun it ; 
 No puling, pining moppet, as you said,
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 137 
 
 Nor moping maid, that I must still be teaching 
 The freedoms of a wife all her life after ; 
 But one that, having worn the chain before 
 (And worn it lightly, as report gave out), 
 Enfranchised from it by her poor fool's death, 
 Took it not so to heart that I need dread 
 To die myself, for fear a second time 
 To wet a widow's eye. 
 
 Mrs. F. Some widows, sir, 
 Hearing you talk so wildly, would be apt 
 To put strange misconstruction on your words, 
 As aiming at a Turkish liberty, 
 Where the free husband hath his several mates ; 
 His Penseroso, his Allegro wife, 
 To suit his sober, or his frolic fit. 
 
 Selby. How judge you of that latitude 1 
 
 Mrs. F. As one, 
 
 In European customs bred, must judge. Had I 
 Been born a native of the liberal East, 
 I might have thought as they do. Yet I knew 
 A married man that took a second wife, 
 And (the man's circumstances duly weigh'd, 
 With all their bearings) the considerate world 
 Nor much approved, nor much condemn'd the deed. 
 
 Selby. You move my wonder strangely. Pray, proceed. 
 
 Mrs. F. An eye of wanton liking he had placed 
 Upon a widow, who liked him again, 
 But stood on terms of honourable love, 
 And scrupled wronging his most virtuous wife ; 
 When to their ears a lucky rumour ran, 
 That this demure and saintly-seeming wife 
 Had a first husband living ; with the which 
 Being question'd, she but faintly could deny. 
 "A priest indeed there was; some words had past, 
 But scarce amounting to a marriage rite. 
 Her friend was absent ; she supposed him dead ; 
 And, seven years parted, both were free to choose." 
 
 Selby. What did the indignant husband 1 Did he not
 
 138 POEMS. 
 
 With violent handlings stigmatise the cheek 
 Of the deceiving wife, who had entail'd 
 Shame on their innocent babe ? 
 
 Mrs. F. He neither tore 
 
 His wife's locks nor his own ; but wisely weighing 
 His own offence with hers in equal poise, 
 And woman's weakness 'gainst the strength of man, 
 Came to a calm and witty compromise. 
 He coolly took his gay-faced widow home, 
 Made her his second wife ; and still the first 
 Lost few or none of her prerogatives. 
 The servants call'd her mistress still ; she kept 
 The keys, and had the total ordering 
 Of the house affairs ; and, some slight toys excepted, 
 Was all a moderate wife would wish to be. 
 
 Selby. A tale full of dramatic incident I- 
 And, if a man should put it in a play, 
 How should he name the parties ? 
 
 Mrs. F. The man's name 
 
 Through time I have forgot the widow's too ; 
 But his first wife's first name, her maiden one, 
 Was not unlike to that your Katherine bore, 
 Before she took the honour'd style of Selby. 
 
 Selby. A dangerous meaning in your riddle lurks ; 
 One knot is yet unsolved ; that told, this strange 
 And most mysterious drama ends. The name 
 Of that first husband 
 
 Enter LUCY. 
 
 Mrs. F. Sir, your pardon. 
 The allegory fits your private ear. 
 Some half-hour hence, in the garden's secret walk, 
 We shall have leisure. Exit. 
 
 Selby. Sister, whence come you 1 
 
 Lucy. From your poor Katherine's chamber, where she 
 
 droops 
 In sad presageful thoughts, and sighs, and weeps,
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 139 
 
 And seems to pray by turns. At times she looks 
 As she would pour her secret in my bosom 
 Then starts, as I have seen her, at the mention 
 Of some immodest act. At her request, 
 I left her on her knees. 
 
 Selby. The fittest posture ; 
 For great has been her fault to Heaven and me. 
 She married me with a first husband living, 
 Or not known not to be so, which, in the judgment 
 Of any but indifferent honesty, 
 Must be esteem'd the same. The shallow Widow, 
 Caught by my art, under a riddling veil 
 Too thin to hide her meaning, hath confess'd all. 
 Your coming in broke off the conference, 
 When she was ripe to tell the fatal name 
 That seals my wedded doom. 
 
 Lucy. Was she so forward 
 To pour her hateful meanings in your ear 
 At the first hint ? 
 
 Selby. Her newly-flattered hopes 
 Array'd themselves at first in forms of doubt ; 
 And with a female caution she stood off 
 Awhile, to read the meaning of my suit, 
 Which with such honest seeming I enforced, 
 That her cold scruples soon gave way ; and now 
 She rests prepared, as mistress, or as wife, 
 To seize the place of her betrayed friend 
 My much offending, but more suffering, Katherine. 
 
 Lucy. Into what labyrinth of fearful shapes 
 My simple project has conducted you ! 
 Were but my wit as skilful to invent 
 A clue to lead you forth ! I call to mind 
 A letter, which your wife received from the Cape, 
 Soon after you were married, with some circumstances 
 Of mystery too, 
 
 Selby. I well remember it. 
 That letter did confirm the truth (she said) 
 Of a friend's death, which she had long fear'd true,
 
 140 POEMS. 
 
 But knew not for a fact. A youth of promise 
 She gave him out a hot adventurous spirit 
 That had set sail in quest of golden dreams, 
 And cities in the heart of Central Afric ; 
 But named no names, nor did I care to press 
 My question further, in the passionate grief 
 She show'd at the receipt. Might this be he ? 
 
 Lucy. Tears were not all. When that first shower 
 
 was past, 
 
 With clasped hands she raised her eyes to Heaven, 
 As if in thankfulness for some escape, 
 Or strange deliverance, in the news implied, 
 Which sweeten'd that sad news. 
 
 Selby. Something of that 
 I noted also 
 
 Lucy. In her closet once, 
 Seeking some other trifle, I espied 
 A ring, in mournful characters deciphering 
 The death of " Robert Halford, aged two 
 And twenty." Brother, I am not given 
 To the confident use of wagers, which I hold 
 Unseemly in a woman's argument ; 
 But I am strangely tempted now to risk 
 A thousand pounds out of my patrimony, 
 (And let my future husband look to it, 
 If it be lost), that this immodest Widow 
 Shall name the name that tallies with that ring. 
 
 Selby. That wager lost, I should be rich indeed 
 Rich in my rescued Kate rich in my honour, 
 Which now was bankrupt. Sister, I accept 
 Your merry wager, with an aching heart 
 For very fear of winning. 'Tis the hour 
 That I should meet my Widow in the walk, 
 The south side of the garden. On some pretence 
 Lure forth my Wife that way, that she may witness 
 Our seeming courtship. Keep us still in sight, 
 Yourselves unseen ; and by some sign I'll give 
 (A finger held up, or a kerchief waved),
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 141 
 
 You'll know your wager won then break upon us, 
 As if by chance. 
 
 Lucy. I apprehend your meaning 
 
 Selby. And may you prove a true Cassandra here, 
 Though my poor acres smart for't, wagering sister. 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE. Mrs. Selby's Chamber. 
 MKS. FKAJMPTON. KATHEKINE. 
 
 Mrs. F. Did I express myself in terms so strong ? 
 
 Kath. As nothing could have more affrighted me. 
 
 Mrs. F. Think it a hurt friend's jest, in retribution 
 Of a suspected cooling hospitality. 
 And, for my staying here, or going hence 
 (Now I remember something of our argument), 
 Selby and I can settle that between us. 
 You look amazed. What if your husband, child, 
 Himself has courted me to stay 1 
 
 Kath. You move 
 My Avonder and my pleasure equally. 
 
 Mrs. F. Yes, courted me to stay, waived all objections, 
 Made it a favour to yourselves ; not me, 
 His troublesome guest, as you surmised. Child, child, 
 When I recall his flattering welcome, I 
 Begin to think the burden of my presence 
 Was 
 
 Kath. What, for Heaven 
 
 Mrs. F. A little, little spice 
 Of jealousy that's all an honest pretext, 
 No wife need blush for. Say that you should see 
 (As oftentimes we widows take such freedoms, 
 Yet still on this side virtue), in a jest 
 Your husband pat me on the cheek, or steal 
 A kiss, while you were by, not else, for virtue's sake. 
 
 Kath. I could endure all this, thinking my husband 
 Meant it in sport 
 
 Mrs. F. But if in downright earnest
 
 142 POEMS. 
 
 (Putting myself out of the question here) 
 Your Selby, as I partly do suspect, 
 Own'd a divided heart 
 
 Kath. My own would break 
 
 Mrs. F. Why, what a blind and witless fool it is, 
 That will not see its gains, its infinite gains 
 
 Kath. Gain in a loss ! 
 Or mirth in utter desolation ! 
 
 Mrs. F. He doting on a face suppose it mine, 
 Or any other's tolerably fair 
 What need you care about a senseless secret 1 
 
 Kath. Perplex'd and fearful woman ! I in part 
 Fathom your dangerous meaning. You have broke 
 The worse than iron band, fretting the soul, 
 By which you held me captive. Whether my husband 
 Is what you give him out, or your fool'd fancy 
 But dreams he is so, either way I am free. 
 
 Mrs. F. It talks it bravely, blazons out its shame ; 
 A very heroine while on its knees ; 
 Rowe's Penitent, an absolute Calista ! 
 
 Kath. Not to thy wretched self these tears are falling ; 
 But to my husband, and offended Heaven, 
 Some drops are due and then I sleep in peace, 
 Relieved from frightful dreams, my dreams though sad. 
 
 [Exit. 
 
 Mrs. F. I have gone too far. Who knows but in this 
 
 mood 
 
 She may forestall my story, win on Selby 
 By a frank confession ? and the time draws on 
 For our appointed meeting. The game's desperate 
 For which I play. A moment's difference 
 May make it hers or mine. I fly to meet him. [Exit. 
 
 SCENE. A Garden. 
 
 ME. SELBY. MRS. FEAMPTON. 
 
 Selby. I am not so ill a guesser, Mistress Frampton, 
 Not to conjecture that some passages
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL 143 
 
 In your unfinish'd story, rightly interpreted, 
 Glanced at my bosom's peace ; 
 
 You knew my wife ? 
 
 Mrs. F. Even from her earliest school-days. What 
 
 of that 1 
 
 Or how is she concern'd in my fine riddles, 
 Framed for the hour's amusement ? 
 
 Selby. By my hopes 
 Of my new interest conceived in you, 
 And by the honest passion of my heart, 
 Which not obliquely I to you did hint ; 
 Come from the clouds of misty allegory, 
 And in plain language let me hear the worst. 
 Stand I disgraced, or no 1 
 
 Mrs. F. Then, by my hopes 
 Of my new interest conceived in you, 
 And by the kindling passion in my breast, 
 Which through my riddles you had almost read, 
 Adjured so strongly, I will tell you all. 
 In her school years, then bordering on fifteen, 
 Or haply not much past, she loved a youth 
 
 Selby. My most ingenuous Widow 
 
 Mrs. F. Met him oft 
 By stealth, where I still of the party was 
 
 Selby. Prime confidant to all the school, I war- 
 rant, 
 And general go-between (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. One morn he came 
 In breathless haste : " The ship was under sail. 
 Or in few hours would be, that must convey 
 Him and his destinies to barbarous shores, 
 Where, should he perish by inglorious hands, 
 It would be consolation in his death 
 To have call'd his Katherine his." 
 
 Selby. Thus far the story 
 Tallies with what I hoped (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. Wavering between 
 The doubt of doing wrong, and losing him ;
 
 144 POEMS. 
 
 And my dissuasions not o'er hotly urged, 
 
 Whom he had flatter'd with the bridemaid's part ; 
 
 Selby. I owe my subtle widow, then, for this (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. Briefly, we went to church. The ceremony 
 Scarcely was huddled over, and the ring 
 Yet cold upon her ringer, when they parted 
 He to his ship ; and we to school got back, 
 Scarce miss'd, before the dinner-bell could ring. 
 
 Selby. And from that hour 
 
 Mrs. F. Nor sight, nor news of him, 
 For aught that I could hear, she e'er obtain'd. 
 
 Selby. Like to a man that hovers in suspense 
 Over a letter just received, on which 
 The black seal hath impress'd its ominous token, 
 Whether to open it or no, so I 
 Suspended stand, whether to press my fate 
 Further, or check ill curiosity, 
 That tempts me to more loss. the name, the name 
 Of this fine youth 1 
 
 Mrs. F. What boots it, if 'twere told t 
 
 Selby. Now, by our loves, 
 And by my hopes of happier wedlocks, some day 
 To be accomplish'd, give to me his name ! 
 
 Mrs. F. 'Tis no such serious matter. It was Hunt- 
 ingdon. 
 
 Selby. How have three little syllables pluck'd from me 
 A world of countless hopes ! (aside). Evasive Widow ! 
 
 Mrs. F. How, sir ! I like not this (aside}. 
 
 Selby. No, no, I meant 
 
 Nothing but good to thee. That other woman, 
 How shall I call her but evasive, false, 
 And treacherous t by the trust I place in thee, 
 Tell me, and tell me truly, was the name 
 As you pronounced it 1 
 
 Mrs. F. Huntingdon the name 
 Which his paternal grandfather assumed, 
 Together with the estates, of a remote 
 Kinsman ; but our high-spirited youth
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 145 
 
 Selby. Yes 
 
 Mrs. F. Disdaining 
 
 For sordid pelf to truck the family honours, 
 At risk of the lost estates, resumed the old style, 
 And answer'd only to the name of 
 
 Selby. What? 
 
 Mrs. F. Of Halford. 
 
 Selby. A Huntingdon to Halford changed so soon ! 
 Why, then, I see a witch hath her good spells 
 As well as bad, and can by a backward charm 
 Unruffle the foul storm she has just been raising. 
 
 [Aside. He makes the signal. 
 
 My frank, fair-spoken Widow ! let this kiss, 
 Which yet aspires no higher, speak my thanks, 
 Till I can think on greater. 
 
 Enter LUCY and KATHEFJXE. 
 
 Mrs. F. Interrupted ! 
 
 Selby. My sister here ! and see, where with her come,? 
 My serpent gliding in an angel's form, 
 To taint the new-born Eden of our joys. 
 Why should we fear them 1 AVe'll not stir a foot, 
 Nor coy it for their pleasures. [He courts the Widoiv. 
 
 Lucy (to KATHERINE). This, your free 
 And sweet ingenuous confession binds me 
 For ever to you ; and it shall go hard 
 But it shall fetch you back your husband's heart, 
 That now seems blindly straying : or, at worst, 
 In me you have still a sister.' Some wives, brother, 
 Would think it strange to catch their husbands thus 
 Alone with a trim widow ; but your Katherine 
 Is arm'd, I think, with patience. 
 
 Kath. I am fortified 
 
 With knowledge of self-faults to endure worse wrongs, 
 If they be wrongs, than he can lay upon me ; 
 Even to look on, and see him sue in earnest, 
 As now I think he does it but in seeming, 
 To that ill woman.
 
 146 POEMS. 
 
 Selby. Good words, gentle Kate, 
 And not a thought irreverent of our Widow. 
 Why, 'twere unmannerly at any time, 
 But most uncourteous on our wedding-day, 
 When we should show most hospitable. Some wine. 
 
 [Wine is brought. 
 
 I am for sports. And now I do remember, 
 The old Egyptians at their banquets placed 
 A charnel sight of dead men's skulls before them, 
 With images of cold mortality, 
 To temper their fierce joys when they grew rampant. 
 I like the custom well : and ere we crown 
 With freer mirth the day, I shall propose, 
 In calmest recollection of our spirits, 
 We drink the solemn "Memory of the Dead." 
 
 Mrs. F. Or the supposed dead (aside to him}. 
 
 Selby. Pledge me, good wife (she fills). 
 
 Nay, higher yet, till the brimm'd cup swell o'er. 
 
 Kath. I catch the awful import of your words ; 
 And, though I could accuse you of unkindness, 
 Yet as your lawful and obedient wife, 
 While that name lasts (as I perceive it fading, 
 Nor I much longer may have leave to use it), 
 I calmly take the office you impose ; 
 And on my knees, imploring their forgiveness, 
 Whom I in heaven or earth may have offended, 
 Exempt from starting tears, and woman's weakness, 
 I pledge you, sir The Memory of the Dead ! 
 
 [She drinks kneeling. 
 
 Selby. 'Tis gently and discreetly said, and like 
 My former loving Kate. 
 
 Mrs. F. Does he relent ? (aside}. 
 
 Selby. That ceremony past, we give the day 
 To unabated sport. And, in requital 
 Of certain stories, and quaint allegories, 
 Which my rare Widow hath been telling to me, 
 To raise my morning mirth, if she will lend 
 Her patient hearing, I will here recite
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 147 
 
 A Parable ; and, the more to suit her taste, 
 The scene is laid in the East. 
 
 Mrs. F. I long to hear it. 
 Some tale, to fit his wife (aside). 
 
 Kath. Now comes my TRIAL. 
 
 Lucy. The hour of your deliverance is at hand, 
 If I presage right. Bear up, gentlest sister. 
 
 Selby. "The Sultan Haroun" Stay now I have it 
 " The Caliph Haroun in his orchards had 
 A fruit-tree, bearing such delicious fruits, 
 That he reserved them for his proper gust ; 
 And through the palace it was death proclaimed 
 To any one that should purloin the same." 
 
 Mrs. F. A heavy penance for so light a fault 
 
 Selby. Pray you, be silent, else you put me out. 
 " A crafty page, that for advantage watch'd, 
 Detected in the act a brother page, 
 Of his own years, that was his bosom-friend ; 
 And thenceforth he became that other's lord, 
 And like a tyrant he demean'd himself, 
 Laid forced exactions on his fellow's purse ; 
 And when that poor means fail'd, held o'er his head 
 Threats of impending death in hideous forms ; 
 Till the small culprit on his nightly couch 
 Dream'd of strange pains, and felt his body writhe 
 In tortuous pangs around the impaling stake." 
 
 Mrs. F. I like not this beginning 
 
 Selby. Pray you attend. 
 " The Secret, like a night-hag, rid his sleeps, 
 And took the youthful pleasures from his days, 
 And chased the youthful smoothness from his brow, 
 That from a rose-cheek'd boy he waned and waned 
 To a pale skeleton of what he was ; 
 And would have died, but for one lucky chance." 
 
 Kath. Oh ! 
 
 Mrs. F. Your wife she faints some cordial smell 
 to this. 
 
 Selby. Stand off. My sister best will do that office.
 
 148 POEMS. 
 
 Mrs. F. Are all his tempting speeches come to 
 this 1 (aside). 
 
 Selby. What ail'd my wife ? 
 
 Kath. A warning faintness, sir, 
 Seized on my spirits when you came to where 
 You said " a lucky chance." I am better now. 
 Please you go on. 
 
 Selby. The sequel shall be brief. 
 
 Kath. But, brief or long, I feel my fate hangs on 
 it (aside). 
 
 Selby. " One morn the Caliph, in a covert hid, 
 Close by an arbour where the two boys talk'd 
 (As oft we read that Eastern sovereigns 
 Would play the eaves-dropper, to learn the truth 
 Imperfectly received from mouths of slaves), 
 O'erheard their dialogue ; and heard enough 
 To judge aright the cause, and know his cue. 
 The following day a Cadi was despatch'd 
 To summon both before the judgment-seat ; 
 The lickerish culprit, almost dead with fear, 
 And the informing friend, who readily, 
 Fired with fair promises of large reward, 
 And Caliph's love, the hateful truth disclosed." 
 
 Mrs. F. What did the Caliph to the offending boy, 
 That had so grossly err'd ? 
 
 Selby. His sceptred hand 
 He forth in token of forgiveness stretch'd 
 And clapp'd his cheeks, and courted him with gifts, 
 And he became once more his favourite page. 
 
 Mrs. F. But for that other 
 
 Selby. He dismissed him straight, 
 From dreams of grandeur and of Caliph's love, 
 To the bare cottage on the withering moor, 
 Where friends, turn'd fiends, and hollow confidants, 
 And widows, hide, who in a husband's ear 
 Pour baneful truths, but tell not all the truth ; 
 And told him not that Robin Halford died 
 Some moons before his marriage-bells were rung.
 
 THE WIFE'S TRIAL. 149 
 
 Too near dishonour hast thou trod, dear wife, 
 
 And on a dangerous cast our fates were set ; 
 
 But Heaven, that will'd our wedlock to be blest, 
 
 Hath interposed to save it gracious too. 
 
 Your penance is to dress your cheek in smiles, 
 
 And to be once again my merry Kate. 
 
 Sister, your hand ; 
 
 Your wager won, makes me a happy man ; 
 
 Though poorer, Heaven knows, by a thousand pounds. 
 
 The sky clears up after a dubious day. 
 
 Widow, your hand. I read a penitence 
 
 In this dejected brow ; and in this shame 
 
 Your fault is buried. You shall in with us, 
 
 And, if it please you, taste our nuptial fare ; 
 
 For, till this moment, I can joyful say, 
 
 Was never truly Selby's Wedding Day.
 
 150 POEMS. 
 
 [In a leaf of a quarto edition of the " Lives of the Saints, written 
 in Spanish by the learned and reverend father Alfonso Villegas, 
 Divine of the Order of St. Dominick, set forth in English by John 
 Heigham, Anno 1630," bought at a Catholic bookshop in Duke 
 Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, I found, carefully inserted, a painted 
 flower, seemingly coeval with the book itself ; and did not for some 
 time discover that it opened in the middle, and was the cover to a 
 very humble draught of a Saint Anne, with the Virgin and Child ; 
 doubtless the performance of some poor but pious Catholic, whose 
 meditations it assisted.] 
 
 LIFT with reverent hand that tarnish'd flower, 
 
 That shrines beneath her modest canopy 
 
 Memorials dear to Romish piety ; 
 
 Dim specks, rude shapes of Saints : in fervent hour 
 
 The work perchance of some meek devotee, 
 
 Who, poor in worldly treasures to set forth 
 
 The sanctities she worshipp'd to their worth, 
 
 In this imperfect tracery might see 
 
 Hints, that all Heaven did to her sense reveal. 
 
 Cheap gifts best fit poor givers. We are told 
 
 Of the love mite, the cup of water cold, 
 
 That in their way approved the offerer's zeal. 
 
 True love shows costliest, where the means are scant ; 
 
 And, in their reckoning, they abound, who want. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QTJILLINAK 
 
 A PASSING glance was all I caught of thee, 
 In my own Enfield haunts at random roving. 
 Old friends of ours were with thee, faces loving ; 
 Time short : and salutations cursory, 
 Though deep and hearty. The familiar name 
 Of you, yet unfamiliar, raised in me 
 Thoughts what the daughter of that man should be 
 Who call'd our Wordsworth friend. My thoughts did 
 frame
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY. 151 
 
 A growing Maiden, who, from clay to day 
 Advancing still in stature, and in grace, 
 Would all her lonely father's griefs efface, 
 And his paternal cares with usury pay. 
 I still retain the phantom, as I can ; 
 And call the gentle image Quillinan. 
 
 TO DORA WORDSWORTH, 
 
 ON BEING ASKED BY HER FATHEE TO WRITE IN HER 
 ALBUM. 
 
 AN album is a banquet : from the store, 
 
 In his intelligential orchard growing, 
 
 Your sire might heap your board to overflowing ; 
 
 One shaking of the tree 'twould ask no more 
 
 To set a salad forth, more rich than that 
 
 Which Evelyn 1 in his princely cookery fancied : 
 
 Or that more rare, by Eve's neat hands enhanced, 
 
 Where a pleased guest, the angelic virtue sat. 
 
 But like the all-grasping founder of the feast, 
 
 Whom Nathan to the sinning king did tax, 
 
 From his less wealthy neighbours he exacts ; 
 
 Spares his own flocks, and takes the poor man's beast. 
 
 Obedient to his bidding, lo, I am, 
 
 A zealous, meek, contributory Lamb. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY. 
 
 IN Christian world MARY the garland wears ! 
 EEBECCA sweetens on a Hebrew's ear ; 
 Quakers for pure PRISCILLA are more clear ; 
 And the light Gaul by amorous NINON swears. 
 Among the lesser lights how LUCY shines ! 
 What air of fragrance ROSAMOND throws around ! 
 How like a hymn doth sweet CECILIA, sound ! 
 Of MARTHAS, and of ABIGAILS, few lines 
 
 1 Acetaria, a discourse on Sallets, by J. E., 1706.
 
 152 POEMS. 
 
 Have bragg'd in verse. Of coarsest household stuff 
 
 Should homely JOAN be fashioned. But can 
 
 You BARBARA resist, or MARIAN ? 
 
 And is not CLARE for love excuse enough 1 
 
 Yet, by my faith in numbers, I profess, 
 
 These all, than Saxon EDITH, please me less. 
 
 1833. 
 
 THE SELF -ENCHANTED. 
 
 I HAD sense in dreams of a beauty rare, 
 
 Whom Fate had spell-bound, and rooted there, 
 
 Stooping, like some enchanted theme, 
 
 Over the marge of that crystal stream, 
 
 Where the blooming Greek, to Echo blind, 
 
 With self-love fond, had to waters pined. 
 
 Ages had waked, and ages slept, 
 
 And that bending posture still she kept : 
 
 For her eyes she may not turn away, 
 
 Till a fairer object shall pass that way 
 
 Till an image more beauteous this world can show, 
 
 Than her own which she sees in the mirror below. 
 
 Pore on, fair creature ! for ever pore, 
 Nor dream to be disenchanted more ; 
 For vain is expectance, and wish is vain, 
 Till a new Narcissus can come again. 
 
 1832. 
 
 TO A FRIEND, ON HIS MARRIAGE. 
 
 What makes a happy wedlock ? What has fate 
 Not given to thee in thy well-chosen mate 1 
 Good sense good humour ; these are trivial things, 
 Dear M , that each trite encomiast sings. 
 But she hath these, and more. A mind exempt 
 From every low-bred passion, where contempt, 
 Nor envy, nor detraction, ever found 
 A harbour yet ; au understanding sound ;
 
 TO LOUISA M . 153 
 
 Just views of right and wrong ; perception full 
 Of the deform'd, and of the beautiful, 
 In life and manners ; wit above her sex, 
 Which, as a gem, her sprightly converse decks ; 
 Exuberant fancies, prodigal of mirth, 
 To gladden woodland walk, or winter hearth ; 
 A noble nature, conqueror in the strife 
 Of conflict with a hard discouraging life, 
 Strengthening the veins of virtue, past the power 
 Of those whose days have been one silken hour, 
 Spoil'd fortune's pamper'd offspring ; a keen sense 
 Alike of benefit, and of offence. 
 With reconcilement quick, that instant springs 
 From the charged heart with nimble angel wings ; 
 While grateful feelings, like a signet sign'd 
 By a strong hand, seem burnt into her niiud. 
 If these, dear friend, a dowry can confer 
 Eicher than land, thou hast them all in her ; 
 And beauty, which some hold the chiefest boon, 
 Is in thy bargain for a make-weight thrown. 
 
 1833. 
 
 TO LOUISA M- 
 
 Wliom I used to call "Monkey." 
 
 LOUISA, serious grown and mild, 
 I knew you once a romping child, 
 Obstreperous much and very wild. 
 
 Then you would clamber up my knees, 
 And strive with every art to tease, 
 When every art of yours could please. 
 
 These things would scarce be proper now, 
 But they are gone, I know not how, 
 And woman's written on your brow.
 
 154 POEMS. 
 
 Time draws his finger o'er the scene ; 
 
 But I cannot forget between 
 
 The Thing to me you once have been 
 
 Each sportive sally, wild escape, 
 The scoff, the banter, and the jape, 
 And antics of my gamesome Ape. 
 
 FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT 
 COMPOSERS. 
 
 SOME cry up Haydn, some Mozart, 
 
 Just as the whim bites ; for my part, 
 
 I do not care a farthing candle 
 
 For either of them, or for Handel. 
 
 Cannot a man live free and easy, 
 
 Without admiring Pergolesi 1 
 
 Or through the world with comfort go 
 
 That never heard of Doctor Blow 1 
 
 So help me Heaven, I hardly have ; 
 
 And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, 
 
 Like other people, if you watch it, 
 
 And know no more of stave or crotchet 
 
 Than did the primitive Peruvians ; 
 
 Or those old ante-queer-diluvians 
 
 That lived in the unwash'd world with Jubal, 
 
 Before that dirty blacksmith Tubal, 
 
 By stroke on anvil, or by summat, 
 
 Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut. 
 
 I care no more for Cimarosa 
 
 Than he did for Salvator Rosa, 
 
 Being no painter ; and bad luck 
 
 Be mine, if I can bear that Gluck ! 
 
 Old Tycho Brahe, and modern Herschel, 
 
 Had something in them ; but who's Purcel 1 
 
 The devil with his foot so cloven, 
 
 For aught I care, may take Beethoven ;
 
 TO MARGARET W . 155 
 
 And, if the bargain does not suit, 
 
 I'll throw him Weber in to boot ! 
 
 There's not the splitting of a splinter 
 
 To choose 'twixt him last named, and Winter. 
 
 Of Doctor Pepusch old Queen Dido 
 
 Knew just as much, God knows, as I do. 
 
 I would not go four miles to visit 
 
 Sebastian Bach (or Batch, which is it 1) 
 
 No more I would for Bononciui. 
 
 As for Novello, or Rossini, 
 
 I shall not say a word to grieve 'em, 
 
 Because they're living ; so I leave 'em. 
 
 TO MARGARET W- 
 
 MARGAKET, in happy hour 
 Christen'd from that humble flower 
 
 Which we a daisy call ! 
 May thy pretty namesake be 
 In all things a type of thee, 
 
 And image thee in all. 
 
 Like it you show a modest face, 
 An unpretending native grace ; 
 
 The tulip, and the pink, 
 The china and the damask rose, 
 And every flaunting flower that blows, 
 
 In the comparing shrink. 
 
 Of lowly fields you think no scorn ; 
 Yet gayest gardens would adorn, 
 
 And grace, wherever set. 
 Home-seated in your lonely bower, 
 Or wedded a transplanted flower 
 
 I bless you, Margaret ! 
 
 October 8, 1SJ
 
 ROSAMUND GEAY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 IT was noontide. The sun was very hot. An old gentle- 
 woman sat spinning in a little arbour at the door of her 
 cottage. She was blind ; and her granddaughter was 
 reading the Bible to her. The old lady had just left her 
 work, to attend to the story of Ruth. 
 
 " Orpah kissed her mother-in-law ; but Ruth clave 
 unto her." It was a passage she could not let pass 
 without a comment. The moral she drew from it was 
 not very new, to be sure. The girl had heard it a hundred 
 times before and a hundred times more she could have 
 heard it, without suspecting it to be tedious. Rosamund 
 loved her grandmother. 
 
 The old lady loved Rosamund too ; and she had 
 reason for so doing. Rosamund was to her at once a 
 child and a servant. She had only her left in the world. 
 They two lived together. 
 
 They had once known better days. The story of 
 Rosamund's parents, their failure, their folly, and dis- 
 tresses, may be told another time. Our tale hath grief 
 enough in it. 
 
 It was now about a year and a half since old Margaret 
 Gray had sold off all her effects, to pay the debts of 
 Rosamund's father just after the mother had died of a 
 broken heart ; for her husband had fled his country to 
 hide his shame in a foreign laud. At that period the old
 
 158 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 lady retired to a small cottage, in the village of Widford, 
 in Hertfordshire. 
 
 Rosamund, in her thirteenth year, was left destitute, 
 without fortune or friends ; she went with her grand- 
 mother. In all this time she had served her faithfully 
 and lovingly. 
 
 Old Margaret Gray, when she first came into these 
 parts, had eyes, and could see. The neighbours said, 
 they had been dimmed by weeping : be that as it may, 
 she was latterly grown quite blind. " God is very good 
 to us, child ; I can feel you yet." This she would some- 
 times say ; and we need not wonder to hear, that Rosa- 
 mund clave unto her grandmother. 
 
 Margaret retained a spirit unbroken "by calamity. 
 There was a principle within, which it seemed as if no 
 outward circumstances could reach. It was a religious 
 principle, and she had taught it to Rosamund ; for the 
 girl had mostly resided with her grandmother from her 
 earliest years. Indeed she had taught her all that she 
 knew herself and the old lady's knowledge did not extend 
 a vast way. 
 
 Margaret had drawn her maxims from observation ; 
 and a pretty long experience in life had contributed to 
 make her, at times, a little positive ; but Rosamund never 
 argued with her grandmother. 
 
 Their library consisted chiefly in a large family Bible, 
 with notes and expositions by various learned expositors 
 from Bishop Jewell downwards. 
 
 This might never be suffered to lie about like other 
 books but was kept constantly wrapped up in a hand- 
 some case of green velvet, with gold tassels the only 
 relic of departed grandeur they had brought with them 
 to the cottage everything else of value had been sold 
 off for the purpose above-mentioned. 
 
 This Bible Rosamund, when a child, had never dared 
 to open without permission ; and even yet, from habit, 
 continued the custom. Margaret had parted with none 
 of her authority ; indeed it was never exerted with much
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 159 
 
 harshness ; and happy was Rosamund, though a girl 
 grown, when she could obtain leave to read her Bible. 
 It was a treasure too valuable for an indiscriminate use ; 
 and Margaret still pointed out to her granddaughter 
 where to read. 
 
 Besides this, they had the "Complete Angler, or 
 Contemplative Man's Recreation," with cuts "Pilgrim's 
 Progress," the first part a " Cookery Book," with a few 
 dry sprigs of rosemary and lavender stuck here and there 
 between the leaves (I suppose, to point to some of the old 
 lady's most favourite receipts) and there was " "Wither's 
 Emblems," an old book, and quaint. The old-fashioned 
 pictures in this last book were among the first exciters 
 of the infant Rosamund's curiosity. Her contemplation 
 had fed upon them in rather older years. 
 
 Rosamund had not read many books besides these ; 
 or if any, they had been only occasional companions : 
 these were to Rosamund as old friends, that she had long 
 known. I know not, whether the peculiar cast of her 
 mind might not be traced, in part, to a tincture she had 
 received, in early life, from Walton, and Wither, from 
 John Bunyan, and her Bible. 
 
 Rosamund's mind was pensive and reflective, rather 
 than what passes usually for clever or acute. From a 
 child she was remarkably shy and thoughtful this was 
 taken for stupidity and want of feeling ; and the child 
 has been sometimes whipped for being a stubborn thing, 
 when her little heart was almost bursting with affection. 
 
 Even now her grandmother would often reprove her, 
 when she found her too grave or melancholy ; give her 
 sprightly lectures about good humour and rational mirth ; 
 and not unfrequently fall a crying herself, to the great 
 discredit of her lecture. Those tears endeared her the 
 more to Rosamund. 
 
 Margaret would say, " Child, I love you to cry, when 
 I think you are only remembering your poor dear father 
 and mother I would have you think about them some- 
 times it would be strange if you did not but I fear,
 
 160 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Rosamund, I fear, girl, you sometimes think too deeply 
 about your own situation and poor prospects in life. 
 When you do so, you do wrong remember the naughty 
 rich man in the parable. He never had any good thoughts 
 about God, and his religion : and that might have been 
 your case." 
 
 Rosamund, at these times, could not reply to her : she 
 was not in the habit of arguing with her grandmother ; 
 so she was quite silent on these occasions or else the 
 girl knew well enough herself, that she had only been sad 
 to think of the desolate condition of her best friend, to 
 see her, in her old age, so infirm and blind. But she had 
 never been used to make excuses, when the old lady 
 said she was doing wrong. 
 
 The neighbours were all very kind to them. The 
 veriest rustics never passed them without a bow, or a 
 pulling off of the hat some show of courtesy, awkward 
 indeed, but affectionate with a "good morrow, madam/' 
 or " young madam," as it might happen. 
 
 Rude and savage natures, who seem born with a pro- 
 pensity to express contempt for anything that looks like 
 prosperity, yet felt respect for its declining lustre. 
 
 The farmers, and better sort of people (as they are 
 called) all promised to provide for Rosamund, when her 
 grandmother should die. Margaret trusted in God, and 
 believed them. 
 
 She used to say, " I have lived many years in the 
 world, and have never known people, good people, to be 
 left without some friend ; a relation, a benefactor, a 
 something. God knows our wants that it is not good 
 for man or woman to be alone ; and he always sends us 
 an helpmate, a leaning-place, a somewhat." Upon this 
 sure ground of experience, did Margaret build her trust 
 in Providence. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ROSAMUND had just made an end of her story (as I was 
 about to relate) and was listening to the application of
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 161 
 
 the moral (which said application she was old enough to 
 have made herself, but her grandmother still continued 
 to treat her in many respects as a child, and Rosamund 
 was in no haste to lay claim to the title of womanhood) 
 when a young gentleman made his appearance, and inter- 
 rupted them. 
 
 It was young Allan Clare, who had brought a present 
 of peaches, and some roses, for Rosamund. 
 
 He laid his little basket down on a seat of the arbour ; 
 and in a respectful tone of voice, as though he were 
 addressing a parent, inquired of Margaret, " how she did." 
 
 The old lady seemed pleased with his attentions 
 answered his inquiries by saying, that "her cough was 
 less troublesome a nights, but she had not yet got rid of 
 it, and probably she never might ; but she did not like 
 to tease young people with an account of her infirmities." 
 
 A few kind words passed on either side, when young 
 Clare, glancing a tender look at the girl, who had all 
 this time been silent, took leave of them with saying, " I 
 shall bring Elinor to see you in the evening." 
 
 When he was gone, the old lady began to prattle. 
 
 " That is a sweet dispositioned youth, and I do love 
 him dearly, I must say it there is such a modesty in 
 all he says or does he should not come here so often, 
 to be sure, but I don't know how to help it ; there is so 
 much goodness in him, I can't find in my heart to forbid 
 him. But, Rosamund, girl, I must tell you beforehand ; 
 when you grow older Mr. Clare must be no companion 
 for you while you were doth so young, it was all very 
 well but the time is coming, when folks will think harm 
 of it, if a rich young gentleman, like Mr. Clare, comes so 
 often to our poor cottage. Dost hear, girl 1 Avhy don't 
 you answer ? come, I did not mean to say anything to 
 hurt you speak to me, Rosamund nay, I must not 
 have you be sullen I don't love people that are sullen." 
 
 And in this manner was this poor soul running on, 
 unheard and unheeded, when it occurred to her that 
 possibly the girl might not be within hearing. 
 M
 
 162 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 And true it was, that Rosamund had slunk away at 
 the first mention of Mr. Clare's good qualities : and when 
 she returned, which was not till a few minutes after 
 Margaret had made an end of her fine harangue, it is 
 certain her cheeks did look very rosy. That might have 
 been from the heat of the day or from exercise, for she 
 had been walking in the garden. 
 
 Margaret, we know, was blind ; and, in this case, it 
 was lucky for Rosamund that she was so, or she might 
 have made some not unlikely surmises. 
 
 I must not have my reader infer from this, that I at 
 all think it likely, a young maid of fourteen would fall in 
 love without asking her grandmother's leave the thing 
 itself is not to be conceived. 
 
 To obviate all suspicions, I am disposed to communi- 
 cate a little anecdote of Rosamund. 
 
 A month or two back her grandmother had been 
 giving her the strictest prohibitions, in her walks, not to 
 go near a certain spot, which was dangerous from the 
 circumstance of a huge overgrown oak-tree spreading its 
 prodigious arms across a deep chalk-pit, Avhich they 
 partly concealed. 
 
 To this fatal place Rosamund came one day female 
 curiosity, we know, is older than the flood let us not 
 think hardly of the girl, if she partook of the sexual 
 failing. 
 
 Rosamund ventured farther and farther climbed along 
 one of the branches approached the forbidden chasm 
 her foot slipped she was not killed but it was by a mercy 
 she escaped other branches intercepted her fall and 
 with a palpitating heart she made her way back to the 
 cottage. 
 
 It happened that evening, that her grandmother was 
 in one of her best humours, caressed Rosamund, talked 
 of old times, and what a blessing it was they two found 
 a shelter in their little cottage, and in conclusion told 
 Rosamund " she was a good girl, and God would one day 
 reward her for her kindness to her old blind grandmother."
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 163 
 
 This was more than Eosamund could bear. Her 
 morning's disobedience came fresh in her mind, she felt 
 she did not deserve all this from Margaret, and at last 
 burst into a fit of crying, and made confession of her fault. 
 The old gentlewoman kissed and forgave her. 
 
 Eosamund never went near that naughty chasm again. 
 
 Margaret would never have heard of this, if Rosamund 
 had not told of it herself. But this young maid had a 
 delicate moral sense, which would not suffer her to take 
 advantage of her grandmother, to deceive her, or conceal 
 anything from her, though Margaret was old, and blind, 
 and easy to be imposed upon. 
 
 Another virtuous trait I recollect of Eosamund, and, 
 now I am in the vein, I will tell it. 
 
 Some, I know, will think these things trifles and 
 they are so but if these minutiae make my reader better 
 acquainted with Eosamund, I am content to abide the 
 imputation. 
 
 These promises of character, hints, and early indica- 
 tions of a sweet nature, are to me more dear, and choice 
 in the selection, than any of those pretty wild flowers, 
 which this young maid, this virtuous Eosamund, has ever 
 gathered in a fine May morning, to make a posy to place 
 in the bosom of her old blind friend. 
 
 Eosamund had a very just notion of drawing, and 
 would often employ her talent in making sketches of the 
 surrounding scenery. 
 
 On a landscape, a larger piece than she had ever yet 
 attempted, she had now been working for three or four 
 months. She had taken great pains with it, given much 
 time to it, and it was nearly finished. For whose parti- 
 cular inspection it was designed, I will not venture to 
 conjecture. We know it could not have been for her 
 grandmother's. 
 
 One clay she went out on a short errand, and left her 
 landscape on the table. When she returned, she found 
 it gone. 
 
 Eosamund from the first suspected some mischief, but
 
 164 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 held her tongue. At length she made the fatal discovery. 
 Margaret, in her absence, had laid violent hands on it ; 
 not knowing what it was, but taking it for some waste 
 paper, had torn it in half, and with one half of this 
 elaborate composition had twisted herself up a thread- 
 paper ! 
 
 Kosamund spread out her hands at sight of the dis- 
 aster, gave her grandmother a roguish smile, but said not 
 a word. She knew the poor soul would only fret, if she 
 told her of it, and when once Margaret was set a-fretting 
 for other people's misfortunes, the fit held her pretty long. 
 
 So Kosamund that very afternoon began another piece 
 of the same size and subject ; and Margaret, to her dying 
 day, never dreamed of the mischief she had unconsciously 
 done. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 EOSAMUND GRAY was the most beautiful young creature 
 that eyes ever beheld. Her face had the sweetest expres- 
 sion in it a gentleness a modesty a timidity a cer- 
 tain charm a grace without a name. 
 
 There was a sort of melancholy mingled in her smile. 
 It was not the thoughtless levity of a girl it was not 
 the restrained simper of premature womanhood it was 
 something which the poet Young might have remembered, 
 when he composed that perfect line, 
 
 "Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair." 
 
 She was a mild-eyed maid, and everybody loved her. 
 Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her. 
 Her yellow hair fell in bright and curling clusters, like 
 
 "those hanging locks 
 Of yoxing Apollo." 
 
 Her voice was trembling and musical. A graceful 
 diffidence pleaded for her whenever she spake and,
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 165 
 
 if she said but little, that little found its way to the 
 heart. 
 
 Young, and artless, and innocent, meaning no harm, 
 and thinking none ; affectionate, as a smiling infant 
 playful, yet unobtrusive, as a weaned lamb everybody 
 loved her. Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed 
 for her. 
 
 The moon is shining in so brightly at my window, 
 where I write, that I feel it is a crime not to suspend my 
 employment awhile to gaze at her. 
 
 See how she glideth, in maiden honour, through the 
 clouds, who divide on either side to do her homage. 
 
 Beautiful vision ! as I contemplate thee, an internal 
 harmony is communicated to my mind, a moral bright- 
 ness, a tacit analogy of mental purity ; a calm like that 
 we ascribe in fancy to the favoured inhabitants of thy 
 fairy regions, " argent fields." 
 
 I marvel not, moon, that heathen people, in the 
 " olden times," did worship thy deity Cynthia, Diana, 
 Hecate. Christian Europe invokes thee not by these 
 names now her idolatry is of a blacker stain ; Belial is 
 her God she worships Mammon. 
 
 False things are told concerning thee, fair Planet 
 For I will ne'er believe, that thoti canst take a perverse 
 pleasure in distorting the brains of us poor mortals. 
 Lunatics ! moon-struck ! Calumny invented, and Folly 
 took up, these names. I would hope better things from 
 thy mild aspect and benign influences, 
 
 Lady of Heaven, thou lendest thy pure lamp to light 
 the way to the Virgin Mourner, when she goes to seek 
 the tomb where her Warrior Lover lies. 
 
 Friend of the distressed, thou speakest only peace to 
 the lonely sufferer, who walks forth in the placid evening, 
 beneath thy gentle light, to chide at fortune, or to com- 
 plain of changed friends, or unhappy loves. 
 
 Do I dream, or doth not even now a heavenly calm 
 descend from thee into my bosom, as I meditate on the 
 chaste loves of Eosamund and her Clare 1
 
 166 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ALLAN CLARE was just two years older than Rosamund. 
 He was a boy of fourteen, when he first became acquainted 
 with her it was soon after she had come to reside with 
 her grandmother at Widford. 
 
 He met her by chance one day, carrying a pitcher in 
 her hand, which she had been filling from a neighbouring 
 well the pitcher was heavy, and she seemed to be bend- 
 ing with its weight. 
 
 Allan insisted on carrying it for her for he thought 
 it a sin, that a delicate young maid, like her, should be 
 so employed, and he stand idle by. 
 
 Allan had a propensity to do little kind offices for 
 everybody but at sight of Rosamund Gray his first fire 
 was kindled his young mind seemed to have found an 
 object, and his enthusiasm was from that time forth 
 awakened. His visits, from that day, were pretty frequent 
 at the cottage. 
 
 He was never happier than when he could get Rosa- 
 mund to walk out with him. He would make her admire 
 the scenes he admired fancy the wild flowers he fancied 
 watch the clouds he was watching and not unfre- 
 quently repeat to her poetry, which he loved, and make 
 her love it. 
 
 On their return, the old lady, who considered them 
 yet as but children, would bid Rosamund fetch Mr. Clare 
 a glass of her currant wine, a bowl of new milk, or some 
 cheap dainty, which was more welcome to Allan than the 
 costliest delicacies of a prince's court. 
 
 The boy and girl, for they were no more at that age, 
 grew fond of each other more fond than either of them 
 suspected. 
 
 " They would sit and sigh, 
 And look upon each other, and conceive 
 Not what they ail'd ; yet something they did ail, 
 And yet were well and yet they were not well ; 
 And what was their disease, they could not tell."
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 167 
 
 And thus, 
 
 " In this first garden of their simpleuess 
 They spent their childhood. " 
 
 A circumstance had lately happened, which in some 
 sort altered the nature of their attachment. 
 
 Eosamund was one day reading the tale of "Julia de 
 RoubigneY' a book which young Clare had lent her 
 
 Allan was standing by, looking over her, with one 
 hand thrown round her neck, and a finger of the other 
 pointing to a passage in Julia's third letter. 
 
 " Maria ! in my hours of visionary indulgence, I have 
 sometimes painted to myself a husband no matter whom 
 comforting me amidst the distresses, which fortune had 
 laid upon us. I have smiled upon him through my tears ; 
 tears, not of anguish, but of tenderness ; our children 
 were playing around us, unconscious of misfortune ; we 
 had taught them to be humble, and to be happy ; our 
 little shed was reserved to us, and their smiles to cheer 
 it. I have imagined the luxury of such a scene, and 
 affliction became a part of my dream of happiness." 
 
 The girl blushed as she read, and trembled she had 
 a sort of confused sensation, that Allan was noticing her 
 yet she durst not lift her eyes from the book, but con- 
 tinued reading, scarce knowing what she read. 
 
 Allan guessed the cause of her confusion. Allan 
 trembled too his colour came and went his feelings 
 became impetuous and, flinging both arms round her 
 neck, he kissed his young favourite. 
 
 Rosamund was vexed, and pleased, soothed and 
 frightened, all in a moment a fit of tears came to her 
 relief. 
 
 Allan had indulged before in these little freedoms, and 
 Rosamund had thought no harm of them but from this 
 time the girl grew timid and reserved distant in her 
 manner, and careful of her behaviour, in Allan's presence 
 not seeking his society, as before, but rather shunning 
 it delighting more to feed upon his idea in absence.
 
 168 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Allan too, from this day, seemed changed : his manner 
 became, though not less tender, yet more respectful and 
 diffident his bosom felt a throb it had till now not 
 known, in the society of Rosamund and, if he was less 
 familiar with her than in former times, that charm of 
 delicacy had superadded a grace to Rosamund, which, 
 while he feared, he loved. 
 
 There is a mysterious character, heightened indeed by 
 fancy and passion, but not without foundation in reality 
 and observation, which true lovers have ever imputed to 
 the object of their affections. This character Rosamund 
 had now acquired with Allan something angelic, perfect, 
 exceeding nature. 
 
 Yonng Clare dwelt very near to the cottage. He had 
 lost his parents, who were rather wealthy, early in life ; 
 and was left to the care of a sister, some ten years older 
 than himself. 
 
 Elinor Clare was an excellent young lady discreet, 
 intelligent, and affectionate. Allan revered her as a 
 parent, while he loved her as his own familiar friend. 
 He told all the little secrets of his heart to her but 
 there was one, which he had hitherto unaccountably con- 
 cealed from her namely, the extent of his regard for 
 Rosamund. 
 
 Elinor knew of his visits to the cottage, and was no 
 stranger to the persons of Margaret and her granddaughter. 
 She had several times met them, when she has been 
 walking with her brother a civility usually passed on 
 either side but Elinor avoided troubling her brother 
 with any unseasonable questions. 
 
 Allan's heart often beat, and he had been going to tell 
 his sister all but something like shame (false or true, I 
 shall not stay to inquire) had hitherto kept him back 
 still the secret, unrevealed, hung upon his conscience like 
 a crime for his temper had a sweet and noble frankness 
 in it, which bespake him yet a virgin from the world. 
 
 There was a fine openness in his countenance the 
 character of it somewhat resembled Rosamund's except
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 169 
 
 that more fire and enthusiasm were discernible in Allan's 
 his eyes were of a darker blue than Rosamund's his 
 hair was of a chestnut colour his cheeks ruddy, and 
 tinged with brown. There was a cordial sweetness in 
 Allan's smile, the like to which I never saw in any other 
 face. 
 
 Elinor had hitherto connived at her brother's attach- 
 ment to Rosamund. Elinor, I believe, was something of 
 a physiognomist, and thought she could trace in the 
 countenance and manner of Rosamund qualities which 
 no brother of hers need be ashamed to love. 
 
 The time was now come when Elinor was desirous of 
 knowing her brother's favourite more intimately an 
 opportunity offered of breaking the matter to Allan. 
 
 The morning of the day in which he carried his present 
 of fruit and flowers to Rosamund, his sister had observed 
 him more than usually busy in the garden, culling fruit 
 with a nicety of choice not common to him. 
 
 She came up to him, unobserved, and, taking him by 
 the arm, inquired, with a questioning smile "What are 
 you doing, Allan 1 and who are those peaches designed 
 for?" 
 
 " For Rosamund Gray," he replied ; and his heart 
 seemed relieved of a burthen, which had long oppressed it. 
 
 " I have a mind to become acquainted with your 
 handsome friend will you introduce me, Allan 1 I think 
 I should like to go and see her this afternoon." 
 
 " Do go, do go, Elinor you don't know what a good 
 creature she is and old blind Margaret, you will like her 
 very much." 
 
 His sister promised to accompany him after dinner ; 
 and they parted. Allan gathered no more peaches, but 
 hastily cropping a few roses to fling into his basket, went 
 away with it half filled, being impatient to announce to 
 Rosamund the coming of her promised visitor.
 
 170 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 WHEN Allan returned home, he found an invitation had 
 been left for him, in his absence, to spend that evening 
 with a young friend, who had just quitted a public school 
 in London, and was come to pass one night in his father's 
 house at Widford, previous to his departure the next 
 morning for Edinburgh University. 
 
 It was Allan's bosom friend they had not met for 
 some months and it was probable, a much longer time 
 must intervene, before they should meet again. 
 
 Yet Allan could not help looking a little blank, when 
 he first heard of the invitation. This was to have been 
 an important evening. But Elinor soon relieved her 
 brother, by expressing her readiness to go alone to the 
 cottage. 
 
 " I will not lose the pleasure I promised myself, what- 
 ever you may determine upon, Allan I will go by myself, 
 rather than be disappointed." 
 
 " Will you, will you, Elinor 1" 
 
 Elinor promised to go and I believe, Allan, on a 
 second thought, was not very sorry to be spared the 
 awkwardness of introducing two persons to each other, 
 both so dear to him, but either of whom might happen 
 not much to fancy the other. 
 
 At times, indeed, he was confident that Elinor must 
 love Rosamund, and Rosamund must love Elinor but 
 there were also times in which he felt misgivings it was 
 an event he could scarce hope for very joy ! 
 
 Allan's real presence that evening was more at the 
 cottage than at the house where his bodily semblance was 
 visiting his friend could not help complaining of a 
 certain absence of mind, a coldness he called it. 
 
 It might have been expected, and in the course of 
 things predicted, that Allan would have asked his friend 
 some questions, of what had happened since their last 
 meeting, what his feelings were on leaving school, the
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 171 
 
 probable time when they should meet again, and a hundred 
 natural questions, which friendship is most lavish of at 
 such times ; but nothing of all this ever occurred to Allan 
 they did not even settle the method of their future 
 correspondence. 
 
 The consequence was, as might have been expected, 
 Allan's friend thought him much altered, and, after his 
 departure, sat down to compose a doleful sonnet about a 
 "faithless friend." I do not find that he ever finished 
 it indignation, or a dearth of rhymes, causing him to 
 break off in the middle. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 IN my catalogue of the little library at the cottage, I 
 forgot to mention a book of Common Prayer. My reader's 
 fancy might easily have supplied the omission old ladies 
 of Margaret's stamp (God bless them) may as well be 
 without their spectacles, or their elbow chair, as their 
 prayer-book I love them for it. 
 
 Margaret's was a handsome octavo, printed by Basker- 
 ville, the binding red, and fortified with silver at the 
 edges. Out of this book it was their custom every 
 afternoon to read the proper psalms appointed for the 
 day. 
 
 The way they managed was this : they took verse by 
 verse Rosamund read her little portion, and Margaret 
 repeated hers, in turn, from memory for Margaret could 
 say all the psalter by heart, and a good part of the Bible 
 besides. She would not unfrequently put the girl right, 
 when she stumbled or skipped. This Margaret imputed 
 to giddiness a quality, Avhich Rosamund was by no 
 means remarkable for but old ladies, like Margaret, are 
 not, in all instances, alike discriminative. 
 
 They had been employed in this manner just before 
 Miss Clare arrived at the cottage. The psalm they had 
 been reading, was the hundred and fourth Margaret was
 
 172 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 naturally led by it into a discussion of the works of 
 creation. 
 
 There had been thunder in the course of the day an 
 occasion of instruction which the old lady never let pass 
 she began 
 
 "Thunder has a very awful sound some say, God 
 Almighty is angry whenever it thunders that it is the 
 voice of God speaking to us for my part, I am not afraid 
 of it ." 
 
 And in this manner the old lady was going on to par- 
 ticularise, as usual, its beneficial effects, in clearing the 
 air, destroying of vermin, etc., when the entrance of Miss 
 Clare put an end to her discourse. 
 
 Rosamund received her with respectful tenderness 
 and, taking her grandmother by the hand, said with great 
 sweetness, " Miss Clare is come to see you, grandmother." 
 
 " I beg pardon, lady I cannot see you but you are 
 heartily welcome is your brother with you, Miss Clare 1 
 I don't hear him." 
 
 " He could not come, madam, but he sends his love 
 by me." 
 
 "You have an excellent brother, Miss Clare but 
 pray do us the honour to take some refreshment Rosa- 
 mund 
 
 And the old lady was going to give directions for a 
 bottle of her currant wine when Elinor, smiling, said 
 "she was come to drink a dish of tea with her, and 
 expected to find no ceremony." 
 
 "After tea I promise myself a walk with you, Rosa- 
 mund, if your grandmother can spare you " Rosa- 
 mund looked at her grandmother. 
 
 " for that matter, I should be sorry to debar the 
 girl from any pleasure I am sure it's lonesome enough 
 for her to be with me always and, if Miss Clare will take 
 you out, child, I shall do very well by myself till you 
 return it will not be the first time, you know, that I have 
 been left here alone some of the neighbours will be 
 dropping in by-and-by or if not, I shall take no harm."
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 173 
 
 Rosamund had all the simple manners of a child she 
 kissed her grandmother, and looked happy. 
 
 All tea-time the old lady's discourse was little more 
 than a panegyric on young Clare's good qualities. Elinor 
 looked at her young friend, and smiled. Rosamund was 
 beginning to look grave but there was a cordial sun- 
 shine in the face of Elinor, before which any clouds of 
 reserve that had been gathering on Rosamund's, soon 
 brake away. 
 
 "Does your grandmother ever go out, Rosamund?" 
 
 Margaret prevented the girl's reply by saying,- -"My 
 dear young lady, I am an old woman, and very infirm 
 Rosamund takes me a few paces beyond the door some- 
 times but I walk very badly I love best to sit in our 
 little arbour, when the sun shines I yet can feel it warm 
 and cheerful and, if I lose the beauties of the season, I 
 can still remember them with pleasure, and rejoice that 
 younger eyes than mine can see and enjoy them I shall 
 be very happy if you and Rosamund can take delight in 
 this fine summer evening." 
 
 " I shall want to rob you of Rosamund's company 
 now and then, if we like one another. I had hoped to 
 have seen you, madam, at our house. I don't know 
 whether we could not make room for you to come and 
 live with us what say you to it 1 Allan would be proud 
 to tend you, I am sure j and Rosamund and I should be 
 nice company." 
 
 Margaret was all unused to such kindnesses, and wept 
 Margaret had a great spirit yet she was not above 
 accepting an obligation from a worthy person there was 
 a delicacy in Miss Clare's manner she could have no 
 interest, but pure goodness, to induce her to make the 
 offer at length the old lady spake from a full heart. 
 
 "Miss Clare, this little cottage received us in our 
 distress it gave us shelter when we had no home we 
 have praised God in it and, while life remains, I think 
 I shall never part from it Rosamund does everything 
 for me "
 
 174 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 " And will do, grandmother, as long as I live " and 
 then Rosamund fell a-crying. 
 
 " You are a good girl, Kosamund, and, if you do but 
 find friends when I am dead and gone, I shall want no 
 better accommodation while I live but God bless you, 
 lady, a thousand times for your kind offer." 
 
 Elinor was moved to tears, and, affecting a sprightli- 
 ness, bade Rosamund prepare for her walk. The girl 
 put on her white silk bonnet ; and Elinor thought she 
 never beheld so lovely a creature. 
 
 They took leave of Margaret, and walked out together 
 they rambled over all Rosamund's favourite haunts- 
 through many a sunny field by secret glade or wood walk, 
 where the girl had wandered so often with her beloved 
 Clare. 
 
 Who now so happy as Rosamund 1 She had ofttimes 
 heard Allan speak with great tenderness of his sister 
 she was now rambling, arm in arm, with that very 
 sister, the "vaunted sister" of her friend, her beloved 
 Clare. 
 
 Not a tree, not a bush, scarce a wild flower in their 
 path, but revived in Rosamund some tender recollection, 
 a conversation perhaps, or some chaste endearment. Life, 
 and a new scene of things, were now opening before her 
 she was got into a fairy-land of uncertain existence. 
 
 Rosamund was too happy to talk much but Elinor 
 was delighted with her, when she did talk : the girl's 
 remarks were suggested, most of them, by the passing 
 scene and they betrayed, all of them, the liveliness of 
 present impulse : her conversation did not consist in a 
 comparison of vapid feeling, and interchange of sentiment 
 lip-deep it had all the freshness of young sensation in it. 
 
 Sometimes they talked of Allan. 
 
 "Allan is very good," said Rosamund, "very good 
 indeed to my grandmother he will sit with her, and 
 hear her stories, and read to her, and try to divert her a 
 hundred ways. I wonder sometimes he is not tired. 
 She talks him to death ! "
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 175 
 
 " Then you confess, Rosamund, that the old lady does 
 tire you sometimes." 
 
 "0 no, I did not mean that it's very different I 
 am used to all her ways, and I can humour her, and please 
 her, and I ought to do it, for she is the only friend I ever 
 had in the world." 
 
 The new friends did not conclude their walk till it 
 was late, and Rosamund began to be apprehensive about 
 the old lady, who had been all this time alone. 
 
 On their return to the cottage, they found that Mar- 
 garet had been somewhat impatient old ladies, good old 
 ladies, will be so at times age is timorous, and suspicious 
 of danger, where no danger is. 
 
 Besides, it was Margaret's bedtime, for she kept very 
 good hours indeed, in the distribution of her meals, and 
 sundry other particulars, she resembled the livers in the 
 antique world, more than might well beseem a creature of 
 this. 
 
 So the new friends parted for that night, Elinor having 
 made Margaret promise to give Rosamund leave to come 
 and see her the next day. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Miss CLARE, we may be sure, made her brother very 
 happy when she told him of the engagement she had 
 made for the morrow, and how delighted she had been 
 with his handsome friend. 
 
 Allan, I believe, got little sleep that night. I know 
 not, whether joy be not a more troublesome bed-fellow 
 than grief hope keeps a body very wakeful, I know. 
 
 Elinor Clare was the best good creature the least 
 selfish human being I ever knew always at work for 
 other people's good, planning other people's happiness 
 continually forgetful to consult for her own personal 
 gratifications, except, indirectly, in the welfare of another, 
 while her parents lived, the most attentive of daughters
 
 176 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 since they died, the kindest of sisters I never knew but 
 one like her. 
 
 It happens that I have some of this young lady's letters 
 in my possession, I shall present my reader with one of 
 them it was written a short time after the death of her 
 mother, and addressed to a cousin, a dear friend of Elinor's, 
 who was then on the point of being married to Mr. Beau- 
 mont of Staffordshire, and had invited Elinor to assist at 
 her nuptials. I will transcribe it with minute fidelity. 
 
 Elinor Clare to Maria Leslie. 
 
 WIDFOED, July the , 17 . 
 
 Health, innocence, and beauty, shall be thy bridemaids, 
 my sweet cousin. I have no heart to undertake the office. 
 Alas ! what have I to do in the house of feasting ? 
 
 Maria ! I fear, lest my griefs should prove obtrusive. 
 Yet bear with me a little I have recovered already a 
 share of my former spirits. 
 
 I fear more for Allan than myself. The loss of two 
 such parents, with so short an interval, bears very heavy 
 on him. The boy hangs about me from morning till night. 
 He is perpetually forcing a smile into his poor pale cheeks 
 you know the sweetness of his smile, Maria. 
 
 To-day, after dinner, when he took his glass of wine 
 in his hand, he burst into tears, and would not, or could 
 not then, tell me the reason afterwards he told me 
 " he had been used to drink mamma's health after dinner, 
 and that came in his head, and made him cry." I feel 
 the claims the boy has upon me I perceive that I am 
 living to some end and the thought supports me. 
 
 Already I have attained to a state of complacent 
 feelings my mother's lessons were not thrown away upon 
 her Elinor. 
 
 In the visions of last night her spirit seemed to stand 
 at my bedside a light, as of noonday, shone upon the 
 room she opened my curtains she smiled upon me with 
 the same placid smile as in her lifetime. I felt no fear.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 177 
 
 "Elinor," she said, "for my sake take care of young Allan," 
 and I awoke with calm feelings. 
 
 Maria ! shall not the meeting of blessed spirits, think 
 you, be something like this ? I think, I could even now 
 behold my mother without dread I would ask pardon 
 of her for all my past omissions of duty, for all the little 
 asperities in my temper, which have so often grieved her 
 gentle spirit when living. Maria ! I think she would not 
 turn away from me. 
 
 Oftentimes a feeling, more vivid than memory, brings 
 her before me I see her sit in her old elbow chair, her 
 arms folded upon her lap, a tear upon her cheek, that 
 seems to upbraid her unkind daughter for some inatten- 
 tion I wipe it away and kiss her honoured lips. 
 
 Maria ! when I have been fancying all this, Allan will 
 come in, with his poor eyes red with weeping, and taking 
 me by the hand, destroy the vision in a moment. 
 
 I am prating to you, my sweet cousin, but it is the 
 prattle of the heart, which Maria loves. Besides, whom 
 have I to talk to of these things, but you you have 
 been my counsellor in times past, my companion, and 
 sweet familiar friend. Bear with me a little I mourn 
 the "cherishers of my infancy." 
 
 I sometimes count it a blessing, that my father did not 
 prove the survivor. You know something of his story. 
 You know there was a foul tale current, it was the busy 
 
 malice of that bad man, S , which helped to spread 
 
 it abroad -you will recollect the active good nature of our 
 
 friends W and T ; what pains they took to 
 
 undeceive people with the better sort their kind labours 
 prevailed; but there was still a party, who shut their ears. 
 You know the issue of it. My father's great spirit bore up 
 against it for some time my father never was a bad man 
 but that spirit was broken at the last, and the greatly- 
 injured man was forced to leave his old paternal dwelling 
 in Staffordshire for the neighbours had begun to point at 
 him. Maria ! I have seen them point at him, and have 
 been ready to drop.
 
 178 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 In this part of the country, where the slander had not 
 reached he sought a retreat and he found a still more 
 grateful asylum in the daily solicitudes of the best of 
 wives. 
 
 " An enemy hath done this," I have heard him say 
 and at such times my mother would speak to him so 
 soothingly of forgiveness, and long-suffering, and the bear- 
 ing of injuries with patience ; would heal all his wounds 
 with so gentle a touch ; I have seen the old man weep 
 like a child. 
 
 The gloom that beset his mind, at times betrayed him 
 into scepticism he has doubted if there be a Providence ! 
 I have heard him say, " GOD has built a brave world, but 
 methinks he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they 
 may" 
 
 At such times he could not endure to hear my mother 
 talk in a religious strain. He would say, " Woman, have 
 done you confound, you perplex me, when you talk of 
 these matters, and for one day at least unfit me for the 
 business of life." 
 
 I have seen her look at him GOD, Maria ! such 
 a look ! it plainly spake, that she was willing to have 
 shared her precious hope with the partner of her earthly 
 cares but she found a repulse. 
 
 Deprived of such a wife, think you the old man could 
 have long endured his existence? or what consolation 
 would his wretched daughter have had to offer him, but 
 silent and imbecile tears 1 
 
 My sweet cousin, you will think me tedious and I 
 am so but it does me good to talk these matters over. 
 And do not you be alarmed for me my sorrows are sub- 
 siding into a deep and sweet resignation. I shall soon 
 be sufficiently composed, I know it, to participate in my 
 friend's happiness. 
 
 Let me call her, while yet I may, my own Maria 
 Leslie ! Methinks, I shall not like you by any other 
 name. Beaumont ! Maria Beaumont ! it hath a strange 
 sound with it, I shall never be reconciled to this name
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 179 
 
 but do not you fear Maria Leslie shall plead with me 
 for Maria Beaumont. 
 
 And now, my sweet friend, God love you, and your 
 
 ELINOR CLARE. 
 
 I find in my collection, several letters, written soon 
 after the date of the preceding, and addressed all of them 
 to Maria Beaumont. I am tempted to make some short 
 extracts from these my tale will suffer interruption by 
 them but I was willing to preserve whatever memorials 
 I could of Elinor Clare. 
 
 From Elinor Clare to Maria Beaumont. 
 
 (AN EXTRACT.) 
 1 have been strolling out for half an hour in the 
 
 fields ; and my mind has been occupied by thoughts, 
 which Maria has a right to participate. I have been 
 bringing my mother to my recollection. My heart ached 
 with the remembrance of infirmities, that made her closing 
 years of life so sore a trial to her. 
 
 I was concerned to think that our family differences 
 have been one source of disquiet to her. I am sensible 
 that this last we are apt to exaggerate after a person's 
 death; and surely, in the main, there was considerable 
 harmony among the members of our little family, still I 
 was concerned to think, that we ever gave her gentle 
 spirit disquiet. 
 
 I thought on years back on all my parents' friends 
 
 the H s, the F s, on D , S , and on 
 
 many a merry evening in the fire-side circle, in that com- 
 fortable back parlour it is never used now. 
 
 Oh, ye Matravises l of the age, ye know not what ye 
 lose, in despising these petty topics of endeared remem- 
 brance, associated circumstances of past times ; ye know 
 not the throbbings of the heart, tender yet affectionately 
 familiar, which accompany the dear and honoured names of 
 father or of mother. 
 
 1 This name will be explained presently.
 
 180 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Maria ! I thought on all these things ; my heart ached 
 at the review of them it yet aches, while I write this 
 but I am never so satisfied witli my train of thoughts, as 
 when they run upon these subjects ; the tears they draw 
 from us, meliorate and soften the heart, and keep fresh 
 within us that memory of dear friends dead, which alone 
 can fit us for a readmission to their society hereafter. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 1 had a bad dream this morning, that Allan was 
 
 dead ; and who, of all persons in the world, do you think, 
 put on mourning for him ? Why, Matravis. This alone 
 might cure me of superstitious thoughts, if I were inclined 
 to them ; for why should Matravis mourn for us, or our 
 family 1 Still it was pleasant to awake, and find it but 
 a dream. Methinks something like an awakening from 
 an ill dream shall the Resurrection from the dead be. 
 Materially different from our accustomed scenes, and ways 
 of life, the World to come may possibly not be ; still it is 
 represented to us under the notion of a Rest, a Sabbath, 
 a state of bliss. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 Methinks, you and I should have been born 
 
 under the same roof, sucked the same milk, conned the 
 same hornbook, thumbed the same Testament, together : 
 for we have been more than sisters, Maria ! 
 
 Something will still be whispering to me, that I shall 
 one day be inmate of the same dwelling with my cousin, 
 partaker with her in all the delights, which spring from 
 mutual good offices, kind words, attentions in sickness 
 and in health, conversation, sometimes innocently trivial, 
 and at others profitably serious ; books read and com- 
 mented on, together; meals eat, and walks taken, together, 
 and conferences, how we may best do good to this poor 
 person or that, and wean our spirits from the world's 
 cares, without divesting ourselves of its charities. What
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 181 
 
 a picture I have drawn, Maria ! and none of all these 
 things may ever come to pass. 
 
 From anotlier Letter. 
 
 Continue to write to me, my sweet cousin. 
 
 Many good thoughts, resolutions, and proper views of 
 things, pass through the mind in the course of the day, 
 but are lost for want of committing them to paper. Seize 
 them, Maria, as they pass, these Birds of Paradise, that 
 show themselves and are gone, and make a grateful 
 present of the precious fugitives to your friend. 
 
 To use a homely illustration, just rising in my fancy, 
 shall the good housewife take such pains in pickling 
 and preserving her worthless fruits, her walnuts, her 
 apricots, and quinces and is there not much spiritual 
 housewifery in treasuring up our mind's best fruits, our 
 heart's meditations in its most favoured moments ? 
 
 This said simile is much in the fashion of the old 
 Moralisers, such as I conceive honest Baxter to have been, 
 such as Quarles and Wither were, with their curious, 
 serio-comic, quaint emblems. But they sometimes reach 
 the heart, when a more elegant simile rests in the fancy. 
 
 Not low and mean, like these, but beautifully familiar- 
 ised to our conceptions, and condescending to human 
 thoughts and notions, are all the discourses of our LORD 
 conveyed in parable, or similitude, what easy access do 
 they win to the heart, through the medium of the 
 delighted imagination ! speaking of heavenly things in 
 fable, or in simile, drawn from earth, from objects common, 
 accustomed. 
 
 Life's business, with such delicious little interruptions 
 as our correspondence affords, how pleasant it is ! why 
 can we not paint on the dull paper our whole feelings, 
 exquisite as they rise up ? 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 ! had meant to have left off at this place ; but, 
 
 looking back, I am sorry to find too gloomy a cast tine-
 
 182 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 turing my last page a representation of life false and 
 unthankful. Life is not all vanity and disappointment 
 it hath much of evil in it, no doubt ; but to those 
 who do not misuse it, it affords comfort, temporary 
 comfort, much much that endears us to it, and dignifies 
 it many true and good feelings, I trust, of which we need 
 not be ashamed hours of tranquillity and hope. But the 
 morning was dull and overcast, and my spirits were under 
 a cloud. I feel my error. 
 
 Is it no blessing, that we two love one another so 
 dearly that Allan is left me that you are settled in 
 life that worldly affairs go smooth with us both above 
 all, that our lot hath fallen to us in a Christian country 1 
 Maria ! these things are not little. I will consider life 
 as a long feast, and not forget to say grace. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 Allan has written to me you know, he is on a 
 
 visit at his old tutor's in Gloucestershire he is to return 
 home on Thursday Allan is a dear boy he concludes 
 his letter, which is very affectionate throughout, in this 
 manner 
 
 "Elinor, I charge you to learn the following stanza 
 by heart 
 
 The monarch may forget his crown, 
 
 That on his head an hour hath been ; 
 The bridegroom may forget his bride 
 
 Was made his wedded wife yestreen, 
 The mother may forget her child, 
 
 That smiles so sweetly on her knee : 
 But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 
 And all that thou hast done for me. 
 
 The lines are in Burns you know, we read him for 
 the first time together at Margate and I have been used 
 to refer them to you, and to call you, in my mind, Glen- 
 cairn for you were always very, very good to me. I 
 had a thousand failings, but you would love me in spite 
 of them all. I am going to drink your health." 
 
 I shall detain my reader no longer from the narrative.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 183 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THEY had but four rooms in the cottage. Margaret 
 slept in the biggest room upstairs, and her granddaughter 
 in a kind of closet adjoining, where she could be within 
 hearing, if her grandmother should call her in the 
 night. 
 
 The girl was often disturbed in that manner two or 
 three times in a night she has been forced to leave her 
 bed, to fetch her grandmother's cordials, or do some little 
 service for her but she knew, that Margaret's ailings 
 were real and pressing, and Rosamund never complained 
 never suspected, that her grandmother's requisitions 
 had anything unreasonable in them. 
 
 The night she parted with Miss Clare, she had helped 
 Margaret to bed, as usual and, after saying her prayers, 
 as the custom was, kneeling by the old lady's bed-side, 
 kissed her grandmother, and wished her a good-night 
 Margaret blessed her, and charged her to go to bed directly. 
 It was her customary injunction, and Rosamund had never 
 dreamed of disobeying. 
 
 So she retired to her little room. The night was 
 warm and clear the moon very bright her window 
 commanded a view of scenes she had been tracing in the 
 day-time with Miss Clare. 
 
 All the events of the day past, the occurrences of their 
 walk arose in her mind. She fancied she should like to 
 retrace those scenes but it was now nine o'clock, a late 
 hour in the village. 
 
 Still she fancied it would be very charming ; and then 
 her grandmother's injunction came powerfully to her 
 recollection she sighed and turned from the window 
 and walked up and down her little room. 
 
 Ever, when she looked at the window, the wish 
 returned. It was not so very late. The neighbours were 
 yet about, passing under the window to their homes ; she 
 thought, and thought again, till her sensations became
 
 184 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 vivid, even to painfulness her bosom was aching to give 
 them vent. 
 
 The village clock struck ten ! the neighbours ceased 
 to pass under the window! Rosamund, stealing down- 
 stairs, fastened the latch behind her, and left the cottage. 
 
 One, that knew her, met her, and observed her with 
 some surprise. Another recollects having wished her a 
 good-night. Eosamund never returned to the cottage ! 
 
 An old man, that lay sick in a small house adjoining 
 to Margaret's, testified the next morning, that he had 
 plainly heard the old creature calling for her grand- 
 daughter. All the night long she made her moan, and 
 ceased not to call upon the name of Rosamund. But no 
 Rosamund Avas there the voice died away, but not till 
 near daybreak. 
 
 When the neighbours came to search in the morning, 
 Margaret was missing ! She had straggled out of bed, 
 and made her way into Rosamund's room worn out with 
 fatigue and fright, when she found the girl not there, she 
 had laid herself down to die and, it is thought, she died 
 praying for she was discovered in a kneeling posture, 
 her arms and face extended on the pillow, where Rosa- 
 mund had slept the night before a smile was on her 
 face in death. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 FAIN would I draw a veil over the transactions of that 
 night but I cannot grief, and burning shame, forbid 
 me to be silent black deeds are about to be made public, 
 which reflect a stain upon our common nature. 
 
 Rosamund, enthusiastic, and improvident, wandered 
 unprotected to a distance from her guardian doors ; 
 through lonely glens, and woodwalks, where she had 
 rambled many a day in safety ; till she arrived at a shady 
 copse, out of the hearing of any human habitation. 
 
 Matravis met her. " Flown with insolence and 
 
 wine," returning home late at night, he passed that way !
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 185 
 
 Matravis was a very ugly man. Sallow-complexioned ! 
 and, if hearts can wear that colour, his heart was sallow- 
 complexioned also. 
 
 A young man with gray deliberation ! cold and sys- 
 tematic in all his plans ; and all his plans were evil. 
 His very lust was systematic. 
 
 He would brood over his bad purposes for such a 
 dreary length of time, that it might have been expected, 
 some solitary check of conscience must have intervened to 
 save him from commission. But that light from heaven 
 was extinct in his dark bosom. 
 
 Nothing that is great, nothing that is amiable, existed 
 for this unhappy man. He feared, he envied, he sus- 
 pected ; but he never loved. The sublime and beautiful 
 in nature, the excellent and becoming in morals, were 
 things placed beyond the capacity of his sensations. He 
 loved not poetry nor ever took a lonely walk to meditate 
 never beheld virtue, which he did not try to disbelieve, 
 or female beauty and innocence, which he did not lust to 
 contaminate. 
 
 A sneer was perpetually upon his face, and malice 
 grinning at his heart. He would say the most ill-natured 
 things, with the least remorse of any man I ever knew. 
 This gained him the reputation of a wit other traits got 
 him the reputation of a villain. 
 
 And this man formerly paid his court to Elinor Clare ! 
 with what success I leave my readers to determine. It 
 was not in Elinor's nature to despise any living thing 
 but in the estimation of this man, to be rejected was to 
 be despised ; and Matravis never forgave. 
 
 He had long turned his eyes upon Eosamund Gray. 
 To steal from the bosom of her friends the jewel they 
 prized so much, the little ewe lamb they held so dear, 
 it was a scheme of delicate revenge, and Matravis had 
 a twofold motive for accomplishing this young maid's 
 ruin. 
 
 Often had he met her in her favourite solitudes, but 
 found her ever cold and inaccessible. Of late the girl
 
 186 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 had avoided straying far from her own home, in the fear of 
 meeting him but she had never told her fears to Allan. 
 
 Matravis had, till now, been content to be a villain 
 within the limits of the law but, on the present occasion, 
 hot fumes of wine, co-operating with his deep desire of 
 revenge, and the insolence of an unhoped meeting, over- 
 came his customary prudence, and Matravis rose, at once, 
 to an audacity of glorious mischief. 
 
 Late at night he met her, a lonely, unprotected virgin 
 no friend at hand no place near of refuge. 
 
 Rosamund Gray, my soul is exceeding sorrowful for 
 thee I loathe to tell the hateful circumstances of thy 
 wrongs Night and silence were the only witnesses of 
 this young maid's disgrace Matravis fled. 
 
 Rosamund, polluted and disgraced, wandered, an 
 abandoned thing, about the fields and meadows till day- 
 break. Not caring to return to the cottage, she sat her- 
 self down before the gate of Miss Clare's house in a 
 stupor of grief. 
 
 Elinor was just rising, and had opened the windows 
 of her chamber, when she perceived her desolate young 
 friend. She ran to embrace her she brought her into 
 the house she took her to her bosom she kissed her 
 she spake to her ; but Rosamund could not speak. 
 
 Tidings came from the cottage. Margaret's death 
 was an event which could not be kept concealed from 
 Rosamund. When the sweet maid heard of it, she lan- 
 guished, and fell sick ; she never held up her head after 
 that time. 
 
 If Rosamund had been a sister, she could not have 
 been kindlier treated, than by her two friends. 
 
 Allan had prospects in life ; might, in time, have 
 married into any of the first families in Hertfordshire ; 
 but Rosamund Gray, humbled though she was, and put 
 to shame, had yet a charm for him ; and he would have 
 been content to share his fortunes with her yet, if Rosa- 
 mund would have lived to be his companion. 
 
 But this Avas not to be, and the girl soon after died.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 187 
 
 She expired in the arms of Elinor quiet, gentle, as she 
 lived thankful, that she died not among strangers and 
 expressing by signs, rather than words, a gratitude for 
 the most trifling services, the common offices of humanity. 
 She died uncomplaining ; and this young maid, this un- 
 taught Rosamund, might have given a lesson to the grave 
 philosopher in death. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 I WAS but a boy, when these events took place. All the 
 village remember the story, and tell of Rosamund Gray 
 and old blind Margaret. 
 
 I parted from Allan Clare on that disastrous night, 
 and set out for Edinburgh the next morning, before the 
 facts were commonly known ; I heard not of them and 
 it was four months before I received a letter from Allan. 
 
 " His heart," he told me, " was gone from him ; for 
 his sister had died of a phrenzy fever !" not a word of 
 Rosamund in the letter I was left to collect her story 
 from sources which may one day be explained. 
 
 I soon after quitted Scotland, on the death of my 
 father, and returned to my native village. Allan had 
 left the place, and I could gain no information, whether 
 he were dead or living. 
 
 I passed the cottage. I did not dare to look that way, 
 or to inquire who lived there. A little dog, that had 
 been Rosamund's, was yelping in my path. I laughed 
 aloud like one mad, whose mind had suddenly gone from 
 him ; I stared vacantly around me, like one alienated 
 from common perceptions. 
 
 But I was young at that time, and the impression 
 became gradually weakened, as I mingled in the business 
 of life. It is now ten years since these events took place, 
 and I sometimes think of them as unreal. Allan Clare 
 was a dear friend to me ; but there are times, when Allan 
 and his sister, Margaret and her granddaughter, appeal- 
 like personages of a dream an idle dream.
 
 188 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 \ 
 
 STRANGE things have happened unto me I seem scarce 
 awake but I will re-collect my thoughts, and try to give 
 an account of what hath befallen me in the few last 
 weeks. 
 
 Since my father's death our family have resided in 
 London. I am in practice as a surgeon there. My 
 mother died two years after we left Widford. 
 
 A month or two ago I had been busying myself in 
 drawing up the above narrative, intending to make it 
 public. The employment had forced my mind to dwell 
 upon facts, which had begun to fade from it ; the memory 
 of old times became vivid, and more vivid I felt a strong 
 desire to revisit the scenes of my native village of the 
 young loves of Rosamund and her Clare. 
 
 A kind of dread had hitherto kept me back ; but I 
 was restless now, till I had accomplished my wish. I 
 set out one morning to walk I reached Widford about 
 eleven in the forenoon after a slight breakfast at my 
 Inn where I was mortified to perceive, the old landlord 
 did not know me again (old Thomas Billet he has 
 often made angle rods for me when a child) I rambled 
 over all my accustomed haunts. 
 
 Our old house was vacant, and to be sold. I entered, 
 unmolested, into the room that had been my bed-chamber. 
 I kneeled down on the spot where my little bed had stood 
 I felt like a child I prayed like one it seemed as 
 though old times were to return again ; I looked round 
 involuntarily, expecting to see some face I knew but all 
 was naked and mute. The bed was gone. My little 
 pane of painted window, through which I loved to look at 
 the sun, when I awoke in a fine summer's morning, was 
 taken out, and had been replaced by one of common glass. 
 
 I visited, by turns, every chamber they were all 
 desolate and unfurnished, one excepted, in which the 
 owner had left a harpsichord, probably to be sold I
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 189 
 
 touched the keys I played some old Scottish tunes, 
 which had delighted me when a child. Past associations 
 revived with the music blended with a sense of unreality, 
 which at last became too powerful I rushed out of the 
 room to give vent to my feelings. 
 
 I wandered, scarce knowing where, into an old wood, 
 that stands at the back of the house we called it the 
 ivilderness. A well-known form was missing, that used 
 to meet me in this place it was thine, Ben Moxam the 
 kindest, gentlest, politest, of human beings, yet was he 
 nothing higher than a gardener in the family. Honest 
 creature, thou didst never pass me in my childish rambles, 
 without a soft speech, and a smile. I remember thy good- 
 natured face. But there is one thing, for which I can 
 never forgive thce, Ben Moxam ; that thou didst join 
 with an old maiden aunt of mine in a cruel plot, to lop 
 away the hanging branches of the old fir-trees. I 
 remember them sweeping to the ground. 
 
 I have often left my childish sports to ramble in this 
 place its glooms and its solitude had a mysterious charm 
 for my young mind, nurturing within me that love of 
 quietness and lonely thinking, which have accompanied 
 me to maturer years. 
 
 In this ivilderness I found myself after a ten years' 
 absence. Its stately fir-trees were yet standing, with 
 all their luxuriant company of underwood the squirrel 
 was there, and the melancholy cooiugs of the wood-pigeon, 
 all was as I had left it my heart softened at the sight 
 it seemed, as though my character had been suffering 
 a change, since I forsook these shades. 
 
 My parents were both dead ; I had no counsellor left, 
 no experience of age to direct me, no sweet voice of 
 reproof. The Lord had taken away my friends, and I 
 knew not where he had laid them. I paced round the 
 wilderness, seeking a comforter. I prayed, that I might 
 be restored to that state of innocence, in which I had 
 wandered in those shades. 
 
 Methought, my request was heard ; for it seemed, as
 
 190 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 though the stains of manhood were passing from me, and 
 I were relapsing into the purity and simplicity of child- 
 hood. I was content to have been moulded into a perfect 
 child. I stood still, as in a trance. I dreamed that I 
 was enjoying a personal intercourse with my heavenly 
 Father ; and, extravagantly, put off the shoes from my 
 feet for the place where I stood, I thought, was holy 
 ground. 
 
 This state of mind could not last long ; and I returned, 
 with languid feelings, to my Inn. I ordered my dinner 
 green peas and a sweetbread it had been a favourite dish 
 with me in my childhood I was allowed to have it on 
 my birthdays. I was impatient to see it come upon table 
 but, when it came, I could scarce eat a mouthful ; my 
 tears choked me. I called for wine I drank a pint and 
 a half of red wine and not till then had I dared to visit 
 the churchyard, where my parents were interred. 
 
 The cottage lay in my way Margaret had chosen it 
 for that very reason, to be near the church for the old 
 lady was regular in her attendance on public worship I 
 passed on and in a moment found myself among the 
 tombs. 
 
 I had been present at my father's burial, and knew 
 the spot again my mother's funeral I was prevented by 
 illness from attending a plain stone was placed over the 
 grave, with their initials carved upon it for they both 
 occupied one grave. 
 
 I prostrated myself before the spot ; I kissed the earth 
 that covered them I contemplated, with gloomy delight, 
 the time when I should mingle my dust with theirs and 
 kneeled, with my arms incumbent on the grave-stone, in 
 a kind of mental prayer for I could not speak. 
 
 Having performed these duties, I arose with quieter 
 feelings, and felt leisure to attend to indifferent objects. 
 Still I continued in the churchyard, reading the various 
 inscriptions, and moralising on them with that kind of 
 levity, which will not unfrequently spring up in the mind, 
 in the midst of deep melancholy.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 191 
 
 I read of nothing but careful parents, loving husbands, 
 and dutiful children. I said jestingly, where be all the 
 bad people buried? Bad parents, bad husbands, bad 
 children what cemeteries are appointed for these 1 ? do 
 they not sleep in consecrated ground 1 or is it but a pious 
 fiction, a generous oversight, in the survivors, which thus 
 tricks out men's epitaphs when dead, who in their life- 
 time discharged the offices of life, perhaps, but lamely 1 
 Their failings, with their reproaches, now sleep with them 
 in the grave. Man wars not ivith the dead. It is a trait 
 of human nature, for which I love it. 
 
 I had not observed, till now, a little group assembled 
 at the other end of the churchyard ; it was a company of 
 children, who were gathered round a young man, dressed 
 in black, sitting on a gravestone. 
 
 He seemed to be asking them questions probably, 
 about their learning and one little dirty ragged-headed 
 fellow was clambering up his knees to kiss him. The 
 children had been eating black cherries for some of the 
 stones were scattered about, and their mouths were 
 smeared with them. 
 
 As I drew near them, I thought I discerned in the 
 stranger a mild benignity of countenance, which I had 
 somewhere seen before I gazed at him more attentively. 
 
 It was Allan Clare ! sitting on the grave of his sister. 
 
 I threw my arms about his neck. I exclaimed "Allan," 
 he turned his eyes upon me he knew me : we both 
 wept aloud it seemed as though the interval, since we 
 parted, had been as nothing I cried out, " Come, and 
 tell me about these things." 
 
 I drew him away from his little friends he parted 
 with a show of reluctance from the churchyard Margaret 
 and her granddaughter lay buried there, as well as his 
 sister I took him to my Inn secured a room, where 
 we might be private ordered fresh wine scarce knowing 
 what I did, I danced for joy. 
 
 Allan was quite overcome, and taking me by the hand 
 he said, " This repays me for all."
 
 192 KOSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 It was a proud day for me I had found a friend I 
 thought dead earth seemed to me no longer valuable, 
 than as it contained him ; and existence a blessing no 
 longer than while I should live to be his comforter. 
 
 I began at leisure, to survey him with more attention. 
 Time, and grief, had left few traces of that fine enthusiasm 
 which once burned in his countenance his eyes had lost 
 their original fire, but they retained an uncommon sweet- 
 ness, and, whenever they were turned upon me, their 
 smile pierced to my heart. 
 
 "Allan, I fear you have been a sufferer." He replied 
 not, and I could not press him further. I could not call 
 the dead to life again. 
 
 So we drank, and told old stories and repeated old 
 poetry and sung old songs as if nothing had happened. 
 We sat till very late I forgot that I had purposed 
 returning to town that evening to Allan all places were 
 alike I grew noisy, he grew cheerful Allan's old 
 manners, old enthusiasm, were returning upon him we 
 laughed, we wept, we mingled our tears, and talked 
 extravagantly. 
 
 Allan was my bedfellow that night and we lay 
 awake, planning schemes of living together under the 
 same roof, entering upon similar pursuits ; and praising 
 GOD that we had met. 
 
 I was obliged to return to town the next morning, and 
 Allan proposed to accompany me. "Since the death of 
 his sister," he told me, "he had been a wanderer." 
 
 In the course of our walk, he unbosomed himself with- 
 out reserve told me many particulars of his way of life 
 for the last nine or ten years, which I do not feel myself 
 at liberty to divulge. 
 
 Once, on my attempting to cheer him, when I perceived 
 him over thoughtful, he replied to me in these words : 
 
 " Do not regard me as unhappy, when you catch me 
 in these moods. I am never more happy than at times, 
 when by the cast of my countenance men judge me most 
 miserable.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 193 
 
 " My friend, the events which have left this sadness 
 behind them are of no recent date. The melancholy, 
 which comes over me with the recollection of them, is 
 not hurtful, but only tends to soften and tranquillise my 
 mind, to detach me from the restlessness of human 
 pursuits. 
 
 " The stronger I feel this detachment, the more I 
 find myself drawn heavenward to the contemplation of 
 spiritual objects. 
 
 " I love to keep old friendships alive and warm within 
 me, because I expect a renewal of them in the World of 
 Spirits. 
 
 " I am a wandering and unconnected thing on the earth. 
 I have made no new friendships, that can compensate me 
 for the loss of the old and the more I know mankind, 
 the more does it become necessary for me to supply their 
 loss by little images, recollections, and circumstances, of 
 past pleasures. 
 
 " I am sensible that I am surrounded by a multitude 
 of very worthy people, plain-hearted souls, sincere, and 
 kind. But they have hitherto eluded my pursuit, and 
 will continue to bless the little circle of their families and 
 friends, while I must remain a stranger to them. 
 
 "Kept at a distance by mankind, I have not ceased 
 to love them and could I find the cruel persecutor, the 
 malignant instrument of GOD'S judgments on me and 
 mine, I think I would forgive, and try to love him too. 
 
 " I have been a quiet sufferer. From the beginning 
 of my calamities it was given to me, not to see the hand 
 of man in them. I perceived a mighty arm, which none 
 but myself could see, extended over me. I gave my 
 heart to the Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will 
 of the Universe. The irresistible wheels of destiny passed 
 on in their everlasting rotation, and I suffered myself 
 to be carried along with them, without complaining."
 
 194 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 ALLAN told me, that for some years past, feeling himself 
 disengaged from every personal tie, but not alienated 
 from human sympathies, it had been his taste, his humour 
 he called it, to spend a great portion of his time in hos- 
 pitals and lazar-houses. 
 
 He had found a wayward pleasure, he refused to name 
 it a virtue, in tending a description of people, who had 
 long ceased to expect kindness or friendliness from man- 
 kind, but were content to accept the reluctant services, 
 which the oftentimes unfeeling instruments and servants 
 of these well-meant institutions deal out to the poor sick 
 people under their care. 
 
 It is not medicine, it is not broths and coarse meats, 
 served up at a stated hour with all the hard formalities 
 of a prison, it is not the scanty dole of a bed to die on 
 which dying man requires from his species. 
 
 Looks, attentions, consolations, in a word, sympathies, 
 are what a man most needs in this awful close of mortal 
 sufferings. A kind look, a smile, a drop of cold water 
 to the parched lip for these things a man shall bless 
 you in death. 
 
 And these better things than cordials did Allan love 
 to administer to stay by a bedside the whole day, when 
 something disgusting in a patient's distemper has kept 
 the very nurses at a distance to sit by, while the poor 
 wretch got a little sleep and be there to smile upon him 
 when he awoke to slip a guinea, now and then, into the 
 hands of a nurse or attendant these things have been to 
 Allan as privileges, for which he was content to live, 
 choice marks, and circumstances, of his Maker's goodness 
 to him. 
 
 And I do not know whether occupations of this kind 
 be not a spring of purer and nobler delight (certainly 
 instances of a more disinterested virtue) than ariseth 
 from what are called Friendships of Sentiment.
 
 ROSAMUND GRAY. 195 
 
 Between two persons of liberal education, like opinions, 
 and common feelings, oftentimes subsists a Vanity of 
 Sentiment, which disposes each to look upon the other as 
 the only being in the universe worthy of friendship, or 
 capable of understanding it, themselves they consider as 
 the solitary receptacles of all that is delicate in feeling, 
 or stable in attachment : when the odds are, that under 
 every green hill, and in every crowded street, people of 
 equal worth are to be found, who do more good in their 
 generation, and make less noise in the doing of it. 
 
 It was in consequence of these benevolent propensities 
 I have been describing, that Allan oftentimes discovered 
 considerable inclinations in favour of my way of life, 
 which I have before mentioned as being that of a surgeon. 
 He would frequently attend me on my visits to patients ; 
 and I began to think, that he had serious intentions of 
 making my profession his study. 
 
 He was present with me at a scene a death-lied scene 
 I shudder, when I do but think of it. 
 
 CHA.PTEK XIII. 
 
 I WAS sent for the other morning to the assistance of a 
 gentleman, who had been wounded in a duel, and his 
 wounds by unskilful treatment had been brought to a 
 dangerous crisis. 
 
 The uncommonness of the name, which was Matravis, 
 suggested to me, that this might possibly be no other 
 than Allan's old enemy. Under this apprehension, I did 
 what I could to dissuade Allan from accompanying me - 
 but he seemed bent upon going, and even pleased himself 
 with the notion, that it might lie within his ability to do 
 the unhappy man some service. So he went with me. 
 
 When we came to the house, which was in Soho 
 Square, we discovered that it was indeed the man the 
 identical Matravis, who had done all that mischief in 
 times past but not in a condition to excite any other 
 sensation than pity in a heart more hard than Allan's.
 
 196 ROSAMUND GRAY. 
 
 Intense pain had brought on a delirium we perceived 
 this on first entering the room for the wretched man 
 was raving to himself talking idly in mad, unconnected 
 sentences, that yet seemed, at times, to have a reference 
 to past facts. 
 
 One while he told us his dream. " He had lost his 
 way on a great heath, to which there seemed no end 
 it was cold, cold, cold and dark, very dark an old 
 woman in leading-strings, blind, was groping about for a 
 guide " and then he frightened me, for he seemed 
 disposed to be jocular, and sung a song about an " old 
 woman clothed in grey," and said " he did not believe in 
 a devil." 
 
 Presently he bid us "not tell Allan Clare" Allan 
 was hanging over him at that very moment, sobbing. I 
 could not resist the impulse, but cried out, " This is Allan 
 Clare Allan Clare is come to see you, my dear sir." 
 The wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for he 
 turned his head away, and began talking of charnel houses, 
 and dead men, and "whether they knew anything that 
 passed, in their coffins." 
 
 Matravis died that night.
 
 CUBIOUS FRAGMENTS, 
 
 EXTRACTED FROM A COMMON-PLACE BOOK, WHICH BE- 
 LONGED TO ROBERT BURTON, THE FAMOUS AUTHOR 
 OF THE "ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY." 
 
 EXTRACT I. 
 
 I DEMOCRITUS Junior have put my finishing pen to a 
 tractate De Melancholia, this day, December 5, 1620. 
 First, I blesse the Trinity, which hath given me health 
 to prosecute my worthlesse studies thus far, and make sup- 
 plication with a Laus Deo, if in any case these my poor 
 labours may be found instrumental to weede out black 
 melancholy, carking cares, harte-grief, from the mind of 
 man. Sed hoc magis volo quam expecto. 
 
 I turn now to my book, i nunc liber, goe forth, my 
 brave Anatomy, child of my brain-sweat, and yee, candidi 
 lectores, lo ! here I give him up to you, even do with him 
 what you please, my masters. Some, I suppose, will 
 applaud, commend, cry him up (these are my friends) hee 
 is a flos rarus, forsooth, a none-such, a Phoenix (concern- 
 ing whom see Plinius and Mandeuille, though Fienus de 
 monstris doubteth at large of such a bird, whom Montaltus 
 confuting argueth to have been a man malce scrupidosi- 
 tatis, of a weak and cowardlie faith : Christopherus a 
 Vega is with him in this). Others again will blame, hiss, 
 reprehende in many things, cry down altogether, my col- 
 lections, for crude, inept, putid, post cwnam scripta, 
 Cory ate could write better iipon a full meal, verbose, in- 
 erudite, and not sufficiently abounding in authorities, dog- 
 mata, sentences, of learneder writers which have been 
 before me, when as that first named sort clean otherwise 
 judge of my labours to bee nothing else but a messe of
 
 198 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 
 
 opinions, a vortex attracting indiscriminate, gold, pearls, 
 hay, straw, wood, excrement, an exchange, tavern, marte, 
 for foreigners to congregate, Danes, Swedes, Hollanders, 
 Lombards, so- many strange faces, dresses, salutations, 
 languages, all which Wolfius behelde with great contente 
 upon the Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly in his 
 book the world's Epitome, which Sannazar so bepraiseth, 
 e contra our Polydore can see nothing in it ; they call me 
 singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in this 
 age, which is all too neoteric and light for my humour. 
 
 One cometh to me sighing, complaining. He expected 
 universal remedies in my Anatomy; so many cures as 
 there are distemperatures among men. I have not put 
 his affection in my cases. Hear you his case. My fine 
 Sir is a lover, an inamorato, a Pyramus, a Romeo ; he 
 walks seven years disconsolate, moping, becauset he can- 
 not enjoy his miss, insanus amor is his melancholy, the 
 man is mad ; delirat, he dotes ; all this while his Glycera 
 is rude, spiteful, not to be entreated, churlish, spits at 
 him, yet exceeding fair, gentle eyes (which is a beauty), 
 hair lustrous and smiling, the trope is none of mine, 
 JEneas Sylvius hath crines ridentes in conclusion she is 
 wedded to his rival, a boore, a Corydon, a rustic, omnino 
 ignarus, he can scarce construe Corderius, yet haughty, 
 fantastic, opiniatre. The lover travels, goes into foreign 
 parts, peregrinates, amoris ergo, sees manners, customs, 
 not English, converses with pilgrims, lying travellers, 
 monks, hermits, those cattle, pedlars, travelling gentry, 
 Egyptians, natural wonders, unicorns (though Aldo- 
 brandus will have them to be figments), satyrs, semi-viri, 
 apes, monkeys, baboons, curiosities artificial, pyramides, 
 Virgilius his tombe, relicks, bones, which are nothing but 
 ivory as Melancthon judges, though Cornutus leaneth to 
 think them bones of dogs, cats (why not men ?), which 
 subtill priests vouch to have been saints, martyrs, heu 
 Pietas / By that time he has ended his course, fugit 
 hora, seven other years are expired, gone by, time is he 
 should return, he taketh ship for Britaine, much desired
 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 199 
 
 of his friends, favebant venti, Neptune is curteis, after 
 some weekes at sea he landeth, rides post to town, greets 
 his family, kinsmen, compotores, those jokers his friends 
 that were ivont to tipple ivith him at alehouses; these 
 wonder now to see the change, quantum mutatus, the man 
 is quite another thing, he is disenthralled, manumitted, 
 he wonders what so bewitched him, he can now both see, 
 hear, smell, handle, converse with his mistress, single by 
 reason of the death of his rival, a widow having children, 
 grown willing, prompt, amorous, shewing no such great 
 dislike to second nuptials, hee might have her for asking, 
 no such thing, his mind is changed, he loathes his former 
 meat, had liever eat ratsbane, aconite, his humour is to 
 die a batchelour; marke the conclusion. In this humour 
 of celibate seven other years are consumed in idleness, 
 sloth, world's pleasures, which fatigate, satiate, induce 
 Avearinesse, vapours, tcedium vitce : When upon a clay, 
 behold a wonder, .redit Amor, the man is as sick as ever, 
 he is commenced lover upon the old stock, walks with his 
 hand thrust into his bosom for negligence, moping he 
 leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, 
 eyes sunken, anhelus, breath ivlieezy and asthmatical, by 
 reason of over-mudi sighiny : society he abhors, solitude 
 is biit a hell, what shall he doe 1 all this while his mis- 
 tresse is forward, coming, amantissima, ready to jump at, 
 once into his mouth, her he hateth, feels disgust when she 
 is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, old, a painted Jezabeel, 
 Alecto, Megara, and Tisiphone all at once, a Corinthian 
 Lais, a strumpet, only not handsome ; that which he 
 affecteth so much, that which drives him mad, distracted, 
 phrenetic, beside himself, is no beauty which lives, noth- 
 ing in rerum naturd (so he might entertain a hope of a 
 cure), but something which is not, can never be, a cer- 
 tain fantastic opinion or notional image of his mistresse, 
 that which she ^vas, and that which hee thought her to be, 
 in former times, how beautiful ! torments him, frets him, 
 follows him, makes him that he wishes to die. 
 
 This Caprichio, Sir Humourous, hee cometh to me to
 
 200 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 
 
 be cured. I counsel marriage with his mistresse, accord- 
 ing to Hippocrates his method, together with milk diet, 
 herbs, aloes, and wild parsley, good in such cases, though 
 Avicenna preferreth some sort of wild fowl, teals, widgeons, 
 becca ficos, which men in Sussex eat. He flies out in a 
 passion, ho ! ho ; and falls to calling me names, dizzard, 
 ass, lunatic, moper, Bedlamite, Pseudo-Democritus. I 
 smile in his face, bidding him be patient, tranquil, to no 
 purpose, he still rages, I think this man must fetch his 
 remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land, Islands in the 
 Moone, etc. 
 
 EXTRACT II. 
 
 * * * Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst them- 
 selves, in logomachies, subtle controversies, many dry 
 blows given on either side, contentions of learned men, 
 or such as would be so thought, as Bodinus de Periodis 
 saith of such an one, arrident amid ridet mundus, in 
 English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they 
 flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwhile 
 the world thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, 
 a sophist * * * 
 
 * * * Philosophy running mad, madness philosophi- 
 sing, much idle -learned inquiries, what truth is ? and 
 no issue, fruit, of all these noises, only huge books are 
 written, and who is the wiser ? * * * * Men sitting in 
 the Doctor's chair, we marvel how they got there, 
 being homines intellectus piilverulenti, as Trincauellius 
 notes; they care not so they may raise a dust to 
 smother the eyes of their oppugners ; homines par- 
 vulissimi as Lemnius, whom Alcuin herein taxeth of 
 a crude Latinism ; dwarfs, minims, the least little men, 
 these spend their time, and 'tis odds but they lose their 
 time and wits too into the bargain, chacing of nimble and 
 retiring Truth. Her they prosecute, her still they 
 worship, libant, they make libations, spilling the wine, 
 as those old Romans in their sacrificials, Cerealia, May- 
 games.- Truth is the game all these hunt after, to the
 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 201 
 
 extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the moistures, 
 humidum radicale exsiccant, as Galen, in his counsels to 
 one of these wear-wite, brain-moppers, spunges, saith. 
 * * * and for all this nunquam metam attinyunt, and 
 how should they 1 they bowle awry, shooting beside the 
 marke ; whereas it should appear, that Truth absolute on 
 this planet of ours, is scarcely to be found, but in her 
 stede Queene opinion predominates, governs, whose shift- 
 ing and ever mutable Lampas, me seemeth, is man's 
 destinie to follow, she prcecurseth, she guideth him, 
 before his uncapable eyes she frisketh her tender lights, 
 which entertayne the child-man, untill Avhat time his 
 sight be strong to endure the vision of Very Truth, 
 which is in the heavens, the vision which is beatifical, as 
 Anianus expounds in his argument against certain mad 
 wits which helde God to be corporeous ; these were 
 dizzards, fools, gothamites. * * * but and if Very Truth 
 be extant indeede on earth, as some hold she it is which 
 actuates men's deeds, purposes, ye may in vaine look for 
 her in the learned universities, halls, colleges. Truth is 
 no Doctoresse, she taketh no degrees at Paris or Oxford, 
 amongst great clerks, disputants, subtile Aristotles, men 
 nodosi ingenii, able to take Lully by the chin, but often- 
 times to such an one as myself, an Idiota or common 
 person, no great things, melancholising in woods where 
 waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains, whereas the 
 silly man expecting no such matter, thinketh only how 
 best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with 
 Natura her pleasant scenes, woods, waterfalls, or Art 
 her statelier gardens, parks, terraces, Belvideres, on a 
 sudden the goddesse herself Truth has appeared, with a 
 shyning lyghte and a sparklyng countenance, so as yee 
 may not be able lightly to resist her. * * * * 
 
 EXTRACT IV. 
 
 This morning, May 2, 1602, having first broken my 
 fast upon eggs and cooling salades, mallows, water-cresses,
 
 202 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 
 
 those herbes, according to Villanovus his prescription, who 
 disallows the use of meat in a morning as gross, fat, 
 hebetant, feral, altogether fitter for wild beasts than 
 men, e contra commendeth this herb-diete for gentle, 
 humane, active, conducing to contemplation in most men, 
 I betook myselfe to the nearest fields. (Being in 
 London I commonly dwell in the suburbes, as airiest, 
 quietest, loci musis propriores, free from noises of caro- 
 ches, waggons, mechanick and base workes, workshoppes, 
 also sights, pageants, spectacles of outlandish birds, fishes, 
 crocodiles, Indians, mermaids, adde quarrels, fightings, 
 wranglings of the mobbe, plebs, the rabble, duellos with 
 fists, proper to this island, at which the stiletto'd and 
 secrete Italian laughs :) withdrawing myselfe from these 
 buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a bezo las manos to 
 the citty, I begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as horses 
 dilatis naribus snort the fresh aires, with exceeding great 
 delight, when suddenly there crosses me a procession sad, 
 heavy, dolorous, tristfull, melancholick, able to change 
 mirth into dolour, and overcast a clearer atmosphere than 
 possibly the neighbourhoods of so great a city can afford. 
 An old man, a poore man, deceased, is borne on men's 
 shoulders to a poore buriall, without solemnities of hearse, 
 mourners, plumes, mutce personce, those personate actors 
 that will weep if yee shoiv them a piece of silver ; none of 
 those customed civilities of children, kinsfolk, dependants, 
 following the coffin ; he died a poore man, his friends 
 assessores opum, those cronies of his that stuck by him so 
 long as lie had a penny, now leave him, forsake him, 
 shun him, desert him : they think it much to follow his 
 putrid and stinking carcase to the grave ; his children, if 
 he had any, for commonly the case stands thus, this poore 
 man his son dies before him, he survives poore, indigent, 
 base, dejected, miserable, etc., or if he have any which 
 survive him, sua negotia agunt, they mind their own 
 business, forsooth, cannot, will not, find time, leisure, 
 inclination, extremum munus perficere, to follow to the 
 pit their old indulgent father, which loved them, stroked
 
 CURIOUS FRAGMENTS. 203 
 
 them, caressed them, cockering them up, quantum potuit, 
 as farre as his means extended, while they were babes, 
 chits, minims, hee may rot in his grave, lie stinking in 
 the sun, for them, have no buriall at all, they care not. 
 nefas ! Chiefly I noted the coffin to have been without 
 a pall, nothing but a few planks of cheapest wood that 
 could be had, naked, having none of the ordinary symp- 
 tomata of a funerall, those locularii which bare the body, 
 having on diversely, coloured coats, and none black ; (one 
 of these reported the deceased to have been an almsman 
 seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in the work- 
 house of St. Giles in the fields, to whose proper burying 
 ground he was now going for interment). All which 
 when I behelde, hardly I refrained from weeping, and 
 incontinently I fell to musing : "If this man had been 
 rich, a Croesus, a Crassus, or as rich as Whittington, 
 what pompe, charge, lavish cost, expenditure of rich 
 buriall, ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies, had 
 been thought too good for such an one ; what store of 
 panegyricks, elogies, funerall orations, etc., some beggarly 
 poetaster, worthy to be beaten for his ill rimes, crying 
 him up, hee was rich, generous, bountiful, polite, learned, 
 a Maecenas, while as in very deede he was nothing lesse : 
 what weeping, sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining, 
 kinsmen, friends, relatives, fourtieth cousins, ppor rela- 
 tives, lamenting for the deceased ; hypocriticall heirs, 
 sobbing, striking their breasts (they care not if he had 
 died a year ago) ; so many clients dependants, flatterers, 
 parasites, cunning Gnathoes, tramping on foot after the 
 hearse, all their care is, who shall stand fairest with the 
 successour ; he meantime (like enough) spurns them from 
 him, spits at them, treads them under his foot, will have 
 nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the 
 right : flccc sunt majora gravitate Heracliti. These 
 follies are enough to give crying Heraditus a Jit of the 
 spleene.
 
 HYPOCHONDKIACUS. 
 
 BY myself walking, 
 
 To myself talking, 
 
 When as I ruminate 
 
 On my untoward fate, 
 
 Scarcely seem I 
 
 Alone sufficiently, 
 
 Black thoughts continually 
 
 Crowding my privacy ; 
 
 They come unbidden, 
 
 Like foes at a wedding, 
 
 Thrusting their faces 
 
 In better guests' places, 
 
 Peevish and malecontent, 
 
 Clownish, impertinent, 
 
 Dashing the merriment : 
 
 So in like fashions 
 
 Dim cogitations 
 
 Follow and haunt me, 
 
 Striving to daunt me, 
 
 In my heart festering, 
 
 In my ears whispering, 
 
 " Thy friends are treacherous, 
 
 Thy foes are dangerous, 
 
 Thy dreams ominous." 
 
 Fierce Anthropophagi, 
 Spectra, Diaboli, 
 What scared St. Anthony, 
 Hobgoblins, Lemnres,
 
 HYPOCHOXDKIACUS. 205 
 
 Dreams of Antipodes, 
 Night-riding Incubi 
 Troubling the fantasy, 
 All dire illusions 
 Causing confusions ; 
 Figments heretical, 
 Scruples fantastical, 
 Doubts diabolical ; 
 Abaddon vexeth me, 
 Mahu perplexeth me, 
 Lucifer teareth me 
 Jesu ! Maria ! liberate nos ab his 
 diris tentationibus Inimici.
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF CHEIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, 
 without diminishing the stock which is imperiously 
 demanded to furnish the more pressing and homely wants 
 of our nature, he has disposed of one or more perhaps out 
 of a numerous offspring, under the shelter of a care scarce 
 less tender than the paternal, where not only their bodily 
 cravings shall be supplied, but that mental pabulum is 
 also dispensed, which HE hath declared to be no less 
 necessary to our sustenance, who said that " not by bread 
 alone man can live;" for this Christ's Hospital unfolds 
 her bounty. Here neither, on the one hand, are the 
 youth lifted up above their family, which we must suppose 
 liberal though reduced ; nor, on the other hand, are they 
 liable to be depressed below its level by the mean habits 
 and sentiments which a common charity-school generates. 
 It is, in a word, an Institution to keep those who have 
 yet held up their heads in the world from sinking ; to 
 keep alive the spirit of a decent household, when poverty 
 was in danger of crushing it ; to assist those who are the 
 most willing, but not always the most able, to assist 
 themselves ; to separate a child from his family for a 
 season, in order to render him back hereafter, with feel- 
 ings and habits more congenial to it, than he could even 
 have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of it. 
 It is a preserving and renovating principle, an antidote 
 for the res angusta domi, when it presses, as it always 
 does, most heavily upon the most ingenuous natures. 
 This is Christ's Hospital ; and whether its character
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 207 
 
 would be improved by confining its advantages to the 
 very lowest of the people, let those judge who have 
 witnessed the looks, the gestures, the behaviour, the 
 manner of their play with one another, their deportment 
 towards strangers, the whole aspect and physiognomy of 
 that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, 
 who freshen and make alive again with their sports the 
 else mouldering cloisters of the old Grey Friars -which 
 strangers who have never witnessed, if they pass through 
 Newgate Street, or by Smithfield, would do well to go 
 a little out of their way to see. 
 
 For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no 
 charity-boy ; he feels it in the antiquity and regality of 
 the foundation to which he belongs ; in the usage which 
 he meets with at school, and the treatment he is accus- 
 tomed to out of its bounds ; in the respect, and even 
 kindness, which his well-known garb never fails to procure 
 him in the streets of the metropolis ; he feels it in his 
 education, in that measure of classical attainments, which 
 every individual at that school, though not destined to a 
 learned profession, has it in his power to procure, attain- 
 ments which it would be worse than folly to put it in the 
 reach of the labouring classes to acquire ; he feels it in 
 the numberless comforts, and even magnificences, which 
 surround him ; in his old and awful cloisters, with their 
 traditions ; in his spacious schoolrooms, and in the well- 
 ordered, airy, and lofty rooms where he sleeps ; in his 
 stately dining-hall, hung round with pictures, by Verrio, 
 Lely, and others, one of them surpassing in size and 
 grandeur almost any other in the kingdom ; l above all, in 
 the very extent and magnitude of the body to which he 
 belongs, and the consequent spirit, the intelligence, and 
 public conscience, which is the result of so many various 
 yet wonderfully combining members. C'orn pared with 
 
 1 By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne, 
 surrounded by his courtiers (all curious portraits), receiving the 
 mathematical pupils at their annual presentation, a custom still 
 kept up on New Year's Day at Court.
 
 208 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 this last-named advantage, what is the stock of informa- 
 tion (I do not here speak of book-learning, but of that 
 knowledge which boy receives from boy), the mass of 
 collected opinions, the intelligence in common, among 
 the few and narrow members of an ordinary boarding- 
 school. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital or Blue -coat boy has a dis- 
 tinctive character of his own, as far removed from the 
 abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the 
 disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other 
 of the public schools. There is pride in it, accumulated 
 from the circumstances which I have described as differ- 
 encing him from the former ; and there is a restraining 
 modesty, from a sense of obligation and dependence, which 
 must ever keep his deportment from assimilating to that 
 of the latter. His very garb, as it is antique and vener- 
 able, feeds his self-respect ; as it is a badge of depen- 
 dence, it restrains the natural petulance of that age from 
 breaking out into overt acts of insolence. This pro- 
 duces silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that 
 cowardly shyness which boys mewed up at home will 
 feel ; he will speak up when spoken to, but the stranger 
 must begin the conversation with him. Within his 
 bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he 
 steals along with all the self- concentration of a young 
 monk. He is never known to mix with other boys, they 
 are a sort of laity to him. All this proceeds, I have no 
 doubt, from the continual consciousness which he carries 
 about him of the difference of his dress from that of the 
 rest of the world ; with i modest jealousy over himself, 
 lest, by over- hastily mixing with common and secular 
 playfellows, he should commit the dignity of his cloth. 
 Nor let any one laugh at this ; for, considering the pro- 
 pensity of the multitude, and especially of the small 
 multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress above 
 all, where such peculiarity may be construed by malice 
 into a mark of disparagement this reserve will appear 
 to be nothing more than a Avise instinct in the Blue-coat
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 209 
 
 boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that 
 it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger 
 may soon satisfy himself by putting a question to any of 
 these boys : he may be sure of an answer couched in 
 terms of plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. 
 Let him put the same question to a parish -boy, or to 
 
 one of the trencher-caps in the cloisters, and the 
 
 impudent reply of the one shall not fail to exasperate 
 any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to 
 reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to 
 depress and sadden him. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital boy is a religious character. 
 His school is eminently a religious foundation ; it has its 
 peculiar prayers, its services at set times, its graces, 
 hymns, and anthems, following each other in an almost 
 monastic closeness of succession. This religious character 
 in him is not always untinged with superstition. That 
 is not wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales 
 and traditions which must circulate with undisturbed 
 credulity, amongst so many boys, that have so few checks 
 to their belief from any intercourse with the world at 
 large ; upon whom their equals in age must work so 
 much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards 
 an over-belief in matters of religion, which will soon 
 correct itself when he comes out into society, may be 
 classed a turn for romance above most other boys. This 
 is to be traced in the same manner to their excess of 
 society with each other, and defect of mingling with the 
 world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such books 
 as the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and others of 
 a still wilder cast, are, or at least were in my time, 
 sought for by the boys. I remember when some half- 
 dozen of them set off from school, without map, card, or 
 compass, on a serious expedition to find out Philip 
 Quard's Island. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong 
 is peculiarly tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to 
 run out into ceremonial observances, and to impose a 
 p
 
 210 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 yoke upon itself beyond the strict obligations of the moral 
 law. Those who were contemporaries with me at that 
 School thirty years ago, will remember with what more 
 than Judaic rigour the eating of the fat of certain boiled 
 meats 1 was interdicted. A boy would have blushed, as 
 at the exposure of some heinous immorality, to have been 
 detected eating that forbidden portion of his allowance of 
 animal food, the whole of which, while he was in health, 
 was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger. The 
 same, or even greater, refinement was shown in the re- 
 jection of certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave rise to 
 these supererogatory penances, these self-denying ordi- 
 nances, I could never learn ; 2 they certainly argue no 
 defect of the conscientious principle. A little excess in 
 that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance 
 for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. 
 But in the less ambiguous line of duty, in those direc- 
 tions of the moral feelings which cannot be mistaken or 
 depreciated, I will relate what took place in the year 
 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I must be 
 pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. 
 Indeed the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon 
 this subject, almost brings back those times ; they are 
 present to me still. But I believe that in the years 
 which have elapsed since the period which I speak of, the 
 character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little 
 changed. Their situation in point of many comforts is 
 improved ; but that which I ventured before to term the 
 public conscience of the school, the pervading moral sense, 
 of which every mind partakes, and to which so many in- 
 dividual minds contribute, remains, I believe, pretty much 
 
 1 Under the denomination of gags. 
 
 2 I am told that the late steward, Mr. Hathaway, who evinced on 
 many occasions a most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the com- 
 fort of the boys, had occasion for all his address nnd perseverance 
 to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices, in which he 
 at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one half of the 
 animal nutrition of the school those honours which painful super- 
 stition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from it.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL 211 
 
 the same as when I left it. I have seen within this 
 twelvemonth almost the change which has been produced 
 upon a boy of eight or nine years of age, upon being 
 admitted into that school ; how, from a pert young cox- 
 comb, who thought that all knowledge was comprehended 
 within his shallow brains, because a smattering of two or 
 three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into 
 him by injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with 
 the wholesome society of so many schoolfellows, in less 
 time than I have spoken of, he has sunk to his own level, 
 and is contented to be carried on in the quiet orb of 
 modest self-knowledge in which the common mass of that 
 unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem to move ; from 
 being a little unfeeling mortal, he has got to feel and 
 reflect. Nor would it be a difficult matter to show how, 
 at a school like this, where the boy is neither entirely 
 separated from home, nor yet exclusively under its in- 
 fluence, the best feelings, the filial for instance, are 
 brought to a maturity which they could not have 
 attained under a completely domestic education ; how the 
 relation of parent is rendered less tender by unremitted 
 association, and the very awfulness of age is best appre- 
 hended by some sojourning amidst the comparative levity 
 of youth ; how absence, not drawn out by too great ex- 
 tension into alienation or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon 
 the relish of occasional intercourse, and the boy is made 
 the better child by that which keeps the force of that 
 relation from being felt as perpetually pressing on him ; 
 how the substituted paternity, into the care of which he 
 is adopted, while in everything substantial it makes up 
 for the natural, in the necessary omission of individual 
 fondness and partialities, directs the mind only the more 
 strongly to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which 
 such weaknesses are the bond of strength, and the 
 appetite which craves after them betrays no perverse 
 palate. But these speculations rather belong to the 
 question of the comparative advantage of a public over a 
 private education in general. I must get back to my
 
 212 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 favourite school ; and to that which took place when our 
 old and good steward died. 
 
 And I will say, that when I think of the frequent 
 instances which I have met with in children, of a hard- 
 heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to the loss of 
 relations, even of those who have begot and nourished 
 them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something in 
 the peculiar conformation of that school, favourable to the 
 expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that, at the 
 period which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys 
 there was not a dry eye to be found among them, nor a 
 heart that did not beat with genuine emotion. Every 
 impulse to play, until the funeral day was past, seemed 
 suspended throughout the school ; and the boys, lately so 
 mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters 
 alone, or in sad groups standing about, few of them with- 
 out some token, such as their slender means could pro- 
 vide, a black riband or something to denote respect and a 
 sense of their loss. The time itself was a time of anarchy, 
 a time in which all authority (out of school-hours) was 
 abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those days 
 superseded ; and the gates, which at other times kept us 
 in, were left without watchers. Yet, with the exception 
 of one or two graceless boys at most, who took advantage 
 of that suspension of authorities to skulk out, as it was 
 called, the whole body of that great school kept rigorously 
 within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment ; 
 and they who broke bounds, though they escaped punish- 
 ment from any master, fell into a general disrepute among 
 us, and, for that which at any other time would have 
 been applauded and admired as a mark of spirit, were 
 consigned to infamy and reprobation ; so much natural 
 government have gratitude and the principles of reverence 
 and love, and so much did a respect to their dead friend pre- 
 vail with these Christ's Hospital boys above any fear which 
 his presence among them when living could ever produce. 
 And if the impressions which were made on my mind so long 
 ago are to be trusted, very richly did their steward deserve
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 213 
 
 this tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call to 
 mind his portly form, the regal awe which he always con- 
 trived to inspire, in spite of a tenderness and even weak- 
 ness of nature that would have enfeebled the reins of 
 discipline in any other master ; a yearning of tenderness 
 towards those under his protection, which could make five 
 hundred boys at once feel towards him each as to their 
 individual father. He had faults, with which we had 
 nothing to do ; but, with all his faults, indeed, Mr. Perry 
 was a most extraordinary creature. Contemporary with 
 him, and still living, though he has long since resigned 
 his occupation, will it be impertinent to mention the 
 name of our excellent upper grammar-master, the Eev. 
 James Boyer ? He was a disciplinarian, indeed, of a 
 different stamp from him whom I have just described ; 
 but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a temper a little 
 too hasty to leave the more nervous of us quite at our ease 
 to do justice to his merits in those days, are long since 
 over, ungrateful were we if we should refuse our testimony 
 to that unwearied assiduity with which he attended to 
 the particular improvement of each of us. Had we been 
 the offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not 
 have been instigated by the strongest views of recompense 
 and reward to have made himself a greater slave to the 
 most laborious of all occupations than he did for us sons 
 of charity, from whom, or from our parents, he could ex- 
 pect nothing. He has had his reward in the satisfaction 
 of having discharged his duty, in the pleasurable con- 
 sciousness of having advanced the respectability of that 
 institution to which, both man and boy, he was attached ; 
 in the honours to which so many of his pupils have suc- 
 cessfully aspired at both our Universities ; and in the 
 staff with which the Governors of the Hospital at the 
 close of his hard labours, with the highest expressions of 
 the obligations the school lay under to him, unanimously 
 voted to present him. 
 
 I have often considered it among the felicities of the 
 constitution of this school, that the offices of steward and
 
 2H RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 schoolmaster are kept distinct; the strict business of 
 education alone devolving upon the latter, while the 
 former has the charge of all things out of school, the 
 control of the provisions, the regulation of meals, of dress, 
 of play, and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By 
 this division of management, a superior respectability 
 must attach to the teacher while his office is unmixed 
 with any of these lower concerns. A still greater advantage 
 over the construction of common boarding-schools is to be 
 found in the settled salaries of the masters, rendering 
 them totally free of obligation to any individual pupil or 
 his parents. This never fails to have its effect at schools 
 where each boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the 
 master derives from him, where he views him every day 
 in the light of a caterer, a provider for the family, who is 
 to get so much by him in each of his meals. Boys will 
 see and consider these things ; and how much must the 
 sacred character of preceptor suffer in their minds by 
 these degrading associations ! The very bill which the 
 pupil carries home with him at Christmas, eked out, 
 perhaps, with elaborate though necessary minuteness, in- 
 structs him that his teachers have other ends than the 
 mere love to learning in the lessons which they give him ; 
 and though they put into his hands the fine sayings of 
 Seneca or Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of 
 those disinterested pedagogues to teach philosophy gratis. 
 The master, too, is sensible that he is seen in this light ; 
 and how much this must lessen that affectionate regard 
 to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter labour 
 of instruction, and convert the whole business into un- 
 welcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors 
 that I have conversed with on the subject are ready, with 
 a sad heart, to acknowledge. From this inconvenience 
 the settled salaries of the masters of this school in great 
 measure exempt them; while the happy custom of 
 choosing masters (indeed every officer of the establish- 
 ment) from those who have received their education there, 
 gives them an interest in advancing the character of the
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 215 
 
 school, and binds them to observe a tenderness and a re- 
 spect to the children, in which a stranger, feeling that 
 independence which I have spoken of might well be ex- 
 pected to fail. 
 
 In affectionate recollections of the place where he was 
 bred up, in hearty recognitions of old schoolfellows met 
 with again after the lapse of years, or in foreign countries, 
 the Christ's Hospital boy yields to none ; I might almost 
 say he goes beyond most other boys. The very compass 
 and magnitude of the school, its thousand bearings, the 
 space it takes up in the imagination beyond the ordinary 
 schools, impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an 
 elevation of mind, that attends him through life. It is 
 too big, too affecting an object, to pass away quickly 
 from his mind. The Christ's Hospital boy's friends at 
 school are commonly his intimates through life. For 
 me, I do not know whether a constitutional imbecility 
 does not incline me too obstinately to cling to the remem- 
 brances of childhood ; in an inverted ratio to the usual 
 sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged 
 in since seems of any value or importance, compared to 
 the colours which imagination gave to everything then. 
 I belong to no body corporate such as I then made a part 
 of. And here before I close, taking leave of the general 
 reader, and addressing myself solely to my old school- 
 fellows, that were contemporaries with me from the year 
 1782 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of 
 those circumstances of our school, which they will not be 
 unwilling to have brought back to their minds. 
 
 And first, let us remember, as first in importance in 
 our childish eyes, the young men (as they almost were) 
 who, under the denomination of Grecians, were waiting 
 the expiration of the period when they should be sent, at 
 the charges of the Hospital, to one or other of our Uni- 
 versities, but more frequently to Cambridge. These 
 youths, from their superior acquirements, their superior 
 age and stature, and the fewness of their numbers (for 
 seldom, above two or three at a time Avere inaugurated
 
 216 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 into that high order), drew the eyes of all, and especially 
 of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and 
 admiration. How tall they used to seem to us ! how 
 stately would they pace along the cloisters ! while the 
 play of the lesser boys was absolutely suspended, or its 
 boisterousness at least allayed, at their presence ! Not 
 that they ever beat or struck the boys that would have 
 been to have demeaned themselves the dignity of their 
 persons alone insured them all respect. The task of 
 blows, of corporal chastisement, they left to the common 
 monitors, or heads of wards, who it must be confessed, in 
 our time had rather too much licence allowed them to 
 oppress and misuse their inferiors ; and the interference 
 of the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual 
 power, was not unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its 
 mediation, the heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal 
 power, or monitor. In fine, the Grecians were the solemn 
 Muftis of the school. .ZEras were computed from their 
 time ; it used to be said, such or such a thing was done 
 
 when S or T was Grecian. 
 
 As I ventured to call the Grecians the Muftis of the 
 school, the king's boys, 1 as their character then was, may 
 well pass for the Jauisaries. They were the terror of 
 all the other boys ; bred up under that hardy sailor, as 
 well as excellent mathematician, and co-navigator with 
 Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were 
 adapted to fit them for the rough element which they 
 were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punish- 
 ments, which were expected to be borne with more than 
 Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions 
 of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To 
 make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, 
 seemed to be his only aim ; to this everything was 
 subordinate. Moral obliquities, indeed, were sure of 
 receiving their full recompense, for no occasion of laying 
 on the lash was ever let slip ; but the effects expected to 
 
 1 The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the founda- 
 tion of Charles the Second.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 217 
 
 be produced from it were something very different from 
 contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales 
 a perpetual fund of humour, a constant glee about him, 
 which, heightened by an inveterate provincialism of 
 North-country dialect, absolutely took away the sting from 
 his severities. His punishments were a game at patience, 
 in which the master was not always worst contented when 
 he found himself at times overcome by his pupil. What 
 success this discipline had, or how the effects of it operated 
 upon the after-lives of these king's boys, I cannot say : 
 but I am sure that, for the time, they were absolute 
 nuisances to the rest of the school. Hardy, brutal, and 
 often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in the 
 whole mass : older and bigger than the other boys (for, 
 by the system of their education they were kept longer 
 at school by two or three years than any of the rest, 
 except the Grecians), they were a constant terror to 
 the younger part of the school ; and some who may 
 read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation 
 into which the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when 
 the cry was raised in the cloisters, that the First Order 
 was coming for so they termed the first form or class 
 of those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some good 
 purposes in the school. They were the military class 
 among the boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who ex- 
 tended the fame of the prowess of the school far and near : 
 and the apprentices in the vicinage, and sometimes the 
 butchers' boys in the neighbouring market, had sad occa- 
 sion to attest their valour. 
 
 The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumer- 
 ate all those circumstances, some pleasant, some attended 
 with some pain, which seen through the mist of distance, 
 come sweetly softened to the memory. But I must crave 
 leave to remember our transcending superiority in those 
 invigorating sports, leap-frog, and basting the bear ; our 
 delightful excursions in the summer holidays to the New 
 River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live 
 the long clay in the water, never caring for dressing our-
 
 218 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 
 
 selves when we had once stripped ; our savoury meals 
 afterwards, when we came home almost famished with 
 staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at 
 other times to the Tower, where, by ancient privilege, 
 we had free access to all the curiosities ; our solemn pro- 
 cessions through the City at Easter, with the Lord 
 Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a shilling, with the 
 festive questions and civic pleasantries of the dispensing 
 Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the 
 banquet ; our stately suppings in public, where the well- 
 lighted hall, and the confluence of well-dressed company 
 who came to see us, made the whole look more like a 
 concert or assembly, than a scene of a plain bread and 
 cheese collation ; the annual orations upon St. Matthew's 
 day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done, 
 seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had clone 
 honour to our school by being educated in it, the names 
 of those accomplished critics and Greek scholars, Joshua 
 Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I marvel they left out 
 Camden while they were about it). Let me have leave 
 to remember our hymns and anthems, and well- toned 
 organ ; the doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in 
 the solemn cloisters, upon the seldom-occurring funeral of 
 some schoolfellow ; the festivities at Christmas, when the 
 richest of us would club our stock to have a gaudy day, 
 sitting round the fire, replenished to the height with logs, 
 and the penniless, and he that could contribute nothing, 
 partook in all the mirth, and in some of the substantiali- 
 ties of the feasting ; the carol sung by night at that time 
 of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often 
 lain awake to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) 
 till ten, when it was sung by the older boys and monitors, 
 and have listened to it, in their rude chanting, till I have 
 been transported in fancy to the fields of Bethlehem, and 
 the song which was sung at that season by angels' voices 
 to the shepherds. 
 
 Nor would I Avillingly forget any of those things which 
 administered to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands, and
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 219 
 
 town-made shirts, which some of the most fashionable 
 among us wore ; the town-girdles, with buckles of silver, 
 or shining stone ; the badges of the sea-boys ; the cots, 
 or superior shoe-strings of the monitors ; the medals of 
 the markers (those who were appointed to hear the Bible 
 read in the wards on Sunday morning and evening), which 
 bore on their obverse in silver, as certain parts of our 
 garments carried in meaner metal, the countenance of our 
 Founder, that godly and royal child, King Edward the 
 Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name the young flower 
 that was untimely cropped as it began to fill our land 
 with its early odours the boy -patron of boys the 
 serious and holy child who walked with Cranmer and 
 Ridley fit associate, in those tender years, for the bishops 
 and future martyrs of our Church, to receive, or (as 
 occasion sometimes proved) to give instruction. 
 
 ' ' But ah ! what means the silent tear ? 
 
 Why, e'en mid joy, my bosom heave ? 
 Ye long lost scenes, enchantments dear ! 
 Lo ! how I linger o'er your grave. 
 
 " Fly then, ye hours of rosy hue, 
 
 And bear away the bloom of years ! 
 And quick succeed, ye sickly crew 
 
 Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears ! 
 
 " Still will I ponder Fate's unaltered plan, 
 Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man." l 
 
 1 Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital, in the 
 Poetics of Mr. George Dyer.
 
 ON THE TEAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEEE. 
 
 CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR 
 STAGE REPRESENTATION. 
 
 TAKING a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck 
 with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not 
 remember to have seen before, and which upon examina- 
 tion proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. 
 Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good 
 Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of 
 consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandal- 
 ised at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures 
 into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. 
 Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure 
 the following lines : - 
 
 To paint fair Nature, by divine command, 
 Her magic pencil in his glowing hand, 
 A Shakspere rose : then, to expand his fame 
 Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came. 
 Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, 
 The Actor's genius made them breathe anew ; 
 Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay, 
 Immortal Garrick call'd them back to-day : 
 And till Eternity with power sublime 
 Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, 
 Shakspere and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine, 
 And earth irradiate with a beam divine. 
 
 It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to 
 attempt anything like a criticism on this farrago of false 
 thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection it led me into 
 was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor 
 here celebrated to our own. it should have been the
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 221 
 
 fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that 
 has had the luck to please the town in any of the great 
 characters of Shakspere, with a notion of possessing a 
 mind congenial ivith the poetfs ; how people should come 
 thus unaccountably to confound the power of originating 
 poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of being- 
 able to read or recite the same when put into words ; * 
 or what connection that absolute mastery over the heart 
 and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, 
 has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which 
 a player by observing a few general effects, which some 
 common passion, as grief, anger, etc., usually has upon 
 the gestures and exterior, can easily compass. To know 
 the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of 
 an Othello or a Hamlet, for instance, the ivhen and the 
 why and the liow far they should be moved ; to what 
 pitch a passion is becoming ; to give the reins and to pull 
 in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in 
 or the slacking is most graceful ; seems to demand a reach 
 of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which 
 is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these 
 passions in the countenance or gesture, which signs are 
 usually observed to be most lively and emphatic in the 
 weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all but 
 indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, 
 generally ; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, 
 wherein it differs from the same passion in low and 
 vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea 
 by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) 
 can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But 
 such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which 
 
 1 It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dra- 
 matic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads 
 Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet 
 and philosopher ; nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, 
 who is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any 
 man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there 
 must be some mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his inti- 
 mate friends, set upon a level with Milton.
 
 222 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared 
 with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understand- 
 ing in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play- 
 writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, 
 but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, 
 the actor with the character which he represents. It is 
 difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea 
 of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We 
 speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking 
 of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to un- 
 lettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage of 
 reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player 
 for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, 
 and to whom the very idea of what an author is cannot 
 be made comprehensible without some pain and perplexity 
 of mind : the error is one from which persons otherwise 
 not meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate 
 themselves. 
 
 Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very- 
 high degree of satisfaction which I received some years 
 back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of Shakspere 
 performed, in which these two great performers sustained 
 the principal parts. It seemed to embody and realise 
 conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. 
 But dearly do we pay all our life afterwards for this 
 juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the 
 novelty is past, we find to our cost that, instead of realis- 
 ing an idea, we have only materialised and brought down 
 a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have 
 let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance. 
 
 How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its 
 free conceptions thus cramped and pressed down to the 
 measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be judged from 
 that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn 
 to those plays of Shakspere which have escaped being 
 performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of 
 the same writer which have happily been left out in the 
 performance. How far the very custom of hearing any-
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 223 
 
 thing spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, 
 may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, etc., 
 which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their 
 being to be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of 
 books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that 
 celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning " To be or not 
 to be," or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, 
 it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory 
 boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place 
 and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become 
 to me a perfect dead member. 
 
 It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of 
 opinion that the plays of Shakspere are less calculated for 
 performance on a stage than those of almost any other 
 dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a 
 reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, 
 which comes not under the province of acting, with which 
 eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do. 
 
 The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and 
 the turns of passion ; and the more coarse and palpable 
 the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes and ears of 
 the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For 
 this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons 
 talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising 
 manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been 
 the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is 
 plain, because the spectators are here most palpably 
 appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of 
 words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed 
 round such " intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the 
 direct object of the imitation here. But in the best 
 dramas, and in Shakspere above all, how obvious it is, 
 that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or 
 dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial 
 one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of 
 that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of 
 mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have 
 arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short
 
 224 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 of intuition. We do here as we do with novels written 
 in the epistolary form. How many improprieties, perfect 
 solecisms in letter- writing, do we put up with in "Clarissa" 
 and other books, for the sake of the delight which that 
 form upon the whole gives us. 
 
 But the practice of stage representation reduces every- 
 thing to a controversy of elocution. Every character, 
 from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to the 
 shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. 
 The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet 
 sounds of lovers' tongues by night ; the more intimate 
 and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an 
 Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all 
 those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading, as 
 when we read of those youthful dalliances in Paradise 
 
 As beseem'cl 
 
 Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league, 
 Alone : 
 
 by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are 
 these things sullied and turned from their very nature by 
 being exposed to a large assembly ; when such speeches 
 as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of 
 the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though 
 nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is 
 manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge of 
 her endearments and her returns of love. 
 
 The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, 
 since the days of Betterton, a succession of popular per- 
 formers have had the greatest ambition to distinguish 
 themselves. The length of the part may be one of their 
 reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a 
 play, and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic 
 representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and 
 reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider it 
 as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction. But 
 Hamlet himself what does he suffer meanwhile by being 
 dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures 
 to the crowd ! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 225 
 
 does, are transactions between himself and his moral 
 sense, they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which 
 he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered 
 parts of the palace to pour forth ; or rather, they are the 
 silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting, 
 reduced to ivords for the sake of the reader, who must 
 else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These 
 profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring rumina- 
 tions, which the tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls 
 and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticu- 
 lating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an 
 audience, making four hundred people his confidants at 
 once 1 I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to 
 do ; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, he must accom- 
 pany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his 
 auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. 
 He must be thinking all the while of his appearance, 
 because he knoivs that all the lohile the spectators are 
 judging of it. And this is the way to represent the shy, 
 negligent, retiring Hamlet. 
 
 It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a 
 vast quantity of thought and feeling to a great portion 
 of the audience, who otherwise would never learn it for 
 themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition 
 gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable ; 
 but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, 
 but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being 
 acted. I have heard much of the wonders which Garrick 
 performed in this part ; but as I never saw him, I must 
 have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a 
 character came within the province of his art. Those 
 who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his 
 eye, and of his commanding voice : physical properties, 
 vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can 
 never insinuate meaning into an auditory, but what 
 have they to do with Hamlet 1 what have they to do 
 with intellect 1 In fact, the things aimed at in theatrical 
 representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the 
 Q
 
 226 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable 
 hearing to what is spoken : it is not what the character 
 is, but how he looks ; not what he says, but how he 
 speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the play of 
 Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as 
 Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but 
 totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features 
 of Shakspere, his stupendous intellect ; and only taking 
 care to give us enough of passionate dialogue, which 
 Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish ; I see not 
 how the effect could be much different upon an audience, 
 nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shaks- 
 pere to us differently from his representation of Banks or 
 Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished 
 prince, and must be gracefully personated ; he might be 
 puzzled in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly 
 cruel to Ophelia, he might see a ghost, and start at it, 
 and address it kindly when he found it to be his father ; 
 all this in the poorest and most homely language of the 
 servilest creeper after nature that ever consulted the 
 palate of an audience ; without troubling Shakspere for 
 the matter; and I see not but there would be room for 
 all the power which an actor has, to display itself. All 
 the passions and changes of passion might remain ; for 
 those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought; 
 it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling 
 a note or two in the voice, a whisper with a significant 
 foreboding look to announce its approach, and so contagi- 
 ous the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let 
 the words be what they will, the look and tone shall carry 
 it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions. 
 
 It is common for people to talk of Shakspere's plays 
 being so natural, that everybody can understand him. 
 They are natural indeed, they are grounded deep in nature, 
 so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of 
 most of us. You shall hear the same persons say that 
 George Barnwdl is very natural, and Othello is very 
 natural, that they are both very deep ; and to them they
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 227 
 
 are the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and 
 shed tears, because a good sort of young man is tempted 
 by a naughty woman to commit a trifling peccadillo, the 
 murder of an uncle or so, 1 that is all, and so comes to 
 an untimely end, which is so moving ; and at the other, 
 because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent 
 white wife : and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a 
 hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe hap- 
 pen to both the heroes, and have thought the rope more 
 due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of the texture of 
 Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously laid 
 open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic 
 confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate 
 springing from the depths of love, they see no more than 
 the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies 
 apiece to look through the man's telescope in Leicester 
 Fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the 
 moon. Some dim thing or other they see, they see an 
 actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, 
 and they recognise it as a copy of the usual external 
 effects of such passions ; or at least as being true to that 
 symbol of the emotion which %>a-sses current at the theatre 
 for it, for it is often no more than that : but of the 
 grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great or 
 heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy, 
 
 1 If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, 
 I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the galleries, 
 that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London 
 should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why 
 are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of 
 an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous 
 sermon of George Barnwell ? Why at the end of their vistas are 
 we to place the galloivs ? Were I an uncle, I should not much 
 like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his 
 eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as 
 done upon such slight motives ; it is attributing too much to such 
 characters as Millwood ; it is putting things into the heads of good 
 young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. 
 Uncles that think anything of their lives, should fairly petition the 
 Chamberlain against it.
 
 228 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 that common auditors know anything of this, or can 
 have any such notions dinned into them by the mere 
 strength of an actor's lungs, that apprehensions foreign 
 to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can 
 neither believe, nor understand how it can be possible. 
 
 We talk of Shakspere's admirable observation of life, 
 when we should feel that not from a petty inquisition 
 into those cheap and every-day characters which sur- 
 rounded him, as they surround us, but from his own 
 mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, 
 the very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images 
 of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us 
 recognising a part, think we comprehend in our natures 
 the whole ; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he 
 positively creates in us for nothing more than indigenous 
 faculties of our own minds, which only waited the appli- 
 cation of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and 
 clear echo of the same. 
 
 To return to Hamlet. Among the distinguishing 
 features of that wonderful character, one of the most 
 interesting (yet painful) is that soreness of mind which 
 makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius with harsh- 
 ness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews 
 with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if 
 they be not mixed in the latter case with a profound 
 artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discour- 
 tesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that 
 loving intercourse, which can no longer find a place 
 amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) 
 are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our 
 admiration of Hamlet, the most patient consideration of 
 his situation is no more than necessary ; they are what 
 we forgive afterwards, and explain by the whole of his 
 character, but at the time they are harsh and unpleasant. 
 Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows 
 to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this 
 character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the 
 utmost these ambiguous features, these temporary de-
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 229 
 
 formities in the character. They make him express a 
 vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his 
 gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable ; 
 they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at 
 Ophelia's father, contempt in its very grossest and most 
 hateful form ; but they get applause by it : it is natural, 
 people say ; that is, the words are scornful, and the actor 
 expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so 
 much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking. 
 So to Ophelia. All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, 
 rant and rave at her as if she had committed some great 
 crime, and the audience are highly pleased, because the 
 words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by 
 the strongest expression of satirical indignation of which 
 the face and voice are capable. But then, whether 
 Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal appearances 
 to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. 
 The truth is, that in all such deep affections as had sub- 
 sisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a stock of su- 
 pererogatory love (if I may venture to use the expression), 
 which in any great grief of heart, especially where that 
 which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, con- 
 fers a kind of indulgence upon the grieved party to express 
 itself, even to its heart's dearest object, in the language 
 of a temporary alienation ; but it is not alienation, it is a 
 distraction purely, and so it always makes itself to be 
 felt by that object : it is not anger, but grief assuming 
 the appearance of anger, love awkwardly counterfeiting 
 hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown : but 
 such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to 
 show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute 
 aversion, of irreconcilable alienation. It may be said 
 he puts on the madman ; but then he should only so far 
 put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction 
 will give him leave ; that is, incompletely, imperfectly ; 
 not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of 
 his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like one of 
 those harlotry players."
 
 230 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of 
 pleasure which Shakspere's plays give in the acting seems 
 to me not at all to differ from that which the audience 
 receive from those of other writers ; and, tJiey being in 
 themselves essentially so different from all others, I must 
 conclude that there is something in the nature of acting 
 which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not 
 speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as 
 fine stage performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in 
 the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S. ? Belvidera, 
 and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less 
 liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona 1 ? 
 Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same way? 
 Is not the female performer as great (as they call it) in 
 one as in the other 1 Did not G-arrick shine, and was he 
 not ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that 
 his wretched day produced, the productions of the Hills 
 and the Murphys and the Browns, and shall he have 
 that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an insepar- 
 able concomitant with Shakspere 1 A kindred mind ! 
 who can read that affecting sonnet of Shakspere which 
 alludes to his profession as a player : 
 
 Oh for my sake do yon -with Fortune chide, 
 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Than public means which public manners breeds 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand 
 
 Or that other confession ; 
 
 Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, 
 
 And made myself a motley to the view, 
 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear 
 
 Who can read these instances of jealous self- watchfulness 
 in our sweet Shakspere, and dream of any congeniality 
 between him and one that, by every tradition of him, 
 appears to have been as mere a player as ever existed ;
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 231 
 
 to have had his mind tainted with the lowest player's 
 vices, envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after 
 applause ; one who in the exercise of his profession was 
 jealous even of the women-performers that stood in his 
 way ; a manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems 
 and finesse : that any resemblance should be dreamed of 
 between him and Shakspere, Shakspere who, in the 
 plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could 
 with that noble modesty, which we can neither imitate 
 nor appreciate, express himself thus of his own sense of 
 his own defects : 
 
 Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
 Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd : 
 Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope. 
 
 I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merits 
 of being an admirer of Shakspere. A true lover of his 
 excellences he certainly was not for would any true 
 lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes 
 such ribald trash as Tate and Gibber, and the rest of 
 them, that 
 
 With their darkness durst affront his light, 
 have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspere 1 I 
 believe it impossible that he could have had a proper 
 reverence for Shakspere, and have condescended to go 
 through that interpolated scene in Richard the Third, in 
 which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling 
 her he loves another woman, and says, " if she survives 
 this she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered 
 this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as 
 any of the genuine parts : and for acting, it is as well 
 calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard 
 lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of 
 playing it, and it lets us into the secret of acting, and 
 of popular judgments of Shakspere derived from acting. 
 Not one of the spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.'s 
 exertions in that part, but has come away with a proper 
 conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills
 
 232 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 little children in their beds, with something like the 
 pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's books 
 are represented to have taken in that practice ; moreover, 
 that he is very close and shrewd, and devilish cunning, 
 for you could see that by his eye. 
 
 But is in fact this the impression we have in reading 
 the Richard of Shakspere ? Do we feel anything like 
 disgust, as we do at that butcher-like representation of 
 him that passes for him on the stage 1 A horror at his 
 crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is 
 it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect 
 which he displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant 
 spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into characters, 
 the poetry of his part not an atom of all which is made 
 perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it. Nothing but 
 his crimes, his actions, is visible ; they are prominent and 
 staring ; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty 
 genius, the man of vast capacity, the profound, the 
 witty, accomplished Richard? 
 
 The truth is, the characters of Shakspere are so much 
 the objects of meditation rather than of interest or curi- 
 osity as to their actions, that while we are reading any 
 of his great criminal characters, Macbeth, Richard, even 
 lago, we think not so much of the crimes which they 
 commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intel- 
 lectual activity which prompts them to overleap those 
 moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer ; there 
 is a certain fitness between his neck and the rope ; he is 
 the legitimate heir to the gallows ; nobody who thinks at 
 all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case 
 to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an 
 instance from the higher tragedy, what else but a mere 
 assassin is Glenalvon ! Do we think of anything but of 
 the crime which he commits, and the rack which he 
 deserves ? That is all which we really think about him. 
 Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakspere so 
 little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while 
 the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted great-
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 233 
 
 ness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the 
 crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see these 
 things represented, the acts which they do are compara- 
 tively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of 
 sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those 
 images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to 
 utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the 
 time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to 
 murder Duncan, when we no longer read it in a book, 
 when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstrac- 
 tion which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see 
 a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually pre- 
 paring to commit a murder, if the acting be true and 
 impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance 
 of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the 
 natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unper- 
 petrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give 
 a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the 
 delight which the words in the book convey, where the 
 deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense 
 of presence : it rather seems to belong to history, to 
 something past and inevitable, if it has anything to do 
 with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, 
 is that which is present to our minds in the reading. 
 
 So to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering 
 about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors 
 by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but 
 what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him 
 into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling 
 which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the 
 Lear of Shakspere cannot be acted. The contemptible 
 machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes 
 out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of 
 the real elements, than any actor can be to represent 
 Lear : they might more easily propose to personate the 
 Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's 
 terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal 
 dimension, but in intellectual : the explosions of his
 
 234 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 passion are terrible as a volcano : they are storms turning 
 up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with 
 all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. 
 This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be 
 thought on ; even as he himself neglects it. On the 
 stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weak- 
 ness, the impotence of rage ; while we read it, we see not 
 Lear, but we are Lear, we are in his mind, we are 
 sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of 
 daughters and storms ; in the aberrations of his reason, 
 we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, im- 
 methodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exert- 
 ing its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will 
 upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What 
 have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification 
 of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in 
 his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of 
 his children, he reminds them that " they themselves are 
 old 1 " What gestures shall we appropriate to this ? 
 What has the voice or the eye to do with such things 1 
 But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it 
 show : it is too hard and stony ; it must have love-scenes, 
 and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is 
 a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put 
 his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick 
 and his followers, the showmen of scene, to draw the 
 mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending ! as 
 if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, 
 the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fail- 
 dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing 
 for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could 
 sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder 
 and preparation, why torment us with all this unneces- 
 sary sympathy 1 As if the childish pleasure of getting 
 his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act 
 over again his misused station, as if at his years, and 
 with his experience, anything was left but to die. 
 
 Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a
 
 OX THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 235 
 
 stage. But how many dramatic personages are there in 
 Shakspere, which though more tractable and feasible (if 
 I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, 
 some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shown 
 to our bodily eye. Othello, for instance. Nothing can 
 be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of 
 our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of 
 highest extraction, through the force of love and from a 
 sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every 
 consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and 
 wedding with a coal-black Moor (for such he is repre- 
 sented, in the imperfect state of knowledge respecting 
 foreign countries in those days, compared with our own, 
 or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors 
 are now well enough known to be by many shades less 
 unworthy of white woman's fancy) it is the perfect 
 triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagination over 
 the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But 
 upon the stage, when the imagination is no longer the 
 ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor unassisted 
 senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played, 
 whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind 
 in his colour ; whether he did not find something ex- 
 tremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of 
 Othello and Desdemona; and whether the actual sight 
 of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful com- 
 promise which we make in reading ; and the reason it 
 should do so is obvious, because there is just so much 
 reality presented to our senses as to give a perception of 
 disagreement, with not enough of belief in the internal 
 motives, all that which is unseen, to overpower and 
 reconcile the first and obvious prejudices. 1 What we 
 
 1 The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not 
 offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing, 
 is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a 
 picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the 
 poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us, which 
 vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the 
 picture. The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the
 
 236 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 see upon a stage is body and bodily action ; what we are 
 conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, 
 and its movements : and this, I think, may sufficiently 
 account for the very different sort of delight with which 
 the same play so often affects us in the reading and the 
 seeing. 
 
 It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those 
 characters in Shakspere which are within the precincts of 
 nature, have yet something in them which appeals too 
 exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being 
 made objects to the senses without suffering a change 
 and a diminution, that still stronger the objection must 
 lie against representing another line of characters, which 
 Shakspere has introduced to give a wildness and a super- 
 natural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still 
 further from that assimilation to common life in which 
 their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When 
 we read the incantations of those terrible beings the 
 Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of 
 their hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is 
 the effect upon us other than the most serious and appal- 
 ling that can be imagined 1 Do we not feel spell- bound 
 as Macbeth was 1 Can any mirth accompany a sense of 
 their presence 1 We might as well laugh under a con- 
 sciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and 
 really present with us. But attempt to bring these 
 beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so 
 many old women, that men and children are to laugh at. 
 Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is believing," 
 the sight actually destroys the faith : and the mirth in 
 which we indulge at their expense, when we see these 
 creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemni- 
 fication which we make to ourselves for the terror which 
 
 awkward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look not 
 quite naked ; by a sort of prophetic anachronism antedating the 
 invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the play, we see with 
 Desdemona's eyes ; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 237 
 
 they put us in when reading made them an object of 
 belief, when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, 
 as children to their nurses and their elders ; and we 
 laugh at our fears, as children who thought they saw 
 something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of 
 a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this 
 exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly 
 bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. 
 It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a 
 faith in these terrors : a ghost by chandelier light, and 
 in good company, deceives no spectators, a ghost that 
 can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions 
 made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, 
 and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous 
 child against any apprehensions : as Tom Brown says of 
 the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable 
 armour over it, " Bully Dawson would have fought the 
 devil with such advantages." 
 
 Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation 
 of the vile mixture which Dryden has thrown into the 
 Tempest : doubtless without some such vicious alloy, the 
 impure ears of that age would never have sate out to 
 hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the 
 sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the 
 Tempest of Shakspere at all a subject for stage repre- 
 sentation 1 It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and 
 to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it ; but 
 to have a conjuror brought before us in his conjuring- 
 gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself 
 and some hundred of favoured spectators before the 
 curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of 
 the hateful incredible, that all our reverence for the 
 author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross 
 attempts upon the senses to be in the lughest degree 
 childish and inefficient Spirits and fairies cannot be 
 represented, they cannot even be painted, they can only 
 be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of 
 scenery, which the luxury of the age demands, in these
 
 238 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. 
 That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so 
 much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal 
 to the higher faculties, positively destroys the illusion 
 which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing- 
 room, a library opening into a garden, a garden with 
 an alcove in it, a street, or the piazza of Covent Garden 
 does well enough in a scene ; we are content to give as 
 much credit to it as it demands ; or rather, we think 
 little about it, it is little more than reading at the top 
 of a page, "Scene, a Garden;" we do not imagine our- 
 selves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar 
 objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and 
 caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our 
 minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell ; l 
 or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an 
 interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear 
 those supernatural noises of which the isle was full : 
 the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well 
 hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of 
 sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we 
 do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out that chime, 
 which if it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks, 
 
 Time would run back and fetcli the age of gold, 
 
 And speckled vanity 
 
 Would sicken soon and die, 
 
 And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould ; 
 
 Yea Hell itself would pass away, 
 
 And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day. 
 
 The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not 
 more impossible to be shown on a stage, than the En- 
 chanted Isle, with its no less interesting and innocent first 
 settlers. 
 
 The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that 
 
 1 It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures 
 and scenes are very different things. Painting is a word of itself, 
 but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive ; and there 
 is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes 
 and real people.
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 239 
 
 of the Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our 
 stage. I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, 
 the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which 
 he varied, the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish 
 priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and 
 the importunity of the public eye, require this. The 
 coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was fairly a 
 counterpart to that which our King wears when he goes 
 to the Parliament-house, just so full and cumbersome, 
 and set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must 
 be represented, I see not what to find fault with in this. 
 But in reading, what robe are we conscious of ? Some 
 dim images of royalty a crown and sceptre, may float 
 before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it 1 
 Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other 
 robe-maker could pattern 1 This is the inevitable conse- 
 quence of imitating everything, to make all things 
 natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine 
 abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of 
 external appearances as to make us feel that we are 
 among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and 
 better part of our imagination is employed upon the 
 thoughts and internal machinery of the character. But 
 in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, 
 call upon us to judge of their naturalness. 
 
 Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the 
 pleasure which we take in seeing one of these fine plays 
 acted, compared with that quiet delight which we find in 
 the reading of it, to the different feelings, with which a 
 reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine 
 poem. The accursed critical habit, the being called 
 upon to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a dif- 
 ferent thing to the former. In seeing these plays acted, 
 we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet compares 
 the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, 
 who wants to see the pictures 1 But in the acting, a 
 miniature must be lugged out ; which we know not to be 
 the picture, but only to show how finely a miniature may
 
 240 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 be represented. This shewing of everything, levels all 
 things : it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys, of import- 
 ance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than 
 by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the 
 banquet-scene in Macbeth : it is as much remembered as 
 any of her thrilling tones or impressive looks. But does 
 such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the 
 reader of that wild and wonderful scene 1 Does not the 
 mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can ? Does it 
 care about the gracefulness of the doing it 1 But by 
 acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are 
 raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest 
 of the play. 
 
 I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of 
 Shakspere. It would be no very difficult task to extend 
 the inquiry to his comedies ; and to show why Falstaff, 
 Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest are equally in- 
 compatible with stage representation. The length to 
 which this Essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, 
 sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, 
 without going any deeper into the subject at present.
 
 CHAEACTEES OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEEE. 
 
 WHEN I selected for publication, in 1808, Specimens of 
 English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of 
 Shakspere, the kind of extracts which I was anxious to 
 give were, not so much passages of wit and humour, 
 though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion, 
 sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations, 
 serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to 
 poetry than to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic 
 poetry. The plays which I made choice of were, with 
 few exceptions, such as treat of human life and manners, 
 rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their 
 train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate 
 mortals Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amar- 
 illis. My leading design was, to illustrate what may be 
 called the moral sense of our ancestors. To shew in what 
 manner they felt, when they placed themselves by the 
 power of imagination in trying circumstances, in the con- 
 flicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending 
 duties ; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were ; how 
 their griefs were tempered, and their full-swolu joys 
 abated : how much of Shakspere shines in the great 
 men his contemporaries, and how far in Ids divine mind 
 and manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was 
 also desirous to bring together some of the most admired 
 scenes of Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the 
 world the only dramatic poets of that age entitled to be
 
 242 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 considered after Shakspere, and, by exhibiting them in 
 the same volume with the more impressive scenes of old 
 Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others, 
 to shew what we had slighted, while beyond all propor- 
 tion we had been crying up one or two favourite names. 
 From the desultory criticisms which accompanied that 
 publication I have selected a few which I thought would 
 best stand by themselves, as requiring least immediate 
 reference to the play or passage by which they were 
 suggested. 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 
 
 Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen. This 
 tragedy is in King Cambyses' vein ; rape, and murder, 
 and superlatives ; " huffing braggart puft lines," such as 
 the play-writers anterior to Shakspere are full of, and 
 Pistol but coldly imitates. 
 
 Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd. 
 The lunes of Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer mad- 
 ness. Nebuchadnezzar's are mere modest pretensions 
 compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian 
 Shepherd. He comes in, drawn by conquered kings, and 
 reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that they can 
 draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage 
 with my own eyes, I never believed that it was any thing 
 more than a pleasant burlesque of mine ancient's. But 
 I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a 
 play, which their ancestors took to be serious. 
 
 JZdward the Second. In a very different style from 
 mighty Tamburlaine, is the tragedy of Edward the 
 Second. The reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in 
 Edward furnished hints which Shakspere scarcely im- 
 proved in his Richard the Second ; and the death-scene 
 of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene 
 ancient or modern with which I am acquainted. 
 
 The Rich Jew of Malta. Marlowe's Jew does not 
 approach so near to Shakspere's as his Edward the 
 Second does to Kichard the Second. Barabas is a mere
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 243 
 
 monster brought in with a large painted nose to please 
 the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, 
 invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition 
 as a century or two earlier might have been played before 
 the Londoners " by the royal command," when a general 
 pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously 
 resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to see a super- 
 stition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious 
 ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing 
 in it now revolting. We have tamed the claws of the 
 beast, and pared its nails, and now we take it to our 
 arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it ; it is visited by 
 princes, affects a taste, patronises the arts, and is the 
 only liberal and gentlemanlike thing in Christendom. 
 
 Doctor Faustus. The growing horrors of Faustus' 
 last scene are awfully marked by the hours and half-hours 
 as they expire, and bring him nearer and nearer to the 
 exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony 
 and a fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have been 
 tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and 
 the Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus 
 must have been delectable food : to wander in fields where 
 curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf 
 near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which 
 are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell 
 from the tree of knowledge. 1 Barabas the Jew, and 
 Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at 
 least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They 
 both talk a language which a believer would have been 
 tender of putting into the mouth of a character though 
 but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes 
 not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the 
 person of another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking 
 her own dialect ; and, themselves being armed with an 
 unction of self-confident impunity, have not scrupled to 
 
 1 Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor Adam- 
 ites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself, and 
 from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple. HowdVs Letters.
 
 244 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 handle and touch that familiarly which would be death 
 to others. Milton in the person of Satan has started 
 speculations hardier than any which the feeble armoury 
 of the atheist ever furnished ; and the precise, strait-laced 
 Richardson has strengthened Vice, from the mouth of 
 Lovelace, with entangling sophistries and abstruse pleas 
 against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and 
 Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to have 
 invented. 
 
 THOMAS DECKER. 
 
 Old Fortunatus. The humour of a frantic lover, in 
 the scene where Orleans to his friend Galloway defends 
 the passion with Avhich himself, being a prisoner in the 
 English king's court, is enamoured to frenzy of the king's 
 daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as 
 passionate an inamorata as any which Shakspere ever 
 drew. He is just such another adept in Love's reasons. 
 The sober people of the world are Avith him 
 
 A swarm of fools 
 Crowding together to be counted wise. 
 
 He talks "pure Biron and Romeo," he is almost -as poeti- 
 cal as they, quite as philosophical, only a little madder. 
 After all, Love's sectaries are a reason unto themselves. 
 We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the 
 days when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed 
 health and disease ; the kindliest symptom, yet the most 
 alarming crisis in the ticklish state of youth ; the 
 nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits ; the mother 
 of twin births, wisdom and folly, valour and weakness ; 
 the servitude above freedom ; the gentle mind's religion ; 
 the liberal superstition. 
 
 The Honest Whore. There is in the second part of 
 this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts 
 some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of 
 honour and shame, contrasted without violence, and ex- 
 pressed without immodesty, which is worth all the strong
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 245 
 
 lines against the harlot's profession with which both 
 parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is 
 always to be suspected who, to make vice odious, dwells 
 upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort 
 of relish and retrospective fondness. But so near are the 
 boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out 
 sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer 
 against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which 
 in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his 
 appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve 
 him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those 
 appetites in other men. When Cervantes with such pro- 
 ficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who 
 sees not that he has been a great reader of books of 
 knight-errantry perhaps was at some time of his life in 
 danger of falling into those very extravagances which he 
 ridiculed so happily in his hero 1 
 
 JOHN MARSTOX. 
 
 Antonio and Mdlida. The situation of Andrugio and 
 Lucio, in the first part of this tragedy, where Andrugio 
 Duke of Genoa banished his country, with the loss of a 
 son supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of his 
 mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants 
 but Lucio an old nobleman, and a page resembles 
 that of Lear and Kent in that king's distresses. An- 
 drugio, like Lear, manifests a kinglike impatience, a 
 turbulent greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies 
 which he enters lists to combat, " Despair and mighty 
 Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he 
 brings to vanquish them, "cornets of horse," etc., are in 
 the boldest style of allegory. They arc such a " race of 
 mourners " as the " infection of sorrows loud " in the in- 
 tellect might beget on some " pregnant cloud " in the 
 imagination. The prologue to the second part, for its 
 passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of prepara- 
 tion which it sounds, might have preceded one of those
 
 246 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 old tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so 
 highly commended, as free from the common error of the 
 poets in his day, of " intermixing comic stuff' with tragic 
 sadness and gravity, brought in without discretion cor- 
 ruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a prepara- 
 tive as the "warning voice which he who saw the 
 Apocalypse heard cry." 
 
 What you Will. I shall ne'er forget how he went 
 cloath'd. Act I. Scene 1. To judge of the liberality of 
 these notions of dress, we must advert to the days of 
 Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon 
 habited like the merchant here described would have 
 excited among the flat round caps and cloth stockings 
 upon 'Change, when those " original arguments or tokens 
 of a citizen's vocation were in fashion, not more for thrift 
 and usefulness than for distinction and grace." The 
 blank uniformity to which all professional distinctions in 
 apparel have been long hastening, is one instance of the 
 decay of symbols among us, which, whether it has con- 
 tributed or not to make us a more intellectual, has cer- 
 tainly made us a less imaginative people. Shakspere 
 knew the force of signs : a " malignant and a turban'd 
 Turk." This " meal-cap miller," says the author of God's 
 Revenge against Murder, to express his indignation at an 
 atrocious outrage committed by the- miller Pierot upon 
 the person of the fair Marieta. 
 
 AUTHOR UNKNOWN. 
 
 The Merry Devil of Edmonton. The scene in this 
 delightful comedy, in which Jerningham, " with the true 
 feeling of a zealous friend," touches the griefs of Moun- 
 chensey, seems written to make the reader happy. Few 
 of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to 
 this. They torture and wound us abundantly. They 
 are economists only in delight. Nothing can be finer, 
 more gentlemanlike, and nobler, than the conversation 
 and compliments of these young men. How delicious is
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE, 247 
 
 Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that Jer- 
 ningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his 
 friend reminds him ! I wish it could be ascertained, which 
 there is some grounds for believing, that Michael Drayton 
 was the author of this piece. It would add a worthy ap- 
 pendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my native 
 Earth ; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, 
 with the fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son ; 
 who has not left a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stept 
 over, without honourable mention ; and has animated hills 
 and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams of 
 old mythology. 
 
 THOMAS HEYWOOD. 
 
 A Woman Killed ivith Kindness. Heywood is a sort 
 of prose Shakspere. His scenes are to the full as 
 natural and affecting. But we miss the poet, that which 
 in Shakspere always appears out and above the surface 
 of the nature. Heywood's characters in this play, for 
 instance, his country gentlemen, etc., are exactly what 
 we see, but of the best kind of what AVC see, in life. 
 Shakspere makes us believe, while we are among his 
 lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are 
 familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old ; but we 
 awake, and sigh for the difference. 
 
 The English Traveller. Heywood's preface to this 
 play is interesting, as it shews the heroic indifference 
 about the opinion of posterity, which some of these great 
 writers seem to have felt. There is a magnanimity in 
 authorship as in everything else. His ambition seems 
 to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the 
 players speak his lines while he lived. It does not ap- 
 pear that he ever contemplated the possibility of being 
 read by after ages. What a slender pittance of fame 
 was motive sufficient to the production of such plays as 
 the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and the 
 Woman Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take 
 care that a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.
 
 248 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM KOWLEY. 
 
 A Fair Quarrel. The insipid levelling morality to 
 which the modern stage is tied down, would not admit 
 of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. 
 A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile 
 goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous 
 passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which 
 the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal 
 casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the 
 animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, 
 no less than in the everlastingly inculcated duties of for- 
 giveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical 
 meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never 
 so absurd, never fails of applause. Our audiences come 
 to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. 
 They compare notes with the amiable characters in the 
 play, and find a wonderful sympathy of disposition between 
 them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality, 
 out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble 
 of copying it from originals within his own breast. To 
 know the boundaries of honour, to be judiciously valiant, 
 to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in 
 the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life as nothing 
 when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, 
 yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when 
 that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and 
 tottering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunt- 
 ing that sword which the imaginary strokes of a sup- 
 posed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon 
 but lately : to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned 
 story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a 
 greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and 
 wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed 
 sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to the 
 laws of the land, or a commonplace against duelling. 
 Yet such things would stand a writer nowadays in far
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 249 
 
 better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious 
 honour ; and he would be considered as a far better teacher 
 of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were 
 living. 
 
 WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 A New Wonder ; a Woman Never Vext. The old 
 play-writers are distinguished by an honest boldness of 
 exhibition, they shew everything without being ashamed. 
 If a reverse in fortune is to be exhibited, they fairly bring 
 us to the prison-grate and the alms-basket. A poor man 
 on our stage is always a gentleman, he may be known by 
 a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by wearing black. 
 Our delicacy in fact forbids the dramatising of distress at 
 all. It is never shewn in its essential properties it 
 appears but as the adjunct of some virtue, as something 
 which is to be relieved, from the approbation of which 
 relief the spectators are to derive a certain soothing of 
 self-referred satisfaction. We turn away from the real 
 essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, 
 moral duties ; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly 
 represented, the relative duties might be safely trusted 
 to themselves, and moral philosophy lose the name of a 
 science. 
 
 THOMAS MIDDLETOX. 
 
 The Witch. Though some resemblance maybe traced 
 between the charms in Macbeth, and the incantations in 
 this play, which is supposed to have preceded it, this 
 coincidence will not detract much from the originality of 
 Shakspere. His Avitches are distinguished from the 
 witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are 
 creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire 
 mischief, might resort for occasional consultation. Those 
 originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. 
 From the moment that their eyes first meet with Mac- 
 beth',?, he is spell -bound. That meeting sways his 
 destiny. He can never break the fascination. These
 
 250 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 witches can hurt the body, those have power over the 
 soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon : 
 the hags of Shakspere have neither child of their own, 
 nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are 
 foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are 
 sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As 
 they are without human passions, so they seem to be 
 without human relations. They come with thunder and 
 lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know 
 of them. Except Hecate, they have no names; which 
 heightens their mysteriousness. The names, and some of 
 the properties, which the other author has given to his 
 hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious 
 things. Their presence cannot co-exist with mirth. But, 
 in a lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine 
 creations. Their power, too, is, in some measure, over the 
 mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, " like a thick 
 scurf" over life. 
 
 WILLIAM ROWLEY, THOMAS DECKEE, 
 JOHN FOED, etc. 
 
 The Witch of Edmonton. Mother Sawyer, in this 
 wild play, differs from the hags of both Middleton and 
 Shakspere. She is the plain traditional old woman 
 witch of our ancestors ; poor, deformed, and ignorant ; 
 the terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice. That 
 should be a hardy sheriff, with the power of the county 
 at his heels, that would lay hands upon the Weird 
 Sisters. They are of another jurisdiction. But upon the 
 common and received opinion, the author (or authors) 
 have engrafted strong fancy. There is something fright- 
 fully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar. 
 
 CYRIL TOUENEUE. 
 
 The Revengers' Tragedy. The reality and life of the 
 dialogue, in which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their
 
 CONTEMPORAEY WITH SHAKSPERE. 251 
 
 mother, and then threaten her with death for consenting 
 to the dishonour of their sister, passes any scenical 
 illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, 
 and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I were 
 presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself 
 as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in 
 words more keen and dagger-like than those which Hamlet 
 speaks to his mother. Such power has the passion of 
 shame truly personated, not only to strike guilty creatures 
 unto the soul, but to " appal " even those that are " free." 
 
 JOHN WEBSTER. 
 
 The Duchess of Malfy. All the several parts of the 
 dreadful apparatus -with which the death of the Duchess 
 is ushered in, the waxen images which counterfeit death, 
 the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bell- 
 man, the living person's dirge, the mortification by 
 degrees, are not more remote from the conceptions of 
 ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffer- 
 ing which they seem to bring upon their victim is out of 
 the imagination of ordinary poets. As they are not like 
 inflictions of this life, so her language seems not of this 
 world. She has lived among horrors till she is become 
 "native and endowed unto that element." She speaks 
 the dialect of despair ; her tongue has a smatch of 
 Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skil- 
 fully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as 
 much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is 
 ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to 
 take its last forfeit : this only a Webster can do. Inferior 
 geniuses may " upon horror's head horrors accumulate," 
 but they cannot do this. They mistake quantity for 
 quality; they " terrify babes with painted devils;" but 
 they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors 
 want dignity, their affrightmcnts are without decorum. 
 
 The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona. This White 
 Devil of Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and
 
 252 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 pleads with such an innocence-resembling boldness, that 
 we seem to see that matchless beauty of her face which 
 inspires such gay confidence into her, and are ready to 
 expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very 
 judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as 
 spectators, and all the court, will rise and make proffer 
 to defend her in spite of the utmost conviction of her 
 guilt ; as the Shepherds in Don Quixote make proffer to 
 follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela, "without 
 making any profit of her manifest resolution made there 
 in their hearing." 
 
 So sweet and lovely does she make the shame, 
 Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, 
 Does spot the beauty of her budding name ! 
 
 I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this 
 play, for the death of Marcello, except the ditty which 
 reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. 
 As that is of the water, watery ; so this is of the earth, 
 earthy Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems 
 to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates. 
 
 In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, 
 I have said that there is nothing in the undoubted plays 
 of Jonson which would authorise us to suppose that he 
 could have supplied the additions to Hieronymo. I sus- 
 pected the agency of some more potent spirit. I thought 
 that Webster might have furnished them. They seemed 
 full of that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which 
 bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy. On second con- 
 sideration, I think this a hasty criticism. They are more 
 like the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus 
 Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set inward ; 
 if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating con- 
 versation in a kind of bravery. 
 
 JOHN FORD. 
 
 The Broken Heart. I do not know where to find, in 
 any play, a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so sur-
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 253 
 
 prising as in this. This is indeed, according to Milton, 
 to describe high passions and high actions. The fortitude 
 of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out his bowels 
 till he died without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily 
 image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration 
 of the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence 
 against her nature, keeps closely covered, till the last 
 duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. Stories of 
 martyrdom are but of chains and the stake ; a little 
 bodily suffering. These torments 
 
 On the purest spirits prey, 
 
 As on entrails, joints, and limbs, 
 
 With answerable pains, but more intense. 
 
 What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its 
 weaknesses ! Who would be less weak than Calantha 1 
 Who can be so strong ? The expression of this trans- 
 cendent scene almost bears us in imagination to Calvary 
 and the Cross ; and we seem to perceive some analogy 
 between the scenical sufferings which we are here con- 
 templating, and the real agonies of that final completion 
 to which we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford 
 was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, 
 not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly 
 where she has her full residence in the heart of man ; in 
 the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. There 
 is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and 
 the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of 
 Giovanni and Annabella, in the play 1 which stands at 
 the head of the modern collection of the works of this 
 author, we discern traces of that fiery particle, which, in 
 the rrregular starting from out the road of beaten action, 
 discovers something of a right line even in obliquity, and 
 shews hints of an improveable greatness in the lowest 
 descents and degradations of our nature. 
 
 1 T/s Pity she is a Whore.
 
 254 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE. 
 
 Alaham, Mustapha. The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, 
 printed among his poems, might with more propriety 
 have been termed political treatises than plays. Their 
 author has strangely contrived to make passion, character, 
 and interest, of the highest order, subservient to the ex- 
 pression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is nine parts 
 Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. 
 In this writer's estimate of the powers of the mind, the 
 understanding must have held a most tyrannical pre- 
 eminence. Whether we look into his plays, or his most 
 passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made 
 rigid with intellect. The finest movements of the human 
 heart, the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable, 
 are essentially comprised in the actions and speeches of 
 Cselica and Camena. Shakspere, who seems to have 
 had a peculiar delight in contemplating womanly perfec- 
 tion, whom for his many sweet images of female excel- 
 lence all women are in an especial manner bound to love, 
 has not raised the ideal of the female character higher 
 than Lord Brooke, in these two women, has done. But 
 it requires a study equivalent to the learning of a new 
 language to understand their meaning when they speak. 
 It is indeed hard to hit : 
 
 Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day 
 Or seven though one should musing sit. 
 
 It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him 
 to express the emotions of our sensitive natures. There 
 would be all knowledge, but sympathetic expressions 
 would be wanting. 
 
 BEN JONSON. 
 
 The Case is Altered. The passion for wealth has worn 
 out much of its grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors 
 certainly conceived of money as able to confer a distinct
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 255 
 
 gratification in itself, not considered simply as a symbol 
 of wealth. The old poets, when they introduce a miser, 
 make him address his gold as his mistress ; as something 
 to be seen, felt, and hugged ; as capable of satisfying two 
 of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, un- 
 satisfying medium in the place of the good old tangible 
 metal, has made avarice quite a Platonic affection in 
 comparison with the seeing, touching, and handling 
 pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank note can 
 no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this 
 passion, than Creusa could return her husband's embrace 
 in the shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spenser ; 
 Barabas' contemplation of his wealth in the Rich Jew of 
 Malta; Luke's raptures in the City Madam; the idolatry 
 and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this 
 early comic production of Ben Jonson's. Above all hear 
 Guzman, in that excellent old translation of the Spanish 
 Rogue, expatiate on the " ruddy cheeks of your golden 
 ruddocks, your Spanish pistolets, your plump and full- 
 faced Portuguese, and your clear-skinned pieces of eight 
 of Castile," which he and his fellows the beggars kept 
 secret to themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plenti- 
 ful manner. "For to have them, to pay them away, is 
 not to enjoy them ; to enjoy them, is to have them lying 
 by us ; having no other need of them than to use them 
 for the clearing of the eye-sight, and the comforting of 
 our senses. These we did carry about with us, sewing 
 them in some patches of our doublets near unto the heart, 
 and as close to the skin as we could handsomely quilt 
 them in, holding them to be restorative." 
 
 Poetaster. This Roman play seems written to con- 
 fute those enemies of Ben in his own days and ours, who 
 have said that he made a pedantical use of his learning. 
 He has here revived the whole Court of Augustus, by a 
 learned spell. We are admitted to the society of the 
 illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse 
 in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they 
 were used to express themselves in their native Latin.
 
 256 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS. 
 
 Nothing can be imagined more elegant, refined, and court- 
 like, than the scenes between this Louis the Fourteenth of 
 antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and secret 
 of that kind of intercourse is contained therein. The 
 economical liberality by which greatness, seeming to waive 
 some part of its prerogative, takes care to lose none of 
 the essentials ; the prudential liberties of an inferior, 
 which flatter by commanded boldness and soothe with 
 complimentary sincerity. These, and a thousand beauti- 
 ful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels, 
 and from those numerous court-masques and entertain- 
 ments which he was in the daily habit of furnishing, 
 might be adduced to shew the poetical fancy and elegance 
 of mind of the supposed rugged old bard. 
 
 Alchemist. The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed 
 by the torrent of images, words, and book-knowledge, 
 with which Epicure Mammon (Act II. Scene 2) confounds 
 and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come pouring 
 out like the successive falls of Nilus. They " doubly re- 
 double strokes upon the foe." Description outstrides 
 proof. We are made to believe effects before we have 
 testimony for their causes. If there is no one image 
 which attains the height of the sublime, yet the conflu- 
 ence and assemblage of them all produces a result equal 
 to the grandest poetry. The huge Xerxean army counter- 
 vails against single Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the 
 most determined offspring of its author. It has the whole 
 " matter and copy of the father eye, nose, lip, the trick 
 of his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as contem- 
 poraries have described old Ben to be. Meercraft, Boba- 
 dil, the Host of the New Inn, have all his image and 
 superscription. But Mammon is arrogant pretension 
 personified. Sir Samson Legend, in Love for Love, is 
 such another lying, overbearing character, but he does 
 not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a " towering 
 bravery " there is in his sensuality ! he affects no plea- 
 sure under a Sultan. It is as if " Egypt with Assyria 
 strove in luxury."
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 257 
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Bussy D' Ambois, Byron's Conspiracy, Byron's Tragedy, 
 etc. etc. Webster has happily characterised the "full 
 and heightened style " of Chapman, who, of all the English 
 play-writers, perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspere in 
 the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less 
 purely dramatic. He could not go out of himself, as 
 Shakspere could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate 
 other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive 
 and a soul to embrace all forms and modes of being. He 
 would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not 
 abundantly shewn himself to be one ; for his Homer is 
 not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles 
 and Ulysses re-written. The earnestness and passion 
 which he has put into every part of these poems, would 
 be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. 
 His almost Greek zeal for the glory of his heroes can only 
 be paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry, with 
 which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the 
 old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the 
 acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great 
 obstacle to Chapman's translations being read, is their 
 unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same 
 breath the most just and natural, and the most violent 
 and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever 
 words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, 
 as if all other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. 
 But passion (the all in all in poetry) is everywhere present, 
 raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into 
 the absurd. He makes his readers glow, weep, tremble, 
 take any affection which he pleases, be moved by words, or 
 in spite of them, be disgusted and overcome their disgust. 
 
 FRANCIS BEAUMONT. JOHN FLETCHER. 
 
 Maid's Tragedy. One characteristic of the excellent 
 old poets is, their being able to bestow grace upon sub- 
 
 s
 
 258 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 jects which naturally do not seem susceptible of any. I 
 will mention two instances. Zelrnane in the Arcadia of 
 Sidney, and Helena in the All's Well that Ends Well of 
 Shakspere. What can be more unpromising at first 
 sight, than the idea of a young man disguising himself 
 in woman's attire, and passing himself off for a woman 
 among women ; and that for a long space of time ? Yet 
 Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that 
 neither does Pyrocles' manhood suffer any stain for the 
 effeminacy of Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the 
 princesses at all diminished when the deception comes to 
 be known. In the sweetly constituted mind of Sir 
 Philip Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhand- 
 some meditation could find a harbour. He turned all 
 that he touched into images of honour and virtue. Helena 
 in Shakspere is a young woman seeking a man in mar- 
 riage. The ordinary rules of courtship are reversed, the 
 habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with such exquisite 
 address this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena's 
 forwardness loses her no honour ; delicacy dispenses with 
 its laws in her favour, and nature, in her single case, 
 seems content to suffer a sweet violation. Aspatia, in 
 the Maid's Tragedy, is a character equally difficult, with 
 Helena, of being managed with grace. She too is a 
 slighted woman, refused by the man who had once en- 
 gaged to marry her. Yet it is artfully contrived, that 
 while we pity we respect her, and she descends without 
 degradation. Such wonders true poetry and passion can 
 do, to confer dignity upon subjects which do not seem 
 capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all 
 points with Helena ; she does not so absolutely predomin- 
 ate over her situation but she suffers some diminution, 
 some abatement of the full lustre of the female character, 
 which Helena never does. Her character has many 
 degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy ; but it has weak- 
 ness, which, if we do not despise, we are sorry for. After 
 all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of 
 Shaksperes and Sidneys.
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 259 
 
 Philaster. The character of Bellario must have been 
 extremely popular in its clay. For many years after the 
 date of Philaster's first exhibition on the stage, scarce a 
 play can be found without one of these women pages in 
 it, following in the train of some pre-engaged lover, call- 
 ing on the gods to bless her happy rival (his mistress), 
 whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving 
 rise to many pretty equivoques by the way on the con- 
 fusion of sex, and either made happy at last by some 
 surprising turn of fate, or dismissed with the joint pity 
 of the lovers and the audience. Donne has a copy of 
 verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a resolution 
 which she seems to have taken up from some of these 
 scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page. 
 It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, 
 in wit, and pathos, that it deserves to be read as a 
 solemn close in future to all such sickly fancies as he 
 there deprecates. 
 
 JOHN FLETCHER. 
 
 Thierry ana Theodoret. The scene where Ordella 
 offers her life a sacrifice, that the king of France may not 
 be childless, I have always considered as the finest in all 
 Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the 
 female heroic character, next to Calantha in the Broken 
 Heart. She is a piece of sainted nature. Yet noble as 
 the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the 
 manner of it, compared with Shakspere's finest scenes, 
 is faint and languid. Its motion is circular, not pro- 
 gressive. Each line revolves on itself in a sort of separate 
 orbit. They do not join into one another like a running- 
 hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow ; his versification, 
 though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn ; he lays 
 line upon line, making up one after the other, adding 
 image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. 
 Shakspere mingles everything, runs line into line, em- 
 barrasses sentences and metaphors ; before one idea has
 
 260 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, 
 
 burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for dis- 
 closure. Another striking difference between Fletcher 
 and Shakspere, is the fondness of the former for un- 
 natural and violent situations. He seems to have thought 
 that nothing great could be produced in an ordinary way. 
 The chief incidents in some of his most admired tragedies 
 shew this. 1 Shakspere had nothing of this contortion 
 in his mind, none of that craving after violent situations, 
 and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I 
 think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The 
 wit of Fletcher is excellent, 2 like his serious scenes, but 
 there is something strained and far-fetched in both. He 
 is too mistrustful of Nature, he always goes a little on 
 one side of her. Shakspere chose her without a reserve : 
 and had riches, power, understanding, and length of days, 
 with her, for a dowry. 
 
 Faithful Shepherdess. If all the parts of this delight- 
 ful pastoral had been in unison with its many innocent 
 scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem 
 fit to vie with Comus or the Arcadia, to have been put 
 into the hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter 
 for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander. 
 But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short 
 of infatuation could have driven Fletcher upon mixing 
 with this " blessedness " such an ugly deformity as Cloe, 
 the wanton shepherdess ! If Cloe was meant to set off 
 Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that such 
 weeds by juxtaposition do not set off, but kill sweet 
 flowers. 
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER. THOMAS DECKER. 
 
 The Virgin Martyr. This play has some beauties of 
 so very high an order, that with all my respect for Mas- 
 singer, I do not think he had poetical enthusiasm capable 
 of rising up to them. His associate Decker, who wrote 
 
 1 Wife for a Month, Cupid's Eevengc, Double Marriage, etc. 
 
 2 Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.
 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPERE. 261 
 
 Old Fortunatus, had poetry enough for anything. The 
 very impurities which obtrude themselves among the 
 sweet pieties of this play, like Satan among the Sons of 
 Heaven, have a strength of contrast, a raciness, and a 
 glow, in them, which are beyond Massinger. They are 
 to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to Miranda. 
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER. THOMAS MIDDLETON. 
 WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 Old Law. There is an exquisiteness of moral sensi- 
 bility, making one's eyes to gush out tears of delight, and 
 a poetical strangeness in the circumstances of this sweet 
 tragi-comedy, which are unlike anything in the dramas 
 which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of a subtler 
 edge. Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in it, had 
 both of them finer geniuses than their associate. 
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY 
 
 Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, 
 not so much for any transcendent talent in himself, as 
 that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke 
 nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings 
 and notions in common. A new language, and quite a 
 new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with the 
 Restoration.
 
 SPECIMENS 
 FEOM THE WEITINGS OF FULLER, 
 
 THE CHUKCH HISTORIAN. 
 
 THE writings of Fuller are usually designated by the 
 title of quaint, and with sufficient reason ; for such was 
 his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not upon most 
 occasions it would have been going out of his way to 
 have expressed himself out of them. But his wit is not 
 always a lumen siccum, a dry faculty of surprising; on 
 the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped 
 in human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of 
 telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the perpetual 
 running commentary of the narrator happily blended with 
 the narration, is perhaps unequalled. 
 
 As his works are now scarcely penised but by anti- 
 quaries, I thought it might not be unacceptable to my 
 readers to present them with some specimens of his 
 manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some 
 few passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative 
 description. I shall arrange them as I casually find 
 them in my book of extracts, without being solicitous to 
 specify the particular work from which they are taken. 
 
 Pyramids. " The Pyramids themselves, doting with 
 age, have forgotten the names of their founders." 
 
 Virtue in a short person. " His soul had but a short 
 diocese to visit, and therefore might the better attend the 
 effectual informing thereof."
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 263 
 
 Intellect in a very tall one. " Oft times such who arc 
 built four stories high, are observed to have little in their 
 cock-loft." 
 
 Naturals. " Their heads sometimes so little, that there 
 is no room for wit ; sometimes so long, that there is no 
 Avit for so much room." 
 
 Negroes. " The image of God cut in ebony." 
 
 School-divinity. " At the first it will be as welcome 
 to thee as a prison, and their very solutions will seem 
 knots unto thee." 
 
 Mr. Perkins, the Divine. " He had a capacious head, 
 with angles winding and roomy enough to lodge all 
 controversial intricacies." 
 
 The same. " He would pronounce the word Damn 
 with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his 
 auditors' ears a good while after." 
 
 Judges in capital cases.- "Olet him take heed how 
 he strikes, that hath a dead hand." 
 
 Memory. " Philosophers place it in the rear of the 
 head, and it seems the mine of memory lies there, because 
 there men naturally dig for it, scratching it when they 
 are at a loss." 
 
 Fancy. " It is the most boundless and restless faculty 
 of the soul ; for while the Understanding and the Will 
 are kept, as it were, in libera custodia to their objects of 
 verum et bonum, the Fancy is free from all engagements : 
 it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without 
 wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed ; 
 in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference 
 of the world ; by a kind of omnipotency creating and 
 annihilating things in an instant ; and things divorced in 
 Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place." 
 
 Infants. " Some, admiring what motives to mirth 
 infants meet with in their silent and solitary smiles, have 
 resolved, how truly I know not, that then they converse 
 with angels ; as indeed such cannot among mortals find 
 any fitter companions." 
 
 Music. " Such is the sociableness of music, it con-
 
 264 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 
 
 forms itself to all companies both in mirth and mourn- 
 ing ; complying to improve that passion with which it 
 finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it is an 
 invention which might have beseemed a son of Seth to 
 have been the father thereof: though better it was that 
 Cain's great grandchild should have the credit first to 
 find it, than the world the unhappiness longer to have 
 wanted it." 
 
 St. Monica. " Drawing near her death, she sent most 
 pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw 
 a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness- 
 broken body." l 
 
 Mortality. "To smell to a turf of fresh earth is 
 wholesome for the body, no less are thoughts of mortality 
 cordial to the soul." 
 
 Virgin. " No lording husband shall at the same time 
 command her presence and distance ; to be always near 
 in constant attendance, and always to stand aloof in awful 
 observance." 
 
 Elder Brother. "Is one who made haste to come 
 into the world to bring his parents the first news of male 
 posterity, and is well rewarded for his tidings." 
 
 Bishop Fletcher. " His pride was rather on him than 
 in him, as only gait and gesture deep, not sinking to his 
 heart, though causelessly condemned for a proud man, as 
 who was a good hypocrite, and far more humble than he 
 appeared." 
 
 Masters of Colleges. " A little allay of dulness in a 
 Master of a College makes him fitter to manage secular 
 affairs." 
 
 The Good Yeoman. " Is a gentleman in ore, whom 
 the next age may see refined." 
 
 Good Parent. " For his love, therein, like a well- 
 drawn picture, he eyes all his children alike." 
 
 Deformity in Children. " This partiality is tyranny, 
 
 1 The soul's dark cottage, batter' d and decay'd, 
 Lets in new lights through chinks which time has made. 
 
 WALLER.
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 265 
 
 when parents despise those that are deformed ; enough to 
 break those ivhom God had boived before." 
 
 Good Master. " In correcting his servant he becomes 
 not a slave to his own passion. Not cruelly making new 
 indentures of the flesh of his apprentice. He is tender 
 of his servant in sickness and age. If crippled in his 
 service, his house is his hospital. Yet how many throw 
 away those dry bones, out of the which themselves have 
 sucked the marrow !" 
 
 Good Widoiv. " If she can speak but little good of 
 him [her dead husband] she speaks but little of him. So 
 handsomely folding up her discourse, that his virtues are 
 shewn outwards, and his vices wrapped up in silence ; as 
 counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory who 
 hath moulds cast on his body." 
 
 Horses. " These are men's wings, wherewith they 
 make such speed. A generous creature a horse is, sensible 
 in some sort of honour ; and made most handsome by that 
 which deforms men most pride." 
 
 Martyrdom. " Heart of oak hath sometimes warped 
 a little in the scorching heat of persecution. Their want 
 of true courage herein cannot be excused. Yet many 
 censure them for surrendering up their forts after a long 
 siege, who would have yielded up their own at the first 
 summons. Oh ! there is more required to make one 
 valiant, than to call Cranmer or Jewel coward ; as if the 
 fire in Smithfield had been no hotter than what is painted 
 in the Book of Martyrs." 
 
 Text of St. Paul." St. Paul saith, let not the sun 
 go down on your wrath, to carry news to the antipodes 
 in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us 
 take the Apostle's meaning rather than his words, with 
 all possible speed to depose our passion ; not understand- 
 ing him so literally, that we may take leave to be angry 
 till sunset : then might our wrath lengthen with the 
 days ; and men in Greenland, where the day lasts above 
 a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for revenge." 1 
 
 1 This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one
 
 266 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 
 
 Bishop Brownrig. " He carried learning enough in 
 numerate about him in his pockets for any discourse, and 
 had much more at home in his chests for any serious 
 dispute." 
 
 Modest Want. "Those that with diligence fight against 
 poverty, though neither conquer till death makes it a 
 drawn battle ; expect not but prevent their craving of 
 thee : for God forbid the heavens should never rain, till 
 the earth first opens her mouth ; seeing some grounds ivill 
 sooner burn than chap." 
 
 Death-bed Temptations. "The devil is most busy on 
 the last day of his term ; and a tenant to be outed cares 
 not what mischief he doth." 
 
 Conversation. "Seeing we are civilised Englishmen, 
 let us not be naked savages in our talk." 
 
 Wounded Soldier. " Halting is the stateliest march of 
 a soldier ; and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an 
 ancient as torn as his colours." 
 
 Wat Tyler. "A misogrammatist ; if a good Greek 
 word may be given to so barbarous a rebel." 
 
 Heralds. " Heralds new mould men's names, taking 
 from them, adding to them, melting out all the liquid 
 letters, torturing mutes to make them speak, and making 
 vowels dumb, to bring it to a fallacious homonomy at 
 the last, that their names may be the same with those 
 noble houses they pretend to." 
 
 Antiquarian Diligence. " It is most worthy observa- 
 tion, with what diligence he [Camden] inquired after 
 ancient places, making hue and cry after many a city 
 which was run away, and by certain marks and tokens 
 pursuing to find it ; as by the situation on the Roman 
 highways, by just distance from other ancient cities, by 
 
 would have thought of deducing, setting lip an absurdum on 
 purpose to hunt it down, placing guards as it were at the very 
 outposts of possibility, gravely giving out laws to insanity and 
 prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects, could never 
 have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that 
 of Fuller, or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the 
 conclusion of this passage most aptly imitates.
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 267 
 
 some affinity of liame, by tradition of the inhabitants, by 
 Roman coins digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. 
 A broken urn is a whole evidence ; or an old gate still 
 surviving, out of which the city is run out. Besides, 
 commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown out 
 of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural 
 affection as dutifully to own those reverend ruins for her 
 mother." 
 
 Henry de Essex. " He is too well known in our English 
 Chronicles, being Baron of Raleigh, in Essex, and Heredi- 
 tary Standard Bearer of England. It happened in the 
 reign of this king [Henry II.] there was a fierce battle 
 fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the English 
 and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex animum et 
 signum simul abjecit, betwixt traitor and coward, cast 
 away both his courage and banner together, occasioning 
 a great overthrow of English. But he that had the 
 baseness to do, had the boldness to deny the doing of so 
 foul a fact ; until he was challenged in combat by Robert 
 de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him 
 overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance 
 was confiscated to the king, and he himself, partly thrust, 
 partly going into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, 
 under ivhich, betivixt shame and sanctity, he blushed out 
 the remainder of his life." 1 Worthies. Article, "Bed- 
 fordshire." 
 
 1 The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been 
 pronounced impossible : it has given an interest, and a holy char- 
 acter, to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the 
 concluding account of the last clays, and expiatory retirement, of 
 poor Henry de Essex. The address with which the whole of this 
 little story is told is most consummate : the charm of it seems to 
 consist in a perpetual balance of antitheses not too violently opposed, 
 and the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept : 
 " Betwixt traitor and coward " " baseness to do, boldness to 
 deny " " partly thrust, partly going, into a convent " " betwixt 
 shame and sancity. " The reader by this artifice is taken into a 
 kind of partnership with the writer, his judgment is exercised in 
 settling the preponderance, he feels as if he were consulted as to 
 the issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead 
 weight of his own judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.
 
 268 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 
 
 Sir Edward ffanvood, Knt. " I have read of a bird, 
 which hath a face like, and yet will prey upon, a man ; 
 who coming to the water to drink, and finding there by 
 reflection, that he had killed one like himself, pineth 
 away by degrees, and never afterwards enjoy eth itself. l 
 Such in some sort the condition of Sir Edward. This 
 accident, that he had killed one in a private quarrel, put 
 period to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes 
 all the days of his life. No possible provocations could 
 afterwards tempt him to a duel ; and no wonder that 
 one's conscience loathed that whereof he had surfeited. 
 He refused all challenges with more honour than others 
 accepted them ; it being well known, that he would set 
 his foot as far in the face of his enemy as any man alive." 
 Worthies. Art. "Lincolnshire." 
 
 Decayed Gentry. "It happened in the reign of King 
 James, when Henry Earl of Huntingdon was Lieutenant 
 of Leicestershire, that a labourer's son in that county 
 was pressed into the wars ; as I take it, to go over with 
 Count Mansfield. The old man at Leicester requested 
 his son might be discharged, as being the only staff of 
 his age, who by his industry maintained him and his 
 mother. The Earl demanded his name, which the man 
 for a long time was loth to tell (as suspecting it a fault 
 
 1 I do not know where Fuller read of this bird ; but a more 
 awful and affecting story, and moralising of a story, in .Natural 
 History, or rather in that Fabulous Natural History, where poets 
 and mythologists found the Phoenix and the Unicorn, and " other 
 strange fowl," is nowhere extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas 
 Browne, if he had heard of it, would have exploded among his 
 Vulgar Errors ; but the delight which he would have taken in the 
 discussing of its probabilities, would have shown that the truth of 
 the fact, though the avowed object of his search, was not so much 
 the motive which put him upon the investigation, as those hidden 
 affinities and poetical analogies, those essential verities in the 
 application of strange fable, which made him linger with such 
 reluctant delay among the last fading lights of popular tradition ; 
 and not seldom to conjure up a superstition, that had been long 
 extinct, from its dusty grave, to inter it himself with greater 
 ceremonies and solemnities of burial.
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 269 
 
 for so poor a man to confess the truth), at last he told 
 his name was Hastings. " Cousin Hastings," said the 
 Earl, "we cannot all be top branches of the tree, though 
 we all spring from the same root ; your son, my kinsman, 
 shall not be pressed." So good was the meeting of 
 modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an honourable person, 
 and gentry I believe in both. And I have reason to 
 believe that some who justly own the surnames and 
 blood of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets (though 
 ignorant of their own extractions), are hid in the heap of 
 common people, where they find that under a thatched 
 cottage, which some of their ancestors could not enjoy in 
 a leaded castle, contentment, with quiet and security." 
 Worthies. Art., " Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes." 
 
 Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman. "Thomas 
 Curson, born in Allhallows, Lombard Street, armourer, 
 dwelt without Bishopsgate. It happened that a stage- 
 player borrowed a rusty musket, which had lain long 
 leger in his shop : now though his part were comical, he 
 therewith acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the 
 standers by, the gun casually going off on the stage, 
 which he suspected not to be charged. the difference 
 of divers men in the tenderness of their consciences ; some 
 are scarce touched with a wound, whilst others are wounded 
 with a touch therein. This poor armourer was highly 
 afflicted therewith, though done against his will, yea 
 without his knowledge, in his absence, by another, out of 
 mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his 
 estate to pious uses : no sooner had he gotten a round 
 sum, but presently he posted with it in his apron to the 
 Court of Aldermen, and was in pain till by their direction 
 he had settled it for the relief of poor in his own and 
 other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds 
 accordingly, as I am credibly informed by the then 
 churchwardens of the said parish. Thus as he conceived 
 himself casually (though at a great distance) to have 
 occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate and 
 direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."
 
 270 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 
 
 Burning of Wickliffe' s Body by Order of the Council of 
 Constance. "Hitherto [A.D. 1428] the corpse of John 
 Wickliffe had quietly slept in his grave about forty-one 
 years after his death, till his body was reduced to bones, 
 and his bones almost to dust. For though the earth in 
 the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he 
 was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth 
 of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet 
 such the appetite thereof, and all other English graves, 
 to leave small reversions of a body after so many years. 
 But now such the spleen of the Council of Constance, as 
 they not ouly cursed his memory as dying an obstinate 
 heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this charitable 
 caution, if it may be discerned from the bodies of other 
 faithful people) to be taken out of the ground, and thrown 
 far off from any Christian burial. In obedience here- 
 unto, Rich. Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, Diocesan of 
 Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight, 
 scent, at a dead carcase) to ungrave him. Accordingly 
 to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, 
 Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors, and their servants (so that 
 the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone 
 amongst so many hands), take what was left out of the 
 grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into 
 Swift, a neighbouring brook, running hard by. Thus this 
 brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, 
 Severn into the narroiv seas, they into the main ocean; 
 and thus the ashes of Wickliffe are tlie emblem of his 
 doctrine, which now is dispersed all tJie ivorld over.' n 
 Church History. 
 
 1 The concluding period of this most lively narrative I will not 
 call a conceit : it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever met 
 with. One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the 
 reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, 
 and all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of 
 the baffled Council : from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, 
 from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the 
 main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dis- 
 persed all the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Cfesar
 
 SPECIMENS FROM FULLER'S WRITINGS. 271 
 
 to the clay that stops a beer-barrel, is a no less curious pursuit 
 of "ruined mortality ;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this : it 
 degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature at least ; but 
 this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort 
 of ubiquity, a diffusion, as far as the actions of its partner can 
 have reach or influence. 
 
 I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint 
 conceit of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read 
 it in a temper different from that in which the writer composed it ? 
 The most pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are 
 nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard 
 II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries 
 out, 
 
 " O that I were a mockery king of snow, 
 To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke," 
 
 if we have been going on pace for pace with the passion before, 
 this sudden conversion of a strong- felt metaphor into something to 
 be actually realised in nature, like that of Jeremiah, " Oh ! that 
 my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly 
 and strikingly natural ; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a 
 conceit : and so is a "head" turned into "waters."
 
 ON THE 
 GENIUS AND CHAEACTEK OF HOGAETH ; 
 
 WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS 
 OF THE LATE MR. BARRY. 
 
 ONE of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a 
 boy was in the contemplation of those capital prints by 
 Hogarth, the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, which, 
 along with some others, hung upon the walls of a great 
 
 hall in an old-fashioned house in shire, and seemed 
 
 the solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and 
 life-deserted apartment. 
 
 Recollection of the manner in which those prints used 
 to affect me, has often made me wonder, when I have 
 heard Hogarth described as a mere comic painter, as one 
 whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny 
 that there are throughout the prints which I have men- 
 tioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, 
 would be to run counter to the common notions of man- 
 kind ; but to suppose that in their ruling character they 
 appeal chiefly to the risible faculty, and not first and 
 foremost to the very heart of man, its best and most 
 serious feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their 
 aim and purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they 
 are not so much Comedies, which they have been likened 
 to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less mingled 
 with any thing of mere fun, were never written upon 
 paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, 
 or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 273 
 
 I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being 
 asked which book he esteemed most in his library, 
 answered, " Shakspere : " being asked which he esteemed 
 next best, replied "Hogarth." His graphic represen- 
 tations are indeed books : they have the teeming, fruitful, 
 suggestive meaning of ivords. Other pictures we look 
 at, his prints we read. 
 
 In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes enter- 
 tained myself with comparing the Timon of Athens of 
 Shakspere (which I have just mentioned) and Hogarth's 
 Rake's Progress together. The story, the moral, in both 
 is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extrava- 
 gance, ending in the one Avith driving the Prodigal from 
 the society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in 
 the other with conducting the Rake through his several 
 stages of dissipation into the still more complete desola- 
 tions of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture arc 
 described with almost equal force and nature. The levee 
 of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate 
 in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's levee in 
 the opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating 
 poet, and other similar characters, in both. 
 
 The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress is perhaps 
 superior to the last scenes of Timon. If we seek for 
 something of kindred excellence in poetry, it must be in 
 the scenes of Lear's beginning madness, where the King 
 and the Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire to produce 
 such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and misery 
 rebuked by mirth ; where the society of those " strange 
 bed-fellows " which misfortunes have brought Lear ac- 
 cpuainted with, so finely sets forth the destitute state of 
 the monarch, w r hile the lunatic bans of the one, and the 
 disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the 
 other, so wonderfully sympathise Avith that confusion, 
 which they seem to assist in the production of, in the 
 senses of that "child-changed father." 
 
 In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake's 
 Progress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous 
 T
 
 274 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 with the. terrible. Here is desperate madness, the over- 
 turning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which 
 we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and pressure 
 of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a 
 building; and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into 
 idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times never 
 having been strong, we look upon the consummation of 
 their decay with no more of pity than is consistent with 
 a smile. The mad taylor, the poor driveller that has 
 gone out of his wita (and truly he appears to have had 
 no great journey to go to get past their confines) for the 
 love of Charming Betty Careless, these half-laughable, 
 scarce-pitiable objects take off from the horror which the 
 principal figure would of itself raise, at the same time 
 that they assist the feeling of the scene by contributing 
 to the general notion of its subject : 
 
 Madness, tliou chaos of the brain, 
 What art, that pleasure giv'st, and pain ? 
 Tyranny of Fancy's reign ! 
 Mechanic Fancy, that can build 
 Vast labyrinths and mazes wild, 
 With rule disjointed, shapeless measure, 
 Fill'd with horror, fill'd with pleasure ! 
 Shapes of horror, that would even 
 Cast doubts of mercy upon heaven. 
 Shapes of pleasure, that, but seen, 
 Would split the shaking sides of spleen. 1 
 
 Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to 
 remark, that in the poor kneeling weeping female, who 
 accompanies her seducer in his sad decay, there is some- 
 thing analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather 
 to be called, in Lear, the noblest pattern of virtue 
 which even Shakspere has conceived, who follows his 
 royal master in banishment, that had pronounced his 
 banishment, and forgetful at once of his wrongs and 
 dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a menial, 
 retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the carcase, 
 the shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear ? 
 
 1 Lines inscribed under the plate.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 275 
 
 In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the 
 impression which we receive depends upon the habit of 
 mind which we bring with us to such perusal. The same 
 circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall 
 render another very serious ; or in the same person the 
 first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The 
 misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot's 
 Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter ; 
 but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, 
 a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter 
 has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful 
 assemblage of depraved beings, who, without a grain of 
 reverence or pity in their perverted minds, are performing 
 the sacred exteriors of duty to the relics of their departed 
 partner in folly, but I am as much moved to sympathy 
 from the very want of it in them, as I should be by the 
 finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded 
 by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends, per- 
 haps more by the very contrast. What reflections does 
 it not awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the 
 creature (a female too) must have lived, who in death 
 wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That 
 wretch who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon 
 the corpse with a face which indicates a perfect negation 
 of all goodness or womanhood the hypocrite parson and 
 his demure partner all the fiendish group to a thought- 
 ful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if 
 the poor friendless carcase had been depicted as thrown 
 out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its 
 obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet. 
 
 It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met 
 together in this picture, incongruous objects being of 
 the very essence of laughter, but surely the laugh is far 
 different in its kind from that thoughtless species to 
 which we are moved by mere farce and grotesque. We 
 laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight 
 of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with 
 filial fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which
 
 276 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 he is coming to fleece and plunder, we smile at the 
 exquisite irony of the passage, but if we are not led on 
 by such passages to some more salutary feeling than 
 laughter, we are very negligent perusers of them in book 
 or picture. 
 
 It is the fashion with those who cry up the great 
 Historical School in this country, at the head of which 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from 
 that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. 
 Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of 
 subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar 
 artist. The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds 
 into every picture, would alone imvulgarise every subject 
 which he might choose. Let us take the lowest of his 
 subjects, the print called Gin Lane. Here is plenty of 
 poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view ; 
 and accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately 
 disgusted and repelled. I have seen many turn away 
 from it, not being able to bear it. The same persons 
 would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon 
 Poussin's celebrated picture of the Plague at Athens. 1 
 Disease and Death and bewildering Terror, in Athenian 
 garments are endurable, and come, as the delicate critics 
 express it, within the "limits of pleasurable sensation." 
 But the scenes of their own St. Giles', delineated by their 
 own countryman, are too shocking to think of. Yet if 
 we could abstract our minds from the fascinating colours 
 of the picture, and forget the coarse execution (in some 
 respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap 
 plate, accessible to the poorer sort of people, for whose 
 instruction it was done, I think we could have no hesita- 
 tion in conferring the palm of superior genius upon 
 Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's 
 picture. There is more of imagination in it that power 
 which draws all things to one, which makes things 
 animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, 
 
 1 At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish Square.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 277 
 
 subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve 
 to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar 
 expression, tells. Every part is full of " strange images 
 of death." It is perfectly amazing and astounding to 
 look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman 
 and the half-dead man, which are as terrible as any thing 
 which Michael Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in 
 the print contributes to bewilder and stupefy, the 
 very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express it, 
 tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunk 
 seem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical 
 spirit of frenzy which goes forth over the whole com- 
 position. To show the poetical and almost prophetical 
 conception in the artist, one little circumstance may serve. 
 Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he 
 has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the 
 action, he shews you what (of a kindred nature) is passing 
 beyond it. Close by the shell, in which, by the direction 
 of the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an 
 old wall, which, partaking of the universal decay around 
 it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in this wall 
 are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in 
 some funeral procession which is passing by on the other 
 side of the wall, out of the sphere of the composition. 
 This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the 
 subject could only have been conceived by a great genius. 
 Shakspere, in his description of the painting of the Trojan 
 War, in his Tarqmn and Lucrece, has introduced a similar 
 device, where the painter made a part stand for the 
 whole : 
 
 For much imaginary work was there, 
 Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kiud, 
 That for Achilles' image stood his spear, 
 Grip'd in an armed hand ; himself behind 
 Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind : 
 A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, 
 Stood for the whole to be imagined. 
 
 This he well calls imaginary work, where the spectator
 
 278 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 must meet the artist in his conceptions half way ', and it 
 is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust 
 so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew 
 every thing distinct and full, as they require an object to 
 be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it. 
 
 When I think of the power displayed in this (I will 
 not hesitate to say) sublime print, it seems to me the 
 extreme narrowness of system alone, and of that rage for 
 classification, by which, in matters of taste at least, we 
 are perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, 
 that would make us concede to the work of Poussin 
 above mentioned, and deny to this of Hogarth, the name 
 of a grand serious composition. 
 
 We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and 
 theories. We call one man a great historical painter, 
 because he has taken for his subjects kings or great men, 
 or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. 
 We term another the painter of common life, and set 
 him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, 
 without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shewn 
 by the latter may not much more than level the distinc- 
 tion which their mere choice of subjects may seem to 
 place between them ; or whether, in fact, from that very 
 common life a great artist may not extract as deep an 
 interest as another man from that which we are pleased 
 to call history. 
 
 I entertain the highest respect for the talents and 
 virtues of Eeynolds, but I do not like that his reputation 
 should overshadow and stifle the merits of such a man 
 as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and classifications 
 we should be content to sacrifice one of the greatest 
 ornaments of England. 
 
 I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Eeynolds, 
 whether, in the countenances of his Staring and Grinning 
 Despair, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino 
 and dying Beaufort, there be anything comparable to the 
 expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his 
 broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the Rake's
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 279 
 
 Progress, 1 where a letter from the manager is brought to 
 him to say that his play " will not do ? " Here all is easy, 
 natural, undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is 
 here accumulated ! the long history of a mis-spent life is 
 compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series 
 of plates before had told it ; here is no attempt at Gor- 
 gonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning 
 at the antique bed-posts, no face-making, or consciousness 
 of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but 
 grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with 
 the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it, 
 a final leave taken of hope, the coining on of vacancy 
 and stupefaction, a beginning alienation of mind looking 
 like tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the 
 beholder to feed on for the hour together, matter to 
 feed and fertilise the mind. It is too real to admit 
 one thought about the power of the artist who did it. 
 When we compare the expression in subjects which 
 so fairly admit of comparison, and find the superi- 
 ority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere 
 contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in 
 the one case in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and 
 in the other in the State Prison of Pisa, or the bedroom 
 of a cardinal, or that the subject of the one has never 
 been authenticated, and the other is matter of history, 
 so weigh down the real points of the comparison, as to 
 induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one 
 scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that 
 which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from 
 which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to 
 make choice of the other) with something like disgraced 2 
 
 1 The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That 
 which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance 
 of the debauchee in the second plate of the Marriage Alamode, 
 which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as any thing in 
 Ecclesiastes. 
 
 2 Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the 
 presumption of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in paint- 
 ing, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.
 
 280 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 The Boys under Demoniacal Possession of Raphael 
 and Dominichino, by what law of classification are we 
 bound to assign them to belong to the great style in 
 painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake 
 of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam 
 scene 1 I am sure he is far more impressive than either. 
 It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. 
 There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost 
 endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by strong 
 mental agony, the frightful obstinate laugh of madness, 
 yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were 
 witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing 
 but what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no 
 tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. 
 This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny 
 to Shakspere the honours of a great tragedian, because 
 he has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business 
 of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for 
 the two concluding scenes of the RaMs Progress, because 
 of the Comic Lunatics T which he has thrown into the 
 
 Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, 
 but what he has left its in this kind have at least this merit, that 
 they have expression of some sort or other in them, the Child 
 Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter, for instance : which is more than 
 can be said of Sir Joshua Reynold's Repose in Egypt, painted for 
 Mackliu's Bible, where for a Madonna he has substituted a sleepy, 
 insensible, unmothevly girl, one so little worthy to have been 
 selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither 
 heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But 
 indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, 
 root and branch, at the Reformation. Our artists are too good 
 Protestants to give life to that admirable commixture of maternal 
 tenderness with reverential awe and wonder approaching to worship, 
 with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci and Raphael (them- 
 selves by their divine countenances inviting men to worship) con- 
 template the union of the two natures in the person of their 
 Heaven-born Infant. 
 
 1 There are of madmen, as there are of tame, 
 
 All-humour' d not alike. We have here some 
 
 So apish and fantastic, play with a feather ; 
 
 And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image 
 
 So blemish'd and defac'd, yet do they act
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 281 
 
 one, or the Alchymist that he has introduced in the other, 
 who is paddling in the coals of his furnace, keeping alive 
 the flames of vain hope within the very walls of the 
 prison to which the vanity has conducted him, which have 
 taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to the 
 desponding figure who is the principal person of the 
 scene. 
 
 It is the force of these kindly admixtures, which 
 assimilates the scenes of Hogarth and of Shakspere to 
 the drama of real life, where no such thing as pure 
 tragedy is to be found ; but merriment and infelicity, 
 ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twi-formed 
 births, disagreeing complexions of one intertexture, per- 
 petually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the 
 world. Then it is that the poet or painter shews his 
 art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he 
 chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, 
 or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to, his 
 principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger 
 in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of correspond- 
 ency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem 
 to interrupt, while the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, 
 and the doggerel nonsense of the Cook and his poisoning 
 associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, are 
 pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords, as bad as the 
 quarrelling dog and cat under the table of the Lord and 
 the Disciples at Emmaus of Titian 1 
 
 Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to 
 prints which he may not be fortunate enough to possess, 
 it may be sufficient to remark, that the same tragic cast 
 of expression and incident, blended in some instances with 
 a greater alloy of comedy, characterises his other great 
 work, the Marriage Alamode, as well as those less elabor- 
 
 Such antic and such pretty lunacies, 
 That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile. 
 Others again we have, like angry lions, 
 Fierce as wild bulls, untamable as flies. 
 
 Honest Whore.
 
 282 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 ate exertions of his genius, the prints called Industry and 
 Idleness, the Distrest Poet, etc., forming, with the Harlot's 
 and Rakds Progresses, the most considerable if not the 
 largest class of his productions, enough surely to rescue 
 Hogarth from the imputation of being a mere buffoon, 
 or one whose general aim was only to shake the sides. 
 
 There remains a very numerous class of his perform- 
 ances, the object of which must be confessed to be prin- 
 cipally comic. But in all of them will be found something 
 to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury 
 and others. They have this difference, that we do not 
 merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection 
 by them. In this respect they resemble the characters of 
 Chaucer's Pilgrims, which have strokes of humour in 
 them enough to designate them for the most part as comic, 
 but our strongest feeling still is wonder at the compre- 
 hensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and 
 painter have done, into one small canvas so many diverse 
 yet .co-operating materials. 
 
 The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary 
 interest, as in caricatures, or those grotesque physiognomies 
 which we sometimes catch a glance of in the street, and, 
 struck with their whimsicality, wish for a pencil and the 
 power to sketch them down ; and forget them again as 
 rapidly, but they are permanent abiding ideas. Not 
 the sports of nature, but her necessary eternal classes. 
 We feel that we cannot part with any of them, lest a 
 link should be broken. 
 
 It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn 
 a mean or insignificant countenance. 1 Hogarth's mind 
 was eminently reflective ; and, as it has been well observed 
 of Shakspere, that he has transfused his own poetical 
 
 1 If there are any of that description, they are in his Strolling 
 Players, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford as the 
 richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know, in the 
 mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but 
 in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably 
 poor and wanting ; it is perhaps the only one of his performances 
 at which we have a right to feel disgusted.
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 283 
 
 character into the persons of his drama (they are all 
 more or less poets) Hogarth has impressed a thinking 
 character upon the persons of his canvas. This remark 
 must not be taken universally. The exquisite idiotism 
 of the little gentleman in the bag and sword beating his 
 drum in the print of the Enraged Musician, would of 
 itself rise up against so sweeping an assertion. But I 
 think it will be found to be true of the generality of 
 his countenances. The knife-grinder and Jew flute-player 
 in the plate just mentioned may serve as instances instead 
 of a thousand. They have intense thinking faces, though 
 the purpose to which they are subservient by no means 
 required it ; but indeed it seems as if it was painful to 
 Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance. 
 
 This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the 
 faces of his characters, is one reason why the works of 
 Hogarth, so much more than those of any other artist are 
 objects of meditation. Our intellectual natures love 
 the mirror which gives them back their own likenesses. 
 The mental eye will not bend long with delight upon 
 vacancy. 
 
 Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth 
 and the common painters of droll or burlesque subjects, 
 with whom he is often confounded, is the sense of beauty, 
 Avhich in the most unpromising subjects seems never 
 wholly to have deserted him. "Hogarth himself," says 
 Mr. Coleridge, 1 from whom I have borrowed this observa- 
 tion, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, 
 "never drew a more ludicrous distortion, both of attitude 
 and physiognomy, than this effect occasioned : nor was 
 there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces 
 which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist never 
 extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as 
 a poet, so often and so gladly introduces as the central 
 figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figure 
 (such is the power of true genius) neither acts nor is 
 meant to act as a contrast : but diffuses through all, and 
 1 The Friend, No. XVI.
 
 284 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and 
 human kindness ; and even when the attention is no 
 longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, 
 still blends its tenderness with our laughter : and thus 
 prevents the instructive merriment at the ivhims of nature, 
 or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men, from degener- 
 ating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred." To 
 the beautiful females in Hogarth, which Mr. C. has 
 pointed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of 
 children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular 
 delight in) into his pieces. They have a singular effect 
 in giving tranquillity and a portion of their own innocence 
 to the subject. The baby riding in its mother's lap in 
 the March to Finchley (its careless innocent face placed 
 directly behind the intriguing time-furrowed countenance 
 of the treason-plotting French priest) perfectly sobers the 
 whole of that tumultuous scene. The boy mourner wind- 
 ing up his top with so much unpretending insensibility 
 in the plate of the Harlot's Funeral (the only thing in 
 that assembly that is not a hypocrite) quiets and soothes 
 the mind that has been disturbed at the sight of so much 
 depraved man and woman kind. 
 
 I had written thus far, when I met with a passage in 
 the writings of the late Mr. Barry, which, as it falls in 
 with the vulgar notion respecting Hogarth, which this 
 Essay has been employed in combating, I shall take the 
 liberty to transcribe, with such remarks as may suggest 
 themselves to me in the transcription; referring the 
 reader for a full answer to that which has gone before. 
 
 " Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does undoubtedly entitle 
 him to an honourable place among the artists, and that his little 
 compositions, considered as so many dramatic representations, 
 abounding with humour, character, and extensive observations on 
 the various incidents of low, faulty, and vicious life, are very 
 ingeniously brought together, and frequently tell their own story 
 with more facility than is often found in many of the elevated and 
 more noble inventions of Rafaelle, and other great men ; yet it 
 must be honestly confessed, that in what is called knowledge of 
 the figure, foreigners have justly observed, that Hogarth is often
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 285 
 
 so raw and unformed, as hardly to deserve the name of an artist. 
 But this capital defect is not often perceivable, as examples of the 
 naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, 
 which are for the most part filled with characters that in their 
 nature tend to deformity ; besides, his figures are small, and the 
 junctures, and other difficulties of drawing that might occur iu 
 their limbs, are artfully concealed with their clothes, rags, etc. 
 But what would atone for all his defects, even if they were twice 
 told, is his admirable fund of invention, ever inexhaustible in its 
 resources ; and his satyr, which is always sharp and pertinent, and 
 often highly moral, was (except in a few instances, where he 
 weakly and meanly suffered his integrity to give way to his envy) 
 seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way. Hogarth 
 has been often imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his 
 humorous ; but very few have attempted to rival him in his 
 moral walk. The line of art pursued by my very ingenious pre- 
 decessor and brother academician, Mr. Penny, is quite distinct 
 from that of Hogarth, and is of a much more delicate and superior 
 relish ; he attempts the heart, and reaches it, whilst Hogarth's 
 general aim is only to shake the sides ; in other respects no com- 
 parison can be thought of, as Mr. Penny has all that knowledge of 
 the figure and academical skill, which the other wanted. As to Mr. 
 Bunbury, who had so happily succeeded in the vein of humour and 
 caricature, he has for some time past altogether relinquished it, 
 for the more amiable pursuit of beautiful nature : this, indeed, is 
 not to be wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in Mrs. 
 Bunbury, so admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and 
 beauty continually at his elbow. But (to say all that occurs to 
 me on this subject) perhaps it may be reasonably doubted, whether 
 the being much conversant with Hogarth's method of exposing 
 meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of his works, is not rather 
 a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit ; which, if it does 
 not find a false relish and a love of and search after satyr and 
 buffoonery in the spectator, is at least not unlikely to give him 
 one. Life is short ; and the little leisure of it is much better laid 
 out upon that species of art which is employed about the amiable 
 and the admirable, as it is more likely to be attended with better 
 and nobler consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art 
 may be compared with two sets of people with whom we might 
 associate ; if we give ourselves up to the Foots, the Keuricks, etc., 
 we shall be continually busied and paddling in whatever is ridicu- 
 lous, faulty, and vicious in life ; whereas there are those to be 
 found, with whom we should be in the constant pursuit and study 
 of all that gives a value and a dignity to human nature." [Account 
 of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room of the Society of Arts, 
 Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Adelphi, by James Barry, 
 R. A. Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy; reprinted in 
 the last quarto edition of his works.]
 
 286 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 " it must be honestly confessed, that in what is called 
 
 knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed," etc. 
 
 It is a secret well known to the professors of the art 
 and mystery of criticism, to insist upon what they do not 
 find in a man's works, and to pass over in silence what 
 they do. That Hogarth did not draw the naked figure 
 so well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, especially 
 as " examples of the naked," as Mr. Barry acknowledges, 
 " rarely (he might almost have said never) occur in his 
 subjects;" and that his figures under their draperies do 
 not discover all the fine graces of an Antinous or an 
 Apollo, may be conceded likewise ; perhaps it was more 
 suitable to his purpose to represent the average forms of 
 mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses it) 
 of the age in which he lived : but that his figures in 
 general, and in his best subjects, are so glaringly incorrect 
 as is here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so far as 
 positively to deny the fact. And there is one part of the 
 figure in which Hogarth is allowed to have excelled, which 
 these foreigners seem to have overlooked, or perhaps 
 calculating from its proportion to the whole (a seventh 
 or an eighth, I forget which) deemed it of trifling import- 
 ance ; I mean the human face ; a small part, reckoning 
 by geographical inches, in the map of man's body, but 
 here it is that the painter of expression must condense 
 the wonders of his skill, even at the expense of neglecting 
 the "jonctures and other difficulties of drawing in the 
 limbs," which it must be a cold eye that in the interest 
 so strongly demanded by Hogarth's countenances, has 
 leisure to survey and censure. 
 
 "The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and 
 brother academician, Mr. Penny. " 
 
 The first impression caused in me by reading this 
 passage, was an eager desire to know who this Mr. Penny 
 was. This great surpasser of Hogarth in the " delicacy 
 of his relish," and the " line which he pursued," where is 
 he, what are his works, what has he to shew 1 In vain
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 287 
 
 I tried to recollect, till by happily putting the question 
 to a friend who is more conversant in the works of the 
 illustrious obscure than myself, I learned that he was the 
 painter of a Death of Wolfe which missed the prize the 
 year that the celebrated picture of West on the same 
 subject obtained it ; that he also made a picture of the 
 Marquis of Granby relieving a Sick Soldier ; moreover, 
 that he was the inventor of two pictures of Suspended 
 and Restored Animation, which I now remember to have 
 seen in the Exhibition some years since, and the prints 
 from which are still extant in good men's houses. This 
 then I suppose is the line of subjects in which Mr. Penny 
 was so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not 
 of that opinion. The relieving of poverty by the purse, 
 and the restoring a young man to his parents by using 
 the methods prescribed by the Humane Society, are 
 doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to teach 
 the first rudiments of humanity ; they amount to about 
 as much instruction as the stories of good boys that give 
 away their custards to poor beggar-boys in children's 
 books. But, good God ! is this milk for bales to be set 
 up in opposition to Hogarth's moral scenes, his strong 
 meat for men ? As well might we prefer the fulsome 
 verses upon their own goodness, to which the gentlemen 
 of the Literary Fund annually sit still with such shameless 
 patience to listen, to the satires of Juvenal and Persius ; 
 because the former are full of tender images of Worth 
 relieved by Charity, and Charity stretching out her hand 
 to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme of the latter is 
 men's crimes and follies with their black consequences 
 forgetful meanwhile of those strains of moral pathos, those 
 sublime heart-touches, which these poets (in them chiefly 
 shewing themselves poets) are perpetually darting across 
 the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject con- 
 solatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty 
 mankind have made us even to despair for our species, 
 'that there is such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in 
 the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly out
 
 288 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 refreshing admonitions, to which we turn for shelter 
 from the too great heat and asperity of the general satire. 
 
 And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth 1 
 nothing which "attempts and reaches the heart?" no 
 aim beyond that of " shaking the sides ?" If the kneeling 
 ministering female in the last scene of the Rakes Progress, 
 the Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before, and 
 have dared almost to parallel it with the most absolute 
 idea of Virtue which Shakspere has left us, be not enough 
 to disprove the assertion ; if the sad endings of the 
 Harlot and the Eake, the passionate heart-bleeding en- 
 treaties for forgiveness which the adulterous wife is pouring 
 forth to her assassinated and dying lord in the last scene 
 but one of the Marriage Alamode, if these be not 
 things to touch the heart, and dispose the mind to a 
 meditative tenderness : is there nothing sweetly concilia- 
 tory in the mild, patient face and gesture with which the 
 wife seems to allay and ventilate the feverish, irritated 
 feelings of her poor, poverty-distracted mate (the true 
 copy of the genus irritabile) in the print of the Distrest 
 Poet ? or if an image of maternal love be required, where 
 shall we find a sublimer view of it than in that aged 
 woman in Industry and Idleness (plate V.) who is clinging 
 with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to her 
 brutal, vice-hardened child, whom she is accompanying 
 to the ship which is to bear him away from his native 
 soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy : in whose 
 shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems 
 obliterated, and a brute beast's to be left instead, shocking 
 and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its 
 cradle before it was so sadly altered, and feels it must 
 belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of 
 his country shall be suffered to continue to beat in it. 
 Compared with such things, what is Mr. Penny's " know- 
 ledge of the figure and academical skill which Hogarth 
 wanted ?" 
 
 With respect to what follows concerning another 
 gentleman, with the congratulations to him on his escape
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 289 
 
 out of the regions of "humour and caricatura," in which 
 it appears he was in danger of travelling side by side 
 with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country that 
 Mrs. Hogarth knew her province better than by disturbing 
 her husband at his pallette to divert him from that uni- 
 versality of subject, which has stamped him perhaps, next 
 to Shakspere, the most inventive genius which this island 
 has produced, into the "amiable pursuit of beautiful 
 nature," i.e. copying ad infinitum the individual charms 
 and graces of Mrs. H . 
 
 " Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, 
 paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious." 
 
 A person xmacquainted with the works thus stigmatised, 
 would be apt to imagine that in Hogarth there was 
 nothing else to be found but subjects of the coarsest and 
 most repulsive nature. That his imagination was natur- 
 ally unsweet, and that he delighted in raking into every 
 species of moral filth. That he preyed upon sore places 
 only, and took a pleasure in exposing the unsound and 
 rotten parts of human nature ; whereas, with the excep- 
 tion of some of the plates of the Harlot's Progress, which 
 are harder in their character than any of the rest of his 
 productions (the Stages of Cruelty I omit as mere worth- 
 less caricaturas, foreign to his general habits, the offspring 
 of his fancy in some wayward humour), there is scarce one 
 of his pieces where vice is most strongly satirised, in 
 which some figure is not introduced upon which the 
 moral eye may rest satisfied ; a face that indicates good- 
 ness, or perhaps mere good humouredness and carelessness 
 of mind (negation of evil) only, yet enough to give a 
 relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, and keep the 
 general air from tainting. Take the mild, supplicating 
 posture of patient Poverty in the poor woman that is 
 persuading the pawnbroker to accept her clothes in pledge, 
 in the plate of Gin Lane, for an instance. A little does 
 it, a little of the good nature overpowers a world of bad. 
 One cordial, honest laugh of a Tom Joues absolutely 
 u
 
 290 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 clears the atmosphere that was reeking with the black, 
 putrifying breathings of a hypocrite Blifil. One homely, 
 expostulating shrug from Strap warms the whole air 
 which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingratitude from 
 his friend Random had begun to freeze. One "Lord 
 bless us ! " of Parson Adams upon the wickedness of the 
 times, exorcises and purges off the mass of iniquity which 
 the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could cull out and 
 rake together. But of the severer class of Hogarth's 
 performances, enough, I trust, has been said to shew that 
 they do not merely shock and repulse ; that there is in 
 them the "scorn of vice" and the "pity" too; something 
 to touch the heart, and keep alive the sense of moral 
 beauty; the "lacrymae rerum," and the sorrowing by 
 which the heart is made better. If they be bad things, 
 then is satire and tragedy a bad thing ; let us proclaim 
 at once an age of gold, and sink the existence of vice and 
 misery in our speculations ; let us 
 
 wink, and shut our apprehensions up 
 
 From common sense of what men were and are : 
 
 .let us make believe with the children that everybody is 
 good and happy; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics 
 upon the world. 
 
 But that larger half of Hogarth's works which were 
 painted more for entertainment than instruction (though 
 such was the suggestiveness of his mind, that there is 
 always something to be learned from them) his humorous 
 scenes, are they such as merely to disgust and set us 
 against our species ? 
 
 The confident assertions of such a man as I consider 
 the late Mr. Barry to have been, have that weight of 
 authority in them which staggers, at first hearing, even a 
 long, preconceived opinion. When I read his pathetic 
 admonition concerning the shortness of life, and how 
 much better the little leisure of it were laid out upon 
 " that species of art which is employed about the amiable 
 and the admirable;" and Hogarth's "method" proscribed
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 291 
 
 as a "dangerous or worthless pursuit," I began to think 
 there was something in it ; that I might have been 
 indulging all my life a passion for the works of this 
 artist, to the utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense ; 
 but my first convictions gradually returned, a world of 
 good-natured English faces came up one by one to my 
 recollection, and a glance at the matchless Election 
 Entertainment, which I have the happiness to have 
 hanging up in my parlour, subverted Mr. Barry's whole 
 theory in an instant. 
 
 In that inimitable print (which in my judgment as far 
 exceeds the more known and celebrated March to Fincldey, 
 as the best comedy exceeds the best farce that ever was 
 written) let a person look till he be saturated, and when 
 he is done wondering at the inventiveness of genius which 
 could bring so many characters (more than thirty distinct 
 classes of face) into a room, and set them down at table 
 together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural 
 a manner, engage them in so many easy sets and occupa- 
 tions, yet all partaking of the spirit of the occasion which 
 brought them together, so that we feel that nothing but 
 an election time could have assembled them ; having no 
 central figure or principal group (for the hero of the piece, 
 the Candidate, is properly set aside in the levelling indis- 
 tinction of the day, one must look for him to find him), 
 nothing to detain the eye from passing from part to part, 
 where every part is alike instinct with life, for here are 
 no furniture -faces, no figures brought in to fill up the 
 scene like stage choruses, but all dramatis pet -some : when 
 he shall have done wondering at all these faces so strongly 
 charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the finest 
 miniature ; when he shall have done admiring the num- 
 berless appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles 
 which rich genius flings into the heap when it has already 
 done enough, the over-measure which it delights in giving, 
 as if it felt its stores were exhaustless ; the dumb rhetoric 
 of the scenery for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in 
 Hogarth are living and significant things ; the witticisms
 
 292 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 that are expressed by words (all artists but Hogarth have 
 failed when they have endeavoured to combine two 
 mediums of expression, and have introduced words into 
 their pictures), and the unwritten numberless little 
 allusive pleasantries that are scattered about ; the work 
 that is going on in the scene, and beyond it, as is made 
 visible to the "eye of mind," by the mob which chokes 
 up the doorway, and the sword that has forced an entrance 
 before its master : when he shall have sufficiently admired 
 this wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the result 
 left on his mind. Is it an impression of the vileness and 
 worthlessness of his species 1 or is not the general feeling 
 which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to 
 act sensibly on his mind, a kindly one in favour of his 
 species ? was not the general air of the scene wholesome 1 
 did it do the heart hurt to be among it 1 Something of 
 a riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldly-minded- 
 ness in some of the faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness 
 which does not promise any superfluous degree of sincerity 
 in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling 
 so much good company together : but is not the general 
 cast of expression in the faces, of the good sort 1 do they 
 not seem cut out of the good old rock, substantial English 
 honesty 1 ? would one fear treachery among characters of 
 their expression ? or shall we call their honest mirth and 
 seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names of vice 
 and profligacy 1 ? That poor country fellow, that is grasping 
 his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves 
 at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has 
 never parted with since he came into the room), and is 
 enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all the capacities 
 of his soul the slender joke which that facetious wag, his 
 neighbour, is practising upon the gouty gentleman, whose 
 eyes the effort to suppress pain has made as round as 
 rings does it shock the " dignity of human nature " to 
 look at that man, and to sympathise with him in the 
 seldom-heard joke which has unbent his careworn, hard- 
 working visage, and drawn iron smiles from it 1 or with
 
 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 293 
 
 that full -hearted cobbler, who is honouring with the 
 grasp of an honest fist the unused palm of that annoyed 
 patrician, whom the license of the time has seated 
 next him. 
 
 I can see nothing " dangerous " in the contemplation 
 of such scenes as this, or the Enraged Musician, or the 
 Southward Fair, or twenty other pleasant prints which 
 come crowding in upon my recollection, in which the 
 restless activities, the diversified bents and humours, the 
 blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be 
 called, rather than their " vices and follies," are held up 
 in a laughable point of view. All laughter is not of a 
 dangerous or soul -hardening tendency. There is the 
 petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills 
 Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which 
 implies and cherishes it. What heart was ever made 
 the worse by joining in a hearty laugh at the simplicities 
 of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of 
 the ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a per- 
 ception of the amiable? That tumultuous harmony of 
 singers that are roaring out the words, " The world shall 
 bow to the Assyrian throne," from the opera of Judith, 
 in the third plate of the series, called the Four Groups 
 of Heads ; which the quick eye of Hogarth must have 
 struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred 
 oratorios in this country, while "Music yet was young;" 
 when we have done smiling at the deafening distortions, 
 which these tearers of devotion to rags and tatters, these 
 takers of Heaven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry 
 of the occupation of angels, are making, what unkindly 
 impression is left behind, or what more of harsh or con- 
 temptuous feeling, that when we quietly leave Uncle 
 Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about 
 the room 1 The conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that 
 with all the self-applause of a Raphael or Corregio (the 
 twist of body which his conceit has thrown him into has 
 something of the Corregiesque in it) is contemplating the 
 picture of a bottle which he is drawing from an actual
 
 294 ON THE GENIUS OF HOGARTH. 
 
 bottle that hangs beside him, in the print of Beer Street, 
 while we smile at the enormity of the self-delusion, 
 can we help loving the good humour and self-complacency 
 of the fellow? would we willingly wake him from his 
 dream? 
 
 I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth 
 have necessarily something in them to make us like them ; 
 some are indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, 
 and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and 
 truth to nature in the painter ; but I contend that there 
 is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, 
 which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the 
 contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, 
 that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human 
 face, they give us skill to detect those gradations of 
 sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious 
 observer) in the countenances of the world about us ; and 
 prevent that disgust at common life, that tcedium quo- 
 tidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for 
 ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In 
 this, as in many other things, they are analogous to the 
 best novels of Smollett or Fielding.
 
 ON THE 
 POETICAL WOBKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 
 
 THE poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty 
 homeliness of manner, and a plain moral speaking. He 
 seems to have passed his life in one continued act of an 
 innocent self-pleasing. That which he calls his Motto is 
 a continued self-eulogy of two thousand lines, yet we read 
 it to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost 
 without a consciousness that we have been listening all 
 the while to a man praising himself. There are none of 
 the cold particles in it, the hardness and self-ends which 
 render vanity and egotism hateful. He seems to be 
 praising another person, under the mask of self ; or rather 
 we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the 
 virtue which he celebrates ; whether another's bosom, or 
 his own, were its chosen receptacle. His poems are full, 
 and this in particular is one downright confession, of a 
 generous self-seeking. But by self he sometimes means 
 a great deal, his friends, his principles, his country, the 
 human race. 
 
 Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this 
 writer any of those peculiarities which pleased him in the 
 satires of Dryden or Pope, will be grievously disappointed. 
 Here are no high -finished characters, no nice traits of 
 individual nature, few or no personalities. The game 
 run down is coarse general vice, or folly as it appears 
 in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is stript and 
 whipt ; no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curi-
 
 296 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 
 
 ously anatomised, and read upon. But to a well-natured 
 mind there is a charm of moral sensibility running through 
 them which amply compensates the want of those luxuries. 
 Wither seems everywhere bursting with a love of good- 
 ness, and a hatred of all low and base actions. At this 
 day it is hard to discover what parts in the poem here 
 particularly alluded to, Abuses Stript and Whipt, could 
 have occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was 
 Vice in High Places more suspicious than now 1 had she 
 more power ? or more leisure to listen after ill reports ? 
 That a man should be convicted of a libel when he named 
 no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is 
 like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, 
 where Faithful is arraigned for having "railed on our 
 noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his 
 honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal 
 Delight, and the Lord Luxurious." What unlucky 
 jealousy could have tempted the great men of those days 
 to appropriate such innocent abstractions to themselves ? 
 
 Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of 
 idolatry his own possible virtue. He is for ever antici- 
 pating persecution and martyrdom ; fingering, as it were, 
 the flames, to try how he can bear them. Perhaps his 
 premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to 
 censures, which he would otherwise have slipped by. 
 
 The homely versification of these Satires is not likely 
 to attract in the present day. It is certainly not such 
 as we should expect from a poet " soaring in the high 
 region of his fancies with his garland and his singing 
 robes about him ; " 1 nor is it such as he has shewn in 
 his Philarete, and in some parts of his Shepherds Hunting. 
 He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary 
 humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines 
 choose sober gray or black ; but in their humility consists 
 their sweetness. The deepest tone of moral feeling in 
 them (though all throughout is weighty, earnest and 
 passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions against shed- 
 1 Milton.
 
 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 297 
 
 ding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled Revenge. 
 The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly 
 interesting. While the Christian sings his own victory 
 over Anger, the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out 
 to let you know, that it was some higher principle than 
 fear which counselled this forbearance. 
 
 Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never 
 seems to have abated a jot of that free spirit, which sets 
 its mark upon his writings, as much as a predominant 
 feature of independence impresses every page of our late 
 glorious Burns ; but the elder poet wraps his proof-armour 
 closer about him, the other wears his too much outwards ; 
 he is thinking too much of annoying the foe, to be quite 
 easy within ; the spiritual defences of Wither are a per- 
 petual source of inward sunshine, the magnanimity of the 
 modern is not without its alloy of soreness, and a sense 
 of injustice, which seems perpetually to gall and irritate. 
 AVither was better skilled in the "sweet uses of adversity," 
 he knew how to extract the "precious jewel" from the 
 head of the "toad," without drawing any of the "ugly 
 venom " along with it. The prison notes of Wither are 
 finer than the wood notes of most of his poetical brethren. 
 The description in the Fourth Eglogue of his Shepherds 
 Hunting (which was composed during his imprisonment 
 in the Marshalsea) of the power of the Muse to extract 
 pleasure from common objects, has been oftener quoted, 
 and is more known, than any part of his writings. Indeed 
 the whole Eglogue is in a strain so much above not only 
 what himself, but almost what any other poet has written, 
 that he himself could not help noticing it ; he remarks, 
 that his spirits had been raised higher than they were 
 wont " through the love of poesy." The praises of 
 Poetry have been often sung in ancient and in modern 
 times ; strange powers have been ascribed to it of influence 
 over animate and inanimate auditors ; its force over fas- 
 cinated crowds has been acknowledged ; but, before 
 AVither, no one ever celebrated its power at home, the 
 wealth and the strength which this divine gift confers
 
 298 ON THE POETICAL WOKKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 
 
 upon its possessor. Fame, and that too after death, was 
 all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves 
 from their art. It seems to have been left to Wither to 
 discover that poetry was a present possession, as well as 
 a rich reversion ; and that the Muse had promise of both 
 lives, of this, and of that which was to come. 
 
 The Mistress of Philarete is in substance a panegyric 
 protracted through several thousand lines in the mouth 
 of a single speaker, but diversified, so as to produce an 
 almost dramatic effect, by the artful introduction of some 
 ladies, who are rather auditors than interlocutors in the 
 scene ; and of a boy, whose singing furnishes pretence for 
 an occasional change of metre : though the seven syllable 
 line, in which the main part of it is written, is that in 
 which Wither has shewn himself so great a master, that 
 I do not know that I am always thankful to him for the 
 exchange. 
 
 Wither has chosen to bestow upon the lady whom he 
 commends, the name of Arete, or Virtue ; and, assuming 
 to himself the character of Philarete, or Lover of Virtue, 
 there is a sort of propriety in that heaped measure of 
 perfections, which he attributes to this partly real, partly 
 allegorical, personage. Drayton before him had shadowed 
 his mistress under the name of Idea, or Perfect Pattern, 
 and some of the old Italian love-strains are couched in 
 such religious terms as to make it doubtful, whether 
 it be a mistress, or Divine Grace, which the poet is 
 addressing. 
 
 In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages 
 of pre-eminent merit. The first is where the lover, after 
 a flight of rapturous commendation, expresses his wonder 
 why all men that are about his mistress, even to her very 
 servants, do not view her with the same eyes that he 
 does. 
 
 Sometimes I do admire 
 
 All men burn not with desire : 
 
 Nay, I muse her servants are not 
 
 Pleading love ; but ! they dare not. 
 
 And I therefore wonder, why
 
 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 299 
 
 They do not grow sick and die. 
 
 Sure they would do so, but that, 
 
 By the ordinance of fate, 
 
 There is some concealed thing, 
 
 So each gazer limiting, 
 
 He can see no more of merit, 
 
 Than beseems his worth and spirit. 
 
 For in her a grace there shines, 
 
 That o'er-daring thoughts confines, 
 
 Making worthless men despair 
 
 To be loved of one so fair. 
 
 Yea, the destinies agree, 
 
 Some good judgments blind should be, 
 
 And not gain the power of knowing 
 
 Those rare beauties in her growing. 
 
 Reason doth as much imply : 
 
 For, if every judging eye, 
 
 Which beholdeth her, should there 
 
 Find what excellencies are, 
 
 All, o'ercome by those perfections, 
 
 Would be captive to affections. 
 
 So, in happiness unblest, 
 
 She for lovers should not rest. 
 
 The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties 
 to gold, and stars, and the most excellent things in 
 nature ; and, fearing to be accused of hyperbole, the 
 common charge against poets, vindicates himself by boldly 
 taking upon him, that these comparisons are no hyper- 
 boles ; but that the best things in nature do, in a lover's 
 eye, fall short of those excellencies which he adores 
 
 in her. 
 
 What pearls, what rubies can 
 
 Seem so lovely fair to man, 
 As her lips whom he doth love, 
 When in sweet discourse they move, 
 Or her lovelier teeth, the while 
 She doth bless him with a smile ? 
 Stars indeed fair creatures be ; 
 Yet amongst i:s where is he 
 Joys not more the whilst he lies 
 Sunning in his mistress' eyes, 
 Than in all the glimmering light 
 Of a starry winter's night ? 
 
 Note the beauty of an eye 
 
 And if aught you praise it by
 
 300 ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. 
 
 Leave such passion in your mind, 
 Let my reason's eye be blind. 
 Mark if ever red or white 
 Anywhere gave such delight, 
 As when they have taken place 
 In a worthy woman's face. 
 * * * * 
 
 I must praise her as I may, 
 Which I do mine own rude way, 
 Sometime setting forth her glories 
 By unheard of allegories etc. 
 
 To the measure in which these lines are written, the 
 wits of Queen Anne's days contemptuously gave the name 
 of Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips, who 
 has used it in some instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, 
 to my feeling at least, very deliciously; but Wither, 
 whose darling measure it seems to have been, may shew, 
 that in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the sub- 
 tilest movements of passion. So true it is, which Drayton 
 seems to have felt, that it is the poet who modifies the 
 metre, not the metre the poet j in his own words, that 
 
 It's possible to climb ; 
 To kindle, or to slake ; 
 Altho' in Skel ton's rhime. 1 
 
 1 A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the Shepherds 
 Hunting take the following 
 
 If thy verse doth bravely tower, 
 
 As she makes wing, she gets power; 
 
 Yet the higher she doth soar, 
 
 She's affronted still the more, 
 
 'Till she to the high'st hath past, 
 
 Then she rests with fame at last. 
 
 What longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this ! what 
 Alexandrine is half so long in pronouncing, or expresses labour 
 slowly but strongly surmounting difficulty with the life with which 
 it is done in the second of these lines ? or what metre could go 
 beyond these, from Philarete 
 
 Her true beauty leaves behind 
 
 Apprehensions in my mind 
 
 Of more sweetness, than all art 
 
 Or inventions can impart. 
 
 Thoughts too deep to be express'd, 
 
 And, too strong to be suppress'd.
 
 THE LOKDOKEB. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 ME. REFLECTOR I was born under the shadow of St. 
 Dunstan's steeple, just where the conflux of the eastern 
 and western inhabitants of this twofold city meet and 
 jostle in friendly opposition at Temple Bar. The same 
 day which gave me to the world, saw London happy in 
 the celebration of her great annual feast. This I cannot 
 help looking upon as a lively omen of the future great 
 good-will which I was destined to bear toward the city, 
 resembling in kind that solicitude which every Chief 
 Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever concerns her 
 interests and well-being. Indeed I consider myself in 
 some sort a speculative Lord Mayor of London : for though 
 circumstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of 
 ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and Spital 
 Sermon, yet thus much will I say of myself in truth, that 
 Whittington with his Cat (just emblem of vigilance and a 
 furred gown) never went beyond me in affection, which I 
 bear to the citizens. 
 
 I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has 
 begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, 
 amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from 
 solitude and rural scenes. This aversion was never inter- 
 rupted or suspended, except for a few years in the younger 
 part of my life, during a period in which I had set my 
 affections upon a charming young woman. Every man 
 while the passion is upon him, is for a time at least
 
 302 THE LONDONER. 
 
 addicted to groves and meadows and purling streams. 
 During this short period of my existence, I contracted 
 just familiarity enough with rural objects to understand 
 tolerably well ever after the poets, when they declaim in 
 such passionate terms in favour of a country life. 
 
 For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesita- 
 tion in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up 
 at the pit door of Drury Lane Theatre, just at the hour 
 of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer pleasures, than I 
 could ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep that 
 ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs. 
 
 This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in 
 London. The man must have a rare recipe for melan- 
 choly, who can be dull in Fleet Street. I am naturally 
 inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like 
 all other ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or 
 distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded 
 Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my 
 cheek for unutterable sympathies with the multitudinous 
 moving picture, which she never fails to present at all 
 hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime. 
 
 The very deformities of London, which give distaste to 
 others, from habit do not displease me. The endless suc- 
 cession of shops where Fancy mis-called Folly is supplied 
 with perpetual gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical 
 aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with 
 its proper food. The obliging customer, and the obliged 
 tradesman things which live by bowing, and things 
 which exist but for homage do not affect me with dis- 
 gust ; from habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, 'where 
 other men, more refined, discover meanness : I love the 
 very smoke of London, because it has been the medium 
 most familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of 
 honour at work in the dirty ring which encompasses two 
 combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal 
 justice in the detection of a pick-pocket. The salutary 
 astonishment with which an execution is surveyed, con- 
 vinces me more forcibly than a hundred volumes of abstract
 
 THE LONDONER. 303 
 
 polity, that the universal instinct of man in all ages has 
 leaned to order and good government. 
 
 Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest 
 incidents of a town life, is attained by the same well- 
 natured alchemy, with which the Foresters of Arden, in 
 a beautiful country, 
 
 Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 
 
 Where has spleen her food but in London? Humour, 
 Interest, Curiosity, suck at her measureless breasts with- 
 out a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid her 
 noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been 
 doing all uiy life, if I have not lent out my heart with 
 usury to such scenes ! I am, Sir, your faithful servant, 
 
 A LONDONER.
 
 ON BUEIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE 
 CHARACTEE OF AN UNDERTAKER. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 MR. REFLECTOR I was amused the other day with having 
 the following notice thrust into my hand by a man who 
 gives out bills at the corner of Fleet Market. Whether 
 he saw any prognostics about me, that made him judge 
 such a notice seasonable, I cannot say ; I might perhaps 
 carry in a countenance (naturally not very florid) traces 
 of a fever which had not long left me. Those fellows 
 have a good instinctive way of guessing at the sort of 
 people that are likeliest to pay attention to their papers. 
 
 " BURIAL SOCIETY. 
 
 " A favourable opportunity now offers to any person, of 
 either sex, who would wish to be buried in a genteel 
 manner, by paying one shilling entrance, and twopence 
 per week for the benefit of the stock. Members to be 
 free in six months. The money to be paid at Mr. 
 Middleton's, at the sign of the First and the Last, Stone- 
 cutter's Street, Fleet Market. The deceased to be fur- 
 nished as follows : A strong elm coffin, covered with 
 superfine black, and finished with two rows, all round, 
 close drove, best japanned nails, and adorned with orna- 
 mental drops, a handsome plate of inscription, Angel 
 above, and Flower beneath, and four pair of handsome 
 handles, with wrought gripes ; the coffin to be well
 
 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES, ETC. 305 
 
 pitched, lined, and ruffled with fine crape ; a handsome 
 crape shroud, cap, and pillow. For use, a handsome 
 velvet pall, three gentlemen's cloaks, three crape hatbands, 
 three hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves ; two porters 
 equipped to attend the funeral, a man to attend the same 
 with band and gloves ; also, the burial fees paid, if not 
 exceeding one guinea." 
 
 "Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a noble animal, 
 splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." Whoever 
 drew up this little advertisement, certainly understood 
 this appetite in the species, and has made abundant pro- 
 vision for it. It really almost induces a tcedium vitce 
 upon one to read it. Methinks I could be willing to die, 
 in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close- 
 drove best black japanned nails, how feelingly do they 
 invite and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be 
 fastened down ! what aching head can resist the tempta- 
 tion to repose, which the crape shroud, the cap, and the 
 pillow present 1 what sting is there in death, which the 
 handles with wrought gripes are not calculated to pluck 
 away ? what victory in the grave, which the drops and 
 the velvet pall do not render at least extremely disput- 
 able ? but above all, the pretty emblematic plate with the 
 Angel above and the Flower beneath, takes me mightily. 
 
 The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society 
 has been established but a very few years, upwards of eleven 
 hundred persons have put down their names. It is really 
 an affecting consideration to think of so many poor people, 
 of the industrious and hard-working class (for none but 
 such would be possessed of such a generous forethought) 
 clubbing their twopences to save the reproach of a parish 
 funeral. Many a poor fellow, I dare sware, has that 
 Angel and Flower kept from the Angel and Punchboivl, 
 while, to provide himself a bier, he has curtailed himself 
 of beer. Many a savoury morsel has the living body been 
 deprived of, that the lifeless one might be served up in a 
 richer state to the worms. And sure, if the body could 
 understand the actions of the soul, and entertain generous 
 x
 
 306 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES ; AND THE 
 
 notions of things, it would thank its provident partner, 
 that she had been more solicitous to defend it from dis- 
 honours at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with 
 good things in the time of its union. If Csesar were 
 chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most 
 decently, every Burial Society may be considered as a 
 club of Caesars. 
 
 Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the 
 poorer sort of people, a generous horror of the workhouse 
 more than the manner in which pauper funerals are con- 
 ducted in this metropolis. The coffin nothing but a few 
 naked planks, coarsely put together, the want of a pall 
 (that decent and well-imagined veil, which, hiding the 
 coffin that hides the body, keeps that which would shock 
 us at two removes from us), the coloured coats of the men 
 that are hired, at cheap rates, to carry the body, alto- 
 gether give the notion of the deceased having been some 
 person of an ill-life and conversation, some one who may 
 not claim the entire rites of Christian burial, one by 
 whom some parts of the sacred ceremony would be 
 desecrated if they should be bestowed upon him. I meet 
 these meagre processions sometimes in the street. They 
 are sure to make me out of humour and melancholy all 
 the day after. They have a harsh and ominous aspect. 
 
 If there is anything in the prospectus issued from Mr. 
 Middleton's, Stonecutter's Street, which pleases me less 
 than the rest, it is to find that the six pair of gloves are 
 to be returned, that they are only lent, or, as the bill 
 expresses it, for use, on the occasion. The hood, scarfs, 
 and hatbands, may properly enough be given up after 
 the solemnity : the cloaks no gentleman would think of 
 keeping ; but a pair of gloves, once fitted on, ought not 
 in courtesy to be re-demanded. The wearer should cer- 
 tainly have the fee-simple of them. The cost would be 
 but trifling, and they would be a proper memorial of the 
 day. This part of the Proposal wants reconsidering. It 
 is not conceived in the same liberal way of thinking as 
 the rest. I am also a little doubtful whether the limit,
 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 307 
 
 within which the burial fee is made payable, should not 
 be extended to thirty shillings. 
 
 Some provision too ought undoubtedly to be made in 
 favour of those well-intentioned persons and well-wishers 
 to the fund, who, having all along paid their subscriptions 
 regularly, are so unfortunate as to die before the six 
 months, which would entitle them to their freedom, are 
 quite completed. One can hardly imagine a more dis- 
 tressing case than that of a poor fellow lingering on in a 
 consumption till the period of his freedom is almost in 
 sight, and then finding himself going with a velocity which 
 makes it doubtful whether he shall be entitled to his 
 funeral honours : his quota to which he nevertheless 
 squeezes out, to the diminution of the comforts which 
 sickness demands. I think, in such cases, some of the 
 contribution-money ought to revert. With some such 
 modifications, which might easily be introduced, I see 
 nothing in these Proposals of Mr. Middleton which is not 
 strictly fair and genteel ; and heartily recommend them 
 to all persons of moderate incomes, in either sex, who are 
 willing that this perishable part of them should quit the 
 scene of its mortal activities, with as handsome circum- 
 stances as possible. 
 
 Before I quit the subject, I must guard rny readers 
 against a scandal, which they may be apt to take at the 
 place whence these Proposals purport to be issued. From 
 the sign of the First and the Last, they may conclude 
 that Mr. Middleton is some publican, who, in assembling 
 a club of this description at his house, may have a sinister 
 end of his own, altogether foreign to the solemn purpose 
 for which the club is pretended to be instituted. I must 
 set them right by informing them that the issuer of these 
 Proposals is no publican, though he hangs out a sign, 
 but an honest superintendent of funerals, who, by the 
 device of a Cradle and a Coffin, connecting both ends of 
 human existence together, has most ingeniously contrived 
 to insinuate, that the framers of these first and last re- 
 ceptacles of mankind divide this our life betwixt them,
 
 308 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES ; AND THE 
 
 and that all that passes from the midwife to the under- 
 taker may, in strict propriety, go for nothing : an awful 
 and instructive lesson to human vanity. 
 
 Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands 
 by chance, and appear to have been written about the 
 beginning of the last century, I stumbled, among the rest, 
 upon the following short Essay, which the writer calls 
 " The Character of an Undertaker." It is written with 
 some stiffness and peculiarities of style, but some parts of 
 it, I think, not unaptly characterise the profession to 
 which Mr. Middleton has the honour to belong. The 
 writer doubtless had in his mind the entertaining charac- 
 ter of Sable, in Steele's excellent comedy of the Funeral. 
 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 
 
 " He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourn- 
 ing assemblies, grand marshal at funeral processions, the 
 only true yeoman of the body, over which he exercises a 
 dictatorial authority from the moment that the breath 
 has taken leave to that of its final commitment to the 
 earth. His ministry begins where the physician's, the 
 lawyer's, and the divine's, end. Or if some part of the 
 functions of the latter run parallel with his, it is only in 
 ordine ad spiritualia. His temporalities remain unques- 
 tioned. He is arbitrator of all questions of honour which 
 may concern the defunct ; and upon slight inspection will 
 pronounce how long he may remain in this upper world 
 with credit to himself, and when it will be prudent for his 
 reputation that he should retire. His determination in 
 these points is peremptory and without appeal. Yet, with 
 a modesty peculiar to his profession, he meddles not out of 
 his own sphere. With the good or bad actions of the 
 deceased in his lifetime he has nothing to do. He leaves 
 the friends of the dead man to form their own conjectures 
 as to the place to which the departed spirit is gone. His 
 care is only about the exuviae. He concerns not himself 
 even about the body, as it is a structure of parts internal,
 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 309 
 
 and a wonderful microcosm. He leaves such curious 
 speculations to the anatomy professor. Or, if anything, 
 he is averse to such wanton inquiries, as delighting rather 
 that the parts which he has care of should be returned 
 to their kindred dust in as handsome and unmutilated 
 condition as possible ; that the grave should have its full 
 and unimpaired tribute, a complete and just carcase. 
 Nor is he only careful to provide for the body's entireness, 
 but for its accommodation and ornament. He orders the 
 fashion of its clothes, and designs the symmetry of its 
 dwelling. Its vanity has an innocent survival in him. 
 He is bed-maker to the dead. The pillows which he lays 
 never rumple. The day of interment is the theatre in 
 which he displays the mysteries of his art. It is hard 
 to describe what he is, or rather to tell what he is not, on 
 that day : for, being neither kinsman, servant, nor friend, 
 he is all in turns ; a transcendant, running through all 
 those relations. His office is to supply the place of self- 
 agency in the family, who are presumed incapable of it 
 through grief. He is eyes, and ears, and hands, to the 
 whole household. A draught of wine cannot go round 
 to the mourners, but he must minister it. A chair may 
 hardly be restored to its place by a less solemn hand than 
 his. He takes upon himself all functions, and is a sort 
 of ephemeral major-domo ! He distributes his attentions 
 among the company assembled according to the degree of 
 affliction, which he calculates from the degree of kin to the 
 deceased ; and marshals them accordingly in the proces- 
 sion. He himself is of a sad and tristful countenance ; 
 yet such as (if well examined) is not without some show 
 of patience and resignation at bottom : prefiguring, as it 
 were, to the friends of the deceased, what their grief shall 
 be when the hand of Time shall have softened and taken 
 down the bitterness of their first anguish ; so handsomely 
 can he fore -shape and anticipate the work of Time. 
 Lastly, with his wand, as with another divining rod, he 
 calculates the depth of earth at which the bones of the 
 dead man may rest, which he ordinarily contrives may be
 
 310 ON BURIAL SOCIETIES, ETC. 
 
 at such a distance from the surface of this earth, as may 
 frustrate the profane attempts of such as would violate 
 his repose, yet sufficiently on this side the centre to give 
 his friends hopes of an easy and practicable resurrection. 
 And here we leave him, casting in dust to dust, which is 
 the last friendly office that he undertakes to do." 
 
 Begging your pardon for detaining you so long among 
 "graves, and worms, and epitaphs," I am, Sir, your 
 humble servant, 
 
 MORITURUS.
 
 OX THE 
 
 DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL 
 WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY; 
 
 WITH A HINT TO THOSE WHO HAVE THE TEAMING OP AD- 
 VERTISEMENTS FOE APPEEHENDING OFFENDEES. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 ME. REFLECTOR There is no science in their pretensions 
 to which mankind are more apt to commit grievous 
 mistakes, than in the supposed very obvious one of 
 physiognomy. I quarrel not with the principles of this 
 science, as they are laid down by learned professors ; 
 much less am I disposed, with some people, to deny its 
 existence altogether as any inlet of knowledge that can 
 be depended upon. I believe that there is, or may be, 
 an art to "read the mind's construction in the face." 
 But, then, in every species of reading, so much depends 
 upon the eyes of the reader ; if they are blear, or apt to 
 dazzle, or inattentive, or strained with too much attention, 
 the optic power will infallibly bring home false reports 
 of what it reads. How often do we say, upon a cursory 
 glance at a stranger, what a fine open countenance he 
 has, who, upon second inspection, proves to have the 
 exact features of a knave. Nay, in much more intimate 
 acquaintances, how a delusion of this kind shall continue 
 for months, years, and then break up all at once.
 
 312 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING 
 
 Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short 
 space of time, if those blue eyes where, during so many 
 years of anxious courtship, truth, sweetness, serenity, 
 seemed to be written in characters which could not be 
 misunderstood ask him if the characters which they 
 now convey be exactly the same ? if for truth he does 
 not read a dull virtue (the mimic of constancy) which 
 changes not, only because it wants the judgment to make 
 a preference 1 if for sweetness he does not read a stupid 
 habit of looking pleased at everything; if for serenity 
 he does not read animal tranquillity, the dead pool of the 
 heart, which no breeze of passion can stir into health 1 
 Alas ! what is this book of the countenance good for, 
 which when we have read so long, and thought that we 
 understood its contents, there comes a countless list of 
 heart-breaking errata at the end ! 
 
 But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone 
 is subject. I have inadvertently wandered from my 
 purpose, which was to expose quite an opposite blunder, 
 into which we are no less apt to fall, through hate. How 
 ugly a person looks upon whose reputation some awkward 
 aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his countenance clears 
 up with his character. I remember being persuaded of 
 a man whom I had conceived an ill opinion of, that he 
 had a very bad set of teeth ; which, since I have had 
 better opportunities of being acquainted with his face and 
 facts, I find to have been the very reverse of the truth. 
 That crooked old woman, I once said, speaking of an 
 ancient gentlewoman, whose actions did not square alto- 
 gether with my notions of the rule of right. The unani- 
 mous surprise of the company before whom I uttered these 
 words, soon convinced me that I had confounded mental 
 with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous 
 about the old lady but her deeds. 
 
 This humour of mankind to deny personal comeliness 
 to those with whose moral attributes they are dissatisfied, 
 is very strongly shewn in those advertisements, which 
 stare us in the face from the walls of every street, and,
 
 MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY. 313 
 
 with the tempting bait which they hang forth, stimulate 
 at once cupidity and an abstract love of justice in the 
 breast of every passing peruser ; I mean, the advertise- 
 ments offering rewards for the apprehension of absconded 
 culprits, strayed apprentices, bankrupts who have conveyed 
 away their effects, debtors that have run away from their 
 bail. I observe, that in exact proportion to the indignity 
 with which the prosecutor, who is commonly the framer 
 of the advertisement, conceives he has been treated, the 
 personal pretensions of the fugitive are denied, and his 
 defects exaggerated. 
 
 A fellow, whose misdeeds have been directed against 
 the public in general, and in whose delinquency no in- 
 dividual shall feel himself particularly interested, generally 
 meets with fair usage. A coiner or a smuggler shall get 
 off tolerably well. His beauty, if he has any, is not much 
 underrated, his deformities are not much magnified. A 
 runaway apprentice, who excites perhaps the next least 
 degree of spleen in his prosecutor, generally escapes with 
 a pair of bandy legs ; if he has taken anything with him 
 in his flight, a hitch in his gait is generally superadded. 
 A bankrupt, who has been guilty of withdrawing his 
 effects, if his case be not very atrocious, commonly meets 
 with mild usage. But a debtor who has left his bail in 
 jeopardy, is sure to be described in characters of unmingled 
 deformity. Here the personal feelings of the bail, which 
 may be allowed to be somewhat poignant, are admitted 
 to interfere ; and, as wrath and revenge commonly strike 
 in the dark, the colours are laid on with a grossness 
 which I am convinced must often defeat its own purpose. 
 The fish that casts an inky cloud about him that his 
 enemies may not find him, cannot more obscure himself 
 by that device than the blackening representations of 
 these angry advertisers must inevitably serve to cloak and 
 screen the persons of those who have injured them from 
 detection. I have before me at this moment one of these 
 bills, which runs thus ;
 
 314 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING 
 
 " Fifty Pounds Reward. 
 
 "Run away from his bail, John Tomkins, formerly 
 resident in Princes Street, Soho, but lately of Clerken- 
 well. Whoever shall apprehend, or cause to be appre- 
 hended and lodged in one of his Majesty's jails, the 
 said John Tomkins, shall receive the above reward. 
 He is a thickset, sturdy man, about five foot six inches 
 high, halts in his left leg, with a stoop in his gait, with 
 coarse red hair, nose short and cocked up, with little 
 gray eyes, one of them bears the effect of a blow which 
 he has lately received, with a pot belly, speaks with a 
 thick and disagreeable voice, goes shabbily dressed, had 
 on when he went away, a greasy shag greatcoat with 
 rusty yellow buttons." 
 
 Now, although it is not out of the compass of possibility 
 that John Tomkins aforesaid may comprehend in his 
 agreeable person all the above-mentioned aggregate of 
 charms; yet, from my observation of the manner in 
 which these advertisements are usually drawn up, though 
 I have not the pleasure of knowing the gentleman, yet 
 would I lay a wager, that an advertisement to the follow- 
 ing effect would have a much better chance of apprehending 
 and laying by the heels this John Tomkius than the 
 above description, although penned by one who, from the 
 good services which he appears to have done for him, 
 has not improbably been blessed with some years of 
 previous intercourse with the said John. Taking, then, 
 the above advertisement to be true, or nearly so, down 
 to the words "left leg" inclusive (though I have some 
 doubt if the blemish there implied amount to a positive 
 lameness, or be perceivable by any but the nearest friends 
 of John) I would proceed thus : 
 
 " Leans a little forward in his walk, his hair thick 
 and inclining to auburn, his nose of the middle size, a little 
 turned up at the end, lively hazel eyes (the contusion, as 
 its effects are probably gone off by this time, I judge 
 better omitted), inclines to be corpulent, his voice thick
 
 MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY. 315 
 
 but pleasing, especially when he sings, had on a decent 
 shag greatcoat with yellow buttons." 
 
 Now, I would stake a considerable wager (though by 
 no means a positive man) that some such mitigated de- 
 scription would lead the beagles of the law into a much 
 surer track for finding this ungracious varlet, than to set 
 them upon a false scent after fictitious ugliness and 
 fictitious shabbiness; though, to do those gentlemen 
 justice, I have no doubt their experience has taught them 
 in all such cases to abate a great deal of the deformity 
 which they are instructed to expect ; and has discovered 
 to them, that the Devil's agents upon this earth, like their 
 master, are far less ugly in reality than they are painted. 
 
 I am afraid, Mr. Reflector, that I shall be thought 
 to have gone wide of my subject, which was to detect 
 the practical errors of physiognomy, properly so called ; 
 whereas I have introduced physical defects, such as lame- 
 ness, the effects of accidents upon a man's person, his 
 wearing apparel, etc., as circumstances on which the eye 
 of dislike, looking askance, may report erroneous con- 
 clusions to the understanding. But if we are liable, 
 through a kind, or an unkind passion, to mistake so 
 grossly concerning things so exterior and palpable, how 
 much more are we likely to err respecting those nicer 
 and less perceptible hints of character in a face, whose 
 detection constitutes the triumph of the physiognomist 1 
 
 To revert to those bestowers of unmerited deformity, 
 the framers of advertisements for the apprehension of 
 delinquents, a sincere desire of promoting the ends of 
 public justice induces me to address a word to them on 
 the best means of attaining those ends. I will endeavour 
 to lay down a few practical, or rather negative, rules for 
 their use, for my ambition extends no further than to 
 arm them with cautions against the self-defeating of their 
 own purposes : 
 
 1. Imprimis, then, Mr. Advertiser ! If the culprit 
 whom you are willing to recover be one to whom in 
 times past you have shewn kindness, and been disposed
 
 316 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING 
 
 to think kindly of him yourself, but he has deceived your 
 trust, and has run away, and left you with a load of debt 
 to answer for him, sit down calmly, and endeavour to 
 behold him through the spectacles of memory rather 
 than of present conceit. Image to yourself, before you 
 pen a tittle of his description, the same plausible, good- 
 looking man who took you in ; and try to put away 
 from your mind every intrusion of that deceitful spectre 
 which perpetually obtrudes itself in the room of your 
 former friend's known visage. It will do you more 
 credit to have been deceived by such a one ; and depend 
 upon it, the traitor will convey to the eyes of the world 
 in general much more of that first idea which you formed 
 (perhaps in part erroneous) of his physiognomy, than of 
 that frightful substitute which you have suffered to creep 
 in upon your mind and usurp upon it ; a creature which 
 has no archetype except in your own brain. 
 
 2. If you be a master that have to advertise a runaway 
 apprentice, though the young dog's faults are known only 
 to you, and no doubt his conduct has been aggravating 
 enough, do not presently set him down as having crooked 
 ankles. He may have a good pair of legs, and run away 
 notwithstanding. Indeed, the latter does rather seem to 
 imply the former. 
 
 3. If the unhappy person against whom your laudable 
 vengeance is directed be a thief, think that a thief may 
 have a good nose, good eyes, good ears. It is indis- 
 pensable to his profession that he be possessed of sagacity, 
 foresight, vigilance ; it is more than probable, then, that 
 he is endued with the bodily types or instruments of these 
 qualities to some tolerable degree of perfectness. 
 
 4. If petty larceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not 
 confound meanness of crime with diminutiveness of stature. 
 These things have no connection. I have known a tall 
 man stoop to the basest action, a short man aspire to 
 the height of crime, a fair man be guilty of the foulest 
 actions, etc. 
 
 5. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some
 
 MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY. 317 
 
 atrocious and aggravated murder. Here is the most 
 difficult case of all. It is above all requisite, that such 
 a daring violator of the peace and safety of society should 
 meet with his reward, a violent and ignominious death. 
 But how shall we get at him 1 Who is there among us, 
 that has known him before he committed the offence, 
 that shall take upon him to say he can sit down coolly 
 and pen a dispassionate description of a murderer 1 
 The tales of our nursery, the reading of our youth, 
 the ill-looking man that was hired by the Uncle to de- 
 spatch the Children in the Wood, the grim ruffians who 
 smothered the babes in the Tower, the black and beetle- 
 browed assassin of Mrs. Ratcliffe, the shag-haired villain 
 of Mr. Monk Lewis, the Tarquin tread, and mill-stone 
 dropping eyes, of Murder in Shakspere, the exaggerations 
 of picture and of poetry, what we have read and what 
 we have dreamed of, rise up and crowd in upon us such 
 eye-scaring portraits of the man of blood, that our pen 
 is absolutely forestalled ; we commence poets when we 
 should play the part of strictest historians, and the veiy 
 blackness of horror which the deed calls up, serves as a 
 cloud to screen the doer. The. fiction is blameless, it is 
 accordant with those wise prejudices with which nature 
 has guarded our innocence, as with impassable barriers, 
 against the commission of such appalling crimes ; but, 
 meantime, the criminal escapes ; or if, owing to that 
 wise abatement in their expectation of deformity, which, 
 as I hinted at before, the officers of pursuit never fail to 
 make, and no doubt in cases of this sort they make a 
 more than ordinary allowance, if, owing to this or any 
 accident, the offender is caught and brought to his trial, 
 who that has been led out of curiosity to witness such a 
 scene, has not with astonishment reflected on the difference 
 between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of 
 one which he has been collecting and heightening all his 
 life out of books, dreams, etc. The fellow, perhaps, is a 
 sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eye-brows, 
 the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag, and
 
 318 ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL, ETC. 
 
 with none of those marks which our fancy had pre- 
 bestowed upon him. 
 
 I find I am getting unawares too serious ; the best way 
 on such occasions is, to leave off, which I shall do by 
 generally recommending to all prosecuting advertisers 
 not to confound crimes with ugliness ; or rather, to 
 distinguish between that physiognomical deformity, which 
 I am willing to grant always accompanies crime, and 
 mere physical ugliness^ which signifies nothing, is the 
 exponent of nothing, and may exist in a good or bad 
 person indifferently. 
 
 CE.ITO.
 
 ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING 
 EEOM BEINGS HANGED 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector. 
 
 SIR I am one of those unhappy persons whose misfor- 
 tunes, it seems, do not entitle them to the benefit of pure 
 pity. All that is bestowed upon me of that kindest 
 alleviator of human miseries, conies dashed with a double 
 portion of contempt. My griefs have nothing in them 
 that is felt as sacred by the bystanders. Yet is my 
 affliction in truth of the deepest grain. The heaviest task 
 that was ever given to mortal patience to sustain. Time, 
 that wears out all other sorrows, can never modify or 
 soften mine. Here they must continue to gnaw, as long 
 as that fatal mark 
 
 Why was I ever born 1 Why was innocence in my 
 person suffered to be branded with a stain which was 
 appointed only for the blackest guilt 1 What had I done, 
 or my parents, that a disgrace of mine should involve a 
 whole posterity in infamy 1 ? I am almost tempted to 
 believe, that, in some pre-existent state, crimes to which 
 this sublunary life of mine hath been as much a stranger 
 as the babe that is newly born into it, have drawn down 
 upon me this vengeance, so disproportionate to my actions 
 on this globe. 
 
 My brain sickens, and my bosom labours to be delivered 
 of the weight that presses upon it, yet my conscious pen 
 shrinks from the avowal. But out it must
 
 320 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 0, Mr. Reflector ! guess at the wretch's misery who 
 now writes this to you, when, with tears and burning 
 blushes, he is obliged to confess, that he has been 
 
 HANGED 
 
 Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from 
 you, as your imagination presents to you fearful images of 
 your correspondent unknown, hanged ! 
 
 Fear not, Mr. Editor. No disembodied spirit has the 
 honour of addressing you. I am flesh and blood, an un- 
 fortunate system of bones, muscles, sinews, arteries, like 
 yourself. 
 
 Then, I presume, you mean to be pleasant That ex- 
 pression of yours, Mr. Correspondent, must be taken some- 
 how in a metaphorical sense 
 
 In the plainest sense, without trope or figure Yes, 
 Mr. Editor ! this neck of mine has felt the fatal noose, 
 these hands have tremblingly held up the corroborative 
 prayer-book, these lips have sucked the moisture of the 
 last consolatory orange, this tongue has chanted the 
 doleful cantata which no performer was ever called upon 
 to repeat, this face has had the veiling night-cap drawn 
 over it 
 
 But for no crime of mine. Far be it from me to arraign 
 the justice of my country, which, though tardy, did at 
 length recognise my innocence. It is not for me to reflect 
 upon judge or jury, now that eleven years have elapsed 
 since the erroneous sentence was pronounced. Men will 
 always be fallible, and perhaps circumstances did appear 
 at the time a little strong 
 
 Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes (as 
 the spectators were pleased to compute it, a man that 
 is being strangled, I know from experience, has altogether a 
 different measure of time from his friends who are breath- 
 ing leisurely about him, I suppose the minutes lengthen 
 as time approaches eternity, in the same manner as the 
 miles get longer as you travel northward ), after hanging 
 four minutes, according to the best calculation of the 
 bystanders, a reprieve came, and I was cut DOWN
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 321 
 
 Really I am ashamed of deforming your pages with 
 these technical phrases if I knew how to express my 
 meaning shorter 
 
 But to proceed. My first care after I had been brought 
 to myself by the usual methods (those methods that are 
 so interesting to the operator and his assistants, who are 
 pretty numerous on such occasions, but which no patient 
 was ever desirous of undergoing a second time for the 
 benefit of science), my first care was to provide myself 
 with an enormous stock or cravat to hide the place you 
 understand me ; my next care was to procure a residence 
 as distant as possible from that part of the country where 
 I had suffered. For that reason I chose the metropolis, 
 as the place where wounded honour (I had been told) 
 could lurk with the least danger of exciting inquiry, and 
 stigmatised innocence had the best chance of hiding her 
 disgrace in a crowd. I sought out a new circle of ac- 
 quaintance, and my circumstances happily enabling me to 
 pursue my fancy in that respect, I endeavoured, by 
 mingling in all the pleasures which the town affords, to 
 efface the memory of what I had undergone. 
 
 But, alas ! such is the portentous and all-pervading 
 chain of connection which links together the head and mem- 
 bers of this great community, my scheme of lying perdu 
 was defeated almost at the outset. A countryman of mine, 
 whom a foolish lawsuit had brought to town, by chance 
 met me, and the secret was soon blazoned about. 
 
 In a short time, I found myself deserted by most of 
 those who had been my intimate friends. Not that any 
 guilt was supposed to attach to my character. My officious 
 countryman, to do him justice, had been candid enough 
 to explain my perfect innocence. But, somehow or other, 
 there is a want of strong virtue in mankind. We have 
 plenty of the softer instincts, but the heroic character is 
 gone. How else can I account for it, that of all my 
 numerous acquaintance, among whom I had the honour 
 of ranking sundry persons of education, talents, and 
 worth, scarcely here and there one or two could be found, 
 Y
 
 322 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 who had the courage to associate with a man that had 
 been hanged. 
 
 Those few who did not desert me altogether, were 
 persons of strong but coarse minds; and from the absence 
 of all delicacy in them I suffered almost as much as from 
 the superabundance of a false species of it in the others. 
 Those who stuck by me were the jokers, who thought 
 themselves entitled by the fidelity which they had shewn 
 towards me to use me with what familiarity they pleased. 
 Many and unfeeling are the jests that I have suffered 
 from these rude (because faithful) Achateses. As they 
 passed me in the streets, one would nod significantly to 
 his companion and say, pointing to me, " smoke his 
 cravat," and ask me if I had got a wen, that I was so 
 solicitous to cover my neck. Another would inquire, 
 What news from * * * Assizes ? (which you may guess, 
 Mr. Editor, was the scene of my shame), and whether the 
 sessions was like to prove a maiden one ? A third would 
 offer to ensure me from drowning. A fourth would tease 
 me with inquiries how I felt when I was swinging, 
 whether I had not something like a blue flame dancing 
 before my eyes ? A fifth took a fancy never to call me 
 anything but Lazarus. And an eminent bookseller and 
 publisher, who, in his zeal to present the public with 
 new facts, had he lived in those days, I am confident, 
 would not have scrupled waiting upon the person himself 
 last mentioned, at the most critical period of his existence, 
 to solicit a few facts relative to resuscitation, had the 
 modesty to offer me * * guineas per sheet, if I would 
 write, in his Magazine, a physiological account of my 
 feelings upon coming to myself. 
 
 But these were evils which a moderate fortitude might 
 have enabled me to struggle with. Alas ! Mr. Editor, 
 the women, whose good graces I had always most 
 assiduously cultivated, from whose softer minds I had 
 hoped a more delicate and generous sympathy than I found 
 in the men, the women began to shun me this was the 
 uukindest blow of all.
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 323 
 
 But is it to be wondered at? How couldst thou 
 imagine, wretchedest of beings, that that tender creature 
 Serephina would fling her pretty arms about that neck 
 which previous circumstances had rendered infamous 1 
 That she would put up with the refuse of the rope, the 
 leavings of the cord 1 Or that any analogy could subsist 
 between the knot which binds true lovers, and the knot 
 which ties malefactors ? 
 
 I can forgive that pert baggage Flirtilla, who, when I 
 complimented her one day on the execution which her 
 eyes had done, replied, that, to be sure, Mr. * * was a 
 judge of those things. But from thy more exalted mind, 
 Celestina, I expected a more unprejudiced decision. 
 
 The person whose true name I conceal under this ap- 
 pellation, of all the women that I was ever acquainted 
 with, had the most manly turn of mind, which she had 
 improved by reading and the best conversation. Her 
 understanding was not more masculine than her manners 
 and whole disposition were delicately and truly feminine. 
 She was the daughter of an officer who had fallen in the 
 service of his country, leaving his widow and Celestina, 
 an only child, with a fortune sufficient to set them above 
 want, but not to enable them to live in splendour. I had 
 the mother's permission to pay my addresses to the young 
 lady, and Celestina seemed to approve of my suit. 
 
 Often and often have I poured out my overcharged soul 
 in the presence of Celestina, complaining of the hard and 
 imfeeliiig prejudices of the world, and the sweet maid has 
 again and again declared, that no irrational prejudice 
 should hinder her from esteeming every man according to 
 his intrinsic worth. Often has she repeated the consola- 
 tory assurance, that she could never consider as essen- 
 tially ignominious an accident, which was indeed to be 
 deprecated, but which might have happened to the most 
 innocent of mankind. Then would she set forth some 
 illustrious example, which her reading easily furnished, of 
 a Phocion or a Socrates unjustly condemned ; of a Raleigh 
 or a Sir Thomas More, to whom late posterity had done
 
 324 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 justice ; and by soothing my fancy with some such agree- 
 able parallel, she would make me almost to triumph in 
 my disgrace, and convert my shame into glory. 
 
 In such entertaining and instructive conversations the 
 time passed on, till I importunately urged the mistress of 
 my affections to name a day for our union. To this she 
 obligingly consented, and I thought myself the happiest 
 of mankind. But how was I surprised one morning on 
 the receipt of the following billet from my charmer : 
 
 SIR You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse 
 failing, ingratitude, if, with anguish of heart, I feel myself 
 compelled by irresistible arguments to recall a vow which 
 I fear I made with too little consideration. I never can 
 be yours. The reasons of my decision, which is final, are 
 in my own breast, and you must everlastingly remain a 
 stranger to them. Assure yourself that I can never cease 
 to esteem you as I ought. CELESTINA. 
 
 At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to 
 Celestina's lodgings, where I learned, to my infinite morti- 
 fication, that the mother and daughter were set off on a 
 journey to a distant part of the country, to visit a rela- 
 tion, and were not expected to return in less than four 
 months. 
 
 Stunned by this blow, which left me without the 
 courage to solicit an explanation by letter, even if I had 
 known where they were (for the particular address was 
 industriously concealed from me), I waited with im- 
 patience the termination of the period, in the vain hope 
 that I might be permitted to have a chance of softening 
 the harsh decision by a personal interview with Celestina 
 after her return. But before three months were at an 
 end, I learned from the newspapers, that my beloved had 
 given her hand to another ! 
 
 Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to 
 account for the strange step which she had taken ; and it 
 was not till some years after that I learned the true reason
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 325 
 
 from a female relation of hers, to whom it seems Celestina 
 had confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit of 
 mine that had caused her to break off the match so 
 abruptly, nor any preference which she might feel for any 
 other person, for she preferred me (she was pleased to 
 say) to all mankind ; but when she came to lay the matter 
 closer to her heart, she found that she never should be 
 able to bear the sight (I give you her very words as they 
 were detailed to me by her relation) the sight of a man 
 in a nightcap, who had appeared on a public platform, 
 it would lead to such a disagreeable association of ideas ! 
 And to this punctilio I was sacrificed. 
 
 To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, 
 to which this last and heaviest might well render me 
 callous, behold me here, Mr. Editor ! in the thirty-seventh 
 year of my existence (the twelfth, reckoning from my re- 
 animation), cut off from all respectable connections, re- 
 jected by the fairer half of the community, who in my 
 case alone seemed to have laid aside the characteristic 
 pity of their sex ; punished because I was once punished 
 unjustly ; suffering for no other reason than because I 
 once had the misfortune to suffer without any cause at all. 
 In no other country, I think, but this, could a man have 
 been subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his 
 innocence had been clearly established. 
 
 Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in 
 the horrible dungeons of the Inquisition, had I heaved 
 myself up from a half bastinado in China, or been torn 
 from the just-entering, ghastly impaling stake in Barbary, 
 had I dropped alive from the knout in Russia, or come 
 off with a gashed neck from the half-mortal, scarce-in- 
 time-retracted scimitar of an executioneering slave in 
 Turkey,- I might have borne about the remnant of this 
 frame (the mangled trophy of reprieved innocence) with 
 credit to myself in any one of those barbarous countries. 
 No scorn, at least, would have mingled with the pity 
 (small as it might be) with which what was left of me 
 would have been surveyed.
 
 326 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 The singularity of my case has often led me to inquire 
 into the reasons of the general levity with which the sub- 
 ject of hanging is treated as a topic in this country. I 
 say as a topic : for let the very persons who speak so 
 lightly of the thing at a distance be brought to view the 
 real scene, let the platform be bona fide exhibited, and 
 the trembling culprit brought forth, the case is changed; 
 but as a topic of conversation, I appeal to the vulgar 
 jokes which pass current in every street. But why men- 
 tion them, when the politest authors have agreed in 
 making use of this subject as a source of the ridiculous ? 
 Swift, and Pope, and Prior, are fond of recurring to it. 
 Gay has built an entire drama upon this single founda- 
 tion. The whole interest of the Beggar's Opera may 
 be said to hang upon it. To such writers as Fielding and 
 Smollett it is a perfect bon bouche. Hear the facetious 
 Tom Brown, in his Comical View of London and West- 
 minster, describe the Order of the Show at one of the 
 Tyburn Executions in his time : " Mr. Ordinary visits 
 his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight. Doleful pro- 
 cession up Holborn Hill about eleven. Men handsome 
 and proper that were never thought so before, which is 
 some comfort, however. Arrive at the fatal place by 
 twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and Sabbath -breaking, 
 repented of. Some few penitential drops fall under the 
 gallows. Sheriffs men, parson, pickpockets, criminals, all 
 very busy. The last concluding peremptory psalm struck 
 up. Show over by one." In this sportive strain does 
 this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so 
 serious, which yet he would hardly have done, if he had 
 not known that there existed a predisposition in the 
 habits of his unaccountable countrymen to consider the 
 subject as a jest. But what shall we say to Shakspere, 
 who (not to mention the solution which the Graved igger 
 in Hamlet gives of his fellow-workman's problem), in 
 that scene in Measure for Measure, where the Clown calls 
 upon Master Barnardine to get up and be hanged, which 
 he declines on the score of being sleepy, has actually gone
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 327 
 
 out of his way to gratify this amiable propensity in his 
 countrymen ; for it is plain, from the use that was to be 
 made of his head, and from Abhorson's asking, " Is the 
 axe upon the block, sirrah 1" that beheading, and not 
 hanging, was the punishment to which Barnardine was 
 destined. But Shakspere knew that the axe and block 
 were pregnant with no ludicrous images, and therefore 
 falsified the historic truth of his own drama (if I may so 
 speak) rather than he would leave out such excellent 
 matter for a jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in 
 mid-air has been ever esteemed to be by Englishmen. 
 
 One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude 
 itself into our contemplations upon this mode of death, I 
 suppose to be, the absurd posture into which a man is 
 thrown who is condemned to dance, as the vulgar delight 
 to express it, upon nothing. To see him whisking and 
 wavering in the air, 
 
 As the wind you know will wave a man ; l 
 
 to behold the vacant carcase, from which the life is newly 
 dislodged, shifting between earth and heaven, the sport of 
 every gust ; like a weathercock, serving to shew from 
 which point the wind blows ; like a maukin, fit only to 
 scare away birds ; like a nest left to swing upon a bough 
 when the bird is flown ; these are uses to which we can- 
 not without a mixture of spleen and contempt behold the 
 human carcase reduced. We string up dogs, foxes, bats, 
 moles, weasels. Man surely deserves a steadier death. 
 
 Another reason why the ludicrous associates more 
 forcibly with this than with any other mode of punish- 
 ment, I cannot help thinking to be, the senseless costume 
 with which old prescription has thought fit to clothe the 
 exit of malefactors in this country. Let a man do what 
 he will to abstract from his imagination all idea of the 
 whimsical, something of it will come across him when he 
 contemplates the figure of a fellow-creature in the day- 
 time (in however distressing a situation) in a nightcap. 
 
 1 Hieronirao in the Spanish Tragedy.
 
 328 ON THE INCONVENIENCES 
 
 Whether it be that this nocturnal addition has something 
 discordant with daylight, or that it is the dress which we 
 are seen in at those times when we are " seen," as the 
 Angel in Milton expresses it, "least wise;" this I am 
 afraid will always be the case ; unless indeed, as in my 
 instance, some strong personal feeling overpower the 
 ludicrous altogether. To me, when I reflect upon the 
 train of misfortunes which have pursued me through life, 
 owing to that accursed drapery, the cap presents as purely 
 frightful an object as the sleeveless yellow coat and devil- 
 painted mitre of the San Benitos. An ancestor of mine, 
 who suffered for his loyalty in the time of the civil wars, 
 was so sensible of the truth of what I am here advancing, 
 that on the morning of execution, no entreaties could 
 prevail upon him to submit to the odious dishabille, as he 
 called it, but he insisted upon wearing, and actually 
 suffered in, the identical flowing periwig -which he is 
 painted in, in the gallery belonging to my uncle's seat 
 in shire. 
 
 Suffer me, Mr. Editor, before I quit the subject, to say 
 a word or two respecting the minister of justice in this 
 country ; in plain words, I mean the hangman. It has 
 always appeared to me that, in the mode of inflicting 
 capital punishments with us, there is too much of the 
 ministry of the human hand. The guillotine, as perform- 
 ing its functions more of itself and sparing human agency, 
 though a cruel and disgusting exhibition, in my mind, has 
 many ways the advantage over our way. In beheading, 
 indeed, as it was formerly practised in England, and in 
 whipping to death, as is sometimes practised now, the 
 hand of man is no doubt sufficiently busy ; but there is 
 something less repugnant in these downright blows than 
 in the officious barber-like ministerings of the oilier. To 
 have a fellow with his hangman's hands fumbling about 
 your collar, adjusting the thing as your valet would 
 regulate your cravat, valuing himself on his menial 
 dexterity 
 
 I never shall forget meeting my rascal, I mean the
 
 RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED. 329 
 
 fellow who officiated for me, in London last winter. I 
 think I see him now, in a waistcoat that had been mine, 
 smirking along as if he knew me 
 
 In some parts of Germany, that fellow's office is bylaw 
 declared infamous, and his posterity incapable of being 
 ennobled. They have hereditary hangmen, or had at 
 least, in the same manner as they had hereditary other 
 great officers of state ; and the hangman's families of two 
 adjoining parishes intermarried with each other to keep 
 the breed entire. I wish something of the same kind 
 were established in England. 
 
 But it is time to quit a subject which teems with 
 disagreeable images 
 
 Permit me to subscribe myself, Mr. Editor, Your 
 unfortunate friend, 
 
 PENSILIS.
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 
 
 Sedet, ajternumque sedebit, 
 Infelix Theseus. VIRGIL. 
 
 THAT there is a professional melancholy, if I may so 
 express myself, incident to the occupation of a tailor, is 
 a fact which I think very few will venture to dispute. 
 I may safely appeal to my readers, whether they ever 
 knew one of that faculty that was not of a temperament, 
 to say the least, far removed from mercurial or jovial. 
 
 Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The 
 peacock is not more tender, from a consciousness of his 
 peculiar infirmity, than a gentleman of this profession is 
 of being known by the same infallible testimonies of his 
 occupation. "Walk, that I may know thee." 
 
 Do you ever see him go whistling along the footpath 
 like a carman, or brush through a crowd like a baker, or 
 go smiling to himself like a lover? Is he forward to 
 thrust into mobs, or to make one at the ballad-singer's 
 audiences 1 Does he not rather slink by assemblies and 
 meetings of the people, as one that wisely declines popular 
 observation 1 
 
 How extremely rare is a noisy tailor ! a mirthful and 
 obstreperous tailor ! 
 
 "At my nativity," says Sir Thomas Browne, "my 
 ascendant was the earthly sign of Scorpius ; I was born 
 in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a 
 piece of that leaden planet in me." One would think 
 that he were anatomising a tailor ! save that to the latter's 
 occupation, methinks, a woollen planet would seem more
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 331 
 
 consonant, and that he should be born when the sun was 
 in Aries. He goes on. "I am no way facetious, nor 
 disposed for the mirth and galliardise of company." How 
 true a type of the whole trade ! Eminently economical 
 of his words, you shall seldom hear a jest come from one 
 of them. He sometimes furnishes subject for a repartee, 
 but rarely (I think) contributes one ore proprio. 
 
 Drink itself does not seem to elevate him, or at least 
 to call out of him any of the external indications of 
 vanity. I cannot say that it never causes his pride to 
 swell, but it never breaks out. I am even fearful that it 
 may swell and rankle to an alarming degree inwardly. 
 For pride is near of kin to melancholy; a hurtful 
 obstruction from the ordinary outlets of vanity being 
 shut. It is this stoppage which engenders proud humours. 
 Therefore a tailor may be proud. I think he is never 
 vain. The display of his gaudy patterns in that book 
 of his which emulates the rainbow, never raises any 
 inflations of that emotion in him, corresponding to what 
 the wig-maker (for instance) evinces, when he expatiates 
 on a curl or a bit of hair. He spreads them forth with 
 a sullen incapacity for pleasure, a real or affected indiffer- 
 ence to grandeur. Cloth of gold neither seems to elate, 
 nor cloth of frize to depress him according to the beauti- 
 ful motto which formed the modest impresse of the shield 
 worn by Charles Brandon at his marriage with the king's 
 sister. Nay, I doubt whether he would discover any 
 vain-glorious complacence in his colours, though " Iris " 
 herself "dipt the woof." 
 
 In further corroboration of this argument who ever 
 saw the wedding of a tailor announced in the newspapers, 
 or the birth of his eldest son 1 
 
 When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be 
 himself a good dancer, or to perform exquisitely on the 
 tight rope, or to shine in any such light and airy pastimes 1 
 to sing, or play on the violin 1 
 
 Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, 
 ringing of bells, firing of cannons, etc. *?
 
 332 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 
 
 Valiant I know they can be ; but I appeal to those 
 who were witnesses to the exploits of Eliot's famous 
 troop, whether in their fiercest charges they betrayed any- 
 thing of that thoughtless oblivion of death with which a 
 Frenchman jigs into battle, or whether they did not shew 
 more of the melancholy valour of the Spaniard, upon 
 whom they charged ; that deliberate courage which con- 
 templation and sedentary habits breathe ? 
 
 Are they often great newsmongers ? I have known 
 some few among them arrive at the dignity of speculative 
 politicians ; but that light and cheerful every-day interest 
 in the affairs and goings-on of the world, which makes 
 the barber 1 such delightful company, I think is rarely 
 observable in them. 
 
 This characteristic pensiveness in them being so not- 
 orious, I wonder none of those writers, who have expressly 
 treated of melancholy, should have mentioned it. Burton, 
 whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in 
 that kind who preceded him, and who treats of every 
 species of this malady, from the hypochondriacal or windy 
 to the fieroical or love melancholy, has strangely omitted 
 it. Shakspere himself has overlooked it. "I have neither 
 the scholar's melancholy (saith Jaques) which is emula- 
 tion ; nor the courtier's, which is proud ; nor the soldier's, 
 which is politic ; nor the lover's, which is all these : " 
 
 1 Having incidentally mentioned the barber, in a comparison of 
 professional temperaments, I hope no other trade will take offence, 
 or look upon it as an incivility done to them, if I say, that in 
 courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces 
 which "gladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his. 
 Indeed so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful and 
 agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court 
 (where the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps 
 at the universities) there are seven of them to whom I am personally 
 known, and who never pass me without the compliment of the hat 
 
 on either side. My truly polite and urbane friend, Mr. A m, 
 
 of Flower-de-luce-court, in Fleet Street, will forgive my mention 
 of him in particular. I can truly say, that I never spent a quarter 
 of an hour under his hands without deriving some profit from the 
 agreeable discussions, which are always going on there.
 
 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 333 
 
 and then, when you might expect him " to have brought 
 in, " nor the tailor's, which is so and so " he comes to 
 an end of his enumeration, and falls to a defining of his 
 own melancholy. 
 
 Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair 
 an opportunity of bringing it in, in his Penseroso. 
 
 But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing 
 against the existence of any well-attested fact, I shall 
 proceed and endeavour to ascertain the causes why this 
 pensive turn should be so predominant in people of this 
 profession above all others. 
 
 And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing 
 apparel being derived to us from the fall, and one of the 
 most mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain 
 seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of 
 things have been intended to be impressed upon the 
 minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care 
 of contriving the human apparel has been entrusted, 
 to keep up the memory of the first institution of clothes, 
 and serve as a standing remonstrance against those 
 vanities, which the absurd conversion of a memorial of 
 our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined 
 to produce ? Correspondent in some sort to this, it may 
 be remarked, that the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow 
 place, in the cabalistic language of his order, is said to 
 have certain melancholy regions always open under his 
 feet. But waiving further inquiry into final causes, where 
 the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try to 
 discover the efficient causes of this melancholy. 
 
 I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, 
 omitting some subordinate ones, viz. the sedentary 
 habits of the tailor ; something peculiar in his diet. 
 
 First, his sedentary habits. In Doctor Norris' famous 
 narrative of the frenzy of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, 
 being questioned as to the occasion of the swelling in his 
 legs, replies that it came "by criticism;" to which the 
 learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a distemper which 
 he had never read of, Dennis (who appears not to have
 
 334 ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS. 
 
 / 
 
 been mad upon all subjects) rejoins with some warmth, 
 that it was no distemper, but a noble art ! that he had 
 sat fourteen hours a day at it : and that the other was a 
 pretty doctor not to know that there was a communi- 
 cation between the brain and the legs. 
 
 When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours 
 continuously, which the critic probably practised only 
 while he was writing his "remarks," is no more than 
 what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance of his art, 
 submits to daily (Sundays excepted) throughout the year, 
 shall we wonder to find the brain affected, and in a manner 
 overclouded, from that indissoluble sympathy between the 
 noble and less noble parts of the body, which Dennis 
 hints at ? The unnatural and painful manner of his 
 sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil, insomuch 
 that I have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their 
 boards to so many envious Junos, sitting cross-legged to 
 hinder the birth of their own felicity. The legs trans- 
 versed thus 1*3 crosswise, or decussated, was among the 
 ancients the posture of malediction. The Turks, who 
 practise it at this day, are noted to be a melancholy 
 people. 
 
 Secondly, his diet. To which purpose I find a most 
 remarkable passage in Burton, in his chapter entitled 
 "Bad diet a cause of melancholy." "Amongst herbs to 
 be eaten (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, dis- 
 allowed; but especially CABBAGE. It causeth troublesome 
 dreams, and sends up black vapours to the brain. Galen, 
 loc. affect, lib. 3, cap. 6, of all herbs condemns CABBAGE. 
 And Isaack, lib. 2, cap. 1, animce gravitatem facit, it 
 brings heaviness to the soul." I could not omit so 
 flattering a testimony from an author, who, having no 
 theory of his own to serve, has so unconsciously con- 
 tributed to the confirmation of mine. It is well known 
 that this last named vegetable has, from the earliest 
 periods which we can discover, constituted almost the 
 sole food of this extraordinary race of people. 
 
 BUKTON, Junior.
 
 HOSPITA ON THE IMMODEEATE INDUL- 
 GENCE OF THE PLEASURES OF THE 
 PALATE. 
 
 To the Editor of the Ecflector. 
 
 ME. REFLECTOR My husband and I are fond of com- 
 pany, and being in easy circumstances, we are seldom 
 without a party to dinner two or three days in a week. 
 The utmost cordiality has hitherto prevailed at our 
 meetings ; but there is a young gentleman, a near rela- 
 tion of my husband's, that has lately come among us, 
 whose preposterous behaviour bids fair, if not timely 
 checked, to disturb our tranquillity. He is too great a 
 favourite with my husband in other respects, for me to 
 remonstrate with him in any other than this distant way. 
 A letter printed in your publication may catch his eye ; 
 for he is a great reader, and makes a point of seeing all 
 the new things that come out. Indeed, he is by no 
 means deficient in understanding. My husband says 
 that he has a good deal of wit ; but for my part I cannot 
 say I am any judge of that, having seldom observed him 
 open his mouth, except for purposes very foreign to con- 
 versation. In short, Sir, this young gentleman's failing 
 is, an immoderate indulgence of his palate. The first 
 time he dined with us, he thought it necessary to extenuate 
 the length of time he kept the dinner on the table, by 
 declaring that he had taken a very long walk in the 
 morning, and came in fasting ; but as that excuse could
 
 336 INDULGENCE OF THE PALATE. 
 
 not serve above once or twice at most, he has latterly 
 dropped the mask altogether, and chosen to appear in his 
 own proper colours without reserve or apology. 
 
 You cannot imagine how unpleasant his conduct has 
 become. His way of staring at the dishes as they are 
 brought in, has absolutely something immodest in it : it 
 ' like the stare of an impudent man of fashion at a fine 
 woman, when she first comes into a room. I am positively 
 in pain for the dishes, and cannot help thinking they have 
 consciousness, and will be put out of countenance, he 
 treats them so like what they are not. 
 
 Then again he makes no scruple of keeping a joint of 
 meat on the table, after the cheese and fruit are brought 
 in, till he has what he calls done with it. Now how 
 awkward this looks, where there are ladies, you may 
 judge, Mr. Reflector, how it disturbs the order and 
 comfort of a meal. And yet I always make a point of 
 helping him first, contrary to all good manners, before 
 any of my female friends are helped, that he may avoid 
 this very error. I wish he would eat before he comes 
 out. 
 
 What makes his proceedings more particularly offensive 
 at our house is, that my husband, though out of common 
 politeness he is obliged to set dishes of animal food before 
 his visitors, yet himself and his whole family (myself 
 included) feed entirely on vegetables. We have a theory, 
 that animal food is neither wholesome nor natural to man ; 
 and even vegetables we refuse to eat until they have 
 undergone the operation of fire, in consideration of those 
 numberless little living creatures which the glass helps 
 us to detect in every fibre of the plant or root before it 
 be dressed. On the same theory we boil our water, 
 which is our only drink, before we suffer it to come to 
 table. Our children are perfect little Pythagoreans : it 
 would do you good to see them in their nursery, stuffing 
 their dried fruits, figs, raisins, and milk, which is the 
 only approach to animal food which is allowed. They 
 have no notion how the substance of a creature that ever
 
 INDULGENCE OF THE PALATE. 337 
 
 had life can become food for another creature. A beef- 
 steak is an absurdity to them ; a mutton-chop, a solecism 
 in terms ; a cutlet, a word absolutely -without any mean- 
 ing ; a butcher is nonsense, except so far as it is taken 
 for a man who delights in blood, or a hero. In this 
 happy state of innocence we have kept their minds, not 
 allowing them to go into the kitchen, or to hear of any 
 preparations for the dressing of animal food, or even to 
 know that such things are practised. But as a state of 
 ignorance is incompatible with a certain age ; and as my 
 eldest girl, who is ten years old next Midsummer, must 
 shortly be introduced into the world and sit at table with 
 us, where she will see some things which will shock all 
 her received notions, I have been endeavouring by little 
 and little to break her mind, and prepare it for the 
 disagreeable impressions which must be forced upon it. 
 The first hint I gave her upon the subject, I could see 
 her recoil from it with the same horror with which we 
 listen to a tale of Anthropophagism ; but she has gradually 
 grown more reconciled to it in some measure, from my 
 telling her that it was the custom of the world, to 
 which, however senseless, we must siibmit so far as we 
 could do it with innocence, not to give offence ; and 
 she has shewn so much strength of mind on other occa- 
 sions, which I have no doubt is owing to the calmness 
 and serenity superinduced by her diet, that I am in good 
 hopes, when the proper season for her debut arrives, she 
 may be brought to endure the sight of a roasted chicken 
 or a dish of sweetbreads, for the first time, without 
 fainting. Such being the nature of our little household, 
 you may guess what inroads into the economy of it, 
 what revolutions and turnings of things upside down, the 
 
 example of such a feeder as Mr. is calculated to 
 
 produce. 
 
 I wonder at a time like the present, when the scarcity 
 
 of every kind of food is so painfully acknowledged, that 
 
 shame has no effect upon him. Can he have read Mr. 
 
 Malthus's Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to Population ? 
 
 z
 
 338 INDULGENCE OF THE PALATE. 
 
 Can he think it reasonable that one man should consume 
 the sustenance of many 1 
 
 The young gentleman has an agreeable air and person, 
 such as are not unlikely to recommend him on the score 
 of matrimony. But his fortune is not over large ; and 
 what prudent young woman would think of embarking 
 hers with a man who would bring three or four mouths 
 (or what is equivalent to them) into a family 1 ? She 
 might as reasonably choose a widower in the same cir- 
 cumstances with three or four children. 
 
 I cannot think who he takes after. His father and 
 mother, by all accounts, were very moderate eaters ; only 
 I have heard that the latter swallowed her victuals very 
 fast, and the former had a tedious custom of sitting long 
 at his meals. Perhaps he takes after both. 
 
 I wish you would turn this in your thoughts, Mr. 
 Reflector, and give us your ideas on the subject of excessive 
 eating ; and, particularly, of animal food. 
 
 HOSPITA.
 
 EDAX ON" APPETITE. 
 
 To the Editor of the Reflector . 
 
 MR. EEFLECTOK I am going to lay before you a case of 
 the most iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil 
 suffered. 
 
 You must know, then, that I have been visited with a 
 calamity ever since my birth. How shall I mention it 
 without offending delicacy 1 Yet, out it must. My 
 sufferings, then, have all arisen from a most inordinate 
 appetite 
 
 Not for wealth, not for vast possessions, then might 
 I have hoped to find a cure in some of those precepts of 
 philosophers or poets, those verba et voces which Horace 
 speaks of: 
 
 " quibtis Inmc lenire dolorem 
 Possis, et magnam morbi deponere pattern ; " 
 
 not for glory, not for fame, not for applause, for against 
 this disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, 
 as Pope has chosen to render it, 
 
 rhymes, -\vhich fresh and fresh applied, 
 the arraut'st puppy of his pride ; " 
 
 Will cure 
 
 nor yet for pleasure, properly so called : the strict and 
 virtuous lessons which I received in early life from the 
 best of parents a pious clergyman of the Church of 
 England, now no more, I trust have rendered me suffi- 
 ciently secure on that side : 
 
 No, sir, for none of these things : but an appetite, in
 
 340 EDAX ON APPETITE. 
 
 its coarsest and least metaphorical sense, an appetite 
 for food. 
 
 The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pap-dish days 
 I cannot go back far enough to remember, only I have 
 been told, that my mother's constitution not admitting of 
 my being nursed at home, the woman who had the care 
 of me for that purpose used to make most extravagant 
 demands for my pretended excesses in that kind ; which 
 my parents, rather than believe anything unpleasant of 
 me, chose to impute to the known covetousness and 
 mercenary disposition of that sort of people. This blind- 
 ness continued on their part after I was sent for home, 
 up to the period when it was thought proper, on account 
 of my advanced age, that I should mix with other boys 
 more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was 
 accordingly sent to boarding-school. 
 
 Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be 
 disguised. The prying republic of which a great school 
 consists, soon found me out : there was no shifting the 
 blame any longer upon other people's shoulders, no 
 good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of 
 which I stood accused in the article of bread and butter, 
 besides the crying sin of stolen ends of puddings, and 
 cold pies strangely missing. The truth was but too 
 manifest in my looks, in the evident signs of inanition 
 which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the 
 double allowance which my master was privately in- 
 structed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of 
 the ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown 
 persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once 
 detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows, the 
 mark against which every puny leveller directed his little 
 shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were 
 raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. 
 Ventri natus, Ventri deditus, Vesana gula, Escarum 
 gurges, Dapibtis indulgens, Non dans froena guide, 
 Sedans lautce fercula mensce, resounded wheresoever I 
 passed. I led a weary life, suffering the penalties of
 
 ED AX ON APPETITE. 341 
 
 guilt for that which was no crime, but only following the 
 blameless dictates of nature. The remembrance of those 
 childish reproaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams. 
 My school-days come again, and the horror I used to feel, 
 when in some silent corner retired from the notice of my 
 unfeeling play-fellows, I have sat to mumble the solitary 
 slice of gingerbread allotted me by the bounty of consider- 
 ate friends, and have ached at heart because I could not 
 spare a portion of it, as I saw other boys do, to some 
 favourite boy ; for if I know my own heart, I was never 
 selfish, never possessed a luxury which I did not hasten 
 to communicate to others but my food, alas ! was none ; 
 it was an indispensable necessary ; I could as soon have 
 spared the blood in my veins, as have parted that with 
 my companions. 
 
 Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever : we should 
 grow reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The 
 miseries of my school-days had their end; I was once 
 more restored to the paternal dwelling. The affectionate 
 solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured 
 purpose of concealing even from myself the infirmity 
 which haunted rne. I was continually told that I was 
 growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely 
 represented as being nothing more than a symptom and 
 an effect of that. I used even to be complimented upon 
 it. But this temporary fiction could not endure above a 
 year or two. I ceased to grow, but alas ! I did not 
 cease my demands for alimentary sustenance. 
 
 Those times are long since passed, and with them have 
 ceased to exist the fond concealment, the indulgent 
 blindness, the delicate overlooking, the compassionate 
 fiction. I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to 
 the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing 
 can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed 
 in a balance : that which appetite demands, is set down 
 to the account of gluttony, a sin which my whole soul 
 abhors, nay, which Nature herself has put it out of my 
 power to commit. I am constitutionally disenabled from
 
 342 ED AX ON APPETITE. 
 
 that vice ; for how can he be guilty of excess, who never 
 can get enough ? Let them cease, then, to watch my 
 plate ; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to 
 the seven baskets of fragments, and the supernaturally 
 replenished cup of old Baucis ; and be thankful that their 
 more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved 
 them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of 
 them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as 
 some one calls it, is supplied. Alas ! I am doomed to 
 stop short of that continence. 
 
 What am I to do ? I am, by disposition, inclined to 
 conviviality, and the social meal. I am no gourmand : I 
 require no dainties : I should despise the board of Helio- 
 gabalus, except for its long sitting. Those vivacious, 
 long -continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed, I 
 justly envy ; but the kind of fare which the Curii and 
 Dentati put up with, I could be content with. Dentatus 
 I have been called, among other unsavoury jests. Double- 
 meal is another name which my acquaintance have palmed 
 upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which I put in 
 practice for some time without being found out ; which 
 was, going the round of my friends, beginning with the 
 most primitive feeders among them, who take their 
 dinner about one o'clock, and so successively dropping in 
 upon the next and the next, till by the time I got among 
 my more fashionable intimates, whose hour was six or 
 seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and 
 complete meal (as I reckon it), without taking more than 
 one dinner (as they account of dinners) at one person's 
 house. Since I have been found out, I endeavour to 
 make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go 
 out. But alas ! with me, increase of appetite truly grows 
 by what it feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me 
 at those dinner-parties is, the senseless custom of cheese, 
 and the dessert afterwards. I have a rational antipathy 
 to the former ; and for fruit, and those other vain vege- 
 table substitutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate 
 aliment for human creatures since the flood, as I take it
 
 ED AX ON APPETITE. 343 
 
 to be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, 
 given to Noah and his descendants), I hold them in 
 perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I remember a pretty 
 apologue, which Mandeville tells very much to this pur- 
 pose in his Fable of the Bees : He brings in a Lion 
 arguing with a Merchant, who had ventured to expostu- 
 late with this king of beasts upon his violent methods of 
 feeding. The Lion thus retorts : " Savage I am ; but 
 no creature can be called cruel but what either by malice 
 or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity. The Lion 
 was born without compassion ; we follow the instinct of 
 our nature ; the gods have appointed us to live upon the 
 waste and spoil of other animals, and as long as we can 
 meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the living ; 'tis 
 only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport. 
 Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vege- 
 tables. (Under favour of the Lion, if he meant to assert 
 this universally of mankind, it is not true. However, 
 what he says presently is very sensible.) Your violent 
 fondness to change, and greater eagerness after novelties, 
 have prompted you to the destruction of animals without 
 justice or necessity. The Lion has a ferment within him, 
 that consumes the toughest skin and hardest bones, as 
 well as the flesh of all animals without exception. Your 
 squeamish stomach, in which the digestive heat is weak 
 and inconsiderable, won't so much as admit of the most 
 tender parts of them, unless above half the concoction 
 has been performed by artificial fire beforehand ; and yet 
 what animal have you spared, to satisfy the caprices of a 
 languid appetite 1 Languid I say ; for what is man's 
 hunger if compared with the Lion's 1 Yours, when it is 
 at the worst, makes you faint ; mine makes me mad : oft 
 have I tried with roots and herbs to allay the violence of 
 it, but in vain; nothing but large quantities of flesh can 
 any ways appease it." Allowing for the Lion not having 
 a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus naturae that 
 was possible of the human appetite, he was, generally 
 speaking, in the right; and the Merchant was so impressed
 
 344 EDAX ON APPETITE. 
 
 with his argument that, we are told, he replied not, but 
 fainted away. 0, Mr. Eeflector, that I were not obliged 
 to add, that the creature who thus argues was but a type 
 of me ! Miserable man ! / am that Lion. " Oft have I 
 tried with roots and herbs to allay that violence, but in 
 vain ; nothing but 
 
 Those tales which are renewed as often as the editors 
 of papers want to fill up a space in their unfeeling 
 columns, of great eaters, people that devour whole geese 
 and legs of mutton for wagers, are sometimes attempted 
 to be drawn to a parallel with my case. This wilful 
 confounding of motives and circumstances, which make 
 all the difference of moral or immoral in actions, just 
 suits the sort of talent which some of my acquaintance 
 pride themselves upon. Wagers / I thank heaven I 
 was never mercenary, nor could consent to prostitute a 
 gift (though but a left-handed one) of nature, to the 
 enlarging of my worldly substance ; prudent as the 
 necessities, which that fatal gift have involved me in, 
 might have made such a prostitution to appear in the eyes 
 of an indelicate world. 
 
 Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction of that 
 talent which was given me, I have been content to sacri- 
 fice no common expectations ; for such I had from an old 
 lady, a near relation of our family, in whose good graces 
 
 I had the fortune to stand, till one fatal evening . 
 
 You have seen, Mr. Eeflector, if you have ever passed 
 your time much in country towns, the kind of suppers 
 which elderly ladies in those places have lying in petto 
 in an adjoining parlour, next to that where they are 
 entertaining their periodically-invited coevals with cards 
 and muffins. The cloth is usually spread some half-hour 
 before the final rubber is decided, whence they adjourn 
 to sup upon what may emphatically be called nothing. 
 A sliver of ham, purposely contrived to be transparent to 
 shew the china-dish through it, neighbouring a slip of 
 invisible brawn, which abuts upon something they call a 
 tartlet, as that is bravely supported by an atom of
 
 EDAX ON APPETITE. 345 
 
 marmalade, flanked in its turn by a grain of potted beef, 
 with a power of such dishlings, minims of hospitality, 
 spread in defiance of human nature, or rather with an 
 utter ignorance of what it demands. Being engaged at 
 one of these card parties, I was obliged to go a little 
 before supper-time (as they facetiously call the point of 
 time in which they are taking these shadowy refections), 
 and the old lady, with a sort of fear shining through the 
 smile of courteous hospitality that beamed in her coun- 
 tenance, begged me to step into the next room and take 
 something before I went out in the cold, a proposal 
 which lay not in my nature to deny. Indignant at the 
 airy prospect I saw before me, I set to, and in a trice 
 despatched the whole meal intended for eleven persons, 
 fish, flesh, fowl, pastry, to the sprigs of garnishing parsley, 
 and the last fearful custard that quaked upon the board. 
 I need not describe the consternation, when in due time 
 the dowagers adjourned from their cards. Where was 
 
 the supper "? and the servants' answer, Mr. had eat 
 
 it all. That freak, however, jested me out of a good three 
 hundred pounds a year, which I afterwards was informed 
 for a certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention 
 it not in illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am 
 possessed of ; for any unlucky wag of a school-boy, with 
 a tolerable appetite, could have done as much without 
 feeling any hurt after it, only that you may judge 
 whether I am a man likely to set my talent to sale, or to 
 require the pitiful stimulus of a wager. 
 
 I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, 
 of a reptile in Africa, whose venom is of that hot, 
 destructive quality, that wheresoever it fastens its tooth, 
 the whole substance of the animal that has been bitten in 
 a few seconds is reduced to dust, crumbles away, and 
 absolutely disappears ; it is called from this quality, the 
 Anuihilator. Why am I forced to seek, in all the most 
 prodigious and portentous facts of Natural History, for 
 creatures typical of myself. / am that Snake, tlw.it Anni- 
 hilator : " wherever I fasten, in a few seconds "
 
 346 EDAX ON APPETITE. 
 
 happy sick men, that are groaning under the want 
 of that very thing, the excess of which is my torment ! 
 fortunate, too fortunate, if you knew your happiness, 
 invalids ! What would I not give to exchange this fierce 
 concoctive and digestive heat, this rabid fury which 
 vexes me, which tears and torments me, for your quiet, 
 mortified, hermit-like, subdued, and sanctified stomachs, 
 your cool, chastened inclinations, and coy desires for 
 food! 
 
 To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I 
 owe this unnatural craving I must leave to the anatomists 
 and the physicians to determine : they, like the rest of the 
 world, have doubtless their eye upon me ; and as I have 
 been cut up alive by the sarcasms of my friends, so I 
 shudder when I contemplate the probability that this 
 animal frame, when its restless appetites shall have ceased 
 their importunity, may be cut up also (horrible sugges- 
 tion !) to determine in what system of solids or fluids 
 this original sin of my constitution lay lurking. What 
 work will they make with their acids and alkalines, their 
 serums and coagulums, effervescences, viscous matter, bile, 
 chyle, and acrimonious juices, to explain that cause which 
 nature, who willed the effect to punish me for my sins, 
 may no less have determined to keep in the dark from 
 them, to punish them for their presumption. 
 
 You may ask, Mr. Reflector, to what purpose is my 
 appeal to you : what can you do for me ? Alas ! I know 
 too well that my case is out of the reach of advice, out 
 of the reach of consolation. But it is some relief to the 
 wounded heart to impart its tale of misery ; and some of 
 my acquaintance, who may read my case in your pages, 
 under a borrowed name, may be induced to give it a more 
 humane consideration than I could ever yet obtain from 
 them under my own. Make them, if possible, to reflect, 
 that an original peculiarity of constitution is no crime ; 
 that not that which goes into the mouth desecrates a man, 
 but that which comes out of it, such as sarcasm, bitter 
 jests, mocks and taunts, and ill-natured observations ;
 
 EDAX ON APPETITE. 347 
 
 and let them consider, if there be such things (which we 
 have all heard of) as Pious Treachery, Innocent Adultery, 
 etc., whether there may not be also such a thing as Inno- 
 cent Gluttony. I shall only subscribe myself, your 
 afflicted Servant, -p
 
 ME. H : 
 
 A FARCE, IN TWO ACTS. 
 As it was performed at Drury Lane Theatre, December 1806. 
 
 " Mr. H , thou wert DAMNED. Bright shone the morning 
 
 on the play-bills that announced thy appearance, and the streets 
 were filled with the buzz of persons asking one another if they 
 would go to see Mr. H , and answering that they would cer- 
 tainly ; but before night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his 
 friends and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert DAMNED ! Hadst 
 thou been anonymous, thou haply mightst have lived. But thou 
 didst come to an untimely end for thy tricks, and for want of a 
 better name to pass them off." Theatrical Examiner. 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Mr. H Mr. Elliston. 
 
 BELVIL ...... Mr. Hartley. 
 
 LANDLORD PRY .... Mr. Wewitzer. 
 
 MELESINDA ..... Miss Mellon. 
 
 MAID TO MELESINDA .... Mrs. Harlowe. 
 
 GENTLEMEN, LADIES, WAITERS, SERVANTS, ETC. 
 
 SCENE. Bath. 
 PROLOGUE. 
 
 SPOKEX BY MR. ELLISTON. 
 
 IF we have sinn'd in paring down a name, 
 All civil well-bred authors do the same, 
 Survey the columns of our daily writers 
 You'll find that some Initials are great fighters.
 
 MR. H . 349 
 
 How fierce the shock, how fatal is the jar, 
 
 When Ensign W. meets Lieutenant R. 
 
 With two stout seconds, just of their own gizzard, 
 
 Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard ! 
 
 Letter to letter spreads the dire alarms, 
 
 Till half the Alphabet is up in arms. 
 
 Nor with less lustre have Initials shone, 
 
 To grace the gentler annals of crim. con. 
 
 Where the dispensers of the public lash 
 
 Soft penance give a letter and a dash 
 
 Where vice reduced in size shrinks to a failing, 
 And loses half her grossness by curtailing. 
 Faux pas are told in such a modest way, 
 
 The affair of Colonel B with Mrs. A 
 
 You must forgive them for what is there, say, 
 
 Which such a pliant Vowel must not grant 
 
 To such a very pressing Consonant 1 
 
 Or who poetic justice dares dispute, 
 
 When, mildly melting at a lover's suit, 
 
 The wife's a Liquid, her good man a Mute 1 
 
 Even in the homelier scenes of honest life, 
 
 The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife, 
 
 Initials I am told have taken place 
 
 Of Deary, Spouse, and that old-fashion'd race ; 
 
 And Cabbage, ask'd by Brother Snip to tea, 
 
 Replies, " I'll come but it don't rest with me 
 
 I always leaves them things to Mrs. C." 
 
 should this mincing fashion ever spread 
 
 From names of living heroes to the dead, 
 
 How would Ambition sigh, and hang the head, 
 
 As each loved syllable should melt away 
 
 Her Alexander turn'd into great A. 
 
 A single C. her Caesar to express 
 
 Her Scipio shrunk into a Roman S. ; 
 
 And, nick'd and dock'd to these new modes of speech, 
 
 Great Hannibal himself a Mr. H.
 
 350 MR. H- 
 
 ACT I. 
 
 SCENE. A Public Room in an Inn Landlord, Waiters, 
 Gentlemen, etc. Enter MR. H. 
 
 Mr. H. Landlord, has the man brought home my 
 boots 1 
 
 Land. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. You have paid him 1 
 
 Land. There is the receipt, sir, only not quite filled 
 up ; no name, only blank " Blank, Dr. to Zekiel Spanish 
 for one pair of best hessians." Now, sir, he wishes to 
 know what name he shall put in who he shall say 
 " Dr." 
 
 Mr. H. Why, Mr. H., to be sure. 
 
 Land. So I told him, sir ; but Zekiel has some qualms 
 about it. He says, he thinks that Mr. H. only would 
 not stand good in law. 
 
 Mr. H. Eot his impertinence ! bid him put in Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, and not trouble me with his scruples. 
 
 Land. I shall, sir. [Exit. 
 
 Enter a Waiter. 
 
 Wait. Sir, Squire Level's man is below, with a hare 
 and a brace of pheasants for Mr. H. 
 
 Mr. H. Give the man half-a-crown, and bid him return 
 my best respects to his master. Presents, it seems, will 
 find me out, with any name, or no name. 
 
 Enter 2d Waiter. 
 
 2d Wait. Sir, the man that makes up the Directory 
 is at the door. 
 
 Mr. If. Give him a shilling ; that is what these fellows 
 come for. 
 
 2d Wait. He has sent up to know by what name your 
 Honour will please to be inserted.
 
 MR. H . 351 
 
 Mr. H. Zounds, fellow ! I give him a shilling for 
 leaving out my name, not for putting it in. This is one 
 of the plaguy comforts of going anonymous. 
 
 [Exit 2d Waiter. 
 
 Enter 3d Waiter. 
 
 3d Wait. Two letters for Mr. H. [Exit. 
 
 Mr. H. From ladies (opens them"). This from Mele- 
 sinda, to remind me of the morning call I promised ; the 
 pretty creature positively languishes to be made Mrs. H. 
 I believe I must indulge her (affectedly]. This from her 
 cousin, to bespeak me to some party, I suppose (opening 
 it] Oh, " this evening " " Tea and cards " (surveying 
 himself ivith complacency). Dear H., thou art certainly 
 a pretty fellow. I wonder what makes thee such a 
 favourite among the ladies ; I wish it may not be owing 
 to the concealment of thy unfortunate pshaw ! 
 
 Enter th Waiter. 
 
 4th Wait. Sir, one Mr. Printagain is inquiring for you. 
 
 Mr. H. Oh, I remember, the poet : he is publishing 
 by subscription. Give him a guinea, and tell him he 
 may put me down. 
 
 th Wait. What name shall I tell him, sir 1 
 
 Mr. H. Zounds ! he is a poet ; let him fancy a name. 
 
 [Exit th Waiter. 
 
 Enter 5th Waiter. 
 
 5th Wait. Sir, Bartlemy the lame beggar, that you 
 sent a private donation to last Monday, has by some 
 accident discovered his benefactor, and is at the door 
 waiting to return thanks. 
 
 Mr. H. Oh, poor fellow, who could put it into his 
 head'? Now I shall be teased by all his tribe, when 
 once this is known. Well, tell him I am glad I could 
 be of any service to him, and send him away.
 
 352 MK. H. . 
 
 5th Wait. I would have done so, sir ; but the object 
 of his call now, he says, is only to know who he is 
 obliged to. 
 
 Mr. H. Why, me. 
 
 5th Wait. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. Me, me, me who else, to be sure ? 
 
 5th Wait. Yes, sir; but he is anxious to know the 
 name of his benefactor. 
 
 Mr. H. Here is a pampered rogue of a beggar, that 
 cannot be obliged to a gentleman in the way of his pro- 
 fession, but he must know the name, birth, parentage, 
 and education of his benefactor. I warrant you, next he 
 will require a certificate of one's good behaviour, and a 
 magistrate's license in one's pocket, lawfully empowering 
 So-and-so to give an alms. Anything more 1 
 
 5th Wait. Yes, sir : here has been Mr. Patriot, with 
 the county petition to sign ; and Mr. Failtiine, that owes 
 so much money, has sent to remind you of your promise 
 to bail him. 
 
 Mr. If. Neither of which I can do while I have no 
 name. Here is more of the plaguy comforts of going 
 anonymous, that one can neither serve one's friend nor 
 one's country. Damn it, a man had better be without a 
 nose than without a name ! I will not live long in this 
 mutilated, dismembered state ; I will to Melesinda this 
 instant, and try to forget these vexations. Melesinda ! 
 there is music in the name ; but then, hang it ! there is 
 none in mine to answer to it. \_Exit. 
 
 (While MR. H. has been speaking, tivo gentlemen 
 have been observing him curiously.} 
 
 1st Gent. Who the devil is this extraordinary per- 
 sonage 1 
 
 2d Gent. Who 1 why, 'tis Mr. H. 
 
 1st Gent. Has he no more name ? 
 
 2d Gent. None that has yet transpired. No more ! 
 why, that single letter has been enough to inflame the 
 imaginations of all the ladies in Bath. He has been
 
 MR. H . 353 
 
 here but a fortnight, and is already received into all the 
 first families. 
 
 1st Gent, "Wonderful ! yet nobody knows who he is, 
 or where he comes from ! 
 
 2d Gent. He is vastly rich, gives away money as if he 
 had infinity ; dresses well, as you see ; and for address, 
 the mothers are all dying for fear the daughters should 
 get him ; and for the daughters, he may command them 
 
 as absolutely as . Melesinda, the rich heiress, 'tis 
 
 thought, will carry him. 
 
 1st Gent. And is it possible that a mere anonymous 
 
 2d Gent. Phoo ! that is the charm, Who is he ? and 
 
 What is he ? and What is his name 1 The man with 
 
 the great nose on his face never excited more of the 
 gaping passion of wonderment in the dames of Strasburg 
 than this new-comer with the single letter to his name 
 has lighted up among the wives and maids of Bath ; his 
 simply having lodgings here draws more visitors to the 
 house than an election. Come with me to the parade, 
 and I will show you more of him. [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE. In the Street. 
 MR. H. walking, BELVIL meeting him. 
 
 Bel. My old Jamaica schoolfellow, that I have not 
 seen for so many years 1 it must, it can be no other than 
 Jack (going up to him). My dear Ho 
 
 Mr. H. (stopping his mouth). Ho ! the devil 
 
 hush ! 
 
 Bel. Why, sure it is 
 
 Mr. H. It is; it is your old friend Jack, that shall 
 be nameless. 
 
 Bel. My dear Ho 
 
 Mr. H. (stopping him). Don't name it. 
 
 Bel. Name what ? 
 
 Mr. H. My cursed unfortunate name. I have reasons 
 to conceal it for a time. 
 
 2 A
 
 354 MR. H . 
 
 Bel. I understand you Creditors, Jack 1 
 
 Mr. H. No, I assure you. 
 
 Bel. Snapped up a ward, peradventure, and the whole 
 Chancery at your heels ? 
 
 Mr. H. I don't use to travel with such cumbersome 
 luggage. 
 
 Bel. You ha'n't taken a purse ? 
 
 Mr. H. To relieve you at once from all disgraceful 
 conjectures, you must know 'tis nothing but the sound of 
 my name. 
 
 Bel. Ridiculous ! 'Tis true yours is none of the most 
 romantic, but what can that signify in a man 1 
 
 Mr. iff. You must understand that I am in some 
 credit Avith the ladies. 
 
 Bel. With the ladies ! 
 
 Mr. H. And truly I think not without some preten- 
 sions. My fortune 
 
 Bel. Sufficiently splendid, if I may judge from your 
 appearance. 
 
 Mr. H. My figure 
 
 Bel. Airy, gay, and imposing. 
 
 Mr. H. My parts 
 
 Bel. Bright. 
 
 Mr. H. My conversation 
 
 Bel. Equally remote from flippancy and taciturnity. 
 
 Mr. H. But then my name damn my name ! 
 
 Bel. Childish! 
 
 Mr. H. Not so. Oh ! Belvil, you are blest with one 
 which sighing virgins may repeat without a blush, and 
 for it change the paternal. But what virgin of any 
 delicacy (and I require some in a wife) would endure to 
 be called Mrs. 1 
 
 Bel. Ha ! ha ! ha ! most absurd ! Did not Clementina 
 Falconbridge the romantic Clementina Falconbridge 
 fancy Tommy Potts 1 and Rosabella Sweetlips sacrifice 
 her mellifluous appellative to Jack Deady 1 Matilda, her 
 cousin, married a Gubbins, and her sister Amelia a 
 Clutterbuck.
 
 MR. H . 355 
 
 Mr. H. Potts is tolerable, Deacly is sufferable, Gubbins 
 is bearable, and Clutterbuck is endurable, but Ho 
 
 Bel. Hush ! Jack, don't betray yourself. But you are 
 really ashamed of the family name 1 
 
 Mr. H. Ay, and of my father that begot me, and my 
 father's father, and all their forefathers that have borne 
 it since the Conquest. 
 
 Eel. But how do you know the women are so squeamish 1 
 
 Mr. H. I have tried them. I tell you there is neither 
 maiden of sixteen nor widow of sixty but would turn up 
 their noses at it. I have been refused by nineteen 
 virgins, twenty-nine relicts, and two old maids. 
 
 Bel. That was hard indeed, Jack ! 
 
 Mr. II. Parsons have stuck at publishing the banns, 
 because they averred it was a heathenish name ; parents 
 have lingered their consent, because they suspected it 
 was a fictitious name ; and rivals have declined my chal- 
 lenges, because they pretended it was an ungeutlemanly 
 name. 
 
 Bel. Ha ! ha ! ha ! but what course do you mean to 
 pursue 1 
 
 Mr. H. To engage the affections of some generous 
 girl, who will be content to take me as Mr. H. 
 
 Bel. Mr. H. 1 
 
 Mr. II. Yes, that is the name I go by here ; you know 
 one likes to be as near the truth as possible. 
 
 Bel. Certainly. But what then ? to get her to 
 consent 
 
 Mr. H. To accompany me to the altar Avithout a 
 
 name : in short, to suspend her curiosity (that is 
 
 all) till the moment the priest shall pronounce the 
 irrevocable charm which makes two names one. 
 
 Bel. And that name and then she must be pleased, 
 
 ha ! Jack 1 
 
 Mr. If. Exactly such a girl it has been my fortune to 
 
 meet with. Heark'ee (ivhispers) (musing) yet, hang 
 
 it ! 'tis cruel to betray her confidence. 
 
 Bel. But the family name, Jack ]
 
 356 MR. H . 
 
 Mr. H. As you say, the family name must be per- 
 petuated. 
 
 Bel. Though it be but a homely one. 
 
 Mr. H. True ; but, come, I will show you the house 
 where dwells this credulous melting fair. 
 
 Bel. Ha, ha ! my old friend dwindled down to one 
 letter. [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE. An apartment in MELESINDA'S House. 
 MELESINDA sola, as if musing. 
 
 Mel. H., H., H. ? Sure it must be something precious 
 by its being concealed. It can't be Homer, that is a 
 heathen's name ; nor Horatio, that is no surname ; what 
 if it be Hamlet? the Lord Hamlet pretty, and I his 
 poor distracted Ophelia ! No, 'tis none "of these ; 'tis 
 Harcourt or Hargrave, or some such sounding name, or 
 Howard high-born Howard that would do. Maybe 
 it is Harley; methinks my H. resembles Harley the 
 feeling Harley. But I hear him, and from his own lips 
 I will once for ever be resolved. 
 
 Enter MR. H. 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Melesinda ! 
 
 Mel. My dear H., that is all you give me power to 
 swear allegiance to, to be enamoured of inarticulate 
 sounds, and call with sighs upon an empty letter. But 
 I will know. 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Melesinda, press me no more for the 
 disclosure of that which iu the face of day so soon must 
 be revealed. Call it whim, humour, caprice in me. 
 Suppose I have sworn an oath never, till the ceremony 
 of our marriaga is over, to disclose my true name. 
 
 Mel. Oh ! H., H., H., I cherish here a fire of restless 
 curiosity which consumes me. 'Tis appetite, passion ; 
 call it whim, caprice in me. Suppose I have sworn I 
 must and will know it this very night.
 
 MR. H . 357 
 
 Mr. H. Ungenerous Melesinda ! I implore you to 
 give me this one proof of your confidence. The holy 
 vow once past, your H. shall not have a secret to 
 withhold. 
 
 Mel. My H. has overcome : his Melesinda shall pine 
 away and die before she dares express a saucy inclination ; 
 but what shall I call you till we are married ? 
 
 Mr. H. Call me ? call me anything. Call me Love, 
 Love ! Ay, Love, Love will do very well. 
 
 Mel. How many syllables is it, Love ? 
 
 Mr. H. How many 1 ud, that is coming to the ques- 
 tion with a vengeance. One, two, three, four, what 
 does it signify how many syllables ? 
 
 Mel. How many syllables, Love 1 
 
 Mr. H. My Melesinda's mind, I had hoped, was 
 superior to this childish curiosity. 
 
 Mel. How many letters are there in it 1 
 
 [Exit MR. H., followed by MELESINDA repeating 
 the question. 
 
 SCENE. A Room in the Inn. Two Waiters disputing. 
 
 1st Wait. Sir Har bottle Hammond, you may depend 
 upon it ! 
 
 2d Wait. Sir Harry Hardcastle, I tell you ! 
 
 1st Wait. The Hammonds of Huntingdonshire. 
 
 2d Wait. The Hardcastles of Hertfordshire. 
 
 1st Wait. The Hammonds. 
 
 2d Wait. Don't tell me ! does not Hardcastle begin 
 with an H 1 
 
 1st Wait. So does Hammond, for that matter. 
 
 2d Wait. Faith, so it does, if you go to spell it. I 
 did not think of that. I begin to be of your opinion ; he 
 is certainly a Hammond. 
 
 1st Wait. Here comes Susan Chambermaid, may be 
 she can tell.
 
 358 MR. H . 
 
 Enter SUSAN. 
 
 Both. Well, Susan, have you heard anything who this 
 strange gentleman is 1 
 
 Sus. Haven't you heard 1 it's all come out ; Mrs. 
 Guesswell, the parson's widow, has been here about it. 
 I overheard her talking in confidence to Mrs. Setter and 
 Mrs. Pointer, and she says they were holding a sort of a 
 cummitty about it. 
 
 Both. What? What? 
 
 Sus. There can't be a doubt of it, she says, what from 
 his Jigger and the appearance he cuts, and his sumpshous 
 way of living, and above all from the remarkable circum- 
 stance that his surname should begin with an H., that 
 he must be 
 
 Both. Well? Well? 
 
 Sus. Neither more nor less than the Prince 
 
 Both. Prince! 
 
 Sus. The Prince of Hessy-Cassel in disguise. 
 
 Both. Very likely. Very likely. 
 
 Sus. Oh, there can't be a doubt on it. Mrs. Guess- 
 well says she knows it. 
 
 1st Wait. Now, if we could be sure that the Prince 
 of Hessy What-do-you-call-him was in England on his 
 travels. 
 
 2d Wait. Get a newspaper. Look in the newspapers. 
 
 Sus. Fiddle of the newspapers ! who else can it be ? 
 
 Both. That is very true (gravely). 
 
 Enter LANDLORD. 
 
 Land. Here Susan ! James ! Philip ! where are you 
 all 1 The London coach is come in, and there is Mr. 
 Fillaside, the fat passenger, has been bawling for some- 
 body to help him off with his boots. (The Chamber- 
 maid and Waiters slip out.) 
 
 (Solus.) The house is turned upside down since the
 
 MR. H . 359 
 
 strange gentleman came into it. Nothing but guessing and 
 speculating, and speculating and guessing; waiters and 
 chambermaids getting into corners and speculating, ostlers 
 and stable-boys speculating in the yard. I believe the very 
 horses in the stable are speculating too, for there they 
 stand in a musing posture, nothing for them to eat, and 
 not seeming to care whether they have anything or no ; 
 and, after all, what does it signify 1 I hate such curious 
 
 odso, I must take this box up into his bedroom he 
 
 charged me to see to it myself I hate such inquisitive 
 
 I wonder what is in it ? it feels heavy. (Reads) 
 
 "Leases, title-deeds, wills." Here, now, a man might 
 satisfy his curiosity at once. Deeds must have names to 
 them, so must leases and wills. But I wouldn't no I 
 
 wouldn't it is a pretty box too prettily dovetailed. 
 
 I admire the fashion of it much. But I'd cut my fingers 
 
 off before I'd do such a dirty what have I to do 
 
 curse the keys, how they rattle ! rattle in one's pockets 
 the keys and the halfpence (takes out a bunch and 
 plays ivith them). I wonder if any of these would fit ? 
 One might just try them ; but I wouldn't lift up the 
 lid if they did. Oh no, what should I be the richer for 
 knowing 1 ? (All this time he tries the keys one by one.) 
 What's his name to me ? a thousand names begin with 
 an H. I hate people that are always prying, poking and 
 prying into things, thrusting their finger into one place 
 a mighty little hole this and their keys into another. 
 Lord ! little rusty fits it ! but what is that to me ? I 
 wouldn't go to no, no but it is odd little rusty should 
 
 just happen (While he is turning up the lid of the 
 
 box, ME. H. enters behind him unjierceived.) 
 
 Mr. H. What are you about, you dog ? 
 
 Land. Lord, sir ! pardon ; no thief, as I hope to be 
 saved. Little Pry was always honest. 
 
 Mr. H. What else could move you to open that 
 box 1 ? 
 
 Land. Sir, don't kill me, and I will confess the whole 
 truth. This box happened to be lying that is, I hap-
 
 360 MR. H . 
 
 pened to be carrying this box, and I happened to have 
 my keys out, and so little rusty happened to fit 
 
 Mr. H. So little rusty happened to fit ! and would 
 not a rope fit that rogue's neck ? I see the papers have 
 not been moved all is safe ; but it was as well to 
 frighten him a little (aside). Come, Landlord, as I think 
 you honest, and suspected you only intended to gratify 
 a little foolish curiosity 
 
 Land. That was all, sir, upon my veracity. 
 
 Mr. H. For this time I will pass it over. Your name 
 is Pry, I think ? 
 
 Land. Yes, sir, Jeremiah Pry, at your service. 
 
 Mr. H. An apt name ; you have a prying temper ; I 
 mean, some little curiosity a sort of inquisitiveness 
 about you. 
 
 Land. A natural thirst after knowledge you may call 
 it, sir. When a boy, I was never easy but when I was 
 thrusting up the lids of some of my schoolfellows' boxes, 
 not to steal anything, upon my honour, sir only to see 
 what was in them ; have had pens stuck in my eyes for 
 peeping through key-holes after knowledge ; could never 
 see a cold pie with the legs dangling out at top but my 
 fingers were for lifting up the crust, just to try if it 
 were pigeon or partridge, for no other reason in the 
 world. Surely, I think, my passion for nuts was owing 
 to the pleasure of cracking the shell to get at something 
 concealed, more than to any delight I took in eating the 
 kernel. In short, sir, this appetite has grown with my 
 growth. 
 
 Mr. H. You will certainly be hanged some day for 
 peeping into some bureau or other, just to see what is 
 in it. 
 
 Land. That is my fear, sir. The thumps and kicks I 
 have had for peering into parcels, and turning of letters 
 inside out, just for curiosity ! The blankets I have 
 been made to dance in for searching parish registers for 
 old ladies' ages, just for curiosity ! Once I was dragged 
 through a horse-pond, only for peeping into a closet that
 
 MR. H . 361 
 
 had glass doors to it, while my Lady Bluegarters was 
 undressing, just for curiosity ! 
 
 Mr. H. A very harmless piece of curiosity, truly ! 
 And now, Mr. Pry, first have the goodness to leave that 
 box with me, and then do me the favour to carry your 
 curiosity so far as to inquire if my servants are within. 
 
 Land. I shall, sir. Here ! David ! Jonathan ! I 
 think I hear them coming, shall make bold to leave 
 you, sir. [Exit. 
 
 Mr. H. Another tolerable specimen of the comforts of 
 going anonymous ! 
 
 Enter tivo Footmen. 
 
 1st Foot. You speak first. 
 
 2d Foot. No, you had better speak. 
 
 1st Foot. You promised to begin. 
 
 Mr. H. They have something to say to me. The 
 rascals want their wages raised, I suppose ; there is always 
 a favour to be asked when they come smiling. Well, 
 poor rogues, service is but a hard bargain at the best. 
 I think I must not be close with them. Well, David 
 well, Jonathan. 
 
 1st Foot. We have served your Honour faithfully 
 
 2d Foot. Hope your Honour won't take offence 
 
 Mr. If. The old story, I suppose wages ? 
 
 1st Foot. That's not it, your Honour. 
 
 2d Foot. You speak. 
 
 1st Foot. But if your Honour would just be pleased 
 to 
 
 2d Foot. Only be pleased to 
 
 Mr. H. Be quick with what you have to say, for I am 
 in haste. 
 
 1st Foot. Just to 
 
 2d Foot. Let us know who it is 
 
 1st Foot. Who it is we have the honour to serve. 
 
 Mr. H. Why, me, me, me ! you serve me ! 
 
 Id Foot. Yes, sir ; but we do not know who you are.
 
 362 MR. H . 
 
 Mr. H. Childish curiosity ! do not you serve a rich 
 master, a gay master, an indulgent master ? 
 
 - 1st Foot. Ah, sir ! the figure you make is to us, your 
 poor servants, the principal mortification. 
 
 2d Foot. When we get over a pot at the public-house, 
 or in a gentleman's kitchen, or elsewhere as poor servants 
 must have their pleasures when the question goes round, 
 who is your master 1 and who do you serve 1 and one 
 says, I serve Lord So-and-so, and another, I am Squire 
 Such-a-one's footman 
 
 1st Foot. We have nothing to say for it, but that we 
 serve Mr. H. 
 
 2d Foot. Or Squire H. 
 
 Mr. H. Really you are a couple of pretty modest, 
 reasonable personages ; but I hope you will take it as no 
 offence, gentlemen, if, upon a dispassionate review of all 
 that you have said, I think fit not to tell you any more 
 of my name than I have chosen, for especial purposes, to 
 communicate to the rest of the world. 
 
 1st Foot. Why then, sir, you may suit yourself. 
 
 2d Foot. We tell you plainly, we cannot stay. 
 
 1st Foot. We don't choose to serve Mr. H. 
 
 2d Foot. Nor any Mr. or Squire in the alphabet 
 
 1st Foot. That lives in Chris-cross Row. 
 
 Mr. H. Go, for a couple of ungrateful, inquisitive, 
 senseless rascals ! Go hang, starve, or drown ! Rogues, 
 to speak thus irreverently of the alphabet ! I shall live 
 to see you glad to serve old Q to curl the wig of great 
 S adjust the dot of little i stand behind the chair of 
 X, Y, Z wear the livery of Et-csetera and ride behind 
 the sulky of And-by-it-self-and ! [Exit in a rage.
 
 MR. H . 363 
 
 ACT II. 
 
 SCENE. A handsome Apartment well lighted, Tea, Cards, 
 etc. A Large Party of Ladies and Gentlemen, 
 , among them MELESINDA. 
 
 1st Lady. I wonder when the charming man will be 
 here ! 
 
 2d Lady. He is a delightful creature ! Such a 
 polish- 
 
 3d Lady. Such an air in all that he does or says- 
 4th Lady. Yet gifted with a strong understanding- 
 
 5tk Lady. But has your ladyship the remotest idea of 
 what his true name is ? 
 
 1st Lady. They say his very servants do not know it. 
 His French valet, that has lived with him these two 
 years 
 
 2d Lady. There, madam, I must beg leave to set you 
 right : my coachman 
 
 1st Lady. I have it from the very best authority, my 
 footman 
 
 2d Lady. Then, madam, you have set your servants 
 on 
 
 1st Lady. No, madam, I would scorn any such little 
 mean ways of coming at a secret. For my part, I don't 
 think any secret of that consequence. 
 
 2d Lady. That's just like me ; I make a rule of 
 troubling my head about nobody's business but my 
 own. 
 
 Mel. But then she takes care to make everybody's 
 business her own, and so to justify herself that way 
 (aside). 
 
 1st Lady. My dear Melesinda, you look thoughtful. 
 
 Mel. Nothing. 
 
 2d Lady. Give it a name. 
 
 Mel. Perhaps it is nameless. 
 
 1st Lady. As the object Come, never blush nor
 
 364 MR. H . 
 
 deny it, child. Bless me ! what great ugly thing is that, 
 that dangles at your bosom ? 
 
 Mel. This 1 it is a cross : how do you like it ? 
 
 2d Lady. A cross ! Well, to me it looks for all the 
 world like a great staring H ? (Here a general laugh.} 
 
 Mel. Malicious creatures ! Believe me, it is a cross, 
 and nothing but a cross. 
 
 1st Lady. A cross, I believe, you would willingly 
 hang at ! 
 
 Mel. Intolerable spite ! 
 
 [Mr. H. is announced. 
 
 Enter MR. H. 
 
 1st Lady. Oh, Mr. H., we are so glad 
 
 2d Lady. We have been so dull 
 
 3d Lady. So perfectly lifeless ! You owe it to us to 
 be more than commonly entertaining. 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies, this is so obliging 
 
 4:th Lady. Oh, Mr. H., those ranunculas you said were 
 dying, pretty things ! they have got up 
 
 5th Lady. I have worked that sprig you commended. 
 I want you to come 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies 
 
 6th Lady. I have sent for that piece of music from 
 London. 
 
 Mr.H. The Mozart (seeing MELESINDA) Melesinda ! 
 
 Several Ladies at once. Nay, positively, Melesinda, 
 you shan't engross him all to yourself. 
 
 [While the Ladies are pressing about MR. H. tfte 
 Gentlemen show signs of displeasure. 
 
 1st Gent. We shan't be able to edge in a word, now 
 this coxcomb is come. 
 
 2d Gent. Damn him ! I will affront him. 
 
 1st Gent. Sir, with your leave, I have a word to say 
 to one of these ladies. 
 
 2d Gent. If we could be heard
 
 MR. H . 365 
 
 (The Ladies pay no attention but to ME. H.) 
 
 Mr. H. You see, gentlemen, how the matter stands. 
 (Hums an air.} I am not my own master: positively, 
 
 I exist and breathe but to be agreeable to these 
 
 Did you speak ? 
 
 1st Gent. And affects absence of mind, puppy ! 
 
 Mr. H. Who spoke of absence of mind? did you, 
 madam? How do you do, Lady Wearwell how do 1 ? 
 I did not see your ladyship before. What was I about 
 to say 1 oh ! absence of mind. I am the most unhappy 
 dog in that way sometimes spurt out the strangest 
 things the most mal-a-propos without meaning to give 
 the least offence, upon my honour sheer absence of mind 
 things I would have given the world not to have said. 
 
 1st Gent. Do you hear the coxcomb 1 
 
 1st Lady. Great wits, they say 
 
 2d Lady. Your fine geniuses are most given 
 
 3d Lady. Men of bright parts are commonly too 
 vivacious 
 
 Mr. H. But you shall hear. I was to dine the other 
 day at a great Nabob's, that must be nameless, who, 
 between ourselves, is strongly suspected of being very 
 rich, that's all. John, my valet, who knows my foible, 
 cautioned me, while he was dressing me as he usually 
 does where he thinks there's a danger of my committing a 
 lapsus to take care in my conversation how I made any 
 allusion, direct or indirect, to presents you understand 
 me 1 I set out double-charged with my fellow's con- 
 sideration and my own, and, to do myself justice, behaved 
 with tolerable circumspection for the first half hour or 
 so till at last a gentleman in company, who was indulg- 
 ing a free vein of raillery at the expense of the ladies, 
 stumbled upon that expression of the poet which calls 
 them "fair defects." 
 
 1st Lady. It is Pope, I believe, who says it. 
 
 Mr. H. No, madam, Milton. Where was I? Oh, 
 " fair defects." This gave occasion to a critic in company
 
 366 MR. H . 
 
 to deliver his opinion on the phrase that led to an 
 enumeration of all the various words which might have 
 been used instead of " defect," as want, absence, poverty, 
 deficiency, lack. This moment I, who had not been 
 attending to the progress of the argument (as the denoti- 
 ment will show), starting suddenly up out of one of my 
 reveries, by some unfortunate connection of ideas, which 
 the last fatal word had excited, the devil put it into my 
 head to turn round to the Nabob, who was sitting next 
 me, and in a very marked manner (as it seemed to the 
 company) to put the question to him, " Pray, sir, what 
 may be the exact value of a lac of rupees V You may 
 guess the confusion which followed. 
 
 1st Lady. What a distressing circumstance ! 
 
 2d Lady. To a delicate mind 
 
 3d Lady. How embarrassing 
 
 &tk Lady. I declare I quite pity you. 
 
 \st Gent. Puppy ! 
 
 Mr. H. A Baronet at the table, seeing my dilemma, 
 jogged my elbow ; and a good-natured Duchess, who does 
 everything with a grace peculiar to herself, trod on my 
 toes at that instant : this brought me to myself, and 
 covered with blushes, and pitied by all the ladies I 
 withdrew. 
 
 1st Lady. How charmingly he tells a story ! 
 
 2d Lady. But how distressing ! 
 
 Mr. H. Lord Squandercounsel, who is my particular 
 friend, was pleased to rally me in his inimitable way upon 
 it next day. I shall never forget a sensible thing he said 
 on the occasion speaking of absence of mind, my foible 
 says he, my dear Hogs 
 
 Several Ladies. Hogs what ? ha ! 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Hogsflesh my name here a uni- 
 versal scream) Oh, my cursed unfortunate tongue! 
 H., I mean Where was I *? 
 
 1st Lady. Filthy ! abominable ! 
 
 Id Lady. Unutterable ! 
 
 3d Lady. Hogs foh !
 
 MR. H . 367 
 
 th Lady. Disgusting ! 
 
 5th Lady. Vile ! 
 
 6th Lady. Shocking ! 
 
 1st Lady. Odious ! 
 
 2d Lady. Hogs pah ! 
 
 3d Lady. A smelling bottle look to Miss Melesinda. 
 Poor thing ! it is no wonder. You had better keep off 
 from her, Mr. Hogsflesh, and not be pressing about her 
 in her circumstances. 
 
 1st Gent. Good time of day to you, Mr. Hogsflesh ! 
 
 2d Gent. The compliments of the season to you, Mr. 
 Hogsflesh ! 
 
 Mr. H. This is too much flesh and blood cannot 
 endure it. 
 
 1st Gent. What flesh ? hog's-flesh 1 
 
 2d Gent. How he sets up his bristles ! 
 
 Mr. H. Bristles ! 
 
 1st Gent. He looks as fierce as a hog in armour. 
 
 Mr. H. A hog ! Madam ! (here he severally 
 
 accosts the Ladies, who by turns repel him). 
 
 1st Lady. Extremely obliged to you for your atten- 
 tions ; but don't want a partner. 
 
 2d Lady. Greatly flattered by your preference ; but 
 believe I shall remain single. 
 
 3d Lady. Shall always acknowledge your politeness ; 
 but have no thoughts of altering my condition. 
 
 4:th Lady. Always be happy to respect you as a friend; 
 but you must not look for anything further. 
 
 5th Lady. No doubt of your ability to make any 
 woman happy ; but have no thoughts of changing my 
 name. 
 
 6th Lady. Must tell you, sir, that if, by your insinua- 
 tions, you think to prevail with me, you have got the 
 wrong sow by the ear. Does he think any lady would 
 go to pig with him ? 
 
 Old Lady. Must beg you to be less particular in your 
 addresses to me. Does he take me for a Jew, to long 
 after forbidden meats ?
 
 368 MR. H . 
 
 Mr. H. I shall go mad ! to be refused by old Mother 
 Damnable she that's so old, nobody knows whether she 
 was ever married or no, but passes for a maid by courtesy; 
 her juvenile exploits being beyond the farthest stretch of 
 tradition ! old Mother Damnable ! 
 
 [Exeunt all, either pitying or seeming to avoid him. 
 
 SCENE. The Street. BELVIL and another Gentleman. 
 
 Bel. Poor Jack ! I am really sorry for him. The ac- 
 count which you give me of his mortifying change of 
 reception at the assembly would be highly diverting if it 
 gave me less pain to hear it. With all his amusing 
 absurdities, and amongst them not the least a pre- 
 dominant desire to be thought well of by the fair sex, he 
 has an abundant share of good-nature, and is a man of 
 honour. Notwithstanding all that has happened, Mele- 
 sinda may do worse than take him yet. But did the 
 women resent it so deeply as you say ] 
 
 Gent. Oh, intolerably ! They fled him as fearfully, 
 when 'twas once blown, as a man would be avoided who 
 was suddenly discovered to have marks of the plague, 
 and as fast, when before they had been ready to devour 
 the foolishest thing he could say. 
 
 Bel. Ha ! ha ! so frail is the tenure by which these 
 women's favourites commonly hold their envied pre- 
 eminence ! Well, I must go find him out and comfort 
 him. I suppose I shall find him at the inn. 
 
 Gent. Either there or at Melesinda's. Adieu ! 
 
 [Exeunt. 
 
 SCENE. ME. H 's Apartment. 
 
 Mr. H. (solus). Was ever anything so mortifying 1 to 
 be refused by old Mother Damnable ! with such parts 
 and address, and the little squeamish devils to dislike me 
 for a name a sound ! Oh, my cursed name ! that it 
 was something I could be revenged on ! if it were alive,
 
 MR. ii . 369 
 
 that I might tread upon it, or crush it, or pummel it, or 
 kick it, or spit it out for it sticks in my throat and 
 will choke me. 
 
 My plaguy ancestors ! if they had left me but a Van 
 or a Mac, or an Irish 0', it had been something to qualify 
 it. Mynheer Van Hogsflesh, or Sawney MacHogsflesh, 
 
 or Sir Phelim O'Hogsflesh, but downright blunt . 
 
 If it had been any other name in the world, I could have 
 borne it. If it had been the name of a beast, as Bull, 
 Fox, Kid, Lamb, Wolf, Lion ; or of a bird, as Sparrow, 
 Hawk, Buzzard, Daw, Finch, Nightingale ; or of a fish, 
 as Sprat, Herring, Salmon j or the name of a thing, as 
 Ginger, Hay, Wood ; or of a colour, as Black, Gray, 
 White, Green ; or of a sound, as Bray ; or the name of 
 a month, as March, May ; or of a place, as Barnet, 
 Baldock, Hitchin ; or the name of a coin, as Farthing, 
 Penny, Twopenny ; or of a profession, as Butcher, Baker, 
 Carpenter, Piper, Fisher, Fletcher, Fowler, Glover ; or a 
 Jew's name, as Solomons, Isaacs, Jacobs ; or a personal 
 name, as Foot, Leg, Crookshanks, Heaviside, Sidebottom, 
 Longbottom, Ramsbottom, Wiuterbottom ; or a long 
 name, as Blanchenhagen, or Blanchenhausen ; or a short 
 name, as Crib, Crisp, Crips, Tag, Trot, Tub, Phips, 
 Padge, Papps, or Prig, or Wig, or Pip, or Trip; Trip 
 had been something, but Ho . 
 
 (Walks about in great agitation, recovering his 
 calmness a little, sits doivn.) 
 
 Farewell the most distant thoughts of marriage the 
 finger-circling ring, the purity-figuring glove, the envy- 
 pining bridesmaids, the wishing parson, and the simpering 
 clerk ! Farewell the ambiguous blush-raising joke, the 
 titter-provoking pun, the morning-stirring drum ! No 
 son of mine shall exist to bear my ill-fated name ! No 
 nurse come chuckling to tell me it is a boy ! No mid- 
 wife, leering at me from under the lids of professional 
 gravity ! I dreamed of caudle (sings in a melancholy 
 tone) Lullaby, Lullaby, hush-a-by-baby ! how like its 
 2 B
 
 370 MR. H . 
 
 papa it is ! (makes motions as if he was nursing). And 
 then, -when grown up, "Is this your son, sir 1 ?" "Yes, 
 sir, a poor copy of me, a sad young dog ! just -what his 
 father was at his age. ' I have four more at home." 
 Oh ! oh ! oh ! 
 
 Enter LANDLOED. 
 
 Mr. H. Landlord, I must pack up to-night ; you will 
 see all my things got ready. 
 
 Land. Hope your Honour does not intend to qmt the 
 " Blue Boar," sorry anything has happened. 
 
 Mr. H. He has heard it all. 
 
 Land. Your Honour has had some mortification, to 
 be sure, as a man may say ; you have brought your pigs 
 to a fine market. 
 
 Mr. H. Pigs ! 
 
 Land. What then ? take old Pry's advice, and never 
 mind it. Don't scorch your crackling for 'em, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. Scorch my crackling ! a queer phrase ; but 
 I suppose he don't mean to affront me. 
 
 Land. What is done can't be undone ; you can't make 
 a silken purse out of a sow's ear. 
 
 Mr. H. As you say, landlord, thinking of a thing does 
 but augment it. 
 
 Land. Does but hogment it, indeed, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. Hogment it ! damn it ! I said augment it. 
 
 Land. Lord, sir, 'tis not everybody has such gift of 
 fine phrases as your Honour, that can lard his discourse. 
 
 Mr. H. Lard ! 
 
 Land. Suppose they do smoke you 
 
 Mr. H. Smoke me ? 
 
 Land. One of my phrases ; never mind my words, sir, 
 my meaning is good. We all mean the same thing, only 
 you express yourself one way, and I another, that's all. 
 The meaning's the same ; it is all pork. 
 
 Mr. H. That's another of your phrases, I presume. 
 (Bell rings, and the landlord called for.)
 
 MR H . 371 
 
 Land. Anon, anon. 
 
 Mr. H. Oh, I wish I were anonymous ! 
 
 [Exeunt several ways. 
 
 SCENE. MELESINDA'S Apartment. 
 MELESINDA and MAID. 
 
 Maid. Lord, madam ! before I'd take on as you do 
 about a foolish what signifies a name 1 Hogs Hogs 
 what is it \ is just as good as any other, for what 
 I see. 
 
 Mel. Ignorant creature ! yet she is perhaps blest in 
 the absence of those ideas which, while they add a zest 
 to the few pleasures which fall to the lot of superior 
 natures to enjoy, doubly edge the 
 
 Maid. Superior natures ! a fig ! If he's hog by 
 name, he's not hog by nature that don't follow ; his 
 name don't make him anything, does it 1 He don't grunt 
 the more for it, nor squeak, that ever I hear he likes 
 his victuals out of a plate, as other Christians do ; you 
 never see him go to the trough 
 
 Mel. Unfeeling wretch ! yet possibly her intentions 
 
 Maid. For instance, madam, my name is Finch Betty 
 Finch. I don't whistle the more for that, nor long after 
 canary-seed while I can get good wholesome mutton no, 
 nor you can't catch me by throwing salt on my tail. If 
 you come to that, hadn't I a young man used to come 
 after me they said courted me his name was Lion 
 Francis Lion, a tailor ; but though he was fond enough 
 of me, for all that he never offered to eat me. 
 
 Mel. How fortunate that the discovery has been made 
 before it was too late ! Had I listened to his deceits, 
 and, as the perfidious man had almost persuaded me, 
 precipitated myself into an inextricable engagement 
 before 
 
 Maid. No great harm if you had. You'd only have
 
 372 MR. H . 
 
 bought a pig in a poke and what then 1 Oh, here he 
 comes creeping 
 
 Enter MR. H., abject. 
 
 Go to her, Mr. Hogs Hogs Hogsbristles what's 
 your name? Don't be afraid, man don't give it up 
 she's not crying only summat has made her eyes red 
 she has got a sty in her eye, I believe (going). 
 
 Mel. You are not going, Betty ? 
 
 Maid. Oh, madam, never mind me I shall be back 
 in the twinkling of a pig's whisker, as they say. \Exit. 
 
 Mr. H. Melesinda, you behold before you a wretch 
 who would have betrayed your confidence, but it was 
 love that prompted him ; who would have tricked you 
 by an unworthy concealment into a participation of that 
 disgrace which a superficial world has agreed to attach to 
 a name but with it you would have shared a fortune 
 not contemptible, and a heart but 'tis over now. That 
 name he is content to bear alone to go where the perse- 
 cuted syllables shall be no more heard, or excite no mean- 
 ing some spot where his native tongue has never pene- 
 trated, nor any of his countrymen have landed, to plant 
 their unfeeling satire, their brutal wit, and national ill 
 
 manners where no Englishman (Here MELESINDA, 
 
 ivho has been pouting during this speech, fetches a deep 
 sigh.} Some yet undiscovered Otaheite, where witless, 
 unapprehensive savages shall innocently pronounce the 
 ill-fated sounds, and think them not inharmonious. 
 
 Mel. Oh! 
 
 Mr. H. Who knows but among the female natives 
 might be found 
 
 Mel. Sir ! (raising her head). 
 
 Mr. H. One who would be more kind than some 
 Oberea Queen Oberea. 
 
 Mel. Oh! 
 
 Mr. H. Or what if I were to seek for proofs of recipro-
 
 MR. H . 373 
 
 cal esteem among unprejudiced African maids in Mono- 
 motopa ? 
 
 Enter SERVANT. 
 Serv. Mr. Belvil. [Exit. 
 
 Enter BELVIL. 
 
 Mr. H. In Monomotopa (musing}. 
 
 Bel. Heyday, Jack ! what means this mortified face ? 
 nothing has happened, I hope, between this lady and 
 you 1 ? I beg pardon, madam, but understanding my 
 friend was with you, I took the liberty of seeking him 
 here. Some little difference possibly which a third person 
 can adjust not a word will you, madam, as this gentle- 
 man's friend, suffer me to be the arbitrator strange ! 
 hark'ee, Jack, nothing has come out, has there ? you 
 understand me. Oh, I guess how it is somebody has 
 got at your secret. You haven't blabbed it yourself, have 
 you ? ha ! ha ! ha ! I could find in my heart Jack, 
 what would you give me if I should relieve you 
 
 Mr. H. No power of man can relieve me (sighs), but 
 it must lie at the root gnawing at the root here it 
 will lie. 
 
 Bel. No power of man 1 not a common man, I grant 
 you ; for instance, a subject it's out of the power of any 
 subject. 
 
 Mr. II. Gnawing at the root there it will lie. 
 
 Bel. Such a thing has been known as a name to be 
 changed ; but not by a subject (shows a Gazette). 
 
 Mr. II. Gnawing at the root (suddenly snatches the 
 paper out of BELVIL'S hand] ; ha ! pish ! nonsense ! give 
 it me what ! (reads) promotions, bankrupts a great 
 many bankrupts this week there it will lie (lays it down, 
 takes it up again, and reads) "The King has been 
 graciously pleased" gnawing at the root "graciously 
 pleased to grant unto John Hogsflesh" the devil
 
 374 MR. H . 
 
 " Hogsflesh, Esq., of Sty Hall, in the county of Hants, 
 his royal license and authority " Lord ! Lord ! 
 " that he and his issue " me and my issue " may take 
 and use the surname and arms of Bacon" Bacon, the 
 surname and arms of Bacon ! " in pursuance of an in- 
 junction contained in the last will and testament of 
 Nicholas Bacon, Esq., his late uncle, as well as out of 
 grateful respect to his memory : " grateful respect, poor 
 
 old soul ! here's more " and that such arms may 
 
 be first duly exemplified " they shall, I will take care of 
 that " according to the laws of arms, and recorded in 
 the Heralds' Ofiice." 
 
 Bel. Come, madam, give me leave to put my own in- 
 terpretation upon your silence, and to plead for my friend, 
 that now that only obstacle which seemed to stand in the 
 way of your union is removed, you will suffer me to com- 
 plete the happiness which my news seems to have brought 
 him, by introducing him with a new claim to your favour, 
 by the name of Mr. Bacon. (Takes their hands and 
 joins them, which MELESINDA seems to give consent to with 
 a smile.} 
 
 Mr. H. Generous Melesinda ! my dear friend " he 
 and his issue," me and my issue Lord ! 
 
 Bel. I wish you joy, Jack, with all my heart ! 
 
 Mr. H. Bacon, Bacon, Bacon how odd it sounds ! 
 I could never be tired of hearing it. There was Lord 
 Chancellor Bacon. Methinks I have some of the Verulam 
 blood in me already methinks I could look through 
 Nature there was Friar Bacon, a conjurer I feel as if 
 I could conjure too 
 
 Enter a SERVANT. 
 
 Serv, Two young ladies and an old lady are at the 
 door, inquiring if you see company, madam. 
 
 Mr. H. " Surname and arms " 
 
 Mel. Show them up. My dear Mr. Bacon, moderate 
 your joy !
 
 MR. H . 375 
 
 Enter three Ladies, being part of those ivho were at the 
 assembly, 
 
 \st Lady. My dear Melesinda, how do you do 1 
 
 2d Lady. How do you do 1 We have been so con- 
 cerned for you 
 
 Old Lady. We have been so concerned (seeing him) 
 Mr. Hogsflesh 
 
 Mr. H. There's no such person nor there never was 
 nor 'tis not fit there should be "surname and 
 
 Bel. It is true what my friend would express ; we have 
 been all in a mistake, ladies. Very true, the name of 
 this gentleman was what you call it, but it is so no 
 longer. The succession to the long -contested Bacon 
 estate is at length decided, and with it my friend suc- 
 ceeds to the name of his deceased relative. 
 
 Mr. H. "His Majesty has been graciously pleased " 
 
 1st Lady. I am sure we all join in hearty congratula- 
 tion (sighs). 
 
 2d Lady. And wish you joy with all our hearts 
 (heighho /). 
 
 Old Lady. And hope you will enjoy the name and 
 estate many years (cries). 
 
 Bel. Ha ! ha ! ha ! mortify them a little, Jack. 
 
 1st Lady. Hope J T OU intend to stay 
 
 2d Lady. With us some time 
 
 Old Lady. In these parts. 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies, for your congratulations I thank you ; 
 for the favours you have lavished on me, and in particular 
 for this lady's (turning to the old Lady) good opinion, I 
 rest your debtor. As to any future favours (accosts 
 them severally in the order in which he ivas refused by 
 them at the assembly) Madam, shall always acknowledge 
 your politeness ; but at present, you see, I am engaged 
 with a partner. Always be happy to respect you as a 
 friend, but you must not look for anything further. Must
 
 376 MR. H . 
 
 beg of you to be less particular in your addresses to me. 
 Ladies all, with this piece of advice, of Bath and you 
 
 Your ever grateful servant takes his leave. 
 Lay your plans surer when you plot to grieve ; 
 See, while you kindly mean to mortify 
 Another, the wild arrow do not fly, 
 And gall yourself. For once you've been mistaken ; 
 Your shafts have miss'd their aim Hogsflesh has saved 
 his Bacon !
 
 NOTES. 
 
 Sonnets (p. 1). These sonnets are the earliest of Lamb's ex- 
 periments in verse. They were written at the age of twenty, 
 and tell of his attachment to Ann Simmons the Anna of the 
 sonnets, the Alice Winterton of his later writings, the girl 
 whose acquaintance he made during his visits to his grand- 
 mother at Blakesware in Hertfordshire. See Talfourd's Final 
 Memorials, Letter to Coleridge 1796 : "The following sonnet 
 was composed during a walk down to Hertfordshire early in the 
 last summer : 
 
 ' The Lord of Light shakes off his drowsyhed, ' etc. 
 
 The last line is a copy of Bowies' ' To the green hamlet in the 
 peaceful plain.' Your ears are not so very fastidious : many 
 people would not like words so prosaic and familiar in a sonnet 
 as Islington and Hertfordshire. The next was written within 
 a day or two of the last, on revisiting a spot where the scene 
 was laid of my first sonnet, ' that mock'd my steps with many 
 a lonely glade ' : 
 
 ' When last I roved these winding wood-walks green, ' etc. 
 
 The next retains a few lines from a sonnet of mine which you 
 once remarked had no ' body of thought ' in it. I agree with 
 you, but have preserved a part of it, and it runs thus. I flatter 
 myself you will like it : 
 
 ' A timid grace sits trembling in her eye, ' etc. 
 
 The next and last I value most of all. 'Twas composed close 
 upon the heels of the last, in that very wood I had in mind 
 when I wrote ' Methinks how dainty sweet ' : 
 
 'We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,' etc." 
 
 Of these early sonnets there are several versions as first 
 written by Lamb ; then as altered by Coleridge ; and lastly as 
 revised by Lamb, when reissued in the volumes of 1818. They 
 are given here according to this latest revision. All readers of
 
 . 378 NOTES. 
 
 Lamb's Letters will remember his soreness about Coleridge's 
 alterations of his sonnets, and his pathetic "Coleridge! spare 
 my ewe-lambs." 
 
 Sonnet 7 (p. 4). Written by Lamb in the winter of 1795-96, 
 when in temporary confinement at the asylum at Hoxton. See 
 letter to Coleridge of 1796. The sonnet that follows, though 
 belonging to a later date, is inserted here in accordance with a 
 wish of Lamb expressed in a letter to Coleridge: "If the 
 fraternal sentiment conveyed in the following lines will atone 
 for the total want of anything like merit or genius in it, I 
 desire you will print it next after my other sonnet to my sister." 
 For whatever reason, these lines were afterwards withdrawn 
 from publication, and were not printed in Lamb's lifetime. 
 
 Sonnet 9 (p. 5). A voyage to Margate with his sister in the 
 Old Margate Hoy, afterwards celebrated in Elia, seems to have 
 been the occasion of this sonnet. 
 
 Sonnet 10 (p. 5). There is some doubt as to the authorship of 
 this sonnet. It is signed C. L. in the first edition of Coleridge's 
 Poems (Bristol, 1796), and is included among Lamb's contribu- 
 tions to the second edition of these poems in the following 
 year. But it had appeared with the signature S. T. C. in a series 
 of sonnets published by Coleridge in the Morning Chronicle in 
 1794 ; and is once again claimed for Coleridge in the third 
 edition of his poems in 1803. On the whole it seems likely 
 that it was a joint composition of the two friends, and was 
 finally surrendered by Lamb to his companion. Lamb did not 
 include it in the first collected edition of his works in 1818. 
 
 To Sara and her Samuel (p. 6). "Written on occasion of a 
 disappointment. Lamb had unsuccessfully asked leave of 
 absence from his office to visit Coleridge and his wife at Bristol. 
 The lines were sent in a letter to Coleridge of July 5, 1796, and 
 were printed in the January following in the Monthly Magazine. 
 Talfourd points out how strangely Lamb confounds the Avon of 
 Bristol with that of Stratford-on-Avon. 
 
 To the Poet Cowper (p. 7). "I fear you will not accord en- 
 tirely with my sentiments of Cowpgr as expressed above (per- 
 haps scarcely just) ; but the poor gentleman has just recovered 
 from his lunacies, and that begets pity ; and pity, love ; and 
 love, admiration ; and then it goes hard with people but they 
 lie !" (Letter to Coleridge, July 1796.) 
 
 Blank Verse (p. 7). The seven poems that follow are from 
 the second edition of Coleridge's Poems, 1797. These, and the 
 sonnets already given, were prefaced by the following dedica-
 
 NOTES. 379 
 
 tion : "The few following poems, creatures of the Fancy and 
 the Feeling, in life's more vacant hours, produced, for the most 
 part, by Love in Idleness, are, with all a brother's fondness, 
 inscribed to Mary Aim Lamb, the author's best friend and 
 sister." 
 
 To Charles Lloyd (p. 11). See letter to Coleridge of 1797 : 
 "You have learned by this time, with surprise no doubt, that 
 Lloyd is with me in town. The emotions I felt ou his coming 
 so unlocked for are not ill expressed in what follows, and what, 
 if you do not object to them as too personal, and to the world 
 obscure or otherwise wanting in worth, I should wish to make 
 part of our little volume." 
 
 A Vision of Repentance (p. 13). From the supplement to the 
 volume of 1797, not dated, but sent by Lamb to Coleridge in a 
 letter of April 15, 1797. 
 
 To Charles Lloyd (p. 15). The blank verse that follows is from 
 the joint volume Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles 
 Lamb, 1798. "The following I wrote when I had returned 
 from C. Lloyd, leaving him behind me at Burton with Southey. 
 To understand some of it you must remember that at that time 
 he was very much perplexed in mind." (Letter to Coleridge, 
 1797.) 
 
 Written on the day of my Aunt's Funeral (p. 16). See letter 
 to Coleridge, January 5, 1797. " My poor old aunt whom you 
 have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at 
 school ; who used to toddle there to bring me good things, 
 when I, schoolboy like, only despised her for it, and used to be 
 ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal- 
 hole steps as you went into the old Grammar School, and open 
 her apron, and bring out her bason, with some nice thing she 
 had caused to be saved for me ; the good old creature is now 
 lying on her death-bed. . . . She says, poor thing, she is glad 
 she is come home to die with me. " 
 
 Written a year after the Events (p. 17). Sent to Coleridge in 
 a letter of September 1797, with the following heading (" Friday 
 next, Coleridge, is the day on which my mother died "). 
 
 Written soon after the preceding Poem (p. 19). Sent by Lamb 
 to Southey, and mentioned by the latter in a note to his friend 
 Wynn, November 20, 1797 "I know that our tastes differ 
 much in poetry, and yet I think you must like these lines by 
 Charles Lamb. I believe you know his history, and the dread- 
 ful death of his mother. "
 
 380 NOTES. 
 
 The old familar Faces (p. 21). Dated by Lamb, January 
 1798. The first stanza was omitted by him when the poem 
 was reprinted in 1818, in common with other poems that bore 
 reference to his mother's death. The allusion in the fifth 
 stanza 
 
 " I had a friend, a kinder friend has no man " 
 
 was to Coleridge, between whom and Lamb the relations had 
 been for some time the reverse of cordial. There had been 
 little jealousies and wounded vanities in connection with the 
 joint volume of poems. As a poet. Coleridge was already show- 
 ing himself possessed of powers far greater than Lamb's, and 
 moreover he had been of late disposed to ridicule that affec- 
 tation of simplicity which had marked the early poems of him- 
 self and his friend. In November 1797 Coleridge printed in 
 the Monthly Magazine three sonnets, signed Nehemiah Higgin- 
 lottom, ostensibly intended to parody certain characteristics of 
 his own earlier manner. Unfortunately, if a parody on himself, 
 it was doubly so on his fellow-poet ; and it seems impossible to 
 doubt that the second of these effusions was somewhat ungener- 
 ously aimed at Lamb, and intended to give pain. It runs 
 thus 
 
 To SIMPLICITY. 
 
 ! I do love thee, meek Simplicity ! 
 For of thy lays the lulling simpleness 
 
 Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress, 
 Distress though small, yet haply great to me ! 
 "Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad 
 
 1 amble on ; yet, though I know not why, 
 So sad I am but should a friend and I 
 Grow cool and miff, ! I am very sad ! 
 And then with sonnets and with sympathy 
 My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall ; 
 Now of my false friend plaining plaintively, 
 Now raving at mankind in general ; 
 
 But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all, 
 All very simple, meek Simplicity ! 
 
 The "friend of my bosom" was Lamb's new friend Charles 
 Lloyd, who had taken Coleridge's place as his nearest friend 
 and confidant. I have preserved in the last stanza the italics 
 originally used by Lamb in alluding to the lady whose doors 
 were now closed upon him "Some are taken from me." See 
 my Memoir of Lamb in the Men of Letters Series. 
 
 Living without God in the World (p. 23). Contributed by 
 Lamb to the first volume of Cottle's Annual Anthology. See 
 Letter of Lamb to Southey of November 28, 1798.
 
 NOTES. 381 
 
 John Woodvil (p. 25). Published in a thin duodecimo 
 volume in 1802. It was written three years earlier, and shown 
 to Coleridge and Southey, who strongly dissuaded Lamb from 
 printing it. At Christmas 1799 Lamb ottered it to John 
 Kemble, then manager of Drury Lane, but it was not unnatur- 
 ally declined. The influences under which the play was written 
 are pointed out in Lamb's dedicatory letter to Coleridge, pre- 
 fixed to the collected edition of his works in 1818. The title 
 originally chosen for the play was Pride's Cure. Lamb defends 
 this title in a letter to Manning of December 1799. " I meant 
 his (i.e. John Woodvil's) punishment, not alone to be a cure 
 for his daily and habitual pride, but the direct consequence 
 and appropriate punishment of a particular act of pride." 
 Southey writes to Charles Danvers in December 1801 : "Lamb 
 and his sister see us often ; he is printing his play, which will 
 please you by the exquisite beauty of its poetry, and provoke 
 you by the exquisite silliness of its story." It was reviewed in 
 the Edinburgh of April 1803. 
 
 The Witch (p. 66). Originally written as an episode in John 
 Woodvil, the characters being, instead of the "old servant and 
 stranger," Sandford, Sir Walter Woodvil's steward, and Margaret. 
 See letter of Lamb to Southey, April 20, 1799. " The following 
 is a second extract from my tragedy, that is to be. 'Tis narrated 
 by an old steward to Margaret, orphan ward of Sir Walter 
 Woodvil. ... I expect you to like the old woman's curse." 
 See also a letter to Manning of November 3, 1800 : "At last 
 I have written to Kemble to know the event of my play, which 
 was presented last Christmas. As I suspected, came an answer 
 back that the copy was lost, and could not be found ; no hint 
 that anybody had to this day ever looked into it, with a 
 courteous (reasonable !) request of another copy (if I had one by 
 me), and a promise of a definitive answer in a week. I could 
 not resist so facile and moderate a demand, so scribbled out 
 another, omitting sundry things, such as (he witch story, about 
 half of the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and 
 transposing that soliloquy about England getting drunk." 
 
 A Ballad : noting the difference of Rich and Poor (p. 68). 
 See letter to Coleridge, August 6, 1800 : "I have hit off the 
 following in imitation of old English poetry which, I imagine, 
 I am a dab at. The measure is immeasurable ; but it most 
 resembles that beautiful ballad, The Old and Young Courtier ; 
 and in its feature of taking the extremes of two situations for 
 just parallel, it resembles the old poetry certainly." 
 
 Ballad from the German (p. 69). During Lamb's connection 
 with the press (1800-1803), one of his joint schemes with Cole-
 
 382 NOTES. 
 
 ridge was to versify prose translations of German poems supplied 
 by the latter. We may suppose that this paraphrase of Thekla's 
 song in Wallenstein was one of these experiments. Coleridge, 
 in a note to his translation of Wallenstein in 1800, introduced 
 a slightly different version, with the following preface: "I 
 cannot but add here an imitation of this song, with which the 
 author of 'The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Blind Margaret' 
 has favoured me, and which appears to me to have caught the 
 happiest manner of our old ballads 
 
 ' The clouds are black 'ning, the storms threat'ning, 
 The cavern doth mutter, the greenwood moan ; 
 Billows are breaking, the damsel's heart aching, 
 Thus in the dark night she singeth alone, 
 Her eye upward roving : 
 
 ' The world is empty, the heart is dead surely, 
 In this world plainly all seemeth amiss ; 
 To thy heaven, Holy One, take home thy little one, 
 I have partaken of all earth's bliss 
 Both living and loving.'" 
 
 Whether this was Lamb's first draft, or whether it is Lamb's 
 version revised by Coleridge, cannot now be determined. 
 
 Hester (p. 69). Lamb writes to Manning in 1803 : " I send 
 you some verses I have made on the death of a young Quaker 
 you may have heard me speak of as being in love with for some 
 years while I lived at Pentonville, though I had never spoken 
 to her in my life. She died about a month since." Her name 
 was Hester Savory, but no other fact about her seems recover- 
 able. It was in 1800 that Lamb was living in Chapel Street, 
 Pentonville. 
 
 A Farewell to Tobacco (p. 70). Published in Leigh Hunt's 
 Reflector (iv. 1811). Sent in a letter to Wordsworth and his 
 sister, in September 1805: "I wish you may think this a 
 handsome farewell to my ' Friendly Traitress. ' Tobacco has 
 been my evening comfort and my morning curse for these five 
 years ; and you know how difficult it is from refraining to pick 
 one's lips even, when it has become a habit. This poem is the 
 only one which I have finished since so long as when I wrote 
 'Hester Savory." I have had it in my head to do it these two 
 years, but tobacco stood in its own light when it gave me 
 headaches that prevented my singing its praises. Now you 
 have got it, you have got all my store, for I have absolutely not 
 another line . . . The 'Tobacco' being a little in the way of 
 Wither (whom Southey so much likes), perhaps you will some- 
 how convey it to him with my kind remembrances." The Ode
 
 NOTES. 383 
 
 bears, in fact, traces and reminiscences of many old authors. 
 The metre is Wither's, and the alternate praise and abuse of his 
 theme is borrowed from the Author's Abstract of Melancholy, 
 prefixed to Burton's Anatomy. The couplet 
 
 " Stinking'st of the stinking kind, 
 Filth of the mouth and log of the mind," 
 
 is a parody of one in Flecknoe's Invocation to Silence (1674), 
 
 " Offspring of a heavenly kind, 
 Frost of the mouth and thaw of the mind. " 
 
 Lints on the Celebrated Picture by Leonardo da Vinci (p. 75). 
 In the 1818 volumes Lamb printed four copies of verses on sub- 
 jects connected with this painter the other three being by his 
 sister Mary. It is evident, from his letters of this period, that 
 he was increasingly interested in the works of Leonardo. See 
 the Elia Essay Old China. 
 
 To T. L. H.a Child (p. 83). Thornton Leigh Hunt, the 
 eldest child of Leigh Hunt. The occasion of these lines was 
 the imprisonment of Leigh Hunt in the Surrey gaol, from 1813 
 to 1815, for the Examiner libel on the Prince Regent. Hunt 
 writes in his autobiography : " My eldest little boy, to whom 
 Lamb addressed some charming verses on the occasion, was my 
 constant companion, and we used to play all sorts of juvenile 
 games together. It was, probably, in dreaming of these games 
 (but the words had a more touching effect on my ear) that he 
 exclaimed one night in his sleep, 'Xo! I'm not lost, I'm 
 found.'" Charles and Mary Lamb were constant visitors at the 
 prison. Hunt adds: "The Lambs came to comfort me in 
 all weathers, hail or sunshine, in daylight and in darkness, 
 even in the dreadful frost and snow of the beginning of 1814." 
 
 To Miss Kelly (p. 84). The four following sonnets appear 
 for the first time in the volumes of 1818, and the date and oc- 
 casion of their composition cannot be ascertained. It is interest- 
 ing to know that the sonnet on the Family Name attracted the 
 attention of Goethe. . "When Crabb Robinson visited Weimar in 
 1829, in conversation with Goethe he asked "whether he knew 
 the name of Lamb." "Oh yes! Did he not write a 'pretty 
 sonnet on his own name?" "Charles Lamb," adds Robinson, 
 " though he always affected contempt for Goethe, yet was mani- 
 festly pleased that his name was known to him." The mingled 
 sarcasm and pathos of the sonnet to John Lamb will not escape 
 the reader's attention. 
 
 Written at Cambridge (p. 87). The majority of the poems 
 that follow are from the "Album Verses, with a feiu others,"
 
 384 NOTES. 
 
 published by Edward Moxon in 1830. The following was the 
 dedication to this volume : 
 
 " DEAR MOXON I do not know to whom a Dedication of these 
 Trifles is more properly due than to yourself. You suggested 
 the printing of them. You were desirous of exhibiting a speci- 
 men of the manner in which publications, entrusted to your 
 future care, would appear. With more propriety, perhaps, the 
 'Christmas,' or some other of your own simple, unpretending, 
 compositions might have served this purpose. But I forgot 
 you have bid a long adieu to the Muses. I had on my hands 
 sundry copies of Verses, written for Albums 
 
 ' These books, kept by modern young ladies for show, 
 Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know, ' 
 
 or otherwise floating about in Periodicals, which you have chosen 
 in this manner to embody. I feel little interest in this publica- 
 tion. They are simply Advertisement Verses. 
 
 " It is not for me, nor you, to allude in public to the kindness 
 of our honoured Friend, under whose auspices you are become a 
 Bookseller. May that fine-minded Veteran in Verse enjoy life 
 long enough to see his patronage justified ! I venture to pre- 
 dict that your habits of industry, and your cheerful spirit, 
 will carry you through the world. I am, dear Moxon, your 
 friend and sincere Well-wisher, CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 . "ENFIELD, \stJune 1830." 
 
 The "Veteran in Verse" was Samuel Rogers, who enjoyed 
 life for a quarter of a century longer. The little volume was 
 roughly handled by the reviewers, whose unfriendly comments 
 were repelled by Southey in a sonnet contributed to the Times 
 newspaper. Lamb writes to Bernard Barton in August 1830 : 
 "Thank you for your warm interest about my little volume, for 
 the critics on which I care the five hundred thousandth part of 
 a half farthing. I am too old a militant for that. How noble 
 though in E. S. to come forward for an old friend who had 
 treated him so unworthily. . . . What a clamour against a poor 
 collection of Album Verses, as if we had put forth an Epic." 
 
 WoFk (p. 88). Published in the Examiner in 1822. 
 Leisure (p. 88). London Magazine, April 1821. 
 
 In the Album of Lucy Barton (p. 89). Written at Bernard 
 Barton's request, and sent in a letter to him of September 30, 
 1824 : " I am ill at these numbers, but if the above be not too 
 mean to have a place in thy daughter's sanctum, take them 
 with pleasure. "
 
 NOTES. 385 
 
 Tlie Young Catechist (p. 91). " Apropos of Van Balen, an 
 artist who painted me lately had painted a blackamoor pray- 
 ing, and not filling his canvas, stuffed in his little girl 
 aside of blacky, gaping at him unmeaningly, and then did not 
 know what to call it. Now, for a picture to be promoted to the 
 exhibition (Suffolk Street) as historical, a subject is requisite. 
 What does Mr. T. but christen it the 'Young Catechist,' and 
 published it with dialogue following, which dubbed it an his- 
 torical painting. Nothing to a friend at need. " (Letter to B. 
 Barton, 1827.) 
 
 On an infant dying as soon as born (p. 93). Written on oc- 
 casion of the death of the first child of Thomas Hood. In the 
 Memorials of Hood by his daughter we find this reference to the 
 event : " The first few years of his married life were the most 
 unclouded my father ever knew. The young couple resided for 
 some years in Robert Street, Adelphi. Here was born their first 
 child, which to their great grief scarcely survived its birth. In 
 looking over some old papers I found a few tiny curls of golden 
 hair, as soft as the finest silk, wrapped in a yellow and time- 
 worn paper inscribed in my father's handwriting : 
 
 ' Little eyes that scarce did see, 
 
 Little lips that never smiled ; 
 
 Alas ! my little dear dead child, 
 Death is thy father, and not me, 
 I but embraced thee, soon as he !' 
 
 On this occasion those exquisite lines of Charles Lamb's 'On 
 an infant dying as soon as born,' were written and sent to my 
 father and mother." It is interesting to put side by side these 
 two copies of verses. They are curiously characteristic of the 
 different genius of these two great humorists. 
 
 The Christening (p. 95). From Blackwood's Magazine, May 
 1829. Written on the baptism of a child of Charles and Mary 
 Gisburne May, at Eufield, in May 1829. 
 
 The Gipsy's Malison (p. 96). The origin of these lines is 
 told in an amusing letter of Lamb's to Mr. Procter (Barry 
 Cornwall) of January 29, 1829 -."When Miss Ouldcroft (who 
 is now Mrs. Reddarn) was at Enfield, which she was in summer 
 time, and owed her health to its sun and genial influences, she 
 visited (with young-lady-like impertinence) a poor man's cottage 
 that had a pretty baby (0 the yearning !), gave it fine caps and 
 sweetmeats. On a day, broke into the parlour our two maids 
 uproarious. ' maam ! who do you think Miss Ouldcroft (they 
 pronounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for ?' 'A child,' 
 answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity. ' 'Tis the 
 2 C
 
 386 NOTES. 
 
 man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.' Miss Ouldcroft 
 was staggered and would have cut the connection, but by main 
 force I made her go and take her leave of her protegee. I thought, 
 if she went no more, the Abactor, or Abactor's wife (vide Ains- 
 worth), would suppose she had heard something ; and I have 
 delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseer's actually overhauled 
 a mutton pie at the baker's (his first, last, and only hope of 
 mutton pie), which he never came to eat, and thence inferred 
 his guilt. Per occasionem cujus I framed the sonnet ; observe 
 its elaborate construction. I was four days about it." The 
 sonnet appeared in Blackivood for January 1829. Lamb had 
 already written to Procter "Did you see a sonnet of mine iu 
 BlacTcwood's last ? Curious construction. Elaborata facilitas ! 
 and now I'll tell. 'Twas written for ' The Gem,' but the Editors 
 declined it, on the plea that it would shock all mothers, so they 
 published The Widow instead. I am born out of time." 
 
 To a young Friend on her twenty-first Birthday (p. 103). To 
 Emma Isola, the adopted daughter of Charles and Mary Lamb, 
 and afterwards the wife of Edward Moxon. The "respected 
 grandsire" was an Italian refugee who had settled in Cambridge 
 und supported himself as a teacher of languages. Two eminent 
 poets, Gray and Wordsworth, learned Italian from him. 
 
 Harmony in Unlikeness (p. 105). The "fair Maria" is, of 
 course, Mary Lamb, and "Emma Brown," the Miss Isola of 
 the two preceding poems. As Mary Lamb had at this time well 
 passed her sixtieth year, the tender playfulness of these lines will 
 not pass unnoticed. 
 
 To a celebrated Female Performer in " The Blind Boy" (p. 
 105). Lamb's old favourite, Miss Kelly. 
 
 Translations from the Latin of Vincent Bourne (p. 109). 
 Lamb had made the acquaintance of Vincent Bourne's Latin 
 Poems in 1815. He writes to Wordsworth in that year : "Since 
 I saw you I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes 
 not every day, the Latin Poems of V. Bourne, which were quite 
 new to me. What a heart that man had ! all laid out upon 
 town scenes, a proper counterpoise to some people's rural extra- 
 vaganzas. Why I mention him is, that your Power of Music 
 reminded me of his poem of the Ballad Singer in the Seven 
 Dials .... What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, 
 mattcrful creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower 
 of everything, his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. 
 Bless him ! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why wasn't 
 he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?" 
 It will be remembered that Covvper entertained the same high
 
 NOTES. 387 
 
 admiration for Bourne, whose pupil lie had been at Westminster, 
 and translated some of the best of his Latin poems. 
 
 Epicedium. Going or Gone (p. 119). Contributed to Hone's 
 Table Book in 1827. After the sixth stanza there were origin- 
 ally the two following, carrying on the description of ' ' Old 
 Dorrell " : 
 
 " Had he mended in right time, 
 He need not in night-time 
 (That black hour and fright-time) 
 
 Till sexton interred him, 
 Have groaned in his coffin, 
 While demons stood scoffing 
 You'd ha' thought him a coughing 
 My own father 1 heard him. 
 
 Could gain so importune 
 With occasion opportune, 
 That for a poor Fortune, 
 
 That should have been ours, 2 
 In soul he should venture 
 To pierce the dim centre 
 Where will-forgers enter, 
 
 Amid the dark Powers." 
 
 Old Dorrell is mentioned elsewhere by Lamb, as one from 
 whom his family had had " expectations." See the Elia Essay 
 New Year's Eve : " It was better that our family should have 
 missed that legacy which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that 
 I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, 
 and be without the idea of that specious old rogue. " The other 
 persons named in these verses are mostly old inhabitants of the 
 village of Widford, which he knew so well in the happy Blakes- 
 ware days. Mrs. Tween of Widford has kindly furnished me 
 with particulars of some of these. Ben Carter the gardener, and 
 Lilly the postillion, were servants of the Plumer family the 
 latter "a diminutive man with a remarkable red face." His 
 gravestone is in Widford churchyard. He died at the advanced 
 age of 89, in October 1812. Clemitson was the tenant of what 
 is called Blakesware Farm. 3 Clapton was another Widford 
 farmer (buried May 8, 1802). Mrs. Tween tells me that the 
 "elder Mr. and Mrs. Plumer of Blakesware always went out in 
 a carriage and four, with Lilly as Postillion, two outriders, and 
 a couple of carriage-dogs. " 
 
 Kitty "Wheatley" is probably a mistake (for Lamb had a 
 "royal disdain" for accuracy in spelling) for Whately. The 
 
 1 Who sat up with him. 
 
 2 I have this fact from parental tradition only.
 
 388 NOTES. 
 
 Rev. Joseph Whately, vicar of "Widford, married Jane Plumer, 
 sister of the Mr. Plumer who sat in the House of Commons for 
 Hertfordshire ; and the " Kitty" here referred to was probably 
 one of his daughters. Joseph Whately's youngest child became 
 Archbishop of Dublin. 
 
 The Wife's Trial (p. 122). Written in the summer of 1827. 
 Lamb writes to Barton, August 10 : " I am trying my hand at 
 a drama, in two acts, founded on Crabbe's ' Confidant,' mutatis 
 mutandis. " The change to which Lamb thus directs attention 
 concerns the precise nature of the secret which the malicious 
 friend holds in terrorem over the wife's head. Again, on August 
 28, Lamb writes to the same friend : ' ' Yesterday I sent off 
 my tragi-comedy to Mr. Kenible. Wish it luck. I made it all 
 ('tis blank verse, and I think of the true old dramatic cut), or 
 most of it, in the green lanes about Enfield. " The little drama 
 was not found suitable for the stage, and was ultimately pub- 
 lished in Blackwood for December 1828. 
 
 To a Friend, on his Marriage (p. 152). Evidently to Edward 
 Moxon, who married Emma Isola in July of this year, 1833. 
 
 Free thoughts on several eminent Composers (p. 154). Sent in 
 a letter to William Ayrton in May 1830. The little note, ex- 
 quisitely humorous, has been kindly placed at my disposal by 
 Mr. W. S. Ayrton of Saltburn. It is as follows : 
 
 "EXFIELD, Thursday. 
 
 (No other date. ) 
 
 "DEAR AYRTON Novello paid us a visit yesterday, and I 
 very much wished you with us. Our conversation was princi- 
 pally, as you may suppose, upon Music; and he, desiring me to 
 give him my real opinion respecting the distinct grades of ex- 
 cellence in all the eminent Composers of the Italian, German, and 
 English Schools, I have done it, rather to oblige him than from 
 any overweening opinion I have of my own judgment in that 
 science. Such as it is, I submit it to better critics, and am, 
 dear Ayrtou, yours sincerely, CH. LAMB." 
 
 To Margaret W (p. 155). Lamb's last verses, written 
 
 only a few weeks before his death in December of the same year. 
 It is pleasant to find what sweet and graceful fancies were still 
 at his command in the gloomy loneliness of his last days. The 
 lines were first printed in the Athenaeum of March 14, 1835. 
 
 Rosamund Gray (p. 157). Written and published in 1798, 
 when Lamb was in his twenty-fourth year, under the title of 
 " A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret. " The 
 earliest reference by Lamb to the story is in a letter to Southey,
 
 NOTES. 389 
 
 undated, but apparently of October 1798. Southey was at this 
 time living at Westbury, near Bristol, writing many of his 
 shorter poems and ballads, and sending them to Lamb for his 
 criticism and revision. One of these poems, a short tale in 
 verse, called "The Rxiined Cottage," had been thus submitted 
 to Lamb, and he writes back as follows : " I thank you heartily 
 for the Eclogue which pleases me mightily, being so full of 
 picture-work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless 
 perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite ; and this 
 is not the first or second time you have clothed your indignation 
 in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning 
 in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred 
 with old Margaret. " 
 
 " Old Margaret " is the grandmother in the story of Rosamund 
 Gray, and here begin the many curious coincidences afforded 
 by the tale. Southey's Eclogue, with some slight variations of 
 detail, is in fact Lamb's story told over again in a hundred and 
 twenty lines of blank verse a pious old grandmother, a lovely 
 grandchild, a seduction, and the consequent death of the old 
 lady. That Southey should have sent the poem to Lamb, 
 without apologising for using his material, seems as strange as 
 that Lamb should have received it with no further expression 
 of surprise than that just quoted. Lamb goes on to criticise 
 some points in his friend's treatment of the subject, and adds 
 " I am thinking, I believe, of the song 
 
 ' An old woman clothed in gray, 
 
 Whose daughter was charming and young, 
 And she was deluded away 
 
 By Roger's false flattering tongue. ' 
 
 A Roger- Lothario would be a novel character ; I think you 
 might paint him very well. You may think this a very silly 
 suggestion, and so indeed it is ; but in good truth, nothing 
 else but the first words of that foolish ballad put me upon 
 scribbling my Rosamund." 
 
 It might be assumed that this was one of Lamb's ordinary 
 hoaxes, were it not that in the last lines of his story he makes 
 the villain of the tale, Matravis, in the course of his delirious 
 wanderings, to sing "a song about an old woman clothed in 
 gray." But it is quite as likely that his story recalled to him 
 the ribald old ballad as that it was suggested by it. 
 
 The story is indeed, as I have said elsewhere, made up of 
 strange and fantastic ingredients. The scene is laid in Wid- 
 ford, the Hertfordshire village close to Blakesware, where the 
 happiest days of Lamb's childhood had been passed, and where 
 he had formed the first and only love attachment of his life. 
 In a cottage, about half a mile from Blakesware Hall (bearing
 
 390 NOTES. 
 
 the incongruous name of Blenheims), lived the girl who is 
 believed by the people of Widford to be the original of Rosa- 
 mund Gray, but whose actual name was Ann (or Nancy) 
 Simmons, the Anna of Lamb's early sonnets, the Alice W n 
 of the Essays of Elia. But though real persons seem to be 
 indicated in the story, the events in which they take part are 
 without foundation in fact, for the girl who won the heart of 
 Charles Lamb married prosperously, and lived to an advanced 
 age. Lamb found a name for his heroine in a song " Rosamund 
 Gray," by his early friend Lloyd, published in "Poems on 
 various Subjects" (Carlisle, 1795). Nothing but the name 
 could certainly have been found by Lamb in the prosaic com- 
 monplace of this effusion, of which a single stanza will suffice 
 as specimen 
 
 " If actions are great, no one cares if they're good, 
 
 A tyrant's a reverenced name, 
 The grant of renown is imprinted in blood, 
 
 And a sword is a passport to fame. 
 And I've marked honest virtue with misery bowed, 
 
 Tho' she urge inoffensive her way ; 
 Yes, feelings I've marked that would honour the proud, 
 
 In the bosom of liosannmd Gray." 
 
 But it was quite in Lamb's manner to appropriate any name 
 that was associated with a personal friend, or had lately struck 
 him in his reading ; and though it is a "far cry " from Charles 
 Lloyd to Christopher Marlowe, we are not surprised to find 
 that the villain of the story should be named Matravis (a slip 
 of spelling, we may be sure, for Matrevis), one of the assassins 
 who murder the king in Marlowe's Edward the Second. The 
 remaining characters in the tale are sentimentalised abstrac- 
 tions of himself and his sister Mary (Allan and Elinor Clare), 
 his old grandmother, Mrs. Field, Coleridge (the schoolfellow 
 who precedes Allan Clare to college), and a few of the servants 
 and villagers of Blakesware and Widford. Of the original of 
 Matravis (if such ever existed) we know nothing. As a crea- 
 tion he is absolutely characterless and shadowy, but there are 
 sentences in the story containing allusions so bitterly incisive, 
 and yet so irrelevant to the story he takes part in, that it is 
 impossible to doubt that Lamb had in view some old enemy 
 from whom he or his family had suffered injury. How other- 
 wise are we to account for the detail that Matravis had once 
 "paid his court to Elinor Clare," or for the outbursts in 
 Elinor's letter to Maria, " ye Matravises of the age," or for 
 the mention of the dream that Allan was dead, and that 
 Matravis "put on mourning for him " ? allusions with no bear- 
 ing on Lamb's story, and which can only be attributed to an
 
 NOTES. 391 
 
 overmastering desire of the moment to unburden himself of a 
 personal grievance. 
 
 The "unique" character of the romance, which Talfoiml 
 lays stress upon, lies in a curious combination of the utterly 
 artificial method of the sentimental fiction of Lamb's day, with 
 a vein of real genius and poetry, which no conventionalities 
 could obliterate. The theatrical platitudes of Elinor Clare's 
 letters to her cousin are not at all more false to nature than 
 those of the two friends in Julia de Roubigne, from which they 
 are closely copied ; but they offend the taste the more, because 
 in Mackenzie all is alike hollow, and in Lamb they stand out 
 against a background of truth and genuine sensibility. But 
 there is the truth must be said a tinge of insanity in the story. 
 Two years before, its author had been for a time under restraint, 
 and since then, though he never again needed this protection 
 against himself, he had undergone an agony such as few men 
 are called upon to endure. But through whatever "dim and 
 perilous ways " the intellect is sounding on, we never lose touch 
 of the sweet and human heart that beats underneath. Shelley 
 was not overstating the truth when he wrote to Leigh Hunt, 
 "What a lovely thing is his Rosamund Gray! How much 
 knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in 
 it ! " The mellow autumn light on garden and cottage was 
 never more perfectly felt by poet or painter than in the opening 
 pages of this story. If the clouds gather afterwards, we 
 wonder and are sorry even as when they gather at the close 
 round one of the matchless lyrics of William Blake. 
 
 Curious Fmgmcnfs (p. 197). Published in 1801, in the small 
 volume containing John Wooclvil. 
 
 In March 1800 Lamb, writing to Manning about his plans 
 and projects, tells how Coleridge had introduced him to Daniel 
 Stuart of the Morning Post : "He has lugged me to the brink 
 of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a 
 first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the 
 anatomist of melancholy." Six months later he has to write 
 that his idea of furnishing political squibs to the Post, had como 
 to nothing ; but adds, " I had struck off two imitations of Burton, 
 quite abstracted from any modern allusions, which it was my 
 intent only to lug in from time to time to make 'em popular. 
 Stuart has got these with an introductory letter ; but not hearing 
 from him, I have ceased from my labours, but I write to him 
 to-day to get a final answer. I am afraid they won't do for a 
 paper. Burton is a scarce gentleman, not much known, else I 
 had done 'em pretty well. I have also hit off a few lines in the 
 name of Burton, being a Conceit of Diabolic Possession. Burton 
 Avas a man often assailed by deepest melancholy, and at other 
 times much given to laughing and jesting, as is the way with
 
 392 NOTES. 
 
 melancholy men. I will send them you ; they were almost 
 extempore, and no great things ; but you will indulge them." 
 They were not found suitable for the Morning Post. " Fate 
 and 'Wisest Stuart' say, No," and Lamb accordingly printed 
 them in the following year with his John Woodvil, having in 
 the meantime changed the name of the lines from Conceit of 
 Diabolic Possession to Hypochondriacus. 
 
 Recollections of Christ's Hospital (p. 206). A paper contri- 
 buted by Lamb to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1813. It 
 appeared in two instalments in the June of that year, and in 
 the supplement to the annual volume. When Lamb reprinted 
 the essay in his volume of 1818 he omitted the opening para- 
 graphs, which were as follows : 
 
 "A great deal has been said about the governors of this 
 Hospital abusing their right of presentation by presenting the 
 children of opulent parents to the Institution. This may have 
 been the case in an instance or two ; and what wonder, in an 
 establishment consisting, in town and country, of upwards of a 
 thousand boys ! But I believe there is no great danger of an 
 abuse of this sort ever becoming very general. There is an old 
 quality in human nature which will perpetually present an 
 adequate preventive to this evil. While the coarse blue coat 
 and the yellow hose shall continue to be the costume of the 
 school (and never may modern refinement innovate upon 
 the venerable fashion !) the sons of the aristocracy of this 
 country, cleric or laic, will not often be obtruded upon this 
 seminary. 
 
 " I own I wish there were more room for such complaints. I 
 cannot but think that a sprinkling of the sons of respectable 
 parents among them has an admirable tendency to liberalise 
 the whole mass, and that to the great proportion of clergymen's 
 children in particular which are to be found among them it is 
 owing that the foundation has not long since degenerated into 
 a mere charity-school, as it must do upon the plan so hotly 
 recommended by some reformists, of recruiting its ranks from 
 the offspring of none but the very lowest of the people. 
 
 " I am not learned enough in the history of the Hospital to 
 say by what steps it may have departed from the letter of its 
 original charter ; but, believing it, as it is at present constituted, 
 to be a great practical benefit, I am not anxious to revert to 
 first principles, to overturn a positive good, under pretence of 
 restoring something which existed in the days of Edward the 
 Sixth, when the face of everything around us was as different 
 as can be from the present. Since that time the opportunities 
 of instruction to the very lowest classes (of as much instruction 
 as may be beneficial and not pernicious to them) have multi- 
 plied beyond what the prophetic spirit of the first suggester of
 
 NOTES. 393 
 
 this charity 1 could have predicted, or the wishes of that holy 
 man have even aspired to. There are parochial schools, and 
 Bell's and Lancaster's, with their arms open to receive every 
 sou of ignorance, and disperse the last fog of uninstructed dark- 
 ness which dwells upon the land. What harm, then, if in the 
 heart of this noble city, there should be left one receptacle where 
 parents of rather more liberal views, but whose time-straitened 
 circumstances do not admit of affording their children that 
 better sort of education which they themselves, not without cost 
 to their parents, have received, may without cost send their 
 sons ? For such Christ's Hospital unfolds her bounty." 
 
 What was the immediate occasion of Lamb's paper it is im- 
 possible to say, but about four years previously the question of 
 the right of governors to present certain candidates, sons of 
 gentlemen, to the foundation, had arisen and been discussed 
 with some bitterness in the newspapers of the day. The son 
 of the Vicar of Edmonton, a Mr. Dawson Warren, had been 
 presented to the school, and a member of the Common Council 
 had drawn attention to the case as contrary to the spirit of the 
 regulations in force as to candidates for admission. The question 
 was carefully inquired into, and after much debate the case of 
 Mr. Warren's son was decided in his favour, and a committee 
 drew up a new form of presentation which has remained sub- 
 stantially in force to the present day. It is obviously to this 
 incident, and the public interest aroused by it, that the opening 
 sentences of the original essay refer. 
 
 Lamb reprinted the bulk of his essay under its present title 
 (it had been originally headed On Christ's Hospital, and the char- 
 acter of the Christ's Hospital Boys] in his collected works in 1818. 
 Two years later he followed it up with the Elia Essay, Christ's 
 Hospital five and thirty years ago, in which (assuming the 
 character of a second writer criticising his predecessor) he deals 
 in lighter fashion with some other aspects of the school. The 
 character of James Boyer, the headmaster, is drawn in both 
 essays with the utmost frankness. Coleridge, in his Table 
 Talk, relates some experiences which leave no doubt that 
 Lamb's picture was not overdrawn. " The discipline at Christ's 
 Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan ; all domestic ties were 
 to be put aside. ' Boy ! ' I remember Boyer saying to me once 
 when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, 
 ' Boy ! the school is your father ! Boy ! the school is your mother ! 
 Boy ! the school is your brother ! Boy ! the school is your sister ! 
 the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all 
 the rest of your relations ! Let's have no more crying ! ' " 
 
 1 Bishop Ridley, in a sermon preached before King Edward the 
 Sixth.
 
 394 NOTES. 
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspere (p. 220). From Leigh 
 Hunt's Reflector, where it appeared in 1811, under the title 
 of Theatralia, No. 1, on Garrick and Acting. It was signed 
 with the letter "X." 
 
 In my Memoir of Charles Lamb, in the Men of Letters Series, 
 I have dwelt upon the curious mixture of truth and paradox 
 supplied by this essay. The most obvious criticism upon the 
 paper is that it proves too much, and makes all theatrical 
 representations not only superfluous, but actually injurious 
 to the effect of a drama. Lamb seems to have awakened to a 
 consciousness of this before the close of his argument, for he 
 admits that the method employed would extend with equal 
 force to Shakspere's comedies, and that it would be ' ' no very 
 difficult task" to show "why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh 
 Evans and the rest, are equally incompatible with stage repre- 
 sentation." Happily, we possess such criticism of Lamb's upon 
 the best acting of his day as shows that he could on occasion 
 feel very strongly what the drama may owe to its interpreters 
 on the stage. We have only to recall his description of Mrs. 
 Jordan's Viola or Bensley's Malvolio. In fact, while we read 
 the present paper we are reminded of a story of the late Charles 
 Austin and the prize essay, and feel that Lamb could have 
 written, if not "a much better one," certainly one at least as 
 good ' ' on the other side. " It is hardly needful to point out 
 that the essay contains some of the noblest criticism ever 
 written, and that in protesting against the eighteenth century 
 adapters of Shakspere Lamb was doing an unexampled service 
 to the cause of true art. Gibber's version of Richard III. kept 
 the stage up to yesterday ; Tate's Lear was finally set aside by 
 Macready in 1838. 
 
 The following letter of Lamb's, bearing on the subject of 
 these alterations of Shakspere, may appropriately be given 
 here. It is practically new, for it was contributed to the 
 Spectator in November 1828, and has never (to my knowledge) 
 been reprinted : 
 
 "SHAKSPERE'S IMPROVERS. 
 "To the Editor of the Spectator. 
 
 " SIR Partaking in your indignation at the sickly stuff inter- 
 polated by Tate in the genuine play of King Lear, I beg to lay 
 before you certain kindred enormities that you may be less 
 aware of, which that co-dilutor of Sternhold and Hopkins, with 
 his compeers, were suffered nay, encouraged by an English 
 public of a century and a half ago to perpetrate upon the 
 dramas of Shakspere. 
 
 "I speak from imperfect recollection of one of these new 
 versions which I have seen, namely, of Coriolanus by the
 
 NOTES. 395 
 
 same hand which touched up King Lear in which he, the said 
 Nahum, not deeming his authors catastrophe enough striking, 
 makes Aufidius (if my memory fail me not) violate the person 
 of the wife, and mangle the body of the little son of his Roman 
 rival. Shadwell, another improver, in his version of Timon of 
 Athens, a copy of which (167) is lying before me, omits the 
 character of Flavius, the kind - hearted steward, that fine 
 exception to the air of general perfidy in the play, which would 
 else be too oppressive to reader or spectator ; and substitutes 
 for it a kind female who is supposed to be attached to Timon 
 to the last, thus making the moral of the piece to consist in 
 showing, not the hollowness of friendships conciliated by a 
 mere undistinguishing prodigality, but the superiority of 
 woman's love to the friendships of men. Evandra too has 
 a rival in the affections of the noble Athenian. So impossible 
 did these blockheads imagine it to be to interest the feelings 
 of an audience without an intrigue, that the misanthrope 
 Timon must whine and the daughterly Cordelia must whimper 
 their love affections before they could hope to touch the gentle 
 hearts in the boxes ! Had one of these gentry taken in hand 
 to improve the fine Scriptural story of Joseph and his brethren, 
 we should have had a love-passion introduced to make the mere 
 fraternal interest of the piece go down an episode of the amours 
 of Reuben or Issachar with the fair Mizraim of Egypt. 
 
 "Thus Evandra closes the eyes of Shad well's dying Timon, 
 who it seems has poisoned himself : 
 
 ' Evan. Oh my dear Lord ! why do yoti stoop and bend 
 Like flowers o'ercharged with dew, whose yielding stalks 
 Cannot support them ? 
 
 ' Timon. So now my weary pilgrimage on earth 
 Is almost finished ! now my best Evaudra, 
 I charge thee by our loves, our mutual loves, 
 Live, and live happy after me, and if 
 A thought of Timon comes into thy mind, 
 And brings a tear from thee 
 
 ( What then ? v:hy, then] 
 
 let some diversion 
 Banish it.' 
 
 And so, after some more drivel of the same stamp, the noble 
 Timon dies. And was not tins a dainty dish to set before an 
 audience of the Duke's Theatre in the year 167| ? Yet Betterton 
 then acted Timon, and his wife Evandra. 
 
 " I now come to the London Acting Edition of Macbeth of the 
 same date, 1678 (played, if I remember, by the same players at 
 the same house), from which I made a few rough extracts when 
 I visited the British Museum for the sake of selecting from the
 
 396 NOTES. 
 
 'Garrick Plays.' As I can scarcely expect to be believed upon 
 my own word, as to what our ancestors at that time were willing 
 to accept for Shakspere, I refer the reader to that collection 
 to verify my report. "Who the improver 1 was in this instance 
 we are left to guess, for the title page leaves us to conjecture. 
 Possibly the players each one separately contributed his new 
 reading, which was silently adopted. Flesh and blood could 
 not at this time of day submit to a thorough perusal of the 
 thing ; but, from a glance or two of casual inspection, I am 
 enabled to lay before the reader a few flowers. In one of the 
 lyric parts Hecate is made to say 
 
 ' On a corner of the moon, 
 A drop my spectacles Lave found, 
 I'll catch it.' 
 
 " Hecate, the solemn president of classic enchantments, thence 
 adopted into the romantic the triform Hecate wearing spec- 
 tacles to assist old sight ! (No. 4 or No. 5, as the opticians class 
 them, is not said) one may as well fancy Cerberus in a bran- 
 new collar, or the "dreaded name of Demogorgon" in jack- 
 boots. Among the ingredients of the cauldron is enumerated, 
 not a tiger's, but what ? Header 
 
 'A Dutchman's chawdron.' 
 
 "We were about that time engaged in a war with Holland. 
 Again, Macduff being about to journey across the heath, the 
 'blasted heath,' answers his lady who cautiously demands of 
 him, ' Are you afoot ?' 
 
 ' Knowing the way to be both short and easy, 
 And that the chariot did attend me here, 
 I have adventured ' 
 
 From which we may infer that the Thane of Fife lived as a 
 nobleman ought to do, and kept his carriage. Again, the same 
 nobleman, on the morning after Duncan's murder, says, ' Ris- 
 ing this morning early, 1 went to look out of my window, I 
 could scarce see further than my heath.' And indeed the 
 original author informs us that it had been a 'rough night,' 
 so that the improver does not wander far from his text. The 
 exquisite familiarity of this prose-patch was doubtlessly in- 
 tended by the improver to break the tiresome monotony of 
 Shakspere's blank verse. In conclusion, Lady Macbeth is 
 brought in repentant and counselling her husband to give up 
 the crown for conscience sake. Item, she sees a ghost, which 
 
 1 Mr. Swinburne points out to me that it was Sir William 
 Davenant.
 
 NOTES. 397 
 
 is all the time invisible to him. Such was the Macbeth which 
 Betterton acted, and a contemporary audience took on trust for 
 Shakspere's. C. L." 
 
 CJutracters of Dramatic Writers Contemporary with Shak - 
 spere (p. 241). Chosen by Lamb in 1818, for publication in 
 his collected works, from the "Specimens of English Dramatic 
 Poets, who lived about the time of Shakspere," published in 
 1808. His prefatory words explain that he here selects such 
 criticisms as would be intelligible and interesting apart from 
 the passages to which they refer. 
 
 Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian 
 (p. 262). First printed in Leigh Hunt's Reflector, Xo. iv. 1811. 
 
 On the Genius and Character of Hogarth (p. 272). The Re- 
 flector, No. iii. 1811. The " old-fashioned house in shire" 
 
 was Blakesware in Hertfordshire. See letter of Lamb to 
 Southey in October 1799 : "I have but just got your letter, 
 being returned from Herts, where I have passed a few red-letter 
 days with much pleasure. I would describe the country to you, 
 as you have done by Devonshire, but alas ! I am a poor pen at 
 that same. I could tell you of an old house with a tapestry 
 bedroom, the 'judgment of Solomon-' composing one panel, 
 and 'Actaeon spying Diana naked' the other. I could tell of 
 an old marble hall, with Hogarth's prints, and the Roman 
 Caesars in marble hung round. " 
 
 On the Poetical Works of George Wither (p. 295). First 
 printed in Lamb's works, 1818. These critical remarks were, 
 in the first instance, marginal notes made by Lamb in an inter- 
 leaved copy of Wither's Philarete and other poems, edited 
 and printed by Lamb's friend and old schoolfellow, John 
 Matthew Gutch, at his private press at Bristol. Mr. Gutch, in 
 the appendix to his Lyttel Geste of Robin Hode (1847), thus 
 tells the story of their origin : 
 
 "It was in the year 1809 that the editor's attention was 
 first directed to Wither's publications, and his admiration of 
 his poems gradually increased as many of his rare pieces fell 
 into his hands, particularly those which Mr. Park had collected, 
 with many of that gentleman's valuable annotations inter- 
 spersed in their pages. He was encouraged to proceed in his 
 selection by his warm-hearted friend and schoolfellow, Charles 
 Lamb, who, it will be seen by the following letter, first became 
 acquainted with Wither's poems through the editor : 
 
 'DEAR GUTCH I did not see your brother who brought me 
 Wither, but I understood he said you were daily expecting to 
 come to town ; this has prevented my writing. The books
 
 398 NOTES. 
 
 Lave pleased me excessively ; I should think you could not 
 have made a better selection. I never saw PMlarete before 
 judge of my pleasure. I could not forbear scribbling certain 
 critiques in pencil on the blank leaves. Shall I send them, or 
 may I expect to see you in town ? Some of them are remarks 
 on the character of Wither and of his writings. Do you mean 
 to have anything of that kind ? "What I have said on Philarcle 
 is poor, but I think some of the rest not so bad ; perhaps I 
 have exceeded my commission in scrawling over the copies, 
 but my delight therein must excuse me, and pencil marks will 
 rub out. Where is the life ? Write, for I am quite in the 
 dark. Yours, with many thanks, C. LAMB. 
 
 ' Perhaps I could digest the few critiques prefixed to the 
 "Satires," "Shepherds' Hunting," etc., into a short abstract of 
 Wither's character and works, at the end of his life. But, 
 may be, you don't want anything, and have said all you wish 
 in the life. 
 
 'Aprils, 1810, London.' 
 
 " These pencil-marks Charles Lamb afterwards requested the 
 editor to return to him, and they formed the matter of one of 
 his papers in the collection of his works first published in 
 1818." 
 
 Mr. Gutch was quite wrong in supposing that Lamb 
 first became acquainted with Wither through this privately 
 printed edition. What Lamb says is that he there met with 
 PMlarete for the first time. Four years earlier we find Lamb 
 referring to Wither as one of his favourite writers. (See note 
 to the Farewell to Tobacco. ) And from Wither he had borrowed 
 the rhymed couplet which remained to the end of his life the 
 metre he most affected. 
 
 The interleaved copy referred to by Mr. Gutch is now in the 
 possession of Mr. A. C. Swinburne, and through his kindness 
 I have been enabled to make a careful examination of it. An 
 early copy of Gutch's edition was, in the first instance, inter- 
 leaved, and sent to Lamb for his corrections of the press and 
 suggestions as to emendations of the text, where corrupt or 
 doubtful. These he furnished, together with criticisms and 
 other remarks, written on the blank pages. Mr. Gutch seems 
 then to have sent on the volumes to Dr. G. F. Nott, the 
 editor of Surrey's and Wyatt's Poems. Dr. Nott added his 
 quota of corrections and suggestions, and the volumes once 
 more found their way into the hands of Lamb, who proceeds 
 (more suo) to criticise the last interloper with the utmost free- 
 dom of language and (as may well be believed) with a critical 
 acumen that leaves Dr. Nott far behind. The necessity for
 
 NOTES. 399 
 
 continually differing from this rival critic finds abundant scope 
 for grim jest in connection with his opponent's surname, 
 "It should not, Nott ! " occurring over and over again, with 
 slight variations of form. Many of Lamb's interjectional re- 
 marks and desperate plays upon words would hardly bear the 
 dignity of type ; but now and again occurs some such fine 
 outburst as the following. On Wither's Satire ix. On Ambition, 
 Dr. Nott remarks, "A very dull essay indeed," whereupon 
 Lamb turns upon him with fury, " Why double-dull it with 
 thy dull commentary ? Have you nothing to cry out but 
 'very dull,' 'a little better,' 'this has some spirit,' 'this is 
 prosaic ' ? Foh ! If the sun of Wither withdraw awhile, 
 clamour not for joy, Owl, it will out again, and blear thy 
 envious eyes." 
 
 And the shortest of Lamb's marginal comments often contain 
 some felicity of expression which could have fallen from none 
 but himself, as when Wither, in the Satire On Presumption, 
 asks 
 
 " How, then, will those presumptuous fellows speed ? 
 Who think (forsooth) because that once a yeere 
 They cau afford the poor some slender cheere ; 
 Observe their country feasts, or common doles, 
 And entertain their Christmas wassail bowls, 
 Or else because that for the churches good, 
 They in defence of Hock-tide custome stood, 
 A Whitsun-ale, or some such godly motion," 
 
 Lamb quietly notes, " The Puritan pokes out his tender horns 
 here." 
 
 Which Drayton seems to have felt (p. 300). The quotation 
 from Drayton is from the Ode "To Himself, and the Harp," 
 in which occur the noble lines : 
 
 Apollo and the nine 
 Forbid no man their shrino, 
 
 That cometh with hands pure ; 
 Else they be so divine, 
 They will not him endure. 
 
 It is a notable instance of the lack of care with which Lamb's 
 text has been dealt with by editors, that from the first appear- 
 ance of this paper in 1818 to the present time, an error has 
 been allowed to remain that makes nonsense of Drayton's lines. 
 "Slake" has been from the first misprinted "Stake." 
 
 The Londoner (p. 301). This short essay is in the form of a 
 letter to Leigh Hunt's Reflector, but as a matter of fact it never
 
 400 NOTES. 
 
 appeared in any of the four numbers to which that periodical 
 extended. It had probably been sent to Hunt for publication, 
 and been prevented from appearing by the early collapse of the 
 venture. 
 
 The paper was written many years before as far back indeed 
 as 1802. In a letter to Manning of February in that year, after 
 defending his new play, John Woodvil, against certain criti- 
 cisms of his friend, he adds somewhat abruptly, "I will now 
 transcribe 'The Londoner' (No. 1), and wind up all with affec- 
 tion and humble servant at the end." Then followed, according 
 to Talfourd, a transcription of this very paper. The subject of 
 it was fresh in Lamb's thoughts or memory, and the essay is 
 indeed an expansion of a passage in a letter to Wordsworth of 
 about a year before "I have passed all my days in London 
 until I have found as many and intense local attachments as 
 any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The 
 lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street ; the innumerable 
 trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses ; 
 all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden ; the 
 very women of the town ; the watchmen, drunken scenes, 
 rattles, life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night ; the 
 impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street ; the crowds, the 
 very dirt and mud, the sun shining iipon houses and pavements, 
 the print-shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, 
 coffee-houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes 
 London itself a pantomime and a masquerade all these things 
 work themselves into my mind and feed me without a power of 
 satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night 
 walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the 
 motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life all these 
 things must be strange to you, so are your rural emotions to 
 me. But, consider, what must I have been doing all my life 
 not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such 
 scenes ? " 
 
 The last sentence of this passage is repeated, it will be 
 noticed, almost word for word, in the present essay. Lamb's 
 affection for the great city was one of the most real and per- 
 manent of his life. "When he was living, in later years, in 
 Covent Garden, he heads a letter to Payne Collier, "The 
 Garden of England," and such indeed it was to him. Like Dr. 
 Johnson returning from the Hebrides, he "resumed existence" 
 only when he came back to the familiar surroundings of Fleet 
 Street. There lies before me an unpublished letter of Lamb's 
 to his old fellow -clerk in the India House, Mr. Dodwell, 
 written only a few weeks after he had settled at Enfield and 
 ceased for ever to be a " Londoner." The letter is full of varied 
 interest, of wild fun interspersed with truly "Elian" s\ibtleties,
 
 NOTES. 401 
 
 and I make no apology for printing a portion of it. The original 
 is in the possession of the family of the late Mr. Arthur Loveday 
 of "Wardington, Banbury, through whose kindness I am able to 
 give it : 
 
 " ENFIELD CHASE, 
 
 nearly opposite to the 1st Chapel, or, better to 
 define it, east side, opposite a white house in 
 which a Mrs. Vaughan (in ill health) still resides. 
 
 October 7, 1827. 
 
 "My DEAR, DODWELL Your little pig found his way to Enfield 
 this morning, without his feet, or rather his little feet came 
 first, and, as I guessed, the rest of him soon followed. He is 
 quite a beauty. It was a pity to kill him, or rather, as Rice 
 would say, it would have been a pity not to kill him in his 
 state of innocence. He might have lived to be corrupted by 
 the ways of the world, and for all his delicate promise have 
 turned out, like an old tea-broker you and I remember, a lump of 
 fat rusty Bacon. . . , Your kind letter has left a relish upon 
 my taste, it read warm and short as to-morrow's crackling. I 
 am not quite so comfortable at home yet as I should be else in 
 the neatest compactest house I ever got, a perfect God-send, 
 but for some weeks I must enjoy it alone. She always comes 
 round again. It is a house of a few years' standing, built (for 
 its size with every convenience) by an old humorist for him- 
 self, which he tired of as soon as he got warm in it. Grates, 
 locks, a pump, convenience indescribable, and cheap as if it 
 had been old and craved repairs. For me, who always take 
 the first thing that offers, how lucky that the best should first 
 offer itself ! My books, my prints, are up, and I seem (so like 
 this room I write in is to a room there) to have come here 
 transported in the night, like Gulliver in his flying house ; and 
 to add to the deception, the new river has come down from 
 Islington with me. 'Twas what I wished to move my house, 
 and I have realised it. Only instead of company seven nights 
 in the week, I see my friends on the first day of it, and enjoy 
 six real Sabbaths. The museum is a loss, but I am not so far 
 but I can visit it occasionally, and I have exhausted the plays 
 there. 
 
 1 Indisputably I shall allow no sage and onion to be crammed 
 into the throat of so tender a suckling. 
 
 ' Bread and milk, with some odoriferous mint, and the 
 liveret minced. 
 
 ' Come and tell me when he cries, that I may catch his 
 little eyes. 
 
 ' And do it nice and crips ' (that's the cook's word). 
 2 D
 
 402 NOTES. 
 
 "You'll excuse me, I have been only speaking to Becky 
 about the dinner to-morrow. After it, a glass of seldom-drunk 
 wine to my friend Dodwell, and, if she will give a stranger 
 leave, to Mrs. Dodwell ; then to the memory of the last, and 
 of the last but one, learned Dodwell, of whom, but not whom, 
 I have read so much. ..." 
 
 On Burial Societies, and the Character of an Undertaker 
 (p. 304). Leigh Hunt's Reflector. (No. iii. Art. xiii. 1811.) 
 
 On the danger of confounding Moral with Personal Deformity 
 (p. 311). Leigh Hunt's Reflector. (No. ii. Art. xv. 1811.) 
 
 On the Inconveniences resulting from being Hanged (p. 319). 
 (Leigh Hunt's Reflector, No. ii. Art. xii. 1811.) The leading 
 idea of this essay was afterwards made by Larnb the subject of a 
 farce called "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," which, after various 
 ineffectual attempts to produce it upon the stage, he finally 
 published in Blackwood for January 1830. There is now lying 
 before me a note of Lamb's to the elder Charles Mathews, 
 accompanying a copy of the farce, which he submitted to 
 Mathews' approval for production at the Adelphi. The note is 
 dated October 27, 1828. Lamb's desire for success as a dramatist 
 remained with him to the end of his life. 
 
 The idea of hanging, with all its grim accessories, was a 
 favourite one with this strange humorist. Readers of his 
 correspondence will recall a Latin epigram on the subject, 
 written for a school-boy, and sent to Southey in a letter of May 
 1830. My friend Archdeacon Hessey has quite lately published 
 in the pages of a school magazine (conducted by the boys of 
 Merchant Taylors School) the true history of this epigram, and 
 kindly allows me to transfer it to my notes. The composition 
 of epigrams in Latin and in English was part of the regular 
 curriculum of Merchant Taylors. "We boys," writes Dr. 
 Hessey, "were allowed to obtain assistance from our friends (if 
 we could) in this sort of composition, though in other matters 
 we were bound to draw upon our own resources. 
 
 "The subjects for 1830 were Suum Cuique and Brevis esse 
 laboro. After some three or four exercise nights I confess that 
 I was literally 'at my wits' end.' But a brilliant idea struck 
 me. I had frequently, boy as I was, seen Charles Lamb at my 
 father's house, and once, in 1825 or 1826, I had been taken to 
 have tea with him and his sister, Mary Lamb, at their little 
 house, Colebrook Cottage, a whitish-brown tenement, standing 
 by itself close to the New River at Islington. He was very 
 kind, as he always was to young people, and very quaint. I 
 told him that I had devoured his ' Roast Pig,' and he congratu- 
 lated me on possessing a thorough school-boy's appetite. And
 
 NOTES. 403 
 
 he was pleased when I mentioned my having seen the boys at 
 Christ's Hospital at their public suppers, which then took place 
 on the Sunday evenings in Lent. ' Could this good-natured 
 
 mottos.' In a day or two there arrived from Enfield, to which 
 Lamb had removed some time in 1827, not one, but two epi- 
 grams, one on each subject. That on Suum Cuique was in 
 Latin, and was suggested by the grim satisfaction which had 
 recently been expressed by the public at the capture and execu- 
 tion of some notorious highwayman. ... I have now before 
 me the copies of them, as they were shown up to the head-master, 
 with the names of J. A. Hessey and F. Hessey attached to them 
 respectively." Dr. Hessey proceeds to give the authentic text 
 of the Latin epigram, which I may be allowed to repeat, especi- 
 ally as a misprint in Talfourd's version has never been corrected 
 by later editors : 
 
 "SUUM CUIQUE. 
 
 " Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas 
 
 Fur, rapiens, spolians, quod mihi quodque tibi 
 
 Proprium erat temnens haec verba Meumque Tuumque. 
 Omne Suum est. Tandem cuique suum tribuit. 
 
 Dat laqueo collum : vestes vali ! carnifici dat : 
 Sese Diabolo : sic bene, Cuique Suum." 
 
 On tfie Melancholy of Tailors (p. 330). This paper first 
 appeared in the Champion of December 4, 1814, then edited by 
 John Scott, afterwards editor of the London Magazine. The 
 paper seems to be referred to by Lamb in a letter to Words- 
 worth, written just after or just before its appearance in print, 
 in the end of November 18"l4. The "Burton" mentioned 
 refers to his having signed the essay " Burton junior " : 
 
 "DEAR W. Your experience about tailors seems to be in 
 point blank opposition to Burton, as much as the author of 
 ' The Excursion ' does, toto ccelo, diifer in his notion of a 
 country life from the picture which AV. H. (William Hazlitt) 
 has exhibited of the same. But with a little explanation you 
 and B. may be reconciled. It is evident that he confined his 
 observations to the genuine native London tailor. What freaks 
 tailor-nature may take in the country is not for him to give 
 account of. And certainly some of the freaks recorded do give 
 an idea of the persons in question being beside themselves, 
 rather than in harmony with the common, moderate, self- 
 enjoyment of the rest of mankind. A flying-tailor, I venture 
 to say, is no more in rerum naturd than a flying-horse or a 
 gryphon. His wheeling his airy flight from the precipice you
 
 404 NOTES. 
 
 mention had a parallel in the melancholy Jew who toppled from 
 the monument. Were his limbs ever found ? Then, the man 
 Avho cures diseases by words is evidently an inspired tailor. 
 Burton never affirmed that the art of sewing disqualified the 
 practiser of it from being a fit organ for supernatural revelation. 
 He never enters into such subjects. "Pis the common, unin- 
 spired tailor which he speaks of. Again, the person who makes 
 his smiles to be heard, is evidently a man under possession ; a 
 demoniac tailor. A greater hell than his own must have a hand 
 in this. I am not certain that the cause which you advocate 
 has much reason for triumph. You seem to me to substitute 
 light -headedness for light - heartedness by a trick, or not to 
 know the difference. I confess a grinning tailor would shock 
 me. Enough of tailors ! " 
 
 The title and the signature of this essay declare the source of 
 its inspiration. It is likely enough that the mention by the 
 original Burton of cabbage as a " melancholy diet " suggested the 
 whole paper. Cabbage in its double sense of the vegetable so 
 called and of stealing has been long a calumnious jest at the 
 expense of tailors, from a supposed inclination in them to appro- 
 priate odd scraps and remnants of the cloth entrusted to them. 
 This expression, and the grim title (referred to in this letter) 
 given to the dark cavity beneath a tailor's working-board into 
 which the fragments of " cabbage " were dropped, were favourite 
 jests with Lamb. See the stanza in his "Satan in search of a 
 wife," the Devil having fallen in love with a tailor's daughter : 
 
 " Who is she that by night from her balcony looks 
 On a garden where cabbage is springing ? 
 'Tis the tailor's fair lass ." 
 
 Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of tJie Pleasures of the 
 Palate (p. 335). The Reflector, No. iv. 1811. 
 
 Edax on Appetite (p. 339). The Reflector, No. iv. 1811. 
 
 Mr. H,, a Farce, in two Acts (p. 348). Lamb's letters to 
 Wordsworth and Manning in the summer of 1806 are full of 
 almost childish delight in the prospect of the first performance 
 of his farce. Thus he writes to Manning in China : " Now, 
 you'd like to know the subject. The title is ' Mr. H.,' no more ; 
 how simple, how taking ! A great H sprawling over the play- 
 bill, and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is a cox- 
 comb appearing at Bath, vastly rich all the ladies dying for 
 him all bursting to know who he is but he goes by no other 
 name than Mr. H., a curiosity like that of the dames of 
 Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I won't tell 
 you any more about it. Yes, I will : but I can't give you 
 any idea how I've done it. I'll just tell you that after much
 
 NOTES. 405 
 
 vehement admiration, when his true name comes out, ' Hogs- 
 flesh,' all the women shun him, avoid him, and not one can 
 be found to change her name for him that's the idea how 
 flat it is here but how whimsical in the farce ; and only think 
 how hard upon one it is that the ship is despatched to-morrow, 
 and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after 
 but all China will ring of it by and by." 
 
 The looked-for triumph was, as every one knows, to be ex- 
 changed for summary failure. ' ' Great curiosity," says Talfourd, 
 who was evidently among the audience, ' ' was excited by the 
 announcement ; the house was crowded to the ceiling ; and 
 the audience impatiently awaited the conclusion of the long, 
 dull, intolerable opera of 'The Travellers,' by which it was 
 preceded. At length Mr. Elliston, the hero of the farce, 
 entered, gaily dressed and in happiest spirits enough, but 
 not too much elated and delivered the prologue with great 
 vivacity and success. The farce began ; at first it was much 
 applauded, but the wit seemed wire-drawn, and when the cur- 
 tain fell on the first act the friends of the author began to fear. 
 The second act dragged heavily on, as second acts of farces will 
 do ; a rout at Bath, peopled with ill-dressed and over-dressed 
 actors and actresses, increased the disposition to yawn ; and 
 when the moment of disclosure came, and nothing worse than 
 the name Hogsflesh was heard, the audience resented the long 
 play on their curiosity, and would hear no more. Lamb, with 
 his sister, sat, as he anticipated, in the front of the pit, and 
 having joined in encoring the prologue, the brilliancy of which 
 injured the farce, he gave way with equal pliancy to the common 
 feeling, and hissed and hooted as loudly as any of his neighbours. 
 The next morning's play-bill contained a veracious announce- 
 ment that 'the new farce of Mr. H., performed for the first 
 time last night, was received by an overflowing audience with 
 universal applause, and will be repeated for the second time 
 to-morrow ; ' but the stage lamps never that morrow saw ! 
 Elliston would have tried it again, but Lamb saw at once that 
 the case was hopeless, and consoled his friends with a century 
 of puns for the wreck of his dramatic hopes." 
 
 Crabb Robinson was also present at the first performance, 
 and confirms Talfourd's account in every respect. He adds : 
 "The prologue was very well received. Indeed it could not 
 fail, being one of the very best in the language. But on the 
 disclosure of the name the squeanushness of the vulgar taste in 
 the pit shewed itself by hisses, and I recollect that Lamb joined, 
 and was probably the loudest hisser in the house." Hazlitt in 
 his "Table Talk" Essay "On great and little things" adds 
 yet a few more details to the history of the event : "I remem- 
 ber when Lamb's farce was damned (for damned it was, that's
 
 406 NOTES. 
 
 certain) I used to dream every night for a month after (and then 
 I vowed I would plague myself no more about it) that it was 
 revived at one of the minor or provincial theatres with great 
 success, that such and such retrenchments had been made in 
 it, and that it was thought it might do at the other House. I 
 had heard, indeed (this was told in confidence to Lamb), that 
 Gentleman Lewis was present on the night of its performance, 
 and said that if he had had it he would have made it, by a 
 few judicious curtailments, ' the most popular little thing that 
 had been brought out for some time.' How often did I conjure 
 up in recollection the full diapason of applause at the end of 
 the prologue, and hear my ingenious friend in the first row of 
 the pit roar with laughter at his own wit ! " And Hazlitt's 
 Recollections end with the passage beginning "Mr. H., thou 
 wert damned," which Lamb prefixed to his farce when he pub- 
 lished it for the first time in 1818, and which has been pre- 
 served in that place as a fit and appropriate preface ever since. 
 
 Neither the inadequacy of the secret in the case of the 
 hero's name nor its vulgarity seems to have been the real 
 secret of the public resentment. An able American critic, 
 Mr. J. Brander Matthews, gives the true cause. "The fault of 
 the piece," he writes, "the fatal fault, was the keeping of the 
 secret from the spectators. To keep a secret is a misconception 
 of true theatrical effect, an improper method of sustaining 
 dramatic suspense. An audience is interested not in what the 
 end may be, but in the means whereby that end is to be 
 reached. ... If the audience that night had been slily let 
 into the secret in an early scene they would have had double 
 enjoyment in watching the futile endeavours of the dramatis 
 personce to divine it, and they would not have been disappointed 
 when Mr. Hogsflesh let slip his full patronymic. Kept in 
 ignorance, the spectators joined the actors in speculation, and 
 when the word was revealed they were not amused by the dis- 
 gust of the actors, so annoyed were they that they had been 
 puzzled by a vulgar name. Perhaps, too, there was a certain 
 reaction after the undue expectancy raised by the prologue. 
 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth that ' the number of friends they 
 had in the House was astonishing. ' Now nothing is so dan- 
 gerous on the first night of a new play as a large number of 
 friends in the audience. One is greatly inclined to regret that 
 Lamb did not yield to Elliston, and let the play be acted again. 
 If it had had a second chance the injudicious friends would have 
 been absent, and the name of the hero would have been noised 
 abroad, and, once in the possession of this secret, the audience 
 might well have laughed long and heartily at the hero's mis- 
 adventures." 
 
 I do not know whether it has been noticed that Lamb's
 
 NOTES. 407 
 
 prologue is suggested by Garrick's to the School for Scandal. 
 It was but thirty years since Sheridan's plays were written, and 
 the fascination of his mannerisms still controlled all writers 
 of comedy. Lamb's wit, however, was not of the Congreve 
 type, and he had to rely mainly on vivacity of manner, and a 
 too liberal sprinkling of puns and such verbal humour. It is 
 hardly unfair to him to suggest that the last words of the 
 farce, "Hogsflesh has saved his Bacon," were the first thought 
 of, and that the farce was written to lead up to them. 
 
 The surname Hogsflesh, it may be added, is by no means con- 
 fined to Lamb's farce. Mr. Leslie, the artist, in his delightful 
 book on the Thames, mentions a school-fellow of that name, 
 and the editor has heard, not remotely, of a family bearing the 
 name, who, with a coyness that would have delighted Lamb, 
 softened the obnoxious syllables into Ho'flesh. Lamb had pro- 
 bably met with the name in real life, and his prompt fancy had 
 at once seized upon its farcical capabilities. The farce seems 
 never to have been acted in public iu England since its summary 
 rejection in December 1806. But it was played at an amateur 
 performance by the late C. J. Mathews in 1822, as recorded 
 in the actor's memoirs. In America the fate of the little play 
 has been different. Three months after its performance at 
 Drury Lane it was produced in New York. It was produced 
 later, in 1812, in Philadelphia, at the Chestnut Street Theatre, 
 and had a considerable run. 
 
 I append a list of the works of Lamb published during his 
 lifetime, in which the writings included in this volume origin- 
 ally appeared : 
 
 (1.) Poems on various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of 
 Jesus College, Cambridge. London : printed for C. G. and J. 
 Robinsons and J. Cottle, bookseller, Bristol. 1796. (Contains 
 four sonnets, signed C. L. ) 
 
 (2.) Poems, by S. T. Coleridge. Second edition to which 
 are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd. 
 Printed by N. Biggs for J. Cottle, Bristol, and Messrs. Robin- 
 sons, London. 1797. 
 
 (3.) Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb. 
 London : printed by T. Bensley for John and Arthur Arch, 
 No. 23 Grace Church Street. 1798. 
 
 (4.) A Talc of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret, by 
 Charles Lamb. London : printed for Lee and Hurst, No. 32 
 Paternoster Row. 1798. 
 
 (5.) John Woodvil, a Tragedy, by C. Lamb, to which are 
 added Fragments of Burton, the author of the Anatomy of 
 Melancholy. London. 1802.
 
 408 NOTES. 
 
 (6. ) Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, who lived about the 
 time of Shakspere, with Notes, by Charles Lamb. London. 
 1808. 
 
 (7.) The Works of Charles Lamb. In two volumes. London. 
 1818. 
 
 (8.) Album Verses, with a few others, by Charles Lamb. 
 London. 1830. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
 
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