THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 
 MISCELLANIES 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY, 
 
 HECTOR OF EVERSLEY J 
 CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO HER MAJESTY. 
 
 REPRINTED CHIEFLY FROM 'ERASER'S MAGAZINE' AND 
 THE 'NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.' 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 JOHN W. PAEKEE AND SON, WEST STEAND. 
 1859- 
 
 [Tke Author reterve* tke rigM of TratulatioH.']
 
 LOJTDOW: 
 
 SAVUI AWD EDWABDS, riUNTBM, CHAKDO-STBET 
 OOTBVT-OABDEV.
 
 Ac 
 g 
 
 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 , SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME ...... 1 
 
 ; 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS* . . 110 
 
 MY WINTER GARDEN 134 
 
 / CHALK-STREAM STUDIES 164 
 
 j TENNYSON 214 
 
 THE POETRY OP SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART . . . 234 
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE 269 
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON ...... 304 
 
 HOURS WITH THR MYSTICS 325 
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL 357 
 
 8S3372
 
 MISCELLANIES. 
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME/ 
 
 is stranger thau fiction/ A trite remark. 
 J- We all say it, again and again : but how few of 
 us believe it ! How few of us, when we read the history 
 of heroical times and heroical men, take the story 
 simply as it stands. On the contrary, we try to ex- 
 plain it away ; to prove it all not to have been so very 
 wonderful : to impute accident, circumstance, mean and 
 commonplace motives ; to lower every story down to 
 the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly to 
 ourselves, and to the God who is near us all) choose to 
 consider our level ; to rationalize away all the wonders, 
 till we make them at last impossible, and give up 
 caring to believe them; and prove to our own melan- 
 choly satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world 
 with a pin, in his sleep, by accident. 
 
 And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of 
 left-handed truth involved. These heroes are not so far 
 removed from us, after all. They were men of like 
 passions with ourselves, with the same flesh about 
 them, the same spirit within them, the same world 
 
 * NOETH BRITISH EEVIEW. No. XLV. 1. ' Life of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh.' By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S. London, 1853. 2. ' Ra- 
 leigh's Discovery of Guiana.' Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk. 
 (Hakluyt Society), 1848. 3. 'Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.' 
 By M. Napier. Cambridge, 1853. 4. ' Raleigh's Works, with 
 Lives by Oldys and Birch.' Oxford, 1829. 5. ' Bishop Goodman's 
 History of his own Times.' London, 1839. 
 VOL. I. B
 
 2 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 outside, the same devil beneath, the same God above. 
 They and their deeds were not so very wonderful. 
 Every child who is born into the world is just as won- 
 derful ; and, for aught we know, might, mutatis mu- 
 tandis, do just as wonderful deeds. If accident and 
 circumstance helped them, the same may help us : have 
 helped us, if we will look back down our years, far 
 more than we have made use of. 
 
 They were men, certainly, very much of our own 
 level : but may we not put that level somewhat too 
 low ? They were certainly not what we are ; for if 
 they had been, they would have done no more than 
 we : but is not a man's real level not what he is, but 
 what he can be, and therefore ought to be ? No 
 doubt they were compact of good and evil, just as we : 
 but so was David, no man more; though a more 
 heroical personage (save One) appears not in all human 
 records ; but may not the secret of their success have 
 been, that, on the whole (though they found it a sore 
 battle), they refused the evil and chose the good ? It 
 is true, again, that their great deeds may be more or 
 less explained, attributed to laws, rationalized : but is 
 explaining always explaining away? Is it to degrade a 
 thing to attribute it to a law ? And do you do any- 
 thing more by ' rationalizing' men's deeds than prove 
 that they were rational men ; men who saw certain 
 fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, 
 according to the Baconian apophthegm, that nature is 
 conquered by obeying her? 
 
 But what laws ? 
 
 To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews will give the best answer, 
 where it says, that by faith were done all the truly 
 great deeds, and by faith lived all the truly great men, 
 who have ever appeared on earth.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 3 
 
 There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of 
 this faith ; its object is one more or less worthy : but 
 it is in all cases the belief in certain unseen eternal 
 facts, by keeping true to which a man must in the long 
 run succeed. Must ; because he is more or less in 
 harmony with heaven, and earth, and the Maker 
 thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a great 
 portion of the universe ; perhaps the whole ; for as he 
 who breaks one commandment of the law is guilty of 
 the whole, because he denies the fount of all law, so he 
 who with his whole soul keeps one commandment of it 
 is likely to be in harmony with the whole, because he 
 testifies of the fount of all law. 
 
 I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old 
 hero, of a man of like passions with ourselves ; of one 
 who had the most intense and awful sense of the un- 
 seen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby ; of one who 
 had hard struggles with a flesh and blood which made 
 him at times forget those laws, and failed mightily 
 thereby : of one whom God so loved that He caused 
 each slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own 
 punishment with it, that while the flesh was delivered 
 over to Satan, the man himself might be saved in the 
 Day of the Lord; of one, finally, of whom nine hun- 
 dred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand may say, 
 * I have done worse deeds than he : but I have never 
 done as good ones/ 
 
 In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys 
 of South Devon, among the white apple-orchards and 
 the rich water-meadows, and the red fallows and red 
 kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as 
 beautiful as day, and christened Walter Raleigh. His 
 father was a gentleman of ancient blood : none older in 
 the land : but, impoverished, he had settled down upon 
 the wreck of his estate, in that poor farm-house. No 
 
 B 2
 
 4 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 record of him now remains ; but he must have been a 
 man worth knowing and worth loving, or he would not 
 have won the wife ne did. She was a Champernoun, 
 proudest of Norman squires, and could probably boast 
 of having in her veins the blood of Courtneys, Emperors 
 of Byzant. She had been the wife of the famous 
 knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Comptou Castle, 
 and had borne him three brave sons, John, Humphrey, 
 and Adrian ; all three destined to win knighthood also 
 in due time, and the two latter already giving promises, 
 which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable 
 men of their time. And yet the fair Champernoun, at 
 her husband's death, had chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, 
 and share life with him in the little farm-house at 
 Hayes. She must have been a grand woman, if the 
 law holds true that great men always have great 
 mothers ; an especially grand woman, indeed ; for few 
 can boast of having borne to two different husbands 
 such sons as she bore. No record, as far as we know, 
 remains of her ; nor of her boy's early years. One 
 can imagine them, nevertheless. 
 
 Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield 
 fires are extinguished. He can recollect, perhaps, 
 hearing of the burning of the Exeter martyrs ; and he 
 does not forget it ; no one forgot or dared forget it 
 in those days. He is brought up in the simple and 
 manly, yet high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the 
 times of ' an old courtier of the Queeu's/ His two 
 elder half-brothers also, living some thirty miles away, 
 in the quaint and gloomy towers of Compton Castle, 
 amid the apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble 
 as ever formed a young lad's taste. Humphrey and 
 Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, both of them, rise to 
 knighthood, are what are they not ? soldiers, scholars, 
 Christians, discoverers and ' planters ' of foreign lauds,
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 5 
 
 geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical philoso- 
 phers ; many-sided, high-minded men, not without 
 fantastic enthusiasm ; living heroic lives, and destined, 
 one of them, to die a heroic death. From them 
 Raleigh's fancy has been fired, and his appetite for 
 learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy, fishing 
 in the grey trout-brooks, or going up with his father 
 to the Dartmoor hills, to hunt the deer with hound and 
 horn, amid the wooded gorges of Holne, or over the 
 dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the cloud-capt 
 thickets of Gator's Beam, and looking down from thence 
 upon the far blue southern sea, wondering when he shall 
 sail thereon, to fight the Spaniard, and discover, like 
 Columbus, some fairy-land of gold and gems. 
 
 For before this boy's mind, as before all intense 
 English minds of that day, rise, from the first, three 
 fixed ideas, which yet are but one the Pope, the 
 Spaniard, and America. 
 
 The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies 
 (whether they pretend a formal peace or not) of Law 
 and Freedom, Bible and Queen, and all that makes an 
 Englishman's life dear to him. Are they not the in- 
 carnations of Antichrist ? Their Moloch sacrifices 
 flame through all lands. The earth groans because of 
 them, and refuses to cover the blood of her slain. 
 And America is the new world of boundless wonder and 
 beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two evil 
 powers arrogate an exclusive and divine right ; and 
 God has delivered it into their hands ; and they have 
 done evil therein with all their might, till the story of 
 their greed and cruelty rings through all earth and 
 heaven. Is this the will of God ? Will he not avenge 
 for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who 
 executeth justice and judgment in the earth ? 
 
 These are the young boy's thoughts. These were
 
 6 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AXD UIS TIME. 
 
 his thoughts for sixty-six eventful years. In whatsoever 
 else he wavered, he never wavered in that creed. He 
 learnt it in his boyhood, while he read Fox's Martyrs 
 beside his mother's knee. He learnt it as a lad, when 
 he saw his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by 
 Spanish tyranny and treachery from peaceful merchant- 
 men into fierce scourges of God. He learnt it scholas- 
 tically, from fathers and divines, as an Oxford scholar, 
 in days when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom 
 there was no guile. He learnt it when he went over, 
 at seventeen years old, with his gallant kinsman Henry 
 Champernoun, and his band of 100 gentlemen volun- 
 teers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of the per- 
 secuted French Protestants. He learnt it as he listened 
 to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew ; he learnt it as 
 he watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres 
 of the Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris 
 in behalf of those victims of ' the Pope and Spain/ 
 He preached it in far stronger and wiser words than I 
 can express it for him, in that noble tract of 1591, on 
 Sir Richard Grenville's death at the Azores a Tyrtsean 
 trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears ; 
 he discussed it like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 
 1596, on ' A War with Spain.' He sacrificed for it the 
 last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his fortunes, his 
 just recovered liberty ; and he died with the old God's 
 battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response 
 from the hearts of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving 
 generation. This is the background, the key-note of 
 the man's whole life, of which, if we lose the recollection, 
 and content ourselves by slurring it over in the last 
 pages of his biography with some half-sneer about his 
 putting, like the rest of Elizabeth's old admirals, ' the 
 Spaniard, the Pope, and the Devil ' in the same cate- 
 gory, we shall understand very little about Raleigh ;
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 7 
 
 though, of course, we shall save ourselves the trouble of 
 pronouncing as to whether the Spaniard and the Pope 
 were really in the same category as the devil ; or, in- 
 deed, which might be equally puzzling to a good many 
 historians of the last century and a half, whether there 
 be any devil at all. 
 
 The books which I have chosen to head this review, 
 are all of them more or less good, with one exception, 
 and that is Bishop Goodman's Memoirs, on which much 
 stress has been lately laid, as throwing light on various 
 passages of Raleigh, Essex, Cecil, and James's lives. 
 Having read it carefully, I must say plainly, that I 
 think the book an altogether foolish, pedantic, and 
 untrustworthy book, without any power of insight or 
 gleam of reason ; without even the care to be self-consis- 
 tent ; having but one object, the whitewashing of James, 
 and of every noble lord whom the bishop has ever known : 
 but in whitewashing each, the poor old flunkey so 
 bespatters all the rest of his pets, that when the work 
 is done, the whole party look, if possible, rather dirtier 
 than before. And so I leave Bishop Goodman. 
 
 Mr. Fraser Tytler's book is well known ; and it is 
 on the whole a good one ; because he really loves and 
 admires the man of whom he writes: but he is wonder- 
 fully careless as to authorities, and too often makes the 
 wish father to the thought indeed to the fact. More- 
 over, he has all the usual sentimental cant about Mary 
 Queen of Scots, and all the usual petty and prurient 
 scandal about Elizabeth, which is simply anathema ; and 
 which prevents his really seeing the time in which Raleigh 
 lived, and the element in which he moved. This sort 
 of talk is happily dying out just now ; but no one can 
 approach the history of the Elizabethan age (perhaps of 
 any age) without finding that truth is all but buried 
 under mountains of dirt and chaff an Augaean stable,
 
 8 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 which, perhaps, will never be swept clean. Yet I 
 have seen, with great delight, several attempts toward 
 removal of the said superstratum of dirt and chaff from 
 the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all evi- 
 dently from the same pen (and that one, more per- 
 fectly master of English prose than any man living), 
 in the ' Westminster Review' and ' Eraser's Maga- 
 zine.'* 
 
 Sir Robert Schomburgk's edition of the Guiana 
 Voyage contains an excellent Life of Ealeigh, perhaps 
 the best yet written ; of which I only complain, when 
 it gives in to the stock-charges against Raleigh, as it 
 were at second-hand, and just because they are stock- 
 charges, and because, too, the illustrious editor (unable 
 to conceal his admiration of a discoverer in many points 
 so like himself), takes all through an apologetic tone of 
 1 Please don't laugh at me. I daresay it is very foolish; 
 but I can't help loving the man.' 
 
 Mr. Napier's little book is a reprint of two Edin- 
 burgh Review articles on Bacon and Raleigh. The 
 first, a learned statement of facts in answer to some 
 unwisdom of a Quarterly reviewer (possibly an Oxford 
 Aristotelian ; for ' we think we do know that sweet 
 Roman hand'). It is clear, accurate, convincing, com- 
 plete. There is no more to be said about the matter, 
 save that facts are stubborn things. 
 
 The article on Raleigh is very valuable ; first, because 
 Mr. Napier has had access to many documents unknown 
 to former biographers; and next, because he clears 
 
 * I especially entreat readers' attention to two articles in vin- 
 dication of the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in ' Fraser's Magazine' of 
 1854; to one in the 'Westminster' of 1854., on Mary Stuart; and 
 one in the same of 1852, on England's Forgotten Worthies, by a pen 
 now happily well known in English literature, Mr. Anthony 
 Froude'a.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 9 
 
 Raleigh completely from the old imputation of deceit 
 about the Guiana mine, as well as of other minor 
 charges. With his general opinion of Raleigh's last 
 and fatal Guiana voyage, I have the misfortune to 
 differ from him toto coelo, on the strength of the very 
 documents which he quotes. But Mr. Napier is always 
 careful, always temperate, and always just, except where 
 he, as I think, does not euter into the feelings of the 
 man whom he is analysing. Let readers buy the book 
 (it will tell them a hundred things they do not know) 
 and be judge between Mr. Napier and me. 
 
 In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a 
 smile how good old Time's scrubbing-brush, which clears 
 away paint and whitewash from church pillars, does the 
 same by such characters as Raleigh's. After each fresh 
 examination, some fresh count in the hundred-headed 
 indictment breaks down. The truth is, that as people 
 begin to believe more in nobleness, and to gird up their 
 loins to the doing of noble deeds, they discover more 
 nobleness in others. Raleigh's character was in its 
 lowest Nadir in the days of Voltaire and Hume. What 
 shame to him? For so were more sacred characters 
 than his. Shall the disciple be above his master? 
 Especially when that disciple was but too inconsistent, 
 and gave occasion to the uncircumcised to blaspheme? 
 But Cayley, after a few years, refutes triumphantly 
 Hume's silly slanders. He is a stupid writer : but he 
 has sense enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to 
 do that. 
 
 Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the 
 dirt-heap ; Mr. Napier clears him (for which we owe him 
 many thanks), by simple statement of facts, from the 
 charge of having deserted and neglected his Virginia 
 colonists ; Humboldt and Schomburgk from the charge 
 of having lied about Guiana ; and so on ; each succes-
 
 10 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 sive writer giving in generally on merest hearsay to the 
 general complaint against him, either from fear of run- 
 ning counter to big names, or from mere laziness, and 
 yet absolving him from that particular charge of which 
 his own knowledge enables him to judge. In the 
 trust that I may be able to clear him from a few 
 more charges, I write these pages, premising that I 
 do not profess to have access to any new and recondite 
 documents. I merely take the broad facts of the 
 story from documents open to all, and comment on 
 them as every man should wish his own life to be 
 commented on. 
 
 But I do so on a method which I cannot give 
 up ; and that is the Bible method ; I say boldly, that 
 historians have hitherto failed in understanding not only 
 Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the persons 
 and facts in his day, because they will not judge them 
 by the canons which the Bible lays down by which 
 I mean not only the New Testament, but the Old, 
 which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch Presby- 
 terians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is 
 ' not contrary to the New/ 
 
 Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which 
 I am sorry, coming as it does from a countryman of 
 John Knox. ' Society, it would seem, was yet in a 
 state in which such a man could seriously plead, that 
 the madness he feigned was justified' (his last word is 
 unfair, for Raleigh only hopes that it is no sin) 'by 
 the example of David, King of Israel !' What a shock- 
 ing state of society when men actually believed their 
 Bibles, not too little, but too much ! For my part, 
 I think that if poor dear Raleigh had considered the 
 example of David a little more closely, he need never 
 have feigned madness at all ; and that his error lay 
 quite in an opposite direction from looking on the
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 11 
 
 Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure models. 
 At all events, let us try Raleigh by the very scrip- 
 tural standard which he himself lays down, not 
 merely in this case unwisely, but in his ' History of the 
 World' more wisely than any historian whom we have 
 ever read ; and say, ' Judged as the Bible taught 
 our Puritan forefathers to judge every man, the cha- 
 racter is intelligible enough; tragic, but noble and 
 triumphant : judged as men have been judged in 
 history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon 
 save those of the private judgment, which philosophic 
 cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear of public opinion, 
 may happen to have forged, the man is a pheno- 
 menon, only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than 
 his biographers' notions about him.' Again I say, 
 I have not solved the problem ; but it will be enough 
 if I make some think it both soluble, and worth 
 solving. 
 
 Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of 
 a country, into what sort of a world, the young adven- 
 turer is going forth, at seventeen years of age, to seek 
 his fortune. 
 
 Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown 
 with the young life of England. The earliest fact, 
 perhaps, which he can recollect, is the flash of joy on 
 every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is dead, 
 and Elizabeth reigns at last. As he grows, the young 
 man sees all the hope and adoration of the English 
 people centre in that wondrous maid, and his own 
 centre in her likewise. He had been base had he been 
 otherwise. She comes to the throne with such a 
 prestige as never sovereign came since the days when 
 Isaiah sang his paean over young Hezekiah's accession. 
 Young, learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a father 
 and mother she could not help being), with an expres-
 
 12 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 sion of countenance remarkable (I speak of those 
 early days) rather for its tenderness and intellectual 
 depth than its strength, she comes forward as the 
 Champion of the Reformed Faith, the interpretress of 
 the will and conscience of the people of England her- 
 self persecuted all but to the death, and purified by 
 affliction, like gold tried in the fire. She gathers 
 round her, one by one, young men of promise, and 
 trains them herself to their work. And they fulfil it, 
 and serve her, and grow grey-headed in her service, 
 working as faithfully, as righteously, as patriotically, as 
 men ever worked on earth. They are her ' favourites ;' 
 because they are men who deserve favour ; men who 
 count not their own lives dear to themselves for the 
 sake of the queen and of that commonweal which their 
 hearts and reasons tell them is one with her. They 
 are still men, though ; and some of them have their 
 grudgiugs and envyings against each other : she keeps 
 the balance even between them as skilfully, gently, 
 justly, as woman ever did, or mortal man either. 
 Some have their conceited hopes of marrying her, 
 becoming her masters. She rebukes and pardons. 
 ' Out of the dust I took you, sir ! go and do your duty, 
 humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust I 
 trample you again V And they reconsider themselves, 
 and obey. But many, or most of them, are new men, 
 country gentlemen, and younger sons. She will follow 
 her father's plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal 
 princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the 
 Roses, are still strong enough to throw everything into 
 confusion by resisting at once the Crown and Commons. 
 Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards 
 with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs ; will 
 restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the 
 middle class and the majority submit to the feudal
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. ]3 
 
 lords and the minority. The Alruna -maiden, \vith her 
 c aristocracy of genius/ is too strong for them ; the 
 people's heart is with her, and not with dukes. Each 
 mine only blows up its diggers, and there are many 
 dry eyes at their ruin. Her people ask her to marry. 
 She answers gently, proudly, eloquently : ' She is 
 married the people of England is her husband. She 
 has vowed it.' And well she keeps her vow. And 
 yet there is a tone of sadness in that great speech. 
 Her woman's heart yearns after love, after children ; 
 after a strong bosom on which to repose that weary 
 head. But she knows that it must not be. She has 
 her reward. ' Whosoever gives up husband or child 
 for my sake and the gospel's, shall receive them back 
 a hundredfold in this present life/ as Elizabeth does. 
 Her reward is an adoration from high and low, which 
 is to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained, 
 which was not so then. 
 
 For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation ; 
 England is fairyland ; the times are the last days 
 strange, terrible, and glorious. At home are Jesuits 
 plotting ; dark, crooked -pathed, going up and down in all 
 manner of disguises, doing the devil's work if men ever 
 did it ; trying to sow discord between man and man, class 
 and class ; putting out books full of filthy calumnies, 
 declaring the queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a 
 usurper; English law null and all state appointments 
 void, by virtue of a certain 'Bull/ and calling on the sub- 
 jects to rebellion and assassination, even on the bed- 
 chamber women to do to her ' as Judith did to Holo- 
 fernes.' She answers by calm contempt. Now and then 
 Burleigh and Walsingham catch some of the rogues, 
 and they meet their deserts ; but she for the most part 
 lets them have their way. God is on her side, and she 
 will not fear what man can do to her.
 
 14 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of 
 fantastic splendour. Spain stands strong and awful, a 
 rising world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes 
 and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and Parraas, men 
 whose path is like the lava stream ; who go forth slaying 
 and to slay, in the name of their gods, like those old 
 Assyrian conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with tute- 
 lary genii flying above their heads, mingled with the 
 eagles who trail the entrails of the slain. By conquest, 
 intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the southern 
 nations her vassals or her tools ; close to our own shores, 
 the Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties; 
 abroad, the Western Islands, and the whole trade of 
 Africa and India, will in a few years be hers. And 
 already the Pope, whose ' most Catholic' and faithful 
 servant -she is, has repaid her services in the cause of 
 darkness by the gift of the whole New World a gift 
 which she has claimed by cruelties and massacres un- 
 exampled since the days of Timour and Zinghis Khan. 
 There she spreads and spreads, as Drake found her pic- 
 ture in the Government House at St. Domingo, the 
 horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, ' Non 
 sufficit orbis/ Who shall withstand her, armed as she 
 is with the three-edged sword of Antichrist supersti- 
 tion, strength, and gold? 
 
 English merchantmen, longing for some share in the 
 riches of the New World, go out to trade in Guinea, in 
 the Azores, in New Spain ; and are answered by shot 
 and steel. ' Both policy and religion/ as Fray Simon 
 says, fifty years afterwards, ' forbid Christians to trade 
 with heretics !' ' Lutheran devils, and enemies of God/ 
 are the answer they get in words ; in deeds, whenever 
 they have a superior force they may be allowed to land, 
 and to water their ships, even to trade, under exor- 
 bitant restrictions ; but generally this is merely a trap
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND IIIS TIME. 15 
 
 for them. Forces are hurried up ; and the English are 
 attacked treacherously, in spite of solemn compacts; for 
 ' No faith need be kept with heretics/ And woe to 
 them if any be taken prisoners, even wrecked. The 
 galleys, and the rack, and the stake, are their certain 
 doom; for the Inquisition claims the bodies and souls 
 of heretics all over the world, and thinks it sin to lose 
 its own. A few years of such wrong raise questions in 
 the sturdy English heart What right have these 
 Spaniards to the New World ? The Pope's gift ? Why, 
 he gave it by the same authority by which he claims 
 the whole world. The formula used when an Indian 
 village is sacked is, that God gave the whole world to 
 St. Peter, and that he has given it to his successors, 
 and they the Indies to the King of Spain. To acknow- 
 ledge that lie would be to acknowledge the very power 
 by which the Pope claims a right to depose Queen 
 Elizabeth, and give her dominions to whomsoever he 
 will. A fico for bulls ! 
 
 By possession, then? That may hold for Mexico, 
 Peru, New Grenada, Paraguay, which have been colo- 
 nized; though they were gained by means which make 
 every one concerned in conquering them worthy of the 
 gallows ; and the right is only that of the thief to the 
 purse whose owner he has murdered. But as for the 
 rest Why the Spaniard has not colonized, even ex- 
 plored, one- fifth of the New World, not even one- 
 fifth of the coast. Is the existence of a few petty 
 factories, often hundreds of miles apart, at a few river 
 mouths, to give them a claim to the whole intermediate 
 coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts inside ? We 
 will try that. If they appeal to the sword, so be it. 
 The men are treacherous robbers; we will indemnify 
 ourselves for our losses, and God defend the right. 
 
 So argued the English ; and so sprung up that
 
 16 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 strange war of reprisals, in which, for eighteen years, it 
 M'as held that there was no peace between England and 
 Spain beyond the line ; i.e., beyond the parallel of lon- 
 gitude where the Pope's gift of the western world was 
 said to begin ; and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, 
 extended to the Azores, Canaries, and coasts of Africa, 
 where English and Spaniards flew at each other as 
 soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as 
 natural enemies, each invoking God in the battle with 
 Antichrist. 
 
 Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, 
 his heart full of chivalrous worship for England's tute- 
 lary genius, his brain aflame with the true miracles of 
 the new-found Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast 
 imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power. 
 And yet he is no wayward dreamer, unfit for this 
 workday world. With a vein of song ' most lofty, inso- 
 lent, and passionate/ indeed unable to see aught without 
 a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently practical, 
 contented to begin at the beginning, that he may end 
 at the end ; one who could work terribly, t who always 
 laboured at the matter in hand as if he were born only 
 for that/ Accordingly, he sets to work faithfully and 
 stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering ; and learns it in 
 silence and obscurity. He shares (it seems) in the 
 retreat at Moncontour, and is by at the death of Conde, 
 and toils on for five years, marching and skirmishing, 
 smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc, 
 and all the wild work of war. During the San Bartho- 
 lomew massacre we hear nothing of him ; perhaps he 
 took refuge with Sidney and others in Walsingham's 
 house. No records of these years remain, save a few 
 scattered reminiscences in his works, which mark the 
 shrewd, observant eye of the future statesman. 
 
 When he returned we know not. We trace him,
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 17 
 
 in 1576, by some verses prefixed to Gascoigne's satire, 
 The ' Steele Glass/ solid, stately, epigrammatic, ' by 
 Walter Rawely of the Middle Temple/ The style is 
 his ; spelling of names matters nought in days in which 
 a man would spell his own name three different ways 
 in one document. Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew 
 Lord Grey of Wilton, and most men about town, too, 
 and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably 
 with him. It seems to have been the fashion for young 
 idlers to lodge among the Templars; indeed, toward 
 the end of the century, they had to be cleared out, as 
 crowding the wigs and gowns too much, and perhaps 
 proving noisy neighbours, as Raleigh may have done. 
 To this period may be referred, probably, his justice 
 done on Mr. Charles Chester (Ben Jonson's Carlo 
 Buffone), ' a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a 
 drum in a room ; so one time, at a tavern, Raleigh beats 
 him and seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, 
 with hard wax/ For there is a great laugh in Raleigh's 
 heart, a genial contempt of asses; and one that will 
 make him enemies hereafter : perhaps shorten his days. 
 
 One hears of him next (but only by report) in the 
 Netherlands, under Norris, where the nucleus of the 
 English line (especially of its musquetry) was training. 
 For Don John of Austria intends not only to crush the 
 liberties and creed of the Flemings, but afterwards to 
 marry the Queen of Scots, and conquer England ; and 
 Elizabeth, unwillingly and slowly, for she cannot stomach 
 rebels, has sent men and money to The States, to stop 
 Don John in time; which the valiant English and 
 Scotch do on Lammas-day, 1578, and that in a fashion 
 till then unseen in war. For coming up late and 
 panting, and 'being more sensible of a little heat of 
 the sun, than of any cold fear of death,' they throw off 
 their armour and clothes, and, in their shirts (not over- 
 
 VOL. i. c
 
 18 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 clean, one fears), give Don John's rashness such a 
 rebuff, that two months more see that wild meteor, 
 with lost hopes and tarnished fame, die down and vanish 
 below the stormy horizon. In these days, probably, it 
 is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a soldier of fortune, 
 of a ' fancy high and wild, too desultory and over- 
 voluble/ who had, among his huudred-and-one schemes, 
 one for the plantation of America ; as poor Sir Thomas 
 Stukely (whom Raleigh must have known well), uncle 
 of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida. 
 
 Raleigh returns : Ten years has he been learning his 
 soldier's trade in silence. He will take a lesson in 
 seamanship next. The court may come in time; for, 
 by now, the poor squire's younger son must have dis- 
 covered perhaps even too fully that he is not as 
 other men are; that he can speak, and watch, and 
 dare, and endure, as none around him can do. How- 
 ever, there are ' good adventures toward,' as the ' Morte 
 d' Arthur' would say ; and he will off with his half- 
 brother Humphrey Gilbert, to carry out his patent for 
 planting Meta Incognita, 'The Unknown Goal/ as 
 Queen Elizabeth has named it, which will prove to 
 be too truly and fatally unknown. In a latitude south 
 of England, and with an Italian summer, who can guess 
 that the winter will out-freeze Russia itself ? The mer- 
 chant-seaman, like the statesman, had yet many a thing 
 to learn. Instead of smiling at our forefathers' igno- 
 rance, let us honour the men who bought knowledge for 
 us their children at the price of lives nobler than our own. 
 
 So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey 
 Gilbert, to carry out the patent for discovering and 
 planting in Meta Incognita : but the voyage prospers 
 not. A 'smart brush with the Spaniards' sends them 
 home again, with the loss of Morgan, their best captain, 
 and ' a tall ship,' and Meta Incognita is forgotten for
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 19 
 
 a while : but not the Spaniards. Who are these who 
 forbid all English, by virtue of the Pope's bull, to cross 
 the Atlantic? That must be settled hereafter; and 
 Raleigh, ever busy, is off to Ireland, to command a 
 company in that ' common-weal, or rather common- 
 woe/ as he calls it in a letter to Leicester. Two years 
 and more pass here ; and all the records of him which 
 remain are of a man, valiant, daring, and yet prudent 
 beyond his fellows. He hates his work : and is not on 
 too good terms with stern and sour, but brave and 
 faithful Lord Grey: but Lord Grey is Leicester's friend, 
 and Raleigh works patiently under him, like a sensible 
 man, just because he is Leicester's friend. Some modern 
 gentleman of note (I forget who, and do not care to 
 recollect) says, that Raleigh's ' prudence never bore 
 any proportion to his genius.' The next biographer 
 we open accuses him of being too calculating, cunning, 
 time serving ; and so forth. Perhaps both are true. 
 The man's was a character very likely to fall alternately 
 into either sin, doubtless, did so a hundred times. 
 Perhaps both are false. The man's character was, on 
 occasion, certain to rise above both faults. We have 
 evidence that he did so his whole life long. 
 
 He is tired of Ireland at last : nothing goes right 
 there (when has it?), nothing is to be done there. 
 That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and 
 that which is wanting cannot be numbered. He comes 
 to London, and to Court. But how ? By spreading 
 his cloak over a muddy place for Queen Elizabeth to 
 step on ? It is a pretty story : very likely to be a true 
 one : but biographers have slurred a few facts in their 
 hurry to carry out their theory of 'favourites,' and to 
 prove that Elizabeth took up Raleigh on the same 
 grounds that the silliest boarding-school miss might 
 have done. Not that I deny the cloak story, if true, 
 
 c a
 
 20 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 to be a very pretty story ; perhaps it justifies, taken 
 alone, Elizabeth's fondness for him. There may have 
 been self-interest in it ; we are bound, as ' men of the 
 world/ to impute the dirtiest motive that we can find : 
 but how many self-interested men do we know, who 
 would have had quickness and daring to do such a 
 thing? Men who are thinking about themselves are 
 not generally either so quick-witted, or so inclined to 
 throw away a good cloak, when by much scraping and 
 saving they have got one. I never met a cunning, 
 selfish, ambitious man who would have done such a 
 thing. The reader may : but even if he has, we must 
 ask him, for Queen Elizabeth's sake, to consider that 
 this young Quixote is the close relation of two of the 
 finest public men then living, Champernoun and Carew. 
 That he is a friend of Sidney ; a pet of Leicester ; that 
 he has left behind him at Oxford, and brought with him 
 from Ireland, the reputation of being a rara avis, a new 
 star in the firmament ; that he has been a soldier in 
 her Majesty's service (and in one in which she has a 
 peculiar private interest) for twelve years ; that he has 
 held her commission as one of the triumvirate for govern- 
 ing Munster, and been the commander of the garrison 
 at Cork ; and that it is possible that she may have heard 
 something of him before he threw his cloak under her 
 feet, especially as there has been some controversy 
 (which we have in vain tried to fathom) between him 
 and Lord Grey about that terrible Smerwick slaughter ; 
 of the result of which we know little, but that Raleigh, 
 being called in question about it in London, made such 
 good play with his tongue, that his reputation as an 
 orator and a man of talent was fixed once and for ever. 
 Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret 
 diplomatic mission about the Anjou marriage ; he is
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 21 
 
 in fact now installed in his place as ' a favourite/ And 
 why not? If a man is found to be wise and witty, 
 ready and useful, able to do whatsoever he is put to, 
 why is a sovereign, who has eyes to see the man's 
 worth, and courage to use it, to be accused of I know 
 not what, because the said man happens to be good- 
 looking ? 
 
 Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh's life. 
 What does he intend to be ? Soldier, statesman, 
 scholar, or sea-adventurer ? He takes the most natural, 
 yet not the wisest course. He will try and be all four 
 at once. He has intellect for it ; by worldly wisdom 
 he may have money for it also. Even now he has 
 contrived (no one can tell whence) to build a good bark 
 of two hundred tons, and send her out with Humphrey 
 Gilbert on his second and fatal voyage. Luckily for 
 Raleigh she deserts and comes home, while not yet out 
 of the Channel, or she had surely gone the way of the 
 rest of Gilbert's squadron. Raleigh, of course, loses 
 money by the failure, as well as the hopes which he 
 had grounded on his brother's Transatlantic viceroyalty. 
 And a bitter pang it must have been to him, to find 
 himself bereft of that pure and heroic counsellor, just 
 at his entering into life. But with the same elasticity 
 which sent him to the grave, he is busy within six 
 months in a fresh expedition. If Meta Incognita be 
 not worth planting, there must be, so' Raleigh thinks, 
 a vast extent of coast between it and Florida, which is 
 more genial in climate, perhaps more rich in produce ; 
 and he sends Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow to look 
 for the same, and not in vain. 
 
 On these Virginian discoveries I shall say but little. 
 Those who wish to enjoy them should read them in all 
 their naive freshness in the originals; they will sub-
 
 22 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 scribe to S. T. Coleridge's dictum, that no one novv-a- 
 days can write travels as well as the old worthies could, 
 who figure in Hakluyt and Purchas. 
 
 But to return to the question What does this man 
 intend to be ? A discoverer and colonist ; a vindicator 
 of some part at least of America from Spanish claims ? 
 Perhaps not altogether : else he would have gone himself 
 to Virginia, at least the second voyage, instead of send- 
 ing others. But here, it seems, is the fatal, and 
 yet pardonable mistake, which haunts the man through- 
 out. He tries to be too many men at once. Fatal : 
 because, though he leaves his trace on more things 
 than (perhaps) did ever one man before or since, he, 
 strictly speaking, conquers nothing, brings nothing to 
 a consummation. Virginia, Guiana, the ' History of 
 the World/ his own career as a statesman as dictator 
 (for he might have been dictator had he chosen), all 
 are left unfinished. And yet most pardonable ; for if a 
 man feels that he can do many different things, how 
 hard to teach himself that he must not do them all ! 
 How hard to say to himself, ( I must cut off the right 
 hand, and pluck out the right eye.' I must be less 
 than myself, in order really to be anything. I must 
 concentrate my powers on one subject, and that perhaps 
 by no means the most seemingly noble or useful, still 
 less the most pleasant, and forego so many branches of 
 activity in which I might be so distinguished, so useful.' 
 This is a hard lesson. Raleigh took just sixty -six years 
 learning it, and had to carry the result of his experience 
 to the other side of the dark river, for there was no 
 time left to use it on this side. Some readers may 
 have learnt the lesson already. If so, happy and 
 blessed are they. But let them not, therefore, exalt 
 themselves above Walter Raleigh ; for that lesson is 
 (of course) soonest learnt by the man who can excel in
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 23 
 
 few things, later by him who can excel in many, and 
 latest of all by him who, like Raleigh, can excel in all. 
 
 Few details remain concerning the earlier court 
 days of Raleigh. He rises rapidly, as we have 
 seen. He has an estate given him in Ireland, 
 near his friend Spenser, where he tries to do well and 
 wisely, colonizing, tilling, and planting it ; but, like 
 his Virginia expeditions, principally at second hand. 
 For he has swallowed (there is no denying it) the 
 painted bait. He will discover, he will colonize, he 
 will do all manner of beautiful things, at second hand : 
 but he himself will be a courtier. It is very tempting. 
 Who would not, at the age of thirty, have wished to 
 have been one of that chosen band of geniuses and 
 heroes whom Elizabeth had gathered round her ? 
 Who would not, at the age of thirty, have given his 
 pound of flesh to be captain of her guard, and to go with 
 her whithersoever she went? It is not merely the intense 
 gratification to carnal vanity (which if any man denies 
 or scoffs at, always mark him down as especially 
 guilty) which is to be considered ; but the real, actual 
 honour, in the mind of one who looked on Elizabeth 
 as the most precious and glorious being which the 
 earth had seen for centuries. To be appreciated by 
 her ; to be loved by her ; to serve her ; to guard her ; 
 what could man desire more on earth ? 
 
 Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now, Lord 
 Warden of the Stannaries; business which of course keeps 
 him in England, business which he performs (as he does all 
 things) wisely and well. Such a generation as this ought 
 really to respect Raleigh a little more, if it be only for his 
 excellence in their own especial sphere that of business. 
 Raleigh is a thorough man of business. He can ' toil 
 terribly/ and what is more, toil to the purpose. In all 
 the everyday affairs of life, he remains without a blot ;
 
 24 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 a diligent, methodical, prudent man, who, though he 
 plays for great stakes, ventures and loses his whole 
 fortune again and again, yet never seems to omit the 
 ' doing the duty which lies nearest him f never gets into 
 mean money scrapes ; never neglects tenants or duty ; 
 never gives way for one instant to ' the eccentricities 
 of genius/ 
 
 If he had done so, be sure that we should have 
 heard of it. For no man can become what he has 
 become without making many an enemy ; and he has 
 his enemies already. On which statement naturally 
 occurs the question why? An important question 
 too; because several of his later biographers seem to 
 have running in their minds some such train of thought 
 as this Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he 
 would not have had so many enenies ; and because he 
 was a bad fellow, there is an a priori reason that 
 charges against him are true. Whether this be arguing 
 in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the begin- 
 ning of this enmity, and the reputed causes of it. In 
 after years it will be, because he is ' damnable proud / 
 because he hated Essex, and so forth: of which in their 
 places. But what is the earliest count against him ? 
 Naunton (who hated llaleigh, and was moreover a 
 rogue and a bad fellow) has no reason to give, but 
 that ' the Queen took him for a kind of oracle, which 
 much nettled them all ; yea, those he relied on began 
 to take this his sudden favour for an alarm ; to be 
 sensible of their own supplantation, and to project 
 his ; which shortly made him to sing, ' Fortune my 
 foe/ ' 
 
 Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much 
 faith in it, it gives no reason for the early dislike of 
 Raleigh, save the somewhat unsatisfactory one which 
 Cain would have given for his dislike of Abel. More-
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 25 
 
 over, Mr. Tytler gives a letter of Essex's, written as 
 thoroughly in the Cain spirit as any we ever read, and 
 we wonder that, after, as he says, first giving that 
 letter to the world, he could have found courage to 
 repeat the old sentimentalism about the * noble and 
 unfortunate' Earl. His hatred of Ealeigh (which, as 
 we shall see hereafter, Raleigh not only bears patiently, 
 but requites with good deeds as long as he can) springs, 
 by his own confession, simply from envy and disappointed 
 vanity. The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about 
 her liking for the ' knave Raleigh.' She, ' taking hold 
 of one word disdain,' tells Essex that ' there was no 
 such cause why I should thus disdain him.' On which, 
 says Essex, ' as near as I could I did describe unto her 
 what he had been, and what he was; and then I did 
 let her see, whether I had come to disdain his compe- 
 tition of love, or whether I could have comfort to give 
 myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe 
 of such a man. I spake for grief and choler as much 
 against him as I could : and I think he standing at the 
 door might very well hear the worst that I spoke of 
 him. In the end, I saw she was resolved to defend 
 him, and to cross me/ Whereon follows a ' scene/ 
 the naughty boy raging and stamping, till he insults 
 the Queen, and calls Raleigh ' a wretch ;' whereon poor 
 Elizabeth, who loved the coxcomb for his. father's sake, 
 ' turned her away to my Lady Warwick,' and Essex 
 goes grumbling forth. 
 
 On which letter, written before a single charge has 
 been brought (as far as yet known, against Raleigh), 
 Mr. Tytler can only observe that it ' throws much 
 light on the jealousy' between Raleigh and Essex, ' and 
 establishes the fact, that Elizabeth delighted to see 
 them competing for her love.' 
 
 This latter sentence is one of those (too common)
 
 26 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 which ought to rouse indignation. I have quoted only 
 the passage which Mr. Tytler puts in italics, as proving 
 his case : but let any reader examine that letter word 
 by word, from end to end, and say whether even Essex, 
 in the midst of his passion, selfishness, and hatred, lets 
 one word drop which hints at Elizabeth ' delighting' in 
 seeing the competition, any more than one which brings 
 a tangible charge against Raleigh. It is as gratuitous 
 and wanton a piece of evil-speaking as we ever read in 
 any book ; yet, I am ashamed to say, it is but an 
 average specimen of the fairness with which any fact is 
 treated now-a-days, which relates to the greatest 
 sovereign whom England ever saw, the ' Good Queen 
 Bess/ of whom Cromwell the regicide never spoke 
 without deepest respect and admiration. 
 
 Raleigh's next few years are brilliant and busy ones ; 
 and gladly, did space permit, would I give details 
 of those brilliant adventures which make this part of 
 his life that of a true knight-errant. But they are 
 mere episodes in the histoiy, and we must pass them 
 quickly by, only saying that they corroborate in all 
 things our original notion of the man just, humane, 
 wise, greatly daring and enduring greatly ; and filled 
 with the one fixed idea, which has grown with his 
 growth and strengthened with his strength, the 
 destruction of the Spanish power, and colonization of 
 America by English. His -brother Humphrey makes 
 a second attempt to colonize Newfoundland, and perishes 
 as heroically as he had lived. Raleigh, undaunted by 
 his own loss in the adventure and his brother's failure, 
 sends out a fleet of his own to discover to the southward, 
 and finds Virginia. One might spend pages on this 
 beautiful episode ; on the simple descriptions of the fair 
 new land which the sea-kings bring home ; on the 
 profound (for those times at least) knowledge which
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 27 
 
 prompted Raleigh to make the attempt in that 
 particular direction which had as yet escaped the notice 
 of the Spaniards ; on the quiet patience with which, 
 undaunted by the ill-success of the first colonists, he 
 sends out fleet after fleet, to keep the hold which he 
 had once gained, till, unable any longer to support the 
 huge expense, he makes over his patent for discovery 
 to a company of merchants, who fare for many years 
 as ill as Raleigh himself did : but one thing one has a 
 right to say, that to this one man, under the providence 
 of Almighty God, do the whole United States of 
 America owe their existence. The work was double. 
 The colony, however small, had to be kept in possession 
 at all hazards; and he did it. But that was not 
 enough. Spain must be prevented from extending her 
 operations northward from Florida ; she must be 
 crippled along the whole east coast of America. And 
 Raleigh did that too. We find him for years to come 
 a part-adventurer in almost every attack on the 
 Spaniards ; we find him preaching war against them on 
 these very grounds, and setting others to preach it also. 
 Good old Hariot (Raleigh's mathematical tutor, whom 
 he sent to Virginia) re-echoes his pupil's trumpet-blast. 
 Hooker, in his epistle dedicatory of his Irish History, 
 strikes the same note, and a right noble one it is. 
 ' These Spaniards are trying to build up a world-tyranny 
 by rapine and cruelty. You, sir, call on us to deliver 
 the earth from them, by doing justly and loving mercy ; 
 and we will obey you P is the answer which Raleigh 
 receives (as far as we can find) from every nobler- 
 natured Englishman. 
 
 It was an immense conception : a glorious one : it 
 stood out so clear : there was no mistake about its 
 being the absolutely right, wise, patriotic thing : and 
 so feasible, too, if Raleigh could but find ' six cents
 
 28 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 homines qui savaient mourir.' But that was just 
 what he could not find. He could draw round him, 
 and did, by the spiritual magnetism of his genius, 
 many a noble soul : but he could not organize them, 
 as he seems to have tried to do, into a coherent body. 
 The English spirit of independent action, never 
 stronger than in that age, and most wisely encouraged 
 (for other reasons) by good Queen Bess, was too strong 
 for him. His pupils will ' fight on their own hook' 
 like so many Yankee rangers ; quarrel with each 
 other : grumble at him. For the truth is, he demands 
 of them too high a standard of thought and purpose. 
 He is often a whole heaven above them in the huge- 
 ness of his imagination, the nobleness of his motive ; 
 and Don Quixote can often find no better squire than 
 Sancho Panza. Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvil 
 makes a mess of it : burns an Indian village because 
 they steal a silver cup ; throws back the colonization 
 of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions of 
 discipline and retributive justice ; and Raleigh requites 
 him for his offence by embalming him, his valour and 
 his death, not in immortal verse, but in immortal 
 prose. The t True Relation of the Fight at the Azores' 
 gives the key-note of Raleigh's heart. If readers will 
 not take that as the text on which his whole life is a 
 commentary, they may know a great deal about him, 
 but him they will never know. 
 
 The game becomes fiercer and fiercer. Blow and 
 counterblow between the Spanish king (for the whole 
 West-Indian commerce was a government job) and the 
 merchant nobles of England. At last, the Great 
 Armada comes, and the Great Armada goes again. 
 'Venit, vidit, fugit,' as the medals said of it. And to 
 Walter Raleigh's counsel, by the testimony of all con* 
 temporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 29 
 
 attributed. Where all men did heroically, it were 
 invidious to bestow on him alone a crown, ' ob patriara 
 servatatn.' But henceforth, Elizabeth knows well 
 that she has not been mistaken in her choice ; and 
 Raleigh is better loved than ever, heaped with fresh 
 wealth and honours. And who deserves them better ? 
 
 The immense value of his services in the defence of 
 England should excuse him from the complaint 
 which one has been often inclined to bring against 
 him, Why, instead of sending others Westward Ho, 
 did he not go himself? Surely he could have recon- 
 ciled the jarring instruments with which he was work- 
 ing. He could have organized such a body of men as 
 perhaps never went out before or since on the same 
 errand. He could have done all that Cortez did, and 
 more ; and done it more justly and mercifully. 
 
 True. And here seems (as far as little folk dare 
 judge great folk) to have been his mistake. He is too 
 wide for real success. He has too many plans ; he is 
 fond of too many pursuits. The man who succeeds is 
 generally the narrow man ; the man of one idea, who 
 works at nothing but that ; sees everything only through 
 the light of that ; sacrifices everything to that ; the 
 fanatic, in short. By fanatics, whether military, com- 
 mercial, or religious, and not by ' liberal-minded men* 
 at all, has the world's work been done in all ages. 
 Amid the modern cants, one of the most mistaken is 
 the cant about the ' mission of genius/ the ' mission of 
 the poet/ Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the 
 anointed kings of mankind, at least, so the little 
 poets sing, each to his little fiddle. There is no 
 greater mistake. It is the practical, prosaical fanatic 
 who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do 
 it, is certain to put down his spade every five minutes, 
 to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and
 
 30 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 moralize on dead asses, till he ends a ' Neron malgre 
 lui-meme/ fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning. 
 And perhaps this is the secret of Raleigh's failure. 
 He is a fanatic no doubt, a true knight-errant : but he 
 is too much of a poet withal. The sense of beauty 
 inthrals him at every step. Gloriana's fairy court, 
 with its chivalries and its euphuisms, its masques and 
 its tourneys, and he the most charming personage in it, 
 are too charming for him as they would have been 
 for us, reader : and he cannot give them up, and go 
 about the one work. He justifies his double- minded - 
 ness to himself, no doubt, as he does to the world, by 
 working wisely, indefatigably, and bravely ; but still he 
 has put his trust in princes, and in the children of 
 men. His sin, as far as we can see, is not against 
 man, but against God : one which we do not now-a- 
 days call a sin, but a weakness. Be it so. God 
 punished him for it, swiftly and sharply; which I 
 hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave him 
 for it. 
 
 So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, 
 40,000?. on Virginia, writes charming court-poetry with 
 Oxford, Buckhurst, and Paget, brings over Spenser 
 from Ireland, and introduces Colin Clout to Gloriana, 
 who loves as who would not have loved ? that most 
 beautiful of faces and of souls ; helps poor puritan Udali 
 out of his scrape as far as he can ; begs for Captain 
 Spring, begs for many more, whose names are only 
 known by being connected with some good deed of 
 his. ' When, Sir Walter/ asks Queen Bess, ' will you 
 cease to be a beggar ?' ' When your Majesty ceases to 
 be a benefactor/ Perhaps it is in these days that he 
 set up his ' office of address/ some sort of agency for 
 discovering and relieving the wants of worthy men. 
 So all seems to go well. If he has lost in Virginia,
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 31 
 
 he has gained by Spanish prizes ; his wine-patent is 
 bringing him in a large revenue, and the heavens smile 
 on him. f Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased in 
 goods, and have need of nothing ; and knowest not 
 that thou art poor and miserable and blind and naked.' 
 Thou shalt learn it, then, and pay dearly for thy 
 lesson. 
 
 For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very 
 great sin, for which, as usual with his elect, God inflicts 
 swift and instant punishment ; on which, as usual, 
 biographers talk much unwisdom. He seduces Miss 
 Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour. Elizabeth 
 is very wroth ; and had she not good reason to be wroth ? 
 Is it either fair or reasonable to talk of her ' demanding 
 a monopoly of love/ and ' being incensed at the 
 temerity of her favourite, in presuming to fall in love 
 and marry without her consent?' Away with such 
 prurient cant. The plain facts are : that a man nearly 
 forty years old abuses his wonderful gifts of body and 
 mind, to ruin a girl nearly twenty years younger than 
 himself. What wonder if a virtuous woman (and 
 Queen Elizabeth was virtuous) thought it a base deed, 
 and punished it accordingly? There is no more to be 
 discovered in the matter, save by the vulturine nose 
 which smells a carrion in every rose-bed. Raleigh has 
 a great attempt on the Plate-fleets in hand ; he hurries 
 off, from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil, on the 
 loth of March, f I mean not to come away, as some 
 say I will, for fear of a marriage, and I know not 
 what. . . . For I protest before God, there is none 
 on the face of the earth that I would be fastened 
 unto.' 
 
 This famous passage is one of those over which the 
 virtuosity of modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung 
 so fondly, as giving melancholy proof of the ' duplicity
 
 32 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 of Raleigh's character ;' as if a man who once in his life 
 had told an untruth was proved by that fact to be a 
 rogue from birth to death : while others have kindly 
 given him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter 
 were not written after a private marriage, and therefore 
 Raleigh, being 'joined unto' some one already, had a 
 right to say, that he did not wish to be joined to any 
 one. But we do not concur in this doubt. Four months 
 after, Sir Edward Stafford writes to Anthony Bacon, 
 ' If you have anything to do with Sir W. R., or any 
 love to make to Mistress Throgmorton, at the Tower to- 
 morrow you may speak with them.' This implies that 
 no marriage had yet taken place. And surely, if there 
 had been a private marriage, two people who were about 
 to be sent to the Tower for their folly would have made 
 the marriage public at once, as the only possible self- 
 justification. But it is a pity, in our . opinion, that 
 biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed lie 
 of Raleigh's, had not taken the trouble to find out what 
 the words mean. In their virtuous haste to prove him 
 a liar, they have overlooked the fact that the words, 
 as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument 
 self-contradictory. He wants to prove, we suppose, 
 that he does not go to sea for fear of being forced to 
 marry Miss Throgmorton. It is, at least, an unex- 
 pected method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, 
 to say that he wishes to marry no one at all. ' Don't 
 think that I run away for fear of a marriage, for I do 
 not wish to marry any one on the face of the earth/ 
 is a speech which may prove Raleigh to have been a 
 goose, but we must understand it before we can say that 
 it proves him a rogue. If we had received such a 
 letter from a friend, we should have said at once, ' Why 
 the man, in his hurry and confusion, has omitted the 
 word ; he must have meant to write, not ' There is
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 33 
 
 none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened 
 to/ but ' There is none on the face of the earth that I 
 would rather be fastened to/ ' which would at once 
 make sense, and suit fact. For Raleigh not only 
 married Miss Throgmorton forthwith, but made her the 
 best of husbands. My conjectural emendation may go 
 for what it is worth ; but that the passage, as it stands 
 in Murdin's State papers (the MSS. I have not seen) 
 is either misquoted, or miswritten by Raleigh himself, 
 I cannot doubt. He was not one to think nonsense, 
 even if he scribbled it. 
 
 The Spanish raid turns out well. Raleigh overlooks 
 Elizabeth's letters of recall till he finds out that the 
 King of Spain has stopped the Plate-fleet for fear 
 of his coming, and then returns, sending on Sir John 
 Burrough to the Azores, where he takes the ' Great 
 Carack/ the largest prize (1600 tons) which had 
 ever been brought into England. The details of that 
 gallant fight stand in the pages of Hakluyt. It 
 raised Raleigh once more to wealth, though not 
 to favour. Shortly after he returns from the sea, 
 he finds himself, where he deserves to be, in the Tower, 
 where he does more than one thing which brought 
 him no credit. How far we are justified in calling 
 his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his keeper, 
 for not letting him 'disguise himself, and get into a 
 pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the 
 queen, or his heart would break/ hypocrisy, is a very 
 different matter. Honest Arthur Gorges (a stanch 
 friend of Raleigh's) tells the story laughingly and 
 lovingly, as if he thought Raleigh sincere, but some 
 what mad ; and yet honest Gorges has a good right 
 to say a bitter thing ; for after having been ' ready to 
 break with laughing at seeing them two brawl and 
 scramble like madmen, and Sir George's new periwig 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 torn off his crown/ he sees ' the iron walking' and 
 daggers out, and playing the part of him who taketh 
 a dog by the ears, ' purchased such a rap on the 
 knuckles, that I wished both their pates broken, and so 
 with much ado they staid their brawl to see my bloody 
 fingers/ and then set to work to abuse the hapless 
 peacemaker. After which things Raleigh writes a 
 letter to Cecil, which is still more offensive in the eyes 
 of virtuous biographers, how 'his heart was never 
 broken till this day, when he hears the queen goes so 
 far off, whom he followed with love and desire on so 
 many journeys, and am now left behind in a dark prison 
 all alone/ . . . . 'I that was wont to behold 
 her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking 
 like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair 
 about her pure cheeks/ and so forth, in a style in 
 which the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, 
 just because the roses are more fragrant than 
 they should be in a world where all ought 
 to be either vultures, or carrion for their dinners. 
 As for his despair, had he not good reason to be 
 in despair? By his own sin, he has hurled himself 
 down the hill which he has so painfully climbed. 
 He is in the Tower surely no pleasant or hopeful 
 place for any man. Elizabeth is exceeding wroth 
 with him ; and what is worse, he deserves what 
 he has got. His whole fortune is ventured in an 
 expedition over which he has no control, which has 
 been unsuccessful in its first object, and may be alto- 
 gether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as 
 a pis-aller, and so leave him penniless. There want 
 not, too, those who will trample on the fallen. The 
 deputy has been cruelly distraining on his Irish tenants 
 for a ' supposed debt of his to the Queen of 4co/. for 
 rent/ which was indeed but fifty merks, and which was
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 35 * 
 
 paid, and has carried off 500 milch kine from 
 the poor settlers whom he has planted there, and 
 forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle. 
 Moreover, the whole Irish estates are likely to come 
 to ruin, for nothing prevails but rascality among the 
 English soldiers, impotenc^ among the governors, and 
 rebellion among the natives. Three thousand Burkes 
 are up in arms ; his ' prophecy of this rebellion' ten days 
 ago was laughed at, and now has come true ; and alto- 
 gether, Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in as 
 evil case as he ever was on earth. No wonder, poor fellow, 
 if he behowls himself lustily, and not always wisely, to 
 Cecil, and every one else who will listen to him. 
 
 As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget 
 the standing-point from which such speeches were made ? 
 Over and above his present ruin, it was (and ought to 
 have been) an utterly horrible arid unbearable thing to 
 Raleigh, or any man, to have fallen into disgrace with 
 Elizabeth by his own fault. He feels (and perhaps 
 rightly) that he is as it where excommunicate from 
 England, and the mission and the glory of England. 
 Instead of being, as he was till now, one of a 
 body of brave men working together in one great 
 common cause, he has cut himself off from the congre- 
 gation by his own selfish lust, and there he is left 
 alone with his shame. We must try to realize to our- 
 selves the way in which such men as Raleigh looked 
 not only at Elizabeth, but at all the world. There was, 
 in plain palpable fact, something about her, her history, 
 her policy, the times, the glorious part which England, 
 and she as the incarnation of the then English spirit, 
 were playing upon earth, which raised imaginative and 
 heroical souls into a permanent exaltation a 'fairy- 
 land/ as they called it themselves, which seems to us 
 fantastic, and would be fantastic in us, because we are 
 
 D a
 
 36 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 not at their work, or in their days. There can be no 
 doubt that a number of as noble men as ever stood 
 together on the earth, did worship that woman, fight 
 for her, toil for her, risk all for her, with a pure chival- 
 rous affection which has furnished one of the beautiful 
 pages in all the book of history. Blots there must 
 needs have been, and inconsistencies, selfishnesses, 
 follies; for they too were men of like passions with 
 ourselves ; but let us look at the fair vision as a whole, 
 and thank God that such a thing has for once existed 
 even imperfectly on this sinful earth : instead of playing 
 the part of Ham, and falling under his curse; the 
 penalty of slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, 
 which surely falls on any generation which is ' banausos,' 
 to use Aristotle's word which rejoices in its forefathers' 
 shame, and unable to believe in the nobleness of others, 
 is unable to become noble itself. 
 
 As for the ' Alexander and Diana' affectations, they 
 were the language of the time : and certainly this 
 generation has no reason to find fault with them, or 
 with a good deal more of the ' affectations' and ' flattery' 
 of Elizabethan times, while it listens complacently night 
 after night to ' honourable members' complimenting 
 not Queen Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh Windbag, Fiddle, 
 Faddle, Red-tape, and party, with protestations of 
 deepest respect and fullest confidence in the very 
 speeches in which they bring accusations of every offence 
 short of high-treason to be understood, of course, in a 
 'parliamentary sense,' as Mr Pickwick's were in a 
 ' Pickwickian' one. If a generation of Knoxes and 
 Mortons, Burleighs and llaleighs, shall ever arise again, 
 one wonders by what name they will call the parliamen- 
 tary morality, and parliamentary courtesy of a genera- 
 tion which has meted out such measure to their 
 ancestors' failings ?
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 37 
 
 'But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.' 
 I thank the objector even for that ' then ;' for it is 
 much now-a-days to find any one who believes that 
 Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk 
 of her as if she was born about seventy years of age, 
 covered with rouge and wrinkles. I will undertake 
 to say, that as to the beauty of this woman there is a 
 greater mass of testimony, and from the very best 
 judges too, than there is of the beauty of any personage 
 in history ; and yet it has become the fashion now to 
 deny even that. The plain facts seem, that she was 
 very graceful, active, accomplished in all outward 
 manners, of a perfect figure, and of that style of intel- 
 lectual beauty, depending on expression, which attracted 
 (and we trust always will attract) Britons, far more 
 than that merely sensuous loveliness in which no doubt 
 Mary Stuart far surpassed her. And there seems little 
 doubt, that like many Englishwomen, she retained her 
 beauty to a very late period in life, not to mention that 
 she was, in 1592, just at that age of rejuvenescence 
 which makes many a woman more lovely at sixty than 
 she has been since she was thirty-five. No doubt, too, 
 she used every artificial means to preserve her famous 
 complexion ; and quite right she was. This beauty of 
 hers had been a talent (as all beauty is) committed to 
 her by God ; it had been an important element in her 
 great success ; men had accepted it as what beauty of 
 form and expression generally is, an outward and visible 
 sign of the inward and spiritual grace ; and while the 
 inward was unchanged, what wonder if she tried to 
 preserve the outward? If she was the same, why 
 should she not try to look the same ? And what blame 
 to those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was 
 the same, they too should fancy that she looked the same 
 the Elizabeth of their youth, and should talk as if the
 
 38 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 fair flesh, as well as the fair spirit, was immortal? 
 Does not every loving husband do so, when he forgets 
 the grey hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes 
 of time ; and sees the partner of many joys and sorrows 
 not as she has become, but as she was, ay, and is to 
 him, and will be to him, he trusts, through all eternity ? 
 There is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers 
 which we have not seen, potential and crude, again and 
 again in the best and noblest of young men whom we 
 have met, till it was crushed in them by the luxury, 
 effeminacy, and unbelief in chivalry, which is the sure 
 accompaniment of a long peace ; which war may burn 
 up with beneficent fire ; which, to judge by the unex- 
 pected heroisms and chivalries of the last three years, 
 it is burning up already. 
 
 But we must hasten on now ; for Raleigh is out of 
 prison in September ; and by the next spring in parlia- 
 ment, speaking wisely and well, especially on his fixed 
 idea, war with Spain, which he is rewarded for forthwith 
 in Father Passou's ' Andreae Philopatris Responsio/ by 
 a charge of founding a school of Atheism for the cor- 
 ruption of young gentlemen ; a charge which Lord 
 Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant as he is, will find it 
 useful one day to recollect. 
 
 Elizabeth, however, now that he has married the 
 fair Throgmorton, and done wisely in other matters, 
 restores him to favour. If he has sinned, he has 
 suffered : but he is as useful as ever, now that his 
 senses have returned to him, and he is making good 
 speeches in parliament, instead of bad ones to weak 
 maidens ; so we find him once more in favour, and 
 possessor of Sherborne Manor, where he builds and 
 beautifies, with ' groves and gardens of much variety 
 and great delight/ And God, too, seems to have for- 
 given him ; perhaps has forgiven ; for there the fair
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 39 
 
 Throgmorton brings him a noble boy. Ut sis vitalis 
 metuo puer ! 
 
 Raleigh will quote David's example one day, not 
 wisely or well. Does David's example ever cross him 
 now, and those sad words, ' The Lord hath put away 
 thy sin, . . . nevertheless the child that is born unto 
 thee shall die ?' 
 
 Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more. 
 Sherborne Manor, a rich share in the great carack, a 
 beautiful wife, a child ; what more does this man want 
 to make him happy ? Why should he not settle down 
 upon his lees, like ninety-nine out of the hundred, or 
 at least try a peaceful and easy path toward more 
 ' praise and pudding ?' The world answers, or his 
 biographers answer for him, that he needs to reinstate 
 himself in his mistress's affection ; which is true or not, 
 according as we take it. If they mean thereby, as most 
 seem to mean, that it was a mere selfish and ambitious 
 scheme by which to wriggle into court favour once 
 more why, let them mean it : I shall only observe, 
 that the method which Raleigh took was a rather more 
 dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are 
 wont to take. But if it be meant that "Walter Raleigh 
 spoke somewhat thus with himself, ' I have done a 
 base and dirty deed, and have been punished for it. I 
 have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves 
 me, and whom I find to be a treasure ; and God, instead 
 of punishing me by taking her from me, has rendered 
 me good for evil by giving her to me. I have justly 
 offended a mistress whom I worship, and who, after 
 having shown her just indignation, has returned me 
 good for evil by giving me these fair lands of Sherborne, 
 and only forbid me her presence till the scandal has 
 passed away. She sees, and rewards my good in spite 
 of my evil ; and I, too, know that I am better than I
 
 40 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 have seemed; that I am fit for nobler deeds than 
 seducing maids of honour. How can I prove that ? 
 How can I redeem my lost name for patriotism and 
 public daring ? How can I win glory for my wife, 
 seek that men shall forget her past shame in the 
 thought, ' She is Walter Raleigh's wife ?' How can I 
 show my mistress that I loved her all along, that I 
 acknowledge her bounty, her mingled justice and 
 mercy ? How can I render to God for all the benefits 
 which He has done unto me ? How can I do a deed 
 the like of which was never done in England ?' 
 
 If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh's 
 mind, what could we say of it, but that it was the 
 natural and rational feeling of an honourable and right- 
 hearted man, burning to rise to the level which he 
 knew ought to be his, because he knew that he had 
 fallen below it ? And what right better way of testifying 
 these feelings than to do what, as we shall see, Raleigh 
 did ? What right have we to impute to him lower 
 motives than these, while M ? e confess that these 
 righteous and noble motives would have been natural 
 and rational ; indeed, just what we flatter ourselves 
 that we should have felt in his place ? Of course, in 
 his grand scheme, the thought came in, ( And I shall 
 win to myself honour, and glory, and wealth/ of 
 course. And pray, sir, does it not come in in your 
 grand schemes ; and yours ; and yours ? If you made 
 a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and benevolently 
 managed factory, would you forbid all speech of the 
 said wisdom and benevolence, because you had intended 
 that wisdom and benevolence should pay you a good 
 percentage? Are Price's Patent Candle Company 
 the less honourable and worthy men, because their 
 righteousness has proved to be a good investment ? 
 Away with cant, and let him that is without sin among 
 you cast the first stone.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 41 
 
 So Raleigh hits upon a noble project ; a desperate 
 one, true : but he will do it or die. He will leave 
 pleasant Sherborne, and the bosom of the beautiful 
 bride, and the first-born son; and all which to most 
 makes life worth having, and which Raleigh enjoys 
 more intensely (for he is a poet, and a man of strong 
 nervous passions withal) than most men. But, 
 
 I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 Loved I not honour more. 
 
 And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, 
 danger of death in battle, danger of the Inquisition, 
 rack, and stake, in search of El Dorado. What so 
 strange in that? I have known half-a-dozen men 
 who, in his case, and conscious of his powers, would 
 have done the same from the same noble motive. 
 
 He begins prudently ; and sends a Devonshire man, 
 Captain Whiddon (probably one of the Whiddons of 
 beautiful Chagford), to spy out the Orinoco. He finds 
 that the Spaniards are there already ; that Berreo, who 
 has attempted El Dorado from the westward, starting 
 from New Granada and going down the rivers, is 
 trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth ; that he is 
 hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to 
 hunt them and sell them for slaves, imprisoning the 
 Caciques to extort their gold, torturing, ravishing, kid- 
 napping, and conducting himself as was usual among 
 Spaniards of those days. 
 
 Raleigh's spirit is stirred within him. If 'Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin 7 (fiction as it is) excite us, how must a far worse 
 reality have excited Raleigh, as he remembered that 
 these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in iniquity, 
 and as he remembered, too, that these same men arc 
 the sworn foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and 
 her queen ? What a deed, to be beforehand with them 
 for once ! To dispossess them of one corner of that 
 western world, where they have left no trace but blood
 
 42 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 and flame ! He will go himself ; he will find El Dorado 
 and its golden Emperor; and, instead of conquering, 
 plundering, and murdering him, as Cortez did Monte- 
 zuma, and Pizarro Atahuallpa, he will show him English 
 strength, espouse his quarrel against the Spaniards; 
 make him glad to become Queen Elizabeth's vassal 
 tributary, leave him perhaps a body guard of English 
 veterans, perhaps colonize his country, and so at once 
 avenge and protect the oppressed Indians, and fill the 
 Queen's treasury with the riches of a land equal, if not 
 superior, to Peru and Mexico. 
 
 Such is his dream ; vague perhaps : but far less 
 vague than those with which Cortez and Pizarro started, 
 and succeeded. After a careful survey of the whole 
 matter, I must give it as my deliberate opinion, that 
 Raleigh was more reasonable in his attempt, and had 
 more fair evidence of its feasibility, than either Cortez 
 or Pizarro had for theirs. It is a bold assertion. If any 
 reader doubts its truth, he cannot do better than to 
 read the whole of the documents connected with the two 
 successful, and the one unsuccessful, attempts at finding 
 a golden kingdom. Let them read first Prescott's ' Con- 
 quests at Mexicoand Peru/ and then Schomburgk's edition 
 of Raleigh's ' Guiana.' They will at least confess when 
 they have finished, that truth is stranger than fiction. 
 
 Of Raleigh's credulity in believing in El Dorado, 
 much has been said. I am sorry to find even so 
 wise a man as Sir Robert Schomburgk, after bearing 
 good testimony to Raleigh's wonderful accuracy about 
 all matters which he had an opportunity of observing, 
 using this term of credulity. I must dare to differ on 
 that point even with Sir Robert, and ask by what 
 right the word is used? First, Raleigh says nothing 
 about El Dorado (as every one is forced to confess) 
 but what Spaniard on Spaniard had been saying for
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 43 
 
 fifty years. Therefore the blame of credulity ought to 
 rest \vith the Spaniards, from Philip von Huten, Ore- 
 liana, and George of Spires, upward to Berreo. But 
 it rests really with no one. For nothing, if we will 
 examine the documents, is told of the riches of El 
 Dorado which had not been found to be true, and seen 
 by the eyes of men still living, in Peru and Mexico. 
 Not one-fifth of America had been explored, and 
 already two El Dorados had been found and conquered. 
 What more rational than to suppose that there was 
 a third, a fourth, a fifth, in the remaining four-fifths ? 
 The reports of El Dorado among the savages were just of 
 the same kind as those by which Cortez and Pizarro 
 hunted out Mexico and Peru, saving that they were far 
 more widely spread, and confirmed by a succession of 
 adventurers. I entreat readers to examine this 
 matter, in Raleigh, Schomburgk, Humboldt, and Con- 
 damine, and judge for themselves. As for Hume's 
 accusations, I pass them by as equally silly and 
 shameless, only saying, for the benefit of readers, that 
 they have been refuted completely by every one who 
 has written since Hume's days : and to those who are 
 inclined to laugh at Raleigh for believing in Amazons 
 and ' men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders/ 
 I can only answer thus. 
 
 About the Amazons, Raleigh told what he was told ; 
 what the Spaniards who went before him, and Con- 
 dacnine who came after him, were told ; Humboldt 
 thinks the story possibly founded on fact ; and I must 
 say, that after reviewing all that has been said 
 thereon, it does seem to me the simplest solution of 
 the matter just to believe it true; to believe that there 
 was, about his time, or a little before, somewhere about 
 the upper Orinoco, a warlike community of women, 
 (Humboldt shows how likely such would be to spring 
 up where women flee from their male tyrants into the
 
 44 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 forests.) As for the fable which connected them with 
 the lake Manoa, and the city of El Dorado, we can 
 only answer, ' If not true there and then, it is true 
 elsewhere now ;' for the Amazonian guards of the King 
 of Dahomey at this moment, as all know, surpass in 
 strangeness and in ferocity all that has been reported 
 of the Orinocan viragos, and thus prove once more, 
 that truth is stranger than fiction.* 
 
 Beside ; and here I stand stubborn, regardless of 
 gibes and sneers ; it is not yet proven that there was 
 not in the sixteenth century, some rich and civilized 
 kingdom like Peru or Mexico, in the interior of South 
 America. Sir Robert Schomburgk has disproved the 
 existence o Lake Parima : but it will take a long time, 
 and more explorers thau one, to prove that there are 
 no ruins of ancient cities, such as Stephens stumbled 
 on in Yucatan, still buried in the depths of the forests. 
 Fifty years of ruin would suffice to wrap them in a 
 leafy veil which would hide them from every one who 
 did not literally run against them. Tribes would die 
 out, or change place, (as the Atures, and many other 
 great nations have done in those parts,) and every tra- 
 ditional record of them perish gradually, (for it is only 
 gradually and lately that it has perished ;) while if it 
 be asked, What has become of the people themselves ? 
 the answer is, that when any race, (like most of the 
 American races in the sixteenth century,) is in a dying 
 state, it hardly needs war to thin it down, and reduce 
 the remnant to savagery. Greater nations than El 
 Dorado was even supposed to be have vanished ere now, 
 and left not a trace behind ; and so may they. But 
 enough of this. I leave the quarrel to that honest 
 and patient warder of tourneys, Old Time, who will 
 surely do right at last, and go on to the dog-headed 
 
 * Since this was written, a similar Amazonian body-guard has 
 been discovered, I hear, in Pegu.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 45 
 
 worthies, without necks, and long hair hanging down 
 behind, who, as a cacique told Raleigh, that ' they had 
 of late years slain many hundreds of his father's people/ 
 and in whom even Humboldt was not always allowed 
 (he says) to disbelieve, (so much for Hume's scoff at 
 Raleigh as a liar,) one old cacique boasting to him that 
 he had seen them with his own eyes. Humboldt's ex- 
 planation is, that the Caribs, being the cleverest and 
 strongest Indians, are also the most imaginative; and 
 therefore, being fallen children of Adam, the greatest 
 liars, and that they invented both El Dorado and the 
 dog-heads out of pure wickedness. Be it so. But all 
 lies crystallize round some nucleus of truth; and it 
 really seems to me nothing very wonderful, if the 
 story should be on the whole true, and these worthies 
 were in the habit of dressing themselves up, like foolish 
 savages as they were, in the skins of the Aguara dog, 
 with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in 
 order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as 
 the Red Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, 
 and deer, with fox tails, false bustles of bison skin, and 
 so forth. There are plenty of traces of such foolish 
 attempts at playing ' bogy' in the history of savages, 
 even of our own Teutonic forefathers ; and this I 
 suspect to be the simple explanation of the whole 
 mare's nest. As for Raleigh being a fool for believing 
 it ; the reasons he gives for believing it are very rational ; 
 the reasons Hume gives for calling him a fool rest 
 merely on the story's being strange ; on which grounds 
 one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth, 
 from one's own existence to what one sees in every drop 
 of water under the microscope, yea, to the growth of 
 every seed. The only sound proof that dog-headed 
 men are impossible, is to be found in comparative 
 anatomy, a science of which Hume knew no more than
 
 46 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 Raleigh, and which for one marvel it has destroyed, has 
 revealed a hundred. I do not doubt, that if Raleigh 
 had seen and described a kangaroo, especially its all 
 but miraculous process of gestation, Hume would have 
 called that a lie also : but I will waste no more time 
 in proving that no man is so credulous as the unbe- 
 liever the man who has such mighty and world -em- 
 bracing faith in himself, that he makes his own little 
 brain the measure of the universe. Let the dead bury 
 their dead. 
 
 He sails for Guiana. The details of his voyage 
 should be read at length. Everywhere they show the 
 eye of a poet as well as of a man of science. He sees 
 enough to excite his hopes more wildly than ever ; he 
 goes hundreds of miles up the Orinoco in an open boat, 
 suffering every misery : but keeping up the hearts of 
 his men, who cry out, ' Let us go on, we care not how 
 far.' He makes friendship with the caciques, and 
 enters into alliance with them on behalf of Queen 
 Elizabeth against the Spaniards. Unable to pass the 
 falls of the Caroli, and the rainy season drawing on, he 
 returns, beloved and honoured by all the Indians, 
 boasting that, during the whole time he was there, no 
 woman was the worse for any man of his crew. 
 Altogether, we know few episodes of history so 
 noble, righteous, and merciful, as this Guiana voyage. 
 But he has not forgotten the Spaniards. At Trinidad 
 he attacks and destroys (at the entreaty of the oppressed 
 Indians) the new town of San Jose, takes Berreo 
 prisoner, and delivers from captivity five caciques, whom 
 Berreo kept bound in one chain, ' basting their bodies 
 with burning bacon/ (an old trick of the Conquistadores,) 
 to make them discover their gold. He tells them that 
 he was ' the servant of a queen who was the greatest 
 cacique of the north, and a virgin ; who had more
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 47 
 
 caciqui under her than there were trees on that island ; 
 that she was an enemy of the Castellan! (Spaniards), 
 in behalf of their tyranny and oppression, and that she 
 delivered all such nations about her as were by them 
 oppressed, and having freed all the coast of the northern 
 world from their servitude, had sent me to free them 
 also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their 
 invasion and conquest/ After which perfectly true and 
 rational speech, he subjoins, (as we think equally 
 honestly and rationally,) ' I shewed them her Majesty's 
 picture, which they so admired and honoured, as it had 
 been easy to have brought them idolators thereof/ 
 
 This is one of the stock-charges against Raleigh, at 
 which all biographers (except quiet, sensible Oldys, who, 
 dull as he is, is far more fair and rational than most of his 
 successors) break into virtuous shrieks of 'flattery/ 'mean- 
 ness,' 'adulation/ 'courtiership/ and so forth. Mr. Napier 
 must say a witty thing for once, and is of opinion that 
 the Indians would have admired far more the picture 
 of a ' red monkey.' Sir Robert Schomburgk (unfor- 
 tunately for the red monkey theory), though he quite 
 agrees that Raleigh's flattery was very shocking, says, 
 that from what he knows (and no man knows more) of 
 Indian taste, they would have far preferred to the 
 portrait which Raleigh showed them (not Mr. Napier's 
 red monkey, but) such a picture as that at Hampton 
 Court, in which Elizabeth is represented in a fantastic 
 court dress. Raleigh, it seems, must be made out a rogue 
 at all risks, though by the most opposite charges. 
 Mr. Napier is answered, however, by Sir Robert; and 
 Sir Robert is answered, we think, by the plain fact, 
 that, of course, Raleigh's portrait was exactly such a 
 one as Sir Robert says they would have admired; a 
 picture probably in a tawdry frame, representing Queen 
 Bess, just as queens were always painted then, bedizened
 
 48 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 with ' browches, pearls, and owches/ satin and ruff, and 
 probably with crown on head and sceptre in hand, 
 made up as likely as not expressly for the purpose for 
 which it was used. In the name of all simplicity and 
 honesty, I ask, why is Raleigh to be accused of saying 
 that the Indians admired Queen Elizabeth's beauty, 
 when he never even hints at it ? And why do all 
 commentators deliberately forget the preceding para- 
 graph, Raleigh's proclamation to the Indians, and the 
 circumstances under which it was spoken? The 
 Indians are being murdered, ravished, sold for slaves, 
 basted with burning fat; and grand white men come 
 like avenging angels, and in one day sweep their tyrants 
 out of the land, restore them to liberty and life, and 
 say to them, ' A great Queen far across the seas has 
 sent us to do this. Thousands of miles away she has 
 heard of your misery, and taken pity on you ; and if 
 you will be faithful to her she will love you, and deal 
 justly with you, arid protect you against these Spaniards 
 who are devouring you as they have devoured all the 
 Indians round you ; and for a token of it a sign that 
 we tell you truth, and that there is really such a great 
 Queen, who is the Indian's friend here is the picture 
 of her.' What wonder if the poor idolatrous creatures 
 had fallen down and worshipped the picture (just as 
 millions do that of the Virgin Mary, without a thou- 
 sandth part as sound and practical reason) as that of a 
 divine, all-knowing, all-merciful deliverer ? As for its 
 being the picture of a beautiful woman or not, they 
 would never think of that. The fair complexion and 
 golden hair would be a sign to them that she belonged 
 to the mighty white people, even if there were no 
 bedizenment of jewels and crowns over and above; and 
 that would be enough for them. When will biographers 
 learn to do common justice to their fellow-men, by
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 49 
 
 exerting now and then some small amount of dramatic 
 imagination, just sufficient to put themselves for a 
 moment in the place of those of whom they write ? 
 
 So ends his voyage : in which, he says, ( from my- 
 self I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a 
 beggar and withered. But I might have bettered my 
 poor estate if I had not only respected her Majesty's 
 future honour and riches. It became not the former 
 fortune in which I once lived to go journeys of piccory/ 
 (pillage;) 'and it had sorted ill with the offices of 
 honour which, by her Majesty's grace, I hold this day 
 in England, to run from cape to cape, and place to 
 place, for the pillage of ordinary prizes.' 
 
 So speaks one whom it has been the fashion to 
 consider as little better than a pirate, and that, too, in 
 days when the noblest blood in England thought no 
 shame (as indeed it was no shame) to enrich them- 
 selves with Spanish gold. But so it is throughout this 
 man's life. If there be a nobler word than usual to be 
 spoken, or a more wise word either, if there be a more 
 chivalrous deed to be done, or a more prudent deed 
 either, that word and that deed are pretty sure to be 
 Walter Raleigh's. 
 
 But the blatant beast has been busy at home ; and, 
 in spite of Chapman's heroical verses, he meets with 
 little but cold looks. Never mind. If the world will 
 not help to do the deed, he will do it by himself; and 
 no time must be lost, for the Spaniards on their part 
 will lose none. So, after six months, the faithful 
 Keymis sails again, again helped by the Lord High 
 Admiral and Sir Robert Cecil. It is a hard race for 
 one private man against the whole power and wealth of 
 Spain; and the Spaniard has been beforehand with 
 them, and re-occupied the country. They have for- 
 tified themselves at the mouth of the Caroli, so it is 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 impossible to get to the gold mines; they are en- 
 slaving the wretched Indians, carrying off their women, 
 intending to transplant some tribes, and to expel others, 
 and arming cannibal tribes against the inhabitants. All 
 is misery and rapine; the scattered remnant comes 
 asking piteously, why Raleigh does not come over to 
 deliver them ? Have the Spaniards slain him, too ? 
 Keymis comforts them as he best can; hears of more 
 gold mines, and gets back safe, a little to his own 
 astonishment, for eight-and-twenty ships of war have 
 been sent to Trinidad, to guard the entrance to 1 
 Dorado, not surely, as Keymis well says, ' to keep us 
 only from tobacco/ A colony of 500 persons is ex- 
 pected from Spain. The Spaniard is well aware of the 
 richness of the prize, says Keymis, who all through 
 shows himself a worthy pupil of his master. A careful, 
 observant man he seems to have been, trained by that 
 great example to overlook no fact, even the smallest. 
 He brings home lists of rivers, towns, caciques, poison- 
 herbs, words, what not; he has fresh news of gold, 
 spleen-stones, kidney-stones, and some fresh specimens : 
 but be that as it may, he, ' without going as far as his 
 eyes can warrant, can promise Brazil-wood, honey, 
 cotton, balsamum, and drugs, to defray charges/ He 
 would fain copy Raleigh's style, too, and, ' whence his 
 lamp had oil, borrow light also/ ' seasoning his unsa- 
 voury speech ' with some of the ' leaven of Raleigh's 
 discourse/ Which, indeed, he does even to little pe- 
 dantries and attempts at classicality, and after professing 
 that ' himself and the remnant of his few years he hath 
 bequeathed wholly to Raleana, and his thoughts livr 
 only in that action/ he rises into something like 
 grandeur when he begins to speak of that ever-fertile 
 subject, the Spanish cruelties to the Indians : ' Doth 
 not the cry of the poor succourless ascend unto the
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 51 
 
 heavens? Hath God forgotten to be gracious to the 
 work of his own hands ? Or shall not his judgments 
 in a day of visitation by the ministry of his chosen 
 servant come upon these bloodthirsty butchers, like rain 
 into a fleece of wool ? ' Poor Keymis ! To us he is 
 by no means the least beautiful figure in this romance ; 
 a faithful, diligent, loving man, unable, as the event 
 proved, to do great deeds by himself, but inspired with 
 a great idea by contact with a mightier spirit, to whom 
 he clings through evil report, and poverty, and prison, 
 and the scaffold, careless of self to the last, and ends 
 tragically, ' faithful unto death ' in the most awful 
 sense. 
 
 But here remark two things : first, that Cecil be- 
 lieves in Raleigh's Guiana scheme; next, that the 
 occupation of Orinoco by the Spaniards, which Raleigh 
 is accused of having concealed from James in 1617, has 
 been, ever since 1595, matter of the most public 
 notoriety. 
 
 Raleigh has not been idle in the meanwhile. It 
 has been found necessary after all to take the counsel 
 which he gave in vain in 1588, to burn the Spanish 
 fleet in harbour ; and the heroes are gone down to 
 Cadiz fight, and in one day of thunder storm the Se- 
 vastopol of Spain. Here, as usual, we find Raleigh, 
 though in an inferior command, leading the whole by 
 virtue of superior wisdom. When the good Lord Ad- 
 miral will needs be cautious, and land the soldiers first, 
 it is Raleigh who persuades him to force his way into 
 the harbour, to the joy of all captains. When hot- 
 headed Essex, casting his hat into the sea for joy, 
 shouts ' Intramos/ and will in at once, Raleigh's time 
 for caution comes, and he persuades them to wait till 
 the next morning, and arrange the order of attack. 
 That, too, Raleigh has to do, and moreover to lead it; 
 
 E 2
 
 f>2 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 and lead it he does. Under the forts are seventeen 
 galleys ; the channel is ' scoured ' with cannon : but on 
 holds Raleigh's ( Warspite/ far ahead of the rest, througli 
 the thickest of the fire, answering forts and galleys 
 ' with a blur of the trumpet to each piece, disdaining 
 to shoot at those esteemed dreadful monsters/ For 
 there is a nobler enemy ahead. Right in front lie the 
 galleons; and among them the 'Philip' and the ' Andrew/ 
 two of those who boarded the ' Revenge/ This day there 
 shall be a reckoning for the blood of his old friend ; he 
 is 'resolved to be revenged for the ' Revenge/ Sir Richard 
 Grenvile's fatal ship, or second her with his own life ; ' 
 and well he keeps his vow. Three hours pass of des- 
 perate valour, during which, so narrow is the passage, 
 only seven English ships, thrusting past each other, all 
 but quarrelling in their noble rivalry, engage the whole 
 Spanish fleet of fifty-seven sail, and destroy it utterly. 
 The ' Philip' and ' Thomas/ burn themselves despairing. 
 The English boats save the ' Andrew/ and ' Matthew/ 
 One passes over the hideous record. ' If any man/ says 
 Raleigh, ' had a desire to see hell itself, it was there 
 most lively figured/ Keymis's prayer is answered in 
 part, even while he writes it ; and the cry of the 
 Indians has not ascended in vain before the throne of 
 God! 
 
 The soldiers are landed; the city stormed and 
 sacked, not without mercies and courtesies, though, to 
 women and unarmed folk, which win the hearts of the 
 vanquished, and live till this day in well-known ballads. 
 The Flemings begin a ' merciless slaughter/ Raleigh 
 and the Lord Admiral beat them off. Raleigh is 
 carried on shore with a splinter wound in the leg, 
 which lames him for life : but returns on board in an 
 hour in agony; for there is no admiral left to order 
 the fleet, and all are run headlong to the sack. In
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 53 
 
 vain he attempts to get together sailors the following 
 morning, and attack the Indian fleet in Porto Real 
 Roads; within twenty-four hours it is burnt by the 
 Spaniards themselves; and all Raleigh wins is no 
 booty, a lame leg, and the honour of having been the 
 real author of a victory even more glorious than that of 
 1588. 
 
 So he returns ; having written to Cecil the highest 
 praises of Essex, whom he treats with all courtesy and 
 fairness ; which those who will may call cunning : we 
 have as good a right to say that he was returning good 
 for evil. There were noble qualities in Essex. All 
 the world gave him credit for them, and far more than 
 he deserved ; why should not Raleigh have been just 
 to him ; even have conceived, like the rest of the world, 
 high hopes of him, till he himself destroyed these hopes? 
 For now storms are rising fast. On their return Cecil 
 is in power. He has been made Secretary of State 
 instead of Bodley, Essex's pet, and the spoilt child 
 begins to sulk. On which matter, I am sorry to say, 
 Mr. Tytler and others talk much unwisdom, about 
 Essex's being too ' open and generous, &c., for a 
 courtier/ and ' presuming on his mistress's passion for 
 him / and represent Elizabeth as desiring to be thought 
 beautiful, and ' affecting at sixty the sighs, loves, tears, 
 and tastes of a girl of sixteen/ and so forth. It is 
 really time to get rid of some of this fulsome talk, 
 culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the 
 darker and fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit 
 slanderers, which I meet with a flat denial. There is 
 simply no proof. She in love with Essex or Cecil ? 
 Yes, as a mother with a son. Were they not the chil- 
 dren of her dearest and most faithful servants, men who 
 had lived heroic lives for her sake? What wonder if 
 she fancied that she saw the fathers in the sons ? They
 
 54 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 had been trained under her eye. What wonder if she 
 fancied that they could work as their fathers worked 
 before them ? And what shame if her childless heart 
 yearned over them with unspeakable affection, and 
 longed in her old age to lay her hands upon the 
 shoulders of those two young men, and say to England, 
 ' Behold the children which God, and not the flesh, has 
 given me ?' Most strange it is, too, that women, who 
 ought at least to know a woman's heart, have been es- 
 pecially forward in publishing these stupid scandals, 
 and sullying their pages by retailing prurient slander 
 against such a one as Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 But to return. Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil; 
 and he has good reason. Cecil is the cleverest man in 
 England, saving himself. He has trusted and helped 
 him, too, in two Guiana voyages ; so the connexion is 
 one of gratitude as well as prudence. We know not 
 whether he helped him in the third Guiana voyage in 
 the same year, under Captain Berry (a north Devon 
 man, from Grenvile's country), who found a mighty folk, 
 who were ' something pleasant, having drunk much that 
 day/ and carried bows with golden handles; but failed 
 in finding the Lake Parima, and so came home. 
 
 Raleigh's first use of his friendship with Cecil is to 
 reconcile him, to the astonishment of the world, with 
 Essex, alleging how much good may grow by it; for 
 now ' the Queen's continual unquietness will grow to 
 contentment/ That, too, those who will may call policy. 
 We have as good a right to call it the act of a wise and 
 faithful subject, and to say, ' Blessed are the peace- 
 makers, for they shall be called the children of God/ 
 He has his reward for it, in full restoration to the 
 Queen's favour; he deserves it. He proves himself 
 once more worthy of power and it is given to him. 
 Then there is to be a second great expedition ; but this
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 55 
 
 time its aim is the Azores. Philip, only maddened by 
 the loss at Cadiz, is preparing a third armament for the 
 invasion of England and Ireland, and it is said to lie at 
 the islands to protect the Indian fleet. Raleigh has the 
 victualling of the land-forces, and like everything else 
 he takes in hand, ' it is very well done/ Lord Howard 
 declines the chief command, and it is given to Essex. 
 Raleigh is to be rear-admiral. 
 
 By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up 
 a foolish quarrel against Raleigh for disrespect in having 
 stayed behind to bring up some stragglers. But when no 
 armada is to be found at the Azores, Essex has after all 
 to ask Raleigh what he shall do next. Conquer the 
 Azores, says Raleigh, and the thing is agreed on. 
 Raleigh and Essex are to attack Fayal. Essex sails 
 away before Raleigh has watered. Raleigh follows as 
 fast as he can, and at Fayal finds no Essex. He must 
 water there, then and at once. His own veterans want 
 him to attack forthwith, for the Spaniards are fortify- 
 ing fast ; but he will wait for Essex. Still no Essex 
 comes. Raleigh attempts to water, is defied, finds him- 
 self ' in for it/ and takes the island out of hand in the 
 most masterly fashion, to the iufuriation of Essex. 
 Good Lord Howard patches up the matter, and the 
 hot-headed coxcomb is once more pacified. They go 
 on to Graciosa, where Essex's weakness of will again 
 comes out, and he does not take the island. Three 
 rich Caracks, however, are picked up. 'Though we 
 shall be little the better for them/ says Raleigh pri- 
 vately to Sir Arthur Gorges, his faithful captain, ' yet 
 I am heartily glad for our General's sake ; because they 
 will in great measure give content to her Majesty, so 
 that there may be no repining against this poor Lord 
 for the expense of the voyage.' 
 
 Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied,
 
 56 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 that the voyage is not over likely to end well ; but he 
 takes it, in spite of ill-usage, as a kind-hearted man 
 should. Again Essex makes a fool of himself. They 
 are to steer one way in order to interrupt the Plate- 
 fleet. Essex having agreed to the course pointed out, 
 alters his course on a fancy ; then alters it a second 
 time, though the hapless Monson, with the whole Plate- 
 fleet in sight, is hanging out lights, firing guns, and 
 shrieking vainly for the General, wbo is gone on a new 
 course, in which he might have caught the fleet after 
 all, in spite of his two mistakes, but that he chooses to 
 go a round-about way instead of a short one ; aud away 
 goes the whole fleet safe, save one Carack, which runs 
 itself on shore and burns, aud the game is played out, 
 and lost. 
 
 All want Essex to go home as the season is getting 
 late : but the wilful and weak man will linger still, and 
 while he is hovering to the south, Philip's armament 
 has sailed from the Groyne, on the undefended shores 
 of England, and only God's hand saves us from the 
 effects of Essex's folly. A third time the armadas of 
 Spain are overwhelmed by the avenging tempests, and 
 Essex returns to disgrace, having proved himself at once 
 intemperate and incapable. Even in coming home there 
 is confusion, and Essex is all but lost on the Bishop 
 and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite of the warnings of 
 Raleigh's sailing-master ' Old Broadbent,' who is so 
 exasperated at the general stupidity that he wants 
 Raleigh to leave Essex and his squadron to get out of 
 their own scrape as they can. 
 
 Essex goes off to sulk at Wanstead : but Vere excuses 
 him, and in a few days he comes back, and will needs 
 fight good Lord Howard for being made Earl of Not- 
 tingham for his services against the Armada and at 
 Cadiz. Baulked of this, he begins laying the blame of
 
 SIR WALTER KALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 57 
 
 the failure at the Azores on Raleigh. Let the spoilt 
 naughty boy take care ; even that ' admirable temper' 
 for which Raleigh is famed, may be worn out at last. 
 
 These years are Raleigh's noon stormy enough at 
 best, yet brilliant. There is a pomp about him, out- 
 ward and inward, which is terrible to others, danger- 
 ous to himself. One has gorgeous glimpses of that 
 grand Durham House of his, with its carvings and its 
 antique marbles, armorial escutcheons, ' beds with green 
 silk hangings, and legs like dolphins, overlaid with 
 gold / and the man himself, tall, beautiful, and grace- 
 ful, perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and 
 fro, his beautiful wife upon his arm, his noble boy 
 beside his knee, in his ' white satin doublet, em- 
 broidered with pearls, and a great chain of pearls about 
 his neck/ lording it among the lords with ( an awful- 
 ness and ascendency above other mortals/ for which 
 men say that ' his naeve is, that he is damnable proud / 
 and no wonder. The reduced squire's younger son 
 has gone forth to conquer the world ; and he fancies, 
 poor fool, that he has conquered it, just as it really has 
 conquered him ; and he will stand now on his blood and 
 his pedigree, (no bad one either,) and all the more 
 stiffly because puppies like Lord Oxford, who instead 
 of making their fortunes have squandered them, call 
 him 'jack and upstart/ and make impertinent faces 
 while the Queen is playing the virginals, about ' how 
 w ? hen jacks go up, heads go down.' Proud ? No 
 wonder if the man be proud. ' Is not this great Baby- 
 lon, which I have built ?' And yet all the while he 
 has the most affecting consciousness that all this is not 
 God's will, but the will of the flesh ; that the house of 
 fame is not the house of God ; that its floor is not the 
 rock of ages, but the sea of glass mingled with fire, 
 which may crack beneath him any moment, and let
 
 58 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 the nether flame burst up. He knows that he is living 
 in a splendid lie ; that he is not what God meant 
 him to be. He longs to flee away and be at peace. 
 It is to this period, not to his death-hour, that ' The Lie' 
 belongs ;* saddest of poems, with its melodious con- 
 tempt and life-weariness. All is a lie court, church, 
 statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, town and country, 
 all are shams ; the days are evil ; the canker is at the 
 root of all things ; the old heroes are dying one by one ; 
 the Elizabethan age is rotting down, as all human 
 things do, and nothing is left but to bewail with Spenser 
 ' The Ruins of Time ;' the glory and virtue which have 
 been the greater glory and virtue which might be even 
 now, if men would but arise and repent, and work 
 righteousness, as their fathers did before them. But 
 no. Even to such a world as this he will cling, and 
 flaunt it about as captain of the guard in the Queen's 
 progresses and masques and pageants, with sword-belt 
 studded with diamonds and rubies, or at tournaments, 
 in armour of solid silver, and a gallant train with 
 orange-tawny feathers, provoking puppy Essex to bring 
 in a far larger train in the same colours, and swallow 
 up Raleigh's pomp in his own, so achieving that famous 
 ' feather-triumph' by which he gains little but bad 
 blood and a good jest. For Essex is no better tilter 
 than he is general ; and having ' run very ill' in his 
 orange-tawny, comes next day in green, and runs still 
 worse, and yet is seen to be the same cavalier ; whereon 
 a spectator shrewdly observes, that he changed his 
 colours e that it may be reported that there was one in 
 green who ran worse than he in orange-tawny.' But 
 enough of these toys, while God's hand-writing is upon 
 the wall above all heads. 
 
 * It is to be found in a MS. of 1596.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 59 
 
 Raleigh knows that the hand-writing is there. The 
 spirit which drove him forth to Virginia and Guiana is 
 fallen asleep : but he longs for Sherborne and quiet 
 country life, and escapes thither during Essex's im- 
 prisonment, taking Cecil's son with him, and writes as 
 only he can write, about the shepherd's peaceful joys, 
 contrasted with ' courts' and ' masques' and ' proud 
 towers,' 
 
 Here are no false entrapping baits 
 Too hasty for too hasty fates, 
 Unless it be 
 The fond credulity 
 
 Of sill} r fish, that worldling who still look 
 Upon the bait, but never on the hook ; 
 
 Nor envy, unless among 
 The birds, for prize of their sweet song. 
 
 Go ! let the diving negro seek 
 For pearls hid in some forlorn creek, 
 We all pearls scorn, 
 Save what the dewy morn 
 Congeals upon some little spire of grass, 
 Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass ; 
 
 And gold ne'er here appears 
 Save what the yellow Ceres bears. 
 
 Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh's life ; 
 but most tragic of all are these scenes of vain-glory, in 
 which he sees the better part, and yet chooses the worse, 
 and pours out his self-discontent in song which proves 
 the fount of delicacy and beauty which lies pure and 
 bright beneath the gaudy artificial crust. What might 
 not this man have been ! And he knows that too. 
 The stately rooms of Durham House pall on him, and 
 he delights to hide up in his little study among his 
 books and his chemical experiments, and smoke his 
 silver pipe, and look out on the clear Thames and the 
 green Surrey hills, and dream about Guiana and the 
 Tropics ; or to sit in the society of antiquaries with 
 Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow ; or in* his own
 
 60 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, 
 and at last with Shakspeare's self, to hear and utter 
 
 ' Words that have been 
 So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
 As if that every one from whom they came, 
 Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.' 
 
 Anything to forget the hand-writing on the wall, which 
 will not be forgotten. 
 
 But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile, 
 nevertheless. He will serve God and Mammon. So 
 complete a man will surely be able to do both. Un- 
 fortunately the thing is impossible, as he discovers too 
 late ; but he certainly goes as near success in the at- 
 tempt as ever man did. Everywhere we find him 
 doing justly and loving mercy. Wherever this man 
 steps he leaves his foot-.print ineffaceably in deeds of 
 benevolence. For one year only, it seems, he is 
 governor of Jersey : yet to this day, it is said, the 
 islanders honour his name, only second to that of Duke 
 Rollo, as their great benefactor, the founder of their 
 Newfoundland trade. In the west country he is ' as a 
 king/ ' with ears and month always open to hear and 
 deliver their grievances, feet and hands ready to go and 
 work their redress.' The tin merchants have become 
 usurers ' of fifty in the hundred/ Raleigh works till 
 he has put down their ' abominable and cut-throat 
 dealing.' There is a burdensome west-country tax on 
 curing fish ; Raleigh works till it is revoked. In par- 
 liament he is busy with liberal measures, always before 
 his generation. He puts down a foolish act for com- 
 pulsory sowing of hemp, in a speech on the freedom of 
 labour worthy of the nineteenth century. He argues 
 against raising the subsidy from the three pound men 
 ' Call you this, Mr. Francis Bacon, par jugum,
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 61 
 
 when a poor man pays as much as a rich ?' He is 
 equally rational and spirited against the exportation of 
 ordnance to the enemy; and when the question of 
 abolishing monopolies is mooted he has his wise word. 
 He too is a monopolist of tin, as Lord Warden of the 
 Stannaries. But he has so wrought as to bring good 
 out of evil ; for ' before the granting of his patent, let 
 the price of tin be never so high, the poor workman 
 never had but two shillings a week ;' yet now, ' so has 
 he extended and organized the tin-works, that any man 
 who will can find work, be tin at what price soever, 
 have four shillings a week truly paid. . . . Yet 
 if all others may be repealed, I will give my consent as 
 freely to the cancelling of this, as any member of this 
 house.' Most of the monopolies were repealed : but we 
 do not find that Raleigh's was among them. Why 
 should it be if its issue was more tin, and full work, 
 and double wages ? In all things this man approves 
 himself faithful in his generation. His sins are not 
 against man, but against God ; such as the world thinks 
 no sins ; and hates them, not from morality, but from 
 envy. 
 
 In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had 
 prophesied, only waited Raleigh's death, breaks out in 
 his absence, and Ireland is all aflame with Tyrone's 
 rebellion. Raleigh is sent for. He will not accept 
 the post of Lord Deputy, and go to put it down. 
 Perhaps he does not expect fair play as long as Essex 
 is at home. Perhaps he knows too much of the ' com- 
 mon weal, or rather common woe,' and thinks that what 
 ^is crooked cannot be made straight. Perhaps he is 
 afraid to lose by absence his ground at court. Would 
 that he had gone, for Ireland's sake and his own. How- 
 ever, it must not be. Ormond is recalled, and Knolles
 
 62 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 shall be sent; but Essex will have none but Sir 
 George Carew ; whom, Naunton says, he hates, and 
 wishes to oust from court. He and Elizabeth argue 
 it out. He turns his back on her, and she gives him 
 (or does not give him, for one has found so many of 
 these racy anecdotes vanish on inspection into simple 
 wind, that one believes none of them) a box on the ear; 
 which if she did, she did the most wise, just, and prac- 
 tical thing which she could do with such a puppy. He 
 claps his hand (or does not) to his sword ( He would 
 not have taken it from Henry VIII./ and is turned 
 out forthwith. In vain Egerton, the lord keeper, tries 
 to bring him to reason. He storms insanely. Every 
 one on earth is wrong but he ; every one is conspiring 
 against him ; he talks of ' Solomon's fool' too. Had 
 he read the Proverbs a little more closely, he might 
 have left the said fool alone, as being a too painfully 
 exact likeness of himself. It ends by his being worsted, 
 and Raleigh rising higher than ever. I cannot 
 see why Raleigh should be represented as henceforth 
 becoming Essex ' avowed enemy/ save on the ground 
 that all good men are and ought to be the enemies of 
 bad men, when they see them about to do harm, and 
 to ruin the country. Essex is one of the many persons 
 upon whom this age has lavished a quantity of maudlin 
 sentimentality, which suits oddly enough with its pro- 
 fessions of impartiality. But there is an impartiality 
 which ends in utter injustice; which by saying care- 
 lessly to every quarrel, ' Both are right, and both are 
 wrong/ leaves only the impression that all men are 
 wrong, and ends by being unjust to every one. So has . 
 Elizabeth and Essex's quarrel been treated. There was 
 some evil in Essex ; therefore Elizabeth was a fool for 
 liking him. There was some good in Essex ; therefore 
 Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him. This is the sort
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. G3 
 
 of slipshod dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to 
 be wrong, even while Essex is confessed to be wrong 
 too ; while the patent facts of the case are, that Eliza- 
 beth bore with him as long as she could, and a great 
 deal longer than any one else could. Why Raleigh 
 should be accused of helping to send Essex into Ire- 
 land, I do not know. Camden confesses (at the same 
 time that he gives a hint of the kind) that Essex would 
 let no one go but himself. And if this was his humour, 
 one can hardly wonder at Cecil and Raleigh, as well as 
 Elizabeth, bidding the man begone and try his hand at 
 government, and be filled with the fruit of his own de- 
 vices. He goes ; does nothing ; or rather worse than 
 nothing ; for in addition to the notorious ill-manage- 
 ment of the whole matter, we may fairly say that he 
 killed Elizabeth. She never held up her head again 
 after Tyrone's rebellion. Elizabeth still clings to him, 
 changing her mind about him every hour, and at last 
 writes him such a letter as he deserves. He has had 
 power, money, men, such as no one ever had before, 
 why has he done nothing but bring England to shame ? 
 He comes home frantically (the story of his bursting 
 into the dressing-room rests on no good authority) with 
 a party of friends at his heels, leaving Ireland to take 
 care of itself. Whatever entertainment he met with 
 from the fond old woman, he met with the coldness 
 which he deserved from Raleigh and Cecil. Who can 
 wonder ? What had he done to deserve aught else ? 
 But he all but conquers ; and Raleigh takes to his bed 
 in consequence, sick of the whole matter ; as one would 
 have been inclined to do oneself. He is examined and 
 arraigned ; writes a maudlin letter to Elizabeth, of which 
 Mr. Tytler says, that it ' says little for the heart which 
 could resist it;' another instance of the strange self- 
 contradictions into which his brains will run. In one
 
 64 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 page, forsooth, Elizabeth is a fool for listening to these 
 pathetical ' love letters ;' in the next page she is hard- 
 hearted for not listening to them. Poor thing ! Do 
 what she would she found it hard enough to please all 
 parties while alive ; must she be condemned over and 
 above in seternum to be wrong whatsoever she does ? 
 Why is she not to have the benefit of the plain, 
 straightforward interpretation which would be allowed 
 to any other human being, namely, that she approved 
 of such fine talk, as long as it was proved to be sincere 
 by fine deeds ; but that when these were wanting, the 
 fine talk became hollow, fulsome, a fresh cause of anger 
 and disgust ? Yet still she weeps over him when he 
 falls sick, as any mother would ; and would visit him 
 if she could with honour. But a ' malignant influence 
 counteracts every disposition to relent/ No doubt, a 
 man's own folly, passion, and insolence, has generally a 
 very malignant influence on his fortunes, and he may 
 consider himself a very happy man if all that befalls 
 to him thereby is what befel Essex, deprivation of his 
 offices, and imprisonment in his own house. He is 
 forgiven after all ; but the spoilt child refuses his bread 
 and butter without sugar. What is the pardon to him 
 without a renewal of his license of sweet wines ? 
 Because he is not to have that, the Queen's f condi- 
 tions are as crooked as her carcase.' Flesh and blood 
 can stand no more, and ought to stand no more. After 
 all that Elizabeth has been to him, that speech is the 
 speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature. And such 
 he shows himself to be in the hour of trial. What if 
 the patent for sweet wines is refused him ? Such gifts 
 were meant as the reward of merit ; and what merit 
 has he to show ? He never thinks of that. Blind 
 with fury he begins to intrigue with James, and slan- 
 ders to him, under colour of helping his succession, all
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 65 
 
 whom he fancies opposed to him. What is worse, he 
 intrigues with Tyrone about bringing over an army of 
 Irish Papists to help him against the Queen, and this 
 at the very time that his sole claim to popularity rests 
 on his being the leader of the Puritans. A man must 
 have been very far gone, either in baseness or in blind 
 fury, who represents Raleigh to James as dangerous to 
 the commonweal, on account of his great power in the 
 west of England and Jersey, ' places fit for the Spaniard 
 to land in.' Cobham, as warden of the Cinque ports, 
 is included in his slander ; and both he and Raleigh 
 will hear of it again. 
 
 Some make much of a letter, supposed to be written 
 about this time by Raleigh to Cecil, bidding Cecil 
 keep down Essex, even crush him, now that he is once 
 down. I do not happen to think the letter to be 
 Raleigh's. His initials are subscribed to it; but not 
 his name ; and the style is not like his. But as for 
 seeing ' unforgiveness and revenge in it/ whose soever 
 it may be, I hold and say there is not a word which 
 can bear such a construction. It is a dark letter : but 
 about a dark matter, and a dark man. It is a worldly 
 and expediential letter, appealing to low motives in 
 Cecil, though for a right end ; such a letter, in short, 
 as statesmen are wont to write now-a-days. If Raleigh 
 wrote it, God punished him for doing so speedily 
 enough. He does not usually punish statesmen now-a- 
 days for such letters ; perhaps because He does not love 
 them as well as Raleigh. But as for the letter itself. 
 Essex is called a * tyrant/ because he had shown him- 
 self one. The Queen is to 'hold Bothwell/ because 
 ' while she hath him, he will even be the canker of her 
 estate and safety/ and the writer has ' seen the last of 
 her good days, and of ours after his liberty.' On 
 which accounts, Cecil is not to be deterred from doing 
 
 VOL. i. P
 
 66 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 what is right and necessary ' by any fear of after- 
 revenges/ and ' conjectures from causes remote/ as 
 many a stronger instance (given) will prove, but ' look to 
 the present/ and so l do wisely/ There is no real 
 cause for Cecil's fear. If the man who has now lost a 
 power which he ought never to have had, be now kept 
 down, neither he nor his son will ever be able to harm 
 the man who has kept him at his just level. What 
 ' revenge, selfishness, and craft ' there can be in all 
 this, it is difficult to see; as difficult as to see why 
 Essex is to be talked of as ' unfortunate/ and the blame 
 of his frightful end thrown on every one but himself: 
 or why Mr. Tytler finds it unnecessary to pursue his 
 ' well-known story further/ after having proved Raleigh 
 to be all on a sudden turned into a fiend : unless, in- 
 deed, it was inconvenient to bring before the reader's 
 mind the curious and now forgotten fact, that Essex's 
 end was brought on by his having chosen one Sunday 
 morning for breaking out into open rebellion, for the 
 purpose of seizing the city of London and the Queen's 
 person, and compelling her to make him lord and 
 master of the British isles ; in which attempt he and 
 his fought with the civil and military authorities, till 
 artillery had to be brought up, and many lives were lost. 
 Such little escapades may be pardonable enough in 
 'noble and unfortunate' earls: but our readers will 
 perhaps agree that if they chose to try a similar experi- 
 ment, they could not complain if they found them- 
 selves shortly after in company with Mr. Mitchell at 
 Spike Island, or Mr. Oxford in Bedlam. But those 
 were days in which such Sabbath amusements on the 
 part of one of the most important and powerful per- 
 sonages of the realm could not be passed over so lightly, 
 especially when accompanied by severe loss of life ; 
 and as there existed in England certain statutes con-
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 67 
 
 cerning rebellion and high treason, which must needs 
 have been framed for some purpose or other, the au- 
 thorities of England may be excused for fancying that 
 they bore some reference to such acts as that which the 
 noble and unfortunate earl had just committed, as wan- 
 tonly, selfishly, and needlessly, it seems to me, as ever 
 did man on earth. 
 
 I may seem to jest too much upon so solemn a 
 matter as the life of a human being : but if I am not 
 to touch the popular talk about Essex in this tone, I 
 can only touch it in a far sterner one; and if ridicule 
 is forbidden, express disgust instead. 
 
 I have entered into this matter of Essex somewhat 
 at length, because on it is founded one of the mean 
 slanders from which Raleigh never completely recovered. 
 The very mob who, after Raleigh's death, made him a 
 Protestant martyr (as, indeed, he was), looked upon 
 Essex in the same light, hated Raleigh as the cause 
 of his death, and accused him of glutting his eyes 
 with Essex's misery, puffing tobacco out of a window, 
 and what not all mere inventions, as Raleigh declared 
 upon the scaffold. He was there in his office, as 
 captain of the guard, and could do no less than be 
 there. Essex, it is said, asked for Raleigh just before 
 he died : but Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob having 
 murmured. What had Essex to say to him ? Was it, 
 asks Oldys, shrewdly enough, to ask him pardon for the 
 wicked slanders which he had been pouring into James's 
 credulous and cowardly ears? We will hope so, and 
 leave poor Essex to God and the mercy of God, assert- 
 ing once more, that no man ever brought ruin and 
 death more thoroughly on himself by his own act, 
 needing no imaginary help downwards from Raleigh, 
 Cecil, or other human being. 
 
 And now begins the fourth act of this strange tra- 
 F 2
 
 68 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 gedy. Queen Elizabeth dies; and dies of grief. It 
 has been the fashion to attribute to her, I know not 
 why, remorse for Essex's death ; and the foolish and 
 false tale about Lady Nottingham and the ring has 
 been accepted as history. The fact seems to be that 
 she never really held up her head after Burleigh's 
 death. She could not speak of him without tears; 
 forbade his name to be mentioned in the Council. No 
 wonder ; never had mistress a better servant. For 
 nearly half a century have these two noble souls loved 
 each other, trusted each other, worked with each other ; 
 and God's blessing has been on their deeds ; and now 
 the faithful God-fearing man is gone to his reward; 
 and she is growing old, and knows that the ancient 
 fire is dying out in her ; and who will be to her what 
 he was ? Buckhurst is a good man, and one of her 
 old pupils; and she makes him Lord Treasurer in 
 Burleigh's place : but beyond that, all is dark. ' I am 
 a miserable forlorn woman ; there is none about me that 
 I can trust/ She sees through false Cecil ; through 
 false Henry Howard. Essex has proved himself worth- 
 less, and pays the penalty of his sins. Men are grow- 
 ing worse than their fathers. Spanish gold is bringing 
 in luxury and sin. The last ten years of her reign are 
 years of decadence, profligacy, falsehood ; and she cannot 
 but see it. Tyrone's rebellion is the last drop which 
 fills the cup. After fifty years of war, after a drain of 
 money all but fabulous, expended on keeping Ireland 
 quiet, the volcano bursts forth again just as it seemed 
 extinguished, more fiercely than ever, and the whole 
 work has to be done over again, when there is neither 
 time, nor a man, to do it. And ahead, what hope is 
 there for England ? Who will be her successor ? She 
 knows in her heart that it will be James : but she 
 cannot bring herself to name him. To bequeath the
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 69 
 
 fruit of all her labours to a tyrant, a liar, and a 
 coward ! (for she knows the man but too well.) It is 
 too hideous to be faced. This is the end, then ? ' Oh 
 that I were a milke maide, with a paile upon mine 
 arm ! ' But it cannot be. It never could have been ; 
 and she must endure to the end. 
 
 ' Therefore I hated life ; yea, I hated all my labour 
 which I had taken under the sun ; because I should 
 leave it to the man that shall be after me. And who 
 knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet 
 shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have 
 shewed myself wise, in wisdom, and knowledge, and 
 equity. . . . Vanity of vanities, and vexation of 
 spirit !' And so, with a whole book of Ecclesiastes 
 written on that mighty heart, the old lioness coils 
 herself up in her lair, refuses food, and dies. We 
 know few passages in the world's history so tragic as 
 that death. 
 
 Why did she not trust Raleigh ? First, because 
 Raleigh (as we have seen) was not the sort of man 
 whom she needed. He was not the steadfast single- 
 eyed statesman ; but the many-sided genius. Besides, 
 he was the ringleader of the war-party. And 
 she, like Burleigh before his death, was tired of the 
 war ; saw that it was demoralizing England ; was 
 anxious for peace. Raleigh would not see that. It 
 was to him a divine mission which must be fulfilled at 
 all risks. As long as the Spaniards were opposing the 
 Indians, conquering America, there must be no peace. 
 Both were right from their own point of view. God 
 ordered the matter from a third point of view ; for His 
 wrath was gone out against this people. 
 
 Beside, we know that Essex, and after him Cecil and 
 Henry Howard, had been slandering Raleigh basely 
 to James. Can we doubt that the same poison had
 
 70 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 been poured into Elizabeth's ears? She might dis- 
 trust Cecil too much to act upon what he said of 
 Raleigh ; and yet distrust Raleigh too much to put the 
 kiugdom into his hands. However, she is gone now, 
 and a new king has arisen, who knoweth not Joseph. 
 
 James comes down to take possession. Insolence, 
 luxury, and lawlessness mark his first steps on his 
 going amid the adulations of a fallen people; he hangs 
 a poor wretch without trial ; wastes his time in hunting 
 by the way ; a bad and base man, whose only re- 
 deeming point (if in his case it be one) is his fondness 
 for little children. But that will not make a king. 
 The wise elders take counsel together. Raleigh and 
 good Judge Fortescue are for requiring conditions from 
 the new comer, and constitutional liberty makes its 
 last stand among the men of Devon, the old county of 
 warriors, discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen 
 Bess had said, that the men of Devon were her right 
 hand. But in vain ; James has his way ; Cecil and 
 Henry Howard are willing enough to give it him. Let 
 their memory be accursed ; for never did two bad men 
 more deliberately betray the freedom of their country. 
 So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the 
 young men, and makes answer to England, ' My father 
 chastised you with whips ; but I will chastise you with 
 scorpions.' He takes a base pleasure, shocking to the 
 French ambassador, in sneering at the memory of 
 Queen Elizabeth ; a perverse delight in honouring every 
 rascal whom she had punished. Tyrone must come to 
 England to be received into favour, maddening the soul 
 of honest Sir John Harrington. Essex is christened 
 ' my martyr/ apparently for having plotted treason 
 against Elizabeth with Tyrone. Raleigh is received 
 with a pun ' By my soul, I have heard rawly of thee, 
 mon ;' and when the great nobles and gentlemen come
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGII AND HIS TIME. 71 
 
 to court with their retinues, James tries to hide his 
 dread of them in an insult ; pooh poohs their splendour, 
 and says, ' he doubts not that he should have been able 
 to win England for himself, had they kept him out/ 
 Raleigh answers boldly, ' Would God that had been put 
 to the trial.' 'Why?' 'Because then you would 
 have known your friends from your foes/ ' A reason ' 
 (says old Aubrey) ' never forgotten or forgiven/ Au- 
 brey is no great authority ; but the speech smacks so 
 of Raleigh's offhand daring, that one cannot but believe 
 it, as one does also the other story of his having advised 
 the lords to keep out James and erect a republic. Not 
 that he could have been silly enough to propose such a 
 thing seriously at that moment ; but that he most 
 likely, in his bold way, may have said, ' Well, if we 
 are to have this man in without conditions, better a 
 republic at once.' Which, if he did say, he said what 
 the next forty years proved to be strictly true. However, 
 he will go on his own way as best he can. If James 
 will give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes 
 will join, fit out a fleet against Spain, and crush her, 
 now that she is tottering and impoverished, once and 
 for ever. Alas ! James has no stomach for fighting, 
 cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword would not 
 provoke Spain for the world why, they might send 
 Jesuits and assassinate him j and as for the money, he 
 wants that for very different purposes. So the answer 
 which he makes to Raleigh's proposal of war against 
 Spain, is to send him to the Tower, and sentence him 
 to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on a charge of 
 plotting with Spain. 
 
 Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been 
 written on the subject of this dark ' Cobham plot,' I 
 find but one thing come brightly out of the infinite 
 confusion and mystery, which will never be cleared up
 
 72 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 till the day of judgment, and that is Raleigh's inno- 
 cence. He, and all England, and the very man who 
 condemned him, knew that he was innocent. Every 
 biographer is forced to confess this, more or less, in 
 spite of all efforts to be what is called 'impartial/ 
 So I shall waste no words upon the matter, only ob- 
 serving, that whereas Raleigh is said to have slandered 
 Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had slan- 
 dered him, one passage of this Cobham plot disproves 
 utterly such a story, which after all, rests (as far as I 
 know) only on hearsay, being ' spoken of in a manuscript 
 written by one Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.' 
 For in writing to his own wife, in the expectation of 
 immediate death, Raleigh speaks of Cecil in a very 
 different tone, as one in whom he trusted most, and 
 who has left him in the hour of need. I ask the 
 reader to peruse that letter, and say whether any man 
 would write thus, with death and judgment before his 
 face, of one whom he knew that he had betrayed; or, 
 indeed, of one who he knew had betrayed him. We 
 see no reason to doubt that Raleigh kept good faith 
 with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till after his trial 
 that Cecil was the manager of the whole plot against 
 him, and as accomplished a villain as one meets with in 
 history. 
 
 I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of 
 this Cobham plot. Every one knows them ; no one 
 can unravel them. The moral and spiritual signifi- 
 cance of the fact is more interesting than all questions 
 as to Cobham's lies, Brooke's lies, Aremberg's lies, 
 Coke's lies, James's lies : Let the dead bury their 
 dead. It is the broad aspect of the thing which is so 
 wonderful ; to see how 
 
 The eagle, towering in his pride of place, 
 Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 73 
 
 This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought 
 that he and Cecil were to -rule England together, while 
 all else were the puppets whose wires they pulled. 
 ' The Lord hath taken him up, and dashed him down ' 
 and by such means, too, and on such a charge ! Be- 
 traying his country to Spain ! Absurd incredible 
 He would laugh it to scorn ; but it is bitter earnest. 
 There is no escape. True or false, he sees that his 
 enemies will have his head. It is maddening ; a hor- 
 rible nightmare. He cannot bear it ; he cannot face (so 
 he writes to that beloved wife) 'the scorn, the taunts, 
 the loss of honour, the cruel words of lawyers/ He 
 stabs himself. Read that letter of his, written after 
 the mad blow had been struck ; it is sublime from in- 
 tensity of agony. The way in which the chastisement 
 was taken proves how utterly it was needed, ere that 
 proud, success- swollen, world -en tangled heart could be 
 brought right with God. 
 
 And it is brought right. The wound is not mortal. 
 He comes slowly to a better mind, and takes his doom 
 like a man. That first farewell to his wife was written 
 out of hell. The second rather out of heaven. Read 
 it, too, and compare; and then see how the Lord has 
 been working upon this great soul : infinite sadness, in- 
 finite tenderness and patience, and trust in God for 
 himself and his poor wife : ' God is my witness, it was 
 for you and yours that I desired life ; but it is true 
 that I disdain myself for begging it. For know, dear 
 wife, that your son is the son of a true man, and one 
 who, in his own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly 
 and misshapen forms. . . . The everlasting, powerful, 
 infinite, and omnipotent God, who is goodness itself, 
 the true life and light, keep thee and thine, have mercy 
 upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and 
 accusers, and send us to meet in his glorious kingdom/
 
 74 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 Is it come to this, then ? Is he fit to die, at last ? 
 Then he is fit to live ; and live he shall. The tyrants 
 have not the heart to carry out their own crime, and 
 Raleigh shall be respited. 
 
 But not pardoned. No more return for him into 
 that sinful world, where he flaunted on the edge of the 
 precipice, and dropped heedless over it. God will 
 hide him in the secret place of His presence, and keep 
 him in his tabernacle from the strife of tongues ; and 
 a new life shall begin for him ; a wiser, perhaps a happier, 
 than he has known since he was a little lad in the farm- 
 house in pleasant Devon far away. On the I5th 
 of December he enters the Tower. Little dreams he 
 that for more than twelve years those doleful walls 
 would be his home. Lady Raleigh obtains leave to 
 share his prison with him, and, after having passed ten 
 years without a child, brings him a boy to comfort the 
 weary heart. The child of sorrow -is christened Carew. 
 Little think those around him what strange things 
 that child will see before his hairs be grey. She has 
 her maid, and he his three servants ; some five or six 
 friends are allowed 'to repair to him at convenient 
 times/ He has a chamber-door always open into the 
 lieutenant's garden, where he ' has converted a little 
 hen-house into a still-room, and spends his time all the 
 day in distillation.' The next spring a grant is made 
 of his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder, to trus- 
 tees named by himself, for the benefit of his family. So 
 far, so well ; or, at least, not as ill as it might be : but 
 there are those who cannot leave the caged lion in peace. 
 
 Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of 
 paying up the arrears which he owes on the wine and 
 other offices, brings in a claim of aooo/. But the 
 rogue meets his match, and finds himself, at the end 
 of a lawsuit, in prison for debt. Greater rogues, how- 
 ever, will have better fortune, and break through the
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 75 
 
 law-cobwebs which have stopped a poor little fly like 
 Sanderson. For Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts 
 his eyes on the Sherborne land. It has been included 
 in the conveyance, and should be safe ; but there are 
 others who, by instigation surely of the devil himself, 
 have had eyes to see a flaw in the deed. Sir John 
 Popham is appealed to. Who could doubt the result ? 
 He answers, that there is no doubt that the words 
 were omitted by the inattention of the engrosser 
 (Carew Raleigh says that but one single word was want- 
 ing, which word was found notwithstanding in the 
 paper-book, i.e., the draft ;) but that the word not being 
 there, the deed is worthless, and the devil may have 
 his way. To Carr, who has nothing of his own, it 
 seems reasonable enough to help himself to what belongs 
 to others; and James gives him the land. Raleigh 
 writes to him, gently, gracefully, loftily. Here is an 
 extract : ' And for yourself, sir, seeing your fair day is 
 now in the dawn, and mine drawn to the evening, your 
 own virtues and the king's grace assuring you of many 
 favours and much honour, I beseech you not to begin 
 your first building upon the ruins of the innocent ; and 
 that their sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first 
 plantation.' He speaks strongly of the fairness, sym- 
 pathy, and pity, by which the Scots in general had laid 
 him under obligation ; argues from it his own evident 
 innocence ; and ends with a quiet warning to the young 
 favourite, not to ' undergo the curse of them that enter 
 into the fields of the fatherless.' In vain. Lady 
 Raleigh, with her children, entreats James, on her knees : 
 in vain, again. ' I mun ha' the land,' is the answer ; 
 ' I mun ha' it for Carr.' And he has it ; patching 
 up the matter after awhile by a gift of 8ooo/. to her 
 and her elder son, in requital for an estate of 50007. 
 a-year. 
 
 So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day,
 
 76 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 and clinging more and more to that fair wife, and 
 her noble boy, and the babe whose laughter makes 
 music within that dreary cage. And all day long, as 
 we have seen, he sits over his still, compounding and 
 discovering, and sometimes showing himself on the wall 
 to the people, who gather to gaze at him, till Wade 
 forbids it, fearing popular feeling. In fact, the 
 world outside has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as 
 if he were a chained magician, who, if he were let loose, 
 might do with them all what he would. Salis- 
 bury and Somerset are of the same mind. Woe to 
 them if that silver tongue should once again be un- 
 locked ! 
 
 The Queen, with a woman's faith in greatness, sends 
 to him for ' cordials/ Here is one of them, famous in 
 Charles the Second's days as ' Sir Walter's Cordial :' 
 
 |J> Zedoary and saffron, each . . . ^ Ib. 
 
 Distilled water 3 pints. 
 
 Macerate, &c., and reduce to 1^ pint. 
 
 Compound powder of crabs' claws . . .1602. 
 
 Cinnamon and Nutmegs 2 
 
 Cloves i 
 
 Cardamom seeds . . . . . . 
 
 Double refined sugar 2 Ib. 
 
 Make a confection. 
 
 Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which 
 flesh is heir to. It does not seem that Raleigh so 
 boasted himself; but the people, after the fashion of 
 the time, seem to have called all his medicines ' cor- 
 dials/ and probably took for granted that it was by this 
 particular one that the enchanter cured Queen Anne 
 of a desperate sickness, ' whereof the physicians were 
 at the farthest end of their studies' (no great way to go 
 in those days) ' to find the cause, and at a nonplus for 
 the cure.' 
 
 Raleigh (this is Sir Anthony Welden's account) asks
 
 SIB WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 77 
 
 for his reward, only justice. Will the Queen ask 
 that certain lords may be sent to examine Cobham, 
 ' whether he had at any time accused Sir Walter of 
 any treason under his hand ?' Six are sent ; Salis- 
 bury among them. Cobham answers, ' Never ; nor 
 could I : that villain Wade often solicited me, and not 
 so prevailing, got me by a trick to write my name on 
 a piece of white paper. So that if a charge came under 
 my hand, it was forged by that villain Wade, by writ- 
 ing something above my hand, without my consent or 
 knowledge/ They return. Salisbury acts as spokes- 
 man ; and has his equivocation ready. ' Sir, my Lord 
 Cobham has made good all that ever he wrote or said ' 
 having, by his own account, written nothing but his 
 name. This is Sir Anthony Welden's story. One 
 hopes, for the six lords' sake, it may not be true ; but 
 there is no reason, in the morality of James's court, 
 why it should not have been. 
 
 So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on. 
 And he does work. As his captivity becomes more and 
 more hopeless, so comes out more and more the state- 
 liness, self-help, and energy of the man. Till now he 
 has played with his pen : now he will use it in earnest ; 
 and use it as perhaps no prisoner ever did. Many a 
 good book has been written in a dungeon. ' Don 
 Quixote/ the 'Pilgrim's Progress/ beautiful each 
 in its way, and destined to immortality : Raleigh 
 begins the ' History of the World,' the most God- 
 fearing and God-seeing history which I know of among 
 human writings ; though blotted by flattery of James 
 in the preface : wrong : but pardonable in a man trying 
 in the Tower to get out of that doleful prison. But 
 all his writings are thirty years too late ; they express 
 the creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied 
 Spain in the name of a God of righteousness, not of
 
 78 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 men who cringe before her in the name of a God of 
 power and cunning. The captive eagle has written with a 
 quill from his own wing a quill which has been wont ere 
 now to soar to heaven. Every line smacks of the memories 
 of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais 
 Roads; and many a grey-headed veteran, as he read 
 them, must have turned away his face to hide the noble 
 tears, as Ulysses from Demodocus when he sang the 
 song of Troy. So there sits Raleigh, like the prophet 
 of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching 
 the darkness gather upon the land year by year, ' like 
 the morning spread over the mountains/ the darkness 
 which comes before the dawn of the Day of The Lord ; 
 which he shall never see on earth, though it be very 
 near at hand ; and asks of each new-comer, ' Watch- 
 man, what of the night ?' 
 
 But there is one bright point at least in the dark- 
 ness; one on whom Raleigh's eyes, and those of all 
 England, are fixed in boundless hope ; one who, by the 
 sympathy which attracts all noble natures to each other, 
 clings to the hero utterly ; Henry, the Crown Prince. 
 'No king but my father would keep such a bird in a 
 cage/ The noble lad tries to open the door for the 
 captive eagle; but in vain. At least he will make 
 what use he can of his wisdom. He asks him for ad- 
 vice about the new ship he is building, and has a simple 
 practical letter in return, and over and above probably the 
 two valuable pamphlets, ' Of the Invention of Ships,' 
 and ' Observations on the Navy and Sea Service ;' which 
 the Prince will never see. In 1611 he asks Raleigh's 
 advice about the foolish double marriage with the 
 Prince and Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer 
 two plain-spoken discourses as full of historical learning 
 as of practical sound sense. 
 
 These are benefits which must be repaid. The
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AXD HIS TIME. 79 
 
 father will repay them hereafter in his own way. In 
 the meanwhile the son does so in his way, by soliciting 
 the Sherborne estate as for himself, intending to restore 
 it to Raleigh. He succeeds. Carr is bought off for 
 25,ooo/., where Lady Raleigh had been bought off with 
 Soool. ; but neither Raleigh nor his widow will ever 
 be the better for that bargain, and Carr will get Sher- 
 borne back again, and probably, in the king's silly 
 dotage, keep the 25,0001. also. 
 
 For, as we said, the Day of The Lord is at hand ; 
 and he whose virtues might have postponed it must be 
 taken away, that vengeance may fall where vengeance 
 is due, and men may know that verily there is a God 
 who judgeth the earth. 
 
 In November, 1612, Prince Henry falls sick. 
 
 When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends 
 to Raleigh for some of the same cordial which had 
 cured her. Medicine is sent, with a tender letter, as it 
 well might be ; for Raleigh knew how much hung, not 
 only for himself, but for England, on the cracking 
 threads of that fair young life. It is questioned at 
 first whether it shall be administered. ' The cordial/ 
 Raleigh says, ' will cure him or any other of a fever, 
 except in case of poison/ 
 
 The cordial is administered : but it comes too late. 
 The prince dies, and with him the hopes of all good men. 
 ***** 
 
 At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free. 
 He is sixty-six years old now, grey-headed and worn 
 down by confinement, study, and want of exercise : but 
 he will not remember that. 
 
 Still in his ashes live their wonted fire. 
 
 Now for Guiana, at last ! which he has never for- 
 gotten ; to which he has been sending, with his
 
 80 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 slender means, ship after ship to keep the Indians 
 in hope. 
 
 He is freed in March. At once he is busy at his 
 project. In August he has obtained the King's com- 
 mission, by the help of Sir Ralph Winwood, Secretary 
 of State, who seems to have believed in Raleigh. At 
 least Raleigh believed in him. In March next year he 
 has sailed, and with him thirteen ships, and more than 
 a hundred knights and gentlemen, and among them, 
 strange to say, Sir Warham St. Leger. This can 
 hardly be the quondam Marshal of Munster, under 
 whom Raleigh served at Smerwick, six-and-thirty years 
 ago. He would be nearly eighty years old ; and as 
 Lord Doneraile's pedigree gives three Sir Warhams, 
 we cannot identify the man. But it is a strong argu- 
 ment in Raleigh's favour that a St. Leger, of a Devon 
 family, which had been serving with him in Ireland, and 
 intimately connected with him bis whole life, should 
 keep his faith in Raleigh after all his reverses. Never- 
 theless, the mere fact of an unpardoned criminal, said 
 to be ' non ens' in law, being able in a few months to 
 gather round him such a party, is proof patent of what 
 slender grounds there are for calling Raleigh ' sus- 
 pected' and 'unpopular.' 
 
 But he does not sail without a struggle or two. 
 James is too proud to allow his heir to match with 
 any but a mighty king, is infatuated about the Spanish 
 marriage ; and Gondomar is with him, playing with his 
 hopes and with his fears also. 
 
 The people are furious; and have to be silenced 
 again and again; there is even fear of rioting. The 
 charming and smooth-tongued Gondomar can hate ; 
 and can revenge, too. Five 'prentices, who have in- 
 sulted him for striking a little child, are imprisoned 
 and fined several hundred pounds each. And as for 
 hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no Spaniard (to
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 81 
 
 let alone the private reasons which some have supposed) 
 had he not hated Spain's ancient scourge and un- 
 swerving enemy. He comes to James, complaining 
 that Raleigh is about to break the peace with Spain. 
 Nothing is to be refused him which can further the one 
 darling fancy of James ; and Raleigh has to give in 
 writing the number of his ships, men, and ordnance, 
 and, moreover, the name of the country and the very 
 river whither he is going. This paper was given, 
 Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James's solemn 
 promise not to reveal it ; and Raleigh himself seems to 
 have believed that it was to be kept private; for he 
 writes afterwards to Secretary Winwood in a tone of 
 astonishment and indignation, that the information 
 contained in his paper had been sent on to the King of 
 Spain, before he sailed from the Thames. Winwood 
 could have told him as much already ; for Buckingham 
 had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him 
 why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador ' to 
 acquaint him with the order taken by his Majesty 
 about Sir W. R/s voyage/ But however unwilling 
 the Secretary (as one of the furtherers of the voyage) 
 may have been to meddle in the matter, Gondomar had 
 had news enough from another source ; perhaps from 
 James's own mouth. For the first letter to the West 
 Indies, about Raleigh, was dated from Madrid, March 
 1 9 ; and most remarkable it is, that in James's ' Decla- 
 ration/ or rather apology, for his own conduct, no 
 mention whatsoever is made of his having given infor- 
 mation to Gondomar. 
 
 Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go 
 with one or two ships only. He might work a mine, 
 and that the King of Spain should give him a safe 
 convoy home with all his gold. How kind ! And 
 how likely would Raleigh and his fellow-adventurers 
 
 VOL. i. o
 
 82 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 have been to accept such an offer ; how likely, too, to 
 find men who would sail with them on such an errand, 
 to be ' flayed alive/ as many who travelled to the 
 Indies of late years had been, or to have their throats 
 cut, tied back to back, after trading unarmed and 
 peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of Raleigh's men 
 had been but two or three years before in that very 
 Orinoco. So James is forced to let the large fleet go ; 
 and to let it go well armed also ; for the plain reason, 
 that otherwise it dare not go at all ; and in the mean- 
 while, letters are sent from Spain, in which the 
 Spaniards call the fleet ' English enemies,' and ships 
 and troops are moved up as fast as possible from the 
 Spanish main. 
 
 But, say some, James was as much justified in telling 
 Gondomar, and the Spaniards in defending themselves. 
 On the latter point there is no doubt. 
 
 They may get who have the will, 
 And they may keep who can. 
 
 But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured 
 in this Guiana business for years ; after having spent 
 his money in vain attempts to deliver these Guianians 
 from their oppressors. It is hard, and he feels it so. 
 He sees that he is not trusted ; that, as James himself 
 confesses, his pardon is refused simply to keep a hold 
 on him ; that, if he fails, he is ruined. 
 
 As he well asks afterward, 'If the king did not 
 think that Guiana was his, why let me go thither at 
 all ? He knows that it was his by the law of nations, 
 for he made Mr. Harcourt a grant of part of it. If it 
 be, as Gondomar says, the King of Spain's, then I had 
 no more right to work a mine in it than to burn a 
 town.' Argument which seems to me unanswerable. 
 But, says James, and others with him, he was forbid to 
 meddle with any country occupate or possessed by
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 83 
 
 Spaniards. Southey, too, blames him severely for not 
 having told James that the country was already settled 
 by Spaniards. I can excuse Southey, but not James, for 
 overlooking the broad fact, that all England knew it, as I 
 have shown, since 1594; that if they did not, Gondomar 
 would have taken care to tell them ; and that he could 
 not go to Guiana without meddling with Spaniards. His 
 former voyages and publications made no secret of it. On 
 the contrary, one chief argument for the plan had been 
 all through the delivery of the Indians from these very 
 Spaniards, who, though they could not conquer them, 
 ill used them in every way : and in his agreement with 
 the Lords about the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes 
 especial mention of the very place, which will soon fill 
 such a part in our story, ' San Thome, where the 
 Spaniards inhabit,' and tells the Lords whom to ask, as 
 to the number of men who will be wanted ' to secure 
 Keymish's passage to the mine ' against these very 
 Spaniards. What can be more clear, save to those who 
 will not see? 
 
 The plain fact is, that Raleigh went, with his eyes 
 open, to take possession of a country to which he 
 believed that he and King James had a right, and that 
 James and his favourites, when they, as he pleads, 
 might have stopped him by a word, let him go, knowing 
 as well as the Spaniards what he intended ; for what 
 purpose, but to have an excuse for the tragedy which 
 ended all, it is difficult to conceive. ' It is evident,' 
 wisely says Sir Robert Schomburgk, ' that they winked 
 at consequences which they must have foreseen/ 
 
 And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count 
 Desmarets, brings a grave charge against Raleigh. 
 Raleigh, in his apology, protests that he only saw 
 Desmarets once on board of his vessel. Desmarets 
 says in his despatches, that he was on board of her 
 
 G 2
 
 84 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 several times (whether he saw Raleigh or not more than 
 once does not appear), and that Raleigh complained to 
 him of having been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his 
 estate, and so forth (which, indeed, was true enough), 
 and that he was on that account resolved to abandon his 
 country, and, if the expedition succeeded, offer himself 
 and the fruit of his labour to the King of France. 
 
 If this be true, Raleigh was very wrong. But Sir 
 Robert Schomburgk points out that this passage, 
 which Mr. Napier says occurs in the last despatch, was 
 written a month after Raleigh had sailed ; and that the 
 previous despatch, written only four days after Raleigh 
 sailed, says nothing about the matter. So that it 
 could not have been a very important or fixed resolution 
 on Raleigh's part, if it was only to be recollected a 
 month after. I do not say (as Sir Robert Schom- 
 burgk is very much inclined to do) that it was alto- 
 gether a bubble of French fancy. It is probable and 
 natural enough that Raleigh, in his just rage at finding 
 that James was betraying him, and sending him out 
 with a halter round his neck, to all but certain ruin, 
 did say wild words that it was better for him to serve 
 the Frenchman than such a master that perhaps he 
 might go over to the Frenchman after all or some 
 folly of the kind, in that same rash tone which, as we 
 have seen, has got him into trouble so often already : 
 and so I leave the matter, saying, Beware of making 
 any man an offender for a word, much less one who is 
 being hunted to death in his old age, and knows it. 
 
 However this may be, the fleet sails ; but with no 
 bright auguries. The mass of the sailors are ' a scum 
 of men ; ' they are mutinous and troublesome ; and 
 what is worse, have got among them (as, perhaps, they 
 were intended to have) the notion that Raleigh's being 
 still ' non ens' in law absolves them from obeying him
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 85 
 
 when they do not choose, and permits them to say of 
 him behind his back what they list. They have long 
 delays at Plymouth. Sir Warham's ship cannot get 
 out of the Thames. Pennington, at the Isle of Wight, 
 ' cannot redeem his bread from the bakers/ and has to 
 ride back to London to get money from Lady Raleigh. 
 The poor lady has it not, and gives a note of hand to 
 Mr. Wood of Portsmouth. Alas for her ! She has 
 sunk her 8000 L, and, beside that, sold her Wickham 
 estate for 2500^.; and all is on board the fleet. 'A 
 hundred pieces ' are all the ready money the hapless 
 pair had left on earth, and they have parted them 
 together. Raleigh has fifty-five, and she forty-five, till 
 God send it back if, indeed, he ever send it. The 
 star is sinking low in the west. Trouble on trouble. 
 Sir John Fane has neither men nor money ; Captain 
 Witney has not provisions enough, and Raleigh has to 
 sell his plate in Plymouth to help him. Courage ! one 
 last struggle to redeem his good name ! 
 
 Then storms off Scilly a pinnace is sunk ; faithful 
 Captain King driven back into Bristol; the rest have 
 to lie by awhile in some Irish port for a fair wind. 
 Then Bailey deserts with the Southampton at the Cana- 
 ries ; then ' unnatural weather/ so that a fourteen 
 days' voyage takes forty days. Then ' the distemper' 
 breaks out under the line. The simple diary of that 
 sad voyage still remains, full of curious and valuable 
 nautical hints ; but recording the loss of friend on 
 friend ; four or five officers, and, f to our great grief, our 
 principal refiner, Mr. Fowler/ ' Crab, my old ser- 
 vant/ Next a lamentable twenty-four hours, in which 
 they lose Pigott, the lieutenant-general, ' mine honest 
 frinde, Mr. John Talbot, one that had lived with me 
 a leven yeeres in the Tower, an excellent general 
 skoller, and a faithful and true man as ever lived/
 
 86 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 with two ' very fair conditioned gentlemen/ and ' mine 
 own cook Francis/ Then more officers and men, and 
 my ' cusen Payton.' Then the water is near spent, 
 and they are forced to come to half allowance, till they 
 save and drink greedily whole canfuls of the bitter rain 
 water. At last Raleigh's own turn comes ; running on 
 deck in a squall, he gets wet through, and has twenty 
 days of burning fever ; ' never man suffered a more 
 furious heat,' during which he eats nothing but now 
 and then a stewed prune. 
 
 At last they make the land, at the mouth of the Ura- 
 poho, far south of their intended goal. They ask for 
 Leonard the Indian, ' who lived with me in England 
 three or four years, the same man that took Mr. Har- 
 court's brother, and fifty men, when they were in ex- 
 treme distress, and had no means to live there but by 
 the help of this Indian, whom they made believe that 
 they were my men ;' but the faithful Indian is gone 
 up the country, and they stood away for Cayenne, 
 ' where the cacique (Harry) was also my servant, and 
 had lived with me in the Tower two years.' 
 
 Courage once more, brave old heart ! Here, at least, 
 thou art among friends, who know thee for what thou 
 art, and look out longingly for thee as their deliverer. 
 
 Courage; for thou art in fairyland once more; the 
 land of boundless hope and possibility. Though Eng- 
 land and England's heart be changed, yet God's earth 
 endures, and the harvest is still here, waiting to be 
 reaped by those who dare. Twenty stormy years may 
 have changed thee, but they have not changed the fairy- 
 land of thy prison dreams. Still the mighty Ceiba 
 trees with their silk pods tower on the palm-fringed 
 islets; still the dark mangrove thickets guard the 
 mouths of unknown streams, whose granite sands are 
 rich with gold. Friendly Indians come, and Harry
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 87 
 
 with them, bringing maize, peccari pork, and arma- 
 dillos, plantains and pine-apples, and all eat and 
 gather strength ; and Raleigh writes home to his 
 wife, ' to say that I may yet be king of the Indians 
 here, were a vanity. But my name hath lived among 
 them' as well it might. For many a year those sim- 
 ple hearts shall look for him in vain, and more than 
 two centuries and a half afterwards, dim traditions of 
 the great white chief who bade them stand out to the 
 last against the Spaniards, and he would come and 
 dwell among them, shall linger among the Carib tribes ; 
 even, say some, the tattered relics of an English flag, 
 which he left among them that they might distinguish 
 his countrymen. 
 
 Happy for him had he stayed there indeed, and been 
 their king. How easy for him to have grown old in 
 peace at Cayenne ! But no ; he must on for honour's 
 sake, and bring home if it were but a basketful of that 
 ore, to show the king, that he may save his credit. 
 He has promised Arundel that he will return. And 
 return he will. So onward he goes to the ' Triangle 
 Islands/ There he sends off five small vessels for 
 Orinoco, with four hundred men. The faithful Keymis 
 has to command and guide the expedition. Sir War- 
 ham is lying ill of the fever, all but dead ; so George 
 Raleigh is sent in his place as sergeant-major, and with 
 him five land companies, one of which is commanded 
 by young Walter, Raleigh's son ; another by a Captain 
 Parker, of whom we shall have a word to say presently. 
 
 Keymis's orders are explicit. He is to go up ; find 
 the mine, and open it ; and if the Spaniards attack 
 him, repel force by force : but he is to avoid, if possible, 
 an encounter with them : not for fear of breaking the 
 peace, but because he has ' a scum of men, a few gen- 
 tlemen excepted, and I would not for all the world re-
 
 88 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 ceive a blow from the Spaniards to the dishonour of 
 our nation.' There \ve have no concealment of hostile 
 instructions, any more than in Raleigh's admirable in- 
 structions to his fleet, which after laying down excel- 
 lent laws for morality, religion, and discipline, go on 
 with clause after clause as to what is to be done if they 
 meet ' the enemy/ What enemy ? Why, all Spanish 
 ships which sail the seas ; and who, if they happen to 
 be sufficiently numerous, will assuredly attack, sink, 
 burn, and destroy Raleigh's whole squadron, for daring 
 to sail for that continent which Spain claims as its own. 
 
 Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad, and in through 
 the Serpent's Mouth, round Punto Gallo to the famous 
 lake of Pitch, where all recruit themselves with fish 
 and armadillos, pheasants (Penelope Cristata), palmitos, 
 and gtiavas, and await the return of the expedition from 
 the last day of December to the middle of February. 
 They see something of the Spaniards meanwhile, and 
 what they see is characteristic. Sir John Ferns is sent 
 up to the Spanish town, to try if they will trade for 
 tobacco. The Spaniards parley; in the midst of the 
 parley pour a volley of musketry into them at forty 
 paces, yet hurt never a man ; and send them off calling 
 them thieves and traitors. Fray Simon's Spanish 
 account of the matter is, that Raleigh intended to dis- 
 embark his men, that they might march inland on San 
 Joseph. How he found out the fact remains to be 
 proved. In the meanwhile, I shall prefer believing 
 that Raleigh is not likely to have told a lie for his own 
 private amusement in his own private diary. I can- 
 not blame the Spaniards much ; the advices from Spain 
 are sufficient to explain their hostility. 
 
 On the 29th the Spaniards attack three men and 
 a boy who are ashore boiling the fossil pitch ; kill one 
 man, and carry off the boy. Raleigh, instead of going
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 89 
 
 up to the Spanish port and demanding satisfaction, as 
 he would have been justified in doing after this second 
 outrage, remains quietly where he is, expecting daily to 
 be attacked by Spanish armadas, and resolved to ' burn 
 by their sides/ Happily, or unhappily, he escapes 
 them. Probably he thinks they waited for him at 
 Margarita, expecting him to range the Spanish main. 
 
 At last the weary days of sickness and anxiety suc- 
 ceed to days of terror. On the ist of February a 
 strange report comes by an Indian. An inland savage 
 has brought confused and contradictory news down the 
 river, that San Thome is sacked, the governor and two 
 Spanish captains slain (names given), and two English 
 captains, nameless. After this entry follow a few con- 
 fused ones, set down as happening in January, concern- 
 ing attempts to extract the truth from the Indians and 
 negligence of the mariners, who are diligent in nothing 
 but pillaging and stealing. And so ends abruptly this 
 sad document. 
 
 The truth comes at last ; but when, does not appear, 
 in a letter from Keymis, dated January 8. San 
 Thome has been stormed, sacked, and burnt. Four 
 refiners' houses were found in it ; the best in the town ; 
 so that the Spaniards have been mining there : but no 
 coin or bullion except a little plate. One English 
 captain is killed, and that captain is Walter Raleigh, 
 his first-born. He died, leading them on, when some 
 ' more careful of valour and safety, began to recoil 
 shamefully/ His last words were, ' Lord have mercy 
 upon me, and prosper our enterprise/ A Spanish 
 captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a 
 musket after he had received a bullet. John Plessing- 
 ton, his sergeant, avenged him by running Erinetta 
 through with his halbert. 
 
 Keymis has not yet been to the mine ; he could
 
 90 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 not, by reason of the murmurings, discords, and vexa- 
 tions ;' but he will go at once, make trial of the mine, 
 and come down to Trinidad by the Macareo mouth. 
 He sends a parcel of scattered papers (probably among 
 them the three letters from the King of Spain), a roll 
 of tobacco, a tortoise, some oranges and lemons. ' Pray- 
 ing God to give you health and strength of body, and 
 a mind armed against all extremities, I rest ever to be 
 commanded, your lordship's, Keymish/ 
 
 ( Oh Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had 
 died for thee !' But weeping is in vain. The noble 
 lad sleeps there under the palm trees, beside the mighty 
 tropic stream, while the fair Basset, ' his bride in the 
 sight of God/ recks not of him as she wanders in the 
 woods of Umberleigh, wife to the son of Raleigh's dead- 
 liest foe. Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God's blessing is 
 not on this voyage of thine. Surely He hath set thy 
 misdeeds before Him, and thy secret sins in the light of 
 His countenance. 
 
 Another blank of misery : but his honour is still safe. 
 Keymis will return with that gold ore, that pledge of 
 his good faith for which he has ventured all. Surely 
 God will let that come after all, now that he has paid 
 as its price his first-born's blood ? 
 
 At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers. All 
 are weary, spirit-broken, discontented, mutinous. Where 
 is the gold ore? 
 
 There is none. Keymis has never been to the mine 
 after all. His companions curse him as a traitor who 
 has helped Raleigh to deceive them into ruin ; the mine 
 is imaginary a lie. The crews are ready to break into 
 open mutiny ; after a while they will do so. 
 
 Yes, God is setting this man's secret sins in the light 
 of His countenance. If he has been ambitious, his 
 ambition has punished itself now. If he has cared
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 91 
 
 more for his own honour than for his wife and children, 
 that sin too has punished itself. If he has (which I 
 affirm not) tampered with truth for the sake of what 
 seemed to him noble and just ends, that too has 
 punished itself; for his men do not trust him. If he 
 has (which I affirm not) done any wrong in that mat- 
 ter of Cobham, that too has punished itself; for his 
 men, counting him as ' non ens' in law, will not respect 
 or obey him. If he has spoken after his old fashion, 
 rash and exaggerated words, and goes on speaking 
 them, even though it be through the pressure of despair, 
 that too shall punish itself; and for every idle word 
 that he shall say, God will bring him into judgment. 
 And why, but because he is noble ? Why, but because 
 he is nearer to God by a whole heaven than Bucking- 
 hams, Henry Howards, Salisburys, and others whom 
 God lets fatten on their own sins, having no under- 
 standing, because they are in honour, and have chil- 
 dren at their hearts' desire, and leave the rest of their 
 substance to their babes? Not so does God deal with 
 His elect, when they will try to worship at once self 
 and Him ; He requires truth in the inward parts, and 
 will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, and 
 full of light. 
 
 Keymis returns with the wreck of his party. The 
 scene between him and Raleigh may be guessed. 
 Keymis has excuse on excuse. He could not get 
 obeyed after young Raleigh's death : he expected to 
 find that Sir Walter was either dead of his sickness, or 
 of grief for his son, and had no wish 'to enrich 
 a company of rascals who made no account of him/ 
 He dare not go up to the mine because (and here 
 Raleigh thinks his excuse fair) the fugitive Spaniards 
 lay in the craggy woods through which he would have 
 to pass, and that he had not men enough even to hold
 
 92 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 the town securely. If he reached the mine, and left a 
 company there, he had no provisions for them ; and he 
 dared not send backward and forward to the town, 
 while the Spaniard's were in the woods. The warnings 
 sent by Gondomar had undone all, and James's trea- 
 chery had done its work. So Keymis ' thinking it a 
 greater error (so he said) to discover the mine to the 
 Spaniards, than to excuse himself to the Company, said 
 that he could not find it/ From all which, one thing 
 at least is evident, that Keymis believed in the existence 
 of the mine. 
 
 Raleigh ' rejects these fancies ; ' tells him before 
 divers gentlemen, that ' a blind man might find it, by 
 the marks which Keymis himself had set down under 
 his hand : ' that ' his case of losing so many men in the 
 woods ' was a mere pretence : after Walter was slain, 
 he knew that Keymis had no care of any man's sur- 
 viving. ' You have undone me, wounded my credit 
 with the King, past recovery/ As you have followed 
 your own advice, and not mine, you must satisfy his 
 Majesty. I shall be glad if you can do it : but I 
 cannot/ There is no use dwelling on such vain 
 regrets and reproaches. Raleigh perhaps is bitter, 
 unjust, though I cannot see that he was; as he him- 
 self writes twice, to his wife and Sir Ralph Winwood, 
 his ' brains are broken/ He writes to them both, and 
 re-opens the letters to add long postscripts, at his wits' 
 end. Keymis goes off ; spends a few miserable days ; 
 and then enters Raleigh's cabin. He has written his 
 apology to Lord Arundel, and begs Raleigh to allow of 
 it. ' No. You have undone me by your obstinacy, 
 I will not favour or colour your former folly/ ' Is 
 that your resolution, sir ? ' ' It is/ ' I know not 
 then, sir, what course to take/ And so he goes out, 
 and into his own cabin overhead. A minute after, a
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 93 
 
 pistol-shot is heard. Raleigh sends up a boy to know 
 the reason. Keymis answers from within, that he has 
 fired it off because it had been long charged ; and all is 
 quiet. 
 
 Half-an-hour after the boy goes into the cabin. 
 Keymis is lying on his bed, the pistol by him. The 
 boy moves 'him. The pistol-shot has broken a rib, and 
 gone no further : but as the corpse is turned over, a 
 long knife is buried in that desperate heart. Another 
 of the old heroes is gone to his wild account. 
 
 Gradually drops of explanation ooze out. The 
 ' Sergeant-Major, Raleigh's nephew, and others, confess 
 that Keymis told them that he could have brought 
 them in two hours to the mine : but as the young heir 
 was slain, and his father was unpardoned, and not like 
 to live, he had no reason to open the mine, either for 
 the Spaniard or the King' Those latter words are 
 significant. What cared the old Elizabethan seaman 
 for the weal of such a king ? And, indeed, what good 
 to such a king would all the mines in Guiana be ? They 
 answered that the King, nevertheless, had ' granted 
 Raleigh his heart's desire under the great seal/ He 
 replied that ' the grant to Raleigh was to a man ' non 
 ens' in law, and, therefore, of no force.' Here, too, 
 James's policy has worked well. How could men dare 
 or persevere under such a cloud ? 
 
 How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at 
 all ? The only answer is, that they knew Raleigh well 
 enough to have utter faith in him, and that Keymis 
 himself knew of the mine. 
 
 Puppies at home in England gave out that he had 
 killed himself from remorse at having deceived so many 
 gentlemen with an imaginary phantom. Every one, of 
 course, according to his measure of charity, has power 
 and liberty to assume any motive which he will. Mine
 
 94 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 is simply the one which shows upon the face of the 
 documents ; that the old follower, devoted alike to the 
 dead son and to the doomed father, feeling that he 
 had, he scarce knew how, failed in the hour of need, 
 frittered away the last chance of a mighty enterprise, 
 which had been his fixed idea for years, and ruined the 
 man whom he adored, avenged upon himself the fault 
 of having disobeyed orders, given peremptorily, and to 
 be peremptorily executed. 
 
 Here, perhaps, my tale should end; for all beyond 
 is but the waking of the corpse. The last death- 
 struggle of the Elizabethan heroism is over, and all its 
 remains vanish slowly, in an undignified sickening way. 
 All epics end so. After the war of Troy, Achilles 
 must die by coward Paris' arrow, in some mysterious 
 confused pitiful fashion ; and stately Hecuba must rail 
 herself into a very dog, and bark for ever shamefully 
 around lonely Cynossema. Young David ends as a 
 dotard Solomon as worse. Glorious Alexander must 
 die, half of fever, half of drunkenness, as the fool dieth. 
 Charles the Fifth, having thrown away all but his follies, 
 ends in a convent, a superstitious imbecile; Napoleon 
 squabbles to the last with Sir Hudson Lowe about 
 champagne. It must be so ; and the glory must be 
 God's alone. For in great men, and great times, there 
 is nothing good or vital, but what is of God, and not 
 of man's self. And when He taketh away that divine 
 breath they die, and return again to their dust. But 
 the earth does not lose ; for when he sendeth forth His 
 Spirit they live, and renew the face of the earth. A 
 new generation arises, with clearer sight, with fuller 
 experience, sometimes with nobler aims ; and 
 
 The old order changeth, giving place to the new, 
 And God fulfils himself in many ways. 
 
 The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 95 
 
 There was no more life left in it ; and God had some- 
 thing better in store for England. Raleigh's ideal was 
 a noble one : but God's was nobler far. Raleigh would 
 have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and de- 
 stroyed her very vitals by that gold, as Spain was 
 destroyed. And all the while the great and good God 
 was looking steadfastly upon that little struggling Vir- 
 ginian village, Raleigh's first-born, forgotten in his new 
 mighty dreams, and saying, e Here will I dwell, for I 
 have a delight therein.' There, and not in Guiana; 
 upon the simple tillers of the soil, not among wild 
 reckless gold-hunters, would His blessing rest. The 
 very coming darkness would bring brighter light. The 
 evil age itself would be the parent of new good, and 
 drive across the seas steadfast Pilgrim Fathers, and 
 generous Royalist Cavaliers, to be the parents of a 
 mightier nation than has ever yet possessed the earth. 
 Verily, God's ways are wonderful, and his counsels in 
 the great deep. 
 
 So ends the Elizabethan epic. Must we follow the 
 corpse to the grave ? It is necessary. 
 
 And now, ' you gentlemen of England, who sit at 
 home at ease,' what would you have done in like case ? 
 Your last die thrown ; your last stake lost ; your 
 honour, as you fancy, stained for ever ; your eldest son 
 dead in battle What would you have done? What 
 Walter Raleigh did was this. He kept his promise. 
 He had promised Lord Arundel to return to England ; 
 and return he did. 
 
 But it is said, his real intention, as he himself 
 confessed, was to turn pirate, and take the Mexico 
 fleet. 
 
 That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed 
 his mind, may have been a terrible temptation to him, 
 may even have broken out in hasty words, one does
 
 96 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 not deny. He himself says that he spoke of such a 
 thing, ' to keep his men together/ All depends on 
 how the words were spoken. The form of the sentence, 
 the tone of voice, is everything. Who could blame 
 him, if, seeing some of the captains whom he had most 
 trusted deserting him, his men heaping him with every 
 slander, and, as he solemnly swore on the scaffold, 
 calling witnesses thereto by name, forcing him to take 
 an oath that he would not return to England before 
 they would have him, and locking him into his own 
 cabin who could blame him, I ask, for saying, in that 
 daring off-hand way of his, which has so often before 
 got him into trouble, ' Come, my lads, do not despair. 
 If the worst comes to the worst, there is the Plate- 
 fleet to fall back upon ? ' When I remember, too, 
 that the taking of the said Plate-fleet was, in Raleigh's 
 eyes, an altogether just thing ; and that he knew per- 
 fectly, that if he succeeded therein, he would be backed 
 by the public opinion of all England, and probably buy 
 his pardon of James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved 
 money better ; my surprise rather is, that he did not go 
 and do it. As for any meeting of captains in his 
 cabin, and serious proposal of such a plan, I believe 
 it to be simply one of the innumerable lies which James 
 inserted in his declaration, gathered from the tales of 
 men, who fearing (and reasonably) lest their heads 
 should follow Raleigh's, tried to curry favour by slan- 
 dering him. This ' Declaration ' has been so often ex- 
 posed, that I may safely pass it by; and pass by 
 almost as safely the argument which some have drawn 
 from a chance expression of his in his pathetic letter to 
 Lady Raleigh, in which he ' hopes that God would 
 send him somewhat before his return/ To prove an 
 intention of piracy in the despairing words of a ruined 
 man writing to comfort a ruined wife for the loss of
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 97 
 
 her first-born, is surely to deal out hard measure. 
 Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty words 
 which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so 
 judged either by man or God ! 
 
 Sir Julius Caesar, agaiu, one of the commission ap- 
 pointed to examine him, informs us, that on being 
 confronted with Captains St. Leger and Pennington, 
 he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico 
 fleet, if the mine failed. To which I can only 
 answer, that all depends on how the thing was said, 
 and that this is the last fact which we should find in 
 Sir Julius's notes, which are, it is confessed, so con- 
 fused, obscure, and full of gaps, as to be often hardly 
 intelligible. The same remark applies to Wilson's 
 story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking 
 worthless. Wilson, it must be understood, is employed, 
 after Raleigh's return, as a spy upon him, which office 
 he executes, all confess, (and Wilson himself as much 
 as any,) as falsely, treacherously, and hypocritically as 
 did ever sinful man ; and, inter alia, he has this, ' This 
 day he told me what discourse he and the Lord Chan- 
 cellor had about taking the Plate-fleet, which he con- 
 fessed he would have taken had he lighted on it.' To 
 which my Lord Chancellor said, 'Why, you would 
 have been a pirate.' ' Oh/ quoth he, ' did you ever 
 know of any that were pirates for millions ? They 
 only that wish for small things are pirates/ Now, 
 setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go 
 out of his way to impeach himself to the man whom 
 he must have known was set there to find matter for 
 his death, all, we say, depends on how it was said. If 
 the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, ' To take the 
 Mexico fleet would be piracy/ it would have been just 
 like Raleigh to give such an answer. The speech is a 
 perfectly true one : Raleigh knew the world, no man 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 93 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 better ; and saw through its hollovvness, and the cant 
 and hypocrisy of his generation ; and he sardonically 
 states an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his 
 own morality, but that of the world ; just as he is doing 
 in that passage of his apology, about which I must 
 complain of Mr. Napier. ' It was a maxim of his/ 
 says Mr. Napier, ' that good success admits of no 
 examination/ This is not fair. The sentence in the 
 original goes on, ' so the contrary allows of no excuse, 
 however reasonable and just whatsoever/ His argu- 
 ment all through the beginning of the apology, sup- 
 ported by instance on instance from history, is, I 
 cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in 
 opening this mine. So it is always. Glory covers the 
 multitude of sins. But a man who has failed is a fair 
 mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented 
 mutineer; as I am now. What else, in the name of 
 common sense, could have been his argument ? Does 
 Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even if in the 
 face of all the noble and pious words which he had 
 written he held so immoral a doctrine, would have 
 been shameless and senseless enough to assert his 
 own rascality in an apology addressed to the most 
 ' religious ' of kings in the most canting of gene- 
 rations ? 
 
 But still more astonished are we at the use which 
 Mr. Napier has made of Captain Parker's letter. The 
 letter is written by a man in a state of frantic rage 
 and disappointment. There never was any mine, he 
 believes now. Keymis's ' delays we found mere delu- 
 sions ; for he was false to all men and hateful to him- 
 self, loathing to live since he could do no more villany. 
 I will speak no more of this hateful fellow to God aud 
 man/ And it is on the testimony of a man in this 
 temper that we are asked to believe that ' the admiral
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 99 
 
 and vice-admiral/ Raleigh and St. Leger, are going to 
 the Western Islands ' to look for homeward-bound 
 men/ if, indeed, the looking for homeward-bound men 
 means really looking for the Spanish fleet, and not 
 merely for recruits for their crews. I never recollect 
 (and I have read pretty fully the sea-records of those 
 days) such a synonym used either for the Mexican or 
 Indian fleet. But let this be as it may, the letter 
 proves too much. For, first, it proves, that whosoever 
 is not going to turn f pirate/ our calm and charitable 
 friend Captain Parker is ; ' for my part, by the permis- 
 sion of God, I will either make a voyage, or bury myself 
 in the sea.' Now, what making a voyage meant there 
 is no doubt ; and the sum total of the letter is, that a 
 man intending to turn rover himself accuses, under 
 the influence of violent passion, his comrades of doing 
 the like. We may believe him about himself: about 
 others, we shall wait for testimony a little less in- 
 terested. 
 
 But the letter proves too much again. For Parker 
 says that ' Witney and Woolaston are gone off a-head 
 to look for homeward-bound men/ thus agreeing with 
 Raleigh's message to his wife, that ' Witney, for whom 
 I sold all my plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave 
 more credit and countenance than to all the captains of 
 my fleet, ran from me at the Grenadas, and Woolaston 
 with him/ 
 
 And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and 
 Woolaston, and Parker's intentions to 'pirate' separately, 
 (if it be true,) agree with King James's story of 
 Raleigh's calling a council of war and proposing an 
 attack on the Plate-fleet? One or the other must 
 needs be a lie ; probably both. Witney's ship was of 
 only 160 tons; Woolaston's probably smaller. Five 
 such ships would be required, as any reader of Hakluyt 
 
 H 2
 
 100 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 must know, to take a single Carack ; and it would be 
 no use running the risk of hanging for any less prize. 
 The Spanish main was warned and armed, and the 
 Western Isles also. Is it possible that these two men 
 would have been insane enough in such circumstances 
 to go without Raleigh, if they could have gone with 
 him ? And is it possible that he, if he had any set 
 purpose of attacking the Plate-fleet, would not have 
 kept them, in order to attempt that with him which 
 neither they nor he could do without each other? 
 Moreover, no 'piratical' act ever took place, (and if any 
 had, we should have heard enough about it ;) and why 
 is Parker to be believed against Raleigh alone, when 
 there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of 
 the captains ? Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with 
 Mr. Tresham, and another gentleman, that Raleigh 
 appealed by name on the scaffold, as witnesses that it 
 was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, 
 and not he them. 
 
 My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational 
 enough, that Raleigh's ' brains/ as he said, ' were 
 broken / that he had no distinct plan : but that loth to 
 leave the New World without a second attempt on 
 Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, 
 ' and with good hope,' (as he wrote to Win wood him- 
 self,) ' of keeping the sea till August with some four 
 reasonable good ships/ (probably, as Oldys remarks, to 
 try a trading voyage,) but found his gentlemen too dis- 
 pirited and incredulous, his men too mutinous to do 
 anything ; and seeing his ships go home one by one, at 
 last followed them himself, because he had promised 
 Arundel and Pembroke so to do, having, after all, as 
 he declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in per- 
 suading his men to land at all in England. The other 
 lies about him, as of his having intended to desert his
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 101 
 
 soldiers in Guiana, his having taken no tools to work 
 the mine, and so forth, one only notices to say, that 
 the declaration takes care to make the most of them, 
 without deigning (after its fashion) to adduce any proof 
 hut anonymous hearsays. If it tte true that Bacon 
 drew up that famous document, it reflects no credit 
 either on his honesty or his ' inductive science/ 
 
 So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth. He finds 
 that Captain North has brought home the news of his 
 mishaps, and that there is a proclamation against him, 
 (which by the bye lies, for it talks of limitations and 
 cautions given to Raleigh which do not appear in his 
 commission,) and, moreover, a warrant out for his ap- 
 prehension. He sends his men on shore, and starts for 
 London to surrender himself, in company with faithful 
 Captain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and 
 from whom we have details of the next few days. Near 
 Ashburton, he is met by Sir Lewis Stukely, his near 
 kinsman; Vice- Admiral of Devon, who has orders to 
 arrest him. Raleigh tells him that he has saved him 
 the trouble ; and the two return to Plymouth, where 
 Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at liberty, and 
 rides about the country. We should be slow in imputing 
 baseness : but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely's 
 subsequent conduct that he had from the first private 
 orders to give Raleigh a chance of trying to escape, in 
 order to have a handle against him, such as his own 
 deeds had not yet given. 
 
 The ruse, if it existed then (as it did afterwards) 
 succeeds. Raleigh hears bad news. Gondomar has 
 (or has not) told his story to the king by crying, 
 ' Piratas ! piratas ! piratas !' and then rushing out with- 
 out explanation. James is in terror lest what had 
 happened should break off the darling Spanish match. 
 Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death. Life is sweet, and
 
 102 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 Guiana is yet where it was. He may win a basketful 
 of the ore still, and prove himself no liar. He will 
 escape to France. Faithful King finds him a Rochelle 
 ship ; he takes boat to her, goes half-way, and returns. 
 Honour is sweeter than life, and James may yet be just. 
 The next day he bribes the master to wait for him one 
 more day, starts for the ship once more, and again re- 
 turns to Plymouth (King will make oath) of his own 
 free will. The temptation must have been terrible, 
 and the sin none. What kept him from yielding but 
 innocence and honour? He will clear himself; and if 
 not, abide the worst. Stukely and James found out 
 these facts, and made good use of them afterwards. 
 For now comes ' a severe letter from my Lords' to 
 bring Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit ; 
 and with it comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of 
 whom honest King takes little note at the time, but 
 who will make himself remembered. 
 
 And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable. 
 Raleigh's brains are indeed broken. He is old, worn- 
 out with the effects of his fever, lame, ruined, broken- 
 hearted, and, for the first time in his life, weak and 
 silly. He takes into his head the paltriest notion that 
 he can gain time to pacify the king by feigning himself 
 sick. He puts implicit faith in the rogue Mannourie, 
 whom he has never seen before. He sends forward 
 Lady Raleigh to London perhaps ashamed, (as who 
 would not have been ?) to play the fool in that sweet 
 presence ; and with her good Captain King, who is to 
 engage one Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh's, to 
 find a ship wherein to escape, if the worst comes to the 
 worst. Cotterell sends King to an old boatswain of 
 his, who owns a ketch. She is to lie off Tilbury ; and 
 so King waits Raleigh's arrival. What passed in the 
 next four or five days will never be truly known, for
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 103 
 
 our only account comes from two self- convicted villains, 
 Stukely and Mannourie. On these disgusting details 
 I shall not enter. First, because one cannot trust a 
 word of them; secondly, because no one will wish to 
 hear them who feels, as I do, how pitiable and painful 
 is the sight of a great heart and mind utterly broken. 
 Neither shall I spend time on Stukely's villanous 
 treatment of Raleigh, (for which he had a commission 
 from James in writing,) his pretending to help him to 
 escape, going down the Thames in a boat with him, 
 trying in vain to make honest King as great a rogue 
 as himself. Like most rascalities, Stukely's conduct, 
 even as he himself states it, is very obscure. All that 
 we can see is, that Cotterell told Stukely everything ; 
 that Stukely bade Cotterell carry on the deceit; that 
 Stukely had orders from head-quarters to incite Raleigh 
 to say or do something which might form a fresh ground 
 of accusal ; that, being a clumsy rogue, he failed, and fell 
 back on abetting Raleigh's escape, as a last resource. 
 Be it as it may, he throws off the mask as soon as 
 Raleigh has done enough to prove an intent to escape ; 
 arrests him, and conducts him to the Tower. 
 
 There two shameful months are spent in trying to 
 find out some excuse for Raleigh's murder. Wilson is 
 set over him as a spy ; his letters to his wife are inter- 
 cepted. Every art is used to extort a confession of a 
 great plot with France, and every art fails utterly 
 simply, it seems to me, because there was no plot. 
 Raleigh writes an apology, letters of entreaty, self- 
 justification, what not; all, in my opinion, just and 
 true enough ; but like his speech on the scaffold, weak, 
 confused the product of a ' broken brain.' However, 
 his head must come off; and as a last resource, it must 
 be taken off upon the sentence of fifteen years ago, and 
 he who was condemned for plotting with Spain, must
 
 104 Sill WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 die for plotting against her. It is a pitiable business : 
 but, as Osborne says, in a passage, (p. 108 of his 
 Memoirs of James,) for which one freely forgives him all 
 his sins and lies, (and they are many,) 
 
 As the foolish idolaters were wont to sacrifice the choicest of their 
 children to the devil, so our king gave up his incomparable jewel to 
 the will of this monster of ambition (the Spaniard), under the pre- 
 tence of a superannuated transgression, contrary to the opinion of the 
 more honest sort of gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty's 
 pardon lay inclusively in the commission he gave him on his setting 
 out to sea; it being incongruous that he, who remained under the 
 notion of one dead in the law, should as a general dispose of the lives 
 of others, not being himself master of his own. 
 
 But no matter. He must die. The Queen inter- 
 cedes for him, as do all honest men : but in vain. He 
 has twenty-four hours' notice to prepare for death ; 
 eats a good breakfast ; takes a cup of sack and a pipe ; 
 makes a rambling speech, in which one notes only the 
 intense belief that he is an honest man, and the intense 
 desire to make others believe so, in the very smallest 
 matters ; and then dies smilingly, as one weary of life. 
 One makes no comment. Raleigh's life really ended 
 on the day that poor Keymis returned from San Thome. 
 
 And then ? 
 
 As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction. No 
 dramatist dare invent a ' poetic justice' more perfect 
 than fell upon the traitor. It is not always so, no 
 doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that 
 most awful of all punishments impunity. But there 
 are crises in a nation's life in which God makes terrible 
 examples, to put before the most stupid and sensual 
 the choice of Hercules, the upward road of life, the 
 downward one which leads to the pit. Since the time 
 of Pharaoh and the Red Sea host, history is full of 
 such palpable, unmistakeable revelations of the Divine 
 Nemesis ; and in England, too, at that moment, the 
 crisis was there ; and the judgment of God was revealed
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 105 
 
 accordingly. Sir Lewis Stukely remained it seems at 
 Court ; high in favour with James : but he found, never- 
 theless, that people looked darkly on him. Like all 
 self-convicted rogues, he must needs thrust his head into 
 his own shame, and one day he goes to good old Lord 
 Charles Howard's house ; for being Vice- Admiral of 
 Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero. The 
 old liou explodes in an unexpected roar. ' Darest thou 
 come into my presence, thou base fellow, who art re- 
 puted the common scorn and contempt of all men ? 
 Were it not in mine own house, I would cudgel thee 
 with my staff for presuming to speak to me !' Stukely, 
 his tail between his legs, goes off and complains to 
 James. ' What should I do with him ? Hang him ? 
 On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, 
 all the trees in the island were too few.' Such is the 
 gratitude of kings, thinks Stukely ; and retires to write 
 foolish pamphlets in self justification, which, unfor- 
 tunately for his memory, still remain to make bad 
 worse. 
 
 Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice- 
 Admiral of Devon, with a shield of sixteen quarterings, 
 and the blood-royal in his veins, was detected debasing 
 the King's coin within the precincts of the royal palace, 
 together with his old accomplice, who, being taken, 
 confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false. 
 He fled, a ruined man, back to his native county, 
 and his noble old seat of Affton; but Ate is on the 
 heels of such 
 
 Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, 
 
 sudden she grips him, 
 
 Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to 
 mortals. 
 
 A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West 
 country against the betrayer of its last Worthy. The
 
 106 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 gentlemen closed their doors against him ; the poor 
 refused him (so goes the legend) fire and water. Driven 
 by the Furies, he fled from Affton, and wandered 
 northward down the vale of Taw, away to Appledore, 
 and there took boat, and out into the boundless 
 Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded with shipping, for 
 which Raleigh's genius had discovered a new trade and 
 a new world. 
 
 Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on 
 the horizon, rises the Ultima Thule of Devon, the little 
 isle of Lundy. There one outlying peak of granite, 
 carrying up a shelf of slate upon its southern flank, 
 has risen through the waves, and formed an island some 
 three miles long, desolate, flat-headed, fretted by every 
 frost and storm, walled all round with four hundred 
 feet of granite cliff, sacred only (then at least) to puffins 
 and pirates. Over the single landing-place frowns 
 from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, ' Moresco Castle/ 
 as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John 
 de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked 
 his works of darkness : a grey, weird, uncanny pile of 
 moorstone, through which all the winds of heaven howl 
 day and night. 
 
 In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, 
 Lord of Affton, cursing God and man. 
 
 These things are true. Said I not well that reality 
 is stranger than romance? 
 
 But no Nemesis followed James. 
 
 The answer will depend much upon what readers 
 consider to be a Nemesis. If to have found England 
 one of the greatest countries in Europe, and to have 
 left it one of the most inconsiderable and despicable ; if 
 to be fooled by flatterers to the top of his bent, until 
 he fancied himself all but a god, while he was not even 
 a man, and could neither speak the truth, keep himself
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 107 
 
 sober, or look on a drawn sword without shrinking ; 
 if, lastly, to have left behind him a son who, in spite 
 of many chivalrous instincts, unknown to his father, 
 had been so indoctrinated in that father's vices as to 
 find it impossible to speak the truth even when it served 
 his purpose; if all these things be no Nemesis, then 
 none fell on James Stuart. 
 
 But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was re- 
 quired. He, too, had his share in the sin. In Carew 
 Raleigh's simple and manful petition to the Commons 
 of England for the restoration of his inheritance, we 
 find a significant fact, stated without one word of com- 
 ment, bitter or otherwise. At Prince Henry's death, 
 the Sherborne lands had been given again to Carr, 
 Lord Somerset. To him, too, 'the whirligig of time 
 brought round its revenges/ and he lost them when 
 arraigned and condemned for poisoning Sir Thomas 
 Overbury. Then Sir John Digby, afterwards Earl of 
 Bristol, begged Sherborne of the King, and had it. 
 Pembroke (Shakspeare's Pembroke) brought young 
 Carew to Court, hoping to move the tyrant's heart. 
 James saw him and shuddered; perhaps conscience- 
 stricken, perhaps of mere cowardice. ' He looked like 
 the ghost of his father,' as he well might, to that guilty 
 soul. Good Pembroke advised his young kinsman to 
 travel, which he did till James's death in the next year. 
 Then coming over (this is his own story) he asked of 
 Parliament to be restored in blood, that he might in- 
 herit aught that might fall to him in England. His 
 petition was read twice in the Lords. Whereon ' King 
 Charles sent Sir James Fullarton (then of the bed- 
 chamber) to Mr. Raleigh, to command him to come to 
 him ; and being brought in, the King, after using him 
 with great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly, 
 that when he was prince, he had promised the Earl of
 
 108 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 
 
 Bristol to secure his title to Sherborne against the heirs 
 of Sir Walter Raleigh ; whereon the earl had given 
 him, then prince, ten thousand pounds ; that now he 
 was bound to make good his promise, being king ; that, 
 therefore, unless he would quit his right and title to 
 Sherborne, he neither could or would pass his bill of 
 restoration.' 
 
 Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, ' urged/ 
 he says, ' the justness of his cause ; that he desired 
 only the liberty of the subject, and to be left to the 
 law, which was never denied any freeman/ The king 
 remained obstinate. His noble brother's love for the 
 mighty dead weighed nothing with him, much less 
 justice. Poor young Raleigh was forced to submit. 
 The act for his restoration was passed, reserving Sher- 
 borne for Lord Bristol, and Charles patched up the 
 scoundrelly affair, by allowing to Lady Raleigh and her 
 son after her, a life pension of four hundred a year. 
 
 Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a 
 note of bitterness; though he professes his intent to 
 range himself and his two sons for the future ' under 
 the banner of the Commons of England/ he may be a 
 royalist for any word beside. Even where he mentions 
 the awful curse of his mother, he only alludes to its 
 fulfilment by ' that which hath happened since to that 
 royal family, is too sad and disastrous for me to repeat, 
 and yet too visible not to be discerned.' We can have 
 no doubt that he tells the exact truth. Indeed the 
 whole story fits Charles's character to the smallest de- 
 tails. The want of any real sense of justice, combined 
 with the false notion of honour; the implacable ob- 
 stinacy ; the contempt for that law by which alone he 
 held his crown ; the combination of unkingly meanness 
 in commanding a private interview, and shamelessness 
 in confessing his own rascality all these are true notes
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 109 
 
 of the man whose deliberate suicide stands written, a 
 warning to all bad rulers till the end of time. But 
 he must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy 
 rogue too. That ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol's 
 money should make many a sentimentalist reconsider 
 (if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made to reconsider, 
 or even to consider, any thing) their notion of him as 
 the incarnation of pious chivalry. 
 
 At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear. 
 
 The widow's curse followed him home. Naseby 
 fight and the Whitehall scaffold were God's judgment 
 of such deeds, whatever man's may be.
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTEES. <; 
 
 THE cholera, as was to be expected, has reappeared 
 in England again ; and England, as was to be ex- 
 pected, has taken no sufficient steps towards meeting 
 it; so that if, as seems but too probable, the plague 
 should spread next summer, we may count with tole- 
 rable certainty upon a loss of some ten thousand lives. 
 
 That ten thousand, or one thousand, innocent people 
 should die, of whom most, if not all, might be saved 
 alive, would seem at first sight a matter serious enough 
 for the attention of ' philanthropists.' Those who abhor 
 the practice of hanging one man would, one fancies, 
 abhor equally that of poisoning many ; and would pro- 
 test as earnestly against the painful capital punishment 
 of diarrhoea as against the painless one of hempen rope. 
 Those who demand mercy for the Sepoy, and immunity 
 for the Coolie women of Delhi, unsexed by their own 
 brutal and shameless cruelty, would, one fancies, de- 
 mand mercy also for the British workman, and immu- 
 nity for his wife and family. One is therefore some- 
 what startled at finding that the British nation reserves 
 to itself, though it forbids to its armies, the right of 
 putting to death unarmed and unoffending men, women, 
 and children. 
 
 After further consideration, however, one finds that 
 there are, as usual, two sides to the question. One is 
 bound, indeed, to believe, even before proof, that there 
 are two sides. It cannot be without good and suffi- 
 
 * FBASEB'S MAGAZINE, No. CCCXXXVII.
 
 ' A MAD WOULD, MY MASTERS.' .HI 
 
 cient reason that the British public remains all but 
 indifferent to sanitary reform ; that though the science 
 of epidemics, as a science, has been before the world 
 for more than twenty years, nobody believes in it 
 enough to act upon it, save some few dozen of fanatics, 
 some of whom have (it cannot be denied) a direct pecu- 
 niary interest in disturbing what they choose to term the 
 poison-manufactories of free and independent Britons. 
 
 Yes; we should surely respect the exprest will and 
 conviction of the most practical of nations, arrived at 
 after the experience of three choleras, stretching over a 
 whole generation. Public opinion has declared against 
 the necessity of sanitary reform : and is not public opi- 
 nion known to be, in these last days, the IthurieFs spear 
 which is to unmask and destroy all the follies, super- 
 stitions, and cruelties of the universe ? The immense 
 majority of the British nation will neither cleanse them- 
 selves nor let others cleanse them : and are we not 
 governed by majorities? Are not majorities, con- 
 fessedly, always in the right, even when smallest, and 
 a show of hands a surer test of truth than any amount 
 of wisdom, learning, or virtue ? How much more, 
 then, when a whole free people is arrayed, in the calm 
 magnificence of self-confident conservatism, against a 
 few innovating and perhaps sceptical philosophasters ? 
 Then surely, if ever, vox populi is vox coeli. 
 
 And, in fact, when we come to examine the first 
 and commonest objection against sanitary reformers, we 
 find it perfectly correct. They are said to be theorists, 
 dreamers of the study, who are ignorant of human 
 nature ; and who in their materialist optimism, have 
 forgotten the existence of moral evil till they almost 
 fancy at times that they can set the world right simply 
 by righting its lowest material arrangements. The 
 complaint is perfectly true. They have been ignorant 
 of human nature ; they have forgotten the existence of
 
 112 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 moral evil ; and if any religious periodical should com- 
 plain of their denying original sin, they can only answer 
 that they did in past years fall into that folly, but that 
 subsequent experience has utterly convinced them of 
 the truth of the doctrine. 
 
 For, misled by this ignorance of human nature, they 
 expected help, from time to time, from various classes 
 of the community, from whom no help (as they ought 
 to have known at first) is to be gotten. Some, as a 
 fact, expected the assistance of the clergy, and especially 
 of the preachers of those denominations who believe that 
 every human being, by the mere fact of his birth into 
 this world, is destined to endless torture after death, 
 unless the preacher can find an opportunity to deliver 
 him therefrom before he dies. They supposed that to 
 such preachers the mortal lives of men would be inex- 
 pressibly precious ; that any science which held out a 
 prospect of retarding death in the case of ' lost mil- 
 lions' would be hailed as a heavenly boon, and would 
 be carried out with the fervour of men who felt that 
 for the souVs sake no exertion was too great in behalf 
 of the body. 
 
 A little more reflection would have quashed their 
 vain hope. They would have recollected that each of 
 these preachers was already connected with a congre- 
 gation ; that he had already a hold on them, and they on 
 him ; that he was bound to provide for their spiritual 
 wants before going forth to seek for fresh objects of 
 his ministry. They would have recollected that on 
 the old principle (and a very sound one), of a bird in 
 the hand being worth two in the bush, the minister of 
 a congregation would feel it his duty, as well as his in- 
 terest, not to defraud his flock of his labours by spending 
 valuable time on a secular subject like sanitary reform, 
 in the hope of possibly preserving a few human beings,
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 113 
 
 whose souls he might hereafter (and that again would 
 be merely a possibility) benefit. 
 
 They would have recollected, again, that these con- 
 gregations are almost exclusively composed of those 
 classes who have little or nothing to fear from epi- 
 demics, and (what is even more important) who would 
 have to bear the expenses of sanitary improvements. 
 But so sanguine, so reckless of human conditions had 
 their theories made them, that they actually expected 
 that parish rectors, already burdened with over-work 
 and vestry quarrels nay, even that preachers who got 
 their bread by pew-rents, and whose life-long struggle 
 was, therefore, to keep those pews filled, and those 
 renters in good humour should astound the respect- 
 able house-owners and rate-payers who sat beneath them 
 by the appalling words, ' You, and not the visitation 
 of God, are the cause of epidemics ; and of you, now 
 that you are once fairly warned of your responsibility, 
 will your brothers' blood be required.' Conceive Sani- 
 tary Reformers expecting this of ' ministers/ let their 
 denomination be what it might many of the poor men, 
 too, with a wife and seven children ! Truly has it 
 been said, that nothing is so cruel as the unreasonable- 
 ness of a fanatic. 
 
 They forgot, too, that sanitary science, like geology, 
 must be at first sight ' suspect* in the eyes of the priests 
 of all denominations, at least till they shall have ar- 
 rived at a much higher degree of culture than they now 
 possess. 
 
 Like geology, it interferes with that Deus e machina 
 theory of human affairs which has been in all ages the 
 stronghold of priestcraft. That the Deity is normally 
 absent, and not present ; that He works on the world 
 by interference, and not by continuous laws ; that it is 
 the privilege of the priesthood to assign causes for these 
 
 VOL. I. I
 
 114 ( A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 'judgments' and ' visitations' of the Almighty, and to 
 tell mankind why He is angry with them, and has 
 broken the laws of nature to punish them ; this, in 
 every age, has seemed to the majority of priests a doc- 
 trine to be defended at all hazards ; for without it, so 
 they hold, their occupation were gone at once.* No 
 wonder, then, if they view with jealousy a set of lay- 
 men attributing these < judgments' to purely chemical 
 laws, and to misdoings and ignorance which have as 
 yet no place in the ecclesiastical catalogue of sins. 
 True, it may be that the Sanitary Reformers are right : 
 but they had rather not think so. And it is very easy 
 not to think so. They only have to ignore, to avoid 
 examining the facts. Their canon of utility is a pecu- 
 liar one ; and with facts which do not come under that 
 canon they have no concern. It may be true, for in- 
 stance, that the eighteenth century, which to the clergy 
 is a period of scepticism, darkness, and spiritual death, 
 is the very century which saw more done for science, 
 for civilization, for agriculture, for manufacture, for the 
 prolongation and support of human life, than any pre- 
 ceding one for a thousand years and more. What 
 matter? That is a ' secular' question, of which they 
 need know nothing. And sanitary reform (if true) is 
 just such another ; a matter (as slavery has been seen 
 to be by the preachers of the United States) for the 
 legislator, and not for those whose kingdom is ' not of 
 this world.' 
 
 Others again expected, with equal wisdom, the as- 
 sistance of the political economist. The fact is unde- 
 
 * A most honourable exception to this rule is a sermon by the 
 Rev. C. Richson, of Manchester, on the Sanitary Laws of the Old 
 Testament, with notes by Dr. Sutherland.
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 115 
 
 niable, but at the same time inexplicable. What they 
 could have found in the doctrines of most modern 
 political economists which should lead them to suppose 
 that human life would be precious in their eyes, is un- 
 known to the writer of these pages. Those whose 
 bugbear has been over-population, whose motto has 
 been an euphuistic version of 
 
 The more the merrier ; bat the fewer the better fare, 
 
 cannot be expected to lend their aid in increasing the 
 population by saving the lives of two-thirds of the 
 children who now die prematurely in our great cities ; 
 and so still further overcrowding this unhappy land 
 with those helpless and expensive sources of national 
 poverty rational human beings, in strength and health. 
 Moreover and this point is worthy of serious atten- 
 tion that school of political economy, which has now 
 reached its full development, has taken all along a view 
 of man's relation to nature diametrically opposite to 
 that taken by the Sanitary Reformer, or indeed by any 
 other men of science. The Sanitary Reformer holds, 
 in common with the chemist or the engineer, that 
 Nature is to be obeyed only in order to conquer her; 
 that man is to discover the laws of her existing pheno- 
 mena, in order that he may employ them to create new 
 phenomena himself; to turn the laws which he discovers 
 to his own use; if need be, to counteract one by an- 
 other. In this power, it has seemed to them, lay his 
 dignity as a rational being. It was this, the power of 
 invention, which made him a progressive animal, not 
 bound as the bird and the bee are, to build exactly as 
 his forefathers built five thousand years ago. 
 
 By political economy alone has this faculty been 
 denied to man. In it alone he is not to conquer nature, 
 
 I 2
 
 116 1 A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 but simply to obey her. Let her starve him, make him 
 a slave, a bankrupt, or what not, he must submit, as 
 the savage does to the hail and the lightning. ' Laissez- 
 faire/ says the ' Science du neaut/ the ' Science de 
 la misere/ as it has truly and bitterly been called ; 
 ' Laissez-faire/ Analyse economic questions if you 
 will : but, beyond analysis you shall not step. Any 
 attempt to raise the political economy to its synthetic 
 stage is to break the laws of nature, to fight against 
 facts as if facts were not made to be fought against 
 and conquered, and put out of the way, whensoever they 
 interfere in the least with the welfare of any human 
 being. The drowning man is not to strike out for his 
 life, lest by keeping his head above water he inter- 
 fere with the laws of gravitation. Not that the poli- 
 tical economist, or any man, can be true to his own 
 fallacy. He must needs try his hand at the synthetic 
 method, though he forbids it to the rest of the world : 
 but the only deductive hint which he has as yet given 
 to mankind is, quaintly enough, the most unnatural 
 ' eidolon specuV which ever entered the head of a dehu- 
 manized pedant namely, that once famous ' Pre- 
 ventive Check/ which, if a nation did ever apply it as 
 it never will could issue, as every doctor knows, in 
 nothing less than the questionable habits of abortion, 
 child-murder, and unnatural crime. 
 
 The only explanation of such conduct (though one 
 which the men themselves will hardly accept) is this 
 that they secretly share somewhat in the doubt which 
 many educated men have of the correctness of their 
 inductions; that these same laws of political economy 
 (where they leave the plain and safe subject-matter 
 of trade) have been arrived at somewhat too hastily ; 
 that they are, in plain English, not quite sound enough
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 117 
 
 yet to build upon; and that we must wait for a few 
 more facts before we begin any theories. Be it so. 
 At least these men, in their present temper of mind, 
 are not likely to be very useful to the Sanitary Re- 
 former. 
 
 "Would that these men, or the clergy had been the 
 only bruised reed in which the Sanitary Reformers put 
 their trust. They found another reed, however, and 
 that was public opinion : but they forgot that (what- 
 ever the stump-orators may say about this being the 
 age of electric thought, when truth flashes triumphant 
 from pole to pole, &c.) we have no proof whatsoever that 
 the proportion of fools is less in this generation than 
 in those before it, or that truth, when unpalatable (as 
 it almost always is), travels any faster than it did five 
 hundred years ago. They forgot that every social im- 
 provement, and most mechanical ones, have had to make 
 their way against laziness, ignorance, envy, vested 
 wrongs, vested superstitions, and the whole vis inertias 
 of the world, the flesh, and the devil. They were guilty 
 indeed, in this case, not merely of ignorance of human 
 nature, but of forgetfulness of fact. Did they not 
 know that the excellent New Poor-law was greeted with 
 the curses of those very farmers and squires who now 
 not only carry it out lovingly and willingly to the very 
 letter, but are often too ready to resist any improvement 
 or relaxation in it which may be proposed by that very 
 Poor-law Board from which it emanated ? Did they 
 not know that agricultural science, though of sixty 
 years' steady growth, has not yet penetrated into a third 
 of the farms of England ; and that hundreds of farmers 
 still dawdle on after the fashion of their forefathers, 
 when by looking over the next hedge into their neigh- 
 bour^ field they might double their produce and
 
 118 
 
 their profits ? Did they not know that the adaptation 
 of steam to machinery would have progressed just 
 as slowly, had it not been a fact patent to babies that 
 an engine is stronger than a horse ; and that if cotton, 
 like wheat and beef, had taken twelve months to manu- 
 facture, instead of five minutes, Manchester foresight 
 would probably have been as short and as purblind as 
 that of the British farmer? What right had they to 
 expect a better reception for the facts of sanitary science? 
 facts which ought to, and ultimately will, disturb the 
 vested interests of thousands, will put them to incon- 
 venience, possibly at first to great expense ; and yet 
 facts which you can neither see nor handle, but must 
 accept and pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for, 
 on the mere word of a doctor or inspector who gets his 
 living thereby. Poor John Bull ! To expect that you 
 would accept such a gospel cheerfully was indeed to ex- 
 pect too much ! 
 
 But yet, though the public opinion of the mass 
 could not be depended on, there was a body left, 
 distinct from the mass, and priding itself so much on 
 that distinctness that it was ready to say at times of 
 course in more courteous at least in what it considered 
 more Scriptural language ' This people which kuoweth 
 not the law is accursed/ To it therefore to the reli- 
 gious world some over-sanguine Sanitary Reformers 
 turned their eyes. They saw in it ready organized (so 
 it professed), for all good works, a body such as the 
 world had never seen before. Where the religious 
 public of Byzantium, Alexandria, or Rome numbered 
 hundreds, that of England numbered its thousands. 
 It was divided, indeed, on minor points, but it was 
 surely united by the one aim of saving every man his 
 own soul, and of professing the deepest reverence for
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 119 
 
 that Divine Book which tells men that the way to at- 
 tain that aim is, to be good and to do good ; and which 
 contains among other commandments this one ' Thou 
 shalt not kill/ Its wealth was enormous. It possest 
 so much political power, that it would have been able 
 to command elections, to compel ministries, to encou- 
 rage the weak hearts of willing but fearful clergymen by 
 fair hopes of deaneries and bishoprics. Its members 
 were no clique of unpractical fanatics, no men less. 
 Though it might number among them a few martinet 
 ex-post-captains, and noblemen of questionable sanity, 
 capable of no more practical study than that of unful- 
 filled prophecy, the vast majority of them were land- 
 owners, merchants, bankers, commercial men of all 
 ranks, full of worldly experience, and of the science of 
 organization, skilled all their lives in finding and in 
 employing men and money. What might not be hoped 
 from such a body, to whom that commercial imperium 
 in imperio of the French Protestants which the edict 
 of Nantes destroyed was poor and weak ? Add to this 
 that these men's charities were boundless ; that they 
 were spending yearly, and on the whole spending wisely 
 and well, ten times as much as ever was spent before 
 in the world, on educational schemes, missionary 
 schemes, church building, reformatories, ragged schools, 
 needlewomen's charities what not. No object of dis- 
 tress, it seemed, could be discovered, no fresh means of 
 doing good devised, but these men's money poured 
 bountifully and at once into that fresh channel, and an 
 organization sprang up for the employment of that 
 money, as thrifty and as handy as was to be expected 
 from the money-holding classes of the great commer- 
 cial nation. 
 
 "What could not these men do ? "What were they
 
 120 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 not bound by their own principles to do ? No wonder 
 that some weak men's hearts beat high at the thought. 
 What if the religious world should take up the cause of 
 Sanitary Reform ? What if they should hail with joy 
 a cause in which all, whatever their theological differ- 
 ences, might join in one sacred crusade against dirt, 
 degradation, disease, and death ? What if they should 
 rise at the hustings to inquire of every candidate, ' Will 
 you or will you not, pledge yourself to carry out Sani- 
 tary Reform in the place for which you are elected, and 
 let the health and the lives of the local poor be that 
 ' local interest' which you are bound by your election 
 to defend ? Do you confess your ignorance of the 
 subject ? Then know, Sir, that you are unfit, at this 
 point of the nineteenth century, to be a member of the 
 British Senate. You go thither to make laws ' for the 
 preservation of life and property/ You confess yourself 
 ignorant of those physical laws, stronger and wider 
 than any which you can make, upon which all human 
 life depends, by infringing which the whole property of 
 a district is depreciated. Again, what might not the 
 ' religious world/ and the public opinion of ' pro- 
 fessing Christians/ have done in the last twenty ay, in 
 the last three years ? 
 
 What it has done, is too patent to need comment 
 here. 
 
 The reasons of so strange an anomaly are to be ap- 
 proached with caution. It is a serious thing to impute 
 motives to a vast body of men, of whom the majority 
 are really respectable, kind- hearted, and useful ; and 
 if in giving one's deliberate opinion one seems to blame 
 them, let it be recollected that the blame -lies not so 
 much on them as on their teachers : on those who, for 
 some reasons best known to themselves, have truckled
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 121 
 
 to, and even justified, the self-satisfied ignorance of a 
 comfortable monied class. 
 
 But let it be said, and said boldly, that these men's 
 conduct in the matter of sanitary reform seems at 
 least to show that they value virtue, not for itself, but 
 for its future rewards. To the great majority of these 
 men (with some heroic exceptions, whose names may 
 be written in no subscription list, but are surely written 
 in the book of life) the great truth has never been 
 revealed, that good is the one thing to be done, at all 
 risks, for its own sake; that good is absolutely and 
 infinitely better than evil, whether it pay or not to all 
 eternity. Ask one of them. ' Is it better to do right 
 and go to hell, or do wrong and go to heaven?' they 
 will look at you puzzled, half angry, suspecting you of 
 some secret blasphemy, and, if hard prest, put off the 
 new and startling question by saying, that it is absurd 
 to talk of an impossible hypothesis. The human 
 portion of their virtue is not mercenary, for they are 
 mostly worthy men ; the religious part thereof, that 
 which they keep for Sundays and for charitable insti- 
 tutions, is too often mercenary, though they know it 
 not. Their religion is too often one of ' loss and gain/ 
 as much as Father Newman's own ; and their actions, 
 whether they shall call them ' good works ' or ' fruits 
 of faith,' are so much spiritual capital, to be repaid 
 with interest at the last day. 
 
 Therefore, like all religionists, they are most anxious 
 for those schemes of good which seem most profitable 
 to themselves and to the denomination to which they 
 belong ; and the best of all such works is, of course, 
 as with all religionists, the making of proselytes. They 
 really care for the bodies, but still they care more 
 for the souls, of those whom they assist and not
 
 122 4 A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 wrongly either, were it not that to care for a man's 
 soul usually means, in the religious world, to make him 
 think with you ; at least to lay him under such obli- 
 gations as to give you spiritual power over him. There- 
 fore it is that all religious charities in England are 
 more and more conducted, just as much as those of 
 Jesuits and Oratorians, with an ulterior view of pro- 
 selytism ; therefore it is that the religious world, though 
 it has invented, perhaps, no new method of doing good ; 
 though it has been indebted for educational movements, 
 prison visitations, infant schools, ragged schools, and so 
 forth, to Quakers, cobblers, even in some cases to men 
 whom they call infidels, have gladly adopted each and 
 every one of them, as fresh means of enlarging the 
 influence or the numbers of their own denominations, 
 and of baiting for the body in order to catch the soul. 
 A fair sample of too much of their labour may be seen 
 anywhere, in those tracts in which the prettiest stories, 
 with the prettiest binding and pictures, on the most 
 secular even, sometimes, scientific of subjects, end 
 by a few words of pious exhortation, inserted by a 
 different hand from that which indites the carnal mass 
 of the book. They did not invent the science, or the 
 art of story-telling, or the woodcutting, or the plan of 
 getting books up prettily or, indeed, the notion of 
 instructing the masses at all ; but finding these things 
 in the hands of ' the world/ they have ' spoiled the 
 Egyptians/ and fancy themselves beating Satan with 
 his own weapons. 
 
 If, indeed, these men claimed boldly all printing, 
 all woodcutting, all story-telling, all human arts and 
 sciences, as gifts from God himself; and said, as the 
 book which they quote so often says, 'The Spirit of 
 God gives man understanding, these, too, are His 
 gifts, sacred, miraculous, to be accounted for to Him ;'
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 123 
 
 then they would be consistent ; and then, too, they 
 would have learnt, perhaps, to claim sanitary science 
 for a gift divine as any other : but nothing, alas ! is as 
 yet further from their creed. And therefore it is that 
 sanitary reform finds so little favour in their eyes. 
 You have so little in it to show for your work. You 
 may think you have saved the lives of hundreds; but 
 you cannot put your finger on one of them : and they 
 know you not ; know not even their own danger, much 
 ?ess your beneficence. Therefore, you have no lien on 
 them, not even that of gratitude ; you cannot say to a 
 man, ' I have prevented you having typhus, therefore 
 you must attend my chapel. 5 No ! sanitary reform 
 makes no proselytes. Tt cannot be used as a religious 
 engine. It is too simply human, too little a respecter 
 of persons, too like to the works of Him who causes 
 His sun to shine on the evil and the good, and His 
 rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good 
 to the unthankful and to the evil, to find much favour 
 in the eyes of a generation which will compass sea and 
 land to make one proselyte. 
 
 Yes. Too like the works of our Father in heaven, 
 as indeed all truly natural and human science needs 
 must be. True, to those who believed that there is a 
 Father in heaven, this would, one supposes, be the 
 highest recommendation. But how many of this 
 generation believe that? Is not their doctrine, the 
 doctrine to testify for which the religious world exists, 
 the doctrine which if you deny, you are met with one 
 universal frown and snarl that man has no Father in 
 heaven : but that if he becomes a member of the religious 
 world, by processes varying with each denomination, he 
 may strange paradox create a Father for himself ? 
 
 But so it is. The religious world has lost the 
 belief which even the elder Greeks and Romans had,
 
 124 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 of a ' Zeus, Father of gorls and men.' Even that it 
 has lost. Therefore have man, and the simple human 
 needs of man, no sacredness in their eyes ; therefore is 
 nature to them no longer ' the will of God exprest in 
 facts/ and to break a law of nature no longer to sin 
 against him who ' looked on all that He had made, and 
 behold, it was very good.' And yet they read their 
 Bibles, and believe that they believe in Him who 
 stood by the lake-side in Galilee, and told men that 
 not a sparrow fell to the ground without their Father's 
 knowledge and that they were of more value than 
 many sparrows. Do those words now seem to some so 
 self-evident as to be needless ? They will never seem 
 so to the Sanitary Reformer, who has called on the 
 1 British Public ' to exert themselves in saving the 
 lives of thousands yearly ; and has received practical 
 answers which will furnish many a bitter jest for the 
 Voltaire of the next so-called ' age of unbelief/ or fill 
 a sad, but an instructive chapter in some future en- 
 larged edition of Adelung's ' History of Human Folly/ 
 
 All but despairing, Sanitary Reformers have turned 
 again and again to her Majesty's Government. Alas 
 for them. The Government was ready and willing 
 enough to help. The wicked world said ' Of course. 
 It will create a new department. It will give them 
 more places to bestow : ' but the real reason of the 
 \villingness of Government seems to be that those who 
 compose it are thoroughly awake to the importance of 
 the subject. 
 
 But what can a poor Government do, whose strength 
 consists (as that of all English Governments must) in 
 not seeming too strong ; which is allowed to do any- 
 thing, only on condition of doing the minimum ? Of 
 course, a government is morally bound to keep itself 
 in existence ; for is it not bound to believe that it can
 
 C A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 125 
 
 govern the country better than any other knot of men ? 
 But its only chance of self-preservation is to know, 
 \vith Hesiod's wise man, ' how much better the half is 
 than the whole/ and to throw over many a measure 
 which it would like to carry, for the sake of saving the 
 few which it can carry. 
 
 An English Government, now-a-days, is simply at 
 the mercy of the forty or fifty members of the 
 House of Commons who are crotchety enough or 
 dishonest enough to put it unexpectedly in a mi- 
 nority; and they, with the vast majority of the 
 House, are becoming more and more the delegates of 
 that very class which is most opposed to sanitary 
 reform. The honourable member goes to Parliament 
 not to express his opinions (for he has stated most 
 distinctly at the last election that he has no opinions 
 whatsoever), but to protect the local interests of his 
 constituents. And the great majority of those consti- 
 tuents are small houseowners the poorer portion of 
 the middle class. Were he to support Government in 
 anything like a sweeping measure of sanitary reform, 
 woe to his seat at the next election ; and he knows it ; 
 and therefore, even if he allow the Government to have 
 its Central Board of Health, he will take good care, 
 for his own sake, that the said Board shall not do too 
 much, and that it shall not compel his constituents to 
 do anything at all. 
 
 No wonder, that while the attitude of the House of 
 Commons is such toward a matter which involves the 
 lives of thousands yearly, some educated men should 
 be crying that representative institutions are on their 
 trial, and should sigh for a strong despotism. 
 
 There is an answer, nevertheless, to such sentiment- 
 alists, and one hopes that people will see the answer 
 for themselves, and that the infection of Imperialism,
 
 126 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 which seems spreading somewhat rapidly, will be 
 stopped by common sense and honest observation of 
 facts. 
 
 A despotism doubtless could carry out sanitary re- 
 form : but doubtless, also, it would not. 
 
 A despot iu the nineteenth century knows well how 
 insecure his tenure is. His motto must be, 'Let us 
 eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ; ' and, therefore, 
 the first objects of his rule will be, private luxury and 
 a standing army ; while, if he engage in public works, 
 for the sake of keeping the populace quiet, they will 
 be certain not to be such as will embroil him with the 
 middle classes, while they will win him no additional 
 favour with the masses, utterly unaware of their neces- 
 sity. Would the masses of Paris have thanked Louis 
 Napoleon the more if, instead of completing the Tuil- 
 eries, he had sewered the St. Antoine ? All argu- 
 ments to the contrary are utterly fallacious, which are 
 drawn from ancient despotisms, Roman, Eastern, Pe- 
 ruvian, or other ; and for this simple reason, that they 
 had no middle class. If they did work well (which is 
 a question), it was just because they had no middle 
 class that class, which in a free State, is the very 
 life of a nation, and yet which, in a despotism, is sure 
 to be the root of its rottenness. For a despot who 
 finds, as Louis Napoleon has done, a strong middle 
 class already existing, must treat it as he does ; he 
 must truckle to it, pander to its basest propensities, 
 seem to make himself its tool, in order that he may 
 make it his. For the sake of his own life, he must do 
 it; and were a despot to govern England to-morrow, 
 we should see that the man who was shrewd enough 
 to have climbed to that bad eminence, would be shrewd 
 enough to know that he could scarcely commit a more
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 127 
 
 suicidal act than, by some despotic measure of sanitary 
 reform to excite the ill-will of all the most covetous, 
 the most stupid, and the most stubborn men in every 
 town of England. 
 
 There is another answer, too, to ' Imperialists ' who 
 talk of Representative institutions being on their trial, 
 and let it be made boldly just now. 
 
 It will be time to talk of representative institutions 
 being good or bad, when the people of England are 
 properly represented. 
 
 In the first place, it does seem only fair that the 
 class who suffer most from epidemics should have some 
 little share in the appointment of the men on whose 
 votes extermination of epidemics now mainly depends. 
 But that is too large a question to argue here. Let 
 the Government see to it in the coming session. 
 
 Yet how much soever, or how little soever, the 
 suffrage be extended in the direction of the working 
 man, let it be extended, at least in some equal degree, 
 in the direction of the educated man. Few bodies in 
 .England now express the opinions of educated men 
 less than does the present House of Commons. It is 
 not chosen by educated men, any more than it is by 
 proletaires. It is not, on an average, composed of 
 educated men ; and the many educated men who are 
 in it have, for the most part, to keep their knowledge 
 very much to themselves, for fear of hurting the feel- 
 ings of ' ten-pound Jack/ or of the local attorney who 
 looks after Jack's vote. And therefore the House of 
 Commons does not represent public opinion. 
 
 For, to enounce with fitting clearness a great but 
 much forgotten truth, To have an opinion, you must 
 have an opinion. 
 
 Strange : but true, and pregnant too. For, from it
 
 128 { A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 may be deduced this corollary, that nine-tenths of what 
 is called public opinion is no opinion at all ; for on the 
 matters which come under the cognizance of the House 
 of Commons (save where superstition, as in the case 
 of the Sabbath, or the Jew Bill, sets folks thinking 
 generally on the wrong side), nine people out of ten 
 have no opinion at all ; know nothing about the matter, 
 and care less ; wherefore, having no opinions to be re- 
 presented, it is not important whether that nothing 
 be represented or not. 
 
 The true public opinion of England is composed of 
 the opinions of the shrewd, honest, practical men in 
 her, whether educated or not ; and of such, thank God, 
 there are millions : but it consists also of the opinions 
 of the educated men in her ; men who have had leisure 
 and opportunity for study ; who have some chance of 
 knowing the future, because they have examined the 
 past ; who can compare England with other nations, 
 English creeds, laws, customs, with those of the rest of 
 mankind ; who know somewhat of humanity, human 
 progress, human existence ; who have been practised in 
 the processes of thought ; and who, from study, have 
 formed definite opinions, differing doubtless in infinite 
 variety, but still, all founded upon facts, by something 
 like fair and scientific induction. 
 
 Till we have this class of men fairly represented in 
 the House of Commons, there is little hope for sanitary 
 reform : when it is so represented, we shall have no 
 reason to talk of representative institutions being on 
 their trial. 
 
 And it is one of the few hopeful features of the pre- 
 sent time, that an attempt is at last being made to 
 secure for educated men of all professions a fair terri- 
 torial representation. A memorial to the Government 
 has been presented, appended to which, in very great
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 129 
 
 numbers, are the names of men of note, of all ranks, 
 all shades in politics and religion, all professions, legal, 
 clerical, military, medical, and literary. A list of 
 names representing so much intellect, so much learn- 
 ing, so much acknowledged moderation, so much good 
 work already done and acknowledged by the country, 
 has never, perhaps, been collected for any political 
 purpose ; and if their scheme (the details of which are 
 not yet made public) should in anywise succeed, it will 
 do more for the prospects of sanitary reform than any 
 forward movement of the last quarter of a century. 
 
 For if sanitary reform, or perhaps any really pro- 
 gressive measure, is to be carried out henceforth, we 
 must go back to something like the old principle of the 
 English constitution, by which intellect, as such, had 
 its proper share in the public councils. During those 
 middle ages when all, the intellect and learning was 
 practically possest by the clergy, they constituted a 
 separate estate of the realm. This was the old plan 
 the best which could be then devised. After learning 
 became common to the laity, the educated classes were 
 represented more and more only by such clever young 
 men as could be thrust into Parliament by the private 
 patronage of the aristocracy. Since the last Reform 
 Bill, even that supply of talent has been cut off; and 
 the consequence has been, the steady deterioration of 
 our House of Commons toward such a level of medio- 
 crity as shall satisfy the ignorance of the practically 
 electing majority, namely, the tail of the middle class ; 
 men who are apt to possess all the failings with few of 
 the virtues of those above them and below them ; who 
 have no more intellectual training than the simple 
 working man, and far less than the average shopman, 
 and who yet lose, under the influence of a small com- 
 petence, that practical training which gives to the 
 
 VOL. i. K
 
 130 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 working man, made strong by wholesome necessity, 
 chivalry, endurance, courage, and self-restraint ; whose 
 business morality is made up of the lowest and nar- 
 rowest maxims of the commercial world, unbalanced 
 by that public spirit, that political knowledge, that 
 practical energy, that respect for the good opinion of 
 his fellows, which elevate the large employer. On the 
 hustings, of course, this description of the average free 
 and independent elector would be called a calumny ; 
 and yet, where is the member of Parliament who will 
 not, in his study, assent to its truth, and confess, that 
 of all men whom he meets, those who least command 
 his respect are those among his constituents to secure 
 whom he takes most trouble ; unless, indeed, it be the 
 pettifoggers who manage his election for him ? 
 
 Whether this is the class to whose public opinion 
 the health and lives of the masses are to be entrusted, 
 is a question which should be settled as soon as 
 possible. 
 
 Meanwhile let every man who would awake to the 
 importance of sanitary questions, do his best to teach 
 and preach, in season and out of season, and to in- 
 struct, as far as he can, that public opinion which is as 
 yet but public ignorance. Let him throw, for instance, 
 what weight he has into the 'National Association for 
 the Advancement of Social Science.' In it he will 
 learn, as well as teach, not only on sanitary reforms, 
 but upon those cognate questions which must be con- 
 sidered with it, if it is ever to be carried out. 
 
 Indeed, this new * National Association ' seems the 
 most hopeful and practical move yet made by the saiii- 
 tarists. It may be laughed at somewhat at first, as the 
 British Association was"; but the world will find after 
 a while that, like the British Association, it can do 
 great things towards moulding public opinion, and
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 131 
 
 compel men to consider certain subjects, simply by 
 accustoming people to hear them mentioned. The 
 Association will not have existed in vain, if it only 
 removes that dull fear and suspicion with which 
 Englishmen are apt to regard a new subject, simply 
 because it is new. But the Association will do far 
 more than that. It has wisely not confined itself to 
 any one branch of social science, but taken the subject 
 in all its complexity. To do otherwise, would have 
 been to cripple itself. It would have shut out 
 many subjects Law Reform, for instance which are 
 necessary adjuncts to any sanitary scheme ; while it 
 would have shut out that very large class of benevolent 
 people who have as yet been devoting their energies to 
 prisons, workhouses, and schools. Such will now have 
 an opportunity of learning that they have been treat- 
 ing the symptoms of social disease rather than the 
 disease itself. They will see that vice is rather the 
 effect than the cause of physical misery, and that the 
 surest mode of attacking it, is to improve the physical 
 conditions of the lower classes ; to abolish foul air, 
 fouled water, foul lodging, and overcrowded dwellings, 
 in which morality is difficult, and common decency im- 
 possible. They will not give up Heaven forbid that 
 they should give up their special good works ! but 
 they will surely throw the weight of their names, their 
 talents, their earnestness, into the great central object 
 of preserving human life, as soon as they shall have 
 recognised that prevention is better than cure ; and 
 that the simple and one method of prevention is, to 
 give the working man his rights. Water, air, light. 
 A right to these three at least he has. In demanding 
 them, he demands no more than God gives freely to 
 the wild beast of the forest. Till society has given 
 him them, it does him an injustice in demanding of 
 
 K 3
 
 132 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 
 
 him that he should be a useful member of society. If 
 he is expected to be a man, let him at least be put on 
 a level with the brutes. When the benevolent of the 
 land (and they may be numbered by tens of thousands) 
 shall once have learnt this plain and yet awful truth, a 
 vast upward step will have been gained. Because this 
 new Association will teach it them, during the next 
 ten or twenty years, may God's blessing be on it, and 
 on the noble old man who presides over it. Often 
 already has he deserved well of his country; but never 
 better than now, when he has lent his great name and 
 great genius to the object of preserving human life 
 from wholesale destruction by unnecessary poison. 
 
 And meanwhile let the sanitary reformer work and 
 wait. ' Go not after the world/ said a wise man, ' for 
 it thou stand still long enough, the world will come 
 round to thee.' And to sanitary reform the world 
 will come round at last. Grumbling, scoffing, cursing 
 its benefactors; boasting at last, as usual, that it dis- 
 covered for itself the very truths which it tried to 
 silence, it will come ; and will be glad at last to accept 
 the one sibylline leaf, at the same price at which it 
 might have had the whole. The Sanitary reformer 
 must make up his mind to see no fruit of his labours, 
 much less thanks or reward. He must die in faith, as 
 St. Paul says all true men die, ' not having received 
 the promises ;* worn out, perhaps, by ill-paid and un- 
 appreciated labour, as that truest-hearted and most 
 unselfish of men, Charles Robert Walsh, died but two 
 years ago. But his works will follow him not, as the 
 preachers tell him, to heaven for of what use would 
 they be there, to him or to mankind ? but here on 
 earth, where he set them, that they might go on in his 
 path, after his example, and prosper and triumph long 
 years after he is dead, when his memory shall be blessed
 
 'A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.' 133 
 
 by generations not merely ' yet unborn/ but who never 
 would have been born at all, had he not inculcated 
 into their unwilling fathers the simplest laws of 
 physical health, decency, life laws which the wild cat 
 of the wood, burying its own excrement apart from its 
 lair, has learnt by the light of nature ; but which 
 neither nature nor God himself can as yet teach to a 
 selfish, perverse, and hypocritical generation.
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 1 
 
 SO, ray friend : you ask me to tell you how I contrive 
 to support this monotonous country life ; how, fond 
 as I am of excitement, adventure, society, scenery, art, 
 literature, I go cheerfully through the daily routine of 
 a commonplace country profession, never requiring a 
 six- weeks' holiday : not caring to see the Continent, 
 hardly even to spend a day in London; having never 
 yet actually got to Paris. 
 
 You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round 
 me, whose talk is of bullocks as indeed mine is often 
 enough ; why I am not by this time ' all over blue 
 mould ;' why I have not been tempted to bury myself in 
 my study, and live a life of dreams among old books. 
 
 I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher. I am 
 possibly, after all, a man of small mind, content with 
 small pleasures. So much the better for me. Mean- 
 while, I can understand your surprise, though you 
 cannot understand my content. You have played a 
 greater game than mine ; have lived a life, perhaps 
 more fit for an Englishman ; certainly more in accord- 
 ance with the taste of our common fathers, the Vikings, 
 and their patron Odin ' the goer/ father of all them 
 that go ahead. You have gone ahead, and over many 
 lands; and I reverence you for it, though I envy you 
 not. You have commanded a regiment indeed an 
 army, and ' drank delight of battle with your peers ;' 
 
 * FBASEB'S MAGAZINE, January, 1858.
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 135 
 
 you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judg- 
 ment, like a noble Englishman as you are, old friend, 
 among thousands who never knew before what justice 
 and judgment were. You have tasted (and you have 
 deserved to taste) the joy of old David's psalm, when 
 he has hunted down the last of the robber lords of 
 Palestine. You have seen ' a people whom you have 
 not known, serve you. As soon as they heard of you, 
 they obeyed you ; but the strange children dissembled 
 with you :' yet before you, too, ' the strange children 
 failed, and trembled in their hill-forts/ 
 
 Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have 
 done it ; and I do not wonder that to a man who has 
 been set to such a task, and given power to carry it 
 through, all smaller work must seem paltry ; that such 
 a man's very amusements, in that grand Indian laud, 
 and that free adventurous Indian life, exciting the 
 imagination, calling out all the self-help and daring of 
 a man, should have been on a par with your work ; 
 that when you go a sporting, you ask for^no meaner 
 preserve than the primaeval forest, no lower park wall 
 than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya. 
 
 Yes ; you have been a ' burra Shikarree' as well as 
 a ' burra Sahib.' You have played the great game in 
 your work, and killed the great game in your play. 
 How many tons of mighty monsters have you done to 
 death, since we two were schoolboys together, five-and- 
 twenty years ago ? How many starving villages have 
 you fed with the flesh of elephant or buffalo ? How 
 many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or 
 wary old alligators, their craws full of poor girls' ban- 
 gles ? Have you not been charged by rhinoceroses, all 
 but ript up by boars ? Have you not seen face to face 
 Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheep pri- 
 maeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth?
 
 136 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 Your memories must be like those of Theseus and 
 Hercules, full of slain monsters. Your brains must be 
 one fossiliferous deposit, in which gaur and samburr, 
 hog and tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped to- 
 gether, as the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are 
 heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And therefore I 
 like to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to 
 myself. I spell over with my boy Mayne Reid's de- 
 lightful books, or the ( Old Forest Ranger/ or Williams's 
 old ' Tiger Book/ with Howitt's plates, and try to 
 realize the glory of a burra Shikarree; and as I read 
 and imagine, feel with Sir Hugh Evans, ' a great dis- 
 position to cry/ 
 
 For there were times, full many a year ago, when 
 my brains were full of bison and grizzly bear, mustang 
 and big-horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and hopes of wild 
 adventure in the Far West, which I shall never see ; 
 for ere I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly 
 enough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn my 
 bread in a very quiet way; that England was to be 
 henceforth my prison or my palace, as I should choose 
 to make it ; and I have made it, by Heaven's help, the 
 latter. 
 
 I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats 
 of youth, this little England or rather, this little 
 patch of moor in which I have struck roots as firm as 
 the wild fir-trees do looked at moments rather like a 
 prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart 
 would sigh, ' Oh ! that I had wings' not as a dove, to 
 fly home to its nest and croodle there but as an eagle, 
 to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and 
 self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back as 
 altogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the 
 thirst for adventure and excitement was strong in me, 
 as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 137 
 
 went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, 
 the glorious old worlds of the East why should not I ? 
 Others rambled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture- 
 galleries and palaces, filling their minds with fair memo- 
 ries why should not I ? Others discovered new wonders 
 in botany and zoology why should not I? Others too, 
 like you, fulfilled to the utmost that strange lust after the 
 burra shikar, which even now makes my pulse throb as 
 
 often as I see the stags' heads in our friend A 's 
 
 hall : why should not I ? It is not learnt in a day, the 
 golden lesson of the Old Collect, to ' love the thing 
 which is commanded, and desire that which is pro- 
 mised/ Not in a day : but in fifteen years one can 
 spell out a little of its worth ; and when one finds 
 one's self on the wrong side of forty, and the first 
 grey hairs begin to show on the temples, and one can 
 no longer jump as high as one's third button scarcely, 
 alas ! to any button at all ; and what with innumerable 
 sprains, bruises, soakings, and chillings, one's lower 
 limbs feel in a cold thaw much like an old post-horse's, 
 why, one makes a virtue of necessity : and if one still 
 lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for won- 
 ders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the 
 turf on the lawn and the brook in the park ; and with 
 good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in 
 one Tour autour de mon jardin. 
 
 For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of 
 nature in every tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to 
 see it, and can disabuse our minds of that tyrannous 
 phantom of size. Only recollect that great and small 
 are but relative terms ; that in truth nothing is great 
 or small, save in proportion to the quantity of creative 
 thought which has been exercised in making it ; that 
 the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stone- 
 henge, is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge
 
 138 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 together, though lie may measure the tenth of an inch, 
 and the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet. 
 You differ from me? Be it so. Even if you prove 
 me wrong I will believe myself in the right : I cannot 
 afford to do otherwise. If you rob me of my faith in 
 ' minute philosophy/ you rob me of a continual source 
 of content, surprise, delight. 
 
 So go your way and I mine, each working with all 
 his might, and playing with all his might, in his own 
 place and way. Remember only that though I never 
 can come round to your sphere, you must some day 
 come round to me, when wounds, or weariness, or 
 merely, as I hope, a healthy old age, shall shut you 
 out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether 
 human or quadruped. For you surely will not take to 
 politics in your old age? I shall not surely live to 
 see you (as I saw many a fine fellow woe's me ! last 
 year) soliciting the votes, not of the people, but of the 
 snobocracy, on the ground of your having neither 
 policy, nor principles, nor even opinions, upon any 
 matter in heaven or earth ? Then in that day will you 
 be forced, my friend, to do what I have done this many 
 a year; to refrain your soul, and keep it low. You 
 will see more and more the depth of human ignorance, 
 the vanity of human endeavours. You will feel more 
 and more that the world is going God's way, and not 
 yours, or mine, or any man's ; and that if you have 
 been allowed to do good work on earth, that work is 
 probably as different from what you fancy it as the 
 tree is from the seed whence it springs. You will 
 grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of 
 your labours ; because if you saw it you would probably 
 be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes 
 of God would not be very good in yours ; and content, 
 also, to receive your discharge, and work and fight no 
 more, sure that God is working and fighting, whether
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 139 
 
 you are in hospital or in the field. And with this 
 growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will 
 grow on you a respect for simple labours, a thankful- 
 ness for simple pleasures, a sympathy with simple 
 people, and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and 
 my little tours about that moorland which I call my 
 winter-garden, and which is to me as full of glory and 
 of instruction as the Himalaya or the Punjab are to 
 you, and in which I contrive to find as much health 
 and amusement as I have time for and who ought to 
 have more ? 
 
 I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in 
 any legal sense (for only in a few acres have I a life 
 interest), but in that higher sense in which ten thou- 
 sand people can own the same thing, and yet no man's 
 right interfere with another's. To whom does the 
 Apollo Belvedere belong, but to all who have eyes to 
 see its beauty? So does my winter-garden; and 
 therefore to me among the rest. 
 
 And there (which is a gain to a poor man) my 
 pleasure in it is a very cheap one. So are all those 
 of a minute philosopher, except his microscope. But 
 my winter-garden, which is far larger, at all events, 
 than that famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one 
 penny in keeping up. Poor, did I call myself? Is it 
 not true wealth to have all I want without paying for 
 it? Is it not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some 
 twenty gentlemen, and noblemen, nay, even royal per- 
 sonages, planting and improving for me? Is it not 
 more than royal wealth to have sun and frost, gulf- 
 stream and south-westers, laws of geology, phytology, 
 physiology, and other ologies in a word, the whole 
 universe and the powers thereof, day and night, paving, 
 planting, roofing, lighting, colouring my winter-garden 
 for me, without my even having the trouble to rub a 
 magic ring and tell the genie to go to work ?
 
 140 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. 
 In the doings of our little country neighbourhood I 
 find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too 
 sad, to be written down. In the words of those whose 
 talk is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possible 
 metaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to work 
 them out. In fifteen miles of moorland I find the 
 materials of all possible physical science, and long, too, 
 that I had time to work out one smallest segment of 
 that great sphere. How can I be richer, if I have 
 lying at my feet all day a thousand times more wealth 
 than I can use? 
 
 Some people most people in these run-about rail- 
 way days, would complain of such a life, in such a 
 ' narrow sphere/ so they call it, as monotonous. Very 
 likely it is so. But is it to be complained of on that 
 account ? Is monotony in itself an evil ? Which is 
 better, to know many places ill, or to know one place 
 well ? Certainly if a scientific habit of mind be a 
 gain it is only by exhausting as far as possible the 
 significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that 
 sentence a truly scientific one in its magniloquence?) 
 that you can discover any glimpse of the significance 
 of the universal. Even men of boundless knowledge, 
 like Humboldt, must have had once their speciality, 
 their pet subject, or they would have, strictly speaking, 
 no knowledge at all. The volcauos of Mexico, patiently 
 and laboriously investigated in his youth, were to 
 Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos. I 
 learn more, studying over and over again the same 
 Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should by roam- 
 ing all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. 
 Fifteen years have I been puzzling at the same ques- 
 tions and have only guessed at a few of the answers. 
 What sawed out the edges of the moors into long
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 141 
 
 narrow banks of gravel? What cut them off all flat 
 atop? What makes Erica ciliaris grow in one soil, 
 and the bracken in another? How did three species 
 of Club-moss one of them quite an Alpine one get 
 down here, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this 
 isolated patch of gravel? Why did that one patch of 
 Carex arenaria settle in the only square yard for miles 
 and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to its na- 
 tive sandhill by the seashore, to make it comfortable? 
 W r hy did Myosurus minimus, which I had hunted for 
 in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in the fif- 
 teenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at 
 least for two hundred years a farm-yard gateway? 
 Wny does it generally rain here from the south-west, 
 not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to 
 rise again ? Why why is everything, which lies under 
 my feet all day long ? I don't know ; and you can't 
 tell me. And till I have found out, I cannot complain 
 of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting 
 to be explained, and so to create novelty at every turn. 
 Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally plea- 
 sant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous : but 
 there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wed- 
 lock. Living in the same house is monotonous : but three 
 removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomo- 
 tion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, 
 as usual, is right. ' Those who travel by land or sea' 
 are to be objects of our pity and our prayers; and I 
 do pity them. I delight in that same monotony. It 
 saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, 
 and a host of bad passions. It gives a man the blessed 
 invigorating feeling that he is at home ; that he has 
 roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; 
 and that only the being who will do nothing cruel or 
 useless can tear them up. It is pleasant to look down
 
 142 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 on the same parish day after day, and say, T know all 
 that lies beneath, and all beneath know me. If I want a 
 friend, I know where to find him ; if I want work done, 
 I know who will do it. It is pleasant and good to see 
 the same trees year after year ; the same birds coming 
 back in spring to the same shrubs ; the same banks 
 covered with the same flowers, and broken (if they be stiff 
 ones) by the same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride 
 the same horse, to sit in the same chair, to wear the same 
 old coat. That man who offered twenty pounds re- 
 ward for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a sage, 
 and I wish I knew him. Why should one change one's 
 place, any more than one's wife or one's children ? Is 
 a hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one strange shell 
 into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little 
 better, either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal? 
 No ; George Riddler was a true philosopher. 
 
 Let vules go sarching vur and nigh, 
 We bides at Whuin, my dog and I ; 
 
 and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable ; 
 for the oftener one sees, the better one knows ; and the 
 better one knows, the more one loves. 
 
 It is an easy philosophy ; especially in the case of the 
 horse, where a man cannot afford more than one, as I 
 cannot. To own a stud of horses, after all, is not to own 
 horses at all, but riding-machines. Your rich man who 
 rides Crimcea in the morning, Sir Guy in the afternoon, 
 and Sultan to-morrow, and something else the next day, 
 may be a very gallant rider : but it is a question whether 
 he enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives to the 
 poor man who rides him day after day ; one horse, who 
 is not a slave, but a friend ; who has learnt all his 
 tricks of voice, hand, heel, and knows what his master 
 Avants, even without being told ; who will bear with his
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 143 
 
 master's infirmities, and feels secure that his master 
 will bear with his in turn. 
 
 Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour ; and were one 
 rich, one would do even as the rich are wont : but still, 
 I am a minute philosopher. And therefore, this after- 
 noon, after I have done the same work, visited the same 
 people, and said the same words to them, which I have 
 done for years past, and shall I trust, for many a year 
 to come, I shall go wandering out into the same winter- 
 garden on the same old mare ; and think the same 
 thoughts, and see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps 
 the same good fellows hunting of their fox, as I have 
 done with full content this many a year ; and rejoice, 
 as I said before, in my own boundless wealth, who have 
 the whole universe to look at, without being charged 
 one penny for the show. 
 
 As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy 
 the want of luxuries only because I cannot get them ; 
 but if my self-deception be useful to me, leave it alone. 
 
 No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent 
 winter-garden at the Crystal Palace : yet let me, if I 
 choose, prefer my own ; I argue that, in the first place, 
 it is far larger. You may drive, I hear, through that 
 grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You 
 may ride through mine for fifteen miles on end. I 
 prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph Paxton 
 ever planned, that dome above my head some three 
 miles high, of soft dappled grey and yellow cloud, 
 through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue sky 
 peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on yellow bogs 
 and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk-ranges 
 gleaming far away. But, above all, I glory in my 
 evergreens. What winter-garden can compare for them 
 with mine? True I have but four kinds Scotch fir, 
 holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to
 
 144 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog- 
 grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple 
 tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fra- 
 grant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well : 
 in painting as in music, what effects are more grand 
 than those produced by the scientific combination, in 
 endless new variety, of a few simple elements ? Enough 
 for me is the one purple birch ; the bright hollies round 
 its stem sparkling with scarlet beads ; the furze-patch, 
 rich with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, 
 tipped here and there with a golden bud ; the deep soft 
 heather carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream 
 for hours ; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and 
 the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, 
 against the soft grey sky. 
 
 An ugly straight-edged, monotonous fir plantation ? 
 "Well, I like it, outside and inside. I need no saw- 
 edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with 
 the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw- 
 edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They 
 are my Alps ; little ones it may be : but after all, as I 
 asked before, what is size ? A phantom of our brain ; 
 an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider 
 wisely, consists in form, and not in size : and to the 
 eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two 
 inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of 
 divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in 
 the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see ? 
 Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to 
 see something more of what is to be seen ; and you 
 will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; 
 mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every 
 rabbit burrow : dark strids, tremendous cataracts, ' deep 
 glooms and sudden glories/ in every foot-broad rill 
 which wanders through the turf. All is there for you
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 145 
 
 to see, if you will but rid yourself of ' that idol of 
 space ;' and nature, as every one will tell you who has 
 seen dissected an insect under the microscope, as grand 
 and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest forms. 
 
 ' The March breeze is chilly : but I can be always 
 warm if I like in my winter-garden. I turn my horse's 
 head to the red wall of fir stems, and leap over the 
 furze-grown bank into my cathedral ; (wherein, if there 
 be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no 
 idols ;) but endless vistas of smooth red, green-veined 
 shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away 
 into endless gloom paved with rich brown fir-needle 
 a carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty 
 years. Red shafts, green roof, and here and there a 
 pane of blue sky neither Owen Jones nor Willement 
 can improve upon that ecclesiastical ornamentation, 
 while for incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine 
 fragrance, far sweeter to my nostrils than the stifling- 
 narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic cathedral. \ 
 There is not a breath of air within : but the breeze^ 
 sighs over the roof above in a soft whisper. I shut 
 my eyes and listen. Surely that is the murmur of the 
 summer sea upon the summer sands in Devon far away. 
 I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves 
 gently upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And 
 with the innumerable wave-sighs come innumerable 
 memories, and faces which I shall never see again upon 
 this earth. I will not tell even you of that, old friend. 
 
 It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp 
 of fir-needles above my head ; according as the wind is 
 east or west, the needles dry or wet. This easterly 
 key of to-day is shriller, more cheerful, warmer in 
 sound, though the day itself be colder : but grander 
 still, as well as softer, is the sad soughing key in which 
 the south-west wind roars on, rain-laden, over the 
 
 VOL. i. L
 
 146 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 forest, and calls me forth being a minute philosopher 
 to catch trout in the nearest chalk-stream. 
 
 The breeze is gone awhile ; and I am in perfect 
 silence a silence which may be heard. Not a sound ; 
 and not a moving object ; absolutely none. The 
 absence of animal life is solemn, startling. That ring- 
 dove, who was cooing half-a-mile away, has hushed his 
 moan ; that flock of long-tailed titmice, which were 
 twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few minutes 
 since, are gone ; and now there is not even a gnat to 
 quiver in the slant sun-rays. Did a spider run over 
 these dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his foot- 
 fall. The creaking of the saddle, the soft footfall of 
 the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem 
 alone in a dead world. A dead world : and yet so full 
 of life, if I had eyes to see ! Above my head every 
 fir-needle is breathing breathing for ever, and currents 
 unnumbered circulate in every bough, quickened by 
 some undiscovered miracle ; around me every fir-stem 
 is distilling strange juices, which no laboratory of man 
 can make ; and where my dull eye sees only death, the 
 eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use. 
 
 Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the 
 winter-garden, and meditate upon that one word 
 Life ; and specially on all that Mr. Lewes has written 
 so well thereon of late for instance 
 
 We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification 
 with Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal 
 arises, must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the 
 surrounding world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though 
 latent with life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after 
 lying thousands of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, 
 and smile forth as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it not a 
 perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individual 
 with the universal? And ma}' we not, in speculative moods, con- 
 sider Death as the grand impatience of the soul to free itself from 
 the circle of individual activity the yearning of the creature to be 
 united with the Creator P
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 147 
 
 As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In 
 the early days of man's history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings 
 were regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the 
 merest wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of 
 her laws could wean man from impatient speculations; and now, 
 what is our intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough 
 mental absorption of Nature ? When that absorption is completed, 
 the mystic drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature's processes be 
 visible to man, as a Divine Effluence and Life. 
 
 True; yet not all the truth. But who knows all 
 the truth ? 
 
 Not I. ' We see through a glass darkly/ said St. 
 Paul of old ; and what is more, dazzle and weary our 
 eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking too long 
 and earnestly through the imperfect and by no means 
 achromatic lens. Enough. I will think of something 
 else. I will think of nothing at all 
 
 Stay. There was a sound at last ; a light footfall. 
 
 A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great 
 bright eyes full of terror, her ears aloft to catch some 
 sound behind. She sees us, turns short, and vanishes 
 into the gloom. The mare pricks up her ears too, 
 listens, and looks : but not the way the hare has gone. 
 There is something more coming ; I can trust the finer 
 sense of the horse, to which (and no wonder) the Mid- 
 dle Age attributed the po\ver of seeing ghosts and 
 fairies impalpable to man's gross eyes. Beside, that 
 hare was not travelling in search of food. She was 
 not ' loping' along, looking around her right and left, 
 but galloping steadily. She has been frightened : she 
 has been put up : but what has put her up ? And 
 there, far away among the fir-stems, rings the shriek 
 of a startled blackbird. What has put him up? 
 
 That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes 
 widen till they are ready to burst, and your ears are 
 first shot forward towards your nose, and then laid back 
 with vicious intent. Stand still, old woman ! Do you 
 
 L 2
 
 148 MY WINTER- GARDEN. 
 
 think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catch a 
 fox? 
 
 A fox it is indeed ; a great dog-fox, as red as the 
 fir- stems between which he glides. And yet his legs 
 are black with fresh peat stains. He is a hunted fox : 
 but he has not been up long. 
 
 The mare stands like a statue : but I can feel her 
 trembling between my knees. Positively he does not 
 see us. He sits down in the middle of a ride, turns 
 his great ears right and left, and then scratches one of 
 them with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the 
 better. Now he is up again and on. 
 
 Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, 
 or rather lieth, for it is on dead flat ground, the famous 
 castle of Malepartus, which beheld the base murder of 
 Lampe, the hare, and many a seely soul beside. I 
 know it well; a patch of sand heaps, mingled with 
 great holes, amid the twining fir roots ; ancient home 
 of the last of the wild beasts. And thither, unto 
 Malepartus safe and strong, trots Reinecke, where he 
 hopes to be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and 
 innumerable starting- holes, as the old apologue has it, 
 of his ballium, covert-way, and donjon keep. Full 
 blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his toes deli- 
 cately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning 
 and conceit as that world-famous ancestor of his, whose 
 deeds of unchivalry were the delight, if not the model, 
 of knight and kaiser, lady and burgher, in the Middle 
 Age. 
 
 Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus ; 
 examines it with his nose ; goes on to a postern ; ex- 
 amines that also, and then another, and another : while 
 I perceive afar, projecting from every cave's mouth, the 
 red and green end of a new fir-faggot. Ah, Reinecke ! 
 fallen is thy conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 149 
 
 hast worst foes to deal with than Bruin the bear, or 
 Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom thy great 
 ancestor outwitted. Man the many-counselled has 
 been beforehand with thee; and the earths are 
 stopped. 
 
 One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches 
 those trusty counsellors, his ears, as if he would tear 
 them off, ' revolving swift thoughts in a crafty mind.' 
 
 He has settled it now. He is up and off and at 
 what a pace ! Out of the way, Fauns and Hamadryads, 
 if any be left in the forest. What a pace ! And with 
 what a grace beside ! 
 
 Oh lleinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite 
 of thy great naughtiness. Art thou some fallen spirit, 
 doomed to be hunted for thy sins in this life, and in 
 some future life rewarded for thy swiftness, and grace, 
 and cunning, by being made a very messenger of the 
 immortals ? Who knows ? Not I. 
 
 I am rising fast to Pistol's vein. Shall I ejaculate? 
 Shall I notify ? Shall I waken the echoes ? Shall I 
 break the grand silence by that scream which the vulgar 
 view-halloo call ? 
 
 It is needless ; for louder and louder every moment 
 swells up a sound which makes my heart leap into my 
 mouth, and my mare into the air. 
 
 Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that 
 thou wert here this day, and not in St. Martin's Hall, 
 to hear that chorus, as it pours round the fir-stems, 
 rings against the roof above, shatters up into a hun- 
 dred echoes, till the air is live with sound ! You love 
 madrigals, and whatever Weelkes, or Wilbye, or Or- 
 lando Gibbons sang of old. So do I. Theirs is music 
 fit for men : worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and 
 Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare ! but oh that you 
 could hear this madrigal ! If you must have ' four
 
 150 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 parts/ then there they are. Deep-mouthed bass, 
 rolling along the ground ; rich joyful tenor ; wild wist- 
 ful alto ; and leaping up here and there above the 
 throng of sounds, delicate treble shrieks and trills of 
 trembling joy. I know not whether you can fit it into 
 your laws of music, any more than you can the song 
 of that Ariel sprite who dwells in the Eolian harp, or 
 the roar of the waves on the rock, or 
 
 Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
 And murmur of innumerable bees. 
 
 But music it is. A madrigal ? Rather a whole 
 opera of Der Freischutz dsemoniac element and all 
 to judge by those red lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry 
 voices ; and such as should make Reinecke, had he 
 strong aesthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted 
 from his cradle to his grave, that such sweet sounds 
 might by him enrich the air. Heroes of old were glad 
 to die, if but some ' vates sacer' would sing their fame 
 in worthy strains : and shalt not thou too be glad, 
 Reinecke ? Content thyself with thy fate. Music 
 soothes care; let it soothe thine, as thou runnest for 
 thy life ; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour. 
 For as the Etruscans (says Athenaeus) were so luxurious 
 that they used to flog their slaves to the sound of the 
 flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweet- 
 lips and Melody, eat thee to the sound of rich organ- 
 pipes, that so thou mayest, 
 
 Like that old fabled swan, in music die. 
 
 And now appear, dim at first and distant, but 
 brightening and nearing fast, many a right good fellow 
 and many a right good horse. I know three out of 
 four of them, their private histories, the private his- 
 tories of their horses : and could tell you many a good 
 story of them : but shall not, being an English gentle-
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 131 
 
 man, and not an American litterateur. They are not 
 very clever, or very learned, or very anything except 
 gallant men : but they are good enough company for 
 me, or any one ; and each has his own specialite, for 
 which I like him. That huntsman I have known for 
 fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his father's 
 death-bed. I am godfather to that whip's child. I 
 have seen the servants of the hunt, as I have the hounds, 
 grow up round me for two generations, and I look on 
 them as old friends and like to look into their brave, 
 honest, weather-beaten faces. That red coat there, I 
 knew him when he was a schoolboy ; and now he is a 
 captain in the Guards, and won his Victoria Cross at 
 Inkermann : that bright green coat is the best farmer, 
 as well as the hardest rider, for many a mile round ; 
 one who plays, as he works, with all his might, and 
 might have been a beau sabreur and colonel of dra- 
 goons. So might that black coat, who now brews good 
 beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of 
 Guardians, and rides, like the green coat, as well as he 
 works. The other black coat is a county banker : but 
 he knows more of the fox than the fox knows of him- 
 self, and where the hounds are, there will he be this 
 day. That red coat has hunted kangaroo in Australia ; 
 that one, as clever and good as he is brave and simple, 
 stood by Napier's side at Meanee ; that one won his 
 Victoria at Delhi, was cut up at Lucknow, with more 
 than twenty wounds ; that one has but what matter 
 to vou who each man is ? Enough that each can tell 
 
 V 
 
 me a good story, welcome me cheerfully, and give me 
 out here, in the wild forest, the wholesome feeling of 
 being at home among friends. 
 
 There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft 
 tread of these hundred horse-hoofs upon the spungy, 
 vegetable soil. They are trotting now in ' common
 
 152 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 time/ You may hear the whole Croats' March (the 
 finest trotting march in the world) played by those iron 
 heels ; the time, as it does in the Croats' March, 
 breaking now and then, plunging, jingling, struggling 
 through heavy ground, bursting for a moment into a 
 jubilant canter as it reaches a sound spot. 
 
 The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, 
 puzzled by the windings of Reinecke's footsteps. I can 
 hear the flap and snort of the dogs' nostrils as they 
 canter round me ; and I like it. It is exciting ; but 
 why who can tell ? 
 
 What beautiful creatures they are, too ! Next to a 
 Greek statue (I mean a real old Greek one; for I am 
 a thoroughly anti-preraphaelite benighted pagan heathen 
 in taste, and intend some day to get up a Cinque-Cento 
 Club, for the total abolition of Gothic art) next to a 
 Greek statue, I say, T know few such combinations of 
 grace and strength as in a fine foxhound. It is the 
 beauty of the Theseus light and yet massive ; and 
 light not in spite of its masses, but on account of the 
 perfect disposition of them. I do not care for grace 
 in man, woman, or animal, which is obtained (as in the 
 old German painters) at the expense of honest flesh 
 and blood. It may be all very pure, and unearthly, 
 and saintly, and what not : but it is not healthy ; and, 
 therefore, it is not really High Art, let it call itself 
 such as much as it likes. The highest art must be 
 that in which the outward is the most perfect symbol 
 of the inward ; and, therefore, a healthy soul can be 
 only exprest by a healthy body ; and starved limbs and 
 a hydrocephalous forehead must be either taken as in- 
 correct symbols of spiritual excellence, or as (what they 
 were really meant for) symbols of certain spiritual 
 diseases which were in the Middle Age considered as 
 ecclesiastical graces and virtues. Wherefore I like
 
 MY W1NTER-GAKDEN. 153 
 
 pagan and naturalist art ; consider Titian and Correggio 
 as unappreciated geniuses, whose excellences the world 
 will in some saner mood rediscover; hold in direct 
 opposition to Rio, that llafaelle improved steadily all 
 his life through, and that his noblest works are not 
 those somewhat simpering Madonnas and somewhat 
 impish Bambinos (very lovely though they are), but 
 those great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons, 
 which (with Andrea Mantegna's Heathen Triumph) 
 Cromwell saved for the British nation. I expect no 
 one to agree with all this for the next quarter of a 
 century : but after that I have hopes. The world will 
 grow tired of pretending to admire Manichsean pictures 
 in an age of natural science, and of building churches 
 on the Popish model, to be used for Protestant worship ; 
 and art will let the dead bury their dead, and beginning 
 again where Michael Angelo and Rafaelle left oft', work 
 forward into a nobler, truer, freer, and more divine 
 school than the world has yet seen at least, so I hope. 
 And all this has grown out of those foxhounds. 
 Why not ? Theirs is the sort of form which expresses 
 to me what I want art to express Nature not limited, 
 but developed, by high civilization. The old savage 
 ideal of beauty was the lion, type of mere massive 
 force. That was succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, 
 say the fawn, type of delicate grace. By cunning 
 breeding and choosing, through long centuries, man 
 has combined both, and has created the foxhound, lion, 
 and fawn in one. Look at that old hound, who stands 
 doubtful, looking up at his master for advice. Look 
 at the severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve. His 
 head is finer than a deer's; his hind legs tense as 
 steel springs ; his forelegs straight as arrows : and 
 yet see the depth of chest, the sweep of loin, the 
 breadth of paw, the mass of arm and thigh ; and if you
 
 154 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 have an eye for form, look at the absolute majesty of 
 his attitude at this moment. Majesty is the only 
 word for it. If he were six feet high, instead of twenty- 
 three inches, with what animal on earth could you 
 compare him ? Is it not a joy to see such a thing 
 alive ? It is to me, at least. I should like to have 
 one in my study all day long, as I would have a statue 
 or a picture; and when Mr. Morrell gave (as they 
 say) two hundred guineas for Hercules alone, I believe 
 the dog was well worth the money, only to look at. 
 But I am a minute philosopher. 
 
 I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disap- 
 peared. Old Virginal's stem flourishes ; instantly her 
 pace quickens. One whimper, and she is away full- 
 mouthed through the wood, and the pack after her : 
 but not I. 
 
 I am not going with them. My hunting days are 
 over. Let it suffice that I have, in the days of my 
 vanity, ' drank delight of battle with my peers far 
 on the ringing plains' of many a county, grass and 
 forest, down and vale. No, my gallant friends. You 
 know that I could ride, if I chose ; and I am vain 
 enough to be glad that you know it. But vain are 
 your coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right 
 hands. ' Life,' as my friend Tom Brown says, ' is 
 not all beer and skittles ;' it is past two now, and I 
 have four old women to read to at three, and an old 
 man to bury at four, and I think on the \vhole, that 
 you will respect me the more for going home and 
 doing my duty. That I should like to see this fox 
 fairly killed, or even fairly lost, I deny not. That I 
 should like it as much as I can like any earthly and 
 outward thing, I deny not. But sugar to one's bread 
 and butter is not good ; and if my Avinter-garden re- 
 present the bread and butter, then will fox-hunting
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 155 
 
 stand to it in the relation of superfluous and unwhole- 
 some sugar : so farewell ; and long may your noble 
 sport prosper ' the image of war with only half its 
 danger/ to train you and your sons after, into gallant 
 soldiers full of 
 
 The reason firm, the temperate will, 
 Endurance, foresight, strength and skill. 
 
 So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems 
 and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which need both my 
 eyes and my horse's at every moment ; and woe to the 
 ' anchorite/ as old Bunbury names him, who carries his 
 nose in the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe 
 to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take 
 the slightest hint of the heel, and wince hind legs or 
 fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in 
 wait for him. Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or 
 cowardly, or in anywise not ' masters of the situation.' 
 
 Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look any- 
 where but over your horse's nose, under the dark roof, 
 between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light. 
 Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, wherein is no tink- 
 ling rivulet, ever pure ; but instead a bog, hewn out 
 into a chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow 
 ditches some twenty feet apart. Blundering among the 
 stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every 
 third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden 
 in long hassock grass. Oh Aira csespitosa, most stately 
 and most variable of British grasses, why will you 
 always grow where you are not wanted ? Through you 
 the mare all but left her hind legs in that last gripe. 
 Through you a red coat ahead of me, avoiding one of 
 your hassocks, jumped with his horse's nose full butt 
 against a fir stem, and stopped, 
 
 As one that is struck dead 
 By lightning, ere he lulls,
 
 156 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 as I shall soon, in spite of the mare's cleverness. 
 Would we were out of this ! 
 
 Out of it I shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at 
 last, bright between the dark stems. Up a steep slope 
 and over a bank which is not very big, but being com- 
 posed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with 
 me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, 
 and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and 
 out on the open moor. 
 
 Grand old moor ! stretching your brown flats right 
 away toward Windsor for many a mile. Far to our 
 right is the new Wellington College, looking stately 
 enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite of its 
 two ugly towers and pinched waist. When shall we 
 have a decent public building? I can't stop to medi- 
 tate on so very remote a chance. Close over me is 
 the long fir- fringed ridge of Easthampstead, ending 
 suddenly in Caesar's camp ; and hounds and huntsmen 
 are already far ahead are racing up the Roman road, 
 which the clods of these parts, unable to give a better 
 account of it, call the Devil's Highway. 
 
 Racing indeed; for as Reinecke gallops up the nar- 
 row heather-fringed pathway, he brushes off his scent 
 upon the twigs at every stride, and the hounds race 
 after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, for 
 convenience, in one long line upon the track ; but going 
 heads up, stems down, at a pace which no horse can 
 follow. I only hope they may not overrun the scent ! 
 
 They have overrun it ; halt, and put their heads down 
 a moment. But with one swift cast in full gallop they 
 have hit it off again, fifty yards away in the heather, long 
 ere the horsemen are up to them ; for those hounds 
 can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves, 
 and so have learnt to trust themselves, and act for 
 themselves ; as boys should learn at school, even at the
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 157 
 
 risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing head 
 indeed, down a half cleared valley, and over a few in- 
 effectual turnips, withering in the peat, a patch of 
 growing civilization in the heart of the wilderness ; 
 and then over the brook, while I turn slowly away, 
 through a green wilderness of self-sown firs. 
 
 There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, 
 colonizing the desert in spite of frost, and gales, and 
 barrenness; and clustering together, too, as Scotsmen 
 always do abroad, little and big, every one under his 
 neighbour's lee, according to the good old proverb of 
 their native land, ' Caw me, and I'll caw thee.' 
 
 I respect them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their 
 forms, from James the First's gnarled giants, up iu 
 Bramshill Park the only place in England where a 
 painter can learn what Scotch firs are down to the 
 little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, 
 triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an 
 untoward youth. Seven years on an average have most 
 of them spent in ineffectual efforts to become a foot high. 
 Nibbled off by hares, trodden down by cattle, cut down 
 by turf parers, seeing hundreds of their brethren cut 
 up and carried off in the turf-fuel, they are as gnarled 
 and stubbed near the ground as an old thorn-bush in a 
 pasture. But they have conquered at last, and are 
 growing away, eighteen inches a-year, with fair green 
 brushes silver-tipt, reclothing the wilderness with a 
 vegetation which it has not seen for how many thou- 
 sand years ? 
 
 No man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was 
 indigenous to England, and, mixed with the larch, 
 stretched in one vast forest from Norfolk into Wales, 
 England was not as it is now. Snowdon was, it may 
 be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the edges 
 of its glaciers the marmot and the musk ox, the elk and
 
 158 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 the bear, wandered down into the Lowlands, and the 
 hyena and the tiger dwelt in those caves where fox and 
 badger only now abide. And how did the Scotch fir 
 die out ? Did the whole land sink slowly from its 
 sub-Alpine elevation into a warmer climate below ? 
 Or was it never raised at all ? Did some change of the 
 Atlantic sea-floor turn for the first time the warm Gulf 
 Stream to these shores; and with its soft sea-breezes 
 melt away the ' Age of Ice/ till glaciers and pines, 
 marmots and musk oxen, perspired to death, and 
 vanished for an (Eon ? Who knows ? Not I. But 
 of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether, as we 
 hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was re- introduced 
 by James the First when he built Bramshill for Raleigh's 
 hapless pet, Henry the Prince, or whatever may have 
 been the date of their re-introduction, here they are, 
 and no one can turn them out. In countless thousands 
 the winged seeds float down the south-west gales from 
 the older trees ; and every seed which falls takes root 
 in ground which, however unable to bear broad-leaved 
 trees, is ready by long rest for the seeds of the needle- 
 leaved ones. Thousands perish yearly ; but the east- 
 ward march of the whole, up hill and down dale, is sure 
 and steady as that of Lynceus' Goths in Goethe's 
 Helena : 
 
 Bin lang und breites Volksgewicht, 
 
 Der erste wusste vom letzen nicht. 
 
 Der erste fiel, der zweite stand, 
 Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand, 
 Ein jeder hundertfach gestarkt ; 
 Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt. 
 
 Till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, 
 stretching to the eastward of each tract of older trees, 
 a long cloud of younger ones, like a green cornet's tail 
 I wish their substance was as yielding this day. 
 Truly beautiful grand indeed to me it is to see
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 159 
 
 young live Nature thus carrying on a great savage pro- 
 cess in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial 
 English land ; and reproducing here, as surely as in the 
 Australian bush, a native forest, careless of mankind. 
 Still, I wish it were easier to ride through. Stiff are 
 those Scotchmen, and close and stout they stand by 
 each other, and claw at you as you twist through them, 
 the biggest aiming at your head, or even worse, at your 
 knees ; while the middle-sized slip their brushes between 
 your thigh and the saddle, and the little babies tickle 
 your horse's stomach, or twine about his fore-feet. 
 Whish whish ; I am enveloped in what seems an 
 atmosphere of scrubbing-brushes. Fain would I shut 
 my eyes : but dare not, or I shall ride against a tree. 
 Whish whish ; alas for the horse which cannot wind 
 and turn like a hare ! Plunge stagger. What is 
 this ? A broad line of ruts ; perhaps some Celtic track- 
 way, two thousand years old, now matted over with firs ; 
 dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only 
 masked by a line of higher and darker heath : but 
 doubly dangerous now when masked by dark under- 
 growth. You must find your own way here, mare. I 
 will positively have nothing to do with it. I disclaim all 
 responsibility. There are the reins on your neck ; do 
 what you will, only do something and if you can, 
 get forward, and not back. 
 
 There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot 
 contemptuously through the advanced skirmishers of 
 the Scotch invading army ; and watch my friends some 
 mile and a half off, who have threaded a practicable 
 trackway through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet for 
 firs to root in, and away in ' a streamer/ Now a 
 streamer is produced in this wise. There is but one 
 possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook ; 
 one possible path in a cover ; and as each man has to
 
 160 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 wait till the man before him gets through, and then 
 gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on 
 the man before him : wherefore, by all laws of known 
 arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the 
 last of the ten find himself two hundred yards behind 
 the foremost, which process several times repeated, pro- 
 duces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz., twenty 
 men galloping absurdly as hard as they can, in a line 
 half a mile long, and in humours which are celestial 
 in the few foremost, contented in the central, and gra- 
 dually becoming darker in the hindmost ; till in the last 
 man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. Fare- 
 well, brave gentlemen ! I watch, half sadly, half self- 
 contented, the red coats scattered like sparks of fire 
 over hill and dale, and turn slowly homeward, to visit 
 my old woman. 
 
 I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, 
 planted with rows of oaks, surrounded by trim sunny 
 cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilder- 
 ness. Across the village cricket-ground (we are great 
 cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old 
 game live among us), and then up another hollow lane, 
 which leads between damp shaughs and copses toward 
 the further moor. 
 
 Curious things to a minute philosopher are these 
 same hollow lanes. They set him on archaeological 
 questions, more than he can solve ; and I meditate as I 
 go, how many centuries it took to saw through the warm 
 sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he trots, 
 with the oak boughs meeting over his head. Was it 
 ever worth men's while to dig out the soil ? Surely 
 not. The old method must have been, to remove the 
 softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground ; 
 and then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the 
 rains and the wheels of generations sawed gradually
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 1G1 
 
 deeper and deeper, till this road-ditch was formed. 
 But it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of 
 these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, 
 must be as old or older than the Conquest. In Devon- 
 shire, I am sure that they are. But there many of 
 them, one suspects, were made, not of malice, but of 
 cowardice prepense. Your indigenous Celt was, one 
 fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep when he 
 could under cover of banks and hill-sides ; while your 
 bold Roman made his raised roads straight over hill 
 and dale, ' ridge- ways' from which, as from an eagle's 
 eyrie, he could survey the conquered lowlands far and 
 wide. It marks strongly the difference between the 
 two races, that difference between the Roman paved 
 road, with its established common way for all passen- 
 gers, its regular stations and milestones, and the Celtic 
 trackway, winding irresolutely along in innumerable 
 ruts, parting to meet again, as if each savage (for they 
 were nothing better) had taken his own fresh path when 
 he found the next line of ruts too heavy for his cattle. 
 Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen many an- 
 cient roads, some of them long disused, which could 
 have been hollowed out for no other purpose but that 
 of concealment. 
 
 So I go slowly up the - hill, till the valley lies 
 beneath me like a long green garden between its two 
 banks of brown moor, and through a cheerful little 
 green, with red brick cottages scattered all round, 
 each with its large neat garden, and beehives, and 
 pigs and geese, and turf-stack, and dipt yews and 
 hollies before the door, and rosy dark-eyed children, 
 and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild ' heth- 
 cropper's' home. When he can, the good man of 
 the house works at farm labour, or cuts his own turf; 
 and when work is scarce, he cuts copses and makes 
 
 VOL. i. M
 
 1G2 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 
 
 heath-brooms, and does a little poaching. True, he 
 seldom goes to church, save to be christened, mar- 
 ried, or buried ; but he equally seldom gets drunk. 
 For church and public stand together two miles off; 
 so that social wants sometimes bring their own com- 
 pensations with them, and there are two sides to every 
 question. 
 
 Hark ! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. 
 And then another, and another. My friends may 
 trust it ; for the clod of these parts delights in the 
 chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts away 
 flail and fork wildly, to run, shout, assist, and in- 
 terfere in all possible ways, out of pure love. The 
 descendant of many generations of broom-squires and 
 deer-steulers, the instinct of sport is strong within 
 him still, though no more of the king's deer are to be 
 shot in the winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an 
 apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He 
 now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and 
 too probably once in his life, ' hits the keeper into the 
 river/ and reconsiders himself for a while after over a 
 crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults ; 
 and I have mine. But he is a thorough good fellow 
 nevertheless ; quite as good as I : civil, contented, in- 
 dustrious, and often very handsome ; and a far shrewder 
 fellow too owing to his dash of wild forest blood 
 gipsy, highwayman, and what not than his bullet- 
 headed, and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South-Saxon 
 of the Chalk-downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and 
 tall of bone ; swaggering in his youth ; but when he 
 grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and 
 courteous as a prince. Sixteen years have I lived with 
 him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude 
 word or action from him. 
 
 W 7 ith him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and
 
 MY WINTER-GARDEN. 163 
 
 be buried by his side; and to him I go home con- 
 tented, to look after his petty interests, cares, sorrows 
 Petty, truly seeing that they include the whole primal 
 mysteries of life Food, raiment, and work to earn them 
 withal; love and marriage, birth and death, right 
 doing and wrong doing, ' sckicksal und eigene schuld / 
 and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the 
 eyes of a minute philosopher are most divine, because 
 they are most commonplace Catholic as the sunshine 
 and the rain which come down from the Heavenly 
 Father, alike upon the evil and the good. As for 
 doing fine things, my friend, with you, I have learnt 
 to believe that I am not set to do fine things, simply 
 because I am not able to do them ; and as for seeing 
 fine things, with you, I have learnt to see the sight 
 as well as to tiy to do the duty which lies nearest me; 
 and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I make 
 good use of my eyes and brain in this life, I shall see 
 if it be of any use to me all the fine things, or per- 
 haps finer still, in the life to come. But if not what 
 matter ? In any life, in any state, however simple or 
 humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy a 
 Minute Philosopher; and if a man be busy, and busy 
 about his duty, what more does he require, for time 
 or for eternity ? 
 
 M 2
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES/ 
 
 THISHING is generally associated in men's minds 
 -L with wild mountain scenery ; if not with the alps 
 and cataracts of Norway, still with the moors and lochs 
 of Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the wooded 
 crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, 
 Hereford, or the Lowlands. And it cannot be denied 
 that much of the charm which angling exercises over 
 cultivated minds, is due to the beauty and novelty of 
 the landscapes which surround him ; to the sense of 
 freedom, the exhilarating upland air. Who would pre- 
 fer the certainty of taking trout out of some sluggish 
 preserve, to the chance of a brace out of Edno or Llyn 
 Dulyn ? The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but 
 in the pains which it has cost ; in the upward climbs 
 through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled 
 stream : the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay 
 flower-bed of blue and purple butter-wort : the steady 
 breathless climb up the crags, which looked but one 
 mile from you when you started, so clear against the 
 sky stood out every knoll and slab ; the first stars of the 
 white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood -bed ropt, as if a fairy 
 had pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon 
 some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack of 
 the cliff; the first grey tufts of the Alpine club-moss, the 
 first shrub of crow-berry, or sea-green rose-root, with 
 
 * FBASEB'S MAGAZINE, September, 1858.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 165 
 
 its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the 
 two-thousand-feet-liue, and the beginning of the Alpine 
 world ; the scramble over the and waves of the porphyry 
 sea aloft, as you beat round and round like a weary 
 pointer dog in search of the hidden lake ; the last de- 
 spairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid on 
 Moel Meirch ; the hasty gaze around, far away into the 
 green vale of Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and 
 long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue sea 
 flecked with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and 
 wildernesses of mountain peaks, east, west, south, and 
 north : one glance at the purple gulf out of which 
 Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from 
 base to peak : and then the joyful run, springing over 
 bank and boulder, to the fathomless tarn beneath your 
 feet : the pull at the whisky-flask, as you toss yourself, 
 bathed in perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed 
 pause, as you recollect that you are alone on the moun- 
 tain-tops, by the side of the desolate volcano crater, 
 out of all hope of speech or help of man ; and, if you 
 break your leg among those rocks, may lie there till 
 the ravens pick your bones ; the anxious glance round 
 the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more 
 anxious glance through your book to guess what they 
 will choose to take ; what extravagant bundle of red, 
 blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps 
 some jewelled monster from Amboyna or New Guinea 
 may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout 
 to cease for once their life-long business of picking 
 leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist 
 your ankles and break your shins for the next three 
 hours. What matter (to a minute philosopher, at least) 
 if, after two hours of such enjoyment as that, he goes 
 down again into the world of man with empty creel, or 
 with a dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter, gamer,
 
 166 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 and redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or 
 Kennet? What matter? If he has not caught them, 
 he might have caught them ; he has been catching them 
 in imagination all the way up ; and if he be a minute 
 philosopher he holds that there is no falser proverb than 
 that devil's beatitude, ' Blessed is he who expecteth 
 nothing, for he shall not be disappointed/ 
 
 Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, 
 for he enjoys everything once at least ; and if it falls 
 out true, twice also. 
 
 Yes* Pleasant enough is mountain fishing. But 
 there is one objection against it, that it is hard work to 
 get to it ; and that the angler, often enough half-tired 
 before he arrives at his stream or lake, has left for his 
 day's work only the lees of his nervous energy. 
 
 Another objection, more important perhaps to a 
 minute philosopher than to the multitude, is, that there 
 is in mountain-fishing an element of excitement an 
 element which is wholesome enough at times for every 
 one ; most wholesome at all times for the man pent up 
 in London air and London work ; but which takes away 
 from the angler's most delicate enjoyment, that dreamy 
 contemplative repose, broken by just enough amusement 
 to keep his body active, while his mind is quietly taking 
 in every sight and sound of nature. Let the Londoner 
 have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, 
 and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to 
 his nine months' prison. The countryman, who needs 
 no such change of air and scene, will prefer more home- 
 like, though more homely pleasures. Dearer to him 
 than wild cataracts or Alpine glens, are the still, hidden 
 streams which Bewick has immortalized in his vignettes, 
 and Creswick in his pictures; the long glassy shallow, 
 paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between 
 low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak,
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 167 
 
 and alder, to the low bar over which the stream comes 
 swirling and dimpling, as the water-ouzel flits piping 
 before him, and the murmur of the ringdove comes soft 
 and sleepy through the wood. There, as he wades, he 
 sees a hundred sights and hears a hundred tones, which 
 are hidden from the traveller on the dusty highway 
 above. The traveller fancies that he has seen the 
 country. So he has ; the outside of it, at least ; but 
 the angler only sees the inside. The angler only is 
 brought close face to face with the flower, and bird, and 
 insect life of the rich river banks, the only part of the 
 landscape where the hand of man has never interfered, 
 and the only part in general which never feels the 
 drought of summer, 'the trees planted by the water- 
 side, whose leaf shall not wither/ 
 
 Pleasant are those hidden waterways ; but yet are 
 they the more pleasant because the hand of man has 
 not interfered with them ? 
 
 It is a question, and one which the older one grows 
 the less one is inclined to answer in the affirmative. 
 The older one grows, the more there grows on one the 
 sense of waste and incompleteness in all scenery where 
 man has not fulfilled the commission of Eden, ' to dress 
 it and to keep it ;' and with that, a sense of loneliness 
 which makes one long for home, and cultivation, and 
 the speech of fellow men. 
 
 Surely the influence of mountain scenery is exagge- 
 rated now-a-days. In spite of the reverend name of 
 Wordsworth (whose poetry, be it remembered, wants 
 exactly that element of hardihood and manliness which 
 is supposed to be the birthright of mountaineers), one 
 cannot help, as a lowlander, hoping that there is a little 
 truth in the threnodes of a certain peevish friend who 
 literally hates a mountain, and justifies his hatred in 
 this fashion :
 
 163 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 ' I do hate mountains. I would not live among 
 them for ten thousand a-year. If they look like para- 
 dise for three months in the summer, they are a verita- 
 ble inferno for the other nine ; and I should like to con- 
 demn my mountain-worshipping friends to pass a whole 
 year under the shadow of Snowdon, with that great 
 black head of his shutting out the sunlight, staring 
 down into their garden, overlooking all they do in the 
 most impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at them 
 with rain, hail, snow, and bitter freezing blasts, even in 
 the hottest sunshine. A mountain? He is a great 
 stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in his head, whose 
 highest ambition is to give you one also. As for his 
 beauty, no natural object has so little of its own ; he 
 owes it to the earthquakes that reared him up, to the 
 rains and storms which have furrowed him, to every 
 gleam and cloud. which pass over him. In himself he 
 is a mere helpless stone-heap. Our old Scandinavian 
 forefathers were right when they held the mountain 
 Yotuns to be helpless pudding-headed giants, the sport 
 of gods and men : and their Cambridge descendant, in 
 spite of all his second-hand sentiment, holds the same 
 opinion at his heart ; for his first instinct, jolly honest 
 fellow that he is, on seeing a snow alp, is to scramble 
 up it and smoke his cigar upon the top. And this 
 great stupid braggart, pretending to be a personage and 
 an entity, which, like Pope's monument on Fish-street 
 hill, 
 
 Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies, 
 
 I am called upon now-a-days to worship, as my better, 
 my teacher. Shall I, the son of Odin and Thor, wor- 
 ship Hrymir the frost giant, and his cows the water- 
 falls ? Shall I bow down to the stock of a stone ? 
 My better? I have done an honest thing or two in 
 my life, but I never saw a mountain do one yet. As
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 169 
 
 for his superiority to me, in what does it consist ? His 
 strength ? If he be stronger than I, let him cut stones 
 out of my ribs, as I can out of his. His size ? Am I 
 to respect a mountain the more for being 1 0,000 feet 
 high ? As well ask me to respect Daniel Lambert for 
 weighing five-and-twenty stone. His cunning con- 
 struction? There is not a child which plays at his foot, 
 not an insect which basks on his crags, which is not 
 more fearfully and wonderfully made ; while as for his 
 grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up 
 him, peel him out of his shooting jacket and trousers, 
 is a hundred times more beautiful, and more grand too, 
 by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient pru- 
 dery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore 
 the truly divine, element in art, and look for inspira- 
 tion, not to living men and women, but to leaves and 
 straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry baser than 
 that of the old Canaanites ; for they had the courage 
 to go up to the mountain tops, and thence worship 
 the host of heaven : but we are to stay at the bottom, 
 and worship the mountains themselves. Byron began 
 the folly with his misanthropic ' ChiWe Harold/ and 
 Mr. Ruskiu is perfecting it with his ' Stones of Venice/ 
 Sermons in stones? I don't believe in them. I have 
 seen a better sermon in an old peasant woman's face 
 than in all the Alps and Apennines of Europe. Did 
 you ever see any one who was the better for moun- 
 tains ? Have the Alps made * * * a whit honester, 
 or * * * a whit more good-natured, or Lady * * * a 
 whit cleverer? Do they alter one hair's breadth for 
 the better the characters of the ten thousand male and 
 female noodles who travel forth to stare at them every 
 year? Do mountains make them lofty- minded and 
 generous-hearted ? No. Cselum, non animum mutant, 
 qui trans mare currurit. Don't talk to me of the moral
 
 170 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 and physical superiority of mountain races, for I tell 
 you it is a dream. Civilization, art, poetry, belong to 
 the lowlands. Are the English mountaineers, pray, or 
 the French, or the Germans? Were the Egyptians 
 mountaineers, or the Romans, or the Assyrians, as soon 
 as they became a people? The Greeks lived among 
 mountains, but they took care to inhabit the plains ; 
 and it was the sea and not the hills which made them 
 the people which they are. Does Scotland owe her 
 life to the highlander, or to the lowlander? If you 
 want an experimentum crucis, there is one. As for 
 poetry, will you mention to me one mountain race 
 which has written great poetry? You will quote the 
 Hebrews. I answer that the life of Palestine always 
 kept to the comparatively low lands to the west of 
 Jordan, while the barbarous mountaineers of the eastern 
 range never did anything, had but one Elijah to show 
 among them. Shakspeare never saw a hill higher than 
 Malvern beacon ; and yet I suppose you will call him a 
 poet? As for mountain morality look at the Swiss. 
 If you wish to know the morals of the men, ask any 
 English traveller who has just paid his bill ; if those of 
 the women, ask any German student returned from his 
 vacation ramble. Mountaineers look well enough at a 
 distance; seen close at hand you find their chief dis- 
 tinctions to be starvation and ignorance, fleas and goitre, 
 with an utter unconsciousness unless travellers put it 
 into their heads of the ' soul -elevating glories ' by 
 which they have been surrounded all their lives.' 
 
 He was gently reminded of the existence of the 
 Tyrolese. 
 
 ' You may just as wisely remind me of the Circas- 
 sians. What can prove my theory more completely 
 than the fact that in them you have the two finest races 
 of the world, utterly unable to do anything for hu-
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES., 171 
 
 manity, utterly unable to develop themselves, because, 
 to their eternal misfortune, they have got caged among 
 those abominable stoneheaps, and have not yet been 
 able to escape?' 
 
 It was suggested that if mountain races were gene- 
 rally inferior ones, it was because they were the rem- 
 nants of conquered tribes driven up into the highlands 
 by invaders. 
 
 ' And what does that prove but that the stronger and 
 cunninger races instinctively seize the lowlands, because 
 they half know (and Providence knows altogether) that 
 there alone they can become nations, and fulfil the 
 primaeval mission to replenish the earth and subdue 
 it? No, no, my good sir. Mountains are very well 
 when they are doing their only duty that of making 
 rain and soil for the lowlands : but as for this new- 
 fangled admiration of them, it is a proof that our senses 
 are dulled by luxury and books, and that we require to 
 excite our palled organ of marvellousness by signs and 
 wonders, aesthetic brandy and cayenne. No. I have 
 remarked often that the most unimaginative people, who 
 can see no beauty in a cultivated English field or in 
 the features of a new-born babe, are the loudest ravers 
 about glorious sunsets and Alpine panoramas ; just as 
 the man with no music in his soul, to whom a fugue of 
 Sebastian Bach, or one of Mendelssohn's Songs without 
 Words, means nothing, and is nothing, thinks a mon- 
 ster concert of drums and trumpets uncommonly fine.' 
 
 This is certainly a sufficiently one-sided diatribe. 
 Still it is one-sided : and we have heard so much of the 
 other side of late, that it may be worth while to give 
 this side also a fair and patient hearing. 
 
 At least he who writes wishes that it may have a 
 fair hearing. He has a sort of sympathy with Lord 
 Macaulay's traveller of a hundred and fifty years since,
 
 172 CHALK- STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 who amid the ' horrible desolation' of the Scotch high- 
 lands, sighs for ' the true mountain scenery of Richmond- 
 hill.' The most beautiful landscape he has ever seen, 
 or cares to see, is the vale of Thames from Taplow or 
 from Cliefden, looking down towards Windsor, and up 
 toward Reading ; to him Bramshill, looking ont far and 
 wide over the rich lowland from its eyrie of dark pines, 
 or Littlecote nestling between deer-spotted upland and 
 rich water-meadow, is a finer sight than any robber 
 castle of the Rhine. He would not complain, of course, 
 were either of the views backed, like those glorious ones 
 of Turin or Venice, by the white saw-edge of the dis- 
 tant Alps : but chiefly because the perpetual sight of 
 that Alp-wall would increase the sense of home, of 
 guarded security, which not the mountain, but the sea, 
 or the very thought of the sea, gives to all true Eng- 
 lishmen. 
 
 Let others therefore (to come back to angling) tell 
 of moor and loch. But let it be always remembered 
 that the men who have told of them best have not been 
 mountaineers, but lowlanders who carried up to the 
 mountain the taste and knowledge which they had gained 
 below. Let them remember that the great Sutherland- 
 shire sportsman and sporting writer, the late Mr. St. 
 John, was once a fine gentleman about town ; that 
 Christopher North was an Edinburgh Professor, a man 
 of city learning and city cultivation ; and, as one more 
 plea for our cockney chalk streams of the south, that 
 Mr. Scrope (who passed many pleasant years respected 
 and beloved by Kennet side, with Purdy at his heels) 
 enjoyed, they say, the killing of a Littlecote trout as 
 heartily as he did that of a Tweed salmon. 
 
 Come, then, you who want pleasant fishing days 
 without the waste of time and trouble and expense 
 involved in tM'o hundred miles of railway journey,
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 173 
 
 and perhaps fifty more of highland road, and try what 
 you can see and do among the fish not sixty miles from 
 town. Come to pleasant country inns, where you can 
 always get a good dinner; or, better still, to pleasant 
 country houses, where you can always get good society ; 
 to rivers which will always fish, brimfull in the longest 
 droughts of summer, instead of being, as those mountain 
 ones are, very like a turnpike-road for three weeks, and 
 then like bottled porter for three days ; to streams on 
 which you have strong south-west breezes for a week 
 together on a clear fishing water, instead of having, as 
 on those mountain ones, foul rain spate as long as the 
 wind is south-west, and clearing water when the wind 
 chops up to the north, and the chill blast of ' Clarus 
 Aquilo' sends all the fish shivering to the bottom ; 
 streams, in a Avord, where you may kill fish (and large 
 ones) four days out of five from April to October, in- 
 stead of having, as you will most probably in the moun- 
 tain, just one day's sport in the whole of your month's 
 holiday, Deluded friend, who suffered in Scotland last 
 year a month of Tantalus his torments, furnished by 
 art and nature with rods, flies, whisky, scenery, keepers, 
 salmon innumerable, and all that man can want, except 
 water to fish in ; and who returned, having hooked ac- 
 cidentally by the tail one salmon which broke all and 
 went to sea why did you not stay at home and take 
 your two- pounders and three-pounders out of the quiet 
 chalk brook which never sank an inch through all that 
 drought, so deep in the caverns of the hills are hidden 
 its mysterious wells? Truly, wise men bide at home, 
 with George Riddler, while ' a fool's eyes are in the 
 ends of the earth.' 
 
 Repent, then ; and come with me, at least in fancy, 
 at six o'clock upon some breezy morning in June, not 
 by roaring railway nor by smoking steamer, but in the
 
 174 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 cosy four-wheel, along brown heather moors, down 
 into green clay woodlands, over white chalk downs, 
 past Roman camps and scattered blocks of Sarsden 
 stone, till we descend into the long green vale where, 
 among groves of poplar and abele, winds silver Whit. 
 Come and breakfast at the neat white inn, of yore a 
 posting house of fame. The stables are now turned 
 into cottages ; and instead of a dozen spruce ostlers and 
 helpers, the last of the postboys totters sadly about the 
 yard and looks up eagerly at the rare sight of a horse 
 to feed. But the house keeps up enough of its ancient 
 virtue to give us a breakfast worthy of Pantagruel's 
 self; and after it, while we are looking out our flies, 
 you can go and chat with the old postboy, and hear 
 his tales, told with a sort of chivalrous pride, of the 
 noble lords and fair ladies before whom he has ridden 
 in the good old times gone by even, so he darkly 
 hints, before ' His Royal Highness the Prince' himself. 
 Poor old fellow, he recollects not, and he need not re- 
 collect, that these great posting houses were centres of 
 corruption, from whence the newest vices of the 
 metropolis were poured into the too-willing ears of 
 village lads and lasses; and that not even the New 
 Poor-Law itself has done more for the morality of the 
 South of England than the substitution of the rail for 
 coaches. 
 
 Now we will walk down through the meadows some 
 half mile, 
 
 While all the land in flowery squares, 
 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind 
 Smells of the coming summer, 
 
 to a scene which, as we may find its antitype any- 
 where for miles round, we may boldly invent for our- 
 selves. 
 
 A red brick mill (not new red brick, of course) shall
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 175 
 
 hum for ever below giant poplar-spires, which bend 
 and shiver in the steady breeze. On its lawn labur. 
 nums shall feather down like dropping wells of gold, 
 and from under them the stream shall hurry leaping 
 and laughing into the light, and spread at our feet into 
 a broad bright shallow, in which the kine are standing 
 knee-deep already, a hint, alas ! that the day means 
 heat. And there, to the initiated eye, is another and 
 a darker hint of glaring skies, perspiring limbs, and 
 empty creels. Small fish are dimpling in the central 
 eddies : but here, in six inches of water, on the very 
 edge of the ford road, great tails and back-fins are 
 showing above the surface, and swirling suddenly 
 among the tufts of grass, sure sign that the large fish 
 are picking up a minnow-breakfast at the same time 
 that they warm their backs, and do not mean to look 
 at a fly for many an hour to come. 
 
 Yet courage ; for on the rail of yonder wooden bridge 
 sits, chatting with a sun-browned nymph, her bonnet 
 pushed over her face, her hayrake in her hand, a river- 
 god in coat of velveteen, elbow on knee and pipe in 
 mouth, and rising when he sees us, lifts his wideawake, 
 and halloas back a roar of comfort to our mystic adju- 
 ration, 
 
 ' Keeper ! Is the fly up?' 
 
 e Mortial strong last night, gentlemen/ 
 
 therewith he shall lounge up to us, landing-net in 
 hand, and we will wander up stream and away. 
 
 We will wander for though the sun be bright, here 
 are good fish to be picked out of sharps and stop-holes 
 into the water-tables, ridged up centuries since into 
 furrows forty feet broad and five feet high, over which 
 the crystal water sparkles among the roots of the rich 
 grass, and hurries down innumerable drains to find its 
 parent stream between tufts of great blue geranium,
 
 176 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 and spires of purple loosestrife, and the delicate white 
 and pink comfrey-bells, and the avens fairest and 
 most modest of all the water-side nymphs, who hangs 
 her head all day long in pretty shame, with a soft blush 
 upon her tawny cheek. But at the mouth of each of 
 those drains, if we can get our flies in, and keep our- 
 selves unseen, we will have one cast at least. For at 
 each of them, in some sharp-rippling spot, lies a great 
 trout or two, waiting for beetle, caterpillar, and what- 
 soever else may be washed from among the long grass 
 above. There, and from brimming feeders, which slip 
 along, weed-choked, under white hawthorn hedges, and 
 beneath the great roots of oak and elm, shall we pick 
 out full many a goodly trout. There, in yon stop -hole 
 underneath that tree, not ten feet broad or twenty 
 long, where just enough water trickles through the 
 hatches to make a ripple, are a brace of noble fish, no 
 doubt ; and one of them you may be sure of, if you will 
 go the proper way to work, and fish scientifically with 
 the brace of flies I have put on for you a governor 
 and a black alder. In the first place, you must throw 
 up into the little pool, not down. If you throw down, 
 they will see you in an instant; and besides, you will 
 never get your fly close under the shade of the brick- 
 work, where alone you have a chance. What use 
 throwing into the still shallow tail, shining like oil in 
 the full glare of the sun ? 
 
 ( But I cannot get below the pool without ' 
 
 Without crawling through that stiff" stubbed hedge, 
 well set with trees, and leaping that ten-foot feeder 
 afterwards. Very well. It is this sort of thing which 
 makes the stay-at-home cultivated chalk-fishing as much 
 harder work than mountain angling, as a gallop over 
 a stiffly enclosed country is harder than one over an 
 open moor. You can do it or not, as you like ; but
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 177 
 
 if you \vish to catch large trout on a bright day, I 
 should advise you to employ the only method yet dis- 
 covered. 
 
 There you are through ; and the keeper shall hand 
 you your rod. You have torn your trousers, and got 
 a couple of thorns in your shins. The one can be 
 mended, the other pulled out. Now, jump the feeder. 
 There is no run to it, so you have jumped in. Never 
 mind : but keep the point of your rod up. You are 
 at least saved the lingering torture of getting wet inch 
 by inch ; and as for cold water hurting any one Credat 
 Judaeus. 
 
 Now make a circuit through the meadow forty yards 
 away. Stoop down when you are on the ridge of 
 each table. A trout may be basking at the lower end 
 of the pool, who will see you, rush up, and tell all his 
 neighbours. Take off that absurd black chimney-pot, 
 which you are wearing, I suppose, for the same reason as 
 Homer's heroes wore their koruthous and phalerous, to 
 make yourself look taller and more terrible to your 
 foes. Crawl up on three legs ; and when you are in 
 position, kneel down. So. 
 
 Shorten your line all you can you cannot fish 
 with too short a line up-stream ; and throw, not into 
 the oil-basin near you, but right up into the darkest 
 corner. Make your fly strike the brickwork and 
 drop in. So ? No rise ? Then don't work or draw 
 it, or your deceit is discovered instantly. Lift it out, 
 and repeat the throw. 
 
 What ? You have hooked your fly in the hatches ? Very 
 good. Pull at it till the casting-line breaks ; put on a 
 fresh one, and to work again. There ! you have him. 
 Don't rise ! fight him kneeling ; hold him hard, and 
 give him no line, but shorten up anyhow. Tear and 
 haul him down to you before he can make to his home, 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 178 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 while the keeper runs round with the net 
 
 There, he is on shore. Two pounds, good weight. 
 Creep back more cautiously than ever, and try again. 
 
 There. A second fish, over a pound weight. 
 
 Now we will go and recover the flies off the hatches ; 
 and you will agree that there is more cunning, more 
 science, and therefore more pleasant excitement, in 
 ' foxing* a great fish out of a stop-hole, than in whip- 
 ping far and wide over an open stream, where a half- 
 pounder is a wonder and a triumph. As for physical 
 exertion, you will be able to compute for yourself how 
 much your back, knees, and fore-arm will ache by nine 
 o'clock to-night, after some ten hours of this scrambling, 
 splashing, leaping, and kneeling upon a hot June day. 
 This item in the day's work will of course be put to 
 the side of loss or of gain, according to your tempera- 
 ment : but it will cure you of an inclination to laugh at 
 us "VVessex chalk-fishers as Cockneys. 
 
 So we will wander up the streams, taking a fish here 
 
 and a fish there, till Really it is very hot. We 
 
 have the whole day before us ; the fly will not be up 
 till five o'clock at least ; and then the real fishing will 
 begin. Why tire ourselves beforehand ? The squire 
 will send us luncheon in the afternoon, and after that 
 expect us to fish as long as we can see, and come up 
 to the hall to sleep, regardless of the ceremony of dress- 
 ing. For is not the green drake on ? And while he 
 reigns, all hours, meals, decencies, and respectabilities 
 must yield to his caprice. See, here he sits, or rather 
 tens of thousands of him, one on each stalk of grass 
 green drake, yellow drake, brown drake, white drake, 
 each with his gauzy wings folded over his back, waiting 
 for some unknown change of temperature, or something 
 else, in the afternoon, to wake him from his sleep, and 
 send him fluttering over the stream ; while overhead
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 179 
 
 the black drake, who has changed his skin and reproduced 
 his species, dances in the sunshine, empty, hard, and 
 happy, like Festus Bailey's Great Black Crow (the only 
 humorous thing he ever wrote), who all his life sings 
 ' Ho, ho, ho/ 
 
 For no oiie will eat him, he well doth know. 
 
 However, as we have insides, and he has actually 
 none, and what is more strange, not even a mouth 
 wherewith to fill the said insides, we had better copy 
 his brothers and sisters below whose insides are still 
 left, and settle with them upon the grass awhile beneath 
 yon goodly elm. 
 
 Comfort yourself with a glass of sherry and a biscuit, 
 and give the keeper one, and likewise a cigar. He will 
 value it at five times its worth, not merely for the 
 pleasure of it, but because it raises him in the social 
 scale. ' Any cad/ so he holds, ' smokes pipes ; but a 
 good cigar is the note of the quality/ and of them who 
 ' keep company with the quality/ as keepers do. He 
 puts it in his hat-crown, to smoke this evening in 
 presence of his compeers at the public-house, retires 
 modestly ten yards, lies down on his back in a dry 
 feeder, under the shade of the long grass, and instantly 
 falls fast asleep. Poor fellow ! he was up all last night 
 in the covers, and will be again to-night. Let him 
 sleep while he may, and we will chat over chalk-fishing. 
 
 The first thing, probably, on which you will be in- 
 clined to ask questions, is the size of the fish in these 
 streams. We have killed this morning four fish averag- 
 ing a pound weight each. All below that weight we 
 throw in, as is our rule here ; but you may have re- 
 marked that none of them exceeded half a pound ; that 
 they were almost all about herring size. The smaller 
 ones I believe to be year-old fish, hatched last spring 
 
 N 2
 
 180 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 twelvemonth ; the pound fish two-year olds. At what 
 rate these last would have increased depends very much, 
 I suspect, on their chance of food. The limit of life 
 and growth in cold-blooded animals seems to depend 
 very much on their amount of food. The boa, alligator, 
 shark, pike, and I suppose the trout also, will live to a 
 great age, and attain an enormous size, give them but 
 range enough ; and the only cause why there are trout 
 of ten pounds and more in the Thames lashers, while 
 one of four pounds is rare here, is simply that the 
 Thames fish has more to eat. Here, were the fish not 
 sufficiently thinned out every year by anglers, they 
 would soon become large-headed, brown, and flabby, 
 and cease to grow. Many a good stream has been spoilt 
 in this way, when a squire has unwisely preferred 
 quantity to quality of fish. 
 
 And if it be not the quantity of feed, I know no 
 clear reason why chalk and limestone trout should be 
 so much larger and better flavoured than any others. 
 The cause is not the greater swiftness of the streams ; 
 for (paradoxical as it may seem to many), a trout likes 
 swift water no more than a pike does, except when 
 spawning or cleaning afterwards. At those times his 
 blood seems to require a very rapid oxygenation, and 
 he goes to the ' sharps' to obtain it : but when he is 
 feeding and fattening, the water cannot be too still for 
 him. Streams which are rapid throughout never pro- 
 duce large fish ; and a hand-long trout transferred from 
 his native torrent to a still pond, will increase in size 
 nt a ten times faster rate. In chalk streams the largest 
 fish are found oftener in the mill-heads than in the mill- 
 tails. It is a mistake, though a common one, to fancy 
 that the giant trout of the Thames lashers lie in swift 
 water. On the contrary, they lie in the very stillest 
 spot of the whole pool, which is just under the hatches.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 181 
 
 There the rush of the water shoots over their heads, 
 and they look up through it for every eatable which 
 may be swept down. At night they run down to the 
 fan of the pool, to hunt minnow round the shallows ; 
 but their home by day is the still deep ; and their pre- 
 ference of the lasher pool to the quiet water above is 
 due merely to the greater abundance of food. Chalk 
 trout, then, are large not merely because the water is 
 swift. 
 
 Whether trout have not a specific fondness for lime ; 
 whether water of some dozen degrees of hardness is not 
 necessary for their development? are questions which 
 may be fairly asked. Yet is not the true reason this; 
 that the soil on the banks of a chalk or limestone 
 stream is almost always rich red loam, carrying an 
 abundant vegetation, and therefore an abundant crop 
 of animal life, both in and out of the water? The 
 countless insects which haunt a rich hay meadow, all 
 know who have eyes to see ; and if they will look into 
 the stream they will find that the water- world is even 
 richer than the air-world. 
 
 Every still spot in a chalk stream becomes so choked 
 with weed as to require mowing at least thrice a year, 
 to supply the mills with water. Grass, milfoil, water 
 crowfoot, hornwort, starwort, horsetail, and a dozen 
 other delicate plants, form one tangled forest, denser 
 than those of the Amazon, and more densely peopled 
 likewise. 
 
 To this list will soon be added our Transatlantic 
 curse, Babingtonia diabolica, alias Anacharis alsinas- 
 trum. It has already ascended the Thames as high as 
 Reading ; and a few years more, owing to the present 
 aqua-vivarium mania, will see it filling every mill-head 
 in England, to the torment of all millers. Young 
 ladies are assured that the only plant for their vivariums
 
 182 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 is a sprig of anacharis, for which they pay sixpence 
 the market value being that of a wasp, flea, or other 
 scourge of the human race ; and when the vivarium 
 fails, its contents, Anacharis and all, are tost into the 
 nearest ditch ; for which the said young lady ought to 
 be fined five pounds ; and would be, if Governments 
 governed. What an f if \' 
 
 But come; for the sun burns bright, and fishing 
 is impossible : lie down upon the bank above this 
 stop. There is a campshutting (a boarding in English) 
 on which you can put your elbows. Lie down on your 
 face, and look down through two or three feet of water 
 clear as air, into the water forest where the great trout 
 feed. 
 
 Here; look into this opening in the milfoil and 
 crowfoot bed. Do you see a grey film around that 
 sprig? Examine it through the pocket lens. It is a 
 forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They are 
 Vorticellae ; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary 
 current on its rim, is scavenging the water till a tad- 
 pole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions 
 of living creatures are there on that one sprig ? Look 
 here ! a brown polype, with long waving arms a 
 gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is 
 Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I 
 think by Trembley). Ere we go home I may show you 
 perhaps Hydra viridis, with long pea-green arms, and 
 rosea, most beautiful in form and colour of all the 
 strange family. You see that lump, just where his 
 stalk joins his bell-head ? That is a budding baby. 
 Ignorant of the joys and cares of wedlock, he increases 
 by gemmation. See ! here is another, with a full-sized 
 young one growing on his back. You may tear it off 
 if you will he cares not. You may cut him into a 
 dozen pieces, they say, and each one will grow, as a
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 183 
 
 potato does. I suppose, however, that he also sends 
 out of his mouth little free ova medusoids call them 
 what you will, swimming by cilise, which afterwards, 
 unless the water beetles stop them on the way, will 
 settle down as stalked polypes, and in their turn prac- 
 tise some mystery of Owenian parthenogenesis, or 
 Steenstruppian alternation of generations, in which all 
 traditional distinctions of plant and animal, male and 
 female, are laughed to scorn by the magnificent fecun- 
 dity of the Divine imaginations. 
 
 That dusty cloud which shakes off in the water as 
 you move the weed, under the microscope would be 
 one mass of exquisite forms Desmidise and Diato- 
 macese ; and what not ? Instead of running over long 
 names, take home a little in a bottle, put it under 
 your microscope, and if you think good verify the 
 species from Hassall, Ehrenberg, or other wise book ; 
 but without doing that, one glance through the lens will 
 show you why the chalk trout grow fat. 
 
 Do they, then, eat these infusoria ? 
 
 That is not clear. But minnows and small fry eat 
 them by millions; and so do tadpoles, and perhaps 
 caddis baits and water crickets. 
 
 "\Vhat are they ? 
 
 Look on the soft muddy bottom. You see number- 
 less bits of stick. Watch awhile, and those sticks are 
 alive, crawling and tumbling over each other. The 
 weed, too, is full of smaller ones. Those live sticks 
 are the larva-cases of the Caperers Phryganese of 
 which one family nearly two hundred species have been 
 already found in great Britain. Fish up one, and you 
 find, amid sticks and pebbles, a comfortable silk case, 
 tenanted by a goodly grub. Six legs he has, like all 
 insects, and tufts of white horns on each ring of his 
 abdomen, which are his gills. A goodly pair of jaws
 
 184 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 he has too, and does good service with them : for he 
 is the great water scavenger. Decaying vegetable 
 matter is his food, and with those jaws he will bark a 
 dead stick as neatly as you will with a penknife. But 
 he does not refuse animal matter. A dead brother 
 (his, not yours) makes a savoury meal for him ; and 
 a party of those Vorticellse would stand a poor chance 
 if he came across them. You may count these caddis 
 baits by hundreds of thousands ; whether the trout eat 
 them case and all, is a question in these streams. In 
 some rivers the trout do so ; and what is curious, during 
 the spring, have a regular gizzard, a temporary thick- 
 ening of the coats of the stomach, to enable them to 
 grind the pebbly cases of the caddises. See ! here is 
 one whose house is closed at both ends 'grille/ as 
 Pictet calls it, in his unrivalled monograph of the 
 Genevese Phryganeae, on which he spent four years of 
 untiring labour. The grub has stopped the mouth of 
 his case by an open network of silk, defended by small 
 pebbles, through which the water may pass freely, 
 while he changes into his nymph state. Open the 
 case ; you find within not a grub, but a strange bird- 
 beaked creature, with long legs and horns laid flat by 
 its sides, and miniature wings on its back. Observe 
 that the sides of the tail, and one pair of legs, are 
 fringed with dark hairs. After a fortnight's rest in 
 this prison this ' nymph' will gnaw her way out and 
 swim through the water on her back, by means of that 
 fringed tail and paddles till she reaches the bank and 
 the upper air. There, under the genial light of day, 
 her skin will burst, and a four-winged fly emerge, to 
 buzz over the water as a fawn-coloured Caperer 
 deadliest of trout flies; if she be not snapped up be- 
 forehand under water by some spotted monarch in 
 search of supper.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 185 
 
 But look again among this tangled mass of weed. 
 Here are more larvae of water-flies. Some have the 
 sides fringed with what look like paddles, but which 
 are gills. Of these one part have whisks at the tail, 
 and swim freely. They will change into ephemerae, 
 cock-winged ' duns/ with long whisked tails. The 
 larvae of the famous green drake (Ephemera vulgata) 
 are like these, but we shall not find them. They are 
 all changed by now into the perfect fly, and if not, 
 they burrow about the banks, and haunt the crayfish- 
 holes, and are not easily found. 
 
 Some, again, have the gills on their sides larger and 
 broader, and no whisks at the tail. These are the 
 larvae of Sialis, the black alder, Lord Stowell's fly, 
 shorm fly, hunch-back of the Welsh, with which we have 
 caught our best fish to-day. 
 
 And here is one of a delicate yellow-green, whose 
 tail is furnished with three broad paddle-blades. These, 
 I believe, are gills again. The larva, I believe, is that 
 of the Yellow Sally Chrysoperla viridis a famous fly 
 on hot days in May and June. Among the pebbles 
 there, below the fall, we should have found, a month 
 since, a similar but much larger grub, with two 
 paddles at his tail. He is the 'creeper' of the 
 northern streams, and changes to the great crawling 
 stone fly (May-fly of Tweed), Perla bicaudata, an ugly 
 creature, which runs on stones and posts, and kills right 
 well on stormy days, when he is beaten into the stream. 
 
 There. Now we have the larvae of the four great 
 trout-fly families, Phryganeae, Ephemerae, Sialidse, Per- 
 lidse; so you have no excuse for telling as not only 
 Cockneys, but really good sportsmen who write on fish- 
 ing, have done such fibs as, that the green drake 
 comes out of a caddis-bait, or give such vague gene- 
 ralities as, ' this fly comes from a water-larva.'
 
 186 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 These are, surely, in their imperfect and perfect 
 states, food enough to fatten many a good trout : but 
 they are not all. See these transparent brown snails, 
 Limnese and Succinse, climbing about the posts ; and 
 these other pretty ones, coil laid within coil as flat as 
 a shilling, Planorbis. Many a million of these do the 
 trout pick off the weed day by day ; and no food, not 
 even the leech, which swarms here, is more fattening. 
 The finest trout of the high Snowdon lakes feed almost 
 entirely on leech and snail baits they have none and 
 fatten till they cut as red as a salmon. 
 
 Look here too, once more. You see a grey moving 
 cloud about that pebbled bed, and underneath that 
 bank. It is a countless swarm of ' sug/ or water- 
 shrimp ; a bad food, but devoured greedily by the great 
 trout in certain overstocked preserves. 
 
 Add to these plenty of minnow, stone-loach, and 
 miller's thumbs, a second course of young crayfish, and 
 for one gormandizing week of bliss, thousands of the 
 great green-drake fly : and you have food enough for 
 a stock of trout which surprise, by their size and num- 
 ber, an angler fresh from the mountain districts of 
 the north and west. To such a fisherman, the tale of 
 Mr. * * *, of Ramsbury, who is said to have killed in 
 one day in his own streams on Kennet, seventy-six 
 trout, all above a pound, sounds like a traveller's 
 imagination ; yet the fact is, I believe, accurately 
 true. 
 
 This, however, is an extraordinary case upon an ex- 
 traordinary stream. In general, if a man shall bring 
 home (beside small fish) a couple of brace of from one 
 to three pounds a-piece, he may consider himself as a 
 happy man, and that the heavens have not shone, but 
 frowned, upon him very propitiously. 
 
 And now comes another and an important question.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 187 
 
 For which of all these dainty eatables, if for any, do 
 the trout take our flies ? and from that arises another. 
 Why are the flies with which we have been fishing 
 this morning so large of the size which is usually 
 employed on a Scotch lake ? You are a North-country 
 fisher, and are wont, upon your clear streams, to fish 
 with nothing but the smallest gnats. And yet our 
 streams are as clear as yours what can be clearer? 
 
 Whether fish really mistake our artificial flies for dif- 
 ferent species of natural ones, as Englishmen hold ; or 
 merely for something good to eat, the colour whereof 
 strikes their fancy, as Scotchmen think ; a theory which 
 has been stated in detail, and with great semblance of 
 truth, in Mr. Stewart's admirable Practical Angler, is 
 a matter about which much good sense has been written 
 on both sides. 
 
 Whosoever will, may find the great controversy fully 
 discussed in the pages of Ephemera. Perhaps (as in 
 most cases) the truth lies between the two extremes ; at 
 least, in a chalk-stream. 
 
 Ephemera's list of flies may be very excellent, but it 
 is about ten times as long as would be required for any 
 of our southern streams. Six or seven sort of flies 
 ought to suffice for any fisherman ; if they will not kill, 
 the thing which will kill is yet to seek. 
 
 To name them : 
 
 1. The caperer. 
 
 2. The March-brown. 
 
 3. The governor. 
 
 4. The black alder. 
 
 And two or three large palmers, red, grizzled, and 
 coch-a-bonddhu, each with a tuft of red floss silk at 
 the tail. These are enough to show sport from March 
 to October ; and also like enough to certain natural flies 
 to satisfy the somewhat dull memory of a trout.
 
 188 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 But beyond this list there is little use in roaming, as 
 far as my experience goes. A yellow dun kills some- 
 times marvellously on chalk-streams, and always upon 
 rocky ones. A Turkey-brown ephemera, the wing made 
 of the bright brown tail of the cock partridge, will, 
 even just after the May-fly is off, show good sport in 
 the forenoon, when he is on the water; and so will in 
 the evening the claret spinner, to which he turns. 
 Excellent patterns of these flies may be found in 
 Ronalds : but after all, they are uncertain flies ; and, 
 as Harry Verney used to say, ' they casualty flies be all 
 havers/ which sentence the reader, if he understands 
 good Wessex, can doubtless translate for himself. 
 
 And there are evenings on which the fish take greedily 
 small transparent ephemerae. But, did you ever see 
 large fish rise at these ephemerae ? and even if you did 
 can you imitate the natural fly ? And if you did, would 
 it not be waste of time ? For the experience of many 
 good fishers is, that trout rise at these delicate duns, 
 black gnats, and other microscopic trash, simply faute 
 de mieux. They are hungry, as trout are six days in 
 the week, just at sunset. A supper they must have, 
 and they take what comes ; but if you can give them 
 anything better than the minute fairy, compact of equal 
 parts of glass and wind, which naturalists call an Ephe- 
 mera or Bsetis, it will be most thankfully received, if 
 there be ripple enough on the water (which there sel- 
 dom is on a fine evening) to hide the line : but even 
 though the water be still, take boldly your caperer or 
 your white moth (either of them ten times as large as 
 what the trout are rising at), hurl it boldly into a likely 
 place, and let it lie quiet and sink, not attempting to 
 draw or work it; and if you do not catch anything by 
 that means, comfort yourself with the thought that 
 there are others who can.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 189 
 
 And now to go through our list, beginning with 
 
 i. The caperer. 
 
 This perhaps is the best of all flies ; it is certainly the 
 one which will kill earliest and latest in the year; and 
 though I would hardly go as far as a friend of mine, who 
 boasts of never fishing with anything else, I believe it 
 will, from March to October, take more trout, and possibly 
 more grayling, than any other fly. Its basis is the wood- 
 cock wing; red hackle legs, which should be long and 
 pale ; and a thin mohair body, of different shades of red- 
 brown, from a dark claret to a pale sandy. It may thus, 
 tied of different sizes, do duty for half a dozen of the com- 
 monest flies ; for the early claret (red-brown of Ronalds ; 
 a Nemoura, according to him), which is the first spring- 
 fly ; for the red spinner, or perfect form of the March - 
 brown ephemera ; for the soldier, the soft-winged reddish 
 beetle which haunts the umbelliferous flowers, and being 
 as soft in spirit as in flesh, perpetually falls into the water, 
 and comes to grief therein ; and last but not least, for 
 the true caperers, or whole tribe of phryganidse, of which 
 a sketch was given just now. As a copy of them, the 
 body should be of a pale red brown, all but sandy (but 
 never snuff-coloured, as shop-girls often tie it), and its 
 best hour is always in the evening. It kills well when 
 fish are gorged with their morning meal of green drakes; 
 and after the green drake is off, it is almost the only 
 fly at which large trout care to look ; a fact not to be 
 wondered at when one considers that nearly two hun- 
 dred species of English phryganidse have been already 
 described, and that at least half of them are of the fawn- 
 tint of the caperer. Under the title of flame-brown, 
 cinnamon, or red-hackle and rail's wing, a similar fly 
 kills well in Ireland, and in Scotland also ; and is some- 
 times the best sea-trout fly which can be laid on the 
 water. Let this suffice for the caperer.
 
 190 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 2. Of the March-brown ephemera there is little to 
 be said, save to notice Ronalds' and Ephemera's excel- 
 lent description, and Ephemera's good hint of fishing 
 with more than one March-brown at once, viz., with a 
 sandy-bodied male, and a greenish-bodied female. The 
 fly is a worthy fly, and being easily imitated, gives great 
 sport, in number rather than in size; for when the 
 March-brown is out, the two or three pound fish are 
 seldom on the move, preferring leeches, tom-toddies, 
 and caddis-bait in the nether deeps, to lanky ephemerae 
 at the top ; and if you should (as you may) get hold of 
 a big fish on the fly, ' you'd best hit him in again,' as 
 we say in Wessex; for he will be, like the Ancient 
 Mariner 
 
 Long, and lank, and brown, 
 As is the ribbed sea-sand. 
 
 3. The ' governor.' In most sandy banks, and dry 
 poor lawns, will be found numberless burrows of ground 
 bees who have a great trick of tumbling into the water. 
 Perhaps, like the honey bee, they are thirsty souls, and 
 must needs go down to the river and drink ; perhaps, 
 like the honey bee, they rise into the air with some 
 difficulty, and so in crossing a stream are apt to strike 
 the further bank, and fall in. Be that as it may, an 
 imitation of these little ground bees is a deadly fly the 
 whole year round ; and if worked within six inches of 
 the shore, will sometimes fill a basket when there is not 
 a fly on the water or a fish rising. There are those 
 who never put up a cast of flies without one ; and 
 those, too, who have killed large salmon on him in the 
 north of Scotland, when the streams are low. 
 
 His tie is simple enough. A pale partridge or wood- 
 cock wing, short red hackle legs, a peacock-herl body, 
 and a tail on which too much artistic skill can hardly 
 be expended of yellow floss silk, and gold twist or
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 191 
 
 tinsel. The orange-tailed governors { of ye shops/ as 
 the old drug-books would say, are all 'havers/ for the 
 proper colour is a honey yellow. The mystery of this 
 all-conquering tail seems to be, that it represents the 
 yellow pollen, or ' bee bread' in the thighs or abdomen 
 of the bee; whereof the bright colour, and perhaps 
 the strong musky flavour, makes him an attractive and 
 savoury morsel. Be that as it may, there is no better 
 rule for a chalk stream than this when you don't 
 know what to fish with, try the governor. 
 
 4. The black alder (Sialis nigra, or Lutaria). 
 
 What shall be said, or not be said of this queen of 
 flies? And what of Ephemera, who never mentions 
 her ? His alder fly is I know not what ; certainly 
 not that black alder, shorm fly, Lord Stowell's fly, or 
 hunchback, which kills the monsters of the deep, sur- 
 passed only by the green drake for one fortnight ; but 
 surpassing him in this, that she will kill on till Septem- 
 ber, from that happy day on which 
 
 You find her out on every stalk 
 Whene'er you take a river walk, 
 When switts at eve begin to hawk 
 
 O thou beloved member of the brute creation ! 
 Songs have been written in praise of thee; statues 
 would ere now have been erected to thee, had that 
 hunch back and flabby wings of thine been 'suscep- 
 tible of artistic treatment/ But ugly thou art in the 
 eyes of the uninitiated vulgar a little stumpy old maid, 
 toddling about the world in a black bonnet and a brown 
 ' cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, but doing good 
 wherever thou comest, and leaving sweet memories be- 
 hind thee ; so sweet that the trout will rise at the 
 ghost or sham of thee, for pure love of thy past kind- 
 nesses to them, months after thou hast departed from this 
 sublunary sphere. What hours of bliss do I not owe
 
 192 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 to thee ! How have I seen, in the rich meads of Wey, 
 after picking out wretched quarter-pounders all the 
 morning on March-brown and red-hackle, the great 
 trout rush from every hover to welcome thy first ap- 
 pearance among the sedges and buttercups ! How 
 often, late in August, on Thames, on Test, on Loddon- 
 heads, have I seen the three and four-pound fish prefer 
 thy dead image to any live reality. Have I not seen 
 poor old Si. Wilder, king of Thames fishermen (now 
 gone home to his rest), shaking his huge sides with de- 
 light over thy mighty deeds, as his fourteen-inch whis- 
 kers fluttered in the breeze like the horse-tail standard 
 of some great Bashaw, while crystal Thames murmured 
 over the white flints on Monkey Island shallow, and 
 the soft breeze sighed in the colossal poplar spires, and 
 the great trout rose and rose, and would not cease, at 
 thee, my alder-fly? Have I not seen, after a day in 
 which the earth below was iron, and the heavens above 
 as brass, as the three-pounders would have thee, and 
 thee alone, in the purple August dusk, old Moody's 
 red face grow redder with excitement, half-proud at 
 having advised me to ' put on' thee, half fearful lest we 
 should catch all my lady's pet trout in one evening? 
 Beloved alder fly ! would that I could give thee a soul 
 (if indeed thou hast not one already, thou, and all 
 things which live), and make thee happy in all aeons to 
 come : but as it is, such immortality as I can I bestow 
 on thee here, in small return for all the pleasant days 
 
 thou hast bestowed on me. 
 
 < 
 
 Bah ! I am becoming poetical ; let us think how to 
 tie an alder-fly. 
 
 The common tie is good enough. A brown mallard, 
 or dark hen-pheasant tail for wing, a black hackle for 
 legs, and the necessary peacock-herl body. A better 
 still is that of Jones Jones Beddgelert, the famous fish-
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 103 
 
 ing clerk of Snowdonia, who makes the wing of dap- 
 pled peacock-hen, and puts the black hackle on before 
 the wings, in order to give the peculiar hunch-backed 
 shape of the natural fly. Many a good fish has this 
 tie killed. But the best pattern of all is tied from the 
 mottled wing-feather of an Indian bustard ; generally 
 used, when it can be obtained, only for salmon flies. 
 The brown and fawn check pattern of this feather 
 seems to be peculiarly tempting to trout, especially to 
 the large trout of Thames ; though in every river where 
 I have tried the alder, I have found the bustard wing 
 facile princeps among all patterns of the fly. 
 
 Of palmers (the hairy caterpillars) are many sorts. 
 Ephemera gives by far the best list yet published. 
 Ronalds has also three good ones, but whether they are 
 really taken by trout instead of the particular natural 
 insects which he mentions, is not very certain. The 
 little coch-a-bonddhu palmer, so killing upon moor 
 streams, may probably be taken for young larva? of the 
 fox and oak-egger moths, abundant on all moors, upon 
 trefoils, and other common plants; but the lowland 
 caterpillars are so abundant and so various in colour 
 that trout must be good entomologists to distinguish 
 them. Some distinction they certainly make ; for one 
 palmer will kill where another does not : but this de- 
 pends a good deal on the colour of the water : the red 
 palmer being easily seen, will kill almost anywhere and 
 any when, simply because it is easily seen ; and both 
 the grizzle and brown palmer may be made to kill by 
 adding to the tail a tuft of red floss silk ; for red, it 
 would seem, has the same exciting effect on fish which 
 it has upon many quadrupeds, possibly because it is the 
 colour of flesh. The mackerel will often run greedily 
 at a strip of scarlet cloth ; and the most killing pike-fly 
 I ever used had a body made of remnants of the hunts- 
 VOL. i. o
 
 194 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 man's new 'pink.' Still, there are local palmers. On 
 Thames, for instance, I have seldom failed with the 
 grizzled palmer, while the brown has seldom succeeded, 
 and the usually infallible red never. There is one more 
 palmer worth trying, which Scotsmen, I believe, call 
 the Royal Charlie ; a coch-a-bonddhu or furnace hackle, 
 over a body of gold-coloured tloss silk, ribbed with broad 
 gold tinsel. Both in Devonshire and in Hampshire this 
 will kill great quantities of fish, wherever furzy or 
 otherwise wild banks or oak-woods afford food for the 
 oak-egger and fox moths, which children call * Devil's 
 Gold Rings/ and Scotsmen ( Hairy Oubits.' 
 
 Two hints more about palmers. They must not be 
 worked on the top of the water, but used as stretchers; 
 and allowed to sink as living caterpillars do ; and next, 
 they can hardly be too large or rough, provided that 
 you have skill enough to get them into the water with- 
 out a splash. I have killed well on Thames with one 
 full three inches long, armed of course with two small 
 hooks. With palmers and perhaps with all baits 
 the rule is, the bigger the bait the bigger the fish. A 
 large fish does not care to move except for a good 
 mouthful. The best pike-fisher I know prefers a half- 
 pound chub when he goes after one of his fifteen pound 
 jack ; and the largest pike I ever ran and lost, alas ! 
 who seemed of any weight above twenty pounds, was 
 hooked on a live white fish of full three-quarters of a 
 pound. Still, no good angler will despise the minute 
 North country flies. In Yorkshire they are said to kill 
 the large chalk trout of Driffield as well as the small 
 limestone and grit fish of Craven ; if so, the gentlemen 
 of the Driffield Club, who are said to think nothing of 
 killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb tackle, 
 must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely enough to 
 be) the best anglers in England.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES, 195 
 
 In one spot only in Yorkshire, as far as I know, do 
 our large chalk flies kill : namely, in the lofty limestone 
 tarn of Malham. There palmers, caperers, and rough 
 black flies, of the largest Thames and Kennet sizes, 
 seem the only attractive haits ; and for this reason, that 
 they are the flies of the place. The cinnamon phry- 
 ganea comes up abundantly from among the stones; 
 and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn abounds, 
 as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the 
 caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths : another 
 proof that the most attractive flies are imitations of the 
 real insects. On the other hand, there are said to be 
 times when midges, and nothing else, will rise fish on 
 some chalk streams. The delicate black hackle which 
 Mr. Stewart praises so highly (and which should always 
 be tied on a square sneck-bend hook), will kill in June 
 and July ; and on the Itchen, at Winchester, hardly 
 any flies but small ones are used after the green drake 
 is off. But there is one sad objection against these said 
 midges what becomes of your fish when hooked on 
 one in a stream full of weeds (as all chalk streams are 
 after June,) save 
 
 One struggle more, and I am free 
 
 From pangs which rend my heart in twain? 
 
 "Winchester fishers have confessed to me that they 
 lose three good fish out of every four in such cases ; 
 and as it seems pretty clear that chalk fish approve of 
 no medium between very large flies and very small 
 ones, I advise the young angler, whose temper is not 
 yet schooled into perfect resignation, to spare his own 
 feelings by fishing with a single large fly say the go- 
 vernor in the forenoon, the caperer in the evening, 
 regardless of the clearness of the water. I have seen 
 flies large enough for April, raise fish excellently in 
 Test and other clear streams in July and August; and 
 
 o a
 
 196 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 what is more, drag them up out of the weeds and into 
 the landing-net, where midges would have lost them in 
 the first scuffle. 
 
 So much for our leading chalk flies ; all copies of 
 live insects. Of the entomology of mountain streams 
 little as yet is known : but a few scattered hints may 
 suffice to show that in them, as well as in the chalk 
 rivers, a little natural science might help the angler. 
 
 The well-known fact that smaller flies are required 
 on the moors than in the lowlands, is easily explained 
 by the fact that poorer soils and swifter streams pro- 
 duce smaller insects. The large Phryganeae, or true 
 caperers, whose caddis-baits love still pools and stag- 
 nant ditches, are there rare; and the office of water- 
 scavenger is fulfilled by the Rhyacophiles (torrent- 
 lovers) and Hydropsyches, whose tiny pebble-houses are 
 fixed to the stones to resist the violence of the summer 
 floods. In and out of them the tiny larva runs to find 
 food, making in addition, in some species, galleries of 
 earth along the surface of the stones, in which he takes 
 his walks abroad in full security. In any of the brown 
 rivulets of Windsor forest, toward the middle of summer, 
 the pebble-houses of these little creatures may be seen in 
 millions, studding every stone. To the Hydropsyches 
 (species montana? or variegata? of Pictet) belongs that 
 curious little Welsh fly, known in Snowdon by the 
 name of the Gwynnant, whose tesselated wing is best 
 imitated by brown mallard feather, and who so swarms 
 in the lower lakes of Snowdon, that it is often necessary 
 to use three of them on the line at once, all other flies 
 being useless. It is perhaps the abundance of these 
 tesselated Hydropsyches which makes the mallard wing 
 the most useful in mountain districts, as the abundance 
 of the fawn and grey Phrygaiiidae in the south of 
 England makes the woodcock wing justly the favourite.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 197 
 
 The Rhyacophiles, on the other hand, are mostly of a 
 shining soot-grey, or almost black. These may be seen 
 buzzing in hundreds over the pools on a wet evening, 
 and with them the sooty Mystacides, called silver- 
 horns in Scotland, from their antennae, which are of 
 preposterous length, and ringed prettily enough with 
 black and white. These delicate fairies make move- 
 able cases, or rather pipes, of the finest sand, generally 
 curved, and resembling in shape the Dentalium shell. 
 Guarded by these they hang in myriads on the smooth 
 ledges of rock, where the water runs gently a few 
 inches deep. These are abundant everywhere : but I 
 never saw so many of them as in the exquisite Cother 
 brook, near Middleham, in Yorkshire. In that deli- 
 cious glen, while wading up beneath the ash-fringed 
 crags of limestone, out of which the great ring ouzel 
 (too wild, it seemed, to be afraid of man) hopped down 
 fearlessly to feed upon the strand, or past flower-banks 
 whore the golden globe-flower, and the great blue 
 geranium, and the giant campanula, bloomed beneath 
 the white tassels of the bird-cherry, I could not tread 
 upon the limestone slabs without crushing at every 
 step hundreds of the delicate Mystacide tubes, which 
 literally paved the shallow edge of the stream, and 
 which would have been metamorphosed in due time 
 into small sooty moth-like fairies, best represented, I 
 should say, by the soft black- hackle which Mr. Stewart 
 recommends as the most deadly of North-country flies. 
 Not to these, however, but to the Phryganese (who, 
 when sticks and pebbles fail, often make their tubes of 
 sand, e. g. P. flava), should I refer the red -cow fly, 
 which is almost the only autumn killer in the Dartmoor 
 streams. A red cow-hair body and a woodcock wing 
 is his type, and let those who want West-country trout 
 remember him.
 
 198 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 Another fly, common on some rocky streams, but 
 more scarce in the chalk, is the ' Yellow Sally/ which 
 entomologists, with truer appreciation of its colour, call 
 Chrysoperla viridis. It may be bought at the shops ; 
 at least a yellow something of that name, but bearing 
 no more resemblance to the delicate yellow-green 
 natural fly, with its warm grey wings, than a Pre- 
 Raphaelite portrait to the human being for whom it is 
 meant. Copied, like most trout flies, from some tra- 
 ditional copy by the hands of cockney maidens, who 
 never saw a fly in their lives, the mistake of a mistake, 
 a sham raised to its tenth power, it stands a signal 
 proof that anglers will never get good flies till they 
 learn a little entomology themselves, and then teach it 
 to the tackle makers. But if it cannot be bought, 
 it can at least be made ; and I should advise every 
 one who fishes rocky streams in May and June, to 
 dye for himself some hackles of a brilliant greenish- 
 yellow, and in the most burning sunshine, when fish 
 seem inclined to rise at no fly whatsoever, examine 
 the boulders for the Chrysoperla, who runs over them, 
 her wings laid flat on her back, her yellow legs moving 
 as rapidly as a forest-fly's ; try to imitate her, and use 
 her on the stream, or on the nearest lake. Certain it 
 is that in Snowdon this fly and the Gvvynnant Hy- 
 dropsyche will fill a creel in the most burning north- 
 easter, when all other flies are useless; a sufficient 
 disproof of the Scotch theory that fish do not prefer 
 the fly which is on the water.* 
 
 Another disproof may be found in the ' fern web,' 
 1 bracken clock 5 of Scotland ; the tiny cockchafer, 
 with brown wing-cases and dark-green thorax, which 
 
 * The Ripon list of natural flies contains several other species of 
 small Nemouridse unknown to me, save one brown one, wliich is 
 seen here, though rarely, in June.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 199 
 
 abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the 
 fern, or on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. The 
 famous Loch- Awe fly, described as an alder-fly with a 
 rail's wing, seems to be nothing but this fat little 
 worthy : but the best plan is to make the wings, either 
 buzz or hackle, of the bright neck-feather of the cock 
 pheasant, thus gaining the metallic lustre of the beetle 
 tribe. Tied thus, either in Devonshire or Snowdon, 
 few flies surpass him when he is out. His fatness 
 proves an attraction which the largest fish cannot 
 resist. 
 
 The Ephemerae, too, are far more important in rapid 
 and rocky streams than in the deeper, stiller waters of 
 the south. It is worth while for a good fish to rise at 
 them there ; the more luxurious chalk trout will seldom 
 waste himself upon them, unless he be lying in shallow 
 water, and has but to move a few inches upward. 
 
 But these Ephemerae, like all other naiads, want 
 working out. The species which Mr. Ronalds gives, 
 are most of them, by his own confession, very uncertain. 
 Of the Phryganidae he seems to know little or nothing, 
 mentioning but two species out of the two hundred 
 which are said to inhabit Britain ; and his land flies and 
 beetles are in several cases quite wrongly named. How- 
 ever, the professed entomologists know but little of the 
 mountain flies ; and the angler who would help to 
 work them out would confer a benefit on science, as 
 well as on the ' gentle craft/ As yet the only ap- 
 proach to such a good work which I know of, is a 
 little book on the trout flies of Ripon, with excellent 
 engravings of the natural fly. The author's name is 
 not given ; but the book may be got at Ripon, 
 and most valuable it must be to any North-country 
 fisherman. 
 
 But come, we must not waste our time in talk, for
 
 200 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 here is a cloud over the sun, and plenty more coming 
 up behind, before a ruffling south-west breeze, as 
 Shelley has it 
 
 Calling white clouds like flocks to feed in air. 
 
 Let us up and onward to that long still reach, 
 which is now curling up fast before the breeze ; there 
 are large fish to be taken, one or two at least, even 
 before the fly comes on. You need not change your 
 flies ; the cast which you have on governor, and black 
 alder will take, if anything will. Only do not waste 
 your time and muscle, as you are beginning to do, by 
 hurling your flies wildly into the middle of the stream, 
 on the chance of a fish being there. Fish are there, 
 no doubt, but not feeding ones. They are sailing 
 about and enjoying the warmth ; but nothing more. 
 If you want to find the hungry fish and to kill them, 
 you must stand well back from the bank or kneel 
 down, if you are really in earnest about sport ; and 
 throw within a foot of the shore, above you or below 
 (but if possible above) with a line short enough to 
 manage easily; by which I mean short enough to 
 enable you to lift your flies out of the water at each 
 throw without hooking them in the docks and comfrey 
 which grow along the brink. You must learn to raise 
 your hand at the end of each throw, and lift the flies 
 clean over the land-weeds, or you \vill lose time, and 
 frighten all the fish, by crawling to the bank to unhook 
 them. Believe me, one of the commonest mistakes 
 into which young anglers fall is that of fishing in ' skip- 
 jack broad/ in plain English, in mid-stream, where 
 few fish, and those little ones, are to be caught. Those 
 who wish for large fish work close under the banks, and 
 seldom take a mid-stream cast, unless they see a fish 
 rise there.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 201 
 
 The reason of this is simple. Walking up the 
 Strand in search of a dinner, a reasonable man will 
 keep to the trottoir, and look in at the windows close 
 to him, instead of parading up the mid-street. And 
 even so do all wise arid ancient trout. The banks 
 are their shops; and thither they go for their dinners, 
 driving their poor little children tyrannously out into 
 the mid-river to fare as hap may hap. Over these 
 children the tyro wastes his time, flogging the stream 
 across and across for weary hours, while the big papas 
 and mammas are comfortably under the bank, close at 
 his feet, grubbing about the sides for water crickets, 
 and not refusing at times a leech or a young crayfish, 
 but perfectly ready to take a fly if you offer one large 
 and tempting enough. They do but act on experience. 
 All the largest surface-food beetles, bees, and palmers 
 comes off the ^hore ; and all the caperers and alders, 
 after emerging from their pupa-cases, swim to the 
 shore in order to change into the perfect insect in the 
 open air. The perfect insects haunt sunny sedges and 
 tree -stems whence the one is often called the sedge, 
 the other the alder-fly and from thence drop into the 
 trouts' mouths ; and within six inches of the bank 
 will the good angler work, all the more sedulously and 
 even hopefully if he sees no fish rising. I have known 
 good men say that they had rather not see fish on the 
 rise, if the day be good ; that they can get surer sport, 
 and are less troubled with small fish, by making them 
 rise ; and certain it is, that a day when the fish are 
 rising all over the stream is generally one of disap- 
 pointment. They are then picking at Ephemerae, or 
 small gnats, which rise up from their pupa-state pretty 
 equally all over the stream, and which, as I have said 
 before, no man can imitate at least well enough to 
 kill in anything but a strong stream or ripple. And
 
 202 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 even then it is a question whether the fish, which cover 
 the surface with those fleeting rings of glass which 
 Creswick alone knows how to paint, are really the 
 large fish ; and whether it is not wiser, instead of 
 searching one's book through for some gnat which they 
 will take perchance, to keep to the large standard flies 
 and to the bank ; save, of course, in those few glorious 
 hours when the green drake is up, and every man may 
 do what is right in the sight of his own eyes. 
 
 Another advantage of bank fishing is, that the fish 
 sees the fly only for a moment. He has no long gaze 
 at it, as it comes to him across the water. It either 
 drops exactly over his nose, or sweeps down the stream 
 straight upon him. He expects it to escape on shore 
 the next moment, and chops at it fiercely and hastily, 
 instead of following and examining. Add to this the 
 fact that when he is under the bank there is far less 
 chance of his seeing you ; and duly considering these 
 things, you will throw away no more time in drawing, 
 at least in chalk-streams, flies over the watery wastes, 
 to be snapped at now and then by herring-sized pin- 
 keens. In rocky streams, where the quantity of bank 
 food is far smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold good ; 
 though who knows not that his best fish are generally 
 taken under some tree from which the little cater- 
 pillars (having determined on slow and deliberate 
 suicide) are letting themselves down gently by a silken 
 thread into the mouth of the spotted monarch, who has 
 but to sail about and about, and pick them up one 
 by one as they touch the stream ? A sight which 
 makes one think (as does a herd of swine crunching 
 acorns, each one of which might have become a ' builder 
 oak') how Nature is never more magnificent than in her 
 waste. 
 
 The next mistake, natural enough to the laziness of
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 203 
 
 fallen man, is that of fishing down-stream, and not up. 
 What Mr. Stewart says on this point should be read 
 by every tyro. By fishing up-stream, even against the 
 wind, he will on an average kill twice as many trout 
 as when fishing down. If trout are out and feed- 
 ing on the shallows, up or down will simply make the 
 difference of fish or no fish ; and even in deeps, where 
 the difference in the chance of not being seen is not so 
 great, many more fish will be hooked by the man who 
 fishes up-stream, simply because when he strikes he 
 pulls the hook into the trout's mouth instead of out of 
 it. But he who would obey Mr. Stewart in fishing 
 up-stream must obey him also in discarding his light 
 London rod, which is in three cases out of four as 
 weak and ' floppy' in the middle as a waggon whip, 
 and get to himself a stiff and powerful rod, strong 
 enough to spin a minnow; whereby he will obtain, 
 after some weeks of aching muscles, two good things 
 a fore-arm fit for a sculptor's model, and trout hooked 
 and killed, instead of pricked and lost. 
 
 Killed, as well as hooked ; for how large trout are 
 to be killed in a weedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod 
 which will take them down, is a question yet unsolved. 
 Even the merest cockney will know, if he thinks, that 
 weeds float with their points down-stream, and that 
 therefore if a fish is to be brought through them with- 
 out entangling, he must be ' combed' through them in 
 the same direction. But how is this to be done, if a 
 fish be hooked below you on a weak rod? With a 
 strong rod indeed you can, at the chance of tearing out 
 the hook, keep him by main force on the top of the 
 water, till you have run past him and below him, 
 shortening your line anyhow in loops there is no 
 time to wind it up with the reel and then do what 
 you might have done comfortably at first had you
 
 204 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 been fishing up viz., bring him down-stream, and let 
 the water run through his gills, and drown him. But 
 
 with a weak rod Alas for the tyro ! He catches 
 
 one glimpse of a silver side plunging into the depths ; 
 he finds his rod double in his hand ; he finds fish and 
 flies stop suddenly somewhere ; he rushes down to the 
 spot, sees weeds waving around his line, and guesses 
 from what he feels and sees that the fish is grubbing 
 up-stream through them, five feet under water. He 
 tugs downwards and backwards, but too late ; the drop- 
 fly is fast wrapt in horse-tail and water- grass, callitriche 
 and potamogeton, and half a dozen more horrid things 
 with long names and longer stems ; and what remains 
 but the fate of Campbell's Lord Ullin ? 
 
 The waters wild went o'er his child, 
 And he was left lamenting. 
 
 Unless, in fact, large fish can be got rapidly down- 
 stream, the chance of killing them is very small; and 
 therefore the man who fishes a willow-fringed brook 
 downward, is worthy of no crown but Ophelia's, besides 
 being likely enough, if he attempt to get down to his 
 fish, to share her fate. The best fishermen, however, 
 will come to shame in streams bordered by pollard 
 willows, and among queer nooks, which can be only 
 fished down-stream. I saw, but the other day, a fish 
 hooked cleverly enough, by throwing to an inch where 
 he ought to have been, and indeed was, and from the 
 only point whence the throw could be made. Out of 
 the water he came, head and tail, the moment he felt 
 the hook, and showed a fair side over two pounds 
 weight .... and then? Instead of running away, 
 he ran right at the fisherman, for reasons which were 
 but too patent. Between man and fish were ten yards 
 of shallow, then a deep weedy bank, and then the hole 
 which was his house. And for that weedy bank the
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 205 
 
 spotted monarch made, knowing that there he could 
 drag himself clear of the fly, as perhaps he had done 
 more than once before. 
 
 What was to be done? Take him down-stream 
 through the weed ? Alas, on the man's left hand an 
 old pollard leant into the water, barring all downward 
 movement. Jump in and run round ? He had rather 
 to run back from the bank, from fear of a loose line ; 
 the fish was coming at him so fast that there was no 
 time to wind up. Safe into the weeds hurls the fish ; 
 the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps in 
 mid-leg deep, and staggers up to him, in hopes of 
 clearing; finds the dropper fast in the weeds, and 
 the stretcher, which had been in the fish's mouth, 
 wantoning somewhere in the depths Quid plura? 
 Let us draw a veil over that man's return to shore. 
 
 No mortal skill could have killed that fish. Mor- 
 tal luck (which is sometimes, as most statesmen 
 know, very great) might have done it, if the fish had 
 been irretrievably fast hooked ; as, per contra, I once 
 saw a fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an 
 alder bush, on the same bank as the angler. The 
 stream was swift : there was a great weed-bed above ; 
 the man had but about ten feet square of swiftwater to 
 kill the trout in. Not a foot downstream could he 
 take him ; in fact, he had to pull him hard up-stream 
 to keep him out of his hover in the alder roots. Three 
 times that fish leapt into the air nearly a yard high ; 
 and, yet, so merciful is luck, and so firmly was he 
 hooked, in five breathless minutes he was in the 
 landing-net ; and when he was there and safe ashore, 
 just of the shape and colour of a silver spoon, his 
 captor lay down panting upon the bank, and with Sir 
 Hugh Evans, manifested ' a great dispositions to cry.' 
 But it was a beautiful sight. A sharper round be-
 
 206 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 tween man and fish never saw I fought upon this side 
 of Merry England. 
 
 I saw once, however, a cleverer, though not a more 
 dashing feat. A handy little fellow (I wonder where 
 he is now ? ) hooked a trout of nearly three pounds 
 with his dropper, and at the same moment a post 
 with his stretcher. What was to be done ! To keep 
 the fish pulling on him, and not on the post. And 
 that, being favoured by standing on a four-foot bank, 
 he did so well that he tired out the fish in some six 
 feet square of water, stopping him and turning him 
 beautifully whenever he tried to run, till I could get 
 in to him with the landing-net. That was twenty 
 years since. If the little man has progressed in his 
 fishing as he ought, he should be now one of the finest 
 
 anglers in England. 
 
 ***** 
 
 So. Thanks to bank fishing, we have, you see, 
 landed three or four more good fish in the last two 
 hours And ! What is here ? An ugly two-pound 
 chub, Chevin, ' Echevin/ or Alderman, as the French 
 call him. How is this, keeper? I thought you al- 
 lowed no such vermin in this water? 
 
 The keeper answers, with a grunt, that ' they allow 
 themselves. That there always were chub hereabouts, 
 and always will be ; for the more he takes out with the 
 net, the more come next day/ 
 
 Probably. No nets will exterminate these spawn- 
 eating, fry-eating, all-eating pests, who devour the 
 little trout, and starve the large ones, and at the first 
 sign of the net, fly to hover among the most tangled 
 roots. There they lie, as close as rats in a bank, and 
 work themselves the farther in the more they are 
 splashed and poked by the poles of the beaters, 
 the fly, well used, will if not exterminate them
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 207 
 
 still thin them down greatly ; and very good sport 
 they give, in ray opinion, in spite of the contempt in 
 which they are commonly held, as chicken-hearted fish, 
 who show no fight. True ; but their very cowardice 
 makes them the more difficult to catch ; for no fish 
 must you keep more out of sight, and further off. 
 The very shadow of the line, (not to mention that of 
 the rod) sends them flying to hover ; and they rise so 
 cautiously and quietly, that they give excellent lessons 
 in patience and nerve to a beginner. If the fly is 
 dragged along the surface, or jerked suddenly from 
 them, they flee from it in terror ; and when they do, 
 after due deliberation, take it in, their rise is so quiet, 
 that you can seldom tell whether your fish weighs 
 half-a-pound or four pounds and a half unless you, 
 like most beginners, attempt to show your quickness 
 by that most useless exertion, a violent strike. Then, 
 the snapping of your footlink, or (just as likely) of the 
 top of your rod, makes you fully aware, if not of the 
 pluck, at least of the brute strength, of the burly 
 alderman of the waters. No fish, therefore, will better 
 teach the beginner the good old lesson, ' not to frighten 
 a fish before you have tired him/ 
 
 For flies chub will rise greedily at any large 
 palmers, the larger and rougher the better. A red 
 and a grizzled hackle will always take them ; but the 
 best fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle the 
 ' undertaker' of the London shops. He, too, can 
 hardly be too large, and should be made of a fat body 
 of black wool, with the metallic black feather of a 
 cock's tail wrapped loosely over it. A still better wing 
 is one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumed 
 bird, e.g., Phlogophorus Impeyanus, the Menaul 
 Pheasant, laid flat and whole on the back, to imitate 
 the wing-shells of the beetle, the legs being repre-
 
 208 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 sented by any loose black feathers (not hackles, which 
 are too fine). Tied thus, it will kill not only every 
 chub in a pool (if you give the survivors a quarter of 
 an hour wherein to recover from their horror at their 
 last friend's fate) but also, here and there, very large 
 trout. 
 
 Another slur upon the noble sport of chub fishing 
 is the fact of his not being worth eating a fact which, 
 in the true sportsman's eyes, will go for nothing. But 
 though the man who can buy fresh soles and salmon 
 may despise chub, there are those who do not. True, 
 you may make a most accurate imitation of him by 
 taking one of Palmer's patent candles, wick and all, 
 stuffing it with needles and split bristles, and 
 then stewing the same in ditch-water. Nevertheless, 
 strange to say, the agricultural stomach digests chub ; 
 and if, after having filled your creel, or three creels 
 (as you may too often) with them, you will distribute 
 them on your way home to all the old women you 
 meet, you will make many poor souls happy, after 
 having saved the lives of many trout. 
 
 But here we come to a strip of thick cover, part of 
 our Squire's home preserves, which it is impossible to 
 fish, so closely do the boughs cover the water. We 
 will walk on through it towards the hall, and there 
 get what we begin sorely to need something to eat. 
 It will be of little use fishing for some time to come ; 
 for these hot hours of the afternoon, from three till 
 six, are generally the ' deadest time ' of the whole day. 
 
 And now, when we have struggled in imagination 
 through the last bit of copse, and tumbled over the 
 palings into the lawn, we shall see a scene quite as 
 lovely, if you will believe it, as any Alp on earth. 
 
 What shall we see as we look across the broad, still, 
 clear river, where the great dark trout sail to and fro
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 209 
 
 lazily in the sun? For having free-warren of our 
 fancy and our paper, we may see what we choose. 
 
 White chalk-fields above, quivering hazy in the heat. 
 A park full of merry haymakers ; gay red and blue 
 wagons, stalwart horses, switching off the flies ; dark 
 avenues of tall elms ; groups of abele, ' tossing their 
 whispering silver to the sun ; ' and amid them the 
 house what manner of house shall it be? Tudor or 
 Elizabethan, with oriels, mullioned windows, gables, 
 and turrets of strange shape ? No : that is common- 
 place. Everybody builds Tudor houses now. Our 
 house shall smack of Inigo Jones or Christopher 
 Wren ; a great square red-brick mass, made light and 
 cheerful though, by coins and windows of white sars- 
 den-stone ; with high-peaked French roofs, broken by 
 louvers and dormers, haunted by a thousand swallows 
 and starlings. Old walled gardens, gay with flowers, 
 shall stretch right and left. Clipt yew alleys shall 
 wander away into mysterious glooms : and out of their 
 black arches shall come tripping children, like white 
 fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies dream- 
 ing and reading in the hammock there, beneath the 
 black velvet canopy of the great cedar-tree, like some 
 fair Tropic flower hanging from its boughs. Then 
 they shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn, 
 where the purple rhododendrons hang double, bush and 
 image, over the water's edge, and call to us across the 
 stream, ' What sport ? ' and the old Squire shall beckon 
 the keeper over the long stone bridge, and return with 
 him bringing luncheon and good ale; and we will sit 
 down, and eat and drink among the burdock leaves, 
 and then watch the quiet house, and lawn and flowers, 
 and fair human creatures, and shining water, all sleep- 
 ing breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious 
 blue, till we doze off, lulled by the murmur of a thou- 
 VOL. i. P
 
 210 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 sand insects, and the rich minstrelsy of nightingale 
 and blackcap, thrush and dove. 
 
 Peaceful, graceful, complete English country life 
 and country houses everywhere finish and polish, 
 Nature perfected by the wealth and art of peaceful 
 centuries ! Why should I exchange you, even for the 
 sight of all the Alps, for bad roads, bad carriages, 
 bad inns, bad food, bad washing, bad beds, and fleas, 
 fleas, fleas? 
 
 Let that last thought be enough. There may be 
 follies, there may be sorrows, there may be sins (though 
 I know there are no very heavy ones), in that fine old 
 house opposite : but thanks to the genius of my native 
 land, there are at least no fleas. 
 
 Think of that, wandering friend ; and of this also, 
 that you will find your warm bath ready when you go 
 to bed to-night, and your cold one when you rise 
 to-morrow morning ; and in content and thankfulness, 
 
 stay iii England, and be clean. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Here, then, let us lounge a full two hours, too 
 comfortable and too tired to care for fishing, till 
 the hall-bell rings for that dinner which we as good 
 anglers will despise. Then we will make our way to 
 the broad reaches above the house. The evening 
 breeze should be ruffling it gallantly ; and see, the fly 
 is getting up. The countless thousands are rising off 
 the grass and flickering to and fro above the stream. 
 Stand still a moment, and you will hear the air full of 
 the soft rustle of innumerable wings. Hundreds more, 
 even more delicate and gauzy, are rising through the 
 water and floating helplessly along the surface, as Aph- 
 rodite may have done when she rose in the ^Egean, 
 half frightened at the sight of the new upper world.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 211 
 
 And, see, the great trout are moving everywhere. Fish 
 too large and well fed to care for the fly at any other 
 season, who have been lounging among the weeds all 
 day and snapping at passing minnows, have come to 
 the surface ; and are feeding steadily, splashing five or 
 six times in succession, and then going down awhile to 
 bolt their mouthful of victims; while here and there a 
 heavy silent swirl tells of a fly taken before it has 
 reached the surface, untimely slain before it has seen 
 the day. 
 
 Now put your Green-drake on ; and throw, regard- 
 less of bank-fishing or any other rule, wherever you 
 see a fish rise. Do not work your flies in the least, 
 but let them float down over the fish, or sink if they 
 will ; he is more likely to take them under water 
 than on the top. And mind this rule ; be patient 
 with your fish ; and do not fancy that because he does 
 not rise to you the first or the tenth time, therefore he 
 will not rise at all. He may have filled his mouth 
 and gone down to gorge; and when he comes up 
 again, if your fly be the first which he meets, he will 
 probably seize it greedily, and all the more so if it be 
 under water, so seeming drowned and helpless. Be- 
 sides, a fish seldom rises twice exactly in the same 
 place, unless he be lying between two weeds, or in the 
 corner of an eddy. His small wits, when he is feed- 
 ing in the open, seem to hint to him that after having 
 found a fly in one place he must move a foot or two 
 on to find another ; and therefore it may be some time 
 before your turn comes, and your fly passes just over 
 his nose ; which if it do not do, he certainly will not, 
 amid such an abundance, go out of his way for it. In 
 the meanwhile your footlink will very probably have 
 hit him over the back, or run foul of his nose, in 
 
 P 2
 
 212 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 
 
 which case you will not catch him at all. A painful 
 fact for you ; but if you could catch every fish you saw, 
 where would be the trout for next season? 
 
 Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a 
 second chance. I almost prefer the dark claret-spin- 
 ner, with which I have killed very large fish alternately 
 with the green drake, even when it was quite dark ; 
 and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake. 
 
 For a blustering evening like this your drake can 
 hardly be too large or too rough ; in brighter and 
 stiller weather the fish often prefer a fly half the size 
 of the natural one. Only bear in mind that the most 
 tempting form among these millions of drakes is that 
 one whose wings are very little coloured at all, of a pale 
 greenish yellow ; whose body is straw-coloured, and his 
 head, thorax, and legs, spotted with dark brown 
 best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhu 
 hackle. 
 
 The best imitation of this, or of any drake, which 
 I have ever seen, is one by Mr. Macgowan, whilome of 
 Ballyshaunon, now of No. 7, Bruton-street, Berkeley- 
 square, whose drakes, known by a waxy body of some 
 mysterious material, do surpass those of all other men, 
 and should be known and honoured far and wide. But 
 failing them, you may do well with a drake which is 
 ribbed through the whole length with red hackle over 
 a straw-coloured body. A North countryman would 
 laugh at it, and ask us how we fancy that fish will 
 mistake for that delicate waxy fly a heavy rough palmer, 
 made heavier and rougher by two thick tufts of yellow 
 mallard Aving : but if he will fish therewith, he will 
 catch trout ; and mighty ones they will be. I have 
 found, again and again, this drake, in which the hackle is 
 ribbed all down the body, beat a bare-bodied one in the 
 ratio of three fish to one. The reason is difficult to guess.
 
 CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 213 
 
 Perhaps the shining transparent hackle gives the fly 
 more of the waxy look of the natural insect ; or perhaps 
 the ( buzzy' look of the fly causes the fish to mistake it 
 for one half-emerged from its pupa case, fluttering, en- 
 tangled, and helpless. But whatever be the cause, I 
 am sure of the fact. Now silence and sport for the 
 next three hours. 
 
 There ! All things must end. It is so dark that I 
 have been fishing for the last five minutes without any 
 end fly ; and we have lost our two last fish simply by 
 not being able to guide them into the net. But what 
 an evening's sport we have had ! Beside several over 
 a pound which I have thrown in (I trust you have 
 been generous and done likewise), there are six fish 
 averaging two pounds a-piece ; and what is the weight 
 of that monster with whom I saw you wrestling 
 dimly through the dusk, your legs stuck knee-deep in 
 a mudbank, your head embowered in nettles, while the 
 keeper waltzed round you, roaring mere incoherencies ? 
 four pounds full. Now, is there any sherry left in 
 the flask? No. Then we will give the keeper five 
 shillings ; he is well worth his pay ; and then drag our 
 weary limbs toward the hall to bath and bed, while you 
 confess, I trust, that you may get noble sport, hard ex- 
 ercise, and lovely scenery, without going sixty miles 
 from London town.
 
 TENNYSON; 
 
 /CRITICS cannot in general he too punctilious in 
 \J their respect for an incognito. If an author in- 
 tended us to know his name, he would put it on his 
 title-page. If he does not choose to do that, we have 
 no more right to pry into his secret than we have to 
 discuss his family affairs or open his letters. But 
 every rule has its exceptional cases ; and the book 
 which stands first upon our list is surely such. All 
 the world, somehow or other, knows the author. His 
 name has been mentioned unhesitatingly by several 
 reviews already, whether from private information, or 
 from the certainty which every well-read person must 
 feel that there is but one man in England possessed at 
 once of poetic talent and artistic experience sufficient 
 for so noble a creation. We hope, therefore, that we 
 shall not be considered impertinent if we ignore an in- 
 cognito which all England has ignored before us, and 
 attribute In Memoriam to the pen of the author of The 
 Princess. 
 
 Such a course will probably be the more useful one 
 to our readers ; for this last work of our only living 
 great poet seems to us at once the culmination of all 
 his efforts and the key to many difficulties in his former 
 
 * PHASER'S MAGAZINE, Sept. 1850. i. 'In Memoriam.' Moxon, 
 Dover-street. 1850. 2. 'The Princess, a Medley.' By Alfred Ten- 
 nyson. Third Edition. Moxon, Dover-street. 1850. 3. ' Poems.' 
 By Alfred Tennyson. Moxon, Dover-street. 1842.
 
 TENNYSON. 215 
 
 writings. Heaven forbid that we should say that it 
 completes the circle of his powers. On the contrary it 
 gives us hope of broader effort in new fields of thought 
 and forms of art. But it brings the development of 
 his Muse and of his Creed to a positive and definite 
 point. It enables us to claim one who has been hitherto 
 regarded as belonging to a merely speculative and 
 peirastic school as the willing and deliberate champion 
 of vital Christianity, and of an orthodoxy the more sin- 
 cere because it has worked upward through the abyss 
 of doubt ; the more mighty for good because it justifies 
 and consecrates the aesthetics and the philosophy 
 of the present age. We are sure, moreover, that the 
 author, whatever right reasons he may have had for con- 
 cealing his own name, would have no quarrel against 
 us for alluding to it, were he aware of the idolatry 
 with which every utterance of his is regarded by the 
 cultivated young men of our day, especially at the uni- 
 versities, and of the infinite service of which this In 
 Memoriam may be to them, if they are taught by it 
 that their superiors are not ashamed of faith, and that 
 they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of deny- 
 ing the cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they 
 -will pass upwards with their teacher from the vague 
 though noble expectations of Locksley Hall, to the 
 assured and everlasting facts of the proem to In Memo- 
 riam, in our eyes the noblest Christian poem which 
 England has produced for two centuries. 
 
 To explain our meaning, it will be necessary, per- 
 haps, to go back to Mr. Tennyson's earlier writings, of 
 which he is said to be somewhat ashamed now a 
 fastidiousness with which we will not quarrel ; for it 
 should be the rule of the poet, forgetting those things 
 which are behind, to press on to those things which are 
 before, and ' to count not himself to have apprehended,
 
 216 TENNYSON. 
 
 but' no, we will not finish the quotation : let the 
 
 readers of In Memoriam finish it for themselves, and 
 see how after all the poet, if he would reach perfection, 
 must be found by Him who found St. Paul of old. In 
 the meantime, as a true poet must necessarily be in ad- 
 vance of his age, Mr. Tennyson's earlier poerns, rather 
 than these latter ones, coincide with the tastes and 
 speculations of the young men of this day. And in 
 proportion, we believe, as they thoroughly appreciate 
 the distinctive peculiarities of those poems, will they be 
 able to follow the author of them on his upward path. 
 Some of our readers, we would fain hope, remember 
 as an era in their lives the first day on which they read 
 those earlier poems ; how, fifteen years ago, Mariana in 
 the Moated Grange, The Dying Swan, The Lady of 
 Shalott, came to them as reyelations. They seemed to 
 themselves to have found at last a poet who promised 
 not only to combine the cunning melody of Moore, 
 the rich fulness of Keats, and the simplicity of Words- 
 worth, but one who was introducing a method of ob- 
 serving Nature different from that of all the three, 
 and yet succeeding in everything which they had at- 
 tempted, often in vain. Both Keats and Moore had 
 an eye for the beauty which lay in trivial and daily 
 objects. But in both of them there was a want of deep 
 religious reverence, which kept Moore playing gracefully 
 upon the surface of phenomena without ever daring to 
 dive into their laws or inner meaning ; and made poor 
 Keats fancy that he was rather to render Nature poetical 
 by bespangling her with florid ornament, than simply to 
 confess that she \vas already, by the grace of God, far 
 beyond the need of his paint and gilding. Even Words- 
 worth himself had not full faith in the great dicta which 
 he laid down in his famous Introductory Essay. Deep 
 as was his conviction that Nature bore upon her sim-
 
 TENNYSON. 217 
 
 plest forms the finger-mark of God, he did not always 
 dai'e simply to describe her as she was, and leave her 
 to reveal her own mystery. We do not say this in 
 depreciation of one who stands now far above human 
 praise or blame. The wonder is, not that Wordsworth 
 rose no higher, but that, considering the level on which 
 his taste was formed, he had power to rise to the height 
 above his age which he did attain. He did a mighty 
 work. He has left the marks of his teaching upon 
 every poet who has written verses worth reading for 
 the last twenty years. The idea by which he con- 
 quered was, as Coleridge well sets forth, the very one 
 which, in its practical results on his own poetry, pro- 
 cured him loud and deserved ridicule. This, which 
 will be the root idea of the whole poetry of this gene- 
 ration, was the dignity of Nature in all her manifesta- 
 tions, and not merely in those which may happen to 
 suit the fastidiousness or Manichseism of any particular 
 age. He may have been at times fanatical on his idea, 
 and have misused it, till it became self-contradictory, 
 because he could not see the correlative truths which 
 should have limited it. But it is by fanatics, by men 
 of one great thought, that great works are done ; and 
 it is good for the time that a man arose in it of fearless 
 honesty enough to write Peter Bells and Idiot Boys, to 
 shake all the old methods of nature-painting to their roots, 
 and set every man seriously to ask himself what he 
 meant, or whether he meant anything real, reverent, or 
 honest, when he talked about ' poetic diction/ or ' the 
 beauties of Nature.' And after all, like all fanatics, 
 Wordsworth was better than his own creed. As Cole- 
 ridge thoroughly shows in the second volume of the 
 Biographia Litteraria, and as may be seen nowhere 
 more strikingly than in his grand posthumous work, 
 his noblest poems and noblest stanzas are those in
 
 218 TENNYSON. 
 
 which his true poetic genius, unconsciously to himself, 
 sets at naught his own pseudo-naturalist dogmas. 
 
 Now Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Words- 
 worth's principle from the very first, seemed by instinc- 
 tive taste to have escaped the snares which had proved 
 too subtle both for Keats and Wordsworth. Doubtless 
 there are slight uiaiseries, after the manner of both 
 those poets, in the first editions of his earlier poems. He 
 seems, like most other great artists, to have first tried 
 imitations of various styles which already existed, before 
 he learnt the art of incorporating them into his own, 
 and learning from all his predecessors, without losing 
 his own individual peculiarities. But there are descrip- 
 tive passages in them also which neither Keats nor 
 Wordsworth could have written, combining the honest 
 sensuous observation which is common to them both, 
 with a self-restrained simplicity which Keats did not 
 live long enough to attain, and a stately and accurate 
 melody, an earnest songfulness (to coin a word) which 
 Wordsworth seldom attained, and from his inaccurate 
 and uncertain ear, still seldomer preserved without the 
 occurrence of a jar or a rattle, a false quantity, a false 
 rapture, or a bathos. And above all, or rather be- 
 neath all for we suspect that this has been through- 
 out the very secret of Mr. Tennyson's power there 
 was a hush and a reverent awe, a sense of the mystery, 
 the infinitude, the awfulness, as well as of the mere 
 beauty of wayside things, which invested these poems 
 as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and majesty 
 of tone, beside which both Keats' and Wordsworth's 
 methods of handling pastoral subjects looked like the 
 colouring of Julio Romano or Watteau by the side of 
 Correggio or Titian. 
 
 This deep, simple faith in the divineness of Nature 
 as she appears, which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson's
 
 TENNYSON. 219 
 
 differentia, is really the natural accompaniment of a 
 quality at first sight its very opposite, and for which he 
 is often blamed by a prosaic world ; namely, his sub- 
 jective and transcendental mysticism. It is the mystic, 
 after all, who will describe Nature most simply, 
 because he sees most in her ; because he is most ready 
 to believe that she will reveal to others the same mes- 
 sage which she has revealed to him. Men like Behmen, 
 Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner 
 cloud-world of man's spirit, even though they lose their 
 way there, dazzled by excess of wonder men who, like 
 Wordsworth, can give utterance to such subtle anthro- 
 pologic wisdom as the Ode on the Intimations of Im- 
 mortality, will for that very reason most humbly and 
 patiently ' consider the lilies of the field, how they 
 grow/ And even so it is just because Mr. Tennyson 
 is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and what an 
 ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of 
 mere sensuous activity, calls ' dreamy/ that he has 
 become the greatest naturalistic poet which England 
 has seen for several centuries : the same faculty which 
 enabled him to draw such subtle subjective pictures of 
 womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him 
 to see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the 
 most distinctive and successful of his earlier poems, how 
 
 The creeping mosses and clambering weeds, 
 And the willow branches hoar and dank, 
 
 And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds, 
 
 And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, 
 
 And the silvery marish-flowers that throng 
 
 The desolate creeks and pools among, 
 
 Were flooded over with eddying song. 
 
 No doubt there are in the earlier poems exceptions 
 to this style, attempts to adorn Nature, and dazzle 
 with a barbaric splendour akin to that of Keats, as, 
 for instance, in the Recollections of the Arabian
 
 220 TENNYSON. 
 
 Nights. But how cold and gaudy, in spite of indi- 
 vidual beauties, is that poem by the side of either of 
 the Marianas, and especially of that one in which the 
 scenery is drawn, simply and faithfully, from those 
 counties which the world considers the quintessence of 
 the prosaic the English fens. 
 
 Upon the middle of the night 
 
 Waking she heard the night-fowl crow ; 
 
 The cock sung out an hour ere light : 
 From the dark fen the oxen's low 
 
 Came to her : without hope of change, 
 In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn, 
 Till cold winds woke the grey-eyed morn 
 
 About the lonely moated grange. 
 
 ******* 
 
 About a stone-cast from the wall 
 
 A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, 
 And o'er it many, round and small, 
 
 The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 
 Hard by a poplar shook alway, 
 
 All silver-green with gnarled bark, 
 
 For leagues no other tree did mark 
 The level waste, the rounding gray. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Throughout all these exquisite lines occurs but one 
 instance of what the vulgar call ' poetic diction/ All 
 is simple description, in short and Saxon words, and 
 yet who can deny the effect to be perfect superior to 
 any similar passage in Wordsworth ? And why ? 
 Because the passage quoted, and indeed the whole 
 poem, is perfect in what artists call tone tone in the 
 metre and in the sound of the words, as well as in the 
 images and the feelings expressed. The weariness, 
 the dreariness, the dark mysterious waste, exist alike 
 within and without, in the slow monotonous pace of the 
 metre and the words, as well as in the boundless fen, 
 and the heart of her who, ' without hope of change, in 
 sleep did seem to walk forlorn.' 
 
 The same faith in Nature, the same instinctive cor-
 
 TENNYSON. 221 
 
 rectness in melody, springing from that correct insight 
 into Nature, ran through the poems inspired by me- 
 diaeval legends. The very spirit of the old ballad 
 writers, with their combinations of mysticism and ob- 
 jectivity, their freedom from any self-conscious attempt 
 at reflective epithets or figures, runs through them all. 
 We are never jarred in them, as we are in all the attempts 
 at ballad-writing and ballad-restoring before Mr. Tenny- 
 son's time, by discordant touches of the reflective in 
 thought, the picturesque in Nature, or the theatric in 
 action. To illustrate our meaning, readers may re- 
 member the ballad of Fair Emmeline, in Bishop 
 Percy's Reliques. The bishop confesses, if we mistake 
 not, to have patched one end of the ballad. He need 
 not have informed us of that fact, while such lines as 
 these following meet our eyes 
 
 The Baron turned aside, 
 And wiped away the rising tears 
 He proudly strove to hide. 
 
 No old ballad writer would have used such a com- 
 plicated concetto ! Another, and even a worse instance 
 is to be found in the difference between the old and 
 new versions of the grand ballad of Glasgeriou. In 
 the original, we hear how the elfin harper could 
 
 Harp fish out of the water, 
 
 And water out of a stone, 
 And milk out of a maiden's breast 
 
 That bairn had never none. 
 
 For which some benighted ' restorer ' substitutes 
 
 Oh, there was magic in his touch, 
 And sorcery in his string ! 
 
 No doubt there was. But while the new poetaster 
 informs you of the abstract notion, the ancient poet 
 gives you the concrete fact ; as Mr. Tennyson has done 
 with wonderful art in his exquisite St. Agnes, where
 
 222 TENNYSON. 
 
 the saint's subjective mysticism appears only as era- 
 bodied in objective pictures 
 
 Break up the heavens, oh, Lord ! and far 
 
 Through all yon starlight keen 
 Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star, 
 
 In raiment white and clean. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott's ballads fail just on the same 
 point. Even Campbell cannot avoid an occasional 
 false note of sentiment. In Mr. Tennyson alone, as 
 we think, the spirit of the Middle Age is perfectly 
 reflected ; its delight, not in the ' sublime and pic- 
 turesque/ but in the green leaves and spring flowers for 
 their own sake, the spirit of Chaucer and of the Robin 
 Hood Garland, the naturalism which revels as much 
 in the hedgerow and garden as in alps, and cataracts, 
 and Italian skies, and the other strong stimulants to 
 the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of an 
 unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to Brown- 
 ing, has rushed abroad to seek. It is enough for Mr. 
 Tennyson's truly English spirit to see how 
 
 On either side the river lie 
 Long fields of harley and of rye, 
 That clothe the wold and meet the sky ; 
 And through the field the road runs by 
 
 To many-tower 'd Camelot. 
 Or how 
 
 In the stormy east-wind straining, 
 The pale yellow woods were waning, 
 The broad stream in his banks complaining, 
 Heavily the low sky raining 
 Over tower'd Camelot. 
 
 Give him but such scenery as that, which he can see 
 in every parish in England, and he will find it a fit 
 scene for an ideal myth, subtler than a casuist's ques- 
 tionings, deep as the deepest heart of woman. 
 
 But in this earlier volume the poet has not yet 
 arrived at the art of combining his new speculations on
 
 TENNYSON. 223 
 
 man with his new mode of viewing Nature. His 
 objective pieces are too exclusively objective, his sub- 
 jective too exclusively subjective ; and where he deals 
 with natural imagery in these latter, he is too apt, as 
 in Eleanore, to fall back upon the old and received 
 method of poetic diction, though he never indulges in 
 a commonplace or a stock epithet. But in the interval 
 between 1830 and 1842 the needful interfusion of the 
 two elements has taken place. And in Locksley Hall 
 and the Two Voices we find the new doubts and 
 questions of the time embodied naturally and organi- 
 cally, in his own method of simple natural expression. 
 For instance, from the Search for Truth in the Two 
 Voices 
 
 Cry, faint not, climb : the summits lope 
 Beyond the furthest nights of hope, 
 Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope. 
 
 Sometimes a little corner shines, 
 
 As over rainy mist inclines 
 
 A gleaming crag with belts of pines. 
 
 ' I will go forward,' sayest thou ; 
 ' I shall not fail to find her now. 
 Look up, the fold is on her brow.' 
 
 Or again, in Locksley Hall, the poem which, as we 
 think deservedly, has had most influence on the minds 
 of the young men of our day 
 
 Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, 
 And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, 
 Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn ; 
 And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, 
 Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men ; 
 Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new : 
 That which they have done but earnest of the things which they 
 shall do : 
 
 and all the grand prophetic passage following, which is 
 said, we know not how truly, to have won for the poet
 
 224 TENNYSON. 
 
 the respect of that great statesman whose loss all good 
 men deplore. 
 
 In saying that Locksley Hall has deservedly had so 
 great an influence over the minds of the young, we 
 shall, we are afraid, have offended some who are accus- 
 tomed to consider that poem as Werterian and un- 
 healthy. But, in reality, the spirit of the poem is 
 simply anti- Werterian. It is man rising out of sickness 
 into health, not conquered by Werterism, but con- 
 quering his selfish sorrow, and the moral and intellectual 
 paralysis which it produces, by faith and hope, faith 
 in the progress of science and civilization, hope in the 
 final triumph of good. Doubtless, that is not the 
 highest deliverance, not a permanent deliverance at 
 all. Faith in God and hope in Christ alone can 
 deliver a man once and for all, from Werterism, or any 
 other moral disease ; that truth was reserved for In 
 Memoriam : but as far as Locksley Hall goes, it is a 
 step forward a whole moral seon beyond Byron and 
 Shelley ; and a step, too, in the right direction, just 
 because it is a step forward, because the path of de- 
 liverance is, as Locksley Hall sets forth, not backwards 
 towards a fancied paradise of childhood not backward 
 to grope after an unconsciousness which is now im- 
 possible, an implicit faith which would be unworthy of 
 the man, but forward on the road on which God has 
 been leading him, carrying upward with him the aspi- 
 rations of childhood, and the bitter experience of youth, 
 to help the organized and trustful labour of manhood. 
 There are, in fact, only two deliverances from Wer- 
 terism possible in the nineteenth century ; one is into 
 Popery, and the other is 
 
 Forward, forward, let us range ; 
 
 Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change; 
 Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day : 
 Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
 
 TENNYSON. 225 
 
 But such a combination of powers as Mr. Tennyson's 
 naturally develop themselves into a high idyllic faculty ; 
 for it is the very essence of the idyl to set forth the 
 poetry which lies in the simpler manifestations of Man 
 and Nature; yet not explicitly, by a reflective mo- 
 ralizing on them, as almost all our idyllists Cowper, 
 Gray, Crabbe, and Wordsworth have been in the 
 habit of doing, but implicitly, by investing them all 
 with a rich and delightful tone of colouring, perfect 
 grace of manner, perfect melody of rhythm, which, 
 like a gorgeous summer atmosphere, shall glorify with- 
 out altering the most trivial and homely sights. And 
 it is this very power, as exhibited in the Lord of 
 Burleigh, Audley Court, and the Gardener's Daughter, 
 which has made Mr. Tennyson, not merely the only 
 English rival of Theocritus and Bion, but, in our 
 opinion, as much their superior as modern England is 
 superior to ancient Greece. 
 
 Yet in The Princess, perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises 
 higher still. The idyllic manner alternates with the 
 satiric, the pathetic, even the sublime, by such imper- 
 ceptible gradations, and continual delicate variations of 
 key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes 
 the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet har- 
 monious fairy-land, in which his fancy ranges. In this 
 work, too, Mr. Tennyson shows himself more than ever 
 the poet of the day. In it more than ever the old is 
 interpenetrated with the new the domestic and scien- 
 tific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in 
 every page, to make use of modern words and notions, 
 from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of 
 his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical. Though, as we 
 just said, his stage is an ideal fairy-land, yet he has 
 reached the ideal by the only true method, by bring- 
 ing the Middle Age forward to the Present one, and 
 
 VOL. i. Q
 
 226 TENNYSON. 
 
 not by ignoring the Present to fall back on a cold and 
 galvanized Medievalism ; and thus he makes his 
 ' Medley ' a mirror of the nineteenth century, pos- 
 sessed of its own new art and science, its own new 
 temptations and aspirations, and yet grounded on, and 
 continually striving to reproduce, the forms and ex- 
 periences of all past time. The idea, too, of The 
 Princess is an essentially modern one. In every age 
 women have been tempted, by the possession of su- 
 perior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to deny 
 their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone as 
 men, whether on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic 
 saintship, or philosophic pride. Cleopatra and St. 
 Hedwiga, Madame de Stael and the Princess, are merely 
 different manifestations of the same self-willed and 
 proud longing of woman to unsex herself, and realize, 
 single and self- sustained, some distorted and partial 
 notion of her own as to what the ' angelic life ' should 
 be. Cleopatra acted out the pagan ideal of an angel ; 
 St. Hedwiga, the mediaeval one ; Madame de Stael hers, 
 with the peculiar notions of her time as to what ' spi- 
 rituel ' might mean ; and in The Princess Mr. Tennyson 
 has embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet 
 equally fallacious, because equally unnatural analogue, 
 which we may meet too often up and down England 
 now. He shows us the woman, when she takes her 
 stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, work- 
 ing out her own moral punishment, by destroying in 
 herself the tender heart of flesh : not even her vast 
 purposes of philanthropy can preserve her, for they are 
 built up, not on the womanhood which God has given 
 her, but on her own self-will ; they change, they fall, 
 they become inconsistent, even as she does herself, till, 
 at last, she loses all feminine sensibility ; scornfully 
 and stupidly she rejects and misunderstands the heart
 
 TENNYSON. 227 
 
 of man ; and then falling from pride to sternness, from 
 sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly 
 love as a crime, robs the mother of her child, and 
 becomes all but a vengeful fury, with all the peculiar 
 faults of woman, and none of the peculiar excellences 
 of man. 
 
 The poem being, as its title imports, a medley of jest 
 and earnest, allows a metrical licence, of which we are 
 often tempted to wish that its author had not availed 
 himself; yet the most unmetrical and apparently care- 
 less passages flow with a grace, a lightness, a colloquial 
 ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten the effect 
 of the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the 
 unrivalled finish and melody of these latter. In these 
 come out all Mr. Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, 
 his mastery of language, which always fits the right 
 word to the right thing, and that word always the 
 simplest one, and the perfect ear for melody which 
 makes it superfluous to set to music poetry which, read 
 by the veriest schoolboy, makes music of itself. The 
 poem, we are glad to say, is so well known that it 
 seems unnecessary to quote from it ; yet there are here 
 and there gems of sound and expression of which, 
 however well our readers may know them, we cannot 
 forbear reminding them again. For instance, the end 
 of the Idyl in book vii. beginning ' Come down, O 
 maid' (the Avhole of which is perhaps one of the most 
 perfect fruits of the poet's genius) : 
 
 Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
 The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees. 
 
 Who, after three such lines, will talk of English as 
 a harsh and clumsy language, and seek in the effemi- 
 nate and monotonous Italian for expressive melody of 
 sound ? Who cannot hear in them the rapid rippling 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 TENNYSON. 
 
 of the water, the stately calmness of the wood-dove's 
 note, and, in the repetition of short syllables and soft 
 liquids in the last line, the 
 
 Murmuring of innumerable bees ? 
 
 Or again, what combination of richness with sim- 
 plicity in such a passage as this : 
 
 Breathe upon my brows ; 
 In tbat fine air I tremble, all the past 
 Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this 
 I scarce believe, and all the rich to come 
 Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels 
 Athwart the smoke of burning leaves. 
 
 How Mr. Tennyson can have attained the prodigal 
 fulness of thought and imagery which distinguishes this 
 poem, and especially the last canto, without his style 
 ever becoming overloaded, seldom even confused, is 
 perhaps one of the greatest marvels of the whole pro- 
 duction. The songs themselves, which have been in- 
 serted between the cantos in the last edition of the 
 book, seem, perfect as they are, wasted and smothered 
 among the surrounding fertility ; till we discover that 
 they stand there, not merely for the sake of their in- 
 trinsic beauty, but serve to call back the reader's mind, 
 at every pause in the tale of the Princess's folly, to that 
 very healthy ideal of womanhood which she has spurned. 
 
 At the end of the first canto, fresh from the de- 
 scription of the female college, with its professoresses, 
 and hostleresses, and other Utopian monsters, we turn 
 the page ; and 
 
 As through the land at eve we went, 
 
 And pluck'd the ripen'd ears, 
 We fell out, my wife and I, 
 
 And kissed again with tears : 
 
 And blessings on the falling-out 
 
 That all the more endears, 
 When we fall out with those we love, 
 
 And kiss again with tears !
 
 TENNYSON. 229 
 
 For when we came where lies the child 
 
 We lost in other years, 
 There above the little grave, 
 
 We kissed again with tears. 
 
 Between the next two cantos intervenes the well- 
 known cradle-song, perhaps the best of all ; and at the 
 next interval is the equally well-known bugle-song, the 
 idea of which is that of twin-labour and twin-fame, in 
 a pair of lovers. 
 
 Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
 And grow for ever and for ever. 
 
 In the next, the memory of wife and child inspirits 
 the soldier in the field; in the next, the sight of the 
 fallen hero's child opens the sluices of his widow's tears ; 
 and in the last, and perhaps the most beautiful of all, 
 the poet has succeeded, in the new edition, in super- 
 adding a new form of emotion to a canto in which he 
 seemed to have exhausted every resource of pathos 
 which his subject allowed ; and prepares us for the 
 triumph of that art by which he makes us, after all, 
 love the heroine whom he at first taught us to hate 
 and despise, till we see that her naughtiness is after all 
 one that must be kissed and not whipped out of her, 
 and look on smiling while she repents, with Prince 
 Harry of old, ' not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new 
 silk and old sack :' 
 
 Ask me no more : the moon may draw the sea ; 
 
 The cloud may stoop from Heaven and take the shape, 
 With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape ; 
 
 But, too fond, when have I answered thee ? 
 Ask me no more. 
 
 Ask me no more : what answer should T give P 
 I love not hollow cheek or faded eye : 
 Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die! 
 
 Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live ; 
 Ask me no more. 
 
 Ask me no more : thy fate and mine are seafd : 
 I strove against the stream and all in vain : 
 Let the great river take me to the main : 
 
 No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield ; 
 Ask me no more.
 
 230 TENNYSON. 
 
 We now come to In Mcmoriam ; a collection of 
 poems on a vast variety of subjects, but all united, as 
 their name implies, to the memory of a departed friend. 
 We know not whether to envy more the poet the 
 object of his admiration, or that object the monument 
 which has been consecrated to his nobleness. For in 
 this latest and highest volume, written at various in- 
 tervals during a long series of years, all the poet's 
 peculiar excellences, with all that he has acquired 
 from others, seem to have been fused down into a per- 
 fect unity, and brought to bear on his subject with that 
 care and finish which only a labour of love can inspire. 
 We only now know the whole man, all his art, all his 
 insight, all his faculty of discerning the piu nell' uno, 
 and the uno nelP piu. As he says himself: 
 
 My love has talked with rocks and trees, 
 He finds on misty mountain-ground ; 
 His own vast shadow glory-crowned ; 
 
 He sees himself in all he sees. 
 
 Everything reminds him of the dead. Every joy or 
 sorrow of man, every aspect of nature, from 
 
 The forest crack 'd, the waters curl'd, 
 The cattle huddled on the lea, 
 
 to 
 
 The thousand waves of wheat 
 That ripple round the lonely grange. 
 
 In every place where in old days they had met and 
 conversed; in every dark wrestling of the spirit with 
 the doubts and fears of manhood, throughout the whole 
 outward universe of nature, and the whole inward 
 universe of spirit, the soul of his dead friend broods 
 at first a memory shrouded in blank despair, then 
 a living presence, a ministering spirit, answering 
 doubts, calming fears, stirring up noble aspira- 
 tions, utter humility, leading the poet upward step
 
 TENNYSON. 231 
 
 by step to faith, and peace, and hope. Not that there 
 runs throughout the book a conscious or organic method. 
 The poems seem often merely to be united by the identity 
 of their metre,so exquisitely chosen, that while the major 
 rhyme in the second and third lines of each stanza 
 gives the solidity and self-restraint required by such 
 deep themes, the mournful minor rhyme of each first 
 and fourth line always leads the ear to expect some- 
 thing beyond, and enables the poet's thoughts to wander 
 sadly on, from stanza to stanza and poem to poem, in 
 an endless chain of 
 
 Linked sweetness long drawn out. 
 
 There are records of risings and fallings again, of 
 alternate cloud and sunshine, throughout the book ; 
 earnest and passionate, yet never bitter; humble, yet 
 never abject ; with a depth and vehemence of affection 
 ' passing the love of woman/ yet without a taint of 
 sentimentality ; self-restrained and dignified, without 
 ever narrowing into artificial coldness ; altogether 
 rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare; and all knit 
 together into one spiritual unity by the proem at 
 the opening of the volume in our eyes, the noblest 
 English Christian poem which several centuries have 
 seen. 
 
 We shall not quote the very poems which we should 
 most wish to sink into men's hearts. Let each man 
 find for himself those which suit him best, and medi- 
 tate on them in silence. They are fit only to be read 
 solemnly in our purest and most thoughtful moods, in 
 the solitude of our chamber, or by the side of those we 
 love, with thanks to the great heart who has taken 
 courage to bestow on us the record of his own friend- 
 ship, doubt, and triumph. 
 
 It has been often asked why Mr. Tennyson's great
 
 232 TENNYSON. 
 
 and varied powers had never been concentrated on one 
 immortal work. The epic, the lyric, the idyllic facul- 
 ties, perhaps the dramatic also, seemed to be all there, 
 and yet all sundered, scattered about in small frag- 
 mentary poems. In Memoriam, as we think, explains 
 the paradox. Mr. Tennyson had been employed on 
 higher, more truly divine, and yet more truly human 
 work than either epos or drama. Within the unseen 
 and alone truly Real world which underlies and explains 
 this mere time-shadow, which men miscall the Real, he 
 had been going down into the depths, and ascending 
 into the heights, led, like Dante of old, by the guiding 
 of a mighty spirit. And in this volume, the record of 
 seventeen years, we have the result of those spiritual 
 experiences in a form calculated, as we believe, to be a 
 priceless benefit to many an earnest seeker in this 
 generation, and perhaps to stir up some who are priding 
 themselves on a cold dilettantism and barren epicurism, 
 into something like a living faith and hope. Blessed 
 and delightful it is to find, that even in these new ages 
 the creeds which so many fancy to be at their last 
 gasp, are still the final and highest succour, not merely 
 of the peasant and the outcast, but of the subtle artist 
 and the daring speculator. Blessed it is to find the 
 most cunning poet of our day able to combine the 
 complicated rhythm and melody of modern times with 
 the old truths which gave heart to martyrs at the 
 stake ; and to see in the science and the history of the 
 nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the 
 words which we learnt at our mothers' knee. Blessed, 
 thrice blessed, to find that hero-worship is not yet 
 passed away; that the heart of man still beats young 
 and fresh ; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, 
 Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shake-
 
 TENNYSON. 233 
 
 speare and his nameless friend, of ' love passing the 
 love of woman/ ennobled by its own humility, deeper 
 than death, and mightier than the grave, can still 
 blossom out, if it be but in one heart here and there, 
 to show men still how sooner or later ' he that loveth 
 knoweth God, for God is Love/
 
 THE POETEY OF SACKED AND LEGENDARY ART.* 
 
 MUCH attention has been excited this year by the 
 alleged fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal 
 power was to receive its death-blow in temporal 
 matters, at least during the past year 1848. For 
 ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the 
 obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in the 
 public esteem, than we have in other interpreters of 
 prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views of past 
 history are enough to damp our faith in their discern- 
 ment of the future. It does seem that people ought 
 to understand what has been, before they predict what 
 will be. History is ' the track of God's footsteps 
 through time ;' it is in His dealings with our forefathers 
 that we may expect to find the laws by which He will 
 deal with us. Not that Mr. Fleming's conjecture 
 must be false ; among a thousand guesses there ought 
 surely to be one right one. And it is almost impossible 
 for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however 
 clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at 
 some truth or other. The interpreters of prophecy 
 therefore, like all other interpreters, have our best 
 wishes, though not our sanguine hopes. But, in the 
 meantime, there are surely signs of the approaching 
 ruin of Popery, more certain than any speculations on 
 
 * PHASER'S MAGAZINE, March, 1849. ' Sacred and Legendary 
 Art.' By Mrs. Jameson. 2 vols. London. 1848. Longman 
 and Co.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 233 
 
 the mystic numbers of the Revelation. We should 
 point to recent books, not to books which merely 
 expose Rome that has been done long ago, usque ad 
 nauseam, but to books which do her justice, to Mr. 
 Maitland's ' Dark Ages ;' Lord Lindsay's * Christian 
 Art ;' and last, but not least, to the very charming 
 book of Mrs. Jameson, whose title heads this review. 
 In them, and in a host of similar works in Germany, 
 which Dr. Wiseman's party hail as signs of coming 
 triumph, we fancy we see the death-warrant of Ro- 
 manism ; because they prove that Rome has nearly 
 done her work, that the Protestants are learning the 
 lesson for the sake of which Providence has so long 
 borne with that monstrous system. When Popery has 
 no more truth to teach us, but not till then, will it 
 vanish away into its native night. 
 
 We entreat Protestant readers not to be alarmed at 
 us. We have not the slightest tendency toward the 
 stimulants of Popery, either in their Roman unmixed 
 state, or in their diluted Oxford form. We are, with 
 all humility, more Protestant than Protestantism 
 itself; our fastidious nostril, more sensitive of Jesuits 
 than even those of the author of ' Hawkstone,' has 
 led us at moments to fancy that we scent indulgences 
 in Conduit-street Chapel, and discern inquisitors in 
 Exeter Hall itself. Seriously, none believe more 
 firmly than ourselves that the cause of Protestantism 
 is the cause of liberty, of civilization, of truth ; the 
 cause of man and God. And because we think 
 Mrs. Jameson's book especially Protestant, both in 
 manner and intention, and likely to do service 
 to the good cause, we are setting to work herein to 
 praise and recommend it. For the time, we think, for 
 calling Popery ill names is past; though to abstain 
 is certainly sometimes a sore restraint for English
 
 236 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 spirits, as Mrs. Jameson herself, we suspect, has found : 
 but Romanism has been exposed, and refuted tri- 
 umphantly, every month for centuries, and yet the 
 Romish nations are not converted ; and too many Eng- 
 lish families of late have found, by sad experience, 
 that such arguments as are in vogue are powerless to 
 dissuade the young from rushing headlong into the very 
 superstitions which they have been taught from their 
 childhood to deride. The truth is, Protestantism may 
 well cry, ' Save me from my friends !' We have at- 
 tacked Rome too often on shallow grounds, and finding 
 our arguments weak, have found it necessary to over- 
 state them. We have got angry, and caught up the 
 first weapon which came to hand, and have only cut 
 our own fingers. We have very nearly burnt the 
 Church of England over our heads, in our hurry 
 to make a bonfire of the Pope. We have been too 
 proud to make ourselves acquainted with the very 
 tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of 
 reading no Popish books but such as we were sure 
 would give us a handle for attack, and not even them 
 without the precaution of getting into a safe passion 
 beforehand. We have dealt in exaggerations, in special, 
 pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations of motive, 
 in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have out- 
 raged the common feelings of humanity by remaining 
 blind to the virtues of noble and holy men because 
 they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in 
 Italy as well as in England. We have talked as if 
 God had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and 
 reprobation in the next millions of Christian people, 
 simply because they were born of Romish and not of 
 Protestant fathers. And we have our reward ; we have 
 fared like the old woman who would not tell the chil- 
 dren what a well was for fear they should fall into
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 237 
 
 one. We see educated and pious Englishmen joining 
 the Romish communion simply from ignorance of Rome, 
 and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. 
 Our medicines produce no effect on them, and all we 
 can do is, like quacks, to increase the dose. Of course 
 if ten boxes of Morison's pills have killed a man, it 
 only proves that he ought to have taken twelve of 
 them. We are jesting, but as an Ulster Orange- 
 man would say, ' it is in good Protestant earnest.' 
 
 In the meantime some of the deepest cravings of 
 the human heart have been left utterly unsatisfied. 
 And be it remembered, that such universal cravings are 
 more than fancies ; they are indications of deep spiritual 
 wants, which, unless we supply them with the good 
 food which God has made for them, will supply 
 themselves with poison, indications of spiritual facul- 
 ties, which it is as wicked to stunt or distort by misedu- 
 cation as it is to maim our own limbs or stupify our 
 understanding. Our humanity is an awful and divine 
 gift; our business is to educate it throughout God 
 alone must judge which part of it shall preponderate 
 over the rest. But in the last generation and, alas ! 
 in this also little or no proper care has been taken 
 of the love for all which is romantic, marvellous, heroic, 
 which exists in every ingenuous child. Schoolboys, 
 indeed, might, if they chose, in play-hours, gloat over 
 the ' Seven Champions of Christendom/ or Lempriere's 
 gods and goddesses ; girls might, perhaps, be allowed to 
 devour by stealth a few fairy tales, or the ' Arabian 
 Nights ;' but it was only by connivance that their 
 longings were satisfied from the scraps of Moslemism, 
 Paganism, anywhere but from Christianity. Pro- 
 testantism had nothing to do with the imagination, 
 iu fact, it was a question whether reasonable people 
 had any ; whether the devil was not the original maker
 
 238 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 of that troublesome faculty in man, woman, and child. 
 Poetry itself was, with most parents, a dram, to be 
 given, like Dalby's Carminative, as a pis aller, when 
 children could not possibly be kept quiet by Miss 
 Edgeworth or Mrs. Mangnall. Then, as the chil- 
 dren grew up, and began to know something of history 
 and art, two still higher cravings began to seize on 
 many of them, if they were at all of deep and earnest 
 character : a desire to associate with religion their new 
 love for the beautiful, and a reverence for antiquity ; a 
 wish to find some bond of union between themselves 
 and the fifteen centuries of Christianity which elapsed 
 before the Reformation. They applied to Protestant 
 teachers and Protestant books, and received too often 
 the answer that the Gospel had nothing to do with 
 art, art was either Pagan or Popish; and as for the 
 centuries before the Reformation, they and all in them 
 belonged utterly to darkness and the pit. As for the 
 heroes of early Christianity, they were madmen or 
 humbugs ; their legends, devilish and filthy puerilities. 
 They went to the artists and literary men, and received 
 the same answer. The medieval writers were fools. 
 Classical art was the only art ; all painters before the 
 age of Raphael superstitious bunglers. To be sure, 
 as Fusell said, Christianity had helped art a little ; but 
 then it was the Christianity of Julio and Leone, in 
 short, of the worst age of Popery. 
 
 These falsehoods have worked out their own punish- 
 ment. The young are examining for themselves, and 
 finding that we have deceived them ; a revulsion in 
 their feelings has taken place, similar to that which 
 took place in Germany some half-century ago. They 
 are reading the histories of the Middle Ages, and if we 
 call them barbarous they will grant it, and then quote 
 instances of individual heroism and piety, which they
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 239 
 
 defy us or any honest man not to admire. They are 
 reading the old legends, and when we call them super- 
 stitious they grant it, and then produce passages in 
 which the highest doctrines of Christianity are em- 
 bodied in the most pathetic and noble stories. They 
 are looking for themselves at the ante-Raphaellic 
 artists, and when we tell them that Fra Angelico's 
 pictures are weak, affected, ill-drawn, ill-coloured 
 they grant it, and then ask us if we can deny the 
 sweetness, the purity, the rapt devotion, the saintly 
 virtue, which shines forth from his faces. They ask 
 us how beautiful and holy words or figures can be 
 inspired by an evil spirit. They ask us why they are 
 to deny the excellence of tales and pictures which 
 make men more pure and humble, more earnest and 
 noble. They tell us truly that all beauty is God's 
 stamp, and that all beauty ought to be consecrated to 
 his service. And then they ask us, ' If Protestantism 
 denies that she can consecrate the beautiful, how can 
 you wonder if we love the Romanism which can ? You 
 say that Popery created these glorious schools of art : 
 how can you wonder if, like Overbeck, ' we take the 
 faith for the sake of the art which it inspired ? ' ' 
 
 To all which, be it true or false (and it is both), 
 are we to answer merely by shutting our eyes and ears 
 tight, and yelling ' No Popery ! ' or are we to say 
 boldly to them, ' We confess ourselves in fault ; we 
 sympathize with your longings; we confess that Pro- 
 testantism has not satisfied them ; but we assert that 
 the only cause is, that Protestantism has not been 
 true to herself; that Art, like every other product of 
 the free human spirit, is her domain, and not Popery's ; 
 that these legends, these pictures, are beautiful just in 
 as far as they contain in them the germs of those eter- 
 nal truths about man, nature, and God, which the
 
 240 POETRY OF SACKED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 lleformation delivered from bondage ; that you can 
 admire them, and yet remain thorough Protestants ; 
 and more, that unless you do remain Protestants, you 
 will never enter into their full beauty and significance, 
 because you will lose sight of those very facts and ideas 
 from which they derive all their healthy power over 
 you ? 
 
 These thoughts are not our own ; they are uttered 
 all over England, thank God ! just now, by many 
 voices and in many forms : if they had been boldly 
 spoken during the last fifteen years, many a noble 
 spirit, we believe, might have remained in the Church 
 of its fathers which has now taken refuge in Romanism 
 from the fruits of miseducation. One great reason 
 why Romanism has been suffered to drag on its exist- 
 ence is, we humbly think, that it might force us at 
 last to say this. We have been long learning the les- 
 son ; till we have learnt it thoroughly Romanism will 
 exist, and we shall never be safe from its allurements. 
 
 These thoughts may help to explain our opening 
 sentences, as well as the extreme pleasure with which 
 we hail the appearance of Mrs. Jameson's work. 
 
 The authoress has been struck, during her examina- 
 tion of the works of Christian artists, with the extreme 
 ignorance which prevails in England on the subjects 
 which they portray. 
 
 We have had (she says, in an introduction, every 
 word of which we recommend as replete with the tiniest 
 Christian philosophy), 
 
 Inquiries into the Principles of Taste, treatises on the Sublime and 
 Beautiful, Anecdotes of Painting, and we abound in antiquarian 
 essays on disputed pictures and mutilated statues ; but up to a late 
 period any inquiry into the true spirit and significance of works of 
 art, as connected with the history of religion and civilization, would 
 have appeared ridiculous, or, perhaps, dangerous. We should have 
 had another cry of 'No Popery!' and Acts of Parliament prohibit- 
 ing the importation of saints and Madonnas. P. xxi.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 241 
 
 And what should we have gained by it, but more 
 ignorance of the excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of 
 its real dangers ? If Protestantism be the truth, know- 
 ledge of whatsoever kind can only further it. We 
 have found it so in the case of classical literature. 
 Why should we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel? 
 Our boys have not taken to worshipping Jupiter and 
 Juno by reading about them. We never feared that 
 they would. We knew that we should not make them 
 pagans by teaching them justly to admire the poetry, 
 the philosophy, the personal virtues of pagans. And, 
 iu fact, the few who since the revival of letters have 
 deserted Christianity for what they called philosophic 
 heathenism, have in almost every case sympathized, 
 not with the excellences, but with the worst vices of 
 the Greek and Roman. They have been men like 
 Leo X. or the Medici, who, ready to be profligates 
 under any religion, found in heathenism only an excuse 
 for their darling sins. The same will be the fruits of 
 a real understanding of the mediaeval religion. It will 
 only endanger those who carried already the danger in 
 themselves, and would have fallen into some other snare 
 if this had been away. Why should we fancy that Pro- 
 testantism, like the Romanism which it opposes, is a 
 plant that will not bear the light, and can only be pro- 
 tected at the expense of the knowledge of facts ? Why 
 will we forget the great spiritual law which Mrs. 
 Jameson and others in these days are fully recognising, 
 that ' we cannot safely combat the errors of any man 
 or system without first giving them full credit for what- 
 ever excellences they may retain?' Such a course is 
 the true fruit of that free spirit of Protestantism which 
 ought to delight in recognising good to whatever party 
 it may belong ; which asserts that every good gift and 
 perfect gift comes directly from above, and not through 
 
 VOL. I. R
 
 242 TOETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 the channel of particular formularies or priesthoods ; 
 which, because it loves faith and virtue for their own 
 sakes, and not as mere parts of a ' Catholic system/ 
 can recognise them and delight in them wherever it 
 finds them. 
 
 Upon these creations of ancient art (as Mrs. Jameson says) we 
 cannot look as those did for whom they were created ; we cannot 
 annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them ; we cannot, 
 in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed 
 before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work through a 
 reverentially excited fancy. We are critical, not credulous. We no 
 longer accept this polytheistic form of Christianity; and there is 
 little danger, I suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses 
 of superstition to which it led. But if I have not much sympathy 
 with modern imitations of mediaeval art, still less can I sympathize 
 with that narrow puritanical jealousy which holds the monuments of 
 a real and earnest faith in contempt : all that God has permitted to 
 exist once in the past should be considered as the possession of the 
 present ; sacred for example or warning, and held as the foundation 
 on which to build up what is better and purer. Introd. p. xx. 
 
 Mrs. Jameson here speaks in the name of a large and 
 rapidly increasing class. The craving for religious art, 
 of which we spoke above, is spreading far and wide ; 
 even in dissenting chapels we see occasional attempts 
 at architectural splendour, which would have been con- 
 sidered twenty years ago heretic or idolatrous. And 
 yet with all this there is, as Mrs. Jameson says, a 
 curious ignorance with regard to the subject of medi- 
 aeval art, even though it has now become a reigning 
 fashion among us. 
 
 We have learned, perhaps, after running through half the gal- 
 leries and churches in Europe, to distinguish a few of the attributes 
 and characteristic figures which meet us at every turn, yet without 
 any clear idea of their meaning, "derivation, or relative propriety. 
 The palm of victory, we know, designates the martyr, triumphant 
 in death. We so far emulate the critical sagacity of the gardener 
 in Zeluco, that we have learned to distinguish St. Laurence by his 
 gridiron, and St. Catherine by her wheel. We are not at a loss to 
 recognise the Magdalene's ' loose hair and lifted eye,' even when 
 without her skull and her vase of ointment. We learn to know St. 
 Francis by his brown habit, and shaven crown, and wasted, ardent 
 features; but how do we distinguish him from St. Anthony, or St.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 243 
 
 Dominick ? As for St. George and the dragon from the St. George 
 of the Louvre Raphael's who sits his horse with the elegant tran- 
 quillity of one assured of celestial aid, down to him ' who swings on 
 a sign-post at mine hostess's door,' he is our familiar acquaintance. 
 But who is that lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing 
 aloft the symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished* 
 dragon ? ' That is a copy after Raphael.' And who is that majestic 
 creature holding her palm-branch, while the unicorn crouches at her 
 feet ? ' That is the famous Moretto at Vienna.' Are we satisfied ? 
 Not in the least ! but we try to look wiser, and pass on. 
 
 In the old times, the painters of these legendary scenes and sub- 
 jects could always reckon securely on certain associations and certain 
 sympathies in the minds of the spectators. We have outgrown 
 these associations, we repudiate these sympathies. We have taken 
 these works from their consecrated localities, in which they once 
 held each their dedicated place, and we have hung them in our 
 drawing-rooms and our dressing-rooms, over our pianos and our 
 sideboards, and now what do they say to us ? That Magdalene, 
 weeping amid her hair, who once spoke comfort to the soul of the 
 fallen sinner, that Sebastian, arrow-pierced, whose upward, ardent 
 glance, spoke of courage and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf, that 
 poor tortured slave, to whose aid St. Mark comes sweeping down 
 from above, can they speak to us of nothing save flowing lines, 
 and correct drawing, and gorgeous colour? Must we be told that 
 one is a Titian, the other a Guido, the third a Tintoret, before we 
 dare to melt into compassion or admiration ? or the moment we refer 
 to their ancient religious signification and influence, must it be with 
 disdain or with pity ? This, as it appears to me, is to take not a 
 rational, but rather a most irrational, as well as a most irreverent, 
 view of the question : it is to confine the pleasure and improvement 
 to be derived from works of art within very narrow bounds ; it is to 
 seal up a fountain of the richest poetry, and to shut out a thousand 
 ennobling and inspiring thoughts. Happily there is a growing 
 appreciation of these larger principles of criticism as applied to the 
 study of art. People look at the pictures which hang round their 
 walU, and have an awakening suspicion that there is more in them 
 than meets the eye more than mere connoisseurship can interpret ; 
 and that they have another, a deeper significance than has been 
 dreamed of by picture dealers and picture collectors, or even picture 
 critics. Introd. xxiii. 
 
 On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry 
 of Sacred and Legendary Art. Her first volume con- 
 tains a general sketch of the legends connected with 
 angels, with the scriptural personages, and the primitive 
 fathers. Her second, the histories of most of ' those 
 sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have 
 
 a 2
 
 244 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real 
 history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so dis- 
 figured by poetical embroidery that they have in some 
 sort the air of ideal beings.' Each story is followed 
 by a series of short, but brilliant, criticisms on those 
 pictures in which the story has been embodied by 
 painters of various schools and periods, and illustrated 
 by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts, which 
 add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work. 
 A future volume is promised which shall contain the 
 ' legends of the monastic orders, and the history of the 
 Franciscans and the Dominicans, considered merely in 
 their connexion with the revival and the development 
 of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
 turies ;' a work which, if it equal the one before us, 
 will doubtless be hailed by those conversant with that 
 wonderful phase of human history as a valuable addi- 
 tion to our psychologic and aesthetic literature. 
 
 We ought to petition, also, for a volume which should 
 contain the life of the Saviour, and the legends of the 
 Virgin Mary ; though this latter subject, we are afraid, 
 will be too difficult for even Mrs. Jameson's tact and 
 delicacy to make tolerable to English readers, so 
 thoroughly has the Virgin Mary, as especial patroness 
 of purity, been intermixed in her legends with every 
 form of prudish and prurient foulmindedness.* 
 
 The authoress has wisely abstained from all contro- 
 versial matters. In her preface she begs that it may 
 be clearly understood, ' that she has taken throughout 
 the aesthetic and not the religious view of these pro- 
 ductions of art ; which, in as far as they are informed 
 with a true and earnest feeling, and steeped in that 
 
 * Since this was written, Mrs. Jameson's volume on the Legends 
 of the Madonna has succeeded excellently in giving us, if not a com- 
 plete, yet still a readable and modest picture of mediaeval Mariolatry.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 245 
 
 beauty which emanates from Genius inspired by Faith, 
 may cease to be religion, but cannot cease to be poetry ; 
 and as poetry only/ she says, ' I have considered them/ 
 In a word, Mrs. Jameson has done for them what 
 schoolmasters and schoolboys, bishops and Royal Aca- 
 demicians, have been doing for centuries, by Greek 
 plays and Greek statues, without having incurred, as 
 we said above, the slightest suspicion of wanting to 
 worship heathen gods and goddesses. 
 
 Not that she views these stories with the cold, un- 
 believing eye of a Goethe, merely as studies of ' artistic 
 effect ;' she often transgresses her rule of impartiality, 
 and just where we should wish her to do so. Her 
 geniality cannot avoid an occasional burst of feeling, 
 such as concludes her notice of the stories about the 
 Magdalene and the other c beatified penitents.' 
 
 Poets have sung, and moralists and sages have taught, that for 
 the frail woman there was nothing left but to die ; or if more re- 
 mained for her to suffer, there was at least nothing left for her to be 
 or do, no choice between sackcloth and ashes and the livery of sin. 
 The beatified penitents of the early Christian Church spoke another 
 lesson, spoke divinely of hope lor the fallen, hope without self- 
 abasement or defiance. We, in these days, acknowledge no such 
 saints ; we have even done our best to dethrone Mary Magdalene ; 
 but we have martyrs, ' by the pang without the palm,' and one, 
 at least, among these who has not died without lifting up a voice of 
 eloquent and solemn warning ; who has borne her palm on earth, 
 and whose starry crown may be seen on high even now amid the 
 constellations of Genius. Vol. ii. p. 386. 
 
 To whom the authoress may allude in this touching 
 passage our simplicity cannot guess in the least. We 
 may, therefore, without the suspicion of partiality, say 
 to the noble spirit of purity, compassion, and true 
 liberality which breathes throughout this whole chapter, 
 ' Go on and conquer.' 
 
 Nor again can Mrs. Jameson's English honesty avoid 
 an occasional slip of delicate sarcasm ; for instance, in 
 the story of St. Filomena, a bran-new saint, whose
 
 246 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 discovery at Rome in 1 802, produced there an excite- 
 ment which we should suspect was very much wanted, 
 which we recommend to all our readers as an instance 
 of the state into which the virtues of honesty and com- 
 mon sense seem to have fallen in the Eternal City of 
 humbugs. 
 
 No doubt there are many such cases of imposture 
 among the list of saints and martyrs : yet, granting 
 all which have been exposed, and more, there still re- 
 mains a list of authentic stories, sadder and stranger 
 than any romance of man's invention, to read which 
 without deep sympathy and admiration our hearts must 
 be callous or bigoted indeed. As Mrs. Jameson her- 
 self well says (vol. ii. p. 137) : 
 
 When iii the daily service of our Church we repeat these words of 
 the sublime hymn (' The noble army of martyrs praise Thee !'), I 
 wonder sometimes whether it be with a full appreciation of their 
 meaning ? whether we do really reflect on all that this noble army 
 of martyrs has conquered for us? Did they indeed glorify God 
 through their courage, and seal their faith in their Redeemer with 
 their blood ? And if it be so, how is it that we Christians have 
 learned to look coldly upon the effigies of those who sowed the seed 
 of the harvest which we have reaped ? Sanguis martyrum semen 
 Christianorum ! We may admit that the reverence paid to them in 
 former days was unreasonable and excessive; that credulity and 
 ignorance have in many instances falsified the actions imputed to 
 them ; that enthusiasm has magnified their numbers beyond all 
 belief; that when the communion with martyrs was associated with 
 the presence of their material remains, the passion for relics led to 
 a thousand abuses, and the belief in their intercession to a thousand 
 superstitions. But why, in uprooting the false, uproot also the 
 beautiful and the true P 
 
 Thoroughly and practically convinced as we are of 
 the truth of these words, it gave us some pain when, 
 in the work of a very worthy person, The Church in 
 the Catacombs, by Dr. Maitlaud (not the author of The 
 Dark Ages), we found, as far as we could perceive, a 
 wish 'to advance the Protestant cause/ by throwing 
 general doubt on the old martyrologies and their monu-
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 247 
 
 ments in the Roman catacombs. If we shall have 
 judged hastily, we shall be ready to apologize. None, 
 as we have said before, more firmly believe that the 
 Protestant cause is the good cause ; none are more 
 reverentially inclined toward all honest critical investi- 
 gations, more anxious to see all truth, the Bible itself, 
 sifted and tested in every possible method ; but we must 
 protest against what certainly seems too contemptuous 
 a rejection of a mass of historic evidence hitherto un- 
 doubted, except by the school of Voltaire; and of the 
 hasty denial of the meaning of Christian and martyro- 
 logic symbols, as well known to antiquaries as Stone- 
 henge or Magna Charta. 
 
 At the same time, Dr. Maitland's book seems the 
 work of a righteous and earnest man, and it is not its 
 object, but its method, of which we complain. The 
 whole question of martyrology, a far more important 
 one than historians generally fancy, requires a thorough 
 investigation, critical and historical ; it has to be done, 
 and especially just now. The Germans, the civil en- 
 gineers of the intellectual world, ought to do it for us, 
 and no doubt will. But those who undertake it must 
 bring to the work, not only impartiality, but enthu- 
 siasm ; it is the spirit only, after all, which can quicken 
 the eye, which can free the understanding from the 
 idols of laziness, prejudice, and hasty induction. To 
 talk philosophically of such matters a man must love 
 them ; he must set to work with a Christian sympathy, 
 and a manly admiration for those old spiritual heroes 
 to whose virtue and endurance Europe owes it that she 
 is not now a den of heathen savages. He must be 
 ready to assume everything about them to be true 
 which is neither absurd, immoral, nor unsupported by 
 the same amount of evidence which he would require 
 for any other historic fact. And, just because this very
 
 218 POETHY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 tone of mind enthusiastic but not idolatrous, discrimi- 
 nating but not captious runs through Mrs. Jameson's 
 work, we hail it with especial pleasure, as a fresh move 
 in a truly philosophic and Christian direction. Indeed, 
 for that branch of the subject which she has taken in 
 hand, not the history, but the poetry of legends and of the 
 art which they awakened, she derives a peculiar fitness, 
 not merely from her own literary talents and acquaint- 
 ance with continental art, but also from the very fact 
 of her being an English wife and mother. Women 
 ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics at once 
 more quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than 
 ourselves, whose proper business is creation. Perhaps 
 in Utopia they will take the reviewer's business entirely 
 off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by 
 the bye, in one leading periodical. But of all critics an 
 English matron ought to be the best open as she 
 should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and ad- 
 miring sympathies, accustomed by her Protestant edu- 
 cation to unsullied purity of thought, and inheriting 
 from her race, not only freedom of mind and reverence 
 for antiquity, but the far higher birthright of English 
 honesty. 
 
 And such a genial and honest spirit, we think, runs 
 through this book. 
 
 Another difficult task, perhaps the most difficult of 
 all, the authoress has well performed. We mean the 
 handling of stories whose facts she partly or wholly 
 disbelieves, while she admires and loves their spirit and 
 moral ; or doctrines, to pronounce on whose truth or 
 falsehood is beyond her subject. This difficulty Mr. 
 Newman, in the ' Lives of the English Saints/ edited 
 and partly written by him, turned with wonderful as- 
 tuteness to the advantage of Romanism ; but others, 
 more honest, have not been so victorious. Witness the
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 249 
 
 painfully uncertain impression left by some parts of one 
 or two of those masterly articles on Romish heroes 
 which appeared in the ' Quarterly Review ; ' an uncer- 
 tainty which we have the fullest reason to believe was 
 most foreign to the reviewer's mind and conscience. 
 Even Mr. Macaulay's brilliant history here and there 
 falls into the same snare. No one but those who have 
 tried it can be aware of the extreme difficulty of pre- 
 venting the dramatic historian from degenerating into 
 an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or understand 
 the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like 
 the present, becomes frantically reckless, under the cer- 
 tainty that, say what he will, he will be called a Jesuit 
 by the Protestants, an Infidel by the Papists, a Pan- 
 theist by the Ultra-High-Church, and a Rogue by all 
 three. 
 
 Now, we certainly shall not say that Mrs. Jameson is 
 greater than the writers just mentioned; but we must 
 say, that female tact and deep devotional feeling cut the 
 Gordian knot which has puzzled more cunning heads. 
 Not that Mrs. Jameson is faultless ; we want something 
 yet, in the telling of a Christian fairy-tale, and know 
 not what we want : but never were legends narrated 
 with more discernment and simplicity than these. 
 
 As an instance, take the legend of St. Dorothea 
 (vol. ii. p. 184), which is especially one of those stories 
 of 'sainted personages who/ as Mrs. Jameson says, 
 ' lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages 
 of Christianity; and whose real history, founded on 
 fact or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical em- 
 broidery, that they have in some sort the air of ideal 
 beings ; ' and which may, therefore, be taken as a com- 
 plete test of the authoress's tact and honesty : 
 
 In the province of Cappadocia and in the city of Caesarea, dwelt a 
 noble virgin, whose name was Dorothea. In the whole city there
 
 250 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 was none to be compared to her in beauty and grace of person. She 
 was a Christian, and served God day and night with prayers, with 
 fasting, and with alms. 
 
 The governor of the city, by name Sapritius (or Fabricius), was a 
 very terrible persecutor of the Christians, and hearing of the maiden, 
 and of her great beauty, he ordered her to be brought before him. 
 She came, with her mantle folded on her bosom, and her eyes meekly 
 cast down. The governor asked, ' Who art thou P' and she replied, 
 ' I am Dorothea, a virgin, and a servant of Jesus Christ.' He said, 
 1 Thou must serve our gods, or die.' She answered mildly, ' Be it 
 so; the sooner shall I stand in the presence of Him whom I most 
 desire to behold.' Then the governor asked her, ' Whom meanest 
 thou P' She replied, ' I mean the Son of God, Christ, mine espoused ! 
 his dwelling is paradise ; by his side are joys eternal ; and in his 
 garden grow celestial fruits and roses that never fade." Then Sa- 
 pritius, overcome by her eloquence and beauty, ordered her to be 
 carried back to her dungeon. And he sent to her two sisters, whose 
 names were Calista and Christeta, who had once been Christians, but 
 who, from terror of the torments with which they were threatened, 
 had renounced their faith in Christ. To these women the governor 
 promised large rewards if they would induce Dorothea to follow 
 their evil example ; and they, nothing doubting of success, boldly 
 undertook the task. The result, however, was far different ; for 
 Dorothea, full of courage and constancy, reproved them as one 
 having authority, and drew such a picture of the joys they had for- 
 feited through their falsehood and cowardice, that they fell at her 
 feet, saying, 'O blessed Dorothea, pray for us, that, through thy 
 intercession, our sins may be forgiven and our penitence accepted !' 
 And she did so. And when they had left the dungeon they pro- 
 claimed aloud that they were servants of Christ. 
 
 Then the governor, furious, commanded that they should be 
 burned, and that Dorothea should witness their torments. And she 
 stood by, bravely encouraging them, and saying, ' my sisters, fear 
 not ! suffer to the end ! for these transient pangs shall be followed 
 by the joys of eternal life !' Thus they died : and Dorothea herself 
 was condemned to be tortured cruelly, and then beheaded. The first 
 part of her sentence she endured with invincible fortitude. She was 
 then led forth to death ; and, as she went, a young man, a lawyer 
 of the city, named Theophilus, who had been present when she was 
 first brought before the governor, called to her mockingly, 'Ha! 
 fair maiden, goest thou to join thy bridegroom ? Send me, I pray 
 thee, of the fruits and flowers of that same garden of which thou 
 hast spoken : I would fain taste of them !' And Dorothea, looking 
 on him, inclined her head with a gentle smile, and said, ' Thy 
 request, Theophilus, is granted !' Whereat he laughed aloud 
 with his companions; but she went on cheerfully to death. 
 
 When she came to the place of execution, she knelt down and 
 prayed ; and suddenly appeared at her side a beautiful boy, with 
 hair bright as sunbeams
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 251 
 
 ' A smooth-faced, glorious thing, 
 With thousand blessings dancing in his eyes.' 
 
 In his hand he held a basket containing three apples, and three 
 fresh-gathered and fragrant roses. She said to him, ' Carry these 
 to Theophilus ; say that Dorothea hath sent them, and that I go 
 before him to the garden whence they came, and await him there.' 
 With these words she bent her neck, and received the death-stroke. 
 Meantime the angel (for it was an angel) went to seek Theophilus, 
 and found him still laughing in merry mood over the idea of the 
 promised gift. The angel placed before him the basket of celestial 
 fruit and flowers, saying, ' Dorothea sends thee this,' and vanished. 
 What words can express the wonder of Theophilus? Struck by 
 the prodigy operated in his favour, his heart melted within him ; he 
 tasted of the celestial fruit, and a new life was his ; he proclaimed 
 himself a servant of Christ, and, following the example of Dorothea, 
 suffered with like constancy in the cause of truth, and obtained the 
 crown of martyrdom. 
 
 We have chosen this legend just because it is in 
 itself as superstitious and fantastic as any in the book. 
 We happen to hold the dream of ' The Spiritual Mar- 
 riage/ as there set forth, in especial abhorrence, and 
 we have no doubt Mrs. Jameson does so also. We are 
 well aware of the pernicious effect which this doctrine 
 has exercised on matrimonial purity among the south- 
 ern nations ; that by making chastity synonymous with 
 celibacy, it degraded married faithfulness into a restric- 
 tion which there were penalties for breaking, but no 
 rewards for keeping. We see clearly enough the 
 cowardice, the shortsightedness, of fancying that man 
 can ensure the safety of his soul by fleeing from the 
 world ; in plain English, deserting the post to which 
 God has called him, like the monks and nuns of old. 
 We believe that the numbers of the early martyrs have 
 been exaggerated. We believe that they were like 
 ourselves, imperfect and inconsistent human beings-; 
 that, on the showing of the legends and fathers them- 
 selves, their testimony for the truth was too often 
 impaired by superstition, fanaticism, or passion. But 
 granting all this, we must still say, in the words of one
 
 252 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 who cannot be suspected of Romanizing, the great Dr. 
 Arnold : 
 
 Divide the sum total of reported martyrs by twenty ; by fifty, if 
 you will ; after all, you have a number of persons of all ages and 
 sexes suffering cruel torments and deaths for conscience sake, and 
 ibr Christ's ; and by their sufferings, manifestly with God's bless- 
 ing, ensuring the triumph of Christ's Gospel. Neither do I think 
 that we consider the excellence of this martyr spirit half enough. 
 
 Indeed we do not. Let all the abatements mentioned 
 above, and more, be granted ; yet, even then, when we 
 remember that the world from which Jerome or An- 
 thony fled was even worse than that denounced by Juvenal 
 and Persius, that the nuptials which, as legends say, 
 were often offered the virgin martyrs as alternatives for 
 death, were such as employed the foul pens of Petro- 
 nius and Martial, that the tyrants whom they spurned 
 were such as live in the pages of Suetonius, and the 
 Augustse Historiae Scriptores, that the gods whom 
 they were commanded to worship, the rites in which 
 they were to join, were those over which Ovid and 
 Apuleius had gloated, which Lucian had held up to the 
 contempt of heathendom itself that the tortures which 
 they preferred to apostacy and to foul crimes were, by 
 the confessions of the heathens themselves, too horrible 
 for pen to tell, it does raise a flush of indignation 
 to hear some sleek bigot-sceptic, bred up in the safety 
 and luxury of modern England, among Habeas Corpus 
 Acts and endowed churches, trying from his warm fire- 
 side to sneer away the awful responsibilities and the 
 heroic fortitude of valiant men and tender girls, to 
 whose piety and courage he owes the very enlighten- 
 ment, the very civilization, of which he boasts. 
 
 It is an error, doubtless, and a fearful one, to wor- 
 ship even such as them. But the error, when it arose, 
 was at worst the caricature of a blessed truth. Even 
 for the sinful, surely it was better to admire holiness
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 253 
 
 than to worship their own sin. Shame on those who, 
 calling themselves Christians, repine that a Cecilia or a 
 Magdalen replaced an Isis and a Venus; or who can 
 fancy that they are serving Protestantism by tracing 
 malevolent likenesses between even the idolatry of a 
 saint and the idolatry of a devil ! True, there was 
 idolatry in both, as gross in one as the other. And 
 what wonder? "What wonder if, amid a world of 
 courtesans, the nun was worshipped? At least God 
 allowed it ; and will man be wiser than God ? ' The 
 times of that ignorance He winked at.' The lie that 
 was in it He did not interfere to punish. He did 
 more; He let it work out, as all lies will, their own 
 punishment. We may see that in the miserable cen- 
 tury which preceded the glorious Reformation ; we may 
 see it in the present state of Spain and Italy. The 
 crust of lies, we say, punished itself; to the germ of 
 truth within it we partly owe that we are Christian 
 men this day. 
 
 But granting, or rather boldly asserting all this, and 
 smiling as much as we choose at the tale of St. Doro- 
 thea's celestial basket, is it not absolutely, and in spite 
 of all, an exquisite story ? Is it likely to make people 
 better or worse? We might believe the whole of it, 
 and yet we need not, therefore, turn idolaters and wor- 
 ship sweet Dorothea for a goddess. But if, as we trust 
 in God is the case, we are too wise to believe it all 
 if even we see no reason (and there is not much) for 
 believing one single word of it yet still we ask, is it not 
 an exquisite story ? Is there not heroism in it greater 
 than of all the Ajaxes and Achilles who ever blustered 
 on this earth ? Is there not power greater than of 
 kings God's strength made perfect in woman's weak- 
 ness ? Tender forgiveness, the Saviour's own likeness ; 
 glimpses, brilliant and true at the core, however dis-
 
 254 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 torted and miscoloured, of that spiritual world where 
 the wicked cease from troubling, where the meek alone 
 shall inherit the earth, where, as Protestants too be- 
 lieve, all that is spotless and beautiful in nature as well 
 as in man shall bloom for ever perfect? 
 
 It is especially in her descriptions of paintings that 
 Mrs. Jameson's great talents are displayed. Nowhere 
 do we recollect criticisms more genial, brilliant, pictu- 
 resque than those which are scattered through these 
 pages. Often they have deeper merits, and descend 
 to those fundamental laws of beauty and of religion by 
 which all Christian art must ultimately be tested. 
 Mrs. Jameson has certainly a powerful inductive faculty; 
 she comprehends at once the idea* and central law of 
 a work of art, and sketches it in a few vivid and mas- 
 terly touches; and really, to use a hack quotation 
 honestly for once, ' in thoughts which breathe, and 
 words which burn/ As an instance, we must be 
 allowed to quote at length this charming passage on 
 angel paintings, so valuable does it seem not only as 
 
 * We are sorry to see, however, that Mrs. Jameson has been so 
 far untrue to her own faculty as to join in the common mistake of 
 naming Raphael's well-known cartoon at Hampton Court, ' Elymas 
 the Sorcerer struck Blind.' On the supposition that this is its sub- 
 ject, its method of arrangement is quite unworthy of the rest, as the 
 action would be split into the opposite corners of the picture, and 
 the post of honour in the centre occupied by a figure of secondary 
 importance ; besides, the picture would lose its significance as one of 
 this great series on ' Religious Conviction and Conversion.' But, 
 strange to say, Raphael has all the while especially guarded against 
 this very error, by labelling the picture with a description of its 
 subject. Directly under the central figure is written, ' Sergius 
 Paulus, Proconsul, embraces the Christian faith at the preaching of 
 Paul.' Taking which simple hint, and looking at the face of the 
 proconsul (himself a miracle of psychology) as the centre to which 
 all is to be referred, the whole composition, down to the minutest 
 details, arranges itself at once in that marvellous unity which is 
 Raphael's especial glory.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 255 
 
 information, but as a specimen of what criticism 
 should be : 
 
 On the revival of art, we find the Byzantine idea of angels every- 
 where prevailing. The angels in Gimabue's famous ' Virgin and 
 Child enthroned,' are grand creatures, rather stern ; but this arose, 
 I think, from his inability to express beauty. The colossal angels 
 at Assisi, solemn sceptred kingly forms, all alike in action and 
 attitude, appeared to me magnificent. 
 
 In the angels of Giotto we see the commencement of a softer grace 
 and a purer taste, farther developed by some of his scholars. Benozzo 
 Gozzoli and Orcagna have left in the Campo Santo examples of the 
 most graceful and fanciful treatment. Of Benozzo's angels in the 
 Iticardi Palace I have spoken at length. His master, Angelico 
 (worthy the name!), never reached the same power of expressing 
 the rapturous i-ejoicing of celestial beings, but his conception of the 
 angelic nature remains unapproached, unapproachable ; it is only 
 his, for it was the gentle, passionless, refined nature of the recluse 
 which stamped itself there. Angelico's angels are unearthly, not so 
 much in form as in sentiment ; and super-human, not in power but 
 in purity. In other hands, any imitation of his soft ethereal grace 
 would become feeble and insipid. With their long robes falling 
 round their feet, and drooping many-coloured wings, they seem not 
 to fly or to walk, but to tioat along, ' smooth sliding without step.' 
 Blessed, blessed creatures ! love us, only love us ; for we dare not 
 task your soft, serene beatitude, by asking you to help us ! 
 
 There is more sympathy with humanity in Francia's angels : they 
 look as if they could weep, as well as love and sing. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Correggio's angels are grand and lovely, but they are like chil- 
 dren enlarged and sublimated, not like spirits taking the form of 
 children ; where they smile it is truly, as Annibal Caracci expresses 
 it, con una naturalezza et simplicita die innamora e sforza a ridere 
 con loro ; but the smile in many of Correggio's angel heads has 
 something sublime and spiritual, as well as simple and natural. 
 
 And Titian's angels impress me in a similar manner I mean 
 those in the glorious Assumption at Venice with their childish 
 forms and features, but an expression caught from beholding the 
 face of ' our Father that is in Heaven :' it is glorified infancy. I 
 remember standing before this picture, contemplating those lovely 
 spirits, one after another, until a thrill came over me like that which 
 I felt when Mendelssohn played the organ, I became music while 
 I listened. The face of one of those angels is to the face of a child 
 just what that of the Virgin in the same picture is compared with 
 the fairest of the daughters of earth : it is not here superiority of 
 beauty, but mind, and music, and love kneaded, as it were, into 
 form and colour. 
 
 But Raphael, excelling in all things, is here excellent above all : 
 his angels combine, in a higher degree than any other, the various
 
 256 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 faculties and attributes in which the fancy loves to clothe these 
 pure, immortal, beatified creatures. The angels of Giotto, of Benozzo, 
 of Fiesole, are, if not female, feminine; those of Filippo Lippi, and 
 of Andrea, masculine: but you cannot say of those of Raphael, that 
 they are masculine or feminine. The idea of sex is wholly lost in 
 the blending of power, intelligence, and grace. In his early pictures, 
 grace is the predominant characteristic, as in the dancing and singing 
 angels in his Coronation of the Virgin. In his later pictures the 
 sentiment in his ministering angels is more spiritual, more dignified. 
 As a perfect example of grand and poetical feeling, I may cite the 
 angels as ' Regents of the Planets,' in the Capella Chigiana. The 
 cupola represents in a circle the creation of the solar system, according 
 to the theological and astronomical (or rather astrological) notions 
 which then prevailed a hundred years before ' the starry Galileo 
 and his woes.' In the centre is the Creator ; around, in eight com- 
 partments, we have, first, the angel of the celestial sphere, who 
 seems to be listening to the divine mandate, ' Let there be light 
 in the firmament of Heaven ;' then follow, in their order, the Sun, 
 the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The name 
 of each planet is expressed by its mythological representative ; the 
 Sun by Apollo, the Moon by Diana : and over each presides a grand 
 colossal winged spirit, seated or reclining on a portion of the zodiac 
 as on a throne. I have selected two angels to give an idea of this 
 peculiar and poetical treatment. The union of the theological and 
 the mythological attributes is in the classical taste of the time, and 
 quite Miltomc. In Raphael's child-angels, the expression of power 
 and intelligence, as well as innocence, is quite wonderful ; for in- 
 stance, look at the two angel-boys in the Dresden Madonna di San 
 Sisto, and the angels, or celestial genii, who bear along the Almighty 
 when he appears to Noah. No one has expressed like Raphael the 
 action of flight, except, perhaps, Rembrandt. The angel who 
 descends to crown Santa Felicita cleaves the air with the action of 
 a swallow ; and the angel in Rembrandt's Tobit soars like a lark 
 with upward motion, spurning the earth. 
 
 Michael Angelo rarely gave wings to his angels ; I scarcely recol- 
 lect an instance, except the angel in the Annunciation : and his ex- 
 aggerated human forms, his colossal creatures, in which the idea of 
 power is conveyed through attitude and muscular action, are, to my 
 taste, worse than unpleasing. My admiration for this wonderful 
 man is so profound that I can afford to say this. His angels are 
 superhuman, but hardly angelic : and while in Raphael's angels we do 
 not feel the want of wings, we feel while looking at those of Michael 
 Angelo that not even the 'sail-broad vans' with which Satan 
 laboured through the surging abyss of chaos could suffice to lift 
 those Titanic forms from earth, and sustain them in mid-air. The 
 group of angels over the Last Judgment, flinging their mighty limbs 
 about, and those that surround the descending figure of Christ in the 
 Conversion of St. Paul, may be referred to here as characteristic ex- 
 amples. The angels, blowing their trumpets, puff and strain like so
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 257 
 
 many troopers. Surely this is not angelic : there may be power, 
 great, imaginative, and artistic power, exhibited in the conception 
 of form, but in the beings themselves there is more of effort than of 
 power: serenity, tranquillity, beatitude, ethereal purity, spiritual 
 grace, are out of the question. 
 
 In this passage we may remark an excellence in 
 Mrs. Jameson's mode of thought which has become 
 lately somewhat rare. We mean a freedom from that 
 bigoted and fantastic habit of mind which leads nowa- 
 days the worshippers of high art to exalt the early 
 schools to the disadvantage of all others, and to talk 
 as if Christian painting had expired with Perugino. 
 We were much struck with our authoi'ess's power of 
 finding spiritual truth and beauty in Titian's ' Assump- 
 tion/ one of the very pictures in which the 'high art' 
 party are wont to see nothing but ' coarseness ' and 
 ' earthliuess ' of conception. She, having, we suppose, 
 a more acute as well as a more healthy eye for the 
 beautiful and the spiritual, and, therefore, able to per- 
 ceive its slightest traces wherever they exist, sees in 
 those ' earthly ' faces of the great masters, ' an ex- 
 pression caught from beholding the face of our Father 
 that is in Heaven.' The face of one of those ' angels,' 
 she continues, ' is to the face of a child just what that 
 of the Virgin in the same picture is compared with 
 the fairest of the daughters of earth : it is not here 
 superiority of beauty, but mind, and music, and love 
 kneaded, as it were, into form and colour.' 
 
 Mrs. Jameson acknowledges her great obligations to 
 M. Rio; and all students of art must be thankful to 
 him for the taste, learning, and earnest religious feel- 
 ing which he has expended on the history of the 
 earlier schools of painting. An honest man, doubtless, 
 he is ; but it does not follow, alas ! in this piecemeal 
 world, that he should write an honest book. And his 
 bigotry stands in painful contrast to the genial and 
 
 VOL. i. s
 
 258 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 comprehensive spirit by which Mrs. Jameson seems 
 able to appreciate the specific beauties of all schools 
 and masters. M. Bio's theory (and he is the spokes- 
 man of a large party) is, unless we much misjudge 
 him, this, that the ante-Raflaellic is the only Christian 
 art ; and that all the excellences of these early painters 
 came from their Romanism ; all their faults from his 
 two great bugbears, Byzantinism and Paganism. In 
 his eyes, the Byzantine idea of art was Manichean ; in 
 which we fully coincide, but add, that the idea of the 
 early Italian painters was almost equally so : and that 
 almost all in them that was not Manichean they owe 
 not to their Romanism or their Asceticism, but to their 
 healthy layman's common sense, and to the influence 
 of that very classical art which they are said to have 
 been pious enough to despise. Bigoted and ascetic 
 Romanists have been, in all ages, in a hurry to call 
 people Manicheans, all the more fiercely because their 
 own consciences must have hinted to them that they 
 were somewhat Manichean themselves. When a man 
 suspects his own honesty, he is, of course, inclined to 
 prove himself blameless by shouting the loudest against 
 the dishonesty of others. Now M. Rio sees clearly 
 and philosophically enough what is the root of Ma- 
 nicheanism, the denial that that which is natural, 
 beautiful, human, belongs to God. He imputes it 
 justly to those Byzantine artists who fancied it carnal 
 to attribute beauty to the Saviour or to the Virgin 
 Mary, and tried to prove their own spirituality by 
 representing their sacred personages in the extreme of 
 ugliness and emaciation, though some of the specimens 
 of their painting which Mrs. Jameson gives proves that 
 this abhorrence of beauty was not so universal as M. 
 Rio would have us believe. We agree with him that 
 this absurdity was learned from them by earlier and
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 259 
 
 semi-barbarous Italian artists, that these latter rapidly 
 escaped from it, and began rightly to embody their 
 conceptions in beautiful forms; and yet we must urge 
 against them, too, the charge of Manicheanism, and of 
 a spiritual eclecticism also, far deeper and more per- 
 nicious than the mere outward eclecticism of manner 
 which has drawn down hard names on the school of 
 the Caracci. 
 
 For an eclectic, if it mean any thing, means this, 
 one who, in any branch of art or science, refuses to 
 acknowledge Bacon's great law, ' That Nature is only 
 conquered by obeying her/ who will not take a full 
 and reverend view of the whole mass of facts with 
 which he has to deal, and from them deducing the 
 fundamental laws of his subject, obey them whither- 
 soever they may lead ; but who picks and chooses out 
 of them just so many as may be pleasant to his private 
 taste, and then constructs a partial system which differs 
 from the essential ideas of Nature, in proportion to the 
 number of facts which he has determined to discard. 
 And such a course was pursued in art by the ascetic 
 painters between the time of Giotto and Raffaelle. 
 Their idea of beauty was a partial and a Manichean 
 one ; in their adoration for a fictitious ' angelic nature/ 
 made up from all which is negative in humanity, they 
 were prone to despise all by which man is brought in 
 contact with this earth, the beauties of sex, of strength, 
 of activity, of grandeur of form ; all, that is, in which 
 Greek art excels : their ideal of beauty was altogether 
 effeminate. They prudishly despised the anatomic 
 study of the human figure, of landscape and chiaroscuro. 
 Spiritual expression with them was everything ; but it 
 was only the expression of the passive spiritual facul- 
 ties, of innocence, devotion, meekness, resignation; 
 all good, but not the whole of humanity. Not that 
 
 s 2
 
 260 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 they could be quite consistent in their theory. They 
 were forced to paint their very angels as human beings; 
 and a standard of human beauty they had to find some- 
 where; and they found one, strange to say, exactly 
 like that of the old Pagan statues (wings and all for 
 the wings of Christian angels are copied exactly from 
 those of Greek Genii), and only differing in that ascetic 
 and emasculate tone, which was peculiar to themselves. 
 Here is a dilemma which the worshippers of high art 
 have slurred over. Where did Angelico da Fiesole 
 get the idea of beauty which dictated his exquisite 
 angels? We shall not, I suppose, agree with those 
 who attribute it to direct inspiration, and speak of 
 it as the reward of the prayer and fasting by which 
 the good monk used to prepare himself for painting. 
 Must we then confess that he borrowed his beauties 
 from the faces of the prettiest nuns with whom he was 
 acquainted ? That would be sad naturalism ; and sad 
 eclecticism, too, considering that he must have seen 
 among his Italian sisters a great many beauties of a 
 very different type from that which he has chosen to 
 copy ; though, we suppose, of God's making equally 
 with that of his favourites. Or did he, in spite of 
 himself, steal a side-glance now and then at some of 
 the unrivalled antique statues of his country, and copy 
 on the sly any feature or proportion in them which 
 was emasculate enough to be worked into his pictures? 
 That, too, is likely enough; nay, it is certain. We 
 are perfectly astonished how any draughtsman, at least 
 how such a critic as M. Rio, can look at the early 
 Italian painters without tracing everywhere in them 
 the classic touch, the peculiar tendency to mathematic 
 curves in the outlines, which is the distinctive pecu- 
 liarity of Greek art. Is not Giotto, the father of 
 Italian art, full of it in every line ? Is not Perugino ?
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 261 
 
 Is not the angel of Lorenzo Credi in Mrs. Jameson's 
 woodcut? Is not Francia, except just where he is 
 stiff, and soft, and clumsy ? Is not Fra Angelico 
 himself? Is it not just the absence of this Greek ten- 
 dency to mathematical forms in the German painters 
 before Albert Durer, which makes the specific dif- 
 ference, evident to every boy, between the drawing of 
 the Teutonic and Italian schools ? 
 
 But if so, what becomes of the theory which calls 
 Pagan art by all manner of hard names ? which dates 
 the downfall of Christian art from the moment when 
 painters first lent an eye to its pernicious seductions ? 
 How can those escape the charge of eclecticism, who, 
 without going to the root-idea of Greek art, filched 
 from its outside just as much as suited their purpose ? 
 And how, lastly, can M. Rio's school of critics escape 
 the charge of Manichean contempt for God's world 
 and man, not as ascetics have fancied him, but as God 
 has made him, when they think it a sufficient con- 
 demnation of a picture to call it naturalistic; when, 
 they talk and act about art as if the domain of the 
 beautiful were the devil's kingdom, from which some 
 few species of form and elements were to be stolen by 
 Christian painters, and twisted from their original evil 
 destination into the service of religion ? 
 
 On the other hand, we owe much to those early 
 ascetic painters ; their works are a possession for ever. 
 No future school of religious art will be able to rise to 
 eminence without taking full cognisance of them, and 
 learning from them their secret. They taught artists, 
 and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy 
 of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of the 
 beauty of the soul within ; they helped to deliver 
 men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and 
 loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in
 
 262 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury ; 
 they asserted the superiority of the spirit over the flesh ; 
 according to their light, they were faithful preachers 
 of the great Christian truth, that devoted faith, and 
 not fierce self-will, is man's glory. Well did their 
 pictures tell to brutal peasant, and to still more brutal 
 warrior, that God's might was best shewn forth, not 
 in the elephantine pride of a Hercules, or the Titanic 
 struggles of a Laocoon, but in the weakness of martyred 
 women, and of warriors who were content meekly to 
 endure shame and death, for the sake of Him who con- 
 quered by sufferings, and bore all human weaknesses ; 
 who ' was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and, like a 
 sheep dumb before the shearer, opened not his mouth/ 
 
 We must conclude with a few words on one point 
 on which we differ somewhat from Mrs. Jameson the 
 allegoric origin of certain legendary stories. She 
 calls the story of the fiend, under the form of a dragon, 
 devouring St. Margaret, and then bursting at the sign 
 of the cross while the saint escaped unhurt, ' another 
 form of the familiar allegory the power of Sin over- 
 come by the power of the Cross.' 
 
 And again, vol. ii. p. 4 : 
 
 The legend of St. George came to us from the East ; where, under 
 various forms, as Apollo and the Python, as Bellerophon and the 
 Chimaera, as Perseus and the Sea-monster, we see perpetually recur- 
 ring the mythic allegory by which was figured the conquest achieved 
 by beneficent Power over the tyranny of wickedness, and which 
 reappears in Christian art in the legends of St. Michael and half a 
 hundred other saints. 
 
 To us these stories seem to have had by no means 
 an allegorical, but rather a strictly historic foundation ; 
 and our reasons for this opinion may possibly interest 
 some readers. 
 
 Allegory, strictly so called, is the offspring of an ad- 
 vanced, and not of a semi-barbarous state of society.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 263 
 
 Its home is in the East not the East of barbarous 
 Pontine countries peopled by men of our own race, 
 where the legend of St. George is allowed to have 
 sprung up, but of the civilized, metaphysical, dark- 
 haired races of Egypt, Syria, and Hindostan. The 
 ' objectivity' of the Gothic mind has never had any 
 sympathy with it. The Teutonic races, like the earlier 
 Greeks, before they were tinctured with Eastern 
 thought, had always wanted historic facts, dates, names, 
 and places. They even found it necessary to import 
 their saints ; to locate Mary Magdalene at Marseilles, 
 Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, the three Magi 
 at Cologne, before they could thoroughly love or under- 
 stand them. Englishmen especially cannot write alle- 
 gories. John Bunyan alone succeeded tolerably, but 
 only because his characters and language were such as 
 he had encountered daily at every fireside and in every 
 meeting-house. But Spenser wandered perpetually 
 away, or rather, rose up from his plan into mere 
 dramatic narrative. His work and other English alle- 
 gories, are hardly allegoric at all, but rather symbolic; 
 spiritual laws in them are not expressed by arbitrary 
 ciphers, but embodied in imaginary examples, suffi- 
 ciently startling or simple to form a plain key to other 
 and deeper instances of the same law. They are ana- 
 logous to those symbolic devotional pictures in which 
 the Madonna and saints of all ages are grouped together 
 with the painter's own contemporaries no allegories 
 at all, but the plain embodiment of a fact in which the 
 artist believed ; not only ' the communion of all saints/ 
 but also their habit of assisting, often in visible form, 
 the Christians of his own time. 
 
 These distinctions may seem over-subtle, but our 
 meaning will surely be plain to any one who will com- 
 pare ' The Faery Queen/ or f The Legend of St.
 
 264 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 George/ with the Gnostic or Hindoo reveries, and the 
 fantastic and truly Eastern interpretation of Scripture, 
 which the European monks borrowed from Egypt. 
 Our opinion is, that in the old legends the moral did not 
 create the story, but the story the moral ; and that 
 the story had generally a nucleus of fact within all 
 its distortions and exaggerations. This holds good of 
 the Odinic and Grecian myths ; all are now more or 
 less inclined to believe that the deities of Zeus's or 
 Odin's dynasties were real conquerors or civilizers of 
 flesh and blood, like the Manco Capac of the Peruvians, 
 and that it was around records of their real victories 
 over barbarous aborigines, and over the brute powers 
 of nature, that extravagant myths grew up, till more 
 civilized generations began to say, 'These tales must 
 have some meaning they must be either allegories or 
 nonsense/ and then fancied that in the remaining 
 thread of fact they found a clue to the mystic sense of 
 the whole. 
 
 Such, we suspect, has been the history of St. George 
 and the Dragon, as well as of Apollo and the Python. 
 It is very hard to have to give up the dear old dragon 
 who haunted our nursery dreams, especially when there 
 is no reason for it. We have no patience with anti- 
 quaries who tell us that the dragons who guarded 
 princesses were merely ' the winding walls or moats of 
 their castles.' What use, then, pray, was there in the 
 famous nether garment with which Regnar Lodbrog 
 (shaggy-trousers) choked the dragon who guarded his 
 lady-love ? And Regnar was a real piece of flesh and 
 blood, as King ^Ella and our Saxon forefathers found to 
 their cost : his awful death-dirge, and the effect which 
 it produced, are well known to historians. We cannot 
 give up Regnar's trousers, for we suspect the key to the 
 whole dragon-question is in the pocket of them.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 265 
 
 Seriously, Why should not these dragons have been 
 simply what the Greek word dragon means what the 
 earliest romances, the Norse myths, and the supersti- 
 tions of the peasantry in many parts of England to 
 this day assert them to have been ' mighty worms/ 
 huge snakes? All will agree that the Python, the 
 representative in the old world of the ' Boa Constrictor' 
 of the new, lingered in the Homeric age, if not later, 
 both in Greece and in Italy. It existed on the oppo- 
 site coast of Africa (where it is now extinct) in the 
 time of Regulus ; we believe, from the traditions of all 
 nations, that it existed to a far later date in more re- 
 mote and barbarous parts of Europe. There is every 
 reason to suppose that it still lingered in England after 
 the invasion of the Cymri say not earlier than B.C. 
 600 for it was among them an object of worship ; 
 and we question whether they would have been likely 
 to have adored a foreign animal, and, as at Abury, 
 built enormous temples in imitation of its windings, and 
 called them by its name. 
 
 The only answer to these traditions has as yet been, 
 that no reptile of that bulk is known in cold climates. 
 Yet the Python still lingers in the Hungarian marshes. 
 A few years ago a huge snake, as large as the 
 Pythons of Hindostan, spread havoc among the flocks 
 and terror among the peasantry. Had it been Ariosto's 
 ' Ore/ an a priori argument from science would have 
 had weight. A marsupiate sea-monster is horribly 
 unorthodox ; and the dragon, too, has doubtless been 
 made a monster of, but most unjustly ; his legs have 
 been patched on by crocodile-slaying crusaders, while 
 his wings where did they come from ? From the 
 traditions of ' flying serpents/ which have so strangely 
 haunted the deserts of Upper Egypt from the time of 
 the old Hebrew prophets, and which may not, after
 
 266 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 all, be such lies as folk fancy. How scientific prigs 
 shook with laughter at the notion of a flying dragon ! 
 till one day geology revealed to them, in the Ptero- 
 dactylus, that a real flying dragon, on the model of 
 Carlo Crivelli's in Mrs. Jameson's book, with wings 
 before and legs behind, only more monstrous than that, 
 and than all the dreams of Seba and Aldrovandus 
 (though some of theirs, to be sure, have seven heads), 
 got its living once on a time in this very island of 
 England ! But such is the way of this wise world ! 
 When Le Vaillant, in the last century, assured the 
 Parisians that he had shot a giraffe at the Cape, he 
 was politely informed that the giraffe was fabulous, 
 extinct in short, that he lied ; and now, behold ! the 
 respectable old unicorn (and good Tories ought to 
 rejoice to hear it) has been discovered at last by a 
 German naturalist, Von Miiller, in Abyssinia, just 
 where our fathers told us to look for it ! And why 
 should we not find the flying serpent, too ? The inte- 
 rior of Africa is as yet an unknown world of wonders ; 
 and we may yet discover there, for aught we know, the 
 descendants of the very satyr who chatted with St. 
 Anthony. 
 
 No doubt the discovery of huge fossil animals, as 
 Mrs. Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor 
 Owen, may have modified our ancestors' notions of 
 dragons : but in the old serpent worship we believe the 
 real explanation of these stories is to be found. There 
 is no doubt that human victims, and even young 
 maidens, were offered to these snake gods ; even the 
 sunny mythology of Greece retains horrible traces of 
 such customs, which lingered in Arcadia, the mountain- 
 fastness of the old and conquered race. Similar cruelties 
 existed among the Mexicans ; and there are but too 
 many traces of it throughout the history of heathendom.
 
 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 267 
 
 The same superstition may, as the legends assert, 
 have lingered on, or been, at least, revived during the 
 later ages of the empire, in remote provinces, left in 
 their primaeval barbarism, at the same time that they 
 were brutalized by the fiendish exhibitions of the Circus, 
 which the Roman governors found it their interest 
 to introduce everywhere. Thus the serpent became 
 naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil 
 spirit by Christians as well as by the old Hebrews; 
 thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the 
 malaria and fever which arose from the fens haunted 
 by it a superstition which gave rise to the theory 
 that the tales of Hercules and the Hydra, Apollo 
 and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, 
 were sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters 
 whose poisonous breath destroyed cattle and young 
 maidens only typhus and consumption. We see no 
 reason why early Christian heroes should not have 
 actually met with such snake gods, and felt themselves 
 bound, like Southey's Madoc, or Daniel in the old 
 rabbinical story, whose truth has never been disproved, 
 to destroy the monsters at all risk. We see no reason, 
 either, why their righteous daring may not have been 
 crowned with victory ; and suspect that on such events 
 were gradually built up the dragon-slaying legends 
 which charmed all Europe, and grew in extravagances 
 and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the 
 bombast of the ' Seven Champions/ and expired in the 
 immortal ballad of the ' Dragon of Wantley/ in which 
 More of More Hall, on the morning of his battle with 
 the monster, invoked the saints no more, but 
 
 To make him strong and mighty 
 
 He drank by the tale 
 
 Six pots of ale, 
 And a quart of aqua-vita?.
 
 268 POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 
 
 So ended the sublime sport of dragon-slaying. Its 
 only remnant may now be seen in Borneo, whither 
 that noble Christian man, Bishop Macdougall, took out 
 the other day a six-chambered rifle, on the ground that 
 ' while the alligators ate his school-children at Sarawak, 
 it was his duty as a bishop to shoot the alligators/
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 ON reading this little book,* and considering all 
 the exaggerated praise and exaggerated blame 
 which have been lavished on it, we could not help 
 falling into many thoughts about the history of English 
 poetry for the last forty years, and about its future 
 destiny. Great poets, even true poets, are becoming 
 more and more rare among us. There are those even 
 who say that we have none; an assertion which, as 
 long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty 
 of denying. But were he, which Heaven forbid, taken 
 from us, whom have we to succeed him ? And 
 he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the dawn 
 of the autumn than of the spring. His gorgeousness 
 is that of the solemn and fading year ; not of its youth, 
 full of hope, freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like 
 some stately hollyhock or dahlia of this month's 
 gardens, he endures while all other flowers are dying; 
 but all around is winter a mild one, perhaps, wherein 
 a few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on ; but, 
 like all mild winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, 
 too, are not without their gaudiness, even their beauty, 
 although bred only from the decay of higher organisms, 
 the plagiarists of the vegetable world. Such is poetry 
 in England ; while in America the case is not much 
 better. What more enormous scope for new poetic 
 thought than that which the New World gives ? Yet 
 
 * FRASEK'S MAGAZINE, October, 1853. 'Poems,' by Alexander 
 Smith. London: Bogue. 1853.
 
 270 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 the American poets, even the best of them, look linger- 
 ingly and longingly back to Europe and her legends; 
 to her models, and not to the best of them to her 
 criticism, and not to the best of that and bestow but 
 a very small portion of such genius as they have on 
 America and her new forms of life. If they be nearer 
 to the spring than we, they are still deep enough in the 
 winter. A few early flowers may be budding among 
 them, but the autumn crop is still in somewhat shabby 
 and rain-bedrabbled bloom. And for us, where are 
 our spring flowers ? What sign of a new poetic school ? 
 Still more, what sign of the healthy resuscitation of 
 any old one? 
 
 'What matter, after all?' one says to oneself in 
 despair, re-echoing Mr. Carlyle. ' Man was not sent 
 into the world to write poetry. What we want is 
 truth. Of the former we have enough in all con- 
 science just now. Let the latter need be provided 
 for by honest and righteous history, and as for 
 poets, let the dead bury their dead/ .... And 
 yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. 
 Carlyle : nay, beings who are not men, but mere 
 forked radishes, will write it. Man is a poetry- 
 writing animal. Perhaps he was meant to be one. 
 At all events, he can no more be kept from it than 
 from eating. It is better, with Mr. Carlyle's leave, 
 to believe that the existence of poetry indicates some 
 universal human hunger, whether after ' the beau- 
 tiful/ or after ' fame/ or after the means of paying 
 butchers' bills ; and accepting it as a necessary evil 
 which must be committed, to see that it be committed 
 as well, or at least as little ill, as possible. In excuse 
 of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against himself, 
 reminding him of a saying of Goethe once bepraised by
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 271 
 
 him in print, ' We must take care of the beautiful, 
 for the useful will take care of itself/ 
 
 And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his Dunciad, 
 did the beautiful require more taking care of, or evince 
 less capacity for taking care of itself; and never, we 
 must add, was less capacity for taking care of it evinced 
 by its accredited guardians of the press than at this 
 present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's 
 poems is to be taken as a fair expression of ' the 
 public taste/ 
 
 Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander 
 Smith is not the object of our reproaches : but Mr. 
 Alexander Smith's models and flatterers. Against 
 him we have nothing whatsoever to say ; for him, very 
 much indeed. 
 
 Very young, as is said, self-educated, drudging for 
 his daily bread in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of 
 brick and mortar, he has seen the sky, the sun and 
 moon and, moreover, the sea, report says, for one day 
 in his whole life ; and this is nearly the whole of his 
 experience in natural objects. And he has felt, too 
 painfully for his peace of mind, the contrast between 
 his environment and that of others his means of 
 culture and that of others and, still more painfully, 
 the contrast between his environment and culture, and 
 that sense of beauty and power of melody which he 
 does not deny that he has found in himself, and which 
 no one can deny who reads his poems fairly ; who 
 reads even merely the opening page and key-note of 
 the whole : 
 
 For as a torrid sunset burns with gold 
 Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul 
 A passion burns from basement unto cope. 
 Poesy, poesy, I'd give to thee 
 As passionately my rich laden years,
 
 272 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 My bubble pleasures, and my awful joys, 
 As Hero gave her trembling sighs tofind 
 Delicious death on wet Leander's lip, 
 Bare, bold, and tawdry, as a fingered moth 
 Is my poor life ; but with one smile thou canst 
 Clothe me with kingdoms. Wilt thou smile on me P 
 Wilt bid me die lor thee? Oh, fair and cold ! 
 As well may some wild maiden waste her love 
 Upon the calm front of a marble Jove. 
 
 Now this scrap is by no means a fair average spe- 
 cimen of Mr. Smith's verse. But is not the self- 
 educated man who could teach himself, amid Glasgow 
 smoke and noise, to write such a distich as that ex* 
 quisite one which we have given in italics, to be judged 
 lovingly and hopefully ? 
 
 What if he has often copied? What if, in this very 
 scrap, chosen almost at random, there should be a touch 
 from Tennyson's ' Two Voices ? ' And what if imi- 
 tations, nay, caricatures, be found in almost every page ? 
 Is not the explanation simple enough, and rather cre- 
 ditable than discreditable to Mr. Smith ? He takes as 
 his models Shelley, Keats, and their followers. Who 
 is to blame for that ? The Glasgow youth, or the 
 public taste, which has been exalting these authors 
 more and more for the last twenty years as the great 
 poets of the nineteenth century ? If they are the 
 proper ideals of the day, who will blame him for 
 following them as closely as possible for saturating 
 his memory so thoroughly with their words and 
 thoughts that he reproduces them unconsciously to 
 himself? Who will blame him for even consciously 
 copying their images, if they have said better than he 
 the thing which he wants to say, in the only poetical 
 dialect which he knows ? He does no more than all 
 schools have done, copy their own masters ; as the 
 Greek epicists and Virgil copied Homer; as all suc- 
 ceeding Latin epicists copied Virgil ; as Italians copied
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 273 
 
 Ariosto and Tasso; as every one who can copies 
 Shakspeare ; as the French school copied, or thought 
 they copied, ' The Classics/ and as a matter of duty 
 used to justify any bold image in their notes, not by 
 its originality, but by its being already in Claudian, or 
 Lucan, or Virgil, or Ovid ; as every poetaster, and a 
 great many who were more than poetasters, twenty 
 years ago, used to copy Scott and Byron, and as all 
 poetaster? now are copying the very same models as 
 Mr. Smith, and failing while he succeeds. 
 
 We by no means agree in the modern outcry for 
 ' originality/ Is it absolutely demanded that no poet 
 shall say anything whatsoever that any other poet has 
 said ? If so, Mr. Smith may well submit to a blame, 
 which he will bear in common with Shakspeare, 
 Chaucer, Pope, and many another great name ; and es- 
 pecially with Raphael himself, who made no scruple of 
 adopting not merely points of style, but single motives 
 and incidents, from contemporaries and predecessors. 
 Who can look at any of his earlier pictures, the Cruci- 
 fixion for instance, at present in Lord Ward's gallery 
 at the Egyptian Hall, without seeing that he has not 
 merely felt the influence of Perugino, but copied him ; 
 tried deliberately to be as like his master as he could ? 
 Was this plagiarism ? If so, all education, it would 
 seem, must be a mere training in plagiarism. For how 
 is the student to learn, except by copying his master's 
 models ? Is the young painter or sculptor a plagiarist 
 because he spends the first, often the best, years of his 
 life in copying Greek statues ; or the school-boy, for 
 toiling at the reproduction of Latin metres and images, 
 in what are honestly and fittingly called ' copies ' of 
 verses ? And what if the young artist shall choose, as 
 Mr. Smith has done, to put a few drawings into the 
 exhibition, or to carve and sell a few statuettes ? What 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 274 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 if the school-boy, grown into a gownsman, shall contri- 
 bute his share to a set of ' Arundines Cami' or ' Pro- 
 lusiones Etonienses ' ? Will any one who really knows 
 what art or education mean complain of them for 
 having imitated their models, however servilely ? Will 
 he not rather hail such an imitation as a fair proof, first 
 of the student's reverence for authority a more impor- 
 tant element of ' genius' than most young folks fancy 
 and next, of his possessing any artistic power what- 
 soever? For, surely, if the greater contains the less, 
 the power of creating must contain that of imitating. 
 A young author's power of accurate imitation is, after 
 all, the primary and indispensable test of his having 
 even the capability of becoming a poet. He who cannot 
 write in a style which he does know, will certainly not 
 be able to invent a new style for himself. The first 
 and simplest form in which any metrical ear, or fancy, 
 or imagination, can show itself, must needs be in imi- 
 tating existing models. Innate good taste that is, 
 true poetic genius will of course choose the best models 
 in the long run. But not necessarily at first. What 
 shall be the student's earliest ideal must needs be de- 
 termined for him by circumstance, by the books to 
 which he has access, by the public opinion which he 
 hears expressed. Enough if he chooses, as Raphael 
 did, the best models which he knows, and tries to ex- 
 haust them, and learn all he can from them, ready to 
 quit them hereafter when he comes across better ones, 
 yet without throwing away what he has learnt. * Be 
 faithful in a few things, and thou shalt become ruler 
 over many things/ is one of those eternal moral laws 
 which, like many others, holds as true of art as it does 
 of virtue. 
 
 And on the whole, judging Mr. Alexander Smith by 
 this rule, he has been faithful over a few things, and
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 275 
 
 therefore we have fair hope of him for the future. For 
 Mr. Smith does succeed, not in copying one poet, but 
 in copying all, and very often in improving on his 
 models. Of the many conceits which he has borrowed 
 from Mr. Bailey, there is hardly one which he has not 
 made more true, more pointed and more sweet ; nay, 
 in or two places, he has dared to mend John Keats 
 himself. But his whole merit is by no means confined 
 to the faculty of imitation. Though the ' Life Drama' 
 itself is the merest cento of reflections and images, 
 without coherence or organization, dramatic or logical, 
 yet single scenes, like that with the peasant and that 
 with the fallen outcast, have firm self-consistency and 
 clearness of conception ; and these, as a natural conse- 
 quence, are comparatively free from those tawdry 
 spangles which deface the greater part of the poem. 
 And, moreover, in the episode of ' The Indian and the 
 Lady/ there is throughout a 'keeping in the tone/ as 
 painters say, sultry and languid, yet rich and full of 
 life, like a gorgeous Venetian picture, which augurs 
 even better for Mr. Smith's future success than the 
 two scenes just mentioned ; for consistency of thought 
 may come with time and training ; but clearness of in- 
 ward vision, the faculty of imagination, can be no more 
 learnt than it can be dispensed with. In this, and this 
 only, it is true that poeta nascitur non fit ; just as no 
 musical learning or practice can make a composer, 
 unless he first possess an innate ear for harmony and 
 melody. And it must be said that it is just in the pas- 
 sages where Mr. Smith is not copying, where he forgets 
 for awhile Shelley, Keats, and the rest, and is content 
 to be simply himself, that he is best ; terse, vivid, sound, 
 manly, simple. May he turn round some day, and 
 deliberately pulling out all borrowed feathers, look at 
 himself honestly and boldly in the glass, and we will 
 
 T 2,
 
 276 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 
 
 warrant him, on the strength of the least gaudy, and as 
 yet unpraised passages in his poems, that he will find 
 himself after all more eagle than daw, and quite well 
 plumed enough by nature to fly at a higher, because for 
 him a more natural, pitch than he has yet done. 
 
 True, he has written a great deal of nonsense ; non- 
 sense in matter as well as in manner. But therein, 
 too, he has only followed the reigning school. ... As 
 for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his models, 
 out-Herod Herod. But why not? If Herod be a 
 worthy king, let him be by all means out-Heroded, if 
 any man can do it. One cannot have too much of a 
 good thing. If it be right to bedizen verses with meta- 
 phors and similes which have no reference, either iu 
 tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be 
 as many of them as possible. If a saddle is a proper 
 place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with dia- 
 monds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's harness- 
 maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric 
 splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to 
 forswear pigskin and severe simplicity not to say 
 utility and comfort. If poetic diction be different in 
 species from plain English, then let us have it as 
 poetical as possible, and as unlike English ; as ungram- 
 matical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, 
 carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be 
 correct to express human thought by writing whole 
 pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then 
 trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear 
 an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the 
 notion which they are to illustrate, then let the meta- 
 physic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful 
 and far-fetched as possible. If Marino and Cowley be 
 greater poets than A.riosto and Milton, let young poets 
 imitate the former with might and main, and avoid
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 277 
 
 spoiling their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible 
 common sense of the latter. If Byron's moral (which 
 used to be thought execrable) be really his great excel- 
 lence, and his style (which used to be thought almost 
 perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us 
 have his moral without his style, his matter without 
 his form ; or that we may be sure of never falling for 
 a moment into his besetting sins of terseness, grace, 
 and completeness without any form at all. If poetry, 
 in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought 
 to be as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, 
 Virgil or Horace, Sbakspeare or Spenser, Dante or 
 Tasso, let those too idolized names be rased henceforth 
 from the Calendar ; let the Ars Poetica be consigned 
 to flames by Mr. Calcraft, and Martinus Scriblerus's 
 Art of Sinking placed forthwith on the list of the 
 Committee of Council for Education, that not a work- 
 ing man in England may be ignorant that, whatsoever 
 superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted 
 heathens who built the Parthenon, nous avons changes 
 tout cela. In one word, if it be best and most fitting 
 to write poetry in the style in which almost every one 
 has been trying to write it since Pope and plain sense 
 went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in, 
 let it be so written ; and let him who most perfectly so 
 1 sets the age to music,' be presented by the assembled 
 guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too classic 
 laurel, but with an electro -plated brass medal, bearing 
 the due inscription, ' Ars est nescire artem.' And 
 when, in twelvemonths' time, he finds himself forgot- 
 ten, perhaps decried, for the sake of the next aspirant, 
 let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the 
 common sense of the many will not prove a juster and 
 a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and 
 bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.
 
 278 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he 
 will find the very excellences after which our young 
 poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming oppo- 
 sites, which are now despised and discarded ; natural- 
 ness produced by studious art; sublimity by strict 
 self-restraint : depth by clear simplicity ; pathos by 
 easy grace ; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as 
 well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue 
 among the poetasters, by honest faith in God. If he 
 be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by 
 the fondness for perpetual antitheses, let him remem- 
 ber, that what seems strange to our day was natural 
 and habitual in his ; and that, in the eyes of our 
 grandchildren, Keats's and Shelley's peculiarities will 
 seem as monstrous as Pope's or Johnson's do in ours. 
 But if, misled by the popular contempt for Pope, he 
 should be inclined to answer this advice with a shrug 
 and a smile, we entreat him, and all young poets, to 
 consider, line by line, word by word, sound by sound, 
 only those once well-known lines, which many a brave 
 and wise man of fifty years ago would have been unable 
 to read without honourable tears : 
 
 In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung, 
 The floor of plaister, and the walls of dung, 
 On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, 
 With tape-tyed curtains, never meant to draw, 
 The ' George and Garter,' dangling from that bed, 
 Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, 
 Great Villiers lies. Alas ! how changed from him, 
 That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim ? 
 Gallant and gay, in Clieveden's proud alcove, 
 The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; 
 Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring 
 Of mimic statesmen, and their merry king. 
 No wit to flatter, left of all his store ! 
 No fool to laugh at, which he valued more. 
 There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends, 
 And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends. 
 
 Yes; Pope knew, as well as Wordsworth and our
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 279 
 
 f Naturalist!/ that no physical fact was so mean or 
 coarse as to be below the dignity of poetry when in 
 its right place. He could draw a pathos x and sub- 
 limity out of the dirty inn chamber, such as Words- 
 worth never elicited from tubs and daffodils because 
 he could use them according to the rules of art, which 
 are the rules of sound reason and of true taste. 
 
 The answer to all this is ready now-a-days. We 
 are told that Pope could easily be great in what he at- 
 tempted, because he never attempted any but small 
 matters ; easily self-restraining, because his paces were 
 naturally so slow ; above all, easily clear, because he is 
 always shallow ; easily full of faith in what he did 
 believe, because he believed so very little. On the 
 two former counts we may have something to say 
 hereafter. On the two latter, we will say at once, 
 that if it be argued, as it often is, that the reason of 
 our modern poetical obscurity and vagueness lies in 
 the greater depth of the questions which are now agi- 
 tating thoughtful minds, we do utterly deny it. Human 
 nature, human temptations, human problems, are radi- 
 cally the same in every age, by whatsoever outward 
 difference of words they may seem distinguished. 
 Where is deeper philosophic thought, true or false, 
 exprest in verse, than in Dante, or in Spenser's two 
 cantos of ' Mutabilities ? ' Yet if they are difficult to 
 understand, their darkness is that of the deep blue sea. 
 Vague they never are, obscure they never are ; because 
 they see clearly what they want to say, and how to say 
 it. There is always a sound and coherent meaning in 
 them, to be found if it be searched for. 
 
 The real cause of this modern vagueness is rather to 
 be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that 
 inability, or carelessness about seeing any object 
 clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause
 
 280 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier 
 manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of 
 thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training, 
 which enabled Spenser and Milton to draw up a state 
 paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same 
 manful possession of their subject which gives grace 
 and completeness to the ' Penseroso ' or the ' Epithala- 
 mion.' And if our poets have their doubts, they 
 should remember, that those to whom doubt and in- 
 quiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about 
 them till they can sing poems of triumph over them. 
 There has no temptation taken our modern poets save 
 that which is common to man the temptation of 
 wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art fit 
 them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves 
 fit the laws, or care to find them out. 
 
 What ? Do you wish, asks some one, a little con- 
 temptuously, to measure the great growing nineteenth 
 century by the thumb-rule of Alexander Pope ? No. 
 But to measure the men who write in the nineteenth 
 century by a man who wrote in the eighteenth; to 
 compare their advantages with his, their circumstances 
 with his ; and then, if possible, to make them ashamed 
 of their unmanliness. Have you young poets of this 
 day, your struggles, your chagrins ? Do you think the 
 hump-backed dwarf, every moment conscious at once 
 of his deformity and his genius conscious, probably, 
 of far worse physical shame than any deformity can 
 bring, ' sewed up in buckram every morning, and re- 
 quiring a nurse like a child' caricatured, lampooned, 
 slandered, utterly without fault of his own insulted 
 and rejected by the fine lady whom he had dared to 
 court in reality, after being allowed and allured to flirt 
 with her in rhyme do you suppose that this man had 
 nothing to madden him ? to convert him into a 
 sneering, snarling misanthrope ? Yet was there one
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 281 
 
 noble soul who met him who did not love him, or whom 
 he did not love ? Have you your doubts ? Do you find 
 it difficult to make your own speculations, even your 
 own honest convictions, square with the popular super- 
 stitions ? What were your doubts, your inward con- 
 tradictions, to those of a man who, bred a Papist, and 
 yet burning with the most intense scorn and hatred of 
 lies and shams, bigotries and priestcrafts, could write 
 that ' Essay on Man ? Read that, young gentlemen 
 of the Job's -wife school, who fancy it a fine thing to 
 tell your readers to curse God and die, or, at least to 
 show the world in print how you could curse God by 
 divine right of genius, if you chose, and be ashamed of 
 your cowardly wailings. 
 
 Alexander Pope went through doubt, contradiction, 
 confusion, to which yours are simple and light ; and 
 conquered. He was a man of like passions with your- 
 selves ; infected with the peculiar vices of his day ; 
 narrow, for his age was narrow ; shallow, for his age 
 was shallow ; a bon-vivant, for his age was a gluttonous 
 and drunken one ; bitter, furious, and personal, for 
 men round him were such; foul-mouthed often, and 
 indecent, as the rest were. Nay, his very power, 
 when he abuses it for his own ends of selfish spite and 
 injured vanity, makes him, as all great men can be (in 
 words at least, for in life he was far better than the 
 men around him), worse than his age. He can out- 
 rival Dennis in ferocity, and Corigreve in filth. So 
 much the worse for him in that account which he has 
 long ago rendered up. But in all times and places, as 
 far as we can judge, the man was heart-whole, more 
 and not less righteous then his fellows. With his 
 whole soul he hates what is evil, as far as he can re- 
 cognise it. With his whole soul he loves what is good, 
 as far as he can recognise that. With his soul believes 
 that there is a righteous and good God, whose order
 
 282 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 no human folly or crime can destroy ; and he will say 
 so; and does say it, clearly, simply, valiantly, reve- 
 rently, in that ' Essay on Man/ His theodicy is 
 narrow; shallow, as was the philosophy of his age. 
 But as far as it goes, it is sound faithful to God, and 
 to what he sees and knows. Man is made in God's 
 image. Man's justice is God's justice ; man's mercy 
 is God's mercy ; man's science, man's critic taste, are 
 insights into the laws of God himself. He does not 
 pretend to solve the great problem. But he believes 
 that it is solved from all eternity ; that God knows, 
 God loves, and God rules ; that the righteous and 
 faithful man may know enough of the solution to know 
 his duty, to see his way, to justify God ; and as much 
 as he knows he tells. There were in that diseased, 
 sensitive cripple no vain repinings, no moon-struck 
 howls, no impious cries against God. ' Why hast thou 
 made me thus ?' To him God is a righteous God, 
 a God of order. Science, philosophy, politics, criti- 
 cism, poetry, are parts of His order they are parts of 
 the appointed onward path for mankind ; there are 
 eternal laws for them. There is a beautiful and fit 
 order, in poetry, which is part of God's order, which men 
 have learnt ages ago, for they, too, had their teaching 
 from above ; to offend against which is absolutely wrong, 
 an offence to be put down mildly in those who offend 
 ignorantly : but those who offend from dulness, from the 
 incapacity to see the beautiful, or from carelessness about 
 it, when praise or gain tempt them the other way, 
 have some moral defect in them ; they are what Solo- 
 mon calls fools ; they are the enemies of man ; and he 
 will 'hate them right sore, even as though they were 
 his own enemies' which indeed they were. He knows 
 by painful experience that they deserve no quarter : 
 that there is no use giving them any ; to spare them 
 is to make them insolent ; to fondle the reptile is to
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 283 
 
 be bitten by it. True poetry, as the messenger of 
 heavenly beauty, is decaying ; true refinement, true 
 loftiness of thought, even true morality, are at stake. 
 And so he writes his ' Dunciad/ .... And would 
 that he were here, to write it over again, and write it 
 better ! 
 
 For write it again he surely would. And write it 
 better he would also. With the greater cleanliness of 
 our time, with all the additional experience of history, 
 with the greater classical, aesthetic, and theological 
 knowledge of our day, the sins of our poets are as 
 much less excusable than those of Eusden, Blackmore, 
 Gibber, and the rest, as Pope's ' Dunciad' on them 
 would be more righteously severe. "What, for instance, 
 would the author of the ' Essay on Man' say to any one 
 who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is not to be quoted) 
 of the ' Life Drama' as the thoughts of his hero, with- 
 out any after atonement for the wanton insult it con- 
 veys toward him whom he dares in the same breath to 
 call ' Father/ simply because he wants to be something 
 very fine and famous and self-glorifying, and Provi- 
 dence keeps him waiting awhile? .... Has Pope 
 not said it already ? . . . . 
 
 Persist, by all divine in man unawed, 
 
 But learn, ye dunces, not to scorn your God ! 
 
 And yet no; the gentle goddess would now lay no 
 such restriction on her children, for in Pope's day no 
 man had discovered the new poetic plan for making the 
 divine in man an excuse for scorning God, and finding 
 in the dignity of ' heaven-born genius' free licence to 
 upbraid, on the very slightest grounds, the Being from 
 whom he said genius pretends to derive his dignity. In 
 one of his immortal saws he has cautioned us against 
 ' making God in man's image.' But it never entered 
 into his simple head that man would complain of God 
 for being made in a lower image than even his own.
 
 284 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 Atheism he could conceive of; the deeper absurdity of 
 Authotheism was left for our more enlightened times and 
 more spiritual muses. 
 
 It will be answered that all this blasphemy is not to 
 be attributed to the author, but to the man whose spi- 
 ritual development he intends to sketch. To which 
 we reply that no man has a right to bring his hero 
 through such a state without showing how he came 
 out of the slough as carefully as he came into it, espe- 
 cially when the said hero is set forth as a marvel- 
 lously clever person ; and the last scene, though full 
 of beautiful womanly touches, and of a higher morality 
 than the rest of the book, contains no amende honor- 
 able, not even an explanation of the abominable stuff 
 which the hero has been talking a few pages back. He 
 leaps from the abyss to the seventh heaven ; but, un- 
 fortunately for the spectators, he leaps behind the 
 scenes, and they are none the wiser. And next; 
 people have no more right, even for dramatic purposes, 
 to put such language into print for any purpose what- 
 soever, than they have to print the grossest indecencies, 
 or the most disgusting details of torture and cruelty. 
 No one can accuse this magazine of any fondness for 
 sanctimonious cant or lip-reverence ; but if there be a 
 ' Father in Heaven/ as Mr. Smith confesses that there 
 is, or even merely a personal Deity at all, some sort of 
 common decency in speaking of Him should surely be 
 preserved. No one would print pages of silly calumny 
 and vulgar insult against his earthly father, or even 
 against a person for whom he had no special dislike, 
 and then excuse it by, ( Of course, I don't think so : 
 but if any one did think so, this would be a very smart 
 way of saying what he thought/ Old Aristotle would 
 call such an act ' banauson / in plain English, black- 
 guard ; and we do not see how it can be called anything
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 285 
 
 else, unless in the case of some utter brute in human 
 form, to whom ' there is no ccenum, and therefore no 
 obscoenum ; no fanum, and therefore no profanum.' 
 The common sense of mankind in all ages has con- 
 demned this sort of shamelessness, even more than it 
 has insults to parental and social ties, and to all which 
 raises man above the brute. Let Mr. Smith take 
 note of this, and let him, if he loves himself, mend 
 speedily ; for of all styles wherein to become stereotyped 
 the one which he has chosen is the worst, because in it 
 the greatest amount of insincerity is possible. There is a 
 Tartarus in front of him as well as an Olympus ; a 
 hideous possibility very near him of insincere impiety 
 merely for the purpose of startling ; of lawless fancy 
 merely for the purpose of glittering ; and a still more 
 hideous possibility of a revulsion to insincere cant, 
 combined with the same lawless fancy, for the purpose 
 of keeping well with the public, in which to all ap- 
 pearances one of our most popular novelists, not to 
 mention the poet whose writings are most analogous to 
 Mr. Smith's, now lies wallowing. 
 
 "Whether he shall hereafter obey his evil angel, and 
 follow Mr. Bailey, or his good angel, and become a 
 great poet, depends upon himself; and above all upon 
 his having courage to be himself, and to forget himself, 
 two virtues which, paradoxical as it may seem, are 
 correlatives. For the ' subjective' poet in plain words, 
 the egotist is always comparing himself with every 
 man he meets, and therefore momentarily tempted to 
 steal bits of their finery wherewith to patch his own 
 rents ; while the man who is content to be simply what 
 God has made him, goes on from strength to strength 
 developing almost unconsciously under a divine educa- 
 tion, by which his real personality and the salient 
 points by which he is distinguished from his fellows,
 
 286 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 become apparent with more and more distinctness of 
 form, and brilliance of light and shadow, as those well 
 know who have watched human character attain its 
 clearest and grandest as well as its loveliest outlines, 
 not among hankerers after fame and power, but on 
 lonely sickbeds, and during long unknown martyrdoms 
 of humble self-sacrifice and loving drudgery. 
 
 But whether or not Mr. Smith shall purify himself 
 and he can do so, if he will, right nobly the world 
 must be purified of his style of poetry, if men are ever, 
 as he hopes, to f set this age to music / much more if 
 they are once more to stir the hearts of the many by 
 Tyrtseau strains, such as may be needed before our hairs 
 are grey. The ' poetry of doubt/ however pretty, 
 would stand us in little stead if we were threatened 
 with a second Armada. It will conduce little to the 
 valour, ' virtus/ manhood of any Englishman to be 
 informed by any poet, even in the most melodious verse, 
 illustrated by the most startling and pancosmic meta- 
 phors, ' See what a highly-organized and peculiar 
 stomach-ache I have had ! Does it not prove indis- 
 putably that I am not as other men are ?' What gos- 
 pel there can be in such a message to any honest man 
 who has either to till the earth, plan a railroad, colonize 
 Australia, or fight his country's enemies, is hard to dis- 
 cover. Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, 
 and therefore most poetical, of ages, is to be ' set to 
 music/ when all those who talk about so doing persist 
 obstinately in poring, with introverted eyes, over the 
 state of their own digestion or creed. 
 
 What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the 
 Maker of them both wants, is a poet who shall begin 
 by confessing that he is as other men are, and sing 
 about things which concern all men, in language which 
 all men can understand. This is the only road to that
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 287 
 
 gift of prophecy which most young poets are uow-a- 
 day in such a hurry to arrogate to themselves. We 
 can only tell what man will be by fair induction, by 
 knowing what he is, what he has been. 
 
 And it is most noteworthy that in this age, in which 
 there is more knowledge than there ever was of what 
 man has been, and more knowledge, through innume- 
 rable novelists, and those most subtle and finished ones, 
 of what man is, that poetry should so carefully avoid 
 drawing from this fresh stock of information in her so- 
 confident horoscopes of what man will be. 
 
 There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry 
 and the common-sense of all time, as there is between 
 poetry and modern knowledge. Our poets are not 
 merely vague and confused, they are altogether frag- 
 mentary disjecta membra poetarum; they need some 
 uniting idea. And what idea ? 
 
 Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. 
 Nevertheless we answer simply, What our poets want 
 is faith. 
 
 There is little or no faith now-a-days. And without 
 faith there can be no real art, for art is the outward 
 expression of firm, coherent belief. And a poetry of 
 doubt, even a sceptical poetry, in its true sense, can 
 never possess clear and sound form, even organic form 
 at all. How can you put into form that thought which 
 is by its very nature formless ? How can you group 
 words round a central idea when you do not possess a 
 central idea? Shakspeare in his one sceptic tragedy 
 has to desert the pure tragic form, and Hamlet remains 
 the beau-ideal of 'the poetry of doubt/ But what 
 would a tragedy be in which the actors were all Ham- 
 lets, or rather scraps of Hamlets ? A drama of Hamlet 
 is only possible because the one sceptic is surrounded 
 by characters who have some positive faith, who do
 
 288 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 their work for good or evil undoubtingly while he is 
 speculating about his. And both Ophelia, and Laertes, 
 Fortinbras, the king, yea the very grave-digger, know 
 well enough what they want, whether Hamlet does or 
 not. The whole play is, in fact, Shakspeare's subtle 
 reductio ad adsurdum of that very diseased type of 
 mind which has been for the last forty years identified 
 with ' genius' with one difference, namely, that Shak- 
 speare, with his usual clearness of conception, exhibits 
 the said intellectual type pure and simple, while modern 
 poets degrade and confuse it, and all the questions de- 
 pendent on it, by mixing it up unnecessarily with all man- 
 ner of moral weaknesses, and very often moral crimes. 
 But the poet is to have a faith now-a-days of course 
 a ' faith in nature/ This article of Woi'dsworth's 
 poetical creed is to be assumed as the only necessary 
 one, and we are to ignore altogether the somewhat im- 
 portant fact that he had faith in a great deal besides 
 nature, and to make that faith in nature his sole diffe- 
 rentia and source of inspiration. Now we beg leave to 
 express not merely our want of faith in this same ' faith 
 in nature/ but even our ignorance of what it means. 
 Nature is certain phenomena, appearances. Faith in 
 them is simply to believe that a red thing is red, and a 
 square thing square ; a sine qua non doubtless in poetry, 
 as in carpentry, but which will produce no poetry, but 
 only Dutch painting and gardeners' catalogues in a 
 word, that lowest form of art, the merely descriptive ; 
 and into this very style the modern naturalist poets, 
 from the times of Southey and Wordsworth, have been 
 continually falling, and falling therefore into baldness 
 and vulgarity. For mere description cannot represent 
 even the outlines of a whole scene at once, as the da- 
 guerreotype does; they must describe it piecemeal. 
 Much less can it represent that whole scene at once in
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 289 
 
 all its glories of colour, glow, fragrance, life, motion. 
 In short it cannot give life and spirit. All merely 
 descriptive poetry can do is to give a dead catalogue - 
 to kill the butterfly, and then write a monograph on it. 
 And, therefore, there comes a natural revulsion from 
 the baldness and puerility into which Wordsworth too 
 often fell by indulging his false theories on these 
 matters. 
 
 But a revulsion to what? To the laws of course 
 which underlie the phenomena. But again to which 
 laws? Not merely to the physical ones, else Turner's 
 ' Chemistry' and Watson's ' Practice of Medicine' are 
 great poems. 
 
 True, we have heard Professor Forbes's book on 
 Glaciers called an epic poem, and not without reason : 
 but what gives that noble book its epic character is 
 neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but the dis- 
 covery of those laws; the methodic, truthful, valiant, 
 patient battle bet.ween man and nature, his final victory, 
 his wresting from her the secret which had been locked 
 for ages in the ice- caves of the Alps, guarded by cold 
 and fatigue, danger, and superstitious dread. For 
 nature will be permanently interesting to the poet, and 
 appear to him in a truly poetic aspect, only in as far 
 as she is connected by him with spiritual and personal 
 beings, and becomes in his eyes either a person herself, 
 or the dwelling and organ of persons. The shortest 
 scrap of word-painting, as Thomson's ' Seasons' will 
 sufficiently prove, is wearisome and dead, unless there 
 be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a 
 living figure, the scene is deliberately described with 
 reference to the poet or the reader, not as something 
 in itself, but as something seen by him, and grouped 
 and subordinated exactly as it would strike his eye and 
 mind. But even this is insufficient. The heart of 
 
 VOL. i. u
 
 290 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER TOPE. 
 
 man demands more, and so arises a craving after the 
 old nature-mythology of Greece, the old fairy legends of 
 the Middle Age. The great poets of the Renaissance 
 both in England and in Italy had a similar craving. 
 But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are re- 
 garded by them is most significantly different. With 
 Spenser and Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, 
 are regarded in their fancied connexion with man. 
 Even in the age of Pope, when the gods and the Rosi- 
 crucian Sylphs have become alike ' poetical machinery/ 
 this is their work. But among the moderns it is as 
 connected with nature, and giving a soul and a per- 
 sonality to her, that they are most valued. The most 
 pure utterance of this feeling is perhaps Schiller's 
 * Gods of Greece/ where the loss of the Olympians is 
 distinctly deplored, because it has unpeopled, not 
 heaven, but earth. But the same tone runs through 
 Goethe's classical ' Walpurgis Night/ where the old 
 human ' twelve gods/ the anti-types and the friends of 
 men, in whom our forefathers delighted, have vanished 
 utterly, and given place to semi-physical Nereides, 
 Tritons, Telchines, Psylli, and Seismos himself. 
 
 Keats, in his wonderful ' Endymion/ contrived to 
 unite the two aspects of Greek mythology as they 
 never had been united before, except by Spenser in his 
 ' Garden of Adonis.' But the Pantheistic notion, as 
 he himself says in ' Lamia/ was the one which lay 
 nearest his heart ; and in his ' Hyperion' he begins to 
 deal wholly with the Nature gods, and after magni- 
 ficent success, leaves the poem unfinished, most pro- 
 bably because he had become, as his readers must, 
 weary of its utter want of human interest. For that, 
 after all, is what is wanted in a poetical view of 
 nature ; and that is what the poet, in proportion to his 
 want of dramatic faculty, must draw from himself. He
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 291 
 
 must he does in these days colour Nature with the 
 records of his own mind, and bestow a factitious life 
 and interest on her by making her reflect his own joy 
 or sorrow. If he be out of humour, she must frown ; 
 if he sigh, she must roar; if he be what he very 
 seldom is tolerably comfortable, the birds have liberty 
 to sing, and the sun to shine. But by the time that 
 he has arrived at this stage of his development, or 
 degradation, the poet is hardly to be called a strong 
 man. He who is so much the slave of his own moods 
 that he must needs see no object save through them, is 
 not very likely to be able to resist the awe which 
 Nature's grandeur and inscrutability brings with it, and 
 to say firmly, and yet reverently 
 
 Si fractus illabatur orbis, 
 Impavidum ferient ruinae. 
 
 He feels, in spite of his conceit, that Nature is not 
 going his way, or looking his looks, but going what he 
 calls her own way, what we call God's way. At all 
 events, he feels that he is lying, when he represents 
 the great universe as tuned to his small set of Pan's 
 pipes, and all the more because he feels that, conceal it 
 as he will, those same Pan's pipes are out of tune with 
 each other. And so arises the habit of impersonating 
 Nature, not after the manner of Spenser (whose purity 
 of metaphor and philosophic method, when he deals 
 with Nature, is generally even more marvellous than 
 the richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in 
 her single and accidental phenomena ; and of ascribing 
 not merely animal passions or animal enjoyment, but 
 human discursive intellect and moral sense, to inanimate 
 objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more 
 of a man than the poet is as indeed they very often 
 may be. 
 
 These, like everything else, are perfectly right in 
 
 U 2
 
 292 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 their own place where they express passion, either 
 pleasurable or painful, passion, that is, not so intense 
 as to sink into exhaustion, or to be compelled to self- 
 control by the fear of madness. In these two cases, as 
 great dramatists know well enough, the very violence 
 of the emotion produces perfect simplicity, as the hur- 
 ricane blows the sea smooth : but where fanciful lan- 
 guage is employed to express the extreme of passion, it 
 is felt to be absurd, and is accordingly called rant and 
 bombast ; and where it is not used to express passion 
 at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the 
 poet's mind, or of his characters, with regard to ex- 
 ternal nature; when it is considered, as it is by most 
 of our modern poets, the staple of poetry, indeed poetic 
 diction itself, so that the more numerous and the 
 stranger conceits an author can cram into his verses, 
 the finer poet he is ; then, also, it is called rant and 
 bombast, but of the most artificial, insincere, and (in 
 every sense of the word) monstrous kind ; the offspring 
 of an effeminate Nature- worship, without self-respect, 
 without true manhood, because it exhibits the poet as 
 the puppet of his own momentary sensations, and not 
 as a man superior to nature, claiming his likeness to 
 the Author of nature, by confessing and expressing the 
 permanent laws of nature, undisturbed by fleeting ap- 
 pearances without, or fleeting tempers within. Hence 
 it is, that as in all insincere and effete times the poetry 
 of the day deals more and more with conceits, and less 
 and less with true metaphors. In fact, hinc illse la- 
 chrymse. This is, after all, the primary symptom of 
 disease in the public taste, which has set us on writing 
 this review that critics all round are crying, ' An ill- 
 constructed whole, no doubt ; but full of beautiful pas- 
 sages' the word ' passages' turning out to mean, in 
 plain English, conceits. The simplest distinction, per-
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 293 
 
 haps, between an image and a conceit is this that 
 while both are analogies, the image is founded on 
 an analogy between the essential properties of two 
 things the conceit on an analogy between its acci- 
 dents. Images, therefore, whether metaphors or 
 similes, deal with laws ; conceits with private judg- 
 ments. Images belong to the imagination, the power 
 which sees things according to their real essence and 
 inward life, and conceits to the fancy or phantasy, 
 which only sees things as they appear. 
 
 To give an example or two from the ' Life Drama:' 
 
 His heart holds a dead hope, 
 As holds the wretched west the sunset's corse 
 Spit on, insulted by the brutal rains. 
 
 The passion-panting sea 
 Watches the unveiled beauty of the stars 
 Like a great hungry soul. 
 
 Great spirits, 
 
 Who left upon the mountain-tops of Death 
 A light that made them lovely. 
 
 The moon, 
 Arising from dark waves which plucked at her. 
 
 And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, 
 whereof it must be said, that beautiful or not, in the 
 eyes of the present generation and many of them are 
 put into very beautiful language, and refer to very 
 beautiful natural objects they are not beautiful really 
 and in themselves : because they are mere conceits ; 
 the analogies in them are fortuitous, depending not on 
 the nature of the things themselves, but on the private 
 fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical 
 coherence than a conundrum or a pun ; in plain Eng- 
 lish, untrue : only allowable to Juliets or Othellos, 
 while their self-possession, almost their reason, is in 
 temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or 
 sorrow. Every one must feel the exquisite fitness of
 
 294 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 Juliet's f Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds,' &c., for 
 one of her character, in her circumstances : every one, 
 we trust, and Mr. Smith among the number, will some 
 day feel the exquisite unfitness of using such conceits 
 as we have just quoted, or any other, page after page, 
 for all characters and chances. For the West is not 
 wretched; the rains never were brutal yet, and do not 
 insult the sun's corpse, being some millions of miles 
 nearer us than the sun, but only have happened once 
 to seem to do so in the poet's eyes. The sea does not 
 pant with passion, does not hunger after the beauty of 
 the stars; Death has no mountain-tops, or any pro- 
 perty which can be compared thereto ; and ' the dark 
 waves' in that most beautiful conceit which follows, 
 and which Mr. Smith has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, 
 improving it marvellously nevertheless do not ' pluck 
 at the moon,' but only seem to do so. And what 
 constitutes the beauty of this very conceit far the 
 best of those we have chosen but that it looks so 
 very like an image, so very like a law, from being so 
 very common and customary an ocular deception to 
 one standing on a low shore at night? 
 
 Or, again, in a passage which has been already often 
 quoted as exquisite, and in its way is so : 
 
 The bridegroom sea 
 
 Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride ; 
 And in the fulness of his marriage joy 
 He decorates her tawny brow with shells, 
 Retires a pace, to see how fair she looks, 
 Then proud, runs up to kiss her. 
 
 Exquisite ? "Yes ; but only exquisitely pretty. It 
 is untrue a false explanation of the rush and recoil of 
 the waves. We learn nothing by these lines; we gain 
 no fresh analogy between the physical and the spiritual 
 world, not even between two different parts of the
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 295 
 
 physical world. If the poetry of this age has a peculiar 
 mission, it is to declare that such an analogy exists 
 throughout the two worlds ; then let poetry declare it. 
 Let it set forth a real intercommunion between man and 
 nature, grounded on a communion between man and God 
 who made nature. Let it accept nature's laws as the 
 laws of God. Truth, scientific truth, is the only real 
 beauty. * Let God be true, and every man a liar.' 
 
 Now, be it remembered that by far the greater 
 proportion of this book consists of such thoughts as 
 these ; and that these are what are called its beauties ; 
 these are what young poets try more and more daily to 
 invent conceits, false analogies. Be it remembered, 
 that the affectation of such conceits has always marked 
 the decay and approaching death of a reigning school of 
 poetry ; that when, for instance, the primaeval forest of 
 the Elizabethan poets dwindled down into a barren 
 scrub of Vaughans, and Cowleys, and Herberts, and 
 Crashawes, this was the very form in which the deadly 
 blight appeared. In vain did the poetasters, frightened 
 now and then at their own nonsense, try to keep up 
 the decaying dignity of poetry by drawing their con- 
 ceits, as poetasters do now, from suns and galaxies, 
 earthquakes, eclipses, and the portentous, and huge, 
 and gaudy in nature ; the lawlessness and irreverence 
 for nature, involved in the very worship of conceits, 
 went on degrading the tone of the conceits themselves, 
 till the very sense of true beauty and fitness seemed 
 lost ; and a pious and refined gentleman like George 
 Herbert could actually dare to indite solemn conun- 
 drums to the Supreme Being, and believe that he was 
 writing devout poetry, and ' looking through nature up 
 to nature's God,' when he delivered himself thus in one 
 of his least offensive poems (for the most sacred and 
 most offensive of them we dare not quote, lest we incur
 
 296 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 the same blame which we have bestowed on Mr. Smith), 
 and sing of Church festivals as 
 
 Marrow of time, eternity in brief, 
 Compendiums epitomized, the chief 
 Contents, the indices, the title-pages 
 Of all past, present, and succeeding ages, 
 Sublimate graces, antedated glories ; 
 
 The cream of holiness, 
 The inventories 
 
 Of future blessedness, 
 The florilegia of celestial stories, 
 Spirit of Joys, the relishes and closes 
 Of angels' music, pearls dissolved, roses 
 Perfumed, sugar 'd honeycombs. . . . 
 
 That manner, happily for art, was silenced by the 
 stern, truth-loving common sense of the Puritans. 
 Whatsoever else, in their crusade against shams, they 
 were too hasty in sweeping away, they were right, at 
 least, in sweeping away such a sham as that. And 
 now, when a school has betaken itself to use the very 
 same method in the cause of blasphemy, instead of on 
 that of cant, the Pope himself, with his Index Prohi- 
 bitus, might be a welcome guest, if he would but stop 
 the noise, and compel our doting Muses to sit awhile 
 in silence, and reconsider themselves. 
 
 In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and 
 poetry, and guiding the age, and curbing the world, and 
 waking it, and thrilling it, and making it start, and 
 weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what 
 else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world 
 curbed, or thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by 
 them. Why should it be ? Curb and thrill the 
 world? The world is just now a most practical world : 
 and these men are utterly unpractical. The age is 
 given up to physical science : these men disregard and 
 outrage it in every page by their false analogies. If 
 they intend, as they say, to link heaven and earth by
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 297 
 
 preaching the analogy of matter and spirit, let them, 
 in the name of common prudence, observe the laws of 
 matter, about which the world does know something, 
 and show their coincidence with the laws of spirit if 
 indeed they know anything about the said laws. 
 Loose conceits, fancies of the private judgment, were 
 excusable enough in the Elizabethan poets. In their 
 day, nature was still unconquered by science; me- 
 diaeval superstitions still lingered in the minds of men ; 
 and the magical notions of nature which they had 
 inherited from the Middle Age received a corroboration 
 from those Neo-Platonist dreamers, whom they con- 
 founded with the true Greek philosophers. But, now 
 that Bacon has spoken, and that Europe has obeyed 
 him, surely, among the most practical, common sense, 
 and scientific nation of the earth, severely scientific 
 imagery, imagery drawn from the inner laws of nature, 
 is necessary to touch the hearts of men. They know 
 that the universe is not such as poets paint it ; they 
 know that these pretty thoughts are only pretty 
 thoughts, springing from the caprice, the vanity, very 
 often from the indigestion of the gentlemen who take 
 the trouble to sing to them ; and they listen, as they 
 would to a band of street musicians, and give them 
 sixpence for their tune, and go on with their work. 
 The tune outside has nothing to do with the work 
 inside. It will not help them to be wiser, abler, more 
 valiant certainly not more cheerful and hopeful men, 
 and therefore they care no more for it than they do for 
 an opera or a pantomime, if as much. Whereupon the 
 poets get disgusted with this same hard-hearted, prosaic 
 world which is trying to get its living like an indus- 
 trious animal as it is and demand homage for what ? 
 For making a noise, pleasant or otherwise? For not 
 being as other men are ? For pleading ' the eccen-
 
 298 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 tricities of genius' as an excuse for sitting like 
 naughty children in the middle of the schoolroom floor, 
 in everybody's way, shouting and playing on penny 
 trumpets, and when begged to be quiet, that other 
 people may learn their lessons, considering themselves 
 insulted, and pleading ' genius ' ? Genius ! hapless 
 by-word, which, like charity, covers novv-a-days the 
 multitude of sins, all the seven deadly ones included ! 
 Is there any form of human folly which one has not 
 heard excused by f he is a genius, you know one must 
 not judge him by common rules.' Poor genius to 
 have come to this ! To be when confest, not a reason 
 for being more of a man than others, but an excuse 
 for being less of a man, less amenable than the herd to 
 the common laws of humanity, and therefore less able 
 than they to comprehend its common duties, common 
 temptations, common sins, common virtues, common 
 destinies. Of old the wise singer did by virtue of 
 feeling with all, and obeying with all, learn to see for 
 all, to see eternal laws, eternal analogies, eternal con- 
 sequences, and so became a seer, vates, prophet ; but 
 now he is become a genius, a poetical pharisee, a 
 reviler of common laws and duties, the slave of his own 
 private judgment, who prophesies out of his own 
 heart, and hath seen nothing but only the appearances 
 of things distorted and coloured by ' genius.' Heaven 
 send the word, with many more, a speedy burial ! 
 
 And what becomes of artistic form in the hands of 
 such a school ? Just what was to be expected. It is 
 impossible to give outward form to that which is in its 
 very nature formless, like doubt and discontent. For 
 on such subjects thought itself is not denned ; it has 
 no limit, no self-coherence, not even method or organic 
 law. And in a poem, as in all else, the body must be 
 formed according to the law of the inner life ; the utter-
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 299 
 
 ance must be the expression, the outward and visible 
 autotype, of the spirit which animates it. But where 
 the thought is defined by no limits, it cannot express 
 itself in form, for form is that which has limits. Where 
 it has no inward unity it cannot have any outward one. 
 If the spirit be impatient of all moral rule, its utter- 
 ance will be equally impatient of all artistic rule ; and 
 thus, as we are now beginning to discover from expe- 
 rience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to 
 use those forms of verse which have been always held 
 to be the highest ; tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, 
 even the subjective lyrical ode. For they, too, to 
 judge by every great lyric which remains to us, require 
 a groundwork of consistent, self-coherent belief; and 
 they require also an appreciation of melody even more 
 delicate, and a verbal polish even more complete than 
 any other form of poetic utterance. But where there 
 is no melody within, there will be no melody without. 
 It is in vain to attempt the setting of spiritual dis- 
 cords to physical music. The mere practical patience 
 and self-restraint requisite to work out rhythm when 
 fixed on, will be wanting ; nay, the fitting rhythm will 
 never be found, the subject itself being arhythmic ; 
 and thus we shall have, or, rather, alas ! do have, a 
 wider and wider divorce of sound and sense, a greater 
 and greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm 
 of musical utterance, and watch the clear and spirit- 
 stirring melodies of the older poets swept away by a 
 deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad, diffuse, un- 
 finished, unmusical, to which any other metre than that 
 in which it happens to have been written would have 
 been equally appropriate, because all are equally inap- 
 propriate; and where men have nothing to sing, it is 
 not of the slightest consequence how they sing it. 
 While poets persist in thinking and writing thus, it
 
 300 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 is in vain for them to talk loud about the poet's divine 
 mission, as the prophet of mankind, the swayer of the 
 universe, and so forth. Not that we believe the poet 
 simply by virtue of being a singer to have any such 
 power. While young gentlemen are talking about govern- 
 ing heaven and earth by verse, Wellingtons and Peels, 
 Arkwrights and Stephensons, Frys and Chisholms, are 
 doing it by plain, practical prose ; and even of those 
 who have moved and led the hearts of men by verse, 
 every one, as far as we know, has produced his magical 
 effects by poetry of the very opposite form to that 
 which is now in fashion. What poet ever had more 
 influence than Homer ? What poet is more utterly 
 antipodal to our modern schools? There are certain 
 Hebrew psalms, too, which will be confest, even by 
 those who differ most from them, to have exercised 
 some slight influence on human thought and action, 
 and to be likely to exercise the same for some time to 
 come. Are they any more like our modern poetic forms 
 than they are like our modern poetic matter? Ay, 
 even in our own time, what has been the form, what 
 the temper, of all poetry, from Korner and Heine, 
 which has made the German heart leap up, but sim- 
 plicity, manhood, clearness, finished melody, the very 
 opposite in a word of our new school ? And to look 
 at home, what is the modern poetry which lives on the 
 lips and in the hearts of Englishmen, Scotchmen, 
 Irishmen ? It is not only simple in form and lan- 
 guage, but much of it fitted, by a severe exercise of 
 artistic patience, to tunes already existing. Who does 
 not remember how the ' Marseillaise' was born, or how 
 Burns's ' Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled,' or the story 
 of Moore's taking the old ' Bed Fox March,' and giving 
 it a new immortality as ' Let Erin remember the days of 
 old/ while poor Emmett sprang up and cried, ' Oh,
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 301 
 
 that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that 
 tune !' So it is, even to this day, and let those who 
 hanker after poetic fame take note of it ; not a poem 
 which is now really living but has gained its immor- 
 tality by virtue of simplicity and positive faith. 
 
 Let the poets of the new school consider carefully 
 Wolfe's ( Sir John Moore/ Campbell's ' Hohenlinden/ 
 ' Mariners of England/ and ' Rule Britannia/ Hood's 
 ' Song of the Shirt' and ( Bridge of Sighs/ and then 
 ask themselves, as men who would be poets, were it 
 not better to have written any one of those glorious 
 lyrics than all which John Keats has left behind him ; 
 and let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer 
 the question to themselves, the sound heart of the Eng- 
 lish people has already made its choice ; and that when 
 that beautiful ' Hero and Leander/ in which Hood 
 has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own 
 weapons, by virtue of that very terseness, clearness, and 
 manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the 
 limbo of the Crashawes and Marines, his ' Song of the 
 Shirt' and his ' Bridge of Sighs' will be esteemed by 
 great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what 
 they are two of the most noble lyric poems ever 
 written by an English pen. If our poetasters talk with 
 Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest 
 human things, they will find them there in perfection ; 
 if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they 
 will find them there. If they want the truly sublime 
 and the awful, they will find them there also. But 
 they will find none of their own favourite concetti ; 
 hardly even a metaphor ; no taint of this new poetic 
 diction into which we have now fallen, after all our 
 abuse of the far more manly and sincere 'poetic 
 diction* of the eighteenth century ; they will find no 
 loitering by the way to argue and moralize, and grumble
 
 302 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 at Providence, and show off the author's own genius 
 and sensibility ; they will find, in short, two real works 
 of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly 
 what they want to say, and saying it in the shortest, 
 the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. 
 Saying it rather taught to say it. For if that ' divine 
 inspiration of poets/ of which the poetasters make 
 such rash and irreverent boastings, have indeed, as all 
 ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will 
 rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals 
 from unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men 
 whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that 
 mere passionate sensibility; which our modern Draco 
 once described when speaking of poor John Keats, as 
 ' an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, 
 crying to the universe, ' Oh, that thou wert one 
 great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee !' ' 
 
 Our task is ended. We have given as plainly as we 
 can our reasons for the opinion which this Magazine 
 has exprest several times already, that with the excep- 
 tion of Mr. Allingham, our young poets are a very hope- 
 less generation, and will so continue unless they utterly 
 repent and amend. If they do not choose to awaken 
 themselves from within, all that is left for us is to hope 
 that they may be awakened from without, or by some 
 radical revulsion in public taste be shown their own real 
 value and durability, and compelled to be true and manly 
 under pain of being laughed at and forgotten. A gene- 
 ral war might, amid all its inevitable horrors, sweep 
 away at once the dyspeptic unbelief, the insincere 
 bigotry, the effeminate frivolity which now paralyses our 
 poetry as much as it does our action, and strike from 
 England's heart a lightning flash of noble deeds, a 
 thunder peal of noble song. Such a case is neither an 
 impossible nor a far-fetched one ; let us not doubt that
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE. 303 
 
 by some other means if not by that the immense 
 volume of thought and power which is still among us 
 will soon find its utterance, and justify itself to after 
 ages by showing in harmonious and self-restrained 
 poetry its kinship to the heroic and the beautiful of 
 every age and clime. And till then ; till the sunshine 
 and the thaw shall come, and the spring flowers burst 
 into bud and bloom, heralding a new golden year in 
 the world's life, let us even be content with our pea- 
 green and orange fungi; nay, even admire them, as 
 not without their own tawdry beauty, their clumsy 
 fitness ; for after all they are products of nature, though 
 only of her dyspepsia ; and grow and breed as indeed 
 cutaneous disorders do by an organic law of their 
 own ; fulfilling their little destiny, and then making, 
 according to Professor Way, by no means bad manure. 
 And so we take our leave of Mr. Alexander Smith, en- 
 treating him, if these pages meet his eye, to consider 
 three things, namely, that in as far as he has written 
 poetry, he is on the road to ruin by reason of following 
 the worst possible models. That in as far as the pre- 
 vailing taste has put these models before him, he is 
 neither to take much blame to himself, nor to be in 
 anywise disheartened for the future. That in as far as 
 he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic method, whether 
 in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he has 
 done, and do all that he has not done, he will become 
 what he evidently, by grace of God, can become if he 
 will, namely, a lasting and a good poet.
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BTBON .' 
 
 I 'HE poets, who forty years ago proclaimed their in- 
 tention of working a re volution in English literature, 
 and who have succeeded in their purpose, recommended 
 especially a more simple and truthful view of nature. 
 The established canons of poetry were to be discarded as 
 artificial; as to the matter, the poet was to represent mere 
 nature as he saw her ; as to form, he was to be his own 
 law. Freedom and nature were to be his watchwords. 
 
 No theory could be more in harmony with the spirit 
 of the age, and the impulse which had been given to 
 it by the burning words of Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 The school which arose expressed fairly the unrest and 
 unruliness of the time, its weariness of artificial re- 
 straint and unmeaning laws, its craving after a nobler 
 and a more earnest life, its sense of a glory and mystery 
 in the physical universe, hidden from the poets of the 
 two preceding centuries, and now revealed by science. 
 So far all was hopeful. But it soon became apparent, 
 that each poet's practical success in carrying out the 
 theory was, paradoxically enough, in inverse proportion 
 to his belief in it; that those who like Wordsworth, 
 Southey, and Keats, talked most about naturalness and 
 freedom, and most openly reprobated the school of Pope, 
 were, after all, least natural and least free ; that the 
 balance of those excellences inclined much more to 
 those who like Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Moore, 
 
 * FBASEB'S MAGAZINE, November, 1853.
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 305 
 
 troubled their heads with no theories, but followed the 
 best old models which they knew ; and that the rightful 
 sovereign of the new Parnassus, Lord Byron, protested 
 against the new movement, while he followed it ; upheld 
 to the last the models which it was the fashion to decry, 
 confest to the last, in poetry as in morals, ' Video 
 meliora proboque, deteriora sequor/ and uttered again 
 and again prophecies of the downfall of English poetry 
 and English taste, which seem to be on the eve of 
 realization. 
 
 Now no one will, we presume, be silly enough to 
 say that humanity has gained nothing by all the very 
 beautiful poetry which has been poured out on it during 
 the last thirty years in England. Nevertheless, when 
 we see poetry dying down among us year by year, 
 although the age is becoming year by year more marvel- 
 lous and inspiring, we have a right to look for some 
 false principle in a school which has had so little endur- 
 ing vitality, which seems now to be able to perpetuate 
 nothing of itself but its vices. 
 
 The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new 
 poetry was spoiled by an influx of German bad taste, 
 will hardly hold good now, except with a very few 
 very ignorant people. It is now known, of course, 
 that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe 
 may have had with Pope, it was not on account of his 
 being too severe an artist, but too loose a one ; not for 
 being too classical, but not classical enough ; that Eng- 
 lish poets borrowed from them nothing but their 
 most boyish and immature types of thought, and that 
 these were reproduced, and laughed at here, while the 
 men themselves were writing works of a purity, and 
 loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the world 
 except in the writings of Milton for nearly two centu- 
 ries. This feature, however, of the new German poetry, 
 
 VOL. i. x
 
 306 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 was exactly the one which no English poet deigned to 
 imitate, save Byron alone; on whom, accordingly, 
 Goethe always looked, with admiration and affection. 
 But the rest went their way unheeding ; and if they 
 have defects, those defects are their own ; for when 
 they did copy the German taste, they, for the most part, 
 deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good ; and 
 have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove 
 itself a very short-lived one. 
 
 But we cannot deny that, in spite of all faults, these 
 men had a strength. They have exercised an influence. 
 And they have done so by virtue of seeing a fact which 
 more complete, and in some cases more manly poets, 
 did not see. Strangely enough, Shelley, the man who 
 was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons 
 of good taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not 
 most clearly, still most intensely, and who proclaimed 
 it most boldly. His influence, therefore, is outliving 
 that of his compeers, and growing and spreading, for 
 good and for evil ; and will grow and spread for years 
 to come, as long as the present great unrest goes 
 on smouldering in men's hearts, till the hollow settle- 
 ment of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel 
 that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, 
 but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years' 
 prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is 
 played out at last, and the drama itself begun. 
 
 Such is the way of Providence ; the race is not to 
 the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor the pro- 
 phecy to the wise. The Spirit bloweth where He 
 listeth, and sends on His errands those who deny Him, 
 rebel against Him profligates, madmen ; and hyste- 
 rical Rousseaus, hysterical Shelleys, uttering words like 
 the east wind. He uses strange tools in His cosmogony : 
 but He does not use them in vain. By bad men if not
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 307 
 
 by good, by fools if not by wise, His work is done, and 
 done right well. 
 
 There was, then, a strength and a truth in all these 
 men ; and it was this that more or less clearly, they 
 all felt that they were standing between two worlds ; 
 amid the ruins of an older age ; upon the threshold of 
 a new one. To Byron's mind, the decay and rotten- 
 ness of the old was, perhaps, the most palpable ; to 
 Shelley's, the possible glory of the new. "Wordsworth 
 declared a little too noisily, we think, as if he had 
 been the first to discover the truth, the dignity and 
 diviueness of the most simple human facts and rela- 
 tionships. Coleridge declares that the new can only 
 assume living form, by growing organically out of the 
 old institutions. Keats gives a sad, and yet a whole- 
 some answer to them both, as, young and passionate, 
 he goes down with Faust ' to the Mothers/ 
 
 To the rich warm youth of the nations, 
 Childlike in virtue and faith, though childlike in passion and 
 
 pleasure, 
 
 Childlike still, still near to the gods, while the sunset of Eden 
 Lingered in rose-red rays on the peaks of Ionian mountains. 
 
 And there, amid the old classic forms, he cries 
 ' These things, too, are eternal : 
 
 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. 
 
 These, or things even fairer than they, must have their 
 place in the new world, if it is to be really a home for 
 the human race.' So he sings, as best he can, the 
 half-educated and consumptive stable-keeper's son, from 
 his prison-house of London brick, and in one mighty 
 yearn after that beauty from which he is debarred, 
 breaks his young heart, and dies, leaving a name not 
 ' writ in water,' as he dreamed, but on all fair things, 
 all lovers' hearts, for evermore. 
 
 Here then, to return, is the reason why the hearts 
 x 2
 
 308 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 of the present generation have been influenced so 
 mightily by these men, rather than by those of whom 
 Byron wrote, with perfect sincerity 
 
 Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe, will try 
 'Gainst you the question with posterity. 
 
 These lines, written in 1818, were meant to apply 
 only to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. Whether 
 they be altogether just or unjust, is not now the 
 question : yet it must seem somewhat strange to our 
 young poets, that Shelley's name is not among those 
 who are to try the question of immortality against the 
 Lake School; and yet many of his most beautiful 
 poems had been already written. Were, then, ' The 
 Revolt of Islam and Alastor/ it seems, not destined, 
 in Byron's opinion, to live as long as the ' Lady of 
 the Lake/ and the ' Mariners of England ? ' Per- 
 haps not. At least the omission of Shelley's name is 
 noteworthy. But still more noteworthy are these words 
 of his to Mr. Murray, dated January 23, 1819 : 
 
 ' Read Pope most of you don't but do .... and 
 the inevitable consequence would be, that you would 
 burn all that I have ever written, and all your other 
 wretched Claudians of the day (except Scott and Crabbe) 
 into the bargain.' .... 
 
 And here arises a new question Is Shelley, then, 
 among the Claudians? It is a hard saying. The pre- 
 sent generation will receive it with shouts of laughter. 
 Some future one, which studies and imitates Shaks- 
 peare instead of anatomizing him, and which gradually 
 awakens to the now forgotten fact, that a certain man 
 named Edmund Spenser once wrote a poem, the like 
 of which the earth never saw before, and perhaps may 
 never see again, may be inclined to acquiesce in the 
 verdict, and believe that Byron had a discrimination hi
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 309 
 
 this matter, as in a hundred more, far more acute than 
 any of his compeers, and had not eaten in vain, poor 
 fellow, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 
 In the meanwhile, we may perceive in the poetry of 
 the two men deep and radical differences, indicating a 
 spiritual difference between them even more deep, 
 which may explain the little notice which Byron takes 
 of Shelley's poetry, and the fact that the two men had 
 no deep sympathy for each other, and could not in any- 
 wise 'pull together' during their sojourn in Italy. 
 Doubtless, there were plain outward faults of temper 
 and character on both sides ; neither was in a state of 
 mind which could trust itself, or be trusted by those 
 who loved them best. Friendship can only consist 
 with the calm and self-restraint and self-respect of 
 moral and intellectual health ; and both were diseased, 
 fevered, ready to take offence, ready, unwittingly, to 
 give it. But the diseases of the two were different, as 
 their natures were ; and Shelley's fever was not Byron's. 
 Now it is worth remarking, that it is Shelley's form 
 of fever, rather than Byron's, which has been of late 
 years the prevailing epidemic. Since Shelley's poems 
 have become known in England, and a timid public, 
 after approaching in fear and trembling the fountain 
 which was understood to be poisoned, has begun first to 
 sip, and then, finding the magic water at all events 
 sweet enough, to quench its thirst with unlimited 
 draughts, Byron's fiercer wine has lost favour. Well < 
 at least the taste of the age is more refined, if that 
 be matter of congratulation. And there is an excuse 
 for preferring champagne to waterside porter, heady 
 with grains of paradise and quassia, salt and cocculum 
 indicum. Nevertheless, worse ingredients than O3nan- 
 thic acid may lurk in the delicate draught, and the
 
 310 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 Devil's Elixir may be made fragrant, and sweet, 
 and transparent enough, as French moralists well 
 know, for the most fastidious palate. The private 
 sipping of eau de Cologne, say the London physicians, 
 has increased mightily of late : and so has the reading 
 of Shelley. It is not surprising. Byron's Corsairs 
 and Laras have been, on the whole, impossible during 
 the thirty years' peace ; and piracy and profligacy are 
 at all times, and especially now-a-days, expensive 
 amusements, and often require a good private fortune 
 rare among poets. They have, therefore, been wisely 
 abandoned as ideals, except among a few young per- 
 sons, who used to wear turn-down collars, and are now 
 attempting mustachios and Mazzini hats. But even 
 among them, and among their betters rather their 
 more-respectables nine-tenths of the bad influence 
 which is laid at Byron's door, really is owing to Shel- 
 ley. Among the many good-going gentlemen and 
 ladies, Byron is generally spoken of with horror he is 
 ' so wicked/ forsooth ; while poor Shelley, ' poor dear 
 Shelley/ is ( very wrong, of course/ but ' so refined/ 
 1 so beautiful/ ' so tender/ a fallen angel, while Byron 
 is a satyr and a devil. We boldly deny the verdict. 
 Neither of the two are devils : as for angels, when we 
 have seen one, we shall be better able to give an 
 opinion : at present, Shelley is in our eyes far less like 
 one of those old Hebrew and Miltonic angels, fallen or 
 unfallen, than Byron is. And as for the satyr ; the 
 less that is said for Shelley, on that point, the better. 
 If Byron sinned more desperately and flagrantly than 
 he, it was done under the temptations of rank, wealth, 
 disappointed love, and under the impulses of an animal 
 nature, to which Shelley's passions were 
 
 As moonlight unto suulight, and as water unto wine.
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 311 
 
 And, at all events, Byron never set to work to con- 
 secrate his own sin into a religion, and proclaim the 
 worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical 
 development of ' pure' humanity. No Byron may be 
 brutal ; but he never cants. If at moments he finds 
 himself in hell, he never turns round to the world, and 
 melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they 
 could but see it in its true light. 
 
 The truth is, that what has put Byron out of favour 
 with the public of late, is not his faults, but his ex- 
 cellencies. His artistic good taste, his classical polish, 
 his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight 
 into humbug, above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of 
 being always intelligible ; these are the sins which 
 condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerizing, table-turn- 
 ing, spirit-rapping, Spiritualizing, Romanizing genera- 
 tion, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad 
 taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous 
 sentimentalism. The age is an effeminate one ; and it 
 can well afford to pardon the lewduess of the gentle 
 and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that 
 of the sturdy peer, proud of his bull- neck and his 
 boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek 
 ruffians at Missolonghi, and ' had no objection to a pot 
 of beer;' and who might, if he had reformed, have 
 made a gallant English gentleman; while Shelley, if 
 once his intense self-opinion had deserted him, would 
 have probably ended in Rome, as an Oratorian or a 
 Passiouist. 
 
 We would that it were only for this count that 
 Byron has had to make way for Shelley. There is, as 
 we said before, a deeper moral difference between the 
 men, which makes the weaker, rather than the stronger, 
 find favour in young men's eyes. For Byron has the
 
 312 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 most intense and awful sense of moral law of law 
 external to himself. Shelley has little or none ; less, 
 perhaps, than any known writer who has ever meddled 
 with moral questions. Byron's cry is, I am miserable, 
 because law exists ; and I have broken it, broken it so 
 habitually, that now I cannot help breaking it. I 
 have tried to eradicate the sense of it by speculation, 
 by action : but I cannot 
 
 The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. 
 
 There is a moral law independent of us, and yet the very 
 marrow of our life, which punishes and rewards us by 
 no arbitrary external penalties, but by our own con- 
 science of being what we are. 
 
 The mind which is immortal, makes itself 
 Requital for its good or evil thoughts ; 
 Is its own origin of ill, and end 
 And its own place and time its innate sense 
 When stript of this mortality, derives 
 No colour from the fleeting things about, 
 But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy, 
 Born from the knowledge of its own desert. 
 
 This idea, confused, intermitted, obscured by all forms 
 of evil for it was not discovered, but only in the pro- 
 cess of discovery is the one which comes out with 
 greater and greater strength, through all Corsairs, 
 Laras, and Parasinas, till it reaches its completion in 
 Cain and in Manfred, of both of which we do boldly 
 say, that if any sceptical poetry at all be right, which 
 we often question, they are right and not wrong ; that 
 in Cain, as in Manfred, the awful problem which, per- 
 haps, had better not have been put at all, is never- 
 theless fairly put, and the solution, as far as it is seen, 
 fairly confessed ; namely, that there is an absolute and 
 eternal law in the heart of man, which sophistries of 
 his own, or of other beings, may make him forget,
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 313 
 
 deny, blaspheme ; but which exists externally, and will 
 assert itself. If this be not the meaning of Manfred, 
 especially of that great scene in the chamois hunter's 
 cottage, what is ? If this be not the meaning of Cain, 
 and his awful awakening after the murder, not to any 
 mere dread of external punishment, but to an over- 
 whelming, instinctive, inarticulate sense of having done 
 wrong, what is ? 
 
 Yes; that law exists, let it never be forgotten, is 
 the real meaning of Byron, down to that last terrible 
 Don Juan, in which he sits himself down, in artificial 
 calm, to trace the gradual rotting and degradation of a 
 man without law, the slave of his own pleasures ; a 
 picture happily never finished, because he who painted 
 it was taken away before he had learnt, perhaps when he 
 was beginning to turn back from the lower depth 
 within the lowest deep. 
 
 Now to this whole form of consciousness, poor 
 Shelley's mind is altogether antipodal. His whole life 
 through was a denial of external law, and a substitu- 
 tion in its place of internal sentiment. Byron's cry is, 
 There is a law, and therefore I am miserable. Why 
 cannot I keep the law ? Shelley's is, There is a law, 
 and therefore I am miserable. Why should not the 
 law be abolished ? Away with it, for it interferes with 
 my sentiments Away with marriage, ' custom and 
 faith, the foulest birth of time.' We do not wish to 
 follow him down into the fearful sins which he defended 
 with the small powers of reasoning and they were 
 peculiarly small which he possessed. Let any one 
 who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference 
 between Byron's mind and Shelley's, compare the 
 writings in which each of them treats the same sub- 
 ject namely, that frightful question about the relation
 
 314 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 of the sexes, which forms, evidently, Manfred's crime ; 
 and see if the result is not simply this, that Shelley 
 glorifies, what Byron damns. ' Lawless love' is 
 Shelley's expressed ideal of the relation of the sexes : 
 and his justice, his benevolence, his pity, are all equally 
 lawless. 'Follow your instincts,' is his one moral 
 rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with 
 those lofty ideas of right, which it was the will of 
 Heaven that he should retain, ay, and love, to the very 
 last, and so reducing them all to the level of senti- 
 ments. ' Follow your instincts' But what if our in- 
 stincts lead us to eat animal food ? ' Then you must 
 follow the instincts of me Percy Bysshe Shelley. I 
 think it horrible, cruel; it offends my taste.' What 
 if our instincts lead us to tyrannize over our fellow- 
 men ? ' Then you must repress those instincts. I 
 Shelley think that, too, horrible and cruel.' Whether 
 it be vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically 
 the same, sentiment; which, in his case, as in the 
 case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, 
 not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the pri- 
 vate sentiments of the writer. This is Shelley ; a sen- 
 timentalist pure and simple : incapable of anything 
 like inductive reasoning ; unable to take cognizance of 
 any facts but those which please his taste, or to draw 
 any conclusion from them but such as also pleases his 
 taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the 
 Ode to Liberty, which, had it been written by any other 
 man but Shelley, possessing the same knowledge as he, 
 one would have called a wicked and deliberate lie 
 but in his case, is to be simply passed over with a 
 sigh, like a young lady's proofs of table-turning and 
 ra\ ping spirits. She wished to see it so and therefore 
 so she saw it. 
 
 For Shelley's nature is utterly womanish. Not
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 315 
 
 merely his weak points, but his strong ones, are those 
 of a woman. Tender and pitiful as a woman : and yet, 
 when angry, shrieking, railing, hysterical as a woman. 
 The physical distaste for meat and fermented liquors, 
 coupled with the hankering after physical horrors, are 
 especially feminine. The nature of a woman looks out 
 of that wild, beautiful, girlish face the nature : but 
 not the spirit ; not 
 
 The reason firm, the temperate will, 
 Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill. 
 
 The lawlessness of the man, with the sensibility of the 
 woman. . . . Alas for him ! He, too, might have dis- 
 covered what Byron did ; for were not his errors avenged 
 upon him within, more terribly even than without? 
 His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, 
 peevish, irrational; and yet his pain fills his whole 
 being, blackens the very face of nature to him : but he 
 will not confess himself in the wrong Once only, if 
 we recollect rightly, the truth flashes across him for a 
 moment, amid the clouds of selfish sorrow 
 
 Alas, I have nor hope nor health, 
 
 Nor peace within, nr calm around; 
 Nor that content surpassing wealth 
 
 The sage in meditation found, 
 And walked with inward glory crowned. 
 
 ' Nor' alas for the spiritual bathos, which follows 
 
 that short gleam of healthy feeling, and coming to 
 himself 
 
 fame nor power, nor love, nor leisure, 
 Others I see whom these surround, 
 
 Smiling they live and call life pleasure, 
 To me that cup has been dealt in another measure ! 
 
 Poor Shelley ! As if the peace within, and the 
 calm around, and the content surpassing wealth, were 
 things which were to be put in the same category with 
 fame, and power, and love, and leisure. As if they
 
 316 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 were things which could be ' dealt ' to any man j 
 instead of depending (as Byron, who, amid all his 
 fearful sins, was a man, knew well enough) upon a 
 man's self, a man's own will, arid that will exerted to 
 do a will exterior to itself, to know and to obey a 
 law. But no, the cloud of sentiment must close over 
 again, and 
 
 Yet now despair itself is mild 
 
 Even as the winds and waters are ; 
 I could lie down like a tired child, 
 
 And weep away this life of care, 
 Which I have borne, and still must bear, 
 
 Till death like sleep might seize on me, 
 And I might feel in the warm air, 
 
 My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
 Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony ! . . 
 
 Too beautiful to laugh at, however empty and sen- 
 timental. True : but why beautiful ? Because there 
 is a certain sincerity in it, which breeds coherence 
 and melody, which, in short, makes it poetry. But 
 what if such a tone of mind be consciously encou- 
 raged, even insincerely affected as the ideal state for a 
 poet's mind, as his followers have done ? 
 
 The mischief which suoh a man would do is con- 
 ceivable enough. He stands out, both by his excellencies 
 and his defects, as the spokesman and ideal of all the 
 unrest and unhealth of sensitive young men for many 
 a year after. His unfulfilled prophecies only help to 
 increase that unrest. Who shall blame either him for 
 uttering those prophecies, or them for longing for their 
 fulfilment ? Must we not thank the man who gives us 
 fresh hope that this earth will not be always as it is 
 now ? His notion of what it will be may be, as 
 Shelley's was, vague, even in some things wrong and 
 undesirable. Still, we must accept his hope and faith 
 in the spirit, not in the letter. So have thousands of 
 young men felt, who would have shrunk with disgust
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 317 
 
 from some of poor Shelley's details of the ' good time 
 coming.' And shame on him who should wish to rob 
 them of such a hope, even if it interfered with his 
 favourite 'scheme of unfulfilled prophecy/ So men 
 have felt Shelley's spell a wondrous one perhaps, 
 they think, a life-giving, regenerative one. And yet 
 what dream at once more shallow, and more impossible ? 
 Get rid of kings and priests; marriage may stay, 
 pending discussions on the rights of women. Let the 
 poet speak what he is to say being, of course, a matter 
 of utterly secondary import, provided only that he be a 
 poet; and then the millennium will appear of itself, 
 and the devil be exorcised with a kiss from all hearts 
 except, of course, those of * pale priests,' and ' tyrants, 
 with their sneer of cold command' (who, it seems, have 
 not been got rid of after all), and the Cossacks and Croats 
 
 whom they may Choose to call to their rescue 
 
 And on the appearance of the said Cossacks and Croats, 
 the poet's vision stops short, and all is blank beyond. 
 A recipe for the production of millenniums which has 
 this one advantage, that it is small enough to be com- 
 prehended by the very smallest minds, and reproduced 
 thereby, with a difference, in such spasmodic melodies 
 as seem to those small minds to be imitations of 
 Shelley's nightingale notes. 
 
 For nightingale notes they truly are. In spite of 
 all his faults and there are few poetic faults in which 
 he does not indulge, to their very highest power, in spite 
 of his ' interfluous' and ' innumerous,' and the rest of 
 his bad English in spite of bombast, horrors, maun- 
 dering, sheer stuff and nonsense of all kinds, there is 
 a plaintive natural melody about this man, such as no 
 other English poet has ever uttered, except Shaks- 
 pcare, in some few immortal songs. Who that has 
 read Shelley does not recollect scraps worthy to stand
 
 318 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 by Ariel's song chaste, simple, unutterably musical ? 
 Yes, when he will be himself Shelley the scholar and 
 the gentleman and the singer, and leave philosophy 
 and politics, which he does not understand, and shriek- 
 ings and cursings, which are unfit for any civilized and 
 self-respecting man, he is perfect. Like the American 
 mocking-bird, he is harsh only when aping other men's 
 tunes his true power lies in his own 'native wood- 
 notes wild/ 
 
 But it is not this faculty of his which has been 
 imitated by his scholars; for it is not this faculty 
 which made him their ideal, however it may have 
 attracted them. All which sensible men deplore in 
 him, is that which poetasters have exalted in him. His 
 morbidity and his doubt have become in their eyes 
 his differential energy, because, too often, it was all 
 in him with which they had wit to sympathize. They 
 found it easy to curse and complain, instead of helping 
 to mend. So had he. They found it pleasant to 
 confound institutions with the abuses which defaced 
 them. So had he. They found it pleasant to give 
 way to their spleen. So had he. They found it 
 pleasant to believe that the poet was to regenerate the 
 world, without having settled with what he was to re- 
 generate it. So had he. They found it more pleasant 
 to obey sentiment than inductive laws. So had he. 
 They found it more pleasant to hurl about enormous 
 words and startling figures, than to examine reverently 
 the awful depths of beauty which lie in the simplest 
 words, and the severest figures. So had he. 
 
 And thus arose a spasmodic, vague, extravagant, 
 effeminate, school of poetry, which has been too often 
 hastily and unfairly fathered upon Byron. Doubtless 
 Byroa has helped to its formation ; but only in as far 
 as his poems possess, or rather seem to possess, ele-
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 319 
 
 raents in common with Shelley's. For that consc ous 
 struggle against law, by which law is discovered, nnay 
 easily enough be confounded with the utter repudiation 
 of it. Both forms of mind will discuss the same 
 questions ; both will discuss them freely, with a certain 
 plainness and daring, which may range through all 
 grades, from the bluntness of Socrates down to reckless 
 immodesty and profaneness. The world will hardly 
 distinguish between the two ; it did not in Socrates' 
 case, mistook his reverent irreverence for Atheism, and 
 martyred him accordingly, as it has since martyred 
 Luther's memory. Probably, too, if a living struggle 
 is going on in the writer's mind, he will not have dis- 
 tinguished the two elements in himself; he will be 
 profane when he fancies himself only arguing for truth ; 
 he will be only arguing for truth, where he seems to 
 the respectable undoubting to be profane. And in the 
 meanwhile, whether the respectable understand him or 
 not, the young and the inquiring, much more the 
 distempered, who would be glad to throw off moral law, 
 will sympathize with him, often more than he sympa- 
 thizes with himself. Words thrown off in the heat of 
 passion ; shameful self-revealings which he has written 
 with his very heart's blood : ay, even fallacies which he 
 has put into the mouths of dramatic characters for the 
 very purpose of refuting them, or at least of calling 
 on all who read to help him to refute them, and to 
 deliver him from the ugly dream, all these will, by the 
 lazy, the frivolous, the feverish, the discontented, be 
 taken for integral parts and noble traits of the man to 
 whom they are attracted, by finding that he, too, has 
 the same doubts and struggles as themselves, that he 
 has a voice and art to be their spokesman. And hence 
 arises confusion on confusion, misconception on miscon- 
 ception. The man is honoured for his dishonour.
 
 320 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 Chronic disease is taken for a new type of health ; and 
 Byron is admired and imitated for that which Byron is 
 trying to tear out of his own heart, and trample under 
 foot as his curse and bane, something which is not 
 Byron's self, but Byron's house-fiend, and tyrant, and 
 shame. And in the meanwhile that which calls itself 
 respectability and orthodoxy, and is unless Augustine 
 lied neither of them, stands by ; and instead of echoing 
 the voice of him who said, ' Come to me ye that are 
 weary arid heavy laden, and I will give you rest/ 
 mumbles proudly to itself, with the Pharisees of old, 
 ' This people, which knoweth not the law, is accursed.' 
 We do not seek to excuse Byron any more than we 
 do Shelley. They both sinned. They both paid bitter 
 penalty for their sin. How far they were guilty, or 
 which of them was the more guilty, we know not. We 
 can judge no man. It is as poets and teachers, not as 
 men and responsible spirits ; not in their inward beings, 
 known only to Him who made them, not even to them- 
 selves, but in their outward utterance, that we have a 
 right to compare them. Both have done harm. Neither 
 have, we firmly believe harmed any human being who 
 had not already the harm within himself. It is not by 
 introducing evil, but by calling into consciousness and 
 more active life evil which was already lurking in the 
 heart, that any writer makes men worse. Thousands 
 doubtless have read Byron and Shelley, and worse books, 
 and have risen from them as pure as when they sat down. 
 In evil as well as in good, the eye only sees that which it 
 brings with it the power of seeing say rather, the wish 
 to see. But it is because, in spite of all our self-glorifying 
 paeans, our taste has become worse and not better, that 
 Shelley, the man who conceitedly despises and denies 
 law, is taking the place of Byron, the man who only 
 struggles against it, and who shows his honesty and his
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 321 
 
 greatness most by confessing that his struggles are in- 
 effectual ; that, Titan as he may look to the world, his 
 strength is misdirected, a mere furious weakness, which 
 proclaims him a slave in fetters, while prurient young 
 gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on hills, and 
 scaling Olympus itself. They are tired of that notion, 
 however, now. They have begun to suspect that Byron 
 did not scale Olympus after all. How much more 
 pleasant a leader, then, must Shelley be, who unques- 
 tionably did scale his little Olympus having made it 
 himself first to fit his own stature. The man who has 
 built the hay-rick will doubtless climb it again, if need 
 be, as often as desired, and whistle on the top, after 
 the fashion of the rick-building guild, triumphantly 
 enough. For after all Shelley's range of vision is 
 very narrow, his subjects few, his reflections still 
 fewer, when compared, not only with such a poet as 
 Spenser, but with his own contemporaries ; above all 
 with Byron. He has a deep heart, but not a wide one ; 
 an intense eye, but not a catholic one. And, there- 
 fore, he never wrote a real drama ; for in spite of all 
 that has been said to the contrary, Beatrice Cenci is 
 really none other than Percy Bysshe Shelley himself in 
 petticoats. 
 
 But we will let them both be. Perhaps they 
 know better now. 
 
 One very ugly superstition, nevertheless, we must 
 mention, of which these two men have been, in Eng- 
 land at least, the great hierophants; that namely, on 
 which we touched in our last the right of ' genius' to 
 be ' eccentric/ Doubtless there are excuses for such a 
 notion : but it is one against which every wise man must 
 set his face like a flint, and at the risk of being called a 
 ' Philister* and a ' flunkey,' take part boldly with re- 
 spectability and this wicked world, and declare them to 
 
 VOL. i. Y
 
 322 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 be for once utterly in the right. Still there are ex- 
 cuses for it. A poet, especially one who wishes to be 
 not merely a describer of pretty things, but a ' Vates' 
 and seer of new truth, must often say things which 
 other people do not like to say, and do things which 
 others do not like to do. And, moreover, he will be 
 generally gifted, for the very purpose of enabling him 
 to say and do these strange things, with a sensibility 
 more delicate than common, often painful enough to 
 himself. How easy for such a man to think that he 
 has a right not to be as other men are ; to despise little 
 conventionalities, courtesies, even decencies; to offend 
 boldly and carelessly, conscious that he has something 
 right and valuable within himself, which not only atones 
 for such defects, but allows him to indulge in them, as 
 badges of his own superiority ! 
 
 This has been the notion of artistic genius which has 
 spread among us of late years, just in proportion as the 
 real amount of artistic genius has diminished ; till we 
 see men, on the mere ground of being literary men, too 
 refined to keep accounts, or pay their butchers' bills ; 
 affecting the pettiest absurdities in dress, in manner, 
 in food; giving themselves credit for being unable to 
 bear a noise, keep their temper, educate their own 
 children, associate with their fellow men ; and a thou- 
 sand other paltry weaknesses, moroseuesses, self-indul- 
 gences, fastidiousnesses, vulgarities for all this is 
 essentially vulgar, and demands, not honour and sym- 
 pathy, but a chapter in Mr. Thackeray's Book of Snobs. 
 Non sic itur ad astra. Self-indulgence arid exclusiveness 
 can only be a proof of weakness. It may accompany 
 talent, but it proves that talent to be partial and de- 
 fective. The brain may be large, but the manhood, 
 the ' virtus,' is small, where such things are allowed, 
 much more where they are gloried in. A poet such a
 
 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 323 
 
 man may be, but a world -poet never. He is sectarian, 
 a poetical Quaker, a Puritan, who, forgetting that the 
 truth which he possesses is equally the right and in- 
 heritance of every man he meets, takes up a peculiar 
 dress or phraseology, as symbols of his fancied differ- 
 ence from his human brothers. All great poets, till 
 Shelley and Byron, as far as we can discern, have been 
 men especially free from eccentricities; careful not 
 merely of the chivalries and the respectabilities, but 
 also of the courtesies and the petty conventionalities, 
 of the age in which they lived ; altogether well-bred 
 men of the world. The answer, that they learnt the 
 ways of courts, does not avail ; for if they had had no 
 innate good- breeding, reticence, respect for forms and 
 customs, they would never have come near courts at 
 all. It is not a question of rank and fashion, but of 
 good feeling, common sense, unselfishness. Goethe, 
 Milton, Spenser, Shakspeare, Rabelais, Ariosto, were 
 none of them high-born men; several of them low- 
 born ; and only rose to the society of high-born men 
 because they were themselves innately high-bred, 
 polished, complete, without exaggerations, affectations, 
 deformities, weaknesses of mind and taste, whatever 
 may have been their weaknesses on certain points of 
 morals. The man of all men most bepraised by the 
 present generation of poets, is perhaps Wolfgang von 
 Goethe. Why is it, then, that of all men he is the one 
 whom they strive to be most unlike? 
 
 And if this be good counsel for the man who merely 
 wishes and no blame to him to sing about beautiful 
 things in a beautiful way, it applies with tenfold force 
 to the poet who desires honestly to proclaim great 
 truths. If he has to offend the prejudices of the world 
 in important things, that is all the more reason for his 
 bowing to those prejudices in little things, and being 
 
 Y a
 
 324 THOUGHTS ON SHELLEY AND BYRON. 
 
 content to be like his neighbours in outward matters, 
 in order that he may make them like himself in inward 
 ones. Shall such a man dare to hinder his own message, 
 to drive away the very hearers to whom he believes him- 
 self to be sent, for the sake of his own nerves, laziness, 
 antipathies, much more of his own vanity and pride ? 
 If he does so, he is unfaithful to that very genius on 
 which he prides himself. He denies its divinity, by 
 treating it as his own possession, to be displayed or 
 hidden as he chooses, for his own enjoyment, his own 
 self-glorification. Well for such a man if a day comes 
 to him in which he will look back with shame and 
 self-reproach, not merely on every scandal which he 
 may have caused by breaking the moral and social 
 laws of humanity, by neglecting to restrain his appe- 
 tites, pay his bills, and keep his engagements ; but also 
 on every conceited word and look, every gaucherie and 
 rudeness, every self-indulgent moroseness and fastidi- 
 ousness, as sins against the sacred charge which has 
 been committed to him; and determines with that 
 Jew of old, who, to judge from his letter to Philemon, 
 was one of the most perfect gentlemen of God's making 
 who ever walked this earth, to become ' all things to 
 all men, if by any means he may save some/
 
 HOUBS WITH THE MYSTICS* 
 
 FEW readers of this magazine probably know any- 
 thing about ' Mystics / know even what the term 
 means : but as it is plainly connected with the adjective 
 ' mystical/ they probably suppose it to denote some 
 sort of vague, dreamy, sentimental, and therefore use- 
 less and undesirable, personage. Nor can we blame 
 them if they do so ; for mysticism is a form of thought 
 and feeling now all but extinct in England. There are 
 probably not ten thorough mystics among all our mil- 
 lions ; the mystic philosophers are very little read by 
 our scholars, and read not for but in spite of their 
 mysticism ; and our popular theology has so completely 
 rid itself of any mystic elements, that our divines look 
 with utter disfavour upon it, use the word always as a 
 term of opprobrium, and interpret the mystic expressions 
 in our liturgy which mostly occur in the Collects 
 according to the philosophy of Locke, really ignorant, 
 it would seem, that they were written by Platonist 
 mystics. 
 
 We do not blame them, either, save in as far as 
 teachers of men are blameworthy for being ignorant 
 of any form of thought which has ever had a living 
 hold upon good and earnest men, and may therefore 
 take hold of them again. But the English are not now 
 a mystic people, any more than the old Romans were ; 
 
 * FEASEB'S MAGAZINE, September, 1856. 'Hours with the 
 Mystics.' By Kobert Alfred Vaughan, B.A. Two Volumes. Lon- 
 don : John VV. Parker and Sou. 1856.
 
 326 HOUES WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 their habit of mind, their destiny in the world, are like 
 those of the Romans, altogether practical ; and who can 
 be surprised if they do not think about what they are 
 not called upon to think about ? 
 
 Nevertheless, it is quite a mistake to suppose that 
 mysticism is by its own nature unpractical. The 
 greatest and most prosperous races of antiquity the 
 Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindoos, Greeks had the 
 mystic element as strong and living in them as the Ger- 
 mans have now ; and certainly we cannot call them un- 
 practical peoples. They fell and came to ruin as the 
 Germans may do when their mysticism became un- 
 practical : but their thought remained, to be translated 
 into practice by sounder-hearted races than themselves. 
 Rome learnt from Greece, and did, in some confused 
 imperfect way, that which Greece only dreamed ; just 
 as future nations may act hereafter, nobly and usefully, 
 on the truths which Germans discover, only to put in a 
 book and smoke over. For they are terribly practical 
 people, these mystics, quiet students and devotees as 
 they may seem. They go, or seem to go, down to the 
 roots of things, after a way of their own ; and lay foun- 
 dations on which be they sound or unsound those 
 who come after them cannot choose but build ; as we 
 are building now. For our forefathers were mystics for 
 generations; they were mystics in the forests of Ger- 
 many and in the dales of Norway ; they were mystics in 
 the convents and the universities of the middle ages ; 
 they were mystics, all the deepest and noblest minds of 
 them, during the Elizabethan era. 
 
 Even now the few mystic writers of this island are 
 exercising more influence on thought than any other 
 men, for good or for evil. Coleridge and Alexander 
 Knox have changed the minds, and with them the acts, 
 of thousands ; and when they are accused of having ori-
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 327 
 
 ginated, unknowingly, the whole 'Tractarian' move- 
 ment, those who have watched English thought care- 
 fully can only answer, that on the confession of the 
 elder Tractarians themselves, the allegation is true : 
 but that they originated a dozen other 'movements' 
 beside in the most opposite directions, and that free- 
 thinking Emersonians will be as ready as Romish per- 
 verts and good plain English churchmen to confess 
 that the critical point of their life was determined by 
 the writings of the fakeer of Highgate. At this very 
 time, too, the only real mystic of any genius who is 
 writing and teaching is exercising more practical in- 
 fluence, infusing more vigorous life into the minds of 
 thousands of men and women, than all the other 
 teachers of England put together ; and has set rolling 
 a ball which may in the next half century gather into 
 an avalanche, perhaps utterly different in form, material, 
 and direction, from all which he expects. 
 
 So much for mystics being unpractical. If we look 
 faithfully into the meaning of their name, we shall see 
 why, for good or for evil, they cannot be unpractical ; 
 why they, let them be the most self-absorbed of re- 
 cluses, are the very men who sow the seeds of great 
 schools, great national and political movements, even 
 great religions. 
 
 A mystic according to the Greek etymology 
 should signify one who is initiated into mysteries : one 
 whose eyes are opened to see things which other people 
 cannot see. And the true mystic in all ages and 
 countries, has believed that this was the case with him. 
 He believes that there is an invisible world as well as 
 a visible one ; so do most men : but the mystic believes 
 also that this same invisible world is not merely a 
 supernumerary one world more, over and above the 
 earth on which he lives, and the stars over his head,
 
 328 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 but that it is the cause of them and the ground of them ; 
 that it was the cause of them at first, and is the cause 
 of them now, even to the budding of every flower, and 
 the falling of every pebble to the ground ; and there- 
 fore, that having been before this visible world, it will 
 be after it, and endure just as real, living, and eternal, 
 though matter were annihilated to-morrow. 
 
 ' But, on this showing, every Christian, nay, every 
 religious man, is a mystic ; for he believes in an invisible 
 world?' The answer is found in the plain fact, that 
 good Christians here in England do not think so them- 
 selves ; that they dislike and dread mysticism ; would 
 not understand it if it were preached to them ; are more 
 puzzled by those utterances of St. John, which mystics 
 have always claimed as justifying their theories, than 
 by any part of their bibles. There is a positive and 
 conscious difference between popular metaphysics and 
 mysticism ; and it seems to lie in this : the invisible 
 world in which Englishmen in general believe, is one 
 which happens to be invisible now, but which will not be 
 so hereafter. When they speak of the other world they 
 mean a place which their bodily eyes will see some day, 
 and could see now if they were allowed ; when they 
 speak of spirits they mean ghosts who could, and per- 
 haps do, make themselves visible to men's bodily eyes. 
 We are not inquiring here whether they be right or 
 wrong ; we are only specifying a common form of human 
 thought. 
 
 The mystic, on the other hand, believes that the in- 
 visible world is so by its very nature, and must be so 
 for ever. He lives therein now, he holds, and will live 
 in it through eternity : but he will see it never with 
 any bodily eyes, not even with the eyes of any future 
 ' glorified' body. It is ipso facto not to be seen, only 
 to be believed in ; never for him will ' faith be changed
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 329 
 
 for sight/ as the popular theologians say that it will ; 
 for this invisible world is only to be ' spiritually dis- 
 cerned.' 
 
 This is the mystic idea, pure and simple ; of course 
 there are various grades of it, as there are of the popu- 
 lar one ; for no man holds his own creed and nothing 
 more ; and it is good for him, in this piecemeal and 
 shortsighted world, that he should not. Were he over- 
 true to his own idea, he would become a fanatic, perhaps 
 a madman. And so the modern evangelical of the 
 Venn and Newton school, to whom mysticism is 
 neology and nehushtan, when he speaks of ' spiritual 
 experiences/ uses the adjective in its purely mystic 
 sense; while Bernard of Cluny, in his once famous 
 hymn, ' Hie breve vivitur/ mingles the two conceptions 
 of the unseen world in inextricable confusion. Between 
 these two extreme poles, in fact, we have every variety 
 of thought ; and it is good for us that we should have 
 them ; for no one man or school of men can grasp the 
 whole truth, and every intermediate modification sup- 
 plies some link in the great cycle of facts which its 
 neighbours have overlooked. 
 
 In the minds who have held this belief, that the un- 
 seen world is the only real and eternal one, there has 
 generally existed a belief, more or less confused, that 
 the visible world is in some mysterious way a pattern 
 or symbol of the invisible one ; that its physical laws 
 are the analogues of the spiritual laws of the eternal 
 world : a belief of which Mr. Vaughan seems to think 
 lightly ; though if it be untrue we can hardly see how 
 that metaphoric illustration in which he indulges so 
 freely, and which he often uses in a masterly and grace- 
 ful way, can be anything but useless trifling. For what 
 is a metaphor or a simile but a mere paralogism having 
 nothing to do with the matter in hand, and not to be
 
 330 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 allowed for a moment to influence the reader's judgment, 
 unless there be some real and objective analogy homo- 
 logy we should call it between the physical phenome- 
 non from which the symbol is taken, and the spiritual 
 truth which it is meant to illustrate ? What divineness, 
 what logical weight, in our Lord's parables, unless He was 
 by them trying to show his hearers that the laws which 
 they saw at work in the lilies of the field, in the most 
 common occupations of men, were but lower manifesta- 
 tions of the laws by which are governed the inmost 
 workings of the human spirit ? What triflers, on any 
 other ground, were Socrates and Plato. What triflers, 
 too, Shakspeare and Spenser. Indeed, we should say 
 that it is the belief, conscious or unconscious, of the 
 eternal correlation of the physical and spiritual worlds, 
 which alone constitutes the essence of a poet. 
 
 Of course this idea led, and would necessarily lead, to 
 follies and fancies enough, as long as the phenomena 
 of nature were not carefully studied, and her laws 
 scientifically investigated ; and all the dreams of 
 Paracelsus or Van Helmont, Cardan or Crollius, 
 Baptista Porta or Behmen, are but the natural and 
 pardonable errors of minds which, while they felt 
 deeply the sanctity and mystery of nature, had no 
 Baconian philosophy to tell them what nature actu- 
 ally was, and what she actually said. But their idea 
 lives still, and will live as long as the belief in a one 
 God lives. The physical and spiritual worlds cannot be 
 separated by an impassable gulf. They must, in some 
 way or other, reflect each other, even in their minutest 
 phenomena, for so only can they both reflect that abso- 
 lute primaeval Unity in whom they both live and move 
 and have their being. Mr. Vaughan's object, however, 
 has not been to work out in his book such problems as 
 these. Had he done so, he would have made his readers
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 331 
 
 understand better what mysticism is ; he would have 
 avoided several hasty epithets, by the use of which he 
 has, we think, deceived himself into the notion that he 
 has settled a matter by calling it a hard name ; he 
 would have explained, perhaps, to himself and to us, 
 many strange and seemingly contradictory facts in the 
 annals of mysticism. But he would also not have 
 written so readable a book. On the whole he has 
 taken the right course, though one wishes that he had 
 carried it out more methodically. 
 
 A few friends, literate and comfortable men, and 
 right-hearted Christians withal, meet together to talk 
 over these same mystics, and to read papers and extracts 
 which will give a general notion of the subject from 
 the earliest historic times. The gentlemen talk about 
 and about a little too much; they are a little too fond 
 of illustrations of the popular pulpit style; they are 
 often apt to say each his say, with very little care of 
 what the previous speaker has uttered ; in fact these 
 conversations are, as conversations, not good, but as 
 centres of thought they are excellent. There is not a 
 page nor a paragraph in which there is not something 
 well worth recollecting, and often reflections very wise 
 and weighty indeed, which show that whether or not Mr. 
 Vaughan has thoroughly grasped the subject of mys- 
 ticism, he has grasped and made part of his own mind 
 and heart many things far more practically important 
 than mysticism, or any other form of thought ; and no 
 one ought to rise up from the perusal of his book with- 
 out finding himself, if not a better, at least a more 
 thoughtful man, and perhaps a humbler one also, as he 
 learns how many more struggles and doubts, discoveries, 
 sorrows and joys, the human race has passed through, 
 than are contained in his own private experience. 
 
 The true value of the book is, that though not ex-
 
 332 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 haustive of the subject, it is suggestive. It affords the 
 best, indeed the only general, sketch of the subject 
 which we have in England, and gives therein bound- 
 less food for future thought and reading ; and the 
 country parson, or the thoughtful professional man, 
 who has no time to follow out the question for himself, 
 much less to hunt out and examine original documents, 
 may learn from these pages a thousand curious and in- 
 teresting hints about men of like passions with himself, 
 and about old times, the history of which as of all 
 times was not the history of their kings and queens, 
 but of the creeds and deeds of the ' masses' who 
 worked, and failed, and sorrowed, and rejoiced again, 
 unknown to fame. Whatsoever, meanwhile, their own 
 conclusions may be on the subject-matter of the book, 
 they will hardly fail to admire the extraordinary variety 
 and fulness of Mr. Vaughan's reading, and wonder when 
 they hear unless we are wrongly informed that he is 
 quite a young man, 
 
 How one small head could compass all he knew. 
 
 He begins with the mysticism of the Hindoo Yogis. 
 And to this, as we shall hereafter show, he hardly does 
 justice; but we wish now to point out in detail the 
 extended range of subjects, of each of which the book 
 gives some general notion. From the Hindoos he 
 passes to Philo and the neo-Platonists ; from them to 
 the pseudo-Dionysius, and the mysticism of the early 
 Eastern Church. He then traces, shrewdly enough, 
 the influence of the pseudo-Areopagite and the Easterns 
 on the bolder and more practical minds of the Western 
 Latins, and gives a sketch of Bernard and his Abbey 
 of Clairvaux, which brings pleasantly enough before us 
 the ways and works of a long-dead world, which was 
 all but inconceivable to us till Mr. Carlyle disinterred
 
 HOURS ;WTTH THE MYSTICS. 333 
 
 it in his picture of Abbot Sampson, the hero of Past 
 and Present. 
 
 We are next introduced to the mystic schoolmen, 
 Hugo, and Richard of St. Victor; and then to a far 
 more interesting class of men, and one with which Mr. 
 Vaughan has more sympathy than with any of his cha- 
 racters, perhaps because he knows more about them. 
 His chapters on the German mysticism of the four- 
 teenth century ; his imaginary, yet fruitful chronicle of 
 Adolf of Arnstein, with its glimpses of Meister Eckart, 
 Suso, the 'Nameless Wild/ Ruysbroek, and Tauler 
 himself, are admirable, if merely as historic studies, and 
 should be, and we doubt not will be, read by many as 
 practical commentaries on the 'Theologia Germanica/ 
 and on the selection from Tauler^s ' Sermons/ now in 
 course of publication. Had all the book been written 
 as these chapters are, we should not have had a word 
 of complaint to make, save when we find the author 
 passing over without a word of comment, utterances 
 which, right or wrong, contain the very key-note and 
 central idea of the men whom he is holding up to ad- 
 miration, and as we think, of mysticism itself. There 
 is, for instance, a paragraph attributed to Ruysbroek, in 
 p. 275, vol. i., which, whether true or false and we 
 believe it to be essentially true is so inexpressibly im- 
 portant, both in the subject which it treats, and in the 
 way in which it treats it, that twenty pages of com- 
 ment on it would not have been misdevoted. Yet it 
 is passed by without a word. 
 
 Going forward to the age of the Reformation, the 
 book then gives us a spirited glimpse of John Bokelson 
 and the Munster Anabaptists, of Carlstadt and the 
 Zurichian prophets, and then dwells at some length on 
 the attempt of that day, to combine physical and spiri- 
 tual science in occult philosophy. We have enough to
 
 334 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 make us wish to hear more of Cornelius Agrippa, Para- 
 celsus, and Behmen, with their alchemy, ' true magic/ 
 doctrines of sympathies,* signatures of things, cabbala, 
 and Gamahea, and the rest of that (now fallen) inverted 
 pyramid of pseudo-science. His estimate of Behmen 
 and his writings, we may observe in passing, is both 
 sound and charitable, and speaks as much for Mr. 
 Vaughan's heart as for his head. Then we have a 
 little about the Rosicrucians and the Comte de Gabalis, 
 and the theory of the Rabbis, from whom the Rosicru- 
 cians borrowed so much, all told in the same lively 
 manner, all utterly new to ninety-nine readers out of a 
 hundred, all indicating, we are bound to say, a much 
 more extensive reading than appears on the page itself. 
 
 From these he passes to the mysticism of the coun- 
 ter-Reformation, especially to the two great Spanish 
 mystics, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross. Here 
 again he is new and interesting ; but we must regret 
 that he has not been as merciful to Theresa as he has 
 to poor little John. 
 
 He then devotes some eighty pages and very well 
 employed they are in detailing the strange and sad 
 story of Madame Guyon, and the ' Quietist' movement 
 at Louis Quatorze's Court. Much of this he has taken, 
 with all due acknowledgment, from Upham ; but he 
 has told the story most pleasantly, in his own way, 
 and these pages will give a better notion of Feuelon, 
 and of the ' Eagle ' (for eagle, read vulture) ' of Meaux/ 
 
 * Why has Mr. Vaughan omitted to give us a few racy lines on 
 Sir Matthew Hale's ' Divine Contemplations of the Magnet,' Sir 
 Kenelm Digby's ' Weapon-Salve,' and Valentine Greatrake's ' Mag- 
 netic Cures ?' He should have told the world a little, too, about 
 the strange phenomenon of the Jesuit Kircher, in whom Popery 
 attempted to recover the very ground which Behmen and the Pro- 
 testant nature- my sties were conquering from them.
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 335 
 
 old Bossuet, than they are likely to find elsewhere in 
 the same compass. 
 
 Following chronological order as nearly as he can, 
 he next passes to George Fox and the early Quakers, 
 introducing a curious and in our own case quite novel 
 little episode concerning ' The History of Hai Ebn 
 Yokhdan/ a mediaeval Arabian romance, which old Bar- 
 clay seems to have got hold of and pressed into the 
 service of his sect, taking it for literal truth. 
 
 The twelfth book is devoted to Swedenborg, and a 
 very valuable little sketch it is, and one which goes far 
 to clear up the moral character, and the reputation for 
 sanity also, of that much calumniated philosopher, 
 whom the world knows only as a dreaming false prophet, 
 forgetting that even if he was that, he was also a sound 
 and severe scientific labourer, to whom our modern 
 physical science is most deeply indebted. 
 
 This is a short sketch of the contents of a book 
 which is a really valuable addition to English literature, 
 and which is as interesting as it is instructive. But 
 Mr. Vaughan must forgive us if we tell him frankly 
 that he has not exhausted the subject; that he has 
 hardly defined mysticism at all at least, has defined 
 it by its outward results, and that without classifying 
 them; and that he has not grasped the central idea of 
 the subject. There were more things in these same 
 mystics than are dreamt of in his philosophy ; and he 
 has missed seeing them, because he has put himself 
 rather in the attitude of a judge than of an inquirer. 
 
 He has not had respect and trust enough for the 
 men and women of whom he writes ; and is too much 
 inclined to laugh at them, and treat them de haut en 
 bas. He has trusted too much to his own great power 
 of logical analysis, and his equally great power of il- 
 lustration, and is therefore apt to mistake the being
 
 336 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 able to put a man's thoughts into words for him, for the 
 being really able to understand him. To understand any 
 man, we have must have sympathy for him, even affec- 
 tion. No intellectual acuteness, no amount even of 
 mere pity for his errors, will enable us to see the man 
 from within, and put our own souls into the place of his 
 soul. To do that, one must feel and confess within 
 oneself the seed of the same errors which one reproves 
 in him ; one must have passed more or less through his 
 temptations, doubts, hunger of heart and brain; and 
 one cannot help questioning, as one reads Mr. 
 Vaughan's book, whether he has really done this in 
 the case of those of whom he writes. He should have 
 remembered, too, how little any young man can have 
 experienced of the terrible sorrows which branded into 
 the hearts of these old devotees the truths to which they 
 clung more than to life, while they too often warped 
 their hearts into morbidity, and caused alike their folly 
 and their wisdom. Gently indeed should we speak 
 even of the dreams of some self-imagined ' Bride of 
 Christ/ when we picture to ourselves the bitter agonies 
 which must have been endured ere a human soul could 
 develop so fantastically diseased a growth. ' She was 
 only a hysterical nun/ "Well, and what more tragical 
 object, to those who will look patiently and lovingly 
 at human nature, than a hysterical nun ? She may 
 have been driven into a convent by some disappoint- 
 ment in love. And has not disappointed affection 
 been confessed, in all climes and ages, to enshroud 
 its victim ever after in a sanctuary of reverent pity? 
 If sorrow ' broke her brains/ as well as broke her 
 heart, shall we do aught but love her the more for 
 her capacity of love ? Or she may have entered the 
 convent, as thousands did, in girlish simplicity, to 
 escape from a world she had not tried, before she had
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 337 
 
 discovered that the world could give her something 
 which the convent could not. What more tragical than 
 her discovery in herself of a capacity for love which 
 could never be satisfied within that prison ? And 
 when that capacity began to vindicate itself in strange 
 forms of disease, seemingly to her supernatural, often 
 agonising, often degrading, and at the same time 
 (strange contradiction) mixed itself up with her noblest 
 thoughts, to ennoble them still more, and inspire her not 
 only with a desire of physical self-torture, which would 
 seem holy both in her own eyes and her priest's, but 
 with a love for all that is fair and lofty, for self-devotion 
 and self-sacrifice shall we blame her shall we even 
 smile at her, if, after the dreadful question ' Is this the 
 possession of a demon ?' had alternated with ' Is this the 
 inspiration of a god ?' she settled down, as the only 
 escape from madness and suicide, into the latter thought, 
 and believed that she found in the ideal and perfect man- 
 hood of One whom she was told to revere and love as a 
 God, and who had sacrificed his own life for her, a sub- 
 stitute for that merely human affection from which she 
 was for ever debarred ? Why blame her for not num- 
 bering that which was wanting, or making straight that 
 which was crooked? Let God judge her, not we : and 
 the fit critics of her conduct are not the easy gentleman- 
 like scholars, like Mr. Vaughan's Athertons and Gowers, 
 discussing the ' aberrations of fanaticism' over wine and 
 walnuts ; or the gay girl, Kate ; hardly even the happy 
 mother, Mrs. Atherton : but those whose hairs are grey 
 with sorrow ; who have been softened at once and 
 hardened in the fire of God ; who have cried out of the 
 bottomless deep like David, while lover and friend were 
 hid away from them, and they laid amid the corpses 
 of their dead hopes, dead health, dead joy, as on a 
 ghastly battle-field, ' stript among the dead, like those 
 VOL. i. z
 
 338 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 who are wounded, and cut away from God's hands ;' 
 who have struggled drowning in the horrible mire of 
 doubt, and have felt all God's billows and waves sweep 
 over them, till they were weary of crying, and their 
 sight failed for waiting so long upon God ; and all the 
 faith and prayer which was left was, ' Thou wilt not 
 leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see 
 corruption/ Be it understood however, for fear of any 
 mistake, that we hold Mr. Vaughan to be simply and 
 altogether right in his main idea. His one test for all 
 these people, and all which they said or did, is Were 
 they made practically better men and women thereby ? 
 He sees clearly that the ' spiritual' is none other than 
 the ' moral' that which has to do with right and wrong ; 
 and he has a righteous contempt for everything and 
 anything, however graceful and reverent, and artistic 
 and devout, and celestial and super-celestial, except in 
 as far as he finds it making better men and women do 
 better work at every-day life. 
 
 But even on this ground we must protest against such 
 a sketch as this, even of one of the least honourable of 
 the middle-age saints : 
 
 ATHEBTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable I 
 must say something the converse of flourished about the beginning 
 of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a 
 genuine daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her 
 children dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to 
 violent devotion falls ill suffers incessant anguish from a compli- 
 cation of disorders has rapturous consolations and terrific tempta- 
 tions is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the em- 
 pyrean . . . 
 
 Very amusing, is it not ? To have one's mother, 
 husband, children die the most commonplace sort 
 of things what (over one's wine and walnuts) one 
 describes as being ' alone and sorrowful.' Men who 
 having tasted the blessings conveyed in those few words, 
 have also found the horror conveyed in them, have
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 339 
 
 no epithets for the state of mind in which such a fate 
 would leave them. They simply pray that if that hour 
 came, they might just have faith enough left not to 
 curse God and die. Amusing, too, her falling ill, and 
 suffering under a complication of disorders, especially if 
 those disorders were the fruit of combined grief and 
 widowhood. Amusing also her betaking herself to 
 violent devotion. In the first place, if devotion be a 
 good thing, could she have too much of it ? If it be 
 the way to make people good (as is commonly held by 
 all Christian sects), could she become too good? The 
 more important question which springs out of the fact, 
 we will ask presently. ' She has rapturous consolations 
 and terrific temptations/ Did the consolations come 
 first, and that the temptations were a revulsion from 
 ' spiritual' exaltation into l spiritual' collapse and me- 
 lancholy, or did the temptations come first, and the 
 consolations come after to save her from madness and 
 despair ? Either may be the case ; perhaps both were : 
 but somewhat more of care should have been taken in 
 expressing so important a spiritual sequence as either 
 case exhibits. 
 
 It is twelve years and more since we studied the 
 history of the ' B. Angela de Foligni/ and many another 
 kindred saint ; and we cannot recollect what were the 
 terrific temptations, what was the floor of hell which 
 the poor thing saw yawning beneath her feet. But 
 we must ask Mr. Vaughan, has he ever read Boccaccio, 
 or any of the Italian novelists up to the seventeenth 
 century? And if so, can he not understand how 
 Angela de Foligni, the lovely Italian widow of the 
 fourteenth century, had her terrific temptations, to 
 which, if she had yielded, she might have fallen to the 
 lowest pit of hell, let that word mean what it may ; 
 and temptations all the more terrific because she saw 
 
 z 2
 
 340 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 every widow round her considering them no tempta- 
 tions at all, but yielding to them, going out to invite 
 them in the most business-like, nay, duty-like, way? 
 What if she had ' rapturous consolations ?' What if 
 she did pour out to One who was worthy not of less 
 but of more affection than she offered in her passionate 
 southern heart, in language which in our colder 
 northerns would be mere hypocrisy, yet which she had 
 been taught to believe lawful by that interpretation of 
 the Canticles which (be it always remembered) is com- 
 mon to Evangelicals and to Romanists ? What if 
 even, in reward for her righteous belief, that what she 
 saw all widows round her doing, was abominable and 
 to be avoided at all risks, she were permitted to enjoy a 
 passionate affection, which after all was not misplaced ? 
 There are mysteries in religion as in all things, where 
 it is better not to intrude behind the veil. Wisdom is 
 justified of all her children : and folly may be justified 
 of some of her children also. 
 
 Equally unfair it seems to u&, is the notice of St. 
 Brigitta, in our eyes a beautiful and noble figure. A 
 widow she, too and what worlds of sorrow are there 
 in that word, especially when applied to the pure deep- 
 hearted Northern woman, as she was, she leaves her 
 Scandinavian pine-forests to worship and to give where- 
 ever she can, till she arrives at Rome, the centre of the 
 universe, the seat of Christ's vicegerent, the city of God, 
 the gate of Paradise. Thousands of weary miles she 
 travels, through danger and sorrow and when she finds 
 it, behold, it is a lie and a sham ; not the gate of Para- 
 dise, but the gate of Sodom and of hell. Was not that 
 enough to madden her, if mad she became? What 
 matter after that her ' angel dictated discourses on the 
 Blessed Virgin/ ' bombastic invocations to the Saviour's 
 eyes, ears, hair?' they were at least the best objects
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 341 
 
 of worship which the age gave her. In one thing she 
 was right, and kept her first love. ' What was not quite 
 so bad, she gives to the world a series of revelations, in 
 which the vices of popes and prelates are lashed unspar- 
 ingly, and threatened with speedy judgment/ Not quite 
 so bad ? To us the whole phenomenon wears an utterly 
 different aspect. At the risk of her life, at the risk of 
 being burned alive did any one ever consider what 
 that means? the noble Norsewoman, like an Alruna 
 maid of old, hurls out her divine hereditary hatred of 
 sin and filth and lies. At last she falls back on Christ 
 himself as the only home for a homeless soul in such 
 an evil time. And she is not burnt alive. The 
 hand of One mightier than she is over her, and she is 
 safe under the shadow of His wings, till her weary 
 work is done and she goes home, her righteousness 
 accepted for His sake : her folly, hysterics, dreams 
 call them by what base name we will forgiven and 
 forgotten for the sake of her many sorrows, and her 
 faithfulness to the end. 
 
 But whatever fault we may find with these sketches, 
 we can find none with Mr. Vaughan's reflections on 
 them : 
 
 What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of 
 the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of 
 the sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed 
 to inflict upon themselves ! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, 
 which has, in some countries, to strike with his hoof among the 
 spines of the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, 
 the few drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affec- 
 tionate suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty 
 kindness is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness 
 of asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these 
 pliant, excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made 
 useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their per- 
 formances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are 
 trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they 
 are exhibited to bring grist to the mill like birds and beasts forced 
 to postures and services against the laws of their being like those
 
 342 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly 
 hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The self- 
 devotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has 
 always thus made the most of for herself. Calculating men, who 
 have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known 
 well how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements 
 of a brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt 
 that, once and again, some priest might have been seen, with cold 
 grey eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the 
 enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress of heaven 
 in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as 
 these visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot be fairly 
 set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for 
 mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere 
 with a morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the 
 great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the 
 trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. 
 They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken ; yet they are 
 covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about 
 the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing 
 garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature it is 
 the decoration of another and a strange element ; the roots are in 
 the air ; the boughs, which should be lull of birds, are in the flood, 
 covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alli- 
 gator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural 
 place and independent growth, to clothe them, in their helplessness, 
 with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but 
 ecclesiastical the native product of that overwhelming superstition 
 which has subverted and enslaved their nature. The Church of 
 Rome takes care that while simple souls think they are cultivating 
 Christian graces, they shall be forging their own chains ; that their 
 attempts to honour God shall always dishonour, because they disen- 
 franchise themselves. To be humble, to be obedient, to be chari- 
 table, under such direction, is to be contentedly ignorant, pitiably 
 abject, and notoriously swindled. 
 
 Mr. Vaughan cannot be too severe upon the Romish 
 priesthood. But it is one thing to dismiss with sum- 
 mary contempt men, who, as they do, keep the keys of 
 knowledge, and neither enter in themselves nor suffer 
 others to enter, and quite another thing to apply the 
 same summary jurisdiction to men who, under whatso- 
 ever confusions, are feeling earnestly and honestly after 
 truth. And therefore we regret exceedingly the mock 
 trial which he has introduced into his Introduction. 
 We regret it for his own sake ; for it will drive away
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 343 
 
 from the book indeed, it has driven thoughtful and 
 reverent people who, having a strong though vague 
 inclination toward the mystics, might be very profitably 
 taught by the after pages to separate the evil from the 
 good in the Bernards and Guyons whom they admire, 
 they scarce know why ; and will shock, too, scholars to 
 whom Hindoo and Persian thoughts on these subjects 
 are matters not of ridicule, but of solemn and earnest 
 investigation. 
 
 Besides, the question is not so easily settled. Put- 
 ting aside the flippancy of the passage, it involves 
 something very like a petitio principii to ask offhand, 
 f Does the man mean a living union of heart to Christ, 
 a spiritual fellowship or converse with the Father, when 
 he talks of the union of the believer with God parti- 
 cipation in the Divine nature?' For first, what we 
 want to know is, the meaning of the words what 
 means ' living ?' what ' union ?' what ' heart ?' They 
 are terms common to the mystic and to the popular 
 religionist, only differently interpreted; and in the 
 meanings attributed to them lies nothing less than the 
 whole world-old dispute between Nominalist and Realist; 
 not yet to be settled in t\vo lines by two gentlemen 
 over their wine, much less ignored as a thing settled 
 beyond all dispute already. If by ' living union of heart 
 with' Mr. Vaughan meant ' identity of morals with' 
 he should have said so : but he should have borne in 
 mind that all the great Evangelicals have meant much 
 more than this by those words ; that on the whole, instead 
 of considering as he seems to do, and we do the moral 
 and the spiritual as identical, they have put them in 
 antithesis to each other, and looked down upon ' mere 
 morality' just because it did not seem to them to in- 
 volve that supernatural, transcendental, ' mystic' ele- 
 ment which they considered that they found in Scrip-
 
 344 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 ture. From Luther to Owen and Baxter, from them 
 to Wesley, Cecil, and Venn, Newton, Bridges, the great 
 Evangelical authorities would (not very clearly or con- 
 sistently, for they were but poor metaphysicians, but 
 honestly and earnestly) have accepted some modified 
 form of the mystic's theory, even to the ' discerning 
 in particular thoughts, frames, impulses, and inward 
 witnessings, immediate communications from heaven/ 
 Surely Mr. Vaughan must be aware that the majority of 
 ' vital Christians' on this ground are among his mystic 
 offenders ; and that those who deny such possibilities 
 are but too liable to be stigmatized as ' Pelagians/ 
 and ' Rationalists/ His friend Atherton is bound to 
 show cause why those names are not to be applied to 
 him, as he is bound to show what he means by ' living 
 union with Christ/ and why he complains of the mystic 
 for desiring ' participation in the Divine nature/ If 
 he does so, he only desires what the New Testament 
 formally, and word for word, promises him ; whatsoever 
 be the meaning of the term, he is not to be blamed for 
 using it. Mr. Vaughan cannot have forgotten the 
 many expressions, both of St. Paul and St. John, 
 which do at first sight go far to justify the mystic, 
 though they are but seldom heard, and more seldom 
 boldly commented on, in modern pulpits, of Christ 
 being formed in men, dwelling in men ; of God dwell- 
 ing in man and man in God ; of Christ being the life 
 of men, of men living, and moving, and having their 
 being in God; and many another passage. If these be 
 mere metaphors, let the fact be stated, with due reasons 
 for it. But there is no sin or shame in interpreting 
 them in that literal and realist sense in which they 
 seem at first sight to have been written. The first 
 duty of a scholar who sets before himself to investigate 
 the phenomena of ' mysticism/ so called, should be to
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 345 
 
 answer these questions : Can there be a direct commu- 
 nication, above and beyond sense or consciousness, 
 between the human spirit and God the Spirit? And 
 if so, what are its conditions, where its limits, to tran- 
 scend which is to fall into ' mysticism ?' 
 
 And it is just this which Mr. Vaughan fails in doing. 
 In his sketch, for instance, of the mysticism of India, 
 he gives us a very clear and (save in two points) sound 
 summary of that ' round of notions, occurring to minds 
 of similar make under similar circumstances/ which is 
 ' common to mystics in ancient India and in modern 
 Christendom/ 
 
 Summarily, I would say, this Hindoo mysticism : 
 
 (i.) Lays claim to disinterested love as opposed to a mercenary 
 religion ; 
 
 (2.) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic 
 literalism of the Vedas; 
 
 (3.) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper 
 and worshipped; 
 
 (4.) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite ; 
 
 (5.) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, 
 withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers, giving 
 recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance ; 
 
 (6.) Believes that eternity may thus be realized in time; 
 
 (7.) Has its mythical miraculous pretensions, i.e., its theurgic 
 department ; 
 
 (8.) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion, to 
 submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide, his Guru. 
 
 Against the two latter articles we except. The 
 theurgic department of mysticism unfortunately but 
 too common seems to us always to have been (as 
 it certainly was in Neo-platoriism) the despairing return 
 to that ceremonialism which it had begun by shaking 
 off, when it was disappointed in reaching its high aim 
 by its proper method. The use of the Guru, or Father 
 Confessor (which Mr. Vaughan confesses to be incon- 
 sistent with mysticism), is to be explained in the same 
 way ; he is a last refuge after disappointment.
 
 346 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 But as for the first six counts. Is the Hindoo 
 mystic a worse or a better man for holding them ? Are 
 they on the whole right or wrong? Is not disinter- 
 ested love nobler than a mercenary religion ? Is it not 
 right to protest against ceremonial prescriptions, and 
 to say, with the later prophets and psalmists of the 
 Jews, ( Thinkest thou that He will eat bull's flesh, and 
 drink the blood of goats. Sacrifice and burnt-offering 
 thou wouldst not. ... I come to do thy will, O God V 
 What is, even, if he will look calmly into it, the 
 ' pantheistic identification of subject and object, wor- 
 shipper and worshipped/ but the clumsy yet honest 
 effort of the human mind to say to itself, ' Doing God's 
 will is the real end and aim of man ?' The Yogi looks 
 round upon his fellow men, and sees that all their 
 misery and shame come from self-will ; he looks within, 
 and finds that all which makes him miserable, angry, 
 lustful, greedy after this and that, comes from the same 
 self-will. And he asks himself, How shall I escape 
 from this torment of self? how shall I tame my way- 
 ward will, till it shall become one with the harmonious, 
 beautiful, and absolute Will which made all things ? 
 At least, I will try to do it, whatever it shall cost me. 
 I will give up all for which men live wife and child, 
 the sights, scents, sounds of this fair earth, all things, 
 whatever they be, which men call enjoyment ; I will 
 make this life one long torture, if need be : but this 
 rebel will of mine I will conquer. I ask for no reward. 
 That may come in some future life. But what care I. 
 I am now miserable by reason of the lusts which war 
 in my members ; the peace which I shall gain in being 
 freed from them will be its own reward. After all I 
 give up little. All these things round me the 
 primaeval forest, and the sacred stream of Ganga, the 
 mighty Himalaya, mount of God, ay, the illimitable
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 347 
 
 vault of heaven above me, sun aud stars what are 
 they but ' such stuff' as dreams are made of?' Brahm 
 thought, and they became something and somewhere. 
 He may think again, and they will become nothing 
 and nowhere. Are these eternal, greater than I, worth 
 troubling my mind about? Nothing is eternal, but 
 the Thought which made them, and will unmake them. 
 They are only venerable in my eyes, because each of 
 them is a thought of Brahm's. And I, too, have 
 thought ; I alone of all the kinds of living things. Am 
 I not, then, akin to God ? what better for me than to 
 sit down and think, as Brahm thinks, and so enjoy my 
 eternal heritage, leaving for those who cannot think, 
 the passions and pleasures which they share in common 
 with the beasts of the field ? So I shall become more 
 and more like Brahm ; will his will, think his thoughts, 
 till I lose utterly this house-fiend of self, and become 
 one with God? 
 
 Is this a man to be despised ? Is he a sickly dreamer, 
 or a too valiant hero? and if any one be shocked at 
 this last utterance, let him consider carefully the words 
 which he may hear on Sunday ; ' Then we dwell in 
 Christ, and Christ in us ; we are one with Christ, and 
 Christ with us/ That belief is surely not a false one. 
 Shall we abhor the Yogi because he has seen, sitting 
 alone there amid idolatry and licentiousness, despotism 
 and priestcraft, that the ideal goal of man is what we 
 confess it to be in the communion service ? Shall we 
 not rather wonder and rejoice over the magnificent 
 utterances in that Bhagavat-Gita which Mr. Vaughan 
 takes for the text book of Hindoo mysticism, where 
 Crishna, the teacher human, and yet God himself, 
 speaks thus 
 
 There is nothing greater than I ; all things hang on me, as pre- 
 cious gems upon a string. . . . 1 am life in all things, and zeal in the
 
 348 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 zealous. I am the eternal seed of nature : I am the understanding 
 of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong, free 
 from lust and anger. . . . Those who trust in me know Brahm, 
 the supreme and incorruptible. ... In this body I am the teacher 
 of worship. He who thinks of me will find me. He who finds me 
 returns not again to mortal birth. ... I am the sacrifice, I am 
 the worship, I am the incense, I am the fire, I am the victim, I am 
 the father and mother of the World ; I am the road of the good, the 
 comforter, the creator, the witness, the asylum, and the friend. 
 They who serve other gods with a firm belief, involuntarily worship 
 me. I am the same to all mankind. They who serve me in adora- 
 tion are in me. If one whose ways are ever so evil serve me alone, 
 he becometh of a virtuous spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness. 
 Even women, and the tribes of Visya and Soodra, shall go the 
 supreme journey, if they take sanctuary with me ; how much more 
 my holy servants the Brahmins and the Ragarshees ! Consider 
 this world as a finite and joyless place, and serve me. 
 
 There may be confused words scattered up and down 
 here ; there are still more confused words not im- 
 moral ones round them, which we have omitted ; but 
 we ask, once and for all, is this true, or is it not ? Is 
 there a being who answers to this description, or is 
 there not ? And if there be, was it not a light price 
 to pay for the discovery of him ' to sit upon the sacred 
 grass called koos, with his mind fixed on one object 
 alone; keeping his head, neck, and body steady, with- 
 out motion ; his eyes fixed upon the point of his nose, 
 looking at no other place around' or any other simple, 
 even childish, practical means of getting rid of the dis- 
 turbing bustle and noise of the outward time-world, 
 that he might see the eternal world which underlies it ? 
 What if the discovery be imperfect, the figure in many 
 features erroneous? Is not the wonder to us, the 
 honour to him, that the figure should be there at all ? 
 Inexplicable to us on any ground, save that one com- 
 mon to the Bhagavat-Gita, to the gospel. ' He who 
 seeks me shall find me/ "What if he knew but in part, 
 and saw through a glass darkly ? Was there not an 
 inspired apostle, who could but say the very same
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 349 
 
 thing of himself, and look forward to a future life in 
 which he would 'know even as he was known?' 
 
 It is well worth observing, too, that so far from the 
 moral of this Bhagavat-Gita issuing in mere contempla- 
 tive Quietism, its purpose is essentially practical. It 
 arises out of Arjoun's doubt whether he shall join in 
 the battle which he sees raging below him; it results 
 in his being commanded to join in it, and fight like a 
 man. \Ve cannot see, as Mr. Vaughan does, an ' un- 
 holy indifference' in the moral. Arjoun shrinks from 
 fighting because friends and relatives are engaged on 
 both sides, and he dreads hell if he kills one of them. 
 The answer to his doubt is, after all, the only one 
 which makes war permissible to a Christian, who looks 
 on all men as his brothers : 
 
 ' You are a Ksahtree, a soldier ; your duty is to 
 fight. Do your duty, and leave the consequences of it 
 to Him who commanded the duty. You cannot kill 
 these men's souls any more than they can yours. You 
 can only kill their mortal bodies ; the fate of their souls 
 and yours depends on their moral state. Kill their 
 bodies, then, if it be your duty, instead of torment- 
 ing yourself with scruples, which are not really 
 scruples of conscience, only selfish fears of harm to 
 yourself, and leave their souls to the care of Him who 
 made them, and knows them, and cares more for them 
 than you do.' 
 
 This seems to be the plain outcome of the teaching. 
 What is it, mutatis mutandis, but the sermon, 'cold- 
 blooded' or not, which every righteous soldier has to 
 preach to himself, day by day, as long as his duty com- 
 mands him to kill his human brothers ? 
 
 Yet the fact is undeniable that Hindoo mysticism 
 has failed of practical result that it has died down 
 into brutal fakeerism. We look in vain, however, in
 
 350 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 Mr. Vaughan's chapter for an explanation of this fact, 
 save his assertion, which we deny, that Hindoo mysti- 
 cism was in essence and at its root wrong and rotten. 
 Mr. Maurice (' Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy/ 
 p. 46) seems to point to a more charitable solution. 
 ' The Hindoo' (he says) ' whatsoever vast discovery he 
 may have made at an early period of a mysterious 
 Teacher near him, working on his spirit, who is at the 
 same time Lord over nature, began the search from 
 himself he had no other point from whence to begin 
 and therefore it ended in himself. The purification 
 of his individual soul became practically his highest 
 conceivable end; to carry out that he must separate 
 from society. Yet the more he tries to escape self 
 the more he finds self; for what are his thoughts 
 about Brahm, his thoughts about Krishna, save his 
 own thoughts ? Is Brahm a projection of his own 
 soul? To sink in him, does it mean to be nothing? 
 Am I, after all, my own law ? And hence the down- 
 ward career into stupid indifferentisrn, even into Anti- 
 nomian profligacy.' 
 
 The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the 
 belief of an objective external God, but one who cares 
 for more than his individual soul ; as one who is the 
 everpresent guide, and teacher, and ruler of his whole 
 nation ; who regards that nation as a whole, a one 
 person, and that not merely one present generation, 
 but all, past or future, as a one ' Israel ;' lawgivers, 
 prophets, priests, warriors. All classes are his minis- 
 ters. He is essentially a political deity, who cares 
 infinitely for the polity of a nation, and therefore 
 bestows one upon them 'a law of Jehovah.' Gra- 
 dually, under this teaching, the Hebrew rises to the 
 very idea of an inward teacher, which the Yogi had, 
 and to a far purer and clearer form of that idea ; but
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 351 
 
 he is not tempted by it to selfish individualism, or con- 
 templative isolation, as long as he is true to the old 
 Mosaic belief, that this being is the Political Deity, 
 ' the King of Kings/ The Pharisee becomes a selfish 
 individualist just because he has forgotten this; the 
 Essene, a selfish ' mystic' for the same reason ; Philo 
 and the Jewish mystics of Alexandria lose in like 
 manner all notion that Jehovah is the lawgiver, and 
 ruler, and archetype of family and of national life. 
 Christianity retained the idea; it brought out the 
 meaning of the old Jewish polity in its highest form ; 
 for that very reason it was able to bring out the mean- 
 ing of the ' mystic' idea in its highest form also, with- 
 out injury to men's work as members of families, as 
 citizens, as practical men of the world ; and so to con- 
 quer at last that Manichaean hatred of marriage and 
 parentage, which from the first to the sixteenth cen- 
 tury shed its Upas shade over the church. 
 
 And here let us say boldly to Mr. Vaughan and to 
 our readers As long as ' the salvation of a man's own 
 soul' is set forth in all pulpits as the first and last end 
 and aim of mortal existence; as long as Christianity is 
 dwelt on merely as influencing individuals each apart 
 as ' brands plucked, one here and another there, 
 from the general burning,' so long will mysticism, in 
 its highest form, be the refuge of the strongest spirits, 
 and in its more base and diseased forms the refuge of 
 the weak and sentimental spirits. They will say, each 
 in his own way ' You confess that there can be a 
 direct relation, communion, inspiration, from God to 
 my soul, as 1 sit alone in my chamber. You do not 
 think that there is such between God and what you 
 call the world ; between Him and nations as wholes, 
 families, churches, schools of thought, as wholes; that 
 He does not take a special interest, or exercise a special
 
 352 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 influence, over the ways and works of men over 
 science, commerce, civilization, colonization, all which 
 affects the earthly destinies of the race. All these you 
 call secular ; to admit His influence over them for their 
 own sake (though of course He overrules them for the 
 sake of his elect) savours of Pantheism. Is it so? 
 Then we will give up the world. We will cling to the 
 one fact which you confess to be certain about us, that 
 we can take refuge in God, each in the loneliness of 
 his chamber, from all the vain turmoil of a race which 
 is hastening heedless into endless misery. You may 
 call us mystics, or what you will. We will possess our 
 souls in patience, and turn away our eyes from vanity. 
 We will commune with our own hearts in solitude, and 
 be still. We will not even mingle in your religious 
 world, the world which you have invented for your- 
 selves, after denying that God's human world is sacred ; 
 for it seems to us as full of intrigue, ambition, party- 
 spirit, falsehood, bitterness, and ignorance, as the poli- 
 tical world, or the fashionable world, or the scientific 
 world ; and we will have none of it. Leave us alone 
 with God/ 
 
 This has been the true reason of mystical isolation 
 in every age and country. So thought Macarius and 
 the Christian fakeers of the Thebaid. So thought the 
 mediaeval monks and nuns. So thought the German 
 Quietists when they revolted from the fierce degrada- 
 tion of decaying Lutheranism. So are hundreds think- 
 ing now ; so may thousands think ere long. If the 
 individualizing phase of Christianity which is now domi- 
 nant shall long retain its ascendancy, and the creed of 
 Dr. Gumming and Mr. Spurgeon become that of the 
 British people, our purest and noblest spirits will act 
 here, with regard to religion, as the purest and noblest 
 in America have acted with regard to politics. They
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 353 
 
 will withdraw each into the sanctuary of his own heart, 
 and leave the battle-field to rival demagogues. They 
 will do wrong, it may be. Isolation involves laziness, 
 pride, cowardice ; but if sober England, during the next 
 half-century, should be astonished by an outburst of 
 mysticism, as grand in some respects, as fantastic in 
 others, as that of the thirteenth or the seventeenth 
 centuries, the blame, if blame there be, will lie with 
 those leaders of the public conscience who, after having 
 debased alike the Church of England arid the dissent- 
 ing sects with a selfish individualism which was as 
 foreign to the old Cromwellite Ironside as to the High 
 Church divine, have tried to debar their disciples from 
 that peaceful and graceful mysticism which is the only 
 excusable or tolerable form of religion beginning and 
 ending in self. 
 
 Let it be always borne in mind, that Quakerism was 
 not a protest against, or a revulsion from, the Church 
 of England, but from Calvinism. The steeple-houses, 
 against which George Fox testified, were not served by 
 Henry Mores, Cudworths, or Norrises : not even by 
 dogmatist High-Churchmen, but by Calvinist ministers, 
 who had ejected them. George Fox developed his own 
 scheme, such as it was, because the popular Protes- 
 tantism of his day failed to meet the deepest wants of 
 his heart ; because, as he used to say, it gave him ' a 
 dead Christ/ and he required a ' living Christ/ Doc- 
 trines about who Christ is, he held, are not Christ him- 
 self. Doctrines about what he has done for man, are 
 not He himself. Fox held, that if Christ be a living 
 person, He must act (when he acted) directly on the 
 most inward and central personality of him, George 
 Fox ; and his desire was satisfied by the discovery of 
 the indwelling Logos, or rather by its re-discovery, 
 after it had fallen into oblivion for centuries. "\Vhe- 
 
 VOL. i. A A
 
 354 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 ther he were right or wrong, he is a fresh instance of 
 a man's arriving, alone and unassisted, at the same 
 idea at which mystics of all ages and countries have 
 arrived ; a fresh corroboration of our belief, that there 
 must be some reality corresponding to a notion which 
 has manifested itself so variously, and among so many 
 thousands of every creed, and has yet arrived, by what- 
 soever different paths, at one and the same result. 
 
 That he was more or less right that there is no- 
 thing in the essence of mysticism contrary to practical 
 morality, Mr. Vaughan himself fully confesses. In his 
 fair and liberal chapters on Fox and the Early Quakers, 
 he does full justice to their intense practical benevo- 
 lence ; to the important fact that Fox only lived to do 
 good, of any and every kind, as often as a sorrow to be 
 soothed, or an evil to be remedied, crossed his path. 
 We only wish that he had also brought in the curious 
 and affecting account of Fox's interview with Cromwell, 
 in which he tells us (and we will take Fox's word 
 against any man) that the Protector gave him to under- 
 stand, almost with tears, that there was that in Fox's 
 faith which he was seeking in vain from the ' ministers' 
 around him. 
 
 All we ask of Mr Vaughan is, not to be afraid of 
 his own evident liking for Fox ; of his own evident 
 liking for Tauler and his school ; not to put aside the 
 question which their doctrines involve, with such half- 
 utterances as 
 
 The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular move- 
 ments and monitions as Divine. But, at the same time, the 
 ' witness of the Spirit,' as regards our state before God, is some- 
 thing more, I believe, than the mere attestation to the written 
 word. 
 
 As for the former of these two sentences, he may be 
 quite right, for aught we know. But it must be said, 
 on the other hand, that not merely Quakers, but decent
 
 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 355 
 
 men of every creed and age, have we may dare to say, 
 in proportion to their devoutness believed in such 
 monitions ; and that it is hard to see how any man 
 could have arrived at the belief that a living person was 
 working on him, and not a mere unpersonal principle, 
 law, or afflatus (spirit of the universe, or other me- 
 taphor for hiding materialism) unless by believing, 
 rightly or wrongly, in such monitions. For our only 
 inductive conception of a living person demands that 
 that person shall make himself felt by separate acts. 
 
 But against the second sentence we must protest. 
 The question in hand is not whether this ' witness of 
 the Spirit' is 'something more' than anything else. 
 But whether it exists at all, and what it is. Why was 
 the book written, save to help toward the solution of 
 this very matter? The question all through has been 
 Can an immediate influence be exercised by the 
 Spirit of God on the spirit of man ? Mr. Vaughau 
 assents, and says (we cannot see why) that there is no 
 mysticism in such a belief. Be that as it may, what 
 that influence is, and how exercised, is all through the 
 de quo agitur of mysticism. Mr. Vaughan, however, 
 seems here for awhile to be talking realism through an 
 admirable page, well worth perusal (pp. 264-5). Yet 
 his grasp is not sure. We soon find him saying what 
 More and Fox would alike deny, that * The story of 
 Christ's life and death is our soul's food.' No ; Christ 
 himself is would the Catholic Church and the mystic 
 alike answer. And here again, the whole matter in 
 dispute is (unconsciously to Mr. Vaughan) opened up 
 in one word. And if this sentence does not bear 
 directly on that problem, on what does it bear ? It 
 was therefore with extreme disappointment that on read- 
 ing this, and saying to ourselves, ' Now we shall hear at 
 last what Mr. Vaughan himself thinks on the matter/ 
 A A a
 
 356 HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 
 
 we found that he literally turned the subject off, as if 
 not worth investigation, by making the next speaker 
 answer, a propos of nothing, that 'the traditional 
 asceticism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.' 
 
 "Why, too, has Mr. Vaughan devoted a few lines 
 only to the great English Platonists, More, Norris, 
 Smith of Jesus, Gale, and Cudworth? He says, 
 indeed, that they are scarcely mystics, except in as far 
 as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. In our 
 sense of the word they were all of them mystics, and 
 of a very lofty type ; but surely Henry More is a 
 mystic in Mr. Vaughan's sense also. If the author of 
 Conjectura Cabbalistica be not a mystical writer (he 
 himself uses the term without shame), who is ? 
 
 "We hope to see much in this book condensed, much 
 modified, much worked out, instead of being left frag- 
 mentary and embryotic; but whether our hope be 
 fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before 
 the man who could write such a book as this is, in 
 spite of all defects. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Since the above was written, Mr. Vaughau's pre- 
 mature death has robbed us of a man who might have 
 done brave work, by lessening, through his own learn- 
 ing, the intellectual gulf which now exists between 
 English Churchmen and Dissenters. Dis aliter visum. 
 But Mr. Vaughan's death does not, I think, render it 
 necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed 
 here ; and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled 
 now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.
 
 BUMS AND HIS SCHOOL. 1 
 
 FOUR faces among the portraits of modern mei 
 great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful ; 
 not merely in expression, but in the form and propor- 
 tion and harmony of features : Shakspeare, Raffaelle, 
 Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so ; for the 
 mind makes the body, not the body the mind ; and the 
 inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the out- 
 ward, as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace 
 of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul, 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be ' in 
 presence weak, in speech contemptible/ hampered by 
 some thorn in the flesh to interfere apparently with 
 the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise 
 purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athe- 
 nians, the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest 
 of human bodies, that they, or rather those of them to 
 whom eyes to see had been given, might learn that 
 soul is after all independent of matter, and not its 
 creature and its slave. But, in the generality of cases, 
 
 * NOBTH BRITISH REVIEW, No. XXXI. T. ' Elliott's Poems. 1 
 London, 1833. 2. Poems of Robert Nicoll. Third Edition. Edin- 
 burgh, 1843. 3. 'Life and Poems of John Bethune.' London, 
 1841. 4. 'Memoirs of Alexander Bethune.' By W. M'Combie. 
 Aberdeen, 1845. 5. ' Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom 
 Weaver.' By William Thorn, of Inverury. Second Edition. Lon- 
 don, 1845. 6- ' The Purgatory of Suicides.' By Thomas Cooper. 
 London, 1845. 7- ' The Book of Scottish Song.' By Alexander 
 Whitelaw. Edinburgh, 1848.
 
 358 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells 
 us, if not, alas ! what the man might have been, still 
 what he has become. Yet even this former problem, 
 what he might have been, may often be solved for us 
 by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and weak- 
 ness have had their will upon the features ; and, there- 
 fore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we 
 alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each 
 genius which we could recollect. Placing them side 
 by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of 
 Robert Burns an honourable station among them. Of 
 Shakspeare's we do not speak, for it seems to us to 
 combine in itself the elements of all the other three ; 
 but of the rest, we question whether Burns's be not, 
 after all, if not the noblest, still the most loveable 
 the most like what we should wish that of a teacher of 
 men to be. Raffaelle the most striking portrait of 
 him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil sketch by his own 
 hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford though without 
 a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy, 
 formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. 
 His is a face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goethe, 
 even in his earliest portraits, looks as if his expression 
 depended too much on his own will. There is a self- 
 conscious power, and purpose, and self-restraint, and 
 all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which 
 might win worship, and did ; but not love, except as 
 the child of enthusiasm or of relationship. But Burns's 
 face, to judge of it by the early portrait of him by 
 Nasmyth, must have been a face like that of Joseph of 
 old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was mobbed 
 by the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets. 
 The magic of that countenance, making Burns at once 
 tempter and tempted, may explain many a sad story. 
 The features certainly are not perfectly regular ; there
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 359 
 
 is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal health 
 in the outline or colour : but the marks of intellectual 
 beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of 
 being but too triumphant among a people of deep 
 thought and feeling. The lips, ripe, yet not coarse or 
 loose, full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are 
 parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of the 
 heart ; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and 
 yet the bones show thought massively and manfully 
 everywhere ; the eyes laugh out upon you with bound- 
 less good humour and sweetness, with simple, eager, 
 gentle surprise a gleam as of the morning star, look- 
 ing forth upon the wonder of a new-born world 
 altogether 
 
 A station like the herald Mercury, 
 New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill. 
 
 Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most win- 
 ning eloquence a rich flow of spirits and fulness of 
 health and life a deep sense of wonder and beauty in 
 the earth and man an instinct of the dynamic and 
 supernatural laws which underlie aud vivify this mate- 
 rial universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular 
 and unscientific, all but superstitious turn him loose 
 in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the 
 eighteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas ! to 
 cast his horoscope. 
 
 And what an age in which to be turned loose ! for 
 loose he must go, to solve the problem of existence for 
 himself. The grand simple old Scottish education 
 which he got from his parents must prove narrow and 
 unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not 
 because it was in itself imperfect ; not because it did 
 not contain implicitly all things necessary for his ' sal- 
 vation' in every sense, all laws which he might re- 
 quire for his after-life guidance ; but because it con-
 
 360 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 tained so much of them as yet only implicitly ; because 
 it was not yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, 
 and power of satisfying the new doubts and cravings of 
 such minds and such times as Burns's. It may be 
 that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was 
 to be taught that it must awaken and expand and 
 renew its youth in shapes equally sound, but more 
 complex and scientific. But it had not done so then. 
 And when Burns found himself gradually growing be- 
 yond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted 
 beyond it in another and a lower one, what was there 
 in those times to take up his education at the point 
 where it had been left unfinished ? He saw around 
 him in plenty animal good-nature and courage, barbaric 
 honesty and hospitality more, perhaps, than he would 
 see now ; for the upward progress into civilized excel- 
 lences is sure to be balanced by some loss of savage 
 ones but all reckless, shallow, above all, drunken. It 
 was a hard-drinking, coarse, materialist age. The 
 higher culture, of Scotland especially, was all but 
 exclusively French not a good kind, while Voltaire 
 and Volney still remained unanswered, and ' Les 
 Liaisons Dangereuses' were accepted by all young gen- 
 tlemen, and a great many young ladies, who could read 
 French, as the best account of the relation of the sexes. 
 Besides, the philosophy of that day, like its criticism, 
 was altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, mate- 
 rialist in its ultimate and logical results. Criticism 
 was outward, and of the form merely. The world was 
 not believed to be already, and in itself, mysterious and 
 supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man 
 who could see and proclaim that supernatural element. 
 Before it was admired, it was to be raised above nature 
 into the region of ' the picturesque/ or what not ; arid
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 361 
 
 the poet was the man who gave it this factitious and 
 superinduced beauty, by a certain ' kompsologia ' and 
 * meteoroepeia/ called ' poetic diction/ now happily be- 
 coming extinct, mainly, we believe, under the influence 
 of Burns, although he himself thought it his duty to 
 bedizen his verses therewith, and though it was destined 
 to flourish for many a year more in the temple of the 
 father of lies, like a jar of paper flowers on a Popish 
 altar. 
 
 No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns 
 should receive not only no guidance, but no finer ap- 
 preciation. True ; he was admired, petted, flattered ; 
 for that the man was wonderful, no one could doubt. 
 But we question whether he was understood; whether, 
 if that very flowery and magniloquent style which we 
 now consider his great failing had been away, he would 
 not have been passed over by the many as a writer of 
 vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad-muse of 
 Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here 
 and there, even in the eighteenth century itself wit- 
 ness Auld Eobin Gray. But who suspected that they 
 were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years afterwards, 
 would be prouder and more greedy than of all the 
 second-hand French culture which seemed to her then 
 the highest earthly attainment ? The review of Burns 
 in an early number of the ' Edinburgh Review/ said 
 to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as 
 clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and 
 bewildered feeling with which the world must have 
 regarded such a phenomenon. Alas ! there was incon- 
 sistency and bewilderment enough in the phenomenon 
 itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded ; 
 the confusion was already there, even in the mind of 
 the more practical literary men, who ought, one would
 
 362 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 have thought, also to have been the most deep-sighted. 
 But no. The reviewer turns the strange thing over 
 and over, and inside out and some fifteen years after 
 it has vanished out of the world, having said out its 
 say and done all that it had to do, he still finds it too 
 utterly abnormal to make up his mind about in any 
 clear or consistent way, and gets thoroughly cross with 
 it, and calls it hard names, because it will not fit into 
 any established pigeon-hole or drawer of the then 
 existing anthropological museum. Burns is ' a literary 
 prodigy/ and yet it is ( a derogation' to him to consider 
 him as one. And that we find, not as we should have 
 expected, because he possessed genius which would have 
 made success a matter of course in any rank, but be- 
 cause he was so well educated ' having acquired a 
 competent knowledge of French, together with the 
 elements of Latin and Geometry/ and before he had 
 composed a single stanza, was ' far more intimately 
 acquainted with Pope, Shakspeare, and Thomson, than 
 nine-tenths of the youths who leave school for the 
 University/ &c. &c. ; in short, because he was so 
 well educated, that his becoming Robert Burns, the 
 immortal poet, was a matter of course and necessity. 
 And yet, a page or two on, the great reason why it was 
 more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to become an 
 original and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of 
 ( the herd of scholars and academical literati/ who are 
 depressed and discouraged by ' perusing the most cele- 
 brated writers, and conversing with the most intelli- 
 gent judges/ is found to be, that 'the literature and 
 refinement of the age do not exist for a rustic and 
 illiterate individual ; and consequently the present time 
 is to him what the rude times of old were to the vigor- 
 ous writers who adorned them.' In short, the great 
 reason of Robert Burns's success was that he did not
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 363 
 
 possess that education, the possession of which proves 
 him to be no prodigy, though the review begins by 
 calling him one, and coupling him with Stephen Duck 
 and Thomas Dermody. 
 
 Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen 
 years after Burns's death, found himself between the 
 horns of such a dilemma which indeed, like those of 
 an old Arnee bull, meet at the points, and form a com- 
 plete circle of contradictions what must have been 
 the bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's 
 very lifetime? what must, indeed, have been his own 
 bewilderment at himself, however manfully he may 
 have kept it down ? No wonder that he was unguided, 
 either by himself or by others. We do not blame 
 them ; him we must deeply blame ; yet not as we 
 ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in the least to 
 those temptations under which Burns fell. 
 
 Biographies of Burns, and those good ones, accord- 
 ing to the standard of biogi'aphies in these days, are 
 said to exist : we cannot say that we have as yet cared 
 to read them. There are several other biographies, 
 even more important, to be read first, when they are 
 written. Shakspeare has found as yet no biographer ; 
 has not even left behind him materials for a biography, 
 such at least as are considered worth using. Indeed, 
 we question whether such a biography would be of any 
 use whatever to the world ; for the man who cannot, by 
 studying his dramas in some tolerably accurate chro- 
 nological order, and using as a running accompani- 
 ment and closet commentary those awe-inspiring son- 
 nets of his, attain to some clear notion of what sort of 
 life William Shakspeare must have led, would not see 
 him much the clearer for many folios of anecdote. 
 For after all, the best biography of every sincere man 
 is sure to be his own works ; here he has set down,
 
 364 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 ' transferred as in a figure/ all that has happened to 
 him, inward or outward, or rather, all which has 
 formed him, produced a permanent effect upon his 
 mind and heart ; and knowing that, you know all you 
 need know, and are content, being glad to escape the 
 personality and gossip of names, and places, and of 
 dates even, except in as far as they enable you to place one 
 step of his mental growth before or after another. Of 
 the honest man this holds true always ; and almost al- 
 ways of the dishonest man, the man of cant, affecta- 
 tion, hypocrisy ; for even if he pretend in his novel or 
 his poem to be what he is not, he still shows you thereby 
 what he thinks he ought to have been, or at least what 
 he thinks that the world thinks he ought to have been, 
 and confesses to you, in the most naive and confiden- 
 tial way, like one who talks in his sleep, what learning 
 he has or has not had ; what society he has or has not 
 seen, and that in the very act of trying to prove the 
 contrary. Nay, the smaller the man or woman, and 
 the less worth deciphering his biography, the more 
 surely will he show you, if you have eyes to see and time 
 to look, what sort of people offended him twenty years 
 ago ; what meanness he would have liked ' to indulge 
 in/ if he had dared, when young, and for what other 
 meanness he relinquished it, as he grew up ; of what 
 periodical he stood in awe when he took pen in hand, 
 and so forth. Whether his books treat of love or 
 political economy, theology or geology, it is there, the 
 history of the man legibly printed, for those who care 
 to read it. In these poems and letters of Burns, we 
 apprehend, is to be found a truer history than any 
 anecdote can supply, of the things which happened to 
 himself, and moreover of the most notable things 
 which went on in Scotland between 1759 an( ^ J 79^ 
 This latter assertion may seem startling, when we
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 365 
 
 consider that we find in these poems no mention what- 
 soever of the discoveries of steam-boats and spinning- 
 jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing cities, the 
 revolution in Scottish agriculture, or even in Scottish 
 metaphysics. But after all, the history of a nation is 
 the history of the men, and not of the things thereof ; 
 and the history of those men is the history of their 
 hearts, and not of their purses, or even of their heads ; 
 and the history of one man who has felt in himself the 
 heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated 
 many belonging to the next generation, is so far the 
 collective history of that generation, and of much no 
 man can say how much of the next generation; and 
 such a man, bearing within his single soul two genera- 
 tions of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have 
 been ; and his poems, as such, a contemporaneous his- 
 tory of Scotland, the equal to which we are not likely 
 to see written for this generation, or several to come. 
 
 Such a man sent out into such an age, would na- 
 turally have a hard and a confused battle to fight, 
 would probably, unless he fell under the guidance of 
 some master-mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly 
 deformed, as Burns did. His works are after all only 
 the disjecta membra poetse ; full of hints of a great might- 
 have-been. Hints of the keenest and most dramatic 
 appreciation of human action and thought. Hints of 
 an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the excess of 
 its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe 
 of the Scottish muse, in which 
 
 Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw 
 
 A lustre grand, 
 And seem'd to my astonished view 
 
 A well-known land. 
 
 The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, 
 might be a translation from Dante's 'Paradiso/ so broad,
 
 366 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 terse, vivid, the painter's touch. Hints, too, of a hu- 
 mour, which, like that of Shakspeare, rises at times 
 by sheer depth of insight into the sublime ; as when 
 
 Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch 
 Just like a winking baudrons. 
 
 Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been 
 sharpened in such a perpetual word-battle as that amid 
 which Shakspeare lived from the age of twenty, might 
 have rivalled Shakspeare's own ; which even now asserts 
 its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten 
 phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like 
 barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader. And 
 as for his tenderness the quality without which all 
 other poetic excellence is barren it gushes forth to- 
 ward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one 
 exception, namely, the hypocrite, ever alike ' spiacente 
 a Dio e ai nemici sui ;' and therefore intolerable to 
 Robert B urns' s honesty, whether he be fighting for or 
 against the cause of right. Again we say, there are 
 evidences of a versatile and manifold faculty in this 
 man, which, with a stronger will and a larger education, 
 might have placed him as an equal by the side of those 
 great names which we mentioned together with his 
 at the commencement of this Article. 
 
 But one thing Burns wanted ; and of that one thing 
 his age helped to deprive him, the education which 
 comes by reverence. Looking round in such a time, 
 with his keen power of insight, his keen sense of 
 humour, what was there to worship ? Lord Jeffrey, or 
 whosoever was the author of the review in the ' Edin- 
 burgh/ says disparagingly, that Burns had as much 
 education as Shakspeare. So he very probably had, 
 if education mean book-learning. Nay, more, of the 
 practical education of the fireside, the sober, iudus-
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 367- 
 
 trious, God-fearing education, and ' drawing out* of the 
 manhood, by act and example, Burns may have had 
 more under his good father than Shakspeare under his ; 
 though the family life of the small English burgher in 
 Elizabeth's time would have generally presented, as we 
 suspect, the very same aspect of staid manfulness and 
 godliness which a Scotch farmer's did fifty years ago. 
 But let that be as it may, Burns was not born into an 
 Elizabethan age. He did not see around him Raleighs 
 and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes and Fro- 
 bishers, Spensers and Jonsons, Southamptons and 
 Willoughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and moulding 
 the great whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong, 
 and wise a woman who, whether right or wrong, 
 bowed the proudest, if not to love, yet still to obey. 
 
 That was the secret of Shakspeare's power. Heroic 
 himself, he was born into an age of heroes. You see 
 it in his works. Not a play but gives patent evidence that 
 to him all forms of human magnanimity were common 
 and way-side flowers among the humours of men which 
 he and Ben Jonson used to wander forth together to ob- 
 serve. And thus he could give living action and speech to 
 the ancient noblenesses of Rome and the middle age ; for 
 he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged in 
 everything but in the dress. Had he known Greek lite- 
 rature he could have recalled to imperishable life such 
 men as Cimou and Aristides, such deeds as Marathon 
 and Salami s. For had we not had our own Salamis 
 acted within a few years of his birth ; and were not 
 the heroes of it still walking among men? It was 
 surely this continual presence of ' men of worship/ 
 this atmosphere of admiration and respect and trust, 
 in which Shakspeare must have lived, which tamed 
 down the wild self-will of the deer-stealing fugitive
 
 368 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 from Stratford, into the calm large-eyed philosopher, 
 tolerant and loving, and full of faith in a species made 
 in the likeness of God. Not so with Burns. One 
 feels painfully in his poems the want of great characters ; 
 and still more painfully that he has not drawn them, 
 simply because they were not there to draw. That he 
 has a true eye for what is noble, when he sees it, let 
 his ' Lament for Glencairn' testify, and the stanzas in 
 his ' Vision/ in which, with a high-bred grace which 
 many a courtly poet of his day might have envied, he 
 alludes to one and another Scottish worthy of his time. 
 There is no vein of saucy and envious ' banausia' in 
 the man ; even in his most graceless sneer, his fault 
 if fault it be is, that he cannot and will not pretend 
 to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of re- 
 spect. He sees around him and above him, as well as 
 below him, an average of men and things dishonest, 
 sensual, ungodly, shallow, ridiculous by reason of their 
 own lusts and passions, and he will not apply to the 
 shams of dignity and worth, the words which were 
 meant for their realities. After all, he does but say 
 what every one round him was feeling and thinking : 
 but he said it; and hypocritical respectability shrank 
 shrieking from the mirror of her own inner heart. But 
 it was all the worse for him. In the sins of others he 
 saw an excuse for his own. Losing respect for and 
 faith in his brother men, he lost, as a matter of course, 
 respect for himself, faith in himself. The hypocrisy 
 which persecutes in the name of law, whether poli- 
 tical or moral, while in private it transgresses the very 
 law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned by his 
 passionate and sorely-tempted character into a too 
 easy excuse for disbelieving in the obligation of any law 
 whatsoever. He ceases to worship, and therefore to be 
 himself worshipful, and we know the rest.
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 36 9 
 
 " * He might have still worshipped God ?' He might, 
 and surely amid all his sins, doubts, and confusions; 
 the remembrance of the old faith learned at his parent's 
 knee, does haunt him still as a beautiful regret and 
 sometimes, in his bitterest hours, shine out before his 
 poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, lighting him 
 homewards after all. Whether he reached that home or 
 not, none on earth can tell. But his writings show, if 
 anything can, that the vestal-fire of conscience still 
 burned within, though choked again and again with 
 bitter ashes and foul smoke. Consider the time 
 in which he lived, when it was ' as with the people, so 
 with the priest/ and the grand old life-tree of the 
 Scottish Kirk, now green and vigorous with fresh 
 leaves and flowers, was all crusted with foul scurf and 
 moss, and seemed to have ceased growing, and to be 
 crumbling down into decay ; consider the terrible con- 
 tradiction between faith and practice which must have 
 met the eyes of the man, before he could write with 
 the same pen and one as honestly as the other ' The 
 Cottar's Saturday Night/ and ' Holy Willie's Prayer.' 
 But those times are past, and the men who acted in 
 them gone to another tribunal. Let the dead bury 
 their dead : and, in the meantime, instead of cursing the 
 misguided genius, let us consider whether we have not 
 also something for which to thank him ; whether, as 
 competent judges of him aver from their own experi- 
 ence, those very seeming blasphemies of his have not 
 produced more good than evil; whether, though 'a 
 savour of death unto death/ to conceited and rebellious 
 spirits, they may not have helped to open the eyes of 
 the wise to the extent to which the general eighteenth 
 century rottenness had infected Scotland, and to make 
 intolerable a state of things which ought to have been 
 
 intolerable, even if Burns had never written. . 
 
 VOL. I. B B
 
 370 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 We are not attacking the reviewer, far less the 
 * Edinburgh Review/ which some years after this not 
 only made the amende honorable to Burns, but showed 
 a frank impartiality only too rare in the reviews of 
 these days, by publishing in its pages the noble article 
 on Burns which has since appeared separately in 
 Mr. Carlyle's Miscellanies ; we wish to show, from the 
 reviewer's own words, the element in which Burns had 
 to work, the judges before whom he had to plead, and 
 the change which, as we think, very much by the in- 
 fluence of his own poems, has passed upon the minds 
 of men. How few are there who would pen now 
 about him such a sentence as this ' He is,' (that is, 
 was, having gone to his account fifteen years before,) 
 ' perpetually making a parade of his own inflammability 
 and imprudence, and talking with much self-compla- 
 cency and exultation of the offence he has occasioned to 
 the sober and correct part of mankind,' a very small 
 part of mankind, one would have thought, in the British 
 isles at least, about the end of the last century. But, 
 it was the fashion then, as usual, to substitute the 
 praise of virtues for the practice of them; and three- 
 bottle and ten-tumbler men had a very good right, of 
 course, to admire sobriety and correctness, and to de- 
 nounce any two-bottle and six-tumbler man who was 
 not ashamed to confess in print the weaknesses which 
 they confessed only by word of mouth. Just, and yet 
 not just. True, Burns does make a parade of his 
 thoughtlessness, and worse : but why ? because he 
 gloried in it? He must be a very skin-deep critic 
 who cannot see, even in the most insolent of those 
 blameworthy utterances, an inward shame and self- 
 reproach, which if any man had ever felt in himself, 
 he would be in nowise inclined to laugh at it in others. 
 Why, it is the very shame which wrings those poems
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 371 
 
 out of him. They are the attempt of the strong man 
 fettered to laugh at his own consciousness of slavery 
 to deny the existence of his chains to pretend to him- 
 self that he likes them. To us, some of those wildest 
 * Rob the Ranter* bursts of blackguardism are most 
 deeply mournful, hardly needing that the sympathies 
 which they stir up should be heightened by the little 
 scraps of prayer and bitter repentance, which lie up 
 and down among their uglier brethren, the disjecta 
 membra of a great ' De Profundis/ perhaps not all 
 unheard. These latter pieces are most significant. The 
 very doggrel of them, the total absence of any attempt 
 at ornament in diction or polish in metre, is proof 
 complete of their deep heart-wrung sincerity. They 
 are like the wail of a lost child, rather than the remorse 
 of a Titan. The heart of the man was so young to 
 the last ; the boy- vein in him, as perhaps in all great 
 poets, beating on through manhood for good and for 
 evil. No ! there was parade there, as of the lost woman, 
 who tries to hide her self-disgust by staring you out of 
 countenance, but of complacency and exultation, none. 
 On one point, namely politics, B urns' s higher sym- 
 pathies seem to have been awakened. It had been 
 better for him, in a worldly point of view, that they had 
 not. In an intellectual, and even in a moral point of 
 view, far worse. A fellow-feeling with the French Re- 
 volution, in the mind of a young man of that day, was 
 a sign of moral health, which we should have been, 
 sorry to miss in him. Unable to foresee the out- 
 come of the great struggle, having lost faith in those 
 everlasting truths, religious and political, which it was 
 madly setting at nought, what could it appear to him but 
 an awakening from the dead, a return to young and 
 genial health, a purifying thunder-storm. Such was 
 his dream, the dream of thousands more, and not so 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 -wrong a one after all. For that, since that fearful out- 
 burst of the nether pit, all Europe has arisen and 
 awakened into manifold and beautiful new life, who can 
 deny ? We are not what we were, but better ; or 
 rather, with boundless means of being better if we 
 will. We have entered a fresh era of time for good 
 and evil ; the fact is patent in every sermon we hear, 
 in every book we read, in every invention, even 
 the most paltry, which we see registered. Shall 
 we think hardly of the man who saw the dawn 
 of our own day, and welcomed it cheerfully and 
 hopefully, even though he fancied the mist-spectres 
 to be elements of the true sunrise, and knew not and 
 who knows ? the purposes of Him whose paths are 
 in the great deep, and His ways past finding out ? At 
 least, the greater part of his influence on the times 
 which have followed him, is to be ascribed to that very 
 ' Radicalism' which in the eyes of the respectable 
 around him, had sealed his doom, and consigned him to 
 ignoble oblivion. It has been, with the working men 
 who read him, a passport for the rest of his writings ; 
 it has allured them to listen to him, when he spoke of 
 high and holy things, which but for him, they might 
 have long ago tossed away as worthless, in the reckless- 
 ness of ignorance and discontent. They could trust 
 his t Cottar's Saturday Night ' they could believe that 
 he spoke from his heart, when in deep anguish he cries 
 to the God whom he had forgotten, while they 
 would have turned with a distrustful sneer from the 
 sermon of the sleek and comfortable minister, who in 
 their eyes, however humbly born, had deserted his 
 class, and gone over to the camp of the enemy, and 
 the flesh-pots of Egypt. 
 
 After the time of Burns, as was to be expected, 
 Scottish song multiplies itself tenfold. The nation
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 373 
 
 becomes awakened to the treasures of its own old lite- 
 rature, and attempts, what after all, alas ! is but a 
 revival ; and like most revivals, not altogether a suc- 
 cessful one. Of the twelve hundred songs contained 
 in Mr. Whitelaw's excellent collection, whereof more 
 than a hundred and fifty are either wholly or partly 
 Burns's, the small proportion written before him are 
 decidedly far superior in value to those written after 
 him ; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to 
 explain, if we consider the great social changes which 
 have been proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought 
 which have been arising, during the last half-century. 
 True song requires for its atmosphere a state rather of 
 careless Arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and doubt, 
 of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and 
 pardonable regret for a dying past ; and in that state 
 the mind of the masses, throughout North-Britain, has 
 been weltering confusedly for the last few years. The 
 new and more complex era into which we are passing 
 has not yet sufficiently opened itself to be sung about ; 
 men hardly know what it is, much less what it will be ; 
 and while they are hard at work creating it, they have 
 no breath to spare in talking of it : one thing they do 
 see and feel, painfully enough at times, namely, that 
 the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away, before 
 the combined influence of manufactures and the large- 
 farm system, to be replaced, doubtless, hereafter by 
 something better, but in the meanwhile dragging down 
 with it in its decay but too much that can ill be spared 
 of that old society which inspired Hamsay and Burns. 
 Hence the later Scottish song writers seldom really 
 sing; their proses want the unconscious lilt and flash 
 of their old models ; they will hardly go (the true test of 
 a song) without music. The true test, we say again, of 
 a song. Who needs music, however fitting and beautiful
 
 374 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 the accustomed air may happen to be, to ' Roy's Wife 
 of Aldivalloch/ or ' The Bride cam' out o' the byre/ 
 or either of the casts of ' The Flowers of the Forest/ 
 or to ' Auld Lang Syne' itself ? They bubble right up 
 out of the heart, and by virtue of their inner and un- 
 conscious melody, which all that is true to the heart has 
 in it, shape themselves into a song, and are not shaped 
 by any notes whatsoever. So with many, most indeed, 
 of Burns's ; and a few of Allan Cunningham's ; the ' Wet 
 sheet and a flowing sail/ for instance. But the great 
 majority of these later songs seem, if the truth is to be 
 spoken, inspirations at second hand, of people writing 
 about things which they would like to feel, and which 
 they ought to feel, because others used to feel them in 
 old times ; but which they do not feel as their fore- 
 fathers felt ; a sort of poetical Tractarianism, in short. 
 Their metre betrays them, as well as their words; in 
 both they are continually wandering, unconsciously to 
 themselves, into the elegiac except when on one sub- 
 ject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first 
 hand, and from the depths of her heart namely, alas ! 
 the barley bree : and yet never, even on this beloved 
 theme, has she risen again to the height of Burns's 
 bacchanalian songs. 
 
 But when sober, there is a sadness about the Scottish 
 muse now-adays as perhaps there ought to be and 
 the utterances of hers which ring the truest are laments. 
 We question whether in all Mr. Whitelaw's collection 
 there is a single modern poem, (placing Burns as the 
 transition point between the old and new,) which rises 
 so high, or pierces so deep, with all its pastoral sim- 
 plicity, as Smibert's 'Widow's Lament.' 
 
 Afore the Lammas tide 
 
 Had dwin'd the birken tree, 
 In a' our water side, 
 
 Nae wife was blest like me ;
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 375 
 
 A kind gudeman, and twa 
 
 Sweet bairns were round me here ; 
 But they're a' ta'en awa', 
 
 Sin' the fa' o' the year. 
 
 Sair trouble cam* our gate, 
 
 And made me, when it cam', 
 A bird without a mate, 
 
 A ewe without a lamb. 
 Our hay was yet to maw, 
 
 And our corn was yet to shear ; 
 When they a' dwined awa', 
 
 In the fa* o' the year. 
 
 I daurna look a-field, 
 
 For aye I trow to see, 
 The form that was a bield 
 
 To my wee bairns and me ; 
 But wind, and weet, and snaw, 
 
 They never mair can fear, 
 Sin' they a' got the ca', 
 
 In the fa' o' the year. 
 
 Aft on the hill at e'ens, 
 
 I see him 'mang the ferns, 
 The lover o' my teens, 
 
 The father o' my bairns : 
 For there his plaid I saw, 
 
 As gloamin' aye drew near- 
 But my a's now awa', 
 
 Sin' the fa' o' the year, 
 
 Our bonnie rigs theirsel', 
 
 Reca' my waes to mind, 
 Our puir dumb beasties tell 
 
 O' a' that I ha'e tyned ; 
 For whae our wheat will saw, 
 
 And whae our sheep will shear, 
 Sin' my a' gaed awa', 
 
 In the fa' o' the year P 
 
 My heart is growing cauld, 
 
 And will be caulder still, 
 And sair, sair in the fauld, 
 
 Will be the winter's chill ; 
 For peats were yet to ca', 
 
 Our sheep they were to smear, 
 When my a' dwined awa', 
 
 In the fa' o' the year. 
 
 I ettle whiles to spin, 
 
 But wee wee patterin* feet, 
 Come rinnin* out and in, 
 
 And then I first maun greet :
 
 376 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 I ken its fancy a f , 
 
 And faster rows the tear, 
 That my a' dwined awa', 
 
 In the fa' o' the year. 
 
 Be kind, heav'n abune ! 
 
 To ane sae wae and lane, 
 An' tak' her hamewards sune, 
 
 In pity o' her mane : 
 Lang ere the March winds blaw, 
 
 May she, far far frae here, 
 Meet them a' that's awa', 
 
 Sin' the fa' o' the year. 
 
 It seems strange why the man who could write this, 
 who shows, in the minor key of metre, which he has so 
 skilfully chosen, such an instinct for the true music of 
 words, could not have written much more. And yet, 
 perhaps, we have ourselves given the reason already. 
 There was not much more to sing about. The fashion 
 of imitating old Jacobite songs is past, the mine now 
 being exhausted, to the great comfort of sincerity and 
 common sense. The peasantry, whose courtships, rich 
 in animal health, yet not over pure or refined, Allan 
 Ramsay sung a hundred years ago, are learning to 
 think, and act, and emigrate, as well as to make love. 
 The age of Theocritus and Bion has given place to 
 shall we say the age of the Csesars, or the irruption of 
 the barbarians ? and the love-singers of the North are 
 beginning to feel, that if that passion is to retain any 
 longer its rightful place in their popular poetry, it 
 must be spoken of henceforth in words as lofty and 
 refined as those in which the most educated and the 
 most gifted speak of it. Hence, in the transition be- 
 tween the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a 
 jumble of the two elements, not always felicitous ; 
 attempts at ambitious description, after Burns's worst 
 manner ; at subjective sentiment, after the worst manner 
 of the world in general ; and yet, all the while, a con- 
 sciousness that there was something worth keeping in
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 377 
 
 the simple objective style of the old school, without 
 which the new thoughtfulness would be hollow, aud 
 barren, and windy ; and so the two are patched together, 
 ' new cloth into an old garment, making the rent 
 worse/ Accordingly, these new songs are universally 
 troubled with the disease of epithets. Ryan's exquisite 
 ' Lass wi' the Bonny Blue Een/ is utterly spoiled by 
 two offences of this kind. 
 
 She'll steal out to meet her loved Donald again, 
 and 
 
 The world's false and vanishing scene ; 
 
 as Allan Cunningham's still more exquisite ' Lass of 
 Preston Mill ' is by one subjective figure, 
 
 Six hills are woolly with my sheep, 
 Six vales are lowing with my kye. 
 
 Burns doubtless committed the same fault again and 
 again : but in his time it was the fashion ; and the 
 older models (for models they are and will remain for 
 ever) had not been studied and analyzed as they have 
 been since. Burns, indeed, actually spoiled one or two 
 of his own songs by altering them from their first cast to 
 suit the sentimental taste of his time. The first ver- 
 sion, for instance, of the ' Banks and Braes o* Bonnie 
 Boon/ is far superior to the second and more popular 
 one, because it dares to go without epithets. Compare 
 the second stanza of each : 
 
 Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird, 
 
 That sings upon the bough ; 
 Thou minds me o' the happy days 
 
 When my fause love was true. 
 ****#* 
 
 Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, 
 That wantons through the flowery thorn ; 
 
 Thou minds me o' departed joys, 
 Departed never to return. 
 
 AVliat is said in the latter stanza which has not been 
 said in the former, and said more dramatically, more
 
 378 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 as the images would really present themselves to the 
 speaker's mind ? It would be enough for him that 
 the bird was bonnie, and singing ; and his very sorrow 
 would lead him to analyze and describe as little as 
 possible a thing which so painfully contrasted with his 
 own feelings; whether the thorn was flowery or not, 
 would not have mattered to him, unless he had some 
 distinct association with the thorn-flowers, in which 
 case he would have brought out the image full and 
 separate, and not merely thrown it in as a make-weight 
 to ' thorn / and this is the great reason why epithets 
 are, nine times out of ten, mistakes in song and ballad 
 poetry, he never would have thought of ' departed ' 
 before he thought of 'joys.' A very little considera- 
 tion of the actual processes of thought in such a case, 
 will show the truth of our observation, and the instinc- 
 tive wisdom of the older song-writers, in putting the 
 epithet as often as possible after the noun, instead of 
 before it, even at the expense of grammar. They are 
 bad things at all times in song- poetry, these epithets ; 
 and, accordingly, we find that the best German writers, 
 like Uhland and Heine, get rid of them as much as 
 possible, and succeed thereby, every word striking and 
 ringing down with full force, no cushion of an epithet 
 intruding between the reader's brain-anvil and the 
 poet's hammer to break the blow. In Uhland's ' Three 
 Burschen,' if we recollect right, there are but two 
 epithets, and those of the simplest descriptive kind 
 ' Thy fair daughter' and a ' black pall/ Were there 
 more, we question whether the poet would have suc- 
 ceeded, as he has done, in making our flesh creep as 
 he leads us on from line to line and verse to verse. 
 So Tennyson, the greatest of our living poets, eschews 
 as much as possible, in his later writings, these same 
 epithets, except in cases where they are themselves
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 379 
 
 objective and pictorial in short, the very things which 
 he wants you to look at, as, for instance, 
 
 And into silver arrows break 
 The sailing moon in creek and cove. 
 
 This is fair enough ; but, indeed, after laying down our 
 rule, we must confess that it is very difficult to keep 
 always true to it, in a language which does not, like 
 the Latin and German, allow us to put our adjectives 
 very much where we choose. Nevertheless, whether 
 we can avoid it or not, every time we place before the 
 noun an epithet which, like ' departed joys,' relates to 
 our consciousnesses concerning the object, and not 
 merely to the object itself; or an epithet which, like 
 ' flowery thorn/ gives us, before we get to the object 
 itself, those accidents of the object which we only dis- 
 cern by a second look, by analysis and reflection; (for 
 the thorn, if in the flower, would look to us, at the 
 first glance, not ' flowery/ but ' white/ ' snowy/ or 
 what you will which expresses colour, and not scientific 
 fact) every time, we repeat, this is done, the poet 
 descends from the objective and dramatic domain of 
 song, into the subjective and reflective one of elegy. 
 
 But the field in which Burns's influence has been, as 
 was to be expected, most important and most widely 
 felt, is in the poems of working men. He first proved 
 that it was possible to become a poet and a cultivated 
 man, without deserting his class, either in station or in 
 sympathies ; nay, that the healthiest and noblest ele- 
 ments of a lowly born poet's mind might be, perhaps 
 certainly must be, the very feelings and thoughts which 
 he brought up with him from below, not those which 
 he received from above, in the course of his artificial 
 culture. From the example of Burns, therefore, many 
 a working man, who would otherwise have ' died and 
 given no sign/ has taken courage, and spoken out the
 
 380 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 thought within him, in verse or prose, not always 
 wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in 
 the belief that he had a sort of divine right to speak 
 and be heard, since Burns had broken down the 
 artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted, by act as 
 well as song, that ' a man's a man for a' that.' Al- 
 most every volume of working men's poetry which we 
 have read, seems to re-echo poor Nicoll's spirited, 
 though somewhat over-strained address to the Scottish 
 genius : 
 
 This is the natal day of him, 
 Who, born in want and poverty, 
 
 Burst from his fetters, and arose, 
 The freest of the free. 
 
 Arose to tell the watching earth 
 What lowly men could feel and do, 
 
 To show that mighty, heaven-like souls 
 In cottage hamlets grew. 
 
 Burns ! thou hast given us a name 
 To shield us from the taunts of scorn : 
 
 The plant that creeps amid the soil 
 A glorious flower has borne. 
 
 Before the proudest of the earth 
 
 We stand with an uplifted brow ; 
 Like us, thou wast a toil-worn man, 
 
 And we are noble now ! 
 
 The critic, looking calmly on, may indeed question 
 whether this new fashion of verse writing among work- 
 ing men has been always conducive to their own hap- 
 piness. As for absolute success as poets, that was not 
 to be expected of one in a hundred, so that we must 
 not be disappointed if among the volumes of working 
 men's poetry, of which we give a list at the head of our 
 Article, only two should be found, on perusal, to con- 
 tain any writing of a very high order, although these 
 volumes form a very small portion of the verses which 
 have been written, during the last forty years, by men 
 engaged in the rudest and most monotonous toil. To
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 381 
 
 every man so writing, the art, doubtless, is an enno- 
 bling one. The habit of expressing thought in verse 
 not only indicates culture, but is a culture in itself of 
 a very high order. It teaches the writer to think 
 tersely and definitely ; it evokes in him the humanizing 
 sense of grace and melody, not merely by enticing him 
 to study good models, but by the very act of composi- 
 tion. It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts, and 
 aspirations, which might otherwise fret and canker 
 within, breeding, as they too often do in the utterly dumb 
 English peasant, self-devouring meditation, dogged 
 melancholy, and fierce fanaticism. And if the effect of 
 verse writing had stopped there, all had been well ; 
 but bad models have had their effect, as well as good 
 ones, on the half-tutored taste of the working men, and 
 engendered in them but too often a fondness for frothy 
 magniloquence and ferocious raving, neither morally 
 nor aesthetically profitable to themselves or their 
 readers. There are excuses for the fault ; the young 
 of all ranks naturally enough mistake noise for awful- 
 ness, and violence for strength ; and there is generally 
 but too much, in the biographies of these working 
 poets, to explain, if not to excuse, a vein of bitterness, 
 which they certainly did not learn from their master, 
 Burns. The two poets who have done them most harm, 
 in teaching the evil trick of cursing and swearing, are 
 Shelley and the Corn-Law Rhymer; and one can well 
 imagine how seducing two such models must be, to 
 men struggling to utter their own complaints. Of 
 Shelley this is not the place to speak. But of the 
 Corn-Law Rhymer we may say here, that howsoever 
 he may have been indebted to Burns's example for the 
 notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by 
 Burns's own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone 
 of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of
 
 382 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evi- 
 dently intentional. He tries to curse ; f he delights' 
 may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man 'in 
 cursing f he makes a science of it ; he defiles, of malice 
 prepense, the loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes 
 (and he can be most sweet) by giving some sudden, 
 sickening revulsion to his reader's feelings; and he 
 does it generally with a power which makes it at once 
 as painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who 
 are struggling with the same temptations as the poet. 
 Now and then, his trick drags him down into sheer 
 fustian and bombast ; but not always. There is a ter- 
 rible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, 
 perhaps unequalled in England, in his generation. His 
 poems are like his countenance, coarse and ungoverned, 
 yet with an intensity of eye, a rugged massiveness of 
 feature, which would be grand but for the seeming de- 
 ficiency of love and of humour love's twin and insepar- 
 able brother. Therefore it is, that although single 
 passages may be found in his writings, of which Milton 
 himself need not have been ashamed, his efforts at dra- 
 matic poetry are utter failures, dark, monstrous, unre- 
 lieved by any really human vein of feeling or character. 
 As in feature, so in mind, he has not even the delicate 
 and graceful organization which made up in Milton for 
 the want of tenderness, and so enabled him to write, 
 if not a drama, yet still the sweetest of masques and 
 idyls. 
 
 Rather belonging to the same school than to that of 
 Burns, though never degrading itself by Elliott's 
 ferocity, is that extraordinary poem, ' The Purgatory 
 of Suicides,' by Thomas Cooper. As he is still in the 
 prime of life, and capable of doing more and better 
 than he yet has done, we will not comment on it as 
 freely as we have on Elliott, except to regret a similar
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 383 
 
 want of softness and sweetness, and also of a clearness 
 and logical connexion of thought, in which Elliott 
 seldom fails, except when cursing. The imagination 
 is hardly as vivid as Elliott's, though the fancy and in- 
 vention, the polish of the style, and the indications of 
 profound thought on all subjects within the poet's 
 reach, are superior in every way to those of the Corn- 
 Law Rhymer ; and when we consider that the man who 
 wrote it had to gather his huge store of classic and 
 historic anecdote while earning his living, first as a 
 shoemaker, and then as a Wesleyan country preacher, 
 we can only praise and excuse, and hope that the day 
 may come when talents of so high an order will find 
 some healthier channel for their energies than that in 
 which they now are flowing. 
 
 Our readers may wonder at not seeing the Ettrick 
 Shepherd's poems among the list at the head of the 
 Article. It seems to us, however, that we have done right 
 in omitting them. Doubtless, he too was awakened 
 into song by the example of Burns ; but he seems to us 
 to owe little to his great predecessor, beyond the general 
 consciousness that there was a virgin field of poetry in 
 Scotch scenery, manners, and legends a debt which 
 Walter Scott himself probably owed to the Ayrshire 
 peasant just as much as Hogg did. Indeed, we per- 
 haps are right in saying, that had Burns not lived, 
 neither "Wilson, Gait, Allan Cunningham, or the crowd 
 of lesser writers who have found material for their 
 fancy in Scotch peculiarities, would have written as 
 they have. The three first names, Wilson's above all, 
 must have been in any case distinguished ; yet it is 
 surely no derogation to some of the most exquisite 
 rural sketches in ' Christopher North's Recreations,' to 
 claim them as the intellectual foster-children of ' The 
 Cottar's Saturday Night.' In this respect, certainly,
 
 384 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 the Ettrick Shepherd has a place in B urns' s school, 
 and, in our own opinion, one which has been very much 
 overrated. But the deeper elements of Burns's mind, 
 those which have especially endeared him to the work- 
 ing man, reappear very little, or not at all, in Hogg. 
 He left his class too much below him; became too 
 much of the mere aesthetic prodigy, and member of a 
 literary clique ; frittered away his great talents in bril- 
 liant talk and insincere Jacobite songs, and, in fine, 
 worked no deliverance on the earth. It is sad to 
 have to say this : but we had it forced upon us pain- 
 fully enough a few days ago, when re-reading ( Kilmeny.' 
 There may be beautiful passages in it; but it is not 
 coherent, not natural, not honest. It is throughout 
 an affectation of the Manichsean sentimental-sublime, 
 which God never yet put into the heart of any brawny, 
 long-headed, practical Borderer, and which he therefore 
 probably put into his own head, or, as we call it, 
 affected, for the time being; a method of poetry 
 writing which comes forth out of nothing, and into 
 nothing must return. 
 
 This is unfortunate, perhaps, for the world ; for we 
 question whether a man of talents in anywise to be 
 compared with those of the Ettrick Shepherd has fol- 
 lowed in the footsteps of Burns. Poor Tannahill, 
 whose sad story is but too well known, perished early, 
 at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind him a good 
 many pretty love-songs of no great intrinsic value, if the 
 specimens of them given in Mr. Whitelaw's collection 
 are to be accepted as the best. Like all Burus's succes- 
 sors, including even Walter Scott and Hogg, we have 
 but to compare him with his original to see how al- 
 together unrivalled on his own ground the Ayrshire 
 farmer was. In one feature only TannahilPs poems, 
 and those later than him, except where pedantically
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 385 
 
 archaist, like many of Motherwell's, are an improve- 
 ment on Burns ; namely, in the more easy and complete 
 interfusion of the two dialects, the Norse Scotch and 
 the Romanesque English, which Allan Ramsay at- 
 tempted in vain to unite ; while Burns, though not 
 succeeding by any means perfectly, welded them to- 
 gether into something of continuity and harmony 
 thus doing for the language of his own country very 
 much what Chaucer did for that of England ; a happy 
 union, in the opinion of those who, as we do, look on 
 the vernacular Norse Scotch as no barbaric dialect, but 
 as an independent tongue, possessing a copiousness, 
 melody, terseness, and picturesqueness which makes it, 
 both in prose and verse, a far better vehicle than the 
 popular English for many forms of thought. 
 
 Perhaps the young peasant who most expressly stands 
 out as the pupil and successor of Burns, is Robert 
 Nicoll. He is a lesser poet, doubtless, than his master, 
 and a lesser man, if the size and number of his capa- 
 bilities be looked at ; but he is a greater man, in 
 that, from the beginning to the end of his career, he 
 seems to have kept that very wholeness of heart and 
 head which poor Burns lost. Nicoll's story is, mutatis 
 mutandis, that of the Bethunes, and many a noble 
 young Scotsman more. Parents holding a farm between 
 Perth and Dunkeld, they and theirs before them for 
 generations inhabitants of the neighbourhood, ' decent, 
 honest, God-fearing people/ The farm is lost by re- 
 verses, and manfully Robert Nicoll's father becomes a 
 day-labourer on the fields which he lately rented : and 
 there begins, for the boy, from his earliest recollections, 
 a life of steady, sturdy drudgery. But they must have 
 been grand old folk, these parents, and in no wise ad- 
 dicted to wringing their hands over ' the great might- 
 have-been/ Like true Scots Bible lovers, they do be- 
 
 VOL. i. c c
 
 386 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 lieve in a God, and in a will of God, underlying, abso- 
 lute, loving, and believe that the might-have-been ought 
 not to have been, simply because it has not been ; and 
 so they put their shoulders to the new collar patiently, 
 cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same. 
 The mother especially, as so many great men's mothers 
 do, stands out large and heroic, from the time when, 
 the farm being gone, she, ' the ardent book-woman/ 
 finds her time too precious to be spent in reading, and 
 sets little Robert to read to her as she works what a 
 picture ! to the last sad day, when, wanting money to 
 come up to Leeds to see her dying darling, she ' shore 
 for the siller/ rather than borrow it. And her son's life 
 is like her own a most pure, joyous, valiant little 
 epic. Robert does not even take to work as something 
 beyond himself, uninteresting and painful, which, how- 
 ever, must be done courageously : he lives in it, enjoys 
 it as his proper element, one which is no more a burden 
 and an exertion to him than the rush of the strid is to 
 the trout who plays and feeds in it day and night, un- 
 conscious of the amount of muscular strength which he 
 puts forth in merely keeping his place in the stream. 
 Whether carrying Kenilworth in his plaid to the woods, 
 to read while herding, or selling currants and whisky 
 as the Perth storekeeper's apprentice, or keeping his 
 little circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure 
 heart with the thought of the twenty pounds which 
 his mother has borrowed wherewith to start him, or 
 editing the ' Leeds Times/ or lying on his early death- 
 bed, just as life seems to be opening clear and broad 
 before him, he 
 
 Bates not a jot of heart or hope, 
 
 but steers right onward, singing over his work, with- 
 out bluster or self-gratulation, but for very joy at having 
 work to do. There is a keen practical insight about
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 387 
 
 him, rarely combined, in these days, with his single- 
 minded determination to do good in his generation. His 
 eye is single, and his whole body full of light. 
 
 It would indeed (writes the grocer's boy, encouraging his de- 
 spondent and somewhat Werterean friend) be hangman's work to 
 write articles one day to be forgotten to-morrow, it' that were all ; 
 but you forget the comfort the repayment. If one prejudice is 
 overthrown, one error rendered untenable ; if but one step in ad- 
 vance be the consequence of your articles and mine the conse- 
 quences of the labour of all true men are we not deeply repaid ? 
 
 Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother : 
 
 That money of E.'s hangs like a millstone about my neck. If I 
 had paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man. But do 
 not mistake me, mother ; I am not one of those men who faint and 
 falter in the great battle of life. God has given me too strong a 
 heart for that. I look upon earth as a place where every man is set 
 to struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure- 
 hearted, and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation 
 to which earth is the gate. ... If men would but consider how 
 little of real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much 
 afraid poverty included there would be more virtue and happi- 
 ness, and less world and Mammon-worship on earth than is. I 
 think, mother, that to me has been given talent ; and if so, that 
 talent was given to make it useful to man. 
 
 And yet there is a quiet self-respect about him 
 withal : 
 
 In my short course through life (says he in confidence to a friend 
 at one-and-twenty) I have never feared an enemy, or failed a friend ; 
 and I live in the hope I never shall. For the rest, I have written 
 my heart in my poems; and rude and unfinished, and hasty as they 
 are, it can be read there. 
 
 ******* 
 
 From seven years of age to this very hour, I have been dependent 
 only on my own head and hands for everything for very bread. 
 Long years ago aye, even in childhood adversity made me think, 
 and feel, and suffer; and would pride allow me, I could tell the 
 world many a deep tragedy enacted in the heart of a poor, forgotten, 
 uncared-for boy. . . . But I thank God, that though I felt and suf- 
 fered, the scathing blast neither blunted my perceptions of natural 
 and moral beauty, nor, by withering the affections of my heart, made 
 me a selfish man. Often when I look back I wonder how I bore the 
 burden how I did not end the evil day at once and for ever. 
 
 Such is the man, in his normal state ; and as was to 
 be expected, God's blessing rests on him. Whatever 
 
 c c 2
 
 388 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 he sets his hand to succeeds. "Within a few weeks of 
 his taking the editorship of the ' Leeds Times/ its circu- 
 lation begins to rise rapidly, as was to be expected with 
 an honest man to guide it. For NicolPs political creed, 
 though perhaps neither very deep nor wide, lies clear 
 and single before him, as everything else which he 
 does. He believes naturally enough in ultra-Radicalism 
 according to the fashions of the Reform Bill era. That 
 is the right thing; and for that he will work day and 
 night, body and soul, and if needs be, die. There, in 
 the editor's den at Leeds, he ' begins to see the truth 
 of what you told me about the world's unworthiness ; 
 
 but stop a little. I am not sad as yet If I am 
 
 hindered from feeling the soul of poetry among woods 
 and fields, I yet trust I am struggling for something 
 worth prizing something of which I am not ashamed, 
 and need not be. If there be aught on earth worth 
 aspiring to, it is the lot of him who is enabled to do 
 something for his miserable and suffering fellow-men ; 
 and this you and I will try to do at least.' 
 
 His friend is put to work a ministerial paper, with 
 orders ' not to be rash, but to elevate the population 
 gradually ;' and finding those orders to imply a consi- 
 derable leaning towards the By-ends, Lukewarm, and 
 Facing-both-ways school, kicks over the traces, wisely, 
 in Nicoll's eyes, and breaks loose. 
 
 Keep up your spirits (says honest Nicoll). You are higher at this 
 moment in my estimation, in your own, and that of every honest 
 man, than you ever were before. Tait's advice was just such as I 
 should have expected of him ; honest as honesty itself. You must 
 never again accept a paper but where you can tell the whole truth 
 without fear or favour. . . . Tell E. (the broken-loose editor's lady- 
 love) from me to estimate as she ought the nobility and determina- 
 tion of the man who has dared to act as you have done. Prudent 
 men will say that you are hasty : but you have done right, what- 
 ever may be the consequences. 
 
 This is the spirit of Robert Nicoll ; the spirit which
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 389 
 
 is the fruit of early purity and self-restraint, of living 
 'on bread-and-cheese and water/ that he may buy 
 books ; of walking out to the Inch of Perth at four 
 o'clock on summer mornings, to write and read in peace 
 before he returns to the currants and the whisky. The 
 nervous simplicity of the man comes out in the very 
 nervous simplicity of the prose he writes ; and though 
 there be nothing very new or elevated in it, or indeed 
 in his poems themselves, we call on our readers to 
 admire a phenomenon so rare, in the ( upper classes' at 
 least, in these days, and taking a lesson from the 
 peasant's son, rejoice with us that ' a man is born into 
 the world.' 
 
 For Nicoll, as few do, practises what he preaches. 
 It seems to him, once on a time, right and necessary 
 that Sir William Moles worth should be 'returned for 
 Leeds ; and Nicoll having so determined, ( throws him- 
 self, body and soul, into the contest, with such ardour, 
 that his wife afterwards said, and we can well believe 
 it, that if Sir William had failed, Robert would have 
 died on the instant !' why not ? Having once made up 
 his mind that that was the just and right thing, the 
 thing which was absolutely good for Leeds, and the 
 human beings who lived in it, was it not a thing to die 
 for, even if it had been but the election of a new 
 beadle? The advanced sentry is set to guard some 
 obscure worthless dike-end obscure and worthless in 
 itself, but to him a centre of infinite duty. True, 
 the fate of the camp does not depend on its being 
 taken ; if the enemy round it, there are plenty behind 
 to blow them out again. But that is no reason what- 
 soever why he, before any odds, should throw his 
 musket over his shoulder, and retreat gracefully to the 
 lines. He was set there to stand by that, whether 
 dike-end or representation of Leeds ; that is the right
 
 390 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 thing for him ; and for that right he will fight, and if 
 he be killed, die. So have all brave men felt, and so have 
 all brave deeds been done, since man walked the earth. 
 It is because that spirit, the spirit of faith, has died 
 out among us, that so few brave deeds are done now, 
 except on battle-fields, and in hovels whereof none but 
 God and the angels know. 
 
 So the man prospers. Several years of honourable and 
 self-restraining love bring him a wife, beautiful, loving, 
 worshipping his talents ; a help meet for him, such as 
 God will send at times to those whom he loves. Kind 
 men meet and love and help him ' The Johnstones, 
 Mr. Tait, William and Mary Howitt;' Sir William 
 Molesworth, hearing of his last illness, sends him un- 
 solicited fifty pounds, which, as we understand it, 
 Nicoll accepts without foolish bluster about inde- 
 pendence. Why not ? man should help man, and be 
 helped by him. Would he not have done as much for 
 Sir William ? Nothing to us proves Nicoll's heart - 
 wholeness more than the way in which he talks of his 
 benefactors, in a tone of simple gratitude and affection, 
 without fawning, and without vapouring. The man 
 has too much self-respect to consider himself lowered 
 by accepting a favour. 
 
 But he must go after all. The editor's den at Leeds 
 is not the place for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes ; 
 and work rises before him, huger and heavier as 
 he goes on, till he drops under the ever-increasing 
 load. He will not believe it at first. In sweet child- 
 like playful letters, he tells his mother that it is no- 
 thing. It has done him good ( opened the grave 
 before his eyes, and taught him to think of death/ 
 ' He trusts that he has not borne this, and suffered, and 
 thought in vain/ This too, he hopes, is to be a fresh 
 lesson-page of experience for his work. Alas ! a few 
 months more of bitter suffering, and of generous kind-
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 391 
 
 ness and love from all around him, and it is over 
 with him at the age of twenty-three. Shall we regret 
 him ? shall we not rather believe that God knew 
 best; and considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere 
 of the second-class press, and the strange confused 
 ways into which old ultra-Radicalism, finding itself 
 too narrow for the new problems of the day, has 
 stumbled and floundered during the last fifteen years, 
 believe that he might have been a worse man had he 
 been a longer-lived one, and thank heaven that { the 
 righteous is taken away from the evil to come ?' 
 
 As it is, he ends as he began. The first poem in his 
 book is ' The Ha' Bible ;' and the last, written a few 
 days before his death, is still the death-song of a man 
 without fear, without repining, without boasting, 
 blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet with 
 a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and home- 
 wards. And so ends his little epic, as we called it. 
 May Scotland see many such another 1 
 
 The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate 
 by any means. He is far inferior to Burns in range 
 of subject, as he is in humour and pathos. Indeed, 
 there is very little of these latter qualities in him any- 
 where rather playfulness, flashes of child-like fun, as 
 in ' The Provost/ and ' Bonnie Bessie Lee.' But he 
 has attained a mastery over English, a simplicity and 
 quiet which Burns never did ; and also, we need not 
 say, a moral purity. His ' poems, illustrative of the 
 Scotch peasantry,' are charming throughout alive and 
 bright with touches of real humanity, and sympathy 
 with characters apparently antipodal to his own. 
 
 His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with 
 that cardinal fault of his school, of which he steered so 
 clear in prose fine words ; yet he never, like the Corn- 
 Law Rhymer, falls a cursing. He is evidently not a 
 good hater even of ' priests and kings, and aristocrats,
 
 392 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 and superstition / or perhaps he worked all that froth 
 safely over and off in debating-club speeches and lead- 
 ing articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine 
 Metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong ; 
 for there is no form of loveable or right thing which 
 this man has come across, which he does not seem to 
 have appreciated. Beside pure love and the beauties 
 of nature, those on which every man of poetic power 
 and a great many of none, as a matter of course, have 
 a word to say, he can feel for and with the drunken 
 beggar, and the warriors of the ruined manor-house, 
 and the monks of the abbey, and the old mailed Nor- 
 mans with their ' priest with cross and counted beads 
 in the little Saxon chapel' things which a radical 
 editor might have been excused for passing by with 
 a sneer. 
 
 His verses to his wife are a delicious little glimpse 
 of Eden ; and his ' People's Anthem' rises into some- 
 what of true grandeur by virtue of simplicity : 
 
 Lord, from Thy blessed throne, 
 Sorrow look down upon ! 
 
 God save the Poor ! 
 Teach them true liberty 
 Slake them from tyrants free 
 Let their homes happy be ! 
 
 God save the Poor ! 
 
 The arms of wicked men 
 
 Do Thou with might restrain 
 
 God save the Poor ! 
 Raise Thou their lowliness 
 Succour Thou their distress 
 Thou whom the meanest bless ! 
 
 God save the Poor ! 
 
 Give them stanch honesty 
 
 Let their pride manly be- 
 God save the Poor ! 
 
 Help them to hold the right ; 
 
 Give them both truth and might, 
 
 Lord of all LIFE and LIGHT ! 
 God save the Poor !
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 393 
 
 And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting re- 
 mark, that if the ' poems illustrative of the feelings of 
 the intelligent and religious among the working-classes 
 of Scotland' be fair samples of that which they profess 
 to be, Scotland may thank God, that in spite of tem- 
 porary manufacturing rot-heaps, she is still whole at 
 heart; and that the influence of her great peasant 
 poet, though it may seem at first likely to be adverse 
 to Christianity, has helped, as we have already hinted, 
 to purify and not to taint ; to destroy the fungus, but 
 not to touch the heart, of the grand old Covenant-kirk 
 life-tree. 
 
 Still sweeter, and, alas ! still sadder, is the story of 
 the two Bethunes. If NicolFs life, as we have said, 
 be a solitary melody, and short though triumphant 
 strain of work -music, theirs is a harmony and true 
 concert of fellow-joys, fellow-sorrows, fellow-drudgery, 
 fellow-authorship, mutual throughout, lovely in their 
 joint-life, and in their deaths not far divided. Alexander 
 survives his brother John only long enough to write 
 his Memoirs, and then follows ; and we have his story 
 given us by Mr. M'Combie, in a simple unassuming little 
 volume not to be read without many thoughts, per- 
 haps not rightly without tears. Mr. M'Combie has 
 been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He is all 
 but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume 
 with letters of preternatural length from Alexander to his 
 publishers and critics, and from the said publishers and 
 critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and 
 business-like cast, but entirely successful in doing that 
 which a book should do namely, in showing the world 
 that here was a man of like passions with ourselves, 
 who bore from boyhood to the grave hunger, cold, wet, 
 rags, brutalizing and health-destroying toil, and all the 
 storms of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and con- 
 quered them every one.
 
 394 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a 
 ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a 
 grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exer- 
 tion ; he is twice blown up in quarrying with his own 
 blast, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and 
 scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not 
 thirteen, is set to stone-breaking on the roads during 
 intense cold, and has to keep himself from being frost- 
 bitten and heart-broken by monkey gambols ; takes to the 
 weaving trade, and having helped his family by the 
 most desperate economy to save lol. wherewith to buy 
 looms, begins to work them, with his brother as an 
 apprentice, and finds the whole outlay rendered useless 
 the very same year by the failures of 1825-26. So the 
 two return to day-labour at fourteenpence a day. John, 
 in a struggle to do task-work honestly, over-exerts 
 himself, and ruins his digestion for life. Next year he 
 is set in November to clean out a watercourse knee- 
 deep in water ; then to take marl from a pit ; and 
 then to drain standing water off" a swamp during an in- 
 tense December frost ; and finds himself laid down with 
 a three months' cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying 
 the foundation of the consumption which destroyed him. 
 But the two brothers will not give in. Poetry they 
 will write ; and they write it to the best of their powers, 
 on scraps of paper, after the drudgery of the day, in a 
 cabin pervious to every shower, teaching themselves the 
 right spelling of the words from some ' Christian 
 Remembrancer' or other apparently not our meek and 
 unbiassed contemporary of that name ; and all this 
 without neglecting their work a day or even an hour, 
 when the weather permitted the ' only thing which 
 tempted them to fret/ being hear it, readers, and per- 
 pend ! ' the being kept at home by rain and snow.' 
 Then an additional malady (apparently some calculous
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 395 
 
 one) comes on John, and stops by him for the six re- 
 maining years of his life. Yet bet ween 1826 and 1832, 
 John has saved 14^. out of his miserable earnings, to be 
 expended to the last farthing on his brother's recovery 
 from the second quarry accident. Surely the devil is 
 trying hard to spoil these men. But no. They are 
 made perfect by sufferings. In the house with one 
 long narrow room, and a small vacant space at the end 
 of it, lighted by a single pane of glass, they write and 
 urite untiring, during the long summer evenings, 
 poetry, ' Tales of the Scottish Peasant Life/ which at 
 last bring them in somewhat ; and a work on practical 
 economy, which is bepraised and corrected by kind 
 critics in Edinburgh, and at last published without a 
 sale. Perhaps one cause of its failure might be found 
 in those very corrections. There were too many vio- 
 lent political allusions in it, complains their good 
 Mentor of Edinburgh ; and persuades them, seemingly 
 the most meek and teachable of heroes, to omit them ; 
 though Alexander, while submitting, pleads fairly 
 enough for retaining them, in a passage which we will 
 give, as a specimen of the sort of English possible to 
 be acquired by a Scotch day-labourer, self-educated, all 
 but the rudiments of reading and writing, and a few 
 lectures on popular poetry from ' a young student of 
 Aberdeen/ now the Rev. Mr. Adamson, who must look 
 back on the friendship which he bore these two young 
 men, as one of the noblest pages in his life. 
 
 Talk to the many of religion, and they will put on a long face, 
 confess that it is a thing of the greatest importance to all and go 
 away and forget the whole. Talk to them of education : they will 
 readily acknowledge that it's ' a braw thing to be weel learned," and 
 begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of 
 Jeremiah because they cannot make it as long, on the ignorance of 
 the age in which they live ; but they neither stir hand nor foot in 
 the matter. But speak to them of politics, and their excited coun- 
 tenances and kindling eye show in a moment how deeply they are
 
 396 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 interested. Politics are therefore an important feature, and an 
 almost indispensable element in such a work as mine. Had it con- 
 sisted solely of exhortations to industry and rules of economy, it 
 would have been dismissed with an ' Ou ay, it's braw for him to crack 
 that way : but if he were whaur we are, 'deed he wad just hae to do 
 as we do.' But by mixing up the science with politics, and giving 
 it an occasional political impetus, a different result may be reasonably 
 expected. In these days no man can be considered a patriot or friend 
 of the poor, who is not also a politician. 
 
 Tt is amusing, by the bye, to see how the world 
 changes its codes of respectability, and how, what is 
 anathema in one generation, becomes trite orthodoxy in 
 the next. The political sins in the work were, that ' my 
 brother had attacked the corn-laws with some severity ; 
 and I have attempted to level a battery against that sort 
 of servile homage which the poor pay to the rich V 
 
 There is no use pursuing the story much further. 
 They again save a little money, and need it; for the 
 estate on which they have lived from childhood chang- 
 ing hands, they are, with their aged father, expelled 
 from the dear old dog-kennel, to find house-room where 
 they can. Why not ? ' it was not in the bond.' The 
 house did not belong to them ; nothing of it, at least, 
 which could be specified in any known lease. True, 
 there may have been associations : but what associations 
 can men be expected to cultivate on fourteenpence a 
 day ? So they must forth, with their two aged parents, 
 and build with their own hands a new house elsewhere, 
 having saved some 30!. from the sale of their writings. 
 The house, as we understand, stands to this day 
 hereafter to become a sort of artisan's caaba and pil- 
 grim's station, only second to Burns's grave. That, at 
 least, it will become, whenever the meaning of the 
 words ' worth ' and ' worship ' shall become rightly 
 understood among us. 
 
 For what are these men, if they are not heroes and 
 saints? Not of the Popish sort, abject and effeminate,
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 397 
 
 but of the true, human, evangelic sort, masculine and 
 grand like the figures in Raffaelle's Cartoons com- 
 pared with those of Fra Bartolomeo. Not from super- 
 stition, not from selfish prudence, but from devotion to 
 their aged parents, and the righteous dread of depend- 
 ence, they die voluntary celibates, although their writings 
 show that they, too, could have loved as nobly as they 
 did all other things. The extreme of endurance, self- 
 restraint, of ' conquest of the flesh/ outward as well as 
 inward, is the life- long lot of these men ; and they go 
 through it. They have their share of injustice, tyranny, 
 disappointment ; one by one each bright boy's dream 
 of success and renown is scourged out of their minds, 
 and sternly and lovingly their Father in heaven teaches 
 them the lesson of all lessons. By what hours of 
 misery and blank despair that faith was purchased, we 
 can only guess; the simple strong men give us the 
 result, but never dream of sitting down and analysing 
 the process for the world's amusement or their own 
 glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could 
 have told us ; whether the mere fact of a man's being 
 able to dissect himself, in public or in private, is not 
 proof-patent that he is no man, but only a shell of a 
 man, with works inside, which can of course be exhi- 
 bited and taken to pieces a rather more difficult 
 matter with flesh and blood. If we believe that God 
 is educating, the when, the where, and the how are 
 not only unimportant, but, considering who is the 
 teacher, unfathomable to us, and it is enough to be 
 able to believe with John Bethune, that the Lord of 
 all things is influencing us through all things ; whether 
 sacraments, or sabbaths, or sun-gleams, or showers all 
 things are ours, for all are His, and we are His, and 
 He is ours ; and for the rest, to say with the same 
 John Bethune :
 
 398 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 Oh, God of glory ! thou hast treasured up 
 
 For me my little portion ot distress ; 
 But with each draught in every bitter cup 
 
 Thy hand hath mixed, to make its soreness less, 
 Some cordial drop, for which thy name I bless, 
 And offer up my mite of thankfulness. 
 
 Thou hast chastised my frame with dire disease, 
 Long, obdurate, and painful ; and thy hand 
 
 Hath wrung cold sweat-drops from my brow ; for these 
 I thank thee too. Though pangs at thy command 
 Have compassed me about, still, with the blow, 
 Patience sustained my soul amid its woe. 
 
 Of the actual literary merit of these men's writings 
 there is less to be said. However extraordinary, con- 
 sidering the circumstances under which they were 
 written, may be the polish and melody of John's verse, 
 or the genuine spiritual health, deep death-and-devil- 
 defying earnestness, and shrewd practical wisdom, which 
 shines through all that either brother writes, they do 
 not possess any of that fertile originality, which alone 
 would have enabled them, as it did Burns, to compete 
 with the literary savans, who, though for the most part 
 of inferior genius, have the help of information and 
 appliances, from which they were shut out. Judging 
 them, as the true critic, like the true moralist, is bound 
 to do, ' according to what they had, not according to 
 what they had not/ they are men who, with average 
 advantages, might have been famous in their day. God 
 thought it better for them to ' hide them in his 
 tabernacle from the strife of tongues ;' and seldom 
 believed truism He knows best. Alexander shall not, 
 according to his early dreams, ' earn nine hundred 
 pounds by writing a book, like Burns,' even though 
 his ideal method of spending be to buy all the boys in 
 the parish ' new shoes with iron tackets and heels,' 
 and send them home with shillings for their mothers, 
 and feed their fathers on wheat bread and milk, with 
 tea and bannocks for Sabbath-days, and build a house
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 399 
 
 for the poor old toil-stiffened man whom he once saw 
 draining the hill-field, ' with a yard full of gooseberries, 
 and an apple-tree !' not that, nor even, as the world 
 judges, better than that, shall he be allowed to do. 
 The poor, for whom he writes his ' Practical Economy/ 
 shall not even care to read it ; and he shall go down 
 to the grave a failure and a lost thing in the eyes of 
 men : but not in the eyes of grand God-fearing old 
 Alison Christie, his mother, as he brings her, scrap by 
 scrap, the proofs of their dead idol's poems, which she 
 lias prayed to be spared just to see once in print, and, 
 when the last half-sheet is read, loses her sight for 
 ever; not in her eyes, nor in those of the God who 
 saw him, in the cold winter mornings, wearing John's 
 clothes, to warm them for the dying man before he 
 got up. 
 
 His grief at his brother's death is inconsolable. He 
 feels for the first time in his life, what a lot is his for 
 he feels for the first time that 
 
 Parent and friend and brother gone, 
 I stand upon the earth alone. 
 
 Four years he lingers ; friends begin to arise from one 
 quarter and another, but he, not altogether wisely or 
 well, refuses all pecuniary help. At last Mr. Hugh 
 Miller recommends him to be editor of a projected 
 ' Non-Intrusion' paper in Dumfries, with a salary, to 
 him boundless, of ioo/. a year. Too late ! The iron 
 has entered too deeply into his soul ; in a few weeks 
 more he is lying in his brother's grave ' Lovely 
 and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths not 
 divided.' 
 
 ' William Thorn of Inverury/ is a poet altogether of 
 the same school. His * Rhymes and Recollections of a 
 Handloom Weaver ' are superior to those of either 
 Nicoll or the Bethunes, the little love-songs in the
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 volume reminding us of Burns's best manner, and the 
 two languages in which he writes being better amalga- 
 mated, as it seems to us, than in any Scotch song 
 writer. Moreover, there is a terseness, strength, and 
 grace about some of these little songs, which would put 
 to shame many a volume of vague and windy verse, 
 which the press sees yearly sent forth by men, who, 
 instead of working at the loom, have been pampered 
 from their childhood with all the means and appliances 
 of good taste and classic cultivation. We have room 
 only for one specimen of his verse, not the most highly 
 finished, but of a beauty which can speak for itself. 
 
 DBEAMINGS OF THE BEEEAVED. 
 
 The morning breaks bonny o'er mountain and stream, 
 An' troubles the hallowed breath of my dream. 
 The gowd light of morning is sweet to the e'e, 
 But ghost-gathering midnight, thou'rt dearer to me. 
 The dull common world then sinks from my sight, 
 And fairer creations arise to the night ; 
 When drowsy oppression has sleep-sealed my e'e, 
 Then bright are the visions awakened to me ! 
 
 Oh, come, spirit-mother ! discourse of the hours 
 My young bosom beat all its beating to yours, 
 When heart-woven wishes in soft counsel fell 
 On ears how unheedful, proved sorrow might tell ! 
 That deathless affection nae sorrow could break ; 
 When all else forsook me, ye would na forsake ; 
 Then come, oh my mother ! come often to me, 
 An' soon an' for ever I'll come unto thee ! 
 
 An' then, shrouded loveliness ! soul-winning Jean, 
 How cold was thy hand on my bosom yestreen ! 
 'Twas kind for the love that your e'e kindled there 
 Will burn, aye an' burn, till that breast beat nae mair 
 Our bairnies sleep round me, oh bless ye their sleep ! 
 Your ain dark-eyed Willie will wauken an' weep ! 
 But blythe through his weepin', he'll tell me how you, 
 His heaven-hamed mammie, was dauting his brow. 
 
 Though dark be our dwellin', our happin' tho' bare, 
 And night closes round us in cauldness and care, 
 Affection will warm us and bright are the beams 
 That halo our burnt- in yon dear land o' dreams :
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 401 
 
 Then weel may I welcome the night's deathly reign, 
 Wi' souls of the dearest I mingle me then ; 
 The gowd light of morning is lightless to me, 
 But, oh ! for the night with its ghost revelrie ! 
 
 But, even more interesting than the poems them- 
 selves, is the autobiographical account prefixed, with its 
 vivid sketches of factory life in Aberdeen, of the old 
 regime of 1770; when 'four days did the weaver's work 
 Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, were of course jubilee. 
 Lawn frills gorged (?) freely from under the wrists of 
 his fine blue gilt-buttoned coat. He dusted his head 
 with white flour on Sunday, smirked and wore a cane ; 
 walked in clean slippers on Monday; Tuesday heard 
 him talk war bravado, quote Volney, and get drunk : 
 weaving commenced gradually on Wednesday. Then 
 were little children pirn-fillers, and such were taught 
 to steal warily past the gate-keeper, concealing the 
 bottle. These wee smugglers had a drop for their ser- 
 vices, over and above their chances of profiting by the 
 elegant and edifying discussions uttered in their hear- 
 ing. Infidelity was then getting fashionable/ But 
 by the time Thorn enters on his seventeen years* 
 weaving, in 1814, the Nemesis has come. ' Wages are 
 six shillings a week where they had been forty ; but 
 the weaver of forty shillings, with money instead of wit, 
 had bequeathed his vices to the weaver of six shillings, 
 with wit instead of money/ The introduction of 
 machinery works evil rather than good, on account of 
 the reckless way in which it is used, and the reckless 
 material which . it uses. ' Vacancies in the factory, 
 daily made, were daily filled by male and female work- 
 ers; often queer enough people, and from all parts 
 none too coarse for using. The pickpocket, trained to 
 the loom six months in Bridewell, came forth a journey- 
 man weaver ; and his precious experiences were infused 
 into the common moral puddle, and in due time did 
 
 VOL. I. D D
 
 402 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 their work.' No wonder that ' the distinctive charac- 
 ter of all sunk away. Man became less mauly 
 woman unlovely and rude/ No wonder that the 
 factory, like too many more, though a thriving concern 
 to its owners, becomes ' a prime nursery of vice and 
 sorrow/ ' Virtue perished utterly within its walls, and 
 was dreamed of no more; or, if remembered at all, 
 only in a deep and woful sense of self-debasement a 
 struggling to forget, where it was hopeless to obtain/ 
 But to us, almost the most interesting passage in his 
 book, and certainly the one which bears most directly 
 on the general purpose of this article, is one in which 
 he speaks of the effects of song on himself and his 
 fellow faotory-workers. 
 
 Moore was doing all he could for love-sick boys and girls, yet they 
 had never enough ! Nearer and dearer to hearts like ours was the 
 Ettrick Shepherd, then in his full tide of song and story ; but nearer 
 and dearer still than he, or any living songster, was our ill-fated 
 fellow-craftsman, Tannahill. Poor weaver chiel ! what we owe to 
 you I your ' Braes of Balquidder," and ' Yon Burnside,' and 
 ' Gloomy Winter,' and the ' Minstrel's' wailing ditty, and the noble 
 ' Gleneiffer.' Oh ! how they did ring above the rattle of a thousand 
 shuttles ! Let me again proclaim the debt which we owe to these 
 song spirits, as they walked in melody from loom to loom, minis- 
 tering to the low-hearted ; and when the breast was filled with 
 everything but hope and happiness, let only break out the healthy 
 and vigorous chorus, ' A man's a man for a' that,' and the fagged 
 weaver brightens up. . . . Who dare measure the restraining in- 
 fluences of these very songs ? To us they were all instead of Ser- 
 mons. Had one of us been bold enough to enter a church, he must 
 have been ejected for the sake of decency. His forlorn and curiously 
 patched habiliments would have contested the point of attraction 
 with the ordinary eloquence of that period. Church bells rang not 
 for us. Poets were indeed our priests : but for those, the last relic 
 of moral existence would have passed away. Song was the dew- 
 drop which gathered during the long dark night of despondency, 
 and was sure to glitter in the very first blink of the sun. You might 
 have seen ' Auld Robin Gray' wet the eyes that could be tearless 
 amid cold and hunger, and weariness and pain. Surely, surely, then 
 there was to that heart one passage left. 
 
 Making all allowance for natural and pardonable 
 high-colouring, we recommend this most weighty and
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 403 
 
 significant passage to the attention of all readers, and 
 draw an argumeutum a fortiori, from the high estima- 
 tion in which Thorn holds those very songs of Tanna- 
 hill's, of which we just now spoke somewhat depreciat- 
 ingly, for the extreme importance which we- attach to 
 popular poetry, as an agent of incalculable power in 
 moulding the minds of nations. 
 
 The popular poetry of Germany has held that great 
 nation together, united and heart-whole for centuries, 
 in spite of every disadvantage of internal division, and 
 the bad influence of foreign taste ; and the greatest of 
 their poets have not thought it beneath them to add 
 their contributions, and their very best, to the common 
 treasure, meant not only for the luxurious and learned, 
 but for the workman and the child at school. In Great 
 Britain, on the contrary, the people have been left to 
 form their own tastes, and choose their own modes of 
 utterance, with great results, both for good and evil ; 
 and there has sprung up before the new impulse which 
 Burns gave to popular poetry, a considerable literature 
 considerable not only from its truth and real artistic 
 merit, but far more so from its being addressed princi- 
 pally to the working-classes. Even more important is 
 this people's literature question, in our eyes, than the 
 more palpable factors of the education question, about 
 which we now hear such ado. It does seem to us, that 
 to take every possible precaution about the spiritual 
 truth which children are taught in school, and then 
 leave to chance the more impressive and abiding teach- 
 ing which popular literature, songs especially, give them 
 out of doors, is as great a niaiserie as that of the 
 Tractarians who insisted on getting into the pulpit in 
 their surplices, as a sign that the clergy only had the 
 right of preaching to the people, while they forgot that, 
 by means of a free press, (of the licence of which they,
 
 404 BURNS AND JEIIS SCHOOL. 
 
 too, were not slack to avail themselves,) every penny-a- 
 liner was preaching to the people daily, and would do 
 so, maugre their surplices, to the end of time. The 
 man who makes the people's songs is a true popular 
 preacher. Whatsoever, true or false, he sends forth, 
 will not be carried home, as a sermon often is, merely 
 in heads, to be forgotten before the week is out : it 
 will ring in the ears, and cling round the imagination, 
 and follow the pupil to the workshop, and the tavern, 
 and the fireside ; even to the deathbed, such power is 
 in the magic of rhyme. The emigrant, deep in Austra- 
 lian forests, may take down Chalmers's sermons on Sab- 
 bath evenings from the scanty shelf: but the songs of 
 Burns have been haunting his lips, and cheering his 
 heart, and moulding him, unconsciously to himself, in 
 clearing and in pasture all the weary week. True, if 
 he be what a Scotchman should be, more than one old 
 Hebrew psalm has brought its message to him during 
 these week-days : but there are feelings of his nature 
 on which those psalms, not from defect, but from their 
 very purpose, do not touch : how is he to express them, 
 but in the songs which echo them ? These will keep 
 alive, and intensify in him, and in the children who 
 learn them from his lips, all which is like themselves. 
 Is it, we ask again, to be left to chance what sort of 
 songs these shall be ? 
 
 As for poetry written for the working classes by the 
 upper, such attempts at it as we yet have seen, may be 
 considered nil. The upper must learn to know more 
 of the lower, and to make the lower know more of 
 them a frankness of which we honestly believe they 
 will never have to repent. Moreover, they must read 
 Burns a little more, and cavaliers and Jacobites a little 
 less. As it is, their efforts have been as yet exactly in 
 that direction which would most safely secure the
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 405 
 
 blessings of undisturbed obscurity. Whether ' secular* 
 or f spiritual/ they have thought proper to adopt a 
 certain Tommy-good-child tone, which, whether to 
 Glasgow artisans or Dorsetshire labourers, or indeed 
 for any human being who is ' grinding among the iron 
 facts of life/ is, to say the least, nauseous; and the 
 only use of their poematicula has been to demonstrate 
 practically, the existence of a great and fearful gulf 
 between those who have, and those who have not, in 
 thought as well as in purse, which must be, in the 
 former article at least, bridged over as soon as possible, 
 if we are to remain one people much longer. The 
 attempts at verse for children are somewhat more suc- 
 cessful a certain little ' Moral Songs' especially, said 
 to emanate from the Tractarian School, yet full of a 
 health, spirit, and wild sweetness, which makes its au- 
 thoress, in our eyes, 'wiser than her teachers/ But 
 this is our way. We are too apt to be afraid of the 
 men, and take to the children as our pis aller, covering 
 our despair of dealing with the majority, the adult po- 
 pulation, in a pompous display of machinery for in- 
 fluencing that very small fraction, the children. ' Oh, 
 but the destinies of the empire depend on the rising 
 generation V Who has told us so ? how do we know 
 that they do not depend on the risen generation ? 
 Who are likely to do more work during our lifetime, 
 for good and evil, those who are now between fifteen 
 and five-and-forty, or those who are between five and 
 fifteen? Yet for those former, the many, and the 
 working, and the powerful, all we seem to be inclined 
 to do is to parody Scripturg, and say, ' He that is un- 
 just, let him be unjust still ; and he that is filthy, let 
 him be filthy still/ 
 
 Not that we ask any one to sit down, and, out of 
 mere benevolence, to write songs for the people.
 
 406 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 Wooden, out of a wooden birthplace, would such go 
 forth, to feed fires, not spirits. But if any man shall 
 read these pages, to whom God has given a truly poetic 
 temperament, a gallant heart, a melodious ear, a quick 
 and sympathetic eye for all forms of human joy, and 
 sorrow, and humour, and grandeur; an insight which 
 can discern the outlines of the butterfly, when clothed 
 in the roughest and most rugged chrysalis-hide; if the 
 teachers of his heart and purposes, and not merely of 
 his taste and sentiments, have been the great songs of 
 his own and of every land and age ; if he can see in 
 the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and 
 Jeremiah, and, above all, in the parables of Him who 
 spake as never man spake, the models and elemental 
 laws of a people's poetry, alike according to the will of 
 God and the heart of man ; if he can welcome gallantly 
 and hopefully the future, and yet know that it must 
 be, unless it would be a monster and a machine, the 
 loving and obedient child of the past ; if he can speak 
 of the subjects which alone will interest the many, on 
 love, marriage, the sorrows of the poor, their hopes, 
 political and social, their wrongs, as well as their sins 
 and duties; and that with a fervour and passion akin 
 to the spirit of Burns and Elliott, yet with more calm- 
 ness, more purity, more wisdom, and therefore with more 
 hope, as one who stands upon a vantage ground of 
 education and culture, sympathizing none the less with 
 those who struggle behind him in the valley of the 
 shadow of death, yet seeing from the mountain peaks 
 the coming dawn, invisible as yet to them. Then let 
 that man think it no fall, but rather a noble rise, to leave 
 awhile the barren glacier ranges of pure art, for the 
 fertile gardens of practical and popular song, and write 
 for the many, and with the many, in words such as 
 they can understand ; remembering that that which is
 
 BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 407 
 
 simplest is always deepest ; that the many contain iu 
 themselves the few ; and that when he speaks to the 
 wanderer and the drudge, he speaks to the elemental 
 and primeval man, and in him speaks to all who have 
 risen out of him. Let him try, undiscouraged by 
 inevitable failures ; and if at last he succeeds in giving 
 vent to one song which will cheer hardworn hearts at 
 the loom and the forge, or wake one pauper's heart 
 with the hope that his children are destined not to die 
 as he died, or recall, amid Canadian forests or Austra- 
 lian sheep-walks, one thrill of love for the old country, 
 her liberties, and her laws, and her religion, to the 
 settler's heart ; let that man know that he has earned 
 a higher place among the spirits of the wise and good, 
 by doing, in spite of the unpleasantness of self-denial, 
 the duty which lay nearest him, than if he had out- 
 rivalled Goethe on his own classic ground, and made 
 all the cultivated and the comfortable of the earth 
 desert, for the exquisite creations of his fancy, Faust, 
 and Tasso, and Iphigenie. 
 
 END OF VOL. I.
 
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