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 LETTERS TO 
 
 DEAD AUTHORS
 
 LETTERS TO DEAD 
 AUTHORS BY AN- 
 DREW LANG. ANEW 
 EDITION 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, ^ CO. 
 LONDON <&- NEW YORK. 1892
 
 First printed, March, 1886. Reprinted, May, 1886. 
 New Edition, January, 1892. Reprinted, April, 1892.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 "PN 
 S\\ 
 
 592. 
 
 TO 
 
 MISS THACKERAY 
 
 THESE EXERCISES 
 
 IN THE ART OF DIPPING 
 
 ARE DEDICATED
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THESE essays were originally written for the 
 St. James's Gazette, at the suggestion of Mr. F. 
 W. Greenwood, who then edited the paper. 
 They have now for some time been out of print, 
 and in revising them the author has made a few 
 slight corrections. He must admit that the 
 form in which they are cast, comments on 
 authors' work addressed to themselves, has 
 never been greatly to his mind. It is plain 
 that one could not write about themselves to 
 contemporaries, although Politics, since Junius's 
 time, have not disdained this mode of criticism. 
 Letters to and from the Dead have not infre- 
 quently been ventured in literature, but to 
 attempt letters from Dead Authors would 
 demand a confidence which the present writer
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 does not possess. Except in the single instance 
 of Chapelain, he has approached no author 
 whom he does not admire, and this perhaps has 
 made his task less difficult, if there be degrees in 
 impossibility. Yet he feels that he has been 
 especially unsuccessful in the case where his 
 admiration and sympathy are deepest and most 
 sincere.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 , PACK 
 
 I. To W. M. THACKERAY i 
 
 II. To CHARLES DICKENS . 9 
 
 III. To PIERRE DE RONSARD 19 
 
 IV. To HERODOTUS 29 
 
 V. EPISTLE TO MR. ALEXANDER POPE .... 40 
 
 VI. To LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA 47 
 
 VII. To MA!TRE FRAN^OYS RABELAIS .... 56 
 VIII. To JANE AUSTEN 64 
 
 IX. To MASTER ISAAK WALTON 73 
 
 X. To M. CHAPELAIN 83 
 
 XI. To* SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE, KT 93 
 
 XII. To ALEXANDRE DUMAS 100 
 
 XIII. To THEOCRITUS 109 
 
 XIV. To EDGAR ALLAN POE 117 
 
 XV. To SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART 127 
 
 XVI. TO EUSEBtUS OF C^tSAREA Ij6
 
 X CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGO 
 
 XVII. To PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 145 
 
 XVIII. To MONSIEUR DE MOLIRE, VALET DE 
 
 CHAMBRE DU Ror 154 
 
 XIX. To ROBERT BURNS 164 
 
 XX. To LORD BYRON 172 
 
 XXI. To OMAR KHAYYAM 180 
 
 XXII. To Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS 185
 
 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS, 
 i. 
 
 To W. M. Thackeray. 
 
 SIR, There are man)' things that stand in 
 the way of the critic when he has a mind to 
 praise the living. Ho may dread the charge of 
 writing rather to vex a rival than to exalt the 
 subject of his applause. He shuns the appear- 
 ance of seeking the favour of the famous, and 
 would not willingly be regarded as one of the 
 many parasites who now advertise each move- 
 ment and action of contemporary genius. " Such 
 and such men of letters are passing their summer 
 holidays in the Val d'Aosta," or the Mountains 
 of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as it may 
 happen. So reports our literary "Court Cir- 
 cular," and all our Prtcieuses read the tidings 
 
 B
 
 2 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 with enthusiasm. Lastly, if the critic be quite 
 new to the world of letters, he may super- 
 fluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the 
 abundance of his eulogy. No such doubts 
 perplex us when, with all our hearts, we would 
 commend the departed ; for they have passed 
 almost beyond the reach even of envy ; and to 
 those pale cheeks of theirs no commendation 
 can bring the red. 
 
 You, above all others, were and remain with- 
 out a rival in your many-sided excellence, and 
 praise of you strikes at none of those who have 
 survived your day. The increase of time only 
 mellows your renown, and each year that passes 
 and brings you no successor does but sharpen 
 the keenness of our sense of loss. In what other 
 novelist, since Scott was worn down by the 
 burden of a forlorn endeavour, and died for 
 honour's sake, has the world found so many of 
 the fairest gifts combined ? If we may not call 
 you a poet (for the first of English writers of 
 light verse did not seek that crown), who that 
 was less than a poet ever saw life with a glance 
 so keen as yours, so steady, and so sane ? Your 
 pathos was never cheap, your laughter never
 
 THACKERAY. 3 
 
 forced ; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of 
 the preacher. Your funny people your Costi- 
 gans and Fokers were not mere characters of 
 trick and catch-word, were not empty comic 
 masks. Behind each the human heart was 
 beating ; and ever and again we were allowed 
 to see the features of the man. 
 
 Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a 
 profession, like another, but a constant reflection 
 of the whole surface of life : a repeated echo of 
 its laughter and its complaint. Others have 
 written, and not written badly, with the stolid 
 professional regularity of the clerk at his desk ; 
 you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said 
 that " it needs heaven-sent moments for this 
 skill." There are, it will not surprise you, some 
 honourable women and a few men who call you 
 a cynic ; who speak of " the withered world of 
 Thackerayan satire ; " who think your eyes were 
 ever turned to the sordid aspects of life to the 
 mother-in-law who threatens to " take away her 
 silver bread-basket ; " to the intriguer, the sneak, 
 the termagant ; to the Beckys, and Barnes New- 
 comes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of this world. The 
 quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with
 
 4 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 life, not with you ; they might as wisely blame 
 Monsieur Bufifon because there are snakes in his 
 Natural History. Had you not impaled certain 
 noxious human insects, you would have better 
 pleased Mr. Ruskin ; had you confined yourself 
 to such performances, you would have been 
 more dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in 
 fiction. 
 
 You are accused of never having drawn a 
 good woman who was not a doll, but the ladies 
 that bring this charge seldom remind us either 
 of Lady Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty 
 Lambert The best women can pardon you 
 Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory ; they find it 
 harder to forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen 
 Pendennis. Yet what man does not know in 
 his heart that the best women God bless them 
 lean, in their characters, either to the sweet 
 passiveness of Emmy or to the sensitive and 
 jealous affections of Helen ? 'Tis Heaven, not 
 you, that made them so ; and they are easily 
 pardoned, both for being a very little lower than 
 the angels and for their gentle ambition to be 
 painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings 
 and harps and haloes, So ladies have occa-
 
 ^THACKERAY. $ 
 
 sionally seen their own faces in the glass of 
 fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola 
 and Consuelo. Yet when these fair idealists, 
 Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed Rosa- 
 mund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice 
 of malice in the portraits which we miss in your 
 least favourable studies ? 
 
 That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of 
 Henry Esmond was a snarling cynic; that he 
 who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a 
 good woman : these are the chief charges (all 
 indifferent now to you, who were once so sensi- 
 tive) that your admirers have to contend against. 
 A French critic, M. Taine, also protests that you 
 do preach too much. Did any author but your- 
 self so frequently break the thread (seldom a 
 strong thread) of his plot to converse with his 
 reader and moralise his tale, we also might be 
 offended. But who that loves Montaigne and 
 Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of the 
 one and can bear with the melancholy of the 
 other, but prefers your preaching to another's 
 playing ! 
 
 Your thoughts come in, like the intervention 
 of the Greek Chorus, as an ornament and source
 
 6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, 
 they bid us pause a moment over the wider 
 laws and actions of human fate and human life, 
 and we turn from your persons to yourself, and 
 again from yourself to your persons, as from the 
 odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action 
 of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my 
 taste, does the mere music and melancholy 
 dignity of your style in these passages of medi- 
 tation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. 
 I remember that scene where Clive, at Barnes 
 Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the Affec- 
 tions, sees Ethel who is lost to him. "And the 
 past and its dear histories, and youth and its 
 hopes and passions, and tones and looks for ever 
 echoing in the heart and present in the memory 
 these, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as 
 he looked across the great gulf of time, and 
 parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had 
 loved for many years." 
 
 For ever echoing in the heart and present in the 
 memory: who has not heard these tones, who 
 does not hear them as he turns over your books 
 that, for so many years, have been his com- 
 panions and comforters ? We have been young
 
 THACKERAY. 7 
 
 r 
 
 and old, we have been sad and merry with you, 
 we have listened to the midnight chimes with 
 Pen and "VVarrington, have stood with you 
 beside the deathbed, have mourned at that yet 
 more awful funeral of lost love, and with you 
 have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our 
 old and immortal affections, a ttal souvenir I 
 And whenever you speak for yourself, and speak 
 in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in 
 our literature is the beauty of your sentences 1 
 " I can't express the charm of them " (so you 
 write of George Sand ; so we may write of 
 you) : " they seem to me like the sound of 
 country bells, provoking I don't know what vein 
 of music and meditation, and falling sweetly and 
 sadly on the ear." Surely that style, so fresh, 
 so rich, so full of surprises that style which 
 stamps as classical your fragments of slang, and 
 perpetually astonishes and delights would 
 alone give immortality to an author, even had 
 he little to say. But you, with your whole wide 
 world of fops and fools, of good women and 
 brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery 
 adventurers : you who created the Stcynes and 
 Newcomes, the Beckys and Blanches, Captain
 
 8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong 
 all that host of friends imperishable you must 
 survive with Shakespeare and Cervantes in the 
 memory and affection of men.
 
 ( 9 
 
 II. 
 To Charles Dickens. 
 
 SIR, It has been said that every man is born 
 a Platonist or an Aristotelian, though the enor- 
 mous majority of us, to be sure, live and die 
 without being conscious of any invidious philo- 
 sophic partiality whatever. With more truth 
 (though that does not imply very much) every 
 Englishman who reads may be said to be a 
 partisan of yourself or of Mr. Thackeray. Why 
 should there be any partisanship in the matter ; 
 and why, having two such good things as your 
 novels and those of your contemporary, should 
 we not be silently happy in the possession ? 
 Well, men arc made so, and must needs fight 
 and argue over their tastes in enjoyment. For 
 myself, I may say that in this matter I am what 
 the Americans do not call a " Mugwump," what
 
 io LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 English politicians dub a "superior person" 
 that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the 
 best of both. 
 
 It must be owned that this attitude is some- 
 times made a little difficult by the vigour of 
 your special devotees. They have ceased, in- 
 deed, thank Heaven ! to imitate you ; and even 
 in " descriptive articles " the touch of Mr. 
 Gigadibs, of him whom " we almost took for the 
 true Dickens," has disappeared. The young 
 lions of the Press no longer mimic your less 
 admirable mannerisms do not strain so much 
 after fantastic comparisons, do not (in your 
 manner and Mr. Carlyle's) give people nick- 
 names derived from their teeth, or their com- 
 plexion ; and, generally, we are spared second- 
 hand copies of all that in your style was least to 
 be commended. But, though improved by lapse 
 of time in this respect, your devotees still put 
 on little conscious airs of virtue, robust manli- 
 ness, and so forth, which would have irritated 
 you very much, and there survive some press 
 men who seem to have read you a little (espe- 
 cially your later works), and never to have read 
 anything else. Now familiarity with the pages
 
 DICKENS. 1 1 
 
 of "Our Mutual Friend" and " Dombey and 
 Son " does not precisely constitute a liberal 
 education, and the assumption that it does is 
 apt (quite unreasonably) to prejudice people 
 against the greatest comic genius of modern 
 times. 
 
 On the other hand, Time is at last beginning 
 to sift the true admirers of Dickens from the 
 false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense of the word, 
 is a popular success, a popular reputation. For 
 example, I know that, in a remote and even 
 .Pictish part of this kingdom, a rural household, 
 humble and under the shadow of a sorrow 
 inevitably approaching, has found in " David 
 Copperfield " oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and 
 of sickness. On the other hand, people are now 
 picking up heart to say that " they cannot read 
 Dickens," and that they particularly detest 
 " Pickwick." I believe it was young ladies who 
 first had the courage of their convictions in this 
 respect " Tout sied aux belles," and the fair, 
 in the confidence of youth, often venture on 
 remarkable confessions. In "The Natural His- 
 tory of Young Ladies" I do not remember 
 that the author describes the Humorous Young
 
 13 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Lady. 1 She is a very rare bird indeed, and 
 humour generally is at a deplorably low level 
 in England. 
 
 Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since 
 you left us ; and it may be said that inordinate 
 philanthropy, genteel sympathy with Irish 
 murder and arson, Societies for Badgering the 
 Poor, Esoteric Buddhism, and a score of other 
 plagues, including what was once called ^Esthe- 
 ticism, are all, primarily, due to want of humour. 
 People discuss, with the gravest faces, matters 
 which properly should only be stated as the 
 wildest paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in 
 a period almost destitute of humour, many 
 respectable persons " cannot read Dickens," and 
 are not ashamed to glory in their shame. We 
 ought not to be angry with others for their 
 misfortunes ; and yet when one meets the crftins 
 who boast that they cannot read Dickens, one 
 certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel Weller 
 felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter. 
 
 How very singular has been the history of the 
 
 1 Tlie Natural History of Young Ladies was falsely attributed, 
 by some writers, to Dickens. We owe it to some other philo- 
 sopher.
 
 DICKENS. 13 
 
 decline of humour ! Is there any profound 
 psychological truth to be gathered from con- 
 sideration of the fact that humour has gone out 
 with cruelty ? A hundred years ago, eighty 
 years ago nay, fifty years ago we were a cruel 
 but also a humorous people. We had bull- 
 baitings, and badger-drawings, and hustings, 
 and prize-fights, and cock-fights ; we went to 
 see men hanged ; the pillory and the stocks 
 were no empty "terrors unto evil-doers," for 
 there was commonly a malefactor occupying 
 each of these institutions. With all this we had 
 a broad-blown comic sense. We had Hogarth, 
 and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and 
 Gilray ; we had Leech and Surtees, and the 
 creator of ^Tittlebat Titmouse ; we had the 
 Shepherd of the " Noctes," and, above all, we 
 had you. 
 
 From the old giants of English fun burly 
 persons delighting in broad caricature, in decided 
 colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at 
 the more prominent and obvious human follies 
 from these you derived the splendid high spirits 
 and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. 
 Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp
 
 I 4 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 and all the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and 
 John Browdie these and their immortal com- 
 panions were reared, so to speak, on the beef 
 and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting, badger- 
 baiting old England, which we have improved 
 out of existence. And these characters, as- 
 suredly, are your best ; by them, though stupid 
 people cannot read about them, you will live 
 while there is a laugh left among us. Perhaps 
 that does not assure you a very prolonged exist- 
 ence, but only the future can show. 
 
 The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, 
 let us hope, last for ever and a day. Honest 
 old Laughter, the true lutin of your inspiration, 
 must have life left in him yet, and cannot die ; 
 though it is true that the taste for your pathos, 
 and your melodrama, and plots constructed 
 after your favourite fashion ("Great Expecta- 
 tions " and the " Tale of Two Cities " are excep- 
 tions) may go by and never be regretted. Were 
 people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far 
 as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago ? 
 Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who 
 declared that Wordsworth "would never do," 
 cried like a child over your Little Nell. One
 
 DICKENS. 15 
 
 still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick 
 Swiveller; but who can cry over little Nell? 
 
 Ah, Sir, how could you who knew so 
 intimately, who remembered so strangely well 
 the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of child- 
 hood how could you " wallow naked in the 
 pathetic," and massacre holocausts of the Inno- 
 cents? To draw tears by gloating over a 
 child's death-bed, was it worthy of you ? Was 
 it the kind of work over which our hearts should 
 melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a 
 dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions 
 of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl men- 
 tioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved. 
 
 She was more than usual calm, 
 She did not give a single dam, 
 
 wrote the astonishing child who diverted the 
 leisure of Scott. Over your Little Nell and 
 your Little Dombey I remain more than usual 
 calm ; and probably so do thousands of your 
 most sincere admirers. But about matter of 
 this kind, and the unsealing of the fountains 
 of tears, who can argue? Where is taste? 
 where is truth ? What tears are " manly, Sir, 
 manly," as Fred Bayham has it ; and of what
 
 16 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 lamentations ought we rather to be ashamed ? 
 Sunt lacryma rerum ; one has been moved in 
 the cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock ; or 
 by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows slew 
 the parched Athenians among the mire and 
 blood ; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome 
 says Adsuin, or over the diary of Clare Doria 
 Forey, or where Aramis laments, with strange 
 tears, the death of Porthos. But over Dombey 
 (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel. 
 
 When an author deliberately sits down and 
 says, " Now, let us have a good cry," he poisons 
 the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in 
 many breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of 
 " Dombey and Son " there is little we care to 
 remember except the deathless Mr. Toots ; just 
 as we forget the melodramatics of "Martin 
 Chuzzlewit." I have read in that book a score 
 of times ; I never see it but I revel in it in 
 Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans. 
 But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did, 
 what Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, 
 what all the pictures with plenty of shading 
 illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. 
 In the same way, one of your most thorough-
 
 DICKENS. 17 
 
 going admirers has allowed (in the licence of 
 private conversation) that " Ralph Nickleby and 
 Monk are too steep ; " and probably a cultivated 
 taste will always find them a little precipitous. 
 
 " Too steep : " the slang expresses that 
 defect of an ardent genius, carried above itself, 
 and out of the air we breathe, both in its 
 grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To 
 force the note, to press fantasy too hard, to 
 deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, 
 that was the failing which proved you mortal. 
 To take an instance in little : when Pip went 
 to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy thought the 
 seedsman " a very happy man to have so many 
 little drawers in his shop." The reflection is 
 thoroughly boyish ; but then you add, " I 
 wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs 
 ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those 
 jails and bloom." That is not boyish at all ; that 
 is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at work. 
 
 " So we arraign her ; but she," the Genius of 
 Charles Dickens, how brilliant, how kindly, how 
 beneficent she is ! dwelling by a fountain of 
 laughter imperishable ; though there is some- 
 thing of an alien salt in the neighbouring 
 
 c
 
 18 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy 
 would be, how " dispeopled of her dreams," if, 
 in some ruin of the social system, the books of 
 Dickens were lost ; and if The Dodger, and 
 Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle and Miss 
 Squeers and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and 
 Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with 
 ivlenander's men and women ! We cannot think 
 of our world without them ; and, children of 
 dreams as they are, they seem more essential 
 Ulan great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have 
 actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and 
 orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not 
 almost welcome " Free Education " ? for every 
 Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, 
 is a reader the more for you. 
 
 P.S. Alas, how strangely are we tempered, 
 and how strong is the national bias ! I have 
 been saying things of you that I would not hear 
 an enemy say. When I read, in the criticism 
 of an American novelist, about your "hysteri- 
 cal emotionality" (for he writes in American), 
 and your "waste of verbiage," I am almost 
 tempted to deny that our Dickens has a single 
 fault, to deem you impeccable !
 
 19 
 
 III. 
 
 To Pierre de Roiisanl. 
 
 (l-RINCE OF POETS.) 
 
 MASTER AND PRINCE OF POETS, As we 
 know what choice thou madest of a sepulchre 
 (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of 
 Fate), so we know well the manner of thy 
 chosen immortality. In the Plains Elysian, 
 among the heroes and the ladies of old song, 
 there was thy Love with thee to enjoy her para- 
 dise in an eternal spring. 
 
 La du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle 
 
 Sans exchange le suit, 
 La terre sans labeur, de sa grasse ntamelle, 
 
 Toute chose y produit; 
 D'enbas la troupe sainte autrtfois amonrcuse, 
 
 Nous hotiorant sur tous, 
 Viendra nous saluer, Jestimant bien-heit reuse 
 
 De s'afcointer de nous. 
 
 There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of 
 old days, with Belleau, and Du Bellay, and
 
 20 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Baif, and the flower of the maidens of Anjou. 
 Surely no rumour reaches thee, in that happy 
 place of reconciled affections, no rumour of the 
 rudeness of Time, the despite of men, and the 
 change which stole from thy locks, so early 
 grey, the crown of laurels and of thine own 
 roses. How different from thy choice of a 
 sepulchre have been the fortunes of thy tomb ! 
 
 I will that none should break 
 The marble for my sake, 
 Wishful to make more fair 
 My sepulchre ! 
 
 So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet numbers 
 run in my rude English. Wearied of Courts 
 and of priories, thou didst desire a grave beside 
 thine own Loire, not remote from 
 
 The caves, the founts that fall 
 
 From the high mountain wall, 
 
 That fall and flash and fleet, 
 
 With silver feet. 
 Only a laurel tree 
 Shall guard the grave of me ; 
 Only Apollo's bough 
 Shall shade me now ! 
 
 Far other has been thy sepulchre: not in the 
 free air, among the field flowers, but in thy 
 priory of Saint Cosme, with marble for a monu-
 
 PIERRE DE RONSARD. 21 
 
 ment, and no green grass to cover thee. Rest- 
 less wert thou in thy life ; thy dust was not to 
 be restful in thy death. The Huguenots, ces 
 nonveaux Chretiens qui /a France ont pille'e, 
 destroyed thy tomb, and the warning of the 
 later monument, 
 
 ABT, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCAS HUMUM SACRA EST, 
 
 has not scared away malicious men. The storm 
 that passed over France a hundred years ago, 
 more terrible than the religious wars that thou 
 didst weep for, has swept the column from the 
 tomb. The marble was broken by violent 
 hands, and the shattered sepulchre of the Prince 
 of Poets gained a dusty hospitality from the 
 museum of a country town. Better had been 
 the laurel of thy desire, the creeping vine, and 
 the ivy tree. 
 
 Scarce more fortunate, for long, than thy 
 monument was thy memoiy. Thou hast not 
 encountered, Master, in the Paradise of Poets, 
 Messieurs Malhcrbe, DC Balzac, and Boileau 
 Boileau who spoke of thec as Ce poltc orgiteilleux 
 trtbucht de si hant ! 
 
 These gallant gentlemen, I make no doubt,
 
 22 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 are happy after their own fashion, backbiting 
 each other and thee in the Paradise of Critics. 
 In their time they wrought thee much evil, 
 grumbling that thou wrotest in Greek and Latin 
 (of which tongues certain of them had but little 
 skill), and blaming thy many lyric melodies and 
 the free flow of thy lines. What said M. de 
 Balzac to M. Chapelain? "M. de Malherbe, 
 M. de Grasse, and yourself must be very little 
 poets, if Ronsard be a great one." Time has 
 brought in his revenges, and Messieurs Chape- 
 lain and De Grasse are as well forgotten as 
 thou art well remembered. Men could not 
 always be deaf to thy sweet old songs, nor 
 blind to the beauty of thy roses and thy loves. 
 When they took the wax out of their ears that 
 M. Boileau had given them lest they should 
 hear the singing of thy Sirens, then they were 
 deaf no longer, then they heard the old deaf 
 poet singing and made answer to his lays. 
 Hast thou not heard these sounds? have they 
 not reached thee, the voices and the lyres of 
 The"ophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset ? 
 Methinks thou hast marked them, and been 
 glad that the old notes were ringing again and
 
 PIERRE DE RONSARD. 23 
 
 the old French lyric measures tripping to thine 
 ancient harmonies, echoing and replying to the 
 Muses of Horace and Catullus. Returning to 
 Nature, poets returned to thee. Thy monument 
 has perished, but not thy music, and the Prince 
 of Poets has returned to his own again in a 
 glorious Restoration. 
 
 Through the dust and smoke of ages, and 
 through the centuries of wars we strain our eyes 
 and try to gain a glimpse of thee, Master, in 
 thy good days, when the Muses walked with 
 thee. We seem to mark thee wandering silent 
 through some little village, or dreaming in the 
 woods, or loitering among thy lonely places, or 
 in gardens where the roses blossom among 
 wilder flowers, or on river banks where the 
 whispering poplars and sighing reeds make 
 answer to the murmur of the waters. Such a 
 picture hast thou drawn of thyself in the 
 summer afternoons. 
 
 Je ra'cn vais pourmener tantost parmy la plaine, 
 Tantost en un village, ct tantost en un bois, 
 k"t tantost par les lieux solitaires et cois. 
 J'aime fort les jardins qui scntent le sauvagc, 
 J'aime le flot de 1'eau qui gazoiiillc au rivagc. 
 
 Still, methinks, there was a book in the hand
 
 34 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 of the grave and learned poet ; still thou 
 wouldst carry thy Horace, thy Catullus, thy 
 Theocritus, through the gem-like weather of 
 the Renouveau, when the woods were enamelled 
 with flowers, and the young Spring was lodged, 
 like a wandering prince, in his great palaces 
 hung with green : 
 
 Orgueilleux de ses fleurs, enfle* de sa jeunesse, 
 
 Loge comme un grand Prince en ses vertes maisons ! 
 
 Thou sawest, in these woods by Loire side, the 
 fair shapes of old religion, Fauns, Nymphs, and 
 Satyrs, and heard'st in the nightingale's music 
 the plaint of Philomel. The ancient poets 
 came back in the train of thyself and of the 
 Spring, and learning was scarce less dear to 
 thee than love ; and thy ladies seemed fairer 
 for the names they borrowed from the beauties 
 of forgotten days, Helen and Cassandra. How 
 sweetly didst thou sing to them thine old 
 morality, and how gravely didst thou teach the 
 \esson of the Roses ! Well didst thou know it, 
 veil didst thou love the Rose, since thy nurse, 
 carrying thee, an infant, to the holy font, let 
 fall on thee the sacred water brimmed with 
 floating blossoms of the Rose !
 
 PIERRE DE ROXSARD. 25 
 
 Mignonne, aliens voir si la Rose, 
 Qui ce matin avoit desclose 
 Sa robe de pourpre au soleil, 
 A point perdu ceste vespree 
 Les plis de sa robe pourpree, 
 Et son teint au votre pareiL 
 
 And again, 
 
 La belle Rose du Printemps, 
 Aubert, admoneste les hommes 
 Passer joyeusement le temps, 
 Et pendant que jeunes nous sommes, 
 Esbattre la fleur de nos ans. 
 
 In the same mood, looking far down the future, 
 thou sangest of thy lady's age, the most sad, 
 the most beautiful of thy sad and beautiful 
 lays ; for if thy bees gathered much honey 
 'twas somewhat bitter to taste, like that of the 
 Sardinian yews. How clearly we see the great 
 hall, the grey lady spinning and humming 
 among her drowsy maids, and how they waken 
 at the word, and she sees her spring in their 
 eyes, and they forecast their winter in her face, 
 when she murmurs "Twas Ronsard sang of 
 me." 
 
 Winter, and summer, and spring, how swiftly 
 they pass, and how early time brought thce his 
 sorrows, and grief cast her dust upon thy head.
 
 26 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Adieu ma Lyre, adieu fillettes, 
 Jadis mes douces amourettes, 
 Adieu, je sens venir ma fin, 
 Nul passetemps de ma jeunesse 
 Ne m'accompagne en la vieillesse, 
 Que le feu, le lict et le vin. 
 
 Wine, and a soft bed, and a bright fire : to this 
 trinity of poor pleasures we come soon, if, indeed, 
 wine be left to us. Poetry herself deserts us ; 
 is it not said that Bacchus never forgives a 
 renegade? and most of us turn recreants to 
 Bacchus. Even the bright fire, I fear, was not 
 always there to warm thine old blood, Master, or, 
 if fire there were, the wood was not bought with 
 thy bookseller's money. When autumn was 
 drawing in during thine early old age, in 1584, 
 didst thou not write that thou hadst never 
 received a sou at the hands of all the publishers 
 who vended thy books? And as thou wert 
 about putting forth thy folio edition of 1584, 
 thou didst pray Buon, the bookseller, to give 
 thee sixty crowns to buy wood withal, and 
 make thee a bright fire in winter weather, and 
 comfort thine old age with thy friend Gallan- 
 dius. And if Buon will not pay, then to try the 
 other booksellers, "that wish to take everything 
 and give nothing."
 
 PIERRE DE RONSARD. 2^ 
 
 Was it knowledge of this passage, Master, or 
 ignorance of everything else, that made 'certain 
 of the common steadfast dunces of our days 
 speak of thee as if thou hadst been a starveling, 
 neglected poetaster, jealous forsooth of Maitre 
 Fran^oys Rabelais? See how ignorantly M. 
 Fleury writes, who teaches French literature 
 withal to them of Muscovy, and hath indited a 
 Life of Rabelais. " Rabelais e"tait revetu d'un 
 emploi honorable ; Ronsard etait traite en 
 subalterne," quoth this wondrous professor. 
 What ! Pierre de Ronsard, a gentleman of a 
 noble house, holding the revenue of many 
 abbeys, the friend of Mary Stuart, of the Due 
 d'Orleans, of Charles IX., he is traitt en subal- 
 terne, and is jealous of a frocked or unfrocked 
 manant like Maitre Francoys ! And then this 
 amazing Fleury falls foul of thine epitaph on 
 Maitre Francoys and cries, " Ronsard a voulu 
 faire des vers mcchants ; il n'a fait que de me- 
 chants vers." More truly saith M. Sainte-Beuve, 
 "If the good Rabelais had returned to Meudon 
 on the day when this epitaph was made over the 
 wine, he would, methinks, have laughed heartily." 
 But what shall be said of a Professor like the
 
 28 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 egregious M. Fleury, who holds that Ronsard 
 was despised at Court ? Was there a party at 
 tennis when the king would not fain have had 
 thee on his side, declaring that he ever won 
 when Ronsard was his partner ? Did he not 
 give thee benefices, and many priories, and call 
 thee his father in Apollo, and even, so they say, 
 bid thee sit down beside him on his throne ? 
 Away, ye scandalous folk, who tell us that there 
 was strife between the Prince of Poets and the 
 King of Mirth. Naught have ye by way of proof 
 of your slander but the talk of Jean Bernier, a 
 scurrilous, starveling apothecary, who put forth 
 his fables in 1697, a century and a half after 
 Maitre Frangoys died. Bayle quoted this 
 fellow in a note, and ye all steal the tattle one 
 from another in your dull manner, and know 
 not whence it comes, nor even that Bayle would 
 none of it and mocked its author. With so 
 little knowledge is history written, and thus 
 doth each chattering brook of a " Life " swell 
 with its tribute " that great Mississippi of false- 
 hood," Biography. 1 
 
 1 Ronsard's epitaph for Rabelais was merely a translation 
 from the Greek Anthology.
 
 IV. 
 
 To Herodotus. 
 
 To Herodotus of Halicarnassus, greeting. 
 Concerning the matters set forth in your 
 histories, and the tales you tell about both 
 Greeks and Barbarians, whether they be true, or 
 whether they be false, men dispute not little but 
 a great deal. Wherefore I, being concerned to 
 know the verity, did set forth to make search in 
 every manner, and came in my quest even unto 
 the ends of the earth. For there is an island of 
 the Cimmerians beyond the Straits of Heracles, 
 some three days' voyage to a ship that hath a 
 fair following wind in her sails ; and there it is 
 said that men know many things from of old : 
 thither, then, I came in my inquiry. Now, the 
 island is not small, but large, greater than the 
 whole of Hellas ; and they call it Britain. In 
 that island the east wind blows for ten parts of
 
 30 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 the year, and the people know not how to cover 
 themselves from the cold. But for the other 
 two months of the year the sun shines fiercely, 
 so that some of them die thereof, and others 
 die of the frozen mixed drinks ; for they have 
 ice even in the summer, and this ice they put to 
 their liquor. Through the whole of this island, 
 from the west even to the east, there flows a 
 river called Thames : a great river and a 
 laborious, but not to be likened to the River of 
 Egypt. 
 
 The mouth of this river, where I stepped out 
 from my ship, is exceedingly foul and of an evil 
 savour by reason of the city on the banks. Now 
 this city is several hundred parasangs in circum- 
 ference. Yet a man that needed not to breathe 
 the air might go round it in one hour, in chariots 
 that run under the earth ; and these chariots are 
 drawn by creatures which breathe smoke and 
 sulphur, such as Orpheus mentions in his "Argo- 
 nautica," if it be by Orpheus. The people of 
 the town, when I inquired of them concerning 
 Herodotus of Halicarnassus, looked on me with 
 amazement, and went straightway about their 
 business namely, to seek out whatsoever new
 
 HERODOTUS. $l 
 
 thing is coming to pass all over the whole 
 inhabited world, and as for things old, they take 
 no keep of them. 
 
 Nevertheless, by diligence I learned that he 
 who in this land knew most concerning Hero- 
 dotus was a priest, and dwelt in the priests' city 
 on the river which is called the City of the Ford 
 of the Ox. But whether lo, when she wore a 
 cow's shape, had passed by that way in her 
 wanderings, and thence comes the name of that 
 city, I could not (though I asked all men I met) 
 learn aught with certainty. But to me, consider- 
 ing this, it seemed that lo must have come 
 thither. And now farewell to lo. 
 
 To the City of the Priests there are two 
 roads : one by land ; and one by water, follow- 
 ing the river. To a well-girdled man, the land 
 journey is but one day's travel ; by the river it 
 is longer but more pleasant; Now that river 
 flows, as I said, from the west to the east. And 
 there is in it a fish called chub, which they 
 catch ; but they do not eat it, for a certain 
 sacred reason. Also there is a fish called trout, 
 and this is the manner of his catching. They 
 build for this purpose great dams of wood,
 
 32 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 which they call weirs. Having built the weir 
 they sit upon it with rods in their hands, and a 
 line on the rod, and at the end of the line a 
 little fish. There then they "sit and spin in 
 the sun," as one of their poets says, not for a 
 short time but for many days, having rods in 
 their hands and eating and drinking. In this 
 wise they angle for the fish called trout ; but 
 whether they ever catch him or not, not having 
 seen it, I cannot say ; for it is not pleasant to me 
 to speak things concerning which I know not 
 the truth. 
 
 Now, after sailing and rowing against the 
 stream for certain days, I came to the City of 
 the Ford of the Ox. Here the river changes 
 his name, and is called Isis, after the name of the 
 goddess of the Egyptians. But whether the 
 Britons brought the name from Egypt or 
 whether the Egyptians took it from the Britons, 
 not knowing I prefer not to say. But to me it 
 seems that the Britons are a colony of the 
 Egyptians, or the Egyptians a colony of the 
 Britons. Moreover, when I was in Egypt I saw 
 certain soldiers in white helmets, who were 
 certainly British. But what they did there (as
 
 HERODOTUS. 33 
 
 Egypt neither belongs to Britain nor Britain to 
 Egypt) I know not, neither could they tell me. 
 But one of them replied to me in that line of 
 Homer (if the Odyssey be Homer's), " We have 
 come to a sorry Cyprus, and a sad Egypt." 
 Others told me that they once marched against 
 the Ethiopians, and having defeated them 
 several times, then came back again, leaving 
 their property to the Ethiopians. But as to the 
 truth of this I leave it to every man to form his 
 own opinion. 
 
 Having come into the City of the Priests, I 
 went forth into the street, and found a priest of 
 the baser sort, who for a piece of silver led me 
 hither and thither among the temples, discours- 
 ing of many things. 
 
 Now it seemed to me a strange thing that the 
 city was empty, and no man dwelling therein, 
 save a few priests only, and their wives, and 
 their children, who are drawn to and fro in 
 little carriages dragged by women. But the 
 priest told me that during half the year the city 
 was desolate, for that there came somewhat 
 called "The Long," or "The Vac," and drave 
 out the young priests. And he said that these 
 
 D
 
 31 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 did no other thing but row boats, and throw 
 balls from one to the other, and this they were 
 made to do, he said, that the young priests 
 might learn to be humble, for they are the 
 proudest of men. But, whether he spoke truth 
 or not I know not, only I set down what he 
 told me. But to anyone considering it, this 
 appears rather to jump with his story namely, 
 that the young priests have houses on the river, 
 painted of divers colours, all of them empty. 
 
 Then the priest, at my desire, brought me to 
 one of the temples, that I might seek out all 
 things concerning Herodotus the Halicarnassian, 
 from one who knew. Now this temple is not 
 the fairest in the city, but less fair and goodly 
 than the old temples, yet goodlier and more 
 fair than the new temples ; and over the roof 
 there is the image of an eagle made of stone 
 no small marvel, but a great one, how men came 
 to fashion him ; and that temple is called the 
 House of Queens. Here they sacrifice a boar 
 once every year ; and concerning this they tell a 
 certain sacred story which I know but will not 
 utter. 
 
 Then I was brought to the priest who had a
 
 HERODOTUS. 3 
 
 name for knowing most about Egypt, and the 
 Egyptians, and the Assyrians, and the Cappa- 
 docians, and all the kingdoms of the Great 
 King. He came out to me, being attired in a 
 black robe, and wearing on his head a square 
 cap. But why the priests have square caps I 
 know, and he who has been initiated into the 
 mysteries which they call " Matric " knows, but 
 I prefer not to tell. Concerning the square cap, 
 then, let this be sufficient. Now, the priest 
 received me courteously, and when I asked him, 
 concerning Herodotus, whether he were a true 
 man or not, he smiled, and answered " Abu 
 Goosh," which, in the tongue of the Arabians, 
 means " The Father of Liars." Then he went 
 on to speak concerning Herodotus, and he said 
 in his discourse that Herodotus not only told the 
 thing which was not, but that he did so wilfully, 
 as one knowing the truth but concealing it. 
 For example, quoth he, " Solon never went to 
 see Croesus, as Herodotus avers ; nor did those 
 about Xerxes ever dream dreams ; but Hero- 
 dotus, out of his abundant wickedness, invented 
 these things. 
 
 " Now behold," he went on, " how the curse of
 
 36 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 the Gods falls upon Herodotus. For he pretends 
 that he saw Cadmeian inscriptions at Thebes. 
 Now I do not believe there were any Cadmeian 
 inscriptions there : therefore Herodotus is most 
 manifestly lying. Moreover, this Herodotus 
 never speaks of Sophocles the Athenian, and 
 why not ? Because he, being a child at school, 
 did not learn Sophocles by heart : for the 
 tragedies of Sophocles could not have been 
 learned at school before they were written, nor 
 can any man quote a poet whom he never 
 learned at school. Moreover, as all those about 
 Herodotus knew Sophocles well, he could not 
 appear to them to be learned by showing that 
 he knew what they knew also." Then I thought 
 the priest was making game and sport, saying 
 first that Herodotus could know no poet whom 
 he had not learned at school, and then saying 
 that all the men of his time well knew this poet, 
 " about whom everyone was talking." But the 
 priest made little account of this, that Herodotus 
 and Sophocles were friends, which is proved for 
 that Sophocles wrote an ode in praise of Hero- 
 dotus. 
 
 Then he went on, and though I were to write
 
 HERODOTUS. 37 
 
 with a hundred hands (like Briareus, of whom 
 Homer makes mention) I could not tell you all 
 the things that the priest said against Hero- 
 dotus, speaking truly, or not truly, or sometimes 
 correctly and sometimes not, as often befalls 
 mortal men. For Herodotus, he said, was 
 chiefly concerned to steal the lore of those who 
 came before him, such as Hecataeus, and then to 
 escape notice as having stolen it. Also he said 
 that, being himself cunning and deceitful, 
 Herodotus was easily beguiled by the cunning 
 of others, and believed in things manifestly 
 false, such as the story of the Phoenix-bird. 
 
 Then I spoke, and said that Herodotus him- 
 self declared that he could not believe that 
 story ; but the priest regarded me not. And he 
 said that Herodotus had never caught a croco- 
 dile with cold pig, nor did he ever visit Assyria, 
 nor Babylon, nor Elephantine ; but, saying that 
 he had been in these lands, said that which was 
 not true. He also declared that Herodotus, 
 when he travelled, knew none of the Fat Ones 
 of the Egyptians, but only those of the baser 
 sort. And he called Herodotus a thief and a 
 beguiler, and "the same with intent to deceive,"
 
 38 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 as one of their own poets writes. And, to be 
 short, Herodotus, I could not tell you in one day 
 all the charges which are now brought against 
 you ; but 1 concerning the truth of these things, 
 you know, not east, but most, as to yourself 
 being guilty or nnocent. Wherefore, if you 
 have anything to show or set forth whereby you 
 may be relieved from the burden of these 
 accusations, now is the time. Be no longer 
 silent; but, whether through the Oracle of the 
 Dead, or the Oracle of Branchidae, or that in 
 Delphi, or Dodona, or of Amphiaraus at Oropus, 
 speak to your friends and lovers (whereof I am 
 one from of old) and let men know the very 
 truth. 
 
 Now, concerning the priests in the City of the 
 Ford of the Ox, it is to be said that of all men 
 whom we know they receive strangers most 
 gladly, feasting them all day. Moreover, they 
 have many drinks, cunningly mixed, and of 
 these the best is that they call Archdeacon, 
 naming it from one of the priests' offices. 
 Truly, as Homer says (if the Odyssey be 
 Homer's), " when that draught is poured into 
 the bowl then it is no pleasure to refrain."
 
 HERODOTUS. 39 
 
 Drinking of this wine, or nectar, Herodotus, I 
 pledge you, and pour forth some deal on the 
 ground, to Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in the 
 House of Hades. 
 
 And I wish you farewell, and good be with 
 you. Whether the priest spoke truly, or not 
 truly, even so may such good things betide you 
 as befall dead men.
 
 40 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS, 
 
 V. 
 
 Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope. 
 
 FROM mortal Gratitude, decide, my Pope, 
 Have Wits Immortal more to fear or hope ? 
 Wits toil and travail round the Plant of Fame, 
 Their Works its Garden, and its Growth their 
 
 Aim, 
 
 Then Commentators, in unwieldy Dance, 
 Break down the Barriers of the trim Pleasance, 
 Pursue the Poet, like Actaeon's Hounds, 
 Beyond the fences of his Garden Grounds, 
 Rend from the singing Robes each borrowed 
 
 Gem, 
 
 Rend from the laurel'd Brows the Diadem, 
 And, if one Rag of Character they spare, 
 Comes the Biographer, and strips it bare ! 
 
 Such, Pope, has been thy Fortune, such thy 
 
 Doom. 
 Swift the Ghouls gathered at the Poet's Tomb,
 
 POPE. 41 
 
 With Dust of Notes to clog each lordly Line, 
 Warburton, Warton, Croker, Bowles, combine ! 
 Collecting Cackle, Johnson condescends 
 To interview the Drudges of your Friends. 
 Thus though your Courthope holds your merits 
 
 high, 
 
 And still proclaims your Poems Poetry, 
 Biographers, un-Boswell-like, have sneered, 
 And Dunces edit him whom Dunces feared ! 
 
 "They say," "What say they?" Not in vain 
 
 You ask ; 
 
 To tell you what they say, behold my Task ! 
 " Methinks already I your Tears survey " 
 As I repeat " the horrid Things they say." l 
 
 Comes El n first : I fancy you'll agree 
 Not frenzied Dennis smote so fell as he ; 
 For El n's Introduction, crabbed and dry, 
 Like Churchill's Cudgel's a marked with Lie, and 
 Lie! 
 
 " Too dull to know what his own System meant 
 Pope yet was skilled new Treasons to invent ; 
 
 1 A'aftoffAe Lock. * In Mr. Hogarth's Caricatura.
 
 42 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 A Snake that puffed himself and stung his 
 
 Friends, 
 
 Few Lied so frequent, for such little Ends ; 
 His mind, like Flesh inflamed, 1 was raw and 
 
 sore, 
 And still, the more he writhed, he stung the 
 
 more! 
 
 Oft in a Quarrel, never in the Right, 
 His Spirit sank when he was called to fight. 
 Pope, in the Darkness mining like a Mole, 
 Forged on Himself, as from Himself he stole, 
 And what for Gary 11 once he feigned to feel, 
 Transferred, in Letters never sent, to Steele 1 
 Still he denied the Letters he had writ, 
 And still mistook Indecency for Wit. 
 His very Grammar, so De Quincey cries, 
 ' Detains the Reader, and at times defies ! ' " 
 
 Fierce El n thus : no Line escapes his Rage, 
 And furious Foot-notes growl 'neath every 
 
 Page: 
 
 See St-ph-n next take up the woful Tale, 
 Prolong the Preaching, and protract the Wail ! 
 
 1 Elwin's Pope, ii. 15.
 
 FOPE. 43 
 
 " Some forage Falsehoods from the North and 
 
 South, 
 But Pope, poor D 1, lied from Hand to 
 
 Mouth ; 1 
 
 Affected, hypocritical, and vain, 
 A Book in Breeches, and a Fop in Grain ; 
 A Fox that found not the high Clusters sour, 
 The Fanfaron of Vice beyond his power, 
 Pope yet possessed " (the Praise will make you 
 
 start) 
 " Mean, morbid, vain, he yet possessed a 
 
 Heart ! 
 
 And still we marvel at the Man, and still 
 Admire his Finish, and applaud his Skill : 
 Though, as that fabled Barque, a phantom 
 
 Form, 
 
 Eternal strains, nor rounds the Cape of Storm, 
 Even so Pope strove, nor ever crossed the 
 
 Line 
 That from the Noble separates the Fine ! " 
 
 The Learned thus, and who can quite reply, 
 Reverse the Judgment, and Retort the Lie? 
 
 1 "Poor Pope was always a hand-to-mouth liar.'' Peft, hy 
 Leslie Stephen, 139.
 
 41 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 You reap, in arm&d Hates that haunt your 
 
 Name, 
 Reap what you sowed, the Dragon's Teeth of 
 
 Fame : 
 
 You could not write, and from unenvious Time 
 Expect the Wreath that crowns the lofty 
 
 Rhyme, 
 
 You still must fight, retreat, attack, defend, 
 And oft, to snatch a Laurel, lose a Friend ! 
 
 The Pity of it ! And the changing Taste 
 
 Of changing Time leaves half your Work a 
 
 Waste ! 
 
 My Childhood fled your Couplet's clarion tone, 
 And sought for Homer in the Prose of Bohn. 
 Still through the Dust of that dim Prose 
 
 appears 
 
 The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of Spears ; 
 Still we may trace what Hearts heroic feel, 
 And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the Steel ! 
 But, ah, your Iliad seems a half-pretence, 
 Where Wits, not Heroes, prove their Skill in 
 
 Fence, 
 
 And great Achilles' Eloquence doth show 
 As if no Centaur trained him, but Boileau !
 
 POPE. 45 
 
 Again, your Verse is orderly, and more, 
 
 "The Waves behind impel the Waves before ; " 
 
 Monotonously musical they glide, 
 
 Till Couplet unto Couplet hath replied. 
 
 But turn to Homer ! How his Verses sweep ! 
 
 Surge answers Surge and Deep doth call on 
 
 Deep; 
 
 This Line in Foam and Thunder issues forth, 
 Spurred by the West or smitten by the North, 
 Sombre in all its sullen Deeps, and all 
 Clear at the Crest, and foaming to the Fall, 
 The next with silver Murmur dies away, 
 Like Tides that falter to Calypso's Bay ! 
 
 Thus Time, with sordid Alchemy and dread, 
 Turns half the Glory of your Gold to Lead ; 
 Thus Time, at Ronsard's wreath that vainly 
 
 bit- 
 
 Has marred the Poet to preserve the Wit, 
 Whose Knife cut cleanest with a poisoned 
 
 pain, 
 
 Who almost left on Addison a stain, 
 Yet Thou (strange Fate that clings to all of 
 
 Thine!) 
 When most a Wit dost most a Poet shine.
 
 46 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 In Poetry thy Dunciad expires, 
 
 When Wit has shot "her momentary Fires." 
 
 Tis Tragedy that watches by the Bed 
 
 " Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red," 
 
 And Men, remembering all, can scarce deny 
 
 To lay the Laurel where thine Ashes lie !
 
 VI. 
 
 To Lucian of Santosa fa. 
 
 IN what bower, oh Lucian, of your redis- 
 covered Islands Fortunate are you now reclin- 
 ing ; the delight of the fair, the learned, the 
 witty, and the brave ? In that clear and tran- 
 quil climate, whose air breathes of "violet and 
 lily, myrtle, and the flower of the vine," 
 
 " Where the daisies are rose-scented, 
 And the Rose herself has got 
 Perfume which on earth is not" 
 
 among the music of all birds, and the wind- 
 blown notes of flutes hanging on the trees, 
 methinks that your laughter sounds most silvery 
 sweet, and that Helen and fair Charmides are 
 still of your company. Master of mirth, and 
 Soul the best contented of all that have seen the 
 world's ways clearly, most clear-sighted of all 
 that have made tranquillity their bride, what
 
 48 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 other laughers dwell with you, where the crystal 
 and fragrant waters wander round the shining 
 palaces and the temples of amethyst ? 
 
 Heine surely is with you ; if, indeed, it was 
 not one Syrian soul that dwelt among alien 
 men, Germans and Romans, in the bodily 
 tabernacles of Heine and of Lucian. But he 
 was fallen on evil times and evil tongues ; while 
 Lucian, as witty as he, as bitter in mockery, as 
 happily dowered with the magic of words, lived 
 long and happily and honoured, imprisoned in 
 no " mattress-grave." Without Rabelais, with- 
 out Voltaire, without Heine, you would find, 
 methinks, even the joys of your Happy Islands 
 lacking in zest ; and, unless Plato came by your 
 way, none of the ancients could meet you in the 
 lists of sportive dialogue. 
 
 There, among the vines that bear twelve times 
 in the year, more excellent than all the vine- 
 yards of Touraine, while the song-birds bring 
 you flowers from vales enchanted, and the shapes 
 of the Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind- 
 woven raiment of sunset hues ; there, in a land 
 that knows not age, nor winter, midnight, nor 
 autumn, nor noon, where the silver twilight of
 
 LUCIAN OF S AMOS ATA. 49 
 
 summer-dawn is perennial, where youth does 
 not wax spectre-pale and die ; there, my Lucian, 
 you are crowned the Prince of the Paradise of 
 Mirth. 
 
 Who would bring you, if he had the power 
 from the banquet where Homer sings : Homer, 
 who, in mockery of commentators, past and to 
 come, German and Greek, informed you that he 
 was by birth a Babylonian ? Yet, if you, who 
 first wrote Dialogues of the Dead, could hear 
 the prayer of an epistle wafted to " lands indis- 
 coverable in the unheard-of West," you might 
 visit once more a world so worthy of such a 
 mocker, so like the world you knew so well of old. 
 
 Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your 
 sense and of your mockery ! Here, where faith 
 is sick and superstition is waking afresh ; where 
 gods come rarely, and spectres appear at five 
 shillings an interview ; where science is popular, 
 and philosophy cries aloud in the market-place, 
 and clamour does duty for government, and 
 Thais and Lais are names of power here, 
 Lucian, is room and scope for you. Can I not 
 imagine a new " Auction of Philosophers," and 
 what wealth might be made by him who bought
 
 50 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 these popular sages and lecturers at his estimate, 
 and vended them at their own ? 
 
 HERMES : Whom shall we put first up to 
 auction ? 
 
 ZEUS : That German in spectacles ; he seems 
 a highly respectable man. 
 
 HERMES : Ho, Pessimist, come down and let 
 the public view you. 
 
 ZEUS : Go on, put him up and have done with 
 him. 
 
 HERMES: Who bids for the Life Miserable, 
 for extreme, complete, perfect, unredeemable 
 perdition ? What offers for the universal ex- 
 tinction of the species, and the collapse of the 
 Conscious ? 
 
 A PURCHASER : He does not look at all a bad 
 lot. May one put him through his paces ? 
 
 HERMES : Certainly ; try your luck. 
 
 PURCHASER : What is your name ? 
 
 PESSIMIST: Hartmann. 
 
 PURCHASER : What can you teach me? 
 
 PESSIMIST : That Life is not worth Living. 
 
 PURCHASER : Wonderful 1 Most edifying ! 
 How much for this lot ? 
 
 HERMES: Two hundred pounds.
 
 LUC I AN OF S A A/OS ATA. 51 
 
 PURCHASER : I will write you a cheque for 
 the money. Come home, Pessimist, and begin 
 your lessons without more ado. 
 
 HERMES : Attention ! Here is a magnificent 
 article the Positive Life, the Scientific Life the 
 Enthusiastic Life. Who bids for a possible 
 place in the Calendar of the Future ? 
 
 PURCHASER: What does he call himself? he 
 has a very French air. 
 
 HERMES : Put your own questions. 
 
 PURCHASER : What's your pedigree, my Philo- 
 sopher, and previous performances ? 
 
 POSITIVIST : I am by Rousseau out of Catho- 
 licism, with a strain of the Evolution blood. 
 
 PURCHASER : What do you believe in ? 
 
 POSITIVIST : In Man, with a large M. 
 
 PURCHASER : Not in individual Man ? 
 
 POSITIVIST : By no means ; not even always 
 in Mr. Gladstone. All men, all Churches, all 
 parties, all philosophies, and even the other sect 
 of our own Church, are perpetually in the 
 wrong. Buy me, and listen to me, and you will 
 always be in the right. 
 
 PURCHASER : And, after this life, what have 
 you to offer me ?
 
 52 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 POSITIVIST : A distinguished position in the 
 Choir Invisible ; but not, of course, conscious 
 immortality. 
 
 PURCHASER : Take him away, and put up 
 another lot. 
 
 Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the 
 Darwinian, with his notions, and the Lotzian, 
 with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and 
 Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Abso- 
 lute which is a sort of a something, might all be 
 offered with their divers wares ; and cheaply 
 enough, Lucian, you would value them in this 
 auction : of Sects. "There is but one way to 
 Corinth," as of old ; but which that way may be, 
 oh master of Hermotimus ; we know no more 
 than he did" of old ; and still we find, of all philo- 
 sophies, that the Stoic route is most to be recom- 
 mended. But we have our Cyrenaics too, though 
 they are no longer "clothed in purple, and crowned 
 with flowers, and fond of drink and of female 
 flute-players." Ah, here too, you might laugh, 
 and fail to see where the Pleasure lies, when the 
 Cyrenaics are no "judges of cakes" (nor of ale, 
 for that matter), and are strangers in the Courts 
 of Princes. " To despise all things, to make use
 
 LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA. 53 
 
 of all things, in all things to follow pleasure 
 only : " that is not the manner of the new, if it 
 were the secret of the older Hedonism. 
 
 Then, turning from the philosophers to the 
 seekers after a sign, what change, Lucian, would 
 you find in them and their ways ? None ; they 
 are quite unaltered. Still our Peregrinus, and 
 our Peregrina too, come to us from the East, or, 
 if from the West, they take India on their way 
 India, that secular home of drivelling creeds, 
 and of religion in its sacerdotage. Still they 
 prattle of Brahmins and Buddhism ; though, 
 unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn 
 themselves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after the 
 Derby. We are not so fortunate in the demise 
 of our Theosophists ; and our police, less wise 
 than the Hellenodicae, would probably not 
 permit the Immolation of the Quack. Like 
 your Alexander, they deal in marvels and 
 miracles, oracles and warnings. All such bogy 
 stories as those of your " Philopseudes," and the 
 ghost of the lady who took to table-rapping 
 because one of her best slippers had not been 
 burned with her body, are gravely investigated 
 by the Psychical Society.
 
 54 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with 
 us the man without a tinge of letters, who 
 buys up old manuscripts "because they are 
 stained and gnawed, and who goes, for proof of 
 valued antiquity, to the testimony of the book- 
 worms." And the rich Bibliophile now, as in your 
 satire, clothes his volumes in purple morocco and 
 gay dorures, while their contents are sealed to him. 
 
 As to the topics of satire and gay curiosity 
 which occupy the lady known as " Gyp," and 
 M. HaleVy in his " Les Petites Cardinal," if you 
 had not exhausted the matter in your "Dia- 
 logues of Hetairai," you would be amused to 
 find the same old traits surviving without a 
 touch of change. One reads, in Halevy's French, 
 of Madame Cardinal and, in your Greek, of the 
 mother of Philinna, and marvels that eighteen 
 hundred years have not in one single trifle 
 altered the mould. Still the old shabby light- 
 loves, the old greed, the old luxury and squalor. 
 Still the unconquerable superstition that now 
 seeks to tell fortunes by the cards, and, in your 
 time, resorted to the sorceress with her magical 
 " bull-roarer " or turndun. 1 
 
 1 The Greek }6p$os, mentioned by Lucian and Theocritus, 
 was the magical weapon of the Australians the turndun.
 
 LUC IAN OF S AMOS ATA. 55 
 
 Yes, Lucian, we are the same vain creatures 
 of doubt and dread, of unbelief and credulity, 
 of avarice and pretence, that you knew, and 
 at whom you smiled. Nay, our very " social 
 question " is not altered. Do you not write, in 
 "The Runaways," "The artisans will abandon 
 their workshops, and leave their trades, when 
 they see that, with all the labour that bows 
 their bodies from dawn to dark, they make a 
 petty and starveling pittance, while men that 
 toil not nor spin are floating in Pactolus " ? 
 
 They begin to see this again as of yore ; but 
 whether the end of their vision will be a 
 laughing matter, you, fortunate Lucian, do not 
 need to care. Hail to you, and farewell 1
 
 56 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 VII. 
 
 To Maitre Frangoys Rabelais. 
 
 OF THE COMING OF THE COQCIGRUES. 
 
 MASTER, In the Boreal and Septentrional 
 lands, turned aside from the noonday and the 
 sun, there dwelt of old (as thou knowest, and as 
 Olaus voucheth) a race of men, brave, strong, 
 nimble, -and adventurous, who had no other care 
 but to fight and drink. There, by reason of the 
 cold (as Virgil witnesseth), men break wine 
 with axes. To their minds, when once they 
 were dead and gotten to Valhalla, or the place 
 of their Gods, there would be no other pleasure 
 but to swig, tipple, drink, and boose till the 
 coming of that last darkness and Twilight, 
 wherein they, with their deities, should do battle 
 against the enemies of all mankind ; which day 
 they rather desired than dreaded. 
 
 So chanced it also with Pantagruel and
 
 RABELAIS. 57 
 
 Brother John and their company, after they 
 had once partaken of the secret of the Dive 
 Bouteille. Thereafter they searched no longer ; 
 but, abiding at their ease, were merry, frolic, 
 jolly, gay, glad, and wise ; only that they always 
 and ever did expect the awful Coming of the 
 Coqcigrues. Now concerning the day of that 
 coming, and the nature of them that should 
 come, they knew nothing ; and for his part 
 Panurge was all the more adread, as Aristotle 
 testifieth that men (and Panurge above others) 
 most fear that which they know least. Now 
 it chanced one day, as they sat at meat, with 
 viands rare, dainty, and precious as ever Apicius 
 dreamed of, that there fluttered on the air a 
 faint sound as of sermons, speeches, orations, 
 addresses, discourses, lectures, and the like ; 
 whereat Panurge, pricking up his ears, cried, 
 "Methinks this wind bloweth from Midlothian," 
 and so fell a trembling. 
 
 Next, to their aural orifices, and the avenues 
 audient of the brain, was borne a very melan- 
 choly sound as of harmoniums, hymns, organ- 
 pianos, psalteries, and the like, all playing 
 different airs, in a kind most hateful to the
 
 SS LET7EKS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Muses. Then said Pan urge, as well as he 
 might for the chattering of his teeth : " May I 
 never drink if here come not the Coqcigrues ! " 
 and this saying and prophecy of his was true 
 and inspired. But thereon the others began 
 to mock, flout, and gird at Panurge for his 
 cowardice. " Here am I ! " cried Brother John, 
 " well-armed and ready to stand a siege ; being 
 entrenched, fortified, hemmed-in and surrounded 
 with great pasties, huge pieces of salted beef, 
 salads, fricassees, hams, tongues, pies, and a 
 wilderness of pleasant little tarts, jellies, pastries, 
 trifles, and fruits of all kinds, and I shall not 
 thirst while I have good wells, founts, springs 
 and sources of Bordeaux wine, Burgundy, wine 
 of the Champagne country, sack and Canary. 
 A fig for thy Coqcigrues ! " 
 
 But even as he spoke there ran up suddenly 
 a whole legion, or rather army, of physicians, 
 each armed with laryngoscopes, stethoscopes, 
 horoscopes, microscopes, weighing machines, 
 and such other tools, engines, and arms as they 
 had who, after thy time, persecuted Monsieur 
 de Pourceaugnac ! And they all, rushing on 
 Brother John, cried out to him, " Abstain !
 
 RABELAIS. 59 
 
 Abstain!" And one said, "I have well 
 diagnosed thee, and thou art in a fair way to 
 have the gout." "I never did better in my 
 days," said Brother John. "Away with thy 
 meats and drinks ! " they cried. And one said, 
 " He must to Royat ; " and another, " Hence 
 with him to Aix;" and a third, "Banish him 
 to Wiesbaden;" and a fourth, "Hale him to 
 Gastein ; " and yet another, " To Barbouille 
 with him in chains ! " 
 
 And while others felt his pulse and looked at 
 his tongue, they all wrote prescriptions for him 
 like men mad. " For thy eating," cried he that 
 seemed to be their leader, " No soup ! " " No 
 soup ! " quoth Brother John ; and those cheeks 
 of his, whereat you might have warmed your 
 two hands in the winter solstice, grew white as 
 lilies. "Nay! and no salmon, nor any beef nor 
 mutton ! A little chicken by times, but periculo 
 ttto I Nor any game, such as grouse, partridge, 
 pheasant, capercailzie, wild duck ; nor any 
 cheese, nor fruit, nor pastry, nor coffee, nor eau 
 de vie ; and avoid all sweets. No veal, pork, 
 nor made dishes of any kind." "Then what 
 may I eat?" quoth the good Brother, whose
 
 60 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 valour had oozed out of the soles of his sandals. 
 "A little cold bacon at breakfast no eggs," 
 quoth the leader of the strange folk, " and a 
 slice of toast without butter." "And for thy 
 drink " (" What ? " gasped Brother John)- 
 "one dessert-spoonful of whisky, with a pint 
 of the water of Apollinaris at luncheon and 
 dinner. No more ! " At this Brother John 
 fainted, falling like a great buttress of a hill, 
 such as Taygetus or Erymanthus. 
 
 While they were busy with him, others of the 
 frantic folk had built great platforms of wood, 
 whereon they all stood and spoke at once, both 
 men and women. And of these some wore 
 red crosses on their garments, which meaneth 
 " Salvation ; " and others wore white crosses, 
 with a little black button of crape, to signify 
 " Purity ; " and others bits of blue to mean 
 "Abstinence." While some of these pursued 
 Panurge others did beset Pantagruel ; asking 
 him very long questions, whereunto he gave 
 but short answers. Thus they asked : 
 
 Have ye Local Option here ? Pan. : What ? 
 
 May one man drink if his neighbour be not 
 athirst ? Pan. : Yea!
 
 RABELAIS. , 6| 
 
 Have ye Free Education ? Pan. : What ? 
 
 Must they that have, pay to school them that 
 have not ? Pan. : Nay ! 
 
 Have ye free land ? Pan. : What ? 
 
 Have ye taken the land from the farmer, and 
 given it to the tailor out of work and the candle- 
 maker masterless ? Pan. : Nay ! 
 
 Have your women folk votes ? Pan. : Bosh ! 
 
 Have ye got religion ? Pan. : How ? 
 
 Do you go about the streets at night, brawl- 
 ing, blowing a trumpet before you, and making 
 long prayers ? Pan. : Nay ! 
 
 Have you manhood suffrage ? Pan. : Eh ? 
 
 Is Jack as good as his master ? Pan : 
 Nay! 
 
 Have you joined the Arbitration Society ?- 
 Pan. : Quoy ? 
 
 Will you let another kick you, and will you 
 ask his neighbour if you deserve the same ? 
 Pan. : Nay 1 
 
 Do you eat what you list ? Pan. : Ay ! 
 
 Do you drink when you are athirst ? Pan. 
 Ay! 
 
 Are you governed by the free expression of 
 the popular will ? Pan. : How ?
 
 6a LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Are you servants of priests, pulpits, and 
 penny papers ? Pan : No ! 
 
 Now, when they heard these answers of 
 Pantagruel they all fell, some a weeping, some 
 a praying, some a swearing, some an arbitrating, 
 some a lecturing, some a caucussing, some a 
 preaching, some a faith-healing, some a miracle- 
 working, some a hypnotising, some a writing to 
 the daily press ; and while they were thus busy, 
 like folk distraught, " reforming the island," 
 Pantagruel burst out a laughing ; whereat they 
 were greatly dismayed ; for laughter killeth the 
 whole race of Coqcigrues, and they may not 
 endure it 
 
 Then Pantagruel and his company stole 
 aboard a barque that Panurge had ready in 
 the harbour. And having provisioned her well 
 with store of meat and good drink, they set 
 sail for the kingdom of Entelechy, where, having 
 landed, they were kindly entreated ; and there 
 abide to this day ; drinking of the sweet and 
 eating of the fat, under the protection of that 
 intellectual sphere which hath in all places its 
 centre and nowhere its circumference. 
 
 Such was their destiny ; there was their end
 
 RABELAIS. 63 
 
 appointed, and thither the Ccqcigrues can never 
 come. For all the air of that land is full of 
 laughter, which killeth Coqcigrues ; and there 
 aboundeth the herb Pantagruelion. But for 
 thee, Master Franc_oys, thou art not well liked 
 in this island of ours, where the Coqcigrues are 
 abundant, very fierce, cruel, and tyrannical. 
 Yet thou hast thy friends, that meet and drink 
 to thee, and wish thee well wheresoever thou 
 hast found thy grand pent-(tre.
 
 64 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 VIII. 
 To Jane Austen. 
 
 MADAM, If to the enjoyments of your 
 present state be lacking a view of the minor 
 infirmities or foibles of men, I cannot but think 
 (were the thought permitted) that your pleasures 
 are yet incomplete. Moreover, it is certain that 
 a woman of parts who has once meddled with 
 literature will never wholly lose her love for the 
 discussion of that delicious topic, nor cease to 
 relish what (in the cant of our new age) is 
 styled "literary shop." For these reasons I 
 attempt to convey to you some inkling of the 
 present state of that agreeable art which you, 
 madam, raised to its highest pitch of perfection. 
 
 As to your own works (immortal, as I believe), 
 I have but little that is wholly cheering to tell 
 one who, among women of letters, was almost 
 alone in her freedom from a lettered vanity.
 
 JANE AUSTEN. 65 
 
 You are not a very popular author: your 
 volumes are not found in gaudy covers on 
 every bookstall ; or, if found, are not perused 
 with avidity by the Emmas and Catherines of 
 our generation. 'Tis not long since a blow was 
 dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at 
 your character as an author by the publication 
 of your familiar letters. The editor of these 
 epistles, unfortunately, did not always take your 
 witticisms, and he added others which were too 
 unmistakably his own. While the injudicious 
 were disappointed by the absence of your ex- 
 quisite style and humour, the wiser sort were 
 the more convinced of your wisdom. In your 
 letters (knowing your correspondents) you gave 
 but the small personal talk of the hour, for 
 them sufficient ; for your books you reserved 
 matter and expression which are imperishable. 
 Your admirers, if not very numerous, include 
 all persons of taste, who, in your favour, are apt 
 somewhat to abate the rule, or shake off the 
 habit, which commonly confines them to but 
 temperate laudation. 
 
 'Tis the fault of all art to seem antiquated 
 and faded in the eyes of the succeeding genera- 
 
 F
 
 65 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 tion. The manners of your age were not the 
 manners of to-day, and young gentlemen and 
 ladies who think Scott "slow," think Miss 
 Austen "prim" and "dreary." Yet, even could 
 you return among us, I scarcely believe that, 
 speaking the language of the hour, as you 
 might, and versed in its habits, you would win 
 the general admiration. For how tame, madam, 
 are your characters, especially your favourite 
 heroines ! how limited the life which you knew 
 and described ! how narrow the range of your 
 incidents ! how correct your grammar ! 
 
 As heroines, for example, you chose ladies 
 like Emma, and Elizabeth, and Catherine : 
 women remarkable neither for the brilliance 
 nor for the degradation of their birth ; women 
 wrapped up in their own and the parish's con- 
 cerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and un- 
 acquainted with vain yearnings and interesting 
 doubts. Who can engage his fancy with their 
 match-makings and the conduct of their affec- 
 tions, when so many daring and dazzling 
 heroines approach and solicit his regard ? 
 
 Here are princesses dressed in white velvet 
 stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys ladies with
 
 JANE AUSTEN. 67 
 
 hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their 
 roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, 
 and even their husbands, very often, in figures 
 of some arithmetical importance. With these 
 are the immaculate daughters of itinerant 
 Italian musicians maids whose souls are un- 
 soiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, 
 and whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias 
 and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the 
 more admirable, because entirely derived from 
 loving study of the inexpensive collections 
 vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the 
 corner. When such heroines are wooed by the 
 nephews of Dukes, where are your Emmas and 
 Elizabeths? Your volumes neither excite nor 
 satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern 
 and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, 
 I learn, in the United States, as well as in 
 France and at home. 
 
 You erred, it cannot be denied, with your 
 eyes open. Knowing Lydia and Kitty so in- 
 timately as you did, why did you make of them 
 almost insignificant characters ? With Lydia 
 for a heroine you might have gone far ; and, 
 had you devoted three volumes, and the chief
 
 68 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 of your time, to the passions of Kitty, you 
 might have held your own, even now, in the 
 circulating library. How Lyddy, perched on 
 a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham ; 
 how, on her challenge, he climbed up by a 
 ladder to her side ; how they kissed, caressed, 
 swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, 
 in strange places, and finally eloped : all this 
 might have been put in the mouth of a jealous 
 elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not 
 have been less popular than several favourites 
 of our time. Had you cast the whole narrative 
 into the present tense, and lingered lovingly 
 over the thickness of Mary's legs and the soft- 
 ness of Kitty's cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness 
 of Wickham's whiskers, you would have left a 
 romance still dear to young ladies. 
 
 Or, again, you might entrance fair students 
 still, had you concentrated your attention on 
 Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henry Craw- 
 ford. These should have been the chief figures 
 of " Mansfield Park." But you timidly decline 
 to tackle Passion. " Let other pens," you write, 
 "dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious 
 subjects as soon as T can." Ah, there is the
 
 JANE AUSTEN. 69 
 
 secret of your failure! Need I add that the 
 vulgarity and narrowness of the social circles 
 you describe impair your popularity ? I scarce 
 remember more than one lady of title, and but 
 very few lords (and these unessential) in all 
 your tales. Now, when we all wish to be in 
 society, we demand plenty of titles in our 
 novels, at any rate, and we get lords (and very 
 queer lords) even from Republican authors, 
 born in a country which in your time was not 
 renowned for its literature. I have heard a 
 critic remark, with a decided air of fashion, 
 on the brevity of the notice which your cha- 
 racters give each other when they offer in- 
 vitations to dinner. "An invitation to dinner 
 next day was despatched," and this demonstrates 
 that your acquaintance "went out" very little, 
 and had but few engagements. How vulgar, 
 too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy 
 "keep his breath to cool his porridge." I blush 
 for Elizabeth ! It were superfluous to add that 
 your characters are debased by being invariably 
 mere members of the Church of England as 
 by law established. The Dissenting enthusiast, 
 the open soul that glides from Esoteric Buddhism
 
 70 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher 
 Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look 
 for in vain among your studies of character. 
 Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown 
 sound to you ; so how "can you help us in the 
 stress of the soul's travailings ? 
 
 You may say that the soul's travailings are 
 no affair of yours ; proving thereby that you 
 have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty 
 of the novelist. I only remember one reference, 
 in all your works, to that controversy which 
 occupies the chief of our attention the great 
 controversy on Creation or Evolution. Your 
 Jane Bennet cries : " I have no idea of there 
 being so much Design in the world as some 
 persons imagine." Nor do you touch on our 
 mighty social question, the Land Laws, save 
 when Mrs. Bennet appears as a Land Reformer, 
 and rails bitterly against the cruelty " of settling 
 an estate away from a family of five daughters, 
 in favour of a man whom nobody cared any- 
 thing about." There, madam, in that cruelly 
 unjust performance, what a text you had for 
 a tendenz-romanz. Nay, you can allow Kitty 
 to report that a Private had been flogged,
 
 JANE AUSTEN. 71 
 
 without introducing a chapter on Flogging in 
 the Army. But you formally declined to 
 stretch your matter out, here and there, "with 
 solemn specious nonsense about something 
 unconnected with the story." No "padding" 
 for Miss Austen ! In fact, madam, as you were 
 born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or 
 Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or 
 Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot 
 hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds 
 of a perplexed generation. Your heroines are 
 not passionate, we do not see their red wet 
 cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the manner 
 of our frank young Maenads. What says your 
 best successor, a lady who adds fresh lustre to 
 a name that in fiction equals yours ? She says 
 of Miss Austen : " Her heroines have a stamp 
 of their own. They have a certain gentle self- 
 respect and humour and hardness of heart. . . . 
 Love with them does not mean a passion as 
 much as an interest, deep and silent." I think 
 one prefers them so, and that Englishwomen 
 should be more like Anne Elliot than Maggie 
 Tulliver. "All the privilege I claim for my 
 own sex is that of loving longest when existence
 
 72 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 or when hope is gone," said Anne ; perhaps she 
 insisted on a monopoly that neither sex has all 
 to itself. Ah, madam, what a relief it is to 
 come back to your witty volumes, and forget 
 the follies of to-day in those of Mr. Collins and 
 of Mrs. Bennet ! How fine, nay, how noble is 
 your art in its delicate reserve, never insisting, 
 never forcing the note, never pushing the sketch 
 into the caricature! You worked, without 
 thinking of it, in the spirit of Greece, on a 
 labour happily limited, and exquisitely organ- 
 ised. " Dear books," we say, with Miss Thack- 
 eray "dear books, bright, sparkling with wit 
 and animation, in which the homely heroines 
 charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores 
 are enchanting."
 
 73 ) 
 
 IX. 
 
 To Master Isaak Walton. 
 
 FATHER ISAAK, When I would be quiet 
 and go angling it is my custom to carry in my 
 wallet thy pretty book, "The Compleat Angler." 
 Here, methinks, if I find not trout I shall find 
 content, and good company, and sweet songs, 
 fair milkmaids, and country mirth. For you 
 are to know that trout be now scarce, and 
 whereas he was ever a fearful fish, he hath 
 of late become so wary that none but the 
 cunningest anglers may be even with him. 
 
 It is not as it was in your time, Father, when 
 a man might leave his shop in Fleet Street, of 
 a holiday, and, when he had stretched his legs 
 up Tottenham Hill, come lightly to meadows 
 chequered with waterlilies and ladysmocks, and 
 so fall to his sport. Nay, now have the houses 
 so much increased, like a spreading sore 
 (through the breaking of that excellent law
 
 74 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 of the Conscientious King and blessed Martyr, 
 whereby building beyond the walls was for- 
 bidden), that the meadows are all swallowed up 
 in streets. And as to the River Lea, wherein 
 you took many a good trout, I read in the news 
 sheets that "its bed is many inches thick in 
 horrible filth, and the air for more than half 
 a mile on each side of it is polluted with a 
 horrible, sickening stench," so that we stand in 
 dread of a new Plague, called the Cholera. 
 And so it is all about London for many miles, 
 and if a man, at heavy charges, betake himself 
 to the fields, lo you, folk are grown so greedy 
 that none will suffer a stranger to fish in his 
 water. 
 
 So poor anglers are in sore straits. Unless 
 a man be rich and can pay great rents, he may 
 not fish in England, and hence spring the 
 discontents of the times, for the angler is full 
 of content, if he do but take trout, but if he 
 be driven from the waterside, he falls, perchance, 
 into evil company, and cries out to divide the 
 property of the gentle folk. As many now do, 
 even among Parliamentmen, whom you loved 
 not, Father Isaak, neither do I love them more
 
 1SAAK WALTON. 75 
 
 than Reason and Scripture bid each of us be 
 kindly to his neighbour. But, behold, the 
 causes of the ill content are not yet all ex- 
 pressed, for even where a man hath licence to 
 fish, he will hardly take trout in our age, unless 
 he be all the more cunning. For the fish, 
 harried this way and that by so many of your 
 disciples, is exceeding shy and artful, nor will 
 he bite at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just 
 above his mouth, and floateth dry over him, for 
 all the world like the natural epJiemeris. And 
 we may no longer angle with worm for him, 
 nor with penk or minnow, nor with the natural 
 fly, as was your manner, but only with the 
 artificial, for the more difficulty the more 
 diversion. For my part I may cry, like Viator 
 in your book, " Master, I can neither catch with 
 the first nor second Angle : I have no fortune." 
 So we fare in England, but somewhat better 
 north of the Tweed, where trout are less wary, 
 but for the most part small, except in the 
 extreme rough north, among horrid hills and 
 lakes. Thither, Master, as methinks you may 
 remember, went Richard Franck, that called 
 himself Philantkropus, and was, as it were, tlti
 
 76 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Columbus of anglers, discovering for them a 
 new Hyperborean world. But Franck, doubt- 
 less, is now an angler in the Lake of Darkness, 
 with Nero and other tyrants, for he followed 
 after Cromwell, the man of blood, in the old 
 riding days. How wickedly doth Franck boast 
 of that leader of the giddy multitude, "when 
 they raged, and became restless to find out 
 misery for themselves and others, and the rabble 
 would herd themselves together," as you said, 
 "and endeavour to govern and act in spite of 
 authority." So you wrote ; and what said 
 Franck, that recreant angler? Doth he not 
 praise "Ireton, Vane, Nevill, and Martin, and 
 the most renowned, valorous, and victorious 
 conqueror, Oliver Cromwell " ? Natheless, with 
 all his sins on his head, this Franck discovered 
 Scotland for anglers, and my heart turns to him 
 when he praises "the glittering and resolute 
 streams of Tweed." 
 
 In those wilds of Assynt and Loch Rannoch, 
 Father, we, thy followers, may yet take trout, 
 and forget the evils of the times. But, to be 
 done with Franck, how harshly he speaks of 
 thee and thy book. "For you may dedicate
 
 1SAAK WALTON. 77 
 
 your opinion to what scribbling putationer you 
 please ; the Compleat A ngler if you will, who 
 tells you of a tedious fly story, extravagantly 
 collected from antiquated authors, such as 
 Gesner and Dubravius." Again he speaks of 
 " Isaak Walton, whose authority to me seems 
 alike authentick, as is the general opinion of 
 the vulgar prophet," &c. 
 
 Certain I am that Franck, if a better angler 
 than thou, was a worse man, who, writing his 
 "Dialogues Piscatorial" or "Northern Memoirs" 
 five years after the world welcomed thy " Com- 
 pleat Angler," was jealous of thy favour with 
 the people, and, may be, hated thee for thy 
 loyalty and sound faith. But, Master, like a 
 peaceful man avoiding contention, thou didst 
 never answer this blustering Franck, but wentest 
 quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his 
 roaring Brora and windy Assynt. How could 
 this noisy man know thee and know thee he 
 did, having argued with thee in Stafford and 
 not love Isaak Walton ? A pedant angler, I 
 call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, 
 and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in 
 fishing for men.
 
 78 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 How often, studying in thy book, have I 
 hummed to myself that of Horace 
 
 Laudis amore tumes ? Sunt certa piacula qua te 
 Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello. 
 
 So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy 
 discourse on meadows, and pure streams, and 
 the country life. How peaceful, men say, and 
 blessed must have been the life of this old man, 
 how lapped in content, and hedged about by 
 his own humility from the world ! They forget, 
 who speak thus, that thy years, which were 
 many, were also evil, or would have seemed evil 
 to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes. Thou 
 wert poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for 
 greed of money was thy detestation. Thou 
 wert of lowly rank, in an age when gentle blood 
 was alone held in regard ; yet thy virtues made 
 thee hosts of friends, and chiefly among religious 
 men, bishops, and doctors of the Church. Thy 
 private life was not unacquainted with sorrow ; 
 thy first wife and all her fair children were 
 taken from thee like flowers in spring, though, 
 in thine age, new love and new offspring 
 comforted thee like "the primrose of the later 
 year." Thy private griefs might have made
 
 1SAAK WALTOX. 79 
 
 thee bitter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows 
 of the State and of the Church, which were 
 deprived of their heads by cruel men, despoiled 
 of their wealth, the pious driven, like thee, 
 from their homes ; fear everywhere, everywhere 
 robbery and confusion ; all this ruin might have 
 angered another temper. But thou, Father, 
 didst bear all with so much sweetness as 
 perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a 
 firm faith, nor the love of angling could alone 
 have displayed. For we see many anglers (as 
 witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are 
 angry men, and myself, when I get my hooks 
 entangled at every cast in a tree, have come 
 nigh to swear prophane. 
 
 Also we see religious men that are sour 
 and fanatical, no rare thing in the party that 
 professes godliness. But neither private sorrow 
 nor public grief could abate thy natural kindli- 
 ness, nor shake a religion which was not untried, 
 but had, indeed, passed through the furnace like 
 fine gold. For if we find not Faith at all times 
 easy, because of the oppositions of Science, and 
 the searching curiosity of men's minds, neither 
 was Faith a matter of course in thy day. For
 
 8o LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 the learned and pious were greatly tossed 
 about, like worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by doubts 
 wavering between the Church of Rome and the 
 Reformed Church of England. The humbler 
 folk, also, were invited, now here, now there, by 
 the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists, who 
 gave themselves out to be somebody, while 
 Atheism itself was not without many to witness 
 to it. Therefore, such a religion as thine was 
 not, so to say, a mere innocence of evil in the 
 things of our Belief, but a reasonable and 
 grounded faith, strong in despite of oppositions. 
 Happy was the man in whom temper, and 
 religion, and the love of the sweet country and 
 an angler's pastime so conveniently combined ; 
 happy the long life which held in its hand that 
 threefold clue through the labyrinth of human 
 fortunes ! Around thee Church and State 
 might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, 
 and thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy 
 triumph cruel. 
 
 Thus, by God's blessing, it befell thee 
 
 Nee turpem senectam 
 Degere, nee cithara carentem. 
 
 I would, Father, that I could get at the
 
 ISAAK WALTON. 81 
 
 verity about thy poems. Those recommenda- 
 tory verses with which thou didst grace the 
 Lives of Dr. Donne and others of thy friends, 
 redound more to the praise of thy kind heart 
 than thy fancy. But what or whose was the 
 pastoral poem of "Thealma and Clearchus," 
 which thou didst set about printing in 1678, 
 and gavest to the world in 1683 ? Thou gavest 
 John Chalkhill for the author's name, and a 
 John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Win- 
 chester, being eighty years of his age, in 1679. 
 Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as "a 
 friend of Edmund Spenser's," and how could 
 this be ? 
 
 Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill 
 was but a name of a friend, borrowed by thee 
 out of modesty, and used as a cloak to cover 
 poetry of thine own inditing? When Mr. 
 Flatman writes of Chalkhill, 'tis in words well 
 fitted to thine own merit : 
 
 Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows 
 Except himself, who charitably shows 
 The ready road to virtue and to praise, 
 The road to many long and happy days. 
 
 However it be, in that road, by quiet streams 
 
 G
 
 82 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 and through green pastures, thou didst walk all 
 thine almost century of years, and we, who 
 stray into thy path out of the highway of life, 
 we seem to hold thy hand, and listen to thy 
 cheerful voice. If our sport be worse, may our 
 content be equal, and our praise, therefore, none 
 the less. Father, if Master Stoddard, the great 
 fisher of Tweedside, be with thee, greet him for 
 me, and thank him for those songs of his, and 
 perchance he will troll thee a catch of our dear 
 River. 
 
 Tweed ! winding and wild ! where the heart is unbound, 
 They know not, they dream not, who linger around, 
 How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin 
 From thee the bliss withered within. 
 
 Or perhaps thou wilt better love, 
 
 The lanesome Tala and the Lyne, 
 
 And Manor wi* its mountain rills, 
 An' Etterick, whose waters twine 
 
 Wi' Yarrow frae the forest hills ; 
 An' Gala, too, and Teviot bright, 
 
 An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed, 
 Their kindred valleys a' unite 
 
 Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed ! 
 
 So, Master, may you sing against each other, 
 you two good old anglers, like Peter and 
 Corydon, that sang in your golden age.
 
 < 8 3 ) 
 
 X. 
 To M. Chapelain. 
 
 MONSIEUR, You were a popular poet, and 
 an honourable, over-educated, upright gentle- 
 man. Of the latter character you can never be 
 deprived, and I doubt not it stands you in better 
 stead where you are, than the laurels which 
 flourished so gaily, and faded so soon. 
 
 Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day, 
 But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not 
 May. 
 
 I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in 
 his botany, but your laurel certainly outlived not 
 May, nor can we hope that you dwell where 
 Orpheus and where Homer are. Some other 
 crown, some other Paradise, we cannot doubt it, 
 awaited un si bon homme. But the moral ex- 
 cellence that even Boileau admitted, la foi 
 thonneur, la probitf, do not in Parnassus avail 
 the popular poet, and some luckless Glatigny or
 
 84 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 The*ophile, Regnier or Gilbert, attains a kind of 
 immortality denied to the man of many con- 
 temporary editions, and of a great commercial 
 success. 
 
 If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet 
 was Made, you, Sir, should have been that 
 fortunately manfactured article. You were, in 
 matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers. 
 Never, since Adam's day, have any parents but 
 yours prayed for a poet-child. Then Destiny, 
 that mocks the desires of men in general, and 
 fathers in particular, heard the appeal, and pre- 
 sented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbiere his 
 wife with the future author of " La Pucelle." 
 Oh futile hopes of men, O pectora caca! All 
 was done that education could do for a genius 
 which, among other qualities, " especially lacked 
 fire and imagination," and an ear for verse sad 
 defects these in a child of the Muses. Your 
 training in all the mechanics and metaphysics 
 of criticism might have made you exclaim, like 
 Rasselas, " Enough ! Thou hast convinced me 
 that no human being can ever be a Poet." Un- 
 happily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal 
 Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your
 
 CHAPE LA IN. 85 
 
 powers, you received a pension of one thousand 
 crowns, and were made Captain of the Cardinal's 
 Minstrels, as M. de Treville was Captain of the 
 King's Musketeers. 
 
 Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good in- 
 tentions in poetry were more richly endowed 
 than ever is Research, even Research in Pre- 
 historic English, among us niggard moderns ! 
 How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or even, as you 
 did, a Prime Minister, who would praise and 
 pension me; but Envy be still ! Your existence 
 was made happy indeed ; you constructed 
 odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Hotel 
 Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still 
 young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious 
 celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished 
 Epic. " Who, indeed," says a sympathetic 
 author, M. Theophile Gautier, "who could ex- 
 pect less than a miracle from a man so deeply 
 learned in the laws of art a perfect Turk in 
 the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, 
 and so favoured by the great ? " Bishops and 
 politicians combined in perfect good faith to 
 advertise your merits. Hard must have been 
 the heart that could resist the testimonials of
 
 86 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 your skill as a poet offered by the Due de 
 Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of 
 Avranches, and Monseigneur Godeau, Bishop 
 of Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a 
 genius for finance. 
 
 If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers 
 skilled in finance, and some critics (Manage 
 and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), if ladies of birth 
 and taste, if all the world in fact, combined to 
 tell you that you were a great poet, how can we 
 blame you. for taking yourself seriously, and 
 appraising yourself at the public estimate ? 
 
 It was not in human nature to resist the 
 evidence of the bishops especially, and when 
 every minor poet believes in himself on the 
 testimony of his own conceit, you may be 
 acquitted of vanity if you, listened to the 
 plaudits of your friends. Nay, you ventured 
 to pronounce judgment on contemporaries whom 
 Posterity has preferred to your perfections. 
 " Moliere," said you, " understands the genius 
 of comedy, and presents it in a natural style. 
 The plot of his best pieces is borrowed, but not 
 without judgment ; his morale is fair, and he 
 has only to avoid scurrility."
 
 CHAPELAIN. 87 
 
 Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain ! 
 
 Of yourself you observed, in a Report on 
 contemporary literature, that your " courage and 
 sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work 
 not absolutely good." And yet you regarded 
 " La Pucelle " with some complacency. 
 
 On the " Pucelle " you were occupied during 
 a generation of mortal men. I marvel not at 
 the length of your labours, as you received a 
 yearly pension till the Epic was finished, but 
 your Muse was no Alcmena, and no Hercules 
 was the result of that prolonged night of 
 creation. First you gravely wrote out all the 
 composition in prose : the task occupied you 
 for five whole years. Ah, why did you not 
 leave it in that commonplace but appropriate 
 medium ? What says the Pre*cieuse about you 
 in Boileau's satire ? 
 
 In Chapelain, for all his foes have said, 
 
 She finds but one defect, he can't be read ; 
 
 Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden's woes, 
 
 If only he would turn his verse to prose ! 
 
 The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, 
 it should have remained. Yet for this precious 
 " Pucelle," in the age when " Paradise Lost "
 
 88 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 was sold for five pounds, you are believed to 
 have received about four thousand. Horace 
 was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and 
 then), and he was a wise man who first spoke 
 of aurea mediocritas". At length the great work 
 was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its 
 theme, that divine Maiden to whom France 
 owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have 
 recompensed so strangely. In folio, in italics, 
 with a score of portraits and engravings, and 
 cuts de lampe, the great work was given to 
 the world, and had a success. Six editions in 
 eighteen months are figures which fill the poetic 
 heart with envy and admiration. And then, 
 alas ! the bubble burst. A great lady, Madame 
 de Longueville, hearing the " Pucelle " read 
 aloud, murmured that it was " perfect indeed, 
 but perfectly wearisome." Then the satires 
 began, and the satirists never left you till your 
 poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest 
 Abbe at Menage's had his cheap sneer for 
 Chapelain. 
 
 I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy 
 had much to do with the onslaught on your 
 " Pucelle." These qualities, alas! are not strange
 
 CHAPELAIN. 89 
 
 to literary minds ; does not even Hesiod tell 
 us that "potter hates potter, and poet hates 
 poet " ? But contemporary spites do not harm 
 true genius. Who suffered more than Moliere 
 from cabals ? Yet neither the court nor the 
 town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy 
 of the world. I admit that his adversaries were 
 weaker than yours. What were Boursault and 
 Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De 
 Vise", what were they all compared to your 
 enemy, Boileau ? Brossette tells a story which 
 really makes a man pity you. You remember 
 M. de Puimorin, who, to be in the fashion, 
 laughed at your once popular Epic. " It is all 
 very well," said you, " for a man to laugh who 
 cannot even read." Whereon M. de Puimorin 
 replied : " Qu'il n'avoit que trop su lire, depuis 
 que Chapelain s'&oit avis6 de faire imprimer." 
 A new horror had been added to the accom- 
 plishment of reading since Chapelain had pub- 
 lished. This repartee was applauded, and M. dc 
 Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram. He 
 did complete the last couplet, 
 
 Helas ! pour mes pe'che's, je n'ai sfi que trop lire 
 Depuis que tu fais imprimer.
 
 90 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve 
 the first two lines of his epigram. Then you 
 remember what great allies came to his assist- 
 ance. I almost blush to think that M. 
 Despre"aux, M. Racine, and M. de Moliere, the 
 three most renowned wits of the time, con- 
 spired to complete the poor jest, and assail you. 
 Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be 
 proud that it needed all these sharpest of pens 
 to prick the bubble. Other poets, as popular 
 as you, have been annihilated by an article. 
 Macaulay put forth his hand, and " Satan 
 Montgomery " was no more. It did not need 
 a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little 
 critics was enough to blow him into space ; but 
 you probably have met Montgomery, and of 
 contemporary failures or successes I do not 
 speak. 
 
 I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus 
 of criticism ever made you doubt for a moment 
 whether, after all, you were not a false child of 
 Apollo ? Was your complacency tortured, as 
 the complacency of true poets has occasionally 
 been, by doubts ? Did you expect posterity to 
 reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do
 
 CHAPELA1N. 91 
 
 you justice ? You answered your earliest assail- 
 ant, Liniere, and, by a few changes of words, 
 turned his epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, 
 on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, 
 wrapped up in admiration of yourself. Accord- 
 ing to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am 
 doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you 
 " conceived, on the strength of your reputation, 
 a great and serious veneration for yourself and 
 your genius." Probably you were protected by 
 the invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, 
 probably you declared that mere jealousy dic- 
 tated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain's 
 real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary 
 success, 
 
 Qu'il soit le mieux rente de tous les beaux-esprits. 
 
 This, you would avow, was your offence, and 
 perhaps you were not altogether mistaken. 
 Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours, 
 and, as we think of you, we are again set face 
 to face with that eternal problem, how far is 
 popularity a test of poetry ? Burns was a poet : 
 and popular. Byron was a popular poet, and 
 the world agrees in the verdict of their own
 
 92 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 generations. But Montgomery, though he sold 
 so well, was no poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your 
 verse made of the stuff of immortality. Criti- 
 cism cannot hurt what is truly great ; the 
 Cardinal and the Academy left Chimene as 
 fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinch- 
 beck that perishes under the acids of satire : 
 gold defies them. Yet I sometimes ask myself, 
 does the existence of popularity like yours 
 justify the malignity of satire, which blesses 
 neither him who gives, nor him who takes ? 
 Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet ? I 
 doubt it, Sir, holding that, even unpricked, a 
 poetic bubble must soon burst by its own nature. 
 Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as 
 bad poets are successful, and bad poets will 
 assuredly reflect that their assailants are merely 
 envious, and (while their vogue lasts) that the 
 purchasing public is the only judge. After all 
 the bad poet who is popular and " sells " is not 
 a whit worse than the bad poets who are 
 unpopular, and who deride his songs. 
 
 Monsieur, 
 Votre tres-humble serviteur, &c.
 
 ( 93 ) 
 
 XL 
 To Sir John Maundeville, Kt. 
 
 (OF THE WAYS INTO YNDE.) 
 
 SIR JOHN, Wit you well that men holdcn 
 you but light, and some clepen you a "Liar. 
 And they say that you never were born in 
 Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, nor 
 have seen and gone through manye diverse 
 Londes. And there goeth an old knight at 
 arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath 
 been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester 
 John's country. And he hath been in an Yle 
 that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women 
 bearded. Now men call him Colonel Henry 
 Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great 
 booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. 
 For he saith that ye did pill your tales out 
 of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw 
 snails with shells as big as houses, nor never 
 met no Devyls, but part of that ye say, ye took
 
 94 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye 
 took not his wisdom, withal, but put in thine 
 own foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir John, for the 
 frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, 
 and a merry ; so now, come, let me tell you of 
 the new ways into Ynde. 
 
 In that Lond they have a Queen that 
 governeth all the Lond, and all they ben 
 obeyssant to her. And she is the Queen of 
 Englond ; for Englishmen have taken all the 
 Lond of Ynde. For they were right good 
 werryoures of old, and wyse, noble, and worthy. 
 But of late hath risen a new sort of Englishman 
 very puny and fearful, and these men clepen 
 Radicals. And they go ever in fear, and they 
 scream on high for dread in the streets and the 
 houses, and they fain would flee away from all 
 that their fathers gat them with the sword. 
 And this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean 
 folk and certain of the baser sort hear them 
 gladly, and they say ever that Englishmen 
 should flee out of Ynde. 
 
 Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by many 
 dyverse Contreyes. For Englishmen ben very 
 stirring and nymble, For they ben in the
 
 SIR JOHN MAUNDEV1LLE. 95 
 
 seventh climate, that is of the Moon. And the 
 Moon (ye have said it yourself, Sir John, nathe- 
 less, is it true) is of lightly moving, for to go 
 diverse ways, and see strange things, and other 
 diversities of the Worlde. Wherefore English- 
 men be lightly moving, and far wandering. And 
 they gon to Ynde by the great Sea Ocean. 
 First come they to Gibraltar, that was the point 
 of Spain, and builded upon a rock ; and there 
 ben apes, and it is so strong that no man may 
 take it Natheless did Englishmen take it fro 
 the Spanyard, and all to hold the way to Ynde. 
 For ye may sail all about Africa, and past the 
 Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way 
 unto Ynde is long and the sea is weary, 
 Wherefore men rather go by the Midland sea, and 
 Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea. 
 
 For first they have taken an Yle that is clept 
 Malta ; and therein built they great castles, to 
 hold it against them of Fraunce, and Italy, and 
 of Spain. And from this He of Malta Men gon 
 to Cipre. And Cipre is right a good Yle, and a 
 fair, and a great, and it hath 4 principal Cytees 
 within him. And at Famagost is one of the 
 principal Havens of the sea that is in the world,
 
 96 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 and Englishmen have but a lytel while gone 
 won that Yle from the Sarazynes, Yet say 
 that sort of Englishmen where of I told you, 
 that is puny and sore adread, that the Lond is 
 poisonous and barren and of no avail, for that 
 Lond is much more hotter than it is here. Yet 
 the Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there 
 in tents, and the skill is that they may ben the 
 more fresh. 
 
 From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, 
 and in a Day and a Night he that hath a good 
 wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie. 
 Now the Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, 
 yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of 
 Egypt. And when I say this, I do jape with 
 words, and may hap ye understond me not. 
 Now Englishmen went in shippes to Alessandrie, 
 and brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their 
 soudyours warred agen the Bedoynes, and all to 
 hold the way to Ynde. For it is not long past 
 since Frenchmen let dig a dyke, through the 
 narrow spit of lond, from the Midland sea to 
 the Red sea, wherein was Pharaoh drowned. 
 So this is the shortest way to Ynde there may 
 be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon by sea.
 
 SIR JOHN MAUNDEV1LLE. 97 
 
 But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale 
 enchaunted ; for no man may do his business 
 well that goes thither, but always fares he evil, 
 and therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale 
 perilous, and the sepulchre of reputations. And 
 men say there that is one of the entrees of 
 Helle. In that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold 
 and Silver, for many misbelieving men, and 
 many Christian men also, have gone often time 
 for to take of the Thresoure that there was of 
 old, and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore 
 there is none left. And Englishmen have let 
 carry thither great store of our Thresoure, 
 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they 
 will see it agen I misdoubt me. For that Vale 
 is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes that men 
 clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of 
 olde is the Lond of Bondage. And whatsoever 
 Thresoure cometh into the Lond, these Devyls 
 of Bondholders grabben the same. Natheless 
 by that Vale do Englishmen go unto Ynde, 
 and they gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at 
 the mouth of the Flood of Ynde. Thereby 
 they send their souldyours, when they are 
 adread of them of Muscovy. 
 
 H
 
 98 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 For, look you, there is another way into 
 Ynde, and thereby the men of Muscovy are fain 
 to come, if the Englishmen let them not. That 
 way cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from 
 the sea that is clept Caspian, even to Khiva, 
 and so to Merv ; and then come ye to Zulfikar 
 and Penjdeh, and anon to Herat, that is called 
 the Key of the Gates of Ynde. Then yd win 
 the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great 
 prince and a rich, and he hath in his Thresoure 
 more crosses, and stars, and coats that captains 
 wearen, than any other man on earth. 
 
 For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen 
 maken him gifts, and he keepeth the gifts, and 
 he keepeth his own counsel. For his lond lieth 
 between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, where- 
 fore both Englishmen and men of Muscovy 
 would fain have him friendly, yea, and inde- 
 pendent. Wherefore they of both parties give 
 him clocks, and watches, and stars, and crosses, 
 and culverins, and now and again they let cut 
 the throats of his men some deal, and pill his 
 country. Thereby they both set up their rest 
 that the Emir will be independent, yea, and 
 friendly. But his men love him not, neither
 
 JOHN MAUNDEVILLE. 99 
 
 love they the English, nor the Muscovy folk, 
 for they are worshippers of Mahound, and 
 endure not Christian men. And they love not 
 them that cut their throats, and burn their 
 country. 
 
 Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, and they 
 ben subtle for to make a thing seme otherwise 
 than it is, for to deceive mankind. Wherefore 
 Englishmen putten no trust in them of Muscovy, 
 save only the Englishmen clept Radicals, for 
 they make as if they loved these Develes, out 
 of the fear and dread of war wherein they go, 
 and would be slaves sooner than fight. But the 
 folk of Ynde know not what shall befall, nor 
 whether they of Muscovy will take the Lond, 
 or Englishmen shall keep it, so that their hearts 
 may not enduren for drede. And methinks 
 that soon shall Englishmen and Muscovy folk 
 put their bodies in adventure, and war one with 
 another, and all for the way to Ynde. 
 
 But St. George for Englond, I say, and so 
 enough ; and may the Seyntes hele thce, Sir 
 John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee 
 tormenten. But to thy Boke I list not to give 
 no credence.
 
 ico LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 XII. 
 
 To Alexandre Dumas. 
 
 SIR, There are moments when the wheels of 
 life, even of such a life as yours, run slow, and 
 when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the 
 most intrepid disposition. In such a moment, 
 towards the ending of your days, you said to 
 your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, "I seem to see 
 myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it 
 were founded on the sands." These sands, your 
 uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a 
 foundation more solid than the rock. As well 
 might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of 
 the " Arabian Nights," or the first inventors of 
 the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works 
 were perishable (their names, indeed, have 
 perished), as the creator of " Les Trois Mous- 
 quetaires " alarm himself with the thought that 
 the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas. 
 
 Than yours there has been no greater nor
 
 A LEX AND RE DUMAS. 101 
 
 more kindly and beneficent force in modern 
 letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first 
 impulse of your genius ; but, once set in motion, 
 what miracles could it not accomplish? Our 
 dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a super- 
 human burden ; but your imaginative strength 
 never found a task too great for it. What an 
 extraordinary vigour, what health, what an 
 overflow of force was yours ! It is good, in a 
 day of small and laborious ingenuities, to 
 breathe the free air of your books, and dwell 
 in the company of Dumas's men so gallant, so 
 frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and 
 such trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in 
 "Vingt Ans Apres," like that prisoner of the 
 Bastille, your genius "n'est que d'un parti, c'est 
 du parti du grand air." 
 
 There seems to radiate from you a still per- 
 sistent energy and enjoyment ; in that current 
 of strength not only your characters live, frolic, 
 kindly, and sane, but even your very colla- 
 borators were animated by the virtue which 
 went out of you. How else can we explain it, 
 the dreary charge which feeble and envious 
 tongues have brought against you, in England
 
 102 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 and at home ? They say you employed in your 
 novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in 
 the slang of the studio, the "sculptor's ghost" is 
 fabled to afford. 
 
 Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when un- 
 inspired by you, were faint and impotent as 
 " the strengthless tribes of the dead " in Homer's 
 Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the 
 blood that gave them a momentary valour. It 
 was from you and your inexhaustible vitality 
 that these collaborating spectres drew what life 
 they possessed ; and when they parted from 
 you they shuddered back into their nothingness. 
 Where are the plays, where the romances which 
 Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength ? 
 They are forgotten with last year's snows ; they 
 have passed into the wide waste-paper basket 
 of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when 
 severed from his three friends from Porthos, 
 Athos, and Aramis " he felt that he could do 
 nothing, save on the condition that each of these 
 companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, 
 a share of that electric fluid which was his gift 
 from heaven." 
 
 No man of letters ever had so great a measure
 
 ALEXANDRE DUMAS. 103 
 
 of that gift as you ; none gave of it more freely 
 to all who came to the chance associate of the 
 hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full- 
 blooded, who flocked from your brain. Thus it 
 was that you failed when you approached the 
 supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh 
 and blood, more than the living persons of 
 feebler fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, so 
 masterly in the ease with which he worked, 
 could not escape the reproaches of barren envy. 
 Because you overflowed with wit, you could not 
 be " serious ; " because you created with a word, 
 you were said to scamp your work ; because 
 you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable 
 of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, 
 inaccurate, and prodigal. 
 
 A generation suffering from mental and 
 physical anaemia a generation devoted to the 
 " chiselled phrase," to accumulated "documents," 
 to microscopic porings over human baseness, 
 to minute and disgustful records of what in 
 humanity is least human may readily bring 
 these unregarded and railing accusations. Like 
 one of the great and good-humoured Giants of 
 Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar,
 
 104 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse 
 the world to you who offer it the fresh air of 
 the highway, the battlefield, and the sea the 
 world must always return : escaping gladly from 
 the boudoirs and the bottges, from the surgeries 
 and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet 
 and M. Zola and of the wearisome De Goncourt 
 With all your frankness, and with that queer 
 morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a 
 camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, 
 how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are 
 your romances ! You never gloat over sin, nor 
 dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions 
 of sense. The passions in your tales are honour- 
 able and brave, the motives are clearly human. 
 Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold 
 cord, the clue your knights and dames follow 
 through how delightful a labyrinth of adven- 
 tures ! Your greatest books, I take the liberty 
 to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois (" La 
 Reine Margot," "La Dame de Montsoreau," 
 " Les Quarante-cinq "), and the Cycle of Louis 
 Treize and Louis Quatorze (" Les Trois Mous- 
 quetaires," "Vingt Ans Apres," "Le Vicomte 
 de Bragelonne") ; and, beside these two trilogies
 
 ALEXANDRE DUMAS. to$ 
 
 a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by 
 the three pyramids " Monte Cristo." 
 
 In these romances how easy it would have 
 been for you to burn incense to that great god- 
 dess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your 
 people worship. You had Brantome, you had 
 Tallemant, you had Retif, and a dozen others, 
 to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness 
 and of blood that would have outdone even the 
 present naturalistes. From these alcoves of 
 " Les Dames Gal antes," and from the torture 
 chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us 
 one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the 
 rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, 
 without a thought of their profitable literary 
 uses. You had other metal to work on : you 
 gave us that superstitious and tragical true love 
 of La Mole's, that devotion how tender and 
 how pure ! of Bussy for the Dame de Mont- 
 soreau. You gave us the valour of D'Artagnan, 
 the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility 
 of Athos : Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. 
 I declare your characters are real people to me 
 and old friends. I cannot bear to read the 
 end of " Bragelonne," and to part with them for
 
 Io6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 ever. " Suppose Porthos, Athos, and Aramis 
 should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling 
 their moustaches." How we would welcome 
 them, forgiving D'Artagnan even his hateful 
 fonrberie in the case of Milady. The brilliance 
 of your dialogue has never been approached : 
 there is wit everywhere ; repartees glitter and 
 ring like the flash and clink of small-swords. 
 Then what duels are yours ! and what inimitable 
 battle-pieces ! I know four good fights of one 
 against a multitude, in literature. These are 
 the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death of 
 Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the 
 Wake, the Death of Bussy d'Amboise. We 
 can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting- 
 times with those described in later days ; and, 
 upon my word, I do not know that the short 
 sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin, or 
 the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the 
 rapier of your Bussy or the sword and shield of 
 Kingsley's Hereward. 
 
 They say your fencing is unhistorical ; no 
 doubt it is so, and you knew it. La Mole could 
 not have lunged on Coconnas "after deceiving 
 circle ; " for the parry was not invented except
 
 ALEXAtiDRE DUMAS. to? 
 
 by your immortal Chicot, a genius in advance 
 of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes 
 would have fought with shields and axes, not 
 with small swords. But what matters this 
 pedantry ? In your works we hear the Homeric 
 Muse again, rejoicing in the clash of steel ; and 
 even, at times, your very phrases are uncon- 
 sciously Homeric. 
 
 Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of 
 St. Bartholomew, who flee in terror from the 
 Queen's chamber, and "find the door too 
 narrow for their flight : " the very words were 
 anticipated in a line of the "Odyssey" concern- 
 ing the massacre of the Wooers. And the 
 picture of Catherine de Medicis, prowling " like 
 a wolf among the bodies and the blood," in a 
 passage of the Louvre the picture is taken 
 unwittingly from the "Iliad." There was in 
 you that reserve of primitive force, that epic 
 grandeur and simplicity of diction. This is the 
 force that animates "Monte Cristo," the earlier 
 chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later 
 volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop 
 your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, 
 and less skill, to speak. "Antony," they tell
 
 io8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 me, was " the greatest literary event of its time," 
 was a restoration of the stage. " While Victor 
 Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the 
 wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charle- 
 magne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of 
 Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no 
 more than a room in an inn, where people meet 
 in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the last 
 degree of terror and of pity." 
 
 The reproach of being amusing has some- 
 what dimmed your fame for a moment. The 
 shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast ; 
 and when " La Curee " and " Pot-Bouille " are 
 more forgotten than " Le Grand Cyrus," men 
 and women and, above all, boys will laugh 
 and weep over the page of Alexandre Dumas. 
 Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our 
 childhood. I remember a very idle little boy 
 who was busy with the "Three Musketeers" 
 when he should have been occupied with " Wil- 
 kins's Latin Prose." "Twenty years after" 
 (alas ! and more) he is still constant to that 
 gallant company ; and, at this very moment, is 
 breathlessly wondering whether Grimaud will- 
 steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal's prison.
 
 XIII. 
 
 To Theocritus. 
 
 " SWEET, methinks, is the whispering sound 
 of yonder pine-tree," so, Theocritus, with that 
 sweet word aSu, didst thou begin and strike the 
 keynote of thy songs. " Sweet," and didst thou 
 find aught of sweet, when thou, like thy Daphnis, 
 didst "go down the stream, when the whirling 
 wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the 
 man not hated of the Nymphs " ? Perchance 
 below those waters of death thou didst find, 
 like thine own Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting 
 thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia with her 
 April eyes. In the House of Hades, Theocritus, 
 doth there dwell aught that is fair, and can the 
 low light on the fields of asphodel make thee 
 forget thy Sicily ? Nay, methinks thou hast not 
 forgotten, and perchance for poets dead there is 
 prepared a place more beautiful than their dreams. 
 It was well for the later minstrels of another 
 day, it was well for Ronsard and Du Bcllay to
 
 no LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 desire a dim Elysium of their own, where the 
 sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of 
 the earth, where the poplars are duskier, and the 
 waters more pale than in the meadows of Anjou. 
 There, in that restful twilight, far remote from 
 war and plot, from sword and fire, and from 
 religions that sharpened the steel and lit the 
 torch, there these learned singers would fain 
 have wandered with their learned ladies, satiated 
 with life and in love with an unearthly quiet. 
 But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the 
 Hollow Land was dear, but the high suns of 
 Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country 
 maidens were happiness enough. For thee, 
 therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium 
 beneath the summer of a far-off system, with 
 stars not ours and alien seasons. There, as 
 Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, 
 be with thee the whole year through, where 
 there is neither frost, nor is the heat so heavy 
 on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things 
 blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and 
 dawn. Space is wide, and there be many worlds, 
 and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had 
 a care of his own. Little didst thou need, in
 
 THEOCRITUS. in 
 
 thy native land, the isle of the three capes, little 
 didst thou need but sunlight on land and sea. 
 Death can have shown thee naught dearer than 
 the fragrant shadow of the pines, where the dry 
 needles of the fir are strewn, or glades where 
 feathered ferns make " a couch more soft than 
 Sleep." The short grass of the clifls, too, thou 
 didst love, where thou wouldst lie, and watch, 
 with the tunny watcher till the deep blue sea 
 was broken by the burnished sides of the tunny 
 shoal, and afoam with their gambols in the 
 brine. There the Muses met thee, and the 
 Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering his 
 old thraldom with Admetus, would lead once 
 more a mortal's flocks, and listen and learn, 
 Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas, 
 " didst sweetly sing." 
 
 There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy 
 days, "reclined on deep beds of fragrant lentisk, 
 lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript leaves 
 of the vine, while far above thy head waved 
 many a poplar, many an elm-tree, and close at 
 hand the sacred waters sang from the mouth of 
 the cavern of the nymphs." And when night 
 came, methinks thou wouldst flee from the merry
 
 112 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 company and the dancing girls, from the fading 
 crowns of roses or white violets, from the cotta- 
 bos, and the minstrelsy, and the Bibline wine 
 from these thou wouldst slip away into the 
 summer night. Then the beauty of life and of 
 the summer would keep thee from thy couch, 
 and wandering away from Syracuse by the sand- 
 hills and the sea, thou wouldst watch the low 
 cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods 
 of reed were leaning against the door, while the 
 Mediterranean floated up her waves, and filled 
 the waste with sound. There didst thou see 
 thine ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from 
 their bed of dry seaweed, and heardst them 
 stirring, drowsy, among their fishing gear, and 
 heardst them tell their dreams. 
 
 Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty 
 feet through the ways that the dust makes 
 silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were 
 driven forth with the morning, came fresh to 
 thee, and the trailing dewy branch of honey- 
 suckle struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou 
 wouldst see the Dawn awake in rose and saffron 
 across the waters, and Etna, grey and pale 
 against the sky, and the setting crescent would
 
 THEOCRITUS. M3 
 
 dip strangely in the glow, on her way to the sea. 
 Then, methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like 
 thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, " Fare- 
 well, Selene, bright and fair ; farewell, ye other 
 stars, that follow the wheels of the quiet Night." 
 Nay, surely it was in such an hour that thou 
 didst behold the girl as she burned the laurel 
 leaves and the barley grain, and melted the 
 waxen image, and called on Selene to bring her 
 lover home. Even so, even now, in the islands 
 of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the 
 prayers of maidens. "Bright golden Moon, 
 that now art near the waters, go thou and salute 
 my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed 
 me, saying ' Never will I leave thee.' And lo, 
 he hath left me as men leave a field reaped and 
 gleaned, like a church where none cometh to 
 pray, like a city desolate." 
 
 So the girls still sing in Greece, for though 
 the Temples have fallen, and the wandering 
 shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of 
 the god's house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires 
 burn still to the old divinities in the shrines of 
 the hearths of the peasants. It is none of the 
 new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian 
 
 I
 
 i[ 4 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 shepherds of our time, " Ah, light of mine eyes, 
 what gift shall I send thee, what offering to the 
 other world? The apple fadeth, the quince 
 decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals 
 of the rose. I will send thee my tears shed on 
 a napkin, and what though it burneth in the 
 flame, if my tears reach thee at the last." 
 
 Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these 
 shores beneath the sun, where thou didst wear 
 a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of he- 
 goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled 
 with a plaited belt. Thou wert happier there, 
 in Skily, methinks, and among vines and 
 shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, 
 and heat, and noise of Alexandria. What love 
 of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee away 
 from the red cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of 
 black water wreathed with maidenhair ? 
 
 The music of thy rustic flute 
 Kept not for long its happy country lone ; 
 
 Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note 
 Of men contention tost, of men who groan, 
 
 Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat- 
 It failed, and thou wast mute ! 
 
 What hadst thou to make in cities, and what 
 could Ptolemies and Princes give thee better
 
 THEOCRITUS. 115 
 
 than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine ? 
 Thy Muses were meant to be the delight of 
 peaceful men, not of tyrants and wealthy mer- 
 chants, to whom they vainly went on a begging 
 errand. "Who will open his door and gladly 
 receive our Muses within his house, who is there 
 that will not send them back again without a 
 gift? And they with naked feet and looks 
 askance come homewards, and sorely they up- 
 braid me when they have gone on a vain journey, 
 and listless again in the bottom of their empty 
 coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their 
 chilly knees, where is their drear abode when 
 portionless they return." How far happier was 
 the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant 
 cedar chest where the blunt-faced bees from the 
 meadow fed him with food of tender flowers, 
 because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on 
 his lips ! 
 
 Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, 
 and the oaks of Himera, the galingalc hummed 
 over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her 
 cones, and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca 
 with her feet of carven ivory. Thou soughtcst 
 the City, and strife with other singers, and the
 
 116 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 learned write still on thy quarrels with Apol- 
 lonius and Callimachus, and Antagoras of 
 Rhodes. So ancient are the hatreds of poets, 
 envy, jealousy, and all unkindness. 
 
 Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach 
 thy rural song, though all these centuries, more 
 than two thousand years, they have laboured to 
 vie with thee. There has come no new pastoral 
 poet, though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and 
 Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup 
 time ; and all the modish swains of France have 
 sung against thee, as the soiv challenged Athene. 
 They never knew the shepherd's life, the long 
 winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the 
 long summer days, when over the parched grass 
 all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the 
 shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains 
 in high-heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in 
 rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all 
 concerning them, save their images in porcelain, 
 effigies how unlike thy golden figures, dedicate 
 to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus ! Some- 
 what, Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou 
 that first of men brought the shepherd to Court, 
 and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with 
 the shepherds.
 
 XIV. 
 To Edgar Allan Poe, 
 
 SlR, Your English readers, better acquainted 
 with your poems and romances than with your 
 criticisms, have long wondered at the inde- 
 fatigable hatred which pursues your memory. 
 You, who knew the men, will not marvel that 
 certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your 
 own generation, still harass your name with 
 their malevolence, while old women twitter out 
 their incredible and unheeded slanders in the 
 literary papers of New York. But their per- 
 sistent animosity does not quite suffice to 
 explain the dislike with which many American 
 critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps the 
 greatest literary genius, of their country. With 
 a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to 
 rate native merit too low ; and you, I think, are 
 the only example of an American prophet almost 
 without honour in his own country.
 
 nS 
 
 The recent publication of a cold, careful, and 
 in many respects admirable study of your career 
 (" Edgar Allan Poe," by George Woodberry : 
 Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds 
 English readers who have forgotten it, and 
 teaches those who never knew it, that you were, 
 unfortunately, a Reviewer. How unhappy were 
 the necessities, how deplorable the vein, that 
 compelled or seduced a man of your eminence 
 into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary 
 criticism ! About the writers of his own genera- 
 tion a leader of that generation should hold his 
 peace. He should neither praise nor blame nor 
 defend his equals ; he should not strike one blow 
 at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The breath 
 of their life is in the columns of " Literary 
 Gossip ; " and they should be allowed to perish 
 with the weekly advertisements on which they 
 pasture. Reviewing, of course, there must needs 
 be ; but great minds should only criticise the 
 great who have passed beyond the reach of 
 eulogy or fault-finding. 
 
 Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined 
 to make you a censor ; you vexed a continent, 
 and you are still unforgiven. What " irritation
 
 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 119 
 
 of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite 
 sense of wrong," drove you (in Mr. Longfellow's 
 own words) to attack his pure and beneficent 
 Muse we may never ascertain. But Mr. Long- 
 fellow forgave you easily ; for pardon comes 
 easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the 
 Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not 
 how to forget. "The New Yorkers never for- 
 gave him," says your latest biographer ; and one 
 scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of their 
 malice. It was not individual vanity alone, but 
 the whole literary class that you assailed. " As 
 a literary people," you wrote, " we are one vast 
 perambulating humbug." After that declaration 
 of war you died, and left your reputation to the 
 vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They 
 are writhing and writing still. He who knows 
 them need not linger over the attacks and 
 defences of your personal character ; he will not 
 waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing, private 
 letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so 
 long in settling above your tomb. 
 
 For us it is enough to know that you were 
 compelled to live by your pen, and that in an 
 age when the author of " To Helen " and " The
 
 120 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Cask of Amontillado " was paid at the rate of a 
 dollar a column. When such poverty was the 
 mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep 
 than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chat- 
 terton's, were inevitable and assured. No man 
 was less fortunate than you in the moment of 
 his birth infelix opportunitate vita. Had you 
 lived a generation later, honour, wealth, applause, 
 success in Europe and at home, would all have 
 been yours. Within thirty years so great a 
 change has passed over the profession of letters 
 in America ; and it is impossible to estimate the 
 rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, 
 had chance made him the contemporary of Mark 
 Twain and of " Called Back." It may be that 
 your criticisms helped to bring in the new era, 
 and to lift letters out of the reach of quite un- 
 lettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at 
 least you had a respect for scholarship. You 
 might still marvel over such words as "objec- 
 tional " in the new biography of yourself, and 
 might ask what is meant by such a sentence as 
 " his connection with it had inured to his own 
 benefit by the frequent puffs of himself," and so 
 forth.
 
 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 121 
 
 Best known in your own day as a critic, it is 
 as a poet and a writer of short tales that you 
 must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate 
 poems is a waste of time, so completely does 
 your own brief definition of poetry, " the rhythmic 
 creation of the beautiful," exhaust your theory, 
 and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the 
 poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the 
 example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make 
 you too intolerant of what you call the " didactic " 
 clement in verse. Even if morality be not seven- 
 eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at 
 present estimated), there was a place even on 
 the Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and 
 theirs in the nature of the case must always be 
 the largest public. 
 
 " Music is the perfection of the soul or the 
 idea of poetry," so you wrote ; " the vagueness 
 of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which 
 should be indefinite and never too strongly 
 suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at 
 in poetry." You aimed at that mark, and struck 
 it again and again, notably in " Helen, thy beauty 
 is to me," in "The Haunted Palace," "The 
 Valley of Unrest," and " The City in the Sea."
 
 122 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, 
 have been foreseen, you are, to the world, the 
 poet of one poem " The Raven : " a piece in 
 which the music is highly artificial, and the 
 " exaltation " (what there is of It) by no means 
 particularly "vague." So a portion of the 
 public know little of Shelley but the "Sky- 
 lark/ and those two incongruous birds, the lark 
 and the raven, bear each of them a poet's 
 name, vtvu' per era vinim. Your theory of 
 poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the 
 author of " Kubla Khan ") the foremost of the 
 poets of the world ; at no long distance would 
 come Mr. William Morris as he was when he 
 wrote " Golden Wings," " The Blue Closet," and 
 " The Sailing of the Sword ; " and, close up, 
 Mr. Lear, the author of "The Yongi Bongi 
 Bo," and the lay of the " Jumblies." 
 
 On the other hand Homer would sink into 
 the limbo to which you consigned Moliere. If 
 we may judge a theory by its results, when 
 compared with the deliberate verdict of the 
 world, your aesthetic does not seem to hold 
 water. The " Odyssey " is not really inferior 
 to " Ulalume," as it ought to be if your doctrine
 
 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 123 
 
 of poetry were correct, nor " Le Festin de Pierre " 
 to "Undine." Yet you deserve the praise of 
 having been constant, in your ppetic practice, 
 to your poetic principles principles commonly 
 deserted by poets who, like Wordsworth, have 
 published their aesthetic system. Your pieces 
 are few ; and Dr. Johnson would have called 
 you, like Fielding, " a barren rascal." But how 
 can a writer's verses be numerous if with him, 
 as with you, "poetry is not a pursuit but a 
 passion . . . which cannot at will be excited 
 with an eye to the paltry compensations or the 
 more paltry commendations of mankind ! " Of 
 you it may be said, more truly than Shelley 
 said it of himself, that " to ask you for anything 
 human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg 
 of mutton." 
 
 Humanity must always be, to the majority of 
 men, the trus stuff of poetry; and only a 
 minority will thank you for that rare music 
 which (like the strains of the fiddler in the 
 story) is touched on a single string, and on an 
 instrument fashioned from the spoils of the 
 grave. You chose, or you were destined 
 
 To vary from the kindly race of men ;
 
 124 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 and the consequences, which wasted your life, 
 pursue your reputation. 
 
 For your stories has been reserved a boundless 
 popularity, and that highest success the success 
 of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By this 
 time, of course, you have made the acquaintance 
 of your translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, who 
 so strenuously shared your views about Mr. 
 Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who 
 so energetically resisted all those ideas of " pro- 
 gress " which " came from Hell or Boston." On 
 this point, however, the world continues to 
 differ from you and M. Baudelaire, and perhaps 
 there is only the choice between our optimism 
 and universal suicide or universal opium-eating. 
 But to discuss your ultimate ideas is perhaps 
 a profitless digression from the topic of your 
 prose romances. 
 
 An English critic (probably a Northerner at 
 heart) has described them as " Hawthorne and 
 delirium tremens." I am not aware that extreme 
 orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked 
 progress towards a predetermined effect are 
 characteristics of the visions of delirium. If 
 they be, then there is a deal of truth in the
 
 EDGAR ALLAN FOE. 12 j 
 
 criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens 
 in your style. But your ingenuity, your com- 
 pleteness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy 
 and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, 
 gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his command. 
 He was a great writer the greatest writer in 
 prose fiction whom America has produced. But 
 you and he have not much in common, except 
 a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for 
 gloomy allegories about the workings of con- 
 science. 
 
 I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the 
 latest essays of American fiction. These by no 
 means follow in the lines which you laid down 
 about brevity and the steady working to one 
 single effect Probably you would not be very 
 tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) 
 of Mr. Roe, now your countrymen's favourite 
 novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he is 
 eminently uninspired. In the works of one 
 who is, not what you once called yourself, a 
 Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the 
 acute observation, the subtlety, and the un- 
 failing distinction. But, destitute of humour 
 as you unhappily but undeniably were, you
 
 126 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 would miss, I fear, the charm of " Daisy Miller." 
 You would admit the unity of effect secured 
 in "Washington Square," thought that effect is 
 as remote as possible from the terror of " The 
 House of Usher" or the vindictive triumph of 
 " The Cask of Amontillado." 
 
 Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary 
 spirit : a genius tethered to the hack-work of 
 the press, a gentleman among canaille? a poet 
 among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's 
 taste without a scholar's training, embittered 
 by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by 
 his consolations. 
 
 1 No reference, of course, is intended to the great American 
 writers of Foe's day, but to the lower set of hacks who were 
 his enemies.
 
 XV. 
 To Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 
 
 Rodono, St. Mary's Loch : 
 Sept. 8, 1885. 
 
 SIR, In your biography it is recorded that 
 you not only won the favour of all men and 
 women ; but that a domestic fowl conceived 
 an affection for you, and that a pig, by his will, 
 had never been severed from your company. 
 If some Circe had repeated in my case her 
 favourite miracle of turning mortals into swine, 
 and had given me a choice, into that fortunate 
 pig, blessed among his race, would I have been 
 converted ! You, almost alone among men of 
 letters, still, like a living friend, win and charm 
 us out of the past ; and if one might call up a 
 poet, as the scholiast tried to call Homer, from 
 the shades, who would not, out of all the rest,
 
 128 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 demand some hours of your society ? Who 
 that ever meddled with letters, what child of 
 the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your 
 simple manliness, of the heart that never knew 
 a touch of jealousy, that envied no man his 
 laurels, that took honour and wealth as they 
 came, but never would have deplored them had 
 you missed both and remained but the Border 
 sportsman and the Border antiquary ? 
 
 Were the word " genial " not so much pro- 
 faned, were it not misused in easy good-nature, 
 to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that 
 worn old term might be applied, above all men, 
 to " the Shirra." But perhaps we scarcely need 
 a word (it would be seldom in use) for a cha- 
 racter so rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility 
 and charm as that of Walter Scott. Here, in 
 the heart of your own country, among your own 
 grey round-shouldered hills (each so like the 
 other that the shadow of one falling on its 
 neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour's 
 shape), it is of you and of your works that a 
 native of the Forest is most frequently brought 
 in mind. All the spirits of the river and the 
 hill, all the dying refrains of ballad and the
 
 WALTER SCOTT. 129 
 
 fading echoes of story, all the memory of the 
 wild past, each legend of burn and loch, sem 
 to have combined to inform your spirit, and to 
 secure themselves an immortal life in your song. 
 It is through you that we remember them ; and 
 in recalling them, as in treading each hillside 
 in this land, we again remember you and bless 
 you. 
 
 It is not "Sixty Years Since" the echo of 
 Tweed among his pebbles fell for the last time 
 on your ear ; not sixty years since, and how 
 much is altered ! But two generations have 
 passed ; the lad who used to ride from Edin- 
 burgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for 
 you, and old, is still vending, in George Street, 
 old books and new. Of politics I have not the 
 heart to speak. Little joy would you have had 
 in most that has befallen since the Reform Bill 
 was passed, to the chivalrous cry of " burke Sir 
 Walter." We are still very Radical in the 
 Forest, and you were taken away from many 
 evils to come. How would the cheek of Walter 
 Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed at the names 
 of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and many 
 others that recall political cowardice or military 
 
 K
 
 T30 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 incapacity ! On the other hand, who but you 
 could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or wedded 
 with immortal verse the names of Hamilton 
 (who fell with Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, 
 of many another clansman, brave among the 
 bravest ! Only he who told how 
 
 The stubborn spearmen still made good 
 Their dark impenetrable wood 
 
 could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms 
 in which, as at M'Neill's Zareba and at Abu 
 Klea, 
 
 Groom fought like noble, squire like knight, 
 As fearlessly and well. 
 
 Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, 
 and the voting classes may forget that they are 
 Britons ; but when it comes to blows our fighting 
 men might cry, with Leyden, 
 
 My name is little Jock Elliot, 
 And wha daur meddle wi' me ! 
 
 Much is changed, in the country-side as well as 
 in the country ; but much remains. The little 
 towns of your time are populous and excessively 
 black with the smoke of factories not, I fear, 
 at present very flourishing. In Galashiels you
 
 SJX WALTER SCOTT. 131 
 
 still see the little change-house and the cluster 
 of cottages round the Laird's lodge, like the 
 clachan of Tully Veolan. But these plain 
 remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost 
 buried in a multitude of " smoky dwarf houses " 
 a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has found 
 the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for 
 all. All over the Forest the waters are dirty 
 and poisoned : I think they are filthiest below 
 Hawick ; but this may be mere local prejudice 
 in a Selkirk man. To keep them clean costs 
 money ; and, though improvements are often 
 promised, I cannot see much change for the 
 better. Abbotsford, luckily, is above Galashiels, 
 and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk, 
 Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen. On the 
 other hand, your ill-omened later dwelling, "the 
 unhappy palace of your race," is overlooked by 
 villas that prick a cockney ear among their 
 larches, hotels of the future. Ah, Sir, Scotland 
 is a strange place. Whisky is exiled from some 
 of our caravanserais, and they have banished 
 Sir John Barleycorn. It seems as if the views 
 of the excellent critic (who wrote your life 
 lately, and said you had left no descendants,
 
 132 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 le pauvre homme !} were beginning to prevail. 
 This pious biographer was greatly shocked by 
 that capital story about the keg of whisky that 
 arrived at the Liddesdale farmer's during family 
 prayers. Your Toryism also was an offence 
 to him. 
 
 Among these vicissitudes of things and the 
 overthrow of customs, let us be thankful that, 
 beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the 
 Border country remains as kind and homely 
 as ever. I looked at Ashiestiel some days ago : 
 the house seemed just as it may have been 
 when you left it for Abbotsford, only there was 
 a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the 
 opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the 
 crest with turnips, and the burn did not sing 
 below the little bridge, for in this arid summer 
 the burn was dry. But there was still a grilse 
 that rose to a big March brown in the shrunken 
 stream below Elibank. This may not interest 
 you, who styled yourself 
 
 No fisher, 
 
 Bui a well-wisher 
 
 To the game ! 
 
 Still, as when you were thinking over Mar-
 
 WALTER SCOTT. 133 
 
 mion, a man might have " grand gallops among 
 the hills " those grave wastes of heather and 
 bent that sever all the watercourses and roll 
 their sheep-covered pastures from Dollar Law 
 to White Combe, and from White Combe to 
 the Three Brethren Cairn and the Windburg 
 and Skelf-hill Pen. Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant 
 still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, 
 purior electro^ of Yarrow. St. Mary's Loch lies 
 beneath me, smitten with wind and rain the 
 St. Mary's of North and of the Shepherd. Only 
 the trout, that see a myriad of artificial flies, are 
 shyer than of yore. The Shepherd could no 
 longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much 
 of a size that the country people took them for 
 herrings. 
 
 The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not 
 desecrated : hard by it lies, within a little 
 wood ; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, 
 and the graven letters, and the sword and 
 shield, sleep " Piers Cockburn and Marjory his 
 wife." Not a hundred yards off was the castle- 
 door where they hanged him ; this is the tomb 
 of the ballad, and the lady that buried him rests 
 now with her wild lord.
 
 134 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair, 
 
 When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair ; 
 
 Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae, 
 
 When I turned about and went my way ! * 
 
 Here too hearts have broken, and there is a 
 sacredness in the shadow and beneath these 
 clustering berries of the rowan-trees. That 
 sacredness, that reverent memory of our old 
 land, it is always and " inextricably blended 
 with our memories, with our thoughts, with our 
 love of you. Scotchmen, methinks, who owe 
 so much to you, owe you most for the example 
 you gave of the beauty of a life of honour, 
 showing them what, by heaven's blessing, a 
 Scotchman still might be. 
 
 1 Lord Napier and Ettrick points out to me that, unluckily, 
 the tradition is erroneous. Piers was not executed at all. 
 William Cockburn suffered in Edinburgh. But the Border 
 Minstrelsy overrides history. 
 
 Criminal Trials in Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn, Esq. Vol. 
 i. part i. p. 144, A.D. 1530. 17 Jac. V. 
 
 May 16. William Cokburne of Henderland, convicted (in 
 presence of the King) of high treason committed by him in 
 bringing Alexander Forestare and his son, Englishmen, to the 
 plundering of Archibald Somervile ; and for treasonably bringing 
 certain Englishmen to the lands of Glenquhome ; and for common 
 theft, common reset of theft, out-putting and in-putting thereof. 
 Sentence. For which causes and crimes he has forfeited his 
 life, lands, and goods, movable and immovable ; which shall be 
 escheated to the King. Beheaded.
 
 WALTER SCOTT. 135 
 
 Words, empty and unavailing for what 
 words of ours can speak our thoughts or inter- 
 pret our affections! From you first, as we 
 followed the deer with King James, or rode 
 with William of Deloraine on his midnight 
 errand, did we learn what Poetry means and 
 all the happiness that is in the gift of song. 
 This and more than may be told you gave us, 
 that are not forgetful, not ungrateful, though 
 our praise be unequal to our gratitude. Fuugor 
 inani munere I
 
 136 LETTERS TO DEAD AVTllORS. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 To Eusebius of Ccssarea. 
 (CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN.) 
 
 TOUCHING the Gods of the Heathen, most 
 reverend Father, thou art not ignorant that 
 even now, as in the time of thy probation on 
 earth, there is great dissension. That these 
 feigned Deities and idols, the work of men's 
 hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest ; 
 neither do men eat meat offered to idols. Even 
 as spake that last Oracle which murmured forth, 
 the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, 
 even so " the fair-wrought court divine hath 
 fallen ; no more hath Phcebus his home, no 
 more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of 
 water ; nay, the sweet-voiced water is silent." 
 The fane is ruinous, and the images of men's 
 idolatry are dust. 
 
 Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still
 
 EUSEBIUS OF CsESAREA. 137 
 
 dispute about the beginnings of those sinful 
 Gods : such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus : 
 and marvel how first they won their dominion 
 over the souls of the foolish peoples. Now, 
 concerning these things there is not one belief 
 but many ; howbeit, there are two main kinds 
 of opinion. One sect of philosophers believes 
 as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not 
 vainly persuade that the Gods were the inven- 
 tions of wild and bestial folk, who, long before 
 cities were builded or life was honourably or- 
 dained, fashioned forth evil spirits in their own 
 savage likeness ; ay, or in the likeness of the 
 very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as 
 it is set forth in thy Book of the Preparation for 
 the Gospel, I, humble as I am, do give my con- 
 sent But on the other side are many and 
 learned men, chiefly of the tribes of the Alem- 
 anni, who have almost conquered the whole 
 inhabited world. These, being unwilling to 
 suppose that the Hellenes were in bondage to 
 superstitions handed down from times of utter 
 darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with 
 the heathen philosophers, even with the writers 
 whom thou, most venerable, didst confound with
 
 138 LETTERS to DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of 
 small cords of thy wit 
 
 Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and 
 teachers maintain that the gods of the nations 
 were, in the beginning, such pure natural 
 creatures as the blue sky, the sun, the air, the 
 bright dawn, and the fire ; but as time went on, 
 men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech 
 and no longer understanding the tongue of their 
 own fathers, were misled and beguiled into 
 fashioning all those lamentable tales : as that 
 Zeus, for love of mortal women, took the shape 
 of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an eagle, and 
 sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to 
 speak of. 
 
 Behold, then, most worshipful, how these 
 doctors and learned men argue, even like the 
 philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst 
 confound. For they declare the gods to have 
 been natural elements, sun and sky and storm, 
 even as did thy opponents ; and, like them, as 
 thou saidst, " they are nowise at one with each 
 other in their explanations." For of old some 
 boasted that Hera was the Air ; and some that 
 she signified the love of woman and man ; and
 
 EUSEB1US OF C&SAREA. 139 
 
 some that she was the waters above the Earth ; 
 and others that she was the Earth beneath the 
 waters ; and yet others that she was the Night, 
 for that Night is the shadow of Earth : as if, for- 
 sooth, the men who first worshipped Hera had 
 understanding of these things ! And when 
 Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer 
 declareth), this meant (said the learned in thy 
 days) no more than the strife and confusion of 
 the elements, and was not in the beginning an 
 idle slanderous tale. 
 
 To all which, most worshipful, thou didst 
 answer wisely : saying that Hera could not be 
 both night, and earth, and water, and air, and 
 the love of sexes, and the confusion of the 
 elements ; but that all these opinions were vain 
 dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And 
 why thou saidst even if the Gods were pure 
 natural creatures, are such foul things told of 
 them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me 
 to declare. " These wanderings, and drinkings, 
 and loves, and seductions, that would be shame- 
 ful in men, why," thou saidst, " were they attri- 
 buted to the natural elements ; and wherefore did 
 the Gods constantly show themselves, like the
 
 146 L&TTE&S TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 sorcerers called were-wolves, in the shape of the 
 perishable beasts ? " But, mainly, thou didst 
 argue that, till the philosophers of the heathen 
 were agreed among themselves, not all contra- 
 dicting each the other, they had no semblance 
 of a sure foundation for their doctrine. 
 
 To all this and more, most worshipful Father, 
 I know not what the heathen answered thee. 
 But, in our time, the learned men who stand to 
 it that the heathen Gods were in the beginning 
 the pure elements, and that the nations, forget- 
 ting their first love and the significance of their 
 own speech, became confused and were betrayed 
 into foul stories about the pure Gods these 
 learned men, I say, agree no whit among them- 
 selves: Nay, they differ one from another, not 
 less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and The- 
 agenes, and" the rest whom thou didst laugh to 
 scorn. Bear with me, Father, while I tell thee 
 how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do con- 
 tend among themselves ; and yet these differ- 
 ences of theirs they call " Science " ! 
 
 Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang 
 armed from the head of Zeus, even as among 
 the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou
 
 EUSEB1US OF C&SAREA. 141 
 
 never knewest goddesses are fabled to leap 
 out from the armpits or feet of their fathers. 
 Thou must know that what Plato, in the 
 "Cratylus," made Socrates say in jest, the 
 learned among us practise in sad earnest. For, 
 when they wish to explain the nature of any 
 God, they first examine his name, and torment 
 the letters thereof, arranging and altering them 
 according to their will, and flying off to the 
 speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, 
 and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve 
 their turn. How saith Socrates ? "I bethink 
 me of a very new and ingenious idea that occurs 
 to me ; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser 
 than I should be by to-morrow's dawn. My 
 notion is that we may put in and pull out letters 
 at pleasure and alter the accents." 
 
 Even so do the learned not at pleasure, 
 maybe, but according to certain fixed laws (so 
 they declare) ; yet none the more do they agree 
 among themselves. And I deny not that they 
 discover many things true and good to be 
 known ; but, as touching the names of the 
 Gods, their learning, as it standeth, is confusion. 
 Look, then, at the goddess Athene : taking one
 
 142 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in 
 our coasts Muellerus, the most erudite of the 
 doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden- 
 mouthed. Concerning Athene, he saith that 
 her name is none other than, in the ancient 
 tongue of the Brachmanae, A hand, which, being 
 interpreted, means the Dawn. "And that the 
 morning light," saith he, "offers the best start- 
 ing-point for the later growth of Athene has 
 been proved, I believe, beyond the reach of 
 doubt or even cavil." l 
 
 Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know 
 that another of his nation, the witty Benfeius, 
 hath devised another sense and origin of Athene, 
 taken from the speech of the old Medes. But 
 Muellerus declares to us that whosoever shall 
 examine the contention of Benfeius "will be 
 bound, in common honesty, to confess that 
 it is untenable." This, Father, is " one for 
 Benfeius," as the saying goes. And as Muel- 
 lerus holds that these matters " admit of almost 
 mathematical precision," it would seem that 
 Benfeius is but a Dummkopf, as the Alemanni 
 
 1 "The Lesson of Jupiter." Nineteenth Century, October, 
 1885.
 
 EVSEBIUS OF C&SAREA. 143 
 
 say, in their own language, when they would be 
 pleasant among themselves. 
 
 Now, wouldst thou credit it ? despite the 
 mathematical plainness of the facts, other 
 Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet 
 with Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene 
 was the Dawn, nor yet that she is " the feminine 
 of the Zend Thr&et&na athwyana" Lo, you ! 
 how Prellerus goes about to show that her name 
 is drawn not from Ahand and the old Brach- 
 manae, nor athwyAna and the old Medes, but 
 from "the root alO, whence aiQr\p t the air, or a0, 
 whence avOoc, a flower." Yea, and Prellerus 
 will have it that no man knows the verity of 
 this matter. None the less he is very bold, and 
 will none of the Dawn ; but holds to it that 
 Athene was, from the first, " the clear pure height 
 of the Air, which is exceeding pure in Attica." 
 
 Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, 
 comes one Roscherus in, with a mighty great 
 volume on the Gods, and Furtwaenglerus, 
 among others, for his ally. And these doctors 
 will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus, 
 take Athene for " wisdom in person ; " nor with 
 Welckerus and Prellerus, for "the goddess of
 
 144 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 air;" nor even, with Muellerus and mathe- 
 matical certainty, for " the Morning- Red : " but 
 they say that Athene is the "black thunder- 
 cloud, and the lightning that leapeth there- 
 from " ! I make no doubt that other Alemanni 
 are of other minds : quot Alemanni tot sententia. 
 
 Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, 
 Ov& jap aXX/jXo'C ffvfi<j)(n>va <f>vmo\oyov<rtv. Yet 
 these disputes of theirs they call " Science " ! 
 But if any man says to the learned : " Best of 
 men, you are erudite, and laborious and witty ; 
 but, till you are more of the same mind, your 
 opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, 
 they are at present of no avail whereon to found 
 any doctrine concerning the Gods " that man is 
 railed at for his " mean" and "weak" arguments. 
 
 Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed 
 against thee ? But I must still believe, with 
 thee, that these evil tales of the Gods were in- 
 vented "when man's life was yet brutish and 
 wandering " (as is the life of many tribes that 
 even now tell like tales), and were maintained 
 in honour by the later Greeks " because none 
 dared alter the ancient beliefs of his ancestors." 
 Farewell, Father ; and all good be with thee, 
 wishes thy well-wisher and thy disciple.
 
 XVII. 
 
 To Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
 
 SIR, In your lifetime on earth you were not 
 more than commonly curious as to what was 
 said by " the herd of mankind," if I may quote 
 your own phrase. It was that of one who loved 
 his fellow-men, but did not in his less enthu- 
 siastic moments overestimate their virtues and 
 their discretion. Removed so far away from 
 our hubbub, and that world where, as you say, 
 we " pursue our serious folly as of old," you are, 
 one may guess, but moderately concerned about 
 the fate of your writings and your reputation. 
 As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one 
 of your letters, that the final judgment on your 
 merits as a poet is in the hands of posterity, and 
 that you fear the verdict will be " Guilty," and 
 the sentence " Death." Such apprehensions 
 cannot have been fixed or frequent in the mind 
 of one whose genius burned always with a 
 
 L
 
 146 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 clearer and steadier flame to the last. The jury 
 of which you spoke has met : a mixed jury and 
 a merciful. The verdict is " Well done," and 
 the sentence Immortality of Fame. There have 
 been, there are, dissenters ; yet probably they 
 will be less and less heard as the years go on. 
 
 One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind 
 that prose was your true province, and that 
 your letters will outlive your lays. I know not 
 whether it was the same or an equally well- 
 inspired critic, who spoke of your most perfect 
 lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied 
 cravats) as "a gallery of your failures." But 
 the general voice does not echo these utterances 
 of a too subtle intellect. At a famous Univer- 
 sity (not your own) once existed a band of 
 men known as " The Trinity Sniffers." Perhaps 
 the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of 
 the jurors who from time to time make them- 
 selves heard in your case. The " Quarterly 
 Review," I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards 
 your attempts as tainted by the spirit of " The 
 Liberal Movement in English Literature ; " and 
 it is impossible, alas ! to maintain with any 
 success that you were a Throne and Altar Tory.
 
 PERCY SYSSflE SHELLEY. 147 
 
 At Oxford you are forgiven ; and the old rooms 
 where you let the oysters burn (was not your 
 founder, King Alfred, once guilty of similar 
 negligence ?) are now shown to pious pilgrims. 
 
 But Conservatives, 'tis rumoured, are still 
 averse to your opinions, and are believed to 
 prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. 
 Keble, and, indeed, of the clergy in general. 
 But, in spite of all this, your poems, like the 
 affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are 
 yet " in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the 
 lips of the young." It is in your lyrics that 
 you live, and I do not mean that every one 
 could pass an examination in the plot of " Pro- 
 metheus Unbound." Talking of this piece, by 
 the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals 
 in you a hankering after life in a cave doubt- 
 less an unconsciously inherited memory from 
 cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me 
 that you once spoke of deserting song for prose, 
 and of producing a history of the moral, in- 
 tellectual, and political elements in human 
 society, which, we now agree, began, as Asia 
 would fain have ended, in a cave. 
 
 Fortunately you gave us " Adonais " and
 
 148 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 " Hellas " instead of this treatise, and we have 
 now successfully written the natural history of 
 Man for ourselves. Science tells us that before 
 becoming a cave-dweller he was a Brute ; Ex- 
 perience daily proclaims that he constantly 
 reverts to his original condition. L'homme est 
 tin mtchant animal, in spite of your boyish 
 efforts to add pretty girls " to the list of the 
 good, the disinterested, and the free." 
 
 Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the 
 sterile din of Politics, were " the haunts meet for 
 thee." Watching the yellow bees in the ivy 
 bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water- 
 pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the 
 dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting 
 things into a tissue where light and music were 
 at one, that was the task of Shelley ! " To ask 
 you for anything human," you said, "was like 
 asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop." Nay, 
 rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the 
 Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, 
 and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he 
 has, and what he can offer ; you spread before 
 us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we 
 turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all the
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 149 
 
 multitudes of singers, one is spiritual and 
 strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled ? One, 
 like Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, 
 and his eyes, when he looks on the common 
 world of common men, are, like the eyes of 
 Anchises, blind with excess of light. Let 
 Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but 
 Shelley ! 
 
 Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems 
 (the most romantic of things didactic), our world 
 is no better than the world you knew. This 
 will disappoint you, who had "a passion for 
 reforming it." Kings and priests are very much 
 where you left them. True, we have a poet who 
 assails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly ; 
 yet Mr. Swinburne has never, like " kind Hunt," 
 been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge 
 of treason. Moreover, chemical science has dis- 
 covered new and ingenious ways of destroying 
 principalities and powers. You would be in- 
 terested in the methods, but your peaceful 
 Revolutionism, which disdained physical force, 
 would regret their application. 
 
 Our foreign affairs are not in a state which 
 even you would consider satisfactory ; for \ve
 
 ISO LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 have just had to contend with a Revolt of 
 Islam, and we still find in Russia exactly the 
 qualities which you recognised and described. 
 We have a great statesman whose methods and 
 eloquence somewhat resemble those you attribute 
 to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas ! he is a 
 youth of more than seventy summers ; and not 
 in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern 
 and pass a peaceful millennium in twining buds 
 and beams. 
 
 In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you 
 desired to see have been carried. Ireland has 
 received Emancipation, and almost everything 
 else she can ask for. I regret to say that she 
 is still unhappy ; her wounds unstanched, her 
 wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfran- 
 chised the paupers, and expect the most happy 
 results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are 
 " our own flesh and blood," and, as we compel 
 them to be vaccinated, so we should permit 
 them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse 
 Collings (how you would have loved that man !) 
 has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of 
 the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asy- 
 lums ? This may prove that last element in the
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 151 
 
 Elixir of political happiness which we have long 
 sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret to 
 hear, are still unpopular ; but the new Parlia- 
 ment has done something for Mr. Bradlaugh. 
 You should have known our Charles while you 
 were in the "Queen Mab" stage. I fear you 
 wandered, later, from his robust condition of 
 intellectual development. 
 
 As to your private life, many biographers con- 
 trive to make public as much of it as possible. 
 Your name, even in life, was, alas ! a kind of 
 due-dame to bring people of no very great sense 
 into your circle. This curious fascination has 
 attracted round your memory a feeble folk of 
 commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and 
 others of the tribe. They swarm round you like 
 carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like night- 
 birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and 
 taste have written on you, indeed ; but your 
 weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether 
 it was your heart, or a less dignified and most 
 troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of 
 the funereal pyre. These biographers fight 
 terribly among themselves, and vainly prolong 
 the memory of "old unhappy far-off things, and
 
 I $2 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 sorrows long ago." Let us leave them and their 
 squabbles over what is unessential, their raking 
 up of old letters and old stories. 
 
 The town has lately yawned a weary laugh 
 over an enemy of yours, who has produced two 
 heavy volumes, styled by him " The Real 
 Shelley." The real Shelley, it appears, was 
 Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman 
 so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things 
 by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not 
 made a name in the exact science of Compara- 
 tive Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit 
 of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who 
 called you "a damned Atheist" in the post-office 
 at Pisa. He finds that you had " a little turned- 
 up nose," a feature no less important in his 
 system than was the nose of Cleopatra (accord- 
 ing to Pascal) in the history of the world. To 
 be in harmony with your nose, you were a 
 " phenomenal " liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profli- 
 gate, partly insane, an evil-tempered monster, a 
 self-righteous person, full of self-approbation 
 in fact you were the Beast of this pious 
 Apocalypse. Your friend Dr. Lind was an 
 embittered and scurrilous apothecary, "a bad
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. If- 3 
 
 old man." But enough of this inopportune 
 brawler. 
 
 For Humanity, of which you hoped such great 
 things, Science predicts extinction in a night of 
 Frost The sun will grow cold, slowly as 
 slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your " Pro- 
 metheus," but as surely. If this nightmare be 
 fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid 
 hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a 
 fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in 
 his cruse, the poetry of Shelley. So reading, 
 he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be 
 deprived of those sights which alone (says the 
 nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In 
 your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and 
 cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earth- 
 quake and eclipse. He will be face to face, in 
 fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, 
 and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the 
 heavens. In Shelley's poetry, while Man 
 endures, all those will survive; for your "voice 
 is as the voice of winds and tides," and perhaps 
 more deathless than all of these, and only 
 perishable with the perishing of the human 
 spirit.
 
 154 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 To Monsieur de Molihe, Valet de Cliambre 
 du Roi. 
 
 MONSIEUR, With what awe does a writer 
 venture into the presence of the great Moliere ! 
 As a courtier in your time would scratch 
 humbly (with his comb !) at the door of the 
 Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near 
 your dwelling among the Immortals. You, like 
 the king who, among all his titles, has now none 
 so proud as that of the friend of Moliere you 
 found your dominions small, humble, and dis- 
 tracted ; you raised them to the dignity of an 
 empire : what Louis XIV. did for France you 
 achieved for French comedy ; and the baton of 
 Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of 
 Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King 
 the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist ; 
 by a more magnificent conquest you overcame 
 the Channel. If England vanquished your
 
 MONSIEUR DE MO LI ERE. 155 
 
 country's arms, it was through you that France 
 fenttn victorein cepit, and restored the dynasty of 
 Comedy to the land whence she had been 
 driven. Ever since Dryden borrowed " L'Etour- 
 di," our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters 
 theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France. 
 
 In one respect, to be sure, times and manners 
 have altered. While you lived, taste kept the 
 French drama pure ; and it was the congenial 
 business of English playwrights to foist their 
 rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests 
 into the urban page of Moliere. Now they are 
 diversely occupied ; and it is their affair to lend 
 modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a 
 blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain. 
 But still, as has ever been our wont since 
 Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your 
 successes still we pilfer the plays of France, 
 and take our bien, as you said in your lordly 
 manner, wherever we can find it: We are the 
 privateers of the stage ; and it is rarely, to be 
 sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has 
 not first been "cut out" from the countrymen of 
 Moliere. Why this should be, and what " tene- 
 brifcrous star" (as Paracelsus, your companion
 
 156 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 in the " Dialogues des Morts," would have 
 believed) thus darkens the sun of English 
 humour, we know not ; but certainly our 
 dependence on France is the sincerest tribute 
 to you. Without you, neither Rotrou, nor 
 Corneille, nor " a wilderness of monkeys " like 
 Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to 
 France and restored her to Europe. 
 
 While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful 
 advent of Comedy, fair and beneficent as Peace 
 in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you 
 that we must turn when of comedies we desire 
 the best. If you studied with daily and nightly 
 care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you 
 "let no musty bouquin escape you" (so your 
 enemies declared), it was to some purpose that 
 you laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you 
 eclipsed all who came before you ; and from 
 those that follow, however fresh, we turn : we 
 turn from Re"gnard and Beaumarchais, from 
 Sheridan and Goldsmith, from Musset and 
 Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of 
 your creations. " Creations " one may well say, 
 for you anticipated Nature herself: you gave us, 
 before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a
 
 MONSIEUR DE MOL1ERE. 157 
 
 gentleman not a lacquey ; in a mot of Don 
 Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and the 
 watchword of Comte, V amour de Vhumanitt. 
 
 Before you where can we find, save in 
 Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour; and 
 where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise 
 philosophy of a secular civilisation ? With a 
 heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and 
 generous, a heart often in agony and torment, 
 you had to make life endurable (we cannot 
 doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or 
 hope, or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age 
 when the greatest mind of all, the mind of 
 Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in 
 voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to 
 hazard all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, 
 refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what 
 you found invisible. 
 
 In Religion you beheld no promise of help. 
 When the Jesuits and Jansenists of your time 
 saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of 
 their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises 
 in your play conceived that you were girding at 
 his neighbour), you all the while were mocking 
 every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons
 
 158 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 preached to Agnes we surely hear your private 
 laughter ; in the arguments for credulity which 
 are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen 
 to the eternal self-defence of superstition. Thus, 
 desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent 
 element of life precisely where Pascal re- 
 cognised all that was most fleeting and unsub- 
 stantial in divertissement ; in the pleasure of 
 looking on, a spectator of the accidents of exist- 
 ence, an observer of the follies of mankind. 
 Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to 
 regard our life as a play that is played, as a 
 comedy ; yet how often the tragic note comes 
 in ! What pity, and in the laughter what an 
 accent of tears, as of rain in the wind ! No 
 comedian has been so kindly and human as 
 you ; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for 
 his butts, and to leave them sometimes, in a 
 sense, superior to their tormentors. Sganarelle, 
 M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the 
 rest our sympathy, somehow, is with them, 
 after all ; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentle- 
 man, despite his misadventures. 
 
 Though triumphant Youth and malicious 
 Love in your plays may batter and defeat
 
 MONSIEUR DE MO LIE RE. 159 
 
 Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the 
 victory, or you did not mean that they should 
 win jt They go off with laughter, and their 
 victim with a grimace ; but in him we, that are 
 past our youth, behold an actor in an unending 
 tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your 
 sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are 
 having their day ; you can throw a bone or a 
 crust to the dog that has had his, and has been 
 taught that it is over and ended. Yourself not 
 unlearned in shame, in jealousy, in endurance of 
 the wanton pride of men (how could the poor 
 player and the husband of Ce"limene be un- 
 taught in that experience?), you never sided 
 quite heartily, as other comedians have done, 
 with young prosperity and rank and power. 
 
 I am not the first who has dared to approach 
 you in the Shades ; for just after your own 
 death the author of " Les Dialogues des Morts " 
 gave you Paracelsus as a companion, and the 
 author of " Le Jugement de Pluton " made the 
 " mighty warder " decide that " Molicre should 
 not talk philosophy." These writers, like most 
 of us, feel that, after all, the comedies of the 
 Contemplateur^ of the translator of Lucretius,
 
 160 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 are a philosophy of life in themselves, and that 
 in them we read the lessons of human experience 
 writ small and clear. 
 
 What comedian but Moliere has combined 
 with such depths with the indignation of 
 Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blas- 
 phemy of Don Juan such wildness of irre- 
 sponsible mirth, such humour, such wit ! Even 
 now, when more than two hundred years have 
 sped by, when so much water has flowed under 
 the bridges and has borne away so many trifles 
 of contemporary mirth (cetera fluminis ritu 
 feruntur\ even now we never laugh so well as 
 when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain 
 tread the boards in the Maison de Moliere. 
 Since those mobile dark brows of yours ceased 
 to make men laugh, since your voice denounced 
 the "demoniac" manner of contemporary tra- 
 gedians, I take leave to think that no player 
 has been more worthy to wear the canons of 
 Mascarille or the gown of Vadius than M. 
 Coquelin of the Comedie Frangaise. In him 
 you have a successor to your Mascarille so 
 perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of your 
 date might cry, could they see him, that Moliere
 
 MONSIEUR DE MOL1ERE. 161 
 
 had come again. But, with all respect to the 
 efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle. Barthet, or 
 Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the 
 town to the loss of the fair De Brie, and Made- 
 leine, and the first, the true Celimene, Armande. 
 Yet had you ever so merry a soubrette as Mdme. 
 Samary, so exquisite a Nicole ? 
 
 Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger- 
 mugger two hundred years ago, you are now not 
 over-praised, but more worshipped, with more 
 servility and ostentation, studied with more 
 prying curiosity than you may approve. Are 
 not the Molieristes a body who carry adoration 
 to fanaticism ? Any scrap of your handwriting 
 (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely 
 touching on your life, any fact that may prove 
 your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly 
 seized and discussed by your too minute 
 historians. Concerning your private life, these 
 men often speak more like malicious enemies 
 than friends ; repeating the fabulous scandals 
 of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support 
 them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. 
 It is most necessary to defend you from your 
 friends from such friends as the veteran and 
 
 M
 
 1 62 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the in- 
 dustrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. 
 Truly they seek the living among the dead, 
 and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings 
 of attorneys' offices. As I regard them (for I 
 have tarried in their tents) and as I behold 
 their trivialities the exercises of men who 
 neglect Moliere's works to gossip about Moliere's 
 great-grandmother's second-best bed I some- 
 times wish that Moliere were here to write on 
 his devotees a new comedy, " Les Molieristes." 
 How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived 
 and worked with you, who saw you day by day, 
 who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the 
 kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable 
 of men, the most open-handed in friendship, in 
 charity the most delicate, of the heartiest 
 sympathy ! Ah, that for one day I could 
 behold you, writing in the study, rehearsing 
 on the stage, musing in the lace-seller's shop, 
 strolling through the Palais, turning over the 
 new books at Billaine's, dusting your ruffles 
 among the old volumes on the sunny stalls. 
 Would that, through the ages, we could hear 
 you after supper, merry with Boileau, and with
 
 MONSIEUR DE MO LIE RE. . 163 
 
 Racine, not yet a traitor, laughing over 
 Chapelain, combining to gird at him in an 
 epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking your 
 favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes. 
 Surely of all the wits none was ever so good 
 a man, none ever made life so rich with humour 
 and friendship.
 
 164 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 To Robert Burns. 
 
 SIR, Among men of Genius, and especially 
 among Poets, there are some to whom we turn 
 with a peculiar and unfeigned affection ; there 
 are others whom we admire rather than love. 
 By some we are won with our will, by others 
 conquered against our desire. It has been your 
 peculiar fortune to capture the hearts of a 
 whole people a people not usually prone to 
 praise, but devoted with a personal and patriotic 
 loyalty to you and to your reputation. In you 
 every Scot who is a Scot sees, admires, and 
 compliments Himself, his ideal self indepen- 
 dent, fond of whisky, fonder of the lasses ; you 
 are the true representative of him and of his 
 nation. Next year will be the hundredth since 
 the press of Kilmarnock brought to light its 
 solitary masterpiece, your Poems ; and next 
 year, therefore, methinks, the revenue will re-
 
 ROBERT BURNS. 165 
 
 ceive a welcome accession from the abundance 
 of whisky drunk in your honour. It is a cruel 
 thing for any of your countrymen to feel that, 
 where all the rest love, he can only admire ; 
 where all the rest are idolaters, he may not 
 bend the knee ; but stands apart and beats 
 upon his breast, observing, not adoring a 
 critic. Yet to some of us petty souls, perhaps, 
 and envious that loud indiscriminating praise 
 of " Robbie Burns " (for so they style you in 
 their Change-house familiarity) has long been 
 ungrateful ; and, among the treasures of your 
 songs, we venture to select and even to reject 
 So it must be! We cannot all love Haggis, 
 nor "painch, tripe, and thairm," and all those 
 rural dainties which you celebrate as "warm- 
 reekin, rich ! " " Rather too rich," as the Young 
 Lady said on an occasion recorded by Sam 
 Weller. 
 
 Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware 
 
 That jaups in luggies ; 
 But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer, 
 
 Gie her a Haggis ! 
 
 You have given her a Haggis, with a vengeance, 
 and her " gratefu' prayer " is yours for ever. 
 But if even an eternity of partridge may pall on
 
 1 66 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly 
 delights, cometh satiety at last. And yet what 
 a glorious Haggis it is the more emphatically 
 rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse ! 
 We have had many a rural bard since Theo- 
 critus "watched the visionary flocks," but you 
 are the only one of them all who has spoken 
 the sincere Doric. Yours is the talk of the 
 byre and the plough-tail ; yours is that large 
 utterance of the early hinds. Even Theocritus 
 minces matters, save where Lacon and Comatas 
 quite outdo the swains of Ayrshire. " But thee, 
 Theocritus, wha matches ? " you ask, and your- 
 self out-match him in this wide rude region, 
 trodden only by the rural Muse. " Thy rural 
 loves are nature's sel' ; " and the wooer of Jean 
 Armour speaks more like a true shepherd than 
 the elegant Daphnis of the " Oaristys." 
 
 Indeed it is with this that moral critics of 
 your life reproach you, forgetting, perhaps, that 
 in your amours you were but as other Scotch 
 ploughmen and shepherds of the past and 
 present. Ettrick may still, with Afghanistan, 
 offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your anti- 
 thesis, and the complement of the Scotch
 
 ROBERT BURNS. 167 
 
 character) supposed ; but the morals of Ettrick 
 are those of rural Sicily in old days, or of Moss- 
 giel in your days. Over these matters the Kirk, 
 with all her power, and the Free Kirk too, have 
 had absolutely no influence whatever. To leave 
 so delicate a topic, you were but as other swains, 
 or, as "that Birkie ca'd a lord," Lord Byron ; 
 only you combined (in certain of your letters) a 
 libertine theory with your practice ; you poured 
 out in song your audacious raptures, your half- 
 hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn. 
 You spoke the truth about rural lives and 
 loves. We may like it or dislike it ; but we 
 cannot deny the verity. 
 
 Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, 
 as it was fortunate for Letters and for Scotland, 
 that you were born at the meeting of two ages 
 and of two worlds precisely in the moment when 
 bookish literature was beginning to reach the 
 people, and when Society was first learning to 
 admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries ? 
 Before you how many singers not less truly 
 poets than yourself though less versatile not 
 less passionate, though less sensuous not less 
 simple had been born and had died in poor
 
 168 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 men's cottages ! There abides not even the 
 shadow of a name of the old Scotch song-smiths, 
 of the old ballad-makers. The authors of "Clerk 
 Saunders," of " The Wife of Usher's Well," of 
 "Fair Annie," and "Sir Patrick Spens," and 
 " The Bonny Hind," are as unknown to us as 
 Homer, whom in their directness and force they 
 resemble. They never, perhaps, gave their 
 poems to writing; certainly they never gave 
 them to the press. On the lips and in the hearts 
 of the people they have their lives ; and the 
 singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by 
 society or by fame, are forgotten. " The Iniquity 
 of Oblivion blindly scattereth his Poppy." 
 
 Had you been born some years earlier you 
 would have been even as these unnamed Im- 
 mortals, leaving great verses to a little clan 
 verses retained only by Memory. You would 
 have been but the minstrel of your native valley : 
 the wider world would not have known you, nor 
 you the world. Great thoughts of independence 
 and revolt would never have burned in you ; 
 indignation would not have vexed you. Society 
 would not have given and denied her caresses. 
 You would have been happy. Your songs would
 
 ROBERT BURNS. 169 
 
 have lingered in all " the circle of the summer 
 hills ; " and your scorn, your satire, your narra- 
 tive verse, would have been unwritten or un- 
 known. To the world what a loss ! and what a 
 gain to you ! We should have possessed but a 
 few of your lyrics, as 
 
 When o'er the hill the eastern star 
 Tells bugh tin-time is near, my jo ; 
 
 And owsen frae the furrowed field, 
 Return sae dowf and wearie O ! 
 
 How noble that is, how natural, how uncon- 
 sciously Greek ! You found, oddly, in good 
 Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse: 
 
 In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives 
 Even Sappho's flame ! 
 
 But how unconsciously you remind us both of 
 Sappho and of Homer in these strains about 
 the Evening Star and the hour when the Day 
 piTtvlaatTO flov\vTov$t ? Had you lived and died 
 the pastoral poet of some silent glen, such lyrics 
 could not but have survived ; free, too, of all 
 that in your songs reminds us of the Poet's 
 Corner in the " Kirkcudbright Advertiser." We 
 should not have read how 
 
 Phoebus, gilding the brow o" morning, 
 Banishes ilk darksome shade 1
 
 170 LETTERS JO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by 
 Catullus 
 
 Had we never loved sae kindly, 
 Had we never loved sae blindly, 
 Never met or never parted, 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 
 
 But the letters to Clarinda would have been 
 unwritten, and the thrush would have been 
 untaught in " the style of the Bird of Paradise." 
 A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vita, was 
 not to be yours. Fate otherwise decreed it. 
 The touch of a lettered society, the strife with 
 the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and 
 pride, neglect and success, were needed to make 
 your Genius what it was, and to endow the 
 world with "Tarn o' Shanter," the "Jolly 
 Beggars," and "Holy Willie's Prayer." Who 
 can praise them too highly who admire in them 
 too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, 
 the unsurpassed energy and courage ? So power- 
 ful, so commanding, is the movement of that 
 Beggars' Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously 
 echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet 
 when he conceived the " Vision of Sin." You 
 shall judge for yourself. Recall
 
 ROBERT BURNS. 171 
 
 Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets ! 
 
 Here's to all the wandering train ! 
 Here's our ragged bairns and callets ! 
 
 One and all cry out, Amen ! 
 
 A fig for those by law protected 1 
 
 Liberty's a glorious feast ! 
 Courts for cowards were erected ! 
 
 Churches built to please the priest ! 
 
 Then read this : 
 
 Drink to lofty hopes that cool^ 
 
 Visions of a perfect state : 
 Drink we, last, the public fool, 
 
 Frantic love and frantic hate. 
 
 Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, 
 
 While we keep a little breath I 
 Drink to heavy Ignorance, 
 
 Hob and nob with brother Death ! 
 
 Is not the movement the same, though the 
 modern speaks a wilder recklessness ? 
 
 So in the best company we leave you, who 
 were the life and soul of so much company, good 
 and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, 
 ever gave the world more assurance of a man ; 
 none lived a life more strenuous, engaged in an 
 eternal conflict of the passions, and by them over- 
 come " mighty and mightily fallen." When we 
 think of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have 
 said, remote by one degree from actual truth, and 
 Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.
 
 172 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 XX. 
 
 To Lord Byron. 
 
 MY LORD, 
 
 (Do you remember how Leigh Hunt 
 Enraged you once by writing My dear Byron T) 
 Books have their fates, as mortals have who 
 
 punt, 
 And yours have entered on an age of iron. 
 
 Critics there be who think your satire blunt, 
 Your pathos, fudge ; such perils must environ 
 Poets who in their time were quite the rage, 
 Though now there's not a soul to turn their 
 page. 
 
 Yes, there is much dispute about your worth, 
 And much is said which you might like to 
 know 
 
 By modern poets here upon the earth, 
 Where poets live, and love each other so ;
 
 LORD BYRON. 173 
 
 And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth 
 To hear of bards that pitch your praises low, 
 
 Though there be some that for your credit stickle, 
 As Glorious .Mat, and not inglorious 
 Nichol. 
 
 (This kind of writing is my pet aversion, 
 I hate the slang, I hate the personalities, 
 
 I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion, 
 Of every rhyme that in the singer's wallet is, 
 
 I hate it as you hated the 'Excursion, 
 But, while no man a hero to his valet is, 
 
 The hero's still the model ; I indite 
 
 The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would 
 write.) 
 
 There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot rhyme to, 
 One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim. 
 
 Of him there's much to say, if I had time to 
 Concern myself in any wise with him. 
 
 He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb 
 
 to, 
 He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim, 
 
 A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on 
 
 Shakespeare, and Moliere, and you, and Milton.
 
 174 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Ay, much his temper is like Vivien's mood, 
 Which found not Galahad pure, nor Lancelot 
 brave ; 
 
 Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood, 
 He buries poets in an icy grave, 
 
 His Essays he of the Genevan hood! 
 Nothing so fine, but better doth he crave. 
 
 So stupid and so solemn in his spite 
 
 He dares to print that Moliere could not write ! 
 
 Enough of these excursions ; I was saying 
 That half our English Bards are turned 
 Reviewers, 
 
 And Arnold was discussing and assaying 
 The weight and value of that work of yours, 
 
 Examining and testing it and weighing, 
 
 And proved, the gems are pure, the gold 
 endures. 
 
 While Swinburne cries with an exceeding joy, 
 
 The stones are paste, and half the gold, alloy. 
 
 In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest force, 
 Poetic, in this later age of ours ; 
 His song, a torrent from a mountain source, 
 Clear as the crystal, singing with the showers
 
 LORD BYRON. 175 
 
 Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course 
 
 Through banks o'erhung with rocks and sweet 
 
 with flowers ; 
 
 None of your brooks that modestly meander, 
 But swift as Awe along the Pass of Brander. 
 
 And when our century has clomb its crest, 
 And backward gazes o'er the plains of Time, 
 
 And counts its harvest, yours is still the best, 
 The richest garner in the field of rhyme 
 
 (The metaphoric mixture, 'tis confest, 
 Is all my own, and is not quite sublime). 
 
 But fame's not yours alone ; you must divide all 
 
 The plums and pudding with the Bard of Rydal ! 
 
 WORDSWORTH and BYRON, these the lordly 
 names 
 
 And these the gods to whom most incense 
 
 burns. 
 " Absurd 1 " cries Swinburne, and in anger flames, 
 
 And in an ./Eschylean fury spurns 
 With impious foot your altar, and exclaims 
 
 And wreathes his laurels on the golden urns 
 Where Coleridge's and Shelley's ashes lie, 
 Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry.
 
 176 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never woven 
 One honest thread of life within his song ; 
 
 As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven 
 So Byron is to Shelley ( This is strong !), 
 
 And on Parnassus' peak, divinely cloven, 
 
 He may not stand, or stands by cruel wrong ; 
 
 For Byron's rank (the examiner has reckoned) 
 
 Is in the third class or a feeble second. 
 
 " A Bernesque poet " at the very most, 
 And " never earnest save in politics," 
 
 The Pegasus that he was wont to boast 
 
 A blundering, floundering hackney, full of 
 tricks, 
 
 A beast that must be driven to the post 
 
 By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and 
 sticks, 
 
 A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute, 
 
 That any judge of Pegasi would shoot ; 
 
 In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone 
 In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes. 
 
 And Byron's style is " jolter-headed jargon ; " 
 His verse is "only bearable in prose."
 
 LORD BYRON. 177 
 
 So living poets write of those that are gone, 
 
 And o'er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows ; 
 And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began, 
 By owning you "a very clever man." 
 
 Or rather does not end : he still must utter 
 A quantity of the unkindest things. 
 
 Ah ! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter 
 O'er such a foe the tempest of your wings ? 
 
 'Tis " rant and cant and glare and splash and 
 
 splutter" 
 
 That rend the modest air when Byron 
 sings. 
 
 There Swinburne stops : a critic rather fiery. 
 
 Animis calestibus tantane ircef 
 
 But whether he or Arnold in the right is, 
 Long is the argument, the quarrel long ; 
 
 Non nobis est to settle tantas lites ; 
 
 No poet I, to judge of right or wrong : 
 
 But of all things I always think a fight is 
 The most unpleasant in the lists of song ; 
 
 When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo 
 
 Set an example which we need not follow. 
 
 N
 
 178 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 The fashion changes ! Maidens do not wear, 
 As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets 
 
 A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron's hair ; 
 
 " Don Juan " is not always in our pockets 
 
 Nay, a New Writer's readers do not care 
 
 Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock 
 its 
 
 Manners and morals. Ay, and most young 
 ladies 
 
 To yours prefer the " Epic " called "of Hades " ! 
 
 I do not blame them ; I'm inclined to think 
 That with the reigning taste 'tis vain to 
 quarrel, 
 
 And Burns might teach his votaries to drink, 
 And Byron never meant to make them moral. 
 
 You yet have lovers true, who will not shrink 
 From lauding you and giving you the laurel ; 
 
 The Germans too, those men of blood and iron, 
 
 Of all our poets chiefly swear by Byron. 
 
 Farewell, thou Titan fairer than the Gods ! 
 
 Farewell, farewell, thou swift and lovely spirit, 
 Thou splendid warrior with the world at odds, 
 
 LJnpraised, unpraisable, beyond thy merit ;
 
 LORD BYRON. 179 
 
 Chased, like Orestes, by the Furies' rods, 
 
 Like him at length thy peace dost thou 
 
 inherit ! 
 
 Beholding whom, men think how fairer far 
 Than all the steadfast stars the wandering 
 
 star ! l 
 
 1 Mr. Swinburne's and Mr. Arnold's diverse views of Byron 
 will be found in the Selections by Mr. Arnold and in the Nine- 
 teenth Century,
 
 iSo LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 XXI. 
 To Omar Khayy&m. 
 
 WISE Omar, do the Southern Breezes fling 
 Above your Grave, at ending of the Spring, 
 The Snowdrift of the Petals of the Rose, 
 The wild white Roses you were wont to sing ? 
 
 Far in the South I know a Land divine, 1 
 
 And there is many a Saint and many a Shrine, 
 
 And over all the Shrines the Blossom blows 
 Of Roses that were dear to you as Wine. 
 
 You were a Saint of unbelieving Days, 
 Liking your Life and happy in Men's Praise ; 
 
 Enough for you the Shade beneath the Bough, 
 Enough to watch the wild World go its Ways. 
 
 1 The hills above San Remo, where rose-bushes are planted 
 by the shrines. Omar desired that his grave might be where 
 the wind would scatter rose-leaves over it.
 
 OMAR KHAYYAM. 181 
 
 Dreadless and hopeless thou of Heaven or 
 
 Hell, 
 Careless of Words thou hadst not Skill to spell, 
 
 Content to know not all thou knowest now, 
 What's Death? Doth any Pitcher dread the 
 
 Well ? 
 
 The Pitchers we, whose Maker makes them ill, 
 Shall He torment them if they chance to spill ? 
 
 Nay, like the broken Potsherds are we cast 
 Forth and forgotten, and what will be will ! 
 
 So still were we, before the Months began 
 That rounded us and shaped us into Man. 
 
 So still we shall be, surely, at the last, 
 Dreamless, untouched of Blessing or of Ban ! 
 
 Ah, strange it seems that this thy common 
 
 Thought 
 How all Things have been, ay, and shall be 
 
 nought 
 
 Was ancient Wisdom in thine ancient East, 
 In those old Days when Senlac Fight was 
 
 fought,
 
 1 82 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Which gave our England for a captive Land 
 To pious Chiefs of a believing Band, 
 
 A gift to the Believer from the Priest, 
 Tossed from the holy to the blood -red Hand ! 1 
 
 Yea, thou wert singing when that Arrow clave 
 Through Helm and Brain of him who could not 
 
 save 
 
 His England, even of Harold Godwin's son ; 
 The high Tide murmurs by the Hero's Grave ! 2 
 
 And thou wert wreathing Roses who can tell ? 
 Or chanting for some Girl that pleased thee 
 
 well, 
 
 Or satst at Wine in Nashapur, when dun 
 The twilight veiled the Field where Harold fell ! 
 
 The salt Sea-waves above him rage and roam ! 
 Along the white Walls of his guarded Home 
 
 No Zephyr stirs the Rose, but o'er the Wave 
 The wild Wind beats the Breakers into Foam ! 
 
 1 Omar was contemporary with the battle of Hastings. 
 1 Per mandata Duds, Rex hie, Heralde, quiescis^ 
 Ut custos maneas liltoris et pelagi.
 
 OMAR KHAVYAM, 183 
 
 And dear to him, as Roses were to thee, 
 Rings the long Roar of Onset of the Sea ; 
 
 The Swans Path of his Fathers is his Grave : 
 His Sleep, methinks, is sound as thine can be. 
 
 His was the Age of Faith, when all the West 
 Looked to the Priest for Torment or for Rest ; 
 
 And thou wert living then, and didst not heed 
 The Saint who banned thee or the Saint who 
 blessed ! 
 
 Ages of Progress ! These eight hundred Years 
 Hath Europe shuddered with her Hopes or 
 
 Fears, 
 
 And now ! to thee she listeneth indeed, 
 To thee, and half believeth what she hears ! 
 
 Hadst thou THE SECRET? Ah, and who may 
 
 tell? 
 " An Hour we have," thou saidst ; " Ah, waste 
 
 it well ! " 
 
 An Hour we have, and yet Eternity 
 Looms o'er us, and the Thought of Heaven or 
 
 Helll
 
 1 84 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Nay, we can never be as wise as thou, 
 
 O idle Singer 'neath the blossomed Bough. 
 
 Nay, and we cannot be content to die. 
 We cannot shirk the Questions " Where ? " and 
 " How ? " 
 
 Ah, not from learned Peace and gay Content 
 Shall we of England go the way he went 
 
 The Singer of the Red Wine and the Rose 
 Nay, otherwise than his our Day is spent 1 
 
 Serene he dwelt in fragrant Nashapur, 
 But we must wander while the Stars endure. 
 He knew THE SECRET : we have none that 
 
 knows, 
 No Man so sure as Omar once was sure !
 
 XX IT. 
 To Q. Horatiits Flaccus. 
 
 IN what manner of Paradise are we to conceive 
 that you, Horace, are dwelling, or what region 
 of immortality can give you such pleasures as 
 this life afforded ? The country and the town, 
 nature and men, who knew them so well as you, 
 or who ever so wisely made the best of those 
 two worlds? Truly here you had good things, 
 nor do you ever, in all your poems, look for 
 more delight in the life beyond ; you never 
 expect consolation for present sorrow, and when 
 you once have shaken hands with a friend the 
 parting seems to you eternal. 
 
 Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus 
 Tarn cari capitis? 
 
 So you sing, for the dear head you mourn 
 has sunk, for ever, beneath the wave. Virgil 
 might wander forth bearing the golden branch
 
 186 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 11 the Sibyl doth to singing men allow," and 
 might visit, as one not wholly without hope, the 
 dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To 
 him was it permitted to see and sing " mothers 
 and men, and the bodies outworn of mighty 
 heroes, boys and unwedded maids, and young 
 men borne to the funeral fire before their parents' 
 eyes." The endless caravan swept past him 
 "many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall 
 in autumn woods when the first frost begins ; 
 many as birds that flock landward from the 
 great sea when now the chill year drives them 
 o'er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands." 
 Such things was it given to the sacred poet to 
 behold, and " the happy seats and sweet 
 pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger 
 light clothes all the plains and dips them in a 
 rosier gleam, plains with their own new sun and 
 stars before unknown." Ah, not frustra pius 
 was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melan- 
 choly song. In him, we fancy, there was a 
 happier mood than your melancholy patience. 
 " Not, though thou wert sweeter of song than 
 Thracian Orpheus, with that lyre whose lay led 
 the dancing trees, not so would the blood return
 
 Q. HORAT1US FLACCUS. 187 
 
 to the empty shade of him whom once with 
 dread wand, the inexorable God hath folded 
 with his shadowy flocks ; but patience lighteneth 
 what heaven forbids us to undo." 
 
 Durum, sed levins fit patientia ! 
 
 It was all your philosophy in that last sad 
 resort to which we are pushed so often 
 
 " With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, 
 Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair." 
 
 The Epicurean is at one with the Stoic at 
 last, and Horace with Marcus Aurelius. "To 
 go away from among men, if there are Gods, 
 is not a thing to be afraid of ; but if indeed 
 they do not exist, or if they have no concern 
 about human affairs, what is it to me to live 
 in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of 
 providence ? " 
 
 An excellent philosophy, but easier to those 
 for whom no Hope had dawned or seemed to 
 set. Yes 1 it is harder than common, Horace, 
 for us to think of you, still glad somewhere, 
 among rivers like Liris and plains and vine- 
 clad hills, that 
 
 i 
 
 Solemque sunm, sua sidera norunt.
 
 i S3 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 It is hard, for you looked for no such thing. 
 
 Omnes una manet nox 
 Et cakanda semel via leti* 
 
 You could not tell Maecenas that you would 
 meet him again ; you could only promise to 
 tread the dark path with him. 
 
 Jbimus, ibtmus, 
 
 Ulcunque pracedes, supretnum 
 
 Carpere iter (omites parati* 
 
 Enough, Horace, of these mortuary musings. 
 You loved the lesson of the roses, and now and 
 again would speak somewhat like a death's 
 head over your temperate cups of Sabine 
 ordinaire. Your melancholy moral was but 
 meant to heighten the joy of your pleasant 
 life, when wearied Italy, after all her wars and 
 civic bloodshed, had won a peaceful haven. 
 The harbour might be treacherous ; the prince 
 might turn to the tyrant ; far away on the wide 
 Roman marches might be heard, as it were, 
 the endless, ceaseless monotone of beating 
 horses' hoofs and marching feet of men. They 
 were coming, they were nearing, like footsteps 
 heard on wool ; there was a sound of multitudes 
 and millions of barbarians, all the North, officina
 
 <? HORAT1US FLACCUS. 189 
 
 gentium, mustering and marshalling her peoples. 
 But their coming was not to be to-day, nor to- 
 morrow, nor to-day was the budding Empire to 
 blossom into the blood-red flower of Nero. In 
 the lull between the two tempests of Republic 
 and Empire your odes sound " like linnets in 
 the pauses of the wind." 
 
 What joy there is in these songs! what de- 
 light of life, what an exquisite Hellenic grace 
 of art, what a manly nature to endure, what 
 tenderness and constancy of friendship, what 
 a sense of all that is fair in the glittering stream, 
 the music of the waterfall, the hum of bees, the 
 silvery grey of the olive woods on the hillside ! 
 How human are all your verses, Horace ! what 
 a pleasure is yours in the straining poplars, 
 swaying in the wind ! what gladness you gain 
 from the white crest of Soracte, beheld through 
 the fluttering snowflakes while the logs are 
 being piled higher on the hearth. You sing 
 of women and wine not all whole-hearted in 
 your praise of them, perhaps, for passion 
 frightens you, and 'tis pleasure more than love 
 that you commend to the young. Lydia and 
 Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests
 
 190 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 of a heart at ease in itself, and happy enough 
 when their facile reign is ended. You seem to 
 me like a man who welcomes middle age, and 
 is more glad than Sophocles was to "flee from 
 these hard masters " the passions. In the 
 fallow leisure of life you glance round con- 
 tented, and find all very good save the need 
 to leave all behind. Even that you take with 
 an Italian good-humour, as the folk of your 
 sunny country bear poverty and hunger. 
 
 Durum, sed levius fit patientia ! 
 
 To them, to you, the loveliness of your land 
 is, and was, a thing to live for. None of the 
 Latin poets your fellows, or none but Virgil, 
 seem to me to have known so well as you, 
 Horace, how happy and fortunate a thing it 
 was to be born in Italy. You do not say so, 
 like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, 
 numbering the glories of the land as a lover 
 might count the perfections of his mistress. 
 But the sentiment is ever in your heart and 
 often on your lips. 
 
 Me nee tarn patiens Lacedaemoo, 
 Nee tarn Larissae percussit campus opimse, 
 Quam domus Albunese resonantis
 
 Q. HORATIUS FLACCUS. 191 
 
 Et praeceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda 
 Mobilibus pomaria rivis. 1 
 
 So a poet should speak, and to every singer 
 his own land should be dearest. Beautiful is 
 Italy with the grave and delicate outlines of her 
 sacred hills, her dark groves, her little cities 
 perched like eyries on the crags, her rivers 
 gliding under ancient walls ; beautiful is Italy, 
 her seas, and her suns : but dearer to me the 
 long grey wave that bites the rock below the 
 minster in the north ; dearer are the barren 
 moor and black peat-water swirling in tauny 
 foam, and the scent of bog myrtle and the 
 bloom of heather, and, watching over the lochs, 
 the green round-shouldered hills. 
 
 In affection for your native land, Horace, 
 certainly the pride in great Romans dead and 
 gone made part, and you were, in all senses, a 
 lover of your country, your country's heroes, 
 your country's gods. None but a patriot could 
 have sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as 
 our own hero died on an evil day, for the 
 
 1 "Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Larissxan plain 
 so enraptures as the fane of echoing Albunea, the headlong 
 Anio, the grove of Tibur, the orchards watered by the wandering 
 rills."
 
 192 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 honour of Rome, as Gordon for the honour of 
 England. 
 
 Fertur pudicae conjugis osculum, 
 Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor, 
 Ab se removisse, et virilem 
 Torvus humi posuisse voltum : 
 
 Donee labantes consilio patres 
 Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato, 
 Interque maerentes amicos 
 Egregius properaret exul. 
 
 Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus 
 Tortor pararet : non aliter tamen 
 Dimovit obstantes propinquos, 
 Et populum reditus morantem, 
 
 Quam si clientum longa negotia 
 Dijudicata lite relinqueret, 
 Tendens Venafranos in agros 
 Aut Laced aeinonium Tarentum.* 
 
 We talk of the Greeks as your teachers. 
 
 1 "They say he put aside from him the pure lips of his wife 
 and his little children, like a man unfree, and with his brave 
 face bowed earthward sternly he waited till with such counsel 
 as never mortal gave he might strengthen the hearts of the 
 Fathers, and through his mourning friends go iorth, a hero, 
 into exile. Yet well he knew what things were being pre- 
 pared for him at the hands of the tormentors, who, none 
 the less, put aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the 
 people that would fain have delayed his return, passing through 
 their midst as he might have done if, his retainers' weary 
 business ended and the suits adjudged, he were faring to his 
 Venafran lands or to Dorian Torentum."
 
 Q. HORATWS FLA CCUS. 193 
 
 Your teachers they were, but that poem could 
 only have been written by a Roman! The 
 strength, the tenderness, the noble and monu- 
 mental resolution and resignation these are 
 the gifts of the lords of human things, the 
 masters of the world. 
 
 Your country's heroes are dear to you, Horace, 
 but you did not sing them better than your 
 country's Gods, the pious protecting spirits of 
 the hearth, the farm, the field ; kindly ghosts, 
 it may be, of Latin fathers dead or Gods framed 
 in the image of these. What you actually 
 believed we know not, you knew not. Who 
 knows what he believes ? Parcus Deorum cultor 
 you bowed not often, it may be, in the temples 
 of the state religion and before the statues of 
 the great Olympians ; but the pure and pious 
 worship of rustic tradition, the faith handed 
 down by the homely elders, with that you never 
 broke. Clean hands and a pure heart, these, 
 with a sacred cake and shining grains of salt, 
 you could offer to the Lares. It was a be- 
 nignant religion, uniting old times and new, 
 men living and men long dead and gone, in a 
 kind of service and sacrifice solemn yet familiar. 
 
 o
 
 194 LE7TERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 
 
 Te nihil atlinet 
 Tcnlare multa cade bidentium 
 Parvos coronantcrn marina 
 Rore decs fragiliqite myrto. 
 
 Immunis aram si teiigit mama, 
 Non sumptuosa blandior hoslia 
 Mollivit aversos Penates 
 Farre pio et salienle mica. 1 
 
 Farewell, dear Horace; farewell, thou wise 
 and kindly heathen ; of mortals the most 
 human, the friend of my friends and of so many 
 generations of men. 
 
 1 "Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods with 
 slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest thy tiny deities 
 with myrtle rare and rosemary. If but the hand be clean that 
 touches the altar, then richest sacrifice will not more appease 
 the angered Penates than the duteous cake and salt that crackles 
 in the blaze." 
 
 A ve atque Vale I 
 
 I-KINTEL) BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 LONDON AND BECCLES.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES 
 
 COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below. 
 
 Book Slip-25w-9,'59(A4772s4)4280
 
 PN511L251892 
 005 716 302 4 
 
 A 001 106 101 7 
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PK 
 511 
 
 L25 
 1892