CONFERENCES ON BOOKS

AND MEN

CONFERENCES ON
BOOKS AND MEN

BY THE AUTHOR OF
PAGES FROM A PRIVATE DIARY

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE
1900

Reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine.

DEDICATED

WITH RESPECTFUL ADMIRATION TO THE

UNDERGRADUATES OF THE UNIVERSITY

OF OXFORD.

IN that old spring when I was young,
At Oxford, many a song was sung,
And undergraduate friends were willing
To buy them printed for a shilling.

Our songs were all of Oxford's bliss,
Her spires, her streams, her mysteries ;
Of Love, and Death, and Change, and Fate,-
As known to th' Undergraduate.

Since then full twenty years are sped,
And most are married, some are dead ;
Some sit as ministers of state,
And some as priests beg at their gate.

In all, the pulses fainter beat
And will not move in metric feet ;
Despatches, sermons, whatso goes
Into their brain comes out as prose.

Yet still their ink will flush to flame
If chance permits it Oxfortfs name ;
Still have they won the meed of wit,
If Oxford reads what they have writ.

2095305

DEDICATION.

But should the Undergraduate read,
O heart, then fame is fame indeed ;
Th' o'er-tasked, ingenuous brow to smoothe
Once more, is to renew one's youth.

Then pardon, sirs, if I am bold

To offer, when the blood is cold,

Tame spirts of a parergic pen

To you, who taste both books and men.

URBANUS SYLVAN.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

A STANDARD OF GENTILITY A COLLEGE GAUDY THE
INFLUENCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE UPON MANNERS
CAXTON'S ' BOOK OF COURTESY ' i

II.
OXFORD WIT AND HUMOUR... ... ... ... 18

III.
A FORGOTTEN POET: ABRAHAM COWLEY ... ... 40

IV.

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF 'CORNHILL' UPON PATRIOTIC

SONGS ... ... ... ... ... ... 55

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DIVINE ... ... ... 69

VI.

A HOLIDAY NUMBER ... ... ... ... 92

VII.
A FURTHER HOLIDAY NUMBER ... ... .. .. 115

CONTENTS.

VIII.

PAGE

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR CHIEFLY ABOUT SIR JOHN
DAVIES ; WITH SOME INTRODUCTORY REMARKS UPON
THE PERSONIFYING OF OCCASION ... ... ... I3*>

IX.

THE NEW CRITICISM ... 153

THE TEARS OF THE MUSES ... ... ... ... 169

MR. H. D. TRAILL A SCHOOL OF LITERATURE COMIC

VERSE AN AMERICAN GILBERT ... ... ... 190

XII.

THE LEGEND OF MACCONGLINNE, WITH AN ANNEX ON ULIXES

MAC LAERTIS ... ... ... ... ... 204

XIII.

WILLIAM COWPER ... ... ... . ... 224

XIV.
PEREGRINATIO RELIGIONIS ERGO ... ... ... 238

XV.
THE BLACK BOOKS OF LINCOLN'S INN ... ... ... 248

XYI.

THE POETRY OF CHAUCER ... ... ... ... 2 6 9

CONFERENCES

BOOKS AND MEN

A STANDARD OF GENTILITY A COLLEGE GAUDY
THE INFLUENCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE UPON
MANNERS CAXTON'S 'BOOK OF COURTESY.'

JOURNEYING inside an omnibus, the roof being full
of women, on a recent visit to town, I could not but
overhear my vis-d-vis, who was one of nature's ladies,
expatiating in a loud whisper upon the merits of
some person of my own sex. The crowning en-
comium was this : ' My dear, he was a perfect
gentleman ; his hands were as white as milk.' This
with an (I hope) involuntary glance at my hands, hot
and dusty with turning over books in old book shops,
and conscious of their lack of gloves. A phantom
procession of milk-white gentlemen began flitting
through my brain Jonson's Court Butterfly, Pope's
Sporus, Aucassin- then a too popular advertisement

2 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

flashed into memory with the amendment, ' Pink
Pills for Perfect Gentlemen/ and I must have smiled ;
for nature's lady, perhaps thinking herself caught in
an indiscretion, flushed as pink as my hands. How
interesting all these standards of gentility are ! I
remember a friend telling me that once on her way
home from her dressmaker's, when two girls had
overtaken and passed her in the street, she heard one
say to the other, ' I took her for a lydy from her
back, but she's got a cotting on her dress.' Plainly,
then, in the view of this class of the community, to
be gentle is to be like the lilies of the field, whose
complexion is white, and who neither toil nor spin ;
a very natural and pathetic ideal for them.

On the day of this experience a letter reached me
from my old College at Oxford, bidding me to a
feast. Such invitations I have in former years
declined, I can hardly say why ; certainly not from
any lack of patriotism or respect for the Dons of my
house, or the University. I should never dream of
referring to these as Tennyson does, in that section of
' In Memoriam ' which describes a visit to Cambridge :

And all about
The same gray flats again.

But somehow, when I have by chance met them, I
have found myself at a stand for topics. ' What are
you engaged upon now?' seems a dull and con-
ventional query, and even if they took me into

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 3

confidence, and replied, 'A MS. of Babrius,' I could
only reply, ' Ah ! Babrius.' But on this occasion,
whether it was from a desire to investigate the
relations between paleness and gentility, or from
some deeper, unconscious reason, I accepted ; only I
avoided the necessity of a room in college by pro-
posing myself to a friend whom the process of time
has raised to some eminence in the University. The
first moment of any notable importance in the visit
was the scrutiny of the diagrams hung by the porter's
lodge, setting forth the tables and places of the guests.
I was told afterwards that the arrangement of this
plan had cost the Dean of the College many anxious
days and sleep-broken nights. First, the Calendar
had to be consulted, to make sure that contemporaries
were placed together, for a generation in university
life is but three or four years. Then there was the
effort to recollect who used to be friends, and whether
they had since had any public quarrel. Happily I
found myself well neighboured. Meanwhile, on all
sides, I heard : ' Don't you recognise me ? ' 'Is it
X. ? ' (sometimes ' Can it be X. ? ') and then the
slightly pained ' Of course.' I was delighted that I
had come, though I should have been even better
pleased to have watched the scene unobserved. It
was extraordinary how through the uninteresting
face of a perfect stranger there would break suddenly
the unmistakable likeness of an old companion
'the same, yet not the same' whom it was a

4 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

rejuvenescence to welcome. I was wondering how it
was that I alone had escaped this defeat of Time,
when I was rudely undeceived. 'I have been
puzzling ever so long,' said a voice, ' to make out
who the dickens you could be ; and then I saw your
ear twitch, and I said it must be old ' (giving
me a nickname I had not heard for a quarter of a
century). 'Do you remember how I poured the
water-jug over your head that morning you wouldn't

get up, when we were going to ? ' And then

followed a chain of reminiscences in Miss Bates's
most associational manner, as we walked through the
quadrangle to hall. Then presently, 'Have you

generalised yet ? You wouldn't be old if you

haven't generalised.' ' Well,' I said, ' I haven't
been here much more than ten minutes ; but, as far
as I have seen, I should say the diplomatists have
changed least I suppose their profession obliges
them to treat their face as a mask and avoid all
superfluous play of emotion ; the lawyers have all
fattened that would come naturally from eating
terms ; and the clergy have grown grey and careworn,
no doubt from the cares of the other world and the
deceitfulness of poverty.'

The dinner was excellent was it perhaps because
cooking at the universities is still a tradition, and is
not yet promoted into the rank of a fine art, like
painting and poetry, with professors and lectures?
I would willingly print the bill of fare were there not

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 5

a risk that it might fall into the clutches of some
Radical editor, not a university man, who would
agitate for a new commission to investigate the
expenditure upon college Gaudies. If such an
agitation were ever started, it would be best met, in
my opinion, by a proposal to confer degrees ex officio
and honoris causa, upon all editors of journals, and
so admit them within the range of the genial influ-
ences that radiate from every college buttery. An
American visitor and Oxford in the Long Vacation
is a New America had stopped me, a few minutes
before, outside the College Hall, arrested by what he
described as 'the cunning smell from the kitchen,'
and put many questions about ways and means,
which I answered in as much detail as I could, being
pleased with his epithet ; and quite of his view as to
the tempting power of

Meats of noblest sort

And savour, beasts of chace, or fowl of game,
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boil'd
Gris-amber-steam'd.

I have always thought that the most dehumanising
office open to civilised man is that of archdeacon ;
but I have seen even an archdeacon so far reconciled
to humanity by the insinuating smell of a college
Gaudy as to fling a ballad afterwards to the brighten-
ing moon. I did not forget, before going home that
night, to give a glance round to see how far the
evening's society would warrant my lady's judgment

6 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

that pallor was a sign of gentle birth, and I am pretty
sure that a poll would have returned a plain nega-
tive ; on the other hand I am bound to admit that,
as I met the company in chance ones and twos the
next morning, I thought there might be something
in it. I felt a little pale myself.

In two days was to come the Encaenia, and, as
my host was hospitable, and the interval afforded an
opportunity of visiting some of the many libraries, I
determined to remain. In Queen's Library, which
was new to me a magnificent building, with a plaster
ceiling and much Gibbons carving I fleeted many
hours carelessly. Here, as long as a very polite
senior Fellow could occupy himself at my elbow, I '
was allowed to delectate my hands with turning over
the first four folios of Shakespeare and a ' Paradise
Lost ' of the first title-page ; and when other duties
called him away I was graciously allowed the run of the
Theology without surveillance. The book that most
attracted my cupidity was a little manual of devotions
compiled by Cosin for the English and Protestant
ladies of Henrietta Maria's court, in order that they
might have a book to hold in their hands, and not be
out-faced by the French and Popish ladies with their
1 Horse.' I observed that, while the tomes of St.
Thomas were kept carefully free from dust, those of
his antagonist Duns were left to the decoration of
the spiders. I was a little surprised that the contro-
versy between these two schools of divinity should

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. /

still persist, even in Oxford ; and of course the
presence of spiders' webs may have been merely a
complimentary emblem appropriate to the Doctor
subtilis. In the Bodleian, while studying the curi-
osities in Duke Humphrey's Library, it was my
chance to become something of a curiosity myself.
A royal party was in act of being conducted round
by the librarian, and as the functionary passed me he
said, with a wave of the arm, ' These are students
engaged in research,' or some such phrase. I did
my best, for the honour of the University, to give in
to the illusion pushing it, in fact, so far as to ask a
question of one of the gentlemen who sit in little
cabinets and put their learning at the service of
inquirers. But I found this was going too far. With
exquisite suavity, after cautioning me to speak
lower, the learned gentleman made a note of my
question, looked at it, turned it inside out, and
showed me that in many places it would not hold
water, if, indeed, it was not altogether futile. I was
much struck and interested, amongst other things, by
the employment of children in this ancient library
to fetch the books for the readers. It seemed, in
Milton's phrase, to 'smooth the raven down' of the
Dark Ages till they smiled. I was much interested,
also, to see two learned gentlemen enter, within a few
minutes of each other, who were engaged at the
moment in an animated but perfectly polite contro-
versy in the weekly press ; and it occurred to me that

8 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

the conditions of life in Oxford must make for
courtesy in polemics, as it might easily happen that
the combatants would have to forge their missiles
cheek by jowl in adjoining compartments of this
great war magazine.

The Encaenia, from the circumstance already
referred to of the visit of a royal party, and also
from the fact that Mr. Cecil Rhodes had proposed
himself to receive an honorary degree conferred upon
him at some pre-Raidial epoch, was very largely
attended ; and for the same reason it has been very
largely described in the papers, so that I need not
venture an amateur description. I will but touch on
one or two things that specially impressed me. The
first was the ' too, too solid ' (and ' sallied ') flesh
of my brethren Masters of Arts in the area (I had
almost written arena) of the Sheldonian Theatre.
Access to this was allowed, at the time I entered, only
by a single door at the side. A passage had been
barricaded off the whole length of the theatre from
the great doors for the Vice-Chancellor's procession
to his throne, and on the further side of this there
was only a sprinkling of Masters, who had been
admitted earlier by the door on that side. Un-
fortunately the crowd of Masters who thronged in
at the same door as myself could see this comparative
emptiness, but could not see the gulf fixed between ;
and so they were for ever urging us to press forward,
while we as urgently entreated them to keep back.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 9

At last a certain professor, of great brawn, with a
sensibility impaired by the immolation of many
generations of butterflies, uttered a barbarian shout,
and thrust into the seething magisterial mass,
followed in the ample wake by the head of one
of the Nonconformist colleges. The panic was
awful. A lady, who looked down upon the sea
of faces from the gallery above, told me afterwards
that for the first time in her life she saw and realised
what was meant by the mingled tragic passion of
pity and fear upon human faces (most of the Masters
being trained in the classical school). Two of the
less stalwart fainted, and were helped out of the
press ; one swarmed up a pillar into the ladies'
gallery ; the rest swayed like a sea, giving and
receiving pressure upon all hands. I, who had
steered myself by good luck into a backwater, found
myself covered with much academical flotsam of
caps and gowns. At this point a curator of the
theatre addressed us from the pulpit, begging us to
be cool, and promising if we would be good Masters
that he would admit some of us at the opposite door
into the quiet stations beyond ; and by the with-
drawal of many on this promise, and many more
who made it a pretext to retire altogether, we
regained some composure especially as the air was
now full of dust, which, as Virgil says, is the best
sedative for angry passions. But if I shut my eyes
I can still see the picture on the theatre ceiling, upon

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

which they were so long fixed as I tried to keep my
mouth above the crowd.

It is a familiar observation that nothing tends so
much to self-control as the sight of agitation in
others ; and so it happened that the loss of balance
among the Masters provoked an exemplary decorum,
a somewhat pained decency of demeanour, on the
part of the undergraduates in the gallery. There
were no mad eccentricities, followed by mad dashes
of the Proctor, as in my youth. The young men sat
as if at a concert, and listened in silence not only to
the Newdigate poem a silence prescribed by custom
and good feeling, for any undergraduate might in
his inexperience be guilty of a Newdigate poem
but they listened also to the Professor of Poetry,
a thing without example in the days when I was an
undergraduate. Another noticeable difference from
earlier times was that the wit seemed to be organised.
It is the custom at Oxford, as all the world knows,
for the undergraduates to pelt the recipients of
honorary degrees with good-humoured ridicule ; but
all the smart sayings at this year's Encaenia were
delivered by one or two young gentlemen evidently
chosen for the clearness of their articulation. This
may always have been the rule, and my disillusion-
ment as to the spontaneity of the thing may be merely
that of the grown person at a pantomime. I should
allow that the jests were none the worse, and
probably much the better, for being elaborated at

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. II

home ; and the audience, notably the royal party,
were not wanting in appreciation. This taking of
degrees must be a severe ordeal for a person of
distinction troubled with nerves ; even heroes have
been known to blench and falter at the prospect of
confronting the chartered libertinisms of young
England ; and on this occasion one gentleman,
understood to be willing to face the music generally,
looked pale and flabby as he entered, and grew con-
spicuously more erect, and solid, and master of
his fate as he found the preponderance of cries in
his favour.

In the evenings I dined with my host The con-
versation was curiously different from the more
general talk at the Gaudy, being more epigrammatic,
but restricted within a narrower circle of topics.
Over the wine the guests were amused by some of
Lewis Carroll's puzzles, stored in Common Room as
a mild digestive, such as the problem : ' If a rope over
a pulley had a monkey at one end and an equivalent
weight at the other, and the monkey began to climb,
would the weight rise or fall ? ' There were many
more or less veracious anecdotes told as to the
secret history of the Oxford movement to sufflami-
nate Mr. Rhodes. One gentleman related, on the
very highest authority, that a most distinguished
personage had threatened to leave the theatre if
the senior Proctor vetoed the degree. Another
gentleman knew for a fact that Lord Kitchener had

12 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

said privately to Mr. Rhodes, ' Don't forget, Rhodes,
that I have a sword under my gown if it is wanted '
a tale that excited the imagination of the most
prosaic. Other stories were more ostentatiously
academic and apocryphal, as that Dr. Shadwell had
prepared himself with South's quip upon the general
who accidentally turned his back when being pre-
sented for his degree, and was introduced as ( Hunc
bellicosissimum, qui nunquam antea tergiversatus
est.' Lord Kitchener's bearing, it was added, was
so correct that the witticism could not be introduced.
To return to the question, from which I digressed,
as to standards of gentility. It would be difficult,
and, I venture to think, impossible, to find one that
could be universally applied. A lady at an hotel, in
a story of Mr. Meredith's, was convinced of the
gentility of a new arrival because she overheard him
ordering a cold bath. That was evidently a standard
only for a moment ; for baths were once unknown,
and now they are found even in semi-detached villas
of the baser sort. Again, there is the standard of
dress, but it is notorious that a seat in the House
of Peers gives a man a right to dress as ill as he
pleases. Or there is the standard of table manners.
There is a traditional Oxford tale of a freshman from a
remote and backward province who eat his peas with
a knife, and was rebuked by a senior in the words,
' Don't juggle here, sir.' But again, one cannot move
from dinner-table to dinner-table without observing-

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 13

that eccentricity in feeding is pushed by some
enthusiasts even to indecorum. Or there is the
standard of courtesy, but courtesy is always now
written with the epithet ' old-fashioned.' Or, once
more, there is the standard of tact, which Cardinal
Newman celebrates -in a famous passage ; 1 but there
are crowds of gentlemen without a solitary grain of
tact. The truth would seem to be wrapped up in
the word 'breeding/ and breeding always carries
with it instruction in all such matters only such
instructions bear fruit in various degrees and pro-
portions. No man is well-bred in all points 'no
man but Lancelot, and he is dead.' There comes
a point different in each case where selfishness gets
the better of breeding. As Chaucer says :

Though he were gentil born, and fresh, and gay,
And goodly for to seen, and humble, and free,
No gentillesse of blood ne may hem binde.

The old manuals of good breeding treat of all
sorts of manners and morals ; and it is interesting
to see how very little our English standard has really
changed since Plantagenet days. In one of the most
amusing, Caxton's 'Book of Courtesy,' we find
elaborate instructions as to washing and dressing,
behaving mannerly at table, in talk, at church, etc.,

1 ' He has his eyes on all his company ; he is tender towards the
bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd.
He can recollect to whom he is speaking ; he guards against unseason-
able allusions, or topics which may irritate,' &c.

14 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

and as to reading good books, being kind to animals,
keeping counsel, etc. One or two of the hints would
hardly bear quoting, manners having passed far
beyond the need even of the counsel, and a few are
inappropriate to modern fashions in dress ; but the
most would be as useful in the schoolroom to-day
as they were to the ' lityl John ' for whom they were
first penned. I will transcribe a few verses into
modern spelling :

If ye be served with meates delicate,
(De)part it with your fellows in gentle wise :
The clerk saith ' Nature is content and satiate
With mean diet, and little shall suffice.'
(De)part it therefore as I you devise ;
Engross it not unto your selven all,
For gentleness will ay be liberal.

Burnish no bones with your teeth, be ware
That houndes tache 1 faileth of courtesy ;
But with your knife make the bones bare.
Handle your meat so well and so cleanly
That ye offenden not the company
Where ye be set, as far forth as ye can
Remembering well that manner maketh man.

And when your teeth shall cut your meat small,
With open mouth be ware that ye not eat ;
But look your lips be closed as a wall,
When to and fro ye traverse your meat ;
Keep you so close that men have no conceit
To say of you language of villainy,
Because ye eat your meat unmannerly.

Be ware, my child, of laughing over measure.
Ne at the board ye shall no naile's pare ;

1 Manners.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 15

Nc pick your teeth with knife, I you ensure ;
Eat at your mess, and other folke's spare.
A glutton can but make the dishes bare,
And of enough he taketh never heed ;
Feeding for lust more than he doth for need.

And when the board is thin as of service,

Not replenished with great diversity

Of meat and drink ; good cheer may then suffice,

With honest talking ; and also ought ye

With gladsome cheer than fulsom for to be ;

The poet saith how that the poore board

Men may enrich with cheerful will and word.

And when another man speaketh at table

Beware ye interrupt not his language ;

For that is a thing discommendable,

And it is no sign of folke's sage

To be of language busy and outrage ;

For the wise man saith plainly in sentence :

' He shall be wise that giveth audience?

Be ware also, my child, of rehearsal
Of matters which ben at the table meve'd ; 1
It grieveth oft, and doth men disavail ;
Full many a man that vice hath mischeved ;
Of ill thing said is worse often contrived.
Such reporte's alway, my child, eschew
As may of old friends make enemies new.

Advise you well when ye take your disport,
Honest games that ye haunt and use ;
And such as be but of villains' report
I counsel you, my child, that ye refuse.
For trust ye well, ye shall you not excuse
From birchly feast, 2 an I may you espy
Playing at any game of ribaldry.

1 Moved.

~ Another reading is 'breechless feast.' I am told by experts that
either reading gives a good sense, and that the two are mutually
explanatory.

1 6 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

It is to a goodly child well-sitting

To use disports of mirth and of pleasaunce,

To harp, or lute, or lustily to sing,

Or in the press right mannerly to dance ;

When men see a child of such governance,

They say : ' Glad may this childes friendes be

To have a child so mannerly as he.'

But as our conferences concern books as well as
men, I will quote some of the advice our author gives
about reading : first, what he says about Chaucer, for
its own sake ; and then what he says about his
master Lydgate for the quaintness of the ballade
into which he casts it.

This is how he apostrophises Chaucer :

O Father and Founder of ornate eloquence,
That enlumined hast all our Britaigne,
Too soon we lost thy laureate science.
O lusty liquor of that fulsome fountain !

cursed Death ! why hast thou this poet slain,

1 mean Father Chaucer, Master Galfrid ?
Alas the while that ever he from us died !

Readeth his bookes full of all plesaunce,
Clear in sentence, in language excellent ;
Briefly to write such was his suffisance,
Whatever to say he took in his intent,
His language was so fair and pertinent
It seemed unto manne's hearing
Not only the word, but verily the thing.

Readeth, my child, readeth his bookes all,
Refuseth none, they be expedient ;
Sentence or language or both find ye shall
Full delectable ; for that Father meant,
Of all his purpose and his whole intent,

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How to please in every audience ;

And in our tongue was well of eloquence. 1

And this is his ballade of his master, the monk of
Bury :

Looketh also upon dan John Lidgate

My master, whilome cleped Monk of Bury,

Worthy to be renowned laureate ;

I pray to God, in bliss his soul be merry,

Singing Rex splendens, that heavenly Kery, 2

Among the Muses nine celestial,

Before the highest Jupiter of all.

I not 3 why Death my master did envy,
But for he should change his habit,
Pity it is that such a man should die !
But now I trust he be a Carmelite ;
His amice black is changed into white
Among the Muses nine celestial,
Before the highest Jupiter of all.

Passing the Muses nine of Elicon,
Where is non pareil of Harmony,
Thither I trust my master's soul is gone,
The starred palace above dappled sky,
There to sing sanctus incessantly,
Among the Muses nine celestial,
Before the highest Jupiter of all.

The carelessness of copyists has certainly robbed
this ballade of some of its original glory, but there are
phrases in it that still please.

1 Cf. Spenser, Faerie Queenc, iv, 2. 32. - Kyrie.

3 Know not.

1 8 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

II.
OXFORD WIT AND HUMOUR.

THERE was lately put into my hand a little book
called Memories of Oxford, written by a young
Frenchman, M. Jacques Bardoux, who to an un-
feigned admiration of our heavier virtues seems to
have added an unfeigned contempt for our lighter
intelligence. His strictures and compliments set me
in my turn thinking and remembering, and my
rumination has resulted in a very simple proposition.
Assuming the current division of Jocularia into wit
and humour to be substantially sound, I should say
that there is an academic variety of each : the former
being found for the most part among the fellows and
scholars of colleges, the latter among the under-
graduates ; for the obvious reason that academic wit
postulates learning, while academic humour is the
child of high spirits. University wit, therefore, is apt
to change its form from age to age, for sciences have
their fashions, and the learning of one age is often
the folly of the next ; but University humour, relying
almost entirely upon the genial sense of youth, is a

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far more constant quantity. It might be illustrated
from the traditions of the remotest ages, and be
certain to awake an answering chord in the under-
graduate bosom of to-day. I have a neighbour who,
whenever talk falls upon the Universities, as it is apt
to do just before Easter, will relate how in his youth,
when a certain set of his fellow-collegians affected to
wear their hair longer than the custom of the hour
dictated, they were torn by night from their quiet
beds and conveyed to the college pump. On one
occasion, when this story had been told with more
than ordinary gusto, I could not help suggesting that
the process would have been more in character as
shampooing if the water had been warmed ; but, as
my neighbour pointed out, in that case where would
have been the humour ? Not, of course, that humour
necessarily implies a low temperature (though I have
observed its operation to be more nimble in winter)
but only an unexpected temperature. There are
well-known occasions in University life when it takes
the inflammatory form of making a bonfire of college
desks and deans ; the humour here also lurking in
the element of surprise. In ancient days this high-
blooded humour of the undergraduate body was
largely purged by exercise upon townspeople. 1 But,
as the townsmen's idea of humour was coarse, their

1 A tradition of this was, within living memory, preserved by certain
interludes annually enacted between Town and Gown on the fifth of
November, the meaning of which, however, was altogether forgotten.

20 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

repartees were less satisfactory. In 1214, for
example, the townspeople had to be fined ' propter
suspendium clericorum ; ' and in the next century on
a day long remembered (St. Scholastica's day, 1354),
they again got the best of the joke by calling to their
aid a rabble of country bumpkins, who, having but a
rudimentary sense of fun, flayed the scalps of certain
clerks in scorn of their clergy. So that succeeding
generations of undergraduates found it prudent to
restrain their humour within academical boundaries,
and joke only among gentlemen. 1 These and like
incidents prove that the Town and Gown controversy
was only one, somewhat acute, form of the ancient
antinomy between Clerk and Layman, which itself is
only a particular shape of the eternal conflict between
Form and Matter. It will be recollected that this
antipathy forms the staple of Chaucer's unacademic
humour, most of his caricatures being drawn from
ecclesiastical functionaries. He allows no virtue to
any of them except the poor country parson, it being
a primary lay dogma that in no point but poverty
may the principle of apostolical succession be

1 As an annex to the discussion on p. 12 as to the definition of a
gentleman, I would suggest that he might fairly be described as one
who is content to ' play the game,' whatever the game be in short, a
sportsman ? Many people who are not ' gentle ' will play their own
game fairly enough, but have no respect for that of their neighbours.
Farmers, for example, think themselves genteel for not shooting foxes,
but they do not mind spoiling the sport of the poor bicyclist by strew-
ing the roads with their hedge-clippings.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 21

tolerated, and that there it should even be encouraged.
But the laicising of the University has now removed
from Oxford every trace of this old quarrel, so that
the Reverend the Vice-Chancellor is as often as not
an Alderman of the city, and His Worship the Mayor
in like manner an undergraduate who has taken
' Smalls ' out of compliment to the Vice-Chancellor.
And so, being on this friendly footing, Town and
Gown are once more content to pass an occasional
jest upon each other, the most humorous sally of the
Town in this generation having been the driving a
tram-line down the High Street, and widening
Magdalen Bridge to give it way.

Of University humour I need give no more par-
ticular account, as it is indistinguishable from that
of the English schoolboy in every age. But I must
not omit to mention that there is also a type of wit,
as well as their proper humour, sometimes found
among the more unscholarly undergraduates. Aris-
totle, whose definitions have long supplied the basis
of Oxford training in morals, described wit as 'a
scholarly insolence,' but he gave no name of its own
to the peculiar vein of insolence sometimes found in
those who are not scholars. This type of wit has
always been allowed an opportunity for public display
at the Act ; in old days the function was delegated
to an official called ' Terrae-filius,' a half-licensed
jester, who represented the main undergraduate body.
I say ' half-licensed/ because in many cases where

22 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

the ' Terrae-filius ' went beyond his part and proved
really witty in the ordinary sense of the term, he was
sent down and refused his degree. Addison's father,
for example, had to recant his Terrce-filius speech
upon his knees in Convocation. 1 The Puritans made
an attempt to abolish the office in 1658, but it lasted
out that century. The part is now played at Com-
memoration unofficially by any undergraduate who
cares to attempt it. I may point out that what I
find described in old treatises as ' Oxford manners '
or ' the Oxford manner ' seems to have been simply
a blend of humour with this unscholarly kind of wit.
Steele, referring to it in the Tatlcr (No. 30), says,
' There is in this place [i.e. Oxford] such a true spirit
of raillery and humour, that if they cannot make you
a wise man they certainly will let you know you are
a fool.' This manner is as extinct as the wigs and
knee-breeches of the young gentlemen who used to
cultivate it, so that a paragraph from a last century
writer in which it is touched upon may prove of
interest. Nicholas Amhurst, in his collection of
essays called Terrce-filius, published in 1721, thus
describes the modish undergraduate of the day taking
his walks abroad :

'They have singly, for the most part, very good
assurances ; but when they walk together in bodies,
as they often do, how impregnable are their foreheads !

1 Various anecdotes relating to holders of this office, taken from
Anthony a Wood, will be found in Oxom'ana, i. 104 ff.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 23

They point at every soul they meet, laugh very loud,
and whisper as loud as they laugh. " Demme, Jack,
there goes a prig ! let us blow the puppy up." Upon
which, they all stare him full in the face, turn him
from the wall as he passes by, and set up an horse-
laugh, which puts the plain, raw novice out of
countenance ' (No. 46).

This ' manner,' as I said, is now unknown at Oxford,
as unknown as the ' plain, raw novice ' upon whom it
was exercised, and its place has been taken by an
entirely opposite manner, radiating ' sweetness and
light.' I like to fancy that the change came in
with the century and those delicious creatures who
are depicted in the coloured prints at the end
of Ackerman's History of Oxford. That was a
generation beyond the memory of any persons now
living, so that I have been unable to collect any
authentic information ; but if all the Oxonians of
that epoch were as lovely as Mr. Ackerman's artist
painted them, their memorial should not be allowed
to perish. My favourite is the scholar, standing in a
charming abstraction, his gown wrapped round him
and a book in his hand, doubtless 'of Aristotle and
his philosophye.' But the nobleman and gentleman-
commoner drawn at the moment of being ' proc-
torised ' are as certainly the very pink of gentility.
Indeed, everybody is genteel and pink, from the
Vice- Chancellor overflowing his stall in Convocation
to the slim servitor carrying to the High Table the

24 . CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

silver dish of chops that are to be sublimed into
divinity.

But it is time to pass on to the other and more
important division of our inquiry, which concerns
University wit. It takes, as I have already pointed
out, many forms, its most constant characteristic in
all its forms being satire. It is a sign, however, of the
ingenuous spirit of the place that the persons satirised
are such as are in authority, the true Oxford wit
ever disdaining to meddle with smaller game. The
earliest pieces that have come down to us the ' first
sprightly runnings ' of University wit are in the
learned language, sometimes macaronically inter-
spersed with the vernacular. There are not a few
epigrams on the St. Scholastica riot already referred
to, some of which are rather conundrums than
epigrams : e.g.

G vada bacchando sunt D vada damnificando ;
G bene si radis D caput adde vadis.

What does this mean ? A curious hexameter is
Invadunt aulas, ' bycheson come forth ' geminantes.

Another somewhat celebrated Latin poem is the
Rusttca Academics Oxoniensis nuper reformats de-
scriptio, written by one John Allibond, some time
Master of Magdalen College School (died 1658). It
tells of a countryman who visited Oxford after the
irruption of the Puritans and found it full of doleful

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2$

creatures. He went among other places to the
Bodleian.

Neglectos vidi libros multos,

Quod minime mirandum ;
Nam inter bardos tot et stultos,

There's few could understand ~*eni.

In the eighteenth century the best of the classical
wits was Tom Warton, the Professor of Poetry, who
also edited and contributed to the Oxford Sausage,
perhaps the most famous of all the Oxford wit
collections, and, despite its somewhat Gargantuan
name, deservedly so, for it belongs to a good period,
in the sense that occasional poetry being a fashionable
exercise in the eighteenth century, like music in the
seventeenth, every one who attempted it was at least
master of the rules of prosody. Warton was not
particular, when he saw a good thing, that it should
have been grown in Oxford, and even conveyed a
couple of pieces from Christopher Smart, who had
the poor taste to be a Cambridge man. One of these
pieces is called the ' Lounger,' and describes the
eighteenth century variety of the idle undergraduate :

I rise about nine, get to breakfast by ten,

Blow a Tune on my Flute, or perhaps make a Pen ;

Read a Play 'till eleven, or cock my laced Hat ;

Then step to my Neighbours, 'till Dinner, to chat.

Dinner over, to Totrfs or to James's I go,

The News of the Town so important to know ;

******
From the Coffee-house then I to Tennis away,
And at five I post back to my College to pray.

26 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

I sup before eight, and secure from all Duns,

Undauntedly march to the Mitre or Tuns ;

Where in Punch or good Claret my Sorrows I drown,

And toss off a Bowl ' To the best in the Town.'

At One in the Morning, I call what's to pay,

Then Home to my College I stagger away ;

Thus I tope all the Night, as I trifle all Day.

Warton substituted James s for Clap/tain's, the Oxford
for the Cambridge coffee-house, and there left it.
There is still a Mitre at Oxford, and there used to be
also a Tuns. 1 VVarton's other theft is more remark-
able. He prints Smart's ' Ode to an Eagle confined
in a College Court,' i.e. Trinity. I used to think
that Warton must have printed this as a flirt at Cam-
bridge studies, for Smart saw in the confinement of
the eagle a

Type of the fall of Greece and Rome,
While more than mathematic Gloom
Envelopes all around.

But there seems also to have been an eagle kept at
Queen's, which died in 1808, so that the expression
'more than mathematic gloom' has even greater
point. The Sausage contains the usual proportion
of pieces on incidents of the day, songs in praise of
ale and tobacco, and in contempt of duns, and
parodies of the popular poems of the moment. The
best of the Bacchanalian verses are those upon
' Freeman's best Virginia,' by Hawkins Browne, Esq.

1 He quaffs the nectar of the Tuns.
( The Oxford Sausage, ' Pleasure of being out of Debt.')

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2/

The author, it must be again admitted, was a Cam-
bridge man. All that can be alleged in defence of
Warton for including him among ' the most celebrated
Oxford wits ' is that the verses might quite well
pass for those of an Oxford man ; and indeed we
know that their author showed what spirit he was
really of, by sending his own son to Oxford. There
are five Tobacco poems in the various manners of
Gibber, Thomson, Young, Pope, and Swift.

It is not easy to understand why Warton should
have omitted his own Dean Aldrich's catch 'to be
sung by four men smoking their pipes, not more
difficult to sing than diverting to hear.' 1

Good, good indeed ;
The herb's good weed ;
Fill thy pipe, Will ;
And I prithee, Sam, fill ;
And yet sing still,
And yet sing still,
What say the learn'd ?
Vttafumus, vitafumus!
'Tis what you and I,
And he and I,
You and he and I,
And all of us sumits.
But then to the learn'd say we again
If life's a smoke, as they maintain,
If life's a vapour without doubt,
When a man does die,
He should not cry
That his glass is run, but his pipe is out.

1 Hawkins's History of Music. ' Sam ' is said to have been Mr.
Sampson Estwick of Christ Church.

28 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

But whether we smoke or whether we sing,

Let us be loyal and remember the King,

Let him live, and let his foes vanish thus, thus, thus,

Like, like a pipe, like a pipe of Spanish, thus, thus, thus.

The story goes that this fine scholar, architect, and
musician was also so fine a smoker that an under-
graduate who betted that he would find him smoking
at 10 A.M., only lost his bet because Aldrich at that
moment was filling his pipe.

The parodies in the Sausage range from the
' Splendid Shilling ' of John Philips, written in imi-
tation of Paradise Lost at the beginning of the
century, to a parody of Warton's own serious poetry.
Philips was an undergraduate of Trinity under that
humorous Dr. Bathurst who, though 'his behaviour
in general was inoffensive and obliging,' was once
found in his garden, which ran along the east side of
Balliol, throwing stones at the windows of the rival
foundation with much satisfaction.

Why is it, the philosophic reader may inquire, that
University wit runs so readily to Parody? If only
Oxford were concerned it might be attributed to the
influence of Aristotle, who lays it down in the
Poetics a treatise still read in the Schools that
the source of Poetry is imitation. But Cambridge

where Aristotle is not read, except by Dr. Jackson

is even more addicted to parody than Oxford ; l so

1 The best of all modern University parodies is undoubtedly the
' Heathen Pass-ee,' from the Light Green, said by Mr. Charles Wliib-
ley, in his Cap and Gown, to have been written by an undergraduate

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 29

that this explanation will not suffice. A nearer
reason seems to be that when occasion arises for a
poem when, say, Dr. A. of Magdalen makes himself
absurd, and Dr. B. of Queen's wishes to hold the
mirror up to nature the poetical afflatus of scorn, or
whatever the emotion be, has not, as in the case of
professional poets, a choice of imaginative receptacles
ready for it, and so is apt to condense itself upon the
poem which the indignant Doctor had last in reading.
And if this be true of the Doctor or Master, how
much more true of the Bachelor, and still more of
the undergraduate, whose

whole vocation
Is endless imitation.

But when, to change the figure, the new and some-
what acid wine of the University wit has been accom-
modated in old and creditably labelled bottles, it
becomes a point of honour that the fresh liquor shall
be brought into as close a resemblance to the old as
artifice can contrive. And thus a new art arises.
The new poem must be the same, yet not the same ;

named Hilton in 1872. From a study of Mr. Whibley's book I should
say that parody was of the very genius of Cambridge wit. There
seems, for example, to have been a Cambridge Tatler, which followed
close on the heels of the Oxford Spectator ; and I notice a very clever
writer Calverley, of Christ's College just a little later than Blayds,
of Balliol, on whom he has certainly formed his style. And even when
chronology affords no justification the same curious parallels occur:
witness an obscurer Cambridge Jowett, also celebrated in an epigram,
and a writer of vtrs de societe called Andrew Long.

30 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

it must keep the promise to the eye and ear while
it breaks it to the taste ; and so the ingenuity and
leisure which are, next to criticism, the chief cha-
racteristics of a University, come to the aid of the
latter, and the satire is coaxed or coerced into being
under a familiar form.

There are parodies, of course, which aim at ridi-
culing the poems they burlesque. Such are some of
those in the Sausage, which attack the ' Gothick '
school of Gray, Mason, and Warton himself; such,
in more recent times, is Calverley's celebrated ' The
Cock and the Bull;' and such are some of Mr.
Swinburne's parodies in the Heptalogia. But much
more often the form is caught at by the unborn
ghost of an idea as an opportunity of being born at
all, and then, having captured its vile body, our
admiration is solicited to the grace with which it
comports itself in it. Usually it is a ghastly and
galvanic performance. But some few parodies there
are of this sort written by men who can, if they
please, give to ' airy nothing ' a local habitation of
their own fashioning which pleased once and still
please. Dr. Merry's Lars Porsenna, which sings of
' Adolphus Smalls of Boniface,' and

Whiskered Tomkins, from the Hall
Of seedy Magdalene, \sic\

is still on sale at Shrimpton's, though Tomkins has
grown a beard and Magdalen Hall is merged in

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 31

Hertford. The Shoto-ver Papers (1874-5) contained
one good parody of Mr. Swinburne, called ' Procura-
tores.' l It begins

O vestment of velvet and virtue,

O venomous victors of vice,
Who hurt men who never have hurt you,

Oh, calm, cruel, colder than ice !
Why wilfully wage ye this war ? Is

Pure pity purged out of your breast ?
O purse-prigging Procuratores !

O pitiless pest !

We have smote and made redder than roses

With juice not of fruit nor of bud
The truculent town's people's noses,

And bathed brutal butchers in blood.
And we, all aglow with our glories,

Heard ye not, in the deafening din ;
And ye came, O ye Procuratores,

And ran us all in.

In this last quarter of a fast-closing century the
Oxford poets who have most arrided their generation
by parody are those who have signed them with the
easily extendable initials A. G. and Q. Their works
are to be found in their own volumes, or in the
Oxford Magazine, or in the Echoes from the
Oxford Magazine, and need not be copied here
being, indeed, copyright. A. G. delights us most

1 The author of this parody was, I believe, Mr. Iwan Miiller, then
of New College. Other contributors to the Shotwer Papers were
Mr. F. G. Stokes, of Merton ; Mr. Gordon Campbell, of Exeter ; Mr.
G. W. E. Morrison, of Queen's ; and Mr. F. S. Pulling, of Exeter,
of whom the last two no longer survive.

32 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

with his Latin, Q. with his English. Both, however,
begin to cry out for a commentator. Perhaps the
'Caliban upon Rudiments' is Q.'s most brilliant
whole, and perhaps

The crowds that cheer, but not discriminate,

his most brilliant line.

After Parody Oxford wit displays itself most in
Epigram. The epigrams recorded in our older col-
lections are too often in a more Rabelaisian taste
than, happily, prevails to-day. But some few are
presentable. The following may not be well known.
Our friend Mr. Hawkins Browne seems to have been
a sound critic of verse as well as of tobacco, for he
writes of Young's Night Thoughts on Life, Death,
and Immortality

His Life is lifeless, and his Death shall die,
And mortal is his Immortality.

Dr. Abel Evans, bursar of St. John's, sometimes
referred to as 'the Epigrammatist/ certainly deserved
his style. He is one of the Oxford wits enumerated
in the distich

Alma novem genuit celebres Rhedycina * poetas :
Bub, Stubb, Cobb, Crabb, Trapp, Young, Carey, Tickell,
Evans.

His best-known couplet is that on Sir John Vanbrugh,
who built Blenheim

1 An epithet for Oxford, Latinised from Redychen, said to have
been its British name.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 33

Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he
Laid many heavy loads on thee.

That on Dr. Tadlow is equally short and pointed

When Tadlow walks the streets, the paviours cry
' God bless you, sir ! ' and lay their rammers by.

Dr. Tadlow seems to have bided his opportunity, and
when Dr. Evans, as bursar, cut down some fine
College trees, he retorted, though less incisively

Indulgent Nature to each kind bestows
A secret instinct to discern its foes ;
The rogue a gibbet as his fate foresees,
And bears a keen antipathy to trees.

Not lightly to be forgotten, too, is Dr. Crassus,
celebrated in Terrce-filius, who had a great gift for
epigram ; one of his may stand for many. It is in a
manner since imitated by Mr. Silas Wegg.

Upon a Butt of excellent neat Port.

Upon my word and credit, gentlemen, d'ye see,
I have not smacked such wine in Oxford, since I took my
doctor's degree.

Epigrams have not greatly flourished since the
last century closed. The art has barely been kept
alive among the Professors, who alone have had the
leisure necessary to give this form of wit its proper
finish. Specimens by the late Professor Thorold
Rogers, the late Professor Henry Smith, and the late
Professor Jowett (who had a unique gift of epigram*
matic silence), are still quoted over the 'excellent

34 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

neat port ' in common rooms. Of the Professors
still with us it would be impertinent to speak.
Among junior members of the University the taste
for epigram has been sadly corrupted by the Lear
nonsense verse.

Last, though not least whether for age or dignity,
among the regular forms of University wit must be
mentioned the 'ambiguous pun,' once the veritable
hall-mark of a University man. 1

In this species of wit Cambridge is said to have
borne the bell, and Addison (Spectator, No. 61),
who thought lightly of it, attributed the advantage
of Cambridge to the fens and marshes in which that
University town was then situated. Perhaps the
recent drainage of Oxford may account for the com-
parative neglect into which punning has fallen there,
for not so very long ago it was a fashionable form of
wit ; of which fact I will offer evidence presently.
But first a few examples must be given of Puns, or

1 In garret dark he smokes and puns,

A prey to discipline and duns.
(The Oxford Sausage, ' Progress of Discontent,'

by T. War ton.)

It was a mark of Shakespeare's greatness recognised by his con.
temporaries that, not being a University man, he 'put down' the
scholars at their own games. His best pun was reserved for the
christening of a child of the famous scholar Ben Jonson. ' Ben,' says
he, ' I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest
gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I have resolv'd at last.'
' I prythee what ?' says he. ' I' faith, Ben, I'll e'en give him a dozen
good Lattin spoons, and thou shall translate them.' [Latten was a
cheap metal.]

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 35

rather Punns, as they were practised by our ancestors.
Anthony a Wood, that great antiquary, made a
collection, which was printed in 1751, under the title
of Modius Salium, or The Bushel of Salt ; from which
I will make a few quotations.

1. Under the dial in All Souls quadrangle is written pereunt
ct impiitantur and et is just under the figure XI, whereupon Mr.
Prest-wich used to say, when the shadow of the gnomon came
to et 'twas Eating-time.

2. On Merideth, organist of New College

Here lies one blown out of breath,

Who lived a merry life and dy'd a merry death.

3. Whafs your name f quoth proctor Fell to a scholar of
Merton, when he met him late at night ; Gall, answered he.
Out, you rascal, replied the proctor, do you jeer me? and forth-
with committed him. \_Fel is the Latin for^vz//.]

Perhaps these few extracts will suffice. The author
of Terrcz-filins has a panegyric upon punning in his
39th paper. ' Never,' he says, ' did this facetious art
flourish in such perfection ; it heightens the pleasures
of conversation, gives a quick goust to the toast, a
flavour to the wine, and a relish to the enjoyment
of our friends. How many long summer days and
winter evenings have I spent at Oxford in this witty
and delightful manner ! How was I pleased, though
I was no great artist myself, to hear my jovial com-
panions display their ambiguous capacities against
one another! What a sensible pleasure was it to
behold the sheerest wit bandied about in so lavish a

36 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

manner ! . . . Oh, Oxford ! thou British Paradise !
what ravishing delights dost thou pour forth to thy
children ! what egregious children hast thou to
boast of !

Et hczc olim meminisse juvabit?

After which egregious apostrophe he gives, by way
of supplement to the old book of Oxford jests, a few
illustrations of the art as practised in his day; of
these it will be enough to quote one.

A man who lived just by a pound in Oxford, and kept an ale-
house, put upon his sign these words, viz. ( Ale sold here by the
pound ; ' which seduced a great many young students to go
thither out of curiosity to buy liquor, as they thought, by weight ;
hearing of which the vice-chancellor sent for the landlord to
punish him according to statute, which prohibits all ale-house-
keepers to receive scholars into their houses ; but the fellow
being apprehensive what he was sent for, as soon as he came
into the vice-chancellor's lodgings, fell a spitting and spawling
about the room ; upon which the vice-chancellor asked him in
an angry tone, ' what he meant by that ? ' ' Sir,' says the
fellow, ' I am come to clear myself.' ' Clear yourself, sirrah ! '
says the vice-chancellor, ' but I expect that you should clear
yourself in another manner ; they say that you sell ale by the
pound.' ' No indeed, Mr. vice-chancellor,' replies the fellow,
' I don't.' ' Don't you,' says the vice-chancellor again, ' how
do you, then ? ' ' Very well, 1 replies he, ' I humbly thank you,
Mr. vice-chancellor ; pray how do you, sir ? ' ' Get you gone,'
says the vice-chancellor, ' for a rascal,' and turned him down
stairs. Away went the fellow, and meeting one of the proctors,
told him that the vice-chancellor desired to speak with him
immediately ; the proctor in great haste went to know the vice-
chancellor's command, and the fellow with him, who told the
vice-chancellor when they came before him, 'that here he was.'
' Here he is ! ' says the vice-chancellor, ' who is here ? ' ' Sir,'

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 37

says the impudent ale-house-keeper, ' you bad me go for a rascal,
and lo ! here I have brought you one.' But the poor fellow
paid dearly for his jokes : his licence was taken away, and he
was committed to the castle prison.

The Oxford alehouse-keeper, who had not read
his Aristotle, did not know that it is vicious to
carry a virtue to extremes ; and so, copying his
masters' habits without their discretion, he fell into
disgrace.

It would be tedious to trace the history of the Pun
through the annals of a century's wit ; let it suffice
now to give a few examples of the practice nearer
our own day. I have in my locked cabinet a play
called Pentheus, bearing date 1866, by the present 1
Vice-Chancellor, who would have dealt, one feels
sure, more tenderly with the alehouse-keeper of
Amhurst's anecdote. From Pentheus I take leave to
make a few extracts

Pentheus. Enough ! I've tried your mettle, and I see
You Ve lots of brass and lots of irony ;
For silly words you've shown a great facility
And by this volley proved your w/z;bility, &c. (p. 15).
Glaucon. To-night no supper-table shall we see,
What an insupportable injury (p. 20).
Bacchus. But now, and this is for your private ear
Ino (aside). His private ear! I'll pry vat e'er it be (p. 24).

It would take Edward Terry to do justice to the
last admirable example. Then, skipping a decade,
we come to the Shotover Papers, every number of

1 Now one of the Burgesses of Oxford in Parliament.

38 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

which contains some specimens of the paronomasia.
The best is

THE FRESHMAN'S SPELLING BOOK :

WORDS OF THE SAME PRONUNCIATION BUT OF DIFFERENT
SPELLING AND MEANING.

Bone, to crib. Magdalen, an establishment

Bohn, a crib. where port is absorbed.

Mare, a kind of horse. Oxen, cattle which drive ploughs,

Mayor, a kind of ass. and are kept in cribs.

Maudlin, the effect of ab- Oxon, a place where cribs are

sorbing port. kept, and from which ploughs
drive men away.

Before taking leave of this popular form of Oxford
wit, let me notice a special vein of it worked by a
mathematical gentleman of Christ Church, still better
known as the author of the best child's book the
world has ever seen. Too much or too little mathe-
matics is equally a hindrance to the appreciation of
Mr. Dodgson's meaning, which lies, as an Oxford
meaning always should, in the mean. I am the proud
possessor in its original green cover of a tract called
' The Dynamics of a Parti-cle, with an Excursus on
the new Method of Evaluation as applied to TT.'
From this I will quote a few of the simpler puns.

POSTULATES.
i.

Let it be granted that a speaker may digress from any one
point to any other point,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 39

That a finite argument (i.e. one finished and disposed of) may
be produced to any extent in subsequent debates.

That a controversy may be raised about any question, and
at any distance from that question.

PROP. V. Pr.

TO CONTINUE A GIVEN SERIES.

Example. A and B, who are respectively addicted to Fours
and Fives, occupy the same set of rooms, which is always at
Sixes and Sevens. Find the probable amount of reading done
by A and B while the Eights are on.

I will conclude with the story of the Oxford scholar
which Charles Lamb has made classical by quoting
it in one of his Essays as an illustration of the law
that the worst puns are the best. An Oxford scholar
meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through
the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary
question : ' Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare or a
wig ? ' Lamb's analysis of the merit of this anony-
mous masterpiece is one of the subtlest pieces of
criticism in English,

40 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

III.

A FORGOTTEN POET: ABRAHAM COWLEY.

I HAD intended in this Conference to pursue the topic
I introduced in the last, by a disquisition upon
Oxford guide-books (not forgetting Tom Warton's
famous Companion to the Guide) and Oxford
Magazines, from the Student to which Dr. Johnson
contributed, down through the Oxford and Cam-
bridge Magazine, which William Morris founded and
financed, to the Isis of to-day. And then I had
meant to pass from the Isis to the Granta and
celebrate the literary glories of the sister University.
For if I have imbibed any tincture of the classical
spirit it shows itself in my love of order. I like to
finish with one subject before taking up another. If
I pass a holiday this year among the English lakes,
I plan to spend the next among the lakes of Scotland,
and the next again at Killarney ; and I have the
same regular habits with my mountains and cathe-
drals and other objects of interest.

But my mind became somewhat unhinged by a
miserable experience at the bookseller's. I had gone

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 41

to buy a Cowley to give my god-child, and was met
by blank astonishment, mixed (as it seemed to my
heated fancy) with some pity. ' No, sir, there are so
many poets now, and poetry is so much a drug, that
we are compelled to keep none but standard authors.'
I wondered why the good man called poetry a 'drug.'
I have noticed people always call a thing a ' drug '
when it won't sell, but to judge by the advertise-
ments, drugs are the only merchandise. However, I
did not open this question with my bookseller, but
contented myself with protesting mildly that Cowley
was dead, and might be reckoned a standard author.
To which my friend Sosius : ' I think he can hardly
be a standard, sir ; a " classic " as we call them in
the trade ; our classics are Shakespeare, who sells
wonderfully well for presents now ; perhaps you have
read his life, sir, that has just come out ; rather late
in the day for a biography ; made quite a fortune,
they say ; a swan that knew how to feather his nest,
if I may use the expression ; and then we have
Longfellow, and Eliza Cook, and Hemans, and Scott,
and Shelley, and Milton, and two or three others
whose names I don't justly remember. Oh, Cowper.
It will be Cowper you mean, I expect. Cow/^r it is,
not Covfley. John, get down the Cowpers for Mr.
Sylvan. We have them ruled with red lines in
padded morocco, with rounded edges, very pretty.'
But I had fled, with what I hope was mistaken for
an apology for haste.

42 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

' Who now reads Cowley ? ' Pope asked the
question, having himself read Cowley with great
care, and having some interest in dissuading his
own readers from doing so ; but I had fondly
imagined that as no one now reads Pope, the fashion
had swung back again to Cowley. I suppose I
am wrong. Let me then attempt to revive the
recollection of a man of genius. I like to think
Cowley may have had a good deal in common with
Agathon, a Greek poet whose works survive only in
a few fragments, but whose picture has been drawn
by the pencil of the illustrious Plato in the 'Sym-
posium.' Certainly, he had this in common with
him, that he was 'a perfect gentleman and a
favourite with his friends,' and it may very likely
have been that Agathon's genius was reflective, like
Cowley's, though probably the Greek excelled the
Englishman in passion. Cowley, like Agathon, paid
his poetical tribute to the God of Love, but with
Cowley it was a purely professional tribute. In the
preface to the volume of his love-poems, which he
called The Mistress, he apologises for the book
on the ground that ' Poets are scarce thought Free-
men of their Company without paying some duties
and obliging themselves to be true to love;' and
he is careful to point out that the poet 'may
be, in his own practice and disposition, a philo-
sopher, nay, a Stoick, and yet speak sometimes
with the softness of an amorous Sappho.' Cowley,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 43

it must be allowed, never for the twinkling of
an eye recalls Sappho. It would, indeed, have
been a miracle if the author of the most 'con-
vincing' panegyric upon Solitude and (face Mr.
Walsh) Celibacy, should have written passionate
love-poetry. The book contains a poem called
'The Wish' upon his favourite topic of Solitude,
which, in honour of its place, is tempered with a
' mistress,' but we feel, as we read, that the poem
would have read more naturally had the mistress
been away :

Well, then : I now do plainly see
This busy World and I shall ne'er agree ;
The very Honey of all Earthly Joy

Does of all Meats the soonest cloy.

And they (methinks) deserve my Pity,
Who for it can endure the Stings,
The Croud, and Buz, and Murmurings,

Of this great Hive, the City.

Ah, yet, ere I descend to th' Grave,
May I a small House and large Garden have !
And a. few Friends, and many Books, both true,

Both wise, and both delightful too !

And, since Love ne'er will from me flee,
A Mistress moderately fair,
And good as Guardian-Angels are,

Only belov'd, and loving me !

The ' Mistress moderately fair ' hardly fits in with
the bachelor delights enumerated before her, and
plainly throned higher in the poet's hierarchy of
hopes. If we had any doubt of this, it would be

44 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

removed by the stanzas introduced into the essay
styled ' Of Solitude,' though Solitude is the subject
of most of the others :

Ah wretched, and too solitary he,

Who loves not his own Company !
He'll feel the Weight of 't many a Day,

Unless he call in Sin or Vanity
To help to bear 't away.

Oh Solitude, first State of Humankind !

Which blest remain'd, 'till Man did find
Ev'n his own Helper's Company.

As soon as two (alas !) together join'd,
The Serpent made up three.

Cowley's love-poems, then, may be dismissed as
nothing more than a tribute to the fashion which
strung together ' the lunatic, the lover, and the
poet.' But the volume called The Mistress should
not, for all that, be merely skipped, as it contains
other than amorous poems. There is, for example,
a too clear-eyed poem called ' The Spring/ which
opens

Though you be absent here, I needs must say
The Trees as beauteous are, and Flowers as gay
As ever they were wont to be.

And there are several copies of sparkling vers de
societe. Here, for instance, is a verse from ' The
Welcome,' in which the poet addresses that returned
prodigal, his heart

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 45

When once or twice you chanc'd to view

A rich, well-governed Heart,
Like China, it admitted You

But to the Frontier-part.

From Paradise shut for evermore,
What good is 't that an Angel kept the Door ?

Others are ' Discretion,' and ' The Dissembler,'
and 'The Waiting-Maid,' which contains a perfect
epigram

Th' adorning thee with so much Art

Is but a barb'rous skill ;
Tis but the Poisoning of a Dart

Too apt before to kill.

In the same key is the delightful protest ' to
his Mistress' against finery a protest conceived in
a more gentlemanlike spirit than the often-quoted
verses of Ben Jonson

Tyrian Dye why do you wear,
You whose Cheeks best scarlet are ?

Why do you so fondly pin

Pure Linen o'er your Skin

(Your Skin that's whiter far),
Casting a dusky Cloud before a Star ?

And so on.

But the highest place in this genre is taken by
a poem, which was first published, not in The
Mistress, but among the Miscellanies in the Folio,
a ballad called ' The Chronicle.' It is a most
finished piece, and so far as my reading goes, the
best specimen of vers de socitti! in English. It has
always amazed me that Mr. Locker omitted it from

46 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

his 'Lyra Elegantiarum,' for it exactly answers to
his ideal requirement. 'The tone,' he says, 'should
not be pitched high ; it should be idiomatic and
rather in the conversational key ; the rhythm should
be crisp and sparkling, and the rhyme frequent and
never forced, while the entire poem should be marked
by tasteful moderation, high finish, and complete-
ness.' 'The Chronicle' is, as its name denotes,
a catalogue, more or less raisonne, of Cowley's quite
imaginary 'mistresses.' It opens with a fine
swing

Margarita first possess!,

If I remember well, my Breast,
Margarita first of all ;

But when a while the wanton Maid

With my restless Heart had plaid,
Martha took the flying ball.

Then follows the long tale of tyrants Katharine,
Elisa, Mary and gentle Ann together, another Mary,
Rebecca, Judith

One Month, Three Days, and Half an Hour

Judith held the Sovereign Pow'r.

Wondrous beautiful her Face,
But so weak and small her Wit
That she to govern was unfit,

And so Susanna took her place.

There is much virtue in ' so.' Isabella succeeded
Susan, and- 'black-eyed Bess' Isabella; and then
came an interregnum, followed by an et catera. And
then the poet concludes

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 47

But should I now to you relate

The Strength and Riches of their State,
The Powder, Patches, and the Pins,
The Ribbons, Jewels, and the Rings,
The Lace, the Paint, and warlike things
That make up all their Magazins :

If I should tell the Politick Arts

To take and keep Men's Hearts,
The Letters, Embassies, and Spies,

The Frowns, and Smiles, and Flatteries,

The Quarrels, Tears, and Perjuries,
Numberless, Nameless Mysteries ! 1

And all the little Lime- Twigs laid

By Matcliavil the Waiting- Maid;
I more voluminous should grow

(Chiefly if I like them should tell

All change of weathers that befel)
Than Holinshead or Stow.

But I will briefer with them be,

Since few of them were long with Me.
An higher and a nobler strain

My present Emperess does claim,

Heleonora, First d 1 th' Name,

Whom God grant long to Reign.

I have hinted above that Cowley had points of
similarity with Agathon. It was unfortunate that
he believed himself to be a second Pindar, for most
of his unpopularity with later generations has come
from his self-styled Pindzrique Odes. What
charmed Cowley in the odes of Pindar was their
apparent freedom : the wheels of Pindar's chariot

1 A line worthy of Rossetti.

48 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

seemed to go just where the spirit drove ; but the
fact was that Cowley did not understand the principle
of Pindar's form, and mistook it for formlessness.
However admirable the verses an ode may contain,
unless the principle of its construction appear, half
the pleasure is lost ; and on this account, as well
as their frequent prosiness, Cowley's odes must be
pronounced failures, all but the magnificent Ode to
the Royal Society, which is admirable in both matter
and manner. From the rest the reader will but
glean a line here and a phrase there to please
him. Thus, in one he says of Fame in a fine, ironical
couplet

Some with vast, costly tombs would purchase it,
And by the proofs of death pretend to live.

In the Ode to Dr. Harvey he has a good passage
against natural philosophers who do not study
Nature, but only repeat each other's dogmas

Thus Harvey sought for Truth in Truth's own Book,
The Creatures, which by God himself was writ ;

And wisely thought 'twas fit
Not to read Comments only upon it,
But on th' Original it self to look.
Methinks in Art's great Circle others stand

Lock'd up together, Hand in Hand,

Ev'ry one leads as he is led,

The same bare Path they tread,
And dance, like Fairies, a fantastick Round,
But neither change their Motion, nor their Ground :
Had Harvey to this Road confin'd his Wit,
His noble Circle of the Blood had been untrodden yet.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 49

If one wishes to understand Cowley's ideal in
poetry, we may learn much from his verses 'upon
Wit,' for when our ancestors asked one another to
define Wit, they meant, What does true Poetry
consist in ? We may learn much also from the
Preface to the Folio Edition of his works. Th
qualities upon which he there lays the chief stress
are fertility of invention, modest dignity of style, and
lustre and vigour of elocution, and surely these are
all qualities of his own verse. To his fertility every
poem bears witness. Dr. Johnson, who did not love
him, and who devoted most of his essay upon Cowley
to an attack upon the false taste of what Cowley him-
self styles his ' odd similitudes,' yet, in one of several
remarkable bursts of candour, admits that to write in
Cowley's style required a poet ' at least to read and
think.' Certainly, whatever his subject, Cowley has
always just and weighty and appropriate sentiments
to express. Take, for example, his two great elegies,
that upon his Cambridge friend, William Hervey, and
the other upon the poet Crashaw. Milton's elegy of
' Lycidas ' may be a far better poem than the former,
but it is an incomparably worse elegy. We know no
more about poor drowned Mr. King when we have
done than before we began, and we do not care any
more. How much more touching are Cowley's verses
upon his college companion :

Large was his Soul ; as large a Soul as e'er
Submitted to inform a Body here.

50 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

High as the Place 'twas shortly in Heav'n to have,

But Low, and Humble as his Grave.
So High, that all the Virtues there did come

As to the chiefest Seat

Conspicuous and Great ;
So Low that for Me too it made a room.

If 'Lycidas' be compared too with the Elegy on
Crashaw, it must be admitted that, while in beauty of
writing Milton is far superior being indeed supreme
he is as far inferior in the appropriateness of his
topics. What has his famous attack upon the clergy
to do with Mr. King? Cowley keeps in mind two
points about his friend first that he was a sacred
poet, and secondly that he was a convert to Rome ;
and so his episodes are very appropriately, first an
attack upon the popular cavalier poetry, with its
everlasting heathen gods ; and secondly a hint as to
the relative importance of piety and exactness of
belief; a passage, like so many passages in Cowley,
which was the original of an often-quoted paragraph
in Pope

Pardon, my Mother Church, if I consent

That Angels led him when from thee he went,

For ev'n in Error sure no Danger is

When join'd with so much Piety as his.

Ah, Mighty God, with Shame I speak't and Grief,

Ah that our greatest Faults were in Belief!

His Faith perhaps in some nice Tenets might

Be wrong ; his Life, I'm sure, was in the right.

And I myself a Catholick will be,

So far at least, great Saint, to Pray to thee.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 51

I might go on in this way illustrating the copious-
ness and appropriateness of Cowley's sentiments
through poem after poem ; but let it suffice to add
one more instance, the twin poems For and Against
Hope. What could be more admirable than the
following description of Hope ?

Brother of Fear, more gaily clad !
The merrier Fool o' th' two, yet quite as Mad :
Sire of Repentance, Child of fond Desire /
That blow'st the ChymicKs and the Lover's Fire /
Leading them still insensibly on
By the strong Witchcraft of Anon !

Let me, in conclusion, say a word about Cowley's
style. Dr. Johnson tells us that he ' makes no
selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase ;
he has no elegances, either lucky or elaborate ; and
he has few epithets, and those scattered without
peculiar propriety or nice adaptation.' I feel that
the passages I have already quoted will sufficiently
meet the earlier part of this very sweeping charge ;
but it will be interesting to examine the question of
Cowley's epithets. It was Waller who raised the
epithet to the position of tyrannical importance it
occupied in the eighteenth century ; and we cannot
regret that Cowley did not give in to the new fashion
But to say his epithets are few is to exaggerate, and
to say they are inappropriate is to have an improper
notion of propriety. Take a few lines from the open-
ing stanza of ' The Complaint,' a poem to which no
reference has yet been made :

52 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

In a deep Vision's intellectual Scene,
Beneath a Bow'r for Sorrow made,

Th' uncomfortable Shade
Of the black Yew's unlucky Green,
Mix'd with the mourning Willow's careful Gray,
Where reverend Cam cuts out his famous way,
The Melancholy Cowley lay, &c.

These few lines contain representative epithets of
almost every species, and the reader will be a sufficient
judge of their propriety. I would only call attention
to the peculiar felicity of black, which, taken with
green, gives the true sombre tint of the yew tree,
while it adds a sense of unluckiness ; to uncomfortable,
which contradicts the usual attribute of shade, the
shadow of trees being one of the most consoling
things in nature ; and finally to careful, in the sense
of ' full of care/ which, being an unusual sense, gives
just the note of distinction necessary to heighten the
whole passage. It would have been an instructive
experience if the great Cham of letters had but
vouchsafed to amend Cowley's epithets throughout
this charming poem ; which is, in fact, Cowley's
remonstrance with his ungrateful sovereign for leaving
him in want after a lifetime passed in his service,
though it professes to be Cowley's defence of his
sovereign against the remonstrance of the Muse.
The Muse is finely sarcastic :

Thou, Changeling thou, bewitch'd with Noise and Show,
Wouldst into Courts and Cities from me go ;
Wouldst see the World abroad, and have a Share
In all the Follies, and the Tumults there ;

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Thou wouldst, forsooth, be something in a State
And Business thou wouldst find, and wouldst create :

Business, the frivolous Pretence
Of human Lusts, to shake off Innocence ;

Business, the grave Impertinence !

' Business, the grave Impertinence ! ' Is not that
one phrase enough in itself to convict the great
lexicographer of either malice or incompetence in
writing that Cowley has ' no selection of words ' ?

There are not a few other poems to which I would
gladly invite attention.

But if I am to win friends for Cowley, I must not
be tedious. Only I cannot omit by way of bonne
bouche two pieces which are always in my own
thought, the one written when the poet was a boy,
the other when he was old. But side by side they
show how thoroughly the child was the father of the
man. This is the boy's wish :

This only grant me : that my Means may lie
Too low for Envy, for Contempt too high.

Some Honour I would have,
Not from Great Deeds, but Good alone,
The unknown are better than ill known ;

Rumour can ope the grave.

Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends
Not on the Number, but the choice of Friends.

Books should, not Business, entertain the Light,
And Sleep, as undisturb'd as Death, the Night.

My House a Cottage more
Than Palace, and should fitting be
For all my use, not Luxury.

My Garden painted o'er

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With Nature's hand, not Art's ; and Pleasures yield,
Horace might envy in his Sabine Field.

Thus would I double my Life's fading Space,
For he that runs it well, twice runs his Race.

And in this true delight,
These unbought Sports, this happy State,
I would not fear, nor wish, my Fate,

But boldly say each Night,
To-Morrow let my Sun his Beams display,
Or in Clouds hide them ; / have li-v'd to-Day.

And this is the strain to which he makes his exit :

But his past Life who without Grief can see,

Who never thinks his End too near,

But says to Fame, Thou art mine Heir j
That Man extends Life's natural Brevity ;

This is, this is the only way

To out-live Nestor in a Day.

I will only add one word to anyone whom my
poor praise may incite to buy a copy of Cowley's
poems. You must seek them in the old book shops.
Aim at getting the only edition which turned him
out like a gentleman Tonson's three volumes of
1707 and see that all the plates are there, including
both Charleses and the Cromwell. There should be,
if my reckoning is true, thirty-one.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 55

IV.

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF 'CORNHILL* UPON
PATRIOTIC SONGS.

MY DEAR FRIEND, I want you to condole with me
on the extraordinary want there is of patriotic songs
capable of moving the masses of the people, notwith-
standing that our poets have lately given evidence by
poems that have appealed to the leisured classes that
they are not wanting in imperial instincts. I was much
struck by a letter that appeared lately in the public
press from a very promising young poet, who wrote
to suggest a comparatively unused topic to writers
gravelled for lack of matter. The topic he suggested
was Purgatory. I make bold to think the choice un-
fortunate, not on Protestant but on Platonic grounds.
You will recollect a passage in the third book of the
' Republic ' where the question is being debated as
to the kind of poetry best fitted for the citizens of an
ideal State, and you will recall the fact that one of
the subjects objected against was this very subject of
Purgatory, on the ground that its tendency was to
sap courage. After quoting half-a-dozen lines of

56 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Homer about the state of the soul after death,
Socrates proceeds : ' We must beg Homer and the
other poets not to be angry if we strike out these
and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical
or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the
greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they
meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to
be free, and who should fear slavery worse than death.
Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and
appalling names which describe the world below.
I do not say that these horrible stories may not have
a use of some kind ; but there is a danger that the
nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable
and effeminate by them. Another and a nobler
strain must be sung by us ' (iii. 386, tr. Jowett). Now
it is difficult not to agree with Socrates. Let us
suppose for a moment that Milton, instead of writing
Paradise Lost, which, in Plato's words, ' may have
a use of some kind,' had sung in ' another and a
nobler strain,' had put his blood, for example, into
battle songs of Worcester or Dunbar. Would he not
have merited more of an imperial people ? And, as
he valued the reputation of a practical man, would he
not have exercised a more real influence over the
course of events than by all his prose pamphlets,
which fell still-born from the press ? He might
who knows ? have prevented ' the glorious Restaura-
tion,' and spared us some of the most deplorable
years in our annals. And yet to speak so is perhaps

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 57

to speak unwisely, for a poet gives us what he has it
in him to give, even if it be only about Purgatory ;
and the song which we desiderate the song that
shall 'fly alive through the lips of men' is not
necessarily within the scope even of those who can
write an epic about Hades. I am haunted, indeed,
by the suspicion, which you, dear friend, with your
wonted good nature, will censure as uncharitable,
that the gentleman who expressed a wish to write
the songs of the people on condition that he should
be released from making the laws, would have written
the songs without any such stipulation if only he had
found it possible. I take leave to doubt if there are
ten members of our own Legislature who could be
depended upon for a patriotic song, even if they were
guaranteed ' a pair ' from now to the ; end of the
session. It might nevertheless be worth Sir William
Walrond's while to make the offer. And I firmly
hold that it would be worth the Government's while
to keep a second-class Poet Laureate for this business,
just as the great Dibdin was retained in the last years
of the Napoleonic Terror. If you have any weight,
therefore, with our young writers, I would beg of you
to divert their interests from Purgatory, which could
never be made really attractive to the working classes,
and centre them instead upon politics, imperial or
local. It would be well to disguise the fact, which
might deter persons of real genius, that to write a
successful song is the readiest way to make a fortune.

58 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Now, what are the qualities a song must have to
stir the great heart of the people? If we could
ascertain this, we might be able to give our young
poets some useful hints. It is needless to say that
Mr. Newbolt's method, and even Mr. Kipling's, 1
leaves the demos cold. A first fact to notice would
be that the populace in England, unlike that in
France, can never be brought to take itself heroically.
' Rule Britannia,' for example, is far from being a
popular ditty ; its vogue is amongst the middle
classes, and even there is chiefly due to Arne's music,
and the opportunity which that allows to the aspiring
vocalist. In the abstract, Englishmen do not think
of priding themselves upon their national character-
istics ; they take them for granted. I have often felt
that Mr. W. S. Gilbert, in speaking of an English-
man's ' temptations to belong to other nations,'
sacrificed truth to rhyme ; it is only in the face of an
enemy that a true-born Englishman takes enough
stock of himself to make comparison with any other
nation possible, and then the comparison necessarily
results, not in admiration, but contempt. It was
owing to their psychological truth in this particular
that Garrick's ' Hearts of Oak,' Leveridge's ' Roast
Beef of Old England,' and McDermott's ' We don't
want to fight,' carried the nation by storm. I would
lay down, then, as our first canon that an English

1 This was written before 'The Absent-minded Beggar' amassed
so large a fortune.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 59

fighting song must be not self-glorious, but derisive
of the enemy. And so it must be with all effective
political songs. I suppose the song that had more
political influence in England than any before or
since was ' Lilli-burlero/ which contributed not a
little towards the great Rebellion in 1688. Burnet
tells us that ' the whole army, and at last the people
both in town and country, were singing it perpetually.'
The occasion of it was the sending by James II. of
the Roman Catholic Talbot, made Lord Tyrconnel,
as Deputy to Ireland, and the song is supposed to be
a paean of the Irish Romanists :

Ho ! broder Teague, dost hear de decree,

Lilli burlero, bullen-a-la^
Dat we shall have a new deputie,

Lilli burlero, bullen-a-la.

Lero, lero, lilli burlero, &>c.

Ho ! by my shoul it is de Talbot,
And he will cut all de English troat ;

Tho', by my shoul, de English do praat

De law's on deir side, and Creish knows what.

But if dispence do come from the Pope

We'll hang Magna Charta and dem in a rope, &c.

Alas ! in the two centuries that have elapsed, the
words have lost what spice they ever had ; but the
tune to which they were sung, 'a new Irish tune by

1 ' Lilli burlero and Bullen-a-lah are said to have been the words of
distinction used among the Irish Papists in their massacre of Protestants
in 1641.' PERCY.

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Mr. Purcell,' is as captivating as ever ; it breathes a
spirit of amused raillery, perfectly well-bred, and
much more deadly than the loftiest contempt or the
most furious scorn. You will not have forgotten that
our Uncle Toby, when anything which he deemed
very absurd was offered, would whistle half-a-dozen
bars of it.

The Lowland Scotch, being a self-contented nation
like ourselves, and not wearing their nerves outside
their skin like their Highland brethren, have the
same trick of ventilating their patriotism by derision
of their foes ; but with a difference. Their muse has
a pawky, over-prudent habit of postponing inspiration
until after the issue of the fight Everybody knows
' Heh, Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin' yet,' which was
their amiable way of celebrating Sir John Cope's
defeat at Prestonpans ; it goes to a tune of ribald
briskness ; less well-known now, but equally ungrate-
ful to our feelings at the time, is the ' Song after
Bannockburn.' ' General Leslie's March to Long-
marston Moor ' has the unusual decency of affecting
to be written before the engagement. But, indeed,
this peculiarity, together with lines like the second,
eighth, twelfth, and fourteenth, makes me suspect
that it may be really an English satire, that was blind
to one of the most typical characteristics of the
Scottish war-song. Thus it goes :

March ! march !
Why the Devil do ye na march ?

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Stand to your arms, my lads,

Fight in good order ;
Front about, ye musketeers all,

Till ye come to the English border :
Stand to 't and fight like men,
True Gospel to maintain,
The Parliament's blithe to see us a-coming.
When to the Kirk we come
We'll purge it ilka room,
Frae Popish relics, and a' sic innovation ;

That a' the world may see

There's none i' th' right but we
Of the auld Scottish nation.
Jenny shall wear the hood,
Jockey the sark of God ;
And the kist fu of whistles
That make sic a cleiro

Our pipers braw

Shall hae them a',
Whate'er come on it.
Busk up your plaids, my lads,
Cock up your bonnet.

March ! march !
Why the Devil do ye na march ?
Stand to your arms, my lads,

Fight in good order.

A second noticeable feature in our popular bellicose
poetry is what you, my dear friend, would perhaps
call its ' actuality ; ' its clear eye for the solid facts
of life, its demand for the due purveyance of the
' sinews ' of war, and its refusal to be roused up to
fight, or fobbed off in the way of reward, by such
an ' airy nothing ' as military glory. I have already
remarked upon 'The Roast Beef of Old England ;'
that song lays down with much emphasis that it is

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roast beef, and roast beef alone, that is the chief
cause of the Englishman's success in war ; and it
shows our national straightforwardness that we are
not ashamed to wear before the nations the un-
imaginative sobriquet of John Bull. The Englishman
is no less solicitous about the monetary value of his
successes. He is not of those aesthetic weaklings who
practise the art of war for the art's sake. The true
British feeling was expressed by one of our Poets
Laureate, Mr. Southey, in his justly popular poem
about the Battle of Blenheim ; which represents a
sophisticated German peasant as in vain attempting
to parry the voice of Truth and Nature in that
demand ex ore infantium et lactentium

But what good came of it at last ?

This practical spirit comes out clearly and strongly
in the old ballads which stirred that typical English-
man, Sir Philip Sidney, 'like a trumpet.' Take
' Brave Lord Willoughby ' for example, to which
Byrd wrote a gorgeously romantic tune. There is,
first of all, the clear statement of the numerical odds
that an Englishman, relying on beef, always feels
bound to face :

The fifteenth day of July,

With glistering spear and shield,
A famous fight in Flanders

Was foughten in the field ;
The most conspicuous officers

Were English captains three,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 63

But the bravest man in battle
Was brave Lord Willoughby.

The next was Captain Norris,

A valiant man was he :
The other, Captain Turner,

From field would never flee.
With fifteen hundred fighting men,

Alas ! there were no more,
They fought with forty thousand men

Upon the bloody shore.

Then there follows a clear, business-like statement of
the work done ; and finally a statement every bit as
precise of the remuneration received for it :

To the soldiers that were maimed

And wounded in the fray,
The queen allowed a pension

Of fifteen pence a day,
And from all costs and charges

She quit and set them free :
And this she did all for the sake

Of brave Lord Willoughby.

The same general features are to be found in the
ballads of the other Service. An admirable specimen
of these is the ' Honour of Bristol,' which sets forth
'how the Angel Gabriel of Bristol fought with three
ships, who boarded as many times ; wherein we
cleared our decks and killed five hundred of their
men, and wounded many more and made them fly
into Gales, when we lost but three men, to the
Honour of the Angel Gabriel of Bristol.' One verse
may be quoted. Notice especially the reasons given
for the popularity of this particular vessel :

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This lusty ship of Bristol

Sailed out adventurously
Against the foes of England,

Her strength with them to try :
Well victualled, rigged, and manned she was

With good provision still,
Which made men cry, ' To sea, to sea,

With the Angel Gabriel ! '

Such, roughly, are the characteristics of English
folk-songs, and here, I venture to think, is work for
our poets. See how wide the field is no less than
the whole field of politics, imperial or local quidquid
agunt homines. There is no cause that cannot be
be killed or borne to victory by a song. In my part
of the country, when the cry was raised for ' three
acres and a cow/ our parliamentary members were
hard put to it to face their village meetings.
Expectation pictured them as about to arrive in
patriarchal fashion urging along a herd of kine with
the measuring rod that was to plan out the acres.
But at most they came with two horses, and in their
hand the manuscript roll of a speech, which, under
the circumstances, it was often not easy to deliver.
So they called in the Muses to aid. They revived
that fine song of Dibdin's, the ' Miller's Daughter,'
with its jaunty air, to make the project ridiculous,
and they succeeded. Do you know the song ?

There was a miller's daughter

Liv'd in a certain village,
Who made I a mighty slaughter ;

For I'd have you to know

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 65

Both friend and foe,
The clown and the beau
She always laid low :
And her portion, as I understand,
Was three acres of land.
(Chorus} Three acres and a cow,
A harrow and a plough,
And other things for tillage ;
What d'ye think of my miller's daughter ?

The emphasis with which the italicised line was
always given (or, to put it more phonetically, ' three
hacres and a keow ') was mordant enough to kilt any
bill ever brought into Parliament. Now my argu-
ment is, that what could be done once can be done
always, and that what the nation at this moment
needs is a Tyrtaeus of the Legislature. But he must
not be a dilettante. Can anything be imagined, for
instance, with less snap about it than Tennyson's
attack on the House of Lords in 1852 ?

And you, my Lords, you make the people muse
For doubt if you be of our Barons' breed

\Vere those your sires who fought at Lewes ?
Is this the manly strain of Runnymede?

No, the reader replies, decidedly it isn't ; a poet of
the people who is qualifying as a successor to the old
Barons must not write so, nor must he rhyme muse
with Leives.

I have been casting about for any evidence that
the County, District, and Parish Councils are alive to
the mighty force that lies at their service in song.
All that I have been able to discover is the following

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piece, which is descriptive rather than critical, and
was possibly sung as a cantata at a village meeting,
in the first exuberance of expectation at what Mr.
Ritchie's Act would do for them. It has no poetical
merit, but is interesting as a document of the days
before the parish councils were patronised by the
squires and squiresses, and employed by them as a
means of combining beneficence with economy ; the
expense of improvements which would in old days
have come out of their own pockets being now
divided among all the ratepayers.

The Chairman of the Parish Meeting speaks :

To all and sundry greeting :

Once more on Phoenix wing
Appears our Parish Meeting,

True harbinger of spring.
Choose fifteen good and true men,

As in past years you've done,
(Or, if it please you, women),

All over twenty-one.

In this ideal parish

I need not press on you,
Since criminals are rarish,

That such you must eschew.
Far hence must fly the feet of

The bankrupt and the thief,
And persons in receipt of

Parochial relief.

Else every nomination

I'm ready to receive ;
I'll put them in rotation,

And count the votes you give,

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Unless some person (quoting

Sched. i.) a poll demands,
The method of the voting

Will be by show of hands.

An interval for tJie voting ; after which the Parish
Council is constituted, and its Chairman speaks :

Your Chairman I'm co-opted ;

The O'erseer is Clerk elect ;
What Acts shall be adopted 1

Behoves you now reflect ;
What passion sways th' elector,

What fear or what desire,
For which the irate Rector

We'll rate, and rate the Squire ?

Say, shall we light the village

With the electric ray ?
Though Parson call it pillage,

He can't refuse to pay !
Or shall we by fire-engines

Insure our roofs of thatch
From Vulcan's stealthy vengeance

And childhood's playful match ?

Or washing might be pleasant

When summer heats draw on ;
But Nature laves the peasant

With perspiration.
More useful to the toiler

A wash-house for his clothes,
Complete with patent boiler,

And .mangle, tubs, and trows.

Or, should you care for reading,

Three farthings in the pound -
Procures what light and leading

In libraries are found.

1 The so-called Adoptive Acts are the Lighting and Watching Act,
Baths and Wash-houses Acts, Public Libraries Act, &c.

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Hall Caine and Miss Corelli,

' Enquire Within ' (for cooks),
The Laureate, and Shelley,

And Lubbock's hundred books.

Thus gayer than a circus

Our village life shall run,
With no fear of the work'us

To intrude and spoil the fun.
Our sun can hatch no viper,

No frost can mar our June,
Since others pay the piper

And we but call the_ tune.

[ They make a rate, then dance.

If you are fortunate enough to have met with more
interesting examples of the local muse, I would beg
you to communicate them to me ; in the meantime I
subscribe myself,

Your sincere friend and well-wisher,

URBAN us SYLVAN.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 69

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY. DIVINE.

IN this Conference I propose to stand on one side,
and allow a gentleman to paint his own portrait. I
will choose for the purpose a volume scarce enough
not to be in the Bodleian, and, in order to arouse
interest and disarm prejudice, I will follow the
practice of the late Master of Balliol in his ser-
mons upon remarkable men, and withhold the name.
Let me add that the memoirs are described on
the original title-page as ' replete with humour, use-
ful information, and entertaining anecdote.' The
humour is certainly there, but perhaps not where
the author meant ; the useful information has with
the flight of years ceased to be useful or informing,
and I have passed it over ; the anecdotes I have
selected will still, I hope, be found to entertain.

PASSAGES FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DIVINE.

I was born in London in July 1735, and am the
elder son of reputable parents, though in business ; I
may indeed say, the only son, my brother dying when

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a youth. My family, on my father's side, I know
very little of, except that they were industrious and
virtuous. Being requested by a friend, in the year
1758, to apply to the Herald's office in London for
the coat-of-arms belonging to his family, and wishing
at the same time to know something of my own, I
took that opportunity of searching, to find out, if
possible, whether there were any armorial bearings
annexed to my name. No such name as mine was
to be found in their books, nor any name like it.
Seeming surprised at this, and asking the Herald (a
youth) what he thought of it, he replied I was
probably of the mushroom tribe. Conscious that I
am the offspring of a day, I felt no resentment. In
order to make some atonement for his rough reply,
this sprig of heraldry told me that it was in his power
to ennoble me, and that at much less expence than if
done by the Sovereign. ' For the small sum of forty
pounds,' continued he, ' I can make you out a coat-
of-arms, and ally you to some of the first families in
this kingdom.' I smiled, and said that, not being
ambitious of adscititious honours, I would neither give
forty pounds nor forty pence for the best and most
honourable distinctions which the College of Heralds
could bestow ; and that when I wanted a coat-of-arms,
I could make one myself. He gave me to under-
stand that the College had furnished arms for many
persons of late. ' Let me tell you,' said he, ' it is
forty pounds well laid out a good rraAcf-arms is a

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warm covering, and adds more to a man's consequence
than any coat he wears. Forming a coat yourself/
continued he, ' and wearing any arms not sanctioned
by the College, is punishable in the Marshall's Court.'
I did not dislike the oddity of this King-at-arms, and
asked him what mode was generally pursued to make
out a new coat. He answered, varioiis ; such as
taking part of the escutcheon of any family whose
name had one syllable the same as, or similar to,
that of the gentleman that was to be ; or by giving
some device emblematical of anything either her or
his ancestors were renowned for. In short, this con-
versation brought to my recollection the following
story, which will illucidate the plan at once. A man
applied to the College for a coat-of-arms, and was
asked if any of his ancestors had been renowned for
any singular achievement ? The man paused and
considered, but could recollect nothing. 'Your
father,' said the herald, aiding his memory. 'Your
grandfather ? Your great-grandfather ? ' ' No,' re-
turns the applicant, ' I never knew that I had a
great-grandfather, or a grandfather.' ' Of yourself? '
asks this creator of dignity. ' I know nothing
remarkable of myself] returned the man, ' only that
being once locked up in Ludgate prison for debt, I
found means to escape from an upper window ; and
that, you know, is no honour in a man's 'scutcheon.'
'And how did you get down?' said the herald.
'Odd enough,' retorts the man. 'I procured a cord,

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fixed it round the neck of the statue of King Lud,
on the outside of the building, and thus let myself
down.' 'I have it,' said the herald 'no honour!
Lineally descended from King Lud! and his coat-of-
arms will do for you!

If men, as Tom Paine says, were to consider their
own dignity as men, they would spurn at titles, and
look on them as nicknames. Titles and orders, 'tis
true, are harmless things, but they produce a kind of
foppery in the human character that degrades it ;
talking about its blue ribband like a girl, and showing
its new garter like a child. I was once in company
with a friend, a nobleman, to whom the King had
just given the red ribband. He was then confined to
his room with illness, that soon after brought him to
the grave ; but still he wore the ribband over his
waistcoat, under his flannel gown. The Marquis of
Lothian, who has the green ribband, coming to see
him, the first thing my friend noticed was the mode
in which Lord Lothian wore his ribband, which was
hung so loose that he could put his hand into his
bosom above it. Ill as he was, and scarce able to
speak, and when his thoughts should naturally have
been on more serious matters, he eagerly inquired
how long the fashion had been to wear the ribband
in that manner, and was not easy till he had so
disposed his own. He did not survive this two
months. Such effect has foppery even on a mind
ill-disposed to receive it.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 73

But to speak of myself. My father was proprietor

of the public gardens at , had ambition enough

to keep good company, and, though not a rich man,
brought me up in the line of a gentleman. Fortune
he could not give ; education he did not spare. In
my tenth year I was sent to Westminster School,
where I was contemporary with and known to a
number of gentlemen, some of whom have since been
pleased to recognise me namely, the Earl of Har-
court, the late Duke of Leeds, Lord Hotham, the late
Earl of Northampton, Lord George Lenox, and
others. Had I continued longer than six years at
Westminster I might have grown up more in this
acquaintance ; but, reversing the general rule of
sending boys from a private to a public school, my
father removed me, for convenience, from a public to
a private one. I was taken at fifteen years of age
from Westminster, and placed at Mr. Fountaine's,
the then fashionable seminary for young gentlemen
of rank and fortune. Many of the nobility now
living (1806) will be able to go along with me in
what I shall say of this school. It was the nursery
of great part of the young men of fashion ; but I was
well received among them. And if the idea of
schoolfellow can endear men to each other, I might,
from my connections there, have expected to have
been ushered into more exalted life ; but it was not
to be ; and perhaps I am not the less happy. His
Grace the present Duke of Buccleugh was so attached

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to me that when I quitted school for the University
he blubbered at parting as if his heart would break ;
but some few years after, when the pride of rank had
fastened on him with her talons and warped him, ere
he was twenty years of age, on my meeting with him
in company with a friend, and introducing myself to
him, he scarce deigned to know me, and on my
reminding him of the scene of the parting he turned
round to his friend and smiled with a kind of con-
tempt. I was, like him, at that time young, and I
must own that I felt it. But since I have learned
the ways of mankind, nothing of this kind would
wound me.

Between the age of eighteen and nineteen I was

removed from School to Emanuel College, in

the University of Cambridge, where I continued three
years, during which time there are but one or two
passages of my life worth repeating. Whilst at
college I was courted by my fellow collegians for
more reasons than one. My father, considering me
as extravagant, wrote me a letter in good humour,
saying, in pleasantry, that my mother's uncle, who
was supposed to be worth four score thousand
pounds, had made his will in my favour and left me
the whole of his property, on a persuasion that, from
my natural expensive disposition, I should soon
circulate that treasure he had been so censured for
hoarding, and conceiving it would make some atone-
ment for his supposed covetousness. When the

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postman brought me the letter I had half a dozen
acquaintance with me. I read it aloud. It soon got
wind flew round the college walls like a hurricane ;
and its effect was soon felt throughout the town. I
experienced its good effects also ; for, added to the
homage I received, which is always paid to supposed
wealth, I became instantly in credit. Those trades-
men who were before cautious of trusting me would
almost force their commodities upon me. I took
no advantage, however, of any of them, except the
college cook a saucy fellow, who furnished my
private table with anything and everything I wanted
and the imposing wine merchant, who kept my
cellaret well supplied, but often sold me Made-here-a
for Madeira.

During my stay at college I was a very early riser,
never in bed in the summer-time after four o'clock,
and always indulged myself with a walk into the
country, two hours before the chapel bell rang. I
used to enjoy my reflections on the banks of the
Cam, found myself frequently watched by the simple
villagers lest I should throw myself in ; and was
talked of by them as the melancholy gentleman. So
apt are the people to misconstrue what they are
unused to see an early-rising gentleman. Had I
continued this practice of early rising through my
life, instead of seventy years, I should have already
lived one hundred, and been richer than I am.
Universities are a wise and noble institution, but,

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like many others, have been abused ; and time has
dwindled many of their ceremonies and formalities
into farce : witness that of taking a Bachelor's degree.
The candidate is directed to give the maidservant of
the master of the college to which he belongs half-a-
crown for a paper of pins (at least it was so at
Emanuel when I was at the university in 1754),
which he takes with him to the Senate House, where
these candidates from every college are assembled for
three days, and where they wait for some hours each
day, subject to be examined as to their proficiency in
learning by any master of arts present. Whilst there
waiting, they amuse themselves on the benches at
push-pin. Some few are examined in classical and
mathematical knowledge, but scarce one in ten, and
these only pointed out as young men who can stand
the test.

After being admitted by the Chancellor to answer
the question, the graduate is hurried away to the
schools, where a fellow of his own college, being
appointed his father for the day, gets up into the
rostrum, and the young man into an opposite one.
Here the question is to be asked in Latin, the
supposed determination of the moment. When this
is actually the case, if the respondent presumes to
give any rational answer, or indeed any other than
' Nescio/ i.e. ' I don't know,' and as much as to say,
' I don't care,' he is thumped about by his fellow-
candidates (with which the room is full and in riot)

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 77

with cushions or their caps, and is pulled, perhaps,
headlong from the rostrum, and his gown almost torn
off his back, for his presumption in arraigning the
ignorance of others. Thus, if the father says ' Mi
fili, Domine X, quid est Sobrietas ? ' i.e. ' My son, Sir
X, what is sobriety?' the other, if he has no witty
reply to make, answers ' Nescio ; ' but if the
respondent wishes to excite a laugh, he will, by
concerting this with his father before he enters the
schools, request him to ask him a certain question,
to which he has prepared a smart reply, and which,
being conceived to be offhand, sets the whole place
in a roar. Sometimes it is the spur of the moment.
One young man, I recollect, who had a chew of
tobacco in his mouth, and whom his opponent meant
to rebuke for his indecorum, was asked, ' Quid est
hoc ? ' pointing to the mouth, i.e. 'What is this?' the
other replied by pointing to his own mouth, 'Hoc
est quid,' happily reversing the words. The fellow-
commoners were always at Cambridge called empty
bottles, from the following circumstance that occurred
at Emanuel. Wine-merchants send their porters
occasionally round the colleges to collect the bottles ;
one of these men, during the hour of lecture, knocked
at the lecture-room door by mistake, and called out
1 Empty bottles ! ' The tutor, then out of humour, at
being attended only by one fellow-commoner, when
there were twenty in college, cried out, ' Call again
another time, I have now but one' This soon

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gathered wind, and these young gentlemen of the
first class went afterwards throughout the university
by the name of Empty Bottles. As to professional
students (some very few excepted), they are worse
scholars at leaving college than at their admission.
I heard our tutor once censure a young man at
lecture, who had been nearly three years at college,
by saying that he knew less than a freshman who
sat next him. ' Well, a.nd what of that ? ' retorts the
youth. ' He is but just come from school.'

Leaving Cambridge soon after I was twenty-one
years of age, I returned home to my father's house,
for I could not take orders till I was twenty-three.
During this interval I commenced author. I trans-
lated from the Italian several burlettas, and adapted
them to the English stage. They were performed on
a small stage in my father's gardens. William, Duke
of Cumberland, who was renowned for his eccentric
gaiety, used to amuse himself there. When his
Royal Highness died, he was much regretted at
Windsor, where, in the improvements he made, he
employed all the poor around him, so as to keep
himself continually in want of money ; but he had
an art of getting more when he wanted it, superior to
most men. I had it from very good authority, that
Lord Trevor was applied to by a gentleman when
the bishopric of Durham was vacant, saying that if
he wished his brother to be the bishop, it might
be brought about, on his advancing the Duke of

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Cumberland io,ooo/., who was in immediate want of
it to go to Newmarket. The money was advanced,
and his brother was the bishop. At another time he
obtained a loan of the like sum from his sister, the
Princess Amelia, whom he importuned very much ;
she took him to task, arraigned his dissipated conduct,
and said she never would be instrumental to it. He
assured her that the money he wanted was to com-
plete an improvement in Windsor Park, where it was
well laid out, in employing the surrounding poor, and,
to convince her of it, proposed to take her down to
inspect the works. He had at that time near five
hundred men digging a canal. She went to the
lodge, and he drove her round the park in a one-
horse chaise, and had so contrived it, with his
manager, that as she passed from one place to
another the same set of men, as in a theatre, removed
to another spot, which, when she was brought to,
were seen planting of trees ; at another, five hundred
men (the same) were found grubbing of hedges.
'Well,' said she, 'brother, I had no conception of
this. You must employ near two thousand people.'
' True, madam,' said he, ' and was I to take you to
the other side of the Park, I could shew you as many
more.' No ; she was satisfied that his money was
better expended than she had apprehended, and she
lent him the sum he wanted. The truth of this was
averred to me by an old servant, privy to the
deception.

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Among my youthful friends I must reckon Sir
William Fowler, a young gentleman who, though
possessing a good heart, had an unfortunate end. I
once rescued him from the effects of a midnight
frolic, which had confined him and his friends in St.
Martin's round-house for an assault upon lamps and
upon watchmen. I brought there a Westminster
justice, who for a Portugal piece of $6s., and a bottle
or two of wine, interfered with the constable of the
night, and procured his release. It was against the
order of justice, but the rotation offices were not then
established and justice was at sale. I was as happy
once in getting the Earl of Effingham released from
the Poultry Compter, who was brought in there one
Saturday night for wantonly, in liquor, breaking a
lamp ; the keeper could not release him, saying no
magistrate sat on Sunday, and he must wait there
till Monday ; but going there to do my Sunday duty,
for I was at that time chaplain to the compter, I
argued the case with the keeper, wrote a note to Mr.
Stevenson, then Lord Mayor, prevailed on him to
hear the cause, and his lordship was released imme-
diately on his own bail. He was not made acquainted
of this piece of service I did him, nor did I inform
him. /wanted not his thanks ; I did only as I would
be done by.

Being now of sufficient age to take orders, and my
father enjoining it, I determined to conform ; not
from any prospect of provision in that profession, but

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merely with a view of getting my own living. We
had but little acquaintance among the clergy, and
of course I found getting into orders difficult. The
chief bar was not having a title, that is, an appoint-
ment to a curacy, given under the hand of some
incumbent, and from which he cannot remove the
curate afterwards whilst he thinks proper to employ
assistance, till that curate is otherwise provided for.
My father exerted himself to procure me a title, but
could not succeed. The late Earl of Stanhope, a
friend to my family, took up my cause. He was
intimately acquainted with Dr. Gilbert, then Arch-
bishop of York, to whom he related my case in
writing, and requested his Lordship, if he found me
otherwise qualified, to ordain me ; saying that as he
presumed titles for orders were enjoined by law
merely to indemnify the bishop ordaining from any
expence, he pledged his honor that I never should
be troublesome to him. With this letter I went to
York, and saw the Archbishop, who refused me
ordination, rejecting the letter with disdain, and a
' what do Lords know of the business ? ' This was
the haughty prelate that refused admittance into the
Cathedral of Salisbury to the Mayor and Corporation
of the City, when he was Bishop of that See. Gilbert
Burnet, of very respectable memory, was formerly
Bishop of that diocese, and on an innkeeper of the
city being asked by a traveller in Gilbert's time who
was their Bishop, shrewdly replied, ' It was Gilbert

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Burnet; but now,' shaking his head, 'Burn it, 'tis
Gilbert'

Foiled in my first attempt to procure ordination, I
was still more unwilling to take orders ; for I am
convinced that in making me a clergyman my father
spoilt a good layman ; however, he thought other-
wise, and procuring a title for me in Wiltshire, I sub-
mitted to his decision of my fate. I was appointed
curate of Enford, in Wilts, and was ordained by Dr.
Thomas, Bishop of Salisbury ; but on the day I was
ordained I received a letter from my father, saying
he had procured me a Sunday duty, in Hertfordshire.
It was that of Ware, where I was appointed by the
churchwardens to officiate on Sundays only. Having
no one to record my abilities, as a preacher, but
myself, and the approbation I met with in that time
having been the cause of a variety of incidents and
events, it is necessary that I should inform my readers
that it was my pride to excel, and my early deter-
mination that in whatever line of life I was thrown it
should be my study to reach the top of it in excellence.
I was much admired as a pulpit orator, much caressed,
and much followed, and I trust I shall stand acquitted
of vanity in so saying, when some concomitant cir-
cumstances are made known. I had prepared a few
good sermons, and found myself capable of composing
others. I had a tolerable good voice, a good person
(being five feet eleven inches high), a better delivery,
and an easy, graceful action. There are thousands

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living that know the truth of this. Such is either the
indolence or the ignorance of our clergy in general
that they read and deliver worse than any schoolboy,
and the modern flowers of oratory, I am sorry to
observe, are blowing the nose, huskiness, hawking
and spitting, the stroking of the band, or the exten-
sion of a white hand or white handkerchief. When
I determined to take orders, I studied to be master
of a good delivery, and the approbation I met with
told me that I had not studied in vain.

Lord Chesterfield had certainly great knowledge of
the world, and he considered that a dull boy was
fittest for the church. A lad of spirit indeed and
enterprise, one of acute feelings and whose pride is
soon wounded, is by no means adapted to make his
way in the clerical profession. Preferment is in the
hands of the great, and the great must be humoured,
courted, and flattered. Sir Joseph Mawbey once
observed to me that he wondered much that I had no
preferment. ' You may wonder much, Sir Joseph,'
said I, 'not knowing my disposition; but 7, who
know it, wonder not at all. My natural feelings are
acute. I cannot submit to indignities. I have
abundant resources within myself; I can earn my
bread with my pen, and therefore could never bend
to the pride and caprice of others.' My chief errors
in life have been the not cultivating that respectable
acquaintance which chance threw in my way and a
too ready resentment of injuries.

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After quitting the curacy at Ware, I had two
churches to serve, that of All Saints' in Hertford, in
the morning, and one about three miles from the
town in the afternoon. Though the church at Hert-
ford was crowded by the inhabitants of the towns
of Hertford and Ware (for my former congregation
travelled far to hear me), yet the village church was
as empty as the other was full. The first day I
officiated there, my congregation consisted only of
the clerk, two girls and a boy. Service ended, being
on horseback and a fine afternoon, I rode round
among the principal farmers in the parish, gave them
to understand that I should be very punctual in my
attendance, and hoped they would make a point ot
coming to church. They promised that they would,
and in a few Sundays I had a tolerable congregation.
I preached to them in an easy familiar style, a
language they understood and were pleased with,
and persuade myself that I did as much good in
that place as any minister that there preceded or
followed me. The following will convince my readers
of the truth of what I have advanced, and the appro-
bation I was honoured with. Quitting the parish a
few months after, having received uncommon civilities
and attention from the parishioners, I conceived it
incumbent on me to acknowledge it publicly, in a
kind of farewell discourse. This they were pleased
to take in good part, and requested me to print ; and
in purchasing this sermon they made me up a

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handsome purse. Not satisfied with hearing it once,
several gentlemen requested me to repeat it in the
afternoon at the village church to which I was going,
and they would accompany me there. This being
acceded to, and the day fine and warm in the month
of April, I proposed to walk. Accordingly after
dinner a small party consisting of five or six gentle-
men and as many young ladies joined me, and we
set off in company. They assured me that the
church would be more crowded than ever it had been
since it was built ; for it was small and they knew a
great many that would be there. In short, it occa-
sioned some pleasantries on the way, very flattering
to me. The church was in view for some hundreds
of yards before we reached it, and not perceiving any
person waiting in the churchyard, as is usual in fine
weather at all village-churches before the minister
arrives, I observed that it was fortunate for me that
I had brought my congregation with me, or I should
otherwise have preached to the walls. However,
when we reached the chancel door it was fast, and I
could not obtain admittance. A voice within cried
out, 'You can't come in ; there is not standing-room
for even one more.' It was literally true, and it was
with the greatest difficulty that / could squeeze in.
I recommended it to my company to stand up, upon
an elevated tomb near one of the windows, and
ordered the window to be opened so that they heard
tolerably well. I gave out the psalms to be sung

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and led the way myself, and had the pleasure to hear
the walls ring with the loudest strains of heartfelt
thanksgiving. Wonderful is the effect of social
worship, where all tongues are tuned in unison !
Had I the vanity natural to our order and equal to
what I conceived my abilities would reach, I should
have kept close to my profession, and never estranged
my mind from it ; but I was ambitious to accumulate
a small independence, and the church, with my
indignant spirit, was not the channel. Service being
ended, had it not been for an itinerant preacher, that
called the attention of the lower class of my followers
in the churchyard, I should have walked back to
Hertford at the end of a little regiment ; as it was,
more than 1 50 accompanied me home.

After saying so much of myself, and dwelling so
long on a religions subject, let me enliven it with one
of another kind. Hertford was remarkable, as most
county towns are, for a number of unmarried women
and few unmarried men ; so that they could seldom
make up a dance, though the attempt was always
made at Christmas, at which season of the year I was
there. So I found it three or four years before at
Horsham in Sussex, where the monthly ball consisted
wholly of maidens. I remember being once at this
ball, when twenty couple of young women danced,
and I was the only man among them, and what is
most extraordinary could not get a partner ; for
having asked the rector's daughter to dance a proud

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dame and she declining, all the rest had paired
themselves, and I had the mortification to be only a
looker-on, and an attendant upon them. A regiment
of soldiers being quartered at Hodsdon, within the
distance of two or three miles of Hertford, I pro-
posed at a card assembly to go over there and invite
the officers. It pleased the women, and I became a
favourite on that and some other accounts. For one
of the young ladies I had the honour to dance with,
through a declaration she made to me, perhaps un-
guardedly^ and the mode I pursued in consequence,
perhaps indelicately, yet unknown to her, I obtained a
husband in one of the officers whom I had introduced.
Had it not been from an opening of her mind to me
she would have missed of that happiness it was the
means of procuring her. I am firmly of opinion that
a woman of character and fortune often misses the
object of her choice, thro' an excess of delicacy and a
fear of disclosing her sentiments. There was a young
lady of this town who had been since the age of
seventeen in possession of a clear estate of 5oo/. a
year, and would inherit at her father's death 2O,ooo/. ;
yet this lady declared to me, at the age of twenty-
seven, that she never had an offer of marriage in her
life. I could have told her the reason, if I pleased ;
she was too ordinary to attract the notice of men of
rank and fortune, and men of no rank and fortune
like myself, were afraid to propose to her. Though
I might have said (and a fair opening it was) had I

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not wanted spirit and gallantry, ' to prevent such
a declaration in future, so disgraceful to our sex, /
make you an offer myself.' It was not my fate to be
rich in any way. I have had three wives, but not a
guinea with either. Independence in life has been
the polarity of my magnet, and independence has
kept me poor, not in spirit, but in pocket.

In the parish of Ockley, in Surry, where I con-
tinued more than a year, I received great civilities
from the people in general, and many acts of friend-
ship from individuals so as to enable me, on a curacy
of 4O/. a year, to live comfortably and keep two
saddle-horses. One lent me a house, another
furnished it, a third supplied us with coals, a fourth
with wine, a fifth with poultry ; one with vegetables,
another with fruit, and two days in the week we had .
the use of a gentleman's carriage, to go wherever we
pleased ; my wife was as much beloved as myself,
and these friends studied to bestow, what they meant
to give, in a delicate way, so as neither to hurt my
pride nor my feelings ; so much is the curate of a
country parish befriended, where he is liked. My
proud spirit could ill brook these obligations, but
necessity obliged me to accept them. I considered
them as contributions voluntarily given in support of
a public officer. Nothing could have induced me to
leave this place but ill-health. The situation was
low, and I was afflicted with an ague almost the
whole time I was there. Among the acquaintance I

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made at Ockley was Richard Hull, Esq , first bencher
of the Temple, through whom I was appointed to
preach one Sunday at the Temple Church. I com-
posed a sermon purposely for the occasion. It was
on the abuse of things, in the course of which I ran
through all professions of life, beginning with my
own, and did not spare it. Having expatiated on
this and some others, 'Now,' said I, 'for the pro-
fession of the law/ and made a dead stop. I had
been warm and animated in the preceding part of
my discourse, and had the reader been present and
seen the effect of these last words, he would have
supposed by the agitations of the congregation, their
eagerness to hear, and their apparent fear of hearing
what they should not like, that I was a prophet, or a
messenger sent from heaven. You might have heard
a spider fall. Though I by no means approve of
severities in a pulpit, yet as the conduct of our
lawyers is so very exceptionable and condemnable, I
was determined not to miss the opportunity of open-
ing the eyes of some of them if it were possible.
After service when I returned to the vestry, the con-
gregation crowded round me and thanked me for my
discourse.

Fiom Ockley I removed to London, and took the
curacy of St. Clement-Danes in the Strand, and
became presently sensible of the weight of parochial
duty in a large and populous parish. On quitting
this Dr. Bruce, the King's chaplain at Somerset

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House Chapel, employed me as his assistant. Being
now much at leisure I turned my thoughts to what I
conceived would not only be beneficial to myself but
useful to society ; for to this end we are born. The
first thing I planned was an academy to teach oratory
mechanically. This may draw a smile from some of
my readers who may consider it as a natural gift ;
but Longinus did not think so, or he would not have
taken such pains as he did to form an orator. I had
the honour to read a public lecture in London before
Dr. Samuel Johnson, Dr. Birch, Doctors Maty,
Morton, and Knight, of the Museum, Sir John Field-
ing, Sir John Hill, Dr. Goldsmith, and all the literati
then in town ; and after it recited Cicero's ' Defence
of Milo,' and not only with the applause of my
hearers, but accompanied with their decided opinion
that the thing was not only practicable but likely to
become of general use. My terms were moderate, so
that I had a great many pupils ; but, finding it did
not pay me adequate to my labour, I gave it up.
This was in 1762. Many years afterwards I made a
proposal to the headmaster of Eton School to attend
and teach young gentlemen there the art of elocution ;
but, not having been there bred, I did not succeed in
my application. Had I been educated at Eton,
instead of Westminster, the case would have been
otherwise. So riveted are men to prejudice.

I had not as yet set out as an author, except in
translating the burlettas I have already mentioned ;

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but gave myself much to reading, it being my
determination some day to profit by my studies ; to
this end I made extracts of all matters of importance
I met with, adding my own observations as they then
occurred. So that the thousands of extracts which I
have made in the course of years, interspersed with
my own remarks, is a valuable library of itself. I
have been at the trouble of arranging them under
alphabetical heads, with an intent at some future day
to give them to the world ; if it shall please God to
spare my life so to do ; and I believe this will be the
finale of all my labours. My readers will find a
prospectus of this work at the end of these pages.

P.S. The second part of the learned Doctor's
memoirs, though it exists in MS., has never been
printed, and report says that he did his best to call
in the first part. Happily some copies are still
occasionally to be met with. It may interest my
readers to know that the good man did at last
attain to the competence his independent spirit so
richly deserved. He is famous in the history of
the English Church as the inventor of the 'sermon
printed in script type, in imitation of handwriting,'
designed to save the clergy the labour of transcribing
an invention since perfected by the useful art of
lithography. U. S.

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VI.
A HOLIDAY NUMBER.

O for the great good gift or the loan of a little leisure just to be

lazy ;

Just to be lazy at least in some more sane and sensible way !
O to be just set free for a short sweet space from the cracked

and the crazy
Cares and the tiresome trifles that weary and worry from day

to day !
O to be out of the reach and the realm for a while of this dismal

and dun light
Darkness rather I call it which serves us sadly here for

the sun !
Misty and muddy and fog-and-rain-ruled land, who knowest

naught of the sunlight,

Would I could once be well quit of thee, cut the whole
business and run. 1

So sang the bard during one of our cycles of bad
weather, and by his song made articulate the dumb
longing of multitudes. But the impulse to ' cut the
whole business' is just as strong, perhaps it is
stronger, in such dry summers as we have had lately ;
for the eyes weary of perpetual sunlight, the brain

1 Love in Idleness (Kegan Paul, 1883), p. no. The writer I
believe to have been Mr. Bowyer Nichols.

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wearies, the temper wearies. ' The trivial round,' to
use Mr. Keble's happy phrase, becomes intolerably
trivialwhen it has to be trodden, day after day, through
the dust in a steady glare ; and even those who have
no round to tread, but may sit still in their gardens,
find even their gardens emptied of delight when the
lawns are yellow, except for a green oasis here and
there of insolent buttercup and plantain. And so
the vagabond impulse proved as strong in me this
year as ever. But this year it was bitted and curbed
by a stern lawgiver, who, like the Homeric deities, half
allowed it and half denied. I was permitted to leave
home, to turn an ungrateful back on the household
gods who had been so good to me, the loved Lares,
the divine Penates, ranged on their familiar shelves ;
but I was bidden exchange them for a stretch of
parched-up down and a shingle beach, and a house
full of gods who are no gods, books that cannot be
read, a catalogue of which I will furnish in the sequel.
I have not, of course, reached my present grey
maturity without learning that the rest which we all
pursue is too often a flying and elusive shadow, even
when the conditions of the search can be fixed by
ourselves. I know that Switzerland has its draw-
backs, and Paris, and Iceland. I learned long ago
from Horace that we may change our sky without
renewing our spirit ; I assent to Satan's proposition
that ' the mind is its own place ; ' I say over to
myself, whenever I go for a holiday, those solemn

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lines of Matthew Arnold, which Sir John Davies 1 so
curiously anticipated :

We see all sights from pole to pole,
And glance and nod and bustle by,

And never once possess our soul
Before we die.

And yet, poets and philosophers notwithstanding, as
long as we are in the flesh, a man who can possess
his soul comfortably at an altitude of six thousand
feet above the sea must not be refused the title of a
martyr to duty if he is compelled to do his best to
possess it at the sea-level.

I was amused at the first setting out to notice
how difficult even a duty can be made for one. The
train by which I had arranged to travel had been
chosen by many other people besides myself, and
though I was on the platform twenty minutes before
the hour fixed for our departure, the coaches were
already full. Then it occurred to me to compare
myself with the good mayor, Jean Valjean, in ' Les
Miserables,' when his determination to do a difficult

1 About Sir John Davies we must confer when occasion offers.
I make a note here for the sake of apologising to the numerous friends
whom I have misled as to his monument. Whenever people have
spoken in my hearing of touching at Pangbourne on boating parties,
I have always said, ' Do not fail to visit Sir John Davies's tomb in the
church,' and then, if necessary, I have tried to interest them in that
remarkable poet-politician. But a recent excursion into the Dictionary
of National Biography has informed me, to my deep chagrin, that the
knight buried at Pangbourne in that handsome Jacobean tomb is not
Sir John Davies, but another person of the same name.

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piece of duty seemed about to be frustrated by the
higher powers. There seemed, however, one chance
of making the journey, and this I felt bound to
attempt. One carriage, labelled 'engaged,' contained
only two persons, and I put the question to the
inspector whether any pair of persons, allowing them
to be engaged, even supposing them to be married,
were justified in exercising their monopoly at such
a crisis, to the inconvenience of the general public.
I had never before spoken of myself as ' the general
public,' and I felt a glow of conscience at making
such a sacrifice then. But the inspector replied that
if I, too, chose to pay for eight seats I might secure
equal privacy. ' But,' I argued, ' are you not bound
to carry me by this train, for which I have purchased
a ticket ? ' ' No,' he said, ' but you can write to the
company and claim the return of your money.' ' I can
also,' I retorted, 'write to the Times or the Corn-
hill' By this time many other people had arrived
and were anxiously searching for seats, and quite a
little crowd of would-be passengers had collected, and
were indignantly expostulating with the guard, and
pointing at the happy couple whose privacy, after
costing them so dear, had assumed so public a
character. I, having satisfied my conscience, easily
reconciled myself to one day more with my own
tutelary gods, and was lighting a burnt-offering to
Domiduca, when I found myself dragged by a porter,
and without ceremony pushed into a vacant seat in a

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smoking-carriage. How he discovered it there was
no time to learn, as the train was moving, and my
new companions were reticent ; but I reminded my-
self that Jean Valjean was always helped out of his
disabilities in the nick of time, and that miracles still
happen. It was curious to observe how my mental
state of extreme reluctance, overcome by dogged
determination, seemed in some mysterious fashion to
communicate itself to the train, for it took an hour
upon the road beyond the time estimated by the
company, and yet it advanced steadily. A gentle-
man in the carriage informed the rest of us that
to his knowledge the chairman of the line was a
philosopher, to whom (as such) time would have no
real existence, and that was why the train was late ;
and of course that may have been the simple and
sufficient explanation. However, at last the train
reached its destination, and I mine.

It was some twenty years since I had set foot in
the place let me call it Blankley which was the
home of my forefathers, and it was incredibly
changed. What I had known and loved as a simple
village, upon a hill sloping to the sea, had been
translated into a health-resort of the most vulgar
type, with a parade, vast hotels, and a wilderness ot
lodging-houses. And what still further roused my
bile, it had like a parvenu hyphened a couple of words
on to its own very respectable name, and was no longer
Blankley, but Blankley-on-Sea. My indignation made

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a sonnet, which I mislaid, and have not succeeded
in recovering or recalling to memory, much to my
readers' loss. However, after purging my passion,
I was put into a more genial frame of mind by
noticing that there were still some inhabitants of
Blankley who had refused to acquiesce in the ruin of
their native place, and still held the jerry-builder at
arm's length. The friends of the jerry-builder, con-
fident that he has time on his side, talk about Mrs.
Partington impotently trying with her besom to stop
the march of the tides ; but as I looked up to the
noble hill, and saw that while a new and unsightly
town gathered about its skirts, it remained itself as
green and magnificent and unconcerned as when I
first knew it, I blessed the fortunate husbandman who
knew his own good, and preferred his ancestral acres
before a bag of gold. ' And what is else not to be
overcome ? ' The jerry-builder may be right ; another
generation may see the hill submerged, for no man
can prevent his heir from making what would be
called a good bargain. But even so the vision that
rises up before my mind is not that of Mrs. Partington,
but of the doomed hero who held against Fate the
betrayed pass of Thermopylae. The yeoman whose
farm occupies the hill, and whose refusal to sell still
keeps it beautiful, seems to me a type of all the
sterling qualities that make up the groundwork of
English character. It was such yeomen who won
Agincourt and defeated the invincible Armada. I

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have no personal acquaintance with this one, but his
father was a familiar figure in the place when I was
a boy. I can see him still, riding among his harriers
in a noticeable hat that, if my memory serves me,
was neither of silk nor beaver, but felt. In the
unrestored village church he had a pew in the gallery,
approached by a private staircase, and the fame went
that he never entered the church again after his
peculiar was destroyed. That, perhaps, may be held
to illustrate the less amiable side of the yeoman
temper ; if, at least, our sympathies are with so-called
modern improvements ; if we prefer the organ of to-
day to the bass-viol and clarionet of our grand-
parents, and think it a piece of religion to sit in long
rows upon pitch-pine seats, and rise from them to
salute a misbehaving choir. But if we care less about
marching with the times, and have a reverence for
custom and antiquity, we may be grateful for the
instincts that conserved for us through many centuries
our heritage in the national churches of England,
which all the restoration frenzy of the last fifty years
has not quite succeeded in destroying.

The persons described in the new Blankley guide-
book as ' the overwearied workers from teeming
cities,' who throng its marine parade, are, I do not
question, all persons of extreme respectability. And
one knows they are clean, because one may see them
bathe. Nevertheless, I took an early opportunity to
flee along the coast to a village, a few miles off, which

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still remains a village, although the land has already
been engrossed by the speculative builder. Drains
have been laid and (perhaps in consequence) the
churchyard enlarged, and there are rumours of a
railway station and a mammoth hotel ; but the eye
that is fatigued by the leagues of sea can still refresh
itself with green fields and a sweep of down, the golf-
links of the near future. Moreover, the natives are
still resident ; their places have not yet been usurped
by the generation of lodging-keepers, and their ways
are still simple and human, as the following instance
will show. There are various antiquities in the
neighbourhood which I wished to visit, and for this
purpose a landau (itself an antiquity) could be hired,
with an antique horse appertaining ; but there was
difficulty about the driver. The host at the inn was
always too busy to go out, and there was no ostler.
I could not myself take the reins, having injured my
right arm. But rather than we should lose our drive,
the butcher or the grocer would always consent to
mount the box. I may note that on one occasion,
when the butcher was coachman, we met some
bullocks in a somewhat narrow lane, who, whether
deterred by instinct or by their sense of smell, refused
to pass him, and, notwithstanding the drover's male-
diction, returned by the road they came. The
Saxons are indeed a kindly race. Those mixed
Norse and Danish people who live north of the
Trent, and take a pride in the rudeness of their

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manners, seem to me to have small ground for boast-
ing ; for although Miss Bronte and other novelists
have thrown round them an air of romance, they are
in real life not so engaging as their age-long enemies
the Saxons ; nor are they any more virtuous.

The brutality of the South-coast smuggler, on
which I touched in my lost sonnet, has been much
exaggerated. Here and there, in the last century,
there may have been a band of savages who were
guilty of excesses like those chronicled in the chap-
books ; but smuggling as it was usually carried on,
at Blankley for instance, was a very mild affair,
looked upon as a regular trade by the smaller farmers
and peasantry, who, if they took it up, served a
regular apprenticeship to it ; while to the gentlemen
it was a cheap way of buying good brandy, nothing
more. There was just about as much conscience in
buying brandy known to be smuggled as there is now
in not declaring a box of cigars to the French donane,
or importing into England a Tauchnitz novel of Mr.
Kipling's. I have heard my grandfather tell how it
would even be arranged that a ball at some big
house, to which the Custom-house officers would be
invited, should be the occasion of the landing of a
specially important cargo from the 'Big Jane.' I
have heard him tell also how the smuggling here
came to an end. The Board of Trade made up its
mind to more active measures, and accordingly the
local Coastguard were emboldened to make seizure

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of a certain cargo, of the time and place of whose
landing they had been advertised. The attack was
unusual, and it was resented as a breach of confidence.
The fight raged up the village street, and one of the
Coastguard was killed. The Home Office thought it
wise to make an example, and a warrant was issued
against the captain of the smuggling crew, who was
a well-known and very popular farmer in the place.
It was in the days before railways, and the officers
entrusted with the warrant travelled down by coach,
and talked freely by the way of the object of their
journey. One of their fellow-passengers, who was a
friend of this farmer, left the coach at Lewes and
took horse across country, and by the time the
warrant arrived the farmer was safe in France.
There was, it must be allowed, one very ugly side to
some of the smuggling. In the days when Bonaparte
was meditating his invasion of England there were
some reptile creatures here and there in the coast
villages who sold him information, and this was con-
veyed across the Channel by these irregular mails.
I have often heard from my grandfather the name
of the family at Blankley chiefly credited with this
disgraceful correspondence, but out of charity I
withhold it.

The house we are living in stands at the highest
point of the downs, and marks the site of one of the
stations used to signal the approach of the Armada.
It is built out of the wreck of one of Mr. Pitt's

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Martello towers, upon which an Armstrong gun was
allowed to experiment. So that it turns our thoughts
incessantly to invasion. The illusion is maintained
by a distant view of a camp upon the downs. Seen
nearer it proves to be a camp of London street
arabs, who come down here for a week of sea air and
military discipline. To see an officer walking in the
lanes surrounded by some half-dozen boys with
proud and interested faces gives one an idea of the
right sort of education for these lads. It must be
education by men, and not by books, and the men
should be soldiers, not scholars. A week seems too
little to do them much good, and yet one knows that
even a day may leave memories which will vibrate
through many years. But how excellent a thing it
would be if our unemployed Guardsmen had half a
dozen Hooligan youths told off to each of them, with
whom they might walk in St. James's Park and talk
of many things ! Policemen and clergymen are
almost useless as civilising agents among these strata
of the population, because they are too much identi-
fied with an external law. Walking along the downs
the other day, I came upon three soldiers of a week,
bent with excited faces over some object on the
ground, and hot in dispute about it. As I passed,
one of them appealed to me. ' I say, mister, what's
this 'ere ? ' It was a dead mole, and I said so. ' A
mole,' said one, ' what yer makes moleskin weskits
out o' ? ' I allowed as much. ' Why, it's worth

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money ; yer might get sixpence for it, mightn't
yer ? ' and the spirit of the financier swelled up in
him and made his face white. I told him it might be
as well to let dead moles lie, and touched it with my
stick ; and, sure enough, a colony of creeping things
began to emerge, to the disgust of my young friend,
who had been picturing himself haggling in Hounds-
ditch for the full value of his treasure-trove, and
coming off the triumphant master of sixpence.

To pass now into the library. The books of the
house, upon which I had reckoned for this Con-
ference (for I travel with no books but Shakespeare,
and about Shakespeare silence is best), were as
follows :

Cage Birds and Canaries.

Jahr's Manual.

Bunyan's Works.

The Sword and Trowel (a long series).

Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book.

The Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family.

The Book of Gentility.

At first sight the list was a little dashing. However,
I consoled myself with memories of what persons
of genius had accomplished with even slighter
material. I recalled the story of a once famous man
of letters who, having to write an article for the
' Encyclopaedia,' sent it in to the editor with the
explanation, ' The article is as good as I can make

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it, relying upon the library of the Loch Awe Hotel.'
I have often wished for a catalogue of that famous
library. The Academy newspaper might well
devote one of its prizes to the most convincing
suggestion for it. I recalled also what Lamb tells
us, that a poor book may yet be the best in its place.
And so inspired I set about an investigation.
Luckily for me, I began at the end of the shelf
which I catalogued last, and found The Book of
Gentility by no means an unprofitable study.
I think my readers may be interested to compare
some of its precepts with those given in a previous
Conference from Caxton's Book of Courtesy. The
work is divided into sections with separate titles.
The date is not given, but it fixes itself.

BIRTH.

High birth cannot be said to be 'absolutely requisite in order
to be genteel ; nor (unless in small communities where these
things are canvassed) is gentle birth of any importance. It is
a common thing in the country to describe a person of low
origin by saying that ' he had no grandfather ' ! But in town
this is not a demerit. Some of the most genteel persons of my
acquaintance were born in a ditch.

BRINGING-UP.

I should be sorry to throw any obstacles in the way of
gentility ; but certainly those who, as little boys and girls, are
cockered up, dressed smartly, washed, combed, and set out to
be admired like so many geraniums, have a much easier time
of it afterwards. A relation of mine (a man of strong nerves,
who had been a sailor all his life) told me that the only time he

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ever.had thought seriously of cutting his throat was when, having
excused himself from cutting up a fowl at a large dinner party
at Brixton, a little boy of twelve years of age carved it elegantly
before his face.

EDUCATION (BOARDING-SCHOOLS).

It should be an object of peculiar attention on the part of
parents to select schools wherein the vulgar are not admitted,
else the children will get false notions, which may affect the
whole tissue of their lives. The low-lived, also, are capable of
defying restraint. In a certain boarding-school, not a hundred
miles from Kensington, where a mixture of the classes is con-
siderable, a young lady was caught, about a month since, de-
scending from a window of the fourth storey in a sack attached
to a string. Her companions who were thus letting her down
were so flurried on detection that they relinquished their hold,
and the eloping fair one fell, from a height of sixteen feet,
upon her lover, who stood beneath. The shock may perhaps
be imagined!

EDUCATION (GOVERNESS).

No genteel family is without a governess when the daughters
arrive at the age of fourteen-and-a-half. At the same time, as
girls are naturally vicious, they should always be broken in at
a school beforehand. Governesses frequently return home so
bitten, scratched, and pinched that their lives are despaired of.

WOMEN.

Women are the primum mobile of all that is genteel. They
have an acuter perception of the awkward, the ridiculous, and
the mean than our sex. They have more leisure, more imagina-
tion, and more innate complaisance. The Almacks of gentility
are numerous. They derive their existence from the coteries of
Kensington, Bayswater, the Edgware Road, Clapham, Brixton,
Camberwell, Hampstead, Holloway, and Highbury. In these
coteries the ladies rule cu petit comit^ and with a sway that
would make a giant tremble. Russell Square and the streets

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and squares immediately contiguous form the metropolitan
micleus of gentility, where the same influence promotes the same
effects. The Regent's Park may be described as that especial
spot where the stream of gentility begins to mingle with that
of fashion; this is, therefore, the most exclusive locality of the
former.

THE DINNER-TABLE.

It is ridiculous to pass your plate, out of politeness, from one
to another. Monsieur Buys, the Dutch Envoy, whose politics
and manners were much of a size, once brought a son with him
to a great table at Court. The boy and his father, whatever
was put on their plates, offered it round to every person in
company, so that we could not get a minute's quiet during the
whole dinner. At last their two plates happened to encounter,
and stained half the company with wet sweetmeats and cream.

PUDDING.

It is ungenteel to eat pudding with a fork ; always use a
spoon.

PORT AND PORTER.

Genteel people never drink port at dinner, and never call for
porter.

DINNER-PARTY IN SUMMER.

If you make up a dinner-party in summer, let the hour be
very late. Eight o'clock is the genteel hour, ten o'clock the
fashionable hour.

OPERA AND THEATRES.

It is ungenteel to stare at an opera or ballet as if you had
never seen it before.

SPEAKING TO SERVANTS.

You may say ' Thank you ' to a domestic, but never ' I am
much obliged to you.'

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PRIDE.

Pride is ridiculous in any person, but especially with those
engaged in trade, for they may be worth a million on Monday
and threepence on Thursday.

OYSTERS.

No man, or woman either, can be genteel who has the
reputation of agility in oyster eating.

BEAUTY.

Beauty is not indispensable to gentility. A lady may be,
like Listen, not regularly handsome, and yet quite within the
pale of gentility.

INITIALS.

It is Wellclose Square all over to talk of Mr. A., Mrs. T.,
Master C., &c. The algebra of that sublime neighbourhood
will sometimes run thus : ' How lucky for Mrs. Y.,' M. said,
' You did right, Mrs. F.'

SHAVING.

Time is the edax rerum that levels all things, and therefore a
genteel person may appear unshaven until four o'clock p.m. ;
after that he would lose caste by wearing a beard.

CANDLES.

Tallow candles are at all times detestable, and their
existence is not even known in genteel life.

A FEW STRAY HINTS.

A man of property who would rank as genteel will not permit
his daughters to walk about in copper-coloured pelisses. He
will have no scissor-cut black silhouettes dangling on his walls.
If he gives a dinner, the butler will not be staring in expectation
of signals ; the claret will not be frozen solid ; the hock will
not be lukewarm, the souffle'es as heavy as barm dumplings ;

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white wine will never be proffered after brown game, nor port
with cheese.

BAD HABIT.

A man who would be thought genteel never dines in
boots.

POETASTER.

Your poetaster cannot be a gentleman. He is generally a
sort of curds-and-whey-faced animal, with legs like black sealing-
wax ; and in order to be a la Byron he exhibits his long, bony
neck unencumbered with a stock or handkerchief.

'ALL SOUL.'

This is a cant term, and those to whom it is applied I
have generally found to be examples of ignorance and asinine
affectation.

A MISTAKE.

It is extremely awkward for a young lady to be desired by
a shopman to examine her muff, in order to the discovery of a
gold chain, seals, aquamarine necklace, &c., which may have
got there by mistake.

THE PARK.

If you ride in Hyde Park, take care that your servant does
not ride on ahorse of the same colour, or you will be suspected
of giving your coach horses a benefit. A great, shining horse
with a new saddle is singularly ungenteel.

This last section recalls a veracious anecdote,
which, as it illustrates the topic of gentility as under-
stood by both a lord and a commoner, may find
a place here. A gentleman who had been of great
use to a noble lord, whom I will call Rustington,

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about election matters in his constituency, met him
in the Row and hailed him, 'Good morning, Rusting-
ton.' But the peer trotted by without hearing. So
the gentleman turned his steed and pursued him
with hue and cry ' Rustington ! Rustington ! ' till
he was fain to stop ; and then his pursuer said,
while all the world wondered, ' Oh, I only wanted to
say that if you don't like to know me in town, you
needn't, that's all.'

%* Since this paper appeared I have been impor-
tuned by several persons of taste and consequence
to give them information about the Muse of Mr.
Bowyer Nichols, with a fragment from whom I took
the liberty of introducing the Conference. So far as I
am aware, Mr. Nichols has not collected his works ;
they are to be found among pieces by other hands in
two little volumes, neither of which can now be com-
manded from the bookseller, Love in Idleness and
Love's Looking-glass. As few people care to buy
any poetry now at the price of rubies, it is to be
hoped that Mr. Nichols may think fit to redeem from
their costly oblivion in the second-hand shops a small
sheaf of his lyrics for the virtuosi at a moderate
price ; say, a shilling. I give the idea to Mr. Elkin
Matthews for what it is worth.

To stimulate the demand if my hint is taken, I will
offer here a few examples of Mr. Nichols's quality,
pointing out what I conceive to be his great and

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peculiar merit. This, in a word, I take to be his
sense of rhythm. It is usually assumed as matter of
course that rhythm is an ingredient of all verse, and
that all poets can compass it as easily as rhyme.
But this is a popular delusion. The truth rather is
that an ear for rhythm is one of the rarest gifts of
the gods ; certainly in most of the poets whose works
are now most popular among their friends it is con-
spicuously absent, and what takes its place is greater
or less skill in metrical experiments. Mr. Nichols
belongs to the school of Shelley, whose work, it may
be necessary to point out was as artificial as that of
any poet of to-day if any one doubts this, let him
consult Shelley's MSS. only the artifice, being in
the realm of rhythm instead of metre, conceals itself
in the limpid flow of the resultant effect. Shelley's
star is at this moment not in the ascendant ; prophets,
indeed, are foretelling a revival of the cult of Byron,
and booksellers are bringing out of their cellars his
editiones principes ; still there must always be a saving
remnant who judge their own poetry for themselves,
and judge it by the ear, and with them Shelley's fame
is secure; as secure, in the matter of rhythm, as
Shakespeare's or Chaucer's. Those who hold by
Byron, if they are consistent, must displace Shake-
speare by Ben Jonson, and Chaucer by the heavy-
gaited Gower. Perhaps they do so.

But to come to Mr. Nichols. I would not mind
staking his reputation as a rhythmist upon the

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smallest poem I can find, even a single quatrain, such
as the following epigram upon Marie Antoinette's
toilet-table in the South Kensington Museum :

This was her table, these her trim outspread
Brushes and trays and porcelain cups for red ;
Here sate she while her women tired and curled
The most unhappy head in all the world.

It runs off easily and naturally, without strain ;
the pauses, the cadences in the rhythm, follow the
pauses and cadences in the thought ; so that the
whole appears obvious and inevitable. Could there,
in the matter of rhythm, be higher praise ?

For a second example take a charming little love-
poem, called ' The Passing of the Year,' written in
a trochaic stanza, with the requisite lightness of
touch :

When the breath of March was keen
And the woods were brown and bare,
Covered from the cruel air

In a tangled bed of green

Violets grew unplucked, unseen,

Sweet and meet to wreathe your hair,

If it only could have been.

But Love's heart and hope were strong

As he smiled and whispered low :

When the summer roses blow,
When the summer swallows throng,
Though a little while be long

She will come at last to know,
She will take our flowers and song.

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Now encroaching sunset shows
That the year hath turned his face
Unto failure and disgrace,

Brooding mists and beating snows,

While along the garden rows
Leaf and petal fall apace,

And with each a poor hope goes.

These two little pieces are enough, by themselves,
to show that we have in Mr. Nichols a follower of
that best tradition in English lyrical writing, which
had style without mannerism.

What are his subjects ? So far as I know, he finds
them most commonly in London or in Rome ; less
often in rural scenes. Here is a sunset from the
Pincian :

The cloud-trail moves

Along the west,
Like a flock of doves

That wing to rest ;

The red globe drops

Behind the dome
That stands and tops

The world and Rome.

Alone it lifts

Its head on high ;
The window-rifts

Are full of sky.

Dusky and bare,

A naked frame
Against the glare

Of growing flame,

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The spectral bulk

Might seem to be
Some burnt-out hulk

On a burning sea.

London does not furnish so majestic a picture as
this, but there is plenty of colour in the following
pastel :

The lowering sooty London sky

Flushes with roses manifold ;
The spattered feet of the passer-by

Slip and slide in silver and gold ;

Lilac and violet and blue

The lines of chimney-pots and bricks ;

The omnibus with its spectre crew
Fades like the purple barque of Styx.

Here again is a silhouette from the Park :

I lingered at the crossing by the Row,
And endless carriages at even pace
Rolled on, while still I loitered at my place
Mesmerised by the human torrent-flow ;
A Avoman, fair and famous years ago,
Was carried by me, and I caught her face,
Pillowed on silk and canopied with lace,
Her face, and eyes that wandered to and fro.

I thought, Those eyes were once love's looking-glass,
The world's eyes waited once on those blank eyes ;
Now she would give her diamonds to mark
A head turned here and there to watch her pass ;
And of that bitterness some faint surmise
Shadowed me as I left the crowded Park.

Mr. Nichols prefers to work on a small scale. His

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writings may possibly seem insignificant to the reader
who likes his poetry in great swaths. But works of
art must be judged by the ideal at which they aim.
Some poets write epics, others epigrams. Mr. Nichols
is certainly not an epic poet. Of his epigrams I
should like to quote a couple more ; one, which seems
to me to have more feeling of a February day than
many celebrated photographic efforts :

Snow fallen and faded, snow again to come :
Nor loosed dead winter's grasp, nor loosening :

Alone the lark, high in the chilly dome,

Descries deliverance, and appeals to spring.

The other shall be an example of Mr. Nichols'
humour ; it is called ' Charity ' ; and is an epigram in
the more modern sense of the word :

Poor Susan drinks and cannot sew a stitch,
I think she'll do to make the Jones's frocks

Miss Tomkins has no children, but she's rich ;
I'll pop this foundling down her letter-box.

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VII.

A FURTHER HOLIDAY NUMBER.

August 2Otk. The doctor declares that my fall
has severely shaken the nervous system, and advises
Switzerland ; I can believe he is right. For one
thing I find my friends' best stories irritating ; for
another I proved myself three days ago unequal to
a very simple exploit. I was mounting to the lantern
of Ely Cathedral with a verger, and our course lay
above the roof of the choir. It looked like a frozen
sea across which lay a single width of plank. I asked
if the stone-work would bear me if I fell, and the
verger had his doubts ; but he protested there was no
need to fall ; I had only to walk the plank. The
expression woke boyish memories of the 'Jolly Roger,'
and I laughed and made a push to follow my leader ;
but after a yard or two I gave in ignominiously, ex-
plaining that I did not wish to fall through on to the
choir pavement and desecrate the cathedral with my
lacerated remains. The doctor has recommended the
Bernese Oberland, and advises me to travel with a
courier and a wit. I believe I may be able to induce

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X. to go. He tempers his wit with discretion and is
better than any courier.

2yd. X. will go and will get tickets, foreign
money, &c, and telegraph for rooms. We are to
meet on Friday night at Liverpool Street and travel
by the Hook of Holland to avoid Paris.

2 $th. How interesting the City is ! I must really
come to town more often. The very sight of so
many people is exhilarating. At London Bridge
station I saw a party of children returning from a
country holiday, bringing their sheaves with them.
Their mothers and elder sisters who had come to
meet the train seemed divided in sympathy between
the bundles of corn in their hands and the poor
fragments of shoe-leather on their feet. In Thread-
needle Street a delightful gypsy caravan was making
its way among the civilised nineteenth-century traffic
past the astonished statue of Mr. Peabody. At
Liverpool Street books had to be bought for the
journey. What a boon and a blessing to travellers
are the sixpenny novels ! Nobody would think of
reading them, but they quiet appetite. One used to
have to pay six shillings for the same sedative.
Between a guide-book, one's fellow-travellers, and
the Dreyfus case, one can get through the longest
journey. At last came X., bearing the hotel-keeper's
reply to his telegram: 'Telephone to inquire before
arriving.' What the dickens does the fellow mean ?

26th. A very quiet passage to 'the Hook.' We

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arrived in a fog. The lookout forward had but a
small voice, and it caused us some dismay that the
captain who steered found difficulty in hearing what
he said. Above the elements, above the siren, we
heard from time to time the captain's own voice
raised in objurgatory remonstrance. 'What does he
say ? Why the blank can't you speak so that I can
hear ? '

The journey to Basle was comfortable, as the train
was not crowded, and the admirable system prevailed
of allotting each passenger his seat. The meals were
frequent and the waiters civil, and every quarter of
an hour an old woman dusted the corridor. Hour
by hour, however, the heat increased, and the poor
Kellners travelled with ever limper pace, till by four
o'clock they were all asleep. But, though they slept,
the old woman went indefatigably on dusting the
corridor. In future, whenever the heat is blinking,
I shall see in imagination that automatic old person
dusting and dusting.

I have at several stations to-day seen the Emperor
of Germany upon the platform, which is extraordinary
even for so ubiquitous a personage. I begin to
suspect him of the trick Brer Terrapin played upon
Brer Rabbit in Uncle Remus. I like the military
bearing of all the guards and stationmasters and
ticketsnippers : it gives one the sense of an escort.
But I wish they would take a few more leaves at a
time out of my Cook's budget, and ' leave me, leave

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me to repose.' This last man seems curiously ex-
cited, and is evidently saying things not put down
for him in the guide-book. I wish X. had not chosen
this particular five minutes to take a walk in the
corridor. Finding me impervious to his German, the
fellow discussed the same unto me in French. It
seems there are two stations at Basle, and if we want
the central, we are in the wrong part of the train. I
really must learn German. I remember saying the
same thing twenty years ago. But after all it is
never too old to learn. Did not Cato learn Greek at
eighty ?

2Jth, Basle. What different echoes the name
raises in different bosoms ! It was this mystic name
uttered by M. Bertulus that choked that poor reptile
Major Henry. To many Englishmen it means a cold
station where they miserably snatch a cup of coffee ;
or at most it means an hotel for the night. And yet
the town has a minster and a fine river and a view
and no end of associations with the good and great
of Tudor days. Here was Froben's press apud
inclytam Basileam where Erasmus printed his Greek
Testament and Sir Thomas More his Utopia. In
the Cathedral is Erasmus's tomb with a magniloquent
inscription. The minster outrages one's sentiment by
being built in red sandstone instead of the orthodox
grey ; and its restorer has carried the outrage beyond
endurance by putting on a roof like a highly coloured
wall-paper in a servant's bedroom of the early

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Victorian epoch. The arrangements within are more
in accordance with Mr. Kensit's notions of the fitness
of things ecclesiastical than prevails in our northern
cathedrals.

28t/i. Our journey onward from Basle was less
comfortable because more crowded than it had been
hitherto, but it was more fruitful in objects of con-
templation. We were in the land of tourists, too
many of whom seemed to have abandoned their
manners with their native land. Two American
ladies discussed at the top of their voices for hours
the best sort of silk for a ' waist ; ' a German bride
and bridegroom lay in each other's arms ; at one
point, where there had been a large clearance, a
British matron entered with six daughters. So soon
as the train had started, the matron made the not
very subtle discovery that we were smoking, and
further that it was a smoking compartment. Then
she inquired individually of her daughters whether
they objected to smoking, evidently expecting the
answer ' Yes.' But they had more manners than
their parent, and said ' No.' I wonder what the next
move would have been if they had said ' Yes.' The
whole proceeding was ridiculously English. Nature
in English people abroad seems 'so careful of the
type/

I was hardly surprised when a Frenchman with
whom I got into conversation asked me why English
girls were all alike, though patriotism compelled me

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to retort that the same thing had struck me about
French girls : which he thought curious. This
Frenchman, I was glad to discover, was one of that
slowly increasing band who think well of English
institutions. He had read M. Demolins' book 'A
quoi tient la superiorite des Anglo-Saxons ? ' and
asked me some intelligent questions. He was
especially interested in the English zeal for travel.
After explaining that he was no anti-Semite, he told
me he had been much impressed with the theories of
an Englishman he had met as to the Anglo-Saxons
being the lost Israelitish tribes. He thought the two
races had much in common especially their immense
vitality and perseverance and the desire to put their
feet on the necks of other nations. Besides, he added,
you are both Dreyfusard. He told me incidentally
that our great excursion parties always reminded him
of the preliminary visits paid to Egypt by the sons of
Jacob, before they took possession of the land of
Goshen. 'You would like Switzerland, would you
not ? ' he asked naively. ' Ah,' he went on, ' you are
becoming more imperial, or "jingo" as it is called,
every day. I recall the time when a Cockney that
is, is it not, a tourist of Cook was laughed at ; you
are all Cockneys now. And there are still other
parties one meets Lunnites and Polytechnics. I do
not quite understand the differentia of these ; but you
will tell me if I am right they correspond, do they
not, to our clericals and materialists ? I understand

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that Mr. Lunn, who organises the parties, is the
Archbishop of Worcester.' I was a little vague
myself about the people whom my French friend
called Lunnites and Polytechnics ; but I was charmed
with his etymology of ' cockney,' and told him that
our great poet, the divine William, had prophesied
their multiplication. He says in Twelfth Night, ' I
am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove
a cockney.'

So far we had not been able to telephone to our
hotel, and there had been many uneasy discussions
as to registering the luggage through. But at Inter-
laken we were relieved to find that rooms were at our
service, so that we made the ascent by the funicular
with no mental anxiety to relieve the physical horror.
The engineer of these clambering lifts has but just
passed from the scene of his desecrations, so that it
would be ill-timed to characterise him adversely.
But if I were Rhadamanthus, I would see my way to
something artistic in the way of retribution. My
friend accused me of inconsistency for using what
I so much disapproved of. But I explained that it
is never safe to use ways of travel that are generally
superseded, because the old skill is lost. It would
be injudicious to travel by coach in England at the
old pace, because roads now are worse and the drivers
are out of practice. For the same reason I should
distrust a mule or a chaise a porteurs where a funicular
railway had been long introduced. My aunt, with

122 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

a lady's indifference to both logical principles and
practical convenience, sends her luggage by the
funicular, and travels herself by mule !

We arrived at our destination in the first chill of
the evening. The great flaring electric light outside
the hotel, falling upon buildings of an extravagantly
chalet type, gave the impression of some scene in an
Offenbach opera. Our host fell into his role, receiv-
ing us with tempered politeness, his hotel being full,
and despatched us to the attics. I saw without
surprise that the whole structure, including the stair-
case, was of pine wood, and I blessed my prescience
for packing a rope ladder. The portier informed me
later that this hotel had never yet been burned down,
though the opposition establishment had ; and com-
forted me with the further information that patrols
walked all night both outside and in, and reported
themselves to indicators every half-hour to make
sure they were awake. The same authority laid it
down that the cause of all the danger was the use of
curling irons by the ladies. There should be a Swiss
sumptuary law against their introduction. He hinted
also at a male habit of smoking in bed ; but I take
this to have been mere hypothesis.

The first night at a table d'hote in an hotel where
you are making some stay has always a charm of its
own. You know nothing of anybody, and so you
make conjectures which usually turn out ridiculously
wrong. The people for whom you fancy a distaste

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 123

become presently your chief companions, and those
who look the most interesting most commonly turn
out vapid bores. There were said to be four hundred
persons present ' feeding like one/ and the noise was
polyglot. I was much struck with the orderliness of
the serving. As each course was ready, a bell rang,
and a long procession of maids emerged from the
kitchen round a screen in a snake-like curve, and
then separated to their proper tables. The meal
itself was not remarkable, nor were my immediate
neighbours. My vis-a-vis, on the other hand, was an
American girl of extreme beauty, who sat with a
sister. I was about to pass the menu across the
table, by way of breaking the ice, when the beauty
made a long arm, and took it with some energy.
Thus ended my first Swiss romance a very short
story. For epilogue I added the lines from Matthew
Arnold's ' Sick King : '

Though we take what we desire,
We should, not snatch it eagerly.

The two damsels kept up a whispered dialogue
all through dinner, broken by great choruses of
laughter. After dinner the ladies invaded the
smoking-room, and the men were for the most
part driven out upon the terrace. This, which
I found afterwards to be the regular custom, was
plainly in theory a compliment to the smoking sex ;
but in practice it had its inconveniences, for the room

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became overheated and noisy, while the very spacious
drawing-room was deserted. However, towards nine
o'clock the room cleared, and it became possible to
get hold of a newspaper. The migration at this hour
was, I soon learnt, to a Kursaal, where the band dis-
coursed fairly good dance music. When I went
across at ten, I found X. busy at a very rowdy set of
kitchen lancers. He had broken his ice.

I went early to bed, feeling the fatigue of travel ;
but to go early to bed in a wooden Swiss hotel is not
the way to go early to sleep ; people came upstairs
in batches and stood laughing and talking in the
corridors ; then door after door slammed ; in the
intervals between the batches the chambermaids
jested with the 'boots.' Then my right-hand neigh-
bour came up, and walked up and down his room
apparently meditating ; perhaps he was leaving early
the next morning, for there was much opening and
shutting of drawers and dragging about of portman-
teaus. Presently there was peace on the right, and
I hugged myself for joy that there was nothing but
the roof overhead and perhaps an empty room to the
left. But I had counted without my host. It could
not have been long before through a light sleep I
became aware of voices and laughter. They seemed
strange and yet in a way familar. I soon was roused
enough to recognise them as the voices of my fair
companions at dinner. The world must have been a
very sunny place to these maidens, for their laughter

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 125

seemed endless. Presently their voices took a higher
range : they were quarrelling ; now they were crying,
or one of them was ; I was rejoiced ; if I was to be
kept awake all night I would rather it should be by
their tears than their laughter. But it proved but an
April shower, and in five minutes they were laughing
more than ever. What was I to do ? Had my
doctor -sent me all these hundreds of miles from
home, and all these thousands of feet above the sea,
to soothe my nerves, and was my rest to be disturbed
nighf after night by a couple of giggling girls, how-
ever pretty and American ? I resolved to give them
five minutes' grace, and then knock at the partition.
They would not know who occupied the adjoining
room, and if they did ! I resolved to give them ten
minutes a quarter of an hour. Then I knocked
like a London footman.

2gth. After breakfast we went on the terrace and
proceeded to make more experiments in the delicate
art of opening acquaintance. The regular means to
this for Englishmen is of course the weather, or an
exchange of home nevyspapers ; but the telescopes at
this hotel were of much service. A man who got his
glass upon a chamois on the Black Monk or a party
ascending the Eiger would naturally exhibit his
discovery. I made in this way the acquaintance of a
bandit-looking gentleman, who proved to be a parson
in mufti. But he explained the necessity he lay
under of hiding his profession from the chaplain, if

126 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

he was to enjoy his holiday without being asked to
preach.

The first puzzle of interest for a newcomer in these
big Swiss hotels is to discover the leader of fashion.
Usually it is some wealthy American to whom the
mere English congee and kotow. There seems here
to be no especial star of fashion who sheds command-
ing influence, but a general galaxy or Milky Way of
beauty and talent. Men are in the minority, as they
are indeed in the macrocosm, but in less than their
usual ratio, as our spot is notoriously not a good
starting-place for climbing. But there are a few to
keep us in countenance : I distinguish an Adonis,
who I am told gets up cotillons and tennis tourna-
ments ; a young Hercules in the Omphale stage of
development ; a member of Parliament, several Q.C.'s,
and an Inspector of Schools.

The weather is excellently bright and sunny, and
as usual in bright weather I find the snow mountains
disappointing. They look like huge chocolate
puddings with sugar icing. But the air is exhilarat-
ing beyond words. I feel already like Marlowe's
pampered jades of Asia, ready to do my twenty miles
a day. X. has a great contempt for the Swiss
mountains as mountains, holding that Snowdon
which has passed from the glacier stage is far more
venerable. And an American in the hotel has just
asked me what is the good of them, as they contain
neither gold, nor silver, nor iron, nor copper, nor coal.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. I2/

$ist. The first exhilaration has worn off, and has
been succeeded by depression as extreme. This
also, I am told, is due to the rare tonic qualities of
the air, and will not last long. I hope not. My
sensations recall those of extreme youth after a
private interview in the headmaster's study. This it
is to be servile to all the skyey influences. I find a
short promenade enough at present, and take occasion
to examine the local curiosities and works of art.
All the men make cuckoo-clocks. All the girls sit
about in the open air making torchon lace. They ex-
plain that it is their holidays. A party of Americans
come by with a kodak and proceed to photograph me
and the lace-makers. As they depart I hear them
exclaim, 'What a cunning group guess we rattled
them a bit.' These are, I take it, the baser sort of
Yankees. In front of the hotel is a lead statue of a
Cupid pouring water from an urn. It is the custom
for visitors to drink this water with gusto. ' I call
this your fine champagne', says an Englishman to the
proprietor, who receives the dubious compliment with
a bow and an acid smile. The statue stands opposite
the window of the bureau, so that he has probably
received many congratulations on his water since the
fountain was erected. The biireau is in two compart-
ments, both open to the full view of passers-by. In
one sits the proprietor all day, except at meal times,
counting up his money. In the other is his lady
wife, who ought to be eating bread and honey ; but

128 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

she, I regret to say, is counting too. We say to our-
selves as we pay our weekly bill, with extra charges
for the electric light, the Kursaal, and a hundred
other things, that this fury of attack upon our purses
is because they know they have but a short time.
But the weather is still splendid, and new arrivals
come every day. To-day we have an Anglican
bishop and three Roman priests.

September 1st. Depression continues. I totter
through the grounds to watch a tennis tournament.
Some French boys play very creditably. Hercules
proposes an ascent of the ' horn ' to-morrow ; but
the ascent of the hotel staircase is at present as much
as I can manage. My clerical acquaintance sits
down by me in great distress. 'Have I seen the
bishop ? He is to stay over next Sunday. If only
the chaplain had known he was a parson, he would
have asked him to preach ; and it is a great thing to
preach before a bishop. You never know what may
come of it. Now he had lost his chance.' I advised
him to seek out the chaplain and explain matters ;
but he thought this would be indecent. Besides,
now the bishop was here, the chaplain would want to
preach himself. His only chance was to have been
asked before the bishop came. 'And the moral,'
I asked ? ' Oh,' he said, ' you laymen are always
looking for morals.'

It is the custom here for ladies to make tea
with spirit-lamps in their private rooms, or else go

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 1 29

picnicking to a ' Blumenthal.' To-day I joined such
a party. The discomfort is no greater than that of an
ordinary picnic except for the ants, which abound.
I make this remark to the wit of the party, who
replies that he has found trouble from aunts even at
English picnics. In this valley there was a magni-
ficent ant-run of some thirty feet between two ant-
hills. The grass was entirely worn away by their
passage to and fro. It all seemed very purposeless
to the ignorant onlooker; but I dare say it was
holiday season with them too, and they were being
ordered from one heap to the other for change of air.
In the evening, to revive my spirits, I went across to
the Kursaal to watch the dancers. The road between
the Kursaal and the hotel is lighted with electric
light, and has as I have already noted the appear-
ance of a stage. Paths wind down on to it, and
people pass and talk, and every minute one expects
the principal actor to trip on and bow and begin the
real business of the play. The Kursaal is built with
a long loggia in which many smokers sit to watch
the dancing ; and outside that again stands the
many-headed, and passes his humorous comments-
It is certainly very amusing to watch the various
styles of dancing. By far the most graceful of the
company is a very well preserved colonel ; a naval
lieutenant does all the work with his shoulders ; the
French boy skips down the room in half a dozen
strides ; a delightful old gentleman dances in what

130 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

must have been the Georgian mode. Presently a
middle-aged German couple sitting by my side in the
loggia rise, take off their wraps, pass in, and without
a smile or a word renew their youth. I was much
affected by this tender idyll, and to hide my feelings
went out for a while and off the stage into the
shadows beyond. As I returned I saw a girl being
carried swiftly and silently by a cloaked figure into a
chalet. I was told she had fainted. But I could not
help thinking of Mr. Wells's gruesome imagination
in his Time Machine, of the gnomes hurrying off
with an occasional victim while the gay creatures
affected to take no heed.

2nd. The mountains are this morning covered with
mist. At breakfast we each in turn feel our way to
the ancient jest about ' missing the view/ and ' viewing
the mist.' It serves as a variation on the chronicle of
nightmares which seem to haunt the region. From
time to time the mist breaks up and the peaks are
seen in superb majesty. I resent my own first
indifference, and meditate on Henry Vaughan's fine
saying, ' Mists make but triumphs for the day.'

4th. Many people have left, and we have new
neighbours at meals. A French literary lady, who
very much prided herself on her English, asked me
at lunch if I wtxsfhniniste. The word seemed for the
moment an imputation on my character of invalid,
and I repeated it 'Feministe?' 'Oh, yes,' said my
interlocutor, ' lady's man, who wants women to vote.'

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 131

I hastened to say that, if all women were of her
admirable intelligence, nothing would please me
more. Poor lady ! she is, I fear, driven to talk
English because she has the misfortune to think
Dreyfus innocent, and is given the cold shoulder by
her compatriots here, one of whom yesterday at table
expressed herself sorry at the maladroitness of Maitre
Labori's assassination. ' It would have been one
canaille the less.' Passing through the vestibule I
chanced to overhear one of Hercules's compliments
which pleased me. ' How long have you studied art?'
he was saying to Omphale. ' Oh, ever since I was
eight' 'Oh, you mean then about eight years.'
I heard also a small boy asking the portier whether
there would be any avalanches to-day. The weather
shows signs of clearing ; at least the portier so reads
the signs ; and Hercules is arranging his deferred
excursion. He is kind enough to make a point of
my accompanying the party ; he has already secured
X. ; he hints that after all one climbs with one's legs
rather than with one's arms. (It is my arm that is
hors de combat?) This strikes me as special pleading.
My experience is that one's arm has a good deal of
work on these occasions in carrying ladies' cloaks and
helping them over slippery places. However, there
is a point where a refusal becomes curmudgeonly,
and I accept (subject to favourable weather) with a
certain sinking of heart.

5^7*. The weather at five o'clock is all that the

132 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

par tier's fancy had painted it. We breakfast in some
excitement ; such of us as have no alpenstocks of our
own steal those of persons not yet up, and follow the
diminutive guide supplied by \ho. portier for the sake
of the extra profit to himself. The ascent some
4,000 feet was long, but not difficult except at the
top, where the shale gave way under one's feet ; and
the view certainly came up to Baedeker's description.
Most of the incidents of the excursion were attribu-
table to one lady of the party having elected to make
the ascent in tennis-shoes. But I recall one con-
versation. A goat suddenly appeared from behind
a rock and bleated miserably. ' Now do/ said the
lady with whom I was walking, ' do look about for
that poor creature's mother. I am quite sure that
it has lost its mother. My maternal instincts con-
vince me of that. I cannot go on and leave this poor
creature here in this miserable plight. It will quite
spoil my day. I am sure, Mr. Sylvan, you would not
mind running back a little way, and just looking if
you can see any goats about. This poor thing
is following us, and literally asking for our pity.'
And sure enough it was bleating most uncomfortably.
' I do not care for human beings,' continued my
companion. (I bowed.) 'They have other human
beings to look after them ; but dumb creatures find
their way to my heart at once.' I had not too hastily
fallen in with the suggestion that I should change
our excursion into a goat-stalking expedition,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 133

because I had my own suspicions as to why the
goat was unhappy. And luckily just at this point,
turning a corner, we came on a chalet, where a girl
was waiting for the goat, and at once began milking
it vigorously.

It is the bounden duty of every party making this
ascent to chronicle the feat in an album kept at the
hotel, and to illustrate it with pictures or poems or
humorous sallies, according to their bent and skill.
Our achievement received a double celebration. The
drawing I cannot reproduce. Of the ballade I have
noted a couple of stanzas :

Up rose the sun, and by and by

Up rose the portier, and he
From door to door went solemnly

And knocked and knocked ; and up rose we.

Our boots were nailed ; our hearts were free ;
Our alpenstocks as good as new ;

Our guide almost too small to see :
But Hercules has seen us through !

Four hours we walked ; the sun in sky

Climbed as we climbed, and he and we
Grew very hot ; in fancy's eye

Danced a mirage of cups of tea :

Four hours we walked most thirstily
O'er Alp and Thai, thro' shale and snow,

And wondered when the end would be :
But Hercules has seen us through.

7th. Rain. The hotel this morning was thrown
into consternation by the announcement that Ester-
hazy had arrived. He had spoken to no one, but sat

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in a retired corner, reading an immense pile of papers.
' No doubt the secret dossier] I suggested. Esterhazy
turned out to be an Italian officer, who was only
slightly amused at being taken for such a celebrated
character. ' Now if they had mistaken Esterhazy
for me,' he said, ' I might have been more impressed.'

Wi. Rain. The hotel aneroid points steadily to
c Beau temps.' I asked the portier if the glass ever
moved during the season. An Englishman of a com-
mercial type came and tapped it and went off shaking
his head, and saying he only understood Fahrenheit
barometers. On these days of confinement to the
hotel, my whole energies are spent in avoiding the
M.P. I dare not enter the fumoir unless I hear him
engaged in boring somebody else. Then I know the
victim will not lightly escape, and I may be able to
read the Times. But my reading is broken by whiffs
of his eloquence : ' Of course I told the Government '
' I said to Goschen ' ' I said in my speech : "Wide
as the right honourable gentleman's literary reputa-
tion undoubtedly is " '

qth. Rain. Nothing has been talked of all day
but the probable verdict at Rennes. We had a
telegram as soon as the news was known. ' Ester-
hazy ' harangued us in the vestibule on its iniquity.
' La France doit etre partagee comme la Pologne."
An American lady remarked to me that it was
just like the Uhlan's cleverness to talk like that, or
he would be certain to be lynched. She also remarked

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 135

on the four nines in the date (9 / 9 / 99), and was sure
it had something to do with the number of the Beast.
\ith. The glass is rising, but en revanche the rain
is falling, and the place is damp. There is new snow
on the heights, but here it alternates with sleet and
rain. The mist continues to ascend from the valley,
boiling up as if from a witches' cauldron on the
Lyceum stage. How one longs for a human fire
instead of these stoves ! What says the poet ?

Give a man a pipe he can smoke,
Give a man a fire he can poke.

People are leaving fast. Two of my friends here, a
charming American lady and her daughter, suddenly
rose, said ' This is too tristej packed their trunk, and
were gone. If only it were possible to get a closed
carriage, I would go too. The snow is beginning to
fall heavily, so that to-morrow may perhaps be fine
enough to start. Meanwhile there is nothing to do
but keep warm and avoid the M.P.

136 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

VIII.

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR CHIEFLY ABOUT SIR
JOHN DAVIES J WITH SOME INTRODUCTORY RE-
MARKS UPON THE PERSONIFYING OF OCCASION.

MY DEAR FRIEND, You remind me and you will
forgive me for saying that your memory, if it were
not so admirably balanced by your good nature,
would often drive me to desperation that I have
made many promises in the course of these papers,
not one of which has yet been redeemed. You also
most kindly congratulate me on being home again
once more among my books. Putting the congratu-
lation alongside of the reminder, I come to the
conclusion that your editorial instinct feels the need
of a little pure literature this month to re-establish
these conferences on the lofty table-land from which
in the holiday season they have descended. So be
it. Let me first, however, defend myself from the
suspicion of being a promise-breaker. I recollect
promising to discourse about the poetry of Sir John
Davies, if occasion offered ; but therein lay my
subtlety ; I knew that occasion never does offer ; I

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 137

knew the phrase to be one by which the passionate
hopefulness of the human race is always deceiving
itself, and by which its passionate procrastination
may always be justified. For who is Occasion ? Of
all allegorical personages Occasion impresses me the
least with her verisimilitude. How can one believe
in a lady who is said to go about with all her hair
combed over her face and a bare scalp exposed
behind ? If the question is asked, Why this amazing
coiffure ? the reply is given, Occasion wears her hair
long in front in order that the race of men may pull
it to attract her attention. The notion is, as our
neighbours say, unqualifiable. It is extraordinary
how the brutal Roman genius has been able to im-
pose itself on the civilised Gothic imagination simply
by virtue of its hexameter. A Roman had only to
cast some betise into that iron frame to ensure its
persistence to the end of time.

Fronte capillata est, post est Occasio calva.

It is bad enough that the quotation should be ever-
lastingly dinned in one's ears ; but, after all, quota-
tions are for statesmen and pressmen, and the rest
of the world may pass them by ; but an allegorical
personage once created cannot be destroyed. Poets
naturally suffer most from their obsession. When-
ever Occasion is mentioned in a poet's ear, there rises
before his mental eye this absurd fantasy of the half-
bald, half-hairy female. And what makes the matter

138 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

worse, we use the word Occasion in more than one
sense. We speak, for instance, of an occasion of
anger ; and clearly in this case, if any hair is to be
pulled, it is not that of Occasion but her victims.
But see now the effect of this nightmare allegory
upon the poet Spenser. He wishes to teach the
moral lesson, that the way to suppress anger is to
suppress all occasions of falling into anger, and so he
makes Furor the child of Occasion ; a simple and
admirable trope. But when it comes to picturing
Occasion, he is unable to resist this grotesque business
of the front hair and posterior calvosity ; which has,
in regard to anger, no glimmer of significance.

And him behynd a wicked Hag did stalke

In ragged robes and filthy disaray ;

Her other leg was lame that she note walke,

But on a staffe her feeble steps did stay :

Her locks that loathly were and hoarie gray

Grew all afore and loosely hong unrold ;

But all behind was bald and ivorne away

That none thereof could ever taken hold :

And eke her face ill-favour'd, full of wrinckles old.

Faerie Queene, II. iv. 4.

Milton, who was made of sterner stuff, only half
succumbs to the incubus :

If kingdom move thee not, let move thee zeal
And duty zeal and duty are not slow,
But on Occasion 's forelock watchful wait :
They themselves rather are occasion best.

It strikes one as an unnatural proceeding when

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 139

poets have to turn Euhemerist, but in this case we
are glad that Milton's iconoclasm found so deserving
an object. ' They themselves rather are occasion
best.' How true that has proved in this very
instance ! I might have waited for ever for an
occasion to celebrate Sir John Davies, but as soon as
I decide (not without your delicate impulse) to
celebrate him here and now, I discover that this year
is the tercentenary of his great poem ' Nosce Te-
ipsum/ so that one month's further delay would have
missed the occasion ; or, to put it in the conventional
language, I should have found my fingers slipping
away from the goddess's bare scalp.

The facts of Sir John Davies's life are well put
together in the ' Dictionary of National Biography.'
It was a life spent for the most part in the endeavour
to pacify Ireland by giving it courts of justice that
should command respect, together with the Protestant
religion. In the first half of his policy he had a
certain success, and might, one conjectures, have had
more but for the second half. The scene at the
opening of the Irish Parliament of 1613 might supply
a hint to Mr. Redmond for reviving the fortunes of his
own party in the English Parliament. ' Sir Thomas
Ridgeway proposed Davies as Speaker, intimating
that his appointment had been recommended by the
king. Thereupon Sir James Gough, as champion of
the Catholic party, proposed Sir John Everard, a
noted lawyer and a recusant. During the scene of

I4O CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

disorder that ensued the Catholic members contrived
to install Everard in the chair. As Everard refused
to vacate the chair, Sir Oliver St. John and Ridgeway
" took Sir John Davys by the arms, lifted him from
the ground, and placed him in the chair in Sir John
Everard's lap, requiring him still to come forth of the
chair." ' To make the picture more vivid, the reader
should know that Sir John Davies was remarkably
corpulent, and indeed died ultimately of apoplexy
after a supper party given by the Lord Keeper. The
book, by which Sir John lives in the annals of the
great Irish question, has for its title 'A Discoverie of
the Trve Cavses why Ireland was never entirely
Subdued, nor brought vnder Obedience of the Crowne
of England, vntill the Beginning of his Maiesties
happie Raigne' (London, 1612). By the last clause
of the title one would judge that Sir John Davies,
during his long sojourn in Ireland, had grafted some-
thing of the Irish humour upon his natural English
wit.

The poetry, with which alone we are now concerned,
belongs to Sir John's youth, which was somewhat
heady. He was educated at Oxford and admitted of
the Middle Temple, being called to the Bar in due
course; but two years afterwards he was disbarred
for an attack in the Middle Temple Hall on a friend
of his, one Richard Martin, who, like himself, was a
wit as well as a Templar, and seems to have provoked
him. He was re-admitted four years later after

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 14!

apologies made, but in the meantime retired to
Oxford, where he wrote his philosophical poem,
' Nosce Te-ipsum,' i.e. ' Know Thy-self.' The earliest
and most interesting of his poems, however, is one
called ' Orchestra,' which is described on its original
title-page as

A POEME ON DAUN-
CING

Judicially prooving the

true observation of time and

measure, in the Authenticall

and laudable use of Daun-

cing.

The second edition calls it, with a still more pleasing
variety of type,

A Poeme expressing the An-
tiqiiitie and Excellencie

OF DAVNCING.

In a Dialogue betweene Penelope

and one of her Wooers.

Not Finished.

It is an apologia for what the Daily Telegraph, in its
' passionate salad-days,' used to call the Terpsichorean
art, put into the mouth of Antinous, one of the wooers
of the Queen of Ithaca, in order to persuade her to
dance with him. The Queen has at first demurred,
not on Puritan grounds, but because dancing seems
to her a disorderly novelty. ' Why,' she says,

142 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Why persuade you me to this new rage ?

For all disorder and misrule is new,

For such misgovernment in former age

Our old divine Forefathers never knew ;

Who if they liv'd, and did the follies view

Which their fond nephews 1 make their chief affairs,
Would hate themselves that had begot such heirs.

In reply, Antinous assures the Queen that dancing,
so far from being a novelty, is the oldest thing in the
world, and, so far from being disorderly, is itself the
very principle of order.

Dancing, bright lady, then began to be,
When the first seeds whereof the World did spring,
The fire, air, earth, and water, did agree
By Love's persuasion, nature's mighty king,
To leave their first disordered combating ;
And in a dance such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve.

Since when, they still are carried in a round
And changing come one in another's place ;
Yet do they neither mingle nor confound,
But every one doth keep the bounded space
Wherein the dance doth bid it turn or trace ;

This wondrous miracle did Love devise,

For dancing is Love's proper exercise.

He then, after an over-bold dash into etymology
which Penelope is too well-mannered to criticise,
expatiates through the material universe, and shows
to his own satisfaction that dancing is the sole
occupation of every created thing :

1 Grandsons.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 143

Behold the World, how it is whirled round,
And for it is so whirled is named so ;
For whose large volume many rules are found
Of this new art, which it doth fairly show :
For your quick eyes, in wandering to and fro

From East to West, on no one thing can glance,

But if you mark it well it seems to dance .

First you see fixed in this huge mirror blue

Of trembling lights a number numberless ;

Fixed \hsy are named but with a name untrue,

For they all move and in a dance express

That great long year that doth contain no less
Than threescore hundreds of those years in all
Which the Sun makes with his course natural.

Under that spangled sky, five wandering flames,
Beside the King of Day and Queen of Night,
Are wheeled around, all in their sundry frames
And all in sundry measures do delight,
Yet altogether keep no measure right ;

For by itself each doth itself advance,

And by itself each doth a galliard dance.

And lo the Sea, that fleets about the Land
And like a girdle clips her solid waist,
Music and measure both doth understand ;
For his great crystal eye is always cast
Up to the moon, and on her fixed fast ;

And as she danceth in her pallid sphere,

So danceth he about his centre here.

Sometimes his proud green waves in order set

One after other flow unto the shore ;

Which when they have with many kisses wet,

They ebb away in order as before,

And to make known his courtly love the more
He oft doth lay aside his three-forkt mace
And with his arms the timorous Earth embrace.

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Only the Earth doth stand for ever still :
Her rocks remove not nor her mountains meet
(Although some wits enriched with learning's skill
Say Heaven stands firm and that the Earth doth fleet,
And swiftly turneth underneath their feet),
Yet though the Earth is ever stedfast seen,
On her broad breast hath dancing ever been.

For those blue veins that through her body spread,
Those sapphire streams which from great hills do spring,
The Earth's great breasts (for every wight is fed
With sweet fresh moisture from them issuing),
Observe a dance in their wild wandering ;
And still their dance begets a murmur sweet,
And still the murmur with the dance doth meet-
See how those flowers that have sweet beauty, too,
(The only jewels that the Earth doth wear
When the young Sun in bravery her doth woo),
As oft as they the whistling wind do hear
Do waive their tender bodies here and there ;
And though their dance no perfect measure is,
Yet oftentimes their music makes them kiss.

And so he goes on in smooth stanzas to prove that
dancing is the very soul of politics, science, religion,
and most other things, and every now and then
achieves a stanza or a couplet that deserves a place
in memory, such as his panegyric of Love :

Life's life it is, and cordial to the heart,
And of our better part the better part.

Davies was only five-and-twenty when he wrote
'Orchestra,' and he wrote it in fifteen days, as he

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 145

tells us in the sonnet to his friend Martin (the
Templar) to whom he dedicates

This sudden, rash, half-capriole of my wit.

Alas! 'Orchestra' still delights us, while most of
Sir John's serious poetry is buried in oblivion. How
little can man foresee which fortnight in his career is
to purchase him immortality !

The philosophical poem on which Sir John
probably depended for his niche in the Temple of
Literary Fame, finds nowadays but few readers, for
the simple reason that philosophy married to poetry
must suffer the awful fate of Tithonus. Alas ! we
say, for this grey shadow, once a fashionable system,
lectured on at Oxford (where Sir John made its
acquaintance) and chattered about at ladies' tea-
tables. It cannot die because it is wedded to the
Muse, but to live in one of the late Dr. Grosart's
privately printed editions cannot be called life.
Some poets, indeed, like Wordsworth and Coleridge,
have been philosophers as well as poets ; but it is
not at their philosophical passages that their books
instinctively open. For, indeed, the methods of the
two are so dissimilar that any alliance between them
must be unfruitful. Philosophy endeavours to com-
pass a unity in phenomena by process of argument ;
poetry by passion. "Poetry is allowed to take leaps
to its conclusion. ' The year's at the spring,' says
Browning, 'and day's at the morn,' and he concludes,

146 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

after what a logician must censure as a very in-
sufficient induction, ' God's in His heaven, all's right
with the world.' But we justify his leap, because
our hearts take the leap with him. But when Milton
tells us in cold blood that he means ' to justify the
ways of God to man ' by argument, we put on our
considering caps, and think that the counsel for the
other side makes some good points, which we should
like to hear further discussed.

There was a very cultivated clergyman some half-
century ago, who in his generation was the accredited
anthologist and editor of the poets, the Rev. Mr.
Willmott His candlestick has now been removed,
but the taper while it still burnt did a valuable work
of illumination. Perhaps one day I may ask you
to let me confer about the services the country clergy
have rendered to literary criticism since Headley, all
profits to be given to the Sustentation Fund. I
mention Willmott now, however, not for praise, but
as a warning against allowing professional enthusiasm
to get the better of the literary judgment. For thus
he writes : ' While Shakespeare was peopling the
stage with picturesque pageantry, and Spenser in the
zenith of his reputation was irradiating the intellectual
atmosphere with the sunshine of his beautiful imagina-
tion, Davies .' And then he praises the poem

for 'clearness of thought, ingenuity of reasoning,
accuracy of deduction, and propriety of illustration.'
Well, one would praise a Bampton Lecture so, or

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 147

a Cobden Club Essay, hardly a poem. And as
Shakespeare has been mentioned, one may remind
oneself that that poet has taught us more about the
soul by what Mr. Willmott calls his ' picturesque
pageantry,' than the philosopher by all his 'ingenuity
of reasoning and accuracy of deduction.' But even
philosophers must be given their due. Let us admit
then that ' Nosce Te-ipsum ' has merits. In the first
place the metre, that which we now associate with
Gray's ' Elegy,' is managed with remarkable clever-
ness. Gray contrived to give us, on an average,
a picture a quatrain ; he writes with a slow move-
ment, and the effect is singularly impressive, because
we have leisure to master one idea before we pass
to the next. But Davies has to deal not with ideas
but with arguments ; and to cut every argument
down, or beat it out, so as to get the main point in
the last line, is a feat of no little skill. Then there
are long passages here and there of very telling
rhetoric, and now and .then a quatrain which passion
has lifted into poetry.

Here, for instance, is a passage that may have
caught the eye of Matthew Arnold :

For why should we the busy Soul believe
When boldly she concludes of that and this ;

When of herself she can no judgment give,

Nor how, nor whence, nor where, nor what she is ?

We seek to know the moving of each sphere
And the strange cause of th' ebbs and floods of Nile ;

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But of that clock within our breasts we bear

The subtle motions we forget the while.
We that acquaint ourselves with every zone

And pass both tropics and behold the poles,
When we come home are to ourselves unknown

And unacquainted still with our own souls.

Here is another which supplied a favourite quota-
tion to Coleridge ; it comes as part of a proof that
the soul ' cannot be a body : '

All things received do such proportion take

As those things have wherein they are received ;
So little glasses little faces make

And narrow webs on narrow frames be weaved.
Then what vast body must we make the mind

Wherein are men, beasts, trees, towns, seas, and lands ;
And yet each thing a proper place doth find,

And each thing in the true proportion stands !
Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns

Bodies to spirits by sublimation strange;
As fire converts to fire the thing it burns,

As we our meats into our nature change.

Here surely, too, is a fine adaptation of the

Homeric image of the golden chain fastened to

the throne of Zeus, which Tennyson has also
adapted :

Could Eve's weak hand, extended to the tree,
In sunder rend that adamantine chain,

Whose golden links effects and causes be,

And which to God's own chair doth fixt remain ?

And here is a passage which, as a good ritualist,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 149

I ought to have sent on a post-card to the Arch-
bishops while they were deliberating on their
judgment :

And yet good scents do purify the brain,

Awake the fancy, and the wits refine ;
Hence old Devotion incense did ordain

To make men's spirits apt for thoughts divine.

Considering that Davies lived from 1569 to 1626, he
may at least be cited as some evidence that the
Elizabethan and Jacobean layfolk did not hold the
use of incense to be merely fumigatory. But it
would be unfair to Davies not to give a more
connected passage to show what he can do on
a larger scale. Let us take the section which
treats of ' In what manner the Soul is united to
the Body.'

But how shall we this union well express ?

Nought ties the soul ; her subtilty is such
She moves the body which she doth possess,

Yet no part toucheth but by Virtue's touch.

Then dwells she not therein as in a tent,
Nor as a pilot in his ship doth sit,

Nor as a spider in his web is pent,
Nor as the wax retains the print in it,

Nor as a vessel water doth contain,
Nor as one liquor in another shed,

Nor as the heat doth in the fire remain,
Nor as a voice throughout the air is spread

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But as the fair and cheerful morning light
Doth here and there her silver beams impart,

And in an instant doth herself unite
To the transparent air in all and part ;

Still resting whole when blows the air divide ;

Abiding pure when th' air is most corrupted ;
Throughout the air her beams dispersing wide,

And when the air is tossed, not interrupted.

I have said that Davies was not only a politician and
a poet, but a noted wit. Two of his jocular poems
were printed in the place of honour at the beginning
of Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. One is called
' Yet other twelve wonders of the world,' and is a
sarcastic masque of the various professions ; the
other, written to be presented before the Queen
when Sir Robert Cecil entertained her at his house
in the Strand, is a trialogue, called 'A contention
between a wife, a widow, and a maid.' These repre-
sentatives of the three possible conditions of woman-
hood go to make their offerings at the shrine of
Astraea that is to say, Her Gracious Majesty
and contend by the way for precedence. Appro-
priately, under the circumstances of its representation,
the maid comes off victor. Wit in three centuries
is apt to lose its savour, and we can read now both
these pieces with dry eyes. But Davies wrote half
a dozen or so of parodies on the sonnets of the day,
and these still please. One or two make fun merely
of outrageous tricks of form, but several are more

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 151

subtle. What could be happier as caricature, both
in rhythm and manner generally, than the following,
especially in its first and last line ?

Into the Middle Temple of my heart
The wanton Cupid did himself admit
And gave for pledge your eagle-sighted Wit,
That he would play no rude uncivil part.
Long time he cloaked his nature with his art
And sad and grave and sober he did sit
But at the last he gan to revel it,
To break good rules, and orders to pervert.

Then Love and his young Pledge were both convented

Before sad Reason, that old Bencher grave,

Who this sad sentence unto him presented

By Diligence, that sly and secret knave :

That Love and Wit for ever should depart

Out of the Middle Temple of my heart.

And here is another which is as excellent
fooling :

The hardness of her heart and truth of mine,
When the all-seeing eyes of heaven did see,
They straight concluded that by power divine
To other forms our hearts should turned be.
Then hers, as hard as flint, a flint became,
And mine, as true as steel, to steel was turned,
And then between our hearts sprang forth the flame
Of kindest love, which unextinguished burned.
And long the sacred lamp of mutual love
Incessantly did burn in glory bright :
Until my folly did her fury move
To recompense my service with despite,

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And to put out with snuffers of her pride
The lamp of love which else had never died.

I trust now, dear friend, that I have done my duty
by Sir John's memory, and I subscribe myself
Your obedient humble servant,

URBANUS SYLVAN.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 153

IX.

THE NEW CRITICISM.

Now the New Year reviving old desires,
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.

ONE charm of the New Year is that it brings the
new books. Few people, notwithstanding a literary
affectation to the contrary, are really so coxcombical
as to prefer old books when new are to be had.
There is a gusto, an enthusiasm, with which the
mind throws itself upon the new work that the old,
however reverently esteemed, cannot inspire. Even
shadows of the good things to come, the advertise-
ments which form the best reading in the gazettes
the few weeks before Christmas, are apt to take the
taste out of the second-hand catalogues. There lies
before me Mr. Starkey's list of announcements for
the year of grace 1671, in which I read :

Paradice Regained, a Poem in four books, to which is added
Samson Agonistes. The Author, John Milton, price
bound is, 6d.

Will any one contend that if at this moment, in
exchange for my half-crown, the large and well-
printed octavo lay crisp and clean before me, my

154 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

feelings would be no livelier, if less devout, than
when I take it now from its sacred tabernacle?
Well, the life-blood of the nation is pulsing as high
in its veins as when Milton wrote, perhaps higher ;
there is no want of books or of men ; and as we do

not despise General because he is not Cromwell,

so do not let us despise for not being Milton.

But it is not of poetry that I would speak at this
moment. The books with which my thoughtful soul
lately retired to solitude were critical, and I come
forward now to relate an important discovery. I
prophesy in sober seriousness that this season will
be remembered in the annals of publishing as the
epoch of the final enfranchisement of literary criticism.
Let me explain what I mean. In its humble origin
criticism was nothing but the appraisement of works
of art for the convenience of customers, a form in
which it still survives in the ex cathedra pronounce-
ments of Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, & Hodge,
or Christie & Manson. The next step was to take
on style, and in this stage, which has persisted
through the latter half of this waning century,
criticism began to be valued for its own sake.
Undergraduates in the seventies used to tell each
other that a certain lady ' was older than the rocks
among which she sits, and like the vampire had been
dead many times and learned the secrets of the
grave; and had trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants,' and had been, if I remember right,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 155

a diver also ; and all this varied experience ' had
been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and
lived only in the delicacy with which it had moulded
the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and
the hands.' I can hear still the voice of my bosom
friend of those days, now a stockbroker, as he
chanted rather than spoke this eloquent passage
about a picture of Lionardo's. The criticism of books
has been conducted lately on the same eloquent
principles. It has ceased to be of consequence what
a critic has to say, for no one ever buys a book in
deference to his criticism ; what has come to matter
is how he says it ; and if he says it well, his own
book or essay will be bought. It has long been
obvious to the reflective mind that things could not
remain permanently in what was merely a stage of
transition. If criticism is to be an art, it must not
be restricted to the lower gifts of style and denied the
higher gifts of creative imagination. And this final
fruitage has at last succeeded to efflorescence.
Criticism has culminated. At this moment three
remarkable efforts in imaginative criticism are before
the public, which, though they may presently be
outdistanced and forgotten, yet deserve a cordial
recognition as the first product of the emancipating
birth-throes of critical genius.

The first and second heroes of this triumvirate are
gentlemen who have already won golden opinions in
the second and stylistic stage of criticism ; their

156 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

names are Dr. Edward Dowden and Dr. Edmund
Gosse. I will not illustrate their merits in this region
because they are well known, and because still higher
merits await us ; but I may say that one superb
critical sentence from the former writer's ' Life of
Shelley ' has to my knowledge earned the distinction
of being set in the mathematical examination of one
of our universities, so magnificently tropical, in every
sense, is its use of technical terms. 1 The third of our
heroes has plucked his previous laurels in the less
adventurous field of pure romance I refer to the
distinguished author of Erewhon, Mr. Samuel
Butler. The work that each has this autumn
achieved in the hitherto unopened country of
imaginative criticism may be shortly summarised as
follows. Dr. Dowden has shown us in one splendid
example that the masterpieces of literature are not
exhausted when they are appreciated by the man in
the street ; but, on the contrary, that beyond and
above this mirror-like torpor of appreciation lies a
process of imaginative reconstruction into his own
likeness by each reader who is capable of the
effort, so that not only do we, as Hazlitt says,
become Hamlet, but Hamlet becomes ourselves.
Dr. Gosse has shown us how the passionate pre-
cipitations of lyrical genius may be subtilised back

1 ' The mass and momentum of Byron's genius in its impact with the
mind of Shelley had an effect like that of a planet sheering its way
through the luminous mist of a comet in flight ' (ii. 12).

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 1 57

into the passionate moods and moments which once
gave them birth, so as to enrich the too scanty record
in every poet's biography. And Mr. Butler has
shown us how to take the difficult step beyond this,
and fill in the inevitable and deplorable interstices
between the facts thus evolved, with incidents that
are the creation of pure fancy, thus carrying criticism
to the highest heaven of invention. But, in case my
readers should suspect me of log-rolling, I will pro-
ceed to justify my eulogy by chapter and verse.

I. The most convincing way of exhibiting the
new Hamlet for that is the character whom Dr.
Dowden has recreated for us will be to take typical
passages from the play, the popular interpretations of
which will be in everybody's mind, and compare with
them the same passages as seen in the new light
reflected from the commentator's personality

The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the critic's dream.

To begin with, we may take the best known line in
the whole play :

Ham, To be or not to be, that is the question.
' Here, at any rate,' the unimaginative reader will
say, ' there is no scope for critical reconstruction :
the words are of the simplest, and convey a simple
meaning.' To you, perhaps, my friend, and to me ;
but, as Mr. Watson tells us :

They see not clearliest who see all things clear.

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We may have thought that Hamlet was merely
debating ' the open question ; ' but see what we lose
by being gross Anglo-Saxons ; see how much more
interesting is the new Dublin Hamlet: 'Is my
present project of active resistance against wrong to
be or not to be ; active resistance to evil or passive
fortitude, which is more worthy of me ? ' Shall I
whack my uncle over the head from behind with my
shillelagh, or wait till I can persuade him to tread
upon the tail of my coat ? I need not point out the
greater nobility of this conception, and its moral
importance at the present moment when suicide is so
much in the air.

Hor. There's no offence, my lord.

Ham. Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio,
And much offence too.

Critics of far lower rank have already called
attention to the Irish friend of Hamlet, who makes a
too silent and fugitive appearance in the play, in the
single line addressed to him :

Now might I do it, Pat, when he is praying.
And this line, taken in combination with the oath
above quoted, should suffice to quiet any old-fashioned
people who make a conscience of geography, and
assert that Hamlet could not have been, and cannot
even now be, an Irishman because he was and is a
Dane. Certainly he was a Dane, and is ; but hence-
forth he is also an Irishman. In the ideal world of

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imagination the two facts are not incompatible. In
the ideal world of poetry, Denmark maybe a province
of Ireland, just as Bohemia may have a seaboard. And
so Dr. Dowden, realising what an invocation of St.
Patrick must have implied to an Irish Hamlet, notes
the special propriety of the oath, in the fact that his
father's ghost has called Claudius ' a serpent/ and St.
Patrick was the enemy and expeller of serpents.

The lady shall say her mind freely, or
the blank verse shall halt for't.

Critical imagination had a tough piece of work with
this passage, but it triumphed in the end. The
' ladies ' on the Elizabethan stage were boys, and
boys had then, as now, a short memory and a bad
ear for verse. But in these days, when ' ladies ' are
ladies, a completely new interpretation is required,
adapted at once to their idiosyncrasy and to the most
fashionable type of play. This the imaginative critic
supplies, but I leave it in his volume.

Ham. Look you, how cheerfully my mother
looks, and my father died within 's two hours.

Oph. Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord.

Ham. So long ? Nay then, let the devil wear black,
for I'll have a suit of sables.

By a happy paraphrase of this last speech of
Hamlet's, Dr. Dowden imaginatively brings out the
broad wit and cheery good humour of the fat Irish
prince. ' What an age since my father died ! I am

l6o CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

quite an old gentleman ! I mean to be rich and com-
fortable.' It would vastly help readers to appreciate
his new Hamlet if Dr. Dowden would paraphrase the
whole play.

But perhaps the magical power of the new art is
most vividly shown in the learned professor's re-
habilitation of Hamlet's nonsense. A mere Dane
may talk nonsense, but not an Irish Dane; what
looks like nonsense on the surface must, if probed
deep enough, reveal itself as epigram.

Ros. My lord, you must tell us where the body is,
and go with us to the king.

Ham. The body is with the king, but the king is not
with the body.

In interpreting this dark passage it must be re-
membered that there were more kings than one in
Brentford, and more dead bodies than one in the
play ; and, further, that although it was in character
for Rosencranz, the fawning courtier, to call Claudius
king, it would have been grossly unfilial in Hamlet
to follow suit. Then, by taking the first 'body' of
Polonius and the second of Hamlet senior, and the
first ' king ' of Hamlet senior with his body on, and
the second with his body off, we get this fine piece
of wit, which is both paraphrastically sound and
dramatically convincing: 'The body lies in death
with the king my father, but my father walks dis-
embodied.' Was it not Kepler who congratulated
the Creator of the universe on having at last some

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. l6l

one on the earth who could appreciate his handiwork ?
If Shakespeare's spirit takes any cognisance of his
commentators, he must feel that if he has had to wait
nigh three full centuries for an audience who can
penetrate his meaning, he has not waited in vain.

And so I might go on, exemplifying by passage
after passage the interpretative changes by which the
ter-centenarian Hamlet has been born anew ; but our
other two heroes of the new criticism have an equal
claim on our recognition. I cannot, however, pass
by altogether without remark the subtle way in
which a new construction of the characters reacts
upon the familiar rhythms of the play. It is a fact,
in art as in nature, that ' soul is form and doth the
body make,' and a transmigration of souls cannot be
effected without some corresponding changes in the
body. I will write down a few of the lines as
they stand in this most marvellous edition, and ask
my readers whether the new rhythm is not in keep-
ing with the new spiritual interpretation.

Note, for example, the cheery, jolly-good-fellow
tone in which Hamlet addresses the pater when he
turns up on the Elsinore platform :

Thou comest in such a questionable [i.e. conversational] shape
That I will speak to thee : I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father ; royal Dane O, answer me [punches him in the
ribs}.

On the other hand, the new cheerfulness in the son

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begets, as it obviously must, a new depth of gloom in
the father. He takes to triple iteration, perhaps
because he thinks Hamlet inattentive, or else on the
Bellman's theory in the ' Hunting of the Snark : '
What I tell you three times is true.

He says adieu three times over instead of twice, as
he always used ; and finding that Hamlet has a line
to say with a triple iteration in it, a very proper and
filial line too :

Oh, horrible, oh, horrible, most horrible !

he says it himself before the other can get it out ; and
then replies to it as if the other had said it :

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.

Altogether a very human and Irish and irascible
ghost, whose acquaintance we are delighted to have
made. And we look forward with impatience to Dr.
Dowden's hibernicising of our other old friends
'Macbeth,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'The Merchant of Venice/
and the rest.

In logical process of development, Dr. Gosse's con-
tribution to the new art comes next to Dr. Dowden's,
and should next be considered ; but as Mr. Butler
has dealt with Shakespeare, it will be convenient to
call attention to his merits first. It can be done very
briefly, for his achievement so far, in this matter of
Shakespearean criticism, is the invention of a group
of incidents to account for certain words and phrases

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in the sonnets. Thus Shakespeare says in one
place :

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

Upon which Mr. Butler's energetic imagination in-
vents a 'scuffle' in which Shakespeare was lamed,
where previous generations of prosaic commentators
have been content to see nothing but a bald meta-
phor. Again Shakespeare says :

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak ?

This figure of speech Mr. Butler's eye, rolling in
a fine frenzy, seizes upon, and his critical pen gives
to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. He
invents a practical joke played upon the poet by his
young friend, but somewhat disappointingly suggests
that the same joke was at the bottom of the lameness
too. ' Hardly had he laid the cloak aside before he
was surprised according to a preconcerted scheme,
and very probably roughly handled, for we find him
lame soon afterwards, and apparently not fully re-
covered a twelvemonth later (cf. Sonnet 109. 3). ' If
Mr. Butler will only continue as he has begun, the
biographers of Shakespeare will in future have no
need to lament the scantiness of their material ; and
that learned dryasdust, Dr. Sidney Lee, will have to

164 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

burn his book. What disquiets me, however, in a
person of Mr. Butler's intrepid fancy is his modera-
tion in the use of it. Can it be intermittent ?

And so we come to our third hero, Dr. Gosse,
whose contribution to the new criticism is, as I have
already said, not a coining of incident like Mr.
Butler's, but a reduction of poems by imaginative
insight to the passionate events out of which they
originally sprang. The debt we owe him is more for
the method than for the particular application he
himself has already made of it, for Donne, the poet
on whom he has been experimenting, is not a person
about whom the public is much interested. But the
method is capable of infinite application. In fact I
feel myself a critic new inspired with a mission to
write on these principles the life of Dr. Gosse, whose
volumes of verse stand in attractive row upon my
handiest shelf. And one day I may yield to the
fascination. At this moment the potency of the new
principle can perhaps be more safely exhibited by
applying it to the lyrical confessions of a poet no
longer with us. Dr. Gosse himself will perhaps do
justice to the early history of Browning in due course ;
in the meantime an amateur critic may be allowed to
exhibit some of the more obvious discoveries to which
the new method must lead.

The scene of the more interesting of these newly
recovered incidents is, as might have been anticipated,
the Italy of which Browning was always so fond.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 165

The question of time and place will have to be much
canvassed before a final settlement can commend
itself universally, and there will inevitably be diffi-
culties which can never now be satisfactorily settled.
If only the new criticism had arisen in the poet's life-
time, and while the Browning Society was at its
zenith of activity, the results achieved might have
been fuller and more accurately concatenated. Still,
the incidents remain to us, and their exact sequence
is of quite inferior importance.

The first thing to strike a new critic in the search
for biographical material is Mr. Browning's curious
penchant for duchesses, which is every bit as remark-
able as Donne's for countesses, only Browning's were
not, of course, English duchesses, who are rare birds,
but the more widely spread Italian species. One of
them, a Ferrarese lady, is described as his last
duchess, implying therefore at least two predecessors,
one of whom was probably the duchess that ran away
from the effeminate duke with a gipsy woman ; who
is thus seen to have been in league with Browning, if
not, as I suspect, Browning himself in disguise. From
a poem called ' Love among the Ruins,' it would
appear that they had found a very safe and pictur-
esque trysting-place. It is, however, neither of
these but the first duchess who attracts me most.
Her story is contained in the poem called 'In a
Gondola.' She was a Venetian lady, whose brothers
for some reason had a spite against Mr. Browning,

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and hired bravos to stab him happily, as we know,
without permanent effect. The poem is interesting,
apart from its main story, for a stanza which throws
a side-light upon the poem of Holy Cross Day :

What are we two ?

/ am a Jew

And carry thee farther than friends can pursue,

To a feast of our tribe.

To return once more to the last duchess, whom Mr.
Browning seems to have got rid of with a suddenness
that would have attracted more attention in England,
I cannot make up my mind if she is identical with
Porphyria, or whether Porphyria is another lady
friend whom the poet helped to a too realistic
immortality. Anyhow the duel that is recorded in
' Before ' and ' After ' probably represents the violent
end of this violent passion. It is demonstrable that
the beginning of the end is sketched in the poem
called 'A Lovers' Quarrel.' Compare, e.g., the line
in that poem, ' Laughs with so little cause/ with the
following passage from ' My Last Duchess : '

She had

A heart how shall I say? too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed ; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

. . . . O sir, she smiled no doubt
Whene'er I passed her ; but who passed without
Much the same smile ? This grew ; I gave command ;
Then all smiles stopped together.

It would be too long a tale to unravel and set out

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and apportion among the duchesses all the tangle of
delightful incident that is chronicled in Mr. Brown-
ing's many volumes. And it would require a subtler
brain and a surer hand than mine to accomplish the
task satisfactorily. I cherish the hope that Dr. Gosse
in his recovered leisure may be prevailed upon to
undertake it.

P.S. I spent a few moments, since writing the
above, in turning over that fascinating book,
Whitaker's 'Titled Persons,' in the hope that some
entry or some comment of its learned and critical
editor might throw light on the identity of one or
other of Mr. Browning's duchesses, but without result.
In case my readers do not know that Mr. Whitaker
combines the function of poetical critic with that of
historiographer-general, may I invite their attention
to the entry 'Tennyson, Baron Hallam,' in which
occurs a very remarkable passage, from which a short
extract may be welcome ?

We are persuaded that Tennyson himself would have been
the last to rate his own claims as superior to those of Byron ;
and it is with the latter that the pre-eminence for the nineteenth
century will doubtless remain, except in the judgment of a few
specialists, and of those writers on everything under the sun
who, having often but the slenderest acquaintance with their
subject, seek to keep up with the spirit of the age by writing
bigly and bravely in its advance. The first place is not at all
likely to be Tennyson's. But what poet is to occupy the second
position is a much nicer question, and the respective champions
of Tennyson, Shelley, and Wordsworth must continue to discuss

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it between themselves, while possibly if the literary world would
but revert to the reading of Campbell they woyld find in him a
formidable competitor for all three.

Under the titles 'Arnold, Sir Edwin' and 'Morris,
Sir Lewis ' there are no reflections, as Mr. Whitaker
calls no man unhappy till he is dead. It is therefore
only in the case of hereditary titles that there is an
opportunity for his criticism.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 169

THE TEARS OF THE MUSES.

(Rnskin, Blackmore, Dixon, Steevens.}

THERE was no muse of Prose ; but Herodotus, the
first great prose writer of Greece, divided up his
history among the sacred Nine, by way of modestly
asserting that a perfect prose piece like his own had
required for its perfection the inspiration of the whole
sisterhood. And this gives us a hint that a battle
lately waged as to the true and proper merits of
prose is no more likely to end in victory for any one
side, than a similar battle would as to the true and
proper merits of Poetry. While the Edinburgh
Review very naturally looks to the performances of
its own contributors grammatical, sensible, lucid
as the ne phis idtra of the art, Mr. Charles Whibley,
who has done so much to revive an interest in the
Tudor translators, as naturally prefers something a
little more picturesque in vocabulary, a little more
elaborate in syntax, and a little less timid in trope.
Those of us who do not theorise, and who cannot
write, but are diligent and avid readers, may be dis-
posed to think that style is very much a matter of
eyesight, physical or imaginative, that a man can

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describe as much of a thing as he sees and no more,
and that if one man's page has more colour in it than
another's it is because his retina is more sensitive to
colour. Similarly for a man's thoughts. If he thinks,
not as an individual, but as a member of some class
or party, he will inevitably employ the traditional
phrases in which the common ideas are clothed ; but
if he is an original, much more if he is an eccentric,
like Sir Thomas Browne, or Charles Lamb, or Walter
Pater, he will not even know the traditional phrases,
but will have to shape his thoughts as best he may
in any vocabulary he can get together ; and his
rhythm will depend partly, of course, upon his choice
of models and the delicacy of his ear, but also to a
great extent upon whether he thinks rapidly, and can
foresee his conclusion through a long array of sub-
ordinate clauses, or whether his ore has to be smelted
seven times in the fire. I had a friend once who, if
you suggested in argument any proposition, would,
as likely as not, reply, ' True ; but against that there
are these ten things to be considered' which he
would proceed to enumerate with the precision of
a catalogue. Needless to say, his written style, not
unfamiliar to the public which reads newspapers,
was of that classical and periodic structure whose end
is known from the beginning, and the advance
towards it made, not with tentative skirmishes, but
in Lord Methuen's manner of attack full front, and
in column formation.

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At the head of this Conference I have written the
familiar title of ' The Tears of the Muses ' ; but I wish
to employ it in the collective sense I have indicated
for the tears of the whole college over certain prose-
writers, whose deaths, coming hard one upon another,
have added a gloom to the gloomiest January l in
the memory of those born since the Crimea. Mr.
Ruskin, it is true, the greatest of the four, had long
been a ghost ; but the actual passing of the last of
the prophets could not but win a moment's
tribute of respect even from the young England
that had ceased to believe in him. ' My father,
my father, the chariots of Israel and the horse-
men thereof.' Mr. Blackmore also had done his
work ; but as long as he lived there was always hope
that the hand that wrote Lorna Doone, however
' mattock-hardened/ would again resume its cunning.
Mr. Dixon, on the contrary, was in the middle of his
task, and at the height of his powers, and only at the
beginning of his recognition. When the Laureateship
was vacant and candidates were vying with each
other in odes for the morning press, someone told me
with great glee that he or his neighbour (I forget
which) had met Mr. Swinburne on Putney Common,
who had said oracularly, ' They should appoint Canon
Dixon,' and passed on without explaining himself.
I told my informant that I thought Dixon wasn't
the man for the place ; but I quite saw what Mr.
1 1900.

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Swinburne meant namely, that Dixon had a skill in
ode-building which certainly none of the competitors
could pretend to. My informant, one of those
omniscient people who will never confess to ignorance
or own a blunder, said ' Quite so ' ; but I fear, from
the vivacity with which he told the tale, he had
thought Mr. Swinburne was making a cheap jest at
the Church of England. So, again, I shall not easily
forget the astonishment in Oxford when Mr. Dixon
proposed himself as a candidate far the Professorship
of Poetry at the time when Mr. Palgrave was
appointed (1885). Oxford's satirist, the inimitable
Mr. Godley, at once put his name into the concluding
spondee of an hexameter, where the gravity of its
position might lend emphasis to its own insignifi-
cance

nee tua Palgravius nee Sacri Carminis auctor
quarto quoque die poscit suffragia Dixon.

It was not until last autumn that the University of
Oxford, happening to take up Mr. Mackail's Life of
William Morris, to which Dixon had contributed
fascinating reminiscences of his Oxford friend,
recognised their quality and, turning to the four large
volumes of the History of the Church of England
bearing Dixon's name, recognised in them the
same quality, and gave him an honorary Doctor's
degree. But Oxford cannot be blamed for its tardi-
ness, seeing that the Church of England itself had
not yet recognised Dixon, notwithstanding that its

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controversialists have long furnished themselves for
war from his armoury. If he had served the State as
he had served his Church but the character of the
Church of England as a nursing mother has been
written once for all by John Henry Newman. The
fourth of our lost prose-writers calls for more tears
than the rest, not because his achievement was
greater (for it was far below theirs), but because his
time was all before him. Mr. Steevens had powers
that placed him easily at the head of the profession
he adopted, but they would undoubtedly have carried
him beyond special correspondence into work that
need not have been ephemeral. He too, like Ruskin,
the ' Oxford graduate/ and Blackmore, a scholar of
Exeter, and Dixon, scholar (afterwards honorary
fellow) of Pembroke, owed his training to Oxford,
for he was a scholar of Balliol ; and indeed was in his
year gazetted as proxime for the Hertford, the blue
ribbon of the University in Latin scholarship.

In this Conference I propose to notice, in the
writers I have mentioned, their several ways of using
their pens to convey what they saw with their eyes,
either actually or imaginatively. That many people
use their eyes at all, and find anything to admire in
natural landscape, they owe to Ruskin, who, under
the guise of defending Turner's pictures, taught them
to see in nature the form and the colour that Turner
had seen there and put upon his canvas. It is to this
special pleader's necessity of insisting upon the

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Turneresqueness of nature that we must attribute
the brilliant colouring of so many descriptive passages
in Modern Painters. They are chosen deliberately
for their colour, to open people's eyes. To this
necessity is due also their partial failure. Ruskin
wished to make his impression irresistible, to compel
the purblind to see, and so he painted too much to the
eye, instead of to the imagination. He accumulated
detail upon the retina long after the optic nerves were
exhausted. Hence it is in the smaller pictures that
his effects are most successful. What, for example,
could exceed in beauty and in effect the following
vignette of Murano ?

To the north, there is first the great cemetery wall, then the
long stray buildings of Murano, and the island villages beyond,
glittering in intense crystalline vermilion, like so much jewellery
scattered on a mirror, their towers poised apparently in the air
a little above the horizon, and their reflections, as sharp and
vivid and substantial as themselves, thrown on the vacancy
between them and the sea.

The effect of that description, it is hardly necessary
to point out, depends largely upon the response of
the imagination to the comparison with scattered
jewels. Take for another example the well-known
description of the Campagna in the Preface to the
second edition of Modern Painters :

Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the
solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light.
Let the reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from
the sounds and motion of the living world, and sent forth alone
into this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 175

beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is
white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of
men. The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the
evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly
along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight.
Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead
beneath were struggling in their sleep ; scattered blocks of
blackstone, foursquare, remnants of mighty edifices, not one
left upon another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull
purple poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling
its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the red light
rests like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the
Alban mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear,
quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along
the promontories of the Apennines from the plain to the moun-
tains. The shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the
darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners
passing from a nation's grave.

That is painting to the imagination. By the
suggestion of a vast valley of the shadow full of the
dead and yet not sacred to them, and by a reference
to its scattered stones in the words of the curse upon
Jerusalem, imagination comes to the aid of the purely
physical picture, and makes an indelible impression.
The only marks of weakness in the passage are the
prominent and excessive alliterations, which give it a
certain air of constraint, though each example taken
alone might be defended. But now consider a pas-
sage where the painting appeals merely to the eye
the famous colour passage about Clouds at Sunset :

We have been speaking hitherto of what is constant and
necessary in nature, of the ordinary effects of daylight on
ordinary colours, and we repeat again that no gorgeousness of

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the pallet can reach even these. But it is a widely different
thing when nature herself takes a colouring fit, and does some-
thing extraordinary, something really to exhibit her power. She
has a thousand ways and means of rising above herself, but
incomparably the noblest manifestations of her capability of
colour are those sunsets among the high clouds. I speak
especially of the moment before the sun sinks when his light
turns pure rose-colour, and when this light falls upon a zenith
covered with countless cloud-forms of inconceivable delicacy,
threads and flakes of vapour, which would in common daylight
be pure snow-white, and which give therefore fair field to the
tone of light. There is then no limit to the multitude and no
check to the intensity of the hues assumed. The whole sky
from the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten mantling sea
of colour and fire ; every black bar turns into massy gold, every
ripple and wave into unsullied shadowless crimson and purple
and scarlet, and colours for which there are no words in lan-
guage and no ideas in the mind things which can only be
conceived while they are visible the intense hollow blue of the
upper sky melting through it all, showing here deep and pure
and lightless, there modulated by the filmy formless body of the
transparent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson
and gold. (Mod. P. i. 2. 2.)

As we read we are lost in wonder at the beauty of
the rhythm. It is absolutely faultless except for the
accident of the rhyme between ' white ' and ' light.'
And the impression left on the mind is just the
impression Ruskin intended namely, that Nature is
a superb colourist. But it conveys no picture to the
eye, which was Ruskin's more immediate intention.
Take again such a set piece as that in the chapter
upon ' The Nature of Gothic ' in the Stones of Venice,
which attempts to answer the question why the
architecture of the south of Europe differs from that

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of the north. Ruskin begins by suggesting a con-
trast in physical character between northern and
southern countries.

We know (he says) the differences in detail, but we have not
that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them
in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps and
olives on the Apennines : but we do not enough conceive for
ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a
bird sees on its migration, that difference between the district
of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow
see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a
moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their
flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an
irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the
sun ; here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of
storm, moving upon the burning field ; and here and there a
fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of
ashes, but for the most part a great peacefulness of light ; Syria
and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pave-
ment into the sea-blue, chased as we stoop nearer to them, with
bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with
terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed
among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm that abate
with their grey-green shadows. . . .

It is too much. The idea of a bird's-eye view of
Europe was charming ; so was the imagination of
the golden promontories inlaying the hyaline ; but
to ask us to descend to earth again just to get in the
terraces and orange-trees was an error in judgment,
and it suggests the thought that if we are to notice
the flowers through the whole breadth of Europe we
shall be an unconscionable time on the journey ; and
indeed the eye is already bored, and wanders vaguely

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down the page and down the next, and refuses to go
on with all that detail which it set out expressly to
avoid. And in this case it misses nothing to the pur-
pose, for the end of the journey is merely this reflec-
tion, admirably phrased, but requiring no more
knowledge than the vague and all untravelled
imagination could have compassed with its own
resources :

Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the
burning gems, and smoothes with soft sculpture the jasper
pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a
cloudless sky, but not with less reverence let us stand by him
when with rough strength and hurried stroke he smites an un-
couth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among
the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the
pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an
imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea, creatures
of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life ; fierce
as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade
them.

It seems to me that an examination of Ruskin's
descriptive passages leads to some such conclusion as
this that when his imagination was touched he could
paint a picture which at once conveyed itself to the
reader's imagination and lived there, a permanent
possession ; but that he had not the art of painting
to the eye. As a consequence, when he tried to do
so he was apt to over-labour his work and become
tedious. Ruskin, perhaps, was too much of an
analyst to be able to reproduce the superficial
appearances of things. Still, the least successful of

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his descriptive passages served the purpose of enforc-
ing on the British public the fact that there was
something in the world to see, if it would only open
its eyes and look about. As some sort of commentary
on the distinction made above, it may be interesting
to refer to a curious self-revealing passage at the
beginning the sixth of chapter of The Seven Lamps
of Architecture :

It was springtime too, and all were coming forth in clusters,
crowded for very love ; there was room enough for all, but they
crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to
be nearer each other. There was the wood-anemone star after
star, closing every now and then into nebulae ; and there was
the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois
de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up
with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the
edges ivy as light and lovely as the vine ; and ever and anon,
a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places ; and
in the more open ground, the vetch and comfrey and mezereon,
and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the
wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the
golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came
out presently on the edge of the ravine ; the solemn murmur of
its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing
of the thrushes among the pine boughs ; and on the opposite
side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of
limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touch-
ing them nearly with his wings and with the shadows of the
pines flickering upon his plumage from above ; but with the fall
of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of
the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their
foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult
to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than
that of its own secluded and serious beauty ; but the writer well
remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon

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it, when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the
sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene
in some aboriginal forest of the new continent. The flowers in
an instant lost their light, the river its music ; the hills became
oppressively desolate ; a heaviness in the boughs of the dark-
ened forest showed how much of their former power had been
dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the
glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is
reflected from things more precious in their memories than
it, in its renewing. Those ever-springing flowers and ever-flow-
ing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human
endurance, valour, and virtue, and the crests of the sable hills
that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship,
because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of
Joux, and the foursquare keep of Granson.

This Conference, if it is to keep within any
reasonable bounds, must limit itself to the one point
of description, but it is impossible to mention Mr.
Ruskin's prose without confessing that it served many
other and perhaps higher purposes. In its maturity
it has been compared for flexibility and grace with
Plato's Greek, and there can be no juster, as there
can be no higher, praise ; but it must be added that
Ruskin could send through the grace and flexibility
of his periods a prophetic intensity of passion to
which Plato was a stranger ; witness, for instance,
the eloquent lay sermon called ' The Mystery of Life
and its Arts.' In addition to this Greek lucidity and
Hebrew earnestness he was the possessor of a very
vigorous English turn for humour and sarcasm.
The various courses of lectures, delivered as Slade
Professor at Oxford, furnish abundant evidence.

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Everybody knows his picture of the Apollo of Syracuse
cheek by jowl with the 'self-made man'; his de-
scriptions of the Thames Embankment and the Crystal
Palace, and the story of the 'little incident at
Wallingford ' (Aratra Pentelici, lecture 3). Further,
he had a mediaeval love for mystical interpretation,
which he was fond of exercising upon Shakespeare ;
see, for instance, an astounding passage in Munera
Pnlveris (chap, v.), from which one sentence will be
enough :

Prospero (' for hope ') a true governor is opposed to Sycorax,
the mother of slavery, her name Swine-raven indicating at once
brutality and deathfumess ; hence the line :

' As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed, with raven's
feather] &c.

Ariel is the spirit of generous and free-hearted service, in early
stages of human society oppressed by ignorance and wild-
tryanny ; venting groans as fast as mill-wheels strike ; in ship-
wreck of states dreadful, so that ' all but mariners plunge in the
brine and quit the vessel then all afire with me; ' yet having in
itself the will and sweetness of truest peace, whence that is
especially called Ariel's song :

' Come unto these yellow sands, and there take hands} &c.
&c.

In reading this and similar passages it is fair to
remember that Ruskin usually supplies in other parts
of his voluminous writings the antidote to any
occasional piece of folly ; and in regard to Shake-
speare such may be found in the fourth volume of

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Modern Painters (part v. chap. xx). Of his so-
called socialism, which perhaps has proved the most
widely effective part of his vast and lifelong energy,
I am not the person to speak; nor, remembering
that Unto this Last was expelled from the pages
of CORNHILL by the outraged optimism of Mr.
Thackeray, can this be held a fit place for the discussion.
I pass on to the consideration of Mr. Blackmore as a
literary artist ; and I will say of him just one word
that while incomparably Mr. Ruskin's inferior in the
handling of sentences, which he was inclined to write
in far too lyrical a vein, he was yet a master of
the art, which the other lacked, of painting to the eye.
As I look out of the window at the narrow lane piled
up on one side with the drifted snow, which the
eddies of wind have hollowed into the most fantastic
shapes, I ask myself, ' Has Ruskin given us that ? '
I do not remember at this moment in Mr. Ruskin's
' writings any description of snow except the following
passage in Modern Painters (vol. i. part 2) :

In the range of inorganic nature, I doubt if any object can be
found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh deep snowdrift,
seen under warm light. Its curves are of inconceivable per-
fection and changefulness ; its surface and transparency alike
exquisite ; its light and shade of inexhaustible variety and
infinite finish, the shadows sharp, pale, and of heavenly colour,
the reflected lights intense and multitudinous, and mingled
with the sweet occurrences of transmitted light.

That is an analytical description which might well
prepare a reader for seeing the beauty of the next

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snowdrift he came across, but it would not conjure
up before his mind's eye the picture of any snowdrift
in particular, or indeed in general. But put by the
side of it this passage from the chapter on 'The
Great Winter' in Lorna Doom :

Behold there was no flock at all ! None, I mean, to be seen
anywhere : only at one corner of the field by the eastern end
where the snow drove in a great white billow as high as a barn
and as broad as a house. This great drift was rolling and curl-
ing beneath the violent blast, tufting and combing with rustling
swirls, and carved (as in patterns of cornice) where the grooving
chisel of the wind swept round. Ever and again, the tempest
snatched little whiffs from the channelled edges, twirled them
round, and made them dance over the chine of the monster
pile, then let them lie like herringbones, or the seams of sand
where the tide had been. And all the while from the smother-
ing sky, more and more fiercely at every blast, came the pelting,
pitiless arrows, winged with murky white, and pointed with the
barbs of frost.

But although for people who had no sheep the sight was a
very fine one (so far at least as the weather permitted any sight
at all), yet for us with our flock beneath it this great mount had
but little charm. Watch began to scratch at once, and to howl
along the sides of it ; he knew that his charge was buried there
and his business taken from him. But we four men set to in
earnest, digging with all our might and main, shovelling away
at the great white pile, and fetching it into the meadow. Each
man made for himself a cave scooping at the soft cold flux 'which
slid upon him at every stroke, and throwing it out behind him
in piles of castled fancy. . . . But before we began again, I laid
my head well into the chamber ; and there I heard a faint
' ma-a-ah ' coming through some ells of snow, like a plaintive
buried hope, or a last appeal. I shouted aloud to cheer him
up, for I knew what sheep it was, to wit, the most valiant of all
the wethers. And then we all fell to again, and very soon we

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hauled him out. Watch took charge of him at once with an
air of the noblest patronage, lying on his frozen fleece and lick-
ing all his face and feet, to restore his warmth to him. Then
fighting Tom jumped up at once, and made a little butt at
Watch as if nothing had ever ailed him, and then set off to a
shallow place, and looked for something to nibble at.

Further in and close under the bank, where they had huddled
themselves for warmth, we found all the rest of the poor sheep
packed as closely as if they were in a great pie. It was strange
to observe how their vapour and breath and the moisture
exuding from their wool had scooped, as it were, a coved room for
them lined with a ribbing of deep yellow snow. Also the
churned snow beneath their feet was as yellow as gamboge.

No words need be spent in praising the liveliness
and, unless the word be the same, the life-likeness, or
even more the aliveness of this picture. It is a living
picture indeed. We can see the drift and the
sheep and the whole process of freeing them, all going
on before our eyes. What I meant by the too lyrical
run of some of Blackmore's sentences may be seen
from a passage a little further on, which might be
written as verse :

Often and often the vanes went round and we hoped for change

of weather :
The only change was that it seemed if possible to grow

colder.

Or again, on the same page :

Foreseeing how the snow was spread
Lightly over everything
Covering up the hills and valleys
And the foreshore of the sea,

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They contrived a way to crown it
And to glide like a flake along.
Through the sparkle of the whiteness
And the wreaths of windy tossings
And the ups and downs of cold
Any man might get along
With 'a boat on either foot
To prevent his sinking.

I have no doubt there are numberless passages in
Blackmore which are made by this lilt of his, just as
there are numberless passages in Ruskin made by
his alliteration, though occasionally we come upon a
place which excess has marred.

The characteristic talent of Mr. Dixon did not lie
in his descriptions of natural scenery, though his
lyrics contain such, but in his human portraits. In
person he closely resembled Chaucer, as we see him
in Hoccleve's picture, and in manner as he describes
himself to us in the Canterbury Tales ; and in his
wide and humorous interest in types of humanity,
especially ecclesiastical humanity, and in his power
of drawing them, he suggests Chaucer more than
anyone else. Of course, he had quite other than a
merely Chaucerian interest in Church questions ; but
with that we are not concerned. It is fair to say that
quotations do him injustice, because he did not patch
his historical work with set pieces of character-paint-
ing, but allowed his view of the actors to express
itself by the way. But here and there we get a more
or less formal summing-up, and of such a specimen

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may be welcome. Here are some general remarks
on the character of Henry VIII., of whom Mr. Froude
made a hero. 1

Henry had long been in a declining state of health, suffering
severe pain and uneasiness from his corpulence and the diseases
of his constitution. He seems, however, to have been able to
exert his will to the last, and never to have fallen so low as to be
entirely at the mercy of the men around him. It was to the
advantage of the courtiers, so long as he lived, implicitly to obey
him. They bore with his irascibility and followed him without
murmuring even when he desired the destruction of many
among them. Particular ambition might have been dangerous
to the loyal society of which he was the head, and the extinction
of one or two was always better than the peril of all. Henry
was indeed the man who was fittest to direct the revolution of
the rich against the poor. His stupendous will was guided by
certain primary and unfailing instincts ; his fierce temper would
brook the domination of no human being. The subtlest flattery
failed to insinuate itself into him, the haughtiest spirits got no
hold upon him ; arduous or splendid services awoke in him no
sentiment of royal confidence. The proud Wolsey, the astute
Cromwell, to whom in succession he seemed to have abdicated
his kingship, found that they had no more power over him than
the last dicer whom he had enriched. When he met with a
conscience that resisted his enormities, his resentment was im-
placable. ... In truth there was something unintelligent in the
incapacity of attachment, the inaccessibility to kindly feeling,
which was Henry's strength. The savage creatures would bite

1 Some of Dixon's footnotes on Froude's notions of veracity are very
lively reading. There is a characteristic one in vol. iv. p. 372, from
which I will only quote one sentence on Mr. Froude's style : ' " The
chancellor and the clergy were springing at the leash like hounds with
the game in view, fanaticism and revenge lashing them forward."
If a hound were held in the leash and lashed forward at the same
time, there is no knowing what he might do. Mr. Froude is fond of
the word lash, and indeed it has a fine lashing sound.'

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every hand ; the services and kindness of the keeper exempt
him not from the precautions which must be taken by the
stranger who approaches them. The well-known lineaments of
this monarch expressed his character. That large and swelling
brow, on which the clouds of wrath and the lines of hardness
might come forth at any moment ; those steep and ferocious
eyes ; that small full mouth, close buttoned, as if to prevent the
explosion of a perpetual choler ; these give the physiognomy of
a remarkable man, but not of a great man. There is no noble
history written in them ; and though well-formed, they lack the
clearness of line which has often traced in a homelier visage
the residence of a lofty intellect. . . . It is the last baseness of
tyranny not to perceive genius. Of Seneca and of Lucan the
slaughterer was Nero. Henry the Eighth laid the foundations of
his revolution in the English Erasmus, and set up the gates
thereof in the English Petrarch.

Mr. Steevens's prose will hardly look its best
beside Mr. Dixon's. Dixon was a poet and wrote
such prose as only poets can write, prose with dis-
tinction in every sentence, in every word. Distinction
is precisely what Mr. Steevens's prose always lacks.
If the reader is not interested in the matter that
happens to be in hand, he may skip with assurance,
knowing that nothing in the manner will make per-
severance worth while. In comparing the two styles,
one is reminded of that pleasant conceit in a poem of
George Herbert's :

A man that looks on glasse

On it may stay his eye ;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,

And then the heaven espy.

There is no temptation for the eye to rest upon
Mr. Steevens's glass. But then, what a translucent

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glass it is ! With what minute accuracy, with what
vivid sharpness it presents its picture of the world
without ! How admirably it selects the characteristic
features for with all its apparent simplicity it is
a magic glass and allows them to make their
characteristic impression ! To read a diary of travel
by Mr. Steevens is to feel dispensed from the irksome
necessity of making the journey for oneself. Could
Delhi, for example, ever mean more to me, after
I had seen it with my own eyes, than it does now
when I have seen it through Mr. Steevens's? I
strongly doubt it. For a specimen of Mr. Steevens's
skill I will not draw upon his latest books, which will
be in most people's memory, but will give his picture
of Chicago, partly for the sake of the contrasts it
will suggest with the passages given above from Mr.
Ruskin. To impressionism nothing is common even
if it is unclean.

Go first up on to the tower of the Auditorium. In front, near
three hundred feet below, lies Lake Michigan. There are lines
of breakwater, and a lighthouse inshore, where the water is
grey and brown, but beyond and on either hand to the rim
spreads the brilliant azure of deep water the bosom of a lake
which is also a sea shining in the transparent sunlight. White
sails speckle its surface, and far out ocean-going steamers trail
lazy streaks of smoke behind them. From the lake blow winds
now soft and life-giving like old wine, now so keen as to set
every nerve and sinew on the stretch. Then turn round and
look at Chicago. You might be on a central peak of the high
Alps. All about you they rise, the mountains of building not
in the broken line of New York, but thick together, side by

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side, one behind the other. From this height the flat roofs of
the ordinary buildings of four or five stories are not distinguish-
able from the ground ; planting their feet on these rise the
serried ranks of the heaven-scaling peaks. You are almost
surprised to see no snow on them : the steam that gushes
perpetually from their chimneys, and floats and curls away on
the lake breeze, might well be clouds with the summits rising
above them to the sun. Height on height they stretch away
on every side till they are lost in a murky cloud of smoke
inland. These buildings are all ironcored, and the masonry
is only the shell that cases the rooms in them. They can even
be built downward. You may see one of them with eight
stories of brick wall above, and then four of a vacant skeleton
of girders below ; the superstructure seems to be hanging in
air. Broader and more massive than the tall buildings of New
York, older also and dingier, they do not appear, like them,
simply boxes of windows. Who would suppose that mere
lumps of iron and bricks and mortar could be sublime ? Yet
these are sublime and almost awful. You have awakened, like
Gulliver, in a land of giants, a land where the very houses are
instinct with almost ferocious energy and force.

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XI.

MR. H. D. TRAILL A SCHOOL OF LITERATURE
COMIC VERSE AN AMERICAN GILBERT.

WE were conferring last month about the four men
of genius with a gift for writing prose whom Fate
snatched from us within a few days of each other,
as if to mark with a holocaust the advent of the
closing year of the century. But before the Con-
ference was in print a fifth had joined them in the
person of Mr. H. D. Traill. Mr. Traill was one of
the few writers of the day who possessed wit in the
sense that word bore to our forefathers ; that is to
say, he could produce detachable sayings, good
things, epigrams, that might be quoted as Traill's
latest, just as we quote the good things of Person,
or Rogers, or Sydney Smith. It must be some
sixteen years since I read The New Ltman, but
I can still recall such sentences as ' Amnesty, after
all, is only the Greek for forgetfulness,' and ' I have
noticed that the definitions of Churchmen are often
as animated as lay invectives.' It would be well if

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some admirer would make a collection of such
floating Trailliana as are recoverable, and add to
them the best passages from his Dialogues, because
the Dialogues themselves are not bound for futurity.
It always seemed to me a curious lapse in humour
as well as in critical sagacity on Mr. Traill's part to
have entitled his book ' The New Lucian,' as though
Lucian might stand picturesquely for dead dialogues,
as Priscian stands for dead grammar, and Galen for
dead physic. As soon might we have a new Moliere,
or a new Cervantes, or a new Shakespeare, as a new
Lucian. And Mr. Traill's Dialogues, with all their
cleverness and learning and satire, never for a single
moment recall Lucian. His dialogue is too ' bearded/
as Lucian would have said ; and then again it wants
ease and fluidity. There is too much of the stoccado
and passado, and standing on distance, not enough
sweet touches and quick venews of wit, snip-snap,
quick and home. The conversations have all the
finish of a carefully played game of chess, and
produce something of the same effect of tedium on
the bystanders. And not infrequently the moral and
political philosopher eclipses the satirist altogether,
and we have only a ' new Lyttleton.' In fact, while
to use an ancient and useful distinction Mr. Traill
was a wit, rather than a humourist, he was also
a political philosopher even more than a wit. So
that he will probably make his appeal to posterity
by something else than pure literature. In my

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memory his name will always be green as the writer
of some most vivacious parodies which delighted my
adolescence, and which seem somehow to be better
than those which are being so freely written to-day.
They appeared in the Christmas number of the
'World' newspaper for 1882, in 'The Poets in
Symposium.' Mr. Swinburne sang of his imitators

They strut like jays in my lendings,
They chatter and screech ; I sing.

They mimic my phrases and endings,
And rum old Testament ring ;

But the lyrical cry isn't in it,

And the high gods spot in a minute
That 'tisn't the genuine thing.

Matthew Arnold sings a little ditty entitled ' Bottles ;
or, the Deceased Wife's Sister.'

I take the suffering middle class,

I read each vice, each weakness clear

Eyeing it calmly through my glass,
And say, ' Thou ailest here and here.

' Abounds thy knowledge in defect,

All stunted is thy beauty sense,
Undisciplined thy intellect,

To manners hast thou no pretence.'

I say this on the lecture stage

Of Institute and College new ;
I say't in Jemmy Knowles's page,

And in John Morley's late ' Review.'

And having thus the view I took
Of this long years ago made plain,

I write a preface to a book
And there I say it all again.

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Circumstances over which, as the phrase goes,
I have had no control have obliged me of late to
devote a good deal of attention to a branch of
literature too little regarded by the rank and file
of students, because it is still as in mediaeval times
reproduced by scribes instead of by printers. Shake-
speare's most recent biographer, who has a cormorant's
appetite for hard facts and a hare's distrust of
theories (though I am bound to admit that his
volume appeared before Colonel Baden-Powell's book
on Scouting had made us all theorists), dismisses
with scant courtesy the old-fashioned idea that
Shakespeare received some early training in a lawyer's
office. He thinks that the poet's undoubtedly
accurate and intimate knowledge of legal phraseology
is sufficiently accounted for by his father's many
lawsuits and his own acquaintance among members
of the Inns of Court. But a man may have lawsuits
without learning much of the law ; and my own
experience of the familiar converse of Templars is
that they talk much like other Englishmen. The
idea has been lately borne in upon my mind, and
I share it with my readers for what it is worth, that
the extraordinary precision and flexibility of Shake-
speare's style may be due to an early study of leases
and other legal documents. However this may be,
I hazard the opinion that half a year's apprentice-
ship in a lawyer's office would be admirable training
for most young literary aspirants. They would be

194 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

given certain provisions to express, and they would
by practice come to be able to express them so that
no loophole of escape should remain for the person
whom they were to bind. Such practice would
bring, of course, precision ; and it would also bring
flexibility, because flexibility comes from a many-
sided view, and a lawyer learns to keep a wide look-
out all round him for possible subterfuges. Let me
give an example of what strikes me as a most
admirable paragraph from a document it has been
my fortune to have had to read with some care :

Provided always, and it is hereby agreed and declared, that
notwithstanding anything herein contained, the said lessor shall
have power without obtaining any consent from, or making any
compensation to, the said lessee, to deal as he may think fit
with any other land, buildings, or premises adjoining, or near,
or opposite to, or facing (whether in front, rear, or otherwise),
the premises hereby demised, or any part thereof, or to erect or
suffer to be erected on such other land or premises any build-
ings whatever, whether such buildings shall or shall not affect
or diminish the light or air, which may now, or at any time
during the term hereby granted, be enjoyed by the lessee or
other the tenants or occupiers of the premises hereby demised.

Surely that paragraph is a masterpiece for pre-
cision ; and that is not all. I think no unprejudiced
student of this and similar passages will deny that
in addition to the mere qualities of writing which a
legal training must stimulate, the higher qualities of
the imagination are also brought into play, What a
picture, for instance, the last sentence summons up

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of the lessee with his family and friends around him,
not simply as abstractions, John -Does and Richard
Roes, but actual human beings, alive and glad to be
alive, carpentes vitales auras, as the spirited Latin has
it, rejoicing in the air and sunlight ! Surely that is
a view of mankind that is worth dwelling upon, and
one that it is refreshing to find in a legal agreement.
What a vision too is suggested of the vast and inex-
haustible supplies of sunlight and air, always at man's
service ; so that whether his term of residence be for
seven, fourteen, or twenty- one years, he may always
count upon them ! I fear in this passage the natural
affinity between law and poetry has almost too
violently asserted itself ; for exact truth compels me
to confess that the sunlight at present enjoyed by the
lessee is, and has been for many weeks, purely
imaginary. Let me add two other short specimen
passages where the joy in distinction and the joy in
enumeration rise to an almost lyrical rapture.

And also shall and will, at his own expense, do and execute
all such works as are or may, under or by virtue of any Act or
Acts of Parliament, passed or hereafter to be passed, and for the
time being in force, be directed or required to be done or
executed, in respect of the said demised premises, whether by
the landlord or tenant thereof.

And also will at all times during the said term, when need
shall require, well and substantially repair, support, amend,
point, paint, and cleanse the premises hereby demised, and all
walls, ways, roads, and appurtenances thereto belonging, or
used or enjoyed therewith, with all needful reparations, cleans-
ings, and amendments whatsoever.

196 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

St. David's Day, which ought henceforth to be
Ladysmith Day, only that the English have no
memory for festivals (how many members of Parlia-
ment, unless they have just been to see Mr. Benson's
' Henry V.,' l know that Agincourt was fought on St.
Crispin, and how many of those know when St.
Crispin's Day comes?) Ladysmith Day, then,
brought me from America three volumes by an un-
known author, which, though not pitched in a
martial strain, were in key with the new gaiety of
heart which the first day of March brought to all
Englishmen. A week before they would have
seemed vain and foolish ; but arriving at a moment
of mad hilarity, they seemed as good as Gilbert. It
is worthy of remark how very few tolerable writers
there are of comic verse. Parodists and academic
wits abound, but comic poets are rare birds ; as rare

1 As we go to press the Queen's Proclamation is issued,
ordering that all ranks in Her Majesty's Irish regiments shall
wear, as a distinction, a sprig of shamrock in their head-dress
to commemorate the gallantry of her Irish soldiers during the
recent battles in South Africa. Had Her Majesty, I wonder,
been reading 'Henry V.' lately, and come upon Fluellen's
speech ? ' Your majesty says very true : if your majesties is
remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden
where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps ;
which your majesty know to this hour is an honourable badge
of the service ; and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to
wear the leek upon Saint Tavy's day' (iv. 7. 100). King
William III. is said to have been the last of our sovereigns who
so embellished his crown.

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as low comedians. I used in days gone by to be an
admirer of the muse of Mr. James Frank Sullivan,
whose drawings in Fun once redeemed that so-called
comic paper from contempt. His book of drawings
has long, I am told, been out of print, and I rarely
meet with any one who knows of them. But his
' British Workman, by one who does not believe in
him,' was an admirable study ; and no less admirable
were many of the accompanying sketches, such as
'The Professional and Amateur Models,' 'The
Waiter,' ' False Delicacy,' &c. I do not know
whether his fugitive rhymes have ever been re-
captured. At the moment I can only recall one,
which ran something as follows :

' This dinner-set for seven pounds,'

The customer observed, ' is cheap
Beyond my expectation's bounds.'

But oh ! he wasn't very deep.

For when the service home they brought

According to his stated wish,
The party looked in vain for aught

Beyond a solitary dish.

' I'il back that dinner-set to top

All others I have ever seen,'
He said, returning to the shop ;

' But you forgot the soup-tureen.'

' No service that you've ever seen,'
The shopman said, ' I beg to state,

Included any soup-tureen ;
But you can have it separate.'

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' That dinner-set is very nice,'
The buyer said, ' upon my soul,

And singularly cheap in price ;
But you forgot the salad-bowl.'

' A salad-bowl,' the man explained,
' It is a thing I never knew

That any dinner-set contained ;
But we can get it made for you.'

And so it went on. That is a sufficiently good
instance of what I mean by a comic poem ; it has an
amusing idea, which is amusingly worked out. Mr.
Oliver Herford, the American writer whose books
have just reached me, is not, I believe, known in this
country ; so that I may be doing some service by
introducing him to my readers. Like Mr. Gilbert
and Mr. Sullivan, he draws pictures to illustrate
his own verses, and when that is the case, the one
art necessarily suffers in its divorce from the other.
But that cannot be helped. The first book of
Mr. Herford's, 'Artful Antics,' seems to have been
published as long ago as 1888. It is in intention a
child's book, but contains verses here and there
capable of amusing grave and reverend seniors. A
second volume, ' The Bashful Earthquake,' dates from
1898. Some of the best of the verses are those which
treat of beasts. The crocodile and the giraffe seem
especial favourites with Mr. Herford. Here is a poem
on the former creature :

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A Crocodile once dropped a line
To a Fox to invite him to dine ;

But the Fox wrote to say

He was dining that day
With a Bird friend, and begged to decline,

She sent off at once to a Goat.

' Pray don't disappoint me,' she wrote ;

But he answer'd too late

He'd forgotten the date,
Having thoughtlessly eaten her note.

That is a very characteristic touch, and shows an
appreciative student of goat nature.

The Crocodile thought him ill-bred,
And invited two Rabbits instead;

But the Rabbits replied

They were hopelessly tied
By a previous engagement, and fled.

Then she wrote in despair to some Eels
And begged them to drop in to meals ;

But the Eels left their cards

With their coldest regards,
And took to what went for their heels.

Cried the Crocodile then, in disgust,
' My motives they seem to mistrust.

Their suspicions are base ;

Since they don't know their place,
I suppose if I must starve, I must.''

The same motive is used again in the ballad of the
' Artful Ant.' The artfulness of this insect lay in her
successful catering for a ball supper for a hundred

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guests, ' all the birds and beasts she knew, and many
more beside/ entirely without cost to herself.

From here and there and everywhere

The happy creatures came,
The Fish alone could not be there.

(And they were not to blame.
' They really could not stand the air,

But thanked her just the same.')

The Lion, bowing very low,

Said to the Ant : ' I ne'er
Since Noah's Ark remember so

Delightful an affair.'
(A pretty compliment, although

He really wasn't there.)

They danced, and danced, and danced, and danced ;

It was a jolly sight !
They pranced, and pranced, and pranced, and pranced,

Till it was nearly light !
And then their thoughts to supper chanced

To turn. (As well they might !)

Then said the Ant : 'It's only right

That supper should begin,
And if you will be so polite,

Pray take each other in.'
(The emphasis was very slight,

But rested on ' take />/.')

They needed not a second call ;

They took the hint. Oh, yes,
The largest guest ' took in ' the small

The small ' took in ' the less,
The less ' took in ' the least of all.

(It was a great success !)

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As for the rest but why spin out

This narrative of woe ?
The Lion took them in about

As fast as they could go.
(And went home, looking very stout,

And walking very slow.)

And when the Ant, not long ago,

Lost to all sense of shame,
Tried it again, I chance to know

That not one answer came.
(Save from the Fish, who ' could not go,

But thanked her all the same.')

The same motive recurs in a poem called ' The
Lion's Tour ; ' and when one considers the manners
of wild beasts, it is not extraordinary that a poet
who keeps an eye on the object should have to
devote a great deal of his observation to their meals.
It is found also, with a difference, in the following
so-called ' Fable,' though what exactly the moral
may be the fabulist does not tell us.

It was a hungry pussy cat

Upon Thanksgiving morn,
And she watched a thankful little mouse

That ate an ear of corn.

' If I ate that thankful little mouse,

How thankful he should be,
When he has made a meal himself,

To make a meal for me !

' Then with his thanks for having fed,

And his thanks for feeding me,
With all his thankfulness inside,

How thankful / shall be ! '

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Thus mused the hungry pussy cat

Upon Thanksgiving Day ;
But the little mouse had overheard,

And declined (with thanks) to stay.

Here is another Cat and Mouse poem, this time
with a plain moral :

It was a tragic little mouse

All bent on suicide
Because another little mouse

Refused to be his bride.

' Alas,' he squeaked, ' I shall not wed !

My heart and paw she spurns ;
I'll hie me to the cat instead,

From whence no mouse returns.'

The playful cat met him half-way,

Said she, ' I feel for you ;
You're dying for a mouse, you say,

I'm dying for one too ! '

Now when Miss Mouse beheld his doom,

Struck with remorse, she cried,
' In death we'll meet ! O cat, make room

For one more mouse inside ! '

The playful cat was charmed ; said she,

' I shall be, in a sense,
Your pussy catafalque ! ' Ah me !

It was her last offence !

Reader, take warning from this tale,

And shun the punster's trick ;
Those mice, for fear lest cats might fail,

Had eaten arsenic !

Mr. Hertford's latest volume is entitled an ' Alpha-
bet of Celebrities ; ' but the fun here, depending

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upon the bringing together of incongruous people,
is perhaps intended to lie more in the pictures than
the poetry, which is of this sort :

C is Columbus who tries to explain

How to balance an egg to the utter disdain

Of Confucius, Carlyle, Cleopatra, and Cain.

The humour here may be understood to lurk in
giving Cain the features of a popular novelist of the
same name, and putting Carlyle and Cleopatra on
the same sofa.

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XII.

THE LEGEND OF MACCONGLINNE, WITH AN ANNEX
ON ULIXES MAC LAERTIS.

I FOUND myself a few days since called upon to give
the loyal toast at the annual dinner of a society
which, from causes which I need not go into, happens
to reckon among its members a large proportion of
Irishmen. It was inevitable to refer to the Royal
visit to Dublin ; but wishing to do so in terms which
might be as little as possible suggestive of the daily
newspaper, while they should appeal with peculiar
force to my company, I made use of the following
expression : ' May Her Gracious Majesty prove the
MacConglinne of this generation to the Irish people.'
The toast, I need not say, was drunk with Celtic
enthusiasm, but I could gather from not a few indica-
tions that my reference had not been appreciated ;
and my immediate neighbour asked me to write down
the exact words of my toast to save any blunder that
might arise from the ignorance of English reporters.
I determined, therefore, to take an early opportunity
of introducing to my friends this delightful legend,
both for its own sake and also because it illustrates

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several idiosyncrasies of the Irish character, and
among them, as it seems to me, the thoroughness
of Celtic humour. I mean this : an Englishman's
humour is, as its name implies, a temperament or
a mood ; and it gives place to other moods, such as
choler. If an Englishman is in his choleric vein and
disposed to kill you, your best way of escape is to
arouse his dormant humour, for if he laughs you are
safe. With a Celt, on the other hand, in the same
circumstances there would be no security in his
laughter; for in a Celt choler and humour are not
mutually displacing. The Englishmen who have
been renowned for their humour have generally been
peaceable souls, not easily provoked, like Shake-
speare, whose constant epithet among his contem-
poraries was 'gentle,' or Sir Thomas More, or the
irreverend Mr. Sterne.

But to come to MacConglinne. His legend con-
cerns his exorcising a demon of voracity from an
ancient king of Munster, called Cathal. It descends
to us in two forms, one terse and one elaborated,
which may be read in the edition of Professor Kuno
Meyer. Putting the two together the story comes
out something as follows : MacConglinne was a
scholar who wearied of scholarship and the cloister,
and betook himself to the road and the life of a
wandering gleeman. ' This resolution came into the
mind of the scholar on a Saturday eve exactly at
Roscommon ; for there he was pursuing his reading.

206 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Then he sold the little stock he possessed for two
wheaten cakes and a slice of old bacon with a streak
across its middle. These he put in his book-satchel.
And on that night two pointed shoes of hide, of
seven-folded dun leather, he shaped for himself.' He
took for companion a boy, poetically called 'the
scabbed youth,' and they make their way to Cork,
where there is a great company of strangers as-
sembled, including the King of Munster, to keep the
feast of St. Barre and St. Nessan. Unfortunately
our pilgrims arrive, hungry from their long journey,
during the preliminary fast. They go to the guest-
house of the monastery, and the Scabbed Youth
comforts his master with the reflection that, fast or
no fast, the Abbot will treat a poet well for fear of
the consequences.

' This was the way in which they found the guest-
house on their arrival. It was open. That was one
of the days of the three things, viz. wind and snow
and rain about the door ; so that the wind left not a
wisp of thatch, nor a speck of ashes, that it did not
sweep with it through the outer door, under the beds
and couches and screens of the princely house. The
blanket of the guest-house was rolled, bundled, in
the bed, and was full of lice and fleas. No wonder
truly, for it never got its sunning by day, nor its lift-
ing at night. The bath-tub of the guest-house, with
the water of the night before in it, was by the side of
the door-post. The scholar took off his shoes and

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washed his feet in the bath-tub, in which he after-
wards dipped his shoes. He hung his book-satchel
on the peg in the wall, took up his shoes, and
gathered his hands into the blanket, which he tucked
about his legs. But truly as numerous as the sand
of the sea, or sparks of fire, or dew on a May morning,
or the stars of heaven, were the lice and fleas nibbling
his legs, so that weariness seized him. And no one
came to visit him or do reverence to him. This
came of original sin and MacConglmne's hereditary
sin and his own plain-working bad luck ; so that he
was detained without drink, food, or washing, until
every man in Cork had gone to his bed.'

At last it occurs to the Abbot Manchin to send a
messenger to see if any one is in the guest-house,
and, if so, to light a fire and take him his ration of
oats. But the scholar is in no mood for oats, and
addresses his companion in satiric song

' My lad,' said MacConglinne,

' Let us sing a duet ;
Do thou sing on the relish,

I will sing on the bread.'

And so they sang as follows :

Cork whose bells are so sweet,

Sour is its sand ;
Except the sandy soil

There is no food in the land.

Till doomsday will I not eat,
Or till famine falls on the nation,

Cork's ration of oats,
Cork's oaten ration.

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The messenger remembered the quatrains, ' for his
understanding was sharp,' and reported them to the
Abbot. 'Well,' said Manchin, 'the ill word will tell
you the boy. Little boys will sing those verses
unless the words are avenged on him that made
them.' And the revenge he proposed was this, to
strip the poet of his clothes, and lay scourges and
horsewhips upon him, and then throw him into the
river Lee till he had enjoyed ' his muddy fill of water,'
then to leave him all night in the guest-house without
clothing, except the populous blanket, and in the
morning the monks should take counsel about him.
'Our counsel,' added the Abbot, 'shall be no other
than his crucifixion to-morrow, for the honour of me,
and St. Barre, and the Church.' ' And then it was,'
says the chronicle, 'that his hereditary transgression,
and his own plain-working sin rose against MacCon-
glinne;' for he was stripped and scourged and
thrown into the Lee, and lay in the guest-house till
morning. In the morning the monks assemble in
the guest-house, and although his poem cannot
legally be brought under the head of blasphemy, he
is nevertheless condemned to crucifixion on the
morrow. Then he asks a boon.

'A boon for me,' said MacConglinne, 'for the sake
of Barre, whose festival is to-night. My fill of drink
and food, and your own bed with its bedding, both
quilt and cover.' ' For the sake of our patron I will
grant it,' said the Abbot. After having eaten and

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drunk his fill, MacConglinne lay down, and a heavy
slumber fell upon him. Then in his sleep he saw a
cleric approach him. He wore a white mantle with
a golden brooch, a large silken shirt next his white
skin, and long white-grey curly hair. He said : ' You
sleep well, and you awaiting death.' ' Who are you ? '
said MacConglinne. ' Mura,' 1 said he. ' I have
come to help you.' ' What help is it ? ' said MacCon-
glinne. ' Remember this vision,' said Mura, ' and
recite it in the presence of King Cathal, and you will
cure him from his craving.' Mura then sang the
vision, and MacConglinne remembered it. On the
morrow he was taken to a gathering of the men of
Munster to be crucified. Cathal and the nobles of
Munster were there. Cathal said he would not
crucify a bard, but the clerics might do it themselves,
for it was they that knew the wrong he had done.
MacConglinne, however, having no zeal for immediate
crucifixion and having also now a mission from his
patron saint, set his wit to devise delays. He asks
a boon of the monks, 'My fill of water and let me
draw it myself.' The boon being granted, and
pledges given for its fulfilment, he is taken to the
well, lies down, puts his finger through the loop of his
brooch, dips the pin into the well, and so draws a
drop at a time ; and when his guards grow tired of
waiting, he thus addresses them :

1 St. Mura was abbot and founder of the monastery of Fahan, co.
Donegal, MacConglinne's birthplace.

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' Your own treachery has come upon you, ye curs
and robbers, ye monks of Cork ! When I was in my
cell, what I used to do was to hoard what bits might
reach me during five or six days, and then eat them
in one night, drinking my fill of water afterwards.
This would sustain me to the end of three days and
three nights without anything else, and it would not
harm me. I shall be three days and nights subsist-
ing on what I have eaten just now, three days and
nights more doing penance, and another three days
and nights drinking water, for I have pledges in my
hands ; I vow it to God and St. Barre, whose I am
here,' said MacConglinne ; 'though neither high nor
low of the monks of Cork should leave the place
where they are, but should all go to death in one
night, and Manchin before all or after all, to death
and hell ; since I am sure of heaven and shall be in
the Presence, to which there is neither end nor decay.'

This story was told to the monks of Cork, who
quickly held a meeting, and the upshot of the meet-
ing was that MacConglinne should have a blessing
on his going in humility to be crucified or else that
nine persons should surround him to guard him until
he died where he was, that he might be crucified
afterwards. That message was delivered to MacCon-
glinne. ' It is a sentence of curs/ said he. ' Never-
theless, whatever will come of it, we will go in
humility.'

The monks of Cork, who began to be a little weary

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and ashamed of the whole affair, now asked for a
respite till morning ; but Manchin refused. So
MacConglinne is taken to the Foxes' Wood, and an
axe put in his hand, and he himself obliged to cut
his passion-tree, which he bore on his back to the
green of Cork ; and as it is by that time too late to
crucify him there and then, for vespers must be
sung, he is tied to a pillar till the morning. In the
night he is comforted by an angel, and Manchin, also,
has a revelation that MacConglinne has been sent for
the salvation of King Cathal from the devil of voracity
that possesses him. In the morning, therefore, he
grants him his life, and is for speeding him on his
errand to the King. But MacConglinne, now that
his life is secure, is somewhat coy of renouncing the
glories of martyrdom. ' The windows of heaven,' he
says, ' are open to receive me, and all the faithful,
from Adam and Abel his son, even to the faithful
one who went to heaven in this very moment, are all
chanting in expectation of my soul, that I may enter
heaven. The nine orders of heaven, with cherubim
and seraphim, are awaiting my soul. I care not though
Cathal MacFinguine and the men of Munster, along
with all the Southern Half, and the people of Cork,
and Manchin first or last, should go to death and hell
in one night, while I myself shall be in the unity of
the Trinity.' Nevertheless the present of a certain
much-esteemed cloak of Abbot Manchin's reconciles
him to life.

212 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

He does not go, however, straight to the King, but
to the King's host, whom he finds in great lamentation
at being eaten out of house and home. He asks
what reward would be given him if the King's
appetite could be restrained, and he is promised ' a
white sheep for every -house and for every fold from
Cam to Cork.' The conditions MacConglinne makes
before accepting the offer are worth quoting in full ;
they show the true Celtic appreciation of paetry and
the things of the mind, and also the true Celtic
appreciation of the indifference of the Celtic character
to the binding nature of an engagement to pay rent
and rates :

' I will take that,' said MacConglinne, ' provided
that kings and lords of land, poets and satirists are
pledged to me for the delivery of my dues and for
their fulfilment, so that they shall reach me in full
viz. kings to enforce the dues ; lords of land to keep
spending on the collectors, while they are levying my
dues, food and drink and necessaries ; poets to scathe
and revile if I am cheated of my dues ; and satirists
to scatter the satires and sing them against thee and
thy children and thy race unless my dues reach me.'

The method MacConglinne employs to cure the
King and exorcise the evil spirit of greed seems, to a
modern reader and a Saxon, needlessly elaborate ;
but it has several points of interest. In the first
place, it has moral elements. The scholar first
attracts the King's attention by sharpening his teeth

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on a grindstone, and, when he is noticed, explains
that strangers will scoff to see the King eating and
the scholar hungry.

' " True," said Cathal, giving him an apple and jam-
ming two or three into his own mouth. (During the
space of three half-years that the fiend abode in the
throat of Cathal MacFinguine he had not performed
such an act of humanity as the giving of that one
wild apple to MacConglinne after it had been
earnestly asked.) '

What follows seems the prototype of several
passages in ' Twelfth Night ' where Feste plays the
beggar.

' ' Better two things than one in learning," said
MacConglinne.

' He flung him another.

' " The number of the Trinity ! "

' He gives him one.

' " The four books of the Gospel."

' He threw him one.

' " The five books of Moses."

' He flung him one.

' "The first numerical article which consists of its
own parts and divisions viz. the number six ; for its
half is three, its third is two, and its sixth is one.
Give me the sixth."

' He cast him one apple.

1 " The seven things which were prophesied of thy
God on earth viz. His Conception, &c."

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' He gave him one.

' " The eight Beatitudes of the Gospel, O prince of
kingly judgments ! "

' He threw him one.

' " The nine orders of the kingdom of Heaven, O
royal champion of the world ! "

' He gave him one.

1 " The tenth is the order of manhood, O defender
of the province ! "

' He cast him an apple.

' " The imperfect number of the Apostles after sin."

' He flung him one.

'"The perfect number of the Apostles after sin,
even though they had committed transgression."

' He threw him one.

' " The triumph beyond triumphs, and the perfect
number, Christ with his Apostles."

' " Verily, by St. Barre," said Cathal, " thou'lt
devour me if thou pursue me any further." Cathal
flung him hide, apples and all, so that there was
neither corner nor nook nor floor nor bed that the
apples did not reach. They were not nearer to Mac-
Conglinne than to all else, but they were the farther
from Cathal.'

The next step in the process is to induce Cathal to
fast for a day and a night, which MacConglinne
accomplishes by begging a boon (as usual exacting
pledges for its fulfilment), and then asking Cathal to
fast with him. After the fast has been extended to

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the second night with a three hours' sermon thrown
in, MacConglinne prepared a feast of 'juicy old bacon,
and tender corned-beef and full-fleshed wether, and
honey in the comb, and English salt on a beautiful
polished dish of white silver,' and so well did he play
the cook, rubbing the honey and the salt into one
piece after another, that ' big as the pieces were that
were before the fire, there dropped not to the ground
out of these four pieces as much as would quench a
spark of a candle ; but what there was of relish in
them went into their very centre.' Then having given
orders to the strongest of the warriors to bind Cathal,
he placed the joints before him, and cutting off the
juiciest morsels passed them one by one before the
King's mouth into his own, and told him, while this
vicarious meal proceeded, the vision he had been
vouchsafed by St. Mura, the tale of a marvellous land
where everything was made of cheese or beef fat, and
where it was possible even to be drowned in gravy.

' At the pleasure of the recital and the recounting
of these many various pleasant viands, the lawless
beast that abode within Cathal MacFinguinne came
forth, until it was licking its lips outside his head.
One time, when one of the pieces was put to the
King's mouth, the son of malediction darted forth,
fixed his two claws in the piece that was in the
student's hand, and taking it with him across the
hearth to the other side bore it below the cauldron
that was on the other side of the fire. And the

2l6 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

cauldron was overturned on him. Some story-tellers
relate, however, that it went down the throat of the
priest's gillie ; but it is not so in the books of Cork,
which state that he was put into the cauldron and
burned under it. The King was taken to a sleeping
chamber, and the great house was emptied and burnt
afterwards. Next morning the King arose, and
what he ate was no more than a child of a month
would eat.'

To some readers the somewhat Rabelaisian story
of the Land of Fat may be more interesting than the
legend upon which it has been grafted ; but with
most people in this dyspeptic century a little of it
will go a long way. Here is a specimen passage :

'Then in the harbour of the lake before me I saw
a juicy little coracle of beef fat, with its coating of
tallow, with its thwarts of curds, with its prow of
lard, with its stern of butter, with its thole pins of
marrow, with its oars of flitches of old boar in it.
Indeed, she was a sound craft in which we embarked.
Then we rowed across the wide expanse of New-milk
Lake, through seas of broth, past river-mouths of
mead, over swelling boisterous waves of butter-milk,
by perpetual pools of gravy, past woods dewy with
meat juice, past springs of savoury lard, by islands of
cheeses, by hard rocks of rich tallow, by headlands of
old curds, along strands of dry cheese ; until we reached
the firm, level beach between Butter-mount and Milk-
lake and Curd-point at the mouth of the pass to

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the country of O'Early-eating. Every oar we plied
in New-milk Lake would send its sea-sand of cheese
curd to the surface.'

*%* Tidings have reached me that this story of
MacConglinne has been ill-liked by some gentle ladies
whom I am sorry to distress. Let me, then, in com-
pensation, give them another Irish story for we are all
Irish now a fragment of the mediaeval legend of the
Wandering of Ulysses as it was told over the fire
(if there was a fire) on winter nights in the
monasteries of the west of Ireland. I take it, as I
took the other, from Professor Kuno Meyer's version. 1

After the adventure with the Cyclops the story
proceeds as follows : It is related that a man of the
people of Ulixes went away, out of a hardy and idle
mood, and this was the man who met ^Eneas, the son
of Anchises, when he was on his voyage of exile.
Now, Ulixes was one year on the sea after leaving
that island, and only nine of his men reached land
with him, while the others found death through an
unknown malady. Then Ulixes went on shore, and
shepherds with their flocks met him. Now, that man
was very cunning, a clever right, wise man, sharing
in many a tongue, for he was wont to learn the
tongue of every country to which he came, and to ask
tidings of them in the language that they used. And

1 ' Merugud Uilix Maicc Leirtis,' edited by Kuno Meyer (Nutt,
1886).

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this is what he learnt from them, that the Judge of
Right was lord in that country. ' What right is
it that serves him ? ' asked Ulixes. ' Every man that
gets instruction from him, he will reach his native
land at once," said they. 'Why,' said Ulixes,
' should I not get instruction from him ? ' ' Thou
hast not the means,' said he who spoke with him ;
' for a single day's instruction is not given without
a payment of thirty ounces of gold to him.' 'And
thou,' said they, ' who art thou ? ' ' One of the
fugitives of the Trojans am I/ said he. And he
went from them towards his ship. And his men
asked tidings from him. And he related to them as
he had heard, and told them to get instruction.
But they said that they had no desire to do so ; ' for our
hairs have fallen out, and our eyes have grown dim,
and our faces have become black, and our teeth
yellow, and we have no great need to give away our
gold or our possessions for instruction that would be
of no use to us.' ' Which is better for you,' said
he, ' to leave it in the breaches of danger or at the
gates of death, or to spend it for an instruction
which will be profitable to you ? ' Thereupon they
went on their way to the fortress, and the man of the
place met them on the meadow and asked tidings of
them. And they related to him every hardship that
they had encountered. And he asked them what
they had come for. ' We have come to learn from
thee.' ' Ye will get it, provided ye have the means

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for it.' ' What at all are the means ? ' said they.
' I do not give a single day's instruction without
thirty ounces of red gold.' ' We shall find that for
thee,' said they. Then they were made welcome,
and a separate bed-chamber was given to them, and
meat and drink was taken into it for them, and all
was got ready for them to bathe and to wash. And
there they stayed that night.

Early on the morrow they arose and went to the
place where the Judge of Right was. They weighed
out thirty ounces of red gold to him and he taught
them. And this was the instruction :

' Though ye nine had but one father and one
mother amongst you, and though one man had killed
your father and your mother, yet do ye resolve not
to kill him before ye have held three counsels with
yourselves about it, and before it is certain that ye
all are of one mind for ever. And though it come
upon one man of you only, nevertheless let him not
do the deed until he has three times kept his breath,
and held counsel with his own mind. If that, then, is
what his mind will bring away from the counsel, then
let him do the deed.' 'Say on,' said they. 'No
more for to-day but this/ said he. Then they went
to their house. ' That gold is thrown away,' said
his men to Ulixes. They went there that night, and
though the attendance they had the first night was
good, it was better this night. They rose early on
the morrow, and went to the house of precept.

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Thirty ounces of gold were weighed out to him, and
this is what he said : ' As to the road ye travel
every day, do not follow a bypath or short cut, but
follow the high road.' ' Say on/ said they. ' No
more teaching to-day but this/ said he. Then they
went to their house. ' That gold is lost/ said his
men to Ulixes. ' Who knows but that ye will
find its use/ said Ulixes. And though the attend-
ance of the first two nights was good, it was better
the third night. They arose early on the morrow,
and went to the house of precept. And thirty ounces
of red gold were weighed out, and this is what he
said : ' Do ye see the sun at this moment ? ' ' We
do/ said they. ' Let none of you leave his place or
dwelling, how great soever his impatience may be,
until the sun has reached the place where it is now/
' Say on/ said they. ' No more teaching from me
this turn, but that/ said he.

The last two somewhat costly directions were
found profitable in avoiding the malevolence of certain
evil fairies who had arranged a few landslips and
earthquakes along the route. The first was useful to
Ulysses himself when he reached Ithaca with his
remnant, as will appear from what follows.

The seven that remained reached their native
town and came to the bovver where the queen was.
And they saw her on a great throne upon the firm
floor of the house, and a youth, the fairest in shape of
the heroes of the world, at her shoulder. ' I told you

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so,' said Ulixes. ' We must needs brook it,' said
they. ' Ye good men there before me,' said the
Queen, whose name was Penelope, 'who at all are
ye ? ' ' Seafarers astray are we,' said they. ' Go,'
said she, ' into the guest-house.' They were served
that night till they went to their bed. ' Do ye know
what I should like to do ? ' said Ulixes. ' We know
not,' said they. ' I had a subterranean cave of
escape out of the town, and there is one entrance
to it in the town yonder, with a closing door to it,
and another entrance on the green outside, and the
weight of a flagstone upon it. And what I want to
do is to go through the outer door along the cave to
the other end, until I reach their chamber, and the
place where they are together on the pillow ; there
will I slay them both with my sword.' . . . Then
he arose from them to get into the town beyond, and
he reached the bed-chamber, and heard the conversa-
tion of the two on the pillow. And he bared his
sword on the spot, and raised his arm. ' III is the
pro.fit of my instruction for me,' said he, ' if I do not
first control my nature till I have kept my breath.'
Thrice he raised his arm in order to strike with
the edge of his sword at the neck of the two.
The third time that he raised his arm, then spoke the
Queen : ' Oh, son,' said she, ' thy father has appeared
to me over our heads, and stoutly he was minded to
strike off our heads, thinking that thou wert my fair
leman.' When Ulixes heard that speech his spirit

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rejoiced within him. He went out and lay down
among his men and told them what had happened,
and he gave thanks to the gods for it. On the
morrow they arose and went into the same house.
'Ye good men,' said the Queen, 'who at all are
ye ? ' ' Ulixes, the son of Laertes, am I,' said he.
' Thou art not the Ulixes that we knew,' said she.
' It is I, in sooth/ said he, ' and I shall tell thee my
tokens,' said he. And then he went into their sweet
secrets together and the things she hid in her heart.
' Where art thy men,' said she, ' if thou art Ulixes ? '
' They are gone to ruin,' said he. ' I will ask thy
dog,' said she, 'if thou art Ulixes.' 'I did not
expect her to be alive,' said he. ' I made her the
gruel of long life, for I had seen the great love that
thou didst bear her. And what sort of a dog now is
she ? ' said she. ' Two shining white sides has she,
and a light purple back, and a jet-black belly, and a
greenish tail,' said Ulixes. ' That is the description
of the dog,' said she ; ' and moreover no man in the
place dared to give her food but myself and thee and
the steward.' 'Let the dog be brought in,' said
Ulixes. And four men got up for her and brought
the dog into the house. And when she heard the
sound of Ulixes' voice, she gave a pull at the chain,
so that she sent the four men on their back through
the house behind her, and she sprang to the breast
of Ulixes and licked his face.

The Mighty Folk, the fairies, now play the part of

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Athena, and restore to the hero his ancient shape and
beauty ; and the only sting of the tale is drawn for
such as are not highly endowed Professors of
Moral Philosophy, by the discovery in a little box
which the Instructor had given Ulixes on parting
(much as the lawyer who draws a marriage settlement
sends a wedding present) of the ninety ounces of
gold which had been paid away in fees.

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XIII.

WILLIAM COWPER.

ON April 25th, 1900, Cowper had been dead a
hundred years. The reflection is fairly obvious, but
also somewhat startling, for the lines of Cowper that
we all know by heart have nothing in them that
suggests a bygone age. The appeal of ' The Cast-
away,' or ' Hark, my soul, it is the Lord/ or ' John
Gilpin,' to mention three masterpieces in different
modes, comes as freshly and simply to us as to our
great-grandfathers ; which is a way of saying that
they are, in the truest sense of the word, classical. It
may perhaps be allowable once in a century and not
uninteresting, for one is apt to become a little vague
about the history of classical writers, to rehearse briefly
Cowper's legend, noticing especially the influences that
determined his devotion to literature.

William Cowper was born in 1731 at the rectory
of Great Berkhampstead, in the county of Hertford.
His family had been ennobled in the person of his
great-uncle, the Whig Lord Chancellor to Anne and
George I. ; his grandfather was that Spencer Cowper,

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 225

Judge of the Common Pleas, for love of whom a
pretty quakeress drowned herself; and his father
was chaplain to George II. On the mother's side,
who was a Donne, the blood was perhaps better and
certainly more interesting, as it descended by several
lines from that magnificent virtuoso King Henry III.,
and also from the great Jacobean poet and preacher,
John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. His mother died
when Cowper was six years old, and some very
Cowperesque couplets to her memory, said by Southey
to be by a niece, are to be found upon her monument
in Berkhampstead church. One of the poet's own
most touching poems, written fifty years later on
receiving from a cousin a present of the only known
picture of her, shows that her memory remained
always fresh and vivid in his mind. The impression
of his loss was rendered indelible by the fact that
he was sent off at once to a boarding-school, where,
being weak in health and of acute sensibilities, he
was bullied. Afterwards he proceeded to Westminster,
and made friends with a few boys who by-and-by
made a stir in the world, Warren Hastings, Elijah
Impey, and Charles Churchill. On leaving school he
was articled to an attorney in Ely Place, in whose
office he idled away several years ; in spare moments
' gigging an d making giggle ' with some cousins, the
daughters of Ashley Cowper, who lived hard by in
Southampton Row. His fellow-clerk was Thurlow,
afterwards Lord Chancellor. Cowper, who foretold

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Thurlow's success, made his friend promise to give
him an appointment when he came to the woolsack ;
but when the prophecy was fulfilled Thurlow did not
remember Cowper, but forgot him. When Cowper
brought himself to Thurlow's notice by a present of
his first book of poems, his Lordship, who himself in
moments of leisure meditated the muse, failed to
acknowledge their receipt ; and this so hurt the poet's
feelings that he penned a certain vigorous passage
upon Friendship, which is likely to be remembered
and coupled with the name of Thurlow as long as the
language lasts :

Oh friendship, cordial of the human breast !
So little felt, so fervently professed !
Thy blossoms deck our unsuspecting years ;
The promise of delicious fruit appears :
We hug the hopes of constancy and truth,
Such is the folly of our dreaming youth ;
But soon, alas, detect the rash mistake
That sanguine inexperience loves to make ;
And view with tears th' expected harvest lost,
Decay'd by time, or withered by a frost.
Whoever undertakes a friend's great part
Should be renew'd by nature, pure in heart,
Prepar'd for martyrdom, and strong to prove
A thousand ways the force of genuine love.
He may be call'd to give up health and gain,
To exchange content for trouble, ease for pain,
To echo sigh for sigh, and groan for groan,
And wet his cheeks with sorrows not his own.
The heart of man, for such a task too frail,
When most relied on, is most sure to fail ;
And summon'd to partake its fellow's woe
Starts from its office,, like a broken bow.

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Cowper was called to the bar in 1754 he was at
this time a Templar and a wit and a member of a
Nonsense Club which included George Colman. Two
years later his father died, leaving but little fortune ;
but the son was to a certain extent provided for
by a Commissionership in Bankruptcy, and it was
understood that his cousin, Major Cowper, would be
properly nepotic when the Clerkship of the House
of Lords fell in, to which the Major had the pre-
sentation. In 1763 the vacancy occurred, and the
good kinsman played his part ; nothing was required
of the candidate but to appear at the bar of the
House for a formal examination. Unhappily Cowper
was not a good subject for an examination, however
formal ; he pined even more deeply than the rest of
us for the avt^traoroc /St'oe which Plato tells us is not
for mortals ; a nervous melancholy became accentuated
by the prospect, and on the day fixed for his appear-
ance he attempted suicide. The attempt failed, but
its failure struck him into an ever- deepening religious
horror.

One morning (he wrote afterwards) as I lay between sleeping
and waking, I seemed to myself to be walking in Westminster
Abbey, waiting till prayers should begin ; presently I thought
I heard the minister's voice, and hastened towards the choir ;
just as I was upon the point of entering, the iron gate under the
organ was flung in my face with a jar that made the Abbey
ring ; the noise awoke me : and a sentence of excommunica-
tion from all the churches upon earth could not have been so
dreadful to me as the interpretation which I could not avoid
putting upon this dream.

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When he recovered his reason his relations sub-
scribed him a modest income for the Commissioner-
ship had to be resigned and his brother, who was
a Fellow of a college at Cambridge, settled him at
Huntingdon, so as to be within reach. It was at
Huntingdon that his melancholy figure attracted the
attention of the Rev. Morley Unwin, who invited him
to his house, and presently received him as a boarder.
It is interesting to look back at Cowper's first im-
pressions of this family, with whom his future life and
fortunes were to be bound up :

I have added another family to the number of those I was
acquainted with when you were here. Their name is Unwin
the most agreeable people imaginable ; quite sociable, and as
free from the ceremonious civility of county gentlefolks as any
I have ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation
than a stranger, and their house is always open to me. The
old gentleman carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is
a man of learning and good sense, and as simple as Parson
Adams. His wife has a very uncommon understanding, has
read much, to excellent purpose, and is more polite than a
duchess. The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is a most
amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with
the rest of the family. They see but little company, which suits
me exactly ; go when I will I find a house full of peace and
cordiality in all its parts, and am sure to hear no scandal, but
such discourse, instead of it, as we are all better for. You
remember Rousseau's description of an English morning ; such
are the mornings I spend with these good people ; and the
evenings differ from them in nothing, except that they are still
more snug and quieter.

For nearly two years Cowper lived with the Unwins,
and shared in their life of religious devotion. The

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 22Q

scheme of the day is thus sketched in a letter to his
cousin Mrs. Cowper :

We breakfast commonly between eight and nine ; till eleven
we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful
preacher ; at eleven we attend divine service, and from twelve
to three we separate and amuse ourselves as we please. During
that interval I either read in my own apartment, or walk, or
ride, or work in the garden. We seldom sit an hour after
dinner, but if the weather permits adjourn to the garden, where,
with Mrs. Unwin and her son, I have generally the pleasure
of religious conversation till tea-time. After tea we sally forth
to walk in good earnest. At night we read, and converse as
before till supper, and commonly finish the evening either with
hymns, or a sermon, and last of all the family are called to
prayers.

It was the life of an evangelical Gidding of the
last century ; and the very mechanicalness of the
routine seems to have soothed and numbed Cowper's
too irritable sensibilities. Unhappily, when Mr.
Unwin died, the household removed to Olney, to be
under the spiritual direction of the famous John
Newton. They took a house adjoining the vicarage,
opening a private door between the two gardens, and
entered upon what Cowper calls ' a course of decided
Christian happiness.' But Newton's methods were
not narcotic like good Mr. Unwin's, and he very
soon had poor Cowper mad again. For the sixteen
months that the attack lasted Cowper refused to
leave Newton's house, though his own was next
door ; and it should be remembered, to that unwise
person's credit, that he bore this troublesome visit

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with perfect good will. In the end Cowper's recovery
was promoted by the interest he took in some tame
leverets, whose exploits are chronicled in his poems ;
and a relapse was for the time rendered improbable
by the removal of Mr. Newton to a living in London.
Moreover, literature now came to his aid. To the
admirable Mrs. Unwin is due the credit of setting
Cowper to work on composition, though her choice
of a subject was more what we should expect than
what as experts in lunacy or as lovers of poetry we
can altogether approve. She suggested the ' Progress
of Error,' and this was soon followed by three other
poems of the same kind : ' Truth,' ' Table Talk,'
and ' Retirement.' These, with some other pieces in
the same vein, made up Cowper's first published
volume. The book made no stir ; it was praised
here, and blamed there, but did not sell. This of
course proves not that it was bad, but that it was
more or less original. Still, as Cowper considered
himself a preacher and moralist rather than a poet,
and protested to his friends that his aim in writing
was to do good to his generation under pretence
of entertaining it, we cannot wonder that the jam
failed to reconcile the public to the pill. Cowper's
first volume is, in fact, a literary monument to the so-
called Evangelical movement. It denounces ' Works '
and Roman Catholics. It speaks of a hermit (not a
particular hermit, but the hermit as such) as being
Sore tormented long before his time.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 231

It even censures the Handel Commemoration as
idolatry. What is still tolerable in these first essays
is the honey on the medicine cup. Cowper had a
very pretty vein of satiric humour, and indulges it in
' Retirement ' and ' Conversation ' with considerable
success :

The circle formed, we sit in silent state,

Like figures drawn upon a dial plate ;

' Yes, ma'am,' and ' No, ma'am,' uttered softly, show

Every five minutes how the minutes go ;

Each individual, suffering a constraint

Poetry may but colours cannot paint,

As if in close committee on the sky,

Reports it hot, or cold, or wet, or dry ;

And finds a changing clime a happy source

Of wise reflection and well-tim'd discourse.

We next inquire, but softly and by stealth,

Like conservators of the public health,

Of epidemic throats, if such there are,

And coughs, and rheums, and phthisic, and catarrh.

That theme exhausted, a wide chasm ensues,

Filled up at last with interesting news,

Who danced with whom, and who are like to wed,

And who is hanged, and who is brought to bed ;

But fear to call a more important cause

As if 'twere treason against English laws.

The visit paid, with ecstasy we come

As from a seven years' transportation home,

And there resume an unembarrassed brow,

Recovering what we lost we know not how,

The faculties that seemed reduced to nought,

Expression and the privilege of thought.

Having once tasted the delights of authorship,
Cowper was not wanting in eagerness for a second

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essay ; and at the critical moment a second Muse
appeared on the scene of a more potent and less
puritan inspiration than good Mrs. Unwin. Every
schoolboy has heard of the famous rose ' that Mary
to Anna conveyed,' as if to symbolise the transference
of her authority. Anna was Lady Austen, a baronet's
widow, and a woman of fashion and sensibility who
had lived much in France and knew her Rousseau.
She took lodgings in what had been Newton's house,
and the door between the gardens was once more set
open. To Lady Austen's inspiration we owe two of
the most successful of the minor poems, the ' Divert-
ing History of John Gilpin,' and the ' Loss of the
Royal George,' which was written to a French air for
her harpsichord. We owe also, what is perhaps of
more importance, ' The Task,' so called because
Covvper asked for a subject, and was bidden to write
a poem upon the sofa on which the Muse was reclin-
ing. It must be owned that the idea does not strike
one as very brilliant or happy ; and the poet soon
made his escape from the prescribed topic. It will
be remembered that a transition is made from the
use of sofas by the gouty to the neglect of them by
healthy people and so to country walks. The im-
portance of Lady Austen's suggestion lay, first, in the
fact that the subject was non-religious, and, secondly,
that she urged upon the poet the greater freedom of
blank verse. Of course Cowper would have reckoned
it profanity to write poetry without introducing here

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 233

and there his religious views ; and so we have in
' The Task ' denunciations of chess and abuse of
historians and astronomers in the manner of the
' Moral Essays ; ' but what distinguishes ' The Task '
from the ' Moral Essays ' is that we also get, for the
first time in English literature, a quite unconventional
delight in country life for its own sake, and an admir-
able reproduction of its familiar scenes. This made
the success of the poem at the time, and has since
kept for it a high place in the affections of those who
care for poetry at all. One epithet will suffice to
show the new spirit of close observation that Cowper
brought to his work :

Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern'd
The cheerful haunts of man, to wield the axe
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear.
Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail cropp'd short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk
Wide-scampering snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout ;
Then shakes his powdered coat and barks for joy.
Heedless of all his pranks the sturdy churl
Moves right towards his mark.

The success of Cowper's second volume had a good
effect upon his spirits; it also put him on more
comfortable terms with his friends and kinsmen, who
began to consider it an honour, instead of a nuisance,
to subscribe for his maintenance. Even the Lord
Chancellor's memory of him awoke. The poet began

234 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

also to experience some of the inconveniences of
greatness. Disciples came to visit him ; poetasters
sent him their manuscripts to correct ; he was urged
to sit for his portrait. The Clerk of All Saints,
Northampton, came over to ask him to write the
verses annually appended to the Bill of Mortality for
that parish ; and, with remarkable good nature,
Cowper supplied them for seven years. The story
of the interview is given with Cowper's inimitable
lightness of touch in a letter to his cousin :

On Monday morning last, Sam brought me word that there
was a man in the kitchen who desired to speak with me. I
ordered him in. A plain, decent, elderly figure made its appear-
ance, and being desired to sit, spoke as follows : ' Sir, I am the
clerk of the parish of All Saints in Northampton, brother of Mr.
Cox, the upholsterer. It is customary for the person in my
office to annex to a bill of mortality, which he publishes at
Christmas, a copy of verses. You will do me a great favour, sir, if
you will furnish me with one.' To this I replied, ' Mr. Cox, you
have several men of genius in your town, why have you not
applied to some of them ? There is a namesake of yours in
particular, Cox, the statuary, who, everybody knows, is a first-
rate maker of verses. He, surely, is the man of all the world
for your purpose.' ' Alas ! sir, I have heretofore borrowed help
from him, but he is a gentleman of so much reading that the
gentlemen of our town cannot understand him.' I confess to
you, my dear, I felt all the force of the compliment implied in
this speech. The waggon has accordingly gone this day to
Northampton loaded, in part, with my effusions in the mortuary
style. A fig for poets who write epitaphs upon individuals ! i
have written one that serves for two hundred persons.

'The Task' was published in 1785, when Cowper
was 31, three years after his former volume. But

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 235

already the second Muse had flown. It is idle to
conjecture the reason if it be not reason enough that
this very intellectual and sympathetic and volatile
lady had exhausted in two years the excitement of
the Olney household. To speak of jealousy between
the sister Muses is unnecessary and has been called
vulgar. Her place was taken by Cowper's cousin,
Lady Hesketh, who, now that Cowper's proselytising
zeal had somewhat worn off, began to pay him an
annual visit. By her care the poet and his friend
were induced to remove from Olney, which had no
salubrity to recommend it, to Weston Underwood,
where the Squire, a Mr. Throckmorton, was already
a friend of theirs. At Weston we have a curious
irruption of the Rev. Mr. Newton. Lady Hesketh
used to bring her carriage with her on her visits, and
drove her cousin and Mrs. Unwin about the country-
side ; whereupon some of the Saints informed their
old director that our friends were becoming worldly.
Newton's rebuke has not been preserved, but we have
Cowper's reply, a sufficiently spirited and dignified
remonstrance. Those who do not know the more
than inquisitorial powers arrogated to themselves by
the leaders of this party in its palmy days will find it
hard to believe that Cowper had already been called
upon by Mr. Newton to defend his removal from
Olney. The various letters will be found in Southey's
second volume. Once later Newton attempted inter-
ference, when, after an attack of madness of 1787,

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Cowper took up his translation of Homer as a mental
anodyne. What had a Christian to do with a pagan
poet ? Cowper, however, had the sense and courage
to follow his own instinct in this matter. The
'Homer' was published in 1791 ; and in that year
Mrs. Unwin had a stroke of paralysis, and unhappily
her mind decayed before her body. ' She who had
been so devoted became, as her mind failed, more
exacting, and instead of supporting her partner drew
him down.' He fell again into hypochondria, sitting
for a whole week silent and motionless. The story
of his release from this apathy is singularly touching.
The physician saw that no one but Mrs. Unwin could
rouse him ; and the problem was how to induce her
to do so. At last they prevailed with her to say it
was a fine morning and she should like a walk.
Cowper at once rose and placed her arm in his.

It would be a sad task to follow closely the details
of these last years. Lady Hesketh broke down in
health, and could not pay her accustomed visits ; but
Cowper found a new and true friend in the poet
Hayley. Hayley tried all possible expedients to
rouse Cowper, even to procuring from distinguished
people in town a round-robin expressing their sense
of his great services to the nation ; and he induced
the poor invalids to pay him a visit in Sussex, hoping
to benefit them by change of scene. Both, however,
had sunk too far. Finally the household was moved
to Norfolk ; but though the sound of the sea was for

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 237

a time found soothing, the good effects were not
maintained. Mrs. Unwin died in 1796 ; Cowper sur-
vived her by three years. His last poem, ' The Cast-
away,' founded upon an incident in Anson's 'Voyages,'
is, when its meaning is realised, the most terrible of
English lyrics :

No voice divine the storm allay'd,

No light propitious shone,
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,

We perish'd, each alone :
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

The only consolation one has in thinking of
Cowper's long misery is that a madman cannot feel
about things in the same way as a man in his senses.
Words and ideas must have a different value to him.
It would be impossible, for example, for a sane man
who believed himself condemned to everlasting tor-
ment to pass from that topic, as he does in letters
to Newton, to quite unimportant trifles, and to seek
distraction from the thought in carpentering and paint-
ing in water-colours.

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XIV.

PEREGRINATIO RELIGIONIS ERGO.
Sir Topas, Sir Lancelot.

Top. Welcome, Lancelot, my knight tried and
trusty ; against what malignant dragon or foul fiend
have you been tilting since we last met ?

Lan. I have been on pilgrimage, my reverend
brother.

Top. On pilgrimage, say you ? I thought no knight
went now on pilgrimage, except in my Lord Mayor's
procession on the ninth of November. Have you
been celebrating the quingentenary of Chaucer's
death by a ride to Canterbury, following in the steps
of his ' parfit gentil ' knight. Or stay, you have not
surely joined Lady W 's cavaliers, and enrolled
yourself a new Wiclifite ? The old Wiclif was a
great pluralist, but he did not roam the country steal-
ing images.

Lan. Nay, friend, you do me injustice. I hope
I have too much religion to profane churches, and
too much charity to interfere uith another man's

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 239

devotion. My pilgrimage was out of curiosity, but
not without reverence.

Top. To what shrine, if I may ask ?

Lan. To more than one. I went first to the village

of Olney, where our beloved poet William Cowper

once dwelt ; afterwards I travelled to the tomb of a far

greater man, even to Stratford, where lies Shakespeare.

Top. And you are recompensed for the fatigue of

your journeys ? If I may be bold to put my thought

into words, there are times when I have seen you

merrier. But I am a bad traveller myself, and you

perhaps are not a good one.

Lan. Of fatigue I make no account, and the journey
was happily without collision, or indeed accident of
any sort. I found the shrines well cared for even,
if I dare say it, too well cared for ; but if you have
ever been on such a pilgrimage you will know that
the joy experienced at the shrine is apt to be turned
into disgust by the obtrusion of the relics, and still
more by the obtruders of the relics.

Top. Ah, my friend Lancelot, you are an English-
man, and have no true feeling for antiquity. The
English emancipation from the Roman yoke was
marked by a most barbarian destruction of interest-
ing memorials. No doubt cupidity helped, for most
relics had rich settings ; but the hatred of what was
ancient was the principal motive. You may have
remarked that no Englishman ever keeps a frippery ;
your old clothes man is ever a foreigner.

240 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Lan. I certainly think a man's clothes should be
burnt or buried with him. Why, because you are a
saint (as you are), should I kiss your old shoe, or,
because some one else is a poet, should I stare at his
silk stockings in a glass case ?

Top. The question, friend, is an old one, and there
is no answer to it. For the present, considering the
fall in tithes, my own old shoes (thank you) are too
precious to make relics of. But, tell me, did you not
once let me see your great-grandfather's coat which
he wore as an ensign at Waterloo ?

Lan. He was wounded in it, and the stain of the
blood still shows. I see your drift, and I would
enter, therefore, a distingue about relics, and main-
tain that none should be preserved, or at least
exhibited, which had not to do with the hero's pro-
fession.

Top. I thmk you are perhaps right. But what
offended you at Olney ?

Lan. The exhibition is new, and I forbear to criti-
cise. I doubt not that, as relics accumulate, the more
worthless articles will be discarded. But one thing
there, I confess, roused my ire. I need not tell you
that in all religions the house of the saint or hero
is a relic beyond price. Even our municipal bodies
are alive to this, and do not pull down churches or
dwelling houses that are in this way sacred, unless
the London merchants are extraordinarily insistent.
Judge, then, of my horror when I found that the

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 241

renowned summer-house had vanished from Cowper's
garden.

Top. But such levitation is a most usual pheno-
menon with sacred cottages. They have a way of
being transported, it is said by angels, to where they
are most appreciated. This summer-house, I do not
for a moment doubt, has crossed the Atlantic. Anne
Hatha way's cottage was just making up its mind to
depart, when pressure was put upon it to remain
where it was. You will recall the lines of George
Herbert :

Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.

Relics are flying thither at a great pace, especially
copies of Shakespeare's works in the first folio
edition.

Lan. The summer-house, I am glad to be able to
tell you, had not (when I was there) left Olney, nor
were angels concerned in removing it. It had been
bought by a neighbouring butcher, and placed in his
own yard.

Top. For his own use, or for adoration ?

Lan. I cannot say. I was too angry to inquire ;
and a religious scruple prevented my setting foot
upon his premises.

Top. Is there no chance that it may, at some future
time, be given back or redeemed ? Now that so
much of our English meat comes to us from Australia
and New Zealand, butchers have little need to be

242 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

slaughtermen, and in process of time we may look to
see the growth in them of the finer feelings. But,
tell me, did the relics at Stratford arouse an equal
disgust?

Lan. A greater, since it is notorious they are all
false all, I mean, that have to do with the poet him-
self, except the legal documents. There are boxes
made from the mulberry-tree that once grew in his
garden, and some of these may be genuine ; but, even
so, they are of small interest. Much is made of a
gold ring on which are the letters W and S joined by
a true-love knot the common seal, no doubt, of some
loving couple, as we see the letters H and M joined
on the seal of Darnley and Mary Stuart ; but why
should William display so much affection for Shake-
speare ? I noticed also a tooth of Elephas primigenins ;
but this, though probably genuine, was hardly a relic
of the poet.

Top. You are bitten, I see, by the scepticism of the
age. Did you suggest any of your doubts to the
custodian ?

Lan. I had no opportunity. The room was full of
American pilgrims greedy of the marvellous, and also
in a hurry to catch their trains. The custodian in
each room indicated a few of the more surprising
objects with a wand, and then the room was cleared
for the next party. I did believe, however, as I stood
and gazed at the empty chamber shown me as Shake-
speare's birthplace, that I had at last touched reality ;

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 243

but I have since learnt that the poet's most recent
biographer, Dr. Sidney Lee, insists that there is no
evidence to show that the poet's father was in posses-
sion of the house at the alleged date of the son's
birth.

Top. He does allow, then, your sceptical biographer,
that the poet was born, according to the proverb
poeta nascitur ?

Lan. Oh yes, and in the adjoining house, in what
is now the museum. I wish I had known that at the
time ; it would have distracted me from the sham
relics.

Top. You still bear them a grudge. But are you
not, forgive me, nursing some annoyance whose cause
you have not yet revealed? You are moved more
than I should have thought reasonable by what, after
all, is a very familiar exhibition of human let me
not say credulity, but optimism. Did the keepers
of the treasure make very frequent demands upon
your purse ? That always seems to me the intolerable
and sordid part of such pilgrimages. But that also
is human nature, and satirists have derided it from
the beginning. You remember that when Erasmus
went to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury
groats figure largely in his account of the proceedings.
Here is one place in Bailey's translation :

In the meantime the Shewer of the Relicks came to us, with-
out speaking a word, holding out such a Kind of Table as they
in Germany that take toll on the Bridges hold out to you ;

244 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

and so forth. And you remember how on Chaucer's
pilgrimage the Host loses his temper and becomes
contemptuous of the Pardoner's relics as soon as the
Pardoner passes round the hat :

Come forth, sir Host, and offer first anon,
And thou shall kiss my relikes everychon
Yea, for a groat ! Unbuckle anon thy purse.

Lan. No, friend, do me no such injustice. The
fees were small: two sixpences covered the whole
charge, and I believe the money, which must amount
to a large sum in the course of the year I was told
that 16,000 pilgrims had offered since April i is
wisely expended. But I had, I own, some deeper
chagrin, which, nevertheless, I hesitate to expose to
one of your order.

Top. You must expose it if I am to know, for I am
ill at guessing riddles, and now I am curious. It
cannot be that the antiquaries have discovered Shake-
speare to have been a dissenter !

Lan. No, no ! they have discovered nothing, trust
them. No, my annoyance was caused by the exaction
of a fee at the church door not a large fee, but a
fee ; and though I hope I am not illiberal when the
alms basin is passed round within a church, I must
confess I bitterly resent being charged for admission
into one.

Top. You have much surprised me. When a friend
of mine, a brother cleric, presented himself there
recently, he was asked but for his visiting-card.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 245

Lan. You add fuel to my indignation.

Top. Nay ! let me not do so ; the clergy are poor,
and it was a kind thought to relieve them of the
imposition, however small.

Lan. Have the clergy more right than the laity to
an entrance into parish churches I do not speak of
the chancel, but the nave ?

Top. Nay, let us not take sides in that ancient and
inextinguishable feud between the two orders. But
tell me, was any authority alleged for the demand ?
the bishop's or the archdeacon's ? I am no lawyer,
but the charge does not strike me as a legal one.
Whether it may not be justified in the special case is
another matter. The people from whom it is exacted
do not come to the church as to a church, but as to a
museum.

Lan. That, surely, is a quibble.

Top. Surely not. They are concerned only with
the fact that Shakespeare lies there ; the proposal
has even been made to discontinue Divine Service in
the Chancel (in which Shakespeare, being lay-rector,
was buried) and treat it as a national gallery for
memorials of Shakespearian commentators, biogra-
phers, and actors. If visitors think of the building
as a church at all, it is only as a place where Shake-
speare said his prayers, in the Clopton pew, three
hundred years ago.

Lan. But it is a church all the same, and I am not
reconciled to paying for admission because the young

2|6 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

man who takes my money at the door wears a cassock.
Besides, if the fashion is once started it will spread. 1

Top. Did you gather what use was made of the
money thus raised ?

Lan. I am told it goes to pay for the restoration of
the fabric.

Top. Pace the Anti-Scrape Society, a worthy
object ; and, considering the difficulty there is in
raising money for such objects, cne can hardly blame
the vicar for damming up the Pactolus flowing by his
porch. It is a curious question, brother Lancelot,
why that legend 'Admission Sixpence' is sometimes
so irritating as it is. I am not speaking of churls, or
the Scotsman of story, but of you and me. If I pay
sixpence for a cigar or an ounce of tobacco, I have
no inimical feelings towards the shopman who serves
me ; but if I am asked sixpence to view somebody's
monument I fall into extreme dejection. About the
fact there can be no two opinions ; literature recog-
nises it again and again. It was a commonplace, for
example, last century, and down to the ' Ingoldsby
Legends,' to anathematise the poor custodian of the
chapels in Westminster Abbey. Goldsmith, in his
' Citizen of the World/ has two pages of eloquence
about him ' I asked the man whether the people of
England kept a show, whether the paltry sum he
demanded was not a national reproach ? Whether it

1 Sir Lancelot has proved a true prophet. The charge has been
adopted at Ewelme, in Oxfordshire.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 247

was not more to the honour of the country to let
their magnificence or their antiquities be openly seen,
than thus meanly to tax a curiosity which tended to
show our honour ? ' and so on. An obvious ex-
planation of the matter would be that English people
do not really value aesthetic pleasures, and only pay
for them without grumbling when, like the Royal
Academy's exhibition, they are fashionable. But I
do not think this is the whole explanation. A deeper
fact is that a man's mercenary instincts are the reverse
of altruistic, and it is only when the question of the
other person's advantage is not raised that he can
pay him his sixpence with any equanimity. In buy-
ing tobacco the question of the seller's advantage
does not come up : I do not think of him as profiting
by my loss; rather I think of him as doing me a
service. But when a man asks me for sixpence to
see a show, unless my interest is unusually keen, I
follow that sixpence in imagination from my pocket
to his, and grudge it ; yes, brother Lancelot, grudge
it especially if it be a cassock pocket.

Lan. Well, well, perhaps enough has been said
about sixpence. After all, I saw the great sights
the monument of the poet on the chancel wall,
and, more wonderful still, his tomb below, with the
quatrain forbidding his exhumation ; an inscription
which has availed even in this nineteenth century to
rebuke the curiosity of men and keep his bones
inviolate.

248 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

XV.

THE BLACK BOOKS OF LINCOLN'S INN.

ONE need not be a member of this famous Inn of
Court, or a lawyer at all, or even an historian or
antiquary to feel gratitude to the Honourable Society
for allowing the publication of its records. One
has only to cherish an interest in one's fellow man
to find something fascinating in every page of the
farrago. The records in the three volumes already
printed run from 1422 to 1775. In those three
centuries and a half the greatest changes pass over the
English constitution, both in Church and State, and
there are slight indications now and then that the
changes are realised within the Society ; but for the
most part the life of the Society goes on and takes
its own course untroubled by dynastic revolutions.
Only once or twice when the Keeper of the Black
Book happens to fancy himself as a writer is any
notice taken of events outside the domestic life of the
Inn. The first of such excursions is in 1542, when
Mr. Atkyns gives an account of the Duke of Norfolk's
raid into Scotland, because a certain ' S r Robert

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 249

Bowes, Knyght, felowe of this Hous ' was taken
prisoner ; but this venture into the field of history seems
to have interfered with Mr. Atkyns's discharge of his
proper duties, for he was fined los. the next year for
neglecting to enter the Pensioner's, Treasurer's and
Steward's Accounts. In 1543 there is an elaborate
and belated history of the ' Seidge of Bullan ' ; per-
haps entered here because the then keeper Mr.
Morgan had been himself present at the siege, and
now at last had found his chance of recording his
impressions, for he concludes : ' There mought be
moche more landes and worthie things herin spoken
of the Kinges grace than any wyt of my pen can set
forth ; for, as I there hard say, he sayde hymself he
wolde never depart thens tyll the towne were goten.'
Mr. Towneshend in 1547 betters both these pre-
cedents by an account, covering six folio pages, of
the doings at the Coronation qf Edward II., includ-
ing a great dinner to the judges at Lincoln's Inn,
which is characterised as ' not Epicuryous nor verray
sumptuous, but yet moderatly, discreetly and suffi-
ciently ordred.' His account closes with what the
margin calls 'a Godly and good prayer' for long
life and various blessings (notably ' an uniformyte in
all Godlynes ') to ' the moste woorthy and indolent
Prynce and Kyng, o r naturall and most dradde
sovereigne lorde.' With Mr. Towneshend the passion
to turn chronicler seems to have expired, and in
future great historical events are only referred to as

250 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

they affect the Society. The Armada is inferred in
the entry of a payment of 3/. 1 1 s. for a quarter of the
charges for the rails and cloth for a stand for
members of the Inns of Court when the Queen went
to hear a sermon at St. Paul's. The Civil War is
indicated by a two years' lacuna, and then by various
memoranda about the debts of the House, and the
selling of plate. The Restoration is subtly expressed
by the addition of ' 12 Charles II ' to tfre date of the
first council meeting in May 1660; and in a more
commonplace way by an order for the expulsion
of the regicides Millington, Corbet, Love, and Gar-
land ; and perhaps by the following mysterious order :
'that Oliver St. John, Esq., be desired to take downe
his staircase into the garden, and to walle up his back
doore into Chancery Lane.'

Materials for biography, it need hardly be said, lie
thickly strewn throughout these records, and even
when the details are too trivial for the biographer,
they are interesting to the student of human nature.
Most of us think, for example, of the great Speaker
Lenthall with something that approaches awe. What
a humanising touch is found in the entry under date
May 25, 1641, 'Three dripping panns lent to Mr.
Speaker, and one old one.' If the books of the
hospitable Society are to be trusted, the pans were
never returned, not even the old one. Then again
the believer in the persistence of family qualities finds
here an excellent opportunity of testing his theories.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2$ I

He finds, for example, in the index the great name
of Darwin, and turns up the reference to find he has
unearthed the great grandfather of the naturalist.
Is there, he cries, any indication of interest in the
emotions of men or animals ? Here is the passage :

On May nth, 1719, complaint was made at the Council that
Robert Darwin, Esq., a Barrister of the Society, did bring a
dog into the Hall at dinner time, tho' informed of the order
[against it] which was screened for the better publication. And
the Porter offering to put the said Order in execution, and to
turne his dog out of the Hall, the said M r . Darwin did offer to
fling a pot at the Porter's head, and threatened to knock him
downe ; whereby the said Porter was intimidated.'

surely a most interesting and successful experiment
upon the passions by this Mr. Darwin, foreshowing
his great descendant's achievement. For another
example the curious reader may consult the refer-
ences to Winston Churchill in ii. 406 ff., which give
evidence of remarkable intrepidity in the face of
danger ; and to Thomas Huxley, in ii. 263, who
seems to have had as incisive a method of arguing as
his distinguished namesake this century.

Again, the reader who is learned in architecture
will find much to interest him in the gradual growth
of the Society's buildings, in the laying out of the
walks, in the building of the new chapel from designs
by Mr. 'Indigo' Jones, and its repair within half a
century by Mr. Christopher Wren, a member of the
House. The statistician will revel in the tables of
accounts, aud indeed everybody is statistician enough

252 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

to take a pleasure in the discovery that in 1508 a
hundred five penny nails cost fivepence. The Church
and State man will be delighted to notice how
punctually the Inn adapted itself to all changes in
religion : burning what it had adored, under Mary,
and again adoring what it had burnt, under Elizabeth.
And, of course, lawyers will find abundant gratifi-
cation in tracing out the slow evolution of their
present privileges and customs. But to the general
reader the disciplinary entries are likely to be the
most entertaining. They show, what does not, of
course, need showing, but what is nevertheless always
interesting to have shown, that our national charac-
teristics have a way of persisting through a good
many centuries of change of dress. It is interesting,
for example, to look down a list of excuses for non-
attendance at lecture and hear in them the mild
expostulating voice of the undergraduate of to-day.
Here is a schedule belonging to 30 Henry vi. 1451-
52 in Mr. Baildon's translation from the original dog
latin ; the fine varies according to the number of law
lectures avoided :

Received from Thomas Swylyngton his fine because his
father was seriously ill, as he has sworn, reduced to 6s. %d.

Received from Holland his fine, in consideration that the
death of his mother was the cause of his absence, reduced to
13^. 4/f.

From Chesilden in consideration that he was much annoyed
by Dykby [male vexatus fuit per Dykby] reduced to 2cw.

From Soulby, in consideration that he was seriously put

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 253

out about his marriage, being almost married against his will
[graviter vexatus circa maritagium suum se invito fere maritar'J
reduced to 13-5-. \d.

One wonders if Soulby's wandering attention in
chapel had been arrested by the voice of the
Chaplain (or, as he was then called, the Rector) Sir
John, reading the famous list of excuses in the
parable, ' Uxorem duxi, et ideo non possum venire,'
and had extemporised the nearest possible equivalent,
uxorem fere duxi. Chesilden's excuse has a more
genuine sound, and it has much grim light thrown
upon it by many entries throughout these volumes.
The vexatious Digby probably did not restrict him-
self to sticking pins into his friend's hose at lecture,
but waited about for him afterwards with a dagger.
Here are a few representative passages :

Hilary Term 1465. Kenelm Digas [Is not this Digby in a
disguise, grown older but not wiser ? ] was put out of the Society,
because on the Sunday before Christmas day, he violently
drew his dagger in the Hall of the said Inn upon Denys, one of
the Fellows of the Inn.

Trinity Term 1467. One Robert Hillersden, with malice
aforethought, and incited thereto by Thomas Jenney, struck
Robert Stanshawe with a dagger seriously in several places, so
that he despaired of his life for a long time.

1526. Chalynor fined loj. and the doctor's bill for wounding
Stafferton junior in the Hall with his dagger.

1534. John Buttes fined los. and put out of commons
' bycause he made affray yn the Hall, and there smotte yonge
Gresham w' hys fyste and after that drewe hys dagger upon the
sayd Gresham.'

Other examples of similar violence were not with-
out extenuating circumstances. Mr. Harris in 1587

254 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

is fined 5 marks for 'shedinge of Blud w th in this
House upon a tayler.'

1483. Saxbi was put out of commons for assaulting the
under-cook. He paid a fine of 2O d . for his readmission.

1484. John Myners was put out of commons because he
violently took away the Steward's dagger, and gave him vile
words. Afterwards on his humble submission he was readmitted,
and paid zod.

1499. Foster, Conyers, and Thorneburgh le tierce were put
out of commons for an affray made upon William Cook in his
house about eleven o'clock at night, and for other injuries to the
said William in the kitchen and elsewhere.

1505. William Honychurch fined 2od. for breaking the door
of the kitchen, ex insolencia.

With Honychurch's attitude to the cook all right-
thinking men who have ever been at a university or
Inn of Court will feel some sympathy. But with the
next entry our sympathy must evaporate :

William Honychurch was put out of commons for drawing
his dagger on the chaplain of the Inn in Hall. Fined 3^. 4^.

Possibly the Chaplain had been trying to show
Honychurch that even cooks are human beings, and
should be treated with moderation. I suspect, how-
ever, that he had gone further and pointed out that a
man with a name so ecclesiastical and mellifluous
should abstain from brawls, and not speak evil of
dignities ; and no man can tolerate having his name
thrown up at him. Honychurch lived to be Treasurer
of his Inn, and had to sit in judgment upon a

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 255

similar offence eighteen years later. The record is in
English, and runs as follows :

1523. Master Hawles for his yel [ill] demeyner agenst Sir
Thomas Wythacre, Chappelen of the said plase, and for the
hurtyng of hym with his dagger, shall paie for his fyne to the
said Company xs., the wyche shalbe ordered by the said
Masters of the Benche as they shall thyncke best boith for the
payment of the Surgeyn for his labor in heylyng of the
Chaplyn, and also to the recompence of the said Chapplyn.

Here, too, there is just the chance that the church-
man was the aggressor, for an entry made at a
council held on the eve of St. George 1524 reads :

Item, that Docto r Whyteacres shall take no more meiles tyll
he have spoken with my Masters of the Benche.

Another somewhat trying officer of the Society
was the Fool. There is, one is glad to see, only
a single entry of an assault upon him :

1516. St. Martin's eve. Granted that ' Lobbe le Folet' may
have tunic, hose, and boots from the Treasurer.

Holies is warned to come to the next Council to answer for
wounding Lobbe.

On the whole it is the butler who comes in
for the greatest number of assaults, and after him
the steward :

1502. John Frendes was put out of commons for assault-
ing Hugh Vine, the butler, in the Hall, and drawing blood.
Fined is. 6d.

1509. Thomas Veer was put out of commons, and out of
the Society for an assault and affray on the Butler with his
dagger in the presence of divers Benchers ; he also used con-
tumelious words in the presence of the Governors sitting in
Hall. He was readmitted on payment of y. &,d.

256 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

1515. Nudegate was fined I2d. ' fore gevyng off one off the
buttelers a blow on the ere.'

1588. Thomas Ayloffe was fined 6 i$s. 4d. 'for that he
hath \v th in the House w th great violence assailed and beaten
John Hylyard, one of the butlers.'

1626. Mr. Thomas Huxley committed a fowle affray upon
the person of the Steward. Fined ^10.

1627. Mr. Thomas Sheppard 'fined 10 for his offence
in strikinge Kelwaye Guidot, y e cheife butler and breakinge of
his head.'

But of all such entries that with most style about
it occurs in 1598, when the Keeper of the Black
Book was a Mr. Anthony Death. He describes how
Mr. Henrye Colt ' with a revenge extraordinarie in
most outrageous and violent manner in the Hall, before
the Benchers were risen from the table, did strike
the Steward with a cudgell or bastinado upon the
heade, givinge unto him a most dangerous blowe,
almost to the perill of his life, so that great effusion
of blood followed thereupon, to the great amaze
of the Benchers and others of the Society of the
House.'

The reason for this unpopularity of the Butlers
is not far to seek. To begin with, the Butler was
the official who presided over the Buttery, and
barristers are the last people in the world to be
content with inferior ale in order that the Butler
may amass large profits. Here is a significant
entry, under date February 9, 1519 :

Smyth the buttler for his monyfold mysdemeanours, that is
to sey, in delyveryng of ale out of the buttry in barelles and

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 257

di-barelles, willfull wast makying in the buttry, negligent kepying
of the buttry boke, excessyve espences of chese and candyll,
pleying at cardes in the buttry, and other his wilfull defaultes,
shalbe discharged of his office on Saturday next, at dynar, w'out
ferther delay,

In addition to the more legitimate duties of their
office, the Butlers were also called upon to keep
order in Hall, and to keep order amongst a party of
young gentlemen armed with daggers is a parlous
and thankless task :

June 30, 1523. The Butlers are to see that no Fellow, except
a Bencher, enters into the Buttery, 'apon payne of the olde
ruelles for that made ' ; and the Butler also to be punished.

Item, that the Stuarde and buttelers doo geve knowlyge
to the Ruellers of this Company for the tyme, and shevve the
names of those that shall speke lowde and hygh at meyle
tyme in the Hall, and that the buttelers and Stuarde for the
tyme beying shall cause those persons J;hat soo shall speke hygh
to sesse their hygh speiche.

The Butler, it would seem, was held responsible
both for the quantity of wine drunk at the revels
and for the consequences of the excess :

Feb. 1517. Cholmeley, the late butler, was amerced icxr. for
excessive expenditure of wine last Christmas, and for exercising
bad government in the Inn at the said time in breaking the
doors of Chambers by reason of 'Jake Stray.'

A further reference to Jack Straw and his followers
will be found below.

In later years, after daggers were forbidden in
Hall, the students found the Inn pump a sufficient
means of cooling the enthusiasm of too energetic

258 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

officers of the Society. On one occasion they
' pumped ' a messenger from Archbishop Laud, who
was not the man to pocket the affront. The follow-
ing entry shows an unusual combination of sport with
gambling :

1468. Cornwaleis and J. Ingoldesby went by night and
played at dice, and stole the rabbits of the society ; and while
Cornwaleis, Ingoldesby, and Temperley were chasing the
rabbits, Temperley was robbed by strangers, as it was said
with the consent of Ingoldesby ; which appeared to be so upon
examination.

The rabbits inhabited a place called the Coney-
garth at the south-west corner of the Inn property,
and they are the subject in early days of a good
deal of protective legislation :

1479. Allowed 5-r. to the dwellers at the Bell in Fleet S' for
damages done to their meadows by the rabbits.

1484. Newdegate, Tropnell, Hampden, and Aylof were put
out of commons for hunting rabbits, and fined for readmission,
the first two 3-y. 4^., the latter zod. each.

1496. Arundell le tiers and Knevet junior were put out of
commons for the same ; and it was ordered by the Governors
that if any of the Society shall hunt or kill any coney within the
Conyeyardhe shall forfeit 2os. No one shall carry his bow bent
there under a penalty of $s. $d. for each offence.

1 532. None of the Companye shall bere hys bow bent
withyn the Cony yard, nor hunt nor kyll the conys, upon payn
of xl</.

1546. A generall warning to be gevyn to the Company y' yei
do no more shute in any gonnys, and yf any after shute in any
gonne within the precynct of the same House, to forfeit for
everye shute vjs. vv.]d.

At last in 1572 comes the decision: 'It shall be

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 259

lavvfull from henceforth for any man to destroye the
conyes,' and two conies a mess were allowed ' for
ever thereafter ' on the hunting night. 1

It will be remembered that Robert Shallow,
Esquire, when he was of Clement's Inn, was called
' Mad Shallow,' and along with those notable swinge-
bucklers, 'John Doit of Staffordshire, and black
George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will
Squele, a Cotswold man,' spent many mad days and
nights there. There seem from the Black Book to
have been a good many gentlemen of this kidney
about that date at Lincoln's Inn also.

1505. June 27. Mattok, Hubbert the fourth, Froxmer,
Pledell, Brennyng, Studville, and Norres were put out of
commons for watching with swords and clubs in the middle
of the night, and having a strife and affray with the Society of
Gray's Inn, in scandal of this Society.

1506. Miles Hubbert fined $s. 4</. for breaking the door of
the 'White Hert in Holburne' at night, and beating the house-
wife of the same, to the scandal of the Society.

1520. The following gentlemen were fined for a doe seized
and taken away at the Gate of Lincoln's Inn from a certain poor
man who was coming to speak with Danastre, and who left his
horse standing at the Gate, bearing the said doe : Master
Curzon, y. \d. ; M. Tounesend, 2od. ; M. Burgh, 3*. ^d. ;
M. Lane, -zod. ; M. Smyth, 2od. ; M. See, 2O,/. ; M. Menell,
20^. M. Talbot, iod. Of these sums 14^. was given to
M. Sulyard for the building of the New Gate ; the rest was
given to the poor man in satisfaction for his doe.

1526. Mr. Styell to pay 3-r. ,d. for dycying and cardyng, and

1 The 'hunting-night' was abolished in 1590 on account of some
great disorder. It is vaguely described as consisting of ' sportinges,
late suppinges, late vvatcheinges, and exercises.' Probably some poor
beast was let loose in the hall and hunted.

26O CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

3-y. 4//. for the mantyneng and procuryng of homes to be blawyn
abowte the said place in lammas vacacion laste in disturbyng
of lernyng there, and zos. for a saute and affrey w* a drawyn
swerde upon Mr. Fermore w'oute Lincoln's Inne Gaite.

1546. South, Harryngton, and Elsyngton put out of com-
mons at supper ' for making a frey uppon Ranwyk at the Gate,
and hurlyng butter abowght the House and att the seid
Ranwyke's heade.'

The tricks played within the House itself are very
like those of the modern undergraduate ; but the
notice taken of them strikes one now as a little dis-
proportionate. A certain ' bill of pasquillus ageynst
the benchers ' having been set up in hall, the
following elaborate interrogatories were drawn up by
the Bench to be put to certain suspected persons.

Fyrst, where were yow on Sonday at nyght laste paste,
between ix of the clock and oone of the clocke the same nyghte,
and yn what company were yow yn ?

Item, whatt houre yow went to bedde the same nyghte, where
leye yow, and w* whome, and whatt tyme dyd yow ryse yn the
mornyng ?

Item, whether dyd yow make, wryghte, or sette uppe any
scrowl yn wryghting att the hyghe dais of the Hall of thys
House the same nyght or the next mornyng?

Item, werre you privey, consentyng, or knowing of the
making or wryghtyng of the seid scrowl, or settyng uppe
the same ?

Item, have yow not herd by report whatt person or persons
dyd make or sett uppe the seid scrowl ?

The last item is not playing the game fairly, and
one is glad to observe that there is no record of the
interrogatories being successful in discovering the

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 261

author of the libellous document. Of minor offences
the following may serve as types :

1496 Carminowe fined 3^-. \d. 'quia cepit unam picam [Aug.
pie] de quynces extra clebanum in coquina.'

1506 Parker fined \2d. for throwing wisps \i.e. rushes from
the floor] in Hall during drinking time. Norwich \2d. for the
same offence [' quia jactavit wippis's.'J

1527 Fermor, Dysney and Woodhouse were fined los. each
'bycause they brake the Larderhouse, and took from thens
a swan and a buk in Lammas vacation last.'

1530 'M d that the wyndowe of the buttery was brokyn,
wherby certeyn personz of the Company unknowyn entered in
to the seid butterey, and brake the seler dore, and lett out the
wyne and spoylled and spylt ytt in the flore.' Agreed ' that all
the hoole companye shalbe sworne uppon the Evangeliste to
tell what they knowe concernyng that acte.'

1550 Southwell and Walpole each paid 2s. for entering the
kitchen and taking a piece of beef from the cook.

The most curious entry in regard to Commons is this,
in the year 1502.

Agreed by the Benchers that if anyone of the Society shall
hereafter cut cheese immoderately [immensurabiliter] at the
time of dinner or supper, he shall pay 4^. for each offence.

What is an immensurable helping of cheese for
a barrister? In regard to behaviour at lecture we
have the following memorandum in 1524.

M d to call the company and exhort them to leave knocking
on the pots and making noise in Hall and not to inquiet Mr.
Reader in his study.

In 1493 we have a mysterious story that might
supply matter for speculation in filling up the missing
links to people who like such enigmas :

262 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

William Aylof and Percival Lampton were put out of
commons for not assisting Humfrey Siggewyk and other utter-
barristers to correct and punish an assault and affray made by
Newenham junior on Walter Hobert. They were re-admitted
on the following conditions : that Willian Aylof should stop
up and sufficiently build up with stone and lime, before the
end of term, a certain door opening into the garden of the Inn,
and that he should not' in future go to the house of Margaret
Halle in Melbourne, but should altogether refrain from going
there ; provided that if he should marry, that then he might
pull down the said wall if he should wish to do so, and re-open
the said door ; and that Percival Lampton should pay such fine
as the Society should thereafter assess.

The general peace that prevailed within the walls
of the Inn was due in great measure to the refusal
of the Bench to admit Irishmen. In 1437 ^ was
ordered that none should be admitted, and any
admitted should be expelled. In 1452 one Blonket
from Ireland was admitted on the ground of his
having brought many members to the Society ; and
Bathe was admitted in 1455. But in 1512 we find
the order repeated refusing Irishmen admission
except at the instance of a Bencher, in which case
they were not to sit in hall with the other students,
but with the masters. In 1553 there is an entry of
lod. for a lock and staples to shut the door of the
' Irysshemen.'

The regulations concerning dress are fairly nume-
rous. In 1505 there is a resolution of the Bench
that anyone at the Clerk's Commons shall be deco-
rously clad and not with his shirt in facie popiili
ultra diploidem, i.e. sticking out in public view beyond

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 263

his doublet. And in 1555 Mr. Wyde is fined 2od.
for ' his goyng in his study gowne in Chepsyde on
a Sunday about X of the clock before none, and in
Westminster Hall in the terme tyme in the fore
none.' But as a rule the resolutions are against too
much rather than too little dress. ' Cut or Ponsyd
[pounced] hosyn and bryches ' are forbidden in 1530.
In 1588 hats are forbidden in hall or chapel and
gowns are to be worn in London and Westminster.
In 1610 it is ordered 'by advice of all the Judges of
England that no Utter Barrister or yonge gent, of
the House shall go booted or with his rapyer under
his gowne in the House or City of London.' In
1635 Mr. Nichols a 'yonge gent.' came into the Hall
' in meale time in a scarlett or red coate ' and seems
to have struck the butler who ' admonished ' him,
and misdemeaned himself in a very disorderly
manner towards the Bar mess. He was fined 3/.
and made to apologise in Hall. Later the fine for
not wearing a gown in Hall was fixed at 8s. 6d,, and
it was explained that by a gown was meant ' a decent
gown,' not a piece of one. In 1542 began a long
warfare against beards. It was ordered then that
persons with beards should pay double commons.
This not being effective, it was ordered next that,
' no felowe of this House shall weare a berde uppon
paine of every man that shall do the contrary to be
putte out of commons, and to forfeit for every meal
that he or they having a berde shall take, xijV.'

264 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

This again not being sufficiently deterrent, we find
the following Draconian resolution :

Kingesmell, Kettyll, Middelton, Barrett, Lewes senior, Dow-
dall, Curtes, Lyon, Western junior, Kempe junior, Synnotte,
Howithe and Wutton senior shall eyther cause ther berdes to
be shaven, or els to lie no more in this House till they be
shaven ; and oneless they be shaven before Middsomer nexte,
then he or they then not being shaven to be banysshed the
House.

I have copied the list of names because they
deserve honour as martyrs in a lost cause. Lawyers
now are so proud of their professional tonsure that
they wish all other classes to be shaved, like the fox
in the fable. But the battle was not yet won.
Plainly there was room for some subtlety as to what
constituted a beard and what was merely an un-
shaven chin ; and so it was ruled ' that none under
the degre of a Knight ware any berde above iij
weakes gowinge uppon payne of x\s.' Later the
three weeks licence of fallow was reduced to a fort-
night.

Among the ancient customs which strike us
moderns almost into consternation are the elaborate
celebrations of the greater holidays by solemn revels.
At Christmas a number of functionaries were ap-
pointed King, Marshal, Master of the Revels, &c., and
these officers are entered on the annual lists along
with the treasurer, dean of chapel, &c. The marshal
was always a Bencher, and was ordered to wear a

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 265

certain red gown of office ' from the begynning of
dyner till they goo to soper, upon peyn for every
default vjs. viijW It lay with him ' to learn the
young gentlemen to do service,' the revels being
apparently not only elaborate but formal. Needless
to say that, as wine flowed freely on these occasions,
there were various unrehearsed interludes and often
considerable damage done to person and property,
and in 1519 it is ordained that 'Jack Strawe and all
his adherentes be from henceforth uttrely banyshed
and no more to be used in Lincolles Inne.' When-
ever the Benchers can find any excuse in the dearness
of provisions or the presence of the plague they make
an order that 'no solemn Christmas be kept this
year.' But the revels were too popular to be given
up ; and when they were held, attendance was
compulsory, as at a religious service. Thus one
year there is an order that the butler shall note ' whoe
faylyth at Revells that were at supper in the House,
and he that faylyth shall forfett n\}d. for every tyme.'
At the midsummer revels on St. John Baptist's Eve
in 1546 some students 'in the nyght tyme did take
dovvne the lyghte of Sainte John in the Hall, and
did hang in the stede thereof a horsehede, in dyspite
of the sainte, as yt cowde not by commen presump-
tion be otherwyse entendyd, to the very perilouse
ensample of other.' The culprits were committed to
the Fleet ; and afterwards pardoned, ' being verye
sorye and penytent for their said lewde and nowghtie

266 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

mysdemeanors.' In 1610 we have the following
curious minute : ' At this Counsell the Under Bar-
risters were by decimation put out of commons for
example sake, because the whole Barre offended
by not dauncing on Candlemas Day last, according
unto the auncient order of this Society, when the
Judges were presente ; w th this, that yf the like
fault be committed herehence they shalbe fined or
disbarred.' Nineteen years later we have this :
' Because weomen have of late resorted to our Revells,
w ch disorder the M rs of the Bench doe generally
dislike ; therefore for preventing the like disorder in
tyme to come, It is ordered that the stayre foote
doore leading up to the gallery, where they stoode,
bee from henceforth kept lockt every night of
Revells.' By 1649 the Puritans were strong enough
to put the Revels down, and Parliament made an
order to that effect. They revived with the Restora-
tion, and King Charles was more than once an
interested visitor, on one occasion knighting the
Master of the Revels. The programme for Charles's
first visit is in existence, and consists of a series of
twelve dances in character of various nations.

The good nature and benevolence of the Society to
their servants and tenants, as well as to the 'young
gentlemen,' receive emphatic and repeated illustration
in these pages. The fifteenth century chaplain is
allowed the rare 'luxury of a room with a fireplace,
and when he is caught playing cards there against

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 26/

the rule of the house, he is let off with the fine of a
i Ib. candle to burn before the image of the Virgin.
His wages, too, from generation to generation were
paid punctually every quarter day, and 'for a regard'
he was given every second year ' iiij yardes of brode
cloth to make hym a gowne for his lyverye.' We
read in 1605 that the wages of Gyles, one of the
turn-spits, are on his humble petition increased from
26s. 8d. to 4or. We read in 1591 that 'Richard
Lutwiche, sometyme the wasshepott, whoe by casuall
means ys become lame by the losse of his Legge
shalbe allowed his dyett w th the butlers.' On the
other hand, the proud and haughty steward may ask
year by year for his salary of 3/. 6s. 8d., but he is
met firmly by the rejoinder that there will be no
salary while his account is 'in apparels,' i.e. while
the balance is on the wrong side ; surely an excellent
system of dealing with public treasurers. Again, in
1727, we read that 'upon the complaint made by the
cook of the Society that the dish-washer doth not
come at proper times to do her business, and is very
sluttish, and altho' he has reprimanded her for it, yet
she still continues the same and gives him saucy
language ; and lately upon some difference between
her and the second cook, she threw a pott at his
head, and wounded him so that the surgeons could
hardly stop the blood and were afraid he would loose
his life, and is at present very ill 'the treasurer is
ordered to inquire into the matter. Five months

268 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

later five shillings is paid to ' W 1 " Redington, to
encourage him to burne the charm, and looking after
the people in the kitchen ' a mysterious entry upon
which the learned editor can throw no light.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 269

XVI.
THE POETRY OF CHAUCER.

ON October 25, just five centuries ago, died Geoffrey
Chaucer, the first English poet. This month [Oct.
1900] we shall all be making some effort to do honour
to his memory. Some of us may ride on horseback to
Canterbury along the pilgrims' way, through Dart-
ford and Rochester and Ospringe, changing for the
nonce our ordinary methods of locomotion, like
Chaucer's sailor, who

Rode upon a rouncy as he could.

Others of us, perhaps, performed the journey in 1885,
upon the quingentenary of the original pilgrimage,
and in April among the ' sweet showers,' and did not
find the experience so exhilarating that we wish as yet
to repeat it. For such, a four days' journey through
the publications of the Chaucer Society may be
recommended as an equivalent penance. Others
again care little for celebrations and pilgrimages, and
much for poetry; and they will probably turn to
Chaucer's own book either in the sumptuous edition

2/0 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

of Professor Skeat or the handy volume of Mr.
Pollard. It is with the object of winning, if I may,
some new readers for this great and lovable master
that I this month take up my pen. I shall say
nothing about his life ; the few facts are admirably
marshalled in Mr. Alfred Pollard's shilling primer.
Nor shall I say anything of rhyme-tests, and all
the many interesting questions discussed among the
learned. I address myself to the unlearned, to
the many readers of poetry who are rather shy of
Chaucer because of his queer spelling ; and I will
ask leave to put before them a few passages in the
ordinary spelling of to-day, so far as rhyme and
rhythm will allow ; treating Chaucer, in fact, as we
treat Shakespeare. If I could, I would persuade
them of the unique beauty of Chaucer's verse, of his
fine eye for colour, his excellent faculty of story-
telling, his keen and tolerant reading of human
character, his winning pathos, his lambent humour.
In order to do this, or something of this, I will leave
aside altogether the earlier poems, which perhaps
require for their enjoyment some special sympathy
with mediaeval conventions, and speak only of the
Canterbury Tales.

Our generation has been eminently fortunate, not
only in the number and excellence of its own poetical
writers, but in the growth of a spirit of critical
appreciation of the poets of other ages. When

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2/1

Goldsmith's Citizen of the World pays a visit to
Westminster Abbey he is shown in Poets' Corner
the monuments of Shakespeare, Milton, Prior, and
Drayton. 'Dray ton?' he replies; 'I never heard of
him before, but I have been told of one Pope ; is he
here ? ' Nowadays everybody knows at least two
poems by Drayton : his great sonnet, ' Since there's
no help, come let us kiss and part,' and his Ballad of
Agincourt ; and no one wishes to compensate this
knowledge by indifference to Pope's ' Rape of the
Lock ' or ' Essay on Man.' Chaucer, from the fact
that he stands at the head of our English writers, has
received in every age the respect due to antiquity,
but it is only in our own days, through the patient
labour of such scholars as Dr. Morris, Dr. Furnivall,
and Professor Skeat, that the secret of his verse has
been rediscovered, so that his poetry can be enjoyed
as well as praised. The secret was lost when inflec-
tions were lost, very soon after Chaucer's death, and
it has taken five hundred years to rediscover
it. Chaucer's most enthusiastic panegyrists in this
interval were Spenser and Dryden. Spenser speaks
of Chaucer in terms of the most respectful admiration ;
like Milton in ' L'Allegro,' he bewails the incomplete-
ness of the Squire's Tale, and vows to Chaucer's
' most sacred happy spirit ' that he can only venture
on telling the story of Canace,

through infusion sweet
Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive.

2/2 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

But when he imagines himself to be writing in
Chaucer's manner, the verse he turns out is of this
tumbling quality :

The sovereign of seas he blames in vain
That once sea-beat will to sea again ;
So loitring live you little herd-grooms,
Keeping your beasts in the budded brooms :
And when the shining sun laugheth once
You deemen the spring is come at once.
Then gin you, fond flies, the cold to scorn,
And crowing in pipes made of green corn,
You thinken to be Lords of the year.
But eft, when ye count you freed from fear,
Comes the breme winter with chamfred brows
Full of wrinckles and frosty furrows,
Drearily shooting his stormy dart
Which cruddles the blood and pricks the heart :

a charming passage in itself, but of a movement
nowise like Chaucer's verse with four accents, as any
reader may see for himself by looking only at the
two or three lines from the ' House of Fame ' to
which Spenser here makes reference :

And many flute and lilting-horne

And pypes made of grene corne,

An han thise litel herde gromes

That kepen bestes in the bromes. (iii. 133.)

How Spenser read Chaucer's decasyllabics we can
only guess, but how Dryden read them we can see
from a quotation he makes in his fascinating Preface
to the ' Fables from Boccaccio and Chaucer,' l a book

1 This Preface may now be most conveniently read in Essays of John
Dryden, selected and edited by Professor Ker, our best living critic of
literature.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 273

in which he attempts for his own generation the same
impossible task of paraphrasing into the current
dialect that Home and Wordsworth attempted for
the generation preceding ours. I transcribe the
passage in his spelling :

But firste, I pray you, of your courtesy,
That ye ne arrete it not my villany
Though that I plainly speak in this mattere
To tellen you her words, and eke her chere :
Ne though I speak her words properly.
For this ye knowen as well as I,
Who shall tellen a tale after a man
He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can :
Or else he mote tellen his tale untrue
Or feine things or find words new.

The sixth line Dryden himself spoilt by writing as
for also to bring out the sense ; but the fifth and
tenth must have been hard nuts for him to crack. In
Chaucer's text they stand as follows, and, as we now
understand, must be read with the case-inflections
sounded, as they are marked :

Ne thogh I speke hir word^s proprely
and

Or feyn<? thing, or fynde word<?s newe.

The fourth line Dryden could not forbear amending,
as he transcribed it, by the insertion of ' eke ' to take
the place of the e in word<?s, which he read as mute.
It is extraordinary, considering the way in which
Dryden must have read the passage, that he should
have spoken as mildly as he does about Chaucer's

2/4 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

scansion ; he is only roused when the new school of
critics, who had begun to take an interest in Chaucer,
hinted that the fault lay in eighteenth-century ears :

The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us ; but
'tis like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was
auribus istius temporis accommodata : they who lived with him
and some time after him, thought it musical ; and it continues
so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of
Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries : there is the rude
sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing,
though not perfect. ; Tis true I cannot go so far as he who
published the last edition of him ; for he would make us believe
the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in
a verse where we find but nine ; but this opinion is not worth
confuting ; 'tis so gross and obvious an error, that common
sense (which is a rule in everything but matters of Faith and
Revelation) must convince the reader, that equality of numbers,
in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or
not always practised, in Chaucer's age. It were an easy matter
to produce some thousand of his verses, which are lame for want
of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pro-
nunciation can make otherwise. We can only say that he lived
in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to per-
fection at the first. We must be children before we grow men.
There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius, and a
Lucretius before Virgil and Horace ; even after Chaucer there
was a Spenser, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and
Denham were in being ; and our numbers were in their nonage
till these last appeared.

That we can now read Chaucer's verse with pleasure,
nay with delight, that we have discovered it to be as
learnedly written as Milton's, far more learnedly
written than either Waller's or Denham's, we owe to
our modern scholars, and we must acknowledge our
debt.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 275

The points in which the old critics were content to
praise Chaucer are worth noting. In the first place,
everybody recognised that he found English no
language at all, but a hotch-potch of homely dialects ;
and had left it a language capable of expressing any
thought or emotion that could be expressed in Latin
or French or Italian. Chaucer had demonstrated that
by his translations. The point on which they
especially loved to dwell was the tact with which he
had thus settled the vocabulary of the literary
language. The poet Deschamps calls him, with
what in a later day might have sounded like sarcasm,

Grand translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer.

The writer of a ballade in Caxton's ' Book of Courtesy '
makes use of the phrase ' well of eloquence,' which
Spenser afterwards borrowed in a famous passage of
the ' Faery Oueene ' (IV. ii. 32), and adds this fine
eulogy :

Whatever to say he took in his intent,
His language was so fair and pertinent
It seemed unto mannes hearing
Not only the word, but -verily the thing.

Praise of a writer's language could not go higher than
that. Lydgate and Hoccleve also celebrate him as
' loadstar of our language ' and ' flower of eloquence.'
But it was not until Dryden, who could not honestly
praise his manner, that we have any worthy apprecia-
tion of his matter. In the Preface to the Fables

2/6 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

already referred to Dryden has an elaborate com-
parison between Chaucer and Ovid, in the taste of
the day, which loved wrangling on the respective
merits of the ancients and moderns. Both of them-
he says, were well-bred, well-natured, amorous, and
libertine ; their studies were the same, philosophy
and philology ; both of them were knowing in
astronomy ; both wrote with wonderful facility and
clearness ; neither was a great inventor, but each
built on the inventions of other men, though Dryden
points out that the ' Cock and the Fox ' at least was
Chaucer's own ; both were excellent in description
of persons, but the figures of Chaucer are much more
lively ; to Chaucer also he awards the palm for pro-
priety of sentiments, for knowing what to say on
every occasion, and for knowing when to leave off.
He gives Chaucer the highest commendations that
the eighteenth century could bestow : ' He was
a perpetual fountain of good sense ; ' ' he followed
Nature everywhere.' As I have given the passage in
which Dryden speaks disrespectfully of Chaucer's
verse, let me put by it that in which he praises his
substance ; for the praise is admirable, and the prose
is Dryden's :

He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive
nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has
taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various
manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole
English nation, in his age. Not a single character has escaped
him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other ;

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2//

and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies
and persons. The matter and manner of their tales and of their
telling are so suited to their different educations, humours, and
callings, that each of them would be improper in any other
mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are distinguished
by their several sorts of gravity : their discourses are such as
belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding ; such as
are becoming of them and of them only. Some of his persons are
vicious and some virtuous ; some are unlearn'd, or (as Chaucer
calls them) lewd, and some are learn'd. Even the ribaldry of
the low characters is different: the Reeve, the Miller, and the
Cook, are several men, and distinguished from each other as
much as the mincing Lady Prioress and the broad-speaking,
gap-toothed Wife of Bath. But enough of this ; there is such
a variety of game springing up before me, that I am distracted
in my choice, and know not which to follow. 'Tis sufficient to
say, according to the proverb, that here is Gods plenty.

To turn, however, from Dryden's admirable preface
to the versions from Chaucer that follow is to receive
a rude shock. He tells in the Preface that some
antiquaries of his own day had objected to his
enterprise, but he replied to them that what he was
doing was not for his ' Saxon friends,' but for the
public 'who understand sense and poetry, when
poetry and sense is put into words which they under-
stand.' He speaks of his work as a ' transfusion ' or
' translation ; ' and modestly urges that if in some
places the beauty is lost ' by the innovation of words,'
some beauties may also be added to passages which
had them not originally. I go into this matter at
such length, because it is good for us to appreciate
the debt we owe to those critics who have taught us

2/8 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

the vast interval that really separates Chaucer's verse
from Dryden's once popular 'transfusion.' I have
among my books a copy of Dryden's Fables with
manuscript notes by Leigh Hunt. It is plain that
he began to read the book with the orthodox con-
viction of the day, that Dryden had done an invaluable
service to letters by polishing Chaucer's rough
diamonds ; for he explains at the beginning that an
asterisk is to mark the good passages. But again
and again the asterisk is supplemented by the note
' Word for word from the original,' and there are
many notes which at first hesitatingly and presently
with emphasis record the critic's growing conviction
that Chaucer has been badly served by his friend.
' Dryden has omitted here a very lively and character-
istic part of the picture.' ' These lines are a noble
specimen of increasing energy of " building the lofty
rhime : " but Dryden has omitted a fine finishing
touch of his rude original.' ' The original is much
more natural and pathetic ; ' ' Chaucer has a fine racy
line in this place ; ' ' Chaucer is more native and
striking in this passage.' 'This pleasant satire is
better and pithier in Chaucer.' At last we come to
the note : 'A pretty natural touch of Dryden's, quite
iv or thy of his original' ! There is a famous story of
a young enthusiast telling Mr. Ruskin of a visit he
had paid to Florence, and how he had seen at once
all that the Master had written of the merits of
Botticelli. To whom the master replied : 'At once?

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 279

It took me twenty years' hard study to discover
them.' We now can see at a glance the merit of
Chaucer's verse ; let us not forget the patient labour
of the critics who gave us our eyes. It may be
interesting to compare a passage of Dryden with his
original ; for that purpose we will take a very
beautiful and characteristic description of morning
in the ' Knight's Tale.'

The bisy larke, messager of day,
Salueth in her song the morrow gray ;
And fiery Phebus riseth up so bright
That all the orient laugheth of the light.
And with his streames drieth in the greves
The silver drope's hanging on the leaves.

In Dryden's 'transfusion ' this became :

The morning lark, the messenger of day,

Saluted in her song the morning gray ;

And soon the sun arose with beams so bright,

That all th' horizon laugh'd to see the joyous light ;

He, with his tepid rays, the rose renews,

And licks the drooping leaves and dries the dews.

The reader will not fail to note that all the spring
is taken out of the lines by Dryden's exchange of an
iambic for a trochaic movement, Chaucer having
thirteen trochaic disyllables in the six lines to
Dryden's six ; that all the freshness is taken from
them by the substitution of ' the sun ' for ' fiery
Phebus/ and ' the horizon ' for ' the orient ; ' 1 and that
all the poetry is gone when for the lovely picture
1 But this is from Dante, ' Faceva tutto rider 1'oriente.'

280 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

summoned up by Chaucer's last line we have nothing
but a coarse metaphor and a dull matter-of-fact
statement.

It may be worth while, as Chaucer has not yet
found an anthologist, to collect from his writings a
few passages remarkable for the beauty of their
expression. The difficulty of doing so arises from
the fact that Chaucer has no short lyrics of any
especial moment, and that he writes as a rule in so
free and copious a style, that a passage that can
stand alone and explain itself is apt to run to a good
many lines. His most splendid writing comes in his
long descriptive passages. Occasionally, however,
he introduces a vignette, such as the following from
' The Tale of the Man of Lawe,' which once read can
never be forgotten :

Have ye not seen sometime a pale face
Among a press, of him that hath been lad
Toward his death, whereas him gat no grace,
And such a colour in his face hath had,
Men mighte know his face that was bistad, 1
Amonges all the faces in that rout :
So stant Custance, and looketh her about.

or this from the ' Knight's Tale : '

Right as the hunter in the regne 2 of Thrace
That standeth at the gappe with a spear,
When hunted is the lion or the bear,
And heareth him come rushing in the greves
And breaketh bothe boughes and the leaves,
And think'th, ' Here com'th my mortal enemy,

1 Hard bestead. 2 Kingdom.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 28 1

Withoute fail, he moot be dead, or I ;
For either I moot sleen him at the gap,
Or he moot sleen me, if that me mishap : '
So fareden they, in changing of their hue.

or this from the ' Squire's Tale : '

Men loven of proper kind newfangelness,

As briddes do, that men in cages feed.

For though thou night and day take of them heed,

And straw their cage fair and soft as silk,

And give them sugar, honey, bread, and milk,

Yet right anon, as that his door is up,

He with his feet will spurn adown his cup

And to the wood he will, and wormes eat.

Sometimes, too, he breaks away in the midst of his
tale to address his readers ; and such passages being,
from the nature of the case, especially deeply felt,
have usually an especial charm or vigour of expres-
sion. An example occurs in the ' Clerk's Tale,' when
Chaucer comments on the fickleness of the crowd :

O stormy people ! unsad : and ever untrue !
Ay undiscreet, and changing as a vane,
Delighting ever in rumble 2 that is new,
For like the moon ay waxe ye and wane ;
Ay full of clapping, 3 dear enough a Jane 4 ;
Your doom is false, your Constance evil preveth, 6
A full great fool is he that on you leveth. 6

Another example is the address 'virginibus puer-
isque' in the concluding stanzas of 'Troilus and
Cressida : '

1 Unsettled. - Rumour. 3 Chatter.

J At a halfpenny. 5 Proveth. 6 Believeth.

282 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

younge, freshe, folkes, he or she,

In which ay love upgroweth with your age,

Repaireth 1 home fro worldly vanity !

And of your heart upcasteth the visage

To th' ilke God that after his image

You made ; and thinketh all n'is but a fair

This world, that passeth soon as floweres fair !

But even single lines suffice for the assay of
Chaucer's poetic metal. When we think of Dryden's
complacent patronage of his attempts at verse-
writing, and come upon such a magnificent line as
that which begins a paragraph in the ' Knight's
Tale'

In darkness and horrible' and strong prisoiin ;

or further on in the same Tale a line breathing the
very soul of desolation

What is this world ? what asketh men to have ?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Alone, withouten any company

we cannot but wonder at the blindness of our fore-
fathers. And the reader is always coming upon such
lines.

1 have not had no part of children twain
But first sickness, and after woe and pain,

says poor patient Grisilda to her insufferable lord and
master. What better praise of music could there be
than the simple line

That it is like an heaven for to hear ?
1 The reader will note that -eth is the ending of the imperative.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 283

or what deeper philosophy of love than
I can but love her best, my sweete foe ? '

or what happier description of joy than
As fain as fowl is of the brighte sun ?

or what sweeter invocation of summer than

Now welcome summer with thy sunne soft
That hath this winter's weather overshaken ?

Troilus, wandering through Troy and musing upon
the place where he had parted from Cressida, finds in
the wind there the sound of her sighing, and thus
reasons upon it :

And hardily this wind that more and more
Thus stoundemeal ' 2 increaseth in my face
Is of my lady's deepe sighes sore !
I prove it thus for in none other space
Of all this toun, save only in this place,
Feel I no wind that soitndeth so like pain :
It saith ' Alas, why twinned 3 be we twain ? '

As we are tasting Chaucer's virtue thus in single
lines, it may be well here to note how, despite the
smooth and large flow of most of his writing, he has
when he pleases the skill to cast a fact or a moral
sentence into a terse, telling phrase, that lives in the
memory. Several times in his Tales he interjects
the line,

For pity runneth soon in gentle heart.

1 This is the original of Sidney's 'That sweet enemy France.'

2 Momently. 3 Parted.

284 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

It would be impossible to put the fact that vulgar
people take a pleasure in attributing low motives for
conduct above their comprehension more concisely
than thus :

They deemen gladly to the badder end.

The Hawk who gave her heart to the Tercelet
expresses the extent of her devotion in this vigorous
image :

And shortly, so far forth this thing is went,
That my will was his wille's instrument.

And she casts her sorrow and disgust at her false
lover's empty protestation into the biting epigram :

What he answered it needeth not rehearse,
Who can say bet than he, who can do worse ?
When he hath all well said, then hath he done.

When Arcite is thrown from his horse and irrecover-
ably wounded, Chaucer, after showing for several
verses his learning in the medicine of the day, puts
the case into a couplet :

And certainly where Nature will not wirche, 1
Farewell, physic ! go bear the man to church.

And has not the whole mystery of cooking found its
fit metaphysical expression in this exclamation :

These cooke's how they stamp 2 and strain and grind
And turnen substance into accident ?

But it is time to give an example of what Chaucer
. larger scale.

Work. - Pound.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 285

The ' Knight's Tale,' as befits the subject, is full of
gorgeous colour, and splendid with pictures of chivalry
at its best and brightest. One knows not which to
admire more, the beaten gold of the story, or the
jewels that are set into it. For an example of the
former take the first sight of Emilye by Palamon.

Thus passeth year by year and day by day,
Till it fell ones, in a morrow of May,
That Emelye that fairer was to seen
Than is the lily upon his stalke green
And fresher than the May with floweres new
For with the rose colour strove her hew
I not 1 which was the fairer of them two
Ere it were day, as was her wont to do,
She was arisen, and all ready dight ;
For May will have no sluggardy anight.
The season pricketh every gentle heart,
And maketh him out of his sleep to start
And saith, ' Arise and do thine observance.'
This maked Emelye have remembrance
To do honour to May, and for to rise.
Yclothed was she fresh, for to devise ;
Her yellow hair was broided in a tress
Behind her back, a yarde long, I guess.
And in the garden, at the sun uprist,
She walketh up and down, and as her list
She gathereth floweres, party white and red,
To make a subtil 2 garland for her head,
And as an angel heavenly she song.
The greate tower, that was so thick and strong,
Which of the castle was the chief dungeoun
(Where as the knightes weren in prisoun,
Of which I tolde you, and tellen shall)
Was even joynant to the garden-wall,
Where as this Emelye had her playing.

1 Know not. - Fine wrought.

286 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Bright was the sun and clear that morrowning.

And Palamon, this woful prisoner,

As was his wont, by leave of his gaoler

Was risen and roamed in a chamber on high

In which he all the noble city seigh '

And eke the garden, full of branches green,

Where as this freshe Emelye the shene

Was in her walk, and roamed up and down.

This sorrowful prisoner, this Palamon,

Goeth in the chamber, roaming to and fro,

And to himself complaining of his woe ;

That he was born full oft he said ' alas ' !

And so befel, by ^venture or cas, 2

That through a window, thick of many a bar

Of iron great and square as any spar, 3

He cast his eyen upon Emelya

And therewithal he blenched, and crie"d ' a ' !

For the finest specimens of Chaucer's talent for
making pictures we must turn to the third part of the
' Knight's Tale,' in which he describes the "great
lists, a mile in circuit, which Theseus set up for the
tournament between the two lovers ; with their three
' oratories ' of Venus, Mars, and Diana. It will be
interesting to place side by side the passages about
the statue of Venus and the portraiture upon the wall
of the temple of Mars, for the utter contrast of their
styles.

The statue of Venus, glorious for to see,
Was naked, fleeting in the large sea,
And from the navel down all covered was
With waves, green and bright as any glass.
A citole in her right hand hadde she,
And on her head, full seemly for to see,

1 Saw. 2 Hap. Bolt.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 287

A rosy garland, fresh and well smelling ;
Above her head her doves flickering.
Before her stood her sone Citpido.
Upon his shoulders winges had he two ;
And blind he was as it is often seen ;
A bow he bare and arrows bright and keen

First, on the wall was painted a forest

In which there dwelleth neither man nor beast.

With knotty, knarry, barren trees old

Of stubbes sharp and hideous to behold,

In which there ran a rumble and a swough l

As though a storm should bresten every bough ;

And downward from an hill, under a bent,

There stood the temple of Mars armipotent

Wrought all of burnished steel, of which th' entree

Was long and strait and ghastly for to see ;

And there out came a rage and such a vese 2

That it made all the gates for to rese. 3

The northern light in at the doores shone,

For window on the wall ne was there none

Through which men mighten any light discern.

The doors were all of adamant eterne

Yclenched overthwart and endelong

With iron tough, and for to make it strong,

Every pilla'r, the temple to sustain,

Was tonne great, of iron bright and shene.

By these two let us put the jewelled picture of the
King of Ind :

The great Emetreus, the King of Ind,
Upon a steede bay, trapped in steel,
Covered in cloth of gold, diapred well,
Came riding like the god of armes, Mars.
His coat-armure was of cloth of Tars 4

1 A moaning and soughing wind. 2 Rush of wind,

3 Shake. 4 Chinese silk.

288 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Couched with pearles, white and round and great ;

His saddle was of burnt gold, new ybet ;

A mantelet upon his shoulder hanging,

Bret-ful 1 of rubies red, as fire sparkling ;

His crispe hair like ringes was yrun,

And that was yellow and glittered as the sun.

And as a lion he his looking cast.

So far we have been attending to Chaucer's skill in
expression ; his mastery of rhythm and metre, his
mastery over words, his skill in telling a story and
painting a picture. The passages quoted will illus-
trate what Matthew Arnold once spoke of as the
' lovely charm ' of Chaucer's ' divine liquidness of
diction, his divine fluidity of movement' It remains
to speak of what is more commonly recognised as
Chaucer's great poetic virtue, namely (to quote
Matthew Arnold again), his ' large, free, simple, clear,
yet kindly view of human life.' This comes out most
evidently in the great work of Chaucer's later life, the
' Prologue ' to The Canterbury Tales. Every one
who has read the ' Prologue,' and it is to be hoped
that their number is legion, will say as Dryden said :
' I can see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales,
their humours, their features, and the very dress, as
distinctly as if I had supped with them at the
" Tabard " in Southwark.' And not only can we see
them, we can see through them. Chaucer has given
us more than dress, features, and humours; with
these he has given us their characters, and almost

1 Brim-ful.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 289

always sympathetically. His method is, from the
circumstances, entirely different from Shakespeare's,
whom in his benignity and in his humour he not a
little resembles ; he cannot to any great extent put
his pilgrims before us and let them speak ; he has to
describe them ; and therefore there cannot fail to be
about the portraits a slight touch of caricature. But
it is of the slightest. The portrait is clearly recognis-
able as the portrait of a type, but it is none the less
individual. The most lively of them all is naturally
the one who is the most dramatised, the host, Harry
Bailly. Both in the ' Prologue ' and in the dramatic
passages connecting the several tales he figures as the
moving spirit, boisterous, self-confident, merry, with
a word and a jape for every one a carefully
graduated word and jape, however, as between gentle
and simple ; for he was not only ' bold in his speech '
but ' wise, and well y-taught.' Compare, for example,
his wheedling tone to the Prioress :

My lady Prioresse, by your leave,
So that I wist I shoulde you not grieve,
I woulde deemen that ye tellen should
A tale next, if so were that ye would :
Now will you vouchesafe, my lady dear ?

with the patronising air he adopts to the poor Clerk
of Oxford :

' Sir Clerk of Oxenford,' our hoste said,
' Ye ride as coy and still as doth a maid
Were newe spoused, sitting at the board ;
This day ne heard I of your tongue a word ; '

290 CONFERENCES ON B 30KS AND MEN.

or the rude way he breaks in when the Franklin is
complimenting the young Squire on his tale the
tale that was, alas ! left ' half-told.' His admonition
to the Parson expresses in a line the Englishman's
feeling about sermons :

' Be fructuous- and that in little space.'

What he said when the sermon was over is not
recorded ; we could not blame him if he were asleep.
Like most big men he was tender-hearted, and was
so much upset by the Doctor's Tale about Virginia
that he moralises on things in general for some thirty
lines.

By corpus bones ! but l I have triacle, 2
Or else a draught of moist and corny ale,
Or but l I hear anon a merry tale,
Mine heart is lost for pity of this maid.

Characteristically also, like publicans to-day, he is a
good Church and State man, with a horror of Dissent.
When the Parson reproves him for swearing, he
breaks out

' O Jankyn, be ye there ?
I smell a Loller in the wind,' quoth he.

One must not speak of the host without referring to
Mistress Bailly, of whom her husband gives a far
from pleasant sketch at the end of the 'Tale of
Melibeus.'

So much of the life Chaucer drew has passed

1 Unless. " Balm.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2QI

away that we cannot prove the verisimilitude of his
portraits by comparing them with their modern
representatives except in a few instances. The
professional manner of the lawyer is well caught in a
celebrated couplet :

Nowhere so busy a man as he there n'as,
And yet he seemed busier than he was.

Of the physician he notes his careful diet, his skill in
making a fortune, and his want of leisure or inclina-
tion for theology ; of the merchant, his admirable
bearing, which carefully concealed the state of his
fortunes at any moment. Some of the best portraits
are those of country folk : the Reeve, or Estate-
steward, who, while he satisfied the estate auditors,
managed to enrich himself so that he could lend his
master money, but who would let no one cheat his
master but himself; and the Country Justice, the St.
Julian of his countryside :

Withoute bake meat was never his house,
Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,
It snowed in his house of meat and drink.
Of alle dainties that men coulde think,
After the sundry seasons of the year,
So chaunged he his meat and his supper.
Woe was his cook but if his sauce were
Poignant and sharp, and ready all his gear.
His table dormant in his hall alway
Stood ready covered all the longe day.

Of the Knight, and his son, and their yeoman he
speaks with great respect ; his sarcasms are chiefly

2Q2 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

reserved for the clerical pilgrims, who, as was natural
on a religious pilgrimage, outnumber the laity. In
his treatment of these, he shows himself a sympathiser
with Wyclif, with whom he shared the patronage of
John of Gaunt. For instance, he is much more
tender to the monk than to the friar. All that he
has to say against the monk is that he loved hunting,
and Chaucer's humour is sometimes so sly that it is
difficult to make sure how far he sympathised with
the monk in his athletic tastes. He calls him

A manly man, to been an abbot able,

Full many a dainty horse had he in stable.

And when he rode men might his bridle hear

Ginglen in a whistling wind as clear

And eke as loud as does the chapel bell,

Where as this lord was keeper of the cell.

He gave not of that text a pulled hen

That saith, that hunters be not holy men ;

And / said his opinion was good.

Why should he study and make himselven wood 1

Upon a book in cloister alway to pore,

Or swinken 2 with his handes, and labour,

As Austin bid ? How shall the world be served ?

Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.

The monk, when the Host reproaches him for retir-
ing to a cloister instead of bringing up a family, takes
it all in good part, and for his tale tells a series of
moral ' Tragedies,' or stories of great men fallen on
evil days. On the other hand, Chaucer follows
Wyclif in furiously attacking the friars and pardoners.

1 Mad. - Work.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 293

The friar he makes a mere wanton, and the pardoner
a rascally impostor and thief. Indeed, in the case of
the pardoner the poet's indignation gets the better
of his artistic judgment. It is incredible that the
pardoner, however much he had drunk, if he were
sober enough to tell his tale at all, should have
painted his own malpractice as cynically as he does
saying that his motive in preaching was only covet-
ousness and then have passed round the hat at the
end. His description of his pulpit manner recalls
a style of preaching very fashionable with young
curates twenty years ago :

I stande like a clerk in my pulpet,
And when the lewed l people is down yset,
Then pain I me to stretche forth the neck,
And east and west upon the people I beck,
As doth a dove sitting on a barn.

With the pardoner and the friar must go the cherubic
summoner, who served the Archdeacon's writs. He
and the friar quarrel and tell tales against each
other's profession, Chaucer plainly regarding them
both as tarred with the same brush. As a set-off
against them we have the famous portrait of the poor
Country Parson :

A good man was there of religioun
And was a poore parson of a toun ;
But rich he was of holy thought and work ;
He was also a learned man, a clerk,

' Lay.

294 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN

Wide was his parish, and houses far asunder,
But he ne lefte not, for rain ne thunder,
In sickness nor in mischief to visite
The farrest in his parish, much and lyte,
Upon his feet and in his hand a staff.
This noble ensample to his sheep he gave,
That first he wrought and afterward he taught ;
Out of the gospel he the worde's caught ;
And this figure he added eke thereto
That if gold ruste what shall iron do ?

In concluding this Conference it may be interesting
to collect a few specimens of Chaucer's humour. In
many of the tales there is not very much scope for
humour ; we have only an occasional stroke by the
way. If there is opportunity for bringing in a rabble,
Chaucer usually gives himself play for a line or two ;
and it may be remembered that the only humorous
passages in Spenser are his descriptions of crowds,
which he borrows, like so much else, from his master.
Chaucer's best crowd is that, described in the* Squire's
Tale/ which stood round the 'wondrous horse of
brass ' conjecturing what it might be.

But evermore their moste wonder was
How that it coulde go, and was of brass !
It was of Fairy, as all the people seemed.
Diverse folk diversely they deemed ;
As many heads as many wits there been.
They murmered as doth a swarm of been, 1
And maden skiles 2 after their fantasies,
Rehearsing of these olde poetries,

1 Bees. " Reasons.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 295

And saiden, It was like the Pegasee,

The horse that hadde winges for to flee ;

Or else it was the Greekes horse Synon,

That broughte Troye to destruction,

As men may in these olde gestes read.

' Mine heart,' quoth one, ' is evermore in dread

I trow some men of armes ben therein,

That shapen them this city for to win ;

It were right good that all such things were knowe ;'

Another roundeth l to his fellow lowe,

And said, ' He lieth, it is rather like

An dpparence ymade by some magic,

As Jugglers playen at these feastes great.'

And so forth. Spenser copies this in his description
of the crowd that gathers round the slain dragon :

Some feared and fled ; some feared and well it feigned.

One that would wiser seem than all the rest

Warned him not touch, for yet perhaps remained

Some lingering life within his hollow breast,

Or in his womb might lurk some hidden nest

Of njany Dragonettes, his fruitful seed :

Another said that in his eyes did rest

Yet sparkling fire, and bade thereof take heed

Another said he saw him move his eyes indeed.

So diversely themselves in vain they fray.

The ' Clerk's Tale,' which celebrates the patience
of Grisilda under the trials of the young ' Markis,'
affords no opportunity for merriment ; but Chaucer
cheers it at the end by an Envoy.

Grisild is dead and eke her patience,
And both atones buried in Itaille ;-

i Whispers. 2 Italy,

296 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

For which I cry in open audience,
No wedded man so hardy be to assail
His wife's patience, in hope to find
Grisilda, for in certain he shall fail.

Ye archewives, standeth at defence,

Since ye be strong as is a great came"!,

Ne suffreth not that men you do offence ;

And slender wives, feeble as in battel,

Be eager ' as is a tiger yond in Ind ;

Ay clappeth as a mill, I you counsel.

Ne dread them not, ne do them reverence ;

For though thy husband armed be in mail,

The arrows of thy crabbed eloquence

Shall pierce his breast and eke his aventail ; 2

In jealousy I rede eke thou him bind,

And thou shall make him couch as doth a quail.

The relations of the sexes, indeed, furnish occasion to
not a few sarcastic interjections :

Husbands be alle good, and have been yore,
That knowen wives, I dare say you no more,

he says in the ' Man of Law's Tale ; ' and then,
a few lines below, to make the balance true, he cries
out :

O Satan envious since thilke day

That thou wert chased from our heritage,

Well knowest thou to women the olde way !

Sometimes we cannot be quite sure whether
Chaucer is smiling or not. Among the images of
death and destruction on the wall of the Temple of
Mars, we have

1 JJitter. " Front of helmet.

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 2Q/

The hunter strangled by the wilde bears,
The sow freten the childe right in the cradle,
The cook yscalded for all his longe ladle.
The barber, and the butcher, and the smith.

But there is one tale in which Chaucer gives full
play to his humour, and that is the ' Nun's Priest's
Tale ' about the Cock and the Fox. So far as is
known the amplification of the old fable is due
entirely to Chaucer, and from first to last there is not
a dull line in it. The description of Chaunticleer and
Dame Partelote, his dream, her contempt for his
cowardice and recommendation of physic, their grave
discussion about the origin and purpose of dreams,
the hue and cry after Reynard, are each better than
the last. We must allow ourselves but two passages,
and if these should drive any stranger to Chaucer, to
take up and read the story for himself, their length
will be atoned for. First for Chanticleer and his
Dame :

His voice was merrier than the merry orgdn,
On masse days that in the churche gon, 1
Well sikerer 2 was his crowing in the lodge
Than is a clock or an abbey orloge.
His comb was redder than the fine coral
And batteled as it were a castle wall.
His bill was black, and as the jet it shone ;
Like azure were his legges and his toen ; 3
His nailes whiter than the lily flower,
And like the burnished gold was his colour.
This gentle cock had in his governaunce
Sevon hennes, for to don all his pleasaunce,

1 Goes. - More certain. 3 Toes.

298 CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN.

Which were his sisters and his paramours,
And wonder like to him, as of colours ;
Of which the fairest hewed on her throat,
Was cleped fair damoisel Pertelote.
Courteous she was, discreet and debonair,
And compaignable, and bare herself so fair,
Since thilke day that she was seven night old,
Tha-t truely she hath the heart in hold
Of Chaunticleer, locken in every lith ! l
He loved her so that well him was therewith.
But such a joy was it to hear them sing,
When that the brighte sunne gan to spring,
In sweet accord ' my love is faren in londe.' z

Chaunticleer's banishment of his fears as soon as
the day dawns is charmingly described :

Now let us speak of mirth and stint all this ;

Madame Pertelote, so have I bliss,

Of one thing God hath sent me large grace ;

For when I see the beauty of your face,

Ye be so scarlet red about your yen

It maketh all my dreade for to dien ;

For, also siker as 3 In principio

Mutter est hominis confusio ;

(Madame, the sentence of this Latin is

' Woman is mannes joy and all his bliss ; ' 4 )

I am so full of joy and of solace

That I defye bothe sweven and dream.'

And with that word he flew down from the beam,

For it was day, and eke his henne's all ;

And with a chuck he gan them for to call,

For he had found a corn lay in the yard.

Royal he was, he was no more afeard ;

He looketh as it were a grim leoiin ;

And on his toes he roameth up and down,

Him deigned not to set his foot to ground.

1 Limb. 2 Gone away. 3 As sure as.

4 The sense of the Latin really i?, ' Woman is man's confusion,'

CONFERENCES ON BOOKS AND MEN. 299

He chucketh when he hath a corn yfound,
And to him runnen then his wives all.

After telling of the fox's lying in wait, the poet
apostrophises the Cock and proceeds to poke a little
quiet fun at the Schoolmen :

Chaunticleer, accursed be that morrow,
That thou into that yard flew from the beams !
Thou wert full well y-warned by thy dreams,
That thilke day was perilous to thee ;

But what that God forwot must needes be,

After the opinion of certain clerkes.

Witness on him. that any perfect cleric is,

That in school is great altercation

In this matter, and great disputison,

And hath been of an hundred thousand men.

But I ne cannot boult l it to the bren,

As can the holy doctor Augustine,

Or Boece, or the bishop Bradwardine,

Whether that Godde's worthy forwitting

Straineth me needely to don a thing,

(Needily clepe I simple necessity) ;

Or elles if free choice be granted me

To do that same thing, or do it not,

Though God forwot it ere that it was wrought ;

Or if his witting straineth never a deal

But by necessity conditional.

1 will not have to do of such mattere !
My tale is of a cock, as ye may hear.

What happened in the event the reader who does
not know must discover in the poet's text.
1 Sift to the bran.

THE END.

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