01374 9122_ 

 
 
 p 
 
 V.
 
 A SURVEY OF 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 1780-1830
 
 A SURVEY OF 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 1780-1830 
 
 BY 
 
 OLIVER ELTON 
 
 HON. D.LITT. (DURHAM) 
 
 I'KOKBSSOR OK ENGLISH L1TKUATUHE IN TUB 
 UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL 
 
 ' I have endeavoured to feel what is good, and 
 to give a reason for the faith that was in me, when 
 necessary, and when in my power.' HAZLITT. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 VOL. I 
 
 LONDON 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 1912 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 TO MY PARENTS
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS work has been termed a survey and not a history, though 
 it contains matter for the historian, and his point of view has 
 been kept in mind throughout in the arrangement of the theme. 
 But the historical aspect is meant to be subordinate ; and the 
 book is really a review, a direct criticism, of everything I can 
 find in the literature of fifty years that speaks to me with any 
 sound of living voice. As the motto on the title-page may 
 indicate, it is a series of judgments upon works of art. I do 
 not know what literature is unless it is an art. Life and ideas, 
 society and manners, politics and affairs, must always be studied 
 in order to understand that art and to judge of its productions. 
 But on each of these productions our last word must be an 
 answer to the questions, Is it well done ? Does it last ? What 
 is it to me ? Even the further question, How does it arise ? is 
 less ultimate and imperative. It is of course equally right 
 and needful to study literature for the light which it may cast 
 upon other things upon thought or ethics or national char- 
 acter ; but that is a different enterprise, not to be confounded 
 with the present one, although the material may often be the 
 same in the two cases. 
 
 The summaries and studies of tendency which will be 
 found in the first and last chapters and elsewhere may seem 
 to stray from the programme here laid down, and have been 
 included with some hesitation. They are sketches, often 
 simple headings ; and it would have taken a book as long 
 again, and also a whole band of specialist writers, to do them 
 justice. The influence of foreign literatures on England, and 
 of Byron and Scott abroad ; the material conditions of author- 
 ship, and the effects of the periodical press upon the craft ; 
 the records of scholarship, and the evolution of philosophy 
 as it is mirrored in letters ; many of these topics still await 
 a concerted attack, though much has been done already to 
 map them out. Indeed, the books and studies in which
 
 viii ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the historical aspect of the ' romantic period ' is prominent 
 are so many and so good, that I have not pretended to do their 
 work again, and am by no means anxious to enter into compe- 
 tition. I owe them a debt which, like the aid of many generous 
 friends, colleagues, and correspondents, is most imperfectly 
 acknowledged in the notes. 
 
 One or two more special obligations should be mentioned 
 here. Professor George Saintsbury, D.Litt., has most kindly 
 read the proof sheets, and offered many valuable suggestions ; 
 he has made, as would be expected, handsome allowance for 
 any differences in our critical views, and has encouraged this 
 somewhat lengthy enterprise. Dr. John Sampson has helped 
 me without stint in many ways, by commentary and counsel. 
 Two very close students of Blake, Mr. D. J. Sloss, M.A., and 
 Mr. John P. R. Wallis, M.A., have given advice of much 
 value for the text of the fifth chapter. The good offices of 
 several Slavonic and oilier scholars are named in vol. ii., p. 
 420. Mr. G. S. Veitch, B.A., freely placed at my disposal many 
 memoranda on the pamphlets of the time of Burke. Two 
 workers in our University Library have bestowed much time 
 and labour : the great bulk of the Index has been made by 
 Miss Eileen Kelly ; and Miss Dorothy Allmand has checked 
 a very large number of references and quotations in the notes. 
 For any errors that remain, and for the whole work as it 
 stands, the author alone is accountable. 
 
 Most of the pages on Crabbe are reprinted from Blttck- 
 irood's Magazine, and some of the observations on Coleridge 
 arc from the Modern Language Review, by the courtesy of the 
 proprietors of those journals. The chief librarian and staff 
 of the Picton Library in Liverpool were good enough to make 
 access easy in every way to their shelves, which are specially 
 rich in the literature of the period; and I am also obliged 
 to the authorities of the Free Reference Library in Manchester, 
 for leave to inspect the Alexander Ireland Collection. 
 
 O. E. 
 
 LIVERPOOL, Scj>teml>er 1912.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 I. Tribute to the ' age of reason ' ; its value to the reviewer of 
 romance ; its inherent merits, and its bequest to the next age. Mental 
 features of the period 1700-80: (1) the impulse of criticism, which 
 generates new literary forms ; (2) use of learning anil science for recon- 
 structive effort ; (3) reappearance of the imagination in the service of 
 learning ........ 1 
 
 II. Mark of the new literature, ' the reunion of poetry and prose 
 under the rule of the imagination.' The prose of purpose and its oppo- 
 site. ' Purpose ' in poetry, variably present. ' Art for art ' ; critical 
 standpoint of this book indicated ..... 6 
 
 III. 1780, why a real date in our literature ; its different importance 
 in the history of prose and of verse. Essential change accompanying ; 
 ' the convalescence of the feeling for beauty.' Three elements in this 
 renewal: (1) requickening of the artistic senses. The classical poets 
 
 from this point of view. Growing alertness to natural scenery . . 9 
 
 IV. And to the animal world : Bewick, Gilbert White. Theorists on 
 
 the 'picturesque' : Gilpin, Twining, Price. Various senses of this word 12 
 
 V. Feeling for beauty renewed (2) through growing sympathy with 
 mankind, especially in its humbler walks. The humanity of the classical 
 writers : Johnson and Walpole cited. Great change in sympathy never- 
 theless ; contrast of Goldsmith and Blake ; renovated sense of the 
 infinite . . . . . . . .18 
 
 VI. Feeling for beauty renewed through (3) the movement of 
 philosophic thought. Influences mentioned (a) of Rousseau, (l>) of the 
 revolutionary theorists, (r) of German thought, (d) of mystical tradition 
 
 and Plato. Consequent recovery of the great metaphysical style of verse 23 
 
 VII. Chief problem of the new literature, to find an adequate diction 
 for verse and imaginative prose. (1) Diction becomes sensuous and con- 
 crete, and also true, instead of abstract and factitious ; in order to give 
 a notation for the new vision and perception. Influence of the Old 
 Masters here, and also in the re-creation of (2) the heroic style. (3) Dis- 
 covery of a plain poetic diction for representing humble persons and 
 their talk. Reaction of poetic language upon poetic perception and 
 feeling ; the Old Masters helping again . . . .25 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 I. New lease of life, 1780-1800. Importance of studying this phase 30 
 
 II. The Rolliad; John Wolcot ('Peter Pindar'); Whig skits and 
 travesties ........ 32 
 
 lx
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 PAOE 
 
 III. Anti-revolutionary satire. William Gifford, his Baviad and 
 Maeviad, and translations ; Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature ; The 
 Anti-Jacobin, its authors ; attacks on Whigs, Radicals, subversive 
 doctrine, ' sentimental ' and anarchical ethics, and literary mawkislmess 
 and affectation. The Neio Morality . . . . .35 
 
 TV. Erasmus Darwin and The Botanic Oarden ; his ' scientific ' poetry, 
 machinery, and theories of imagery and diction . . .41 
 
 V. Crabbe : cause of his early acceptance ; his attack on Goldsmith, 
 
 and on the romantic novel. Early works, The Village . . .44 
 
 VI. Crabbe : digressions into freer, romantic verse : Sir Eustace Grey 49 
 
 VII. Crabbe: Parish Register, Borough, Tales . . .51 
 
 VIII. Crabbe : Tales of the Hall ; his poetic theories ; ' poetry with- 
 out an atmosphere.' Examples of his stories . . . f>5 
 
 IX. Crabbe : his technique in rhyme and diction . . .GO 
 
 X. Johnson's Lives. Samuel Rogers : Pleasures of Memory ; Italy . 63 
 XL Thomas Campbell. Dispute over Pope's poetry : Bowles and 
 
 Byron ........ 07 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 I. Revival of the Sonnet T. Warton, Bampfylde, Charlotte Smith, 
 Bowles ; marks of the school ; Coleridge and Bowles ; continuity of the 
 Sonnet form . . . . . . .72 
 
 II. Cowper the renewer of poetical taste ; his value as an inventor of 
 forms ; confessional writing ; his prose and letters . . .70 
 
 III. Cowper, his religion and his malady. The four acts of his life 
 
 (a) 1731-65; magazine articles, early verses, and Memoir . . 79 
 
 IV. The second act (/>) 1765-81 ; letters, Adelphi, Olnnj Hymns . 81 
 
 V. The third (r) 1781-86: period of productiveness ; the volume of 
 1782, The Task, John Gil pin, Tirocinium, etc. The fourth act (d) 1786- 
 1800; Teedon letters ; Homer; Yardlcy Oak .... S3 
 
 VI. Cowper's views of poetry : his models Milton and simplicity. The 
 effect of Milton and Thomson on Cowper exemplified . . .85 
 
 VII. Lighter, and lyrical verse ; John Gitjiin ; satires, Tahle Talk . 89 
 
 VIII. The Task, its character and diction ; transposition of the 
 language of Milton ; Crowe's Lewesdon. Hill; Tardily Oak . . 91 
 
 IX. Translations of Homer ; visit of Milton to Cowper in a dream . 96 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 SCOTTISH LYRIC: ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 
 
 I. Stages of the poetical work of Burns ; little change or develop- 
 ment. Likeness with the new poets of the South ; connections with the 
 English classical school . . . . . .100 
 
 II. Burns and the soil ; portraying power, in relation to scenery, hi* 
 friends, his enemies, and himself. Everything individual ; persons and 
 places specified. Revolutionary feeling original in Scottish character. 
 Anti-Kirk . . . . . . . . 10M 
 
 Relationship to Scottish tradition, in temper and literary forms. 
 Character as a peasant. ' The freedom of the natural soul ' ; self- 
 destructive elements 109
 
 CONTENTS xi 
 
 PAOE 
 
 III. Form : in what sense Burns is a classic ; species of his perfection. 
 Theocritus nncl Catullus. Speed of his verse ; brevity of his composi- 
 tions. Comparison with the English poets of his time . . .115 
 
 IV. Songs : Burns the voice of the Scottish past. Differences between 
 the songs and the other poems. Methods exemplified from Aitfd Lang 
 
 Syne and other pieces. Varieties of strain . . . .120 
 
 V. English and Scottish poetry of Burns discriminated. Fallacies 
 current; senses of the term ' English '; examples . . .125 
 
 VI. Position amongst Scottish singers of his time ; no school founded 
 by Burns. Procedure of various poets ; multitude of writers. Lady 
 Nairne. Selected writers : Hector MacNeill ; Allan Cunningham ; 
 Robert Tannahill ; Anster Fair . . . . .128 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 I. Seeming isolation of Blake ; his scanty debt to contemporaries. 
 First period, 1783-91, first lyrics and earliest unrhymed lays. Second 
 period, 1792-6, mythic and prophetic lays, and Songs of Experience. 
 Third period, 1797-1804 and later; darker prophetic lays, and Ever- 
 lasting Gospel, etc. Felpham, 1801-3. Last period, to 1827, prose 
 works, late lyrics ; Blake chiefly now a designer . . .137 
 
 II. Nature of Blake's ' vision ' ; its threefold effect, on his theories, 
 on his imagery, and on his workmanship. Poetical Sketches ; literary 
 models, Elizabethan and other ; signs of original style. Songs of Inno- 
 cence and Book of Thel ; conception of childhood ; latent sense of strife ; 
 mood of these poems . . . . . . .140 
 
 III. Mythic lays : prose Marrinyc of Heaven awl If ell, and ideas 
 there set forth ; individualism of Blake, and its connection with his 
 gospel ; relation to the critical age. Fabric, personages, nomenclature 
 of the lays. Visions of the Daughters of Alhion, America, Europe, Urizen, 
 Ahania, Book oj Los, Song of Los . . . . .145 
 
 IV. Some influences shaping these poems : Milton and Paradise Lost ; 
 the Bible ; Macpherson's Ossian. Metres possibly traceable to Mac- 
 pherson's prose : (1) the seven-beat line ; its powers ; (2) the three-beat 
 
 line. Examples . . . . . . .155 
 
 V. Songs of Experience, their relationship to Songs of Innocence. 
 Other metaphysical lyrics ; use of technical terms. The Mental 
 Traveller. Auguries of Innocence. The Everlasting Gospel, its ethics . 159 
 
 VI. Later prophetic works: The. Four Zoas (Vala) ; Jerusalem; 
 Milton. General character ; reference to chosen passages. Increasing 
 dryness and darkness of symbolism. Lawless 'Gothic ' . . 1G4 
 
 VII. Prose : Vision of the Laxt Judgment ; Descriptive Catalogue, and 
 Canterbury Pilgrimage. Blake's lack of contemporary influence. Men- 
 tion of him by Southey, Wordsworth, Landor, Coleridge, Lamb, Crabb 
 Robinson. Solitary in his age, yet essentially connected with it. His 
 position among poets . ..... 1G8 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 I. Fiction during the transition, 1780-1812; relation to the four 
 great novelists of the eighteenth century. Main divisions : (a) the
 
 xii CONTENTS 
 
 FAGS 
 
 novel of English life and manners ; new lineage of women writers ; 
 (6) the novel of ' terror ' or ' suspense ' (see Cli. vn. ). Cross tendencies : 
 interest in doctrine, in history and foreign lands, and in natural scenery . 172 
 
 II. Stray examples, 1770-80: The Spiritual Quixote. Mackenzie. 
 Work of Miss Burney. Instructive fiction ; scheme of the ' progress ' 
 
 and the moral 'contrast' . . . . . .175 
 
 III. Mrs. Inchbald's two stories. Male doctrinaires : Bage's Herm- 
 sprong. Holcroft's tales. Cumberland's Henry. Mrs. Opie's tales, 
 their range and qualities. Miss Edgeworth : view of life ; short stories 
 for the young. Purpose of the Irish novels : Castle Rack-rent ; The 
 Absentee, etc. Day, Sandford and Merton. Hannah More. Mrs. 
 Hamilton ........ 180 
 
 IV. Miss Austen ; social world she portrays ; stages of her work. 
 The Steventon novels : Sense and Sensibility ; Pride and Prejudice, 
 nature of its pre-eminence; Northanger Abbey (see Ch. vn.) ; Lndy 
 Susan. The Chawton novels : Mansfield Park ; Emma ; Persuasion. 
 
 Miss Austen not 'impersonal' ; increase of kindliness; scenery . 191 
 
 V. Miss Austen ; her reading and possible models. Vocabulary, its 
 purity. Method of work ; view of poetry. Avoidance of tragedy and 
 passion; summary severity. Her feminine point of view ; valediction . 198 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 I. Contrast with the novel of manners ; a movement of expansion. 
 Debt to older romance. Walpole ; Castle, of Otranto. Clara Reeve ; 
 
 The Old English Baron and The Progress of Romance . . . 202 
 
 II. The Oriental tale, its blending of fantasy and satire. William 
 Beckford ; Vathek ; The Princess Zulka'is ; travels. Beckford's temper 
 
 and influence ; Byron's admiration ..... 20") 
 
 III. William Godwin ; Caleb Williams ; St. Leon ; other tales. Dr. 
 John Moore ; Zcluco. Mrs. Ann Radclili'e ; notes of landscape ; Ctaston 
 de Jjlondeville ; Romance of the Forest ; The Italian ; Mysteries of 
 Udolpho ........ 209 
 
 IV. Matthew Clregory Lewis; The Monk. Mrs. Shelley; Frankni- 
 stein. C. R. Maturin ; the motive of terror and suspense ; early tales ; 
 Womm ; Mi/moth the Wandtn r ; its plan and characteristic power. 
 Examples; mastery of musical prose. Tales from lilarkit'owl. James 
 Hogg, Confessions of a Fanatic . . . . .215 
 
 V. Parodies of romance and the supernatural story. E. S. Barrett ; 
 The Heroine. Jane Austen ; Northanger Abbey. Monstrous adventure 
 
 and blague ; Raspe's Adventures of Huron Munchausrn . . . 223 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 
 
 I. Weakness of Britain during this period in pure philosophy. 
 Reaction against Hume : Thomas Reid and ' common sense ' ; multiplica- 
 tion of ' original principles.' Dugald Stewart: lectures and discourses ;
 
 CONTENTS xiii 
 
 PAD! 
 
 his discussions on aesthetics ; beauty and the imagination ; love of litera- 
 ture. Reversion towards Hume : Thomas Brown ; his analytic skill ; 
 connection with the English empirical school. Sir Joshua Reynolds's 
 Discourses : genius and the ' great style ' . . . .227 
 
 II. Burke: his last phase (1780-90-97) an integral one; unity 
 of his point of view. Sketch of his work before 1780 : The Sublime 
 and Beautiful ; Observations and Present Discontents, their controlling 
 
 idea. Zenith of his power : American speeches and epistles . . 234 
 
 III. Burke : Indian speeches, and orations against Hastings. Limita- 
 tions of his liberalism ; in what sense a mystic.' Natural rights' and 
 
 the ' social covenant ' ....... 237 
 
 IV. Burke: writings, 1790-97. The Reflections; obsession with 
 1688 ; ignorance of causes of the French Revolution, prescience of its 
 effects. Importance of the book in the evolution of political thought. 
 Letters on a Regicide Peace and kindred writings : Appeal from the New 
 
 to the Old Whigs ....... 242 
 
 V. Burke : his union of gifts as statesman, philosopher, and writer. 
 Style : influence of Milton for good and ill. Inlaying of quotation and 
 allusion ; excesses. Burke's models for his sentence and period. In- 
 fluence of Bolingbroke, doubtful. Examples of long, and of brief, 
 sentence-structure ; average scale of sentence, exemplified . . 245 
 
 VI. Burke : rhetorical art and devices. Examples of figurative 
 speech. Use of iteration and echo ; the passage on ' peace.' Amplifica- 
 tion ; and modes of irony. Comparisons and metaphors, their variety 
 and ferocity. Expansion of metaphors. Burke's cadence and rhythm ; 
 example ........ 250 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE Continued 
 
 I. Burke's adversaries : Richard Price ; sharpshooters ; nature of 
 replies. Joseph Priestley. Mackintosh : Vindicicp, GalliciK and later 
 utterances ; literary character. Robert Hall. Thomas Paine ; Common 
 Sense; Rights of Man ; Age of Reason .... 258 
 
 II. William Godwin, the typical doctrinaire ; influence ; develop- 
 ment of sympathy ; essays ; Political Justice. Mary Wollstonccraft ; 
 Rights of Women ....... 268 
 
 III. Arthur Young, Travels in France, etc. ; autobiography. Jeremy 
 Bentham ; view of the past ; divergence from the revolutionary theorists. 
 Principles of Morals and Legislation ; Bentham's calculus and principle 
 of utility.' His form and style ; concentration on names and defini- 
 tions. Verbal coinages : nature of influence .... 275 
 
 IV. William Palcy, his eclectic system ; and official character ; 
 Moral and Political Philosophy ; his optimism, how qualified ; his 
 temper ; lucidity and excellence of his writing. James Mill. Change 
 in the rationalistic spirit. T. R. Malthus and David Ricardo. Robert 
 Owen ........ 283 
 
 V. William Cobbett ; relation to the theorists and the Revolution. 
 Peter Porcupine ; sketch of literary life. Advice to Young Men and 
 Women ; and 'to a lover.' Romance and Cobbett. Educational views ; 
 Rural Rides, tirades, observations, scenery ; love of beauty . . 290
 
 xiv CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE: EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 PAffK 
 
 I. Repute of Scott's verse ; his temper towards books ; his conception 
 
 of romance, at successive periods ..... 297 
 
 II. Interest in German ; Lenore. The ballad since Percy : Herd, 
 Pinkerton, Ritson. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Distribution of 
 poems in the Minstrelsy. Scott's procedure (avowed, nnavowed, and 
 imputed) with his texts ...... 300 
 
 III. Imitations ' and ' legendary poems ' distinguished ; Scott's 
 varieties of style. His companions : Leyden ; Talcs of Wonder ; (leorge 
 
 Ellis . . . . . . . . 305 
 
 IV. The ballad between 1802 and 1832: Jamieson, R. H. Evans, 
 Motherwell ........ 308 
 
 V. Transition of Scott from ballad to lay ; metres used : romance 
 stanzas, octosyllabics, Chrislabcl measure . . . .310 
 
 VI. Lays : Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, Lady of the La/a , etc. 314 
 
 VII. Lyric and miscellaneous verse ; ditl'ercnt levels of style and 
 excellence. Underestimated greatness of Scott as a lyrist. His 
 Elizabethan inspiration . . . . . .316 
 
 VIII. James Hogg, ' The Ettrick Shepherd ' : ballads, songs, The 
 Queen's Wake : Kilmeny ...... 320 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 SCOTT: THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 I. Further stages of Scott's idea of romance : in Waverley, and The 
 Heart of Midlothian ....... 325 
 
 II. Periods (1814-20, 1821-6, 1826-31) of the novels, and grouping. 
 Sketch of each period : vindication of the latest novels . . 327 
 
 III. Some general traits : use of the supernatural and depiction of 
 villainy ; motives drawn from law ; attitude to theological matters ; 
 portraiture of Highlanders ...... 332 
 
 IV. The historical novel : Miss Lcc ; Miss Porter. Contrast with 
 the history play. Treatment of eighteenth century, and of the Middle 
 Ages ; Ivanhoe. The seventeenth and sixteenth centuries ; portraits of 
 kings and queens ....... 335 
 
 V. Scott's attitude to his public, its drawbacks and value. Character 
 of his endings; interest of 'extrication'; poetic justice, romance, and 
 the 'scheme of averages.' Exceptional endings ; Dridc of Lammcrmoor ; 
 
 SV. RonaiiB Well ; Kenilivorth. Early heroes, defended . . 340 
 
 VI. Vast population of the novels ; comparison with Balzac, and 
 with later English novelists. Facility and 'popularity' ; J. L. Adnlphus 
 quoted. False charge of ' superficiality ' .... 345 
 
 VII. The styles of Scott. Adolplm.s quoted again. Varieties of 
 manner. Talk of his monarchs. Real and unreal style, exemplified. 
 Resource in technical ingredients (costume, etc.). Unequal success in 
 passionate dialogue ; causes. Lyric oratory in prose ; studious technique 
 and harmonies. Literary diction in Scots ; Madge Wildfire. The style 
 
 in the passages of higher feeling ; felicity. Language of the Journal . 349 
 
 VIII. Other prose works. Tales of a Grandfather ; Life of Dryden, 
 
 and Life of Swift. Critical reviews. Scott on his own craft . . 358
 
 CONTENTS XT 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 AND OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 TAfJE 
 
 I. Influence of Scott : English successors, such as Horace Smith and 
 Leigh Hunt. G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth, not included 
 here. Scottish fiction: Moir's Mansic Wauch. John Gait, his pro- 
 ductiveness ; Annals of the Parish, The Entail, The Provost, The 
 Ayrshire Legatees. Andrew Picken. Michael Scott . . .361 
 
 II. Miss Ferrier : her characteristics and personages : view of poetic 
 justice and didactic element. Marriage, Inheritance, Destiny . . 366 
 
 III. Irish fiction : Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) ; The Wild Irish 
 Girl, O'Donnel, The O'Briens anil the O'Flethertys. Michael and John 
 Banim : Tales of the O'Harei Family, etc. Gerald Griffin, The 
 Collegieins. T. Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Killarney Legensls . 369 
 
 IV. English fiction : Miss Mitford's Our Village. Eastern Tales : T. 
 Hope, Anastashis, its veracity of colouring. J. J. Morier, Hajji Babei in 
 Ispahan and Hajji Beiba in England : other stories. Trelawny's 
 Adventures of a Younger tion ...... 374 
 
 V. Thomas Love Peacock : the commentator and satirist of ' romance ' ; 
 parallel with Samuel Butler. Poems: Khododaphne, etc., and lyrics. 
 Plan and style of his fictions ; his stock of characters ; opinions, shown 
 in Crotchet Castle, Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt, etc. Romantic satires : 
 Maid Marian, The Misfortunes of Elphin .... 379 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 I. Growth of the periodical press after 1800; effect on the art of 
 prose; conception of the 'article.' Existing organs. Foundation and 
 aims of the Edinburgh Review. New characteristics. Jeffrey as a 
 critic ; his method, limitations, attitude to imaginative work. His 
 
 style and manner ; jcux d'esprit by Thomas Moore and Copleston . 386 
 
 II. Brougham, his fertility, oratorical method, form. Sydney Smith : 
 as reviewer; and as pamphleteer and fighter ; mental temper ; Whig 
 temper as reformer ; attitude to religion. His wit, its character ; his 
 
 style of portraiture ....... 394 
 
 III. The Quarterly lierien- : foundation and staff; Gifford, Croker, 
 Barrow, Scott, Southey, Lock hart. Traits of the two great quarterlies ; 
 their representative character and bias ; unsigned articles ; editorial 
 autocracy . . . . . . . .401 
 
 IV. Blackwood'e Edinburgh Magazine ; anti-Whiggery ; creative aims, 
 and humour. John Wilson (Christopher North') : his poems and tales ; 
 Nodes Ambrosianat ; criticisms ..... 404 
 
 V. John Gibson Lockhart : his career ; Peter's Letters ; early pranks ; 
 tales (Adam Blair, Valerius, Reginald Dulton, Matt fit n- Wnld] ; verses, 
 Ancient Spanish Ballad* ; Life of Xcott, its excellences. William 
 Maginn : his verses, skits, sketches, and essays . . . 409 
 
 VI. Some other journals ; the London Magazine 1 , etc. Increasing 
 volume of the periodical press. Ugo Foscolo and Italian literature. 
 Study of older English and of foreign writers : the Retrospective Review . 418 
 
 NOTES 421
 
 CHAPTER I 
 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 I. Tribute to the ' age of reason ' ; its value to the reviewer of romance ; 
 its inherent merits, and its bequest to the next age. Mental features of the 
 period 1700-1780 : (1) the impulse of criticism, which generates new literary 
 forms ; (2) use of learning and science for reconstructive effort ; (3) reappear- 
 ance of the imagination in the service of learning. 
 
 II. Mark of the new literature, ' the reunion of poetry and prose under the 
 rule of the imagination.' The prose of purpose and its opposite. ' Purpose ' 
 in poetry, variably present. ' Art for art ' ; critical standpoint of this book 
 indicated. 
 
 III. 1780, why a real date in our literature ; its different importance in 
 the history of prose and of verse. Essential change accompanying ; ' the 
 convalescence of the feeling for beauty.' Three elements in this renewal : 
 (1) requickening of the artistic senses. The classical poets from this point 
 of view. Growing alertness to natural scenery ; 
 
 IV. And to the animal world: Bewick, Gilbert White. Theorists on the 
 ' picturesque ' : Gilpin, Twining, Price. Various senses of this word. 
 
 V. Feeling for beauty renewed (2) through growing sympathy with mankind, 
 especially in its humbler walks. The humanity of the classical writers : 
 Johnson and Walpole cited. Great change in sympathy nevertheless ; con- 
 trast of Goldsmith and Blake ; renovated sense of the infinite. 
 
 VI. Feeling for beauty renewed through (3) the movement of philosophic 
 thought. Influences mentioned (a) of Rousseau, (6) of the revolutionary 
 theorists, (c) of German thought, (d) of mystical tradition and Plato. Con- 
 sequent recovery of the great metaphysical style of verse. 
 
 VII. Chief problem of the new literature, to find an adequate diction for 
 verse and imaginative prose. (1) Diction becomes sensuous and concrete, 
 and also true, instead of abstract and factitious ; in order to give a notation 
 for the new vision and perception. Influence of the Old Masters here, and also 
 in the re-creation of (2) the heroic style. (3) Discovery of a plain poetic diction 
 for representing humble persons and their talk. Reaction of poetic language 
 upon poetic perception and feeling ; the Old Masters helping again. 
 
 THE reviewer of the romantic period must begin by calling for 
 justice to the age of reason ; he must, for his own sake, be fair 
 to the first three quarters of the eighteenth century. We have 
 not the privilege of Blake and Wordsworth and Keats, who 
 VOL. i. A
 
 2 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 were rebels and liberators, and whose business it was to be 
 ungrateful. We are likely to think too little rather than too 
 much of the writers who are termed classical, and who have 
 long ceased to be dangerous. No doubt Addison and Fielding, 
 Goldsmith and Hume, leave us no central or ultimate standard 
 for the art of prose ; but a just and a sound standard they do 
 leave us. No doubt Dryden, Pope, and their followers leave 
 us a flawed and inadmissible standard for the art of verse, nor 
 does Gray leave us an impeccable one. But in their own kinds, 
 where they succeed, all these writers, whether of prose or verse, 
 are still masters ; they are touchstones of style and composi- 
 tion. We must keep our classical literature firmly in mind 
 and respect it, whilst approaching its successor. It will often 
 help us not a little, and save some vapouring, to compare 
 the new dynasty with the old. We shall appreciate both 
 more distinctly. It is good, for example, to turn back from 
 Carlyle, with his caldron of wasteful words, and to take a 
 course of Hume and Gibbon. We may lose in this way some 
 illusions about Carlyle ; we shall never again fancy that he is 
 a clear thinker or a great constructive artist. But we shall 
 also come to value, as never before, his prodigality of power and 
 depth of spirit ; we shall see, not only that he can sometimes 
 speak like Shakespeare, but that he is ours, and that he has 
 formed us all as Hume or Gibbon can never form us. It may 
 also be well, when we encounter a man of crazed and wasted 
 tragic gift, such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes, to imagine him 
 figuring in the Lives of the Poets, and to think what crabbed, 
 undeniable things Johnson would have said against him ; 
 that will save us from any fantastic or blown-up estimate ; 
 and then we may remember how Johnson would have missed 
 the whole essence, the lyric rarity, of Beddoes, just as he 
 missed the whole essence of Donne. Or if we set one of the 
 more shapeless volumes of Scott or Dickens beside Tom Jones, 
 or Shelley's satires beside the Epistle to Augustus, we see at 
 once what has been lost. The glories and advantages of the 
 writers who came after 1780 are so great, that we can afford 
 to acknowledge their defeats. It is of still more moment to 
 remember what they actually inherit from their predecessors. 
 
 To cast this account with any approach to fulness is for the 
 historians of English thought. The chronicler of letters, by 
 the nature of his task, can only mention some stray items. 
 He has to cross himself religiously every time that he goes 
 outside the boundaries of art, and to hasten back with all speed. 
 This task, in one respect, is simpler in the age of Words wort h
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 3 
 
 and Lamb than in that of Locke or of Adam Smith, because 
 the record of thoughts and that of letters are more closely 
 inter-knotted in the earlier period than in the later. The prose 
 masters of the eighteenth century are often primarily philo- 
 sophers or scholars, concerned with proving or disproving 
 something, or with clearing up the facts of history and society. 
 From 1780 to 1830 this task, with few exceptions, falls to 
 writers of the second or third rate ; it is an age of invention 
 and appreciation, not of demonstration. But the spirit of 
 those elders descends into it nevertheless, though the form and 
 voice are changed ; and must be tracked and recognised, if 
 we would understand the continuity of literature. 
 
 We speak vaguely of the characteristic eighteenth-century 
 spirit and temper ; but it can be resolved, on the intellectual 
 side, into three or four elements, or what the Germans call 
 ' moments,' which by no means succeed one another strict!} 7 
 in the order of time, or sweep on without interruption, but 
 which end in making themselves all felt, and are all found in 
 play by the end of the century. 
 
 1. The first of these is the impulse of criticism. This impulse 
 is European, and Britain takes a full share in it. Criticism 
 is everywhere ; it appears in as many shapes as Glaucus ; 
 it inhabits every region of letters. It has many memorials ; 
 amongst them are Bayle's Dictionary (1697-1702), Hume's 
 essays on political theory and religion (1741-2), the Encyclo- 
 pedia (1751-80), Rousseau's Emile and Contrat Social (17G2), 
 the tracts of Lessing on theology and aesthetic. These are 
 voices, often crying in sharp mutual contradiction, of the great 
 enlightenment, or Aufkldrung, as the process is called by which 
 the mind of Europe turned round upon tradition and came to 
 a terrible explanation with itself. Taken together, these works 
 exhibit a thorough, hostile scrutiny of received opinions in 
 metaphysical, moral, and social science, and in art. The nature 
 of knowledge, the proof of miracles, the laws and sanctions 
 of marriage, the methods of bringing up the next generation, 
 or of teaching languages, the poetry of Donne or of Pope 
 nothing is allowed to live upon its legend. This is criticism ; and 
 here we are concerned with its effect upon the art of letters. 
 
 It is too little noted that many forms of art arise from definite 
 intellectual needs, which in themselves are outside the province 
 of art. These soldiers in the war of criticism had to invent 
 artillery. Unknown literary forms were devised, or old ones 
 revived in a fresh guise, in order to embody the new spirit. 
 Among them may be mentioned the dialogues of Berkeley and
 
 4 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 Hume, the satiric parables of Voltaire and Marmontel, the 
 philosophic poems of Pope, and the polemical romances of 
 Rousseau. Remoter from the main current of ideas, but still 
 critical in purport, are the moral essays and sketches of Addison, 
 and the dramatic reviews of Lessing. The point for remark 
 is that these kinds of writing outlive their original applications, 
 and are used, when the issues debated are obsolete, for purposes 
 at first undreamed-of. They suffer change on the way, but 
 they can be recognised. Thus the fictions of Beckford, and 
 those of Peacock, inherit some of their shape or spirit from 
 Voltaire's. The papers of Hazlitt are the late flower of the 
 species invented by the authors of The Spectator. T intern 
 Abbey would have been different but for some of Pope's deistic 
 verses. Byron's mode of satire is derived from Pope's, but 
 is then transformed, though by no means out of knowledge, 
 into a mode that is freer ; and his habit of arguing in bad blank 
 verse comes straight down from the last century, though his 
 ideas are not the same. Landor's personages do not talk much 
 on the origin of mind or the moral sanction, but the mould of 
 the Imaginary Conversations came down to him through the 
 English philosophers, and he did not take it direct from the 
 ancients. Nor is it only the moulds that thus continue. The 
 style and accent that are struck out in the heat of battle do not 
 perish on the morrow, but are preserved for other war-cries. 
 So Macaulay's invective often echoes and out-clamours that of 
 Junius ; and many a fighting page of Huxley, or of Newman, 
 is cast in good eighteenth-century form, for which Swift or 
 William Law may be at last responsible. And just as the 
 forms that are born of the spirit of criticism may be used for 
 new ideas, so the ideas that are born of that spirit may pass into 
 other forms. In this way the formulae of Godwin's prose are 
 taken over into Prometheus Unbound, and lose their pallor and 
 flame into life. The emotions and thoughts of Rousseau, after 
 they have created his lyrical and piercing prose, are appropri- 
 ated by the poets, and colour Childe Harold. Thus the effects, 
 direct and other, of the critical spirit take their place amongst 
 the great array of influences those of antiquity, of the Middle 
 Ages, of modern Germany, or of the Elizabethans, which, after 
 1800, are all found shaping English literature. 
 
 2. But to name Rousseau or Lessing is to have passed already 
 out of the region of pure criticism. Reason cannot unbuild 
 for ever, and after a writer like Hume, with his destructive 
 analysis, has come and gone, reason is still left with a mass of 
 concrete material to reckon with and set in order. This is the
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 5 
 
 stuff of learning and science, in the reconstruction of which is 
 found the second ruling impulse of the time. In the third 
 quarter of the century this impulse is most powerfully at work. 
 It is no longer the old, pre-critical learning of Sir Thomas 
 Browne or Joseph Glanvill, but sifted learning, which has been 
 submitted to a new calculus, taught to it by the physical 
 sciences, which have been quietly developing ever since the 
 Renaissance. To trace the conquests of this spirit is for the 
 historian of knowledge. But its effect is felt in pure literature, 
 which has diverse points of contact with learning. One such 
 is found in a work like Lowth's Praelectiones on the sacred 
 poetry of the Hebrews, which received an English dress nearly 
 hah a century (1787) after their delivery ; another in Warton's 
 History of English Poetry (1774-81) ; a third in the notes on 
 mediaeval and other lore made by Gray. These are land- 
 marks in the progress of poetry, which was nourished by the 
 rediscovery of its own past. But the weighty monuments of 
 prose in the third quarter of the century are not brick-heaps of 
 learning ; the architect has been at work. There had been 
 nothing like them in England before. The marshalling of the 
 material, processional, imperial past in the Decline and Fall ; 
 and of the past, in its continuity of institution and sentiment 
 with the present, in Burke's American and Indian speeches ; 
 of the solid, inherited facts of the present, in the Wealth of 
 Nations (1776) ; of the facts of biography, ordered and 
 quickened, in the Lives of the Poets and in Boswell's Johnson ; 
 all this is Roman work, and made to stand. So much infor- 
 mation and hard thinking tells on the poets, novelists, and 
 fantasts of the next age, and not only on its historians and 
 economists. The ideas of Burke live anew in Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge ; Gibbon's pageants inspire De Quincey's Revolt of 
 the Tartars ; Scott is a historian and a romancer at once. The 
 prose of one period, with its big positive achievements, the fruit 
 of organised learning, touches the imagination of the next. 
 
 3. But in that prose the imagination is at work already ; it 
 is there in the Decline and Fall, and in Burke, in the service of 
 knowledge ; it is the master-builder. Here it approaches the 
 faculty of the poet, with the difference that its material is 
 limited by the facts ; while in the biographers it appears simply 
 as accurate insight or the sense of composition, and in Adam 
 Smith as clearness of scientific grouping and power of general- 
 ising. We are not surprised that poetry and fiction should be 
 on the eve of a revival, which indeed has already begun. The 
 ' shaping spirit of imagination,' after a long pause, is recovering
 
 6 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 its higher uses. The path was cleared for it, during the 
 classical age, by the work of pure criticism done in its absence. 
 Criticism, learning, reconstruction to these three notes of 
 the eighteenth century is now added a fourth, that of the 
 imagination ; it has come back, and soon it dominates our 
 literature. 
 
 These four elements do not appear in neat succession, like 
 the points of a lecture ; the mind of a nation does not work in 
 that way. It takes a step onward, then another back, then 
 seems to lie still, then spurts forward again, as Pascal says, 
 plus que jama is. Sometimes the imagination is seen at play, 
 only to be chilled by a resurgence of pure criticism. Thus 
 Berkeley precedes Hume, and the fire of Rousseau is quenched 
 in the English utilitarians, who are his debtors. Perhaps it 
 is only in Goethe that the scientific and the inventive faculties 
 are found all in harmony. Still, our ' romantic ' literature, if 
 we stand well back from it, is seen to enter into its full heritage. 
 It has a strong vein of criticism and scepticism ; it has, in the 
 novel, a powerful hold on real life and on the past ; it has, at 
 any rate, the desire for large constructions and imaginative 
 wholes. This unity of mental impulse is by no means the same 
 thing as unity of opinion. The new age is full of intellectual 
 disharmonies, such as that between Wordsworth and Shelley. 
 There is no orchestra in romanticism ; it is a tree with many 
 branches, from which are heard many songs by no means in 
 accord. But for all that, the dead century is justified of its 
 works, in its successor ; there is no sudden or complete break. 
 
 II 
 
 In art, the chief difference is seen in the changed relationship 
 of prose to poetry. From 1700 to 1780, the performance is 
 far greater in prose, and the reigning schools of verse do the 
 work of prose, and so the performance in verso is inferior and 
 secondary. From 1780 to 1830 poetry is in the ascendant, 
 and nearly all the best prose is creative, and is doing the work of 
 poetry. The imagination is working freely, and not, as it must 
 in history or sociology, under the restrictions of fact. The his- 
 torians and philosophers are, as writers, of the second or third 
 rank, until the appearance of Carlyle. This reunion of poetry 
 and prose under t/ic rule, of the, free imagination is the great mark 
 of our literature from 1780 to 1830. After all their delays, and 
 recessions, and conflicts, the forces of criticism, knowledge, and 
 reconstruction begin to unite ; and the free imagination unites
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 7 
 
 them. This fact becomes clear, not only to academic philo- 
 sophers like Dugald Stewart, but to the poets themselves ; 
 the rights of the imagination are first proclaimed by Blake 
 (see Ch. v.) sub specie aeternitatis, and later its function is dis- 
 cerned and analysed by Coleridge (Ch. xvi.). 
 
 The best prose of the time, as the sequel will show, is innocent 
 of purpose, in the sense that it does not exist in order to teach 
 or persuade, or to alter opinion or behaviour, but to reveal ; 
 and is content to be judged by the pleasure that it gives through 
 its own perfection. In Sidney's words, it ' nothing affirms, 
 and therefore never lieth.' St. Ronan's Well, and Dream- 
 Children, and The Daughter of Lebanon, are equally disinter- 
 ested. Literary criticism, it is true, is partly concerned with 
 establishing theoretic principle, and thus has its purpose ; but 
 it is oftener, as in Lamb, a species of creative writing, concerned 
 with making us see, and not with arguing us into admiration. 
 In Coleridge the two purposes are intermixed ; but Coleridge 
 is most himself when he works intuitively, and not by demon- 
 stration ; and, powerfully as he stimulated thought, he did 
 not do enough to redress the balance or to make England a 
 philosophic country ; for his great system went bankrupt on 
 his hands. 
 
 It may be said that this distinction between the presence and 
 absence of ' purpose,' in the sense defined, breaks down when 
 applied to poetry itself, and that the poetic imagination may 
 work perfectly on behalf of such a purpose. Was not Blake 
 a fighting poet, and did not Wordsworth say he was ' a teacher 
 or nothing ' ? The Everlasting Gospel, and The Prelude, and 
 Adonais, are poems of doctrine. The doctrinal aim is heard 
 even in Keats, and overarches the lyric dream in which Shelley 
 lived, and presses incessantly on Wordsworth. Few of the 
 greater poets are quite free from it. All this is true ; and such 
 a purpose is another legacy from the past century. A further 
 distinction must therefore be made. 
 
 There seem to bo three kinds of poetic effort, shading off one 
 into the other. There is the writing that is not begotten by 
 the wish to enforce a view, and is content to be very good ; 
 which hardly plays with anything that can be called an idea, 
 even to clothe it in Sinai raiment, or to make it the servant 
 of art. Even in the classical age there is a little of this kind ; 
 it is present in a few pages of Collins or Thomson, and in some 
 of Macpherson's prose. After 1780 there is much more of it ; 
 there are Songs of Innocence, and the lyrics of Burns. After 
 1800 there is still more. Of Christabel, of most of the verse of
 
 8 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 Keats, you cannot ask whether it is true or false ; or of the 
 ending of Brougham Castle. But there is a second kind of 
 poetry, whose aim is doctrine, and which is none the worse for 
 that. A poetic idea is handled in such a way that a proposition 
 is involved. Lucretius, and that not only in his scholastic 
 passages, raises the greatest questions with a certain directness ; 
 and so does Hamlet, who does not simply play with such 
 questions, but who wants an answer to them, though he may 
 not get it. Prometheus Unbound enforces Shelley's tenets ; 
 so does the Ode to Duty ; there is a conviction behind them. 
 There is a great deal of such poetry in the romantic period ; 
 it may be inspired by Greek, or revolutionary, or German 
 philosophy. It will not do to say that the poetry is good in 
 so far as it escapes from its purpose, and weak in so far as it 
 propounds ; for this is notoriously not true ; although it is 
 true that the poetry is weak in so far as it merely declaims. 
 But there is a third kind, where the poem would have been 
 different if questions had not been asked and answered, but 
 where they are not asked or answered in the poem. Ideas, in 
 Coleridge's phrase, medicate the poetic atmosphere. Neglecting 
 the dubious cases, we have such a treatment when Wordsworth 
 describes the pressure of the hills upon his soul as he skated 
 along Esthwaite Lake, or calls London ' the chronicle at 
 once and bury ing-place of passions ' ; or when, to Keats as 
 he muses, ' Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.' This 
 poetry may not be better than the second kind, but it is not 
 exposed to the same risks ; for it cannot be contradicted, and 
 it is independent of all changes of thought. The romantic 
 period is rich in it. 
 
 All these species are equally good, if the work is equally well 
 done, and in all it can be well done. Art may or may not be 
 for art's sake, if only it is art. It must work under the law of 
 beauty, even if it is not deliberately made for that end ; or it 
 is cast into the oven. No good intentions ethical, intellectual, 
 or other can either save or damn it. Above all, no artistic 
 good intentions, if not realised, can save it. Its aim and theme 
 may be anything that will admit of its working under the law. 
 What aims and themes really admit of that obedience, or have 
 ensured it, can only be judged by the event, that is, by the 
 execution. This is not a novel view ; but it may be stated 
 once for all, at the risk of the obvious, and with the reader's 
 leave, as that obtaining in the present survey : 
 
 A modest creed, and yet 
 Pleasant, if one considers it.
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 III 
 
 The ten years before the French Revolution saw the ending 
 of a great period of English prose, and the beginning of a new 
 period of English verse. The work of Johnson, Gibbon, and 
 Reynolds was now being finished ; that of Adam Smith had 
 appeared earlier ; Burke's was more than half done, and it is 
 only his last seventeen years that directly concern us. He alone 
 supports the great traditions of prose, and is active almost to 
 the end of the century. The new bent that prose was to receive 
 after 1800 is foreseen in the novelists who come between Sterne 
 and Scott. It contains some anticipations of coloured and 
 impassioned writing. In verse, the year 1780 marks a true 
 revival. The decade of the sixties, with Percy, Macpherson, 
 Chatterton, and The Deserted Village (1770), had seen a false 
 dawn of romance, but this was not soon to ' ripen into a steady 
 morning.' The chief poem of the next ten years, Seattle's 
 Minstrel (1771 and 1774), marks little advance in power, 
 despite its gleams of vision and pleasant, half-playful echo of 
 Spenser's cadence. But amidst its elegant triteness there is a 
 new poetic idea, expressed in the title. The minstrel is an 
 ' itinerant poet and musician,' born in a ' rude age,' thoroughly 
 ' Gothic ' in his bearing, and bearing ' a character not only 
 respectable but sacred.' This idea was captured by Chateau- 
 briand, and faintly prophesies Scott's Lay. But it does not 
 touch the four poets who next arise. The Village and Poetical 
 Sketches, The Task and the Kilmarnock Poems, all come forth 
 between 1782 and 1787 ; so that these years are an acknow- 
 ledged era in the growth of ' romanticism.' That term, of 
 course, only came into use much later, by way of retrospect. 
 The word ' romantic ' is much older, and some of its meanings, 
 on the lips of the writers after 1780, will be noticed. The 
 modern definitions of it cannot be counted ; and instead of 
 trying to add another, it is better to begin with facts than with 
 names, and to ask, What is the general change that steals over 
 the English imagination during the eighteenth century ? Many 
 causes for the change will appear the interest in the past, in 
 the older English poets, in the classics, in foreign letters, in 
 nature ; but what, in fact, is the change itself ? 
 
 It can be stated as the convalescence of the feeling for beauty. 
 Not ' strangeness in beauty,' and not ' the sense of wonder ' ; 
 these terms cover too little, and are only varieties of some- 
 thing more fundamental the feeling for beauty itself. The 
 years from 1780 to 1830 differ from the years 1730 to 17SO
 
 10 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 in the swifter recognition of the ailment, in the assured con- 
 valescence, in the completed cure. 
 
 The feeling for beauty is restored ; beauty becomes again 
 the object of the imagination ; and this feeling is enriched from 
 three separate but meeting sources. First of all, the senses of 
 the artist are regenerated ; this is at the bottom of everything. 
 Secondly, his renewed perceptions of the face of living nature 
 are attended by a vision of humanity, a new passion and 
 humour, the expression of which is brought under the law of 
 beauty. Thirdly, this new knowledge and self-knowledge are 
 read in the light of new ideas ; philosophical conceptions and 
 visions invade literary art, and are brought under its law. 
 Great material or mental occurrences, like the Revolution, or 
 the appearance of Napoleon, or the publication of the philo- 
 sophy of Kant, give in time a formidable substance and 
 reality to this third element. The pathways of hope stretch 
 and brighten before humanity, and the very walls of its despair 
 or impotence rise in blacker strength, as the imagination 
 pictures them. And out of these three elements, the new 
 senses, the new sympathies and passions, and the new ideas, 
 arises a new style, or rather many styles, that strive to catch 
 up with the new material and express it ; and each of them 
 aims at its specific beauty. And let no one imagine that we 
 are bound here to say what we mean by beauty in itself ; for 
 there is no such thing, or if there be, it is of no consequence to 
 us ; there are only infinite manifestations of beauty. Here 
 we follow Goethe, who said to Eckermann, on the 18th of 
 April 1827 : 
 
 I cannot help laughing at the sesthetical folks who torment them- 
 selves in endeavouring, by some abstract words, to reduce to a 
 conception that inexpressible thing to which we give the name 
 of beauty. Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never 
 makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a 
 thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various 
 as nature herself. 
 
 Yes, it is so various that even in its lower grades of perfect 
 address, or expressiveness, such as we meet in a page of 
 Cobbett's, or of Jane Austen's, it is perceptible. It includes 
 the 'sublime,' from which the old theorists distinguished 
 it, and the terrible, and the pathetic, and the like, for it is 
 the form and condition under which these qualities operate ; 
 it comes to bo almost co-extensive, in the sphere of art, with 
 form itself. But beauty, to exist in art at all, must first of
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 11 
 
 all be perceived in the world ; and for this to occur, there must 
 be a regeneration of the poetic senses. 
 
 The masters of classical verse Dryden, Pope, and Swift 
 had the lively angry senses of the novelist ; they had the 
 seeing eye, the thirsty ear, the quick apprehension of manners, 
 and they had little love for what they perceived. But their 
 poetic senses were seldom awake, save in one direction ; they 
 had an ear for words, a noble fervour for sound and rhythm, 
 over a limited range. With their rhymed couplets they created 
 a little world of music ear-shattering sometimes, it is true, 
 rather than what De Quincey called ' heart-shattering ' music ; 
 oftener the tune of hammer and shuttle and bones than of harp 
 or viol. Beyond this, they seem to have little of the poet's 
 bodily sensibility to beauty, though Pope had his share of it 
 at first ; and their shortcoming in such perception is punished by 
 their failure to reach the rarest pitch of language. They cared 
 little for the face of the world. The thinker or orator may get 
 on without caring much for this. But even fiction, however 
 rich in sympathy and knowledge, falls by just so much short 
 of the fulness of life, as it fails to disclose the actual countenance 
 of nature, or of man and woman ; while poetry, if it does not 
 do that, banishes itself to the strangest limbo. It follows that 
 the history of our imaginative writing, with its heralding 
 struggles, and hopeful but fatal half -triumphs, and long re- 
 lapses, and impulses that petrify before they achieve, and its 
 perfect and prophetic things neglected at the time, is, at 
 bottom, very much the history of the artistic senses and their 
 growth, as they urge and shape themselves finally into the 
 words that are, as Longinus says, ' the light of the mind.' 
 
 A survey of our poetry, through Thomson and Gray and 
 Collins, through Macpherson's Ossian and Smart and Chatter- 
 ton, through Goldsmith, up to Blake and Burns, might easily 
 thread itself on this one clue, which would be proved a sound 
 one by the event, leading us as it does to two artists of the 
 richest sensitive faculty, each of whom has found a true style 
 for receiving and transmitting without hindrance the physical 
 message of the world. Blake, as a point of doctrine, and in 
 the interests of spiritual vision, disowns the five senses as 
 sources of falsehood, but of course his painting and poetry are 
 rooted in their report : nihil est quod non prius in sensu. It 
 would also be just to take one aspect of such a renewed sensi- 
 bility, the feeling for natural scenery, and for the words that 
 interpret it to the inner eye, as a representative one ; and this 
 feeling would be found to vary pretty regularly, though not
 
 12 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 uniformly, with the general imaginative power of each poet. 
 One sign of the times, in the last quarter of the century, is its 
 fuller extension among the prose writers. The travel notes 
 of Beckford, or of Mrs. Radcliffe, will furnish illustration 
 (Ch. vii.) ; but a word may be added here, failing a better place, 
 on two effects of this alertness to natural things, which emerge 
 more clearly about the same period. One is its extension to 
 the living creatures that are a part of nature, and the other is 
 that habit of pictorial vision, somewhat grotesque at times, 
 but real enough, which seeks to utter itself in a theory of the 
 ' picturesque.' 
 
 IV 
 
 The feeling for the beauty and expressiveness of the animal 
 world, of its sociability with man, and of its value to poet and 
 artist, becomes much enhanced. Blake's treatment, whether 
 indignantly sympathetic, or magnificently symbolic, of the 
 tiger, the emmet, and the lamb, has never been surpassed. 
 Burns's friendly, sentimental, or satiric presentment of the beasts 
 and with whom he lived, sheep, dogs, and horses has no such 
 strange light hanging over it ; he talks to these creatures, or 
 talks to himself about them, aloud, in their presence, as men do 
 who live much with them. Cowper makes a kind of vers de 
 societe about his pets or their enemies a spaniel, or a kitten 
 threatened by a viper. He observes them closely, not as a 
 naturalist, but for the fun and pleasure of the thing. For the 
 true intuition of animal character, and of the beauty or oddness 
 of line in small creatures, we must perhaps leave the poets, 
 and turn to the engravings of Bewick, whose Select Fables, as 
 well as his Quadrupeds and his British Birds, came out during 
 this period (1784-1804). In Bewick design is faithfully sub- 
 ordinated to observation, and to the scientific spirit ; but just 
 those postures and aspects are chosen, which are lovely or 
 humorous as well as cruelly characteristic. His delight in 
 the exact planting of a bird's claw, or the sweep of a squirrel's 
 tail, and his power to compose them often as if within the 
 dimensions of a coin or medallion, attest Bewick's footing on 
 that enchanted if rather narrow ground, which is common to 
 art and to science, and whore neither exists merely on 
 sufferance. 
 
 Bewick watches, but Gilbert White both watches and 
 listens ; one of the most poetic things in The Natural History of 
 Selborne l (1789) is the notation of the songs and calls of birds 
 and of other natural sounds. White leaves a store of observa-
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 13 
 
 tions that are, as it were, just ready for Keats or Tennyson 
 to take up ; on the ' loud audible humming of bees in the 
 air, though not one insect is to be seen ' ; on the blackcap, 
 with his ' full, sweet, deep, loud, and wild pipe ' ; on the echo, 
 which returns better from naked rocks than from ' hanging 
 woods,' because ' in the latter the voice is, as it were, entangled 
 and embarrassed in the covert,' and which succeeds better 
 with ' quick dactyls ' so White observes than with ' slow, 
 heavy, embarrassed spondees of the same number of syllables.' 
 Once he says : 
 
 When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages therefrom 
 night and day ; and especially at first waking ; which, by their 
 importunity, give me more uneasiness than pleasure. 
 
 The poet of The Ancient Mariner read and pencilled the book 
 with delight, and sometimes seems to be speaking himself ; 
 as when White tells how 
 
 the sun, at noon, looked blank as a clouded moon, and shed a 
 rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms ; 
 but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and set- 
 ting . . . and indeed there was reason for the most enlightened 
 person to be apprehensive ; for, all the while, Calabria, and part of 
 the isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earthquakes. 
 
 White, when he speaks of the ' majestic mountains ' of 
 Sussex, is in an even more naive state of mind than Gray 
 among the Lakes. His imaginative touches are exceptional ; 
 but they grow, without any break, out of his peaceful, minute, 
 and precise work as the naturalist of his own village. The 
 scientific value of his observations on birds, earthworms, the 
 times of flowering trees, and many other such matters, is 
 acknowledged, and his direct and vivid manner, as he writes 
 his scraps of letter to Pennant or Barrington, raises them, like 
 the letters of Cowper, to the level of literature. Thus in 
 White, also, art and science meet ; it is neither the large, 
 abstract, generalising science of the previous age, nor yet 
 the more rigid and technical science of that which was to 
 follow, but a science that studies the face and the life of the 
 earth, finds nature on the whole benevolent and providential, 
 but muses now and then on her curious contradictions, as shown, 
 for instance, in the feeling of animals for their young their 
 cr-Topyrj : ' nor is the violence of this affection more wonderful 
 than the shortness of its duration.' 
 
 The fresh delight, not unmixed with alarm, but full of a
 
 14 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 boyish sense of discovery, which came to Gray in the presence 
 of Alpine and Cumbrian scenery, is well known. It gives a 
 new colour and ripple to his prose, although, when he tries to 
 use the same experience for his verse, as in The Bard, he is 
 turbid, and we have no image of what he describes. Gray does 
 not think of a visible scene as a picture, he is content to be 
 the natural man. It was not till later that this selective 
 process, suggested partly by the painters, partly by the craft 
 of landscape gardening, found its formulae and told on descrip- 
 tive prose. To writing, indeed, and not to nature or to paint- 
 ings, the word ' picturesque ' seems to have been early, though 
 not first, applied by Warton and Johnson. Dugald Stewart, 1 in 
 his Philosophical Essays (1810), traces the derived senses ; 
 first, ' those combinations or groups or attitudes of objects, 
 that are fitted for the purposes of the painter ' ; and next, 
 these elements ' in the improvement of real landscape ' which 
 can be suggested by ' the study of painting.' These three senses, 
 blended in varying measure, long attach to the term, and can 
 be traced down to the aesthetic criticism of Hazlitt : nor have 
 such associations disappeared by the date of Modern Painters. 
 Many of these new instincts became evident in the long- 
 popular work by Archibald Alison, 2 Essays on the Nature and 
 Principles of Taste (1790), which furnished Dugald Stewart, 
 Jeffrey, and many more with matter for their discussions on 
 the Beautiful and the Sublime. In somewhat formal guise, 
 and in an elegant and amateurish fashion, but with a keen eye 
 for the facts of artistic sensibility, Alison develops his analysis 
 of the complex pleasure, which he calls ' delight,' and which 
 is afforded by the exercise of ' taste.' The ground of this 
 delight he finds in the associative process. The things of sense, 
 in themselves, merely make us glad or sorrowful, or fill us with 
 terror. Then comes the imagination, which works through the 
 ' train of thought ' thus set in motion, and carries us beyond 
 our sensations and simple emotions, calling up further memories 
 and ideas ; and aesthetic delight depends, and depends solely, 
 on its workings. It might seem that the delight given by a 
 forest filled with the glow of sunset could not be enhanced ; 
 but add the sound of evening bells ! Then, indeed, is true 
 delight ; for the ideas of piety, worship, and the like are super- 
 added, consummate the pleasure ; the imagination has done 
 its work. Alison perversely refuses to permit the mere senses 
 to please the ' taste,' and he is hampered by the false traditional 
 distinctions, fixed by Burke, between the ' beautiful ' and the 
 'sublime.' But his analyses of the actual qualities in nature
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 15 
 
 (the sounds of birds, and the elements, and the human voice, 
 as well as colour and natural form) are remarkably skilful 
 and persistent, and often read like a rude draft of a page of 
 Ruskin. In his pages that renewed feeling for natural beauty, 
 which we have found in literature at large, becomes conscious 
 and introspective, and prepares the way for a deeper self- 
 scrutiny. This renewal, however, is best studied at the time 
 in the theories of the ' picturesque,' an idea which Alison tries 
 to fit in to his theory of artistic sensation. 
 
 In 1772 William Gilpin, a country clergyman like White, 
 published Observations relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 
 written some fifteen years before ; the first of many such dis- 
 courses, of which his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791) is the 
 most methodical. The once-read but wearisome Tours of 
 Dr. Syntax, by William Combe, are a whimsical burlesque of 
 Gilpin's wanderings in the Lakes, and the Highlands, and the 
 Wye Valley, and the Welsh Mountains. Gilpin sometimes 
 raises a smile, but he is beyond the reach of such a buffoon. 
 He goes about to ' examine landscape by the laws of pictur- 
 esque beauty,' and, like painters, he is often disappointed with 
 it. He is blind to the beauty that does not seem to him to be 
 a good composition. He lays down rules and taboos as to 
 what is or is not pictorial. ' Two cows,' we learn, ' will hardly 
 combine,' in paint. It is offensive for a river to enter a fore- 
 ground at a right angle, but we may plant ' trees to hide the 
 deformity.' 
 
 A straight line at the summit of a wood, except in very remote 
 distances, is familiar, heavy, and disgusting. ... A regular line at 
 the base of a long line of wood sceneiy is almost as disgusting. 
 
 That is, both the painter and the landscape-gardener may, 
 indeed must, put in the trees. But Gilpin has much better 
 things to say. The laying out of nature so as to please the eye 
 soon becomes his absorbing interest, and the book On Forest 
 Scenery, illustrated by the Scenery of the New Forest in Hamp- 
 shire, is an entertaining mass of observation and precept. The 
 beauty and special physiognomy of oak and spruce and chest- 
 nut, the arrangement of clump and glen, of copse and ' open 
 grove,' the effects of water and atmosphere, are treated nicely 
 and systematically. Many of Gilpin's remarks show the alert- 
 ness of his senses. He feels the value of the English blur, or 
 ' rich distance ' : 
 
 The calm, overcast, soft day, which these climates often produce 
 at the beginning of autumn, hazy, mild, and undisturbed, affords
 
 16 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 a beautiful medium, spreading over the woods a sweet, grey tint, 
 which is specially favourable to their distant appearance. 
 
 At another time we are reminded of Cowper's Yardley Oak, 
 and hear of the grandeur of ruined trees : 
 
 They record the history of some storm, some blast of lightning, 
 or other great event, which transfers its great ideas to tJie landscape 
 . . . the maladies of trees are greatly subservient to the uses of the 
 pencil. 
 
 Sometimes there is a faint forecast of Wordsworth, not only 
 when Gilpin speaks of the ' lengthening gleam of wan dead 
 light ' on Bassenthwaite, but when he adds : 
 
 Every great and pleasing form, which we had seen during the day, 
 now played, in strong imagery, upon the fancy ; as, when the grand 
 chorus ceases, the ideal music vibrates in the ear. 
 
 Gilpin is further curious, because on one side he draws on 
 Burke's conception of the sublime, so genuine in its feeling, so 
 crude in its analysis ; and the elements of awe, mystery, 
 strangeness, and terror form part of his notion of the pictur- 
 esque ; whilst on the other, he leads the way to the ' romantic ' 
 scenery of Waverley, insisting on certain arrangements, con- 
 ventional lights and shades, supposed to be taught by the 
 school of Salvator Rosa, and assuming that they must move us, 
 much as Addison held that Milton's Adam and Eve must 
 interest us. 1 
 
 A similar temper, in which actual scenery, painting, and 
 poetry are confusedly cultivated together, can be illustrated 
 from the travel notes of a third country parson, Thomas 
 Twining, 2 the gifted translator of the Poetics of Aristotle and 
 the friend of Dr. Burney. The attitude is not unlike Gray's, 
 for the writer is fresh ; no man has felt the like before ; the 
 place described is the valley of the Calder, and the date 1781 ; 
 and since the tone is not quite that of any of the new poets 
 who were so soon to speak, the length of the quotation stands 
 excused : 
 
 The valley contracts itself ; the hills crowd about you, rising 
 almost perpendicularly on each side, wooded from top to bottom, 
 with black, craggy rocks peeping out here and there ; picturesque 
 little mills, with their rush of water, close under the woods ; bridges, 
 some stone, of a single arch, others of wood, but all exactly as a 
 painter would have them ; cottages perched about, some in the road, 
 others close to the stream, in most romantic and improbable situations, 
 more like stone nests than houses ; here and there little cross vales
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 17 
 
 opening into this, paths winding up the woods, craggy roads losing 
 themselves round the corner of a wood, etc., etc. I sicken with 
 vague description ! In short, the effect it had on me (and Elmsall 
 too) was that of painted landscapes of the most invented and poetic 
 kind realised ; and every object, animate or inanimate, that we 
 saw was of a piece with the surrounding scene . . . a man with a 
 pack on his shoulder and a staff in his hand trudging over a rustic 
 bridge, or climbing up a winding path through a wood ; men driving 
 pack-horses, or lounging along sideways on the empty packsaddle 
 a favourite figure with painters. 1 
 
 Twining also expresses, unawares, what is called the ' dis- 
 interested ' character of aesthetic enjoyment ; the words were 
 written in 1793, the year of Wordsworth's Descriptive 
 Sketches : 
 
 This pleasure is something totally sui generis to me ... a 
 serenity, a perfect complacency, a full satisfaction that wants 
 nothing, looks forward to nothing, leaves no wish to be anything 
 or anywhere but what I am and where I am then ; all this mixed 
 with more benevolence than I can feel perhaps in any other situation. 
 Set me in a romantic valley, I could pluck out my eyes and give them 
 to my friend if I could see the prospect without them. 
 
 Twining's picture of the vale of Llanrwst is in the same tone ; 
 he was a musician, and had a keen, enjoying, critical nature. 
 We can draw, as it were, lines of affinity or contrast between 
 such passages, in one direction to the Spanish notes of Beck- 
 ford, in another to the fervent descriptions of tourists, 2 in 
 another to the poems of Cowper, in another to the paintings of 
 their contemporary, the elder Crome, in order to see what is 
 meant by the renewal of the artistic senses. 
 
 Sir Uvedale Price, 3 whose prolix work On the Picturesque 
 (1794) is the most methodical of all these discussions, has 
 little to say of literature, but applies his conception, nearly 
 identical with Gilpin's, to painting, to nature, and to orna- 
 mental landscape. The essence of the picturesque, which is 
 midway between the ' beautiful ' and the ' sublime,' is the 
 element of ' roughness and abruptness, with sudden deviations.' 
 Thus a Pomeranian terrier is picturesque, and a smooth spaniel 
 is not. The Venetian painters are picturesque, because their 
 colours are broken and blended ; and so is Gothic as con- 
 trasted with Grecian architecture, which Price, like Reynolds, 
 describes as consisting of ideal or ' central ' forms, ' midway 
 between the extremes of every kind.' But a ruined Greek 
 temple is picturesque. How near these notions of the pictur- 
 esque approach to that of the ' romantic,' as conceived by the 
 
 TOL. I. B
 
 18 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 school of Mrs. Radcliffe, and afterwards by Scott's hero, 
 Edward Waverley, may be seen from a passage in which 
 Price describes two landscapes. The first is, by definition, 
 picturesque. There are 
 
 varied and strongly-marked elTects of broken ground ; of sudden 
 projections and deep hollows ; of old twisted trees with furrowed 
 bark ; of water tumbling in a deep worn channel over rocks and 
 rude stones, and half lost among shaggy roots, decaying stumps, and 
 withered fern. 
 
 The influence of Burke's theory of ' beauty,' as equivalent to 
 delicacy and loveliness and ' smoothness,' is seen in the con- 
 trasted picture of 
 
 a glade or small valley of the softest turf and finest verdure ; the 
 ground on each side swelling gently into knolls . . . the whole 
 adorned with trees of the smoothest and tenderest bark ... a gentle 
 stream festooned with foliage . . . stones with their surface some- 
 times varied and softened by the rich velvet of mosses, etc. 
 
 Through these definitions and distinctions, simple-minded 
 as they may now seem, the artistic senses put themselves to 
 school ; and if the theorists lag behind the poets and painters 
 themselves, that is in the nature of things. Sometimes the 
 artist is himself the philosopher ; and by Blake and Reynolds, 
 as will appear later, the real questions of aesthetic are asked, 
 and often resolutely answered. 
 
 Besides this refreshed perception of the visible and audible 
 world, there is a new vision of mankind, and a new vein of 
 passion and humour correspondent. No unreal line need be 
 drawn ; the elements are only separate in analysis, and they 
 unfold together : 
 
 And when the mind is quicken'd, out of doubt, 
 The organs, though defunct and dead before, 
 Break up their drowsy grave, and newly move 
 With casted slough and fresh legerity. 
 
 And when the 'organs' are quickened, it is incredible that 
 they should not straightway, or in the same act, perceive man 
 and woman anew, and the child, as well as the lamb, and the 
 water-snakes, and the hares, in the same recovered light, and 
 to the same accompaniment of murmuring sound, with which 
 they have begun to perceive the nature that we miscall dead.
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 19 
 
 And it does prove that the vision of mankind, both as it famili- 
 arly is, but had never yet been seen to be ; as it may be, or 
 never may be, but as it is good to think that it will be ; and 
 of the creatures which, as we now know, stand in the long 
 history somewhere behind humanity, arrested in their way 
 towards it, but leaving in it types and traces of themselves 
 the gadfly, the butterfly, the good and bad serpent, the lion ; 
 it proves that this vision has stolen in, along with an eye 
 for landscape, and with a re-perception of the music of the 
 elements ; not indeed, always in the same hour, or in the same 
 minds, yet ever present and re-invading, like an adolescence 
 of the soul. 
 
 In seeking to define this change, we must, once more, not 
 do wrong to the less purely imaginative writers. At first 
 wo incline to say that the change came through a breach with 
 the spirit of the prosaic, quarrelsome, heavy-footed, unrefined 
 age of reason. And it is easy to think this, if we fix our eyes 
 on the showy, ruthless things written in the old forms, like The 
 Dunciad, or Swift's picture of the beings who were indeed 
 immortal but grew horribly older and older ; and then upon 
 the visions of Blake and Wordsworth, and on their critical 
 revolt ; noticing also Blake's dictum that ' Gothic is living 
 form,' and Wordsworth's attacks upon ' Ossian ' and Pope's 
 Homer. But long before the philosophic passion for mankind 
 met and deepened, in these authors, the waters of romance, 
 we can trace a larger humanity gaining upon the characteristic 
 eighteenth-century writers, and taking in fresh types and social 
 layers. The humble and the dowdy, the pariahs and eccentrics 
 of the earth, the trader, the seaman, and the bourgeois, could 
 stir the imagination after all. Wesley claimed their souls ; 
 Oglethorpe, Howard, and other noble reformers, won them 
 better schools and prisons ; Johnson was their helpmate ; 
 Fielding with friendly deep irony, and Hogarth with the love 
 that chastises, took their portraits ; and Gray thought of them 
 gently when they were dead. De Quincey's tenderness for 
 Ann of Oxford Street, or for ' the convict of Norfolk Island, 
 blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off 
 England,' is in the same lineage of sentiment, exalted and 
 intensified. In all this there was little doctrine. We seldom 
 hear of the rights of the poor, or of their abstract equality with 
 ourselves, or of the value of landscape in their education, or 
 of the hope that some day, under a new heaven, they may 
 be happy and redeemed. Such ideas come more fully to 
 light in the tracts of Paine and Godwin, and with many a
 
 20 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 premonitory flash, as of no summer lightning, in the verse of 
 Blake or Burns. The writers of the classical period see men 
 through no such medium. 
 
 The eighteenth century, pure and simple, was rich enough in 
 humanity, and so was its characteristic writing, as the examples 
 of Steele, of Fielding, and of Johnson are enough to show. There 
 is nothing better, for heart or for style, than Johnson's last 
 letter to his mother ; if by style we mean the heart's choice of 
 the right words, and the care taken that the aged senses of the 
 reader shall not have to think twice over a single syllable. 
 
 DEAR HONOURED MOTHER, Your weakness afflicts me beyond 
 what I am able to communicate to you. I do not think you unfit 
 to face death, but I know not how to bear the thought of losing 
 you. Endeavour to do all you can for yourself. Eat as much as 
 you can. I pray often for you ; do you pray for me. I have 
 nothing to add to my last letter. I am, dear mother, your dutiful 
 son, SAM. JOHNSON. 
 
 Such men saw life plain, and had nothing to learn, in the 
 simpler kind of great prose expression, from romance ; it is 
 romance that is in debt to them. They loved their kind be- 
 cause they had mixed much with it and had kept their heads, 
 and not because they held that they ought to love it. There 
 is none of that excess, or fatal tip-over into wrong sentiment, 
 which was the price paid by romance for its victories, and 
 which often disfigures the pages of Dickens and Thackeray, 
 and even of Charlotte Bronte ; persons who, with romance 
 behind them, dealt in eloquence and colour. Do not these 
 writers, so full of genius and passion, frequently and horribly 
 put us off and chill our humanity by some overloaded, ill- 
 written appeal to it, and by emotional false notes ? We have 
 not to be on our guard in this way with Amelia, or with the 
 character-sketches of William Law. The ' sensibility ' of 
 Richardson and Sterne, which is correctly viewed as a new 
 ingredient in our literature, is one of the origins of this excess : 
 the writing of the classical school is not. Well, that noble 
 kind of plainness in the utterance of deep feeling, which is 
 commanded also, with more grace and play, if with less 
 solemnity, by Goldsmith, in his Vicar of Wakefield this is 
 the bequest, it is perhaps the grand bequest, of the classical 
 ago to later literature. It is taken up afterwards by the 
 masters of romance. It is heard in the private journals of Scott 
 and of Carlyle when they are alone with their memories of 
 bereavement ; or in some pages of Vanity Fair \ or in the first
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 21 
 
 untroubled flowings of the talent of George Eliot. There is 
 no break here between two ages ; there is a large, plain, un- 
 broken tradition ; the language is what our ancestors called 
 the language of the heart. Such an idiom cannot be con- 
 cocted ; and when we say that the gift of finding it is style, 
 we mean by style the removal of anything that can disturb 
 expression, and not something plastered on to, or artificially 
 shaping, expression. In one way it is the absence, in another 
 the crown, of literature. Wordsworth attains to this style 
 when he speaks of 
 
 The memory of what has been 
 And never more shall be. 
 
 No doubt such effects are the same in all tongues and at all 
 times ; but our classical prose lends itself well to them. Swift's 
 memorial to Esther Johnson is another instance ; and, very 
 late in the day, we come on a soberer one still, in Walpole's 
 letter to the Miss Berrys, written on 10th October 1790, when 
 he was seventy-three, and these old companions were leaving 
 England : 
 
 If I live to see you again, you will then judge whether I am 
 changed but a friendship so rational and pure as mine is, and so 
 equal for both, is not likely to have any of the fickleness of youth, 
 when it has none of its other ingredients. It was a sweet consola- 
 tion to the short time that I may have left, to fall into such a society 
 no wonder then that I am unhappy at that consolation being 
 abridged. I pique myself on no philosophy but what a long use and 
 knowledge of the world had given me, the philosophy of indifference 
 to most persons and events. I do not pique myself on being ridicu- 
 lous at this very late period of my life ; but when there is not a 
 grain of passion in my affection for you two, and when you both 
 have the good sense not to be displeased at my telling you so (though 
 I hope you would have despised me for the contrary), 1 am not 
 ashamed to say that your loss is heavy to me. 
 
 This, in its way, is not easily beaten by anything that comes 
 after ; ' prose and reason ' are here justified of their children ; 
 and when we also remember the generous vividness with which 
 the four great novelists, headed by Fielding, represented real 
 life, and how they added new types and proverbial figures to 
 the stock of the world Squire Western, Lovelace, my Uncle 
 Toby in a fashion that had not been done, save once or twice 
 by Defoe and Addison, since the good days of the drama, we 
 shall not be inclined to do them wrong. 
 
 All the same, these writers precede rather than anticipate a 
 real change in the spirit of humanity, a change which every-
 
 22 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 body feels, while it is hard to put a name to it because it strikes 
 so deep. It is doubly false to describe it as a change from the 
 spirit of cheerful or self-satisfied optimism to that of ' romantic ' 
 melancholy. Why, the melancholy and gloom of the eighteenth 
 century itself were just what struck the youthful Goethe l ; 
 and not only ' Ossian,' but Swift and Johnson are there to 
 attest it ; while, on the other side, the buoyancy of prophetic 
 hope in Blake or Shelley is crossed by a thousand misgivings. 
 It is rather that, as time passes, both sorrow and happiness 
 speak in a different voice ; as may be seen at once by compar- 
 ing extremes, the gloom of Rasselas and that of Childe Harold, 
 or the good cheer of Fielding with that of Scott. It is trite 
 to say that the passions and emotions are always the same ; 
 it is more to the purpose to see how their texture alters. Take 
 the simple expression of innocent pleasure, in a picture of 
 village games. Here is Goldsmith's : 
 
 How often have I blest the coming day, 
 
 When toil remitting lent its turn to play, 
 
 And all the village train, from labour free, 
 
 Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree ; 
 
 While many a pastime circled in the shade, 
 
 The young contending as the old survey'd ; 
 
 And many a gambol frolick'd o'er the ground, 
 
 And sleights of art and feats of strength went round : 
 
 And still, as each repeated pleasure tir'd, 
 
 Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspir'd. 
 
 Blake has another treatment, in The Echoing Green : 
 
 Old John, with white hair, 
 Does laugh away care, 
 Sitting under the oak, 
 Among the old folk. 
 They laugh at our play, 
 And soon they all say, 
 Such, such were our joj's, 
 When we all, girls and boys, 
 In our youth time were seen 
 On the Echoing Green. 
 
 Till the little ones, weary, 
 
 No more can be merry ; 
 
 The sun does descend, 
 
 And our sports have an end. 
 
 Round the laps of their mothers 
 
 Many sisters and brothers, 
 
 Like birds in their nest, 
 
 Are ready for rest, 
 
 And sport no more seen 
 
 On the darkening Green.
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 23 
 
 Blake wrote that less than twenty years after Goldsmith ; 
 but he is in a different world. It is not only that he sees, and 
 that he works in images, which wreathe themselves in foliage 
 and figure round the margin of his ' song of innocence ' ; or 
 that his style is pure and right, while Goldsmith's is sweetly 
 conventional ; but that the human sentiment is deeper, subtler, 
 and more universal. Indeed, the more we look into Blake, the 
 surer we are that in his union of pure humanity with poetic 
 truth and passion, and in his command of terror and wrath and 
 pity, he is both the earliest among the greater poets, and the 
 greatest among the earlier poets, in whom the changes we 
 describe are apparent. Those who wrote after him in the 
 Lakes, or at Ravenna, or at Great Marlow, were hardly touched 
 by his influence ; but, before their time, and on his lips, the 
 conception of love had been raised into a different sphere ; 
 the ' renascence of wonder,' by which the love of marvel was 
 transformed into the sense of mystery, had reached one of its 
 summits ; and the sense of human brotherhood had found 
 impassioned utterance. Blake's feeling for the infinite was 
 habitual, and the presence of this feeling is the broadest, if 
 necessarily the least definable difference of the new poetry from 
 the best of the old. Its expression, in beautiful form, and in 
 relation to nature and human life, during the fifty years suc- 
 ceeding the Poetical Sketches, falls to be noted at various points 
 in the sequel. 
 
 VI 
 
 Thus comes in sight the third of the sources from which 
 the recovered sense of beauty is enriched ; and this is the 
 movement of philosophic thought. Man's conception of himself, 
 of his fellows, of his training and destiny, and of the social 
 fabric, is powerfully modified. The chronicle of this move- 
 ment falls to the student of thought and culture ; it is often 
 remote from the chronicle of letters, but the two sometimes 
 coalesce. This happens, either when some monument of 
 philosophic prose is achieved ; or when abstract ideas are 
 found telling powerfully, if less methodically, upon the work 
 of the imagination. Between 1780 and 1830 there are no 
 great English philosophers (apart from Burke and Coleridge) 
 who can be called great writers. But how deeply the poets 
 and essayists are penetrated by abstract ideas will appear 
 hereafter. Meanwhile some of the leading forces of this order 
 may be noticed. 
 
 1. The most potent single influence is that of Rousseau.
 
 24 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 By his passion for nature, both in itself and in its connection 
 with his educational doctrine ; by his exaltation of the natural 
 man, and his treatment of love ; and, above all, by the immense 
 extension that he gave to the habit of self-disclosure, and to 
 what may be termed confessional literature ; in all these 
 ways, by direct and indirect example, as well as by the revul- 
 sions or counter-forces that he provoked, Rousseau is an 
 acknowledged founder of romanticism, and his effect on 
 England has still to be duly explored. It is perhaps first 
 visible in the doctrinaire and pedagogic fiction (Ch. VI.) of the 
 years preceding Scott, and next in the earlier speculations of 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 2. The writings of the French revolutionary theorists, in- 
 cluding Helvetius, D'Holbach, and Condorcet, soon filter into 
 the English defenders of the Revolution. After 1790, through 
 Godwin, Paine, and other middlemen, and above all through 
 the hostile and passionate descriptions of Burke, the ideas of 
 these radical writers are familiarised in England. The rights 
 of individuals and classes, the value to be attached to social 
 institutions, and the capacity of man for perfection, are all 
 fiercely debated, sometimes even in fiction ; they are all present 
 to the imagination of the time. It is hard to distinguish this 
 literary process from the influence of the Revolution itself, 
 which divided the nation into two camps. On that a book 
 remains to be written ; and one chapter of it must relate the 
 effect of these great events upon our literature. Some material 
 for such a study is scattered through our chapters upon the 
 novel, upon Wordsworth, upon Coleridge, upon Shelley, and 
 upon Hazlitt. See too Ch. xxvi. 
 
 3. The voyage of philosophical ideas from Germany to 
 England was accomplished in a slow old-fashioned sailing-boat, 
 and much of the cargo was lost on the way. Dugald Stewart, 
 the chief disseminator of metaphysics before Hamilton, gave 
 a cold and timid welcome to Kant, whose works were but 
 tardily translated or understood. The first version l of the 
 Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1838 ; it is curious to find 
 Schopenhauer, 2 years before, proposing himself to make one, to 
 be revised by an English hand. His own great work (1818) 
 was not known in this country till much later. Coleridge was 
 the first to put into wide circulation (though without method, 
 and sometimes without acknowledgment) some of the con- 
 ceptions of Kant, and still more those of Fichte, and Schelling, 
 and Schlegel. Something is also due to the essays of De 
 Quincey. But it is only towards the end of the period that
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 25 
 
 the ' transcendental ' spirit is fully appropriated and uttered 
 by Carlyle (Ch. xxvi.). 
 
 4. Other traditions of thought, opposed to pure rational- 
 ism, are found moulding poetic art. Blake, with more energy 
 than coherence, shaped in verse a mystical theosophy of his 
 own ; but his debt to Swedenborg or Boehme is not easily 
 definable, and he was neglected in his own day. More fruitful 
 was the influence of Plato, who was translated, as well as 
 Plotinus and other neo-Platonists, by Thomas Taylor, and 
 who so potently affected Shelley. It is easy to see how these 
 forces, as well as those issuing from Germany, ministered to 
 that feeling for the infinite which we have seen to be one of the 
 notes of romanticism ; but a particular study of their working 
 is much to be desired. 
 
 The most visible effect of this motley movement of ideas 
 upon literary art remains to be mentioned, and is of the first 
 importance. It is nothing less than the revival of meta- 
 physical verse in the grand style. The Essay on Man is meta- 
 physical verse ; but it is a second-rate statement of second- 
 rate and second-hand ideas. Still, such as it is, it is the last 
 attempt of the sort in England made for fifty years by a great 
 man of letters. There are noble preluding notes in Thomson 
 and Cowper ; but Blake was the first to revive, however 
 imperfectly, the style in question ; by which is meant here the 
 expression, under the law of beauty, by an imagination fully 
 kindled, of high abstract conceptions. This gift is only fully 
 developed by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and after them by 
 Shelley ; also by Keats ; and, in his manner, also by Byron. 
 We hear it in ' My Spectre around me night and day,' and in 
 Dejection, and The Prelude, and Adonais, and the revised 
 Hyperion, and in Cain too, just as clearly as we hear it in the 
 speeches of Macbeth, or Moloch, or in Donne, or in Spenser's 
 Four Hymns. Without this style, the summits of poetry can 
 scarcely be reached ; and without a living movement of thought, 
 fertilising poetry while at work outside it, the style cannot be 
 attained. 
 
 VII 
 
 In speaking of style, we have arrived already at the central 
 problem of the new literature. The renewal of the artistic 
 senses, the larger view of humanity, the quickening power of 
 ideas these things, after all, are not literature itself ; they are 
 only its nourishment. What was to be its language ? That 
 was the question for poetry and imaginative prose. How
 
 26 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 discern, amongst the struggling and alloyed kinds of diction 
 reigning down to 1780 the diction of Pope, of Thomson, of 
 Gray, of Collins, of the folk-ballads, and of ' Ossian,' the 
 diction that would serve, in order that the new material might 
 be shapen and the new spirit expressed ? This question 
 begins to be answered after 1780 ; by 1810 it is answered more 
 decisively ; by 1830 it has been answered to the utmost- 
 answered even to the point of exhaustion, as may be seen from 
 the throng of echoes. Each of the poets and masters of prose 
 is found, more or less consciously, giving his own answer. In 
 the critical utterances of Crabbe, of the ' Lake poets,' or of 
 De Quincey upon language, versification, and rhetoric, the 
 process of choice becomes articulate, and sometimes defiant. 
 In the archaisms of Leigh Hunt and Keats, who took words 
 and formations from late Renaissance English, the effort to 
 make a diction is just as apparent. In other writers, like 
 Shelley, there seems to be little of such effort ; his style, after 
 the first, comes right of itself, or by the grace of the gods of 
 Hellas. But whether consciously or not, each artist helps in 
 the fashioning of his own instrument, and does not merely 
 inherit it ; and, by the end of the period, a whole language has 
 come into being, a new multitude of dialects for the uses of the 
 imagination. We need not forestall our recital ; but it is easy 
 to see what were some of the types of poetic utterance, which 
 had to be created again after long disuse or extinction. The 
 species and varieties, appropriated to the recognised forms, 
 such as lyric or versified story, or the essay or the prose reverie, 
 are not here referred to ; such an analysis would be intricate 
 and perhaps bewildering. It is simpler to ask in what general 
 ways language responded to the call made upon it by the eager 
 and nimble ' organs ' which had come to ' break up their drowsy 
 grave,' and also by the enlarged sympathy of the artists 
 with the human drama. The metaphysical verse, which had 
 arisen for the utterance of speculative ideas, has been 
 mentioned. 
 
 1. The dead old abstract diction of the classical poets had to 
 go, though it lingered stubbornly in Campbell and others. 
 There must be a new fount of diction, in order to ' make the too 
 much loved earth more lovely ' to the mind's eye and ear. 
 And, in the very heart of the classical age, it had been found, 
 if only at moments. Every one knows some of these antici- 
 pations in the letters of Gray, the Ode to Evening, the Song 
 to David, or the Ballad of Charitie ; or in the yet earlier lines, 
 which the poet of The Seasons strangely rejected :
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 27 
 
 Thus the glad skies, 
 
 The wide-rejoicing earth, the woods, the streams 
 With every life they hold, down to the flower 
 That paints the lowly vale, or insect-wing 
 Wav'd o'er the shepherd's slumber, touch the mind 
 To nature tun'd, quick-urging through the nerves 
 The glittering spirits in a flood of day. 
 
 There were many such passages for the romantic rebels to 
 build upon ; but they were too much obscured in the mass of 
 writing that would not serve ; in the abstractions and inver- 
 sions of Thomson, in the ' kind of cumbrous splendour which 
 we wish away,' justly censured by Johnson in his Life of Gray ; 
 in the desert of the later volumes of Chalmers and Anderson. 
 We must not think of the poets who came after 1780 as at all 
 clearly aware of their own pedigree ; for this has only been 
 worked out since their time. What they did, therefore, in 
 their search for a language, besides trusting to nature, was 
 just what these scattered ancestors of romanticism had done 
 themselves. They went back to the Old Masters. They 
 leaned over the shoulders of Chaucer, or Milton, or the Eliza- 
 bethans, and studied for their secret. In this sense the new 
 poetry is a ' revival ' ; and one of its central and obvious facts 
 is its literary inspiration. This is seen in the search for a fresh 
 vocabulary, by which to represent scenery, or sound, or dim 
 strong impressions of luxury, or the war of the elements. Blake 
 began with the Elizabethans, and learned their delicate lyrical 
 colouring. Coleridge, working on the popular ballad, and 
 Keats on the descriptive poetry of Browne or Chapman, and 
 Beddoes on the imagery of the old tragedians, are familiar 
 instances of this procedure. The idiom of the senses and 
 passions was thus enlarged. 
 
 2. The lofty and heroic style had also to be re-created 
 something adequate to the subjects of Laodamia, or The Cenci, 
 or Hyperion, or the Hellenics. There was nothing in the 
 eighteenth century that would meet this need. Nor would 
 those poems have been what they are, without resort to the 
 great traditions of the dramatists, or Milton, or Virgil. Even 
 apart from the choice of matter, the initial effect of the double 
 revival that of the classics, and that of the older English 
 poets cannot well be overstated. It furnished a staff, a 
 standard, a control. There are many varieties of heroic 
 language ; there is the bare plain kind, such as Shelley achieves 
 in the last speech of Beatrice Cenci, and there is the splendid 
 elaborate kind, such as Wordsworth achieves in his
 
 28 ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 Fierce confederate storm 
 Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore 
 Within the walls of cities. 
 
 There is abundance of both these kinds, and of others, in the 
 romantic period ; each of the greater poets has one or other 
 of them, if only at moments. This heroic speech is not so 
 evenly diffused amongst them as it is amongst the old 
 dramatists, any more than the gift of pure lyric is so evenly 
 diffused ; but it is there, and we are never sure it will not be 
 heard. 
 
 3. At the other extreme of diction, the problem was equally 
 pressing, and more critical. There is no upper limit of poetical 
 language, but there is a lower limit ; and the determination 
 of that limit, which had been hitherto blurred or left too high, 
 was of moment. The question arose at once out of the poets' 
 increase of sympathy with humble and inarticulate lives, and 
 from the need of bringing their fates and doings, and also their 
 talk, into verse. Crabbe we shall find solving this question 
 in his way ; but he did not transfigure, in the act of retaining, 
 the lower and plainer sorts of language. It was Wordsworth 
 who faced the problem and answered it, less by his critical 
 theories than by his verse. The result, in spite of all his 
 mistakes, was not to lower poetry, but to extend its territory. 
 
 One of the fruits of this general retrieval of poetic language, 
 whether won by mother-wit, or by the refreshed attention to 
 the Old Masters, or by both, need not be ignored. This is the 
 reaction of language itself upon thought, vision, and feeling. 
 Thomson and Gray were born into a false style which sometimes 
 blinds and deafens them, and they cannot perceive the object 
 through its mists. When we read, in Spring : 
 
 Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds 
 Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism ; 
 And to the sage-instructed eye unfold 
 The various twine of light, by thce dissolved 
 From the white-mingling maze ; 
 
 we feel that a sham diction has kept the poet from seeing the 
 rainbow, which is not a ' twine of light,' and does not suggest a 
 prism. He has to work himself free of this diction, and often 
 he does so, and is simple and homely : 
 
 The blackbird whistles from the thorny brake ; 
 The mellow bullfinch answers from the grove ; 
 
 or simple and lofty : 
 
 The mountains lift their green heads to the sky.
 
 ANTICIPATIONS 29 
 
 As a truer diction is accomplished, it conies to purge the ear 
 and vision ; the study of Virgil, of Paradise Lost, of the Faerie 
 Queene, releases the poetic perceptions ; not without toil and 
 penance and many remnants of error, but it does release 
 them. So Keats, taught by Milton to find the right words, 
 comprehends the passions of a fallen god : 
 
 Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair. 
 
 And when Blake writes : 
 
 And mournful lean Despair 
 
 Brings me yew to deck my grave, 
 
 it is Spenser's Despair, not Satan's or Beelzebub's, that starts 
 his mind upon the vision and gives him the right pattern of 
 emblem. With all this, we must not exaggerate the kind or 
 amount of inspiration that the Old Masters gave ; they did their 
 work, and retired ; but once the true key of language is found, 
 and however it is found, it keeps feeling and sensation from 
 going wrong. The more definite bequests of mediaeval romance 
 and ballad may appear best as an introduction to the verse of 
 Scott. It is needless to speak of them too soon, in connection 
 with Crabbe, or Cowper, or Burns.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE: CRABBE 
 
 I. New lease of life, 1780-1800. Importance of studying this phase. 
 
 II. The Rolliad; John Wolcot ('Peter Pindar'); Whig skits and 
 travesties. 
 
 III. Anti-revolutionary satire. William Gifford, his Baviad and Maeviad, 
 and translations ; Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature ; The Anti-Jacobin, its 
 authors ; attacks on Whigs, Radicals, subversive doctrine, ' sentimental ' 
 and anarchical ethics, and literary mawkishness and affectation. The New 
 Morality. 
 
 IV. Erasmus Darwin and The Botanic Garden ; his ' scientific ' poetry, 
 machinery, and theories of imagery and diction. 
 
 V. Crabbe : cause of his early acceptance ; his attack on Goldsmith, and 
 on the romantic novel. Early works, The Village. 
 
 VI. Crabbe : digressiohs into freer, romantic verse : Sir Eustace Grey. 
 
 VII. Crabbe : Parish Register, Borough, Tales. 
 
 VIII. Crabbe : Tales of the Hall ; his poetic theories ; ' poetry without an 
 atmosphere.' Examples of his stories. 
 
 IX. Crabbe : his technique in rhyme and diction. 
 
 X. Johnson's Lives. Samuel Rogers : Pleasures of Memory ; Italy. 
 
 XI. Thomas Campbell. Dispute over Pope's poetry : Bowles and Byron. 
 
 As the third quarter of the eighteenth century wears on, 
 bringing us in sight of Blake and Cowper, we become restive 
 at waiting by the sickbed of the old classical school ' of verse, 
 and wish that we had done with it. But its life is tougher 
 than we thought, and a little patience is worth while. So 
 strong a tradition dies hard ; the familiar distich, the hard 
 blank line, the factitious diction and idiom, the habit of argu- 
 ing and preaching and reviling in verse, and the trick of parody, 
 go on long after Blake and Cowper have told them to depart. 
 More than that, these forms and fashions of verse actually 
 have, after 1780, spurts of active life and refreshed invention. 
 They enlist Gifford, they enlist Canning. And, even after- 
 wards, they have a kind of life beyond the grave. They pass 
 into some of the poets of the new age, who deride or ignore 
 them ; and they are traceable in Wordsworth and in Keats. 
 We should watch, therefore, some of the less shadowy survivors 
 
 30
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 31 
 
 of tho old school, who are so vociferous during the age and by 
 the side of the long-surviving Crabbe, the last great craftsman 
 to employ the same technique. After leaving Crabbe, some 
 poets of a shaken reputation, such as Rogers and Campbell, 
 are to be noticed ; for their roots, at any rate, are in the tradi- 
 tion of Pope, and they begin to write before the end of the 
 century. There is no need to pause over verse -makers who 
 died without the need of ridicule ; such as William Mason, 
 the biographer of Gray, with his frosty and studied classic 
 tragedies ; or as William Hayley, who is remembered as the 
 biographer of Cowper and Romney, and as the generous if 
 unperceiving friend of Blake, and not for his once popular 
 Triumphs of Temper (1781), which sets forth, in a vein of genteel 
 banter, the uses of good temper to those in search of a husband. 
 The classical verse and diction were doubtless doomed ; 
 but then they were their own executioners. It was they that 
 mocked themselves to death ; and they did not wait for the 
 new poetry to do so. The Rolliad and The Anti-Jacobin 
 embody, besides a political purpose, the protest of lively good 
 sense, unpoetical humour, and the feeling for absurdity, 
 against the aberrations into which literature had fallen. It is 
 now the ' age of prose and reason ' that, in a moment of dying 
 illumination, judges its own weaknesses, and at the same time 
 the failures of the weaker romanticists. When Canning 
 mimics Erasmus Darwin, it is in the best eighteenth-century 
 style, which Pope himself might have envied. When Thomas 
 Warton and Mason are parodied in The Rolliad, they are 
 treated as feeble and inefficient rebels against the true canons 
 of poetry. Wordsworth, too, attacks Gray and Ossian, but 
 in a solemn denunciatory way, which is not always either 
 critical or amusing. The wit of the last classical writers is 
 thus sharpened for new victims, some of whom come from its 
 own camp ; and, thus encouraged, it lasts to the end of the 
 century and beyond. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 
 (1809) is a belated essay in the same kind of warfare. 
 
 There is an unbroken series of satires of this order between 
 1780 and 1798, formed by The Rolliad, the verses of Wolcot, 
 Gifford, and Mathias, and The Anti- Jacobin. They vary 
 much in wit and in seriousness of conviction, but are all full 
 of wrath or venom, and all employ one or other of the forms 
 that had come into being or reached perfection in the ages 
 of Dryden and Pope, the heroic couplet, the octosyllabic 
 couplet, the irregular ode, the pungent lyric, the rattling insolent
 
 32 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 doggerel stanza. They proceed from both parties, but the 
 honours rest on the whole with the Tories, or Liberal-Tories, 
 who are better scholars, and more high-bred amid all their 
 sarcasm and invective, and who have left more literature 
 behind them. 
 
 II 
 
 The dust lies deep now on the collection of Whig lampoons 
 and parodies known as The Rolliad, 1 which began to appear after 
 Pitt's installation in 1784, were first collected in 1795, and ran 
 through twenty-one editions before the end of the century. 
 A guerilla band of the beaten party, with surprising persistency, 
 impudence, gaiety, and zest opened fire on the ministry and all 
 its friends. The work falls into three successive parts, of 
 which the first, the Criticisms on the Rolliad, is by far the most 
 spirited. An unlucky, jolter-headed Devon squire, Colonel 
 Rolle, had made an arrogant remark in the House on the 
 occasion of the ' Westminster Scrutiny,' when the Government 
 failed to unseat Fox on a charge of illegality. Colonel Rolle 
 is thereupon made the whipping-boy for his party ; his boast 
 of descent from Duke Rollo furnishes a peg for a mock pedigree, 
 coat-of-arms, and motto 'Jouez bien votre role, or, as we have 
 sometimes seen it spelt, Rolle.' The Rolliad is an imaginary 
 epic in honour of the family and its fortunes in war, at court, 
 on the gallows, and in the service of the Tory party. Frag- 
 ments of the epic are quoted, which serve as a text for the prose 
 ' criticisms.' Such, for example, is the character of Pitt, the 
 ' new Octavius ' ' pert without fire, without experience 
 sage ' the only passage from the book that is still often quoted. 
 The verse, whether it be deliberately ridiculous, or satirical, 
 is of the hackneyed classical kind ; but not much of it can be 
 remembered, for the now forgotten names cluster as thick as 
 those in The Dunciad, and the united gang of wits never pro- 
 duced a single page, either in verse or prose, that endures like 
 the happier pieces of The Anti-Jacobin. But The Rolliad is 
 still sprightly, and curious, and unduly ignored ; it gives a 
 lively picture of the most fleeting of all things, the jokes and 
 personalities that fly about the House of Commons ; and the 
 mock-Addisonian seriousness of the Criticisms is well sus- 
 tained. Yet who now cares for gibes against the tea tax, or for 
 the ivory bed presented by Mrs. Hastings to the Queen, or for 
 the sanitary drawbacks of the House, or for sneers against the 
 continence of Mr. Pitt and the learning of Mr. Dundas ? To 
 keep these things alive an Attic salt is wanted, of which
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 33 
 
 not even George Ellis, and apparently not Dr. Laurence nor 
 General Burgoyne nor the rest of the company, could furnish 
 more than a poor pinch. The second venture, entitled Pro- 
 bationary Odes for the Laureateship, brings us nearer to litera- 
 ture. They are a series of poems supposed to be written in 
 rivalry for the succession to the deceased William Whitehead, 
 and contain some close and roguish parodies not only of Mac- 
 pherson, who was now a ministerial penman, but of the expiring 
 school of Gray. Mason and the two Wartons were on the Tory 
 side, and they also represented a style of elaborate verse that 
 was still resented and mocked for its ' obscurity.' The attacks 
 of Johnson on Gray are oddly echoed in those of Johnson's 
 political foes upon Gray's disciples ; and the sour ' Table of 
 Instructions ' given by the King to Thomas Warton, the 
 nominated laureate (' seventhly and finally, that it may not 
 be amiss to be a little intelligible '), is a curious item that 
 marks the date (1785). The roughest and most ribald of 
 these satires are found in the Political Miscellanies, the third 
 instalment of the work ; they approach the sewerage of Wolcot 
 himself. Writers such as those of The Rolliad are like bar- 
 barians on the confines of civilised territory ; their methods 
 and manners in war hardly come within the comity of nations ; 
 and in a little time they perish. 
 
 John Wolcot, or ' Peter Pindar ' l (1738-1819), directed that 
 his coffin should be laid touching that of the author of Hudi- 
 bras ; but his true place is by the ashes of Gillray though at a 
 respectable distance, indeed, from any real artist. He belongs 
 to the history of caricature and mimicry ; for, like the authors 
 of The Rolliad and the pictorial squibbers of the time, he caught 
 to the life, and stamped on the mind of the country, the figure 
 and accents of the King. Here he is a true low comedian in 
 rhyme : a kind of Foote, for mischievous accuracy of idiom 
 and gesture ; aping and mocking endlessly with the same 
 blackguardly good-humoured gusto : so that his portraits of 
 King George meeting the cattle-driver, or visiting the brewerj 7 , 
 or inspecting the mysterious dumpling, are a living likeness, 
 which we can verify by reference to the Diary of Miss Burney 
 and other authorities. Beside these triumphs, most of Wolcot's 
 attacks on Johnson and Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi (Bozzy and 
 Piozzi}, or on the traveller Bruce or Sir Joseph Banks, are 
 but daubs, though never quite void of gross fun. The 
 great fair of literature is incomplete without its rnerryandrews 
 and street performers ; and of these, in the time we are re- 
 viewing, Peter Pindar is the most amusing and vociferous, 
 VOL. i. c
 
 34 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 and when we wish for the relief of being vulgar we can listen 
 to him. 
 
 Of one other personage, himself, he gives a true and un- 
 abashed representation. The sharp and butcherly but not 
 ill-formed or witless features of his portrait seem to emerge 
 as we follow him from his score of odes on the Royal Acade- 
 micians (1785), through his heroi-comic Lousiad, and his Peeps 
 at St. James's, and his endless pasquinades, odes, and doggerel, 
 to the end of his five volumes (1812). With a certain slipshod 
 power he masters, or employs, a great variety of styles and 
 measures the ode, the epigram, the ballad, the parody, or 
 the heroic couplet ; always with a lax fertility and resource 
 of rhyme, and an interminable volubility of tongue ; as he 
 
 says : 
 
 A desultory way of writing, 
 
 A hop and step and jump mode of inditing 
 
 My great and wise relation, Pindar, boasted ; 
 
 And his rhymes were begotten 
 
 Amidst the hurly-burly of my brain, 
 Where the mad lyric Muse, with pain, 
 Hammering hard verse her skill employs 
 And beats the tinman's shop in noise, 
 Catching wild tropes and similes 
 That hop about like swarms of fleas. . . . 
 
 The echo of Butler's couplets is heard here plain enough ; 
 but there the likeness ends ; for Wolcot has neither Butler's 
 learning, nor his background of stern disenchanted thought ; 
 instead, he uses at times the clown's privilege and penalty of 
 turning serious out of hours, and concocts a copy of verses to 
 a glowworm or a sentimental ballad without compunction. 
 His pieces in Devon dialect are better. Such as he was, his 
 vogue was immense. His stuff was translated, and he was 
 considered worth an attempt to silence by bribery, which he 
 boasts that he resisted ; and he went on railing when he was 
 blind and old. We do not pity him when he met his equal in 
 railing ; in 1800 Gifford addressed him an Epistle, and the 
 kennel fight of words became a bodily scrimmage in a bookshop. 
 This tradition of relentless personalities, though transformed 
 out of its primitive foulness, by no means passed away from 
 literature ; we find it, of course, in Byron, and much more 
 strangely in the satiric sallies of Shelley against Castlereagh 
 and Eldon. Gifford himself, indeed, received a verbal cudgel- 
 ling from Hazlitt, who practised the art of self-defence with 
 his usual relish.
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 35 
 
 III 
 
 William Gifford's thirty pages of autobiography, prefixed 
 to his translation of Juvenal in 1802, outlast all his original 
 verses and most of his criticism. They are in the sterner 
 sort of plain prose, curt, bitter, and not undignified classical 
 in its way. There is none of the declamation which he came 
 to acquire and practise, and which he would have felt bound 
 to employ had his story been in verse ; for the great weakness 
 of the eighteenth century was to see the differences between 
 verse and prose in a false light. A drunken father, a tyrannic 
 guardian, a schooling broken by life as a seaman and as a 
 cobbler's apprentice, a native rage for knowledge, without 
 money or means to find the tools, so that he was driven to write 
 his mathematical problems on beaten leather ' with a blunted 
 awl ' ; a persistence, that revealed to him his strong memory 
 and power to write, and that was finally rewarded by escape 
 from the prison cell in which his youthful mind had been shut ; 
 these are the elements that went to make Gifford's honest, 
 warped, truculent, narrow spirit, never quite satisfied that it 
 was even with mankind for its early sufferings. His story is 
 not unlike that of Crabbe, and Gifford was also relieved by a 
 patron, Lord Grosvenor. He had meanwhile made his way to 
 Oxford, increased his Latin, and felt the fascination of Juvenal 
 and Persius. First, he produced in 1794 his Baviad, written 
 in the style of Churchill, but with a greater measure of acrid 
 faculty, and it at once became known. The persons and works 
 that he tears to pieces in this satire, the so-called 'Delia Cruscan ' 1 
 poets, did not, and do not, exist. But their sickliness was 
 popular for the hour ; Mrs. Piozzi, settled at Florence, their 
 priestess ; and a Mr. Greathead, a Mr. Merry, and a Mr. Jer- 
 ningham, who wrote of and to one another in organs like The 
 World, under female signatures of the ' Laura Matilda ' sort. 
 They were mildly and feebly revolutionary in their chatter 
 and their tenets, and attracted the Tory scourge all the more 
 in consequence. Their wraiths flit across the Diary of Samuel 
 Rogers, 2 who met them at the house of Helen Maria Williams, 3 
 conversing with admiration on Thomas Paine. The curious 
 can find examples of their preciosity in the works of Mary 
 Robinson, known as ' Perdita,' the famous beauty, actress, 
 and dupe of George Regent. In the following year Gifford 
 produced his Maeviad, a work in the same bloodthirsty, over- 
 done style. 
 
 Gifford's two satires ' are the last forcible examples of the
 
 36 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 ' imitation,' or transplantation of a Latin satirical classic into 
 modern surroundings. This kind was practised by Boileau, 
 brought into English by Oldham and Rochester, and perfected 
 by Pope and Johnson. Gifford adores and celebrates the 
 shade of Pope : 
 
 So may thy varied verse, from age to age, 
 Inform the simple, and delight the sage : 
 
 and in the Baviad he does for the first satire of Persius what 
 Pope had done earlier for Horace, and Johnson for Juvenal ; 
 that is, he follows him verse by verse, substituting modern 
 for ancient instances. Gifford, like Pope, persuades himself 
 that he has a great moral mission to crush small poets, whom 
 he typifies as the Bavius and Maevius contemned by Virgil ; 
 and, in fact, as Scott put it, he ' squabashed at one blow a set 
 of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long 
 enough.' He was right, but his violence is such that some of 
 the absurdity he derides recoils on himself when he treats his 
 victims as criminals and lepers ; most of them were quite 
 respectable creatures,' as well as poetasters. In the Maeviad 
 he is remarkably indiscriminate. It is directed against the 
 abuses of the contemporary drama, and is a valuable docu- 
 ment, for that reason, of the fashions of the hour, else so 
 fugitive ; but Gifford fiercely ridicules tolerable comedy like 
 that of Holcroft or Colman in the same breath as the sickliest 
 adaptations from the German. His verse is loud and monoton- 
 ous, like the noise of a sledge-hammer hitting wild, and in 
 precision of insult is not to be compared to that of Canning. 
 These were the poems that the keen, capricious, honest, bored 
 old arbiter of wit, Horace Walpole, described, somewhat 
 strangely, as ' soothing.' It is pleasant to think that any word 
 of William Gifford's should ever have soothed any mortal. But 
 the crack of the heads broken in 1794 has long ceased either to 
 soothe or to excite. Gifford's next task (before his exchange of 
 gutter-missiles with Wolcot) was to conduct The Anti-Jacobin. 
 But his translations are not to be overlooked, for they arc- 
 perhaps the best evidence of his power in verse. They are 
 close, careful, and full of strength. The rhythms are far more 
 flexible and various than in the Baviad. The high-pitched 
 parts are of the same kind, but the easier and more conversa- 
 tional ones show the healthy influence of Crabbe, and episodes 
 like that of the turbot in Juvenal's satire go well into Crabbe's 
 style. In the Preface to his Persius, Gifford defends the free- 
 dom of his metre against the objection
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 37 
 
 that uiy lines run into one another, and that they would have 
 pleased more had the sense concluded with the couplet. I once 
 thought the same . . . but subsequently formed a different (I must 
 say a more correct) opinion of the duty of a translator. 
 
 Gifford does not translate politely ; he softens and modifies 
 little ; he goes through the dirty part of his work like a man, 
 without relish and without shirking ; and he genuinely shares 
 the moral indignation of his originals. His later offences 
 against criticism do not cancel either the merit of these versions 
 or his service as an editor of the old dramatists. The subject 
 of his editorial labours on the Quarterly Review belongs to the 
 sequel (Ch. xiu.). 
 
 A now spectral satiric poem, once long in vogue, The Pursuits 
 of Literature, by Thomas James Mathias, 1 may be named as 
 filling the brief interval between The Maeviad and The Anti- 
 Jacobin. This learned, conceited, and unbearable work, in 
 four books (1794-7), ran through thirteen editions in eleven 
 years, and is certainly a mirror, on its political and social side, 
 of anti -revolutionary taste and prejudice. It is in dialogue, 
 and the effect is that of ' a rivulet of text meandering through 
 a meadow of margin,' for it is choked with curious, usually 
 rancorous and pedantic notes in prose, and with ' notes upon 
 the note.' It is a kind of petty Dunciad, and a museum of 
 allusions to contemporary writers and politicians. The verse 
 is of the splenetic, sometimes telling sort made current by 
 Gifford, but is without Gifford's energy. If this were all, 
 Mathias would not be worthy of mention ; but his literary 
 views are more refreshing. He represents in his way an appeal 
 from the false to the truer romanticism. He assails Godwin 
 and Lewis ; also Gilpin, for his aesthetic pedantry ; and 
 Ireland, for his bogus Vortigern. He is well seen in Greek, and 
 his anthology 2 of Italian canzoni and sonnets (1802) is an 
 excellent one, and early in the field ; it extends from Dante to 
 Guidi and Menzini. In his Preface (written in Italian) he 
 proclaims his wish to serve the ' Renaissance of Italian poetry 
 and letters in England,' and to restore it to the ' ancient and 
 accustomed potency ' that it enjoyed in the days of Elizabeth ; 
 and he calls for the institution of Italian chairs in our uni- 
 versities a wish that has been seldom fulfilled. He is also 
 interested in matters ' Runic,' namely in Old Norse literature, 
 and in ' Odin's magic tree.' Mathias feels the void that was 
 soon to be filled up by Scott and Coleridge, when he laments 
 (Pursuits, Dial, iv., 1797) that ' the specious miracles of 
 romance have never of late years produced a poet.' His own
 
 38 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 pompous heroics are of the old school, but in his preferences 
 he is forward-looking, and pays his respects both to Cowper 
 and Burns. In his own day Mathias was welcomed not for 
 these prophetic tastes, but as an ally of Canning, who praises 
 him in The New Morality as the ' nameless bard,' the honest 
 patriot, and the rigid censor morum. But the work of Mathias 
 is forgotten in that of his eulogist. 
 
 The wit of The Anil- Jacobin? or Weekly Examiner (20th Nov- 
 ember 1797 to 9th July 1798), is now best known from a handful 
 of its verses, which are quoted apart from their setting The 
 Friend of Humanity, and The U-niversity of Gottingen, and The 
 Loves of the Triangles. But it is only to be fairly enjoyed in the 
 original large yellowed sheets in double columns, edited by 
 Gifford ; with their regular bill of fare the ' Lies,' ' Misrepre- 
 sentations,' and ' Mistakes ' of the Whigs, the scraps of political 
 news, and the ' answers to correspondents.' There is a per- 
 vading form and finish which makes The Anti-Jacobin not so 
 much a newspaper as a piece of literature. The chief contri- 
 butors, besides Gifford himself, are Canning, Frere, and George 
 Ellis ; and in the poetical department their shares have been 
 more or less closely assigned. Canning and Frere have a main 
 hand in the best things ; to Ellis fall many of the Horatian 
 parodies ; but The Duke and the Taxing-Man, at the expense 
 of ' Duke Smithson of Northumberland,' is set down to Lord 
 Macdonald, and is one of the happiest mock-Percy ballads of 
 the time. It is stated that Pitt contributed here and there, 
 and that he wrote the last verse in The U-niversity of Gottingen, 
 ' Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu.' 
 
 The poetry was first collected in 1801, and is still alive. It 
 is alive because its wit and pungency are inspired by real rage, 
 hatred, and conviction. Canning and his friends are as dead 
 in earnest and as much alarmed as their master, Burke, and in 
 the same cause, and wrote against much the same principles 
 and persons. They are not simply pea-shooting in order to 
 sting people's faces in a carnival. They think society is 
 menaced in its foundations by a disease that has spread from 
 France ; a disease in the first instance of the brain, but one 
 which attacks all the other members. ' Philosophy ' begins 
 by sapping the faith ; it is then translated into political 
 anarchy, and the family goes down in the wreck. A new, pre- 
 tentious code of morals is put up like a house of cards, which 
 it is the work, or the fierce amusement, of the Anti-Jacobins to 
 shatter. The ' rights of man,' truly interpreted, mean mob- 
 rule, free love, and judicial murder. Worst of all, a nauseous
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 39 
 
 sentiment and rhetoric (infuriating to men of classical taste 
 and scholarship) cloak these enormities, and are most fitly 
 punished by raking parody. All this the writers of The Anti- 
 Jacobin truly believe, and hence the red and hectically puking 
 wrath of conviction in the poem called The New Morality, which 
 appeared in their final number (almost at the same time as 
 Lyrical Ballads), and which is the last really effective salvo of 
 the old poetic artillery. The other skits and parodies of the 
 book are more like jets of Greek fire for the scorching and 
 blistering of the enemy. In form it is one of the most masterly 
 productions of the whole classical school. There are many 
 touches of Dryden in its impetus and cadence, as hi the lines 
 on ' Sensibility ' : 
 
 Sweet child of sickly Fancy Her of yore 
 From her lov'd France Rousseau to exile bore ; 
 And while midst lakes and mountains wild he ran 
 Full of himself, and shunn'd the haunts of Man, 
 Taught her o'er each lone vale and Alpine steep 
 To lisp the stories of his wrongs, and weep ; 
 Taught her to cherish still in either eye, 
 Of tender tears a plentiful supply, 
 And pour them in the brooks that babbled by 
 Taught her to mete by rule her feelings strong, 
 False by degrees, and delicately wrong, 
 For the crush'd Beetle, first the widow'd Dove, 
 And all the warbled sorrows of the grove ; 
 Next for poor suffring Guilt and, last of all, 
 For Parents, Friends, a King and Country's fall. 
 
 This poem cannot be too carefully studied, if we would under- 
 stand the essence of the conservative reaction in England, at 
 its origins, and in its essence, and in its literary expression. 
 At first we think the writers are simply unscrupulous, snatch- 
 ing at any weapon in a holy war the kind of war wherein 
 least scruple is shown. But as we read the whole Anti- Jacobin 
 through, prose and verse, we see that they have really lost their 
 heads, like the nation. They confound, not in bad faith, all 
 kinds of persons ; the Whigs both moderate and extreme, 
 such as the writers of The Rolliad, and the doctrinaires and 
 republicans who had thrown up their hats in 1790. Fox and 
 Erskine and the Duke of Bedford are herded with Paine and 
 Thehvall and Condorcet. It is well known how Coleridge comes 
 in for a vicious kick, and Charles Lamb, 1 who heeded not 
 politics, for a comically wanton one, which may have enter- 
 tained him : 
 
 C E and S Y, L D and L BE and Co , 
 
 Tune all your mystic harps to praise LEPAUX !
 
 40 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 All this muddling of ranks, and persons, and distances looks 
 strange enough in the light of history ; but that is just the 
 interest of The Anti-Jacobin ; it is inspired by a true and out- 
 raged sense of patriotism ; its operations are conducted with 
 brilliancy, with real genius ; nay more, it shows a sense of 
 some of the intellectual and social bearings of the Revolution, 
 from which the more destructive criticism of current moral and 
 political systems does actually date, so that the modern world 
 is different in consequence. Burke foresaw the same thing 
 in an incomparably larger way. What he and the Anti- 
 Jacobins underrated was the native tenacity of the English 
 mind to things established. It must not be thought that 
 these considerations take us too far from a work which is now 
 remembered by a few squibs and travesties. But the fun of 
 the Anti-Jacobins must not be lost sight of. 
 
 With a sound tactical instinct, Canning and his band extended 
 their lash to the literary follies of the Whigs, and of all their 
 other foes. They are the true progeny of the Scriblerus Club, 
 making war on nonsense, and, above all, on learned or pedantic 
 nonsense, as such. They mimic the Ossianic proclamations of 
 Napoleon, and mock, justly enough, at Dr. Parr's ' buzz prose ' 
 a phrase implying an irreverent allusion to his famed wig. 
 The more foolish sort of German play, still rife in adapted 
 form on the English stage (see Ch. xxi. post), is gibbeted in The 
 Rovers, 1 which was itself acted at the Haymarket in 1811, and 
 which, like Sheridan's Critic, can still be joyfully read without 
 any knowledge of the thing derided. The Double Arrange- 
 ment, as the play is also termed, is a matrimonial arrangement, 
 and is surrounded with the happiest circumstance of farce. 
 Erasmus Darwin, being a Liberal as well as a bad poet, is 
 slowly and studiously roasted in The Loves of the Triangles. 
 The forgotten John Payne Knight and his Progress of Civil 
 Society are still more scientifically disposed of in The Progress 
 of Man, which contains another satire on the extreme revolu- 
 tionary view of marriage : 
 
 For LOVE then only flaps his purple wings, 
 
 When uncontroul'd by PRIESTCRAFT or by KINGS. 
 
 Southey, whose lot was to be mauled by Canning as a callow 
 Radical, and by Byron and Hazlitt as an apostate and a Tory, 
 is thrice at least attacked. Etonian scholarship, in this case, 
 barbed political hatred ; the sapphics and dactylics of Southey's 
 verse are carefully marked, in the prefaces to the parodies, 
 to show their incorrect scansion : and thousands who have
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 41 
 
 laughed at The Friend of Humanity and the Needy Knife- 
 Grinder have failed to see the jest upon the versification, 
 in which longs and shorts are confounded, and how the false 
 gallop of 
 
 Fast o'er , the bleak heath rattling drove a chariot 
 is exactly echoed in 
 
 u *J \J W 
 
 Was it the Squire i for killing of his , game, or ... 
 
 It is said that the paper was stopped by Pitt, at the 
 instance of the alarmed moderate Tories ; but the attack was 
 renewed for many years, by other hands, and with infinitely 
 less spirit, in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 1 which is 
 announced in the last number of The Anti-Jacobin. This 
 sequel opens with a picture by Gillray representing a cheerful 
 blowsy damsel named Truth, holding a torch to reveal the 
 toads and bats in the ' Cave of Jacobinism.' The Review 
 lived long enough to attack Mackintosh (see Ch. ix. post) for 
 modifying his own revulsion of feeling against the French 
 Revolution ; but in 1821 it expired. 
 
 IV 
 
 The best known victim of The Anti- Jacobin is doubtless 
 Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The first portion to be pub- 
 lished of his poem, The Botanic Garden, came out in 1789, 
 under the title of The Loves of the Plants ; it was this that 
 Canning fatally parodied in The Loves of the Triangles. But it 
 was really the second part ; and the true first part, called The 
 Economy of Vegetation, was set in its place when the whole 
 work appeared in 1791. The Botanic Garden had ten years 
 of popularity, and a fourth edition appeared even in 1799, 
 after Canning had tired his volley. It was admired by Horace 
 Walpole. 2 It died, perhaps, of the change of taste as much as 
 of ridicule, and for the historian it remains the model of a 
 false style carried to its utmost by the native energy of 
 the writer. 
 
 Charles Darwin 3 has told with pleasant demureness and 
 piety the career of his grandfather, Erasmus, an inquirer of 
 genuine skill and sometimes prophetic sagacity in the field of 
 biological and medical science. Zoonomia (1794-6), a disserta- 
 tion on pathology, and Phytologia (1799), which attributes
 
 42 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 something like consciousness to plants, cover to a surprising 
 degree the same range of problems inheritance, selection, 
 ' insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions and 
 sociological impulses ' as occupied the younger Darwin ; 
 and many suggestions of the same kind are found in the prose 
 notes to The Botanic Garden and to The Temple of Nature (1803). 
 But verse Erasmus Darwin regarded as a tool rather than an 
 end ; a tool, indeed, that was to be burnished and sharpened 
 carefully, but one whose aim was the enlargement and com- 
 mendation of knowledge ; in his own words, he wished to 
 ' enlist imagination under the banner of science.' His science 
 and his poetry retain an historical interest, but little more ; 
 and while his biological theories, in their relation to those 
 of Lamarck and of Charles Darwin, are more than curious, 
 his poetry, instead of pointing to the future, marks the 
 exhaustion in the very act of revival of a perishing 
 method and style. 
 
 Besides turning the forces at play in the air and the other 
 elements into nymphs and gnomes, Erasmus Darwin judged that 
 the Linnean classification of plants by the numbers of their 
 stamens and pistils might be graciously adjusted to verse by 
 personifying the first as ' swains ' and the second as ' belles,' 
 and by working out, with dreadful insistence, their complicated 
 'loves': 
 
 Media's soft chains five suppliant boys confess, 
 And hand in hand the laughing belle address. 
 
 The anthers of Curcuma are often without filaments, and 
 thus we hear that 
 
 Five beardless boys the obdurate beauty move 
 With soft attentions of Platonic love. 
 
 Darwin dressed out a whole garden in this fashion, and The 
 Loves of the Plants is nothing if not systematic. Canning's 
 preface to his parody is as good as any of his verses : 
 
 I am persuaded that there is no Science, however abstruse, nay, 
 no Trade or Manufacture, which may not be taught by a Didactic 
 Poem. In that before you, an attempt is made (not unsuccessfully) 
 to enlist the Imagination under the banners of Geometry. Botany 
 I found done to my hand. ... I trust that the range and variety 
 of illustration with which I have endeavoured to ornament and 
 enlighten the arid truths of Euclid and Algebra, will be found to 
 have smoothed the road of Demonstration, to have softened the 
 rugged features of Elementary Propositions, and, as it were, to have 
 strewed the Asses' Bridge with flowers.
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 43 
 
 The application is in this strain : 
 
 Yet why, Ellipsis, at thy fate repine ? 
 
 More lasting bliss, securer joys, are thine. 
 
 Though to each Fair his treach rous wish may stray, 
 
 Though each in turn may seize transient sway, 
 
 'Tis thine with mild coercion to restrain, 
 
 Twine round his struggling heart, and bind with endless chain. 
 
 The loves of the ' blest Isosceles ' and the ' fair Parabola ' 
 are equally well known ; and they are still readable, while 
 most of Darwin is not. His unlucky plan was suggested to 
 him by Miss Seward, who wrote a little piece of prefatory 
 verse in the Ovidian manner, but handed over the Linnean 
 theme to Darwin, ' as not strictly proper for a female pen.' 
 He interwove in it his Rosicrucian sylphs and salamanders ; 
 and this machinery he borrowed from The Rape of the Lock ; 
 steeping himself in Pope in the decorative, fanciful, or 
 coloured parts of Pope, not in the Dunciad or the Moral Essays 
 and catching, at any rate, the pomp and ring of Pope's heroics. 
 The sound of his verse, indeed, is like that of a gong ; and 
 Darwin feels, crudely and mechanically, but more than any 
 other follower of Pope, the value of open vowels, seven in a 
 line if possible : 
 
 Near and more near j-our beamy cars approach 
 
 and he has the sense of climax and onset, and the courage of 
 his blatancy, as is shown in the much-quoted passage on the 
 final crash of the worlds (Economy of Vegetation, iv. 379 
 ' Roll on, ye stars '). This manner he brought to a pitch of 
 bastard splendour, so that it perished with a certain noise, 
 and Darwin rather than Canning put an end to Darwin. 
 
 But he also had a real and raw perception of violent colour, 
 which plays its perverted part in the revival of the artistic 
 senses during this period. Darwin made up a dogma accord- 
 ingly. ' The words expressive of those ideas belonging to 
 vision make up the principal part of poetry ' ; whereas, he adds, 
 prose is above all things ' abstract ' in its vocabulary. This is 
 at least an attempt to remember that poetry is concrete ; it is 
 a revolt, however blind, against the current vices of poetical 
 diction. But Darwin acts upon his dogma without mercy ; 
 in one passage of seventeen lines occur the words, bright, star, 
 golden, dazzling, bright again, lucid, pearly, glittering, crystal, 
 and blazed. This unshaded diction is everywhere ; ' the poet 
 writes to the eye,' and he succeeds in hurting it. But the stuff 
 is different from that of the Hayleys, who are unable even to 
 form a nefarious purpose. Darwin's most fatal defect is one
 
 44 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 upon which the parodists did not fail to fasten ; it is simply 
 that he finds nothing irrelevant to his topic. He is eloquent 
 and philanthropic when he praises Howard ; but burlesque is 
 often superfluous. In one canto, where the air-nymphs are 
 introduced as the ' machines,' there are divagations on the 
 formation of steam, the waters of the goddess Buxtonia, the 
 loves of Jupiter, the decease of a Mrs. French, the principles 
 of the common pump, the doings of Hercules, and finally on 
 the charitable actions of a Miss Jones, a native of Ireland : 
 
 Sound, nymphs of Helicon, the trump of fame, 
 And teach Hibernian echoes Jones's name, 
 Bind round her polish'd brows the civic bay, 
 And drag the fair Philanthropist to d&y. 
 
 Darwin's ideal of sonority survived, we may think, in some 
 pages of Rogers and of Campbell ; and it is well to inspect 
 his works, if only to see what was still admired when the Lyrical 
 Ballads were being composed, and against what manner of 
 writing their authors revolted. 
 
 Charles Darwin; writing in 1879, speaks of having ' met with 
 old men who spoke with a degree of enthusiasm about his 
 grandfather's poetry, quite incomprehensible at the present 
 day ' ; and quotes Horace Walpole's praise of the ' twelve 
 verses,' which Walpole considered ' the most sublime passages 
 in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I 
 am acquainted.' These are from The Triumph of Flora, and 
 open thus : 
 
 ' Let there bo Light ! ' proclaimed the Almighty Lord. 
 Astonished Chaos heard the potent word ; 
 Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs, 
 And the mass starts into a million suns. 
 
 Thus may sharp sceptical wits, when for once they give a 
 loose to admiration, be taken in. But some of Darwin's lines 
 are divided from grandeur by a narrow yet bottomless gulf ; 
 and let no man boast, for the nearly sublime is the hardest 
 tiling of all to detect, in a contemporary. These problems 
 arise at the upper limits of poetry ; at the lower, there are 
 others which call for equal care ; and these are abundant enough 
 in the work of Crnbbo, 1 the last of the greater l classical ' poets. 
 
 The first phase of George Crabbe's life (1754-1832) was one 
 of harsh struggle and lumbering experiment, and lasts to
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 45 
 
 the publication of The Village, in 1783. His early life as an 
 apothecary's apprentice, a quay-labourer, and an unsuccessful 
 surgeon ; his bitter penury, and his solicitations of London 
 publishers and patrons, were brought to an end by the aid of 
 Edmund Burke, who in 1781 befriended Crabbe and induced 
 him to publish The Library. Inebriety (1775) and The Candi- 
 date (1780) had already fallen flat. He became a clergyman, 
 was appointed chaplain (again at Burke's instance) to the Duke 
 of Rutland, published The Village, and married Sarah Elmy, 
 whose family had helped him just to keep the wolf from the 
 door. After The Newspaper (1785) he produced no more for 
 the greater part of a generation, and held a series of livings, 
 chiefly in the Eastern counties. He had made a name, but it 
 was fading, until in 1807 it was revived by The Parish Register, 
 and Crabbe's third and more prosperous phase now began. The 
 Borough (1810) and Tales in Verse (1812) were also widely 
 acclaimed. His last volume was Tales of the Hall (1819). He 
 had meantime become rector of Trowbridge, where he remained 
 all his life ; but he became a recognised and welcome personage 
 in London society, and cheered up very considerably. His 
 visit to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh occurred in 1822. He 
 left behind him a number of posthumous Tales, wisely saved 
 and published by his son, together with most of his other 
 works, in 1834. The modern editors have added a good many 
 poems to the list. Crabbe, after the reaction from his first 
 fame, hardly came into his own till the later nineteenth century. 
 Crabbe has no new theories of humanity ; he is one of the 
 poets and storytellers who simply watch mankind and describe 
 it. He is a novelist in verse of real mark and power, and his 
 code and ruling conceptions precede and in no way prophesy 
 those of 1789, though he wrote on till 1819, and even later, 
 and lived till 1832. His first work of any character, The 
 Village (1783), came out in the same decade as Blake's Poetical 
 Sketches, Burns's Kilmarnock poems, and Cowper's Task. 
 For this Crabbe is miscalled a pioneer, though he really stands 
 at the close of a literary age. If he is a pioneer at all, it is more 
 in the history of fiction than in that of poetry. His style and 
 verse, with some exceptions, are of the old school. His aims 
 are those of the preacher and the photographic satirist, not 
 those of the makers of romance. Hence his vogue and its 
 long eclipse. Burke, nobly, launched him ; 1 Johnson read him 
 ' with great delight ' ; 2 he chronicled realities of their own time 
 in a cadence which they knew and sanctioned ; he tacked a 
 homespun moral to a concrete anecdote in a familinr rhyme
 
 46 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 which disconcerted nobody. If he at first wrote in order to 
 show up Goldsmith's idyllic picture of Auburn, he only did 
 so in a modification of that classical style and rhetoric of which 
 Goldsmith had used another modification. Later, the arch- 
 reviewers Jeffrey and Gifford, who briefed themselves against 
 Wordsworth and his fellows, poured their praise on Crabbe, 
 and indeed rated him more truly than a later age, if with some 
 extravagance. Crabbe was priceless to them ; he showed 
 what could be done in the old poetic manner which they offici- 
 ally upheld, as distinct from the new poetic manner which they 
 were vainly committed to obstructing. But their praises 
 perished with their rule, to the detriment of Crabbe's glory, 
 which dwindled although Scott honoured him, and Byron, in 
 a famous line, spoke to his ' sternness ' and veracity. Words- 
 worth's appreciation is of note, being unwittingly a tribute to 
 the ' classical ' school which he detested. Crabbe's works, he 
 said, ' will last, from their combined merits as Poetry and 
 Truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse 
 since they first made their appearance.' He especially admired 
 the sketch of the poorhouse in The Village, no doubt for its 
 ' truth ' ; but the ' poetry,' which is in the minute style of 
 Pope when Pope drew the deathbed of Zimri, Duke of Bucking- 
 ham, Wordsworth might at best have been expected to 
 tolerate : 
 
 Theirs is yon House that holds the parish poor, 
 Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door ; 
 There, where the putrid vapours, nagging, play, 
 And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day ; 
 There children dwell who know no parents' care ; 
 Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there ! 
 Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, 
 Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed. . . . 
 
 As the more winged kind of poetry triumphed, this sort of 
 excellence went out of vogue, and Crabbe with it, to be defended 
 from time to time by connoisseurs like Edward FitzGerald ; 
 and Newman warmly admired Tales of the Hall. But the 
 reason why Crabbe is little read lies deeper than the advent 
 of Keats and Tennyson, or than his own undeniable gift for 
 being tedious and obvious. His scene is too like that of life 
 as we know it really to be ; and most of us, so far from rejoicing 
 in that scene, go to poetry and fiction in order to forget it and 
 to be charmed out of all necessity for reckoning with it. But 
 there is a minority. Crabbe's stories, like those of the late 
 George Gissing, must retain a small yet stubborn public, who
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 47 
 
 do not mind being made to wince by the representation of life 
 as they know it to be, even though the tones of the recital be 
 hard, grim, and didactic. The chronicles of Aldborough at 
 the close of the eighteenth century, and of New Grub Street at 
 the end of the nineteenth, do they not endure like hammered 
 iron-work ? Why should they be pleasant ? 
 
 Crabbe has left no doubt as to the shade of his conservatism, 
 which comes out in his temper towards Goldsmith's poetry 
 and towards the ' romantic ' novels that preceded Scott. Like 
 Fielding, he made several false starts, and then hit on his own 
 talent because he was angry with another man's book. But 
 he attacked a different illusion from Fielding not the worth- 
 less and cunning ' virtue ' which won for Richardson's Pamela 
 her promotion to the office of squire's lady, but the unrealities 
 of the Deserted Village. That poem was not, indeed, quite 
 what Crabbe thought it to be. Its pictures of the cottage 
 furniture and the village school are just as accurate and as 
 ' Dutch ' as any of Crabbe's own, and they have, besides, the 
 charm that springs from remembered happiness and from 
 pensive good nature. To put them beside The Village is some- 
 thing like putting Chaucer beside Langland or Ben Jonson. 
 There is the same natural wave-like movement of the words, 
 the same open humour and freedom from the hindered, heavy 
 tone of the responsible satirist. It is wonderful to see how 
 Goldsmith softens the sharp edges of the rhetoric on which he 
 was brought up. Crabbe took those decorative peasants too 
 seriously ; they are but figures in the composition. He sat 
 down with a grim resolve to visit Auburn, and he reported on 
 it like a sanitary inspector who is paid to know the worst. The 
 village life is a ' life of pain ' ; the ' real picture of the poor ' 
 shall now be painted. ' Auburn and Eden can no more be 
 found.' Accordingly he paints, or rather catalogues, the 
 squalors of an actual village in a setting of barren landscape. 
 What he really outdid and eclipsed was the picture, not of 
 Auburn happy, but of Auburn desolate ; because, instead of 
 Goldsmith's sentiment and amateur economics, he gave the 
 naked facts. ' Goldsmith's,' said one of Crabbe's friends in 
 1784, ' would henceforth be really the deserted village' 
 Through this, rather unfair, revulsion Crabbe discovered his 
 real bent, and never again deserted it. 
 
 With more reason he girded at the romantic fiction of the 
 hour. The authoress of Norihanger Abbey may have been 
 reading Ellen Orford when she said that she could ' fancy 
 being Mrs. Crabbe.' In that poem the Louisas and Clemen-
 
 48 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 tinas, who always just escape the ravisher, or who brave the 
 moans and gibing sprites of Mrs. Radcliffo's castles, nre capably 
 derided. These 
 
 females and their men 
 Are but the creatures of the author's pen ; 
 Nay, creatures borrow' d and again convey'd 
 From book to book the shadows of a shade. 
 
 And the books themselves Louisa, or the Cottage on the Moor, 
 by a Mrs. Helme, or Darnley Cottage, by a Mrs. Bonhote, are 
 only remembered through Crabbe's explanatory notes, which 
 give us a glimpse of what young ladies read in the years before 
 Waverley. Thus, too, his ' preceptor's wife,' whom her teacher 
 schools so hard in English history, that she ends by thinking 
 that the Revolution is identical with the Reformation, privately 
 battens on The Haunted Hall and the Confessions of a Nun ; 
 and his Belinda Waters, in the tale bearing her name, is so 
 surfeited on trash of the same kind that she cannot so much as 
 finish Clarissa. To the taste for these works, and for Mrs. 
 Radcliffe 1 and Lewis, Crabbe tried to furnish an antidote ; but 
 his own liking for ancient genuine romance, if unexpected, is 
 clearly shown by the confessions of his Old Bachelor, who, for 
 a nice but sound reason which may be fairly taken as the 
 author's own, amuses himself with the Arthurian legends and 
 Cervantes. He has, like Kent in Lear, ' years on his back 
 forty-eight,' he is too old to dream of being, as he had dreamed 
 in his youth, a ' modern ' hero of romance. About those elder 
 worthies there can be no deception : 
 
 But all the mighty deeds and matchless powers 
 Of errant knights, we never fancied ours ; 
 And thus the progress of each gifted knight 
 Must at all times create the same delight ; 
 Lovelace, a forward youth, might hope to seem, 
 But Lancelot never that he could not dream ; 
 Nothing reminds us in the magic page 
 Of old romance, of our declining age ; 
 If once our fancy mighty dragons slew 
 This is no moro than fancy now can do ; 
 But when the heroes of a novel come. 
 Conquer'd and conquering, to a drawing-room, 
 We no more feel the vanity that sees 
 Within ourselves what we admire in these. 
 And so we leave the modern tale, to fly 
 From realm to realm with Tristram and Sir Guy. 
 
 Crabbe's early kindness for ' Arabian Nights and Persian 
 Tales,' for Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe, and for Jane
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 49 
 
 Shore and Rosamond, comes out in his pleasant sketch The 
 Happy Day. Peter, the schoolmaster's son, who is allowed 
 to range over the great library at Silford Hall, has all that 
 literature, as well as Esop and the tale of Giant Hickerthrift, 1 
 in his own store at home ; as well as the Monthly Magazine, 
 sixpence a number, with its extracts : 
 
 Scraps cut from sermons, scenes removed from plays, 
 With heads of heroes famed in Tyburn's palmy days. 
 
 In these he revelled, for 
 
 Sir Walter wrote not then, nor He by whom 
 Such gain and glory to Sir Walter come, 
 That Fairy-Helper. 
 
 It was doubtless in the spirit of Peter, or of the Old Bachelor, 
 that Crabbe himself liked the Waverley Novels when they 
 came. His stay with Scott, in the year when George the 
 Fourth came to Edinburgh, is the sprightliest incident in his 
 grave life passed, after a youth of hardship, in a series of 
 obscure parsonages and it is known to all through Lockhart. 
 It is told also in the Life by Crabbe's son, one of the best, 
 frankest, and discreetest of filial biographies. It is known, 
 too, how Scott loved Crabbe's tales, and read them to the 
 last regarding their author, it may be, more as a fellow- 
 novelist than as a fellow-poet. 
 
 VI 
 
 The rare sallies of Crabbe into romantic verse are remarkable. 
 They are not in the fashion of Marmion or Lara, but in that 
 of the Lyrical Ballads, whose occasional influence upon him 
 seems traceable. Sir Eustace Grey, The World of Dreams, and 
 The Hall of Justice, none of them printed earlier than 1805, are 
 in fact ' lyrical ballads,' not novelettes in heroic couplet. 
 The author has read Coleridge and Wordsworth, but rises to a 
 high, nervous, passionate note of his own, which, had it failed 
 and flagged less often, would have raised him nearer to their 
 kingdom. One example may serve. Sir Eustace Grey, who 
 is in a madhouse, after telling, in a sane and dispiriting style 
 enough, the story of his wife's elopement, suddenly startles 
 us by reciting how the ' ill-favoured Ones,' the demons of his 
 delirium, bore his dispossessed spirit along sea and land, through 
 fen and over precipice, and by the salt scents of the foreshore. 
 Some of the stanzas are the finest in this peculiar order between 
 The Ancient Mariner and Rarelston : 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 50 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 At length a moment's sleep stole on, 
 
 Again came my commission'd foes ; 
 Again through sea and land we 're gone, 
 
 No peace, no respite, no repose : 
 Above the dark broad sea we rose, 
 
 We ran through bleak and frozen land ; 
 I had no strength their strength t' oppose, 
 
 An infant in a giant's hand. 
 
 They placed me where those streamers play, 
 
 Those nimble beams of brilliant light ; 
 It would the stoutest heart dismay, 
 
 To see, to feel, that dreadful sight : 
 So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright, 
 
 They pierced my frame with icy wound ; 
 And all that half-year's polar night, 
 
 Those dancing streamers wrapp'd me round. 
 
 Here then, in a way quite foreign to his habit, and some- 
 what in the way of Coleridge, Crabbe lets himself go ; and he 
 also lets himself go, somewhat in the way of Wordsworth, in 
 The Sisters (Tales of the Hall, bk. viii.) : 
 
 That. is the grave to Lucy shown, 
 
 The soil a pure and silver sand, 
 The green cold moss above it grown, 
 
 Unpluck'd of all but maiden hand : 
 In virgin earth, till then unturn'd, 
 
 There let my maiden form be laid, 
 Nor let my changed clay be spurn'd, 
 
 Nor for new guest that bed be made. 
 
 But the regular tissue of his tales is quite different, as a chance 
 passage from the same poem shows : 
 
 Jane laughed at all their visits and parade, 
 And call'd it friendship in a hot-house made ; 
 A style of friendship suited to his taste, 
 Brought on and ripen'd, like his grapes, in haste ; 
 She saw the wants that wealth in vain would hide, 
 And all the tricks and littleness of pride : 
 On all the wealth would creep the vulgar stain, 
 And grandeur strove to look itself in vain. 
 
 The contrast shows in what opposite fashion romance and 
 realism work when a tale has to be told. The romantic imagina- 
 tion of Coleridge or Keats, or of Crabbe in these few pieces, 
 evolves itself in a series of liberating touches. It is like a new 
 butterfly or young bird which begins with weak gentle flights, 
 but goes farther and higher every moment, and at last is out 
 of sight of the ground where it could only crawl or struggle 
 one way. We arc left with the sense of freedom and release.
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 51 
 
 and, even if the subject be painful or tragic, of expansion and 
 joy. We are bound by no laws but those of beauty and coher- 
 ence and fidelity to the spirit of the dream, and the effect may 
 be won by precision of outline 
 
 The soil a pure and silver sand ; 
 or by the intimation of limitless space and movement 
 
 And all that half year's polar night 
 
 Those dancing streamers wrapp'd me round. 
 
 Once, in his youth (1778), under the stress of want and 
 melancholy, Crabbe for an instant had sung like Blake : 
 
 Trembling and poor, I saw the light, 
 New waking from unconscious night : 
 Trembling and poor I still remain, 
 To meet unconscious night again. 
 
 VII 
 
 But this is not the normal way of the imagination iu such 
 writers. They are bound to the fatalities of this earth, to the 
 chainwork of real cause and effect, to expressiveness and not 
 to beauty. Their fancy works by exclusion, not by expansion. 
 They shut one door upon charm, and another upon freedom. 
 Their scenery is grim and exact : 
 
 The few dull flowers that o'er the place are spread 
 Partake the nature of their fenny bed ; 
 Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom, 
 Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume ; 
 Here the dwarf sallows creep, the septfoil harsh, 
 And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh. 
 
 This is a tolerable allegory of the garden of Grabbers own 
 fancy. Such bitter landscapes are in harmony with the forlorn 
 persons that haunt them, and with the seagulls that wheel 
 about 
 
 While to the storm they give their weak complaining cry ; 
 
 Or clap the sleek white pinion to the breast, 
 
 And in the restless ocean dip for rest. 
 
 He relates his passages of the human comedy in much the same 
 tone. He enjoys tracing frustrate lives and the slow degenera- 
 tion of the soul. He notes the outward obstructions and 
 inward faintings of ordinary men or women, who at last appear 
 to us, in Hamlet's phrase, either as lapsed in time and passion, 
 like half the persons over fifty whom we encounter, or as
 
 52 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 winning, at the utmost, some such tempered grey happiness 
 or relative success as fall to the lot of the other half. Most of 
 his tales are of this complexion ; they are such as we hear 
 every day, and they leave in the memory that sediment of 
 regret without surprise which of all feelings is the least access- 
 ible and the most exasperating to youth. For youth, or for a 
 young forward-looking epoch for his ow r n epoch Crabbe did 
 not write. In 1820, he was a stranger, save in his rarer moods, 
 and a chance survivor ; and that is why, beside Byron or Cole- 
 ridge, he and his style are so instructive. Both orders of 
 style are good, and art and thought are incomplete without 
 them both. Indeed, they are apt to recur in a curious rhythm, 
 one overlapping the other, and of this rhythm a great deal of 
 inventive literature is made up ; as we see by confronting the 
 first part of the Romance of the Rose with the second, or The 
 Winter's Tale with Volpone. We have to denote these con- 
 trasting modes of art by such rough terms as romantic and 
 realistic. But, while both are good, the after-world, which is 
 always young and not middle-aged, finds a nobler nourish- 
 ment in the freer' and happier kind of creation ; which is 
 therefore safe, and needs no rescuing ; while criticism has 
 always to be rescuing the other kind, of which Crabbe is a 
 master, and to be pleading that this also is of the kingdom. 
 We shall, however, see that his temper softened, and his sense 
 of beauty grew keener, with years ; and that without any 
 sacrifice of force. 
 
 Crabbe's art has a definite progress of its own. He forced 
 his way out of the empty, rancid invective of the school of 
 Churchill. He advanced from the general to the concrete, 
 from tirades like Inebriety, through the vigorous commonplace, 
 barely enlivened by a few vivid strokes, of The Library (1781), 
 to descriptions like those of The Village. But in The Village 
 he is trying to depict real life in half-real language. The Poor 
 and the Great, Sloth and Danger, the finny tribe, the deluded 
 fair, and the stout churl with his teeming mate, are still queerly 
 obtrusive amidst the literal, thudding diction which Crabbe 
 was to retain and shape so aptly. But he can already trace a 
 scene or a silhouette ; and the excellent sketch of his hunting 
 parson, who fights shy of pauper deathbeds, is perhaps pro- 
 voked by Goldsmith's idyll. Still he cannot yet model an 
 individual portrait, or invent a situation, or tell a story ; The 
 Newsjxiper (1785) shows no advance; and at this point he 
 pauses for twenty-two years, improving his art in silence, 
 curbing the desire to publish, burnishing and rejecting. When
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 53 
 
 he produces The Parish Register and The Borough, it is plain 
 that he has not altered, but only bettered, his methods, and 
 that he is still doing an eighteenth-century thing in an 
 eighteenth - century way. The tune is finer, but it is 
 played on the old instrument. His portraits are now those of 
 a master, but they are of the type already made classical by 
 Dryden and Pope ; only the social scene is changed, and 
 people are called by their names instead of Shimei and 
 Chloe, Jacob Holmes and Peter Grimes. They are drawn 
 generally ' from the order of society placed between the humble 
 and the great.' In the Preface to the Tales (1812), Crabbe 
 appeals formally to the shades of his poetic ancestors to warrant 
 this method the ' fair representation of existing character '- 
 and expresses his willingness ' to find some comfort in his 
 expulsion from the rank and society of Poets, by reflecting that 
 men much his superiors are likewise cut out.' But he can now 
 exhibit a situation and a scene, as well as draw a ' character.' 
 He has qualified his satiric bias, and desires, not, indeed, to 
 ' adopt the notions of pastoral simplicity,' but to embody 
 ' more natural views of the peasantry, considered as a mixed 
 body of persons . . . contented or miserable.' He has also begun 
 to find his ultimate and characteristic form of the Tale, which 
 is sometimes a mere anecdote, but in its fullest development 
 is a fore-shortened and dramatic life-history. He considers it 
 as a kind of petty epic, with a ' regular succession of events, 
 and a catastrophe to which every incident should be subservi- 
 ent, and which every character, in a greater or less degree, 
 should conspire to accomplish.' But instead of expanding 
 this framework, and writing a long novel in verse, of epic length, 
 as his reviewers told him to do, he wisely kept his tales short, 
 and tried to brace them together into a larger unity by some 
 1 associating circumstance,' after the manner of Chaucer and 
 Boccaccio. Yet this effort he found a strain. The Parish 
 Register is artificially assorted under baptisms, marriages, and 
 burials ; and in The Borough the wish to be doggedly exhaustive 
 hurts the performance. It is a survey of Aldborough, done 
 from memory, with trades, clubs, almshouses, inns, and 
 elections all painfully gazetted. He describes jelly-fish, and 
 the ' various tribes and species of marine vermes,' in verse 
 which Gifford hailed as ' pleasing and eveille,' but which is as 
 glossy and repugnant as Erasmus Darwin's. Also he dis- 
 courses on preparatory schools, and on the ' mode of paying 
 the borough minister.' For these misdeeds his excuse is their 
 ' variety ' ; but it is only a variety of tedium. Crabbe has
 
 54 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 dropped the tedium of rhetoric, only to inflict the tedium of 
 fact. But in both poems there are wonderful acrid land- 
 scapes, and little tragic biographies, and rasping satire as of 
 old, and of dramatic action and suspense not a little. The 
 easy, lazy, popular vicar is described with a distant, half- 
 scornful good-temper, if not very grammatically : 
 
 Mothers approved a safe contented guest, 
 And daughters one who backed each small request : 
 In him his flock found nothing to condemn ; 
 Him sectaries liked, he never troubled them ; 
 No trifles failed his yielding mind to please, 
 And all his passions sunk in early ease ; 
 Nor one so old has left this world of sin 
 More like the being that he enter'd in. 
 
 But when Crabbe comes to the chronicle of Peter Grimes, the 
 murderer of his prentices, or of Clelia the coquette, who ends 
 her days in the almshouse, he is on his final ground ; and his 
 power of working out the slow fatal mutations of ordinarj 7 
 character approves him by far the greatest novelist of the posi- 
 tive order between Sterne and Scott. For he favours the old 
 scheme of tragedy, which Dante describes as beginning cheer- 
 fully, while its ending is foetida et horribilis. His habit, too, is 
 to build on real characters and stories, and to dwell on, perhaps 
 to exaggerate, 1 their grievous endings. He enjoys his own 
 vigour and rancour in developing such a scheme. He likes, too, 
 the form of the Progress, as practised by Hogarth or Lillo in the 
 preceding age. The Progress is a tragical tract in artistic form, 
 showing in definite stages the punishment, or self -punishment, 
 of a vice or a foible. The decline of Clelia is demonstrated at 
 halting-points of ten years, which affect us like a Hogarthian 
 series. No one can sum them up more aptly than Jeffrey, 
 whose notes on Crabbe are amongst the best things that he 
 did, and are also amongst the best things ever written on 
 Crabbe : 
 
 She began life as a sprightly, talking, flirting girl, who passed for 
 a wit and a beauty in the half-bred circle of the Borough, and who, 
 in laying herself out to entrap a youth of distinction, unfortunately 
 fell a victim to his superior art, and forfeited her place in society. 
 She then became the smart mistress of a dashing attorney then 
 tried to teach a school lived as the favourite of an innkeeper 
 let lodgings wrote novels set up a toyshop and, finally, was 
 admitted into the Almshouse. There is nothing very interesting, 
 perhaps, in such a story ; but the details of it show the wonderful 
 accuracy of the author's observation of character.
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 55 
 
 In his studies of crime, of which Crabbe is a keen observer, 
 this curious habit of marking out uniform stages is carried into 
 detail. It is unlike the free, continuous style of Balzac or the 
 great dramatists, but it is very lucid. Jachin, the parish 
 clerk, who is nervous at first, but soon robs the offertory 
 regularly, seems to slip one stair downward towards Avernus 
 with each succeeding couplet : 
 
 But custom sooth'd him ere a single year 
 All this was done without restraint or fear : 
 Cool and collected, easy and composed, 
 He was correct till all the service closed ; 
 Then to his home, without a groan or sign, 
 Gravely he went, and laid his treasure by. 
 
 Jachin is found out, but not prosecuted ; he is dismissed, and 
 wastes in a remorse of which the phases are sharply marked ; 
 and the mud-bank and the marsh-dyke are the right back- 
 ground for ' the strong yearnings of a ruin'd mind.' Crabbe here 
 dwells with gusto upon the successful onset of mean tempta- 
 tion ; in Peter Grimes he is engrossed with the gradual break- 
 down of the brain under the delirium of fruitless repentance. 
 The spirits of the slaughtered boys rise up before Grimes, each 
 at the fatal spot in the river. They call him with ' weak, sad 
 voices,' and amidst them stands his own father, whom he had 
 one day struck down though not actually knifed : 
 
 ' He cried for mercy, which I kindly gave, 
 But he has no compassion in his grave.' 
 
 This couplet, singled out by Ruskin, shows a higher reach of 
 Crabbe's art than his usual symmetrical analysis. Now and 
 then, not often, he has the Jacobean power of tragic thrust. 
 
 VIII 
 
 After The Borough he settled down to writing stories for the 
 rest of his life. There are more than sixty of them in all. 
 Besides the Tales and the Tales of the Hall, there are the Pos- 
 thumous Tales. In the Preface of 1812 the poet defends his 
 principles at length. He says in effect that his works are not 
 the less poems because they do not answer to the description 
 by Shakespeare's Theseus of ' the forms of things unknown.' 
 which are ' bodied forth ' by the imagination. We should all 
 now admit his plea that everything depends ' on the manner 
 in which the poem itself is conducted.' Few men have ever 
 hit off their own style in a sentence of such precision as the
 
 66 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 following : ' Pope himself has no small portion of this actuality 
 of relation, this nudity of description, ancj. poetry without an 
 atmosphere.' ' Poetry without an atmosphere ' is indeed the 
 schedule into which a whole family of writers, too roughly 
 denoted, we have seen, as realistic, falls. If Prosper Merimee 
 or Daniel Defoe had written tales in verse, it would have 
 applied to them ; and it does apply to much of the dramatic 
 verse of Ben Jonson, to the Trivia of Gay, and to Crabbe 
 himself. Language, in work of this order, calls up nothing 
 but its overt meaning and explicit point ; it does not set us 
 dreaming, it has no halo or penumbra, it does not glance from 
 earth to heaven. The edges of every image are clear and 
 achromatic. The fancy is pinned to the object, and there is 
 nothing else in the field. The oceanic murmur of human life, 
 around and beyond the persons immediately speaking, is un- 
 heard. The glory of this sort of writing is its patient veracity 
 and solidity of thought, and its correspondence with vehement 
 real life. It expresses a single mood of the plastic genius 
 the mood in which we gladly barter a hundred Alastors for 
 one Ellen Orford ; and then we tire, and then go back again 
 to dreams. But meanwhile it is this quality that keeps Crabbe 
 alive and keeps him right, for he has the true style for it, the 
 true ' actuality of relation ' and ' nudity of description.' In 
 his tragic poems he does not open infinite chasms like Shake- 
 speare ; we go down far, but we touch solid bottom in the dark- 
 ness. The fall is into a mine, not into space or the unsounded 
 sea. Instead of lago's line, 
 
 From this time forth I never will speak word, 
 
 or de Flores', in Middleton's Changeling 
 
 A woman dipp'd in blood, and talk of modesty ! 
 
 we have 
 
 And he, the man that should have taught the soul, 
 Wish'd but the body in his base control. 
 
 It was this difference of kind which the early reviewers 
 forgot when they celebrated Crabbe as a master of the highest 
 tragedy. We may be sure that he knew better himself. They 
 were nearer the mark when they noted ' his extraordinary 
 powers of giving pain,' and, they might have added, his extra- 
 ordinary pleasure in giving and realising pain. He retains 
 this saturnine gift unimpaired to the last, because he seldom 
 exaggerates or overreaches himself, like Charles Dickens or 
 Victor Hugo when they try to be dreadful. There are no 
 Jonas Chuzzlewits in Crabbe ; nor has he, on the other hand,
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 57 
 
 a shred of the imagination that can body forth a Quilp or a 
 Quasimodo. 
 
 The sixty tales do not show much change in scope or spirit, 
 unless it be the invasion of a milder, gentler cynicism, and the 
 appearance of a surer style, as the poet ages. The Tales of the 
 Hall are ' told in the after-dinner tete-d-tetes that take place 
 in that time between the worthy brothers over their bottle ' ; 
 the brothers themselves, George and Richard, being drawn 
 with a more Addisonian humour than of old ; for ' the crab- 
 apple,' as it has been said, ' had ripened.' And when the 
 tales are over, the rich bachelor, the elder brother, suddenly 
 endows the younger, the family man, with a ' sweet farm and 
 neat mansion,' as in some scrambled-up benevolent ending 
 of Dickens or of Eugene Sue. The true test of a satirist, or 
 realist, is when he turns to idyll to indemnify himself ; for if 
 lie does not, like M. Zola, become at once unreal or sentimental, 
 he renews our confidence. Crabbe sometimes survives this 
 test, though hardly in the close of the Tales of the Hall. Still, 
 some of his themes, as in The Natural Death of Love ' Love 
 dies all kinds of death,' as Crabbe well observes and in 
 Smugglers and Poachers, are as drastic as ever. The latter 
 story was suggested by Romilly, and has a more dramatic 
 build than usual. There is stuff in it for a whole novel, and 
 we can fancy it in the hands of Mr. Thomas Hardy. There are 
 two brothers, one a poacher, one a gamekeeper, rivals in love. 
 Rachel buys the life of the poacher who is in prison, and 
 whom she loves by marrying the gamekeeper, whom she does 
 not love. She has an interview in the prison, which Jeffrey 
 says ' will almost bear a comparison ' with that of Isabella 
 with Claudio. This is just what it will not bear, although 
 Crabbe's verbal echoes show that he has the scene in mind. If 
 we can forget Claudio, the poacher Robert is admirable. He, 
 too, reasons himself into accepting the bargain ; and Rachel's 
 bearing is deeply imagined : 
 
 ' Go, and be his but love him not, be sure 
 Go, love him not, and I will life endure : 
 He, too, is mortal ! ' Rachel deeply sigh'd, 
 But would no more converse : she had complied, 
 And was no longer free she was his brother's bride. 
 
 ' Farewell ! ' she said, with kindness, but not fond, 
 
 Feeling the pressure of the recent bond, 
 
 And put her tenderness apart to give 
 
 Advice to one who so desired to live : 
 
 She then departed, join'd the attending guide, 
 
 Reflected wept was sad was satisfied.
 
 58 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 The poacher is released, but relapses ; and on a wild roaring 
 night the brothers meet and shoot each other in the dark wood. 
 Rachel now loves her husband, and pities his brother, and 
 sleeps uneasily : 
 
 More than one hour she thought, and, dropping then 
 In sudden sleep, cried loudly, ' Spare him, men ! 
 And do no murder ! ' then awaked she rose, 
 And thought no more of trying for repose. 
 
 Rachel's wanderings in the wood, and the picture of moon, 
 cloud, and storm in the fratricidal night-scene, excel anything 
 else of the same kind in Crabbe ; there is no lack of ' atmo- 
 sphere ' in poetry like this, and the internal rhymes and 
 assonances help the effect : 
 
 The moon was risen, and she sometimes shone 
 Through thick white clouds, that flew tumultuous on. 
 Passing beneath her with an eagle's speed, 
 That her soft light imprison'd and then freed : 
 The fitful glimmering through the hedgerow green 
 Gave a strange beauty to the changing scene ; 
 And roaring winds and rushing waters lent 
 Their mingled voice that to the spirit went. 
 
 Rachel lives on, but she looks on at the affairs of men as men 
 look upon the games of children. As to the world, 
 
 It cannot longer pain her, longer please. 
 
 Many of the tales are not tragedies, but comedies of manners, 
 told with a kind of savage good humour, and turning on the 
 tiny caste distinctions that are still so fierce and inveterate 
 amongst the humbler classes in England. Such is Danvers 
 and JRayner. The heads of these two tradesman families are 
 at first friends, as the world goes ; friends, because neighbours 
 and equals. A sober and convenient friendship of the kind 
 will stand an ordinary shower ; it is ' cloth of frieze, not cloth 
 of gold ' ; it is ' a good useful coat, and nothing more.' 
 Danvers comes into money and moves into a House, or Hall. 
 His son Richard, betrothed to Phoebe Rayner, is firm and 
 honourable, but Crabbe traces with his customary relish the 
 ' natural death of love.' 
 
 Yet not indifferent was our Lover grown, 
 Although the ardour of the flame was flown ; 
 He still of Phoebe thought, her lip, her smile, 
 But grew contented with his fate the while. 
 
 Old Rayner, who has come down in the world, is invited with 
 his family to visit the Hall. Jane Austen would have delighted,
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 59 
 
 had she lived to read this posthumous story, in the scene where 
 Rayner tries to broach the topic of a loan, while Danvers seems 
 too absorbed in pointing out his possessions to listen. Richard, 
 still faithful, goes to see the Rayners, and finds them the 
 worse for their drop in their fortunes. They have become 
 noisy ; and ' our incomparable Dutch painter ' revels in 
 describing their evening at home : 
 
 Meantime there rose, amid the ceaseless din, 
 A mingled scent, that crowded room within ; 
 Rum and red-herring, Cheshire cheese and gin. 
 Pipes, too, and punch, and sausages, and tea, 
 Were things that Richard was disturbed to see. 
 
 He is more disturbed to find Phoebe dallying with a strange 
 sailor in the street ; but he pulls himself together, and bids 
 her ' a calm good-night.' ' And home ' so the tale ends 
 
 And home turn'd Phoebe in due time to grace 
 A tottering cabin and a tatter'd race. 
 
 Crabbe is perhaps more convincing in his tragi-comedies 
 than in his tragedies. They are just as lifelike ; and the pro- 
 fessional moralist does not find his work so easy in a story like 
 William Bailey. Fanny, William's betrothed, is led astray 
 by the conventional young lord, and for a while thinks she is 
 happy. The letter which she writes to her parents is one of 
 the many evidences that Crabbe's sense of beauty and skill 
 in natural pathos increased in his later life. 
 
 True that she lived in pleasure and delight, 
 
 But often dream'd and saw the farm by night ; 
 
 The boarded room that she had kept so neat, 
 
 And all her roses in the window-seat ; 
 
 The pear-tree shade, the jasmine's lovely gloom, 
 
 With its long twigs that blossom'd in the room ; 
 
 But she was happy, and the tears that fell 
 
 As she was writing had no grief to tell ; 
 
 We weep when we are glad, we sigh when we are well. 
 
 The parents die ; William, the lover, wanders nine years ; he 
 too wishes to die, and ' the shady lane, broad heath, and 
 starry sky ' fail to comfort him though Wordsworth, unlike 
 Crabbe, might have forced them to do so. He commences 
 Methodist, and finds himself one day in a village inn. The 
 hostess, a widow, is reading a hymn-book, and shows emotion 
 at the sight of William, who, like Troilus in Henryson's poem, 
 sees in her something that reminds him of his old love. But 
 the lady is not at all like the beggar Cressida. She is cheerful
 
 60 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 and comfortable, and, after a little fencing, in which she feigns 
 to be a stranger, she owns to being Fanny herself. The ending 
 is in Crabbe's regular key : 
 
 This pair, our host and hostess of the Fleece, 
 
 Command some wealth, and smile at its increase ; 
 
 Saving and civil, cautious and discreet, 
 
 All sects and parties in their mansion meet ; . . . 
 
 There meet the wardens at their annual feast, 
 
 With annual pun ' the parish must be fleeced.' . . . 
 
 So live the pair and life's disasters seem 
 
 In their unruffled calm a troubled dream. 
 
 It is, we may suppose, to be regarded as a happy ending when 
 the sufferers forget the interesting part of their lives, and are 
 dismissed with this gentle playfulness. There is, however, 
 some irony in such an ending, of which Crabbe seems well 
 aware. This irony is well suited to a tale, but in a drama 
 it would be an anti -climax. 
 
 IX 
 
 Such are a few .of Crabbe's narratives. Their variety is 
 somewhat concealed by the style in which they are told. The 
 history of that style, which is not so monotonous as it seems 
 at first, is straightforward enough. Allowing for a few excur- 
 sions, he remained throughout ' classical ' in his form. He 
 slowly escaped from the fetters of the classical verbiage. He 
 never, indeed, quite escaped, but then he never had been 
 quite enslaved. From the first he has a habit of swinging 
 his moralist's ferule vaguely in the air, and then suddenly 
 letting it whistle down on a concrete pair of shoulders : 
 
 Bland adulation ! other pleasures pall 
 On the sick taste, and transient are they all ; 
 But this one sweet has such enchanting power, 
 The more we take, the faster we devour : 
 Nauseous to those who must the dose apply, 
 And most disgusting to the standers-by. 
 
 This might have been written by anybody of Crabbe's genera- 
 tion, but his peculiar, clumsy, efficient stroke is heard at 
 once : 
 
 Yet in all companies will Laughton feed, 
 Nor care how grossly men perform the deed. 
 
 It was not, however, for his acres of declamation that Crabbe 
 was mocked in Rejected Addresses, but for the dead prosaic 
 minuteness, of which there are acres also. It is needless to 
 quote James or Horace Smith, for Crabbe is often his own
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 61 
 
 parodist. He was always ready to write ' meanly,' in a kind 
 of rhyming prose, where not the prose but the rhyme seems to 
 be the intruder. He could write 
 
 Mamma look'd on with thoughts to these allied ; 
 She felt the pleasure of reflected pride ; 
 
 Or even thus 
 
 But how will Bloomer act 
 When he becomes acquainted with the fact ? 
 
 Much of the meanness of such passages is due to their thick 
 and lumbering rhymes. Act, fact ; all, scrawl ; aunt, grant ; 
 flood, mud! The whole weight of a couplet lies upon its 
 rhymes, and Crabbe does not mind making the worst of them. 
 In defence of such practices, and of his general fen-like level, 
 he might have said that his business was to reproduce the flat 
 encumbered talk of common folk, and that to have quitted 
 verse for prose would have been to resign half his power. Sucli 
 a plea does not make the passages more lively. But after all 
 he is an artist. FitzGerald and other admirers, distressed by 
 his inequalities, have tried to make anthologies. But his work 
 that is worth keeping would fill a big anthology, and it is better 
 to take him wholesale. Without essentially altering his narra- 
 tive style, he cleared and purged it. He stretched and adjusted 
 the familiar couplet with singular address to his chosen purpose, 
 nor has it ever again been used so well for that purpose. Our 
 bourgeois fiction has been written in prose instead, not wholly 
 to its gain. Perhaps Middlemarch, cast into form like his, 
 would have had a better chance of permanence. The narra- 
 tives in blank verse of The Excursion are more liable to be dull 
 than Crabbe's heroics, to which dialogue and monologue are 
 much better fitted. The motion is sometimes that of a spring- 
 less cart, but the ground is covered quicker than might be 
 feared. After a time the sensation is pleasant, and we can 
 watch the life of the roadside and the inn-parlour. 
 
 The hardest task of Crabbe was to manage the speeches of 
 his prosaic dramatis personce in a medium so full of rhetorical 
 associations. 1 We can trace the increase of his skill. In The 
 Village he resembles a professional letter-writer who puts fine 
 language into the mouths of the inarticulate. His old shepherd, 
 for example, perorates most disastrously, like somebody in 
 Dryden's heroic plays : 
 
 I, like yon wither'd leaf, remain behind, 
 Xipt by the frost, and shivering in the wind ;
 
 62 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CR ABBE 
 
 There it abides till younger buds come on ; 
 As I, now all my fellow-swains are gone. 
 Then, from the rising generation thrust, 
 It falls, like me, unnoticed in the dust. 
 
 After a while this kind of talk gives way to another one, 
 much more subtly modulated to the tones of actual prosaic 
 speech, and yet not out of place in rhyme. In the scathing 
 story of The Brothers, Isaac, the elder, under the pressure of a 
 stingy wife, edges the younger one, an old sailor who is down 
 in the world, into the worst room of the house, and finally 
 begs him to ' go up on the loft.' The effect is aided by the 
 poet's care in the detail of punctuation and printing. 
 
 ' Ah, brother Isaac ! What ! I 'm in the way ! ' 
 ' No, on my credit, look ye, No ! but I 
 Am fond of peace, and my repose must buy 
 On any terms in short, we must comply : 
 My spouse had money she must have her will 
 Ah ! Brother marriage is a bitter pill ' : 
 
 George tried the lady ' Sister, I offend.' 
 ' Me ? ' she replied ' Oh no ! you may depend 
 On my regard but watch your Brother's way, 
 Whom I, like you, must study and obey.' 
 
 Crabbe's versification likewise grew in freedom, though he 
 remained faithful to his distich. In his handling of it, he 
 remembers the finish and balance of Pope, but aspires to the 
 nobler sweep of Dryden, freely using the triple rhymes and 
 alexandrines. His lines are more continuous than Pope's, 
 and in their overrunning and interlacing come to resemble 
 what Johnson, speaking of The Hind and Panther, calls Dryden's 
 ' deliberate and final scheme ' of verse. Only Crabbe goes 
 further still, since he has to forge a rhythm that accords with 
 natural domestic talk. He is therefore the last great writer 
 of the couplet in its ' classical ' form. Its later uses by Keats 
 and William Morris for romantic narrative are coloured by 
 memories of the Jacobeans and of Chaucer. Nothing could be 
 more skilful technically, or better done, than some lines from 
 Procrastination. Dinah has waited many years for her absent 
 lover Rupert, but has become meanwhile rich, avaricious, and 
 sanctimonious. He returns, poor as he went, to claim her, 
 and she rebuffs him. 
 
 iShe ceased ; with steady glance, as if to see 
 
 The very root of this hypocrisy, 
 
 He her small fingers moulded in his hard 
 
 And bronzed broad hand ; then told her his regard,
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 63 
 
 His best respect were gone, but love had still 
 Hold in his heart, and govern'd yet the will 
 Or he would curse her : saying this, he threw 
 The hand in scorn away, and bade adieu 
 To every lingering hope, with every care in view. 
 
 A plain style, but inimitable ; the verse follows every wave of 
 the wanderer's disgust and chagrin. Now and then, in higher 
 mood, Crabbe escapes still more thoroughly from the bonds 
 of his metrical tradition; and we could almost believe that some 
 lines he wrote in 1817 or 1818 were shaped after reading Keats, 
 whose Endymion came out in the spring of the latter year : 
 
 He chose his native village, and the hill 
 
 He climb'd a boy had its attraction still ; 
 
 With that small brook beneath, where he would stand 
 
 And stooping fill the hollow of his hand 
 
 To quench th' impatient thirst then stop awhile 
 
 To see the sun upon the waters smile, 
 
 In that sweet weariness, when, long denied, 
 
 We drink and view the fountain that supplied 
 
 The sparkling bliss, and feel, if not express, 
 
 Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness. 
 
 Crabbe is one of the poets whose day has declined and who 
 are spoken of with distant respect. But his day may ripen 
 again, in Wordsworth's phrase, ' into a steady morning.' He 
 did not always see why poetry should be pleasant ; but he did 
 want poetry to be a means of representing life, and his verse 
 beats into us the impression of life, and of his own faithful 
 and brooding spirit ; and, sometimes, also, of beauty. 
 
 x 
 
 It may be convenient here to glance back at the critical 
 champion of the old school. In his later years Johnson 
 applauded the first satires of Cowper, and the first sketches of 
 Crabbe, for they seemed to give a new lease of power to the 
 dying style which he understood and had himself practised. 
 It is a mark of our classical poets that their professed defenders 
 not only Johnson, but Jeffrey and Byron outlived their 
 day of power. It was otherwise in France, where Malherbc 
 and Boileau preceded their own school, and were taken at their 
 own valuation as its doctors. The Lives of the Poets were 
 finished in 1781, and are the ripe and final judgments passed 
 by the classical age upon itself. They are, indeed, not idola- 
 trous judgments ; for Johnson's independence and mother- 
 wit suggest many reserves ; and the poets who come within
 
 64 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 his pale are nicely balanced, according to their own canons, 
 against one another ; but within those canons Johnson gener- 
 ally moves, so that his general attitude to Pope or Dryden is a 
 filial one. What he would have made of Songs of Experience 
 or of Christabel, we can partly guess from his dealings with 
 Gray's Odes and Lycidas. But it would have been of interest 
 to hear the concession that his real, his stifled, his under- 
 estimated sense for the greater poetry would have drawn from 
 him ; we come on that sense when he speaks of U Allegro or of 
 The Castle of Indolence ; on which he wrote, as perhaps he might 
 have written of Kubla Khan : ' It opens a scene of lazy luxury, 
 that fills the imagination.' But we cannot tell, for most of the 
 poets whom he reviews were chosen not by himself but by 
 the booksellers, and Chatterton was not among them. Nor is 
 it certain that he knew the Song to David, when he slighted the 
 poetry of its author. The English Bards of his admirer, Byron, 
 he would probably have condemned, and rightly, as crude in 
 its own kind. He remains, ' raying out curious observations 
 to the last,' greater than his superstitions, far greater than his 
 books or even than his talk, not to be packed into any formula 
 which serves him up as a mere Tory or apostle of common sense ; 
 but still in the last resort a force, a temperament, a ' character ' 
 rather than an artist. He has been the victim of phrases that 
 are still current concerning him. The ' sturdy old moralist ' 
 was so close to the hard facts of life and death that he 
 played freely enough with ethical conventions. The ' preju- 
 diced Tory ' had the soul of a democrat when lie had to deal 
 with Chesterfield. The ' preacher of common sense ' was a 
 mystic, of his own kind, and a hypochondriac. It is a pleasure 
 to go back to him after reading the madder parts of Blake, or 
 the more unctuous pages of Coleridge. He had the noblest 
 and most penetrating of all tributes from Carlyle, who fixed 
 rightly for praise on his virility and his heroic quality. 
 
 Still the reviewer of the age that followed Johnson must 
 perforce leave him aside, after thus much notice paid ; for in 
 the development of its art and spirit he does not count, and to 
 attend too much to him will only blind us to the antecedents 
 of that development in Johnson's own time, to which Johnson 
 was blind or hostile. For, unlike Burke, he did not even 
 connect himself with the next age by becoming a voice of the 
 reaction against its revolutionary impulses. He did not 
 live long enough for that, nor had he the requisite kind of 
 power. The feeling for beauty was what the classical poets, 
 of the strictest sect, wanted. Pope had it, but came fatally to
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 65 
 
 lose it. Johnson, Churchill, and the political satirists have it 
 not at all. Goldsmith, who uses a variety of the same tech- 
 nique, has a true feeling for beauty, though it is hindered in 
 expression by his technique. He has not very keen artistic 
 senses, saving in some of his water-colour scenes, but he has 
 the gentleness and charm that his contemporaries lack. This 
 gentleness and charm sometimes make him unreal, in the way 
 that Crabbe resented ; but they save him all the same. Gold- 
 smith has a just, sane vision, after all, of country life, with its 
 slow changes and innocent humours ; and when he describes 
 it, and quits the abstract-sentimental, his diction becomes 
 right and simple. 
 
 And, 'mid his old hereditary trees, 
 Trees he has climbed so oft, he sits and sees 
 His children's children playing round his knees : 
 Then happiest, youngest, when the quoit is flung, 
 When, side by side, the archers' bows are strung ; 
 His to prescribe the place, adjudge the prize. . . . 
 
 The reader will not find these lines anywhere in Goldsmith, 
 for they occur in Samuel Rogers 's l Human Life (1819) ; but 
 Rogers is here speaking in the tones of Goldsmith, from whom, 
 as a poet, he derives, and whom, as well as Gray and Beattie, 
 he studied carefully. Both Human Life and the much earlier 
 Pleasures of Memory (1792) have the same kind of atmosphere, 
 the same drawbacks and recompenses, as The Deserted Village, 
 though they are far less vivid. In this way Rogers carries on, 
 with a kind of humane elegance, the happier species of classical 
 tradition, alongside of the hoarse railing of the satirists. He 
 began to write before Gifford, and lived to see the publication 
 of Maud ; but in his verse he remained true to his upbringing. 
 He does not count for much as a poet, and knew it ; he has the 
 wish rather than the power to be one, and possesses taste, the 
 feminine of talent. 
 
 Rogers was a connoisseur who took to verse-making, and 
 wrote with patient though somewhat ineffectual care. The 
 Pleasures of Memory took him many years to make, and yet 
 it is only a recital of pleasant things remembered, and has no 
 unity. It is abstract, as its title shows ; a weakness shared 
 by Akenside and Campbell ; for Imagination, Memory, Hope, 
 and their ' pleasures,' cannot give backbone to a poem. The 
 exiled Tahitian remembers his hut, the young Foscari re- 
 members Venice : 
 
 And hence the charm historic scenes impart ; 
 Hence Tiber awes, and Avon melts the heart. 
 VOL. I. E
 
 66 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 This is no real subject. The pleasant, glossy workmanship 
 does not wear well, save in lines and brief passages. Rogers's 
 Epistle to a Friend (1798) and Voyage of Columbus (1810) have 
 the same ring and metre ; but Italy, of which the first part 
 appeared in 1822, is in blank verse of a kind that betrays new 
 influences, especially that of Wordsworth, mingling with the 
 old. A second part, signed, came in 1828 ; and both parts 
 were issued again after much polishing. Italy, in its final 
 appearance, is a work of art in the visible sense, like Rogers's 
 collected Poems (1838). Both books are perfect in aspect and 
 printing, and in the taste with which the steel engravings from 
 Turner, Stothard, or Prout are set upon the page. Italy is a 
 poem of travel and association, or rather a series of Reise- 
 bilder. It is written from scene to scene, and from allusion to 
 allusion, which are studiously sewn together. The picture of 
 Marguerite of Tours (which has a breath of The Excursion), the 
 story of the Foscari, the pictures of Arqua and Naples, perhaps 
 show Rogers at his best ; with the well-known lines on Venice, 
 which after all are better grammar and verse than Byron's in 
 Childe Harold. The aim of Rogers is now that of Southey 
 and Wordsworth purity and simplicity of diction ; the old 
 rhetoric is mostly purged away ; and this aim he reaches, 
 though he has not poetic energy to sustain him. His confes- 
 sion, a true one, gives the keynote of such a style : 
 
 Nature denied him much, 
 
 But gave him at his birth what most he values ; 
 A passionate love for music, sculpture, painting, 
 For poetry, the language of the gods, 
 For all things here, or grand or beautiful, 
 A setting sun, a lake among the mountains, 
 The light of an ingenuous countenance, 
 And, what transcends them all, a noble action. 
 
 Flat enough, in its sincerity. The mistake of Rogers was not 
 to write more prose. The little anecdote inserted in Italy, 
 ' The Bag of Gold,' and passages in his letters, show how lively 
 he could be, and so do tho records of his talk. 
 
 Many causes contributed to make Rogers a personage, and 
 in a chronicle of literary society his name would bulk large. 
 He lived till past ninety (1703-1855), and was a name and 
 an institution through two or three generations. The 
 ' pleasures of memory ' were certainly his. His wealth, his 
 kindness, his hospitalities, and his love of art and of collecting 
 gave him his prominence. As a writer, he spoke agreeably 
 to the slow-marching, modish taste of the leisured classes,
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 67 
 
 who were carried away by Moore and Byron, but distrusted 
 or were indifferent to Coleridge and Shelley, and who, in their 
 ordinary moods, preferred the kind of passive pleasure that the 
 verse of Italy afforded. His sharp odd wit was licensed, and to 
 the high Whig company, of which Moore's diary is the mirror, 
 Rogers was long indispensable. He figures in the gallery of 
 Carlyle, with his ' sardonic shelf chin ' ; but in the history of 
 poetry he belongs essentially to an earlier day. 
 
 No one knew so many people as Rogers, or remembered so 
 much. He was the correspondent of Wordsworth, Scott, and 
 Byron, and familiar with Brougham and the whole Whig 
 circle. He seems to touch the surface of London society at 
 every point. Living till ninety, he became himself a piece of 
 history, a walking book of memoirs. He recalled faces that 
 already flitted like wraiths over the tarnished mirror of the 
 literary dictionaries. He had seen the Gordon riots, 1 and heads 
 on Temple Bar, and young girls carted to Tyburn. He had 
 heard Burke congratulate Reynolds, after one of his Academy 
 lectures, in a quotation from Milton, and the Delia Cruscans 
 chattering literature (ante, p. 35) to Miss Helen Maria Williams. 
 In Edinburgh he had talked with Blair, Robertson, and Adam 
 Smith. Dr. Parr had written him a letter of comments on 
 The Pleasures of Memory, and Gilpin, to whose judicious love 
 for the picturesque he responded with a platonic affection for 
 nature, had written him one also. He liked Mackintosh, but 
 was bored by his metaphysical talk. His Recollections cover 
 a whole age, and he lived through it, as patriarchs often do, 
 without understanding its deeper currents in the least. He 
 has not the intellectual receptiveness of Crabb Robinson ; he 
 is all anecdotes, bitter tongue, and benevolence, but cannot 
 paint a portrait either physical or mental. Yet, with Moore, 
 he was the most social of all the men of letters, and he was just 
 a wit and poet, or less, and was near many wits and poets, 
 and lived and died in the odour of literature. 
 
 XI 
 
 In a time of poetic change, the passage from the older themes 
 and styles into the new is best seen in the writers of middle 
 rank and mixed performance. For it is they that struggle 
 against both the old and the new in turn ; their voices are not 
 quite their own, yet are not merely echoes ; they are a little, 
 but not too much, ahead of average cultured taste, and they 
 content it greatly, and distract it from uneasiness in the
 
 68 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 presence of the solitary genius that disregards it. In happy 
 hour they may break away from their own canons and their 
 admired official manner, and produce some short thing of a 
 truer quality. Such a poet is Thomas Campbell 1 (1777-1844), 
 a man of genuine if unrealised talent and of prolonged note 
 and prominence, who won early fame by The Pleasures of Hope 
 (1799). The state of public appreciation in the year after 
 Lyrical Ballads can be measured by the reception of this poem, 
 one of the last of any worth written in the didactic couplet. 
 Its traditional kind of title, recalling Akenside and Rogers, 
 is a mere formula, serving to cloak a number of disunited 
 episodes ; and the whole may be described as ' poetry rejoicing 
 in abstractions.' The language and verse have much of the 
 smoothness, or nap, which Rogers and Darwin strove to attain ; 
 but there are also ardours, and generosities, and rushes, to 
 which the style is inadequate ; and we are not surprised when 
 Campbell afterwards finds his power in lyric. He is a fervent 
 admirer of the Revolution, and never wholly cools down into 
 the Whiggery of his friends and set. He is full of sympathy 
 with Poland, and -with oppressed slaves ; and his oratory is 
 sincere and at times potent. Ten years later came another 
 long poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, conventional in manner, 
 and obvious rather than false in its pathos ; the subject is a 
 tribute to the growing taste for exotic scenery ; and the 
 story is related in fluent Spenserian stanzas of the rhetorical 
 kind. 
 
 Campbell's short poems and ballads date from various 
 periods ; Ye Mariners of England, The Battle of the Baltic, 
 and Hohenlinden were inspired by his visit to Germany (1802), 
 where he was near the smell of powder. Lochiel's Warning 
 and Lord Ullin's Daughter, Glenara and The Exile of Erin and 
 O'Connor's Child, are of scattered dates ; but his best lyrics, 
 like Wordsworth's, were all composed by 1806. Their diction 
 is often less pure than Scott's, but they have at times a ring 
 as of bronze ; a metrical passion that carries them through 
 even when the diction will not bear scrutiny. In The Battle 
 of the Baltic, for instance, three out of the eight stanzas are 
 spoilt by false expression ; the third, by ' the might of England 
 flushed ' ; the sixth, by ' death withdrew his shades ' ; and 
 the last, by the condolence of the mermaid. But all this is 
 retrieved by the alternating crash and suspense of the lines. 
 Campbell's verse is ' popular,' in the same sense as Scott's ; 
 there are broad easy transitions, feelings that go home 
 and need no curious explanation, unmistakable trumpet-
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 69 
 
 notes or drum-taps. This is an admirable style when it suc- 
 ceeds, but few can handle it and yet remain poets. Campbell 
 is one of those few. His pathos is of the same order, palpable 
 and unshaded, but it is there. Moore has the same power 
 of going home to us ; but his hand is finer, and he succeeds 
 in pure lyric, not in the lyric of situation or story. Campbell's 
 Song of the Greeks, with the shattering sound of its anapaestics, 
 is now too little remembered ; at the other extreme, The Beech 
 Tree's Petition, with its old-fashioned Cowper-like grace and 
 tenderness, and the Lines written on Revisiting a Scene in 
 Argyleshire, which are both heroic and pathetic, remain with 
 us out of a mass of verses devoid of character. 
 
 It was ill for Campbell that he resisted the new poetry with 
 so much prejudice, and refused to learn from it, though he lived 
 for nearly half a century after its rise. He was a man of 
 talent, but he would not listen. It is much the same with 
 his criticism, which is found in his Essay on British Poetry, and 
 in the notices of the British poets prefixed to his Specimens 
 (1819), and also in his Lectures on Poetry. He has many 
 flashes of sensibility, little real sense of values ; and an 
 attempt to speak for posterity, which dwelt on Langhorne and 
 Mason, omitted the masterpiece of Smart, and praised in 
 Chatterton not his imagery, but his strength of ' moral por- 
 traiture,' is now curious reading. His notes on the old masters 
 show the same mixture of feeling and blankness ; but he was 
 the first to attempt, however summarily, the whole survey 
 from Chaucer to Burns, and he dotted in the names over a 
 larger map than that sketched by Warton or Johnson, or even 
 by Coleridge and Lamb. He spoke of Spenser as aptly as any 
 of these judges : 
 
 We shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of vision- 
 ary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colours 
 of language. . . . The clouds of his allegory may seem to spread 
 into shapeless forms, but they are still the clouds of a glowing 
 atmosphere. Though his story grows desultory, the sweetness and 
 grace of his manner still abide by him. . . . We always rise from 
 perusing him Avith melody in the mind's ear, and with pictures of 
 romantic beauty impressed on the imagination. 
 
 He compares equally well with the romantic critics when he 
 touches on Jonson and Massinger. The digression, in his 
 chapter on Pope, on the launching of a ship of the line, is prose 
 in full official uniform, rather too new and conscious, and has 
 the same inspiration as his best odes ; its sincerity as well as 
 its defects remind us of them. It is not often quoted now :
 
 70 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 
 
 Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of 
 having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spec- 
 tators. They seem yet before me I sympathise with their deep 
 and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthusiasm. 
 It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity. When 
 the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm water on which 
 she swung majestically round gave the imagination a contrast of 
 the stormy element on which she was soon to ride. All the days of 
 battle and all the nights of danger which she had to encounter ; 
 all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had 
 to do and suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before 
 the mind ; and when the heart gave her a benediction, it was like 
 one pronounced on a living being. 
 
 This passage became a battle-ground in the small but noisy 
 pamphlet war, waged over the poetic merits of Pope, and 
 echoing on, tediously enough, until 1821. By then most of 
 the new poets and critics had, absent-mindedly, turned their 
 backs on Pope, and the whole dispute is a survival. It may 
 therefore be named here, though the combatants belong to 
 later chapters. In his edition of Pope (1806) William Lisle 
 Bowles, 1 continuing Joseph Warton's argument of fifty years 
 earlier, had striven to put Pope in his true place, as a perfect 
 describer of ' the manners,' who had lost his hold on natural 
 imagery, and who is therefore an artificer, a writer of the second 
 order. Much later, Campbell, in the Essay on English Poetry, 
 spoke warmly for the defence ; whereon Bowles, in his Invari- 
 able Principles of Poetry, replied for the prosecution. A 
 shower of leaves followed ; but in the rival tracts of Bowles 
 and Byron the contention comes to an issue. It is a false, or 
 a crudely stated, issue ; 2 namely whether, as Bowles put it, 
 ' poetry be more immediately indebted to what is sublime or 
 beautiful in the works of nature, or in the works of art.' And 
 his position proves to be that 
 
 the descriptive poet, who paints from an intimate knowledge of 
 external nature, is more poetical, supposing the fidelity and execu- 
 tion equal, not than the painter of human passion, but (than) the 
 painter of external circumstances in artificial life ; Cowper paints 
 a morning walk, Pope a game of cards. 
 
 This statement will be denied only by those who deny that 
 poetic pleasures, ' supposing the execution equal,' can be com- 
 pared at all, or ranked in gradation ; but no such modern 
 argument was in the mind of Bowles's critics. He overreached 
 himself, by attempting to deny that images drawn from the 
 handiwork of man are sufficient to give the true pleasure ; and
 
 THE END OF THE CLASSICAL VERSE : CRABBE 71 
 
 inquires of Campbell, why, if they were sufficient, ' it was 
 necessary to bring your ship off the stocks ? ' It was easy for 
 Byron to rejoin that the handiwork of man counts for as much, 
 in the picture of the ship, as nature, and ' that the poetry is at 
 least reciprocal.' But such arguments could come to little 
 good on either side, and in the age of Coleridge they strike us 
 as somewhat infantile. 
 
 It is in one of these pamphlets that Byron calls Pope 'A 
 Grecian temple of the purest architecture.' He is the last real 
 champion, though a blind one, of the stricter classical poetry ; 
 he begins, in his English Bards, by writing in it himself as best 
 he may ; but it is soon overlaid in him, though never quite 
 extinguished. After Byron it appears more rarely ; but we 
 have never quite done with it ; it is heard in Keats's Lamia, 
 it is heard in the Jacobite's Epitaph of Macaulay ; in lines like 
 
 Heard by Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees, 
 And pined by Arno for his lovelier Tees, 
 
 it is heard in its full force and charm. But this chapter has 
 traced its old age, which takes a new spurt, becoming hale and 
 keen, about the end of the eighteenth century. It is found 
 turning on its decayed forms and mocking them ; or stung 
 into oratory by hatred of the Revolution ; or doing, in Crabbe, 
 the work of the novel of manners ; or refreshing itself from the 
 springs of the ballad. But meanwhile the change was astir, 
 which must now be described.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 I. Revival of the Sonnet T. Warton, Bampfylde, Charlotte Smith, Bowles ; 
 marks of the school ; Coleridge and Bowles ; continuity of the Sonnet form. 
 
 II. Cowper the renewer of poetical taste ; his value as an inventor of forms ; 
 confessional writing ; his prose and letters. 
 
 III. Cowper, his religion and his malady. The four acts of his life (rt) 
 1731-65: magazine articles, early verses, and Memoir. 
 
 IV. The second act (6) 1765-81 : letters, Adelphi, Olney Hymns. 
 
 V. The third (c) 1781-86 : period of productiveness ; the volume of 1782, 
 The Task, John Gilpin, Tirocinium, etc. The fourth act (d) 1786-1800; 
 Teedon letters ; Homer ; Yardley Oak. 
 
 VI. Cowper's views of poetry : his models Milton and simplicity. The 
 effect of Milton and Thomson on Cowper exemplified. 
 
 VII. Lighter, and lyrical verses, John Gilpin ; satires, Table Talk. 
 
 VIII. The Task, its character and diction ; transposition of the language 
 of Milton ; Crowe's Leicesdon Hill ; Yardley Oak. 
 
 IX. Translations of Homer ; visit of Milton to Cowper in a dream. 
 
 THE triumphs and auguries of the new poetry, between 1780 
 and 1798, are chiefly to be found in Cowper, Blake, and Burns ; 
 and Cowper comes first in order, not only because he published 
 earliest, but because he is deeper in the classical tradition, and 
 is seen working out of it, gradually losing the metallic ring 
 of his first satires, and moving towards simplicity and grace 
 and ' the language of the heart.' Such a process may also 
 be traced in one of the minor rills of verse, which had long 
 been wholly dried up, but was soon to be an ample stream. 
 Cowper wrote sonnets to Romney and Hayley, as well as to 
 Mary Unwin, but only in his later years ; the sonnet 1 was not 
 one of the forms that he did most to revive, and he had been 
 anticipated here by a gentle band of writers mostly soon 
 forgotten. The history of the sonnet during the span covered 
 by this book falls into two chapters. One begins with the 
 nine sonnets of Thomas Warton, nearly all published in 1777, 
 and closes with the first of Wordsworth's, written in 1801. 
 The second may be said to cl>se with Blanco White's famous
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 73 
 
 sonnet, To Night, in 1827, when Wordsworth had done his best 
 in this form, and Keats had been some while dead. 
 
 Warton's few sonnets are not all metrically accurate, in 
 the Italian sense, and he does not make a very clear pause in 
 thought at the end of the octave. In manner he follows the 
 odes of Gray rather than the single sonnet upon West ; he aims 
 at resonance and rich historical colouring, and he also describes 
 nature, though he sees her not a little through the spectacles 
 of Milton. The ' Renascence of wonder ' is well seen in 
 Warton's treatment of Stonehenge, or of a Leaf of Dugdale's 
 Monasticon ; and these pieces tell us a good deal about the 
 historian of English poetry. He has that sense of an antiquity, 
 half-ruined by time and half rescued by scholarship and 
 piety, which goes back to the Renaissance. He also has a 
 touch of introspection and melancholy, which is not suggested 
 by his recorded appearances in common rooms or at ' The 
 Club.' The sonnet On the River Lodon, though ill-rhymed, 
 begins in such a strain : 
 
 Ah ! what a weary race my feet have ran, 
 Since first I trod thy banks with alders crowned, 
 And though my way was all through fairy ground, 
 Beneath thy azure sky and golden sun . . . 
 
 The same pensiveness is heard in Bowles, though he is not 
 the first successor of Warton in this field. It is worth while 
 disinterring the sonnets of John Bampfylde, a young musician 
 who fell into destitution in London and died insane. They 
 are but a handful, and yet, contrasted with the regular diction 
 of the day, they are full of keener tones and of a gentle realism 
 that recalls Goldsmith rather than Crabbe. The mixture of 
 styles in a time of transition is oddly sensible in a passage of 
 this sort : 
 
 The ruddy prattlers clear 
 
 Hug the gray mongrel ; meanwhile maid and lad 
 
 Squabble for roasted crabs. 
 
 And the sense of a dreary country day, when time hangs 
 heavy, is given in the sonnet On a Wet Summer : 
 
 Mute is the mournful plain ; 
 Silent the swallow sits beneath the thatch, 
 The vacant hind hangs pensive o'er hi.s hatch, 
 Counting the frequent drops from reeded eaves. 
 
 That strange egotist, and esteemed editor and bibliographer, 
 Sir Egerton Brydges, relates how, on going up to Cambridge in 
 1780, he read and admired Bampfylde, and resolved to 'give
 
 74 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 himself up to English poetry.' He was also moved by the same 
 great example as Wordsworth twenty years later ; and in 
 these obscure authors, as well as in those that are famous, we 
 trace the impulse of renovation in our poetry. Brydges went 
 back to Milton ; not the Milton of the epics, whom a dozen 
 poets had followed afar off, nor the Milton of L' Allegro, like 
 the Wartons ; but, he says, 
 
 I had, in studying Milton's noble sonnets noble in defiance of 
 Johnson convinced myself of the force and majesty of plain Ian- 
 guage, and I resolved never to be seduced into a departure from it. 
 
 Brydges unluckily did not make much of his resolve, though 
 he produced a host of sonnets, of which some are dated as early 
 as 1782. He is colourless, though his language is fairly ' plain,' 
 and his metrical structure is correct but for some stray alex- 
 andrines. There were also nine editions, between 1784 and 
 1800, of the sonnets of Mrs. Charlotte Smith, the writer of The 
 Old Manor House and of some apt and pointed poems for the 
 young. Mrs. Smith often rhymes irregularly, but she studies 
 Petrarch, and aims' at gloss as well as at the expression of an 
 elegant melancholy induced by the contemplation of scenery. 
 Sometimes she manages to record simple feelings simply, and 
 looks at nature and listens to it in her own way : 
 
 The dark and pillowy clouds, the sallow trees, 
 Seem o'er the ruins of the year to mourn ; 
 
 And, cold and hollow, the incessant breeze 
 Sobs through the falling leaves of withered fern. 
 
 If we shade the sight from Wordsworth's greater sonnets, we 
 shall perceive these timid rays which struggle from behind 
 them and outlive the arc -lamp effects of Erasmus Darwin. 
 In the years 1787-89 the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine 
 disclose not a few experiments in the sonnet form ; some merely 
 genteel, like Miss Anna Seward's, and some scholarly, like 
 those of Henry Gary, afterwards the translator of Dante, and 
 Landor's friend. In 1789 came the first sheaf of sonnets, 
 fourteen in number, by William Lisle Bowles, published at 
 Bath. We need not discount overmuch the fervent gratitude 
 expressed by Coleridge, then a boy of seventeen, towards these 
 poems, or that of Wordsworth, who read them a few years 
 later. Coleridge, at least, found in them a refuge from con- 
 ventional diction, and a lasting impulse towards a quiet and 
 natural stylo of poetry ; an impulse which, as will appear, 
 lies as deep in Coleridge as the richer and stranger one that
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 75 
 
 comes out in TJie Ancient Mariner. Bowles added to his 
 sonnets, and produced five editions of them in six years, pour- 
 ing out much verse besides in which the same qualities are 
 seen less concentrated. He had no poetic force, but he had the 
 elements of poetic Tightness ; a genuine and gentle strain of 
 humanity, that of the cultured rural clergyman ; and an 
 instinct for seeking humble-minded solitude in the midst of 
 natural things as a solace in trouble. Above all, he had a 
 suitable diction, in faint relief, but generally pure and adequate. 
 A certain proneness in Bowles to the sentimental, which 
 attracted the sneers of satirists, did not repel Coleridge. The 
 poetic mercies of the year 1789 were still not so lavish, but 
 that we can appreciate the newness of Bowles's imagery : the 
 ' evening glimmering o'er the sighing sedge,' the ' distant 
 turret's gleaming fan,' the ' willow'd hedge ' in the Cherwell ; 
 and he more than once anticipates Wordsworth's mood of 
 retrospect which is nourished and cheered by memories of 
 beauty : 
 
 For this a look upon thy hills I cast, 
 And many a soften'd image of the past 
 Pleased to combine, and bid remembrance keep, 
 To soothe me with fair views and fancies rude 
 When I pursue my path in solitude. 
 
 Bowles's Bamborough Castle, and many of his other sonnets, 
 are imperfect, being in an unlinked system of rhymes. He 
 uses a variety of the Elizabethan form, in closed rhymes 
 (abba, cddc, effe, gg), and many other schemes as well, but 
 usually manages to suggest something of the effect of the 
 Italian kind, which Wordsworth revived so potently. His 
 pamphlets against the surviving idolatry of Pope have been 
 mentioned. It was the poets who decided the matter and 
 abated the titles of Pope, before his critical defenders had 
 perceived that this had been done. Bowles outlived all such 
 wars, and also the age succeeding them, and lived on till 1850. 
 His ' mixture of talent and simplicity ' is described by Moore, 
 who visited his parsonage in Wiltshire and saw its ' Shen- 
 stonian inscriptions ' ; ' his sheepbells,' says Moore, ' arc 
 tuned in thirds and fifths, but he is an excellent fellow not- 
 withstanding.' 
 
 The Sonnet then is a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is 
 developed . . . but those Sonnets appear to me the most exquisite 
 in which moral Sentiments, Affections, and Feelings are deduced 
 from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature. . . . Respecting the 
 metre of a Sonnet, the Writer should consult his own convenience.
 
 76 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 So speaks Coleridge in his Poems of 1797, which included 
 specimens by Charles Lamb, Lloyd, and himself. The book 
 was enlarged from the edition of the year before, in which he 
 also printed some by Bowles ; whose poems, he remarks, 
 ' domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part 
 of our identity.' This description of the sonnet is avowedly 
 drawn from the practice of Bowles and Charlotte Smith, and 
 fairly represents the stage which the form had reached before 
 Wordsworth took it up. It is characteristic of the school that 
 Coleridge had at first used the title ' Effusion ' ; but Charles 
 Lamb told him to ' call them Sonnets, for heaven's sake, and 
 not " Effusions," ' and he did so. His friends, luckily, did not 
 ' consult their own convenience ' as to the metre ; those of 
 Charles Lloyd, in his Poems of 1795, and in later volumes, are 
 fairly orthodox in measure, and indeed are often renderings 
 from Petrarch, and his conceptions of its structure are sound 
 enough (see post, Ch. xvi., ad fin.). Southey's sonnets also 
 begin about this time, and it should be noted how the poetic 
 generations overlap, for Coleridge had begun sonnet-writing 
 before Cowper had written his lines to Mary Unwin : a work of 
 a different strain to the ' effusions ' of the school just noticed, 
 and one which has a whole lifetime of troublous experience and 
 devotion behind it. 
 
 II 
 
 It was not for Crabbe to open new pathways for our poetry. 
 During his long silence, between 1785 and 1807, came up the 
 spring tide, just reaching Crabbe himself. Burns wrote in 
 Scots, and his influence was only oblique, for his forms could 
 not be transplanted. Nor can the position of William Cowper x 
 (1731-1800), as the first renewer of a better public taste, be 
 contested on behalf of Blake. We cannot say how Blake 
 might have affected his generation had his Poetical Sketches 
 or his illuminated prints been better known. Perhaps he 
 would still have been too original and remote to stir it. In 
 any case, he moves in a wholly different heaven of imagination 
 from Cowper, as is shown sufficiently by the drawings he made 
 for ' Spring ' and ' Winter,' when they are compared with the 
 text of The Task ; though for Cowper might be claimed a 
 closer acquaintance with at least one circle of hell. The two 
 poets are most unlike, where they might be expected to 
 approach one another, in the quality of their imaginative 
 affection for the redbreast or the tamo lamb. Cowper's task, 
 though he did not know it and refused to be called ' one of the
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 77 
 
 literati,' was the revival of poetical taste, and in a measure 
 of poetry itself. 
 
 His value as a craftsman and inventor is high. He struck 
 out and used beautifully more than one of the styles, which 
 were presently to be taken over into the stock of the poets 
 and elaborated. The Wreck of the Royal George lies close 
 behind the heroic songs of Campbell and Tennyson ; Yardley 
 Oak, and the landscapes of The Task, forerun some of the 
 ruminations in The Prelude and The Excursion ; and if the 
 pictures of the postman, the wagoner, and the gipsies have 
 not been followed, it is because they cannot be improved. 
 So Cowper's humorous and domestic verses carry on a tone 
 which is heard again, with a difference, in Locker-Lampson 
 and Austin Dobson long afterwards. And the newness of his 
 work was seen at once ; he was not too far beyond his public 
 for recognition. The Task and John Oilpin were read by every 
 one, and if Cowper's popularity has faded, and his retiring 
 figure is easily hidden behind his successors, still Time has 
 spared much of his verse, and has sifted it with far more kind- 
 ness than that of the loud, demonstrative Youngs and Churchills. 
 Of Cowper's prose the life is assured ; and if he rises to higher 
 and stranger things in his verse, his prose is more safely charmed 
 against uncertainty of style. But his prose, unlike his verse, 
 does not initiate ; it carries on one of the best traditions already 
 in existence, and its pedigree down from Addison is of the 
 purest. Both in prose and verse it is his instinct to be confi- 
 dential, and this strain of confessional writing, in which so 
 much of the matter is sad and unhappy, while much is blithe 
 the strain that we hear in The Task and The Castaway, and the 
 poem on the hares, and the correspondence, is one that Cowper 
 acclimatised in English letters, just as Rousseau had acclima- 
 tised it in European letters. We find the same instinct, and 
 other maladies, in Coleridge or Shelley ; and the presence of 
 this note is another distinguishing mark of the literature that 
 we call romantic. In Wordsworth, too, we find the same 
 instinct, without so much of the malady. 
 
 The natural man in Cowper was gay, and sociable, and a 
 little dandified, fond of nonsense but very gently bred ; shy, 
 but capable under strain of serious passion ; irresistibly over- 
 running with humorous and affectionate expressiveness to a 
 very few persons, some of whom must be women ; but caring, 
 at bottom, quite as much for things for hedges, and trees, and 
 the greenhouse, and the carpenter's shop, as well as for the 
 animals that run about them ; and caring, though not so much,
 
 78 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 for a very few books on wet days, or as a distraction. And 
 the necessity lay upon him to express himself, to his friends, 
 and next to the public ; not to let this bright, playful life ripple 
 away into the sand ; to watch it, and seize it as it passed, 
 and to set it down for the pleasure of doing so, so as to prolong 
 and recall the satisfaction of talking about it. Women are 
 accounted foremost in this kind of writing, and it would be easy 
 to call Cowper the best feminine correspondent in the language. 
 But it would be less than just to him, for he is more agreeable 
 than some famous women who have written letters, like Mme. 
 de Sevigne and Mrs. Carlyle ; their tongues may be trusted to 
 take the skin off, and, as Nietzsche says, ' Even the sweetest 
 woman is bitter,' while Cowper is humane ; and in light verse, 
 which he wrote as perfectly as he did his letters, women are 
 hardly ever artists at all. It is fair to say that he was inspired 
 by women when he did his best in this vein. The gayest of 
 his letters are written to Harriet, Lady Hesketh, his cousin ; 
 his happiest early verses, of the tender as well as the cheerfully 
 artificial kind, to her sister Theodora, whom he wished to many, 
 and who remembered him all her life ; The Task and John 
 Oilpin, as all know, and possibly Retirement, were done at the 
 instance of Lady Austen ; while his two poems to Mrs. Unwin 
 herself, and his lines to his mother's picture, take us away 
 altogether from this blithe side of Cowper into his strange and 
 solitary house of sadness and bondage, which even those 
 sisters of mercy could not enter, though they might knock and 
 thrust a message of comfort under the door. They ministered, 
 above all, to the long spells of comparative happiness, which 
 are so fully represented in his effortless letters, and in his 
 seeming-effortless verse. 
 
 The range of these letters and the qualities by which they 
 attract are not hard to describe. The lyra heroica, and the 
 high Wordsworthian strain, are not there ; but otherwise the 
 whole of the natural man, and the whole of Cowper's inward 
 struggle, are represented in them. It is hard to say anything 
 about their form, except that it is always right. Any limita- 
 tions in the letters are not due to inexpressiveness or bad 
 writing, but to Cowper's character. For this reason they do 
 not enter into competition with Swift's letters, or Carlyle's, 
 or with those of Keats or Coleridge ; the mental horizon and 
 the whole colouring are different. But though the stage is 
 smaller, the scene has plenty of variety and motion. Cowper 
 reviews it, moved less by any strong current of the blood than 
 by a happy little excitement of the nerves, not unlike that
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 79 
 
 which we seem to recognise in the Nun's Priest's Tale, the 
 story of the cock and the fox. Perhaps Chaucer and Cowper, 
 however dissimilar, have the same central quality vivacity. 
 Chaucer would have delighted in the interview with the gentle- 
 man, Mr. Cox, 1 who came to get out of Cowper the ' Stanzas 
 subjoined to the yearly Bill of Mortality of the parish of All 
 Saints, Northampton ' ; and he, too, would have consented. 
 
 A plain, decent, elderly figure made its appearance, and being 
 desired to sit, spoke as follows . . . [Cowper replies] ' 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 par- 
 ticular, 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 much help of 
 him, but he is a gentleman of so much reading that the people of 
 our town cannot understand him.' 
 
 We can see how such writing is a form of the author's con- 
 versation. He tells of domestic nothings, sends light intimate 
 confidences about his tea-parties, his digestion, or his money 
 matters. Everything is gently alive, and we have to read on. 
 It is the record of the week-day man. In a truly English and 
 eighteenth-century tone he exclaims : ' Pulpits for preaching, 
 and the parlour, the garden, and the walk for friendly and 
 agreeable conversation.' It is the tone of many a country 
 house to-day ; equable, well-mannered, cheerful no vulgarity, 
 little passion, good or bad, and not too much thinking, even 
 on Sundays. Time goes quickly in such places : even when, 
 as with Cowper, there is both thinking and passion ; and at 
 the age of forty-nine he writes : 
 
 My days steal away silently and march on (as poor mad King Lear 
 would have made his soldiers march) as if they were shod with felt ; 
 not so silently but that I can hear them. 
 
 But for the illness within, such a life might have been without 
 events. It is the chequering of soft lights with heavy shadows 
 that gives these letters their distinction, and makes them the 
 picture of a soul. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Cowper's religion and his madness are, of course, not quite 
 interchangeable terms. Their relationship is not a simple 
 one ; they certainly inflamed one another ; and neither of 
 them can be separated from the intenser expressions of his 
 literary genius ; so that the problem is one of art as well as of
 
 80 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 psychology. His faculty of self-expression spared no part of 
 his experience. He is our best authority for his own case, for 
 in his darkest hours his perspicuous logic, even his sobriety 
 of form, seldom desert him, and his melancholy, as he says, 
 ' does not at all affect the operations of my mind on any sub- 
 ject to which I can attach it.' This, whether a blessing or a 
 curse to Cowper, is his characteristic. He could not be more 
 lucid had he been clinically watching the despair of another 
 person. Mrs. Browning's verses on his grave show less self- 
 control than any poem of Cowper's own, and the ' maniac ' 
 whose ' deathless singing ' they celebrate could reason about 
 his own fixed idea, though he could not reason it away, with 
 singular rigour. The damnable kingdom of darkness which 
 he came to inhabit, he describes in a crystal style ; and we 
 look down into the heart of his delirium, where dreadful shapes 
 are seen in motion and in perfectly clear outline. 
 
 Thus the history of Cowper's mental health is interwoven 
 with that of his literary genius ; and his life divides itself into 
 four acts, or unequal phases from this point of view. The 
 first covers wellnigh half of it, and may be taken to end with 
 his discharge from Dr. Cotton's asylum in June 1765, after a 
 visit of eighteen months. Cowper came out with his reason 
 restored, and his hope of salvation certified for a time, in the 
 thirty-fourth year of his age. In 1752, when twenty-one, he 
 had recovered from a slighter access of melancholia, religious 
 in its character and cure, but free from definite delusions. The 
 sapphics ' written under the influence of delirium,' which are 
 the earliest evidence of his power, date from 1763. He had 
 published nothing but a few papers, after the manner of Steele, 
 in the shortlived Connoisseur ; and he had only written a hand- 
 ful of verses, part earlier and part later than the illness of 
 1752 ; some of them playful in the manner of his favourite 
 Prior, easy talk in jaunty rhyme, others gallant with the light 
 artifice of the old school, others again marked by a soft and 
 complaining note, with that ' even How ' of anapaestic melody 
 which Tennyson noted for admiration ; but a handful only. 
 Cowper's subsequent Memoir of his early life, embodied in 
 Southey's biography, is the longest production of this period : 
 a picture where every line, every scene of the writer's spiritual 
 adventures is exactly engraved. Adjusted to a mood of 
 religious thankfulness, it is unfair to the natural man, with 
 his cheerful accomplishments and his intervals of peace. But 
 it shows clearly how madness, clothed in doctrine, supervened 
 on that original self, and stole its birthright, and became
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 81 
 
 second nature ; so that whenever he righted himself after- 
 wards and wrote as a child of this world, it was a true recovery 
 of the youth of his soul. We also see that while in his first 
 access religion had driven away his melancholy, in his second 
 and darker one, and ever afterwards, doctrine and mania went 
 together, dragging him down in one terrible undertow, and at 
 last uniting to ' whelm him in deeper gulfs ' than that other 
 ' castaway ' of whom he afterwards wrote. His doctrine 
 became in turn the cure and the disease, remedying and poison- 
 ing itself. The Memoir was not printed until long after his 
 death, and is the work of a delicate master of prose. He 
 relates in it the terrors occasioned by his dread of being publicly 
 examined for the clerkship in the House of Lords ; his baffled 
 attempts at suicide, and his deepening certainty of spiritual 
 death ; the casual texts and voices, wafted in and out of his 
 mind, that held his hope and reason at their mercy ; his removal 
 under care ; and his gradual reassurance of salvation. The 
 same kind of power is to be shown afterwards in his letters ; 
 but not at once, for if ever Cowper's reports upon his soul are 
 forced or heavy, it is during those brief years after his release, 
 when he found that all was well with him. 
 
 IV 
 
 So the first act ends prosperously in a sense (1765) ; but 
 the second, which may be held to last nearly till the advent of 
 Lady Austen, that gay exorcist of devils, in 1781, is different. 
 It begins with his settlement at Huntingdon and his meeting 
 with the Unwins. It produced some of the best and cheeriest 
 of his letters ; his tract, published in 1816, and entitled 
 Adelphi, on the death of his brother John ; and the Olney 
 Hymns (1779), written in partnership with the Rev. John 
 Newton, his confessor and director. In the critical year 1773, 
 after a spell of deepening gloom, Cowper had the dream l which 
 remained for ever one of fixed points of his delusions, and whose 
 fatal voice, Actum est de te, periisti, if it sank in happy hours 
 to a disregarded whisper, was always there and ready to be 
 heard. Henceforward his soul was the battle-ground, though 
 not in the sense that he supposed, of a good and an evil 
 principle. On one side was the natural man, with his joy in 
 life, with his powers of observation and invention, of gossip, 
 and of friendship. On the other was his belief that he was 
 lost ; he, the companion of the hares 2 and finches, who shared in 
 their light timid life, so that he seems at times like one of them 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 82 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 endowed by some charm with the power of speech, was not only 
 damned, but was a special victim of the wisdom of God, who 
 had made him promises once upon a time, but had withdrawn 
 them for mysterious good reasons. This period ends with the 
 temporary victory of the good principle, which remains in 
 possession, if not undisturbed, during the five years in which 
 Cowper rekindled English poetry. 
 
 It is not hard to see why he was led to the evangelical fold 
 within the borders of the church. A religion his heart must 
 have, and it must also satisfy his taste. The dry and dominant 
 orthodoxy, with its array of ' defences ' and Paley its coming 
 prophet, could not touch him, and left him cold. The grosser 
 demonstrations of Methodism would have jarred on his self- 
 respect. He fell amongst good, narrow people, professing a 
 milder variation of the Protestant beliefs ; they nursed his 
 health and happiness, and he became one of their flock. But 
 he also fell in with Mr. Newton, whose influence, though on 
 some counts it has been fairly vindicated for Newton l had 
 some humour and some tenderness was in the long run for 
 evil. The text tantum potuit suadere malorum holds good 
 against the creed which Newton enforced upon Cowper. The 
 fault cannot be laid wholly on his mania ; for his creed both 
 inflamed and defined his mania, and helped to turn his waking 
 and sleeping hours into the hell which he was certain awaited 
 him. The doctrine of reprobation might be suited for certain 
 sinners, for reclaimed slavers, for hard and heavy theological 
 drinkers, like the iron-gutted Newton ; but Cowper was of a 
 finer make, and not a sinner at all. He was far too logical 
 for his views to be otherwise than deadly to his health. For 
 such a creed is only bearable in proportion as the victim fails 
 to realise its results in the imagination. Cowper had trembling, 
 naked sensibilities, and reasoned his notions to the bitter end. 
 He hated Rome ; yet who cannot wish that he had been born 
 in the old faith, 2 and come into the hands of some humane, 
 adroit confessor, such as Balzac paints, who might have 
 ' cleansed the stuff'd bosom ' at the right moment, and led 
 him back, by mingled suggestion and authority, to the paths 
 of sanity, softening by nominal penances gently graded, or by 
 the chance of purgatory at the worst, the more hideous of the 
 patient's delusions ? For Cowper, being not a sinner, but the 
 very pattern of innocence, went through a struggle harder 
 than any sinner's ; a struggle with a possessing delusion. The 
 real tragedy lies in his never suspecting it was a delusion. He 
 fought, not against its truth, but against his imagined know-
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 83 
 
 ledge that it was true, and he tried, successfully for a time, to 
 beat it off by distraction. Still the drama is the same ; his 
 will on the one side, guiding his power of attention, and the 
 central conviction on the other. The worst and unfairest 
 thing was that he was alone, and had no physician of the body 
 and soul, of the kind that we have wished for, who could help 
 him. Thus the two combatants fought at the very springs of 
 his life. With his normal strength he could sometimes hold 
 out, and even for long periods ; but when he sank below that 
 level he was overweighted. A fixed idea lies in wait like a 
 ruthless creature of prey, taking advantage of every weakness, 
 and stealing in under the guard in the darkness. It is never 
 tired, and the will is often tired. Victory is often delusive ; 
 the enemy shams dead and is up again. Cowper went through 
 all this, and did much before he succumbed. 
 
 His miseries are not wholly to the loss of literature, and that 
 is the only reason why we speak of them. Had he been saved 
 by some fortunate medicine of the soul, we should not have 
 had, as we now have, ringing in our ears the terrible, almost 
 Shakespearean cries of his double self of that which suffered, 
 and of that which watched and worded the suffering. He 
 might have made more of his gay mundane verse ; but we 
 should not have known his full power as a writer. Indeed, 
 in a pitiable, indirect way, we owe his existing poetry to his 
 disease. ' Despair made amusement necessary, and I found 
 poetry the most agreeable amusement.' Some of his merry 
 pieces were made in ' the saddest mood.' Much of his best 
 was done to hold the enemy at bay. But we also owe to the 
 enemy many rare, strange, and bitter pages the letters to 
 Newton, and afterwards the letters to Teedon and The Castaway 
 that enrich English at Cowper's cost. 
 
 In the third act of the drama (1781-80) we can watch the real 
 self of Cowper dominant if always on its guard. Nearly all 
 his long original poems, and some of his best shorter ones, were 
 written now ; the volume of 1782, and The Task, and Tiro- 
 cinium, and John Gilpin, and The Loss of the Royal George. 
 The impulse to create, which at first was due to Mrs. Unwin, 
 and followed on the removal of Mr. Newton to a larger sphere 
 of parochial usefulness, rose and brightened in the presence of 
 Lady Austen. ' At fifty years of age,' he says, not quite 
 accurately, ' I commenced an author.' His ' tide of animal
 
 84 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 sprightliness ' was not all that he retrieved. The whole of 
 his life at Olney during those years, with its scenery, its familiar 
 persons, its affections and dreams, lay before him now in soft 
 unclouded light, ready to start into words, not without flashes 
 of more exalted and heroic vision ; and he was able, in his 
 longer intervals of peace, to perfect his poetic medium. The 
 background makes the result more wonderful, for his darker, 
 more self-destructive thoughts, often conjured up by the act 
 of writing to Mr. Newton, are constantly audible. ' My brier 
 is a wintry one ; the flowers are withered, but the thorn 
 remains.' ' The ground I tread upon is hollow.' ' There is a 
 mystery in my destruction.' We must honour Cowper the more 
 for the force of will that enabled him to combat an adversary 
 within him, whom he supposed to be permitted of God, and who 
 he knew would win. But still more impressive is his steadi- 
 ness of hand as he wrote his descriptions and pleasantries, and 
 his unjarred delicacy of style in his best passages. Thus we 
 need not, with some critics, thrust away the records of Cowper's 
 darkness, in pure respect for him. Our respect increases as 
 we read them, and they are amongst his title-deeds as a writer. 
 The last act covers the remaining fourteen years of his life 
 (1786-1800), of which many letters, and the Homer, and some 
 other verses and translations, are the memorial. One of 
 them, the fragment Yardley Oak (1791), is the best work of 
 his imagination. The Homer was a task, undertaken as part 
 of the campaign against bad dreams. Of those dreams the 
 letters become more and more the chronicle, though others are 
 gay as of old, and some contain Cowper's mature thoughts on 
 Homer and translation. The Teedon correspondence, it has 
 been truly said, ' though generally sober and natural in form, 
 is almost entirely insane in substance.' J Teedon was an adorer, 
 an unlettered schoolmaster, whose conceit was that he received, 
 in answer to his prayers, divine ' notices ' of Cowper's rescue 
 and salvation. The poet's replies, if ' insane in substance,' 
 have a vein of grim irony. He listens to the oracle, but 
 declines its consolations, and replies, sometimes in the third 
 person, with the courtesy of a gentleman addressing an inferior. 
 His own experience never confirms the favourable reports of 
 Teedon. He describes them, in fact, as ' sarcasms of God,' 
 and ' the most deadly arrows in His quiver.' He is told that 
 it is the divine will he should set to work, but work he cannot : 
 ' neither can I reconcile a providential deprivation of the means 
 with a providential call to the undertaking.' The certitude 
 that he is lost gains ground, and he repeats the strain of his
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 85 
 
 words to Newton : ' I feel a wish that I had never been, a 
 wonder that I am, and an ardent but hopeless desire not to 
 be.' He cannot bear to read the opening of Paradise Lost, 
 because he may one day have to ' labour in that field of fire 
 and brimstone.' His nicety of phrase never leaves him, but 
 grows with the failure of his hopes. ' My days have been 
 chequered, not with darkness and light, but with discriminated 
 shades of darkness.' ' Non-existence is no evil, but to exist 
 with the least chance of eternal misery is an evil not to be 
 estimated.' ' Infinite despair is a sad prompter.' He doubts 
 the value of prayer, and finds that his God continues to break 
 promises. At last he sees that his ' next plunge will be into 
 madness ' ; and so it proves. As is shown by his sympathy 
 with Madame Guyon, whose poems he translated, Cowper was 
 by nature a mystic of the tender kind, craving for gentle 
 gradual illuminations and final union with the divine. But in 
 his case, under the sway of a relentless theology, the mystical 
 experience is inverted, and he is dragged slowly backward 
 from blessedness to that state of despair, which the ordinary 
 mystic passes through and leaves behind. He fought to the 
 last, revising his Homer and trying to edit the works of 
 Milton ; but the disease conquered, and something like the 
 seventh age of man ' sans everything ' was Cowper's lot. 
 But until words failed him he was true to words : when he could 
 not use them otherwise, he used them for the record of his 
 sick soul, and this loyalty to his calling enhances his honours 
 as a writer. He died in 1800. The Lyrical Ballads were out, 
 but he does not seem to have read them. 
 
 VI 
 
 In his views of poetry Cowper is a rebel, and his ' gentleness ' 
 need not be exaggerated. Even in his moral poems of 1782 
 he is seen escaping from the current style, though he uses the 
 traditional couplet. In The Task and Yardley Oak he finds 
 his own style. And he tells us what the tyranny was with 
 which he broke, and where he sought for inspiration. He 
 broke with Pope, and Johnson, and artifice. He was inspired 
 by the love of Milton and the love of simplicity, 1 and his real 
 feat is to have found a poetic language that reconciled these 
 two affections. 
 
 The lines in Table Talk which deplore the ' mere mechanic 
 art ' of Pope's followers, while celebrating Pope's own ' musical 
 finesse,' form only part of Cowper's indictment, which 13 aimed
 
 86 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 at the style, not of the Epistles and Satires, but of the Homer. 
 His letters are full of reproaches against Pope's looseness of 
 rendering, his unreal glossiness and floweriness, his ' inflated 
 and strutting phraseology,' and his defectiveness in pathos and 
 feeling ; vices that are all bound up with his false choice of a 
 metre. Cowper's paper x in the Gentleman's Magazine is the 
 speech for the prosecution. He also calls Pope a 'disgusting 
 letter- writer,' conscious and vain ; he himself prefers a letter 
 ' of the true helter-skelter kind/ and says truly that in his 
 own correspondence he is ' clear of the charge of premedita- 
 tion.' We feel that in much of his verse he is guided by the 
 feeling that Pope's ways are wrong ; and this although, in 
 the Preface to his own Iliad, Cowper says, ' I number myself 
 amongst the warmest admirers of Mr. Pope as an original poet.' 
 To Johnson, in a rhymed epitaph and in his letters, he does 
 rather unwilling justice. He praises the narrative part of the 
 Lives of the Poets, which shows ' great erudition and sense,' and 
 ' a penetrating insight into character,' as well as ' a happy 
 talent of correcting the popular opinion.' But while the book 
 was in its first vogue, Cowper was writing indignantly to his 
 friends about it. ' That Johnson ' is ' a literary cossack,' 
 whose ' old jacket ' he would like to ' thresh ' ; he is a ' cox- 
 comb,' deaf to Prior and deafer still to Milton. That was the 
 real offence. Johnson slighted, he could not enjoy the style 
 of Milton, which had long cast its threatening shadow forward 
 over the vogue of Dryden and Pope, and to which Cowper now 
 went back as a model for the renovation of exalted verse. 
 
 Cowper's own taste in literature was not wide, and was 
 capable of being infantile. He condemns the lives that the 
 poets lived, and thinks those chronicled by Johnson ' a very 
 worthless set of people.' He can say that a ' virtuous madrigal ' 
 of Sternhold and Hopkins is worth all ' Butler's wit, Pope's 
 numbers, Prior's ease,' and this remark is worse than any- 
 thing said by Johnson himself. He cannot bear Chapman's 
 translation ; he has no taste for the Scots of Burns. He con- 
 fesses that his own cultivation is slender, and that, for fear of 
 falling into imitation, he seldom reads an English poet ; a 
 fear that, considering his sensitive chameleon habit of mind, 
 may have been a sound one. But he makes one great excep- 
 tion. ' Few people,' he said, ' have studied Milton more, or 
 are more familiar with his poetry, than myself.' He sees that 
 the seal of Milton's greatness is his language, and says nobly 
 and well that ' Milton took a long stride forward, left the 
 language of his own day far behind him, and anticipated the
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 87 
 
 expressions of a century yet to come.' This forecast was 
 verified in Hyperion, and Prometheus Unbound, and Lander's 
 Regeneration ; and Cowper begins to verify it himself in The 
 Task and Yardley Oak. His manner is original, but it starts 
 from Milton's, the triumphant dignity of whose intertwisted 
 cadences is ever in his ears. His fashion of describing quite 
 familiar things is a kind of unaffronting, pleasant parody, or 
 transposition, of Milton's epic style. 
 
 The influence of Milton had taken a bad turn in the eighteenth 
 century. Much of his technique, to speak the truth, is in- 
 tricate and skilful but dull, hard and ill-inspired ; and on this 
 part of it the poets took hold, who could not take hold on his 
 greatness. Thus Milton served, while he altered, the artistic 
 vices of the century. The well-known pack of epics, georgics, 
 and didactics was the consequence. Thomson and Gray in 
 their colder moments fall into the same bad company. If we 
 think of Young and Akenside trying to be sublime, or of Warton 
 trying to be pensive, we see that the wrong following of Milton 
 was as rich a source of false writing as Pope's Homer itself. 
 But for all that, Milton is the greatest single force in the libera- 
 tion of our poetry. Where he is great, his power over his 
 fellow-craftsmen is perpetual. Travesty could not for ever 
 mar his music ; the sound of it is always there, in the intervals 
 of those unskilful, unbearable imitative drums and tomtoms, 
 and it swells up from the distance like the 
 
 Gradual solitary gust 
 That comes upon the silence, and dies off 
 As if the ebbing air had but one wave. 
 
 This double effect of Milton's verse for good and evil is well 
 seen in Cowper, though the evil is qualified by Cowper's humour 
 and tact. It is seen plainer, no doubt, in Thomson. In 
 Cowper's blank verse, in his most Miltonic passages, the slightly 
 petrifying memory of Thomson is apt to interfere. In the 
 invocation to Evening we see the power of Milton, the deflect- 
 ing power of Thomson, and the new, original harmony that is 
 achieved nevertheless : 
 
 Come, Evening, once again, season of peace ; 
 Return, sweet Evening, and continue long ! 
 Methinks I see tlice in the streaky west, 
 With matron step slow-moving, while the Xight 
 Treads on thy sweeping train. 
 
 Milton could not have fallen to ' streaky ' ; and the ' matron 
 step slow-moving ' is like Thomson when he wishes to be like
 
 88 
 
 Milton ; but the personal appeal and slow undulation of the 
 first two lines are Cowper's own. Though they could not have 
 been written but for Milton's cadences, it is Cowper who bids 
 the evening continue long, for fear, perhaps, of the darkness 
 and the visions that the night may bring. And when, following 
 his master, he follows him amiss, as in the rhetorical wastes 
 of the Winter Morning's Walk, it is more from a wrong choice 
 of subject than from failure of ear or style. The Homer must 
 be called a painful instance of failing ear, though it aims at 
 Milton's dignity. But Cowper shows his mastery of the epic 
 style in his original pieces ; not so much in the startling 
 passages where he rises to its full pitch, as in the level, simple, 
 descriptive parts, where he carries it delicately down to the 
 rendering of domestic things ; a kind of verse that approaches 
 prose, but is decisively severed from prose by the poetry that 
 hangs in the air like the minute sparkles of dust that he 
 describes as rising from the threshing-floor. Indeed, for his 
 quieter pencillings Cowper may well have caught a hint from 
 those of Paradise Regained, or from the lines that describe 
 the man who comes out from the reeking town to enjoy the 
 smell of ' tedded grass ' ; a text that would be much to 
 Cowper's mind, and may also interpret our own feeling when 
 we open The Task after closing The Dunciad. This subdued 
 method he often uses : 
 
 Yes, thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand 
 That feeds thce ; thou mayst frolic on the floor 
 At evening, and at night retire secure 
 To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed. 
 
 There is Milton in this, but there is also simplicity, and 
 simplicity is Cowper's other star. He desires it, and often 
 reaches it. He does not study any author in order to do so : 
 it comes to him by nature. In his verse he sometimes swerves 
 from it, either towards the noble elaboration that Milton 
 taught him, or towards a false elaboration ; but in prose he 
 has it always. He has it in his expression not only of simple 
 and winning things, but of elusive and painful things. Often 
 it is equally at his command in verse and prose for the treat- 
 ment of the same topic : ' When I think,' he says, ' I am very 
 apt to do it in rhyme.' A viper attacks his kittens, and the 
 result is a letter to a friend, and also the rhymed Colubriad. 
 The Castaway is the counterpart of his letters to Teedon, and 
 the passage in The Task, where he calls himself a stricken deer 
 that left the herd, of a letter to Lady Hesketh. 1 ' Simplicity,'
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 89 
 
 he wrote in 1783 (the year of Blake's Poetical Sketches, of 
 which he did not know), 
 
 Simplicity is become a very rare quality in a writer. . . . Swift 
 and Addison were simple ; Pope knew how to be so, but was fre- 
 quently tinged with affectation ; since their day I hardly know a 
 celebrated writer who deserves that character. 
 
 He himself deserves it, whenever he sits down to describe 
 some incident that he has seen the day before, and which he 
 dashes down and has done with. The virtue of such a style 
 is that we do not look at it, but look through it, and the result 
 is a classic. 
 
 VII 
 
 As a light poet Cowper derives from the school of Prior, 
 but substitutes country grace and neatness for town finish. 
 The verse of affectionate and happy compliment addressed 
 to women, such as The Rose and Catharina, is peculiarly his. 
 He also loves a fable, with a little perfunctory moral attached, 
 the story of which is drawn from experience ; sometimes we 
 find it told again in his letters. The Dog and the Water-Lily 
 and The Retired Cat are of this order. Nearer to him than 
 any poet could be, is Bewick, with his ' tail-pieces ' ; there is 
 the same perfection of minute line, and the same expressive- 
 ness of plant or animal life. The Diverting History of John 
 Oilpin (which might be credited to the shade of Goldsmith, 
 did we not know its authorship) is the most cheerful and voci- 
 ferous thing that Cowper wrote, and yet has all his neatness 
 and finish too ; qualities to which the slyly-inserted, loose- 
 hanging ballad tags contribute not a little. A favourite metre 
 for quite other effects is the ' rocking-horse ' or anapaestic 
 quatrain ; of this Cowper was born a master, and in his hands 
 it escapes those dangers of cloggedness on the one side, and 
 of mawkishness on the other, to which it has often fallen. 
 Well do some of Cowper's youthful lines compare with the 
 popular and famous effects, in the same measure, of Moore 
 and Byron : 
 
 Bid adieu, my sad heart, bid adiou to thy peace ; 
 
 Thy pleasure is past, and thy sorrows increase ; 
 
 One stanza of this lyric is worthy and no more could be 
 said in the matter of lyrical melody of Edgar Allan Poe, 
 whose insuperable line 
 
 And the fever called living is conquered at last,
 
 90 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 is as true a mirror of his own temper as these are of Cowper's : 
 
 Already deprived of its splendour and heat, 
 I feel thee more slowly, more heavily beat ; 
 Perhaps overstrained with the quick pulse of pleasure, 
 Thou art glad of this respite to beat at thy leisure ; 
 But the sigh of distress shall now weary thee more 
 Than the nutter and tumult of passion before. 
 
 ' The poplars are felled ' is better known ; it has the ' same 
 whispering sound,' which rose in the former piece, one of 
 Cowper's few love-poems, to a light wail, and in this one sinks 
 to something just above silence. Of the two heroic lyrics, 
 written in another tune, as though to the ' harp the Cambro- 
 Britons used,' Boadicea is the more conventional, in the pattern 
 of Gray, and is better in rhythm than in phrase. There is 
 no such flaw in The Loss of the Royal George. It is not in any 
 pattern at all, it has no precedent nearer than Drayton, it is 
 freer of blemish than anything of the sort in Campbell ; and 
 we can the better feel the perfection of its almost hard sim- 
 plicity, by imagining in how opposite a mode of excellence, 
 in what symphonies of undulating prose, the same ' vision 
 of sudden death ' might have been treated by De Quincey. 
 Here Cowper quits himself and his usual manner ; while in 
 the lines To the Nightingale, which point as nobly and as 
 plainly forward to the best of the same kind in Wordsworth, 
 as it excels Logan's (or Michael Bruce's) verses To the Cuckoo, 
 printed only eleven years earlier, he is back again with himself 
 and his troubles ; and wins us thereby perhaps more thoroughly 
 than Wordsworth himself, who always refuses or does not 
 desire to complain. But it is one of Cowper's many herald 
 poems, and is dated 1792. 
 
 By the side of verse like this, the bulky moral satires that 
 Cowper had produced ten years before seem of a past genera- 
 tion. To do them justice, they must be compared with the 
 school from which they are seen emerging. The first of them 
 is called Table Talk, but the title of another, Expostulation, 
 better expresses their temper, and as a whole they are the 
 medium of the author's opinions rather than of his genius. 
 The influence of Churchill, Cowper's schoolfellow, whom he 
 portrays with a generous touch, has been suggested ; and some 
 of the invectives might be those of a shriller Churchill. Cowper 
 writes better than that ferocious improviser, whom he admired 
 too much ; but he knows the world less well. He beats the 
 air when he rates society at large. In attacking slavery and 
 inhumanity it is not enough to be on the right side. But
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 91 
 
 anything that really comes within the sharpened ken of the 
 recluse, he touches vividly at once. He excels in the formal 
 rhymed character, as in that of the fashionable preacher, or 
 of the 
 
 fine puss-gentleman that 's all perfume, 
 
 or of the elderly prude whom he saw in Hogarth's drawing. 
 In Retirement there is plenty of gaiety; he is on his own ground, 
 and is beginning to draw landscape. But the best feature 
 in the volume of 1782 is the freer, quicker run of the heroic 
 verse, as compared with Johnson's or Goldsmith's. There 
 is less see-saw, and a visible struggle against the ' mechanic 
 art.' But the fetters were still so strong that Cowper, with 
 a true instinct, turned in The Task to blank verse. He found 
 it hard to write, and suffered a revulsion, and said in 1784, 
 ' I do not mean to write any more blank. It is more difficult 
 than rhyme, and not so amusing in the composition.' But 
 he went on with it, and played no common tune upon it. 
 
 Cowper also produced two unimportant polemics in rhyme. 
 A still-born work by his cousin Madan, a clergyman, called 
 Thelyphthora, to prove that polygamy is not unscriptural 
 and would palliate the ills of society, provoked Anti-Thelyph- 
 thora, ' a tale,' in which the heretic, Sir Airy, after a scene of 
 dalliance, is overthrown by ' Sir Mar-Madan,' supposed to be 
 a Monthly Reviewer. It is strange to see Cowper trying for 
 the bold and scathing utterance of Dryden, whose versifica- 
 tion he nearly follows. The elaborate Tirocinium, or a Review 
 of ScJiools, may be coloured by what he had observed, rather 
 than by anything that he had suffered, at Westminster ; but 
 in spite of a few brisk passages and accurate pictures, it is the 
 railing of a hermit. These pieces are dated 1781 and 1784 ; 
 Cowper's tardy genius is seen to have expanded at a rapid 
 rate, in The Task of the following year. It was time, indeed, 
 that he should do something considerable, at the age of fifty- 
 four. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Task is neither a formal garden nor a woodland ; it is 
 more like a park cunningly and irregularly laid out, where we 
 do not see too much at once and are for ever recrossing our 
 own steps unexpectedly. There are grass, and water, and 
 arbours ; it is a pity that, do what we will, we should so often, 
 round sudden corners, come on the same uncomely preaching- 
 box amid the greenery. Still Cowper achieves his wish to 
 secure ' much variety and no confusion ' in this lively offshoot
 
 92 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 of the dull old local and didactic poem. Such literary origins 
 betray themselves in the dull unreadable stretches of the book. 
 Much of the style is simply that of Cowper's earlier satires, 
 like Truth and Hope, with the rhymes gone. The poet is here 
 his own judge : 
 
 Since pulpits fail, and sounding-boards reflect 
 Most part an empty ineffectual sound, 
 What chance that I, to fame so little known, 
 Nor conversant with men or manners much, 
 Should speak to purpose, or with better hope 
 Crack the satiric thong ? 
 
 All the same, we can admire the easy finesse of the tran- 
 sitions in The Task, and the impression of art which is left 
 amidst the absence of plan. Cowper is himself the subject, 
 in the philosophical sense, of the poem ; he is present in all 
 he describes, and takes us along with him. It is his own 
 shadow that he watches in the winter morning's walk, and the 
 word we meaning himself, and the reader his friend and 
 companion is always recurring : 
 
 Hence, ankle-deep in moss and flowery thyme, 
 We mount again, and feel at every step 
 Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft 
 Raised by the mole. 
 
 It is this introduction of himself that makes Cowper a 
 neighbour of the romantic poets. He has not the magic 
 carpet of Coleridge, he is tied to the valley of Ouse ; but he 
 confides in his reader, he signs every landscape and ' interior,' 
 as a place that has become part of his inner vision. It is true 
 that the passages, which show that a new painter of natural 
 things has appeared, are sometimes stiffened out with a poetic 
 diction that would be pedantic were it not really half -playful ; 
 the ' fleecy tenants ' of the sheepfold, the ' leaning pile decidu- 
 ous ' of the haystack. In The Seasons this kind of speech 
 was used seriously ; by the poets of Lyrical Ballads it was 
 solemnly and duly denounced ; Cowper comes between, with 
 his pleasant, not quite satirical, use of it. For him it retains 
 some real dignity ; he does not parody it as a bad thing, and 
 does not smile so much at the diction as at himself for using it. 
 In Yardley Oak this dissolving stage of the high epical or 
 didactic style is again evident. 
 
 The simplest and best of these scenes occur in The Sofa, the first 
 of the six books, and in the beginning of the fourth, The Winter 
 Evening ; but they are seldom far off. Much is gained by the
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 93 
 
 feeling that the artist is not making a set picture, but is hirn- 
 self moving from point to point of what he describes, fearful 
 of being tired or tiresome. He denotes the different colours 
 of the leaves, with no attempt to carry the fancy beyond them, 
 with no mystery, just as they come, and as if no one had seen 
 them before, but rather as if he were sorting out green tints for 
 a pleasant embroidery-pattern. 
 
 paler some, 
 
 And of a wanniah grey ; the willow such, 
 And poplar that with silver lines his leaf, 
 And ash far stretching his umbrageous arm ; 
 Of deeper green the elm ; and, deeper still, 
 Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak. 
 
 This is the regular texture of his description, and it gives 
 relief to the richer poetic passages which he also com- 
 mands : 
 
 The chequered earth seems restless as a flood 
 Brushed by the wind. 
 
 At times he gives the note to Wordsworth : 
 
 Mighty winds 
 
 That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood 
 Of ancient growth, make music not unlike 
 The dash of Ocean on his winding shore, 
 And lull the spirit while they fill the mind ; 
 Unnumbered branches waving in the blast, 
 And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once. 
 
 From this he passes to the mountain torrent, which so soon 
 slips down into a rill ; and so to the birds of the day and the 
 night ; and thence again to the ' weather-house, that useful 
 toy,' whence a puppet-man, wrapped up, emerges as a signal 
 of rain, as the curious may see in the drawing that Blake : made 
 for the passage. The style, which is sensitive to these changes 
 of theme, is a new thing in our poetry, and its varieties 
 invite discrimination. They may, despite their different 
 levels and intensities, be regarded as modifications of the same 
 pattern, and not as patches of pied materials carefully sewn in. 
 This pattern, as suggested already, is the epic language of 
 Milton transposed for Cowper's purposes. One of his juvenile 
 pieces was a travesty of Milton in the fashion of Phillips'a 
 Splendid Shilling ; the subject is, On Finding the Heel of a 
 Shoe : 
 
 This ponderous heel of perforated hide 
 Compact, with pegs indented many a row.
 
 94 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 In the same way he starts the topic of The Sofa, which Lady 
 Austen had commanded. Mankind first sat on a stool : 
 
 And such in ancient halls and mansions drear 
 
 May still be seen, but perforated sore 
 
 And drilled with holes the solid oak is found. 
 
 For some ninety lines he thus acquits himself of his ' task,' 
 working out the vein and reverting to it later whenever the 
 tone requires ; but meanwhile he is free, and breaks away 
 into his own simpler, happy movement : 
 
 But gouty limb, 
 
 Though on a Sofa, may I never feel, 
 For I have loved the rural walk through lanes 
 Of grassy swarth. 
 
 And so for two hundred lines more the walk continues, until 
 he finds that he is forgetting his true original text, which is to 
 dispraise the town in honour of the country ; and to that text, 
 not without dreariness, but with the lucky digression on the 
 gipsies, and the noble one on the story of Crazy Kate, he keeps. 
 Milton and simplicity to those two elements, variously 
 blended, the style of The Task can be referred. Cowper is 
 most himself, and turns his back most completely on the 
 poetical tradition from Dryden onwards, and anticipates the 
 best writing of the same order in the age yet to come, when he 
 writes thus : 
 
 She begs an idle pin of all she meets, 
 And hoards them in her sleeve ; but needful food, 
 Though pressed with hunger oft, or comelier clothes, 
 Though pinched with cold, asks never. Kate is crazed. 
 
 This, not to speak beyond measure, is more like something in 
 King Lear than it is like Milton. We dare not say that there 
 is much of it in The Task, but there is enough ; it has the 
 piercing sound that we find in Cowpers lines to Mrs. Unwin, 
 the sudden lift into a rarer world of feeling than his usual, 
 observant, lively habit of mind might seem to promise. En- 
 couraged by thus finding his powers, Cowper tries, towards the 
 close of his long poem, and at intervals throughout it, to raise 
 his language to a climax for the utterance of his religious 
 and social faith. But this lofty, reflective sort of writing, 
 while it shows the piety and beauty of his spirit, is not often 
 successful ; and he hardly accomplishes it very well, except 
 in the unfinished Yardley Oak, one of his last original composi- 
 tions} in verse (1791).
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 95 
 
 The Task, it may be said in passing, had an immediate and 
 by no means unworthy echo in the Lewesdon Hill 1 (1785) of 
 William Crowe, afterwards Public Orator at Oxford, and writer 
 of an unrefreshing tract on versification. This poem, long 
 since disregarded, but admired at the time by Rogers and his 
 set and twice reissued, shows a vivid sense of simple colour 
 and a gift for the true familiar style. It runs off too much 
 into mere discoursing, but the scenery at moments bears con- 
 fronting with Cowper's own pictures ; and as it is hard to 
 find, a quotation may be given : 
 
 How changed is thy appearance, beauteous hill ! 
 Thou hast put off thy wintry garb, brown heath 
 And russet fern, thy seemly-coloured cloak, 
 To bide the hoary frosts and dripping rains 
 Of chill December, and art gaily robed 
 In livery of spring ; upon thy brow 
 A cap of flowery hawthorn, and thy neck 
 Mantled with new spring furze and spangles thick 
 Of golden bloom ; nor lack thee tufted woods 
 Adown thy sides ; tall oaks of lustre green, 
 The dark fir, the light ash, and the nesh tops 
 Of the young hazel join to form thy skirts 
 In many a wavy fold of verdant wreaths. 
 So gorgeously hath nature dressed thee up 
 Against the birth of May ; and, vested so, 
 Thou dost appear more gracefully array'd 
 Than Fashion's worshippers. 
 
 This is unpretending, but it is more natural than much of 
 The Seasons ; for The Task has come between ; and the sprink- 
 ling of Dorset words like nesh is agreeable. Crowe's picture of 
 the Tor of Glastonbury veiled in cloud, so that ' its dim bulk 
 becomes annihilate,' has the same quality. The poem conies 
 well between The Task and Yardley Oak. 
 
 The birth and glory, the decay and mutations of a noble 
 tree are themes that might easily drop into prose or platitude. 
 It might, on the other hand, awaken a high imagination ; we 
 can surmise what Wordsworth, in happy hour, might have 
 done with it. Cowper's is a poem midway between these 
 opposites ; it is a poem of the fancy, with a current of didactics ; 
 and it has a relieving element of play, rising to imaginative 
 power ; and it is wrought with such extreme study as almost 
 to burden itself with refinements. It is of a different tribe to 
 the ruminations of Blair, Young, and their company, on the 
 mutability of things. The versification, however, has several 
 of the marks of the school, such as those epithet-guarded nouns, 
 as in 'excoriate forks deform,' and prominent 'wens globose,'
 
 96 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 which go back to Milton, but which are here half -playful ; and 
 also the awkward final monosyllable (a blemish of Milton's 
 followers), which jerks the line to its knees at the end of a 
 paragraph : 
 
 And all thine embryo vastness, at a gulp. 
 
 Still, the metre is a worthy outgrowth and adaptation of the 
 slow-moving Miltonic one, with a great frequency and rich 
 variety of pause, and many single verses of high nobility : 
 
 Thought cannot spend itself, comparing still 
 The great and little of thy lot, thy growth 
 From almost nullity into a state 
 Of matchless grandeur, and declension thence, 
 Slow, into such magnificent decay. 
 
 Cowper failed to make an ending ; after finishing with the 
 oak, he starts on a curious analysis, which proves too hard to 
 carry further, of the mind of Milton's Adam ; and so, with a 
 large image, he breaks off : 
 
 History, not wanted yet, 
 
 Leaned on her elbow, watching Time, whose course, 
 Eventful, should supply her with a theme. 
 
 IX 
 
 The translations * of the Iliad and Odyssey, which distracted 
 for Cowper ' so many thousand hours,' were also part of his 
 campaign on behalf of simplicity against rhetoric. In the 
 Prefaces to his first and to his revised editions of the Iliad 
 we have his full mind. He rejected rhyme and chose blank 
 verse, he tells us, because a rhymed version cannot be faithful, 
 and can only be an imitation or paraphrase ; and because Pope 
 had been driven by his rhymes into infidelity to his original : 
 
 On this head, therefore, the English reader is to be admonished, 
 that the matter found in me, whether he like it or not, is found also 
 in Homer, and that the matter not found in me, how much soever 
 he may admire it, is found only in Mr. Pope. I have omitted 
 nothing : I have invented nothing. 
 
 This claim is just ; in so far as Cowper's scholarship allowed, 
 and so far as is possible in any metrical translation, he follows 
 Homer close, as to his ' matter ' ; so close at times, indeed, that 
 we find ourselves wishing he had written in prose, which 
 would have been Cowper's prose, and would have left him 
 freer still to render word by word. He does not touch on the
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 97 
 
 difficulties of his metre, such as the inequality of the English 
 decasyllable, in its length and contents, to the hexameter ; 
 but is satisfied with saying, that the example of Milton shows 
 it can be used with energy and harmony a harmony enhanced 
 by occasional roughness for a long translated poem. That 
 this is true, the fragments of the Iliad translated by Tennyson 
 will show; but Co\vper could not give either the energy or the 
 harmony. He seems to lose the command of those qualities, 
 that he shows in his original verse ; and the reason is less any 
 failure of power, than his principle of fidelity, and the fetters 
 of the diction he has chosen. And it is chosen in order that 
 it may not resemble Pope's, and may resemble Homer's. The 
 result is, that he loses also the speed and sonority which Pope 
 attains. 
 
 Cowper found that Homer ends his periods with the end of 
 a line, and does the same. He varies his pauses within the 
 line very studiously, though more by effort than with a true 
 instinct ; but his closes are nearly always bad in his Homer, 
 as they often are in his own blank verse. In this he failed to 
 escape from the grand fault of the eighteenth-century poets. 
 Sometimes he does escape from it : 
 
 My brother ! who in me 
 Hast found a sister worthy of thy hate, 
 Authoress of all calamity to Troy, 
 Oh that the winds, the day when I was born, 
 Had swept me out of sight, whirl'd me aloft 
 To some inhospitable mountain-top, 
 Or plung'd me in the deep ; there had I sunk 
 O'erwhelm'd, and all these ills had never been. 
 
 This is Cowper at his best ; the passage runs fast ; the 
 Miltonic inversions in the fifth and seventh lines, and the 
 trisyllabic foot in the third, and the retarded close, make an 
 excellent harmony ; and one reason is that he does not here 
 keep quite close to the Greek words, and feels less cramped. 
 But more commonly we have this kind of effect : 
 
 Meantime from tower to tower the Ajaces mov'd 
 Exhorting all, with mildness some, and some 
 With harsh rebuke, whom they observed through fear 
 Deelining base the labours of the fight. 
 
 This is the dead stop, and this the Latin mannerism, to which 
 Thomson and Young were enslaved ; nothing is less like Homer, 
 or like Milton. 
 
 Cowper's plain diction, which he defends, is a step in the 
 right path ; but his fault is, that unlike Homer lie does not 
 
 VOL. I. ('
 
 98 WILLIAM COWPER 
 
 make it poetical. In his Preface, which is one of his best 
 pieces of prose and of criticism, he seems to see this peril, and 
 his statement of his ideal can hardly be bettered : 
 
 Were it possible to find an exact medium, a manner so close that 
 it should let slip nothing of the text, nor mingle anything extrane- 
 ous with it, and at the same time so free as to have an air of origin- 
 ality, this seems precisely the mode in which an author might be 
 best rendered. . . . The translation which partakes equally of fidelity 
 and liberality, that is close, but not so close as to be servile, free, 
 but not so free as to be licentious, promises fairest. 
 
 True ; but under this lies the assumption, that the happy 
 medium is found, and the ' plain and unelevated ' language 
 of Homer reproduced, by a bare diction, which is only one 
 degree above prose, and which is distinguished from prose 
 chiefly by superimposing many syntactic inversions and epithets 
 adverbially used : devices which Milton had employed, but 
 which Thomson had travestied from Milton, and which Cowper 
 imitates from Thomson and his contemporaries. The great 
 drawback of Cowper's version is that it is not poetical enough ; 
 and if we were to read it only, we should think Homer rather 
 a dry speaker. Cowper, when translating, could seldom give 
 the right ineffable turn to his plain language. In his revisions, 
 in deference to critics, he smoothed out some of the rough 
 rhythms and made many other changes, but this did not 
 mend matters. The importance of his version is therefore 
 chiefly historical ; in that he wrought faithfully at the mean- 
 ing, and said farewell to rhetoric, and used, though he did 
 not master, the greatest of metrical instruments. 
 
 His translations of Milton's Latin poems remain to be named. 
 They are full of sympathy, but, being put into a form (although 
 a supple one) of the eighteenth-century couplet, and ' tagged 
 with rhyme,' they fail to give the impression of the original, 
 or its intensity and curious ruggedness. But for these and 
 other honours the shade of Milton was not ungrateful ; for 
 he came in a dream, 1 and admitted Cowper into the company 
 of the poets. The letter to Hayley in which this incident is 
 described is as perfect in form as anything in Cowper, and 
 shows once more that he is of the company of Addison. 
 
 I dreamed that being in a house in the city, and with much 
 company, looking towards the lower end of the room from the upper 
 end of it, I descried a figure which I i in mediately knew to be 
 Milton's. He was very gravely but very neatly attired in the 
 fashion of his day, and had a countenance which filled me with
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 99 
 
 those feelings that an affectionate child has for a beloved father, such, 
 for instance, as Tom has for you. My first thought was wonder, where 
 he could have been concealed for so many years ; my second, a 
 transport of joy to find him still alive ; my third, another transport 
 to find myself in his company ; and my fourth, a resolution to accost 
 him. I did so, and he received me with complacence, in which I 
 saw equal sweetness and dignity. I spoke of his Paradise Lost, 
 as every man must, who is worthy to speak of it at all, and told him 
 a long story of the manner in which it affected me, when I first 
 discovered it, being at that time a schoolboy. He answered me by 
 a smile and a gentle inclination of his head. He then grasped my 
 hand affectionately, and with a smile that charmed me, said, ' Well, 
 you for your part will do well also.' At last, recollecting his great 
 age (for I understood him to be two hundred years old), I feared 
 that I might fatigue him by much talking ; I took my leave, and 
 he took his with an air of the most perfect good breeding. His 
 person, his features, his manner were all so perfectly characteristic, 
 that I am persuaded an apparition of him could not represent him 
 more completely. This may be said to have been one of the dreams 
 of Pindus, may it not ? 
 
 ' Well, you for your part will do well also ' ; could there be 
 a more delicate way for a diffident poet, in a dream, to promise 
 himself some share of permanence ? He has attained it. 
 Go forward some twenty years to Shelley and his companions, 
 and Cowper seems like one of those half-forgotten old water- 
 colour masters of exquisite line, in the dim blue of whose 
 English low skies and blotted distances there is not much 
 sunlight, and whom it may not be best to hang among the 
 Turners. But we should put him in the ante-room, and 
 study him first before going forward. We are sure to come 
 back to him ; we come back to him, even after Shelley, for 
 a while.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SCOTTISH LYRIC : ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 
 
 I. Stages of the poetical work of Burns ; little change or development. 
 Likeness with the new poets of the South ; connections with the English 
 classical school. 
 
 II. Burns and the soil ; portraying power, in relation to scenery, his friends, 
 his enemies, and himself. Everything individual ; persons and places speci- 
 fied. Revolutionary feeling original in Scottish character. Anti-Kirk. 
 
 Relationship to Scottish tradition, in temper and literary forms. Char- 
 acter as a peasant. ' The freedom of the natural soul ' ; self-destructive 
 elements. 
 
 III. Form : in what sense Burns is a classic ; species of his perfection. 
 Theocritus and Catullus. Speed of his verse ; brevity of his compositions. 
 Comparison with the English poets of his time. 
 
 IV. Songs : Burns the voice of the Scottish past. Differences between the 
 songs and the other poems. Methods exemplified from Auld Lang Syne and 
 other pieces. Varieties of strain. 
 
 V. English and Scottish poetry of Burns discriminated. Fallacies current ; 
 senses of the term ' English ' ; examples. 
 
 VI. Position amongst Scottish singers of his time ; no school founded by 
 Burns. Procedure of various poete ; multitude of writers. Lady Nairne. 
 Selected writers : Hector MacXeill ; Allan Cunningham ; Robert Tannahill ; 
 Anster Fair. 
 
 MOST of the work of Robert Burns 1 (1759-96) was done during 
 his last twelve years. Some good things have reached us that 
 he wrote before he was twenty-five a handful of songs, and 
 a poem or two like The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie ; 
 more than enough to show his quality. But his art was in 
 no sense precocious, and seems to have flowered suddenly. 
 The three years that followed his migration to Mossgiel in 
 1784 are as surprising in their swift and rich fertility as those 
 that Marlowe spent in London or Byron in Italy. Afterwards 
 it is not easy to trace much growth or change in his genius, 
 his interests, or his power of execution, except that he gave 
 himself more and more to pure lyric. After his volumes of 
 1786 and 1787 (Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect) he did 
 not invent or practise many new species of poetry. He hardly 
 100
 
 101 
 
 wrote more than two long, concerted compositions ; one of 
 which, The Jolly Beggars, not published in his lifetime, may be 
 of early date, while the other, Tarn o' Shanter, may have been 
 composed in 1790. His third volume of Poems (1793) contains 
 some admirable pieces, but they are of the old kinds. In 1787 
 had begun Burns's regular activities as saviour, editor, and 
 maker of Scottish popular lyric. Many of the best and 
 freshest of his songs appeared in James Johnson's Scots Musical 
 Museum (1787-96), especially in the volume of 1788. Mean- 
 while, in 1792, began his contributions to the Scottish Airs of 
 James Thomson, a person of Anglified taste in diction ; and 
 these, though they include many famous and beautiful pieces, 
 lack the even perfection and choiceness of the songs in the 
 Museum. Burns left many of his best poems and songs to 
 be collected, or published, after his death, including Holy 
 Willie's Prayer and The Twa Herds, and endless scraps, epi- 
 grams, verse epistles, political squibs, and humorous epitaphs. 
 He was as free-handed as Nature ; being indeed, as Pope says 
 of Shakespeare, ' not so much an imitator as an instrument 
 of Nature.' 
 
 We can think of Burns either as a singer of the new age 
 after the dead season, an unconscious companion of Blake 
 and Cowper ; or, more truly, as crowning the long history of 
 Scottish poetry, of which he comes forward as the authentic 
 voice and living soul. He is at any rate a classic ; not merely 
 because he is a great poet who left much that is perfect, but 
 because of the likeness of that perfect work to the classical 
 antique. There may be, at this time of day, little left to say 
 about Burns ; but we may once more note his value and interest 
 from these three points of view as a poet of Britain, as a 
 poet of Scotland, and as the most classical poet of his time 
 writing in any form of English. 
 
 His connections and likenesses with the poets of the South 
 are curious. His first flowering-time coincides nearly with 
 that of Blake ; and, different as they are, both of them are 
 inspired by the past of poetry. Blake, in his youth, was 
 stirred by the Elizabethan tradition that had long faded clown 
 and was only then being duly recovered. But to Burns the 
 past was also the present ; he found in full life the native verse, 
 with its ancestral forms and themes, and of this he became 
 the sovereign artist ; he had four hundred unbroken years 
 of inheritance behind him. Blake flung away from his early 
 love of Spenser and seventeenth-century lyric, and made an 
 art of his own which has found no real followers;. Burns
 
 102 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 schooled himself, ever deeper and more devotedly, in the 
 inherited art of his country, and left it higher than it 
 had ever been, and became so puissant, nay, so oppressive, 
 a representative of it, that with the southern reader he 
 generally blots out the figures both of his creditors and 
 his debtors. 
 
 Burns owed nothing to Cowper or Crabbe, though he read 
 Cowper with admiration, exclaiming, ' Is not The Task a 
 glorious poem ? ' whilst Cowper called Burns an extraordinary 
 genius, but blamed his ' uncouth dialect ' which in fact is 
 not a dialect but a language ; and Crabbe, with the ' stalk 
 of carl-hemp ' in his composition, honoured Burns 1 ' as enthu- 
 siastically as the warmest of his countrymen.' Burns him- 
 self was brought up not only on native song and legend, but 
 in the current schools of southern verse and prose. He read 
 Pope, The Spectator, Locke, then Thomson and Shenstone, 
 then the novelists ; and then, he says, ' meeting with Fergus- 
 son's Scotch Poems, I strung anew my wildly-sounding rustic 
 lyre with emulating vigour.' His taste for the classical tradi- 
 tion he always kept ; read with delight the essays in the 
 Mirror and Lounger ; and, when called upon to stock a village 
 library, recommended the same diet. 
 
 The earliest thing of composition I remember taking pleasure in 
 was The Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison beginning ' How 
 are Thy servants blest, Lord.' 
 
 Any one can see the bad, the deflecting influence of much 
 of this reading upon Burns. His English poems are chequered 
 with its stiffer diction, and his high-falsetto English prose- 
 due perhaps somewhat to Mackenzie is all too abundant. 
 But it was a sound influence as well. It helped to make him 
 classical in the true and large, as well as in the unlucky and 
 transitory sense of the term. ' Sensibility,' in its literary 
 guise, played havoc with him ; but then the strong, cool-headed 
 element in Fielding or Pope appealed to him too ; these great 
 describers of manners taught him veracity, we may think, 
 and economy. What Pope and Addison, at their best, had 
 achieved was scale, concision, keeping, and rapidity ; and 
 these are qualities of Burns inborn doubtless, but brought 
 out and encouraged by such models. It has been remarked 
 by a French scholar 2 how much Burns owes to 
 
 the two most classical authors of the classical age of English letters, 
 who possessed grace and sobriety of form, and whose ideas are 
 developed on a highly reasonable plan.
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 103 
 
 Burns profited by these qualities, not when he was inditing 
 too elegant prose, and not when he wrote, 
 
 Here Poesy might wake her Heav'n-taught lyre, 
 And look through nature with creative fire, 
 
 which is detestable ; but when he was truly himself, when he 
 was making The Tica Dogs or the Epistle to Lapraik ; when 
 he is economical, and swift, and plain. It was to Pope and 
 his school, more than to Collins or Thomson or any forerunner 
 of romance, that he owed such gifts, so far as he owed them 
 to any Englishman. But he owed them in the main, after 
 all, to no Englishman, but to the best native habit and to the 
 tradition which he was himself to strengthen. 
 
 He is of the new poetry, on the other hand, in a score of 
 ways ; but it is by coincidence, not by infection. If, like 
 Blake, and in fuller measure than Cowper and Crabbe, he has 
 the artistic senses fully alive, and a vivid delicate notation 
 for what he sees and hears ; and if he is near to some of them, 
 not only in his feeling for beauty, but in his feeling for homely 
 and humorous life and for realistic detail ; well, it is not 
 because he has drunk at the waters of Romanticism as 
 others have ; he has drunk from another, from the old, long- 
 flowing, northern source. His one point of closer contact 
 with southern letters is seen in his real but rather fitful revolu- 
 tionary zeal ; but this affinity also is somewhat illusory. 
 His primary power is that of seeing the object ; his words 
 show it ; they do not, as with the pseudo-classicists, get 
 between us and the object. To prove this duly would be to 
 quote too much ; and only stray instances, familiar enough, 
 can be repeated here. 
 
 II 
 
 Burns lived nearer to the brown earth, upturned for sowing 
 and crowded with life, than any other of our poets. But he 
 does not in general portray scenery for its own sake, though 
 he can do so brilliantly. It is a habitation for men and dumb 
 creatures, a background, a chorus, a thing subordinate to the 
 life that swarms in it. It is alive itself, not in any pantheistic 
 way after the manner of Wordsworth or Shelley, and it offers 
 to Burns no religion and no instruction. Sometimes, certainly, 
 it is an occasion for something a little declamatory or half- 
 sincere, as in some of his most famous pieces, like those to 
 the mouse or the daisy. In the latter poem Burns is not free, 
 save for half a dozen admirable stanzas, from a suspicion of
 
 104 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 strain, any more than Chaucer, in his treatment of the same 
 flower, is free from a suspicion of exquisite convention. The 
 comparison of the plough-torn daisy to the artless victim of 
 misplaced confidence and to the simple bard himself is a piece 
 of rhetorical emotion. He is best when he describes without 
 such afterthoughts. Carlyle noted the painting of the torrent 
 in The Brigs of Ayr ; where ' haunted Garpal ' is 
 
 Arous'd by blust'ring winds an' spotting thowes ; 
 In mony a torrent down the snaw-broo rowes ; 
 While crashing ice, borne on the roaring spate, 
 Sweep dams, an' mills, an' brigs, a' to the gate ; 
 And from Glenbuck, down to the Ration-key, 
 Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd, tumbling sea ; 
 Then down ye '11 hurl, deil nor ye never rise ! 
 And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies. 
 
 This passage is but one out of many ; and Burns is equally 
 sensitive to the happiness of rapid and yet peaceful water. 
 He sees the burn ' wimpling ' through the glen, straying round 
 a rocky scaur, and gives us all its glitter and musical motion : 
 
 Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, 
 
 Wi v bickerin, dancin dazzle ; 
 Whyles cookit underneath the braes 
 
 Below the spreading hazel 
 Unseen that night. 
 
 But he does not speak of mountains or of solitudes, which 
 he does not visit. His country is low and rolling and fat- 
 Ayrshire and thereabouts. It is not thickly peopled, except 
 with wild creatures, and of these he knows all the sounds. 
 He hears the curlews call and the paitricks whir and the 
 bitterns roar and the corncrakes clamour. He also knows 
 the colour of the holiday dresses, and catches the glitter of 
 the silks and scarlets on the women ' skelping barefoot ' to 
 the Holy Fair. Transient lights do not escape him ; the 
 greedy glower of the elder at his twopence in the plate, or the 
 moonbeams glancing through every chink in Alloway Kirk. 
 Everything is seen in movement ; he has comparatively few 
 pictures of ' still life.' Things flash by, or the wind sweeps 
 the voices along. The pace of excited actual existence, jovial 
 or angry or rueful, is given by Burns as by few other poets. 
 Blake has the same swift energy, but he sees other things, 
 or sees them otherwise ; witli a rim of rainbow about them, 
 even when they belong to this earth. But both Blake and 
 Burns perceive, in a fashion that contrasts with Cowper and 
 Gray and Thomson, who sit down before the object, or stroll 
 past it, and linger on their words and elaborate their ob&erva-
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 105 
 
 tions. This swift method goes back far in Scottish verse, 
 and is found again and again from Dunbar to Fergusson, 
 but in Burns it is pre-eminent. 
 
 The same gift is seen in his representations of animals. 
 He does not merely love them, but knows them ; he does not 
 merely feel wrath for them, or see them in a kind of splendour, 
 like Blake, or treat them with a humorous feminine tender- 
 ness, like Cowper. His sheep are persons ; he is a farmer, 
 and knows them by their faces. His old ewe, his old mare, 
 are not mere types. Maggie is a classic old mare, with as 
 definite traits as a human being : 
 
 Tho' ye was trickle, slee, an' funnic, 
 
 Ye ne'er was donsie ; 
 But namely, tawie, quiet, an' cannie, 
 
 An' unco sonsie. 
 
 He has, too, the hard sense of the peasant, and never takes 
 the brutes too seriously ; unless we except his sentimentalis- 
 ing over the field-mouse, where he is thinking of himself more 
 than of that other plaything of fortune ; but even there he 
 is saved by his banter. In The Tu-a Dogs, indeed, Caesar 
 and Luath are not so much dogs as shrewd men, a travelled 
 valet and a cotter, comparing notes ; but they are also 
 admirably drawn as dogs. 
 
 He is thus, as it were, the novelist of the animals, and he 
 applies the same gift to his friends, enemies, and acquaint- 
 ance. It comes to him from native Scots tradition, as well 
 as from his English reading. He has the ' devouring eye and 
 portraying hand ' that Emerson remarked in Carlyle, and his 
 hand is kept steady by the requirements of rhyme. His person- 
 ages come out clear in a line or phrase, which tells all that 
 need be known, or was ever to tell, of 
 
 Rough, rude, ready-witted Rankine, 
 The wale o' cocks for fun an' drinkin ! 
 
 or of Matthew Henderson the sportsman. This worthy is 
 described indirectly, and we know, from the kindly jesting 
 artifice of the elegy, what he was like : 
 
 Mourn, sooty coots, and speckled teal", 
 Ye fisher herons, watching eels ; 
 
 and from the ending : 
 
 But by thy honest turf I '11 wait, 
 
 Thou rnan of worth ! 
 And mourn the ae best fellow's fate 
 
 E'er lay in earth !
 
 106 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 We can almost reconstruct Burns's circle from his poetry ; 
 Sillar, Lapraik, Hamilton, and a dozen more, as well as the 
 elders and preachers, so sternly engraved and grotesquely 
 displayed as if by a comic Dante, fill the gallery ; and the 
 old Scots practice of versified compliment or invective is here 
 trained and consummated. Everything, too, is individual 
 and real. The persons and places are actual, not general or 
 invented. The insignificance of William Fisher (' Holy Willie ') 
 or of David Sillar or Lapraik does not hurt the permanence of 
 the art that records them. The subject of a portrait by an 
 Old Master does not much matter. Scott also drew from 
 certain originals, when he chose, in his novels ; but Burns 
 preserves and publishes the real names both of friend and 
 victim. And his ploughmen, elders, sportsmen, or drunkards 
 are just themselves ; they are not seen, like Michael or 
 the Pedlar in Wordsworth's stories, as types of mankind 
 at large. 
 
 In this way he brings new classes of men into the field of 
 vision ; thus continuing, in a poetic -satiric spirit, the work 
 of the eighteenth-century novel-writers, though he is under 
 no obligation to them. He sees men with a slighter sense of 
 their dramatic interplay, of the story and the action, than 
 Fielding ; but, in recompense, with a familiarity and equality 
 which Fielding, who is all the while consciously and admirably 
 a gentleman, does not affect or know. Nor does Bums por- 
 tray only the peasant class ; the factor, the gauger, the 
 retailer, sit to him ; also the liberal-minded lawyer, Gavin 
 Hamilton, who ' was prosecuted by the Session for causing his 
 servants to dig new potatoes in the garden on the last Lord's 
 Day of July 1787 ' ; and, over against him, the resounding 
 roaring preachers, Black Russell, or Moodie, who ' clears the 
 points of faith Wi' rattlin and wi' thumpin.' All these are 
 newcomers, not precisely into Scots verse, but into British 
 literature at large. Herein Burns is like a maker of memoirs 
 who puts his acquaintance into a printed book during their 
 lifetime. Pope did the same thing, usually in a spirit of 
 hatred. Burns hates as hard as Pope, though without his 
 mendacity, inhumanity, or hoarded spite ; hates in a right, 
 healthy spirit of hating ; openly, that is, and ruthlessly and 
 often, it would seem, deservedly ; his railing elders are cut as 
 clear as Thersites in the Iliad. He invents new varieties of 
 contempt, and new accents for it. He is mock-deferential, 
 and unbearably and irresistibly familiar, in his lines to the 
 Prince Regent :
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 107 
 
 For you, young Potentate o' Wales, 
 
 I tell your Highness fairly, 
 Down Pleasure's stream, wi' swelling sails, 
 
 I 'm tauld ye 're driving rarely ; 
 But some day ye may gnaw your nails, 
 
 An' curse your folly sairly, 
 That e'er ye brak Diana's pales, 
 
 Or rattl'd dice wi' Charlie 
 By night or day. 
 
 He is merciless, like a mocking-bird, to the elders who exhort 
 the young minister in The Ordination, and inform him 
 
 That Stipend is a carnal weed 
 He takes but for the fashion ; 
 
 while, in the Address to the Unco Quid or the Rigidly Righteous, 
 scorn melts down into remonstrance and a plea for pity. Or 
 he shows no contempt at all, but a jaunty defiant kindliness, 
 mixed with posturing, as in his Welcome to his unlawfully- 
 begotten daughter. But always, when he despises or praises, 
 it is not society at large, or mere classes ; he has in his eye 
 known and remembered persons who keep emerging, and not 
 composite general pictures of the fanatic or hypocrite. 
 
 In the same fashion the places named in Burns's poems bear 
 real names, and he is sometimes as much a ' local poet ' as 
 Cowper or Wordsworth. Galston Moor and Mossgiel and the 
 ' Brigs of Ayr ' are there with their physiognomies, like Weston 
 Underwood or Loughrigg Fell ; always peopled and alive, for 
 Burns is seldom alone with them. He does not, like Words- 
 worth, look on these spots as part of his own past, or as having 
 helped to make his soul. He is part of them, rather than they 
 of him ; he is one of the persons who lived among them, and 
 the one who truly saw them. They are drawn rapidly, in 
 sketches or impressions, in a phrase or line, and decisively 
 dismissed. The pace is a rattling one, but it does not blur 
 the sharpness of the imagery. 
 
 Burns also gives a truer account and picture of himself than 
 any of his critics, who are left behind drawing inferences and 
 measuring verdicts. In each of his moods, and not least in 
 his rhetorical factitious ones, he is true to the mood, and 
 expresses it completely ; and so exhibits, even when he docs 
 not know, himself. ' Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool ' 
 says much in few words. His bombast, when he writes to Mrs. 
 M'Lehose, is real, and his humility, when he wishes that he 
 could rival Ramsay or Gilbertfield, is real also. He knows all 
 his own vices, and boasts of them or laments them with equal
 
 108 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 sincerity. He hoards and keeps back nothing ; he has, except 
 in matters of form and finish, no second thoughts ; and he 
 has no real romance. ' II est passionne, non ro?nanesque.' l 
 He has no sense of wonder, beyond his easy shudder at the 
 ghostly and supernatural ; he exploits the terrors of the 
 clerical or popular devil with a kindly flout at the legend. 
 He does not deal in the half-said, or in poetic suggestion 
 of the kind that we meet in Coleridge. The edges are 
 always clear and the colours definite, like his mind. If he 
 has not the magic of the underworld, he has plenty of the 
 magic of life and motion and sudden vistas. He seldom 
 cares for history, though he is in the midst of its memorials, 
 and though of song and tune and custom and proverb he is a 
 treasure-house. 
 
 There is not much more unity in the nature of Burns than 
 there is in the population of a village. There is, it is true, an 
 artistic unity in his work seen as a whole ; but this disguises, 
 or rather expresses, many moods and personalities. He is a 
 Jacobite, and a democrat ; anti-clerical, and passionately 
 pious ; ribald, and ethical ; pompously braggart, and temper- 
 ately manly. To deal in such antitheses is not to shirk the 
 problem of his character ; on the contrary, to try and draw 
 them out into a harmony is to falsify it. This is why he is so 
 interesting. He is, or was, half Scotland. His first ruling 
 passion is thoroughly to fathom each feeling, and to perceive 
 each trait, as it comes. He does not count the cost ; or rather 
 he does so afterwards, and then he represents one feeling the 
 more. His variety of style and music is but the embodiment 
 of this multiformity, for his other and corresponsive ruling 
 passion is to find the words, the tune, that finally expresses the 
 thing before him or within him. 
 
 Besides this thickly-peopled vision of the men and women 
 who are near him, Burns brings into his feeling towards them a 
 new ingredient, which is partly of his own day. He is called 
 a poet of the Revolution, who chants the claims of the peasant 
 to a hearing ; ' a man 's a man for a' that ' ; and he certainly 
 did this, and was willing to suffer in person, rather uncouthly, 
 for hoisting his red flag.- His early Jacobite sentiment, more 
 poetic than political, was overlaid, though not obliterated, 
 after 1790. But it was not the revolution-fever that made him 
 democratic. The Scot had always known that a man 's a man 
 for a' that. The disregard of persons and ranks is in the blood 
 of the people, queerly crossed with a simple-minded, and some- 
 times excessive, respect for descent and prestige. Burns
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 109 
 
 simply found the words for the sentiment of equality ; although, 
 in a flash of just self-criticism, he said that the song in which 
 they occur, ' Is there for honest poverty,' was ' not really 
 poetry.' The idea of the rights of man, or any general idea, 
 must not be thought of as sinking far into him. He is not a 
 poet of ideas, and this is another trait that separates him from 
 most of the romantic writers. 
 
 His crusade against the Kirk tyranny is more deeply inspired. 
 This ugly abuse drove Burns to write his best and most undying 
 satire. But his animus is made up of various elements. It is 
 not merely that of a man whose amours are taken publicly to 
 task by the local inquisition, to which he must submit ; not 
 merely the recoil of a wild-blooded and uncontrolled poet 
 against clerical discipline. It is more than the natural cry of 
 one who speaks for the ' pagan, free-living, lewd, Scots world.' 
 The spirit is not at all that of a Voltairian, or of Tom Paine. 
 Burns, being a tolerably representative Scot, is something of 
 a theologian. It was more than personal friendship that made 
 him espouse and celebrate the 'New Lights,' 1 a local or pro- 
 vincial denomination, or rather group, of less rigid tenets 
 than those of the ruling Calvinists. Burns praises these 
 moderate clergy of Arminian tendencies, and rails at their 
 adversaries. He had himself been bred an alien to the stricter 
 articles of predestination and election. The clear-headed 
 Manual of Religious Belief compiled by his father for his 
 benefit, and the theological text-books that he is known to 
 have read, are liberal in drift. Burns lays no stress on Trini- 
 tarian doctrine ; his words are sometimes Arian in complexion ; 
 often they go further, and are those of a vaguely fervent deism. 
 Less than that he never believed ; and some of his pious 
 breathings are of the true eighteenth-century, deistic stamp : 
 ' thou great unknown Power ! thou Almighty God, who 
 hast lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immor- 
 tality ! ' This question is not without its bearing on his use 
 of language. His devoutness, which is undoubted although 
 fitful, takes high-flown Anglified form in some of his letters 
 to Mrs. M'Lehose. In The Cotter's Saturday Night, under an 
 occasionally unreal, or rather uncongenial phraseology, there 
 is a genuine pulse of piety ; and, as he tells us, he had 'greeted 
 by his father's fireside ' whilst composing it. The workman- 
 ship of the English parts of this piece has been sometimes 
 underestimated. At other times he would turn out, in 
 uncomfortable poetical or rhetorical diction, his utterances 
 of revulsion and repentance, in which the devotion, though
 
 110 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 honest enough, has gone rather hectic. But all these moods 
 are only moods, and he never turns any one facet towards us 
 for long. 
 
 If Burns shares many traits with the English romantic 
 writers his love of colour, his eye for nature, his care for 
 common humanity, his rebel independence, and his freshness of 
 rhythm ; and if, on the other hand, he is not in their debt, 
 being, indeed, rather anti-romantic than romantic in temper ; 
 where, then, does he get these traits ? The answer, already 
 anticipated, is that he got them in Scotland. They were not 
 new at all in Scotland, or in Scottish verse ; they had already 
 found lively vernacular expression, even whilst the spirit of 
 classicism was dominating England. Burns, it has now long 
 been seen, struck scarcely a chord that had not been sounded 
 some time or other on the Scottish lyre or pipes. Some chords, 
 indeed, he seldom sounded at all ; the recovery of the folk- 
 ballad he left to Scott. But the vivid passion for natural 
 things had been present in northern verse, with long enfeeb- 
 lings and intermissions, ever since the fifteenth century. The 
 tenderly satiric fashion of addressing beasts and men was 
 familiar to Burns, not only from older native verse, but from 
 that of his immediate forerunner Robert Fergusson, who died 
 in 1774, when Burns was a boy, and to whom Burns inscribed 
 the memorial stone in the Canongate burying-place. His 
 artistic debt to this poet, his elder brother in gaiety, misery, 
 and poetry, has often been described ; it is shown, for instance, 
 how the measure and machinery, the mazy motion and the 
 crowded coupling life, of Fergusson's Leith Races are remem- 
 bered in The Holy Fair ; and how The Farmer's Ingle suggested 
 the framework of The Cotter's Saturday Night, though the 
 sentiment is much more profoundly felt by Burns. So, too, 
 the friendly or derisive epistle in verse was a long-standing 
 form, which Burns took over, expanded, varied, and made 
 into an instrument of widest compass, for the expression of 
 insolent, button-holing colloquy, or of stentorian abuse, or 
 of chaff, or of confidential gentle talk. Metrical scholars l 
 have traced with care the origins and descent of Burns's 
 favourite staves. The chief of them, the six-lined verse 
 built on two rhymes, goes back to Old French and Provencal, 
 through a long intervening history in Scots, and is also 
 abundantly found in mediaeval English poetry. Burns, by 
 choice, thinks in this measure ; he describes, muses, sneers, 
 reviles, toasts, and even maunders in it. Its commonest 
 movement is a forward rush on the triple and repeated
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 111 
 
 rhyme, stopped and clinched by the short line introducing 
 the new rhyme : 
 
 Your critic-folk may cock their nose, 
 And say, ' How can you e'er propose, 
 You who ken hardly verse frae prose, 
 To mak a sang ? ' 
 
 Then the other two lines, long and short, on the same two 
 rhymes, face round and give the answer, or complete the idea, 
 with a fling-up of the heels : 
 
 But, by your leaves, my learned foes, 
 Ye 're maybe wrang. 
 
 Or those two lines are an afterthought : 
 
 Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin ! 
 Its silly wa's the win's are strewin ! 
 An' naething, now, to build a new ane, 
 
 0' foggage green ! 
 An' bleak December's win's ensuin, 
 
 Baith snell an' keen ! 
 
 Or there is no turn, or ' break ' at all, and the whole runs in a 
 single breath : 
 
 I 'm truly sorry man's dominion 
 Has broken Nature's social union, 
 An' justifies that ill opinion 
 
 Which makes thee startle 
 At me, thy poor earth-born companion 
 
 An' fellow-mortal ! 
 
 Such changes are rung without end ; but the requickening 
 of the rhythmical pulse in the fifth line, and the clanging finish 
 in the sixth, are everywhere. The longer measures, also 
 historic, and either borrowed direct or adapted by Burns, of 
 The Holy Fair and of the Epistle to Davie ; the first with its 
 single-line tag, or ' bob-wheel,' harping on the same rhyme 
 throughout in a relentless jaunty way (' Fu crump that day ' 
 ' by night or day '), and the second with its four line-tag 
 built on difficult ' internal rhymes,' also jaunty ; these 
 measures, in his hands, show an almost insolent ease and 
 mastery of technique, like that of a champion jig-dancer ; 
 and the clap of the sandal on the ground at the close is 
 irresistibly suggested. Much more could be said on -the 
 metres used by Burns ; for example, on the double initial 
 sandal-clap in The Kirk's Alarm, with the rhyme repeated 
 just when it seems forgotten : the effect, as before, being
 
 112 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 slightly diabolical, like the subsequent reduplication of the 
 longer line : 
 
 Dr. Mac ! Dr. Mac ! 
 
 You should stretch on a rack, 
 To strike wicked Writers wi' terror : 
 
 To join faith and sense, 
 
 Upon onie pretence, 
 Was heretic, damnable error 
 
 Dr. Mac ! 
 'Twas heretic, damnable error. 
 
 And for quick, striding narrative, or satiric enumeration, 
 Burns often uses and reinvigorates the old rhyming octo- 
 syllabic, as in Tarn o' Shanter or The Two, Dogs ; and the 
 long heroic couplet, as in The Brigs of Ayr, yields a piquant 
 mixture of Pope-like balance and vernacular freedom. But 
 on all this many have written, and well ; and it only need be 
 added that his songs are the clearest proof of this originality 
 of verbal tune, united with dependence on tradition ; being 
 usually founded either on airs, or on words, or on both 
 words and airs, that had long been in use by the people 
 and were the natural voice of its moods of pastime, indig- 
 nation, or sorrow. 
 
 No such legacy of poetic form can be one of form alone. 
 The soul of Burns, we know, was itself an inheritance. That 
 tone of fatal familiarity, for one thing, before which every- 
 thing goes down, is deep in the northern character, and is 
 a feature, it is not too much to say, even of its religious history. 
 If Burns is a free-living peasant amorist, living at first by semi- 
 polygamous village custom, full of passion, blatancy, fickleness, 
 tenderness, fun, true and sham sentiment, unchivalry, repent- 
 ances, and domestic feeling, and if he enjoys and suffers 
 accordingly, well, it is idle to pity him singly ; we must take 
 generations of his peasant forbears under the wing of our 
 patronage or condonation, and praise or blame Scotland. 
 He is, no doubt, not the only kind of peasant, nor does he show 
 us every kind. Scott has shown us others, in David Deans, 
 and again in Mause Hcadrigg. But Burns, on the whole, is a 
 far more superb figure, and represents a richer type, than 
 any which it lay within the plan or perhaps the ability of 
 Scott to portray. No two artists can ever really interfere 
 with each other ; least of all two such as Scott and Burns, 
 who cover so much canvas between them ; but it is instruc- 
 tive to see them at work on the same kind of scene. It 
 is hardly fair, indeed, to read The Jolly Beggars, 1 Burns's 
 longest, best harmonised, most magnificent production, perfectly
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 113 
 
 harmonious in its uproar, and without one flagging moment in 
 its ever-varying bravura, immediately before passing to the 
 humours of the middle-class topers in Guy Mannering. For 
 Pleydell and his companions are ready to go back to their offices, 
 and make money next morning, and litigate ; they never 
 ' whistle owre the lave o't ' ; they respect the main chance too 
 religiously ; claret is their interlude, and an unruffled con- 
 science helps them through the day. The jolly beggars have 
 no such afterthought ; they must pad the roads, and sleep 
 under the hedge, till the next orgy ; their whole real life is 
 in that evening chorus ; it is not likely that Edie Ochiltree 
 will be among them, though not impossible. Their songs 
 (which Scott himself praised admirably) are the most splendid 
 literature possible of its own order. Burns sees them, as 
 Will Waterproof saw London, in ' a kind of glory,' and it is 
 thus that they see themselves. This is as different as can be 
 from the tolerant light of Scott's comedy of humours, with 
 its easy cunning gradations. A merrymaking of bourgeois 
 is described by a great dramatic genius, who is also a gentle- 
 man. A merrymaking of tramps is described by a great 
 lyric genius, who is also a ploughman. In the first case there 
 is a profound perception of the subject ; in the second, some- 
 thing much nearer to an identification with the subject. It 
 is, of course, here or elsewhere, nothing to Burns that his 
 subject is not a lady's or a children's, or even a gentleman's, 
 affair. He will write about anything, whether it be fit for 
 publication or not ; and is said to have referred to his own 
 ' Cloaciniads.' He must share such reproaches, once more, 
 with the national muse. All these moods, in their quick- 
 revolving play and recurrence, make up both his actual and 
 his imaginative life. We like some imperfections in Burns 
 better than others. He had a big waste-heap in his nature ; 
 indeed, something like a principle of self-destruction, which 
 must be held to have shortened his days and his happiness : a 
 visitation which it is enough to note without proceeding to 
 the insolence of excessive compassion, and without raking 
 overmuch into the detail of his amours and excesses ; a pro- 
 cedure, after all, that is only profitable when some libel has 
 to be refuted. 
 
 If we ask what Burns represents, above all, in the life and 
 temper of his country, and what, therefore, is his essence, it 
 is, to borrow a phrase from a later singer, the freedom of the 
 natural soul. The new thing in him is the completeness of 
 that freedom, and the perfection with which it is expressed. 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 1U SCOTTISH LYRIC: 
 
 The eighteenth-century poets, in general, and the first founders 
 of the new verse, Crabbe and Cowper nay, even their great 
 successors, Wordsworth and Coleridge, have not this ; if they 
 win freedom, it is not of this kind. Blake has it, and Byron 
 and Shelley have it afterwards. This kind of freedom need 
 not imply revolutionary or explosive tenets, though it often 
 goes along with them ; a man like Chaucer, a man like Fielding 
 may have it, where no question of opinion arises. The Scottish 
 nature has it, except where artificially bound down or cramped 
 in some fashion. But the writers of England, whom Burns 
 in his youth perused, have it not. They are limited and con- 
 trolled ; around writers like Thomson and Gray, admirable 
 as they are, stand all kinds of abstractions Reason, Decorum, 
 Custom, Virtue, sentinelling in arms at the four corners of 
 their field. Social ordinance is implied in the outlook of 
 Crabbe and Cowper ; the self -prescription of a lofty, regulated 
 life is everywhere in Wordsworth ; within those borders he 
 works ; often with supreme success, but within them. Even 
 Coleridge, the freest mind of his time, is haunted by the 
 phantom of that order and self-possession to which he could 
 not in his life attain. Blake, on the other hand, likes to think 
 that these old sentinels go over as ninepins at his thrust. 
 Indeed, he is stronger herein than Burns, because he is quite 
 happy in his freedom, and never repents, having no cause for 
 headaches ; whereas Burns has many headaches, having 
 courted nature's slap in the face, and versifies them in 
 moderately good lines ; and is indeed all the more a Scot for 
 that. But he regains his poetic superiority over Blake, not 
 only by his more constantly perfect form, but because he has 
 more of plain humanity in him more, at least, of the earth, 
 of the faun, of the orgiast ; and he gives us their poetry. 
 Blake is far more moral than Burns ; only his morality is 
 high and imaginative, not that of custom and the sentinels. 
 Burns, instead, has the right ' goat foot music ' in his blood 
 and in his verses ; in Tarn o' Shunter, in The Jolly Beggars, 
 in the lines To a Louse, in Death and Doctor Hornbook ; these 
 are among the best things that he has done. 
 
 That is not to say they are of the highest kind of poetry. 
 Only, in reading them, one forgets the distinction of high and 
 low in the sense of their perfection. They show us not only 
 the ' freedom,' but the ' natural soul ' itself ; they show us 
 the soul of dirt, and drink, and careless roaring laughter, 
 and of the sudden lust, and the sweating frenzied quickening 
 dance, and the drunken chorus, and the profane and greasy
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 115 
 
 and unseemly catch. But if this were all, we should hardly 
 talk of ' freedom.' It is in the power to escape from these 
 things, and then to escape back to them, that the freedom 
 consists. Burns is often a servant of Pan ; but he is also a 
 tender observer, an arch-friend and comrade, and a hater of 
 hypocrisy. He is also a moralist, in no dry way, but in his 
 own emotional, convincing way ; he sees how ' illicit love ' 
 may ' petrify the feeling,' and celebrates the piety of the fire- 
 side. It is not that he pulls up in the middle of a wild dance, 
 and corrects himself, and tries to exorcise Pan ; but that he 
 feels different things at different times, and expresses each of 
 them thoroughly. That one man, in the course of time, 
 should arise to give full utterance to all these feelings, and that 
 too in song, is surely no immoderate allowance. But for him, 
 they would not have been sung, or not sung thus, and that 
 complex tune would have been missing from the endless opera 
 omnia of the poets. That the life of the singer should be 
 broken up and cut short, was likely enough ; but we are 
 talking of poetry, and not of such consequences, nor are we 
 here deploring the weakness of human will or nature's want of 
 scruple in shattering her instruments. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There is nothing new or mysterious in Burns, except his 
 perfection ; and even here the secret is an open one ; it is 
 his power to represent everything, every feeling, as it comes, 
 and just as it is, and to have done with it. In saying he is 
 a classic, we do not mean merely that he has left verse that 
 endures, though that is true ; nor that he owes something to 
 the narrowly classical school of Pope, though that is true 
 also ; but rather that he reminds us of the antique ; that he 
 represents real life and feeling with the clearness, Tightness, 
 and beauty of the antique ; and that this is true in the same 
 degree of no other British writer during the romantic period. 
 It is the characteristic of Burns ; it is why he is so deeply 
 satisfactory, and why we come back to him again and again, 
 and why we feel that when he is as remote in time as Theo- 
 critus is to-day, people will take the trouble to learn his 
 language, and will treat him as an ancient writer who perennially 
 gives pleasure and entertainment ; so that Burns, perhaps, 
 will be part of some far future Renaissance ; and all this 
 because of his form. Such prophesying is easy, and may 
 sound cheap enough ; but during the century that has passed
 
 116 SCOTTISH LYRIC: 
 
 since Burns wrote, this perfection of his, this power of survival, 
 have asserted themselves already. 
 
 Carlyle said in his lovely, early, elegiac prose : 
 
 While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers 
 through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and 
 assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves, this little Valclusa fountain 
 will also arrest our eye, for this also is of Nature's own and most 
 cunning workmanship ; bursts from the depths of the earth, with 
 a full gushing current, into the light of day ; and often will the 
 traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters and muse among its 
 rocks and pines ! 
 
 The imagery need not lead us astray. ' Valclusa fountain ' 
 suggests Petrarch, and ' cunning workmanship/ and studious 
 finish ; the earliest modern equivalent, it may be, to antique 
 Tightness and beauty of form ; but then Petrarch does not, 
 like Burns, represent the real life of men, and indeed, for all 
 his pains, hardly represents a real life of his own. Near to 
 Burns in such qualities comes Wordsworth ; not when, as in 
 Laodamia, he is deliberately antique, but when he is telling 
 the tale of Michael or The Brothers. There, indeed, he is 
 perfect, right, simple, and enduring, although he steeps 
 his story in reflection and theory. But it is curious that 
 Burns, at his best, writes in a style that answers better than 
 Wordsworth's own to the description of poetry that Words- 
 worth himself put forward, namely, that it should be written 
 in ' the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,' 
 and be ' purified of all rational causes of disgust and dislike.' 
 Burns uses such a language, when he is really himself and is 
 not practising English eighteenth-century diction ; that is, 
 he uses it for most of the time. But he unites it with clearness, 
 and beauty, and Tightness, and blithe humour ; it comes 
 easily to him, as he tells us in lines which themselves show his 
 command of it. He has just named Jean, his wife : 
 
 O, how that Name inspires my stylo ! 
 The words come skclpin, rank an' file, 
 
 Amaist before I ken ! 
 The ready measure rins as line, 
 As Phoebus and the famous Nine 
 
 Were glowrin owre my pen. 
 My spaviet Pegasus will limp, 
 
 Till ance he 's fairly het ; 
 And then ho '11 hilch, an' stilt, an' jimp, 
 And rin an unco fit ; 
 
 But least then, the beast then 
 
 Should rue thia hasty ride, 
 
 I '11 light now, and dight now 
 
 Hia sweaty, wizen'd hide.
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 117 
 
 These powers come out when Burns seems most slapdash 
 and spontaneous ; and the lines to James Smith give us, no 
 doubt, his real and habitual mood : 
 
 Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash ; 
 
 Some rhyme (vain thought !) for needfu' cash ; 
 
 Some rhyme to court the countra clash, 
 
 An' raise a din ; 
 For me, an aim I never fash ; 
 
 I rhyme for fun. 
 
 But we must not talk loosely about the antique ; what do 
 we mean by it ? There is no Greek or Latin Burns. To come 
 nearest to one, we must seek for some poet, or poets, who write, 
 first of all, in what is called dialect, that is, not in the central 
 and predominant idiom of their civilisation ; who use this 
 dialect for a homely purpose, to present real life, the life of 
 homely people ; whose form is rapid, passionate, beautiful, 
 seemingly unstudied, and yet quite right ; and who are 
 personal, who are not afraid of telling us of their own loves 
 and hatreds the hatreds are essential and who let their 
 dignity take care of itself ; who, in a word, with all their art, 
 leave us with the sense that they are forces and pieces of 
 nature, and who do not talk about being artists, but leave 
 that business to their expositors. Well, Catullus has some 
 of these traits the speed, the passion, the lack of dignity, 
 the personal tinge, the monumental form ; and Theocritus 
 has some others, the dialect, the gentle vivacious play of homely 
 life, the love of nature and fun. Both of them have, in different 
 ways, the appropriate art ; both give the real language of men 
 in impeccable shape. We need not touch on the qualities 
 in which they excel Burns or differ from him ; but he is 
 something like a compound of the two ; half -lyrical, half- 
 portraying ; with the same hatred of surplusage, and the same 
 Tightness. He came to these qualities, not at all by knowing 
 the ancients, and not only by his native gift, but also by 
 inheriting the long tradition of poetry, which he took up, and 
 crowned, and eclipsed ; the tradition of Dunbar, and Ramsay, 
 and Fergusson, and a hundred nameless poets, or poets who 
 only have bequeathed a song and a bare name ; so that he is 
 not only a classic, but the classic of his country. 
 
 Outside the drama, Burns is perhaps the swiftest in move- 
 ment of our poets, as Spenser and Wordsworth are the slowest. 
 No man travels through an action, or a gamut of feeling, in 
 fewer words. The beginning of a verse is out of sight ere the 
 end is reached. The pace of Tarn o' Shanter or The Holy Fair
 
 118 SCOTTISH LYRIC: 
 
 is unequalled. Scott comes next, but even he warms to his 
 work more slowly, and takes longer over it. Burns is ready 
 at once. His is not the light gliding step of Chaucer, who 
 covers the ground quick and imperceptibly. In Burns you hear 
 the musical clatter of the horse's hoofs. In fourteen lines of 
 The Tiva Dogs he carries his young gallant through France, 
 Spain, Italy, and Germany (where he seeks a water-cure), 
 whipping him well as he goes. In eight lines are recounted the 
 landmarks, each denoting a violent death, past which Tarn 
 o' Shanter ' skelpit on.' 
 
 By this time he was cross the ford, 
 Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd ; 
 And past the birks and meikle stane, 
 Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane ; 
 And thro' the whins, and by the cairn, 
 Whare hunters fand the murder' d bairn ; 
 And near the thorn, aboon the well, 
 Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel. 
 
 This makes us feel, like Tarn o' Shanter, ' glorious.' So, too, 
 the brook in Hallowe'en rushes down to the valley in a single 
 stanza, and the endless sports and charms of the occasion 
 succeed each other faster than in the reality. It is the same 
 when Burns is stirred with anger or sorrow. The satire on Holy 
 Willie and the tent-preachers runs like a fired train ; even his 
 gentler lines, like those on the daisy, do not linger. In the 
 Cotter's Saturday Night he affects for a time the slow pensive 
 movement of his Spenserian models (whom, rather than Spenser, 
 he is studying) ; but gets impatient and breaks away. 
 
 His compositions are all short ; only a few of them are of 
 middle length, like Tarn o' Shanter and The Vision ; the 
 longest, The Jolly Beggars, is barely three hundred lines. The 
 descriptive and narrative pieces are often under a hundred 
 lines. Here again Burns is an artist ; he knows just how much 
 he can do without loss of power, or wandering from his gift. 
 When he is diffuse, it is nearly always when he falls into the 
 wrong sort of southern English ; The Vision suffers in this way 
 as it goes on. Using Scots, he never halts. When he is in the 
 vein, he seems neither short nor long, because the ear and mind 
 of the reader are alive and at the stretch and lose count of 
 time. No one gets so much life into so little room. 
 
 But Burns's method is different in different kinds of writing. 
 The Epistles do not go straight forward, but chat rapidly, and 
 circle^round the subject, and end when they please, like an 
 actual letter. The satiric and bitter poems, on the contrary,
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 119 
 
 like Holy Willie's Prayer, are deliberately concentrated for 
 effect, and the poet leaves off while he is still angry does not 
 wait till he is placable. Tarn o' Shanter is his masterpiece in 
 composition in a single metre, perfectly begun and conducted 
 and rounded off ; The Jolly Beggars is his masterpiece in a 
 combination of metres, alternately descriptive and lyrical, a 
 roaring and yet accordant clamour of changing voices. Here 
 the passion runs so high that a longer poem at the same 
 tension would be physically impossible ; Burns feels that, 
 and leaves off before there is danger of an ebb. This it is 
 to be classical ; and several sayings of Burns explain his 
 method as an artist : 
 
 I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish 
 rather than the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose. 
 . . . All my poetry is the effect of easy composition, but of laborious 
 correction. . . . The rough material of fine writing is certainly 
 the gift of genius ; but I as firmly believe that the workmanship 
 is the united effort of pains, attention, and repeated trial. 
 
 Burns's manuscripts, and his comments to Johnson and 
 Thomson on the text of his songs, show his fidelity to this 
 creed. It may be connected, on one side, with his study of 
 Pope and Addison ; on another, it recalls that of his con- 
 temporary Blake, who, far off in London, was preaching the 
 gospel of execution, or of firm determinate outline. Burns's 
 thrift and precision are among his greater attributes as a poet. 
 It was long before the English romantic writers learned to 
 avoid superfluity. Blake came to forget his own lesson ; 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge often achieved thrift and precision, 
 but they are never long safe. Byron attained those qualities 
 in a few lyrics and in satire. Shelley had them not by divine 
 gift, but learned them by practice in his craft. Keats learned 
 them soon, and was able to ' load every rift with ore.' Never 
 sure of them in his prose, Burns is always sure of them in his 
 Scottish verse. On the whole, he is more economical than 
 any of the southern poets, and produces, better than any of 
 them, the effect of ease by intense labour. 
 
 There is no need to note other differences. There are no 
 veils upon his style ; neither Blake's veil of strangeness and 
 shadow, which makes us feel that the images, ' determinate ' 
 as they are, are also symbols ; nor yet Shelley's veil of light 
 and air, which leaves the words themselves almost impalpable. 
 Burns's greatest qualities, of outline, precision, and concreteness, 
 are alien to such achievements. And, it may be said again,
 
 120 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 he had little definable influence upon English poets after him. 
 The fountain has been there to sparkle eternally before them, 
 but hardly to drink from. Wordsworth was in his debt, and 
 paid the debt in Burns's own stanza, with sincere honour and 
 strong feeling, if with a certain slightly misplaced compassion ; 
 but in the poems where he does so he has not learned Burns's 
 lesson as an artist. It is in Scotland that we must seek for the 
 influence of Burns ; and there it will be seen to be powerful, 
 nay, almost overpowering, like too strong an air ; and he pro- 
 duced no great disciples, partly because the life that he recorded 
 was beginning to fade down while he wrote. 
 
 IV 
 
 To pass from Burns's poems his epistles, satires, and narra- 
 tives to his songs is to pass to something purer and more 
 piercing and aerial, less tied to traditional tales, real persons, 
 known legends, local incidents, and all the harsh tough fibres 
 of Scottish character and the oddities of country physiognomy. 
 It is to pass from the earth to the air or to the fire. For even 
 when the matter of the songs is actually of that familiar sort, 
 rank or homely, it has wandered wider on the lips of the 
 people ; and the poet makes it universal by his treatment, 
 and sublimates it. He captures the whole ' breath and finer 
 spirit ' of a nation which, more than all others, is inconceivable 
 without its songs. And he works up those floating words and 
 airs into something that is more and not less enduring than 
 their current originals, and which, in its turn, becomes the 
 true possession of the folk. No one has ever done this for 
 England, where there is not the like material to work upon ; 
 nor even for Ireland, where the material is far more abundant ; 
 the achievement of Moore, though of high credit, being in 
 another direction, and omitting too much of the Irish soul. 
 Burns was near enough to the songs, as Scott was to the ballads, 
 of the country, to work exactly in their spirit ; and was also 
 so much above them as to put them through a kind of purga- 
 tion, to rid them of their concrete, lobes, and to disengage their 
 perpetual essence. Thus he really became the singing soul of 
 his people. Scotland, like the isle that was both Caliban's 
 and Prospero's, is ' full of sweet airs, that give delight, and 
 hurt not ' and that sometimes do hurt, with all their sweet- 
 ness, like wicked arrows. It is also full of wandering words 
 to those airs ; words which at times live in their purest form in 
 the mouth of the people, but are oftener written down in black-
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 121 
 
 letter and chapbook, in forms full of beauty and imperfec- 
 tion. Many had been saved by previous collectors and poets, 
 or trimmed at times by editors like Ramsay into modish 
 eighteenth -century style. Of all this material Burns was the 
 repository. Scholars have patiently examined his sources and 
 methods, of which only a few distinctive examples l can be cited. 
 Nearly two hundred songs were sent by Burns to his two 
 employers ; some in 1787 to the unlettered engraver James 
 Johnson, for his Musical Museum ; others in 1792 for the 
 Scottish Airs of George Thomson ; and many more he scattered 
 broadcast. In the Museum he was left very free, and was 
 virtually editor, and he was then at his best ; when he contri- 
 buted to Scottish Airs his finer hour was past, although we 
 still come on such things as Wandering Willie, Duncan Gray, 
 1 saw ye bonie Lesley,' and * Scots Wha Hae.' Nearly all 
 the pieces he treated are by nameless and untraceable authors. 
 His procedure may be first exemplified in Auld Lang Syne. 
 He writes : 
 
 Is not the Scotch phrase ' Auld Langsyne ' exceedingly expres- 
 sive ? . . . There is an old song and tune which has often thrilled 
 through my soul. . . . The following song the old song of the 
 olden time, and which has never been in print, nor even in 
 manuscript, until I took it down from an old man's singing, is 
 enough to recommend any air. 
 
 The refrain, in fact, had often been in print, twice in the 
 eighteenth century ; once in the form, which Burns would 
 seem to have seen : 
 
 On old long syne, 
 On old long syne, my jo, 
 On old long syne ; 
 That thou canst never once reflect 
 On old long syne. 
 
 The first line, ' Should old acquaintance be forgot,' exists in 
 another printed version, assigned to Ramsay. How much 
 Burns took from the ' old man ' if indeed he existed and 
 how he added to it, we shall never know ; but we can be sure 
 that he stripped away any lustreless patches, resembling those 
 in the printed versions, and substituted his own gold. The 
 old man may have had a purer oral version than any extant 
 in print, or Burns may have invented the old man, and taken 
 the refrain of one version and the opening of the other, and 
 written all that comes between. 
 
 In 'O, my luve is like a red, red rose/ Burns took the germ of
 
 122 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 each of the four stanzas from one or other of three preceding 
 songs ; examples of which, though they are possibly not those 
 that he saw, remain. One blackletter runs : 
 
 Her cheeks are like the roses 
 
 That blossom fresh in June ; 
 0, she 's like a new-strung instrument 
 
 That 's newly put in tune. 
 
 The jejune ' That blossom fresh ' appears, under Burns's hand, 
 as ' that 's newly sprung ' ; in the rest the metre is mended, 
 the repetition ' new,' ' newly,' is cut away, and the phrase 
 re-created to 
 
 0, my luve is like the melody 
 That 's sweetly play'd in tune. 
 
 The next stanza has a traceable original in this : 
 
 The seas they shall run dry, 
 
 And rocks melt into sands ; 
 Then I '11 love you still, my dear, 
 
 When all these things are done. 
 
 Burns corrects the -rhyme, turns the ' run dry ' into Scots, and 
 retains the tender extravagance : 
 
 Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, 
 
 And the rocks melt wi' the sun ; 
 And I will luve thee still, my dear, 
 
 While the sands o' life shall run. 
 
 The last verse has for possible ancestor a good ringing stanza, 
 in a different poem, with a ' repeat ' which Burns has to clear 
 away in order to keep his own measure : 
 
 Altho' I go a thousand miles, 
 
 I vow thy face to see, 
 Altho' I go ten thousand miles, 
 
 I '11 come again to thee, dear love, 
 I '11 come again to thee. 
 
 This becomes a long-drawn plaint mingled with the promise : 
 
 And fare thee weel, my only love, 
 
 And fare thee weel a while ! 
 And I will come again, my luve, 
 
 Tho' it were ten thousand mile. 
 
 Again, the noblest of Burns's, perhaps of all, Jacobite 
 ditties, ' It was a' for our rightfu' king/ one of the great 
 achievements of romantic patriot song in any form of English, 
 was suggested by an old and admirable poem which opens 
 thus :
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 123 
 
 The cold winter is past and gone, and now comes in the spring, 
 
 And I am one of the King's life-guards, and must go fight for my King, 
 
 My dear, 
 I must go fight for my King ; 
 
 and closes thus : 
 
 The trooper turn'd himself about all on the Irish shore, 
 
 He has given the bridle reins a shake, saying, Adieu for evermore, 
 
 My dear, 
 Adieu for evermore. 
 
 This old poem is a dialogue, in which the lady says that she 
 will dress in man's attire, and go along with her lover to the 
 wars, and tear her hair and snood for him in mourning when 
 he is gone ; but the trooper will not let her, and bids her fare- 
 well. This stereotype Burns discards ; he leaves the speaker 
 watching and thinking by night, but he retains the thrilling 
 low tones of the repeat ' my dear ' at the end of every verse. 
 He puts the last stanza into the middle, builds out from it, 
 and in his own last stanza supplies the new keynote, the 
 intolerable touch of home : 
 
 When day is gane, and night is come, 
 
 And a' folk bound to sleep, 
 I think on him that 's far awa, 
 
 The lee-lang night, and weep, 
 My dear 
 
 The lee-lang night and weep. 
 
 Such ways of working could be shown at endless length. 
 Burns took whatever served him, and did what he would with 
 it, with unfailing instinct ; and also, as his manuscripts often 
 show, gave to it a ceaseless care and revision which is most 
 striking in some of the most artless-seeming and reeled-off 
 ditties. ' saw ye bonie Lesley ' is a piece of gallantry of 
 his own, in honour of a real Miss Leslie Baillie, whom he accom- 
 panied, with her father, on a ride southward. The song is, in 
 his own phrase, a parody of an old one, Bonnie Lizzie Baillie, 
 so that the surname and the tune were really all he had to 
 work upon. 
 
 To classify these songs, or even the best of them, is hardly 
 possible, any more than we can classify the airs that go with 
 them. In dozens of them the Northern Pan is evoked, with 
 his extraordinary leer ; he puts his face so close to yours that 
 your dignity is gone and you feel his breath ; he is chucklingly 
 familiar ; he measures your tolerance at the moment, and 
 delights to go beyond it ; then he dances back, singing, to 
 watch the effect. In pure mischief, he will provide a
 
 124 SCOTTISH LYRIC: 
 
 drawing-room version, which is still roguish, but presentable ; 
 the two forms of Duncan Gray can be consulted for this 
 device. Suddenly he vanishes, and a woman's voice is heard 
 piercingly : 
 
 Near me, near me, 
 
 Laddie, lie near me ! 
 Lang hae I lain my lane, 
 
 Laddie, lie near me ! 
 
 This feminine long-drawn call is heard often enough ; ' Here 
 awa, there awa, wandering Willie ! ' ' Wilt thou be my dearie ? ' 
 or the male voice is heard in reply, in a bass : 
 
 O, this is no my ain lassie, 
 
 Fair tho' the lassie be : 
 Weel ken I my ain lassie 
 
 Kind love is in her e'e. 
 
 Or Burns's own voice is raised, in honour of his wife ; ' Of a' 
 the airts the wind can blaw ' was written on his honeymoon, 
 with only a melody to work upon. Another group, the con- 
 vivial, is the lyric counterpart of Scotch Drink and the like, 
 which are formal poems not meant for singing but for saying. 
 ' O, guid ale comes,' and ' The Deil's awa wi' th' exciseman ' 
 are of this chanted order ; but they are not so numerous as 
 other kinds. Of the Jacobite songs the greatest has been 
 quoted, but there are many more ; ' Awa', Whigs, awa' ! ' 
 and ' O'er the water to Charlie,' and ' Carl, an the King come,' 
 and the resonant ' Ye Jacobites by name,' a good example 
 of Burns's English at its best. 
 
 And, at the other extreme from the scurril, stands the literary, 
 rhetorical muse, with ' Turn again, thou fair Eliza,' and 
 ' Thickest Night, surround my dwelling.' We can hardly 
 grudge a few of these things, for they complete, not so delight- 
 fully but faithfully, the picture of Burns and his moods, and 
 represent, they also, an artificial but actual element in Scottish 
 song. They are usually in sheer English, and in factitious 
 English too ; and what more may here be said about Burns 
 and his lyrics and poems can most profitably take the shape 
 of an attempt to do justice to his English muse, so commonly 
 derided, and to show what is more accurately meant by 
 ' Scots,' as a medium for verse. That is a false and ragged 
 division of his poetry, according to which his English is 
 always inferior and conventional, and Scots his only excellent 
 vehicle.
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 125 
 
 Here, no doubt, is one sort of English, not even good in an 
 assumed style, but bad considered as English of any sort : 
 
 Thou ! who pour'd the patriotic tide 
 That streani'd thro' Wallace's undaunted heart, 
 
 Who dar'd to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride, 
 Or, nobly, die, the second glorious part. 
 
 Unluckily there are hundreds of such instances ; the start 
 is wrong, the movement is factitious, the grammar is amiss, 
 though the sentiment is unassailable ; it is worse than Rule, 
 Britannia, which is much to say. The same sort of thing, in 
 mawkish-amorous vein, could, alas, easily be quoted, and 
 would correspond to similar stuff in the prose of the ' Sylvander 
 and Clarinda ' correspondence. But let us pass forward, 
 only staying to deprecate Carlyle's flushed description of the 
 Ode Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive, as 
 something that ' might have been chanted by the furies of 
 /Eschylus ' ; whereas such lines as 
 
 Dweller in yon dungeon dark, 
 Hangman of creation, mark ! 
 
 and their sequel, are simply turgid, bogus-sublime eighteenth- 
 century English, absurdly beyond the occasion, which is but 
 the death of a rich miserly old lady. Another sort of English 
 is this : 
 
 From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
 That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad : 
 
 Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 
 ' An honest man 's the noblest work of God.' 
 
 That is truer, but it is true in a southern tradition, the 
 tradition of Pope or Gray ; to Burns we feel it is only second 
 nature. As he himself saw, ' Scots Wha Hae ' is rhetoric too 
 (if good rhetoric), though the tune is northern. But in which 
 language does he write To the Toothache ? 
 
 When fevers burn, or ague freezes, 
 Rheumatics gnaw, or colic squeezes, 
 Our neebors sympathise to ease us 
 
 Wi' pitying moan ; 
 But thee ! thou hell o' a' diseases, 
 
 They mock our groan ! 
 
 This is not southern, eighteenth-century ' poetic diction ' at 
 all, but it is English truly enough, with a few northern vowels
 
 126 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 and curtailments, in a northern metre and temper. Here again 
 is the stanza, quoted already, which is no worse : 
 
 I 'm truly sorry man's dominion 
 Has broken Nature's social union, 
 An' justifies that ill opinion 
 
 Which makes thee startle 
 At me, thy poor earth-born companion 
 
 An' fellow-mortal ! 
 
 Only one word, and otherwise not even one vowel is in Scots ; 
 yet so strong is the illusion caused by metre and association, 
 that we hear it uttered in the broadest accent. Take another 
 verse with the final tag, from A Dream : there is more northern 
 salt in it still, but still no one word that really asks to be 
 translated : 
 
 Guid-mornin to your Majesty ! 
 
 May Heaven augment your blisses ! 
 On ev'ry new birthday ye see, 
 
 A humble poet wishes ! 
 My Bardship here, at your Levee, 
 
 On sic a day as this is, 
 Is sure an uncouth sight to see, 
 
 Amang thae Birthday dresses 
 Sae fine this day. 
 
 On the other side, with 
 
 A daimen icker in a thrave 
 
 's a snia request, 
 or with 
 
 Yet aft a ragged cowte 's been known 
 
 To make a noble aiver ; 
 So, ye may doucely fill a throne 
 For a' their clish-ma-claver, 
 
 we are in presence of a language where many of the important 
 words are foreign, and need the glossary. It is only at this 
 point that ' Scots ' ceases to be a purely comparative term ; 
 and it is clear that the ingredients may be mixed in any 
 measure, except that in no sense can a poem be wholly in 
 Scots ; there being no such entire separate language, apart 
 from the Gaelic. The poet's choice, therefore, is often not 
 between English and Scots, but between one sort of English 
 (or British if the term is held more soothing) and another. 
 How far the poem, without being in Scots, is yet Scottish, 
 and not Southron, depends on other considerations besides 
 the vocabulary and spelling, or the pronunciation as shown 
 by the spelling. It depends on the metre and its associations,
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 127 
 
 for one thing ; is there the true kick-up of the heels, unknown 
 to the southerner ? 
 
 Hear how he clears the points o' Faith 
 
 Wi' rattlin and wi' thumpin; 
 Now meekly calm, now wild in wrath, 
 
 He 's stainpin, an' he 's jumpin ! 
 
 And it depends, more still, on our mental image of the speaker 
 and his Doric sounds and the faces of the cronies around him. 
 The English speech, so the Scot would say, is only a fainter 
 form of the Scots, aspiring to be like it ; and to appease him 
 we will accept that view. 
 
 These elementary reflections are only dwelt on, that we may 
 come into sight of a truer judgment upon Burns's prowess in 
 the two languages. Plainly the bisection, still customary, of 
 his talent into that which uses the ' Doric ' well, and that 
 which misuses the English, must be qualified. Some of his 
 songs, and some of the best, the most indigenous, the most 
 peaty, and some of those that go nearest home, contain no 
 words that really require translation ; at most, they contain 
 words in the alternative northern sound and orthography. 
 His noblest lines, ' Had we never loved sae blindly,' are of 
 this kind. ' It was a' for our rightfu' king ' is another instance ; 
 and Macpherson's Lament, which stirred Carlyle, and made 
 the face of Tennyson darken with sympathy, is all in English 
 except the word sturt ; indeed it is in something like high 
 English, of the old Cavalier style. The fable that the cateran 
 Macpherson fiddled the tune on the way to the gallows is 
 discredited, but the tale is told of an Irishman : 
 
 Sae rantingly, sao wantonly, 
 
 Sae dauntingly gaed he, 
 He play'd a spring, and danced it round, 
 
 Below the gallows-tree. 
 
 That is the refrain ; and the high reckless style is this : 
 
 0, what is death but parting breath ? 
 
 On many a bloody plain 
 I 've dared his face, and in this place 
 
 I scorn him yet again ! 
 
 In others, of course, like My IJoggie and John Anderson, 
 there is enough of Scots to give the distinguishing tint ; in a 
 thing like Scroggam there is much more. The truth is that 
 when Burns starts in the right mood, and in the right key of 
 language, he can be almost equally good whatever proportion 
 of the vernacular he may use. All we can say is, that he is
 
 128 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 always safe in ' Scots,' that the very best of his pieces have a 
 large dash of it, and that a single vivid, unforgettable, puzzling 
 word in a stanza is enough to give the colouring. These remarks 
 are meant not to be academic ; but to urge that Burns is 
 thus brought nearer to the main stream of our common litera- 
 ture. Our southern share in his glory is made good ; and the 
 very freedom and intensity of his natural genius serves to 
 lower, not to stiffen, those barriers of bent and feeling which 
 history and religion have raised over-high between the two 
 branches of our race. 
 
 VI 
 
 Burns may outshine all the other vernacular Scottish poets l 
 of his day ; but we must not let him, as painters say, kill 
 them, or we shall miss much that is good and shall also fail 
 to understand Burns. He is by far the greatest force amongst 
 them, and the one secure artist, the only classic ; the mass 
 of his excellent work exceeds that of all the rest taken together ; 
 and there is hardly a chord in the national soul, known to those 
 others, which he has not struck powerfully. But for all that 
 they are there ; their very multitude shows that the voice of 
 Burns was only the strongest and truest in a populous chorus ; 
 and after him, as before him, the same tunes echo on, and 
 Burns's way of dealing with them, itself an ancient one, 
 becomes the commoner for his example. In this sense, and 
 in hardly any other, can he be said to have founded a school. 
 He did not give an impulse to Scottish song at all commen- 
 surate with his own power ; but an impulse he did give to it, 
 which only died down after a quarter of a century or more. 
 It is hard for the critic to be at once a Scot and not a Scot ; 
 to enter into the joy of this northern poetry, and at the same 
 time to escape mere national bias and over-estimate. And 
 the poetry itself is not readily classified. Perhaps the broadest 
 distinction is between that which is made to be sung and that 
 which is made to be said, a distinction that strikes deep in 
 the work of Burns, as in that of his companions. In either 
 case, as often as not, the work is not pure invention, but is 
 cast in some inherited form, and founded either on some float- 
 ing ancient verse, or on a popular air, or on both. The whole 
 body of production is so fragmentary and various and unequal, 
 that it is simpler to select the names of a few authors, than 
 to keep to any strict demarcation by kinds. In 1789 Burns 
 wrote :
 
 129 
 
 My success has encouraged sucli a shoal of ill-spawned monsters 
 to crawl into public notice, under the title of Scottish poets, that 
 the very term Scots poetry borders on the burlesque. 
 
 Any other method would mean tracing the history of many 
 separate themes and refrains through their curious fortunes. 
 Such a ditty, for instance, as the admirable Cauld Kail in 
 Aberdeen 1 has a long record. In its first form it dates back 
 to 1728 ; this was preserved by Herd in his Antient and 
 Modern Scotish Songs (ed. 1791) in two shapes, one of them 
 purely bacchanalian, the other roguishly remonstrative : 
 
 Wow, Aberdeen, what did you mean 
 
 Sae young a maid to woo, sir ? 
 I 'm sure it was nae mows [jest] to her, 
 
 Whate'er it was to you, sir ! 
 
 This rough production was taken up by William Reid, and also 
 by Alexander, Duke of Gordon ; the latter put it into a rollick- 
 ingly convivial form that delighted Burns and appeared in 
 Johnson's Musical Museum. But that sweet singer of the 
 Land o' the Leal, Lady Nairne, disapproved of it, and, accord- 
 ing to her programme of refining popular songs in the cause 
 of virtue, she retained the overture, 
 
 There 's cauld kail in Aberdeen, 
 
 There 's castocks [cabbage-haulms] in (Strabogie, 
 
 but turned the song into a tale of a husband who ' pray'd wi' 
 micht,' and that successfully, ' to keep him frae the cogie,' or 
 drinking-pot ; a deft enough version, and doubtless effective 
 for its end. This is a typical procedure, and another is seen 
 in the use made by Tennant of the old ballad (claimed for 
 a seventeenth-century Semple of Beltrees) of Maggie Lander, 
 for his capital long piece, presently to be named, Anster Fair. 
 The general debt of Burns to Fergusson and older writers has 
 been named ; but he drew on contemporaries too, and the 
 Logan Braes and Halloween of John Mayne, the printer of 
 Dumfries, were of some slight use to him. Mayno also used 
 the old six-line measure, which Burns made his own, before 
 Burns wrote ; and his poem, The Siller Gun, 2 which briskly 
 and vividly celebrates the shooting for the prize instituted at 
 Dumfries by James vr., was expanded in five successive edi- 
 tions, overlapping at both ends the period of Burns's pro- 
 duction. So, too, John Hamilton's ditty, 'Up in the mornin' 
 early/ is put to a very old tune which Burns also utilised ; and 
 this eulogy of late rising, with its sharply-cut picture of the 
 VOL. i, I
 
 130 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 linnets starving in the bushes, is uttered as freshly as anything 
 by Burns himself. In other cases, where there is no actual 
 original for words or air, the temper or theme is of traditional 
 type, and the examples are often found in authors who left 
 one or two masterpieces out of scores of experiments. To 
 make a list would be only to review the countless minor poets 
 who figure in the anthologies. But the wells of rough or reck- 
 less humour and of impassioned pathos in the Scottish soul 
 are not easily exhausted. Lady Anne Lindsay, afterwards 
 Lady Barnard, wrote her famous Auld Robin Gray in 1770, 
 at the age of twenty ; she kept her authorship a secret for over 
 half a century, and at last disclosed it to Scott. It is perfect ; 
 her little sister had suggested the incident of the stealing of 
 the cow the last and worst misfortune of the heroine ; and 
 for this we must forgive the sequel, which Lady Anne afterwards 
 perpetrated, and in which Auld Robin Gray confesses on his 
 deathbed that he, for ill motives, had been the stealer of the 
 cow, and bequeaths his wife to her old lover. Many other 
 songs were made with this didactic drift ; and in one, Hector 
 MacNeilPs Scotland's Scaith, or Will and Jean, we have a really 
 brilliant and convincing poetical tract, of the Hogarthian kind, 
 against the evils of whisky. Without these curious revulsions and 
 repentances of the complex Scottish muse, suddenly remember- 
 ing her Puritan upbringing, our picture of her is incomplete. 
 
 Nor do they by any means paralyse her art. The verses 
 of Carolina Oliphant, afterwards Lady Nairne, 1 are often written 
 with a purpose, and that without loss of life or sweetness. Her 
 purpose was avowedly to temper and reform indecorous or 
 unedifying old strains. This unpromising aim is often aptly 
 carried through, as in the verses entitled Eppie Macnab, of 
 which the old form contained, as Burns puts it, ' more wit 
 than decency,' but whose gay and rapid rhythm does not 
 disappear in Lady Nairne's hands. Her best pieces, however, 
 such as Caller Herrin* and The Land o' the Leal, are free from 
 any such experiment or its dangers. There is a heartfelt lilt 
 about them which carried them home at once to the people, 
 and the tune of the former, ' representing the chime of the bells 
 of the Tron Church,' lias always rung in their ears. The Laird 
 o' Cockpen, in its full form, ends with two daring and delightful 
 verses, out of key with the rest, added by Miss Terrier. Lady 
 Nairne's Jacobite songs like The Hundred Pipers, ' Will ye no 
 come back again ? ' and Charlie is my Darling, have established 
 themselves as classics of their kind, and must be among the 
 last good things written in the true loyal vein. In this writer,
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 131 
 
 as in Hogg and Scott, Jacobitism has become a tender and 
 passionate cult for a past cause rather than an active warfare, 
 and permits of an equally loyal acceptance of the house of 
 Hanover. In one piece, Ye 'II mount, Gudeman, there is a 
 trace of the old savagely humorous scorn of the conquered for 
 the conqueror ; the gudewife purposely scalds, under pretence 
 of bathing, the foot of the Jacobite gudeman, and prevents 
 him, just in time, from sallying forth to Culloden. Lady 
 Nairne has a surer note and a more various power than most 
 of the contemporaries of Scott or Burns. But John Skinner 1 
 with his Tullochgorum, and Muirhead, with his racy little idyll 
 of flyting, Bess the Oawkie, and Sir Alexander Boswell, 2 with 
 his Jenny's Bawbee and Jenny dang the Weaver may be men- 
 tioned, the rest 3 cannot be numbered. Perhaps the cradle song, 
 ' Baloo, baloo,' of Richard Gall, the friend of Campbell, should 
 be named for its lovely cadence. It must serve to single out 
 three more names, those of Hector MacNeill, 4 Tannahill, and 
 Allan Cunningham, from the throng, leaving James Hogg to 
 a later page (Ch. x.). 
 
 Scotland's Scaith (1795) has been named already, and it 
 may be regarded as a companion picture, or rather antidote 
 and contrast, to the earlier and also popular verses of Alexander 
 Wilson, the ' American ornithologist,' entitled Watty and Meg 
 (1792) a tale of a husband whose boon companions teach 
 him how to tame a scolding, intolerable wife. She breaks in 
 upon their carouse with a storm of abuse ; Watty goes home, 
 takes their counsel, and ' reforms ' his Maggie by the mere 
 threat of desertion, making the condition that she shall never 
 ' gloom ' again when he comes home late in the evening. ' One 
 hundred thousand copies,' it is said, of this ditty were sold 
 in a few weeks ; it is in good vernacular, with little hint 
 of rhetorical English. Hector MacNeill's counter-poem is a 
 curious rude mixture of such English with a kind of prosaic 
 Crabbe-like realism : 
 
 Brattling down the brae, and near its 
 
 Bottom, Will first marv'lling sees 
 ' Porter, Ale, and British Spirits ' 
 
 Painted bright between twa trees. 
 
 ' Godsake ! Tarn ! here 's walth for drinking ! 
 
 Wha can this newcomer be ? 
 ' Hout ! ' quo' Tarn, ' there 's droutli in thinking ; 
 
 Let 's in, Will, and syne we '11 see.' 
 
 In the sequel, The Waes o' War, the wrecked husband serves 
 as a soldier, loses a leg, but returns to find his family saved
 
 132 SCOTTISH LYRIC: 
 
 from the worst by the charity of the Duchess of Buccleuch. 
 Of the first piece it is written that fourteen editions sold within 
 one year. This alert appetite of a poor nation not only for 
 writing but for buying tolerable poetry is unheard of in the 
 south, where ballad and folk-song were as yet either slow to 
 reach the press, or reached it in a vulgarised shape. The 
 spirit of song was omnipresent in Scotland, like the Bible ; 
 and many of the chief favourites were also the best poetry. 
 This is well seen in the case of MacNeill himself, some of whose 
 rarer things, and not merely his more moral and conventional 
 pieces, were and remained popular. The sentiment of The 
 Wee Thing, or Mary of Castlecary, like its lingering anapaestic 
 tune, sounds more Irish than Scottish ; Mary, disguised as a 
 man, relates how she had met and kissed herself 
 
 Down by the burnie whar flowers the haw-tree ; 
 
 and when her lover, indignant, wishes to fight her, she throws 
 off bonnet and plaid, and all is well. In other verses, ' Come 
 under my plaidie,' ' Tak tent and be wary,' ' I lo'ed ne'er a 
 laddie but ane,' there is a stealing, happy, voluptuous rhythm, 
 and an immediate sense that the lines are made to be sung, 
 which at once carried them far on the lips of the people. 
 MacNeill aims at verbal sweetness, and quotes with approval 
 a critic who compared the Scots to Ionic Greek ; ' it delights 
 to throw out the consonants, to produce a concourse of 
 vowels, to soften the sound.' He thrice sifted and published 
 his poems in 1801, 1806, and 1812. 
 
 Allan Cunningham (1784-1842) differs from the rest of this 
 company, not only in date, but in being a capable man of 
 all work as well as a poet. He wrote vivid and competent 
 prose as well as verse, and in verse he used English and Scots 
 with equal familiarity. His English is often conventional, 
 but in a few poems, of which the best known is A Wet Sheet 
 and a Flowing Sea, he commands a style and rhythm that rise 
 far above Dibdin's to a level with almost the best of Campbell's. 
 In tho fragment, ' Gane were but the winter cauld,' there is a 
 deliberate simplicity which approaches artifice, but also an 
 extraordinary irregular charm : 
 
 Let nane tell my father, 
 
 Or my mither sae dear ; 
 I '11 meet them baith in heaven 
 
 At the spring o' the year. 
 
 In his Hame, Hame, Hame, in spite of the flecks of declamatory 
 phrase, the lines chant themselves irresistibly ; and here also
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 133 
 
 a cunning run of extra-metrical syllables, or else of mono- 
 syllabic feet, coming at the beginning of the line or midway 
 at the break, nobly justifies itself : 
 
 The green leaf o' loyalty 'a begun for to fa', 
 
 The bonny white rose it is withering and a' ; 
 
 But I '11 water 't wi' the blude of usurping tyrannic, 
 
 An' green it will grow in my ain countrie. 
 
 Hame, hame, hame, hame fain wad I be, 
 
 O hame, hame, hame to my ain countrie ! 
 
 Cunningham may be said to have commenced as poet with 
 his pastiches in the Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song 
 (1810), which he avowed later that he had palmed off on the 
 editor, Cromek, the rascally engraver, as popular originals. 
 They contain such ballads as The Young Maxwell, a spirited 
 mimicry of the folk-style ; sorrowful and cheerful songs (' A 
 weary body 's blythe whan the sun gangs down ') ; lively 
 humorous pieces, and Jacobite and other poems, of which the 
 two quoted above are examples. Cunningham supplied in 
 this form most of what Cromek published in the Remains. It 
 is impossible to say exactly what he really collected J from the 
 folk, or how he treated it. Later, when he produced some of 
 them under his own name, he anglicised and otherwise changed 
 a good deal ; the result can be seen in Sir Marmaduke Maxwell 
 (1822), a new dramatic piece, to which 'Twenty Scottish 
 Songs ' are added. Some of them meanwhile had found their 
 way into James Hogg's Jacobite Relics of Scotland (1822), and 
 Hogg is there disinclined to credit Cunningham with the 
 authorship, which had meantime been asserted or suggested. 
 A touch of delicate, not unpoetic affectation and imitation, 
 distinguishes the best of Cunningham's work from that of his 
 contemporaries. His editions of Songs of Scotland 2 (1825) and 
 of Burns, whilst useful, would have been more so had he not 
 played with the texts. He worked for most of his later life 
 as manager of the works in Chantrey's studio his original 
 trade was that of mason and in his leisure produced plays, 
 novels, and biographies. Of these little is remembered but 
 his Lives of Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects 
 (1829-33), which contain his most vigorous and useful prose; 
 and, perhaps, his Life of Wilkie. 
 
 Few lyrical poets of the north were more popular, in the 
 generation after Burns, than Robert Tannahill 3 (1774-1810), 
 the weaver of Paisley, another of the singers who by prefer- 
 ence wrote to music. He was himself versed in fife and pipo, 
 and was alive to the charm of gentle words and undulating
 
 134 SCOTTISH LYRIC : 
 
 syllables, with a quick feeling, above all, for the plaintiveness 
 of names. The titles of some of his best-loved pieces, Jessie 
 the Flower o' Dunblane, The Lass o' Arranteenie, The Braes o 
 Gleniffer, Loudouri's Bonnie Woods and Braes, attest, like the 
 verses themselves, this kind of sensibility, without which no 
 man can be more than half a poet. Tannahill wove not only 
 Paisley silk to his patterns, but his own words to Highland 
 and other tunes, M r orking in Scots, and less successfully (as 
 might be feared) in English. His English is often ordinary, 
 experimental, and too full of personifications ; it is best when 
 it is gently tinted with Scots. He wished his verse to be sung ; 
 and the story is that he found it ' the most delightful moment 
 of his life ' when he overheard a country girl chanting one of 
 his own lines : 
 
 We '11 meet beside the dusky glen, on some burn-side. 
 
 In his best poem, made to an old air, The Braes o' Balquhither, 
 Tannahill has won a true prosodic charm and joy : 
 
 Let us go, lassie, go 
 ' To the braes o' Balquhither, 
 Where the blaeberries grow 
 
 'Mang the bonnie Highland heather ; 
 Where the deer and the rae 
 
 Lightly bounding together 
 Sport the lang summer day 
 
 On the braes o' Balquhither. 
 
 His other vernacular works have a gaiety and tartness of their 
 own, and are varied enough, sometimes following and some- 
 times escaping from the patterns set by Burns, whose example, 
 we come to think, is as often oppressive as it is inspiring. 
 Tannahill made beast-fables, epistles, ordinary drink-songs, 
 and jaunty verse of sundry sorts. One such work, The Keb- 
 buckston Wedding, ' written to an ancient Highland air,' has a 
 kind of Ingoldsby fling in its motley rhythms and rhymes. 
 At other seasons he follows something like the metre and 
 manner of The Twa Dogs, but it is rather a kind of Scottish 
 Hudibrastic, as he himself terms it ; and in his Epistle ' to 
 J. B*ch*n*n ' he speaks aptly enough of his own habits of 
 writing : 
 
 But scrimpt o' time and lear scholastic 
 
 My lines limp on in Hudibraatic . . . 
 
 Till hope, grown sick, flings down her claim 
 
 And drops her dreams of future fame. 
 
 Yes, O waesuck ! should I be vaunty ? 
 
 My Muae is just a Rozinante,
 
 ROBERT BURNS AND OTHERS 135 
 
 She stammers forth with hilching canter, 
 Sagely intent on strange adventure, 
 Yet sao uncouth in garb and feature, 
 She seems the fool of literature. 
 
 Tannahill was a ' too quick despairer,' and hard upon him- 
 self ; it is a pity that he did not give rein to his spirits, and 
 play ' the fool of literature ' longer. He made an end of 
 himself at the age of thirty-five, after having burned many 
 of his works. His poems and songs had appeared in a volume 
 in 1807, and also occasionally in George Thomson's collection 
 of Musical Melodies. 
 
 As we stop and listen again to this whole forestful of 
 Scottish singers, Burns included, in sweet, voluble, confusing 
 chorus, and forget their separate and individual notes, we get 
 above all a sense of something impersonal, communal, and 
 inexhaustible. There is an astonishing range of tones, from 
 the pure and piercing to the fat, gross, and uproarious, and 
 from the pensive and gentle to the fierce and vindictive. And 
 yet it is all one voice ; the very falsetto, which plays its part 
 in the tumult, is distinctively Scottish, for it arises commonly 
 from the sudden juxtaposition of pseudo-poetic southern 
 ornamental language with a purer style, and the resulting 
 shock is unlike anything that can be caused by incongruities 
 of style within the same language. But on the whole this 
 element does not bulk large ; there is more discord than 
 falsetto the discord of suddenly-alternating moods of anger 
 and tenderness, ribaldry and pathos, which are not harmonised 
 by the Scottish muse any more than in the Scottish nature ; 
 but the result is all the more typical and expressive. The 
 mixture of fun, satire, and the dreadful in Burns's Address 
 to the Deil is not a harmony ; it is a discord, and all the better 
 and righter for that. There is none of that English passion 
 for consistency, for a slowly unified intellectual point of view, 
 which we find in so many of our poets ; in Wordsworth, for 
 example, and more unexpectedly in Keats and Shelley. The 
 northern poet has no consistency : he is a pipe on which many 
 airs are sounded ; he is, despite all the prudence, self-control, 
 and other virtues imputed to his race, a creature of mood and 
 the hour, and therefore the better singer. Hence we are not 
 to look for long concerted compositions, like the Odes of the 
 Lake poets, or the Hellenics of Landor. The Jolly Beggars is 
 perhaps the nearest thing we can find to a carefully composed 
 long work of art in the vernacular, but its components are 
 themselves of a kind that proves the rule.
 
 136 SCOTTISH LYRIC 
 
 The Italian medley (see Ch. xvii.) did not flourish only in 
 the south of England. Once at least it was grafted on a 
 Scottish stock and bore pleasant fruit. Some years before 
 the publication of Frere's Whistlecraft, William Tennant, the 
 lame and learned schoolmaster of Anstruther Easter in Fife, 
 produced his Anster Fair (1812), in six cantos, celebrating 
 the magic courtship, by Rob the Ranter, of Maggie Lauder, 1 
 the heroine of the old native popular ditty. This little elfish 
 tale is excellently shaped and told. The scene is laid in the 
 time of James v., who presides over the festivities ; Puck and 
 his dame have been imprisoned severally in a mustard-pot 
 and a pepper-box by Michael Scot the wizard, against the 
 time when the fairest of Scottish maids shall wed the supplest 
 of Scottish men. Inspired by these ' ouphes,' Maggie appoints 
 a day of sports, the winner whereof is to gain her hand, whilst 
 Rob arms himself with enchantments and carries off the prize 
 in a donkey race, a sack race, and lastly, in tale-telling that 
 is all. The personages and humours of Fife, with a sprinkling 
 of the dialect, are served up with lively skill and mock-heroic 
 expansiveness. Tennant gives the taste of peasant talk, and 
 a picture of the peasant mind, broadly enough ; the thick 
 odours of the soil are not smothered by too much literature. 
 The poetic turn, which Burns gives to his rankest and most 
 ribald snatches, is attained by Tennant sometimes ; and at other 
 times there is a true interfusion of homely and vivid things 
 with a rarer spirit : 
 
 So on she rode in virgin majesty, 
 
 Charming the thin dead air to kiss her lips, 
 And with the light and grandeur of her eye 
 
 Shaming the proud sun into dim eclipse ; 
 While, round her presence clust'ring far and nigh, 
 
 On horseback some, with silver spurs and whips, 
 And some afoot with shoes of dazzling buckles, 
 Attended knights, and lairds, and clowns with horny knuckles. 
 
 As will be seen, ' the stanza of Fairfax ' namely the octave 
 ' is here shut with the alexandrine of Spenser, that its close 
 may be more full and sounding ' ; a variation that is happily 
 enough carried through. Tennaut became a professor of 
 Eastern languages, producing The Thane of Fife (1822) and 
 other pieces ; but Anster Fair, often since reprinted, alone 
 survives : there is a wild fling or dance in it as of villagers 
 maddened by the fairies.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 I. Seeming isolation of Blake ; his scanty debt to contemporaries. First 
 period, 1783-91, first lyrics and earliest unrhymed lays. Second period, 
 1792-6, mythic and prophetic lays, and Songs of Experience. Third period, 
 1797-1804 and later ; darker prophetic lays, and Everlasting Gospel, etc. Felp- 
 ham, 1801-3. Last period, to 1827, prose works, late lyrics ; Blake chiefly 
 now a designer. 
 
 II. Nature of Blake's ' vision ' ; its threefold effect, on his theories, on 
 his imagery, and on his workmanship. Poetical Sketches ; literary models, 
 Elizabethan and other ; signs of original style. Songs of Innocence and Book 
 of Thel ; conception of childhood ; latent sense of strife ; mood of these 
 poems. 
 
 III. Mythic lays : prose Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and ideas there set 
 forth ; individualism of Blake, and its connection with his gospel ; relation to 
 the critical age. Fabric, personages, nomenclature of the lays. Visions of the 
 Daughters of Albion, America, Europe, Urizen, Ahania, Book of Los, Song of Los. 
 
 FV. Some influences shaping these poems : Milton and Paradise Lost ; the 
 Bible ; Macpherson's Ossian. Metres possibly traceable to Macpherson's 
 prose : (1) the seven-beat line ; its powers ; (2) the three-beat line. Examples. 
 
 V. Songs of Experience, their relationship to Songs of Innocence. Other 
 metaphysical lyrics ; use of technical terms. The Mental Traveller. Auguries 
 of Innocence. The Everlasting Gospel, its ethics. 
 
 VI. Later prophetic works: The Four Zoas (Vala) ; Jerusalem; Milton. 
 General character; reference to chosen passages. Increasing dryness and 
 darkness of symbolism. Lawless ' Gothic.' 
 
 VII. Prose : Vision of the Last Judgment ; Descriptive Catalogue, and 
 Canterbury Pilgrimage. Blake's lack of contemporary influence. Mention 
 of him by Southey, Wordsworth, Landor, Coleridge, Lamb, Crabb Robinson. 
 Solitary in his age, yet essentially connected with it. His position among 
 poets. 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 1 (1757-1827), that great reporter of visions, 
 whose work and life remain to fortify the artist, seems at first 
 *ight to have sprung from nothing ; to be a dreamer without 
 a pedigree, a Melchisedec, an example of the self-originating 
 energy of genius, and an alien to the thought and poetry around 
 him. Reason is the Devil to William Blake ; the world of 
 appearances, which science has to analyse, he disowns ; to 
 doubt and dissect is to extinguish the sun and moon. Blake 
 is the living negation of negations. The corresponding kinds 
 
 137
 
 138 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 of art, distinctive of the eighteenth century, are to him no 
 art at all, whether they be photographic and realistic like the 
 Epistle to Arbuihnot, or logical and abstract like the Essay on 
 Man. Crabbe's motto, ' nudity of description, actuality of 
 relation, and poetry without an atmosphere,' well expresses 
 what Blake hates and avoids. He has not, like Cowper, to 
 break away from the classical manner and attitude ; it has 
 no hold on him at any time after his boyhood ; and even then 
 he uses it but for a moment, to proclaim the dearth of poetry : 
 
 The languid strings do scarcely move, 
 The sound is forced, the notes are few. 
 
 The designs that Blake made to the verse of Blair and Young, 
 to Ambrose Phillips or to Hayley, are merely occasioned, 
 not inspired, by the texts. His poetical vices are not those 
 of his day. He owes nothing, or nothing permanent, to the 
 forerunners of the new poetry, to Thomson or Gray or Collins ; 
 a good deal, as will appear, to Macpherson ; something to 
 the hymnodists ; but, to his own poetic contemporaries, 
 nothing. He is far away from Burns, and has an outlook 
 into the infinite that is foreign to Burns, whose excellence 
 it is to represent real life with antique clearness, liveliness, 
 and beauty. 
 
 Unnoticed, he was sooner in the field than Burns. In 1783 
 Poetical Sketches was privately printed. It was in ordinary 
 type ; but all the other poems that Blake issued, except The 
 French Revolution, appeared in his own form of ' illuminated 
 printing.' Thus none of his verse came fairly before the 
 world in his lifetime ; each copy of each poem was in the 
 nature of a separate work of art. He made the words and 
 designs, engraved them by an original process, and often 
 coloured the copies, on the top of the tint in which they were 
 printed, by hand ; the issues were therefore very limited. 
 The harmony and variety of Blake's gifts, together with the 
 uncharted course of thought that he steered, and the unearth- 
 liness of the land that his mind came to inhabit, explain his 
 want of immediate influence and the slow growth of his name. 
 
 At first his work was chiefly lyrical, and the symbolic in- 
 gredient little seen. From 1783 to 1791 he produced, besides 
 Poetical Sketches, his Songs of Innocence (1789), and three 
 mythic narratives in long unrhymed lines : namely Tiriel, 
 which remained unpublished; The Book of Thel (1789); and 
 The French Revolution (1791), of which one printed copy has 
 at last been found. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790),
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 139 
 
 which is mostly in prose, contains some of Blake's fundamental 
 doctrine. The years 1791-5 mark his maturity as a poetic 
 artist. The lyric impulse still prevails, but is more and 
 more enlisted in the service of symbol. Songs of Experience 
 (1794) are not merely pendants or palinodes to Songs of Inno- 
 cence ; they introduce a new order of ideas, being hatched 
 from the same nest as the mythic lays of the same period 
 and often inscrutable without reference to them. Visions of 
 the Daughters of Albion (1793), America, a Prophecy (1793), 
 Europe, a Prophecy (1794), The First Book of Urizen (1794), 
 The Book of Ahania (1795), The Song of Los and The Book of 
 Los (also 1795), are sometimes known collectively as the 
 earlier ' prophetic ' works. In conception and purport, though 
 not altogether in metre and diction, they differ from Thel and 
 TirieL They form a noble body of mythic verse, cast in a 
 mould that had no precedent, and containing a set of incidents 
 and personages more or less in common. Their poetical fresh- 
 ness, greatness and imperfection, are at once apparent. They 
 are not easily thought of apart from their designs, and Blake's 
 portentous gift as a draughtsman was mainly shown, up to 
 1797, in the illustration of his own texts. He was soon to 
 do his drawings, over five hundred in number, to Young's 
 Night Thoughts. These came out in 1797, the first of the 
 long series of inventions that culminate in those to the Book 
 of Job (1826), and to Dante (c. 1826). 
 
 During seven years (1797-1804) Blake proceeded to elaborate 
 his symbolic system, or no-system, into greater perplexity. 
 The Four Zoas, originally entitled Vala and begun about 
 1794, was much worked over and altered, and in the end left 
 in manuscript. It served in some measure as a quarry for 
 the two long ' Prophecies ' Jerusalem and Milton (from 1804). 
 These were begun during the years 1801-3, when Blake stayed 
 at Felpham l under the auspices of William Hayley the most 
 exalted, illuminated, and fruitful period, as he judged, of his 
 inner and visionary life. The songs that occur in his letters 
 to his friend Butts are the most wonderful of poetic diaries. 
 After 1804 he laboured at these ' Prophetic ' works, and also, 
 after 1810, at that great fighting lyric The Everlasting Gospel. 
 In the course of these last twenty -three years, Blake also wrote 
 some brief but signally noble and eloquent compositions in 
 prose. Only one, the Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, includ- 
 ing the criticism on the Canterbury Pilgrims, was published 
 (1804). The Catalogue 'for the year 1810' and the so-called 
 Public Address did not appear in his lifetime. He gave him-
 
 140 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 self more and more to design, and in his own day was best 
 known and esteemed as an illustrator. Like Michelangelo 
 and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he can only be fully judged by 
 minds that are equally awake to fine art and to literature. 
 He is here considered as a man of letters. But it may be said 
 that there is no disaccord either between his designs and his 
 writings, or between his character and his art. He had the 
 happiness of unreserved and sincere, though not always of 
 lucid, self-expression. In his letters, his recorded talk, his 
 printed prose, his verse, his drawings and paintings, every- 
 thing is mirrored : his indignant and tender habit of soul, 
 sometimes childlike, sometimes grotesque, but essentially 
 noble ; his intuitive, prophetic way of thought, with its incon- 
 sequence, its hit-or-miss quality, its frequent and triumphant 
 insight ; his natural dualism, which led him to array all the 
 forces, persons, and ideas in the world in one or other of two 
 opposing camps ; and his regardless self-sufficing courage, 
 bodily, intellectual, and moral. The truth of the old Greek 
 psychology, which views pity and terror as feelings near akin, 
 and the artist as playing upon them both together, is well 
 justified in Blake, in whose work, as with a kind of natural 
 rhythm, alternate the ' terrific numbers ' and the ' mild and 
 gentle numbers.' 
 
 II 
 
 Blake's idiosyncrasy, his faculty of ' vision,' lies behind all 
 his creations ; it affected his ideas and opinions and bears 
 on the incidental question of his sanity. Nothing is better 
 known about him than that he saw, when a child, angels walk- 
 ing among the haymakers, and afterwards, in the fields at 
 Felpham, grey shadows, luminous and majestic ; that the 
 kings of England sat to him for their pictures, and that two 
 of the major prophets once dined with him. But he dis- 
 tinguished these sights, and the accompanying voices, from 
 those of what we call the external world, declaring at the 
 same time that this latter was mirage, and the visions the 
 reality. Further descriptions must be left to the professional 
 psychologists ; but so long as the distinction is maintained 
 between the two worlds that of ordinary phenomena, and 
 that of the visions which are externalised, or locally referred 
 to the same world, but are not confounded with its contents 
 so long there can hardly be said, in strictness, to be any 
 delusion. Blake could have bargained with the haymakers, 
 and painted the angels, without any bewilderment. His
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 141 
 
 reading of Swedenborg l may have quickened this faculty and 
 coloured its deliverances ; but he did not cultivate trances, 
 nor again did he try to shape and control his visions ; he let 
 them come and go, and recorded them in words or lines as 
 might best serve. The paradox did not trouble him, that 
 only the despised message of the senses could, in the last 
 resort, furnish him with the shapes, colours, and sounds con- 
 nected with his apparitions ; and about this paradox we too 
 may be at peace, being concerned only with the poetic results. 
 The whole world of nature, its creatures and phenomena, 
 come before his inner eye in a kind of glory, with new gestures, 
 new robes and colours, and thus clothed in the interest of a 
 moral or spiritual, or a polemical meaning ; and soon it is 
 also tenanted by endless elemental figures, embodiments of 
 this meaning and couriers of his thought, in human shapes 
 that have become angelic or monstrous ; all seen 2 ; and these, 
 again, dwell in countries, each with its own provinces, into which 
 space is mapped and quartered, and which are likewise seen. 
 
 The effects of this master-faculty on Blake's art and think- 
 ing are manifold. It shapes his view of the imagination, 
 which he holds to be (together with feeling) the sole source of 
 vital truth ; and hence arises his whole theory of art, which 
 inspires his greatest prose, and is the earliest and most shatter- 
 ing blast sounded against the canons of the time. Further, 
 his vision is anthropomorphic, and the dramatis persona in 
 his poems have the character of imaginary portraits, as in 
 the pictures accompanying : 
 
 Think of a white cloud 3 as being holy, you cannot love it ; but 
 think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs in your thought ; 
 for to think of holiness as distinct from man is impossible to the affec- 
 tions : thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot. 
 
 Thirdly, it is vision that gives to Blake's imagery that 
 ' sharp and wiry bounding line,' which he tells us is ' the great 
 golden rule of art as well as of life,' and which is really its 
 characteristic, coupled with the phantasmal remoteness that 
 is never far off even in his familiar style. He makes us see 
 designs to his words, even when he does not draw them : 
 
 Joys upon our branches sit, 
 Chirping loud and singing sweet. 
 
 These lines from a youthful poem tell us that the whole 
 shadow-show of personifications, so bitterly to be criticised 
 by Wordsworth, is doomed to death, if indeed it has ever 
 lived. We watch the * joys ' in their actual shapes, infantine
 
 142 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 or birdlike. But lastly, Blake's power of evocation did him 
 harm, because he often respected his visions too much either 
 to correct their drawing or their utterances. Moses would not 
 have edited the Commandments ; Blake would not reconsider 
 any ugly drivel about ' Kox ' or ' Kotope,' thinking it was 
 dictated by voices divine. A tale told by a living critic l goes 
 to the root of this matter : 
 
 I was once showing Rodin some facsimiles of Blake's drawings, 
 and, telling him about Blake, I said : ' He used to literally see these 
 figures ; they are not mere inventions.' ' Yes,' said Rodin, ' he 
 saw them once ; he should have seen them three or four times.' 
 There, it seems to me, is the fundamental truth about the art of 
 Blake ; it is a record of vision which has not been thoroughly 
 mastered even as vision. 
 
 The same is true of his writing, at least in its later stages : 
 it is full of vision that is not fully mastered even as vision, 
 and of a message that is not fully mastered even as a message. 
 In the lyrics and the earlier mythic works, both the vision and 
 the message are much more distinct and beautiful. Indeed, 
 the presence or absence of vision helps us to distinguish the 
 early experiments where he models, however admirably, upon 
 his reading, from those in which he speaks for himself. ' My 
 silks and fine array,' in Poetical Sketches, is a Jacobean song, 
 so perfectly done as to suggest the transmigration into Blake 
 of some old writer's soul. But it has not his phantom touch ; 
 the ' axe and spade ' are not seen, but remembered from Shake- 
 speare, as Beddoes or Lamb might have remembered them. 
 ' Love's all-worship'd tomb ' is not seen, but musically thought 
 of. It is otherwise in the Mad Song : 
 
 Like a fiend in a cloud 
 With howling woe 
 After night I do crowd, 
 And with night will go. 
 
 It is an accident that this is a verse and not a drawing. 
 Amidst much in Poetical Sketches that is boyish studio-work, 
 we often come on such true recoveries of a long-dead style, 
 as recall the piercing lyrics of the old dramatists. Wonderful 
 as these echoes are for the year 1783, or for any date, Blake 
 did not farther pursue the manner of seventeenth-century 
 song ; nor that of Spenser ; nor that of Shakespeare's early 
 plays, which he caught, in King Edward the Third, with much 
 spirit and gusto, and only occasionally recalled, much later, in 
 his Jerusalem ; nor, again, that of the ballad, a kind of verse
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 143 
 
 to which he pays his tribute in Qwin, King of Norway. Twice 
 afterwards, it is true, in that ' glorified street-ballad ' William 
 Bond, and in the ditty in Jerusalem, ' I was a monk of Charle- 
 maine,' the same sound is heard. The slow sonority of the 
 school of Gray is present in the famed lines of lingering regret 
 for the decrepitude of English poetry. On the other hand, 
 Blake's personal and mature style is often anticipated in 
 Poetical Sketches : 
 
 I turn my back to the east, 
 
 From whence comforts have increased ; 
 
 For light doth seize my brain 
 
 With frantic pain. 
 
 That is the note of Songs of Experience. And the crude and 
 botched beginnings of his ' prophetic ' diction, and even of its 
 distinguishing metre, are evident in prose tirades like Samson 
 and The Couch of Death, while there are lines that might come 
 from America or the Four Zoas : 
 
 yet may Albion smile again and stretch her peaceful arms. 
 
 So, too, ' I love the jocund dance ' is a ' song of innocence ' ; 
 and that sharp dualism of contrasting tones and moods on 
 which Blake's art was always to revolve, presenting in alterna- 
 tion the beauty of joy and tenderness, and of wrath or sorrow 
 the happy, and the ' furious face of things,' in Sir Thomas 
 Browne's phrase is seen, even thus early, to be inherent. 
 
 Childhood, in our eighteenth-century literature, had been 
 treated conventionally, or given over to the pedagogues. 
 Songs of Innocence celebrate it as a state, or type, of unf alien 
 mortality, with only passing shadows cast upon its sports and 
 pleasures ; and yet so strict is the insistence on gentle and 
 happy themes, that we feel the harsher voice of adult know- 
 ledge or doubt to be in Blake's ears all the while ; and this is 
 uttered in The Voice of the Ancient Bard, 1 which may be placed 
 in either series of Songs. It also speaks suddenly at the end 
 of the contemporary Book of Thel, where it calls to Thel from 
 ' her own grave-plot,' and inquires, without giving any answer, 
 into the significance of man's mature senses, with all their 
 snares and discords. Into this place underground Thel has 
 wandered from a land of innocence, in which she wailed her 
 own weariness ; and where, questioning lily and clod as to 
 the mystery of their common caducity, she has learned a 
 gospel peaceful and Christian enough, but inadequate to solve 
 the discords of life ; the gospel, indeed, of the Songs of Inno-
 
 144 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 cence themselves. It is plain that Blake is not setting himself, 
 in works like A Cradle Song and The Lamb, to versify a world 
 of false pretty pastoral that breaks at the touch of life ; for, 
 in his conception, innocence is the final and not only the 
 primitive estate of man, although the soul lapses meanwhile 
 and the great wars of experience intervene. It is the dream 
 of Isaiah who saw ' Mercy, Pity, and Peace ' enthroned and 
 was thought to have foreseen the reign of Christ ; and it is 
 renewed by the idealist and revolutionary movement of Blake's 
 time, though he translates it into art and not into programmes : 
 
 For Mercy has a human heart, 
 Pity a human face, 
 And Love, the human form divine, 
 And Peace, the human dress. 
 
 These ethics always remain essential in Blake's creed of 
 the regeneration of man, though he comes to think of this 
 event rather in its intellectual aspect, as ' an overwhelming 
 of bad art and science.' In such an infantine state of trust 
 there are no problems ; the animals are chosen for their posses- 
 sion of the Christian virtues ; the lion's ruddy eyes ' flow with 
 tears of gold,' and the tiger is not yet made. To the little 
 boy lost God appears, 'like his father, in white.' It is poetry 
 rooted in the simplest pious sentiment, and seems to be not 
 a little influenced by traditional hymnody : 
 
 He doth give his joy to all ; 
 He becomes an infant small ; 
 He becomes a man of woe ; 
 He doth feel the sorrow too. 
 
 As critics have remarked, the tune here and elsewhere may 
 be distantly suggested by Watts's Divine Songs for the Use of 
 Children (1720). The hymns, however, of Watts and Wesley often 
 have no style at all, but only an excellent rhythm and senti- 
 ment, which are enough for the worshipper ; while Songs of 
 Innocence have an irregular, inexplicable, and simple lightness 
 of style. The touches of rarer colour and transfiguring diction 
 answer to the bolder flourishes that break out amidst the 
 soft spray- work of the margins. Holy Thursday, with its 
 echo of Sternhold and Hopkins, is a masterpiece in the familiar- 
 splendid. The Chimney-Sweeper, in its glory of doggerel, is like 
 a broadsheet gone to heaven. And often a single phrase, 
 like ' happy, silent, moony beams,' or a couplet, 
 
 Once a dream did weave a shade 
 O'er my angel-guarded bed.
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 145 
 
 actually recovers for us those dumb sensations of imaginative 
 childhood, that Wordsworth describes in his great Ode. 
 
 Go down some poor but not stricken ghetto on a morning of 
 unexpected sunshine, that glorifies the dirt and the sweepers 
 and sets the children dancing to the hurdy-gurdies. A woman 
 swings an infant in her arms and talks to it ; old men sun 
 themselves at entries, and the sparrows almost perch upon 
 them. They might be in the meadows, or under the ' old 
 oak.' The eye ignores the squalor, and only fixes on the 
 ideal gestures, the sweep of a young bare arm or the curve of 
 a mob issuing from the school-gates. Why should not the 
 world be good after all ? If we were only Blake, we could 
 ' trap the moment,' and engrave another song of innocence. 
 It was all true while it lasted, and it may even come back. 
 Such a place at night, in its more obvious aspects, might 
 inspire the second Holy Thursday, or the sombre London 
 those Songs of Experience, which reflect an adult, or rather 
 adolescent, dismay at social wrongs and evils. But this 
 later series is divided from the first by five fruitful years, 
 and must be studied along with the other works, larger in 
 scope and much more disconcerting in form, that Blake had 
 meanwhile begun. 
 
 in 
 
 Some of the ideas that shape the fabric and the action of 
 these parabolic lays The Daughters of Albion and its successors 
 can be seen in prose form in The Marriage of Heaven and 
 Hell. This book is only a starting-point ; its ideas are further 
 developed, through the play of symbol, in the poems them- 
 selves ; but it is Blake's clearest confession of faith before 
 1800, and the place it holds in his work is not unlike that of 
 Thus spake Zarathustra in Nietzsche's. Nothing more is here 
 attempted than barely to name some of his tenets. A patient 
 and scientific marshalling of the texts will probably reveal 
 that his peculiar terminology, in the case both of abstract 
 terms and of proper names, has more consistency and mean- 
 ing than has yet been established ; but also, that the artistic 
 worth of the poems in question, already seen to be great, 
 will not appear much greater. However that may be, they 
 are unique in their method of presenting ideas ; it is not 
 Wordsworth's method, or Shelley's, or Spenser's ; though in 
 some ways, regarded as polemical epics or semi-dramas, they 
 are nearest to Shelley ; and in his ultimate hope and expecta- 
 tion for mankind Blake obviously approaches Shelle}'. But 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 146 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 some of his fundamental ideas and all his poetic machinery 
 are different. 
 
 He holds, then, that truth is given in vision, neither by 
 the mere report of the five senses, nor yet by logical reason- 
 ing. As for the senses, they have a qualified kind of veracity : 
 
 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is a 
 portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul 
 in this age. ... If the doors of perception were cleansed, every- 
 thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. 
 
 This last sentence was uttered to Blake by the prophet 
 Ezekiel. Here sense is contrasted, as inferior, with soul or 
 spirit, but it is still a better avenue to truth than any process 
 of inference. Science and consecutive argument are foreign 
 to Blake, and he raises his hatred of them into a dogma. He 
 vindicates the claims of intuition against the whole temper 
 and method of the rationalistic age. Art, therefore, is not 
 that mere copying of outward phenomena, which is only for 
 the stage of apprenticeship. 1 It copies images that are given 
 to the inner eye, tjiough^they may be seen as external. They 
 are more vivid and real than the messages of sense. Blake, 
 in 1800, thinks of them as reminiscences from an eternal 
 region : 
 
 In my brain are studies and chambers full of books and pictures 
 of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my 
 mortal life, and those works are the delight and study of archangels. 
 
 But in The Marriage, of Heaven and Hell Blake is mostly 
 concerned with applying his artistic creed to ethics and society. 
 Here he is a child of the age of reason, with its revolutionary 
 hopes and dreams. But he does not reason, for he has only 
 two forms of words in which to present truth. One of these 
 is aphorism, the other is symbol. Both forms are used in 
 this work, so explosively charged with the energy that it 
 celebrates. The gospel that emerges is that of power, of affirma- 
 tion, and of happiness due to satisfied desire. The historic 
 creeds, or ' bibles,' we hear, taught that energy, as coming 
 from the body, is the essential evil ; the contrary is true. 
 Blake's individualism, whilst inborn, was probably encouraged 
 to take this dogmatic shape by his association with Paine, 
 the Wollstonecrafts and their circle, from whom he learned 
 some of the immigrant revolutionary doctrines. The aphor- 
 istic form ho may have derived from the pretentious maxims 
 of Lavater. but it suggests rather the Book of Proverbs. On
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 147 
 
 the ethical side, his verse and prose are filled with bold vindi- 
 cations of natural pleasure. Burns, whilst nearer to common 
 humanity at many points, is subject to rueful, white-sheet, 
 next-morning fits of penitence, the result of a want of real love 
 or passion and of his maltreatment of natural instincts. Blake 
 treats these instincts loftily, and never fails in passion. Such 
 a gospel of delight and power might seem to suit ill with his 
 other strain of gentleness and pity, which he draws straight 
 from the New Testament. But both moods are part of his 
 belief in the inborn goodness of man and woman, when let 
 alone by laws, priests, and authorities. Humanity, in its 
 unfallen, ideal and ultimate condition, does not know this 
 contradiction ; nor indeed is there any between joy or energy 
 and pity or tenderness. 
 
 Blake derided Rousseau, in the same breath as Voltaire, as 
 a mocker, and cannot have comprehended him ; but Rousseau's 
 ' state of nature ' had become a current idea, and probably 
 reinforces the memories of the Hebrew Paradise in Blake's 
 picture of the early innocence of mankind. And the general 
 notion of the ' enlightenment,' a notion in which Rousseau 
 and the negative critical spirits concur, though they approach 
 it, on different sides, namely, that man's state of bondage, 
 weakness and misery is due to the vast oppressive institutions, 
 which in a state of delusion he has built up for himself ; this 
 notion is taken over by Blake wholesale, and supplies a second 
 source for his symbolic imagery. His antitheology rests upon 
 it, as well as his antinomianism. Only here, by a sudden turn, 
 his psychology intervenes, and the enemy, the tyrant Urizen, 
 is represented as Reason, whom we might have expected to 
 find in the guise of a liberator. 
 
 Blake reviles the five senses and also the logical reason. 
 This mixture is not so inconsistent as it seems, for the 
 destructive reason had really, in certain schools, led to 
 a crude sorb of sensualism and materialism, and Blake, in 
 his own way, proclaims the revolt against such conclu- 
 sions. His dislike of ' science ' may be childish, and his 
 dislike of the world of sense-imagery on which he really 
 drew, ungrateful, but he is not childish at all in the alter- 
 natives, the preferences, that these dislikes involve. And 
 what, then, are they ? What is left, 1 if sense and reason are 
 disallowed ? With Blake, the imagination and the heart are 
 left ; vision and love ; the sights and voices of the inner sense 
 (which he calls imagination) ; and, on the other side, the 
 reconciliation of man with his fellows, through mercy and
 
 148 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 pity, and therewith his recovery of his place in eternity. Only 
 in the light of this view can be understood his strident pro- 
 clamation of personal freedom, of the wickedness of restrictive 
 law, and of the uncurbed rights of desire. Where all is love, 
 no law is wanted. But Blake converted this truth into the 
 fallacy that the absence of law must lead to the reign of love. 
 No one need trouble to argue against him ; indeed it is almost 
 absurd to play the schoolman at all with Blake, with his 
 assertive, Hebraic, intuitive soul. He stands to be judged 
 by the artistic perfection that he has given to his best and 
 richest ideas ; and this test he stands a hundred times over. 
 The second of his letters to Butts, 
 
 And the voice faded mild ; 
 I remain'd as a child ; 
 All I ever had known 
 Before me bright shone ; 
 
 and A Cradle Song, and the passage on the nightingale in the 
 second book of Milton, and the chant of Nature at the end of 
 The Four Zoas, reveal his dream : 
 
 The lions ... in evening sport upon the plains ; 
 
 They raise their faces from the earth, conversing with the man ; . . . 
 
 ' How is it that all things are changed, even as in ancient time ? ' 
 
 The sun arises from his dewy bed, and the fresh airs 
 
 Play in his smiling beams, giving the seeds of life to grow, 
 
 And the fresh earth beams forth ten thousand thousand springs of life : 
 
 This vision of the new earth, where all things living are at 
 peace, is Blake's religion. After all, two things, perhaps the 
 only two things, that are certain are beauty, and goodness 
 or love. However each of them arose, and however they be 
 analysed, and in whatever instances (unrecognised by Blake) 
 their calls may conflict, and in spite of the doubts and problems 
 that arise within the sphere of each of them, there they are ; 
 and in nine cases out of ten they involve no problems and 
 speak for themselves. This is enough to work upon. The 
 artist gives expression to both ; primarily to beauty, and also 
 to goodness so far as it can be presented under the law of 
 beauty. The great religious founder gives expression to both, 
 primarily to goodness, but also to beauty, since he too becomes 
 a kind of artist in his expression of the law of goodness or love. 
 Operate on Blake ; cut away from him all his paradox, all 
 his confusions, all that is cracked and distorted in his think- 
 ing, all that is inad or disorganised in his execution, and 
 there still remain his perfect presentations of love and beaut) . 
 This is why he is a great man, and why we return to him.
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 149 
 
 But he is a poet not only of these large simple things, that 
 are self-evident once they are said or painted, but of the 
 disharmonies of man's present life and nature. Good explains 
 itself, but evil does not explain itself. This may be why 
 Christ spoke, in comparison, so little of evil, and left that 
 business to divines. Blake has an amazing intuition of evil 
 and disharmony ; he has an endless flood of imagery, also of 
 rhetoric, when talking of it ; some of his personifications and 
 pictures of it Urizen, A Poison Tree, the lines in Auguries 
 of Innocence : 
 
 The harlot's cry from street to street 
 Shall weave old England's winding-sheet. 
 The winner's shout, the loser's curse, 
 Dance before dead England's hearse : 
 
 these, in their different styles, are beyond praise. But in such 
 a region Blake, both as thinker and artist, is much harder to 
 follow, and is less to be trusted, than when he is celebrating 
 love and beauty. His antipathies are far more confused, and 
 his form correspondingly more complex, obscure, and fallible. 
 In habit of mind he is Manichsean ; for the kind of instinctive 
 dualism, which ranges all men and things under the banner 
 of two conflicting principles, one good and one evil, is a matter 
 of temperament ; theories and systems are made afterwards 
 to satisfy the instinct. Blake is under the necessity of this 
 kind of dualism. It is natural to every fighter, but is intensified 
 in his case by the cast of his imagination, which delighted in 
 marshalling two great elemental hosts at war in eternity, 
 dividing them into endless regiments, and making these elements 
 symbolic of everything he loved and hated in human history. 
 The misfortune is that the world is really divided not into two 
 camps, but into two thousand. But of history Blake knew 
 nothing ; on his negative side, he springs from the movement 
 that made a clean sweep of its instruction. His combat 
 answers to no real series of events in the growth of the human 
 spirit, which has undergone a gradual evolution, in spite of 
 the immense arrests, recessions and lapses, that to judge by 
 all precedent are sure to recur. There may again be a long 
 night with a few stars : ' dark ages,' illuminated by some 
 exceptional souls. Thus Blake's drama, though noble and 
 poetic, is purely an ideal one. 
 
 Many have tried, with some success, to clear the jungle of 
 technical terms in which Blake embodies his cosmogony, his 
 moral code, his picture of mankind, and his eschatology. But 
 the lexicon of his symbolism is still to seek. His dialect has
 
 150 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 to be classified and analysed, in order to show how far his use 
 of each term is fixed and consistent and in this path some 
 progress is likely and how far it varies, bifurcates, or trespasses 
 on his usage of other terms. No effort is made here to sum 
 up what is already known or surmised, much less to explore 
 further. Such a task would involve a long chapter, or a book. 
 One class of such words is taken from common speech, though 
 the meaning is altered and even reversed. ' Spectre,' ' emana- 
 tion,' ' vegetable,' ' sex,' ' state,' ' angel,' ' devil,' ' the Eternals,' 
 are but a few examples. Another class is personal ; the names 
 presently to be mentioned from the Prophetic books are but 
 a handful of the whole. These, as to origin, may be Ossianic, 
 or Biblical, or purely fantastic (like De Quincey's Gombroon 
 or the inventions of the little boy Malkin l ) ; or historic, like 
 ' Jerusalem ' and ' Milton ' and ' Albion,' used in a non-natural 
 sense ; or real persons turned phantasmagoric, like the grotesque 
 ' Kox ' and ' Schofeld.' The poetic effect is often disastrous ; 
 but one remark may be made, to show that Blake had some 
 traits of the divines whom he despised. 
 
 We are reminded at once of the part that ' wit ' and ' will ' 
 play in the verse of Donne and his followers, or ' grace ' and 
 ' justify ' in evangelical hymns. Now, if such words are not 
 to lower the pulse of the poetry, it must be because they are 
 blows as well as words. They come charged with violent and 
 deep historical passions ; they reverberate. Their broad 
 sense is familiar ; the emotions they have kindled are still more 
 so. But Blake had to create his own associations ; he had 
 to force his terms, above all, into lyrical utterance, making 
 us forget any natural sense they may possess, and bringing 
 us to share his own passion. The daring with which he faces 
 this obstacle is sometimes triumphant, but the hope is on the 
 whole forlorn. It is here that he falls away from art, though 
 it is also here that it is capable of wonders. In one of his 
 ' intellectual battles,' the ' spectre,' or discursive reason of 
 man and his ' emanation,' or faculty of spiritual enlighten- 
 ment, are evilly sundered. The spectre refuses all appeals for 
 mercy, and this abstruse topic rises to a fiery hymn : 
 
 Never, never I return ; 
 Still for victory I burn. 
 Living, thee alone I '11 have, 
 And when dead I '11 be thy grave. 
 
 Those who have lived at all with what are called religious 
 people will remember how often they make a kind of mosaic
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 151 
 
 of devout terminology and familiar speech, using the names 
 of the divinities, or the keywords of their special creed, as a 
 kind of amulet or token, just as another kind of devotee might 
 finger his beads half-consciously. They may refer to Lord 
 Beaconsfield or Bismarck, without ado, as ' Antichrist.' This 
 is just like Blake. He gives nicknames to Time, Space, Jehovah, 
 Reason or Passion, and forgets to explain. In most of his 
 letters this dialect is used quite naturally. ' Vegetated ' and 
 'eternity,' in the following, are words with special connota- 
 tions, which have to be learned : 
 
 I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our 
 ancient days before the earth appeared in its vegetated mortality 
 to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity, which 
 can never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at 
 the remotest corners of heaven from each other. 
 
 And noticeably, as time passes, he comes back, by circuits 
 of his own, to the common tongue of devout souls, and drops 
 his invented phrase as though after all it had not enough 
 depth or resonance for the feelings of his heart ; and this, 
 though he is still ' drunk with intellectual vision.' But his 
 ideals are the same as ever, and the combination would be 
 piquant were it not, in Blake, entirely reverential and natural : 
 
 It is the greatest of crimes to depress true art and science. . . . 
 I know that such mockers are most severely punished in eternity. 
 I know it, for I see and dare not help. The mocker of art is the 
 mocker of Jesus. Let us go on, dear sir, following His cross : let 
 us take it up daily, persisting in spiritual labours, and the use of 
 that talent which it is death to bury, and of that spirit to which 
 we are called. 
 
 Blake stands at the extreme left among those western 
 mystics who have taken up the conceptions and language of 
 the current creed into their own systems. His debt to two 
 of them, whom he certainly studied, has not yet been well 
 ascertained. Jacob Boehme l he read in William Law's trans- 
 lation (1764), and the influence has been traced in Blake's 
 treatment of the scriptural books as one long symbol, and in 
 his conception of the severance of Urizen from Eternity, 
 leading to the limitation of his essence and to the fall of man. 
 Swedenborg, 2 though disowned by Blake on account of his 
 concessions to the churches and to the more passive of the 
 Christian virtues, no doubt affected him strongly up to a 
 point. The reality of the spiritual world, with its concrete 
 visions, actually seen, like persons of the household, by the
 
 162 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 purged eye ; and the modelling of this spiritual world, as to 
 imagery and shape, upon the phenomenal ; these are clear 
 resemblances. But beyond this Blake strikes out for himself, 
 and perhaps the kinship between the two seers is rather tribal 
 than individual. They differ from all those mystics who 
 concentrate their direct knowledge of the divine into some 
 single moment of ecstasy, coming once or twice in a lifetime. 
 On the contrary, they live in perpetual communion, not with 
 the nameless essence of divinity, but with a whole crowd of 
 heavenly visitants ; the skies, in Ruskin's phrase, ' rain 
 revelations ' upon them. Blake, of course, is still further 
 from those mystics (by far the majority) who enjoin ascetic 
 practice and inward stillness and rise through painful and 
 definite stages from one ledge of perception to a higher. The 
 whole process of making his soul by such practices was utterly 
 foreign to him. His likeness to visionaries of other types, 
 like Bruno, is superficial. A pantheist he can only be called 
 in so far as he holds the human soul and the Eternal to be 
 identical, both in man's primitive and in his ultimate regenerate 
 condition, and in so. far as the lovely things of nature have a 
 divine element ('heaven in a wild flower'). But as to the 
 actual intermediate state of man, he is, as has been said, an 
 uncompromising dualist. He seems to emphasise the reality, 
 while denying the permanence, of evil. 
 
 The earlier mythic books, then, may be taken to figure 
 various incidents in the cycle of the adventures of the human 
 spirit, in its course from freedom and joy, through slavery and 
 darkness, back to something like its first estate. This general 
 view, characteristic of the time, is a noble and poetic one, and 
 in itself as great as Milton's. Blake's treatment of it is unique 
 and original ; but the strangest artistic vices are developed 
 by the way, and it can hardly satisfy even minds of his own 
 semi-oriental order, much less minds that, like the present 
 writer's, are in sympathy with the forms of classic and romantic 
 perfection. But it gives a sense of power and expansion 
 merely to watch Blake's experiments ; and it is not easy to 
 cease wondering at the springs of native energy which enabled 
 him, at such a time of our literature, even to conceive his 
 enterprise. 
 
 These books are all narrative in form, and the persons mythical 
 and imaginary, though historic names and figures, with the 
 queerest connotations, sometimes cross the scene. As in the 
 Faerie Queene, or in a dream, the beings introduced are of quite 
 different classes and on different levels, so to speak, of reality.
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 153 
 
 There are beings, and also places, derived from the Jewish and 
 Christian systems Jehovah, Jesus, Satan, Jerusalem, Beulah, 
 angels, devils. These seldom mean what they seem to mean, 
 and do not even consistently mean the opposite. Milton, too, 
 is there, with a special significance. Then there are the coin- 
 ages, sometimes Biblical, sometimes Ossianic l in design, but 
 sometimes purely invented Urizen, Los, Oothoon, and the 
 rest. The stories at first seem independent, but soon they 
 become episodes in the vast religious and quasi-epical theme, 
 which has to be divined from them all taken together, and 
 which is not pre -determined like Milton's, but grows by after- 
 thought upon afterthought. The result is often fatal to 
 structure and expression, for the symbols come to be inter- 
 preted, not into ordinary or philosophic speech, but in terms 
 of one another, with shifting values and interminglings infinite. 
 The interludes of spluttering paradox or frantic dogma cannot 
 spoil, but they disconnect, the long passages of pure and lofty 
 execution. Blake's verse cannot long be thought of apart 
 from the surrounding designs. He has deified Energy, and, 
 with a patient yet fiery energy, he flings himself alike upon 
 line, colour, and language ; he courts Matter with violence, and 
 stamps himself on her, and ' plants himself in all her nerves.' 
 
 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, that extreme and ardent 
 chant, is the first long poem produced by Blake when in the 
 full possession of his moral or anti-moral creed and of his 
 narrative method. It is the fierce or pathetic plaint of inno- 
 cent natural desire, supposed to be baffled to the last by malign 
 laws of mortal contriving. Oothoon, the victim of the Titanic 
 Bromion, finds that by her unwilling defilement she has offended 
 against the frozen code of marriage law and usage, and is thus 
 severed from her lover Theotormon, himself imbued with their 
 errors. He refuses her love ; and her solemn and lofty pro- 
 testation against the tyranny of the law, her assertion of her 
 claim to joy distinguished expressly from ' self-love ' and 
 her final frustration, are in Blake's purest lyric style. There 
 is here less of the misshapen, and more of clean plastic power, 
 than in most of the succeeding myths. 
 
 Much of America is a mere orgy of grotesqueness. Washing- 
 ton and Albion's angel, Ore and Hancock, jostle together in 
 the same episode, while the ' Eternal Lion,' who is by no means 
 the British Lion, ' lashes his tail ' and looks on. Grotesque ? 
 Yet the sublime is never far off, and the march of the action 
 is fairly distinct. Ore, a type of liberating rebel, and the 
 announcer of ' sweet delight,' opposes Albion's Angel, who
 
 154 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 descends like a plague upon America. Ore is routed for the 
 time, whilst Urizen, the god of the old order, the symbol of 
 frozen law and obsolete faith, descends and stays the victory 
 during the twelve years that separate the American Revolu- 
 tion from the French. In Europe the myth begins to over- 
 power all historical reference. The invasion of wider and 
 darker symbol is required to image the continuing fall of man 
 and his deferred release. The ' night ' of Enitharmon, a symbol 
 of coercive morality, has lasted for eighteen hundred years, 
 since a false law was riveted upon the world ; and now Ore the 
 redeemer, the spirit of happiness, appears together with Los, 
 who is one of the protagonists of light throughout the 
 mythic poems. The rebel Ore descends to his task ; Los has 
 ' call'd all his sons to the strife of blood ' in the year 1789. 
 Enitharmon awakes and weeps, and now begins the contest for 
 freedom. The abrupt imagery of this poem, which contains 
 some very obscure under-myths, is lit up by starry and sonorous 
 lines ; it is a pity that it is defaced by pointless and capricious 
 changes of rhythm. 
 
 In The First Boole of Urizen the chains of man are shown in 
 the forging. Urizen typifies man's bondage under the senses 
 and his consequent ' exile from eternity.' He is the rule, now 
 of blighting abstinence or of social restraint ; now of the 
 five senses, which shut off that vision which is the life of the 
 soul ; now that of the logical reason, especially that of the 
 apologists and deists ; and now that of priestcraft and religion 
 generally. Urizen thus dissolves into a goodly company, 
 which includes Jehovah, Lord Bacon, Voltaire, and even 
 Rousseau. Moreover, he is not only the bondage of man, but 
 man in bondage, who has had happier antecedents, which 
 may perhaps return, but which meanwhile increase the per- 
 plexities. All these notions are covered up under the image 
 of a sombre old giant with a long beard, who is sometimes 
 stern and cruel, but is sometimes exhibited as in much agony. 
 This is a fairly simple instance of Blake's symbolic methods. 
 It is not unjust to call such a confusion insane, but the poetry 
 often surpasses that of the age of sanity. The physical changes 
 of Urizen, which signify the generation of man's enslaved body 
 and spirit, inspire a superb piece of metaphysical verse, whose 
 cadence is like that of the grinding of monstrous subterranean 
 mills. Los, the prince of the beneficent armies, fights in vain 
 against his fetters, and Ore is chained to Jealousy. So the 
 web of religion is woven round these sons of Urizen ; but all 
 is not lost, for one of them escapes to another land. In the
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 155 
 
 sequel, The Book of Ahania, this escaped son, after enlightening 
 the earth awhile, is smitten by his father. Ahania, the ' parted 
 soul ' and the wife of Urizen, whom the same son has torn 
 from their father's being, bewails, in the most thrilling lines 
 that Blake ever wrote, the days when she and her father joyed 
 together. Ahania's significance as a symbol is dark, but, like 
 many of Spenser's characters, she takes on an independent 
 life of her own, apart from the meaning. Such creatures are 
 often the voice of Blake's rarest poetry. 
 
 Two brief pieces close the series. The Book of Los relates 
 the passing of the golden age and the binding of Urizen by 
 Los. It is a lofty piece of cosmogony. The looming of the 
 ' backbone of Urizen ' upon the void at the first glimmerings 
 of light, and the formation of the ' Human Illusion,' a symbol 
 of the deception of the senses, are visions not to be for- 
 gotten. In The Song of Los, or Song of Time, are shown, in 
 rapid sweeping strokes, the rise and onset of the various reli- 
 gions, each of them the fatal gift of Urizen. The motto might 
 be Samuel Daniel's sentence, ' Religion, the mother of form 
 and fear.' In the East rises abstract philosophy, with its 
 deadening power ; and, after a long history, the last mani- 
 festation is materialism, or the ' philosophy of the five senses.' 
 At last, in 1789, Ore arises ; a war begins of which the end is 
 not yet (1795), and 'Urizen wept.' 
 
 IV 
 
 The influence of Paradise Lost upon this series of lays is 
 apparent, and works in two directions. The phantoms are 
 ranged in two armies, representing the powers of good and 
 evil. There are combats, speeches, forecasts a good deal of 
 the epic machinery, though it is much transformed ; there is 
 the corresponding contrast of physical radiance, glory, and 
 dazzle, with darkness and mist ; and there is the epical con- 
 flict of emotions triumph, onset, buoyancy, with despair 
 and wrath. But to these Miltonic elements Blake gives his 
 own turn, which is explained by his famous saying that 
 ' Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it.' That is, 
 Milton's dramatic and his official sympathies were at variance, 
 and he drew the fallen angels, the popular party, with power 
 and conviction, and their adversaries more perfunctorily. 
 This is a familiar line of comment on Milton, as well as a true 
 one ; and the poems of Blake give effect to it. He transfers 
 to the uses of his own creed the conception of the war waged
 
 156 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 in space, with human weapons though not by human beings, 
 between colossal groups of figures, who include the authors 
 or principles of good and ill. The stake is the destiny of man, 
 who has possessed, loses, and is one day to regain a paradise. 
 The devils, however, or incarnations of energy, are now the 
 sons of light ; they are the redeemers ; they signify ' the 
 freedom of the natural soul ' ; while their foes, the repre- 
 sentatives of reason, law, order, and slavery, include the 
 Christian deity, and all in human history for which his worship 
 stood to Blake. To this ' inverted theology ' Milton, ' without 
 knowing it,' lent his scheme. 
 
 Into the service of rebellious doctrine Blake, like Mr. Swin- 
 burne afterwards, pressed his intimate knowledge of the 
 Bible. Its language and imagery, its movement and colouring, 
 enter into the whole texture of his writing. His mind was 
 nearer than Milton's to the spirit of Hebrew lyric, working 
 as it does Orientally, through figures, apostrophes, and passion- 
 ate separate affirmations, and not by the chainwork of reasoned 
 Western oratory. ' The terrific numbers are reserved for the 
 terrific parts, and the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle 
 parts ' ; and in both parts the inspiration is scriptural : 
 
 I will cause my voice to be heard on the clouds that glitter in the sun, 
 
 I will call ; and who shall answer me ? I shall sing ; who shall reply ? 
 
 For from my pleasant hills behold the living, living springs, 
 
 Running among my green pastures, delighting among my trees. 
 
 I am not here alone ; my flocks, you are my brethren. 
 
 And you, O birds ! that sing and adorn the sky, you are my sisters. 
 
 I sing, and you reply to my song ; I rejoice, and you are glad. 
 
 (The Four Zoas, Night ix.) 
 
 My tents are fall'n ! my pillars are in ruins ! my children dash'd 
 Upon Egypt's iron floors and the marble pavements of Assyria. 
 I melt my soul in reasonings among the towers of Heshbon ; 
 Mount Zion is become a cruel rock, and no more dew 
 Nor rain ; no more the spring of the rock appears ; but cold, 
 Hard, and obdurate are the furrows of the mountain of wine and oil. 
 
 (Jerusalem.) 
 
 This parallelism, which here contends with and throws out 
 the metre, is not more inveterate in Blake's style than the 
 forms of the lyrical question and proverb. Both of them tend 
 to chequer the verse with prose rhythm. The Book of Job 
 and Revelation and the prophets are never far off. The sacred 
 books of Urizen are to Blake, after all, an inexhaustible foun- 
 tain of beauty ; nay, at moments he rivals them. Their 
 influence is not all for good, if it be true that from the begin- 
 ning of Ezekiel springs that many-tentacled system of alleged
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 157 
 
 fourfold ' correspondences ' that mars the later Prophetic 
 works, with its endless opposed couples of phantasmal figures 
 creatures propagated, like some organisms, by rapid fission. 
 But the greatness of these originals, as well as their beauty, 
 is often reproduced. Despite faults that would wreck any 
 smaller poet, and often wrecked himself, Blake has a plastic 
 rage, a smelting power, that is hard to parallel. He is Vulcan 
 at work, with a dash of Apollo. His persons are not merely 
 ideas, they are passions ; or they are tubes, through which 
 voices come of despair or exultation, in a slow chanting move- 
 ment. Something must be forgiven to one who created his 
 own immortals. There have been much greater poets, 
 observers, and thinkers than Blake, but few convey so 
 imminent a sense of some great reality that is for ever sway- 
 ing the thin but effectual screen of words. 
 
 A lesser yet still potent influence, that of Macpherson's 
 ' Ossian,' l is felt in Blake's versification, and not there only. 
 Fingal and Temora were in full vogue in Blake's boyhood, and 
 came out less than twenty years before Poetical Sketches, which 
 contains one of the many imitations then fashionable. What- 
 ever Johnson and Wordsworth may say, Macpherson (for we 
 need not speak of ' Ossian ') could not be wholly an evil genius. 
 He has the true wail of the wandering spirit ; he invented a 
 new melancholy. His prose has no depth or fulness, but a sad 
 veiled delicacy of its own. It is true that Blake sometimes 
 faithfully follows its iniquities : 
 
 The strong voice ceas'd, for a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea. 
 The Eastern cloud rent ; on his cliffs stood Albion's wrathful prince ; 
 A dragon form, clashing his scales at midnight, he arose 
 And flamed red meteors round the land of Albion beneath. 
 
 We know this ' glossy and unfeeling diction,' this rhythm that 
 breaks off short and does not keep its promises, these brief 
 clipped clauses. There is plenty of it in Blake, and he falls 
 back on it when he is tired. But some of his greatest passages 
 would have been different without Macpherson behind them ; 
 and Blake has lifted his cadences into a harmony and con- 
 tinuous beauty of his own discovering : 
 
 I cry, Arise, O Theotormon ! For the village dog 
 
 Barks at the breaking day ; the nightingale has done lamenting ; 
 
 The lark does rustle in the ripe corn ; and the eagle returns 
 
 From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure East, 
 
 Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to awako 
 
 The sun that sleeps too long. Arise, my Theotormon ! I am pure, 
 
 Because the night is gone that clos'd me in its deadly black.
 
 158 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 It is, however, not much to Macpherson's credit that Blake 
 is metrically in his debt. The inventor of Fingal is a slattern 
 in his rhythms, and his prose easily runs into two lands of 
 unacknowledged verse. One is a monotonous iambic measure 
 of twelve or fourteen syllables ; and the blank seven-foot 
 line, in which many of Blake's mythic books (beginning with 
 the gentle Thel and the highly Ossianic, but usually dim and 
 feeble Tiriel) are written, may well have come to him from 
 Macpherson. It is unlike in march to Chapman's similarly 
 constructed line, but it is often very like this : 
 
 (1) At length the sudden clang is waked on all the echoing shields. 
 
 (2) Each takes his hill by night ; at intervals they darkly stand. 
 
 (3) Unequal bursts the hum of songs between the roaring wind. 
 
 (Fingal, bk. i.) 
 
 It is therefore probable that Macpherson's vices were Blake's 
 opportunities. Certainly, in the series of lays from the gentle 
 Book of Thel onwards, this measure, in its unrhymed form, is 
 created, and nobly employed, for English verse. It is varied, 
 and suppled, and broken up, and run on with patient or 
 instinctive art. The beauty and resources of the measure 
 can be judged from scattered examples : 
 
 (1) bright Ahania [|a boy is born of the dark ocean. 
 
 (2) Walk | heavy ! || soft and bent || are the bones of villagers. 
 
 (3) ' Queen of the vales,' || the matron clay answer'd, || ' I heard thy sighs.' 
 
 (4) cruel ! || destroyer ! j| consumer ! || avenger ! 
 
 (5) Laughs at affection, || glories in rebellion, || scoffs at love. 
 
 It was one of the ill angels, or ' spectres,' that led Blake, in 
 Jerusalem and Milton, lured by the show of freedom, to give 
 up all metre in name, whilst recurring to it when off. his guard ; 
 the result being sometimes a repulsive jumble of verse and 
 prose as bad as Macpherson's own. But through most of 
 the earlier lays there is a run of even yet varied melody. 
 
 For Urizen, Ahania, and The Book of Los, a shorter measure 
 is used, which may come from the same source ; a choppy, 
 rapid, breathless line, made up (in technical terms) of three 
 amphibrachs, with or without a spare syllable at the end. 
 The type is near to that of Prudentius's resurrection hymn, 
 
 Xunc maesta quicsco querola, 
 and is shown in such verses as 
 
 Enraged in the desolate darkness, 
 or 
 
 And tut-so were the changes of Urizcii.
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 159 
 
 But this base is so ruggedly modified by Blake as often to 
 leave little of it remaining except the fundamental, triple 
 hammer-stroke : 
 
 His cold horrors silent, dark Urizen 
 
 Prepar'd ; his ten thousands of thunders 
 
 Rang'd in gloom'd array stretch out across 
 
 The dread world ; and the rolling of wheels 
 
 As of swelling seas sound in his clouds, 
 
 In his hills of stor'd snows, in his mountains 
 
 Of hail and ice : voices of terror 
 
 Are heard, like thunders of autumn 
 
 When the cloud blazes over the harvests. (Urizen.) 
 
 It is curious to find that whole paragraphs of Macpherson 
 can be marked off into series of three-beat units roughly 
 resembling this metre. It is the medium of Blake's most vehe- 
 ment passages, in which he seems to toss and sport with the 
 unhewn and unmoulded elements of the chaos as it gathers 
 into a world, leaving far behind and out of knowledge the 
 faltering if unmistakable tune of such an original as this : 
 
 What voico is that I hear ? | that voice like the summer wind ? 1 1 sit not 
 by the nodding rushes ; 1 1 hear not the fount of the rooks. | Afar, Vinvela, 
 afar, 1 1 go to the wars of Fingal. | My dogs attend me no more ; | no more I 
 tread the hill. | No more from on high I see thee, | fair-moving by the 
 stream of the plain ; | bright as the bow of heaven ; ' as the moon on tho 
 western wave. \ (Carric-Thura.) 
 
 The Songs of Experience, though they must be studied along 
 with the mythic lays, do not all bear openly on the poet's 
 metaphysics. Many of them are in the nature of ' songs of 
 innocence ' re-written, as it were retracted, in a sadder and 
 abstruser mood. In the new Holy Thursday and Chimney 
 Sweeper theory has injured song, and first thoughts were 
 better. The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found might 
 have been songs of innocence but for the stranger notes of 
 fear and pity that they strike, and for their suggestion of 
 the desolate haunted country of the lays. Ah! Sunflower 
 seems at first but a lovely image, yet it accords with Blake's 
 ruling thoughts, and tells of the resurrection of buried love 
 and baffled desire, ready for their reunion in eternity. Most
 
 160 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 of these Songs are written under the shadow of Urizen. The 
 soul has now ' lapsed ' from its memory of immortal things, 
 the rose of beauty is gnawed by the worm, and innocence, 
 oppressed under the law of jealousy and error, is saddened by 
 the sight, and still more by the sensation, of hatred. Moral 
 law itself, the gaoler, takes on deceptively beautiful shapes, 
 figured in Tirzah, and keeps the senses in a mysterious thraldom. 
 Even pity and love now depend for their existence on the pain 
 and misery of others ; and these are the words of the Devil : 
 
 Pity would be no more 
 If we did not make somebody poor ; 
 And Mercy no more would be 
 If all were as happy as we. 
 
 This law is figured as a ' poison tree,' a tree of mystery, 
 which gratifies the new thirst for vengeance. The Tiger is 
 not a simple-minded utterance of wonder at the unexpected 
 resources of Paley's clockmaker God ; and Blake's answer to 
 the question, ' Did He who made the lamb make thee ? ' is 
 not in the affirmative. The ' tiger ' is a creation of another 
 dynasty altogether, and belongs to the present reign of terror, 
 not to man's primal or to his ultimate world. 
 
 Instead of the creatures of beauty and gentleness which 
 explain themselves and raise no problem, here is one in whom 
 beauty is united with an ominous strength and a deadly 
 purpose. Whence can these proceed but from the same qualities 
 in its Maker ? The potent anvil-music l of this great poem, 
 reminding us of some lyrics of Ibsen, is in contrast with that 
 of Earth's Answer, which in sentiment can be paralleled from 
 The Book of Ahania. Here, as often, Blake manages to convey 
 the accent of human feeling through his half -human voices, 
 which come faint and clear, as if from another planet, across 
 leagues of space : 
 
 Prison'd on wat'ry shore, 
 
 .Starry Jealousy does keep my den ; 
 
 Cold and hoar, 
 
 Weeping o'er, 
 
 I hear the father of the ancient men. 
 
 For any such purity of lyric phrase and solemnity of solitary 
 pain we have to go back past Milton. The Songs of Experience 
 mark an epoch in the history of our serious lyrical verse. 
 Blake's immunity from all false intervening styles, and his 
 independence, now achieved, of the Elizabethan style, crown 
 him as the tme rccoverer of song. His gift is now fully tested
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 161 
 
 upon his mature experience and thinking, as in Songs of Inno- 
 cence it could not be ; and is tested triumphantly, for no one 
 else can evoke, by the mere fall of the words, the same distant 
 and terrible but beautiful apparitions. The change of temper 
 is echoed in the new rhythms that Blake has come to command. 
 The briefer, tinier measures of Songs of Innocence are reinforced 
 by others, not always longer or more complex, but weighted 
 with a richer vowel-music, and tending to a slow, menacing 
 movement, of which the rhymed short couplet is the vehicle : 
 
 In what distant deeps or skies 
 Burnt the fire of thine eyes ? 
 On what wings dare he aspire ? 
 What the hand dare seize the fire ? 
 
 To this gnomic form, in which each couplet is self-contained 
 and has the effect of an inscription on the tomb or of 
 a brand upon the forehead, Blake, in his later poetry, often 
 reverted. Songs of Experience was the last book of lyric that 
 he engraved or issued ; but there is a considerable body of 
 such verse besides that he left in manuscript, which must not 
 be judged as approved by him for publication, but which 
 contains some of his strangest and loveliest, as well as of his 
 crudest and most experimental writing. 
 
 Some of this occurs in his letters and Prophetic books, but 
 it is chiefly contained in the two manuscripts known as the 
 Rossetti MS. and the Pickering MS., which are now at last 
 duly edited and accessible. The former MS. contains poems 
 written about, but not long before, 1793, and also poems 
 written from 1800 to 1810, as well as The Everlasting Gospel. 
 In the latter is found a series of symbolic pieces dating from 
 his stay at Felpham (1800-3). It is best here merely to note 
 this distribution, and to group this whole body of work by 
 theme and style. Many of the topics of Songs of Experience 
 are handled again. There are verses in honour of love (' Love 
 to faults is always blind '), and expressive of Blake's fierce 
 and buoyant anti-ascetical temper, such as In a Myrtle Shade 
 and Soft Snow, and ' Abstinence sows sand all over.' There 
 are more songs of sorrow and adult experience, like The Wild 
 Flower's Song and The Smile. Others are assaults on priest- 
 craft and dogma, such as Infant Sorrow, The Land of Dreams, 
 and The Grey Monk. Many of them are penetrated with symbol , 
 or perturbed by it, but are still clearly to be distinguished 
 from the mythic histories, or short lays, that are cast in 
 lyrical or semi-lyrical form, and are sometimes as hard to 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 162 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 interpret as the Prophetic works themselves. The Mental 
 Traveller, The Crystal Cabinet, and The Golden Net remain 
 like some beautiful and elaborate script in a half-known 
 tongue. In the first of these the technical terms are less 
 apparent, and the language is that of pure poetry, but it 
 implies one of Blake's abstrusest and most suggestive theories 
 that, namely, of a series of mental ' states ' which re- 
 main ever the same and self-subsistent, and distinct from 
 the individual souls that pass through them. In this 
 fashion Blake elsewhere gives his own turn to the problem 
 of evil, and conciliates its existence with his idealism. 
 The individual is defined not by his morality, but by his 
 species : 
 
 Goodness or badness has nothing to do with character. An 
 apple-tree, a pear-tree, a horse, a lion, are characters ; but a good 
 apple-tree or a bad is an apple-tree still. A horse is not more a 
 lion for being a bad horse that is its character ; its goodness or 
 badness is another consideration. 
 
 Thus good and evil cannot attach permanently to the indi- 
 vidual. Some such order of ideas lies at the root, it seems, 
 of The Mental Traveller, which receives many broken lights 
 from the later Prophetic books. The Crystal Cabinet, once 
 read as a description of the phenomena of gestation, is now 
 pronounced to treat of the moral law and the passions. The 
 poems, however, like many things in the Hebrew prophets, 
 haunt the imagination independently of this or any meaning, 
 and perhaps are better without the meaning. It is otherwise 
 with the visionary rhymes written by Blake from Felpham 
 in his letters to Butts. Here he is not always relating an 
 episode in the murky war of Mansoul ; but he tells of the 
 angels amongst whom he literally walked, and these verses, 
 with their scenes of immortal brightness, and their composed 
 but glorious ecstasy, are the diary of his almost disembodied 
 spirit at its highest tide of illumination. The technique is 
 worthy of the mood, with its rushing short lines, improvised, 
 breathless, and ringing on their soon-recurrent rhymes, in 
 the first letter to Butts ; and, in the sterner but not less 
 impetuous ones of the second letter, the music of Christabel is 
 for the first time fully recovered and rivalled by any poet : 
 
 When I had ray defiance given, 
 The sun stood trembling in Heaven ; 
 The moon, that glow'd remote below, 
 Became leprous and white as snow ;
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 163 
 
 And every soul of men on the earth 
 
 Felt affliction, and sorrow, and sickness, and dearth. 
 
 Los flam'd in my path, and the sun was hot 
 
 With the bows of my mind and the arrows of thought. 
 
 None of Blake's epigrams were meant to be printed, and 
 they must not be taken too solemnly, if their sharp wild wit 
 is crossed with a streak of comic and boyish spleen. One 
 bundle of such rhymed sentences, however, namely Auguries 
 of Innocence, stands apart, and may be treated as a pendant 
 to the Proverbs of Hell, printed earlier in The Marriage of Heaven 
 and Hell. Their exaltation of childlike faith faith, be it 
 remembered, in the right things above reasoning doubt, and 
 of love and brotherhood above ruinous wars and rancour, 
 is not unexpected, though it is here cast less into song than 
 into motto-form. Blake's wrathful affection for the animal 
 world, which he sees tortured under the reign of cruelty, is 
 already also familiar, and is another point of contact with his 
 time. He admits not only bird and beast, but the emmet, 
 caterpillar, moth and fly, who flit through his designs and 
 at once become serviceable emblems, and themselves warriors 
 against doubt. But this poem, with its separate volleys 
 of chain-shot, noble and piquant as it is, does not prepare us 
 for the continuous roar of artillery, for the daring and onset, 
 in Blake's greatest militant poem, The Everlasting Gospel. 1 
 
 This work lies in fragments which are now seen to piece 
 themselves into something like a whole. It was much recast, 
 and never published. Dated not earlier than 1810, it is 
 later than Milton and Jerusalem, 2 and is pronounced ' the 
 latest of Blake's surviving poems, with the possible exception 
 of The Keys of the Gates.' It is little crossed by symbol ; indeed 
 the clue to it is that Blake means precisely what he says. It 
 is the fruit at once of his vehement antinomianism and of his 
 reverence for what he judges to be the doctrine of Christ, the 
 great preacher of the love that casteth out law. But Christ 
 is also a man of war, and his traditional attributes 3 are stormily 
 denied. Was it ' gentleness ' to rebuke his parents and ' bind 
 old Satan in his chain ' ? Was it ' humility ' to use the elders 
 and priests ' like dogs,' and to wait for his ' revenge ' at the 
 Last Day (presumably upon ' bad art and science ') ? Was 
 it a lesson in ' chastity ' to dismiss the woman, whose real 
 sin was to harbour false motives for love ' custom or covet,' 
 whence arise adulteries indeed ? It is curious how Tolstoy's 
 tenets of celibacy and non-resistance, which he founds on 
 the same documents, fit Blake's like the other half of a broken
 
 164 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 plate. The workmanship of this mighty unfinished mani- 
 festo ranges from Blake's finest to his roughest. He slips 
 into doggerel down at heel, or runs on in sharp jingling Hudi- 
 brastic rhymes, or rises to such winged verse as that which 
 hymns the downfall of the Mosaic law. The tune sank into 
 Rossetti, in whose Jenny it seems to be audible ; there is the 
 same sardonic passion. It might be hard, for a moment, to 
 say which poet had written the lines, 
 
 'Twas covet, or 'twas custom, or 
 Some trifle not worth caring for ; 
 That they may call a shame and sin 
 Love's Temple that God dwelleth in. 
 
 VI 
 
 In The Everlasting Gospel, Blake's thought and style recover 
 from the progressive darkening and confusion that meet us 
 in his three longest Prophetic poems, which were all begun, if 
 not completed, at an earlier date. In these he attempted to 
 expand the lay into the epic, and thought of Jerusalem and 
 Milton, it seems, as the crown of his poetic work. He failed ; 
 he was wrong. He lost hold on the ordinary associations of 
 words ; he multiplied his symbols, and their meanings more 
 than ever shift and dislimn like the clouds that Polonius read 
 as Hamlet pleased. Still worse is the lack of composition ; 
 the order of the episodes is often a matter of indifference. 
 Blake, in his revolt against classicism, proclaimed that ' Gothic 
 is living form ' ; but he never saw, what Coleridge explained, 
 that the most complex works of ' Gothic ' poetry, such as 
 Shakespeare's tragedies, are creatures of law of a law self- 
 evolved and self-justified, but a law none the less. His celestial 
 friends, whose messages he would not alter, left him with 
 only a lawless Gothic. It is tempting to say that if Blake can 
 ever be charged with insanity, it is in the arrangement and 
 pattern of these works. But it is rather a case of gigantic 
 wrong- headedness or misreckoning. He is like some Titan 
 who might catch up shapeless boulders, and, without any 
 inkling of the law of strains and pressures, strive to heap them 
 into a vast tower or air-hung bridge. The general design can 
 be made out, and stray pieces of shapen fabric. This design 
 in all three books is much the same. Each of them is, in 
 Dante's sense, a kind of ' comedy ' the beginning overcast 
 and gloomy, the issue bright and joyous. Man is at last re- 
 generate, and those elements of his soul are reunited which
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 165 
 
 have been torn apart by the wars of his fallen state. As before, 
 these elements are figured by symbols, subdivided and inter- 
 shifting without end. The style, though most variable, is far 
 better than the composition. However dark in detail, or 
 blown up into a wind of words, or deformed by repulsive cata- 
 logues, or by the more odious devices of Blake's algebra, it 
 rises, not a dozen but a hundred times, into strength, beauty, 
 purity and melody. 
 
 The Four Zoas, dated 1797, and begun three years before at 
 the earliest, was apparently never meant to be engraved or 
 issued, and portions of it were drafted into Jerusalem. There 
 is more good poetry in it than in its successors, and Blake is 
 more at leisure. The metre is less frequently broken or aban- 
 doned. Some strands can be picked out of the ravelled story. 
 One clue is found in the adventures of Albion or the human 
 spirit, who is parted from his eternal home, is plunged in a long 
 intervening sleep, and is at last restored to his first estate. 
 This is ' the death and judgment of Albion the ancient man.' 
 Meanwhile he comes under the sway of the ' four Zoas,' or 
 principles of the soul, who have split off from one another, 
 and have again split individually, each into his good and evil 
 element, his ' emanation ' or ' spectre.' Their wars and 
 dealings figure the present divided condition of mankind ; 
 and from these battles result ' the torments of love and jealousy,' 
 a phrase that Blake introduced into his title. The Zoas, 
 headed by Los, wander over space, and the fall of another of 
 their number, Urizen, is once more told. At last each ' spectre ' 
 and its ' emanation ' meet again, and the four Zoas are once 
 more blended in eternal life. The process is thus from unity 
 through difference back to unity. No such statement as this 
 can even intimate the complexities of the work, the numberless 
 incidents and their import, or the huge wheelwork of ' corre- 
 spondences ' or analogies that besets the whole. Amongst 
 the stray splendours of The Four Zoas might be cited the lyric, 
 occurring in the fifth Night, of the woes of Urizen ; and in the 
 second Night the chant also cast in regular metre of Enithar- 
 mon over Los ; the war-song of the ' demons of the deep ' in 
 the seventh Night ; the evangel, in the eighth, uttered by 
 Ahania ; and, in the last, the recovery of Ahania by Urizen. 
 The symbols of light, imagination, and prophecy prevail, and 
 1 sweet science reigns.' 
 
 In Jerusalem, begun in 1804, the web of symbol is denser 
 and more confounding : like Milton, this poem can only 
 disgust save in selections, but without such selections the
 
 166 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 genius of the writer will not be understood. It contains long 
 passages of rare and achieved beauty. The concluding colloquy 
 of Jesus with Albion is a fervent and stately picture of the 
 dream that Blake dreamed for his fellow-men. Amongst other 
 passages that stand out from the background of welter are that 
 in which the desolation of Albion is mourned, and the de- 
 scription of the symbolic house, built by Los, in a Spenserian 
 style of architecture. Over another enormous survey, that 
 of the countries of the earth, Blake sweeps with the wing of 
 Marlowe. The dialogue of Joseph and Mary upon sin and 
 forgiveness is exquisite in form. On a lower level, there is 
 the sounding tirade of Los to the giants of Albion. There are 
 many other beautiful things, but the critics, not unjustly, 
 have beggared language in lamenting the general fogginess 
 and incoherence of the book. The wandering figure styled by 
 Blake Jerusalem, who is a personage and not a place, is 
 buffeted amongst the alien or hostile elements generated in 
 consequence of the fall of man. Some of the four Zoas now 
 reappear, but they are less conspicuous than before, and the 
 emphasis is now laid upon the false creeds and moral codes 
 that mankind invents to deceive and fetter itself in the course 
 of its pilgrimage. Amongst these are not only the Christian 
 confessions, but the theories of the deists, whom Blake de- 
 nounces as a product of the age of frigid reason. ' There is 
 no natural religion,' he exclaims elsewhere ; the heart and 
 imagination, he thinks, were as little concerned with the creation 
 of Voltaire's deity as with that of Jehovah. Jerusalem ends 
 with the abolition of error and the accomplishment of the reign 
 of love amidst the rejoicings of universal nature. Such a close 
 reminds us of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and in single 
 passages Blake is the peer of Shelley ; but no great poet has 
 ever managed, by the conduct of his story, so completely to 
 revolt the artistic judgment. 
 
 In his preface to Jerusalem Blake, borrowing the phrase of 
 Milton, declares his rebellion, not only against the modern 
 bondage of rhyming, but against metre itself, which he calls 
 ' monotonous cadence,' and as ' much a bondage as rhyme 
 itself.' 
 
 I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences 
 and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied, 
 and put in its fit place. The terrific numbers are reserved for the 
 terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, 
 and the prosaic for inferior parts : all are necessary to each 
 other.
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 167 
 
 The rhythmical prose thus adopted is a form full of loveliness 
 and resource, and it can only be objected that Blake does not 
 allow himself sufficient freedom in its use. He keeps a pre- 
 vailingly iambic cadence, and often slips back into the long 
 metrical line ; or else he comes too near to doing so, and recalls 
 the effect that Lydgate produces by his mangling of Chaucer's 
 versification. But he constantly attains a measured Biblical 
 movement of high dignity : and the same harmonies, as well 
 as the same discords and shortcomings, are perceptible in 
 Milton. 
 
 This, possibly the latest of Blake's works, is his mythical 
 account of the ' progress of poetry.' The familiar dramatis 
 personce reappear, but with a difference. Many fall into the 
 background : the symbolism is less tangled, and the story 
 more traceable than in Jerusalem. Milton is the type of the 
 poetic imagination, or of prophecy. His departed spirit quits 
 the Eternals to be the messenger of their harmonies, travels 
 long through space and its imaginary worlds, a destined deliverer 
 of the human soul. John Milton, however, in his mortal career 
 had been distracted between his true mission and the tempta- 
 tions of a false creed, and crowned his offences by imitating 
 the ancient classics ; and now, after the voyage, transmigrates, 
 accompanied by Ololon, another representative of inspiration, 
 into the body of William Blake, then sojourning at Lambeth. 
 After huge struggles and vicissitudes, the reign of imagination 
 and the renewal of the human spirit are assured. The gospel 
 of courage and energy makes ' self-annihilation ' perfect ; free 
 invention triumphs over cold, laborious art, and the aim is 
 attained 
 
 To cast aside from poetry all that is not inspiration, 
 That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of madness 
 Cast on the inspired by the tamo high finisher of paltry blots, 
 Indefinite or paltry rhymes, or paltry harmonies : 
 
 four lines that well show Blake's aesthetic doctrine, and his 
 lapse into the verse that he disowned. Milton shows through- 
 out the fluctuations of this metre. In the lovely and full- 
 throated chant of birds and flowers, the ' Vision of the lamen- 
 tation of Beulah,' it falls back with more or less docility into 
 the long regular line, with its daring and haunting modulations, 
 while the movement of Ecclesiastes or Revelation is heard in 
 such Asiatically rich passages as the formation and adornment 
 of the human passions by the sons of Los. Amongst other 
 happy islets in Milton may be named the dance of the sons of 
 Luvah, and the adaptation from Paradise Lost of the ' great
 
 168 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 solemn assembly,' where the guilt and destinies of the human 
 soul are prophesied. 
 
 VII 
 
 All Blake's writings in ordinary unmeasured prose are brief, 
 and their bulk is not large. They are to be found in his letters ; 
 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ; in the prefaces to Milton 
 and Jerusalem, and in the fragments called Sibylline Leaves ; 
 also in the short series of engraved maxims, There is no Natural 
 Religion ; in the marginal notes he made to Swedenborg's 
 Divine Love and Wisdom, and to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Dis- 
 courses ; and, above all, in his Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, 
 Poetical and Historical Inventions (1809), which includes 
 Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine-and-twenty Pilgrims ; and 
 in the two series of notes, one concerning his picture, A Vision 
 of the Last Judgment, and the other styled by earlier editors 
 the Public Address. The two last-named works were never 
 published, and should be read in their original disjointed form. 
 Blake can write in a plain strong-headed way, not Sibylline 
 at all, as is evident in his business communications, and in his 
 letter relating his encounter with the soldier at Felpham. 
 The descriptive parts in the Vision of the Last Judgment have 
 the same exactness, and are, as he would have said, ' deter- 
 minate.' This clear cutting is found more constantly in his 
 prose than in his verse, and is only enhanced by his occasional 
 use, which is always precise, of such technical words as ' vege- 
 tated,' ' demon,' or ' spectrous.' But it is always accom- 
 panied by passion. Blake says, ' Passion and expression are 
 beauty itself ' ; and he has them both. His prose is full of 
 light, glow, and energy. In the letters from Felpham, it is 
 a worthy setting to the verse, and there could be no better 
 praise. In general, it falls into one or other of the forms, 
 namely aphorism and visionary picture, that are natural to 
 Blake. The account of the Canterbury Pilgrims is the nearest 
 in mould to the ordinary critical essay ; it is not more dis- 
 continuous than a good deal in Hazlitt, and it remains Blake's 
 shrewdest and wisest comment on the actual life of men, as 
 distinct from the life of vision. But this it is, because ho 
 sees the life of men sub specie ceternitatis. He perceives, travel- 
 ling by his own path, the grand excellence of Chaucer's Pro- 
 logue, namely, that it represents eternal types of mankind. 
 This is true, and is much more important to remember than 
 the commonplace truth that Chaucer gives us a ' picture of 
 the age,' or of the persons he had seen. These ' characters,'
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 169 
 
 Blake says, ' are those which compose all ages and nations 
 . . . they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal 
 human life.' Chaucer himself is such a ' character,' for ' he 
 is the great poetical observer of men, who is in every age born 
 to record and eternise its acts.' Blake in all this reads into 
 Chaucer something not in Chaucer's mind ; but every great 
 critic, who is himself a creator, must do the same when approach- 
 ing another creator. We may leave academicians to do less 
 than this. We are not troubled by hearing that the Sompnour 
 is ' a Devil of the first magnitude,' or the Ploughman, ' Hercules 
 in his supreme eternal state, divested of his spectrous shadow.' 
 This typical character Blake realises in the heads he draws for 
 his picture, and his criticism, it must be remembered, is much 
 upon his own picture as upon the poem. He is himself, it may 
 be said, one character the more ; he is the seer of these eternal 
 types, in which most people only discover Harry Bailey and 
 his convoy. His splenetic remarks on Stothard and others are 
 not mere injustice, but they belong to his mortal part and 
 may be left aside. 
 
 The Vision, the Catalogue, and the Address are a treasury 
 of Blake's critical and aesthetic opinions, which are bordered 
 on one side by his conception of ' vision ' and on the other by 
 his ethical code. It is not easy to make his tenets clearer than 
 he has done himself. He does not set them out with method. 
 His mind is best revealed in pensees or detached observations ; 
 indeed he is one of the last great masters of that form of writing. 
 He thinks in proverbs. The Address gives his canons of fine 
 art ; it is the glorification of line, of drawing, and of ' execu- 
 tion,' by which Blake primarily means line : ' painting is 
 drawing on canvas, and engraving is drawing on copper, and 
 nothing else.' The attacks on Rubens, Rembrandt, and 
 Titian complicate this clear article of faith. In the Vision 
 and the Catalogue and the smaller prose fragments the concep- 
 tion is larger. The now familiar doctrine, of the eternity of the 
 types which are seen by the imagination in a state of vision, 
 is handled again. The most important distinction brought 
 out, and one which ought to be taken to heart ' for the sake 
 of eternal life,' is that between allegory and vision. The first 
 is ' formed by the daughters of Memory,' or the deliberate 
 reason ; the second is ' surrounded by the daughters of inspira- 
 tion.' Saturn is invented to express the iron age ; and this 
 is allegory ; yet there is some vision at once involved, when 
 Saturn is figured as ' a very aged man.' Otherwise he is not 
 a creature of vision ; he is not seen. He is not, therefore, one
 
 170 WILLIAM BLAKE 
 
 with his meaning. Moreover, allegories ' are things that 
 relate to moral virtues,' which, unhappily, ' do not exist ' ; 
 that is, are not begotten of the imagination, and are products, 
 we may suppose, of the reign of Urizen. They imply a curbing 
 of the passions ; but that is not the way to heaven, which 
 comes through cultivation of the ' understanding ' a different 
 faculty, be it noted, in Blake's dialect, from ' reason.' It is 
 the faculty that shall prevail at the Last Judgment, that 
 ' overwhelming of bad art and science.' By ' understanding ' 
 Blake seems to mean simply the perception of truth of his 
 truth. We are not to look for the missing links in his argu- 
 ment, or for attention to the ordinary terms of philosophy, 
 in all this ; but there is little real obscurity. The theory of 
 the permanence of ' characters,' or the essential forms of things 
 in ' eternity,' is enlarged on with Blake's loftiest eloquence. 
 His ignorance of book-theory was an advantage to him ; it 
 enabled him to say some of the best things in the language on 
 imagination and poetry. 
 
 Partly owing to his method of publication, Blake had no 
 influence on English literature before 1860, but he was not 
 unregarded by men of letters. 1 Southey paid him tribute. 
 Wordsworth, whom Blake thought, after all reservations, a 
 ' great man ' and ' the only poet of the age,' observed to Crabb 
 Robinson : 
 
 There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something 
 in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity 
 of Lord Byron and Walter Scott. 
 
 Landor shrewdly wished that Wordsworth and Blake could 
 have ' divided ' Blake's madness between them ; ' for some 
 accession of it in the one case, and some diminution in the 
 other, would very greatly have improved both.' Thus can 
 the poets speak of one another. Coleridge, in one of his letters, 
 makes a carefully capricious class-list of the Songs of Innocence 
 and Experience, placing some of the best of them in the fourth 
 rank. Lamb praised the ' spirited criticism on Chaucer,' 
 which was ' so mystical and so full of vision,' and also The 
 Tiger, and called Blake ' one of the most extraordinary persons 
 of the age.' Crabb Robinson's reports of him in his later 
 years are the best of all, in the veracity of their ' sharp and 
 wiry line.' Despite such attentions, Blake was long chiefly 
 remembered as an artist of curious power, who had written 
 verses to accompany his pictures. Three short memoirs were 
 produced between his death and 1863, when Gilchrist, an art
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE 171 
 
 critic who died prematurely, revealed him as a mighty and 
 ignored designer, and published his lyrical writings, the text 
 being edited, after the manner of corrupt classics, by Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti ; nor was a true text to be rescued from the 
 neglect or falsification of successive editors until the twentieth 
 century. In 1868 came Swinburne's masterpiece of appraisal, 
 at once impassioned and precise. A scattered trail of editions 
 and explanations followed, but the second retrieval of Blake's 
 fame dates from within the last twenty years. We are now in 
 sight of having all that he wrote, just as he wrote it. 
 
 Blake is not one of those lesser figures that, after a genera- 
 tion, fall into a dim but established place in the general esteem. 
 Nor is he one of the great poets, like Keats, whose rank comes 
 to settle itself. He is with Wordsworth and Shelley, who 
 hold no such position, but over whom each age disputes in the 
 light of its own ideas and revulsions. But one thing we see, 
 that this stranded artist was near the heart of the romantic 
 Renaissance, and that in him centre and originate some poetic 
 and spiritual forces which have only become intelligible long 
 afterwards. He was alone, and yet in company ; he worked, 
 after all, along with others, without their knowledge or his 
 own. His art and creed are much determined by his rebellion 
 against the age of criticism, reason, and science ; of which, 
 again, on his negative side, he is also the creature. He 
 announces the claims of individual thought, of natural passion, 
 and of free imagination, in a manner more unaffected than 
 Byron's, more masculine and humane than Shelley's, and 
 earlier than both. He has a deeper sense of beauty than any 
 Englishman of his generation. He is also the true renewcr 
 of a great and lovely poetical style, especially in lyric ; and he 
 is this, while the poets of Lyrical Ballads arc still struggling 
 in the bird-lime of conventional diction. He is not now hidden, 
 as Cowper is a little hidden, by those who began to write 
 after him. His poetic note, at its best, strikes on our ear as 
 undulled and as independent of Fashion, whom his contempor- 
 ary, Leopardi, calls 'the sister of Death.' A stray sentence 
 written by Blake on a margin in Swedenborg's Din'e Love and 
 Wisdom gives much of his mind in a few words : 
 
 He who loves feels love descend into him, and if he has wisdom, 
 may perceive it from the poetic genius, which is the Lord.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 I. Fiction during the transition, 1780-1812; relation to the four great 
 novelists of the eighteenth century. Main divisions : (a) the novel of 
 English life and manners ; new lineage of women writers ; (b) the novel of 
 'terror' or 'suspense' (see Ch. vn.). Cross tendencies: interest in doctrine, 
 in history and foreign lands, and in natural scenery. 
 
 II. Stray examples, 1770-80 : The Spiritual Quixote. Mackenzie. Work 
 of Miss Burney. Instructive fiction ; scheme of the ' progress ' and the 
 moral ' contrast.' 
 
 III. Mrs. Inchbald's two stories. Male doctrinaires : Bage's Hermsprong. 
 Holcroft's tales. Cumberland's Henry. Mrs. Opie's tales, their range and 
 qualities. Miss Edgeworth : view of life ; short stories for the young. Pur- 
 pose of the Irish novels : Castle Rackrent ; The Absentee, etc. Day, Sandford 
 and Merlon. Hannah More. Mrs. Hamilton. 
 
 IV. Miss Austen ; social world she portrays ; stages of her work. The 
 Steventon novels : Sense and Sensibility ; Pride and Prejudice, nature of its 
 pre-eminence ; Northanger Abbey (see Ch. vn.) ; Lady Susan. The Chaw- 
 ton novels : Mansfield Park ; Emma ; Persuasion. Miss Austen not ' im- 
 personal ' ; increase of kindliness ; scenery. 
 
 V. Miss Austen ; her reading and possible models. Vocabulary, its purity. 
 Method of work ; view of poetry. Avoidance of tragedy and passion ; sum- 
 mary severity. Her feminine point of view ; valediction. 
 
 THE ' poetic genius, which is the Lord,' was also astir, during 
 the last decade of the century, in Scott, Wordsworth, and 
 Coleridge ; but its record must now be forsaken awhile, in 
 order to notice other workings of the English mind and imagina- 
 tion, in prose. And first of fiction, 1 which for thirty years 
 remains in a transitional state, and whose rebirth is much 
 later than that of poetry. The great age of the novel ends 
 after A Sentimental Journey (17G8) and Humphry Clinker 
 (1771), to be renewed in Sense and Sensibility (published 181 1), 
 and in Waverley (1814). But the generation of writers that 
 come between are not all mere dusty forerunners of Scott and 
 Miss Austen. They have left some good stories ; there is 
 Miss Burney, there is Beckford to sustain us. Some of their 
 work has suffered from Northanger Abbey what the rhymed 
 
 172
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 173 
 
 romances suffer from Chaucer's Sir Thopas ; it is chiefly 
 remembered in parody. But Mrs. Opie and Airs. Inchbald, 
 Caleb Williams and Maturin's Women, ought not thus to 
 perish of mockery. To go back to them is somewhat like 
 going back from Chaucer to The Owl and the Nightingale, or 
 The Fox and the Wolf. Sometimes, indeed, they serve as a 
 lively prelude to the greater writers. There are scenes in 
 Cecilia that forecast Pride and Prejudice, and the talk of Targe 
 and Buchanan in Dr. John Moore's Zeliico is a passage of robust 
 Scottish humour composed long before Waverley. But we 
 often come on something that Scott and Miss Austen do not 
 give at all. The sardonic wit and fevered fantasy of Beckford 
 have no following, and the tortures of Caleb Williams in his 
 wanderings or of Mon9ada in his dungeon, are never outdone 
 in their own kinds. It is true that few of these intervening 
 writers can write a book. They should be sifted into an 
 anthology of scenes and passages, which might well be accom- 
 panied by the Lives that Scott prefixed to Ballantyne's Novelists' 
 Library ; a series of criticisms in his loose, shrewd, generous 
 style, which often show us how he stood towards his pre- 
 cursors, and what he could and could not, and also what he 
 need not, learn from them. 
 
 The four chief novelists of the mid-century at once left their 
 traces ; but none of them founded a real school, and their 
 true influence was postponed, or deflected abroad. Fielding 
 had imitators like Richard Cumberland ; but his large easy 
 posture of mind, at home amongst all sorts of men, and his 
 power of taking life as it is, without excitement or acidity, 
 are not found again before Scott. His knowledge of the 
 English high roads, with their humours and noises, reappears 
 in Dickens, and some of his sharper irony, the irony of Jonathan 
 Wild, in Barry Lyndon. Smollett created the angry novel, a 
 most honourable and British species, and his pure and classic 
 language gives him permanence ; the influence of his exter- 
 nality, and of his lively, if often machine-made characters, 
 upon the author of Martin Chuzzlewit, is well known. Richard- 
 son was a great inventor of types Lovelace, Clarissa, Grandi- 
 son which sank into the general mind, as can be seen in French 
 and German fiction ; but at home his unreal style, sometimes 
 heated and sometimes pedantic, did ill service, for nothing 
 leaves posterity so cold as the rhetoric of the emotions. His 
 analytic power and skill in maintaining a hectic suspense, 
 and his occasional tragic pathos, keep him alive. Sterne's 
 disciples, like Henry Mackenzie, ' the man of feeling,' caught
 
 174 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 everything but his wit, insight, and execution, all consummate. 
 Thus the history of our fiction from 1780 to 1814 is only in a 
 small measure the history of these influences. 
 
 The novel does not grow, in the sense of getting better and 
 better, during this period, but it does grow in variety and 
 fertility, and its lines of direction l become plainer. Of such 
 broad lines there are two, which sometimes cross one another, 
 and which are themselves crossed and confused by slighter 
 ones. First of all is continued the central, congenial busi- 
 ness of eighteenth-century fiction, namely the portraiture of 
 English life and manners in a spirit that is positive rather 
 than poetical ; a work begun by Defoe, and carried to its 
 utmost by Fielding, with Smollett by his side. But the differ- 
 ence after 1780 is this, that the Salic law is now abolished, and 
 that women come into the kingdom of which they have shared 
 the rule, with intervals, ever since. This lineage begins with 
 Evelina (1778) ; Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, Miss Edgeworth 
 follow ; and then comes Miss Austen, who escapes their weak- 
 nesses and perfects her own form of art, so that the shades of 
 that dimmer dynasty behind and beside her, on whose ' heels 
 a fresh perfection treads,' require now to be evoked with some 
 energy. But some of them are more daring than Miss Austen ; 
 the situation in Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art, and the talk 
 of Miss Burney's cads and eccentrics, bear no painfully feminine 
 stamp. In one way the scope of the novel is enlarged by them 
 all. Many of their tales might bear the old title of ' Women 
 beware women.' For the first time in England, women are 
 nicely depicted by their own sex, sometimes with heart and 
 sympathy, but oftener with that cool, intimate veracity 
 which is so salutary, but which omits so much of the essence 
 of women as men see them. This instinct, in any case, lies 
 near the heart of the counter -romance, the passion for realism, 
 which will meet us so constantly in the age of romance, and 
 which may be thought of as the spirit of the eighteenth century 
 living on and asserting itself against the rebels. 
 
 Naturally, there can be no strict classification according to 
 sex. There are male intruders into this domain, like Bage 
 and Holcroft ; and, on the other hand, Mrs. Radcliffe and Mrs. 
 Shelley figure amongst the second and contrasting group of 
 novelists, who will be reviewed in the next chapter and who 
 work alongside of the romantic poets. Their work is some- 
 times styled the ' novel of terror,' but the ' novel of suspense ' 
 is a wider term ; such a title as the ' satanic novel ' sounds 
 portentous, but might be justified literally by reference to the
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 175 
 
 favourite type of villain exhibited in these stories, with his 
 blasted front, his look of defiance and command, his power 
 to argue and seduce, and his perfunctory touches of human 
 feeling. It was in this spirit that Burns ' bought a pocket 
 Milton,' that he might study the ' intrepid, umMelding inde- 
 pendence,' and other qualities, of ' that great personage, 
 Satan.' Beckford, Lewis, and Maturin played their part, as will 
 be seen, not only in developing the pattern, but in the revival 
 of the artistic senses, and of the art of plotting out a story. 
 
 The frontiers between the novel of manners and the novel 
 of suspense are blurred by several cross-lines of tendency. 
 One of these is the inclination to the didactic and doctrinal. 
 There is a strong infusion of moral and social ideas, often of a 
 revolutionary cast, and a great deal of tedious set discussion. 
 The rights of men, women, children and animals, and the 
 bearing of those rights on education, law, government and 
 marriage, come up with more or less emphasis in the pages 
 of writers as different as Godwin and Miss Edge worth. In 
 Scott and Miss Austen this excrescence disappears, and their art 
 is not opinionated. A second interest is that felt in history. 1 
 Some of Scott's forgotten precursors return to past ages, or 
 extend the scene to foreign lands with their scenery and 
 memorials. The novels of the Misses Lee and the Italian 
 tales of Mrs. Radcliffe are examples. Thirdly, the growing 
 love for landscape is a recurrent feature of the transitional 
 novel. This, as we have seen, is an instinct which letters 
 share with painting, prose with poetry, and the novelists with 
 the travellers and the theorists on the ' picturesque.' Thus 
 the interest in doctrine, the interest in history and foreign 
 places, and the interest in nature, are found in varying measure 
 throughout both the chief schools of fiction. It is simpler 
 to take each of the schools chronologically, and to let these 
 minor features appear in course of the survey. 
 
 II 
 
 A few examples, 2 earlier than 1780, of the trail left by 
 the great novelists may be referred to. Fielding's scene the 
 English inn-yard, the parsonage, the disreputable town house 
 is reproduced in the curious and pleasant comic romance 
 called The Spiritual Quixote, or the Summer's Ramble of Mr. 
 Geoffrey Wildgoose (1774), by the Rev. Richard Graves, also 
 a translator of Marcus Aurelius and La Casa. But the horse- 
 play and billingsgate and rude satire more resemble Smollett's,
 
 176 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 and the adventures in London of the innocent Miss Townsend 
 recall his livelier episodes. Wildgoose, who might be called 
 a Methodist l Hudibras, is a young man of means, bitten with 
 the doctrines of Wesley and Whitfield, who are introduced 
 in person. He wanders round the Midlands preaching and 
 attracting not only crowds but occasionally dirt and addled 
 eggs, and hears many confidences, which are sewn, after 
 Fielding's manner, into the book as separate tales. There 
 are also gentler tones, and a certain shamefaced liking for 
 the picturesque, and we are carried to the Leasowes, where 
 it was practised by the author's friend, Mr. Shenstone. The 
 book is pure eighteenth century in the narrower sense ; but 
 there is a grudging recognition of the Wesleyans and their 
 ' enthusiasm.' 
 
 Sterne, too, had his following ; his charm, his suddenness, 
 his unscrupulous use of his intimacy with life, were his own ; 
 but his too famous ' sensibility ' was exaggerated in The Man 
 of Feeling (1771), by Henry Mackenzie, the ' Scottish Addison,' 
 who also drew something from Richardson. The hero of this 
 tale, Harley, is a cheerful, but usually also a foolish giver, 
 and is considerably swindled by the objects of his benevolence. 
 His ready tears are a perennial and unintended source of 
 entertainment to the reader. There is, however, also some 
 sharpness of drawing, and Mackenzie was in fact a tolerably 
 dry-headed Scottish man of business. The Man of the World 
 (1773) is a pendant, and the hero is a cynical transgressor. 
 Julia de Roubigne. (1777), in epistolary form, establishes 
 Mackenzie's connection with the anti-slavery movement of 
 his time. He was the first to greet, in somewhat patronising 
 terms, the genius of Burns, in his Lounger, a magazine pro- 
 duced in Edinburgh (1785-7), a sequel to the earlier Mirror. 
 Mackenzie edited these periodicals and wrote much in them, 
 and is one of the latest of the pupils who worked in the studio 
 of Addison. He had cultivated tastes, and Scott records his 
 lecture on German literature, given in 1788, as one of the first 
 incitements to a study that was still most uncommon. Another 
 little tale by an unknown hand, and faintly imitative of Sterne, 
 is The Correspondents (1775), also cast into the form of letters. 
 Not without nicety, the relationship is developed between a 
 wretched old dangler of rank and a young widow, who chooses 
 him as her mentor. With inimitable prudery and sensibility, 
 she keeps him at arm's length, angling (so we think) for an 
 offer of marriage which never comes ; and on the last page, 
 after some critical remarks on the letters of ' Junius/ she
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 177 
 
 signs herself, in gently spiteful italics, ' your affectionate 
 friend.' Sterne's trick of doubling away and breaking off just 
 before a crisis is followed with some address. 
 
 But not thus was the novel to be kept alive. In Evelina, 
 the gay photographic comedy of the male novelists assumes 
 a feminine sharpness and lightness of touch. Miss Burney, 1 
 though more decorous than they, is far from prim, and what in 
 Smollett would have been an unnatural reserve is in her only 
 an engaging boldness. She was admired by some of the 
 strongest minds of the time, including Johnson, Burke, and 
 Reynolds, as well as by their descendant Macaulay. They 
 relished her sketches of real life, as they did those of Crabbe ; 
 they liked the written talk of a woman of wit and breeding, 
 not too much given to sentiment. They admired the fine 
 handiwork, which they could no more imitate than they could 
 make lace. Fanny Burney is, in essence, less a novelist than 
 a reporter, or an ideal maker of memoirs. Her fictitious 
 dialogues have the same air of veracity, of line-by-line repro- 
 duction, as her record of her talks with royalty or with the 
 unspeakable old court dame, Schwellenberg. In Evelina she 
 keeps to the epistolary convention, for the heroine tells her 
 whole tale to her adviser, Mr. Villars, in writing. The draw- 
 backs of the method are clear, but at least it gives the sense 
 of the present ; we have the false lights and half-lights, in 
 which events are seen as they occur, instead of the notion that 
 the omniscient author is buttoning up the secret. Miss Burney's 
 strength hardly lies in plot, though she gets over its necessities 
 gracefully enough. But her sense of type, her gaiety and 
 economy of stroke, and her intuition of manners, especially 
 of bad manners, had no precedent in English fiction. Madame 
 Duval with her French, and Captain Mirvan with his dressed 
 monkey, and the crowd of matrons, beauties and fops, arc 
 still alive. They rescue for us the vision of a world that was 
 soon to perish. The Bath of Humphry Clinker, of Evelina, 
 of Anstey's New Bath Guide, and of Persuasion, has a different 
 array of humours and ceremonies in each case. 
 
 Miss Burney's powers grew, but not in full harmony ; for 
 Cecilia (1782), as Macaulay has shown, begins to suffer from 
 an unnatural weight of diction, due to Johnson's infection : 
 and this spoils and lengthens out many of the impassioned 
 scenes, which become too polite and elaborate. The language 
 of a man, even of a young man, making love must have been 
 simpler than that of Mr. Dclvile. But in this convention Miss 
 Burney was of her age, and Scott is equally at fault in the 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 178 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 same way. The light comedy, also, is seen hardening into 
 the exhibition of humours ; and herein Cecilia stands to 
 Evelina somewhat as Ben Jonson's second comedy stands to 
 his first : there is more mind in the work, but less nature. 
 Yet the story is wonderfully well built up and carried through ; 
 the spring of Cecilia's troubles the refusal of caste-proud 
 aristocrats to let their son change his name in order to marry 
 her, while she must marry if she is to keep her fortune is 
 not at all improbable ; and the villainy of Monckton is most 
 plausibly kept from Cecilia, while the reader is aware of it. 
 In the throng of humourists, too, there is still rich and delightful 
 comedy. Briggs and Simkin and Hobson are extravagant, 
 but only as the best creations of Dickens are extravagant 
 The passages of arms between the elder Delvile, a sort of Sir 
 Leicester Dedlock in his grotesque ancestral pride, and Lady 
 Honoria Pemberton, a perfectly lifelike piece of giddy mischief, 
 are in the best style of comedy. 
 
 ' I believe, indeed, a person of family such as mine will hardly 
 be supposed to have come into the world for the office of amusing 
 it!' 
 
 ' O, no, sir,' cried she, with pretended innocence ; ' nobody, I am 
 sure, ever saw you with such a thought.' 
 
 But he had come into the world for just that office, as the 
 sequel shows : 
 
 ' Caps and wigs, dinners and bouquets ! ' interrupted Mr. Delvile ; 
 ' your ladyship's estimate of wealth is really extremely minute.' 
 
 ' Why, you know, sir, as to caps and wigs, they are very serious 
 things, for we should look mighty droll figures to go about bare- 
 headed ; and as to dinners, how would the Delviles have lasted all 
 these thousand centuries if they had disdained eating them ? ' 
 
 Passion may be formal in Miss Burney's dialogue, but her 
 humour is outspoken enough. With little of Jane Austen's 
 still irony, her touch upon fatuity and vulgarity, in the reported 
 speech of the Branghtons or of Mr. Briggs, is more startling, 
 and may be called more masculine. She had mixed more with 
 loud men than the observer of Chawton, and fiction is well 
 on its way to the still robuster style of Miss Ferrier. But 
 one gift all these ladies have, which is denied to the male 
 novelist and works on the nerves even of the admiring male 
 reader. They can pile up small cruel vexations and comic 
 embarrassments on the heroine till she does not know where 
 to look, and this screw they turn without mercy ; or rather 
 they torture their victim to death with needles, till we hate
 
 and weary of the sight and wish to think that this chill, small 
 inhumanity of the authoress towards her puppets, is not a 
 secondary sexual characteristic. Poor Miss Burney was to 
 suffer something of the sort herself ; her vice-like memory 
 records it all in her Diary, and is seen even in Camilla (1796). 
 
 Mrs. Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets have been named 
 already, was in her day more noted for her work in fiction. She 
 translated Manon Lescaut, and The Old Manor House (1793) 
 was the most popular of her novels. It is a not incongruous 
 or ungraceful mixture of the story of manners and the story 
 of suspense ; there are strange faces, and alarming sounds, 
 and an agitated heroine ; but there is some naturalness and 
 ease in the dialogue. These old once-fashionable stories are 
 now thin and pale, but the fortunes of Mrs. Smith's Orlando 
 and Monimia, and the humours of the coachmen and old ladies 
 who surround them, are at least recited without rhetoric. 
 
 The edifying tale of real life, as composed in the eighteenth 
 century, has long been obsolete, but has most respectable 
 origins. They lie far away, in the Morality, with its personified 
 virtues and vices ; in the comedy of Jonson and Massinger ; 
 in the formal Character, and in its offspring, the typical 
 portraits, more or less conventionalised, of Addison and 
 Steele. Thence the tradition was taken over by artists so 
 different, yet so close allied, as Fielding and Hogarth. Field- 
 ing's genius, of course, eludes any such formula ; but his 
 mechanism is simple enough in one sense ; the wicked flourish 
 long, the decent are tried and buffeted, but some poetic 
 justice the justice, that is, proper to comedy, is done at last. 
 In Hogarth (and in his contemporary, Lillo, the dramatist, 
 who stands outside literature knocking at the door), the further 
 conception of the Progress is developed. The lives of the good 
 boy and the bad are next exhibited, in neatly parallel phases, 
 the one destined for the mayoral robes and the other for the 
 hangman's toilet. In Hogarth the pedagogic element is most 
 powerful ; but we can swallow it, because it is commended 
 by his magnificent energy of invective, by the truth and great - 
 ness of his execution, and also by his recurrent sense of beauty. 
 But the same element becomes more dubious as the novel 
 falls into the hands, or aprons, of the women, and takes on 
 the character of sampler-work. Story-tolling, while seasoned 
 with more or less of wit and observation, becomes a means 
 of preaching the reader into virtue and good sense. Fiction 
 becomes a spinster, or elderly wedded relation, of The Alchemist 
 and The Spectator. The habit of setting villainy over against
 
 180 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 goodness, or sensibility against sense, becomes the frame of 
 mind of the novelist, the very form of her thought. She 
 starts, not with persons, but with these abstractions, whom she 
 tries, and sometimes certainly contrives, to create into persons. 
 Fiction thus shades off into educational writing, 1 which at this 
 period mostly lies outside literature. To understand fully 
 the atmosphere of the novel, it would be right to spend some 
 time with the ' blue-stocking ' and cultured dames of the period 
 Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone, and the rest for whom our 
 chronicle has no leisure, and with male instructors like the 
 essayist Dr. John Gregory. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This element of schoolroom ethics, oddly mixed with some- 
 thing much more daring, and with not a little vigour of observant 
 wit, is found in the two novels (praised by Byron) 2 of Mrs. 
 Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821). Her own life is a better 
 story than either. She was beautiful and stage-struck ; 
 married young and abruptly, though happily ; but was, after 
 seven years, left a widow ; played many first-rate parts Lady 
 Anne, Cordelia, Desdemona chiefly in the provinces, with 
 much intelligence, but was hampered by a defect of speech ; 
 was often in straits and always generous ; and her prudence, 
 her charm, her attraction, are described by many observers, 
 including Mary Shelley. Mrs. Inchbald edited several collec- 
 tions of plays, and herself wrote or adapted nearly a score of 
 pieces; but her repute rests on A Simple Story (1791) and 
 Nature and Art (1796), which were at once successful. 
 
 In A Simple Story there is much good breakfast-table 
 comedy, and no lack of ' passion,' rather of the genteel sort. 
 There is also some sharp and almost subtle sketching of 
 character. The persons are two old maids, two priests, a 
 young peer, and a young flirt. This Miss Milner is the ward 
 of one of the priests, named Dorriforth. She commands our 
 sympathy with her sprightly ways, though the authoress is 
 shocked at her bearing. She and her guardian are in love, 
 but both are silent for fear of sacrilege. A real subject seems 
 here to be in sight, but it is evaded ; for Rome dispenses Dorri- 
 forth (now an earl) from his vows, that a noble Catholic race 
 may not perish. He becomes betrothed to Miss Milner, and 
 administers to her the most terrific lectures when she goes 
 to a masquerade in male attire. Still, they marry. Years 
 pass ; we then learn that Lady Elmwood has played false, of 
 course with a nobleman ; but she dies. So Elmwood turns
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 181 
 
 Timon, refuses even to see his daughter Matilda, who lives 
 in his house, and only relents when he is called upon to save 
 her from a ruffian ravisher also a nobleman. Matilda has 
 been brought up well, and therefore ends well, but her poor 
 mother had gone wrong through missing the effects of ' proper 
 education ' ; with which words, printed in capitals, the book 
 concludes. The liveliest passages are those between the two 
 priests, Dorriforth with his irksome conscience, and Sandford, 
 the very insolent but unlocked director of that conscience, 
 a cleric who ' perfectly knew how to influence the sentiments 
 and sensations of all humankind,' and who is therefore a 
 parlour version of the lowering Jesuits that meet us in the 
 pages of Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin. 
 
 Nature and Art, though also tolerably ridiculous in detail, 
 is by no means dull or conventional in its moral. The tale 
 occupies two generations. William and Henry are the bad 
 and good brothers. William is ambitious, callous, and con- 
 ventional : he becomes a dean. Henry is good and kind, 
 launches the ungrateful William in life, but marries a public 
 singer whom the dean's aristocratic lady declines to receive. 
 Mrs. Henry dying, the dean reflects that ' had he known she 
 had been so near her dissolution, she might have been intro- 
 duced to Lady Clementina ' a phrase that gives us the length 
 of Mrs. Inchbald's stiletto. Time goes by, and Henry, who 
 has lived by playing the violin to the natives of Africa, sends 
 back his son, Henry the younger, to his uncle's care. This 
 Henry is a Rousseau-bred child, and asks the dean such awk- 
 ward questions as ' what is the difference between a war and 
 a massacre/ and why, if there are no ranks in heaven, there 
 are any upon earth. William the younger, the dean's son, is 
 a successful and competent villain. He seduces a girl, saddles 
 his cousin with the crime, and rises (we must get over this as 
 best we may) to be a judge. His victim turns thief to support 
 her child, and after many years is brought up for sentence 
 before W T illiam. He does not recognise her ; he condemns her 
 to be hanged, and hanged she is. Her letters reach him 
 afterwards. In the management of this climax, however 
 absurdly it is led up to, there is real power and suspense. The 
 judgment-scene is impressive, and the letters have a pathos 
 neither overstrung, nor yet, what would be worse, understrung 
 and childish which is rare in the fiction of the time. Henry, 
 of course, prospers in the end. But at least there is no reliance 
 on the glaring, overt, poetical justice of Hogarth or of Lillo. 
 The villain is not hanged 1 himself, but hangs an innocent, whose
 
 182 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 death lies at his door. It is perhaps the best praise of Mrs. Inch- 
 bald that she contrives to make us forget the probabilities. 
 
 Imagine Sir Charles Grandison brought up on a diet of the 
 Contrat Social, and we shall have some conception of the hero 
 of Robert Bage's novel, Hermsprong, or Man as he is Not l 
 (1796) a title that is only too accurate. Hermsprong is not, 
 like Fielding's Square or Thwackum, a man of one idea, who 
 is carnal in the intervals of philosophical discussion, but an 
 idea in man's clothing, who courts real women, knocks down, 
 with an irresistible fist, wicked and aggressive persons of 
 quality, and discourses of an ideal community and its virtues. 
 He has learnt his doctrines in America, but his Utopia is some- 
 thing not to be found, we learn, ' even in America ' ; it is one 
 in which ' all the members had the power so to alternate the 
 employments of the mind and body, that the operations of 
 each might be enjoyment.' Hermsprong carries the atmo- 
 sphere of Price and Paine into all companies, and one fragment 
 of dialogue, containing an often-quoted phrase, gives his view 
 of the rights of women : 
 
 ' Now, the devil take me,' said Sumelin, ' if I know what either 
 you or this Mrs. Wollstonecraft would be at. But this I know, that 
 the influence of women is too great ; that it has increased, is in- 
 creasing, and ought to be diminished.' 
 
 ' Well, then,' Mr. Hermsprong answered, ' let it be diminished on 
 the side of charms ; and let its future increase be on the side of 
 mind.' 
 
 ' To what purposes ? ' the banker asked. ' To invade the pro- 
 vinces of men ? ' 
 
 When he is off this track of thought, Bage has a curious rol- 
 licking tone ; he had been brought up a quaker. The plot of 
 his story is beneath description, and his heroine correct beyond 
 endurance ; but her confidant, Miss Fluart, is a brilliantly- 
 sketched little flirt, amazingly free-spoken and on the right 
 side, and capable of keeping in order old Lord Grondale, 
 who is a variation, with sundry satyr-like qualities added, 
 of Miss Burney's Delvile ; a person with a mad conceit of 
 his rank, and a domestic tyrant. There is a good deal of 
 comedy in Hermsprong ; but the better it is, the more it is 
 spoilt by the ingredient of doctrine. Bage's other novels, such 
 as Man as he Is (1792), which was enjoyed by Cowper, and 
 Mount Henneth, show the same mixture in less readable form. 
 The Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft 2 (1745-1809), the play- 
 wright, actor, traveller and radical, relate with admirable
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 183 
 
 vigour, and in manly style, his wandering life ; they were com- 
 pleted by Hazlitt and published in 1816. Holcroft's connection 
 with the Society for Constitutional Information, and with 
 Thelwall, Home Tooko, and other revolutionary spirits, cost 
 him an indictment. He figured in the famous case of 1794, 
 but was discharged without a trial. His Road to Ruin, the best 
 of his melodramatic comedies, appeared in 1792, and is named 
 hereafter (Ch. xxi). He has an ingrained weakness for theoris- 
 ing, but his stories give a lively picture of manners and opinions, 
 and often of his own career. Alwyn (1780) describes the life 
 of a wandering player like himself. In Anna St. Ives (1792, 
 7 vols.) the hero is the son of a gardener, and his merits, we hear, 
 ' almost exceed expression.' He puts the arrogant gentry in 
 the wrong at every turn, by sheer greatness of soul. He stops 
 a duel between two complete strangers by his lofty remon- 
 strances. His foil is a feeble sort of Lovelace, who is at last 
 shamed into virtue by his example. ' I pardon you, sir,' says 
 the hero, ' and leave you to pardon yourself.' We see this 
 gentleman through the eyes of the heroine, who writes most 
 of the letters that compose the story. He might be described, 
 in sporting phrase, as ' by Grandison out of Doctrine.' The 
 Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794) is a work worthier of the 
 author of the Road to Ruin. Sometimes it is as quick and 
 vivid as Roderick Random. The hero's childhood, schooling, 
 university life, and experience in journalism, are told with the 
 same hard, high spirits ; and long political ruminations, of a 
 radical cast, are interspersed. The cursing, gambling, and 
 raking of the Oxford boys, and the revenge of the squire on the 
 obnoxious parson, whose tithe he pays in the shape of a horde 
 of rats, are episodes lively enough. There are two things in 
 Hugh Trevor especially worthy of remembrance. One is the 
 radical but jovial, the jovial but melancholy ditty, of Gaffer 
 Gray, and the other is the clergyman who put an amazing 
 quantity of emphasis on his ' epithet, Prodigious' Scott's 
 kindly notice of Holcroft, whose opinions he abhorred, is such 
 as we should expect, and the ' epithet ' may have stuck in his 
 memory. In another story, The Memoirs of Bryan Perdue 
 (1805), Holcroft laments what law has made of man, and muses 
 on the bright examples that Jack Sheppard and Eugene Aram 
 would have furnished, if only they had had the chance. 
 
 The dramatist Richard Cumberland, in his novel Henry 
 (1795), presents another hero of the same breed as those of 
 Bage and Holcroft ; and there is the same awkward compound 
 of theory and horse-play. The plot is assiduously arranged
 
 184 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 in the manner of Fielding, with books and prefaces, and 
 Cumberland gives a late edition of the classical canons of the 
 art of fiction : 
 
 A Novel may be considered as a kind of dilated comedy ; its 
 plot, therefore, should be uniform, and its narrative unbroken ; 
 episodes and digressions are sparingly, if at all, to be admitted. . . . 
 Every writer, who wishes to endear man to man by pleasing pictures 
 of human nature, will let the good preponderate over the evil ; he 
 will not take his maxims from Rochefoucault, nor shape his fellow- 
 creatures after the models of Hobbes or Swift. 
 
 It is unlucky that these honest prescriptions fail to impart 
 life to Henry. As Scott observes, Cumberland must have been 
 too acute to mistake the purpose of Fielding's first novel ; but 
 he makes his hero a kind of Joseph Andrews, who resists the 
 most trying assaults on his virtue ; and, like other followers 
 of Fielding who lacked insight, he falls back upon Smollett- 
 esque humours and noise. We return without regret from 
 Cumberland to the women novelists, in whose hands virtue 
 is safer because more vivacious. 
 
 In the tales of Mrs. Opie 1 (1769-1853), the wife of the painter, 
 there is a piquant outlook on the world of human disturbance 
 from beneath the shelter of the quaker bonnet. The daughter 
 of Dr. James Alderson of Norwich the cultured, liberal-minded 
 Norwich of the Taylors and Gurneys she knew Godwin and 
 the radical set, as well as Mrs. Siddons and Kemble. She 
 travelled freely, and saw Napoleon, Kosciusko, and Louis 
 Philippe ; talked with Scott, Erskine, Fox, and Dr. Chalmers ; 
 kept to the last her habit of sitting in the civil courts, in order 
 to study eloquence and the human drama ; and remained full 
 of jest and repartee and sprightliness. She was a moral and 
 religious woman of the world, and believed, like her com- 
 panions, in the power of direct ethical instruction upon the 
 character of the young ; a belief which, along with its artistic 
 parasites, the scheme of the ' progress,' and the framework 
 of the moral contrast, determined much of her attitude as a 
 novelist. She passed easily and gradually away from the 
 advanced views of her youth; and when, in 1825, she joined 
 the Society of Friends, she had done most of her story-telling ; 
 her Detraction Displayed, and her Art of Lying in all its Branches, 
 being not tales but discourses. 
 
 Mrs. Opie's tales are now little read, and have been under- 
 valued. Most of them are brief, though Adeline Moivbray ( 1 804) 
 is a full-length novel. Her first signed work, Father and
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 185 
 
 Daughter (1810), is all pain and pathos. In other cases she 
 essays the novel of sensation, as in A Tale of Trials and in The 
 Ruffian Boy ; the latter of which shows a certain kinship with 
 Mrs. Radcliffe. The ' ruffian ' is an Italian, who swears ven- 
 geance against a damsel who has slighted him, and chases her 
 through some two hundred pages, being detected in various 
 guises by his eyes. This is the pair of terrible eyes that now 
 begins to haunt English fiction ; they are seen in Vathek and 
 The Monk, and they descend through Byron's poems to the 
 villains of Bulwer Lytton and Dickens. Their original ancestry 
 is perhaps found in the ' baleful eyes ' of Milton's Satan. 
 Mrs. Opie has thus a stronger dash of romance than Miss Edge- 
 worth or Miss Austen ; but the best of her works are lacking in 
 this element. Her Simple Tales, Tales of Real Life, New Tales, 
 and Tales of the Heart, appeared at intervals from 1806 to 1820. 
 
 Mrs. Opie is most herself when she is working out the embroil- 
 ments caused by some minor vice or foible, in a witty moral 
 tract. Her knowledge of the world is generally sufficient to 
 make her narrative water-tight, and she excels in the slightly 
 formal dialogue of persons of quality, ironically presented. 
 In Lady Anne and Lady Jane she does her work only too well, 
 for she enlists our sympathy with the flighty, secretive, prodigal 
 Lady Jane, who ruins her husband, and at last dies wretchedly, 
 stabbed by the wife of a poor creditor whom her refusals to 
 pay have driven to suicide. Lady Anne, brusque, dignified, 
 noble, and severely restraining her liking for the husband of 
 Lady Jane, is less engaging, despite the careful austerity with 
 which her failings are exhibited. Another anecdote, White 
 Lies, has an unpromising title, and the schoolroom is at once 
 suggested by the contrast of the good sister, Clara, who is burst- 
 ing with sincerity and informs a strange gentleman that he 
 certainly looks very 'yellow/ with the 'white liar,' her sister 
 Eleanor. But the actual intricate little plot, wherein Eleanor's 
 lies nearly cause the dismissal of a worthy tutor, and at last 
 cause her to be subpoonaed by both parties in a lawsuit, is 
 most deftly contrived. Eleanor never reforms ; her word is 
 always doubted by her husband, ' a nobleman many years older 
 than herself.' 
 
 One of the most arresting of these stories is A Wife's Duty ; 
 it has no plot, but is the record of a life. Helen Pendarves, the 
 wife, is Mrs. Opie's masterpiece. Her unaltcring love for her 
 volatile though not ill-natured husband (who is led away by 
 a wicked ex-actress) ; her moments of feminine pleasure in 
 her rival's reverses, and her slow sad measurements of her
 
 186 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 own fading beauty, are all drawn with a craft that faintly 
 suggests that of Thackeray. All the parties find themselves 
 in Paris during the Terror, and Helen, in disguise, lodges in 
 a baker's shop frequented by Robespierre, Danton, and 
 Anacharsis Clootz. Pendarves dies, and Helen then marries 
 an old admirer and is happy ; that is all. Mrs. Opie lets herself 
 go in her portraits of rakish fine gentlemen and ladies ; and 
 one of them, the bitter-tongued Sir Charles Delmour, is a highly 
 natural figure. He shows himself a true friend to the virtuous 
 wife, when she takes his addresses in a right and humorous 
 spirit. The copybook element is happily in abeyance in A 
 Wife's Duty, and the way in which the shadows lift repeatedly, 
 only to fall again, while to the last the issue is unforeseen, is 
 lifelike enough. Once, in The Welcome Home, Mrs. Opie betrays 
 her knowledge of the danger besetting her art ; and the fading 
 of her vogue, once considerable, may be explained by her 
 confession. The elderly hero marries the plain friend of his 
 youth, whom he has found faithful after many years, and the 
 authoress exclaims : 
 
 Alas, I fear I am painting a very unnatural character for a general 
 officer just returned a rich and prosperous bachelor from India ! 
 But I must have my own way ; and paint such a man as he ought 
 to think and feel, not perhaps as he would. 
 
 Cheerful prudence, which teaches that good sense and good 
 feeling always succeed, while thriftlessness and selfishness are 
 never lucky long what is the fruit of such a doctrine when it 
 is sown in Irish soil, with the sun and dew upon it of Irish wit 
 and pathos ? The answer is found in the stories of Maria 
 Edgeworth 1 (1767-1849). She was the pupil and at first the 
 literary partner of her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 
 whose autobiography 2 is a precious document for its mixture 
 of humour, mental courage, and pedantry, and also for its 
 notices of the life and character of Edgeworth 's friend, Thomas 
 Day, presently to be named. Father and daughter wrote to- 
 gether Practical Education (1798), a series of ingenious essays, 
 which is of some interest in the history of the domestic appli- 
 cation of Rousseau's theories ; and as Edgeworth had from 
 first to last a family of nineteen, he had a right to offer 
 such counsels. This band of brothers and sisters was a good 
 quarry for Miss Edgeworth. She came to know many layers 
 of Irish society. She understood the tragi-comedy of leases, 
 rents, borrowing ; the humours of the country house, and of 
 Dublin routs, as well as the struggles and personages of cottage
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 187 
 
 life. These she describes with something of the precision 
 of the historian, and Scott's tributes 1 to her labours, as a kind 
 of model for his own, were not merely due to generosity. 
 
 Miss Edgeworth's impulse to preach, or to laugh men into 
 good behaviour, is, like Addison's, inseparable from the gift 
 of cunning observation. She had too much of this gift merely 
 to divide mankind into sheep and goats ; and though, in nearly 
 all her stories, there are representatives of each extreme the 
 good and the rascally land-agent, the thoughtful and the 
 feather-headed child, the raffish and the steady governess 
 her real strength lies in the multitude of midway characters, 
 who are, indeed, more or less definitely scheduled to the debit 
 or credit of the universe, but are full of humour, life, and 
 nature nevertheless. She was in print sooner than Miss 
 Austen, long outlived her, and published three times as much, 
 but just fell short of producing any single classic. Her works 
 are of two kinds, the longer and the shorter story, the latter 
 being more expressly instructive in tone, and generally aiming 
 at the improvement of the young. Of this kind are the Moral 
 Tales for Young People (1801), and Popular Tales (1804). These 
 little works, and with them the familiar Rosamond, Frank, 
 and Harry and Lucy, seem to challenge criticism as to their 
 morality, which indeed is often inferior to their skill. The 
 world is a big schoolroom, and the mistress often away. The 
 naughty for a time have the advantage over the good, or the 
 faults of the good get them into trouble. The mistress always 
 comes back just in time, and gives some little shove to circum- 
 stance which sets things right. The good, now chastised and 
 enlightened, come into their own ; the others are humbled or 
 dismissed, but without bloodshed or ruin. A happy marriage 
 and a good conscience are, as it were, ingredients of well- 
 earned comfort. It is easy to see the primness of these ethics ; 
 but after all, the scene is a comic one, and an ' unjust ' ending 
 would shock the feelings of the audience. As Hegel says, a 
 gloomy finish is only warrantable when high tragedy is in 
 question ; otherwise, it is merely wasteful. These remarks 
 apply in some degree to Miss Edgeworth's ampler works, in 
 which the characters are adult. 
 
 The earliest of them, Castle Rackrent (1800), reveals her 
 larger purpose ; it is to paint a portion of the Irish people as 
 they really were, for the enlightenment of English readers. 
 A portion only ; for the later and sterner tones of the Banims 
 or of Carleton are not in question at all. There is no passion 
 or bitterness, but, instead, a not undignified humorous melan-
 
 188 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 choly, tenderness, and liveliness. The speaker in Castle 
 Rackrent, Thady Quirk the steward, who was drawn from life, 
 gives the oral memoirs of his landed and beggared masters with 
 a sad and steady veracity, shot across with jesting. In The 
 Absentee, which is one of the second series of Tales of Fashion- 
 able Life (1809 and 1812), there is a more poetic strain. The 
 absentee, Lord Clonbrony, has left his estate in the hands of 
 agents, and his heir, Lord Colambre, conies in disguise to 
 inspect, and receives the simple and beautiful hospitality of 
 the tenants. The high-stepping, embarrassed Clonbrony, and 
 his lady, who affects the English pronunciation and so exposes 
 herself to the darts of the stony English dames, are types new 
 in literature. In some of Miss Edgeworth's other Irish scenes, 
 such as Ennui and Manoeuvring, there are also genial and 
 spirited pictures, but the threat of pedagogy is not so well 
 veiled. Belinda (1801) is more of a regularly-built novel, with 
 a strain of improbable romance. Belinda herself is the good 
 child of the story-books, who has shot up and ' come out '- 
 the creation of an authoress who began with Rousseau and 
 sensibility, and has ended with a rather trying ideal of good 
 sense. One of the ladies observes : 
 
 ' For my part, I own I should like to be a strong devil rather than 
 a weak angel.' 
 
 ' You forget,' said Belinda, ' that it is not Milton, but Satan, who 
 says, " Fallen spirit, to be weak," etc.' 
 
 Blake's comments on this passage would have been worth 
 hearing ; it is ineffable, and is doubtless meant as an antidote 
 to the ' satanic ' ideal. After reading it, we agree with Mr. 
 Vincent, who ' drove toward London . . . thinking that if 
 Belinda had more faults she would be more amiable.' It may 
 be thought that Miss Edge worth agreed with Belinda in her 
 attitude to Satan. It also gives a clue to her attitude, to find 
 that one of her young men (in Ormond) is led away by reading 
 Tom Jones, but recovers after studying the character of 
 Grandison, whom he finds first absurd and then impressive. 
 Her other long stories, Patronage (1814), and Harrington, and 
 Ormond (1817), show the same preoccupations and qualities. 
 The former, her longest book, relates the troubles and final 
 good fortune of a virtuous family who scorn to rise through 
 political patronage, while the toad-eating place-hunters come 
 to grief ; the latter is an Irish story, full of subtlety and 
 surprises in its characterisation. Humour, in Miss Edgeworth's 
 books, is never far off ; lucidity and vivacity are everywhere,
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 189 
 
 only interrupted by the didactic strain, and sometimes not 
 marred even by its presence. Considerable as her craft is, 
 her national service is greater, and her discovery of a new field 
 of fiction perhaps greater still. To this witness- is borne not 
 only by Scott ; Tourgeniev, 1 it is stated, said that he was an 
 ' unconscious disciple of Miss Edgeworth is setting out on his 
 literary career,' and that but for her delineation of the squires 
 of Longford, he might not have thought of describing the 
 parallel class in Russia. 
 
 To be armed against the prejudices of the world, and to dis- 
 tinguish real merit from tho splendid vices which pass current in 
 what is called society, is one of the most difficult of human sciences. 
 
 It is Mr. Barlow who is speaking ; but the voice and the 
 spirit are those of his creator, Thomas Day, whose History of 
 Sandford and Merton (1783-9) is a most representative docu- 
 ment of the new spirit of pedagogy between Rousseau and the 
 Revolution. In the world Day depicts there is no need of a 
 Revolution ; it is not a good world ; it is cruel, snobbish, preju- 
 diced, uninformed ; but it is to be taught and argued out of 
 these vices. Reason must win, and ' a rational moderation ' 
 will prevail ; and the boyish mind is as clay in the hand of the 
 instructor. He will tell his pupil to be kind to children and 
 animals, to make no difference between white man and 
 coloured, to apologise for temper, to be dutiful and fraternal. 
 These things are not only noble, but profitable. Kind- 
 ness pays, as in the classic instance of Androcles ; it wins 
 gratitude, and gratitude pays too in the long run. Spleen, 
 intolerance, and selfishness do not. With this comic kind of 
 worldlincss mingles a finer strain, though the form it takes 
 may be grotesque. In Sandford and Merton, as in Day's 
 Dying Negro and other verses, there is a breath of real humanity 
 and courage. He draws out his ' history ' with some skill ; 
 he interweaves stories which provoke questions, and the 
 questions draw out explanations and more stories. His own 
 life is the most edifying story of all. Day, in his first ardour 
 for the programme of Rousseau, adopted and reared (wo 
 foundling girls, by hand, and on principle ; deferring his choice 
 of a wife until he could judge which of them would best servo. 
 Neither came up to his ideal, and Dny married elsewhere. He 
 was killed by the horse which he was riding, and which, from 
 motives of humanity, he had declined to have broken in. 
 
 But this want of humour is by no means a feature of all the 
 moralists of the age. Miss Hannah More 2 (17-45-1833), whose
 
 190 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 name must here be duly saluted, although she barely touches 
 the chronicle of fiction, or indeed (despite her voluminous 
 production) of letters, had no little wit and sprightliness, and 
 fully perceived their value to the educational arsenal. She by 
 no means falls among the radical doctrinaires, but gave much 
 of her time to warring against them with their own weapons, 
 and enforcing a high-minded, prim, old-fashioned, not ungainly 
 Toryism against Tom Paine and all subverters of society. 
 She knew and was esteemed by Garrick, Walpole, Johnson, 
 and Burke, and lived into the next era. She turned out quite 
 lively fugitive verse, such as The Bas Bleu ; Strictures on Female 
 Education (1799), inculcating the acquirement of solid house- 
 hold qualities rather than showy accomplishment ; dialogues, 
 full of animation, in the popular style, one of which. Village 
 Politics, by Will Chip, an anti-Paine production, is good reading, 
 ' many hundred thousand copies,' as she tells us, ' being circu- 
 lated in a short time ' ; and moral tracts innumerable ; besides 
 sundry tragedies (one of which, Percy, was played by Garrick) 
 and Sacred Dramas, which need not be described. Hannali 
 More's most popular work, Calebs in Search of a Wife (1809), 
 which ran through sixteen editions in as many years, is a novel 
 without a story, or rather a series of social sketches and aphor- 
 isms in the guise of a novel. The hero, a prig not without 
 brains, reviews a whole regiment of damsels, in ' search ' of 
 one who will rise to the ideal commended to him by his de- 
 parted parents. There is a piquant mixture of observation 
 and satire with mere droning and disquisition. Had Hannah 
 More been able to think of literature as an end, and not as a 
 means, we always feel that she might have made something 
 of it ; but then she would not have been herself ; and she 
 found her bourne in an old age of charitable and admirable 
 deeds, labouring to better the estate of the children in the 
 Mendips. She kept to the end her amiability and gaiety, of 
 the cast so often found in very good people who have known 
 the world. 
 
 Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton 1 is a forerunner of Gait and the 
 chroniclers of Scottish country manners ; her story, The 
 Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), is said to have left many a family 
 the trimmer for its teachings, and it was highly and justly 
 praised by Scott. The writer is a northern sister of Mrs. 
 Opie and her company, writing with an innocent and avowed 
 moral purpose ; but she draws her personages sharply, and 
 from an even humbler social layer than Miss Edgeworth. She 
 was a learned lady of letters with a ruling interest in educa-
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 191 
 
 tioual theory. Her Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo 
 Rajah (1796), with its demure irony, mock-Eastern floweriness 
 and young-ladyish doctrine, comes in the lineage between The 
 Citizen of the World and Hajji Baba : a kind of true eighteenth- 
 century mintage, going back to Lettres Persanes. Her Rajah 
 turns mild eyes of admiration and bewilderment upon English 
 institutions and society ; upon war, and horse-racing, and routs, 
 and stupid modish conversation, and the novel of sensibility, 
 and the revolutionary sceptic. Ho is struck by the Christian 
 sacred books, but sees much in English life that they do not 
 appear expressly to authorise. He finds that the sacred 
 animal of the country is not the cow but the partridge, and 
 that a poacher is nevertheless not punished with death. Mrs. 
 Hamilton's Popular Essays and other treatises are less lively, 
 but are of interest to the historian of educational opinion. 
 Her moral novelette teaches the virtues of order, and above all 
 of cleanliness, in village life ; and her lively pictures of the 
 fetid unsecured dwelling, with its grimy panes that will not 
 open, its dunghill, and its promiscuous cooking utensils, and of 
 the rustics who think nevertheless that all is ' weel enough,' 
 are of a fidelity that goes near to affect the stomach. Her 
 brisk use of the vernacular contrasts, as might be expected, 
 with the studied English of her sermons and admonitions. 
 She is brought up on Locke and benevolence and good sense, 
 but admires Rousseau and scenery and simple living ; and her 
 undoubted share of observing faculty is smothered only too 
 much in doctrine. Mrs. Hamilton is early in the field amongst 
 the lesser Scottish novelists, who will be noticed hereafter 
 (Ch. xii.). 
 
 IV 
 
 But the novel of manners had long waited for its mistress. 
 Narrative and portraiture, talk and style, had yet to reach 
 perfection and to interpenetrate, in the pure service of art. 
 The ailment of preaching, with its symptom, the fondness for 
 abstract personages, had struck deep. No classic manner 
 had been attained. No woman, in particular, had written who 
 was content with what she could really do, for some had 
 meddled with passions, others with theories, others with dic- 
 tion, that were too much for them. But the missing harmony 
 of gifts is found in Jane Austen J (1775-1817). She does not 
 mar them, for she knows what to sacrifice. All that Bentham 
 or Cobbett saw in England, she leaves out of view. For her
 
 192 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 there existed no French Revolution, no public abuses, no 
 history. She ignores all ranks above that of the baronet, or 
 solid rich landlord (Cobbett's ' fundlord '), and below the lowest 
 middle class ; * seldom draws servants, being too much of a lady 
 to have the backstair consciousness that troubles Thackeray ; 
 avoids country folk ; and never admits an artist or man of 
 letters into her pages. Her scene is no larger than her own 
 experience : the rectory, the country mansion, the small town, 
 the professional circle, with rare sallies to Bath or Portsmouth 
 or Lyme these are the boundaries of her life and art. ' Three 
 or four families in a country village is the very thing to work 
 upon.' The lieutenants and admirals, who bring in a breath 
 of foreign air, are such as she had known at home ; they are 
 the winged ants who fly abroad and then back to the nest. 
 She was not a shy recluse, but had no clear business in the 
 world except that of a good-looking, sociable, maiden aunt 
 who was liked by every one and who wrote tales which for a 
 long while nobody would publish. If we come back to her 
 after the Brontes, she may seem to leave out the chief things 
 in life. So she seemed to Charlotte Bronte. 2 But she is not 
 so to be approached. Drop romance, shut Wuthering Heights 
 or Villette, go into Miss Austen's world, and her power of selec- 
 tion is so sure that we forget there is any other, just as the 
 people in her books forget it. Her furniture of belief and 
 custom was that of a million spinsters, but she had the surest 
 of artistic consciences, the gift of style and story-telling, and 
 a native power of ironical miniature. She died at forty-two, 
 leaving six novels, some fragments, and a number of domestic 
 letters. The nature of her craft is defined, when she speaks 
 of ' the little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I work 
 with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.' 
 But it produces a great effect, and outlives most of the big 
 ambitious pictures. To have given birth to Jane Austen is 
 one of the best things done for England by the society she 
 describes. 
 
 Her first three books were written at Steventon between 
 1796 and 1799 ; but Pride and Prejudice was not published till 
 1812, Sense and Sensibility preceding it in 1811, and Northanger 
 Abbey following in 1818. The second three were written at 
 Chawton, another Hampshire village, between 1811 and 1816: 
 Mansfield Park was published in 1814, Emma in 1816, Per- 
 suasion posthumously. These show a deeper skill and 
 humanity than the Steventon novels, but no essential change 
 in style or method. The mature finality of form and temper
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 193 
 
 in Pride and Prejudice if it was not greatly revised before 
 printing is one of the mysteries of letters, for Jane Austen 
 wrote it at twenty- two, while Pamela was written at fifty and 
 Joseph Andrews at thirty-five. The verses of Chatterton 
 are in this way not more remarkable. The young are full 
 of satire, but their pictures of life seldom bear looking into ; 
 and if they have the power of expression, their power of 
 thought lags behind it. In Jane Austen all three gifts are 
 shown at once and for good. Such a fact may be partly 
 explained by that avoidance, already noted, of tragical or 
 vehement matter which saves her from false experiments ; 
 but this very avoidance shows the precocity of her artistic 
 instinct. 
 
 Sense and Sensibility was the first tale she published, and, 
 though written in its present form after Pride and Prejudice, 
 it was founded on an earlier draft, Elinor and Marianne, of 
 which it surely bears the traces. It is built on an Edge- 
 worthian ' contrast,' and touched with a governessing tone to 
 which Jane Austen seldom returned. Nor is the contrast 
 sound : it is a little sermon against poetry, romance, and 
 unreasoned love. These things are rebuked in the ' sensi- 
 bility ' of Marianne Dashwood, who is humbled and schooled, 
 and submits devotedly at last to a dull marriage. The cool, 
 well-ordered ' sense ' of Elinor is dreary enough. To drive 
 home the text, both sisters are tried and deceived or humiliated 
 by various selfish, callow, gross, or fickle persons : and in the 
 drawing of these Jane Austen reveals her craft, with a sour- 
 ness as yet somewhat unrelieved. The tune is set by the 
 opening scene of raking small comedy, where Mrs. John 
 Dashwood reasons her husband out of keeping his promise 
 to look after his orphaned half-sisters ; and Mrs. Jennings, 
 the two Miss Steeles, and the Palmers, ring all the changes, 
 and mark every transitional stage, between cheery vulgarity 
 and frigid meanness. Miss Austen lived in fancy with her 
 characters, and would impart to her friends some facts about 
 them not related in her books. She told her family that 
 Miss Steele never managed to ' catch the Doctor,' and that 
 the amount given by the sparing Mrs. Norris in Mansfield 
 Park for the expenses of a relative was ' one pound.' 
 
 In Pride and Prejudice, the ideals of cool sense are no longer 
 personified ; indeed, in the priggish Mary Bennet, who ' piqued 
 herself upon the solidity of her reflections,' they are half- 
 parodied. The book is built, not on the opposition of two 
 embodied principles, a right and a wrong, but on the clash 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 194 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 of two opposing foibles, which have to be softened before the 
 persons led astray by them can come together. Darcy is 
 possessed by family pride, and Elizabeth Bennet by the pre- 
 judice that he is all pride. The title originally intended was 
 First Impressions. Darcy turns out to be reticent and generous, 
 but the reader is almost as slow in discovering these qualities 
 as Elizabeth herself. For Darcy is, in fact, at first something 
 of a caricature or dressed-up idiosyncrasy, like a person in 
 Jonson's comedies ; and then he becomes a human being. 
 Or it may be fairer to say that his character changes, and is 
 not merely revealed, during the story. The train of events 
 is somewhat intricately but most logically adjusted to ensure 
 the better acquaintance of Elizabeth and Darcy, and their 
 happiness ; and a crowd of personages in the second plane 
 is created, whose absorbed dealings with one another operate 
 to this end, and who are also chosen to serve as foils, in 
 various subtle ways, to the hero and heroine. One of them, 
 Jane Bennet, the elder sister, must have been harder to draw 
 than the sharp-witted, likeable Elizabeth, who misjudges 
 others so youthfully and naturally. Jane, good-looking and 
 steady-natured, has just that touch of obstinate kindness 
 which refuses to believe till the last moment that a rogue is 
 indeed a rogue, and even then is content to think him a self- 
 deceiver. Miss Austen knows better ; but she brings out 
 the gentle fragrance and folly of such a character with much 
 affection. Darcy, on his part, is furnished with a travesty 
 of his own ' pride ' in the person of his aunt, Lady Catherine 
 de Bourgh, who enters just at the moment when some foil is 
 required to make him less offensive. Lady Catherine and 
 her famous chaplain Mr. Collins have been called extravagant, 
 but this appearance would vanish if they figured in a play, 
 and not in a tale of domestic humours. Their words would 
 ring across the footlights, and Moliere has just such startling 
 personages. Mr. Collins's classic proposal to Elizabeth is 
 not nearly so great a triumph as the letter that he writes just 
 after the elopement of Lydia Bennet. No one in the book is 
 wholly spared, and least of all the father of Elizabeth, Mr. 
 Bennet, the student and superior man, the master of sarcasm, 
 whose irony is turned against himself by the disaster of the 
 unashamed Lydia. The unison of character, situation, and 
 story in Pride and Prejudice is more wonderful the more it 
 is examined. Though not the most humane of Miss Austen's 
 books, it is the most boldly plotted out, and perhaps the most 
 humorouslv written.
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 195 
 
 If, as Miss Austen's family held, the brief sketch called 
 Lady Susan was written early, it is another proof of her quick 
 maturity of brain. She did not print it, perhaps because the 
 effect produced by the heroine on those about her is insuffi- 
 ciently explained. Lady Susan is a cynical coquette, with 
 a gift for hard lying in a gentle voice, and no lack of courage 
 when she is brought to bay ; but it is hardly credible that 
 she should not to be found out sooner. The outline of the 
 other characters is clear enough ; of Lady Susan's brazen 
 confidante ; of her bullied daughter ; of the swain who has 
 to be ' talked, flattered, and finessed into an affection ' for the 
 daughter, by Lady Susan herself, with whom he is entangled ; 
 and of the ponderous parents who bring up the rear. The 
 fragment called The Watsons is much more amiable in tone 
 than this bitter little book, but breaks off before the drama 
 is reached. 
 
 NortJianger Abbey may be noticed later, as an epilogue to 
 the ' novels of terror ' which it parodies. There remain the 
 three Chawton stories, written, though not all published, at 
 an interval of years after the three early novels. Mansfield 
 Park has no plot and keeps no secret long ; the interest of 
 mystery is abandoned. The old gay sharpness remains, but 
 is refined into greater subtlety ; the temper is gentler, the 
 whole modulation finer. The humble, grateful, clear-judging, 
 almost passive Fanny Price challenges none of the irony of 
 which Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland are the victims. 
 She may be drawn too much to pattern, and she does not affect 
 events ; but the events all take their point and value from her 
 connection with them. Some of her discourses with Edmund 
 Bertram, long her only defender, and clearly her destined 
 husband, are lengthy, and might be called the last refuge of 
 the old periodical essay. 1 But the chief concern of the authoress 
 is Fanny's happiness, and towards this purpose all the other 
 personages unconsciously move and work. The scene is too 
 well known to describe : the big, opulent country house, 
 where Fanny is kept for charity, the daughter of a sister who 
 has married meanly. The master, Sir Thomas Bertram, 
 blind and heavy-handed, and full of consequence, but not 
 unkind or unjust ; his lady, engrossed in ' pug ' ; the flashy 
 daughters who come to grief and vanish ; Fanny's light - 
 tongued, sprightly rival, Mary Crawford, on whom the authoress 
 is too hard, and who for a time draws Edmund Bertram away 
 from Fanny Price ; Edmund himself, a prig who gives his 
 confidences to the supposed sisterly sympathy of Fanny ;
 
 196 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 these, and more, fill but never overcrowd the scene, which 
 is the most congenial one that Miss Austen ever chose. Sud- 
 denly, as if to avoid monotony, Fanny is swept off to her noisy, 
 malodorous home at Portsmouth, which is described with a 
 ruthlessness that reminds us of George Gissing. But the 
 staple of the book is the intricate little comedy of the Bertram 
 household, leaden with true English caste-complacency, into 
 which some air is let by the coming and going of the sailor- 
 brother and the fast young flirting men. Fanny's final and 
 happy installation, in contrast with her first insignificance, 
 impresses Sir Thomas Bertram himself, and forms, says the 
 authoress, 
 
 just such a contrast ... as time is for ever producing between 
 the plans and decisions of mortals, for their own instruction and 
 their neighbours' entertainment. 
 
 Such is the keynote of this and the other Chawton stories. 
 The didactic standpoint is there, but the ' instruction ' is 
 swathed in irony for our ' entertainment,' and is seldom pressed 
 upon us without such disguise. And the feeling for beauty has 
 crept in timidly ; not so much for personal beauty, which is 
 more drily recognised, but for beauty of character. Miss 
 Austen watches over Fanny Price as over some late-flowering, 
 disregarded herb, promising herself that it shall thrive against 
 all odds of climate and weather. There is also an unobtrusive 
 kind of justice. The mean, the slight, and the stagnant are 
 only punished by remaining just what they are, whilst actual 
 culprits are left to their natural chagrin, ' without ' our ' pre- 
 suming to look forward to a juster appointment hereafter ' 
 a noiseless touch of something too delicate to be called 
 scepticism. 
 
 In Emma Miss Austen reverts to the type of heroine whom, 
 whilst loving, she effectually chastens ; the story is the chasten- 
 ing of Emma Woodhouse. She is an ' imaginist,' who thinks 
 she can see into the minds of others ; she loves interfering and 
 match-making, and she is not a little of a snob. On one occa- 
 sion she says that she would be ' sorry to see greater pride or 
 refinement in the teacher of a school ' ; and, on beholding the 
 mansion of Mr. Knightley, she feels ' an increasing respect for 
 it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted 
 in blood and understanding.' But it is not this weakness that 
 she expiates, for she becomes the mistress of the mansion. 
 Her other errors subject her to cruel humiliations. She tries 
 to estrange her little friend, Harriet Smith, from the young
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 197 
 
 farmer whom Harriet at last marries. She finds that the 
 man whom she destines for Harriet is all the while adoring 
 herself, and she has to explain. She flirts with a youth in the 
 absence of Jane Fairfax, to whom he is secretly engaged, and 
 confides to him injurious fancies about Jane. The slow, 
 lengthy, microscopic analysis of all this is amazingly skilful, 
 and may be an inheritance from Richardson, but there is a 
 certain hard repellent prolixity about much of it. The talking 
 old lady, Miss Bates, is a bore to the reader, though the tedium 
 is well redeemed by the unfailing minute farce of Mr. Wood- 
 house's sayings. We do not tire of the man who ' would not 
 recommend an egg boiled by any one else ' than his own cook. 
 The drawbacks of Emma are on the side of over-completeness. 
 The ending is all bright and kind comedy, in which every one 
 is made happy and talks over past mistakes. And here, as in 
 Persuasion, there are unwonted touches of pleasure in natural 
 things. One passage might serve as a motto for Miss Austen's 
 genius in its gentler hours : 
 
 It was a sweet view sweet to the eye and the mind. English 
 verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, 
 without being oppressive. 
 
 Persuasion shows how little, after all, Jane Austen is ' im- 
 personal.' Her delightful favouritism, and her hatred of some 
 of her own creatures, are evident all through. These come 
 first upon the scene ; Sir Walter Elliot, baronet of Kelly nch 
 Hall, chief amongst them, a man who is wholly made up of 
 vanity ' vanity of person and of situation.' He recedes into 
 the background as the tale goes on, to receive a parting lash 
 ?vt the conclusion. The love-affairs of Anne, his second 
 daughter, are the subject ; her gradual and imperilled recovery 
 of an old suitor, whom she has rejected long before under 
 mistaken advice. Her final happy marriage 1 is brought about 
 through a hurry and maze of small incidents, all planned with 
 untiring skill ; but the attention is steadily kept upon the 
 changing mind, the alarms, the gradual dawning hopes, the 
 revulsions, of Anne herself. In Anne, as in Fanny Price, Miss 
 Austen is bent on portraying her own sex from within. There 
 is a true ' vindication of the rights of women.' Men, says 
 Anne to Captain Harvillc, who is discussing the comparative 
 constancy of the sexes, 
 
 have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Edu- 
 cation has been theirs in so much higher a degree. The pen has 
 been in their hands. 1 will not allow books to prove anything.
 
 198 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 So Anne's story is told for her, in half-lights, with a suppressed 
 tenderness and a delight in doing her justice, and without any 
 touch of scorn. When she first meets Wentworth again, ' the 
 room seemed full of persons and voices.' She walks in Bath, 
 musing on ' high-wrought love and eternal constancy,' and ' it 
 was almost enough to spread perfume and purification all the 
 way/ At last she marries her sailor, and ' the dread of a future 
 war ' was ' all that could dim her sunshine.' The tints of the 
 surrounding scenery are just washed in, and are in keeping. 
 Anne sits under a ' low rambling holly,' and watches ' the last 
 smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges.' 
 Miss Austen lets out her own feelings in Persuasion more than 
 she does in her published letters. Her method in this book 
 is distinctive ; bold satire melts into high comedy, and this 
 again into a pathos which closes in idyll. 
 
 It is not easy to see what writers Miss Austen studied for 
 imitation or avoidance. Her biographer says that ' every 
 circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison was familiar 
 to her,' and she must have learnt something from the fine 
 chain-armourer's craft of Richardson. Miss Burney she 
 studied, and praises not only Cecilia but Camilla. Mrs. Rad- 
 cliffe she perused in a different spirit. She liked Scott's verse, 
 but her reading of the earlier Waverley Novels was not fervent. 
 She knew The Corsair, but Crabbe was nearer to her mind. 
 Her jest that ' if ever she married at all, she could fancy being 
 Mrs. Crabbe ' is better known than her method of keeping 
 it up : 
 
 I have never seen the death of Mrs. Crabbe. . . . Poor woman ! 
 I will comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good 
 to her children . . . she had better not leave any. (1813) 
 
 In respect of style and finish she is not at all like a feminine 
 Crabbe ; she is much more like a feminine Congreve, notwith- 
 standing her different views of decorum. Every word has its 
 place, its value, its quintessential aptness, but, as befits a 
 woman, the style is nearer than Congreve's to the simple and 
 natural. Goldsmith, and before him Addison, had come 
 between. Miss Austen's English is hardly at all antiquated ; 
 her diction and sentences would not sound strange, except 
 for their excellence, in any book written since 1750. In 
 Mansfield Park there is a sprinkling of terms that are still con-
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 199 
 
 sciously foreign ; some of them, it is true, are used by affected 
 persons ; they include ton, eclat, eclair cissement, tout ensemble, 
 con amore, apropos, exigeant. Fanny Price, too, thinks of 
 Edmund Bertram as ' the flirt, perhaps, of Mrs. Rush worth ' ; 
 and Dr. Grant ' brought on apoplexy and death by three great 
 institutionary dinners in one week.' In Emma occur ' deedily ' 
 and ' imaginist.' On the whole, there are but few obsolete 
 words or turns in the stories. 
 
 From her correspondence we can guess something of her 
 way of working. A young relation, Anna Austen, submits 
 a story to her. She corrects the errors of ceremonial address 
 in the dialogue ; resents the phrase, ' a vortex of dissipation,' 
 as ' novel-slang ' ; welcomes such a ' nonpareil ' of a name as 
 ' Newton Prior,' and adds, profanely, that ' Milton would have 
 given his eyes for it ' ; finally advising thus, in tones that no 
 doubt echo her own self-criticisms as she worked : 
 
 I wish you could make Mrs. Forester l talk more ; but she must 
 be difficult to manage and make entertaining, because there is so 
 much good sense and propriety about her that nothing can be made 
 very broad. Her economy and her ambition must not be too 
 staring. 
 
 In a like strain is her concise judgment on a popular tale, Mary 
 Brunton's Self-Control (1811), which may here be adopted: 
 ' an excellently-mannered, elegantly-written work, without any 
 nature or probability in it.' She has not much confidence in 
 the poets, though they have written well about the autumn. 
 Poetry is risky, and works only on the feelings, and must not 
 invade life too deeply, for fear of the letting in of waters. This 
 is also the view, we know, of Plato ; but Miss Austen's stand- 
 point is that of the ' age of reason.' So at least we may assume 
 if, as is probable, Anne Elliot speaks for Miss Austen in her 
 remarks to Captain Benwick, who repeats verses ' with tremu- 
 lous feeling ' : 
 
 She ventured to hope that he did not always read poetry ; and to 
 say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom 
 safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely ; and that the 
 strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very 
 feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly. 
 
 It would bo absurd to say that the writer of Persuasion, had 
 no divination or knowledge of love ; but we must not make 
 wrong demands upon her talent, or wonder if passion is absent 
 from her pages. Her male characters show their feelings 
 by attentions, by proposals, by manner, by anything except
 
 200 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 
 
 passion. The quarrels of Darcy and Elizabeth, or of Knightley 
 and Emma, are simply those of gentlefolk very much out 
 of temper. Her heroines feel something keenly tenderness, 
 suspense, affection, pique ; but to Jane Austen decorum is of 
 the soul, and is oddly united with her perfect freedom of 
 intellectual comment. Illicit love she relegates ; the offenders 
 in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park go out of her books, 
 as they would have gone out of her actual world, into some 
 kind of scandalous limbo. They show no sign of enjoying 
 themselves ; neither are they reprehended in set form : 
 
 Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery ; I quit such odious 
 subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly 
 in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all 
 the rest. 
 
 Miss Austen excels her fellow-novelists, not because she 
 avoids the didactic, which indeed is dear to her, but because 
 she resolves it, after her first experiments, into her art, the art 
 of the comedian ; just as Moliere, in his larger way, does also. 
 Her unpretending code, her celebration of self-control and 
 clear-sightedness, are taken up into a quiet strain of compre- 
 hensive irony. Anne Elliot has a vacuous sister whose pursuits 
 are recounted, and this is the chorus : 
 
 Such were Elizabeth Elliot's sentiments and sensations ; such the 
 cares to alloy, the agitations to vary, the sameness and elegance, 
 the prosperity and the nothingness, of her scene of life. 
 
 The sentence has, for once, a Johnsonian balance. Elizabeth 
 Elliot is herself nothing ; but she is one of thousands, and 
 therefore draws upon herself this stately, fatal, and general 
 description. Sometimes such people are dismissed with one 
 twist of the bowstring, like the youth whom Miss Austen met 
 at Bath (' Mr. B. seems nothing more than a tall young man '),* 
 or like poor Richard in Persuasion, who 
 
 had been nothing more than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable 
 Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself 
 to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead. 
 
 It takes some acidity to create a dead person in a book, 
 merely in order thus to denounce him ; but perhaps Jane Austen 
 had known such a youth. Other characters, babblers or gossips, 
 silly or acrid, are allowed to talk at length, in a way that would 
 be unbearable without the solvent of humour. A female realist 
 without humour would make us wish to hang ourselves. As 
 it is, Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park is never too long, though 
 she is very long. Humour not only keeps us pleased with our-
 
 THE NOVEL OF MANNERS AND JANE AUSTEN 201 
 
 selves, but satisfies our reason. It finds an intelligible, if not 
 a satisfactory, niche in the world even for Elizabeth Elliot, and 
 sets her mean, confused train of thought so clearly before us, 
 that we judge her to be after all not wholly beneath the making 
 of God, any more than a small but complex insect. 
 
 These tales sometimes make us feel that there is no free will. 
 ' We are conscious of our actions,' says Spinoza, ' but not of the 
 causes that produce them.' Miss Austen, on her own stage, 
 shows us those causes ; the mesh is very close. It seems woven 
 so close as to hamper movement, and we long for a sword to 
 slash it ; but there is no such sword, for the web is life, the 
 private life of every day, with its incidents and motives. To 
 produce this illusion, even for a moment, requires very high 
 talent. The same talent also causes a discomfort, of which 
 one other source may be hinted. 
 
 Miss Austen has had admirers innumerable, including men 
 as different as Macaulay, Tennyson and Coleridge. There can 
 be no doubt of her work lasting. It lasts, not only because 
 of her craft, but because she is representative. She speaks 
 for a type, usually inarticulate or incapable of art, which has 
 never, before or since, been able to speak for itself so well. 
 She is a clear-eyed, calm, hardly passionate, by no means 
 heartless, unmarried English lady : above all a lady. ' Even 
 the sweetest woman,' says Nietzsche, ' is bitter.' But this is 
 the penalty of sweetness ; Miss Austen is not ' sweet,' and 
 therefore not, or not fundamentally, bitter. Her gaze is like 
 that of a mirror ; it reflects daylight, with rare rays of 
 tempered sun. But it is also feminine in a profound degree. 
 She sees her world as men could not see it if they would, 
 as they would feel ashamed of seeing it as they could, and 
 as they admire her for seeing it ; and they feel at once, 
 disconcerted, how much her presentment omits, and how 
 truthful it is nevertheless. This is the way of most women ; 
 they see what has all the while been under our nose, and 
 show it to us, and laugh at us for our blindness. She, how- 
 ever, has none of their dependence or inconsequence, of 
 which we at once take advantage. She is the woman our 
 enemy. We could only have the advantage of her by taking 
 her off her own ground ; and, artist and humourist as she is, 
 she knows this, and never quits her ground. The contest is a 
 drawn one. She abides ; we acknowledge her, we do not quite 
 like her, and we quit her perhaps run away from her not 
 without relief, bidding to such cold voices a somewhat long 
 farewell.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE NOVEL OP SUSPENSE 
 
 I. Contrast with the novel of manners ; a movement of expansion. Debt 
 to older romance. Walpole ; Caslle of Otranto. Clara Reeve ; The Old English 
 Baron and The Progress of Romance. 
 
 II. The Oriental tale, its blending of fantasy and satire. William Beck- 
 ford ; Vathek ; The Princess Zulka'is ; travels. Beckford's temper and 
 influence ; Byron's admiration. 
 
 III. William Godwin ; Caleb Williams ; St. Leon ; other tales. Dr. John 
 Moore ; Zeluco. Mrs. Ann Radcliffe ; notes of landscape ; Gaston de Blonde- 
 ville ; Romance of the Forest ; The Italian ; Mysteries of Udolpho. 
 
 IV. Matthew Gregory Lewis ; The Monk. Mrs. Shelley ; Frankenstein. 
 C. R. Maturin ; the motive of terror and suspense ; early tales ; Women ; 
 Melmoih the Wanderer, its plan and characteristic power. Examples ; 
 mastery of musical prose. Tales from Blackwood. James Hogg, Confessions 
 of a Fanatic. 
 
 V. Parodies of romance and the supernatural story. E. S. Barrett; The 
 Heroine. Jane Austen; Northanger Abbey. Monstrous adventure and 
 blague ; Raspe's Adventures of Baron Munchausen. 
 
 IT is now time to go back forty years and more, to the novel 
 of suspense, which is a true descendant of old romance, and is 
 therefore the renewal of something that the classical age had 
 disowned and lost. It is also a school of example and warn- 
 ing, and in some slight measure of mischief, to the master of 
 romance ; and the shrewd and genial judgments passed upon it 
 by Sir Walter Scott in his reviews of the novelists, prepare us 
 for his own mixture of triumph and failure when he attempts 
 the dreadful or the supernatural. From Miss Austen and her 
 precursors, and from realism, we return with our zest sharpened 
 for romance sharpened by the very perfection of that realism. 
 Who, indeed, has not felt stifled by it ? Who has not been led, 
 by Northanger Abbey itself, to wish with a boyish appetite for 
 a real enchanted castle, and for crime, and for mystery ? Even 
 bastard romance is better than none. The real earth can never 
 contain us. We must have our hippogriff. Not even the 
 ironies of an exquisitely reasonable art can hold us for more 
 than a season. We must go back to the thing derided, to the 
 
 202
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 203 
 
 thing that deserves derision, if we have nothing better. It 
 keeps a certain advantage over those who unmask it. The 
 perfection of that fine and feminine skill involves a certain 
 movement of contraction, and means sacrifices. But in the 
 contemporary and opposing school of sensation and marvel, of 
 passion however strained, and of rhetoric however unreal, the 
 movement is at least one of expansion. The windows are 
 opened, the horizon is enlarged, the wings are fledged, and, in 
 spite of all zigzag flights and absurdities, the earth is left behind. 
 The writers of this group, in the nature of the case, are more 
 unlike one another than the lively describers of manners, but 
 they have traits in common, and some genius rmongst them, 
 and their vices are full of instruction. 
 
 Walpole, in the preface to his unbearable Castle of Otranto 
 (1764), professes to unite the talk of real life with the wonders 
 of romance, and so to reconcile ' nature ' and ' imagination.' 
 He is always acute in comment, and comes near to stating the 
 true problem of the romancer ; but when he sets to work, he 
 only manages to scatter bald conversations amongst prepos- 
 terous occurrences. The Castle of Otranto, with its bleeding 
 statues and helmets suddenly cascading from the void, is 
 remembered as something which was once laughed at, and 
 which is still said in histories to have set the pattern of the 
 ' Gothic ' story. And so much it really did in the sense that 
 some faint and straggling lines of the pattern are to be traced 
 in it. There is an intrigue ; a pretence of describing some re- 
 mote but real place and period ; an attempt at colouring ; and 
 a dish of marvels, served cold. Yet, such as it is, The Castle 
 of Otranto does presage a new life for romance in England, and 
 takes up the thread which had never been wholly broken from 
 the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. The debt, indeed, 
 of Fielding and Richardson to the prose romance, which had 
 died out in the classical age, is not to be ignored ; it is real, 
 if oblique. The stock figures of the hero, the heroine, the 
 villain, the servant, the wise friend, the seductress, the sage 
 elder, come to our great classical novelists from a score of 
 sources the old comedy, the romantic play, the tale in verse ; 
 and among these, no doubt, is the romance proper. But in 
 Walpole and his followers the filiation is more direct ; there is 
 a revival, however feeble and unpromising ; and with all 
 manner of pauses, false experiments, retrogressions and sudden 
 advances, the type develops, until it once more enters the 
 borders of fine art. Some of the stages in its growth are now 
 to be noticed. The tradition of The Castle of Otranto was first
 
 204 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 carried forward by a prim and gentle dealer in the supernatural, 
 Mrs. Clara Reeve, who was repelled by the raw expedients of 
 Walpole ' a picture that walks out of its frame, a skeleton 
 ghost in a hermit's cowl ' and was fain to keep her story 
 ' within the utmost verge of probability ' ; and accordingly only 
 deals in the clattering of a dead man's armour, and the hollow 
 groans that proceed from his mouldering remains. She finally 
 produces his ghost in full equipment, for a moment. Her 
 purpose, however, is the same 'to unite the various merits 
 and graces of the ancient Romance and the modern Novel '- 
 and these requirements she puts in her neat way : 
 
 There is required a sufficient degree of the marvellous, to excite 
 the attention ; enough of the manners of real life, to give an air 
 of probability to the work ; and enough of the pathetic, to engage 
 the heart in its behalf. 
 
 Such is the aim of The Old English Baron : a Gothic Story, 
 entitled, on its first appearance in 1777, The Champion of Virtue. 
 The scene is laid ' in the minority of Henry the Sixth,' but, 
 except for a single combat and an occasional archaism, the 
 sentiments are those of a modern country house. There are the 
 good boy of the didactic novel, Edmund, dispossessed of his 
 inheritance, the wicked rival, the benevolent priest, and the 
 sampler heroine. Miss Reeve dovetails her little plot aptly 
 enough, and her limpid way of writing kept her book long 
 alive, so that it was thrice reprinted late in the nineteenth 
 century. It is really a domestic tale, not a novel of terror at 
 all ; but the affair of the ghost is pleasantly managed, as it 
 might be in capable private theatricals, and there is the affec- 
 tation, at any rate, of a definite historical date. 
 
 Mrs. Reeve's too elegant dialogues, The Progress of Romance 
 (1785), which are conducted by shadowy speakers named 
 Hortensius and Sophronia, lead us into a curious backwater of 
 contemporary taste. She frankly turns her back on real life, 
 and so far repudiates the programme of her master Walpole. 
 She distinguishes the romance from the novel in a crude style 
 that does not ill express the practice of the hour and the 
 difference between Mrs. Radcliffe and Mrs. Opie. Her dis- 
 tinction is by no means meant impartially ; it is made at 
 the expense of the novel, and for the glorification of romance, 
 which she tries to promote into a variety of the epic, itself 
 assumed to be the noblest sort of fiction. Her criticisms of 
 Fielding and Richardson are in a ladylike vein and devoid 
 of zeal.
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 205 
 
 The romance is a heroic fable which treats of fabulous persons 
 and things. The novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of 
 the times in which it is written. The romance in lofty and elevated 
 language describes what never happened nor (sic) is likely to happen. 
 The novel gives a familiar relation of such things as pass every day 
 before our eyes, such as may happen to our friends or to ourselves. 
 
 The romance, however, that Mrs. Reeve admires is of the spun- 
 out, marvellous, and sentimental sort ; it is not the ' world of 
 fine fabling ' invented by the middle ages and Spenser, and 
 defended by Kurd and Warton. Still she is by no means 
 without reading, and in her forgotten book are preserved the 
 names of many a story, of which the names may here more 
 than suffice. Mrs. Sheridan's Sidney Biddulph, Mrs. Brooke's 
 Emily Montague, and The Delicate Distress, by a Mrs. Griffiths, 
 represent the kind of diet, no doubt, that Crabbe derides in his 
 Ellen Orford : 
 
 There 's something rapturous in distress, or, oh ! 
 
 Could Clementina bear her lot of wo ? 
 
 Or what she underwent could maiden undergo ? 
 
 Nor need Mrs. Reeve's catalogue of the current ' moral tales 
 well told as a warning to youth ' be here transcribed. But 
 she is probably the first writer to recount the Oriental or 
 pseudo-Oriental stories Hawkesworth's Almoran, and The 
 Loves of Othniel and Achshah, are examples that were eagerly 
 devoured. The greatest of all these would hardly have earned 
 her approval ; Vathek appeared in the year after The Progress 
 of Romance ; and the story of Gebir and Charoba, soon to 
 be used by Landor, occurs, in a watered form, in the same 
 instructive work. 
 
 II 
 
 The type was not a new one, for it was in the classical age 
 that the East, so long forgotten, came back to fertilise the 
 fancy of the West. The material was first revealed in Galland's 
 version of the Arabian Nights, and in the Persian Tales and the 
 Turkish Tales. All these collections, already familiar in French, 
 had been put into English in the age of Addison, whose Mirza 
 and other fables, it is true, have no more ' taste ' than the 
 ' white of an egg.' The marriage of these immigrant stories 
 with the classical spirit of reason, edification, and satire left a 
 strange offspring the conte moral et fantastique, which ranges 
 from the purest and wildest fancy to the Zadig of Voltaire, 
 where the Orientalism is simply a light arm of offence, and to
 
 206 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 the loaded moralising of Johnson. The splendour and extra- 
 vagance of the originals is imitated, but turns cold and pallid 
 in the process, and their poignancy is transformed into an 
 elaborate modern irony ; an irony which, in the hands of 
 Voltaire, of Marmontel, of Johnson, and of Goldsmith, is 
 pointed at the expense of human nature and human vanity 
 and social convention. Meantime the real East ceases to be 
 known or taken seriously, and its imaginative colouring is 
 lost until the appearance of William Beckford 1 (1760-1844). 
 In him, despite his share of eighteenth-century irony, there is 
 a true revival ; for the Eastern senses, wrought on by the 
 drug imagination, expand, and dream, and build colossal 
 toppling towers of pleasure and luxury ; and then, finding 
 how narrow after all is that infinite sphere, they fall back 
 defeated, and rest on the pageant of daily life, on the din of 
 the bazaars and the quarrels of merchants, and on ingenious 
 anecdote and proverb. Something of all this is felt in Beck- 
 ford's inventions, and in no other writing of the time. 
 
 The History of the Caliph Vathek 2 was completed in French 
 about 1783, and published in that language in 1787. A flat 
 and free English translation by the Rev. Samuel Henley, with 
 notes, was overseen by the author ; but, in disobedience to 
 his orders, was published before the French original, in 1786. 
 Vathek is in outward form a conte moral, but the ingredients 
 come from Eastern literature and from the caldron of Beck- 
 ford's own fancy. He had never been out of Europe, but the 
 Tightness of his costume and colouring is praised by Byron 
 and other judges, whilst the wit and passion, and the sombre 
 sense of fatality and mortal tragedy, are wonderfully harmonised 
 with the externals, and the result is a classic. Vathek wearies 
 of the 'palace of the five senses,' which though surfeited are 
 not asleep, and his exorbitant pride and lust lead him to the 
 use of black magic. This is the beginning ; at the end is the 
 famed Hall of Eblis, 3 whose dwellers cover their flaming hearts 
 with their hands, as they suffer the reward of ' unrestrained 
 passions and atrocious actions ' ; midway is the pretty mis- 
 chievous idyll of Gulchenrouz and Nouronihar ; and there are 
 wild comic interludes, such as the scene where the ' cursed 
 Indian ' is spurned by the madness of the people ' like an 
 invulnerable football,' and is left ' still retaining his rotundity 
 of figure.' Some parts of the book, no doubt, are like the 
 duller stretches in a bad dream ; but we are borne on in a 
 world where cause and purpose lose their meaning, and events 
 please or pain us without reason and without awakening sur-
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 207 
 
 prise. Vathek must not eat certain melons, though there is no 
 reason why he should not ; and yet, in the course of his royal 
 rake's progress, eat them he does. The mixture of all this with 
 the Voltairian temper is Beckford's characteristic. 
 
 Whilst writing Vathek, Beckf ord had prepared three ' episodes,' ] 
 or intercalated tales, which were to have been told by victims 
 wandering in the Hall of Ebb's ; these are named in the first 
 French edition, and Beckford read some of them out to Samuel 
 Rogers. The stories of the Prince Kalilah and the Princess 
 Zulkais, of Prince Alasi, and of Prince Barkiarokh, have lately 
 been printed in the French. The first of these is told by 
 Zulkais herself, and is unfinished ; but there seems good reason 
 for the heart of the princess to have been turned into a coal 
 of fire. Per quod quis peccat, per idem et torquelur. Zulkais 
 and her twin brother Kalilah are ominously born ; their father, 
 the Emir, has murdered a holy man who rebuked him for 
 dabbling in sorceries. They are bathed in infernal essences 
 under the auspices of the Ginns, and grow up endowed with 
 a furious vitality. Kalilah is removed to learn manly arts, 
 but Zulkais pines and rages for his company. Then she too 
 is banished, to a land of wizardry, where a sage, the Climber 
 of Palm-trees, lives amongst his flock of colossal ostriches, 
 and receives her as his guest. The sage is under covenant 
 with Eblis to deliver him twenty unfortunate souls ; but they 
 must sin first, before they can be damned. He sees the 
 unlawful passion of Zulkais, and promises to satisfy it if she 
 will face a most formidable Ginn. Zulkais crosses a cave, 
 where she seems to see reptiles with human faces, into a vast 
 room, paved with flesh-coloured and sanguine-veined marble, 
 and covered with motley tapestries, 'lesquels faisaient un move- 
 ment lent, comme si des gens etouffes sous leur poids les avoient 
 soulev^s. . . .' There the fragment stops : it has the lordly 
 and bitter sensuality, oppressed by the shadow of fate and 
 penance, which Beckford understood. 
 
 Lord Chatham called Beckford ' my young vivid friend,' 
 and observed, ' He is just as much compounded of the elements 
 of air and fire as I was.' Beckford, like Blake, was a dreamer, 
 as defiant, as full of stubborn vitality ; but he was ironical 
 and divided in soul, knowing the pain of curious pleasures, 
 and revelling in things that are strange and costly and transi- 
 tory ; not, like Blake, living the life of vision with a single 
 mind. Blake was poor ; Beckford was heir to the wealth that 
 begot rather than satisfied his dreams. Of this wealth his 
 genius seems a sort of exhalation, having the faults that
 
 208 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 attend one almost says that beseem such a nature : a 
 streak of insolence, race-pride, and want of measure : faults 
 which are at least a relief in the age of reason and philanthropy. 
 His youthful letters are vehement and coloured, and foretell 
 the man. He produced two works of imagination : Vathek 
 and Fonthill Abbey ; the latter a ' folly ' that began to fall 
 down even in his lifetime, although, to the regret of his Neronian 
 fancy, not in his presence. He liked the grandiose and wasteful, 
 but his connoisseurship was fastidious and even catholic. 
 He was an autocrat among collectors, lived till eighty-four out- 
 bidding and bargaining, and was hard to take in. His worldly 
 wit and elfish satirical fancy kept him from being his own dupe, 
 and are a kind of preservative acid to his Oriental fantasies. 
 This lifelong habit of mind is seen in his boyish joke on his 
 housekeeper, whose head he filled with legends of the family 
 pictures, afterwards published as Biographical Memoirs of Extra- 
 ordinary Painters (1800) : and the criticisms are such as these : 
 
 ' The astonishment of the head at finding itself off its own 
 shoulders, was expressed to admiration.' 'She had chosen Grafl' 
 of Nuremberg for her husband, merely to study the Nud in a modest 
 way.' ' An Italian painter, by name Insignificant!, remarked on 
 the delicacy of his pencil.' 
 
 In the same temper he treated the Duchess of Gordon, 
 whom he suspected of intentions ; he feasted her royally at 
 Fonthill for a week, but refused once to see her. He pub- 
 lished wild parodies of the ' Minerva Press ' romances. He 
 drew sharp Heine -like pictures of grandees and clerics in the 
 Peninsula. His palate for beautiful splendour, for orange 
 thickets and splendid apartments and Moorish carving, is 
 delightfully crossed by a kind of Cervantesque pleasantry at 
 the cost of his hosts, the Prior and the Almoner. He loves 
 the picturesqueness of a big feast, and the sight of bland, 
 adroit, holy men torpid with enjoyment. His books and notes 
 of travel 1 were first published in 1783 as Dreams, Waking 
 Thoughts, and Incidents, and afterwards in 1834 with many 
 changes. Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of 
 Alcobaw and Batalha (1835) followed. Beckford has a more 
 accurate vision of foreign scenery than any English writer 
 between Gray and Ruskin, Wordsworth not excluded. He 
 revives the sleeping perception of colour, and finds the words 
 for it. His account of the Red Indian's Paradise recalls 
 Chateaubriand. It is drawn from books ; but he sees for 
 himself the ' serene light ' of the full moon ' on the pale gray
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 209 
 
 of the olives ' ; the ' faint gleam of the sunlight melting the 
 deadly white of the thick clouds ' ; and the ' melancholy 
 blue ' of an Italian prospect. His most nobly-wrought descrip- 
 tions are those of the Chartreuse, of Cintra, and of the road 
 on which he galloped alone between Alcobapa and Batalha, 
 with its ' lizards as green as emeralds, ascending the sides of 
 the causeway, and looking at me, I thought, with kind and 
 friendly eyes.' The colour and cadence of Beckford's prose, 
 which are natural, and also conscious, but not overstudied, 
 are of course better perceived in these books of travel than in 
 Vathek, where the English was only revised by him ; and they 
 grow out of the surcharged and unclarified style of his youthful 
 letters, which have their own charm. In the renewal of our 
 imaginative prose Beckford's honours, like Maturin's, require 
 asserting ; and they are obscured by his choice of a foreign 
 language for his greatest book. 
 
 Beckford was admired, naturally, by Byron 1 and Disraeli. 
 With Byron, in his shrewd odd way, he refused to risk a meet- 
 ing ; their pride might have clashed. In both there was a 
 mixture of hot and cold, of passion and satire ; and though 
 Byron had no such hold as Beckford on the preterhuman East, 
 and could imagine no kind of Arabian Night of the same order, 
 his earlier notion of his heroes and himself is foretold and 
 influenced, as has often been remarked, by the figure of Eblis : 
 
 His person was that of a young man, whose noble and regular 
 features seemed to have been tarnished by malignant vapours ; 
 in his large eyes appeared both pride and despair ; his flowing 
 hair retained some resemblance to that of an angel of light. 
 
 This is no Oriental figure ; Eblis, in Beckford's original, 
 has a bristly head of hair and beard ; it is Milton's hero a 
 little humanised, and the type comes to pervade the fiction 
 between Beckford and Scott. The features are those of the 
 k anti-hero,' as Miss Austen calls him, who appears in Mrs. 
 RadclifTe, Godwin, and Maturin. Disraeli, in Alroy, also 
 frankly owned the spell, to the delight of Beckford in his 
 old age, and flowing compliments were interchanged in the 
 Eastern taste. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The doctrinaire succeeds the fantast. William Godwin's 
 
 Political Justice (1793, see Ch. ix.), which told so powerfully 
 
 on the poets, is unread, but one at least of his stories, Caleb 
 
 Williams (1794), remains alive, and his fiction is not to be 
 
 vor>. i. o
 
 210 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 classed with his Life of Chaucer and other honest jobs. What 
 is the link between the two Godwins, the builder of abstract 
 card-houses, lofty but ephemeral, and the inventor of criminal 
 or alchemical fiction ? It is not only that the doctrine, the 
 prosy ethics, invade the novels and at times choke them. 
 The link is found in the psychology. In his life, as he went 
 round ' preaching and holding the hat,' he was owlishly remote 
 from human things, or undignifiedly close to them. But he 
 had a turn for literary vivisection, and especially for the 
 analysis of remorse or self-torture, and rises to a kind of cold 
 vehemence in describing it. His sufferers live, the figures 
 around them are faint and forgettable. 
 
 The doctrine of Caleb Williams is of interest as a symptom 
 of the time. On one side it is revolutionary : ' a general review 
 of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which 
 man becomes the destroyer of man ' : a protest for the right 
 of the crushed classes to justice at the hand of a besotted 
 squirearchy and magistracy : a denunciation, like that of 
 Reade or Dickens, against the cruelty of prisons : a claim on 
 behalf of the righteous individual against oppression. Williams, 
 the detector of crime, suffers in these ways at the hands of the 
 murderer, Falkland, a person of place and consideration ; 
 and Tyrrel, the murdered man, is himself an oppressor of the 
 same sort. The conception of the criminal himself chasing 
 the detective is original. But in another way the book is anti- 
 romantic. Tyrrel, after many crimes, knocks Falkland down 
 in a public assembly. Falkland, though ' of a noble nature,' 
 slips out, knifes him, and throws the crime on two innocents 
 who are hanged. This he does, we hear, from a false notion 
 of the ignominy attached to being thus knocked down : k thou 
 imbibedst the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth . . . 
 from that moment thou only continuedst to live to the phantom 
 of departed honour.' This is like some tale of Crabbe : there 
 is the same criticism of the false point of honour. It is notable 
 that despite all such doctrine Godwin took care to make both 
 his criminals mixed, if he could not quite make them real, 
 characters ; and that despite his pompous, preaching style 
 he can produce an atmosphere heavily charged with terror 
 and unspoken accusation. The silent struggle between Falk- 
 land and Williams, his young secretary, who admires, fears, 
 suspects him, and draws at last an avowal from him, only to 
 fall into his power and be hounded into misfortune and dis- 
 believed, is more skilfully told than anything of the same sort 
 until Lockhart's Adam Blair. The detective novel in England
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 211 
 
 has ever since been crude in its psychology, depending on 
 ingeniously woven events rather than on complex motive. 
 One of the curious episodes in the book is that which intro- 
 duces a band of doctrinaire thieves, who refuse to ' stain ' 
 their ' cause ' with ' cruelty, malice, and revenge,' and who 
 are ' thieves without a licence at open war with another set of 
 men who are thieves according to law ' namely, the holders 
 of property. 
 
 Thus Godwin had the makings of an artist. His story of 
 the composition of Cold) Williams l is not unlike Poe's analysis 
 of The Raven. He plotted out the book backwards. The 
 third volume was to be the merciless harrying of a terrified 
 victim through a string of adventures. The second was to 
 give the motive for the persecution : ' a secret murder, to the 
 investigation of which the innocent victim ' of the pursuit ' should 
 be impelled by an unconquerable spirit of curiosity.' It was 
 lastly in the first volume needful to create an interest in 
 the murderer and explain his power to do mischief. He was 
 accordingly made not only a man of great fortune and great 
 intellect, but possessed originally of ' a mighty store of amiable 
 dispositions and virtues,' which are in some sort the propelling 
 cause of his crime. In this plan Godwin succeeded, except 
 that the transformation of Tyrrel from a philanthropist into 
 a fiend is not made credible. The satanic colouring is hard 
 to paint upon the features of a high-minded humanitarian 
 theorist ; and it is amusing to see the author of Political Justice 
 making himself ' extremely conversant with the Newgate 
 Calendar and the Lives of the Pirates? and ' tracing a certain 
 similitude between the story of Caleb Williams and the tale 
 of Bluebeard.' 
 
 St. Leon (1799) is a tedious, odd mixture of the sham his- 
 torical novel and the moral tale, in which Godwin tries to 
 retract the slight that he had seemed to cast in Political Justice 
 (the first edition especially) on ' the affections and charities 
 of private life.' ' True wisdom will recommend to us indi- 
 vidual attachments.' To drive home the proposition he pro- 
 ceeds to ' mix human feelings and passions with incredible 
 situations.' St. Leon is a young chevalier of the period when 
 k Marot, Rabelais, Erasmus, and Scaliger ' were contempor- 
 aries ; and, after gambling away his substance, falls in with a 
 mysterious stranger. This personage, though destitute and 
 soon to die, is able to give him the elixir of life and the philo- 
 sopher's stone. 'I have,' says St. Leon, 'in my possession 
 the choice of being as wealthy as I please, and the gift of
 
 212 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 immortal life.' The gifts bring him no good, and cut him off, 
 in particular, from the family affections. He is suspected of 
 murdering the stranger, owing to his sudden wealth ; is disgraced, 
 is imprisoned by the Inquisition, and breaks his wife's heart. 
 He becomes magically young again, but no one can recognise 
 him, and he loses all care for life. Finally he has to fight with 
 his own son. The heavy sermons of Godwin are poor refresh- 
 ment, but the book is curious for its triple pretence of doctrine, 
 supernaturalism, and history. Fleetwood (1805) is another 
 dull disquisitive story. Cloudesley (1830) is a work of Godwin's 
 old age, rambling and absurd, but by no means without 
 remnants of his power. Cloudesley, like Caleb Williams, is 
 in the secret of a crime ; but is also an accomplice, and plays 
 cat-and-mouse with his fellow-criminal ; and his own glimpses 
 and waverings of conscience are skilfully told. There is a 
 peculiar reflection of flame, without the heat, in all Godwin's 
 stories. 
 
 A villain of different complexion from Godwin's is seen in 
 Dr. John Moore's Zeluco (1786) ; he is not much less black, or 
 much more real, than the creations of the terror-mongers ; 
 but he is shown by daylight, in a setting of real manners and 
 incidents, not by limelight. Herein Zeluco is a reversion to 
 the patterns of Blifil and Ferdinand Count Fathom. He has 
 ' a genteel figure and alluring manners,' and is ' constitution- 
 ally intrepid' and 'an admirable swordsman.' When a boy 
 he coolly squeezes a pet sparrow to death : in his manhood he 
 excels in a vein of ' blasphemous irony,' and is so cruel a master 
 of his plantations that his slaves howl for joy at his departure. 
 He strangles his infant ; is vain, malicious, and gross : but is 
 a great self -tormentor, with unlucky rags of a conscience. 
 Finally, when duly stabbed, he weakens, repents, apologises. 
 All this is a tribute, and sometimes a skilful one, to that idea 
 of villainy that haunted our novelists for half a century : but 
 it is really a deflection of Moore's talent for portraiture and 
 satire. He is a more travelled Fielding, with a touch of the 
 same broad temper and the same gift. His Mr. Squander, 
 who will have it that a picture is either by ' Guido or Rheni ' : 
 and his two Scotsmen, Buchanan and Targe, who begin a social 
 glass in friendship, but end with a duel over the character of 
 Mary Queen of Scots : his Nerina, the treacherous mistress of 
 Zeluco ; are all real and solid figures. Moore recorded his 
 travels in Italy, Germany, and France ; judged the discipline 
 of the Prussian army, and met Voltaire, who told him that the 
 English nation was ' like a hogshead of their own strong beer,
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 213 
 
 the top of which was flattish, the bottom dregs, and the middle 
 excellent.' His books on the French Revolution l are of value, 
 and he followed somewhat the same course as Wordsworth 
 and many more, beginning with a liberal and humanitarian 
 enthusiasm, and taking a chill afterwards. 
 
 Walked towards Shakspeare's Cliff ; the fleet still in view. . . . 
 The French coast, white and high, and clear in the evening gleam. 
 Evening upon the sea becoming melancholy, silent, and pale. A 
 leaden-coloured vapour rising upon the horizon, without confound- 
 ing the line of separation ; the ocean whiter, till the last deep 
 twilight falls, when all is one, gradual, inseparable, indistinguish- 
 able grey. 
 
 No complaining of the wind, but a strong and awful monotony. 
 . . . Nothing sudden ; nothing laboured ; all a continuance of 
 pure power, without effort. 
 
 The massy tower at the end of the east terrace [at Windsor] 
 stood up high in shade ; but immediately from behind it the moon- 
 light spread, and showed the flat line of wall at the end of that 
 terrace, with the figure of a sentinel moving against the light, as 
 well as a profile of the dark precipice below. . . . No sound but the 
 faint clinking of the soldier's accoutrements, as he paced on watch, 
 and the remote voices of people turning the end of the east terrace, 
 appearing for a moment in the light there and vanishing. In a 
 high window of the tower a light. Why is it so sublime to stand 
 at the foot of a dark tower, and look up its height to the sky and 
 the stars ? ... It was on this terrace, surely, that Shakspearc 
 received the first hint of the time for the appearance of his ghost. 
 
 These passages are from Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's 2 private journal 
 of her travels ; the first is dated in the autumn of 1797, when 
 Dorothy Wordsworth, in the west country, was writing her 
 diary also, and was soon to note the ' night cloudy but not 
 dark ' and the ' sky covered over with one continuous cloud,' 
 which pass into Christabel. Mrs. Radcliffe's talent and style 
 can be more justly judged from such extracts, written only 
 for herself, than from the wrought-up, literary landscapes of 
 her stories, or of her Journey through Holland and the Lake* 
 (1796). They show her eye for sad colour, and for the formid- 
 able face of nature; for large, 'romantic' masses of archi- 
 tecture, confused under the starlight, with a single windoAv 
 shining ; the whole being a mise en scene for those spectral 
 effects, which appealed to the thirst of her own day. 
 
 One of her tales, Oaston de Blondeville, posthumously pub- 
 lished, is very downright in its method ; for here a real murdered 
 ghost stalks in broad day and scares King Henry in. and a 
 whole hall full of barons. But her habit, much deplored by
 
 214 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 critics, yet most entertaining, is to work up her mysteries and 
 then dutifully explain them away. The groans, hideous faces, 
 and footsteps, turn out to belong to a waxen image, or to 
 a concealed female prisoner : a rationalising process for which 
 the reader in the end comes to ache exceedingly. In A Sicilian 
 Romance (1790) there is a certain anticipation of Jane Eyre ; 
 for the sequestered wife, the source of the phantom terrors, 
 is finally discovered in the closed wing of the tower ; she is, 
 unlike Mrs. Rochester, quite in her senses, though her condi- 
 tion is reduced. In The Romance of the Forest (1791) there 
 are a bad marquis, four or five thwarted abductions, secret 
 chambers, and midnight patterings ; and there is also one 
 almost real personage, the traitor La Motte, who plays 
 Hubert to the Marquis's King John, and like Hubert relents. 
 The 'MS.' which Adeline reads at midnight is an early draft of 
 that which Miss Austen's Catherine Morland sought in the 
 ebony cabinet. But there was more material for Northanger 
 Abbey in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). We have to imagine 
 the shiver with which the younger sort, in the generation before 
 Scott, read the adventures of the orphan heiress, Emily 
 D'Aubert, who fell into the hands of the bandit Montoni 
 and was exposed to the terrors of his castle in the Apennines. 
 It is here that the cold air of reason is most studiously let in 
 upon the sources of terror. Mrs. Radcliffe waits till the shock 
 has told, and then discloses that it is caused by a trick. But 
 in doing so she really works on more than one hitherto un- 
 touched nerve ; and in especial, on the sense of alarm caused 
 by isolated and untraceable sounds. There is much scenery 
 in The Mysteries of Udolpho, and a feeling for the sombre 
 picturesque ; but on closer scrutiny the lines are seen to be 
 indefinite, and the Italian scenes were written without a know- 
 ledge of the country. It is the rhetoric of landscape ; and 
 this had hardly yet appeared in English fiction. 
 
 In The Italian (1797), the supper of horrors is one of many 
 courses ; but here again every dish is snatched from our lips 
 untasted, like those set before Sancho Panza in the Island of 
 Barataria. Schedoni is about to slay his sleeping daughter, 
 but sees a miniature on her breast just in time. The young 
 lover goes four times before the Inquisition, and is just not 
 racked. But the suspense is well wrought up, and the two 
 villains appositely destroy each other. One of them, Schedoni, 
 has the true trade-mark ; his face ' bore the traces of many 
 passions, which seemed to have fixed the features they no 
 longer animated.' He also has the traditional eyes, both of
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 215 
 
 which are ' intense and fiery,' as those of the second villain 
 are also. This is more liberal than the allowance given to 
 the Caliph Vathek, one of whose eyes was of the ordinary kind, 
 while the other felled people like bullocks. Like Maturin, 
 but without his power, and like Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe traffics 
 in the terrors of the Holy Office. Her landscapes leave a hazy 
 sense of bigness and colour ; and nothing else interrupts the 
 swift pace and ingenious changes of the tale, which holds us 
 once we have surrendered ourselves to the world of melo- 
 drama. The novels of sensation written a hundred years 
 later are much more tedious. 
 
 IV 
 
 All these writers had done their worst, in prose, to practise 
 upon the nerves of fear and wonder ; and in prose their race 
 was to continue. Meanwhile the same note is heard more 
 delicately sounding here and there in verse ; in the super- 
 natural ballads saved by Percy, in the translations of Gray 
 from the Norse, in Tarn o' Shanter, and in Blake. The two 
 currents do not fairly meet until Scott, who used both verse 
 and prose, though seldom very well, for such purposes. But 
 an earlier point of coalescence is found in the productions of 
 Matthew Gregory Lewis 1 (1775-1818), who died early, yet not 
 sooner than his own notoriety. His competent vulgarity of 
 style caught the public for a season ; his kindly and naive 
 character, recorded genially by Sir Walter Scott, is comically 
 at odds with the ' rape, murder, and superlatives ' of his printed 
 works, which include tales, plays, and poems (Ch. x.). He was 
 incited by admiration for Mrs. Radcliffe to fillip the public with 
 a three-man beetle ; and so, in 1795, when, as in blank verse 
 he observes, ' I scarce have seen my twentieth year,' he pub- 
 lished The Monk. But the scenery, the tentative yet often 
 delicate colours of Mrs. Radcliffe are gone ; there is no imagina- 
 tive suspense left ; the supernatural, no longer explained or 
 averted, is blatant, and the devil himself appears twice ; once, 
 according to tradition, as a seraph of light, and once undis- 
 guised. His victim is the monk, Ambrosio, a companion of 
 the Schedonis. The crimes of Ambrosio are described with 
 boyish indecency. It says much for the genius of Maturin that 
 The Monk did not at once extinguish all the modish pictures of 
 satanic priests and the Inquisition ; for the anti-Roman bray is 
 heard with curious frequency in this school of fiction. The 
 language of Lewis has some of the lower journalistic qualities.
 
 216 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 There was an outcry, and he abridged his book, but was careful 
 not to expurgate too much. He wrote much else, but ' Monk ' 
 Lewis he remained. These things 
 
 Be but as bugs to fearen babes withal, 
 Compared to the creatures in the sea's entrall. 
 
 This streak of the morbid-grotesque lingers in the second 
 generation of romantic poets, with some of whom Lewis was 
 acquainted. Other sources, such as the Jacobean drama, are 
 found influencing Beddoes ; and the subject of Keats's Lamia 
 is drawn from Burton's Anatomy. But the party gathered in 
 June 1816 at the Villa Diodati in Secheron were incited by a 
 book of German tales to their well-known pastime of capping 
 ghost stories. Each of them was to write one, and some of 
 the results survive. Shelley's, if he made it, is lost ; but the 
 streak was in him, indeed it was almost a taint. He had paid 
 his toll before by his boyish and curiously worthless com- 
 positions, St. Irvyne and Zastrozzi ; in The Sensitive Plant and 
 elsewhere he exceeds, rather than excels, in ghastly detail ; 
 and on hearing Chri'stabel recited, if the anecdote is true, he 
 shrieked on suddenly beholding in vision a woman with eyes 
 upon her breasts. Byron began a fragment called The Vampyre, 1 
 and John William Polidori, his young physician, who, like 
 Mrs. Shelley describes the competition, wrought up Byron's 
 beginnings into a story with the same title. But the real 
 fruit of that evening was Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein (1817). 
 It was born of a dream, and the dream was born of a passage 
 she had read in Erasmus Darwin, who was experimenting in 
 the artificial production of life. In that dream she beheld 
 the monster coming to consciousness under the operations of 
 Frankenstein, ' the modern Prometheus ' : ' the pale student 
 of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put to- 
 gether,' which begins to ' stir with an uneasy, half -vital motion.' 
 The crimes of this giant, who stifles women and children, are 
 not out of the ordinary except for their number. But his 
 literary ancestry is a mixed one. He studies Volney's Ruins 
 of Empire, Plutarch, and Werther, and unites the sentiments of 
 Milton's Satan with those of Political Justice : 
 
 Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage 
 him, but I am solitary and abhorred. ... I, like the arch-fiend, 
 bore a hell within me. 
 
 Yet only a giant beheld in a nightmare by the daughter of 
 Godwin could have discoursed thus :
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 217 
 
 I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me ; for 
 you do not reflect that you are the cause of its success. If any 
 felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them 
 an hundred and an hundred-fold ; for that one creature's sake, 
 I should make peace with the whole kind ! 
 
 But Mrs. Shelley's force of imagination is shown, and also 
 strained to breaking point, in the scenes where the demon 
 relates his own sensations at the birth of life, his delight in 
 nature, his agony when the world hounds him away in horror, 
 and his rage to punish mankind when Frankenstein refuses to 
 conjure into being a female mate, a monstrous Eve, for his 
 consolation ; and when, once more like Satan, he feels remorse 
 over the corpse of Frankenstein, and seeks his death, under a 
 grim arctic light, on a solitary ' ice-raft.' The colossal pup- 
 pet of Frankenstein, the 'modern Prometheus,' has reached 
 the popular fancy, and his name is still confused with that of 
 his supposed creator. It may be added that other tales by 
 Mary Shelley, such as Transformation and The Mortal Im- 
 mortal, are weaker dealings in the preternatural ; and her 
 widowed life in Italy inspired some of the sketches, idyllic or 
 pathetic, that she contributed to various annuals. The best 
 of them please by their facile and fluent rhythms and their 
 simple scenery. The Last Man (1826) is a fantasy on the same 
 subject as Campbell's poem, and contains an odd idealisation 
 of Byron, or of the Byronic hero, in the person of a Count 
 Raymond. But meanwhile had arisen the most potent of all 
 the terror-mongers. 
 
 It was not for nothing that Charles Robert Maturin l (1782- 
 1824) was befriended and admired by Scott 2 and Byron, 3 and 
 left his print on French romanticism. At first sight he seems an 
 Irish clergyman of rigid eighteenth-century tastes, who condemns 
 Rousseau 4 and sensibility in order to praise Miss Edgeworth 
 and common sense. Human nature, he truly says, has ' wants 
 utterly unprovided for in the statutes of romance.' But he 
 ministers, more than any of our novelists, to one of the wants of 
 romance itself. He is the first to find a notation and a rhythm 
 for obscure, damped, and half -paralysed feeling, and ' for the 
 fear arising from objects of invisible terror.' His aim is that 
 
 of darkening the gloomy, and deepening the sad ; of painting life 
 in extremes ; of representing those struggles of passion when the 
 soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed. 
 
 He begins with a wish to edify, but forgets it under the pressure 
 of his genius. A sentence that he writes on love shows him in
 
 218 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 the act of escaping, and also how far romance had travelled 
 between Richardson and Scott : 
 
 Its folly and fantasy, its high, remote, incommunicable modes of 
 feeling and expression, its nice and subtle pleasures, its happiness 
 that mocks mortality and its despair that defies religion, seldom 
 can, seldom ought to be, represented. 
 
 Maturin's power, of which there are traces in his once-famous 
 verse tragedy of Bertram (see Ch. xxi.), was only realised in 
 prose. The first of his six stories, The Fatal Revenge, 1 or the 
 Family of Montorio, written at the age of twenty-four, is a 
 late survivor of the Radcliffian species. There is a terrible 
 monk, Schemoli, after the likeness of Schedoni, an intricate 
 vendetta, and many other familiar ingredients. ' The date of 
 that style of writing was out when I was a boy,' says Maturin, 
 ' and I had not the power to revive it.' But the command of 
 imagery and lyrical cadence is evident. 
 
 In the deep and silent hour, when the night vapour, fine as an 
 infant's breath, stands in the air when the leaf of the poplar and 
 aspen is unmoved when there is a hissing in the ear for very 
 stillness, then I love to lean from my casement and utter his name 
 once and softly. 
 
 This breathless, wound-up manner, marked by dashes and 
 want of relief, is in the regular tradition ; but the power in 
 handling it is new. Maturin had some of the nice introspective - 
 ness, though none of the religion, of the mystic, and his de- 
 scription, in the same tale, of Ippolito's ecstasy, as he awakes 
 from his noonday sleep and the waking world has not yet 
 gathered round him, is unparalleled in the prose of the time. 
 There is less of this quality in The Wild Irish Boy (1808), 
 written in letter-form, and in The Milesian Chief (1812), but 
 Gustave Blanche's 2 words on the latter story are true of both : 
 ' C'est un livre ou etincellent ga et la des pages magnifiques.' 
 Here Maturin turns to describing Irish scenes and personages ; 
 but his ' Milesian ' is not only a martyr-rebel, but an unreal 
 Ossianic hero, descended from the ' ancient bards ' ; not an 
 Irishman of any known variety. Women ; or, Pour et Contre, 
 popular in a French version under the name of Eva ; ou Amour 
 et Religion, is more noteworthy, and ought to be reprinted. 
 Here, too, the spring of terror is hardly touched. Maturin 
 had a real, though hardly a practised gift for representing 
 manners and humours. The plot is a violent one, turning on 
 the rivalry of a mother and a daughter, who do not know their 
 kinship, for the love of the same youth, whose flutterings
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 219 
 
 between them are shown with merciless skill. But the ending 
 is grim and strained ; for the youth and the daughter die, 
 leaving the mother to her remorse. The family of repulsive 
 Irish Methodists, amongst whom the young Eva is brought 
 up, are sharply discriminated : the holy-worldly father, the 
 plain and dignified mother, and the hateful red-headed Tar- 
 tuffian cleric. Eva is unlettered, an inarticulate and silent 
 sufferer, who cannot argue, but only loves. * There were 
 indeed flowers under the snow, but one was chilled in the effort 
 to bring them to light.' She is taken by some persons of fashion 
 to hear the singing of her splendid rival, really her mother, 
 Zaira, who, as the reviewers pointed out, was an ambitious 
 study after Madame de Stael's Corinne. The youth, De Courcy, 
 drifts to Paris in the wake of Zaira, a lover on probation, but 
 in appearance her ignominious cavalier. So the two women 
 break their hearts over one weakling, whom neither of them wins. 
 Maturin's last story, The Albigenses (1824), does not want a 
 certain pomp and brilliance, but the following of Scott is at once 
 too close and too far off. The passions of the Covenanters are 
 transferred to the thirteenth century, and the trappings of 
 chivalry from the Black Knight to Simon de Montfort. 
 
 Mdmoth the Wanderer (1820), Maturin's masterpiece, and the 
 greatest of all the ' novels of terror,' consists of several stories, 
 nested or interlaced to the point of confusion, but separate in 
 place and circumstance. The scene, which opens in modern 
 Ireland, shifts to Spain, then to an Indian island, then to Spain, 
 then to the England of the Restoration, then back to Spain, 
 and closes in Ireland. All these tales are linked only by the 
 fateful appearances of John Melmoth, who has traits at once of 
 Faustus, of Mephistopheles, and of the Wandering Jew, as well 
 as of Milton's Satan, and who is yet a tragic figure of a new 
 species. He lias dealt in unlawful arts ; has traded with the 
 powers of darkness and lost his salvation ; has gained in 
 exchange the gift of prolonged life and unfading prime, of 
 passing through walls and over seas, and of paralysing a mob 
 with a wave of his hand. He is an agent of the enemy of man, 
 for whom he seeks new victims. But the original point is that 
 Melmoth seeks them for his own deliverance. He is allowed by 
 his contract to shift his barren powers, together with his hopeless 
 destiny, upon any innocent soul whose consent can be obtained. 
 
 It has been said that this power has been accorded to me, that 
 I might be enabled to tempt wretches in their fearful hour of 
 extremity, with the promise of deliverance and immunity, on 
 condition of their exchanging situations with me.
 
 220 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 The half-dozen tales of which the book consists are all 
 framed upon this plan. Each intended victim, in whatever 
 land or age, is brought to dire extremity, and then appears 
 Melmoth with his smooth or terrible speech, offering release 
 on the incommunicable condition ; which is never put into 
 words but once, 1 but left to be supposed. Some of the tempted 
 die, some escape, but none succumb. In his last words, before 
 Melmoth flings himself over a precipice in Ireland, near the 
 home of his forefathers, he exclaims : 
 
 I have been on earth a terror, but not an evil to its inhabitants. 
 None can participate in my destiny but with his own consent none 
 have consented 2 none can be involved in its tremendous penalties, 
 but by participation. I alone must sustain the penalty. . . . No 
 one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. 
 / have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain that world, 
 would lose his own soul. 
 
 In one episode, the Tale of the Indians, this shape of malignity 
 and terror is for a while humanised. He finds a maiden, 
 Immalee, or Isidora, upon a lonely island, which is described 
 with idyllic beauty. She is one of Rousseau's children of 
 nature ; in remorse he abandons his designs upon her ; but 
 meets her later in Spain, and brings her to her end. This is 
 the only streak of kindness or charm in a tale that bears upon 
 the chord of terror to the point of the grotesque. The very 
 elements share in Maturin's extravagance ; a certain shower 
 of rain is (as Mr. Boythorn might have said) ' perhaps the 
 most violent that was ever precipitated upon the earth.' 
 Melmoth's superhuman length of days makes us smile when 
 he remembers ' a trifling but characteristic circumstance that 
 happened in the reign of Louis xin.' But Maturin, in his 
 own phrase, ' indulged in a splendid aristocracy of imagina- 
 tion.' The pictures of Mon$ada suffering in prison and of 
 his failure to escape are a triumph of furious fancy ; and 
 the opening pages, relating the arrival of Melmoth's young 
 descendant at his ruined home, while the peasants whisper 
 of the presence of the powers of darkness, would suffice to 
 justify the existence of the ' novel of terror.' No one so power- 
 fully struck the notes of insane unlocated fear and nightmare 
 suspense. The punishment of bombast may follow, and 
 Thackeray make excellent easy fun of Melmoth's awful eyes ; 
 but it is Baudelaire who is right when he exclaims : ' Ce rire 
 glace et tord lea entrailles ... en dechirant et en brulant 
 les levres du rieur irresistible.' The genius both of Hugo and
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 221 
 
 of Balzac l felt the spell ; so that Maturin, like Poe after him, 
 won a definite and deserved, if an exiled influence. All his 
 tales were soon put into French. 
 
 Without balance or constructive gift or measure, he can 
 write. It is true that he writes, as he feels, in italics, and that 
 he is too lengthy. But he and Beckford alone of their school 
 have a style. He has a sense for the concerted music of the 
 prose period, which often reminds us even of De Quincey's. 
 His sentences are briefer, more spontaneous, without the 
 ineffable dream-architecture and mighty harmonies of De 
 Quincey's ; but he has colour and musical sonority, and also 
 the gift of a kind of sudden, poetic epigram. ' My life was a sea 
 without a tide.' ' All colours disappear in the night, and despair 
 has no diary.' ' He died as he had lived, in a kind of avarici- 
 ous delirium.' ' The locks were so bad and the keys so rusty, 
 that it was always like the cry of the dead in the house when 
 the locks were turned.' Two longer passages may be added : 
 
 You will hardly believe, sir, that I slept profoundly ; yet I did ; 
 but I would rather never sleep again, than awake so horribly. 1 
 awoke in the darkness of day. I was to behold the light no more : 
 nor to watch those divisions of time, which, by measuring our 
 portions of suffering, appear to diminish them. . . . These eras 
 by which we compute the hours of darkness and inanity are incon- 
 ceivable to any but those who are situated as I was. 
 
 The movement there is staccato, as in many sentences of 
 Sir Thomas Browne. Elsewhere it is more undulating, and 
 fairly recalls that of the opium-eater. The diction is on, or 
 over, the edge of absurdity ; but what a feeling for epithet, what 
 a justified boldness of image, what an onset and harmony ! 
 
 The darkness increased, and the clouds collected like an army 
 that had mustered its utmost force, and stood in obdured and 
 collected strength against the struggling light of heaven. A broad, 
 red, and dusky line of gloomy light gathered round the horizon, 
 like an usurper watching the throne of an abdicated sovereign, and, 
 expanding its portentous circle, sent forth alternately Hashes of 
 lightning, pale and red ; the murmur of the sea increased, and the 
 arcades of the banyan-tree, that had struck its patriarchal root not 
 five hundred paces from where Immalee stood, resounded the deep 
 and almost unearthly murmur of the approaching storm through 
 all its colonnades ; the primeval trunk rocked and groaned, and 
 the everlasting fibres seemed to withdraw their grasp from the 
 earth, and quiver in air at the sound. Nature, with every voice 
 she could inspire from earth, or air, or water, announced danger to 
 her children.
 
 222 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 After Maturin such assaults upon the feelings might have 
 seemed to be exhausted, but they went on nevertheless. Many 
 of the Tales from Blackwood, which date from 1821 onwards, 
 are in a similar vein, and show the misguidance or frustration 
 of considerable power. They often relate a situation of rack- 
 ing physical peril, which closes in by logical degrees upon the 
 victim, until he is just rescued or not rescued at all. A doctor 
 is shut in a copper boiler which gets slowly hotter and hotter, 
 and he takes notes of his symptoms while he can. In a tale 
 by William Maginn, a bell-ringer is pinned just beneath a 
 vibrating bell, which nearly crushes and maddens him. A 
 chaplain has a deadly bout with a condemned murderer in his 
 cell. One such story, The Iron Shroud (1830), by William 
 Mudford, is typical. A seven-windowed prison, diabolically 
 contrived, contracts each day by the subtraction of a single 
 window, and at last turns into a coffin. The style in these 
 stories is flushed and emphatic, and tends to defeat itself ; 
 and the various writers seem to be groping, sometimes with 
 gleams of success, for the secret of Poe's undiscovered and 
 inquisitorial art. The work of the American, Charles Brockden 
 Brown, may here just be mentioned, especially his highly 
 ingenious detective story, Edgar Huntly (1801), in which a 
 mysterious crime is committed by a sleep-walker. In England, 
 the power of dreadful suggestion is recaptured much later, in 
 Lytton's story of The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) ; while 
 it reappears in Jane Eyre, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 
 and in The Woman in White, in varying degree. But these are 
 works of larger make, and the supernatural and the uncanny 
 are not their only interests. 
 
 Other by-ways of fiction, mostly blind alleys, can be followed 
 up by the reader of the Tales from Blackwood. The German- 
 macabre manner, which is singularly unsatisfying, is often 
 essayed. In one story a virtuous youth is entrapped into 
 marrying the headsman's daughter and succeeding to his 
 trade ; he practises his prentice hand on a ruffian, who proves 
 to be an old college friend. In another there is a struggle 
 with a murderer (another German) and with his mistress, upon 
 a floating beacon. The Evil One often figures, and sometimes 
 causes his victims to take one another's personalities, with 
 grotesque effect ; a motive that is inherited from Hoffmann 
 and his school. Other tales deal in Italian scenery : and 
 this ma}' be the last rag of Mrs. Radcliffe's influence. Di 
 Vasari (1820) and Antonio di Carrara (1832) are examples of 
 this species. In others, again, there is a double dose of peda-
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 223 
 
 gogy and sentiment, mixed according to the old prescription ; 
 as in The First and Last Kiss (1829), where a miscreant about 
 to be hanged breaks down in the presence of his son, hitherto 
 unknown to him. In these stray examples there is ample 
 talent and energy displayed ; they serve to show some of the 
 minor currents of fiction towards the end of the period. 
 Other novelists who flourish after the appearance of Waverley 
 may be reserved (see Ch. xn.). But one other handling of a 
 preterhuman subject, in which the enemy of man is a chief 
 performer, may be noticed now. 
 
 This is James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 
 afterwards entitled Confessions of a Fanatic. The style and 
 psychological insight seemed so foreign to the Ettrick Shepherd, 
 that the work was sometimes assigned to Lockhart : unless, 
 indeed, the Enemy himself were the author. But Hogg's 
 manuscript draft was found, and the credit is his. 1 He may, 
 indeed, have been studying in the school of Adam Blair. The 
 ' confessions,' at first sight, seem but the diary of a religious 
 maniac ; but the conception is subtler than that. The time 
 is the seventeenth century, and the story is first told from 
 the point of view of the onlookers. It produces a true impres- 
 sion of witchcraft and diablerie, and reminds us even of the 
 masterpieces of Meinhold. The antinomian doctrine utilised 
 resembles, however, that of Browning's Johannes Agricola. 
 The elected and saved soul, free to sin unharmed, is tempted 
 to use its power, and hideous crimes are the consequence. 
 The tempter is an imposing personage, with a haggard and 
 defiant gaze, who may be described as Satan posing as the 
 Satanic hero. This being has the skill to resemble any person 
 whom he pleases, including his victim. The bewildering 
 havoc that ensues is described with undeniable power ; but 
 the slow yielding of the criminal, and his tension and agony 
 of brain, are yet more remarkably analysed. This late and 
 remarkable offshoot of the tale of terror appeared in 1824, and 
 has the odd touch of sterile excitement and the copious hot 
 flow of language that hung about the stories produced in that 
 decade. But all such extremes of fantasy, in the course of 
 nature, soon cause a reaction ; the soul cries out against them, 
 and we betake ourselves to the satire and burlesque, more 
 or less delicate, that they generate ; for the rational spirit, 
 the eighteenth-century spirit, onoe more asserts itself in these 
 shapes. 
 
 The tale of terror and the language of sensibility are both 
 travestied together in The Heroine (1S13), by Eaton Stannard
 
 224 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 Barrett, 1 a young Irish journeyman of letters, of whom little 
 else is known. It is a boisterous, male extravaganza of con- 
 siderable skill. The quiet and permanent art of Miss Austen 
 is not attempted ; but in its happy-go-lucky method and 
 unfailing high spirits The Heroine recalls rather Fielding's or 
 Sheridan's treatment of the heroic tragedies ; and it can be 
 relished by those who know not Udolpho, or Ida of Athens, or 
 The Novice of St. Dominick, just as Tilburina still holds the 
 theatre although no one present has heard of the writings 
 parodied in The Critic. Barrett certainly sticks at nothing ; 
 his notes mischievously give the actual quotations that are 
 woven into his text ; and he profanely rifles not only Mrs. 
 Radcliffe and her companions but Werther and Ossian and 
 La Nouvelle Helo'ise, and not only Miss Burney but Sterne ; 
 and Sir Francis Burdett, and Burke, and Johnson are alike 
 his victims. His mimicry of the style of The Lives of the Poets 
 is admirable. As in Northanger Abbey, the ' heroine ' is a 
 young lady whose head is turned by romances, some of which 
 ' address the imagination alone, and . . . act upon the mind 
 like inebriating stimulants ' ; whilst others, of Rousseau's 
 species, ' indulge in a strain of overwrought and useless, if not 
 pernicious, sentimentality.' Unlike Catherine Morland, she 
 tells her own story, and indicates her own madness for to 
 madness she comes ; a feat of narrative demanding more 
 delicacy than Barrett possesses. The humour here is not a 
 little jerky and ghastly. Cherry Wilkinson, who changes her 
 name to Cherubina, deserts her old father, wanders alone to 
 London, is gulled and fleeced by a cheap actor, who courts her 
 in stage armour ; dreams herself the heiress to a great mansion, 
 and is cruelly humoured by its mistress for the pleasure of the 
 guests ; lives, a female Quixote, with a certain Jerry for her 
 Sancho, in a ruined castle, which she defends with all the 
 circumstance of chivalrous romance ; runs through other 
 tedious adventures, the satire thinning down into shapeless 
 wisps ; and is at last, after many real miseries, cured of her 
 brainsickness and given back to her decent lover. Some frail, 
 old-fashioned pieces of verse restore a certain perfume to the 
 book, which is at any rate full of impetus and gaiety, and is 
 by far the most comprehensive skit upon the fiction that was 
 ceasing to be in vogue. It appeared aptly on the eve of 
 the publication of Waverley. Romance, therefore, was to take 
 a new and indefinite lease of life, despite these signs of revul- 
 sion. Barrett's ' address of the heroine to the reader ' has 
 a streak of Lucianic wit. The old fancv of the material.
 
 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 225 
 
 winged life of human words, that are transported into some 
 other sphere, is happily worked out. All the characters, so we 
 hear, in any manuscript that is once completed, 
 
 acquire the quality of creating a soul or spirit, which takes immedi- 
 ate flight, and ascends through the regions of air, till it arrives at 
 the MOON ; where it is then embodied, and becomes a living creature : 
 the precise counterpart, in mind and person, of its literary proto- 
 type. ... It is not unusual to hear a mitred parrot screaming a 
 political sermon, or a fashionable jay twittering a refined bravura. 
 These birds, then, are our philosophers ; and so great is their value, 
 that they sell for as much as your patriots. 
 
 Northanger Abbey was composed during the full tide of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe's popularity, only four years after the appearance 
 of Udolpho, but was not published till 1818. Even then, 
 the protest of cool mocking sense against the extravagances of 
 the school was by no means superfluous, as the half-jesting 
 allusions in Waverley to ' romance ' are enough to show. The 
 parody is so good and crafty, that little else now keeps the 
 name of Mrs. Radcliffe alive in the general mind. Jane Austen 
 does not object to the true supernatural ; she has nothing to 
 do with it. But the whole furniture of the tale of terror is 
 patiently counterfeited ; the heroine of mysterious birth, the 
 midnight watch, the locked doors, and the secret scrolls ; and, 
 above all, the trick of explaining the secrets away. Like 
 Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Northanger Abbey is a novel 
 of discipline ; the comic undeceiving of Catherine Morland is the 
 subject, or part of the subject. But Miss Austen strikes wider 
 still. The enemy, once more, is sensibility, as fostered, in this 
 case, by a diet of the wrong sort of fiction : she assails the 
 conception of life, the glorification of the young lady, as set 
 forth in romance. In the same breath, the methods of Miss 
 Burney and Miss Edgeworth are indignantly vindicated. The 
 book is thus full of indications of Miss Austen's literary tastes 
 and preferences. In deliberate contrast with the scenes of 
 Catherine's fancy, the actual world about her is of the pettiest. 
 The drivel of the ladies, young and old, almost amounts to a 
 parody of Miss Austen's own manner. The young parson 
 Tilney, the mouthpiece of sarcasm and sense, is himself rather 
 tedious; but the amplest amends are made by the unforget- 
 table John Thorpe, at whose college the consumption of port 
 was ' four pints a day at the utmost.' 
 
 This chronicle of the novel may clo.se, for the time, with a 
 farce for the after-piece. One jest, imagined by a German 
 VOL. i. r
 
 226 THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE 
 
 but produced in English, was translated into almost every 
 western language. Baron Munchausen's 1 Narrative of his 
 Marvellous Adventures and Campaigns in Russia (1785) is a 
 little classic in its own venerable species, namely the tale of 
 fabulous adventure, or Liigendichtung . It relates, in a few 
 chapters, the experiences that the Baron told over his wine. 
 There are less than two dozen yarns ; they include that of the 
 crocodile who swallowed the head of the lion who jumped over 
 the head of the Baron ; of the horse that was tied to the steeple 
 in the snowstorm ; of the other horse (of classic parentage), 
 which was cut in two, drank of the fountain, and was sown up 
 again ; of the music frozen in the post-horn (also traditional) ; 
 of the explosion of the flints inside the bear ; and of the cherry- 
 tree that grew out of the stag's forehead. The Baron speaks 
 correct, rather flat English, without raising his voice ; the 
 dulness of his manner is part of the joke, as he explains each 
 successive marvel by a greater one. 
 
 These anecdotes came from the brain, and also partly from 
 the reading, of a singular Dousterswivelish personage, Rudolf 
 Erich Raspe, whose own story is in keeping with his inventions. 
 He translated Ossian, and wrote on Percy's Reliques, and was 
 of Burger's circle in Gottingen. Here he was the guest of the 
 Freiherr von Miinchhausen, locally known for drawing the 
 longbow, whose name, heartlessly corrupted and utilised by 
 Raspe, has passed into our language. This Raspe was learned 
 in zoology and other sciences, and in the history of painting ; 
 but unluckily stole some objects of price, and fled to England, 
 where he was helped by Walpole ; and spent many of his days 
 prospecting, ' salting,' and sinking mines. Within a few years 
 his book was enlarged by unknown hands ; Burger put the fifth 
 edition into German ; and the seventh (1793) fixed the current 
 text. The added matter is less amusing than Raspe's, but is 
 full of contemporary allusions. Bruce's Travels (1790), which 
 had provoked much derision, partly on account of the true 
 stories they contained, are parodied ; the new pastime of 
 ballooning is mocked at ; and the French Revolution is treated 
 in the spirit of the modern cheap comic paper. Raspe's own 
 chapters, however, give the reader a start which carries him 
 through. It is reported that the real Miinchhausen was un- 
 grateful for his fame, and that he became morose and reticent.
 
 CHAPTER Vili 
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, 
 AND BURKE 
 
 I. Weakness of Britain during this period in pure philosophy. Reaction 
 against Hume : Thomas Reid and ' common sense ' ; multiplication of 
 ' original principles.' Dugald Stewart : lectures and discourses ; his dis- 
 cussions on aesthetics ; beauty and the imagination ; love of literature. 
 Reversion towards Hume : Thomas Brown ; his analytic skill ; connection 
 with the English empirical school. Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses : genius 
 and the ' great style.' 
 
 II. Burke: his last phase (1780-1790-1797) an integral one; unity of hi.s 
 point of view. Sketch of his work before 1780 : The Sublime and Beautiful ; 
 Observations and Present Discontents, their controlling idea. Zenith of his 
 power : American speeches and epistles. 
 
 III. Burke : Indian speeches, and orations against Hastings. Limita- 
 tions of his liberalism ; in what sense a ' mystic.' ' Natural rights ' and the 
 ' social covenant.' 
 
 IV. Burke : writings, 1790-97. The Reflections ; obsession with 1688 ; 
 ignorance of causes of the French Revolution, prescience of its effects. Im- 
 portance of the book in the evolution of political thought. Letters on a Regi- 
 cide Peace and kindred writings : Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. 
 
 V. Burke : his union of gifts as statesman, philosopher, and writer. Style : 
 influence of Milton for good and ill. Inlaying of quotation and allusion ; ex- 
 cesses. Burke's models for his sentence and period. Influence of Bolingbrokc, 
 doubtful. Examples of long, and of brief, sentence-structure ; average 
 scale of sentence, exemplified. 
 
 VI. Burke : rhetorical art and devices. Examples of figurative speech. 
 Use of iteration and echo ; the passage on ' peace.' Amplification ; and 
 modes of irony. Comparisons and metaphors, their variety and ferocity. 
 Expansion of metaphors. Burke's cadence and rhythm ; example. 
 
 IT is time to turn awhile from the literature of invention to 
 that of thought. On most of our philosophic writers from 
 1780 to 1830 one reflection is inevitable. Burke apart, they 
 belong to a second-rate, insular period of speculation, while 
 the poets, the novelists, and the critics belong to a first-rate, 
 original period of art. There is no such mental movement ' 
 as that which quickens the Germany of Kant, Fichte, and 
 Schopenhauer. Bentham's greatness lies in applied philosophy ; 
 
 w
 
 228 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 the greatness of Coleridge lies in poetry and criticism and 
 in the fertile application of imported ideas. Such a poverty 
 of atmosphere reacts visibly upon the poets themselves, 
 much to their detriment; and especially before 1800. We can 
 hardly imagine so great a man as Blake living in so curious 
 a mental welter in France, Germany, or Italy. Nor are 
 Wordsworth and Shelley in real contact with the European 
 mind. Burke himself, with all his weight and power, illus- 
 trates the same deficiency. He detests first principles, derides 
 pure analysis, and uses 'metaphysician ' as a term of contumely. 
 
 The movement of sheer criticism, as already noted, was 
 fulfilled in Hume, who reduced experience to a series of ' im- 
 pressions/ and who further reduced two of these impressions 
 namely our sense of a causal tie between the rest of our 
 impressions, and our belief that there is a permanent ground 
 for them all within ourselves to an illusion. The world- 
 famous result of this process was to startle the mind of Kant 
 from his ' dogmatic sleep,' and to drive him to construct his 
 critical philosophy. But the knowledge of Kant's works 
 reached our shores very slowly ; and meanwhile, at home, 
 in Hume's native country, began what may be called the 
 insular revulsion against Hume's principles. This movement 
 issued in the works of the ' Scottish school,' whose creed was 
 named by its adherents, though not too happily, the ' philo- 
 sophy of common sense.' In the hands of Thomas Reid, 1 the 
 founder, this philosophy is pre-revolutionary in spirit as well 
 as in date. His Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles 
 of Common Sense (1768) is much expanded and explained in 
 his lectures, collected under the titles Essays on the Intellectual 
 Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of the 
 Human Mind (1788). These later works of Reid's are less 
 dry and compact than the earlier ; they approach nearer to 
 literature, and have a plainness and clearness not overmuch 
 diversified by professional ornament. Reid has now and then 
 a happy illustrative wit, as in his chapter on the ' Train of 
 Thought,' which, he is concerned to show, is not a mere succes- 
 sion of ' ideas ' or impressions, but is necessarily related to a 
 subject who can select and attend to them : 
 
 We seem to treat the thoughts that present themselves to the 
 fancy in crowds as a great man treats those that attend his levee. 
 They are all ambitious of his attention ; he goes round the circle, 
 bestowing a bow upon one, a smile upon another ; asks a short 
 question of a third ; while a fourth is wanted for a particular con- 
 ference ; and the great part have no particular mark of attention,
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 229 
 
 but go as they came. It is true he can give no mark of his attention 
 to those who were not there ; but he has a sufficient number for 
 making choice and distinction. 
 
 Reid's essay on Taste, which involves an analysis of the beauti- 
 ful and the sublime, qualities which he argues reside in ' things ' 
 and not merely in our minds, is full of acute passages, and 
 some of his remarks about the need of ' grandeur in the subject ' 
 are oddly prophetic of Matthew Arnold, and also are dis- 
 tinguished by much ' common sense.' 
 
 The philosophy of Reid and his successors thus represents 
 in the first instance a reaction from the spirit of destructive 
 criticism to concrete experience, to which they appeal for the 
 new foundations of philosophy. But they do not, like Kant, 
 start from experience in order to dig down into its presupposi- 
 tions ; on the contrary, they find ready given in experience a 
 number of original principles in logic, mathematics, psychologj 7 , 
 aesthetic, and ethics ; and they say that these are ultimate 
 and inexplicable, and that modern thought since Descartes 
 has wasted its force, and has only ended in scepticism, by 
 trying to explain them. Such principles Reid sometimes 
 calls ' common sense,' sometimes by other names ; and he 
 spends much of his time in the work of descriptive psychology, 
 which elucidates their nature and scope. The study of mind 
 was really advanced in this way ; and the whole procedure, 
 which has often been wrongly called a kind of suicide of 
 philosophy, is full of historic import. Reid (though his 
 followers narrow the list) is prone quietly to assume as ulti- 
 mate all those phenomena that he fails to explain. But he 
 is really working towards a true vindication of that rational 
 element in human experience, which Hume had explained 
 away. The assumptions of ordinary life and language, if not 
 a pure illusion, need to be accounted for, and it was a service 
 to restate them, and along with them the problem of philosophy. 
 
 Reid thus takes his share in that mental process of the time 
 the return from pure criticism to the sifted results of experi- 
 ence and learning which, as we have seen (Ch. T.), per- 
 meates literature. In his case, however, it is not so much 
 history, or social and economic phenomena, or the political 
 inheritance of his country, that he reasserts, as the contents 
 of any and every man's consciousness. In this he was true, 
 after all, to the traditional temper of British philosophy 
 from Bacon to Locke, although he seems to repudiate the 
 tradition. Much of the value of his work consists in his
 
 230 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 review of the actual facts of mind. His reconstruction does 
 not go very far, and the consciousness which he examines is 
 that of the educated, respectable, and orthodox person. The 
 new ideas of Rousseau, or of the French ideologists, or of 
 Kant, do not appear to have reached him. Hence he was 
 unaware of the strength of the enemy, or of the scope of those 
 distinctions between the ' reason' and the ' understanding,' 
 or the ' fancy ' and the ' imagination,' which Coleridge spent 
 his days in seeking, not very effectually, to expound. 
 
 The conclusions of Reid were explained, popularised, and 
 qualified by Dugald Stewart 1 (1753-1828), who enjoyed much 
 honour in his own time. His contribution to ideas is admitted 
 to be slight ; and much of his once admired eloquence, with 
 all its lucidity, enthusiasm, and range of illustration, is rather 
 too flat-footed and long-winded to rank as literature. It was 
 first heard in the lecture-room, and the audience included 
 many of the best Scotsmen of the day, including Scott and 
 Jeffrey, as well as English Whigs or Liberals like Brougham 
 and Sydney Smith. Stewart was thus an active and honourable 
 middleman of culture, who kept speculation and discussion 
 alive during a dead season. In his Elements of the Philosophy 
 of the Human Mind (1792, 1814, 1827) can be found his general 
 system of metaphysic and psychology ; in the Philosophical 
 Essays (1810) his most easy and pointed writing ; in the 
 Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers his ethic ; and, in 
 his dissertation, written for the Encyclopedia Britannica, his 
 sketch of the history of modern thought. He is noticeably 
 unappreciative of Kant, who seems to him to be repeating 
 old answers to old questions in a special ' jargon.' Stewart 
 also wrote somewhat heavy memoirs of Adam Smith, Robert- 
 son, and Reid. 
 
 One of Stewart's best traits is his constant effort to light 
 up his philosophy by elegant examples, drawn from the 
 travellers, poets, and novelists. His lectures are variegated 
 with quotations, and show a real love of letters. This habit 
 profits him best in the field of aesthetic. It has been shown 
 already (Ch. T.) how he analyses the notion of the ' picturesque.' 
 He has a genuine feeling for beauty in nature, art, and poetry, 
 and tries to give a reasoned account of that feeling. Some- 
 what insular, and seemingly unaware of Lessing's or Kant's 
 utterances on the subject, he nevertheless goes far beyond 
 Reid, and also beyond his own successors of the English and 
 Scottish schools. There is nothing in Mackintosh, Brown. 
 Hamilton, or James Mill, so comprehensive or so much to
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 231 
 
 the point as the chapter on Imagination in the Elements, or 
 the pages on the Beautiful and the Sublime in the Philosophical 
 Essays. Like Alison (see p. 14 ante) he has a keen sense of the 
 multiplicity of factors involved in the perception of a beautiful 
 thing of the bundle of graces that are covered by the girdle 
 of Venus. He is on the brink of stating the distinction asserted 
 by Coleridge and Wordsworth between the purposes of science 
 and those of poetry ; and, when he observes that the poet 
 ' addresses the understanding only as a vehicle of pleasure,' 
 it is evident that the day of eighteenth -century didactics is 
 setting. He also gives a parting kick to the notion that poetry 
 is concerned chiefly with abstract ideas. The pleasure that 
 the poet conveys, we hear, ' will in general be found propor- 
 tionate to the beauty and liveliness of the images he suggests.' 
 Stewart's account of taste as an acquired faculty, not identical 
 with mere sensibility, but involving reason and reflection, and 
 yet for all that prompt, instantaneous, and unconscious in 
 its judgments, is admirably worked out. He describes the 
 connoisseur as one whose taste has been moulded by a long 
 commerce with masterpieces ; and adds, shrewdly, that there 
 is likely to be something wrong in a work which only the 
 connoisseur can admire. He profits by Longinus, cares next 
 to nothing for the ' rules ' of criticism, and anticipates Charles 
 Lamb's objection to seeing the tragedies of Shakespeare per- 
 formed ; although he applies this objection to comedy, saying 
 that the actor can only disturb the picture that our fancy has 
 formed of Falstaff. Reading Dugald Stewart, we feel that 
 the path is made ready for Coleridge, for genius observant of 
 itself, and for a philosophy of poetry that is worthy of the 
 poetry it accompanies. 
 
 Dugald Stewart's pupil, Thomas Brown 1 (1778-1820), was 
 also his partner and successor in the chair of Moral Philosophy 
 at Edinburgh, and continued the tradition of academic eloquence. 
 His discourses were still more popular, in part because his 
 rhetorical decorations, which come thickly, were more com- 
 monplace. There are many graces of the class-room ; and the 
 numerous quotations are of the old-fashioned sort, drawn 
 from Thomson, Akenside, Beattie, and Pope ; but they were 
 commended by Brown's elocution and earnestness. His 
 Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind were post- 
 humously published, and reached a nineteenth edition in 
 thirty-one years a surprising vogue for a philosophical work. 
 But the last edition was in 1860 ; and Brown, though his fine 
 analytic faculty is always mentioned with respect, retains
 
 232 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 chiefly a historical interest. His early Inquiry into the Nature 
 of Cause and Effect, which in its final form appeared in 
 1818, is an excellent example of his power, and still a real 
 whetstone for the wit ; it is hard reasoning ; with little orna- 
 ment, it is both clear and subtle, and one of the best examples 
 of philosophical style during this period. 
 
 Brown, indeed, in spite of his flowers, is more precise than 
 Stewart both in argument and in language, and makes more 
 positive contributions to the study of consciousness. He 
 represents a reaction from the school of Reid, and his tendency 
 is to simplify rather than to multiply the original and unex- 
 plained principles of the mind. His Inquiry into causation 
 is largely a return towards Hume, whose theory, in the first 
 edition (1804), it is confined to examining. Causation is only 
 invariable succession ; but the belief in such succession is 
 intuitive and original. In the end Brown manages to con- 
 ciliate his belief in God and miracles with his partial adhesion 
 to Hume. In his Lectures he pleads for a rigidly scientific 
 treatment of mental phenomena, or, as he puts it, of ' intel- 
 lectual physics ' ; extends, with great acumen, the analysis 
 of perception and of association, which he prefers to call 
 suggestion ; and throughout sounds the note, so distinctive 
 of the English school, of nominalism that is, he continually 
 inquires how far different words (such as consciousness, feel- 
 ing, etc.) really signify separate things ; a tendency long since 
 familiar in Hobbes, and carried very far by James Mill and 
 his son. It is to this southern group of Benthamites that 
 Brown really attaches in method, though his conclusions in 
 theology and ethics, unlike theirs, are orthodox. We accord- 
 ingly find him, in the next generation, assailed by Hamilton 
 and defended by John Stuart Mill. He remained, however, 
 in a kind of half-way house, and, dying early, hardly matured 
 his speculative gift. 
 
 All these Scottish philosophers, including Sir William 
 Hamilton, whose publications begin in 1829 and lie beyond 
 our limits, have the stamp of the teacher and shepherd. Most 
 of their bequest is in the form of lectures given to young 
 students ; a feature that determines their literary form in 
 many ways. They are clear, and usually diffuse ; their 
 chapters are discourses of an hour's length ; and they seek, 
 in varying measure, to hold the audience by declamation, 
 quotation, example, and appeal. Bentham and his circle, 
 some of whom are noticed in the next chapter, are not under 
 the same necessity, and do not write as if for listeners.
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 233 
 
 Burke, however, does so, and likewise his friend Reynolds, 1 
 whom it is right to name here before reaching Burke. The 
 fifteenth and last of Sir Joshua's Discourses to the students 
 of the Royal Academy was delivered in 1790, two years before 
 his death ; the series began in 1769. Ten years earlier, in 
 The Idler (Oct. 20 and Nov. 10, 1759), appears that worship 
 of typical and general forms, the representation of which, in 
 Reynolds's eyes, is the aim of the ' grand style ' : 
 
 The Italian attends only to the invariable, the great, and general 
 ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal Nature ; the Dutch, 
 on the contrary, to literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail, 
 as I may say, of Nature modified by accident. 
 
 It is this point of view, worked out in the Discourses, which 
 moved the wrath of Blake, whose cult of ' minutely appro- 
 priate particulars ' has already been recorded, and who observed 
 that ' to generalise is to be an idiot.' On one side, certainly, 
 Reynolds inclines to the same superstitions as the philosopher 
 in Rassclas, with his passion for ' generals ' in poetry ; and it 
 is a common remark, that the big subject-pictures of Reynolds 
 in ' the grand style ' led him away from his gift ; for his 
 portraits, which are his true achievement, are ' particular ' 
 enough. Still, as a critic, he is more of the new age than of 
 the old. His quest is beauty, and just as his aim in portraiture 
 is to depict the essence, the universal element, of the character 
 of Johnson or Goldsmith, so he is vowed, as sincerely as Blake, 
 to the gospel of execution. He is all for genius, and leaves 
 mechanical rules to apprentices: but he anticipates (1774) the 
 thought of Coleridge, that genius, so far from being lawless, 
 evolves its own law in the act of creation : 
 
 What we now call Genius, begins, not where rules, abstractedly 
 taken, end ; but where known, vulgar, and trite rules no longer 
 have any place. It must of necessity be, that even works of Genius, 
 like every other fact, as they must have their cause, must likewise 
 have their rules ; it cannot be by chance, that excellencies are 
 produced with any constancy or any certainty, for this is not the 
 nature of chance ; but the rules by which men of extraordinary 
 parts, and such as are called men of Genius, work, are either such 
 as they discover by their own peculiar observations, or of such a 
 nice texture as not easily to admit being expressed in words. 
 
 Sir Joshua, in his tempered way, has the true spirit of 
 Longinus, by whom he assuredly profits. The pronounce- 
 ment that ' the great end of art is to strike the imagination ' ; 
 the criticism of the dialogue between Duncan and Banquo
 
 234 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 before Macbeth's castle ; the description of artistic sagacity 
 or intuition, as ' the result of the accumulated experience of 
 our whole life ' ; and the advice to the student to ' compare 
 your efforts with those of some great master,' these things 
 are all in the manner of the De Sublimitate, and breathe its 
 quickening spirit. The tributes to common sense and cool 
 reason, which are interspersed amongst these higher sayings, 
 are of less note ; they are, as it were, official epitaphs on the 
 age that is passing. 
 
 II 
 
 The place of Edmund Burke l (1729-97) in the new literature 
 has been already hinted (Ch. i.). He embodies, more power- 
 fully than any one, the mental tendencies and changes that 
 are seen gathering force through the eighteenth century. A 
 volume of positive knowledge, critically sifted and ascertained ; 
 a constructive vision of the past and its institutions ; the 
 imagination, under this guidance, everywhere at play ; all 
 these elements unite in Burke. His main field is political 
 philosophy, of which he is the centre in his own day and for 
 long afterwards ; only Bentham and Bentham's school contest 
 that position, and many thinkers who are not Burke's disciples 
 derive from him by revulsion. His favourite form is oratory, 
 uttered or written. His medium is prose, and the work of his 
 later years, alone, outweighs all contemporary prose in power ; 
 with much to spare, if it is put into a scale like the verses in 
 the Frogs of Aristophanes. The other members of the ' Literan r 
 Club,' Johnson and Gibbon, Goldsmith and Reynolds, died 
 before him ; their labours are like monuments of an elder race, 
 planted on the borders of the new, and seldom concern the 
 present survey. Burke lived and wrote till 1797. The works 
 of his last seven years, in which he delivered himself on French 
 affairs, form a final, integral phase, prepared for and explained 
 by the ten years preceding. Yet his whole body of production 
 has the unity of some large cathedral, whose successive ac- 
 cretions reveal the natural growth of a single mind, without 
 any change or essential break ; although, to those who ignore 
 the signs of transition, the beginning and the end may seem 
 incongruous. Burke has often been taunted with the seeming 
 change of creed, that marks his utterances after 1790 ; ever 
 since, upon the appearance of his Reflections, the Whig Dr. Parr 
 hung his portrait, in disgust, upside down. But to Burke 
 himself this change was only a shifting of the emphasis. If 
 the verdict of history has borne out his opinion of the American
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 235 
 
 War, and of the duty we owe to India, while it has by no means 
 approved his whole presentment of the Revolution, the reason 
 lies less in any inconsistency on Burke's part, than in a consis- 
 tency over-rigid and entire, which kept him from seeing that 
 the creed which fitted one set of conditions was too inflexible 
 for another. If he is false to any tenet of his own, it is to that 
 which asserts the wisdom of a large expediency and an elastic 
 judgment in matters political. We can at any rate see the 
 process of his opinions, which, as expounded in his Appeal 
 from the. New to the Old Whigs, assures us that in his own eyes 
 he was faithful to himself. It is chiefly from this standpoint, 
 of the essential unity of Burke's thinking, that the writings of 
 his youth and prime may here be touched on. They also 
 show the growth of his art up to its highest and most charac- 
 teristic stage. 
 
 One of them, his Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the 
 Sublime and Beautiful 1 (1756 and 1765), has a special interest. 
 It throws light on his modes of rhetoric, and on the poetical 
 cast of his nature. He works with the blunt psychology of the 
 day ; but his rough firm hold on the facts of sensibility is 
 striking enough. He says absurd things about love and the 
 feelings, but to his own feelings he is true, and lie has the courage 
 of his crudities. His account of sympathy and of the emotional 
 effect of tragedy is a genuine addition to Aristotle's. ' We 
 have a delight, and that no small one, in the real pains and 
 distresses of others.' l Terror is a passion that always pro- 
 duces delight when it does not press too close.' He notes, 
 before Lessing, a point that Lessing missed, when he says that 
 no painter could express the effect of Virgil's words, ' quos ipse 
 sacraverat ignes.' Burke likes bold and splendid effects ; 
 adores the higher rhetoric which was to become his own ; and 
 is humanly awake to the difference between admiration and 
 love in matters of art ; founding, indeed, on this difference, 
 and driving too far, his distinction between the sublime and 
 the beautiful. He insists, however, in the style of the time, 
 that words convey ideas and symbols rather than real images ; 
 and this is hardly true of his own words, for he is the most 
 concrete of English reasoners and orators. 
 
 The golden voice of Burke's wisdom is heard between 17 GO 
 and 1781 ; it was then that his political conceptions were in 
 the fullest harmony. He found the moulds for his three 
 favoured forms of utterance, the pamphlet, the letter, and the 
 speech. To say that he is an orator through them all is but 
 half the truth ; for even in his public speeches there are the
 
 236 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 tones of soliloquy, of the reasoner who is satisfying himself 
 and is alone with his principles. In Burke's Observations 
 (1769) and his Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) his 
 real temper and mode of address begin to emerge. His utter- 
 ances On the Relief of Dissenters (1773) and on the Acts of 
 Uniformity (1772) are governed by the same ideas. His 
 experience in the first Rockingham administration gives the 
 ply to his convictions. He is already sure that politics are 
 not a science ; and that they ' ought to be adjusted not to 
 human reasonings, but to human nature, of which the reason 
 is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.' Piety, the 
 reverence for the past, the sense of an inherited social bond, 
 must also be taken into account ; and these afford no formula. 
 High expediency what has been proved by the past to be 
 good under the circumstances and in the long run is the only 
 canon. But there are also guiding clues ; one of which is that 
 in cases of dispute the presumption is in favour of the people, 
 while another is that ' the constitution stands in a nice equi- 
 poise,' and must not lean too much towards either the pre- 
 scriptive or the innovating element. The keystone of the 
 English polity, to Burke, is religion ; and it is not confined 
 to the English establishment, though this is vital to the state. 
 He has a kindness for the old faith, but none for the infidels, 
 who are ' outlaws of the Constitution.' The Observations and 
 the Thoughts are addressed to a confused and evil emergency, 
 and do not deal with affairs of the widest scope. But already 
 the characteristics of Burke's thought and style appear, as 
 well as his profound conversance with constitutional history, 
 finance, and affairs. There is a constant reference to general 
 truths, as in the famous defence of Party. The maxims that 
 come into play go far beyond the occasion. There is a per- 
 petual ground-swell of passion, embanked and held in check, 
 but ever breaking out into sombre irony and sometimes into 
 figure ; but metaphors and other tropes are not yet very 
 frequent. 
 
 In the American orations and letters the mind and art of 
 Burke are seen at their highest. They include the speeches 
 On American Taxation (1774) and On Conciliation with America 
 (1775) ; the intervening address on the Bristol election, where 
 Burke vindicates the independence of the member in the 
 presence of his constituents ; the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 
 a noble description and defence of Burke's Whiggism ; and 
 the impassioned and Miltonic speech made at Bristol in 1780 
 before declining the poll, as well as the brief oration given
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 237 
 
 afterwards. These works may be thought of as forming a 
 single, though not a preconceived, composition, in which 
 Burke 's philosophy unfolds under the heat generated by the 
 greatest of imperial problems. The speech On American 
 Taxation is a varied and mighty piece of pleading. It is a 
 mixture of narrative, retrospect, refutation, and hard argument, 
 enlivened with a series of those character-portraits of which 
 the last great master had been Clarendon. Grenville and 
 Chatham are described to the House that had not so long 
 since heard their voices. The speech is a great crescendo of 
 denunciation and reasoned warning against the criminal 
 exercise of the legal right to tax America. In the speech 
 On Conciliation the theme is greater still. Goethe was pleased 
 when an Englishman called his genius ' panoramic ' ; the word 
 applies well to Burke's. Reading him, we can better believe 
 that the long orations of antiquity can really have been de- 
 livered. In the art of unfolding and amplifying, Burke is the 
 rival of those ancients. His architectural skill is supreme, 
 and reminds us of other feats of the same kind in different 
 regions of the section in Hobbes's Leviathan, ' Of Common- 
 wealth/ or of Hooker's overture ' Of Law,' works on which 
 the mind can rest satisfied in the same way. The overture, not 
 too long, leading to the main thesis, ' the proposition is peace ' ; 
 the swift view, as from a high place, of the colonial population, 
 trade, temper, and religion ; the definition of the duties of 
 empire, and the scornful dismissal of ' what a lawyer tells me 
 I may do ' ; the sixfold resolution in favour of ' taxation by 
 grant ' ; the appeal to the ties of blood, and the final sursum 
 corda! all this union of heat and light, of righteousness and 
 statesmanship, could not have been achieved, even by a greater 
 genius, on any issue less great. Much, in these cases, ' depends 
 on the subject ' ; and there has not since been another continent 
 in dispute. In his Addresses to the king and to the colonists 
 Burke clears himself and his friends of any complicity in the 
 offence of maltreating America. The first of these addresses 
 is one of the most splendid and self-controlled of his shorter 
 works. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Between 1780 and 1790 Burke gave most of his mind to 
 India. His speech, in the former year, for Economical Reform, 
 directed against extravagance and corruption in the civil 
 service, is an admirable piece of irony, seemingly sedate, but 
 savage underneath. On the East his first considerable oration
 
 238 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 was made in favour of Fox's East India Bill (1783) ; but he 
 had already drafted the ninth and eleventh reports of the 
 committees upon Indian affairs. The speech, though its 
 actual proposal failed, not undeservedly, has a twofold interest. 
 First of all Burke applies to India nearly the same political 
 principle as he had applied to America. He admits the legal 
 right of the East India Company to govern, as he had admitted 
 the legal right of England to tax. But this right is part of a 
 trust ; it is revocable if used perversely, and not for the good of 
 the people ; Parliament may resume it. Commercial monopoly 
 can never be one of the eternal ' rights of men.' Such words 
 were sure to be cited against Burke himself when he 
 criticised the confiscatory doings of the National Assembly. His 
 Whiggism still kept him on the popular side, but India gave 
 new wings to his oratorical genius. Macaulay has well described 
 the effect of these Eastern studies on Burke's imagination. 
 They gave it something which America could never give, and 
 on which it could work, certain of an inexhaustible stimulus. 
 His Irish warmth of vision carried him into a different world 
 from that of even the high-minded and highly trained Anglo- 
 Indian. Together with Sir William Jones, Burke did more 
 than all men to bring home to English readers the nature of 
 the East. He was less moved even by the colour and pageant, 
 by the strangeness and the riches of that remote world, than 
 by its appeal to the sense of bigness, for which it is his supreme 
 gift to find expression. Antiquity and spaciousness, number 
 and area and mass, kindle his fancy. And above all is the 
 sense that omnia exeunt in mysterium. His words can never 
 be obsolete : 
 
 Our Indian government 1 is in its best state a grievance. . . . 
 All these circumstances are not, I confess, very favourable to the 
 idea of our attempting to govern India at all. But there we are ; 
 there we are placed by the Sovereign Disposer ; and "vve must do 
 the best we can in our situation. The situation of man is the 
 preceptor of his duty. 
 
 The whole of Burke, or Burke at his best, is there : the 
 doctrine of expediency, of making the best of things, is to him 
 mysteriously sanctioned and divinely true ; and it consists 
 with a wrath against oppression and misdoing, which he can 
 in no case judge to be expedient. His pictures of the officials, 
 ' birds of prey and of passage,' of Benares and of the Begums, 
 and his praises of Francis and of Fox, are among the capital 
 examples of his eloquence, as yet hardly tinged with that over-
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 239 
 
 strain and hoarseness which were to attend and punish, ten 
 years later, the unsettling of his saner judgment. These 
 decorations are rarer, though not less gorgeous, in the next 
 of his important attacks on the government of India, the 
 Speech on the Nabob of ArcoCs Debts (1785). This, perhaps the 
 most masterly of Burke's expositions of finance, is also charged 
 high with passion and imagery. The famous account of Hyder 
 All swooping on the Carnatic marks the extreme limit to which 
 rhetoric of this kind can successfully go, and triumph, without 
 toppling over. Indeed, as it stands, it would exceed were it 
 not true ; invented, it would revolt us ; nor should it be read 
 by itself in a book of extracts. It is one of the streaks of 
 colour in a close-woven fabric, intricate, technical, and his- 
 torical, a great feat of pleading and reasoning. Many of the 
 same qualities are found in the orations impeaching Hastings, 
 which occupied ten days in 1788, and nine days, on the reply, 
 in 1794. Hard argument, fired with lofty and terrific but 
 monotonous moral invective, is the staple of these famous 
 charges, which drew from Burke the most sustained effort, 
 and afforded him the most splendid and scenic appearance, 
 of his whole life. There are, however, few of those noble 
 halts and pauses which mark the American speeches, where 
 he rises above the moment to lay down high enduring principles 
 of statecraft or political science ; and there are few of the set 
 and finished pictures in which he excelled. The loftiest inter- 
 lude is that on the nature of arbitrary power, in the fourth 
 day's impeachment ; here Burke's vision of human duty, as 
 prior to the claims or the birth of the individual, and imposed 
 by the divine power which prescribes the mysterious tie of 
 the social fabric, rises to its highest. Posterity distinguishes 
 his attacks on Hastings, which have to be qualified not only 
 in their detail but in their total effect, from his exposure of 
 the system by which India was ruled and of its iniquities ; and 
 honours Burke, more than any single man, with the credit of 
 having made that system impossible. Before the long trial 
 was over, his mind had been drawn off by an even greater 
 theme. 
 
 It is in some of Burke's lesser compositions that we can 
 best trace the limitations of his liberalism, and prepare to 
 judge of the Reflections and their sequel. In 1773 he had 
 spoken for the relief of dissenters. In 1782 he made an admir- 
 able protest, happily soon to be superfluous, against the worst 
 disabilities laid on Irish Catholics. But in 1792, haunted by 
 the spectre of a Jacobin tyranny in England, he was to speak
 
 240 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 against a petition for absolving Unitarians from the test. 
 This body, associated in the person of Priestley and others 
 with radical ideas, he treated as a political faction. His 
 attachment to the establishment never wavered ; it was to 
 him part of the order of providence. There could be no doubt 
 how he would view the expropriation of the French church 
 and the dismissal of the national religion. Nor had he ever 
 the radical faith in increased representation. As his best 
 exponent * has observed : 
 
 Neither now nor ever had Burke any real conception of a polity 
 for England other than government by the territorial aristocracy 
 in the interests of the nation at large, and especially in the 
 interests of commerce. 
 
 His speech On Representation (1782) is not a democratic 
 deliverance. Prescription, and the wisdom of generations, 
 and the folly of hasty change, are principles that he does 
 not find too big for his conclusion against numerical count- 
 ing of heads, or the necessary rule of the majority. He may 
 have been wrong-: but it was not incongruous in him to 
 revile the constitution of France in 1790. 
 
 Burke has been called a mystic, and his pamphlets on 
 France are full of the spirit which that word is meant to 
 describe ; indeed, it runs through all he wrote. It is some- 
 thing, perhaps, of a misnomer. There is nothing Oriental or 
 pantheistic about him, nor does he seek for lonely and ecstatic 
 revelations of the divine. His ' mysticism ' amounts, no doubt, 
 to something more than a sense of an overruling providence, 
 and a belief, in Hegel's phrase, that ' the history of the world 
 is the judgment on the world.' This he firmly holds, and one 
 famous sentence has a modern ring : 
 
 The individual is foolish. The multitude for the moment is 
 foolish . . . but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, 
 as a species, it almost always acts right. 
 
 This comes, in the long run, to judging by the event ; and 
 it would be cheap and easy to turn such a maxim against 
 Burke's verdict upon the Revolution in France. But it is 
 not exactly mystical, except in the sense that it rests upon a 
 feeling that the ultimate sanctions of personal and national 
 duty must remain unexplained. It is the new philosophic 
 and poetic instinct applied to ' the frame and contexture of 
 society.' In the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke 
 pleads that the individual is born to a number of ' prior obliga- 
 tions ' to which he never formally consents :
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 241 
 
 Dark and inscrutable l are the ways by which we come into the 
 world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of 
 nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes unknown 
 to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are 
 able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to 
 perform. 
 
 Here, once more, the imagination, nourished by the vision 
 of the long past, and learned in the instances of history, is 
 seen following its clues back to the verge of darkness, and 
 rebuilding the conception of human obligation. It is this 
 tone that distinguishes Burke from the political thinkers of 
 his century. 
 
 Such an order of the world Burke accepts as divinely 
 arranged, and invisible in its ends as in its origins ; but 
 there his mysticism stops. It is easy to see how the French 
 Revolution would appear to him to violate such an order, 
 and to sacrifice all the conquests of culture and piety. He 
 may seem over-fond of identifying ' the sovereign reason of 
 the world with the feudal order, or at least with the settle- 
 ment of 1688 ; but we grow accustomed to his way of laying 
 down wide impressive principles, which may be misapplied, 
 but whose truth and value are independent of his minor 
 premiss. 
 
 The immense curve of Burke's political thinking cannot be 
 followed here, but one of its focal points may be referred to. 
 This is the conception of 'natural rights,' 2 or 'the rights of 
 man,' a formula that has affected the world in a way only com- 
 parable with the influence of the great theological doctrines. 
 It shaped states, it shed blood, it maddened multitudes. 
 It owed its motive power, no doubt, to the sufferings and 
 abuses for the dislodgment of which it furnished a battle-cry. 
 It was not a mere notion of the schools. Burke's attitude 
 to this conception is therefore of interest. It might seem 
 that he held it as an article of faith when he spoke of America 
 or of India, but abandoned it when he turned to France. 
 After 1790 he certainly turned his batteries upon it. Was 
 he inconsistent here ? 
 
 The question is complicated by another conception now 
 obsolete, that of the ' social covenant ' ; the alleged express 
 arrangement, beginning at an unknown point of time, between 
 the governors and the governed. Burke often wrote under 
 the sway of this conception ; as though, when organised 
 society came into being, the rights which had only existed 
 before in the ideal and moral sense, were now guaranteed in 
 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 242 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 fact by a bargain. Such rights, then, seemed to be assured 
 to the people, unless there were a breach of faith by the rulers. 
 But suppose such a breach ; had the people then a right to 
 ' resume their rights,' as the revolutionaries declared ? If 
 so, what was a sufficient cause ? Who, moreover, was to 
 decide ? Burke seems to vary in his answers. Sometimes 
 he implies that the bargain could only be undone, on the popular 
 side, under extreme necessity. At other times he speaks as 
 if such rights were more or less of a fiction, and ' the whole 
 organisation of government a consideration of convenience.' 
 At others he explains the rights of men away, though admitting 
 their existence : 
 
 In the gross and complicated mass of human passions and con- 
 cerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of 
 refraction and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them 
 as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. 
 
 After 1790, his hatred of mere abstract considerations, and 
 of ' metaphysics,' .prevails. In the Appeal from the New to 
 the Old Whigs, he again wholly scouts the claims of the bare 
 numerical majority to form so momentous a decision as that 
 involved in a ' resumption ' of power. The truth seems to 
 be that he held much the same principles as ever, but refused 
 to stretch them so as to include a much greater and more 
 difficult case than he had yet encountered. Nothing in English 
 or even in American history put his popular sympathies or 
 political principles to so terrible a trial as the French Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 IV 
 
 The compositions of Burke's last seven years are writings, 
 not speeches ; and they are perhaps the worse written for not 
 being speeches. They did not, like the American orations, de- 
 pend upon his power of holding the attention of tired or angry 
 men ; they did not call out Burke's architectural faculty. The 
 Reflections on the Revolutions in France (1790) are in some 
 disorder ; the thoughts spring out of one another, and not 
 out of a plan held from the first before the mind. They take 
 fire as they succeed, like a train of powder, which blazes 
 round and round the original victims, 1 Dr. Price and his friends, 
 with a disproportionate fury. The argument of Price's sermon, 
 that the people has a right to elect its governors and ' cashier 
 them for misconduct,' is treated as a blasphemous parody of
 
 243 
 
 the principles of 1688. The English Revolution is an obsession 
 to Burke, and his greatest difficulty. It was a necessity, 
 and it was irregular ; yet, once established, its settlement is 
 something ' in just correspondence and symmetry with the 
 order of the world.' But out of this vicious circle he rises 
 to a superb confession of faith. Society is, indeed, not a legal 
 covenant, but ' a partnership, not only between those who are 
 living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, 
 and those who are yet to be born.' It is this breach with the 
 past, this mortgaging of the future, that horrifies him. All 
 the satiric and pathetic pictures in his book take their colour- 
 ing in the end from this sentiment. A pack of philosophers, 
 lawyers, politicians, and adventurers have overthrown all the 
 sacred, hardly won equilibrium of society ; mad anarchy is 
 masquerading as the voice of ' reason ' and of human ' rights.' 
 The world created by prescription, law, ordinance, and piety 
 is gone ; and ' France is now plunged into the antagonist world 
 of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.' 
 
 Burke's ignorance of the primary causes of the Revolution 
 has often been noticed, as well as his engrossment with English 
 precedent and practice ; and the retort of Mackintosh l has the 
 weight of Burke's own best sayings : 
 
 Great revolutions are too immense for technical formality. All 
 the sanction that can be hoped for in such events is the voice of 
 the people, however informally and irregularly expressed. This 
 cannot be pretended to have been wanting in France. 
 
 Burke never saw that the French nation desired that the old 
 order should go, and that such a desire was not caused, but only 
 made articulate, by the theories of the philosopher. He did not 
 see that the existing economic, social, and political conditions 
 could only be reformed by an explosion. Once, at the close of 
 the year 1721, in his Thoughts on French Affairs, he seems to think 
 it possible he may be wrong. But this was only a mood, and 
 to the last he was confirmed in his diagnosis by the fulfilment 
 of his forecast, in which he showed himself a prophet indeed, 
 that the end would be a despotic establishment without a 
 parallel in history. The Reflections, with all this, is a mighty 
 book ; for Burke is kindled by the occasion, as never before, 
 to expound the central thought of his political philosophy, which 
 he had all his life cherished but had only uttered incidentally. 
 Society and law, he holds, are not arrangements founded on 
 a bargain, but a living web of sacred obligations by which 
 each generation is bound to the last and to the next. He thus
 
 244 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 starts not from the individual and his dues, but from the com- 
 munity and its experience. This conception of the social fabric 
 affected all subsequent thinking. At the time, events in France 
 seemed to Burke nothing but a violation of his fundamental tenet. 
 With all their fury, the Reflections do not leave us with the 
 sense that the writer has lost hold upon himself. We still feel 
 that at need he could and would have made his American 
 speeches over again. This is hardly the case when we turn 
 to the Letters on a Regicide Peace, which are hoarse with a 
 wrath that is blinded, because it seems to itself to be justified, 
 by events. The old judicial wisdom is not wholly lost, but it 
 comes like a break of clear deep sky in the intervals of a 
 tornado. The Revolution has now become an affair of huger 
 omen ; it is an international infection ; an ' armed doctrine,' 
 which is ' separated from religion/ pervading several countries, 
 and forming ' a principle of union between the partisans in 
 each.' The war is now between ' the partisans of the ancient, 
 civil, moral, and political order in Europe,' and an anarchical 
 sect. This sect is active in England also ; and it is agreed 
 that Burke's mental vision became bloodshot with dread of a 
 Jacobin upheaval at home. He is no longer a student of facts 
 and conditions, his conclusions are fixed, the historic judgment 
 no longer inhibits or guides his emotions, and the fulness with 
 which some of his fears have been justified has demoralised 
 his power to distinguish. But the Letters on a Regicide Peace 
 are by no means without instruction. Burke does not alto- 
 gether stand still. He analyses in the first letter the paltry 
 occasions that set great events in motion ' a child, a girl at 
 the door of an inn ' in the spirit of Pascal. He describes 
 the influence of the philosophes correctly, but insufficiently. 
 He discerns clearly why the King failed and perished. In the 
 third Letter, posthumously published, there is a luminous 
 view of the industrial revolution in England ; and a survey, of 
 the old comprehensive sort, of all the nations of Europe and 
 their situation is given in order to show that the demand 
 made for peace in 1797 appeals to the interest of none of them. 
 Before these letters came two briefer writings, the Letter to 
 a Member of the National Assembly (1791) and Thoughts on 
 French Affairs (1791), which are the last in which Burke 
 throughout retains some of the philosophic temper. The 
 notices in the Letter of Rousseau and his creed admit us to 
 Burke's conception of domestic piety and order, though they 
 misrepresent Rousseau. At the close, when he replies to the 
 inquiry of his correspondent, ' What, after all, would he have
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 245 
 
 done ? ' he has nothing to say except that he is not on the 
 spot, does not know the situation, and has no advice to offer. 
 He can only say, in effect, that the French ought to have 
 managed their revolution like Englishmen. The most notable 
 feature in these Thoughts is the definition of the political dogma 
 which he fears will spread to other nations ; and this is the most 
 succinct expression of the opposite of Burke's creed. It is 
 
 that the majority, told by the head, of the taxable people in 
 every country, is the perpetual, natural, unceasing, indefeasible 
 sovereign ; that this majority is perfectly master of the form, as 
 well as the administration, of the state ; and that the magistrates, 
 under whatever names they are called, are only functionaries to 
 obey the orders (general as laws, or particular as decrees) which 
 that majority may make ; that this is the only natural government ; 
 that all others are tyranny and usurpation. 
 
 The Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), and the 
 shorter tract on The Conduct of the Minority (1793), complete 
 Burke's later exposition of his political religion. The former 
 no man can read without seeing that Burke himself felt there 
 was no violence at all in his seeming apostasy, with which he 
 was reproached by Paine and Priestley and scores of others. 
 He may have erred in his diagnosis of France ; but he con- 
 structs a constitutional theory which fairly covers his whole 
 career. Verbal inconsistencies were, and can be, easily col- 
 lected ; yet the edifice of Burke's doctrine holds together, and 
 has lasted long. He is more than a voice and leader of Whig- 
 gism ; he established one of its greater types. He is the 
 ancestor of those who would applaud the institution of some 
 kind of representative government of the British kind, by 
 peaceful means, in Turkey or Finland. But he is also the 
 perpetual voice and oracle of those who believe in the rule of 
 a 'natural aristocracy,' founded on hereditary rank and 
 property, over a not unduly represented people, and linked 
 with a national church enshrining the most respectable 
 sources of piety and consolation. This Whiggism is not dead, 
 and Burke is its philosopher. 
 
 Burke's authority was highest during the last ten years of 
 his life, for he had behind him the whole force of the reaction 
 which he was a chief instrument in creating. He never had 
 the conduct of affairs, but he was the intellectual head of a 
 majority, and won the prestige of a seer whose omens seemed
 
 246 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 to have come too true. He received many honours, and the 
 Reflections became a text-book of conservatism abroad. Even 
 greater than his authority was (to use a term of physics) his 
 ' displacement,' or the wave of thought and passion that he 
 threw into disturbance. He was immensely provocative of 
 literature, as the next chapter will show. For a long while 
 we can tell the colouring of man's politics by his estimate of 
 Burke, as the examples of Mackintosh and Wordsworth, of 
 Coleridge and Hazlitt, of Paine and Godwin, are enough to 
 prove. He is generally judged by these writers on the strength 
 of his later works ; in which, it is true, we feel, even at the 
 worst, that we are listening to a great voice. But his lasting 
 claims as a political thinker and author rest more surely upon 
 his earlier labours. It is in the American and Indian speeches, 
 in the addresses to the king and the Thoughts on the Present 
 Discontents, that the real Burke is heard. 
 
 In each of his peculiar gifts he may have been excelled, but 
 never in their union. He has much of the equipment of the 
 historian, the legist, and the financier, and his grasp of par- 
 ticulars is strong and almost savage. His practical instinct 
 and prescience as a statesman have at many points been 
 approved by history. Above all, it is his power of referring 
 every issue to some general truth, in the light of which he 
 justifies his conclusions, that distinguishes and crowns his 
 genius. He is also one of the masters of form and language 
 in his own field, ranking with Bacon or Machiavelli, and one 
 of the princes of English prose. 
 
 In his combination of oratory and philosophy he stands 
 nearest to Bacon, who gives the same impression of power 
 unwasted and only half-disclosed. This is true, at least, of 
 all that Burke wrote before 1790. But Bacon's mind is cool, 
 his zeal is for the expansion of knowledge, and he is little 
 tempted to let himself go. Burke is passionate, and reins 
 himself in. The consciousness of the great affairs in which 
 he has been a part, and of the great ideas which are a part of 
 himself, is the muffled accompaniment to all he writes ; and 
 it is this, as much as his sheer strength of mind, that gives him 
 his superiority over his adversaries, so that he is remembered 
 while they are not. There is none of the thin eager play of 
 mere brain, or of mere enthusiasm ; there is a ' commingling 
 of blood and judgment ' everywhere. The resonance and 
 depth of a great nature are presupposed in such a style as 
 Burke's. Its variety is not unlike Bacon's ; the words some- 
 times roll on iii long undulations, or spread like a flood, and
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 247 
 
 sometimes are chopped into shorter waves. But Burke's 
 style derives from Milton rather than from Bacon, and the 
 influence of Milton was not all for good. The uncouth shrieking 
 similes and sallies of rabid irony, in the Letters on a Regicide 
 Peace, owe too much to the author of Eikonoklastes and Colas- 
 terion. But the bursts of sublimity in Burke's own meaning 
 of the sublime, as something that depends on the mingled 
 delight and pain inspired by terrible things are Miltonic also, 
 and sometimes even convey Milton's phrases. 
 
 In the speeches there is a good deal of quotation from Virgil 
 and Horace, of the old parliamentary kind which disappeared 
 with Gladstone. In the Letter to a Noble Lord, after the noble 
 picture of the English polity and its permanence, the lines 
 Dum domus Aeneae come down like an avalanche, and any 
 other conclusion would sound weak after them. But the 
 inlaid work of allusion and verbal reminiscence is more curious. 
 Once a whole page l is decked with phrases from Henry V. and 
 Paradise Lost : ' the highest heaven of invention,' ' the swell- 
 ing scene,' 'impatient dogs of war,' 'the port of Mars,' 'the 
 minister of vengeance,' the ' grim Moloch of regicide ' where 
 the language of heroic verse seems to Burke no more than 
 adequate for the occasion. Elsewhere, the harpies 2 of Virgil, 
 and the generation of ' all monstrous, all prodigious things ' 
 from ' night and hell,' are united in the same image, at the 
 expense of the ' revolution harpies of France ' : another 
 Miltonic eruption. Or the allusion is implicit, as with the 
 text mens agitat molem (perhaps remembered through Pope) 
 in the speech On Conciliation, where it is applied to ' the spirit 
 of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty 
 mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part 
 of the empire.' Sometimes, in the later tracts, where Burke 
 lets himself go, the elaboration is startling. Once he is praising, 
 with fierce sarcasm, the clear and orderly style of the French 
 minister who affronted our ambassador. His mind flies 
 to the ' embroideries of Babylon ' and the ' looms of the 
 Gobelins ' for a parallel to the artistic perfection of the 
 insult ; and thence to the tapestry, 3 with which Virgil wished 
 to adorn the theatre that he proposed to raise to Augustus 
 
 upon the banks of the Mincio, who now hides his head in his reeds, 
 and leads his slow and melancholy windings through banks wasted 
 by the Barbarians of Gaul. 
 
 Nor is this enough ; for he goes on to quote Virgil, and then 
 Dryden's ' somewhat paraphrastic ' version of him. The patch
 
 248 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 is gorgeous, but could false oratory go further ? It is different 
 in Burke's greater days, when he pleads for America, and 
 when his ornament is soberer. 
 
 But before considering his use of figure, we have to search, 
 somewhat baffled, for the models of Burke's sentence and period. 
 He does not go back consciously to the full-sounding harmonies 
 of the seventeenth century, save indeed when he remembers 
 Milton. He owes no debt like that of Johnson to Sir Thomas 
 Browne, or that of Ruskin to Jeremy Taylor. In his youth 
 he studied Bolingbroke, of whose sentiments and manner he 
 produced that remarkable piece of mimicry, A Vindication 
 of Natural Society (1756), which some mistook for a serious 
 utterance, and even for Bolingbroke's own. Burke in fact 
 scouted Bolingbroke, and called him, justly enough, ' a super- 
 ficial writer ' ; and in his parody can be read the exact con- 
 tradiction of all his own articles of faith. Nor is it clear, as 
 has sometimes been suggested, that his own style was moulded 
 by Bolingbroke's. The author of The Idea of a Patriot King, 
 however little he may have had to say, studied Cicero to some 
 purpose, and wrote his ample and balanced sentences with a 
 noticeable light ease ; with that ' careless and negligent ease 
 of a man of quality,' which Scott unluckily attributed to Byron. 
 Bolingbroke's cadence is more flowing than that of any writer 
 of his century, Gibbon not excepted. Burke never flows 
 or floats ; he swims powerfully, heavily, with no grace in his 
 stroke, but with a staying power that makes Bolingbroke look 
 ridiculous. It is not easy to see that he learnt anything 
 which he could not learn in Bolingbroke's great original, 
 Cicero. He has not, indeed, the ease of Cicero either ; but 
 a close study of his oratorical habits irresistibly suggests the 
 antique pattern. He is nearer, at any rate, to the master of 
 Latin eloquence than is either of his contemporaries, Gibbon 
 and Johnson, who share with him the honours of reviving 
 the longer period and a statelier diction, after the reign of the 
 plainer, or flatter, or briefer Georgian prose. It is rarely that 
 he falls into the familiar movement of The Rambler ; indeed, 
 the following sentence is beneath either writer, and might 
 have come from the later pages of their little friend, Miss 
 Burney : 
 
 It is a remark, 1 liable to as few exceptions as any generality can 
 be, that they who applaud prosperous folly, and adore triumphant 
 guilt, have never been known to succour or even to pity human 
 weakness or offence when they become subject to human vicissitude, 
 and meet with punishment instead of obtaining power (1791).
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 249 
 
 This pedantry is unusual ; for even when Burke's construc- 
 tion is rude or heavy, it is saved by his thought and impetus. 
 His sentences can be longer and more intricate than those of 
 any good author between Clarendon and Coleridge ; and their 
 patterns are endless. He likes a complex rather than a merely 
 co-ordinate or accretive structure, and one that is carefully 
 jointed into a series of lesser contrasted clauses. One example 
 must serve : 
 
 But I cannot conceive l any existence under heaven (which in the 
 depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly 
 odious and disgusting, than an impotent helpless creature, without 
 civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other 
 qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride 
 and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contend- 
 ing for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied 
 to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others con- 
 temptible and wretched (1777). 
 
 But neither this, nor yet the brief and gnomic phrase in which 
 he excels, is his staple sentence. He often intersperses 
 Tacitean or Sallustian epigrams among his long-breathed 
 paragraphs ; and these often fall into antithetic rhythm, 
 suggesting the eager passion to clinch the argument. Thus 
 of Rockingham we hear that 
 
 he never stirred from his ground ; no, not an inch. He remained 
 fixed and determined, in principle, in measure, and in conduct. 
 He practised no managements. He secured no retreat. He 
 sought no apology (1774). 
 
 These triplicities would weary if they were frequent. Another 
 variation is a fourfold movement rising to a climax, each 
 member being similarly introduced : 
 
 I am a Royalist, I blushed for this degradation of the crown. 1 
 am a Whig, I blushed for the dishonour of Parliament. I am a 
 true Englishman, I felt to the quick for the disgrace of England. ] 
 am a man, I felt for the melancholy reverse of human affairs, in the 
 fall of the first power in the world (1780). 
 
 Such examples only seem artificial when they are torn from 
 the page. Burke's skill is to lead up to them, and so to heat 
 the mind that they do not seem beyond the mark when we 
 reach them. They have, no doubt, that fulness of diction, 
 which is in danger of becoming a plethora. But this is a fault 
 of power and wealth, not of weakness. Passages of the staccato
 
 250 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 kind, moreover, do not represent Burke's regular style, any 
 more than his long, winding periods represent it. His working 
 sentence is neither long nor short, but of the middle scale, 
 perhaps with a leaning towards amplitude. Its duration is 
 fixed by the power of attention in an average audience. It 
 moves fast, but not without effort. The wheels, we may say, 
 shake the ground, like those of a gun-carriage dragged along 
 impatiently. As an example, the well-known defence of party 
 may be chosen, with the sentences numbered for convenience ; 
 but we have to think of the same manner being prolonged 
 over a thousand pages. 
 
 1. Party 1 is a body of men united for promoting by their joint 
 endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle 
 in which they are all agreed. 2. For my part, I find it impossible 
 to conceive that any one believes in his own politics, or thinks them 
 to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them 
 reduced into practice. 3. It is the business of the speculative 
 philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. 4. It is the 
 business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find 
 out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with 
 effect. 5. Therefore every honourable connection will avow it is 
 their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who 
 hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to 
 carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and 
 authority of the state (1770). 
 
 This shows the usual varieties of the scale well enough ; and 
 it may be added that though the diction is classical and pure, 
 still the phrases in italics would not now be used except by 
 some one imitating the author. Indeed, only the third sen- 
 tence would be entirely natural. Burke is perhaps the last 
 great author, apart from irregular masters like Carlyle, in 
 whom we continually feel these little points of strangeness. 
 
 VI 
 
 The proper study of his rhetoric would demand a treatise. 
 The scholastic pigeon-holer of all the figures of speech need 
 go no further for examples than to this one author. They are 
 second nature to Burke, with his dramatic, Irish habit of tongue 
 and his classical education. Many of them have gone out of 
 public use, and even Macaulay, who is not too restrained in his 
 tropes, would never have used those in which Burke, in 1783, 
 referred to the defeat of the East India Bill :
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 251 
 
 1. God forbid 1 1 should forget it ! 2. O illustrious disgrace ! O 
 victorious defeat ! 3. May your memorial be fresh and new to the 
 latest generations ! 4. May the day of that generous conflict be 
 stamped in characters never to be cancelled or worn out from the 
 records of time ! 5. Let no man hear of us, who shall not hear 
 that in a struggle against the intrigues of courts, and the perfidious 
 levity of the multitude, we fell in the cause of honour, in the cause 
 of our country, in the cause of human nature itself ! 6. But if 
 fortune should be as powerful over fame, as she has been prevalent 
 over virtue, at least our conscience is beyond her jurisdiction. 7. My 
 poor share in the support of that great measure no man shall ravish 
 from me. 8. It shall be safely lodged in the sanctuary of my heart ; 
 never, never to be torn from thence, but with those holds that grapple 
 it to life. 
 
 This sounds, in form, artificial, as though Burke were in- 
 stinctively thinking in Latin prose ; and artificial it is. But 
 there is no limit to the measure in which a man can teach 
 himself to use such artifice for the honest expression of feeling, 
 whilst yet he elaborates every phrase. Any academic dis- 
 section, therefore, of such methods, is only following, however 
 coldly, in the steps of the artist. Nearly all Burke's favourite 
 tools are seen in this passage ; we can give them the rhetorician's 
 names if we like. In no. 1, exclamation. In no. 2, ' oxy- 
 moron/ or contradiction, like the apostrophe to the Duke of 
 Bedford as ' poor rich man ! ' or Romeo's ' cold fire ! sick 
 health ! ' In no. 4, the repetition or amplification of no. 3. 
 In no. 5, rhythmical antithesis, and climax with three members ; 
 as in another passage, where he speaks ' of human, of Christian, 
 of English blood ' narrowing to a climax. In no. 6, antithesis 
 again. In no. 7, inversion, a rather favourite device of the 
 Latinising orator, found often in the Letter to a Noble Lord : 
 ' Personal offence I have given them none.' This habit of 
 speech has become rarer since Burke's day. In no. 8, metaphor 
 and iteration ; and so following. 
 
 The colours, however, are painted in, not merely plastered 
 on. They do not burst without transition from the firm, 
 close, rather grey, but never cold texture of the whole. They 
 could not disappear without loss to the argument, as so many 
 of Macaulay's patches could disappear to its advantage. This 
 is true of most of Burke's decorations. The most favoured of 
 them, which is indeed inherent in all oratory, but was learnt 
 from Burke by Macaulay, depends on the pleasure of echo. 
 It is the harping on a single keyword, or the repetition of an 
 opening phrase (the 'epanaphora' of the grammarians). In 
 the speech On Conciliation the keyword is peace.
 
 252 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 The proposition j is peace. 1 | Not peace | through the medium j of 
 war ; not peace | to be hunted | through the labyrinth of intricate | 
 and endless negotiations | ; not peace j to arise out of universal 
 discord, | fomented ; from principle in all parts | of the empire j ; 
 not peace. ... It is simple | peace ; j sought | in its natural 
 course, j and in its ordinary | haunts, j It is peace | sought | in 
 the spirit | of peace j ; and laid | in principles ] purely ' pacific 
 (1775). 
 
 This iteration makes us see the stubborn faces on the opposite 
 benches. There is contempt in it ; their ears must be 
 dinned, they must remember the word peace through the long 
 intricate survey that is to follow. So, in the description (1785) 
 of the ' fictitious private debts ' of the East India Company's 
 servants, Burke hammers viciously on his keyword like a 
 blacksmith on a rivet : 
 
 It is there the public is robbed. It is robbed in its army ; it is 
 robbed in its civil administration ; it is robbed in its credit ; it is 
 robbed in its investment which forms the commercial connection 
 between that country and Europe. There is the robbery. 
 
 The historian of literary criticism 2 has said that Burke is 
 a master of the figure Amplification. It is indeed his habit 
 and his instinct, not only to ' wind into his subject,' as Johnson 
 said, ' like a serpent,' but to progress in it by a kind of un- 
 coiling motion, dilating as lie goes. Argument and picture, 
 detail and inference, question and metaphor, all move to the 
 attack. The paragraph advances in a kind of crescendo, the 
 clauses often lengthening and growing louder up to its middle 
 point, or a little later, and then slowing and shortening to a 
 brief conclusion ; the whole running upon a single motive, 
 or even, as in the above quotations, upon a single word. Even 
 when this plan is not adopted, the tendency to amplify, or 
 turn facet after facet of the idea to the front, until they are all 
 exhausted, is invariable. It is hard to illustrate briefly ; but 
 let an entire speech of Burke's be read from this point of view. 
 The contrast of the independent member and his ' court -rival,' 
 in Thoughts on the Present Discontents, is too long to extract, 
 but is a good example on a small scale. The passage on peace 
 already given is shorter still. It is wonderful to see how 
 Burke avoids verbiage, or saying the same thing in other terms, 
 which is the risk of this method. From that he is saved by the 
 fulness of his thinking and his horror of magnificent platitude.
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 253 
 
 Often he has a turn that would have aroused the fervour 
 of the great appreciator known to us by the name of Longimis. 
 In his Speech on Economical Reform (1780) he risks an appeal, 
 in the face of the Commons, to the example of the enemy. 1 
 He has described the financial policy of Necker, and the 
 reforms of the French revenue. But he repudiates any in- 
 vidious purpose in the comparison : 
 
 It is in order to excite in us the spirit of a noble emulation. Let 
 the nations make war upon each other (since we must make war), 
 not with a low and vulgar malignity, but with a competition of 
 virtues. This is the only way by which both parties can gain by 
 war. The French have imitated us ; let us through them, imitate 
 ourselves ; ourselves in our better and happier days. 
 
 A speaker who was willing to offend for the sake of startling, 
 and to defeat his purpose, would simply have said : ' The 
 French have imitated us ; let us imitate them.' Burke comes 
 to the verge of this imprudence, but he sees the outcry on the 
 lips of the adversary, and silences them by the word ourselves ; 
 and then, seizing the moment of bewilderment, repeats it, 
 and explains it by the noble past ; ourselves, in our better and 
 happier days ; he does not say when those days were ; the days 
 of Elizabeth, or of Cromwell ? Let the House choose ! This 
 is true oratory, honest diplomacy. 
 
 The whole oration, together with the Letter to a Noble Lord, 
 is an armoury of Burke 's weapons of irony and sarcasm ; for 
 he has hardly any other form of humour. He is generally 
 blunt and savage. If he is brutal at times, we must remember 
 that he had thick skins and skulls on which to operate. It is 
 in the taste of the time, if it is often below what would beseem 
 Burke ; and we hear that Lord North, who cherished no 
 rancour against wit, rejoiced in the skill of Burke's sallies at 
 the expense of himself and his friends. He had occasion thus 
 to applaud, when he heard himself described as 'submitting 
 with spirit to the spirited remonstrances of the Welsh,' and 
 may have made himself happy over the celebrated obstacle 
 to the reform of the royal kitchen, that ' the King's turnspit 
 was a member of parliament.' He may have relished the 
 gloomy splendour of the passage about the dead accountants 
 of the exchequer : 
 
 Death, indeed, domineers over everything but the forms of the 
 exchequer. Over these it has no power. They are impassive and 
 immortal. The audit of the exchequer, more severe than the audit 
 to which the accountants are gone, demands proofs which in the
 
 254 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 nature of things are difficult, sometimes impossible, to be had. . . . 
 Terrors and ghosts of unlaid accountants haunt the houses of their 
 children from generation to generation. 
 
 The pictures of the Board of Trade as a ' sort of gently ripen- 
 ing hothouse,' and of the turmoil in the King's household at 
 the threat of reform ' what a storm of gold keys would fly 
 about the ears of the minister,' must have completed Lord 
 North's good temper. The speech was one of Burke's happiest 
 as well as most effective efforts. The reckless outspoken 
 savagery of the martyrs in France is still far off ; and the 
 deadly courtesy of the Letter to a Noble Lord would have been 
 out of place. That historic retort was written in 1796, in the 
 full tide of Burke's anti-Gallic diatribes ; and beside them it 
 is a model of restraint, made more telling by periodic eruptions 
 of direct wrath. He seizes to the full the advantage of a first- 
 rate case. He is too old for mock-modesty, which indeed had 
 never been his failing. The young and opulent Duke of Bed- 
 ford had attacked in the Lords Pitt's offer of a pension to the 
 great preacher of ' economical reform.' In sonority, in dignity, 
 in the ease with which he tosses his enemy upon his pike, in a 
 certain Shakespearean freedom of words, Burke never surpassed 
 this short composition. The name and title of the Duke of 
 Bedford always come back upon the ear, each time with a 
 louder ring of formally polite contempt. 
 
 It little signifies to the world what becomes of such things as me, 
 or even as the Duke of Bedford. . . . But that is high matter, and 
 ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment, as what 
 may belong to me, or even to the Duke of Bedford. 
 
 And when he is contrasting ' his Grace ' with the martyred 
 noblesse, the epithet Shakespearean is borne out by such a turn 
 as this : 
 
 A great many of them had as pompous titles as he, and were of 
 full as illustrious a race ; some few of them had fortunes as ample ; 
 several of them, without meaning the least disparagement to the 
 Duke of Bedford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, 
 and as well educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of 
 honour, as he is. 
 
 This mode of fierce understatement irony in the original 
 sense of that term is much affected by Burke. His defence 
 of his consistency in accepting the pension, and of his career, 
 is needless ; but his personality, like Milton's, is always burst- 
 ing through his most impersonal writings, and never to better
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 255 
 
 purpose than here. He has, too, the same unfailing wells of 
 scorn and anger. 
 
 Burke's comparisons and metaphors would repay a curious 
 inquiry. In his profusion he is more like a seventeenth- 
 century writer Jeremy Taylor or Barrow than any one of 
 his own century. But he does not, like Taylor, introduce such 
 things for the sake of their beauty, to relieve a stiff discourse, 
 or as a vent for the poetry of his nature. They are commonly 
 an arm of offence. Sometimes they are genial, like the picture 
 of General Conway, in the Speech on American Taxation, after 
 he had carried a repeal of the duties ; ' hope elevated, and 
 joy brightened his crest.' In the great set passages, like that 
 on Hyder Ali raiding the people of the Carnatic, they are 
 heavily and splendidly loaded ; the ' black cloud,' ' the menac- 
 ing meteor which blackened all their horizon,' are precisely 
 apt figures for the terror descending from the hills. More 
 often a harsh and homely pleasantry is their characteristic, 
 as in the blusterous description of Chatham's ministry, ' so 
 checkered and speckled.' Burke, in his essay on Taste, pre- 
 fixed to the tractate On the Sublime and Beautiful, had spoken 
 of the happy liveliness of our sensations, ' in the morning of 
 our days, when our senses are unworn and tender.' ' It is 
 rather the soft green of the soul on which we rest our eyes.' 
 His own figurative language seldom has that kind of delicate 
 freshness. It is rather calculated so as to raise a grating 
 startled laugh, or the applause of a gross excited audience. 
 His savageries are innumerable, and constantly take the shape 
 of similes from birds and animals. The eagle, the raven, the 
 cuckoo, the wild cat, the tame cat ('the grave, demure, insidi- 
 ous, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers '), 
 the bird of night, the harpies, the leviathan, are the menagerie 
 that he lets loose into his metaphors. He is not seldom animal 
 himself, especially in his later explosions : it is the foible of a 
 big temperament. Images from ulcers and offal, from mid- 
 wives and embryos, seem to him the only ones that are not 
 inadequate to certain subjects. His fashion is to elaborate 
 them ; there is a run of words, in which the accentual beat 
 falls on the salient images. In one passage, 1 in the Appeal from 
 the New to the Old Whigs, we can pick out the bearing by these 
 words alone ; the run is upon ' passive . . . ravisher . . . 
 resistance . . . wittols . . . seducers . . . assignations.' The 
 reference is to the supposed attempts of the English ' Jacobin ' 
 societies to violate the British constitution. At the beginning 
 of the third Letter on a Regicide Peace, a whole page is not
 
 256 PROSE OF DOCTRINE : 
 
 enough for an epic simile, suggested by the tale of the Irish- 
 man, who ' on his journey having found a piece of pleasant 
 road, proposed to his companion to go over it again.' The 
 ' irksome journey of the regicide negotiations ' is here signified. 
 But Burke will not let it go ; his restless fancy labours it out ; 
 and at any rate he observes the true rule of the simile, that 
 little of it shall start away from the original theme, or be alien 
 to the thing compared. It is another side of his amplifying 
 habit, and he thus rounds off his paragraph : 
 
 Backward and forward ; oscillation, not progression ; much going 
 in a scanty space ; the travels of a postilion, miles enough to circle 
 the globe in one short stage ; we have been, and we are yet to be, 
 jolted and rattled over the misplaced stones, and the treacherous 
 hollows, of this rough, ill-kept, broken-up, treacherous French 
 causeway. 
 
 We do not want all this ; it adds nothing to the idea, though 
 much to the image ; and perhaps Burke 's memories of diligence- 
 travelling, when he visited France years before, quicken his 
 wrath, which extends to the road itself and not only to the 
 regicides. 
 
 Burke is a great master of sound, as these quotations show, 
 though his harmonies are what he calls ' sublime ' rather than 
 beautiful. His rhythm is emphatic, and far less uniform than 
 Gibbon's. The surface undulation is churned up and broken 
 by the passion of the orator. For the same reason, there is 
 far less correspondence of accent in the clauses than is found 
 in Johnson's formal prose. The cross-currents of feeling make 
 little swirls and back-eddies, and sometimes also heavy breakers, 
 in the impetuous, tidal movement of Burke's language. 
 Speaking technically, the ordinary iambic or anapsestic march 
 of English prose is greatly varied by the spondees, trochees, 
 dactyls, and more complex groups, which signify some startling 
 arrest of attention, or accompany some vehement gesture. 
 This may be illustrated from the passage on peace quoted earlier. 
 It falls into some thirty-four natural groups, and ten of these 
 open with, or consist of, a stressed syllable : a proportion far 
 above the ordinary. Such analysis, of necessity rude, merely 
 indicates Burke's tune upon his anvil ; it would be easy to 
 quote instances of a higher and more cunning cadence, but they 
 are everywhere ; and his skill in the orchestration of language 
 is not rivalled until we reach Landor and De Quincey. 
 
 Much of Burke's edifice has not tumbled ; it has only 
 weathered, like an old collegiate building, and remains stable
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY, AND BURKE 257 
 
 and fit for a new race to inhabit. The other doctrinal prose 
 that meets us between Burke and Coleridge is often in a 
 tedious style of architecture, and crazy too. We may ask 
 what Priestley, Mackintosh, and Paine have to do with 
 letters. Unphilosophical impatience ! Their achievement in 
 the plainer kind of ministerial prose is important, and they arc 
 capable of floating significant ideas for a whole generation. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE Continued 
 
 I. Burke's adversaries : Richard Price ; sharpshooters ; nature of replies. 
 Joseph Priestley. Mackintosh. Vindicice Gallicce and later utterances ; 
 literary character. Robert Hall. Thomas Paine; Common Sense; Rights 
 of Man ; Age of Reason . 
 
 II. William Godwin, the typical doctrinaire ; influence ; development of 
 sympathy ; essays ; Political Justice. Mary Wollstonecraft ; Rights of Women. 
 
 III. Arthur Young, Travels in France, etc. ; autobiography. Jeremy 
 Bentham ; view of the past ; divergence from the revolutionary theorists. 
 Principles of Morals ami Legislation ; Benthani's calculus and principle of 
 ' utility.' His form and style ; concentration on names and definitions. 
 Verbal coinages : nature of influence. 
 
 IV. William Paley, his eclectic system ; and official character ; Moral 
 and Political Philosophy ; his optimism, how qualified ; his temper ; lucidity 
 and excellence of his writing. James Mill. Change in the rationalistic 
 spirit. T. R. Malthus and David Ricardo. Robert Owen. 
 
 V. William Cobbett ; relation to the theorists and the Revolution. Peter 
 Porcupine ; sketch of literary life. Advice to Young Men and Women ; and 
 ' to a lover.' Romance and Cobbett. Educational views ; Rural Rides, 
 tirades, observations, scenery ; love of beauty. 
 
 THE writers who provoked or answered Burke during his later 
 years cannot be recounted here. Most of their pamphlets 
 are but waifs of paper rag upon the torrent. Three or four of 
 them emerge into literature, or rather into the debateable 
 ground upon its borders. One oration once famous, but now 
 remembered through the bloodshot representation of it in the 
 Reflections, may be named in order to show it as it was. This 
 is the Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), delivered by 
 Dr. Richard Price, the moral philosopher and radical, to the 
 ' Society for commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain.' 
 Price had been a noted champion of American independence, 
 and his speech begins as a mild nonconformist decoction of the 
 ' Declaration of the Rights of Men.' In bland, neat proposi- 
 tions he asserts the claim to liberty of conscience in religion, 
 the right to resist the abuses of power, and lastly, 'the right to
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 259 
 
 choose our governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to 
 frame a government for ourselves.' There is still gross in- 
 equality in the representation, and toleration is unachieved. 
 To put these things right is true patriotism ; and Christ Him- 
 self ' possessed a particular affection for His country, though 
 a very wicked country.' The Revolution over the water is a 
 great omen : and, exclaims Price, ' methinks I see the dominion 
 of kings exchanged for the dominion of law, and the dominion 
 of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.' 
 This was just the tone to exasperate an Old Whig, with a 
 philosophic and imaginative reverence for the past. In an 
 appendix to a later edition, Price pressed home that analogy 
 between the two revolutions, the English and the French, 
 which Burke was to spend so much of his power in discriminat- 
 ing. But he died in 1791, and left the task of fuller apology 
 to others. 
 
 On the issue of the Reflections, the air was darkened by a 
 surprising cross-fire aimed at Burke, 1 of darts, and mud-pellets, 
 and heavier musketry as well. He was taunted as a turncoat 
 by Charles Pigott, the author of the scurrilous Female Jockey 
 Club, and by Wolcot, the kennel-satirist. Person is said to 
 have written the Catechism to the Natives of Hampshire, in 
 which Burke's scorn for the 'swinish multitude ' is parodied. 
 Mary Wollstonecraft said that had Burke been a Jew, he would 
 have joined in the cry of ' Crucify Him ! ' and the republican 
 historian of England, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, 2 in a pamphlet 
 largely written in italics, exclaimed that he wished ' to crush 
 all the rights of men.' ' A Country Attorney ' rose up to prove 
 that there was much good in lawyers. Staunch Whigs and 
 Hanoverians, like Lord Stanhope and Sir Brooke Boothby 
 (whose tract is a pattern of stiff dignity), argued that the 
 principles of the National Assembly were, after all, but those 
 of Holt and Somers. The question, wrote Boothby, was 
 reduced to this, ' whether the late government of France 
 was such as ought to have been endured ' ; and whilst rejoic- 
 ing in the overthrow of the French Church, he approved, like 
 his adversary, the ' apparent ' inequalities of the English re- 
 presentation. The epithet is a curious instance of arrested 
 Whiggery. 
 
 The first attacks of weight came almost simultaneously 
 from three writers, Joseph Priestley (Letters to Mr. Burke, 
 1791), Sir James Mackintosh (Vindicica Galliccc, 1791), and 
 Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man, in two parts, 1791 and 
 1792). Arthur Young's chapter on the Revolution did not
 
 260 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 appear till 1794, at the close of his Travels in France. But 
 these works do not merely arise out of the Reflections. They 
 imply a powerful existing movement of thought, which was now 
 to undergo its crucial test. The old arguments on either side 
 are now not only reanimated, but transformed and made 
 real by events ; hope and fear become passionate ; and after 
 1789 there is a new scope and a new life in our controversial 
 literature. 
 
 Of the three mentioned, Priestley and Paine were tried 
 debaters, and Mackintosh a younger student. Joseph Priestley 
 (1733-1804) had already won his glory as a chemist, and promin- 
 ence as the philosopher of the Unitarians, whom he had joined 
 after a long Odyssey as a theologian. He was a truly volumin- 
 ous writer. His soon obsolete history of Early Opinions 
 concerning Jesus (1756) was one of his first ventures. Bishop 
 Horsley, in his tracts, 1 had retorted with greater learning, with 
 equal but more skilful acrimony, and in a far more finished 
 style, upon Priestley's History of the Corruptions of Christianity 
 (1782). This is the work of a half-way rationalist, or what he 
 terms a 'rational dissenter,' who believes in the Resurrection, 
 but questions the Atonement. Priestley's ultimate aim, how- 
 ever, is to plead for religious toleration and the abolition of 
 tests ; a reform in which Horsley, whose liberalism 2 was in 
 many ways signal considering his caste and surroundings, is 
 curiously in agreement with his foe. We can guess Priestley's 
 political doctrine. It is based, in words to which Bentham 
 owned his debt, on ' utility,' 3 for we read in the Essay on the 
 First Principles of Government (1768) : 
 
 The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority 
 of the members, of any state, is the great standard by which every- 
 thing relating to that state must finally be determined. 
 
 Priestley 4 also infers what Burke so fiercely denies, that the 
 decision as to what is for the public good must needs rest with 
 the majority. The transition from Whig to Radical theory 
 is here visible. Kings, in Dryden's phrase, are ' only officers 
 in trust,' and the people may uproot them on good cause shown. 
 At the same time, says Priestley, the people, or majority, must 
 interfere little with the individual, for the variety of Athenian 
 habit and custom is better than a Spartan uniformity. The 
 golden rule of toleration must be stretched, even for the benefit 
 of the atheist. Popery is, says Priestley agreeably, ' the most 
 considerable part of that Antichrist which God will destroy 
 in His own time ' ; but Papists must be allowed in this world
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 261 
 
 to worship and to teach school. Universal suffrage, he adds, 
 is not to be thought of, but he would give votes to ' the 
 majority of those whose circumstances render them above 
 being corrupted ' a truly Whig deliverance. 
 
 His Letters to Burke are less reserved, and bring before us in 
 a lively way those hopes and joys of which Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge wrote, in the glow, clouded by regrets, of their own 
 retrospect. Priestley was now an oldish idealist ; but he too 
 ' stood on the top of golden hours,' and he gives the emotions 
 of the Prelude in plain prose : 
 
 Government, we may now [1791] expect to see, not only in theory 
 and in books, but in actual practice, calculated for the general 
 good, and taking no more on it than the general good requires ; 
 leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as 
 possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with 
 men's notions concerning God and a future state, than with philo- 
 sophy or medicine. 1 
 
 Priestley's attacks on Burke's supposed inconsistency are 
 commonplace, nor can he grasp Burke's profound view of the 
 vitality of the social fabric. He chiefly resents the attack 
 made in the Reflections upon the civil disestablishment of the 
 French Church, and fully develops the nonconformist view. 
 A church, he says, with unwonted vigour of imagery, is a ' sloth 
 eating the branches, a glutton on the shoulders of this noble 
 animal,' namely the state. Like most of the disputants on 
 either side, Priestley finds himself thinking more about England 
 than about France. Nothing is rarer than to see the question 
 of the Revolution argued without reference either to the Whig 
 Revolution, or the home politics of the day, or the future 
 relations of the two countries. Save at the hands of Young, 
 it hardly can be said to receive scientific discussion at all. 
 
 Of all those who answered Burke, Sir James Mackintosh 2 
 most resembled what Burke once had been. That sympa- 
 thetic vision of another country's needs and vital impulses, 
 which lights up the American Speeches, is not absent from 
 Vindicice Gallicce. In 1791 Mackintosh found it no strain to 
 justify the Revolution by the Whig tenets which he had largely 
 learned from Burke himself, and to enlist in the cause a store 
 of political and historical learning which no one else on the 
 same side could furnish, and which bore a promise of rival- 
 ling his master's. He was only twenty-six, but in a certain 
 weighty fervour he already excelled, as the sentence already 
 quoted (p. 243) shows. He justifies the action of the Third
 
 262 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 Estate as sanctioned by the nation in fact if not in form, and 
 ably defends the doings of the National Assembly from the 
 legal and institutional standpoint. Nor does its audacity 
 repel him : 
 
 Where would be the atrocious guilt of a grand experiment, to 
 ascertain the portion of freedom and happiness that can be created 
 by political institutions ? . . . A government of art, the work of 
 legislative intellect, was loudly demanded. 
 
 Commenting on this ' experiment,' Mackintosh develops 
 his view of the rights of man from his new- Whig vantage- 
 ground, which is different from that of the revolutionaries 
 themselves. He does not say, with Paine, that ' society is 
 made by our wants, and government by our wickedness,' 
 but he regards positive law as in essence prohibitive. What- 
 ever it does not forbid, that the ' natural ' rights of man, which 
 are anterior in authority to law, permit him to do. Some of 
 these rights were indeed surrendered to law, but only in order 
 to prevent men from violating the rest and injuring one another. 
 But no law can supersede the right of men to political equality 
 within the commonwealth. In 1688 no grander experiment 
 was needed, in order to preserve this right, than to change 
 the monarch ; but in 1789 the whole social order required 
 remodelling. The excesses of the first three years seemed 
 to Mackintosh the inevitable price of the change. He also 
 clearly foresaw the international import of the events of 
 France ; ' the old Gothic governments of Europe have lived 
 their time.' His weakness is to think that the Revolutionary 
 settlement was a stable one ; and, unlike Burke, he fails to 
 see the share of the sceptical writers in the overthrow of the 
 French Church. But his treatise brought him fame at once ; 
 and though it did not reach the people, it served to rally the 
 educated Whigs from the shock inflicted by the Reflections. 
 
 Mackintosh's later phases of feeling towards the Revolution 
 are a kind of prose counterpart of Wordsworth's, and would 
 form a singular study. In five years his zeal was shaken ; 
 and his review of the Regicide Peace introduced him to Burke. 
 The veteran praised him for his 'victory over himself,' and 
 bequeathed him, as it were, his own sword ; and the natural 
 affinity between the two men now found full expression. In 
 1 799, Mackintosh gave his once famous lectures ' On the Law 
 of Nature and Nations,' of which only the first, containing 
 the scheme of the whole series, is preserved. Here he recanted, 
 in the face of London, his earlier views ; the massacres in
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 263 
 
 Paris, the oppression of the Swiss, the whole course of the last 
 seven years, had cleared away his illusions, and he delivered 
 an acrid attack, whose tone he afterwards regretted, on the 
 principles of one of his hearers, William Godwin. In later 
 years Mackintosh coolly reviews his own revulsions l in the 
 light of the sequel, writing On the State of France in 1815 during 
 the Hundred Days. The good and evil of the Revolution 
 he at last finds ' a most perplexing account to balance,' seeing 
 that so many good results had proceeded from events that 
 were attended with so many detestable crimes. This conclu- 
 sion does not greatly advance the question ; but Mackintosh, 
 with that judicial precision which made him ineffective in 
 the Commons, but which is his real title to fame as a publicist, 
 analyses both the benefits and the crimes with scientific patience. 
 His career as a lawyer, as a speaker, as a historian of ethical 
 theory, as a political philosopher, and as a humanitarian, 
 hardly belongs to letters. Little that he has left holds its 
 ground, and his multifarious accomplishment makes it hard 
 to fix his features. He would have been a great professor, 
 but it is hard to say of what. His prompt and learned memory 
 and his swift facility as a talker, orator and writer made him 
 a kind of precursor of Macaulay, whose description of him is 
 classical. The journals of the time attest his reputation. - 
 Lord John Russell and Thomas Moore reveal him as an intel- 
 lectual focus for the earlier Holland House group, and the 
 latter observes : 
 
 Mackintosh, as usual, delightful ; his range of knowledge and 
 memory so extensive, passing (as Greville remarked) from Voltaire's 
 verses to Sylvia up to the most voluminous details of the Council 
 of Trent. 
 
 Society has usually some personage on whom it relies for 
 this mixture of wit and erudition ; who stands to it for intellect 
 without the repulsiveness of intellect ; who does its thinking 
 for it, gracefully ; who may say what he will, and it is sure 
 to be excellent. Mackintosh, Macaulay, and Lord Acton 
 have sustained this truly English tradition. But Mackintosh 
 was more lucid in pleading, and in big, synthetic, historical 
 survey, than in philosophic thinking. James Mill's hard- 
 hitting and acrid Fragment on Mackintosh exposes a certain 
 vagueness, which meets us often when he handles fundamentals. 
 He is much more at home in court. His defence of Peltier 
 is a really noble, though a somewhat forensically flushed, com- 
 position ; and his speech on the Case of Missionary Smitl/.
 
 264 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 though less celebrated, is equally good. Mackintosh was, like 
 his friend Romilly, an impassioned assailant of injustice, 
 of the best Whig tradition ; he was a gallant soldier in the 
 war of humanity ; he fought for the mitigation of the hateful 
 old criminal law, and lived to speak in 1831 for Reform. 
 
 The style of Vindicice is that of the day, periodic, balanced, 
 and too like The Rambler. It lends itself to epigram ; we 
 hear of Mr. Burke's ' virulent encomiums on urbanity, and 
 inflammatory harangues against violence.' The orations are 
 clear, cogent, fastidiously worded, but somehow fail, like most 
 of Mackintosh's writings, to bite on the mind. In general, 
 he is lucid, packed with illustrations, varieties, quotations 
 from Lucan and Cicero, careful appeals, now of rather ashen 
 aspect ; and we wonder why we do not wonder more. Perhaps 
 the style of the lecturer is the most impermanent in this world ; 
 and Mackintosh, even in his diaries, even in his journals to his 
 wife, is ever an agreeable lecturer or an impersonal, official 
 reviewer. Hazlitt's 1 tart, sprightly, rather unfair account 
 of him, outlives all that the man himself so equitably, so 
 attractively, enunciated. 
 
 Another readable and reasoned plea against Burke, written 
 in the tide of the reaction, and never recanted, is the Apology 
 for the Freedom of the Press and for General Liberty (1793), 
 by Robert Hall. It is a lucid and grave defence of free inquiry, 
 the right of association, and parliamentary reform. ' It is 
 incumbent on Mr. Burke and his followers to ascertain the 
 time when natural rights were relinquished.' Hall deplores 
 the Terror ; but ' the friends of Liberty, instead of wishing 
 for a similar event in England, are intent chiefly on reform 
 to avoid its necessity.' He wrote much else on politics and 
 always in the same sense, but his reputation rests chiefly on 
 the records of his pulpit oratory. 
 
 Thomas Paine- (1737-1809) is a very good combative 
 writer, though he is the contrary of a beautiful one. There 
 is no doubt as to the tribe to which he belongs, or the audience 
 to which he speaks. He aims at every one who can read print 
 and is capable of a political or anti-clerical passion, and who 
 can tolerate his homely, often vulgar directness. He has 
 affinities with Defoe, for he can tell a plain tale noticeably well, 
 as is shown by his accounts of his stay in the house that once 
 had been the Pompadour's ; of his arrest by the French police, 
 just after he had finished the first part of The Age of Reason ; 
 and of his illness in the Luxembourg prison. He is Defoe 
 without the cunning of hand. He also made little apologues
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 265 
 
 and fables, which are rather clumsy. Like Cobbett, he is a 
 heavy-weight, unsparing of punishment, and hammering at 
 many of the same intractable things the court, the titled, 
 the pensioners, and all stabled clergy. But he has not Defoe's 
 art, or Cobbett's love of real life and the concrete picturesque. 
 Paine's true business is to decoct and clarify doctrine, radical, 
 republican or deistic, for the consumption of the plain citizen ; 
 and no English author of his day had a larger number of readers 
 at the time. He could no more be ignored than a shower of 
 stones, which indeed his sentences resemble ; and they fly 
 at the most august of heads and windows and facades. This is 
 not what he calls a ' hinting and intimating manner of writing.' 
 On the Book of Genesis he observes : 
 
 It begins abruptly. It is nobody that speaks. It is nobody 
 that hears. It is addressed to nobody. It has neither first, second, 
 nor third person. It has every criterion of being a tradition. It 
 has no voucher. 
 
 Evidently such a man has but a moderate feeling for high 
 literature ; nor does he know that its niceties exist it is not 
 that he consciously avoids them. It would take pages to 
 mention the qualities of this kind that Paine does not possess ; 
 but their absence was essential to the terror and rancour which 
 he inspired for a generation, and which have caused his aims 
 and ideas often to be misinterpreted upon false hearsay. He 
 can still be read ; it is not so easy to go to sleep over Tom 
 Paine as it is over Mackintosh or Priestley ; and in spite of 
 his amusing unacquaintance with most of history, art, philo- 
 sophy and religion, the issues for which he fought, and the 
 arguments he used, are not so obsolete but that he can still 
 give provocation, as he would have wished to do. 
 
 Paine wrote little before 1776 ; he had then been in America 
 two years, and produced his pamphlet Common Sen-se, which 
 urges, with real dignity and afflatus, that ' independence is 
 the only bond that can keep and tie us together.' The articles 
 that followed, The American Crisis, are of a high order of 
 patriotic oratory. It is not every pressman who can thus 
 spirit up a whole army at a critical time. The writing is at 
 times brutal, and so is war ; but it is full of essential rough 
 nobility, and it has more swell and fulness than Paine's later 
 works ; it is in the good tradition of Swift, though destitute 
 of Swift's irony and subtlety. Paine's other American writings, 
 largely composed after his return to Europe, such as the 
 Memorial to Monroe, and the aggressive Letter to Washington,
 
 266 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 are narrower, and too full of the author's self-esteem and self- 
 confidence qualities which proved a useful carapace for a 
 man with innumerable enemies, and which rested upon his 
 impregnable courage. 
 
 The first part (1791) of The Rights of Man is a reply to 
 Burke's Reflections ; the second (1792) also controverts the 
 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. Together they form 
 a popular text-book of Republican principles, which won for 
 Paine a long-resounding fame and obloquy. This polemical 
 sermon on the tenets of the Declaration of Independence 
 was written in England, whither Paine had returned in 1787. 
 He was prosecuted, and wished to face trial, but was induced, 
 it is said by William Blake, to escape to Paris. He was tried, 
 and defended by Erskine, and outlawed in his absence. Punish- 
 ments hailed upon those who published and spread The Rights of 
 Man, but many hundred thousand copies were sold in England. 
 Paine's career in Paris, his ties with Condorcet, his election 
 to the Assembly, his imprisonment by Robespierre, and his 
 release, belong to history ; so does his ineffectual but credit- 
 able and wise plea that ' Louis Capet ' should be spared and 
 exiled to the United States. The war between Burke and 
 Paine is more than a dispute of authors ; it represents the 
 conflict of two great historic movements and two types of 
 brain. They could contradict each other, but could never 
 come to close quarters. Paine's Dissertation on the First 
 Principles of Government shows this very clearly (1795). 
 Law and government are to Burke the crown of social endeavour 
 and the life of the body politic. To Paine and his school they 
 are unavoidable inventions, ever dangerous to the freedom 
 which they profess to secure. They have to prove their 
 harmlessness at every step ; they always tend to trespass 
 on the sacred circle of individual or ' natural ' rights. The 
 only conception that could help to harmonise these views 
 was that of historic growth and progressive adaptation ; and 
 this conception hardly reached the revolutionary camp, though 
 it had been sketched by Herder and others, and a distinct 
 premonition of it may be seen in the far-reaching Esquisse of 
 Condorcet. To Paine it meant nothing ; nor did it effectively 
 penetrate Burke, whose ideas of political development were 
 arrested by his engrossment with 1688. Burke cared much 
 for history, but not much for the history of the future. In 
 his plea for leaving America alone, he had never embraced 
 the ' metaphysical ' principles of freedom and equality after- 
 wards formulated in the Declaration of Independence.
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 267 
 
 Paine has no original ideas, but his course of thought is 
 peculiar. It is wrong to treat him as a kind of Whig who 
 has broken loose into radicalism. His view is in origin as 
 much religious as political. 1 He had been brought up a quaker ; 
 he had belonged to a body with which the law had savagely 
 interfered to repress the free cult of the inner light. Paine 
 is a strange offspring of the gospel of peace and quietude ; 
 but his ardour for freedom of thought and expression is in 
 fact nourished upon it, and his attacks on the edifice and 
 external authority of the Christian religion proceed from the 
 same source. He became a deist of a type hardly contem- 
 plated by Bishop Butler ; not an ' atheist,' for he asserts with 
 much vehemence the existence of a first cause and his ' hope 
 of happiness hereafter.' A clue is thus found to the inner 
 connection between The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. 
 It must be added that Paine had a genuine ' religion of 
 humanity,' 2 and seems to have coined the phrase. His informa- 
 tion as to the condition of the French people, though slight 
 indeed beside that of Arthur Young, was sufficient to feather 
 the most telling of his shafts against Burke. The passage 
 has often been quoted, though not always credited to Paine, 
 and perhaps marks the highest scope of his eloquence : 
 
 Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection 
 that I can find throughout his book, has he bestowed on those who 
 lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope in the 
 most miserable of prisons. It is painful to behold a man employ- 
 ing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. 
 Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress 
 touching his heart, but by the showy semblance of it striking his 
 imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. 
 
 Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason (1794) in 
 prison, out of his memory ; the second part, done with the 
 Bible before him, is minuter and duller. He has no sense of 
 poetry, and not an ounce of scholarship ; all his objections 
 are those of a hard rabid mother-wit. He assaults the whole 
 body of revealed religion, the supernatural, and the claims 
 temporal and spiritual of all the churches. In this, and in 
 his method and manners, it would not be hard to find his 
 French counterparts and suggesters. But Paine is deeply 
 religious in his way ; he holds to his scanty creed 3 with fervour ; 
 he honestly admires all the works of the Lord ' a fair crea- 
 tion prepared to receive us the instant we are born ' ; and he 
 believes that ' religious duties consist in doing justice, loving
 
 268 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.' 
 He is also quite sincere when he says that 
 
 The people of France were running headlong into atheism, and I 
 had the work translated and published in their own language to 
 stop them in that career. 
 
 The curious can read Paine's address, conceived in the same 
 spirit, to the society of Theophilanthropists in Paris, and his 
 retorts upon Erskine, the Bishop of LlandafT, and others who 
 charged him with blasphemy and error. The same swift, 
 ruthless, shearing stroke is everywhere. There is no amenity, 
 but there is always force, and this in itself implies a kind of 
 form. Paine is the parent of a line of freethinkers whose 
 work, like much of his own, lies below the levels of culture and 
 letters, but who are none the less a stubborn element in the 
 mental life of the nation. It is worth remarking that he too 
 shared in the revulsion l against France, not because he doubted 
 his principles, but because France had abandoned them. In 
 1802 he said, with ' a smile of contempt ' : 
 
 They have shed blood enough for liberty, and now they have it 
 in perfection. This is not a country for an honest man to live in ; 
 they do not understand anything at all of the principles of free 
 government, and the best way is to leave them to themselves. You 
 see they have conquered Europe, only to make it more miserable 
 than it was before. 
 
 This clean short cut contrasts with the lengthy spiritual 
 circuits by which the poets reached the same conclusion, or 
 rather gave up their creed as well as their sanguine hopes. 
 But a stranger apostle than Paine has yet to be delineated. 
 
 II 
 
 Most men, after vanity and heat of blood have long obscured 
 their logic, learn a little from the visitations of experience, 
 which comes like a whiff of ammonia to clear the brain. With 
 the doctrinaire, le pedant, the course is reversed. The brain 
 is early his tyrant, and feeds simply on itself and resists 
 experience. Before such a man has ceased to be unteachable, 
 he may be dead, and his books lumber ; and he may have 
 done harm by the way. His best hope is to be overtaken by 
 humanity, to become young in middle age, to find himself 
 out, and to recant ; but this is unlikely to happen. It is still 
 less likely that he never had anything to say. He is the child
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 269 
 
 of a time when notions are fermenting too quickly for wisdom 
 and knowledge to keep pace with them or to clarify them. 
 It seems incredible that he should ever have moulded men's 
 faith or set them on fire ; yet so it was. After his time, derision 
 being too easy, it is the rueful task of the critic to give him hi? 
 due. All this we feel in the case of William Godwin 1 (1756- 
 1836), whose fame was followed by an apathy deeper than 
 had befallen, in his own day, the deists of fifty years before. 
 ' Who now reads Bolingbroke ? ' Burke had exclaimed ; and 
 who now reads Godwin 1 Students, it may be replied, are 
 beginning to do so, and those who are curious in psychology 
 and character. Godwin's connections with the history of 
 opinion are now seen to be important and real. He is the 
 representative and pioneer of the peaceful, idealising type 
 of anarchist who throws out explosive ideas in the intervals 
 of an inoffensive life, and who is usually a Frenchman. Godwin 
 is a focus of radical speculation in England during the last 
 years of the eighteenth century. Mackintosh wrote for 
 legists, and Paine for the ' man in the street ' ; but round 
 Godwin and the Wollstonecrafts gathered the intellectual 
 rebels, the essayists and poets, who were influenced by this 
 doctrinaire. Into the poets many of his hopes and concep- 
 tions passed, not unlike some stark lump of jelly on the 
 shore that is cast into the sea and flowers into lovely shape 
 and lucent colour when beheld through the dream of the 
 water. 
 
 A tribute paid to Political Justice by the receptive but 
 critical Crabb Robinson 2 explains its effect as well as anything 
 said of it by the poets : 
 
 I read a book which gave a turn to my mind and in effect 
 directed the whole course of my life. ... It made me feel more 
 generously. I had never before, nor, I am afraid, have I ever since 
 felt so strongly the duty of not living to one's self, but of having 
 for one's sole object the good of the community. 
 
 Few of those who deride Godwin deserve to have anything 
 as good as this said about them. He was the friend of Curran, 
 of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, and also of Lamb, who laughed at 
 his pedantries without offence. He has been called a thinking 
 machine without passions ; but he married once for love, and 
 Mary Wollstonecraft would not have accepted a machine ; 
 though Godwin's idea of living twenty doors off his wife cer- 
 tainly betokens much deliberation. Afterwards he wished to 
 marry the beautiful widowed Mrs. Revelry, afterwards Mr?.
 
 270 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 Gisborne. ' You are invited to form the sole happiness of 
 one of the most known men of the age ' so he inimitably 
 put his offer ; but he was in love nevertheless. These things, 
 together with hardship and bereavements, made some inroads 
 on the crazy intellectualism with which Godwin started. 
 He is remembered too little for the courage that he showed in 
 1794, when Holcroft and other friends were tried for treason, 
 and too much for his elderly habit of ' preaching and holding 
 the hat.' His cooler negations lost hold on him, but he 
 kept the unquenchable optimism which is the best feature 
 of himself and his group. An old man, and lonely, and in 
 straits, he wrote that ' human understanding and human 
 virtue will hereafter accomplish such things as the heart 
 of man has never yet been daring enough to conceive.' He 
 is most interesting in his essays, where he talks of himself 
 and his youth, with its shyness and courage, its presumption 
 and humility ; and of the need of humane methods in educa- 
 tion ; and of his own tender feeling, which was genuine, as a 
 friend and a father ; and of his tardy love of beautiful things. 
 Godwin's mind is the last we should expect to yield to a 
 mystical adoration of nature ; but some of his own disciples 
 among the poets may have reacted upon him. In any case, 
 the following passage, written in 1820, is pretty well for an 
 apostle of bare logic. Godwin's development herein reflects 
 that of his time ; the whole difference between 1780 and 1820 
 is implied in the change : 
 
 I am an adorer of nature. I should pine to death if I did not live 
 in the midst of so majestic a structure as I behold on every side. I 
 am never weary of admiring and reverencing it. All that I see, the 
 earth, the sea, the rivers, the trees, the clouds, and, most of all, 
 man, fills me with love and astonishment. My soul is full 
 to bursting with the mystery of all this, and I love it the 
 better for its mysteriousness. It is too wonderful for me ; it is 
 past finding out ; but it is beyond expression delicious. This is 
 what I call religion. 
 
 It is the old devout deism of the revolutionaries with a colour- 
 ing of the new poetry, pantheistic now in tendency, and 
 almost physical in its expression. There is only one step 
 more to Shelley ; and from such a passage we realise better 
 the links between teacher and pupil. 
 
 The author of Political Justice and Caleb Williams cannot 
 be called a mere journeyman ; but he produced hack histories, 
 fables, ' dramas for children,' and even tragedies. Of his
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 271 
 
 Lives only that of Chaucer is remembered ; it was a piece of 
 fresh and honest record-hunting buried in a mass of surplusage. 
 His stories have been noticed already (Ch. vn.). His best 
 writing is found in his essays. The Enquirer (1797), and the 
 noticeable Thoughts on Man (published 1831, but largely 
 written earlier) mark one of the higher levels in the long 
 depression of the essayist's art between Goldsmith and 
 Hazlitt. Godwin's sketch of the species of English prose is 
 not without interest ; he thinks that his own kind, the colder, 
 terser, purer, later kind of classical English, is the very best. 
 He rewrote his sentences incessantly, always aiming at 
 lucidity. His style is affected to the last, in spite of his con- 
 cessions to poetry, by his unfading and aboriginal faith in 
 logic and the power of argumentation. This tenet is at the 
 base of Political Justice, and, especially in the first edition, 
 is carried to all lengths. 
 
 The book is an odd assortment of doctrines, ' pigging together, 
 heads and points,' as Burke pleasantly observes of Chatham's 
 government. None of them are original, but the combination 
 is peculiar to Godwin, and has some unity of surface. He tells 
 us a few of the sources of his inspiration. The mind is a blank 
 page, or rather plastic material. And it is unfree ; the dogma 
 of metaphysical determinism, taught by the writer's Calvin- 
 istic training (he was in turn Calvinist, deist, and atheist), 
 is confirmed by his reading of Hartley and of d'Holbach's 
 System of Nature. His psychological dogma is the unlimited 
 power of reason over the emotions, which can be ensured by 
 steady habit in the individual and then will soon become 
 universal in the race. Motives, therefore, can and should be 
 presented in the form, not of emotions or commands, but of 
 arguments. These are, and are to be, the only efficient driving 
 power. Godwin's entire view of the education of the child 
 and the treatment of the criminal follows from this, and is 
 partly taken from Helvetius. He did service by insisting on 
 the element of rational persuasion, but he reduced that of 
 force and discipline to a ludicrous vanishing quantity. Man 
 at large, he proceeds, by a proper concentration on rational 
 motives, can quickly and indefinitely improve. His third 
 dogma, that man is thus perfectible, if only he puts himself 
 under the sway of reason, concurs with that of Condorcet ; 1 
 and it was this, above all, which fired the vision of Shelley. 
 Much, indeed, of Political Justice is a parody, which must be 
 read to be believed, of useful and even vital truths. There is 
 still a kind of pallid fire gleaming over the pages, which enables
 
 272 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 us to understand its contemporary power. Of the author 
 Hazlitt said in 1825 : 
 
 Five-and-twenty years ago he was in the very zenith of a sultry 
 and unwholesome popularity ; he blazed as a sun in the firmament 
 of reputation ; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more 
 sought after, and wherever truth, liberty, justice was the theme, 
 his name was not far off. Now he has sunk below the horizon, and 
 enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. 
 
 Godwin's notoriety sprang in part from his paradoxical 
 and destructive applications of his notion of ' justice.' The 
 essence of this was, that every man, in the eye of reason, 
 counts for as much as every other, no matter what his rela- 
 tionship may be to you or me. His theory was impersonality 
 run mad. ' Men, 5 he cries, ' may one day feel that they are 
 partakers of a common nature ' ; and he proceeds to con- 
 clusions, which are in a style of farce that would have delighted 
 Moliere. The famous incredible passage about Fenelon and 
 the chambermaid is the climax. The case is supposed of a 
 fire in the palace of Cambrai. Only one life or the other can 
 be saved. 
 
 Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid, I ought to have 
 chosen to die, rather than that Fenelon should have died. The 
 life of Fenelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid. 
 . . . Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother, 
 or my benefactor, this would not alter the truth of the proposition. 
 The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the 
 chambermaid ; and justice, pure unadulterated justice, would still 
 have preferred that which was most valuable. . . . What magic is 
 there in the pronoun ' my,' to overturn the decisions of everlasting 
 truth ? My wife or my mother may be a fool or a prostitute, 
 malicious, lying, or dishonest. If they be, what consequence is it 
 that they are mine ? 
 
 In St. Leon, we may remember, Godwin retracted much of this, 
 conceded that ' true wisdom will recommend to us individual 
 attachments,' and commended ' the affections and charities 
 of private life ' ; so that he must not be too hotly prosecuted 
 on behalf of the chambermaid. But the same principle of 
 ' justice ' lies at the root of his anarchism, which he works 
 out with a tenacity that preserves his memory amongst his 
 successors in that creed. 
 
 From Rousseau, from the philosopkes, and from the events 
 of 1789, Godwin draws his assurance that the great obstacle 
 to the reign of justice is the existence of government, which
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 273 
 
 * by its nature counteracts the improvement of the individual 
 mind,' and which ' gives substance and permanence to our 
 errors.' Every law and institution partakes in its degree of 
 this evil. Unequal allotment of property is a clear violation 
 of the elementary rights of justice ; kings and nobles, popes 
 and bishops, are creatures and begetters of force and injustice. 
 Marriage is a form of monopoly and slavery, and rests on an 
 impulse which the progress of reflection, we learn, will surely 
 weaken ; meantime, it has no rational sanction. Make as 
 few laws as possible, nay do not make any more at all. But, 
 he adds, obey those that exist, for violently to resist them is 
 to appeal to violence ; argue, until they are all abolished. 
 By a queer circuit and another train of thought Godwin thus 
 reaches the conclusion of his polar opposite, Hobbes, as to the 
 duty of non-resistance. It was this opinion no doubt which, 
 together with the high price of his book, decided Mr. Pitt that 
 he might be left unprosecuted, unlike Paine or Thelwall. His 
 unexpected defence of private property, which he deduces 
 from the abstract right to be free (making a man's goods a 
 kind of extension of his personality), is in the same sense. 
 But behind it all Godwin cherishes no mean dream, of an age 
 when there will be 
 
 no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no 
 government ... no disease, no anguish, no melancholy, and no 
 resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good 
 of all. Mind will be active and eager, yet never disappointed. 
 
 He mentions two curious origins for his characteristic views. 
 One is the writings of Swift, which taught him the vanity and 
 corruption of governments ; and the other is the ' Latin 
 historians,' from whom he may have drawn his patterns of 
 stoical and passionless virtue. From such far-off sources 
 came, ultimately, some of the sublime forecasts of Prometheus 
 Unbound. 
 
 Those cool insane pages of Political Justice which treat of 
 marriage and the affections contain far less of good sense and 
 sound prophecy than the rambling, superficially turgid Vindi- 
 cation of the Eights of Woman (1792), by Mary Wollstonecraft l : 
 one of the few notable books written by a woman in the cause 
 of her sex. It was published not only before the authoress 
 had accepted Godwin, but before she met Imlay, the brute 
 who lived with her and left her, and her letters to whom, 
 beginning cheerfully and happily, soon become a memorial of 
 affection tragically wrecked. She cannot write, but is all the 
 VOL. i. s
 
 274 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 more eloquent for that. Had she composed the Vindication 
 after her disasters and not before, its chief shortcoming, an 
 inexperience of passion, would have been removed. Mary Woll- 
 stonecraft shared with Godwin the faith which they bequeathed 
 to their daughter, Mary Shelley, and to Shelley himself. They 
 all believe in the progress of virtue, the power of reasoning, 
 and the reform of education. Indeed, the ' rights ' 1 which 
 Mary Wollstonecraft vindicates are not primarily political or 
 legal, or the right of competition. She wishes women to be 
 'duly prepared by education to be the companions of men/ 
 and to be ' free to strengthen their reason till they comprehend 
 their duty.' She does not wish them to be otherwise like 
 men ; she preaches grace, modesty, dignity, and reserve. 
 But she would have them women and not merely ladies ; and 
 in this she goes beyond most of the poetry, fiction, and peda- 
 gogy of her day. She is, indeed, something of the doctrinaire 
 when she refuses to attribute ' a sex to mind ' ; but we still 
 lack a sound psychology of sex ; and we wonder the less at 
 her mistake, when she describes the ideals of the authors that 
 revolt her, in her fifth and most valuable chapter, 'Animad- 
 versions on some of the writers who have rendered women 
 objects of pity, bordering on contempt.' The clumsy phrase- 
 ology is characteristic ; but we should now agree that these 
 ' writers ' are mostly unprofitable, however inconsistent with 
 one another. 
 
 In her eyes the worst is of course Rousseau. We are still 
 amazed at the influence of his doctrine when we find it filter- 
 ing not only into Madame de Stael and the rebels, but into 
 the male and female governesses of young French and English 
 persons into the works of Madame de Genlis, the Sermons of 
 Dr. Fordyce, and Dr. Gregory's Legacy to his Daughters : most 
 of whom, in divers tones, extol the passive woman, silent, 
 decorous, accomplished, cunningly and demurely dressed, and 
 of just such a degree of prudery as may both attract and 
 detain a husband. Equally hateful to Mary Wollstonecraft 
 are the cynical counsels of Lord Chesterfield. Her feminine 
 ideal is sound and high, but utterly lacking in play and humour ; 
 Miss Burney is outside her view. So is Mile, de Lespinasse ; 
 for Mary Wollstonecraft thinks of love as a passing stimulus 
 to the brain and nature of a woman ; love but once, marry 
 then, and ' after marriage let passion calmly subside into 
 friendship.' This is rather too simple, if it is not precisely 
 the language of a ' hyena in petticoats,' as Horace Walpole 
 termed her. Her plea, however, for bringing up girls
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 275 
 
 together with boys in state-endowed day-schools, for giving them 
 'a rational affection for their country/ and for saving them 
 from the quackery of fortune-tellers and ' magnetisers,' might 
 have been made a century later without being obsolete. She 
 never came to the fulness of her mind or nature. She died in 
 giving birth to Mary Godwin, afterwards Mary Shelley, and 
 Shelley's tribute to both is famous and just : 
 
 for One then left this earth 
 Whose life was like a setting planet mild, 
 Which clothed thee in the radiance undefilcd 
 Of its departing glory ; still her fame 
 Shines on thee. 
 
 ni 
 
 With one sagacious and profoundly satisfactory writer who 
 affects no philosophy, a travelled observer of courage and 
 practical genius, we have the comfort of being on firm earth 
 again. Arthur Young * touches literature, nay he belongs to 
 it, by virtue of his Travels in France (1792) and his Auto- 
 biography. These emerge, along with many a stray page in his 
 other travels, pamphlets, and records, from a mass of purely 
 professional and expert writings. He is acknowledged to be 
 the greatest of our authors on agriculture. King George 
 used to take in his carriage a copy of the Annals of Agriculture, 
 which Young edited for many years and largely wrote, and 
 professed himself more indebted to him than to any other 
 subject. Napoleon read the Travels in France when at Elba. 
 Foreign monarchs and learned bodies rained distinctions upon 
 the author. The Travels in two years were translated into 
 French and German, and have been regularly studied in the 
 schools of France. The Tours in the southern counties, in 
 the northern counties, in Ireland, in Catalonia, and in Italy 
 have some of the same fascinating quality and of the same 
 scientific and sociological value. The careful and persistent 
 accuracy, the clear method, and the same zest and life, are 
 found in all. 
 
 The Travels in France, however, which extend over the 
 years 1787-90, are more of a book than any of these. Young 
 would, in vain, have disclaimed being a man of letters. But 
 in the Travels he contrasts the plan and arrangement with 
 that of his other Tours, in which he had mingled together, 
 rather than blended, the form of the diary and that of the dis- 
 sertation, with a certain effect of shapelessness. He there- 
 fore now placed at the end, in a second section, the essays on
 
 276 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 population, commerce, and the like, including the best of 
 all, the famous chapter on the character, causes, and prospects 
 of the Revolution, which is worth more than all the books of 
 all the theorists, Burke's included, and has taken its place as 
 a permanent and trustworthy document. In the first section 
 he preserves, freed from long disquisition, the impressions of 
 travel from day to day, and carries us with him in his ride over 
 almost the whole of France. The charm of the book is in its 
 union of precise and pointed diagnosis, living observation, 
 and indignant British comment ; the master-passion of the 
 man, veracity, is in every line ; the central thread is his purpose 
 to discover the material basis of the power and resources 
 of France. ' How far were that power and those resources 
 founded on the permanent basis of an enlightened agriculture ? ' 
 
 These are subjects that will never be understood from the specu- 
 lations of the mere farmer, or the mere politician ; they demand 
 a mixture of both ; and the investigation of a mind free from 
 prejudice, particularly national prejudice ; from the love of system, 
 and of the vain theories that are to be found in the closets of specu- 
 lators alone. God forbid that I should be guilty of the vanity of 
 supposing myself thus endowed ! I know too well the contrary, 
 and have no other pretension to undertake so arduous a work, than 
 that of having reported the agriculture of England with some little 
 success. 
 
 Owing to his plan, to his rigid retrenchment and revision, 
 which he wisely recommends as a practice to authors, and to 
 his life and vivacity, the Travels are a book, not for experts 
 or students only, but for all the world ; and all the world reads 
 them. The story of Young's speech to the mob that threatened 
 him for not wearing the cockade, which ' a hussy ' had pinned 
 on too loosely, is like a scene in Fielding : he told them in 
 imperfect French that in his country the gratids seigneurs 
 were the taxed, and not the tiers etat, and commended the 
 method ; whereon he was suffered to pass amidst applause, 
 but took care to pin on the next cockade tighter. True courage 
 is shown by his remark that he did not ' half like ' the ex- 
 perience. His glimpses of the Assembly and the King, of 
 Mirabeau and Sieyes, are most lively. He watches the dress, 
 the buildings, the scenery, the vintages, the cultivation, the 
 flowers, the table manners, the looks of the women (whom he 
 did not disregard), the varieties of sport, the public works and 
 undertakings, with a Baconian passion for avoiding prejudice 
 and seeing things as they were. He does not aim at style, but 
 attains it by his terseness and instinctive choice of language ;
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 277 
 
 writes in a varying, gusty fashion, sometimes jotting mere 
 notes, sometimes running on for a longer disquisition ; and 
 reserves his more serried and formal manner, with suggestions 
 of a set eloquence which is not unsuccessful, for his dissertations. 
 
 Young was never in love with the Revolution ; he simply 
 described its actual causes, and was shocked and carried away 
 by its effects. In the moment of anti- Jacobin panic, he 
 suggested and pressed the institution of the national militia. 
 It is sad to read his admirable autobiography. His days 
 darkened ; his personal rewards and honours came too late, 
 and bereavement too soon. Gradually he found ' true evan- 
 gelical religion ' of a narrow self -tormenting type, and re- 
 proached himself with some innocent pleasures. But he 
 admitted the solace that was offered by the news of his own 
 fame and by the sense of having done a mighty stroke of work 
 for his beloved agriculture. 
 
 To a reader fresh from Burke, Jeremy Bentham 1 may at first 
 seem to be his exact opposite ; a child of the pure stock of the 
 ' enlightenment,' and a fellow of Paine or Godwin. He shares 
 in their destructive and simplifying spirit. He has no respect 
 for history ; the longer a social fabric, with its justifying 
 formulae, has existed, the more suspicious is Bentham of its 
 title. To him the past is chiefly a series of incrusted errors. 
 Art and poetry are idle things ; the dogmatic and the mystical 
 sides of religion, and still more its organised embodiments, rest 
 upon traditional phrases that are themselves in the nature of 
 ' fictitious entities.' The British law and constitution arc not 
 a stately tree sanctified by growth and use, but a tangle of old 
 roots that sterilise the ground. Some of the supposed key- 
 words of ethical science, like duty and virtue, arc obstructions 
 to clear thinking and to human welfare. ' In the penal code,' 
 says Bentham, ' having for its principle the greatest happi- 
 ness principle, no such word would have place.' The word in 
 question is ' mercy.' But he means that mercy is superfluous, 
 if the award of justice is already based on a true calculation 
 of the ' greatest happiness ' : and ho wrote with impressive 
 effect at first against the abuse, and latterly against the use, 
 of capital punishment. 2 This handling of the past and of 
 existing institutions is in the spirit that Burke abhorred ; the 
 spirit, namely, of logical dissection and of judgment by reference 
 to a formula. 
 
 But if we come to Bentham from the philosophes them- 
 selves from Godwin, or from Condorcet, or from Helvetius 3 
 (whom Bentham in his youth so much admired, that he thought
 
 278 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 of offering to be his servant) he seems almost a conservative. 
 His treatment of the dream of human perfectibility is enough 
 to separate him from the pure doctrinaires. Even when law 
 and commerce are reformed, armies disbanded, and revolutions 
 no longer needed, it will only mean the ' absence of a certain 
 quantity of evil.' Jealousy, hatred, pain, and poverty will 
 always be, says Bentham, with us. ' Let us seek only what is 
 attainable ; it presents a career sufficiently vast for genius.' 
 He disbelieves in many other extreme tenets ; treats the Declara- 
 tion of Independence and the doctrines of ' natural rights ' 
 and 'natural equality' with contempt, as a tissue of con- 
 fusions ; thinks that the equalisation of goods by the state 
 would be upset in a month by competition ; and considers 
 woman l a domestic rather than a political animal, requiring, 
 indeed, much protection, but normally under the governance 
 of the husband ' because he is the stronger.' His bent, after 
 all, is English and towards the concrete, though he refers all 
 things to his principle of utility, as Malebranche saw all things 
 in God. If he is blind to the past, he has a practical and 
 detailed vision of the future. He forestalls some points of 
 Chartism, and the radical programme of the nineteenth century ; 
 pleads for universal suffrage, for yearly parliaments, and also 
 for the payment of members, which in this country was enacted 
 only yesterday. Bentham's purpose is reform ; and above 
 all, to use a word of his own coinage, it is codification. God- 
 win and Paine thought nothing out ; Bentham, in a termin- 
 ology that is often grotesque but always an attempt to wrestle 
 with the facts, is minute in reconstruction. Many of his ideas 
 are embodied in enactments that are now taken for granted. 
 He is a man of science, and has influenced the life of the nation, 
 through its law, perhaps more than any other theorist. 
 Strictly speaking, it is Benthamism, 2 or Bentham's theory 
 worked out by his followers, that has had this effect. But in the 
 union of critical courage and reorganising instinct no other 
 thinker of our revolutionary age can approach him. 
 
 Bentham's work as a jurist, therefore, concerns the historians 
 of legal science and reform. He was not such a historian 
 himself, and is nothing akin to his great younger contemporary, 
 Savigny. He is the head and fountain of our codifying school 
 of lawyers. His place as a philosopher, in the stricter sense, 
 is less assured, but he deeply affected insular speculation. 
 With pure metaphysic he is not concerned, it is to him a quarrel 
 over hollow names. His formula 3 of the ' greatest happiness 
 for the greatest number ' is a good working one for law, but on
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 279 
 
 its speculative side it is tentative ; and his moral psychology, 
 though elaborately outlined, omits some of the chief actual 
 springs of human endeavour. His importance as a moralist is 
 to be studied in his expounders and elaborators. But Ben- 
 tham has also a real if an odd and anomalous interest for the 
 student of letters. 
 
 He wrote two of his most fruitful and distinctive books before 
 the Revolution. A Fragment on Government, 1 which attacks 
 Blackstone's idolatrous theory of the constitution, came out 
 anonymously in 1776. This trenchant pamphlet by an ob- 
 scure lawyer under thirty was credited to Lord Mansfield 
 and other ripe authorities. The disclosure of the authorship 
 launched Bentham in the political, and even the fashionable 
 world, under the auspices of Lord Shelburne and the advance- 
 guard of the Whig party ; and this society he describes with 
 the sharp quaint vigour that distinguishes the Fragment itself. 
 The pedantry of systematic and enormous subdivision, which 
 afterwards defaced his treatises, is still latent, and it was a 
 fault he could at any time fling off when he made the effort. 
 It is present, though his special crabbed terminology has not 
 yet appeared, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals 
 and Legislation, which was published in 1789, having lain ready 
 printed for nine years. This work contains the bedrock of 
 his philosophy ; he built upon it afterwards, but never swerved 
 from its fundamental positions. Bentham founds all human 
 action, both as it is and as it ' ought ' to be, on ' two sovereign 
 masters, pleasure and pain,' which he treats as ultimate terms 
 defying definition and needing none ; works out, imperturb- 
 ably and amazingly, his famous ' calculus,' defining good, 
 virtue, and everything else, as a balance struck between pain 
 and pleasure, as computed in the long run and rightly under- 
 stood ; and jumps, with equal coolness, to his identification 
 of the good of each man with the good of all, that is, with ' the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number.' In laying down 
 this ' universal measure of right and wrong,' he passes from 
 morals to legislation, which, as he well puts it, has the ' same 
 centre as morals, but not the same circumference ' ; and 
 sketches out his conception of punishment as preventive and 
 exemplary, but not vindictive. This theory is one of his 
 titles to glory, and has powerfully affected English law. The 
 Defence of Usury (written 1787), one of his most lively and 
 influential books, was written during a visit to Russia. He 
 composed much that he did not publish,- and the titles of his 
 works number more than seventy. Discourses on Civil and
 
 280 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 Penal Legislation, A Treatise on Judicial Evidence, Anarchical 
 Fallacies, and Chrestomathia figure amongst them. 
 
 The form and style of his writings change visibly with time. 
 Bentham becomes less and less desirous of a general audience ; 
 his tone is less that of the disputant, and increasingly analytic 
 and scientific ; he speaks more to the experts and to himself. 
 Often he cares no more for the amenities of literature, or to 
 be readable, than a chemist or zoologist. Many of his treatises, 
 instead of printing them, he put in a drawer, and left to his 
 devotees to edit and beat into presentable shape. Of those 
 that he published, the most important only reached the lay 
 reader by a strange circuit. Bentham was early famous in 
 France, and was made a French citizen in 1792. He corre- 
 sponded with the leaders of liberal thought in many countries. 
 Much of his fame was due to the labours of his admirer, the 
 Genevese fitienne Dumont, whose recasts in French * of 
 Bentham's codifying and reforming treatises gave them im- 
 mense currency. Cleared of bristling scholastic terms, and 
 presented in a neater Gallic dress, they penetrated far, and 
 were again translated into many languages, including English. 
 Thus the Traite de Legislation, a digest of various works and 
 manuscripts, is current in an English retranslated version, 
 which is not from Bentham's own hand. In other cases the 
 process is more direct ; the Rationale of Judicial Evidence 
 was edited from his manuscripts by John Stuart Mill. 
 
 Bentham thus touches literature in several ways. Many 
 of his earlier and some of his later works are in a plain, hard- 
 hitting, sarcastic idiom. But he also theorised on style and 
 language in the spirit of a radical reformer, though his purpose 
 was scientific and not artistic. He is, like Hobbes, a nominal- 
 ist in grain, deeply preoccupied with the delusions inherent 
 in daily language and bent on dispelling them. Phrases like 
 the ' will of God,' the ' law of nature,' and ' the social compact,' 
 he treats as venerable impostures that are to be unmasked and 
 left shivering before the world. But he has not, like Hobbes, 
 the use of Latin and the sense of classical style to keep him 
 a true man of letters. His master-passion is to define, reduce, 
 distinguish, bifurcate, and simplify. He wishes the names of 
 the human impulses and virtues, and the key- words of philo- 
 sophy, and the various compartments of political theory, 
 to have a meaning and value precise as avoirdupois. The 
 common standard he finds in his master-phrases of utility and 
 the general happiness. These cannot themselves be weighed ; 
 they are ultimate ; they are the weights themselves, like the
 
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 standard pounds and ounces in the Mint. In his curious and 
 instructive Table of the Springs of Human Action he tries to 
 classify the names of the motives and moral qualities of man- 
 kind, in order to see for what real entities there are no words, 
 or no single words, in the language. Thus there are no such 
 names for the virtuous opposites of avarice and anger ; we have 
 to say ' just resentment,' and the like. And there prove to 
 be many more names for bad things than for good ones. Ben- 
 tham does not draw cynical inferences, but muses on the 
 poverty of speech, and if he does not invent the missing words, 
 it is evident that he would like to do so. In matters of edu- 
 cation and science he does not shrink from the process. Every- 
 where his aim is to find an unchangeable meaning for each 
 term. In jurisprudence, where haloes are not marketable 
 and atmosphere is not evidence, this tendency does more good 
 than harm. 
 
 It is easy to see what is lost, if we once assume that words 
 have no indefinable associations. The keyboard of expression 
 becomes limited, nor is the want made good by the barbarous- 
 sounding compounds of Bentham's later works. These have 
 been much mocked and deplored, but they may easily be 
 judged in a wrong spirit. He was only doing what men of 
 science do every day. He makes up compounds from Greek 
 and Latin and English to express some new conception or 
 branch of knowledge, which only thus comes to be realised. 
 If our schools of tropical medicine have not adopted the term 
 ' phthisozoics ' for the science concerned with the destruction 
 of noxious organisms, they might have done so. Sometimes 
 he unconsciously plays the part of an English Aristophanes. 
 Certainly his Greek words are not so bad as some of the English 
 equivalents that he sets beside them. ' Catastaticochrestic ' 
 looks well beside ' established-use-affording,' and ' ccenonesio- 
 scopic ' is better than ' communication-regarding.' Some- 
 times we have only the English. In his ' Chrestomathic 
 Instruction-table,' an interesting sketch of a pattern educa- 
 tion, comes the expression ' balbutient recollection-assisting 
 repetition-prohibiting.' This seems to mean that we must 
 not let a stammering child repeat his words as an aid to memory. 
 It has often been noted that not all Bentham's terms are of 
 this kind. A few, though ugly, have made themselves neces- 
 sary ; nay, they are the first clear expression of some new idea 
 which has gained a wider life through their use. The word 
 ' international,' by its very existence, has done something for 
 mankind; and so has 'codify.' 'Minimize' has become
 
 282 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 regular though learned English, while ' maximize ' has made 
 less way. Bentham's playful expressions, like ' virtuous 
 soup ' and ' plausible potatoes,' also express real ideas ; but 
 these are in the nature of epigram. ' Deontology,' 1 a needless 
 synonym for ethics, and the title of one of his books, is not 
 nearly so apt, and has not survived. 
 
 He does not hesitate to lay down the law about style, and his 
 canons are what would be expected. They are found in some 
 of the old rhetoricians, and in the plainer writers of our classical 
 age. A copious store of right words, clearness, simplicity, 
 condensation, and, lowest of all, mere melodiousness and 
 ' pronunciability ' these are the virtues, in order of merit, 
 of the sound writer. To the last, when he chose, he practised 
 them himself, and could turn out a vivid apologue or appeal, 
 abrupt and effective enough ; and his recorded conversation 
 shows the same qualities, being racy, explosive, whimsical, 
 and shrewd. It is a pity he had no better Bos well than Sir 
 John Bowring, the first editor of the Westminster Review, 
 which Bentham founded in 1824, and to which we return 
 hereafter (Ch. xin.). 
 
 Outside jurisprudence and political science Bentham exerted 
 no influence on foreign thought. At home, on the contrary, 
 he left a profound trace, and also gave endless provocation. 
 He was, at any rate, the cause of literature in others. John 
 Stuart Mill has left the clearest and fairest estimate of his 
 powers, which is all the more effective for being the view of 
 an escaped Benthamite. The most fallacious and unintelli- 
 gent of the attacks upon him may be read in Sartor Resartus, 
 where his creed is pelted with mud and called ' pig-philosophy.' 
 This unluckily is not the mere fatrasie of a humourist, but the 
 sincere outburst of a man who was unable by nature to form, 
 or even to value, a distinct philosophical conception. The, 
 mighty wave of Carlyle's influence, and its general beneficence, 
 need not be questioned ; but it may be asked which of the two 
 men did more for public justice and the wellbeing of the world. 
 Bentham's incapacity for certain of the higher reaches of the 
 human spirit was, no doubt, somewhat rigid. But he had a 
 single great idea, and cast it into a thousand fruitful forms. 
 His limitations are too plain to harm any mortal, and he had 
 in a high degree the philosopher's passion for truth and clear- 
 ness at all costs. In common life he was not a pedant, but 
 quite a human queer old patriarch, 2 warm-blooded and enter- 
 taining. He was no acrid ironbound doctrinaire like his 
 disciple James Mill, and was free from the painful self-centred-
 
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 ness and solemnity of Herbert Spencer. There is more human 
 nature in him than in William Paley l (1745-1805), the popular 
 divine, with whom he has some affinities more obvious than 
 deeply rooted. 
 
 IV 
 
 Paley is colder than Bentham, and has none of his initiative ; 
 he belongs as clearly to his own age as Bentham to the future ; 
 or rather he gives an epitome, in superior form, of a number 
 of current ideas that had long been converging towards the 
 kind of scheme that Paley constructs. His leading ideas are 
 derivative. 2 He is the great populariser of the mechanical 
 theory of the universe, with its ' argument from contrivance ' 
 on the one side, and its ' theological utilitarianism ' on the 
 other. 'I make no pretence,' he says, 'to perfect originality ; 
 I claim to be something more than a mere compiler.' He is 
 not a mere compiler, neither has he a really synthetic mind ; 
 he is an eclectic, with a passion for the assurance of logical 
 completeness. He pieces together, most honestly, the various 
 elements of his system into a single fabric, and throws upon 
 them so clear a daylight that the weaknesses in the stitching 
 do not easily escape notice. He was accepted in England as 
 the official defender of the faith and teacher of the young, 
 though he has had no lasting hold even upon insular thought. 
 One of his works at once became, and another still remains, 
 an official text-book in Cambridge, his own university. The 
 isolation of the English mind at this period could not be better 
 exemplified. The Moral and Political Philosophy appeared in 
 1785, between the first and the second editions of the Critique 
 of Pure Reason. Kant's great work was not to find, as a whole, 
 an English dress for half a century. But Paley, as we shall 
 see, can by no means be left out of the history of literature. 
 
 His other chief works, Horce Paulino?, (1790), A View of the 
 Evidences of Christianity (1794), and Natural Theology (1802) 
 are designed to form, witli the Moral and Political Philosophy. 
 a coherent scheme. Paley worked backwards, and in each 
 successive work (counting the Horce and the Evidences to- 
 gether), strove to make good the presuppositions of the last. 
 The keystone of the Philosophy is his famous ' otherworldli- 
 ness,' or theory of far-sighted self-regard, which rests the 
 ultimate inducement to virtue and deterrent from misdoing 
 upon the certainty of posthumous reward and punishment. 
 The credibility of revealed religion is thus taken for granted, 
 and his next two treatises are devoted to marshalling the
 
 284 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 historical and inductive evidence for the Christian religion, 
 the proof from miracles and 'undesigned coincidences,' and 
 the probability of just such a revelation being needed and 
 given as the world in fact received. But miracles, and the 
 reading of history they involve, he by no means presents as 
 proving the truths of natural religion : on the contrary, they 
 largely presuppose those truths. Accordingly, in his Natural 
 Theology, Paley, ' taking his stand on human anatomy ' princi- 
 pally, develops his conception of the universe as a well-con- 
 trived machine, set and kept going by the maker of whoso 
 existence it is the invincible proof. 
 
 It is not for us to examine these reasonings, which no doubt 
 now seem remote enough to most theologians. Paley's calcula- 
 tion of pleasures and pains, which links him with Bentham, who 
 has been called ' Paley minus a belief in hell-fire ' l ; his lack of 
 sense for the continuity of social institutions, which separates 
 him in his own age from Burke ; his conception of society as 
 fixed once for all, and of a single form of revelation as vitally 
 dissociated from all. others ; and his indifference to meta- 
 physics, are enough to antiquate Paley as a thinker. But a 
 curious distinctive view of human life and character comes out 
 in the course of his argument. He represents a type of mind 
 that we have all met and that seems likely to last long in this 
 country ; without vision, imagination or passion, but candid, 
 and determined to find no rest till it has found a comfortable 
 formula ; with its conclusions in favour of established ideas 
 and institutions unconsciously prejudged from the first. Such 
 persons are sometimes misnamed optimists, but Paley, their 
 type, is a strangely qualified optimist, 2 and does not like the 
 term. In his eyes this is by no means the best of all possible 
 worlds the truths of salvation might have been made much 
 plainer ; the beasts do devour one another, and though this 
 keeps down ' superfecundity,' it is not in itself productive of 
 a balance of pleasure, any more than wars and plagues. The 
 provision of venom for the serpent, though it may be useful 
 to himself, may well appear, as Paley oddly says, ' overdone.' 
 There may, all the same, if we only knew, be really a ' strict 
 system of optimism,' and in any case there is an immense 
 balance of happiness in the world, and the exceptions do not 
 bulk large enough to make it improbable that there is design 
 everywhere, and that the design is good. He rises to a real, 
 if rather complacent eloquence in his picture of the ' happy 
 living things ' in the enjoyment of their life ; and in Words- 
 worth and Coleridge, it must be remembered, we find something
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 285 
 
 of the same temper transformed into a sympathy and rapture 
 which ' no tongue can declare.' Even the sober Paley is here 
 on the brink of romance. But he soon pulls himself up. In 
 his shrinking from ' enthusiasm ' 1 he is of the eighteenth century, 
 for it was not only the men of science and sceptics, but the 
 whole settled English caste, scholarly, professional, and even 
 literary, that shared in that aversion. Paley goes to listen to 
 the Methodists, and does not doubt that their emotions do them 
 good, or that ' conversion ' is necessary for certain classes of 
 sinners, and that it is a real phenomenon ; but, when pressed, 
 he reduces it simply to a ' revolution of principle,' that is, of 
 behaviour ; and no one who is not a very great sinner need be 
 unhappy because he does not feel those emotions. 
 
 In one well-known passage this temper of Paley 's becomes 
 ludicrous. Christ, he says, was quite unlike the Methodists. 
 He was not marked by ' impassioned devotion ' ; there was no 
 undue ' heat in His piety ' ; on the contrary, He was a person 
 of much ' moderation and soundness of judgment ' ; and the 
 priceless ' negative qualities of our religion, as it came out of 
 the hands of its founder,' are thus highly authorised. Christ, 
 in fact (we might comment), is not an Oriental at all, but, 
 whilst undoubtedly divine, is on the human side a signally 
 judicious and unemotional dignitary, who has profited not a 
 little by a reading of Locke. Paley, it is fair to say, both in 
 his sermons and in the peroration to his Evidences, leaves this 
 point of view far behind, and is touched for once by the 
 sense of ' strangeness in beauty ' when he reviews the appeal 
 made by Christianity to the world, in contrast with its low 
 beginnings. 
 
 But the virtues of his regular style, which are remarkable, 
 reflect his steady temper. His writing is as clear as the water 
 standing in a tank. We see down to the hard metallic floor. 
 He took great pains over his form, and had much the same 
 ideals in that respect as Godwin, his mental opposite the 
 ideals of concise elegance and of a pointedness not over- 
 done, which belong to the barer Georgian prose. He writes, 
 however, better than Godwin, partly because he is a better 
 scholar, and partly because he aims at popularity. In fact. 
 Paley's purpose is that old one of the Royal Society, to be ' as 
 near the mathematical plainness as we can.' He has a plain, 
 undeniable, parsonic sense, and even raciness. His diction 
 is very free from pedantry ; it is rare that we come on such 
 terms as versute, prepollency, obmutescence, or prejudication. 
 In the preface to his Moral Philosophy he explains his prin-
 
 286 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 ciples of style, and he acts up to them. He wishes to be read ; 
 he will not practise the short, disjointed, fatiguing aphoristic 
 manner and here he is thinking perhaps of Montesquieu ; 
 nor will he refine overmuch, or deal in minute divisions and 
 distinctions, like a schoolman ; nor will he perplex his page, 
 like Grotius and the great legists, with technical ' forensic ' 
 matter, or traffic in ' cant ' unanalysed phrases such as 
 ' natural rights ' ; but will ' attemper ' the excellences of these 
 various methods, and come home to his hearers. In the same 
 way he advises the youthful preacher to be neither too vague 
 nor too minute, but to aim at a ' decent particularity.' The 
 result may be open to the reproach that Nietzsche cast against 
 John Stuart Mill, of an almost ' affronting clearness ' ; and to 
 refresh our conception of lucidity as a philosophic virtue we 
 must turn to Berkeley or to Schopenhauer. But Paley, if 
 not an artist, is a noticeably careful and pleasing craftsman in 
 prose, and the chainwork of argument in his Horce Paulina 
 shows him to be a master of exposition. 
 
 The most original and fertile disciple of Bentham, James 
 Mill 1 (1773-1836), is best remembered as a man of letters for 
 his History of British India (1817 ; see post, Ch. xxrv.) ; other- 
 wise he belongs chiefly to the history of English philosophy. 
 On psychology and political economy he left an imprint, and 
 he was not only a producer but a powerful agent in the dis- 
 tribution of ideas. He began his career as the lieutenant 
 and interpreter of Bentham, in the Edinburgh Review and 
 other journals. By his articles (1814) in the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica he put into wide circulation the reformer's legal 
 and political ideas. His rigid precision of language, and 
 incessant scrutiny of the sense of current terms, also served 
 him well in his Elements of Political Economy (1821), an 
 exposition of the thoughts of Ricardo, and a good example 
 of his simplifying and syllogistic method ; but with the decline 
 of the deductive school of reasoning its importance decreased. 
 His Analysis of the Human Mind (1829) was of great note in 
 the development of the associational theory, reverting as it 
 does to Hartley and going behind the assumptions of the later 
 Scottish writers. It is a very compact and lucid survey of 
 mental anatomy from the earlier standpoint of the school. 
 Mill shares with Brown, and possesses in even higher 
 measure, the passion for getting to the root of current words, 
 and, so to speak, deflating them of their vague and distracting 
 connotations ; a habit of mind, as already noticed, charac- 
 teristic of the English genius. Hence James Mill's style gives
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 287 
 
 a certain intellectual pleasure ; it is bare, dry, rigid, and simple, 
 running to short impatient sentences, as though he wished 
 to shake his reader by the shoulders. He failed, as we know, 
 wholly to shake the life out of his son, John Stuart Mill, 
 but did not leave him unscathed. The filial tributes in the 
 son's Autobiography, and in his edition (1869) of the Analysis, 
 remain the best and fairest description of James Mill's mind 
 and temper. In his view of human feeling and imagination, 
 and of all that ministers to them, he is the most impossible 
 of the doctrinaires in an age of doctrine. He went all the 
 lengths of his type ; but he was a soldier in the intellectual 
 war of much integrity and valour, and also a servant of public 
 justice. 
 
 By now the ideas of 1792 have been left far out of sight, 
 and the distance of Bentham and his group from the theorists 
 who were at war with Burke is significant enough. The pro- 
 gramme of legal, political and educational reform, working 
 through existing means, and sapping in a stubborn but orderly 
 way the fabric of abuses, has supplanted the doctrine of a 
 clean sweep. Advance is seen to be a slow affair, not to be 
 contrived by mere subversion. At the same time, the notion 
 of suddenly altering the individual for the better by the mere 
 removal of the institutions he has built around himself, has 
 become chimerical. He is still, it is true, regarded as primarily 
 a reasoning and calculating animal ; and the later, like the 
 earlier school, is seen at times heading straight for bankruptcy, 
 owing to an impoverished and unimaginative view of human 
 nature. This sort of rationalism is a legacy from the eighteenth 
 century a kind of wedge driven by it into the nineteenth. 
 Still there is a change of attitude ; man is seen to be a prudential 
 creature, following the least painful course of action, rather 
 than a rational one who balances the good and ill that he 
 may cause to his fellows. The old optimism is not extinguished, 
 but noticeably tempered. All this speculation, be it remem- 
 bered, goes on by the side of the poets and dreamers and observers 
 who, for their part, are meanwhile representing mankind 
 quite otherwise, but who appropriate the ideas of the philo- 
 sophers intermittently. Real life, and the human drama, 
 and also romance, will come presently into view again. But 
 one other theorist of great and not merely passing influence, 
 whose name has contributed an epithet to the language, must 
 briefly be noticed. 
 
 The first edition of the Essay on Population of Thomas 
 Robert Malthus 1 appeared in 1798, as a counterblast to the
 
 288 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 notion of Godwin and Condorcet that mankind, given certain 
 political changes, can advance at a hand-gallop towards per- 
 fection. But what, said Malthus, if man ' tends ' always to 
 multiply quicker than his food can increase in abundance ? 
 And what if he is only kept back by evil forces, by internecine 
 tendencies, by war and by his own vices, from thus reaching 
 famine-point ? If that greater evil is only staved off by these 
 lesser but still considerable ones, what of human perfecti- 
 bility then ? Already multitudes live all too near the ' margin 
 of subsistence,' and are kept from sinking below it by a 
 vicious circle of Poor Law charities. After launching this 
 missile Malthus travelled, and in 1803 produced an almost 
 wholly new edition of his book, not only stiffened by an array 
 of figures drawn from different countries, but modified by a 
 new and more hopeful consideration. Man, he now says, 
 can practise ' moral restraint ' ; he can remain celibate longer 
 and also chaste longer (or at any rate not less so than before) ; 
 and when he marries he can arrange, by the practice of self- 
 control, not to have too many mouths to feed. The fatal 
 law still remains which determines the difference between 
 the increase of population in a geometrical, and that of food 
 in an arithmetical ratio but this can be counteracted in part 
 by the self-discipline recommended. Then the operative will 
 be surer to secure due work and a due wage a prospect 
 that leaves much more hope for the Benthamite campaign 
 of law reform and reasonable education, seeing that there will 
 not be too many unfed persons to profit by the results. 
 
 All this, here most rudely summarised, rests, so the 
 economists tell us, on many unproved assumptions, the great 
 fundamental law of ratios itself being largely erroneous ; 
 while, again, so far as accurate, it was no discovery on the 
 part of Malthus, being forestalled, as he himself often pro- 
 claims, by earlier pens ; and was rather a restatement, in 
 telling form and in technical phrase, of things generally known 
 but little realised. Yet the name and some of the prestige 
 of Malthus have persisted. This is probably more due to his 
 shrewd and pointed presentment of the problem of the indi- 
 vidual, which is always with us, than to his doubtful general 
 proposition concerning the law of food-supply and popula- 
 tion. At the time, he found unexpected allies and adversaries. 
 He was hailed by philosophical Radicals for the reason given, 
 and also by pessimists who refused to see any hope of the 
 artisan exercising self-control, as well as by Tories, who were 
 relieved to think that his straits were his own fault after all.
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 289 
 
 Cobbett, on the other hand, continually jeered at ' parson 
 Malthus,' from the point of view of a hearty Briton who held 
 that the more healthy young people the better, with the New 
 World to fall back upon. Cobbett, however, cared little for any 
 reasoned theory : and it is of more consequence to remember 
 that Darwin received from reading Malthus the first impulse 
 to muse upon the struggle for existence. In his conception 
 of life as a state of somewhat gloomy probation, in which 
 personal success and comfort depend on self-control, Malthus 
 chimes in with Paley. 
 
 The writings of the chief economist of the period, David 
 Ricardo, 1 such as those on currency and banking, and the 
 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), belong 
 wholly to the history of his own science, and are poor in literary 
 or human interest. He is the great representative of his own 
 method, that of the rigid and acute deduction of consequences 
 from an abstract economic theorem, and is a close and 
 serried writer. He derives in part from Malthus, especially 
 in respect of his once -famous theory of rent, and was closely 
 associated with James Mill. Ricardo 's natural sympathies 
 with his brother-capitalists are not a little modified by his 
 league with the Radicals ; and he scornfully denies 2 that the 
 rights of property would be imperilled by a moderate exten- 
 sion of the franchise. He was largely responsible for formu- 
 lating the notion of the ' economic man,' who is guided by 
 pure profit and loss considerations ; and though he admits 
 that such a being is an abstraction, he leaves it to others to 
 make good the missing elements in their application to real 
 life. Indeed, these rival diagrams of human nature form the 
 chief interest of the economists to our chronicle. As it has 
 been well said of the earlier contrast between the pictures of 
 Godwin and Malthus : 
 
 The purely rational being, emancipated from sex and from death, 
 was confronted with a creature of appetite who lived only to eat 
 and to generate. 
 
 The name of Robert Owen, the once famed socialist, philan- 
 thropist, and founder of infant schools, finds even less place 
 in the chronicle of letters. His New View of Society (1813-6) 
 and his Book of the New Moral World are unoriginal in thought ; 
 he announces as a high discovery that the will is not free, 
 that rewards and punishments are wrong, that the child is 
 wholly plastic, and that reason and kindness are the means 
 of education. The interest of these tenets lies purely in Owen's 
 
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 290 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 practical application of them, which was remarkable ; and 
 his style is heavy, clumsy, and iterative, in spite of his high 
 importance in the history of social and co-operative effort. 
 He is named here, however, as a late survivor of the pure- 
 blooded doctrinaires. 
 
 It may seem wrong to speak of William Cobbett l (1763- 
 1835) in this chapter, for he has no doctrine ; or rather, he 
 runs through a whole course of doctrines, which are less the 
 fruits of thinking than of feeling, passion, and observation, 
 and in the end fall into a motley enough array. But Cobbett 
 in one way was a son of the Revolution, who only came after 
 many years to know his own parentage and found his feet 
 by revolting against the reaction in which at first he shared. 
 He became the most powerful and sonorous Radical of his 
 time, bellowing against privilege, and ' fundlords,' and judicial 
 inhumanities, and clerical reactionaries, and the neglect of 
 the poor, until he was the most popular and the best-hated 
 man in England. At the same time, he was leagues apart 
 from the theorists of the age preceding, and at many points 
 retained traces of the ' counter-revolution ' ; his material, 
 for one thing, being hard concrete facts and figures, and not 
 theory at all ; while, for another, he had no sentimental 
 abstract love for the people, from whom he sprang, but the 
 candid eye for their faults and brutal tongue of a fellow- 
 artisan. Like Arthur Young, he cares not for ideas but for 
 things ; and like him is a faithful and most vivid describer 
 of things ; although, once he quits the object, he can be, 
 unlike Young, wholly reckless in his inferences and applications. 
 As a writer, he is in a different class altogether from any of 
 the men of doctrine ; he excels them all, he excels every one 
 named in the present chapter and the last, save only Burke. 
 With Cobbett we get back to real literature. 
 
 He must have written as much as Defoe, and the two have 
 many of the same virtues plainness, brevity of phrase, instinc- 
 tive Tightness of diction and idiom, and the power of gaining 
 the ear of all who understand the English language. Cobbett 
 has a complete notion of the mind and passions of the ordinary 
 man, and of the words that will reach him quickest. Much 
 of his immense body of production is journalism, perfectly 
 designed for such a purpose ; but it is journalism continually 
 rising into art ; it is interspersed with sallies of invective, 
 description, eloquence, and even pathos. His best pages are 
 thus scattered far and wide, and he did not more than once 
 or twice in his Advice to Young Men, in the Rural Rides,
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 291 
 
 in his Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, make a real 
 book ; differing thus from Defoe, who has far more cunning and 
 economy in composition, though he is destitute of Cobbett's 
 cordial warmth and loudness, and is as secretive as Cobbett 
 is expansive. 
 
 The writings of Cobbett have never been collected, and there 
 is no recounting them here. He has taken care, in a hundred 
 dispersed passages, to be the leading authority for his own life, 
 and when he is telling of it he writes his best. His childhood, 
 his scanty schooling, the awakening of his spirit by the perusal 
 of A Tale of a Tub, his existence in an attorney's office and then 
 as a sergeant-major in New Brunswick, his first return home, his 
 accusations against his officers, his life as a bookseller in Phila- 
 delphia, his quarrels and libel actions, his second return in 
 1800, at once to be welcomed by the Tories and banqueted 
 by Pitt and Canning, but soon to quarrel with the Govern- 
 ment ; all this adventure he relates, unsurpassably in his 
 way, with all his brazen bravery of heart and tongue, his 
 invincible confidence, his cheerful and colossal one-sidedness. 
 In 1801 he published the Wwks of Peter Porcupine, in twelve 
 volumes, which contain his first ten years' work as an author 
 tracts aimed against his military superiors, against Priestley 
 and Paine, against his adversaries in America. A Bone to 
 Gnaw for the Democrats and A Kick for a Bite are exemplary 
 titles. He is already as rabid as he will ever be, which is much 
 to say ; but he will soon be as rabid on the other side. His 
 so-called Tory phase comes to an end ; and for complex and 
 still disputed reasons 1 partly conviction, partly self-interest, 
 partly pique Cobbett becomes an Anti-Pittite, and com- 
 mences professional reformer. His letters to Lord Hawkes- 
 bury in 1801, and to Addington, give a premonition of this 
 change. Next year he founds the famous journal, Cobbett's 
 Weekly Political Register, which lasts until 1835 ; an amazing 
 enterprise, carried through mostly single-handed, amidst all 
 manner of trials and obstacles, and the source, above all 
 else, of his ultimate power in the country. He also started, 
 in 1806, Cobbett's Parliamentary History, which was carried on 
 partly by deputy. But the Register is the hunting-ground 
 for many of Cobbett's opinions and his reminiscences, and it 
 took up his best energies for nearly twenty years. Most of 
 this time, but for his two years' sojourn in Newgate, he spent 
 on his estate at Botlcy, which he has many times delightfully 
 described. He wrote his popular and amusing though highly 
 dogmatic English Grammar (1818), and another sketch this
 
 292 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 time a favourable one of Tom Paine. A Year's Residence 
 in the United States is the journal of his third visit (1817-18), 
 and, though ostensibly a ' guide to farmers,' and concerned 
 with planting, sowing, and selling, includes some of his liveliest 
 divagations on American topers, on Hampshire parsons, and 
 on the Reform agitation at home. With Cobbett anything 
 can lead to anything ; and his odd invective against potatoes, 
 considered as a fashionable food, easily carries him away into 
 a scold against that other superstitious habit of the British 
 race, its admiration for William Shakespeare. 
 
 The last fifteen years of Cobbett's life (1820-35) were not less 
 stirring and combative. He held the pen for Queen Caroline ; 
 he quarrelled with O'Connell ; he was tried in the King's Bench 
 for encouraging arson by his writings, and got off; in 1831 
 he advocated the creation of new peers, and sat, somewhat 
 ineffectually, in Parliament. He journeyed in England, 
 Scotland, and Ireland, and his Rural Rides (1830) and his 
 Tour in Scotland are the result a most living chronicle. He 
 threw off works like Cottage Economy and Advice to Gardeners ; 
 but his Advice to Young Men and Young Women (1830) was his 
 greatest, while his virulent, vivid, and partisan History of the 
 Protestant Reformation in England (1824-5) was probably his 
 most popular book. In his last years he produced a Legacy 
 to Labourers and a Legacy to Parsons ; for Cobbett's loves 
 and hatreds knew no flagging while the breath was in him. 
 
 The Advice to Young Men and Young Women is one of the 
 most telling of English lay sermons ; it is also a mirror of 
 Cobbett's heart and creed, and one of the prime authorities 
 for his life. The writing is as personal in its way as De 
 Quincey's or Lamb's. Cobbett has a faithful and jealous 
 memory for the least incidents of his life ; he still is young in 
 heart himself, though nearing sixty ; he is closer than any- 
 body to common, fighting, working, multiplying humanity. 
 He does not ' only talk of population.' He loathes Malthus, 
 and man-midwives, and inoculation, and many other necessary 
 or useful things. He is defiantly unromantic, and ' deprecates ' 
 the reading of romance, and in the next breath he tells, in- 
 comparably well, the romance of his own courtship. He is 
 resplendently cheerful and abominably healthy. His morality 
 is tough, sound, coarse, and fibrous ; and it is never quite 
 commonplace, owing to his sharp observation and rough comic 
 insight. He may not be ' spiritual ' or ' distinguished ' ; it 
 would take chapters to say what Cobbett's work is not ; but 
 here, at any rate, is certainly literature.
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 293 
 
 Unawares, Cobbett often reminds us in his counsels of the 
 old manuals of behaviour, which were common in late Renais- 
 sance times and were a kind of poor relation of the more 
 exalted ' courtesy-books.' He does not, of course, try, like 
 the author of the Galateo, to form a gentleman, a thoroughly 
 presentable person ; but simply a young farmer, tradesman, 
 or professional man ; and he is not first of all concerned with 
 his manners. He tells him how to bear himself in the suc- 
 cessive and primary relations of life as a ' youth,' a ' lover,' 
 a ' husband,' a ' father,' and a ' citizen.' The ' Advice to a 
 Lover ' tells us much about Cobbett himself. It is blunt 
 enough, but shrewd and warm-blooded in temper. He despises 
 a ' provident frigidity,' and young men who fear to take risks. 
 Love may sometimes be a fatal passion, and in any case is a 
 thing lying beyond reason ; but anything is better than 
 ' bargain and sale,' or marrying for money and ambition. 
 Why, Buonaparte mated for ambition, and behold the fruits ! 
 Cobbett dearly loves to prophesy by way of hypothesis, and 
 here he exceeds himself ; had Buonaparte married ' the poorest 
 and prettiest girl in all France,' he ' would in all probability 
 have now [1830] been on an imperial throne, instead of being 
 eaten by worms at the bottom of a very deep hole in St. 
 Helena.' This is something for Hampshire lads to think upon, 
 before they proceed to learn the eight requirements demanded 
 by Cobbett in a wife. It is enough to name his racy reasons 
 for the last of these, namely beauty, omitting his praises of 
 industry, frugality, good temper, and the like. A beautiful 
 woman, for one thing, is less likely to ' fall,' having so many 
 more admirers than a plain one. She is likelier to keep her 
 man faithful ; she costs less to dress than a plainer mate ; 
 and, moreover, the troubles of life are so many, and are such 
 ' powerful dampers of the passions,' that it ' requires something, 
 and a good deal too, to keep ' the husband ' pleased with his 
 bargain.' The last and most inimitable reason is this that 
 whereas only a brute will slight the wife whom he has chosen, 
 because of her want of looks, but whereas men in general do 
 4 hardly act with justice in such a case,' the best course is ' to 
 guard against such a temptation,' and ' not to marry any one 
 you do not think handsome.' O shades of the makers of 
 E pipsychidion and the Ode to Melancholy \ This contemporary 
 of yours know r s something that you do not know, though of 
 your heavens and hells and purgatories he has less than no 
 conception ! But then he is not your contemporary : he is 
 really of the century before you ; and how cheering for us, in
 
 294 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 the year 1830, to be able to call once more for justice to the 
 eighteenth century, and to propose its health, coupled with 
 the name of Mr. Cobbett ! Yet again, he has his own kind 
 of romance : for what else is his picture of his inner conflict 
 between his loyalty to ' the poor little brunette in England,' 
 his future wife, and the charm of the fair young New Brunswick 
 lady, a ' bouquet of lilies and roses, with her long light hair 
 twisted nicely up ' ? With her he had ' jaunted,' and with 
 her he might have stopped, lost to fame. But he stuck to 
 home, and duty, and happiness, and persecution, and glory ; 
 and otherwise, he adds, ' I, unapplauded, unfeared, unenvied, 
 and uncalumniatcd, should have lived and died ' in the 
 backwoods of New Brunswick. This it is to have a good 
 conscience, and to be Cobbett. 
 
 He is a self-satisfied and thorough Tory in matters domestic, 
 and leagues away from Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 Women have a sacred right to a most patient hearing. There 
 are, indeed, duties on both sides. Let the young husband 
 stay at home, avoid ' sotting clubs,' and mind the baby, heed- 
 less of ridicule, in consideration of ' what a young woman gives 
 up on her wedding day ' ; but let him insist on ' dutiful deport- 
 ment,' and let him ' control if necessary ' the wife's tongue, 
 and also any inclination to form ' female comites ' of sym- 
 pathisers ; but let him decide all things of moment, ay, and 
 decide them right. If his wife is unfaithful, let him be utterly 
 merciless, and show her the door and here Cobbett gets red, 
 and British, and rhetorical, the very pattern of the man 
 described by Heine, who saw him at a famous meeting at the 
 ' Crown and Anchor ' in 1827, and detested him. Yet his 
 testimony to his own wife is a noble and a touching one ; and 
 the long, rolling sentence, poured out in one breath, may be 
 quoted for its own sake, and also as showing, perhaps, Cobbett's 
 English at its acme : 
 
 Love came and rescued me from this horrible slavery ; placed 
 the whole of my time at my own disposal ; made me free as air ; 
 removed every restraint upon the operations of my mind, naturally 
 disposed to communicate its thoughts to others ; and gave me for 
 my leisure hours a companion, who, though deprived of any oppor- 
 tunity of acquiring what is called learning, had so much good sense, 
 so much useful knowledge, was so innocent, so just in all her ways, 
 so pure in thought, word, and deed, so disinterested, so generous, 
 so devoted to me and her children, so free from all disguise, and 
 withal so beautiful and so talkative, and in a voice so sweet, so 
 cheering, that I must, seeing the health and the capacity which it
 
 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 295 
 
 had pleased God to give me, have been a criminal, if I had done 
 much less than that which I have done ; and I have always said, 
 that if my country feel any gratitude for my labours, that gratitude 
 is due to her full as much as to me. 
 
 In his talk upon education Cobbett often recalls Locke, 
 although he has a different class of pupil in mind, and thinks 
 of the training of farmers, not of leisured gentry. But both 
 of them love detail, and write from experience, and are sound 
 naturalists when studying the young male animal, and are 
 kindly and humane. Cobbett, however, is to the last more of 
 a child himself than Locke can at any age have been. He has 
 a robust and sound view of what the young citizen ought to be 
 like. He wants a nation of big men, fighters who have grown 
 up from a lusty, turbulent infancy ; who have lived from the 
 first on sweet air, and exercise, and plain food ; who have not 
 been driven to books, or debarred from them ; who have 
 grown up not at school but at home, if possible with a boister- 
 ous, ingenious, affectionate sort of William Cobbett for a 
 parent ; who have learned to like and watch animals, and 
 know some arithmetic, geography, and English history ; and 
 have shunned immoral books like Tom Jones, and not 
 attended to the poets, who are too often mere abjects and 
 placemen. Like all educators, Cobbett, in drawing out his 
 programme, leaves us with a clear picture of himself. This 
 programme is very far from that of the male and female 
 pedagogues ! of the preceding age. 
 
 With all his effrontery and iterations, his continual charging 
 at the same red rags, Cobbett appeases us at last by his humanity 
 and his good English. He is a man and not, what Lamb called 
 Godwin, a ' professor ' ; there is none of the maddening frigid 
 drip of doctrinaire talk in his pages. He is of the brown earth 
 earthy, and his joyous shouting pilgrimage along its high roads 
 is refreshing to watch. He has ridden through England, 
 filled with blind wrath against ' fundlords,' but with an eye 
 that feasts on the country, on the formation of clouds and the 
 flight of starlings, when he looks up from his scrutiny of the crops 
 and piggeries. The Rural Rides are full of this kind of charm, 
 and of such glimpses of country manners as meet us in the 
 older novelists. In Warminster market he revels in ' the very 
 finest veal and lamb that I had ever seen in my life, and so 
 exceedingly beautiful, that I could hardly believe my eyes.' 
 He falls in with a gipsy girl, who could have told his fortune 
 had he been thirty years younger ; or explains to a farmer 
 the etymology of Beaulieu ; and all amid the bluster of a
 
 296 PROSE OF DOCTRINE 
 
 thousand tirades. We hear a man speaking who has worked 
 with his hands, and has hedged and hoed peas, and has sat in 
 messrooms, and in prison, far from wife and children : one 
 of .whom, on hearing his father was in Newgate, ' to disguise 
 his tears, and smother his sobs, fell to work with his hoe, 
 and chopped about like a blind person ' ! He is a big farmer 
 with a genius for transparent expression, which is the medium 
 of his affections and hatreds and experiences. 
 
 He has also the sense of beauty, though little of what is 
 called poetry, in his composition. The beautiful is one of 
 his appetites, which are numerous and honest, and to satisfy 
 it is not in his eyes a literary affair at all ; but the result is 
 literature. 
 
 Standing on the hill at Knighton, you see the three ancient and 
 lofty and beautiful spires rising up at Leicester ; you see the river 
 winding down through a broad bed of one of the most beautiful 
 meadows that man ever set his eyes on ; you see the bright verdure 
 covering all the land, even to the tops of the hills, with here and there 
 a little wood, as if made by God to give variety to the beauty of the 
 scene, for the river brings the coal in abundance for fuel, and the 
 earth gives the brick and the tile in abundance. 
 
 This is unaffected enough, it is central English of any period ; 
 but the thing could not, or would not have been, and was not, 
 written a hundred years before ; people did not enjoy these 
 things, it seems, in these ways in George the First's time ; and 
 Cobbett, so often cited as an arch-Philistine, has therefore his 
 share in the so-called Time-Spirit, and is a congener of Shelley 
 and Carlyle, with a plain manner.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 I. Repute of Scott's verse ; his temper towards books ; his conception of 
 romance, at successive periods. 
 
 II. Interest in German ; Lenore. The ballad since Percy : Herd, Pinker- 
 ton, Ritson. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Distribution of poems in tho 
 Minstrelsy. Scott's procedure (avowed, unavowed, and imputed) with his 
 texts. 
 
 III. ' Imitations ' and ' legendary poems ' distinguished ; Scott's varieties 
 of style. His companions : Leyden ; Tales of Wonder ; George Ellis. 
 
 IV. The ballad between 1802 and 1832 : Jamieson, R. H. Evans, Mother- 
 well. 
 
 V. Transition of Scott from ballad to lay ; metres used : romance stanzas, 
 octosyllabics, ChristaM measure. 
 
 VI. Lays : Lay of the Last Minstrel, Mannion, Lady of the Lake, etc. 
 
 VII. Lyric and miscellaneous verse ; different levels of style and excellence. 
 Underestimated greatness of Scott as a lyrist. His Elizabethan inspiration. 
 
 VIII. James Hogg, ' The Ettrick Shepherd ' : ballads, songs, The Queen's 
 Wake : Kilmeny. 
 
 THERE is an inclination to think of Scott's poetry l as an out- 
 worn commodity, however suitable it may remain for tho 
 young. Does he not say that Byron beat him at his own 
 game of telling adventures in verse ? And where, it is asked, 
 is BjTon now ? Who reads, for pleasure, Mazeppa or The 
 Bride of Abydos ? And in what limbo, then, are Kokeby and 
 The Lord of the Isles ? Scott, with his modesty, with his 
 cheerful admissions, seems to provoke such questions ; he 
 talks of his verse, and of its popularity, and of the decline of 
 that popularity before the fame of Byron, much in the tone 
 of a decent merchant, who has disposed of so many hogsheads 
 of good wine or butter ; but the brand is going out of use, and 
 a rival house holds the market. Just, he says, as Mr. Wilkes 
 explained ' to his late majesty ' that he himself was never a 
 Wilkite, 
 
 so I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself from having been at 
 any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it was in the 
 highest fashion with the million. 
 
 297
 
 298 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 And he is equally free from over-confidence as to the fate of 
 his stories ; he is nearer to Chaucer than to Shakespeare in 
 his attitude to literary fame. He has none of the lonely 
 assurance of the ' artist ' ; and he dwells in no ' tower of 
 ivory/ but in a sociable, well-lit upper room, looking out upon 
 the market-place, where the humours of men and women 
 move before him as in a theatre. The Waverley Novels have 
 never wanted for critics. Their light-heartedness, their freedom 
 from missionary ferocity, caused Carlyle, shallowly, to judge 
 them shallow ; and their language has often been stigmatised 
 as careless and transient. That Scott is greater than anything 
 he wrote, is also easy to say, and the truth. 
 
 But then it is very high praise. Scott's own judgment, 
 even of his poetry, is not a final one ; and his prose, in its 
 variety and inequality of craftsmanship, has seldom been 
 sufficiently studied ; it is a most accurate register of the 
 fluctuations in his sympathy and insight, in his humour and de- 
 scriptive skill. To note, both in his verse and his prose, where 
 the colours are indeed faded, and where they remain fast and 
 bright, is a delightful inquiry. Scott, moreover, is so great 
 and good an entertainer, that we have to be on the alert for 
 the moments when he is something more than that and rises 
 into high, at times into consummate, literature. 
 
 But authorship, no doubt, is not the word for the temper of 
 Sir Walter Scott ; it better suits that of Southey, who lived 
 in books and for their sake. In Scott life and books inter- 
 penetrate ; their call to him is a harmonious one ; and together 
 they make for him a third thing, which may be described as 
 experience. Ballads and tales of the border he learned when 
 young, and often by ear, not from print. He rode, and kept 
 lively company, and read human nature, including that of 
 lawyers, in undress. He was crossed in love, saying little ; 
 he spun a wide and a tough web of friendship with persons 
 of all ranks ; he founded a family, and, full of the romance of 
 the soil, planted himself upon it ; he became a master of 
 humours, chronicle, anecdote, legend, dialect, costume, law, 
 and genealogy. He read enormously, not in order to be 
 learned, but to lengthen backwards his vivid perception of 
 the present ; seemingly at random, but unconsciously in the 
 service of his future craft ; so that when the time came, his 
 pen went with a mysterious ease and speed, and his memory, 
 not verbally very exact, but of the strongest kind, gave him 
 back for use all its appropriations. His notes show the stores 
 of documents that he devoured, and of true tale or legend
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 299 
 
 that lie behind his inventions. He was certainly the most 
 widely read and the most learned of all British romancers. 
 
 In his first period of authorship, lasting about ten years 
 (1796-1805), Scott translated, edited, and imitated poetry, 
 without writing much of his own that is good ; in his second 
 period (1805-14) he truly wrote poetry ; while in the last 
 (1814-32) he wrote chiefly prose, and a good deal of verse at 
 intervals. The edition of Dryden, and some other prose, 
 falls into the second of these stages. All the while, whichever 
 medium he used, he was at his life's work of romancing. 1 Even 
 in his reviews, lives, and histories ; in his accounts of the 
 British novelists, or of Gulliver and of Dryden's heroic plays, 
 and in Tales of a Grandfather, he is back again with romance. 
 The word is always in his mouth, and its meaning changes 
 for him from one period to another. It was to acquire further 
 meanings beyond and outside Scott's range ; in Coleridge, 
 in Keats, in Peacock, we find them ; but he leads us close up 
 to those meanings, and it is well to pause with Scott and clear 
 our notions of the term. At first he understood by romance 
 the spirit and form of Percy's Reliques, especially of the 
 narrative popular ballad of the Border Chevy Chase or 
 Kinmont Willie and also of its German and English follow- 
 ings. Next, it came to cover the mediaeval lays or tales, in 
 verse or prose, whether French or British, of which he has 
 left his views in his Essay on Romance. Going to these lays 
 and ballads as a pattern, and embodying several ancient 
 elements, such as the feeling for chivalry or for the super- 
 natural, Scott invented a lay of his own, which also brings 
 in the stirring life of real but remote history, marching to the 
 tune of pipe and drum, rather than the life of fairyland or the 
 greenwood as accompanied by the professional twangling 
 harp. Then, after 1814, he turned also to prose, wrote his 
 novels, and so enlarged the conception of romance for good 
 and all, without limit, and bequeathed this conception to 
 Britain and to Europe, to Balzac and Hugo and Merim6e. And 
 here his labour was twofold. First, he brought in the material 
 of which prose was the proper form ; the life and humours 
 of modern Scotland, and of the Border, and of England in 
 part as well ; with all the associated web of legend, chronicle, 
 superstition, custom, law, and dialect. Next, in Ivanhoe, he 
 swung back for a time to the Middle Ages, already otherwise 
 presented by him in his verse, and he portrayed them in his 
 prose tales. Thus was the scope of the historical novel 
 completed. The story of Scott's art is the story of this
 
 300 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 evolution of his idea of romance, under his hand, in its succes- 
 sive and accumulating stages. Accumulating ; for what he had 
 once won he never again let go. The Robin Hood ballad comes 
 back again in Ivanhoe, and the gallant sentiment of The 
 Lord of the Isles remains unweakened in one of the last of the 
 novels. Castle Dangerous. The same code of honour, the ballad 
 pattern of story, are found, too, in The Bride of Lammermoor, 
 curiously interveining the more courtly and romantic artifice 
 and the comedy. Conversely, the illustrative love of the 
 Minstrelsy and of Scott's poems forecasts in a score of ways 
 the subjects and temper of his novels. ' Have they forgotten 
 the prose of the Minstrelsy ? ' was the question of one who 
 listened to the eternal discussion as to the ' author of Waverley.' 
 We shall return to the easy, shifting way in which he spoke of 
 that romantic temper, which is common to all his works. 
 
 II 
 
 For twenty years Scott watched human life and manners 
 without much idea of putting them on record. Experience 
 sank too deep for immediate expression. He sought in books, 
 and in the verse that he read or heard recited, for his topics 
 and poetic form, and has told us the story of his beginnings. 
 In 1795, when he was twenty -four, the refrain of Burger's 
 Lenore, as translated by William Taylor, rang in his ears and 
 moved him to emulation. He printed next year his own 
 version of that poem and of Der Wilde Jager, without attracting 
 notice. He plunged into German, a tongue only just begin- 
 ning to be known ; and relates how the lecture of the aged 
 Mackenzie in 1788 on German literature gave a first impulse 
 to the study. He read Die Rauber, and translated Gotz von 
 Berlichingen under the title of Gotz icith the Iron Hand (1799). 
 But his heart was with the native ballad ; and in 1802 came 
 the first two volumes of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 
 the third following in the next year. This, the second great 
 monument of British ballad-learning, appeared thirty-seven 
 years after Percy's Reliques, \\ hich is the first. Professor Child's 
 English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98) is the third ; 
 and the fourth can only be raised by some scholar and 
 man of letters who shall critically judge the whole material 
 thus provided. 
 
 The value of the Border Minstrelsy can be seen after a glance 
 at the fortunes of ballad study in Britain since Percy's day. 
 These are sketched by Scott himself in his Remarks on Popular
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 301 
 
 Poetry, written long after, in 1830 ; an account in which he 
 also brings the history up to the time of writing. Hia 
 review is well supplemented by that in William Mother- 
 well's introduction to Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern 
 (1827) ; between them they represent the best opinion of the 
 day upon ballad-learning. Percy's example had soon been 
 infectious. 
 
 In 1769, four years after the first edition of the Reliques, 
 had come David Herd's 1 Antient and Modern Scotish Songs, 
 Heroic Balkids, etc. ; the ballads included, as well as the songs, 
 are of price, and this unostentatious and faithful garland, 
 which reappeared much increased in 1776, is called by Scott, 
 justly and briefly, ' the first classical collection of Scottish 
 songs and ballads.' Herd does not doctor his texts, either for 
 good or ill, and does not forge ; thus contrasting with the 
 impudent but learned antiquary, John Pinkerton, 2 whose 
 Scottish Tragic Ballads (1781, enlarged in Select Scotish Ballads, 
 1783) include some barefaced concoctions. To these the author 
 soon confessed, under the healthy and relentless criticism 
 of Joseph Ritson, who must be called the founder of the 
 scientific study of popular poetry in Britain. 
 
 Ritson's ferocity in dispute is that of a bygone time, and 
 reminds us of Scioppius or Salmasius. In his treatment of 
 Percy and Warton there is a touch of the insanity to which he 
 finally succumbed. The former, he insinuated, had really no 
 * manuscript ' at all behind his Reliques ; but had this been 
 so, the good bishop would have to be credited with the genius 
 of a Chatterton. Ritson found inaccuracies in Warton, and 
 treated him as a pure humbug. He was unsparing in his 
 comment on Johnson and Steevens, as editors of Shakespeare. 
 Some of his peculiarities were more amiable ; he was a vege- 
 tarian, he used and defended an absurd spelling of his own 
 (by no means ' phonetic '), and latterly he became a rabid 
 Jacobin, and dated his letters by the calendar of the French 
 Republic. But Scott's amused regard for Ritson was justified ; 
 and what is stranger, his liking was returned. Ritson un- 
 earthed and edited with great accuracy many invaluable 
 things. He was the first to print some of those famous lyrics, 
 written in the time of Edward i., which confirm the renewal 
 of English song. His Robin Hood (1795) is a collection 
 of good versions both of the better and inferior ballads 
 on the subject. His ' Scottish ' songs, his fairy tales, his 
 Bibliographica Poetica, all have their worth. With Herd he 
 is the first of the ever-increasing band of true investigators
 
 302 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 of our ballad-lore. They bridge the years between Percy 
 and Scott. 
 
 The Minstrelsy 1 contains about one hundred and one distinct 
 poems or fragments, divided by the author into three classes. 
 These are ' historical ballads/ ' romantic ballads,' and ' imita- 
 tions of these compositions by modern authors/ The first kind 
 
 relates events, which we either know actually to have taken place, 
 or which, at least, making due allowance for the exaggerations of 
 poetical tradition, we may readily conceive to have had some 
 foundation in history. 
 
 The romantic ballads include 'such legends as are current 
 upon the Border, relating to fictitious or marvellous adventures/ 
 The third class ' are founded upon such traditions, as we may 
 suppose in the elder times would have employed the harps of 
 the minstrels.' This is clear enough ; but some further dis- 
 tinctions will be of use, and the contents of the Minstrelsy may 
 be approximately redistributed as follows : 
 
 1. There are sixty-two folk-ballads of the true kind. Many 
 of these are ' historical/ including a number that Scott was 
 the first to publish, such as The Lochmaben Harper and Rose 
 the Red and White Lily. Others, which are ' romantic/ the 
 world owes to him also, including The Wife of Usher's Well 
 and Clerk Saunders. Ballads that are neither ' historical ' 
 nor yet supernatural, for instance Lord Thomas and Fair Annie, 
 he does not group separately : they are not ' such as we may 
 readily conceive to have had some foundation in history.' 
 But these often belong to various familiar, widespread motives 
 of the ballad-muse, out of place and time. 2. Of the remain- 
 ing thirty-eight poems some are anomalous, like The Tica 
 Corbies and Fair Helen, being lyrical in cast. There are also 
 at least ten true old folk-lyrics or lyrical scraps, such as The 
 Lyke-wake Dirge and Lesly's March ; a small but costly 
 garland. 3. The ' modern imitations ' contain about twenty- 
 seven lyrical or narrative poems. Amongst these are three 
 palmed off on Scott by Surtecs as ancient, a song and some 
 five ballads of Scott's own, and five contributions by Leyden ; 
 the rest being to the credit of Robert Jamieson, Kirkpatrick 
 Sharpe, Lewis, Morritt, Colin Mackenzie, Marriott, and Miss 
 Seward. 
 
 But for Scott, some of the best popular poetry in Europe 
 would almost certainly have been lost, for the reciters were 
 often old and the versions only lingered in remote places. In 
 his Preface he briefly explains the advantage he enjoyed from
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 303 
 
 the help of Herd, from the recitations of Mrs. Brown of Falk- 
 land (which reached him deviously through Lord Woodhouse- 
 lee), from ' Glenriddell's manuscripts,' and from other sources. 
 He also speaks of his procedure with his texts, which of late 
 (1912) has been much canvassed : 
 
 No liberties have been taken, either with the recited or the 
 written copies of these ballads, farther than that, where they dis- 
 agreed, which is by no means unusual, the editor, in justice to the 
 author, has uniformly preserved what seemed to him the best, or 
 most poetical, reading of the passage. . . . Some arrangement was 
 also occasionally necessary, to recover the rhyme, which was often, 
 by the ignorance of the reciters, transposed, or thrown into the 
 middle of the line. With these freedoms, which were essentially 
 necessary to remove obvious corruptions, and fit the ballads for the 
 press, the editor presents them to the public, under the complete 
 assurance that they carry with them the most indisputable marks 
 of their authenticity. 
 
 Scott often states that he has compounded the text of a par- 
 ticular poem from two or more versions, or has taken one 
 version as a basis and mended it from others. But he left no 
 apparatus criticus, so that we can only tell just what he did 
 when the MS. versions that were before him chance to have 
 been saved. His language does not hide, though it hardly 
 brings out, the fact, which the lay reader is slow to appreciate, 
 that a poem in the Minstrelsy may often be something that no 
 man had ever before heard, or read, or uttered, in the form in 
 which it is printed. It is now known that Scott went much 
 further in plastic treatment than he felt it needful to explain. 
 He made almost as free with his material, at times, as Burns 
 with the vernacular songs. If he thinks he can write better, in 
 the ballad-spirit, than the texts before him, he alters ; not, 
 indeed, leaving much out, but filing and burnishing, changing 
 and inserting words and phrases, and adding stanzas of his 
 own. The Gay Gosshawk, for example, is made up in this way, 
 and shows the freedom of his dealings, both of the kind that he 
 avows and of the kind he does not. The Lochmaben Harper, 
 Katharine Janfarie, and many more, are thus altered, though 
 in a less degree ; and illustrations would be endless. One 
 significant one may be given. Scott found that one of his 
 texts of Sir Patrick Spens mentioned Norway as the destina- 
 tion of the ship, and also that the ' Maid of Norway ' was 
 acknowledged heiress to the throne of Scotland in the year 
 1285. He persuaded himself that ' the cause of Sir Patrick 
 Spens' voyage ' may well have been to bring back this princess,
 
 304 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 of whom his texts said nothing. He put her into the version 
 he published, so completing one of the most beautiful stanzas 
 in any ballad : 
 
 To Noroway, to Noroway, 
 
 To Noroway o'er the faem ; 
 The king's daughter of Noroway, 
 
 'Tis thou maun bring her hame. 
 
 In doing this, Scott no doubt felt, and truly, that he was 
 carrying out the practice of ballad-makers ; he joined the 
 ranks of the unknown authors, and worked in their way, chang- 
 ing where he was moved to do so. He became for the moment 
 one of these lawful but unregistered sons of the Muse. He did 
 not wish to make a canonical text of a ballad, for there is no 
 such thing. He did not wish to save all the traditional versions 
 for the sake of literary scholarship or of folklore students. 
 He wished to carry on Percy's work, both by fostering the 
 love of popular poetry, and by producing the best version 
 that his material and his poetic tact together enabled him to 
 produce. A better poet than Percy, he had a better claim to 
 manipulate. 
 
 What he cannot be shown to have done, and what the world, 
 without damning proof, will never believe he did, was to foist 
 upon it a ballad that he knew to be an imitation as old, genuine, 
 and popular. Like all men who are found not to have made 
 a full confession, he has imaginary sins laid to his charge. His 
 good faith in his handling, for instance, of the ballad Auld 
 Maitland, 1 has been questioned. 
 
 But we are convinced that the case has broken down. At 
 times, indeed, he is easy-going in his judgment of the ' literary 
 imitation ' ; charing, for instance, at the rancour and punctilio 
 with which Ritson prosecutes the faults of Percy. But his 
 view is clear enough. Speaking of Frere's translation of the 
 Battle of Brunanburh into fourteenth - century English, he 
 observes that ' where the license is avowed, and practised 
 without any intention to deceive, it cannot be objected to 
 but by critical pedantry.' He was incapable of a huge 
 practical joke like Prosper Meri moo's La Guzla, which was 
 given out as translated ' from the Illyrian.' There is a great 
 gulf between this kind of act and the utmost of Scott's 
 unacknowledged modifications of actual ballads. It is a pity 
 he left no apparatus, for then no questions could have arisen. 
 The ' imitations ' in the Minstrelsy are put into a separate 
 section and signed.
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 305 
 
 in 
 
 This third section comes as an anti-climax after the treasures 
 of the first two. Here we are in the company not only of 
 Scott himself and of Leyden, but of Lewis, and of Colin Mac- 
 kenzie, and of Miss Seward. But if we read it along with the 
 Tales of Wonder, we appreciate the atmosphere in which Scott 
 was working. It is that of the poetic studio, in which a band 
 of enthusiasts are trying to copy old designs, or to work in 
 their spirit, and are gleefully deceiving themselves as to the 
 likeness. Scott himself was not thus deceived, and points 
 out an essential distinction : 
 
 I may hint at the difference, not always attended to, betwixt 
 legendary poems, and real imitations of the old ballad. The reader 
 will find specimens of both in the modern part of this collection. 
 
 He cites his own Glenfinlas and Eve of St. John as ' legendary ' 
 poems ; the ' third part ' of Thomas the Rhymer, labelled 
 ' modern,' is another example, and indeed most of the imita- 
 tive section is of this kind : 
 
 In numbers high, the witching tale 
 
 The prophet pour'd along ; 
 No after bard might e'er avail 
 
 Those numbers to prolong ; 
 
 though Scott does prolong them ; and in the second part of 
 the same tale, ' altered from ancient prophecies,' he imitates 
 the old style : 
 
 There shall the lion lose the gylte, 
 And the libbards bear it clean away ; 
 
 At Pinkin Cleuch there shall be spilt 
 Much gentil bluid that day. 
 
 In his poetic diction Scott was often distracted from the 
 pure sources by the mimicries of German or British enthu- 
 siasts. He did not always see the difference of styles, though 
 most of his own touches in the text of the Minstrelsy are in 
 perfect keeping. But he wrought, as if impartially, now in 
 the true and now in the artificial manner. Sometimes, in his 
 subsequent lays, he was to give a very echo to the old authentic 
 strain : 
 
 Bewcastle now must keep the hold, 
 
 Speir-Adam's steeds must bide in hall, 
 Of Hartley-burn the bowmen bold 
 
 Must only shoot from battled wall : 
 And Liddesdale may buckle spur. 
 
 VOL. I. U
 
 306 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 This is as late as 1813, from The Bridal of Triermain, and it 
 is quite different from the regular manner of the lays. Of 
 that, at its worst, there are many anticipations in the Cadyow 
 Castle of ten years earlier : 
 
 Glencairn and stout Parkhead were nigh, 
 
 Obsequious at their Regent's rein, 
 And haggard Lindesay's iron eye, 
 
 That saw fair Mary weep in vain. 
 
 Scott was thus the life and soul of a band ; and his work 
 as editor and poet is so bound up with that of his companions, 
 that the names of two or three among them will be little inter- 
 ruption to this chapter. The most vivid figure and the greatest 
 scholar of his circle was certainly John Leyden, 1 whose Lord 
 Soulis, The Gout of Keeldar, The Mermaid, and other pieces, 
 appeared in the Minstrelsy. Leyden, even when he tries to 
 imitate the ballad, only produces the ' legendary ' poem ; 
 hardly a single verse has the popular stamp ; either the 
 multiplied rhyme, or the extra dash of the picturesque, or 
 the modern-lurid, or something else, interferes. But this is 
 no censure upon Leyden's stories ; in the best of them there 
 is a devilry, a savage gallop, a touch of the unheimlich, which 
 is hardly present in Scott's own. Leyden gets nearest to the 
 ballad-tune in such a verse as this : 
 
 Swift was the Cout o' Keeldar's course 
 
 Along the lily lee ; 
 But home came never hound or horse, 
 
 And never home came he. 
 
 But this is not characteristic. He may or may not have read 
 The Ancient Mariner, but in The Elfin Knight (contributed to 
 Tales of Wonder) he is for a moment of the same world, which 
 is not ours : 
 
 And light and fair are the fields of air 
 
 Where he wanders to and fro ; 
 Still doom'd to fleet from the regions of heat 
 
 To the realms of endless snow. 
 
 Leyden was himself what he wished to be, a Border ballad- 
 hero. His wild generous courage, his oblivion of obstacles, 
 distance, hardship ; his grating oddity and loudness, his 
 essential veracity and force, are well chronicled by Scott. 
 He was full to the lips, like his friend, of the historic, legendary, 
 and supernatural lore of his country, and had the scholar's 
 memory and precision besides. A mighty linguist, and an 
 Orientalist who aspired to rival Sir William Jones, he spent
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 307 
 
 eight years in the East, translating not only out of but into 
 many tongues, leaving behind him a mass of erudite material, 
 and dying at thirty-six. Leyden should himself be made the 
 subject of a martial or adventurous lay. His poetic gift, 
 outside of his ballads, was rather of the glossy classical order. 
 But his versions are full of spirit, and like Campbell, he could 
 attain a rushing rhythm which is better than his diction. It 
 is heard in his lines (1803), too little known, on The Battle of 
 Assay e : 
 
 Ah, mark these British corses on the plain ! 
 
 Each vanish'd like a star 
 
 'Mid the dreadful ranks of war, 
 
 While their foeraen stood afar, 
 And gaz'd with silent terror on the slain. 
 
 Of one volume, in which he himself had no share, but which 
 connects itself with the ' imitations ' in the Minstrelsy, Scott has 
 left a genial and amused account. This is the Tales of Wonder 
 (1801), edited by his friend Lewis, in which we seem to hear the 
 death-rattle of the older mystery-mongering verse. The assault 
 on the nerves was continued later and with more genius by 
 Maturin in prose. Coleridge had already transplanted terror 
 and marvel into the inner places of poetry, but Lewis went 
 on piling horrors so much beyond the verge of the grotesque, 
 that he saw the joke and produced writings of the Ingoldsby 
 type as if in self-defence. This note is audible in the Tales 
 of Wonder, and in the much derided but absurdly efficient 
 Alonzo and Imogene. Lewis himself parodied this produc- 
 tion ; needlessly enough, when the original ran thus : 
 
 His vizor was closed, and gigantic his height, 
 
 His armour was sable to view ; 
 All pleasure and laughter were hush'd at his sight ; 
 The dogs, as they eyed him, drew back in affright ; 
 
 The lights in the chamber burned blue ! 
 
 This is the spirit of The Castle of Otranto, facing out its own 
 nonsense with a ' dry grin.' There is a blunt and vulgar but 
 undoubted hold on rhythm ; and we know from Scott that 
 Lewis was ' a martinet for the accuracy of rhymes and numbers,' 
 as some of his letters testify. Lewis's other verses, though 
 worthless, are symptomatic. There are translations, after 
 (Jray, of Norse poems ; couplets after Parnell ; and lyrics 
 from Goethe. The Gay Gold Ring is his best original piece, 
 and is, indeed, no laughing matter. The dead maiden comes 
 back to reclaim a ring that had belonged to another lover, 
 and wins it from the possessor at the price of three nights'
 
 308 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 stay ; but each time her touch chills him to palsy. In the 
 same volume are some of Scott's early ballads, and Southey's 
 Old Woman of Berkeley. This and Southey's other bogle- 
 pieces are the best things of the school, and the best that he 
 did (see Ch. xiv.). Scott and most of his group often face 
 the supernatural in a pleasant, antiquarian spirit, which meets 
 us again in his poems and stories. They relish rather than 
 dread the unseen ; we seem to hear them crying ' Capital, 
 capital ! ' over Clerk Saunders or The Wife of Usher's Well. 
 This is not quite the mood of Coleridge or Maturin. 
 
 The kindly Lewis ministered to a passing taste for horrors ; 
 but another friend, cherished by Scott for his wit, conversa- 
 tion, and learning, left a deeper mark. George Ellis had begun 
 with his free cheerful contes, the Poetical Tales of Sir Gregory 
 Gander ; joined the makers of the Rolliad and Probationary 
 Odes ; changed his views, accepted Pitt, whom he had attacked, 
 and helped Canning and Frere with The Anti- Jacobin. He 
 was first of all a satirist ; but concurrently a mediae valist 
 no bad combination. In 1790 he produced Specimens of the 
 Early English Poets, and in 1805 the more noteworthy Specimens 
 of Early English Metrical Romances, in which the English 
 counterparts of the Breton lays, as well as Amis, and Guy, 
 and Bevis, and many more were made known not only to 
 scholars but to ' gentle readers.' The Specimens are a mixture 
 of dissertation, quotation, and half -humorous summary. 
 Ellis faces romance a little in the spirit of Sir Thopas, but his 
 feeling for its beauty pierces through his gentlemanly sardonic 
 style. The book helps to explain the impulse that encouraged 
 Scott to pass from the ballad to the lay. 
 
 IV 
 
 Before describing this change, it is in place to notice the 
 stimulus to ballad study that was given by the Minstrelsy 
 during Scott's lifetime. 1 Alongside of him, but unaware of 
 his labours, another inquirer, Robert Jamieson, the Moray- 
 shire antiquary, had also been reaping. Jamieson had not 
 Scott's genius or luck, but was in method more scientific. 
 In 1799 he 
 
 set about collecting, in the exact state in which they are now 
 recited in the country, such popular ballads and songs as were still 
 deemed to merit preservation, but had escaped the researches of 
 former compilers.
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 309 
 
 Jamieson, like Scott, came on the track of Mrs. Brown of 
 Falkland, and found that she not only remembered the ballads 
 she had heard in childhood, but sometimes compared, and per- 
 haps insensibly combined, different versions of the same poem : 
 a classic example of the way in which ballads are transmitted, 
 and modified, and at last captured in writing. These and 
 other treasures he put in order, scrupulously noting any piece- 
 work of his own. When he came to compare notes with 
 Scott, they found that they had discovered some of the same 
 things. But their friendship is a model for rival scholars. 
 They co-operated, along with Henry Weber, in the Illustrations of 
 Northern Antiquities (1814). Jamieson had already opened up 
 further a vast field, the comparative study of ballads, by the 
 translations from the Danish in his Popular Ballads and Songs 
 (1806). He saw the analogies between the Scottish and the 
 Scandinavian poems, and revealed the precious Kjcempeviser, 
 or heroic ballads collected in the sixteenth century, to the 
 British reader. He also wrote imitations of his own : one of 
 them is in the Minstrelsy ; they are over-studious and bristle 
 with Scots. 1 The confessed imitations of the folk-ballad by 
 James Hogg, chiefly to be found in his Mountain Bard (1807), 
 are of much greater mark, and will be noticed presently. 
 
 The scientific temper of Ritson and Jamieson, and the 
 opposite impulse of piecing, ' restoring,' and imitating whether 
 from good motives or bad the popular poetry, grew side by 
 side, and came into natural conflict. The orthodox view is 
 well stated by R. H. Evans in 1810, in his revised edition of 
 the Old Ballads originally issued by his father, Thomas Evans, 
 the Strand bookseller, in 1777 and again in 1784. Evans 
 the son was able to draw on the Roxburghe and Pepys 
 collections, had a strict view of the sanctity of texts, and 
 deprecated the practice of altering them silently : 
 
 I contend that when such alterations are frequent, systematic, 
 and unnoticed, the poetry of different ages is confounded ; the 
 reader is in a state of perpetual delusion. 
 
 This is an artistic as well as a scholarly objection, and tells 
 against both Percy and Scott. Evans, however, was prob- 
 ably thinking of dishonest ballad-mongers. In 1810 appeared 
 Allan Cunningham's fabrications, already mentioned, in the 
 Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song ; and, sixteen years 
 later, his Songs of Scotland. These provoked the honest wrath 
 of one of the most meritorious of all the explorers, William 
 Motherwell, whose Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (1827),
 
 310 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 contains not only several new ballads and versions, and thirty- 
 three ballad-airs, but an excellent history of the progress of 
 the study for a century past. There are many other publica- 
 tions, such as those of John Finlay (1808) and of George Kinloch 
 (1827) ; but they cannot be detailed here, and it is plain that 
 Scott had lived to see his work bear fruit. In 1830 he writes 
 that during his own life ' the taste for the ancient ballad has 
 more than once arisen and more than once subsided.' Many 
 of the harvesters were themselves moved to melody ; and the 
 confessed imitations of Jamieson and Finlay contrast with 
 the impudent inventions of Cunningham and Peter Buchan. 1 
 
 We have Scott's word for it that he quitted the ballad-form, 
 about 1804, largely for metrical reasons, and because the 
 fashion was changing. He had not yet written one piece that 
 was excellent. N.ow he passed from the ballad to the lay ; that 
 is the critical event in his life as a poet. For in doing this 
 he not only invented a kind of minor species, or satellite, of 
 the epic, but also found out his genius for lyric, which is much 
 greater than his genius for either lay or ballad ; he became 
 the greatest of our lyric poets between Blake, or Burns, and 
 Shelley : Coleridge, who wrote less that is lyrically perfect, 
 not being excluded. But on this golden vein Scott hardly 
 struck at once ; and meanwhile can be traced, in any of his 
 rhyming stories, the steps by which he passed from ballad to 
 lay and came to build on the various tunes, mediaeval and 
 other, that long had haunted and sung in his brain. To the 
 end he wavered between several styles and measures ; and 
 the narrative convention he finally produced, however noble 
 and gallant, was not, like his lyrics, inimitable ; for it left its 
 mark on his disciples, and also on a finer species of romance 
 than Scott could himself imagine. 
 
 The Lay of the Last Minstrel was meant to be a ballad for 
 the Minstrelsy, but it grew too long for insertion. It was 
 composed in the true spirit, in order to satisfy an old passion ; 
 ' for no other reason than to discharge my mind of the ideas 
 which from infancy have rushed upon it.' But in writing it 
 Scott found that he wanted a freer march and versification- 
 than those of the ballad ; something less cramping and more 
 spacious than had served for Cadyow Castle and The Eve of 
 St. John, and truly fitted for a ' romance of Border chivalry 
 and enchantment.' The ballad was pent in too strait a
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 311 
 
 stanza ; the reins were pulled too often to allow of an un- 
 checked onset in the verse or a clear gallop against the shield 
 of the distant enemy. 
 
 The ballad measure itself, which was once listened to as to 
 an enchanting melody, had become hackneyed and sickening, 
 from its being the accompaniment of every grinding hand-organ ; 
 and besides, a long work in quatrains, whether those of the 
 common ballad, or such as are termed elegiac, has an effect upon 
 the mind like that of the bed of Procrustes upon the human body ; 
 for as it must be both awkward and difficult to carry on a long 
 sentence from one stanza to another, it follows that the meaning 
 of each period must be comprehended within four lines, and equally 
 so that it must be extended so as to fill that space. 
 
 What Scott sought was therefore not so much a better or a 
 truer diction, as a measure, or measures, that would give scope 
 for a rhymed long sentence and allow the concerted, rapid 
 movement of heroic narrative. Thus in his form he was 
 making partly for the epic ; but in doing so he adopted in turn 
 several distinct measures which had belonged historically less 
 to pure epic than to adventurous romance. In recounting 
 these, the whole remaining series of Scott's rhymed stories 
 after 1804 may be considered together : Marmion and The 
 Lady of the Lake, Rokeby and The Lord of the Isles, with their 
 appendices Harold the Dauntless and The Bridal of Triermain. 
 
 First, he drew on some of the stanzas that Chaucer had 
 derided ; and he gave a louder ring, and a rapider, to their 
 faint simple chime than can ever be heard in Sir Cleges or Sir 
 Percevale. The octosyllabic rhyme is once, twice, or thrice 
 repeated crescendo, until the note is lowered, but not too much, 
 and the stanza brought to for a moment, by the line of six, 
 which breaks and falls with a never-failing spell. A new set 
 of eights then begin, whose wave is likewise broken by a new 
 line of six, rhyming with that of six which came before. Well 
 delivered, this effect of alternate rush and fall would charm 
 even in an unknown language. Scott's stanzas must be 
 shouted on a moor to do them justice. It is well that they go 
 so fast, or we should stop and think of the style, which is not 
 always quite pure : but its faults are at least not due to that 
 infantile element, which Scott's friend, Ellis, had marked down, 
 not without affectionate satire, in the originals. 
 
 The rhythm is one that can be kept going a long while : it 
 will do not only for rare effects, but for the tissue of the story. 
 It suits crises and battles, and all kinds of preparation and
 
 312 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 expectancy, and the catalogues of warriors and their birth- 
 places. It occurs, with many variations, in the Lay, and much 
 oftener in Marmion. In The Lord of the Isles and The Bridal 
 of Triermain it rises to a music of ampler soar and stoop, which 
 foretells and influences that of Mr. Swinburne's consummate 
 romance, The Tale of Balen. 
 
 The lists with painted plumes were strown, 
 Upon the wind at random thrown, 
 But helm and breastplate bloodless shone, 
 It seem'd their feather'd crests alone 
 
 Should this encounter rue. 
 And ever, as the combat grows, 
 The trumpet's cheery voice arose, 
 Like lark's shrill song the flourish flows, 
 Heard while the gale of April blows 
 
 The merry greenwood through. 
 
 More often, Scott went back to the simple rhymed octo- 
 syllables of a hundred romances, French and English, and 
 managed to give them a cadence of his own despite the long 
 intervening history of the metre. It prevails in The Lady of 
 the Lake and Rokeby. The separate couplets are strongly 
 marked, yet easily linked together, and they run quicker than 
 with any other of our poets, unless we except Burns. The 
 style associated by Scott with this measure, as indeed with 
 the others, varies greatly. Under the spur of a warlike or 
 heroic scene, the words run gallantly enough, and call to 
 battle : 
 
 Douglas leans on his war-sword now, 
 
 And Randolph wipes his bloody brow. 
 
 This seems an easy way of writing, but no one had thought 
 of it before. It was the strain that fired the ruminative 
 Wordsworth for once to do the like, and to outdo it, in his Song 
 at the Feast of Brougham Castle. Yet it is perhaps chiefly in 
 this measure that we find masses of the strange conventional 
 writing, in its way as artificial as Pope's, into which Scott 
 so easily slipped, and which had, in its turn, to be put away 
 by the romantic poets in their search for a pure style. 
 
 But Isabel, who long had seen 
 Her pallid cheek and pensive mien, 
 And well herself the cause might know, 
 Though innocent, of Edith's woe, 
 Joy'd, generous, that revolving time 
 Gave means to expiate the crime. 
 
 Scott can cover acres of paper with this kind of thing, in 
 his desire for popularity and facility. He can also do perfectly
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 313 
 
 well without it ; in the introductions to Marmion, and else- 
 where, he often uses the same measure in a finer, quieter, and 
 truer way ; and his causerie in verse, ranging from the high 
 to the familiar style, has the same kind of variable but assured 
 charm as the prose of his letters and journals ; nay, stands out 
 against much of his other poetry as those natural, moving 
 passages of prose do against the high-pitched scenes of literary 
 dialogue in Ivanhoe. The famous lines on Pitt, or those on 
 Dryden, which come in these interposed ' introductions ' that 
 are addressed to Stewart Rose or to James Skene, have a sort 
 of Latin purity and sonority, and could serve, each of them, as 
 an inscription ; as the words written for one of Stevenson's 
 lighthouses in 1814 Pharos loquitur do so serve ; and here 
 is an impeccable example of Scott's diction : 
 
 Far in the bosom of the deep, 
 
 O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep ; 
 
 A ruddy gem of changeful light, 
 
 Bound on the dusky brow of night, 
 
 The seaman bids my lustre hail, 
 
 And scorns to strike his timorous sail. 
 
 Of the monotonous fluency and wastefulness that beset the 
 metre, when used for a long poem, Scott was from the first 
 well aware ; and the wish to escape them led him to the third 
 of his metrical devices. He had heard Christabel recited, 1 about 
 the year 1802, long before its publication ; and it seemed that 
 the freedoms of the measure, with its unlimited modulations 
 of the four-beat line, were just what he wanted, to give variety 
 to his couplets or stanzas. He owns his debt to Coleridge, whose 
 spells he seems to have thought could be had for the asking. 
 And even though his verse gains in glow and pace by the use 
 of them, he is led largely by the metre itself to attempt all 
 kinds of diablerie and subtlety for which his more downright 
 and daylight genius but poorly fitted him. The echoes of 
 Christabel in the beginning of The Lay of the Last Minstrel 
 show the difference when compared with the original. No 
 doubt the omen-haunted castles of either poet would never 
 have existed but for those foolish, melodramatic ones of Ann 
 Radcliffe and her followers. But Coleridge moves within the 
 unholy circle, and his fancy is at once the lord and servant of 
 its own spell ; whilst the fancy of Scott, ordinarily at work 
 on healthy matters of this world, is merely forcing itself, at 
 the appropriate hour of night, to feel the well-known influences 
 of that hour, and to make us share the feeling in question. 
 He does not go on long at such work, but seems to fly back with
 
 314 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 relief to the spirit of raillery and common sense, and the 
 revulsion can be remarked even in his prosody. The jigging 
 impudent couplets that open Harold the Dauntless or The Bridal 
 of Triermain are an anticipation of Miss Kilmansegg or The 
 Ingoldsby Legends ; they carry the homelier strain of Christabel 
 a step farther ; perhaps they owe something to the coarse but 
 not ineffectual tunes of Lewis in his Tales of Wonder ; in any 
 case, such work constitutes a third instrument, or implement, 
 of Scott's versecraft, to which he is apt to turn when he has 
 in hand some grandiose piece of wizardry. 
 
 VI 
 
 In his rhymed romances these styles and measures are 
 variably and studiously intermixed. These poems were not, 
 like some of the Waveiiey Novels, struck off in a heat ; ' verse,' 
 says Scott, ' I write twice and sometimes three times over.' 
 This carefulness does not make the verse better than the novels, 
 for he was often more of an artist when he was taking less 
 trouble, that is, when he was not writing against the grain or 
 purely for the market. In general, the lays are much feebler 
 as stories than the novels. Indeed, only two of them, The 
 Lady of the Lake and The Lord of the Isles, are well told. In 
 the others, the interest does not rest upon the story, but on 
 the episodes and digressions, on incidental pageant and motion 
 and colour. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, says the author, 
 ' the description of scenery and manners was more the object 
 than a combined and regular narrative ' ; and Marmion is 
 faulty in conduct, not only because it turns on the unchival- 
 rous and ' commercial ' crime of forgery, which Scott was 
 sorry to have introduced, but because Marmion himself is a 
 villain drawn from the stock of paste-board, puppet Satans, 
 kept by the inflammatory novelists of the last age ; the scowl, 
 the fellness, and, worst of all, the glimpses of pity and virtue 
 nothing is spared us. The merit of the poem, as of Rokeby, 
 lies in those elements which it shares with the historical novel, 
 and much is to be forgiven for the canto on Flodden Field. 
 Indeed, for actual fighting, for duels to the death, for down- 
 right taunting and ' fly ting,' Scott's verse is a better vehicle 
 than his prose, just as it is for rapid description of scenery. 
 For dialogue and the exhibition of character his prose has a 
 capacity of which his verse does not even give an inkling. 
 Rokeby is another confused story, with another theatrical 
 buccaneer, Bertram of Risingham ; it would have been better
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 315 
 
 told in prose. But there is always some want of zest about 
 Scott's pictures of the Civil War : in Woodstock the personages 
 are lively enough, but the great public quarrel leaves us cold. 
 The real beauty of Rolceby is in its landscapes, in its roll of 
 musical Yorkshire names, and in its lyrics. 
 
 In The Lady of the Lake, which is on the old topic, common 
 to ballad and romance alike, of the monarch wandering in 
 disguise, the interest honestly depends on the story and on 
 the traits of chivalry and delicacy that spring out of it. The 
 visions of Allan Bane and the rites that precede the sending 
 round of the Fiery Cross are kept well in their place, and do 
 not encroach on the main subject, which is an idyllic thing of 
 pure beauty and drawn straight from native tradition. Scott 
 could scarcely have told the tale better in prose ; it contains 
 some of his rarest lyrics, including the Coronach. The style 
 is usually direct and pure ; and the disguised King James the 
 Fifth must be forgiven for having for once called a tartan a 
 ' bosom's chequered shroud.' Ellen Douglas, touched with 
 the ' indignant spirit of the North,' is not unlike one of 
 Wordsworth's maidens, but is not the worse for the absence of 
 any official certificate that she has undergone the ' education 
 of nature.' The secret of the king's identity is well kept from 
 her, and also from the reader ; it is let out in a coup de theatre 
 at the close. In the first draft of the poem, however, it was 
 detected by a 'friend of powerful understanding,' unidentified, 
 to whom Scott read the work aloud. 
 
 The Lord of the Isles, founded on the chronicles of the Bruce, 
 came out in the same year as Waverley. Scott wrote it under 
 the sense that the star of Byron was too strong for him, and 
 also with his mind heavy over the loss of a good friend ; the 
 ending is hasty for so intricate a story. But one scene is worthy 
 of the best sagas, in its pictures of a quarrel between four walls, 
 and in the nicety of its chivalrous portraiture. Bruce enters 
 the halls of his enemy, Lorn, in disguise, claiming shelter as a 
 guest. When he discovers himself, bloodshed is threatened, 
 and those present group themselves and speak. The tension, 
 the swell and momentary ebb of passion, and the cross-currents 
 of motive in the contending parties, are shown to perfection. 
 The two chiefs with their adherents ; the Lord of the Isles, 
 Ronald, who is the betrothed of the daughter of Lorn, but who 
 goes over to the guest ; the English knight, Argentine, who 
 is drawn with special liking, and the arbitrating churchman : 
 all these are distinguished, more broadly and quickly of course 
 as befits a lyric narrative, but with the same kind of skill and
 
 316 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 historical instinct, as the personages who surround Queen 
 Mary in The Abbot. The later meeting of Bruce and Ronald 
 with the pirates, and the bloody little tussle in the ' dreary 
 cabin/ rank with the best things of the kind in the literature 
 of adventure, or in the Waverley Novels themselves, of which, 
 in a certain sense, The Lord of the Isles may be called the 
 earliest. 
 
 VII 
 
 Besides a sheaf of miscellaneous verse, occasional, con- 
 ventional, or jocose, there remains the properly lyrical poetry 
 of Scott ; in keeping which to the last we have, in his own 
 phrase, ' reserved, like the postboy, a trot for the avenue.' 
 Many of these poems are inserted amidst the prose or verse of 
 the narratives, and are thus, like the songs of the old play- 
 wrights, to be read in their setting rather than in any ' golden 
 treasury.' The chanted scraps of Davie Gellatley or of Madge 
 Wildfire are of this kind ; they can stand and survive without 
 the scenes where they occur, but those scenes cannot so well 
 stand or survive without them : and the same is true of the 
 lyrics of Edmund of Winston in Rokeby ; Brignal Banks, 
 and ' A weary lot is thine,' and Allen-a-Dale. Such lyrics are 
 often in a different style from the surrounding narrative. 
 Had Scott been an Elizabethan, and the evidence of his 
 authorship obscure, treatises might have been written to 
 show that the writer of these songs, on internal evidence, was 
 an interpolator of genius ; nay, that the same hand could not 
 have written 
 
 With desperate merriment he sung, 
 
 The cavern to the chorus rung ; 
 
 Yet mingled with his reckless glee 
 
 Remorse's bitter agony, 
 
 and also the song that ensues : 
 
 O, Brignal Banks are wild and fair, 
 
 And Greta woods are green ; 
 And you may gather garlands there 
 
 Would grace a summer queen. 
 
 This uncertainty and inequality extends, no doubt, to the 
 songs and lyrics themselves ; and it is idle to complain that 
 Scott seems unaware of the difference between his nobler and 
 his cheaper music between County Guy or the Pibroch, and 
 things like Ahriman and Zernebock. Of such differences he 
 is as little aware as Wordsworth ; thinking, no doubt, equally
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 317 
 
 little of them all, as Wordsworth thought equally well, it 
 might seem, of all his productions ; but misled, where he was 
 misled, in a different way. Where Scott plunges into a false 
 kind of writing, it is the fault of literature, of his reading, of 
 his resolve to be a romantic, an exotic, to the last drop of his 
 blood, no matter at what outlay of sham eastern or sham 
 northern sentiment. His mistakes and occasional dullnesses, 
 like some of Chaucer's, are often due to his instinct for being 
 representative for giving utterance to every new feeling, and 
 painting every sort of national life, of which he has read. If 
 the material for understanding the East, or the Eddas, was 
 still imperfect, that was not his fault ; but it may be doubted 
 if he had much sympathy for either in his temperament. What 
 Zernebocks would we not throw to the lions for more of his 
 jovial ditties like 
 
 Our vicar still preaches that Peter and Poule 
 
 Laid a swinging long curse on the bonny brown bowl ! 
 
 Of these ditties The Foray (1830) is the latest and by no 
 means the worst. Scott remains, we said, the chief of our 
 lyrical poets, or of our singing poets, between Burns, or Blake, 
 and Shelley. He has more song in him than Wordsworth, 
 though he has none of the power requisite for creating a great 
 ode or a high metaphysical lyric ; and more than Coleridge, 
 in the proper sense of the term song ; for the supreme musical 
 artistry and instinct of Coleridge are used more for lyric 
 narrative than for sheer song, in which his successes though 
 great are few. Scott would have been a great poet if he had 
 left only his songs ; he would have been a less alloyed poet 
 had he written nothing else. The best of them excel all the 
 rest of his verse, however good ; their regular, average perform- 
 ance is above that of his other verse ; as for the worst in either 
 kind, that does not exist for us at all, so that the comparison 
 may be spared. Many amongst them, of a less inscrutable 
 perfection than the best, are like little lays within the long 
 ones, carrying on their sentiment in the shape of a minstrel's 
 interlude, either with a galloping, abducting kind of tune, 
 like Young Lochinvar, or with all the forms of romance, like 
 Rosabelle. Such pieces range from the lyric of narrative to 
 that of situation, or of pure feeling. One large group is loud 
 and cordial and joyous ; either with chivalric gaiety, such as 
 ' Waken, lords and ladies gay ' and ' Anna Marie ' ; or with 
 swinging daredeviiry, like the dactyls of ' March, march, 
 Ettrick and Teviotdale ' ; or the voice is lowered in the wary
 
 318 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 excitement of the deerhunt, as in the magical song in The Lady 
 of the Lake : 
 
 It was a stag, a stag of ten, 
 
 Bearing its branches sturdily ; 
 He came stately down the glen, 
 
 Ever sing hardily, hardily. 
 
 It was there he met with a wounded doe, 
 
 She was bleeding deathfully ; 
 She warned him of the toils below, 
 
 0, so faithfully, faithfully ! 
 
 Well as Scott could draw out such scenes into a chapter of 
 careful prose, he had in his lyric form a more precious and 
 trustworthy vessel for their essential emotion and breathless- 
 ness. And in this special sort of power, the power of giving 
 the true passion of external things battle, sport, adventure, 
 it must be said that lyric since his day has been greatly wanting. 
 Even in the verse of Peacock, which comes nearest in ring, 
 there is always a touch of travesty, of counter-romance, as if 
 the first fine ardour 'were waning. But, with all their delicate 
 charm, these joyous pieces of Scott's can hardly rank in per- 
 fection of workmanship, or in power to move, with those that 
 are elegiac or sorrowful. In the great Pibroch, founded on 
 a Highland tune, there is the wail of the pipes amidst the 
 swell of anger. Such verse as The Maid of Neidpath, which 
 tells a true story, has the kind of melody, real enough but 
 almost common property among the poets, which is com- 
 manded at will by Thomas Moore. But ' Where shall the 
 lover rest ? ' and ' A weary lot is thine, fair maid,' the latter 
 of a more popular, the former of a far more cunning rhythm 
 
 There thy rest shalt thou take, 
 
 Parted for ever, 
 Never again to wake, 
 
 Never, never ! 
 
 Eleu loro, etc., Never, O never ! 
 
 these are only overpassed by the two companion yet con- 
 trasted funeral songs, which are still greater miracles of avoid- 
 ance, soaring as they do so far above that level of spirited, 
 notable diction which Scott forged for his lays, but which is 
 fatal, somehow, to the utterance of the best that is in him. 
 Proud Maisie is acknowledged to remain as high above all 
 praise or analysis, giving as it does in its sixteen lines the 
 essence of all that needs to be said about the dying of a young 
 girl, as the Coronach is beyond all parallel in its expression 
 of the tribal soul laid bare in public sorrow over the passing
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 319 
 
 of the chieftain. Of the same etherealised diction there are 
 signs in many other lyrics of lofty temper and pure execution, 
 from County Guy to ' When the glede 's in the blue cloud,' 
 and from Brignal Banks to ' Hail to the chief who in triumph 
 advances.' And, when it comes, it is felt that the spirit of 
 song is not forced by the will or conjured up by incantations, 
 but descends on the poet, and he has only to keep still for fear 
 of marring its message. 
 
 In some of the best of these pieces, such as are spoken by 
 Gellatley or by Madge Wildfire, the starting-point is clearly 
 traditional poetry, or the songs of the older dramatists, as 
 the case may be ; and this is usually a fortunate beginning 
 for Scott, and sets him in the right key of diction. It may be 
 thought that he is at his best when he builds upon such themes 
 but also rises out of sight of them, just as Coleridge, in the 
 Ancient Mariner, works on the popular ballad and transcends 
 it. Proud Maisie is itself a poem with a like origin. Scott's 
 procedure, in the sixty-third chapter of Waverley, with the 
 old snatch ' They came upon us in the night,' which he pieces 
 out with rl^mes of his own in the macabre style : 
 
 But follow, follow me, 
 
 While glow-worms light the lea, 
 
 I '11 show ye where the dead should be 
 
 Each in his shroud, 
 
 While winds pipe loud, 
 
 And the red moon peeps dim through the cloud, 
 
 this procedure is analogous to that of Burns when he touched 
 or added to Scottish melodies, or to his own in the Border 
 Minstrelsy. In all this we see what is meant by ' romanticism,' 
 in its connection with ' romance.' For romanticism takes 
 romance, with all its themes and moods, and re-creates it, 
 almost out of knowledge ; making sometimes a sophisticated 
 product, far inferior to the original ; but often also a thing 
 of equal but different value ; as an elaborately beautiful 
 woman may resemble some simpler ancestress, not less fair ; 
 may, after all, owe her rarest touch to that consciously in- 
 herited likeness, however it be overlaid and disguised. 
 
 Now and then Scott reproduces, knowingly and in pleasant 
 exercise of power, the actual sound of his originals most 
 commonly, of the ballads which to the last rang in his brain. 
 
 Merry it is in good greenwood, 
 
 When the mavis and merle are singing, 
 
 But merrier were they in Dunfermline grey, 
 When all the bells were ringing.
 
 320 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 There are six whole poems, like Alice Brand, which have the 
 regular language and trappings of the folk-ballad, including 
 its refrain ; but these are in the nature of formal imitations, 
 and the true virtue of such attempts is scarcely to be seen in 
 Scott, or until the appearance of Rossetti. It is worth adding, 
 however, that Scott's lyrical power lasted late, though after 
 the failure of his fortunes it may have come more painfully. 
 In 1818 his full vigour is heard in ' Donald Caird's come again ' ; 
 and his only personal verses, The Dreary Change, are dated 
 a year earlier. The poet did not die in him : for just as many 
 a typical scene of the lays was taken over and transplanted 
 in the firm earth of the novels, so through his prose are heard 
 lyrical snatches to the last, like golden fragments of youth. 
 
 Whilst searching for a form, Scott momentarily tried the 
 drama. 1 The subjects of Halidon Hill, Auchindrane, and the 
 rest, resemble those of the lays and novels. But he could 
 not find a style, and fell into the easy loose-girt one of Fletcher, 
 the master of the silver age before it was tarnished, or into 
 the slower, more positive one of Massinger. The one suits 
 generous and adventurous topics, the other is more reflective. 
 Sometimes his echoes have a curious fidelity. The same 
 knack, which is not unlike that of Charles Lamb, is seen in 
 the pleasant and innocently mischievous mottoes from ' Old 
 Plays/ or from 'New Plays,' which head many chapters in 
 the novels, and are interspersed amongst real quotations. 
 That prose, however, is a better medium for Scott than dramatic 
 verse, can be seen by comparing the dull stretches of Auchin- 
 drane with the lively explanatory note which gives the authority 
 for the story. Scott set no store by his dramatic trifles, 
 though his historical essay on the drama is full of his sense 
 for situation and character. 
 
 VIII 
 
 James Hogg, 2 'the Ettrick Shepherd' (1770-1835), maybe 
 introduced as a balladmonger in the wake of Scott, though he 
 is equally a songsmith of the fellowship of Burns. His prose 
 tales have been mentioned (Ch. vn.) ; but to approach him 
 through his association with Blackwood's Magazine 3 and John 
 Wilson would be misleading. Wilson, as ' Christopher North,' 
 used Hogg to his face, with more than the licence that Landor 
 allowed himself in the case of Southey, as the hero of imaginary 
 conversations. The ' Shepherd ' of the Nodes Ambrosiance, 
 with his bursts of coloured diction and his harangues on the
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 321 
 
 poetry of eatables, easily becomes tedious, and it is a relief 
 to turn to the droll business-like style and to the peasant 
 shrewdness, suspiciousness, and complacency of Hogg's own 
 autobiography. It is want of breeding rather than of grati- 
 tude that defaces his volume on The Private Life of Sir Walter 
 Scott ; yet he was not unworthy of Scott's incessant and sagacious 
 kindness. ' I was a sort of natural songster,' Hogg observes, 
 ' without another advantage upon earth.' His self -training 
 in letters was difficult and tardy. Hogg never even heard 
 of Burns while he was alive, but in 1797 a ' half daft man ' 
 repeated to him Tain o' Shanter ' on the hill.' ' I resolved 
 to be a poet, and to follow in the steps of Burns.' In 1800 
 appeared his first published song, an excellent one, Donald 
 M' Donald. He was next ' dissatisfied ' with the imitative 
 ballads in the Border Minstrelsy, and set about making better 
 ones ; which he did, and printed the first-fruits in 1807 in 
 the Mountain Bard, a work of which ' Mr. Scott had encouraged 
 the publication.' 
 
 Hogg, as we have seen, was right in being ' dissatisfied.' 
 He has a wonderful ease of mimicry, catches the true ring of 
 the folk-ballad oftener than Leyden or Surtees, and does not 
 so often swerve into mere literature. But he is only too 
 faithful ; he is perversely ready to mint the baser coinage of 
 broadsheet diction, and the result is hideous : 
 
 Her browe nae blink of scorninge wore, 
 
 Her teeth were ivorie, 
 Her lips the little purple floure 
 
 That blumes on Bailley-lee. 
 
 Hogg falls into this style a score of times ; but then he retrieves 
 it a hundred times ; and this he does even in the ballad thus 
 defaced, Gilmanscleuch ; and also in Sir David Graeme, and 
 Lord Derwent and The Liddel Bower. The last is a good 
 example of Hogg's manner of treating ' certain traditionary 
 stories,' which he 'chants to certain old tunes.' There are 
 plenty of ballad cliches or formulae, but they are not used coldly. 
 Douglas begins, addressing the wife of his kinsman Liddel : 
 
 ' O will ye walk the wood, lady ? 
 
 Or will ye walk the lea ? 
 ( )r will ye gae to the Liddel Bower, 
 
 An' rest awhile wi' me ? ' 
 
 ' The deer lies in the wood, Douglas, 
 
 The wind blaws on the lea ; 
 An' when I gap to Liddel Bower, 
 
 It shall not be wi' thee.' 
 VOL. I. X
 
 322 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 Douglas cajoles menacingly, and reminds her how he had 
 ' kissed her young and rosy lips.' She retorts that she has 
 rued the day, and that Douglas had then thought only on her 
 land. She bids him listen to the wee bird, which sings wae 
 for the comely knight Liddel, whose ' blood is on a kinsman's 
 spear.' The murderer forces the lady to fly with him : her 
 kinsmen (Caerlaverock yeomen) now scour the land for her in 
 vain ; and ' lang, lang may her mother greet ' (as the ladies 
 did for Sir Patrick Spens), for 
 
 The deed was done at Liddel Bower 
 About the break of day. 
 
 There is some of the economy of stroke here that marks the 
 authentic ballads, and the language is little alloyed. 
 
 In 1810 Hogg published The Forest Minstrel ' of which 
 about two-thirds of the songs were my own ' the first instal- 
 ment, and the largest, of his purely lyrical writings. Another 
 notable group are found in his contributions issued at first 
 as of popular origin, but afterwards acknowledged as his own 
 to The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (1819-21). In lyric he did 
 his soundest and most various, if not his loftiest, work. Many 
 of his songs may be forgotten ; they are hack-writing and 
 slipshod, especially when he abandons Scots and seeks to be 
 glossy. But he has left a score of songs that are almost beyond 
 reproach in their several orders. Galloping dactylic measures, 
 the passion of foray, and the insolence of vengeance triumphant, 
 inspire him happily ; and the rushing, truly magnificent ditty, 
 ' Lock the door, Lariston, lion of Liddisdale,' seems to have 
 escaped the eye of many anthologists, who have faithfully 
 presented the ill-written and amateurish Skylark. The cadence 
 of ' Rise ! rise ! Lowland and Highland men ' is almost as 
 stirring, and so is that of McKimman, and of ' Cam ye by Athol, 
 lad wi' the philabeg,' and of Donald M'Gillawy. Of another 
 sort, that of the mocking, wheezing whisky-song, John of 
 Brackadale and The Laird o' Lamington are capital examples ; 
 and no ' kailyard ' story gives the cheery gross atmosphere of 
 Scottish country life better than The Village of Balmaquhapple 
 a kind of satiric picture without any exact precedent even in 
 Burns. Nearer to the strain of Burns are the short-lined 
 lyrics, ' When Maggy gangs away,' and M eg o' Marley. Among 
 the Jacobite poems, The Highlander's Farewell is conspicuous, 
 and also ' Up an' rin awa', Geordie.' These are but instances ; 
 and Hogg (though his note is here less certain) can also be 
 pathetic in high English now and then, as he is in ' The moon
 
 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 323 
 
 was a-waning ' ; and also in Scots, where he can be better 
 trusted, as in An Aged Widow's Lament. But his rarest 
 workmanship, in which he seems to become another man, is 
 not found in his briefer lyrics. 
 
 In 1813, the year of Rokeby, the Queen's Wake brought at 
 once to Hogg the poetic fame of which it still secures to him 
 a remnant. Scott, as we know, was beginning to feel the 
 counter-vogue of Byron, and had suffered already from the 
 imitators of his lays. The Queen's Wake he assuredly reckoned 
 amongst ' the more favourable imitations, produced by persons 
 of talent,' although it does not reveal a rival who ' could over- 
 shoot him with his own bow.' The plan is pleasantly simple : 
 Mary of Scotland keeps her ' wake ' for three nights at Holy- 
 rood, and hears seventeen bards, beginning with Rizzio, chant 
 their songs and tales in emulation. She favours Rizzio, but 
 the hearers, rightly enough, do not prefer his song, and, 
 wrongly enough, acclaim for the first prize a Highlander named 
 Gardyn. Their award has long been overridden, and the 
 thirteenth of the bards, ' Drummond from the moors of Ern,' 
 the singer of Kilmeny, is admitted to be the best ; but the 
 eighth, a Fife man without a name, must surely be accounted 
 next, or even equal, on the strength of the superb comic - 
 horrible ballad called The Witch of Fife. In these two poems 
 and some others Hogg uses archaic Scots, and such a style 
 takes him almost clean away from his more modern and in- 
 effectual one. This latter is a variation of Scott's own, but 
 it serves mostly to bring out Hogg's want of poetic sureness 
 and training. Some of the martial parts, indeed, like those 
 in the sixteenth piece, Dumlanrig, are like Scott and worthy of 
 him. But Hogg's compensations are found in a certain ballad 
 rage, a wildness that comes and goes, a sudden rareness forcing 
 its way through the stock diction. There is plenty of pace 
 in Earl Walter, a fighting poem of the conventional Border- 
 chivalric sort. In The Witch of Fife there is also comic drama, 
 strange colour, and an overflow of Scotch-Bacchic devil-may- 
 care humour. The old goodman who rebukes his witch-wife 
 for her cantrips, but is converted by the hope of riding through 
 the air to drink the bishop's wine that is locked in Carlisle tower, 
 and who is left behind at daybreak to be wakened by five 
 rough Englishmen and just escapes the flames, is a true 
 creature of the native muse. 
 
 Kilmeny is built up on a ballad-theme of the regular kind 
 the sojourn of a mortal for a space of years in a kind of paradise 
 among the fairies, and her return to earth. But the old pagan
 
 324 SCOTT'S VERSE : EARLIER MEDIEVALISM 
 
 underworld, flowery and shadowy, becomes a heavenly land, 
 and an Elysium of virgin spirits. Moreover, such travellers in 
 popular ballad, if they come back to the world, usually remain 
 there ; but Kilmeny cannot bear the grossness of earth, and 
 vanishes again to ' the land of thochte.' Another difference 
 from popular poetry is in the measure, which is founded on 
 that of Christabel, being indeed technically the same, but 
 opposite in its effect ; for Christabel in general goes slow and 
 is weighted with solemnity, but Kilmeny goes fast and trip- 
 pingly, and the tune is both joyous and ethereal, and is not 
 easy to match in our romantic verse. There is, moreover, 
 a mediaeval touch in the praise of pure maidenhood, or 
 ' femenitye,' which belongs more to a romance than a ballad ; 
 and this praise is wonderfully unforced and natural, and not, 
 as is usual in modern verse, a literary sentiment. The medley 
 is a harmonious one, and the peasant fancy of Scotland is 
 here seen in its finer flower. Nor can the pseudo-antique 
 look and cast of Kilmeny make it less lovely, or mar its title 
 to be called Hogg's most perfect composition. 
 
 His other verse, which is voluminous, shows a decided 
 scattering and dilution of his gift, and suffers from his incon- 
 tinence and ease in writing. Yet we are never sure that he 
 will be unpoetical. His lays in the fashion of Scott, of which 
 Queen Hynde is the longest and most laboured, are, indeed, 
 not easily perused ; but his Poetic Mirror, a batch of parodies, 
 or rather imitations, of contemporary poets (including himself), 
 contains curious echoes of Wordsworth's more abstract blank 
 verse ; and in The Pilgrims of the Sun, a fantasy relating the 
 journey of an angel-guided mortal maiden through the heaven, 
 the airy music of Kilmeny is sometimes heard. Mador of the 
 Moor and other ventures may not here be even enumerated ; 
 but no one gains more than James Hogg by a discreetly chosen 
 ' golden treasury.' 1
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 I. Further stages of Scott's idea of romance : in Waverley, and The Heart 
 of Midlothian. 
 
 II. Periods (1814-20, 1821-6, 1826-31) of the novels, and grouping. Sketch 
 of each period : vindication of the latest novels. 
 
 III. Some general traits : use of the supernatural and depiction of 
 villainy ; motives drawn from law ; attitude to theological matters ; por- 
 traiture of Highlanders. 
 
 IV. The historical novel : Miss Lee ; Miss Porter. Contrast with the 
 history play. Treatment of eighteenth century, and of the Middle Ages ; 
 Ivanhoe. The seventeenth and sixteenth centuries; portraits of kings and 
 queens. 
 
 V. Scott's attitude to his public, its drawbacks and value. Character of 
 his endings ; interest of ' extrication ' ; poetic justice, romance, and the 
 ' scheme ' of averages. Exceptional endings ; Bride of Lammermoor ; St. 
 Ronan's Well; Kenilivorth. Early heroes, defended. 
 
 VI. Vast population of the novels ; comparison with Balzac, and with 
 later English novelists. Facility and ' popularity ' ; J. L. Adolphus quoted. 
 False charge of ' superficiality.' 
 
 VII. The styles of Scott. Adolphus quoted again. Varieties of manner. 
 Talk of his monarchs. Real and unreal style, exemplified. Resource in 
 technical ingredients (costume, etc.). Unequal success in passionate dialogue ; 
 causes. Lyric oratory in prose ; studious technique and harmonies. Literary 
 diction in Scots ; Madge Wildfire. The style in the passages of higher feeling ; 
 its felicity. Language of the Journal. 
 
 VIII. Other prose works. Tales of a Grandfather ; Life of Dryden, and 
 Life of Sicifl. Critical reviews. Scott on his own craft. 
 
 THE terms romance 1 and romantic come at last to be used 
 by Scott in several new senses, some of which are satirical. In 
 his Essay on Romance (1823) the aim is that of the historian 
 and enthusiast ; it is not written in the spirit of first love, but 
 there is little sense of disenchantment. He reviews the state 
 of learning on the topic, and notes the labours of Percy, 
 Warton, Ritson, Weber, and George Ellis, distinguishing the 
 mediaeval lays, to which he was deep in debt, from the proso 
 fictions into which they had been merged, and these again from 
 the later schools of fiction, French and English, which carried 
 
 325
 
 326 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 over the shadow of chivalrous sentiment into an unreal world. 
 He stops short of describing the modern novel in England, as 
 founded by Defoe. The early fervour of the public had been 
 long disconcerted. The Radcliffian romance, the exploiting 
 of the supernatural, had lost credit, and the Tales of Wonder 
 had been laughed out of court. What romance had come to 
 mean to Scott is well seen in Waverley itself. It meant first of 
 all that ' picturesque ' quality of natural scenes which permitted 
 of a waterfall or even a reservoir being called romantic the 
 rhetoric, so to say, of landscape, as exhibited in Salvator Rosa 
 and the emphatic school of painting. Mountains, torchlight, 
 savage figures, Highlanders. The scene, too, is solitary and 
 foreign : no one has visited it before. In Waverley the shade 
 of Poussin is invoked. Flora Maclvor is found 
 
 gazing on the waterfall. Two paces further stood Cathleen, holding 
 a small Scottish harp. . . . The sun, now stooping to the west 
 . . . seemed to add more than human brilliancy to the full expres- 
 sive darkness of Flora's eye. 
 
 Flora herself is ' like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto.' 
 But Scott, as was noted by Coleridge, who found himself an 
 ' exact and harmonious opposite ' in this regard, cared for 
 natural things less in themselves than through their human 
 and historical associations. The breaking up of the Highland 
 camp, which is told breathlessly, in the very spirit of Marmion, 
 is 'a romantic effect.' One other passage must be given in 
 full, for it unites every element in Scott's notion of romance 
 scenery, foreignness, literary memories of ballad or lay, the 
 sense of danger and wonder and solitude, and, last of all, the 
 humorous return of Scott upon his hero, or upon himself, as he 
 comes out of his bath of romance and shakes himself, and 
 recommences realist and Lowlander. 
 
 The cool, and yet mild air of the summer night, refreshed Waverley 
 after his rapid and toilsome walk ; and the perfume which it wafted 
 from the birch trees, bathed in the evening dew, was exquisitely 
 fragrant. 
 
 He had now time to give himself up to the full romance of his 
 situation. Here he sate on the banks of an unknown lake, under 
 the guidance of a wild native, whose language was unknown to him, 
 on a visit to the den of some renowned outlaw, a second Robin Hood, 
 perhaps, or Adam o' Gordon, and that at deep midnight, through 
 scenes of difficulty and toil, separated from his attendant, left by 
 his guide : What a variety of incidents for the exercise of a 
 romantic imagination, and all enhanced by the solemn feeling of 
 uncertainty, at least, if not of danger ! The only circumstance
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 327 
 
 which assorted ill with the rest, was the cause of his journey the 
 Baron's milk cows ! this degrading incident he kept in the back- 
 ground. 
 
 It is sometimes forgotten how well Scott kept his head as a 
 romancer ; too well, it may be, always to produce perfect 
 conviction. Miss Austen's mockery of the marvels and secrets 
 of Northanger Abbey, or a book like Barrett's Heroine, brings 
 us at once outside the enchanted land, into that of frank 
 counter -romance ; all sympathy has been lost. In the stories 
 of Peacock, like Maid Marian, there is the friendliest parody 
 and banter, but also not a little of the original charm and 
 attraction of romance ; not indeed its mystery, its breathless- 
 ness ; but its chivalry, its heartiness are there. And we are 
 not to forget that this gentle derision, this vein of realism and 
 jolly satire, are also mediaeval things, as we see in The Fox and 
 the Wolf and in Chaucer's Sir Thopas ; and that such correc- 
 tives were quite well known to the English and Scottish workers 
 in the shop of Romanticism. Scott, as we have seen, in the 
 person of Edward Waverley betrays his share of this tendency 
 to return upon, but not therefore to repudiate, romance. His 
 double attitude is still better seen in his comment upon Jeanie 
 Deans, who, so wrote one of Scott's surest critics, Lady 
 Louisa Stuart, 1 after reading The Heart of Midlothian ' without 
 youth, beauty, genius, warm passions, or any other novel 
 perfection, is here our object from beginning to end.' Of 
 Jeanie, Scott says at once that she is ' no heroine of romance.' 
 But soon, in describing her ' venturous resolution to journey 
 to London,' he says that there is indeed ' something of romance ' 
 in that ; and so he uses the term in its noblest traditionary 
 sense, to denote the quest of a high but seemingly forlorn 
 purpose, through all kinds of dangers and devilries, for the sake 
 of love or piety. The actual heroine of the tale, Helen Walker, 
 may have made her pilgrimage along the same roads. So the 
 term ' romance ' gathers meaning ; and we may think of the 
 recital of Jeanie's expedition on the one side, and of a poem like 
 La Belle Dame sans Merci on the other, as the twin and equal, 
 the lofty, the confronted summits of ' romance.' 
 
 II 
 
 Like the plays of Shakespeare and the Comcdie Ihnnainc, 
 the Waverley Novels were written very fast. But they have 
 caught and held the world, and there is stuff in the weakest, 
 and many of them are works of art. The liveliest way ot
 
 328 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 watching their evolution from point to point, seen in the light 
 of the whole performance, is to read first the author's over- 
 tures and advertisements to each one as it came, and next the 
 prefaces that he added when all was finished. These comments 
 are integral parts of the novels, just as much as the masked 
 narrative introductions by Cleishbotham or Clutterbuck. If we 
 stand a little way off from this big, irregular, motley, yet never 
 wholly incongruous pleasure-house, which was eighteen years 
 in the building, we see how the designer, in his passion for 
 variety and commodity, continually struck on new design 
 and ornament, carried it far, then feared it would be tiresome 
 and went back to the old, but soon returned once more to the 
 new that he had quitted ; how he lagged, revived, digressed ; 
 and how to the last, if sometimes tired of writing, he leaves 
 no sense that his patterns were exhausted, any more than the 
 author of the Canterbury Tales. 
 
 In the Waverley Novels there are thirty-one complete 
 stories, only four pf which, the first set of the Chronicles of 
 the Canongate, are quite short. They fall into three groups, 
 unequal in volume, but each covering about six years. The 
 first group contains nine stories, in which the historical novel 
 of genius is founded. The second opens in 1820 with Ivanhoe, 
 which extends the historical novel to the Middle Ages ; in 
 this group there are thirteen stories. The third opens in 1825 
 with the fall of Scott's fortunes, and contains five novels and 
 four brief tales. The stress was greatest in this last phase, 
 but the pace was hotter in the second one, with its thirteen 
 publications ; in 1823, for example, appeared two masterpieces 
 in opposite styles, Quentin Durward and St. Ronan's Well, 
 with the long Peveril of the Peak thrown in. The first group, 
 however, contains more successes, and is more leisurely in the 
 execution ; and contains no failure, unless it be The Black 
 Dwarf. The familiar spirit who got all this done while Scott 
 was talking, or attending in court, or editing, has kept the 
 secret of his processes. 
 
 All the first nine stories are laid in Scotland, though in the 
 travels of Captain Waverley and Jeanie Deans there is plenty 
 of that clash and contrast of the two races (seldom at the 
 expense of the northerner) which was a favourite and brilliant 
 resource of the artist. In six the period is the eighteenth 
 century, of which Scott's memory and fancy were fullest, 
 and in three the seventeenth. In four cases, Guy Mannering, 
 The Antiquary, The Bride of Lammermoor, and The Black 
 Dwarf, the note of history is absent or distant ; in two, Rob
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 329 
 
 Roy and The Heart of Midlothian, it comes much nearer ; 
 while only in Waverley, Old Mortality, and A Legend of Montrose, 
 does the private interest of the story march along with public 
 and momentous events. 
 
 In the ' General Preface ' can be studied the prenatal 
 vicissitudes of Waverley, Scott's own opinion of its merits, 
 and his account of his early essays in prose romance. The 
 plan permitted of a variety hitherto unknown in fiction ; 
 real history, and Scottish humour, and scenery, and lyrical 
 interlude, and folklore, all are there, commingled if imper- 
 fectly blended. The gold is not well sifted, but the shaft 
 is sunk and the ore found. As if he doubted his achievement, 
 Scott's next three tales are without any historical setting, 
 though built in part from actual lore or memories. Their 
 real brilliance is in the painting of the nether vernacular 
 life of the Lowlands. In Guy Mannering appear Scott's first 
 great creations of character, Dominie Sampson and Dandie 
 Dinmont ; and astrology and prophecy intrude. The swindle 
 of alchemy is satirised in The Antiquary, which might have 
 come from the hand of a softer, more humorous Ben Jonson ; 
 but Edie Ochiltree is more like some personage of Shakespeare's. 
 The Black Dwarf is a misanthrope of literary parentage, not 
 the less unreal because drawn from a real model ; and in this 
 tale there is plenty of the conventional romance which Scott 
 helped to extinguish. Rob Roy followed, where history 
 reappears amidst the throng of humours, and Diana Vernon 
 rides through them, and in Fairservice and Jarvie the feat is 
 achieved of near contrast and perfect keeping. Then, re- 
 gathering his powers, he produced Old Mortality, the swiftest, 
 the most varied, the least alloyed, the most fully alive of all 
 his novels. 
 
 Scott's second masterpiece, the greatest of all his writings, 
 is The Heart of Midlothian. The consummation of his epical 
 gift is shown in the account of the Porteous riots, and of his 
 portraying gift in Jeanie Deans. The Bride of Lammermoor 
 and A Legend of Montrose conclude this period. Ravenswood 
 and Dalgetty are Tragedy and Comedy incarnate, like com- 
 panion figures flanking a proscenium. In the second of these 
 novels, Scott goes back to the theme of clan warfare and to 
 his keen but sometimes overcharged drawings of Highland 
 character. Two of these latter works fall into the three 
 series of Tales of my Landlord, each with its prefatory setting. 
 
 His more headlong rate in the second period made for 
 inequality. The preface to Ivanhoe explains his anxiety to
 
 330 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 innovate, and his fear, not that his Scottish vein was exhausted, 
 but that the public might be tired of it. He returned to the 
 Middle Ages, which he had deserted since quitting poetry, 
 and he also laid his scene, for the first time, in England ; the 
 double change introducing a new, faintly archaic style into 
 the dialogue. Scott's powers were refreshed by the venture ; 
 and though Ivanhoe is not all equally real, nor its romantic 
 diction always right, some of the life-blood of The Knight's 
 Tale, and of the best Robin Hood ballads, and of the legend 
 of Cceur-de-Lion, is transfused into it, and it keeps its gloss and 
 vigour. It created a new variety of historical fiction. Scott 
 next essayed the sixteenth century. The Monastery, over- 
 weighted by a too substantial wraith, was redeemed by its 
 sequel, The Abbot, which contains his most skilful scenes 
 of courtly tragi-comedy. The Pirate, though it introduces 
 fresh scenery and is a reversion to the eighteenth century, is a 
 less happy interlude between Kenilworth and The Fortunes of 
 Nigel, where the scene shifts to England, and, in the latter 
 story, to the play of Scottish humours in England. Ivanhoe 
 and The Fortunes of Nigel stand out amongst all these 
 for a colour, dash, and pageantry which Scott hardly attained 
 before or afterwards. The whole series is also distinguished 
 by its portrait-gallery of queens and princes. In the first 
 period, there had only been the Pretender : in the second 
 come Cceur-de-Lion, Mary of Scotland, Elizabeth, and James I. : 
 to whom is added, in Quentin Durward, the figure of Louis xi., 
 a blunt powerful picture of the traditional character. St. 
 Ronan's Well is a digression, of the luckiest kind, into nine- 
 teenth-century manners, and shows Scott's strong head in 
 the conduct of its tragical intrigue. In Redgauntlet he takes 
 farewell of his darling subject, the Jacobite rebellion : it 
 contains the most poetic of all his endings ; and Nanty 
 Ewart and Wandering Willie's Tale make weight against the 
 Byronic Redgauntlet ; while the heavy old epistolary form, 
 which Scott uses so rarely, has its leisurely charm. The 
 Betrothed and The Talisman, which are ' Tales of the Crusaders,' 
 have, like Ivanhoe, the ground-tone of romantic ballad, and 
 the sort of nobleness, and yet of externality, that Scott had 
 displayed in his poems. While he was at work on Woodstock, 
 his story of the Civil War, his catastrophe came. During the 
 whole of this second phase, he had daringly explored new pro- 
 vinces and annexed them to the art of fiction. 
 
 In his third period (1826-31), he wrote at his best and at 
 his worst. Some of the short stories, The Highland Widow
 
 SCOTT: THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 331 
 
 and The Two Drovers, portray the Highland character with a 
 new intimacy and power ; and so does their successor, The 
 Fair Maid of Perth. Anne of Qeierstein, Count Robert of 
 Paris, and Castle Dangerous, all mediaeval, end the list, except 
 for the sketch called The Surgeon's Daughter. No general 
 veil of indulgence need be drawn over these, the last of the 
 Waverley Novels. Scott does not ask us to pity Sir John de 
 Walton or Harry of the Wynd when they fight on against 
 odds, dealing some dazed mechanical strokes, but after all 
 remembering ancient skill, or contriving new, in the heat of 
 the final battle. Nor need we pity Scott. With the natural 
 haughtiness that now served him well, he drove onward, and 
 more wonderful than the courage that all admire is the handi- 
 work that many overlook. The acknowledged failure of 
 Count Robert of Paris may be due not more to fatigue and 
 sickness than to its manner, under the passing influence of 
 Gibbon, being more strictly historical than dramatic. Even 
 here the life comes back when the prisoner batters the tiger 
 in his cell, and the Crusaders' ships face the Greek fire before 
 all Constantinople. That Scott had not allowed the body 
 long to dull the mind, but had only chosen a bad method or 
 background in Count Robert, is clear from Castle Dangerous, 
 written under the same evil conditions, finished at the same 
 time, and followed by his farewell to the public. It is thus 
 the last of the novels ; and the author's visit (19th July 1831) 
 to the Douglas country and St. Bride's church, the scene of 
 his not least spirited affray, is told with sensitive and tender 
 skill by Lockhart. Castle Dangerous, despite its marks of 
 fatigue, is one of the best examples of his more level style, 
 without too much historical digression, with only the smallest 
 shadow thrown from the wing of his evil angel rhetorical 
 dialogue and with that happy interchange of natural talk 
 and adventurous action which is his secret. The tale does 
 indeed suffer from some schism in the interest ; for the long 
 though delicate tracing of the estrangement between the 
 friends De Walton and De Valence gives little help to the 
 central episode involving Bertram the minstrel and the dis- 
 guised Lady of Berkely. But this and all the other arguments 
 and parleys by the way, with their leisurely and chivalrous 
 casuistry, converge on the wild duello in the ruins of St. 
 Bride's. The style is for the most part plain and stripped, 
 and, if somewhat wanting in the old careless wealth of energy, 
 is distinctly that of maturity and not of decline.
 
 332 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 in 
 
 Scott had, as it were, bound himself not only to take over 
 every motive of old story and ballad and quicken it afresh, 
 but to represent the whole nature and temper of his country- 
 men. He was thus doubly led to introduce the supernatural, 
 which figures both in his poems and his novels, and the due 
 handling of which he more than once considers. It was an 
 element in the school of fiction that he supplanted ; and in 
 his reviews of Maturin and Hoffmann we have his mind upon 
 the subject. The rock on which the tales of Mrs. Radcliffe 
 had foundered, the droll explaining away and rationalising the 
 source of terror, he treats with due contempt, and it is un- 
 worthy an artist's notice. Nor has he any use for such mere 
 Arabian Nights as make the marvellous their main concern, with 
 no background of natural reality at all. Soundly he says that 
 the pleasure felt in mere marvel should be ' secondary to that 
 which we extract from observing how mortals like ourselves 
 would be affected ' thereby : and in describing Frankenstein 
 he acutely adds that 
 
 the author opens a sort of account-current with the reader ; drawing 
 upon him, in the first place, for credit to that degree of the marvel- 
 lous which he proposes to employ ; and becoming virtually bound, 
 in consequence of this indulgence, that his personages shall con- 
 duct themselves, in the extraordinary circumstances in which they 
 are placed, according to the rules of probability, and the nature of 
 the human heart. 
 
 In his reluctantly admiring notice of Maturin, whose fortunes 
 he tried to promote, Scott analyses one of the chief effects 
 that are produced upon ' mortals like ourselves ' by the sense 
 of unearthly presences : and this is (in Maturin's phrase) ' the 
 fear arising from objects of invisible terror ' ; and he says 
 with his usual tact, that ' the sensation is usually as transient 
 as it is powerful.' 
 
 The finest and deepest feelings are those which are most easily 
 exhausted. The chord which vibrates and sounds at a touch, 
 remains in silent tension under continued pressure. 
 
 But he could not refrain from touching the chord himself. 
 Romance and Scotland what would they be without the 
 supernatural ? Scott must have played on his chosen instru- 
 ment with one string muted, had he shirked the challenge. 
 As his Letters on Detnonology and Witchcraft show, his memory
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 333 
 
 was packed with delightful tales of bogles, omens, and appear- 
 ances. Genius apart, he had his full share of those feelings 
 of the night without which our nature is incomplete and 
 indeed hardly healthy. He felt, like Shakespeare, the thrill 
 of the supernatural along the nerves of his audience ; but he 
 could not, like him, find the words of the spell. ' Which of you 
 hath done this ? ' There is more in those six words of Macbeth 
 than in the whole business of the Bodach Glas, which is in- 
 fected by the unreality of Fergus Mclvor's language as he 
 mounts the high romantic horse. Scott, in the same Letters, 
 concludes that ' tales of ghosts and demonology are out of date 
 at forty years and upwards,' and only 'overcome us like a 
 summer cloud ' in ' the morning of life.' The effects are 
 evident. We need not speak of that curious Protestant Ariel, 
 the White Lady of Avenel, so careful for the use of scriptures 
 in the mother tongue ; for, as her creator observed, she ' was 
 far from being popular.' He could not work himself into the 
 right heat of imagination over her, and fell back with relief 
 upon the speech of Christie of the Clinthill. In general, 
 except in Wandering Willie's Tale, where he succeeds consum- 
 mately, his hold on the springs of fear is faint, and he loses 
 his genius with the passing of daylight. In the same way, 
 when he has to draw villains, he works hard, but has too little 
 of ' the black drop in his heart ' to succeed. He hardly has 
 the imaginative reticence which makes us feel not only that 
 lago is real, but that what lago does not say is worse than 
 his worst words. Scott does best in this vein when he has a 
 historical figure like Louis xi. to work on. When he can draw 
 on his experience as a lawyer and man of the world, he is 
 entirely at home, but chiefly in villainy that runs to roguery ; 
 and his zest for various types of rogue, Dirk Hatteraick or 
 Dousterswivel, is unfailing. A few other loose strands may 
 now be picked out of the bright, loose, motley texture of the 
 novels. 
 
 One of the toughest of these is woven into his own calling of 
 the law. Shakespeare, somewhat injuriously, admitted meta- 
 phors from dates and leases and indentures into his private 
 sonnets and the last words of Romeo. But Scott, like Balzac, 
 and like Shakespeare also, uses the realities of the law, and that 
 doubly to his profit. His writers, advocates, and judges have 
 living tones and faces, and can hide nothing from him. From 
 Pleydell to Meiklewham, and from Saddletree to the judge 
 in The Two Drovers, each of them speaks in the accent that is 
 natural, not only to himself, but to the particular stratum
 
 334 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 of the profession that he inhabits. Nowhere is the keeping so 
 perfect ; nowhere does the words flow with such tireless ease. 
 But Scott also uses the hard legal facts of marriage, inheritance, 
 and crime for the warp of his stories. The Heart of Midlothian 
 and St. Ronan's Well turn on technical points, and some of their 
 best scenes succeed in dialogue, plot, and characterisation, 
 owing to the author's grasp of practical affairs. The trial of 
 Effie Deans is a less skilful piece of writing than the conference 
 between Francis Tyrrel and Captain Jekyl, where these two 
 gentlemen have to bargain over a delicate, intricate matter 
 of property and legitimacy. In such a situation the pride and 
 passions of men must face at every point the solid edges of a 
 legal obstacle. Balzac made even more than this of the law. 
 It is often his real topic as a social philosopher ; Cesar Birotteau 
 is the story of a bankruptcy, and the laws that concern money 
 bulk large in the society of the Comedie Humaine. Avarice 
 is there, expert in the code, and in dead earnest ; and instead 
 of the flying lights and humours of the Waverley Novels, there 
 is a slow, savage irony. Money surcharged the imagination 
 of Balzac ; Scott stands above it, in the cavalier spirit, though 
 it comes fully into his drama. 
 
 Theology and law are blood relations in North Britain, 
 and indeed everywhere else. The system of Calvin is based 
 on an unequal contract ; and the great contested points of 
 doctrine are woven up throughout Scottish history with the 
 bargains, wars, and schisms of which they were often the 
 occasion. The spirit of David Deans runs through the whole 
 chronicle, and the language of theological argument and dis- 
 tinction came as readily from Scott's pen, when he chose, as 
 that of profane litigation. Nearest to his own temper, no 
 doubt, lay the spirit of simple faith and liberal piety, but he 
 says little of his private mind on the matter. His interest 
 in the fray of creeds seems to have been chiefly dramatic. 
 This, in the novels, is truculent in colouring ; he stands outside 
 it and imagines it by a kind of feat, as in the picture of the 
 preachers in Old Mortality, with their differing styles of elo- 
 quence and unreason. He sees also the comedy of the thing, 
 and represents it triumphantly in the explosions of Mause 
 Headrigg, that ' auld doited dccvil ' who defends her dogmas 
 so urgently. Such pleasant, unexpected fruits could only 
 spring from the rich soil of the national and historical novel. 
 
 The same catholicity drew Scott to portray the other northern 
 nation, the wonderful strangers at his gates the Highlanders. 
 A faithful sketch of their domestic temper and custom can be
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 335 
 
 found in the forgotten story Clan-Albin, by Mrs. Johnstone, 
 which was published in 1815, but mostly written, as the 
 authoress assures us, before Waverley. The adoption of an 
 unknown foundling by the simple community of Clan-Albin 
 is the starting-point of a graceful idyll ; there is an old woman 
 with second sight, and also a piper. Scott, however, was 
 the first to disclose the subtle, elusive talk of the race, their 
 pride in hospitality, and their barbarous, though not savage, 
 sense of honour. At first his Highlanders are either lightly 
 comical, or somewhat turgid and Ossianic ; and even in the 
 later, or post-diluvian novels, there is something too much of 
 that in the speech of Elspat MacTavish in The Highland 
 Widow. The plain and manly delineation of her son Hamish 
 is in contrast. But in The Two Drovers, no sort of falsetto mars 
 the success. It is a real tragedy on a small scale, which begins 
 gaily, announces itself by a petty squabble, explodes suddenly, 
 and ends with the judicial summing-up and sentence on the 
 murderer, Robin Oig. The legal ethics are set forth with 
 Scott's usual relish Oig has dirked his friend two hours after 
 the affront, when there had been time for ' passion to cool, and 
 reason to interpose,' and he is to be hanged. He cannot see 
 he was wrong to attack an unarmed man. ' I give a life for 
 the life I took, and what can I do more ? ' He is throughout 
 consistent : 
 
 While those present expected that the wound . . . would send 
 forth fresh streams at the touch of the homicide, Robin Oig replaced 
 the covering with the brief exclamation ' He was a pretty man ! ' 
 
 The study of young Conachar's cowardice l in The Fair Maid 
 of Perth is studious and painful in comparison with this. Such 
 instances and traits could be multiplied without end from the 
 novels ; but their scope as historical inventions must now be 
 considered more at large. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is no need to tarry among the scanty and futile pre- 
 cedents. There had indeed been an array, during the last 
 quarter of the eighteenth century and after, of pretences at 
 historical fiction.- In Sophia Lee's work, The Recess, or a 
 Tale of Other Times (1784-5), the most violent things are de- 
 scribed in the most ladylike language, and the two heroines 
 are daughters of Mary of Scotland and the Duke of Norfolk. 
 They are secretly reared in a w recess,' or private chamber, 
 and emerge to suffer incredible adventures. tTane Porter's
 
 336 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) is more endurable, but is not 
 strictly historical ; it is concerned with the doings of an inter- 
 esting Polish exile in London, especially in Newgate. The lan- 
 guage of sensibility is in full blast in this story, but there is some 
 life and pace. The Scottish Chiefs (1810), by the same writer, 
 had an equal vogue, which only shows the nakedness of the 
 land. Its hero is a melodramatic William Wallace ; but here 
 also there is a certain overflowing fervour and bogus picturesque- 
 ness which for a long time pleased the public. Both stories 
 remained awhile alive after the Waverley Novels had begun, 
 and Thaddeus was translated into various tongues. 
 
 Scott owed nothing to such precursors, and little to any. 
 Of superb pieces of mimicry like Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, 
 or of a masterpiece like Mme. de La Fayette's La Princesse de 
 Cleves, he seems to have made no use. His ' General Preface ' 
 shows how he drifted into his work almost by chance. He 
 explains his wish to do for Scotland what Miss Edgeworth had 
 done for Ireland ; to describe, namely, the inhabitants, and 
 ' to procure sympathy for their vices and indulgence for their 
 foibles.' He tells also how the Highland ingredient was 
 ' favourable for romance ' ; how the reception of Strutt's 
 Queenhoo Hall, with its archaisms, warned him off for the time ; 
 and how he found his old essay in fiction in a drawer, and 
 reconsidered it. In all this there is little about history ; the 
 idea of finding an historical plot and personages that would 
 yield a human interest only cleared itself slowly in his mind. 
 He did not, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, begin with such 
 an idea ; nor was his inspiration, like theirs, born of a wave of 
 patriot passion working all around him. Patriot he was, but 
 his passion was first of all that of the observer, anxious to save 
 the memory of persons and manners that were just fading out 
 of mind. But the history play had only a sporadic life after its 
 date of perfection, which is marked by Henry the Fifth, while 
 the form invented by Scott was grafted into many literatures ; 
 nor are any of the younger trees of the forest so tall as to hide 
 the patriarch. Still it lives ; the leaves are green, save on a 
 few dead and creaking branches, and the sap is in the trunk. 
 
 To Scott, history at first meant the history of the century 
 in which he was born. The time of Waverley (' sixty years 
 since ') was near enough for him to touch on the lingering 
 passions of the Jacobite, and far enough away to allow of the 
 colouring, both genuine and theatrical, of romance. He knew 
 the whole story of the beaten party, and saw it as in a crystal ; 
 and his ancestral sympathies, while they chanted in his ears
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 337 
 
 the pathos of the disaster, did not blind him. He knew the 
 faults of the fallen, and was on his mettle to deal pretty fairly 
 with the Lowland Whig. His power in this kind of work, if 
 not greater, is more assured than when he describes earlier 
 periods. The departure of Charles Edward and Redgauntlet 
 is in a high strain of fateful and yet not bloody drama, far 
 excelling the excellent passages of brawl and intrigue in 
 Waverley, and woven better into the private story of the book. 
 With his left hand and carelessly, yet with perfect persuasive- 
 ness, he manages the fortunes of the younger Redgauntlet, 
 not without some good-natured contempt ; but with his right, 
 at the same time, he paints a great occasion, the finale of a 
 long act in the national history, when the Wanderer is rowed 
 away, and a Campbell cries Amen to the prayers of a Jacobite. 
 In this situation there is the soul of romance, and there 
 is also the gravity of the epic, of history seen through the 
 imagination. 
 
 When Scott turned to the Middle Ages, his treatment became 
 at once freer and more uncertain, his phrase more romantic 
 and invented. The feelings of Jacobite or Cavalier were in 
 his blood, those of the Crusader only in his fancy. The humours 
 and quips of the English or French, five or six centuries ago, 
 were not like those of his own countrymen in Charles Edward's 
 time : he had to read and study for them. As though he 
 knew this, he enlivened Quentin Durward with the talk of 
 Le Balafre and the Scottish archers. But his passion for 
 writing upon things mediaeval had been starved or distracted 
 for five years, ever since he had finished The Lord of the Isles : 
 and he now came back to them, having meantime practised 
 in prose an instrument of greater tone and compass than the 
 rhymed lay. Setting aside Count Robert of Paris, he wrote 
 seven historical romances of which the time is laid in the 
 Middle Ages, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries in- 
 clusive. Four of these, Ivanhoe, The Betrothed, The Talisman, 
 and Castle Dangerous, are tales of chivalry, turning on the 
 point of honour and the quest for glory. The historic setting 
 is but a pageant, and the political circumstances are some- 
 what wearily explained. In Quentin Durward, on the other 
 hand, the history is carefully worked in after a reading of 
 Comines, and is a real frame to the story. In The Fair Moid 
 of Perth there is a curious amalgam : a larger allowance of 
 citizen humours, and a formal tournament, and historic 
 persons not far off ; but the whole is a background for the 
 study of Conachar and of his failure in conventional courage 
 
 VOL. I. Y
 
 338 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 and honour. The dramatic sympathy and the mercy with 
 which this is described are not mediaeval. 
 
 There is much in mediaeval sentiment that never came home 
 to Scott. To the religious and speculative note, the note of 
 criticism or satire, the more ethereal and also the more reck- 
 less chords of romance, he hardly responded at all. The 
 Romance of the Rose, and the Prologue to the Decameron, and 
 Piers Plowman, leave no mark on him. But what he loved 
 he loved thoroughly : not only the lighter charm of romance, 
 and all its ceremonies and costume : but the soul of chivalry 
 and adventure, drawn from Chaucer and Froissart : of ballad 
 gaiety and good humour, drawn from the Robin Hood Ballads 
 of the best period : and of Scottish patriotism, draw r n from 
 Barbour's Bruce, and embodied in Castle Dangerous. In 
 Ivanhoe Scott, it has often been noticed, confounds two or 
 three centuries together in his pictures of dress and usage, 
 and even provides an Old English death-song, drafted in 
 imitation of the ' scalds,' to whose ' wild strains ' the Saxon 
 Ulrica ' may not unnaturally be supposed to return ' in her 
 extremity. The book is not proof against the antiquary, but 
 it lives none the less, and we are glad of many of the liberties 
 that Scott takes. The real exemplar in the conduct of such 
 a story is not Chaucer, but, as the author himself hints, 
 Ariosto, who intertwists several narratives into one. Scott 
 does this with effect, at some cost of harking back and explana- 
 tions, and then knots his threads together with a light-hearted 
 jerk. The winding of the horn interrupts several infamies 
 at once, and Athelstane is raised from the dead to please the 
 printer, BaUantyne, who w 7 as ' inconsolable on the Saxon 
 being conveyed to the tomb.' Some things in Ivanhoe have 
 been unjustly censured. The sudden death of Boisguilbert, the 
 stage villain, ' a victim to the violence of his own contending 
 passions,' was suggested by something Scott had seen in the 
 Courts at Edinburgh. The wit of Wamba lias been called 
 forced and imitative, and he is no doubt of Elizabethan 
 parentage. But there is more style, in the strict sense, in 
 his speeches than in all the rest of the book. There is nothing 
 subtle or fine in Ivanhoe, none of the reserve of the Scottish 
 stories. It was written in haste and illness, and its art is of 
 a different sort. One trick of narrative it has, which Scott 
 practises elsewhere, and which rather suggests the coolness 
 of the sportsman when he knocks the quarry on the head, 
 though he has been excited in the chase. It is a kind of artful 
 anti-climax. A beginning is highly managed and announced ;
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 339 
 
 the suspense is grandiosely kept up ; Ivanhoe rides into the 
 lists, or Prince John taunts Locksley before the crowd. But 
 the actual event is told in a level, expeditious way, as though 
 the author were thinking of the next chapter. ' The archer 
 vindicated their opinion of his skill : his arrow split the willow rod 
 against which it was aimed.' ' As it chanced, however, saddle, 
 horse, and man rolled on the ground under a cloud of dust.' 
 ' A band of yeomen soon disposed of the ruffians, all of whom 
 lay on the spot dead or mortally wounded.' Victor Hugo 
 never has the sense to slacken the cords in this way. Scott 
 keeps his head, and does not take his show too seriously, and 
 this goes to his credit against the lurid ambitious passages in 
 the dialogue. 
 
 The stories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries come 
 midway, in reality and persuasive power, between the mediaeval 
 and the modern ones. The best of them, Kenilworth, The 
 Abbot, The Fortunes of Nigel, and Woodstock, depend for much 
 of their excellence on the portraiture of the kings and queens 
 who hold the stage. Scott had an instinctive knowledge of 
 courtly sentiment and finesse, though he might sometimes 
 dress it in too fine a style. The broad lines of selfish policy 
 or dissembled ambitious passion, or of highbred oddity, he 
 understood as well as if he had mixed in diplomacy. His 
 monarchs have no touch of the intellectual passion that is 
 found in Shakespeare's ; but in his portraits he shows no little 
 of Shakespeare's gift of developing the character along lines 
 that are warranted by evidence or tradition, though not one 
 word uttered may be historical. The dealing of Richard 
 with John or Saladin, or of Louis xi. with the Duke of Burgundy, 
 or, in another way, of Mary Queen of Scots with Lady Loch- 
 leven, are wonderful in their Tightness, while the three portraits 
 are in quite different styles. Coeur-de-Lion is little more 
 than an excellent ballad-king. Louis xi. is a figure of high 
 melodrama a term that does not, so far as touches the action, 
 exclude the dramatic or a certain distinctness of outline, but 
 which implies a lively mechanical inlaying of consistent traits, 
 rather than that self-unfolding of character through successive 
 vital touches, which at once excites surprise without shocking 
 expectancy. James i., in The Fortunes of Nigel, is a portrait 
 of this latter and finer kind, alive and broadly humorous : yet 
 caricature is eluded, and the laugh is not always again.st the 
 king, whose kindness and conscious shrewdness save the 
 fortunes of Nigel. The same kind of genial power is shown 
 in such figures as Argyle (in The Heart of Midlothian), in the
 
 340 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Black Douglas (Castle Dangerous), and the old Earl of Crawford 
 (Quentin Durward). This gallery of sovereigns and nobles, 
 like Shakespeare's, has often fixed the popular conception of 
 the originals. 
 
 Critics have looked askance at Scott's curious relationship 
 with his readers. No doubt he ran after them ; and the care 
 he took to please them, to give them new fare before they 
 were tired, and to behave generally like an honest catering 
 playwright, is in contrast with the scornful scruple of Words- 
 worth or Flaubert, who wrote to satisfy themselves. He did 
 not work in this haughty way ; he watched the public as 
 narrowly as he does any of his own dramatis personce, and this 
 accounts for many things in the Waverley Novels, including 
 their existence. The public would not stand the White Lady 
 of Avenel sweeping a heavy, angry man off his horse, and it 
 was too strong that she should dig, or produce the illusion of 
 digging, a new-made grave. After this it was well to be chary 
 for a time of introducing bogles. It was tiresome to open with 
 an historical essay, as in Waverley ; if it must come, let it 
 come later in the book, as it does in Old Mortality, where it 
 gives less trouble. In his retrospective prefaces Scott explains 
 how respectfully he had watched, how carefully he had stalked, 
 the general taste from his hiding ; with what a keen sense 
 of the powers of the public to defend itself and slip away from 
 him. He never made the same mistake with it twice. He 
 seldom defends his work in defiance of its opinion ; and this, 
 though it may be part of his modesty, is no doubt a weakness. 
 He seems to have judged by his reception, rather than by his 
 conscience, whether he had written well. Such a mood is 
 nothing akin to the solitary pride which conceives enduring 
 form in silence and chisels it out patiently. 
 
 But Scott probably gained more than ho lost by his tie with 
 the invisible man, the average reader. For one thing, it was 
 not the critics for whom he cared ; he said that their judg- 
 ments were too inconsistent to be of service to him. He 
 treated the reader as Moliere treated his housekeeper, as a 
 touchstone. To this habit we owe some of his finest work, 
 and his incessant fresh discoveries of his own talent. When the 
 day came for him to redeem his debts and honour by his pen, 
 an heroic turn is given to his attitude, and criticism is silent 
 before his effort to work his vein for what it was worth in gold ; 
 all the more, that it was now he wrote such narratives as that
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 341 
 
 of Chrystal Ooftangry, and Wandering Willie's Tale, which 
 are as perfect as though they had been shaped by Tourgeniev's 
 unalloyed desire for perfection. The prefaces to the collected 
 edition tell the story of the novels, from the point of view of 
 their reception, with all possible dignity. It has to be said that 
 his courage in depicting situation, being affected by his sense of 
 what the man in the pit or the stalls will endure, is curiously 
 limited. He does not mind painful and bloody circumstance, 
 if it comes in the course of battle, or of ambush, or of legal 
 justice. The mutual slaughter of Cristal Nixon and Nanty 
 Ewart is told with the brevity and relish of a saga. But he 
 can be unfair to the dramatic suspense, which is apt to be first 
 wound up and then conventionally relieved. The heroine 
 seldom perishes ; the leading gentleman escapes danger with 
 a charmed life, though for no merit of his own. The interest 
 hangs on ingeniously finding a way out for him ; and this 
 interest of extrication, however lively and real it be, is one 
 of the meaner interests of the drama, though it befits tragi- 
 comedy and of course romance. The play of character in 
 an inextricable position is the supreme subject of tragic art, 
 when the position is caused by and reflected in the play of 
 the character itself. Scott in this way resembles his follower, 
 the elder Dumas. His creatures, in general, are far more 
 alive than those of Dumas, but he shrinks from exposing them 
 to the full storms of life. Even Effie Deans marries Staunton, 
 her seducer. What a story, if only, through some one's 
 original spite or folly, she had been hanged like Cordelia, 
 before the reprieve arrived ! Balzac would not have scrupled 
 to describe this. To put such a case is not to presume to 
 write The Heart of Midlothian, but to point out in what its 
 greatness does not lie. 
 
 This preference for a cheerful ending is not, however, wholly 
 a concession to the gods of the theatre. A critic who is now 
 coming into his own, Walter Bagehot, 1 defends the ' poetic 
 justice ' of these novels, as answering to the realities of life 
 and as representing the awards of providence, which ' works 
 on a scheme of averages.' Those who deserve to win or lose 
 commonly, and in the long run, do so. Tragedy deals with the 
 exceptions, romance with the average case. This view perhaps 
 describes Scott's own instinct. It comes to saying that the 
 romancer had better write romance which deals only a 
 moderate punishment to offenders or choose some historical 
 subject that does not end in disaster. Scott often makes the 
 wicked perish and disappear ; yet the lights are not turned on
 
 342 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 them to the full, but on the less interesting figures who prosper 
 at last ; and in this way a comfortable sense is left on the 
 mind of the way in which ' providence works.' In one of his 
 reviews he defends this kind of treatment, and says that the 
 picture of vice triumphant is ' as much out of place as a 
 wen in an academic model ' ; a curious remark, that gives the 
 clue to his rather naive treatment of circumstance. There is 
 much struggle and suspense, but its happy resolution is ex- 
 pected all the time, and so a kind of double consciousness is 
 produced. Scott is placed and classified by his preference for 
 this sort of art, which is not the lowest, and is sometimes nobly 
 workable, and can rise above the pure pleasure of entertain- 
 ment. For an example of a higher form of tragedy we must 
 go to his own life. And yet this is miscalled a tragedy, for 
 its splendour is epical and heroic rather ; for the motive is 
 honour, the conflict is that of a strong man with the weakness 
 of the body, and the end is 
 
 To dyen whan that he is best of name. 
 
 The exceptions to Scott's favourite form of ending are of 
 interest, especially in The Bride of Lammermoor, St. Kenan's 
 Well, and Kenilworth. In the first of these the stuff is that 
 of a ballad. There is actually no such ballad ; but there might 
 have been one of the first rate, if the popular imagination had 
 seized on the story of the Dalrymple family, upon which Scott 
 founded that of Lucy Ashton. It w T ould have been Scottish, 
 tragical, and touched with presentiment and terror. The plot, 
 though too complex as a whole for the hearers of Lord Thomas 
 and Fair Annie or Earl Brand, has many conventions of 
 the kind that they liked ; the pledging and parting of the 
 lovers, the mother's policy and cruelty, the preferred rival, the 
 betrothal where the lover appears too late, the slaying of the 
 bridegroom by the bride and her madness, the drowning of 
 the lover in the quicksand as he rides to his duel with her 
 brother. A ballad-monger would not have let the wicked 
 mother escape, and she would have been not a mother but a 
 ' stepdame.' But the spirit of the Minstrelsy is there, and it 
 would be easy to say that The Bride of Lammermoor is Scott's 
 greatest poem. It is in his diction, in the talk of Ravens wood 
 and Lucy Ashton, that he swerves into romantic common- 
 place. But even there, and in the other parts of the book 
 where he goes quite beyond the ballad -world, the colouring 
 that he draws from that world is distinguishable. Indeed, he 
 rises into a kind of acrid strength which is not common with
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 343 
 
 him. The interludes, though full of vigour the talk of the 
 roving companions Bucklaw and Craigengelt, and the antics 
 of Balderstone and the gossips do not make us laugh loud, 
 any more than the chorus of the village hags or of the sexton : 
 
 Folk may let their kindred shift for themsells when they are alive, 
 and can bear the burden of their ain misdoings ; but it 's an un- 
 natural thing to let them be buried like dogs, when a' the discredit 
 gangs to the kindred what kens the dead corpse about it ? 
 
 The book has been compared to Romeo and Juliet ; and there 
 is certainly the same sense of fatality, and the same youthful 
 and lyrical conception of tragedy ; young love, without any 
 fault of its own, is slain by family hatred and circumstance, 
 and by accidents which are natural effects of circumstance. 
 For this sense of fatality to be unchecked, the construction 
 has to be, as it is, accurate and strict ; no loose, picaresque 
 plan, no impatient wind-up here. And the double tragic 
 ending is wholly natural : it is not the novelist, but the poet 
 who here indemnifies himself and us for his daily tribute to 
 poetic justice and to the ' providential average.' 
 
 In St. Roman's Well, a comedy of manners deepening into a 
 tragedy of intrigue, Scott struck into more than one new vein 
 of his genius ; and the catastrophe is constructed with a bolder 
 irony than he shows elsewhere. The oscillations of hope and 
 fear have a wider swing. The story seems at one point to be 
 heading straight for the solution of tragi-comedy, for the fate 
 which gathers round Clara Mowbray, and which through 
 many chapters seems inevitable, is lightened, and seems to be 
 averted, by the appearance of the old earthly providence 
 Touchwood the nabob, who throws off his mask to play the 
 part of a beneficent cousin. But then he is not in time ; the 
 countermine he has been laying all through the book explodes 
 too late to save Clara Mowbray. She dies, though her fame is 
 righted ; and the irony is, we feel, at the cost not of a mere 
 old nabob, but of life itself, with its everyday caprices that 
 sweep away the innocent. The villain also dies ; but half- 
 justice is more ironical than none. Tyrrel, the hero, lives on, 
 but his story is over, though ho becomes an earl. The chatter- 
 ing women and bullies vanish : 
 
 lions and lionesses, with their several jackalls, blue surtouts, and 
 bluer stockings, fiddlers and dancers, painters and amateurs, authors 
 and critics, dispersed like pigeons by the demolition of a dovecot, 
 have sought other scenes of amusement and rehearsal, and have 
 deserted St. Ronan's Well.
 
 344 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Scott does not often bundle his puppets into the box with 
 this kind of smack, or fly in the face of the romantic rule that 
 the lovers must either both die or both live. But his tone is 
 not that of the bitter philosopher, nor yet that of the enter- 
 tainer who has turned impatient with the job of pulling the 
 wires. There is no loss of temper ; but he no longer dwells 
 in that curious arranged world, with its ' scheme of averages,' 
 that suffices him at other times. He is visited by a breath 
 from another world altogether, which goes, in Newman's words, 
 ' as though from unreasoning elements, not towards final 
 causes ' ; and even if we think it is only the world of the ex- 
 ceptions, we see that it speaks to us more, and cuts deeper with 
 its message, than that common ' providential ' one. We must 
 not pretend that Scott reasoned all this out ; his turn was not 
 for speculation ; but an artist would cease to be an artist if 
 he did not leave us with more definite ideas than it is right for 
 him to formulate. The Introduction (1832) proves that Scott 
 was more concerned with his characters than with his tragic 
 structure. He shows a needless ' sense of temerity ' in his 
 choice of scene, which he defends as a natural setting for his 
 fools, his eccentrics, and his traveller, who is ' partly taken 
 from nature.' St. Bonan's Well warns us at every point that 
 he never reached the limitations of his genius. 
 
 Another tragedy is that of KenilwortK, with its four villains 
 and its butchered lamb Amy Robsart. Here there is neither 
 ballad sentiment nor dramatic irony ; indeed there is little 
 drama at all, but only a pathos overspiced with melodrama, 
 and causing discomfort and protest rather than pity. Scott's 
 heart was not in this business, but in the pageant and the court 
 politics. Leicester, who is unlike the real Leicester, is made a 
 weakling in order to give prominence to the chief villain, Varney, 
 a creature made in imitation of the old ' Italianate ' tragedies ; 
 but Sussex and Raleigh and Elizabeth herself are alive ; nor 
 can the high romantic phrase conceal that instinct, already 
 noted, for the moods, obeisances, and veering favours of a 
 court, which is one of Scott's heirlooms from some earlier 
 existence. The interview between the two earls in the presence 
 at Greenwich is managed with a wonderful oscillation of the 
 suspense, and the pride that was deep in Scott gave him an 
 intuition of the same quality in Elizabeth, just as it had of a 
 subtler edge of pride in Mary of Scotland. But all this matches 
 Kenilworth rather with a history play containing a bloody 
 incident than with a real tragedy. In the crowd of minor 
 homely persons and humours we miss the Scots language.
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 345 
 
 Instead, there is a kind of Elizabethan comic bluster and hard 
 animal spirits, which are visibly mimicked from the prose of the 
 old citizen drama, Jonson's or Middleton's ; and the loyal eccen- 
 trics, Way land Smith and the jumping boy, are thought out, 
 and put in for the sake of the plot, rather than truly invented. 
 
 These are exceptions ; and there is another reason, his well- 
 known carelessness in plotting l (remarked on by Lady Louisa 
 Stuart and other good friends), why Scott never fully ex- 
 plored his own talent for tragedy. A comedy can scramble 
 through with little plot, but a tragedy must have a good one 
 if it is to convince us. Plot is distinguished from story. The 
 story is the narrative as it moves on, and holds us, from point 
 to point. The plot is the narrative, in its whole web, as we 
 look back upon it. In Tom Jones plot and story move together 
 and are one. This holds of hardly one of the Waverley Novels, 
 unless it be St. Ronan's Well. The plot is often loosely attached 
 to the real interest, as in the Heart of Midlothian, where the 
 affairs of George Staunton and Meg Merrilies fail to interest. 
 There is the same sort of rift in Guy Mannering. To say that 
 Scott is a great story-teller and not a great plotter is therefore 
 to say what every one knows, that his real power is in portraiture, 
 in dialogue, and situation. The same may often be said of 
 the plays of Shakespeare. 
 
 In his anonymous review 2 of the earlier novels, Scott admits 
 that his ' heroes,' the Waverleys and Fairfords, are passive 
 creatures and fail to dominate the crisis ; the action is decided 
 without their will. But here, swayed by a conventional con- 
 ception of the hero, he is unjust to himself. Waverley and 
 Fairford are not unreal ; they are the more real for not being, 
 like the heroes of ladies' romances, masters of events. They 
 are not instances, like Ivanhoe or Morton, of featureless pro- 
 tagonists. They are drawn carefully, with contemptuous 
 tolerance. They are natural young men of no distinction, 
 they are types, and they happen to be the centre of dangerous 
 adventures. They form part of the multitude of real beings 
 whom Scott created ; for he was not one of the writers who 
 have nice theories of art but ' only talk of population.' 
 
 VI 
 
 The people whom Scott invented are more numerous and 
 various, and their voices ring truer, than those of any novelist 
 but Balzac. We go from the Waverley Novels to the Comedie 
 Humaine as from one swarming city or countryside to another.
 
 346 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 The traveller will find no third with such a hive of inhabitants. 
 Balzac is the master-painter of man as a social animal. In 
 weight of brain, in his vision of herded mankind and of their 
 motives and fatal relationships, in fulness of evocative power, 
 and in depth of philosophic comment, he is supreme over all 
 but a few ; and those few are poets. From this high seat 
 Balzac is not dethroned by the excesses of his power or the 
 vagaries of his style, which do not concern this comparison. 
 In different ways, each of the two can write badly. But there 
 are other likenesses, some of which arise from the confessed 
 influence of the elder upon the younger writer. Maitre 
 Cornelius would hardly have existed without Quentin Durward, 
 and the Border stories of Scott, with all their differences, 
 offered a certain pattern for Les Chouans. There is through- 
 out the same descriptive and historical instinct, although the 
 history in the Comedie is the nearer to the time of the writer ; 
 the same painful fulness in the antiquarian setting and local 
 disquisition ; the same, or something of the same passion 
 for basing a story upon matters of law and business. Of the 
 two, Balzac rises higher and searches deeper ; his mind is of 
 another order altogether. But in one way Scott regains 
 pre-eminence ; he has the huge advantage of making the 
 reader happier. He walks by nature and habit with a lighter 
 step, through no such strange and lowering atmosphere, with 
 a pure relish for the charm of the wayside, with a ringing 
 humour and a Chaucerian vivacity. At his best, indeed, he 
 is like Chaucer ; while Balzac at his best that is, in the 
 Contes Drolatiques resembles, as lie wishes to resemble, one 
 of the great sixteenth - century Frenchmen, Montaigne or 
 Rabelais. Scott to the last has more youth, nay more 
 boyishness in him ; he is excited about the points of the 
 next dog, or horse, or man, whom he may meet round the 
 turn of the road. He has a clean artistic pleasure in such 
 things and in the expression he finds for them, and he can 
 almost make animals talk. Balzac misses all that, and easily 
 overshoots. 
 
 Scott also keeps his pre-eminence when he is contrasted 
 with the chief English novelists of the last thirty years. Their 
 tales are charged with mental trouble and questioning, or 
 with a high dark irony ; Scott's are not. They comment 
 often on the rough, self-satisfied, working morality of the 
 world ; and such a morality, purged and made gentler it is 
 true, but still taking current codes and institutions for granted, 
 is Scott's own. This chorus to the modern novel is sometimes
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 347 
 
 hopeful and astringent ; it is so with Meredith ; or it is not 
 hopeful, and lacks any source of comfort except the convic- 
 tion of truth ; such a spirit is felt in The Dynasts and Tess of 
 the D'Urbervilles. Scott lived and died long before these ideas 
 were in the air, and was cheerfully deaf to the movements of 
 his time from which they spring. The difference extends to 
 form. The later styles call attention to themselves ; they are 
 picked and winnowed and curious ; Scott's is not. 
 
 Hence there arise two familiar ways of criticising him. There 
 is the criticism that has learnt little and sloughed nothing 
 and still moves admiringly in something like Scott's own 
 world of social and intellectual values. It has many voices 
 from Ruskin downwards. Ruskin often praised Scott well, 
 but was too narrow and capricious to make the necessary 
 comparisons, so that here, as so often, there is a blight upon 
 his commentary. But he and those who are with him are 
 far likelier to get near to Scott than those who are preoccupied 
 with later schools of art, or who are ridden by the false associa- 
 tions of painful, choice, and fastidious language that have 
 gathered for half a century round the word art ; or, again, 
 who must have philosophy as a sauce to fiction. Such judges 
 will be cold to Scott. But we must take care lest we deny 
 him something which fifty years hence will be his own again ; 
 and where shall we be then ? Mr. Pater, who did much to 
 fix those esoteric associations of the words art, style, left the 
 warning nevertheless ; ' Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply- 
 powdered evocation of the " phrase," are equally good art.' 
 He was speaking of style ; but his words are just as true when 
 extended to the representation of character, or to the way in 
 which life and humanity are regarded. To read Scott is to 
 let go the cheaper and retrieve the nobler meaning of the 
 term facility. Sometimes, as we have seen, his handiwork 
 is nice and can be scanned narrowly, like a miniature. In 
 the picture of the Marquis de Hautlieu, not a trait is wrong; 
 yet he may have written it very quickly. At other times we 
 have to stand back, and not peer close, any more than we 
 should at a big historical fresco. Sometimes, no doubt, we 
 do not care to look again, or at all. But everywhere, even 
 in the stories written under cruel stress, there is the same 
 quality, which may be called facility in respect of the crafts- 
 manship, and for which, as regards the effect, the word popu- 
 larity can be borrowed from the best of Scott's early critics. 
 This word is happily used by J. L. Adolphus, 1 in describing 
 his narrative style in prose and verse.
 
 348 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 The same easy openness which was remarked in his prose style 
 is also a prevailing quality in his poetical composition, where, 
 however, it appears not so such in verbal arrangement as in the 
 mode of developing and combining thoughts. Few authors are 
 less subject to the fault of over-describing, or better know the point 
 at which a reader's imagination should be left to its own activity ; 
 but the images which he does supply are placed directly in our 
 view, under a full noonday light. . . . His epithets and phrases, 
 replete as they often are with poetic force and meaning, have always 
 a direct bearing on the principal subject. He pursues his theme, 
 in short, from point to point, with the steadiness and plainness of 
 one who descants on a common matter of fact. ... A poet accus- 
 tomed to express himself in this simple, expanded, and consecutive 
 style can readily transfer the riches of his genius to prose composi- 
 tion, while the attempt would be almost hopeless to one who 
 delighted in abrupt transition and fanciful combination, and whose 
 thoughts habitually condensed themselves into the most com- 
 pendious phraseology. 
 
 This faithful and safe account of the style may be applied 
 to the matter of the novels. Facility and popularity, thus 
 explained, are their most glorious attributes. What with 
 Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a 
 Lady, we have all come to demand that we should be stung 
 by fiction, just as we often are by life. Nor would we for 
 anything miss that experience, nor could we if we would. 
 But much that is most precious in real, as in represented, life, 
 has after all no sting. And in the representation of this part 
 of life Scott is sovereign amongst our novelists. His villains 
 and tragedies, though skilfully staged, are in the last resort 
 and with few exceptions entertaining and nothing else. We 
 sit and watch and are pleased, but our applause is loud it 
 is not that applause of silence with which we listen to Emily 
 Bronte's Heathcliff. Scott never hurts ; there is his limita- 
 tion, and also his greatness. He draws the surface ; we are 
 tempted to think he is not deep, because he does this, and 
 because he does not hurt and sting. But he does not draw 
 the surface superficially, save in his merely conventional 
 pages. He draws it as a master. Nothing is so hard as to 
 draw the surface in this way which is not Smollett's way 
 except to go deeper still, in Shakespeare's way. The real 
 clatter of the world, and the buzz of its open commerce ; the 
 talk of the Grassmarket, and the May games of Kinross fair ; 
 the conversation of Ochiltree and Moniplies and Fairservice ; 
 the colour and humours of the shooting at the popinjay, and 
 the sly undercurrents of the scene ; of these things the older
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 349 
 
 classical censors might have said, as they said of Shakespeare, 
 that they are the fruits of ' nature ' rather than of ' art.' But 
 we have got over that false contrast, which only expresses 
 the difference between one kind of art and another which is 
 equal in honour. It is by the mass and the excellence of 
 such art that Scott keeps his supremacy in Britain. 
 
 The world of the Waverley Novels is so far like the real 
 world, that it evades formulae and summary treatment. It is 
 easy to see what regions of thought or passion Scott never 
 thought of entering. It is not so easy to see the limits of the 
 territories that he actually made his own, or to fix in words 
 the impression of breadth and of power in reserve that he 
 leaves. Behind it all is his rich and noble nature, with all 
 its prejudiced and naively mercantile elements, with all its 
 insuperable courage and indignant sense of honour. Of that 
 nature, and of its instructive modes of expression, and of the 
 various overlaying disguising voices that he found for it, we 
 may have some further inkling by attending to his style, 
 which has never been enough considered. 
 
 VII 
 
 Scott, in the person of Edward Waverley, confesses that ' it 
 was in vain to attempt fixing his attention on ... the beauty 
 of felicitous expression.' This is spoken of his youthful habit 
 in reading, but it may be equally true of the spirit in which 
 he wrote his prose. 1 We do not think of him as ' fixing his 
 attention ' on his own words, on their beauty or felicity, with that 
 temperate self-enjoyment of the careful craftsman which we 
 trace in Gibbon. ' You profess,' said Lady Louisa Stuart, 
 ' never knowing what you are going to write.' ' I have often 
 been amused,' he states in the Journal, ' with the critics dis- 
 tinguishing some passages as particularly laboured, when the 
 pen passed over the whole as fast as it could move, and the 
 eye never again saw them, except in proof. Verse I write 
 twice, and sometimes three times over.' But the effects of 
 hast and labour are easily the same, and some of his swiftest 
 prose is tedious. There is little sign of his having thought 
 or theorised on the art of words, though his prefaces and 
 reviews prove he had pondered much over the right kinds of 
 incident, the artistic possibilities of national character, and the 
 kinds and uses of the supernatural in fiction. Nevertheless 
 Scott practised many shades and varieties of style, which must 
 be discerned if we would come nearer to the heart of his genius.
 
 350 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 Adolphus may be quoted again. He is comparing the 
 manner of the ' great unknown ' with that of Scott's acknow- 
 ledged works. ' The style/ he says, ' seldom presses on our 
 consideration,' and he proceeds : 
 
 It is not to be recognised by the frequent or ambitious use of 
 antithesis, inversion, reiteration, or climax ; by sententious brevity, 
 or sounding circumlocution : by studied points or efforts to surprise 
 . . . the prose of these writers is on the contrary remarkable (if it 
 can in any respect be deemed so) for plainness, and for the rare 
 occurrence of ornament produced by an artful calculation of words. 
 Nothing seems attempted or desired except to compose at as little 
 expense of labour as possible consistently with the ease of the reader. 
 Their style is therefore fluent, often diffuse, but generally perspicu- 
 ous : if it is sometimes weakened by a superabundance, it is seldom 
 darkened by a penury, of words. 
 
 The modern censures of Scott's writing come to little more 
 than this ; and it is hard to better the following eulogy : 
 
 There is a winning air of candour in their address which deserves 
 to be named among their chief excellences . . . they impart 
 knowledge in the frank, unassuming, and courteous manner of a 
 friend communicating with a friend. The use of irony or sarcasm 
 appears repugnant to their natural openness and good humour 
 . . . but there is a kind of serious banter, a style hovering between 
 affected gravity and satirical slyness, in which both writers take an 
 unusual delight. 
 
 Adolphus wrote in 1821, when the Waveiiey Novels were 
 half through : the disclosure of the secret proved his acuteness, 
 but unduly discounted his book ; and his analysis only calls 
 for some further distinctions, which we can now make with all 
 Scott's works before us. Of his prefaces, of his lives of the 
 poets, of his easygoing narrative and notes of his Journal, 
 indeed of his normal way of writing, it is admirably true. But 
 Scott's natural style is often overlaid, and that in sundry ways, 
 with some kind of superadded film, or surface change, which 
 is created by his relation to his reader at the moment. The 
 introductions by the ' Author of Waverley ' read differently 
 from those which he afterwards signed with his name. The 
 historical disquisitions in the novels are not light, in spite of 
 his wish to make the chronicle lively. He tried to get the 
 weight and solidity of history without being abstract or formal ; 
 it was to be epical or dramatic in cast. And he succeeds when 
 he gets to historical character and anecdote, or to big scenic 
 occurrences. In The Heart of Midlothian the style is close-girt 
 and disciplined, like the march of the rioters against Porteous ;
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 351 
 
 as soon as the tale becomes concrete, it ceases to lumber, and 
 the writing becomes easy, classical, and strong. 
 
 How were his kings and persons of quality to converse ? 
 He had to find a style for them, as Wordsworth had to find one 
 for his shepherds. But the task was harder in prose, for there 
 was no tradition to help. Scott could easily have made 
 King Richard, as he had made the Bruce, talk well enough in 
 rhyme. But in prose, while helped by his study of Froissart 
 and the best chroniclers, he had to compound a language. 
 He did this triumphantly ; and the talk of the Chevalier, of 
 Mary of Scotland, of Queen Caroline, shows every noble 
 gradation of his power ; while that of Norna the sibyl and 
 Ulrica the Saxon, and even that of Cceur-de-Lion and of Louis 
 the Eleventh, show the dangers of his more romantic, fabricated 
 manner. Indeed, his strength and weakness come out in such 
 passages as the interview of Hobbie Elliot with the Black 
 Dwarf, where the idiom of the homely speaker is quite right, 
 and that of the other is intolerable ; a perfect instance of 
 sham dramatic contrast. 
 
 ' Muckle obliged for your good will ; and I wad blithely gie you 
 a bond for some o' the siller, or a wadset ower the lands o' Wideopeu. 
 But I dinna ken, Elshie ; to be free wi' you, I dinna like to use 
 siller unless I ken it was decently come by ; and maybe it might 
 turn into sclate-stanes, and cheat some poor man.' 
 
 ' Ignorant idiot ! ' retorted the Dwarf ; ' the trash is as genuine 
 poison as ever was dug out of the bowels of the earth. Take it 
 use it, and may it thrive with you as it hath done with me ! ' 
 
 The loftier diction of Scott's prose must not be judged by 
 excesses of this kind, even if it is a little faded now in its braver 
 colours and its set eloquence, and if there is not much in it that 
 matches the rarest of his lyrical or martial verse. What helps 
 it through is the suffusion of humour, irony, or banter, which 
 keeps it from going too far, and which is felt even in the 
 utterance of his kings and queens. He has also a great resource 
 in one element which bulks largo both in his description and 
 dialogue. This is the talk, which is ever in the mouth of the 
 sovereigns and nobles in the novels, about tilting, hunting, 
 shooting, war, hawking, or archery ; it is not too technical, 
 and holds us because it held Scott so strongly himself. It 
 comes as well from his common people as from his persons of 
 quality, and serves to link all classes together, and makes for 
 naturalness and gaiety. If Prince John and Locksley were 
 to talk on archery at all, it is hard to see how they could have 
 done it better. Scott's immense mass of floating knowledge
 
 352 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 about pastime, heraldry, dogs, horses, even tactics all of it 
 ready to his hand in its careless but not disorderly wealth, is 
 another of the things that remind us of Shakespeare. His 
 followers got up such knowledge, but he could watch them 
 securely, in his own lifetime, toiling after him. None even of 
 the best of them, in a later day, like Dumas the elder, had this 
 advantage in the same measure, to enliven their style. 
 
 One hampering influence upon his language may be roughly 
 described by saying that Scott was too much of a gentleman, 
 or too purely one, to write tragical or passionate dialogue, 
 between educated persons, in English, with perfect ease. He 
 often seems too shy or stoical to write freely, so that when he 
 does break loose he drops into a false manner. This is not the 
 case in his lyric or in his Scots prose. His English prose may 
 have been hurt by the bad tradition that came down from 
 Richardson and was still rife. Whatever the cause, it is easy 
 to find examples of this difficulty of utterance : 
 
 ' Sir William Ashton,' said Ravenswood, ' I pray you, and all 
 who hear me, that you will not mistake my purpose. If this young 
 lady, of her own free will, desires the restoration of this contract, 
 as her letter would seem to imply there is not a withered leaf 
 which this autumn wind strews on the heath, that is more valueless 
 in my eyes. But I must and will hear the truth from her own 
 mouth without this satisfaction I will not leave this spot. . . . 
 Now, choose,' he said, drawing his sword with the right hand, and, 
 with the left, by the same motion, taking a pistol from his belt and 
 cocking it, but turning the point of one weapon and the muzzle of 
 the other to the ground ' choose if you will have this hall floated 
 with blood, or if you will grant me the decisive interview with my 
 affianced bride, which the laws of God and the country alike entitle 
 me to demand.' 
 
 All recoiled at the sound of his voice, and the determined action 
 by which it was accompanied ; for the ecstasy of real desperation 
 seldom fails to overpower the less energetic passions by which it 
 may be opposed. The clergyman was the first to speak. ' In the 
 name of God,' he said, ' receive an overture of peace from the 
 meanest of his servants.' . . . 
 
 The careful description of the weapons is here in odd con- 
 trast with the melodramatic tint of the talk, which is composed 
 in a poor tradition. There is a great deal of this in the novels ; 
 and in the highly-wrought scenes of a tale like Ivanhoe, where 
 the time is put far back, and the archaisms of supposed chival- 
 rous language are superadded, the frigid effect is only increased. 
 It is a manner, which in James, Ains worth, and the mob of 
 successors became worse, and found burial in the parodies of
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 353 
 
 Thackeray. It would be ungrateful to cite the scenes between 
 Waverley and Flora Maclvor : 
 
 ' Incomparable Flora ! ' said Edward, taking her hand, ' how 
 much do I need such a monitor ! ' 
 
 ' A better one by far,' said Flora, gently withdrawing her hand, 
 'Mr. Waverley will always find in his own bosom, when he will 
 give its small still voice leisure to be heard.' 
 
 Even in such passages the matter is never mean ; it is only 
 the words that are wrong ; but then the words are everything. 
 It is actually some such impulse of high or reserved feeling 
 that forces Scott back upon unreal phrase, and forbids him 
 to find the speech that Emily or Charlotte Bronte were to 
 command. It would be cold-blooded indeed to quote Scott's 
 love-letters on a point of style ; but in those written to Char- 
 lotte Charpentier, afterwards his wife, though there is no 
 rhetoric, there is a bookish phrase, an official diction, which is 
 easily seen to be the fruit of delicacy and knightly feeling. 
 We have, to be sure, nothing that he may have written to the 
 other lady whom he had loved. 
 
 But Scott's prose is full of surprises, and it is never safe 
 to predict that he will write ill, even in a vein of which the 
 dangers are manifest. This is seen in his passages of lyric 
 oratory, which ring alternately false and true. When he fails, 
 it is not hard to see why ; he is lured by the strained, shadeless 
 diction of melodrama, or by the supposed need of giving 
 antique colour. And when he succeeds he is a great artist. 
 The outburst of Claverhouse in Old Mortality is an instance ; 
 Scott had not to go far from himself in order to find the right 
 words : it is like the very best passages of his verse, and the 
 diction is right by instinct, even if it be more that of a speech 
 than of a conversation : 
 
 But in truth, Mr. Morton, why should we care so much for death, 
 light upon us or around us whenever it may ? Men die daily 
 not a bell tolls the hour but it is the death-note of some one or other ; 
 and why hesitate to shorten the span of others, or take over-anxious 
 care to prolong our own ? It is all a lottery when the hour of 
 midnight came, you were to die it has struck, you are alive and safe, 
 and the lot has fallen on those fellows who were to murder you. 
 It is not the expiring pang that is worth thinking of in an event 
 that must happen one day, and may befall us on any given moment 
 it is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the 
 long train of light that follows the sunken sun (hat is all which 
 is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave or the 
 ignoble. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 354 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 This is not mere lofty detachable commonplace ; it springs 
 straight from the situation and the character of the speaker, 
 and it is the comment of Walter Scott the poet on the crisis 
 from which he has just freed his hero. It is none the worse, 
 given the atmosphere of romance, for the inversion, certainly 
 more native to verse, in light upon us or around us whenever it 
 may ; nor yet for the inlaid blank line, the memory which the 
 soldier leaves behind him, for this is at once followed by a true 
 cadence of poetic prose, which defies any metrical suggestion : 
 like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun. The only 
 phrases that can be called stereotypes, or cliches, are shorten 
 the span and the expiring pang ; but the note of talk is at once 
 retrieved by those fellows and It is all a lottery. The diction, 
 for the rest, is plain, brief, full of short, full knelling sounds, 
 die daily, bell tolls, hour, care, light, befall, brave. How far all 
 this is instinct and how far study matters little ; yet we cannot 
 doubt that Scott is here, unlike Edward Waverley, ' fixing his 
 attention on the beauty of felicitous expression.' 
 
 The endless Tightness and variety of Scott's lowland or 
 border diction, both in comic and in serious scenes, must be 
 left to a Northerner to praise fitly. The dialect of town and 
 shire, of different social layers, of different individuals, is used 
 with a wealth, with a natural careless inexhaustible flow, that 
 was a new thing in prose. No one had made more than petty 
 or casual use of anything but the southern ' standard English.' 
 Miss Edgeworth had done well with the Anglo-Irish ; but 
 Scots now became, to a public quickened by reading Burns, 
 the key to a new world of humour and character. Many of 
 the persons who talk prose in the plays of Shakespeare are less 
 real and entertaining than those who talk Scots in the Waverley 
 Novels. But these, again, are more like the humourists whom 
 we meet in Ben Jonson's earlier comedies, before his hand 
 had stiffened. The baron of Bradwardine, with his itera- 
 tions and his Latin, is a Jonsonian creation ; and of Dugald 
 Dalgetty the like might be said. Pleydell, and Jarvie, and 
 Balderstone sometimes suggest the same writer. Jeanie Deans 
 is of another kind ; she lias no manner, and speaks in the 
 universal style. 
 
 Some of these Scottish speakers, such as Davie Gellatley 
 or Madge Wildfire, are, no doubt, beings of literary parentage. 
 They are not all alike successful, arid their language is nearer to 
 that of the poetic drama than of the novel. The poet in Scott 
 seems to ache to be up again and doing ; and, when he breaks 
 out into lyric, is himself again. But the ambitious, imaginative
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 355 
 
 prose is another matter ; and the mixture is felt in a passage 
 like that in which Madge Wildfire exclaims : 
 
 ' I dimia ken what makes me sae sleepy I amaist never sleep 
 till my bonny Lady Moon gangs till her bed niair by token, when 
 she 's at the full, ye ken, rowing aboon as yonder in her grand silver 
 coach I have danced to her my lane sometimes for very joy and 
 whiles dead folk came and danced wi' me the like o' Jock Porteous, 
 or ony body I had kenned when I was living for ye maun ken I 
 was ance dead mysell.' 
 
 Here the poor maniac sang in a low and wild tone : 
 
 ' My banes are buried in yon kirkyard 
 
 Sae far ayont the sea, 
 And it is but my blithesome ghaist 
 
 That 's speaking now to thee.' 
 
 The native, ebullient Scots of dialogue, which is the author's 
 prime resource as an humourist, is freshest in the earlier novels, 
 and is the language of the Ochiltrees and Dinmonts. In those 
 of the third period some of the race may be lost ; for such work 
 to be done well good spirits are necessary, and high spirit is 
 not sufficient. Some youthful lack of husbandry is needed for 
 the imagining, in merry hour, of the speech of Dugald Dalgetty : 
 the children of a sadder middle age, which is economical per- 
 force, may be of a finer, but will be of a less hearty complexion. 
 One such later offspring, born when Scott was rallying his 
 despondency and his powers to save his honour, is Chrystal 
 Croftangry, who introduces the second series of Chronicles of 
 the Canongate. Croftangry relates his life, his commonplace 
 bittersweet experience, not so much sweet as bitter ; yet he 
 relates it in tones less of bitterness than of desideriurn and 
 muffled self-reproach. It is by far the most inward, perhaps 
 the most personal, of Scott's shorter sketches. The deep, 
 sure note of regret and retrospect, the rueful but essentially 
 humorous turn of the language, the sense that the gift of humour 
 is some offset if no remedy for the past all this is unlike any- 
 thing else in the novels : only the earlier portrait of the Marquis 
 de Hautlieu has an equal delicacy. Croftangry's story stands 
 beside the usual medley of the novels much as the epistles 
 introducing Marmion stand beside the body of the rhymed 
 romances. There are two piercing scenes, and Scott, often 
 as he stirs and delights, does not often pierce : one, when 
 Chrystal, after a youth of debt and riot, has wandered abroad 
 and made a man of himself, if a somewhat broken man, and 
 comes back home, and finds the old lawyer, who had helped
 
 356 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 him over his scrapes, in second childhood but able to awake 
 and greet him once before a last relapse : the other, when 
 he visits incognito the ' governante ' of his mother's house, 
 and finds her in terribly competent and virulent possession of 
 her Scotch tongue. He hears what she has to say on his far- 
 away youthful misdoings, and goes away uncertain whether 
 he has been recognised. 
 
 The higher lyrical grace and genius of Scott, with its rare 
 ineffable moments, standing out from the gallant soldierly 
 vigour which bore him with a tune on his lips through the 
 day's march, has come to be acknowledged ; but in his prose 
 also there is the counterpart of this refining element, carrying 
 him up into a kind of genius other than that which stamps 
 his ordinary page. To watch for this exceptional mood and 
 its expression, coining as they often do only to disappear too 
 quickly, is well for the critic of Scott, who need concern 
 himself little with the sorrier task of trying to guess what 
 lawful but worldly influences, or what innocent but effectual 
 distractions, kept him from rising to it oftener, or sustaining 
 it longer. The task of discrimination is the harder, because 
 his utterance in his stories has to be impersonal and dramatic, 
 and the best of his soul is apt to appear merely in some finer 
 or more pensive trait of tenderness or humour than is customary; 
 and also because his shyness and dignity make him say 
 delicate things in an imperfect and conventional style, perhaps 
 from some erroneous notion of what is the right language for 
 solemn matter. It is, once more, when he uses the Scots that 
 the veil between his heart and that of his reader is thinnest : 
 
 ' I wad hae putten on a cap, sir,' said Jeanie, ' but your honour 
 kens it isna the fashion of my country for single women ; and I 
 judged that being sae mony hundred miles frae hame, your 
 Grace's heart wad warm to the tartan,' looking at the corner of 
 her plaid. 
 
 ' You judged quite right,' said the Duke. 
 
 There is much of this pure stuff of humanity in the novels ; 
 and there might have been more, had it not been variously 
 hindered by the high-pitched, noble but still artificial diction 
 demanded for the big historical dramas, by the eager pages 
 on costume and antiquities, and by the rest of the web con- 
 necting the narrative. In his stories Scott rarely drops 
 the mask, or speaks in the strain that is heard on every 
 page of the Journal. In one passage of Woodstock, written 
 under the recent stress, there is a breath that carries
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 357 
 
 the words far beyond their actual triteness. It is in the 
 epilogue ; the characters of the story, with whom we have 
 lived so long, are swept in a sentence past long years of 
 intervening life : 
 
 Years rush by us like the wind. We see not whence the eddy 
 comes, nor whitherward it is tending, and we seem ourselves to 
 witness their flight, without a sense that we are changed ; and yet 
 Time is beguiling man of his strength, as the winds rob the woods 
 of their foliage. 
 
 In such reminiscent prose much of the finer part of Scott is 
 revealed, and he is never a greater writer than when he is 
 speaking of himself. The English of the Journal is of no period. 
 Many men are rhetoricians in soliloquy, who would be natural 
 in company. The alter ego whom they are addressing has a 
 certain pose, and is a critic of language, draped in dignity, 
 and prophetic or penitential. This is never felt with Scott. 
 Macaulay is honest when alone, and puts off rhetoric, but he 
 has a certain tone of emphasis and coarseness ; nor has he 
 Scott's sad advantage of having been unfortunate. Apart 
 from the pride and piety, the modesty and courage of the 
 Journal, it shows everywhere the constituents of the author's 
 natural style the anecdote, the Scots word, the Latin quota- 
 tion, the snatch of English verse, the proverb. These are 
 things that bubble from his mind, and often help out his 
 public writing just when we are beginning to think it wanting 
 in lightness. Whatever else of Scott's may lose its colour 
 with time, the Journal cannot do so, with its accurate, un- 
 exaggerated language of pain. Here is an average example, 
 dated not long after Lady Scott's death, and a little longer 
 after the loss of his prosperity : 
 
 Arrived here yesterday before five o'clock. Anybody would 
 think, from the fal-de-ral conclusion of my journal of yesterday, that 
 I left town in a very gay humour cujus contrarium verum est. But 
 nature has given me a kind of buoyancy, I know not what to call it, 
 that mingles even with my deepest afflictions and most gloomy 
 hours. I have a secret pride I fancy it will be so most truly 
 termed which impels me to mix with my distresses strange snatches 
 of mirth ' which have no mirth in them.' In fact, the journey 
 hither, the absence of the affectionate friend that used to be my 
 companion on the journey, and many mingled thoughts of bitter- 
 ness, have given me a fit of the bile. 
 
 This is as well in its kind as the self-lashings of Carlyle, and 
 gives the temper of the speaker just as faithfully.
 
 358 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 VIII 
 
 Scott threw on the market huge bales of miscellaneous 
 prose, 1 and much of it is now scarcely food even for book- 
 worms. The mass of his mechanical industry, like that of 
 Southey, saddens and astonishes. His big Life of Napoleon ; 
 his memoranda of the year 1814-5, published as Paul's Letters 
 to his Kinsfolk ; his Letters from Mungo Malagrowther, Esquire, 
 on the proposed Change of Currency (1826) ; the letterpress 
 that he made for the pictures in the Border Antiquities (1814), 
 and in the Provincial Antiquities of Scotland (1825); these 
 things do not live, and did not live very long. But from them, 
 and from Scott's critical, editorial, and historical prose a 
 selection ought to be made. His haste and frequent heavi- 
 ness, his prolixity in composition, have often enough been 
 blamed and have punished themselves. But the colour and 
 zest of his narrative, the diffused mellow sagacity and charity 
 of his comment, strike the reader continually. Even in the 
 Life of Napoleon (really a sketch of the Revolution and its 
 sequel), although it is prejudiced task-work founded on im- 
 perfect materials, the narrative and anecdotal passages are 
 full of vigour and dramatic feeling. The Tales of a Grand- 
 father (1827-30) is not compressed in style, but it is not a book 
 that we wish were shorter. It keeps its charm, which is that 
 of a historical novel tied more strictly than usual to the facts. 
 It is not at all journeyman- work ; it has the proportion and 
 the tone of a narrative that has been long in the memory ; 
 and it is still one of the best of means for reconciling the childish 
 mind, unawares, to the existence of history. 
 
 There is no dispensing with Scott as a critic and biographer. 
 In his longest memoirs, those of Dryden and Swift, he is both 
 these things at once. The Life in each case embodies a running 
 literary commentary ; the two aspects are not formally 
 separated, as they are in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. There 
 are in Scott few of the memorable sentences which Johnson 
 carves in every paragraph ; and his unit of style is not the 
 maxim or the epigram. There is nothing of the air of a judge's 
 charge. In recompense, there is more of the true effect of 
 narrative, of a living and puzzling piece of history, rather 
 than of a case that has been decided and put upon the shelf. 
 Scott shoulders his way through fact and argument, by no 
 means lightly or swiftly, but with a gallant energy and with 
 a wide-awake equity of temper. The Dryden is a judicious 
 and persuasive plea for the defence, in a suit that cannot
 
 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 359 
 
 yet be said to be closed ; but it would be hard to make a 
 better one for the sincerity of Dryden's changes of opinion. 
 As a critic Scott is here a child of the eighteenth century ; 
 he is the last great writer who accepts and proclaims Dryden 
 as an English poet of the first rate. The Swift is also defensive, 
 but less satisfactory. As a biography, indeed, it is better 
 than its promise, which is merely to ' condense the informa- 
 tion ' of the five or six preceding writers who had attempted 
 the same task. The aim was to weaken the adverse legend 
 which represented Swift as a mere self-seeker and something 
 of a traitor to his cloth. In detail Scott often succeeds ; and 
 while later research has discredited some of his authorities 
 and conclusions, it has also justified, from sources not at Scott's 
 disposal, Swift's motives for his alliance with the Tory party. 
 But Scott could not understand Swift's ' Titanism/ and thinks 
 of the Tale of a Tub as a ' simple and obvious ' party squib. 
 The Life leaves the impression of a great eccentric, full of 
 queer perplexing traits while sound at bottom ; but it gives 
 little inkling of the depths and recesses of a great man, whose 
 transparency and simplicity of expression are an almost 
 impenetrable disguise. 
 
 The Lives of the Novelists and the studies of fiction in the 
 Quarterly Review leave little for the critic to add or deprecate. 
 Scott's leniency of judgment towards minor writers can easily 
 be overstated, and is more often a result of courtesy and good 
 form than of artistic blindness. His mode of stating his 
 reserves is not that of his day ; there is none of the sword- 
 work of Lockhart or the shambles-work of Gifford ; and there 
 is still less of Wilson's headlong praise or railing. There is, 
 perhaps, little philosophic comment, and little that is high- 
 inspired. The tone is that of a generous but acute fellow- 
 craftsman, who offers gentle, sometimes fatal, suggestions to 
 Maturin, or Holcroft, or Cumberland, or to their shades. His 
 manly defence of the morality of Fielding, his criticisms on 
 that of Pamela, his praise of the variety and profusion of 
 Smollett, have not been excelled. All that Scott says about 
 his own art is of interest. In his review of Miss Austen he 
 defends his own habit of filling out his tales with what may 
 be called connective tissue : 
 
 Let any one cut out from the Iliad, or from Shakespeare's pliU's, 
 everything (we are far from saying that cither might not lose some 
 parts with advantage, but let him reject everything) which is abso- 
 lutely devoid of importance and of interest in itself; and he will 
 find that what is left will have left more than half its charms. We
 
 360 SCOTT : THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 
 
 are convinced that some writers have diminished the effect of their 
 works by being scrupulous to admit nothing into them which had 
 not some absolute, intrinsic, and independent merit. They have 
 acted like those who strip off the leaves of a fruit-tree, as being of 
 themselves good for nothing, with the view of securing more nourish- 
 ment to the fruit, which in fact cannot attain its full maturity and 
 flower without them. 
 
 This was said in 1821, and it is true that The Pirate is not 
 the most encouraging commentary upon it ; but it is a good 
 instance of Scott's critical shrewdness, and also of his manner, 
 which has itself some of the charm of an old-fashioned garden, 
 half-formal and half-familiar, with no lack either of fruit or 
 leafage. It is easy to see, in general, what Scott took from 
 romance, and what a mighty impulse he gave to it ; and also 
 how wonderful was his intermittent gift of song ; but we 
 sometimes feel, after all, that romance is something acquired, 
 or only second nature, in him, and that he is really a creature, 
 not essentially poetical, of the age of good sense and daylight 
 humanity. 
 
 The influence of Scott upon British and foreign fiction can 
 hardly be measured, and no estimate is here attempted. Some 
 of its more immediate traces in England, Scotland, and Ireland 
 will be noticed in the next chapter. The endless direct imita- 
 tions are of less consequence ; Scott's real legacy was the 
 enlargement of the horizon of the novel, through one great 
 and fertile idea. This was, simply, the revelation of the past, 
 and of the w r hole scenery and play of national character, as 
 material not merely for the poetic drama or the quasi-epic 
 narrative in verse, or for the historian, or for the painter, but 
 for inventive prose. To the application of this idea there 
 are, in the nature of the case, no limits. Scott's true power 
 is seen in his quickening of talents unlike his own, and of 
 creative work that was outside his own range. The book 
 that will narrate this permanent and international service 
 has not been written, and would require a syndicate of authors. 
 In France, 1 above all, the seed bore fruit during his own life- 
 time, in the first stories of Victor Hugo, including Notre-Dame 
 de Paris, in Merimee's Charles IX., and in De Vigny's Cinq- 
 Mars ; the elder Dumas and Stendhal, besides Balzac, came 
 soon afterwards. But in almost every country in Germany, 
 in Holland, in Russia a distinct, if sometimes transient, group 
 or school of Scott's disciples is recorded.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 I. Influence of Scott: English successors, such as Horace Smith and 
 Leigh Hunt. G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth, not included here. 
 Scottish fiction : Moir's Mansie Wauch. John Gait, his productiveness ; 
 Annals of the Parish, The Entail, The Provost, The Ayrshire Legatees. Andrew 
 Picken. Michael Scott. 
 
 II. Miss Ferrier : her characteristics and personages : view of poetic 
 justice and didactic element. Marriage, Inheritance, Destiny. 
 
 III. Irish fiction : Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) ; The Wild Irish Girl, 
 O'Donnel, The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys. Michael and John Banim : 
 Tales of the O'Hara Family, etc. Gerald Griffin, The. Collegians. T. Crofton 
 Croker's Fairy Legends and Killarney Legends. 
 
 IV. English fiction : Miss Mitford's Our Village. Eastern Tales : T. Hope, 
 Anastasius, its veracity of colouring. J. J. Morier, Hajfi Baba in Ispahan and 
 Hajj\ Baba in England : other stories. Trelawny's Adventures of a Younger Son. 
 
 V. Thomas Love Peacock : the commentator and satirist of ' romance ' ; 
 parallel with Samuel Butler. Poems : Rhododaphne, etc., and lyrics. Plan 
 and style of his fictions ; his stock of characters ; opinions, shown in Crotchet 
 Castle, Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt, etc. Romantic satires : Maid Marian, 
 The Misfortunes of Elphin. 
 
 THE novelists who appeared after Waierley l fall into scattered 
 groups, and it goes hard with any one of them but he betrays 
 the influence of Scott. The story of national life and manners, 
 in Ireland as well as in Scotland, takes a new life from his 
 example, and comes to free itself more or less from his shadow. 
 In England, though he has many disciples, they are mostly 
 either insignificant, or they belong to the following period. 
 Such a tale, for instance, as the Brambletye House (1826) of 
 Horace Smith owed its vogue chiefly to the imitative bold- 
 ness of the undertaking. Cromwell and Milton, Charles the 
 Second and Monmouth and Rochester, are all introduced, and 
 all speakers ; the thread is the adventures of a young Cavalier 
 who witnesses the Plague and the Fire of London. This was 
 a heavy undertaking even for so accomplished a wit. There 
 is more literary quality in Leigh Hunt's Sir Ralph E slier (1832), 
 which is laid in the same period, and where some of the same 
 persons reappear. The two most popular historical novelists
 
 362 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 in the immediate wake of Scott had no particular talent except 
 that of the melodramatist. The earlier, George Payne Rains- 
 ford James, produced his Richelieu in 1829, with Scott's 
 encouragement, and found many buyers for his numerous 
 works through a whole generation. The other, William 
 Harrison Ainsworth, who has decidedly more energy and 
 colour than James, but less than no style, began in 1834 with 
 Rookwood, and was prolific during a still longer period. These 
 writers are not in the true line of development of the English 
 novel. Before 1832 fresh types of fiction are seen arising, 
 which prepare the way, obscurely enough, for the great pro- 
 ducers of the next age. Sketches by Boz began in 1834, The 
 Yellowplusli Papers came out three years after. The beginnings 
 of Disraeli, with Vivian Grey (1826) and The Young Duke 
 (1829), and of Lytton, who started in 1827 with Falkland 
 and Pelham, are only named here as landmarks ; and the 
 influence of Byron upon their temper and style of portraiture 
 is at least as strong as that of Scott. The rather vulgar stories 
 of Theodore Hook belong to the next period, though they begin 
 to appear before 1830. Of English, as distinct from Scottish 
 and Irish writers, this chronicle has to name Miss Mitford, 
 who continues the nicer and more unassuming tradition of 
 feminine art ; the group, represented by Trelawny, Hope, 
 and Morier, who turn to Eastern life, and furnish a kind of 
 prose counterpart, or corrective, to Byron's representations 
 of it ; and Peacock, the artist and arch-humourist, who stands 
 alone, and is a kind of genially mocking chorus to the rest. 
 Many names must be slighted, such as that of George Croly, 
 whose grandiose Salathiel 1 (1827) has a kind of bastard splendour 
 in its rhythms and its descriptions. 
 
 While the Waverleys were appearing, the petty Scottish 
 novel 2 arose and flourished by their side, exploring a social 
 world that Scott had only brushed in his big, humorous fashion 
 or had passed by altogether. The scene is the country town, 
 the village, the laird's household, the manse, the cottage, 
 or the shop. The method is minute, veracious, and somewhat 
 oppressive. We thank heaven often enough that we have not 
 to live among the personages of Gait and Moir ; we are only 
 too sure that they are real. Their lives are apt to be stuffy 
 reading ; but air is let in upon the page, and the imagination 
 is refreshed, by many a stroke of pathos, and above all by the 
 poetry of the native religion, which redeems the speech of 
 the good prosaic minister or tradesman. None of these rural 
 chronicles has been more popular in Scotland than The Life
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 363 
 
 of Mamie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith, Written by Himself, which 
 appeared in Blackwood's, and was reprinted in 1828. The 
 author, David Macbeth Moir, wrote copiously in that magazine 
 under the initial of ' Delta.' He made much gentle imitative 
 verse ; but his talent is best seen in this tale, written mostly in 
 broad Scots. It consists of a series of small, blunt anecdotes, 
 told in a lively way enough and with endless cachinnation by 
 the tailor-humourist, whose character, both canny and foolish, 
 timid except on a few great occasions, and complacent beyond 
 bearing, is certainly stamped on the memory. The seething 
 life, gossip, and clamour of a small town are most faithfully 
 represented by Moir. 
 
 The sixty publications of John Gait (1779-1839), enumerated 
 by himself, 1 include, besides his novels, a row of biographies 
 and books of travel, and dramas, and operas, and verses. His 
 autobiography reveals a curious vagrant career, a very con- 
 siderable streak of self-importance, an appalling industry in 
 book-production. He manages to make his memories of the 
 Duke of York, of Mrs. Clarke, and of Byron tolerably vivid 
 to the reader, and his so-called Life of Byron, like his Letters 
 from the Levant, won some attention. Many of the figures in 
 his stories are like sharp and vivid steel engravings, and not 
 even his prolixity and inequality can obscure his gift. Novels, 
 indeed, he refuses to call his delineations ; they have, he says, 
 no ' consistent fable,' and nothing by way of thread except 
 ' the recurrence on the scene of the same individuals.' For 
 this very reason Gait leaves us with the same sense of dis- 
 connectedness, of the dense painful texture of things, as real 
 life. The Annals of the Parish (1821), the most perfect of his 
 tales in tone and keeping, was composed earlier than Waverley, 
 was declined by Constable on the ground that ' Scottish novels 
 would not do,' was unearthed afterwards, and was praised 
 by Scott, the reviewers, and the public. It is the prose analogue 
 of Crabbe's Parish Register, but is otherwise arranged and 
 presented. The minister, Micah Bahvhiclder, sets down the 
 annual chronicle of his parish during the first fifty years of 
 George in. His matter-of-factness, essential goodness, simple 
 cunning, and pastoral watchfulness, are drawn by himself in 
 the most masterly and unconscious way, and much of the 
 humour lies in his solemn want of perspective : 
 
 The An. Dom. 17G3 was, in many a respect, a memorable year, 
 both in publie and in private. The King granted peace to the 
 French, and Charlie Malcolm that went to sea in the Tobacco trader 
 came home to see his mother.
 
 364 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 These invasions of ' public events,' and their impingement 
 upon the concerns of the parish of Dalmailing the loss of a 
 son in the war, the setting up of a cotton mill, the appearance 
 of some Irish refugees vary the still chronicle, and the whole 
 effect is that of a piece of history seen through near-sighted 
 eyes. The effect is similar in The Provost (1822), a duller 
 chronicle, with a few stirring scenes interposed. The Provost 
 of the town of Gudeman relates his own career and ambitions ; 
 the irruption of a pressgang, a duel, an execution, are described, 
 and well, but the domestic tone prevails. 
 
 Gait's work is not always so gentle. He is sometimes like 
 a Lowland Zola on a small scale. The Entail (1823), which 
 both Scott and Byron are reported to have read thrice, recalls 
 the method of the ' Bougon-Macquart ' series, in that the 
 whole life of a family is related unto the third generation. 
 They are a litigious crew, and every one of them is injured 
 by the legal but monstrous procedure of the founder, the 
 self-made packman, Claud Walkinshaw, who diverts an entail 
 from his eldest son in order to grasp a larger slice of a landed 
 inheritance. He settles the estate on the second son, an 
 imbecile ; his plans miscarry and spread misery and confu- 
 sion, and he dies after a sudden explosion of religious remorse, 
 for which we are ill prepared, and which Jeffrey justly called 
 ' a little too romantic.' Zola has the same sneaking kind- 
 ness as Gait for this kind of sudden escape from his own realism. 
 The Walkinshaw family race are drawn at full length the 
 curmudgeonly brother, the scheming hussy, the good young 
 couple, the terrible old dame, ' Leddy Grippy,' and the lawyers, 
 virtuous and crooked, who intervene. No technicality is 
 spared us ; the law is elaborately got up. Gait has none of 
 Zola's greatness of canvas or ideal, or of his aesthetic theory ; 
 but, instead, a fund of dour vernacular humour and a fitful, 
 most genuine poignancy. The examination in court of Wattie, 
 the idiot, with his delusion about his lost infant, the ' wee 
 Betty Bodle ' ; the shipwreck ; and the discomfiture of the 
 lawyers by the 'Leddy Grippy,' are all scenes worthy of any 
 novelist of that age. Gait is like Zola in another way ; he 
 swamps himself in his own profusion, and his genius for 
 genius he possesses is best seen in a selection. This is true 
 of The Ayrshire Legatees (1821), one of the last examples of 
 a dying method ; it is a string of letters written home by the 
 members of a simple-souled, loquacious family, who repair 
 to London to claim an inheritance. It is full of good obvious 
 fun and also of sly strokes. Among Gait's numerous other
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 365 
 
 tales may be named his ambitious and less successful Ringan 
 Gilhaize, a novel of the Covenanters, and Sir Andrew Wylie 
 (1822), which, though over-long, is noteworthy for the title- 
 character, an odd blunt humourist of a Scot, full of brains and 
 benevolence, who rises from lawyer's apprentice to baronet ; 
 a pleasant variation on the old theme of the good boy's progress 
 in life. 
 
 Only a glance at the other Scottish novelists of the time can 
 here be spared. Lockhart is noticed in the next chapter. 
 The Dominie's Legacy (1830), the chief work of Andrew 
 Picken, is another homely and vivid record. But a relief 
 from the fiction of private and domestic life is to be found in 
 the bluff, Smollettesque sketches of open-air adventure by 
 Michael Scott, whose Tom Cringle's Log and Cruise of the 
 Midge are excellent in the picaresque kind. Scott has much 
 of the freshness and boyish spirits of his successor Marryat. 
 His books are full of gore, gallantry, and jokes that leave 
 bruises behind them. Both of them appeared in Blackwood's, 
 the first in 1829-30, the second in 1834-5, anonymously ; and 
 they are worthy of its tradition, though not free from the odd 
 over-heated manner that somewhat chills a later generation . r 
 The same journal also fathered another story of war and 
 wounds, which is more or less autobiographical. The Subaltern 
 (1825), by George Gleig, is less a novel than a memoir of 
 experience as a soldier in the Peninsular War ; it is readable, 
 unadorned, and not long, and is a useful ' footnote to history.' 
 Gleig afterwards became chaplain-general, and wrote many 
 other works, chiefly of military biography and history, and 
 lived a very long time. Another officer, Captain Thomas 
 Hamilton, also produced a lively and curious document of 
 manners, The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827), 
 which includes many scenes from the Spanish campaigns, 
 amongst others the investment of Badajoz. Thornton shoots 
 his brother accidentally, passes to Glasgow University (which 
 the author does not spare), gets into some discreditable scrapes, 
 but fights well and loses an arm, and returns home to his true 
 love. The book is a scrambling, lengthy affair, but full of 
 incident and excitement. Soon after, in 1820, appeared 
 Frank Mildmay, the first of Marryat's endless yarns, destined 
 and worthy to be read by Thomas Carlyle, and by thousands 
 of schoolboys unto this day.
 
 366 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 II 
 
 There is no more lively, free-spirited, and precise draughts- 
 woman of certain comic types than Susan Edmonstone Ferrier 1 
 (1782-1854). She gives, as her friend and admirer Scott 
 observed, a ' portrait of real society ' ; and her mob of 
 eccentrics and humourists, unsparingly rather than unkindly 
 drawn, actually peopled the old Scottish world that was 
 passing away while she wrote. Her genius was for tran- 
 scription, though she did not merely put people, as it is 
 called, into a book ; and she explains clearly her own method 
 of inventing : 
 
 It has been so often and confidently asserted that all the char- 
 acters are individual portraits, that the author has little hope of 
 being believed when she asserts the contrary. That some of them 
 were sketched from life is not denied, but the circumstances in which 
 they are placed, their birth, habits, language, and a thousand 
 minute particulars, differ so widely from the originals as ought to 
 refute the charge of personality. 
 
 Miss Ferrier has a sense of surface absurdities hardly matched 
 amongst women novelists, and though she has little subtlety, 
 and her pure brisk English is without Miss Austen's verbal 
 cunning, she has one point of contact with the greater artist. 
 Both writers love to depict persons who are all surface and 
 gesture, light and null existences, fops and praters, about 
 whom there is no more to say than what they say themselves. 
 Indeed, if Miss Ferrier has a fault, it is that she leaves little 
 unsaid, and that in her pages there are none of the bubbles 
 of still cool irony that rise to the placid surface of Persuasion. 
 On another level are her friendlier delineations of humble, 
 queer, and good persons with a twist of oddity, or like the acid 
 old rich man in Inheritance, Adam Ramsay, with his bad manners 
 and benevolence. But it must be said that she revels most 
 in moral satire ; in exhibiting characters that are hard and 
 sharp, or race-proud and selfish, or vapid and garrulous ; and 
 in making us hate them as if we had to live with them. Miss 
 Ferrier, when she is really herself and forgets to repress the 
 natural woman in the interest of didactics, is refreshingly 
 unreticent. She is not an Englishwoman folded away in 
 reserve, but a high-tempered, free-spoken Scottish maiden 
 lady of the old stamp. Her letters to her friend Miss Clavering, 
 with their wild spirits and liberal jokes, must be read if we 
 would duly relish this trait in her character. The delightful
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 367 
 
 phrase, ' I begin to suspect I 'm with book myself,' could 
 never have issued from Chawton or Edgeworthstown. 
 
 It is not hard to see when her genius is at play, and when 
 her sense of duty is at work. To give a cheerful turn to the 
 ending, and to deal out an unlikely measure of poetic justice to 
 the characters, is indeed the perquisite of her school of comedy, 
 and must not be called an inartistic procedure, unless we are 
 also to condemn Ben Jonson and Moliere. But Miss Terrier's 
 own defence of the practice goes far with the doctrine that 
 comedy is the handmaid of morality. It may be quoted for its 
 pointedness of statement, and as giving a clue to her method : 
 
 Now, I don't think, like all penny-book manufacturers, that 'tis 
 absolutely necessary that the good boys and girls should be rewarded, 
 and the naughty ones punished. Yet, I think, where there is 
 much tribulation 'tis fitter it should be the consequence rather than 
 the cause of misconduct or frailty. You '11 say that rule is absurd, 
 inasmuch as it is not observed in human life ; that I allow, but we 
 know the inflictions of Providence are for wise purposes, therefore 
 our reason willingly submits to them. But as the only good purpose 
 of a book is to inculcate morality, and convey some lesson of instruc- 
 tion as well as delight, I do not see that what is called a good moral 
 can de dispensed with in a work of fiction. 
 
 The result is a good deal of incidental preaching ; but a more 
 dangerous concession is made by Miss Ferrier to the calls of 
 the ' serious interest.' Her heroines are sometimes patterns 
 of goodness and patience of the official kind ; and she does 
 not shrink from conventional dialogue of an impassioned and 
 high-wrought order, which intrudes amidst the comic realism 
 and is remarkably unreal. Nor are prigs and stock villains 
 wanting ; even Miss Ferrier could not escape from the environ- 
 ment of pseudo -romance and educational fiction. But this 
 price the reader is ready to pay ; none of her three stories are 
 long ; and he glides over these obstructions, soon to return 
 to farce and high comedy and occasional idyll. 
 
 Marriage, which was planned in 1810 and appeared in 1818, 
 is a young book ; it is the voice of youth revenging itself on 
 the bores whom it will tolerate if only it may describe them ; 
 and though the story is nothing, it is plain that a new painter 
 of Scottish manners has arisen. It rests on that contrast of 
 provincial Scottish humours with modish London life which 
 Miss Ferrier favours. One chapter in it, ' The Story of Mrs. 
 Douglas,' was the work of Miss Clavering, who was a sagacious 
 adviser but not a good writer. To this friend Miss Ferrier 
 explains the scheme of the tale :
 
 368 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 I do not recollect ever to have seen the sudden transition of an 
 English beauty, who thinks she can sacrifice all for love, to an 
 uncomfortable solitary Highland dwelling among tall red-haired 
 sisters and grim-faced aunts. . . . The moral to be deduced from 
 that is to warn all young ladies against runaway matches. 
 
 This plan is brilliantly carried through ; the book was read 
 at once, and the anonymous author suspected ; it has held 
 its ground, and must surely do so. But the talk that, for 
 instance, of the three old aunts, who helped to make the fortune 
 of Marriage, sounds like that of voices through a phonograph ; 
 reproducing every error and inflexion, but with most of the 
 human quality gone out of it ; and, mercilessly, taking as long 
 as the actual talk that is copied. This effect is felt throughout 
 Miss Terrier's books ; it needs a singular talent to produce it. 
 
 The Inheritance (1824), a much maturer work, is well and 
 carefully built. The plot and its mystery are sustained. The 
 reader is early allowed to guess, but not to guess quite right, 
 the truth as to the parentage of the Countess of Rossville. She 
 proves to be disentitled to her money and rank ; and much 
 pains, even some passion, are spent on portraying her passing 
 weakness and essential nobility of nature ; although, it must 
 be granted, the Countess and the pedants surrounding her are 
 lectured overmuch by the authoress herself. The villains and 
 raffish fine gentlemen and chattering dames are of a more 
 ordinary stamp ; Miss Pratt is a bore, but redeems herself by 
 the excellent scene where she arrives in a hearse at the doors 
 of her host. The Inheritance shows the powers of Miss Ferrier 
 at their fullest, but Destiny (1830), except for a certain failure 
 in spirits, is a worthy successor. Here also the heroine is 
 buffeted about amongst vulgarians and fribbles. Great skill 
 is shown in re-creating, with a difference, characters of a type 
 already familiar. Inch Orran is another crabbed old man, 
 like Adam Ramsay but without the kindness, and is triumph- 
 antly kept distinct from him. The thick-skinned minister, 
 Mr. M'Dow, with his love of food and money, is a creature of 
 almost Jonsonian breadth and boisterousness ; but here the 
 authoress does not escape the charge of iteration, always the 
 bane of the comedy of humours and of the novels of Charles 
 Dickens. The Highland chief, Glenroy, lavish, arrogant, and 
 swathed in vanity, is drawn in the sharpest lines, nor are we 
 spared his dotage. Miss Ferrier indemnifies herself in Destiny 
 with the figure of the faithful and lowly confidant, Mrs. 
 Macauley, the most human of all her characters. Of Scott's 
 tolerance Miss Ferrier has nothing, but she does not fail in
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 369 
 
 kindness and tenderness, and her letters reveal her heart more 
 clearly than her tales. It is not the least of her distinctions 
 that though she lived for nearly a quarter of a century after 
 publishing Destiny, she wrote no more. She would not force 
 her vein, and felt that it had been fully explored. None of her 
 three books has sunk in the tide. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The record of Irish fiction, which began with Miss Edge- 
 worth, may here be resumed. The novels of Sydney Owenson, 
 afterwards Lady Morgan, 1 who died at a great age in 1859, are 
 but the chief episode in her variegated career. A fervent 
 liberal and patriot, a friend of Thomas Moore, a befriender 
 of Dermody and Maturin, a pleader for Catholic emancipation, 
 a most observant traveller, this versatile and generous-minded 
 if somewhat flighty and emphatic lady won the praises of Byron 
 for her Italy and the rancorous hatred of the Tory party for 
 the first of her books on France (1817). That pungent and 
 first-hand account of French society and letters in the year 
 after Waterloo, which contains many excellent traits and 
 stories, was assailed as the work of a Jacobin, an infidel, and 
 an ignoramus. Croker, in the Quarterly, was the foulest of 
 Lady Morgan's enemies ; and she retorted, with a coup de patte 
 that drew blood, by caricaturing him in her story Florence 
 Macarthy. Lady Morgan has no little innocent vanity in 
 her composition, and often writes too ambitiously, in a flushed, 
 happy-go-lucky style. But she is commendably free from the 
 governess ideal, and has a headlong ardour and vivacity that 
 are wanting to the surer craftsmanship of Manoeuvring and 
 The Absentee. As Miss Owenson, she made her name by The 
 Wild Irish Girl (1806), a decidedly silly production, with its 
 incredible heroine Glorvina and young-ladyish plot. But even 
 here her aim is apparent ; it is to describe and vindicate the 
 Irish people, and especially the Irish poor, as well as the land- 
 scape, song, and stories of her country. Her best novels were 
 published after her marriage to Sir Charles Morgan, a Dublin 
 doctor, and their kindly veracity and light-handed skill in 
 delineation more than redeem the flimsy romantic framework. 
 
 Of these two may bo mentioned, Donnel (1814) and The 
 O'Briens and the O'Flaherti/s (1827). The theme of both is 
 the clash of races in Ireland ; and the vapid, stony, insolent 
 English fashionables are contrasted on the one hand with the 
 noble, dispossessed O'Brien and O'Donnel, of ancient descent, 
 VOL. i. 2 A
 
 370 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 the true aristocrats, and on the other with the Paddies and 
 Rories, the sons of the soil, bubbling over with wit and loyal 
 to their old masters. The contrast is not impartial ; but it 
 is in her pictures of popular life and her reproduction of Irish 
 talk that Lady Morgan excels. O'Donnel was liked by Scott 
 (who reprobated all Lady Morgan's opinions) for the richness 
 of its humorous scenes ; but The O'Briens and the 0' Flaherty s, 
 though it betrays, in its colouring and temper, the influence of 
 the Waverley Novels, is the more original work of the two. 
 As ever, Lady Morgan mingles book-romance with realities. 
 A young collegian, of the stock of the O'Briens, is expelled from 
 Trinity, and joins the Society of United Irishmen ; he is 
 also netted in a flirtation, which comes to nothing, with the 
 wife of one of the Castle ' oligarchs.' There is much intrigue, 
 Jesuitry (male and female), and melodrama ; a beautiful 
 and mysterious political nun ; and there are secret passages, 
 and flitting figures, and traces of the old Radcliffian novel. 
 But the street riot, the race-meeting, the masquerade, the talk 
 of the vacuous dames of quality who beset the hero, and of 
 the old aunts who entertain him, are all presented in the most 
 rapid and lucid style. The book is cumbered by its political 
 purpose ; but Lady Morgan's wrath against the penal laws 
 that prevailed in ' Ninety-eight ' is never hysterical ; her 
 masculine courage in argument and denunciation is unfailing ; 
 and she fights, with her own weapons, gallantly enough. She 
 outlived most of her critics, wrote tirelessly to the end, and 
 remained an ever-youthful and honoured veteran in Dublin 
 society. 
 
 Scott, in his generous way, had professed his wish to do for 
 Scotland no more than Miss Edgeworth had done for Ireland ; 
 the Banims 1 tried to do for Ireland what he had done for Scot- 
 land. No one has ever done this ; but in the first series of 
 Tales by the O'Hara Family (1825) Irish fiction was born anew 
 a vigorous man-child. The stories of Miss Edgeworth are of 
 a delicate wit and veracity, but we do not expect to find much 
 blood in the veins of her personages. We do not ask her to 
 show the black or the passionate side of the Irish nature, or 
 its more desperate vein of humour, or its faith in the terrors 
 of the night. These things are revealed by the Banims, who 
 also seek to give a real picture of national life, and to embody 
 elements of recent or contemporary history ; such, for in- 
 stance, as the doings of the Whiteboys, who are portrayed with 
 Hogarthian clearness and grimness. No comparison with 
 Scott need be pretended ; but, at any rate, the Banims feel
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 371 
 
 along their nerves some of the things that Scott depicted, as 
 we have seen, rather from without. They catch their breath 
 when they speak of fetches and fairies, and do not regard them 
 as so much literature. The elder brother, Michael Banim 
 (1796-1874), seems to have had a sterner fancy than the 
 younger, John, and wrote the most salient of the first series 
 of the Tales, Crohoore of the Bill-hook. He has the gift of 
 rousing and keeping up suspense, though he pulls out the tangle 
 of his plot by a mere piece of melodrama. The story begins 
 with signal skill, fixing an almost indelible suspicion of a 
 dreadful murder upon the wrong man, the red-headed dwarf 
 Crohoore. The scenes in the cave of Dunmore, the vengeance 
 paid out to the tithe-proctor, and the aimless and fruitless 
 chase over bog and valley, are as distinct as anything in Red- 
 gauntlet. A tale by John Banim in this series, John Doe, is 
 confusedly conducted ; but the fight at Clonmel fair, and the 
 illicit still among the mountains, are described with the same 
 sharp cutting and savage vivacity. The Banims write in a 
 plain way, without heaviness or ostentation, except when they 
 are led astray by their love of the lurid, or, from time to time, 
 by the snares of rhetoric. The Smuggler (1833) is an excursion 
 into English manners, vigorous but over-long. The Croppy, 1 
 and John Banim's The Nowlans are also capital tales ; and 
 his popular lyric, Soggarth Aroon ('dear priest ') may be named 
 also. The work of William Carleton (1794-1869) belongs to 
 the next age, though the first series of his Traits and Stories 
 of the Irish Peasantry (1830) was enough to show his superi- 
 ority over all his forerunners in humour, veracity of pathos, 
 and sombre force. 
 
 The Collegians- (1829), founded on a true story related by 
 Curran in The New Monthly Magazine, and itself the basis 
 of Boucicault's play The Colleen Baicn, is a melodrama of 
 the sort that is often hastily described as ' powerful.' The 
 villain, Hardrcss Cregan, suborns the murder of his humbk' 
 wife Eily, secretly espoused ; is torn by natural emotions of 
 horror before, and remorse after, the event ; nearly marries 
 another lady, but is arrested on the eve of the wedding ; is 
 convicted on the evidence of his accomplice ; and then the 
 author, Gerald Griffin, 'did not know what to do ' with Cregan, 
 who had been visibly shaping, through the narrative, for his 
 ultimate destiny on the vulgar stage. Griffin's brother reports 
 the difficulties : 
 
 ' // / hang him, the public will never forgive me ; and yet,' he 
 added playfully in the Irish phrase, ' he deserves hanging as richly
 
 372 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 as any young gentleman from this to himself ; then if I save his 
 life by some device, or trick, or mercy of the law, any other punish- 
 ment will seem too light for crimes like his.' He eventually com- 
 promised the matter by making him die on his way into perpetual 
 exile, which seems to have satisfied all parties. 
 
 Matters so grievous require a merry heart to face them. The 
 Collegians, with its diffuse pathos and rhetoric, is at some 
 distance from the methods of the Banims. Though Griffin 
 does not write well, his drinking, hunting, and sailing scenes 
 are lively and expressive enough, and some of his anecdotes 
 in Anglo-Irish are excellent. The tale of Lady Gregory's 
 farce, The Pot of Broth, occurs in The Collegians. One of the 
 incidents in the real story is better than anything in Griffin's 
 book, and was told by Curran to Lady Morgan. The uncle 
 of the criminal was High Sheriff, and ' his sangfroid and 
 indifference were frightful ; he shrugged his shoulders, tucked 
 his napkin under his chin, said it " was a sad business," and 
 called for soup.' 
 
 Onwards from the days of the Minstrelsy, when he wrote 
 with Leyden the essay on Fairy Superstitions, Scott had 
 gathered and saved the folklore of his country ; and while 
 his greatest imaginative piece in the vernacular, Wandering 
 Willie's Tale, is one of the fruits, the example he set to Ireland 
 is another. Banim and Griffin, like him, inlaid many a legend 
 of fetch and bogle in their stories ; but the first true collector 
 was Thomas Crofton Croker (1798-1854). He needed no 
 stimulus from Scotland. His Fairy Legends and Traditions 
 of the South of Ireland, mostly derived from Munster, appeared 
 in 1825 ; two years later came a second series, and in 1829 
 Legends of the Lakes, afterwards known as Killarney Legends. 
 Croker won Scott's delighted admiration, and opened a mine 
 that will not easily give out. His notes and parallels show him 
 to be an accomplished student and antiquary ; and he has 
 left a classic record of the religion of the people. The Banshee, 
 the Phooka, the Leprechaun, the Fir Darrig, the Dullahan, 
 and their companions who cannot remember first meeting 
 them in Croker 's pages ? To the child they seemed no stranger 
 than many human beings ; and soon they ceased to be strange, 
 though they might be alarming or friendly according to their 
 mood ; the grimmer ones, it is true, who threw about or 
 pocketed their own heads, being perennially dreadful because 
 real, like mischievous or deformed persons ; you might meet 
 them abroad in the evening, and it was well to know their code. 
 This is the attitude of Croker's informants and of their descend-
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 373 
 
 ants, and his skill lies in reproducing it without any emphasis 
 or patronage. A man of true humour and fantasy as well as 
 of accurate learning, he is a reporter with an artistic sense, who 
 does best of all when he gets himself out of the way and does 
 not strive after literature. He catches the idiom and rhythm 
 of those who know, at second, if not at first hand, the actual 
 facts : 
 
 ' So my grandfather, like a fool, you see, opened his hand a little, 
 and the little fellow jumped away laughing, and the never the bit 
 of the purse did he get, only the Cluricaune left the little shoe that he 
 was making ; and my grandfather was mad enough angry with 
 himself for letting him go ; but he had the shoe all his life, and my 
 own mother told me she often see it, and had it in her hand, and 'twas 
 the prettiest little shoe she ever saw.' 
 
 ' And did you see it yourself, Molly ? ' 
 
 ' Oh ! no, my dear, it was lost long afore I was born ; but my 
 mother told me about it often and often enough. 
 
 The adventures of Daniel O'Rourke, who rode to the moon 
 on the back of an eagle, and held on to the reaping-hook that 
 sticks out of the moon, until the man in the moon sawed it 
 off, are told in the first person by the returned traveller, with 
 even greater liveliness ; and the dialogue is always of the 
 native mint, or, to mend the phrase, of the native still. At 
 other times Croker deals in the ornate romantic style, as in 
 The Legend of O'Donoghue, who ' gallops his white charger 
 over the waters of Killarney at early dawn on May morning ' ; 
 a style that might not have existed but for the Waverley 
 Novels and their imitators : 
 
 The first beams of the rising sun were just gilding the lofty summit 
 of Glenaa, when the waters near the eastern shore of the lake became 
 suddenly and violently agitated, though all the rest of its surface 
 lay smooth and still as a tomb of polished marble ; the next moment 
 a foaming wave darted forward, and, like a proud high-crested war- 
 horse exulting in his strength, rushed across the lake towards 
 Toomie mountain. Behind this wave appeared a stately warrior 
 fully armed, mounted upon a milk-white steed, etc. 
 
 The substance of this came from popular narrators, but it has 
 been through a machine ; and many of Croker's tales are in a 
 curious, not disagreeable mixture of the two manners. Some- 
 times he puts his legend into a conventional ballad ; but his 
 prose, unlike his verse, is hard to forget whatever he may tell 
 in it. The boatman's account of the same hero in Killarney 
 Legends is in the more convincing strain :
 
 374 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 ' You thief, you,' says he, ' don't you know I 'm O'Donoghue ? 
 I '11 tache you better manners than to be mistering me ; so, for 
 that very word, you must be off in a jig, or may be it would be worse 
 with you. And what are you frightened at, you spalpeen ? Won't 
 I mind the cattle till you come back ? and won't I lend you my own 
 horse ? ' 
 
 The stories in the Killarney Legends, scattered amongst 
 descriptions of scenery and of fishing and hunting, are of the 
 same stamp as those in the Legends and Traditions. Croker 
 faithfully chronicles the musical notation of the songs, bugle- 
 calls, and echoes that he hears ; and of his own ditties and 
 those of Thomas Moore he is not sparing. 
 
 IV 
 
 The English novelists, in the nature of the case, have no 
 such unity of aim as distinguishes their Scottish or Irish fellow- 
 craftsmen. Their field is more motley, and they have little 
 of the zest of the explorers in countries undescribed. One 
 authoress however, Mary Russell Mitford 1 (1787-1855), in her 
 narrow but flowery square of ground rivals in delicacy and 
 excels in charm the recorders of village manners in Ireland 
 or Scotland. This lady's Recollections of a Literary Life (1852) 
 are an unconscious revelation of her vivacity and charity. 
 Long in devoted attendance on a muddling and selfish father, 
 she tried several modes of living by her pen before she found 
 her subject. She first wrote verses, which would not serve. 
 She then turned to poetical tragedy, and her Julian, Foscari, 
 and Rienzi were performed with considerable success. In the 
 intervals of their production (1823-8), Miss Mitford began to 
 collect the sketches and stories which gave her fame. 
 
 In the three series of Our Village (1824-32), Miss Mitford 
 humanised the tradition of intimate, feminine prose ; she is a 
 kinder spirit than the women novelists, and has the poetic 
 sense besides. She describes simple things that she has seen 
 and liked : her dog Mayflower, a spring coppice, the pleasures 
 of ' violeting,' or an old house, or a rural street ; and, above 
 all, the people in the village, the cottager, the ' farmeress,' 
 the constable, the servant-girl, the poacher, and the local 
 cricketer, whose death is described with whimsical pathos, as 
 Burns celebrates that of Tarn Samson ; or, again, her favourite 
 books and authors, Cowper, Gilbert White, The Tempest 
 an odd assortment. Our Village is full of light, flying literary 
 allusions. Miss Mitford was a great reader, and her letters
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 375 
 
 abound in remarks, sharply enough dashed off, on contempor- 
 ary poetry and fiction, on Lady Morgan, and Melmoth, and 
 the Scotch novels. She likes gentle and unpretentious writing, 
 but is by no means deaf to romance. Her Early Recollections, 
 which occur in Our Village, suggest the similar writing of Mary 
 Lamb ; less haunting in sentiment and language, they have 
 the same sort of nice fidelity and carefulness. Everything is 
 rapid, and usually the tone is buoyant ; there is no prosing ; 
 Miss Mitford is actually full of the ' vital feelings of delight ' 
 that quicken Wordsworth's girls and women, and of the ' in- 
 tense feeling of existence,' as she calls it, that comes over her 
 on the ' first mild day in March.' The spring she finds always 
 incredible, which it is. She is fond of ordinary, pleasant, and 
 lovely objects. She muses aloud, and speaks of her ' murmur- 
 ing cogitations.' She coins quaint words, like ' betweenity ' 
 or ' pastoralities,' or uses local ones, such as ' pightles ' and 
 ' deedily ' (which means ploddingly, as she explains, referring 
 to Miss Austen as a precedent). Not a page of her sketches 
 could have been written by a man, and this is her merit. She 
 gives the impression of her sex better than many more passion- 
 ate women ; her laughter is feminine too, and saves her from 
 the risks of effusion and exaggeration, the bane of professed 
 scene-painters and describers. Her Country Stories (1837) 
 have the same kind of grace, with its gentle touches of pathos, 
 though the stories are nothing. 
 
 It is piquant to turn from these quiet English water-colours 
 to the big ' subject-pictures ' of exotic adventure from 
 Three-Mile Cross, near Reading, to the masculine pictures of 
 bazaars and harems. 
 
 A striking novel of Eastern manners, Thomas Hope's Anas- 
 tasius, or Memoirs of a Greek, urritten at the Close of the 
 Eighteenth Century, appeared in 1819. Beckford, who never 
 left Europe, had caught from books and his own temperament 
 the true strain of fantasy ; Hope, another rich man and con- 
 noisseur of art, travelled at leisure through the East in his 
 youth, and knows and describes it from within with a veracity 
 that piqued Byron. His book is but lightly coloured by 
 Byronism, and its link with the fiction of terror and villainy 
 is most superficial. A villain his Anastasius is, with a leaning 
 to rhetoric, but still a creation of quite another order from the 
 heroes of Mrs. Radcliffe or Maturin. This rascally picaroon, 
 throughout his wanderings, never utterly forfeits our sympathy, 
 although ho deserts and kills, only half by chance, his sworn 
 blood-brother, is the death of two or three trusting women,
 
 376 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 turns Moslem for sheer policy, robs, lies, squanders, and rakes 
 incorrigibly. He has to undergo every shift of fortune ; fights 
 in the Turkish army bravely, commander of the Arnaoots, 
 serves a treacherous Bey in Egypt, scours the Levant and 
 Mediterranean, makes his pilgrimage to Mecca, and oscillates 
 between ill-gotten wealth and well-earned penury. At last, 
 broken at thirty-five and dying, he dictates his memoirs in a 
 hovel in Carinthia, full of dejection and remorse. The book 
 is thus in form an autobiography, and Anastasius, at the last, 
 suffers enough to retrieve our compassion, and his self-analysis 
 is merciless. In his love-passage with the luckless Euphrosyne, 
 in his search for their child Alexis, whom he saves and then 
 loses, and in his revisitings of his old home, there is real pathos. 
 The book is weighted by long stretches of historical descrip- 
 tion and by some prolixity of sentiment, but its irony and 
 vividness, and its nice portraiture of Oriental ceremony, 
 intrigue, bloodshed, and motive, have often been attested. 
 Hope's works on costume and architecture were of antiquarian 
 value in their day, and his designs for furniture are described 
 as having affected, if not much for the better, the taste of the 
 time. He further wrote a curious and unorthodox disquisi- 
 tion on The Origin and Prospects of Man. 
 
 A subtler story of Oriental life, The Adventures of Hajji 
 Bdba of Ispahan 1 (1824), by the traveller and diplomatist, 
 James Justinian Morier, has, unlike Anastasius, met its deserts, 
 and is as fresh as if written yesterday. It contains no melo- 
 drama to antiquate it, and though long is rapid, never prolix ; 
 its humorous savour is delicate, sometimes profound, and 
 omnipresent. Modern authorities have spoken to Morier's 
 knowledge of Persia, and to his observation and intuition of the 
 national character, derived from a stay comparatively short. 
 In his Journeys, published in 1812 and 1818, appears his solid 
 acquaintance with the geography, customs, and externals of 
 the country ; while the gleams of humour in his description 
 of the court and dignitaries prepare us a little for the surprising 
 pictures of Hajji Baba. The tale is told in the first person 
 by the Hajji, or pilgrim, who assumes the title on the strength 
 of a pre-natal voyage to Mecca, beginning even thus early his 
 career of impudence. He is yet another vagrant adventurer, 
 and the tale has no other clue except that ' identity of the 
 hero ' which Aristotle found to be insufficient for an epic, but 
 which serves inevitably for this class of story. Hajji becomes 
 barber, tobacco-seller, dervish, executioner, pipe-vendor, and 
 State emissary in turn. He is a dauntless braggart and a ready
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 377 
 
 coward, an accomplished mime and tale-teller, a humorous 
 rogue whose twinges of remorse are grotesquely brief and 
 inadequate, and a ruthless self-critic whose self-esteem in- 
 stantly bubbles up again. He is shameless, not in any Arabian 
 Nights, irresponsible world, but in the real world, which we 
 see entirely through his eyes ; and yet we do not hate him. 
 Only once is the colouring tragic, and then it is dreadful. This 
 is in the episode of the beautiful Zeenab, his mistress, who, 
 being found unworthy of the Shah's attentions, is gruesomely 
 done to death, Hajji being forced to look on wearing his 
 garb as assistant executioner, but powerless to interfere. His 
 spasm of grief soon passes, and he steps out again, almost 
 merrily. Morier wrought into his book many actual persons 
 and episodes ; but, without being told, we should trace no seam 
 between history and invention. His English, while easy and 
 familiar, is noticeably pure ; and his natural way of inter- 
 weaving Eastern l^perbole, proverb, and poetic allusion with 
 his dialogue is the admiration of those able to judge. In 
 another story, Zohrab the Hostage (1832), the same gifts are seen, 
 although the set forms and high style of the historic novel 
 are somewhat intrusive. And in Ayesha, the Maid of Kars 
 (1834), despite its cheap romantic plot, Morier shows that he 
 has nerve for other work than the comedy of manners. But 
 here too the spirit of Hajji Baba reappears ; and there is 
 the high relish of farce in the episode where the pasha is 
 puzzled by the ' leather pantaloons ' of the English lord, and 
 converts them first into a headgear and next into a wineskin. 
 There is a certain gleeful appreciation in Morier of his tortuous 
 rascally heroes, united with a sharp undcceivable perception 
 of them, that makes these tales un-English in spirit ; there is 
 no contempt or declamation, but a close following of the 
 Persian temper, mobile, rudderless, and not ill-natured, in all its 
 windings and scenic manifestations. In another work, a sequel, 
 The Adventures of Hajji Baba of I$}mhau in England, he turns 
 his satire, by the time-honoured device familiar in Goldsmith 
 and others, upon his own country : which is seen through the 
 surprised open eyes of the Hajji, himself born under quite 
 different conventions of roguery. The satire, however, is 
 double-edged ; neither side escapes ; and the reception at 
 court, the wooing by the Hajji (supposed a prince) of Miss 
 Bessy Hogg, the curiosity of the English ladies over the Cir- 
 cassian slave, and the return to Persia, are all in the best style 
 of impartial comedy. A few of the traits are drawn from 
 experience, as Morier explains, and are recorded in his Second
 
 378 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 Journey. There is, however, hardly the easy and profound 
 humour that distinguishes Hajji Baba in Ispahan from all 
 other Eastern narratives by Englishmen. 
 
 One shapeless, violent, pungent story belongs to an earlier 
 generation than that of its earliest readers. Adventures of 
 a Younger Son 1 (1831), by Edward John Trelawny, the adorer 
 of Shelley and the companion of Byron, makes the work of 
 all the sedentary romancers seem unreal. It is not a novel ; 
 and, as Trelawny wrote, ' my life is not a novel ' ; it is a mix- 
 ture of autobiography, wild fiction, and highly-spiced reading ; 
 of sea knowledge, Smollettesque realism, and undisciplined 
 poetry poetic ore unsmelted. The freebooting, man-sticking 
 hero, whose character is not spared, passes a wretched child- 
 hood at home and at school, which leaves him callous and 
 dauntless, but generous and capable of passion ; and falls 
 in with a superior spirit, admirably drawn, one De Ruyter, 
 who spends his days in a piratical vendetta against the English 
 nation and the East India Company. Under his tutelage 
 the Younger Son sails Malayan and South Sea waters, on 
 endless bloody ventures ; marries Zela, a little Madagascar girl, 
 who shares his perils and saves his life, and loses her at last 
 in a dreadful manner (this is all brain-spun exotic stuff) 
 and at last drifts home a kind of wreck, though in years almost 
 a boy. The tone is often Byronic ; but it is the Byron of 
 Mazeppa and Juan, not of Childe Harold and Lara. There is 
 the same abrupt oscillation between realism and romance, one 
 chapter resembling a prose counterpart of the shipwreck in 
 Don Juan, and another being founded on The Island. Trelawny, 
 like Byron, was versed in the original records of such incidents 
 by Bligh and Mariner. There is also plenty of Byronic pose 
 and personal swagger, but the line between these things and 
 sincerity is hard to trace, and the final impression is one of 
 bitter truthfulness. The very chapter-mottoes are taken 
 from Byron, or else from Shelley and Keats, unfailingly. 
 The ' horrific stories ' which Mrs. Shelley reports Trelawny 
 as loving to recite are here in plenty, and require some 
 strength of stomach in the reader ; but they were honestly 
 relished by the author, and his emphasis is natural and 
 ingrained. But for a certain monotony in the sea-robberies 
 and hair-breadth escapes, the book is unflagging in its pace 
 and vigour ; and its idyllic and descriptive pages, if 
 somewhat made-up in the style of the school, are beautiful 
 nevertheless. It is the work of a man, if not exactly of an 
 artist.
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 379 
 
 After the tension of romance, and doctrine, and contro- 
 versy, conies the wit and satirist, and it is pleasant to see all 
 these things held up to us in his mirror which, like Aristotle's 
 comic mask, ' perverts without giving pain.' The tales and 
 imaginary conversations of Thomas Love Peacock 1 (1785- 
 1866), the friend of Shelley, are part of the comment of the 
 ' romantic period ' upon itself ; we cannot fully understand 
 it without them. In some ways he is like Samuel Butler, 
 who also plays about the affectations of the time and derides 
 them in the name of reason and good sense. Butler jests 
 against the Royal Society, and Peacock against the ' march 
 of mind,' achieved through Mechanics' Institutes and by the 
 labours of Lord Brougham. Butler mocks at astrologers, 
 Peacock at vegetarians and other craze -mongers. Logic, 
 essence, quiddity, and all the terms of the schools, are rhymed 
 to death by the first ; the dialect of the ' transcendental 
 metaphysician, who has pure unanticipated cognitions of 
 everything,' is mimicked by the second. The likeness hardly 
 goes further, for Butler is at bottom serious and rather 
 savage, and his wit and fireworks easily fatigue us ; Peacock, 
 whilst unsparing, is full of bonhomie and Attic scholarship, 
 with a ruling sense for scale and finish, and fears to go on too 
 long. He himself is also, if not an eccentric, what is called a 
 ' character,' as his letters to Shelley and his writings show. His 
 professional existence as a public servant and an early promoter 
 of the steamship traffic in the East does not concern us. He is 
 full of good crusted scholarship, ready with his Greek quota- 
 tions, and fond of the poets, like Nonnus, of the decadence ; 
 and it would be easy to find in him a streak of Lucian. 
 
 Except for his songs and ditties, Peacock's verse is rather 
 curious and representative than good. He passed through a 
 stage of admiration for Erasmus Darwin and the rhetorical 
 parts of Campbell, as through a kind of measles, and imitated 
 the latter poet in his Philosophy of Melancholy (1812). His 
 Ahrimanes, of uncertain date, has noticeable analogies with 
 Alastor, but may be earlier in composition ; in any case, its 
 employment of Spenser's measure is more like Byron's, and 
 the general ring is suggestive of Dryden : 
 
 Xo, far remote, in orient clouds unfurled, 
 
 No prayer, no sacrificial rite he heeds ; 
 
 His reign is past ; hia rival mle the world ; 
 
 From Ahrimanes now all power proceeds ; 
 
 For him the altar burns ; for him the victim bleeds.
 
 380 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 Peacock's Genius of the Thames (1810) and Palmyra (1806) are 
 of the prize poem order, and in that order excellent ; his 
 Rhododaphne (1818) is much more mature, and full of smooth 
 happy turns ; but his prose and letters, written at the same 
 date, are far more his own, and like many good prose writers 
 he is apt to keep his more imitative, factitious self for his 
 serious ambitious verse. Calidore, The Lady of the Hill, and 
 other prose pieces show his romantic fancy, only occasionally 
 crossed by the spirit of satire ; and lyrics like ' Beneath the 
 cypress shade ' and ' Al mio primiero amore,' reveal the delicate 
 and tender sentiment which the satirist, above all men, is shy 
 of publishing. But the songs scattered in Peacock's novels, 
 mostly jovial and mocking, sometimes grave, best of all when 
 the two moods are blended but the satire dominant, unite a 
 flawless finish with the expression of the rollicking or pensive 
 passion of the moment, incomparably well. Not only the 
 famed War-song of Dinas Vawr, and the ditty on the red nose, 
 but a dozen others achieve this union. 
 
 The art of satire in the hands of Peacock, like that of rhetoric 
 in the estimation of Plato, resolves itself into a kind of cookery ; 
 almost, indeed, into the concoction of a single dish, with much 
 the same ingredients, which the chef spends fifteen years in 
 garnishing and making perfect ; which is named after him 
 and copied by others, but of which the open secret dies with 
 him. The fifteen years begin with Headlong Hall (181G) and 
 end with Crotchet Castle (1831). Between came Melincourt 
 (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818); and, as late as 1800, 
 Gryll Grange, in which the veteran returns to the charge, 
 wonderfully lively, if with the gaiety of his prejudice a trifle 
 hardened. All these works are on the same loose plan ; but 
 amidst them come two novels rightly so called, Maid Marian 
 (1822) and The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), of which the 
 form is at once closer to romance and a delicate travesty of 
 it, while the satire that suffuses them is of a rarer and less 
 combative sort. Otherwise, Peacock's fictions are not novels 
 at all ; the conversation is everything ; and an excuse is 
 found for it by a show of a story, sown with descriptions and 
 light episodes. The framework is the same throughout ; a 
 band of humourists, in the old sense of the term, are gathered 
 in a hospitable country house and talk at one another ; and 
 the style is the same, except that it gets better and better up 
 to Crotchet Castle, being, as one critic well says, ' rather 
 engraved than written.' It is this firm and classic quality 
 that distinguishes the wit of Peacock from that of his debtor
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 381 
 
 and son-in-law, George Meredith. The companies that dine, 
 and snap, and toss the shuttle of debate in Richard Fever el 
 or The Egoist, have been accused of unnaturalness ; but they 
 really, with their hit-or-miss manner of repartee, give more 
 the sense of actual excited talk than Peacock's personages. 
 Meredith's make many wonderful strokes and dozens of 
 false ones, but are so heady and high-spirited that they carry 
 the game through and disarm criticism. Peacock, we feel, 
 has scored out every word which he feels will not ring as sharply 
 fifty years afterwards. Yet he does not write, like Sheridan, 
 up to a prepared joke ; he does not seem to know himself 
 what is coming ; there is the true air of impromptu, only no 
 misses are allowed. This quality is present not only in the 
 dialogue but the stage directions, even when they come nearest 
 to the farcical ; but it is Attic farce, and ages well : 
 
 But when Marionetta hinted that she was to leave the Abbey 
 immediately, Scythrop snatched from its repositary his ancestor's 
 skull, filled it with Madeira, and presenting himself before Mr. 
 Glowry, threatened to drink off the contents if Mr. Glowry did not 
 immediately promise that Marionetta should not be taken from the 
 Abbey without her own consent. Mr. Glowry, who took the Madeira 
 to be some deadly brewage, gave the required promise in dismal 
 panic. Scythrop returned to Marionetta with a joyful heart, and 
 drank the Madeira by the way. 
 
 Scythrop, with his gloom and his tendency to mess with 
 chemicals, is in part a travesty of the youthful Shelley, the 
 Shelley of St. Irvyne ; but we soon cease to recognise the poet 
 in him, for he is a pure ' humourist,' like most of Peacock's 
 characters. Every one has an idiosyncrasy or spring ; when 
 it is touched, he explodes, and the talk is a series of such 
 explosions, generated by the mutual contact of the humourists. 
 There is no action, only the endless reciprocal exposure of 
 individual manias. But the tone is not, as in Jonson's 
 Alchemist, that of the learned, boisterous, flagellant moralist ; 
 it is more that of Every Man in his Humour, except that in 
 Peacock there is no action. Nor has he many preferences ; 
 he keeps aloof from his puppets, good-natured and merciless, 
 with a saving kindness for the gay natural young women who 
 pass unspoilt through the noise of his menagerie and keep a 
 free mind. In Melincourt one of these ladies is herself the 
 hostess of a swarm of fortune-hunters and monomaniacs ; 
 she finds her mate in a Mr. Forester, a somewhat c.caltc. but 
 simple and honest follower of Rousseau and the natural life. 
 
 Peacock's way is to keep certain leading characters in stock,
 
 382 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 and to elaborate them in successive tales. There must be a 
 host to pass the decanter and intervene when the voluble, 
 rook-like chorus becomes too shrill. Such is Harry Headlong, 
 the sporting Welsh squire who, wishing ' to be thought a 
 philosopher and a man of taste,' goes to Oxford to seek for 
 a house-party of men of taste and philosophers. Such too 
 is the rich Mr. Ebenezer MacCrotchet, of mixed Hebrew and 
 Scottish parentage, who ' signed himself E. M. Crotchet, 
 which by degrees induced the majority of his neighbours to 
 think that his name was Edward Matthew.' He too, such 
 is his ancestral passion for arguing and hearing argue, asks 
 down ' a numerous detachment from the advanced guard of 
 the " march of intellect." And amongst the visitors, when 
 they come ; amongst the crowd of pure fantastics too-dimen- 
 sional figures, or gesticulating shadows, as they may be called 
 amongst them is commonly found some more solid and sub- 
 stantial man, the centre of the talk, and a divine full of 
 gastronomy and . Greek ; a type sketched in the mere 
 Dr. Gaster of Headlong Hall, revived after nearly half a century 
 in the Dr. Opimian of Gryll Grange, and perfected meanwhile 
 in the Rev. Dr. Folliott of Crotchet Castle. This is Peacock's 
 most living, Fielding-like creation, inspired by the nameless 
 muse of humane wit (who is herself a tenth sister of the hack- 
 neyed nine, and in countenance unlike gentle Thalia). Dr. 
 Folliott is learned, brave, and quick in knock-down blows 
 and retorts, and a worthy progenitor of Meredith's Dr. 
 Middleton. The classic chapter on ' The Sleeping Venus,' 
 where he remonstrates with Mr. Crotchet upon his studyful 
 of casts, is not unlike the best mischievous writing of 
 Goldsmith. 
 
 Fully to relish Peacock, it is well to be able to recognise, 
 under various thin disguises, the caricatured figures of Cole- 
 ridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Southey, Malthus, and 
 Brougham, and other Edinburgh Reviewers. Justice is not 
 to be wished for ; Peacock's unfairness is more pleasing to 
 watch. In his eyes Southey is a mere renegade, a Mr. Feather- 
 nest ; Byron, as Mr. Cypress, talks in a patchwork of pessi- 
 mistic phrases from Childe Harold ; Coleridge seems to be 
 sitter for the portrait of Mr. Panscopc, the universal viewer, 
 in Headlong Hall, and for the more finished one of Mr. Flosky, 
 or the ' lover of shadows ' in Nightmare Abbey, who has 
 christened his eldest son Emmanuel Kant Flosky. His 
 rigmarole, when Marionetta questions him as to the melancholy 
 of her cousin Scythrop, is of the best quality :
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 383 
 
 Marionetta. Do you, or do you not, know what is the matter 
 with my cousin ? 
 
 Mr. Flosky. To say that I do not know, would be to say that I 
 am ignorant of something ; and God forbid, that a transcendental 
 metaphysician, who has pure anticipated cognitions of everything, 
 and carries the whole science of geometry in his head without ever 
 having looked into Euclid, should fall into so empirical an error 
 as to declare himself ignorant of anything. To say that I do know, 
 would be to pretend to positive and circumstantial knowledge 
 touching present matter of fact. . . . 
 
 In all this Peacock seldom shows his own hand : when he 
 does so, it is a simple one. Many of the things he dislikes 
 are plain enough : hazy, morbid romance, the mechanical 
 sort of political economy, the ' march of science ' in its popular 
 applications, and cheap radicalism of all sorts, as well as the 
 besotted toryism of Seithenyn in The Misfortunes of Elphin, 
 when he reasons concerning the leaky embankment : 
 
 It is well ; it works well ; let well alone. Cupbearer, fill. It 
 was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive reason 
 why it should be three parts rotten when I die. 
 
 Peacock's preferences are less often disclosed ; but good song, 
 good Greek, good sense and good wine, are certainly amongst 
 them. His kindness for romance is best seen in his mockery 
 of it, and also in his love of ending a tale with the cheerful 
 marriage of his favourites. 
 
 Melincourt is his longest book, and the fullest, even to the 
 point of tedium, of elaborate crazy monologues. But we are 
 long kept alert by that noble farcical creation, Sir Oran Haut-Ton, 
 and by the expectation of what ho will next do ; not say, 
 for through the two volumes he never speaks. Nor is this 
 silence unnatural, for Sir Oran has walked straight out of 
 Lord Monboddo's Antient Metaphysics (1779-90), a true 
 pioneer- work in anthropology, but one that lent itself to a 
 popular derision more vulgar than Peacock's. Sir Oran's 
 prototype, the tamable, benevolent, accomplished, and yet 
 mute orang-outang, had been cited by Lord Monboddo as a 
 true k missing link,' or rather as undeveloped man. Sir Oran 
 has been caught, and taught, and dressed, and whilst of a 
 peculiar cast of countenance, has received by nature, and 
 perfected by practice, a most distinguished bearing. He 
 rescues damsels, punishes ruffians, takes his wine, and at last 
 sits for the borough of Oncvote. The satire here has several 
 edges, for Sir Oran has the advantage of most of the specimens
 
 384 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 
 
 of mankind with whom he is brought in contact. His silence 
 is a foil to the eloquence of Mr. Fax, who is a travesty of 
 Malthus, and to the humours of Sir Humphrey Hippy, of 
 Hypocon House, who is troubled with the spleen. But the 
 plan of Melincourt straggles and vanishes as the appearances 
 of Sir Oran become fewer. 
 
 In Mr. Chainmail, the medisevalist, Peacock banters the 
 ages of romance ; but he is not their enemy, and, without 
 knowing much about them, he wishes to see them as they 
 were, without the wrong sort of glamour ; and in M aid Marian 
 and Elphin he tries thus to exhibit them. He has the true 
 love for wild scenery, especially for that of Wales, which he 
 knew well, and also for the English greenwood ; though he 
 does not take this or any passion too seriously, it rather is 
 that of the scholar than the lover. He mocks the persons 
 who try to see, or to lay out nature ' picturesquely,' after the 
 manner of Gilpin and Mr. Forester ; but he likes to look at 
 a waterfall, and to imagine a sleeping nymph balanced over 
 it on a projecting bough. In all this, and his tendency to pull 
 himself up when he is admiring too much, he seems to stand 
 between the two centuries. He was not the friend of Shelley 
 for nothing ; but then at times he is also anima Voltairii, 
 habitans in poculo not, indeed, in sicco. In him the age of 
 reason of reason with a difference is once more seen com- 
 menting on itself and on its successor. 
 
 M aid Marian, 1 which he calls a ' comic romance of the 
 twelfth century,' is really a gay, boisterous yet delicate, self- 
 deriding kind of idyll, full of song and hard knocks ; a picture 
 of the golden world of the Robin Hood ballads that Percy 
 and Ritson had revealed. It preceded Ivanhoe by more than 
 a year in composition, except for three of its chapters ; other- 
 wise it might have seemed an attempt to describe the same 
 scenes without the heavy elements the history, melodrama, 
 and pageantry. But it is not an historical novel in any sense ; 
 the ballads, and perhaps the pleasant Elizabethan comedy 
 Robert Earl of Huntingdon, and the old romance of Cosur-de- 
 Lion, are its sufficient inspiration. Maid Marian, a late and 
 not the best creation of the ballad-muse, is improved and 
 glorified. She is here a brave Norman lady, Matilda Fitz- 
 water, who chafes at life in a baronial castle, joins the outlaw 
 band, is a famous archer, holds the disguised King Richard at 
 point with her sword, and weds Young Gamwell, another ballad- 
 hero. Friar Tuck is present also ; he is not the holy and solid 
 Clerk of Copmanhurst, but he is the singer of Peacock's most
 
 THE OTHER NOVELISTS 385 
 
 charming and effortless snatches. The chivalrous robber- 
 code of the best Robin Hood poems is exactly reproduced 
 more lightly, indeed, than it is by Scott ; and the incident 
 of the poor knight who took Our Lady for surety, and whose 
 debt to Robin Hood was paid unwillingly by the Church, 
 is used to the full. 
 
 The Misfortunes of Elpliin is another of Peacock's strange 
 salads of romance and song and satire ; he uses his satire to 
 take off any mawkishness from his romance, and his lyric 
 power to make t he note of beauty and strangeness predominates 
 after all. He knew some Welsh, used old legendary ditties 
 freely as a basis for his own, and broke new ground in trying 
 to re-create the atmosphere of mythic Wales and the world 
 of Arthur. He wrote some years before Lady Charlotte 
 Guest's Mabinogion appeared, but it is partly ascertained from 
 what ancient sagas and poems he drew. He melts together 
 the stories of Elphin and of the bard Taliesin, who becomes 
 the hero as the book proceeds. There is noble Rabelaisian 
 comedy in the figure of Seithenyn, one of the ' three immortal 
 drunkards of Britain,' who becomes, as already noted, a con- 
 servative reasoner much more amusing than Sydney Smith's 
 Mr. Noodle, falls into the flood caused by the breach in the 
 famous embankment, saves himself, however, by clinging to 
 two barrels emptied, providentially, by his own act ; and ends 
 as King Arthur's second butler. There is a somewhat serious 
 rhetorical contrast of the middle with the modern age, put 
 into the mouth of Taliesin ; but the scholar's imaginary recon- 
 struction of Caerleon upon Usk in its ancient splendour is 
 nearer to the mediaeval spirit than anything we find in Scott 
 himself. There is also a bardic competition, which gives 
 occasion for a posy of admirable songs, often closely imitated 
 from the original Welsh. Peacock's prose is also seen to 
 advantage in his reviews and criticisms. His Four Ages of 
 Poetry is paradoxical, and is rather dimmed by Shelley's 
 masterpiece, which it provoked. But his comments on the 
 poetry of Nonnus, his exposure of the scanty scholarship of 
 Moore's Epicurean, and his severe article upon Moore's Life of 
 Byron, are visibly from the pen of the author of Crotchet Castle. 
 His chronicle and description of Shelley show his observant 
 affection, rooted in a humorous sense of the contrast between 
 himself and his friend. Of his little plays lately rescued, The 
 Dilettanti is nearest in spirit to his novels. 
 
 VOL. i. 2 B
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 I. Growth of the periodical press after 1800 ; effect on the art of prose ; 
 conception of the ' article.' Existing organs. Foundation and aims of the 
 Edinburgh Review. New characteristics. Jeffrey as a critic ; his method, 
 limitations, attitude to imaginative work. His style and manner ; jeux 
 d'esprit by Thomas Moore and Copleston. 
 
 II. Brougham, his fertility, oratorical method, form. Sydney Smith : as 
 reviewer, and as pamphleteer and fighter ; mental temper ; Whig temper as 
 reformer ; attitude to religion. His wit, its character ; his style of portraiture. 
 
 III. The Quarterly Review : foundation and staff ; Gifford, Croker, Barrow, 
 Scott, Southey, Lockhart. Traits of the two great quarterlies ; their repre- 
 sentative character and bias ; unsigned articles ; editorial autocracy. 
 
 IV. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine ; anti-Whiggery ; creative aims, 
 and humour. John Wilson (' Christopher North ') : his poems and tales ; 
 Nodes Ambrosiance ; criticisms. 
 
 V. John Gibson Lockhart : his career ; Peter's Letters ; early pranks ; 
 tales (Adam Blair, Valerius, Reginald Dalton, Matthew Wald) ; verses, Ancient 
 Spanish Ballads ; Life of Scott, its excellences. William Maginn : his verses, 
 skits, sketches, and essays. 
 
 VI. Some other journals ; the London Magazine, etc. Increasing volume 
 of the periodical press. Ugo Foscolo and Italian literature. Study of older 
 English and of foreign writers : the Retrospective Review. 
 
 THE swift expansion of the periodical press after 1800 1 estab- 
 lished a new relationship between men of letters and the 
 public, and moulded the art of prose more than any other 
 external influence. Few but the great magazines, which have 
 kept or will soon keep their centenaries, can here be mentioned. 
 Amongst the men of letters that served them, the founders, 
 controllers, and staff officers can be distinguished, not too 
 accurately, from the critics and essayists who simply con- 
 tributed. Wilson, Gifford, Lockhart, and Jeffrey are in the 
 former class, while Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey fall into 
 the second. But with all of them the result is similar ; the 
 article, whether long or short, as distinct from the book or 
 treatise, becomes the unit of composition. The old periodical 
 essay is taken up and transformed ; its types and varieties 
 are enlarged. The Essays of Elia, Hazlitt's reviews, the
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 387 
 
 Confessions of an Opium-eater, the Nodes Ambrosiance, the 
 studies of Macaulay, were all at first articles. Their length, 
 or the length of their serial chapters, is determined by the 
 average reader's power of attention for a single sitting, and 
 by the competing lure of other articles in the same issue. 
 The new prose itself, so various, so coloured, so ductile, takes 
 its impress from the conditions, economic and social, that are 
 newly developed. De Quincey turns into a professional 
 polyhistor, or omniscient writer of all work ; Coleridge into a 
 political journalist on a newspaper ; Southey, Scott, Lockhart, 
 and many more become too frequently reviewing machines. 
 The system of communication between writer and reader is 
 revolutionised ; we can compare the invention of the telephone ; 
 and in the eighteenth century there was nothing of the kind. 
 
 The reviews, indeed, and magazines already existing in 
 1800 are past numbering here. The oldest, the Monthly 
 Review, was Whiggish in tendency, with a Nonconformist 
 colouring ; it was founded in 1749, and continued, with intervals, 
 until as late as 1845. The Tories had the Critical Review, 
 which began in 1756, and lasted until 1817, the birth-year 
 of Blackwood's. The High Churchmen had the British Critic 
 (1793-1843), the Evangelicals the Christian Observer (1802- 
 1857). Of the Anti-Jacobin (1797-98) enough has been said; 
 it is almost the only journal of the time in which we are sure 
 to find wit and talent, and it lived eight months. The Gentle- 
 man's Magazine, on the other hand, survived through many 
 vicissitudes, and lasted, keeping not a little of its early scope, 
 for more than a century and a half (1731-1868). It was full 
 of antiquarian and literary lore, and kept something of the 
 tone of scholarship, and, especially in the later years of the 
 century, contained not a little good prose and verse. But it 
 was not an organ ; and, like its fellow-journals, it had no 
 real claim, or pretence, to mould opinion. Indeed, these 
 ancient tomes are daunting even to the most stubborn reader ; 
 the Literary, the Critical, the British, where are they ? The 
 early Edinburgh^ and Quarterlies are themselves all too spectral ; 
 and what of these wraiths vanishing in their rear ? It is true 
 that genuine men of letters, like Smollett, Johnson, or Cowper, 
 are found contributing to them ; but, in general, their contents 
 were menial work, ill-paid, partisan, uncritical, and in form 
 seldom presentable. 
 
 The origins of the Edinburgh Review have often been told. 
 
 ' The Review, in short, has but two legs to stand on. Litera- 
 ture, no doubt, is one of them : but its Right leg is Politics.'
 
 388 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 This remark of Jeffrey's to Scott, who wished the Review to 
 stand chiefly upon literature and broke with it when its 
 Whiggism became too distinct, expresses the temper of the 
 founders. In their view it was created to save the nation, 
 and the principles of 1688, from the Tory reaction, in 1802 
 at its height ; under the conviction that otherwise the nation 
 would recoil to the perilous principles of 1789, which were 
 only scotched, not killed. Therein lay ' the vast importance, 
 the high and difficult duty, of a middle party,' which should 
 rally the moderate reformers, the stable, cultivated classes, 
 the Liberal members of the great houses, the practical and 
 steadily-moving philanthropists, and the believers in a popular 
 control exercised under a constitutional machinery now long 
 prescriptive. It was seen, indeed, that the world had moved 
 since 1688, and political theory along with it. The ' lessons ' 
 of the French Revolution and its sequel were to be taken to 
 heart. Tyranny was for ever discredited, and kings, as 
 ' officers in trust/ were to be so fenced by popular rights and 
 parliamentary procedure as to remain at once protected, 
 harmless, and beneficent institutions. Fifteen years after the 
 Review began, the same moral was proclaimed upon the fall 
 of Napoleon, when Jeffrey hoped that a new era had opened ; 
 a forecast soon enough to be made foolish. The Whig pro- 
 gramme need not be detailed here, nor the list of championed 
 causes to which, within a quarter of a century, the reviewers 
 could point with pride : Catholic emancipation, reform of 
 prisons, a measure of justice to Ireland, popular education. 1 
 They fought hard with the pen for these things, though most 
 of their writing in this field is clear-cut, lucid, efficient journalism 
 and not literature. The power they acquired, and the fear 
 and dissatisfaction they awakened on both sides, can be 
 measured, within the sphere of journalism itself, by some 
 other great foundations. The Quarterly Review, in 1809, 
 was established by the revolting and equally resolute and 
 dogmatic Tories ; Blackwood's in 1817, by Tories of a younger 
 and nimbler cast ; and the Westminster Review in 1824, by 
 the Radical offspring of Benthamism, who treated the great, 
 belated, compromising ' middle party ' as obstacles to social 
 and legal reform and to intellectual light. Meantime the 
 Whig writers had their day. and the Review an influence that 
 has seldom been won by any periodical in the world. It has 
 its place in every political history of England, and in two 
 ways with all its shortcomings it set journalism on a per- 
 manently higher level. It had its principles, whatever their
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 389 
 
 value, which were impersonal, and to which it held fast. This 
 cannot be said of the periodical writing of Defoe, Swift, and 
 Bolingbroke, the three masters of such writing a century 
 before ; although each of the three was a greater man of 
 letters than most writers on the Review. For secondly, it was 
 disciplined, and concerted, and manned by persons of diverse 
 talents ; and it had a vast body of social and civic opinion 
 behind it, which it partly expressed and partly created. It 
 was, moreover, independent ; in the hands of no parliamentary 
 gang, no bookseller, and of no capitalist. At the same time 
 it was well-to-do, and could and did begin by taking risks, and 
 paid its contributors on a scale hitherto unknown. The same 
 remarks apply to the Quarterly, which spoke, with equal weight, 
 for the opposite school of opinion. These powers and advan- 
 tages were not evident all at once. The Edinburgh Reviewers 
 started with a light heart, and only after a little discovered their 
 strength. Yet few now read their old articles, at any rate before 
 the arrival of Macaulay in 1825, except professed students. 
 
 Till that date, literature in the Edinburgh Review is chiefly 
 in the hands of Francis Jeffrey, 1 who was its editor almost 
 from the first and until 1829. This once-noted despot of 
 letters wrote some two hundred articles, 2 mostly reviews of 
 books. They are chiefly on poetry, drama, fiction, biography, 
 memoirs, and travels, but they also range over law, politics, 
 and speculation. Jeffrey could write about anything, just as 
 he would take any case in the courts. In all he says we seem 
 to hear ' some conclusive little cut his tongue was giving,' as 
 noted by Carlylo in the Reminiscences. It was, indeed, in the 
 intervals of his busy, darting existence as a supremely success- 
 ful advocate and a highly regarded judge, that he wrote his 
 articles. In 1844 he republishcd one hundred of them ; since 
 1853 few have been printed again. The contrast with the 
 Ishmaelite Hazlitt, who had scant authority in his own day, 
 comes homo to us. Hazlitt must increase, and Jeffrey must 
 decrease, and this is only as it ought to be. Genius has its 
 revenges in the long run upon sharp-witted, many-sided 
 competence. But the subsidence of Jeffrey's fame, though 
 not to be prevented, has led to historical injustice, and also 
 to critical error, in spite of judicious protests. 3 He is not 
 merely a representative figure ; he is a curious, complex 
 personage, not easy to measure in spite of his lucidity. As a 
 man he lives in the pages of Carlyle and Lockhart ; but his 
 mind and artistic tastes these observers hardly reveal. 
 
 Many people only know how Jeffrey said that The Excursion
 
 390 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 would not do, that the end of the Ode to Duty is utterly with- 
 out meaning, and that the Immortality Ode is illegible and 
 unintelligible ; that he ignored Shelley, 1 and made much of 
 Rogers ; and yet that for a quarter of a century he was popu- 
 larly taken as a high court of appeal in letters. His own 
 retrospect, 2 written in 1829, of that period tells us more about 
 Jeffrey as a critic than anything else, both in its mixed blind- 
 ness and foresight, and its cool, qualified pessimism. He 
 muses not without pathos : 
 
 Since the beginning of our critical career we have seen a vast deal 
 of beautiful poetry pass into oblivion, in spite of our feeble efforts 
 to recall or retain it in remembrance. The tuneful quartos of 
 Southey are already little better than lumber : and the rich 
 melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the fantastical emphasis of 
 Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting 
 fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out 
 his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into 
 distance and dimness, except where they have been married to 
 immortal music ; and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding 
 from its place of pride. We need say nothing of Milman, and Croly, 
 and Atherstone, and Hood, and a legion of others, who, with no 
 ordinary gifts of taste and fancy, have not so properly survived their 
 fame, as been excluded, by some hard fatality, from what seemed 
 their just inheritance. The two who have the longest withstood this 
 rapid withering of the laurel, and with the least marks of decay on 
 their branches, are Rogers and Campbell . . . 
 
 who, he adds, live by their taste and elegance : titles which, 
 if they ensure fame at all, will surely bring it, in his opinion, 
 to Felicia Hemans. No one will say this passage is meanly 
 written ; there is a plangency about it and a rolling eloquence 
 of which we are nowadays afraid. It is the epitaph inscribed 
 by the chief official critic of that age upon the poetry of the 
 age. Jeffrey clearly thinks that all these writers are dead 
 beyond recovery ; he has no faith in the judgment of orbis 
 terrarum ; and his epithets show, in most instances, where he 
 thinks their fate is merited. As to the fact, he is half right ; 
 some of these reputations did seem in 1829 to be eclipsed, or 
 rather ' melting ' for Tennyson had not risen to eclipse them ; 
 1829 was the hour to try men's faith in poetry the ' dead 
 point ' in the turn of the wheel. Southey (not to name ' Croly 
 and Atherstone ') was really, as a poet, extinct, and has re- 
 mained so ; Byron was really ' receding,' in England at least, 
 and has continued to recede. Crabbe was long out of fashion, 
 but his name is reviving. There is no need to comment on
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 391 
 
 Jeffrey's view of Shelley, with whom he never reckoned, or 
 of Keats, whom, as some will be surprised to learn, he had 
 praised 1 with delighted generosity, and, if not very profoundly, 
 still for the right reasons. Crabbe had always been his 
 favourite, for reasons suggested already ; and his brief sum- 
 maries of Crabbe's stories show his style, quick, living, limpid, 
 at its very best. To Scott's verse he had also done honour, 
 though without seeing the greatness of his lyrics. Southey he 
 had treated very seriously, and also IMla Rookh. 
 
 His tone about Byron is that of deploring admiration. He 
 takes him at his own rating ; accepts his pose ; treats the 
 Childe, and Conrad, and Manfred, as the lacerated and terrific 
 persons that they claim to be, and regrets the effect of their 
 example on society ; reads Don Juan in a manly spirit, dis- 
 claiming ' priestlike cant,' but ' charging ' the author with a 
 tendency to undermine public virtue. We can see that he 
 marvels nevertheless, and in his heart enjoys being harrowed. 
 The whole point of view is remote from ours, and we are 
 fascinated by its simplicity. That Byron should thus have 
 affected a deeply fastidious, upright, dogmatic, scandalised 
 little Scotch advocate and arbiter of elegances gives us the 
 measure of his contemporary power. By Wordsworth 2 Jeffrey 
 was also stirred, more reluctantly. He does not merely wish 
 to be fair to him as to a prisoner at the bar ; Jeffrey, his 
 biographer tells us, loved the sky and all natural things, and in 
 the midst of his railing he stops and is grave. His reviews of 
 Wordsworth are full of such pauses and concessions. He 
 regarded him as a true man and lofty genius who had been too 
 often seduced into the infantine, trivial, and fantastic ; admires 
 Brougham Castle, and some of the sonnets, and many other 
 things, in his own despite. All this makes Jeffrey interesting. 
 
 The truth is ho was too clever, and had too much real 
 feeling, wholly to resist the time. His essay on 'Beauty' 3 in 
 the Britannica shows, amidst some rather futile psychology 
 (founded chiefly upon Alison's Essays on Taste), that he was 
 sensitive to beauty ; and one passage, not without eloquence, 
 forecasts Ruskin's point of view that natural and artistic beauty 
 is rooted in the k human interest ' attached to it ; a view 
 which may be incomplete, but which does not show any dryness 
 of soul. Jeffrey, in fact, is ever tripping gingerly in the rear 
 of Romance, pulling himself up when he feels his pace is too 
 quick, relieving his classical conscience by see-sawing judici- 
 ally, and shrilly pouncing on obvious or supposed blemishes, 
 but really dragged onwards. He is most at his ease with
 
 392 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 Scott's novels, which do not frighten him, and, after due 
 reserves to make sure that he is still a critic, revels in them 
 and praises them well. His notices of the ' secondary Scotch 
 novels ' of Lockhart, Gait, and Wilson, and of Mrs. Hamilton's 
 Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1 are models of their sort. He may 
 seem to give too much room to mere summaries ; but these 
 summaries contain some of his best handiwork ; and he never 
 falls into the modern vice of reviewing a book without giving 
 a clear image of its contents. He is most successful, indeed, 
 with 'secondary writers,' who are often the hardest of all to 
 judge. His statement of the poetic models of Barry Cornwall, 2 
 part Elizabethan, part romantic, could not be bettered, with 
 its conclusion that ' the materials really harmonise very toler- 
 ably.' He has no divine flame, no feeling for the unsaid ; 
 he is finite, and Latin, and academic, and distrusts his sensa- 
 tions while supremely confident in his opinions. His courage 
 is always refreshing. He admires Burns deeply, and enjoys 
 him, but states what may be called the gentlemanly objections 
 to Burns to his acrimony, want of chivalry, and bragging 
 independence with a sharpness that did no harm. The end- 
 less fatuous admirers of the ' bard ' require at least one such 
 shock in every generation as those administered by Jeffrey 
 and by Henley. But the next article in the Review on Burns, 
 which came out under Jeffrey's rule, was Carlyle's, and we are 
 in a new world of criticism. 
 
 Jeffrey's perky, neat, exasperating manner ; his talk of 
 ' bringing charges,' and of ' declining to rescind ' his sentences, 
 has served him ill with posterity, which has also ' declined to 
 rescind.' These tricks, and those of his imitators, provoked 
 some apt retorts and parodies at the time. Moore, in the prose 
 interludes of Lalla Eookh, makes the Great Chamberlain, 
 Fadladeen, criticise the poem itself in the full-blown reviewer's 
 fashion, which is by no means over-mimicked : 
 
 With respect to the style, it was worthy of the matter ; it had 
 not even those politic contrivances of structure which make up for 
 the commonness of the thought by the peculiarity of the manner, 
 nor that stately poetical phraseology by Avhich sentiments mean 
 in themselves, like the blacksmith's apron converted into a banner, 
 are so easily gilt and embroidered into consequence. Then, as to 
 the versification, it was, to say no worse of it, execrable ; it had 
 neither the copious flow of Ferdosi, the sweetness of Hafez, nor the 
 sententious march of Sadi ; but appeared to him, in the uneasy 
 heaviness of its movements, to have been modelled on the gait of 
 a very tired dromedary.
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 393 
 
 A subtler assault was made in 1807 by Edward Copleston, 
 afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, in his Advice to a Young Reviewer, 1 
 with a Specimen of the Art. A rag of the mantle of Swift 
 descended upon Copleston, and Oxford rejoiced at the scari- 
 fying slap dealt to Edinburgh. The young reviewer is advised 
 to ' write what will sell ' ; to work chiefly upon the preface 
 of the book that he is noticing, for here he will discover ' a 
 fund of wealth lying upon the surface ' ; and, above all, to find 
 fault : 
 
 If anybody complains that the great and more valuable parts 
 remain unnoticed; your answer is that it is impossible to pay 
 attention to all, and that your duty is rather to prevent the pro- 
 pagation of error, than to lavish praises upon that which, if really 
 excellent, will work its way in the world without your help. 
 
 The 'Specimen' is a review of ' L' Allegro, by Mr. Milton,' 
 who seems ' to have a turn for this species of nursery tales and 
 prattling lullabies ' ; and after some pleasantries concerning 
 the fabled pedigree of Mirth, the thing concludes : 
 
 Upon the whole Mr. Milton seems to be possessed of some fancy 
 and talent for rhyming ; two most dangerous endowments, which 
 often unfit men for acting a useful part in life, without qualifying 
 them for that which is great and brilliant. . . . With the help of 
 Cocker and common industry, he may become a respectable 
 scrivener ; but it is not all the Zephyrs, and Auroras, and Corydons, 
 and Thyrsis's ; aye, nor his ' junketing Queen Mab ' and ' drudging 
 goblins,' that will ever make him a Poet. 
 
 And yet Jeffrey (to speak in his own manner) though not a 
 great, is not a bad, writer. His style is eighteenth century to 
 the backbone. He was wont to decry the writers of the age 
 of Anne, and loved the Elizabethans much more - (including 
 John Ford) ; and herein he belongs to his time ; but there is 
 no doubt as to his own pedigree. At his best he is plain, light, 
 nimble, and correct, with occasional washes (if the term may 
 be used) of romantic colour, and flying touches of sensibility. 
 He once said to Macaulay, ' The more I think, the less I can 
 imagine where you picked up that style.' It was picked up, 
 largely, from Jeffrey himself ; there is the same precision, the 
 dogmatic short clauses, the lack of atmosphere, the superfluity 
 of edge everything, perhaps, but the antithesis and accumu- 
 lative skill. Macaulay's Milton came out in the Review in 
 1825, and his admiration for Jeffrey 'as near perfection as 
 any human being with whom I have been acquainted,' is touch- 
 ing, and in comic contrast to Carlyle's iconoclasm.
 
 394 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 To follow Jeffrey further would be to review again much of 
 the literature of his age. His excursions among foreign writers 
 swell the account, and his dealings with Wilhelm Meister, 
 Madame de Stael, and Alfieri are all the more odd and piquant 
 when they are blind dealings. His final praise is perhaps to 
 have invented the modern review article. It was at least a 
 new, and perhaps a permanent, mould for criticism. At the 
 worst, he made reviewing honest, circumstantial, instructed, 
 and lucid. He made it a high profession, which it is. He 
 pronounced, rightly or wrongly, but in a distinct and reasoned 
 way, upon a vast number of the books of note published during 
 the romantic period. He made a public ; he made greater 
 critics than himself possible and audible after him. 
 
 II 
 
 One of the chief builders of the Edinburgh Review was Henry 
 Brougham. 1 He is said to have contributed eighty articles 
 in five years, an average of four to each issue ; and, once, to 
 have written an entire number. They are on all manner of 
 things scientific and political, literary and legal. They are 
 all dead ; they have neither the clear finish of Jeffrey's, nor 
 the durable quality of Sydney Smith's. This is an index of 
 Brougham's activities in general, and of the fate of most of 
 his writings and speeches. The immense number of words 
 that he printed, out of the incalculable number that he penned 
 and uttered, has served him little with a later generation ; 
 and his place in a survey, or even in a history, of literature, is 
 a most dubious one. The noise he made, the infinite dust he 
 disturbed, the great and real services he did to the cause of 
 justice, law reform, popular instruction all this is now matter 
 for the labours of the political and social historian. Even at 
 the end of his long lifetime (1778-1868) Lord Brougham was 
 already something of a legend, as we see from the sketch made 
 of him in 1857 (when his collected works were published) by 
 the acutest of critics. Bagehot's study is a model of an intel- 
 lectual portrait ; but we see that the Brougham who wrote 
 in the early Edinburgh numbers, who fought the slave-trade, 
 and defended Queen Caroline, who from 1820 to 1830 was at 
 the pinnacle of his fame and power, who worked like a demon 
 for Reform, who was the despair of his political friends and 
 foes, and of all Lord Chancellors the most incalculable ; we 
 see that this personage, long before his death, had become a 
 somewhat inexplicable name ; and from his writings, selected
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 395 
 
 by himself and revised, we can only, with an effort, reconstruct 
 the impression that he made. 
 
 Very few of his works are saved by their form, for Brougham 
 usually wrote even worse than Mr. Gladstone. They are 
 heavy, parenthetical, rough and ready in their average work- 
 manship, and turbidly elaborate in their more ambitious flights. 
 There is not much in their language which helps us to imagine 
 the compass, power, and flexibility of Brougham's spoken 
 voice. They are reports of the words of a great orator, 
 journalist, and lecturer. We seldom, it is true, fail to feel 
 that the subject, whatever it is, is in the grip of a strong, 
 vehement, and prehensile mind. Brougham's account of the 
 British Constitution has this quality, and his best speeches 
 have it still more. The famous oration for Queen Caroline, 
 which modern poets and playwrights have made use of, has 
 been unduly depreciated, with its loud seven-times written 
 peroration. It all sounds terribly overblown eloquence ; but the 
 note of fury, of sincerity, of rasping irony, rings through, and 
 the whole is anything but a made-up forensic display of wrath. 
 Brougham's revision has not deprived it of the accent of real 
 speech ; even the awkward qualifications and involutions of 
 the sentences give the sense of reality ; they are the retreats 
 and parries of the expert fencer from moment to moment, 
 as he retires to the wall or lunges out advancing. The same 
 impression is left by some of his efforts on slighter occasions ; 
 one of the most justly admired was the speech in defence of 
 a provincial newspaper, which had censured the refusal of 
 the Durham clergy to toll for the death of Queen Caroline. 
 
 Brougham studied the art of the spoken word with special 
 vigour, and nourished himself on Demosthenes. He thought 
 out his arrangement ; he calculated his anger, and turned it 
 on, like a jet of boiling water, at the right or wrong instant- 
 like an engineer ; he was fertile, ready, reckless, and portentous. 
 It is odd that the results do not come, as he hoped they would, 
 into the annals of literature ; but the truth is that Brougham 
 had little sense either of beauty and grace, or of measure, 
 reserve, and relief. He is probably at his best in his accounts 
 of statesmen and speakers, many of whom he had known and 
 seen. His analysis of Burke's oratory and its defects, and 
 of the sources of its power, is full of shrewdness and experi- 
 ence ; and we often trace the influence of Burke when Brougham 
 sets himself to charge, to colour, and to amplify his point. 
 The pictures of Fox, Erskinc, and Windham are admirable, 
 and more leisured than Brougham's ordinary writing. Hi?
 
 396 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 autobiography, written in advanced age, was a failure, and 
 contains many erroneous statements. His addresses on the 
 value of knowledge and the duty of diffusing information are 
 only to be read by the adventurous. 
 
 Dry rot is in Brougham's tomes, and has touched Jeffrey's ; 
 Francis Horner 1 is a shadowy name ; but the writing of Sydney 
 Smith 2 (1771-1845) remains fresh, though most of the causes 
 he fought for have prevailed. By his own report, he suggested 
 the Review ; he edited its first number, and wrote in it for 
 over a quarter of a century, and there is still much salt in his 
 contributions. His notices of books are marked by a pert 
 and cheerful wit, and by a shrewd, rapid, and complacent 
 judgment. His executions are neatly carried out. Review- 
 ing a foolish play by Matthew Gregory Lewis, 3 he hails the 
 ' symptoms of returning, or perhaps nascent purity ' in the 
 mind of its author ; and of Hope's Anastasius he prophetically 
 observes that ' it is too long ; and if this novel perish and is 
 forgotten it is solely on that account.' He is anti-romantic, 
 and cheerfully insular in sentiment ; in Madame de StaeTs 
 Delphine he sees only 'dismal trash,' adding that it 'is calcu- 
 lated to shed a mild lustre over adultery.' But for pure 
 letters he does not care greatly, and writes best when he writes 
 with a purpose, or about books that have a purpose. He is 
 not witty for wit's sake, his jokes are an arm of offence, and 
 his method is to make wicked absurdities seem ridiculous. 
 This is seen best in his longer and more consequent composi- 
 tions. His Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, to my Brother 
 Abraham, who Lives in the Country, by Peter Plymley (1808), 
 form, together with A Letter to the Electors upon the Catholic 
 Question (1808), a classic of our fighting literature. They 
 are a shrapnel-fire of indignant, reasoned, and effective ridicule, 
 in favour of Catholic Emancipation. The same style and 
 vigour are found, undimmed, in the Letters to Archdeacon 
 Singleton on the Ecclesiastical Commission (1837-9), in which 
 the veteran Whig finds himself protesting against his brother- 
 shepherds who seem to be playing tricks with the Establishment. 
 
 Sydney Smith has not the mental ascendency of Swift, or 
 his careless perfection of language, but he is more scrupulous, 
 humane, and generous ; there is no mystery about him, nothing 
 that baffles or frightens the ordinary reader. He is less a 
 master of idiom, less primitive, than Cobbett, and also less 
 kaleidoscopic and unreasonable ; he is far better educated, 
 and more of the trained rhetorician. Indeed, he often suggests 
 Macaulay, and may have taught him some of his devices.
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 397 
 
 His impassioned plea for the Catholics, especially the Irish 
 Catholics, takes the shape of a scornful appeal to the dormant 
 reason of the English clergy. His wit and temper are not 
 Irish at all, but he appreciates the Irish claims better than 
 most writers of his time. He drives home to the head his 
 argument against fanatical coercion and anti-Popish mania. 
 Sometimes his eloquence reaches a truly lofty pitch, as in the 
 passage where he proclaims that the true spirit of policy is 
 ' to fling down no man's altar, to punish no man's prayer.' 
 But his usual tone is that of a man exposing stupidity to the 
 stupid. The English, he constantly feels and says, are stupid, 
 and live on prejudice and legend. The contemplation of 
 their density irritates him into positive alarm when he con- 
 trasts it with the sagacity of Bonaparte and his politic tolera- 
 tion of the Jews in Paris. In 1808 (Plymley's Letters, No. V.) he 
 writes much in the strain of the military Conservative press 
 of to-day (1912) : 
 
 You cannot imagine, you say, that England will ever be ruined 
 and conquered ; and for no other reason that I can find, but because 
 it seems so very odd that it should be ruined and conquered. Alas ! 
 so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian 
 Plymleys. But the English are brave ; so were all these nations. 
 You might get together a hundred thousand men individually 
 brave ; but without generals capable of commanding such a machine, 
 it would be as useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford 
 clergymen, or Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this to the dis- 
 paragement of British officers ; they have had no means of acquir- 
 ing experience ; but I do say it to create alarm ; for we do not 
 appear to me to be half alarmed enough, or to entertain that sense 
 of our danger which leads to the most obvious means of self-defence. 
 
 The passage is a good instance of Sydney Smith's straight and 
 biting style, working ever, like Macaulay's, up to a concrete 
 name or illustration the ' Oxford clergymen ' which is meant 
 to stick in the memory of the dullest. 
 
 It would take time to recount the causes on behalf of which 
 he went forth to battle. In his campaign for toleration, he 
 descends from Hales and Locke, pleading the folly and inex- 
 pediency of the opposite course, and not founding himself 
 on the abstract rights of the victim. There is less than nothing 
 of the revolutionary theorist in him ; indeed, he represents 
 the English revulsion from mere doctrine to considerations 
 of universal good sense. Still he touches Bent ham, whom he 
 admires ; and constitutes himself the populariser of that 
 difficult, subdividing author, who ' invents new and alarming
 
 398 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 expressions ' and so does injustice to his own acuteness. The 
 well-known ' Noodle's Oration ' occurs in a review of the 
 Book of Fallacies . l His articles on prison reform, the game 
 laws, and man-traps, are in essence Benthamite tracts. His 
 contemptuous detachment from the English caste is most 
 clearly shown in his papers on education. Sydney Smith 
 attacks the fetish of the public schools, the monopoly of the 
 classical tongues, and the exclusion of women from equal 
 opportunities of instruction. In an article on female educa- 
 tion, written in 1810, we see that the epoch of Mary Woll- 
 stonecraft and passionate theorising, and also the epoch of 
 Mrs. Trimmer and the governess ideal, has gone, and that the 
 epoch of rational reform is in prospect. He is by no means 
 what would now be called a ' feminist,' but is disconcerting, 
 in his line of argument, to the extremer persons of that camp. 
 
 Can anything, for example, be more perfectly absurd than to 
 suppose that the care and perpetual solicitude which a mother feels 
 for her children, depends upon her ignorance of Greek and of 
 Mathematics ; and that she would desert an infant for a quadratic 
 equation ? We seem to imagine that we can break in pieces the 
 most solemn institutions of nature, by the little laws of a boarding- 
 school ; and that the existence of the human race depends upon 
 teaching women a little more or a little less ; that Cimmerian 
 ignorance can aid parental affection, or the circle of arts and sciences 
 produce its destruction. 
 
 This is something like good perspective ; and accordingly 
 Sydney Smith does not fit very well into the age that is 
 baptized ' romantic ' ; but there he is in it, with his enlightened 
 Whiggery, which is the most recalcitrant of all elements when 
 we try to exhaust the definition of such an age by such a term. 
 One of the oddest and also the most distinctive traits of 
 this active, beneficent country parson, is his conviction that 
 the human animal cannot stand more than a certain amount 
 of religion. 'The Methodists 2 are always desirous of making 
 men more religious than it is possible, from the constitution 
 of human nature, to make them.' The shades of Wesley and 
 of Newman rise up in concert against this notion ; but it is 
 quite a sound one, and the hold of Sydney Smith's class and 
 type upon the English nation is largely due to their firm grasp 
 of it. People, he says, who try to make more of religion than 
 it will bear are ignorant of men ; are for ever 
 
 inviting them to ride, walk, row, wrestle, and dine out religiously ; 
 forgetting that the being to whom this impossible purity is recom-
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 399 
 
 mended, is a being compelled to scramble for his existence and 
 support for ten hours out of the sixteen he is awake ; forgetting 
 that he must dig, beg, read, think, move, pay, receive, praise, scold, 
 command, and obey ; forgetting also that if men conversed as 
 often upon religious subjects as they do upon the ordinary occur- 
 rences of the world, they would converse upon them with the same 
 familiarity and want of respect, etc. 
 
 This combination of reverence and reticence with an unmystical 
 temper and a sense of the ludicrous may not make a poet or 
 a profound speculator ; it is the very prose of religion ; but 
 it gives something for working days, and is a safeguard against 
 bigotry. On its negative side, it comes down from the rational- 
 ising eighteenth century. It reminds us of the alleged epitaph 
 upon the churchman ' whose glory it was to have been a 
 lifelong enemy of all forms of enthusiasm ' ; like Locke and 
 Hume, who wrote upon that phenomenon in the spirit of 
 pathologists analysing a morbid growth. 
 
 The celebrated ' wit ' of Sydney Smith is a pervading habit 
 of mind, and not only a trick of words ; and it is certainly 
 very easy, and natural, and telling ; but it is often enough 
 blunt and loud. It is pamphlet wit, so phrased as to pierce 
 very thick heads. It is not meant merely to amuse persons 
 who are in sympathy with the speaker. Nothing subtle 
 would serve. It easily runs into the kind of cheery snap and 
 crackle that are remarkably ephemeral. Sydney Smith jested 
 in order to enforce certain purposes, which history, it will 
 perhaps be agreed, has pronounced to be right and noble ones. 
 And it is often his purpose that keeps his wit alive, rather than 
 the converse. When the purpose is smart reviewing, there is 
 less to be said for the joke. It can, indeed, as with Macaulay, 
 become vulgar enough : 
 
 Mr. Edgeworth seems to possess the sentiments of an accom- 
 plished gentleman, the information of a scholar, and the vivacity 
 of a first-rate harlequin. He is fuddled with animal spirits, giddy 
 with constitutional joy ; in such a state he must have written on 
 or burst. A discharge of ink was an evacuation absolutely neces- 
 sary, to avoid final and plethoric congestion. 
 
 What is amusing about this is, that it was long supposed to 
 be amusing. Can we not hear through it the stentorian voice, 
 ' like the bell of St. Paul's,' which startled the ear-trumpet 
 of Harriet Martineau, at an assembly, upon her introduction 
 to Sydney Smith ? It is true that it comes from one of the 
 brave early numbers of the Review. It is fairer to take
 
 400 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 mellower examples of a man's style ; and the best of these may 
 be found when Sydney Smith is no longer fighting and com- 
 mitted to emphasis, but when his genial judgment is at work, 
 and when his wit, now touched by humour, is kept down and 
 instrumental to art. For art there really is in his Letter on the 
 Character of Sir James Mackintosh, 1 and in his similar letter to 
 the brother of Francis Homer. These are ' characters ' in 
 the old usage of the term, and masterly things ; lacking, it is 
 true, the gradation, the sense of complexity in the mind de- 
 scribed, that we find in a portrait by Burke or Clarendon ; 
 every trait is in equal relief ; but we feel that the shortcomings 
 are painted in, not from malice, nor from the necessity of 
 finding some fault, but justly and in their natural context. 
 Thus he says of Mackintosh : 
 
 But though easily warmed by great schemes of benevolence and 
 human improvement, his manner was cold to individuals. There 
 was an apparent want of heartiness and cordiality. It seemed as 
 if he had more affection for the species than for the ingredients of 
 which it was composed. He was in reality very hospitable, and so 
 fond of company, that he was hardly happy out of it ; but he did 
 not receive his friends with that honest joy, which warms more than 
 dinner or wine. 
 
 This is incidentally, and by contrariety, a character of Sydney 
 Smith himself. The humour is more subdued and sympathetic 
 in his account of Homer : 
 
 The commandments were written on his face, and I have often 
 told him there was not a crime he might not commit with impunity, 
 as no judge or jury who saw him would give the smallest degree of 
 credit to any evidence against him ; there was in his look a calm 
 settled love of all that was honourable and good an air of wisdom 
 and sweetness ; you saw at once that he was a great man, whom 
 nature had intended for a leader of human beings. 
 
 Sydney Smith's style has the higher qualities, without the 
 impermanence, of journalism. He is instantaneous and direct, 
 never wastes a word, and opens straight upon his subject. 
 His little descriptions, like that of the scenery of Botany Bay 
 or of the countries visited by Waterton (of the Wanderings), 
 have the same quality. His diction is pure and sharp, like 
 Hazlitt's ; whom he rivals, not in imaginative power or in- 
 sight, but in the excellence and ease of his fighting English. 
 He has the brevity and unencumbered naturalness of the best 
 Georgian prose, without the discoloured flatness into which 
 it had fallen.
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 401 
 
 III 
 
 The Quarterly Review? after parleyings between Murray, 
 Canning, and Scott, was founded in 1809, with Gifford for 
 editor, in order to countervail the Edinburgh, rally the Tories, 
 and establish a rival oracle. Its four pillars were to be politics, 
 literature, scholarship, and science. So strong a staff was 
 soon enlisted, that we wonder to-day at the dimness of the old 
 articles as we turn them over. In politics, one of the con- 
 trolling spirits and most profuse contributors who during 
 forty-five years produced no fewer than two hundred and fifty- 
 eight articles was John Wilson Croker, 2 secretary to the 
 Admiralty. A rasping satirist, a narrow-souled critic of letters, 
 an acrimonious partisan, Croker was nevertheless a minute and 
 often accurate investigator, and an able expounder and dis- 
 putant. He was also a more disinterested and useful person 
 than was long supposed. The enmity, not altogether worthy, 
 of Macaulay and Benjamin Disraeli has done him some wrong. 
 But Croker does not survive in literature, although his edition 
 of Boswell's Johnson, assaulted by Macaulay and defended by 
 Lockhart, has served later scholars well. 
 
 Another copious writer, of the solid order, was Sir John 
 Barrow, the traveller, Chinese savant, and South African states- 
 man. Barrow poured out innumerable reviews of voyages 
 and travels, which are still the best contemporary survey of 
 that class of literature. Southey, in the course of thirty years, 
 wrote nearly a hundred articles, and Scott, during the remainder 
 of his life (1809-32), about thirty. The number of all these 
 contributions, and their variety, strike the reader at once. 
 Scott was ready to talk about anything, from fly-fishing to 
 Pepys's Diary, and Southey about anything from Lord Nelson 
 to the Poor Laws. There was, it is true, no Brougham on the 
 Quarterly ; its sciolism was only comparative ; and many of 
 its articles were by professed students, of whom the list is 
 too long to repeat. Hallam and Sharon Turner wrote on history, 
 Malthus and Senior on economj 7 , Ugo Foscolo on the Italian 
 classics all these and many more figure in the register, and 
 the band swelled as time went on. Gilford's editorship lasted 
 till 1824 ; then, after a short tenure by J. T. Coleridge, Un- 
 reins were taken in 1826 by Lookhart, who kept them for nearly 
 thirty years. An admirable editor, ho wrote most copiously 
 in the Review, and it might have been said, but for the Life 
 of Scott, that he buried his genius in the task. 
 
 Criticism in the Quarterly was taken seriously from the first ; 
 VOL. i. 2 c
 
 402 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 but many of its pronouncements were ill-starred. No one 
 would turn to these old reviews to get any real picture of the 
 condition or hopes of English letters between 1809 and 1830. 
 This is not due to the ordinary blindness of contemporaries ; 
 for the few volumes of the London Magazine (1820-9) throw 
 a flood of light on the living spirit of poetry and imagination 
 in that age. Nor is it due to w r ant of wits, which it would 
 be absurd to impute to such a staff. There are, of course, 
 exceptions ; Scott's notices of Miss Austen (No. 27, Oct. 1815), 
 or ELLis's of The. Lord of the Isles and The Corsair, are still worth 
 reading. On the other hand, Croker's treatment of Miss Owen- 
 son's stories, or the notorious review of Keats, are painfully 
 instructive. Even where political bias does not rule, the 
 Quarterly Reviewers seem curiously blank in the presence of 
 artistic excellence ; some organ is lacking, which is present 
 not only in the greater critics of the time, but in lesser ones 
 like Leigh Hunt and Darley, or even in Wainewright the 
 poisoner. Neither is there the youth and flush of the writers 
 for Blackwood's Magazine, which was founded in 1817, partly 
 in order to supply this deficiency, and partly to provide a rally- 
 ing point for the Scottish Tories. 
 
 Before passing to Wilson and his sharpshooters, some 
 features common to the big quarterlies may be brought into 
 relief. These ' organs ' were not prescient ; they were, in 
 general, pretentious ; their air of authority now seems ridicul- 
 ous ; and there is little in them, during the period we are con- 
 sidering, that would be worth a reprint. Still, their service to 
 English culture, as distinct from their contribution to literature, 
 is undeniable. They partly realised the aim of their founders. 
 This may have been, in the first instance, to work out and 
 enforce the strategy of one party or the other. But precisely 
 because, in England, the idea of party strikes so deep, and 
 means so much more than itself, involving, if it is truly bottomed 
 and applied in earnest, the great, historic divisions of national 
 opinion concerning life and thought and art ; just for this 
 reason, the scope of the enterprise became enlarged ; and the 
 Radical, or Whig, or Tory colouring given to the treatment of 
 these greater themes is not wholly a loss. We can never, it is 
 true, rest in such verdicts, or take them at the valuation of 
 such a court ; they destroy the free play of mind, they rightly 
 disgust the independent critic ; and the next generation lifts 
 its eyebrows over them. But, at any rate, they represent 
 something. They are not the whim of an individual, any more 
 than they are words of eternal reason. They are the voice, or
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 403 
 
 the voices raised in unison, of a powerful, concerted, not 
 despicable band of intellects. They tell us, for good or ill, 
 what half of cultivated Britain was agreed in thinking at a 
 particular moment. The great, fertilising ideas that alter 
 speculation or mould poetry do not, it is true, arise in this 
 fashion, but are conceived in the solitude of Konigsberg or 
 Grasmere. Nor are the official organs of opinion the first to 
 hail, or to circulate, such ideas : on the contrary ; but, for a 
 picture of the national mind and opinion, not at its lonely 
 and lofty fountain-heads, nor yet in its ' low fat levels,' but in 
 its upper, civilised ranges, we may well turn to a few faded 
 numbers of the Edinburgh or the Quarterly. 
 
 Their military purpose was well served by two practices 
 which at once strike the artist as pestilent. First of all, the 
 articles, critical as well as controversial, were unsigned. No 
 victim knew, or at least was supposed to know, who had fired 
 a particular cannon or musket shot. If there was any life left 
 in him, he could only aim back at the editor, who was well 
 entrenched. These figures of speech become literally true 
 in the case of the unhappy John Scott, of the London Magazine, 
 who fell in the famous duel with J. H. Christie ; and the burlesque 
 encounter of Jeffrey and Moore might have been a tragedy. 
 But, in general, the missile was impersonal in source ; it came 
 from the Review. To speak in different terms, the judgment 
 was that of a last court of appeal. The conscience, the solemn 
 consideration, of half the community were behind it ; such was 
 the pretence, or such the impression. In political warfare no 
 one can well complain of this method ; the journalist, sinking 
 all personal differences, agrees with his chief and his fellows 
 to accept such discipline. In criticism, too, the practice has 
 been defended, and that by persons of weight, on the ground 
 that the result is franker, and that social perplexities are 
 evaded ; it is defended, too, by the editorial mind, which 
 banks the talent of unknown contributors to the credit of his 
 journal. Few will say, however, that the best criticism gains 
 by not being publicly identified with the author, or that he is 
 not robbed of his payment in glory ; or that he is not tempted, 
 fatally, to mould himself to the general, the infectious, style 
 of his journal ; or, yet again, to be careless as to those last 
 fine scruples of thought and stylo, which would have wrought' 
 with him had he signed his name. Few but men of strong, 
 insuppressible character, like Lamb or Carlyle, can resist these 
 lures. Editors, as a rule, are not patient with such scruples, 
 or with violently individual genius. Gifford complained that
 
 404 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 every one recognised the prose of Southey, because it was so 
 good ; and, to Southey's useless chagrin, tampered with it freely. 
 This despotic habit of the editors is the second of the practices 
 to which we have alluded. It is mostly out of date ; and it 
 proceeded from the same notion of party discipline, not merely 
 from love of meddling or of power. The essay, the article, 
 the criticism, was thought of not as a work of art, or of 
 decent handicraft, coming from a single mind, but as ammuni- 
 tion to be used in the service of a policy by one controlling 
 brain. Hence the good old fashion of cutting, carving, adding, 
 qualifying, and at need virtually falsifying, at headquarters. 
 It seems wonderful how well, in spite of grumbling, men like 
 Scott or Southey stood it, until we remember that they accepted 
 the general procedure, that they did not sign, and, it must be 
 added, that they were very well paid. Scott's anonymous 
 review of his early novels has been already mentioned ; it is 
 a leading case for quotation. It was half a jest ; but it was 
 also seriously meant to redress the imperfect appreciation 
 by Croker of the 'same works. Gifford, this time benevolent, 
 appended some paragraphs of robust eulogy to Scott's care- 
 fully-balanced judgments. This was very well at the time ; 
 but after a while Scott's authorship became known ; and it 
 was only revealed with absolute certainty in 1909, that he had 
 not compared himself with Shakespeare ; after the manner 
 of the legendary critic, who anonymously, and in a religious 
 journal, referred to himself as the ' great and good ' Mr. Such- 
 and-Such. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Whig oracle pronounced its dooms at quarterly intervals 
 in the North and the Tory oracle in the South. But meantime 
 the opposition to the Edinburgh broke out in its own metro- 
 polis. The Scottish Tories regarded it not only as an anti- 
 patriotic organ, which had thrown cold water on the conduct 
 of our arms against Bonaparte, but as lineally descended 
 from the eighteenth-century sceptics, and all too temperate in 
 defence of religion ; and they called it, with much exaggera- 
 tion, infidel. They hated the cool intellectual temper, the 
 complacency, the air of heaven-sent authority with which it 
 spoke. Above all, they found it cold to genius, dead to the 
 nobler sort of literature, and especially unfair to Wordsworth. 
 Such was the cry, not unwarranted, of Wilson and Lockhart, 
 who first opened fire upon the Edinburgh Review in the North. 
 In Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819), Lockhart aims these
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 405 
 
 ourali -tipped shafts with the skill of a Red Indian. What, in 
 a famous phrase, he calls the ' facetious and rejoicing ignor- 
 ance ' of the Reviewers, has, he complains, infected their 
 Scottish readers, and enhanced their innate conceit. 
 
 I do not on my conscience believe, that there is one Whig in 
 Edinburgh to whom the name of my friend Charles Lamb would 
 convey any distinct or definite idea. . . . They do not know even 
 the names of some of the finest poems our age has produced. They 
 never heard of Ruth, or Michael, or The Brothers, or Hartleap Well, 
 or the Recollections of Infancy, or the Sonnets to Buonaparte. They 
 do not know that there is such a thing as the description of a church- 
 yard in The Excursion. Alas ! how severely is their ignorance 
 punished in itself. 
 
 Lockhart's vision, at this stage, was not a little bloodshot ; 
 but we see what it was that stung him and his friends, and it 
 is hard to feel concern for the Review, whose ossification on the 
 literary and spiritual side needs no proving. It is clear that 
 literature first of all, rather than politics or orthodoxy, was the 
 concern of the rebels. Had they really founded a just and 
 catholic tribunal of letters, they would have had a better right 
 to speak. But the beginnings of Blackicood's Edinburgh 1 
 Magazine deprived them of this right. 
 
 The heavy quarterlies had, besides their partisanship, two 
 other great defects ; they were seldom amusing, except in 
 their bludgeoning way, and they were not creative. They 
 consisted of political articles, dissertations, and reviews. They 
 admitted no tales, no skits, no verse, and they had no play of 
 humour or fancy. Some minds of great eminence, such as 
 Scott and Hazlitt, found voice in them, but only within the 
 prescribed limits. In Blackwood's this tradition was broken 
 down, and a new one founded, which, after the first years of 
 uproar, cleared itself, persisted honourably and gaily, and 
 infected periodical journalism at large. 4 Maga,' as it was 
 domestically called, really began in October 1817, though 
 William Blackwood had started a solid and respectable 
 monthly under another title a few months earlier. John 
 Wilson, or ' Christopher North,' and Lockhart, were already 
 on the staff, but only opened fire fairly in the autumn ; and 
 the first year of the magazine was defaced by some rabid 
 notorious performances, 2 such as the attack on Coleridge, the 
 droller sally of the ' Chaldee manuscript,' and the abusive 
 review of Keats ; of which the authorship is only partially 
 known, and which shall not be discussed here. Some of them 
 were retracted and lamented, but mischief was done. This
 
 406 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 is not to take too seriously the sallies of young wits and high 
 bloods. We are not to be prim when we go to see a prize- 
 fight ; but there are rules, and the foul blow against Keats 
 (though it did not, as was long supposed, kill him) is on the 
 record. Blackwood's has, happily, much to plead on the other 
 side of the reckoning. 
 
 For its old numbers can still be read, unlike those of most 
 of its rivals, and like those of the London Magazine and the 
 Liberal, things of a briefer span. It does not, like the London 
 Magazine, contain Elia and The Opium-eater, nor, like the 
 Liberal, The Vision of Judgment and My First Acquaintance 
 with Poets. But it has a diffused excellence, a fund of life and 
 youth ; it has the Nodes Ambrosiance, and a number of good 
 stories, papers by Hogg, Gait, and many more ; and some 
 ardent and generous criticisms. And it opens many a new vein 
 of interest. It contains some of Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, 
 and his versions from Faust ; it includes papers on German, and 
 Italian, and Norse letters. No recitation of these things is 
 possible here, and it is better to notice the work of two of its 
 leaders. Blackwood seems always to have remained in con- 
 trol, but the stamp was given by Lockhart, and still more by 
 Wilson, with whom the genius of the Magazine, as distinct 
 from its wit, satire, and contumely, was popularly identified. He 
 was also answerable for some of its bad taste and bad breeding, 
 but he poured into it, wastefully enough from the point of view 
 of his own fame, a riotous and splendid tide of life and spirits. 
 
 From 1825 onwards John Wilson, 1 or 'Christopher North' 
 (1785-1854), produced stories, articles, sketches, and above 
 all his dialogues called Nodes Ambrosiance, with portentous 
 fertility and speed. More than two hundred and fifty of his 
 contributions can be counted from first to last, and in one year 
 (1834) he averaged more than four in a month. His Nodes 
 began in 1825 and made Wilson's name, but he had written 
 for the Magazine very early, and he had praised Wordsworth 
 with unsparing cordiality. A Scot of noble presence, gallant 
 nature, abounding physical power, and huge productive 
 energy, Wilson had won undergraduate celebrity at Oxford, 
 and also his share of classical scholarship. He had settled at 
 Elleray on Windermerc, and produced his narrative poem, 
 The Isle of Palms, in 1812, chiefly under Wordsworth's influence. 
 He had been well-to-do, but lost much of his money, was thrown 
 on literature, and settled for life in Edinburgh ; this apparent 
 disaster was the making of him, and led to the disclosure of 
 his genius. Another poem, in dramatic guise, The City of the
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 407 
 
 Plague, appeared in 1816, and Wilson wrote much verse besides. 
 But he spent most of his days, like Jeffrey, in working for one 
 periodical. His three novels were published serially in Black- 
 ircxxTs. In 1820, with little reason, he was appointed to the 
 Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, and, at any rate, 
 fired his students and humanised the stylo and title of ' Pro- 
 fessor.' He became a picturesque and adored personage of Old 
 Edinburgh, and one of its famous figures. Much of his best 
 work was done before 1835, but he went on writing, without 
 change of style or theme, almost to the last. John Wilson was 
 a great creature, though he has left little that is permanent. If 
 he is an example of the disadvantage, in art, of temperament 
 without definite plastic power, still on every page is felt what De 
 Quincey called ' his large expansiveness of heart, and a certain 
 air of noble frankness which overspread everything he said.' 
 
 De Quincey, 1 in 1829, was preparing a second article on the 
 genius of John Wilson, having published one already ; and 
 Wilson, in the ingenuous manner of the time, wrote him, in 
 the form of interrogatories, some useful headings : 
 
 If you think The Isle of Palms and The City of the Plague original 
 poems (in design) I hope you will say so. ... If you think me a 
 good private character, do say so. . . . Base brutes have libelled 
 my personal character. ... I have wished [in his novels] to speak 
 of humble life and the elementary feelings of the human heart under 
 the light of a veil of poetry. Have I done so ? Pathos, a sense 
 of beautj r , and humour, I think I possess. Do I ? In The City of 
 the Plague there ought to be something of the sublime. Is there ? 
 ... I wish you would praise me as a lecturer on Moral Philosophy. 
 That would do me good ; and say that I am thoroughly logical and 
 argumentative, if it is true ; not a rhetorician, as fools aver. I 
 think with practice and opportunities I would have been an orator. 
 Am I a good critic ? 
 
 The. Isle of Palms and City of the Plague are not original in 
 design, for they have little design ; but pathos they have, like 
 many of Wilson's briefer poems which are in the nature of 
 lyrical ballads ; and while the influence of Wordsworth (and of 
 Wordsworth's country, which Wilson long inhabited) is omni- 
 present, the pathos is of a diffused, not to say watered kind, 
 without any of Wordsworth's concentration ; it is true pathos, 
 but it is without style, and therefore the poems arc transient. 
 Wilson also derives a good deal from Scott, having the same 
 kind of manly, chivalrous, and sporting interests, and being 
 himself a mighty athlete and a splendid, Apollino, brilliant 
 piece of manhood. The Isle of Pahns is a variant on the kind
 
 408 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 of lay that Scott invented, full of sentiment and tropical 
 scenery. There is nothing ' sublime ' in any of Wilson's verse, 
 but the ' sense of beauty ' there is, far exceeding the power of 
 expression. The Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life and The 
 Trials of Margaret Lyndsay, which concern ' humble life,' have 
 really the aim he describes, but are monotonous and show 
 little of the ' humour,' which, with the best right in the world, 
 Wilson claims to possess. His lectures may have been ' logical,' 
 but have not survived their occasion, and by all accounts were 
 largely displays of vivid eloquence. In one thing Wilson is 
 too modest, when he says that he ' could have been an orator.' 
 He was an orator, in his spoken discourse, and also in his prose. 
 It is astonishing oratory, rushing, various, inexhaustible and 
 almost impossible to read long, or to remember. There is 
 more in it, not only of high spirits, but of spirit, than in any 
 author of the time. The South Briton, until he has read a few 
 of the Nodes Ambrosiance, has no notion of what old Scottish 
 convivial eloquence can be, when in full spate. The amount 
 of rubbish, and of treasure, that it can sweep along, is incredible. 
 Anthologies are of little use ; you cannot ' select ' from a torrent. 
 Nor can you endure it long at a time ; the noise is not always 
 melodious, and often it is a torrent of whisky. Shouts, horse- 
 play, vulgarity, rigmarole, ditties, enormous hearty virulence, 
 still more enormous eulogies ! Out of all this emerge, too soon 
 to be whirled away in the din, snatches of exquisite, impro- 
 vised rather fatally improvised lyric prose ; a great exhala- 
 tion of the joy of life, of sport, of poetry ; lovely, disappearing 
 glimpses of landscape, and bursts of tender or pathetic feeling ; 
 and, over all, a real gift of dramatic, humorous keeping in the 
 portraits of the interlocutors. Christopher North, the presi- 
 dent of the revels, is Wilson himself, facetiously outre and 
 expanded ; the ' Ettrick Shepherd ' is James Hogg boister- 
 ously idealised ; the oddness, the wildness, the explosiveness 
 recorded of Hogg are shown ; but much is imputed to his talk 
 which seems to have been only in his verse, if even there ; 
 the Shepherd has much of the loud wit and eloquence of Wilson 
 himself. Yet he is a genuine creation, and if we have too 
 much of him we can shut the book. 
 
 Wilson is not a ' good critic,' but as a critic he exists, because 
 he has the poetic spirit. He has no critical brains, strictly 
 speaking, and such is his prejudice, and readiness for measure- 
 less absurdity, that no one can think of trusting him, especially 
 where he condemns. He is the exact opposite of Jeffrey ; he 
 is all sensibility and superlatives, both in praise and blame ;
 
 409 
 
 he is expansive, and has no dry dapper conclusiveness of tone. 
 He can be equally offensive in his own way, especially where he 
 praises. It is easy to see why Tennyson could not ' forgive 
 the praise/ in the review of his poems of 1832. But ' crusty,' 
 4 musty,' and the like, are just the wrong epithets for ' Christo- 
 pher ' ; whose voice, in that substantially shrewd and generous 
 notice, is that of the cheery, stentorian, Scotch professor, 
 smiting a promising youth on the head, and then slapping him 
 on the back, for a faulty but brilliant exercise. Wilson really 
 picks out some of the good things in that volume ; and among 
 those that he censured are some that Tennyson afterwards 
 withdrew. 
 
 His slapdash judgments, which often miss fire totally, but 
 are also apt to go near the mark, are well seen in his paper, 
 An Hour's Talk about Poets 1 (1831), of which the burden is that 
 no one in his own day has written a ' great poem ' ; a species 
 of which his only exemplar appears to be Paradise Lost. By a 
 great poem he means a long great poem of the serious kind, a 
 cathedral of a poem ; and although he is terribly inclined to 
 make an exception for Southey, and for Joanna Baillie too, 
 in his main contention he is by chance nearly right, and in 
 his flying criticisms often sagacious. He does not name 
 Shelley, who, after all, has the best claim to the honour ; The 
 Prelude was not published ; Don Juan is out of his category, 
 and shocks him ; and in The Excursion he sees, justly enough, 
 only a series of poetic episodes. Probably his great service 
 to criticism was one of which he was rightly proud. With 
 Lockhart, he praised Wordsworth from the first, through good 
 report and evil ; and he boasts, in his large way, of 
 
 the belief, or rather knowledge, that we have helped to diffuse 
 Wordsworth's poetry, not only over this island, but the furthest 
 dependencies of the British empire and throughout the United States 
 of America. 
 
 When Wordsworth's verse was 'scarcely known except 
 through the Edinburgh Review,' Wilson proclaimed him, with 
 Scott and Byron, as ' one of the three great master-spirits of 
 our day in the poetical world.' For this, if for nothing else, 
 he should be honoured. 
 
 Of all these earlier despots of letters, founders of journalism, 
 and critical Jack Ketches, only one, John Gibson Lockhart 2 
 (1794-1854), has left work that stands. He was better trained 
 in letters, he had more poetical reading, and he wrote uniformly
 
 410 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 better and rarer English, than Jeffrey, Gifford, or Wilson. 
 He was taught at Glasgow, Oxford, and Edinburgh ; and was 
 well seen, not only in the classics, but in French, Spanish, 
 Italian, and afterwards in German. At twenty -three, in 1817, 
 he was already a leader in the new-founded Blcickwood's. 
 His first phase, the ' scorpion '-phase, lasted three or four 
 years ; and his share in the attacks on Leigh Hunt, his blows 
 rained on the Edinburgh Review, and on Whig complacencies 
 and Whig conceptions of politics, religion, and literature, 
 carry us back into a world of acrid jokes, high-blooded quarrels 
 and sharp-edged censures, which are now spectral and mostly 
 unrefreshing. The pointed, not underbred sketches of Edin- 
 burgh and Glasgow Life in his anonymous Peter's Letters 
 to his Kinsfolk (1819), often keep their savour, and may rank 
 beside the portraits of Carlyle for their freedom, and also for 
 their elaborate and desperate efforts to describe heads and 
 faces, in forestalment of Carlyle's way : a practice oddly marred 
 by Lockhart's craze for ' craniology ' and Spurzheim. Mean- 
 time he had met Scott, whose daughter he married : his next 
 phase is that of a novelist ; and his four stories were all done 
 before he was thirty : but unhappily he did not pursue his 
 gifts in that line, or carry out his ambition to paint contem- 
 porary Scottish life thoroughly. From 1825, for more than a 
 quarter of a century, he edited the Quarterly Review ; and in 
 the work of his post, in its endless ephemeral imbroglios and 
 diplomacies, and in his hundred articles, written mostly 
 without a hope or wish for permanence, he would have squan- 
 dered his fine talent, had it not found its highest scope in 
 biography. His little Life of Burns (1828), and his enduring, 
 his great, his incomparable Life of Scott (1836-8) rivet his 
 position in English letters, while his scraps of original verse, 
 and his Ancient Spanish Ballads (1823), attest a high poetic 
 gift never duly realised. Lockhart's reserve and his sharpness 
 caused his character to be long maligned ; but it has now been 
 vindicated by a biographer who possessed, like Lockhart him- 
 self, the equity and temper of a Cavalier. 
 
 Lockhart's faculty, both critical and productive, was far 
 greater than that of the other official reviewers. But it was 
 only in biography that he did his utmost ; elsewhere he threw 
 out brilliant, curious streamers, of which the light is not yet 
 faded ; but they are buried now overmuch behind the cloud. 
 In prose, his fundamental gift is not satire, as he gave some 
 reason to think, but the power of describing real men, manners, 
 physiognomies, and humours : less the gift of the imaginer
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 411 
 
 than of the observer and reporter. His mind and writing, his 
 sarcasm, his pathos, are of the Latin cast, and in his best 
 pages the picture of the law courts in Peter's Letters, the 
 deathbed of Scott, the Oxford scenes in Reginald Dalton, 
 there is that which recalls the letters of Cicero or Pliny. His 
 Valerius, a story of Roman luxmy, pagan magic and Christian 
 martyrdom, has the stamp of an elegant translation, a little 
 cold in its high-wrought pathos, but with a quality of severe 
 grace that forecasts the Roman colloquies, not yet (1821) 
 written, of Landor. All this is different from the prose of the 
 sloven Wilson or the butcher Gifford. It is true that in BlacTc- 
 ivood's Lockhart played some bitter and excessive pranks, 
 and was therefore credited with many others not his own : 
 going farther in the direction of half-bred though never vile 
 personalities than consisted with his really knightly nature. 
 His attacks on Leigh Hunt, though not lacking warrant, 
 were of this order ; Jeffrey and his school Lockhart was only 
 repaying in their own coin ; it was a service, but it lowered 
 Lockhart. Throughout he shares with Wilson the honour of 
 being one of the first to uphold, against more than half the 
 world and with reverent intelligence, the name of Wordsworth ; 
 whose attraction for a man of seemingly alien talent is a testi- 
 mony to both. Indeed, everywhere in Lockhart we have the 
 sense of something bigger than his set, bigger than his daily 
 temper, struggling against his surroundings, his sardonic habit, 
 and his deep-folded secretiveness. He has been called ' a true 
 son of the Manse ' ; and there is truth in the phrase, for his 
 best-known story, Adam Blair (1822), is the tragedy of a manse ; 
 is founded on real events, told him by his father the minister ; 
 and is informed by a strong, conventional, not very sound piety 
 and morality, touched with charity. Adam Blair ' falls,' after a 
 struggle, into a liaison with a married woman, is sorely pun- 
 ished, and comes back to his parish in humility to work out his 
 disgrace, unfrocked and resolute, to be at last reinstated. But 
 the son of the manse had also a poet's instinct for situation ; 
 the tale might have appealed to Wordsworth, but shows a far 
 keener sense of human weakness than belonged to Wordsworth, 
 and with more insight into passion, which is treated, indeed, 
 with too much severity, but not more severely than the Scots 
 would have treated it. An ideal of delicate simplicity and 
 stern goodness hovered before Lockhart through his career 
 as fighting contributor and able editor, and through the 
 boisterous old Scottish scenes that he half-watched, half- 
 shared. Reginald Dalton contains the best extant picture,
 
 412 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 though a slightly overcharged one, of Oxford scenes and per- 
 sonages ; the town and gown row, the wine-party, the hunt, 
 the heads and tutors of colleges ; but here also there is a 
 quiet, idyllic corner, the household of the old Roman priest 
 and the young, sweet heroine, to whom Dalton resorts in the 
 pauses of his boyish rowdiness. In all this Wordsworth 
 counted, and quotations from his verse come in loyally on 
 many a page. The passionate piety and desiderium of the 
 lines that Carlyle loved : 
 
 Be constant to the dead ; 
 The dead cannot deceive, 
 
 reveal and attain the new poetic ideal of simplicity used in the 
 service of grandeur. 
 
 Lockhart was also a romantic half a romantic as well in 
 fiction as in poetry. In his neglected, unreprinted, ill-ordered 
 story, The History of Matthew Wold, which Sir Walter Scott 
 pronounced to be ' full of power, but disagreeable,' there are 
 scenes, lively and veracious enough, of Scottish life ; ' interiors ' 
 of the sordid, worldly manse, and of contrasted piety and 
 humanity ; the humours and talk of an old law lord ; and 
 plenty of the measured sarcasm that Lockhart by now (1824) 
 had mastered. But there is an increased share of that power 
 to imagine and word the inward misery of his hero, which he 
 frequently commands. In Matthew Wold the attempt is ambi- 
 tious, and the threads are complex. Matthew is ousted from 
 his house, and parted from his love, who marries and is deserted 
 by a worthless peer ; he himself marries a good simple woman, 
 who is distraught by Methodism a creed here painted in 
 bitter colours. He finds himself next door to the deserted 
 wife, and is wrongly accused by her husband, whom he fights 
 and kills. His own wife, who is with child, comes in on the 
 pair, mistakes the situation, and dies. Matthew goes mad, 
 but remembers and writes down some of his delirium ; for he 
 recovers, and takes his place in the world, and ends, to the 
 outward eye, a genial old fellow enough. Sir Walter was 
 shocked by the ' vile ending,' but the relentless temper of 
 the tale was out of his range, and he never essayed any such 
 tragedy, unless it were in St. Eonan's Well. His judgment, 
 therefore, is really a self-criticism. It is true that Lockhart, 
 here and elsewhere in his tragical passages, suffers from a 
 certain superfetation, if the word may pass, of language ; 
 he does not move in tragedy with the ease of the masters who 
 are ' native unto that element.' This may be set down as
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 413 
 
 the fate of the normally haughty, reticent writer, whom it 
 costs too much to give his heart away : when the dam of 
 reserve breaks down, the words, so unaccustomed, so reluctant, 
 are apt to be overstrained and to defeat themselves. And no 
 style, not even the comic, is so ephemeral as the tragical, 
 unless it is quite right. But the power is there ; we are not 
 dealing with a Joanna Baillie. Thus Lockhart, in a deeper 
 way than Scott, points forwards, and marks the confluence of 
 the two streams of fiction that have here been traced : the 
 positive or realistic which shows the whims and outer life of 
 men, and the more inquisitive, sombre, and imaginative, with 
 its outlets into the infinite of ' desires and dreams and fears.' 
 But he did not give himself time to work for perfection in 
 story-telling. 
 
 In his poetry, and often in his judgment of poets, he was 
 also of the romantics. So near Scott, so deep in matters 
 Spanish, so full of honour, breeding, and chivalrous punctilio, 
 he could hardly be otherwise. His Wandering Knight's Song, 
 if it has not a more consummate form than Scott's finer lyrics, 
 has a more mediaeval note of pure and centred ardour, and 
 might have been owned by one of the ' Pre-Raphaelites ' : 
 
 I ride from land to land, 
 
 I sail from sea to sea : 
 Some day more kind I fate may find, 
 
 Some night kiss thee. 
 
 This is from the Spanish, and comes, like the almost equally 
 beautiful serenade 'While my lady slcepcth,' in the Ancient 
 Spanish Ballads, which contain Lockhart's best title-deeds, 
 in popular esteem, to the name of poet ; and it was certainly 
 his instinct to put most of his intimate song into translation. 
 The bits of Homer that ho rendered in hexameters, and of 
 Goethe's Faust, show the same preference, and also a notice- 
 able even purity of execution. Coming between Scott and 
 Macaulay, the Spanish Ballads, though long popular, have 
 not held their ground as they should. They are mostly free 
 translations of the assonant romances that ho found in the 
 contemporary German edition of Depping (1810), and arc 
 put into a variety of measures, preferably long alexandrines 
 with a lilting extra syllabic in the middle, or fourtcen-syllabled 
 lines broken by internal rhyme. He often fails in finish, but 
 seldom in rush and swing or in gallantry of sound and diction. 
 The spots and blemishes of conventional epithet or awkward 
 phrase are forgotten, and the rapid careering lines remain
 
 414 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 in the memory. The Penitence of Don Roderick, and The 
 Vengeance of Mudara : 
 
 ' Die, foernan to Sancha die, traitor to Lara ! ' 
 
 As he spake, there was blood on the spear of Mudara 
 
 and Count Alarcos and the Infanta Solisa, and The Song of the 
 Galley all bear the test and have original value as poems. 
 Lockhart's notes on literary and other history have been at 
 many points discounted by later scholarship ; but there is 
 no doubt that he had a true vein of poetic affinity to the 
 original ballad-makers. Some of his other verses, such as 
 the perfect epitaph upon William Maginn, and the more rollick- 
 ing elegy, Captain Patoris Lament, show a vein of talent that he 
 hardly explored. He was also at home in the verse of Frere and 
 Rose and Byron, the serio-comic octave stanza, as can be seen 
 from his Mad Banker of Amsterdam, contributed to Blackwood's. 
 The Life of Scott (1837-8) owes much of its power to the 
 harmony of opposites between the subject and the biographer. 
 Scott was expansive, like a broad flood sparkling in the sun- 
 light ; his instinct was for utterance ; and though he did not 
 wear his heart upon his sleeve, he would, at any rate, talk to 
 himself, as in his Diary he does ; and there he writes down, 
 never thinking of the reader, all that he feels ; and stands 
 that test. With Lockhart utterance is also necessary, but it is 
 a pain, and he has left no diary. The charm is that of exploring 
 a river that sinks at times out of sight. Scott's freedom of 
 self-expression may well have been a wonder to Lockhart, 
 and he makes full use of it in his Life, sure that he is never 
 betraying his master, one of the fathers of his soul, in doing so. 
 He also had that scholarly accuracy in particulars which was 
 hardly the strength of Scott, a careful judgment in using 
 what he had not known at first-hand, and a sure, minute, and 
 un warped skill in giving his personal memories. He had 
 acquired, since his buccaneer days, discretion, fairness, and 
 dignity. He was near enough to Scott as a Tory, a lover of 
 tradition, a sportsman, a boon companion, a poet, and a 
 novelist, to follow on his track without any touch of perfunc- 
 toriness in his sympathy. We do not feel that he is describing 
 this poem, or that novel, because it comes into his task and has 
 to be done. One cavalier understands another ; and latterly, 
 at any rate, he watched Scott with love and anxiety, following 
 every mood, and lapse, and painful and partial recovery. In 
 all the dramatic scenes of Scott's life he shows the power, 
 though he never falls into the risks, of the novelist. We do
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 415 
 
 not feel that the scene has been arranged in his fancy after- 
 wards, and the values perverted in order to give a nobler 
 effect than the truth. Nor has he ever, except once, been 
 gravely attacked on the score of correctness ; and the debate 
 carried on by the Ballantyne firm over the financial ruin of 
 Scott, and his and their share of responsibility for it, still leaves 
 questions unsolved. Bos well's book is nearer to the eternal 
 vulgar truth of things, and Scott said fewer of the words that 
 bite deep, or carry far, than Johnson ; and Boswell had less 
 scruple in recording and prying, while Lockhart wrote under 
 the laws that rule gentlemen, losing thereby, doubtless, many a 
 point. His work produces less illusion of reality than Boswell's ; 
 but then Boswell's illusion implies the fallacy, from which 
 Lockhart is free, namely, that his hero was the centre of con- 
 temporary literature and society ; which is not really true of 
 Johnson. Boswell's tone is that of one of a lower caste ; 
 Lockhart's modesty is unvarying, but he is speaking of a great 
 man of his own caste. His work is first-rate, for his subject is 
 given to him ; he has not to fancy, but to re-create his story, 
 and this is the mark of all the best he wrote. 
 
 One of the most lively and incessant of the free-lances in this 
 age, a man of genuine but squandered wit and scholarship, 
 was William Maginn l (1793-1842), who is now remembered less 
 for anything he achieved than as the sitter for Thackeray's 
 portrait of Captain Shandon. Maginn was for many years, 
 from 1819 to about 1830, one of the lights of Blackicood's ; he 
 wrote sprightly verse and foaming prose in the Nodes Ambrosi- 
 ance ; he created a drunken, bragging, facetious rhyming 
 personage, Ensign Odoherty, on whom he fathered memoirs, 
 maxims, anecdotes, and verses ; mostly in a transient and 
 crackling style of humour. He wrote parodies of Coleridge 
 and a review of Adonais, each more disgusting than the other. 
 He fired off all manner of burlesques, pasquinades, and inde- 
 scribable tipsy sallies. He turned off Latin and Greek verse, 
 chiefly by way of translation, with surprising facility, often 
 vulgarising the originals. He produced a number of Homeric 
 Ballads, translations from the Greek in ballad rhyme, which 
 are hard to bear although Matthew Arnold praised them, and 
 a few verses of which show something of a poet spoilt. Much 
 of Maginn's work is tainted by vulgarity, but where that 
 quality is inoffensive he is capable of excelling. Tuo of his 
 tales or sketches, Bob Burke's Duel icith Ensiyn Brady, and 
 A Story without a Tail, arc capital things of their sort, with not 
 a little droll bragging and bacchanalian humour. What Maginn
 
 416 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 might have done is best seen in his paper on Farmer's Essay 
 on the Learning of Shakespeare, where he shows much learning 
 and an impatient rough scholarly shrewdness. His article 
 on Lady Macbeth is a specimen of his more serious appreciative 
 power, and that on Byron's Werner, with its parallel passages 
 from Miss Harriet Lee's Kruitzner, is not unfair in its severity. 
 In 1830 Maginn became a main prop of Eraser's Magazine, 
 then newly founded, and contributed profusely. His Gallery 
 of Literary Characters did much for the vogue of the journal. 
 Some of his reviews (especially a famous one, which led to a 
 duel, of Grantley Berkeley's novel) suggest rather Mr. Bludyer 
 than Captain Shandon ; they are in the robust old blackguard- 
 ing style, soon to fall out of credit. There is not much satis- 
 faction now to be got from reading Maginn ; the effect is that 
 of the morning after the orgy, with the cards lying torn upon 
 the floor, and the overturned tumblers littering the trays. We 
 leave him, however, with some sense of pathos, and Lockhart's 
 famous, compact, and kindly epitaph in verse is conclusive 
 and almost sufficient. 
 
 The Westminster Review,' 1 though it includes criticisms of 
 poetry and fiction, stands, at least in its earlier years, further 
 off from literature than any of its three great precursors. The 
 organ of the utilitarian Radicals, manned by the two Mills, 
 Austin and others, and partly edited at first by Bowring, its 
 aims were in no sense aesthetic, and in its early articles 2 there is 
 little authorcraft. An exception has to be made for John 
 Mill, whose youthful essays already exhibit his peculiar 
 transparency of style, together with his surface coldness and 
 wilfully repressed enthusiasm. But in that temple of reason 
 there is no altar to the graces. The writing of James Mill 
 has the combination of dryness, fierceness, and precision in 
 analysis, which made him so efficient a warrior. The purpose 
 of the Westminster was threefold. There was first the desire 
 to show up the Whigs. The Tories, or Conservatives (as 
 Croker, in the year 1831, first styled them), were treated as 
 comparatively honest foes, and their iniquities taken for 
 granted. The articles (by James Mill) on the ' see-sawing,' 
 the compromises, and the contradictions, of the Edinburgh 
 Review, are bitterer than those on the Quarterly. One feature 
 of the Westminster during its first years was this direct and 
 formal criticism of its contemporaries. The picture of Jeffrey 
 and Sydney Smith, throwing out a sop to the }>hilosophes with 
 one hand and to the ' aristocrats ' with the other, and the 
 attack on the Whig constitutional theory of the three estates,
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 417 
 
 are highly effective pieces of polemic in the frigid cutting style. 
 The following passage reduces to a formula the difference 
 between the two camps. The ' fews ' referred to are, of course, 
 the Crown, the Lords, and the ' representatives ' : 
 
 There is a theory that by creating three of these fews, a security 
 is obtained for the many by their opposition to one another. This 
 is the theory of the balance ; the balance in the British Constitution 
 of King, Lords, and Commons. . . . Security, it is said, may be 
 obtained for the many by the opposition of these fews to one another. 
 But we have still to ask, what security is there that they will oppose ? 
 . . . if it be possible for them to combine, all idea of security from 
 the balance is chimerical and absurd. The Commons may either 
 be a third few so constituted as to have a separate interest from 
 the many, and to be as eager to obtain the profits of misrule as the 
 other two. Or we may suppose that they are so constituted as to 
 be a perfect organ for the many, and to have no purpose except 
 that of preventing misrule . . . (1825). 
 
 The earlier philosophic radicals will often be found writing 
 in this fashion, practising ' the mathematical plainness,' 
 doggedly and verbally repeating their points, ruthlessly strip- 
 ping and defining their terms. The younger Mill was to 
 introduce a more popular and flexible mode of address. The 
 second aim of the Westminster Reviewers was, of course, to 
 use the weapons invented by the enemy, and discharge the 
 Benthamite artillery quarterly. They applied the conceptions 
 of their master to current problems, and at many points went 
 beyond him. But they cherished also a third purpose, which 
 may be described as that of obtaining publicity for philosophical 
 ideas. Their faith in infinite, untrammelled, and purely 
 reasonable discussion, as the true method at once of reaching 
 the truth and moving the world, is inherited largely from the 
 revolutionary thinkers, and finds classical expression afterwards 
 in Mill's Liberty. Godwin had dreamed of a human society 
 based on mutual persuasion and non-resistance, a society of 
 pure intellects. The Mills thought of it rather as a lively and 
 stubborn debating club, of which the object was not victory 
 but the discovery of truth, which was to be thoroughly threshed 
 out and then unanimously saluted. It is easy to mock at 
 this idea ; but mankind is such, that it will never be realised 
 to excess ; and those who proclaimed so dourly are to be held 
 in honour. The fortunes of the Review, the effect of the dis- 
 cipline upon John Mill, and the revulsion that befell him, are 
 told in his Autobiography. The full force of philosophic 
 Radicalism is not felt till after 1830. 
 
 VOL. I. 2 D
 
 418 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 VI 
 
 The history of the periodical press, quarterly, weekly, daily, 
 and monthly, in its bearing on the history of English culture, 
 ought to be written, but cannot here be even indicated. Even 
 the journals to which the greater critics and essayists, Lamb, 
 Hazlitt, and De Quincey, were contributors cannot be re- 
 counted. There would be much to say of the short-lived 
 London Magazine (1820-9), in which all three figure, and 
 which is still curious and excellent reading ; of the still more 
 ephemeral Knight's Quarterly Magazine (1823-4), which con- 
 tains Macaulay's Ivry and Naseby and his Dialogue between 
 Mr. Cowley and Mr. Milton ; of the New Monthly Magazine, 
 edited by Thomas Campbell (1820) ; not to mention Fraser's, 
 which began in 1830, and the numerous ventures of Leigh 
 Hunt, which will be referred to later (Ch. xix.). A single 
 instance may be given to show how the new press, after a fashion 
 inconceivable forty years earlier, furnished men of letters with 
 a livelihood, a sounding-board, and a public. The greatest 
 importer and interpreter of Italian literature during this age 
 was the exiled patriot and writer, Ugo Foscolo, 1 who passed the 
 last eleven years of his life (1816-27) in England. His articles 
 on the three great Florentines ; on Michelangelo, Ariosto, and 
 Tasso ; and his surveys of Italian letters, reinforcing as they 
 did the labours of Gary and of other scholars and translators, 
 made an epoch in Italian studies, and many of them were 
 retranslated into his own language. A man of difficult and 
 improvident temper, but filled with the true flame of scholar- 
 ship, Foscolo, though befriended by London Whig society, 
 suffered much, and spent some time in a debtor's prison. His 
 living he made through the Reviews, in which nearly all his 
 work appeared. He wrote in the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, 
 the Westminster, the New Monthly, the European Eeview, and 
 the Retrospective Review some five-and-twenty articles in all. 
 Without them he could not have lived, or the work could not 
 have been done. 
 
 The last-named of these journals claims especial praise, and 
 its significance for our survey is more immediate. The 
 renewed and impassioned study of our older writers, especially 
 those of the Renaissance, from More down to Milton, rapidly 
 increased, as succeeding chapters will show, during the first 
 quarter of the nineteenth century. This interest affected not 
 only scholarship and criticism but creative art. The cast of 
 blank verse and lyric, the colour and idiom of prose, the mind
 
 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 419 
 
 and temper of many choice spirits, were profoundly affected 
 by it. There is no need to forestall what must be said in this 
 connection of Coleridge, Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, 
 Darley, Beddoes, and De Quincey. At the same time, despite 
 the labours of Shakespeareans like Malone, of Todd the editor 
 of Spenser, and of many more, the old material itself was hard 
 of access, and what may be called the lesser great authors were 
 often but dimly known. Indeed, they were only just begin- 
 ning to be edited, reprinted, or comprehensively canvassed. 
 The labours of Alexander Dyce over the Elizabethan play- 
 wrights first bore fruit in his editions of Peele (1827-8), of 
 Webster (1830), and of Greene (1831). The organisation of 
 English scholarship belongs to the next age. There had 
 certainly been many pioneers. In 1787 Henry Headley, 1 who 
 belonged to the group of Warton and Bowles, had published 
 his Select Beauties of English Poetry, compiled with a learning 
 and critical instinct that promised highly. An admirer of Dray- 
 ton before Lamb and Southey, a discoverer of many rare and 
 charming seventeenth-century lyrics, and well aware besides 
 of the qualities of eighteenth-century verse, Headley was cut 
 off too young, and must be honourably named. The develop- 
 ment of this kind of study in the course of a generation may be 
 measured by comparing his work with that of the Retro- 
 spective Revieiv (1820-8). 
 
 That this magazine should last eight years was in itself a 
 mark of requickened taste. The aim, announced in the first 
 number, was ' to recall the public from an exclusive attention 
 to new books by making the old ones the subject of critical 
 discussion.' It was, perhaps, not strictly maintained ; for 
 the critical discussion, though sometimes excellent and never 
 inept, is subordinate, inevitably, to the work of the explorer. 
 To make known forgotten or inaccessible authors ; to give 
 long summaries, extracts, and illustrations of their works ; 
 this task of disinterment and disclosure, relieved by pleasant 
 and judicious praise, was methodically begun by the Retro- 
 spective Review. 2 The scope is by no means confined to 
 ' Elizabethan,' or to English, literature. There are papers on 
 ' modern books,' ranging from Beckford's Lives of Extraordinary 
 Painters to Topham's Life of Elwes. The age of Shadwell 
 and Butler, and that of Dennis and Gibber, are not forgotten. 
 Articles are there on Spanish literature, on Ariosto, and on 
 the Moallakdt. Still the main interest was in the writers 
 between 1500 and 1660. Dramatists like Jonson and Tourneur, 
 metaphysicians and fantasts like Donne and Browne and
 
 420 THE OFFICIAL REVIEWERS 
 
 Crashaw, romancers like Sidney, and the literature of the 
 by-ways Lingua, Gondibert, Pharonnida were presented, 
 often introduced, to the readers of the day. It seems that 
 none of the greater critics wrote in this Review ; but the 
 scholarly and critical bent of the time can be all the better seen 
 for that, and is worthily represented by Hartley Coleridge, 
 Talfourd, Palgrave, and the editor, Henry Southern, who was 
 afterwards joined by Sir Harris Nicolas. The articles, which 
 are not signed, are on a notably high and even level of excel- 
 lence, and many deserve reprinting ; even if the style (our 
 own vices being different) is sometimes too stiff and some- 
 times too florid for the modern taste. They are well worth 
 saving from that ' inconceivable profundity of oblivion,' 
 which Mr. Thomas Hardy tells us is the fate of dead cattle, 
 and which has overtaken most of the periodical production 
 of the time. But the volume of journalism, and the passion 
 for writing on the sand, has swelled since 1830 beyond mortal 
 reckoning.
 
 NOTES 
 
 AMONG the histories and general surveys which I have found of most value, 
 and iny debt to which is not easy to particularise, are : C. H. Herford, 
 The Age of Wordsworth ; George Saintsbury, Nineteenth Century Literature, 
 A Short History of English Literature, Essays in English Literature, and also 
 A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, and A History of 
 English Prosody ; Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (for the 
 later writers, where the work of Prof. Walker and my own overlaps con- 
 siderably) ; Thomas Seccombe, The Age of Johnson (for the earlier years) ; 
 C. E. Vaughan, The Romantic Revolt, and T. S. Omond, The Romantic 
 Triumph (in ' Periods of European Literature ') ; W. J. Courthope, History of 
 English Poetry, vols. v. and vi. ; Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement in 
 English Poetry ; H. A. Beers's History of English Romanticism in the XVIIIth 
 Century, and of English Romanticism in the XlXth Century ; Chambers's Cyclo- 
 ixfdia of English Literature, new edition ; and many articles in the eleventh 
 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. To these and to many more writers I 
 have tried to point out the more definite obligations in the following notes, 
 which are meant simply to amplify, verify, and illustrate some points which it 
 would have been cumbrous to dwell on in the text, and also to show what 
 editions or commentaries have proved of most service. In a few cases refer- 
 ence is made at second hand to books (I believe all specified) and to editions 
 that I have been unable to see. The bibliography of this period is so im- 
 mense that no attempt has been made (save in a few instances for special 
 reasons) to expand data of this kind. We still lack in England a proper 
 Grundriss of our later literature. The bibliographies at the end of the Cam- 
 bridge History of English Literature are helping to make good this want ; and 
 much may be looked for, in this respect as well as in all others, from the 
 volume (not yet issued) on the 'romantic period.' Vol. viii. Ch. xxv. (by 
 G. P. Gooch)of the Camb. Modern History, on 'Europe and the French Revolu- 
 tion' has been of special use to me for Ch. ix. ; also vol. vi. Ch. xxir., by C. E. 
 Vaughan, 'The Romantic Movement in European Literature,' for Ch. I., etc. 
 The two vols. (Halle, 1911 and 1912) entitled Die Anfdnge dcr Romantik, by 
 Helene Richtcr, I unfortunately did not see till my own were in type. 
 
 p. 12. Natural History of Selborne. First ed., 1789, four years before 
 White's death. The letters begin in 1767, but are preceded by a more formal 
 account (called The Antiquities of Sclborne) of White's Hampshire village, 
 where he lived long, and officiated as curate. There were six editions before 
 1830, and have been many since ; see the bibliography at the end of Grant 
 Allen's ed. (1900), which is useful for its scientific notes and occasional 
 corrections. White's Life and Letters, ed. Rashleigh Holt-White, appeared 
 in 1901. See the full art. in D. N. B., by A. Newton. 
 
 p. 14, note 1. Dugald Stewart. Works, ed. Hamilton (1877), v. 224-36 (essay 
 OH the Beautiful}, and pp. 438-41 (Notes U and X). Stewart criticises Sir 
 Uvedale Price for severing the conceptions of the beautiful and picturesque, and 
 also his definitions of each. 'The Sublime and the Picturesque are qualifying 
 
 421
 
 422 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 epithets, to limit the meaning of the generic name Beauty, in particular 
 instances.' Stewart holds that the two must unite, for landscape painting ' to 
 produce its highest effect ' ; and introduces into the notion of the picturesque 
 that of suggestion ; it sets the fancy at work, and thus beauties not shown are 
 'supplied or understood.' Here we approach the contemporary idea of the 
 ' romantic ' ; ' a ruined abbey or castle employed to awaken the memory of former 
 times,' eto. See ante upon Waverley, Ch. xi. Also the New English Dictionary, 
 s.v. 'picturesque 1 ; North, in his Examen (1734), uses the term of writing, 
 and Jortin (1758) of conversation. Pope earlier, in a note to the Tenth Iliad, 
 employs it of landscape ; ' the marshy spot of ground,' and the ' reeds that are 
 heaped together to mark the place,' are 'circumstances of most picturesque 
 imagination.' 
 
 p. 14, note 2. Alison's Essays. The following references (from sixth and enlarged 
 ed., 2 vols., 1825) will illustrate the text : i. 75, analysis of 'ideas of emotion,' 
 which furnish the needful 'train of thought' to the imagination; i. 132, 
 distinction of painting from poetry (seemingly in ignorance of Lessing) ; i. 161, 
 the 'emotion of taste' defined, and i. 171-2 ; i. 345, 'no form is peculiarly or 
 solely beautiful ' (in contradiction to Hogarth) ; ii. 200, the kinds of ' natural 
 motion' which are, or are not, 'beautiful' and 'sublime.' 
 
 p. 16, note 1. 'must move us.' I borrow this phrase from a well-known page 
 of Matthew Arnold in his paper ' A French Critic on Milton.' 
 
 p. 16, note 2. Twining. His ed. of the Poetics appeared 1789. See his first 
 dissertation, ' On Poetry,' and especially the pages on ' representative metre.' 
 
 p. 17, note 1. with painters. From Twining's Correspondence, entitled 
 Recreations of a Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century (1882), pp. 
 101-2 ; and for next extract, p. 178 ; all italics in text mine. 
 
 p. 17, note 2. tourists. E.g. in Samuel Derrick's Letters ivritten from 
 Leverpoolc, Chester, Corke, The Lake of Killarncy, etc. (2 vols., 1767), i. 92-128, 
 there is an enthusiastic description of the Killarney country, dated 1760. 
 P. 101 : 'I cannot but say it was pleasant to see, on one hand, the showers 
 posting round the borders of the mountains, upborne by the wings of the 
 wind ; while, on the other, a variety of beautiful rainbows danced before us, 
 the extremities of which were within pistol-shot.' P. 108 : ' On one hand, 
 Mangertogh, and other mountains, that lift their tops to the skies, and, giant- 
 like, seem to threaten the scaling of heaven, rise awful from the verge of the 
 lake ; in some places white, bald, and naked, as if nature had stripped them of 
 their ornaments ; in others, crowned with flourishing trees, etc.' 
 
 p. 17, note 3. Sir U. Price. I have used the 1842 ed. (Sir T. D. Lander's). 
 The definitions are on p. 78 foil., p. 460 foil. ; the passages quoted, on p. 462 foil. 
 Thomas Whately, in his Observations on Modern Gardening (third ed., 1771), 
 pp. 146-50, protests against the limitations of a picture being extended to a 
 garden ; ' a tree which presents one rich mass of foliage has sometimes a 
 fine effect in nature, but in painting is often a heavy lump,' etc. Alison often 
 cites Whately, who applies ideas similar to Gilpin's in a business-like way. 
 See too Sir W. Scott on 'Landscape Gardening' in Quart. Rev., March 1828 ; 
 Misc. Prose (1878), ii. 774 foil. 
 
 p. 22. Goethe. See Aus meinem Leben, bk. xiii., for the effect of English 
 literature of the century upon the companions of his youth, and its affinity with 
 their 'Lebensiiberdruss.' Goethe writes in retrospect, but clearly means that
 
 NOTES 423 
 
 the melancholy impression given by Gray, Young, Ossian, etc., was a truthful 
 one, though exaggerated by the mood of those who received it. His well-known 
 praise of The Vicar of Wakefldd (ib. t bk. x.) may be set off against such 
 reflections. 
 
 p. 24, note 1. first version of the Critique. By Francis Hay wood (1838). 
 Two volumes, however, of his Essays and Treatises appeared in English in 1708, 
 and one of the Metaphysical Works (by John Richardson) in 1836. The 
 latter included the Logic, the Prolegomena to future Metaphysics, and Inquiry 
 into the Proofs for the Existence of God. I have not seen any of these 
 translations ; the references are from Ueberweg's History of Philotophy, Eng. tr. 
 (1876), ii. 138-9. 
 
 p. 24, note 2. Schopenhauer. The story is told by W. Wallace, Schopen- 
 hauer (1890), pp. 161-3 ; the proposal was made (in vain) to Thomas Campbell 
 by Schopenhauer in 1831 ; and in 1829 he had corresponded with the Francis 
 Haywood named above, who was actually to do the work. 
 
 p. 30. sickbed of the old classical school. See Courthope, Hist, of Eng. 
 Poetry, vol. vi. ch. iii., 'Exhaustion of the Classical Influence in English 
 Poetry,' and, for Rogers and Campbell, ib., ch. v., 'The New Whigs.' Dr. 
 Courthope's study of these writers, as reflecting various tendencies in the 
 national life and in the conflict of parties, is original and enlightening, and 
 leads him to a fuller treatment of figures like Mathias and Giflord than is here 
 demanded. 
 
 p. 32. The Rolliad. For the authors and their several shares see N. & Q., 
 1st series, vols. ii. and iii. There is a good brief account in Chambers's 
 Cyclop, of Eng. Lit. (1902), ii. 669-72 ; and see too Saintsbury, Political 
 Verse (1891), pp. 100-11, and Introduction; and C. W. Previte-Orton, 
 Political Satire in English Poetry (1910), p. 138 foil., an essay worth con- 
 sulting on the whole subject. 
 
 p. 33. 'Peter Pindar.' First collected ed., 1788; fourth (not wholly com- 
 plete, 5 vols.), 1812. 
 
 p. 35, note 1. so-called 'Delia Cruscan/ So-called, because their quarters 
 were at Florence, the home of the famous 'Accademia dolla Crusca,' and one 
 of them, Robert Merry, used the signature. 'Crusca,' 'bran, refuse,' is a 
 sufficient title. They published in works like The ll'odil and Tin (hade. 
 Another of them was Edward Jerningham, author of // Lull'-, a poem in 
 praise of mothers who nurse their own infants. For all this sec tin- pleasant 
 account in Courthope, vi. 40-47 ; and the Poet. Work* (3 veils., 1K)(!) of Marx- 
 Robinson. These are worthless but typical ; the very exemplar of the sillinc^ 
 that Gifford derided, but also containing imitations of Wordsworth's more 
 infantine ballads, and an address to Coleridge's baby. The volumes wen 
 posthumous; it is curious to see the signatures both of Wolcot and Coleridge 
 to the ' tributary verses.' 
 
 p. 35, note 2. Samuel Rogers. See P. W. Claydeti, Knrl<i Lil> / X. /'., 
 p. 162 foil. The time is April 1791, the speakers old Macken/ie of die M,i;< 
 of Feeling), Miss Baillie, Dr. Mooro (of Zdufo\ Messrs. Merry. .Ferningham. 
 and others. 'What a beautiful expression is that of Paine !' siid Mr. Merry. 
 . . . [i.e.] ' We have dropped our baby-clothes and breeched ourselves in man- 
 hood. 1 'Beautiful' gives the Delia Crimean note better than anything cited by 
 Gi fiord.
 
 424 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 p. 35, note 3. Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827), versifier, hymnodist, Girondist, 
 radical, writer on the state of France, and Bohemian. 
 
 p. 35, note 4. Gifford's two satires. The Baviad is reprinted in H. Morley's 
 Shorter Eng. Poems (n.d.), pp. 413-6, with some of Gifford's Bludyer-like notes. 
 
 p. 37, note 1. Mathias. For a full account see Courthope, vol. vi. ch. vi., 
 'Anti-Jacobinism in Eng. Poetry,' pp. 127-32; to these pages my text is in 
 debt at several points. The passages from Mathias's preface, quoted by Mr. 
 Courthope, show how seriously he took himself. The last edition came out in 
 1812, apparently. 
 
 p. 37, note 2. anthology. Componimenti Uriel de? piu illustri poeti d'ltalia 
 (3 vols., London, 1802). See the art. by W. P. Courtney in Diet. Nat. Biog. 
 for list of replies to the Pursuits, and remarks on Mathias as an Italian 
 scholar, the best in England ' since the time of Milton.' He edited Gravina, 
 Menzini, and other authors, and translated many English works into 
 Italian. 
 
 p. 38. The Anti-Jacobin. The standard edition of the poetry is by C. 
 Edmonds (3rd ed., 1890), who adds valuable notes. The chief authority for 
 the assignment of authors is Canning's marked copy of the poetry, but it is 
 stated that the habit of the conspirators was for one of them to draft a poem, 
 which ' was generally left open upon the table ' for additions and changes by 
 others ; the remarkable unity of temper and impetus in the whole venture 
 would thus be well accounted for ; Edmonds, preface (ed. 1854), p. xvi. The 
 ' Pitt stanza ' (' Sun, moon ') does not appear in the original sheet, No. 30, 
 June 4, 1798. See too N. and Q., 1st series, iii. 348-9, 431. 
 
 p. 39. Charles Lamb. Lamb suffered inclusion merely on the strength of 
 having contributed verses to Coleridge's youthful Poems of 1796, etc. 
 
 p. 40. The Rovers. A scene from this play was acted at Eton, the school of 
 Canning and Frere, in 1898, according to Gabrielle Festing, J. H. Frere and 
 his Friends (1899), p. 30, a work containing a number of noticeable letters 
 from Canning, Lady Erroll (whom Frere married), Gabriele Kossetti, and Frere 
 himself. See Ch. xvn. post, on Frere. 
 
 p. 41, note 1. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 1798-1821. Inconceiv- 
 ably virulent and dull, so far as I have tested it. The reviewing is of the 
 meanest order (see e.g. that of Waverley, xlvii. 217). None of the brilliant 
 band of The Anti-Jacobin seem to have contributed. The editor was John 
 Gifford (q.v. in Diet. Nat. Biog.), unrelated to William Gifford, and a regular 
 government writer. His aim, however, is to carry on the campaign of Canning 
 and Frere. There is some curious doggerel called The Anarchists (i. 366), in 
 which the assault on ' Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, and Lamb ' is renewed, and 
 Coleridge's Lines to a Young Ass are again ridiculed (see his Poet. Works, 
 ed. Dykes Campbell, p. 477). Gillray's caricature in No. 1 portraying the 
 worshippers of Lepaux, and representing (with purely imaginary features) 
 Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb (the two latter under the guise of 
 toad and frog), is reproduced by E. V. Lucas, Life of Charles Lamb, i. 136-7. 
 
 p. 41, note 2. admired by Horace Walpole. See his letter to Mary Berry, April 
 28, 1789 : ' all, all, all, is the most lovely poetry. And then one sighs that such 
 profusion of poetry, magnificent and tender, should be thrown a way on what neither 
 interests nor instructs, and, with all the pains the notes take to explain, is scarce 
 intelligible.' In her reply Mary Berry says that she ' was early initiated into all
 
 NOTES 426 
 
 the amours and loose manners of the plants,' etc. a vein of banter which meets 
 Walpole half way (Extracts from the Journals and Corresp. of Miss Berry, ed. 
 Lady T. Lewis (1865), i. 162-3). Elsewhere Walpole dauntlessly couples Darwin's 
 poem with the Arabian Nights and King's College Chapel as ' above all rules ' ; 
 and he is not posing, he means these things that is his charm. 
 
 p. 41, note 3. Charles Darwin. See The Life of Erasmus Darwin, by 
 Charles Darwin, being an ' introduction ' to an essay on his scientific works, by 
 Ernst Krause, trans, from the German by W. S. Dallas (1879). Miss Seward's 
 Memoirs of E. D. (1804) are severely censured for inaccuracy and spite 
 by Charles Darwin. Krause brings out strikingly some of the anticipations of 
 the younger by the elder biologist. 
 
 p. 44. George Crabbe. The edition by Crabbe'a son, 8 vols., 1834, contains in 
 vol. i. the biography, and though incomplete is still the pleasantest form for 
 the reader. (Reprinted all in one vol., 1901.) More material, however, has 
 been found, and other MSS. than those which Crabbe the younger used. The 
 Cambridge ed. of the Poetical Works (3 vols., 1905-7), by A. W. Ward, is 
 exhaustive and precise ; and there is a convenient one-vol. edition by A. J. and 
 R. M. Carlyle, less complete (Oxford, 1908). M. Ren Huchon published in a 
 monograph (translated in 1907 by F. Clarke) George Crabbe and hit Times, a work 
 as faithful and thoroughgoing as The Borough itself, and embodying much new 
 biographical material and illustration, as well as many abstracts of the poems 
 and keen critical observations (the references in following notes are to the 
 translation). Headings in Crabbe (Tales of the Hall), by E. FitzGerald (1882) ; 
 Selections, by Bernard Holland (1899), and C. H. Herford (1902). 
 
 p. 45, note 1. Burke, nobly, launched him. The story is told in the Life of 
 Crabbe, ch. iv. It does honour to both men and to their demeanour, as well as 
 to the delicate generosity of Burke towards an unknown aspirant. There is no 
 finer private action recorded to the credit of any 'patron' in the history of 
 English literature. Crabbe's letter to Burke is given in full by his son, and is 
 an excellent example of his prose manner. For facsimile see Huchon, p. 112 ; 
 and id., App. I., pp. 493-8, for text of his highly characteristic third letter to 
 Burke. The verses on the swallows, which satisfied Burke that he was a poet, 
 are in The Village, book i., 'As on the neighbouring beach,' etc. 
 
 p. 45, note 2. Johnson read him ' with delight.' Life, ch. v. The words 
 come in a letter from Johnson to Reynolds, March 4, 1783, in which he 
 encloses his emendations to The Village. One of those Boswoll quotes, from 
 the overture to the poem, which Crabbe adopted. For the paviour's thud of 
 Crabbe's original verse 
 
 But, charm'd by him, or smitten with his views, 
 Shall modern poets court the Mantuan Muse? 
 
 Johnson ha* substituted his own heavily swung, but deep and musical blow 
 upon the iron 
 
 Must sleepy bards tho flattering dream prolong, 
 
 Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song ? 
 
 The whole difference between the couplet of 1748 and that of 1783 is here. 
 
 p. 48. the tast for ... Mrs. Radcliffe. Borough, xx., and Huchon, pp. 257-8. 
 
 p. 49. Giant Hickerthrift. See Huchon, pp. 24, 29, 40-42, for Crabbe's 
 early reading. This kind of pasture lasted long. See Samuel Bamford's 
 Passages in the Life of a Radical (ed. Dunckley, 1893, i. 87), ch. riii.
 
 426 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The young boy's literature was Robinson Crusoe, Jack the Giant-Killer, Saint 
 George and the Dragon, Tom Hickathrift, The, Seven Champions of Christendom, 
 etc., besides the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. This was in the early days of the 
 century, in a simple Lancashire Nonconformist home. There were also ' Robin 
 Hood's Songs ' and Chevy Chase. 
 
 p. 54. perhaps to exaggerate. For cases, see Huchon, pp. 309-10 (note). 
 
 p. 61. rhetorical associations. For analysis of language and metre, sec 
 Huchon, pp. 483-8. 
 
 p. 65. Kogers. Poet. Works in 'Aldine' ed. (E. Bell, 1891). See P. W. 
 Clayden, Early Life of S. E. (1887), and Eogers and his Contemporaries 
 (2 vols., 1889). 
 
 p. 67. the Gordon riots, etc. Clayden, Early Life, p. 38. For Parr's letter, 
 pp. 220-33 ; and for a much better one from W. Gilpin (on The Pleasures of 
 Memory}, pp. 358-60. 
 
 p. 68. Thomas Campbell. Conydete Works, ed. J. Logic Robertson (1908) ; 
 Poet. Works, ed. W. A. Hill (1875), with memoir by W. Allingham. Life and 
 Letters, ed. W. Beattie (3 vols., 1848-50). 
 
 p. 70, note 1. Bowles on Pope. The dispute is summarised in Byron's 
 Letters and Journals (ed. R. E. Prothero, 1901), vol. v. (App. III.), p. 522 foil., 
 where Bowles's Invariable Principles and Byron's two letters are reprinted. 
 The Principles appeared again in Two Letters to the Eight Hon. Lord Byron. 
 Byron's first tract, A Letter [to John Murray] in reference to W. L. Bowles's 
 Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, appeared in 1821 ; the other letter 
 not till 1835. Bowles also wrote (see Prothero, op. cit.) his reply to a Quarterly 
 Reviewer, whom he wrongly thought to be Octavius Gilchrist. Some of the 
 original articles in the controversy are reprinted by E. Rhys, Literary Pamphlets 
 (1897), vol. ii. See too Saintsbury, Hist, of Criticism, iii. 279-82, for a 
 review of the case, and for the gospel of Execution. 
 
 p. 70, note 2. crudely stated issue. See Byron's remarks in his first letter : 
 ' To the question, " whether the description of a game of cards be as poetical, 
 supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a 
 forest ? " it may be answered, that the materials certainly are not equal ; but 
 that " the artist," who has rendered the "game of cards poetical," is " by far the 
 greater of the two." But all this "ordering" of poets is purely arbitrary on 
 the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different "orders" 
 of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not 
 according to his branch of the art. . . . Away then with this cant about 
 " nature " and " invariable principles of poetry " ! A great artist will make a 
 block of stone as sublime as a mountain, and a good poet can imbue a pack of 
 cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America.' 
 
 p. 72. the sonnet. See Dyce, Specimens of Eng. Sonnets (1833) ; Southey, 
 Specimens of the Later Eng. Poets (3 vols., 1807). For Bampfylde, see Dyce, 
 pp. 140-50, and also Sir Egerton Brydges, Autobiography (1834), ii. 257-62 
 (Southey's letters on Bampfylde), and i. 35. Brydges's own sonnets are freely 
 sprinkled through this work, and I have seen his Sonnets and other Poems (ed. 
 1785), which includes a 'Versification of the Six Bards of Ossian.' Warton's 
 sonnets are in Chalmers, vol. xviii. Bowles altered the text of his sonnets a 
 good deal in successive reprints. I have seen the fourth edition (1796), the seventh 
 (1800-1), and the eighth (1802). His numerous metrical schemes include
 
 NOTES 427 
 
 (beside that named in text) abba cddc efefef and abba cddc efefgg ; these are 
 mostly unlucky. See Schipper, Neuenglische Metrik (Bonn, 1888), ii. 867. For 
 the poet's position, see ' W. L. Bowles,' by T. E. Casson, in Eighteenth Century 
 Literature: an Oxford Mitcellany (1909), pp. 151-83. 
 
 p. 76. William Cowper. Southey's ed. of the Life and Works (15 vols., 1836-7) 
 is still the best Cowper library. It includes text of Cowper's Memoir and 
 Adelphi and many letters ; but the Correspondence, edited by T. Wright 
 (4 vols., 1904), in chronological order, supersedes Grimshawe's, Southey's, and 
 other collections, though further letters have been printed by J. C. Bailey in his 
 ed. of the Poetical Works (1905), containing all the verse but the Homer, and 
 an admirable introduction and notes. There are various other editions of the 
 poems ; by W. Benham ('Globe,' 1870, etc.), by J. Bruce (' Aldine'), and by 
 H. S. Milford (1911). Out of many studies may be singled those of Sainte- 
 Beuve, in Causeries du Lundi, vol. xi. (1868) ; by W. Bagehot, in Literary 
 Studies (ed. 1898, vol. i.) ; by Goldwin Smith, Cowper (1880) ; and by Sir Leslie 
 Stephen, Hours in a Library, vol. ii. There is a Concordance by J. Neve 
 (1887). Hayley's Life (1803) was the first. There are many selections from the 
 Letters, e.g. by J. G. Frazer (new ed., 2 vols., 1912). 
 
 p. 79. Mr. Cox. Corresp. (ed. Wright), iii. 183-4, NOT. 27, 1787. 
 
 p. 81, note 1. the dream. Corresp., i. 132-4. 
 
 p. 81, note 2. the hares. Gent. Mag., liv. 412 (June 1784): 'Unnoticed 
 properties of that little animal the Hare," signed ' W. C.' 
 
 p. 82, note 1. Newton. J. Bull, the editor of Newton's Autobiography (Rel. 
 Tract Soc., n.d., pp. 187-192), tries to plead for the beneficence of his influence 
 upon Cowper, urging the comfort that Cowper's religion was to him in bereave- 
 ment, and the geniality, humour, etc., of Newton. In equity, this plea must not 
 be neglected. Cowper was in part enlisted through his affections, and religion at 
 times consoled him. But it was its own terrors which it slightly mitigated ; 
 and on the whole Newton was poison to him. 
 
 p. 82, note 2. the old faith. I find I have unawares recalled and built on a 
 passage in Sainte-Beuve's famous Causerie on Cowper. See notesi';>?'a to p. 76. 
 
 p. 84. 'insane in substance.' Poet. U'orks, ed. Bailey, p. xxix. 
 
 p. 85. simplicity. See Corresp., ii. 129-30, Nov. 24. 1783; ii. 63, May 5, 
 1783 ; and ii. 86, July 27, 1783, fur Cowper's dislike of Gibbon's and 
 Robertson's prose. 
 
 p. 86. paper on Pope's Homer. In Gent. May., Iv. 610-13, Aug. 1775, signed 
 ' Alethes.' 
 
 p. 88. letter to Lady Hesketh. Corrffp., i. 84-7, Jan. 30, 1767. 
 
 p. 93. Blake's drawing of the ' weather-house.' Reproduced in Cowper's Pod. 
 Works, ed. Bailey, p. 254. 
 
 p. 95. Crowe's Leu'esdon Hill and other Poems. First ed., 1788; 1827 ed. 
 (whence quotation in text), ' corrected and much enlarged.' Crowe names in his 
 notes (1788) the passages in ^schylus he had imitated ; a somewhat early bit of 
 Hellenism. One epigram on the 'critic's pruning-knife' may be saved : 
 Well did it wear ; and might have worn 
 
 Full many an age, yet ne'er the worse ; 
 Till Bentley's hand its edge did turn 
 
 On Milton's adamantine verse. 
 The work does not seem to have been reprinted.
 
 428 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 p. 96. translations of Homer. See Corresp., iii. 203-4, on the accuracy of the 
 version ; iii. 446, on the style ; iv. 109, for discussion with Thurlow on rhyme ; 
 iv. 484, an important passage on the principles of translation. 
 
 p. 98. Milton came in a dream. Corresp., iv. 373, Feb. 24, 1793. 
 
 p. 100. Robert Burns. For text I have used the ' Centenary ' ed. by W. E. 
 Henley and T. F. Henderson (4 vols., 1896-7). See too the ed. by A. Lang and 
 W. A. Craigie (1896); and, amongst the other editions, that of Scott Douglas (6 
 vols., 1877-9) and that of C. A. Aitken (Aldine, 3 vols., 1893). Robert Chambers's 
 Life and Works of R. B., with the poems inserted in order of date, was prac- 
 tically rewritten by W. Wallace (4 vols., 1896), and in this form is most 
 valuable. Mr. Wallace has also edited fully, in Burns and Mrs. Dunlop 
 (1898), the correspondence of the two. Of biographies, Lockhart's Life (1828, 
 re-ed. by J. H. Ingram, 1890) and J. C. Shairp's (1879, in 'Eng. Men of 
 Letters ') may be named here ; and, of the endless studies and valuations, 
 Carlyle's review of Lockhart (1828), reprinted in Mite. Essays ; Henley's article 
 in the 'Centenary' ed. (also separably published as Life, Genius, Achievement of 
 Eobert Burns') ; J. Nichol's art. in Ency. Brit., ninth and eleventh editions ; 
 R. L. Stevenson, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882). The exhaustive 
 study by A. Angellier, E. B., La Vie et les Oeuvres (2 vols., Paris, 1898), is of 
 much value. See also W. A. Craigie, A Primer of Burns (1896), for the facts 
 marshalled. For more, see Ency. Brit, (eleventh ed.), s.v. ' Burns.' 
 
 p. 102, note 1. Crabbe . . . honoured Burns. See his Life, by his son, in 
 Works (1834), i. 172. 
 
 p. 102, note 2. a French scholar. Angellier, E. B., i. 17, 20-21. 
 
 p. 108, note 1. ' il est passionne", non romanesque.' See, on Burns's treatment 
 of love, Angellier, ii. 238-313. 
 
 p. 108, note 2. hoisting his red flag. See Wallace-Chambers, iii. 373-81. 
 
 p. 109. the ' New Lights.' For Burns's religious and ecclesiastical sympathies 
 see especially The Holy Fair, The Twa Herds, and Holy Willie's Prayer ; also 
 The Ordination ; and notably The Kirk's Alarm, for its wild derision of the 
 ' alarm ' excited by the supposed Socinian views of William M'Gill ; and the 
 notes of Henley and Henderson to all these pieces. See further Wallace- 
 Chambers, i. 166-72, and i. 455-62, App. II., on ' Religious and Theological 
 Writings which influenced Burns ' ; here is given the text of William Burnes's 
 Manual of Religious Belief, and a reference to John Taylor's Doctrine of 
 Original Sin (1740), which was known to Robert. He also read the sermons 
 of Samuel Bourn, the Norwich Arian, at the instance of Mrs. Dunlop, and 
 admired them much ; see Wallace, Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, pp. 284-5 ; and 
 the note of J. Hay Colligan (in the Glasgow Herald, Jan. 25, 1912), who 
 draws attention to Bourn, to Burns's Arian proclivities and utterances, and 
 to his devotional strain in general. 
 
 p. 110. metrical scholars. Especially Henley and Henderson. See i. 336- 
 341, on the six-line stave (' Burns put it to all manner of uses, and informed it 
 with all manner of sentiments,' etc. ; the history is carefully described from 
 Provencal onwards) ; i. 328-30, on the measure of The Holy Fair (eight lines 
 plus ' bob-wheel ') ; and i. 366-8, on that of the Epistle to Davie (fourteen lines, 
 of which the last four form a tag in rime couee}. See too Saintsbury, Hitt. of 
 Eng. Prosody, iii. 4-8, not least the remarks on Burns's use of anapaest for 
 
 iamb in the first foot of the ' three-foot iambic ' (' like a rogue | for for'gerie ').
 
 NOTES 429 
 
 p. 112. The Jolly Beggars. Scott's praise of this occurs in his Quarterly 
 review (Mite. Prose, 1878, ii. 847) of Cromek's Reliques of It. B. (1808). 
 Cromek printed the poem, which Currie had not done. 
 
 p. 121. a few distinctive examples (of the songs). The data I quote arc all 
 given by Henley and Henderson, vol. iv., in the notes on the respective songs ; 
 the examples could be multiplied tenfold. 
 
 p. 128. other vernacular Scottish poets. Few have been re-edited, and the 
 early editions are often rare. The amplest selection, though not a very critical 
 one, is that of C. Rogers, The Modern Scottish Minstrel (6 vols., 1855-7), where 
 all those named in text and many more may be found. J. Grant Wilson, The 
 Poets and Poetry of Scotland (two series, 1876 and 1877), is also comprehensive 
 and useful. See too Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson, The Songstresses of Scot- 
 land (2 vols., 1871), and a brief but tasteful anthology, The Edinburgh Book of 
 Scottish Verse (1910), by MacNeile Dixon. G. F. Graham, Songs of Scotland 
 (1848, 3 vols.), gives tunes and many interesting notes, and a list (vol. i. pp. 
 v-vi) of the early collections of melodies. See further Chambers, Cyclop, of 
 Eng. Lit. (new ed., 1902, ii. 795-832), for 'Scottish Vernacular Poets under 
 George HI.,' with many extracts. J. Veitch, Hist, and Poetry of the Scottish 
 Border (new ed., 2 vols., 1893) last chapter. 
 
 p. 129, note 1. Cauld Kail in Aberdeen. See Rogers, i. 48, 210, for the Duke 
 of Gordon's and Lady Nairne's versions, and Grant Wilson, i. 402, for that of 
 William Reid (1764-1831). For Burns and the Duke, see Wallace -Chambers, 
 ii. 201-3. 
 
 p. 129, note 2. The Siller dun. See Rogers, i. 108, who states that twelve 
 stanzas came first, in 1777, and then were in 1779 expanded to two cantos, and 
 these to three in 1780, to four in 1808, and to five in 1836. Mayne is certainly 
 one of the best manipulators of the metre in its more rapid and lively motions. 
 The first canto is given by Grant Wilson, i. 375-8. 
 
 p. 130. Lady Nairne. C. Rogers, Life and Songs of the Baroness Nairne, 
 with Memoir (1869). 
 
 p. 131, note 1. John Skinner. He was born in 1721, and is said to have 
 written Tullochgorum, John of Badenyon, and Ewie with the Crookit Horn, early 
 in life. The last-named is a precursor, and by no means a faint one, of Burns's 
 Poor Mailie, and has some of the same true but not too serious pathos 
 affection kept sound by country common sense. See Rogers, i. 11-34. 
 
 p. 131, note 2. Sir A. Boswell. Poet. Works, ed. R. Howie Smith (1871), 
 contains a note by Maidment of the vols. of older English poetry printed 
 privately at Boswell's Auchinleck Press an early example of such enterprise 
 (pp. Ixiii-lxviii). They include The Buke of Ye Chess, A Fig for Momus, etc. 
 The printing is clear and fine. Boswell's own verses (e.g. Clan-Alpiris Vow) 
 are largely in the following of Scott, but his best things are in the popular 
 style. See Grant Wilson, i. 529 foil., and Rogers, ii. 204 foil. 
 
 p. 131, note 3. the rest. Here is a brief enough 'treasury' : (1) Verse of 
 the lively, homely kind, inclining to the boisterous. James Nicol, Haluckit 
 [crazy] Meg, in his Poems (1805). Robert Lochore (Talcs in Rhyme, 1815}, 
 Walter's Waddin', a sprightly following of Burns's Hallou'ten. Mrs. Elizabeth 
 Grant of Carron, Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch ; see Rogers, i. 526. (2) Domestic 
 and idyllic. Andrew Scott, Rural Content, or the Muirland Farmer ; in Grant 
 Wilson, i. 345. Fergusson. The Farmer's Ingle. Lochore. A Kintra Court-
 
 430 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ship. (3) Love-lyrics, either gay and affectionate or sorrowful and charged 
 with desiderium. Susanna Blamire, 1747-94, 'What ails this heart o' mine?' 
 She was a Cumbrian, and wrote also in her own dialect, but this and 
 other delicate lyrics are in Scots. W. Keid, The Lea-rig (first two 
 stanzas by Fergusson ; see Grant Wilson, i. 402 note). Kichard Gall, ' My 
 only jo and dearie, ! ' ; Grant Wilson, i. 552. (4) Jacobite verses ; see e.g. 
 Hogg, Jacobite Belies of Scotland (2 vols., 1819-21) ; perhaps the best known 
 in ' where, tell me where,' by Mrs. Anne Grant of Laggan (died 1838). 
 
 p. 131, note 4. Hector MacNeill. Poet. Works (2 vols., 1801 ; author's last 
 ed., 1812). 
 
 p. 133, note 1. what he really collected. See D. Hogg, Life of A. C. (1875). 
 Some of the authorities that Cunningham caused Cromek to cite are circum- 
 stantial enough ; for instance, ' Gane were but the winter cauld,' is ' recovered 
 by Miss C. Macartney.' Moreover, some pieces, such as The Broken Heart of 
 Annie, are quite different in the Remains and in the Tiventy Songs, so that the 
 confusion is deepened. See J. A. Farrer, Literary Forgeries (1907), pp. 261-4. 
 A previous vol. of Songs was published by Cunningham in 1813. 
 
 p. 133, note 2. Songs of Scotland. These appeared in 4 vols. (1825), and the 
 selection ranges from James v. down to Cunningham's contemporaries, on 
 whom he is often severe, in heavy pseudo-Johnsonian style. Of Robert Gall, 
 the harmless and pleasant lyrist, he writes, 'He can see, but he cannot 
 imagine ' ; but he is not amiss when he blames Hector MacNeill for an 
 occasional false simplicity that touches the grotesque. His verdict on Tanna- 
 hill is chary enough : ' His songs . . . are chiefly remarkable for the nicety 
 and skill with which they are measured out to re-echo the airs to which they 
 are sung' (i. 237, etc.). 
 
 p. 133, note 3. Robert Tannahill. I have used Poems and Songs, chiefly in 
 the Scotish Dialect (1817), There is an ed., with memoir and notes, by D. 
 Semple (Paisley, 1876), which gives the 'Centenary' proceedings of 1874. 
 
 p. 136. Maggie Lauder. This old poem, assigned (by family tradition) to 
 Francis Semple of Beltrees (died 1682), is given (e.g.) by MacNeile Dixon, 
 Edin. Book of Scottish Verse, No. 114, and by Graham, Songs of Scotland, ii. 
 Ill (with air). 
 
 p. 137. William Blake. Messrs. E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats's ed. of the 
 Works (3 vols. 1893), contains a memoir, a text which is nearly complete, 
 lithographed facsimiles of the Prophetic Books, a transcript of Blake's notes on 
 Reynolds, etc. ; and a long and elaborate private interpretation of the sym- 
 bolism, more difficult than Blake's own utterances. Of the poems (as distinct 
 from Prophetic Books), this and all other texts were erroneous, and were anti- 
 quated by Dr. John Sampson's definitive edition (Oxford, 1905), which does 
 not include the Prophetic Books. Dr. Sampson's text, alone, is reprinted in a 
 smaller form (Oxford, 1906), with essay by Sir W. Raleigh. The Prophetic 
 Books are only given fully in ordinary type by E. J. Ellis, Poetical Works of 
 W. B. (2 vols., 190G). Separate coloured facsimiles of several by W. Muir, 
 various dates. Printed texts of Jerusalem (1903) and of Milton (1907) by 
 A. G. B. Russell and E. H. D. Maclagan, with expositions. Alexander 
 Gilchrist'a Life (2 vols., 1863, 1880, 1906) includes most of the poems, as 
 edited at discretion by D. G. Rossetti ; a most valuable list by W. M. 
 Rossetti of Blake's artistic productions, and many plates and pictures. There
 
 NOTES 431 
 
 are many selections : e.g. by R. H. Shepherd (1874), W. M. Rossetti (1874), 
 W. B. Yeats (1893), L. Housman (1893). A. G. B. Russell, Letters of W. B. 
 (1906), includes the Life by Tatham. The other early notices of the poet are 
 reprinted in Arthur Symons, W. B. (1907), the best brief criticism and 
 memoir. Amongst noteworthy comments and elucidations, not named above, 
 are, above all, Swinburne's W. B., A Critical Essay (1868 and 1906) ; James 
 Thomson's article, appended to his Shelley (1884) ; those of W. B. Yeats, Ideas 
 of Good and Evil (1903) ; R. Kassner, Die Mystik, die Kunstler, und das Leben 
 (Leipzig, 1900), pp. 14-57 ; and E. Garnett, in The Portfolio (1895). I have 
 used freely the elaborate study of P. Berger, W. B., Mysticisme d Poesie 
 (1907), especially in reference to the Prophetic Books. See also B. de Selin- 
 court, W. B., 1909. My debts to this literature, especially to Sampson's ed., to 
 Swinburne, and to Berger and Symons, are too great to specify fully. 
 
 p. 139. Blake at Felpham. See Lettert, ed. Russell, pp. 75, 76-84, 108-12, 
 etc.; and poems (in letters) extracted by Sampson, pp. 301-11. 
 
 p. 141, note 1. reading of Swedenborg. See note post to p. 151. 
 
 p. 141, note 2. all seen. See Berger, W. B., pp. 292-300, on Blake's ' double 
 or triple vision,' a valuable analysis ; but the stages of ' vision ' can be thus 
 sharply distinguished only in analysis ; in Blake they seem psychologically 
 continuous, and really one. 
 
 p. 141, note 3. 'a white cloud . . .' From marginalia to Swedenborg, 
 extracted by Berger, p. 475. See too de Selincourt, op. cit., ch. v. 
 
 p. 142. a living critic. See Symons, W. B., p. 217. 
 
 p. 143. Voice of the Ancient Bard. See Sampson, pp. 72, 124-5, for the vary- 
 ing position of this poem in the two series of Songs. In the latest copies it 
 comes at the end of Songs of Innocence, as 'a connecting link with the Intro- 
 duction to Songs of Experience.' 
 
 p. 146. stage of apprenticeship. In his notes to Reynolds's Discourses, given 
 by Ellis and Yeats, ii. 327 : ' no one can ever design till he has learned the 
 language of art by making many finished copies both from Nature and art, and 
 of whatever comes in his way from earliest childhood . . . servile copying is 
 the great merit of copying.' Clearly Blake means that this technical training 
 is necessary for the true copying afterwards of things imagined, see ib., p. 328 : 
 1 vision is determinate and perfect, and he copies that without fatigue.' 
 
 p. 147. what is left? See Berger, W. B., ch. viii. p. 92. 'II ne restera 
 plus que 1'imagination, c'est-a-dire le pouvnir de enter des notions nouvelles, et 
 la passion, c'est-a-dire, dans son sens le plus large, tout ce (|ui est plaisir on 
 douleur, amour on haine ; puis ... la vulonto ou puissance d'action. . . . 
 C'tHait la an plus pros la psychologic de Blake.' 
 
 p. 150. little boy Malkin. See the child's map in A Fathers Mrmoirt to his 
 Child (1803), and Sampson, p. xxi. 
 
 p. 151, note 1. Jacob Boehme. Berger, pp. 233-G. I must be content here 
 to speak at second-hand ; the resemblance does not seem, however, to go very 
 
 deep. 
 
 p. 151, note 2. Swedenborg. Berger, pp. 235-7 ; also pp. 463-77, where the 
 MS. notes by Blake on Divine Love or the Wisdom of Angdf (copy in the 
 British Museum) are excerpted. They are not all salient or sympathetic, but 
 contain a few of Blake's distinctive maxims : 'Love was not created impure, 
 and is not naturally so.' ' If a thing loves, it is infinite/
 
 432 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 p. 153. coinages . . . Ossianic in design. See H. G. Hewlett, Imperfect 
 Genius: William Blake, in Contemp. Rev., vol. xxviii. p. 779: 'Uthorno thus 
 reappeared as Urthona, Lutha as Leutha, Oithona as Oothoon, Touthormod as 
 Theotormon,' etc. This 'curious essay in depreciation,' as Dr. Sampson calls 
 it, traces some of Blake's sources of suggestion very ingeniously, but shows an 
 odd deafness to his genius, and is throughout in the nature of a speech for the 
 prosecution. 
 
 p. 157. Macpherson's Ossian. See Saintsbury, Hist, of Prosody, iii. 21, and 
 43-6, 'Excursus on Ossian.' I let my text stand, though this valuable 
 excursus has appeared since it was written, as I have slightly expanded the 
 statement of Prof. Saintsbury concerning the influence on Blake. Working 
 out this blank seven-foot metre, partly on the lines adopted by Mr. Bridges in 
 his Milton's Prosody, I find that many seemingly irregular lines preserve the 
 underlying beat ; although, in the later ' prophecies,' liberty is seldom far from 
 anarchy. 
 
 p. 160. anvil-music (of The Tiger}. Remarkably reproduced in the contemporary 
 German translation (quoted Sampson, p. 115) by Dr. Julius, published in Vater- 
 landisches Museum, Bd. n. Heft 1 (Hamburg, 1806). The explanation of Blake's 
 appearance in a remote German magazine is found in the zeal of Crabb Robinson, 
 who there wrote an article in German (which I have not seen), Julius adding 
 versions of this and other poems ; as seems to have been first pointed out, Dr. 
 Sampson tells me, by R. H. Shepherd in his edition of the Poems (1874). 
 
 p. 163, note 1. The Everlasting Gospel. See Sampson, pp. 242-61, where the 
 text is fully given for the first time, and its intricate arrangement unravelled. 
 
 p. 163, note 2. Jerusalem. See the exposition in the preface to Russell and 
 Maclagan's reprint ; and Berger, pp. 400-13. 
 
 p. 163, note 3. traditional attributes. See Berger, W. B., pp. 208-9, 215 : 
 'Vivre sans controle etait I'ide'al chre'tien de Blake, comme de la plupart 
 des homines d'imagination.' P. 214 : ' toutes les grandes vertus chre'tiennes, 
 obe'issance, humilite", chastete', ne sont autre chose que des destructions 
 d'e"nergies, des illusions d'Ulro, des creations de spectres, des consequences des 
 lois d'Urizen. Je"sus lui-meme s'est Sieve" centre elles.' 
 
 p. 170. men of letters. (1) The extracts from Crabb Robinson's MSS. relat- 
 ing to Blake are partly found in his published Diary and Reminiscences ; but 
 Mr. A. Symons has re-examined the MSS., and published further material 
 in his work on William Blake. These include the opinions of Blake on Words- 
 worth (Symons, p. 274), and of Wordsworth on Blake (p. 281). (2) Landor : see 
 Life by Forster (ed. 1869), i. 323. (3) Coleridge : see Letters oj S. T. C., ed. 
 E. H. Coleridge, ii. 685-8. (4) Lamb: in letter to Bernard Barton, May 15, 
 1824 ; quoted in Lucas's Life of Charles and Mary Lamb, ii. 125-6. (5) 
 Southey : see Crabb Robinson, Diary, 24th July 1811. (6) See Diary of Lady 
 Charlotte Bury (1838-9), sub anno 1820, cited by Ellis and Yeats, i. 141. 
 
 p. 172. fiction. See, for these two chapters, besides the general histories of 
 literature, Sir W. Raleigh, The English Novel (1894, etc.) ; Wilbur Cross, Develop- 
 ment of the English Novel (New York, 1909) ; besides the general histories, 
 especially Saintsbury, Short History of Eng. Lit., pp. 611 foil., 677 foil. 
 
 p. 174. lines of direction of the novel. See W. Dibelius, Die englische 
 Romankunst, 2 vols., Berlin (1910) ; 'a study of the technique of the English 
 novel in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.' Here
 
 NOTES 433 
 
 Dr. Dibelius works out, in the most formal German way, and with the utmost 
 minuteness, the dependence of the later on the earlier schools. He makes 
 clear, if he somewhat overstates, the debt of Fielding and his contemporaries to 
 the old prose romances, and that of the sensation-mongers and the doctrinaires 
 to Fielding and Smollett. His dissection of the contributions of Lewis and 
 Mrs. Radcliffe is of value ; he shows (i. 332, 338, etc.) the increase of technical 
 skill, and the new elements introduced into fiction, which stand to their 
 credit. 
 
 p. 175, note 1. history. See ante, pp. 335-6, on the precursors of Scott in the 
 historical novel, 
 
 p. 175, note 2. a few examples. The Spiritual Quixote is in Mrs. Barbauld's 
 British Novelists, vols. xxxii., xxxiii. ; Mackenzie's stories, ib., vol. xxix. ; The 
 Correspondents has not been reprinted. 
 
 p. 176. a Methodist Hudibras. For a curious skit of far later date on 
 Methodist breeding, see Memoirs of a Peerest : or the Days of Fox, ' edited ' by 
 Lady Charlotte Bury (1837), ii. 9, etc. A gluttonous Mr. Bumptext and a 
 Mr. Quiesbury figure, phantasmal ancestors of Pecksniff, or descendants of 
 Zeal-in-the-Land Busy. Lockhart's Matthew Wald is tinged with the same 
 antipathy. 
 
 p. 177. Miss Burney. See Austin Dobson's ed. of the Diary (1778-1840) ami 
 Letters of Madame D'Arblay (6 vols., 1904-5), and his study in 'Eng. Men of 
 Letters' (1903) ; and The Early Diary of F. B. (i.e. 1768-78), ed. Mrs. A. R. 
 Ellis (new ed., 2 vols., 1907). 
 
 p. 180, note 1. fiction shades off into educational writing. No record of 
 English pedagogic writing can be essayed here, or of works for the young. A 
 typical list is found in Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance (1785), ii. 102-3, of 
 lessons, spelling-books, tales, and fables for children : e.g. Mrs. Trimmer's 
 Sacred History Selected, and Introduction to the, Knowledy* of Nature ; also Th> 
 Female Academy, or History of Mrs. Teachum ; and various histories, ancient 
 and modern, in the form of question and answer. The well-known publisher, 
 John Newbery, issued many such works. The contemporary tales and playlets 
 of Madame de Genlis were no doubt an example, and she is named by Clara 
 Reeve ; but the subject still awaits full investigation. See <tti\ p. 205. 
 
 p. 180, note 2. Byron. See Litters and Journals, ii. 370 (ed. K. E. Prothero). 
 ' Talking of vanity, whose praise do I prefer ? Why, Mrs. Inchbald's . . . 
 because her Simple Story and Nature, and Art, are, to me, true to their titles ; 
 and, consequently, her short note to Rogers about the Guiocr delighted UIP 
 more than anything, except the Edinburgh Kcviiw.' 
 
 p. 181. not hanged. He dies of fever, but hi* crime is never exposed. There 
 are several reprints of Mrs. Inchbald's stories, none very recent. HIT AT. niotrv 
 were ed. by E. Boaden (2 vols., 1833;. 
 
 p. 182, note 1. Hermsprong. In Barbauld's British NoreJittf, vol. xlviii. Others 
 of his tales are in Ballantyne's Novelists' Library, vol. ix. (1824) ; see tho 
 comments of Scott to all these writers, prefixed therein, and reprinted in his 
 Misc. Prose Works, vol. i. (1878). 
 
 p. 182, note 2. Holcroft's Memoirs and his novels were not reprinted. His 
 Travels from Hamburg through H'cstphalia, etc. (2 vols., LS04 , give word of 
 his meetings with Madame de Stael and other persons of note, but are heavily 
 written. 
 
 VOL. I. - t
 
 434 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 p. 184. Mrs. Opie. Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, by Cecilia Lucy 
 Brightwell (1854), is a dull volume except for Mrs. Opie's own letters. Few of 
 her tales were reprinted ; none, that I can find, lately. See too Kegan Paul, 
 William Godwin. 
 
 p. 186, note 1. Maria Edgeworth. There are many editions of her novels 
 both collectively (e.g. in 10 vols., 1893) and singly. Castle Rackrent, The 
 Absentee, and Ormond, reprinted 1895, have introductions by Lady Ritchie. 
 The original Memoir is by F. A. Edgeworth, her stepmother (privately printed 
 1867), with letters. See too, its abridgment, ed. Aug. Hare (Life, and Letters, 
 2 vols., 1894) ; and the vol. by the Hon. Emily Lawless (in ' Eng. Men of 
 Letters,' 1904) ; and Life by Miss Zimmern in ' Eminent Women Series ' (1883). 
 p. 186, note 2. R. L. Edgeworth. Memoirs, by Maria Edgeworth (2 vols. 
 1820, revised ed. 1844). The latter part is from her hand. 
 
 p. 187. Scott's tributes (to Miss Edgeworth's tales). The first is in 1814, in 
 the postscript to Waverley, where he speaks of his ' wish to emulate, however 
 distantly, the admirable Irish portraits' ; another, in 1829 (general preface to 
 the Waverley Novels), is quoted in text. 
 
 p. 189, note 1. Tourge'niev. See Chambers's Cyclopcedia of Eng. Lit. (1902), 
 ii. 736. Dr. David Patrick, the editor, kindly informs me that the reference is 
 there drawn from. A 'Book of Sibyls, by Miss Thackeray (now Lady Thackeray 
 Ritchie), ed. 1883, p. 140 ; and that the ultimate source is a letter in Daily 
 News, 7th Sept. 1883, signed ' by one who knew' Tourgeniev. I have not traced 
 the statement further, and several Russian scholars I have consulted have failed 
 to find it in Tourgeniev's works. 
 
 p. 189, note 2. Hannah More. Works, 8 vols., 1801, etc. 
 p. 190. Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton. This lady was born in 1758 and lived till 
 1816. She was unmarried, but after a time took the style of 'Mrs.' or 
 ' Mistress.' Her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers is a sarcastic attack on 
 Godwin and the votaries of the Revolution. She wrote verse, and one of her 
 pieces, ' My Ain Fireside,' was very popular. 
 
 p. 191. Jane Austen. A Memoir of Jane Autten, by her nephew, J. E. 
 Austen-Leigh (1869) ; second ed. enlarged, including the discarded chapter of 
 Persuasion, Lady Susan, and The Watsons (1871), etc., and in 'Eversley 
 Series' (1906), is the authority for the facts, together with Letters of Jane 
 Austen, ed. Lord Brabourne (1884). J. A., by Goldwin Smith (' Great Writers,' 
 1890) ; Whately's art. in Quart. Rev. (1830) ; notices in Macaulay's Life (by 
 G. 0. Trevelyan), may be named amongst criticisms ; also the chapter in 
 Milieux d'Art, by Charles Bonnier (1910, privately printed), and A. C. Bradley's 
 paper in Essays by Members of the Eng. Association, vol. ii. (1911). There are 
 many editions : the prefaces by Austin Dobson to that in Macmillan's ' Illus- 
 trated Standard Novels ' are noteworthy. 
 
 p. 192. lowest middle class. The young farmer, Martin, in Emma, is the 
 chief exception, but he is a mere outline. The remark that Jane Austen does 
 not draw servants has, I find, been anticipated by Mr. Austin Dobson in his 
 admirable preface to the same book (ed. 1896), p. xiii. 
 
 p. 192, note 2. Charlotte Bronte. See Clement Shorter, C. B. and her Circle, 
 1896, p. 399, for letter previously unprinted : ' Anything like warmth or 
 enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in 
 commending these works : all such demonstrations the authoress would have
 
 NOTES 435 
 
 met with a well-bred sneer, etc. . . . Jane Austen was a complete and most 
 sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not sensdfss) woman.' 
 Certainly dispassionate, but nothing like insensible ; for she created Anne 
 Elliot. 
 
 p. 195. the old periodical essay. Elizabeth Bonnet read The Mirror ; The 
 Idler lay about at Mansfield Park, also Quarterly Reviews ; and Crabl>e'.s Talc*, 
 and Isaac Hawkins Browne's now forgotten works. The tickle Mr. Crawford also 
 reads Henry VIII. aloud ' with the happiest knack.' 
 
 p. 197. final happy marriage (of Anne Elliot). This incident gare trouble : 
 an occasion for bringing Captain Wentworth to the point was hard to find, and 
 the chapter was twice written, the first draft being printed by Austen-Leigh, 
 Memoir, ch. xii. In the textits rec<y)ttis Wentworth, in company where Anne is 
 present, writes his declaration of love, and hands it to her ; they meet out-of- 
 doors later and all is made clear. In the cancelled chapter she finds herself in 
 Admiral Croft's house with him, and the Admiral sends him to her with a 
 business proposal about Kellynch, on the supposition that she is engaged to 
 Walter Elliot, her cousin. She has to undeceive Wentworth, and the explana- 
 tions follow at once. This strong scene of high comedy Jane Austen abandoned, 
 perhaps owing to its abruptness. The little changes of text in the conversation 
 that is common to the two drafts show her punctilious instinct for language. 
 
 p. 199. 'Mrs. Forester.' Letters, ii. 312. 
 
 p. 200. 'a tall young man.' Cp. Ldter*, i. 213 : ' He was a very young man, 
 just entered Oxford, wearing spectacles, and has heard that Evdina was written 
 by Dr. Johnson.' 
 
 p. 206, note 1. William Beckford. Until 1910 there was little on Beckford's 
 life but the hack Memoirs of W. B. (1859, 2 vols.), by Cyrus Redding, and the 
 art. in D. N. B. by R. Garnett, with the introduction to the same writer's 
 edition of Vathek (1893). Many legends, some of them scandalous, are als" 
 scattered abroad. Much new material, including about 200 unpublished letters, 
 and a careful responsible biography, can be found in Lewis Melville's Life ami 
 Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (1910) ; it contains a bibliography, and 
 shows Beckford's life and character for the first time in his true proportions. 
 See too an art. by the same writer in Fortnightly Btvicir, Dec. 1909; and 
 others on the dealings of Beckford with Henley, in Athena-uni, Nov. 27 and 
 Dec, 4, 1909; with notes on the same topic, ib., Dec. 11, 1909, by John 
 Hodgkin. See too article on W. B. by S. Lane Poole in Quarterly AVtmir, 
 Oct. 1910. 
 
 p. 206, note 2. Vathek. Beckford probably contributed to the prolix notes, as 
 he did not materially alter them in later English editions There should be a new 
 English version of the French, as Henley's donnish style is misleading. For 
 the French, see the reprint by Stephane Mallarme (1876 and 1893); and h\> 
 preface, the most valuable study of Vathfk that exists. The French edition 
 (Mallarme, ed. 1893, pp. xxvi. foil.) came out both at Paris and Lausanne 
 iu 1787, by whose authority is unknown. Its prefatory note states that the 
 English edition had been printed ' through the indiscretion of a literary man t 
 whom the MS. was entrusted three years before.' The French work wa.s not 
 apparently noticed in any review or bibliography ; Mallarmo judges that the 
 copies may have perished in the political storm. In 1815 Beckford had it re- 
 printed, with a few changes ; and Mcriuu-e planned to edit the work, but never
 
 436 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 did so. Mallarmd aptly sums up the paradox : ' Gas special, unique entre 
 mainte reminiscence, d'un ouvrage par 1'Angleterre cru le sien et que la France 
 ignore : ici original, la traduction ; tandis que (pour y tout confondre) 1'auteur 
 du fait de sa naissance et d'adinirable esquisses n'appartient pas aux lettr^s de 
 chez nous, tout en leur demandant, apres coup, une place prepond4rante et 
 quasi d'initiateur oublie ! ' 
 
 p. 206, note 3. Hall of Eblis. The flaming hearts are from T. S. Gueullette's 
 Mogul Tales (Eng. tr., 1736), cited in Weber's Tales of the East, Edin. (1812), 
 iii. 58 foil. Three men are found seated at a triangular table gazing on 
 a book with golden clasps, with the legend, ' Let no man touch this divine 
 treatise who is not perfectly pure.' They are sinners awaiting judgment, and 
 ' through their skin, which appeared like crystal, I saw their hearts compassed 
 by fire, by which, though burnt unceasingly, yet . . . never consumed.' This 
 reference is due to Miss Martha Pike Conant's valuable monograph, The 
 Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century, N. Y., Columbia Univ. 
 Press (1908), pp. 37, 275. Beckford had the Mogul Tales in his library. See 
 Bignon's Adventures of Aldalla, tr. Hatchett (1728) (named in Conant, pp. 38, 
 275). This Hall, says Beckford, ' was the creation of my own fancy. Old Fonthill 
 House had one of the largest halls in the kingdom, lofty and loud-echoing, whilst 
 numerous doors led into it from different parts of the building, through long, 
 dim, sounding passages. It was from this that I formed my imaginary hall ' 
 (Redding, i. 243). 
 
 p. 207. episodes. See The Episodes of Vathck, ed. Lewis Melville (forth- 
 coming). By Mr. Melville's courtesy I was enabled to read a transcript of Alasi 
 etFirouzKahand.Barkiarokh; Alasi and Zulkais appeared in the English Review. 
 Other works are unpublished, including a Liber Veritatis, which is ' likely to 
 remain ' so, as it is a dissection of the heraldic claims of sundry noble families. 
 See for Al-Raoui, ' from the Arabic,' Redding, i. 217 foil. See p. 456^osf, ad fin. 
 
 p. 208. travel. G. T. Bettany's ed. (1891) of Vathek contains Dreams, etc. 
 
 p. 209. Byron. See his note on the Siege of Corinth, where a passage is 
 adapted from Vathek ; and Moore's note to Childe Harold, i. 22, where a diary 
 of Byron is cited praising the ' correctness of costume, beauty of description, 
 and power of imagination ' of Beckford ; the stanza itself ; the allusion in The 
 Giaour to the fiery hearts, and in Manfred (ii. 4) to the hall of Arhuanes ; also 
 Redding, Memoirs, i. 243 : 'Byron complimented me on the tale more than 
 once, especially on Eblis.' 
 
 p. 211. the composition of Caleb Williams. In the preface (1832) to the 
 reprint of Fleetiuood Godwin adds that the use of the first person in his stories 
 was suited to his ' vein of delineation,' which is ' the analysis of the private and 
 internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting-knife in 
 tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive ' : no bad description of the 
 psychological novel, as yet hardly a distinct species. 
 
 p. 213, note 1. books on the French Revolution (by John Moore). His View of 
 Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany (1778) is an early 
 sketch ; the Journal during a Residence in France (1793) is more important. 
 The first of these is in vol. i. of Moore's Works (7 vols., 1820) ; the second in 
 voL iii. ; Zduco in vol. v. (and in Barbauld's British Novelists, vols. xxxiv.-v.) ; 
 another story, Mordaunt, in vol. vii. 
 
 p. 213, note 2. Mrs. Radcliffe. The anonymous Memoir in her Posthumous
 
 NOTES 437 
 
 Works, etc., 4 TO!S., 1833, contains the passages quoted in text from her journals 
 (i. 20, 53, 59-60) ; besides Oaston, and the metrical St. Alban's Abbey. A 
 Journey through Holland, etc. . . . made in the, summer of 1794 (2 vols., 1795), 
 describes also a tour to the English lakes. There are no modern reprints of 
 the novels in full, but many distinctive extracts from Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, and 
 Maturin can be found in Talcs of Mystery, ed. Saintsbury (1891). 
 
 p. 215. Lewis. See Life and Corresp. (2 vols., 1839). The Bravo of Venice 
 (1804), and the drama The Castle Spectre (1798) may be named also ; and the 
 Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (1834). For Byron's opinion of Lewis, 
 see his Letters and Journah (ed. R. E. Prothero, 1898-1900), ii. 3C8 : ' the worst 
 parts of The Monk. . . . These descriptions ought to have been written by 
 Tiberius at Caprea they are forced the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary,' 
 etc. On Lewis himself, ib., pp. 315-18 ; the quotation, kindly and humorous, 
 like Scott's MS. note accompanying, is from Byron's Detached Thoughts. Scott 
 oddly says, ' He had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I ever heard finer 
 than Byron's.' This exceeds ; but Lewis's real power of cadence is remarked 
 on by Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, iii. 92. 
 
 p. 21G. The Vampyre. A precise account of this affair is given in The Diary 
 of John William Polidori, edited by W. M. Rossetti (1911), pp. 11-23, 125-6. 
 Byron's tale, a fragment, was afterwards printed by him at the end of Mazeppa, 
 but meantime Polidori's, which is developed from Byron's hints, though in a 
 different form of narrative, was published in the New Monthly Magazine, April 
 1819 ; it is there attributed to Byron, and won vogue in consequence, and Byron 
 disclaimed it. Mr. Rossetti exonerates Polidori from having been privy to 
 the false ascription of authorship ; and Polidori himself denied the charge in 
 print. 
 
 p. 217, note 1. Maturin. His stories do not seem to have been reprinted 
 after his lifetime, except Montorio in 1841 (Ballantyne's Library), and Melmoth, 
 of which an edition appeared (3 vols.) in 1892, with a valuable anonymous 
 biography and bibliography. 
 
 p. 217, note 2. befriended by Scott. The story is in Lockhart, and Scott's 
 reviews of some of Maturin's novels are reprinted in his Prose Works (1851), 
 xviiL 157-208. 
 
 p. 217, note 3. and Byron. See Letters of Byron, ed. Prothero (1898-1900\ 
 iy. 171-2, for Byron on Coleridge's attack on Bertram, which appeared at the 
 end of the Biographia Litcraria (1817). Byron had caused Bertram to be 
 acted at Drury Lane. 
 
 p. 217, note 4. condemns Rousseau. In Th? Wild Irish Boy (1608), i. 263, 
 the undesirable siren lady of the tale exhibits a library consisting of Rousseau's 
 novels and Lc Coutrat social, works by Cre"billon and Diderot, and (Jodwin's 
 Political Justice. Later (iii. 166-8) Bdinda is eulogised. 
 
 p. 218, note 1. The Fatal Revenge. Published, like the two succeeding 
 novels, under the name of Dennis Jasper Murphy. 
 
 p. 218, note 2. Planche. In Portraits littSraircs (1836), i. 47, art. 'Maturin.' 
 Later, Planche says that posterity will place Bertram between Faust and 
 Manfred; but, we may ask, where is it now? He also speaks, aptly enough, 
 of Maturin's fault, 'une sorte d'exube'rance fastueuse particuliere a son pays 
 . . . 1'emphase des images et le gout des paralogismes." 
 
 p. 220, note 1. never put into words but once. It is indicated in the story of
 
 438 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Walberg, Melmoth (ed. 1892), iii. 133, though not even here either by Melmoth 
 or the person tempted. ' What shall a man give in exchange for his soul 1 
 Oh ! let us starve, die, rot before your eyes, rather than that you should seal 
 your perdition by that horrible ' 
 
 p. 220, note 2. 'none have consented. 1 In the preface to the first edition 
 Maturin gives a passage from one of his own sermons as the key to the book : 
 ' At this moment is there one of us present however we may have departed from 
 the Lord, disobeyed His will, and disregarded His word is there one of us who 
 would, at this moment, accept all that man can bestow, or earth afford, to resign 
 the hope of his salvation ? no, there is not one not such a fool on earth, were 
 the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the oifer.' I owe this quotation to a 
 dissertation by Willy Muller, C. E. M.'a Fatal Revenge . . . imd Melmoth the 
 Wanderer ; ein Beitrag zur Gothic Romance, Weida (1908). Dr. Miiller gives 
 a full analysis of both tales, tracing their connections with Lewis, Mrs. Rad- 
 clifle, etc. 
 
 p. 221. Hugo and Balzac. For the influence of Maturin in France see 
 Charles Bonnier, Milieux d'Art (1910, privately printed), pp. 76-86. Dr. 
 Bonnier gives a translation in French verse of one of the best passages of 
 Bertram, suppressed after representation in the printed copies, and quoted in 
 Scott's review ; and traces the many allusions to Melmoth in Balzac, who in 
 his early tale, L' Elixir de longue Vie, couples him with Manfred, Faust, and 
 Don Juan, and continues his story in Melmoth reconcilie a VEglise. ' L'iclee de 
 la nouvelle de Balzac est la transmigration de ce pouvoir que posse'dait Melmoth, 
 de cette e"nergie, passant de corps en corps, et finissant, dans le transfert, par 
 s'affaiblir et s'e"teindre.' This notion, as Dr. Bonnier points out, is used by 
 R. L. Stevenson in The, Bottle Imp. The whole essay is one of much instruc- 
 tion for the student of Maturin ; the allusions to him in Hugo and De Vigny 
 are indicated ; also his influence on Poe. 
 
 p. 223. the credit is Hogg's. See Athenaum, 16th Nov. 1895. Mrs. Garden, 
 Hogg's daughter, there wrote that she had the MS., which was all in Hogg's 
 hand ; this in rejoinder to suggestions of Lockhart's participation made in the 
 IJlust. London News, Nov. 1894, and in Macmillan's Mag., Sept. 1889. I owe 
 these references to the kindness of the Rev. Charles S. Christie of Cults. 
 
 p. 224. Barrett, The Heroine. Reprinted 1909, with introduction by Sir 
 W. Raleigh. 
 
 p. 226. Baron Munchausen. There are many editions, but the standard one 
 is T. Seccombe's (1895), illustrated by W. Strang and J. B. Clark. Mr. 
 Seccombe's learned introduction is a pleasant guide through the mystifications 
 of the story. 
 
 p. 227. no such mental movement. See a good passage in A. C. Bradley, 
 Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), ' The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth,' 
 pp. 178-180 : 'But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the superiority to pre- 
 judice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to ideas, the atmosphere that is 
 all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we do not find. 
 Can we imagine any one of those four either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley 
 was by the doctrines of Godwin 1 Could any of them have seen in the French 
 Revolution no more significance than Scott appears to have detected ? How 
 cramped are the attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets 
 towards the Christian religion,' etc.
 
 NOTES 439 
 
 p. 228. Thomas Reid. The standard edition of his Work$ is Sir William 
 Hamilton's, first published in 1803. The edition cited here is that of 1846 ; the 
 passage quoted is on p. 380 ; the preface to the Enquiry (p. 95) gives Reid's 
 own account of the effect of Hume's Treatise on his mind ; for the discussion of 
 taste, grandeur, etc., see pp. 492-7. The most useful sketch, for the present 
 purpose, that I have found is in Hb'ffding, Hist, of Mod. Philos. (Eng. tr., vol. i. 
 pp. 449 foil.) ; and see art. on Reid by A. Seth in Ency. Brit., 9th and also 
 llth ed. 
 
 p. 230. Dugald Stewart. Works (10 vols., 1854-8), edited by Sir \V. Hamilton. 
 The following references are from the 1877 reprint of this : on the Beautiful, 
 the Sublime, and Taste, v. 190 foil. ; on the Picturesque, ib., p. 230 foil, (see note 
 ante to p. 14) ; on Imagination, ii. 431 foil. ; and on Wit, ii. 270 foil. For 
 Stewart and other philosophers, reference may be made once for all to Sir L. 
 Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 1876 and 1902), 
 which it is idle to praise. 
 
 p. 231. Thomas Brown. The attacks by Sir W. Hamilton in his Discussions 
 (1852) and elsewhere on Brown's philosophy are vigorous, while J. S. Mill, in 
 his Examination of Hamilton, speaks highly of Brown. His Poetical Workf 
 appeared in 1820 (4 vols.). 
 
 p. 233. Sir J. Reynolds. Malone edited his literary works in 2 vols., 1797. 
 
 p. 234. Burke. The edition here cited of the Works is that in 'Bohn's 
 Standard Library' (G vols.) and of the Speeches in the same (2 vols.). Select 
 Works, ed. E. J. Payne (3 vols., 1897), with valuable notes. The old editions 
 came out 1792-1827, the Correspondence in 1844. Sir J. Prior's Life is in 
 Bohn's ed. T. MacKnight's Life and Times of E. B. (3 vols., 18. r )8-60) is 
 also of value ; but as political and personal studies of Burke the two books 
 (1867 and ('Eng. Men of Letters') 1879) by Lord Morley remain authoritative, 
 along with Sir J. F. Stephen's three papers in Horae Sabbaticae (Third Series, 
 1892). 
 
 p. 235. The Sublime and Beautiful. On all this see Bernard Bosanquet 
 History of Aesthetic (1892). Burke's work deeply influenced Leasing and Men- 
 delssohn and other German theorists, as well as the English and Scottish philo- 
 sophers. See on Sir U. Price in text (ante, p. 17) and on Dugald Stewart 
 (ante, p. 230). Burke's other early writings, such as the Annual Register and 
 Abridgment of the History of England, do not come into our chronicle. 
 
 p. 238. Our Indian government. . . . Work.*, ii. 197. 
 
 p. 240. his best exponent. Lord Morley in Enry. Brit, filth ed., .r.\ 
 
 p. 241, note 1. ' Dark and inscrutable.' Workt, iii. 79. 
 
 p. 241, note 2. ' natural rights ' . . . 'the social covenant.' A few texts, at 
 successive dates, may be referred to, showing the development of Burke'-: 
 attitude towards these conceptions. (1) 1777 : L>tt<-r to the Sheriffs r>f Bristol : 
 definitions of a 'free government' ('for any practical purpose it i- what the 
 people think so') and of the 'extreme of liberty' (Workf, ii. 29-30\ (2; 1777 : 
 Address to the King : ' the people at that time [1R88] re-entered into their 
 original rights ... to the free choice, therefore, of the people, without either 
 king or parliament, we owe that happy establishment . . .' (Workt, v. 473. 
 (3) 1783 : Spetch on East India Bill: 'The rights of men. that is to ?ay, thr 
 natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things' and are still better if 
 'chartered rights' ; and, ' if the abuse is proved, the contract is broken, and we
 
 440 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 re-enter into all our rights, that is, into the exercise of all our duties' (Works, 
 ii. 176-9 the whole passage must be studied). (4) 1788 : Speech on Warren 
 Hastings : ' the primeval, indefeasible, unalterable law of nature and of nations,' 
 etc. (Speeches, i. 101 foil.). For later developments, and Burke's defences of 
 his consistency, see e.g. (5) 1790 : Reflections (Works, ii. 331-5) on the 'natural 
 rights of the people' which are 'almost always sophistically confounded with 
 their power,' and on the ' artificial ' character of government ; and (ii. 368-9) on 
 the 'contract,' now regarded as a 'partnership' between all the generations. 
 (6) 1791 : Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs : the 'new Whig' theory 
 ( Works, iii. 45) that the contract does not ' bind posterity.' 
 
 p. 242. the original victims. See the Observations on the Reflections by 
 William A. Miles, Pitt's diplomatic emissary to Paris in 1790 : Corresp. of W. 
 A. Miles on the French Revol. (1890), i. 265-270. Miles shrewdly points out 
 that Burke's attack on Price's sermon had given currency to that obscure dis- 
 course ; that the attack on the democratic party in France was put down ' to 
 the account of the British Government ' ; ' and hence the idea of our country 
 being hostile to the Kevolution in France is confirmed.' Burke, he adds, ought 
 to have established the 'general satisfaction of the English people with their 
 own constitution and government,' and the impertinence of recommending a 
 change. Miles was well posted for observation, and his few pages are one of 
 the best criticisms on Burke, so far as regards the impression produced by the 
 Reflections. He wrote, however, a scurrilous attack on the Letter to a Noble 
 Lord, called A Letter to Henry Duncombe, Esq. (1796). 
 
 p. 243. retort of Mackintosh. In Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), pp. 61-2. See the 
 whole passage. 
 
 p. 247, note 1. a whole page. Third Letter on a Regicide Peace, in Works, 
 T. 276-7. 
 
 p. 247, note 2. 'harpies.' Letter to a Noble Lord, in Works, v. 120-1. 
 
 p. 247, note 3. tapestry. Third Letter on a Regicide Peace, in Works, 
 v. 266-7. 
 
 p. 248. 'It is a remark . . .' See Appeal, etc., in Works, iii. 92. 
 
 p. 249. 'But I cannot conceive . . .' See Letter to Sheriffs, in Works, ii. 14. 
 
 p. 250. 'Party . . .' See Present Discontents, in Works, i. 375-6. 
 
 p. 251. 'Qod forbid . . .' See On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in Works, 
 iii. 141. 
 
 p. 252, note 1. 'peace.' Works, i. 453-4. 
 
 p. 252, note 2. the historian of literary criticism. Saintsbury, Short Hist, 
 of Eng. Lit. (1898), p. 630 : ' a very "curious, and, until his example made it 
 imitable, nearly unique faculty of building up an argument or a picture by a 
 succession of complementary strokes, not added at haphazard, but growing out 
 of one another.' 
 
 p. 253. the example of the enemy. Works, ii. 62. 
 
 p. 255. one passage. Works, iii. 104-5. 
 
 p. 259, note 1. cross-fire aimed at Burke. The following are some of the 
 titles : The Rights of Kings (1791), assigned to Wolcot ; Observations on the 
 Reflections, etc., by Mrs. Macaulay (1790) ; A Vindication of the Rights of 
 Men (1790), by Mary Wollstonecraft ; Philosophical Reflections on the Late 
 Revolution . . . addressed to Dr. Priestley (1790), by J. Courtenay, M.P. (a curious 
 ironic reductio ad absurdum of monarchical theory ; ' Socrates might have saved
 
 NOTES 441 
 
 himself and his country . . . by supporting the civil and ecclesiastical establish- 
 ment of Athens,' etc.); A Letter from Earl Stanhope (1790) ; Short Observa- 
 tions on ths, . . . Refections (1790), anon. ('I am at a Ions to recognise the 
 bold and ardent assertor of American Independence,' etc.) : Thoughts on 
 Government, occasioned by . . . Reflection* (1790), anon. ('Mr. Burke thinks 
 there must be blood. I will not say, Edmund, thy wish is father to that 
 thought' ! and the like) ; A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Esq., from 
 a Dissenting Country Attorney, in Defence of hi* Civil Profession and Religions 
 Dissent (1791), anon. Letter to Edmund Burke, by Sir Brooke Boothby, Bart. 
 (1791). For the tract attributed to Person, see Beloe's Sexagenarian (1817), 
 voL ii., ad fin., ' Porsoniana.' 
 
 p. 259, note 2. Mrs. Macaulay. 'Their Amazonian allies, headed by Kate 
 Macaulay and the virago Barbauld, whom Mr. Burke calls our poisiardes, spit 
 their rage at eighteenpence a head, and will return to Fleet Ditch, more 
 fortunate in being forgotten than their predecessors, immortalised in the 
 Dunciad.' (H. Walpole to Miss Berry, Dec. 20, 1790.) 
 
 p. 260, note 1. Horsley's tracts. These appeared in the years 1783-5. The 
 issue was historical rather than doctrinal, Priestley having denied to the earlier 
 Christians a belief in Christ's divinity. The bishop, with many professions of 
 charity and prayers against heat, falls foul of his opponent (who had certainly 
 given the provocation, as regards tone) with an icy fury. 
 
 p. 260, note 2. Horsley'a liberalism. See his Speeches in Parliament, pos- 
 thumously published by his son in 1813. It is not clear how much they are 
 edited ; but some of them are masterpieces of lucid and close, as well as of 
 graceful, exposition. Horsley pleaded against the slave-trade, and against the 
 penal laws imposed on Catholics ; always with politic qualifications that give 
 him the substance of what he wants. Slavery in itself he does not absolutely 
 oppose, nnd Catholics he will not admit to civic office. Less hampered, Horsley's 
 really high gifts might have produced some piece of real eloquence, or even of 
 literature. 
 
 p. 260, note 3. utility. See note 3 to p. 278, post. The definition had gained 
 some currency between Priestley's use of it and Bentham's ; see J. Cartwright, 
 Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated (2nd ed., 1777), pp. 81-2 : 
 'The ideas of any positive rights in the people (say they) . . . appear to us to 
 have no absolute existence in nature. . . . As the greatest attainable happiness 
 to the greatest number is the grand end of all the laws of morality and prudence, 
 so what you term positive rights of the people are probably to be considered 
 BO otherwise than as natural means to the end in view.' This tract (first c-d., 
 1776), which pleads for 'equal and complete representation 1 and annual parlia- 
 ments, is regarded as the first, or a very early, formulation of the claims which 
 later became 'points of the charter.' Cartwright penned much else in the 
 same cause which is of historical note : but he is a lumbering writer. 
 
 p. 260, note 4. Priestley. Fforit.*, ed. J. T. Rutt (1817-32), in 26 vols. Vol. 
 v., Hist, of Corruptions ; vol. xxii. contains, besides the Letters to Burke, an 
 Essay on the First Principles of Government, nnd the Free Address in favour of 
 removing Catholic disabilities (1769). The Duty of Forgiveness of 7n;urv. 
 (1791), vol. xv., is the most famous of Priestley's sermons, uttered after the mob 
 had wrecked his house at Birmingham in resentment at the Letters to Burke. 
 This discourse, admirably composed, urges that 'no malevolence of other?
 
 442 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 should extinguish our benevolence to them' ; and Priestley takes care not to 
 minimise the sins he is forgiving. His text, ' forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do,' well indicates the spirit of the work ; with all his qualities 
 Priestley was not strong in the sense of humour, or he might have avoided the 
 parallels implied. 
 
 p. 261, note 1. 'philosophy or medicine.' Works, xxii. 236 (Letter XIV.). 
 These hopes of the doctrinaires could not be more naively set forth than in 
 Eichard Price's discourse, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement, 
 etc., p. 25. The grounds for hope are the alleviation of the horrors of war, 
 ' the softened spirit of popery,' and ' the extinction of the order of Jesuits ' ; 
 together with the diffusion of knowledge created by printing and better naviga- 
 tion ; and lastly, the establishment, ' at this moment going forward, of an equal 
 representation of the different provinces of France.' These things ' render the 
 present state of the world unspeakably different from what it was. They show 
 us man a milder animal than he was, and the world outgrowing its evils, 
 superstition giving way, Antichrist failing, and the Millennium hastening.' This 
 was in 1787. 
 
 p. 261, note 2. Mackintosh. The Miscellaneous Works, in 3 vols., 1846, 
 contain most of his important works, except the History of England and the 
 History of the Revolution of 1688. The Peltier and other speeches are in 
 Works, vol. iii. Memoirs of the Life of the Right Hon. Sir James Mackintosh, by 
 his son, R. J. Mackintosh, 2 vols., 1835, is a rather flaccid and windy compilation, 
 but contains long extracts from the letters and diaries, which are our best means 
 of beholding this elusive man, so much buried behind his books and attainments. 
 
 p. 263, note 1. review* his own revulsions. Life, i. 129-136 (in second ed., 
 1836). The letter written from Bombay in 1804 is the most interesting docu- 
 ment on Mackintosh's mind. Among notable men disenchanted of their first 
 hopes in the Revolution he mentions Klopstock, Kant, Lavater, and Alfieri. 
 Of his lectures he says : ' I rebounded from my original opinions too far 
 towards the opposite extreme.' But ' can I be certain that the establishment of 
 monarchical despotism in France, and the horrible effects of tyranny and 
 imposture around me in this country [India] may not have driven my under- 
 standing once more to a point a little on the democratic side of the centre ? I 
 own I rather suspect myself of this ; and though I labour to correct myself of 
 this, etc.' Such a watching of his own mind, as if it were a compass oscillating 
 under a blow, is Mackintosh all over. For a virulent attack on Mackintosh's 
 return towards Liberalism, see Anti-Jacobin Review, 1814, xxvii. 356, in which 
 his Vindiciae Infernae (sic) are alluded to. 
 
 p. 263, note 2. attest this reputation. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence 
 of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord John Russell (1853-56, 8 vols.), vi. 90. See also Lord 
 J. Russell's account in the preface of the same vol., pp. xi-xii. This versatility 
 of Mackintosh's was evidently his note in the Whig set ; ' epigrams, farces, and 
 novels were not less familiar to him than the treatises of Grotius or the annals 
 of Thuanus.' And again, in somewhat fatuous (unless it be ironic) style, Sir 
 John observes that ' his mind seemed to comprehend in distinct but harmonious 
 method the whole history of human thought, from the earliest speculations of 
 the friends of Job to the latest subtleties of the disciples of Kant.' For other 
 descriptions, see Macaulay's in his well-known Essay ; and references in Scott's 
 Journal.
 
 NOTES 443 
 
 p. 264, note 1. Hazlitt on Mackintosh. In The Spirit of the Age (1825). 
 
 p. 264, note 2. Paine. Moncure D. Conway's Life of Thomas Paine (2 rols., 
 1892), and his edition of The Writings of T. P. (4 vols., 1894-96), are authori- 
 tative as to facts, and clear away many transmitted and injurious libels upon 
 Paine ; a service that may excuse much diffuse hero-worship and want of 
 perspective ; Paine's importance is taken overmuch at his own valuation, and 
 he is made out to be a great Positivist before Comte. 
 
 p. 267, note 1. as much religious as political. This is well shown by Con way, 
 Life, i. 232, 239 ; ii. 201. 
 
 p. 267, note 2. 'religion of humanity.' The phrase occurs in the seventh 
 paper of The Crisis, 21st Nov. 1778. See Life, ii. 206. 
 
 p. 267, note 3. his scanty creed. Paine's deism is enlarged upon in his 
 replies to adversaries ; Life, ii. 263, 266-7. His ' hope of happiness hereafter ' 
 is piquantly expanded ; Life, ii. 370 : 'My own opinion is, that those whose 
 lives have been spent in doing good, and endeavouring to make their fellow- 
 mortals happy, for this is the only way in which we can serve God, will be 
 happy hereafter ; and that the very wicked will meet with some punishment. 
 But those who are neither good nor bad, or are too insignificant for notice will 
 be dropt entirely ... so insignificant, both in character and conduct, as not 
 to be worth the trouble of damning or saving, or of raising from the dead.' 
 
 p. 268. shared in the revulsion. The passage is quoted in Life, ii. 301. 
 
 p. 269, note 1. Godwin. Works seldom reprinted. For bibliographical and 
 other details, and a good account of Godwin's foes and controversies, see R. 
 Gourg, William Godwin (1908), an elaborate dissertation. For biography, see 
 C. Kegan Paul, W. G., His Friends and Contemporaries (2 vols., 1876) ; 
 Stephen, Eng. Thought in the Eighteenth Century (ed. 1902), ii. 264-81 ; the 
 same author's Godivin and Shelley, in Hours in a Library, vol. i. ; and Hazlitt, 
 Spirit of the Age. For the decline of Godwin's repute in his lifetime, see too 
 James and Horace Smith, Horace in London (1813), who for once bcly their 
 taste and good humour by parodying Cowper's tenderest lyric (see post, ii. 281 : 
 
 Thy Muse, for meretricious feats, 
 Does quarto penance now in sheets, 
 Or, clothing parcels, roams the streets, 
 My Godwin ! etc. 
 
 For Godwin as a 'prince of spongers' see Graham Wallas, Life of Francit 
 Place (1898), pp. 59-G1, and Shelley's correspondence. 
 
 p. 269, note 2. Crabb Robinson. See his Diary (ed. 1872), i. 18 ; also many 
 references in its index. 
 
 p. 271. Condorcet. The Etquistt (Tim Tableau historique dcs Progrh ilt 
 1'Etprit humain came out in 1794 (Eng. tr., 1795). It would have saved 
 Godwin some of his errors if he had been able to digest this potent book ; for 
 though it worships the same deity of Reason, which to Condorcet means chiefly 
 the scientific and mathematical reason, it is yet founded on the conception, 
 often largely and powerfully expounded, of the historic growth of Reason. 
 Godwin and his like talk as if Reason had been discovered during the last ten 
 years. Condorcet's large perspectives out of which, it is true, he omits 
 enormous tracts, and which are therefore sometimes seen awry appear to
 
 444 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 hare been strangely unknown both to the philosophers and the poets in England, 
 whether conservative or revolutionary ; an ignorance much to the detriment of 
 both sides. See F. J. Picavet, Les Ideologies (1891), pp. 101-116,'for the position 
 of Condorcet amongst the theorists around him. 
 
 p. 273. Mary Wollstonecraft. The little trail of revolutionary ' feminism,' as 
 it would now be called, that she left behind her, may be studied (from a blindly 
 hostile point of view) in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (1799, iii. 
 27 foil.) in a notice of an anonymous poem called The Unsexed Females, a work 
 modelled on The Pursuits of Literature. Here are pilloried Helen Maria 
 Williams ; Miss Yearsley, a milkmaid who had written rebellious verses ; 
 Mary Hays, authoress of the stories The Victim of Prejudice and Emma 
 Courtney : while Charlotte Smith and Mrs. Barbauld are mournfully rebuked 
 for their gleams of sympathy with radicalism : 
 
 The veteran Barbauld caught the strain, 
 And found her songs of love, her lyrics vain . . . 
 And Charlotte Smith resigned her power to please, 
 Poetic fancy, and poetic ease, etc. 
 
 It is instructive to glance for a moment into these forgotten, weed-choked 
 backwaters of literature. 
 
 p. 274. rights of women. Some of the most thoroughgoing democratic writers 
 were unspeakably shocked at the imputation that their principles led to the 
 female franchise. See Cartwright, Legislative Rights (seconded., 1777), pp. 46-7 : 
 ' I will beg leave to refer the Dean to the Scriptures, and the other gentleman 
 to the law of nature and the common law of England, and both of them to the 
 fair sex, in order to settle this point. . . . Women know too well what God and 
 nature require of them, to put in so absurd a claim for a share in the rights of 
 election. Their privileges and power are of another kind ; and they know their 
 sphere ' (an early use of a familiar cliche}. See for the whole movement 
 W.Lyon Blease, The Emancipation of English Women (1910). 
 
 p. 275. Arthur Young. The Travels in France were edited, with an interesting 
 preface, by Miss M. Betham Edwards (ed. 4, 1892) ; and the Autobiography by 
 the same writer (1898). 
 
 p. 277, note 1. Bentham. The standard but dissatisfying edition of the 
 Works is by Sir John Bowring, 11 vols., 1843. The Life is by Bo wring, the 
 introduction on Bentham's 'Style and Method of Thinking' by John Hill 
 Burton. The letters, with the editor's reminiscences, occupy the last two 
 volumes. Bowring includes some of the authorised remaniements by Dumont, 
 retranslated into English (not by Bentham). There are various separate 
 reprints, e.g. of the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1879). Bentham's 
 inimitable Tables, referred to ante, p. 281, are in Bowring's ed. 
 
 p. 277, note 2. capital punishment. See Works, i. 444 foil. ; and Appendix 
 (1830), i. 525, On Death-punishment. 
 
 p. 277, note 3. Helv6tius. Story told by Crabb Robinson, Diary, i. 195 
 (ed. 1872). 
 
 p. 278, note 1. woman. Works, i. 355 (s.v. ' Marriage '). 
 
 p. 278, note 2. Benthamism. The expository literature is very large ; it must 
 suffice to name Stephen, The Eng. Utilitarians, voL i. 1900 an admirable 
 account both of Bentham's life and of his theories and influence ; Elie Hal<5vy,
 
 NOTES 445 
 
 La Formation du Radicalismc phUosophique, vol. i., ' La Jeunesse de Bentham ' ; 
 1901 ; voL ii., 1904. This is a most minute analysis of the antecedents, views, 
 and influence of Bentham, with voluminous pieces juttificatives. See too C. M. 
 Atkinson, Jeremy Bentham, his Life and Work,n.d. a more recent study, chiefly 
 biographical, and slight on the theoretical side. John Hill Burton's Benthami- 
 ana, 1843, is a hodge-podge of extracts from Bentham's works ; there is room 
 vaa Mill implies) for a really good, characteristic, and ordered selection, which 
 would be of value from the literary as well as the speculative point of view. 
 The essay on Bentham (London and Westm. Review, 1838), reprinted in John 
 Stuart Mill's Dissertations and Discussions (1874), vol. i., written by an escaped 
 but appreciative and judicial Benthamite, in the review that Beutham founded, 
 remains the best summing-up on the subject. See A. V. Dicey, Lair and Public 
 Opinion in England, 1905, pp. 125-209, for an authoritative picture of Ben- 
 tham's influence, direct and indirect, on actual legislation and affairs ; and the 
 facts ho mentions justify Mill's eulogies on Bentham in this field ten times 
 over. 
 
 p. 278, note 3. formula. For debt to Priestley see note 3 to p. 2GO ante. 
 Bentham, Works, x. 142 (from Commonplace Book): 'Priestley was the first 
 (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth : 
 That the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals 
 and legislation ' (see note ad loc. on Beccaria's phrase, ' la maseima felicita divisa 
 nel maggior numero '). So Works, x. 567, ' I was at a fault myself till I 
 stumbled upon " utility " ; and this was imperfect till I found " greatest happi- 
 ness" in Priestley, who did not turn it into a system.' See too Deontology, i. 
 300. The origin of the phrase has been tracked to Hutcheson's Inquiry into 
 our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Bentham later used the term the 'greatest- 
 happiness principle.' 
 
 p. 279. Fragment on Government. See ed. by F. C. Montague (1891). 
 
 p. 279. wrote much he did not publish. See Report of the Bentham MSS. at 
 University College, London, icith a Catalogue, by Thomas Whittaker (1892) ; and 
 further examination of the same in Halevy, La Jeunesse df B., notes passim, 
 which also include many references to the Beutham MSS. in the British 
 Museum. 
 
 p. 280. Dumont's recasts in French. Traitts de Legislation <U M. Jercmit Ben- 
 tham, 1802, p. 280. For some of the results see Sir L. Stephen, The Kng. I'tilitar- 
 ians, i. 220 foil. Bentham says that over 40,000 copies were sold in Paris f<>r tin- 
 South American trade alone. He came into relations with American and Spanish 
 legislators, and Stanhope took a copy to Greece of the TMe of the Springs of 
 Action a somewhat futile travelling bible, no doubt, in such a place ; liyronV 
 opinion of Stanhope ami his liberal nostrums is an amusing commentary. Some 
 precise notes on the dealings of Dumont with Bentham's material may be found 
 in Halcvy, op. cit., i. 369 foil. (Appendix), with examples. Dumont, it appears 
 besides selecting, fusing, and smoothing what he found, suppressed .some of the 
 more drastic passages ; but his great service was to lop the superfluous branches 
 of the Tree of Porphyry, and the needless scholastic subdivisions of the original*. 
 
 p. 282, note 1. Deontology. Compiled and published by Bowrini: in 1834, 
 with much ill editing; the work did not give satisfaction .see J. S. Mill's 
 essay). 
 
 p. 282, note 2. human queer old patriarch. There are many descriptions :
 
 446 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 e.g. by Crabb Robinson, Diary (ed. 1872), ii. 124-5 ; by Bowring, in Works, 
 vol. xi. ; by B. Hush, Residence at the Court of London (1833), which gives a 
 most genial impression ; and by W. Parry, Last Days of Lord Byron (1825) ; 
 this is an inflated, doubtful production, with a vividly farcical account of 
 Bentham's behaviour in his old age. 
 
 p. 283, note 1. Paley. The references are to Works, ed. Chalmers, 5 vols., 
 1819 : they were first collected in 1805. 
 
 p. 283, note 2. derivative. See Stephen, Eng. Thought in the Eighteenth 
 Century, ii. 121 foil. The connection of Paley with the secular English tradition 
 of Locke and Hume on the one side, and with the theological one on the other 
 (especially with Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature, to which Paley owns his 
 debt), is very clearly shown. See the same work, i. 407 foil., for the theological 
 side of Paley ; and Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, p. 142, on 
 Paley's conservatism. 
 
 p. 284, note 1. 'minus a belief in hellfire.' Stephen, op. cit., ii. 125. 
 
 p. 284, note 2. a curiously qualified optimist. Paley is humane, and speaks 
 against slavery and duelling ( Works, i. 172, 198) ; while his defences of the 
 existing House of Lords (i. 429) and of the laws of capital punishment are 
 sufficiently astonishing, and show the gulf between him and Bentham. He 
 believes that men should be hanged for stealing sheep, but not in all cases ; 
 it is more ' useful ' that they should be deterred by a severe law which only 
 occasionally makes examples than by a less comprehensive one which works 
 regularly. As to ' optimism,' see Evidences, in Works, iii. 458 foil Paley's 
 view of life as a state neither of happiness, nor of misery, nor of punishment, 
 nor of retribution, but of ' moral probation,' is twice worked out (in Nat. 
 Theology, Works, iv. 411, and in Sermons, No. xxxiii., Works, v. 438). 
 
 p. 285. enthusiasm. Works, v. 183 foil., sermon ' On Conversion.' For the 
 character of Christ, see Works, iii. 303 foil. 
 
 p. 286. James Mill. See J. S. Mill's Autobiography, and A. Buin, Jamex 
 Mitt (1882). The standard edition of the Analysis is that with notes and 
 amplifications by J. S. Mill, Bain, Findlater, and Grote. See Stephen, Eng. 
 Utilitarians, vol. ii. 
 
 p. 287. Malthua. It must suffice to refer to J. Bonar, Malthus and his Work 
 (1885), and to the memoir by Otter in Malthus's Principles of Pol. Econ. (ed. 
 1836). 
 
 p. 289, note 1. Ricardo. Works, ed. M'Culloch (1846) with memoir ; and ed. 
 E. C. K. Gonner (1891). 
 
 p. 289, note 2. scornfully denies. See Essay on Parliamentary Reform 
 (posthumously reprinted by M'Culloch, Works, p. 551 foil.). 
 
 p. 290. William Cobbett. The best comprehensive picture, given largely in 
 Cobbett's own words, is W. C., a Study of his Life, by E. I. Carlyle, 1904 ; this 
 supersedes most of E. Smith's Life, 2 vols., 1878. The Rural Hides have 
 been edited by Pitt Cobbett (1885), and in an abridged ed. by J. Telford, 2 vols. 
 [1910] ; the Advice to Young Men lias often been reprinted. A Selection from 
 the political writings by Cobbett's son appeared in 6 vols. in 1835. The English 
 Grammar has had many editions. The later, the repentant sketcli of Paine, can 
 be found at the end of Moucure Conway's Life of Paine. 
 
 p. 291. still disputed reasons. See E. I. Carlyle, op. cit., Ch. iv. 
 
 p. 295. male and female pedagogues. Their energies lie mostly outside the
 
 NOTES 447 
 
 story of literature, though within that of literary society and of the progress of 
 pedagogy. For this reason little or nothing is said in this book of Mrs. Delany, 
 Miss Seward, Mrs. Barbauld ; nor yet of Lord Kames, with his Loose Hints on 
 Education (1782), J. Bennet's Strictures on Female Education (1788), and the 
 like ; but a full summary of their notions can be seen in \V. Lyon Blease, 
 Emancipation of English Women, pp. 50 foil. See note to p. 274 ante. 
 
 p. 297. Scott's poetry. The Poetical Works, ed. J. Logic Robertson (1904), 
 is a complete edition. There are many earlier ones, from Scott's own (12 volt., 
 1820) and Lockhart's (12 vols., 1833-4) onwards. Lockhart, Memoirs of the 
 Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), the Journal (ed. David Douglas, 2 vols. 1890), 
 and the Familiar Letters (same editor, 2 vols., 1893), give most of the original 
 material for biography. The Scott literature is very large : amongst separate 
 studies may be named those of R. H. Hutton ('Eng. Men of Letters,' 1878) ; of 
 G. Saintsbury (' Famous Scots ' Series, 1897) ; of Walter Bagehot, in Lit. Studies 
 (ed. 1898, vol. ii. ' The Waverley Novels,' originally published 1858). A partly 
 hostile account, from the cosmopolitan-radical point of view, will be found in 
 Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (Eng. tr., 
 1905), iv. 102-27. (Scott, we learn (p. 127), is 'an author whom all grown-up 
 people have read, and no grown-up people read.') For Scott's circle see Mrs. 
 MacCunn's Sir Walter Scott's Friends (1906). See J. Veitch, History and 
 Poetry of the Scottish Border (new ed., 1893), ch. XL, for the ballads. 
 
 p. 299. romancing. See a good summary by H. A. Beers, History of English 
 Romanticism in the XlXth Century (New York, 1902), ch. i. Prof. Beers 
 shows how 'ballads, Gothic romances, Ossianic poetry, the new German 
 literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, ... all find their focus in Scott.' 
 
 p. 301, note 1. Herd. See H. Hecht, Songs from David Herd's MSS. (Edin., 
 1904), for a full account of Herd and his circle, as well as of the bibliography 
 of the Antient ami Modern Scutish Songs, etc., and of the poems borrowed by 
 Scott and Jamieson. In the 1791 ed. there were further changes. 
 
 p. 301, not* 2. John Pinkerton. He confessed to having made the 'second 
 part' of Hardyknute, of which he had remarked (Select Scotish Ballads, i. xli.) 
 that he was 'indebted for most of the stanzas now recovered to the memory of 
 a lady in Lanarkshire.' The Death of Menteith, and Lord Airth'f Complaint, 
 are among other evident inventions. 
 
 p. 302. The Border Minstrelsy. Standard ed. by T. F. Henderson (4 vols., 
 1902) ; a study giving full data for Scott's procedure with his materials. See 
 e.g. i. 219, on Sir Patrick Sjxns ; in. 117, on Piukertou's forgery ; iii. 148, on 
 Katharine Janfarie. 
 
 p. 304. Auld Maitland. The dispute as to the antiquity and authorship of 
 this piece can be read in Border Minstrelsy, ed. Henderson, i. 240-3 ; Lt.-CoL F. 
 Elliot, Trustworthiness of the Border Ballads, etc. (1906 \ and Further Essays 
 on the Border Ballad* (191<>), pp. 219-248 ; and in A. Lang, .Sir W. Srrtt and 
 the Border Minstrelsy (1910), pp. 18-53. Mr. Lang, by producing in full 
 Hogg's and Scott's correspondence, and by other evidence, established if that 
 were needed) Scott's fairness of dealing ; and, in my opinion, disposed >f Col. 
 Elliot's suggestion that he 'palmed off on the public' a ballad he knew to be a 
 fabrication. Mr. Lang offered a convincing plea that the ballad came to Ho<^ 
 in the form in which Hogg passed it on to Scott. 
 
 p. 3O6. Leyden. The Kelso ed. of fVm* in</ Ballads by Dr. John Lfyden
 
 448 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 (1875) contains Scott's admiring, amused, and affectionate Memoir, first 
 published in the Edinburgh Annual Eegister, 1811, and an anonymous 
 Supplementary Memoir, which is flat, but gives many more details, especially 
 about Leyden's work in the East. His longest poem, Scenes of Infancy, 
 which celebrates Teviotdale, has pleasant passages in the taste of Goldsmith. 
 Scott also pays him honour not only in some well-known lines in The Lord of 
 the Isles, canto iv., but in St. Eonan's Well, where Mr. Cargill, who 'knew 
 him well,' calls him ' a lamp too early quenched.' 
 
 p. 308. ballad study . . . during Scott's lifetime. See the Introductory 
 Remarks on Popular Poetry, prefixed by him to the 1830 ed. of the Minstrelsy 
 (see Henderson, vol. iv. ad init.) ; and Mother well's 'historical introduction' 
 to his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (1827). 
 
 p. 309. bristle with Scots. See Lady of the Lake, note xlix., which gives the 
 version by Jamieson of the Danish original of Alice Brand, 'Der ligger en 
 void i Tester Haf,' in ' the old Scottish idiom' ; which is certainly laid on with 
 a trowel, after this manner : 
 
 There liggs a wold in Wester Haf, 
 There a husbande means to bigg, 
 And thither he carries baith hawk and hound, 
 
 There meaning the winter to ligg. 
 ( The wild deer and daes i' the shaiv out). 
 
 Scott naturally shunned this kind of thing : but it was a pity he could not 
 drink deeper of the real Danish ballads, instead of the more or less bastard 
 modern German followings with 'romantic' colouring. The Kjcempeviser, 
 from which Jamieson drew, were published in 1591. 
 
 p. 310, note 1. Peter Buchan. The Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North 
 of Scotland (1828), collected by Buchan with the aid of a 'wight of Homer's 
 craft,' who became somewhat notorious, are praised and accepted as authentic 
 by Scott in his preface to the 1830 ed. of the Minstrelsy. Buchan usually 
 spins out and covers up beyond recognition any genuine material that the 
 wight may have brought him, and has a genius for degrading good stories. 
 
 p. 310, note 2. freer march and versification. See Saintsbury, Hist. Eng. 
 Prosody, iii. 77-83, on Scott as a metrist. 
 
 p. 313. He had heard Christabel recited. See Lockhart, ch. xiii. This 
 was at Lasswade. John Stoddart had the MS. from Allen, Coleridge's friend, 
 and recited it to Scott, who tells of the event in the Introduction (1830) to 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel. The facts are fully given in the edition of the poem 
 by Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (published for Royal Soc. of Literature, 1907), 
 pp. 44-5, who notes that Southey refers to Scott's imitation in a letter to 
 Wynne of March 5, 1805, and that Scott had also admitted it to Jeffrey ; and 
 adds the remark of S. T. C. that ' no insect was ever more like in the colour 
 of its skin and juices to the leaf it fed on than Scott's muse to Scott himself.' 
 This is hardly true of the borrowings in the Lay, which are of quite another, 
 and quasi-tropical, colouring. See post, ii. 150. 
 
 p. 320, note 1. drama. For Scott on his own plays, see Memorials of the 
 Life of Amelia Opie (1854), p. 177. She met Scott in 1816, and he 'was, he 
 said, a proud man, and his pride would never have allowed him to dance 
 attendance on the managers, and consult the varied tastes of actors and others
 
 NOTES 440 
 
 or words to that effect.' He had once planned a tragedy, on the Joanna 
 Baillie model, but, had ho gone on with it, 'he should have had no Jove in it. 
 His hero should have been the uncle of the heroine, a sort of misanthrope, 
 with only one affection in his heart, love for his niece, like a solitary gleam of 
 sunshine, gilding the dark tower of some ruined and lonely building. Never 
 shall I never can I, forget the fine expression of his lifted eye, as he uttered 
 this ! ' Long afterwards (16., p. 339) the admirable lady, then a rigorous 
 Friend, thought it a proof of 'impaired judgment' in Sir Walter that he could 
 'pen down so many oaths in his diary.' 
 
 p. 320, note 2. James Hogg. I have used The Poetical Works of the Ettrick 
 Shepherd (5 vols., 1838-40). The Life by Wilson promised on the title-pages 
 of the first four vols. never came, and on that of the fifth is substituted the 
 words ' with an autobiography.' This includes a memoir by Hogg, somewhat 
 in scraps, and his ' reminiscences ' of Scott, Cunningham, Gait, Lockhart, and 
 Sym. The memoir first appeared in 1821, prefixed to The Mountain Bard 
 (3rd ed.). There is another collection of the poems (18G5-66), which I have not 
 seen. See too the 'Centenary ed.' of Poem,?, by T. Thomson, with Life (1874) ; 
 and Memorials of Hogg, by Mrs. Garden (1884-87). 
 
 p. 320, note 3. Blackwood's Magazine. Hogg states (Memoir, p. Ixvii) that 
 the magazine was due to his inception ; and that he wrote part of the ' Chaldee 
 Manuscript,' which inflamed all Edinburgh, and was promptly withdrawn 
 (p. Ixix) ; and further (p. Ixxvi), that the editors ' printed his name in full to 
 poems, letters, and essays which he himself never saw.' The readers, therefore, 
 of the old files must be wary. 
 
 p. 324. a 'golden treasury.' See that by W. Wallace (1903). 
 
 p. 325. Romance. See, in Introduction to The Bridal of Triermain (1813), 
 'the author's idea of Romantic Poetry as distinguished from Epic. . . . The 
 former comprehends a fictitious narrative, framed and combined at the 
 pleasure of the writer ; beginning and ending as he may judge best ; which 
 neither exacts nor refuses the use of supernatural machinery. . . . The date 
 may be in a remote age, or in the present ; the story may detail the adventures 
 of a prince or peasant.' This is rather negative ; see the quotation (Lady of the 
 Lake, note xxvi.) from the officer who found it 'romantick' in the High- 
 landers to wrap themselves in soaked plaids in order to keep warm. For 
 an earlier use of the term, op. Richard Graves's tale, The Spiritual (Juirott 
 (1772), bk. vi. ch. ii. : 'A garden . . . was laid out in a romantic taste, with 
 a proper mixture of the dUftjro and the jn-nafroso, the cheerful and the gWmy ; 
 tufts of roses, jasmines, and the most fragrant flowering shrubs, witli a 
 serpentine walk of cypresses and laurels, here and there an urn,' etc. 
 
 p. 327. Lady Louisa Stuart. See Familiar Ldtfrx (1891), vol. i. p. 404; also 
 p. 395. Both passages refer to Old Mortality, and here as elsewhere Lady 
 Louisa Stuart is the shrewdest critic among .Scott's friends. 'It surprises one 
 by not sinking into flatness after the return of Morton from Abroad, which was 
 a very slippery place for 1/011, who profess never knowing what you are going 
 to write.' She objected to Claverhouse's use of the word 'sentimental': 
 '"sentiment" and "sentimental" were, I believe, first introduord into the 
 language by Sterne, and are hardly as old as I am.' Scott erased the word. 
 See too Lady Louisa's remarks on Rob Eon, Fain. Ltt., ii. 11 : 'Beginnings 
 signify little, ends signify more . . . the end of this is huddled.' And on The 
 VOL. I. 2 F
 
 450 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Heart of Midlothian, ib., ii. 20 : 'You grow tired yourself, want to get rid of 
 the story, and hardly care how.' See also ib., ii. 72, 132, 197, and Mrs. 
 MacCunn, Sir Walter Scott's Friends, pp. 205-23. 
 
 p. 335, note 1. Conachar's cowardice. On this see Lockhart, ch. Ixxv. 
 ad fin. 
 
 p. 335, note 2. pretences at historical fiction. See Cross, Development of the 
 Eng. Novel, pp. 110-12 for a list, including Longsword (1762), James White's 
 Adventures of John of Gaunt (1790), and Earl Stronglow (17S9), etc. These 
 I have failed to see. 
 
 p. 341. W. Bagehot. Literary Studies, op. cit., pp. 105-7. 
 
 p. 345, note 1. carelessness in plotting. See Journal, Oct. 18, 1826. 
 ' There is one way to give novelty : to depend for success on the interest of a 
 well-contrived story. But woe 's me ! That requires thought, consideration 
 the writing out a regular plan or plot above all the adhering to one which 
 I never can do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned 
 extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns !) 
 I shall never be able to take the trouble.' 
 
 p. 345, note 2. anonymous review of the earlier novels. In Quart. Rev., 
 Jan. 1817; reprinted in Prose Works, vol. xix. 'His chief characters are 
 never actors, but always acted upon by the spur of circumstances, and have 
 their fates uniformly determined by the agency of the subordinate persons. 
 This arises from the author having usually represented them as foreigners, to 
 whom everything in Scotland is strange.' Other strictures arc made on the 
 loose construction of the stories: 'against this slovenly indifference we have 
 already remonstrated.' For the eulogies see ante, p. 404. 
 
 p. 347. Adolphus. The title is : Letters to Hit-hard Hebcr, Esq., ALP., con- 
 taining Critical remarks on the series of Novels beginning with ' Waverley,' 
 and an Attempt to Ascertain their Author . . . London . . . 1821. John 
 Leycester Adolphus is named by Lockhart, ch. liii., who gives a summary and 
 some extracts ; others are made by "W. P. Ker in the art. on Scott in 
 Chambers's Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit., vol. iii. (1902) pp. 32-3. The first letter 
 is dated July 1821 : there was a second edition next year. The book ought 
 to be reprinted for its critical interest, which outlives the occasion. 'My 
 proposal is to identify the author of Waverley with the author of Marmion,' 
 and this on purely internal evidence : Scott's name is never mentioned. Some 
 of the points of interest are : the authors are both Scotsmen, antiquaries, and 
 sportsmen (Letter II.) ; the novels allude to other contemporaries, but to Scott 
 himself barely or grudgingly (III.) ; 'both, if we mistake not, are lawyers by 
 profession' (III.) ; both show 'address in combining narrative with conversa- 
 tion' (V.), and 'fail in scenes of bold unmitigated villany' ; both write in the 
 ' popular' style (Letter VI. ; see quotation by Ker) ; are fond of colour-effects 
 'flashes, gleams, glares, sparkles, blazes, sunshine, moonlight, and the reflections 
 of all these things in water and from metals' (VI.) ; have similar openings, and 
 types of hero, and make a like use of soliloquy (VII.), and are 'successful in 
 baffling curiosity and eluding anticipation.' Letter VIIT. notes odd likenesses of 
 phrase and diction. 
 
 p. 349. prose. See A. W. Vcrrall, The Prose of Sir Walter Scott, in Quart. 
 Rev. for July 1910 ; the best account of tlio matter known to me since that of 
 Adolphus. Most of my pages on Scott's si vie were written before Dr. Verrall's
 
 NOTES 451 
 
 paper appeared; but as to the ((notation from Claverhousc, I ha\e borrowi-d 
 his method for a moment. His death (1912) i.s a loss to criticism. 
 
 p. 358. miscellaneous prose. Ik-sides the 2<)-v<>l. ed. of the l\'ork.<, (lien- is 
 the 3[isc. I'MM of Sir II'. Scott (2 vols., IS 11- 17), which contains theessav* on 
 Ckiralry, Romance, Drama; the Lars of the Novelists, tho.se of ]>ry<{en "ml 
 Swift, and most things of importance exeept the Kajwlcon and Tales f a 
 Grandfather, 
 
 p. 3GO. in France. See L. Maigron, L>\ Human historique a 1'i'jmtfuc rornan- 
 <i</c (1908) -an elaborate study. 
 
 p. 3G1. novelists who appeared after Waverley. The year 1S32 is a some- 
 what artificial boundary in this chapter, as regards tlie lessor writers; but the 
 period between JJ'em: >/<.// and XkitrJas b// l'>uz is a convenient one. For a fuller 
 account of the transitional novelists, see Hugh Walker, Lidratuft of tl<e 
 I'ictoriau Kra (1910;, pp. 01 L'-o'.VJ. See too Cross, l>ccclopm<nt of the J-Jng. 
 A*(HV/. pp. l-'i<>-7, for lists and examples of Scott's imitators. 
 
 p. '.'jd'2, note- 1. Croly's Salathiel. The Rev. (Jeorge Croly was something of a 
 scholar, and a man-of-all-work in letters, producing tragedies, histories, and 
 stories, lie is Byron's ; llevcrend Lxowley 1'owh-y,' and in hi.> /W/s inl*l-~> 
 V 1S17) he imitates Child..- Harold. His Salatliiel is the Wandering .Jew 
 (Aha.suerus)^ whose ii^ure, as v,e know, lon^ dwelt in the fancy of Shelley. 
 Uut Salathiel nii^lit almost as well be any other Jew. He docs not wander 
 much; and he turns pa trio: and warrior under the early empire, and at 
 last witnesses the fall of Jerusalem. At times there i-^ a kind of likeness to the 
 ;or<joous rhythms of De (^uincey, as in the picture of the cloud and fire that are 
 magically poised over the Roman host. Croly's poems were collected in two vols. 
 in 1830. 
 
 p. Sti^, note -2. the petty Scottish novel. 3/c^iV ]t'an<-h has often been 
 reprinted, and n\> Call's four chief tales. ^\nnal.< of the 1'arifli and Tht 
 Ayrshire Li'fjati-a &re in ' Everyman's Library ' ; Tin.' 1'r'irott and Tin' i'.nt'iil 
 in various editions. 
 
 p. 303. enumeratc.,1 by himself. See (Jail's Autobiography - vols., 1833 \ 
 vol. ii. a<1 fin. : and ii. 211>-:231 for ' llellections on My Own Work' ; and, as to 
 Annuls <>f the /';/-,'.</<, ii. -J27-S. Some of tliis n, alter, and a li.-t, i- -ivtn in 
 the 'Everyman's I/ibrary ! edition. 
 
 p. 3f',i;. Miss Ferrier. The novels were not pnbli.-hed with the writer's name 
 till 1850, by Bent ley, but the secret had long been an open , ne in her art-h- 
 and beyond, 'j here are .several reprints. The ed. of ISM o. mains Mi-> 
 Ferrier' .s record of iier thn- visits to Al-botst'ord, a mixtun- !' kind and sharp 
 observation. For more on tliis seu chap. iv. ol' the M>-in<>ir "/,./ fVrr../ <m<!< nr, 
 o/>*. K /'., wiiit.-n chielly by her -raininephew. John I-Vrrier. and <-dite<l by 
 J. A. Doyle (Is'.i!) - the best commentary on f o novels. For the .(iiotati-n in 
 text on poetic justice, see M<m. ami C,,rn /-., p. 7-" ; for the \>\:\\\ of M>irr,a<j-, 
 p. 7H ; for Miss Cl.iverin-'s comments on liiat work. pp. 117-l s ; and for a 
 judicious comparison 1-y John Ferrier of Mi-s Ferrier \\ iili Mi.- Au-:-n. Mi>s 
 Ed^eworth, and e^p.'rially Miss JJuniey, >ce p]>. i^:;]-o. 
 
 p. 3i'ii). Lady Morgan. Her novels do not -rnn to have been reprinted lately. 
 Her Mfmm'rs ,2 vols., 18f!:I , edited by K. Hei-wonh 1'ixon and Mi-s .lewsbury, 
 consist chieily of letters and diaries. The ra-yed but u.-.-fnl work by W. J. 
 Fitzpatrick La<ly Morgan, her C'a/v-r, Littfarj and I'tr-wia! ;1SG(I; brings
 
 452 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 out the amazing virulence of her enemies. But she took only too good care of 
 herself, and retorted with great spirit when silence might have been better. 
 
 p. 370. John Banim. See the Life by P. J. Murray (1857). An anthology of 
 the work of the Banims and Griffin, similar to that made of Carleton's by Mr. 
 W. B. Yeats, would be a boon. 
 
 p. 371, note 1. The Croppy (1798), by Michael Banim. This has the same 
 mixture of rambling, incredible romance and dramatised history. The ' croppies ' 
 are the United Irishmen ; the bloody frays in Ross and Wexford are the crises, 
 and the abductions, murders, and arsons are in Banim's grimmest style. 
 
 p. 371, note 2. The Collegians. For Curran's anecdote, see Lady Morgan's 
 Memoirs, ii. 288. 
 
 p. 374. Miss Mitford. Our Village, has been often reprinted (e.g. in two vols. 
 in ' Bonn's Standard Library,' and in a selection, 1893, with Introduction by 
 Mrs. Eichmond Ritchie). Her Letters were edited first in three vols., with Life, 
 by A. G. L'Estrange, and then in 1872, in three more vols., by H. Chorley. 
 
 p. 376. Hajjl Baba of Ispahan. Edited, with Introduction, by the Hon. G. 
 Curzon (1895), and several times by other hands. 
 
 p. 378. Trelawny's Adventures of a Younger Son. Ed. R. Garnett, with 
 introduction (1897). 
 
 p. 379. Peacock. His Works have been edited, though not completely, by E. 
 Cole (3 vols., 1875), with Preface by Lord Houghton and Life by Mrs. Clarke, 
 Peacock's granddaughter; his Letters and the novels (10 vols., 1891) by E. 
 Garnett ; and the novels also, at various dates, by G. Saintsbury : see the same 
 writer's article in his Essays (1890). The three plays were published by A. B. 
 Young (1910). See also A. B. Young's dissertation, The Life and Novels of 
 T. L. P. (Norwich, 1904) ; A. Martin Freeman's useful T. L. P., A Critical 
 Study (1911) ; and Carl van Doren, Life of T. L. P. (1911), valuable, especially 
 for biography, bibliography, and sources, and congenially written. 
 
 p. 384. Maid Marian. Peacock works freely upon the Robin Hood story and 
 scenery as told in ballads, good and bad. Once, ch. xv., he invents a ballad- 
 tale which exists nowhere, but which might have existed, and is in perfect keep- 
 ing ; it is told as an anecdote. The rescue of Young Gamwell (who is heard of 
 in Child, Eng. and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 128) by Little John is an ecbo 
 of that of Cloudesly in Adam Bell (ib., No. 116), and to a less degree from Robin 
 Hood and the Monlc (No. 119). Tbe "sclerer" (cellarer) and the Sheriff of 
 Nottingham play their part severally in Geste of R. H., sis. 233 foil., and st. 205 
 foil. The theme of the song, 'Oh ! bold Robin Hood,' is hinted in Child, No. 147 ; 
 the lying monk of another excellent song is from Geste, sts. 245-250. For 
 Friar Tuck, see Child, Nos. 123, 145. Maid Marian herself is named in 
 Child, No. 150, a late and vulgar ballad, surely depraved from some good old 
 one that is lost. The identification of Marian with Matilda Fitzwater is from 
 Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, 1597 (Hazlitt-Dodsley, vol. 
 viii.). Here we also find the interruption of Robin's marriage with Marian by 
 outlawry, the rivalry (introduced earlier in the play than in the tale) of Prince 
 John, his resistance by the baron (who, however, is in Munday's hands a poor 
 creature, as Robin is a sentimentalist), and the final solution by King Richard 
 undisguised. Peacock may have read this in Ritson (Van Doren, p. 161). 
 
 p. 386. periodical press after 1800. See the art. in Ency. Brit, (eleventh ed.) 
 by H. R. Tedder, and references therein ; Saintsbury, Nineteenth Century Lit.
 
 NOTES 453 
 
 (1896), ch. iv., 'The Development of Periodicals." Also the 'Centenary' 
 number of the Edinburgh Revieiv (Oct. 1902) ; and W. A. Copinger, Authorship 
 of the first 100 Nos. of the Ed. Rev. (Bibliographiana, No. 2, Manchester, 1895). 
 
 p. 388. education. The Ed. Rev. provoked, by Sydney Smith's article (the 
 third in No. xxix., Oct. 1809), a sharp retort from Edward Copleston, answered 
 in April 1810 by Smith, Playfair, and Knight (according to Copinger). The 
 Replies to the Calumnies of the Ed. Rev. (1810) is a typical and able defence 
 of the Oxford classical education ; partially printed in Memoir of K Copletton, 
 by W. J. Copleston (1851), pp. 36 foil. 
 
 p. 389, note 1. Francis Jeffrey. Lord Cockburn's Life of Lord Jeffrey, with 
 selected letters, 2 vols. (1852), Macvey Napier's Correspondence (1879), are the 
 chief original authorities ; but the most living portraits are in Lockhart's Peter's 
 Letters, and in Carlyle's Reminiscences. 
 
 p. 389, note 2. articles of Jeffrey ; in 4 vols. (1844), and in 1 vol., 1853. A 
 list of his contributions to the Review, so far as he himself could remember 
 them, is given by Cockburn, and is conveniently reprinted in Jeffrey's Literary 
 Criticism, ed. D. Nichol Smith (1910). The Introduction by this editor, as well 
 as the selection (fourteen articles), is excellent. 
 
 p. 389, note 3. judicious protests. See above all Saintsbury, Hiit. of 
 Criticism, iii. 289-293, and Essays on Eng. Lit., first series, pp. 100-134 ; also 
 Nichol Smith, op. cit. 
 
 p. 390, note 1. ignored Shelley. The art. in the Ed. Review, July 1824, is not 
 by Jeffrey but by Hazlitt. It is not, for him, very critical, but is elegiac and 
 generous, Shelley being pronounced 'with all his faults, a man of genius,' and 
 also 'an honest man.' The conclusion, with its slap at the Quarterly Reviewer of 
 Keats ('the shaft, venal, vulgar, venomous'), would have pleased Shelley Wtter. 
 
 p. 390, note 2. retrospect written in 1829. Ed. Rev., No. xcix. The article 
 is on Mrs. Hemans, and contains an amusing account of what Jeffrey thought 
 the province of 'female poetry.' 
 
 p. 391, note 1. Keats ... he had praised. Ed. Rev., Aug. 1820 (No. Ixvii) : 
 ' his Avorks . . . are so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even 
 while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the 
 intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they 
 so lavishly present.' Endymion, moreover, 'is at least as full of genius as of 
 absurdity'; and, finally, 'Mr. Keats has unquestionably a very beautiful 
 imagination, a perfect ear for harmony, and a great familiarity with the finest 
 diction of English poetry ; but he must learn not to misuse or misapply, 1 etc.. 
 etc. This represents, probably, Jeffrey's furthest reach of sympathy with the 
 romantic poetry in its prime ; and he went further in sympathy than Macaulay 
 or Carlylc. 
 
 ' p. 391, note 2. reviews of Wordsworth. See, in chief, April 1808 (No. xxiii.) 
 (contrast with Crabbe at expense of W.) ; Nov. 1814, No. xlvii. (Ejcturti<m} ; 
 Oct. 1815, No. 1. (White Doe of Rylttone the nadir of Jeffrey's commentaries 
 on poetry) ; in Jan. 1812 (No. xxxviii.), on Wilson's Islf of Palms : a review not 
 saved by Jeffrey for his selection, but containing his real mind on Wordsworth, 
 after he has vented his railings : ' We do not want Mr. Wordsworth to write like 
 Pope or Prior, nor to dedicate his Muse to subjects which he does not himself 
 think interesting ; we are prepared, on the contrary, to listen with far deeper 
 delight to the songs of his mountain solitude, and to gaze on his mellow
 
 454 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 pictures of simple happiness and affection, and his lofty sketching of human 
 worth and energy ; and we only beg that we may have these nobler elements of 
 his poetry without the debasement of childish language, mean incidents, and 
 incongruous images.' This patrician contempt for 'mean' life is evilly shown 
 in the scornful notice of the unlucky Thomas Dermody, April 1SOG (No. xv.). 
 
 p. 391, note 3. on 'Beauty' in the Britannica. In the supplement (1824) to 
 the fourth (and fifth and sixth) editions ; enlarged from art. on Alison's Prin- 
 ciples of Taste in Ed. Rev., May 1811 (No. xxxv.). This tractate heads 
 Jeffrey's selection, and tells much of his temperament. 
 
 p. 392, note 1. Cottagers of Glenburnie. July 1808 (No. xxiv. : not in his 
 Selections). 
 
 p. 392, note 2. Barry Cornwall. In review of A Sicilian Romance, Jan. 
 1820 (No. Ixv.). 
 
 p. 393, note 1. Advice to a Young Reviewer. In the Memoir of E. Ooph-ston 
 (1851), pp. 289 foil., the Advice is quoted in full. Reprinted in Arber's 
 'English Garner': Critical Essay* and Lit. Fragments, re-ed. J. 0. Collins 
 (1903), pp. 149-1GG. Collins, pp. xxii-xxiii, corrects AYhalely's statement 
 (Retnin. of E. Copleaton, p. 6) that the skit is upon a particular review in The. 
 British Critic. It is clearly meant for any one whom the cap lits, Ji-il'rey in 
 especial. 
 
 p. 393, note 2. loved the Elizabethans much more. Sec the art. on Ford, Aug. 
 1811 (No. xxxvi.), for the proof. The survey of English literary history, though 
 brief, is most characteristic and clear, and no one after reading it could ever 
 again call Jeffrey a classicist. See too extract by Nichol Smith, op. cit., pp. 
 19-30, from the art. on Scott's Su:ift, Sept. 1810 (No. liii.)-a still sharper state- 
 ment of his attitude ; also art, on Campbell's S//<ytmeHs, March Ihl9 (No. Ixii.). 
 Jeffrey perhaps coined the phrase 'an age of reason ' for the age of Anne. Mr. 
 Nichol Smith also refers to a similar utterance in a very late art. on Aiher- 
 stone's Fall of Nineveh, in Sept. 1828 (No. xcv.): 'The present age, we think, 
 has a hundred times more poetry, and more true taste for poetry, than that 
 which immediately preceded it, and of which, reckoning its duration from the 
 extinction of the last of Queen Anne's wits down to about thirty odd years ago 
 [this makes the revival begin in the nineties], we take leave to say that it was, 
 beyond all dispute, the most unpoetical age in the annals of this or any other 
 considerable nation.' 
 
 p. 394. Brougham. The IVorlcs and Speeches, in 11 vols. (1855, etc.), contain 
 only a selection, revised by Brougham himself, of his innumerable writing.*. The 
 Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham, ll'rittcn- bu Himself (3 vols., L S 71\ 
 contains many inaccuracies. The most vivid sketches of Brougham are those 
 by Henry Reeve in the Enaj. Brit, (ninth ed., utilised and corrected in 
 eleventh ed.), and by Walter Bagehot in Bio'jntphical Studies (]88l). 
 
 p. 396, note 1. Horner. Publicist, economist, and co-founder of the Ed. Rev. ; 
 for list of his articles see s.v. in D. JV. />'. 
 
 p. 396, note 2. Sydney Smith. The Works were published in 3 vols., 1848 ; 
 the references below are to the one-vol. ed. of 18G9. The Memoirs of Sydney 
 Smith, by Lady Holland, his daughter, are the main authority ; but there are 
 endless allusions in the literature of the time. Amongst modern studies see 
 Bagehot, Literary Stiidies, ' The Edinburgh Reviewers ' ; and A. Chevrillon, 
 8. S. et la Renaissance des Idecs liberates en Anyleterre au xix c siccle, 1894.
 
 NOTES 455 
 
 p. 396, note 3. Lewis. Works, p. 17 (Ed. ficc., 1803). Anastasiux, see 
 Works, pp. 365 foil. (Ed. Per., 1821). 
 
 p. 398, note 1. Book of Fallacies. Works, pp. 498-9 (Ed. Rev., 1825). 
 
 p. 398, note 2. Methodists. W. /,Vr., 1808 ; H'orA's, pp. 97 foil. All 
 varieties of Methodist are treated us 'in one general conspiracy against common 
 sense and rational orthodox Christianity.' The strangest trait of this 'set of 
 beings' is their belief in providential 'interferences,' of which grotesque 
 examples are recited at length. But 'the doctrine of the immediate and 
 perpetual interference of Divine Providence is not true.' The longer passage 
 cited in the text is from the review of Hannah More's Works, Ed. Rev., 1809 ; 
 Works, p. 167. 
 
 p. 400. Character of Mackintosh. Works, pp. 765-8 ; of Homer, ib., 
 pp. 785-7. 
 
 p. 401. Quarterly Review. See 'Centenary' numbers of Q. R., April and 
 July 1909, for much information as to origins, contributors, authorship, 
 etc. 
 
 p. 401, note 2. Croker. Sec The Crohr Paper* (1884, 3 vols.), ed. L. .1. 
 Jennings ; and the defence of his character in Q. R., April 1909. 
 
 p. 405, note 1. Blackwood's. See Jnnah of a Publishing Mouse : William 
 niacku-ood and his Son* . . . (1897-8, 3 vols.) by Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. 
 Gerald Porter ; Lockhart, J'tter's Litters ; and A. Lang, Life of J. G. Lockhart 
 (2 vols., 1897\ vol. i. ^</.Wi// a minute and judicial narrative. 
 
 p. 405, note 2. notorious performances. See above all Lang's Lockhart, 
 i. 121-162. The 'Chaldee manuscript,' withdrawn after the first edition of the 
 number in October 1817, was compounded by Lockhart and Wilson, at the 
 suggestion of Hogg, and with the aid of Blackwood ; its personalities set Edin- 
 burgh by the ears; its worst feature was a wanton attack on Professor Play- 
 fair | duly deplored in I'.^r's Letters, ii. 217 (third ed., 1819). That on Cole- 
 ridge's BiograjJiia Literaria was not by Lockhart (Lang, i. 148, note 
 Mr. Lang vouches for this on evidence privately known to him), and is blamed 
 and also pronounced inexplicable by Lockhart (Ptttr's Letter?, ii. 218). The 
 bespattering of Keats, which is incidental to that of the 'Cockney School' 
 generally and Leigh Hunt in esj eeial, is of untraced autl.r.-hiji. Lockhart 
 (Peter* t Letters, ii. 221-1 still curses the Cockneys without measure, not, how- 
 ever, naming KeaK lie partly relented later, but remained cold , Lang. i. 203, 
 24G) : yet loir.: after, in 1840-41, seems to have urged republishing Keats's poems 
 as if 'willing to repair an injustice ' (Lang, ii. 401, letter quoted from J>ean 
 Boyle, who cites this from Lockhart's own conversation". So long a note may 
 ho excused, as errors are still repeated, and the character of Lockhart, at 
 bot'oiu not only generous but dwelling in'tfmj-la strriin above these coils, is 
 concerned. It should be added that Mr. Lang wipes out the long lingering 
 suggestion that Lockhart was encouraged or aided in his escapades by Scott ; 
 who did his best to divert him from them. 
 
 p. 406. John Wilson. The twelve V-K of Works edited by W. J. Terrier 
 J^55-S^ are a selection, the NodfS filling four vols., the ]\rrrfn1i<:ns of 
 Christopher X<~-rth four, the Ettayt. two, the '/'//.>- one, and the /',.. (/<.- one. A 
 livt of most of his writings in />V<jr/.-('v>rt.f. is given at the did of the Monoir 
 by his daughter, Mrs. (iordon (1862 . The paper* on Spenser, the ^p-innt 
 of the Ilrititli Crit>'-.<, and />('.< /<'"?<"' > are not in Ferrier's edition, but contain
 
 456 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 notable and characteristic things : see Saintsbury, Hist, of Criticism, iii. 472-7, 
 for an account of these and of Wilson as a critic generally. 
 
 p. 407. De Quincey. Letter quoted in Memoir of Wilson, ii. 153 foil. 
 
 p. 409. An Hour's Talk. In Recreations of C. N., i. 287 foil. 
 
 p. 409, note 2. Lockhart. See Lang, op. cit. The Spanish Ballads have been 
 often reissued. For a close criticism of Lockhart's choice of poems, and correc- 
 tions of his statements, see J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Chapters on Spanish Literature 
 (1908), pp. 77-119 (The Eomancero). 
 
 p. 415. Maginn. See his Miscellanies, Prose and Verse, ed. E. W. Montagu 
 (2 vols., 1885), a selection with memoir. Two of the Homeric Ballads are 
 included ; and many ditties, parodies, tales, and essays. 
 
 p. 416, note 1. The Westminster Review. See J. S. Mill, Autobiography 
 (1873) ; and Stephen, English Utilitarians. 
 
 p. 416, note 2. articles (by James Mill). In No. 1 (Jan. 1824), No. 2 (April 
 1824), No. 7 (July 1825; the extract given is from the last-named, vol. iv. 
 p. 197). For a typical anti-Tory article, see that on Southey's Book of the 
 Church (Jan. 1825). 
 
 p. 418. Ugo Foscolo. See the exhaustive study by Francesco Viglione, Ugo 
 Foscolo in Inghilterra (Catania, 1910), and bibliography, ib., pp. 319-21. 
 
 p. 419, note 1. Henry Headley. The 1810 edition of the Selections has a 
 memoir by H. Kett, which gives a charming study of this young undergraduate 
 of Trinity, Cambridge. Headley also wrote in the Gent. Mag., and projected 
 an edition of Southwell a plan carried out long after by Dr. Grosart. His 
 extracts from and appreciation of Drayton were overlooked in my Michael 
 Drayton (1905), and are most judicious. ' The greatness of his heart,' says 
 Headley, ' seems to have produced in him that confused kind of honest indigna- 
 tion which deprived him of the power of discrimination ' a Lamb-like touch. 
 
 p. 419, note 2. The Retrospective Review. See Saintsbury, Hist, of Criticism, 
 iii. 283-6, for an appreciative description of its scope and doings. 
 
 p. 207 (additional note, see p. 436 ante}. The Episodes of Vathek. This 
 work, which has appeared since the above was printed, contains the French 
 text of the stories of Prince Alasi, Prince, Barkiarokh, and Princess Zulkais, 
 with an English translation by the late Sir Frank T. Marzials, and introduc- 
 tion by Mr. Lewis Melville. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. OONSTABI.B, Printers to tlig Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh Univeriity Press
 
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