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The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4

by Charles Lamb · English · Gutenberg #14129 · 640,273 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4

Author: Charles Lamb

Contributor: Mary Lamb


        
Release date: November 23, 2004 [eBook #14129]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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Credits: E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Leonard Johnson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB IN FOUR VOLUMES, VOLUME 4 ***

THE WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB

In Four Volumes

VOL. IV.

A New Edition







CONTENTS.

ROSAMUND GRAY, ESSAYS, ETC.

ROSAMUND GRAY

ESSAYS:--

  RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL

  ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEARE, CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR
  FITNESS FOR STAGE-REPRESENTATION

  CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE

  SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER, THE CHURCH HISTORIAN

  ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH; WITH SOME REMARKS ON A
  PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR. BARRY

  ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER

LETTERS UNDER ASSUMED SIGNATURES, PUBLISHED IN "THE REFLECTOR":--

  THE LONDONER

  ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER

  ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY; WITH A
  HINT TO THOSE WHO HAVE THE FRAMING OF ADVERTISEMENTS FOR
  APPREHENDING OFFENDERS

  ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED

  ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS

  HOSPITA ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE OF THE PLEASURES OF THE
  PALATE

  EDAX ON APPETITE

CURIOUS FRAGMENTS, EXTRACTED FROM A COMMONPLACE BOOK WHICH BELONGED
TO ROBERT BURTON, THE FAMOUS AUTHOR OF THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

MR. H----, A FARCE, IN TWO ACTS


       *       *       *       *       *


POEMS.

[_Those marked with an asterisk are by the Author's Sister._]

HESTER

TO CHARLES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

THE THREE FRIENDS

TO A RIVER IN WHICH A CHILD WAS DROWNED

THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES

*HELEN

A VISION OF REPENTANCE

*DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MOTHER AND CHILD

QUEEN ORIANA'S DREAM

A BALLAD, NOTING THE DIFFERENCE OF RICH AND POOR, IN THE WAYS OF A
RICH NOBLE'S PALACE AND A POOR WORKHOUSE

HYPOCHONDRIACUS

A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO

_TO T. L. H., A CHILD_

BALLAD, FROM THE GERMAN

*DAVID IN THE CAVE OF ADULLAM

*SALOME

*LINES SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF TWO FEMALES, BY LIONARDO DA VINCI

*LINES ON THE SAME PICTURE BEING REMOVED TO MAKE PLACE FOR A PORTRAIT
OF A LADY BY TITIAN

*LINES ON THE CELEBRATED PICTURE BY LIONARDO DA VINCI, CALLED THE
VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS

*ON THE SAME

SONNETS:--

   I. TO MISS KELLY

  II. ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDEN.

 III.

  IV.

   V.

  VI. THE FAMILY NAME

 VII.

VIII.

  IX. TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ., OF THE SOUTH-SEA-HOUSE

   X.

  XI.

BLANK VERSE:--

  CHILDHOOD

  THE GRANDAME

  THE SABBATH BELLS

  FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS

  COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT

JOHN WOODVIL; A TRAGEDY

THE WITCH, A DRAMATIC SKETCH OP THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY


       *       *       *       *       *


ALBUM VERSES, WITH A FEW OTHERS.

IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERGEANT W----

TO DORA W----, ON BEING ASKED BY HER FATHER TO WRITE IN HER ALBUM

IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN'S LADY

IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH S----

IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA Q----

IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY

IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON

IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS

IN THE ALBUM OF MISS----

IN MY OWN ALBUM

MISCELLANEOUS:--

  ANGEL HELP

  ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN

  THE CHRISTENING

  THE YOUNG CATECHIST

  TO A YOUNG FRIEND ON HER TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY

  SHE IS GOING

SONNETS:--

  HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS

  WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE

  TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE "BLIND BOY"

  WORK

  LEISURE

  TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.

  THE GYPSY'S MALISON

COMMENDATORY VERSES, ETC.:--

  TO J. S. KNOWLES, ESQ., ON HIS TRAGEDY OF VIRGINIUS

  TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME OF BARRY CORNWALL

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE "EVERY-DAY BOOK"

  TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ., ON HIS ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE POEMS OF MR.
  ROGERS

  TO A FRIEND ON HIS MARRIAGE

  "O LIFT WITH REVERENT HAND"

  THE SELF-ENCHANTED

  TO LOUISA M----, WHOM I USED TO CALL "MONKEY"

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE LATIN OF VINCENT BOURNE:--

  THE BALLAD-SINGERS

  TO DAVID COOK, OF THE PARISH OF ST. MARGARET'S, WESTMINSTER,
  WATCHMAN

  ON A SEPULCHRAL STATUE OF AN INFANT SLEEPING

  EPITAPH ON A DOG

  THE RIVAL BELLS

  NEWTON'S PRINCIPIA

  THE HOUSEKEEPER

  ON A DEAF AND DUMB ARTIST

  THE FEMALE ORATORS

PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD-MILL

GOING OR GONE

FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS

THE WIFE'S TRIAL; OR, THE INTRUDING WIDOW. A DRAMATIC POEM




ROSAMUND GRAY, ESSAYS,

ETC.




TO

MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.

  Forgive me, BURNEY, if to thee these late
  And hasty products of a critic pen,
  Thyself no common judge of books and men,
  In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.
  My _verse_ was offered to an older friend;
  The humbler _prose_ has fallen to thy share:
  Nor could I miss the occasion to declare,
  What spoken in thy presence must offend--
  That, set aside some few caprices wild,
  Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days,
  In all my threadings of this worldly maze,
  (And I have watched thee almost from a child),
  Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,
  I have not found a whiter soul than thine.




ROSAMUND GRAY.

       *       *       *       *       *

CHAPTER I.


It was noontide. The sun was very hot. An old gentlewoman sat
spinning in a little arbor at the door of her cottage. She was blind;
and her granddaughter was reading the Bible to her. The old lady had
just left her work, to attend to the story of Ruth.

"Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her." It was a
passage she could not let pass without a _comment_. The moral she
drew from it was not very _new_, to be sure. The girl had heard it a
hundred times before--and a hundred times more she could have heard
it, without suspecting it to be tedious. Rosamund loved her
grandmother.

The old lady loved Rosamund too; and she had reason for so doing.
Rosamund was to her at once a child and a servant. She had only _her_
left in the world. They two lived together.

They had once known better days. The story of Rosamund's parents,
their failure, their folly, and distresses, may be told another time.
Our tale hath grief enough in it.

It was now about a year and a half since old Margaret Gray had sold
off all her effects, to pay the debts of Rosamund's father--just
after the mother had died of a broken heart; for her husband had fled
his country to hide his shame in a foreign land. At that period the
old lady retired to a small cottage in the village of Widford in
Hertfordshire.

Rosamund, in her thirteenth year, was left destitute, without fortune
or friends: she went with her grandmother. In all this time she had
served her faithfully and lovingly.

Old Margaret Gray, when she first came into these parts, had eyes,
and could see. The neighbors said, they had been dimmed by weeping:
be that as it may, she was latterly grown quite blind. "God is very
good to us, child; I can _feel_ you yet." This she would sometimes
say; and we need not wonder to hear, that Rosamund clave unto her
grandmother.

Margaret retained a spirit unbroken by calamity. There was a
principle _within_, which it seemed as if no outward circumstances
could reach. It was a _religious_ principle, and she had taught it to
Rosamund; for the girl had mostly resided with her grandmother from
her earliest years. Indeed she had taught her all that she knew
herself; and the old lady's knowledge did not extend a vast way.

Margaret had drawn her maxims from observation; and a pretty long
experience in life had contributed to make her, at times, a little
_positive:_ but Rosamund never argued with her grandmother.

Their library consisted chiefly in a large family Bible, with notes
and expositions by various learned expositors, from Bishop Jewell
downwards.

This might never be suffered to lie about like other books, but was
kept constantly wrapt up in a handsome case of green velvet, with
gold tassels--the only relic of departed grandeur they had brought
with them to the cottage--everything else of value had been sold off
for the purpose above mentioned.

This Bible Rosamund, when a child, had never dared to open without
permission; and even yet, from habit, continued the custom. Margaret
had parted with none of her _authority_; indeed it was never exerted
with much harshness; and happy was Rosamund, though a girl grown,
when she could obtain leave to read her Bible. It was a treasure too
valuable for an indiscriminate use; and Margaret still pointed out to
her grand-daughter _where to read._

Besides this, they had the "Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man's
Recreation," with cuts--"Pilgrim's Progress," the first part--a
Cookery Book, with a few dry sprigs of rosemary and lavender stuck
here and there between the leaves, (I suppose to point to some of the
old lady's most favorite receipts,) and there was "Wither's Emblems,"
an old book, and quaint. The old-fashioned pictures in this last book
were among the first exciters of the infant Rosamund's curiosity. Her
contemplation had fed upon them in rather older years.

Rosamund had not read many books besides these; or if any, they had
been only occasional companions: these were to Rosamund as old
friends, that she had long known. I know not whether the peculiar
cast of her mind might not be traced, in part, to a tincture she had
received, early in life, from Walton and Wither, from John Bunyan and
her Bible.

Rosamund's mind was pensive and reflective, rather than what passes
usually for _clever_ or _acute_. From a child she was remarkably shy
and thoughtful--this was taken for stupidity and want of feeling; and
the child has been sometimes whipt for being a _stubborn thing_, when
her little heart was almost bursting with affection.

Even now her grandmother would often reprove her, when she found her
too grave or melancholy; give her sprightly lectures about good-humor
and rational mirth; and not unfrequently fall a-crying herself, to
the great discredit of her lecture. Those tears endeared her the more
to Rosamund.

Margaret would say, "Child, I love you to cry, when I think you are
only remembering your poor dear father and mother;--I would have you
think about them sometimes--it would be strange if you did not; but I
fear, Rosamund--I fear, girl, you sometimes think too deeply about
your own situation and poor prospects in life. When you do so, you do
wrong--remember the naughty rich man in the parable. He never had any
good thoughts about God, and his religion: and that might have been
your case."

Rosamund, at these times, could not reply to her; she was not in the
habit of _arguing_ with her grandmother; so she was quite silent on
these occasions--or else the girl knew well enough herself, that she
had only been sad to think of the desolate condition of her best
friend, to see her, in her old age, so infirm and blind. But she had
never been used to make excuses, when the old lady said she was doing
wrong.

The neighbors were all very kind to them. The veriest rustics never
passed them without a bow, or a pulling off of the hat--some show of
courtesy, awkward indeed, but affectionate--with a "Good-morrow,
madam," or "young madam," as it might happen.

Rude and savage natures, who seem born with a propensity to express
contempt for anything that looks like prosperity, yet felt respect
for its declining lustre.

The farmers, and better sort of people, (as they are called,) all
promised to provide for Rosamund when her grandmother should die.
Margaret trusted in God and believed them.

She used to say, "I have lived many years in the world, and have
never known people, _good people_, to be left without some friend; a
relation, a benefactor, a _something_. God knows our wants--that it
is not good for man or woman to be alone; and he always sends us a
helpmate, a leaning place, a _somewhat_." Upon this sure ground of
experience, did Margaret build her trust in Providence.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER II.


Rosamund had just made an end of her story, (as I was about to
relate,) and was listening to the application of the moral, (which
said application she was old enough to have made herself, but her
grandmother still continued to treat her, in many respects, as a
child, and Rosamund was in no haste to lay claim to the title of
womanhood,) when a young gentleman made his appearance and
interrupted them.

It was young Allan Clare, who had brought a present of peaches, and
some roses for Rosamund.

He laid his little basket down on a seat of the arbor; and in a
respectful tone of voice, as though he were addressing a parent,
inquired of Margaret "how she did."

The old lady seemed pleased with his attentions--answered his
inquiries by saying, that "her cough was less troublesome a-nights,
but she had not yet got rid of it, and probably she never might; but
she did not like to tease young people with an account of her
infirmities."

A few kind words passed on either side, when young Clare, glancing a
tender look at the girl, who had all this time been silent, took
leave of them with saying, "I shall bring _Elinor_ to see you in the
evening."

When he was gone, the old lady began to prattle.

"That is a sweet-dispositioned youth, and I _do_ love him dearly, I
must say it--there is such a modesty in all he says or does--he
should not come here so often, to be sure, but I don't know how to
help it; there is so much goodness in him, I can't find it in my
heart to forbid him. But, Rosamund, girl, I must tell you beforehand;
when you grow older, Mr. Clare must be no companion for _you_: while
you were both so young it was all very well--but the time is coming,
when folks will think harm of it, if a rich young gentleman, like Mr.
Clare, comes so often to our poor cottage.--Dost hear, girl? Why
don't you answer? Come, I did not mean to say anything to hurt
you--speak to me, Rosamund--nay, I must not have you be sullen--I
don't love people that are sullen."

And in this manner was this poor soul running on, unheard and
unheeded, when it occurred to her, that possibly the girl might not
be _within hearing_.

And true it was, that Rosamund had slunk away at the first mention of
Mr. Clare's good qualities: and when she returned, which was not till
a few minutes after Margaret had made an end of her fine harangue, it
is certain her cheeks _did_ look very _rosy_. That might have been
from the heat of the day or from exercise, for she had been walking
in the garden.

Margaret, we know, was blind; and, in this case, it was lucky for
Rosamund that she was so, or she might have made some not unlikely
surmises.

I must not have my reader infer from this, that I at all think it
likely, a young maid of fourteen would fall in love without asking
her grandmother's leave--the thing itself is not to be conceived.

To obviate all suspicions, I am disposed to communicate a little
anecdote of Rosamund.

A month or two back her grandmother had been giving her the strictest
prohibitions, in her walks, not to go near a certain spot, which was
dangerous from the circumstance of a huge overgrown oak-tree
spreading its prodigious arms across a deep chalk-pit, which they
partly concealed.

To this fatal place Rosamund came one day--female curiosity, we know,
is older than the flood--let us not think hardly of the girl, if she
partook of the sexual failing.

Rosamund ventured further and further--climbed along one of the
branches--approached the forbidden chasm--her foot slipped--she was
not killed--but it was by a mercy she escaped--other branches
intercepted her fall--and with a palpitating heart she made her way
back to the cottage.

It happened that evening, that her grandmother was in one of her best
humors, caressed Rosamund, talked of old times, and what a blessing
it was they two found a shelter in their little cottage, and in
conclusion told Rosamund, "she was a good girl, and God would one day
reward her for her kindness to her old blind grandmother."

This was more than Rosamund could bear. Her morning's disobedience
came fresh into her mind; she felt she did not deserve all this from
Margaret, and at last burst into a fit of crying, and made confession
of her fault. The old gentlewoman kissed and forgave her.

Rosamund never went near that naughty chasm again.

Margaret would never have heard of this, if Rosamund had not told of
it herself. But this young maid had a delicate moral sense, which
would not suffer her to take advantage of her grandmother, to deceive
her, or conceal anything from her, though Margaret was old, and
blind, and easy to be imposed upon.

Another virtuous _trait_ I recollect of Rosamund, and now I am in the
vein will tell it.

Some, I know, will think these things trifles--and they are so--but
if these _minutiæ_ make my reader better acquainted with Rosamund, I
am content to abide the imputation.

These promises of character, hints, and early indications of a _sweet
nature_, are to me more dear, and choice in the selection, than any
of those pretty wild flowers, which this young maid, this virtuous
Rosamund, has ever gathered in a fine May morning, to make a posy to
place in the bosom of her old blind friend.

Rosamund had a very just notion of drawing, and would often employ
her talent in making sketches of the surrounding scenery.

On a landscape, a larger piece than she had ever yet attempted, she
had now been working for three or four months. She had taken great
pains with it, given much time to it, and it was nearly finished. For
_whose_ particular inspection it was designed, I will not venture to
conjecture. We know it could not have been for her grandmother's.

One day she went out on a short errand, and left her landscape on the
table. When she returned, she found it _gone_.

Rosamund from the first suspected some mischief, but held her tongue.
At length she made the fatal discovery. Margaret, in her absence, had
laid violent hands on it; not knowing what it was, but taking it for
some waste-paper, had torn it in half, and with one half of this
elaborate composition had twisted herself up--a thread-paper!

Rosamund spread out her hands at sight of the disaster, gave her
grandmother a roguish smile, but said not a word. She knew the poor
soul would only fret, if she told her of it,--and when once Margaret
was set a fretting for other people's misfortunes, the fit held her
pretty long.

So Rosamund that very afternoon began another piece of the same size
and subject; and Margaret, to her dying day, never dreamed of the
mischief she had unconsciously done.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER III


Rosamund Gray was the most beautiful young creature that eyes ever
beheld. Her face had the sweetest expression in it--a gentleness--a
modesty--a timidity--a certain charm--a grace without a name.

There was a sort of melancholy mingled in her smile. It was not the
thoughtless levity of a girl--it was not the restrained simper of
premature womanhood--it was something which the poet Young might have
remembered, when he composed that perfect line,

  "Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair."

She was a mild-eyed maid, and everybody loved her. Young Allan Clare,
when but a boy, sighed for her.

Her yellow hair fell in bright and curling clusters, like

        "Those hanging locks
  Of young Apollo."

Her voice was trembling and musical. A graceful diffidence pleaded
for her whenever she spake--and, if she said but little, that little
found its way to the heart.

Young, and artless, and innocent, meaning no harm, and thinking none;
affectionate as a smiling infant--playful, yet inobtrusive, as a
weaned lamb--everybody loved her. Young Allan Clare, when but a boy,
sighed for her.

       *       *       *       *       *

The moon is shining in so brightly at my window, where I write, that
I feel it a crime not to suspend my employment awhile to gaze at her.

See how she glideth, in maiden honor, through the clouds, who divide
on either side to do her homage.

Beautiful vision!--as I contemplate thee, an internal harmony is
communicated to my mind, a moral brightness, a tacit analogy of
mental purity; a calm like _that_ we ascribe in fancy to the favored
inhabitants of thy fairy regions, "argent fields."

I marvel not, O moon, that heathen people, in the "olden times," did
worship thy deity--Cynthia, Diana, Hecate. Christian Europe invokes
thee not by these names now--her idolatry is of a blacker stain:
Belial is her God--she worships Mammon.

False things are told concerning thee, fair planet--for I will ne'er
believe that thou canst take a perverse pleasure in distorting the
brains of us, poor mortals. Lunatics! moonstruck! Calumny invented,
and folly took up, these names. I would hope better things from thy
mild aspect and benign influences.

Lady of Heaven, thou lendest thy pure lamp to light the way to the
virgin mourner, when she goes to seek the tomb where her warrior
lover lies.

Friend of the distressed, thou speakest only _peace_ to the lonely
sufferer, who walks forth in the placid evening, beneath thy gentle
light, to chide at fortune, or to complain of changed friends, or
unhappy loves.

Do I dream, or doth not even now a heavenly calm descend from thee
into my bosom, as I meditate on the chaste loves of Rosamund and her
Clare!


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER IV.


Allan Clare was just two years older than Rosamund. He was a boy of
fourteen, when he first became acquainted with her--it was soon after
she had come to reside with her grandmother at Widford.

He met her by chance one day, carrying a pitcher in her hand, which
she had been filling from a neighboring well--the pitcher was heavy,
and she seemed to be bending with its weight.

Allan insisted on carrying it for her--for he thought it a sin that a
delicate young maid, like her, should be so employed, and he stand
idle by.

Allan had a propensity to do little kind offices for everybody--but
at the sight of Rosamund Gray, his first fire was kindled--his young
mind seemed to have found an object, and his enthusiasm was from that
time forth awakened. His visits, from that day, were pretty frequent
at the cottage.

He was never happier than when he could get Rosamund to walk out with
him. He would make her admire the scenes he admired--fancy the wild
flowers he fancied--watch the clouds he was watching--and not
unfrequently repeat to her poetry which he loved, and make her love
it.

On their return, the old lady, who considered them yet as but
children, would bid Rosamund fetch Mr. Clare a glass of her
currant-wine, a bowl of new milk, or some cheap dainty which was more
welcome to Allan than the costliest delicacies of a prince's court.

The boy and girl, for they were no more at that age, grew fond of
each other--more fond than either of them suspected.

         "They would sit, and sigh,
  And look upon each other, and conceive
  Not what they ail'd; yet something they did ail,
  And yet were well--and yet they were not well;
  And what was their disease, they could not tell."

And thus,

  "In this first garden of their simpleness
  They spent their childhood."

A circumstance had lately happened, which in some sort altered the
nature of their attachment.

Rosamund was one day reading the tale of "Julia de Roubignè"--a book
which young Clare had lent her.

Allan was standing by, looking over her, with one hand thrown round
her neck, and a finger of the other pointing to a passage in Julia's
third letter.

"Maria! in my hours of visionary indulgence, I have sometimes painted
to myself a _husband_--no matter whom--comforting me amidst the
distresses which fortune had laid upon us. I have smiled upon him
through my tears; tears, not of anguish, but of tenderness!--our
children were playing around us, unconscious of misfortune; we had
taught them to be humble, and to be happy; our little shed was
reserved to us, and their smiles to cheer it.--I have imagined the
luxury of such a scene, and affliction became a part of my dream of
happiness."

The girl blushed as she read, and trembled--she had a sort of
confused sensation, that Allan was noticing her--yet she durst not
lift her eyes from the book, but continued reading, scarce knowing
what she read.

Allan guessed the cause of her confusion, Allan trembled too--his
color came and went--his feelings became impetuous--and flinging both
arms round her neck, he kissed his young favorite.

Rosamund was vexed and pleased, soothed and frightened, all in a
moment--a fit of tears came to her relief.

Allan had indulged before in these little freedoms, and Rosamund had
thought no harm of them; but from this time the girl grew timid and
reserved--distant in her manner, and careful of her behavior in
Allan's presence--not seeking his society as before, but rather
shunning it--delighting more to feed upon his idea in absence.

Allan too, from this day, seemed changed: his manner became, though
not less tender, yet more respectful and diffident--his bosom felt a
throb it had till now not known, in the society of Rosamund--and, if
he was less familiar with her than in former times, that charm of
delicacy had superadded a grace to Rosamund, which, while he feared,
he loved.

There is a _mysterious character_, heightened, indeed, by fancy and
passion, but not without foundation in reality and observation, which
true lovers have ever imputed to the object of their affections. This
character Rosamund had now acquired with Allan--something _angelic,
perfect, exceeding nature._

Young Clare dwelt very near to the cottage. He had lost his parents,
who were rather wealthy, early in life; and was left to the care of a
sister some ten years older than himself.

Elinor Clare was an excellent young lady--discreet, intelligent, and
affectionate. Allan revered her as a parent, while he loved her as
his own familiar friend. He told all the little secrets of his heart
to her--but there was _one_, which he had hitherto unaccountably
concealed from her--namely, the extent of his regard for Rosamund.

Elinor knew of his visits to the cottage, and was no stranger to the
persons of Margaret and her granddaughter. She had several times met
them, when she had been walking with her brother--a civility usually
passed on either side--but Elinor avoided troubling her brother with
any unseasonable questions.

Allan's heart often beat, and he has been going to tell his sister
_all_--but something like shame (false or true, I shall not stay to
inquire) had hitherto kept him back;--still the secret, unrevealed,
hung upon his conscience like a crime--for his temper had a sweet and
noble frankness in it, which bespake him yet a virgin from the world.

There was a fine openness in his countenance--the character of it
somewhat resembled Rosamund's--except that more fire and enthusiasm
were discernible in Allan's; his eyes were of a darker blue than
Rosamund's--his hair was of a chestnut color--his cheeks ruddy, and
tinged with brown. There was a cordial sweetness in Allan's smile,
the like to which I never saw in any other face.

Elinor had hitherto connived at her brother's attachment to Rosamund.
Elinor, I believe, was something of a physiognomist, and thought she
could trace in the countenance and manner of Rosamund, qualities
which no brother of hers need be ashamed to love.

The time was now come when Elinor was desirous of knowing her
brother's favorite more intimately--an opportunity offered of
breaking the matter to Allan.

The morning of the day in which he carried his present of fruit and
flowers to Rosamund, his sister had observed him more than usually
busy in the garden, culling fruit with a nicety of choice not common
to him.

She came up to him, unobserved, and, taking him by the arm, inquired,
with a questioning smile--"What are you doing, Allan? and who are
those peaches designed for?"

"For Rosamund Gray"--he replied--and his heart seemed relieved of a
burden which had long oppressed it.

"I have a mind to become acquainted with your handsome friend--will
you introduce me, Allan? I think I should like to go and see her this
afternoon."

"Do go, do go, Elinor--you don't know what a good creature she is;
and old blind Margaret, you will like _her_ very much."

His sister promised to accompany him after dinner; and they parted.
Allan gathered no more peaches, but hastily cropping a few roses to
fling into his basket, went away with it half-filled, being impatient
to announce to Rosamund the coming of her promised visitor.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER V.


When Allan returned home, he found an invitation had been left for
him, in his absence, to spend that evening with a young friend, who
had just quitted a public school in London, and was come to pass one
night in his father's house at Widford, previous to his departure the
next morning for Edinburgh University.

It was Allan's bosom friend--they had not met for some months--and it
was probable a much longer time must intervene before they should
meet again.

Yet Allan could not help looking a little blank when he first heard
of the invitation. This was to have been an important evening. But
Elinor soon relieved her brother by expressing her readiness to go
alone to the cottage.

"I will not lose the pleasure I promised myself, whatever you may
determine upon, Allan; I will go by myself rather than be
disappointed."

"Will you, will you, Elinor?"

Elinor promised to go--and I believe, Allan, on a second thought, was
not very sorry to be spared the awkwardness of introducing two
persons to each other, both so dear to him, but either of whom might
happen not much to fancy the other.

At times, indeed, he was confident that Elinor _must_ love Rosamund,
and Rosamund _must_ love Elinor; but there were also times in which
he felt misgivings--it was an event he could scarce hope for very
joy!

Allan's _real presence_ that evening was more at the cottage than at
the house, where his _bodily semblance_ was visiting--his friend
could not help complaining of a certain absence of mind, a _coldness_
he called it.

It might have been expected, and in the course of things predicted,
that Allan would have asked his friend some questions of what had
happened since their last meeting, what his feelings were on leaving
school, the probable time when they should meet again, and a, hundred
natural questions which friendship is most lavish of at such times;
but nothing of all this ever occurred to Allan--they did not even
settle the method of their future correspondence.

The consequence was, as might have been expected, Allan's friend
thought him much altered, and, after his departure, sat down to
compose a doleful sonnet about a "faithless friend."--I do not find
that he ever finished it--indignation, or a dearth of rhymes, causing
him to break off in the middle.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER VI.


In my catalogue of the little library at the cottage, I forgot to
mention a book of Common Prayer. My reader's fancy might easily have
supplied the omission--old ladies of Margaret's stamp (God bless
them!) may as well be without their spectacles, or their elbow-chair,
as their prayer-book--I love them for it.

Margaret's was a handsome octavo, printed by Baskerville, the binding
red, and fortified with silver at the edges. Out of this book it was
their custom every afternoon to read the proper psalms appointed for
the day.

The way they managed was this: they took verse by verse--Rosamund
_read_ her little portion, and Margaret repeated hers in turn, from
memory--for Margaret could say all the Psalter by heart, and a good
part of the Bible besides. She would not unfrequently put the girl
right when she stumbled or skipped. This Margaret imputed to
giddiness--a quality which Rosamund was by no means remarkable
for--but old ladies, like Margaret, are not in all instances alike
discriminative.

They had been employed in this manner just before Miss Clare arrived
at the cottage. The psalm they had been reading was the hundred and
fourth--Margaret was naturally led by it into a discussion of the
works of creation.

There had been _thunder_ in the course of the day--an occasion of
instruction which the old lady never let pass--she began--

"Thunder has a very awful sound--some say God Almighty is angry
whenever it thunders--that it is the voice of God speaking to us; for
my part, I am not afraid of it"----

And in this manner the old lady was going on to particularize, as
usual, its beneficial effects, in clearing the air, destroying of
vermin, &c., when the entrance of Miss Clare put an end to her
discourse.

Rosamund received her with respectful tenderness--and, taking her
grandmother by the hand, said, with great sweetness,--"Miss Clare is
come to see you, grandmother."

"I beg pardon, lady--I cannot _see_ you--but you are heartily
welcome. Is your brother with you, Miss Clare?--I don't hear him."

"He could not come, madam, but he sends his love by me."

"You have an excellent brother, Miss Clare--but pray do us the honor
to take some refreshment--Rosamund"----

And the old lady was going to give directions for a bottle of her
currant wine--when Elinor, smiling, said "she was come to take a cup
of tea with her, and expected to find no ceremony."

"After tea, I promise myself a walk with you, Rosamund, if your
grandmother can spare you." Rosamund looked at her grandmother.

"Oh, for that matter, I should be sorry to debar the girl from any
pleasure--I am sure it's lonesome enough for her to be with _me_
always--and if Miss Clare will take you out, child, I shall do very
well by myself till you return--it will not be the first time, you
know, that I have been left here alone--some of the neighbors will be
dropping in bye and bye--or, if _not_, I shall take no harm."

Rosamund had all the simple manners of a child; she kissed her
grandmother, and looked happy.

All tea-time the old lady's discourse was little more than a
panegyric on young Clare's good qualities. Elinor looked at her young
friend, and smiled. Rosamund was beginning to look grave--but there
was a cordial sunshine in the face of Elinor, before which any clouds
of reserve that had been gathering on Rosamund's soon brake away.

"Does your grandmother ever go out, Rosamund?"

Margaret prevented the girl's reply, by saying--"My dear young lady,
I am an old woman, and very infirm--Rosamund takes me a few paces
beyond the door sometimes--but I walk very badly--I love best to sit
in our little arbor when the sun shines--I can yet feel it warm and
cheerful--and, if I lose the beauties of the season, I shall be very
happy if you and Rosamund can take delight in this fine summer
evening."

"I shall want to rob you of Rosamund's company now and then, if we
like one another. I had hoped to have seen _you_, madam, at our
house. I don't know whether we could not make room for you to come
and live with us--what say you to it? Allan would be proud to tend
you, I am sure; and Rosamund and I should be nice company."

Margaret was all unused to such kindnesses, and wept--Margaret had a
great spirit--yet she was not above accepting an obligation from a
worthy person--there was a delicacy in Miss Clare's manner--she could
have no interest but pure goodness, to induce her to make the
offer--at length the old lady spake from a full heart.

"Miss Clare, this little cottage received us in our distress--it gave
us shelter when we had _no home_--we have praised God in it--and,
while life remains, I think I shall never part from it--Rosamund does
everything for me"--

"And will do, grandmother, as long as I live;"--and then Rosamund
fell a-crying.

"You are a good girl, Rosamund; and if you do but find friends when I
am dead and gone, I shall want no better accommodation while I
live--but God bless you, lady, a thousand times, for your kind
offer."

Elinor was moved to tears, and, affecting a sprightliness, bade
Rosamund prepare for her walk. The girl put on her white silk bonnet;
and Elinor thought she never beheld so lovely a creature.

They took leave of Margaret, and walked out together; they rambled
over all Rosamund's favorite haunts--through many a sunny field--by
secret glade or wood-walk, where the girl had wandered so often with
her beloved Clare.

Who now so happy as Rosamund? She had oft-times heard Allan speak
with great tenderness of his sister--she was now rambling, arm in
arm, with that very sister, the "vaunted sister" of her friend, her
beloved Clare.

Not a tree, not a bush, scarce a wild flower in their path, but
revived in Rosamund some tender recollection, a conversation perhaps,
or some chaste endearment. Life, and a new scene of things, were now
opening before her--she was got into a fairy land of uncertain
existence.

Rosamund was too happy to talk much--but Elinor was delighted with
her when she _did_ talk:--the girl's remarks were suggested most of
them by the passing scene--and they betrayed, all of them, the
liveliness of present impulse;--her conversation did not consist in a
comparison of vapid feeling, an interchange of sentiment lip-deep--it
had all the freshness of young sensation in it.

Sometimes they talked of Allan.

"Allan is very good," said Rosamund, "very good _indeed_ to my
grandmother--he will sit with her, and hear her stories, and read to
her, and try to divert her a hundred ways. I wonder sometimes he is
not tired. She talks him to death!"

"Then you confess, Rosamund, that the old lady _does_ tire _you_
sometimes?"

"Oh no, I did not mean _that_--it's very different--I am used to all
her ways, and I can humor her, and please her, and I ought to do it,
for she is the only friend I ever had in the world."

The new friends did not conclude their walk till it was late, and
Rosamund began to be apprehensive about the old lady, who had been
all this time alone.

On their return to the cottage, they found that Margaret had been
somewhat impatient--old ladies, _good old ladies_, will be so at
times--age is timorous and suspicious of danger, where no danger is.

Besides, it was Margaret's bedtime, for she kept very good
hours--indeed, in the distribution of her meals, and sundry other
particulars, she resembled the livers in the antique world, more than
might well beseem a creature of this.

So the new friends parted for that night. Elinor having made Margaret
promise to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the next day.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER VII.


Miss Clare, we may be sure, made her brother very happy, when she
told him of the engagement she had made for the morrow, and how
delighted she had been with his handsome friend.

Allan, I believe, got little sleep that night. I know not, whether
joy be not a more troublesome bedfellow than grief--hope keeps a body
very wakeful, I know.

Elinor Clare was the best good creature--the least selfish human
being I ever knew--always at work for other people's good, planning
other people's happiness--continually forgetful to consult for her
own personal gratifications, except indirectly, in the welfare of
another; while her parents lived, the most attentive of
daughters--since they died, the kindest of sisters--I never knew but
_one_ like her. It happens that I have some of this young lady's
_letters_ in my possession--I shall present my reader with one of
them. It was written a short time after the death of her mother, and
addressed to a cousin, a dear friend of Elinor's, who was then on the
point of being married to Mr. Beaumont, of Staffordshire, and had
invited Elinor to assist at her nuptials. I will transcribe it with
minute fidelity.


ELINOR CLARE TO MARIA LESLIE.

Widford, July the --, 17--.

Health, Innocence, and Beauty, shall be thy bride-maids, my sweet
cousin. I have no heart to undertake the office. Alas! what have I to
do in the house of feasting?

Maria! I fear lest my griefs should prove obtrusive. Yet bear with me
a little--I have recovered already a share of my former spirits.

I fear more for Allan than myself. The loss of two such parents,
within so short an interval, bears very heavy on him. The boy _hangs_
about me from morning till night. He is perpetually forcing a smile
into his poor pale cheeks--you know the sweetness of his smile,
Maria.

To-day, after dinner, when he took his glass of wine in his hand, he
burst into tears, and would not, or could not then, tell me the
reason--afterwards he told me--"he had been used to drink Mamma's
health after dinner, and _that_ came into his head and made him cry."
I feel the claims the boy has upon me--I perceive that I am living to
_some end_--and the thought supports me.

Already I have attained to a state of complacent feelings--my
mother's lessons were not thrown away upon her Elinor.

In the visions of last night her spirit seemed to stand at my
bedside--a light, as of noonday, shone upon the room--she opened my
curtains--she smiled upon me with the same placid smile as in her
lifetime. I felt no fear. "Elinor," she said, "for my sake take care
of young Allan,"--and I awoke with calm feelings.

Maria! shall not the meeting of blessed spirits, think you, he
something like this?--I think, I could even now behold my mother
without dread--I would ask pardon of her for all my past omissions of
duty, for all the little asperities in my temper, which have so often
grieved her gentle spirit when living. Maria! I think she would not
turn away from me.

Oftentimes a feeling, more vivid than memory, brings her before me--I
see her sit in her old elbow-chair--her arms folded upon her lap--a
tear upon her cheek, that seems to upbraid her unkind daughter for
some inattention--I wipe it away and kiss her honored lips.

Maria! when I have been fancying all this, Allan will come in, with
his poor eyes red with weeping, and taking me by the hand, destroy
the vision in a moment.

I am prating to you, my sweet cousin, but it is the prattle of the
heart, which Maria loves. Besides, whom have I to talk to of these
things but you?--you have been my counsellor in times past, my
companion, and sweet familiar friend. Bear with me a little--I mourn
the "cherishers of my infancy."

I sometimes count it a blessing that my father did not prove the
_survivor_. You know something of his story. You know there was a
foul tale current--it was the busy malice of that bad man, S----,
which helped to spread it abroad--you will recollect the active
good-nature of our friends W---- and T----; what pains they took to
undeceive people--with the better sort their kind labors prevailed;
but there was still a party who shut their ears. You know the issue
of it. My father's great spirit bore up against it for some time--my
father never was a _bad_ man--but that spirit was broken at the
last--and the greatly-injured man was forced to leave his old
paternal dwelling in Staffordshire--for the neighbors had begun to
point at him. Maria! I have _seen_ them _point_ at him, and have been
ready to drop.

In this part of the country, where the slander had not reached, he
sought a retreat--and he found a still more grateful asylum in the
daily solicitudes of the best of wives.

"An enemy hath done this," I have heard him say--and at such times my
mother would speak to him so soothingly of forgiveness, and
long-suffering, and the bearing of injuries with patience; would heal
all his wounds with so gentle a touch;--I have seen the old man weep
like a child.

The gloom that beset his mind, at times betrayed him into
skepticism--he has doubted if there be a Providence! I have heard him
say, "God has built a brave world, but methinks he has left his
creatures to bustle in it _how they may_."

At such times he could not endure to hear my mother talk in a
religious strain. He would say, "Woman, have done--you confound, you
perplex me, when you talk of these matters, and for one day at least
unfit me for the business of life."

I have seen her look at him--O GOD, Maria! such a _look_! it plainly
spake that she was willing to have shared her precious hope with the
partner of her earthly cares--but she found a repulse--

Deprived of such a wife, think you, the old man could long have
endured his existence? or what consolation would his wretched
daughter have had to offer him, but silent and imbecile tears?

My sweet cousin, you will think me tedious--and I am so--but it does
me good to talk these matters over. And do not you be alarmed for
me--my sorrows are subsiding into a deep and sweet resignation. I
shall soon be sufficiently composed, I know it, to participate in my
friend's happiness.

Let me call her, while yet I may, my own Maria Leslie! Methinks, I
shall not like you by any other name. Beaumont! Maria Beaumont! it
hath a strange sound with it--I shall never be reconciled to this
name--but do not you fear--Maria Leslie shall plead with me for Maria
Beaumont.

             And now, my sweet Friend,
                God love you, and your
                    ELINOR CLARE.


I find in my collection several letters, written soon after the date
of the preceding, and addressed all of them to Maria Beaumont.--I am
tempted to make some short extracts from these--my tale will suffer
interruption by them--but I was willing to preserve whatever
memorials I could of Elinor Clare.


FROM ELINOR CLARE TO MARIA BEAUMONT.

(AN EXTRACT.)

"----I have been strolling out for half an hour in the fields; and my
mind has been occupied by thoughts which Maria has a right to
participate. I have been bringing my _mother_ to my recollection. My
heart ached with the remembrance of infirmities, that made her
closing years of life so sore a trial to her.

"I was concerned to think that our family differences have been one
source of disquiet to her. I am sensible that _this last_ we are apt
to exaggerate after a person's death--and surely, in the main, there
was considerable harmony among the members of our little
family--still I was concerned to think that we ever gave her gentle
spirit disquiet.

"I thought on years back--on all my parents' friends--the H----s, the
F----s, on D---- S----, and on many a merry evening, in the fireside
circle, in that comfortable back parlor--it is never used now.--

"O ye _Matravises_[1] of the age, ye know not what ye lose in
despising these petty topics of endeared remembrance, associated
circumstances of past times;--ye know not the throbbings of the
heart, tender yet affectionately familiar, which accompany the dear
and honored names of _father_ or of _mother_.

[Footnote 1: This name will be explained presently.]

"Maria! I thought on all these things; my heart ached at the review
of them--it yet aches, while I write this--but I am never so
satisfied with my train of thoughts, as when they run upon these
subjects--the tears they draw from us, meliorate and soften the
heart, and keep fresh within us that memory of dear friends dead,
which alone can fit us for a readmission to their society hereafter."


FROM ANOTHER LETTER.

"----I had a bad dream this morning--that Allan was dead--and who, of
all persons in the world do you think, put on mourning for him?
Why--_Matravis_. This alone might cure me of superstitious thoughts,
if I were inclined to them; for why should Matravis _mourn_ for us,
or our family?--Still it was pleasant to awake, and find it but a
dream.--Methinks something like an awaking from an ill dream shall
the Resurrection from the Dead be.--Materially different from our
accustomed scenes, and ways of life, the _World to come_ may possibly
not be--still it is represented to us under the notion of a _Rest_, a
_Sabbath_, a state of bliss."


FROM ANOTHER LETTER.

"----Methinks, you and I should have been born under the same roof,
sucked the same milk, conned the same horn-book, thumbed the same
Testament, together:--for we have been more than sisters, Maria!

"Something will still be whispering to me, that I shall one day be
inmate of the same dwelling with my cousin, partaker with her in all
the delights which spring from mutual good offices, kind words,
attentions in sickness and in health,--conversation, sometimes
innocently trivial, and at others profitably serious;--books read and
commented on, together; meals ate, and walks taken, together,--and
conferences, how we may best do good to this poor person or that, and
wean our spirits from the world's _cares_, without divesting
ourselves of its _charities_. What a picture I have drawn, Maria! and
none of all these things may ever come to pass."


FROM ANOTHER LETTER.

"----Continue to write to me, my sweet cousin. Many good thoughts,
resolutions, and proper views of things, pass through the mind in the
course of the day, but are lost for want of committing them to paper.
Seize them, Maria, as they pass, these Birds of Paradise, that show
themselves and are gone,--and make a grateful present of the precious
fugitives to your friend.

"To use a homely illustration, just rising in my fancy,--shall the
good housewife take such pains in pickling and preserving her
worthless fruits, her walnuts, her apricots, and quinces--and is
there not much _spiritual housewifery_ in treasuring up our mind's
best fruits--our heart's meditations in its most favored moments?

"This sad simile is much in the fashion of the old Moralizers, such
as I conceive honest Baxter to have been, such as Quarles and Wither
were with their curious, serio-comic, quaint emblems. But they
sometimes reach the heart, when a more elegant simile rests in the
fancy.

"Not low and mean, like these, but beautifully familiarized to our
conceptions, and condescending to human thoughts and notions, are all
the discourses of our LORD--conveyed in parable, or similitude, what
easy access do they win to the heart, through the medium of the
delighted imagination! speaking of heavenly things in fable, or in
simile, drawn from earth, from objects _common_, _accustomed_.

"Life's business, with such delicious little interruptions as our
correspondence affords, how pleasant it is!--why can we not paint on
the dull paper our whole feelings, exquisite as they rise up?"


FROM ANOTHER LETTER.

"----I had meant to have left off at this place; but looking back, I
am sorry to find too gloomy a cast tincturing my last page--a
representation of life false and unthankful. Life is _not_ all vanity
and disappointment--it hath much of evil in it, no doubt; but to
those who do not misuse it, it affords comfort, _temporary_ comfort,
much--much that endears us to it, and dignifies it--many true and
good feelings, I trust, of which we need not be ashamed--hours of
tranquillity and hope. But the morning was dull and overcast, and my
spirits were under a cloud. I feel my error.

"Is it no blessing that we two love one another so dearly--that Allan
is left me--that you are settled in life--that worldly affairs go
smooth with us both--above all that our lot hath fallen to us in a
Christian country? Maria! these things are not little. I will
consider life as a long feast, and not forget to say grace."


FROM ANOTHER LETTER.

"----Allan has written to me--you know, he is on a visit at his old
tutor's in Gloucestershire--he is to return home on Thursday--Allan
is a dear boy--he concludes his letter, which is very affectionate
throughout, in this manner--

"'Elinor, I charge you to learn the following stanza by heart--

  "'The monarch may forget his crown,
    That on his head an hour hath been;
  The bridegroom may forget his bride
    Was made his wedded wife yestreen;

  "'The mother may forget her child,
    That smiles so sweetly on her knee:
  But I'll remember thee, Glencairn,
    And all that thou hast done for me."

"'The lines are in Burns--you know, we read him for the first time
together at Margate--and I have been used to refer them to you, and
to call you, in my mind, _Glencairn_,--for you were always very good
to me. I had a thousand failings, but you would love me in spite of
them all. I am going to drink your health.'"

I shall detain my reader no longer from the narrative.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER VIII.


They had but four rooms in the cottage. Margaret slept in the biggest
room up-stairs, and her grand-daughter in a kind of closet adjoining,
where she could be within hearing, if her grandmother should call her
in the night.

The girl was often disturbed in that manner--two or three times in a
night she has been forced to leave her bed, to fetch her
grandmother's cordials, or do some little service for her--but she
knew that Margaret's ailings were _real_ and pressing, and Rosamund
never complained--never suspected, that her grandmother's
requisitions had anything unreasonable in them.

The night she parted with Miss Clare, she had helped Margaret to bed,
as usual--and, after saying her prayers, as the custom was, kneeling
by the old lady's bedside, kissed her grandmother, and wished her a
good-night--Margaret blessed her, and charged her to go to bed
directly. It was her customary injunction, and Rosamund had never
dreamed of disobeying.

So she retired to her little room. The night was warm and clear--the
moon very bright--her window commanded a view of _scenes_ she had
been tracing in the daytime with Miss Clare.

All the events of the day past, the occurrences of their walk arose
in her mind. She fancied she should like to retrace those scenes--but
it was now nine o'clock, a late hour in the village.

Still she fancied it would be very charming--and then her
grandmother's injunction came powerfully to her recollection--she
sighed, and turned from the window-and walked up and down her little
room.

Ever, when she looked at the window, the wish returned. It was not so
_very late_. The neighbors were yet about, passing under the window
to their homes--she thought, and thought again, till her sensations
became vivid, even to painfulness--her bosom was aching to give them
vent.

The village-clock struck ten!--the neighbors ceased to pass under the
window. Rosamund, stealing downstairs, fastened the latch behind her,
and left the cottage.

One, that knew her, met her, and observed her with some surprise.
Another recollects having wished her a good-night. Rosamund never
returned to the cottage.

An old man, that lay sick in a small house adjoining to Margaret's,
testified the next morning, that he had plainly heard the old
creature calling for her granddaughter. All the night long she made
her moan, and ceased not to call upon the name of Rosamund. But no
Rosamund was there--the voice died away, but not till near daybreak.

When the neighbors came to search in the morning, Margaret was
missing! She had _straggled_ out of bed, and made her way into
Rosamund's room--worn out with fatigue and fright, when she found the
girl not there, she had laid herself down to die--and, it is thought,
she died _praying_--for she was discovered in a kneeling posture, her
arms and face extended on the pillow, where Rosamund had slept the
night before--a smile was on her face in death.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER IX.


Fain would I draw a veil over the transactions of that night--but I
cannot--grief, and burning shame, forbid me to be silent--black deeds
are about to be made public, which reflect a stain upon our common
nature.

Rosamund, enthusiastic and improvident, wandered unprotected to a
distance from her guardian doors--through lonely glens, and
wood-walks, where she had rambled many a _day_ in safety--till she
arrived at a shady copse, out of the hearing of any human habitation.

_Matravis_ met her.---"Flown with insolence and wine," returning home
late at night, he passed that way!

Matravis was a very ugly man. Sallow-complexioned! and if hearts can
wear that color, his heart was sallow-complexioned also.

A young man with _gray_ deliberation! cold and systematic in all his
plans; and all his plans were evil. His very lust was systematic.

He would brood over his bad purposes for such a dreary length of time
that, it might have been expected, some solitary check of conscience
must have intervened to save him from commission. But that _Light
from Heaven_ was extinct in his dark bosom.

Nothing that is great, nothing that is amiable, existed for this
unhappy man. He feared, he envied, he suspected; but he never loved.
The sublime and beautiful in nature, the excellent and becoming in
morals, were things placed beyond the capacity of his sensations. He
loved not poetry--nor ever took a lonely walk to meditate--never
beheld virtue, which he did not try to disbelieve, or female beauty
and innocence, which he did not lust to contaminate.

A sneer was perpetually upon his face, and malice _grinning_ at his
heart. He would say the most ill-natured things, with the least
remorse, of any man I ever knew. This gained him the reputation of a
wit--other _traits_ got him the reputation of a villain.

And this man formerly paid his court to Elinor Clare!--with what
success I leave my readers to determine. It was not in Elinor's
nature to despise any living thing--but in the estimation of this
man, to be rejected was to be _despised_--and Matravis _never
forgave_.

He had long turned his eyes upon Rosamund Gray. To steal from the
bosom of her friends the jewel they prized so much, the little ewe
lamb they held so dear, was a scheme of delicate revenge, and
Matravis had a twofold motive for accomplishing this young maid's
ruin.

Often had he met her in her favorite solitudes, but found her ever
cold and inaccessible. Of late the girl had avoided straying far from
her own home, in the fear of meeting him--but she had never told her
fears to Allan.

Matravis had, till now, been content to be a villain within the
limits of the law--but, on the present occasion, hot fumes of wine,
cooperating with his deep desire of revenge, and the insolence of an
unhoped-for meeting, overcame his customary prudence, and Matravis
rose, at once, to an audacity of glorious mischief.

Late at night he met her, a lonely, unprotected virgin--no friend at
hand--no place near of refuge.

Rosamund Gray, my soul is exceeding sorrowful for thee--I loathe to
tell the hateful circumstances of thy wrongs. Night and silence were
the only witnesses of this young maid's disgrace--Matravis fled.

Rosamund, polluted and disgraced, wandered, an abandoned thing, about
the fields and meadows till daybreak. Not caring to return to the
cottage, she sat herself down before the gate of Miss Clare's
house--in a stupor of grief.

Elinor was just rising, and had opened the windows of her chamber,
when she perceived her desolate young friend. She ran to embrace
her--she brought her into the house--she took her to her bosom--she
kissed her--she spake to her; but Rosamund could not speak.

Tidings came from the cottage. Margaret's death was an event which
could not be kept concealed from Rosamund. When the sweet maid heard
of it, she languished, and fell sick--she never held up her head
after that time.

If Rosamund had been a _sister_, she could not have been kindlier
treated than by her two friends.

Allan had prospects in life--might, in time, have married into any of
the first families in Hertfordshire--but Rosamund Gray, humbled
though she was, and put to shame, had yet a charm for _him_--and he
would have been content to share his fortunes with her yet, if
Rosamund would have lived to be his companion.

But this was not to be--and the girl soon after died. She expired in
the arms of Elinor--quiet, gentle, as she lived--thankful that she
died not among strangers--and expressing, by signs rather than words,
a gratitude for the most trifling services, the common offices of
humanity. She died uncomplaining; and this young maid, this untaught
Rosamund, might have given a lesson to the grave philosopher in
death.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER X.


I was but a boy when these events took place. All the village
remember the story, and tell of Rosamund Gray, and old blind
Margaret.

I parted from Allan Clare on that disastrous night, and set out for
Edinburgh the next morning, before the facts were commonly known--I
heard not of them--and it was four months before I received a letter
from Allan.

"His heart," he told me, "was gone from him--for his sister had died
of a frenzy fever!"--not a word of Rosamund in the letter--I was left
to collect her story from sources which may one day be explained.

I soon after quitted Scotland, on the death of my father, and
returned to my native village. Allan had left the place, and I could
gain no information, whether he were dead or living.

I passed the _cottage_. I did not dare to look that way, or to
inquire _who_ lived there. A little dog, that had been Rosamund's,
was yelping in my path. I laughed aloud like one mad, whose mind had
suddenly gone from him--I stared vacantly around me, like one
alienated from common perceptions.

But I was young at that time, and the impression became gradually
weakened as I mingled in the business of life. It is now _ten years_
since these events took place, and I sometimes think of them as
unreal. Allan Clare was a dear friend to me--but there are times when
Allan and his sister, Margaret and her grand-daughter, appear like
personages of a dream--an idle dream.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER XI.


Strange things have happened unto me--I seem scarce awake--but I will
recollect my thoughts, and try to give an account of what has
befallen me in the few last weeks.

Since my father's death our family have resided in London. I am in
practice as a surgeon there. My mother died two years after we left
Widford.

A month or two ago, I had been busying myself in drawing up the above
narrative, intending to make it public. The employment had forced my
mind to dwell upon _facts_, which had begun to fade from it--the
memory of old times became vivid, and more vivid--I felt a strong
desire to revisit the scenes of my native village--of the young loves
of Rosamund and her Clare.

A kind of dread had hitherto kept me back; but I was restless now,
till I had accomplished my wish. I set out one morning to walk--I
reached Widford about eleven in the forenoon--after a slight
breakfast at my inn--where I was mortified to perceive the old
landlord did not know me again--(old Thomas Billet--he has often made
angle-rods for me when a child)--I rambled over all my accustomed
haunts.

Our old house was vacant, and to be sold. I entered, unmolested, into
the room that had been my bedchamber. I kneeled down on the spot
where my little bed had stood--I felt like a child--I prayed like
one--it seemed as though old times were to return again--I looked
round involuntarily, expecting to see some face I knew--but all was
naked and mute. The bed was gone. My little pane of painted window,
through which I loved to look at the sun when I awoke in a fine
summer's morning, was taken out, and had been replaced by one of
common glass.

I visited, by turns, every chamber--they were all desolate and
unfurnished, one excepted, in which the owner had left a harpsichord,
probably to be sold--I touched the keys--I played some old Scottish
tunes, which had delighted me when a child. Past associations revived
with the music--blended with a sense of _unreality_, which at last
became too powerful--I rushed out of the room to give vent to my
feelings.

I wandered, scarce knowing where, into an old wood, that stands at
the back of the house--we called it the _Wilderness_. A well-known
_form_ was missing, that used to meet me in this place--it was
thine--Ben Moxam--the kindest, gentlest, politest of human beings,
yet was he nothing higher than a gardener in the family. Honest
creature! thou didst never pass me in my childish rambles, without a
soft speech, and a smile. I remember thy good-natured face. But there
is one thing, for which I can never forgive thee, Ben Moxam--that
thou didst join with an old maiden aunt of mine in a cruel plot, to
lop away the hanging branches of the old fir-trees--I remember them
sweeping to the ground.

I have often left my childish sports to ramble in this place--its
glooms and its solitude had a mysterious charm for my young mind,
nurturing within me that love of quietness and lonely thinking, which
has accompanied me to maturer years.

In this _Wilderness_ I found myself, after a ten years' absence. Its
stately fir-trees were yet standing, with all their luxuriant company
of underwood--the squirrel was there, and the melancholy cooings of
the wood-pigeon--all was as I had left it--my heart softened at the
sight--it seemed as though my character had been suffering a _change_
since I forsook these shades.

My parents were both dead--I had no counsellor left, no experience of
age to direct me, no sweet voice of reproof. The Lord had taken away
my _friends_, and I knew not where he had laid them. I paced round
the wilderness, seeking a comforter. I prayed that I might be
restored to that _state of innocence_, in which I had wandered in
those shades.

Methought my request was heard, for it seemed as though the stains of
manhood were passing from me, and I were relapsing into the purity
and simplicity of childhood. I was content to have been moulded into
a perfect child. I stood still, as in a trance. I dreamed that I was
enjoying a personal intercourse with my heavenly Father--and,
extravagantly, put off the shoes from my feet--for the place where I
stood I thought, was holy ground.

This state of mind could not last long, and I returned with languid
feelings to my inn. I ordered my dinner--green peas and a
sweetbread--it had been a favorite dish with me in my childhood--I
was allowed to have it on my birthdays. I was impatient to see it
come upon table--but, when it came, I could scarce eat a mouthful--my
tears choked me. I called for wine--I drank a pint and a half of red
wine--and not till then had I dared to visit the church-yard, where
my parents were interred.

The _cottage_ lay in my way--Margaret had chosen it for that very
reason, to be near the church--for the old lady was regular in her
attendance on public worship--I passed on--and in a moment found
myself among the tombs.

I had been present at my father's burial, and knew the spot again--my
mother's funeral I was prevented by illness from attending--a plain
stone was placed over the grave, with their initials carved upon
it--for they both occupied one grave.

I prostrated myself before the spot--I kissed the earth that covered
them--I contemplated, with gloomy delight, the time when I should
mingle my dust with theirs--and kneeled, with my arms incumbent on
the gravestone, in a kind of mental prayer--for I could not speak.

Having performed these duties, I arose with quieter feelings, and
felt leisure to attend to indifferent objects.--Still I continued in
the church-yard, reading the various inscriptions, and moralizing on
them with that kind of levity, which will not unfrequently spring up
in the mind, in the midst of deep melancholy.

I read of nothing but careful parents, loving husbands, and dutiful
children. I said jestingly, where be all the _bad_ people buried? Bad
parents, bad husbands, bad children--what cemeteries are appointed
for these?--do they not sleep in consecrated ground? or is it but a
pious fiction, a generous oversight, in the survivors, which thus
tricks out men's epitaphs when dead, who, in their lifetime,
discharged the offices of life, perhaps, but lamely? Their failings,
with their reproaches, now sleep with them in the grave. _Man wars
not with the dead._ It is a _trait_ of human nature, for which I love
it.

I had not observed, till now, a little group assembled at the other
end of the church-yard; it was a company of children, who were
gathered round a young man, dressed in black, sitting on a
gravestone.

He seemed to be asking them questions--probably, about their
learning--and one little dirty ragged-headed fellow was clambering up
his knees to kiss him. The children had been eating black
cherries--for some of the stones were scattered about, and their
mouths were smeared with them.

As I drew near them, I thought I discerned in the stranger a mild
benignity of countenance, which I had somewhere seen before--I gazed
at him more attentively.

It was Allan Clare! sitting on the grave of his sister.

I threw my arms about his neck. I exclaimed "Allan"--he turned his
eyes upon me--he knew me--we both wept aloud--it seemed as though the
interval since we parted had been as nothing--I cried out, "Come, and
tell me about these things."

I drew him away from his little friends--he parted with a show of
reluctance from the church-yard--Margaret and her grand-daughter lay
buried there, as well as his sister--I took him to my inn--secured a
room, where we might be private--ordered fresh wine--scarce knowing
what I did, I danced for joy.

Allan was quite overcome, and taking me by the hand, he said, "This
repays me for all."

It was a proud day for me--I had found the friend I thought
dead--earth seemed to me no longer valuable, than as it contained
_him_; and existence a blessing no longer than while I should live to
be his comforter.

I began, at leisure, to survey him with more attention. Time and
grief had left few traces of that fine _enthusiasm_, which once
burned in his countenance--his eyes had lost their original fire, but
they retained an uncommon sweetness, and whenever they were turned
upon me, their smile pierced to my heart.

"Allan, I fear you have been a sufferer?" He replied not, and I could
not press him further. I could not call the dead to life again.

So we drank and told old stories--and repeated old poetry--and sang
old songs--as if nothing had happened. We sate till very late. I
forgot that I had purposed returning to town that evening--to Allan
all places were alike--I grew noisy, he grew cheerful--Allan's old
manners, old enthusiasm, were returning upon him--we laughed, we
wept, we mingled our tears, and talked extravagantly.

Allan was my chamber-fellow that night--and lay awake planning
schemes of living together under the same roof, entering upon similar
pursuits,--and praising GOD, that we had met.

I was obliged to return to town the next morning, and Allan proposed
to accompany me. "Since the death of his sister," he told me, "he had
been a wanderer."

In the course of our walk he unbosomed himself without reserve--told
me many particulars of his way of life for the last nine or ten
years, which I do not feel myself at liberty to divulge.

Once, on my attempting to cheer him, when I perceived him over
thoughtful, he replied to me in these words:

"Do not regard me as unhappy when you catch me in these moods. I am
never more happy than at times when, by the cast of my countenance,
men judge me most miserable.

"My friend, the events which have left this sadness behind them are
of no recent date. The melancholy which comes over me with the
recollection of them is not hurtful, but only tends to soften and
tranquillize my mind, to detach me from the restlessness of human
pursuits.

"The stronger I feel this detachment, the more I find myself drawn
heavenward to the contemplation of spiritual objects.

"I love to keep old friendships alive and warm within me, because I
expect a renewal of them in the _World of Spirits_.

"I am a wandering and unconnected thing on the earth. I have made no
new friendships, that can compensate me for the loss of the old--and
the more I know mankind, the more does it become necessary for me to
supply their loss by little images, recollections, and circumstances
of past pleasures.

"I am sensible that I am surrounded by a multitude of very worthy
people, plain-hearted souls, sincere and kind. But they have hitherto
eluded my pursuit, and will continue to bless the little circle of
their families and friends, while I must remain a stranger to them.

"Kept at a distance by mankind, I have not ceased to love them--and
could I find the cruel persecutor, the malignant instrument of GOD'S
judgments on me and mine, I think I would forgive, and try to love
him too.

"I have been a quiet sufferer. From the beginning of my calamities it
was given to me, not to see the hand of man in them. I perceived a
mighty arm, which none but myself could see, extended over me. I gave
my heart to the Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will of the
Universe. The irresistible wheels of destiny passed on in their
everlasting rotation,--and I suffered myself to be carried along
with them without complaining."


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER XII.

Allan told me that for some years past, feeling himself disengaged
from every personal tie, but not alienated from human sympathies, it
had been his taste, his _humor_ he called it, to spend a great
portion of his time in _hospitals_ and _lazar-houses_.

He had found a _wayward pleasure_, he refused to name it a virtue, in
tending a description of people, who had long ceased to expect
kindness or friendliness from mankind, but were content to accept the
reluctant services, which the oftentimes unfeeling instruments and
servants of these well-meant institutions deal out to the poor sick
people under their care.

It is not medicine, it is not broths and coarse meats, served up at a
stated hour with all the hard formalities of a prison--it is not the
scanty dole of a bed to die on--which dying man requires from his
species.

Looks, attentions, consolations,--in a word, _sympathies_, are what a
man most needs in this awful close of mortal sufferings. A kind look,
a smile, a drop of cold water to the parched lip--for these things a
man shall bless you in death.

And these better things than cordials did Allan love to
administer--to stay by a bedside the whole day, when something
disgusting in a patient's distemper has kept the very nurses at a
distance--to sit by, while the poor wretch got a little sleep--and be
there to smile upon him when he awoke--to slip a guinea, now and
then, into the hands of a nurse or attendant--these things have been
to Allan as _privileges_, for which he was content to live; choice
marks, and circumstances, of his Maker's goodness to him.

And I do not know whether occupations of this kind be not a spring of
purer and nobler delight (certainly instances of a more disinterested
virtue) than arises from what are called Friendships of Sentiment.

Between two persons of liberal education, like opinions, and common
feelings, oftentimes subsists a Variety of Sentiment, which disposes
each to look upon the other as the only being in the universe worthy
of friendship, or capable of understanding it,--themselves they
consider as the solitary receptacles of all that is delicate in
feeling, or stable in attachment: when the odds are, that under every
green hill, and in every crowded street, people of equal worth are to
be found, who do more good in their generation, and make less noise
in the doing of it.

It was in consequence of these benevolent propensities, I have been
describing, that Allan oftentimes discovered considerable
inclinations in favor of my way of life, which I have before
mentioned as being that of a surgeon. He would frequently attend me
on my visits to patients; and I began to think that he had serious
intentions of making my profession his study.

He was present with me at a scene--a, _death-bed scene_--I shudder
when I do but think of it.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHAPTER XIII.


I was sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gentleman,
who had been wounded in a duel,--and his wounds by unskilful
treatment had been brought to a dangerous crisis.

The uncommonness of the name, which was _Matravis_, suggested to me,
that this might possibly be no other than Allan's old enemy. Under
this apprehension, I did what I could to dissuade Allan from
accompanying me--but he seemed bent upon going, and even pleased
himself with the notion, that it might lie within his ability to do
the unhappy man some service. So he went with me.

When we came to the house, which was in Soho-square, we discovered
that it was indeed the man--the identical Matravis, who had done all
that mischief in times past--but not in a condition to excite any
other sensation than pity in a heart more hard than Allan's.

Intense pain had brought on a delirium--we perceived this on first
entering the room--for the wretched man was raving to
himself--talking idly in mad unconnected sentences--that yet seemed,
at times, to have reference to _past facts_.

One while he told us his dream. "He had lost his way on a great
heath, to which there seemed no end--it was cold, cold, cold,--and
dark, very dark--an old woman in leading-strings, _blind_, was
groping about for a guide"--and then he frightened me,--for he seemed
disposed to be _jocular_, and sang a song about "an old woman clothed
in gray," and said "he did not believe in a devil."

Presently he bid us "not tell Allan Clare."--Allan was hanging over
him at that very moment, sobbing.--I could not resist the impulse,
but cried out, "_This_ is Allan Clare--Allan Clare is come to see
you, my dear Sir."--The wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for
he turned his head away, and began talking of _charnel-houses_, and
_dead men_, and "whether they knew anything that passed in their
coffins."

Matravis died that night.


       *       *       *       *       *


ESSAYS.

RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.


To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, without
diminishing the stock which is imperiously demanded to furnish the
more pressing and homely wants of our nature, he has disposed of one
or more perhaps out of a numerous offspring, under the shelter of a
care scarce less tender than the paternal, where not only their
bodily cravings shall be supplied, but that mental _pabulum_ is also
dispensed, which HE hath declared to be no less necessary to our
sustenance, who said, that, "not by bread alone man can live": for
this Christ's Hospital unfolds her bounty. Here neither, on the one
hand, are the youth lifted up above their family, which we must
suppose liberal, though reduced; nor on the other hand, are they
liable to be depressed below its level by the mean habits and
sentiments which a common charity-school generates. It is, in a word,
an Institution to keep those who have yet held up their heads in the
world, from sinking; to keep alive the spirit of a decent household,
when poverty was in danger of crushing it; to assist those who are
the most willing, but not always the most able, to assist themselves;
to separate a child from his family for a season, in order to render
him back hereafter, with feelings and habits more congenial to it,
than he could even have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of
it. It is a preserving and renovating principle, an antidote for the
_res angusta domi_, when it presses, as it always does, most heavily
upon the most ingenuous natures.

This is Christ's Hospital; and whether its character would be
improved by confining its advantages to the very lowest of the
people, let those judge who have witnessed the looks, the gestures,
the behavior, the manner of their play with one another, their
deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect and physiognomy of
that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, who freshen
and make alive again with their sports the else mouldering cloisters
of the old Grey Friars--which strangers who have never witnessed, if
they pass through Newgate Street, or by Smithfield, would do well to
go a little out of their way to see.

For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy; he
feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he
belongs; in the usage which he meets with at school, and the
treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds; in the respect and
even kindness, which his well-known garb never fails to procure him
in the streets of the metropolis; he feels it in his education, in
that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at that
school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his
power to procure, attainments which it would be worse than folly to
put it in the reach of the laboring classes to acquire: he feels it
in the numberless comforts, and even magnificences, which surround
him; in his old and awful cloisters, with their traditions; in his
spacious school-rooms, and in the well-ordered, airy, and lofty rooms
where he sleeps; in his stately dining-hall, hung round with
pictures, by Verrio, Lely, and others, one of them surpassing in size
and grandeur almost any other in the kingdom;[1] above all, in the
very extent and magnitude of the body to which he belongs, and the
consequent spirit, the intelligence, and public conscience, which is
the result of so many various yet wonderfully combining members.
Compared with this last-named advantage, what is the stock of
information (I do not here speak of book-learning, but of that
knowledge which boy receives from boy), the mass of collected
opinions, the intelligence in common, among the few and narrow
members of an ordinary boarding-school?

[Footnote 1: By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne,
surrounded by his courtiers,(all curious portraits,) receiving the
mathematical pupils at their annual presentation: a custom still kept
up on New-year's-day at Court.]

The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character
of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common
charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought
up at some other of the public schools. There is _pride_ in it,
accumulated from the circumstances which I have described, as
differencing him from the former; and there is _a restraining
modesty_ from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever
keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very
garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect; as it
is a badge of dependence, it restrains the natural petulance of that
age from breaking out into overt acts of insolence. This produces
silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness
which boys mewed up at home will feel; he will speak up when spoken
to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him. Within his
bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along
with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to
mix with other boys; they are a sort of laity to him. All this
proceeds, I have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he
carries about him, of the difference of his dress from that of the
rest of the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by
overhastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he should
commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh at this; for,
considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the
small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress--above all,
where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of
disparagement--this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a
wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor
rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of
either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself, by putting a question to
any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of
plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the
same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the
---- cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to
exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to
reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and
sadden him.

The Christ's Hospital boy is a religions character. His school is
eminently a religious foundation; it has its peculiar prayers, its
services at set times, its graces, hymns, and anthems, following each
other in an almost monastic closeness of succession. This religious
character in him is not always untinged with superstition. That is
not wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales and traditions
which must circulate, with undisturbed credulity, amongst so many
boys, that have so few checks to their belief from any intercourse
with the world at large; upon whom their equals in age must work so
much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards an
over-belief in matters of religion, which will soon correct itself
when he comes out into society, may be classed a turn for romance
above most other boys. This is to be traced in the same manner to
their excess of society with each other, and defect of mingling with
the world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such books as the
"Arabian Nights' Entertainments," and others of a still wilder cast,
are, or at least were in my time, sought for by the boys. I remember
when some half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card,
or compass, on a serious expedition to find out _Philip Quarll's
Island_.

The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is peculiarly
tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial
observances, and to impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict
obligations of the moral law. Those who were contemporaries with me
at that school thirty years ago, will remember with what more than
Judaic rigor the eating of the fat of certain boiled meats[1] was
interdicted. A boy would have blushed as at the exposure of some
heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden
portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he
was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger.
The same, or even greater, refinement was shown in the rejection of
certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave rise to these supererogatory
penances, these self-denying ordinances, I could never learn;[2] they
certainly argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A little
excess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance
for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the
less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral
feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what
took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I
must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed,
the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this subject,
almost bring back those times; they are present to me still. But I
believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I
speak of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little
changed. Their situation in point of many comforts is improved; but
that which I ventured before to term the _public conscience_ of the
school, the pervading moral sense, of which every mind partakes and
to which so many individual minds contribute, remains, I believe,
pretty much the same as when I left it. I have seen, within this
twelvemonth almost, the change which has been produced upon a boy of
eight or nine years of age, upon being admitted into that school;
how, from a pert young coxcomb, who thought that all knowledge was
comprehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering of two
or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into him by
injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with the wholesome
society of so many school-fellows, in less time than I have spoken
of, he has sunk to his own level, and is contented to be carried on
in the quiet orbit of modest self-knowledge in which the common mass
of that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem to move: from being a
little unfeeling mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it
be a difficult matter to show how, at a school like this, where the
boy is neither entirely separated from home, nor yet exclusively
under its influence, the best feelings, the filial for instance, are
brought to a maturity which they could not have attained under a
completely domestic education; how the relation of a parent is
rendered less tender by unremitted association, and the very
awfulness of age is best apprehended by some sojourning amidst the
comparative levity of youth; how absence, not drawn out by too great
extension into alienation or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the
relish of occasional intercourse, and the boy is made the better
_child_ by that which keeps the force of that relation from being
felt as perpetually pressing on him; how the substituted paternity,
into the care of which he is adopted, while in everything substantial
it makes up for the natural, in the necessary omission of individual
fondnesses and partialities, directs the mind only the more strongly
to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which such weaknesses
are the bond of strength, and the appetite which craves after them
betrays no perverse palate. But these speculations rather belong to
the question of the comparative advantages of a public over a private
education in general. I must get back to my favorite school; and to
that which took place when our old and good steward died.

[Footnote 1: Under the denomination of _gage_.]

[Footnote 2: I am told that the late steward [Mr. Hathaway], who
evinced on many occasions a most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the
comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his address and
perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices,
in which he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one
half of the animal nutrition of the school those honors which painful
superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from
it.]

And I will say that when I think of the frequent instances which I
have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and
insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot
and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something
in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the
expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that at the period
which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not a dry eye
to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine
emotion. Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past,
seemed suspended throughout the school; and the boys, lately so
mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in
sad groups standing about, few of them without some token, such as
their slender means could provide, a black riband or something, to
denote respect and a sense of their loss. The time itself was a time
of anarchy, a time in which all authority (out of school hours) was
abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those days superseded;
and the gates, which at other times kept us in, were left without
watchers. Yet, with the exception of one or two graceless boys at
most, who took advantage of that suspension of authorities to _skulk
out_, as it was called, the whole body of that great school kept
rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment; and
they who broke bounds, though they escaped punishment from any
master, fell into a general disrepute among us, and, for that which
at any other time would have been applauded and admired as a mark of
spirit, were consigned to infamy and reprobation; so much _natural
government_ have gratitude and the principles of reverence and love,
and so much did a respect to their dead friend prevail with these
Christ's Hospital boys, above any fear which his presence among them
when living could ever produce. And if the impressions which were
made on my mind so long ago are to be trusted, very richly did their
steward deserve this tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call
to mind his portly form, the regal awe which he always contrived to
inspire, in spite of a tenderness and even weakness of nature that
would have enfeebled the reins of discipline in any other master; a
yearning of tenderness towards those under his protection, which
could make five hundred boys at once feel towards him each as to
their individual father. He had faults, with which we had nothing to
do; but, with all his faults, indeed, Mr. Perry was a most
extraordinary creature. Contemporary with him and still living,
though he has long since resigned his occupation, will it be
impertinent to mention the name of our excellent upper
grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer? He was a disciplinarian,
indeed, of a different stamp from him whom I have just described;
but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a temper a little too hasty
to leave the more nervous of us quite at our ease to do justice to
his merits in those days, are long since over, ungrateful were we if
we should refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity with which
he attended to the particular improvement of each of us. Had we been
the offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not have been
instigated by the strongest views of recompense and reward to have
made himself a greater slave to the most laborious of all occupations
than he did for us sons of charity, from whom, or from our parents,
he could expect nothing. He has had his reward in the satisfaction of
having discharged his duty, in the pleasurable consciousness of
having advanced the respectability of that institution to which, both
man and boy, he was attached; in the honors to which so many of his
pupils have successfully aspired at both our Universities; and in the
staff with which the Governors of the Hospital, at the close of his
hard labors, with the highest expressions of the obligations the
school lay under to him, unanimously voted to present him.

I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution
of this school, that the offices of steward and school-master are
kept distinct; the strict business of education alone devolving upon
the latter, while the former has the charge of all things out of
school, the control of the provisions, the regulation of meals, of
dress, of play, and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this
division of management, a superior respectability must attach to the
teacher, while his office is unmixed with any of these lower
concerns. A still greater advantage over the construction of common
boarding-schools is to be found in the settled salaries of the
masters, rendering them totally free of obligation to any individual
pupil, or his parents. This never fails to have its effect at schools
where each boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the master derives
from him, where he views him every day in the light of a caterer, a
provider for the family, who is to get so much by him in each of his
meals. Boys will see and consider these things; and how much must the
sacred character of preceptor suffer in their minds by these
degrading associations! The very bill which the pupil carries home
with him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate though
necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers have other ends
than the mere love to learning, in the lessons which they give him;
and though they put into his hands the fine sayings of Seneca or
Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of those disinterested
pedagogues to teach philosophy _gratis_. The master, too, is sensible
that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that
affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the
bitter labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into
unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have
conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to
acknowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of the
masters of this school in great measure exempt them; while the happy
custom of choosing masters (indeed every officer of the
establishment) from those who have received their education there,
gives them an interest in advancing the character of the school, and
binds them to observe a tenderness and a respect to the children, in
which a stranger, feeling that independence which I have spoken of,
might well be expected to fail.

In affectionate recollections of the place where he was bred up, in
hearty recognitions of old school-fellows met with again after the
lapse of years, or in foreign countries, the Christ's Hospital boy
yields to none; I might almost say, he goes beyond most other boys.
The very compass and magnitude of the school, its thousand bearings,
the space it takes up in the imagination beyond the ordinary schools,
impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation of mind, that
attends him through life. It is too big, too affecting an object, to
pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ's Hospital boy's friends
at school are commonly his intimates through life. For me, I do not
know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too
obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted
ratio to the usual sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been
engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the
colors which imagination gave to everything then. I belong to no
_body corporate_ such as I then made a part of.--And here, before I
close, taking leave of the general reader, and addressing myself
solely to my old school-fellows, that were contemporaries with me
from the year 1782 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of
those circumstances of our school, which they will not be unwilling
to have brought back to their minds.

And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our childish
eyes, the young men (as they almost were) who, under the denomination
of _Grecians_, were waiting the expiration of the period when they
should be sent, at the charges of the Hospital, to one or other of
our universities, but more frequently to Cambridge. These youths,
from their superior acquirements, their superior age and stature, and
the fewness of their numbers (for seldom above two or three at a time
were inaugurated into that high order), drew the eyes of all, and
especially of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and
admiration. How tall they used to seem to us! how stately would they
pace along the cloisters! while the play of the lesser boys was
absolutely suspended, or its boisterousness at least allayed, at
their presence! Not that they ever beat or struck the boys--that
would have been to have demeaned themselves--the dignity of their
persons alone insured them all respect. The task of blows, of
corporal chastisement, they left to the common monitors, or heads of
wards, who, it must be confessed, in our time had rather too much
license allowed them to oppress and misuse their inferiors; and the
interference of the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual
power, was not unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its mediation
the heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or monitor. In
fine, the Grecians were the solemn Muftis of the school. Eras were
computed from their time;--it used to be said, such or such a thing
was done when S---- or T---- was Grecian.

As I ventured to call the Grecians, the Muftis of the school, the
King's boys,[1] as their character then was, may well pass for the
Janissaries. They were the terror of all the other boys; bred up
under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician and
conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were
adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to
encounter. Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be
borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as
inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To
make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to
be his only aim; to this everything was subordinate. Moral
obliquities, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recompense,
for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let slip; but the
effects expected to be produced from it were something very different
from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a
perpetual fund of humor, a constant glee about him, which, heightened
by an inveterate provincialism of north-country dialect, absolutely
took away the sting from his severities. His punishments were a game
at patience, in which the master was not always worst contented when
he found himself at times overcome by his pupil. What success this
discipline had, or how the effects of it operated upon the
after-lives of these King's boys, I cannot say: but I am sure that,
for the time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school.
Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in
the whole mass; older and bigger than the other boys, (for, by the
system of their education they were kept longer at school by two or
three years than any of the rest, except the Grecians,) they were a
constant terror to the younger part of the school; and some who may
read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation into which
the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was raised in the
cloisters, that _the First Order was coming_--for so they termed the
first form or class of those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some
good purposes, in the school. They were the military class among the
boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who extended the fame of the
prowess of the school far and near; and the apprentices in the
vicinage, and sometimes the butchers' boys in the neighboring market,
had sad occasion to attest their valor.

[Footnote 1: The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the
foundation of Charles the Second.]

The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those
circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which,
seen through the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the
memory. But I must crave leave to remember our transcending
superiority in those invigorating sports, leap-frog, and basting the
bear; our delightful excursions in the summer holidays to the New
River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live the long day
in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves, when we had once
stripped; our savory meals afterwards, when we came home almost
famished with staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at
other times to the Tower, where, by ancient privilege, we had free
access to all the curiosities; our solemn procession through the City
at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a
shilling, with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the
dispensing Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the
banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the well-lighted hall
and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us, made
the whole look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a
plain bread and cheese collation; the annual orations upon St.
Matthew's day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done,
seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honor to our
school by being educated in it, the names of those accomplished
critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I
marvel they left out Camden while they were about it). Let me have
leave to remember our hymns and anthems, and well-toned organ; the
doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters,
upon the seldom-occurring funeral of some school-fellow; the
festivities at Christmas, when the richest of us would club our stock
to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to the
height with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contribute
nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the
substantialities of the feasting; the carol sung by night at that
time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often lain awake
to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was
sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it, in
their rude chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the
fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung at that season, by
angels' voices to the shepherds.

Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered
to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands and town-made shirts, which
some of the most fashionable among us wore; the town-girdles, with
buckles of silver, or shining stone; the badges of the sea-boys; the
cots, or superior shoestrings, of the monitors; the medals of the
markers; (those who were appointed to hear the Bible read in the
wards on Sunday morning and evening,) which bore on their obverse in
silver, as certain parts of our garments carried, in meaner metal,
the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child, King
Edward the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that
was untimely cropt, as it began to fill our land with its early
odors--the boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child who walked
with Cranmer and Bidley--fit associate, in those tender years, for
the bishops, and future martyrs of our Church, to receive, or, (as
occasion sometimes proved,) to give instruction.

  "But, ah! what means the silent tear?
    Why, e'en 'mid joy, my bosom heave?
  Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments dear!
    Lo! now I linger o'er your grave.

  "--Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue,
    And bear away the bloom of years!
  And quick succeed, ye sickly crew
    Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears!

  "Still will I ponder Fate's unaltered plan,
  Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man."[1]

[Footnote 1: Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital,
in the "Poetics," of Mr. George Dyer.]


       *       *       *       *       *


ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEARE.

CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE-REPRESENTATION.

Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen
before, and which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the
celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good
Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated
ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction
of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us
of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this
harlequin figure the following lines:--

  "To paint fair Nature, by divine command
  Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
  A Shakspeare rose; then, to expand his fame
  Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
  Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
  The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
  Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
  Immortal Garrick called them back to day:
  And till Eternity with power sublime
  Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
  Shakspeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
  And earth irradiate with a beam divine."

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt
anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
nonsense. But the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder,
how, from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should
have been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that
has had the luck to please the Town in any of the great characters of
Shakspeare, with the notion of possessing a _mind congenial with the
poet's_; how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty
of being able to read or recite the same when put into words;[1]or
what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man,
which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon
the eye and ear, which a player, by observing a few general effects,
which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c., usually has upon the
gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal
workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for
instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the _how far_ they should be
moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to
pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the
slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of
a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare
imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or
gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all
but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,
generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it
differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the
actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye
(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which
we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow
apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
apt not only to sink the playwriter in the consideration which we pay
to the actor, but even to identify in our minds, in a perverse
manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is
difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet
from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while
we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion
incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the
advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player
for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to
whom the very idea of _what an author is_ cannot be made
comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is
one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost
impossible to extricate themselves.

[Footnote 1: It is observable that we fall into this confusion only
in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads
Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet
and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davis, the bookseller, who
is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in
England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some
mistake in this tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends,
set upon a level with Milton.]

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the
first time a tragedy of Shakespeare performed, in which those two
great performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody
and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape.
But dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure,
this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We
have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions
thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing
actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness,
with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped
being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the
same writer which have happily been left out in the performance. How
far the very custom of hearing anything _spouted_, withers and blows
upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the
Fifth, &c., which are current in the mouths of school-boys, from
their being to be found in _Enfield's Speaker_, and such kind of
books! I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated
soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning "To be or not to be," or to tell
whether it be good, bad or indifferent, it has been so handled and
pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from
its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is
become to me a perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their
distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There
is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting,
with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this
war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed
round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct
object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in
Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_,
whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a
highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into
possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of
mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at
_in that form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do
here as we do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
form upon the whole gives us!

But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
play the orator. The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night! the more intimate
and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a
Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so
delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful
dalliances in Paradise--

                                "As beseem'd
  Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league,
  Alone;"

by the inherent fault of stage-representation, how are these things
sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
at the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her
returns of love!

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of
Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest
ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one
of their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play,
and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation.
The play itself abounds in maxims and reflections beyond any other,
and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral
instruction. But Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by
being dragged forth as the public schoolmaster, to give lectures to
the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are
transactions between himself and his moral sense; they are the
effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and
corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth;
or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his bosom is
bursting, reduced to _words_ for the sake of the reader, who must
else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound
sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the
tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be
represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out
before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at
once! I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to do; he must
pronounce them _ore rotundo_; he must accompany them with his eye; he
must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone or
gesture, or he fails. _He must be thinking all the while of his
appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are
judging of it_. And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent,
retiring Hamlet!

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity
of thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who
otherwise would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the
intellectual acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be
inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted,
but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I have
heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this part; but
as I never saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the
representation of such a character came within the province of his
art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his
eye, and of his commanding voice: physical properties, vastly
desirable in an actor, and without which he can never insinuate
meaning into an auditory,--but what have they to do with Hamlet; what
have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things aimed at in
theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the
form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favorable hearing to what
is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not
what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if
the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as
Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally
omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare,
his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of
passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to
furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an
audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent
Shakspeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or
Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accomplished prince, and must
be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in his mind, wavering
in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia; he might see a ghost, and
start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father;
all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest
creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience;
without troubling Shakspeare for the matter: and I see not but there
would be room for all the power which an actor has, to display
itself. All the passions and changes of passion might remain: for
those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought; it is
a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or
two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to
announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance
of any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and
tone shall carry it off, and make it pass for deep skill in the
passions.

It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare's plays being _so
natural_; that everybody can understand him. They are natural indeed,
they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies
out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say
that George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural,
that they are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of
thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of
young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a _trifling
peccadillo_, the murder of an uncle or so[1] that is all, and so
comes to an untimely end, which is _so moving_; and at the other,
because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white
wife; and the odds are that ninety-nine out of a hundred would
willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and
have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For of
the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously
laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic
confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing
from the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a
cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece to look through the man's
telescope in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and
topography of the moon. Some dim thing or other they see; they see an
actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and
they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of such
passions; or at least as being true to _that symbol of the emotion
which passes current at the theatre for it_, for it is often no more
than that: but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a
great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of
tragedy,--that common auditors know anything of this, or can have any
such notions dinned into them by the mere strength of an actor's
lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should be thus infused
into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it can
be possible.

[Footnote 1: If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the
Managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the
Galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the common people of
London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks.
Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead
of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous
sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistas_ are we to
place the _gallows_?  Were I an uncle, I should not much like a
nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is
really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon
such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to such characters
as Millwood:--it is putting things into the heads of good young men,
which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think
anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain
against it.]

We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observations of life, when we
should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and
every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but
from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the
very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of
knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we
comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the
powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than
indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the
application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and
clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is
that soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of
Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his
interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be
not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to
alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind
for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer
find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do)
are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of
Hamlet, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more
than necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by
the whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and
unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows
to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,
who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous
features,--these temporary deformities in the character. They make
him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his
gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make
him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's
father,--contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but
they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is, the
words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can
judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think
of asking.

So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave
at her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are
highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they
are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of
which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is
likely to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved
so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep
affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a
stock of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the
expression,) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that
which preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of
indulgence upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its
heart's dearest object, in the language of a temporary alienation;
but it is not alienation, it is a distraction purely, and so it
always makes itself to be felt by that object: it is not anger, but
grief assuming the appearance of anger,--love awkwardly
counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown:
but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is
no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion,--of
irreconcilable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman; but
then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own
real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely,
imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of
his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like one of those harlotry
players."

I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which
Shakspeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to
differ from that which the audience receive from those of other
writers; and, _they being in themselves essentially so different from
all others_, I must conclude that there is something in the nature of
acting which levels all distinctions. And, in fact, who does not
speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine
stage-performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as
the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella,
and Euphrasia, are they less liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or
than Desdemona? Are they not spoken of and remembered in the same
way? Is not the female performer as great (as they call it) in one as
in the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was he not ambitious of
shining, in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day
produced,--the productions of the Hills, and the Murphys, and the
Browns,--and shall he have that honor to dwell in our minds forever
as an inseparable concomitant with Shakspeare? A kindred mind! O who
can read that affecting sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his
profession as a player:--

  "Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
  The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
  That did not better for my life provide
  Than public means which public custom breeds--
  Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
  And almost thence my nature is subdued
  To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."--

Or that other confession:--

  "Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
  And made myself a motley to thy view,
  Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--"

Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our
sweet Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one
that, by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a
player as ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest
players' vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after
applause; one who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even
of the women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of
managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse; that any resemblance
should be dreamed of between him and Shakspeare,--Shakspeare, who, in
the plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that
noble modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express
himself thus of his own sense of his own defects:--

  "Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
  Featured like him, like him with friends possest;
  Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_."

I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer
of Shakspeare? A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not;
for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless
scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them,
that

  "With their darkness durst affront his light,"

have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare? I believe it
impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspeare,
and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in
Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart
by telling her he loves another woman, and says, "if she survives
this she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff
with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts: and for
acting, it is as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of
Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of
playing it; and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular
judgments of Shakspeare derived from acting. Not one of the
spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part, but
has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked
man, and kills little children in their beds, with something like the
pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's books are
represented to have taken in that practice; moreover, that he is very
close and shrewd, and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his
eye.

But is, in fact, this the impression we have in reading the Richard
of Shakspeare? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that
butcherlike representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A
horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is
it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not
an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting
it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are
prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the
lofty genius, the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty,
accomplished Richard?

The truth is, the characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of
meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,
that while we are reading any of his great criminal
characters,--Macbeth, Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of
the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring
spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap
these moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is a
certain fitness between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate
heir to the gallows; nobody who thinks at all can think of any
alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of
mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else but
a mere assassin is Glenalvon? Do we think of anything but of the
crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? That is all
which we really think about him. Whereas in corresponding characters
in Shakspeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that
while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness,
solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is
comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the
acts which they do are comparatively everything, their impulses
nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by
those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that
solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall
strike which is to call him to murder Duncan,--when we no longer read
it in a book, when we have given up that vantage ground of
abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a
man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit
a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed
it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about
the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems
unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a
pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which
the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon
us with the painful sense of presence; it rather seems to belong to
history,--to something past and inevitable, if it has anything to do
with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which
is present to our minds in the reading.

So to see Lear acted,--to see an old man tottering about the stage
with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to
represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
represent Lear; they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.
The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid
bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be
thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see
nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage;
while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his
mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a
mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary
purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it
listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What
have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his
age with that of the _heavens themselves_, when, in his reproaches to
them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them
that "they themselves are old?" What gesture shall we appropriate to
this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the
play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show; it is too
hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is
not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover
too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for
Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the
mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living
martyrdom that Lear had gone through,--the flaying of his feelings
alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only
decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he
could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and
preparation,--why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As
if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again
could tempt him to act over again his misused station,--as if, at his
years and with his experience, anything was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more
tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some
circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be
shown to our bodily eye! Othello, for instance. Nothing can be more
soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to
read of a young Venetian lady of the highest extraction, through the
force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying
aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and color, and
wedding with a _coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the
imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those
days, compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions,
though the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less
unworthy of a white woman's fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of
virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses. She sees
Othello's color in his mind. But upon the stage, when the imagination
is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor
unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello
played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in
his color; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in
the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and
whether the actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that
beautiful compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason it
should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality
presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with
not enough of belief in the internal motives,--all that which is
unseen,--to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious
prejudices.[1] What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action;
what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind,
and its movements; and this I think may sufficiently account for the
very different sort of delight with which the same play so often
affects us in the reading and the seeing.

[Footnote 1: The error of supposing that because Othello's color does
not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the
seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in a
picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the poem
we for a while have Paradisiacal senses given us, which vanish when
we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The
painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the awkward shifts
they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort
of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So
in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes: in the
seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.]

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters
in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet
something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination,
to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering
a change and a diminution,--that still stronger the objection must
lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare
has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his
scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to
common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to
consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the
Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish
composition savor of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other
than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not
feel spellbound as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of
their presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the
principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But
attempt to bring these things on to a stage, and you turn them
instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh
at. Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is believing," the sight
actually destroys the faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at
their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be
a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror
which they put us in when reading made them an object of
belief,--when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children
to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears, as
children, who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when
the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For
this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing
in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary
taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost
by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators,--a
ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made
out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed
audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions:
as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his
impenetrable armor over it, "Bully Dawson would have fought the devil
with such advantages."

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile
mixture which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless, without
some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have
sat out to hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the
sweet courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the tempest of
Shakspeare at all a subject for stage-representation? It is one thing
to read of an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale while we
are reading it; but to have a conjurer brought before us in his
conjuring gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself
and some hundred of favored spectators before the curtain are
supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the _hateful
incredible_, that all our reverence for the author cannot hinder us
from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in the
highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot
be represented, they cannot even be painted,--they can only be
believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which
the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary
effect to what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of
familiar life, adds so much to the life of the imitation, in plays
which appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys the illusion
which it is introduced to aid. A parlor or a drawing-room,--a library
opening into a garden--a garden with an alcove in it,--a street, or
the piazza of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene; we are
content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or rather, we
think little about it,--it is little more than reading at the top of
a page, "Scene, a garden;" we do not imagine ourselves there, but we
readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the
help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to
transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely
cell;[1] or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an
interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those
supernatural noises of which the isle was full: the Orrery Lecturer
at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly
stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that
we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out that chime, which if
it were to enwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks,

  "Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
  And speckled Vanity
  Would sicken soon and die,
  And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
  Yea, Hell itself would pass away,
  And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day."

[Footnote 1: It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of
itself; but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive; and
there is the discordancy never to be got over, between painted scenes
and real people.]

The garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
impossible to be shown on a stage, than the Enchanted isle, with its
no less interesting and innocent first settlers.

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,
which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last
time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of
garment which he varied, the shiftings and reshiftings, like a Romish
priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity
of the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish
monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he
goes to the Parliament house, just so full and cumbersome, and set
out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see
not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we
conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre may
float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do
we see in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could
pattern? This is the inevitable consequence of imitating everything,
to make all things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a
fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external
appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,
while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is
employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character.
But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call
upon us to judge of their naturalness.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we
take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that
quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different
feelings with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer,
reads a fine poem. The accursed critical habit--the being called upon
to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the
former. In seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges.
When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second
husband, who wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a
miniature must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture,
but only to show how finely a miniature may be represented. This
showing of everything levels all things: it makes tricks, bows, and
curtseys, of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than
by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene
in Macbeth: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling tones or
impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the
imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does
not the mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care
about the gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of
acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,
injurious to the main interest of the play.

I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspeare. It
would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his
comedies; and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the
rest, are equally incompatible with stage-representation. The length
to which this Essay has run will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently
distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper
into the subject at present.


       *       *       *       *       *


CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,
CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEAKE.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I selected for publication, in 1808, "Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets" who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of
extracts which I was anxious to give were not so much passages of wit
and humor, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of
passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interesting situations,
serious descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than
to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I
made choice of were, with few exceptions, such as treat of human life
and manners, rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals, with their
train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate
mortals--Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amaryllis. My leading
design was to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our
ancestors. To show in what manner they felt when they placed
themselves by the power of imagination in trying circumstances, in
the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending
duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how their griefs
were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated: how much of
Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in
his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was
also desirous to bring together some of the most admired scenes of
Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the world the only
dramatic poets of that age entitled to be considered after
Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting them in the same volume with the more
impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford,
and others, to show what we had slighted, while beyond all proportion
we had been crying up one or two favorite names. From the desultory
criticisms which accompanied that publication, I have selected a few
which I thought would best stand by themselves, as requiring least
immediate reference to the play or passage by which they were
suggested.

       *       *       *       *       *

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

_Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen_.--This tragedy is in King
Cambyses' vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; "huffing braggart
puft lines," such as the play-writers anterior to Shakspeare are full
of, and Pistol but coldly imitates.

_Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd_.--The lunes of
Tamburlaine are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnezzar's are mere
modest pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this
Scythian Shepherd. He comes in drawn by conquered kings, and
reproaches these _pampered jades of Asia_ that they can _draw but
twenty miles a day_. Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I
never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of
mine Ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set
down in a play, which their ancestors took to be serious.

_Edward the Second_.--In a very different style from mighty
Tamburlaine is the Tragedy of Edward the Second. The reluctant pangs
of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakspeare
scarcely improved in his Richard the Second; and the death-scene of
Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or
modern with which I am acquainted.

_The Rich Jew of Malta_.--Marlowe's Jew does not approach so near to
Shakspeare's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second.
Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to
please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries,
invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as a century
or two earlier might have been played before the Londoners "by the
royal command," when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews
had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to see
a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious
ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now
revolting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails,
and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it;
it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and
is the only liberal and gentlemanlike thing in Christendom.

_Doctor Faustus_.--The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene are
awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring
him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is
indeed an agony and a fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have
been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the
Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been
delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to
go, to approach the dark gulf, near enough to look in, to be busied
in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit
that fell from the tree of knowledge.[1] Barabas the Jew, and Faustus
the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to
dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a
believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a
character though but in fiction. But the holiest minds have sometimes
not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of
another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect; and,
themselves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity,
have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly which would be
death to others. Milton, in the person of Satan, has started
speculations hardier than any which the feeble armory of the atheist
ever furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has
strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling
sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which
Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to
have invented.

[Footnote 1: Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor
Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of knowledge itself,
and from the rotten kernels of that fatal apple.--_Howell's
Letters_.]

       *       *       *       *       *

THOMAS DECKER.

_Old Fortunatus_.--The humor of a frantic lover in the scene where
Orleans to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which
himself, being a prisoner in the English king's court, is enamored to
frenzy of the king's daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans
is as passionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare ever drew. He
is just such another adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of the
world are with him,

                  "A swarm of fools
  Crowding together to be counted wise."

He talks "pure Biron and Romeo;" he is almost as poetical as they,
quite as philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's
sectaries are a reason unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to
the noble heresy, since the days when Sidney proselyted our nation to
this mixed health and disease: the kindliest symptom, yet the most
alarming crisis, in the ticklish state of youth; the nourisher and
the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin births, wisdom and
folly, valor and weakness; the servitude above freedom; the gentle
mind's religion; the liberal superstition.

_The Honest Whore_.--There is in the second part of this play, where
Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her
profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without
violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the
_strong lines_ against the harlot's profession, with which both parts
of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be
suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and
minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective
fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective,
that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer
against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his
unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new
province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the
enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes, with such
proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not
that he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry--perhaps
was at some time of his life in danger of falling into those very
extravagances which he ridiculed so happily in his hero!

       *       *       *       *       *

JOHN MARSTON.

_Antonio and Mellida_.--The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the
first part of this tragedy,--where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, banished
his country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon
the territory of his mortal enemy the Duke of Venice, with no
attendants but Lucio, an old nobleman, and a page--resembles that of
Lear and Kent, in that king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear,
manifests a king-like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected
resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, "Despair
and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which he
brings to vanquish them, "cornets of horse," &c., are in the boldest
style of allegory. They are such a "race of mourners" as the
"infection of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on some
"pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The prologue to the second part,
for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of
preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of those old
tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which Milton has so highly
commended, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of
"intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in
without discretion corruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn
a preparative as the "warning voice which he who saw the Apocalypse
heard cry."

_What You Will_.--_O I shall ne'er forget how he went cloath'd_. Act
1. Scene 1.--To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we
must advert to the days of Gresham, and the consternation which a
phenomenon habited like the merchant here described would have
excited among the flat round caps, and cloth stockings upon 'Change,
when those "original arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were
in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction
and grace." The blank uniformity to which all professional
distinctions in apparel have been long hastening is one instance of
the decay of symbols among us, which, whether it has contributed or
not to make us a more intellectual, has certainly made us a less
imaginative people. Shakespeare knew the force of signs: a "malignant
and turbaned Turk." This "meal-cap miller," says the author of God's
Revenge against Murder, to express his indignation at an atrocious
outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the person of the fair
Marieta.

       *       *       *       *       *

AUTHOR UNKNOWN.

_The Merry Devil of Edmonton_.--The scene in this delightful comedy,
in which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend,"
touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader
happy. Few of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to
this. They torture and wound us abundantly. They are economists only
in delight. Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler,
than the conversation and compliments of these young men. How
delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that
Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his friend reminds
him! I wish it could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for
believing, that Michael Drayton was the author of this piece. It
would add a worthy appendage to the renown of that Panegyrist of my
native Earth; who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the
fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left
a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without honorable
mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion
beyond the dreams of old mythology.

       *       *       *       *       *

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

_A Woman Killed with Kindness_.--Heywood is a sort of _prose_
Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But
we miss _the poet_, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and
above the surface of _the nature_. Heywood's characters, in this
play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c., are exactly what we
see, but of the best kind of what we see in life. Shakspeare makes us
believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are
nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem
old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.

_The English Traveller_.--Heywood's preface to this play is
interesting, as it shows the heroic indifference about the opinion of
posterity, which some of these great writers seem to have felt. There
is a magnanimity in authorship, as in everything else. His ambition
seems to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing the players
speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that he ever
contemplated the possibility of being read by after-ages. What a
slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of
such plays as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and
the Woman Killed with Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that
a writer loses nothing by such a noble modesty.

       *       *       *       *       *

THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A Fair Quarrel_.--The insipid levelling morality to which the modern
stage is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as
these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment,
a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the
vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which
the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could
discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a
beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the everlastingly
inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is
hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never
so absurd, never fails of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre
to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the
amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy of
disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic
morality, out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble
of copying it from originals within his own breast. To know the
boundaries of honor, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance
which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to
be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when
that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering,
to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which
the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen
an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done, in a feigned
story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater
delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to
the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of
honor as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against
duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far
better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious honor; and he
would be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old
Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.

       *       *       *       *       *

WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_A New Wonder; a Woman never Vext_.--The old play-writers are
distinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition,--they show
everything without being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune is to be
exhibited, they fairly bring us to the prison-grate and the
alms-basket. A poor man on our stage is always a gentleman; he may be
known by a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by wearing black. Our
delicacy, in fact, forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. It is
never shown in its essential properties; it appears but as the
adjunct of some virtue, as something which is to be relieved, from
the approbation of which relief the spectators are to derive a
certain soothing of self-referred satisfaction. We turn away from the
real essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, moral
duties; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly represented, the
relative duties might be safely trusted to themselves, and moral
philosophy lose the name of a science.

       *       *       *       *       *

THOMAS MIDDLETON.

_The Witch_.--Though some resemblance may be traced between the
charms in Macbeth and the incantations in this play, which is
supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much
from the originality of Shakspeare. His witches are distinguished
from the witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are
creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire mischief, might
resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood,
and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first
meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his
destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt
the body; those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a
son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of
their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul
anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether
they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so
they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and
lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them.
Except Hecate, they have no _names_; which heightens their
mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties which the other
author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weïrd Sisters are
serious things. Their presence cannot coexist with mirth. But in a
lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their
power, too, is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars,
jealousies, strifes, "like a thick scurf" over life.

       *       *       *       *       *

WILLIAM ROWLEY,--THOMAS DECKER,--JOHN FORD, ETC.

_The Witch of Edmonton_.--Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs
from the hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain,
traditional old woman witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and
ignorant; the terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice. That
should he a hardy sheriff, with the power of the county at his heels,
that would lay hands on the Weïrd Sisters. They are of another
jurisdiction. But upon the common and received opinion, the author
(or authors) have engrafted strong fancy. There is something
frightfully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar.

       *       *       *       *       *

CYRIL TOURNEUR.

_The Revenger's Tragedy_.--The reality and life of the dialogue, in
which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then
threaten her with death for consenting to the dishonor of their
sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but
my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I
were presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself, as the
brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen
and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such
power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike
guilty creatures unto the soul, but to "appall" even those that are
"free."

       *       *       *       *       *

JOHN WEBSTER.

_The Duchess of Malfy_.--All the several parts of the dreadful
apparatus with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the
waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the
tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person's dirge, the mortification
by degrees,--are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary
vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to
bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets.
As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems
not of this world. She has lived among horrors till she is become
"native and endowed unto that element." She speaks the dialect of
despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.
To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon
fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is
ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its
last forfeit: this only a Webster can do. Inferior geniuses may "upon
horror's head horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. They
mistake quantity for quality; they "terrify babes with painted
devils;" but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors
want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

_The White Devil_, _or Vittoria Corombona_.--This White Devil of
Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an
innocence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see that matchless
beauty of her face which inspires such gay confidence into her, and
are ready to expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very
judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as spectators,
and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her, in spite
of the utmost conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don
Quixote make proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela,
"without making any profit of her manifest resolution made there in
their hearing."

  "So sweet and lovely does she make the shame,
  Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
  Does spot the beauty of her budding name!"

I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play for the
death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his
drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so
this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling,
which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.

In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that
there is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would
authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the additions to
Hieronymo. I suspected the agency of some more potent spirit. I
thought that Webster might have furnished them. They seemed full of
that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in
the Duchess of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty
criticism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking
distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set
inward; if she talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating
conversation in a kind of bravery.

       *       *       *       *       *

JOHN FORD.

_The Broken Heart_.--I do not know where to find, in any play, a
catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and so surprising, as in this. This
is indeed, according to Milton, to describe high passions and high
actions. The fortitude of the Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out
his bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, is a faint
bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and exenteration of
the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her
nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and a
queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the
stake; a little bodily suffering. These torments

  "On the purest spirits prey,
  As on entrails, joints, and limbs,
  With answerable pains, but more intense."

What a noble thing is the soul, in its strengths and in its
weaknesses! Who would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so
strong? The expression of this transcendent scene almost bears us in
imagination to Calvary and the Cross; and we seem to perceive some
analogy between the scenical suffering which we are here
contemplating and the real agonies of that final completion to which
we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of
poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or
visible images, but directly where she has her full residence, in the
heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds.
There is a grandeur of the soul, above mountains, seas, and the
elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and
Annabella, in the play[1] which stands at the head of the modern
collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that
fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of
beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity,
and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the lowest descents and
degradations of our nature.

[Footnote: "'Tis Pity she's a Whore."]

       *       *       *       *       *

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE.

_Alaham, Mustapha_.--The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among
his poems, might with more propriety have been termed political
treatises than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make
passion, character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient
to the expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is in nine parts
Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this
writer's estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding must
have held a most tyrannical preeminence. Whether we look into his
plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and
made rigid with intellect. The finest movements of the human heart,
the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable, are essentially
comprised in the actions and speeches of Cælica and Camena.
Shakspeare, who seems to have had a peculiar delight in contemplating
womanly perfection, whom for his many sweet images of female
excellence all women are in an especial manner bound to love, has not
raised the ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke, in
these two women, has done. But it requires a study equivalent to the
learning of a new language to understand their meaning when they
speak. It is indeed hard to hit:

  "Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day
  Or seven though one should musing sit."

It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to express
the emotions of our sensitive natures. There would be all knowledge,
but sympathetic expressions would be wanting.

       *       *       *       *       *

BEN JONSON.

_The Case is Altered_.--The passion for wealth has worn out much of
its grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of
money as able to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not
considered simply as a symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they
introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress; as
something to be seen, felt, and hugged; as capable of satisfying two
of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying
medium in the place of the good old tangible metal, has made avarice
quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching,
and handling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no
more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than
Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the Cave
of Mammon in Spenser; Barabas's contemplation of his wealth, in the
Rich Jew of Malta; Luke's raptures in the City Madam; the idolatry
and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this early comic
production of Ben Jonson's. Above all, hear Guzman, in that excellent
old translation of the Spanish Rogue, expatiate on the "ruddy cheeks
of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pistolets, your plump and
full-faced Portuguese, and your clear-skinned pieces-of-eight of
Castile," which he and his fellows the beggars kept secret to
themselves, and did privately enjoy in a plentiful manner. "For to
have them to pay them away is not to enjoy them; to enjoy them is to
have them lying by us; having no other need of them than to use them
for the clearing of the eyesight, and the comforting of our senses.
These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of our
doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could
handsomely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative."

_Poetaster_.--This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies
of Ben in his own days and ours, who have said that he made a
pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole Court
of Augustus, by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of
the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our
own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express
themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more
elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Louis
the Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and
secret of that kind of intercourse is contained therein. The
economical liberality by which greatness, seeming to waive some part
of its prerogative, takes care to lose none of the essentials; the
prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter by commanded
boldness and soothe with complimentary sincerity;--these, and a
thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels,
and from those numerous court-masques and entertainments, which he
was in the daily habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the
poetical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard.

_Alchemist_.--The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of
images, words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act
ii., Scene 2) confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come
pouring out like the successive falls of Nilus. They "doubly redouble
strokes upon the foe." Description outstrides proof. We are made to
believe effects before we have testimony for their causes. If there
is no one image which attains the height of the sublime, yet the
confluence and assemblage of them all produces a result equal to the
grandest poetry. The huge Xerxean army countervails against single
Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of its
author. It has the whole "matter and copy of the father--eye, nose,
lip, the trick of his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as
contemporaries have described old Ben to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the
Host of the New Inn, have all his image and superscription. But
Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. Sir Samson Legend, in Love
for Love, is such another lying, overbearing character, but he does
not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a "towering bravery" there is in
his sensuality! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan. It is as if
"Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury."

       *       *       *       *       *

GEORGE CHAPMAN.

_Bussy D'Ambois_, _Byron's Conspiracy_, _Byron's Tragedy_, &c.
&c.--Webster has happily characterized the "full and heightened
style" of Chapman, who, of all the English play-writers, perhaps
approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the descriptive and didactic, in
passages which are less purely dramatic. He could not go out of
himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate
other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul
to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great
epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one;
for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of
Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he
has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a
reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the
glory of his heroes can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit of
Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, as if personating one of the
zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the
acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to
Chapman's translations being read, is their unconquerable quaintness.
He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural, and the
most violent and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever
words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all
other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all
in all in poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying
the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers
glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by
words, or in spite of them, be disgusted, and overcome their disgust.

       *       *       *       *       *

FRANCIS BEAUMONT.--JOHN FLETCHER.

_Maid's Tragedy_.--One characteristic of the excellent old poets is,
their being able to bestow grace upon subjects which naturally do not
seem susceptible of any. I will mention two instances. Zelmane in the
Arcadia of Sidney, and Helena in the All's Well that Ends Well of
Shakspeare. What can be more unpromising, at first sight, than the
idea of a young man disguising himself in woman's attire, and passing
himself off for a woman among women; and that for a long space of
time? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum, that
neither does Pyrocles' manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of
Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at all diminished
when the deception comes to be known. In the sweetly-constituted mind
of Sir Philip Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome
meditation could find a harbor. He turned all that he touched into
images of honor and virtue. Helena in Shakspeare is a young woman
seeking a man in marriage. The ordinary rules of courtship are
reversed, the habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with such exquisite
address this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena's forwardness
loses her no honor; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her favor,
and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet
violation. Aspatia, in the Maid's Tragedy, is a character equally
difficult with Helena, of being managed with grace. She too is a
slighted woman, refused by the man who had once engaged to marry her.
Yet it is artfully contrived, that while we pity we respect her, and
she descends without degradation. Such wonders true poetry and
passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which do not seem
capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with
Helena; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but
she suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of the
female character, which Helena never does. Her character has many
degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy; but it has weakness, which,
if we do not despise, we are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and
Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys.

_Philaster_.--The character of Bellario must have been extremely
popular in its day. For many years after the date of Philaster's
first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be found without one
of these women-pages in it, following in the train of some
pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless her happy rival (his
mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving
rise to many pretty _equivoques_ by the way on the confusion of sex,
and either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or
dismissed with the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne
has a copy of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a
resolution, which she seems to have taken up from some of these
scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page. It is so
earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, and pathos,
that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to all such
sickly fancies as he there deprecates.

       *       *       *       *       *

JOHN FLETCHER.

_Thierry and Theodoret_.--The scene where Ordella offers her life a
sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have
always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be
the most perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to
Calantha in the Broken Heart. She is a piece of sainted nature. Yet,
noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner
of it, compared with Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and
languid. Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves
on itself in a sort of separate orbit. They do not join into one
another like a running-hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow; his
versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn; he
lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to
image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspeare
mingles everything, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and
metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched
and clamorous for disclosure. Another striking difference between
Fletcher and Shakspeare is the fondness of the former for unnatural
and violent situations. He seems to have thought that nothing great
could be produced in an ordinary way. The chief incidents in some of
his most admired tragedies show this.[1] Shakspeare had nothing of
this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after violent
situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I
think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of
Fletcher is excellent,[2] like his serious scenes, but there is
something strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of
Nature, he always goes a little on one side of her.--Shakspeare chose
her without a reserve: and had riches, power, understanding, and
length of days, with her for a dowry.

[Footnote 1: Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.]

[Footnote 2: Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.]

_Faithful Shepherdess_.--If all the parts of this delightful pastoral
had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric
intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the
Arcadia, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have
made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander.
But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation
could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this "blessedness" such
an ugly deformity as Chloe, the wanton shepherdess! If Chloe was
meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that
such weeds by juxtaposition do not set off, but kill sweet flowers.

       *       *       *       *       *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS DECKER.

_The Virgin Martyr_.--This play has some beauties of so very high an
order, that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had
poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up to them. His associate
Decker who wrote Old Fortunatus, had poetry enough for anything. The
very impurities which obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of
this play, like Satan among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of
contrast, a raciness, and a glow, in them, which are beyond
Massinger. They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to
Miranda.

       *       *       *       *       *

PHILIP MASSINGER.--THOMAS MIDDLETON.--WILLIAM ROWLEY.

_Old Law_.--There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making
one's eyes to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness
in the circumstances of this sweet tragicomedy, which are unlike
anything in the dramas which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of
a subtler edge. Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in it, had both of
them finer geniuses than their associate.

       *       *       *       *       *

JAMES SHIRLEY

Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for
any transcendent talent in himself, as that he was the last of a
great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set
of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language, and quite a
new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with the Restoration.


       *       *       *       *       *


SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER,

THE CHURCH HISTORIAN.


The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint,
and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to
conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been
going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them. But his
wit is not always a _lumen siccum_, a dry faculty of surprising; on
the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human
feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its
eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the
narrator happily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.

As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought
it might not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some
specimens of his manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some
few passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative description. I
shall arrange them as I casually find them in my book of extracts,
without being solicitous to specify the particular work from which
they are taken.

_Pyramids_.--"The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have
forgotten the names of their founders."

_Virtue in a Short Person_.--"His soul had but a short diocese to
visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing
thereof."

_Intellect in a very Tall One_.--"Ofttimes such who are built four
stories high, are observed to have little in their cockloft."

_Naturals_.--"Their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room
for wit; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room."

_Negroes_.--"The image of God cut in ebony."

_School-Divinity_.--"At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a
prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee."

_Mr. Perkins the Divine_.--"He had a capacious head, with angles
winding and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies."

_The same_.--"He would pronounce the word _Damn_ with such an
emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while
after."

_Judges in Capital Cases_.--"O let him take heed how he strikes that
hath a dead hand."

_Memory_.--"Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, and it
seems the mine of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig
for it, scratching it when they are at a loss."

_Fancy_.--"It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul;
for while the Understanding and the Will are kept, as it were, _in
libera custodia_ to their objects of _verum et bonum_, the Fancy is
free from all engagements: it digs without spade, sails without ship,
flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without
bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference
of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating
things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in
Fancy as in a lawless place."

_Infants_.--"Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants meet with
in their silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, how truly I know
not, that then they converse with angels; as indeed such cannot among
mortals find any fitter companions."

_Music_.--"Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms itself to
all companies both in mirth and mourning; complying to improve that
passion with which it finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it
is an invention which might have beseemed a son of Seth to have been
the father thereof: though better it was that Cain's great-grandchild
should have the credit first to find it, than the world the
unhappiness longer to have wanted it."

_St. Monica_.--"Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts
as harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness
through the chinks of her sickness-broken body."[1]

[Footnote 1:

  "The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
  Lets in new lights through chinks which time has made."
                                                 WALLER.]

_Mortality_.--"To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the
body, no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul."

_Virgin_.--"No lordling husband shall at the same time command her
presence and distance; to be always near in constant attendance, and
always to stand aloof in awful observance."

_Elder Brother_.--"Is one who made haste to come into the world to
bring his parents the first news of male posterity, and is well
rewarded for his tidings."

_Bishop Fletcher_.--"His pride was rather on him than in him, as only
gait and gesture deep, not sinking to his heart, though causelessly
condemned for a proud man, as who was a _good hypocrite_, and far
more humble than he appeared."

_Masters of Colleges_.--"A little allay of dulness in a Master of a
College makes him fitter to manage secular affairs."

_The Good Yeoman_.--"Is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see
refined."

_Good Parent_.--"For his love, therein like a well-drawn picture, he
eyes all his children alike."

_Deformity in Children_.--"This partiality is tyranny, when parents
despise those that are deformed; _enough to break those whom God had
bowed before_."

_Good Master_.--"In correcting his servant he becomes not a slave to
his own passion. Not cruelly making new _indentures_ of the flesh of
his apprentice. He is tender of his servant in sickness and age. If
crippled in his service, his house is his hospital. Yet how many
throw away those dry bones, out of the which themselves have sucked
the marrow!"

_Good Widow_.--"If she can speak but little good of him [her dead
husband] she speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her
discourse, that his virtues are shown outwards, and his vices wrapt
up in silence; as counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory,
who hath mould cast on his body."

_Horses_.--"These are men's wings, wherewith they make such speed. A
generous creature a horse is, sensible in some sort of honor; and
made most handsome by that which deforms men most--pride."

_Martyrdom_.--"Heart of oak hath sometimes warped a little in the
scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true courage herein
cannot be excused. Yet many censure them for surrendering up their
forts after a long siege, who would have yielded up their own at the
first summons.--Oh! there is more required to make one valiant, than
to call Cranmer or Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had
been no hotter than what is painted in the Book of Martyrs."

_Text of St. Paul_.--"St. Paul saith, Let not the sun go down on your
wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy
revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than
his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion; not
understanding him so literally, that we may take leave to be angry
till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in
Greenland, where the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have
plentiful scope for revenge."[1]

[Footnote 1: This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one
would have thought of deducing,--setting up an absurdum on purpose to
hunt it down,--placing guards as it were at the very outposts of
possibility,--gravely giving out laws to insanity and prescribing
moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered into
a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller or Sir
Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this
passage most aptly imitates.]

_Bishop Brownrig_.--"He carried learning enough _in numerato_ about
him in his pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in
his chests for any serious dispute."

_Modest Want_.--"Those that with diligence fight against poverty,
though neither conquer till death makes it a drawn battle, expect not
but prevent their craving of thee: for God forbid the heavens should
never rain, till the earth first opens her mouth; seeing _some
grounds will sooner burn than chap_."

_Death-bed Temptations_.--"The devil is most busy on the last day of
his term; and a tenant to be ousted cares not what mischief he doth."

_Conversation_.--"Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be
naked savages in our talk."

_Wounded Soldier_.--"Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier;
and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his
colors."

_Wat Tyler_.--"A _misogrammatist_; if a good Greek word may be given
to so barbarous a rebel."

_Heralds_.--"Heralds new mould men's names--taking from them, adding
to them, melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make
them speak, and making vowels dumb,--to bring it to a fallacious
_homonomy_ at the last, that their names may be the same with those
noble houses they pretend to."

_Antiquarian Diligence_.--"It is most worthy observation, with what
diligence he [Camden] inquired after ancient places, making hue and
cry after many a city which was run away, and by certain marks and
tokens pursuing to find it; as by the situation on the Roman
highways, by just distance from other ancient cities, by some
affinity of name, by tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman coins
digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole
evidence; or an old gate still surviving, out of which the city is
run out. Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown
out of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural affection as
dutifully to own those reverend ruins for her mother."

_Henry de Essex_.--"He is too well known in our English Chronicles,
being Baron of Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of
England. It happened in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was
a fierce battle fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the
English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex _animum et signum
simul abjecit_, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away both his
courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of
English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny
the doing of so foul a fact; until he was challenged in combat by
Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome
in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the
king, and he himself, _partly thrust, partly going into a convent,
hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanctity, he
blushed out the remainder of his life_."[1]--_Worthies_, article
_Bedfordshire_.

[Footnote 1: The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have
been pronounced impossible. It has given an interest, and a holy
character to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the
concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of
poor Henry de Essex. The address with which the whole of this little
story is told is most consummate; the charm of it seems to consist in
a perpetual balance of antithesis not too violently opposed, and the
consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept:--"Betwixt
traitor and coward"--"baseness to do, boldness to deny"--"partly
thrust, partly going, into a convent"--"betwixt shame and sanctity."
The read

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