Chapter XIII (9)

What pearls, what rubies can
Seem so lovely fair to man,
As her lips whom he doth love,
When in sweet discourse they move,
Or her lovelier teeth, the while
She doth bless him with a smile?
Stars indeed fair creatures be;
Yet amongst us where is he
Joys not more the whilst he lies
Sunning in his mistress' eyes.
Than in all the glimmering light
Of a starry winter's night?
Note the beauty of an eye--
And if aught you praise it by
Leave such passion in your mind,
Let my reason's eye be blind.
Mark if ever red or white
Any where gave such delight,
As when they have taken place
In a worthy woman's face.

* * * * *

I must praise her as I may,
Which I do mine own rude way;
Sometime setting forth her glories
By unheard of allegories--&c.

To the measure in which these lines are written, the wits of Queen Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips, who has used it in some instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, to my feeling at least, very deliciously; but Wither, whose darling measure it seems to have been, may shew, that in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the subtilest movements of passion. So true it is, which Drayton seems to have felt, that it is the poet who modifies the metre, not the metre the poet; in his own words, that

It's possible to climb;
To kindle, or to slake;
Altho' in Skelton's rhime.[35]

[35] "A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the _Shepherds
Hunting_ take the following--

"If thy verse doth bravely tower,
_As she makes wing, she gets power_;
Yet the higher she doth soar,
She's affronted still the more,
'Till she to the high'st hath past,
Then she rests with fame at last.

what longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this! what
Alexandrine is half so long in pronouncing or expresses _labor
slowly but strongly surmounting difficulty_ with the life with which
it is done in the second of these lines? or what metre could go
beyond these, from _Philarete_--

"Her true beauty leaves behind
Apprehensions in my mind
Of more sweetness, than all art
Or inventions can impart.
_Thoughts too deep to be express'd,
And too strong to be suppress'd._"

FIVE DRAMATIC CRITICISMS

I.--MRS. GOULD (MISS BURRELL) IN "DON GIOVANNI IN LONDON"

OLYMPIC THEATRE

(1818)

This Theatre, fitted up with new and tasteful decorations, opened on Monday with a burletta founded upon a pleasant extravagance recorded of Wilmot the "mad Lord" of Rochester. The house, in its renovated condition, is just what play-houses should be, and once were, from its size admirably adapted for seeing and hearing, and only perhaps rather too well lit up. Light is a good thing, but to preserve the eyes is still better. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin personated a reigning wit and beauty of the Court of Charles the Second to the life. But the charm of the evening to us, we confess, was the acting of Mrs. T. Gould (late Miss Burrell) in the burlesque _Don Giovanni_ which followed. This admirable piece of foolery takes up our hero just where the legitimate drama leaves him, on the "burning marl." We are presented with a fair map of Tartarus, the triple-headed cur, the Furies, the Tormentors, and the Don, prostrate, thunder-smitten. But there is an elasticity in the original make of this _strange man_, as Richardson would have called him. He is not one of those who change with the change of climate. He brings with him to his new habitation _ardours_ as glowing and constant as any which he finds there. No sooner is he recovered from his first surprise, than he falls to his old trade, is caught "ogling _Proserpine_," and coquets with two she devils at once, till he makes the house _too hot to hold him_; and _Pluto_ (in whom a wise jealousy seems to produce the effects of kindness) turns him neck and heels out of his dominions,--much to the satisfaction of _Giovanni_, who stealing a boat from Charon, and a pair of light heels from _Mercury_, or (as he familiarly terms him) _Murky_, sets off with flying colours, conveying to the world above the souls of three damsels, just eloped from Styx, to comfort his tender and new-born spiritualities on the journey. Arrived upon earth (with a new body, we are to suppose, but his old habits) he lights a-propos upon a tavern in London, at the door of which three merry weavers, widowers, are trouling a catch in triumph over their deceased spouses--

They lie in yonder church-yard
At rest--and so are we.

Their departed partners prove to be the identical lady ghosts who have accompanied the Don in his flight, whom he now delivers up in perfect health and good plight, not a jot the worse for their journey, to the infinite surprise, and consternation ill-dissembled, of their ill-fated, twice-yoked mates. The gallantries of the Don in his second state of probation, his meeting with _Leporello_, with _Donna Anna_, and a countless host of injured virgins besides, doing penance in the humble occupation of apple-women, fishwives and sausage-fryers, in the purlieus of Billinsgate and Covent-garden, down to the period of his complete reformation, and being made an honest man of, by marrying into a sober English citizen's family, although infinitely pleasant in the exhibition, would be somewhat tedious in the recital: but something must be said of his representative.

We have seen Mrs. Jordan in male characters, and more ladies beside than we would wish to recollect--but never any that so completely answered the purpose for which they were so transmuted, as the Lady who enacts the mock _Giovanni_. This part, as it is played at the Great House in the Haymarket (Shade of Mozart, and ye living admirers of Ambrogetti, pardon the barbarity) had always something repulsive and distasteful to us.--We cannot sympathize with _Leporello's_ brutal display of the _list_, and were shocked (no strait-laced moralists either) with the applauses, with the _endurance_ we ought rather to say, which fashion and beauty bestowed upon that disgustful insult to feminine unhappiness. The _Leporello_ of the Olympic Theatre is not one of the most refined order, but we can bear with an English blackguard better than with the hard Italian. But _Giovanni_--free, fine, frank-spirited, single-hearted creature, turning all the mischief into fun as harmless as toys, or children's _make-believe_, what praise can we repay to you, adequate to the pleasure which you have given us? We had better be silent, for you have no name, and our mention will but be thought fantastical. You have taken out the sting from the evil thing, by what magic we know not, for there are actresses of greater mark and attribute than you. With you and your _Giovanni_ our spirits will hold communion, whenever sorrow or suffering shall be our lot. We have seen you triumph over the infernal powers; and pain, and Erebus, and the powers of darkness, are henceforth "shapes of a dream."

II.--MISS KELLY AT BATH

(1819)

Dear G.---- I was thinking yesterday of our old play-going days, of your and my partiality to Mrs. Jordan; of our disputes as to the relative merits of Dodd and Parsons; and whether Smith or Jack Palmer, were the most of a Gentleman. The occasion of my falling into this train of thinking was my learning from the newspapers that Miss Kelly is paying the Bath Theatre a visit. (Your own Theatre, I am sorry to find, is shut up, either from parsimonious feelings, or through the influence of ---- principles.[36]) This lady has long ranked among the most considerable of our London performers. If there are one or two of greater name, I must impute it to the circumstance, that she has never burst upon the town at once in the maturity of her power; which is a great advantage to debutantes, who have passed their probationary years in Provincial Theatres. We do not hear them tuning their instruments. But she has been winning her patient way from the humblest gradations to the eminence which she has now attained, on the self same boards which supported her first in the slender pretensions of chorus-singer. I very much wish that you would go and see her. You will not see Mrs. Jordan, but something else; something on the whole very little, if at all, inferior to that lady, in her best days. I cannot hope that you will think so; I do not even wish that you should. Our longest remembrances are the most sacred; and I shall revere the prejudice, that shall prevent you from thinking quite so favorably of her as I do.--I do not well know how to draw a parallel between their distinct manners of acting. I seem to recognize the same pleasantness and nature in both: but Mrs. Jordan's was the carelessness of a child; her child-like spirit shook off the load of years from her spectators; she seemed one whom care could not come near; a privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness. Hence, if we had more unmixed pleasure from her performances, we had, perhaps, less sympathy with them than with those of her successor. This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit, escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest. She is, in truth, no ordinary tragedian. Her Yarico is the most intense piece of acting which I ever witnessed, the most heart-rending spectacle. To see her leaning upon that wretched reed, her lover--the very exhibition of whose character would be a moral offence, but for her clinging and noble credulity--to see her lean upon that flint, and by the strong workings of passion imagine it a god--is one of the most afflicting lessons of the yearnings of the human heart and its sad mistakes, that ever was read upon a stage. The whole performance is every where _African_, fervid, glowing. Nor is this any thing more than the wonderful force of imagination in this performer; for turn but the scene, and you shall have her come forward in some kindly home-drawn character of an English rustic, a Phœbe, or a Dinah Cropley, where you would swear that her thoughts had never strayed beyond the precincts of the dairy, or the farm; or her mind known less tranquil passions than she might have learned among the flock, her out-of-door companions. See her again in parts of pure fun, such as the House-maid in the Merry Mourners, where the suspension of the broom in her hand, which she had been delightfully twirling, on unexpectedly encountering her sweetheart in the character of a fellow-servant, is quite equal to Mrs. Jordan's cordial inebriation in Nell.--I do not know whether I am not speaking it to her honor, that she does not succeed in what are called fine lady parts. Our friend C. once observed, that no man of genius ever figured as a gentleman. Neither did any woman, gifted with Mrs. Jordan's or Miss Kelly's sensibilities, ever take upon herself to shine as a fine lady, the very essence of this character consisting in the entire repression of all genius and all feeling. To sustain a part of this kind to the life, a performer must be haunted by a perpetual self-reference: she must be always thinking of herself, and how she looks, and how she deports herself in the eyes of the spectators; whereas the delight of actresses of true feeling, and their chief power, is to elude the personal notice of an audience, to escape into their parts, and hide themselves under the hood of their assumed character. Their most graceful self-possession is in fact a self-forgetfulness; an oblivion alike of self and of spectators. For this reason your most approved epilogue-speakers have been always ladies who have possessed least of this self-forgetting quality; and I think I have seen the amiable actress in question suffering some embarrassment, when she has had an address of this sort to deliver; when she found the modest veil of personation, which had half hid her from the audience, suddenly withdrawn, and herself brought without any such qualifying intervention before the public.

[36] The word here omitted by the Bristol Editor, we suppose, is
_methodistical_ (Leigh Hunt in _The Examiner_).

I should apologise for the length of this letter, if I did not remember the lively interest you used to take in theatrical performances.--I am, &c. &c.,

* * * *.

III.--RICHARD BROME'S "JOVIAL CREW"

(1819)

The _Jovial Crew_ or the _Merry Beggars_ has been revived here [the English Opera] after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven years. Can it be so long (it seems but yesterday) since we saw poor LOVEGROVE in _Justice Clack_? his childish treble still pipes in our ears: "Whip 'em, whip 'em, whip 'em." DOWTON was the representative of the Justice the other night, and shook our ribs most incontinently. He was in "excellent foolery," and our lungs crowed chanticleer. Yet it appears to us, that there was a still higher strain of fatuity in his predecessor--that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps after all it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us strangely.

Easy natural WRENCH was the _Springlove_; too comfortable a personage perhaps to personify _Springlove_, in whom the voice of the bird awakens a restless instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. Miss STEVENSON certainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the Lady, however agreeable, who formerly performed the part of _Meriel_. Miss STEVENSON is a fine open-countenanced lass, with glorious girlish manners. But the _Princess of Mumpers_, and _Lady Paramount_, of beggarly counterfeit accents, was _she_ that played _Rachel_. Her gabbling lachrymose petitions; her tones, such as we have heard by the side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come peeping on one on a sudden; with her full black locks, and a _voice_--how shall we describe it?--a voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing but truth and goodness, but warped by circumstance into an assurance that she is telling us a lie--that catching twitch of the thievish irreproveable finger--those ballad-singers' notes, so vulgar, yet so unvulgar--that assurance, so like impudence, and yet so many countless leagues removed from it--her jeers, which we had rather stand, than be caressed with other ladies' compliments, a summer's day long--her face, with a wild out-of-door's grace upon it--

Altogether, a brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our fortune to meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sate for "pretty Bessy," whose father was an Earl, and whose legend still adorns the front of mine Hostess's doors at Bethnal-Green; and the other could be no less than the "Beggar Maid" whom "King Cophetua wooed." "What a lass that were," said a stranger who sate beside us, speaking of Miss KELLY in _Rachel_, "to go a gipseying through the world with." We confess we longed to drop a tester in her lap, she begged so masterly.

By the way, this is the true _Beggar's Opera_. The other should have been called the _Mirror for Highwaymen_. We wonder the Societies for the Suppression of Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the putting down of this infamous protest in favour of air, and clear liberty, and honest license, and blameless assertion of man's original blest charter of blue skies, and vagrancy, and nothing-to-do.

* * * *.

IV.--ISAAC BICKERSTAFF'S "HYPOCRITE"

(1819)

By one of those strange perversities which actuate poor mortals in the place of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free agents, we presume), we had never till the other evening seen DOWTON in _Doctor Cantwell_. By a pious fraud of Mr. ARNOLD'S, who, by a process as simple as some of those by which MATHEWS metamorphoses his person, has converted the play into an opera,--a conversion, by the way, for which we are highly indebted to him,--we have been favoured with this rich novelty at our favourite theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to come lagging in with a posthumous testimony to the merits of a performance of which the town has long rung, but we cannot help remarking in Mr. DOWTON'S acting, the subtil _gradations_ of the hypocrisy; the length to which it runs in proportion as the recipient is capable of taking it in; the gross palpable way in which he adminsters the dose in wholesale to old _Lady Lambert_, that rich fanatic; the somewhat more guarded manner in which he retails it out, only so much at a time as he can bear, to the somewhat less bitten fool her son; and the almost absence of it, before the younger members of the family, when nobody else is by: how the cloven foot peeps out a little and a little more, till the diabolical nature is stung out at last into full manifestation of its horrid self. What a grand insolence in the tone which he assumes, when he commands _Sir John_ to quit _his_ house! and then the tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled! It is in these last perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing injustice not to compare this part of the performance with, and in some respects to give it the preference above, the acting of Mr. KEAN in a situation nearly analogous, at the conclusion of the _City Madam_. _Cantwell_ reveals his pangs with quite as much force, and without the assistance of those contortions which transform the detected _Luke_ into the similitude of a mad tiger, or a foaming demon. DOWTON plays it neither like beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, a bold bad man pushed to extremity. Humanity is never once overstepped. Has it ever been noticed, the exquisite modulation with which he drawls out the word CHARLES, when he calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so resigned. The most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew accented all her honey devil words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The spirit of WHITFIELD seems hovering in the air, to suck in the blessed tones, so much like his own upon earth: Lady HUNTINGDON claps her neat white wings, and gives it out again in heaven to the sainted ones, in approbation.

Miss KELLY is not quite at home in _Charlotte_; she is too good for such parts. Her cue is to be natural; she cannot put on the modes of artificial life, and play the coquet as it is expected to be played. There is a frankness in her tones which defeats her purposes: we could not help wondering why her lover (Mr. PEARMAN) looked so rueful; we forgot that she was acting airs and graces, as she seemed to forget it herself, turning them into a playfulness which could breed no doubt for a moment which way her inclinations ran. She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a hearty _Yes_ or _No_; to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have not the pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she carries the same cordial manners into private life. We have heard, too, of some virtues which she is in the practice of; but they are of a description which repay themselves, and with them neither we nor the public have any thing to do.

One word about WRENCH, who played the Colonel:--Was this man never unhappy? It seems as if care never came near him, as if the black ox could never tread upon his foot; we want something calamitous to befal him, to bring him down to us. It is a shame he should be suffered to go about with his well-looking happy face and tones, insulting us thin race of irritable and irritable-making critics.

* * * *.

V.--NEW PIECES AT THE LYCEUM

(1819)

A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some quarrel has been breeding between the male and female performers, and the women have determined to set up for themselves. Seven of them, _Belles without Beaux_ they call themselves, have undertaken to get up a piece without any assistance from the men, and in our opinion have established their point most successfully. There is Miss CAREW with her silvery tones, and Miss STEVENSON with her delicious mixture of the school-girl and the waiting-maid, and Miss KELLY sure to be first in any mischief, and Mrs. CHATTERLY with some of the best acting we have ever witnessed, and Miss LOVE, worthy of the _name_, and Mrs. GROVE that rhymes to her, and Mrs. RICHARDSON who might in charity have been allowed somewhat a larger portion of the dialogue. The effect was enchanting. We mean, for once. We do not want to encourage these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we longed to have WRENCH bustling among them. A lady who sate near us was observed to gape for want of variety. To us it was delicate quintessence, an apple-pye made all of quinces. We remember poor HOLCROFT'S last Comedy, which positively died from the opposite excess; it was choked up with men, and perished from a redundancy of male population. It had nine principal men characters in it, and but one woman, and she of no very ambiguous character. Mrs. HARLOW, to do the part justice, chose to play it in scarlet.

We did not know Mrs. CHATTERLY'S merits before; she plays, with downright sterling good acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of her prudery by Miss KELLY'S (we did not catch her stage-name) assumption of the dress and character of a brother of seventeen, who makes the prettiest unalarming Platonic approaches; and in the shyest mask of moral battery, no one step of which you can detect, or say _this_ is decidedly going too far, vanquishes at last the ice of her scruples, brings her into an infinite scrape, and then with her own infinite good humour sets all to right, and brings her safe out of it again with an explanation. Mrs. CHATTERLY'S embarrassments were masterly. Miss STEVENSON her maid's start, at surprising a youth in her mistress's closet at midnight, was quite as good. Miss KELLY we do not care to say any thing about, because we have been accused of flattering her. The truth is, this lady puts so much intelligence and good sense into every part which she plays, that there is no expressing an honest sense of her merits, without incurring a suspicion of that sort. But what have we to gain by praising Miss KELLY?

Altogether this little feminine republic, this provoking experiment, went off most smoothly. What a nice world it would be, we sometimes think, _all women!_ but then we are afraid we slip in a fallacy unawares into the hypothesis; we somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as spectators or something among them.

We saw WILKINSON after it in _Walk for a Wager_. What a picture of Forlorn Hope! of abject orphan destitution! he seems to have no friends in the world but his legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes walking on like a perpetual motion. His continual ambulatory presence performs the part of a Greek chorus. He is the walking Gentleman of the piece; a Peripatetic that would make a Stoic laugh. He made us cry. His _Muffincap_ in _Amateurs and Actors_ is just such another piece of acting. We have seen charity boys, both of St. Clement's and Farringdon without, looking just as old, ground down out of all semblance of youth, by abject and hopeless neglect--you cannot guess their age between fifteen and fifty. If Mr. PEAK is the author of these pieces, he has no reason to be piqued at their reception.

We must apologize for an oversight in our last week's article. The allusion made to Mr. KEAN'S acting of _Luke_ in the _City Madam_ was totally inapplicable to the part and to the play. We were thinking of his performance of the concluding scenes of the _New Way to Pay Old Debts_. We confounded one of MASSINGER'S strange heroes with the other. It was _Sir Giles Overreach_ we meant; nor are we sure that our remark was just, even with this explanation. When we consider the intense tone, in which Mr. KEAN thinks it proper (and he is quite as likely to be in the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the temperament of that monstrous character from the beginning, it follows but logically and naturally, that where the wild uncontrollable man comes to be baffled of his purpose, his passions should assume a frenzied manner, which it was altogether absurd to expect should be the same with the manner of the cautious and self-restraining _Cantwell_, even when he breaks loose from all bonds in the agony of his final exposure. We never felt more strongly the good sense of the saying,--Comparisons are odious. They betray us not seldom into bitter errors of judgment; and sometimes, as in the present instance, into absolute matter of fact blunders. But we have recanted.

* * * *.

FOUR REVIEWS

(1819-1820)

I.--_FALSTAFF'S LETTERS_

(1819)

_Original Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends; now first made public by a Gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine MSS. which have been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four hundred years_. London: Robinsons, 1796

A copy of this work sold at the Roxburgh sale for five guineas. We have both before and since that time picked it up at stalls for eighteen pence. Reader, if you shall ever light upon a copy in the same way, we counsel you to buy it. We are deceived if there be not in it much of the true Shakspearian stuff. We present you with a few of the Letters, which may speak for themselves:--

FALSTAFF TO THE PRINCE

"I pr'ythee, Hal, lend me thy 'kerchief. An thy unkindness have not started more salt gouts down my poor old cheek, than my good rapier hath of blood from foemen's gashes in five and thirty years' service, then am I a very senseless mummy. I squander away in drinkings monies belonging to the soldiery! I do deny it--they have had part--the surplus is gone in charity--accuse the parish officers--make them restore--the whoreson wardens do now put on the cloak of supplication at the church doors, intercepting gentlemen for charity, forsooth!--'Tis a robbery, a villainous robbery! to come upon a gentleman reeking with piety, God's book in his hand, brimfull of the sacrament! Thou knowest, Hal, as I am but man, I dare in some sort leer at the plate and pass, but as I have the body and blood of Christ within me, could I do it? An I did not make an oblation of a matter of ten pound after the battle of Shrewsbury, in humble gratitude for thy safety, Hal, then am I the veriest transgressor denounced in God's code. But I'll see them damned ere I'll be charitable again. Let 'em coin the plate--let them coin the holy chalice...."

THE SAME TO THE SAME

"Ha! ha! ha! And dost thou think I would not offer up ten pound for thee? yea, a hundred--more--but take heed of displeasing in thy sacrifice. Cain did bring a kid, yea, a firstling upon the altar, and the blaze ascended not. Abel did gather simple herbs, penny-royal, Hal, and mustard, a fourpenny matter, and the odour was grateful. I had ten pound for the holy offertory--mine ancient Pistol doth know it--but the angel did arrest my hand. Could I go beyond the word?--the angel which did stretch forth his finger, lest the good patriarch should slay his son.--That Ned Poins hath more colours than a jay, more abuse than a taught pie, and for wit--the cuckow's dam may be Fool of the Court to him. I lie down at Shrewsbury out of base fear! I melt into roods, and acres, and poles! I tell thee what, Hal, there's not a subject in the land hath half my temperance of valour.--Did I not see thee combating the man-queller, Hotspur; yea, in peril of subduement? Was it for me to lose my sweet Hal without a thrust, having my rapier, my habergion, my good self about me? I did lie down in the hope of sherking him in the rib--four drummers and a fifer did help me to the ground:--didst thou not mark how I did leer upon thee from beneath my buckler? That Poins hath more scurrility than is in a whole flock of disquieted geese.

"For the rebels I did conceal, thou should'st give me laud. I did think thou wert already encompassed with more enemies than the resources of men could prevent overwhelming thee: yea, that thou wert the dove on the waters of Ararat, and didst lack a resting-place. Was it for me to heap to thy manifold disquiets? Was it for me to fret thee with the advice of more enemies than thou didst already know of? I could not take their lives, and therefore did I take their monies. I did fine them, lest they should scape, Hal, thou dost understand me, without chastisement; yea, I fined them for a punishment. They did make oath on the point of my sword to be true men:--an the rogues forswore themselves, and joined the Welchman, let them look to it--'tis no 'peachment of my virtue...."

AGAIN

"Oh! I am setting on a nest of the most unfledged cuckows that ever brooded under the wing of hawk. Thou must know, Hal, I had note of a good hale recruit or two in this neighbourhood. In other shape came I not; look to it, Master Shallow, that in other shape I depart not. But I know thou art ever all desire to be admitted a Fellow Commoner in a jest. Robert Shallow, Esq. judgeth the hamlet of Cotswold. Doth not the name of judge horribly chill thee? With Aaron's rod in his hand, he hath the white beard of Moses on his chin. In good sooth his perpetual countenance is not unlike what thou wouldst conceit of the momentary one of the lunatic Jew, when he tumbled God's tables from the mount. He hath a quick busy gait--more of this upright Judge (perpendicular as a pikeman's weapon, Hal,) anon. I would dispatch with these Bardolph; but the knave's hands--(I cry thee mercy) his mouth is full in preventing desertion among my recruits. An every liver among them haven't stood me in three and forty shilling, then am I a naughty escheator.--I tell thee what, Hal, I'd fight against my conscience for never a Prince in Christendom but thee.--Oh! this is a most damnable cause, and the rogues know it--they'll drink nothing but sack of three and twopence a gallon; and I enlist me none but tall puissant fellows that would quaff me up Fleet-ditch, were it filled with sack--picked men, Hal--such as will shake my Lord of York's mitre. I pray thee, sweet lad, make speed--thou shalt see glorious deeds."

* * * * *

How say you, reader, do not these inventions smack of Eastcheap? Are they not nimble, forgetive, evasive? Is not the humour of them elaborate, cogitabund, fanciful? Carry they not the true image and superscription of the father which begat them? Are they not steeped all over in character--subtle, profound, unctuous? Is not here the very effigies of the Knight? Could a counterfeit _Jack Falstaff_ come by these conceits? Or are you, reader, one who delights to drench his mirth in tears? You are, or, peradventure, have been a lover; a "dismissed bachelor," perchance, one that is "lass-lorn." Come, then, and weep over the dying bed of such a one as thyself. Weep with us the death of poor _Abraham Slender_.

DAVY TO SHALLOW

"Master Abram is dead, gone, your Worship, dead! Master Abram! Oh! good, your Worship, a's gone. A' never throve, since a' came from Windsor--'twas his death. I called him rebel, your Worship--but a' was all subject--a' was subject to any babe, as much as a king--a' turned, _like as it were the latter end of a lover's lute_--a' was all peace and resignment--a' took delight in nothing but his Book of Songs and Sonnets--a' would go to the Stroud side under the large beech tree, and sing, 'till 'twas quite pity of our lives to mark him; for his chin grew as long as a muscle.--Oh! a' sung his soul and body quite away--a' was lank as any greyhound, and had such a scent! I hid his love-songs among your Worship's law-books; for I thought, if a' could not get at them, it might be to his quiet; but a' snuffed them out in a moment. Good, your Worship, have the wise woman of Brentford secured--Master Abram may have been conjured--Peter Simple says, a' never looked up after a' sent for the wise woman.--Marry, a' was always given to look down afore his elders; a' might do it, a' was given to it--your Worship knows it; but then 'twas peak and pert with him, marry, in the turn of his heel.--A' died, your Worship, just about one, at the crow of the cock.--I thought how it was with him; for a' talked as quick, ay, marry, as glib as your Worship; and a' smiled, and looked at his own nose, and called 'Sweet Ann Page.' I asked him if a' would eat--so a' bad us commend him to his cousin Robert (a' never called your Worship so before) and bad us get hot meat, for a' would not say 'nay' to Ann again.[37] But a' never lived to touch it--a' began all in a moment to sing 'Lovers all, a Madrigall.' 'Twas the only song Master Abram ever learnt out of book, and clean by heart, your Worship--and so a' sung, and smiled, and looked askew at his own nose, and sung, and sung on, till his breath waxed shorter, and shorter, and shorter, and a' fell into a struggle and died. Alice Shortcake craves, she may make his shroud...."

[37] Vide, _Merry Wives of Windsor_, latter part of 1st scene, 1st
act.

* * * * *

Should these specimens fail to rouse your curiosity to see the whole, it may be to your loss, gentle reader, but it will give small pain to the spirit of him that wrote this little book; my fine-tempered friend, J. W.--for not in authorship, or the spirit of authorship, but from the fullness of a young soul, newly kindling at the Shakspearian flame, and bursting to be delivered of a rich exuberance of conceits,--I had almost said _kindred with those of the full Shakspearian genius itself_,--were these letters dictated. We remember when the inspiration came upon him; when the plays of Henry the Fourth were first put into his hands. We think at our recommendation he read them, rather late in life, though still he was but a youth. He may have forgotten, but we cannot, the pleasant evenings which ensued at the Boar's Head (as we called our tavern, though in reality the sign was not that, nor the street Eastcheap, for that honoured place of resort has long since passed away) when over our pottle of Sherris he would talk you nothing but pure _Falstaff_ the long evenings through. Like his, the wit of J. W. was deep, recondite, imaginative, full of goodly figures and fancies. Those evenings have long since passed away, and nothing comparable to them has come in their stead, or can come. "We have heard the chimes at midnight."

* * * *.

II.--CHARLES LLOYD'S POEMS

(1819)

NUGÆ CANORÆ. POEMS BY CHARLES LLOYD

The reader who shall take up these poems in the mere expectation of deriving amusement for an idle hour, will have been grievously misled by the title. _Nugæ_ they certainly are not, but full of weight; earnest, passionate communings of the spirit with itself. He that reads them must come to them in a serious mood; he should be one that has descended into his own bosom; that has probed his own nature even to shivering; that has indulged the deepest yearnings of affection, and has had them strangely flung back upon him; that has built to himself a fortress out of conscious weakness; that has cleaved to the rock of his early religion, and through hope in it hath walked upon the uneasy waters.

We should be sorry to convey a false notion. Mr. Lloyd's religion has little of pretence or sanctimoniousness about it; it is worn as an armour of self-defence, not as a weapon of outward annoyance: the believing may be drawn by it, and the unbelieving need not be deterred. The Religionist of Nature may find some things to venerate in its mild Christianity, when he shall discover in a volume, generally hostile to new experiments in philosophy and morals, some of its tenderest pages dedicated to the virtues of _Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin_.

Mr. Lloyd's poetry has not much in it that is narrative or dramatic. It is richer in natural description; but the _imagery_ is for the most part embodied with, and made subservient to, the _sentiment_, as in many of the sonnets, &c. His genius is metaphysical and profound; his verses are made up of deep feeling, accompanied with the perpetual running commentary of his own deeper self-reflection. His affections seem to run kindliest in domestic channels; and there some strains, commemorative of a dead relative, which, while they do honour to the heart of the writer, are of too sacred a nature, we think, almost to have been committed to print at all; much less would they bear exposal among the miscellaneous matter indispensable to a public journal. We prefer therefore giving an extract from the fine blank verse poem, entitled _Christmas_. It is richly embued with the meditative, introspective cast of mind, so peculiar to this author:--

There is a time
When first sensation paints the burning cheek,
Fills the moist eye, and quickens the keen pulse,
That mystic meanings half conceiv'd invest
The simplest forms, and all doth speak, all lives
To the eager heart! At such a time to me
Thou cam'st, dear holiday! Thy twilight glooms
Mysterious thoughts awaken'd, and I mus'd
As if possest, yea felt as I had known
The dawn of inspiration. Then the days
Were sanctified by feeling, all around
Of an indwelling presence darkly spake.

Silence had borrow'd sounds to cheat the soul!
And, to the toys of life, the teeming brain,
Impregning them with its own character,
Gave preternatural import; the dull face
Was eloquent, and e'en the idle air
Most potent shapes, varying and yet the same,
Substantially express'd.

But soon my heart,
Unsatisfied with blissful shadows, felt
Achings of vacancy, and own'd the throb
Of undefin'd desire, while lays of love
Firstling and wild stole to my trem'lous tongue.
To me thy rites were mock'ry then, thy glee
Of little worth. More pleas'd I trod the waste
Sear'd with the sleety wind, and drank its blast;
Deeming thy dreary shapes most strangely sweet,
Mist-shrouded winter! in mute loneliness
I wore away the day which others hail'd
So cheerily, still usher'd in with chaunt
Of carol, and the merry ringers' peal,
Most musical to the good man that wakes
And praises God in gladness.

But soon fled
The dreams of love fantastic! Still the Friend,
The Friend, the wild roam o'er the drifted snows
Remain unsung! then when the wintry view
Objectless, mist-hidden, or in uncouth forms
Prank'd by the arrowy flake might aptly yield
New stores to shaping fantasy, I rov'd
With him my lov'd companion! Oh, 'twas sweet;
Ye who have known the swell that heaves the breast
Pregnant with loftiest poesy, declare
Is aught more soothing to the charmed soul
Than friendship's glow, the independent dream
Gathering when all the frivolous shews are fled
Of artificial life; when the wild step
Boundeth on wide existence, unbeheld,
Uncheck'd, and the heart fashioneth its hope
In Nature's school, while Nature bursts around,
Nor Man her spoiler meddles in the scene!
Farewell, dear day, much hath it sooth'd my heart
To chaunt thy frail memorial.

Now advance
The darkening years, and I do sojourn, home!
From thee afar. Where the broad-bosom'd hills,
Swept by perpetual clouds, of Scotland, rise,
Me fate compels to tarry.
Ditty quaint or custom'd carol, there my vacant ear
Ne'er blest! I thought of home and happier days!

And as I thought, my vexed spirit blam'd
That austere race, who, mindless of the glee
Of good old festival, coldly forbade
Th' observance which of mortal life relieves
The languid sameness, seeming too to bring
Sanction from hoar antiquity and years
Long past!

* * * *.

III.--BARRON FIELD'S POEMS

(1820)

"FIRST FRUITS OF AUSTRALIAN POETRY"

Sydney, New South Wales. Printed for Private Distribution

I first adventure; follow me who list;
And be the second Austral Harmonist.

Whoever thou art that hast transplanted the British wood-notes to the far-off forest which the Kangaroo haunts--whether thou art some involuntary exile that solaces his sad estrangement with recurrence to his native notes, with more wisdom than those captive Hebrews of old refused to sing their Sion songs in a strange land--or whether, as we rather suspect, thou art that valued friend of ours, who, in thy young time of life, together with thy faithful bride, thy newly "wedded flower," didst, in obedience to the stern voice of duty, quit thy friends, thy family, thy pleasing avocations, the Muses with which thou wert as deeply smitten as any, we believe, in our age and country, to go and administer tedious justice in inauspicious unliterary THIEFLAND[38]--we reclaim thee for our own, and gladly would transport thee back to thy native "fields," and studies congenial to thy habits.

[38] An elegant periphrasis for _the Bay_. Mr. Coleridge led us the
way--"CLOUDLAND, gorgeous land."

We know a merry Captain, and co-navigator with Cook, who prides himself upon having planted the first pun in Otaheite. It was in their own language, and the islanders first looked at him, then stared at one another, and all at once burst out into a genial laugh. It was a stranger, and as a stranger they gave it welcome. Many a quibble of their own growth, we doubt not, has since sprung from that well-timed exotic. Where puns flourish, there must be no inconsiderable advance in civilization. The same good results we are willing to augur from this dawn of refinement at Sydney. They were beginning to have something like a theatrical establishment there, which we are sorry to hear has been suppressed; for we are of opinion with those who think that a taste for such kind of entertainments is one remove at least from profligacy, and that Shakspeare and Gay may be as safe teachers of morality as the ordinary treatises which assume to instil that science. We have seen one of their play bills (while the thing was permitted to last) and were affected by it in no ordinary degree; particularly in the omission of the titles of honour, which in this country are condescendingly conceded to the players. In their Dramatis Personæ _Jobson_ was played by Smith; _Lady Loverule_, Jones; _Nell_, Wilkinson: Gentlemen and Lady Performers alike curtailed of their fair proportions. With a little patronage, we prophesy, that in a very few years the histrionic establishment of Sydney would have risen in respectability; and the humble performers would, by tacit leave, or open permission, have been allowed to use the same encouraging affixes to their names, which dignify their prouder brethren and sisters in the mother country. What a moral advancement, what a lift in the scale, to a Braham or a Stephens of New South Wales, to write themselves _Mr._ and _Miss_! The King here has it not in his power to do so much for a Commoner, no, not though he dub him a Duke.

"The First Fruits" consist of two poems. The first celebrates the plant _epacris grandiflora_; but we are no botanists, and perhaps there is too much matter mixed up in it from the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, to please some readers. The thefts are indeed so open and palpable, that we almost recur to our first surmise, that the author must be some unfortunate wight, sent on his travels for plagiarisms of a more serious complexion. But the old matter and the new blend kindly together; and must, we hope, have proved right acceptable to more than one

----Among the Fair
Of that young land of Shakspeare's tongue.

We select for our readers the second poem; and are mistaken, if it does not relish of the graceful hyperboles of our elder writers. We can conceive it to have been written by Andrew Marvel, supposing him to have been banished to Botany Bay, as he did, we believe, once meditate a voluntary exile to Bermuda. See his fine poem, "Where the remote Bermudas ride."

* * * *.

"THE KANGAROO"

"----mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis."--VIRG., _Æn._, vi.

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!
Thou spirit of Australia,
That redeems from utter failure,
From perfect desolation,
And warrants the creation
Of this fifth part of the earth,
Which would seem an after-birth,
Not conceiv'd in the beginning
(For God bless'd his work at first,
And saw that it was good),
But emerg'd at the first sinning,
When the ground was therefore curst;--
And hence this barren wood!

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!
Tho' at first sight we should say,
In thy nature that there may
Contradiction be involv'd,
Yet, like discord well resolv'd,
It is quickly harmoniz'd.
Sphynx or mermaid realiz'd,
Or centaur unfabulous,
Would scarce be more prodigious,
[Or labyrinthine minotaur
With which great Theseus did war,]
Or Pegasus poetical,
Or hippogriff--chimeras all!
But, what Nature would compile,
Nature knows to reconcile;
And Wisdom, ever at her side,
Of all her children's justified.

She had made the squirrel fragile;
She had made the bounding hart;
But a third so strong and agile
Was beyond ev'n Nature's art.
So she join'd the former two
In thee, Kangaroo!

To describe thee, it is hard:
Converse of the camélopard,
Which beginneth camel-wise,
But endeth of the panther size,
Thy fore half, it would appear,
Had belong'd to "some small deer,"
Such as liveth in a tree;
By thy hinder, thou should'st be
A large animal of chase,
Bounding o'er the forest's space;--
Join'd by some divine mistake,
None but Nature's hand can make--
Nature, in her wisdom's play,
On Creation's holiday.
For howso'er anomalous,
Thou yet art not incongruous,
Repugnant or preposterous.
Better-proportion'd animal,
More graceful or ethereal,
Was never follow'd by the hound,
With fifty steps to thy one bound.
Thou canst not be amended: no;
Be as thou art; thou best art so.

When sooty swans are once more rare,
And duck-moles[39] the museum's care,
Be still the glory of this land,
Happiest work of finest hand!

[39] The _cygnus niger_ of Juvenal is no _rara avis_ in Australia;
and time has here given ample proof of the _ornithorynchus
paradoxus_. [Barron Field's note.]

IV.--KEATS' "LAMIA"

(1820)

LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF SAINT AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. BY JOHN KEATS. AUTHOR OF _ENDYMION_

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shield'd scutcheon blush'd with blood of Queens and Kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven [:--Porphyro grew faint,
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint

Anon his heart revives:] her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair Saint Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.

Such is the description which Mr. Keats has given us, with a delicacy worthy of Christabel, of a high-born damsel, in one of the apartments of a baronial castle, laying herself down devoutly to dream, on the charmed Eve of St. Agnes; and like the radiance, which comes from those old windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost Chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he touches. We have scarcely any thing like it in modern description. It brings us back to ancient days, and

_Beauty making-beautiful old rhymes._

The finest thing in the volume is the paraphrase of Boccaccio's story of the Pot of Basil. Two Florentines, merchants, discovering that their sister Isabella has placed her affections upon Lorenzo, a young factor in their employ, when they had hopes of procuring for her a noble match, decoy Lorenzo, under pretence of a ride, into a wood, where they suddenly stab and bury him. The anticipation of the assassination is wonderfully conceived in one epithet, in the narration of the ride--

So the two brothers, and their _murder'd_ man,
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles----

Returning to their sister, they delude her with a story of their having sent Lorenzo abroad to look after their merchandises; but the spirit of her lover appears to Isabella in a dream, and discovers how and where he was stabbed, and the spot where they have buried him. To ascertain the truth of the vision, she sets out to the place, accompanied by her old nurse, ignorant as yet of her wild purpose. Her arrival at it, and digging for the body, is described in the following stanzas, than which there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser:--

She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow
Like to a native lily of the dell:
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.

Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon
Her silk had play'd in purple fantasies,
She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:
Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair.

That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
Until her heart felt pity to the core
At sight of such a dismal labouring,
And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
Three hours they labour'd at this travail sore;
At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

To pursue the story in prose:--They find the body, and with their joint strengths sever from it the head, which Isabella takes home, and wrapping it in a silken scarf, entombs it in a garden-pot, covers it with mould, and over it she plants sweet basil, which, watered with her tears, thrives so that no other basil tufts in all Florence throve like her basil. How her brothers, suspecting something mysterious in this herb, which she watched day and night, at length discover the head, and secretly convey the basil from her; and how from the day that she loses her basil she pines away, and at last dies [--for this], we must refer our readers to the poem, or to the divine germ of it in Boccaccio. It is a great while ago since we read the original; and in this affecting revival of it we do but

_Weep again a long-forgotten woe._

More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the Lamia. It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. Her first appearance in serpentine form--

----a beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes--