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 RECREATIONS OF 
 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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Recreations of 
 an Anthologist 
 
 By 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 Author of "Ballads of Books," 
 "American Familiar Verse, "etc. 
 
 NEWYORKs 2; x.s: 
 
 DODD, MEAD i^f COMPANY 
 
 =: X X X 2:1904 
 
TWO Oopies Rficeiveo 
 
 AUG 30 1904 
 
 Cooyrteht Enm 
 
 CUASS «- XXo. No. 
 
 <? i, / o o 
 
 COPY B 
 
 
 Copyright, 1896, 1899, 1901, 1904, by 
 DoDD, Mead and Company 
 
 Copyright, 1903, 1904, by 
 Charles Scribner's Sons 
 
 Copyright, 1903, 1904, by 
 Harper & Brothers 
 
 Published September, 1904 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I By Way of Introduction i 
 
 II A Theme, with Variations 13 
 
 III Unwritten Books 37 
 
 IV Seed-Corn for Stories 50 
 V American Satires in Verse 69 
 
 VI American Epigrams 103 
 
 VII A Note on the Quatrain 130 
 
 VIII Carols of Cookery 147 
 
 IX Recipes in Rhyme 164 
 
 X The Uncollected Poems of H. C. Bun- 
 
 NER 186 
 XI The Strangest Feat of Modern Magic 209 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN 
 ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 PRYING eyes all over the world 
 are now seeking to spy out the 
 secret motives of every human 
 action and to find an explana- 
 tion, more or less plausible, for all the 
 freakish deeds and foolish misdeeds of 
 mankind. But no one of these inquirers 
 into the recesses of man's being has yet 
 come forward with a wholly satisfactory 
 explanation of the reasons which lead so 
 many of us to find our chief pleasure in 
 the seemingly idle pastime of "making a 
 collection," as it is called. Why is it that 
 many a man puts his whole heart in this 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 gathering together of the objects of his 
 seeking? There are not a few otherwise 
 sensible beings, good citizens, voters, 
 church-members, who act on the axiom that 
 the chief end of man is to "make a collec- 
 tion," — whether of books or of auto- 
 graphs, of fans or of playing cards, of 
 postage-stamps or of pictorial posters, of 
 coins or of counterfeit money. 
 
 Of course, there Is no denying that any 
 collection, a string of buttons or a shelfful 
 of boot-heels has some scientific value; and 
 more than once has the mere heaper up of 
 unconsidered trifles rendered Inestimable 
 service to the avid investigator Into the 
 records of human endeavor. The acquisi- 
 tive energy of the coin-collectors has led to 
 the lighting up of many a dark spot In 
 chronology; and the accumulative zeal of 
 the autograph-collectors has preserved writ- 
 ings which have helped to elucidate many 
 a doubtful point In history. Even a collec- 
 tion of the buttons of precocious poets or a 
 gathering of the boot-heels of famous 
 
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 female authors might supply suggestive 
 material to an inquisitive critic like Saint- 
 Beuve, who was forever striving to inter- 
 pret the works of every writer by a pains- 
 taking analysis of all the petty facts of his 
 or her personality. 
 
 But however much the collector may 
 boast of the utility of his labors, he knows 
 perfectly well that his motive is not utili- 
 tarian. If he is honest with himself, he 
 will admit humbly that the attraction of 
 "making a collection" does not lie in the 
 ultimate value of the collection when it 
 shall be completed (as far as that may be 
 possible). In the immense majority of 
 cases the beginnings of the collection were 
 accidental and wholly devoid of purpose. 
 Sometimes as the collection grew, the col- 
 lector has become conscious of its possible 
 importance to science; but the charm of 
 collecting is wholly independent of the 
 actual value of the things accumulated. 
 Indeed, the collection seems to lose some of 
 its interest the nearer it approaches to com- 
 3 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 pletion; and it is then increasingly in danger 
 of being disposed of hastily by auction, by 
 private sale or by donation to some 
 museum, so that the former owner may be 
 set free to start again on the joyful labor he 
 delights in. The zest of the sport resides in 
 the pursuit of the game, and not in the 
 counting of the spoils of the chase. "To 
 have and to hold" is not the collector's 
 motto but "to seek and to find." 
 
 It is this accumulation that gives the col- 
 lector his keenest pleasure, this adding 
 together of specimen after specimen, with 
 little thought as to the importance to any 
 investigator of the material thus amassed. 
 The collector is not conscious of any 
 altruistic wish to help along some unknown 
 scientific observer. On the contrary, it is 
 for himself he is working; he is frankly 
 selfish, — not to say greedy. He is on the 
 alert for the objects of his desire, he is 
 capturing them, storing them up one by 
 one, setting them up over against each 
 other, solely for his own enjoyment, to 
 
 4 
 
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 satisfy some inner need of his own soul. 
 And this is why the true collector is 
 almost as likely to be miserly as he is 
 to be liberal. Now and then there is a 
 collector of books or of coins who is 
 notorious for the pitiful delight he takes 
 in denying all access to his treasures, over 
 which he prefers to gloat in contemptible 
 solitude. The spring which moves these 
 meaner collectors is probably a primitive 
 instinct for acquisition; it is a belated sur- 
 vival of an ancestral trait, useful enough, 
 once upon a time, to that remote progenitor 
 of ours who was Probably Arboreal and 
 who needed to lay up stores of all sorts 
 against the coming of winter. And in the 
 pleasure the collector takes in arranging 
 and in re-arranging the things he has 
 brought together with an infinitude of 
 effort, perhaps we ought to recognize a 
 cropping-out of that other rudimentary in- 
 stinct which is known as the play-impulse. 
 But here, as elsewhere in the long story of 
 the ascent of man, we can see a constant 
 5 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 struggle upward. That which begins be- 
 cause of the brute instinct of acquisition, a 
 wanton accumulation without regard to the 
 value of the things heaped up or to the 
 utility of the collection itself, is evolved in 
 time into something higher; and those who 
 begin by collecting buttons or boot-heels 
 may develop at last into expert numisma- 
 tists or learned archasologists. Thus it is, 
 that civilized man, in "this so-called twen- 
 tieth century" of ours, finds his profit in 
 the survival of mere monkey-tricks inher- 
 ited from that distant ancestor who hung 
 suspended by his prehensile tail from the 
 boughs of the forest primeval. 
 
 So far as I am aware no one has hitherto 
 drawn attention to the obvious fact that the 
 motives of the collector of buttons and of 
 boot-heels are closely akin to those of the 
 literary anthologists who gather into a sin- 
 gle volume the scattered poems or prose 
 specimens which seem to belong together. 
 For his own idle amusement at first, he col- 
 lects the poems of varied authorship which 
 6 
 
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 deal with the same theme or which are writ- 
 ten in the same form, considering in the one 
 case the divergency of treatment and in the 
 other the divergency of topic. He may be 
 a lover of the Nicotian weed, seeking out 
 all the ballads which have been indited in 
 praise of tobacco; or he may be a lover of 
 soulful verse, delighting in the variety of 
 the lyric as it flourished in English under 
 Elizabeth or under Victoria. And for his 
 own sole pleasure he begins by bringing 
 together the more accessible poems of the 
 type in which his interest has been awak- 
 ened. Then he finds himself wondering 
 whether there are not many other poems of 
 this same type that he has failed to find; 
 and all at once he is launched on a voyage 
 of discovery from which he returns with 
 spoil of all sorts, and in the course of which 
 he makes acquaintance with many a far 
 country. 
 
 When he contemplates the treasures he 
 has thus been enabled to acquire as the 
 result of his diligent search, and more espe- 
 7 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 daily when he notes how much the charm 
 of certain of his old favorites has been en- 
 hanced by contrast with certain of his more 
 recent discoveries, then he is moved to share 
 his pleasure with others. He cannot help 
 feeling sure that what has given him so 
 much satisfaction is likely also to delight not 
 a few lovers of literature, whose attention 
 has not hitherto been attracted in that 
 special direction. So he pursues his search, 
 and he sets his collection in order, and he 
 seeks faithfully for the missing specimens; 
 and in time he publishes the result of his 
 gleanings. Thus it was that Bell was 
 inspired to present to the public his striking 
 selection from the beautiful songs which 
 besprinkle the works of the British drama- 
 tists. And thus it was that the present 
 writer has been moved to edit three several 
 anthologies as different in theme as may be. 
 'Poems of American Patriotism' was pub- 
 lished in 1882 by Charles Scribner's Sons; 
 and it was reissued by the same firm in 
 1898, when It was included In a series of 
 
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 reading-books for schools. 'Ballads of 
 Books' was published in 1886 by George 
 J. Coombes; and it served as the founda- 
 tion for a volume of the same title pre- 
 pared by Mr. Andrew Lang and pub- 
 lished in London in 1888 by Longmans, 
 Green & Co. The original American 
 collection was reissued in New York in 
 1899 by Dodd, Mead & Co. 'American 
 Familiar Verse : vers de societe' was pub- 
 lished in 1904 by Longmans, Green & 
 Co. as a volume of the 'Wampum Li- 
 brary of American Literature.' A fourth 
 volume, planned long ago, and not yet 
 brought to completion, will select and set in 
 order the chief poems which deal with the 
 past history and which celebrate the present 
 beauty of New York. 
 
 The collection of the material for these 
 several volumes, the hunting up of the 
 poems which were not at hand, the sifting 
 out of the verses which were felt to be un- 
 worthy of their fellows, the preparation of 
 an authentic text and of proper introduc- 
 9 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 tory notes, — all this was a labor of love, 
 no doubt, but it was a labor, for all that, 
 a labor the weight of which no one will be 
 disposed to deny who has ever ventured on 
 the undertaking of an anthology. But it 
 was a labor that of a certainty paid for 
 itself in an increase of knowledge and in a 
 broadening of outlook. And the search for 
 the poems demanding inclusion in one or 
 another of these three volumes led the 
 writer into many a by-path of letters. It 
 ! increased his liking for the curiosities of 
 ! literature, as the elder Disraeli had termed 
 them, — a liking originally awakened by a 
 boyish perusal of Disraeli's own pages. To 
 gratify this liking the papers in the present 
 volume have been written. 
 
 They are, for the most part, minor 
 anthologies, — collections not important 
 enough or not bulking big enough to de- 
 mand Independent existence In a volume, 
 each by Itself. And some of them are fairly 
 to be called by-products of the longer and 
 more important collections. For example, 
 
 10 
 
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 
 
 the paper on the epigram as it has been 
 written here in the United States was the 
 natural result of the attempt to collect the 
 best specimens of American familiar verse 
 {vers de societe), the lyrics which are brief 
 and brilliant and buoyant. And the paper 
 on the quatrain, as this has been handled 
 by American lyrists, was the outgrowth of 
 the collection of American epigrams which 
 revealed the need of making clear the dis- 
 tinction between the epigram of the Greeks 
 of old and the epigram of the English- 
 speaking writers of to-day. 
 
 To most careless users of books the 
 anthologist is but a compiler, like the lexi- 
 cographer, "a harmless drudge;" yet if any 
 anthologists were ever inclined toward 
 boastfulness, they would have little diffi- 
 culty in proving that the practitioners of 
 their humble craft had deserved well of the 
 republic of letters; and they might recall 
 with satisfaction the fact that Longfellow 
 had prepared a bulky tome of selections 
 from the 'Poets and Poetry of Europe' and 
 II 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 that he had also supervised the long series 
 of 'Poems of Places,' a lyrical gazeteer. 
 They might well feel pride in claiming kin- 
 ship in labor with the other American 
 songster who has bestowed upon us 'A 
 Victorian Anthology' and 'An American 
 Anthology,' and with the British bard who 
 made us all his debtors by the lyric jewels 
 he heaped up in the 'Golden Treasury.' 
 (1904.) 
 
 Z2 
 
II 
 
 A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 THERE seems to be nothing that a 
 small mind more eagerly de- 
 lights in than the detection of 
 the small resemblances which 
 are likely to be discoverable when the works 
 of different authors are rigorously com- 
 pared; and there are assuredly few things 
 that a large mind regards with a more lan- 
 guid interest than the foolish and futile 
 accusations of plagiarism now and again 
 bandied about in the public prints. The 
 man of large mind is both tolerant and 
 careless. He knows that it is not rare for 
 the same thought to occur independently 
 and almost simultaneously to two original 
 thinkers — just as the suggestion of natural 
 selection came to Darwin and Wallace 
 almost at the same time. Moreover, he is 
 13 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 well aware that all workers have a right to 
 avail themselves of whatsoever has been 
 accomplished by their predecessors, so long 
 as they do not make false pretences or seek 
 to gain credit under false colors. 
 
 If proof was needed that Poe was not a 
 man of large mind, it might be found in the 
 fact that he was guilty of an article on 'Mr. 
 Longfellow and Other Plagiarists' ; and no 
 one was surprised to learn that Poe him- 
 self could be a plagiarist upon occasion, and 
 that he borrowed for his 'Marginalia' 
 Sheridan's joke about the phoenix and Mr. 
 Whitbread's describing it as a poulterer 
 would. Of course, it is possible that Poe 
 invented this witticism for himself, 
 although this is not at all likely, since the 
 American lyrist was one of those who joked 
 with difficulty. The jest, indeed, is very 
 characteristic of the author of the 'School 
 for Scandal' — and very unlike the other 
 humorous attempts of the author of the 
 ♦Raven.' 
 
 Tennyson once wrote to a critic who had 
 
 14 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 pointed out certain parallelisms in the 
 'Princess': "Why not? Are not human 
 eyes all over the world looking at the same 
 objects, and must there not consequently be 
 coincidences of thought and impressions 
 and expressions ? It is scarcely possible for 
 any one to say or write anything in this late 
 time of the world to which, in all the rest 
 of the literature of the world, a parallel 
 could not som.ewhere be found." Lowell 
 declared that it was now impossible to sink 
 a spade in the soil of Parnassus without dis- 
 turbing the bones of some dead poet. 
 Shelley went so far as to assert that "all 
 knowledge is reminiscence; the doctrine is 
 far more ancient than the times of Plato, 
 and as old as the venerable allegory that the 
 Muses are the daughters of Memory; not 
 one of the nine was ever said to be the child 
 of Invention." And Mr. Aldrich in his 
 quatrain on 'Originality' has asserted that 
 
 No bird has ever uttered note 
 That was not in some first bird's throat ; 
 Since Eden's freshness and man's fall 
 No rose has been original. 
 
 15 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Just as Poe probably borrowed his merry 
 jest from Sheridan, so very likely the re- 
 mark of one of the characters in 'Lady 
 Windemere's Fan' — "I can resist every- 
 thing — except temptation" — is perhaps a 
 reminiscence of the saying of the medieval 
 Franc-Archer de Bagnolet, quoted by 
 Rabelais, "I am not afraid of anything — 
 except danger." But it was apparently 
 quite independently but almost simultane- 
 ously that a similar thought occurred to 
 a Frenchman, an Englishman, and an 
 American. The late Thomas B. Reed, 
 sometime Speaker of the House of Repre- 
 sentatives, once defined a statesman as "a 
 successful politician — who is dead." Mr. 
 Pinero, having in mind the rather boister- 
 ous humor of the 'Rivals' or of 'She 
 Stoops to Conquer,' has asserted that 
 "a comedy is often only a farce — by a 
 deceased dramatist." And in the journal 
 of the Goncourts we can read the kindred 
 remark that "genius is the talent of a dead 
 man." 
 
 i6 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 When M. Rostand brought out 'UAig- 
 lon' Its likeness in theme to 'Hamlet' was 
 promptly pointed out; now the likeness of 
 'Hamlet' to the 'Oresteia' is a commonplace 
 of scholarship; but there is no resemblance 
 whatsoever between the French play and 
 the Greek tragedy, although they have each 
 of them a certain superficial similarity to 
 the English drama. Here we see that two 
 dramas, each of which resembles a third, 
 are not necessarily like each other. Up to 
 the present time no literary detective has 
 accused Mark Twain of overt plagiarism 
 because he — probably unconsciously — 
 transplanted certain Incidents of 'Romeo 
 and Juliet' to the banks of the Mississippi, 
 when Huckleberry Finn was setting before 
 us boldly and simply the outcome of the 
 long-standing Shepherdson-Grangerford 
 feud. And, as yet, Mr. Kipling has not 
 been held up to public contempt because he 
 utilized in his story of the 'King's Ankus' 
 certain devices which Chaucer had already 
 employed In one of the 'Canterbury Tales.' 
 17 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Mr. Kipling's 'Brushwood Boy' is one of 
 the most beautiful of his stories, and it is 
 one of the most original, both in conception 
 and execution. But at the core of it is the 
 possibility of two persons meeting In their 
 dreams; and this idea was already to be 
 found in Mr. Du Maurler's 'Peter Ibbet- 
 son.' The same idea has since been devel- 
 oped by Mr. Marion Crawford in 'Cecilia;' 
 and also by Miss Elizabeth Jordan In 
 a short story called 'Varick's Lady o' 
 Dreams.' Did the two later writers get 
 the suggestion of it from Mr. Kipling 
 or from Mr. Du Maurler? Did Mr. 
 Kipling even get It from Mr. Du Mau- 
 rler? Or did each of the four Indepen- 
 dently happen upon the tempting impos- 
 sibility? It was Fitz James O'Brien 
 who wrote 'What Was It?' — a thrilling 
 tale of a strange creature, which could 
 not be seen but could be felt; and Guy 
 de Maupassant, in 'Le Horla,' introduces 
 us to just such another uncanny and Impos- 
 sible monster, palpable but Invisible. Did 
 i8 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 the Frenchman borrow this weird impossi- 
 bihty from the Irish-American who had 
 invented it thirty years earlier? Or did he 
 reinvent it for himself? No wonder is it 
 that Mr. Austin Dobson asks: 
 
 Ah, World of ours, are you so gray 
 
 And weary, World, of spinning, 
 That you repeat the tales to-day 
 
 You told at the beginning? 
 For lo ! the same old myths that made 
 
 The early stage-successes, 
 Still hold the boards and still are played 
 
 "With new effects and dresses." 
 
 Students of folk-lore seem to be agreed 
 — if indeed they are in accord about any- 
 thing at all — that certain kinds of stones 
 are likely to spring up spontaneously when- 
 ever and wherever the conditions are favor- 
 able, while tales of a different type are 
 apparently transmitted swiftly and myste- 
 riously from one country and one language 
 to another land and another tongue. It 
 was Whewell who asserted that all the Irish 
 bulls had been calves in Greece; and it was 
 Professor Tyrrel who neatly explained that 
 19 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 the Irish bull differed from the bull of all 
 other islands in that "it was always preg- 
 nant." 
 
 To trace these similarities, accidental as 
 they are mostly, or intentional as they may 
 be sometimes, is gratifying to the detective 
 instinct, and it is an amusement harmless 
 enough if we do not exaggerate the impor- 
 tance of our chance finds, and if we recog- 
 nize fully the right of every man to profit 
 by all that has been accomplished by his 
 predecessors. Every generation has the 
 privilege of standing on the shoulders of 
 the generation that went before ; but it has 
 no right to pick the pockets of the first- 
 comer. In an earlier paper on the 'Ethics 
 of Plagiarism' the present writer suggested 
 that the man who finds a new idea deserves 
 the full credit of fresh invention; that the 
 second user of this idea may possibly be 
 considered a plagiarist; that the third per- 
 son to utilize it is only lacking in originality, 
 and that the fourth is merely drawing from 
 the common stock. "And when the fifth 
 
 20 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 man takes it, that's research!" was the apt 
 comment of a philosophic friend. 
 
 The preceding paragraphs may perhaps 
 appear to provide a portico somewhat too 
 pretentious for the modest inquiry which is 
 to follow. Their purpose was but to make 
 it clear that this modest inquiry was not 
 undertaken with any intent to denounce the 
 crime of plagiarism. Its object is rather to 
 show how many forms a pleasant conceit 
 may assume as it travels down the centuries 
 and as it migrates from one language to 
 another. 
 
 Some diligent readers of modern verse 
 may chance to be acquainted with a triolet 
 of the late W. E. Henley's, which turns 
 upon the ease with which a triolet can be 
 written : 
 
 Easy is the triolet, 
 
 If you really learn to make it! 
 Once a neat refrain you get, 
 Easy is the triolet. 
 As you see ! — I pay my debt 
 
 With another rhyme. Deuce take it. 
 Easy is the triolet, 
 
 If you really learn to make it ! 
 
 21 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Probably more than one of those who 
 may have glanced at this pleasantly phrased 
 trifle recalled a rondeau of Mr. Austin 
 Dobson's, which also found its subject-mat- 
 ter in the conditions of the form itself: 
 
 You bid me try, Blue-Eyes, to write 
 A Rondeau. WhatT — forthwith? — To-night? 
 Reflect. Some skill I have, 'tis true; — 
 But thirteen lines ! — and rhymed on two ! 
 "I must," you say. Ah, hapless plight! 
 Still, there are five lines, — ranged aright. 
 These Gallic bonds, I feared, would fright 
 My easy muse. They did till you — 
 You bid me try ! 
 That makes them nine. The port's in sight; — 
 'Tis all because your eyes are bright! 
 Now just a pair to end with "oo," — 
 When maids command, what can't we do ! 
 Behold ! — the Rondeau, tasteful, light. 
 You bid me try ! 
 
 But Mr. Dobson, as is his wont, was 
 scrupulously careful to put forth his ron- 
 deau in English as a free imitation of a ron- 
 deau in French by Voiture : 
 
 Ma foy; c'est fait de moy. Car Isabeau 
 M'a conjure de luy faire un Rondeau. 
 
 Cela me met en une peine extreme. 
 
 Quoy, treize vers, huit en eau, cinq en eme! 
 
 22 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 Je luy ferois aussi tot un bateau. 
 En viola cinq, pourtant, en un monceau ; 
 Faisons-cn huict, en invoquant Brodeau, 
 Et puis mettons, par quelque stratageme, 
 Ma foy, c'est fait. 
 Si je pouvois encore de mon cerveau 
 Tirer cinq vers, I'ouvrage seroit beau. 
 Mais cependant, je suis dedans I'onzieme, 
 Et si je croy que je fais le douzieme, 
 En voila treize ajustes au niveau. 
 
 Ma foy, c'est fait ! 
 
 And this raises the question whether in 
 Voiture we have found the first versifier 
 who filled a fixed form by an airy discussion 
 of the difficulties to be overcome by all who 
 adventure upon that form; and here the 
 answer is easy. Voiture was apparently 
 only the first lyrist to rhyme a rondeau of 
 this sort; for he had as a predecessor 
 Desmarets, who had used this device to 
 help him in the composition of a sonnet. 
 And it is asserted that the Frenchman had 
 borrowed the conceit from an Italian, 
 Marini, a most voluminous sonneteer. Un- 
 fortunately, the present writer has not been 
 able to lay hands on Marini's sonnet, or on 
 23 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 that of Desmarets, despite a diligent search. 
 But the finding of the French lyric, and of 
 the Italian that suggested it, is of less im- 
 portance, since there is no doubt that both 
 of them were derived from a Spanish 
 original. 
 
 In his 'New Art of Making Plays' Lope 
 de Vega advised the dramaturgic novice 
 that the sonnet-form was v/ell-fitted for 
 soliloquies; but, although this particular 
 sonnet is to be found in one of his plays, 
 'La Nina de Plata,' it is not a soliloquy, 
 being recited by the gracioso or comedian, 
 frankly as a poetic composition. 
 
 SONETO A VIOLANTE. 
 
 Un soneto me manda hacer Violante : 
 Que en me vida me he visto en tanto aprieto; 
 Catorce versos dicen que es soneto : 
 
 Burla burlando van los tres delante; 
 
 Yd pense que no hallara consonante, 
 
 Y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto; 
 Mas si me veo en el primer terceto ; 
 
 No hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante 
 En el primer terceto voy entrando, 
 
 Y aun parece que entre con pie derecho, 
 
 24 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 Pucs fin con este verso le voy dando; 
 
 Ya estoy en el segundo, y aun sospecho 
 Que voy los trece versos acabando ; 
 
 Contad si son catorce : ya esta hecho. 
 
 In his study of the hfe and works of the 
 great Spanish playwright, Lord Holland 
 quoted an English adaptation of Lope's 
 Spanish original, written by a certain 
 Thomas Edwards, the author of a carefully 
 forgotten discussion of the 'Canons of 
 Criticism,' these canons being weapons of 
 offence primed and aimed to blow War- 
 burton off the face of the earth. This law- 
 yer-critic refused to bind himself down to 
 the strict Guittonian form of the sonnet; 
 and his wit was not over nimble; but he 
 managed to get his fourteen rhymes in pre- 
 sentable shape : 
 
 Capricious Wray a sonnet needs must have : 
 
 I ne'er was so put to't before — a sonnet? 
 
 Why, fourteen verses must be spent upon it. 
 'Tis good, however, I've conquer'd the first stave. 
 
 Yet I shall ne'er find rhvmes enough by half, 
 Said I, and found myself in the midst of the second: 
 If twice four verses were fairly reckon'd 
 
 I should turn back on the hardest part, and laugh. 
 
 25 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Thus far with good success I think I've scribbled. 
 And of twice seven lines have clear got o'er ten. 
 
 Courage ! Another'll finish the first triplet ; 
 Thanks to the muse, my work begins to shorten, 
 There's thirteen lines got through, driblet by drib- 
 let, 
 'Tis done ! count how you will, I warrant there's 
 fourteen. 
 
 There is a conscientious rigidity about 
 this sturdy British sonneteer and an 
 eighteenth-century stiffness about his sacri- 
 fice to the muse which contrast sharply with 
 the Gallic vivacity and the nineteenth-cen- 
 tury expertness to be found in a sonnet by 
 the late Henri Meilhac (the collaborator of 
 M. Ludovic Halevy, in the composition of 
 the 'Belle Helene,' of the 'Grande Duch- 
 esse de Gerolstein' and of the 'Perichole'), 
 No one can now declare with certainty 
 whether Meilhac borrowed the suggestion 
 from Desmarets or Voiture, his predeces- 
 sors in his own tongue, or whether he took 
 it over from the Italian or from the 
 Spanish. In fact, Meilhac was qfuite ingen- 
 ious enough to have invented the device for 
 26 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 his own use; and his sonnet has the bril- 
 liancy and the buoyancy which we expect 
 to find in the best vers de societe: 
 
 UN SONNET. 
 
 Un Sonnet, dites-vous ; savez-vous bien, Madame, 
 Qu'il me faudra trouver trois rimes a sonnet? 
 
 Madame, heureusement, rime avec ame et flamme, 
 Et le premier quatrain me semble assez complet. 
 
 J'entame le second, le second je I'ent.me, 
 Et prends en I'entament un air tout guilleret, 
 
 Car ne m'etant encor point servi du mot ame, 
 Je compte m'en servir, et m'en sers, en effet. 
 
 Vous m'accorderez bien, maintenant, j 'imagine, 
 Qu'un sonnet sans amour ferait fort triste mine, 
 Qu'il aurait I'air boiteux, contrefait, mal tourne. 
 
 II nous faut de I'amour, il nous en faut quand meme; 
 J'ecris done en tremblant; je vous aime, ou je t'aime, 
 Et voila, pour le coup, mon sonnet termine. 
 
 It was Meilhac's sonnet which the late 
 Henry Cuyler Bunner paraphrased, carry- 
 ing over into English, so far as might be 
 possible, not only the fundamental conceit 
 but also the most of the minor felicities of 
 V 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 the French lyrist. Bunner's 'Sonnet to 
 Order' was avowedly an imitation; and, 
 when it was first published in an American 
 magazine, it was accompanied by its French 
 original : 
 
 A sonnet would you have? Know you, my pet, 
 
 For sonnets fourteen lines are necessary. 
 
 Ah, necessary rhymes, by luck, to fairy — 
 I'll call yoj one, and the first quatrain get. 
 This meets half-way the second ; half-way met, 
 
 One meets an obstacle in a manner airy. 
 
 But here, though it is not your name, as Mary 
 I'll set you down, settling the second set. 
 
 Now, you'll i-dmit, a sonnet without love, 
 Without the savor of a woman in't, 
 Were profanation of poetic art. 
 Love, above all things ! So 'tis writ above. 
 Nor there alone. Your sonneteer, I'd hint. 
 Gives you this sonnet here with all his heart. 
 
 One of the scholarly contributors to Petit 
 de Julleville's history of the French lan- 
 guage and literature remarked that "noth- 
 ing is longer than a sonnet — when there is 
 nothing in it" ; and here we have had some 
 half-dozen sonnets with only one thought 
 28 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 in the lot of them. Yet another is called 
 'A Difficult Sonnet' ; and it was found amid 
 the flotsam and jetsam of a scrap-book, 
 credited vaguely to the University Maga- 
 zine, and seemingly clipped out some twen- 
 ty or thirty years ago. It does not quite 
 continue the tradition that has here been 
 traced down through the modern languages; 
 indeed, the obvious desire of the poet to 
 moralize points to an English lyrist who 
 believed in his own originality: 
 
 With an idea I set to write a sonnet ; 
 The subject was so difficult and terse, 
 I could not quite bring right the tiresome verse, 
 
 Much labor though I spent, and pens, upon it: 
 
 Still I plod on, and line by line I con it, 
 Each time with better words to add, or worse, 
 Till it comes right; and, as I last rehearse 
 
 The settled stanza, make fair copy on it. 
 
 This done, I take my blotted rough endeavor. 
 Covering some sheets with every kind of scrawl 
 
 Of my first failures, some of them quite clever; 
 Into a little pack I bring them all. 
 
 Tear up. (Life is the Poem — where's the taper? 
 
 How shall I burn my blotted bits of paper? 
 
 The triolet, the rondeau, and the sonnet 
 have each in turn been taken by lyrists who 
 29 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 wished thus to exploit their own playful- 
 ness ; and the ballade is the only other fixed 
 form of verse likely to prove equally tempt- 
 ing. But a conscientious search has failed 
 to find any ballade turning on the difficulty 
 of making a ballade, with its three octaves, 
 its envoy, its refrain, and its three rhymes, 
 repeated and interlaced. In 'Cyrano de 
 Bergerac,' M. Rostand makes his hero im- 
 provise a ballade while he is fighting a duel 
 — a gorgeous example of bravado and bra- 
 vura; and the verses, purporting to be put 
 together in the very moment of deadly com- 
 bat, abound in allusions to the structure of 
 the ballade itself. And yet the basis of M. 
 Rostand's ballade, with its refrain "^ la fin 
 de V envoi, je louche," does not differ much 
 from that of Lope de Vega, although the 
 superstructure of the later lyric achieves a 
 certain originality. There are at least two 
 English translations of M. Rostand's play; 
 but any rendering of the flashing lines of 
 the flamboyant original cannot but seem a 
 little pale. Who was it first asserted that a 
 30 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 translated poem was like a boiled straw- 
 berry? 
 
 Of all the Teutonic tongues our own 
 English is the almost only one which has 
 taken part in these international borrow- 
 ings. Students of German poetry, and of 
 Dutch, have been unable to answ^er the 
 appeal for kindred lyrics from these lan- 
 guages. 
 
 In Danish — so a kind correspondent in 
 Copenhagen has informed me — there is a 
 sonnet "by request" from the pen of 
 Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860). He 
 was a student of Spanish literature, and he 
 presents his own poem as an imitation of a 
 Spanish original: 
 
 SONET (efter Mendoza) 
 
 I ^nsker en Sonet. Som I befaler ! 
 Det f^rste med det andet Vers er skrevet, 
 Og er ei Nummer Tre tilskamme blevet, 
 Med fjcrde Vers jeg een Qvartet betaler. 
 
 Jeg kommer til det fcmte. Hjelp! Jeg daler! 
 Sanct Jacob! Marche ! Det sjette fremad drevet! 
 Hvis jeg det syvende kun faaer oplevet, 
 Har jeg dog Livet frelst af disse Qvaler 1 
 
 31 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Nu er jeg fasrdig med de to Qvartetter. 
 Hvad synes jer! Forstaaer jeg mig at vende? 
 Men Himlen veed, jeg skjselver for Tercetter! 
 
 Og hvis jeg kan med ^Ere slutte denne, 
 Jeg skriver i mit Liv ei fleer Sonetter, 
 Da denne fjzirste, Gud skee Lov, fik Ende ! 
 
 Until this Danish lyric came to light, 
 it seemed as though the original inventor 
 of the pleasant device was indisputably 
 Lope de Vega (i 562-1 635). But Hei- 
 berg gives the credit to the author of the 
 earliest picaresque romance 'Lazarillo de 
 Tormes', Diego Hurtando de Mendoza, 
 the brilliant historian (i 503-1 575), who 
 died when Lope was but a boy of thirteen. 
 And just after the Danish sonnet had 
 reached me, another kind correspondent 
 sent me from Idaho this English version 
 of Mendoza's original, translated by Mat- 
 thew Russell: — 
 
 THE SONNET. 
 You ask a sonnet, lady, and behold ! 
 
 The first- line and the second are complete. 
 
 If equal luck I in the third should meet, 
 With one verse more the first quatrain is told. 
 
 32 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 St. James for Spain ! the fifth verse is outrolled — 
 Now for the sixth. 'Twill be a gallant feat 
 If after all I manage to retreat 
 Safe with my life from this encounter bold. 
 
 Already, rounded well, each quatrain stands. 
 What say you, lady? Do I bravely speed? 
 Yet, ah I heaven knows the tercets me affright ; 
 
 And if this sonnet were but off my hands, 
 Another I should ne'er attempt, indeed. 
 But now, thank God, my sonnet's finished quite. 
 
 Apparently the Northern tongues have 
 not taken so kindly to the fixed forms as 
 the Southern languages did. And yet no 
 example of a lyric containing this conceit 
 has been forthcoming from Portuguese or 
 from Provencal. This last deficiency is 
 the more remarkable, since the origin of all 
 the fixed forms has been traced to that 
 home of minstrelsy. The sonnet was in- 
 vented by a Provencal lyrist, just as the 
 rondeau was, and the ballade also. 
 
 The sonnet established itself first, and 
 gained the widest acceptance; and it is only 
 of late that the rondeau and the ballade 
 have achieved a certain popularity, far 
 
 33 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 inferior to that of the sonnet. Indeed, of 
 all the fixed forms the sonnet Is at once 
 the best known and the most noble. It 
 has been used to convey the loftiest of 
 messages; it has done this successfully with- 
 out calling undue attention to the necessary 
 artifice of its construction. The rondeau, 
 on the other hand, and the ballade also, 
 have seemed best fitted for lighter themes 
 of minor importance. They carry more 
 appropriately the ingenious prettiness of 
 vers de societe; whereas the sonnet has 
 proved itself to be worthy of the most 
 elevated themes. 
 
 In seeking to discover what poet it was 
 who first devised a lyric in a fixed form, 
 turning on the arbitrary difficulty of the 
 form itself, there is no need to go further 
 back than the Renascence, since the fixed 
 form was a product of the Renascence, 
 impossible until after rhyme had been 
 elaborated in the Middle Ages. In the 
 lyrics of Rome and Greece, with all their 
 exquisite modulations of metre, there was 
 34 
 
A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 
 
 no rhyme ; and therefore no fixed form was 
 possible, built upon an artful adjustment 
 of repeated and contrasted rhymes. 
 
 In Hebrew versification, it ought to be 
 noted here, the acrostic was held in high 
 esteem. Perchance there exists in Hebrew 
 an acrostic, setting forth the difliculty to 
 be vanquished by every bard who seeks 
 to write an acrostic. 
 (1903) 
 
 P. S. — There is a motto popular in the 
 minor marts of trade: "If you don't see 
 what you want, ask for it." And the 
 original publication of this inquiry 
 promptly moved an anonymous British 
 bard to provide the needed ballade based 
 on the difficulty of its own structure. He 
 called it a 'Ballade in the Making.' 
 
 Do you desire me, friend, to write 
 
 The Ballade of Clement Marot, 
 And incidentally indite 
 
 The lines on which it ought to go? 
 
 Then, firstly, I would have you know, 
 One must be gifted with resource. 
 
 For, like the Rondel and Rondeau, 
 The Ballade is a tour dc force. 
 
 35 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Three rhymes you need ; but choose aright, 
 
 For one (like this of mine in "O") 
 Comes fourteen times ; then find a bright 
 
 Refrain, and keep it mot pour mot 
 
 To fall spontaneously below 
 Each of three septets; this, of course, 
 
 Needs ingenuity, for oh ! 
 The Ballade is a tour de force. 
 
 Think not to find the task as light 
 
 As Rostand tells did Cyrano, 
 Composing octaves through a fight 
 
 And envoy as he pinked his foe. 
 
 Remember, too, your verse should flow 
 Smooth as a river from its source — 
 
 So smooth, in fact, as not to show 
 '^he Ballade is a tour de force. 
 
 L'ENVOI. 
 Envoy, addressed to so-and-so, 
 
 Should all that goes before indorse, 
 As thus : — O reader mine, I trow 
 
 The Ballade is a tour de force. 
 
 3(> 
 
Ill 
 
 UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 TO most of the admirers of Dickens 
 the 'Mystery of Edwin Drood' 
 remains still a mystery, since the 
 author died suddenly and before 
 he had himself disclosed his own answer 
 to his serial conundrum. We may give 
 as many guesses as we choose, we cannot 
 be absolutely certain that our solution of 
 the problem is the real one. Thackeray 
 was far above any mystery-mongering of 
 this sort, and he scorned to entrap his 
 readers into puzzling over a mere enigma 
 of plot; but he had acquired from Dickens 
 the inartistic habit of beginning the inter- 
 mittent publication of a novel before he 
 had composed the final chapters, and 
 'Denis Duval' remains to us an interrupted 
 beginning of what might have been a 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 worthy companion of 'Henry Esmond.' 
 More than one attempt was made to com- 
 plete Dickens's broken narrative, but no 
 rash writer was hardy enough to venture 
 on a continuation of Thackeray's novel. 
 When Wilkie Collins left a serial unfin- 
 ished, Sir Walter Besant kindly supplied 
 a conclusion; and Mr. Quiller-Couch did 
 a like friendly service for Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. 
 
 Here in America Hawthorne tried three 
 times to get his strange story of the bloody 
 footstep into a shape satisfactory to his 
 fastidious sense of form, and he allowed 
 'The Dolliver Romance' to begin to appear 
 in a magazine before he had completed 
 the manuscript. The sudden death of 
 Dickens and of Thackeray was his also, 
 and his instalment of life in this world 
 was sharply cut off — to be continued in 
 our next. As in Thackeray's case, so in 
 Hawthorne's, the impossibility of com- 
 pleting what the master had begun was so 
 plain that even the most foolishly con- 
 38 
 
UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 celted have restrained their pens from the 
 task. As Hawthorne's classmate, Long- 
 fellow, beautifully phrased it: 
 
 There, in seclusion and remote from men, 
 
 The wizard hand lies cold, 
 Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, 
 
 And left the tale half-told. 
 
 Ah ! who shall lift that wand of magic power, 
 
 And the lost clue regain? 
 The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
 
 Unfinished must remain. 
 
 Hawthorne, however, and Thackeray 
 had at least begun these books; the 'Dol- 
 liver Romance' and 'Denis Duval' remain 
 unfinished, but they were not absolutely 
 unwritten. There are in the records of 
 literature other books by other authors 
 actually announced as these were, but 
 never even begun. Some of these un- 
 written books may have been thought out, 
 composed, ready to be set down in black 
 and white with pen and ink, complete in 
 the author's head, and lacking the final and 
 almost mechanical registration. Others 
 
 39 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 seem to have been mere projects, little 
 more than vague dreams, for a possible 
 future realisation. At one stage of its 
 existence every book is but a castle in the 
 air; and, the persevering author acts on 
 Thoreau's assertion, that the air is the 
 proper place for a castle, and that what 
 needs to be done is only to build a solid 
 foundation under it. 
 
 Moliere is said by most of his biog- 
 raphers to have made a translation from 
 Lucretius; and if this ever really existed 
 it is now lost. But another of Moliere's 
 works never did exist — the comedy of 
 'L'Homme de Cour' — which he used to 
 talk about as certain to be his final mas- 
 terpiece, but of which nothing is now 
 known. So Richard Brinsley Sheridan 
 made ready to write a successor to the 
 'Rivals' and the 'School for Scandal,' on 
 the theme of 'Affectation,' but this admira- 
 ble subject did not tempt him to the actual 
 labor of composition. He made a few 
 notes for the proposed play, and pursued 
 40 
 
UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 it no further. Perhaps he was too ab- 
 sorbed in the pleasures of society or in the 
 delights of politics; perhaps he was satis- 
 fied with the comedies he had already writ- 
 ten and willing to rest his title to remem- 
 brance upon these. Michael Kelly tells 
 us how he once said to Sheridan that the 
 manager of Drury Lane would never write 
 another comedy, since he was afraid — 
 afraid of the author of the 'School for 
 Scandal,' And like Moliere and like Sheri- 
 dan, Cervantes had projected a final play, 
 destined to eclipse all its predecessors — 
 'Engafio a los Ojos' — and yet not destined 
 to see the light of day, since the author 
 of 'Don Quixote' died before it was ready, 
 if indeed it was ever begun. 
 
 For years the paper covers of every 
 new book that Victor Hugo issued con- 
 tinued to announce as soon to be pub- 
 lished a romance entitled 'La Quinquen- 
 grogne.' Many posthumous volumes of 
 the French poet's writing in prose and 
 verse have been sent forth by his literary 
 41 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 executors, but of this oddly entitled fic- 
 tion nothing has been heard. Theophile 
 Gautier's 'Capitaine Fracasse' was pro- 
 claimed as almost ready for print for 
 many long years before the first word of 
 it was actually written; but at last Gautier 
 did write up to his title. Which one 
 of his Romanticist companions in arms 
 was it who achieved instant fame on his 
 declaration of intention to astound the 
 world sooner or later with a treatise, 'Sur 
 rincommodite des Commodes?' — a treat- 
 ise which, like a bill in Congress, has been 
 read by title only. 
 
 In 1862, Alphonse Daudet in like man- 
 ner announced as "in press" a volume of 
 stories, which was to be called 'Le Pen- 
 tameron,' and which remained unpublished 
 and probably unwritten when he died in 
 1897. A novel of Daudet's — 'Trousseaux 
 et Layettes' — about which he was in the 
 habit of conversing with his Intim.ates in 
 the later years of his life, seems to have 
 been begun, but apparently it was not very 
 42 
 
UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 far advanced when death overtook him. 
 And the younger Dumas has left on record 
 more than one reference to a comedy to 
 be called 'La Route de Thebes', planned 
 before 'Francillon,' but never brought to 
 the point of perfection during the author's 
 lifetime. 
 
 In the original prospectus of M. Jules 
 Jusserand's admirable series of critical 
 biographies, 'Les Grands Ecrivains Fran- 
 gais,' it was asserted that M. Anatole 
 France would contribute the volume on 
 Racine and M, Jules Lemaitre that on 
 Alfred de Musset. But when the time 
 came to publish the book on Racine its 
 author was found to be not M. France, 
 but M. Gustave Larroumet; and the vol- 
 ume on Musset was prepared, not by M. 
 Lemaitre, but by Mme. Arvede Barine. 
 Boileau was to have been undertaken by 
 M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, and Rousseau 
 by the late Victor Cherbuliez; but M. 
 Gustave Lanson was the author of the 
 account of the great classic critic, and M. 
 
 43 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Chuquet was responsible for the biogra- 
 phy of the progenitor of French Roman- 
 ticism. It is more than ten years since the 
 prospectus of this series was prepared, and 
 M. Brunetiere has not yet given us his 
 promised study of Voltaire, nor has M. 
 Paul Bourget vouchsafed us his analysis of 
 Balzac. 
 
 Talne was to have written the life of 
 Sainte-Beuve for this series, but he died 
 before he had accomplished the pleasant 
 and appropriate task. In like manner 
 Lowell at the time of his death had made 
 little progress with the volume on Haw- 
 thorne which he had agreed to prepare 
 for the corresponding series in this coun- 
 try, Mr. Warner's 'American Men of 
 Letters'; and to an American in London, 
 with whom he was talking over his theme, 
 Lowell expressed his gentle dissatisfaction 
 with the volume on Hawthorne contrib- 
 uted to the 'English Men of Letters' by 
 Mr, Henry James. Lowell remarked that 
 Hawthorne was of New England, all 
 
 44 
 
UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 compact, and could be treated adequately 
 only by a New Englander, whereas Mr. 
 James, in so far as he was an American at 
 all, was a New Yorker. 
 
 The 'American Men of Letters' series 
 has had almost as many substitutions as 
 the 'Grands Ecrivains Francais.' Mr. 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich was to have writ- 
 ten the volume on N. P. Willis, and Pro- 
 fessor Beers did write it. Mr. George 
 W. Cable undertook to prepare an account 
 of William Gilmore Simms, and Professor 
 Trent did prepare it. Mr. Howells was 
 expected to write the life of Longfellow, 
 and Colonel Higginson took it over. And 
 in the original prospectus of the corre- 
 sppnding British series, the earliest of the 
 three, Mr. John Morley's 'English Men of 
 Letters,' the editor reserved to himself two 
 authors, Gray and Burke. The study of 
 Burke he has published, but that of Gray 
 he turned over to Mr. Gosse. And the 
 volume on Berkeley which the late Profes- 
 sor Huxley was to prepare for Mr. Mor- 
 45 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 ley's series never got itself written, although 
 that on Hume did. 
 
 It was more or less in rivalry with Mr. 
 Morley's series that Mr. Andrew Lang 
 began a collection of 'English Worthies,' 
 which the editor himself was to provide 
 with a biography of Izaak Walton — a 
 project abandoned apparently when the 
 series itself was given up. And it was 
 for this set of 'English Worthies' that 
 Robert Louis Stevenson made ready to 
 celebrate the deeds of Wellington, as un- 
 likely a subject as could well be chosen 
 by him — although his master, Scott, had 
 made money by a huge book about Na- 
 poleon. When one of Stevenson's inti- 
 mates — one of his collaborators, indeed 
 — was asked why the victor of Waterloo 
 had been selected by the author of the 
 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' 
 the laughing answer was, "Oh, Louis 
 thinks he has an eye for strategy and 
 tactics." 
 
 To the excellent series of 'History and 
 46 
 
UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 Literature Primers,' which was edited by 
 J. R. Green, the historian, and which con- 
 tains the extraordinarily successful primer 
 of English literature by Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke and the equally illuminative primer 
 of Greek literature by Professor Jebb, 
 Dean Farrar was to contribute a primer 
 of Latin literature. And to a kindred 
 series of little books on 'Classical Writers,' 
 Professor James Bryce had promised a 
 study of Herodotus. Both of these books, 
 now overdue for more than half a score 
 of years, remain unwritten. 
 
 And what has become of the 'Book of 
 the Forty-five Mornings' — most alluring 
 title — which Mr. Rudyard Kipling dangled 
 before our eyes almost as long ago? 
 Everything comes to him who waits, but 
 have we not waited long enough for this? 
 
 Perhaps one or another of these un- 
 written books by men of letters still alive 
 may get themselves Into print all in good 
 time; and, perhaps, none of them will ever 
 see the light. And it may be that their 
 
 47 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 authors are wise in their own generation, 
 in so far as they may prefer the contem- 
 plation of a possibility never to be at- 
 tempted to any effort to possess a reality 
 that might be a bitter disappointment. 
 No unwritten book can ever be a reproach 
 to an author or a burden to his friends, 
 nor can it gratify his enemies. No un- 
 written poem can be picked to pieces by 
 criticasters. No unwritten play can be 
 damned by faint praise. As Scribe, that 
 wiliest of playwrights, once declared, 
 "What is cut out is never hissed." What 
 is unwritten cannot be abused offensively, 
 nor can it be eulogized effusively — which 
 to a sincere author may be even more dis- 
 tasteful. 
 
 No author was ever more frankly sin- 
 cere than Whittier; and it was Whittier 
 who wrote : 
 
 Let the thick curtain fall ; 
 I better know than all 
 How little I have gained, 
 How vast the unattained. 
 48 
 
UNWRITTEN BOOKS 
 
 Sweeter than any sung 
 
 My songs that found no tongue. 
 
 Nobler than any fact 
 
 My wish that failed the act. 
 
 Others shall sing the song, 
 Others shall right the wrong- 
 Finish what I begin— 
 And all I fail of, win. 
 (1899). 
 
 49 
 
IV 
 
 SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 IN the characteristic little book of 
 little essays which Mr. Aldrich has 
 chosen to call 'Ponkapog Papers' 
 there are half a hundred pages of 
 'Asides' — fragmentary and unrelated par- 
 agraphs, compounded of cleverness and 
 shrewdness and wit. In reading these 
 pages we feel almost as though the author 
 had permitted us to peep into his note- 
 book; and we find ourselves wondering 
 whether our manners ought not to bid us 
 close the volume. These 'Asides' seem 
 to be far less labored and less self-conscious 
 than the 'Marginalia,' most of which Poe 
 chipped out of the longer essays and re- 
 views that he did not care to reprint in 
 full. 
 
 Mr. Aldrich tells us that in the blotted 
 50 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 memorandum-book from which he has 
 chosen these chance paragraphs, there are 
 a score or two of suggestions for essays 
 and for sketches and for poems which he 
 has not written and which he never will 
 write. "The instant I jot down an idea," 
 he informs us, "the desire to utilize it 
 leaves me, and I turn away to do something 
 unpremeditated. The shabby volume has 
 become a sort of Potter's Field where I 
 bury my intentions, good and bad, without 
 any belief in their final resurrection." As 
 if in proof of this confession, Mr. Aldrich 
 has included among these 'Asides' two or 
 three suggestions, which he does not intend 
 to utilize himself and which he generously 
 presents to the public. They are seed-corn 
 for stories which he has not cared to plant 
 and tend and harvest himself. 
 
 Here is one of these undeveloped imagin- 
 ings: 
 
 "In his memoirs, Krapotkin states the 
 singular fact that the natives of the Ma- 
 layan Archipelago have an idea that some- 
 51 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 thing is extracted from them when their 
 hkenesses are taken by photography. Here 
 is the motive for a fantastic short-story, in 
 which the hero — an author in vogue or a 
 popular actor — might be depicted as hav- 
 ing all his good qualities gradually photo- 
 graphed out of him. This could well be 
 the result of a too prolonged indulgence in 
 the effort to 'look natural.' First the man 
 loses his charming simplicity; then he be- 
 gins to pose in intellectual attitudes, with 
 finger on brow; then he becomes morbidly 
 self-conscious, and finally ends in an asylum 
 for incurable egotists." 
 
 And here is a second as appallingly 
 Imaginative as the first was humorously 
 fanciful: "Imagine all human beings swept 
 off the face of the earth, excepting one 
 man. Imagine this man in some vast city, 
 New York or London, Imagine him on 
 the third or fourth day of his solitude sit- 
 ting in a house and hearing a ring at the 
 door-bell !" 
 
 As we read this we cannot but wonder 
 52 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 whether the bare idea thus boldly thrown 
 out is not more powerful than any more 
 amply wrought tale could be, even if it 
 was to be told with all Mr. Aldrich's own 
 delicate ingenuity. And then we wonder 
 whether the author refrained from writing 
 this story himself for the reason he has 
 given us, — that he tired of his own sug- 
 gestions so soon as he got them down in 
 black and white — or whether in this case 
 his generosity to the public is not due to 
 the intuitive feeling of an accomplished 
 craftsman that the naked notion, stark and 
 unadorned, is more striking and more pow- 
 erful in its simplicity than it would be if 
 it was elaborated according to all the pre- 
 cepts of the art of fiction. 
 
 In Poe's 'Marginalia' there Is one pas- 
 sage In some measure akin to Mr. Aldrich's 
 second suggestion. "I have sometimes 
 amused myself," the poet declared, "by 
 endeavoring to fancy what would be the 
 fate of an individual gifted, or rather 
 accursed, with an intellect very far supe- 
 
 53 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 rior to that of his race. Of course he 
 would be conscious of his superiority; nor 
 could he (if otherwise constituted as man 
 is) help manifesting his consciousness. 
 Thus he would make enemies at all points. 
 And — since his opinions and speculations 
 would widely differ from those of all man- 
 kind — that he would be considered as a 
 madman, is evident. How horribly pain- 
 ful such a condition ! Hell could invent 
 no greater torture than that of being 
 charged with abnormal weakness on ac- 
 count of being abnormally strong." 
 
 Here again the suggestion itself in its 
 bare simplicity is more effective than any 
 completed story. But there is another of 
 Poe's notions which seems not so difficult 
 of treatment and which he might very 
 readily have carried out. He called it 
 'A Suggestion for a Magazine Article.' 
 
 "Here is a good idea for a magazine 
 
 paper; let somebody 'work it up.' A 
 
 flippant pretender to universal acquirement 
 
 — a would-be Crichton — engrosses, for an 
 
 54 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 hour or two, perhaps, the attention of a 
 large company, most of whom are pro- 
 foundly impressed by his knowledge. He 
 is very witty, in especial, at the expense 
 of a modest young gentleman, who ven- 
 tures to make no reply, and who, finally, 
 leaves the room as if overwhelmed with 
 confusion ; the Crichton greeting his exit 
 with a laugh. Presently he returns, fol- 
 lowed by a footman carrying an armful 
 of books. These are deposited on the 
 table. The young gentleman now, refer- 
 ring to some pencilled notes which he had 
 been secretly taking during the Crichton's 
 display of erudition, pins the latter to his 
 statements, each by each, and refutes them 
 all in turn, by reference to the very authori- 
 ties cited by the egotist himself, whose 
 ignorance at all points is thus made appar- 
 ent." 
 
 With characteristic affectation Poe in- 
 sisted that his 'Marginalia' had been writ- 
 ten in his books, on the margins themselves 
 when these happened to be ample enough, 
 55 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 and on a slip of paper deposited between 
 the leaves when what he had to note was 
 "too much to be included within the nar- 
 row limits of a margin." He admitted 
 this to be a whim, and declared that it might 
 "be not only a very hackneyed, but a very 
 idle practice," but he asserted that he per- 
 sisted in it because it afforded him pleasure. 
 He maintained that "the purely marginal 
 jottings, done with no eye to the Memo- 
 randum Book, have a distinct complexion, 
 and not only not a distinct purpose, but 
 none at all; this it is which imparts to them 
 a value." Unfortunately for Poe's claim 
 that in these fragmentary notes he was 
 talking "freshly, boldly, originally," his 
 editors have been able to trace the most 
 of his paragraphs to articles of his which 
 he did not care to reprint in full. As Mr. 
 Stedman explains, "they afforded the maga- 
 zinist an easy way of making copy," since 
 "they were largely made up of passages 
 lifted from earlier essays and reviews." 
 And Mr. Stedman also points out how 
 56 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 Poe's pretence that his 'Marginalia' are 
 what their prekide and title imply, "is 
 made transparent by their formal, pre- 
 meditated style, so different from that of 
 Hawthorne's *Note-Books,' or that of 
 Thoreau's posthumous apothegms and 
 reflections." 
 
 It is the charm of Hawthorne's 'Note- 
 Books' that they really were written for 
 himself alone and with no thought of pub- 
 lication. Although he went to them for 
 material for the book about his English 
 sojourn, 'Our Old Home,' and although 
 he picked out of them many an idea which 
 he worked up in a tale or in a romance, 
 he kept them for his own eye only. As 
 his widow asserted when she made a selec- 
 tion from these journals for publication 
 several years after his death, he was "enter- 
 taining, and not asserting, opinions and 
 ideas." She insisted that her husband was 
 questioning, doubting and reflecting with 
 his pen, and, as it were, instructing him- 
 self, — so that his note-books should be 
 57 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 read "not as definitive conclusions of his 
 mind, but merely as passing impressions 
 often." 
 
 The later journals kept in Great Britain, 
 in France and in Italy are entertaining 
 because they give us the impressions of 
 Hawthorne himself, recorded at the mo- 
 ment of reception often; but they are far 
 less interesting and less valuable than the 
 note-books he filled in his youth before he 
 had ever left his native land. Here we 
 get very close to him; we see his mind 
 at work; we trace the first hint of a story 
 as he jots it down and we can see it grow- 
 ing as it takes root in his mind. For ex- 
 ample, the idea of the 'Virtuoso's Collec- 
 tion' came to him again and again in 
 slightly different forms; and as we turn 
 the pages of his note-books we can dis- 
 cover when it was that he happened upon 
 one and another of the marvellous curiosi- 
 ties which enriched the strange gathering. 
 In like manner the first suggestion of that 
 characteristic tale, the 'Birthmark,' is set 
 58 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 down in three lines, which tell the whole 
 story: "A person to be in possession of 
 something as perfect as mortal man has 
 a right to demand; he tries to make it 
 better, and ruins it entirely." 
 
 Sometimes the suggestion is merely fan- 
 ciful, and too diaphanous to withstand 
 elaboration: "A person to catch fire-flies, 
 and try to kindle his household fire with 
 them. It would be symbolical of some- 
 thing." Sometimes the suggestion is bold 
 enough and alluring, but not to be accom- 
 plished without a complicated machinery, 
 which would detract from its directness: 
 "The situation of a man in the midst of 
 a crowd, yet as completely in the power 
 of another, life and all, as they two were 
 in the deepest solitude." Sometimes the 
 suggestion is so characteristic, so indi- 
 vidual, so Hawthornesque, that we find 
 ourselves wondering how it was that it 
 did not tempt Hawthorne himself to its 
 ampler unfolding: "A person to be writing 
 a tale, and to find that it shapes itself 
 
 59 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 against his intentions; that the characters 
 act otherwise than he thought; that unfore- 
 seen events occur; and a catastrophe comes 
 which he strives in vain to avert. It might 
 shadow forth his own fate — he having 
 made himself one of the personages." Or 
 this: "Follow out the fantasy of a man 
 taking his life by instalments, instead of 
 at one payment, — say ten years of life 
 alternately with ten years of suspended 
 animation." Of course this last idea has 
 a certain kinship with 'Rip van Winkle' 
 and with the 'Man with the Broken Ear;' 
 but it differs in that Hawthorne supposes 
 his hero to act voluntarily and more than 
 once, whereas there was but a single and 
 involuntary suspension of animation in 
 Irving's tale and in About's. 
 
 Another of Hawthorne's suggestions he 
 might have treated himself, no doubt, with 
 the delicate aroma of pure romance; but 
 the theme would also lend itself to a wholly 
 different treatment, by a novelist enamored 
 of real things and of the externals of life : 
 60 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 "A story, the hero of which is to be repre- 
 sented as naturally capable of deep and 
 strong passion, and looking forward to the 
 time when he shall feel passionate love, 
 which is to be the great event of his exist- 
 ence. But it so chances that he never falls 
 in love, and although he gives up the ex- 
 pectation of so doing, and marries calmly, 
 yet it is somewhat sadly, with sentiments 
 merely of esteem for his bride. The lady 
 might be one who had loved him early in 
 life, but whom then, in his expectation of 
 passionate love, he had scorned." 
 
 No doubt more than one of these sug- 
 gestions fructified in the minds of one or 
 another reader of Hawthorne's 'Note- 
 Books' who happened also to be writers of 
 fiction. If the present writer may offer 
 himself as a witness, or if he may be al- 
 lowed to enter the confessional, he admits 
 that a short-story of his composition, 
 'Esther Feverel,' was only an attempt to 
 carry out a hint of Hawthorne's: "An 
 old looking-glass; somebody finds out the 
 6i 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 secret of making all the images that have 
 been reflected in it pass back again across 
 its surface." And everybody knows that 
 it was a story told to Hawthorne by a 
 friend, and duly entered in the 'Note- 
 Books' which he abandoned to his class- 
 mate Longfellow to treat in verse as 
 'Evangeline.' 
 
 In the volume of essays and sketches of 
 travel which Mr. Howells has called 
 'Literature and Life,' and to which he gave 
 an accurate sub-title when he characterized 
 them as 'Studies,' there is one article con- 
 taining the plot for a story. The paper is 
 named 'Worries of a Winter Walk' and 
 it narrates how Mr. Howells, in his pil- 
 grimages about New York, went over 
 toward the East River and came "upon a 
 bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald 
 civilization," which perplexed him and 
 which suggested a little love-story. He 
 tells us how the first notion of the tale 
 occurred to him, evoked by an unexpected 
 fact he had observed; and then with 1am- 
 62 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 bent humor he traces the succcessive steps 
 by which the story grew in his mind, as 
 it slowly took shape and began to have 
 an independent existence. It was an idyl 
 of the East Side, a kodak-picture snapped 
 in the midst of our cosmopolitan conglom- 
 eration of foreign peoples here in this 
 crowded island. Mr. Howells sets forth 
 one after another the variations of the 
 little tale in his own mind, those which he 
 decided to reject as well as those which he 
 accepted. And finally he presents us with 
 three possible terminations of the story, as 
 though in doubt himself which was in fact 
 the best. The narrative is shot through 
 with the gentle irony and with the honest 
 self-detachment so characteristic of the 
 creator of 'Silas Lapham.' 
 
 In the end we find that he has not actu- 
 ally written out his story; he has merely 
 told us how he might have written it. But 
 the tale is complete; and we can see for 
 ourselves — if only we bring our share of 
 sympathetic imagination — how it would 
 63 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 read if he had chosen to tell it simply as 
 he has told his other stories. To the 
 reader to whom a story is only a story — 
 to the reader who is entertained only by 
 what has happened and who is interested 
 only in discovering how it turns out at last 
 — perhaps the irony and the self-detach- 
 ment are a little disconcerting. But to the 
 scantier band who are alive to the subtle 
 relations of literature and life, the tale 
 thus presented is far more attractive than 
 if it had been presented in the author's 
 usual fashion. And this the author him- 
 self knew, with that understanding of the 
 difficulties of his craft which is part of his 
 equipment as a man of letters. The story 
 itself remains unwritten, but not unwrit- 
 able; and any other teller of tales who is 
 in search of a ready-made plot can have 
 it for the taking. But if any teller of 
 tales does borrow it from Mr. Howells's 
 book, and if he sets it forth in full as 
 though it had happened, he may rest as- 
 sured that his elaborative art is likely to 
 64 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 fail of achieving the successful result at- 
 tained by Mr. Howells's skilful and tactful 
 commingling of ingenious suggestion and 
 playful irony. 
 
 If the present writer may again call him- 
 self as a witness, it will be to confess that 
 in a certain little tale of his own, 'Love at 
 First Sight,' containing only the conversa- 
 tion at dinner of a pretty girl with a young 
 author, he scattered broadcast three several 
 suggestions for stories, — and that his rea- 
 son for this reckless liberality was solely 
 because these suggestions seemed to him 
 more effective as mere suggestions than 
 they would have been had he done his best 
 to work them out conscientiously. One 
 was only an alluring title, to which, how- 
 ever, he had never been able to fit an 
 appropriate plot: 'The Parrot that talked 
 in his Sleep.' The second was the bare 
 hint for a Hawthornesque sketch to be 
 called 'At the End of his Tether,' and to 
 describe how a collector of morbid taste 
 brought together bits of the ropes with 
 65 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 which notorious criminals had been hanged, 
 only at the last to splice these together 
 that he might hang himself. And the 
 third, the 'Queen of the Living Chessmen,' 
 was more fully developed, and the young 
 writer of fiction was able to outline it to 
 the pretty girl at dinner and to profit by 
 her acute criticism. This third tale thus 
 sketched out seemed to have dramatic pos- 
 sibilities of its own — possibilities which so 
 strongly impressed the editor of the maga- 
 zine to which the manuscript was first sub- 
 mitted, that he rejected 'Love at First 
 Sight' with the remark that he would be 
 glad to accept the 'Queen of the Living 
 Chessmen' if the author would write that 
 out as a story by Itself. 
 
 Yet this is just what the author was too 
 wary to attempt. He Is quite willing that 
 it should be undertaken by another pen ; 
 but he had his own reasons for believing 
 that the notion had made Its full effect 
 when it was presented merely as a notion. 
 And It is his belief that the apparent gen- 
 
SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 
 
 erosity of Mr. Howells and of Mr. Al- 
 drich — and that of Poe also — when they 
 gave away the themes for tales that they 
 had invented and that they might have 
 written themselves had they so chosen, v/as 
 the result of a delicate perception of the 
 fact that the bare theme itself is often as 
 valuable as the fully clothed tale would be. 
 The underlying principle which has gov- 
 erned them is well stated by the younger 
 Dumas in his account of the circumstances 
 which led him to rewrite a play brought 
 to him by Emile de Girardin, the 'Supplice 
 d'une Femme.' 
 
 Dumas declares that all he found in 
 Girardin's play was a single and striking 
 situation. "But a situation is not an idea," 
 he explains. "An idea has a beginning, 
 a middle and an end — an exposition, a 
 development, and a conclusion. Anybody 
 can happen on a dramatic situation ; but 
 this must be prepared for, made acceptable, 
 made possible, and above all, untied logi- 
 cally." And then Dumas generously 
 67 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 throws out the suggestion of a new and 
 striking dramatic situation. "A young 
 man asks the hand of a young woman. It 
 is accorded to him. He marries her civilly 
 and religiously; and at the very moment 
 when he is about to take her away with 
 him, he learns categorically that he has 
 married his sister. That is a situation, 
 Isn't it? and most Interesting! But find 
 a way out of it! I give you a thousand 
 guesses, — and I give you the situation If 
 you want It. He who shall make a good 
 play with this as his starting-point will be 
 the veritable author of the piece, and I 
 shall not urge my claim." 
 
 It Is proof of Dumas's perfect under- 
 standing of all the conditions of the drama- 
 turgic art, that when two young French 
 authors took him at his word and actually 
 made a play out of this suggestion of his, 
 the piece, although acted by the admirable 
 company of the Odeon, was promptly dis- 
 missed as Impossible. 
 (1904). 
 
 68 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 A 
 
 LTHOUGH most of the his- 
 torians of American literature 
 have acknowledged that humor 
 is abundant in the writings of 
 our authors, and that this humor is dis- 
 tinctive and characteristic, having a quality 
 of its own, easy enough to perceive, even 
 if difficult to define, no one of these his- 
 torians has as yet cared to consider at 
 length the American contribution to that 
 special form of humor which we call the 
 satire in verse. 
 
 Of this form the earliest masters were 
 Horace and Juvenal, although it is still 
 a matter of dispute which of the two was 
 the more successful in this field. Dryden, 
 who appreciated both of them, and who had 
 found his profit in a shrewd analysis of 
 69 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 their methods, held for the later Latin 
 poet, declaring that "the sauce of Juvenal 
 is more poignant to create in us an appetite 
 of reading him." And then the robust 
 British bard carried still further this culi- 
 nary figure of speech, asserting that *'the 
 meat of Horace is more nourishing; but 
 the cookery of Juvenal more exquisite: so 
 that, granting Horace to be the more gen- 
 eral philosopher, we cannot deny that 
 Juvenal was the greater poet — I mean In 
 satire." 
 
 It is In his learned and acute 'Discourse 
 concerning the Origin and Progress of 
 Satire' that Dryden records these opinions; 
 and In this same essay, one of the richest 
 and most m.asterful of his critical papers, 
 he gives full mead of praise to the French 
 critic whose Influence upon the satirists 
 coming after him was almost as domina- 
 ting as that of the earlier Roman practi- 
 tioners of the art. "If I would only cross 
 the seas," Dryden asserted, "I might find 
 in France a living Horace and a Juvenal, 
 70 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 in the person of the admirable Boileau; 
 whose numbers are excellent, whose 
 thoughts are just, whose language is pure, 
 whose satire is pointed, and whose sense 
 is close." Then the Englishman proceeded 
 to pay to the Frenchman a compliment, 
 which might well be bestowed on himself, 
 saying that what Boileau "borrowed from 
 the Ancients, he repays with usury of his 
 own, in coin as good, and almost as uni- 
 versally valuable." 
 
 The obvious difference between the 
 French satirist and his Roman predeces- 
 sors is that they dealt with society at 
 large, Horace gently laughing at the 
 foibles of the hour, and Juvenal nobly 
 scourging the deeper vices of his darker 
 period, whereas Boileau was interested 
 rather more in literature than in life, car- 
 ing less for the diseases of the body politic 
 than for lapses from the laws of taste and 
 breaches of the rules of art. Here he was 
 followed by Pope, who was far less fortu- 
 nate in his choice of authors to attack. 
 71 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 The judgment of posterity has confirmed 
 most of the contemporary decisions of 
 Boileau ; and the reputations he killed have 
 stayed dead. Not so with Pope, who was 
 ill-advised enough to choose as the heroes 
 of his 'Dunciad,' Theobald and Colley 
 Gibber, writers vulnerable enough, no 
 doubt, but neither of them dunces by any 
 possible extension of the word. Theobald, 
 in fact, was one of the most intelligent of 
 the earlier Shaksperian commentators; and 
 Gibber, however absurd a figure he might 
 make as poet-laureate, was the author not 
 only of one of the most amusing autobi- 
 ographies in the language, but also of at 
 least one comedy which has survived on 
 the stage for nearly two centuries. 
 
 Just as one British compiler, Dodd, in 
 his comprehensive collection of English 
 epigrams, did not care to include any speci- 
 mens of American wit, so another British 
 editor of a recent anthology of 'English 
 Satires,' Mr. Oliphant Smeaton, has failed 
 to reproduce a single American example, 
 72 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 although in his critical introduction he 
 mentions more than one of our authors 
 with casual compliment. It may be that 
 Mr. Smeaton deliberately determined to 
 ignore the American efforts in this depart- 
 ment of literature; but it is far more likely 
 that he was blandly ignorant of the value 
 and of the variety of American satire in 
 verse. In each of the three main divisions 
 of this interesting department of literature, 
 in the genial satire of society, of which 
 Horace set the example, in the broader and 
 bolder satire of contemporary politics, of 
 which Juvenal has left the unapproachable 
 model, and in the more personal and purely 
 literary satire, of which Boileau and Pope 
 have been accepted as masters, — in each of 
 these three contiguous fields of literary en- 
 deavor, American authors have adventured 
 themselves with varying success. 
 
 It is in the first of these three divisions, 
 
 in the satire of society, glancing wittily at 
 
 the men and the manners and the morals 
 
 of the hour, that our American versifiers 
 
 73 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 have advanced least frequently. Yet even 
 in this form of satire the last half of the 
 nineteenth century saw the publication of 
 the late William Allen Butler's 'Nothing 
 to Wear,' of Mr. Stedman's brisk and 
 brilliant 'Diamond Wedding,' of Judge 
 Grant's ingenious 'Little Tin Gods on 
 Wheels,' and of the adroitly rhymed 'Bunt- 
 ling Ball,' generally ascribed to the late 
 Edgar Fawcett. In the first half of the cen- 
 tury Halleck and Drake printed in a New 
 York evening paper the series of lively 
 lyrics which came to be known as the 
 'Croaker Papers' — the collaborating au- 
 thors having chosen to sign their smart 
 rhymes with the name of a character in 
 Goldsmith's 'Good-natured Man.' Unfor- 
 tunately for the fame of the associated 
 bards, their themes were very local and 
 of little lasting importance, so that it is 
 almost Impossible to copy here any of their 
 clever verses without an apparatus of notes 
 explaining the allusions. What is very 
 contemporary is likely to be only tempo- 
 74 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 rary; and the up-to-date is soon seen to 
 be out-of-date. A joke Is no longer allur- 
 ing when It demands a diagram In elucida- 
 tion of its point. 
 
 A few years after the 'Croaker Papers' 
 had astonished and delighted all New 
 York, there was published at least one 
 formal satire of society, prepared in full 
 acceptance of all the precedents which gov- 
 ern a metrical attack on the follies and 
 on the vices of the moment. This is 
 'Gotham and the Gothamites. A Medley. 
 New York: 1823. Published for the Au- 
 thor.' For a New Yorker at the begin- 
 ning of the twentieth century, loving this 
 motley and mighty city of ours for what 
 It is already and also for what it is to be 
 in the future, there is not a little hardship 
 in being forced to withhold high praise 
 from a bard who set forth the pictorial 
 charm of the town as it was four score 
 years ago: 
 
 Beautiful city ! like Venus from the deep, 
 All glowing in her beauty, dost thou spring 
 
 75 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 From out the waters, that murmuring creep 
 
 Around thy island-throne, and proudly bring 
 Unto thy footstool, all that gorgeous stream 
 
 Of pomp — of wealth — of richer merchandise; 
 The world's high homage ! Yea, and I have seen 
 
 The mighty sun o'er thy tall spires arise, 
 Pavillioned in his glory ; and no sight 
 
 Was lovelier 
 
 After this unexpected psan on the beau- 
 ties of Manhattan, which are even now 
 only grudgingly admitted, there is cause 
 for sorrow in the later passages of the 
 satire, scarcely any of which would reward 
 quotation. Perhaps the best bit is that 
 describing the degradation of the theatre, 
 — for the "decline of the drama" is a topic 
 for discussion as old as the playhouse itself : 
 
 Such is the drama ; unbound, unrestrained, 
 It has rushed down to earth, and regained 
 The dust from which it rose; that which was art 
 Approaching afifection, hath changed to low 
 And rude burlesque, and coarse buffoonery. 
 Which would to a wandering charlatan impart 
 The blush of shame ; distortion and ribaldry 
 Are on the -heek and lip of every fostered mime, 
 Who famished, yet impudent, from distant clime 
 Adventures, dead to disgrace and shame. 
 76 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 These specimens must suffice to show 
 that 'Gotham and the Gothamites' is pretty 
 small beer, rather watery, and not likely 
 to intoxicate with delight. It is in his 
 notes in prose rather than in the verse of 
 his text that the anonymous bard strives 
 to awaken contempt for his contemporaries. 
 But his pins are pointless, for the most 
 part, and also headless. 
 
 Perhaps it is among the social rather 
 than among the literary satires that we 
 must include the 'Trollopiad; or. Travel- 
 ling Gentlemen in America. A Satire. By 
 Nil Admirari, Esq. New York; 1837.' 
 This indignant effusion was evoked by the 
 swift succession of British books of travel 
 in America — Mrs. Trollope's volumes, 
 Captain Hall's account of his wanderings, 
 and the 'Journal' of Mrs. Fanny Kemble 
 — books now happily as little read as this 
 metrical retort upon them. It was in the 
 very first number of the 'Sketch Book' that 
 Irving warned British writers against the 
 danger of creating ill-feeling by constant 
 
 n 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 abuse of a people who used the same lan- 
 guage and who were likely in time to be- 
 come the more important half of the race. 
 His good advice had the usual fate of 
 friendly warnings ; and a succession of trav- 
 ellers from across the sea set forth in black 
 and white their casual impressions of the 
 people of These States, revealing some- 
 times a contemptuous hostility and some- 
 times that lordly condescension, the pleas- 
 ure of which is notoriously one-sided. 
 
 The versifier of the 'Trollopiad' was 
 moved to wrath and called for the scourge 
 of the satiric poet : 
 
 POPE— GIFFORD— BYRON— what ! since ye are 
 
 fled, 
 Shall folly rage, and satire's self be dead? 
 Must he who would the warning voice repeat, 
 Breathe it in numbers exquisitely sweet? 
 And pour on dunces' ears a tide of song, 
 As Pope harmonious and as Dryden strong? 
 Oh no ! my humbler muse will mark the foe, 
 How ill so e'er the unwonted numbers flow. 
 In this alone our fools are chang'd from those, — 
 They scrawled in verse, these haply write in prose. 
 They aimed at but a few their venom'd dart, 
 
 78 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 These fain would stab a nation to the heart. 
 
 Unscathed, unpunished by satiric pen, 
 
 Dulness asserts her ancient right again : 
 
 Her thousand children from her sceptre pass, 
 
 Each braying loud, proclaims himself an ASS. 
 
 The mother bids them venture and be bold. 
 
 Where Freedom reigns, and streets are paved with 
 
 gold. 
 "Proceed, my sons, where TROLLOPE leads the 
 
 way," 
 "There one and all are sure to have their day." 
 
 Perhaps the most quotable passage in 
 this rather labored set of couplets is that 
 in which the British visitor is brought face 
 to face with the mightiest of our natural 
 wonders : 
 
 Arriv'd, at last, Niagara to scan. 
 He walks erect and feels himself a man; 
 Surveys the cataract with a "critic's eye," 
 Resolv'd to pass no "imperfections by." 
 Niag'ra, wonder of the Deity, 
 Where God's own spirit reigns in majesty. 
 With sullen roar the foaming billows sweep, 
 A world of waters thunders o'er the steep : 
 The unmingled colours laugh upon the spray. 
 And one eternal rainbow gilds the day. 
 Oh ! glorious God ! Oh ! scene surpassing all ! 
 "True, true," quoth he, " 'tis something of a fall." 
 Now, shall unpunibh'd such a vagrant band, 
 79 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Pour like the plagues of Egypt on the land, 
 Eyeing each fault, to all perfection blind. 
 Shedding the taint of a malignant mind? 
 
 No indelible lines divide social satire 
 from literary satire on the one side and 
 from political on the other; but it is per- 
 haps closer to the latter than to the former. 
 Rather toward political than toward social 
 satire have American wits been more often 
 attracted. No chapters in the late Pro- 
 fessor Moses Coit Tyler's 'Literary His- 
 tory of the American Revolution' are 
 more interesting or more illuminating 
 than those in which he considers the 
 pungent verses of the rival bards who 
 attacked the British cause, or who de- 
 nounced the American, during the years 
 that followed the breach with England. 
 And it is to be noted that although the 
 best known of all the Revolutionary satir- 
 ists — Freneau especially, whom Tyler terms 
 a "poet of hatred rather than of love" — 
 were on the right side, yet the other party 
 was not without its share of rhymesters, 
 80 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 having an apt command of epigram and an 
 ample supply of invective. For example, 
 Dr. Jonathan Odell, who served as chaplain 
 to the Loyalist troops, published in 1779 
 and 1780 four brief satires which have 
 pith and point, and even a certain individu- 
 ality of their own, although obviously imi- 
 tating the method and the manner of Dry- 
 den and of Pope. There is vigor in these 
 verses : 
 
 Was Samuel Adams to become a ghost, 
 Another Adams would assume his post; 
 Was bustling Hancock numbered with the dead, 
 Another full as wise might raise his head. 
 What if the sands of Laurens now were run, 
 How should we miss him — has he not a son? 
 Or what if Washington should close his scene, 
 Could none succeed him? Is there not a Greene? 
 Knave after knave as easy could we join, 
 As new emissions of the paper coin. 
 
 But nothing produced on the Tory side 
 has half the broad humor and the pertinent 
 wit of Trumbull's 'McFingal,' published in 
 part in 1776 and completed in 1782. 
 Trumbull's immediate model is obviously 
 'Hudibras;' but he had found his profit in 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 a study of Churchill as well as of Butler. 
 Yet 'McFingal' is no mere imitation; or 
 else it would have gone the swift way of 
 all other imitations. As Professor Trent 
 has justly remarked, Trumbull's mock epic 
 "shows a wide and digested knowledge of 
 the classics and of the better British poets; 
 and while it lacks the variety and inexhaust- 
 ible wit of Butler's performance, it is in 
 many passages hardly inferior to that in 
 pointedness and in its command of the 
 Hudibrastic verse-form." In the minting 
 of couplets destined to proverbial currency, 
 Trumbull has often the felicity of Butler; 
 and some of his sayings have had the 
 strange fortune of ascription to the satire 
 upon which his was modeled. For example : 
 
 No man e'er felt the halter draw 
 With good opinion of the law. 
 
 and again, 
 
 But optics sharp it needs, I wean, 
 To see what is not to be seen. 
 
 Trumbull has also not a little of Butler's 
 82 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 daring ingenuity in the devising of novel 
 rhymes : 
 
 Behold ! the world shall stare at new sets 
 Of home-made ears in Massachusetts. 
 
 After the Revolution, and before the 
 constitution gave to the scarcely United 
 States the firm government which the na- 
 tion needed, during what the late John 
 Fiske aptly called "the critical period of 
 American history," Trumbull joined with 
 others of the little group known as the 
 "Hartford Wits" in a satire called the 
 'Anarchiad,' published in 1786-87, in which 
 faction was denounced in scathing terms : 
 
 Stand forth, ye traitors, at your country's bar, 
 Inglorious authors of intestine war, 
 What countless mischiefs from their labors rise! 
 Pens dipped in gall, and lips inspired with lies ! 
 Ye sires of ruin, prime detested cause 
 Of bankrupt faith, annihilated laws. 
 Of selfish systems, jealous, local schemes, 
 And unvoiced empire lost in empty dreams ; 
 Your names, expanding with your growing crime, 
 Shall float disgustful down the stream of time; 
 Each future age applaud the avenging song. 
 An outraged nature vindicate the wrong. 
 
 83 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 All things considered, the most amusing 
 political effort in this field between the 
 Revolution and the War of 1812, was the 
 'Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times. A 
 Satire by a Youth of Thirteen; Boston, 
 1808. Printed for the purchasers.' This 
 met with so much success that it was issued 
 in a second edition in the following year. 
 The youth of thirteen survived to be the 
 boy of eighteen, who wrote 'Thanatopsis,' 
 and who was the earliest American poet to 
 transmute into his verse the beauty of nature 
 here in America. Bryant lived to be not 
 a little annoyed when he was reminded of 
 his youthful indiscretion, for with the flight 
 of time he outgrew the political opinions 
 he had taken over from his father and 
 from his father's Federalist friends. Bry- 
 ant came to have a high regard for the 
 character and for the public services and 
 even for most of the political theories of 
 the Jefferson whom the youth of thirteen 
 had ignorantly berated : 
 
 84 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 And thou the scorn of every patriot's name 
 Thy country's ruin and thy council's shame! 
 Poor servile thing! derision of the brave! 
 Who erst from Tarlcton lied to Carter's Cave; 
 Thou who when menaced by perfidious Gaul, 
 Did'st prostrate to her whisker'd minions fall ; 
 And when our cash her empty bags supplied 
 Did'st meanly strive the foul disgrace to hide ; 
 Go, wretch, resign the Presidential chair, 
 Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair. 
 Go search with curious eye for horrid frogs 
 Mid the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs; 
 Or where the Ohio rolls his turbid stream. 
 Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme. 
 Go scan, Philosophist, thy Sally's charms, 
 And sink supinely in her sable arms; 
 But quit to abler hands the helm of State. 
 
 Beyond all question the best American 
 political satire Is Lowell's 'Biglow Papers,' 
 the first series being written during the 
 Mexican War and the second during the 
 Civil War. Although either series may 
 seem fragmentary, each has a real unity 
 of its own; the aim and intent Is ever the 
 same. And the unforgettable figure of 
 Hosea Biglow dominates both sets of 
 satiric lyrics. Lowell was at once a Puri- 
 85 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 tan by descent, a poet by gift of nature, 
 and a wit by stroke of fate; and in the 
 'Biglow Papers' we have revealed the Puri- 
 tan poet who could not help being witty. 
 He could not help preaching, for as he 
 said "all New England was a meeting- 
 house" when he was young; and a satirist 
 must be a preacher in his own way. He 
 had enlisted for the war, and he was ever 
 fighting the good fight. His heart was 
 in his cause; and his desire to help it along, 
 made him conquer the indolence which so 
 often prevented his doing his best as a 
 poet. Lowell tended to improvise, to 
 brood long over a theme, and then to pour 
 out his lines in a sudden burst of inspiration, 
 not always taking the trouble afterward to 
 revise and to refine, to finish and to polish, 
 and to make the most of his genius. It 
 is this which accounts for the inequality 
 of his odes. But when he was at work on 
 the 'Biglow Papers' he wanted to bring 
 his message home, and he waited until he 
 had found a taking rhythm and a refrain 
 86 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 that would sing Itself Into the memory. 
 And so we cannot forget, even if we would, 
 that 
 
 John P 
 Robinson, he 
 Sez he won't vote for Guvnor B. 
 
 and that 
 
 Ole Uncle S, sez he, "I guess 
 
 It is a fact," sez he, 
 "The surest plan to make a man 
 
 Is, think him so, J. B. 
 Ez much ez you or me!" 
 
 Here, as so often in the history of all 
 the arts, we see that the artist has profited 
 by his willingness to take time and trouble, 
 and by his honesty in resolutely grappling 
 with difficulty. The two refrains quoted 
 above are, one of them from the first series, 
 and the other from the second; and this 
 reminds us that Lowell succeeded as well 
 the second time he chose Hosea Biglow 
 for his mouthpiece, as he did the first time, 
 although in literature a sequel is generally 
 87 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 a feeble thing, a faint imitation of its more 
 vigorous elder brother. The motive that 
 impelled the poet was even stronger dur- 
 ing the Civil War than it had been fifteen 
 years earlier; and the wit was no less keen 
 nor the humor less contagious. That 
 Heaven is on the side of the heaviest bat- 
 talions, is an old saying, and almost equally 
 venerable is the belief that it is generally 
 the losing cause which inspires the poet and 
 also the satirist. Certainly Aristophanes 
 seems to us now to have been on the wrong 
 side in the 'Clouds' and in the 'Knights;' 
 and Butler in his 'Hudibras' was making 
 fun of the stern Puritan who had enough 
 iron in his blood to win the victory at last. 
 But here in the United States we have been 
 more fortunate. Clever as were some of 
 the Tory wits, the one satire of the Revo- 
 lution which can still be read with pleasure, 
 is the 'McFingal' of the more patriotic 
 Trumbull; and in the Civil War nothing 
 produced in the South can withstand com- 
 parison with the 'Biglow Papers.' 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 In the third division of satire, the purely 
 literary, we find Lowell again the chief fig- 
 ure with the 'Fable for Critics,' published 
 in 1848, the same year that he sent forth 
 the first series of the 'Biglow Papers' and 
 also the more purely poetic 'Vision of Sir 
 Launfal.' But the 'Fable for Critics' was 
 preceded by another formal and elaborate 
 attempt at literary satire, called 'Truth,' 
 published in 1832; and it was followed 
 by yet another entitled 'Parnassus in Pil- 
 lory,' issued in 1851. Neither of these 
 attains to the level of Lowell's brilliant skit; 
 and they soon faded out of remembrance. 
 Yet each of them has an interest of its 
 own, and calls for cursory consideration 
 here. 
 
 'Truth, a Gift for Scribblers,' by Wil- 
 liam J. Snclling, seems to have achieved 
 a certain success, sufficient at least to cause 
 it to be reprinted, — since it is a second 
 edition "with additions and emendations" 
 that I now have before me. Mr. Snelling 
 tells us how he heard 
 
 89 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 a voice that cries, "Lift up thine hand 
 Against the legions of this locust band ; 
 Let brain-sick youths the wholesome scourge endure ; 
 Their case is urgent. Spare not ! Kill or cure ! 
 Hang, hang them up, like smelts upon a string, 
 And o'er their books a requicscat sing: 
 Arise ! — convince thy country of her shame ; 
 Rise, ere her genius be no more a name ! 
 
 Rous'd by the call of Duty, I obey; 
 
 I draw the sword, and fling the sheath away. 
 
 And with the blade thus drawn, Mr. 
 Snelling runs amuck amid the minor Amer- 
 ican authors of his day, hewing and hack- 
 ing, and yet not revealing any gift of 
 swordsmanship which would let him wound 
 with a sharp epithet or kill with a piercing 
 couplet. Here is a sample of his execution 
 wrought upon the once-popular N. P. 
 Willis: 
 
 Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford 
 To give poor Natty P. — his meet reward? 
 What has he done to be despised by all 
 Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall? 
 Why, as in band-box trim, he walks the streets, 
 Turns up the nose of every man he meets, 
 As if it scented carrion? Why, of late. 
 Do all the critics claw his shallow pate? 
 90 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 From a note In this second edition, 
 it appears that Willis had retorted with an 
 unworthy attempt at an epigram, to which 
 Snelling retaliated with three several efforts 
 of his own, not quite so gross as Willis's, 
 but far feebler. A man of taste often finds 
 it needful to hold his nose as he reads the 
 lines of the less inspired satirists; and as 
 to the reasons for this he had best hold 
 his tongue forever after. Far more agree- 
 able is it to quote Snelling's eulogy of Fitz- 
 Greene Halleck, whose fame is now sadly 
 faded : 
 
 Dear Halleck, wither'd be the hands that dare 
 One laurel from thy nobler brow to tear ; 
 Accept the tribute of a muse inclin'd 
 To bow to nothing, save the power of mind. 
 Bard of Bozzaris, shall thy native shore 
 List to thy harp and mellow voice no more? 
 Shall we, with skill like thine so near at hand, 
 Import our music from a foreign land? 
 While Mirror Morris chants in whimpering note, 
 And croaking Dana strains his screech-owl throat; 
 While crazy Neal to metre shakes his chains. 
 And fools are found to listen to his strains, 
 Wilt thou be silent? Wake, O Halleck, wake! 
 
 91 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Thine and thy country's honor are at stake; 
 Wake, and redeem the pledge ; thy vantage keep ; 
 While Paulding wakes and writes, shall Halleck 
 sleep ? 
 
 Snelling has words of praise also for 
 Bryant; but he falls foul of Whittier; and 
 he delights in abuse of the first efforts of 
 the native American dramatists, especially 
 deriding Stone, who had just devised 'Meta- 
 mora' for the robust talents of Edwin 
 Forrest. 
 
 It was not Snelling's forgotten 'Truth' 
 which evoked the next and the best of 
 American literary satires — the only one 
 indeed which has a permanent value. The 
 immediate cause of the 'Fable for Critics' 
 seems to have been Leigh Hunt's 'Feast 
 of the Poets,' although the influence of 
 Goldsmith's 'Retaliation' is also apparent. 
 Indeed, It is only in 'Retaliation' that we 
 can find a gallery of lightly limned contem- 
 porary portraits worthy of comparison with 
 the collection contained In the 'Fable.' Per- 
 fect as Is Goldsmith's portrayal of Burke 
 92 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 and Reynolds and Garrick, it is not finer 
 or truer than Lowell's depicting of Irving 
 or of Cooper, or than the companion pic- 
 tures of Emerson and Carlyle. In his affec- 
 tionate essay on Dryden, Lowell quotes 
 Dryden's assertion that Chaucer was "a 
 perpetual fountain of good sense," only to 
 suggest that the phrase may be applied to 
 Dryden himself; it fits the American critic- 
 poet almost as well as the British poet- 
 critic. Half a century is it since Lowell 
 narrated his 'Fable;' and even at this late 
 date his criticism seems to us to be rarely 
 at fault. 
 
 Not only did he set forth fifty years 
 ago an opinion of his contemporaries antici- 
 pating the judgment of the twentieth cen- 
 tury, but he chose with unerring instinct 
 the writers whom it was worth while to 
 consider. Here is the weak spot of most 
 literary satires; they deal with the dead 
 already; they slay the petty critics and 
 minor poets certain to die of their own 
 accord, and to be forgotten in a flash. This 
 93 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 is what makes the 'Dunclad' unreadable 
 nowadays except by indefatigable students 
 of the period. Pope gratified his spite 
 against the criticasters and the poetasters, 
 victims really unworthy of his wit; and as 
 a result his lines are now read only by those 
 attracted by his fame. His theme is not to- 
 day tempting to the general reader, and the 
 resolute perusal of the 'Dunciad' demands 
 both courage and endurance. But the 
 'Fable for Critics' is alluring not only to 
 admirers of Lowell, but to all having an 
 interest in the group of American men of 
 letters who adorned the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Of course there are those who hold that 
 the machinery of the fable creaks a little, 
 that the rattling rhymes run away with the 
 lyrist more than once, that the rhythm is 
 somewhat rugged now and again, that the 
 puns are not always as expensive as they 
 might be, that there are other blemishes to 
 be detected by a severe critic. But ever 
 against these trifling defects set the brilliant 
 94 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 truth of the characters of Hawthorne and 
 Holmes and Whittier. Consider, for ex- 
 ample, the cleverness of the portrait of 
 Poe, and note that the sketch is really 
 just, In spite of the crackling of epigram : 
 
 There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby 
 
 Rudge, 
 Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer 
 
 fudge. 
 Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, 
 In a way to make people of common sense damn 
 
 metres, 
 Who has written some things quite the best of their 
 
 kind, 
 But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by 
 
 the mind, . . . 
 
 And the sketch of Bryant, with all the 
 Ingenuity of Its punning and all the arti- 
 ficiality of its rhyming, is not a caricature 
 but a true portrait: 
 
 There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, 
 As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified. 
 Save when the reflection 'tis kindled o' nights 
 With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern 
 
 Lights. 
 He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your 
 
 nation 
 
 95 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 (There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice- 
 
 olation), 
 Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, 
 But no warm applauses come, peal following peal 
 
 on, — 
 He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal 
 
 on: 
 Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 
 
 'em, 
 But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm; 
 If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul. 
 Like being stirred up with the very North Pole. 
 
 He is very nice reading in summer, but inter 
 
 Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter; 
 
 Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is, 
 
 When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices. 
 
 But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right 
 good in him, 
 
 He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him ; 
 
 And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or 
 where'er it is, 
 
 Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest chari- 
 ties. 
 
 If a properly annotated edition of the 
 'Fable for Critics' should ever be published, 
 — and it would be warmly welcomed by all 
 students of American literature — the editor 
 will call attention to Lowell's own opinion 
 96 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 of this passage, expressed in one of his let- 
 ters. He declared that his criticism of 
 Bryant was "funny and as fair as I could 
 make it, immitigably just. Indeed, I have 
 endeavored to be so in all." The friend 
 to whom he was writing had informed 
 Lowell that Bryant seemed to think that 
 the younger poet had been borrowing from 
 him. It is to this that Lowell was refer- 
 ring when he continued, "I am glad I did 
 Bryant before I got your letter .... 
 / steal from him indeed ! If he knew me he 
 would not say so. When I steal I shall 
 go to a specie-vault, not to a till." 
 
 Although he was dealing solely with the 
 literature of his own country, Lowell had 
 ever a cosmopolitan point of view, while 
 still keeping his feet firm on his native soil. 
 He was never either provincial in self-asser- 
 tion or colonial in self-abasement. No one 
 had higher ideals for America; and no one 
 was prompter to see the absurdity of hasty 
 assertions that these ideals had already been 
 attained. He refused resolutely to see a 
 97 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Swan of Avon in any of our wild geese. 
 He laughed to scorn the suggestion that 
 we ought to have great poets of our own 
 merely because of the vastness of the coun- 
 try. He had a healthy detestation of that 
 confession of inferiority which consists in 
 calling Irving the "American Goldsmith," 
 and Cooper the "American Scott." It was 
 this youthful foible — feebler now than it 
 was when the 'Fable' was written, but not 
 yet quite dead — that Lowell girded against 
 in one of his most brilliant passages : 
 
 By the wav, 'tis a fact that displays what profusions 
 Of ail kinds of greatness bless free institutions, 
 That while the Old World has produced barely eight 
 Of such poets as all men agree to call great, 
 And of other great characters hardly a score 
 (One might safely say less than that rather than 
 
 more), 
 With you every year a whole crop is begotten. 
 They're as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton ; 
 Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and 
 
 shanties 
 That has not brought forth its own Miltons and 
 
 Dantes ; 
 I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three 
 
 Shelleys, 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles, 
 Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens. 
 One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, 
 A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons, — 
 In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, 
 He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
 Will be some very great person over again. 
 
 This same foible we find animadverted 
 upon again in 'Parnassus in Pillory. A 
 Satire. By Motley Manners, Esquire. 
 New York: 1851.' The anonymous bard, 
 now known to be A. J. H. Duganne, be- 
 moaned the sad plight of his own country: 
 
 Oh, hapless land of mine ! whose country-presses 
 Labor with poets and with poetesses ; 
 Where Helicon is quaffed like beer at table, 
 And Pegasus is "hitched" in every stable ; 
 Where each smart dunce presumes to print a journal, 
 And every journalist is dubbed a "colonel ;" 
 Where love-sick girls on chalk and water thrive, 
 And prove, by singing, they're unfit to wive ; 
 Where Gray might Miltons by the score compute — 
 "Inglorious" all, but, ah ! by no means "mute." 
 
 And there is sense as well as vigor in 
 his denunciation of that colonial attitude 
 
 99 
 
 l ofC. 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 of so many Americans in the days before 
 the Civil War had made us somewhat less 
 self-conscious : 
 
 The British critics — be it to their glory, 
 
 When they abuse us, do it con aniore; 
 
 There's no half-way about your bulldog pure. 
 
 And there's no nonsense with your "Scotch reviewer." 
 
 Heaven knows how often we've been whipped like 
 
 curs. 
 By those to whom we've knelt as worshippers ; 
 Heaven only knows how oft, like froward chitlings, 
 Our authors have been snubbed by British witlings; 
 Our mountains ranked as mole-hills — our immense 
 And awful forests styled "Virginny fence;" 
 Our virtues all but damned with faintest praise, 
 And our faults blazoned to the widest gaze! 
 I find no fault with them — they praise us rarely; 
 As for abuse — we're open to it fairly ; 
 But faith, it galls me, and I'll not deny it. 
 To mark our own most de5erential quiet ; 
 To note the whining, deprecative air 
 With which we beg for praise, or censure bear; 
 Shrink back in terror if our gifts they spurn, 
 And if they smite one cheek, the other turn ; — 
 Begging that they'll excuse a patient dunce. 
 Who, if he could, would offer both at once. 
 
 Perhaps as good as any of the portraits 
 in 'Parnassus in Pillory' is this of Lowell: 
 
 100 
 
AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 
 
 O, LOWELL ! now sententious — now most wordy — 
 Thy harp Cremona half — half hurdy-gurdy; 
 Wouldst thou arise, and climb the steeps of heaven? 
 Sandals and staff are for thy journey given; 
 Wouldst thou embrace the poet-preacher's lot? 
 Nor purse nor scrip will lift thy steps a jot! 
 Forth on the highways of the general mind, 
 Thy soul must walk, in oneness with mankind. 
 Thou hast done well, but thou canst yet do better, 
 And winning credit, make the world thy debtor ; 
 Pour out thy heart — albeit with flaws and fractures : 
 Give us thyself — no "Lowell manufactures." 
 
 The past fifty years have not called forth 
 another formal satire of contemporary lit- 
 erature, although the need is as acute now 
 as it ever was, and although the public relish 
 for ill-natured remarks is as keen as ever. 
 Probably one reason why the longer satire 
 in verse does not make its appearance is 
 because the immense multiplication of peri- 
 odicals, weekly and monthly, affords to the 
 intending satirist a chance to shoot his 
 shafts one by one in the papers without 
 having to save them up for discharge in a 
 volley and in a volume. Thus it was that 
 the late H. C. Bunner — a cordial lover of 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 poetry, with a trained craftsman's appre- 
 ciation of technic, with a keen sense of 
 humor and with a singular gift of parody, 
 — put forth his satires week by week in the 
 paper he had conducted with prosperity. 
 He evoked the figure of V. Hugo Dusen- 
 bury, a professional poet, understanding 
 all branches of the business, and ready to 
 supply any kind of verse on demand, in 
 quantities to suit the customer. If some 
 future enthusiast shall ransack the files of 
 Puck to edit the 'Life and Literary Remains 
 of V. Hugo Dusenbury,' a younger genera- 
 tion of readers will be enabled to make the 
 acquaintance of an original character 
 sketched with journalistic breadth and free- 
 dom, but not really caricatured beyond re- 
 semblance. And the poems which this pro- 
 fessional poet produced by request and to 
 meet the market, are parodies, most of 
 them, or rather sympathetic imitations, 
 satiric enough at times, appreciative often, 
 
 and never malignant. 
 (1904). 
 
VI 
 
 AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 IN the elaborate and scholarly intro- 
 duction to Mr. Dodd's comprehen- 
 sive collection of the 'Epigram- 
 matists' may be found an amusing 
 illustration of the inability of a man 
 of letters to accept the obvious fact that 
 language is made in the street as well 
 as in the study, and that in common usage 
 the meaning of a word may broaden de- 
 spite the utmost endeavor of precisians to 
 keep it restricted. A word has the mean- 
 ing which the plain people give it; and the 
 trained and careful student of speech must 
 kick in vain against the modifications of 
 meaning which take place in spite of his 
 protests. Mr. Dodd insists that the word 
 epigram, being taken over from the Greek, 
 must preserve in English exactly the sig- 
 103 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 nificance that it had in the language from 
 which we have derived it. In Greek epi- 
 gram, epigraph and epitaph have substan- 
 tially the same meaning; and all three 
 words were applied to brief lyrics elevated 
 in thought and having the lapidary con- 
 cision of an inscription. In Latin, Martial 
 debased the epigram; and in his hands 
 it is a metrical phrasing of an ingenious 
 point or of a keen retort. It is Martial 
 whom the epigrammatists of the modern 
 languages have taken as their master; and 
 therefore in English the primary meaning 
 of epigram is no longer a tiny lyric, lofty 
 in sentiment, and graceful in phrasing; it 
 is more an ingeniously turned witticism 
 adroitly rhymed. 
 
 Landor, who might almost be called a 
 belated Athenian, declared that one of 
 his own brief pieces "resembles not those 
 ridiculous quibbles which the English in 
 particular call epigrams, but rather . . . 
 those exquisite eidylUa, which are modestly 
 called epigrams by the Greeks." And 
 104 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 Mr. Dodd insists again and again that 
 there is no such thing as an epigram unless 
 it follows the Greek model. That the 
 English word epigram still retains this 
 special meaning may perhaps be admitted, 
 but this is no longer its only meaning, — 
 or even its accepted meaning; and any 
 writer who uses language as a means of 
 communicating his thought to the main 
 body of his readers, and who desires to be 
 understood by them, will do well to find 
 some other word to describe the epigram 
 of the purest Greek type, and will accept 
 the fact that in ordinary every-day English 
 epigram now evokes the idea of a brilliant 
 witticism. The common usage of the word 
 nowadays is revealed by the frequent de- 
 scription of the dialogue of Congreve and 
 Sheridan as epigrammatic. 
 
 It is not that English literature is defi- 
 cient in brief poems having the special 
 qualities that we find in the Greek epigram. 
 Even in the 'Greek Anthology' it would be 
 difficult to discover a poem more delicately 
 105 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 felicitous than the epitaph on the Countess 
 of Pembroke : 
 
 Underneath this sable hearse 
 Lies the subject of all verse, 
 Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; 
 Death, ere thou hast slain another 
 Learn'd and fair and good as she 
 Time shall throw a dart at thee. 
 
 And it would not be an arduous task to 
 collect other instances where the poets of 
 our language have rivalled the austere per- 
 fection of the Greek. But none the less 
 has epigram come to indicate to us not a 
 votive tablet but a sparkling retort. Per- 
 haps the best definition of what we moderns 
 understand by an epigram is contained in 
 one which is ascribed by some to an un- 
 known Latin writer and by others to the 
 Spanish fabulist, Yriarte: 
 
 The qualities all in a bee that we meet, 
 
 In an epigram never should fail ; 
 The body should always be little and sweet, 
 
 And a sting should be felt in its tail. 
 
 This is at once a description and an illus- 
 tration; and to be set by the side of it is 
 io6 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 an even terser attempt by an anonymous 
 wit: 
 
 What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, 
 Its body brevity, and wit its soul. 
 
 One of these is Latin or Spanish and the 
 other is British ; and to them may be added 
 a third by an American, Mr. George 
 Birdseye : 
 
 The diamond's virtues well might grace 
 
 The epigram, and both excel 
 In brilliancy in smallest space, 
 
 And power to cut. as well. 
 
 Although we no longer demand in an 
 epigram the ancient ingenuity of sentiment, 
 preferring the modern wit that seeks to 
 surprise, we ought not to debase the stand- 
 ard and to accept as a true epigram merely 
 a rhymed pun or a versified anecdote. Mr. 
 Dodd has quoted, from the preface of a 
 collection published in London in 1735, 
 a protest against these inexpressive rhymes, 
 which hope to pass themselves off for epi- 
 grams: "We have already observed what 
 a gay conceit, or a good sentence, will some- 
 107 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 times serve for points: but what else? 
 Nothing so properly as what can truly be 
 called wit; no jingle of words, pun, quibble, 
 conundrum, mixed wit, or false wit, ought 
 ever to be used, though they have all very 
 often appeared in this kind of poetry." 
 
 A rhymed pun, it is true, may some- 
 times have a certain unexpected felicity 
 which is its own excuse for being. Here 
 is a couplet by an American rhymester — 
 who in these papers must remain anony- 
 mous — on the 'Danse Macabre' of M. 
 Saint-Saens : 
 
 This dance of death, which sounds so musically, 
 Was sure intended for the corpse de ballet. 
 
 And this couplet may be matched by a 
 quatrain, written by Mrs. Lydia Maria 
 Child a half century earlier when a young 
 friend of hers named Nathaniel Deering 
 moved his residence to the town of Canaan : 
 
 Whoever weds the young lawyer at C. 
 
 Will surely have prospects most cheering, 
 For what must his person and intellect be, 
 
 When even his name is "N. Deering?" 
 io8 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 Even the versified anecdote may attain 
 the requisite pithiness of the true epigram 
 as we now understand the term; and per- 
 haps as good an example as any that might 
 be chosen is John Boyle O'Reilly's on the 
 'Lure' : 
 
 "What bait do you use," said a saint to the devil, 
 
 "When you fish where the souls of men abound?" 
 "Well, for special tastes," said the king of evil, 
 
 "Gold and fame are the best I've found." 
 "But for general use?" asked the saint. "Ah, then," 
 Said the demon, "I angle for man, not men, 
 And a thing I hate, 
 Is to change my bait, 
 So I fish with a woman the whole year round." 
 
 But the mere pun in rhyme and the bare 
 anecdote in verse, frequent as they both 
 are, belong to an inferior order of effort. 
 The true epigram is not often based on a 
 pun, which has been called the lowest form 
 of wit — because, as a punster explained, 
 It is the foundation of all wit. And the 
 true epigram does not need to be sustained 
 by a story. The true epigram indeed re- 
 lies on its own wit and It flies aloft on the 
 109 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 twin wings of buoyancy and brilliancy — 
 and here is its close resemblance to familiar 
 verse, as Cowper called it, to vers de 
 societe, as it is more often entitled. 
 
 It is a curious fact that Mr. Dodd's 
 collection of epigrams, which he sought to 
 make as comprehensive as possible and 
 which must contain two or three thousand 
 specimens from almost every literature 
 ancient and modern, does not include a 
 single exan.ple by an American author. 
 And it is almost equally curious that no 
 American editor has as yet attempted to 
 gather together an adequate representation 
 of the epigrams of American authorship. 
 This species of poetry seems to call for 
 wit rather than humor; and the American 
 gift is rather for humor than for wit. And 
 yet there is no lack of epigrams of Amer- 
 ican authorship, of varying merit, no doubt, 
 but permitting a selection not unworthy 
 of comparison with what has been done 
 of late years, either by our kin across the 
 sea In Great Britain, or by the satiric poets 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 of France. Many of the turning points 
 of American history have found record 
 in the couplets and quatrains of the Ameri- 
 can epigrammatists. 
 
 For example, it happened that the motto 
 on the colors of the Hessians who were 
 defeated at Trenton was Nescit Pericula, 
 and as their behavior on this occasion was 
 not over-valiant, an American carelessly 
 rhymed this uncomplimentary quatrain : 
 
 The man who submits without striking a blow, 
 May be said in a sense no danger to know : 
 I pray then, what harm, by the humble submission. 
 At Trenton was done by the standard of Hessian. 
 
 Another Revolutionary epigram was 
 probably written by David Edwards not 
 long after the event it commemorates, 
 Burgoyne's surrender: 
 
 Burgoyne, alas, unknowing future fates, 
 Could force his way through woods, but not through 
 Gates. 
 
 The neatness of the pun was probably 
 appreciated by the debonair British gen- 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 eral whose own wit was displayed in the 
 comedy of the 'Heiress,' which held the 
 stage for several years in England. It 
 was the surrender of Burgoyne which en- 
 couraged the French to come to our aid; 
 and it was the French alliance which 
 brought more swiftly the independence of 
 this country and the establishment of a 
 stable government on the basis of human 
 equality. The most important implement 
 of any such government must be the ballot; 
 and no one attempting to collect the most 
 striking of American epigrams could afford 
 to omit the quatrain of the Reverend John 
 Pierpont on the 'Ballot' : 
 
 A weapon that comes down as still 
 As snowflakes fall upon the sod; 
 
 But executes a freeman's will, 
 
 As lightning does the will of God. 
 
 The Civil War brought forth a fruitage 
 of epigrams as abundant as that of the 
 Revolution; and of these one of the earli- 
 est was written when Admiral Foote was 
 engaged in clearing the Mississippi: 
 
 112 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 The rebels say, in boasting way, 
 They'll every inch of ground dispute; 
 
 A brag, indeed, we'll better heed 
 Whenever they withstand one Foote. 
 
 The mock epitaph has always been a 
 favorite form of epigram, and sometimes 
 a real epitaph may have an epigrammatic 
 flavor. When the Union troops withdrew 
 after one of the battles in front of Rich- 
 mond, a Confederate soldier is said to have 
 buried a dead opponent and to have written 
 on a shingle stuck at the head of the grave 
 these rather grewsome lines: 
 
 The Yankee hosts with blood-stained hands 
 Came southward to divide our lands. 
 This narrow and contracted spot 
 Is all that this poor Yankee got. 
 
 After the capture of the President of the 
 Confederacy, Charles G, Halpine, who was 
 better known as "Miles O'Reilly," put into 
 circulation a fragment of verse which he 
 called 'An Old Maxim Reversed' : 
 
 Et arma ccdunt toga, 
 
 Said a Roman of renown: 
 When the din of war is over, 
 
 Arms yield unto the gown. 
 
 113 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 But this motto Jeff reverses : 
 For, arrayed in female charms, 
 
 When the din of war is over, 
 In his gown he yields to arms. 
 
 After the war came the dread period 
 of Reconstruction, followed by the sorrow- 
 ful days of brutal ring rule in New York 
 and in Boston. It was probably Tweed 
 of New York, whose brazen career evoked 
 from Lowell a biting couplet on the 'Boss' : 
 
 Skilled to pull wires, he baflfles Nature's hope, 
 Who sure intended him to stretch a rope. 
 
 And it was probably Butler of Massa- 
 chusetts who called forth a scorching qua- 
 train which Lowell liked enough to include 
 in his latest volume of verse, and which 
 he termed a 'Misconception' : 
 
 B. taught by Pope to do his good by stealth, 
 'Twixt participle and noun no difference feeling; 
 
 In office placed to serve the Commonwealth, 
 Does himself all the good he can by stealing. 
 
 During the long labors of the American 
 Copyright League to secure such an amend- 
 ment to our laws which would give foreign 
 114 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 authors an honest reward for their work 
 while relieving American writers from an 
 enforced competition with stolen goods, 
 Lowell served as President, and he lived 
 only a few months after the law went into 
 effect which he had helped to pass. To 
 aid in arousing the popular conscience 
 against the sin of literary piracy he wrote 
 an epigram, which the League immediately 
 took for its motto: 
 
 In vain we call old notions fudge, 
 And bend our conscience to our dealing; 
 
 The ten commandments will not budge, 
 And stealing will continue stealing. 
 
 Another epigram of Lowell's, written on 
 his sixty-eighth birthday, falls within the 
 later definition of the epigram, while it 
 lies at ease also within the earlier definition, 
 which Insists rather on a serenity such as 
 we look for in a Greek inscription : 
 
 As life runs on, the road grows strange 
 With faces new, and near the end 
 
 The milestones into headstones change, 
 'Neath everyone a friend. 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 With this austere quatrain of Lowell's 
 may be contrasted another by Emerson, 
 written originally in an album : 
 
 The man who has a thousand friends 
 
 Has not a friend to spare; 
 But he who has one enemy 
 
 Will meet him everywhere. 
 
 In one of his letters Lowell describes 
 a dull dinner in London with a dozen and 
 a half speakers droning away till long after 
 midnight, the only brilliant exception being 
 Sir Frederick Bramwell, who was called 
 upon very late to respond to Applied Sci- 
 ence, and who said that "at this time of 
 night the only illustration of the toast I 
 can think of would be the application of 
 the domestic safety-match to the bed-room 
 candle." Whereupon Lowell promptly 
 handed him this impromptu, scribbled 
 on a card: 
 
 Oh, brief Sir Frederick, might the others catch 
 Your happy science, — and supply your match ! 
 
 This couplet of Lowell's improvised at 
 ii6 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 a dinner may be followed by a quatrain 
 of Longfellow's improvised in an inn- 
 album. At the Sign of the Raven in Zurich 
 Longfellow was overcharged for unsatis- 
 factory accommodation ; and he contributed 
 to the landlord's book these four lines of 
 warning to other travellers : 
 
 Beware of the Raven of Zurich, 
 
 'Tis a bird of omen ill, 
 With an ugly, unclean nest 
 
 And a very, very long bill. 
 
 Another of Longfellow's playful and 
 careless quatrains has also been preserved: 
 
 When you ask one friend to dine, 
 Give him your best wine ! 
 When you ask two, 
 The second best will do ! 
 
 It is to Martial that we can trace the 
 turning aside of the epigram from senti- 
 ment to wit; and in his hands the epigram 
 may pierce like the keenest of rapiers or 
 it may batter like a brutal bludgeon. He 
 is willing to employ either weapon against 
 117 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 the sex he was at once pursuing and abus- 
 ing. Woman, indeed, has always been a 
 shining mark for the hurtling shafts of 
 the epigrammatists of all countries. It was 
 Fitz Greene Halleck, who adapted from 
 Goethe a sarcastic quatrain, which he 
 called 'Honor to Woman' : 
 
 All honor to Woman, the Sweetheart, the Wife, 
 The delight of our homesteads by night and by day, 
 
 The darling who never does harm in her life, — 
 Except when determined to have her own way. 
 
 Several of the epigrams of John G. Saxe 
 are directed against feminine failings. Just 
 now, when so many women affect to be 
 mannish, there is perhaps a certain perti- 
 nence in the pair of couplets he called 
 a 'Dilemma' : 
 
 "Whenever I marry," says masculine Ann, 
 "I must really insist upon wedding a man!" 
 But what if the man (for men are but human) 
 Should be equally nice about wedding a woman? 
 
 Another of Saxe's is rather a rhymed 
 retort than a true epigram; and it has the 
 ii8 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 further disadvantage of recalling a little 
 too closely one of the cleverest repartees 
 in the 'School for Scandal.' Yet it is so 
 neatly turned that it deserves quotation 
 here. It is called 'Too Candid by Half : 
 
 As Tom and his wife were discoursing one day 
 Of their several faults in a bantering way, 
 
 Said she : "Though my wit you disparage, 
 I'm sure, my dear husband, our friends will attest 
 This much, at the least, that my judgment is best." 
 
 Quoth Tom, "So they said at our marriage." 
 
 One of the most striking epigrams about 
 women was written by a woman — the late 
 Anne Reeve Aldrich, who gave her lines the 
 enigmatic title, 'Suppose' : 
 
 How sad if, by some strange new law, 
 
 All kisses scarred ! 
 For she who is most beautiful 
 
 Would be most marred. 
 And we might be surprised to see 
 
 Some lovely wife 
 Smooth-visaged, while a seeming prude 
 
 Was marked for life. 
 
 Another woman, Miss Mary AInge De 
 119 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Vere, has put a certain feminine subtlety 
 into her 'Friend and Lover' : 
 
 When Psyche's friend becomes her lover, 
 How sweetly these conditions blend ! 
 
 But, oh, what anguish to discover 
 Her lover has become — her friend ! 
 
 But it was a man, Mr. Gordon Campbell, 
 who phrased an opinion more masculine 
 in the quatrain which he termed 'My Idol' : 
 
 My idol fell down and was utterly broken, 
 
 The fragments of stone lay all scattered apart; 
 And I picked up the hardest to keep as a token — 
 
 Her heart. 
 
 It was a man again, Mr. W. D. Howells, 
 who wrote this quatrain on 'A Sarcastic 
 Woman' : 
 
 Her mouth is a honey-blossom, 
 No doubt, as the poet sings ; 
 
 But within her lips, the petals, 
 Lurks a cruel bee, that stings. 
 
 And another man, the sculptor-poet, W. 
 W. Story, rhymed these lines on 'Persica' : 
 
 Oh, Persica, Persica, pale and fair, 
 With a ripe blush on your cheek, 
 
 How pretty — how very pretty you are, 
 Until you begin to speak! 
 
 120 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 As for a heart and soul, my dear, 
 You have not enough to sin ; 
 
 Outside so fair, like a peach you are, 
 With a stone for a heart within. 
 
 And it was a third man, Mr. George 
 Birdseye, who ventured upon the attempt 
 to elucidate the wiles of a 'Coquette': 
 
 Her pleasure is in lovers coy ; 
 
 When hers, she gives them not a thought; 
 But, like the angler, takes more joy 
 
 In fishing than in fishes caught. 
 
 The same title served Mr. Thomas 
 Bailey Aldrich for a most pungent and 
 imaginative accusation against a type of 
 woman not unfeminine: 
 
 Or light or dark, or short or tail. 
 She sets a spring to snare them all ; 
 All's one to her; — above her fan 
 She'd make sweet eyes at Caliban. 
 
 And to Mr. Walter Learned we are 
 indebted for one of the pleasantest of the 
 many glancing shafts which have enlivened 
 the merry war between the sexes. He has 
 chosen to call it 'Humility' : 
 
 121 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 You say, when I kissed you, you are sure I must quite 
 Have forgotten myself. So I did ; you are right. 
 No, I'm not such an egotist, dear, it is true, 
 As to think of myself when I'm looking at you. 
 
 The relation between literature and life 
 is so close that there is no need to discuss 
 which of these it was Mr. Aldrich had in 
 mind when he penned his quatrain on 
 'Masks' : 
 
 Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise 
 
 And shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; 
 
 But when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, 
 
 How wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears! 
 
 But it is easy to guess that it was the 
 rude but powerful poems of Walt Whit- 
 man that Mr. Aldrich was criticizing when 
 he wrote his lines, 'On Reading — ' 
 
 Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth 
 Lose half their preciousness and ever must. 
 Unless the diamond with its own rich dust 
 
 Be cut and polished, it seems little worth. 
 
 Indeed, authors have taken each other 
 for the targets of their satire quite as fre- 
 quently as they have chosen to gird at the 
 
 122 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 other sex. Mr. Richard Watson Gilder 
 packed his scorn of an empty rhymester into 
 a terse quatrain, which he entitled 'Wanted, 
 A Theme': 
 
 "Give me a theme," the little poet cried — 
 
 "And I will do my part." 
 " 'Tis not a theme you need," the world replied ; 
 
 "You need a heart." 
 
 And the same lyrist gave another turn 
 to almost the same thought in the cutting 
 lines of his 'Strephon and Sardon' : 
 
 "Young Strephon wears his heart upon his sleeve," 
 
 Thus Sardon spoke, with scoffing air ; 
 Perhaps 'twas envy made the gray-beard grieve — 
 
 For Sardon never had a heart to wear. 
 
 Mr. J. T. Trovv'bridge in his autobiogra- 
 phy preserves for us the six lines of rhyme 
 evoked from him by the short-range con- 
 templation of the curious characteristics of 
 Bronson Alcott: 
 
 Do you care to meet Alcott? His mind is a mirror. 
 Reflecting the unspoken thought of his hearer: 
 To the great he is great ; to the fool he's a fool : 
 In the world's dreary desert a crystalline pool, 
 Where a lion looks in and a lion appears; 
 But an ass will see only his own ass's ears. 
 
 X23 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 When water was first brought into Boston 
 there was much discussion as to the health- 
 fulness of the conduits through which it 
 was conveyed ; and this evoked from Long- 
 fellow these pungent rhymes: 
 
 Cochituate water, it is said, 
 Though introduced in pipes of lead, 
 
 Will not prove deleterious; 
 But if the stream of Helicon 
 Through leaden pipes is made to run, 
 
 The effect is very serious. 
 
 An undergraduate rhymester of Colum- 
 bia, Mr. Russell H. Loines, has voiced a 
 feeling which many another reader of 
 ephemeral verse will swiftly recognize. He 
 was writing 'On a Magazine Sonnet': 
 
 "Scorn not the sonnet," though its strength be sapped» 
 Nor say malignant its inventor blundered ; 
 
 The corpse that here in fourteen lines is wrapped 
 Had otherwise been covered with a hundred. 
 
 Mr. Stedman has told us that no other 
 American poets have been so frequently 
 discussed in print as Whitman and Poe. 
 Mr. Aldrich's epigram, which we may 
 assume to have Whitman for its theme, 
 124 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 has already been quoted; and there are not 
 a few epigrams on Poe, although no one 
 of them rivals the polish and the point of 
 Mr. Aldrich's. There is, however, one 
 worthy of quotation, one launched by 
 Father Tabb against 'Poe's Critics': 
 
 A certain tyrant, to disgrace 
 The more a rebel's resting place, 
 Compelled the people every one 
 To hurl, in passing there, a stone, 
 Which done, behold, the pile became 
 A monument to keep the name. 
 
 And thus it is with Edgar Poe; 
 Each passing critic has his throw, 
 Nor sees, defeating his intent, 
 How lofty grows the monument. 
 
 Another there is, not against Poe or 
 against his critics either, but having as its 
 theme a pretentious biography of the Amer- 
 ican poet by a British writer: 
 
 An Englishman, Ingram, has written Poe's life; 
 
 We recall, as we slowly toil through it. 
 How keenly Poe wielded the critical knife. 
 
 And we wish he were here to review it. 
 
 Not quite so concise, and rather more 
 
 125 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 vigorous In expression, are a dozen lines 
 by the late Richard Henry Stoddard, in 
 which he dwelt on the widespread success 
 of the author of 'Proverbial Philosophy' : 
 
 Hail to Martin Farquhar Tupper ! 
 Who, when he bestrides the crupper 
 Of Pegasus, gets the upper 
 Hand of poets more renowned ; 
 Everywhere his works are found, 
 In poor men's huts, rich men's pavilions, 
 Sold by thousands, sold by millions ; 
 Suited to all times and latitudes, 
 By the everlasting platitudes 
 Spread for breakfast, dinner, supper, 
 Hail to Martin Farquhar Tupper ! 
 
 When a contributor to a long-forgotten 
 literary weekly, the Round Table, chanced 
 to refer disparagingly to a certain essay by 
 Richard Grant White, that lively but sensi- 
 tive essayist retorted at once with these 
 brisk couplets: 
 
 Some knight of King Arthur's, Sir Void or Sir Null, 
 Swears a trifle I wrote is respectably dull. 
 He is honest for once through his weakness of wit, 
 And he censures a fault that he does not commit ; 
 For he shows by example — proof quite unrejectable — 
 That a man may be dull without being respectable. 
 126 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 During one of the more heated periods 
 of the absurd and unending discussion of 
 the foolish suggestion that the plays of 
 Shakspere were in reality written by Bacon, 
 the late T. W. Parsons, best known as a 
 devout student of Dante, ventured into the 
 arena with these convincing lines : 
 
 Shakspere ! whoever thou mayst prove to be, 
 
 God save the Bacon that men find in thee ! 
 
 If that philosopher, though bright and wise. 
 
 Those lofty labors did in truth devise, 
 
 Then it must follow, as the night the day, 
 
 That 'Hamlet,' 'Lear,' 'Macbeth,' and each great play 
 
 That certifies nobility of mind, 
 
 Was written by the "meanest of mankind." 
 
 And to this must be adjoined the sug- 
 gestive quatrain of Mr. Aldrich, which he 
 has wittily entitled 'Points of View': 
 
 Bonnet in hand, obsequious and discreet. 
 
 The butcher that served Shakspere with his meat 
 
 Doubtless esteemed him little, as a man 
 
 Who knew not how the market prices ran. 
 
 Another admirable quatrain of Mr. 
 Aldrich's expresses his wholesome dissatis- 
 faction with the bards of despair; this is 
 127 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 the epigram which he terms 'Pessimistic 
 Poets' : 
 
 I little read those poets who have made 
 A noble art a pessimistic trade, 
 And trained their Pegasus to draw a hearse 
 Through endless avenues of drooping verse. 
 
 Books as well as belles were sometimes 
 the target for the arrows of Saxe's easy 
 wit; and one of his prettily-phrased epi- 
 grams is entitled 'Lucas a non' : 
 
 You'll oft find in books, rather ancient than recent, 
 
 A gap in the page marked "cetera desunt," 
 
 By which you may commonly take it for granted 
 
 The passage is wanting — without being wanted ; 
 
 And may borrow, besides a significant hint 
 
 That desunt means simply not decent to print. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes was ever a facile 
 and felicitous writer of occasional verse; 
 and he was a master of vers de societe with 
 its subtly blended sentiment and humor; but 
 he was rarely willing to limit himself within 
 the narrow boundaries of the epigram. 
 Indeed, there is apparently only one of his 
 shorter poems which falls fairly within the 
 128 
 
AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 
 
 definition. This is the amusing example of 
 fanciful imagination which he chose to call 
 'Cacoethes Scribendi' : 
 
 If all the trees in all the woods were men; 
 
 And each and every blade of grass a pen ; 
 
 If every leaf on every shrub and tree 
 
 Turned to a sheet of foolscap ; every sea 
 
 Were changed to ink, and all the earth's living tribes 
 
 Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, 
 
 And for ten thousand ages, day and night, 
 
 The human race should write, and write and write, 
 
 Till all the pens and paper were used up. 
 
 And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, 
 
 Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink 
 
 Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink. 
 
 There are many epigrammatic stanzas 
 scattered through Holmes's occasional 
 verses; but this is perhaps the only speci- 
 men of his effort in the briefer form with 
 the severe unity of theme which the true 
 epigram insists upon. Of the American 
 poets the two who are easily masters of 
 this form are Lowell and Mr. Aldrich, 
 the former having a bold vigor of his 
 own and the latter preferring rather an 
 ingenious delicacy. 
 
 (1903). 129 
 
VII 
 A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 ONE of the most stimulating con- 
 tributions which M. Brunetiere 
 has made to criticism is his sug- 
 gestion that each of the several 
 kinds of poetry responds to a different de- 
 mand of the human soul; and that therefore 
 — since these demands are eternal — when- 
 ever we find any special kind of poetry 
 apparently absent from any particular 
 period in any literature, we are likely then 
 to find it in illegitimate combination with 
 one of the other kinds. If, for example, the 
 pure lyric is not visible in French literature 
 at a given moment, we may discover that 
 either the dramatic or the epic poetry of 
 France just then happens to be unduly 
 lyric. If, to take another example, we per- 
 ceive that the drama is not flourishing in 
 English literature during a certain epoch, 
 130 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 we are warranted in searching for an ex- 
 pansion of the dramatic element in the 
 epic of that epoch — the epic being held 
 to include its prose brother, the novel. 
 
 There were nine Muses in Greece of old, 
 and to every one is committed the guardian- 
 ship of a single art; and if any of them 
 may chance to be faint and weary, one of 
 her sisters is ever ready to take up her 
 burden and to bear it for her until her 
 strength returns. The arts came into being 
 to satisfy the needs of man; and the needs 
 of man vary only a little with the lapse of 
 the years. Every one who has ever had 
 occasion to compare the literatures of the 
 ancients with the literatures of the moderns, 
 must gladly have noted now and again the 
 serene and Attic simplicity of some latter- 
 day achievements and must have remarked 
 once more the eternal and surprising fresh- 
 ness of some masterpiece of antiquity. 
 
 One of the precious treasures which we 
 have happily inherited from the past is the 
 collection which is known as the 'Greek 
 131 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Anthology,' and which contained the lesser, 
 rather than the larger, of the lyrical effu- 
 sions of that race of poets who were ever 
 seeking the utmost perfection of phrase 
 and the utmost purity of emotion. They 
 recall to us not the mighty art of the Parthe- 
 non frieze, but rather the graceful and 
 delicate workmanship of the Tanagra fig- 
 urines. They may sometimes stretch them- 
 selves to the length of the idyl, but more 
 often they are content to shrink to the mod- 
 est dimensions of the epigram. And the 
 epigram of the Greeks was not like ours; 
 It was not a neatly turned witticism with a 
 snap of the whip at the end of it; it was 
 rather a single, simple thought, compressed 
 into a few lines, ingenious in expression, 
 and exquisite In sentiment. As Lord Neaves 
 says, the "true or the best form of the 
 early Greek epigram does not aim at wit 
 or seek to produce surprise; Its purpose 
 Is to set forth in the shortest, simplest, plain- 
 est language, but yet with perfect purity 
 and even elegance of diction, some fact or 
 132 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 feeling of such interest as would prompt 
 the real or supposed speaker to record it." 
 More than one eulogist of the 'Greek 
 Anthology' has bepraised it as a manifes- 
 tation of the Greek genius without any 
 equivalent in modern literature. In its 
 own special field it may be without any 
 equal in our latter-day poetry; but in so 
 far as we are men like the Greeks with 
 emotions akin to theirs, it is not likely to 
 be wholly without any equivalent. Even 
 though no modern collection exists prop- 
 erly to be compared with the 'Greek An- 
 thology,' the elements of such a collection 
 must be scattered here and there awaiting 
 the pious offices of a devoted collector. 
 In no modern literature is there a lack of 
 brief lyrics, wherein the singers of our own 
 time have voiced their sentiments, simply 
 and effectively. Although our modern epi- 
 gram is not the epigram of the Greeks, none 
 the less has the Greek epigram its analogues 
 in our literature, even if we do not know 
 them by the Greek name. The 'Days' of 
 133 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Emerson, for example, and his 'Letters,' 
 and his 'Forbearance' are worthy of the 
 'Greek. Anthology' so far as their simple 
 elevation is concerned and the felicity of 
 their phrasing. 
 
 It is true that the Athenian specimens 
 of star-dust are unrhymed; and that ever 
 since the Middle Ages we have more often 
 than not preferred to rhyme our lyrics. 
 Ever since the Renascence, indeed, we have 
 revealed a tendency not only to rhyme, but 
 to arrange our rhymes according to a pat- 
 tern. It is in the sonnet that the poets of 
 the past four centuries have been wont to 
 express those uncomplicated feelings for 
 which the Greeks held their own epigram 
 to be sufficient. The Greek had found his 
 advantage in adopting a rather rigid metri- 
 cal scheme for his lesser lyric; and we mod- 
 erns have felt a like aid in the strict struc- 
 ture of the sonnet. A lyrist is at once re- 
 strained and sustained by a fixed form, the 
 framework of rhyme making the task easier 
 than it seemed, since the necessary words 
 134 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 may often spur the lagging fancy. On the 
 other hand, the limitations of the rhyming 
 scheme, though they may help the weak- 
 ling, make even more difficult the achieve- 
 ment of the highest perfection. 
 
 The modern sonnet has thus an obvious 
 analogy to the brief lyric of the 'Greek 
 Anthology;' and it seems as though it might 
 have also occasionally a certain relation to 
 the Greek ode — or at least to some single 
 member of that ode. Perhaps it may be 
 a little fanciful to suggest that if Milton 
 had been a Greek, born before the sonnet 
 had been devised and before rhyme had 
 been elaborated, he might have utilized in 
 an ode the righteous wrath which inspired 
 the noble and sonorous sonnet on the 'Late 
 Massacre in Piedmont' — "Avenge, O Lord, 
 Thy slaughtered saints." And of a cer- 
 tainty it would have been possible for Low- 
 ell to use the sonnet-form for his imagina- 
 tive interpretations of Washington and 
 of Lincoln. 
 
 There is, however, another modern form 
 135 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 which would demand abundant representa- 
 tion in any attempt to prepare a latter-day 
 equivalent to the 'Greek Anthology.' This 
 is the quatrain, which many a modern 
 lyrist, more especially in English, has 
 chosen as the form in which to express a 
 thought or a sentiment not rich enough for 
 the comparativ^e amplitude of the sonnet. 
 Just as the sonnet has established itself 
 solidly in English poetry, while the other 
 fixed forms, the ballade and the rondeau 
 and their lesser brethren, are scarcely yet 
 acclimated amongst us, so the quatrain has 
 been accepted, while the sixain, the huitain 
 and the dixain — to give the French titles 
 to these poems of a single stanza of six, 
 and eight, and ten lines — have tempted 
 only a very few of those who write English. 
 If one of our poets cannot say what he 
 wants to say in four lines, he is likely to 
 say it in fourteen. If what he has to say 
 is not important enough for the ambitious 
 fourteener, he is likely to strive to condense 
 it into the single stanza of four lines. 
 136 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 The sonnet has been discussed and ana- 
 lyzed and belauded; but the quatrain has 
 never received its due recognition. It has 
 made its way without loud heralding — such 
 as accompanied the revival of the ballade, 
 for instance. It has won its wide popularity 
 modestly and by dint of merit alone. Poets 
 have made use of it apparently without 
 thinking of it as a fixed form — if, indeed, 
 it can fairly be so entitled. In fact, the 
 sole poet who seems to have proclaimed 
 its worth is Mr. Frank Dempster Sherman, 
 who used the form itself to sing its own 
 praise: 
 
 Hark at the lips of this pink whorl of shell 
 
 And you shall hear the ocean's surge and roar; 
 
 So in the quatrain's measure, written well, 
 A thousand lines shall all be sung in four! 
 
 As the Greek epigram served for votive 
 tables so the quatrain has been chosen by 
 several American poets for memoVial in- 
 scriptions wherein a lapidary concision was 
 needful. For the beautiful windows put 
 up in St. Margaret's, Westminster, in mem- 
 137 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 ory of Raleigh and of Milton, the inscrip- 
 tions were written by Lowell and Whittier. 
 Here is Lowell's quatrain on Raleigh : 
 
 The New World's Sons, from England's breast we 
 drew 
 
 Such milk as bids remember whence we came; 
 Proud of her Past from which our Present grew, 
 
 This window we erect to Raleigh's name. 
 
 And here is Whittier's on Milton : 
 
 The New World honors him whose lofty plea 
 
 For England's freedom made her own more sure, 
 
 Whose song, immortal as its theme, shall be 
 Their common freehold while both worlds endure. 
 
 Whittier wrote another quatrain for the 
 memorial tablet to Mrs. Sigourney, in 
 Christ Church, Hartford: 
 
 She sang alone, ere womanhood had known 
 The gift of song which fills the air today : 
 
 Tender and sweet, a music all her own 
 May fitly linger where she knelt to pray. 
 
 And Lowell has preserved in the latest 
 volume of his poems the inscription he had 
 prepared for a soldiers' and sailors' monu- 
 ment in Boston : 
 
 138 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 To those who died for her on land and sea, 
 That she might have a country great and free, 
 Boston builds this: build ye her monument 
 In lives like theirs, at duty's summons spent. 
 
 This has not a little of the stately eleva- 
 tion we admire in the best inscriptions of 
 the 'Greek Anthology.' But Lowell used 
 the quatrain not only to honor the dead 
 but also to carry a greeting of affection to 
 the living. On the seventy-fifth birthday 
 of Asa Gray, the foremost of American 
 botanists received congratulations from all 
 parts of the country ; and among them were 
 these four lines from Lowell : 
 
 Just fate, prolong his file, well spent. 
 
 Whose indefatigable hours 
 Have been as gayly innocent 
 
 And fragrant as his flowers. 
 
 Lowell, indeed, not only sent a quatrain 
 as an appropriate salutation, but he also 
 received one on his own birthday from a 
 younger poet, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder: 
 
 Navies nor armies can exalt the state, — 
 Millions of men, nor coined wealth untold: 
 Down to the pit may sink a land of gold ; 
 
 But one great name can make a country great. 
 139 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 The same lyrist has chosen the quatrain 
 also to contain his praise of the 'Washing- 
 ton Monument, at Washington, D. C : 
 
 Straight soars to heaven the white magnificence, — 
 Free as man's thought, high as one lonely name. 
 
 True image of his soul, — serene, immense, — 
 Mightiest of monuments and mightiest fame. 
 
 It was to a still younger American poet, 
 H. C. Bunner — whose life was cut short 
 almost in his youth — that we owe another 
 'To a Hyacinth Plucked for Decoration 
 Day,' which has not a little of the Attic 
 fragrance and felicity : 
 
 O Flower, plucked before the dew 
 Could wet th}' thirsty petals blue — 
 Grieve not ! a dearer dew for thee 
 Shall be the tears of memory. 
 
 Another of Bunner's quatrains deals also 
 with death; this is the vigorous address 
 'To a Dead Woman' : 
 
 Not a kiss in life; but one kiss, at life's end, 
 
 I have set on the face of Death in trust for thee. 
 Through long years keep it fresh on thy lips, O 
 friend ! 
 At the gate of Silence give it back to me. 
 140 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 To many careless readers Bunner's name 
 is known only as that of a humorist; but 
 he had also the sentiment and the pathos 
 which are ever characteristics of the true 
 humorist, who is more than a manufacturer 
 of inexpensive jests. An earlier writer of 
 light verse, George Arnold, had also his 
 more serious side, which never found 
 deeper expression than in his quatrain called 
 'An Autobiography' : 
 
 I was born some time ago, but I know not why: 
 I have lived, — I hardly know either how or where : 
 
 Some time or another, I suppose, I shall die ; 
 
 But where, how or when, I neither know nor care ! 
 
 Here, after this vain vaunting, it may 
 be well to place another of Lowell's qua- 
 trains, one of the little group which he 
 entitled 'Sayings' : 
 
 In life's small things be resolute and great 
 
 To keep thy muscles trained; know'st thou when 
 
 Fate 
 Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee, 
 "I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?" 
 
 To places opportunity may come, as well 
 
 141 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 as to persons, as Mr. M, A. De Wolfe 
 Howe has suggested In his 'Distinction': 
 
 The village sleeps, a name unknown, till men 
 
 With life-blood stain its soil, and pay the due 
 
 That lifts it to eternal fame, — for then 
 'Tis grown a Gettysburg or Waterloo. 
 
 With this may be linked another sug- 
 gestive quatrain, by Mr. Selden L. Whit- 
 comb, on 'Pain' : 
 
 It changed the soul of one to sour 
 
 And passionate regret; 
 To one it gave unselfish power 
 
 To love and to forget. 
 
 It was to one of the undergraduate pub- 
 lications of Columbia University that this 
 was contributed; and from the same 
 monthly may be taken two other qua- 
 trains, dealing each of them with one of 
 these names which it is well for the young 
 to learn to love. The first is by Mr. Walter 
 G. Kellogg: 
 
 If the gods would grant some favor to my Muse, 
 And let me sound a sweet yet potent note, 
 
 This boon above all others would I choose, 
 That I might write as dear old Herrick wrote. 
 
 142 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 And the second is from the pen of a 
 scholar-poet, still connected with Columbia, 
 Mr. Joel E. Spingarn. It has for its theme 
 the English lyrist, who perhaps appeals 
 most ardently to all youthful lovers of 
 poetry — Keats : 
 
 The Star of Fame shines down upon the river, 
 
 And answering the Stream of Life repeats : 
 "Upon our waters shall be writ forever 
 The name of Keats." 
 
 In a collection of 'Yale Verse' may be 
 found a suggestive quatrain by Mr. Walter 
 D. Makepeace, on a subject that has 
 tempted not a few poets, 'Sleep' : 
 
 Down through the mist of half-forgotten things 
 Tired spirits sink beneath night's slumberous sea, 
 
 And, lapped in dream-waves, hear soft murmurings 
 Of Life's blest prelude to Eternity. 
 
 No American poet has shown a more 
 frequent preference for the quatrain than 
 Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and no one 
 has better understood at once its possibili- 
 ties and its limitations. He has unerring 
 certainty of touch; and he never makes 
 the mistake of distending into a sonnet a 
 143 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 thought that would be better compacted 
 into a quatrain. Consider, for example, 
 how graceful and how charming are the 
 four lines which he has called 'Memories' : 
 
 Two things there are with Memory will abide, 
 Whatever else befall, while life flows by: 
 
 That soft cold hand-touch at the altar side; 
 The thrill that shook you at your child's first cry. 
 
 And contrast that quatrain with this, 
 which he has aptly entitled 'Pessimist and 
 Optimist' : 
 
 This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, 
 Taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath: 
 
 This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while 
 Laughs in the teeth of Death. 
 
 Other American poets there are who 
 have delighted in the quatrain; and three 
 further quotations may be adduced to bring 
 out even more clearly the advantage of 
 the condensed form. One Is by Mr. Walter 
 Learned, and he calls it 'Burning the Love- 
 Letters' : 
 
 Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, 
 When life has quit the mortal frame. 
 
 When Love is at his last, we must 
 Bury him thus, with flame to flame. 
 144 
 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 
 
 The second is by Mr. Edwin Markham, 
 who has taken for his theme, 'Poetry' : 
 
 She comes like the hush and beauty of the night, 
 
 And sees too deep for laughter ; 
 Her touch is a vibration and a light 
 
 From worlds before and after. 
 
 And the third is due to Mr. William 
 H. Hayne, who was moved to melody by 
 musing 'On a Bust of Mendelssohn' : 
 
 His high-arched brow and quiet eyelids seem 
 Brushed by the wings of some celestial dream — 
 A bird of passage whose melodious breath 
 Dispersed in music the wan mist of Death. 
 
 In this attempt to draw attention to 
 the quatrain as a definite form, excel- 
 lently devised for the expression of a 
 lyric emotion not ample enough for the 
 more spacious sonnet, the illustrations 
 here selected have all been taken from 
 our own American poets, partly because 
 the quatrain has been cherished rather 
 more by our native lyrists than by their 
 British contemporaries, and also partly be- 
 cause the thoughts they have to express 
 145 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 are a little more likely to appeal to us than 
 are the sentiments voiced by our kin across 
 the sea, who are at once so like us and 
 so unlike us. Certain of the Victorian 
 poets have abundantly employed the stern 
 simplicity of the quatrain — Mr. William 
 Watson, for one; and omission must not 
 be made of the fact that in St. Margaret's, 
 Westminster, besides the two windows 
 adorned with the commemorative quatrains 
 of Lowell and of Whittier, are two others 
 bearing inscriptions also in four lines each 
 by Tennyson and Browning. 
 (1903). 
 
 146 
 
VIII 
 CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 IN one of the preliminary epistles con- 
 tained in the opening pages of a 
 poem on the 'Art of Cookery,' pub- 
 lished in London in 1709, the au- 
 thor presents historic instances to support 
 the lofty eminence upon which he estab- 
 lishes the art he is going immediately to 
 eulogize in several hundred heroic couplets. 
 "Indeed, Cookery," so he declares solemnly, 
 "has an Influence upon Men's Actions even 
 in the highest Stations of human Life. 
 The great Philosopher Pythagoras, in his 
 'Golden Verses,' shews himself to be ex- 
 tremely nice in Eating, when he makes it 
 one of his chief Principles of Morality to 
 abstain from Beans. The noblest Foun- 
 dations of Honour, Justice and Integrity 
 were found to lye hid in Turnips, as ap- 
 pears in that great Dictator, Cincinnatus, 
 147 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 who went from the Plough to the Com- 
 mand of the Roman Army; and having 
 brought home Victory, retir'd to his Cot- 
 tage : For when the Samnite Ambassadors 
 came thither to him, with a large Bribe, 
 and found him dressing Turnips for his 
 Repast, they immediately return'd with 
 this Sentence, 'That it was impossible to 
 prevail upon him that could be contented 
 with such a Supper.' In short, there are 
 no honorary Appellations but what may 
 be made use of to Cooks; for I find through- 
 out the whole Reign of Charlemain, that 
 the Great Cook of the Palace was one of 
 the prime Ministers of State, and Con- 
 ductor of Armies." 
 
 This metrical 'Art of Cookery' is 
 avowedly modelled upon the 'Art of 
 Poetry' of Horace. This bard of the 
 buttery, this lyrist of the larder, this song- 
 ster of the serving-room, tells us that 
 
 A Prince who in a Forest rides astray, 
 And weary to some Cottage finds the way, 
 Talks of no Pyramids of Fowl or Bisks of Fish, 
 148 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 But hungry sups his Cream serv'd up in Earthen 
 
 Dish : 
 Quenches his Thirst with Ale in nut-brown Bowls, 
 And takes the hasty Rasher from the Coals : 
 Pleas'd as King Henry with the Miller free, 
 Who thought himself as good a Man as He. 
 
 The poet is abundant In advice, and he 
 bids 
 
 You that from pliant Paste wou'd Fabricks raise, 
 Expecting thence to gain immortal Praise, 
 Your Knuckles try, and let your Sinews know 
 Their Power to knead, and give the Form to Dough, 
 Chuse your Materials right, your seas'ning fix. 
 And with your Fruit resplendent Sugar mix ; 
 From thence of course the Figure will arise. 
 And Elegance adorn the Surface of your Pies. 
 
 He is apt in axiom, and he declares that 
 
 If you wou'd have me merry with your Cheer 
 Be so yourself, or so at least appear. 
 
 And he asks pertinently : 
 
 Unless some Sweetness at the Bottom lye. 
 Who cares for all the crinkling of the Pye? 
 
 But even in pastry he is against undue 
 extravagance : 
 
 Next let Discretion moderate your Cost, 
 And when you treat, three Courses be the most. 
 149 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Let never fresh Machines your Pastry try, 
 
 Unless Grandees or Magistrates are by, 
 
 Then you may put a Dwarf into a Pye. 
 
 Or if you'd fright an Alderman and Mayor, 
 
 Within a Pasty lodge a living Hare ; 
 
 Then midst their gravest Furs shall Mirth arise, 
 
 And all the Guild pursue with joyful Cries. 
 
 Perhaps the most characteristic passage 
 In the whole poem Is that wherein Horace 
 himself Is Invoked, and wherein the like- 
 ness of the poet to the pastry-cook Is for- 
 mally established : 
 
 Were Horace, that great Master, now alive, 
 
 A Feast with Wit and Judgment he'd contrive. 
 
 As thus — supposing that you wou'd rehearse 
 
 A labour'd Work, and every Dish a Verse. 
 
 He'd say, mend this, and t'other Line, and this; 
 
 If after Tryal it were still amiss. 
 
 He'd bid you give it a new Turn of Face> 
 
 Or set some Dish more curious in its Place, 
 
 If you persist he wou'd not strive to move 
 
 A Passion so delightful as Self-love. 
 
 We shou'd submit our Treats to Criticks View, 
 And ev'ry prudent Cook shou'd read Bossu. 
 Judgment provides the Meat in Season fit. 
 Which by the Genius drest, its Sauce is wit. 
 Good Beef for Men, Pudding for Youth and Age, 
 Come up to the Decorum of the Stage. 
 150 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 The Critick strikes out all that is not just, 
 And 'tis ev'n so the Butler chips his Crust. 
 Poets and Pastry-Cooks will be the same, 
 Since both of them their Images must frame. 
 Chimera's form the Poet's Fancy show, 
 The Cook contrives his Shapes in real Dough. 
 
 Thus wrote a British imitator of the 
 Roman songster of society in the early 
 part of the eighteenth century; and in the 
 later part of the nineteenth century an 
 American imitator of Horace, the late 
 Eugene Field, seems to have been moved 
 by a like impulse. Without going so far 
 as to identify poet and pastry-cook, he 
 felt called upon to hymn the praise of 
 'Rare Roast Beef,' and of 'Gosling Stew' 
 and of 'Apple Pie and Cheese.' Of these 
 three lilting lyrics, each with a culinary 
 ecstasy of its own, the third is by far the 
 best worth quoting here. It has the flavor 
 of New England, beyond all question; it 
 is not without a gusto of its own; and the 
 writer evidently revelled in his adroit alter- 
 nation of double and single rhymes; — 
 'Apple Pie and Cheese' : 
 151 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Full many a sinful notion 
 
 Conceived of foreign powers 
 Has come across the ocean 
 
 To harm this land of ours; 
 And heresies called fashions 
 
 Have modesty effaced, 
 And baleful, morbid passions 
 
 Corrupt our native taste. 
 
 tempora ! O mores ! 
 What profanations these 
 
 That seek to dim the glories 
 Of apple pie and cheese ! 
 ****** 
 
 De gustibus, 'tis stated, 
 
 Non disputandum est. 
 Which meaneth, when translated, 
 
 That all is for the best. 
 So let the foolish choose 'em 
 
 The vapid sweets of sin, 
 
 1 will not disabuse 'em 
 
 Of the heresy they're in; 
 But I, when I undress me 
 
 Each night, upon my knees 
 Will ask the Lord to bless me 
 
 With apple pie and cheese ! 
 
 It must be admitted, however, that the 
 British imitator of Horace and the Ameri- 
 can are not the only poets who have spoken 
 highly of the doubtful dish which the one 
 
 152 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 spells Pye and the other pie. Emerson, 
 a loftier man than either of the others, 
 beyond all question, penned no ode to 
 pastry, it is true; what he had to say in 
 its praise was said in prose, no doubt, and 
 yet what more magnificent eulogy could 
 he have bestowed than his simple query, 
 addressed to those who sat at table with 
 him and who had rejected his proffer of a 
 wedge of pie, "But what is pie for?" 
 
 And Dr. Holmes, quoting this anec- 
 dote, asks permission to declare "that pie, 
 often foolishly abused, is a good creature, 
 at the right time and in angles of thirty 
 or forty degrees," although "in semicir- 
 cles and quadrants it may sometimes prove 
 too much for delicate stomachs." 
 
 One of the writers who contributed to 
 the 'Liber Scriptorum,' the Book of the 
 Authors Club of New York, has therein 
 ventured an explanation of the strange 
 anomaly to which Dr. Holmes draws at- 
 tention, that Emerson, an abandoned pie- 
 eater as he was, never complained of dys- 
 153 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 pepsia, whereas Carlyle, although he was 
 fed on the wholesome oatmeal of his na- 
 tive land, was forever at war with his 
 stomach and "lived with half his self-con- 
 sciousness habitually centred beneath his 
 diaphragm." The explanation proffered 
 by the member of the Authors Club Is as 
 simple as it is alluring; there was so total 
 and complete a sympathy between the 
 American sage and the Scotch humorist 
 that for the first time in recorded history 
 we can behold the phenomenon of the 
 Transfusion of Indigestion. In other 
 words, Emerson ate the pie and Carlyle 
 had the dyspepsia ! 
 
 Of all the pies that are prevalent 
 throughout the great American Pie-Belt, 
 it may be admitted at once that the mince 
 is, perhaps, the most deadly, but it cannot 
 be denied that the pumpkin is the most 
 characteristically American, If not also 
 the most popular. Twice have simple 
 lyrists lifted up their voices to carol forth 
 the proper praise of this delightful dish. 
 The first of these Is anonymous; and It 
 154 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 was in 1818 that he contributed to the 
 Boston Sentinel these stanzas inspired by 
 sincere enthusiasm, the 'Pumpkin Pye.' 
 
 The bards of the Hudson may sing of the melon, 
 
 Its smooth, jetty seeds and its ripe, ruddy core. 
 And the feast of the reaper with ecstasy dwell on. 
 
 Reclining at noon on the cool, breezy shore ; 
 For me, the rich soil of New England produces 
 
 An offering more dear to the taste and the eye, 
 The bright yellow pumpkin — how mellow its juices. 
 
 When temper'd with ginger, and bak'd into pye. 
 ******* 
 Then hail to the Muse of the pumpkin and onion ! 
 
 The Frenchman may laugh and the Englishman 
 sneer 
 At the land of the Bible, and psalm book, and 
 Bunyan, 
 
 Still, still to my bosom her green hills are dear ; 
 Her daughters are pure as her bright crystal 
 fountains. 
 
 And Hymen, if ever thy blessings I try, 
 O ! give me the girl of my own native mountains. 
 
 Who knows how to temper the sweet pumpkin pye. 
 
 The second was no less a poet than 
 
 John Greenleaf Whittier, the laureate of 
 
 New England, the singer who has given 
 
 voice to the homely sentiments of his sec- 
 
 155 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 tion more satisfactorily than any other. 
 Perhaps it may be objected that he deals 
 with the fruit wherefrom the pie is com- 
 pounded than with the pie itself; but this 
 objection is too trivial for discussion. 
 Here is a stanza of Whittier's autumnal 
 dithyramb on the pumpkin : 
 
 Ah ! on Thanksgiving Day, when from East and from 
 
 West, 
 From North and from South come the pilgrim and 
 
 guest ; 
 When the grey-haired New Englander sees round 
 
 his board 
 The old broken links of affection restored ; 
 When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once 
 
 more, 
 And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled 
 
 before ; 
 What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye, 
 What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie? 
 
 An earlier American poet than either of 
 these has sung of an American dish more 
 primitive than apple pie or pumpkin. When 
 Joel Barlow — the maker of that great gun 
 of poesy, the 'Columblad,' now spiked In 
 silence and rusting in oblivion — was at 
 156 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 Chambery in Savoy in January, 1793, his 
 thoughts turned homeward to his native 
 land and to the toothsome simphcity of 
 homely hasty-pudding. He was moved to 
 prepare three cantos in commendation of 
 
 The sweets of Hasty-Pudding. Come, dear bowl, 
 Glide o'er my palate, and inspire my soul. 
 The milk beside thee, smoking from the kine, 
 Its substance mingle, married in with thine, 
 Shall cool and temper thy superior heat, 
 And save the pains of blowing while I eat. 
 
 A httle later the poet's strain rises with 
 the occasion, and he seeks to ascertain the 
 lofty origin of the grateful dish he was 
 decking with chaplets of couplets gathered 
 in his distant exile: 
 
 Assist me first with pious toil to trace 
 Through wrecks of time, thy lineage and thy race ; 
 Declare what lovely squaw, in days of yore, 
 (Ere great Columbus sought thy native shore) 
 First gave thee to the world ; her works of fame 
 Have lived indeed, but lived without a name. 
 Some tawny Ceres, goddess of her days, 
 First learned with stones to crack the well-dried 
 
 maize, 
 Through the rough sieve to shake the golden shower, 
 In boiling water stir the yellow flour; 
 
 157 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 The yellow flour, bestrewed and stirred with haste, 
 
 Swells in the flood and thickens to a paste, 
 
 Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim, 
 
 Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim, 
 
 The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks, 
 
 And the whole mass her true consistence takes. 
 
 Even over in Europe, on the confines 
 of France and Italy, he found the Indian 
 corn transplanted and doing its duty nobly 
 though in a foreign clime: 
 
 But man, more fickle, the bold license claims, 
 In different realms to give thee different names. 
 Thee the soft nations round the warm Levant 
 Polenta call, the French, of course, Polente. 
 E'en in thy native regions, now I blush 
 To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush! 
 On Hudson's banks, while men of Belgic spawn 
 Insult and eat thee by the name Suppawn. 
 All spurious appellations, void of truth ; 
 I've better known thee from my earliest youth — 
 Thy name is Hasty-Pudding! thus my sire 
 Was wont to greet thee fuming from his fire. 
 
 A curious comparison next Invites us to 
 set beside this epic praise of one of the 
 ways of serving the products of our national 
 plant, the maize, with a lighter lyric, 
 wherein a negro balladlst has sung the joys 
 158 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 that accompany another form, in which 
 Indian-meal may be prepared for the tempt- 
 ing of our palates. Here are two stanzas 
 of Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, 
 •When the Co'n-Pone's Hot' : 
 
 Dey is times in life when Nature 
 
 Seems to slip a cog an' go, 
 Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, 
 
 Lak an ocean's overflow ; 
 When the worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' 
 
 Lak a pickaninny's top, 
 An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin' 
 
 Twell it seems about to slop. 
 An' you feel jes' lak a racah 
 
 Dat is trainin' fu' to trot — 
 
 When yo' mammy ses de blessin' 
 
 An' de co'n-pone's hot. 
 ****** 
 
 I have heerd o' lots o' sermons. 
 
 An' I've heerd o' lots o' prayers, 
 An' I've listened to some singin' 
 
 Dat has tuk me up de stairs 
 Of de Glory-Lan' an' set me 
 
 Jes' below de Mahster's th'one, 
 An' have lef my hawt singin' 
 
 In a happy aftahtone, 
 But dem wu'ds so sweetly murmured 
 
 Seems to tech de softes' spot, 
 When my mammy ses de blessin' 
 
 An' de co'n-pone's hot. 
 159 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Hasty-pudding and corn-pone, nourish- 
 ing as they are and estimable in every way, 
 lack distinction a little; they smack of the 
 log cabin and of the negro quarters; they 
 would not appeal to the Little Brothers 
 of the Rich. For them rather does the 
 miserable goose fatten his unhealthy liver; 
 for them the canvasback seeks out the wild 
 celery; for them the terrapin fulfils the 
 end of his existence. Mr. Herman Oelrichs 
 has rhymed for us his regret that the 
 Roman epicures had to depart this life 
 without having tasted the terrapin; and it 
 is evident that the sympathetic poet believes 
 their lives to have been wasted, and worse 
 than wasted, since they failed of the bliss 
 they were most capable of appreciating. 
 
 And if terrapin would be a dish worthy 
 of Horace, what would Thackeray have 
 thought of it? Thackeray penned the 
 'Ballad of Bouillabaisse,' and lent to that 
 unsavoury and unsatisfactory mess — there 
 is no other word for it than that ! — the 
 incomparable aroma of his playful pathos : 
 i6o 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is — 
 
 A sort of soup or broth, or brew, 
 Or hotpotch of all sorts of fishes, 
 
 That Greenwich never could outdo; 
 Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, 
 
 Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace; 
 All these you eat at Terre's tavern, 
 
 In that one dish of Bouillabaisse. 
 
 Indeed, a rich and savory stew 'tis ; 
 
 And true philosophers, methinks, 
 Who love all sorts of natural beauties. 
 
 Should love good victuals aad good drinks. 
 And Cordelier or Benedictine 
 
 Might gladly, sure, his lot embrace. 
 Nor find a fast-day too afflicting. 
 
 Which served him up a Bouillabaisse. 
 
 The sentimental visitors to Marseilles 
 who seek out a proper place to try to like 
 that untempting dish, are rarely honest 
 enough with themselves to admit that it 
 is not the dish itself they have enjoyed, 
 but the tenderness of Thackeray's touch- 
 ing verses: 
 
 Where are you, old companions trusty 
 Of early days here met to dine? 
 
 Come, waiter ! quick, a flagon crusty — 
 I'll pledge them in the good old wine. 
 i6i 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 The kind old voices and old faces 
 
 My memory can quick retrace ; 
 Around the board they take their places, 
 
 And share the wine and Bouillabaisse. 
 
 The learned Dr. Gross is a professor 
 in the University of Freiburg, and he is 
 the author of a most interesting and most 
 instructive treatise on the 'Beginnings of 
 Art,' in the pages of which he discusses 
 not only sculpture and architecture and 
 painting, but also music and the dance, 
 the drama and poetry. And some of the 
 readers of this paper who may have sup- 
 posed that it was only in a sophisticated 
 period of high development and of abun- 
 dant leisure that man could spare time to 
 rhyme recipes and to chant the charm of 
 cookery, will be surprised to learn that this 
 was a habit also of primitive man. "The 
 lyric poetry of hunting tribes," so Dr. 
 Gross assures us, "very rarely soars to a 
 higher flight; it rather abides with unmis- 
 takable preference in the lower regions of 
 sensuality. The coarsest material pleas- 
 162 
 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 
 
 ures occupy a very large space In primitive 
 verse; and Ave do these poets no wrong 
 when we say that their lyric Inspiration Is 
 quite as often of the stomach as of the 
 heart. It must indeed appear a real sacri- 
 lege to an Ideal aesthete that we presume to 
 pass off the eating and drinking songs of 
 the Australians and Botocudos, especially 
 as poetical productions. They are, never- 
 theless, such, as they are truly expressions 
 of feeling In verbal rhythmic form. No 
 feeling Is in and of Itself poetic; and there 
 is no feeling which cannot be made poetical 
 If it Is expressed in an sesthetlc form for 
 an esthetic purpose. It may, moreover, 
 soften the indignation that arises against 
 the use that is made here of the name 
 of poetry. If we recollect that even the 
 tenderest lyric poets of civilization occa- 
 sionally do not consider It unworthy of 
 them to extol the pleasures of the table." 
 (1900). 
 
 163 
 
B 
 
 IX 
 
 RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 4 4 Hi ^ OOKS," said that acute critic, 
 Walter Bagehot, "are for 
 various purposes : tracts, to 
 teach; almanacs, to sell; 
 poetry, to make pastry." The British scof- 
 fer did not foresee that a Gallic dramatist, 
 the author of 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' would 
 one day set upon the stage a pastry cook 
 who should be also a poet and who would 
 be therefore able to declare the eternal 
 principles of the culinary art in imperish- 
 able rhyme. It is this Ragueneau of M. 
 de Rostand who thus sets forth the proper 
 manner of preparing that delectable dish 
 fcnowc as 'Les Tartelettes Amandines' : 
 
 Battez, pour qu'ils soient mousseux 
 
 Quelques oeuf s ; 
 Incorporez a leur mousse 
 Un jus de cedrat choisi; 
 
 Versez-y 
 Un bon lait d'amande douce; 
 164 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 Mettez de la pate a flan 
 
 Dans le flanc 
 De moules a tartclette ; 
 D'un doigt presle, abricotez 
 
 Les cotes ; 
 Versez goutte a gouttelette 
 
 Votre mousse en ces puits, puis 
 
 Que ces puits 
 Passant au four, et, blondines, 
 Sortant en gais troupelets, 
 
 Ce sont les 
 Tartelettes amandines ! 
 
 And this has been rendered readily into 
 Enghsh rhymes by Gertrude Hall, thus: 
 'Almond Cheese Cakes': 
 
 Briskly beat to lightness due, 
 
 Eggs a few ; 
 With the eggs so beaten, beat — 
 Nicely strained for this same use — 
 
 Lemon juice, 
 Adding milk of almonds, sweet. 
 
 With fine pastry dough, rolled flat, 
 
 After that, 
 Line each little scalloped mould ; 
 Round the sides, light-fingered, spread 
 
 Marmalade ; 
 Pour the liquid eggy gold, 
 
 165 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Into each delicious pit ; 
 
 Prison it 
 In the oven, — and, by and by, 
 Almond cheese cakes will in gay 
 
 Blonde array 
 Bless your nostril and your eye ! 
 
 Another French dramatist, the younger 
 Alexander Dumas, has caused a charming 
 young lady in his comedy of 'Francillon' 
 to declare the true formula of a Japanese 
 salad — avowedly of her own invention. 
 But this formula is In bald prose — nay, 
 more, it Is In the broken dialogue of the 
 stage ; and therefore it is inadmissible amid 
 these recipes, more metrical, If not more 
 musical. The so-called Japanese salad of 
 the Frenchman Is just a little too compli- 
 cated to win favor In the eyes of American 
 epicures, whose taste Is simpler, less sophis- 
 ticated — in a word, purer. In a salad the 
 full flavor of the chief ingredient should be 
 evoked directly by the dressing, the sharp- 
 ness of the vinegar and the blandness of 
 the oil uniting for the purpose. And this 
 Is why the British salads often lack a wel- 
 i66 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 come from Americans; they are too fussy; 
 they are not content to let well enough 
 alone. It is this which vitiates the best 
 known of all rhyming recipes — that of 
 Sydney Smith, for a winter salad : 
 
 Two large potatoes passed through the kitchen sieve 
 
 Unwonted softness to the salad give. 
 
 Of mordant mustard add a single spoon — 
 
 Distrust the condiment which bites too soon. 
 
 But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault 
 
 To add a double quantity of salt. 
 
 Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, 
 
 And once with vinegar procured from town. 
 
 True flavor needs it, and your poet begs 
 
 The pounded yellow of the two well-boiled eggs. 
 
 Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl. 
 
 And unsuspected animate the whole. 
 
 And, lastly, on the flavored compound toss 
 
 A magic teaspoon of anchovy sauce. 
 
 Then though green turtle fail, though venison's 
 
 tough, 
 And ham and turkey are not boiled enough, 
 Serenely full the epicure may say, 
 "Fate cannot harm me — I have dined to-day !" 
 
 The verse is brisk enough, whatever may 
 
 be thought of the moral; and the reverend 
 
 rhymester has set a model for a host of later 
 
 poetasters (perhaps even one might here 
 
 167 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 venture on an orthography more appropri- 
 ate, however inaccurate, and style these 
 imitators of the good dean — poet-tasters). 
 The most of these followers of Sydney 
 Smith are nameless; they have failed to 
 tag themselves to their formulas, from 
 modesty, perhaps, and perhaps from care- 
 lessness. Here, for example, are two sets 
 of versified directions for compounding the 
 delectable plum pudding. The first of 
 them is of British authorship, apparently, 
 and also of a stricter orthodoxy; a 'Poetical 
 Recipe for English Plum Pudding' : 
 
 To make a plum pudding to Englishmen's taste, 
 
 So all may be eaten and nothing be waste, 
 
 Take of raisins, and currants, and bread crumbs all 
 
 round ; 
 Also suet from oxen, and of flour a pound. 
 Of citron well candied, or lemon as good, 
 With molasses and sugar, eight ounces, I would. 
 Into this first compound next must be hasted 
 A nutmeg well grated, ground ginger well tasted, 
 Then of milk half a pint, and of fresh eggs take six; 
 Be sure after this that you properly mix. 
 Next tie up in a bag, just as round as you can, 
 Put it into a capacious and suitable pan. 
 Then boil for eight hours just as hard as you can. 
 i68 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 The second seems rather to be of Amer- 
 ican origin, although in such matters exact 
 accuracy is difficult of attainment and the 
 poet without a name is likely to prove a 
 man without a country unless his speech 
 betrayeth him; — 'Plum Pudding': 
 
 Aunt Betsy makes good pudding, 
 
 And you can likewise do it 
 If you follow her directions : 
 
 "Take half a pound of suet, 
 Three quarter pounds of bread crumbs fine, 
 Two tablespoons of brandy wine. 
 One and a quarter pounds of fruit, 
 A pinch of grated ginger root, 
 Quarter-pound moist sugar — brown — 
 A single nutmeg grated down, 
 Two tablespoons of milk or cream 
 (The latter is best, I deem) 
 Four eggs — and just enough molasses 
 To fill one of your small wine-glasses — 
 Then steam five hours." I'm sure you'll say 
 "No better cook than Betsy Leigh." 
 
 The model set by Sydney Smith has been 
 
 followed also by Mr. Adolph Meyer in a 
 
 string of couplets wherein he praises one of 
 
 the foremost of American contributions to 
 
 169 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 the resources of the gastronomic art. In 
 spite of his Teutonic name, the poet is prob- 
 ably an American — although it is to be re- 
 called always that the dish he celebrates 
 has been accepted in France also, infrequent 
 as have been French borrowings from the 
 kitchens of other countries. Here are 
 Mr. Meyer's verses — and it is chiefly in 
 his final quatrain that he recalls the 
 prescription of the earlier Englishman : — 
 'Lobster a I'Americaine' : 
 
 A lobster full of life you need, 
 But, ere you further shall proceed, 
 Drop him within a copper pot 
 That's filled with water boiling-hot. 
 When boiled, then him in eighths divide, 
 Now turn these oft from side to side 
 In butter simmering in a pan, 
 And do this careful as you can. 
 And salt and pepper ere you cease. 
 Of garlic crush a little piece. 
 This with a glass of Chablis add — 
 Your lobster then cannot be bad. 
 Skin six tomatoes and take out the seed ; 
 Do this as thoroughly as it may need. 
 Now with the lobster altogether cook, 
 And that the mixture does not burn, oft look. 
 i;o 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 A little spice would add unto the savor ; 
 
 Bay-leaf and thyme have not too strong a flavor. 
 
 And after thirty minutes on the fire 
 
 The lobster's cooked. In peace you can retire. 
 
 Invite your friends now to this treat 
 
 'Twould tempt a dying man to eat; 
 
 The sauce is better than the lobster, too. 
 
 Such dishes are, you will agree with me, too few, 
 
 This dainty feast would surely animate 
 
 The most despondent, melancholic pate; 
 
 He will give thanks when he in truth can say, 
 
 " 'Twas Lobster a I'Americaine to-day." 
 
 It is true that some iconoclast, ever swift 
 to upset tradition, may be ready to prove 
 that "lobster American style" is French, 
 after all, and in spite of its name. But the 
 nationality of another preparation of shell- 
 fish is indisputable; and the rollicking 
 rhymester who has lyrically recorded the 
 proper method to be employed in its con- 
 coction would stand revealed as an Ameri- 
 can, even though his name was wholly 
 unknown. For where else do clams dwell 
 except in America? They are citizens of 
 the United States by nativity; and it was 
 a worthy patriotism that inspired Mr. W. 
 171 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 A. Croffut to proclaim the transcendent 
 and most appetizing flavor of 'Clam Soup' : 
 
 First catch your clam — along the ebbing edges 
 Of saline coves you'll find the precious wedges, 
 With backs up, lurking in the sandy bottom ; 
 Pull in your iron rake, and lo ! you've got 'em. 
 Take thirty large ones, put a basin under, 
 And cleave with knife the stony jaws asunder; 
 Add water (three quarts) to the native liquor, 
 Bring to a boil (and, by the war, the quicker 
 It boils the better, if you'd do it cutely). 
 Now add the clams, chopped up and minced min- 
 utely. 
 Allow a longer boil of just three minutes. 
 And while it bubbles quickly stir within its 
 Tumultuous depths, where still the mollusks mutter, 
 Four tablespoons of flour and four of butter, 
 A pint of milk, some pepper to your notion. 
 And clams need salting, although born of ocean. 
 Remove from fire (if much boiled they will suffer, 
 You'll find that India-rubber isn't tougher) ; 
 After 'tis off, add three fresh eggs well beaten. 
 Stir once more, and it's ready to be eaten. 
 Fruit of the wave ! oh, dainty and delicious ! 
 Food for the gods ! ambrosia for Apicius ! 
 Worthy to thrill the soul of sea-born Venus, 
 Or titillate the palate of Silenus. 
 
 It is not in the United States, but in 
 Great Britain, that one must seek the song- 
 172 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 stcr of the swan. The cygnets of Norwich 
 are eaten before the end of November, 
 being cooked on a spit according to the 
 directions thus rhythmically preserved: 
 
 Take three pounds of beef fat, beat in a mortar. 
 Put it into the swan, that is, when you've caught her; 
 Some pepper, salt, mace, some nutmeg, an onion. 
 Will heighten the flavor in gourmand's opinion. 
 Then tie up tight with a small piece of tape. 
 That the gravy and other things may not escape. 
 A meal paste, rather thick, should be laid on the 
 
 breast, 
 And some whited brown paper should cover the rest. 
 Fifteen minutes at least ere the swan you take down ; 
 Pull the paste oflf the bird that the breast may get 
 
 brown. 
 
 The Gravy 
 
 To a gravy of beef, good and strong, I opine, 
 You'd be right if you add half a pint of port wine: 
 Pour this through the swan ; yes, quite through the 
 
 belly; 
 Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly. 
 
 Would not the opinion of Pythagoras 
 concerning wild fowl have been modified 
 perforce if he hud ever tasted a young 
 swan thus artfully prepared — or if he had 
 ever had the good fortune to find before 
 ^73 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 him the even more toothsome canvasback 
 duck, as yet unsung by any bard? 
 
 Hawthorne has told us of a dream he 
 had once "that the world had become dis- 
 satisfied with the inaccurate manner in 
 which facts are reported, and had employed 
 him at a salary of a thousand dollars 
 to relate things of importance exactly as 
 they happen." Here is a valuable sugges- 
 tion, fit for instant use. If any philan- 
 thropist is at a loss how to lay out his 
 money to advantage, let him employ half 
 a dozen or half a score of minor poets, 
 deft in the adjustment of rhymes, and set 
 them to singing the praises of the good 
 things of life and to putting into immortal 
 verse the best ways of cooking this or that 
 delectable dish. Thus should the lyrist 
 and the culinary artist collaborate for the 
 benefit of posterity. Men of science tell 
 us that rhymes and jingles linger in the ear 
 longer than mere prose; and recipes likely 
 to be lost if left in perishable prose might 
 aspire to a lofty longevity if fixed In verse. 
 174 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 Here is a case in point. The sack-posset 
 is now no longer concocted; and even the 
 most learned compounder of American 
 drinks would be puzzled if a sack-posset 
 were suddenly demanded. Yet, though 
 the thing itself be vanished from the face 
 of the earth, the formula used in mixing 
 it has survived in verse for now more than 
 a century and a half. In February, 1744, 
 in the Gazette of Bradford, the New York 
 printer gave "a receipt for all young ladies 
 that have an eye to matrimony," — 'To 
 Make a Sack- Posset' : 
 
 From famed Barbados, on the western main, 
 
 Fetch sugar half a pound ; fetch sack from Spain 
 
 A pint ; and from the East India coast 
 
 Nutmeg, the glory of our Northern toast; 
 
 O'er flaming coals together let them heat 
 
 Till the all-conquering sack dissolves the sweet; 
 
 O'er such another fire set eggs, twice ten, 
 
 New born, the product of the wedded hen ; 
 
 Stir them with steady hand, and conscience pricking 
 
 To see the untimely fate of twenty chicken ; 
 
 From shining shelf take down your brazen skillet, 
 
 A quart of milk from gentle cow will fill it; 
 
 When boiled and cooled, put milk and sack to egg, 
 
 175 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Unite them firmly like the triple league ; 
 
 Then, covered close, together let them dwell 
 
 Till miss twice sings, "You must not kiss and 
 
 tell," 
 Then, lad and lass, snatch up your eager spoon, 
 And fall on fiercely, like a starved dragoon. 
 
 Although this has been borrowed from 
 one of the earhest of American newspapers, 
 its authorship is probably British; indeed, 
 one may doubt whether there was in all 
 his Majesty's colonies in 1744 any one hav- 
 ing command over light and easy versifica- 
 tion of this sort. The technical skill of the 
 Bacchanalian instructor may not be worthy 
 of the very highest praise, yet, none the less, 
 it is beyond the possession of any of the 
 American versifiers of that early day, — 
 even if they had deigned to bestow their 
 attention upon the poetic aspects of the 
 culinary art. 
 
 After the lapse of a century and a half, 
 more than one lyrist has arisen in the 
 United States ready to preserve in verse 
 the proper method of preparing one or 
 another of the American national dishes. 
 176 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 The doughnut, the descendant of the Dutch 
 oilcake, that first cousin of the Knicker- 
 bocker cruller: 
 
 One cup of sugar, one cup of milk; 
 
 Two eggs beaten fine as silk, 
 
 Salt and nutmegs (lemon '11 do) ; 
 
 Of baking-powder, teaspoons two. 
 
 Lightly stir the flour in ; 
 
 Roll in pie-board not too thin ; 
 
 Cut in diamonds, twists, or rings. 
 
 Drop with care the doughy things 
 
 Into fat that briskly swells 
 
 Evenly the spongy cells. 
 
 Watch with care the time for turning; 
 
 Fry them brown — just short of burning. 
 
 Roll in sugar, serve when cool. 
 
 Price — a quarter for this rule. 
 
 And even corn-pone has been embalmed 
 in rhyme by a right reverend bard — the 
 corn-pone which the white American rarely 
 gets nowadays, although the red American 
 rarely made it (or its equivalent) before 
 the white American came across the At- 
 lantic, and although the black American 
 best appreciates the delicacy of its proper 
 preparation. It was an American Bishop 
 177 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 (William of Connecticut) who followed 
 the ecclesiastical precedent of the English 
 dean, and proclaimed the only true way 
 of making the humble dish : 
 
 Take a cup of corn-meal, and the meal should be 
 
 yellow ; 
 Add a cup of wheat flour for to make the corn 
 
 mellow ; 
 Of sugar a cup, white or brown or your pleasure, 
 (The color is nothing, the fruit is the measure) ; 
 
 And now comes a troublesome thing to indite. 
 For the rhyme and the reason they trouble me quite ; 
 For after the sugar, the flour, and the meal 
 Comes a cup of sour cream, but unless you should 
 
 steal 
 From your neighbors, I fear you will never be able 
 This item to put upon your cook's table: 
 For "sure and indeed," in all town I rem'ember. 
 Sour cream is as scarce as June buds in December. 
 
 So here an alternative nicely contrived 
 
 Is suggested your mind to relieve. 
 And showing how you without stealing at all 
 
 The ground that is lost may retrieve. 
 Instead of sour cream take one cup of milk, 
 
 "Sweet milk!" what a sweet phrase to utter! 
 And to make it creamlike put into the cup 
 
 Just three tablespoonfuls of butter. 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 Cream of tartar, one teaspoonful, rules dietic — 
 
 How nearly I wrote it down tartar emetic ! — 
 
 But no; cream of tartar it is without doubt, 
 
 And so the alternative makes itself out. 
 
 Of soda the half of a teaspoonful add, 
 
 Or else your poor corn cake will go to the bad ; 
 
 Two eggs must be broken without being beat. 
 
 Then of salt a teaspoonful your work will complete. 
 
 Twenty minutes of baking are needful to bring 
 
 To the point of perfection this "awful good thing." 
 
 To eat at the best this remarkable cake 
 
 You should fish all day long on the royal-named 
 
 lake, 
 With the bright waters glancing in glorious light 
 And beauties outnumbered bewild'ring your sight, 
 On mountain and lake, in water and bay ; 
 And then, when the shadows fall down from on high, 
 Seek "Sabbath Day Point," as the light fades away, 
 And end with this feast the angler's long day. 
 Then, there will you find, without any question. 
 That an appetite honest awaits on digestion. 
 
 British again are the three following, 
 clipped years ago from a newspaper and 
 derived originally, it may be, from the 
 collection of Mr. Punch. They are entitled 
 'Extracts from the Commonplace-Book of 
 a Connoisseur' ; and the first is a recipe 
 for 'Pigeon Soup' : 
 
 179 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 "Eight pigeons take, all pluck, and two, the worst, 
 Review, i.e., cut up. and drown the pair 
 In water that will fill a large tureen. 
 Necks, gizzards, pinions, livers of the rest 
 Add, and boil well, and strain. Season the birds. 
 But part dissected, with your pungent spice. 
 Mixed spice and salt — English, you understand, 
 Not attic; that, perchance, you lack — and then 
 Truss them as if their little toes were cold, 
 Legs into belly. Pick and wash and shred 
 Parsley, young onions, spinach eke; and grate 
 Bread, say a handful. In the frying-pan 
 A lump of butter put, and when it boils. 
 Throw in your bread, and, mind you, do it brown. 
 Put on the stock to boil, and add the birds. 
 Herbs, and fried bread, and when the doves are done, 
 Of course they may be dished. 
 
 — 'Massacre of the Innocents.' 
 
 The second considers *Cocky Leeky': 
 
 Scrag of mutton, shank of veal. 
 From the butcher where you deal ; 
 Good beef stock is even better — 
 Now, then, follow to the letter: 
 Portly fowl, with leeks, say three, 
 Pepper, salt, judiciously. 
 Leeks cut up in inch-long pieces; 
 Slowly boil. When it decreases, 
 After a good hour or more. 
 Add three sliced leeks as before. 
 i8o 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 One hour longer let it bubble, 
 It will pay you for your trouble. 
 If you've followed as you should, 
 You'll declare the stuff is good. 
 
 — 'Macbeth' ( improved ) . 
 
 And the third deals with 'Stewed 
 Oysters' : 
 
 Friend am I, and not foe, and yet men beard me, 
 And boil my beard in my own juice with gravy; 
 Strain off my beard, and put mc in instead, 
 Thicken the mess with flour and ounce of butter, 
 Kill my ambrosial flavor with their ketchup 
 (White wine, anchovy, lemon, what you will). 
 Nutmeg, and salt and pepper, mace and cream; 
 Simmer and serve me up on toasted sippets. 
 They will not let me boil, but my blood boils 
 At thought of how, while they would paint the lily, 
 Pepsine and piquant coolness both must perish. 
 
 — 'The Foreboding Native.' 
 
 And at the end of this crisscrossing of 
 the northern ocean, with quotations first 
 from British bards and then from American 
 artists in metre, it is to New York that a 
 return is necessary again to quote here the 
 chaplet of couplets written by the American 
 who in his day enjoyed the widest fame as 
 i8i 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 a gastronomist, the late Samuel Ward, once 
 a banker in New York and later a lobbyist 
 in Washington — and always a good liver 
 and a good fellow. He called them 'Verses 
 for the Kitchen' : 
 
 Always have lobster sauce with salmon, 
 And put mint sauce your roasted lamb on. 
 
 In dressing salad mind this law — 
 
 With two hard yolks use one that's raw. 
 
 Roast veal with rich stock gravy serve; 
 And pickled mushrooms, too, observe. 
 
 Roast pork, sans apple sauce, past doubt 
 Is 'Hamlet' with the Prince left out. 
 
 Your mutton chops with paper cover 
 And make them amber brown all over. 
 
 Broil lightly your beefsteak — to fry it 
 Argues contempt of Christian diet. 
 
 To roast spring chicken is to spoil 'em — 
 Just split 'em down the back and broil 'em. 
 
 It gives true epicures the vapors 
 To see boiled mutton minus capers. 
 182 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 The cook deserves a hearty cuffing 
 
 Who serves roast fowls with tasteless stuffing. 
 
 Smelts require egg and biscuit powder — 
 Don't put fat pork in your clam chowder. 
 
 Egg sauce — few make it right, alas ! 
 Is good with bluefish or with bass. 
 
 Nice oyster sauce gives zest to cod — 
 A fish, when fresh, to feast a god. 
 
 But one might rhyme for weeks this way. 
 And still have lots of things to say. 
 
 And so I'll close, for, reader mine, 
 This is about the hour I dine. 
 
 Whether these 'Verses for the Kitchen' 
 are fairly to be included under the title of 
 this paper may be a matter of dispute; but 
 not to be debated is the fact that they are 
 far better in manner and in matter than 
 most of the other gastronomic effusions here 
 collected. They have the calm ease of a 
 man who knew what he was talking about 
 183 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 and who thought his opinion on the subject 
 worthy of condensation into couplets, as 
 sharp as carving-knives should be. 
 
 The things we eat by various juice controul, 
 The Narrowness or Largeness of the soul. 
 Onions will make ev'n Heirs or Widows weep. 
 The tender Lettice brings on softer Sleep. 
 Eat Beef or Pye-crust if you'd serious be; 
 Your shell-fish raises Venus from the Sea ; 
 For Nature that inclines to 111 or Good, 
 Still nourishes our Passions by our Food. 
 
 So wrote the author of the 'Art of Cook- 
 ery,' in imitation of Horace's 'Art of 
 Poetry,' a work which is ascribed to the 
 ingenious Dr. King; which was printed in 
 London in 1709 for Bernard Lintott, at 
 the Cross Keys between the two Temple 
 Gates in Fleet Street; and which was 
 humbly inscribed to the Honourable Beef 
 Steak Club. 
 
 With one more quotation from Dr. 
 King's sapient pages — if, indeed, this 'Art 
 of Cookery' be of his inditing — this cul- 
 inary anthology may fitly close : 
 184 
 
RECIPES IN RHYME 
 
 'Tis a sage Question, if the Art of Cooks 
 
 Is lodg'd by Nature, or attained by Books; 
 
 That Man will never frame a noble Treat 
 
 Whose whole Dependence lies on some Receipt. 
 
 Then by pure Nature ev'ry thing is spoil'd, 
 
 She knows no more than stew'd, bak'd, roast, and 
 
 boil'd. 
 When Art and Nature join th' effect will be 
 Some nice Ragoust, or charming Fricasy. 
 (1900). 
 
 185 
 
X 
 
 THE UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF 
 H. C. BUNNER 
 
 THE late H. C. Bunner published 
 two volumes of poetry, 'Airs 
 from Arcady' and 'Rowen: Sec- 
 ond-Crop Songs.' But only a 
 small proportion of his verse, comic and 
 serious, is contained in these two little 
 books. He was always modest in discus- 
 sing his own work, in prose or in verse, 
 yet he was ambitious also; and when he 
 came to choose out those of his writings 
 which he was willing to reprint in book 
 form, he held up a high standard for him- 
 self. When his first volume of short 
 stories, *In Partnership,' was ready for the 
 printer he became dissatisfied with one of 
 his stories, and withdrew it, writing in its 
 stead the vigorous and pathetic tale called 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 *A Letter and a Paragraph.' There is 
 also a long serial story, contributed to a 
 weekly paper, which he refused always to 
 reprint as a book, although it was an ab- 
 sorbingly dramatic narrative. In selecting 
 from his own verse he was even more par- 
 ticular. Perhaps this was due to the fact 
 that he was widely known as the editor 
 of Puck, and that if he had reprinted all 
 of even the best of his humorous verse 
 he would have been accepted only as a 
 comic poet. He was unwilling to have 
 the graceful and imaginative lyrics which 
 give distinction to 'Airs from Arcady' and 
 'Rowen' swamped by an undue proportion 
 of his lighter verse. In neither of these 
 volumes did he include any of his more 
 broadly comic pieces — like this sonnet, 
 for example, in which the reader is left 
 in doubt as to what manner of vessel it 
 is the poet is addressing: — 'To a Schooner'. 
 
 O Brave and Beautiful ! the purling foam 
 Curls clinging with caressing touch around 
 Thy curves symmetrical. My heart doth bound 
 
 187 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 At sight of thee — 'neath native heavens' dome, 
 Or far abroad, where venturous Teutons roam. 
 
 Moist thy smooth sides as swiftly, without sound, 
 
 Across the Bar thou passest, brimmed and crowned 
 With thy rich freight, dearer than musty tome 
 To student's heart ; sweet as the honey-comb. 
 
 Not wondrous caverns underneath the ground, 
 Dark treasure-caves of subterranean gnome, 
 
 Yield fairer boon than in thee I have found — 
 Peace ! O, my blissful spirit's cherished home. 
 
 In yon dark flood lies Care forever drowned ! 
 
 A pleasant flavor of the classics lingers 
 about the lines in which the poet set down 
 his dissatisfaction with 'Atlantic City': 
 
 O City that is not a city, unworthy the prefix At- 
 lantic, 
 
 Forlornest of watering-places, and thoroughly Phila- 
 delphian ! 
 
 In thy despite I sing, with a bitter and deep detesta- 
 tion — 
 
 A detestation born of a direful and dinnerless even- 
 ing. 
 
 Spent in thy precincts unhallowed — an evening I 
 trust may recur not. 
 
 Never till then did I know what was meant by the 
 word god-forsaken : 
 
 Thou its betokening hast taught me, being the 
 chiefest example. 
 
 i88 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 Thou art the scorned of the gods ; thy sand from 
 their sandals is shaken ; 
 
 Thee have they left in their wrath to thy uninter- 
 esting extensivencss, 
 
 Barren and bleak and big; a wild aggregation of 
 barracks, 
 
 Miscalled hotels, and of dovecotes denominate cot- 
 tages ; 
 
 A confusion of ugly girls, of sand, and of health- 
 bearing breezes. 
 
 With one unending plank-walk for a true Philadel- 
 phia "attraction." 
 
 City ambitiously named, why, with inducements 
 delusive. 
 
 Is the un-Philadelphian stranger lured to thy desert 
 pretentious? 
 
 'Tis not alone that thy avenues, broad and unpaved 
 and unending, 
 
 Re-echo yet with the obsolete music of 'Pinafore,' 
 
 Whistled in various keys by the rather too numerous 
 negro ; 
 
 'Tis not alone that Propriety — Propriety too Phila- 
 delphian — 
 
 Over thee stretches an sgis of wholly superfluous 
 virtue ; 
 
 That thou art utterly good; hast no single vice to 
 redeem thee ; 
 
 Tis not alone that thou art provincial in all things, 
 and petty ; 
 
 And that the dulness of death is gay, compared to 
 thy dulness — 
 
 189 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 'Tis not alone for these things that my curse is to 
 rest upon thee : 
 
 But for a sin that crowns thee with perfect and emi- 
 nent badness ; 
 
 Sets thee alone in thy shame, the unworthiest town 
 on the sea-coast : 
 
 This : that thou dinest at Noon, and then in a man- 
 ner barbarian, 
 
 Soupless and wmeless and coffeeless, untimely and 
 wholly indecent — 
 
 As is the custom, I learn, in Philadelphia proper. 
 
 I rose and I fled from thy Supper; I said: "I will get 
 me a Dinner!" 
 
 Vainly I wandered thy streets : thy eating-places un- 
 godly 
 
 Knew not the holiness of Dinner ; in all that evening 
 I dined not ; 
 
 But in a strange low lair, infested of native me- 
 chanics. 
 
 Bolted a fried beef-steak for the physical need of my 
 stomach. 
 
 And for them that have fried that steak, in Aides' 
 lowest back-kitchen 
 
 May they eternally broil, by way of a warning to 
 others. 
 
 During my wanderings, I met, and hailed with de- 
 light one Italian, 
 
 A man with a name from 'Pasquale' — the chap sung 
 by Tagliapietra — 
 
 He knew what it was to dine ; he comprehended my 
 yearnings ; 
 
 190 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 But the spell was also on him; the somnolent spell 
 Philadelphian ; 
 
 And his hostelry would not be open till Saturday 
 next ; and I cursed him. 
 
 Now this is not too much to ask, God knows, that a 
 mortal should want a 
 
 Pint of Bordeaux to his dinner, and a small cigar- 
 ette for a climax : 
 
 But, these things being denied him, where then is 
 your Civilization? 
 
 O Coney Island ! of old I have reviled and blas- 
 phemed thee, 
 
 For that thou dowsest thy glim at an hour that is un- 
 metropolitan ; 
 
 That thy frequenters' feet turn townwards ere strik- 
 eth eleven, 
 
 When the returning cars are filled with young men 
 and maidens. 
 
 Most of the maidens asleep on the young men's cin- 
 dery shoulders — 
 
 Yea, but I spake as a fool, insensate, disgruntled, 
 ungrateful : 
 
 Thee will I worship henceforth in appreciative hu- 
 mility: 
 
 Luxurious and splendid and urban, glorious and gas- 
 lit and gracious. 
 
 Gathering from every land thy gay and ephemeral 
 tenantry, 
 
 From the Greek who hails thee: "Thalatta!" to the 
 rustic who murmurs "My Golly!" 
 
 From the Bowery youth who requests his sweetheart 
 to "look at them billers !" 
 191 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 To the Gaul whom thy laughing waves almost per- 
 suade to immersion : 
 
 O Coney Island, thou art the weary citizen's 
 heaven — 
 
 A heaven to dine, not die in, joyful and restful and 
 clamful, 
 
 Better one hour of thee than an age of Atlantic 
 City! 
 
 And the same flavor, more pronounced, 
 is discoverable also in the daring rhymes 
 on 'Classic Journalism': 
 
 The beautiful garland of justice awaits 
 The eminent poet and general, Socrates. 
 Krophutikos Graphikos. 
 
 5th Century b. c. 
 
 A great thing was journalism in Greece, 
 When that nation was foremost in war and in peace. 
 I was long on the staff of the Athens Courier, 
 And the style the boys ran the machine you shall 
 
 hear. 
 The boss paper it was the South-Spartan Tribune, 
 Which was owned by a man of the name of Laocoon ; 
 And had a grand building, where down the two sides 
 Ran two rows of extra-sized Caryatides. 
 'Twas a very fine sheet, with a half-page of locals, 
 Done up in neat style by J. Themistocles. 
 At the top of its columns, its letter-heads, bills, 
 192 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 It flaunted the name of its founder, Achilles. 
 
 'Twas so high-toned, the boys used to say its chief 
 
 writer 
 Was nobody less than Olympian Jupiter. 
 The staff boasted ladies galore, Hermione 
 Ran the fashion column entirely alone. 
 Cybele did the Art notes; the critical flail 
 Was skilfulUy wielded by Mrs. Omphale. 
 But the Boeotian Herald beat this a long sight, 
 By engaging on glorious terms Aphrodite. 
 And the Herald had Hero, who later demeaned her- 
 Self by receiving the visits of Leander. 
 The East-Acarnanian Times made its gains 
 By the aid and assistance of Aristophanes. 
 When the Greeks sent their troops against Troy's 
 
 forces meagre. 
 The Times dispatched war-correspondent Meleager. 
 Then there was the Attican World, that shocked 
 
 Greece, 
 By opening its columns to Trojan ^neas; 
 But its editor well knew his sheet how to carry on ; 
 Had a competent musical critic in Arion ; 
 And knowing public fancy a feuilleton tickles. 
 He secured for that duty the well known Pericles. 
 The proprietor, he was a fellow of means, 
 Senior partner of Apollo and Diogenes. 
 Ah, those were great times, but they're all long gone 
 
 by. 
 Like the days when I used to be sweet on Clytie ; 
 And Greek journalism has vanished beneath 
 The silent, oblivious waters of Lethe. 
 
 193 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 This had been suggested by the couplet 
 quoted from Mr. W. A. Croffut, who was 
 then contributing to the now departed 
 Daily Graphic. Another copy of verses 
 had its origin in the allegation that a cer- 
 tain songster of the Sierras had written 
 a poem in which the name of the author 
 of 'Faust' was made to rhyme with the 
 unpoetic word teeth. The American hu- 
 morist unhesitatingly mispronounced the 
 names Moliere and Goethe, and wrote 
 these stanzas on 'Shake, Mulleary and 
 
 Go-ethe.' 
 
 I. 
 
 I have a bookcase, which is what 
 Many much better men have not. 
 There are no books inside, for books, 
 I am afraid, might spoil its looks. 
 But I've three busts, all second-hand, 
 Upon the top. You understand 
 I could not put them underneath — 
 Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 
 
 II. 
 
 Shake was a dramatist of note; 
 He lived by writing things to quote, 
 He long ago put on his shroud : 
 194 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 Some of his works arc rather loud. 
 His bald-spot's dusty, I suppose. 
 I know there's dust upon his nose. 
 I'll have to give each nose a sheath — 
 Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 
 
 III. 
 
 Mulleary's line was quite the same ; 
 He has more hair; but far less fame. 
 I would not from that fame retrench — 
 But he is foreign, being French. 
 Yet high his haughty head he heaves, 
 The only one done up in leaves. 
 They're rather limited on wreath — 
 Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Go-ethe wrote in the German tongue: 
 He must have learned it very young. 
 His nose is quite a but for scoflf. 
 Although an inch of it is off. 
 He did quite nicely for the Dutch; 
 But here he doesn't count for much. 
 They all are off their native heath — 
 Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 
 
 V. 
 
 They sit there, on their chests, as bland 
 As if they were not second-hand. 
 I do not know of what they think, 
 
 195 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Nor why they never frown or wink. 
 
 But why from smiling they refrain 
 
 I think I clearly can explain : 
 
 They none of them could show much teeth — 
 
 Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 
 
 In the early days of Puck the young 
 poet chose to consider himself a dweller 
 in the coast of Bohemia ; and yet in more 
 than one of his poems of this period he 
 seems to have anticipated the time when 
 he should remove from the seaport of 
 Prague. This feeling is reflected more 
 fully in the verses which he entitled 'Wed' 
 than in any other of his poems, excepting 
 only, it may be, that called the 'Deserter.' 
 Here is 'Wed': 
 
 For these white arms about my neck — 
 
 For the dainty room, with its ordered grace — 
 For my snowy linen without a fleck — 
 
 For the tender charm of this uplift face — 
 
 For the softened light and the homelike air — 
 
 The low luxurious cannel fire — 
 The padded ease of my chosen chair — 
 
 The devoted love that discounts desire — 
 196 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 T sometimes think, when Twelve is struck 
 By the clock on the mantel, tinkling clear, 
 
 I would take — and thank the gods for the luck — 
 One single hour with the Boys and the Beer. 
 
 Where the sawdust scent of a cheap saloon 
 Is mingled with malt; where each man smokes, 
 
 Where they sing the street songs out of tune, 
 Talk Art, and bandy ephemeral jokes. 
 
 By Jove, I do! And all the time 
 
 I know not a man that is there to-night 
 
 But would barter his brains to be where I'm — 
 And I'm well aware that the beggars are right. 
 
 And here Is its fellow lyric, the 'De- 
 serter' : 
 
 Scene. — In Bohemia. 
 
 Glad? Don't I say so? Aren't your fingers numb 
 where 
 They've felt the home-returning wanderer's grip? 
 Sit down? I will. 
 
 Put my umbrella somewhere 
 Where it won't drip. 
 
 My book — that parcel — thanks ! What is it ? Mrs. 
 
 Barbauld's — no, I mean, Plato's Nursery 
 Rhymes — 
 Burton's Anat — oh, never mind it! This is 
 Just like old times. 
 
 197 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Thank you, I ivill take something. No, not whiskey. 
 I've cut that — oh dear, yes, of course! from 
 choice. 
 One lemonade ! Jove ! I feel younger — frisky — 
 One of the boys. 
 
 Give an account? Oh, I've been quite the rover 
 These two years — yes, I've only just got home. 
 Set out in April. Roughish passage over. 
 Went first to Rome. 
 
 I stayed in Paris longer than I meant to: 
 
 (I had to break the trip there coming back 
 From Rome.) Bonn was the next place that I went 
 to- 
 Met you there. Jack. 
 
 You, with an ancient relative and a Murray — 
 Relative's dead? I hope he ... . ? Ah, that's 
 right ! 
 I say, what made you leave in such a hurry, 
 On Christmas night? 
 
 I got engaged that last week in December. 
 
 — Didn't you meet the Carletons in Bordeaux? 
 You knew the girls. Mine's Florry. You remem- 
 ber — 
 
 The blonde, you know. 
 
 You — what ? God bless me ! And you were refused, 
 eh? 
 
 198 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 Of course you were. That's why you looked so 
 blue 
 That Christmas? Ya-as ! I called the following 
 Tuesday. 
 
 Sorry for you. 
 Hope, though, since then, some fair maid has con- 
 soled you? 
 
 No? Deuce you say. Poor fellow, that's too bad. 
 My wife — 
 
 Of course I am! Hadn't I told you? 
 I thought I had. 
 
 Ah, boys ! These pleasant memories stealing o'er 
 me — 
 I think I will take a Cabana now. 
 Thank you, old man. . . . 
 
 You'll have to roll it for me — 
 I forget how. 
 
 Well, this is pleasant. 'Bacco, tales vivacious, 
 And beer. From youth's free spring once more I 
 quaff, 
 A wild Bohemian. 
 
 Five o'clock ? Good — gracious ! 
 So much? I'm off ! 
 
 No, positively can't. My wife — my dinner. 
 Always in, evenings ; people sometimes call. 
 (Here, Jack ! one word — no grudge against the 
 winner? 
 
 Shake!) 
 
 Good-bye, all ! 
 199 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 And — I suppose my small domestic heaven 
 
 Wouldn't much interest you? If it did — 
 Fellows ! come up next Sunday — tea at seven — 
 And .... 
 
 see .... 
 
 my kid. 
 [Quick Curtain.] 
 
 As these specimens of his stanzas indi- 
 cate, the editor of Puck contributed to its 
 columns verses of various kinds, sometimes 
 broadly comic, sometimes delicately play- 
 ful. His range included "comic copy" 
 neatly rhymed and also the more fanciful 
 vers de societe. As an example of this 
 more difficult variety may be taken the 
 sequence of couplets which he called 'In- 
 teresting' : 
 
 I rowed her out on the broad bright sea, 
 Till the land lay purple upon our lee. 
 
 The heavens were trying the waves to outshine, 
 With never a cloud to the far sea-line. 
 
 On the reefs the billows in kisses broke — 
 But oh, I was dying for one small smoke. 
 
 She spoke of the gulls and the waters green — 
 But what is nature to Nicotine? 
 200 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 She spoke of the tides, and the Triton myth ; 
 And said Jones was engaged to the blonde Miss 
 Smith. 
 
 She spoke of her liking lemon on clams ; 
 And Euclid, and parallelograms. 
 
 For her face was fair and her eyes were brown, 
 And she was a girl from Boston town. 
 
 And I rowed and thought — but I never said — 
 "Does Havana tobacco trouble your head?" 
 
 She talked of algae — she talked of sand — 
 And I thought : "Tobacco you cannot stand." 
 
 She talked of the ocean-steamers' speed — 
 And I yearned for a whiflf of the wicked weed. 
 
 And at last I spoke, between fright and fret: 
 "Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette?" 
 
 She dropped her eyes on the ocean's blue, 
 
 And said: "Would you mind if / smoked too?" 
 
 Not all of his ^'ers de societe were con- 
 tributed to Puck; many of them were pub- 
 lished by the Century, which was then 
 known as Scribner's Monthly. Among 
 these was one poem which "went the rounds 
 
 201 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 of the papers" when it first appeared, but 
 which has since dropped out of sight, since 
 its author refrained from reprinting it; 'In 
 a Paris Restaurant' : 
 
 I gaze, while thrills my heart with patriot pride, 
 
 Upon the exquisite skin, rose-flushed and creamy; 
 The perfect little head ; on either side 
 
 Blonde waves. The dark eyes, vaguely soft and 
 dreamy, 
 Hold for a space my judgment in eclipse, 
 
 Until with half a pout, supremely dainty, 
 "He's real mean" — slips from out the strawberry 
 lips — 
 
 "Oh, ain't he?" 
 
 This at her escort, youthful, black-moustached 
 
 And diamond-studded — this reproof, whereat he 
 Is not to any great extent abashed. 
 
 (That youth's from "Noo Orleens" or "Cincin- 
 natty," 
 I'm sure.) But she — those dark eyes doubtful 
 strike 
 Her sherbet-ice .... Won't touch it. . . . Is in- 
 duced to. 
 Result: "I'd sooner eat Mince-Pie, Jim, like 
 We used to." 
 
 While then my too-soon-smitten soul recants, 
 I hear her friend discoursing with much feeling 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 Of tailors, and a garment he calls "pants." 
 I note into her eyes a softness stealing — 
 A shade of thought upon her low, sweet brow — 
 She hears him not — I swear, I could have cried 
 here — 
 The escort nudges her — she starts, and — "How? 
 The t'deer !" 
 
 This was the finishing and final touch. 
 I rose, and took no further observation. 
 I love my country "just about" as much — 
 
 I have for it as high a veneration — 
 As a man whose fathers fought for liberty. 
 
 Whose veins conduct the blood of Commodore 
 Perry, can. 
 But she was quite too very awfully 
 American. 
 
 To this magazine was also contributed 
 a group of poems in the fixed forms which 
 the younger versifiers of that day had just 
 imported from France via England. The 
 pathetic little triolet on a 'Pitcher of 
 Mignonette,' the rondels 'She was a Beauty' 
 and 'Ready for the Ride,' a rondeau or 
 two, he preserved in his first volume of 
 verse; but the most daring of them all, a 
 triumphant chant-royal, always seemed to 
 203 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 him to be too broadly humorous to be 
 worthy of inclusion among his other poems, 
 and yet in no other chant-royal in English 
 have the difficulties of the form been more 
 ingeniously or more successfully overcome. 
 He gave it a flambuoyant title, 'Behold the 
 Deeds' : 
 
 [Being the Plaint of Adolphe Culpepper Ferguson, 
 Salesman of Fancy Notions, held in durance of his 
 Landlady for a "failure to connect" on Saturday 
 night.] 
 
 I. 
 
 I would that all men my hard case might know, 
 
 How grievously I suffer for no sin : 
 I, Adolphe Culpepper Ferguson, for lo ! 
 
 I of my landlady am locked in, 
 For being short on this sad Saturday, 
 Nor having shekels of silver wherewith to pay : 
 She has turned and is departed with my key ; 
 Wherefore, not even as other boarders free, 
 
 I sing (as prisoners to their dungeon-stones 
 When for ten days they expiate a spree) ; 
 
 Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones! 
 
 II. • 
 
 One night and one day have I wept my woe ; 
 Nor wot I, when the morrow doth begin, 
 
 2C4 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 If I shall have to write to Briggs & Co., 
 To pray them to advance the requisite tin 
 For ransom of their salesman, that he may 
 Go forth as other boarders go alway — 
 
 As those I hear now flocking from their tea, 
 Led by the daughter of my landlady 
 
 Piano-ward. This day, for all my moans, 
 Dry bread and water have been served me. 
 
 Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones ! 
 
 in. 
 
 Miss Amabel Jones is musical, and so 
 
 The heart of the young he-boarder doth win, 
 Playing "The Maiden's Prayer," adagio — 
 
 That fetcheth him, as fetcheth the "bunko skin" 
 The innocent rustic. For my part, I pray : 
 That Badarjewska maid may wait for aye 
 Ere sits she with a lover, as did we 
 Once sit together, Amabel ! Can it be 
 
 That all that arduous wooing not atones 
 For Saturday shortness of trade dollars three? 
 
 Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Yea ! she forgets the arm that was wont to go 
 Around her waist. She wears a buckle, whose 
 pin 
 Galleth the crook of the young man's elbow. 
 / forget not, for I that youth have been. 
 Smith was aforetime the Lothario gay. 
 Yet once, I mind me. Smith was forced to stay 
 205 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Close in his room. Not calm, as I, was he; 
 But his noise brought no pleasaunce, verily. 
 
 Small ease he gat of playing on the bones 
 Or hammering on his stove-pipe, that I see. 
 
 Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones! 
 
 V. 
 
 Thou, for whose fear the figurative crow 
 
 I eat, accursed be thou and all thy kin ! 
 Thee will I show up — yea, up will I show 
 Thy too thick buckwheats, and thy tea too thin. 
 Ay ! here I dare thee, ready for the fray : 
 Thou dost not "keep a first-class house," I say f 
 It dost not with the advertisements agree. 
 Thou lodgest a Briton with a puggaree. 
 
 And thou hast harbored Jacobses and Cohns, 
 Also a Mulligan. Thus denounce I thee ! 
 Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones! 
 
 Boarders ! the worst I have not told to ye : 
 She hath stolen my trousers, that I may not flee 
 
 Privily by the window. Hence these groans. 
 There is no fleeing in a robe de nuit. 
 
 Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones ! 
 
 Bunner's literary executor, the friend 
 with whom he had written 'In Partner- 
 ship' and to whom he had dedicated 'Airs 
 206 
 
UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 
 
 from Arcady,' made a choice from the 
 verses which had not been published when 
 the poet died and also from a brilliant 
 series of 'Ballads of the Town,' which had 
 been contributed from time to time, to the 
 pages of Puck; and these winnowed lyrics 
 were appended to the definitive edition of 
 Bunner's 'Poems,' a single volume which in- 
 cluded both 'Airs from Arcady' and 
 'Rowen: Second-Crop Songs.' But none 
 of the poems, grave or gay, which the 
 author himself had seen fit to reject him- 
 self, were allowed to find a place in this 
 final volume, by which he will be judged 
 in the future. Yet these outcast verses 
 are not unworthy of their writer; and it 
 has seemed a pity to let them slip into the 
 swift oblivion of the back-number. They 
 may be rescued here, even though they 
 must not ever be included in the book 
 which bears the poet's own name. After 
 all, the author ought to have some rights, 
 and he ought to be able to pick and choose 
 those of his own writings by which he is 
 207 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 willing to be judged. His feeling has been 
 finely phrased by Mr. Aldrich : 
 
 Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line, 
 
 Take all, take nothing, — and God send thee cheer ! 
 But my anathema on thee and thine 
 
 If thou add'st aught to what is printed here! 
 
 (1896). 
 
 208 
 
XI 
 
 THE STRANGEST FEAT OF 
 MODERN MAGIC 
 
 IN the extremely interesting address of 
 Dr. Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., as pres- 
 ident of the Society for Psychical 
 Research, which is printed in the 
 proceedings of the Society for March, 
 1902, there is a careful scientific considera- 
 tion of various alleged occurrences which 
 seem to be contrary to the laws of nature as 
 we now understand them. Professor Lodge 
 discusses the proper attitude of a man of 
 science toward these alleged phenomena; 
 and he deplores the inveterate antagonism 
 between orthodox science and the accumu- 
 lating evidence that certain phenomena do 
 occur now and again which seem to be con- 
 trary to natural custom. He explains this 
 antagonism as due to the fact that "Science 
 209 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 has a horror of the unintelligible; it can 
 make nothing of a capricious and disor- 
 derly agent, and it prefers to Ignore the ex- 
 istence of any such," 
 
 But the attempt to ignore is in itself un- 
 scientific. It is the duty of Science to know 
 — to know all that is to be known — and 
 continually to extend the boundaries of 
 knowledge, even though it is unable always 
 to explain the immediate cause of every fact 
 that it records. 
 
 Then Professor Lodge dismisses as un- 
 proved a host of alleged wonders of one 
 kind or another, and he declares that full 
 allowance must be made for "the ingenious 
 and able impositions of a conjurer." He 
 asserts that some of the psychical phenom- 
 ena proclaimed to have occurred "bear a 
 perilous resemblance to conjuring tricks," 
 which can be very deceptive. He warns us 
 that extreme caution is necessary, and full 
 control must be allowed to the observers. 
 He insists, moreover, that in so far as those 
 professing to perform wonders demand 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 their own conditions they must be content 
 to be teated as conjurers. 
 
 There is one marvel wrought by the 
 greatest of modern conjurers of which we 
 have a true record, left us by the performer 
 himself, who has told us what it was that he 
 seemed to do, but who has not explained 
 how he was able to accomplish the extra- 
 ordinary feat. Robert-Houdin was the 
 creator of the latter-day methods of mod- 
 ern magic; he was the inventor of many of 
 the most ingenious and novel illusions, in- 
 cluding the intricate and puzzling exhibi- 
 tion known as "second-sight." He defined 
 himself as "a comedian playing the charac- 
 ter of a magician." Late in life he wrote 
 an account of his many adventures; and 
 these "Confidences of a Prestidigitator" are 
 worthy of comparison with all but the very 
 best autobiographies — if not with Cellini's 
 and Franklin's, at least with Cibber's and 
 Goldoni's. Robert-Houdin's life of him- 
 self, quite as well as any of the others, 
 would justify Longfellow's assertion that 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 "autobiography is what biography ought 
 to be." 
 
 The special feat of Robert-Houdin's 
 which has been mentioned was devised by 
 him for exhibition in a palace and before a 
 king — circumstances which exclude all sug- 
 gestion of collusion or confederacy on the 
 part of the audience. He tells us that in 
 1846 he was summoned to the Palace of 
 Saint-Cloud to give a performance before 
 Louis Philippe and the royal family. He 
 had six days to make all his arrangements, 
 and he invented one new trick for the occa- 
 sion — a trick which could not possibly have 
 been performed under any other circum- 
 stances. He tells us that early on the ap- 
 pointed morning a wagon from the royal 
 stables came to fetch him (and his son, who 
 assisted him), and to convey all his varied 
 paraphernalia. A stage had been set up in 
 one of the large saloons of the palace, the 
 windows of which opened out on the broad 
 and beautiful gardens, with their double 
 rows of orange-trees, each growing in its 
 212 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 square box on wheels. A sentry was placed 
 at the door to see that the conjurer was not 
 disturbed In his preparations. The King 
 himself dropped in once to ask the enter- 
 tainer if he had everything necessary. 
 
 At four o'clock in the afternoon, the 
 King and the Queen, the members of the 
 royal family, and a certain number of 
 invited guests had assembled. The cur- 
 tains were parted; and Robert-Houdin 
 began to amuse and to puzzle his 
 distinguished audience. He reserved for 
 the end of his programme the so- 
 called second-sight in which the son, blind- 
 folded on the stage, named one after an- 
 other all the objects which came into the 
 father's hands, and even described them at 
 length, giving the dates on coins and the 
 inscriptions on watches. It was almost at 
 the end of the programme, and just before 
 the exhibition of second-sight, that Robert- 
 Houdin accomplished the equally astonish- 
 ing trick which he had invented for the oc- 
 casion. In setting forth this feat we can 
 213 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 follow his own accurate but summary ac- 
 count in the autobiography. 
 
 He began by borrowing half a dozen 
 handkerchiefs from his noble spectators. 
 These he took back to the stage and made 
 into a package, which he left upon his table. 
 Then he came down again among the audi- 
 ence with a pack of blank visiting-cards in 
 his hand. He distributed these here and 
 there among the spectators, requesting 
 every one who received a card to write the 
 name of a place where he or she would like 
 the handkerchiefs to be conveyed instantly 
 and invisibly. When a sufficient number 
 of these cards had been written to Insure a 
 large variety of choice, Robert-Houdin 
 gathered them up and went over to Louis 
 Philippe, 
 
 The conjurer asked the King to pick out 
 three cards and then to decide to which of 
 the three places designated thereon he de- 
 sired to have the handkerchiefs transported. 
 
 "Let us see," said the monarch, as he 
 looked at the first card he had taken. Then 
 214 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 he read, "I desire that the handkerchiefs 
 should be found under one of the candela- 
 bra on the chimney." The King looked up 
 and said, "That is too easy for a sorcerer." 
 So he read the writing on the second card, 
 "that the handkerchiefs should be carried 
 to the dome of the Invalides." With his 
 customary shrewdness the King commented 
 on this, saying that it might suit if it was 
 not a great deal too far away, "not for the 
 handkerchiefs — but for us." 
 
 Finally, Louis Philippe glanced at the 
 third card, which he did not read aloud at 
 once, as he had read the others. 
 
 "Ah, ha!" he said, "I'm rather afraid 
 that this would puzzle you ! Do you know 
 what it proposes?" 
 
 "Will your majesty be kind enough to 
 inform me?" answered Robert-Houdin. 
 
 "This card," answered the monarch, 
 "expresses the wMsh that you should cause 
 the handkerchiefs to pass inside the box in 
 which an orange-tree is growing, the last 
 one on the right." 
 
 215 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 Robert-Houdin answered, promptly, "Is 
 that all. Sire? Give the order and I will 
 obey." 
 
 "So be it," Louis Philippe responded; 
 "I shall not be sorry to see a deed of magic. 
 So I choose the box of the orange-tree." 
 
 Then the King whispered an order or 
 two, and several persons ran out promptly 
 into the garden and stationed themselves 
 about the orange-tree — "guarding against 
 any fraud," as Robert-Houdin himself 
 puts it. 
 
 The magician went back on the stage, 
 and, putting the package of handkerchiefs 
 on the centre of his table, he covered it with 
 a ground-glass bowl. Then, taking his 
 wand, he tapped on the bowl and bade the 
 handkerchiefs begone to their appointed 
 place. When he lifted the glass the little 
 package had disappeared; and in its stead 
 there was a white turtle-dove with a ribbon 
 about its neck. 
 
 At this moment the King went swiftly to 
 the glass door, through which he could see 
 216 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 out into the garden; he wanted to make 
 sure that his messengers were keeping faith- 
 ful guard over the orange-tree. 
 
 Turning to the conjurer with an ironic 
 smile, he said: "Ah, Monsieur le Sorcicr, 
 I'm doubtful about the virtue of your magic 
 wand!" 
 
 Then the King gave orders to call the 
 master-gardener and to tell him to open the 
 box of the orange-tree at the end of the 
 row on the right. 
 
 The master-gardener came immediately; 
 and although greatly astonished at the 
 order, he began work at once on the 
 front of the box. Soon he had removed 
 one of the upright panels of which it was 
 composed. 
 
 Apparently he found the soil undisturb- 
 ed, as he inserted his hand carefully in 
 among the roots of the growing tree with- 
 out discovering anything. 
 
 Suddenly a cry of surprise broke from 
 him ; and he withdrew his hand, holding a 
 small iron casket eaten with rust. 
 217 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 This strange treasure-trove, scraped clean 
 of the soil that incrusted it, was brought in 
 and placed on a little table near the King. 
 
 "Well, monsieur," cried Louis Philippe, 
 with a movement of impatient curiosity, 
 "here's a box. Are the handkerchiefs con- 
 tained in that, by some strange chance?" 
 
 "Yes, Sire," the conjurer replied, with 
 assurance. "They are there — and they 
 have been there for a very long while !" 
 
 "A long while?" returned the monarch; 
 "how can that be, as it is not a quarter of 
 an hour since the handkerchiefs were given 
 to you?" 
 
 "I cannot deny that. Sire," responded the 
 magician; "but where would the magic be 
 if I could not accomplish things absolutely 
 incomprehensible? No doubt, your maj- 
 esty will be even more surprised when I 
 prove beyond all question that this casket 
 and what it contains were deposited in the 
 box of the orange-tree sixty years ago !" 
 
 "I should like to be able to take your 
 word for It," said the King, smiling; "but 
 218 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 really I cannot do that. In a case like this 
 I shall insist on proof." 
 
 "If your majesty will only open the iron 
 casket," returned the conjurer, "you will 
 find therein abundant proof of what I have 
 asserted." 
 
 "Before I can open the casket, I must 
 have the key," objected the monarch. 
 
 "You can have the key. Sire, whenever 
 you please," explained the magician. "You 
 have only to detach it from the neck of the 
 turtle-dove." 
 
 Louis Philippe untied the ribbon which 
 was around the neck of the bird, and which 
 held a little rusty key. With this the King 
 hastily opened the casket. 
 
 The first object that presented itself to 
 the eyes of the monarch was a parchment. 
 He took it up and opened it. This is what 
 he read: 
 
 ^''To-day, June 6, 1786. 
 ^^This iron box, containing six handker- 
 chiefs, was placed within the roots of an 
 2ig 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 orange-tree by me, Balsamo, Count Cagli- 
 ostro, to be used in the accomplishing of an 
 act of magic, which shall be performed 
 sixty years from to-day, before Louis Phi- 
 lippe and his family." 
 
 "Decidedly," remarked the monarch, 
 now even more astonished, "this smacks of 
 witchcraft. Nothing is lacking, since both 
 the signature and seal of the celebrated sor- 
 cerer are here at the bottom of this docu- 
 ment, which, God forgive me, seems to 
 smell of sulphur." 
 
 To this gracious pleasantry of the sov- 
 ereign the courtiers paid the proper tribute 
 of laughter. 
 
 Then the King took from out the box a 
 carefully sealed package of parchment. 
 
 "Is it possible," he asked, "that the 
 handkerchiefs are wrapped in this?" 
 
 "Indeed, Sire, that is where they are," 
 answered Robert-Houdin. "But before 
 opening I beg that your majesty will note 
 that the package is also sealed with the seal 
 of Count Cagliostro." 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 "Certainly," said the monarch, looking 
 twice at the red wax with its firm impres- 
 sion. "It is the same." 
 
 And immediately the King, impatient to 
 discover the contents of the packet, tore it 
 open, and spread out before the spectators 
 the six handkerchiefs which the conjurer 
 had borrowed only a few minutes earlier. 
 
 This is the account Robert-Houdin him- 
 self gives; and it may be well to record that 
 he always bore the reputation of being a 
 truthful man. Nothing more extraordinary 
 was ever performed by any mere conjurer; 
 indeed, this feat is quite as startling as any 
 of those attributed to Cagliostro himself, 
 and it has the advantage of being accurately 
 and precisely narrated by the inventor. Not 
 only is the thing done a seeming impossi- 
 bility, but it stands forth the more impres- 
 sively because of the spectacular circum- 
 stances of its performance — a stately pal- 
 ace, a lovely garden, the assembled cour- 
 tiers and the royal family. The magician 
 had to depend on his wits alone, for he was 
 
 221 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 deprived of all the advantages of his own 
 theatre and of all possibility of aid from a 
 confederate mingled amid the casual specta- 
 tors. 
 
 Robert-Houdin was justified in the gentle 
 pride with which he told how he had thus 
 astonished the King of the French. He re- 
 frained from any explanation of the means 
 whereby he wrought his mystery, believing 
 that what is unknown is ever the more mag- 
 nificent. He did no more than drop a hint 
 or two, telling the reader that he had long 
 possessed a cast of Cagliostro's seal, and 
 suggesting slyly that when the King sent 
 messengers out into the garden to stand 
 guard over the orange-tree the trick was al- 
 ready done, and all precautions were then 
 futile. 
 
 Yet, although the inventor«chose to keep 
 his secret, any one who has mastered the 
 principles of the art of magic can venture 
 an explanation. Robert-Houdin has set 
 forth the facts honestly ; and with the facts 
 solidly established it is possible to reason 
 
 222 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 out the method employed to accomplish a 
 deed which, at first sight, seems not only 
 impossible but incomprehensible. 
 
 The first point to be emphasized is that 
 Robert-Houdin was as dexterous as he was 
 ingenious. He was truly a prestidigitator, 
 capable of any sleight-of-hand. Nothing 
 was simpler for so accomplished a per- 
 former than the substitution of one package 
 for another, right before the eyes of all the 
 spectators. And it is to be remembered 
 that although the palace was the King's the 
 apparatus on the extemporized stage was 
 the magician's. Therefore, when he bor- 
 rowed six handkerchiefs and went up on the 
 stage and made them up into a package, 
 which remained on a table in sight of every- 
 body, we can grant without difficulty that 
 the package which remained in sight did 
 not then contain the borrowed handker- 
 chiefs. 
 
 In fact, we may be sure that the borrow- 
 ed handkerchiefs had been conveyed some- 
 how to Robert-Houdin's son, who acted as 
 
 223 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 his assistant. When the handkerchiefs were 
 once in the possession of the son out of 
 sight behind the scenery or hangings of the 
 stage, the father would pick up his pack of 
 blank visiting-cards and distribute a dozen 
 of them or a score, moving to and fro in 
 very leisurely fashion, perhaps going back 
 to the stage to get pencils, which he would 
 also give out as slowly as possible, filling up 
 the time with playful pleasantry, until he 
 should again catch sight of his son. Then, 
 and not until then, would he feel at liberty 
 to collect the cards and take them over to 
 the King. 
 
 When the son had got possession of the 
 handkerchiefs, he would smooth them 
 swiftly, possibly even ironing them into 
 their folds. Then he would put them into 
 the parchment packet, which he would seal 
 twice with Cagliostro's seal. Laying them 
 in the bottom of the rusty iron casket, 
 he would put on top the other parchment, 
 which had already been prepared, with its 
 adroit imitation of Cagliostro's handwrit- 
 224 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 
 
 ing. Snapping down the lid of the casket, 
 the lad would slip out into the corridor and 
 steal into the garden, going straight to the 
 box of the appointed orange-tree. He 
 could do this unobserved, because no one 
 was then suspecting him, and because all 
 the spectators were then engaged in think- 
 ing up odd places to which the handker- 
 chiefs might be transported. Already, in 
 the long morning, probably while the royal 
 household was at its midday breakfast, the 
 father or the son had loosened one of the 
 staples in the back of the box in which the 
 designated orange-tree was growing. The 
 lad now removed this staple and thrust the 
 casket into the already-prepared hole in the 
 centre of the roots of the tree. Then he re- 
 placed the staple at the back of the box, 
 feeling certain that whoever should open 
 the box in front would find the soil undis- 
 turbed. This most difficult part of the task 
 once accomplished, he returned to the stage, 
 or at least in some way he signified to his 
 father that he had accomplished his share 
 225 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 of the wonder, in the performance of which 
 he was not supposed to have any part. 
 
 On seeing his son, or on receiving the sig- 
 nal that his son had returned, Robert-Hou- 
 din would feel himself at liberty to collect 
 the cards on which various spectators had 
 written the destinations they proposed for 
 the package of handkerchiefs, which was 
 still in full sight. He gathered up the cards 
 he had distributed; but as he went toward 
 the King he substituted for those written by 
 the spectators others previously prepared 
 by himself — a feat of sleight-of-hand quite 
 within the reach of any ordinary performer. 
 Of these cards, prepared by himself, he 
 forced three on the sovereign; — and the 
 forcing of cards upon a kindly monarch 
 would present little difficulty to a presti- 
 digitator of Robert-Houdin's consummate 
 skill. 
 
 When the three cards were once in the 
 
 King's hands, the trick was done, for Rob- 
 
 ert-Houdin knew Louis Philippe to be a 
 
 shrewd man in small matters. Therefore, it 
 
 226 
 
STRANGEST FEAT OI^ MODERN MAGIC 
 
 was reasonably certain that when the King 
 had to make a choice out of three places, 
 one near and easy, a second remote and diffi- 
 cult, and a third both near and difficult, 
 Louis Philippe would surely select the 
 third, which was conveniently at hand, and 
 which seemed to be at least as impossible as 
 either of the others. 
 
 The event proved that the conjurer's 
 analysis of the King's character was accu- 
 rate; yet one may venture the opinion that 
 the magician had taken every needed pre- 
 caution to avoid failure, even if the mon- 
 arch had made another selection. Proba- 
 bly Robert-Houdin had one little parch- 
 ment packet hidden in advance somewhere 
 in the dome of the Invalides and another 
 tucked up out of sight in the base of one of 
 the candelabra on the chimney-piece; and if 
 either of the other destinations had been 
 chosen, the substitute packet would have 
 been produced, and the magician would 
 then have offered to transport it also into 
 the box of the orange-tree. And thus the 
 '227 
 
RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 
 
 startling climax of the marvel would have 
 been only a little delayed. 
 
 When so strange a wonder can be 
 wrought under such circumstances by means 
 so simple, we cannot but feel the force of 
 Dr. Lodge's warning that an unwavering 
 scepticism ought to be the attitude of all 
 honest investigators toward every one who 
 professes to be able to suspend the opera- 
 tion of a custom of nature. No one of the 
 feats attributed to Home, the celebrated 
 medium who plied his trade in Paris during 
 the Second Empire, was more abnormal 
 than this trick of Robert-Houdin's, and no 
 one of them is so well authenticated. It 
 may be that certain of the customs of nature 
 are not inexorable, and that we shall 
 be able to discover exceptions now and 
 again. But the proof of any alleged excep- 
 tion, the evidence in favor of any alleged 
 violation of the custom of nature, ought to 
 be overwhelming. 
 
 (1902). 
 
 THE END. 
 
 228 
 
AUG JU 8S04