1 a S EDITED B SEYMOUR E ws- SR-WALTER SCO 9/ POPULAR STUDIES IN LITERATURE HOME STUDY CIRCLE EDITED BY SEYMOUR EATON LITERATURE I. ROBERT BURNS II. SIR WALTER SCOTT III. LORD BYRON From The Chicago Record New York The Doubleday & McClure Co. 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1897, 1898, 1899, BY THE CHICAGO RECORD. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY VICTOR F. LAWSON. C. J. PETERS & SON, TYPOGRAPHERS, BOSTON. INTRODUCTORY STUDY. IN the study of all human effort it is the personal element that is the most interesting. It is also the most fructifying. This is the justification of biography. This is the reason why, in the study of literature for example, so much of the work is rightfully the study of the lives and characters of authors. We recognize the truth of the principle instinctively. We feel readily enough that we are not so much con- cerned in knowing the characteristics of a great man's greatness, the limitations of it, the history of it, as we are in knowing what sort of man it was who was great. We want to know how the qualities to which his great- ness was due comported with the other qualities that he had. In plain words, we want to see how nearly the individual characteristics of a great man are like the characteristics of common humanity. It is the universal instinct of self -betterment that prompts this feeling. We know well that the inspira- tion of a great example is possible only when it seems possible. That it may seem possible it must proceed from a life not wholly unlike our own. The example of a great life would be valueless to us if that life were so unlike our own as to have nothing in common with it. Burns, Scott, and Byron were all great men ; and in vii M41925 Vlll INTRODUCTORY STUDY. the lives of every one of the three there is an inspiration for any one that seeks it. But the inspiration to be derived from the life of Burns is far greater than that to be derived from the lives of the other two. Why ? Because we instinctively recognize in Burns a great human heart, that is to say, a heart throbbing in com- plete unison with the great common heart of humanity. " He was touched with the feeling of our infirmities," could this be said of any human being if not of Burns ? Who can read his life without tears tears of sym- pathy and sorrow welling up at almost every turn in the story ? Intrinsically so noble, and yet by the stress of his environment, and by mistakes of judgment and of conduct, condemned to a life that had so much that was ignoble in it. How typical of the life so many have to live ! It was the fashion, for some fifty years or more, for the world strongly to condemn Burns. But that fashion has passed away. The world has forgiven him. Not a fault or a failing but has been forgiven to him richly. And this not by reason of any newly developed loose- ness of judgment or newly developed laxity of principle ; but because the world has recognized in him a heart that, had years been granted him, would have turned out all right : " Wha does the utmost that he can, Will whyles do main" Scott was born under a brighter star. Inherited ten- dencies, parental influences, education, social advantages, character, disposition, mental endowment, the circum- stances of his environment and his existence generally, INTRODUCTORY STUDY. ix all led up to the realization of a great success. In scarcely any other than one thing, in all his life, did Scott fail to make the most of himself and his chances. But had not that one mistake been made, had not Scott entangled himself in the business of printing and publishing, and so in the end brought ruin upon his fine fabric of realized hopes and dreams, who will say that his life would have had the same interest for posterity, or that his fame would have endured so perpetually re- splendent in all its pristine wonder of brilliancy and power ? Even without our knowing it, our judgment of the poet and the romancist is influenced by our appre- ciation of the character of the man in whom the poet and the romancist were existent. We cannot even think of Scott without thinking of the heroic fortitude of him who at fifty-five years of age sat down to write off by the earnings of his pen a debt of $750,000 ! For Scott we have nothing but admiration and won- der ; but for Byron, as for Burns, there must always be pity. The pity, however, proceeds not from so deep or so general a spring. Every heart finds in Burns an answering throb of tenderness and brotherhood : " Should auld acquaintance be forgot And never brought to min'? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And the days of auld lang syne ? " For a' that, and a' that, Our toils obscure and a' that, The rank is but the guinea stamp The man ! s the gowd for a 1 that." X INTRODUCTORY STUDY. But Byron's freedom-loving spirit is frequently a thing of books and culture, and his sentiment the utterance of a feeling wholly personal to himself without even the suggestion of a general application : " Arouse ye Goths and glut your ire." " A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine Dash down your cup of Samian wine." " Teach me too early taught by thee ! To bear, forgiving and forgiven : On earth thy love was such to me It fain would form my hope in heaven." Besides, there was a note of unreality in Byron. His griefs, his sorrows, his despairs, were melodramatic. His loving was hyperbolical and effusive. Even his passion- ate utterances for freedom lacked " the one thing need- ful," the air of conviction. It was only in his satire - his on-rushing, over-rushing, everywhere-pervading floods of invective and denunciation, glowing with fiery wit and sarcasm as waves of the sea are at times lit up by sunlight that Byron appeared in his own true, unap- proachable self. Yet when he was in this mood, his mind was not always at its sanest. But it was always at its mightiest. But despite the unreality and the putting forward of himself as an object of commiseration, and the bookish- ness of his rhapsodies on liberty, freedom, etc., there was nevertheless much in Byron that was genuinely true and honest ; much, too, that, if considered well, still merits our sympathy. The stars ran evil in their courses the day of his nativity. That he was not a far worse INTRODUCTORY STUDY. XI man than he was is no fault of those who were respon- sible for his birth and being. If we see things in his character and conduct that we would condemn, we must remember that, had not nature been resisted by genius, the probabilities all are that Byron's life would have been wholly trivial and self-indulgent. The truth remains, then, that to understand Byron aright, precisely as to understand Burns aright, it is necessary to understand the man's life, the man's inher- ited disposition and tendencies, the man's character and personality, and the circumstances under which he lived his life. Almost every poem that Byron wrote was a revelation of personal feeling or experience. Knowing this, and knowing, too, how much he had to bear that was no burden of his own making, we can but read him with our hearts open to his moods, matching our own moods to his as best we may. With Scott how all this is different ! Scott is almost as free from personal moods as Shakespeare. Whether he be in prose or verse, at every turn we take we feel that we are in the charge of sanity and discretion. We may 'resign our individual judgments if we will, for we may be sure we shall never be called upon to give ear to thoughts other than the noblest and the purest. It is a natural and not altogether profitless question to enquire : Of the three, Burns, Scott, and Byron, which is the greatest ? Scott and Byron have certainly filled the greater places in literary history. Scott, the founder of the modern historical romance, the unap- proachable reproducer of historical place, time, and Xll INTRODUCTORY STUDY. event, the creator of characters as many and as real as those Shakespeare ushered into the world, is without doubt one of the very greatest names in literary history. Byron's name is not nearly so great, yet, even so, his greatness is considerable. He will remain a star of the first magnitude to all time. As a poet he far surpassed Scott, not merely in immediate popularity, but also in range of theme and variety of composition. He will never again be so popular as he once was, but time cannot wither the laurels that are rightfully his due for some of his descriptive and reflective pieces, and espe- cially for his satire. Satire is not a high kind of poetry ; but such as it is, in certain qualities of it Byron is supreme. Poor Burns' achievement was smaller, much smaller, than either Scott's or Byron's, even if Scott's prose work be dropped out of account. A few poetical epis- tles, a few satires, a few occasional pieces, and his songs that was all. His was no lettered ease, or life of professional dignity and comfort. Working on his farm at the plough's tail, or hedging, ditching, scything, flailing ; or toiling at his excise work journeying four hundred miles on horseback fortnightly what little he conceived could come to him only in flashes of inspi- ration, to be afterwards put down by pen and ink in snatches of time stolen from needful rest. But as to that little what shall we say of it ? What can we say of it, except that much of it is the human intellect's choicest mintage ? A thousand years from now, amid the stress of all the interests that will occupy the world's attention at that date, who will be able to read " Childe Harold," or INTRODUCTORY STUDY. xili even " Don Juan " ? A thousand years from now, who, indeed, will ever find time to read " The Lady of the Lake " or " Ivanhoe " ; or even " Kenilworth " or " Old Mortality ' ' ? And yet may we not safely say that such songs as " Ae fond kiss and then we sever," or " O wert thou in the cauld blast," or "Thou lingering star with lessening ray," or " Ye banks and braes and streams around," or " Of a' the airts the winds can blaw," will be read and sung and treasured in memory's storehouse as the richest of her treasures, as long as our present civilization endures ? And why say this of these songs of Burns rather than of Byron's satires or of Scott's great romances ? Because Burns' songs deal simply and directly, yet beautifully and ennoblingly, with that primary passion of the human heart the love of man for woman, the love of woman for man. Until love itself shall die, and be cast out, these songs of love will endure. And we have no warrant for thinking that love in heart of man or woman will ever grow less strong or less pure than it is to-day. JOHN EBENEZER BRYANT. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTORY STUDY vii ROBERT BURNS. BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 3 SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES . . 33 THE HOME OF ROBERT BURNS ...... 59 READINGS FROM BURNS. THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 74. To A MOUNTAIN DAISY 79 MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN 81 THE BANKS o' DOON 86 TAM o' SHANTER 86 STUDENTS' NOTES AND QUERIES 96 STUDY OUTLINE FOR CLUBS AND CIRCLES .... 103 SIR WALTER SCOTT. BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 109 SIR WALTER SCOTT A TEN-MINUTE TALK .... 128 SCOTT'S POETRY 132 ABBOTSFORD : SCOTT'S HOME 140 CRITICAL STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES .... 149 SOME QUERIES AND ANSWERS 170 READINGS FROM SCOTT. SUNSET IN A STORM 173 DISCOVERY OF THE TOMB OF ROBERT THE BRUCE . . 174 THE PRAYER OF Louis THE ELEVENTH . . . . 177 BEFORE THE READING OF THE WILL . . . . 179 THE FISHERMAN'S FUNERAL 187 THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF FERGUS MAC-IVOR . . 196 SCOTT'S REFLECTIONS ON HIS OWN LIFE . . . . 203 ADDITIONAL READINGS 209 XVI CONTENTS. LORD BYRON. PAGE BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 215 CRITICAL STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES .... 243 READINGS FROM BYRON. MAID OF ATHENS, ERE WE PART 263 ON PARTING 264 FARE THEE WELL 264 EPISTLE TO AUGUSTA 266 WATERLOO 270 VENICE 272 ROME . 274 THE DYING GLADIATOR 275 THE COLISEUM THE PANTHEON 276 ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN 277 FIRST LOVE 279 DONNA JULIA'S LETTER 280 HAIDEE DISCOVERING JUAN 282 THE ISLES OF GREECE 284 STUDENTS' NOTES AND QUERIES 288 STUDY OUTLINE FOR CLUBS AND CIRCLES .... 293 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE PORTRAIT OF BURNS Frontispiece BURNS' COTTAGE, ALLOWAY 4 ROOM IN WHICH BURNS WAS BORN 5 TAM o' SHANTER INN, AYR 7 INTERIOR OF THE BURNS COTTAGE 7 ROBERT BURNS n MRS. BURNS (JEAN ARMOUR) 17 MRS. DUNLOP 23 HOUSE IN WHICH BURNS DIED, DUMFRIES .... 28 FLAXMAN'S STATUE OF BURNS 35 FACSIMILE OF A POEM BY BURNS 41 MAUSOLEUM OF BURNS 51 BURNS' MONUMENT, ALLOWAY 61 THE TWA BRIGS o' AYR 61 ALLOWAY KIRK AND BURIAL PLACE OF THE BURNS FAMILY . 63 THE AULD BRIG o' DOON 64 BURNS' MONUMENT, AYR 65 POOSIE NANSIE'S INN, MAUCHLINE STATION .... 69 BURNS' MONUMENT, EDINBURGH 71 STATUE OF BURNS, DUMFRIES 83 "YE BANKS AND BRAES o' BONNIE DOON" .... 87 SIR WALTER SCOTT 108 WALTER SCOTT IN 1777 in LADY SCOTT 115 ABBOTSFORD, FROM THE SOUTHEAST 121 THE ENTRANCE HALL, ABBOTSFORD 121 MELROSE ABBEY, FROM THE SOUTHEAST 133 THE SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE 134 XV111 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE THE TROSACHS 135 ROSLIN'S GLEN . I3 6 SIR WALTER SCOTT 137 MAP OF THE COUNTRY ABOUT EDINBURGH . . . . 140 ABBOTSFORD: THE GARDEN FRONT 142 THE DRAWING-ROOM AT ABBOTSFORD 143 SIR WALTER SCOTT'S ARMORY 143 THE LIBRARY AT ABBOTSFORD 146 LOCH KATRINE, ELLEN'S ISLE 156 THE CHANTREY BUST OF SCOTT 166 DRYBURGH ABBEY, FROM THE CLOISTER COURT . . . 167 SCOTT'S TOMB AT DRYBURGH ABBEY 167 DRYBURGH ABBEY, FROM THE EAST . . . . . . 176 SCOTT'S MONUMENT AT EDINBURGH 180 SIR WALTER SCOTT 188 PORTRAIT OF BYRON 214 NEWSTEAD ABBEY, THE ANCESTRAL HOME OF LORD BYRON . 216 NEWSTEAD ABBEY, FROM THE FRONT 219 LORD BYRON'S BEDROOM, NEWSTEAD ABBEY .... 223 THE DRAWING-ROOM, NEWSTEAD ABBEY 227 LADY BYRON 230 LORD BYRON 233 ARMS OF THE BYRON FAMILY 240 EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF LORD BYRON .... 247 THE VILLA DIODATI 252 FRANCISCAN CONVENT, ATHENS 254 THE MAID OF ATHENS 257 LORD BYRON'S TOMB . 260 CONTRIBUTORS TO THE HOME STUDY CIRCLE POPULAR STUDIES IN LITERATURE REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D. HAMILTON W. MABIE. COL. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON^_ EDWARD DOWDEN, Litt.D., D.C.L., LL.D. WILLIAM J. ROLFE, Litt.D. HIRAM CORSON, LL.D. BRANDER MATTHEWS, LL.D. JOHN EBENEZER BRYANT, M.A. THEODORE W. HUNT, Ph.D. ALBERT S. COOK, Ph.D., LL.D. 1 ISAAC N. DEMMON, A.M., LL.D. OSCAR LOVELL TRIGGS, Ph.D. LEWIS E. GATES, A.M. MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, LL.D. JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG, LL.D. JULIUS EMIL OLSON, B.L. JOSEPH VILLIERS DENNEY, A.M. ROBERT BURNS. ROBERT BURNS. BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY. BURNS is the world's greatest lyric poet. He is also the national poet of Scotland, the poet revered and loved by Scotsmen the wide world over. The genius of Burns for song writing was of the very highest order. For the writing of poetry of every sort it was of the highest order also, only, unfortunately, he gave to the world few proofs of his genius other than in songs. The story of his life is inexpressibly sad. The great powers with which he was endowed were only partially employed. Oftentimes, too, they were employed on themes unworthy of them. Oppressed with care and anxiety, defeated of hope, broken in health, broken also in courage and in fortitude to resist evil, he came to an untimely end ; and the last years of his life, years in the very prime of manhood, that should have been his happiest years and fruitful of the noblest accomplish- ment, were the saddest years of all, and fruitful of little but disappointment and sorrow. Robert Burns was born in a cottage (still standing) near " Alloway's haunted kirk," and the " Auld Brig o' Doon," about two miles from the town of Ayr, on Jan- 3 LITERA TURE. uary 25, 1759. His father, a man of Scotland's noblest type, had come from Kincardineshire, and was a gar- dener, and at the time of the poet's birth was making a livelihood by cultivating a small nursery garden. His BURNS' COTTAGE, ALLOWAY. mother, whom the poet much resembled both in features and in address, and whom he tenderly loved, was a woman also of the noblest type, who possessed an "inexhaustible store of ballads and traditionary tales," which she made the delightful entertainment of her gifted son during all his years of childhood and youth. When Burns was seven years old his father gave up his nursery garden, and took a farm two miles from the " Brig o' Doon," called Mount Oliphant. At Mount ROBERT BURNS. 5 Oliphant the family remained for eleven years, or until the poet was in his eighteenth year. The Mount Oli- phant farm, however, proved to be a very bottomless pit to the industry of its occupants. Not the consci- entious and zealous labors of the father, nor the over- worked strength of the young poet and his brother, nor ROOM IN WHICH BURNS WAS BORN. the frugal, self-denying endeavors of the mother, were of any avail in their long-continued struggle with its barren- ness. Burns afterward spoke of his toils at Mount Oli- phant as "the unceasing moil of a galley slave." But, worse, his constitution became irretrievably impaired in efforts as a lad to do the work of a man. The father, too, in his hopeless contest with his untoward lot, wore out his strength, and broke his health, In 1/77, how- 6 LITER A TURE. ever, the Mount Oliphant lease ran out, and the family removed to Lochlea, a farm on the north bank of the river Ayr, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here they re- mained for seven years, or until the poet was in his twenty-fifth year. Although the farm at Lochlea was better than the one at Mount Oliphant, the hardships and privations of the previous eleven years of distress had left an irremediable effect upon the financial condi- tion of the family. So that when the father died in February, 1784, the two brothers could with difficulty save enough from the wreck of his belongings to stock a new farm. However, they did the best they could ; and in March (1784) the family moved to Mossgiel, a farm in the parish of Mauchline, about half a mile from Mauch- line village on the river Ayr. Mossgiel was the home of Burns from his twenty-fifth year until his twenty-ninth, that is, until he set up a home for himself at Ellisland. It was at Mossgiel that Burns spent the happiest days of his life, if happy days he may have had. It was there that he was first recognized as a poet. It was there that his genius blossomed into its full flower. It was there that he wrote many of those poems for which he is held dearest in the hearts of his countrymen, and for which his name will be longest cherished by lovers of the beau- tiful and true in every land. It was there that he pre- pared his first volume of poems for printing, and it was from there that he went to Edinburgh to be received with acclaim as Scotland's wondrous "poet ploughman." And it was there he soon returned again, convinced that the applause of the world can be of little avail in a struggle with fate and the consequences of one's own misdoing. It was there, too, that he met and wooed his THE TAM O'SHANTER INN, AYR. INTERIOR OF THE BURNS COTTAGE. ROBERT BURNS. g "Jean," of "the belles of Mauchline " "the jewel o' them a' " ; and it was from there (in 1788) that he brought her to the home he had proudly made for her at Ellisland. Burns had the inestimable blessing of "being born into a family where integrity, honor, sobriety, and every other wholesome virtue had full sway. * And not only were his parents virtuous they were religious. The fear of God was a real and awful thing to them, and in the fear of God they endeavored to bring up their children. In that inimitable picture which the poet has drawn of rural Scottish home-life, " The Cotter's Saturday Night," every line is an image of the life he had lived in his humble home : " The cheerfu 1 supper done, wi 1 serious face, They round the ingle * form a circle wide ; The sire turns o'er, wi 1 patriarchal grace, The big ha' bible, ance 2 his father's pride : His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, His lyart haffets 3 wearing thin and bare : Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide He wales * a portion with judicious care ; And ' Let us worship God! ' he says, with solemn air." And despite toil and poverty, and grievous disappoint- ment of their hopes, father, mother, brothers, and sisters lived the God-fearing lives which these lines betoken, to the end. With Robert Burns it was different. The soul of honor in all matters relating to business, warm- hearted and true-hearted as a friend, dutiful and tender as a son and a brother, tender and dutiful, too, in all the obligations of husband and father, in two relations only 1 Fireside. 2 Once. 8 Gray side-locks. 4 Chooses. 10 LITERATURE. in life did he fail of that high standard which none knew better than he how to set forth and to make plain. In the pure affection of lover and maiden Burns often found a theme for his finest verse : " O happy love ! where love like this is found ! O heart-felt raptures ! bliss beyond compare ! I 've paced much this weary mortal round, And sage experience bids me this declare ' If heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare, One cordial in this melancholy vale, 'T is when a youthful, loving, modest pair In other's arms breathe out the tender tale, Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the ev'ning gale.' " And in the serenity of mind and independence of feeling that come from an unclouded conscience not in worldly success, or honors, or in the comfort and ease that wealth can bring Burns rightly placed his ideal of human happiness : " It 's no' in titles or in rank, It 's no' in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest ; It's no' in makin' muckle mair, 1 It's no' in books, it 's no' in lear, 2 To make us truly blest ; If happiness hae not her seat And centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest : Nae treasures, nor pleasures, Could make us happy lang ; The heart aye's the part aye That makes us right or wrang." 1 Much more. 2 Learning. RORERT BURNS. ROBERT BURNS. 13 But, alas, his own affections, tender and supremely loving though they were, often proved to be not only his own but others' undoing. The pathetic regret of " that exquisitely affecting stanza," which, as Sir Walter Scott has said, " contains the essence of a thousand love- tales," had unfortunately only too frequent occasion to be uttered by him : - " Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted." And his clear insight led him to depict his own weak- nesses of either sort in a " confession " (a supposed epi- taph upon himself), which Wordsworth with pathetic sympathy has declared to be " at once devout, poetical, and human," although unfortunately "a history in the shape of a prophecy," "a foreboding that was to be real- ized," "a record that has proved to be authentic " : " Is there a man whose judgment clear Can others teach the course to steer, Yet runs, himself, life's mad career, Wild as the wave ; Here pause and, thro' the starting tear, Survey this grave. " The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame ; But thoughtless follies laid him low And stain'd his name." Among the blessings which Burns owed to the char- acter of his father was his education. This education in 14 LITERATURE. quantity was not much, but in quality it was inestimable. The grinding poverty which Mount Oliphant's barren- ness imposed upon the fortunes of the elder Burns, pre- cluded his securing for his children even the advantage of the instruction which a Scottish public school at that time afforded, cheaply obtained though this could be. But the zealous desire of this notable father to have his children educated was not to be frustrated by poverty or any other ill fortune. A teacher was secured, as poor perhaps as his pupils, who lived with the family, and instructed the young poet and his brothers and sisters, while the father also, it is said, supplemented the instruc- tion of the teacher with his own help. It is doubtful if in any other home, even in Scotland, such an example of devotion to learning could have been presented. This teacher proved to be to the poet a veritable fount of inspiration ; and under his friendly guidance, even after he ceased to be his pupil, Burns pursued a course of reading very different from that which most lads in his circumstances would have thought of following. His brother Gilbert says of him, that " no book was so volu- minous as to slacken his energies." Even before he had left Mount Oliphant he was familiar with Shakespeare, Pope, and Addison. But his reading covered a far wider range than even these great authors, and included works in theology, philosophy, and history. When afterward he went to Edinburgh, though still a young man, the professors and litterateurs of that academic city were " astonished at his doctrine " ; for his range of informa- tion, his insight into questions of political economy and metaphysics, the vigor and purity of his language, and the vigor and precision of his thought seemed to them ROBERT BURNS. 15 extraordinary. Burns continued to be a reader and a student even to the end ; and though never in all his life was he other than very poor, and though only for a few short months had he money which he could freely spend, yet when he died it was found that his library was such as only a man of taste and of culture, and with a thirst for knowledge, would have been likely to get together ; for it comprised the cream of what was then available in poetry, in the drama, in elegant literature, in works of fiction, in history, in general science, and in theology. It is doubtful if even in the politest circles of Edin- burgh, Glasgow, or Aberdeen, there were any libraries richer in what was really best in the world's literature than that of the so-called ploughman Burns. Burns' earliest, most constant, and most lasting liter- ary passion was song-craft. He was only, as he himself has told us, in his " fifteenth autumn," when he com- posed his first poem ; and this, like his very last poem, and like almost all of his best poems, was a song a love-song. Burns himself thought it " a silly perform- ance," but, nevertheless, it had in it that direct simplic- ity of expression which is the great charm of all his best work : " As bonnie lasses I hae seen And mony full as braw ; l But for a modest, gracefu' mien, The like I never saw. " She dresses aye 2 sae clean and neat, Baith decent and genteel ; And then there 's something in her gait Gars 3 ony dress look weel." 4 l Well dressed. 2 Always. * Makes. *Well. 1 6 LITERA TURK. Even at the early age at which this poem was written, Burns' principal interest lay in the study of the songs and song-legends of his native land ; and his fondest wish was to be able to add something to the lustre of his country's poetic fame : " E'en then a wish I mind its power A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast, That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, Some useful plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least." And this, through good repute and evil repute, through good fortune and ill fortune, was his chief desire all his life long. To achieve this desire he brought to bear both genius and industry. He was rarely idle, except in cir- cumstances when others would have been idle also. " Leeze me on rhyme ; l it 's aye a treasure, My chief, amaist my only pleasure, At hame, a-fiel', at wark or leisure, The Muse, poor hizzie ! 2 Tho' rough and raploch 3 be her measure, She 's seldom lazy." And when in later years he found that his songs were welcomed by his countrymen as worthy to be ranked with any of the nation's best, he would not, although he needed money sadly, accept a penny of pay for any that he could contribute to the nation's stock ; and gave utter- ance at once to his independence and his patriotism in words like these : - 1 Hurrah for poetry. 2 Girl. 8 Coarse. ROBERT BURNS. *' I shall enter into your undertaking with all the small portion of abilities that I have, strained to their utmost exertion by the impulse of enthusiasm. ... As to remuneration you may think my songs either above or below price ; for they shall be absolutely one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be downright prostitution of soul." Burns' poverty-burdened and irregular life, brightened though it had been by genius, wit, humor, and local fame, had ended, in 1786, when he was entering upon his twenty-eighth year, in utter discontent with himself, the gloomiest sort of de- spondency, and a de- termination to leave his native land and find a new home and, if possible, begin a new and better life on a plantation in the West Indies. The father of his chosen Jean would not allow him formally to marry her, and had himself destroyed the document which had certified to their secret contract. He was every moment in danger of being imprisoned because he could not furnish security for the upbringing of his infant children. His mind was dis- tracted by other ties, of one of which the memory, three years later, was the inspiration of the most beau- MRS. BURNS (JEAN ARMOUR ). 1 8 LITERATURE. tiful of all his love lyrics, that immortal " burst of passion," as Professor Wilson calls it, beginning : " Thou ling'ring star with lessening ray That lov'st to greet the early morn, Again thou ushe^st in the day My Mary from my soul was torn ; Oh, Mary ! dear, departed shade ! Where is thy place of blissful rest? Seest thou thy lover lowly laid ? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ? " And he was fast becoming a prey to despair : " Oppressed with grief, oppressed with care, A burden more than I can bear, I set me down and sigh : Oh, life ! thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I ! Dim backward as I cast my view, What sickening scenes appear ! What sorrows yet may pierce me thro 1 , Too justly I may fear ! Still caring, despairing, Must be my bitter doom : My woes here shall close ne'er But with the closing tomb ! " So utterly helpless was Burns' position at this time (1786, when he was in his twenty-eighth year) that he had not money enough even to purchase a steerage pas- sage to Jamaica, whither in his distress he had determined to flee. Some friends, however, suggested the publish- ing his poems, and took upon themselves the task of getting subscriptions for them. In July the little vol- ROBERT BURNS. 19 ume, " Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns," accordingly appeared. Though published in a country town (Kilmarnock, Ayrshire), unheralded by advertisements, and unnoticed by critics and reviewers, its fame soon spread throughout all the Scottish low- lands. Equally by learned and unlearned, by gentry and by people, was its author applauded as the bard of Scotland. With money obtained from the sale of the book the passage for Jamaica was secured and paid for, but the voyage was never undertaken. A change had come in the fortunes of the " Ayrshire Ploughman " (the name by which he was fondly called), both sudden and momentous. The literati of the nation sought him out. Great people of every degree evinced their interest in him, and honored him with their correspondence. Hope sprang up once more in his breast. With encourage- ment pouring in upon him from every quarter, he went to Edinburgh (November, 1786), in the thought that perchance some substantial good fortune would accrue to him there. So far as friendly attentions and kind words were of value, he was not disappointed. He was welcomed with the applause of the entire capital. He was feted and he was feasted, and for a whole winter he was the lion of the town. His head, however, was never turned. He remained the same sincere, self-respecting poet ploughman he had ever been. He knew, perhaps only too well, the real significance of his sudden acces- sion to fame ; and he had good sense enough not to take it too seriously, nay, even to treat it humorously : - '* This wot ye all whom it concerns, I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns, October twenty-third, 2O LITER A TURE. A ne'er-to-be forgotten day, So far I sprachled l up the brae, 2 I dinner'd wi' a lord ! " [Yes] wi' a lord ! stand out my shin ! A lord a peer an earl's son ! Up higher yet my bonnet ! And sic a lord ! lang Scotch ells twa, 3 Our peerage he o'erlooks them a', As I look o'er my sonnet." By April of the next year (1787), however, he had effected the principal object which he had in view when he first set out for Edinburgh, he had secured the publication of the second edition of his poems. This " second edition " was received with the utmost eclat. The best names in Scotland eagerly came forward to assist in the subscription for it ; and Burns soon found himself not only famous, but in the command of consid- erable money. The ultimate profit of the poet because of its publication was not less than ,500. These two volumes of verse, the first, or Kilmarnock, edition of his poems, and the second, or " Edinburgh," edition, were all the literary work from which Burns received any pecuniary benefit. And, with the excep- tion of " Tarn o' Shanter " and " The Wounded Hare," these two editions contained almost all the work other than his songs that he was destined to write. In fact, the earlier book, the Kilmarnock edition, contained the greater part of those poems for which, other than his songs, he is held in highest esteem by his countrymen, his familiar " Epistles," "The Holy Fair," " Scotch Drink," "Hallowe'en," "The Twa Dogs," "Poor Mailie's Elegy," "The Address to the De'il," "To a i Clambered. 2 Slope. * Over six feet tall. ROBERT BURNS. 21 Mountain Daisy," "To a Mouse," and that most revered of all his writings, " The Cotter's Saturday Night." Some poems of his youth, however, equally famous with any of the foregoing, were not included in the volume, and were, indeed, not published in book form during the poet's lifetime ; as, for example, " The Twa Herds," " Holy Willie's Prayer," and " The Jolly Beggars," the last of which is pronounced by both Carlyle and Sir Walter Scott the finest of all his poems. Most of these earlier poems of Burns were written in the garret of the house at Mossgiel, when he was in his twenty-fifth, his twenty-sixth, and his twenty- seventh years ; but others were written previously at Lochlea, and some even dur- ing his youthful and distressful years at Mount Oliphant. Almost every poem that Burns wrote was suggested by some bit of personal history, or some local event in which he took an interest, so that it is impossible to separate his poetry from his biography. Indeed, Burns' poems are his best and truest revelation. In the second, or Edinburgh, edition of his poetry some notable additions were made, as, for example, " Death and Dr. Hornbook," " The Brigs of Ayr," " The Ordination," " The Address to the Unco Quid," and the " Address to a Haggis " ; but the new volume marked no development in the poetic career of the author ; and when Burns retired from Edinburgh to his farm at Ellisland (1788) his days as poet, other than as song-writer, were practically over. Burns unfortunately was a long time in getting a set- tlement with his Edinburgh publishers, and in order to get a settlement at all lived a second winter (1787- 1788) in the capital, which proved to be no blessing to him. In the summer and autumn of 1787, however, he 22 LITERATURE. had taKen two notable tours, one in that romantic border country afterward so celebrated by Scott and Words- worth, and a second in the highlands. But neither of these tours had resulted in poetic inspiration. In each, unfortunately, the poet was accompanied by those who hindered rather than helped his social and literary devel- opment. In fact, all through life, despite his many boon companions, and despite the kindness which many noble men and women displayed toward him, Burns seems to have missed true friendship. It is pitiful to reflect how much he might have accomplished, how much the world would have gained, had he found, when once fortune's sun beamed kindly upon him, some true friend, who could have held him to his proper course until he had safely passed the critical years of transition from lowli- ness to distinction, from obscurity to fame. But alas, that friend was never found, and perhaps never sought for. Burns pursued his way alone, even distrusting the good intentions of those who would and might have helped him, for he was jealous of his independence. He had some expectation of receiving a public appointment, but the expectation proved to be illusive. He then de- termined to become a farmer. Burns' fancy fixed upon " Ellisland " as his new home. This was a small place of a hundred acres on the river Nith, six miles north of Dumfries. It was "a poet's choice," however, "not a farmer's," as a sagacious ac- quaintance presently informed him, and as, unfortunately, he soon found out for himself. But with what remained of his ,500, after he had paid the expenses of his two winters in Edinburgh and of his two tours, and after, also, he had lent his brother .180 and made handsome MRS. DUNLOP. ROBERT BURNS. 25 presents to his mother and sisters, he stocked his farm, and furnished his house ; and, having formally completed his marriage contract, he brought his wife to Ellisland as their future home (November, 1788). For a very short time Burns was very happy at Ellisland. Some of his finest love lyrics owe their inspiration to the feeling of supreme contentment which his newly established domestic life engendered within his breast. His wife proved to be a capable, loving woman, who bore her part both there and ever afterward with wonderful tact, pa- tience, dignity, and kindness. As a master he was beloved ; as a neighbor he was liked and respected. The gentry and the farmers of the whole countryside became his friends. But his farm was a poor one, and he spent his little capital in making up the deficiencies of his in- come. He worked hard, and strove earnestly to plan well and do well ; but with all his efforts he could not make up for his error in locating upon land whose natural beauty and not its fertility had been its chief recommen- dation to him. Bad harvests also occurred to add to his misfortunes. It became exceedingly difficult for him to pay his way. To eke out his income he applied to be appointed excise officer for his district. The position was granted him ; but its duties were galling to his pride and distressing to all his finer feelings, and his whole soul rebelled against them. . " Searching auld wives' barrels Och hone ! the day ! That clarty barm * should stain my laurels ; But what '11 ye say? These movin' things, ca'd wives and weans, Wad move the very hearts o' stanes ! " 1 Filthy yeast. 26 LITERATURE. But he did his public work efficiently in every particu- lar. He saw clearly enough, however, that the degrada- tion of his new life would interfere with his career as poet ; but he resolved manfully to endure it for the sake of the dear ones dependent upon him. In a letter to a brother poet he thus humorously expresses his re- solve : ' But what d' ye think, my trusty fier, 1 I 'm turn'd a gauger. Peace be here ! Parnassian queans, 2 I fear, I fear Ye '11 now disdain me, And then my fifty pound a year Will little gain me. "Ye glaikit, 3 gleesome, dainty daimies, 4 Wha by Castalia's wimplin' streamies, Lowp, 5 sing, and lave your pretty limbies, Ye ken, ye ken, That strang necessity supreme is 'Mang sons o' men " I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, They maun 6 hae brose 7 and brats o 1 duddies 8 ; Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is, I need na vaunt, But I '11 sned besoms 9 thraw saugh woodies, 10 Before they want." But the income Burns derived from his excise work was only ,50 a year, and his financial distresses in- creased rather than diminished. His position became almost unbearable. " My poor, distracted mind is so torn, jaded, and racked, to make one guinea do the business of three, that I detest and abhor the very word business." His excise work not only took him i Friend. 2 The Muses. s Giddy. 4 Dames. 5 Leap. 6 Must. 7 Porridge. 8 Rags of clothing. 9 Cut brooms. 10 Twist willow ropes. ROBERT BURNS. 2 7 away from his farm ("he had ten parishes to survey, covering a tract of fifty miles each way, and requiring him [frequently] to ride 200 miles a week ") ; it also so occupied his thoughts that poetic composition became impossible to him. But worse than all, it separated him from the affectionate domesticity of his home, and forced him to live much at inns and public houses, where every influence worked toward his moral and mental deterioration. To a man of inflexible character and un- sociable disposition such a life might have proved harm- less. But to Burns, whose infinite faculty of sympathy made him welcome to every heart, high or low, rich or poor, young or old, man or woman, the life was ruinous. At the end of 1791 the farm at Ellisland was given up. He had lost all his capital. He had lost faith in himself as a business man. And he had lost faith, too, in himself as a man of prudent conduct ; lost that " cautious self-control " which he had described as " wisdom's root " ; lost, too, once more, his purity of heart, and experienced again, as he had in earlier days, the bitter truth of his own words : " Of all the numerous ills that hurt our peace That press the soul, or wring the mind with anguish, Beyond comparison the worst are those By our own folly or our guilt brought on." Burns' last years were spent at Dumfries. His sole means of livelihood was his income as exciseman, now about 60 a year. He lived poorly, but with all his faults he preserved his independence. He became no man's debtor. At his death it is said he owed not a penny. He had hoped to get a " collectorship," which would have given him .200 a year, and have made him 2g LITERATURE. easy in mind and heart for life ; and had he lived a year or two longer no doubt his hope would have been real- ized. But to other imprudences he now, added that of taking an unnecessarily offensive part in party politics. The collect orship did not come to him. His life became more and more irregular ; his friendships less and less respectable and honoring. But, towards the end, the clouds that had darkened his lowering sun were partly HOUSE IN WHICH BURNS DIED, DUMFRIES. broken and showed a silvery lining. Friends that had been alienated rallied round him again, and his conduct became steadier and more self-controlled. He was al- ways punctilious in the discharge of his public duties ; but now his personal duties were equally faithfully at- tended to. He carefully supervised his children's in- struction, and spent his evenings assisting them in their lessons. He grew kinder and ever kinder to his wife, ROBERT BURNS. 2 9 and made his memory dear and venerable to her as long as life was spared her. He discharged his few debts, even to the " uttermost farthing." He began to realize in his own home that high ideal of domestic enjoyment which he himself some years before had drawn : " To make a happy fireside clime To weans and wife, That 's the true pathos and sublime Of human life." But, unfortunately, early frivolities and later follies of a graver kind had undermined his constitution ; and when illnesses overtook him he had no strength to with- stand them. In an interval of convalescence (July, 1796) he left Dumfries for a short visit to the seashore, in the hope of further recuperation. But instead of growing better, he rapidly grew worse. He returned home again, " the stamp of death on every feature." His mind, his poetic soul, were, however, as clear and as open to inspiration as ever. Some of his most beau- tiful lyrics were written in his last illness ; as, for ex- ample, that one beginning, "Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast On yonder lea, on yonder lea, My plaidie to the angry airt, 1 1 1 d shelter thee, I 'd shelter thee " which was written as a compliment to the young girl, the daughter of a friend, who was lovingly attending him. But on July 21, 1796, he sank into his last sleep. His little children were beside him as he passed away ; 1 Stormy direction. 30 LITERATURE. but his "Jean," "the lassie" he "lo'ed best," who gladly would have died instead of him, alas, through ill- ness could not be with him even to say farewell. The glory of Burns' poetry is in his songs. Almost all else that he has written, however excellent it may be, is but local or national. But his song-craft dealt with the passions of the universal human heart, and is there- fore as universal as humanity itself. Love, distress, hope, fear, joy, grief, tenderness, regret, as phases of affection, never by any other poet were embodied in words of such tuneful melody, or were the subject of such varied and effective exposition. Burns' art, if art he had, as a lyric writer, was of that perfection of execu- tion which concealed all art. His gift of lyric expression was nothing short of divine. His songs literally and absolutely sang themselves into being. Of course not all he wrote was of that superb quality of excellence which his best songs showed. He wrote much that was far below his own standard of perfection. But there is scarcely even a single song that he wrote in which his prayer was not abundantly answered : " Gie me ae spark of Nature's fire, That 's a' the learning I desire ; Then tho' I drudge thro 1 dub * an' mire At pleugh or cart, My muse, tho' hamely in attire, May touch the heart." There is the secret of his power. His muse does " touch the heart " ; touch it on every side ; touch it to its depths. And it was because Burns knew that this 1 Puddle. R OBER T B URNS. 3 1 song-craft of his was a divine gift that he would not sell it. Alas, he often used his gift unworthily ; but when once he realized his mission, sell it he never did. The volumes of his poems published in his lifetime contained but few of his songs. The greater number of them were published (partly during his lifetime, but in greater part after his death) in two works, " The Scots Musical Museum," edited by James Johnson, and "The Melo- dies of Scotland," edited by George Thomson. John- son and Thomson were two enthusiasts who were emulous of getting together complete anthologies of Scottish song ; and Burns would not take a penny of pay from either of them, although he contributed to Johnson's collection over one hundred and eighty songs and to Thomson's over sixty. Not only did he supply original songs to these collections, but he also amended or rewrote many others, furnished notes and other illus- trations for them, and otherwise put the whole vast store of his traditionary lore, and all his poetical and critical ability, at the disposal of their editors. All this he did "for poor auld Scotland's sake." He wished "nae higher praise." And well has Scotland honored his abiding faith in her forgiveness of his frailties and her recognition of his genius. Burns is enthroned in the hearts of Scotsmen everywhere. He is loved by the whole Scottish people as no other poet was ever loved by any people ; for the love of Scotland for her poet is a passion, a love that forgives all and forgets all. And this great love has had its great reward. It has softened the national character, and made clear to the national conscience the deep meaning of that heart- piercing reproof ; "He that is without sin among you 32 LITERATURE. let him cast the first stone." It has raised to a national rule of conduct the divine precept given utterance to by the poet they honor : '* Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentlier, sister woman ; Though they may gang a-kennin' * wrang, To step aside is human : One point must still be greatly dark, The moving ' Why' they do it : And just as lamely can ye mark How far perhaps they rue it. '* Who made the heart, 't is He alone Decidedly can try us ; He knows each chord its various tone, Each spring its various bias : Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it ; What 's done we partly may compute, But know not what 's resisted." i Little. SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES. LORD ROSEBERY S CHARACTERIZATION OF BURNS. THE secret of Burns' extraordinary hold on mankind lies in two words, inspiration and sympathy. Try and reconstruct Burns as he was. A peasant, born in a cottage that no sanitary inspector in these days would tolerate for a moment ; struggling with desperate effort against pauperism, almost in vain ; snatching at scraps of learning in the intervals of toil, as it were with his teeth ; a heavy, silent lad, proud of his ploughing. All of a sudden, without preface or warning, he breaks out into exquisite song like a nightingale from the brush- wood, and continues singing as sweetly with nightin- gale pauses till he dies. A nightingale sings because he cannot help it ; he can only sing exquisitely, because he knows no other. So it was with Burns. What is this but inspiration ? One can no more measure or reason about it than measure or reason about Niagara. If his talents were universal, his sympathy was not less so. His tenderness was not a mere selfish tenderness for his own family, for he loved all mankind except the cruel and the base. Nay, we may go further, and say that he placed all creation, especially the suffering and despised part of it, under his protection. The oppressor in every shape, even in the comparatively innocent em- 33 34 LITERATURE. bodiment of the factor and the sportsman, he regarded with direct and personal hostility. We have something to be grateful for even in the weaknesses of men like Burns. Mankind is helped in its progress almost as much by the study of imperfection as by the contemplation of perfection. Had we nothing before us in our futile and halting lives but saints and the ideal, we might fail altogether. We grope blindly along the catacombs of the world, we climb the dark ladder of life, we feel our way to futurity, but we can scarcely see an inch around or before us. We stumble and falter and fall, our hands and knees are bruised and sore, and we look up for light and guidance. Could we see nothing but distant, unapproachable impeccability, we might well sink prostrate in the hopelessness of emu- lation and the weariness of despair. Is it not, then, when all seems blank and lightless and lifeless, when strength and courage flag, and when perfection seems as remote as a star, is it not then that imperfection helps us ? When we see that the greatest and choicest images of God have had their weaknesses like ours, their temp- tations, their hour of darkness, their bloody sweat, are we not encouraged by their lapses and catastrophes to find energy for one more effort, one more struggle ? Where they failed we feel it a less dishonor to fail ; their errors and sorrow make, as it were, an easier ascent from infinite imperfection to infinite perfection. Man, after all, is not ripened by virtue alone. Were it so, this world were a paradise of angels. No ! Like the growth of the earth, he is the fruit of all the seasons the acci- dent of a thousand accidents, a living mystery moving through the seen to the unseen. He is sown in dis- FLAXMAN'S STATUE OF BURNS. SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES. 37 honor ; he is matured under all varieties of heat and cold ; in mist and wrath, in snow and vapors, in the melancholy of autumn, in the torpor of winter, as well as in the rapture and fragrance of summer, or the balmy affluence of the spring, its breath, its sunshine, its dew. And at the end he is reaped, the product, not of one climate, but of all ; not of good alone, but of evil ; not of joy alone, but of sorrow, perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps stricken and withered and sour. How, then, shall we judge any one ? How, at any rate, shall we judge a giant, great in gifts and great in temptation ; great in strength and great in weakness ? Let us glory in his strength and be comforted in his weakness. And when we thank Heaven for the inestimable gift of Burns, we do not need to remember wherein he was imperfect, nor can we bring ourselves to regret that he was made of the same clay as ourselves. 1 BURNS HAS MADE A BROTHERHOOD OF SCOTSMEN. It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems, that we find Burns most regularly at his best. And excellence in song-writing is a rare gift. The snatches scattered here and there throughout the plays of Shake- speare are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can at all stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy Burns has left behind him. This was his undying leg- acy to the world. Song-writing was a labor of love, almost his only comfort and consolation in the dark days 1 From an address delivered at Glasgow on the centenary of the poet's death, July 21, 1896. 38 LITERATURE. of his later years. He set himself to this as to a con- genial task, and he knew that he was writing himself into the hearts of unborn generations. His songs live ; they are immortal, because every one is a bit of his soul. These are no feverish, hysterical jingles of clinking verse, dead save for the animating breath of music. They sing themselves, because the spirit of song is in them. Quite as marvellous as his excellence in this department of poetry is his variety of subject. He has a song for every age, a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is a subject for a book to itself. His songs are sung all over the world. The love he sings appeals to all, for it is elemental and is the love of all. Heart speaks to heart in the songs of Robert Burns ; there is a freemasonry in them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across the seas in the firmest bonds of brother- hood. What place Burns occupies as a poet has been deter- mined not so much by the voice of criticism as by the enthusiastic way in which his fellow-mortals have taken him to their hearts. The summing-up of a judge counts for little when the jury has already made up its mind. What matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first or second or third rate poet ? His countrymen, and more than his countrymen, his brothers all the world over, who read in his writings the joys and sor- rows, the temptations and trials, the sins and shortcom- ings, of a great-hearted man, have accepted him as a prophet, and set him in the front ranks of immortals. They admire many poets ; they love Robert Burns. They have been told their love is unreasoning and un- reasonable. It may be so. Love goes by instinct more SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES. 39 than by reason ; and who shall say it is wrong ? Yet Burns is not loved 'because of his faults and failings, but in spite of them. His sins are not hidden. He himself confessed them again and again, and repented in sack- cloth and ashes. If he did not always abjure his weak- nesses, he denounced them, and with no uncertain voice ; nor do we know how hardly he strove to do more. What estimate is to be taken of Burns as a man? will have many and various answers. Those who still denounce him as the chief of sinners, and without mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those whom Burns has pilloried to all posterity. There are dull, phlegmatic beings, with blood no warmer than ditch- water, who are virtuous and sober citizens because they have never felt the force of temptation. What power could tempt them ? The tree may be parched and withered in the heat of noonday, but the parasitical fungus draining its sap remains cool and poisonous. So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold and clammy ; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. How can such anomalies understand a man of Burns' wild and passionate nature, or, indeed, human nature at all ? The broad fact remains, however much we may deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins and shortcomings of a large-hearted, healthy human being. Had he loved less his fellow men and women, he might have been accounted a better man. After all, too, it must be remembered that his failings have been consis- tently exaggerated. Coleridge, in his habits of drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns was neither one nor the other, In spite of the occa- 40 LITEjKA TURE. sional excesses of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his responsibili- ties as a husband, a father, and a man, less clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been. Had he lived a few years longer we should have seen the man, mellowed by sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along, with the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are the gifts which the world cannot give, and, if he haply finds them in his own heart, which it cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the closing months of Burns' checkered career. But it was not to be. His work was done. The message God had sent him into the world to deliver he had delivered, imperfectly and with faltering lips it may be, but a divine message all the same. And because it is divine men still hear it gladly and believe. Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his sins as a man and his limitations as a poet, the want of continuity and purpose in his life ; but at the same time let his nobler qualities be weighed against these and the scale " where the pure gold is easily turned in the bal- ance." GABRIEL SETOUN. BORN TO BE SCOTLAND'S POET. In the poems of Burns there are two groups to be distinguished, which faithfully answer to two stages in his literary training. In the first of these he is Scottish and natural, founding his work on that of earlier Scot- Wi / ) FACSIMILE OF A POEM BY BURNS. 42 LITERATURE. tish poets, and surpassing in his general level the highest reaches of their verse. In the second he realized how much of his work was at variance with the prevailing tone of the eighteenth-century English poetry, and tries to fit himself into what he conceives to be the true liter- ary groove. But the vein is not his own, and he caa not work it with success ; seldom does he bring pure ore out of it, except where older threads break out amid the new, in some isolated but brilliant instances. Burns was born to be the poet of Scotland, not to add new forms or new ideas to the school of Pope or Thomson. It was for this that his whole early life fitted him ; his hardships lent their aid to that end. If they did not leave him with a " lean and hungry look," he had yet the other qualities of Cassius ; he read much, he was a great observer, and his large and glowing eye looked right through the minds of men. Like Cassius, too, he was a patriot ; Blind Harry had insured that Scotland and Scottish independence should be to him a prejudice that was also an inspiration. Even his boy- hood had felt the desire to realize this inspiration, a vague but burning wish : " That I for poor auld Scotland's sake, Some usefu 1 plan or book could make, Or sirrg a sang at least. The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, And spared the symbol dear. No nation, no station, My envy e'er could raise ; A Scot still, but blot still, I knew nae higher praise." SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES OF BURNS. 43 He has said the same thing more than once in his letters, but for thoughts like these Burns' only natural expression is in verse. WILLIAM A. CRAIGIE. THE YOUNG DEMOCRACY'S POET-PROPHET. The scholarly Gray had written of the poor with refinement and taste, surrounding them with a certain poetic halo ; but Burns spoke not about, but for them, by his birthright and heritage of poverty and labor. The young democracy, hurrying on the day through the labors of Brindley the mechanic, Hargreaves the poor weaver, or Watt the mathematical-instrument maker's apprentice, finds its poet-prophet in a farmer's boy of the Scotch lowlands. The natural music, the irresistible melody, of Burns' songs was learned, not from the prin- ciples of literary lawgivers, but from the songs of the people. In their captivating lilt, their rich humor, their note of elemental passion, is revealed the soul of the peas- ant class. " Poetry," wrote Wordsworth, who preached a little later the superiority of inspiration to artifice, " poetry comes from the heart and goes to the heart." This is eminently true of the poetry of Burns, whose best songs have that heartfelt and broadly human qual- ity which penetrates where more cultured verse fails to enter, and which outlasts the most elaborate productions of a less instinctive art. PANCOAST. THE PASSIONATE TREATMENT OF LOVE. One element, the passionate treatment of love, had been on the whole absent from our poetry since the 44 LITERA TURE. Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. In his love-songs we hear again, even more simply, more directly, the same natural music which in the age of Elizabeth enchanted the world. It was as a love-poet that he began to write, and the first edition of his poems appeared in 1786. But he was not only the poet of love, but also of the new excitement about mankind. Himself poor, he sang the poor. He did the same work in Scotland in 1786 which Crabbe began in England in 1783, and Cowper in 1785 ; and it is worth remarking how the dates run together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the further widening of human sympathies is shown in his tenderness for animals. He carried on also the Celtic elements of Scottish poetry, but the rat- tling fun of the " Jolly Beggars " and of "Tarn o' Shan- ter " is united to a life-like painting of human character which is peculiarly English. A large gentleness of feel- ing often made his wit into that true humor which is more English than Celtic, and the passionate pathos of such poems as " Mary in Heaven " is connected with this vein of English humor. The special nationality of Scot- tish poetry is as strong in Burns as in any of his prede- cessors, but it is also mingled with a larger view of man than the merely national one. Nor did he fail to carry on the Scottish love of nature ; though he shows the English influence in using natural description not for the love of nature alone, but as a background for human love. It was the strength of his passions and the weak- ness of his moral will which made his poetry and spoilt his life. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES OF BURNS. 45 THE ORIGIN OF THE "ADDRESS TO THE DEIL. One of the delights of Miss Begg's girlhood was the converse of Burns' mother concerning her first-born and favorite child, the poet, a theme of which she never tired. Miss Begg 1 remembered her as a " chirk" old lady, with snapping black eyes and an abundant stock of legends and ballads. She used to declare that Bobbie had often heard her sing " Auld Lang Syne " in his boy- hood; hence it would appear that, at most, he only revised that precious old song. Miss Begg more than once heard the mother tell, with manifest gusto, this incident of their residence at Lochlea : Robert was already inclined to be wild, and between visiting his sweetheart Ellison Begbie " the lass of the twa spark- ling, roguish een " and attending the Tarbolton club and Masonic lodge, was abroad until an unseemly hour every night, and his mother or Isabella, [his sister, afterwards Mrs. Begg] sat up to let him in. His anxious sire, the "priest-like father" of the "Cotter's Saturday Night," determined to administer an effectual rebuke to the son's misconduct, and one night startled the mother by an- nouncing significantly that he would wait to admit the lad. She lay for hours (Robert was later than ever that night), dreading the encounter between the two, till she heard the boy whistling " Tibbie Fowler " as he ap- proached. Then the door opened': the father grimly demanded what had kept him so late ; the son, for reply, gave a comical description of his meeting auld Hornie on 1 Miss Begg was Burns' niece. She was the daughter of Burns' sister, Isabella, who married John Begg. 46 LITERATURE. the way home, an adventure narrated in the " Address to the Deil," and next the mother heard the pair seat themselves by the fire, where for two hours the father roared with laughter at Robert's ludicrous account of the evening's doings at the club, she, meanwhile, nearly choking with her efforts to restrain the laughter which might remind the husband of his intended re- proof. Thereafter the lad stayed out as late as he pleased without rebuke. DR. T. F. WOLFE, in " A Literary Pilgrimage." " HIGHLAND MARY." Nothing in Burns' career is so startling as the inter- lineation of his loves ; they played about him like fire- flies ; he seldom remembered to be off with the old before he was on with the new. Allured by two kinds of attraction, those which were mainly sensual seem scarcely to have interfered with others of a higher strain. It is now undoubted that his white rose grew up and bloomed in the midst of his passion flowers. Of his attachment to Mary Campbell, daughter of a Campbelton sailor, and sometime nurse to the infant son of Gavin Hamilton, he was always chary of speech. There is little record of their intimacy previous to their betrothal on the second Sunday, the I4th of May, 1786, when, standing one on either bank of the Faille, they dipped their hands in the brook, and holding between them a Bible, in the two volumes of which half-obliterated inscriptions still remain, they swore everlasting fidelity. Shortly after she returned to her native town, where " Will you goto the Indies, my Mary ? " and other songs were sent SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES OF BURNS. 47 to her. Having bespoken a place in Glasgow for Mar- tinmas, she went in the autumn to Greenock to attend a sick brother, and caught from him a fever which proved fatal at some date before October 1 2, when her lair was bought in the West Kirkyard, now, on her ac- count, the resort of pilgrims. Mrs. Begg's story of Burns receiving the news of her death has been called in question ; but how deep the buried love lay in his heart is known to every reader of his verse. After flowing on in stillness for three years, it broke forth as the inspira- tion of the most pathetic of his songs . * Thou lingering star with lessening ray," composed in the course of a windy October night, when musing and watching the skies about the corn-ricks at Ellisland. Three years later, it may have been about the same harvest time, even on the same anniversary, the receding past, with a throng of images, sad and sweet, again swept over him, and bodied itself forth in the immortal lyric "Ye banks and braes and streams around The Castle o' Montgomery," which is the last we hear of Highland Mary. PROFESSOR NICHOLS. " CLARINDA." At last, however, out of all patience with his publisher, and recognizing the futility of his hopes of preferment, he had resolved early in December to leave Edinburgh, when he was compelled to stay against his will. A double accident befell him ; he was introduced to a Mrs. 48 LITER A TURE. Maclehose, and three days afterwards, through the care- lessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown from a carriage and had his knee severely bruised. The latter was an accident that kept him confined to his room for a time, and from which he quickly recovered ; but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a serious matter, and for both most unfortunate in its results. It was while he was "on the rack of his present agony" that the Sylvander-Clannda correspondence was begun and continued. That much may be said in excuse for Burns. A man, especially one with the pas- sion and sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all sanity when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb. Certainly the poet does not show up in a pleasant light in this absurd interchange of gasping epistles ; nor does Mrs. Maclehose. " I like the idea of Arcadian names in a commerce of this kind," he unguard- edly admits. The most obvious comment that occurs to the mind of the reader is that they ought never to have been written. It is a pity they were written ; more than a pity they were ever published. . . . Occasionally he is natural in them, but rarely. " I shall certainly be ashamed of scrawling whole sheets of incoherence." We trust he was. The letters are false in sentiment, stilted in diction, artificial in morality. We have a pic- ture of the poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion he does not feel, into love of an accomplished and intellectual woman ; while in his heart's core is reg- istered the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his children. He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to tatters in inflated prose ; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, a religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES OF BURNS. 49 world, and now and again accidentally he assumes the face and figure of Robert Burns. . . . Clarinda comes out of the correspondence better than Sylvander. Her letters are more natural and vastly more clever. She grieves to hear of his accident, and sympathises with him in his suffering ; were she his sister she would call and see him. He is too romantic in his style of address, and must remember she is a married woman. Would he wait like Jacob seven years for a wife ? And perhaps be disappointed ! She is not unhappy : religion has been her balm for every woe. . . . She could well believe him when he said that no woman could love as ardently as himself. . . . But he must not rave ; he must limit himself to friendship. The evening of their third meeting was one of the most exquisite she had ever experienced. Only he must now know she has faults. She means well, but is liable to become the victim of her sensibility. She, too, now prefers the religion of the bosom. She cannot deny his power over her ; would he pay another evening visit on Saturday ? When the poet is leaving Edinburgh, Clarinda is heartbroken. " Oh, let the scenes of nature remind you of Clarinda ! In winter, remember the dark shades of her fate ; in summer, the warmth of her friendship ; in autumn, her glowing wishes to bestow plenty on all ; and let spring animate you with hopes that your friend may yet surmount the wintry blasts of life, and revive to taste a springtime of happiness. At all events, Syl- vander, the storms of life will quickly pass, and one unbounded spring encircle all. Love, there, is not a crime. I charge you to meet me there, O God ! I must lay down my pen." 5 t } ', ,' j'. j I sit me down and sigh : O life ! thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I.'' (/) " Guid grant that thou may aye inherit Thy mither's person, grace, and merit, And thy poor worthless daddy's spirit, Without his failing : 'TwiM please me mair to see't and hear't Than stockit mailins." (m) " When fevers burn, or ague freezes, Rheumatics gnaw, or colic squeezes, Our neighbor's sympathy may ease us, Wi' pitying moan ; But thee thou hell o' a' diseases, Aye mocks our groan !'" (n) " It's no in titles nor in rank ; It 's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest : It's no in making muckle mair ; It 's no in books ; it 's no in lear, To make us truly blest." (0) " Gie me a spark o' Nature's fire ! That 's a' the learning I desire : Then, though I drudge through dub an' mire At pleugh or cart, My muse, though hamely in attire, May touch the heart." (fi) " To make a happy fire-side clime To weans and wife, That 's the true pathos and sublime Of human life." I O2 LITER A TORE. ANSWERS. 1. (a) Nelly Kirkpatrick; () Agnes Fleming; (V) Isabella Steven; (d) Ellison Begbie ; (i 17,000. The total indebtedness thus suddenly thrown upon him amounted to no less than ,150,000. It would have been an easy matter for Scott to have SIR WALTER SCOTT. 125 compromised with his creditors, but his pride made such a recourse abhorrent to him. " God granting me time and health," he said, " I will pay every penny." Then began the grandest part of Scott's career, though an in- finitely sad part. He sat down to work off this enormous debt by his pen alone. Troubles came upon him with unrelenting haste. His wife, of whose delicate beauty and fragile frame he had ever been exceedingly tender, sickened and died. His own health broke. Rheumatism attacked him, and crippled his hands so that he could not hold a pen. He was prostrated by paralytic seizures. Worse than all, his brain gave way. He is said to have worked during much of this time with little more than half a brain. He became a victim to aphasia. Finally his imaginative faculties grew inert. As he himself de- scribed it, " The magician's wand had broken." It is marvellous, however, what Scott accomplished in these five years of bodily and mental paralysis. In three months after the failure he had finished ''Woodstock," the last of his great novels, though not, of course, one of the very best. For this he received ^8,228. In two years he had completed his great historical work, his " Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," for which he received ; 1 8,000. By January, 1828, he had paid off ,40,000 of his debts. It is estimated that in less than six years more, had his health been spared to him, he would have discharged every debt he owed. It is marvellous, too, to realize that some of his very best work (though it was of minor character) was produced during this time of physical and mental impairment. Also during these years several excellent novels were added to his list, and some of his most popular short historical tales were 126 LITERATURE. written. But, alas, his mental powers were failing fast, undoubtedly because of the immense strain to which he was subjecting them. In 1830 there was a very serious seizure. The end was bound to come soon. Two novels that he completed in the early part of 1831, "Count Robert of Paris" and " Castle Dangerous," warned his friends that he should be persuaded to desist. Finally a strange illusion fortunately possessed him. He fancied that all his debts were paid, and that he was once more "a free man," as he put it. He then accepted an offer, which the government had made to his physicians, to place a vessel of the navy at his disposal ; and he spent some months cruising about in the Mediterranean. While many of his faculties were gone, many remained as bright as ever ; and the year had much enjoyment for him. But the death of Goethe in March (1832), whom he had hoped to visit at Weimar, greatly depressed him. He desired to hasten home. In June he was in London, a dying man. With great difficulty he was got to his beloved Abbotsford, where he passionately longed to be. One day he fancied he could write again ; but when he realized that the fingers could not hold the pen in their clasp he sank back in his chair disheartened. " Get me to bed," said he; "that is the only place." And in his bed he died, a few days later Sept. 21, 1832. Though Scott's belief that his debts were paid was an illusion, it was not very far from the truth. The value of his copyrights was very great. In 1833, by an ar- rangement with his publisher, his general creditors were paid in full ; and in 1847, fifteen years after his death, the estate of Abbotsford was finally relieved of all in- cumbrance upon it, and an outstanding bond of ,10,000, SIR WALTER SCOTT. 12 J given to Constable to avert disaster some time betore the ultimate failure, was also discharged. Thus, though he was not granted the health and time he prayed for, the object that he had set himself so resolutely to effect was finally accomplished, and " every penny " of his debt was paid. SIR WALTER SCOTT A TEN-MINUTE TALK. By LEWIS EDWARD GATES, A.B., Professor of English, Harvard University. WHAT value have Sir Walter Scott's novels for men and women of to-day ? Is Scott still worth reading in this age, when science has taught us the importance of truth in fiction, and when novelists analyze action and motive, and explain and illustrate character with a thoroughness and delicate suggestiveness that Scott's "big bow-wow " style never attains to? In point of fact, it is the very lack of subtlety in Scott, that makes him still eminently worth while. He opens to us a world where we may rest for a breathing space from the intellectual worry, the nervous wear and tear, and the over-refining casuistry of modern life. In Scott's world the brave men and the fair women and the treach- erous villains all know from the first with refreshing certainty what they want, and they set about securing this with delightful courage and single-heartedness. Life as Scott portrays it has freedom, directness, and simplicity. It may, of course, be urged that this simpli- fication of human nature tends to reduce life to a strug- gle among a few primitive instincts ; that love, hate, greed for power, jealousy, and two or three more of the good old elementary virtues and vices almost monopolize our attention. With this suggestion in mind it is easy 128 SCOTT: A TEN-MINUTE TALK. 129 to understand the force of Thomas Love Peacock's parody on Scott's war songs : " The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter. We therefore deem it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition ; We met a host and quelled it ; We forced a strong position And killed the men who held it." Scott's novels of adventure seem pretty nearly made up of this instinctive pursuit of obvious goods. Sir Andrew Aguecheek's formula for life it " consists of eating and drinking " will prove fairly true for the life Scott shows us, provided we add righting and love-mak- ing. Yet, with what splendid pageantry this life is put before us ! How magnificent a drama is set in motion by the action of these primitive instincts ! How the natural man within us rejoices in the gorgeous adequacy with which these simple functions are fulfilled! It is precisely for this reason that Scott is a fine tonic, and sends the blood more courageously through our veins. After reading him we feel that life is easier, simpler, better worth while, a braver and finer affair than we have been wont to believe it. To read and enjoy Scott is to renew and preserve our naivetf, and, after all, naiveti is only another name for immortality. Your only utterly disillusioned man is your corpse. Then again, as a pleasant and effective means of com- ing into close imaginative touch with the past of our race, Scott's novels are in many respects still unrivalled. Scott was one of the greatest antiquarians of his day. 130 LITERATURE. He knew with the utmost minuteness and accuracy the manners and customs of feudal England, the character- istics of the life of each age from Saxon times down through the seventeenth century. All this knowledge he offers us in his novels, vitalized by his imagination, and made real by human sympathy. He has seen and felt this life more vividly and intensely than many of us see and feel the life that strikes continuously on our senses from day to day. Century after century he re- constructs for us this life of the past reconstructs it perhaps with illusory beauty, with some meretricious decoration, with much disregard of its actual evils and ennuis. But, at any rate, he makes us aware of its large contours, of its most salient features, of its most signifi- cant qualities. Thus he enlarges our horizon and unites us vitally with the past of our race. We come to see ourselves as only one in a long series of generations. We escape from the egoism of the present, detach our- selves a bit from our own prejudices, realize whence we have come, see ourselves in perspective. To his own age Scott's discovery and reunification of the past was one of his most noteworthy services. Even to-day, after historical research has made such astonishing progress, Scott's novels are among the most prevailingly delight- ful and suggestive revealers of the past. Finally, to know Scott's writings well is to be made free of a singularly lovable and admirable nature. The charm of Scott's personality was irresistible. It imposed itself even on animals. Dogs adored him ; a small pig used to follow him with romantic affection when he went for his walks on the Abbotsford estate. Among peasants, as among literary and society notabilities, he was the SCOTT: A TEN-MINUTE TALK. 131 most welcome of guests. His geniality, his humor, his frank, hearty manliness, his generosity, his readiness to amuse and to be amused, his endless store of entertain- ing anecdote, his tact and his union of sympathy with originality, made him the best of companions for an hour or for a lifetime. His friendships were generous and enduring. All these qualities of mind and heart are in one way or another dimly felt even to-day as a reader runs through Scott's stories. We are taken a bit into the confidence of a very noble nature of a man of large mind, sane instincts, enduring courage, rich sympathy and far-ranging experience. We feel that Scott has lived widely and diversely, and found life good ; we feel that he has suffered deeply and yet has found in human comradeship something that atones. We are insensibly led to an imitation of his frank, courageous acceptance of life of this life of ours that mixes so quaintly its good and its evil. For all these reasons, then, Scott remains despite our modernity, despite our increase in subtlety and accom- plishment and sophistication indeed, largely because of these very characteristics of the life of to-day a permanent source of culture and delight. SCOTT'S POETRY. IN the maturity of his powers he wrote " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," which was received with a rapture of enthusiasm. The selection is a portrait of the aged harper : " The way was long, the wind was cold, The minstrel was infirm and old. His withered cheek and tresses gray Seemed to have known a better day. \ The harp, his sole remaining joy, Was carried by an orphan boy. The last of all the bards was he Who sung of border chivalry. For, well-a-day ! their date was fled ; His tuneful brethren all were dead, And he, neglected and oppressed, Wished to be with them and at rest. No more, on prancing palfrey borne, He carolled, light as lark at morn ; No longer, courted and caressed, High placed in hall a welcome guest, He poured to lord and lady gay The unpremeditated lay. Old times were changed, old manners gone ; A stranger filled the Stuarts' throne ; The bigots of the iron time Had called his harmless art a crime. A wandering harper, scorned and poor, He begged his bread from door to door, And tuned, to please a peasant's ear, The harp a king had loved to hear." 132 SCOTT'S POETRY. 133 The following lines on Melrose Abbey, from the same poem, show Scott's descriptive powers at their best : " If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright Go visit it by the pale moonlight ; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray, MELROSE ABBEY FROM THE SOUTHEAST. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white ; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruined central tower ; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seemed framed of ebon and ivory ; When silver edges the imag'ry, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die ; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, 1 3 4 LIT ERA TURE. And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave ; Then go but go alone the while Then view St. David's ruined pile, And, home returning, soothly swear Was never scene so sad and fair." Scott made the mountains and lakes of Scotland fa- mous throughout the world. The following lines, de- scribing Loch Katrine, are selected from " The Lady of the Lake" : " And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer's ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice, A far-projecting precipice. THE SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE. SCOTT'S POETRY. 135 THE TROSACHS. The broom's tough roots his ladder made ; >The hazel saplings lent their aid ; And thus an airy point he won, Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolPd, In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek and bay, And islands that, empurpled bright, Floated amid the livelier light, And mountains that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south huge Benvenue Down on the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurl'd, The fragments of an earlier world ; 136 LITERATURE. A wildering forest feather'd o'er His ruined sides and summit hoar : While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare." This is the most popular of Scott's poems. It is interesting in story and plot, chivalric in type, and richly picturesque. Its publication carried Scott's fame as a ROSLIN'S GLEN. poet to its most brilliant height. The following stanza is from the boat song : " Hail to the chief who in triumph advances ! Honored and blessed be the ever-green pine 1 . Long may the tree, in his banner that glances, Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line ! SIR WALTER SCOTT. SCOTT'S POETRY. 139 Heaven send it happy dew, Earth lend it sap anew, Gaily to bourgeon and broadly to grow ; While every highland glen Sends our shout back agen, ' Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho ! ieroe ! '" The ruins of Roslin Castle, the baronial residence of the ancient family of St. Clair, located near a ro- mantic and woody dell, are referred to in the " Gray Brother" :- " Who knows not Melville's beechy grove And Roslin's rocky glen, Dalkeith, which all the virtues love, And classic Hawthornden." ABBOTSFORD : SCOTT'S HOME. " I understand his romances the better for having seen his house, and his house the better for having read his romances." NATHANIEL HAW- THORNE. ABBOTSFORD is located about three miles west of Mel- rose, in the county of Roxburgh, Scotland. Before the estate became, in 1 8 1 1 , the property of Sir Walter Scott, MAP OF COUNTRY ABOUT EDINBURGH. the site of the house and grounds formed a small farm known by the name of Clarty Hole. The new name was the invention of the poet, who loved thus to connect himself with the days when Melrose abbots passed over the fords of the River Tweed. 140 ABBOTSFORD: SCOTT'S HOME. 141 On a sloping bank overhanging the river, with the Selkirk hills behind, Scott built at first a small villa, now the western wing of the castle. Afterward, as his income increased, he added the remaining portions of the build- ing, on no uniform plan, but with the desire of combining in it some of the features of those ancient works of Scot- tish architecture which he most venerated. The result is a singularly picturesque and irregular pile, such an one as nobody but Scott would have thought of erecting, yet eminently imposing in its general effect, and in most of its details full of historic interest and beauty. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Mr. Carpenter, Scott describes his new property, adding : " I intend building a small cottage here for my summer abode, being obliged by law, as well as by inclination, to make this country my residence for some months of every year. This is the greatest incident which has lately taken place in our domestic concerns, and I assure you we are not a little proud of being greeted as laird and lady of Abbots ford" The greatest practical romance of Scott's life was the improvement of the almost sterile soil and the construc- tion of the quaint, picturesque edifice, as much castle as mansion, of Abbotsford. The most fascinating scheme among all the wild dreams of his fancy, it has been said, was to purchase lands ; to raise himself a fairy castle ; to become, not the minstrel of a lord as were many of those of old, but a minstrel-lord himself. The practical romance grew. On the banks of the Tweed began to rise the fairy castle, quaint and beautiful. Lands were added to lands ; over hill and dale spread the dark embossment of future woods ; Abbotsford was spoken of far and wide. 142 LI TERA TURE. If you expect a great castle you will be disappointed. It is described as resembling an old French chateau, with its miniature towers and small windows grafted upon an Elizabethan mansion. It occupies considerable ground, but is deficient in massiveness and loftiness. On a castellated gateway is hung an iron collar used for holding culprits by the neck brought from Thrieve \ ABBOTSFORD: THE GARDEN FRONT. Castle, the ancient seat of the Douglases in Galloway. The mansion shows portico, bay windows of painted glass, battlemented gables and turrets. There is a good deal of carved work on the corbels and escutcheons. Through a light screen of freestone, finely carved and arched, the garden and greenhouse may be seen. On all sides, except toward the river, the house connects itself with the garden, according to an old, picturesque THE DRAWING-ROOM AT ABBOTSFORD. SIR WALTER SCOTT'S ARMORY. ABBOTSFORD: SCOTT'S HOME. fashion. On the right hand of the portico is a carved image of Scott's favorite dog, Maida ; on the left, a Gothic fountain from the old cross of Edinburgh. A square tower is ascended by steps from the outside ; at the other end is a round tower covered with ivy. The house is more than one hundred and fifty feet long in front, and its walls abound in heraldic and other carvings. There is a balcony ranging along the whole front, where during dinner John of Skye, the wild piper, used to strut to and fro playing Scotch airs. The porch, upon which gigantic stags' horns are fas- tened, opens into a fine hall, forty feet long and twenty feet wide and high, lined with dark oak wainscot richly carved. The ceiling is a series of arches, also of carved oak, with an armorial shield emblazoned in colors and metals, upon the centre of each beam. Around the cornice are two rows of escutcheons, bearing the arms of thirty or forty of the old chieftains of the border. A running inscription all around in black letter reads as follows : " These be the coat arms of the Clannis and chief men of name \vha keepit the marchys of Scotland in the auld time for the Kynge. Trewe were they in their tyme, and in their defense God them defendit." Over and round a doorway are the shields of Scott's particular personal friends. The room is crowded with curiosities ancient armor, cuirasses and eagles from Waterloo, helmets and spurs, historic swords, and mas- sive chairs. The other show apartments are the drawing-room, dining-room, breakfast-room, armory, library, and study. 146 LITER A TURE. Raeburn's portrait, showing Scott sitting by a ruined wall with two dogs, is in the drawing-room, as is also a portrait of Lady Scott. Mr. Hawthorne, in describing the latter, says it shows " a brunette, with black hair and eyes, very pretty, warm, vivacious, and un-English." The dining-room, a plain, well-proportioned apartment, contains a number of historical portraits. From the ceiling hangs a large and handsome chandelier, which THE LIBRARY AT ABBOTSFORD. had formerly adorned some stately palace. The armory is crowded with curiosities. The library, lighted by windows looking out upon the Tweed, contains over fifty thousand volumes many upon Scottish history, magic, and antiquities. In the study, which really was the author's workshop, ABBOTSFORD: SCOTT'S HOME. 147 there is only a simple table, upon which still remains the massive silver inkstand always used by Scott, and constantly kept clear of ink-stains. Scott was neat, even methodical, in his habits, and eschewed all literary litter. He kept his papers in most exact and regular order, each document duly inscribed with its date and the name of its writer or subject, and tied with red tape. He was careful, even particular, with his books, the majority, which he considered worth the honor and cost, being handsomely bound and lettered ; and almost every summer he had a handy bookbinder at Abbots- ford, who made necessary repairs, retouching and gilding and repasting the loosening title labels. When he lent a book, which was seldom, he took a piece of wood the size of the volume, pasted on one of the edges a slip of paper on which were written the title of the book, the borrower's name and address, the date of lending, and the day on which it should be returned. These blocks were put upon the shelves, and remained there, a record and a reminder, until the loaned books were returned. Abbotsford was usually taxed to its utmost to accom- modate its many guests : some of them old and valued friends ; some, persons of distinction in literature, sci- ence, and society ; some, drawn from abroad to see the country he had described so well ; and some, accepting the slightest hint as an invitation, quartering themselves upon its owner, with selfish curiosity, for several days at a time. Lady Scott was not generally supposed to be a particularly sagacious or brilliant woman ; but there was wisdom as well as wit in her remark that " Abbotsford was very like a large hotel, except that people did not pay." 148 LITERATURE. Many of the trees comprising the Abbotsford forest were brought from distant countries, and the gardens and grounds were planned and planted by Scott himself. It was his delight, when his literary work for the day was finished, to engage in the sports and pleasures of rural life, followed usually by his retinue of dogs ; and none was happier than that " hard-featured and faithful old forester, Tom Purdie, whom Scott's kindness had changed from a poacher into a devoted servant, when the green shooting coat, white hat, and drab trousers of the jovial sheriff appeared in the distance on the path that led to the plantations." CRITICAL STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES. DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF SCOTT'S POETRY. THE distinctive features of the poetry of Scott are ease, rapidity of movement, a spirited flow of narrative that holds our attention, an out-of-doors atmosphere and power of natural description, an occasional intrusion of a gentle personal sadness, and but little more. The subtle and mystical element so characteristic of the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge is not to be found in that of Scott, while in lyrical power he does not approach Shelley. We find, instead, an intense sense of reality in all his natural descriptions ; it surrounds them with an indefinable atmosphere, because they are so transpar- ently true. He possessed in a remarkable degree the rare power of grasping life, as it were, with the bare hand ; of learning by a shrewd insight into men's lives, and by a healthy fellowship with nature in all her moods. PANCOAST. THE CHARM OF SCOTT S VERSE. It has, indeed, rarely happened in the history of liter- ature that poems written off-hand like these, with so little pains and so little revision, have gained more than a brief lease of life. Scott himself, with his delightful 149 150 LITERATURE. modesty, did not look for permanent fame as a poet. In all that he anywhere says of his poetry his words are quite sound, simple, and unpretending. He recognized the limits of his power and the sources of his popularity ; he was pleased, but not elated, by success. Success could, indeed, do nothing but good to so manly and healthy a nature. The real and abiding charm of his verse consists not in its style, or in its stock of ideas, nor in any significance underlying the narrative, but in qualities which depend upon personal character. It is the expression of a generous nature, with a living inter- est in the outward spectacle of the world, a quick sym- pathy with the actors in the long drama of life, and a keen sense of relation to the earth and enjoyment of it. It is the expression of a lover of his own land, of its mountains and glens and rivers and lakes, dearer for the sake of the story of its people, a story as varied and pic- turesque as the scenery itself. The literary critic will find a hundred faults in his poems ; but the boy, en- tranced by the tale, does not know they are there, and the man, jaded with care and weary of books, does - not mind them, finding refreshment in verse inspired with the breath of the open air, unstudied in its animation, unforced in its sentiment, and making simple appeal to his memory and imagination. CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. SCOTT'S IMAGINATIVE POWER. Walter Scott ranks in imaginative power hardly below any writer save Homer and Shakespeare. His best works are his novels ; but he holds a high place as a poet in virtue of his metrical romances and of his lyrical CRITICAL STUDIES OF SCOTT. 1^1 pieces and ballads. His poetry flowed from a nature in which strength, high spirit, and active energy were united with tender sensibility ; and with an imagination wonderfully lively, and directed by historic and antiqua- rian surroundings, and by personal associations toward the feudal past. Homer may have been a warrior de- barred from battle by blindness ; Scott would perhaps have been a soldier if he had not been lame. GOLDWIN SMITH. SCOTT AND THE FUTURE. To couple the name of Scott with dulness sounds profane, especially when one remembers the kind of lit- erature which is bought with avidity at railway bookstalls, and for some mysterious reason supposed to be amusing. If Scott is to be called dull, what reputation is to be pronounced safe? That Scott adulterated his writings with inferior materials, and in some cases beat out his gold uncommonly thin, cannot be denied. But when time has done its worst, will there be some permanent residue to delight a distant posterity, or will his whole work gradually crumble into fragments ? Will some of his best performances stand out like a cathedral amongst ruined hovels, or will they sink into the dust together, and the outlines of what once charmed the world be traced only by historians of literature ? It is a painful task to examine such questions impartially. This prob- ing a great reputation, and doubting whether we can come to anything solid at the bottom, is specially painful in regard to Scott. For he has at least this merit, that he is one of those rare natures for whom we feel not merely admiration, but affection. We cherish the fame 152 LITERATURE. of Pope or Byron or Swift in spit^e of, not on account of, their personal characters; if we satisfied ourselves that their literary reputations were founded on the sand we might partly console ourselves with the thought that we were only depriving bad men of a title to genius. But for Scott men must feel even in stronger measure that kind of warm fraternal regard which Macaulay and Thackeray expressed for the amiable but perhaps rather cold-blooded Addison. The manliness and the sweet- ness of the man's nature predispose us to return the most favorable verdict in our power. And we may add that Scott is one of the last great English writers whose influence extended beyond his island, and gave a stimulus to the development of European thought. We cannot afford to surrender our faith in one to whom, whatever his permanent merits, we must trace so much that is characteristic of the mind of the nineteenth century. Whilst, finally, if we have any Scotch blood in our veins, we must be more or less than men to turn a deaf ear to the promptings of patriotism. When Shakespeare's fame decays everywhere else the inhabitants of Stratford-on- Avon, if it still exist, should still revere their tutelary saint ; and the old town of Edinburgh should tremble in its foundation when a sacrilegious hand is laid upon the glory of Scott. LESLIE STEPHEN. SCOTT'S GREAT AMBITION. There is something of irony in such a result of the herculean labors of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott. He valued his works little compared with the house and lands which they were to CRITICAL STUDIES OF SCOTT. 153 be the means of gaining for his descendants ; yet every end for which he struggled so gallantly is all but lost, while his works have gained more of added lustre from the losing battle which he fought so long than they could have gained from his success. What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen had the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was. Generous, large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in his days of prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivalled popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the current of a stream, these are characteristics which, even when en- hanced as they were in his case by the power to defy physical pain and to live in his imaginative world when his body was writhing in torture, fail to touch the heroic point. Till calamity came Scott appeared to be a nearly complete natural man, but no more. Then first was per- ceived in him something above nature, something which could endure through every end in life for which he had fought so boldly should be defeated, something which could endure and more than endure, which could shoot a soft transparence of its own through his years of dark- ness and decay. That there was nothing very elevated in Scott's per- sonal or moral or political or literary ends ; that he never for a moment thought of himself as one who was bound to leave the earth better than he found it ; that he never seems to have so much as contemplated a social or political life for which he ought to contend ; that he lived to some extent like a child blowing soap-bubbles, the brightest and most gorgeous of which, the Abbotsford 154 LITERATURE. bubble, vanished before his eyes, is not a take-off from the charm of his career, but acids to it the very specialty of its fascination. For it was his entire unconsciousness of moral or spiritual efforts, the simple, straightforward way in which he labored for ends of the most ordinary kind, which made it clear how much greater the man was than his ends, how great was the mind and character which prosperity failed to display, but which became visi- ble at once as soon as the storm came down and the night fell. Few men who battle avowedly for the right battle for it with the calm fortitude, the cheerful equa- nimity, with which Scott battled to fulfil his engage- ments and to save his family from ruin. RICHARD H. HUTTON. SCOTT, THE REVEALER OF HIS OWN COUNTRY. It is upon Scott's early studies of the life of his own country, and what we have ventured to call his revelation of that country to the other nations of the earth, that his fame will always rest. Taken all in all, no such un- broken line of worthy and often brilliant work has been left by any other workman in this region of literature. They have done more to brighten the world, to soothe the weary, to elevate the standard of general, and what if the reader pleases we may call commonplace, excel- lence than any other works of fiction the world has ever seen. Not a word in them all has ever insinuated evil or palliated dishonor. MRS. OLIPHANT. CRITICAL STUDIES OP SCOTT. 155 SCOTT, THE CREATOR OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL. Scott may be said to have created the historical novel. He stands alone in that branch of literary work. Others have made, it may be, one great success in the novel of history, such as Thackeray in " Henry Esmond," George Eliot in "Romola," and Robert Louis Stevenson in " The Master of Ballantrae " ; but Scott has brought alike the times of the Crusaders and of the Stuarts before us. He has peopled the land of Palestine and the hills of Scotland, the forests of England and the borders of the Rhine, for our edification and delight. Paladin and peasant, earl and yeoman, kings and their jesters, bluff men-at-arms and gentle bower maidens, all spring into life again at the touch of the " great enchanter." The Waverley novels are the splendid witness of the breadth, sympathy, and purity of one of the great creative intel- lects of our literature, worthy, indeed, of a place among the immortals, side by side with Chaucer, and nearest to the feet of Shakespeare himself. PANCOAST. SCOTT UNITES THE LOWLANDS AND HIGHLANDS. There is a certain abandon in Scott's work which re- moves it from the dignity of the ancient writers ; but we are repaid for this loss by the intensity and the animated movement, the clear daylight, and the inspired delight in and with which he invented and wrote his stories. It is not composition ; it is Scott actually present in each of his personages, doing their deeds and speaking their thoughts. His national tales and his own country 156 LITERATURE. was his best inspiration are written with such love for the characters and the scenes that we feel his living joy and love underneath each of the stories as a completing charm, as a spirit that enchants the whole. And in these tales and in his poems his own deep kindliness, his sympathy with human nature, united after years of enmity, the Highlands to the Lowlands. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. SOME OF SCOTT'S CHARACTERS. The fame of Scotland's scenery, the inspiration of her romantic history, and the union in sentiment of her LOCH KATRINE, ELLEN'S ISLE. CRITICAL STUDIES OF SCOTT. 157 peoples lowlanders and Highlanders are due very largely to the leadership of Sir Walter Scott. He speaks and acts through characters which were the nat- ural product of the country through centuries of advanc- ing civilization. In bringing back " the moss-trooper and the border knight, the glowing tartans and the tragic passion of the highland chieftains," he introduces Scot- land to herself, and suggests a newer and broader out- look and a larger and richer life. Scott's characters do not flourish outside of the envi- ronments of their origin. They cannot easily be trans- planted. Among the most famous are the following : Dominie Sampson. Absent-minded, faithful, and affectionate, with a remarkable awkwardness of manners and simplicity of char- acter. His language was always quaint, and, having been edu- cated for the church, he frequently used the forcible and peculiar phraseology of the Scriptures. Found in " Guy Mannering." Robin Hood. The gallant and generous "king of outlaws and prince of good fellows." Found in " Ivanhoe." Jeanie Deans. David Deans' daughter. A perfect model of sober heroism of the union of good sense with strong affections. Found in " The Heart of Midlothian." Meg Merrilies. Henry Bertram's gypsy nurse and a character of commanding interest. She was venerated by her tribe, over whom she held arbitrary authority. She impressed beholders with feelings of superstitious awe. Devoted to Henry Bertram, weird and oracular, she moves through the novel like a spirit of destiny. Found in " Guy Mannering." Madge Wildfire. Meg Murdockson's simple-minded daughter. She was very loquacious, and her talk was lively but disjointed. " Pilgrim's Progress" was the favorite subject of her conversation. She received the name of Madge Wildfire from the frequency of her singing the following song : "I glance like the wildfire through country and town, I am seen on the causeway, I 'm seen on the down. 158 LITER A TURE. The lightning that flashes so bright and so free Is scarcely so blithe or so bonny as me." Found in " The Heart of Midlothian." Edie Ochiltree. A mendicant who had formerly been a soldier. He played an important part in bringing to a happy issue the love affairs of Lovel and Miss Wardour, and in his old age became a member of their household. Found in " The Antiquary." Meg Dods. Hostess of Cleikum Inn. Meg's especial antipathy was the fashionable hotel at St. Ronan's well. Desiring no mas- ter, Meg refused to share her small fortune with any of the numer- ous aspirants for her hand. She exerted arbitrary sway over her servants and guests. Found in " St. Ronan's Well." Other characters equally widely known are Fergus and Flora Maclvor in "Waverley"; Mr. Oldbuck, Bailie Littlejohn, and Monkbarns in "The Antiquary"; Preacher Macbrian in "Old Mortality"; MacGregor, Helen Campbell, and Diana Vernon in "Rob Roy"; Saddletree and Sharpitlaw in " The Heart of Mid- lothian " ; Edgar Ravenswood, Caleb Balderstone, and Lucy Ash- ton in " The Bride of Lammermoor" ; Isaac the Jew, Ivanhoe, and Lady Rowena in "Ivanhoe"; Amy Robsart in " Kenilworth " ; Halbert Glendinning in " The Monastery"; and Alice Lee in "Woodstock." SCOTT, A GENUINE MAN. The surliest critic must allow that Scott was a genuine man, which itself is a great matter. No affectation, fan- tasticality, or distortion dwelt in him, no shadow of cant. Nay, withal was he not a right brave and strong man according to his kind? A most composed, invincible man ; in difficulty and distress knowing no discourage- ment ; Samson-like, carrying off on his strong Samson shoulders the gates that would imprison him. CAR- LYLE. REMINISCENCES OF SCOTT. 159 SCOTT S CAPACITY FOR UNIFORM WORK. There is no evidence that any one of the novels was labored or even so much as carefully composed. Scott's method of composition was always the same ; and when writing an imaginative work the rate of progress seems to have been pretty even, depending much more upon the absence of disturbing engagements than on any men- tal irregularity. The morning was always his brightest time ; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill, writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the intervals of screaming fits due to the torture of cramp in the stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a silkworm spins at its golden cocoon. RICHARD H. HUTTON. SCOTT'S GREAT SECRET OF SUCCESS. Scott's son-in-law, Mr. Lockhart, in describing a jour- ney through Scotland, says that wherever Scott slept, whether in a noble mansion or in the shabbiest of coun- try inns, he very rarely mounted the carriage in the morning without having ready a package of manuscript, corded and sealed, and addressed to his printer in Edin- burgh. And yet all the while he kept himself thor- oughly well informed upon contemporary literature of all sorts. Mr. Lockhart gives as the grand secret his perpetual practice of his own grand maxim, " Never to be doing nothing." Every moment was turned to account, and thus he had leisure for everything. On his return from Naples in June, 1832, Scott was 1 6O LIT ERA TURE. at once conveyed to Abbotsford, a complete wreck in body and mind. He desired to be wheeled through his rooms, and as members of his family moved him leisurely for an hour or more up and down the hall and the great library, he kept saying : "I have seen much, but noth- ing like my ain house. Give me one turn more." SCOTT IN CONVERSATION. The conversation of Scott was frank, hearty, pictu- resque, and dramatic. During the time of my visit he inclined to the comic rather than the grave in his anec- dotes and stories, and such, I was told, was his general inclination. He relished a joke or a trait of humor in social intercourse, and laughed with right good will. He talked, not for effect or display, but from the flow of his spirits, the stories of his memory, and the vigor of his imagination. He had a natural turn for narration ; and his narratives and descriptions were without effort, yet wonderfully graphic. He placed the scene before you like a picture ; he gave the dialogue with the appropriate dialect or peculiarities, and described the appearance and characters of his personages with that spirit and felicity evinced in his writings. He made himself so thoroughly the companion of those with whom he happened to be that they forgot for a time his vast superiority, and only recollected and wondered, when all was over, that it was Scott with whom they had been on such familiar terms, and in whose society they had felt so perfectly at ease. WASHINGTON IRVING. REMINISCENCES OF SCOTT, l6l SCOTT S HUMOR. The following quotation is given as illustrating Scott's humor. It was spoken to Ballantyne, the printer and journalist, who thought of leaving Edinburgh to reside in the country : "When our Saviour Himself was to be led into temptation, the first thing the devil thought of was to get Him into the wilderness." SCOTT'S PERSONALITY. Sir Walter Scott was more than six feet in height, though the lameness of his right limb caused him to walk awkwardly. The Rev. J. C. Young, in a memoir of C. M. Young, the tragedian, gives the following description of his personal appearance : ** It was not long before we heard the eager tread of a stamping heel resounding through the corridor, and in another second the door was flung open, and in limped Scott himself. His light-blue, waggish eye, sheltered, almost screened, by its overhanging pent- house of straw-colored, bushy brows ; his scant, sandy-colored hair, the Shakespearean length of his upper lip, his towering Pisgah of a forehead, which gave elevation and dignity to a physiognomy otherwise deficient in both ; his abrupt movements, the mingled humor, urbanity, and benevolence of his smile, all recur to me with startling reality." WASHINGTON IRVING's REMINISCENCE OF SCOTT. Among the many visitors at Abbotsford was Wash- ington Irving. In one of his sketches he thus describes his first meeting with Scott : 1 62 LITERATURE. "In a little while the 'lord of the castle' himself made his appearance. I knew him at once by the descriptions I had read and heard, and the likenesses that had been published. He was tall, and of a large and powerful frame. His dress was simple, and almost rustic. An old green shooting-coat with a dog whistle at the buttonhole, brown linen pantaloons, stout shoes that tied at the ankles, and a white hat that had evidently seen service. He came limping up the gravel walk, aiding himself by a stout walk- ing staff, but moving rapidly, and with vigor. By his side jogged along a large iron-gray staghound of the most grave demeanor." SCOTT S BROAD SCOTCH. Scott's pronunciation of words, considered separately, was seldom much different from that of a well-educated Englishman of his time ; but the tone and accent of his speech was always broadly Scotch. SCOTT'S BODILY STRENGTH. Scott says that when he was a young man he could with one hand, and by grasping the horn, lift a black- smith's anvil. "But," he adds, "I could do it only before breakfast." He was an expert as well as power- ful wielder of the axe. SCOTT, A SMOKER. Smokers may be glad to know that Scott smoked both pipes and cigars. In a letter to his son he says : "As you hussars smoke, I will send you one of my pipes, but you must let me know how I can send it safely. It is a very handsome one, though not my best." REMINISCENCES OF SCOTT. 163 SCOTT S DOGS. Of Scott's deerhounds there is an unbroken succes- sion. It was Camp on whose death he relinquished a dinner invitation previously accepted, on the ground that the death of an old friend rendered him unwilling to dine out ; Maida, to whom he erected a marble monu- ment ; and Nimrod, of whom he spoke so affectingly as too good a dog for his diminished fortunes. SCOTT'S ACTIVITY IN YOUTH. Lockhart gives us many instances of Scott's activity in his boyhood and youth. Despite his lameness he was noted for his fearlessness in climbing and for his strength and hardihood in fighting. A frolic or a fight always found him ready, and he seemed equally well prepared for either. SCOTT'S YOUTHFUL STRATEGY. Scott's sagacity in judging of the characters of others was shown even as a schoolboy. He had long desired to get above a schoolfellow who defied all his efforts. Scott noticed that whenever a question was asked the lad's fingers grasped a particular button on his waist- coat, while his mind went in search of the answer. Scott accordingly concluded that if he would remove this button his rival would be beaten ; and so it proved. The button was cut off ; and the next time the lad was questioned, his fingers being unable to find the button, and his eyes going in perplexed search after his fingers, I 64 LITER A TURE. he stood confounded ; and Scott gained by strategy the place which he failed to gain by mere industry. SCOTT'S ADVICE TO HIS SON. In one of Scott's letters to his son, he expresses him- self on the necessity and dignity of labor as follows : *' I rely upon it that you are now working hard in the classical mine, getting out the rubbish as fast as you can, and preparing yourself to collect the ore. I cannot too n.uch impress upon your mind that labor is the condition which God has imposed upon us in every station of life. There is nothing worth having that can be had without it, from the bread which the peasant wins with the sweat of his brow to the sports by which the rich man must get rid of his ennui. The only difference between them is that the poor man labors to get a dinner for his appetite, the rich man to get an appetite for his dinner. As for knowledge, it can no more be planted in the human mind without labor than a field of wheat can be produced without the previous use of the plow. There is indeed this great difference that chance or circumstance may so cause it that another may reap what the farmer sows ; but no man can be deprived, whether by accident or misfortune, of the fruits of his own study, and the liberal and extended acquisitions of knowl- edge that he makes are all for his own use. Labor, my dear boy, therefore, and improve the time. In youth our steps are light, and our minds are ductile, and knowledge is easily laid up. But if we neglect our spring, our summer will be useless and contemptible, our harvest will be chaff, and the winter of our old age unrespected and desolate." SCOTT'S DEATHBED ADMONITION TO HIS SON-IN-LAW. On his deathbed it consoled him that he had not com- promised the interests of virtue. He said to his son- in-law : - " Lockhart, I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man be virtuous, be re- REMINISCENCES OF SCOTT. 165 ligious be a good man. Nothing else will give you comfort when you come to lie here." SCOTT S FUNERAL AND DRYBURGH ABBEY. Though intended by the family to be strictly private, Scott's funeral was attended by a large concourse of friends and admirers from all parts of Scotland. By their own request Sir Walter's old domestics and forest- ers bore the coffin to the hearse, and from the hearse to the grave, by the side of his wife, in the north transept of the old Abbey of Dryburgh. Dryburgh is a sweet old monastic seclusion on the River Tweed, about four miles from Melrose. Here, lying deep below the surrounding country, the river sweeps on between high, rocky banks overhung with that fine growth of trees which no river presents in more beauty, abundance, and luxuriance. The ruins of the abbey tower magnificently above the trees. The interior is now greensward, and two rows of cedars grow where formerly stood the pillars of the aisles. The cloisters and south transept are more entire, and display much fine workmanship. The square, from one pillar of the aisle to the next, which in many churches, as in Melrose, formed a confessional, forms here a burial- place. It is that of the Scots of Haliburton, from whom Scott was descended ; and that was probably one reason why he chose this place, though its monastic beauty and associations were no doubt the main causes. The ruined arches and the trees about give it the utmost picturesque effect. It is a mausoleum in entire keeping with his character, genius, and feelings, 1 66 LITER A TURE. There is no solemn monument neither " storied urn " nor " ornamented bust" over Scott's grave. A solid THE CHANTREY BUST OF SCOTT. block of Aberdeen granite, shaped after a design by Chantrey, covers the remains, and bears the simple inscription : SIR WALTER SCOTT, BARONET. Died September 2ist, 1832. DRYBURGH ABBEY, FROM THE CLOISTER COURT. SCOTT'S TOMB, AT DRYBURGH ABBEY. REMINISCENCES OF SCOTT. 169 CHANTREY S BUST OF SCOTT. The marble bust done by Sir Francis Chantrey in 1820, now at Abbot sford, seems to command the most favorable criticism of all Scott's likenesses. SCOTT'S MONUMENT IN EDINBURGH. Among the world's memorials of great men, there are few more celebrated for architectural splendor than the monument to Sir Walter Scott, located on Princess Street, Edinburgh. It is slightly more than two hun- dred feet high, and is built of finely grained brown sandstone in the pointed style developed at Melrose Abbey. The first story consists of a noble grained vault, open on four sides, and flanked by large, richly decorated, and pinnacled turrets. Beneath this arch is a statue nine feet high, cut from a single block of marble, and representing Scott seated on a rock and wrapped in a shepherd's plaid, holding book and pen, and attended by Maida lying at his feet. The second story is a small but lofty room, brilliantly lighted with colored windows. Around the exterior of the second and third stories are galleries from which views can be had of the elaborate sculpture with which the monument is enriched, and, especially from the upper gallery, of the city and its vicinity. SOME QUERIES AND ANSWERS. QUERIES. 1. What poem of Robert Browning's describes one of Scott's ancestors? 2. What incidents in Scott's life show his love for his dogs Camp and Maida? 3. What poem of Scott's was composed in the saddle, and has the stir of a cavalry charge in it? 4. In one of Scott's novels, one of the characters, a royalist, is described as having died from the excitement of the joy occa- sioned by his meeting Charles II. on his restoration. Who was the character, and in what novel is the incident told? 5. What heroine of Scott's was it who refused marriage because her interest was in the restoration of the Stuarts, and also encour- aged her brother in an undertaking that led to his execution? 6. What play founded upon one of Scott's novels was acted with great success by Charlotte Cushman and also by Mme. Janauschek? What character in this play did these actresses take? 7. In one of Scott's novels a character, "a descendant of a German printer," is represented as having trained his maiden sister and his niece to consider him, so to speak, " the greatest man on earth." Who was this character? and what is the novel in which the character appears ? 8. What character in the novels is represented as having devoted his life to the renovation of the gravestones of the martyrs of the Covenant ? 9. In what novel of Scott's, and in what character of the novel, is given a picture of sisterly devotion said to be even nobler than that of George Meredith's " Rhoda Fleming"? 10. What novel of Scott's forms the basis of a well-known Italian opera? What incident in the novel is reminiscent of Ophelia? SCOTT Q UERIES AND ANS WERS. I 7 I IT. Who was the soldier of fortune in Scott's novels, that, when visited in prison by the lord of the castle, recognized the lord's dis- guise, throttled him, and forced him to give the password, and so escaped? 12. What king is it, in one of Scott's works, whose character, subtle and superstitious, is frequently said to be Henry Irving's greatest impersonation? 13. In one of Scott's works a beautiful girl is represented as hav- ing been walled up alive. Who was the girl? and in what work is her sad history related? 14. In what book is it described how a famous dwarf hides in a cello case, and informs a king of treachery? 15. Who said the following words, and under what circumstances were they said ? " Mourn not for me, but care for your own safety. I die in mine armor as a should, and I die pitied by Mary Stuart." 16. What famous beauty was it who, when condemned to die at the stake, expressed her gratitude to her deliverer's wife by giving her a casket of diamonds? 17. In what book of Scott's do we have a picture of an Eliza- bethan entertainment? What three queen's favorites are described in the book? And with what sweet girl, now buried at St. Mary's, Oxford, was connected the sad tragedy whose history the book relates ? 1 8. What famous child was once Walter Scott's pet and delight, whom he used to carry to his home through the "angry airt," shielding her in his plaid? 19. What curious instance of the popularity of " Marmion " is recorded ? 20. What novel gives a picture of a king liberated from prison by means of a loved melody sung outside? ANSWERS. (i) " Muckle-Mouth Meg." And this ancestor of Scott's trans- mitted a distinct trace of her large mouth to her descendant, who used it, however, to advantage as the spokesman of his race. (2) When Camp died, Scott refused a dinner invitation previously ac- cepted, saying that "the death of an old friend" prevented his 1/2 LITERATURE. coming. For Maida he built a marble monument. (3) " Mar- mion," a story of the battle of Flodden. (4) Sir Henry Lee, in " Woodstock." (5) Flora Maclvor, in " Waverley," a story which relates to the insurrection in the Stuart interest led by Charles Edward in 1745. (6) " Guy Mannering." The role was that of Meg Merrilies, a weird gypsy, akin to the witches of " Mac- beth." (7) Jonathan Oldbuck in * The Antiquary," who boasted that these two women were the only ones he had ever seen " well broken and bitted to obedience." (8) Robert Patterson, or " Old Mortality," whose white pony fed among the tombs while his mas- ter was engaged in his labors. (9) "The Heart of Midlothian," whose interest centres upon the heroic efforts of Jeanie Deans to procure the pardon of her sister Effie. (10) "The Bride of Lammermoor." Lucy Ashton, the beautiful heroine, goes mad from unhappy love, and a tragedy follows. "Lucia de Lammer- moor" is the opera, (n) Dugald Dalgetty, in "The Legend of Montrose," a second Falstaff, who boasted of his adventures under Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North. (12) Louis XI. in " Quentin Durward." (13) Constance de Beverly, in " Marmion," an escaped nun, who received the doom of death as her punish- ment for broken vows. (14) Sir Humphry Davy, in " Peveril of the Peak." He was a favorite of Henrietta Maria. (15) George Douglas, in "The Abbot." He had assisted the queen to escape. (16) Rebecca, the Jewess, in "Ivanhoe"; and to Ivanhoe's wife, the Saxon Rowena, were given the jewels. (17) In " Kenil worth." Earls of Leicester and Sussex and Sir Walter Raleigh. Amy Rob- sart. (18) Marjorie Fleming, who at seven years of age used to sit on Scotfs stout shoulder and recite Shakespeare a most preco- cious and interesting child. A year later she died. A delightful account of her is given in the Little Classics " Childhood." (19) Two old men, entire strangers, were passing one another on a dark London night. One happened to be repeating to himself, " Charge, Chester, charge ! " when suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, " On, Stanley, on ! " whereupon they finished the death of Marmion together, took off their hats to each other, and parted, laughing. (20) "The Talisman" gives a picture of Richard the Lion-Hearted being found in prison by his minstrel Blondel. READINGS FROM SCOTT. SUNSET IN A STORM. THE sun was now resting his huge disk upon the edge of the level ocean, and gilded the accumulation of tow- ering clouds through which he had travelled the livelong day, and which now assembled on all sides, like mis- fortunes and disasters around a sinking empire and falling monarch. Still, however, his dying splendor gave a sombre magnificence to the massive congregation of vapors, forming out of their unsubstantial gloom the show of pyramids and towers, some touched with gold, some with purple, some with a hue of deep and dark red. The distant sea, stretched beneath this varied and gor- geous canopy, lay almost portentously still, reflecting back the dazzling and level beams of the descending luminary, and the splendid coloring of the clouds amidst which he was setting. Nearer to the beach the tide rippled onward in waves of sparkling silver, that imper- ceptibly, yet rapidly, gained upon the sand. With a mind employed in admiration of the romantic scene, or perhaps on some more agitating topic, Miss Wardour advanced in silence by her father's side, whose recently offended dignity did not stoop to open any con- versation. Following the windings of the beach, they passed one projecting point, or headland of rock, after 173 I 74 LIT ERA TURE. another, and now found themselves under a huge and continued extent of the precipices by which that iron- bound coast is in most places defended. Long project- ing reefs of rock, extending under water, and only evincing their existence by here and there a peak entirely bare, or by the breakers which foamed over those that were partially covered, rendered Knockwinnock Bay dreaded by pilots and shipmasters. The crags which rose between the beach and the mainland, to the height of two or three hundred feet, afforded in their crevices shelter for unnumbered sea-fowl, in situations seemingly secured by their dizzy height from the rapacity of man. Many of these wild tribes, with the instinct which sends them to seek the land before a storm arises, were now winging towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening. The wind began next to arise ; but its wild and moaning sound was heard for some time, and its effects became visible on the bosom of the sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The mass of waters, now dark and threatening, began to lift itself in larger ridges, and sink in deeper furrows, forming waves that rose high in foam upon the breakers, or burst upon the beach with a sound resembling distant thunder. From " The Antiquary." THE DISCOVERY OF THE TOMB OF ROBERT THE BRUCE. Such of the Scottish knights as remained alive re- turned to their own country. They brought back the READINGS FROM SCOTT, heart of the Bruce, and the -bones of the good Lord James. These last were interred in the church of St. Bride, where Thomas Dickson and Douglas held so terrible a Palm Sunday. The Bruce' s heart was buried below the high altar in Melrose Abbey. As for his body, it was laid in the sepulchre in the midst of the church of Dunfermline, under a marble stone. But the church becoming afterwards ruinous, and the roof falling down with age, the monument was broken to pieces, and nobody could tell where it stood. But a little while ago, when they were repairing the church at Dunferm- line, and removing the rubbish, lo ! they found frag- ments of the marble tomb of Robert Bruce. Then they began to dig farther, thinking to discover the body of this celebrated monarch ; and at length they came to the skeleton of a tall man, and they knew it must be that of King Robert, both as he was known to have been buried in a winding sheet of cloth of gold, of which many fragments were found about this skeleton, and also because the breastbone appeared to have been sawn through, in order to take out the heart. So orders were sent from the King's Court of Exchequer to guard the bones carefully, until a new tomb should be prepared, into which they were laid with profound respect. A great many gentlemen and ladies attended, and almost all the common people in the neighborhood ; and as the church could not hold half the numbers, the people were allowed to pass through it, one after another, that each one, the poorest as well as the richest, might see all that remained of the great King Robert Bruce, who restored the Scottish monarchy. Many people shed tears ; for there was the wasted skull which once was the head 1 7 6 LITER A TURE. that thought so wisely and boldly for his country's deliv- erance ; and there was the dry bone which had once been the sturdy arm that killed Sir Henry de Bohun, between the two armies, at a single blow, on the evening before the battle of Bannockburn. It is more than five hundred years since the body of Bruce was first laid into the tomb ; and how many, DRYBURGH ABBEY FROM THE EAST. many millions of men have died since that time, whose bones could not be recognized, nor their names known, any more than those of inferior animals ! It was a great thing to see that the wisdom, courage, and patri- otism of a King could preserve him for such a long time in the memory of the people over whom he once reigned. But then, my dear child, you must remember, that it is READINGS FROM SCOTT. 1JJ only desirable to be remembered for praiseworthy and patriotic actions, such as those of Robert Bruce. It would be better for a prince to be forgotten like the meanest peasant, than to be recollected for actions of tyranny or oppression. From " The Tales of a Grand- father" THE PRAYER OF LOUIS THE ELEVENTH. Above the little door, in memory perhaps of the deed which had been done within, was a rude niche contain- ing a crucifix cut in stone. Upon this emblem the King fixed his eyes, as if about to kneel, but stopped short, as if he applied to the blessed image the principles of worldly policy, and deemed it rash to approach its pres- ence without having secured the private intercession of some supposed favorite. He therefore turned from the crucifix as unworthy to look upon it, and selecting from the images with which, as often mentioned, his hat was completely garnished, a representation of the Lady of Clery, knelt down before it, and made the following extraordinary prayer ; in which, it is to be observed, the grossness of his superstition induced him, in some de- gree, to consider the Virgin of Clery as a different per- son from the Madonna of Embrun, a favorite idol, to whom he often paid his vows. " Sweet Lady of Clery," he exclaimed, clasping his hands and beating his breast while he spoke, " blessed Mother of Mercy ! thou who art omnipotent with Om- nipotence, have compassion with me a sinner ! It is true that I have something neglected thee for thy blessed sister of Embrun ; but I am a King, my power is great, my wealth boundless ; and, were it otherwise, I 1 78 LITERATURE. would double the gabelle on my subjects, rather than not pay my debts to you both. Undo these iron doors ; fill up these tremendous moats ; lead me, as a mother leads a child, out of this present and pressing danger ! If I have given thy sister the county of Boulogne, to be held of her forever, have I no means of showing devotion to thee also ? Thou shalt have the broad and rich province of Champagne ; and its vineyards shall pour their abundance into thy convent. I had prom- ised the province to my brother Charles ; but he, thou knowest, is dead, poisoned by that wicked Abbe of Saint John d' Angely, whom, if I live, I will punish ! I promised this once before, but this time I will keep my word. If I had any knowledge of the crime, believe, dearest patroness, it was because I knew no better method of quieting the discontents of my kingdom. O, do not reckon that old debt to my account to-day ; but be, as thou hast ever been, kind, benignant, and easy to be entreated ! Sweetest Lady, work with thy child, that he will pardon all past sins, and one one little deed, which I must do this night nay, it is no sin, dearest Lady of Clery no sin, but an act of jus- tice privately administered ; for the villain is the greatest impostor that ever poured falsehood into a Prince's ear, and leans besides to the filthy heresy of the Greeks. He is not deserving of thy protection ; leave him to my care ; and hold it as good service that I rid the world of him ; for the man is a necromancer and wizard, that is not worth thy thought and care, a dog, the extinction of whose life ought to be of as little consequence in thine eyes as the treading out a spark that drops from a lamp, or springs from a fire. Think not of this little READINGS FROM SCOTT. 179 matter, gentlest, kindest Lady, but only consider how thou canst best aid me in my troubles ! And I here bind my royal signet to thy effigy, in token that I will keep word concerning the county of Champagne, and that this shall be the last time I will trouble thee in affairs of blood, knowing thou art so kind, so gentle, and so tender-hearted." After this extraordinary contract with the object of his adoration, Louis recited, apparently with deep devotion, the seven penitential psalms in Latin, and several aves and prayers especially belonging to the service of the Virgin. He then arose, satisfied that he had secured the intercession of the Saint to whom he had prayed, the rather, as he craftily reflected, that most of the sins for which he had requested her mediation on former occasions had been of a different character, and that, therefore, the Lady of Clery was less likely to consider him as a hardened and habitual shedder of blood, than the other saints whom he had more frequently made confidants of his crimes in that respect. From " Quen- tin Durward" BEFORE THE READING OF THE WILL. At the appointed hour, Mannering went to a small house in the suburbs to the southward of the city, where he found the place of mourning, indicated, as usual in Scotland, by two rueful figures with long black cloaks, white crapes and hat-bands, holding in their hands poles, adorned with melancholy streamers of the same descrip- tion. By two other mutes, who, from their visages, seemed suffering under the pressure of some strange i8o LITERATURE. calamity, he was ushered into the dining-parlor of the defunct, where the company were assembled for the funeral. In Scotland, the custom, now disused in England, of inviting the relations of the deceased to the interment, is SCOTT'S MONUMENT AT EDINBURGH. universally retained. On many occasions this has a singular and striking effect ; but it degenerates into mere empty form and grimace in cases where the defunct has had the misfortune to live unbeloved and READINGS FROM SCOTT. l8l die unlamented. The English service for the dead, one of the most beautiful and impressive parts of the ritual of the church, would have, in such cases, the effect of fixing the attention, and uniting the thoughts and feelings of the audience present, in an exercise of devotion so peculiarly adapted to such an occasion. But, according to the Scottish custom, if there be not real feeling among the assistants, there is nothing to supply the deficiency, and exalt or rouse the attention ; so that a sense of tedious form, and almost hypocritical restraint, is too apt to pervade the company assembled for the mournful solemnity. Mrs. Margaret Bertram was unluckily one of those whose good qualities had attached no general friendship. She had no near rela- tions who might have mourned from natural affection, and therefore her funeral exhibited merely the exterior trappings of sorrow. Mannering, therefore, stood among this lugubrious company of cousins in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth degree, composing his countenance to the decent solem- nity of all who were around him, and looking as much concerned on Mrs. Margaret Bertram's account as if the deceased lady of Singleside had been his own sister or mother. After a deep and awful pause, the company began to talk aside, under their breaths, however, and as if in the chamber of a dying person. " Our poor friend," said one grave gentleman, scarcely opening his mouth, for fear of deranging the necessary solemnity of his features, and sliding his whisper from between his lips, which were as little unclosed as pos- sible, " Our poor friend has died well to pass in the world." 1 82 LITERATURE. " Nae doubt," answered the person addressed, with half -closed eyes ; " poor Mrs. Margaret was aye careful of the gear." "Any news to-day, Colonel Mannering ? " said one of the gentlemen whom he had dined with the day before, but in a tone which might, for its impressive gravity, have communicated the death of his whole generation. " Nothing particular, I believe, sir," said Mannering, in the cadence which was, he observed, appropriate to the house of mourning. "I understand," continued the first speaker emphat- ically, and with the air of one who is well informed " I understand there is a settlement." " And what does little Jenny Gibson get ? " " A hundred, and the auld repeater." " That 's but sma' gear, puir thing ; she had a sair time o't with the auld leddy. But it 's ill waiting for dead folk's shoon." "I am afraid," said the politician, who was close by Mannering, " we have not done with your old friend Tippoo Saib yet, I doubt he '11 give the Company more plague ; and I am told but you '11 know for certain that East India Stock is not rising." "I trust it will, sir, soon." "Mrs. Margaret," said another person, mingling in the conversation, " had some India bonds. I know that, for I drew the interest for her it would be desirable now for the trustees and legatees to have the colonel's advice about the time and mode of converting them into money. For my part I think But there 's Mr. Mort- cloke to tell us they are gaun to lift." Mr. Mortcloke the undertaker did accordingly, with a READINGS FROM SCOTT. 183 visage of professional length and most grievous solem- nity, distribute among the pall-bearers little cards, as- signing their respective situations in attendance upon the coffin. As this precedent is supposed to be regu- lated by propinquity to the defunct the undertaker, however skilful a master of these lugubrious ceremonies, did not escape giving some offence. To be related to Mrs. Bertram was to be of kin to the lands of Single- side, and was a propinquity of which each relative pres- ent at that moment was particularly jealous. Some murmurs there were on the occasion ; and our friend Dinmont gave more open offence, being unable either to repress his discontent, or to utter it in the key properly modulated to the solemnity. " I think ye might hae at least gi'en me a leg o' her to carry," he exclaimed, in a voice considerably louder than propriety admitted; "God! an it hadna been for the rigs o' land, I would hae gotten her a' to carry mysell, for as mony gentles as are here." A score of frowning and reproving brows were bent upon the unappalled yeoman, who, having given vent to his displeasure, stalked sturdily down-stairs with the rest of the company, totally disregarding the censures of those whom his remarks had scandalized. And then the funeral pomp set forth ; saulies with their batons, and gumphions of tarnished white crape, in honor of the well-preserved maiden fame of Mrs. Margaret Bertram. Six starved horses, themselves the very emblems of mortality, well cloaked and plumed, lugging along the hearse with its dismal emblazonry, crept in slow state towards the place of interment, pre- ceded by Jamie Duff, an idiot, who, with weepers and 1 84 LITERATURE. cravat made of white paper, attended on every funeral, and followed by six mourning coaches, rilled with the company. Many of these now gave more free loose to their tongues and discussed with unrestrained earnest- ness, the amount of the succession, and the probability of its destination. The principal expectants, however, kept a prudent silence, indeed, ashamed to express hopes which might prove fallacious ; and the agent, or man of business, who alone knew exactly how matters stood, maintained a countenance of mysterious importance, as if determined to preserve the full interest of anxiety and suspense. At length they arrived at the churchyard gates ; and from thence, amid the gaping of two or three dozen of idle women with infants in their arms, and accom- panied by some twenty children, who ran gambolling and screaming alongside of the sable procession, they finally arrived at the burial-place of the Singleside fam- ily. This was a square enclosure in the Greyfriars' churchyard, guarded on one side by a veteran angel, without a nose, and having only one wing, who had the merit of having maintained his post for a century, while his comrade cherub, who had stood sentinel on the corresponding pedestal, lay a broken trunk among the hemlock, burdock, and nettles, which grew in gigantic luxuriance around the walls of the mausoleum. A moss- grown and broken inscription informed the reader that in the year 1650 Captain Andrew Bertram, first of Singleside, descended of the very ancient and honorable house of Ellangowan, had caused this monument to be erected for himself and his descendants. . . . Here then, amid the deep black fat loam into which SIR WALTER SCOTT. READINGS FROM SCOTT. 187 her ancestors were now resolved, they deposited the body of Mrs. Margaret Bertram ; and, like soldiers re- turning from a military funeral, the nearest relations, who might be interested in the settlements of the lady, urged the dog-cattle of the hackney coaches to all the speed of which they were capable, in order to put an end to farther suspense on that interesting topic. From " Guy Mannering" THE FISHERMAN'S FUNERAL. The Antiquary, being now alone, hastened his pace, which had been retarded by these various discussions, and the rencontre which had closed them, and soon ar- rived before the half-dozen cottages at Mussel-crag. They had now, in addition to their usual squalid and uncomfortable appearance, the melancholy attributes of the house of mourning. The boats were all drawn up on the beach ; and, though the day was fine, and the season favorable, the chant, which is used by the fishers when at sea, was silent, as well as the prattle of the children, and the shrill song of the mother as she sits mending her nets by the door. A few of the neighbors, some in their antique and well-saved suits of black, others in their ordinary clothes, but all bearing an ex- pression of mournful sympathy with distress so sudden and unexpected, stood gathered around the door of Mucklebac kit's cottage, waiting till "the body was lift- ed." As the Laird of Monkbarns approached, they made way for him to enter, doffing their hats and bon- nets as he passed, with an air of melancholy courtesy ; and he returned their salutes in the same manner. 1 88 LITERATURE. In the inside of the cottage was a scene which our Wilkie alone could have painted with that exquisite feel- ing of nature that characterizes his enchanting pro- ductions. The body was laid in its coffin within the wooden bedstead which the young fisher had occupied while alive. At a little distance stood the father, whose rug- ged weather-beaten countenance, shaded by his grizzled hair, had faced many a stormy night and night-like day. He was apparently revolving his loss in his mind with that strong feeling of painful grief, peculiar to harsh and rough characters, which almost breaks forth into hatred against the world, and all that remain in it, after the beloved object is withdrawn. The old man had made the most desperate efforts to save his son, and had only been withheld by main force from renewing them at a moment, when, without the possibility of assisting the sufferer, he must himself have perished. All this apparently was boiling in his recollection. His glance was directed sidelong towards the coffin, as to an object on which he could not steadfastly look, and yet from which he could not withdraw his eyes. His answers to the necessary questions which were occasionally put to him were brief, harsh, and almost fierce. His family had not yet dared to address to him a word, either of sympathy or consolation. His masculine wife, virago as she was and absolute mistress of the family, as she justly boasted herself, on all ordinary occasions, was, by this great loss, terrified into silence and submission, and compelled to hide from her husband's observation the bursts of her female sorrow. As he had rejected food ever since the disaster had happened, not daring herself READINGS FROM SCOTT. 189 to approach him, she had that morning, with affectionate artifice, employed the youngest and favorite child to present her husband with some nourishment. His first action was to put it from him with an angry violence that frightened the child ; his next, to snatch up the boy, and devour him with kisses. " Ye '11 be a bra' fal- low, an ye be spared, Patie, but ye '11 never never can be what he was to me ! He has sailed the coble wi' me since he was ten years auld, and there wasna the like o' him drew a net betwixt this and Buchanness. They say folks maun submit I will try." And he had been silent from that moment until com- pelled to answer the necessary questions we have already noticed. Such was the disconsolate state of the father. In another corner of the cottage, her face covered by her apron 'which was flung over it, sat the mother, the nature of her grief sufficiently indicated by the wringing of her hands and the convulsive agitation of the bosom which the covering could not conceal. Two of her gossips, officiously whispering into her ear the commonplace topic of resignation under irremediable misfortune, seemed as if they were endeavoring to stun the grief which they could not console. The sorrow of the children was mingled with wonder at the preparations they beheld around them, and at the unusual display of wheat en bread and wine, which the poorest peasant, or fisher, offers to the guests on these mournful occasions ; and thus their grief for their broth- er's death was almost already lost in admiration of the splendor of his funeral. But the figure of the old grandmother was the most remarkable of the sorrowing group. Seated on her 1 90 LITER A TURE. accustomed chair, with her usual air of apathy and want of interest in what surrounded her, she seemed every now and then mechanically to resume the motion of twirling her spindle ; then to look towards her bosom for the distaff, although both had been laid aside. She would then cast her eyes about as if surprised at miss- ing the usual implements of her industry, and appear struck by the black color of the gown in which they had dressed her, and embarrassed by the number of persons by whom she was surrounded. Then, finally, she would raise her head with a ghastly look, and fix her eyes upon the bed which contained the coffin of her grandson, as if she had at once, and for the first time, acquired sense to comprehend her inexpressible calamity. These alternate feelings of embarrassment, wonder, and grief, seemed to succeed each other more than once upon her torpid features. But she spoke not a word, neither had she shed a tear, nor did one of the family understand, either from look or expression, to what ex- tent she comprehended the uncommon bustle around her. Thus she sat among the funeral assembly like a connecting-link between the surviving mourners and the dead corpse which they bewailed, a being in whom the light of existence was already obscured by the en- croaching shadows of death. . . . To return from a digression which can only serve to introduce the honest clergyman more particularly to our readers, Mr. Blattergowl had no sooner entered the hut, and received the mute and melancholy salutations of the company whom it contained than he edged himself towards the unfortunate father, and seemed to endeavor to slide in a few words of condolence or of consolation. READINGS FROM SCOTT. 19 1 But the old man was incapable as yet of receiving either ; he nodded, however, gruffly, and shook the clergyman's hand in acknowledgment of his good inten- tions, but was either unable or unwilling to make any verbal reply. The minister next passed to the mother, moving along the floor as slowly, silently, and gradually, as if he had been afraid that the ground would, like unsafe ice, break beneath his feet, or that the first echo of a footstep was to dissolve some magic spell, and plunge the hut, with all its inmates, into a subterranean abyss. The tenor of what he had said to the poor woman could only be judged by her answers, as, half-stifled by sobs ill-repressed, and by the covering which she still kept over her counte- nance, she faintly answered at each pause in his speech " Yes, sir, yes ! Ye 're very gude ye 're very gude ! Nae doubt, nae doubt ! It's our duty to submit ! But, O dear ! my poor Steenie ! the pride o' my very heart, that was sae handsome and comely, and a help to his family, and a comfort to us a', and a pleasure to a' that lookit on him ! Oh, my bairn ! my bairn ! my bairn ! what for is thou lying there ! and eh ! what for am I left to greet for ye ! " There was no contending with this burst of sorrow and natural affection. Oldbuck had repeated recourse to his snuff-box to conceal the tears which, despite his shrewd and caustic temper, were apt to start on such oc- casions. The female assistants whimpered, the men held their bonnets to their faces, and spoke apart with each other. The clergyman, meantime, addressed his ghostly consolation to the aged grandmother. At first she listened, or seemed to listen, to what he said, with the 192 LITERATURE. apathy of her usual unconsciousness. But as, in press- ing this theme, he approached so near to her ear, that the sense of his words became distinctly intelligible to her, though unheard by those who stood more distant, her countenance at once assumed that stern and expres- sive cast which characterized her intervals of intelligence. She drew up her head and body, shook her head in a manner that showed at least impatienpe, if not scorn of his counsel, and waved her hand slightly, but with a gesture so expressive, as to indicate to all who witnessed it a marked and disdainful rejection of the ghostly con- solation proffered to her. The minister stepped back as if repulsed, and, by lifting gently and dropping his hand, seemed to show at once wonder, sorrow, and compassion for her dreadful state of mind. The rest of the company sympathized, and a stifled whisper went through them, indicating how much her desperate and determined man- ner impressed them with awe and even horror. . . . The coffin, covered with a pall, and supported upon handspikes by the nearest relatives, now only waited the father to support the head, as is customary. Two or three of these privileged persons spoke to him, but he only answered by shaking his hands and his head in token of refusal. With better intention than judgment, the friends, who considered this as an act of duty on the part of the living, and of decency towards the deceased, would have proceeded to enforce their request, had not Oldbuck interfered between the distressed father and his well-meaning tormentors, and informed them, that he himself, as landlord and master to the deceased, " would carry his head to the grave." In spite of the sorrowful occasion, the hearts of the relatives swelled within them READINGS FROM SCOTT. 193 at so marked a distinction on the part of the laird ; and old Alison Breck, who was present among other fish- women, swore almost aloud, " His honor Monkbarns should never want sax warp of oysters in the season (of which fish he was understood to be fond), if she should gang to sea and dredge for them hersell in the foulest wind that ever blew." And such is the temper of the Scottish common people, that, by this instance of com- pliance with their customs, and respect for their persons, Mr. Oldbuck gained more popularity than by all the sums which he had yearly distributed in the parish for purposes of private or general charity. The sad procession now moved slowly forward, pre- ceded by the beadles, or saulies, with their batons, miserable-looking old men, tottering as if on the edge of that grave to which they were marshalling another, and clad, according to Scottish guise, with threadbare black coats, and hunting-caps, decorated with rusty crape. Monkbarns would probably have remonstrated against this superfluous expense, had he been consulted ; but, in doing so, he would have given more offence than he gained popularity by condescending to perform the office of chief mourner. Of this he was quite aware, and wisely withheld rebuke, where rebuke and advice would have been equally unavailing. In truth, the Scottish peasantry are still infected with that rage for funeral ceremonial, which once distinguished the gran- dees of the kingdom so much, that a sumptuary law was made by the Parliament of Scotland for the pur- pose of restraining it ; and I have known many in the lowest stations, who have denied themselves not merely the comforts, but almost the necessaries of life, in order 1 94 UTERA TURE. to save such a sum of money as might enable their surviving friends to bury them like Christians, as they termed it ; nor could their faithful executors be pre- vailed upon, though equally necessitous, to turn to the use and maintenance of the living, the money vainly wasted upon the interment of the dead. The procession to the churchyard, at about half-a- mile's distance, was made with the mournful solemnity usual on these occasions, the body was consigned to its parent earth, and when the labor of the grave- diggers had filled up the trench, and covered it with fresh sod, Mr. Oldbuck, taking his hat off, saluted the assistants, who had stood by in melancholy silence, and with that adieu dispersed the mourners. . . . The coffin had been borne from the place where it rested. The mourners, in regular gradation, according to their rank or their relationship to the deceased, had filed from the cottage, while the younger male children were led along to totter after the bier of their brother, and to view with wonder a ceremonial which they could hardly comprehend. The female gossips next rose to depart, and, with consideration for the situation of the parents, carried along with them the girls of the family, to give the unhappy pair time and opportunity to open their hearts to each other, and soften their grief by communicating it. But their kind intention was with- out effect. The last of them had darkened the entrance of the cottage, as she went out, and drawn the door softly behind her, when the father, first ascertaining by a hasty glance that no stranger remained, started up, clasped his hands wildly above his head, uttered a cry of the despair which he had hitherto repressed, and, in all READINGS FROM SCOl'T. 195 the impotent impatience of grief, half rushed half stag- gered forward to the bed on which the coffin had been deposited, threw himself down upon it, and smothering, as it were, his head among the bed-clothes, gave vent to the full passion of his sorrow. It was in vain that the wretched mother, terrified by the vehemence of her husband's affliction affliction still more fearful as agi- tating a man of hardened manners and a robust frame suppressed her own sobs and tears, and, pulling him by the skirts of his coat, implored him to rise and re- member, that, though one was removed, he had still a wife and children to comfort and support. The appeal came at too early a period of his anguish, and was totally unattended to ; he continued to remain prostrate, indicating, by sobs so bitter and violent that they shook the bed and partition against which it rested, by clenched hands which grasped the bed-clothes, and by the vehement and convulsive motion of his legs, how deep and how terrible was the agony of a father's sorrow. " O, what a day is this ! what a day is this ! " said the poor mother, her womanish affliction already exhausted by sobs and tears, and now almost lost in terror for the state in which she beheld her husband "O, what an hour is this ! and naebody to help a poor lone woman - O, gudemither, could ye but speak a word to him ! wad ye but bid him be comforted! " To her astonishment, and even to the increase of her fear, her husband's mother heard and answered the ap- peal. She rose and walked across the floor without sup- port, and without much apparent feebleness, and stand- ing by the bed on which her son had extended himself, ig6 LITERATURE. she said, " Rise up, my son, and sorrow not for him that is beyond sin and sorrow and temptation. Sorrow is for those that remain in this vale of sorrow and darkness - I, wha dinna sorrow, and wha canna sorrow for ony ane, hae maist need that ye should a' sorrow for me." The voice of his mother, not heard for years as taking part in the active duties of life, or offering advice or consolation, produced its effect upon her son. He as- sumed a sitting posture on the side of the bed, and his appearance, attitude, and gestures, changed from those of angry despair to deep grief and dejection. The grandmother retired to her nook, the mother mechan- ically took in her hand her tattered Bible, and seemed to read, though her eyes were drowned with tears. From " The Antiquary." THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF FERGUS MAC-IVOR. Edward, attended by his former servant Alick Pol- warth who had re-entered his service at Edinburgh, reached Carlisle while the commission of Oyer and Ter- miner on his unfortunate associates was yet sitting. He had pushed forward in haste, not, alas ! with the most distant hope of saving Fergus, but to see him for the last time. I ought to have mentioned, that he had fur- nished funds for the defence of the prisoners in the most liberal manner, as soon as he heard that the day of trial was fixed.. A solicitor, and the first counsel, accordingly attended ; but it was upon the same footing on which the first physicians are usually summoned to the bedside of some dying man of rank ; the doctors to take the advantage of some incalculable chance of an exertion of READINGS FROM SCOTT. 197 nature the lawyers to avail themselves of the barely possible occurrence of some legal flaw. Edward pressed into the court, which was extremely crowded ; but by his arriving from the north, and his extreme eagerness and agitation, it was supposed he was a relation of the prisoners, and people made way for him. It was the third sitting of the court, and there were two men at the bar. The verdict of GUILTY was already pronounced. Edward just glanced at the bar during the momentous pause which ensued. There was no mistaking the stately form and noble features of Fergus Mac-Ivor, although his dress was squalid, and his countenance tinged with the sickly yellow hue of long and close im- prisonment. By his side was Evan Maccombich. Ed- ward felt sick and dizzy as he gazed on them ; but he was recalled to himself as the Clerk of Arraigns pro- nounced the solemn words : " Fergus Mac-Ivor of Glen- naquoich, otherwise called Vich Ian Vohr, and Evan Mac- Ivor, in the Dhu of Tarrascleugh, otherwise called Evan Dhu, otherwise called Evan Maccombich, or Evan Dhu Maccombich you, and each of you, stand at- tainted of high treason. What have you to say for yourselves why the Court should not pronounce judg- ment against you, that you die according to law ? " Fergus, as the presiding Judge was putting on the fatal cap of judgment, placed his own bonnet upon his head, regarded him with a steadfast and stern look, and replied in a firm voice, " I cannot let this numerous audi- ence suppose that to such an appeal I have no answer to make. But what I have to say, you would not bear to hear, for my defence would be your condemnation. Proceed, then, in the name of God, to do what is per- 198 LITERATURE. mitted to you. Yesterday, and the day before, you have condemned loyal and honorable blood to be poured forth like water. Spare not mine. Were that of all my ancestors in my veins, I would have perilled it in this quarrel." He resumed his seat, and refused again to rise. Evan Maccombich looked at him with great earnest- ness, and, rising up, seemed anxious to speak ; but the confusion of the court, and the perplexity arising from thinking in a language different from that in which he was to express himself, kept him silent. There was a murmur of compassion among the spectators, from the idea that the poor fellow intended to plead the influence of his superior as an excuse for his crime. The Judge commanded silence, and encouraged Evan to proceed. " I was only ganging to say, my Lord," said Evan, in what he meant to be an insinuating manner, " that if your excellent honor, and the honorable Court, would let Vich Ian Vohr go free just this once, and let him gae back to France, and no to trouble King George's government again, that ony six o' the very best of his clan will be willing to be justified in his stead ; and if you '11 just let me gae down to Glennaquoich, I '11 fetch them up to ye myself, to head or hang, and you may begin wi' me the very first man." Notwithstanding the solemnity of the occasion, a sort of laugh was heard in the court at the extraordinary nature of the proposal. The Judge checked this inde- cency, and Evan, looking sternly around, when the mur- mur abated, " If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing," he said, " because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich READINGS FROM SCOTT. 199 Ian Vohr, it 's like enough they may be very right ; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word, and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, nor the honor of a gentleman." There was no further inclination to laugh among the audience, and a dead silence ensued. The Judge then pronounced upon both prisoners the sentence of the law of high treason, with all its horrible accompaniments. The execution was appointed for the ensuing day. " For you, Fergus Mac-Ivor/' continued the Judge, " I can hold out no hope of mercy. You must prepare against to-morrow for your last sufferings here, and your great audit hereafter." " I desire nothing else, my lord," answered Fergus, in the same manly and firm tone. The hard eyes of Evan, which had been perpetually bent on his Chief, were moistened with a tear. " For you, poor ignorant man," continued the Judge, "who, following the ideas in which you have been educated, have this day given us a striking example how the loy- alty due to the king and state alone, is, from your un- happy ideas of clanship, transferred to some ambitious individual, who ends by making you the tool of his crimes for you, I say, I feel so much compassion, that if you can make up your mind to petition for grace, I will endeavor to procure it for you. Otherwise " " Grace me no grace," said Evan ; " since you are to shed Vich Ian Vohr's blood, the only favor I would accept from you, is to bid them loose my hands and gie me my claymore, and bide you just a minute sitting where you are ! " 2 OO LITER A TURE. " Remove the prisoners," said the Judge ; " his blood be upon his own head." . . . The place of Fergus' confinement was a gloomy and vaulted apartment in the central part of the Castle a huge old tower, supposed to be of great antiquity, and surrounded by outworks, seemingly of Henry VIII's time, or somewhat later. The grating of the large old- fashioned bars and bolts, withdrawn for the purpose of admitting Edward, was answered by the clash of chains, as the unfortunate Chieftain, strongly and heavily fet- tered, shuffled along the stone floor of his prison to fling himself into his friend's arms. . . . Soon after, a file of soldiers entered with a black- smith, who struck the fetters from the legs of the. prisoners. " You see the compliment they pay to our Highland strength and courage we have lain chained here like wild beasts, till our legs are cramped into palsy, and when they free us, they send six soldiers with loaded muskets to prevent our taking the castle by storm ! " Edward afterwards learned that these severe precau- tions had been taken in consequence of a desperate attempt of the prisoners to escape, in which they had very nearly succeeded. Shortly afterwards the drums of the garrison beat to arms. " This is the last- turn out," said Fergus, "that I shall hear and obey." . . . " We part not here ! " said Waverley. " O yes, we do ; you must come no farther. Not that I fear what is to follow for myself," he said proudly: " Nature has her tortures as well as art ; and how happy should we think the man who escapes from the throes READINGS FROM SCOTT. 2OI of a mortal and painful disorder, in the space of a short half hour ? And this matter, spin it out as they will, cannot last longer. But what a dying man can suffer firmly, may kill a living friend to look upon. This same law of high treason," he continued, with astonishing firmness and composure, " is one of the blessings, Ed- ward, with which your free country has accommodated poor old Scotland : her own jurisprudence, as I have heard, was much milder. But I suppose one day or other when there are no longer any wild Highlanders to benefit by its tender mercies they will blot it from their records, as levelling them with a nation of canni- bals. The mummery, too, of exposing the senseless head they have not the wit to grace mine with a paper coronet ; there would be some satire in that, Edward. I hope they will set it on the Scotch gate though, that I may look, even after death, to the blue hills of my own country, which I love so dearly." . . . An officer now appeared, and intimated that the High Sheriff and his attendants waited before the gate of the Castle, to claim the bodies of Fergus Mac-Ivor and Evan Maccombich. " I come," said Fergus. Accordingly, supporting Edward by the arm, and followed by Evan Dhu and the priest, he moved down the stairs of the tower, the soldiers bringing up the rear. The court was occupied by a squadron of dragoons and a battalion of infantry, drawn up in hollow square. Within their ranks was the sledge, or hurdle, on which the prisoners were to be drawn to the place of execution, about a mile distant from Carlisle. It was painted black, and drawn by a white horse. At one end of the vehicle sat the Executioner, a horrid-looking fellow, as beseemed his 2O2 LITERA TURE. trade, with the broad axe in his hand ; at the other end, next the horse, was an empty seat for two persons. Through the deep and dark Gothic archway, that opened on the drawbridge, were seen on horseback the High Sheriff and his attendants, whom the etiquette betwixt the civil and military powers did not permit to come farther. " This is well GOT UP for a closing scene," said Fergus, smiling disdainfully as he gazed around upon the apparatus of terror. Evan Dhu exclaimed with some eagerness, after looking at the dragoons, " These are the very chields that galloped off at Gladsmuir, before we could kill a dozen o' them. They look bold enough now, however." The priest entreated him to be silent. The sledge now approached, and Fergus, turning round, embraced Waverley, kissed him on each side of the face, and stepped nimbly into his place. Evan sat down by his side. The priest was to follow in a carriage be- longing to his patron, the Catholic gentleman at whose house Flora resided. As Fergus waved his hand to Edward, the ranks closed around the sledge, and the whole procession began to move forward. There was a momentary stop at the gate-way, while the governor of the Castle and the High Sheriff went through a short ceremony, the military officer there delivering over the persons of the criminals to the civil power. " God save King George ! " said the High Sheriff. When the for- mality concluded, Fergus stood erect in the sledge, and, with a firm and steady voice, replied, " God save King James:" These were the last words which Waverley heard him speak. The procession resumed its march, and the sledge READINGS FROM SCOTT. 203 vanished from beneath the portal, under which it had stopped for an instant. The dead-march was then heard, and its melancholy sounds were mingled with those of a muffled peal, tolled from the neighboring cathedral. The sound of the military music died away as the procession moved on the sullen clang of the bells was soon heard to sound alone. Front " Waverley" SCOTT S REFLECTIONS ON HIS OWN LIFE. Abbotsford, 1821. In truth, I have long given up poetry. I have had my day with the public ; and being no great believer in poetical immortality, I was very well pleased to rise a winner, without continuing the game, till I was beggared of any credit I had acquired. Besides, I felt the prudence of giving way before the more forcible and powerful genius of Byron. If I were either greedy, or jealous of poetical fame and both are strangers to my nature I might comfort myself with the thought, that I would hesitate to strip myself to the contest so fearlessly as Byron does ; or to command the wonder and terror of the public, by exhibiting, in my own person, the sublime atti- tude of the dying gladiator. But with the old frankness of twenty years since, I will fairly own, that this same delicacy of mine may arise more from conscious want of vigor and inferiority, than from a delicate dislike to the nature of the conflict. At any rate, there is a time for everything, and without swearing oaths to it, I think my time for poetry has gone by. . . . When I look around me, and consider how many changes you will see in feature, form, and fashion, 204 LITERATURE. amongst all you knew and loved ; and how much, no sudden squall, or violent tempest, but the slow and gradual progress of life's long voyage, has severed all the gallant fellowships whom you left spreading their sails to the morning breeze, I really am not sure that you would have much pleasure. The gay and wild romance of life is over with all of us. The real, dull, and stern history of humanity has made a far greater progress over our heads ; and age, dark and unlovely, has laid his crutch over the stoutest fellow's shoulders. One thing your old society may boast, that they have all run their course with honor, and almost all with distinction ; and the brother suppers of Frederick Street have certainly made a very consider- able figure in the world, as was to be expected, from her talents under whose auspices they were assembled. One of the most pleasant sights which you would see in Scotland, as it now stands, would be your brother George in possession of the most beautiful and romantic place in Clydesdale Corehouse. I have promised often to go out with him, and assist him with my deep experience as a planter and landscape gardener. I promise you my oaks will outlast my laurels ; and I pique myself more upon my compositions for manure than on any other compositions whatsoever to which I was ever accessory. But so much does business of one sort or other engage us both, that we never have been able to fix a time which suited us both ; and with the utmost wish to make out the party, perhaps we never may. This is a melancholy letter, but it is chiefly so from the sad tone of yours who have had such real disas- READINGS FROM SCOTT. 2O5 ters to lament while mine is only the humorous sad- ness, which a retrospect on human life is sure to produce in the most prosperous. For my own course of life, I have only to be ashamed of its prosperity, and afraid of its termination ; for I have little reason, arguing on the doctrine of chances, to hope that the same good fortune will attend me for ever. I have had an affectionate and promising family, many friends, few unfriends, and I think, no enemies and more of fame and fortune than mere literature ever procured for a man before. I dwell among my own people, and have many whose happiness is dependent on me, and which I study to the best of my power. I trust my temper, which you know is by nature good and easy, has not been spoiled by flat- tery or prosperity ; and therefore I have escaped entirely that irritability of disposition which I think is planted, like the slave, in the poet's chariot, to prevent his enjoy- ing his triumph. Should things, therefore, change with me and in these times, or indeed in any times, such change is to be apprehended I trust I shall be able to surrender these adventitious advantages, as I would my upper dress, as something extremely comfortable, but which I can make shift to do without. Edinburgh, 1825. For myself, if things go badly in London, the magic wand of the Unknown will be shivered in his grasp. He must then, faith, be termed the Too-well-known. The feast of fancy will be over with the feeling of inde- pendence. He shall no longer have the delight of wak- ing in the morning with bright ideas in his mind, hasten to commit them to paper, and count them monthly, as 2O6 LITERATURE. the means of planting such scaurs, and purchasing such wastes ; replacing dreams of fiction by other prospective visions of walks by " Fountain heads, and pathless groves; Places which pale passion loves." This cannot be ; but I may work substantial husbandry, i. e., write history, and such concerns. They will not be received with the same enthusiasm ; at least I much doubt, the general knowledge that an author must write for his bread, at least for improving his pittance, de- grades him and his productions in the public eye. He falls into the second-rate rank of estimation : " While the harness sore galls, and the spurs his side goad, The high-mettled racer's a hack on the road." It is a bitter thought ; but if tears start at it, let them flow. My heart clings to the place I have created. There is scarce a tree on it that does not owe its. being to me. What a life mine has been ! half educated, almost wholly neglected, or left to myself ; stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash, and undervalued by most of my companions for a time ; getting forward, and held a bold and clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer ; broken-hearted for two years ; my heart handsomely pieced again ; but the crack will remain till my dying day. Rich and poor four or five times ; once on the verge of ruin, yet opened a new source of wealth almost overflowing. Now to be broken in my pitch of pride, and nearly winged (unless READINGS FROM SCOTT. good news should come), because London chooses to be in an uproar, and in the tumult of bulls and bears, a poor inoffensive lion like myself is pushed to the wall. But what is to be the end of it ? God knows ; and so ends the catechism. Nobody in the end can lose a penny by me that is one comfort. Men will think pride has had a fall. Let them indulge their own pride in thinking that my fall will make them higher, or seem so at least. I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and to hope that some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. Sad hearts, too, at Darnick, and in the cottages of Abbotsford. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest ? How live a poor indebted man, where I was once the wealthy the honored ? I was to have gone there on Saturday in joy and prosperity to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish but the thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must get them kind masters ! There may be yet those who, loving me, may love my dog, because it has been mine. I must end these gloomy forebodings, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet dis- tress. I feel my dogs' feet on my knees. I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere. This is nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things may be. An odd thought strikes me When I die, will the journal of these days be taken out of the ebony 208 LITERATURE. cabinet at Abbotsford, and read with wonder, that the well-seeming Baronet should ever have experienced the risk of such a hitch ? Or will it be found in some ob- scure lodging-house, where the decayed son of Chivalry had hung up his scutcheon, and where one or two old friends will look grave, and whisper to each other, "Poor gentleman" -"a well-meaning man" - " no- body's enemy but his own " " thought his parts would never wear out" -" family poorly left" -"pity he took that foolish title." Who can answer this question ? Poor Will Laidlaw Poor Tom Purdie such news will wring your hearts, and many a poor fellow besides to whom my prosperity was daily bread. From Lockharfs "Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott" READINGS FROM SCOTT. 209 ADDITIONAL READINGS. In addition to the foregoing readings, the following selections from the Waverley novels are specially recom- mended : 1. March of the highland army . (" Waverley," chap, iii.) 2. Midnight scene. (" Guy Mannering," chap, iii.) Servant to the covenanters. (" Old Mortality," chap, xviii.) Helen MacGregor and the outlaws. (" Rob Roy," chap. xxxi.) Prison scene. (" The Heart of Midlothian," chap, xx.) 6. Trial of Rebecca. (" Ivanhoe," chap, xxxvii.) 7. Death of George Douglas. (" The Abbot," chap, xxxvii.) 8. King Richard at the tent of Saladin. ("The Talisman," chap, xxviii.) 9. Wandering Willie"* stale. (" Redgauntlet," letter xi.) 10. Funeral of Lord Ravenswood. (" The Bride of Lammer- moor," chap, ii.) SCOTT'S COLLECTION OF PIPES. LORD BYRON. LORD BYRON, BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY. By JOHN EBENEZER BRYANT. BYRON is one of the world's great poets ; but, like the image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the material of his greatness is not all fine gold. Besides the gold there is much baser metal, as " brass and iron," and there is even " miry clay." But, nevertheless, a chief part of Byron's greatness is gold " fine gold " like the head of Nebuchadnezzar's image ; and this gold, unlike the gold of the image, will not " crumble to pieces " and " become as the chaff of a threshing floor," but will en- dure as long as anything poetical endures. George Gordon Byron, afterwards Lord Byron, was born in London, January 22, 1788. His ancestry on his father's side was of the bluest aristocratical English blood, that had descended in an unbroken stream through the veins of knights and barons from the time of William the Conqueror, downward, until it flushed his own. On his mother's side his ancestry was Scotch, and almost equally distinguished, for his mother was a Miss Catherine Gordon, of Gight, in Aberdeenshire, who traced her descent from King James the First of England and Sixth of Scot- 215 216 LITERATURE. land. But distinguished though his ancestors were, he in- herited from them something more than name and station. His father, Captain John Byron, who died when his son was but three years old, was a spendthrift and a heartless ra ke " Mad Jack Byron " he was called. His grand- father was an admiral, but one whose adventures were wild, stirring, and unfortunate. " Foul- Weather Jack" was his appropriate sobriquet. His granduncle, from NEWSTEAD ABBEY, THE ANCESTRAL HOME OF LORD BYRON. whom he inherited his title and estate, was a notorious hard liver, known as the " wicked lord." His mother, too, was a woman of such ill-balanced character that in her training of her son her conduct could scarcely have been worse. " Byron, your mother is a fool," a school- fellow once candidly told him. " I know it," was his only and sad reply. With such antecedents as these to influence his heredity, it can scarcely be doubted that much of what is eccentric and abnormal in Byron's char- acter and conduct can well be accounted for. His LORD BYRON. 217 mother's property having all been squandered by his worthless father, Byron's younger years were full of poverty. For a while he was at a school at Aberdeen. At ten years of age he succeeded to his title and estate, but his condition at the time was but little improved thereby, for the estate was heavily encumbered. In his fourteenth year he was sent to the famous school at Harrow. His years at Harrow constituted an important epoch in his life, for it was there that he formed the most of those friendships, all of them honorable and honoring, for which his career is so remarkable. Whatever may have been the weakness of Byron's character in regaid to the affections which he experienced for women, his affections for men, when once he placed them, were noble and enduring. For some time at Harrow he was very unhappy ; but after a while he became a leader in the school, and then his life was perhaps the happiest he ever lived. In 1805, at the age of seventeen, Byron went to Cam- bridge. Here his old friendships were continued, and some new ones, equally commendable, were formed. But neither at Harrow nor at Cambridge was Byron a stu- dent in the ordinary sense of the word. At Harrow he read largely of history and biography, but at Cambridge he spent but little time in serious pursuits of any sort. His life there was, indeed, very irregular. But he prac- tised all sorts of athletic games, rode, boxed, and swam like a young Spartan, and became so expert with the pistol that he was looked upon as a man that could take care of himself in any sort of evil circumstances. In 1808 he left Cambridge, and then spent some time at Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home. But the place 2l8 LITERATURE. was badly out of repair, and he had no money to spend towards improving it. In 1809 he became of age and took his seat in the House of Lords. But want of money, reckless living, imprudent adventures and attachments, disappointments in love affairs, and numberless other things had made him tired of life tired of England especially ; and he determined to go abroad. For two years he rambled about in Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor. In 1811 he returned to England again. But in the mean- time several friends whom he loved dearly had died, and his pecuniary condition had but little improved, so that he found himself even more miserable than he was before he went away. Byron's talent for writing poetry was a natural gift, an endowment of genius, and it gained little or nothing from culture. It was a disposition of the mind which, once indulged in, became a habit. During all his life, after once the habit was formed, though he must have been more occupied than most men, for even Byron's idle pursuits were preoccupying ones, scarcely a month passed that he did not write something that has since proved to be a permanent addition to our literature. He began to publish in his eighteenth year, his first produc- tion being a small collection of poems, which, because an elderly friend thought one of them somewhat indelicate, he afterward destroyed. In his nineteenth year he published his " Hours of Idleness." This work, though juvenile and weak enough, did not deserve the ferocious attack which some time after was made upon it by a critic in the Edinburgh Review, supposed to be Lord Brougham. Byron took a twelvemonth to prepare his reply, but when LORD BYRON'. 221 it appeared (" English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " 1809) it showed to the Review, and to all the world be- side, that a new literary star had risen in the firmament, the fierce brightness of whose flame was likely to pale all lesser stars. But though Byron had found in this production what was perhaps his true field of literary effort satire he was as yet too inexperienced in the world to produce either satire or any other form of poetry on original lines. While he was upon his tour abroad, however, he had embodied many of his observations and reflections in a series of poems. But of these he had thought so little that when he returned to London he did not even take the trouble to hunt up a publisher for them. A friend, however, accidentally discovered them, and, recognizing their worth, persuaded their publication. In February, 1812, they appeared " Childe Harold, Cantos I and II." Their impression upon the public was instantaneous and marvellous. As Byron himself so appositely expressed it : "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." In five weeks seven editions of the book were exhausted. And not only did he win this popular success, but in the next two or three years he produced a series of poems "The Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," " The Corsair," "Lara," the "Hebrew Mel- odies " of which each was, if possible, more popular than its predecessor. Byron for the time being was the most popular author the English people had ever known. Even Scott's star, bright and splendid as it was (for " Marmion " and " The Lady of the Lake " were still on every one's lips), was bedimmed beneath the fiercer splendor of this newer luminary. Had Byron died in 1815 his name would have been written in the book of 222 LITERATURE. fame as that of the most popular poet that ever lived. And yet none of these poems that Byron had so far written, not even the first cantos of " Childe Harold," popular as they were, and popular as they still are, were of that force and fervency which all enduring great poems must possess. A poet must feel and think deeply, must suffer, in fact, before he can write great poetry. Byron had not suffered yet, he had only imagined he had. Byron's relations with the other sex were the great determining facts of his life. And as his poetry was the outcome of his life (perhaps more so than that of any other great poet that ever lived) the expression of what he saw and felt and reflected upon in it therefore these relations became the great determining factors in the production of his poetry. And as these relations were rarely regulated according to conventional opinion, according to conventional modes of thinking and acting, it follows that it is impossible to sympathize with Byron, even to understand him, much less to appreciate him, unless one is prepared to put out of sight and forget (for the moment, at any rate) almost every settled opinion and rule of conduct which, in respect of sexual relation- ship, society has established for its safe-guarding. But it must be remembered that Byron was not wholly to blame. Both fate and circumstances worked against him. We have seen what must have been the inherit- ance of disposition that he received from his ancestors on his father's side. We have seen, too, how little his mother's judgment and conduct were fitted to influence him for good. Almost the only principles of morality he ever learned, except what he picked up in the rough and tumble of an old-time English public school, and LORD BYRON. 225 except what he learned from books, he owed to the pre- cepts of a faithful Scotch nurse, who also taught him his Bible (in the knowledge of which, indeed, owing to her instructions, he was very proficient). He had a passion for loving ; but the only woman he ever really loved that is, with an enduring love, at once ardent and pure was his half-sister Augusta, and her h"e was destined rarely ever to see until he had returned from his travels abroad, with a man's full years and with more than a man's full experience. His earlier loves seem always to have been crossed. When yet a young boy he was in love with his cousin, Mary Duff, who afterward married another. When scarcely more than a boy he was in love with another cousin, Margaret Parker, who after- ward died. When he was sixteen years of age he loved and would have married Mary Chaworth, a distant rela- tive and the heiress of estates that adjoined his own ; but she treated him coldly and disdained his advances, though ever afterward, even to the last year of his life, he treasured his idealization of her memory and made her the subject of some of his finest verse. All these passions were conventional enough ; but there were others that were not so conventional. Some of his ten- derest poems, some of the sweetest and most pathetic expressions of regret and sorrow he ever wrote, were addressed to the memory of "Thyrza"; but who "Thyrza" was is not known, nor would Byron ever declare. An explanation given by some of his biog- raphers is that " Thyrza " was a young girl, of lower social degree than himself, who made sacrifices of every- thing for his sake, even so far as to accompany him through England on horseback as his brother. But 226 LITER A TURE. other biographers do not identify "Thyrza" with this poor girl. When Byron came back to England from his Euro- pean tour his experience of the world on all matters of the heart was, at all events, sufficient to entitle him to settle down in quietness and decorum. This, however, he was not permitted to do. The social popularity which the successful publication of " Childe Harold " suddenly thrust upon him would have turned heads much more stably fixed than his. Girls and women of every rank in life literally threw themselves at him. He was hand- some scarcely any one more so, both in face and figure though slightly deformed in one foot, a defect from physical perfection which greatly chafed him. His friends who used to bathe with him used to say that his torso and limbs were as superbly turned as any Apollo's. He was of noble descent and title. His estate, though encumbered, was one of the finest and stateliest in the kingdom. He was a poet, and a great and popular one. He had travelled and seen the world, and was a charming and vivacious companion. Moreover, as the "tang "in the wine gives to it its appetizing flavor, so he had just enough of a reputation for recklessness and wickedness to give to his career, his person, his manners, and his character, an interest so keen and enjoyable that even the properest sort of people felt no scruple in avowing it. In short, he was the lion of the town. His society and his friendship were sought for by every one. Not a family in the kingdom, however old or noble, but would have deemed an alliance with him an honor. And all the time he was the object of secret advances from dames and damsels of the highest social position and the LORD BYRON. 2 29 highest social character. Let all this be remembered when Byron's own undoubted faults are up for judg- ment. He did not marry, however, and after a while, his social relationships becoming in some quarters rather particular and intimate, he ceased to be the object of general adoration which he at first had been. But in the autumn of 1814 he proposed to a Miss Milbanke. She refused at first, but suggested a correspondence. The correspondence thus begun went on with much interest and affection, and after a little while Byron proposed a second time, but, it must be confessed, neither with earnestness nor enthusiasm. The second proposal was accepted, however. They were married in January, 1815. A child (his daughter Ada) was born to them in December. On January 15, 1816, Lady Byron left her husband's house to visit her parents, writing to her husband on the journey a loving and tenderly playful letter. In a very short time, however (a few days), she sent him word that she would never return. Nor did she ever return. Her parents de- manded a legal separation ; and this, after he had vainly endeavored to secure a reconciliation (scarcely believing the action to be in earnest at first), Byron consented to. The world of London turned at once, as if in rage, against its former favorite, and he who a year or two before had been the idol of society, became now the object of its bitterest contumely and reproach. This estrangement of Lord Byron and his wife, this separation so suddenly brought about, so persistently persevered in by Lady Byron's friends (for it is admitted that Byron himself courted reconciliation several times), is the domestic incident that has excited the most 230 LITER A TURE. interest in the whole range of literary history. And it has never been satisfactorily explained. Byron used to say that there was nothing of importance to explain. Lady Byron's friends never offered the public any real explanation, but gave out many grave and serious hints. General incompatibility is the most frequently alleged LADY BYRON. cause ; but that, in face of Lady Byron's tender message on first leaving him and then her sudden taking on of a wholly different attitude, cannot be regarded as sufficient. Lady Byron was a woman of upright character and strict views as to behavior, and she might have regarded her alliance with a man like Byron as an offence against her principles ; but even if this were granted, her deport- ment to her husband on leaving him is unexplainable ; LORD BYRON. 231 and her subsequent deportment to him when he courted reconciliation is thought by many to have been too im- placable. But, on the other hand, she is believed to have been a just woman, one who would not have acted as she did without, at least, thinking she had suffi- cient cause for her action. The affair, however, would no doubt have long since been relegated to the realm of oblivion had not in our own time and in our own country one of our own countrywomen taken part in it. About thirty years ago Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe pub- lished in the Atlantic Monthly a statement said to have been obtained directly from Lady Byron herself, which accused Byron of having a scandalous relationship with one whom he was believed always to have tenderly and honorably loved. The allegations in this statement may have been made by Lady Byron, and when she made them they may have been believed by her to be true ; but no one in England believes that at the time of the estrangement she believed them, or that she even made them then. The explanation is, that afterward, when in failing health and failing mind, she may have made them, and may then have believed them to be true. But to Byron the estrangement, whatever may have been the reasonableness or unreasonableness of it, was of most evil consequence. He left England soon after (April, 1 8 1 6), and never returned to it again. He resided for some time in Switzerland, and there unfortunately made acquaintances that proved to be more than passing inti- macies. His daughter, Allegra, whom he most tenderly loved, and whom he most tenderly cared for as long as she lived, was born in 1817. In the meantime he had come to Italy and taken up his residence at Venice ; and 232 LIT ERA TV RE. there Lord Byron's course took its lowest dip. His life at Venice will hardly be excused even by his warm- est defenders ; and for two years or more nothing but his devotion to poetry was its redeeming feature. In 1819, however, he fell under the influence of a passion which, though irregular, judged by Anglo-Saxon canons of morality, was not considered so irregular in the coun- try where it had its being. The Countess of Guiccioli, a young and beautiful girl, who, for the sake of the connec- tion it established for her family, had been married to an old man of sixty, of ancient title and large estates, met Byron and fell deeply and hopelessly in love with him. Though somewhat sated with loving by this time, Byron reciprocated the young countess's attachment, and after a number of necessary preliminaries (Count Guiccioli consenting, and the parents and family of the countess, also), Byron and the countess were domesticated together. The universal testimony of all who visited Byron during the few short years that remained to him after this arrangement began is that the countess made for him a congenial and lovable companion. It was in the inauspicious and evil circumstances of his early life in Italy that Byron wrote some of his strongest work the last canto of " Childe Harold," " Manfred," " The Lament of Tasso," " Mazeppa," " Beppo," and the first two cantos of " Don Juan." The third canto of "Childe Harold" and "The Prisoner of Chillon " had been written in Switzerland. The remainder of his liter- ary work, the very strongest of all he wrote, was produced in the home that was made for him by the loving care of the Countess Guiccioli. But even successful literary work, much as his heart and pride were in it, and even LORD BYRON. From a sketch by Count D'Orsay, May, 1823. LORD BYRON. 235 the serenity and comfort of happy domesticity, which now for the first time in his life he was enjoying, were not enough to keep the heart and soul of such a man as Byron securely anchored. For with all his faults, and no man ever made a worse use of such as he had, Byron had a true and tender heart, and an ambitious and noble- purposed soul. His estrangement from his wife, his separation from his daughter, greatly fretted and pained him. That in respect of his conduct toward his wife the world would finally exonerate him of serious wrong- doing when it should know all the facts, though it might blame him for his follies, he firmly believed ; and that it might know all the facts he drew up his " Memoirs " and intrusted them to his friend, the poet Moore, for publi- cation after his death ; but, unfortunately for Byron's reputation, Moore rather thoughtlessly allowed these memoirs to be destroyed. But though Byron had thus done what he could to set his mind at rest regarding a matter that touched his pride as well as his heart to the quick, and though he seemed to gain greater literary power with every verse he wrote, and though his home life was a happier one than ever before he had known, yet his unsatisfactory relationship with the great world of soci- ety and action which he was so well fitted to take a shining and commanding part in, made him dissatisfied with the whole tenor of his existence domestic hap- piness and comfort, literary success and honor, and everything else. But a wider field of action immediately opened before him. The patriots of Greece ardently sought his sym- pathy and his aid. He joined the cause for the restora- tion of Hellenic liberty ; and he determined to devote 236 LITERATURE. his life, his means, and his talents to the cause he had adopted. On July 14, 1823, he bade farewell to his devoted "Theresa" (the Countess of Guiccioli), and accompanied by her brother, Count Gamba, who was his faithful companion to the last, he set sail from Genoa in a ship that he had had fitted out for him, to take a per- sonal and practical part in the fight which the Greeks were making against their enslavers. Arrived in Greece, he was hailed as a heaven-sent deliverer. He was made a commander-in-chief, and asked to share in the governor- ship of the Morea. But Greece was full of factions, and a wise course of action was exceedingly difficult. How- ever, Byron was sagacious and prudent, both in acting and in not acting, and he soon convinced the Greeks of all factions that he was one whose judgment could be relied upon. He was appointed commissioner to dispense the loan of a million crowns which the friends of Greece in England had been able to raise for the patriotic revo- lutionists ; and had he lived there is no doubt that he would have been asked to occupy a regal throne. But it was not to be. Byron's work was over. The place where he was stationed, Missolonghi, proved to be a veritable fever-bed. Byron's constitution was peculiarly susceptible to miasmatic influences, and he was implored to leave and go elsewhere. But he would not. He thought that to do so would be to show cowardice. He took the fever ; he was treated most unwisely by his physicians; and he died, April 19, 1824. Thirty-seven guns were fired in his honor, one for every year of his life, and for twenty-one days Greece went in mourning. She also begged for the body of her " liberator "to be buried in the Temple of Theseus at Athens. But the LORD BYRON. remains were taken to England. It was thought that the great poet would have been buried in Westminster Abbey. But an objection was raised, and by his sister's wish he was taken to the burial place of his ancestors at Hucknall, near Newstead, where now she, also, and his little daughter, Ada, the two beings whom he loved most tenderly of all, lie with him. Byron's work, marred though it often is by much that the moralist and the man of good taste must alike con- demn, belongs, nevertheless, to the world's greatest liter- ature. It was great because he himself was great great in force, in scope of observation, in range of sym- pathy, in imaginative idealization, in descriptive faculty, and in the power of putting into clear and memorable language reflections that when once read seem to come to the minds of all readers like thoughts inborn within themselves. But he had an even greater ability than any of these the ability to see the absurdity, the weak- ness, the want of consistency or reasonableness, in the mental and moral attitude of men and women, and of societies, communities, and nations, as to all matters of social conduct ; and the ability also to describe this weakness and to make it a matter for the laughter of gods and men. In other words, he was the greatest social satirist that the modern world has known. Such works as "The Vision of Judgment " and "Don Juan " (for " Don Juan " is really a satire) are unequalled in literature. They may offend our sense of propriety, and undoubtedly they do. They may be unfit for read- ing to any but men and women of fixed principles and settled habits of conduct, and undoubtedly they are. But, nevertheless, in force and swiftness of execution, in 238 LITERATURE. deftness of touch, in color, in action, in vivid imaginative groupings and dispositions, in interest, in the expression of varied feelings from humor to pathos, from the ridicu- lous to the sublime, they excel all other poetic composi- tions that ever have been written. Many critics have described " The Vision of Judgment " as the greatest social satire of modern times. So noble-minded a judge as Sir Walter Scott pronounced " Don Juan " as having " the variety even of Shakespeare." Goethe said of it : " It is full of soul and is exquisitely delicate in its ten- derness." Shelley spoke of it as " wholly new, and yet surpassingly beautiful." And in such opinions as these the world of lesser critics also pretty generally concur. Byron's greatness as a poet lay in the simplicity, the naturalness, the force, the directness, the felicity or appositeness, and oftentimes the beauty, of his descrip- tions and reflections. His was not a creative intellect. He gave to the world no new thought, no new philoso- phy, no new and profound explanation of life and its mysteries, no new inspirations of hope and trust and faith in short, nothing to make the world better, or brighter, or happier, except an enjoyment for the pass- ing hour, a pleasing but temporary incitement of the feeling and fancy. His influence, therefore, is wholly titillative and sensuous, although so in an exceptionally superior degree. That is to say, it is not inspirational or inseminating. It produces no permanent emotion ; it develops no lasting impulses toward either thought or action. Its effect is wholly superficial and evanescent. Many of Byron's reflections and descriptions were uttered by the characters he created, and might, there- fore, be expected to have partaken of his characters' idio- LORD BYRON. 239 syncrasies ; in other words, to have been as dramatic in reality as they were in form. But Byron's want of crea- tive power was manifested here also. He did not possess the gift of dramatic characterization. His hero- ines, outwardly so many varying types of physical loveli- ness, were inwardly only so many varying types of the capacity for loving and being loved. Of other gifts and graces we discover but little in their creator's presenta- tion of them. His heroes, too, were merely modifica- tions of one master type, and that, no doubt, his own. The hero of " Childe Harold " was intended at first to be a dramatic character ; but long before the poem was finished the author ceased even to pretend to make the character anything other than his own. The other great characters of Byron Manfred, Cain, Lara, Conrad, the Giaour, etc. are but idealizations oftentimes extreme idealizations of phases of character which Byron found in himself. Even Don Juan is but the completer realiza- tion of what Byron was, or fancied that he could have been, in his youth. But it must be remembered that Byron made no pretence in his poetical work (except in his lyrics) to be anything else than a narrator. Where he gives his poems a dramatic form, or has his charac- ters speak in their own persons, it is merely to make his narrative run the more easily. A great point of praise for Byron is that he rarely misestimated the scope of his own genius, and so made few failures. His work, such as he did, is what he could do easiest and best ; and he did not even attempt any sort of work that he could not do well. As a rule, Byron had only two sets of intellectual operations to put into words ; first, the description of a 240 LITER A TURE. fact, the narration of an incident, the telling of a story ; and, second, the expression of some reflection. He saw his facts clearly, and he endeavored to express them clearly. His story-telling, therefore, was always simple and direct. His reflections, too, as mental processes, were equally clear-cut. They were never profound or esoteric ; in fact, they were generally obvious, and often- times scarcely more than superficial. These, also, he ARMS OF THE BYRON FAMILY. endeavored to express with the utmost clearness. His style, therefore, partook of the simplicity and directness of his mental operations. As he became more and more experienced in authorship it became the very perfection of simplicity and " rush." He never loitered or dawdled. He went continuously on leaping over or passing round an obstacle never stopping to remove it. In time his song flight became the very swiftest of all our poetic choir. He was not, however, in the least pains- taking in what he wrote. He was scarcely even passably LORD BYROJV. 24! so. His mistakes in syntax, and in construction, were frequent enough to bring upon him the contemptuous criticism of many grammarians. His want of ear, or, rather, his carelessness in all matters of the ear in melody, rhythm, rhyme, etc. has made Swinburne say that no other poet of any considerable renown ever wrote so badly as he. At times, too, he gets so hope- lessly entangled in his metaphors, similes, and other poetic images, as to be scarcely intelligible. But all these defects are merely as grains of dust in the pure wheat. The great body of Byron's verse proceeds as directly straight ahead, and is as easily understood, as the " Pilgrim's Progress " or the " Proverbs of Solomon." The reason why Byron's method of expression was so simple and direct is that his natural gift of expression was so great that everything he wrote he wrote without effort with " running pen," as the Romans used to say. As for style, he paid no thought to it whatever. He never elaborated his composition. " I am like the tiger in the jungle," he used to say ; " if I miss my first spring I go off grumbling to my lair again." Nor of versification did he make any study. Of the various forms of verse which he used those which he most followed were adopted out of mere fancy or caprice ; one, because it had been used by his. favorite Pope ; an- other, because Scott had had success with it ; and so on. Even the " ottava rima," the eight-lined verse of " Beppo " and " Don Juan," which he has made so peculiarly his own, of which, indeed, he is the greatest master of all who ever handled it, was adopted almost by accident. In short, Byron was not an artist, either in composition or versification, and he never attempted to be one. The 242 LIT ERA TURE. assiduous pains of poets like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Gray, or his favorite Pope, or even Scott, he never practised, or even dreamed of. His untutored genius was, in his judgment, all-sufficing, and he was quite will- ing to have it thought so. Indeed, he was quite willing to have it thought that poetry was to him a natural gift one that had come to him without any effort or desire on his part, much as his title of nobility had come to him. He never cared to consider himself simply as a poet. At first, and for a long time, he even would not receive any pay for his poetry, permitting his friends to reap the financial benefits that arose from his exercise of his genius ; although when he had thus allowed several thousand pounds to slip out of his hands, because of his foolish pride, he became more sensible, and took pay like any one else. Afterward, indeed, he got so that he could drive as hard bargains with his publishers as any other author. But never, even when most popular as a writer, or even when most powerful, did he abate one jot from that jauntiness of demeanor which made him appear as if he cared not one whit for his poetic fame ; and in good truth he did care but little for it. CRITICAL STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES. LADY BLESSINGTON S PORTRAIT OF BYRON. " I HAD fancied him taller, with a more dignified and commanding air, and I looked in vain for the hero- looking sort of person with whom I had so long identi- fied him in imagination. His appearance is, however, highly prepossessing ; his head is finely shaped, and the forehead open, high, and noble ; his eyes are grey and full of expression, but one is visibly larger than the other ; his mouth is the most remarkable feature in his face, the upper lip of Grecian shortness, and the corners descending, the lips full and finely cut. In speaking he shows his teeth very much, and they are white and even ; but I observed that even in his smile and he smiles frequently there is something of a scornful expression in his mouth that is evidently natural and not, as many suppose, affected. . . . His countenance is full of expression, and changes with the subject of conversation ; it gains on the beholder the more it is seen, and leaves an agreeable impression. ... He is very slightly lame, and the deformity of his foot is so little remarkable that I am not now aware which foot it is. His voice and accent are peculiarly agreeable but effeminate clear, harmonious, and so distinct that, though his general tone in speaking is rather low than high, not a word is lost. ... I had expected to find 243 2 44 LIT ERA TURE. him a dignified, cold, reserved, and haughty person, resembling those mysterious personages he so loves to paint in his works, and with whom he has been so often identified by the good-natured world. But nothing can be more different ; for were I to point out the promi- nent defect in Lord Byron, I should say it was flip- pa.ncy, and a total want of that natural self-possession and dignity which ought to characterize a man of birth and education." Upon which Mr. William Minto re- marks : " Such, judged by the social standards of his own country, was the look and personal manner of the greatest literary power of this century." BYRON'S SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AS TO HIS LAMENESS. It is certain that one of the poet's feet was, either at birth or at a very early period, so seriously clubbed or twisted as to affect his gait, and to a considerable extent his habits. It also appears that the surgical means boots, bandages, etc. adopted to straighten the limb only aggravated the evil. His sensitiveness on the subject was early awakened by careless or un- feeling references. " What a pretty boy Byron is ! " said a friend to his nurse. " What a pity he has such a leg ! " On which the child, with flashing eyes, cutting at her with a baby's whip, cried out, " Dinna speak of it." His mother herself, in her violent fits, when the boy ran round the room laughing at her attempts to catch him, used to say he was a little dog, as bad as his father, and to call him "a lame brat" -an incident which notoriously suggested the opening scene of the "Deformed Transformed." In the height of his popu- STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF BYRON. 245 larity he fancied that the beggars and street-sweepers in London were mocking him. He satirized and dis- couraged dancing ; he preferred riding and swimming to other exercises, because they concealed his weakness ; and on his deathbed asked to be blistered in such a way that he might not be called on to expose it. The Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington, and others assure us that in society few would have observed the defect if he had not referred to it ; but it was never far from the mind, and therefore never far from the mouth, of the least reticent of men. JOHN NICHOL. BYRON AND LADY BYRON. There is a kind of genius, closely associated with intense irritability, which it is difficult to subject to the most reasonable yoke; and of this sort was Byron's. His valet, Fletcher, is reported to have said that " Any woman could manage my lord, except my lady " ; and Madame De Stael, on reading the "Farewell," that " She would have been glad to have been in Lady Byron's place." But it may be doubted if Byron would have made a good husband to any woman ; his wife and he were even more than unusually ill-assorted. A model of the proprieties, and a pattern of the learned philanthropy of which, in her sex, he was wont to make a constant butt, she was no fit consort for that " mens insana in corpore insano" What could her placid tem- perament conjecture of a man whom she saw, in one of his fits of passion, throwing a favorite watch under the fire, and grinding it to pieces with a poker? Or how could her conscious virtue tolerate the recurring irregu- 246 LIT ERA TURE. larities which he was accustomed, not only to permit himself, but to parade ? The harassment of his affairs stimulated his violence, till she was inclined to suspect him to be mad. JOHN NICHOL. INCOMPATIBILITY OF BYRON AND LADY BYRON. Some of Lady Byron's recently printed letters as that to Lady Anne Barnard, and the reports of later observers of her character, as William Howitt tend to detract from the earlier tributes to her consistent amiability, and confirm our ideas of the incompatibility of the pair. It must have been trying to a poet to be asked by his wife, impatient of his late hours, when he was going to leave off writing verses ; to be told he had no real enthusiasm ; or to have his desk broken open, and its compromising contents sent to the persons for whom they were least intended. The smouldering ele- ments of discontent may have been fanned by the gos- sip of dependants, or the officious zeal of relatives, and kindled into a jealous flame by the ostentation of regard for others beyond the circle of his home. Lady Byron doubtless believed some story which, when communi- cated to her legal advisers, led them to the conclusion that the mere fact of her believing it made reconcili- ation impossible ; and the inveterate obstinacy which lurked beneath her gracious exterior made her cling through life to the substance not always to the form, whatever that may have been of her first impressions. Her later letters to Mrs. Leigh, as that called forth by Moore's " Life," are certainly as open to the charge of STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF BYRON. 247 248 LITER A TURE self-righteousness as those of her husband's are to self- disparagement. JOHN N-ICHOL. " THYRZA. But the death which most deeply wounded Byron came later. 1 Nothing ever racked him with sharper anguish than the death of her whom he mourned under the name of Thyrza. To know the bitterness of his struggle with this sorrow, we have only to look at what he wrote on the day that the news reached him (Oct. 11, 1 8 1 1 ) ; some of his wildest and most ptirely mis- anthropical verse, as well as some of his sweetest and saddest, belongs to that blackest of dates in his calen- dar. It is time that something were done to trace this attachment, which has been strangely overlooked by the essayists and biographers, because it furnishes an im- portant clue to Byron's character, and is, indeed, of hardly less importance than his later attachment to the Countess Guiccioli. Mr. John Morley, in an essay which ought to be read by everybody who wishes to form a clear idea of Byron's poetry as a revolutionary force in itself and an index to the movement of the time, remarks upon the respect which Byron, with all his raillery of the married state in modern society, still shows for the domestic idea. It is against the artificial union, the marriage of convenience, that Byron's raillery is directed ; he always upholds singleness of attachment as an ideal, however cynically or mournfully he laments its infrequence, and points with laughter or with tears 1 Mr. Minto had been previously speaking of the deaths of Byron's friends, Matthews and Wingfield; also of the death of the poet's mother. STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF BYRON. 249 at the way in which it is crossed and cut short by cir- cumstances when it does exist. Byron is not a railer against matrimony, except as a counterfeit of the natu- ral union of hearts. His attachment to Thyrza shows that in this, as in other matters, he was transparently sincere. WILLIAM MINTO. BYRON S REAL CONSTANCY OF AFFECTION. To look for the causes of moodiness and melancholy in material circumstances is a very foolish quest ; but we may be certain that insufficiency of this world's money, and the daily vexations and insults to which his rank was thereby exposed, had much more to do with Byron's youthful gloom than satiety of this world's pleasures. His embarrassed finances, and the impossi- bility of securing the respect due to his title, formed a constant source of annoyance, put his whole system into a morbid condition in which every little slight and repulse festered and rankled with exaggerated virulence. From the daily humiliations and impertinences to which his false position exposed him, aggravated by his jealous and suspicious irritability, he may have turned some- times to Childe Harold's consolations " the harlot and the bowl," but his nature prompted him rather to forget his vexations in purer and worthier objects. Un- fortunately for him, such impetuous and passionate affections as his could rarely find the response for which he craved. In those few cases where devotion was repaid with devotion, the warmth of his gratitude was unbounded ; he loaded poor Thyrza's memory with caresses, careless of what the world might say, remem- 250 LITER A TURE. bering only that the poor girl clung to him with unself- ish love ; and he returned his sister's tender regard with an ardor and constancy that showed how highly he prized, and how eagerly he reciprocated, sincere affec- tion. WILLIAM MINTO. SCOTT, ON BYRON AND BURNS. I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I returned from France ; he dined or lunched with me at Long's in Bond Street. I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humor. The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent. Several letters passed between us one perhaps every half year. Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts ; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the " Iliad," for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men's bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humor I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always left his countenance, like the mist arising from a land- scape. I think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret and perhaps offen^ sive meaning in something that was said to him. In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled spring, work itself clear, which it did in a min- STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF BYRON. 25 I ute or two. A downright steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion. Will Rose, looking by ac- cident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously ; but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his boundless genius, was his generosity of spirit, as well as of purse, and his utter contempt of all the affecta- tions of literature. He liked Moore and me because, with all our other differences, we were both good- natured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the mot-pour-rire . He wrote from impulse, never from effort, and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. SIR WALTER SCOTT. BYRON AND THE WORLD'S TREATMENT OF HIM. He came into the world ; and the world treated him as his mother had treated him, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with cruelty, never with justice. It indulged him without discrimination and punished him without discrimination. He was truly a spoiled child ; not merely the spoiled child of his parent, but the spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society. His first poems were received with a contempt which, feeble as they were, they did not absolutely deserve. The poem which he published on his return from his travels was, on the other hand, extolled far above its merit. At twenty- four he found himself on the pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other 2 5 2 LITER A TURE. distinguished writers beneath his feet. There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence. Everything that could stimulate and everything that could gratify the strongest propensities of our nature, the gaze of a hundred drawing rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, the applause of ap- plauded men, the love of lovely women, all this world and all the glory of it, were at once offered to a youth THE VILLA DIODATI. The Residence of Lord Byron. From a Drawing by Purser. to whom nature had given violent passions, and whom education had never taught to control them. He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to plead for their faults. But his countrymen and countrywomen would love and admire him. They were resolved to see S TUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF B YR ON. 253 in his excesses only the flash and outbreak of that same fiery mind which glowed in his poetry. . . . Everything, it seemed, was to be forgiven to youth, rank, and genius. Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indig- nation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. LORD MACAULAY. BYRON AND SCOTT BYRON'S FORCE AND IMPETUOSITY. Like Scott, Byron is often defective in his rhymes and the other minutiae of his art, and is wanting in exquisite finish in general and absolute perfection and felicity of expression in occasional passages. But the positive blots on his style are more frequent and more offensive than those of Scott, while his best passages are finer. He lacked the patience and self-discipline, he lacked the single-minded devotion to art, without thought of self, requisite for the production of perfect works of art. Like Scott, he wrote with great rapidity. The " Bride of Abydos " is said to have been written in four days; the "Corsair" in ten days; the third canto of "Childe Harold " in a few weeks ; the fourth, in its original draft of 126 stanzas, in a month. He wrote to relieve him- self, or impress the public, not to produce something perfectly beautiful. He falls beneath Scott in the broader technical excellencies of structure, unity, devel- opment, etc. His poems consist of passages of greater or less excellence, strung together without much connec- tion or plan. Yet there is a force and variety in Byron's work that carries us along, so that in such poems as 254 LITER A TURE. " Childe Harold" and " Don Juan" we scarcely note this lack. Here, indeed, we come upon the qualities that give Byron's verse its permanent place in literature. Two critics as different as Swinburne and Matthew Ar- FRANCISCAN CONVENT, ATHENS. The Residence of Lord Byron, 1811. From a Drawing by C. Stanfield, A.R. A. nold agree in according to his poetry " the splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects : the excellence of sincerity and strength." PROFESSOR W. J. ALEXANDER, PH.D. STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF BYRON, 255 BYRON S INDEPENDENCE AND INDIVIDUALITY AS A POET. The position of Byron as a poet is a curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Some- thing of the school of Pope clings to him ; yet no one so completely broke away from old measures and old man- ners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At first he has no interest whatever in the human questions which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy except that which centres round the problem of his own being. " Cain," the most thought- ful of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the representation of the way in which the doctrines of original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We feel naturally great interest in this strong personal- ity, put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into the opposite extreme in "Don Juan." It is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all the con- ventionality of social morality and religion and politics. It claimed for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual act and thought in opposition to that force of society which tends to make all men after one pat- tern. This was the best result of his work, though the way in which it was done can scarcely be approved. As the poet of nature, he belongs also to the old and the new school. Byron's sympathy with Nature is a sympathy 256 LITERATURE. with himself reflected in her moods. But he also es- caped from this position of the later eighteenth-century poets, and he looks on Nature as she is, apart from him- self ; and this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power, and the ease that comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, as well as his amazing productiveness, which mark him specially. But it is always more power of the intellect than of the imagination. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. BYRON'S ADDICTION TO SELF-PORTRAITURE. His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived their principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them. He was himself the begin- ning, the middle, and the end of all his own poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object in every land- scape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron ; and there is every reason to be- lieve that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of the outer world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet lake of Leman, the dell of Egeria, with its summer birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers, the stars, the sea, the moun- tains, all were mere accessories, the background to one dark and melancholy figure. LORD MACAULAY. STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF B YRON. 257 BYRON S MORBIDNESS OF FEELING. Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy, and despair. That THE MAID OF ATHENS. From a Sketch made from Life in 1823. The Poem was written in 1810. Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten, no draughts could exhaust, its perennial waters of bitter- ness. Never was there such variety in monotony as that of Byron. From maniac laughter to piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of human anguish of which he was not master. Year after year, and month after month, he continued to repeat that to be wretched is the destiny of all ; that to be eminently wretched is the destiny of the eminent ; that all the 258 LITERATURE. desires by which we are cursed lead alike to misery, if they are not gratified, to the misery of disappoint- ment ; if they are gratified, to the misery of satiety. His heroes are men who have arrived by different roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock, or of Satan in the burning marl, who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who, to the last, defy the whole power of earth and heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with his favorite creations, as a man whose heart had been withered, whose capacity for hap- piness was gone and could not be restored, but whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter. LORD MACAULAY. THE DECLINE IN BYRON S REPUTATION. During his lifetime Byron enjoyed a renown which has rarely fallen to the lot of any living writer. At the present day it is common to hear people asserting that Byron was not a true poet. Some causes of this rev- olution are patent. In the first place, he cannot be called a moral poet. His collected works are not of a kind to be recommended for family reading ; and the poems in which his genius shines most clearly are pre- cisely those which lie open to the charges of cynicism, unorthodoxy, or licentiousness. Again, he suffers from the very range and versatility of his performance. His masterpieces are long, and make considerable demands upon the reader's patience. Byron has suffered even STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF BYRON. 259 more from the mixed quality of his work. Not only are his poems voluminous, but they are exceedingly unequal. J. A. SYMONDS. BYRON COMPARED WITH OTHER NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. The sudden burst of glory which followed upon the publication of " Childe Harold," and the indiscriminate enthusiasm of his admirers, injured Byron during his lifetime by establishing the certainty that whatever he wrote would be read. It has injured him still more with posterity by stirring a reaction against claims in some respects so obviously ill-founded. Instead of sub- jecting the whole mass of Byron's poetry to a careful criticism, the world has been contented lately to reckon it among the nine days' wonders of a previous age. This injustice would, however, have been impossible, unless a current of taste inimical to Byron had set in soon after his death. Students of literature in England began about that period to assimilate Wordsworth, Cole- ridge, Keats, Shelley, Landor those very poets whom Byron, in his uncritical arrogance, had despised or neg- lected. Their ears became accustomed to versification more exquisite and careful, to harmonies deeper and more refined if less resonant and brilliant. They learned to demand a more patient and studied deline- ation of natural beauty, passion more reserved, artistic aims at once more sober and more earnest, and emotions of a less obtrusively personal type. Tennyson and Browning, with all the poet-artists of the present gener- ation, represent as sheer a departure from Byronian pre- 260 LITER A TURE. cedent as it is possible to take in literature. The very greatness of Byron has unfitted him for an audience educated in this different school of poetry. That great- ness was his truth to fact, conceived as action, feeling, energy ; not as the material for picture-painting, reflec- LORD BYRON'S TOMB. tion, or analysis. Men nursed on the idyllic or the analytic kinds of poetry can hardly do him justice ; not because he is exactly greater, or they indisputably less, but because he makes his best points in a region which is alien to their sympathy. J. A. SYMONDS. BYRON AND PRESENT-DAY STANDARDS OF TASTE. We are nowadays accustomed tor an art which appeals to educated sensibilities, by suggestions and reflections, by careful workmanship and attentive study of form, by STUDIES AND REMINISCENCES OF B YRON. 26 1 artistically finished epitomes of feeling, by picturesquely blended reminiscences of realism, culture, and poetical idealism. Byron's work is too primitive, too like the raw material of poetry, in its crudity and inequality, to suit our Neo- Alexandrian taste. He wounds our sym- pathies ; he violates our canons of correctness ; he fails to satisfy our subtlest sense of art. He showers upon us in profusion what we do not want, and with- holds the things for which we have been trained to crave. His personality inspires no love, like that which makes the devotees of Shelley as faithful to the man as they are -loyal to the poet. His intellect, though robust and masculine, is not of the kind to which we willingly submit. As a man, as a thinker, as an artist, he is out of harmony with us. Nevertheless, nothing can be more certain than Byron's commanding place in English literature. He is the only British poet of the nine- teenth century who is also European ; nor will the lapse of time fail to make his greatness clearer to his fellow- countrymen, when a just critical judgment finally domi- nates the fluctuations of fashion to which he has been subject. J. A. SYMONDS. BYRON MEASURED BY THE STANDARDS OF UNIVERSAL LITERATURE. If we measure Byron from the standpoint of British literature, where of absolute perfection in verse there is perhaps less than we desire, he will scarcely bear the test of niceness to which our present rules of taste ex- pose him. But if we try him by the standards of uni- versal literature, where of finish and exactitude in ex- 262 LIT ERA TURE. ecution there is plenty, we shall find that he has quali- ties of strength and elasticity, of elemental sweep and energy, which condone all defects in technical achieve- ment. Such power, sincerity and radiance, such direct- ness of generous enthusiasm and disengagement from local or patriotic prepossessions, such sympathy with the forces of humanity in movement after freedom, such play of humor and passion, as Byron pours into the common stock, are no slight contributions. Europe does not need to make the discount upon Byron's claims to greatness that are made by his own country. J. A. SYMONDS. READINGS FROM BYRON. MAID OF ATHENS, ERE WE PART. Zoii} /xov, T} /xou, eras dyaTrai. By that lip I long to taste ; By that zone-encircled waist ; By all the token-flowers that tell What words can never speak so well ; By love's alternate joy and woe, Zuir; /xov, od? d Maid of Athens ! I am gone : Think of me, sweet ! when alone. Though I fly to Istambol, Athens holds my heart and soul : Can I cease to love thee ? No ! , 82 LITERATURE. HAIDEE DISCOVERING JUAN. 1 There, breathless, with his digging nails he clung Fast to the sand, lest the returning wave, From whose reluctant roar his life he wrung, Should suck him back to her insatiate grave : And there he lay, full length, where he was flung, Before the entrance of a cliff-worn cave, With just enough of life to feel its pain, And deem that it was saved, perhaps, in vain. With slow and staggering effort he arose, But sunk again upon his bleeding knee And quivering hand ; and then he look'd for those Who long had been his mates upon the sea ; But none of them appear'd to share his woes, Save one, a corpse, from out the famish'd three, Who died two days before, and now had found An unknown barren beach for burial ground. And as he gazed, his dizzy brain spun fast, And down he sunk ; and as he sunk, the sand Swam round and round, and all his senses pass'd : He fell upon his side, and his stretched hand Droop'd dripping on the oar (their jury-mast) ; And, like a wither'd lily, on the land His slender frame and pallid aspect lay, As fair a thing as e'er was form'd of clay. How long in his damp trance young Juan lay He knew not, for the earth was gone for him, And Time had nothing more of night nor day For his congealing blood, and senses dim ; And how this heavy faintness pass'd away He knew not, till each painful pulse and limb, And tingling vein, seem'd throbbing back to life, For Death, though vanquished, still retired with strife. His eyes he open'd, shut, again unclosed, For all was doubt and dizziness ; he thought 1 From " Don Juan," Canto II. READINGS FROM BYRON. 283 He still was in the boat, and had but dozed, And felt again with his despair o'erwrought, And wish'd it death in which he had reposed ; And then once more his feelings back were brought, And slowly by his swimming eyes was seen A lovely female face of seventeen. 'T was bending close o'er his, and the small mouth Seem'd almost prying into his for breath ; And chafing him, the soft warm hand of youth Recall'd his answering spirits back from death ; And, bathing his chill temples, tried to soothe Each pulse to animation, till beneath Its gentle touch and trembling care, a sigh To these kind efforts made a low reply. Then was the cordial pour'd, and mantle flung Around his scarce-clad limbs ; and the fair arm Raised higher the faint head which o'er it hung ; And her transparent cheek, all pure and warm, Pillow'd his death-like forehead ; then she wrung His dewy curls, long drench'd by every storm ; And watch'd with eagerness each throb that drew A sigh from his heaved bosom and hers, too. And lifting him with care into the cave, The gentle girl, and her attendant, one Young, yet her elder, and of brow less grave, And more robust of figure, then begun To kindle fire ; and as the new flames gave Light to the rocks that root'd them, which the sun Had never seen, the maid, or whatsoe'er She was, appear'd distinct, and tall, and fair. Her brow was overhung with coins of gold, That sparkled o'er the auburn of her hair, Her clustering hair, whose longer locks were roll'd In braids behind ; and though her stature were Even of the highest for a female mould, They nearly reach'd her heel ; and in her air There was a something which bespoke command, As one who was a lady in the land. 284 LITER A TURE. Her hair, I said, was auburn ; but her eyes Were black as death, their lashes the same hue, Of downcast length, in whose silk shadow lies Deepest attraction ; for when to the view Forth from its raven fringe the full glance flies, Ne'er with such force the swiftest arrow flew : 'T is as the snake late coiFd, who pours his length, And hurls at once his venom and his strength. Her brow was white and low, her cheek's pure dye Like twilight rosy still with the set sun ; Short upper lip sweet lips ! that make us sigh Ever to have seen such ; for she was one Fit for the model of a statuary (A race of mere impostors, when all's done I Ve seen much finer women, ripe and real, Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal). THE ISLES OF GREECE. 1 The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece ! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace, Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung ! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except the r sun, is set. The Scian and the Teian muse, The hero's harp, the lover's lute, Have found the fame your shores refuse : Their place of birth alone is mute To sounds which echo further west Than your sires' " Islands of the Blest." The mountains look on Marathon And Marathon looks on the sea ; And musing there an hour alone, I dream'd that Greece might still be free ; For standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem myself a slave. 1 From " Don Juan," Canto III. READINGS FROM BYRON. 285 A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o'er sea-born Salamis ; And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations ; all were his ! He counted them at break of day And when the sun set, where were they? And where are they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now The heroic bosom beats no more ! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine ? 'T is something, in the dearth of fame, Though link'd among a fettered race, To feet at least a patriot's shame, Even as I sing, suffuse my face ; For what is left the poet here ? For Greeks a blush for Greece a tear. Must we but weep o'er days more blest? Must we but blush ? Our fathers bled. Earth ! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead ! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylae ! What, silent still? and silent all? Ah ! no ; the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, * Let one living head, But one arise, we come, we come ! " 'T is but the living who are dumb. In vain in vain ! strike other chords ; Fill high the cup with Samian wine ! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine ! Hark ! rising to the ignoble call, How answers each bold Bacchanal ! 286 LIT ERA TURE. You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet ; Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone ? Of two such lessons, why forget The nobler and the manlier one ? You have the letters Cadmus gave, Think ye he meant them for a slave ? Fill high the bowl with Samian wine ! We will not think of themes like these ! It made Anacreon's song divine ; He served, but served Polycrates, A tyrant ; but our masters then Were still at least our countrymen. The tyrant of the Chersonese Was freedom's best and bravest friend ; That tyrant was Miltiades ! O that the present hour would lend Another despot of the kind ! Such chains as his were sure to bind. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine ! On Suli's rock, and Parga's shore, Exists the remnant of a line Such as the Doric mothers bore ; And there, perhaps, some seed is sown, The Heracleidan blood might own. Trust not for freedom to the Franks, They have a king who buys and sells ; In native swords, and native ranks, The only hope of courage dwells ; But Turkish force, and Latin fraud, Would break your shield, however broad. Fill high the bowl with Samian wine ! Our virgins dance beneath the shade, I see their glorious black eyes shine ; But gazing on each glowing maid, My own the burning tear-drop laves, To think such breasts must suckle slaves. READINGS FROM BYRON. 287 Place me on Sunium's marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep ; There, swan-like, let me sing and die : A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine, Dash down yon cup of Samian wine ! STUDENTS' NOTES AND QUERIES. QUERIES. 1 . What famous heroine of Byron's is referred to in the following description ? "Then comes the episode of 'a long low island song of ancient days,' the character of the girl herself being like a thread of pure gold running through the fabric of its surroundings, motley in every page." 2. What famous poem of Byron's is the subject of the following comments? " It can be credited with a text only in the sense in which every large experience, of its own accord, conveys its lesson. It was to the author a picture of the world as he saw it ; and it is to us a mirror in which every attribute of his genius, every peculiarity of his nature, is reflected without distortion." 3. Who are supposed to have been the originals of the following characters in "Don Juan": (a) "Miss Millpond " ; () "Lady Adeline " ; (0 " Aurora Raby " ; (k is DUE on the last date stamped below 14 j&48 7 Jul'HKIi APR 19 1956 '' HOV LD 21-10^-1 2.'46(A2A12sl6) 4 120 YCIOI959 LIBRARY USE TT IN TO DESK M41925 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY