THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 DAVIS 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 WILLIAM P. WRSDSII 
 
+ m 
 
 Is 
 
The Book-Lover's Library. 
 
 Edited by 
 Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A. 
 
THE STORY 
 
 OF 
 
 SOME FAMOUS BOOKS 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK SAUNDERS 
 
 Author of" Salad for the Solitary and the Social,' 
 
 "Evenings with the Sacred Poets" "Pastime 
 
 Papers" etc. 
 
 LONDON 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62 PATERNOSTER ROW 
 
 1887 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOKBftA 
 DAVTS 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 \F a secret history of books 
 could be written? said 
 Thackeray, "and the author's 
 private thoughts and meanings noted 
 down alongside of his story, how many 
 insipid volumes would become interest 
 ing, and dull tales excite the reader ! " 
 It was this suggestive remark of the 
 great novelist that prompted the pre 
 sent attempt to group together the 
 following notes and incidents illustra 
 tive of this subject. T/tese notes have 
 been garnered from a somewhat de 
 sultory though extended course of read 
 ing and research ; yet they are far 
 from being exhaustive of the subject. 
 They are necessarily brief, but should 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 they, in any instance, be regarded as 
 insufficient, the remark attributed to 
 an eminent French writer may possibly 
 be urged as apologetic : he said, " The 
 multiplicity of facts and writings has 
 become so great, that everything soon 
 will have to be reduced to extracts" 
 It has been also urged that "so great 
 is the mass of our book-heritage, that 
 it is absolutely impossible for anyone 
 to make himself acquainted with even 
 the hundredth part of it : so that our 
 choice lies for the most part between 
 ignorance oj much that we would like 
 to know, and that kind of acquaintance 
 which is to be acquired only by de 
 sultory reading? And since it has 
 been affirmed that " lie is the best 
 author who gives the reader the most 
 knowledge and takes from him the 
 least time" these claims have not 
 been ignored, it is believed, in the 
 
Preface. vii 
 
 preparation of the following pages. 
 Everett has remarked that " many of 
 the best books have been written by 
 persons who at the time of writing 
 them had no intention of becoming 
 authors? as in the instance of Pope's 
 " Rape of the Lock " and Rogers' s 
 " Pleasures of Memory? Locke, when 
 he began his work on the "Human 
 Understanding? thought it would not 
 exceed a few sheets. Often the con 
 sciousness of talents and abilities for 
 stick work seems to have been concealed 
 from their possessors until some inci 
 dent has proved the occasion of their 
 development. Besides this, there is a 
 joy in writing which none but writers 
 know " a pleasure in poetic pains ; " 
 and in this consists their genius. 
 Montaigne evidently ^vrote from such 
 an impulse, since his writings are not 
 only in the manner but in the spirit 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 of a monologue. Many other writers 
 might be added to the category ', Lamb, 
 Hazlitt, Leigh Himt, De Quincey, and 
 others. In many instances the birth 
 of a book may be traceable to some ex 
 citing incident \ like many of our dis 
 coveries in art and science. Again, it 
 seems as if an inspiration came to the 
 mind, 
 
 " Great thoughts, great feelings came to them, 
 Like instincts, unawares /" 
 
 Carlyle pays a generous but just 
 tribute to literary toilers himself 
 foremost of the noble order in t/te fol 
 lowing energetic sentences : "Among 
 these men are to be found the brightest 
 specimens and the chief benefactors of 
 mankind. It is they who keep awake 
 tJie finer parts of our souls, that give 
 better aims than power or pleasure, 
 and withstand the total sovereignty of 
 mammon on this earth. They are 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 the vanguard in the march of mind, 
 the intellectual backwoodsmen, re 
 claiming from the idle wilderness new 
 territories for thought and activity. 
 Pity, that from all their conquests, so 
 rich in benefit to others, themselves 
 should reap so little. Of all the things 
 which man can do or make here below, 
 by far the most momentous, wonderful, 
 and worthy, are the things we call 
 books" Emerson has justly remarked 
 that " they prize books most who are 
 themselves wise" since they know by 
 experience, that books not only minister 
 to our purest intellectual enjoyment, 
 but they also invigorate, ennoble, and 
 enrich the mind, as well as bvguile us 
 of the rough and rugged paths of life. 
 TJuirs is the talismanic spell to 
 
 "Lift us unawares 
 Out of our meaner cans. 1 
 
 F. S. 
 
CONCERNING THE HONOUR OF BOOKS. 
 
 SINCE honour from the honourer proceeds, 
 
 How well do they deserve, that memorize 
 
 And leave in books for all posterities 
 
 The names of worthies and their virtuous deeds; 
 
 When all thftir glory else, like water-weeds 
 
 Without their element, presently dies, 
 
 And all their greatness quite forgotten lies, 
 
 And when and how they flourished no man heeds. 
 
 How poor remembrances are statues, tombs, 
 
 And other monuments that men erect 
 
 To princes, which remain in closed rooms 
 
 Where but a few behold them, in respect 
 
 Of Books, that to the universal eye 
 
 Show how they lived, the other where they lie. 
 
 JOHK FLOKIO (1545 1625). 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY. CHAUCER. SPEN 
 SER. SIDNEY'S " ARCADIA " . . i 
 II. MORE'S " UTOPIA." Fox's "BOOK 
 OF MARTYRS." ROGER ASCHAM. 
 MONTAIGNE. BROWNE'S " RELIGIO 
 MEDICI." PEPYS'S AND EVELYN'S 
 "DIARIES" 32 
 
 III. FELTHAM'S " RESOLVES." "EM 
 
 BLEMS." BALLADS. " ROBIN 
 HOOD." "KING ARTHUR." 
 SHAKESPEARE. HOBBES OF MALMES- 
 BURY. ST. PIERRE. "BARON MUNC^ 
 HAUSEN." BUNYAN'S " PILGRIM'S 
 PROGRESS." DRYDEN. POPE. 
 " ROBINSON CRUSOE."" GULLIVER'S 
 TRAVELS." WALTON'S "ANGLER." 
 WHITE'S "SELBORNE" . . 48 
 
 IV. MILTON. YOUNG'S " NIGHT 
 
 THOUGHTS." DR. JOHNSON. 
 GRAY. CAMPBELL . . . .78 
 
x jj Contents. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 V. GOLDSMITH. COWPER. BURNS. 
 
 STERNE. RICHARDSON. FIELDING. 
 SMOLLETT. BECKFORD'S "VA- 
 THEK." WORDSWORTH. SCOTT. 
 COLERIDGE.-AUDUBON.-WILSON . 102 
 
 VI. ROGERS. BUTLER'S " HUDIBRAS."- 
 
 SOUTHEY. CRABBE. FRANKLIN'S 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY." CHARLES 
 LAMB. BYRON. MOORE. CAR- 
 LYLE. POE. DANA. PRESCOTT. 
 
 HOOD I4 * 
 
 VII. MRS. BROWNING. WASHINGTON IR 
 VING. HAWTHORNE. LONGFEL 
 LOW. - HOLMES. - WHITTIER. - 
 
 TENNYSON ! ? 
 
 INDEX ' 2 2 
 
THE STORY 
 
 OF 
 
 SOME FAMOUS BOOKS. 
 
 I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. CHAUCER. SPENSER. 
 SIDNEY'S " ARCADIA." 
 
 JS introductory to an essay on the 
 origin of books, it may not be 
 deemed irrelevant to allude for 
 
 a moment to the origin of authors. Horace 
 
 Smith insists that 
 
 " Were there no readers there certainly would 
 be no writers ; clearly, therefore, the existence of 
 writers depends upon the existence of readers ; and, 
 of course, since the cause must be antecedent to 
 the effect, readers existed before writers. Yet, 
 on the other hand, if there were no writers there 
 could be no readers; so it would appear that 
 writers must be antecedent to readers." 
 
2 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Here there seems to be no sophistry, 
 but a clear logical sequence ; and yet one 
 is hardly ready to accept the conclusion 
 of the argument. I think, indeed, there 
 certainly would be writers even if there were 
 no readers. Before leaving authors for 
 books, something should be said about that 
 strange class of writers who have for ages 
 been accustomed to send adrift over the 
 world their literary offspring, and leave 
 them in a condition of orphanage, unpro 
 tected, and exposed to all the casualties 
 and contingencies of time. What a con 
 course of literary fugitives are ever hover 
 ing about, or seen nestled in some ''poet's 
 corner " of a periodical, or found fluttering 
 out their brief butterfly existence in the 
 columns of some newspaper. Some of 
 these waifs are of strange and surprising 
 beauty, and merit better treatment and 
 conservation. These fugitives and strays 
 of the pen have been classed under a 
 generic name or patronymic, and as 
 Douglas Jerrold has admirably written all 
 that need be said about their mysterious 
 cognomen, herewith I present his words 
 on the subject : 
 
Introductory. 3 
 
 " Of Anon, but little is known, although his 
 works are excessively numerous ; for this mysteri 
 ous writer seems to have dabbled in almost every 
 variety of topic, both in prose and verse ; from the 
 cloudy heights of philosophy down to the common 
 place things of everyday life. Not confined to 
 any country or creed, his name confronts us in 
 books and periodicals, English, American, French, 
 and German. If all the productions of this pro 
 lific scribe were collected together, they would, 
 doubtless, require for their reception something 
 like the capacity of a British Museum. He must, 
 also, be the most modest of authors, to have done 
 so much for literature and the world, and yet so 
 persistently to have preserved his incognito. The 
 only writer who may in the least compete with 
 him in fecundity and personal mystery is his con 
 temporary, Ibid" 
 
 It may seem trite at the present day 
 to apostrophise books when they are in 
 almost every person's hands ; but all books 
 are not true and good books, or such as 
 win the scholar's choice. 
 
 Books are no longer inscribed on illu 
 minated parchments, and kept secluded 
 in the cloistered cell of monasteries, as in 
 times of yore ; but we live in a day when, 
 instead of having laboriously to pore over 
 the verbose manuscripts of antique lore, we 
 have presented to us the golden grain of 
 
4 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 knowledge winnowed from the chaff; and 
 this immunity is offered to all. Not only 
 in the chamber of the scholar, therefore, 
 should we seek for the fruits of study and 
 reading, but the cottage of the farmer and 
 artisan should also bear evidence of the 
 beneficial results of the study of good 
 books. The truest blessing of literature 
 is found in the inward light and peace 
 which it bestows. It has been justly re 
 marked that 
 
 " Genius has its nectaries and its delicate glands, 
 and secretions of sweetness, and upon these the 
 thoughtful reader dilates, A good book resembles 
 a fruitful orchard-tree, carefully tended ; its fruits 
 are perennial, and the better with age." 
 
 Said Blanco White, the author of one 
 of the finest sonnets we have : 
 
 " If I open the treasures of literature, which 
 nourished my mind in youth, I feel young again, 
 and my mind seems to be transported into the 
 regions of love and beauty, which I can now better 
 enjoy than during the fever of the passions.'' 
 
 The books we love, like our personal 
 friends, exert an influence over our minds, 
 and we cherish the memory of our inter 
 course with them both, with pleasure ever 
 
Introductory. 5 
 
 afterwards. To many a student, who 
 prefers quiet retirement to the noisy ex 
 citement of the crowded resorts of fashion 
 able life, his favourite books will have thus 
 acquired for him a personality. He may 
 not be without his personal friendships, yet 
 he will doubtless repeat the experience of 
 Bonnivard, without his enforced seclu 
 sion : 
 
 " My books and I grew friends, 
 So much a long communion tends 
 To make us what we are ; even I 
 Regained my freedom with a sigh." 
 
 Mr. Lowell wisely urges concentration 
 and definiteness of purpose, the choice 
 not merely of the best, but of some one 
 great author, the reading and study of 
 whose writings will quicken attention, 
 force upon us the necessity of thinking, 
 and open up many suggestions of other 
 reading, associated with and centring in 
 the author or the subject of investigation 
 first chosen. 
 
 Books are often spoken of as com 
 panions. But they may be good or bad 
 companions. Mr. Lowell extends the old 
 adage that a man is known by the com- 
 
6 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 pany he keeps, and affirms that he is also 
 made by it. Readers, young or old, may 
 profitably heed what he says in this con 
 nection : 
 
 " There is a choice in books as in friends, and 
 the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual 
 society, is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the 
 dyer's hand, to what it works -in. Cato's advice, 
 * Cum bonis ambula ' (Consort with the good), is 
 quite as true if we extend it to books, for they, 
 too, insensibly give away their own nature to the 
 mind that converses with them. They either 
 beckon upward or drag down." 
 
 Tuckerman has well said : 
 
 "It is remarkable that the men whose relish 
 for books is the most keen, who read sympathe 
 tically, not merely to store the memory and weave 
 the ties of familiar and endearing association with 
 beloved authors, should invariably repudiate the 
 idea of an extensive library. Thinkers do not 
 require books for the information they convey so 
 much as stimulants and faithful companions. They 
 can generate ideas for themselves, and take up a 
 volume, as they turn to a friend, for the refreshment 
 of sympathy or attrition of mind." 
 
 Let us imagine a student anxious to be 
 instructed in all that has been done and 
 thought in preceding times. Whither 
 shall he go? If he betake himself to 
 
Introductory. 7 
 
 nature, he finds that all impress written 
 thereon by man has been eaten out by 
 the corroding tooth of time. He gropes 
 laboriously amid physical relics, but a 
 vague and partial glimpse is his only 
 reward. He visits his library, however, 
 and presents the talisman of a book, and 
 the heralds of discovery come forth to 
 greet him. Galileo holds to his eye the 
 magical mechanism that draws within its 
 range the rings of Saturn and the satellites 
 of Jupiter. He looks again, and Torricelli 
 makes the heavy mercury the prophet of 
 the storm. Again, and the needle, quiver 
 ing to an influence too subtle to be traced, 
 points unerringly amidst the solitudes of 
 the sea, Harvey tells him why the crimson 
 mounts into the cheek ; Jenner panoplies 
 him against his most direful foe, and 
 Daguerre commands the pencil of the 
 sun. He turns again, and Locke teaches 
 him the secrets of his own mind ; Bacon 
 instructs him in the true mode of study ; 
 Linnaeus spreads before him the beauties 
 of leaf and flower ; Lyell clips off some 
 crust from the ancient rock, and reads 
 the earth's autobiography ; while Newton 
 
8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 and La Place bear him safely along 
 the starry pavement of the Milky Way. 
 Deny these treasured resources to the 
 poet, the historian, and the student, and 
 the long-buried ages are voiceless and un- 
 instructive. But by the magic of books, 
 the son of science is rapt by a problem, 
 the philosopher by an abstruse speculation, 
 the antiquary is carried centuries back into 
 the chivalric past, and the lover of poesy 
 is borne upon glittering wings into the 
 regions of imagination and fancy. 
 
 "Why should it not be a worthy end, 
 as old Sir John saith, to read simply for 
 delight ? " it has been asked. 
 
 " God dangles peaches before our eyes, and 
 spreads flowers beneath our feet, and fills the 
 earth with colours and forms of beauty as well as 
 the air with sounds of sweetest melody ; and He 
 no more means us to discard the delightsome from 
 our course of reading, than banish strawberries 
 from our tables, or flowers from our writing- 
 tables." 
 
 How wonderful is the embalmed essence 
 of volatile thought in a book ! Think of the 
 Homeric ballads. Their author's earthly 
 existence ceased three thousand years 
 since ; his body reverted to dust ; but his 
 
Introductory. g 
 
 immortal work outlives all the mutations 
 of Time. 
 
 Said Thomas Hood : 
 
 " Experience enables me to depose to the com 
 fort and blessing that literature can prove in 
 seasons of sickness and sorrow ; how powerfully 
 intellectual pursuits can help in keeping the head 
 from crazing and the heart from breaking. " 
 
 And Madame de Genlis tells us that 
 she had never tasted pleasures so true as 
 those she found " in the study of books, 
 in writing or in music." What can supply 
 their place ? 
 
 " The vision and the faculty Divine " 
 is the endowment of a fickle and capri 
 cious goddess, for she comes not re- 
 sponsively alike to all her devotees. To 
 some, the inspiration, or Divine afflatus, 
 lights up the chambers of the mind, and, 
 like the electric current, not only illumines 
 but energises its powers. To others, the 
 gift has to be sought by ingenious and 
 persevering effort, by earnest study, and 
 sudorous brain-toil. Some win the re 
 wards of fame for their toil, but others, 
 again, fail to secure the applause of the 
 world, and for the pleasure they have 
 
i.O The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 given, have, but too often in return, been 
 denied the necessities of life. Homer, 
 for instance, was the first poet and beggar 
 of note among the ancients ; and in later 
 times, Cervantes died of hunger, like 
 Otway, and some others. 
 
 Southey was not endowed with too 
 much money, but he worked on nobly 
 and unselfishly to the last, until his 
 mind gave way; finding happiness and 
 joy in the pursuit of letters; "not so 
 learned as poor, not so poor as proud, 
 and not so proud as happy ! " These 
 were his own fine words. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott was another, and even 
 more illustrious, instance of the love 
 of letters under the most formidable 
 of difficulties. The sacrifices and efforts 
 which he made during the last few years 
 of his eventful life, even while paralysed, 
 and scarcely able to hold his pen, exhibit 
 him in a truly heroic light. When his 
 physician remonstrated with him against 
 his excessive brain- work, he replied, " If I 
 were to be idle, I should go mad ! " 
 
 Johnson was a poor man, but a very 
 brave one : his head was full of learning, 
 
Introductory. 1 1 
 
 but his pockets were often empty. His 
 bluff and gruff exterior covered a kindly 
 and noble nature. How many more such 
 examples exist on the scroll of literary 
 fame? 
 
 * ' Authors are beings only half of earth, 
 
 They own a world apart from other men : 
 A glorious realm, given by their fancy birth, 
 
 Subjects, a sceptre, and a diadem : 
 A fairy land of thought in which sweet bliss 
 
 Would run to ecstasy in wild delight 
 But that stern Nature drags them back to this 
 
 With call imperious, which they may not 
 
 slight : 
 And then they traffic with their thoughts, to live, 
 
 And coin their labouring brains for daily bread : 
 Getting scant dross, for the rich ore they give, 
 
 While often with the gift their life is shed ! 
 And thus they die, leaving behind a name 
 
 At once their country's glory and her shame ! " l 
 
 " The mental powers acquire their full robust 
 ness when the cheek loses its ruddy hue, and the 
 limbs their elastic step," wrote Dr. Guthrie, "and 
 pale thought sits on manly brows, and the student's 
 lamp burns far into the silent night. The finest 
 flowers of genius have grown in an atmosphere 
 where those of nature are prone to droop, and 
 difficult to bring to maturity." 
 
 1 Fred. West. 
 
1 2 The Story of Some Famous Books 
 
 Prince, a self-taught poet of England, 
 thus portrays a literary laboratory : 
 
 " Lo ! in that quiet and contracted room, 
 Where the lone lamp just mitigates the gloom, 
 Sits a pale student stirred with high desires, 
 With lofty principles and gifted fires ; 
 From time to time, with calm, enquiring looks, 
 He culls the ore of wisdom from his books ; 
 Clears it, sublimes it, till it flows refined 
 From his alembic crucible of mind." 
 
 Mind lives by mind ; thoughts germi 
 nate their kind. We see this alike in the 
 reproductions of nature and in the inexor 
 able demands of the physical system for 
 its appropriate food. 
 
 "Every one of my writings," Goethe says, 
 " has been furnished to me by a thousand different 
 persons, a thousand different things ; the learned 
 and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, with 
 out having the least suspicion of it, to bring me 
 the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their 
 experience. Often others have sowed the harvest 
 I have reaped." 
 
 Great results are the sure rewards of 
 the toil of study and persevering mental 
 industry. Talents, however brilliant, 
 cannot supersede reading and thinking; 
 and thinking assimilates what we read, so 
 that it becomes our own. Aristotle di?- 
 
Introductory. 1 3 
 
 tinguished the learned and the unlearned 
 as the living and the dead. 
 
 " The authors truly remembered and loved are 
 men in the best sense of the term ; the human, 
 the individual informs and stamps their books with 
 an image, or an affluence not born of will, or mere 
 ingenuity, but emanating from the soul ; and this 
 is the quality that endears and perpetuates their 
 fame. Hence Goldsmith is beloved, Milton 
 reverenced, and the grave of Burns a ' Mecca of 
 the mind.' There are books, as there are pictures, 
 which do not catch the thoughtless eye, and yet 
 are the gems of the virtuoso, the oracles of the 
 philosopher, and the consolations of the poet. 
 We love authors, as we love individuals, according 
 to our affinities ; and the extent of the popular 
 appreciation is no more a standard to us, than the 
 world's estimate of our friend, whose nature we 
 have tested by faithful companionship and sym 
 pathetic intercourse. He who has not the mental 
 independence to be loyal to his own intellectual 
 benefactors, is as much a heathen as one who 
 repudiates his natural kin j indeed, an honest soul 
 clings more tenaciously to neglected merit in 
 authors, as in men ; there is a chivalry of taste 
 as of manners. Doubtless Lamb's test for the 
 old English dramatists, Addison's admiration of 
 Milton's poetry, and Carlyle's devotion to Goethe, 
 were all the more earnest and keen because they 
 were ignored by their neighbours. It is well to 
 obey these decided idiosyncrasies." l 
 1 Tuckerman. 
 
1 4 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Among the numerous instances in 
 which the world is indebted to seeming 
 accident for the development of latent 
 genius, the following might be cited, as 
 illustrative. Malebranche, once loitering 
 in a bookstore in Paris, happened to see 
 a volume entitled LHomme, by Descartes, 
 which work he took home and read. It 
 is, to this incident that we are to as 
 cribe those compositions in metaphysics 
 and morals that have placed him in the 
 front rank of the writers of his age. For 
 another illustration in point we might 
 refer to Cowley, who in his early days 
 chanced to meet with a copy of Spenser's 
 Faerie Queen, with the beauties of which 
 he became so enchanted that forthwith 
 he became himself a poet. Who will 
 venture to affirm that we are not indebted 
 to Shakespeare's leaving his native town 
 for London, and engaging with a company 
 of actors for the purpose of aiding his 
 father's resources, that our literature 
 has been so enriched and glorified with 
 his matchless creations ? 
 
 It was remarked by D'Israeli that 
 " had several of our first writers set their fortunes 
 
Introductory 1 5 
 
 on the cast of their friends' opinions, we might 
 have lost some precious compositions." 
 
 The friends of Thomson discovered 
 nothing but faults in his early productions, 
 one of which happened to be his noblest, 
 the Winter. He had created a new school 
 of art, and appealed from his circle to the 
 public. It was Gibbon who wrote : 
 
 "I was disgusted with the modest practice of 
 reading the manuscript to my friends. Of such 
 friends some will praise for politeness and some 
 will criticise for vanity. " 
 
 And Montaigne has honestly told us 
 that in his own province they considered 
 that for him to attempt to become an 
 author was perfectly ludicrous. "While 
 at a distance," he says, " printers purchase 
 me, at home I am compelled to pur 
 chase printers." Much more might be 
 cited of a similar character, to show the 
 discouraging influence of prejudice and 
 hypercriticism at the commencement of 
 a literary career; but in spite of all, 
 genius will triumph over adverse condi 
 tions, notwithstanding all the depressing 
 moods and tenses which accompany 
 literary composition. 
 
1 6 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 "Poetry is its own exceeding great reward," 
 said Coleridge. " It soothes afflictions, crowns 
 poverty, rocks asleep cares and sickness, multi 
 plies and refines pleasures, and endears solitude. 
 We think of Milton, after the sight of his 
 eyes had gone from him, when the rays of early 
 studies shone across his path ; when the voices he 
 loved in youth solemn notes of tragic, or livelier 
 numbers of lyric verse stole into his ear out of 
 the gloom; and nightingales sang as sweetly in 
 Cripplegate, as when the April leaf trembled 
 in his father's garden." 
 
 We remember Camoens in all his trials, 
 whether gazing on land and water from 
 that rocky chair built by nature for him, 
 and still called by his name, upon an 
 isthmus of the China seas; shipwrecked, 
 with his Lusiad held above the waves, and 
 drifting upon a plank to shore ; in Lisbon, 
 waiting in solitude and darkness the re 
 turn of a black servant* who helped to 
 feed his hunger with the alms he begged ; 
 or closing his eyes, a sick mendicant and 
 outcast, in a public hospital. We weep 
 with Tasso, in the hospital of St. Anna, 
 scared by the screams of maniacs in the 
 neighbouring cells, yet sometimes turning 
 his thoughts to the correction of the 
 Eastern Story, and peopling the loneliness 
 
Introductory. 1 7 
 
 with the magnificent tumult of a crusade. 
 What upheld the buffeted pilgrims of 
 Fame in their struggle and poverty ? An 
 animating mastering sense of music lived 
 in their hearts, finding utterance in tones 
 more lulling than the south-west wind of 
 the " Arcadia," which in the ear of Sidney 
 crept " over flowery fields and shadowed 
 waters in the heat of summer/' Happy 
 eyes that make pictures when they are 
 shut ! We are told by naturalists that 
 birds of Paradise fly best against the wind ; 
 and so the many of the votaries of the 
 muse " learn in suffering what they teach 
 in song." 1 
 
 Who, looking back upon their glorious 
 age, does not respond to Whittier's poetic 
 words ? 
 
 " I love the old melodious lays 
 
 Which softly melt the ages through, 
 The songs of Spenser's golden days, 
 
 Arcadian Sidney's silver phrase 
 Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morn 
 ing dew." 
 
 The Elizabethan age boasted a wealth 
 of learning unequalled by any preced- 
 
 1 Willmott. 
 
1 8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 ing and subsequent epoch in the his 
 tory of letters. Shakespeare, surrounded 
 as he was by heroes and mighty men 
 of intellect, formed the great central sun 
 around which the lesser orbs revolved. It 
 was one of their number that justly re 
 marked, referring to the magnates in theo 
 logy, as well as the great poets of that 
 time, that "good men were the stars of 
 the world, and that our poets were also 
 the priesthood interpreting the great pro 
 blem of human life, with its mysteries, 
 passions, and destiny." 
 
 The great era of the discovery of 
 America, and the important events which 
 synchronized with it, the invention of 
 the printing-press and the revival of learn 
 ing, present the natural starting-point in 
 the history of our literature, and conse 
 quently the production of books. Till then, 
 scholarship was, for the most part, re 
 stricted to the cloister, and even the great 
 writers of classic times were well-nigh 
 forgotten amid the polemical discussions 
 of the monastic schools. Without were 
 barbarism, storm and darkness, and the 
 tumult of war ; within were yet a few 
 
Introductory. 1 9 
 
 devoted ones to tend the lamp of learning, 
 and " amid light, fragrance, and music, the 
 ritual of genius continued to be solem 
 nized." Thus the sacred fire of learning 
 burst forth from its scattered shrines, 
 until torch after torch illumined the civi 
 lised world. It was most fitting that 
 the " art preservative of arts " should 
 be inaugurated with the printing of 
 the "Book of books," since no other 
 book apart from its Divine authority 
 has furnished such innumerable themes 
 for historians, poets, philosophers, moral 
 ists, and teachers of its doctrines, as the 
 Bible. 
 
 Of the Mazarin Bible it is well to note 
 that its discovery was almost accidental. 
 Debure,the celebrated bibliographer, states 
 that mere chance led him to discover 
 this literary treasure, the firstfruits of the 
 printing art, and the most precious of 
 books. He says : 
 
 " When making some explorations in the library 
 of the Cardinal, we were not a little surprised to 
 find this first and most celebrated work of the 
 press, which a simple impulse of curiosity caused 
 us to open." 
 
2O The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 The existence of such a j work was, how 
 ever, suspected, from the allusion to it in 
 the Chronicle of Cologne, which speaks of 
 the jubilee year 1450, when the first 
 book, a Bible, " of the larger type," was 
 discovered. 
 
 In these rambling researches over the 
 wide and varied domain of our vernacular 
 literature, in quest of some brief notices 
 of famous books, I solicit the reader's 
 indulgence, at the outset, on account of 
 the desultory and fragmentary character 
 of my notes and details. 
 
 By common consent, the critics assign 
 the post of honour to Geoffrey Chaucer, as 
 father of the English muse ; it is fitting, 
 therefore, that he should claim our first 
 attention, especially as he is also the 
 pioneer of an illustrious succession of 
 British bards ; or as Campbell, in his 
 poetic phrase, apostrophises him : 
 
 *' Our Helicon's first fountain stream ! 
 
 Our morning-star of song, that led the 
 
 way 
 
 To welcome the long-after coming beam 
 Of Spenser's light, and Shakespeare's 
 perfect day ! " 
 
Chaucer. 2 1 
 
 Chaucer in his early days devoted him 
 self to French and Italian models ; but he 
 subsequently fell back upon his own in 
 stincts, and produced works which gave 
 him a claim to be called the first English 
 poet. He did, indeed, 
 
 " Prelude those melodious bursts which fill 
 The spacious times of great Elizabeth 
 With sounds that echo still." 
 
 Chaucer is said so far to have re 
 sembled Petrarch that, like him, he was at 
 once poet, scholar, courtier, statesman, and 
 man of the world ; but considered merely 
 as poets, the two were the very antipodes 
 of each other. Chaucer might be styled, 
 although living in a rude age, the poet of 
 the affections, few writers having ever ex 
 celled him for his animated portraits, as 
 well as for beautiful passages relating to or 
 inspired by woman. To this proclivity of 
 the tender passion we may ascribe much 
 of his poetry. After a protracted court 
 ship he espoused the lady of his love, 
 Philippa Picard. It seems to be the con 
 current opinion of scholars that little is 
 hazarded in assuming that his Canterbury 
 Tales was, as to plan and method, sug- 
 
2 2 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 gested by the Decameron of Boccacio. 
 This work of Chaucer was the product 
 of his genius in its full maturity ; and al 
 though over five centuries have elapsed 
 since the noble work was written, and not 
 withstanding its obsoleteness of style, it 
 has never been more popular with scholars 
 than it is at the present day. There is, 
 indeed, " an added charm in its antiquity, 
 something picturesque in it." Chaucer 
 seems to have surrendered himself to the 
 inspiring influences of nature, and revelled, 
 as at a festival, amid birds and flowers ; 
 hence the rich arabesque character of his 
 poetry, and the marvellous freshness and 
 bloom of his pastoral pictures. The 
 minstrel may also have derived material for 
 his work from Dante's Divina Commedia, 
 as his quotations from it seem to show. 
 The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales 
 introduces us to a company of pilgrims, 
 twenty-nine in number, who have met 
 at the Tabard, an inn at Southwark (but 
 now no longer standing). There they are 
 entertained by the host on the evening 
 prior to their commencing pilgrimage 
 to the shrine of Thomas a Becket, in 
 
Spenser. 2 3 
 
 Canterbury Cathedral ; and these "sondry 
 folke," by way of beguiling time, agree 
 among themselves to contribute each a 
 tale. These "tales" are such masterly 
 pictures of life in Chaucer's days, that 
 they have justly elicited the following 
 beautiful tribute : 
 
 " Old England's fathers live in Chaucer's lay, 
 As if they ne'er had died : he grouped and drew 
 
 Their likeness with a spirit of life so gay, 
 That still they live and breathe, in fancy's view, 
 Fresh beings fraught with truth's imperishable 
 hue ! " 
 
 Another instance of the inspiration of 
 the muse by the witching power of beauty 
 was that of Edmund Spenser, since it is 
 known that the first development of his 
 genius was owing to such influence. To 
 the memory of his Rosalind's rare beauty, 
 to the long-felt influence of this first pas 
 sion, and to the melancholy shade which 
 his early disappointment cast over a mind 
 naturally cheerful, we owe some of the 
 most tender and beautiful passages scat 
 tered through his later poems. In like 
 manner, Sir Philip Sidney had caught his 
 poetic fire from the glowing eyes of his 
 
24 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 " Stella," and that hapless gallant, the 
 Earl of Surrey, from the fascinations of his 
 fair " Geraldine." Referring to the master- 
 passion, Emerson said : 
 
 "No man ever forgot the visitation of that 
 power to his heart and brain which created all 
 things new which was the dawn in him of music, 
 poetry, and art which made the face of Nature 
 radiant with purple light the morning and the 
 night varied enchantments." 
 
 The plan of Spenser's Faerie Queen is 
 described in his prefatory letter to Sir 
 Walter Raleigh. The twelve books were 
 to tell the warfare of twelve knights, in 
 whom the twelve virtues of Aristotle were 
 represented. Only six of these books 
 have descended to us ; the rest, if ever 
 written, were supposed to have been de 
 stroyed in the fire which occurred at 
 Spenser's castle in Ireland. It was here, 
 in 1589, that he composed the first three 
 books, and then read them to Raleigh, 
 who was so delighted with the poem that 
 he brought Spenser to England, and the 
 Queen, the Court, and the literary world 
 were equally pleased it being the first 
 great ideal poem yet produced. Raleigh 
 
Sir Walter Raleigh. 2 5 
 
 introduced Spenser to Queen Elizabeth, 
 and Campbell thus alludes to this meet 
 ing: 
 
 " The fancy might even be pardoned for a 
 momentary superstition, that the genius of their 
 country hovered unseen over their meeting, casting 
 her first look of regard on the poet that was de 
 stined to inspire her future Milton, and the other 
 on the maritime hero who paved the way for 
 colonizing distant regions of the earth, where the 
 language of England was to be spoken, and the 
 poetry of Spenser to be admired." 
 
 The gallant but unfortunate Sir Walter 
 Raleigh's history is replete with touching 
 interest. The following lines, supposed 
 to be the last he ever wrote, possess all 
 the more interest for the fact of their being 
 found written in his Bible, on the evening 
 preceding his execution : 
 
 " Even such is Time, that takes on trust 
 Our youth, our joys, our all we have, 
 And pays us but with age and dust ; 
 Who in the dark and silent grave, 
 When we have wandered all our ways, 
 Shuts up the story of our days : 
 But from this earth, this grave, this dust, 
 My God shall raise me up, I trust ! " 
 
 Spenser, who has been justly styled the 
 " Poet's poet," has been the inspiration of 
 
26 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 many poets of succeeding ages of Milton 
 among others. Cowley, when a boy, read 
 the Faerie Queen, and became "irrevo 
 cably a poet." He was Dryden's master 
 in English. Pope was enthusiastic over 
 it, so were Collins, Gray, Thomson, 
 Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. 
 The following anecdote by Pope re 
 specting his work is related by Spence: 
 
 " After reading a canto of Spenser two or three 
 days ago to an old lady, she said that I had been 
 showing her a gallery of pictures. I don't know 
 how it is, but she said right, there is something in 
 Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old 
 age as it did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queen 
 when I was about twelve, with infinite delight ; 
 and I think it gave me as much when I read it 
 over a year or two ago." 
 
 This great work on which Spenser's 
 fame rests had been begun at an early 
 stage of his career, and was, it seems, 
 slighted on account of its ethics. Sub 
 sequently, in a conversation with some 
 friends, one of them complained that no 
 English poet had given the teachings and 
 precepts of Aristotle and Plato in English 
 verse, and turning to Spenser, said : 
 
Spenser. 27 
 
 "It is you, sir. to whom it pertaineth to show 
 yourself courteous now unto us all, and to make 
 us beholding unto you for the pleasure and profit 
 which we shall gather from your speeches, if you 
 shall vouchsafe to open unto us the goodly cabinet 
 in which this excellent treasure of virtues lieth 
 locked up from the vulgar sort. . . .' 'I doubt 
 not,' answered Spenser, 'but with the consent of 
 most part of you, I shall be excused at this time of 
 this task which would be laid upon me ; for sure 
 I am that it is not unknown to you I have already 
 undertaken a work to the same effect, which is in 
 heroical verse, under the title of the Faerie Queen, 
 to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to 
 every virtue a knight, to be the patron and defender 
 of the same. . . .' " l 
 
 In 1584 he had already advanced some 
 way with the work; and in 1590, going to 
 England with Raleigh, he published the 
 first three books. In 1596 he published 
 three more books, and these, with some 
 stanzas of a seventh book, found after his 
 death, are all that we have of the twelve 
 books originally contemplated. Spenser's 
 epic contains many deep religious truths 
 couched in the form of allegory ; the curi 
 ous reader of the First Book may see that 
 it contains the germ of the thoughts after- 
 
 1 Croft's English Literature. 
 
2 8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 wards expanded in Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
 Progress. Among these may be men 
 tioned the description of Despair and his 
 advice to the Red Cross Knight to commit 
 suicide ; the House of Holiness, where the 
 knight is admitted by the porter Humility, 
 tended by the three maidens, Faith, Hope, 
 and Charity, and comforted by an ancient 
 matron named Mercy. From the top of 
 a hill an old man points out to him a 
 distant view of the heavenly city. 
 
 We must not forget the celebrated work 
 that had so great an influence upon the 
 literature of that and the following age, the 
 Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney. That quaint 
 yet poetic, pastoral romance was, in prose, 
 like Spenser's Faerie Queen in verse, a 
 treasury of intellectual beauties. It should 
 be remembered in judging the work of 
 Sir Philip Sidney, that he thought very 
 meanly of it himself, and that he never 
 intended it for publication. Dedicating 
 the book to his " Dear lady and fair sister 
 the Countess of Pembroke," he says : 
 
 " You desired me to do it, and your desire, to 
 my heart, is an absolute commandment. Now it 
 is done only for you, only to you." 
 
Sidney's " Arcadia" 29 
 
 Aubrey tells us that Sidney 
 
 " was wont to take his table-book out of his 
 pocket and write down his notions as they came 
 into his head, as he was hunting on Sarum's 
 pleasant plains." 
 
 It was in 1580 that Sidney began the 
 composition of his romance. 
 
 A few years since there was exhibited 
 before the Archaeological Society at Salis 
 bury a copy of the Arcadia, between the 
 leaves of which was found wrapped up the 
 lock of the Queen's hair, and some com 
 plimentary lines addressed by Sidney to 
 her. The hair was soft and bright, of a 
 light-brown colour, inclining to red, and 
 on the paper enclosing it was written : 
 "This lock of Queen Elizabeth's own 
 hair was presented to Sir Philip Sidney by 
 Her Majesty's owne faire hands, on which 
 he made these verses, and gave them to 
 the Queen on his bended knee, A.D. 1573." 
 And pinned to this was another paper, on 
 which was written in a different hand, 
 supposed to have been Sidney's own, 
 these lines : 
 
 " Her inward worth all outward show transcends, 
 Envy her merits with regret commends ; 
 
3C The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Like sparkling gems her virtues draw the sight, 
 And in her conduct she is alwaies bright. 
 When she imparts her thoughts, her words have 
 
 force, 
 And sense and wisdom flow in sweet discourse." 
 
 Every person remembers his brave 
 words when he had fallen on the field of 
 Zutphen, and while suffering from thirst, 
 a cup of water being presented to him : 
 as his eye met that of a wounded soldier, 
 he exclaimed, pointing to him, " Thy 
 necessity is yet greater than mine." 
 
 Well might our great dramatist say of 
 him : 
 
 *' His honour stuck upon him as the sun 
 
 In the gray vault of heaven, and by his light 
 Did all the chivalry of England move 
 To do brave acts ! " 
 
 It has been suggested that Sidney's 
 Arcadia was modelled upon Sannazzaro's 
 pastoral romance of the same name or 
 title ; but it is certain that few works 
 enjoyed so great popularity among scholars 
 as Sidney's, or excited a more controlling 
 influence over the literary taste of its time. 
 Both Cowley and Waller were among its 
 admirers, and it was the solace of the 
 
Sidney s " Arcadia? 3 i 
 
 prison-hours of Charles I. Milton states 
 that the prayer of Pamela was introduced 
 into the Eikon Basilike from it. 
 
 Campbell styled Sidney "warbler of 
 poetic prose," and we find in addition 
 some lyric verse, scattered on his pages, 
 that we have been tempted to transcribe. 
 Take for instance these two stanzas : 
 
 " My true love hath my heart, and I have his, 
 
 By just exchange one for the other given ; 
 I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss ; 
 
 There never was a better bargain driven : 
 My true love hath my heart, and I have his. 
 His heart in me, keeps me and him in one; 
 
 My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides,, 
 He loves my heart for once it was his own, 
 
 I cherish his because in me it bides ; 
 My true love hath my heart, and I have his ! " 
 
 The following leads us from gay to 
 grave : 
 " Since nature's works be good, and death doth 
 
 save 
 
 As nature's work, why should we fear to die ? 
 Since fear is vain, but when it may preserve, 
 
 Why should we fear that which we cannot fly ? 
 Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears, 
 Disarming human minds of native might ; 
 While each conceit an ugly figure bears, 
 
 Which were not ill, well- vie wed in reason's 
 light." 
 
II. 
 
 MORE'S " UTOPIA." - Fox's " BOOK 
 OF MARTYRS." ROGER ASCHAM. 
 MONTAIGNE. BROWNE'S " RELIGIO 
 MEDICI." PEPYS'S AND EVELYN'S 
 "DIARIES." 
 
 JNE of the noteworthy books, 
 known at least to scholars, is 
 the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, 
 the idea of which was probably taken 
 mainly from the Republic of Plato ; at any 
 rate this is the opinion of Mr. Hallam ; 
 although Sir Thomas was doubtless 
 familiar with other writers on social and 
 political economy besides Plato and 
 Aristotle, for in the famous fragment of 
 Theopompus of Chios, he might have 
 found some suggestion. In this writer, 
 as in Plato, we discover glimpses of a 
 knowledge of the great Western Continent, 
 which afterwards reappeared in Pulci, 1 
 1 Adams's Famous Books, 
 
Mores" Utopia? 33 
 
 and may probably have led, though in 
 directly, to the eventual discovery of 
 America by Columbus. Euhemerus, the 
 author of Panchaia, found his imaginary 
 commonwealth in a different quarter of 
 the globe; but it is remarkable that he 
 places it, as More places his, upon an 
 island, and in that very Indian Ocean in 
 which "Utopia" is said to lie. This 
 famous work seems to have owed its 
 immediate origin to an embassy in which 
 More was engaged in 1515. 
 
 " He had always been a favourite with 
 Henry VIII., who, with all his faults, was able 
 to recognise merit when he saw it ; and while at 
 Antwerp, More met one Peter Giles, a man of 
 renown ; between them an intimate friendship was 
 soon formed. It was there and then that Sir 
 Thomas wrote the second book of his Utopia, the 
 first having been composed at London the year 
 preceding. The manuscript having been read by 
 Erasmus, was forthwith published in Latin, and 
 'saluted on all sides by a chorus of decided 
 admiration.' " 
 
 And many translations of the work have 
 since been published. 
 
 Following the chronological order, we 
 meet with the well-known Book of Martyrs, 
 
 3 
 
34 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 by John Fox, who, espousing the Pro 
 testant faith, shared with many others ot 
 his creed the persecutions then incident 
 thereto. 
 
 " From the time of his expulsion from his college 
 at Oxford until his death, the career of Fox was 
 marked by a series of misfortunes which probably 
 assisted him in sympathising with the sufferings of 
 those martyrs whose trials he was so soon to put 
 on record, and whose example, so far as it taught 
 him patience in tribulation, he faithfully followed." 
 
 Now that he was deprived of his 
 academic emoluments, he had to seek 
 assistance from his Protestant friends, and 
 after enduring many trials and adversities, 
 he went with others to their asylum at 
 Antwerp, and then settled at Basle, where 
 he devoted himself to the great history 
 with which his name is associated, and 
 which took eleven years to complete. 
 He here found employment chiefly in 
 revising manuscripts, which proved ade 
 quate to his support. After the accession 
 of Elizabeth to the throne, Fox returned 
 to London, and we find him living in the 
 memorable Grub Street, 
 
 "then, as in the days of Pope, the asylum of 
 the more laborious but less affluent authors ; and 
 
Fox's " Book of Martyrs? 3 5 
 
 from that time until his death in 1587 he was 
 occupied in literary work for John Day, the 
 printer." 
 
 When his Martyrology was begun is 
 not ascertained, but it is supposed that 
 the idea of its compilation may have first 
 occurred to him while engaged in studying 
 the history of the Church at college ; 
 although it has been stated that it was 
 first suggested to Fox by Lady Jane Grey. 
 When it is remembered that his work was 
 written in Latin, the translation of which 
 forms three huge folio volumes, we can 
 form some estimate of the enormous labour 
 he had devoted to it. It is satisfactory 
 to learn that the publication of this book 
 was an immediate and signal success, for 
 
 " he received the cordial approbation of the 
 heads of the Church, and the ' Acts and Monu 
 ments ' were ordered to be set up in every one of 
 the parish churches of England," etc. 
 
 How greatly this important protest 
 against spiritual despotism has contributed 
 to the onward march of human progress 
 and civil and religious freedom it would 
 be impossible to estimate. It was this 
 book, accompanied with the Bible, that 
 
3 6 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 gave inspiration to Bunyan, and stirred 
 his wonderful zeal and energy to pourtray 
 for the world his immortal allegory, The 
 Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 We now introduce a different type of 
 student life, Roger Ascham, who is known 
 to us by his quaint work entitled Toxo- 
 philus, or the Schole of Shootinge, and who 
 but for his love of archery would not pro 
 bably have written I'he Schoolmaster, or 
 if the exigencies of his profession had not 
 convinced him that the mode of education 
 common in his time was not the best that 
 it was possible to devise. It is only too 
 clear that the literary outcome of a man 
 is inevitably affected by even the minute 
 incidents of his career, and, therefore, had 
 we space it would be interesting to sum 
 marise the life of this noteworthy writer. 
 But it must suffice to state that he was 
 moved to the compiling his Toxophilus, to 
 cite his antique style, 
 
 " Partly e provoked by the counsell of some 
 gentlemen, partlye moved by the love whiche I 
 have al waves borne toward shotynge, I have 
 written this lytle treatise, wherein if I have not 
 satisfied any man, I trust he wyll the rather be 
 content with my doying, because I am (I suppose) 
 
Roger Ascham. 37 
 
 the firste whiche hath sayde any thynge in this 
 matter." 
 
 It may be stated that The Schole of 
 Shootings is in two parts, and in the form 
 of a conversation between two college 
 fellows " Toxophilus " (the lover of 
 archery) and " Philologus " (the lover o 
 learning) who hold colloquy amid the 
 woods and fields near Cambridge, con-" 
 cerning the respective claims of the Books 
 and the Bowe. He became prebend in 
 York Cathedral, and he died in 1568, 
 greatly lamented by the Queen, who, it is 
 said, exclaimed, " I would rather have lost 
 ten thousand pounds than to have lost 
 my old tutor, Ascham ! " Shortly after his 
 death his larger and most celebrated work, 
 The Schoolmaster, was published. In his 
 preface, the author informs the reader as 
 to the origin of the work ; which appears 
 to have arisen out of a dinner given by 
 Sir William Cecil. 
 
 " At which were present the most of her 
 Majesties most honorable privye counsell, and the 
 rest serving in verye good place. I was glad to be 
 there in the companie of so many wise and good 
 men together, as hardly could have been picked 
 out againe, out of alle England beside." 
 
3 8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 It seems that one of this illustrious 
 company referred to the condition of Eton 
 College, and the. system of tuition then 
 existing, being accompanied with harsh 
 ness in discipline, etc. This incident 
 seems to have aroused Ascham, and in 
 duced him to prepare his treatise on the 
 subject of education. His favourite pupil 
 was the gentle and accomplished but ill- 
 fated Lady Jane Grey. 
 
 Montaigne, the essayist (temp. 1533 
 to 1592), whose name was derived from 
 the chateau where he was born and re 
 sided, gives us no definite idea of what 
 induced him to write his famous essays, 
 which grew into existence during a period 
 of ten years, garrulous as he is on a 
 variety of subjects. It is very probable 
 that if they were at first intended to have 
 any special form at all, it was that of a 
 table-book or journal ; such books were 
 never more commonly kept than in the 
 sixteenth century. But the author must 
 have been more or less conscious of an 
 order existing in the seeming disorder 
 of his thoughts, since he has arranged 
 them into chapters. Although this 
 
Montaigne's " Essays." 39 
 
 rambling essayist has made titles to his 
 chapters, he is so discursive that his 
 digressions prevail more frequently than 
 any direct line of thought ; and his 
 quotations are more conspicuous still in 
 his motley pages. His sole object, he 
 admits, 1 was to leave for his relatives and 
 friends a mental portrait of himself, de 
 fects and all ; while he professed indiffer 
 ence alike as to his fame, or the utility 
 of his writings. Yet notwithstanding all 
 this, his Essays have ever been found 
 among the accepted literature of the 
 
 1 Montaigne, in his preface to his Essays, thus 
 writes : " Here, reader, is a book written in all 
 good faith. It warns thee at the outset, that I 
 have proposed to myself no end but a family and 
 private one ; I had in it no thought of the profit 
 or of my own glory ; my powers are not capable 
 of such an undertaking. I have dedicated it to 
 the special convenience of my relations and friends, 
 in order that when they have lost me (which they 
 must needs do very soon), they may here recover 
 some traits of my character and humour, and that 
 by this means they may preserve more perfect and 
 lively the knowledge which they had of me in 
 life." His two first books of Essays were given 
 to the press in 1 580 at Bordeaux. He had begun 
 their composition at least eight years before ; it 
 was slowly and by degrees that they took shape 
 under his hand ; and he kept continually adding to 
 them, as he admits. 
 
4O The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 library. Montaigne seems to have lived 
 a life of elegant leisure, and delighted 
 in literary and scholastic pursuits. In 
 his study, which he has minutely de 
 scribed, he read and wrote, and indulged 
 himself in the luxury of studious retire 
 ment. As to the influence his productions 
 have exerted in the world of letters, we 
 endorse the estimate of an able critic, 1 
 who remarks : 
 
 " It would be impossible for the stoutest defender 
 of the importance of form in literature, to assign 
 the chief part in Montaigne's influence to style. 
 It is the method, or rather the manner, of think 
 ing of which that style is the garment, which has 
 in reality exercised an influence over the world. 
 Like all writers, except Shakespeare, Montaigne 
 thoroughly and completely exhibits the intellectual 
 and moral complexion of his own time. " 
 
 Another work well known to the studi 
 ous reader is the Religio Medici of Sir 
 Thomas Browne, who took his degree 
 as Doctor of Medicine in 1634, and 
 shortly after took up his abode at 
 Shipden Hall, near Halifax, where he 
 composed his quaint and picturesque 
 book. 
 
 1 Mr. Saintsbury, Encyclopedia Britannica. 
 
Browne s " Religio Medici" 4 1 
 
 " There seems no sufficient reason to question 
 Browne's declaration that this piece was composed 
 for his private exercise and satisfaction, and not 
 intended for publication." 
 
 Dr. Johnson leans to this opinion also ; 
 he says : 
 
 " This has, perhaps, sometimes befallen others, 
 and this, I am willing to believe, did really happen 
 to Dr. Browne ; but there is surely some reason to 
 doubt the truth of the complaint so frequently 
 made of surreptitious editions." 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, in his address 
 to the reader, prefixed to the first 
 authorised edition, Sir Thomas says: 
 
 " This, I confess, about seven years past, with 
 some others of affinity thereto, for my private 
 exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable hours 
 composed ; which being communicated unto one, 
 it became common unto many, and was by tran 
 scription successively corrupted, until it arrived in 
 a most depraved copy at the press. He that shall 
 peruse that work, and shall take notice of sundry 
 particulars and personal expressions therein, will 
 easily discern the intention was not public." 
 
 As a brief example of his style, we 
 cite the following from his Religio Medici \ 
 in which he treats of God in nature : 
 
 " There are two books from whence I collect 
 my divinity ; besides that written one of God, one 
 
4 2 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of His servant, Nature, that universal and public 
 manuscript, that lies expanded unto the eyes of 
 all. Those that never see Him in the one have 
 discovered Him in the other : this was the Scrip 
 ture and theology of the heathen ; the natural 
 motions of the sun made them more admire Him, 
 than its supernatural station did the children of 
 Israel. Surely the heathen knew better how 
 to join and read these mystical letters, than we 
 Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these 
 common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck 
 Divinity from the flowers of nature. ... I call 
 the effects of nature the works of God, Whose 
 hand and instrument she only is ; to ascribe His 
 actions unto her, is to devolve the honour of the 
 agent upon the instrument." 
 
 We subjoin another extract, which is 
 characteristic of his style : 
 
 " Time past is gone like a shadow : make times 
 to come, present ; conceive that near, which may 
 be far off. Approximate thy latter times by 
 present appearances of them ; be like a neighbour 
 unto death, and think there is little to come : and 
 since there is something in us that must live on, 
 join both lives together, unite them in thy thoughts 
 and actions, and live in one but for the other. 
 Pie Who thus ordereth the purposes of this life, 
 will never be far from the next, and is in some 
 manner already in it, by a happy conformity and 
 close apprehension of it." 
 
Pepys's " Diary:' 43 
 
 The Religio Medici was composed at 
 leisure hours, and, as it appears, never 
 would have reached the public, but for the 
 necessity of the author justifying himself 
 from the charge of responsibility for the 
 corrupt piracies which got into print from 
 privately circulated copies of his MS. Be 
 sides the piratical editions, during the 
 author's lifetime eight authorized editions 
 were published ; and besides these the 
 work was translated into many European 
 languages. 
 
 There is always a charm about auto 
 biographical books, even if as in the 
 instance of Pepys's Diary its literature 
 be not of the highest order. This work, 
 however, possessed a twofold attraction. 
 To those who like gossip about the 
 personal details of the writer, as well as 
 to others who prefer historic incidents 
 given by an eyewitness, Pepys will 
 prove, although an egotistical, yet a 
 pleasant companion. It is not my pur 
 pose to sketch this worthy, he himself 
 having rendered that service unnecessary ; 
 and it will suffice to mention the date when 
 he began to keep his Diary, which was 
 
44 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 January ist, 1659-60, to the end of May 
 1669, when he was obliged, from defec 
 tive vision, to discontinue his daily task. 
 In his last entry he says : 
 
 "Thus ends all that I doubt I shall be ever 
 able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of 
 my journal ; and, therefore, whatever comes of it 
 I must forbear, and therefore resolve, from this 
 time forward, to have it kept by my people in long 
 hand, and must be content to set down no more 
 than is fit for them and all the world to know." 
 
 That his Diary was originally written 
 in shorthand was not without cause, 
 since when it was deciphered and pub 
 lished in 1825, the editor intimated that 
 it had been found " absolutely necessary" 
 to make numerous curtailments. 
 
 As a picture of the times in which he 
 lived, it is a valuable work, and although 
 not equal to Evelyn's Diary, is yet very 
 amusing for the details it gives of charac 
 ters and events of that epoch. 
 
 There is a wonderful freshness about 
 this work, as if it were of yesterday, rather 
 than two centuries old; and in this fact 
 lies its chief charm. It differs from ordi 
 nary books of its class in this, that 
 
Evelyns "Diary" 45 
 
 " the author's thoughts, instead of having been 
 written out in the usual way, seem to have recorded 
 themselves by some involuntary automatic process, 
 as words are registered and preserved by the 
 phonograph. By this means the idiosyncrasies 
 of the bustling, patriotic, money-making secretary 
 have been kept in their original freshness for the 
 enter-tainment of the present generation." * 
 
 One of the " healthiest and most in 
 structive of books" is the Diary of John 
 Evelyn, although it does not, in all 
 respects, strictly fulfil what the term im 
 plies. Evelyn's Diary was found, among 
 other papers, at his country seat at Wotton, 
 in Surrey. Evelyn has himself told us in 
 what way the book originated : 
 
 " In imitation of what I had seen my father 
 do, " he remarks, when speaking of himself in his; 
 twelfth year, %< I began to observe matters more 
 punctually, which I did use to set down in a blank 
 almanack." 
 
 These fragmentary memoranda were, 
 it seems, transferred from the blank 
 almanacs to the quarto blank book in 
 which they were afterwards found, and 
 from which the work was printed. This 
 quarto volume, still at Wotton, consists 
 
 1 E. S. Fisher. 
 
46 TJie Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of seven hundred pages, written closely 
 by Evelyn, in a very small hand, and 
 comprising the continuous records of 
 fifty-six years, a period the most roman 
 tic and stirring in the English annals. 
 Sir Walter Scott said that " he had never 
 seen a mine so rich." And of Evelyn 
 himself, it may be said that he was one 
 of the noblest and most exemplary of 
 men in an age not remarkable for purity 
 and virtue in its high places of power. 
 
 The manuscript diary of the celebrated 
 John Evelyn lay among the family papers, 
 at his country seat, from the period of 
 his death, in 1706, until their rare interest 
 and value were discovered in the follow 
 ing singular manner. 
 
 Mr. Upcott, of the London Institution, 
 was requested to arrange and catalogue 
 the library at Wotton, and one day 
 Lady Evelyn remarked, as he had ex 
 pressed his great interest in the collec 
 tion of autographs, the manuscript of 
 Evelyn's Sylva would be interesting to 
 him. Replying, as may be imagined, 
 in the affirmative, the servant was directed 
 to bring the papers from a loft in the ol i 
 
Evelyn's " Diary^ 47 
 
 mansion, and soon Upcott had the de 
 light of finding among the collection the 
 manuscript Diary of John Evelyn, one 
 of the most finished specimens of auto 
 biography in the whole realm of English 
 literature. The work was published in 
 1818. Wotton House is embosomed 
 among the grand old forest trees of his 
 estate, and these he described in his 
 Sylva, during his lifetime. 
 
III. 
 
 FELTHAM'S " RESOLVES." " EIMBLEMS." 
 BALLADS. " ROBIN HOOD." " KING 
 ARTHUR." SHAKESPEARE. HOBBES 
 OF MALMESBURY. ST. PIERRE. 
 " BARON MUNCHAUSEN." BUNYAN'S 
 " PILGRIM'S PROGRESS." DRYDEN. 
 POPE. " ROBINSON CRUSOE." 
 " GULLIVER'S TRAVELS." WALTON'S 
 "ANGLER." WHITE'S " SELBORNE." 
 
 jT is well for us occasionally to 
 turn aside from the thronged 
 thoroughfares of busy life, and 
 escaping from its turmoil and strife of 
 tongues, in the cool eventide to con over 
 some of the suggestive and sagacious tomes 
 of the olden times. When these volumes 
 were written, " the hum of Babel did not 
 reach the scholar's hermitage/' for it was 
 then a time of quiet meditation, as ours 
 is of unrest and earnest activity. One ot 
 
Thomas Fuller. 49 
 
 these philosophic thinkers Owen Felt- 
 ham thus quaintly writes in one of his 
 letters : 
 
 " I have lived in such a course as that my 
 books have ever been my delight and recreation ; 
 and that which some call idleness, I will call the 
 sweetest part of my life, and that is my thinking." 
 
 His well-known book of aphorisms, 
 which he called Resolves, like Arthur War 
 wick's Spare Minutes, a contemporary work, 
 is replete with sententious wisdom. But 
 perhaps more prominent among these 
 magnates of the seventeenth century was 
 Thomas Fuller. A man of multifarious 
 learning and great judgment, he combined 
 within himself those qualities which minis 
 ter to entertainment as well as instruction 
 in an eminent degree. 
 
 "Next to Shakespeare," said Coleridge, " I am 
 not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all 
 other writers, does not excite in me the sense and 
 emotion of the marvellous. He was incomparably 
 the most sensible and least prejudiced great man of 
 an age that boasted of a galaxy of great men. " 
 
 His memory was wonderful, and for 
 quaintness and humour he has been com 
 pared to " Hudibrastic " Butler. To the 
 
 4 
 
5 o The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 noble order of pioneers and martyrs for 
 civic and religious liberty the fraternity 
 of Cromwell, Hampden, Pym, and Milton 
 we are indebted for some of the noblest 
 inspirations in verse and prose which stir 
 the common heart of humanity to this day. 
 
 " It was the short and splendid period of Puritan 
 mastery interpolated between the Shakespeare of 
 Elizabeth and the Dryden of Charles II. ; and a 
 crowd of cavalier poets before the Revolution and 
 after the Restoration. Side by side with these, 
 ' with his garland and singing robes about him, ' 
 stands the solitary sublime form of John Milton, 
 perhaps the very noblest of England's sons." l 
 
 These are the great masters of the lyre 
 and the pen, who have stood for the de 
 fence of human rights, both civil and 
 religious ; and who have also, in melodious 
 verse and eloquent prose, taught us the 
 high themes of Christian philosophy and 
 the practical ethics of daily life. What a 
 brilliant constellation of stars of the first 
 magnitude then shone forth on the literary 
 firmament, Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Cromwell, Bunyan, and Jeremy Taylor, 
 Barrow, Hall, South, Leighton, and Hooke. 
 
 1 Canon Farrar. 
 
Quarks' " Emblems? 5 i 
 
 They lived, although in troublous times, 
 calm and elevated lives, and knew by per. 
 sonal experience the import of the beauti 
 ful remark of Norris of Bemerton, that 
 
 ' ' when all is still and quiet in a man, then will 
 God speak to him, in the cool of the day ; and in 
 that calm and silence of the passions, the Divine 
 Voice will be heard." 
 
 These worthies lived for a high purpose, 
 and they have bequeathed to us the fruit 
 age of their meditative thoughts. Said 
 one of their number : 
 
 " Intellectual pleasures are of a nobler kind than 
 any others ; they are the inclinations of Heaven, 
 and the entertainments of the Deity." 
 
 Francis Quarles is only known to the 
 general reader by his Emblems, which first 
 appeared in 1635. During the middle ages 
 there were several writers of this order, for 
 George Wither compiled A Collection of 
 Emblems, Ancient and Modern, etc. But 
 the fame of Quarles exceeds all others in 
 this class of literature. 
 
 " His visible poetry," said Fuller, " (I mean his 
 Emblems)^ is excellent, catching therein the eye 
 and fancy at one draught." 
 
 Quarles wrote in and for a rude age, and 
 
5 2 The Story of Some Famous Books 
 
 consequently, as the popular taste has 
 changed since then, much that was accept 
 able to his is less adapted to our day ; 
 however much some persons may admire 
 his antique style of illustrating moral and 
 religious truth. Without impugning his 
 undoubted piety, he seems to have in 
 dulged his wayward fancy with incongruous 
 oddities, or strangely "endeavoured to 
 mix the waters of Helicon with those of 
 Zion;" and these eccentricities are un 
 fortunately more conspicuous than are his 
 higher qualities as a writer. He seems, 
 moreover, to have written his verse to suit 
 the grotesque wood-cut illustrations of the 
 book. These Emblems were written, it is 
 believed, at the suggestion of his friend 
 Benlowes, author of Theophila, whom 
 Pope describes as "propitious to block 
 heads," and of whom Warburton said that 
 he was " famous for his own bad poetry 
 and for patronising bad poets." Quarles 
 made an excellent little volume, to which 
 he gave the name Enchiridion, a book 
 of aphorisms and quaint epigrammatical 
 apothegms. It is as a prose writer that we 
 discover his excellence. 
 
Percy's " Reliques." 5 3 
 
 A brief reference to one or two of our 
 most noted old English ballads seems to 
 lie within the range of our investigations. 
 Perhaps the best known of these are 
 Xing Arthur and his Knights of the Round 
 Table, and Robin Hood. Longfellow calls 
 the ballads " the gipsy children of song, 
 born under green hedgerows in the leafy 
 lanes and by-paths of literature in the 
 genial summer time." The troubadours 
 of Provence were of the class; and in 
 England, Drayton wrote the stirring ballad 
 of Agincourt; and in the same sixteenth 
 century probably was written the Nut- 
 brown Maid. 
 
 An annotated edition of Bishop Percy's 
 well-known Reliques of Ancient English 
 Poetry, edited by Mr. H. B. Wheatley, 
 has imparted to this subject an increased 
 interest, it having made available some 
 new information concerning the original 
 manuscript source of these antique ballads. 
 The manuscript itself is about fifteen 
 inches in length by five wide ; some of 
 its pages at beginning and end are lost, 
 having been " used," it is stated, " by 
 some servants to light the fire." The 
 
54 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 handwriting of it is assigned to the year 
 1650. This precious relic was found by 
 Percy under a bureau in the house of his 
 friend Humphrey Pitt, of Shiffnal, Shrop 
 shire. The reticence which Percy and his 
 friends observed respecting this manu 
 script, and their refusal to permit any 
 person to examine it, made it a matter 
 of doubt as to whether Percy's claim 
 of his ballads being founded upon it 
 was valid. Ritson the antiquary, and 
 others, made common cause against the 
 Bishop; and yet he kept his secret 
 till his death. But thanks to the enthu 
 siastic devotion of Dr. Furnivall, the long- 
 coveted relic has been given to the world, 
 in the year of grace 1868, now rescued 
 from the risks and perils to which, in the 
 manuscript form, it has been so long ex 
 posed. Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient 
 English Poetry appeared in 1765. This 
 famous work, consisting of old heroic 
 ballads and songs, was chiefly derived 
 from the old folio manuscript, with the 
 addition of some pieces from the Pepys 
 collection at Cambridge, the Ashmolean 
 library at Oxford, the British Museum, 
 
Robin Hood Ballads. 5 5 
 
 and the works of our earlier poets. 
 The collection has always been con 
 sidered of great value to our literature, 
 for its reproducing the old chivalry and 
 minstrelsy of Elizabethan times. This 
 work it was that captivated Scott, and 
 inspired his Minstrelsy of the Scottish 
 Border. 
 
 The Robin Hood legend dates about the 
 close of the twelfth century. The tradi 
 tions concerning this English outlaw are 
 mostly derived from Stow's Chronicle; 
 but modern research has tended very 
 much to the belief that Robin Hood's 
 existence is merely one of the myths of the 
 middle ages. The famous ballad is, how 
 ever, one of the most popular, not only with 
 the poets, but the public generally. Stow 
 tells us : 
 
 "In the reign of Richard I. (1190) were 
 manie robbers and outlawes, among which Robin 
 Hood and Little John, renowned thieves, continued 
 in the woodes, despoyling and robbing the goodes 
 of the rich. The said Robin entertained an hun 
 dred tall men and good archers, with such spoyles 
 and thefts as he got, upon whom four hundred (were 
 they never so strong) durst not give the onset. 
 Poore men's goodes he spared, abundantlie reliev- 
 
5 6 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 ing them with that which by theft he got from the 
 abbeys and the houses of rich old carles ; whom 
 Maior (the historian) blameth for his rapine and 
 theft, but of all the thieves he affirmeth him to be 
 the prince and the most gentle thiefe." 
 
 The Robin Hood ballads were, doubt 
 less, the popular protest against the oppres 
 sion of the privileged classes, uttered in 
 song ; and as such they may be regarded 
 as the prophecy of the better times that 
 followed. 
 
 Now as to that pet legend of the poets, 
 Prince Arthur with his Knights of the 
 Round Table, he is supposed by some 
 to have been identical with an actual 
 Sovereign in England, in the sixth cen 
 tury. The Welsh bards refer to a Prince 
 Arthur fighting against the Saxons ; and 
 upon this basis the Arthur of romance is 
 believed to have had a real existence. 
 The Arthur of the famous legend was, by 
 the enchantments of the sage Merlin, 
 enabled to do many wonderful things, and 
 ultimately to assume the crown of England, 
 and also to marry " the fairest woman in 
 the land." With her, as a part of her 
 dower, he acquired the enchanted " round 
 
Shakespeare. 5 7 
 
 table," which had once belonged to her 
 father. About this he formed the famous 
 circle of " Knights ; " with these he began 
 to hold his brilliant court at Winchester, 
 the wonderful series of exploits at home 
 and abroad, and the countless adventures 
 recorded in the veritable chronicle of 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth. Even in his 
 day, that is, in the twelfth century, this 
 romantic legend had become incorporated 
 with much of our poetic literature, nor has 
 it ceased to fascinate the minstrels even to 
 this day. 
 
 Of the dramas of Shakespeare who 
 has been styled "the protagonist on the 
 great arena of modern poetry, and the 
 glory of the human intellect " it seems 
 almost superfluous to speak, so much has 
 already been written. Owing to the para 
 lysing influences of the civil war which 
 followed some score of years after the first 
 collective edition of his works, it was re 
 served for more recent times to discover 
 the opulence of his wonderful genius. 
 Nor is it necessary to remind the reader 
 of the innumerable editions which have 
 appeared during the century. It is well 
 
5 8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 known to every student, that many if not 
 most of his historical dramas have their 
 prototype in some of the old chroniclers ; 
 for instance, numerous parallels as to 
 names, characters, and incidents exist in 
 Macbeth, Henry VIII., and other plays 
 which are mainly identical with those in 
 Holinshed. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet, a story which the 
 Veronese believe to be historically true, 
 in the hands of Shakespeare has become 
 the love story of the world. It has been 
 traced back to 1303, as a ballad ; and 
 some two centuries later, Massaccio, a 
 Neapolitan, gave embodiment to the story 
 in a romance, changing the scene to 
 Sienna, and varying the catastrophe. 
 
 Aubrey, the antiquary, informs us that 
 our great dramatist took the humour of 
 Dogberry, in Much Ado about Nothing, 
 from an actual occurrence which hap 
 pened at Grendon, in Buckinghamshire, 
 during one of the poet's journeys between 
 Stratford and London, and that the con 
 stable was living at Grendon when Aubrey 
 first went to Oxford, about the year 1642. 
 
 The old chroniclers Roger of Wend- 
 
Hobbes' "Leviathan." 59 
 
 over and Matthew Paris give the 
 earliest traditions of the Wandering Jew. 
 According to Menzel, the story is but an 
 allegory symbolizing heathenism. Lacroix 
 suggests that it represents the Hebrew 
 race, dispersed and wandering through 
 the world, but not destroyed. 
 
 Next to Bacon, the most conspicuous 
 name in philosophy of his time is that 
 of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury. 
 His renowned work, The Leviathan, was 
 published in 1651; and although he is 
 certainly of the school of the French 
 Freethinkers, if not Atheists, yet his 
 rhetoric is so clear, nervous, and forci 
 ble, that his work is believed to have 
 exerted a controlling influence upon 
 human opinion at the time. He is 
 amenable to critical and correct taste, 
 as well as to morals, for his opinions, 
 which few in our day would be found 
 willing to espouse. It is said that 
 Hobbes was fond of long walks, and 
 that he carried in the head of his cane 
 a pen and ink-horn, as well as a note 
 book in his pocket ; so that he was at 
 any moment able to commit his thoughts 
 
60 The Story of Some Famous Books 
 
 and opinions to paper, as they occurred 
 to him ; and thus he formed his Leviathan. 
 
 It is generally supposed that St. Pierre's 
 Paul and Virginia is a purely fictitious 
 narrative ; but this is not so, the general 
 outline of the story being drawn from 
 facts. The old church of Pamplemousses 
 withstands the ravages of time, and the 
 Morne de la Decouverte will be a more 
 enduring monument than all. The 
 memory of Paul and Virginia is still 
 cherished by the people, many of whom 
 bear their names. 
 
 Paul and Virginia, although the pro 
 duction of a French author, is so 
 universally known in the translation as 
 a choice little romantic idyl, that it well 
 deserves a place of honour. St. Pierre, 
 its author, like our Goldsmith, seems to 
 have been a hapless son of genius, for 
 he wrote his immortal tale in a garret 
 on the Rue St. Etienne-du-Mont, Paris. 
 A touching incident connected with the 
 manuscript of Paul and Virginia is re 
 corded by L. Aime Martin. Madame 
 Necker invited St. Pierre to bring his 
 new story into her salon, and read it 
 
" Paul and Virginia'' 6 1 
 
 before publication to a company of dis 
 tinguished and enlightened auditors. 
 She promised that the judges she would 
 convene to hear him were among those 
 she esteemed most worthy. Monsieur 
 Necker himself, as a distinguished favour, 
 would be at home on the occasion. 
 Buffon, the Abbe Galiani, and M. Ger 
 main were among the tribunal when 
 St. Pierre appeared and sat down with 
 the manuscript open before him. At 
 first he was heard in profound silence ; 
 he went on, and the attention grew 
 languid, the august assembly began to 
 whisper, to yawn, and then listen no 
 longer. M. de Buffon pulled out his 
 watch, and called for his horses ; those 
 sitting near the door noiselessly slipped 
 out; one of the company was seen in 
 profound slumber; some of the ladies 
 wept, but Monsieur Necker jeered at 
 them, and they, ashamed of their tears, 
 dared not confess how much interested 
 they had been. When the reading was 
 finished, not a word of praise was uttered. 
 Madame Necker criticised the conver 
 sations in the book, and spoke of the 
 
62 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 tedious and commonplace action in 
 the story. A shower of iced-water 
 seemed to fall on poor St. Pierre, 
 who retired from the room in a state 
 of overwhelming depression. He felt as 
 if a sentence of death had been pro 
 nounced on his story, and that Paul and 
 Virginia was unworthy to appear before 
 the public eye. But a man of genius, 
 Joseph Vernet, the artist, who had not 
 been present at the reading at Madame 
 Necker's, dropped in one morning on 
 St. Pierre in his garret, and revived his 
 almost sinking courage. " Perhaps St. 
 Pierre will read his new story to his 
 friend Vernet," he said. So the author 
 took up his manuscript again, which had 
 been since the fatal day laid aside, and 
 began to read. As Vernet listened, 
 the charm fell upon him, and at every 
 page he uttered an exclamation of de 
 light. Soon he ceased to praise, he only 
 wept ; and when the author reached that 
 part of the book which Madame Necker 
 had found so much fault with, St. Pierre 
 proposed to omit that part of the narra 
 tive ; but Vernet would not consent to 
 
" Pilgrims Progress." 63 
 
 omit anything. " My friend," exclaimed 
 Vernet, "you are a great painter, and 
 I dare to promise you a splendid reputa 
 tion." His prophecy was speedily 
 verified, for within the year fifty editions 
 of Paul and Virginia are said to have 
 been published. 
 
 The authorship of the Travels of Baron 
 Munchausen was some time a secret; 
 but the book is now ascertained to have 
 been by Rodolph Eric Raspe, a scientific 
 German, who died in 1794, while superin 
 tending some mining operations at Mucress, 
 in the south of Ireland. While employed 
 in the mining districts of Cornwall, he 
 wrote his Travels of Baron Munchausm. 
 He is believed to have been the original 
 of the character of Dousterswivel, which 
 Scott introduced into the Antiquary. 
 
 The Pilgrim's Progress was written 
 while Bunyan was in prison at Bedford, 
 and but half conscious of the gifts 
 which he possessed. It was written for 
 his own entertainment, and therefore 
 without the thought so fatal in its 
 effects, and so hard to be resisted 
 of what the world would say about it. 
 
64 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 It was written in compulsory quiet, when 
 he was comparatively unexcited by the 
 effort of perpetual preaching, and the 
 shapes of things could present them 
 selves to him as they really were. The 
 Pilgrim's Progress is a book which when 
 once read can never be forgotten ; it is, 
 and will remain, unique of its kind, an 
 imperishable monument of the form in 
 which the problem of life presented itself 
 to a person of singular truthfulness, sim 
 plicity, and piety, who, after many 
 struggles, accepted the Puritan creed as 
 the adequate solution of it. 
 
 It may not be generally known that 
 there exist in the British Museum the 
 manuscripts, and also a printed copy of 
 a work, written by Guillaume de Guile- 
 ville, a prior of Calais, who died in 1360. 
 This work, both as to its plan and its 
 characters, bears a remarkable resem 
 blance to the allegory of Bunyan ; and 
 it has been supposed that that work may 
 have suggested to him the design for 
 his Pilgrim's Progress. The work of 
 Guileville was an allegoric poem written 
 in French, but translated, and familiar, 
 
B uny an. 65 
 
 therefore, to the English public. Yet it 
 must be remembered that Bunyan was 
 an unlettered man, and, as far as known, 
 possessed only his Bible and Fox's 
 Book of Martyrs; might he not have 
 been wholly ignorant of the existence of 
 the work in question, and the similarity 
 of its plan with that of the Pilgrim's 
 Progress have been an accidental coin 
 cidence ? 
 
 His knowledge of books must have 
 been very small, but the English version 
 of the Bible, in which our language ex 
 hibits its highest force and perfection, 
 had been studied by him so intensely, 
 that he was completely saturated with its 
 spirit. 
 
 " He wrote unconsciously in its style, and the 
 innumerable Scripture quotations with which his 
 works are incrusted, like a mosaic, harmonize 
 without any incongruity with the general tissue 
 of his language." 
 
 Bunyan's natural temperament was 
 sensitive to an unusual degree. To his 
 fertile brain images crowded quickly 
 upon him, and his ready wit as quickly 
 caught the points of similarity between 
 
 5 
 
66 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 the various stages of Christian experience 
 in this world and his allegory. No one 
 seems to have helped him in the com 
 position of the work. Like Milton in his 
 blindness, Bunyan in his imprisonment 
 had his spiritual perception made all the 
 brighter by his exclusion from the glare 
 of the outside world. Many persons 
 who may be conversant with the Pilgrim's 
 Progress may not fully appreciate how 
 much of fervent piety and strong sense 
 as well as picturesque imagery abound 
 in his numero'us productions, which are 
 saia to amount to the number of the 
 years of his life, sixty. Dean Stanley 
 has justly remarked that 
 
 " We all need to be cheered by the help of 
 Greatheart and Standfast, and Valiant-for-the- 
 Truth and good old Honesty ! Some of us have 
 been in Doubting Castle, some in the Slough of 
 Despond. Some have experienced the tempta 
 tions of Vanity Fair ; all of us have to climb 
 the Hill of Difficulty ; all of us need to be in 
 structed by the Interpreter in the House Beautiful ; 
 all of us bear the same burden ; all of us need the 
 same armour in our fight with Apollyon ; all of us 
 have to pass through the Wicket-gate, to pass 
 through the dark river ; and for all of us (if God 
 so will) there wait the shining ones at the gates 
 
Dry den. 67 
 
 of the Celestial City ! Who does not love to 
 linger over the life story of the ' immortal dreamer,' 
 as one of those characters for whom man has done 
 so little, and God so much ! " 
 
 Dryden's celebrated ode for the festival 
 of St. Cecilia's Day is considered one of 
 the best illustrations of the pliancy of our 
 English extant. One day Lord Boling- 
 broke chanced to call on Dryden, whom 
 he found in unusual agitation, and on in 
 quiring the cause he replied : 
 
 " I have been up all night ; my musical friends 
 made me promise to write them an ode for the 
 feast of St. Cecilia, and I have been so struck with 
 the subject which occurred to me that I could not 
 leave it till I had completed it ; here it is finished 
 at one sitting." 
 
 The poem is designed to exhibit the 
 different passions excited by Timotheus in 
 the mind of Alexander, feasting a triumph 
 ant conqueror in Persepolis. Dryden 
 wrote this grand ode at Burleigh House, 
 where his translation of Virgil was partly 
 executed. This ode has been pronounced 
 unequalled by anything of its kind since 
 classic times. 
 
 If Dryden is to be considered a master 
 
68 The Story of Some Famous Books* 
 
 in lyric, Pope may be called the most 
 attractive of didactic poets. Yet the 
 latter confessed that Dryden's productions 
 first inspired him with the love of the 
 muse. 
 
 Pope devoted five years to his transla 
 tion of Homer, and it proved a great 
 pecuniary as well as literary success. The 
 manuscript of his version of Homer's Iliad, 
 now in the British Museum, presents a 
 curious illustration of the title once con 
 ferred upon the author, of " paper-sparing 
 Pope," as the writing is upon the backs 
 and corners of old letters and fragments 
 and scraps of paper. His Essay on 
 Criticism was, on its appearance, highly 
 praised by Addison in the Spectator, which 
 gave it at once great success. 
 
 The Rape of the Lock, which Johnson 
 styles " the most airy, ingenious, and 
 delightful of all Pope's compositions," 
 was occasioned by a frolic of gallantry. 
 Pope says in his dedication to Arabella 
 Fermor : 
 
 " It was intended only to divert a few young 
 ladies who have good sense and good humour 
 enough to laugh, not only at their sex's little un- 
 
Pobe. 69 
 
 guarded follies, but at their own. But as it was 
 communicated with the air of a secret, it soon 
 found its way into the world. An imperfect copy 
 having been offered to a bookseller, you had 
 the good nature, for my sake, to consent to 
 the publication of one more correct. ... As 
 to the following cantos, all the passages of them 
 are as fabulous as the vision at the beginning, or 
 the transformation at the end (except the loss of 
 your hair, which I always mention with reverence)." 
 
 Pope sought the solace of the muse to 
 beguile his hours of physical suffering. 
 At the age of sixteen he wrote his Pastorals, 
 and soon afterwards his poems The Messiah 
 and Essay on Criticism. Pope's bodily 
 infirmity caused him to be at times very 
 irascible, which once occasioned his long- 
 tried friend, Bishop Atterbury, in plea 
 santry to characterise him as Mens curva 
 in corpore curva. His Essay on Man, 
 which was his next production in order of 
 time, so replete with nervous and pictur 
 esque passages, is yet tinctured with the 
 heresies of his friend Lord Bolingbroke. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, referring to the Essay on 
 Man, after saying that Bolingbroke 
 supplied the poet with the principles of 
 the essay, adds, "These principles it is 
 
70 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 not my business to clear from obscurity, 
 dogmatism, or falsehood." 
 
 The Dunciad was inscribed to Boling- 
 broke, to whose suggestion he was indebted 
 for the idea and many of the principles 
 which are therein espoused. It was not 
 until the fourth and last book was pub 
 lished that Pope avowed himself to be 
 the author, the earlier portions being 
 issued anonymously, for fear that those 
 writers he had attacked would retort upon 
 him. 
 
 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, when first 
 published, and for some time afterwards, 
 was considered as a genuine history ; and 
 even since it has been found to be ficti 
 tious few books have equalled it in popu 
 larity. Its merits have been disparaged 
 on account of its want of originality ; 
 
 "but really," says Sir Walter Scott, "the story 
 of Selkirk, which had been published a few years 
 before, appears to have furnished our author with 
 so little beyond the bare idea of a man living on 
 an uninhabited island, that it seems quite imma 
 terial whether he took his hint from that or any 
 other similar story." 
 
 Sutcliffe, in his history of the island of 
 
" Robinson Crusoe" J i 
 
 Juan Fernandez, from its discovery in 
 1572, gave to his volume the title of 
 Crusoniana, from the fact that it was the 
 well-known abode of Alexander Selkirk 
 on this island which furnished Defoe 
 with the materials of his inimitable 
 romance of Robinson Crusoe. From this 
 source it is known that there was, pre 
 viously to Alexander Selkirk, a solitary 
 tenant of the island, whose sojourn there, 
 as recorded by Dampier and Ringrose, 
 must have been known to Defoe, and to 
 the same source may be traced the original 
 of the story of " Man Friday " and his 
 discovery of his father in Robinson Crusoe. 
 The following is the extract referring to 
 it : 
 
 " At the moment of the hurried escape of a crew 
 of buccaneers from Juan Fernandez, one of the 
 crew, a Mosquito Indian named William, happened 
 to be in the woods adjacent hunting goats, so that 
 the ship was under sail before he got back to the 
 bay. Poor Will had only the clothes on his back, 
 a knife, a gun, and a small horn of powder with a 
 few shot. His situation became still more critical 
 when the Spaniards entered the bay, and having 
 caught sight of him made a diligent search; but he 
 eluded their pursuit, and remained the sole occu 
 pant of the island. His personal history, as given by 
 
7 2 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Dampier, is almost as romantic as that of Robinson 
 Crusoe." 
 
 It was in 1719 that this immortal book 
 made its appeal to the public, but not 
 until it had been rejected by nearly the 
 whole fraternity of London publishers, 
 which is not saying much for their critical 
 acumen. William Taylor, more astute, 
 is said to have cleared a thousand pounds 
 by his publication of the book, which rose 
 into immediate popularity. The place 
 where Defoe composed his romance is 
 believed to have been Stoke Newington, 
 where he was living at that time in retire 
 ment. This is the work upon which the 
 fame of this voluminous writer depends. 
 It has been translated and published in 
 almost every written anguage, and still 
 enjoys literally a world-wide renown. 
 
 Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published 
 without the name of the author; but it 
 was soon discovered, for it was at once 
 greeted with applause. Johnson said of 
 the work that it was 
 
 "so new and strange that it filled the reader 
 with a mingled emotion of merriment and amaze 
 ment. It was read with such avidity that the 
 
Walton's" Angler." 73 
 
 price of the first edition was raised before the 
 second could be made ; it was read by the high 
 and the low, the learned and the illiterate. Criti 
 cism was for awhile lost in wonder : no rules of 
 judgment were applied to a book written in open 
 defiance of truth and regularity." 
 
 As a wonderful satire upon the follies 
 and excesses of those times, as well as an 
 extravaganza for amusement, the book is 
 yet well known. 
 
 This famous politico-satirical romance is 
 one of his works still in vogue, and the 
 work upon which his reputation as a prose 
 writer was established. Swift's personal 
 history is in itself a romance; indeed, it 
 seems to have been tinted with insanity, 
 but it is not our province to refer to 
 this. 
 
 Of Isaac Walton's Complete Angler so 
 much has been written that one would 
 think no more need be added. Charles 
 Lamb said, "It might sweeten a man's 
 temper at any time to read it ; " and 
 a later authority says, "To speak of 
 Walton is to fall to praising him ; " but 
 Byron, who was no angler, thus refers to 
 him : 
 
74 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 " Angling, too, that solitary vice, 
 
 Whatever Isaac Walton sings or says ; 
 
 The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet 
 
 Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it." 
 
 But people in the seventeenth century 
 concerned themselves little or nothing 
 with animal suffering. The advice which 
 Walton gives for the treatment of live-bait 
 is proof sufficient. The Complete Angler 
 is Walton's true title to fame. It was 
 published in 1653, the year in which Oliver 
 Cromwell was declared Protector, and 
 Walton lived to see his work pass 
 through several editions. It has long since 
 taken an undisputed place among English 
 classics; while to speak of its poetry, 
 wisdom, and piety would be to repeat 
 criticism which has passed into common 
 place. 
 
 All we can learn about the origin of the 
 work is from the author's preface, where 
 he quaintly says : 
 
 "I think fit to tell thee these following truths : 
 that I did neither undertake, nor write, nor pub 
 lish, and much less own, this discourse to please 
 myself ; and having been too easily drawn to do 
 all to please others, as I propose not the gaining 
 of credit by this undertaking, so I would nof 
 
Walton's " A ngler" 7 5 
 
 willingly lose any part of that to which I had a just 
 title before I began it, and do therefore desire and 
 hope, if I deserve not commendations, yet I may 
 obtain pardon. And though this discourse may be 
 liable to some exceptions, yet I cannot doubt but 
 that most readers may receive so much pleasure or 
 profit by it as may make it worthy the time of their 
 perusal, if they be not too grave or busy men. 
 And this is all the confidence that I can put on 
 concerning the merit of what is here offered to 
 their consideration and censure ; and if the last 
 prove too severe, as I have a liberty, so I am 
 resolved to use it, and neglect all sour censures. 
 And I wish the reader also to take notice that in 
 writing of it I have made myself a recreation of a 
 recreation ; and that it might prove so to him, and 
 not read dull and tediously, I have in several places 
 mixed, not any scurrility, but some innocent, harm 
 less mirth, of which, if thou be a severe, sour-com- 
 plexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a 
 competent judge ; for divines say, there are offences 
 given, and offences not given, but taken. 
 
 " And I am the willinger to justify the pleasant 
 part of it because, though it is known I can be 
 serious at seasonable times, yet the whole discourse 
 is, or rather was, a picture of my own disposition, 
 especially in such days and times as I have laid 
 aside business and gone a fishing with honest Nat 
 and R. Roe ; but they are gone, and with them 
 most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow that 
 passe th away and returns not." 
 
 " Who ever read Gilbert White's Natural 
 
76 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 History of Selborne without the most ex 
 quisite delight ? " was asked by a writer in 
 Blackwood 's Magazine. White's Natural 
 History of Selborne and Walton's Complete 
 Angler are both books possessing such 
 singular attraction to contemplative readers 
 that their popularity has ever continued 
 to increase. The cause of the esteem in 
 which they both are held is mainly the 
 same. 
 
 " Honest, manly, and godly in their tone, simple 
 and clear in their style, with no ostentation, clear 
 ness and accuracy of observation in those subjects 
 which each particularly affected, and with the 
 charm of enthusiasm, they are models for all suc 
 ceeding writers on kindred subjects." 
 
 Gilbert White, the author, seems to have 
 resembled Isaac Walton in his love of rural 
 sights and sounds the one choosing the 
 woods and the other the streams. The 
 lack of systematic arrangement of his 
 letters, as well as the tone of the letters 
 themselves, render it probable that they 
 were originally written without any design 
 of publication. This was his only book, 
 moreover, and this is suggestive of his 
 freedom from literary ambition. His 
 
Whites " Selbome." 77 
 
 letters give us not only, as a naturalist, 
 much interesting information, but they 
 also afford us a better idea of the author's 
 personal life and character than is else 
 where supplied. 
 
IV. 
 
 MILTON. YOUNG'S "NIGHT THOUGHTS." 
 DR. JOHNSON. GRAY. CAMPBELL. 
 
 |EVER does poetry better attain 
 its true dignity than when it 
 aspires to lay its choicest gar 
 lands at the feet of Him for Whom earth 
 had no crown save one of thorns." The 
 words of Milton are as true as they are 
 eloquent, when he declares the proper 
 office of the poet to be " to celebrate in 
 glorious and lofty hymns the throne and 
 equipage of God's Almightiness." 
 
 The origin of Paradise Lost has been 
 ascribed by some to the poet having read 
 Andreini's drama of L'Adamo, Sacra repre- 
 sentatione, published at Milan, 1613; by 
 others, to his perusal of Jacobus de 
 Theramo's Das Buck Belial, etc., 1472. 
 Yet another theory insists that the prima 
 stamina of the great epic is to be found 
 
" Paradise Lost" 7 9 
 
 in Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas's 
 Divine Weekes and Workes. It is said 
 that Milton himself admitted that he 
 owed much of his work to Phineas 
 Fletcher's Locustes or Apollyonists. He 
 is also supposed to have derived inspira 
 tion for his great epic from a volume 
 entitled The Glasse of Time, by J. Peyton, 
 1609. 
 
 In the year 1654, four years before 
 Milton began Paradise Lost, the famous 
 Dutch poet Vondel, who was recognized 
 by the Writers' Guild as the head of native 
 letters, and had a reputation far beyond 
 the limits of the Netherlands, pub 
 lished a drama called Lucifer ; whose 
 main theme was the rebellion of the angels 
 and their overthrow by the armies of God 
 under the leadership of the archangel 
 Michael. Mr. Edmundson is not by any 
 means the first to indicate Milton's use of 
 this drama, but he puts the proofs for the 
 first time before readers of English, and 
 then seeks to show, "not only that the 
 language and imagery of the Lucifer exer 
 cised a powerful and abiding influence on 
 the mind of Milton, and have left indelible 
 
8o The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 traces upon the pages of the Paradise 
 Lost, but that other writings of Vondel can 
 be shown to have affected in no slight or 
 inconsiderable degree all the great poems 
 of Milton's later life." 
 
 Milton did use the ideas of Vondel 
 largely. But he also used the ideas of 
 others, English, Italian, Roman, and 
 Greek, and justified himself in the famous 
 sentence, " Borrowing, if it be not bettered 
 by the borrower, is accounted plagiarie," 
 leaving it to be understood that, if ever he 
 himself borrowed from others, in all cases 
 he improved the matter taken. 
 
 A study of the origins of Paradise Lost 
 and Samson Agonistes, which leads directly 
 over into Holland, is peculiarly interesting 
 to Americans, since these poems appeared 
 when the Atlantic seaboard was freshly 
 peopled by colonies from Holland and 
 Great Britain. It is in every way a matter 
 that touches us nationally and ancestrally. 
 The Pilgrims, like the Huguenots, who, 
 with the Dutch, founded the Eastern 
 States, were all more or less affected by 
 Dutch religious questions, Dutch politics, 
 and Dutch thought. They found refuge 
 
Milton. 8 1 
 
 in Holland, and were helped by Dutchmen. 
 Milton is the great Puritan poet who be 
 longs to New England quite as much as 
 to Old. But another curious link in the 
 chain is the fact that Roger Williams, of 
 Rhode Island, during his return to London, 
 taught Milton that Dutch language which 
 he immediately put to use, not only in 
 polemics against Salmasius and Morus, 
 but in reading and digesting the religio- 
 satiric plays and epics of Joost van den 
 Vondel. 
 
 Milton has been compared to the 
 nightingale because he warbled his stately 
 harmonies in his blindness ; and, on ac 
 count of his loss, to the bird of Paradise, 
 which, flying against the wind, best dis 
 plays the splendour of its plumage. Or, as 
 Gray has beautifully apostrophised him, as 
 one 
 
 " who rode sublime 
 Upon the seraph wings of ecstasy, 
 The secret of the abyss to spy ; 
 Who passed the flaming bounds of space and time, 
 The living throne, the sapphire's blaze, 
 Where angels tremble while they gaze ! 
 He saw, but, blasted with excess of light, 
 Closed his eyes in endless night." 
 
 6 
 
82 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Milton did not commence the composi 
 tion of his grand epic until he was forty- 
 seven years of age, although he had 
 matured his plan for the work several 
 years previously. Milton's epic was 
 formed out of the first draft of a tragedy 
 to which he had given the title of Adam 
 Unpa radised. 
 
 Paradise Regained is attributed to the 
 poet having been asked by Elwood the 
 Quaker what he could say on the subject. 
 " Thou hast given us Paradise Lost ; hast 
 thou nothing to say of Paradise Found ? " 
 was the demand of Elwood the Quaker, to 
 whom the world is so deeply indebted for 
 his care of the poet, for carrying him to 
 the house of one of his friends in a genial 
 climate, some distance from the plague- 
 stricken city in which he habitually dwelt ; 
 most of all for the answer which he ob 
 tained to his appropriate and well-timed 
 question. 
 
 Milton used to sit leaning backward 
 obliquely in an easy chair ; he frequently 
 composed in bed in the morning, but 
 when he could not sleep and lay awake 
 whole nights, not one verse could he 
 
Milton. 83 
 
 make ; at other times flowed easy his un 
 premeditated lines, with a certain impetus, 
 as he himself used to believe. Then, what 
 ever the hour, he rang for his daughter 
 to commit them to paper. He would 
 sometimes dictate forty lines in a breath, 
 and then reduce them to half the number. 
 
 There is no spectacle in the history of 
 literature more touching and sublime than 
 Milton blind, poor, persecuted and 
 alone, "fallen upon evil days and evil 
 tongues, in darkness and with dangers 
 compassed round" retiring into obscu 
 rity to compose those immortal epics, 
 Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, 
 which have placed him among the greatest 
 poets of all time. The Paradise Lost was 
 originally comprised in ten books ; sub 
 sequently the work was divided into 
 twelve. The composition of the work 
 occupied the poet seven years. 
 
 In his twenty-third year the poet was 
 living with his father at Horton, in Buck 
 inghamshire ; there he continued to reside 
 for five years. In those years he wrote 
 L Allegro and // Penseroso, Comus, The 
 Arcades, and Lycidas. 
 
84 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 The Comus of Milton was suggested by 
 the circumstance of Lady Egerton losing 
 her way in a wood. 
 
 , Milton was one of the principal pioneers, 
 with his pen, in the sacred cause of liberty, 
 as well as our " poet of Paradise." In his 
 latter character, Wilmott pictures him to 
 us as " walking up and down, in his sing 
 ing robes, in the cities of many lands ; 
 having his home and his welcome in every 
 devout heart, and upon every learned 
 tongue of the Christian world." 
 
 The endowment of genius is from the 
 same Divine source that imparted fragrance 
 and beauty to the flower, and song and 
 plumage to the bird. 
 
 " The heart that suffers most, may sing, 
 All beauty seems of sorrow born ; 
 This truth, half seen in life's young morn, 
 Stands full and clear at evening : 
 The gems of thought most highly prized, 
 Are tears of sorrow crystallized." 
 
 The author of Night Thoughts, unlike 
 most of his brother-bards, seemed to prefer 
 the shady side of life ; yet this gloomy 
 proclivity of his pen is the more singular 
 from the fact that he was far from being 
 
Young's "Night Thoughts." 85 
 
 insensible to life's genial influences and 
 enjoyments. One day walking in his 
 garden in company with two ladies, one 
 of whom he afterwards married, his servant 
 came to announce a visitor who wished to 
 see him. "Tell him I am too happily 
 engaged to change my situation," was his 
 reply. His fair companions insisted that 
 he should obey the summons, and they 
 took him to the garden gate, when finding 
 further resistance vain, he bowed to them, 
 and improvised these lines : 
 
 " Thus Adam looked, when from the garden 
 
 driven, 
 
 And thus disputed orders sent from Heaven ; 
 Like him, I go, but yet to go I'm loath, 
 Like him, I go, for angels drove us both : 
 Hard was his fate, but mine still more unkind, 
 His Eve went with him, but mine stays behind ! " 
 
 Notwithstanding the morbid spirit which 
 pervades and overshadows much of his 
 poetry, depriving it somewhat of its potency, 
 it yet abounds with grand imagery and 
 impressive eloquence. Had the poet but 
 infused a little star-light into his Night 
 Thoughts they would have possessed a 
 tenfold charm. 
 
86 The Stoty of Some Famous Books> 
 
 Edward Young, who was chaplain to 
 George II. in 1728, had the misfortune 
 not only to lose by death his young wife, 
 but also two other members of his family 
 circle; and to this triple bereavement is 
 to be ascribed its sombre hue, as well as 
 the composition of his poem ; which was 
 published in 1746. 
 
 The latest and best story of Johnson's 
 Dictionary is by Mr. H. B. Wheatley, 1 
 from which we cite the following : 
 
 " Johnson was one day sitting in Robert 
 Dodsley's shop, when the bookseller took occa 
 sion to observe that a dictionary of the English 
 language would be a work that would be well 
 received by the public. Johnson caught at the 
 idea, but after a pause said, ' I believe I shall not 
 undertake it.' A few years after the publication 
 of the great work, he said to Boswell, ' Dodsley 
 first mentioned to me the scheme of an English 
 dictionary, but I had long thought of it.' 
 Dodsley took great interest in the progress of the 
 work he had suggested, and he appears to have 
 supplied Johnson with those collections of Pope 
 which are referred to in the Plan^ where we read : 
 ' Many of the writers whose testimonies will be 
 alleged were selected by Mr. Pope, of whom I 
 may be justified in affirming that were he still 
 
 Antiquary. 
 
Johnsons "Dictionary." 87 
 
 alive, solicitous as he was for the success of this 
 work, he would not be displeased that I have 
 undertaken it.' Dodsley also thought that the 
 work would gain in credit with the public if it 
 were put under the patronage of the Earl of 
 Chesterfield, and he induced Johnson to address 
 the Plan, which appeared in 1747, to that noble 
 man. Whatever work Johnson may have done at 
 that time in collection of materials, there can be no 
 doubt that he had thoroughly thought out his 
 scheme. The Plan is a masterly production, 
 which can be read with pleasure, for the elegance 
 of its composition and the justness of its criticism. 
 Jt opens with a certain mock humility, in which 
 spirit the author shows in the strongest terms the 
 low estimation in which his vocation was held by 
 the public, with the evident intention of raising 
 that vocation by his own performance. This he 
 has done so successfully, that the title of lexico 
 grapher is given as the highest honour to one of 
 our greatest writers. Between the years 1 747 and 
 1755 Johnson slaved away at his arduous labours, 
 and Lord Chesterfield forgot the very existence of 
 his humble correspondent, to be awakened when 
 it became known that the Dictionary was nearly 
 ready for publication. ' The patron ' wrote two 
 articles in the World, where in a light and airy 
 tone he recommended the work to the public, and 
 suggested that Johnson should be accepted as dic 
 tator of the English language. The reply to these 
 soft blandishments came quick and sharp in the 
 form of a scathing letter written in the most mag 
 nificent English, which will be read to the end of 
 
88 The Story of Some Famous Books 
 
 time with pleasure by all those who are interested 
 in the dignity of literature. Carlyle called this 
 letter ' the far-famed blast of doom, proclaiming 
 into the ears of Lord Chesterfield, and through 
 him of the listening world, that patronage should 
 be no more.' " 
 
 In his Preface to the Dictionary Johnson 
 thus refers to his mode of selectioij of 
 terms and words : 
 
 "When I took the first survey of my under 
 taking, I found our speech copious without order, 
 and energetic without rule. Wherever I turned 
 my view there was perplexity to be disentangled, 
 and confusion to be regulated : choice was to be 
 made out of boundless variety, without any esta 
 blished principles of selection ; adulterations were 
 to be detected, without a settled test of purity; 
 and modes of expression to be rejected or received 
 without the suffrages of any writers of classical 
 reputation or acknowledged authority." 
 
 In the scathing retort upon his quasi 
 patron, Lord Chesterfield, Johnson writes : 
 
 " Seven years, my lord, have now passed since 
 I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed 
 from your door ; during which time I have been 
 pushing on my work through difficulties of which 
 it is useless to complain, and have brought it at 
 last to the verge of publication, without one act of 
 assistance, one word of encouragement, or one 
 
Johnson's "Dictionary? 89 
 
 smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, 
 for I never had a patron before. Is not a patron, 
 my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man 
 struggling for life in the water, and when he has 
 reached ground, encumbers him with help ? " 
 
 And then, referring to the number of 
 persons who, for fifty years, were occu 
 pied on the great French dictionary, 
 while he worked single-handed, he con 
 cludes with a pathos unsurpassable : 
 
 " I may sure be contented without praise of 
 perfection which, if I could obtain in this gloom 
 of solitude, what would it avail ? I have pro 
 tracted my work till most of those whom I wished 
 to please have sunk into the grave, and success 
 and miscarriage are empty sounds. I therefore 
 dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having nothing 
 to fear or hope from censure or from praise." 
 
 No sooner, however, did the Dictionary 
 appear, than it was greeted by the pub 
 lic with unbounded favour. 
 
 Boswell's account of the manner in 
 which Johnson compiled his Dictionary 
 is confused. He seems, according to 
 another authority, to have begun the 
 Herculean task by devoting himself to 
 a diligent study of such English writers 
 as were most correct in their use of 
 
9O The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 language, and under every sentence which 
 he meant to quote, he drew a line, and 
 noted in the margin the first letter of 
 the word under which it was to occur. 
 He then delivered these books to his 
 assistants, who transcribed each sentence 
 on a separate slip of paper, and arranged 
 the same under the word referred to. 
 By this method he collected the several 
 words with their different significations; 
 and when the whole arrangement was 
 alphabetically formed, he gave the defini 
 tions of their meanings, and collected 
 their etymologies, from Skinner, Junius, 
 and other writers on the subject. 
 
 Dodsley, with other booksellers, con 
 tracted with Johnson, single and unaided, 
 for the execution of the colossal work in 
 three years, for the sum of fifteen hun 
 dred and seventy-five pounds. 
 
 Johnson's general habit of composing 
 was to commit to memory what authors 
 usually put on record with pen and paper ; 
 this was his custom in consequence of 
 his defect of sight. He wrote The Vanity 
 of Human Wishes, being the tenth satire 
 of Juvenal imitated, with wonderful 
 
Dr. Johnson. 9 1 
 
 rapidity, composing on one occasion 
 seventy lines without putting them to 
 paper until he had completed them. 
 
 Then, his uncommonly retentive 
 memory enabled him to deliver a whole 
 essay, properly finished, whenever it was 
 called for. Sir John Hawkins informs 
 us that his essays hardly ever underwent 
 a revision before they went to the press ; 
 and adds : 
 
 " The original manuscripts of the Rambler have 
 passed through my hands, and by the perusal of 
 them I am warranted to say, as was said of 
 Shakespeare by the players of his time, that he 
 never blotted a line" 
 
 Johnson's latest, if not his best, work 
 was his Lives of the Poets, originating in 
 the proposal made to him by several 
 publishers that he should write a few 
 lines of biographical and critical preface 
 to the collected works of the English 
 poets, of which they were preparing an 
 edition. 
 
 Johnson himself tells us he has written 
 a hundred lines of verse in a day : 
 
 " I remember I wrote a hundred lines of The 
 Vanity of Human Wishes in a day." 
 
92 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Referring to his work on his Dictionary, 
 his friend Adams asked him how he 
 expected to accomplish it in three years, 
 since the French Academy, consisting of 
 forty members, took forty years to com 
 pile their Dictionary. Johnson replied : 
 
 " Sir, thus it is : this is the proportion ; forty 
 times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen 
 hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman 
 to a Frenchman ! " 
 
 The laborious work necessary for the 
 production of his great Dictionary, which 
 Dr. Johnson undertook to complete in 
 three years, occupied eight, in writing, 
 correcting, and revising. After thirty 
 years of intense devotion to literature, 
 George III. honoured him with a pension 
 of three hundred pounds a year, and thus 
 rescued him from the pressure of pecu 
 niary embarrassments. Johnson's well- 
 known poem, The Vanity of Human 
 Wishes, which was the admiration of 
 Byron and Scott, alone may assign 
 to him a niche in the poetic Pantheon. 
 
 Johnson must have had a certain grim 
 pleasure when he put into words what 
 
Dr. Johnson. 9 3 
 
 he supposed to be the popular opinion 
 of the dictionary-maker : 
 
 " Lexicographer : A writer of dictionaries, a 
 harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing 
 the origin and detailing the signification of 
 words." 
 
 In the first edition of his Dictionary 
 in two hnge folio volumes are to be 
 found queer and obsolete terms, and 
 such odd explanations as that under the 
 word Network, " Anything reticulated or 
 decussated, at equal distances, with in 
 terstices between the intersections." 
 
 Carlyle has, with his customary vigour 
 and fidelity, given us his estimate of 
 Johnson's great knowledge of mankind, 
 and his skilful analysis of individual 
 character, when he writes : 
 
 "Few men have seen more clearly into the 
 motives, the interests, the whole walk and con 
 versation of the living busy world as it lay before 
 him. And to estimate the quantity of work that 
 Johnson has performed, how much poorer the 
 world were had it wanted him, can, as in all such 
 cases, never be accurately done ; cannot, till after 
 some longer space, be approximately done. All 
 work is a seed sown ; it grows and spreads, and 
 
94 TJie Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 sows itself anew, and so, in endless palingenesia, 
 lives and works. To Johnson's writings, good and 
 solid, and still profitable as they are, we have 
 rated his life and conversation as superior. By 
 the one and by the other, who shall compute what 
 effects have been produced, and are still, and into 
 deep time, producing ? " 
 
 His sagacious words and suggestions 
 are likely to last with the literature of the 
 language, for they embody great living 
 truths and principles which are and must 
 continue superior to the changes which 
 affect and rule in the minor affairs of 
 life. 
 
 Johnson who did so much to lift up 
 and dignify the literary profession 
 insisted that "the chief glory of every 
 people arises from its authors." And he 
 yet somewhere puts the strange inquiry, 
 Was there ever anything written by mere 
 man, that was wished longer by its readers, 
 excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, 
 and the Pilgrim's Progress? If these 
 were his pet books, yet he was an omni 
 vorous devourer of all sorts of books 
 himself. 
 
 Among the uses of biographies of dis 
 tinguished persons is that they occasionally 
 
Gray. 9 5 
 
 furnish to us glimpses of their domestic 
 habits and characteristic pursuits. We 
 are interested in even the minor incidents 
 of their lives, for these often contribute 
 to make up the psychological sketch. 
 It is when thus admitted to a private view 
 of their home-life that we are enabled 
 to form a just estimate of their character. 
 It is the small talk and gossip of Boswell's 
 Life of Johnson that is its charm, and 
 that constitutes it such a universal 
 favourite. Boswell has so industriously 
 collected the foolish as well as the wise 
 observations of the great lexicographer, 
 portrayed his asperities as well as his 
 amenities, his eccentricities as well as 
 excellences, so faithfully, that we are at 
 no loss to estimate his character. Let 
 who will question the accuracy of taste 
 discovered in such minute disclosures, 
 it cannot be denied that they are the 
 very details essential to a true portrait. 
 
 Gray, who, it has been said, was 
 " saturated with the finest essence of 
 the Attic muse," wrote his famous Ode, 
 founded upon the Welsh tradition that 
 when Edward I. conquered the Princi- 
 
96 Ttte Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 pality, he ordered the bards to be put 
 to death. * 
 
 Of Gray's Elegy it is related that 
 General Wolfe, on the evening preced 
 ing the memorable battle of the Plains 
 of Abraham,* repeated the noble and 
 seemingly prophetic line 
 
 "The paths of glory lead but to the grave ! " 
 
 to his brother officers, adding : " Now, 
 gentlemen, I would rather be author of 
 that poem than take Quebec!" There 
 are two manuscripts of the Elegy in exist 
 ence ; one containing five stanzas which the 
 author never inserted in the published edi 
 tions. Gray, with a friend, once saw an 
 elegant book-case filled with a choice 
 collection of French classics, handsomely 
 bound, the price of which was one 
 hundred guineas. He expressed a strong 
 desire for this lot, but could not then 
 afford to buy it. The conversation 
 between the poet and his friend being 
 overheard by the Duchess of Northumber 
 land, who was acquainted with the latter, 
 she took the opportunity of ascertaining 
 who his friend was. Upon finding that it 
 
11 Gray's Elegy'' 97 
 
 was Gray the poet, she at once bought the 
 bookcase, with its contents, and sent it to 
 his lodgings, with a note, importing that 
 she was 
 
 *' ashamed of sending so small an acknowledg 
 ment for the infinite pleasure she had received in 
 reading the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, of 
 all others her most favourite poem." 
 
 That oft-quoted couplet 
 
 4 ' Where ignorance is bliss, 
 'Tis folly to be wise," 
 
 we derive from his Ode to Eton College. 
 
 Gray began his Elegy soon after the 
 death of his friend Richard West, about 
 1742 ; it is supposed the event prompted 
 the poem. It was laid aside, however, 
 for nearly seven years, and in 1750 was 
 resumed, when the poet thus referred 
 to the circumstance in his letter to 
 Walpole : 
 
 " I have been here at Stoke a few days (where 
 I shall continue good part of the summer), and 
 having put an end to a thing whose beginning 
 you have seen long ago, I immediately send it 
 you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light 
 of a thing with an end to it, a merit that most 
 of my writings have wanted, and are like to 
 want." 
 
98 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 The Elegy was much handed about 
 in manuscript, and, like Coleridge's 
 Christabel, in that condition gained con 
 siderable celebrity. In 1751 it was 
 ascertained that it was likely to be pub 
 lished without his consent, and Gray 
 desired Walpole to place his copy in 
 Dodsley's hands, to be printed and 
 published, with this direction : 
 
 " Print it without any interval between the 
 stanzas, because the sense is, in some places, 
 continued beyond them ; and the title must be 
 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. If 
 he would add a line or two, to say it came into 
 his hands by accident, I should like it better." 
 
 It has not been ascertained how long 
 Gray was engaged upon the structure of 
 the Elegy, although he is known to have 
 made frequent revisions and alterations of 
 it. The actual locality of its composition 
 is, we believe, as yet undetermined ; there 
 is a tradition that it was within the pre 
 cincts of the church of Granchester, about 
 two miles from Cambridge ; and the 
 " curfew " is supposed to have been the 
 great bell of St. Mary's. 
 
 It would be superfluous to speak of the 
 
Campbell's " Hokcnlinden." 99 
 
 merits of this matchless poem, its world 
 wide popularity evinces how universally it 
 charms and impresses the reader. It has 
 been translated into Hebrew, Greek, Latin, 
 French, Italian, Portuguese, German, and 
 reprinted more frequently in the original 
 than almost any other production of its 
 class. 
 
 Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, written 
 in 1799, when its author was only twenty- 
 two years of age, is mainly indebted to its 
 beautiful episodes for its protracted popu 
 larity. His Hohenlinden, by some con 
 sidered his finest lyric, was yet rejected by 
 a sapient editor of Greenock, and even the 
 poet himself would not admit its merit. 
 
 Campbell in a letter thus refers to the 
 impressions he received of the battle of 
 Hohenlinden, upon which his splendid lyric 
 was founded : 
 
 "Never shall time efface from my memory the 
 recollection of that hour of astonishment and 
 suspended breath, when I stood with the good 
 monks of St. Jacob, to overlook a charge of 
 Klenau's cavalry upon the French under Grenier, 
 encamped below us. We saw the fire given and 
 returned, and heard distinctly the sound of the 
 French pas de charge, collecting the lines to attack 
 
I oo The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 in close column. After three hours awaiting the 
 issue of a severe action, a park of artillery was 
 opened just beneath the walls of the monastery, and 
 several waggoners, who were stationed to convey 
 the wounded in spring waggons, were killed in our 
 sight. My love of novelty now gave way to per 
 sonal fear ; and I took a carriage, in company with 
 an Austrian surgeon, back to Landshut. I re 
 member," he adds, on his return to England, 
 ' ' how little I valued the art of painting before I 
 got into the heart of such impressive scenes ; but 
 in Germany I would have given anything to have 
 possessed an art capable of conveying ideas in 
 accessible to speech and writing. Some particular 
 scenes were rather overcharged with that degree of 
 the terrific which oversteps the sublime ; and I 
 own my flesh yet creeps at the recollection of 
 spring waggons and hospitals ; but the sight of 
 Ingoldstadt in ruins, or Hohenlinden covered with 
 fire seven miles in circumference, were spectacles 
 never to be forgotten." 
 
 It is related of Campbell that shortly 
 before his death he read before the as 
 semblage at the opening of the Exhibition 
 in Suffolk Place, London, that grand piece 
 the Thanatopsis of Bryant, and broke 
 down with emotion when he came to the 
 lines 
 
 " So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
 The innumerable caravan that moves 
 
Campbell. I O I 
 
 To the pale realms of shade, where each shall 
 
 take 
 
 His chamber in the silent halls of Death, 
 Thou go not like the quarry-slave, at night 
 Scourged to his dungeon," etc. ; 
 
 saying that nothing finer had ever been 
 written. 
 
 The oft-cited line of Campbell 
 "Like angel- visits, few and far between," 
 
 has been traced back to Norris of Bemer- 
 ton ; it occurs in the following beautiful 
 stanza : 
 
 " How fading are the joys we dote upon ; 
 Like apparitions seen and gone ; 
 But those who soonest take their flight, 
 Are the most exquisite and strong, 
 Like angel-visits short and bright, 
 Mortality's too weak to bear them long." 
 
 The comparison of human joys to the 
 visits of angels, after having been engrafted 
 into the Grave of Blair, was transferred 
 by Campbell to his Pleasures of Hope, and 
 has long since passed into a poetic 
 proverb. 
 
V. 
 
 GOLDSMITH. COWPER. BURNS. 
 STERNE. RICHARDSON. FIELDING. 
 SMOLLETT. BECKFORD'S " VATHEK." 
 WORDSWORTH. SCOTT. COLERIDGE. 
 
 AUDUBON. Wl LSON. 
 
 ]NTIL comparatively recent times 
 it was supposed that Goldsmith's 
 Vicar of Wakefield was suggested 
 by an anonymous work entitled The Journal 
 of a Wiltshire Curate, but the former hav 
 ing been published in March 1766, and 
 the latter not appearing in print until the 
 following December; and further, Gold 
 smith having written other papers in the 
 British Magazine, in which both works 
 appeared, the supposition of plagiarism, of 
 course, ceases to be possible. 
 
 The ballad of Edwin and Angelina was 
 originally written and privately printed for 
 the amusement of the Countess of North- 
 
" Vicar of Wakefield." 103 
 
 umberland, and was afterwards inserted in 
 the Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 The Vicar of Wakefield was much ad 
 mired by Moore, who read it to his wife ; 
 and Scott tells us he returned to it again 
 and again, and blessed the memory of its 
 author. Carlyle designates it "the best 
 of modern idyls ; " and Goethe declared 
 in his eighty-first year that the Vicar of 
 Wakefield was his delight at the age of 
 twenty, and that he had recently read it 
 again, with a renewed delight, and with a 
 grateful sense of the early benefit he had 
 derived from it. 
 
 While engaged with Newberry the 
 publisher, Goldsmith lodged with a Mrs. 
 Fleming, and it was in her lodgings that 
 being pressed either to pay his bill or 
 to marry his landlady, Goldsmith applied 
 to Dr. Johnson. On that occasion the 
 manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield was 
 produced; and Johnson was so much 
 pleased with it that he obtained sixty 
 pounds for the work, and thus rescued its 
 poor author from the embarrassed situation 
 in which he was placed by Mrs. Fleming. 
 This incident is all the more interesting 
 
104 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 since from such a seeming accident should 
 have sprung one of the most cherished of 
 the literary gems of our language. 
 
 Goldsmith composed his Deserted Village 
 whilst staying at a farmhouse nearly oppo 
 site the church at Springfield, Essex. The 
 village, which he calls Auburn, was Lissoy, 
 where in his youth every spot was familiar 
 to him, as well as the places and also 
 characters then living there, and whom 
 he has sketched in the poem. The 
 schoolmaster was a sketch from life, one 
 Paddy Burn, a man "severe to view;" 
 and so was the keeper of the alehouse 
 where 
 
 " Imagination fondly stoops to trace 
 The parlour splendours of that festive place." 
 
 Every one knows Boswell's carefully- 
 worded account of the romantic circum 
 stances in which Johnson relieved Gold 
 smith's distress by selling the manuscript 
 of his novel to some unnamed bookseller 
 for ;6o. Boswell's story is professedly 
 Johnson's "own exact version," and 
 corrects what he calls the " strangely mis 
 stated " facts of Mrs. Thrale and Sir John 
 
" Vicar of Wakefield." 105 
 
 Hawkins. With these varying accounts 
 Mr. Austin Dobson collates that of Richard 
 Cumberland, and observes, in conclusion : 
 "Boswell's story alone wears an air of 
 veracity, and it has generally been regarded 
 as the accepted version." The novel was 
 published March 27th, 1766, and was 
 advertised in the Public Advertiser of the 
 same date, together with The Traveller, 
 which was published in 1764. 
 
 Mr. Dobson has discovered that as far 
 back as October 28th, 1762, Collins, the 
 Salisbury printer, had purchased of " Dr. 
 Goldsmith, the Author," for 21 a third 
 share in The Vicar of Wakefield. This 
 interesting fact is disclosed by an old ac 
 count book, once belonging to Collins, and 
 now in possession of Mr. Charles Welsh, 
 a member of the firm of publishers suc 
 cessors to John Newberry. Several curious 
 items connected with the sale of the novel 
 are communicated by Mr. Welsh. It 
 appears from the memoranda of Collins 
 that the fourth edition started with a loss, 
 and Collins sold his third share for five 
 guineas. 
 
 " The impression has been general that this 
 
1 06 TJie Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 immortal work enjoyed a brisk sale, at least in the 
 early editions, and that the original purchaser de 
 layed its publication for some fifteen months. The 
 strange truth is now revealed that for more than 
 three years did its three owners agree to keep it 
 from the light, and that one of them was so hopeless 
 of its permanent value that he sold his share for a 
 paltry sum four years after its publication. " 1 
 
 An amusing adventure which occurred 
 in Goldsmith's last journey from his home 
 to Edgeworthstown school is believed to 
 have given birth to the chief incidents in 
 the drama of She Stoops to Conquer. Hav 
 ing set off on horseback (a friend having 
 given him a guinea), he, schoolboy-like, 
 thought he would play the gentleman, and 
 meeting a person on his road, inquired for 
 the best inn. His informant, being dis 
 posed to a practical joke, directed him to 
 the house of the wealthiest personage of 
 the place. Not suspecting any deception, 
 Oliver proceeded as directed, and on 
 reaching the mansion gave directions 
 about his horse. He was ushered into the 
 presence of the squire, who at once de 
 tected the mistake. Being himself fond 
 of a joke, he encouraged the lad in his 
 1 Saturday Review. 
 
Goldsmith. 107 
 
 mistake, and at length found by the relation 
 of his history that Goldsmith's father was 
 not unknown to him. Nothing occurred to 
 undeceive the self-important youth until 
 he had dined with the family circle, and 
 on the following morning when he was 
 about to take his departure, on offering to 
 pay for his entertainment he discovered 
 his mistake. 
 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds relates an anecdote 
 of Goldsmith, while engaged upon his 
 poem, which may be worth repeating. 
 Calling upon the poet, he opened the 
 door without ceremony, and found him in 
 the double occupation of turning a couplet 
 and teaching a pet dog to stand upon his 
 haunches. At one moment he would 
 glance his eye at the desk and at another 
 shake his finger at the dog to make him 
 retain his position. The last lines on the 
 page were still wet (they form a part of the 
 description of Italy), and are these : 
 
 " By sports like these are all their cares beguiled ; 
 The sports of children satisfy the child." 
 
 A literary friend once recommended 
 Goldsmith to employ an amanuensis, and 
 thereby escape the labour of writing his 
 
loS The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 MS., and he tried the experiment. He made 
 an arrangement for the scribe's attend 
 ance, but, after pacing up and down the 
 room, and "racking his brains" to no 
 purpose, he put the fee into the hand of 
 his amanuensis, saying, " It won't do, my 
 friend ; I find that my head and my hand 
 must work together." 
 
 The origin of Cowper's comic ballad 
 oi John Gilpin is well known, but may 
 be repeated here. It happened one 
 afternoon in those years when Cowper's 
 accomplished friend, Lady Austen, made 
 a part of his little social circle, that she 
 observed him looking very dejected, when 
 she told him the story of John Gilpin, 
 which she remembered from childhood. 
 Its effect on the poet was like an enchant 
 ment. He informed Lady Austen on the 
 following morning that the recollection of 
 her story had so captivated him that he 
 had during the night turned it into a ballad. 
 Of this ballad, which had, soon after its 
 publication, become the popular talk of 
 the day, and had been read to crowded 
 houses in theatres, Cowper thus speaks 
 in after days : " The grinners at John 
 
Cowper. 1 09 
 
 Gilpin little dream what the author some 
 times suffers. How I hated myself yester 
 day for ever having wrote it." To his 
 friend Lady Austen Cowper was indebted 
 for the suggestion of the greatest of his 
 productions, The Task. 
 
 Who has not read Cowper's touching 
 lines on "The Receipt of his Mother's 
 Picture " ? The occasion was the receipt 
 of his mother's portrait from his cousin, 
 and in a letter to that lady he uses the 
 following words : 
 
 " The world could not have furnished you with 
 a present so acceptable to me as the picture which 
 you have so kindly sent me. I received it the 
 night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation 
 of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I 
 should have felt had the dear original presented 
 herself to my embraces. I kissed it and hung it 
 where it is the last object that I see at night, and, 
 of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the 
 morning. " 
 
 " It is incorrect to say that Cowper's malady 
 was religious mania ; on the contrary, to his strong 
 religious sentiment was due the consolation of 
 many an hour, lightening its darkness and cheer 
 ing its sorrow, standing as a guardian angel 
 between him and the cell of the raging lunatic and 
 
no The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 the suicide's grave. And so let us leave him, with 
 his own words still fresh in our memory : ' Such 
 was the goodness of the Lord, that He gave me 
 the oil of joy for mourning, and the garments of 
 praise for the spirit of heaviness.' The claim of 
 Cowper to be considered a poet of great excellence 
 has been 'long and indisputably established ; and 
 he may be considered, like Goldsmith, as a pre 
 cursor of that style of poetry which appeals to the 
 great interests of humanity in a rational, philo 
 sophical spirit. His pictures of social life are as 
 truthful as they are charming." l 
 
 To the poet of the domestic virtues, 
 Cowper, are we indebted for having 
 brought the Muse, in her most attractive 
 guise, to sit down by our hearths, and 
 breathe a sanctity over the daily economy 
 of human life. His poetry influences the 
 feelings as a summer day affects the body, 
 imparting to the mind a sense of calm 
 enjoyment and happiness. 
 
 " I would forgive a man for not reading Milton," 
 once said Charles Lamb, "but I would not call 
 that man my friend who should be offended with 
 the divine chit-chat of Cowper." 
 
 He wrote pieces which have given con 
 solation to all classes of Christians, yet 
 1 Waller's Boswell. 
 
Cowper. ill 
 
 he himself took no comfort from them. 
 His last piece, The Castaway, which shows 
 no decay of mental power, though he was 
 then in his seventieth year, is among the 
 most touching poems in any language. 
 He had been reading in Anson's Voyages 
 an account of a man lost overboard in a 
 gale. 
 
 A curious illustration of erratic criticism 
 may be seen in the case of Cowper's Poems. 
 A portion of his poems was offered in 
 manuscript to Johnson, the publisher, on 
 conditions that he should assume the risk 
 of publication. 
 
 "The publisher read the MSS., approved of 
 them, and published them in a volume. But the 
 erudite critics condemned the work as utterly 
 devoid of merit, and nearly the whole edition 
 remained unsold. After a year or more a relative 
 of the poet called again upon the publisher with 
 another batch of manuscripts, which he offered on 
 the same terms, and they were accepted as before. 
 This was the MS. of The Task; and no sooner 
 did this volume make its appearance than the 
 reviewers hailed Cowper as the first poet of the 
 age, and this success set the first work in motion. 
 Johnson, his publisher, was courageous and of 
 good critical judgment, wiser than his first censors, 
 and he reaped his reward, for it is estimated that 
 
112 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 in two years the copyright of Cowper's poems 
 produced the then large sum of six thousand seven 
 hundred and sixty-four pounds ! " l 
 
 Cowper is less read than he deserves to 
 be, but he has this glory, that he has ever 
 been the favourite poet of deeply religious 
 minds ; and his history is peculiarly touch 
 ing, as that of one who, himself plunged 
 in despair and madness, has brought hope 
 and consolation to a thousand other souls. 
 
 " O poets, from a maniac's tongue was poured the 
 
 deathless singing ; 
 O Christians, to your cross of hope a hopeless 
 
 hand was clinging ; 
 O men, this man in brotherhood your weary 
 
 hearts beguiling, 
 Groaned inly while he gave you peace, and died 
 
 while ye were smiling. 
 
 He shall be strong to sanctify the poet's high 
 
 vocation ; 
 And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker 
 
 adoration ; 
 Nor ever shall he be in love by wise and good 
 
 forsaken 
 Named softly as the household name of one 
 
 whom God hath taken ! " * 
 
 While the sweet melodies of Cowper 
 1 Timbs. 2 Canon Farrar. 
 
Burns. 113 
 
 were filling hearts and homes with their 
 music, a rustic peasant of Scotia was tuning 
 his reed to "A Mountain Daisy," or chanting 
 his love-plaints to some fairy-footed nymph 
 beside some Scottish stream. It is not an 
 easy thing to find out the sources of his 
 inspiration ; for the most part they were, 
 doubtless, his love of nature and of his 
 fair friends. Burns was little more than 
 sixteen years old when he wrote some of 
 his most remarkable lyrics ; and the brief 
 limit of thirty-seven years made up the 
 short span of the poet's life, a life so 
 prolific of pleasure to the world, yet so 
 checkered and unpropitious to himself. 
 
 One of Burns's most pathetic of lyrics is 
 that entitled " To Mary in Heaven " : 
 
 " Thou ling'ring star, with lessening ray, 
 That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
 Again thou usher'st in the day 
 My Mary from my soul was torn. 
 O Mary ! dear departed shade ! 
 Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
 See'st thou thy lover lowly laid ? 
 Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?" 
 
 The poet and his rustic maiden met for 
 the last time in a sequestered spot on the 
 
 8 
 
114 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 banks of the Ayr. Standing on either side 
 of a purling brook, and holding a Bible 
 between them, they exchanged their 
 plighted vows. Mary presented her Bible 
 to the poet, and he gave her his. This 
 Bible has been preserved, and on a blank 
 leaf, in Burns's handwriting, is inscribed, 
 "And ye shall not swear by My name 
 falsely ; I am the Lord," and on another 
 blank leaf his name is written. The lovers 
 never met again, Mary having died sud 
 denly at Greenock ; and over her grave 
 a monument has been erected. On the 
 third anniversary of her death, Jean 
 Armour, then his wife, noticed that to 
 wards evening 
 
 "he grew sad about something, went into the 
 barnyard, where he strode restlessly up and down 
 for some time, although repeatedly asked to come 
 irf. Immediately on entering the house, he sat 
 down and wrote this touching poem, which 
 Lockhart characterises as 'the noblest of all his 
 ballads.' " 
 
 Gilbert Burns gives the following ac 
 count of the origin of " The Cotter's Satur 
 day Night ": 
 
 " Robert had frequently remarked to me/ r he 
 
Burns. 115 
 
 says, " that he thought there was something pecu 
 liarly venerable in the phrase, 'Let us worship 
 God,' used by a head of a family, introducing 
 family worship. To this sentiment of the author 
 the world is indebted for this poem. We used 
 frequently to walk together on Sunday afternoons ; 
 and it was on one of these occasions that I first 
 had the pleasure of hearing the author repeat ' The 
 Cotter's Saturday Night.' The 'Cotter' is an 
 exact copy of my father in his manners, and yet 
 the other parts of the description do not apply to 
 our family." 
 
 Burns wrote his famous " Tarn O'Shan- 
 ter " almost impromptu, for he is said to 
 have composed it in a single day. The 
 poet was lingering by the river-side a long 
 time, and his wife and children went out to 
 join him ; but perceiving that her presence 
 was an interruption to him, she retired 
 from him. Her attention was, however, 
 attracted by his wild gesticulations and 
 ungovernable mirth while he was reciting 
 the passages of the poem as they arose in 
 his mind. The piece was suggested by a 
 Scottish legend, which the poet gives in 
 one of his letters to his friend Captain 
 Grose ; and the name was derived from 
 an incident in the life of Douglas Grahame 
 
1 1 6 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of Shanter, a farmer on the Carrick shore, 
 who was, it seems, addicted to libations 
 deep. 
 
 " Should auld acquaintance be forgot," 
 or, as its title reads, " Auld Lang Syne," 
 was described by Burns as being 
 
 "an old song and tune which had often thrilled 
 through his soul ; and he professed to his friend 
 Thomson to have received it from an old man's 
 singing, and exclaimed regarding it, ' Light be the 
 turf on the breast of the Heaven-inspired poet 
 who composed this glorious fragment."' 
 
 The second and third verses, however 
 are known to be his own. 
 
 Among the books which took the 
 strongest hold on the imagination of 
 Burns were two which filled him with a 
 desire to become a soldier ; these were a 
 Life of Hannibal and a Life of Wallace ; 
 and doubtless to the study of the latter 
 may be attributed his noble lyric, " Scots 
 wha hae wi' Wallace bled." 
 
 With regard to the origin of this stirring 
 lyric, whirh he entitles " Bannockburn," 
 we have the poet's own words as follows : 
 
 "There is a tradition, which I have met with 
 in many places of Scotland, that it was Robert 
 
Biirns 117 
 
 Bruce 's march, at the battle of Bannockburn ; and 
 I do not know whether it was the old air, ' Hey 
 tullie, tailie,' but well I know that with Frazer's 
 hautboy, it has often rilled my eyes with tears. 
 This thought, in my solitary wanderings, warmed 
 to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty 
 and independence, which I threw into a kind of 
 Scottish ode, fitted to the air that one might sup 
 pose to be the gallant Royal Scot's address to his 
 heroic followers, on that eventful morning." 
 
 The verses " To a Mouse," and those 
 "To a Mountain Daisy," were composed 
 while their author was holding the plough. 
 Molding the plough was Burns's best time, 
 it is stated, for poetic inspiration as, 
 indeed, some of his best poems prove. 
 The field on the farm of Mossgiel is 
 still pointed out and visited as the scene 
 of many of the productions of the great 
 Scottish peasant-poet. 
 
 Burns tells us that he never feared an 
 enemy or failed a friend, and that "for 
 the rest," he adds : 
 
 " I have written my heart in my poems ; and 
 rude and unfinished and hasty as they are, it can 
 be read there. From seven years of age to this 
 very hour, I have been dependent only on my own 
 head and hands for everything for very bread. 
 But I thank God that though I felt sad suffering, 
 
1 1 8 TJie Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 the scathing blast neither blunted my perceptions 
 of natural and moral beauty, nor, by withering the 
 affections of my heart, made me a selfish man." 
 
 His beautiful, brief lyric, " Ae fond 
 kiss," was the tribute of the poet's brain and 
 heart to his Clarinda; everyone admires 
 the little poetic gem, it is so natural an 
 outburst of affection. The poets have 
 acknowledged its beauty ; Byron and 
 Scott, as well as Mrs. Anna Jameson, are 
 among its admirers. 
 
 " It is a remarkable fact, that the mass of the 
 poetry which has given this extraordinary man his 
 principal fame, burst from him in a comparatively 
 small space of time, not exceeding fifteen months. 
 It began to flow of a sudden, and it ran into one im 
 petuous, brilliant stream, till it seemed to have 
 become comparatively exhausted. " ' 
 
 Carlyle regarded Burns's songs as 
 
 " by far the best that Britain has yet produced. 
 Independent of the clear, manly, heart-felt senti 
 ment that ever pervades his poetry, his songs are 
 honest in another point of view; in form as well 
 as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to music, 
 but they actually and in themselves are music; 
 they have received their life, and fashioned them 
 selves together, in the medium of Harmony, as 
 1 Chambers. 
 
Burns. 119 
 
 Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. If we 
 further take into account the immense variety 
 of his subjects ; how from the loud-flowing revel 
 in 'Willie brew'd a peck o' Malt,' to the still, 
 rapt enthusiasm of sadness for * Mary in 
 Heaven ; ' from the glad kind greeting of * Auld 
 Lang Syne,' or the comic archness of ' Duncan 
 Gray,' to the fire-eyed fury of ' Scots wha hae 
 wi' Wallace bled,' he has found a tone and 
 words for every mood of man's heart, it will seem 
 a small praise if we rank him as the first of all our 
 song-writers, for we know not where to find one 
 worthy of being second to him." 
 
 " Such graves as his are pilgrim-shrines, shrines 
 
 to no code or creed confined, 
 The Delphian vales, the Palestines, the Meccas, 
 
 of the mind ! 
 They linger by the Doon's low trees, the pastoral 
 
 Nith, the wooded Ayr, 
 And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries ! the poet's 
 
 tomb is there. 
 But what to the sculptor's art, his funeral columns, 
 
 wreaths, and urns ? 
 Wear they not graven on the heart the name of 
 
 Robert Burns ? " * 
 
 Gibbon himself informs us of the cir 
 cumstances which led to his writing the 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^ 
 thus : 
 
 1 Fitz-Greene Halleck. 
 
I 20 The Story of Some Famous Books, 
 
 " It was at Rome, as I sat musing amidst the 
 ruins of the Capitol, October I5th, 1764, while 
 the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the 
 temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the de 
 cline and fall of the city first started to my mind. 
 It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th June, 
 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve 
 o'clock, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, 
 in a summer-house in my garden." 
 
 He continues : 
 
 ' ' I will add two facts which have seldom occurred 
 in composition of six. or at least five quartos, my 
 first rough manuscript, without any intermediate 
 copy, has been sent to the press ; second, not a 
 sheet has been seen by any human eye, except 
 those of the author and the printer, the faults 
 and merits are exclusively my own." 
 
 Gibbon tells us of his History : 
 
 " At the outset, all was dark and doubtful, even 
 the title of the work, the true era of the decline 
 and fall of the Empire, the limits of the introduc 
 tion, the division of the chapters and the order of 
 the narration : and I was often tempted to cast 
 away the labour of seven years." 
 
 The memoirs of his life reveal to us a 
 picture of his untiring industry, and per 
 sistent devotion to his great work, cover 
 ing a space of nearly a score of years. 
 
Sterne. 1 2 I 
 
 His famous work was declined by 
 several publishers, and when undertaken 
 by Cadell, only five hundred copies were 
 at first printed ; larger impressions, how 
 ever, soon followed, in rapid succession, 
 until, as Gibbon says, his book " was on 
 every table and almost every toilette." 
 
 Tristram Shandy was condemned by 
 Horace Walpole as "a very insipid and 
 tedious performance ; " yet this was 
 Sterne's greatest work. Dodsley, the 
 publisher, gave him six hundred and 
 fifty pounds for the second edition of 
 the work, and two more volumes ; and 
 Warburton gave him a purse of gold, 
 and styled him " the English R'abelais." 
 Although the work appeared anonymously, 
 yet it was known to be Sterne's from 
 the first. 
 
 Of Sterne's Sentimental Journey there 
 is no history, excepting that the author 
 wrote it from notes made during two 
 journeys in France and Italy. 
 
 Richardson's once popular novels were 
 suggested to him by a brother bookseller, 
 as an attractive vehicle for conveying 
 ethical teaching to the subordinate classes 
 
122 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of society, as well as exhibiting the ideal 
 characters of fiction. Samuel Richardson 
 who has been called the founder of the 
 modern novel published in 1741 his 
 Pamela^ the story of a rustic beauty's 
 adventures and vicissitudes. It originally 
 sprang from a collection of familiar 
 letters, which he designed as a manual 
 for the improvement of the operative 
 classes. The popularity of this work was 
 remarkable, although this, like all 
 Richardson's works, is extremely volu 
 minous. His greatest novel is Clarissa 
 Harlowe, which still is regarded as belong 
 ing to the front rank of prose fiction. 
 
 By this work Richardson, whom no 
 body suspected of literary ability, intro? 
 duced a new class or order in the 
 literature of fiction. He is said to have 
 written the story in his cottage at Ham 
 mersmith, during the daytime, and in the 
 evenings he read portions of his manu 
 script to a few ladies, whom he constituted 
 his censors on his delineations of woman's 
 ways, which to some of us seem past 
 finding out. 
 
 The second prominent novelist of this 
 
Smollett. 123 
 
 period is Fielding, who was described by 
 Byron as " the prose Homer of human 
 nature." In 1742 he produced his first 
 work, Joseph Andrews^ which was, it is 
 said, designed as a humorous satire upon 
 Pamela. His principal book was Tom 
 /ones, which has been considered one of 
 the finest examples of its class extant 
 in fiction. Smollett's Humphrey Clinker 
 is another novel in the epistolary form, 
 and "the most cordial, comic, and 
 laughable of them all" 
 
 In the year 1809 was interred, in the 
 churchyard of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, 
 the body of one Hew Hewson, who died 
 at the age of eighty-five. He was the 
 original of Hugh Strap, in Smollett's 
 Roderick Random. Upwards of forty years 
 he kept a hair-dresser's shop in St. Martin's 
 parish ; the walls were hung round with 
 Latin quotations, and he would frequently 
 point out to his customers and acquaint 
 ances the several scenes in Roderick 
 Random pertaining to himself, which had 
 their origin, not in Smollett's inventive 
 fancy, but in truth and reality. The 
 meeting in a barber's shop at Newcastle- 
 
124 The Story of Some .Famous Books. 
 
 upon-Tyne, the subsequent mistake at 
 the inn, their arrival together in London, 
 and the assistance they experienced from 
 Strap's friend, are all facts. The barber 
 left behind an annotated copy of Roderick 
 Random, showing how far we are in 
 debted to the genius of the author, and 
 to what extent the incidents are founded 
 in reality. 
 
 Another famous work is Beckford's 
 Vathek : An Arabian Tale. This work, 
 which is considered the finest of Oriental 
 romances in prose, as Moore's Lalla Rookh 
 is the first of these in verse, was written 
 before its author had completed his twen 
 tieth year, and published in 1784. For 
 accuracy of detail, beauty of description, 
 and richly luxuriant imagination, it sur 
 passed even Johnson's Rasselas, according 
 to the estimate of Byron and some other 
 critics. This work, although its author 
 was an Englishman, was composed in 
 French, of which its style is a model, 
 and afterwards was translated. No clue 
 to the origin of the production seems 
 to exist. It may be noted that Hopes, 
 celebrated novel, Anastasius ; or, Memoirs 
 
Wordsworth. i 2 5 
 
 of a Modern Greek, which Beckford, it 
 is known, greatly admired, was not pub 
 lished until 1819. He is said to have 
 written this remarkable story at a single 
 sitting. Much of the description of 
 Vathek's palace, and even the Hall of 
 Eblis, was afterwards visibly embodied 
 in the real Fonthill Abbey, of which 
 wonders almost as fabulous were at one 
 time reported and believed. Fonthill 
 Abbey, which had been destroyed by 
 fire, cost the sum of ^273,000. The 
 building was in the Gothic style, and was 
 surmounted by a central tower of two 
 hundred and eighty feet in height. The 
 abbey was enriched with the treasures 
 of art and vertu, as well as a choice 
 collection of books. 
 
 Wordsworth, whose whole life was 
 devoted to his art, and whose poetry 
 was written amidst the inspiration of 
 mountains and meadows, woodland lakes 
 and rural retreats, must have had few 
 cares, living as he did at Grasmere and 
 afterwards at Rydal Mount, sequestered 
 from the busy haunts of men. 
 
 Wordsworth, the pastoral and philo- 
 
126 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 sophic bard of Rydal Mount, Westmore 
 land, reveals to us his love of nature 
 in the following lines : 
 
 ft One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you 
 
 more of man, 
 
 Of moral evil and of good, than all the sages 
 can." 
 
 Many of his pastorals " are fresh," as 
 Coleridge once said, ' with the morning 
 dew." When once asked by a visitor 
 where his library was, he replied, " The 
 woods and streams are my books." So 
 fond was he of wandering over "hill 
 and dale, fountain or fresh shade," that 
 De Quincey has estimated his perambula 
 tions as exceeding in dimension the 
 circuit of the globe itself. He informs 
 us that his fine poem on " Tintern Abbey " 
 was composed after crossing the river 
 Wye, and during a four or five days 1 
 ramble about that most picturesque river, 
 in company with his sister. Not a line 
 of it, however, was either uttered or 
 written down until he reached Bristol. 
 His " Ode on Immortality " has this fine 
 burst of poetic lament on illusions of life 
 and the flight of time : 
 
Wordsworth. 127 
 
 " There was a time when meadow, grove, and 
 
 stream, 
 The earth, and every common sight, to me 
 
 did seem 
 Apparelled in celestial light the glory and the 
 
 freshness of a dream ! 
 It is not now, as it hath been of yore, 
 Turn wheresoe'er I may, by night or day, 
 The things which I have seen, I now can see. no 
 more." 
 
 The well-known tale of " Peter Bell" 
 was founded upon an incident which met 
 the eye of the poet in a newspaper, of 
 an ass being found hanging its head over 
 a canal in a wretched condition. Upon 
 examination it was ascertained that it 
 was looking and waiting for its master, 
 who had fallen into the water and 
 was drowned. Another of Wordsworth's 
 poems, "The Brothers," was suggested 
 by the following incident, which had been 
 told him up Ennerdale. A shepherd had 
 fallen asleep upon the top of a rock, 
 called the Pillar, and there perished, 
 as described in the poem, his staff having 
 been left mid-way on the cliff. It was 
 of this poem that Southey, in writing to 
 Coleridge, said, " God bless Wordsworth 
 
128 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 for that poem ! " Coleridge confessed 
 to another friend that he ''never read 
 that model of English pastoral with an 
 unclouded eye." 
 
 It is the high prerogative of the poet 
 to extract, by the alembic of his genius, 
 beautiful thoughts and images from the 
 minute and even commonplace things, 
 as well as the grander and more sublime 
 aspects of nature. Few objects in the 
 arcana of nature more readily attract 
 the eye of the poet than the bloom and 
 beauty of the perfumed flowers. 
 
 As an illustration of the fact of un 
 conscious possession -of the poetic gift, 
 it is related of Sir Walter Scott that not 
 long before his Lay of the Last Minstrel 
 made its appearance, he was crossing 
 the Firth of Forth in a ferry-boat with a 
 friend, and the two proposed to beguile 
 the time by writing a number of verses 
 on given subjects. At the end of an 
 hour's cogitations, they presented the 
 results, when Scott and his friend only 
 produced between them six lines ! " It 
 is plain," the former exclaimed, "that 
 you and I need never think of getting 
 
Sir Walter Scott. 129 
 
 our living by writing poetry." Yet who 
 made more money and fame by his 
 genius than did Sir Walter Scott? 
 
 An interesting story is furnished by 
 Lockhart of the gradual growth of The 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel. The lovely 
 Countess of Dalkeith hears a wild legend 
 of Border diablerie, and sportively asks 
 Scott to make it the subject of a ballad. 
 The poet's accidental confinement in the 
 midst of a yeomanry camp gave him 
 leisure to meditate his theme to the sound 
 of the bugle; suddenly there flashes on 
 him the idea of extending his simple out 
 line so as to embrace a vivid panorama of 
 that old Border life of war and tumult. 
 A friend's suggestion led to the arrange 
 ment and framework of the Lay and the 
 conception of the ancient Harper. Thus 
 step by step grew the poem that first made 
 its author famous. 
 
 Of the three poems, The Lady of the 
 Lake, Marmion, and the Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel, the last named is considered to 
 bear the palm of excellence. The Lay, 
 however, was modelled after the irregular 
 structure of Coleridge's unfinished poem 
 
 9 
 
130 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of Christabelj as Scott admits that it was 
 in it he first found this measure used in 
 serious poetry. 
 
 Carlyle considers that Scott's first literary 
 effort, the translation of Gb'tz von Ber- 
 lichengen, was the prime cause of his 
 Marmion, Lady of the Lake, and all that 
 followed from the same creative hand. 
 
 The manuscript of Waverley lay hid 
 away in an old cabinet for years before 
 the public were aware of its existence. 
 In the words of the Great Unknown : " I 
 had written the greater part of the first 
 volume and sketched other passages, 
 when I mislaid the manuscript ; and only 
 found it by the merest accident, as I was 
 rummaging the drawer of an old cabinet ; 
 and I took the fancy of finishing it." 
 
 In the year 1816 the Antiquary ap 
 peared, and for eight years a long 
 succession of novels emanated from his 
 prolific brain with a rapidity as wonder 
 ful as their merits were great. Of the 
 origin of these historic romances the 
 author himself thus informs us : 
 
 "My early recollections of Highland scenery 
 and customs made so favourable an impression in 
 
Sir Walter Scott. 131 
 
 the poem called The Lady of the Lake, that I was 
 induced to think of attempting something of the 
 same kind in prose. I had been a good deal in 
 the Highlands at a time when they were much less 
 accessible, and much less visited, than they have 
 been of late years, and was acquainted with many 
 of the old warriors of 1745, who were, like mo<-t 
 veterans, easily induced to fight their battles ovtr 
 again, for the benefit of a willing listener like my 
 self. It naturally occurred to me that the ancient 
 traditions and high spirit of a people who, living 
 in a civilised age and country, retained so strong a 
 tincture of manners belonging to an early period 
 of society, must afford a subject favourable for 
 romance, if it should not prove a curious tale 
 marred in the telling. It was with some idea of 
 this kind that, about the year 1805, I threw to 
 gether about one-third part of the first volume of 
 Waverley. " 
 
 In Scott's Ivanhoe is the character of 
 Rebecca, the original of which was a lady 
 of Philadelphia, named Rebecca Gratz, 
 who was possessed of singular beauty. 
 One of the most intimate friends of her 
 family was Washington Irving, and it is 
 through his acquaintance with this lady 
 and Sir Walter Scott that we have handed 
 down to us the beautiful portraiture that 
 so graces the charming work of that Wizard 
 of the North, Ivanhoe. The original of 
 
132 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Jeanie Deans, in the Heart of Midlothian, 
 was Helen Walker, a Scottish girl, left an 
 orphan with the charge of a younger sister. 
 The reader is doubtless familiar with the 
 thrilling story of her heroic bravery in 
 saving at the last moment her sister's 
 life, who was condemned to suffer the 
 penalty for murder. Scott wrote the 
 epitaph on the tomb of Helen, whose 
 body lies in the churchyard of Irongray, 
 six miles from Dumfries. 
 
 Scott, " the potent wizard of romance, 
 at the waving of whose wand came troop 
 ing on the stage of life again gallant 
 knights and ladies fair, exprisoned chargers 
 and splendid tournaments, with their 
 flashing armour and blazoned shields,' 
 was the poet, also, who loved to sing of 
 knightly deeds of valour and old traditional 
 love-lays. He was endowed with such 
 wonderful fertility of invention and facility 
 of composition, that he was compared to 
 a high-pressure engine, the steam of which 
 always was up as soon as he entered his 
 study, which was generally at six a.m. 
 Melrose he has consecrated by his genius, 
 Abbotsford by his living presence,, and 
 
Sir Walter Scott. 133 
 
 Dryburgh by his sacred dust ; while 
 Nature herself may be said, in his own 
 beautiful lines, to do homage to his 
 memory. 
 
 " Call it not vain, they do not err, who say that 
 
 when the poet dies, 
 
 That Nature mourns her worshipper, and cele 
 brates his obsequies, 
 And rivers teach the ru;hing wave 
 To murmur dirges round his grave ! " 
 
 Sir Walter himself tells us that the fame 
 of Miss Edgeworth did much to inspire 
 him. He says that her writings did more 
 than all the legislative enactments towards 
 completing the union between the Irish 
 and English peoples. Scott felt that he 
 might do for Scotland what Miss Edge- 
 worth had achieved for Ireland that he 
 might familiarize Englishmen with the 
 virtues and foibles of the gallant Scotch 
 race, and promote a free and unrestrained 
 intercourse between the two nations. The 
 idea ultimately developed itself in the 
 long and illustrious series known as the 
 Waverky Novels. 
 
 Washington Irving wrote parts of The 
 Sketch Book in London and elsewhere; 
 
1 34 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 his story of The Stout Gentleman was 
 sketched while mounted on a stile at 
 Stratford-on-Avon. living's love of letters 
 was an intuition ; on one occasion he said, 
 in reference to his fitful muse, "But these 
 capricious moods, of the heat and glow of 
 composition, have been the happiest hours 
 of my life. I have never found, in any 
 thing outside of the four walls of my study, 
 any enjoyment equal to sitting at my 
 writing desk, with a clean page, a new 
 theme, and a mind awake." When in Paris 
 he seems to have been unable to do much 
 with his pen for some six weeks, when his 
 friend Moore called upon him. Irving 
 told him how long he had been waiting 
 for the impulse to write something, but 
 that now it had come to him, and he 
 showed him his desk covered with closely 
 written sheets ; that work was Bracebridge 
 Hall. 
 
 A love of the muse was enkindled 
 in the mind and heart of James Mont 
 gomery in his school-days by hearing Blair's 
 " Grave " read. Many of his poems were 
 composed during his unjust imprisonment ; 
 for he was a philanthropist as well as a 
 
Leigh Hunt. 135 
 
 poet, and because of his conscientious 
 opposition to slavery and other political 
 abuses he became the victim of persecu 
 tion. He wrote his well-known poem 
 " The Common Lot" during a country walk 
 in the snow. His productions are volu 
 minous, and some of his poems and 
 hymns are great favourites, such as his 
 " Oh, where shall rest be found ? " " Night 
 is the time for rest," " There is a calm for 
 those who weep," and "Friend after friend 
 departs ! who has not lost a friend ? " 
 " Prayer is the soul's sincere desire," etc. 
 
 As in the case of Montgomery and 
 others, Leigh Hunt, by the power of his 
 genius, seems to have transfigured the 
 gloomy prison-house into a fairy palace of 
 the imagination ; he wrote in part his 
 Story of Rimini and The Descent of Li 
 berty while deprived of his personal free 
 dom. Leigh Hunt has, indeed, been 
 styled " the most blithesome prison-bird 
 that ever warbled in a cage." 
 
 Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner " has been 
 the subject of extensive criticism, yet 
 
 "Like all his writings, the versification is exquisite: 
 his language puts on every form, it expresses every 
 
136 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 sound ; he almost writes to the eye and to the ear. 
 This production is a wild, mystical, phantasmagoric 
 narrative, most picturesquely related in the old 
 English ballad measure, and in language to which 
 an air of antiquity is skilfully given in admirable 
 harmony with the spectral character of the events. 
 The whole poem is a splendid dream, filling the 
 ear with the strange and floating melodies of sleep, 
 and the eye with a shifting, vaporous succession of 
 fantastic images, gloomy or radiant." l 
 
 This weird poem describes a man who 
 shot an albatross, a bird of good omen to 
 sailors. For this offence he was severely 
 punished, and on his repentance was 
 doomed to wander over the earth, and 
 repeat the story of his wrong as a warning 
 to others. 
 
 " The poem originated," says Wordsworth, 
 ' out of the want of five pounds which Coleridge 
 and I needed to make a tour together in Devon 
 shire. We agreed to write, jointly, a poem, the 
 subject of which Coleridge took from a dream 
 which a friend of his had once dreamt concerning 
 a person suffering under a dire curse from the 
 commission of some crime. I supplied the crime, 
 the shooting of the albatross, from an accident I 
 had met with in one of Shelvocke's voyages. We 
 tried the poem conjointly for a day or two, but we 
 
 1 Shaw's English Literature. 
 
Coleridge. 1 3 7 
 
 pulled different ways, and only a few lines of it 
 are mine." 
 
 Coleridge's changeful career exhibits 
 many phases of character, but among them 
 not the least interesting is that of the poet. 
 One of the Lake-poets, as they have been 
 familiarly styled (Wordsworth and Southey 
 forming with himself the trio), he subse 
 quently removed to Highgate, one of the 
 northern suburbs of London, ostensibly 
 for medical treatment of his opium habit. 
 Instead of being cured, however, it was 
 hinted that he made his medical friend 
 as bad as himself. This sad habit in 
 which he indulged accounts for the strange 
 mystery of some of his poetry, " Kubla 
 Khan," the " Ancient Mariner," and 
 " Christabel." The " Kubla Khan," which 
 is so remarkable for its rich delicacy of 
 colouring, as well as its melody and 
 mystery, owes its existence to the following 
 incident. In the summer of 1797 he was 
 reading in a lonely farm-house, when, 
 being unwell, he took an anodyne, 
 from the effects of which he fell asleep 
 in his chair, at the moment he was read 
 ing the following sentence in Purchas's 
 
138 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Pilgrims : " Here the Khan Kubla com 
 manded a palace to be built, and a stately 
 garden thereunto ; and thus ten miles of 
 fertile ground were enclosed with a wall." 
 He continued asleep for three hours, 
 during which time he vividly remembered 
 having composed from two to three 
 hundred lines, and this without any con 
 sciousness of effort. On awakening, he 
 remembered the whole, and taking his 
 pen, began eagerly to commit to paper. 
 He had written as far as the published 
 fragment, when he was interrupted by 
 some person on urgent business, which 
 detained him about an hour. On resum 
 ing his pen, he was mortified to find that 
 with the exception of a few lines all had 
 vanished from his memory. Coleridge 
 had a wonderful power of summoning up 
 images in his own mind, an instance in 
 point being the lines purporting to have 
 been composed in the valley of Chamouni, 
 whereas Wordsworth informs us that " he 
 never visited the vale of Chamouni, or 
 was near it in his life." 
 
 Upon the authority of De Quincey, it is 
 stated that Coleridge founded the " Hymn 
 
Coleridge. 139 
 
 to Chamouni " on a short poem upon the 
 same subject, by Frederika Brun. " The 
 mere framework of the poem is exactly 
 the same," he says, " but the dry bones of 
 the German outline have been created by 
 Coleridge into the fulness of life." 
 
 Coleridge revealed his omnivorous appe 
 tite for reading in his early life, for he is 
 reported to have " read straight through a 
 circulating library, folios and all ; " and 
 when in his fifteenth year, he says, " I had 
 bewildered myself in metaphysics and 
 theological controversy." The life-story 
 of this gifted writer is a sad one to peruse, 
 full of inconsistencies and errors ; and 
 many of his misfortunes and sufferings 
 were self-inflicted. If his resort to opium- 
 eating was at first for the relief of his 
 rheumatism, soon the remedy in his case 
 became worse than the disease. How 
 painful to read are his own confessions 
 of his infatuated use of the pernicious 
 drug. " In short, conceive whatever is 
 most wretched, helpless, hopeless, and 
 you will form as tolerable a notion of 
 my state as it is possible for a good 
 man to have ! " Poor Coleridge ! his 
 
1 40 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 irresolution and indolence were like evil 
 genii hovering over him through his whole 
 life. In fine, he was a great genius with a 
 great infirmity ; the twinhood of mental 
 strength and feebleness, he claims at 
 once our reverence and our deep com 
 passion. 
 
 De Quincey informs us, when referring 
 to Coleridge and his opium habit, that, like 
 the poet, when his powers of composition 
 for any length of time had been exerted, 
 the result of his exertions produced a feel 
 ing of disgust. " And in after years," he 
 states, " Coleridge confessed that he never 
 could read anything he had written with 
 out a sense of overpowering disgust." Re 
 verting to his own case, which was nearly 
 the same as his, he continues : 
 
 "At times when I had slept at more regular 
 hours, for several nights consecutively, and had 
 armed myself by a sudden increase of the opium 
 for a few days running, I recovered, at times, a 
 remarkable glow of jovial spirits. In some such 
 artificial respites it was from my usual state of 
 distress, and purchased at a heavy price of subse 
 quent suffering, that I wrote the greater part of 
 the Opium Confessions" The narrative part pre 
 ceding the incoherent dreams which that work 
 
Audubon. 141 
 
 describes " was written," he says, " with singular 
 rapidity, but the dreams themselves were composed 
 slowly, and by separate efforts of thought. These 
 circumstances I mention to account for my having 
 written anything in a happy or genial state of 
 mind, when I was in a general state of mind so 
 different by my own description." 
 
 Audubon, the ornithologist, who seems 
 to have been a born naturalist, tells us 
 that 
 
 "no roof seemed so secure to him as that formed 
 of the dense foliage under which the feathered 
 tribes were seen to resort, or the caves and fissures 
 of the massy rocks to which the dark-winged cor 
 morant and the curlew retired to rest, or to protect 
 themselves from the fury of the tempest." 
 
 To advance his skill as a draughtsman 
 he went to Paris, and studied under the 
 celebrated artist David. Returning again 
 to the New World, he revisited the woods 
 and fields with increased ardour and 
 enthusiasm ; he ransacked the prairies and 
 mountains as well as streams and rivers 
 to learn the habits and retreats of the 
 feathered minstrels of the wilderness. 
 His object at first was not to become a 
 writer, but simply to indulge a passion, to 
 enjoy the study of these beautiful creatures 
 
142 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of the air. It was Prince Lucien Bona 
 parte, an accomplished naturalist, who 
 first incited him to arrange his beautiful 
 drawings in a form for publication. With 
 this object in view he revisited prairies, 
 lakes, rivers, and sea shore, and enriched 
 his portfolio with a mass of information 
 and a large number of drawings, when an 
 accident occurred to his collection. The 
 story is thus briefly given. Leaving his 
 home in Kentucky, he went to Philadelphia, 
 and placing his drawings carefully in a box 
 he gave them for safe keeping into the 
 charge of a relative. After an absence of 
 several months he returned, and on open 
 ing the box to his dismay he discovered, 
 instead of his thousand sketches and por 
 traits, nothing remained to him but a pair 
 of Norway rats with their progeny nestled 
 among innumerable bits of paper. The 
 poor artist was overwhelmed ; he slept net 
 for a few nights, but his courage returned, 
 and with a new resolution he again sallied 
 forth with notebook, pencil, and gun into 
 the woods as gaily as if nothing had hap 
 pened. He said he might make better 
 drawings after all than those which had 
 
Audubon. 143 
 
 been destroyed, and this he accomplished 
 within an interval of three years. In 
 reading Audubon's books you feel the 
 fresh air blowing in your face, scent the 
 odour of the prairie flowers and autumn 
 woods, or hear the surging of the sea. 
 He takes you into the squatter's hut, in 
 the lowly swamp, where the tells the story 
 of the woodcutter's pioneer life; or he 
 sallies out in the night to hunt the conger, 
 and when daylight returns he invokes the 
 fairy singers of the woods to your listening 
 ear. Audubon's life was full of romantic 
 adventure, and after encountering and 
 surmounting difficulties that would have 
 discouraged other adventurous spirits, he 
 took his splendid collection of drawings 
 to Europe. There he met with the cordial 
 friendship and aid of such men as Herschel, 
 Cuvier, Humboldt, Brewster, Wilson, and 
 Sir Walter Scott. His grand work forms 
 four large folio volumes, comprising four 
 hundred and forty-eight coloured pictures 
 of the birds of America, life-size ; each is 
 so faithfully portrayed that you catch an 
 idea of the bird's habits and nature as 
 well as its plumage. As a monument of 
 
1 44 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 American devotion to ornithological 
 science this stately work is unrivalled. 
 
 Alexander Wilson, of Paisley, was one 
 in whose " heart the birds nestled and 
 sang." He, like Audubon, acquired an 
 undying fame by first making known to 
 the world of science the feathered denizens 
 of the American forests. In early man 
 hood he went to America, and soon began 
 his favourite pursuit in forming his collec 
 tion of birds, as the basis of his work on 
 American ornithology. He had the good 
 fortune, as soon as he needed, to secure 
 a willing publisher, and he found one 
 in Bradford of Boston. In 1808 Wilson 
 made an extended tour through the 
 wilds and forests, and in little more 
 than seven years, " without patronage, 
 fortune, or recompense," he accomplished 
 more than the combined body of natura 
 lists of Europe had achieved in a century. 
 
VI. 
 
 ROGERS. BUTLER'S " HUDIBRAS." 
 SOUTHEY. CRABBE. FRANKLIN'S 
 " AUTOBIOGRAPHY." CHARLES LAMB. 
 BYRON. MOORE. CARLYLE. 
 POE. DANA. PRESCOTT. HOOD. 
 
 |OGERS'S Pleasures of Memory, 
 published in 1792, and written 
 principally during his leisure 
 moments in his banking house, had an 
 immediate and astonishing success. His 
 Italy proved less successful, and the 
 author revised the poem and published 
 an elegantly illustrated edition of the work, 
 which for its artistic beauty surpassed 
 anything then produced. The cost was 
 enormous, but the poet was wealthy. 
 His most approved production is generally 
 thought to be his Human Life> which 
 appeared in 1819. Mr. Rogers was 
 offered the laureateship in 1850, but he 
 
 10 
 
146 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 declined the proffered honour on account 
 of his advanced age. He was engaged on 
 The Pleasures of Memory for nine years, 
 on Human Life for nearly the same space 
 of time, and Italy was not completed in 
 less than sixteen years. 
 
 The remark was once made to Moore, 
 the poet, that it was supposed his verses 
 slipped off his tongue as if by magic, 
 and a passage of great ease was quoted. 
 "Why, sir," replied Moore, "that line 
 cost me hours, days, and weeks of attri 
 tion before it would come." 
 
 Pope and Goldsmith were among the 
 hard workers with their brains. Gold 
 smith considered four lines a day good 
 work. He was seven years in " beating 
 out the pure gold " of his Deserted Village. 
 
 Samuel Butler commenced his satirical 
 poem Hudibras when engaged with one of 
 Cromwell's generals, Sir Samuel Luke, a 
 Bedfordshire gentleman, where he had an 
 opportunity of studying the habits and 
 characters of the Puritans, that personage 
 having been the original of the "ever- 
 memorable knight." The first three cantos 
 of Hudibras were published in 1663, and 
 
Butler's "Hudibras." 147 
 
 the poem became exceedingly popular 
 with the Court and cavalier party. Butler 
 seems to have received unbounded praise, 
 but no Court patronage followed, for he 
 died in abject poverty in 1680. The 
 original idea of Hudibras was derived from 
 Don Quixote, and although it is now 
 probably but little read, yet the witty 
 couplets and wise saws of Hudibras still 
 linger among the familiar sayings that 
 we are accustomed to use and to hear in 
 our social talk, without remembering 
 whence they have originated. 
 
 It has been said of Butler that he was 
 no less remarkable for his poverty than 
 his pride. A friend of his one evening 
 invited him to supper, and contrived to 
 place in his pocket a purse containing one 
 hundred guineas. On his discovering this 
 good service of his friend, he hurried back 
 and returned the gift with expressions of 
 great displeasure at the supposed insult ! 
 Butler was not a model of good behaviour 
 on many occasions, and to this infirmity 
 in part may be attributed his destitution 
 and neglect by society. Charles II., 
 although he is said to have carried a copy 
 
148 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 of Hudibras about with him in his pocket, 
 does not seem ever to have put anything 
 into the pocket or purse of its author. 
 
 Southey, in a letter to a friend, thus 
 describes his average day's work : 
 
 "Three pages of history (of Portugal) after 
 breakfast, then to transcribe and copy for the 
 press, or make selections and biographies (for 
 Specimens of the British Poets], or what else suits 
 my humour till dinner-time. After dinner, I read, 
 write letters, see the newspapers, and very often 
 indulge in a siesta. After tea I go to poetry 
 (the Curse of Kehama} and correct and re-write, 
 and copy till I am tired ; and then turn to anything 
 else till supper. And this is my life. " 
 
 He was never so happy as when he sat 
 among his books, pen in hand, adding 
 newly written sheets to the pile of manu 
 scripts already in his table drawer. His 
 incessant toil brought on the sad calamity 
 of a brain worn out, and caused the busy 
 workman to wander among the books he 
 had gathered around him and yet loved 
 although the light of reason had passed 
 into eclipse. 
 
 Southey, one of the most prolific of 
 poets, is said to have destroyed more 
 verses written between his twentieth and 
 
Frankliris "Autobiography? 149 
 
 thirtieth years, than he published during 
 his whole life. It is a sad fact to add that 
 for nearly three years he may be said to 
 have survived himself; he used to sit in 
 his library, in hopeless vacuity of mind, 
 unable to hold further converse with his 
 books, which he so loved, as we well 
 know from his tributary stanzas : 
 
 ' ' My days among the dead are passed ! around me 
 
 I behold 
 
 Where'er these casual eyes are cast, the mighty 
 minds of old ; 
 
 My never-failing friends are they, 
 With whom I converse night and day. 
 With them I take delight in weal, and seek relief 
 
 in woe ; 
 
 And, while I understand and feel how much to 
 them I owe, 
 
 My cheeks have often been bedewed 
 With tears of thoughtful gratitude." 
 
 Of Franklin's Autobiography the first 
 part was written at Twyford, England, in 
 1771, while he was visiting Shipley, 
 Bishop of St. Asaph. This portion ended 
 with Franklin's marriage in 1730. In 
 1784 he resumed work on the second part 
 of his memoirs while living at Passy, near 
 Paris. When thus engaged he had not 
 
I 50 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 with him his first part, and supposed it 
 had been left at his home in Philadelphia, 
 after his return from England in 1775. 
 The third part was begun in 1788, while 
 Franklin was in Philadelphia, and is 
 brought down to 1757. This portion ends 
 the Autobiography as it has been usually 
 printed, except in the edition of Mr. John 
 Bigelow, in 1868, which includes a fourth 
 part consisting of a few pages written in 
 1789, and not to be found elsewhere in 
 English. These are rather of a political 
 character, and bring the memoirs down a 
 year later, when they close. Immediately 
 after Dr. Franklin's death, in 1790, the 
 first portion was published in French in 
 Paris, a remarkable fact, that a work 
 destined to have so great popularity should 
 first appear in a foreign tongue. It is, in 
 fact, an English translation from a French 
 translation of the original English ! 
 
 Franklin tells us that from his earliest 
 days he was passionately fond of reading, 
 and that " all the money that came into 
 his hands was laid out in the purchase of 
 books." Among his first acquisitions were 
 Bunyan's works, Plutarch's Lives^ Defoe's 
 
Charles Lamb. 151 
 
 Essay on Projects, and Mather's Essay to do 
 Good. The two last, he adds, gave him 
 "a turn of thinking, that had an influ 
 ence on some of the principal future 
 events of my life." 
 
 Crabbe's poems, comprising The Village 
 and The Library, were so much admired 
 in manuscript by Edmund Burke, that he 
 took them to Dodsley, who published 
 them in a volume. Burke befriended the 
 poet in many ways, and was the means of 
 his being appointed to positions of eccle 
 siastical preferment. Crabbe subsequently 
 produced The Borough and Tales of the 
 Hall, works which brought him into 
 friendship with Southey, Wordsworth, 
 Campbell, Moore, Irving, and Sir Walter 
 3cott ; and it may be added the last books 
 the great novelist called for during his last 
 days were the Bible and Crabbe's poems. 
 
 Charles Lamb's life record is, indeed, 
 a sad one. Who has not been made 
 familiar with the details of its terrible 
 trials and its heroic self-negation ? Is it 
 any wonder that his writings were desul 
 tory and fragmentary, broken, as one may 
 say, like the life out of which they struggled? 
 
I 5 2 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 The wonder is not that he wrote as he 
 did, but that he wrote at all. His strongest, 
 if not his chief, incentive to literature 
 was the necessity for earning money in 
 order to maintain his poor mad sister, for 
 mad she continued at intervals all her life, 
 and was conscious of the dreadful fact. 
 So conscious, indeed, that when she felt 
 her reason giving way, she and Charles 
 used to walk to the mad-house together, 
 hand-in-hand, weeping as if their hearts 
 would break ! l 
 
 " The adoption of the signature * Elia ' by 
 Charles Lamb," says Talfourd, " was purely acci 
 dental. His first contribution was a description 
 of the Old South Sea House, where Lamb had 
 passed a few months' novitiate as a clerk, thirty 
 years before, and of its inmates, who had long 
 passed away; and, remembering the name of a 
 gay, light-hearted foreigner, who had fluttered 
 there at that time, he subscribed his name to 
 the essay," instead of his own. 
 
 The Essays of Elia are unique in litera 
 ture; they are a reflex of the author's 
 peculiar humour, whims, poetic instinct, 
 and his kindly nature. 
 
 It is remarkable that Charles Lamb 
 1 R. H. Stoddard. 
 
Charles Lamb. 153 
 
 should have enjoyed the friendship of 
 such opposite characters during his life as 
 Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. We 
 do not know what circumstances originated 
 his writings, but it is pleasant to know that 
 before his literary productions attracted 
 the applause of the world, he had a select 
 circle of contemporaries who could ap 
 preciate them. Some writers have been 
 compared to musical glasses, because you 
 can get no music out of them until they 
 are wetted. You may have seen a portrait 
 of Lamb that is suggestive of this fact ; his 
 " particular wanity " having been gin and 
 water. Byron, Moore, Campbell, and 
 others, might be named as of the class. 
 Charles Lamb had another infirmity, which 
 was, however, an involuntary one, an im 
 pediment in his speech, or, as he once 
 expressed it, " gifted with a stutter, or 
 catapult, for it shot words out of his 
 mouth." Although accustomed to it all 
 his life, he was naturally annoyed if any 
 one noticed it openly. On one occasion, 
 among the guests at Moxon the 
 publisher's there was a gentleman whose 
 wife made herself prominently unpleasant 
 
154 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 by her loud and incessant talking, and by 
 the shrewishness of her temper, her hus 
 band being the chief sufferer. After a 
 short remark from Lamb, the gentleman 
 observed to him, " I am sorry to perceive 
 that you have an impediment 'in your speech, 
 sir." " Yes, sir, I have," replied Lamb, 
 " don't you wish that your wife had ? " 
 
 Like Thomson, Lamb does not seem to 
 have been an early riser, as we gather 
 from his paper about " Rising with the 
 Lark," which reads in this wise : 
 
 "At what precise minute that little airy musi 
 cian doffs his night gear, and prepares to tune up 
 his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalist 
 enough to determine. But for a mere human 
 gentleman that has no orchestra business to call 
 him from his warm bed to such preposterous 
 exercises we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of 
 course, during this Christmas solstice) to be the 
 very earliest hour at which he can begin to think 
 of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say ; 
 for to do it in earnest requires another half-hour's 
 good consideration." 
 
 A clever limner thus sketches our famed 
 essayist : 
 
 " A small spare man, close gaitered to the knee, 
 In suit of rusty black whose folds betray 
 
Byron. 1 5 5 
 
 The last loved dusty folio, bought to-day, 
 And carried proudly to the sanctuary 
 Of home (and Mary's) keeping. 
 
 Quaintly wise 
 
 In saws and knowledge of a bygone age, 
 Each Old World fancy on a yellow page, 
 Tracked by the ' smoky-brightness ' of his eyes, 
 Shone new-illumined ; or in daring flight 
 That outvied Ariel, his spirit caught 
 The reflex of a rainbowed cloud, and taught 
 The glories of a Dreamland of delight ! " ! 
 
 Byron has told us that the Giaour is 
 but a string of passages. 
 
 " This accusation, brought by himself, against 
 his poems is not just, but when the author goes 
 on to say of them that 'their faults, whatever 
 they may be, are those of negligence and not 
 of labour,' he says what is perfectly true. 
 Lara he declares he ' wrote while undressing 
 after coming home from balls and masquerades, 
 in the year of revelry 1814.' The Bride of 
 Abydos was written in four, the Corsair in ten 
 days. Recalls this ' a humiliating confession, as 
 it proves my own want of judgment in publishing, 
 and the public's in reading, things which cannot 
 have stamina for permanency.' Again he does 
 his poems injustice ; the producer of such poems 
 could not but publish them, the public could not 
 but read them. Nor could Byron have produced 
 
 1 Temple Bar. 
 
I 56 The Story of Some Famous Books- 
 
 his work in any other fashion ; his poetic work 
 could not have first grown and matured in his own 
 mind, and then come forth as an organic whole. 
 Byron had not enough of the artist in him for this, 
 nor enough of self-command. He wrote, as he 
 truly tells us, to relieve himself, and he went on 
 writing because he found the relief became indis 
 pensable. But it was inevitable that works so 
 produced should be, in general, ' a string of 
 passages,' poured out, as he describes them, with 
 rapidity and excitement, and with new passages 
 constantly suggesting themselves, and added while 
 his work was going through the press. But Byron 
 has a wonderful power of vividly conceiving a 
 single incident, a single situation, of throwing 
 himself upon it, grasping it as if it were real and 
 he saw it and felt it, and of making us see and feel 
 it too. To the poetry of Byron the world has 
 ardently paid homage ; full justice from his con 
 temporaries, perhaps even more than justice, his 
 torrent of poetry received. His poetry was ad 
 mired, adored, 'with all its imperfections on its 
 head,' in spite of negligence, in spite of diffuseness, 
 in spite of repetitions, in spite of whatever faults it 
 possessed. His name is still great and brilliant." 1 
 
 Scott lavished extravagant praise on 
 Byron, comparing him for versatility and 
 poetic power to Shakespeare, while others 
 say " he has treated hardly any subject but 
 
 1 Matthew Arnold. 
 
Byron. 157 
 
 one himself." Truth lies between the 
 extremes. 
 
 Lord Byron wrote his poem The Pri 
 soner of Chillon in 1816, shortly after he 
 left England for the last time, and while 
 he was living with Shelley at a little inn 
 at Merges, two miles from Lausanne in 
 Switzerland. When he composed his 
 poem, he did not know that there had 
 been a real prisoner of Chillon : it was the 
 mere sight of the dungeon that suggested 
 the tragedy to his imagination. When 
 Byron was informed of the fact of there 
 having been an actual captive the illus 
 trious Bonnivard incarcerated there, he 
 wrote the fine apostrophe to his memory. 
 
 Bonnivard was a Swiss patriot, whose 
 imprisonment has made this castle on the 
 eastern shore of the Lake of Geneva one 
 of the shrines of freedom. Bonnivard, 
 when but sixteen years old, inherited from 
 his uncle the rich priory of St. Victor ; 
 but having espoused the cause of the city 
 of Geneva against Charles V. of Savoy, 
 the latter sequestered his estates and im 
 prisoned him. After two years he re 
 gained his liberty, and again took up arms 
 
158 The Story of Some Famous Books, 
 
 for the recovery of his estates, but was 
 again defeated, and confined in the castle 
 of Chillon for six years, when at the Re 
 formation he was liberated. 
 
 As to the sources of Byron's several 
 productions, it may be said of them, as of 
 his Childe Harold, which is supposed to 
 be largely autobiographic, that they owe 
 their existence to the moods and modes 
 of his own experience and life, as well as 
 the incidents and characters he met with 
 in his travels. 
 
 It has been suggested that there is a 
 marked resemblance between the career 
 of Shelley and that of Byron. Both were 
 descended from ancient families. Both of 
 them were educated in the conservative 
 atmosphere of public schools and univer 
 sities Byron at Harrow and Cambridge, 
 Shelley at Eton and Oxford. Both of 
 them were trained under conditions which 
 were wholly opposed to the adoption of 
 radical principles. Both of them were 
 married at a comparatively early age, and 
 both of them soon separated from their 
 wives. Both of them were -remarkable for 
 their reckless disregard of public opinion, 
 
Shelley. 1 5 9 
 
 and for the license with which they 
 attacked every political, social, and 
 religious institution. Shelley, it is said, 
 caught inspiration for his muse as he 
 wandered amid the classic ruins of the 
 Palace of the Caesars and other historic 
 sites, as Byron did loitering among the 
 columns and galleries of the Coliseum. 
 Shelley, indeed, tells us that The Prome 
 theus was written upon the mountainous 
 ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the 
 flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous 
 perfume. The bright blue sky of Rome, 
 and the effect of the vigorous awakening of 
 spring in that divinest of climates, and the 
 new life with which it drenches the spirits 
 even to intoxication, were the inspiration 
 of this drama. Shelley while an Oxford 
 student was a voracious reader; he read 
 at all times, even while walking the 
 streets and when a-bed 
 
 One of Moore's descriptive poems 
 was written when the poet visited Norfolk 
 in Virginia. It is founded upon the follow 
 ing legend : 
 
 " A young man who lost his mind, said to have 
 been occasioned by the death of a beautiful maiden 
 
1 60 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 whom he loved, suddenly disappearing from his 
 friends, was never afterwards heard of. As he had 
 frequently been heard to say that the girl was not 
 dead, but gone to the * Dismal Swamp,' it was 
 believed that he had wandered into that dreary 
 wilderness, and had perished among its forest 
 of foliage, or its dreadful morasses." 
 
 "They made her a grave too cold and damp for a 
 
 soul so warm and true ; 
 And she's gone to the ' Lake of the Dismal Swamp, ' 
 
 where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, 
 She paddles her white canoe ! " 
 
 Moore also, during his passage of the 
 St. Lawrence from Kingston, pencilled 
 the lines (nearly as they stand in his works) 
 of the Canadian Boat-song in the blank 
 page of a book which he happened to have 
 in his canoe. 
 
 The poet wrote his famous Lalla Rookh 
 in his cottage near Dovedale, where he 
 also composed many of his beautiful songs 
 and melodies. Concerning this poem, 
 in which the reader is transported to the 
 palaces of Delhi and the gardens of 
 Cashmere, the author tells us that he 
 never reached to the height of his own 
 conception until the thought occurred to 
 him of embodying in his work the per. 
 
Moore and Campbell. 161 
 
 secuted race of the Ghebers or fire- 
 worshippers, who, like the Irish, had long 
 suffered oppression. 
 
 For brevity of stature Nature seerns 
 to have more than compensated the 
 poet with high intellect, and this is evinced 
 in the splendour of his imagery and the 
 Oriental magnificence of his Oriental 
 romances. It was once the privilege 
 of the writer to meet together the two 
 representative bards, Moore and Camp 
 bell, two " bright particular stars " of 
 the first magnitude. The one has sung 
 to us of the gentle passion in melliflu 
 ous strains, and the other has given 
 us bright visions of the Pleasures of Hope^ 
 of which poem a brother-bard has said : 
 " Whether taken as a whole or in parts, it 
 is to be preferred to any didactic poem of 
 equal length in the English language." 
 Campbell wrote it at Edinburgh, when 
 he was but twenty-one years old, and so 
 prolonged was its popularity that it ulti 
 mately brought to its author four thousand 
 five hundred pounds. 
 
 " Coming home to my house one evening, in 
 Park Square, where, as usual, the poet had dropped 
 
 II 
 
1 62 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 in to spend a quiet hour," writes his biographer, 
 " I told him that I had been agreeably detained 
 listening to some street music, near Portman 
 Square. ' Vocal or instrumental ? ' he enquired. 
 ' Vocal, ' I replied ; * the song was an old favourite, 
 remarkably good, and of at least forty years' stand 
 ing.' * Ha ! ' said he, ' I congratulate the author, 
 whoever he is.' ' And so do I,' I responded ; ' it 
 was your own song. ' The Soldier's Dream.' " 
 
 Carlyle was " an indomitable worker 
 from first to last." "One monster there 
 is in the world/' he says, " the idle man." 
 He did not merely preach the gospel of 
 work ; he was it Each of his review 
 articles cost him a month or more of 
 serious work. Sartor Resartus cost him 
 nine months, the French Revolution three 
 years, Cromwell four years, Frederick the 
 Great thirteen years- In Past a fid Present, 
 Carlyle has unconsciously painted his own 
 life and character in truer colours than 
 has any one else. 
 
 " His books are not easy reading ; they are a 
 kind of wrestling to most persons. His style is 
 like a road made of rocks ; when it is good there 
 is nothing like it ; and when it is bad, there is 
 nothing like it. During his last great work, the 
 thirteen years spent in his study at the top of his 
 house, writing the history of Frederick, this isola- 
 
Carfyle. 163 
 
 tion, this incessant toil and penitential gloom, were 
 such as only religious devotees have voluntarily 
 imposed upon themselves. A sort of anthro 
 pomorphic greed and hunger possessed him always, 
 an insatiable craving for strong, picturesque cha 
 racters, and for contact and conflict with them. 
 This was his ruling passion (and it amounted to a 
 passion) all his days. He fed his soul on heroes 
 and heroic qualities, and all his literary exploits 
 were a search for these things." 1 
 
 The French Revolution is generally con 
 sidered to be Carlyle's greatest production ; 
 but when he had written his last paragraph, 
 the author said : 
 
 " What they will do with this book none knows, 
 but they have not had for two hundred years 
 any book that came more truly from a man's very 
 heart, and so let them trample it under foot and 
 hoof, as they see best." 
 
 But its great merits were not discovered 
 until the publication of his Cromwell 
 brought to him popularity and fame for 
 both works. It has been said of his His 
 tory of the French Revolution that 
 
 "No mere industry, nothing but native genius, 
 could have enabled him to see the past as he did, 
 to behold the actors as they lived and suffered, to 
 
 1 Burroughs, Fresh Fields. 
 
1 64 The Story of Some Famous Books* 
 
 make all the crowded scene visible to every spec 
 tator, and construct the whole into a prose epic, 
 full of humour, full of tragedy, as true though not 
 as musical as the Iliad."'' 1 
 
 Carlyle has been not inaptly called " the 
 Censor of the Age ; " his criticisms were 
 often harsh and severe, yet he was an 
 astute and trenchant critic. Amidst much 
 laudation from the highest literary sources, 
 he yet was the subject of strictures of an 
 opposite kind ; for instance, we are con 
 fronted with the following question, pro 
 posed even by an eminent Scotch critic: 
 
 " Can any living man point to a single practical 
 passage in any of his volumes? If not, what is 
 the real value of Mr. Carlyle's writings? What is 
 Mr. Carlyle himself but a phantasm of the species 
 he is pleased to denounce ? " 
 
 We shall see by his writings. 
 
 One of the most eloquent pieces of 
 word-painting which we have seen from 
 any English writer is the following extract 
 from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus : 
 
 " * I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee 
 hive,' have we heard him say, 'and witness their 
 
Carlytis "Sartor Resartus" 165 
 
 wax-laying, and honey-making, and poison-brewing, 
 and choking by sulphur. From the palace espla 
 nade, where music plays while His Serene Highness 
 is pleased to eat his victuals, down to the low lane, 
 where, in her door-sill the aged widow, knitting 
 for a thin livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun. 
 I see it all ; for, except the Schlosskirche weather 
 cock, no biped stands so high. Couriers arrive 
 bestrapped and bebooted, bearing joy and sorrow 
 bagged-up in pouches of leather ; there, top-laden 
 and with four swift horses, rolls in the country 
 Baron and his household ; here, on timber-leg, 
 the lamed soldier hops painfully along, begging 
 alms ; a thousand carriages and wains and cars 
 come tumbling in with food, with young Rusticity 
 and other raw produce, animate or inanimate, and 
 go tumbling out again with produce manufactured. 
 That living flood, pouring through these streets, of 
 all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is 
 coming, whither it is going ? Aus der Ewigkeit 
 zu der Ewigkeit hin, from Eternity, onwards to 
 Eternity ! These are apparitions, what else ? Are 
 they not souls rendered visible : in bodies, that took 
 shape, and will lose it, melting into air ? Their solid 
 pavement is a picture of the sense ; they walk on 
 the bosom of nothing, blank Time is behind them 
 and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and 
 yellow clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on its 
 heels and feather in its crown, is but of to-day, 
 without a yesterday or to-morrow ; and had not 
 rather its Ancestor alive when Hengist and Horsa 
 overran thy island ? Friend, thou seest here a 
 
1 66 The Story of Some Famous Books, 
 
 living link in that tissue of History, which inweaves 
 all being : watch well, or it will be past thee, and 
 seen no more." 
 
 " One day the talk fell upon his books. ' Poor 
 old Sartor!' he said. 'It's a book in which I 
 take little satisfaction ; really a book worth very 
 little as a work of art, a fragmentary, disjointed, 
 vehement production. It was written when I was 
 livin' at Craigenputtock, one o' the solitariest 
 places on the face o' the earth ; a wild moorland 
 place where one might lead a wholesome, simple 
 life, and might labour without interruption, and be 
 not altogether without peace such as London can 
 not give. We were quite alone, and there is much 
 that is beautiful and precious in them as I look 
 back on those days.' He went on to tell of the 
 difficulties he had in getting the book published, 
 of which an account has since been given in his 
 Life, and of the lack of favour with which it was 
 at first received, and then he said : ' But it's been 
 so with all my books. I've had little satisfaction 
 or encouragement in the doin' of them, and the 
 most satisfaction I can get out of them now is the 
 sense of havin' shouldered a heavy burden o' work, 
 an' not flinched under it. I've had but one thing 
 to say from beginnin' to end o' them, and that was 
 that there's no other reliance for this world 01 
 any other but just the Truth, and that if men did 
 not want to be damned to all eternity, they had 
 best give up lyin' and all kinds o' falsehood ; that 
 the world was far gone already through lyin', and 
 
Carlyle. 167 
 
 that there's no hope for it save just so far as men 
 find out and believe the Truth, and match their 
 lives to it." 1 
 
 " Ach, mcin Lieber" said he once, at midnight, 
 when we had returned from the coffee house in 
 rather earnest talk, " it is a true sublimity to dwell 
 here. These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up 
 through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some 
 fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what 
 thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his hunting- 
 dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire ? 
 That stifled hum of Midnight, when traffic has lain 
 down to rest ; and the chariot wheels of Vanity 
 still rolling here and there through distant streets, 
 are bearing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to 
 the due pitch for her ; and only vice and misery, 
 to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad ; 
 that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet 
 slumber of sick life, is heard in Heaven ! Oh, 
 under that hideous coverlet of vapours and putre 
 factions and unimaginable gases, what a ferment 
 ing vat lies simmering and hid 1 The joyful and 
 the sorrowful are there ; men are dying there, men 
 are being born, men are praying on the ether 
 side of a brick partition, men are cursing ; and 
 around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud 
 grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or 
 reposes within damask curtains ; wretchedness 
 cowers into truckle-beds,or shivers, hunger-stricken, 
 nto its lair of straw ; in obscure cellars, rouge-ct- 
 
 >C. E. Norton. 
 
1 68 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard 
 hungry villains ; while councillors of state sit 
 plotting and playing their high chess game, where 
 of the pawns are men. The lover whispers his 
 mistress that the coach is ready ; and she, full of 
 hope and fear, glides down to fly with him over 
 the borders; the thief, still more silently, sets to 
 his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the 
 watchmen first snore in their boxes. Gay man 
 sions, with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are 
 full of light and music, and high-swelling hearts ; 
 but, in the condemned cells, the pulse of life beats 
 tremulous and faint, and blood-shot eyes look out 
 through the darkness." 
 
 Carlyle's knowledge of the German 
 language was such as to place him in 
 advance of any of his contemporaries, and 
 this caused him to be styled a literary 
 Columbus, since he opened up to the 
 English reader the then unknown world 
 of German thought. And it will not be 
 forgotten that to Carlyle has been reserved 
 the great honour of replacing in the pan 
 theon of English history the statue of 
 England's greatest ruler. 
 
 We are all familiar with Poe's remarkable 
 rhythmic poem, "The Raven," but we 
 may not be so well acquainted with its 
 origin or its author. " When he died," in 
 
Poes "Raven" 169 
 
 1849, wrote his biographer, "literary art 
 lost one of its most brilliant, but erratic 
 stars." He was at all times a dreamer, 
 dwelling in ideal' realms, peopled with 
 the creatures and the accidents of his 
 brain. The poem of " The Raven " was 
 probably much more nearly than has been 
 supposed a reflection and an echo of his 
 own history. He was that bird's 
 
 ..." Unhappy master, when unmerciful Disaster 
 Followed fast and followed faster, till his songs one 
 
 burden bore 
 Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden 
 
 bore 
 
 Of never never more ! " 
 
 This remarkable poem was written, it is 
 stated, under very afflictive circumstances, 
 while the poet's wife was rapidly wasting 
 away with consumption at his humble 
 cottage at Bloomingdale, New York. It 
 was a spontaneous inspiration of the sur 
 roundings at the time. 
 
 Among earlier American bards we in 
 stance Drake, whose imaginative poem, 
 " The Culprit Fay," so replete with poetic 
 beauty, is a fairy tale of the highlands of 
 the Hudson. The origin of the poem is 
 
I/O The Story of Some FamousBooks. 
 
 traced to a conversation with Cooper the 
 novelist, and Fitz-Greene Halleck the 
 poet, who, speaking of the Scottish streams 
 and their legendary associations, insisted 
 that the American rivers were not suscep 
 tible of like poetic treatment. Drake 
 thought otherwise, and to make his posi 
 tion good, produced three days after this 
 poem. 
 
 Of the poems of William C. Bryant, 
 perhaps that best known is his " Thana- 
 topsis," written when he was in his nine 
 teenth year, and first printed in the North 
 American Review for 1817, although only 
 about half of the poem as we now have it 
 was then given. Like the familiar poems 
 of Longfellow, this early production, with 
 others, of Bryant will become classic. 
 
 One of the most eminent of American 
 historical writers, W. H. Prescott, when 
 young, met with an accident which greatly 
 impaired his eyesight ; but, notwithstand 
 ing this difficulty, with the aid of a 
 noctograph he devoted himself to his 
 torical studies. His first work was his 
 History of the Reign of Ferdinand and 
 Isabella, which occupied him twelve years, 
 
" Uncle Tom's Cabin? 1 7 1 
 
 and was published in 1838. This work at 
 once established his reputation as one of 
 the foremost of living historians. 
 
 J. Fenimore Cooper published in 1821 
 The Spy, a novel founded on an incident 
 said to have happened in the great war of 
 American independence. Few first works 
 of an author have been equally successful, 
 either in America or England. It exhi 
 bited to the reader new characters and 
 scenes, depicted with great clearness and 
 picturesque effect. Cooper produced a 
 succession of somewhat similar works for 
 nearly thirty years, until his death in 1851. 
 His Last of the Mohicans has been con 
 sidered his masterpiece. 
 
 Every person has, it is presumed, read 
 or heard of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin, and it is only necessary to 
 refer to its origin. It was commenced in 
 1851, as a serial story of southern slave- 
 life, in the National Era of Washington. 
 When completed in 1852, it was pub 
 lished at Boston in book form, and its 
 popularity was so prodigious, both in 
 England and the United States, that 
 over a million copies were sold, and 
 
172 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 many translations also were published in 
 Europe. 
 
 Of the personal history of that poet of 
 the people, Tom Hood, whose memory, 
 it has been said, is "emblazoned with a 
 halo of light-hearted mirth and pleasantry," 
 we do not know so much as we desire. 
 Yet we may gather something of his 
 genial nature from the deep human sym 
 pathies which characterise many of his 
 productions. If he was "the prince of 
 punsters," he was no less the poet of 
 pathos. Of Hood it may be said that 
 he literally " learned in suffering what he 
 taught in song," for his whole life seems 
 to have been a lingering sickness. Re 
 ferring to his own physical debility, he 
 thus writes : 
 
 "That man who has never known a day's ill 
 ness is a moral dunce, one who has lost the 
 greatest moral lesson in life, who has skipped 
 the finest lecture in that great school of humanity, 
 the sick chamber. Let him be versed in meta 
 physics, profound in mathematics, a ripe scholar in 
 the classics, a bachelor of arts, or even a doctor 
 in divinity, yet he is one of those gentlemen whose 
 education has been neglected. For all his college 
 acquirements, how inferior he is in wholesome 
 
Thomas Hood. 
 
 73 
 
 knowledge to the mortal who has had a quarter's 
 gout, or a half year of ague ; how infinitely below 
 the fellow-creature who has been soundly taught 
 his tic-douloureux, thoroughly grounded in rheuma 
 tism, and deeply red in the scarlet fever ! " 
 
 " There were scarcely any events in the life of 
 Thomas Hood ; but one condition there was 
 of too potent determining importance, life-long 
 ill-health ; and one circumstance of moment, a 
 commercial failure, and consequent expatriation. 
 Beyond this, little presents itself for record in the 
 outward facts of his upright and beneficial career, 
 bright with genius and corruscating with wit, dark 
 with the lengthening and deepening shadow of 
 death." 
 
 In 1826 Hood published his first series 
 of Whims and Oddities ; the volume that 
 followed, contained " The Plea for the Mid 
 summer Fairies," and " Hero and Leander," 
 with some others. In 1829 appeared one 
 of the most famous of all Hood's poems 
 of a narrative character, " The Dream of 
 Eugene Aram." Equally a master in the 
 comic and the tragic muse, he has alike 
 charmed us with his touching pathos as 
 with his wit and humour. His " bound 
 lessly whimsical idiosyncrasy " was doubt 
 less bom with him ; but it is supposed its 
 
1/4 The Story of Some Famous Books* 
 
 development may be traced, in part at 
 least, to his early reading of Humphrey 
 Clinker, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and 
 other works of that period. In 1841 
 Hood succeeded Theodore Hook in the 
 editorship of the New Monthly Magazine. 
 Hood's poems are all good, but among 
 his most famous may be named, " The 
 Plea for the Midsummer Fairies," "The 
 Dream of Eugene Aram," " The Bridge of 
 Sighs," "The Haunted House," and 
 " The Song of the Shirt," which last was 
 written in one evening, and came out 
 anonymously in the Christmas number 
 of Punch for 1843; "it ran like wildfire, 
 and rang like a tocsin through the land." 
 And yet, when he wrote it, he thought so 
 little of its merit that he was about to 
 throw it into the waste-basket, but was 
 prevented by his wife, who told him it 
 was the best thing he had written. The 
 world has endorsed her verdict, and, on 
 his monument in Kensal Green Cemetery, 
 are the words inscribed, " He sang the 
 'Song of the Shirt.'" The editor of 
 Punch, looking over his letters one morn 
 ing, opened an envelope inclosing a poem 
 
Hood's "Song of ttie Shirt!' 1 7 5 
 
 which the writer said had been rejected 
 by three London journals. He begged 
 the editor to consign it to the waste-paper 
 basket if it was not thought suitable for 
 Punch, as the author was " sick of the 
 sight of it." The poem was signed " Tom 
 Hood," and was entitled " The Song of 
 the Shirt." 
 
 It was submitted to the weekly meeting 
 of the editor and principal contributors, 
 several of whom opposed its publication 
 as unsuitable to the pages of a comic 
 journal. Mr. Lemon, however, was so 
 firmly impressed with its beauty that he 
 published it. 
 
VII. 
 
 MRS. BROWNING. WASHINGTON IRVING. 
 HAWTHORNE. LONGFELLOW. 
 HOLMES. WHITTIER. TENNYSON. 
 
 1HE life-story of the gifted aii 
 thoress Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning is as touchingly in 
 teresting as it is romantic. When only 
 sixteen years old, she published her " Essay 
 on Mind and other Poems ; " ten years 
 later she became an invalid by the rupture 
 of blood-vessel ; this necessitated her 
 removal from London to the sea coast. 
 Her brother, with other relatives, accom 
 panied her to Torquay, and there occurred 
 the fatal event which saddened her youth, 
 and gave to her poetry a deeper hue of 
 thought and devotional feeling. One 
 summer morning her brother, with two 
 young friends, embarked on board a small 
 sailing-vessel ; they were all said to be 
 
Mrs. Browning. 177 
 
 good sailors and familiar with the coast, 
 and yet but a few minutes after leaving 
 shore, and in sight of their very windows, 
 as they were crossing the bar, the boat 
 went down, and all who were in her 
 perished ! Even the bodies were never 
 recovered. This sad event nearly killed 
 poor Elizabeth Barrett, for she was haunted 
 with the feeling that she had been in some 
 way the cause of the terrible tragedy. 
 Still, she clung to her literary pursuits, 
 finding relief from suffering and diversion 
 from the painful memory in her muse. 
 On her return to her home in London her 
 life for many years was that of a confirmed 
 and seemingly hopeless invalid. Virtually 
 exiled from society, for she saw but few 
 friends, her silent companions were a 
 Hebrew Bible, many Greek writers with 
 Plato at their head, and no small range 
 of polyglot reading. Thus the long and 
 dreary hours of her illness were soothed 
 by composition and study, even of authors 
 of abstruse and profound learning. In 
 1844 the first collected edition of her 
 poems was published, in two volumes 
 In this edition appeared for the first 
 
 12 
 
1/8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 time "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," one 
 of her most popular poems, and yet 
 written by her, it is stated, in the incre 
 dibly brief space of twelve hours ! After 
 her recovery to comparative health, and 
 her somewhat romantic marriage with Mr. 
 Robert Browning, her residence was at 
 Florence, where it continued to be for 
 about fourteen years. It was here, in 185 1, 
 she produced the poem called, after her 
 Italian home, "Casa Guidi Windows," 
 devoted to the political affairs of Italy ; 
 and five years later appeared her beau 
 tiful narrative poem, in nine books, which 
 she named "Aurora Leigh," a series of 
 romantic sketches of modern English life 
 and characters. 
 
 "One or two of tier poems may be indicated, 
 as * The Cry of the Children,' which for pathos 
 may take rank with Hood's ' Song of the Shirt,' 
 and her fine poem, * Aurora Leigh,' which, being 
 more natural or less metaphysical, has made 
 its appeal more successfully to the common heart. 
 Her * Lady Geraldine's Courtship,' also, at once 
 became popular, and deservedly so, for it is a 
 charming poem, although it was the product of 
 only about twelve hours. Her life-story is a shaded 
 one until her union with the poet Browning, 
 
Washington Irving. 179 
 
 when married relations seemed to inspire her 
 with new ambition, as well as happiness. Her 
 cloister-life of maidenhood in England was at an 
 end ; fifteen happy and illustrious years in Italy 
 lay before her ; and in her case the proverb, 
 Caelum non animum, was unfulfilled. Never was 
 there a more complete transmutation of the habits 
 and sympathies of life than that which she ex 
 perienced beneath the blue Italian skies. Still, 
 before all and above all, her refined soul remained 
 in allegiance to the eternal muse. " J 
 
 Washington Irving and Wilkie the 
 painter were fellow-travellers on the Con 
 tinent, about the year 1827. In their 
 rambles about some of the old cities of 
 Spain they were more than once struck 
 with scenes and incidents which reminded 
 them of passages in the Arabian Nights 
 Entertainments. The painter urged Irving 
 to write something that should illustrate 
 those peculiarities, "something in the 
 Haroun-al-Raschid style," which should 
 have much of that Arabian spice which 
 pervades everything in Spain. The author 
 set to work con amore, and produced two 
 goodly volumes of Arabesque sketches 
 and tales, founded on popular traditions 
 1 Stedman's Victorian Poets. 
 
I So The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 and legends. Irving's study was an 
 apartment assigned to him, by privilege, 
 in the Alhambra itself, by the courtesy 
 of the Governor. Wilkie had to leave for 
 London soon after, but Irving remained 
 for several months spell-bound in the 
 enchanted building. 
 
 " How many legends," wrote he, " and traditions, 
 true and fabulous, how many songs and romances, 
 Spanish and Arabian, of love, and war, and chi 
 valry, are associated with this old historic pile. 
 It was my endeavour scrupulously to depict its 
 half Spanish, half Oriental character, its mixture 
 of the heroic, the poetic, and the grotesque, to 
 revive the traces of grace and beauty fast fading 
 from its walls, to record the regal and chivalrous 
 traditions concerning those who once trod its 
 courts, and the whimsical and superstitious legends 
 of the motley race now burrowing among its 
 ruins." 
 
 In one of his letters Irving thus refers 
 to his love for Spanish legendary lore : 
 
 " They have a charm for me, having so much 
 that is high-minded and chivalrous, and quaint, 
 picturesque, and adventurous, and at times half 
 comic about them." 
 
 Mr. Irving, when in Spain, delighted to 
 run over the courts of the Alhambra and 
 
Knickerbocker's "New York." 181 
 
 pick up fragments of legendary literature 
 connected with the chivalry of Castile and 
 Toledo. When at Madrid, and engaged 
 on his Life of Columbus, he used to write 
 from twelve to fourteen hours a day \ and, 
 to use his own words : 
 
 " He never found outside of the walls of his 
 study, any enjoyment equal to sitting at his writing 
 desk." 
 
 Wrote Irving in one of his charming 
 letters from Madrid : 
 
 " I pass most of my mornings in the library 01 
 the Jesuits' College of St. Isidore. You cannot 
 think what a delight I feel in passing through its 
 galleries filled with old, parchment-bound books. 
 It is a perfect wilderness of curiosity to me. What 
 a deep felt quiet luxury there is in delving into the 
 rich ore of these old, neglected volumes. How 
 these hours of uninterrupted intellectual enjoy 
 ment, so tranquil and independent, repay one for 
 the ennui and disappointment too often experienced 
 in the intercourse of society ! " 
 
 In the author's "Apology" to his 
 Knickerbocker's History of New York we 
 read that this famous production originated 
 in the idea of satirising a small handbook, 
 which had then just appeared, entitled 
 A Picture of New York. 
 
1 8 2 TJie Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 " Like that, our work,'' writes Mr. Irving, 
 " was to begin with an historical sketch ; to be 
 followed by notices of the customs, manners, and 
 institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic 
 vein, and treating local errors, follies, and abuses 
 with good-natured satire. To burlesque the 
 pedantic lore displayed in certain American works, 
 our historical sketch was to commence with the 
 creation of the world ; and we laid all kinds of 
 works under contribution for trite citations, rele 
 vant or irrelevant, to give it the proper air of 
 learned research. Before this crude mass of mock 
 erudition could be digested into form, my brother 
 departed for Europe, and I was left to prosecute 
 the enterprise alone. I now altered the plan of 
 the work : discarding all idea of a parody on the 
 Picture of New York, I determined that what had 
 been originally intended as an introductory sketch, 
 should comprise the whole work, and form a comic 
 history of the city. I accordingly moulded the 
 mass of citations and disquisitions into introductory 
 chapters, forming the first books; but it soon became 
 evident to me, that, like Robinson Crusoe with his 
 boat, I had begun on too large a scale, and that, 
 to launch my history successfully, I must reduce its 
 proportions. I accordingly resolved to confine it 
 to the period of the Dutch domination, which, 
 in its rise, progress, and decline, presented that 
 unity of subject required by classic rule. This, 
 then, broke upon me as the poetic age of our 
 city, poetic from its very obscurity ; and open, 
 like the early and obscure days of ancient Rome, 
 to all the embellishments of heroic fiction." 
 
Washington Irving. 183 
 
 Of Irving's inimitable Sketch Book little 
 need be said, except that the papers it 
 comprises were, with two exceptions, 
 written in England. These papers or 
 essays were issued in serial form at first, 
 and afterwards collected into two volumes. 
 The critical acumen of the publishers was, 
 however, sadly at fault, for until Scott 
 interfered in their behalf, they awaited 
 some agent to introduce them to the 
 public. Mr. Murray, however, was wise 
 and shrewd enough to do this service, 
 greatly to the success of the work and the 
 satisfaction of the author and himself. 
 
 It is a point on which professional 
 writers are far from agreeing as to how 
 far one must depend upon " moods " 
 for doing the best literary work. No 
 writer was a greater slave to moods than 
 Washington Irving, who confessed his in 
 ability to do justice to himself, or to any 
 subject, except when he "felt like it." 
 When he was once at work he hardly gave 
 himself time for rest and refreshment 
 until the task before him was completed, 
 or, as he said, until his " brain was wrung 
 dry." His Bractbridge Hall was written 
 
184 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 in a mood, however, that lasted six 
 weeks. 
 
 Mr. Irving's poetic temperament and 
 love of romance found scope for their dis 
 play in the chapters of his Sketch Book 
 entitled " Rip Van Winkle," "The Spectre 
 Bridegroom," and " The Legend of Sleepy 
 Hollow." These were suggested to their 
 author by the legendary lore of the Rhine 
 and the Hartz Mountains. His own words 
 sufficiently evince his fondness for adven 
 ture and travel; hence the character of his 
 sketches of subjects quaint and somewhat 
 unsought by other writers. He says : 
 
 " I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and 
 observing strange characters and manners. I made 
 myself familiar with places famous in history or 
 fable. I had beside this a desire to see the great 
 men of the earth, and it has been my lot to have 
 my roving passion gratified." 
 
 Referring, on one occasion, to the 
 success of his Sketch Book, Irving said : 
 
 "The writing of those stories was so unlike 
 an inspiration, so utterly without any feeling of 
 confidence which could be prophetic of their 
 popularity. " 
 
 Walking with his brother one dull day 
 
Washington Irving. 185 
 
 over Westminster Bridge, he got to telling 
 the old Dutch stones which he had heard 
 at Tarrytown in his youth, when the 
 thought suddenly struck him, I'll make 
 a memoranda of these for a book. 
 Leaving his brother soon after, he went 
 back to his lodgings, and jotted down 
 all the data ; and the next day in 
 one of the darkest of London fogs he 
 wrote out his " Legend of Sleepy 
 Hollow." 
 
 The paucity of data which confronts 
 us concerning the inception or origin of 
 many notable books may, doubtless, be 
 accounted for, to some extent at least, 
 by the fact that when their authors com 
 menced to write them they either did not 
 think it worth while to put upon record 
 the circumstances that prompted or sug 
 gested them to write, or else they did not, 
 at the outset, foresee the proportions to 
 which their work was destined to attain, 
 " they builded better than they knew." 
 It is also to be remembered that many 
 works of celebrity have been the result, 
 or rather the embodiment, of papers or 
 essays that had previously been published 
 
1 86 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 in the serial or periodical form, as in 
 the well-known instances of Dickens and 
 Thackeray, as well as of Hawthorne, and 
 many others. The last named had, like 
 the others referred to, attained to great 
 popularity as a writer in the literary 
 magazines, before he collected his fugi 
 tive contributions into volumes. Of his 
 Twice-told Tales the author himself 
 wrote : 
 
 " The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to 
 say, profound ; but it is rather more remarkable 
 that they so seldom, if ever, show any design on 
 the writer's part to make them so." 
 
 The thoughtful reader of these volumes 
 will scarcely acquiesce, however, with this 
 modest estimate of them. Of all Haw 
 thorne's productions, his most dramatic 
 and popular book is, doubtless, The 
 Scarlet Letter. In the author's introduc 
 tion to the work, the reader will find a 
 detailed account of the discovery of the 
 " scarlet letter " in an upper apartment of 
 the Salem Custom House, among heaps 
 of old musty documents and manuscripts 
 of various kinds, and some of a personal 
 kind. 
 
Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" 187 
 
 " But the object that most drew my attention 
 was a mysterious package of fine red cloth, much 
 worn and faded. There were traces about it of 
 gold embroidery, wrought with wonderful skill ; 
 and on it was the letter A. In the absorbing con 
 templation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto 
 neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, 
 around which it had been twisted. This I now 
 opened, and had the satisfaction to find, recorded 
 by the old surveyor's pen, a reasonably complete 
 explanation of the whole affair." 
 
 Plausible as reads this statement, there 
 is said to be no reality in it, but that it 
 is simply the product of the author's brain. 
 When, during 1858, he visited Italy, he 
 wrote The Marble Fawn, while residing in 
 a spacious antique house in Florence. 
 While Hawthorne was disgusted with 
 Rome, he seems to have been enchanted 
 with Florence, her memories and art- 
 treasures. But to return to The Scarlet 
 Letter, and here we cite from Mr. Field, 
 his publisher : 
 
 " In the winter of 1849, after he had been ejected 
 from the Custom House, I went down to Salem to 
 see him and inquire after his health. He was then 
 living in a modest wooden house ; and we fell into 
 talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I 
 
1 8 8 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 foared I should find him, in a very desponding 
 mood.'* 
 
 He seemed to give up the hope of suc 
 ceeding as a writer ; but when his visitor 
 was in the act of leaving, he handed to 
 him a roll of manuscript, requesting him 
 to take it to Boston, and examine and 
 report upon it ; adding, " It is either very 
 good or very bad, I don't know which." 
 
 ;l ' On my way back to Boston,' says Mr. Field. 
 ' I read the germ of The Scarlet Letter ; and before 
 I slept that night I wroteihim a note all aglow with 
 admiration of the marvellous story he had put into 
 my hands, and told him that I would come again 
 into Salem the next day and arrange for its publi 
 cation. Hawthorne seemed to think I was beside 
 myself, and laughed sadly at my enthusiasm.' " 
 
 He went on with the book and finished 
 it ; and in a letter to another friend, 
 
 " I finished my book only yesterday ; one end 
 being in the press at Boston, while the other was 
 in my head here at Salem, so that, as you see, 
 my story is at least fourteen miles long. My pub 
 lisher speaks of it in tremendous terms of approba 
 tion ; so does Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the 
 conclusion last night. It broke her heart, and 
 sent her to bed with a grievous headache, which I 
 look upon as a triumphant success." 
 
Longfellow 's "Evangeline." 189 
 
 If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, 
 and if his future was painfully vague, his 
 book seems, if not to have been born, 
 at least to have shared in his gloomy 
 shadows, for the tragic story is unrelieved 
 by a single ray of sunshine or mitigation 
 of sorrow. 
 
 The origin of the poet's Evangdine has 
 been thus given in the Atlantic : 
 
 " Hawthorne, dining one day with Longfellow, 
 brought with him a friend from Salem. After 
 dinner this friend said, 'I have been trying to 
 persuade Hawthorne to write a story based upon 
 a legend of Acadie, and still current there; the 
 legend of a girl who. in the dispersion of the 
 Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed 
 her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only 
 found him dying in a hospital, when both were 
 old. Longfellow wondered that this legend did 
 not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and said to 
 him, ' If you really have made up your mind not to 
 use it fora story, will you give it to me for a poem ? ' 
 To this he assented, and promised not to treat it 
 in prose till Longfellow had seen what he could do 
 with it inverse." 
 
 In his diary, under date of December 
 6th, 1838, Mr. Longfellow writes : 
 
 " A beautiful holy morning within me. I was 
 
1 90 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 softly excited, I knew not why, and wrote with 
 peace in my heart, and not without tears in my 
 eyes, ' The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of 
 Death.' I have had an idea of this kind in my 
 mind for a long time, without rinding any expres 
 sion for it in words. This morning it seemed 
 to crystallise at once, without any effort of my 
 own.'* 
 
 "The Skeleton in Armour" was suggested 
 to him, Mr. Longfellow informs us, while 
 he was riding on the seashore at Newport. 
 A year or two previous to his visit a 
 skeleton had been dug up at Fall River, 
 clad in armour, which was corroded and 
 broken ; and the idea occurred to the 
 poet of connecting this discovery with 
 the Round Tower at Newport, generally 
 known hitherto as the Old Windmill, 
 though now claimed by the Danes as 
 a work of their early ancestors. His 
 " Hyperion " and " Voices of the Night " 
 were written at his home in Cambridge. 
 "The Hymn of the Moravian Nuns" he 
 wrote while at college. He says : 
 
 " I read in a newspaper a story that the Mora 
 vian women at Bethlehem had embroidered a 
 banner and presented it to Pulaski. The story 
 made an impression upon my mind, and one idle 
 
" The Song of Hiawatha" 191 
 
 day I wrote the poem. I called them Moravian 
 nuns, because I had gathered from something I had 
 heard or read that they were called nuns. I sup 
 pose I should have said Moravian Sisters, but the 
 change does not spoil the romance. I often felt a 
 curiosity to go and see the people whose patriotic 
 action furnished the theme for this poem, and 
 whose peculiar costumes and steady thrift have 
 gained them the admiration of the world." 
 
 "The Song of Hiawatha" an Indian 
 Edda is founded on a tradition preva 
 lent among the North American tribes, 
 of a personage of miraculous birth, who 
 was sent among them to clear their 
 rivers, forests, and fishing-grounds, and to 
 teach them the arts of peace. According 
 to the legend he was known among the 
 different tribes by various names, such as 
 the following, Michabou, Chiabo, Mana- 
 bozo, and Hiawatha. Mr. Schoolcraft, 
 in his Algic Researches, gives an account 
 of him, derived from the verbal narrations 
 of an Onondaga chief. In Professor 
 Longfellow's poem other curious Indian 
 legends have been interwoven with the 
 above. The scene of the poem is 
 among the Ojibways, on the southern 
 
192 The Story of Some Famous Books* 
 
 shore of Lake Superior, in the region 
 between the Pictured Rocks and the 
 Grand Sable. 
 
 His biographer thus relates the one 
 great tragedy that left its traces on the 
 gentle and beautiful life of the poet : 
 
 " There is a break in the journal here ; and 
 then these lines of Tennyson, added many days 
 after : 
 
 " ' Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace ! 
 
 Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul ! 
 While the stars burn, the moons increase, 
 And the great ages onward roll.' 
 
 "The break in the journal marked a break in 
 his very life ; an awful chasm that suddenly, 
 and without the slightest warning, opened at 
 his feet." 1 
 
 " On July Qth his wife was sitting in the library, 
 with her two little girls, engaged in sealing up 
 some small packages of their curls which she had 
 just cut off. From a match fallen upon the floor 
 her light summer dress caught fire. The shock 
 was too great, and she died the next morning. 
 Three days later her burial took place at Mount 
 Auburn. It was the anniversary of her marriage- 
 day ; and on her beautiful head, lovely and 
 unmarred in death, some hand had placed a wreath 
 
 1 Longfellow's Memoirs of the Poet. 
 
Longfellow. 193 
 
 of orange blossoms. Her husband was not there 
 confined to his chamber by the severe burns 
 which he had himself received. 
 
 * These wounds healed with time. Time could 
 only assuage, never heal, the deeper wounds that 
 burned within. This terrible bereavement, made 
 more terrible by the shock of the suddenness and 
 the manner of it, well-nigh crushed him. Friends 
 gathered round, and letters of sympathy poured in 
 upon him from every quarter, as the sad intelligence 
 flashed over the land and sea. He bore his grief 
 with courage and in silence. Only after months 
 had passed could he speak of it ; and then only in 
 fewest words. To a brother far distant he wrote : 
 { And now, of what we both are thinking, I can 
 write no word. God's will be done.' To a 
 visitor, who expressed the hope that he might be 
 enabled to ' bear his cross ' with patience, he re 
 plied : ' Bear the cross, yes ; but what if one is 
 stretched upon it ! ' " 
 
 Eighteen years after, he wrote these 
 lines, found in his portfolio after his 
 death : 
 
 "THE CROSS OF SNOW. 
 
 *' In the long, sleepless watches of the night, 
 A gentle form the face of one long dead 
 Looks at me from the wall, where round its 
 
 head 
 A night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. 
 
 13 
 
194 TJie Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 Here in this room she died; and soul more 
 white 
 
 Never through martyrdom of fire was led 
 
 To its repose ; nor can in books be read 
 The legend of a life more benedight. 
 
 There is a mountain in the distant west, 
 That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines 
 Displays a cross of snow upon its side. 
 
 Such is the cross I wear upon my breast 
 These eighteen years, through all the changing 
 
 scenes 
 And seasons, changeless since the day she died." 
 
 Longfellow's first printed verses ap 
 peared in a local paper, when he was 
 thirteen. The young poet waited till his 
 father read his newspaper by the log -fire, 
 and then with secret triumph found that 
 the poem was actually printed. That 
 evening he went with his father to visit 
 a neighbour, Judge Mellen, and the old 
 Judge happened to say, " Did you see 
 the piece in to-day's paper? Very 
 stiff, remarkably stiff; moreover, it is 
 all borrowed every word of it." The 
 poet of thirteen felt ready to sink 
 through the floor; but he got away as 
 soon as he could, without betraying him 
 self. He was crushed but not extinguished 
 
Longfellow. 195 
 
 by his first critic. The career that followed 
 has been sketched by the poet's brother, 
 with extracts from letters and journals, 
 enough to make it an autobiography. 
 
 " We find the sources of his poetry here, and 
 are led by the alchemist himself into his laboratory 
 to watch the secrets of making the gold." 
 
 In accordance with the theory of inspir 
 ation, it was always a pleasure when a new- 
 poem formed itself rapidly in his mind 
 and required few emendations. Thus the 
 famous " Psalm of Life " was hastily jotted 
 down upon the blank portions of a note 
 of invitation ; and with reference to the 
 " Wreck of the Hesperus " he says :" I 
 feel pleased with the ballad. It hardly 
 cost me an effort. It did not come into 
 my mind by lines, but by stanzas." It 
 will be remembered that " Tarn o'Shanter, 1 ' 
 the masterpiece of Burns, was also dashed 
 off " at a heat." 
 
 Among the poems published after his 
 death is a touching one called "The 
 Children's Crusade." It was, unfortu 
 nately, left unfinished. It is founded on 
 an event which occurred in 1212. An 
 
196 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 army of twenty thousand children, mostly 
 boys, under the lead of a boy of ten years, 
 named Nicolas, set out from Cologne for 
 the Holy Land. When they reached 
 Genoa, only seven thousand remained. 
 There, as the sea did not divide to allow 
 them to march dry shod to the East, they 
 broke up. Some got as far as Rome ; 
 two ship loads sailed from Pisa and were 
 not heard of again; the rest straggled 
 back to Germany. 
 
 Poetry has often been defined; here 
 is an excellent definition : 
 
 " Poetry, under her own peculiar laws, is more 
 than any other pursuit of man, perhaps, the 
 direct reflection of the spirit of the age as it passes. 
 The mirror she holds up is not so much to nature 
 at large, as to human nature. The poet is, in 
 deed, the child of his century: his art not only 
 gives back the form and pressure to the body 
 of the time ; but it is itself the impersonation of 
 its most advanced thought, the efflorescence of its 
 finest spirit." 1 
 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, 
 the most popular production of that 
 popular poet and essa)ist Dr. Oliver 
 
 1 Quarterly Review. 
 
Whittier. 197 
 
 Wendell Holmes, as far as can be 
 ascertained, has no legendary story as 
 to its origin. That this very original 
 work should have proved such a great 
 favourite surprises no person who has 
 perused its pleasant and brilliant pages. 
 It has been conjectured that the plan of 
 the work may have been suggested 
 either by the Nodes Ambrosiaiice^ or 
 Boswell's Life of Johnson ; but it is safe 
 and, perhaps, sufficient to say that, if 
 modelled after either, it is worthy of both. 
 The gems that are scattered among its 
 pages are evidence enough of the poetic 
 skill and humour of its author. 
 
 As the keynote to much of Whittier's 
 poetry, we might, perhaps, take his own 
 quaint and picturesque stanza : 
 
 "I love the old melodious lays which softly melt 
 the ages through. 
 
 The songs of Spenser's golden days, Arcadia- 
 Sidney's silver phrase, 
 
 Sprinkling o'er the noon of time with freshcU 
 morning dew." 
 
 Whittier's style has been characterised 
 as pure strong Saxon. It is said that 
 he composes many of his beautiful 
 
 < 
 
198 The Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 passages while walking, and afterwards 
 commits them to paper. Most of his 
 eloquent anti-slavery appeals were occa 
 sioned by the events to which they 
 sometimes refer. We gather a little 
 inkling of his genial and kindly nature 
 in the last verses of one of his poems, 
 entitled " The Reward " : 
 
 *' Alas ! the evil which we fain would shun, 
 We do, and leave the wished-for good undone ! 
 
 Our strength to-day 
 
 Is but to-morrow's weakness, prone to fall, 
 Poor, blind, unprofitable servants all 
 
 Are we alway. 
 
 " Yet who, thus looking backward o'er his years, 
 Feels not his eyelids wet with grateful tears, 
 
 If he hath been 
 
 Permitted, weak and sinful as he was, 
 To cheer and aid, in some ennobling cause, 
 
 His fellow men?" 
 
 We have reason to be proud of this 
 poet-philanthropist, " his lyre having 
 been struck and attuned to many a 
 stirring note for freedom and human 
 progress," as well as to the high interests 
 of virtue and religion. 
 
 Latest, but not least, indeed, in the 
 
Lord Tennyson. 199 
 
 illustrious order of the sons of song is 
 the representative poet of England, 
 Lord Tennyson, the Poet-Laureate, who 
 has been justly characterised as " the 
 incarnate voice of cultivated and refined 
 England, in his time." An estimate 
 endorsed by another acknowledged 
 authority, 1 who says : 
 
 " No one else has the same combination of 
 melody, beauty of description, culture, and in 
 tellectual power. He has sweetness and strength 
 in exquisite combination. If a just balance of 
 poetic powers were to be crown of a poet, then 
 undoubtedly Tennyson must be proclaimed the 
 greatest English poet of our time." 
 
 It would be, of course, superfluous to 
 call attention to the earlier productions 
 of his muse, " The May Queen," " Locks- 
 ley Hall," "Maud," "The Idylls of the 
 King," "The Princess," "The Lady of 
 Shalott," and others, since they are 
 familiar to all lovers of true poetry. But 
 it may be well to cite a word or twt 
 from Charles Kingsley respecting his fine 
 philosophical poem in memory of his 
 friend Hallam. He says : 
 1 Justin McCarthy. 
 
2OO TJte Story of Some Famous Books. 
 
 " We know not whether to envy more the poet, 
 the object of his admiration, or the monument 
 which he has consecrated to his nobleness. In this 
 poem, written at various intervals during a series 
 of years, all the poet's peculiar excellences, with 
 all he has acquired from others, seem to have 
 been fused into a perfect unity, and brought to bear 
 on the subject, with that care and finish which 
 only a labour of love can inspire." 
 
 And should there be need for further 
 tribute, we have these enthusiastic words 
 from Mr. Gladstone. Referring to " The 
 Idylls of the King," he says : 
 
 " No one can read this poem without feeling, 
 when it ends, what may be termed the pangs of 
 vacancy of that void in heart and mind for want 
 of its continuance of which we are conscious when 
 some noble strain of music ceases, when some 
 great work of Raphael passes from view, when we 
 lose sight of some spot connected with high associa 
 tions, or when some transcendent character upon 
 the page of history disappears, and the with 
 drawal of it is like the withdrawal of the vital air." 
 
 Should we not, then, cherish with 
 loving regard these treasured legacies 
 of the lyre, and hold in high esteem 
 those who have so nobly enriched our 
 literature, and imparted to our too prosaic 
 
Lord Tennyson. 201 
 
 life such a revenue of intellectual enjoy 
 ment? Finally, if a nation's glory and 
 renown may be said to depend in great part 
 upon its authors and artists, then no logic 
 is needed to enforce their claims upon its 
 grateful esteem and lasting remembrance. 
 
 " The pen hath ruled with regal sway 
 
 The conquering sword, and crowned its way J 
 Like Phoebus, with Promethean fire, 
 Jove's thunder and Apollo's lyre, 
 Its diamond point, like stars at night, 
 Hath turned earth's shadows into light 1 " 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Anonymous Works, 3. 
 
 Arcadia, by Sidney, 28, 29. 
 
 Arnold (Matthew), quoted, 156. 
 
 Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, 56. 
 
 Ascham (Roger), 3638. 
 
 Atterbury (Bishop), 69. 
 
 Audubon (J. J.), the ornithologist, 141144. 
 
 Authors, origin of, i. 
 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 196. 
 
 Ballads, old English, 53. 
 
 Beckford's Vathek, 124. 
 
 Bible, the first printed book, 19. 
 
 Blair's Grave, IOI, 134. 
 
 Boccacio's Decameron, 22. 
 
 Bolingbroke (Lord), 67, 69, 70. 
 
 Bonnivard, 157. 
 
 BoswelFs Life of Johnson, 95. 
 
 Browne's (Sir Thomas) Religio Medici, 40-^-43. 
 
 Browning (Mrs. E. B.), 176 179. 
 
 Bryant's (W. C.) Thanatofsis, 100, 170. 
 
 Bunyan (John), 28, 36, 6367. 
 
 Burns (Robert), 113119. 
 
Index. 203 
 
 Burrough's Fresh Fields, quoted, 163. 
 Butler (Samuel), 49, 146148. 
 Byron (Lord), 155159. 
 
 Camoens, his misfortunes, 16. 
 
 Campbell (Thomas), quoted, 25, 31, 99, 161 ; 
 
 origin of his Hohenlinden, 99. 
 Carlyle (Thomas), quoted, 118; his writings, 
 
 162168. 
 Cervantes, 10. 
 
 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 21 23. 
 Coleridge (Samuel Taylor), 135141 ; quoted, 16, 
 
 49, 126. 
 
 Cooper (J. Fenimore), 171. 
 Cowley (Abraham), 26. 
 Cowper (William), 108112. 
 Crabbe's Poems, 151. 
 
 Croft's English Literature, quoted, 27. * 
 
 Culprit Fay, The, 169. 
 
 Dana's Culprit Fay, 169. 
 
 Defoe's Robinson Ci-usoe, 70 72. 
 
 De Quincey (T.), 126, 138, 140. 
 
 Descartes, 14. 
 
 D' Israeli (Isaac), quoted, 14. 
 
 Dryden (John), his Ode to St. Cecilia, 67. 
 
 Elia, Essays of, 152. 
 Emblems, 51. 
 
 Emerson (R. W.) q^loted, 24. 
 Enchiridion, by Quarles, 52. 
 Evelyn's Diary, 45 47. 
 
204 Index. 
 
 Faerie Queen (Spenser's), 24. 
 Farrar (Canon), quoted, 50, 112. 
 Feltham's Resolves, 48. 
 Fielding's novels, 123. 
 Fisher (E. S.), quoted, 45. 
 Fox's Book of Martyrs, 3336. 
 Franklin's Autobiography, 149. 
 Prater's Magazine, quoted, 164. 
 Fuller (Thomas), 49. 
 
 Genlis (Madame de), 9. 
 
 Gibbon, objected to the criticism of friends, 15 
 
 his Decline and Fall, 119121. 
 Goethe, quoted, 12. 
 Goldsmith's writings, 102 108, 146. 
 Gray's Elegy, 96, 97. 
 Guileville (Guillaume de), 64. 
 Gulliver's Travels, 72, 73. 
 Guthrie (Dr.), n. 
 
 Halleck (FitzGreene), 119, 170. 
 Hawthorne's (N.) writings, 186189. 
 Hobbes (Thomas), of Malmesbury, 59. 
 Hohenlinden (Campbell's), 99. 
 Holmes (Dr. O. W.), 196. 
 Homer, 10. 
 
 Hood (Thomas), 172 175; quoted, 9. 
 Hunt (Leigh), 135. 
 
 Irving (Washington), 133, 134, 179 185. 
 Jerrold (Douglas), 3. 
 
Index. 205 
 
 Johnson (Dr. Samuel), 10, 41, 69, 90 ; his Dic 
 tionary, 86 93. 
 Juan Fernandez, 71* 
 
 Knickerbocker's New York, 181. 
 
 Lalla Rookh, 160. 
 
 Lamb (Charles), 151 155. 
 
 Lemon (Mark), 175. 
 
 Lockhart (J. G.), 129. 
 
 Longfellow (H. W.), 189196. 
 
 Lowell (J. R.), on the choice of books. 5. 
 
 McCarthy (Justin), quoted, 198. 
 
 Malebranche, indebted to Descartes, 14. 
 
 Mazarin Bible, 19. 
 
 Milton (John), 7884. 
 
 Montaigne, not appreciated in his own province, 
 
 15 ; his Essays, 38 40. 
 Montgomery (James), 134. 
 Moore (Thomas), 146, 159 161. 
 More (Sir Thomas), Utopia, 32, 33. 
 Munchausen (Baron), 63. 
 
 Norris of Bemerton, quoted, 51. 
 Norton (C. E). quoted, 167. 
 
 Otway (Thomas), 10. 
 
 Paradise Lost, 78. 
 
 Paul and Virginia, 6063. 
 
 Tepys's Diary, 43, 44. 
 
206 Index. 
 
 Percy's (Bishop) Rdiques. 53. 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress (Banyan's), 28, 36, 6367. 
 
 Poe (E. A.), 168169. 
 
 Pope (Alexander), 69, 70, 146; his opinion of 
 
 the Faerie Queen, 26. 
 Prescott (W. H.), 170. 
 Prince, a self-taught poet, 12. 
 Punch, 175. 
 
 Quarles (F.), his Emblems, 51. 
 Quarterly Review \ quoted. 196. 
 
 Raleigh (Sir W.), 24, 25, 27. 
 Raven (Poe's), 168. 
 Religio Medici (Browne's), 40 43. 
 Richardson's (S.) novels, 121, 122. 
 Robin Hood ballads, 55. 
 Robinson Crusoe, 70 72. 
 Rogers (Samuel), 145. 
 
 St. Pierre's (B.) Paul and Virginia, 60 63. 
 
 Schoolmaster (Ascham's), 36. 
 
 Scott (Sir Walter), 10, 128133. 
 
 Selkirk (Alexander). 71. 
 
 Swift's Gullivers Travels, 72. 
 
 Shakespeare (W.), 18, 57. 
 
 Shaw's English Literature, quoted, 136. 
 
 Shelley (P. B.), 158. 
 
 Sidney (Sir Philip), 2831. 
 
 Sketch Book (Irving's), 183. 
 
 Smith (Horace), quoted, I. 
 
Index. 207 
 
 Smollett's Roderick Random and Humphry 
 
 Clinker, 123. 
 
 Song of the Shirt (Hood's), 174. 
 Southey (Robert), 10, 148. 
 Spenser (Edmund), 23 28. 
 Stedman's Victorian Poets, quoted, 179. 
 Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Sentimental 
 
 Journey, 121. 
 
 Stoddard (R. H.), quoted, 152. 
 Stow's Chronicle, quoted, 55. 
 Stowe (Mrs. H. B.). 1.71. 
 
 Tasso, his misfortunes, 16. 
 Temple Bar, quoted, 155. 
 Tennyson (Lord), 198. 
 Thomson's Seasons. 15. 
 Toxophilus (Ascham's), 36. 
 Tristram Shandy, 121. 
 Tuckerman (H. T.), quoted, 6, 13. 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 171. 
 
 Upcott, his discovery of Evelyn's Diary, 46. 
 
 Utopia (More's), 32, 33. 
 
 Vathek (Beckford's), 124. 
 Vicar of Wakefield, 102. 
 
 Walton's Angler, 7375. 
 
 Wandering yew, 59. 
 
 Warwick's (Arthur) Spare Minutes. 49. 
 
 Wavcrley Novels, 130. 
 
 West (Frederick), quoted, \ i. 
 
208 Index. 
 
 Whcatley (H. B.), 53, 86. 
 
 White's Selborne, 75 77. 
 
 White (Rev. Blanco), quoted, 4. 
 WhittierQ. G.), quoted, 17, 197. 
 Willmott (Rev. W. A.), quoted, 17. 
 Wilson (Alexander), 144. 
 Wither's Emblems, 51. 
 Wordsworth (William), 125128. 
 
 Young's Night Thoughts, 8486. 
 
&e 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 HENRY B. WHEATLEY, F.S.A. 
 
 Taotefully printed on antique paper, handsomely bound in 
 
 cloth ; also on handmade paper, Roxburgh binding, and 
 
 50 only large paper copies for collectors. 
 
 THE DEDICATION of 
 
 BOOKS 
 To PATRON and FRIEND. 
 
 By HENRY B. WHEATLEY, F.S.A. 
 
 Being the Fifth Volume of "The Book-Lover's 
 Library." 
 
 Contents. 
 
 EARLY DEDICATIONS. 
 SHAKESPEARIAN DEDICA 
 TIONS. 
 
 POLITICAL AND SATIRICAL 
 
 DEDICATIONS. 
 DRYDEN'S DEDICATIONS. 
 
 PLAYWRIGHTS' DEDICA 
 TIONS. 
 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 DEDICATIONS. 
 
 DR. JOHNSON'S DEDICA 
 TIONS. 
 
 MODERN DEDICATIONS. 
 
 " rhroughout Mr. Wheatley has done his work 
 thoroughly and in a most judicious way. There is a 
 0od index, highly necessary to such a book, which is 
 certainly worthy of a place in every good library." 
 
 Public Opinion. 
 
 14 
 
MODERN METHODS 
 
 o c 
 ILLUSTRATING BOOKS. 
 
 " The various styles of illustration and the transition 
 from the one to the other, with all the most notable 
 peculiarities of each, from the old woodcuts down to the 
 photogravure of yesterday, are set forth in a graphic 
 and interesting form." Warrington Guardian. 
 
 HOW to FORM a LIE R ART. 
 
 By H. B. WHEATLEY, F.S.A. 
 
 Being the First Volume of " The Book-Lover s 
 Library." 
 
 Contents. 
 
 HOW MEN HAVE FORMED 
 LIBRARIES. 
 
 HOW TO BUY. 
 PUBLIC LIBRARIES. 
 
 PRIVATE LIBRARIES. 
 
 GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES. 
 SPECIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES. 
 PUBLISHING SOCIETIES. 
 
 CHILD'S LIBRARY. 
 ONE HUNDRED BOOKS. 
 
 11 An admirable guide to the best bibliographies arid 
 books of reference. ... It is altogether a volume to 
 be desired." Globe. 
 
 "Everything about this book is satisfactory paper, 
 type, margin, size, above all, the contents." 
 
 St. James's Gazette. 
 
 "Supplies in a compact form much that the librarian 
 and book-lover could not obtain elsewhere without 
 lengthy research." Oxford Chronicle. 
 
THE LITERATURE of LOCAL 
 INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 By G. LAURENCE GOMME, F.S.A. 
 The work is divided into the following sections : 
 
 5. THE GUILDS. 
 
 6. THE MANOR. 
 
 7. THE TOWNSHIP AND 
 
 PARISH. 
 
 1. LOCAL GOVERNMENT 
 
 GENERALLY. 
 
 2. THE SHIRE. 
 
 3. THE HUNDRED. 
 
 4. THE MUNICIPAL BOROUGH 
 
 " A handy and useful guide to the study of a. v*st 
 subject. The writer's experience in bibliography and 
 index-making is fully reflected in the descriptive list 
 of works appended to each section of an excellent 
 exposition of the antiquity and growth of local institu 
 tions." Saturday Review. 
 
 
 
 OLD COOKERY BOOKS and 
 ANCIENT CUISINE. 
 
 By W. C. HAZLITT. 
 
 "This is a book of pleasant gossip on a subject 
 which is not easily exhausted, and can hardly fail to be 
 interesting." Spectator. 
 
 " It will be found very pleasant reading alike by the 
 bibliophilist, the scholarly cook, and those interested in 
 gastronomy." Hotel Review. 
 
 " Mr. Hazlitt has produced a thoroughly entertaining 
 and clever little book, full of curious facts relating to 
 the food of past generations, and its mode of prepara 
 tion for the table." Bookseller. 
 
 "Full of curious information, this work can fairly 
 claim to be a philosophical history of our national 
 cookery." Morning Post. 
 
GLEANINGS inOLD GARDEN 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 By W. C. HAZLITT. 
 
 In this new volume of the BOOK-LOVER'S 
 LIBRARY the author has gleaned in many out- 
 of-the-way fields, and has brought home and 
 spread before the reader a banquet well gar 
 nished with fruit and vegetable lore, rendered 
 pleasant by the fragrance of many old-fashioned 
 flowers. The illustrious men of our country 
 who have delighted in a country life, and have 
 spent their leisure hours in the pleasures of the 
 garden, sit round the board, while some of the 
 great gardeners enliven their patrons with 
 curious narratives of their craft in pleasant 
 fashion. 
 
 Contents. 
 
 PRELIMINARIES. 
 
 LITERARY ANTIQUITIES. 
 
 ELIZABETHAN GARDEN 
 ING. 
 
 THE FRENCH AND DUTCH 
 SCHOOLS. 
 
 HERBALS, PHYSIC-GARD 
 ENS, AND BEES. 
 
 THE KITCHEN-GARDEN. 
 
 THE ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 ARBOURS. 
 
 WINDOW-GARDENING. 
 BACON AS A GARDENER. 
 HERBS AND VEGETABLES. 
 FRUIT TREES. 
 
 FRUIT TREES (continued). 
 
 FLORA. 
 
 MARKET GARDENS IN THE 
 SUBURBS OF LONDON. 
 
 SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GAR 
 DENING LITERATURE. 
 
 " A volume that may afford delight to the lover of 
 gardens, even if he be not a lover of books in general." 
 
 Morning Post. 
 
 i 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 RENEWED BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE 
 RECALL 
 
 LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS 
 
 Book Slir>-50m-12.'64fF772s4)458 
 
351985 
 
 Saunders, F. 
 
 The story of some 
 famous books. 
 
 PN511 
 S28 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS