The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume II Part 21

Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid, Though strongly hedged of b.l.o.o.d.y Lions' paws That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid.

Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause-- But only, for this worthy knight durst prove To lose his crown rather than fail his love.

XI

O happy Thames, that didst my STELLA bear, I saw thyself, with many a smiling line Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear, While those fair planets on thy streams did shine; The boat for joy could not to dance forbear, While wanton winds, with beauty so divine Ravish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine.

And fain those aeol's youth there would their stay Have made; but, forced by nature still to fly, First did with puffing kiss those locks display.

She, so dishevell'd, blush'd; from window I With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace, Let honour's self to thee grant highest place!

XII

Highway, since you my chief Parna.s.sus be; And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, More soft than to a chamber melody,-- Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet, My Muse and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully.

Be you still fair, honour'd by public heed, By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot; Nor blam'd for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed.

And that you know, I envy you no lot Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, Hundreds of years you STELLA'S feet may kiss.

[Footnote 1: Press.]

Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet, are my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of "learning and of chivalry,"--of which union, Spenser has ent.i.tled Sydney to have been the "president,"--shines through them. I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune" or "frigid" in them; much less of the "stiff" and "c.u.mbrous"--which I have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to "trampling horses'

feet." They abound in felicitous phrases--

O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face--

_8th Sonnet._

--Sweet pillows, sweetest bed; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light; A rosy garland, and a weary head.

_2nd Sonnet._

--That sweet enemy,--France--

_5th Sonnet._

But they are not rich in words only, in vague and unlocalised feelings--the failing too much of some poetry of the present day--they are full, material, and circ.u.mstantiated. Time and place appropriates every one of them. It is not a fever of pa.s.sion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a transcendent pa.s.sion pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of them. An historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them; marks the _when_ and _where_ they were written.

I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by the wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) with which W.H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &c., (most profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, just) are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote Sonnets, and was a king-hater; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a _fine idea_ from my mind.

The n.o.ble images, pa.s.sions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies of character, scattered all over the Arcadia (spite of some stiffness and enc.u.mberment), justify to me the character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that _opprobrious thing_ which a foolish n.o.bleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him; and I repose upon the beautiful lines in the "Friend's Pa.s.sion for his Astrophel,"

printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others.

You knew--who knew not Astrophel?

(That I should live to say I knew, And have not in possession still!)-- Things known permit me to renew-- Of him you know his merit such, I cannot say--you hear--too much.

Within these woods of Arcady He chief delight and pleasure took; And on the mountain Partheny.

Upon the crystal liquid brook, The Muses met him every day, That taught him sing, to write, and say.

When he descended down the mount, His personage seemed most divine: A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely chearful eyne.

To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, You were in Paradise the while,

_A sweet attractive kind of grace; A full a.s.surance given by looks; Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of Gospel books--_ I trow that count'nance cannot lye, Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.

Above all others this is he, Which erst approved in his song, That love and honour might agree, And that pure love will do no wrong.

Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame To love a man of virtuous name.

Did never Love so sweetly breathe In any mortal breast before: Did never Muse inspire beneath A Poet's brain with finer store.

He wrote of Love with high conceit, And beauty rear'd above her height.

Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into rage) in the Poem,--the last in the collection accompanying the above,--which from internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke's,--beginning with "Silence augmenteth grief,"--and then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of such absorbing and confounding regrets could have been _that thing_ which Lord Oxford termed him.

NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life.

He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper stood then just where it does now--we are carrying you back, Reader, some thirty years or more--with its gilt-globe-topt front facing that emporium of our artists' grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, that we had observed the same abstinence with Daniel.

A word or two of D.S. He ever appeared to us one of the finest tempered of Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked for both these gentlemen.

It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges; to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river;

With holy reverence to approach the rocks, Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song.

Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's exploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holyday (a "whole day's leave" we called it at Christ's Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned either for such an undertaking, to trace the current of the New River--Middletonian stream!--to its scaturient source, as we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence our solitary quest--for it was essential to the dignity of a DISCOVERY, that no eye of schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had _dodged_ us, reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sun, we sate down somewhere by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, with a t.i.the of our proposed labours only yet accomplished; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders.

Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in literature; from the Gnat which preluded to the aeneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on.

In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke--and it was thought pretty high too--was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases.

The chat of the day, scandle, but, above all, _dress_, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines.

Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant.

A fashion of _flesh_, or rather _pink_-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture, when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.'s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were p.r.o.nounced a "capital hand." O the conceits which we varied upon _red_ in all its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon "many waters." Then there was the collateral topic of ancles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something "not quite proper;" while, like a skilful posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation is destruction; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where "both seem either;" a hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting off his expectant auditory with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man!" But, above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astraea--_ultima Calestum terras reliquit_--we p.r.o.nounced--in reference to the stockings still--that MODESTY TAKING HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP. This might be called the crowning conceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days.

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, pa.s.ses away; as did the transient mode which had so favoured us. The ancles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to rea.s.sume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings.

Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder execution. "Man goeth forth to his work until the evening"--from a reasonable hour in the morning, we presume it was meant. Now as our main occupation took us up from eight till five every day in the City; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with any thing rather than business, it follows, that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes--our supplementary livelihood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese--was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man's Land) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time; that is, no time in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in. To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a half's duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast.

O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past-five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed--(for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we antic.i.p.ated the lark ofttimes in her rising--we liked a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, and to have our friends about us--we were not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless--we were none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague--we were right toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they)--but to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance--to be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it was "time to rise;" and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest-breakers in future--

"Facil" and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the "descending" of the over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get up, as he goes on to say,

--revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras--

and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended--there was the "labour," there the "work."

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them--when the mountain must go to Mahomet--