gallantly tagged the drum of tragic declamation. | child in the go-cart of Religion, or to beslaver the Surely not Cowper nor any other is farther from pretty dress he has just put on, it than Wordsworth. Porson. But his drum is damp; and his tags are none the better for being of hemp, with the broken stalks in. stews. Porrigens teneras manus Pardon a quotation: I hate it: I wonder how it escaped me. Southey. Let Wordsworth prove to the world that there may be animation without blood and Wordsworth goes out of his way to be attacked: broken bones, and tenderness remote from the he picks up a piece of dirt, throws it on the Some will doubt it; for even things the carpet in the midst of the company, and cries most evident are often but little perceived and This is a better man than any of you. He does strangely estimated. Swift ridiculed the music indeed mould the base material into what form of Handel and the generalship of Marlborough, he chooses; but why not rather invite us to conPope the perspicacity and the scholarship template it than challenge us to condemn it? of Bentley, Gray the abilities of Shaftesbury Here surely is false taste. and the eloquence of Rousseau. Shakspeare hardly found those who would collect his tragedies; Milton was read from godliness; Virgil was antiquated and rustic; Cicero Asiatic. What a rabble has persecuted my friend! An elephant is born to be consumed by ants in the midst of his unapproachable solitudes: Wordsworth is the prey of Jeffrey. Why repine? Let us rather amuse ourselves with allegories, and recollect that God in the creation left his noblest creature at the mercy of a serpent. Porson. In our authors of the present day I would recommend principally, to reduce the expenditure of words to the means of support, and to be severe in style without the appearance of severity. But this advice is more easily given than taken. Your friend is verbose; not indeed without something for his words to rest upon, but from a resolution to gratify and indulge his capacity. He pursues his thoughts too far; and considers more how he may show them entirely than how he may show them advantageously. Good men may utter whatever comes uppermost, good poets may not. It is better, but it is also more difficult, to make a selection of thoughts than to accumulate them. He who has a splendid sideboard, should have an iron chest with a double lock upon it, and should hold in reserve a greater part than he displays. Southey. The principal and the most general accusation against him is, that the vehicle of his thoughts is unequal to them. Now did ever the judges at the Olympic games say, "We would have awarded to you the meed of victory, if your chariot had been equal to your horses: it is true they have won; but the people is displeased at a car neither new nor richly gilt, and without a gryphon or sphynx engraved on the axle?” You admire simplicity in Euripides; you censure it in Wordsworth; believe me, sir, it arises in neither from penury of thought, which seldom has produced it, but from the strength of temperance, and at the suggestion of principle. Some of his critics are sincere in their censure, and are neither invidious nor unlearned; but their optics have been exercised on other objects, altogether dissimilar, and they are (permit me an expression not the worse for daily use) entirely out of their element. His very clearness puzzles and perplexes them, and they imagine that straightness is distortion, as children on seeing a wand dipped in limpid and still water. Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are: the turbid look the most profound. Porson. Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size, and bite both indiscriminately. Southey. Our critics are onion-eaters by the I know not why two poets so utterly dissimilar Pyramids of Poetry. They sprawl along the as your author and Coleridge should be con- sands, without an idea how high and wonderful stantly mentioned together. In the one I find are the edifices above, whose base is solid as the diffuseness, monotony, not indistinctness, but un-earth itself, and whose summits are visible over interesting expanse, and such figures and such colouring as Morland's; in the other, bright colours without form, sublimely void. In his prose he talks like a madman when he calls Saint Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians "the sublimest composition of man." Southey. This indeed he hath spoken, but he has not yet published it in his writings: it will appear in his Table Talk, perhaps. Porson. Such table-talk may be expected to come forth very late in the evening, when the wine and candles are out, and the body lies horizontally underneath. He believes he is a believer; but why does he believe that the Scriptures are best reverenced by bearing false witness to them? Is it an act of piety to play the little a hundred ages. Most Ignorance has not been single-handed the enemy of Wordsworth; but Petulance and Malignity have accompanied her, and have been unremittent in their attacks. Small poets, small critics, lawyers who have much time on their hands and hanging heavily, come forward unfeed against him; such is the spirit of patriotism, rushing everywhere for the public good. of these have tried their fortune at some little lottery-office of literature, and, receiving a blank, have chewed upon it harshly and wryly. We, like jackdaws, are amicable creatures while we are together in the dust; but let any gain a battlement or steeple, and behold the rest fly about him at once, and beat him down. I would rather say, read them all; and, knowing that a mind like yours must grasp closely what comes within it, I will then appeal to you whether any poet of our country, since Milton, hath exerted greater powers with less of strain and less of ostentation. I would however, by his permission, lay before you for this purpose a poem which is yet unpublished and incomplete. Porson. Pity, with such abilities, he does not imitate the ancients somewhat more. Southey. Whom did they imitate? If his genius is equal to theirs he has no need of a guide. He also will be an ancient; and the very counterparts of those who now decry him, will extol him a thousand years hence in malignity to the moderns. The ancients have always been opposed to them; just as, at routs and dances, elderly beauties to younger. It would be wise to contract the scene of action, and to decide the business in both cases by couples. Take up a poem of Wordsworth's and read it; "What nails the creature has!" replied an elder one. "Piano-forte keys wanting the white!" I tried to conceal my hands as well as might be; when suddenly there was a titter from the middleaged and young, and a grave look and much erectness from the rest. So serious and stern did they appear to me, I never saw the like but once; which was in a file of soldiers, ordered out to shoot a deserter at St. Ives. I was the only person, young or old, male or female, that blushed; and I had not done so before for thirty years, to the best of my recollection. I now understood that blushing is a sign of half-breeding, and that an elevation of the eyebrow, and the opening of the lips a straw's breadth, are the most violent expressions of feeling permitted in such places. The gentlemen were neutral; unless the neutrality may be said to have been broken by two or three words, which I suspect to have been meant for English; a token-coinage, fit only for the district. One however, more polite and more attentive, bowed to me. I did not recollect his features, which he divined by mine, and said, "Sir, I once recovered your watch for you, and wish I could now as easily recover its neighbour the button." I looked down, and perceived that the place of concealment, the refuge of my hand, had, like my conductor, been false to me. The gentleman was a thieftaker: three others of the fraternity had likewise been invited, on suspicion that there were several pickpockets; I mean beside the legitimate, and supernumerary to those who had been seated by the lady of the house at the card-tables. The thief-takers were recognised by the company: the higher and more respectable spoke familiarly with them; persons of inferior rank saluted them more distantly and coldly: and there were some few who slank obliquely from them as they passed, like landsmen walking on deck in a breeze. This shyness was far from mutual; and the gentlemen, who presided here as the good genii or tutelary deities of the place, awakened with winks one another's smiles, and pardoned the inattention. Why do you repeat the word rout so often? Porson. Not because the expression is novel and barbarous, I do assure you, nor because the thing itself is equally the bane of domestic, of convivial, and of polite society. I was once at one by mistake, and really I saw there what you describe; and this made me (as you tell me I did, though I was not aware of it) repeat the word, and smile. You seem curious. Southey. Rather indeed. Porson. I had been dining out: there were some who smoked after dinner; within a few hours the fumes of their pipes produced such an effect on my head, that I was willing to go into the air a little. Still I continued hot and thirsty; and an undergraduate, whose tutor was my old acquaintance, proposed that we should turn into an oyster-cellar, and refresh ourselves with oysters and porter. The rogue, instead of this, conducted me to a fashionable house in the neighbourhood of Saint James's; and although I expostulated with him, and insisted that we were going upstairs and not down, he appeared to me so ingenuous and so sincere in his protestations to the contrary, that I could well disbelieve him no longer. Nevertheless, receiving on the stairs many shoves and elbowings, I could not help telling him plainly, that, if indeed it was the oyster-cellar in Fleet-street, the company was much altered for the worse, and that in future I should frequent another. When the fumes of the pipes had left me, I discovered the deceit by the brilliancy and indecency of the dresses, and was resolved not to fall into temptation. Although, to my great satisfaction and surprise, no immodest proposal was directly made to me, I looked about, anxious that no other man in company should know me, beside those whose wantonness had conducted me thither; and I would have escaped if I could have found the door, from which every effort I made appeared to remove me farther and farther. A pretty woman said loudly, “He has no gloves on!" Southey. Those are fortunate who lose nothing in such places, and more fortunate who acquire nothing. You yourself remain quite unchanged: not a tone of your voice, not an article of your dress. . . Porson. If this appears strange to you, it will appear stranger that I was an object of imitation. What the thief-taker saw with apprehension, the young gentlemen have copied with sedulity, though they carry gloves. Their hands take that turn. I little thought that any of the company could have known me, or that my treacherous friend would have mentioned my name; and still less should I have prognosticated that I must, in an unguarded moment, set a fashion to the dandies, such as the dress of the ancients and the decency of the moderns had hitherto precluded. I now come to your remark, confirmed to me by my own observation, upon the hostilities at such parties. A beldame with prominent eyes, painted mole-hairs, and abundantly rich in the exten с sive bleaching-ground of cheeks and shoulders, a German as I imagine, was speaking all manner of spiteful things against a young person called pretty; and after a long discussion, not only on her defects, but also on those of her family and parchments, Who is she? I should like to know, terminated the effusion. My betrayer had absconded, not without engaging another to find me and conduct me home. As we were passing through the folding-doors, I saw the baroness (for such he called her) with her arm upon the neck of the girl, and looking softly and benignly, and styling her my young friend here, in such a sweet guttural accent, so long in drawing up, you would have thought it must have come from the heart, at the very least. I mentioned my surprise. "She was so strongly the fashion at the close of the evening," said my Mentor, "that it would never do (for the remainder of the night) not to know her; and, as proper time was wanting to get up a decent enmity, nothing was left for it but sworn friendship. To-morrow the baroness will call her my protégée, and the day after ask again who is she? unless she happens to hear that the girl has a person of high rank among her connexions, which I understand she has; then the baroness will press her to the heart, or to that pound of flesh which lies next it." Trifling people are often useful, unintentionally and unconsciously: illustrations may be made out of them even for scholars and sages. A hangman sells to a ragman the materials on which a Homer is printed. Would you imagine that in places like these it was likely for me to gain a new insight into language? sugar-slaves caught the attention of the mother, who coloured excessively at the words, and said with much gravity of reproof, Indeed, Mr. Small, I never could have thought it of you, and added, waving her hand with matronly dignity toward the remainder of the audience, Sir, I have daughters. And I know not what offence the Great Toe can have committed, that he never should be mentioned by the graver and more stately members of the family, or, if mentioned, be denounced with all his adherents; when many of these graver and statelier walk less humbly, and with much less heed against offending. In Italy, if any extremity of the human body is mentioned, it is preceded by the words, "with respect," so that most respect is shown to the parts, as to the characters, that least deserve it. Southey. Pray tell me what else appeared to you remarkable at the rout: for when a person of your age and with your powers of observation is present at one for the first time, many things must strike him which another sees without reflection. Porson. I saw among the rest two or three strangers of distinction, as I understood by their dresses and decorations: and, observing that nobody noticed them, except the lady of the house, who smiled and dropped a few syllables as she passed, I inquired the next day whether they were discreditable or suspicious. "On the contrary," said my informant, "they are of the highest character as well as of the highest rank, and, above all, of well-proved loyalty: but we Englishmen lose our facility of conversation in the presence of strangers; added to which, we consider it an indecorous thing to pay the least attention to persons to whom we never were introduced. Strangers act otherwise. Every man of education, and of a certain rank, does the honours, not of the house, but of society at large. In no company at Paris, or any other capital in the world, would a foreigner stand five minutes without receiving some attention and courtesy. Abroad all gentlemen are equal, from the duc et pair to the Gascon who dines on chesnuts; and all feel that they are. The Englishman of ancient but private name is indignant and sullen that his "You appear not to understand me, or you rights at home are denied him; and his wounded quibble," said he; "I mean their bosoms." Southey. I should not indeed. Children make us reflect on it occasionally, by an unusual and just expression; but in such society everything is trite and trivial. Porson. Yet so it was. A friend who happened to be there, although I did not see him, asked me afterward what I thought of the naked necks of the ladies. "To tell you the truth,” replied I, "the women of all countries, and the men in most, have usually kept their necks naked." I then understood for the first time that neck signifies bosom when we speak of women, though not so when we speak of men or other creatures. But if bosom is neck, what, according to the same scale of progression, ought to be bosom? The usurped dominion of neck extends from the ear downward to where mermaids become fish. This conversation led me to reflect that I was born in the time when people had thighs; before your memory, I imagine. At present there is nothing but leg from the hip to the instep. My friend Mr. Small of Peter-house, a very decent and regular man, and fond of fugitive pieces, read before a lady and her family, from under the head of descriptive, some verses about the spring and the bees. Unluckily the honied thighs of our little European pride renders him unsocial and uncivil. Pride of another kind acts on our society in the same manner. I have seen Irish peers, issuing from the shop and the desk, push rudely and scornfully by the most ancient of the French nobility; the cadets of whose families founded the oldest of ours, and waved the sword of knighthood over our Plantagenets. For which reason, whenever I sit down at table in any public place with an Irish or even an English peer of recent creation, I select the sturdiest of my servants to stand behind my chair, with orders to conduct him by the ears out of the room, should I lift up a finger to indicate the command." I ought not to have interrupted you so long, in your attempt to prove Wordsworth shall I say the rival or the resembler of the ancients? With sacrifice before the rising morn Performed, my slaughtered lord have I required; dull and cumbersome. The second line and the fourth terminate too much alike, and express to a tittle the same meaning: have I required and have I desired are worse than prosaic; beside which there are four words together of equal length in each. Southey. I have seen a couplet oftener than once in which every word of the second verse corresponds in measure to every one above it. Southey. Such excursions are not unseasonable in such discussions, and lay in a store of good humour for them. Your narrative has amused me exceedingly. As you call upon me to return with you to the point we set out from, I hope II do not see the necessity of Performed, which is may assert without a charge of paradox, that whatever is good in poetry is common to all good poets, however wide may be the diversity of manner. Nothing can be more dissimilar than the three Greek tragedians: but would you prefer the closest and best copier of Homer to the worst (whichever he be) among them? Let us avoid what is indifferent or doubtful, and embrace what is good, whether we see it in another or not; and if we have contracted any peculiarity while our muscles and bones were softer, let us hope finally to outgrow it. Our feelings and modes of thinking forbid and exclude a very frequent imitation of the old classics, not to mention our manners, which have a nearer connexion than is generally known to exist with the higher poetry. When the occasion permitted it, Wordsworth has not declined to treat a subject as an ancient poet of equal vigour would have treated it. Let me repeat to you his Laodamia. Porson. After your animated recital of this classic poem, I begin to think more highly of you both. It is pleasant to find two poets living as brothers, and particularly when the palm lies between them, with hardly a third in sight. Those who have ascended to the summit of the mountain, sit quietly and familiarly side by side; it is only those who are climbing with briers about their legs, that kick and scramble. Yours is a temper found less frequently in our country than in others. The French poets indeed must stick together to keep themselves warm. By employing courteous expressions mutually, they indulge their vanity rather than their benevolence, and bring the spirit of contest into action gaily and safely. Among the Romans we find Virgil, Horace, and several of their contemporaries, intimately united and profuse of reciprocal praise. Ovid, Cicero, and Pliny, are authors the least addicted to censure, and the most ready to offer their testimony in favour of abilities in Greek or countryman. These are the three Romans, the least amiable of nations, and (one excepted) the least sincere, with whom I should have liked best to spend an evening. Southey. Ennius and old Cato, I am afraid, would have run away with your first affections. Porson. Old Cato! he, like a wafer, must have been well wetted to be good for anything. Such gentlemen as old Cato we meet every day in St. Mary Axe, and wholesomer wine than his wherever there are sloes and turnips. Ennius could converse without ignorance about Scipio, and without jealousy about Homer. Southey. And I think he would not have disdained to nod his head on reading Laodamia. Porson. You have recited a most spirited thing indeed and now to give you a proof that I have been attentive, I will remark two passages that offend me. In the first stanza, Porson. The Scotch have a scabby and a frostbitten ear for harmony, both in verse and prose : and I remember in Douglas two such as you describe. This is the place.. the centre of the grove, Here stands the oak.. the monarch of the wood. After this whiff of vapour I must refresh myself He spake of love, such love as spirits feel For all that is most perfect upon earth. Mythologies should be kept distinct: the fireplace of one should never be subject to the smoke of another. The gods of different countries, when they come together unexpectedly, are jealous gods, and, as our old women say, turn the house out of windows. Southey. A current of rich and bright thoughts runs through the poem. Pindar himself would not on that subject have braced one to more vigour, nor Euripides have breathed into it more tenderness and passion. The first part of the stanza you have just now quoted might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions it describes. Porson. I am not insensible to the warmly chaste morality which is the soul of it, nor indifferent to the benefits that literature on many occasions has derived from Christianity. But poetry is a luxury to which, if she tolerates and permits it, she accepts no invitation: she beats down your gates and citadels, levels your high places, and eradicates your groves. For which reason I dwell more willingly with those authors who cannot mix and confound the manners they represent. The hope that we may rescue at Herculaneum a great number of them, hath, I firmly believe, kept me alive. Reasonably may the best be imagined to exist in a library of some thousands. It will be recorded to the infamy of the kings and princes now reigning, or rather of those whose feet put into motion their rocking-horses, that they never have made a common cause in behalf of learning, but, on the contrary, have made a common cause against it. The Earth opened her bosom before them, conjuring them to receive again, while it was possible, the glories of their species; and they turned their backs. They pretend that it is not their business or their duty to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is not an internal affair of any it interests all; it belongs to all and these scrupulous men have no scruple to interfere in giving their countenance and assistance when a province is to be invaded or a people to be enslaved. Southey. To neglect what is recoverable in the authors of antiquity, is like rowing away from a crew that is making its escape from shipwreck. Porson. The most contemptible of the Medicean family did more for the advancement of letters than the whole body of existing potentates. If their delicacy is shocked or alarmed at the idea of a proposal to send scientific and learned men to Naples, let them send a brace of pointers as internuncios, and the property is their own. Twenty scholars in seven years might retrieve the worst losses we experience from the bigotry of popes and califs. I do not intend to assert that every Herculanean manuscript might within that period be unfolded; but the three first legible sentences might be; which is quite sufficient to inform the intelligent reader whether a farther attempt on the scroll would repay his trouble. There are fewer than thirty Greek authors worth inquiring for; they exist beyond doubt, and beyond doubt they may, by attention, patience, and skill, be brought to light. out of England and northern Germany: in the rest of the world, exclusive of Greece, I doubt whether fifty scholars ever read one page of it without a version. Southey. Give fifteen to Italy, twelve to the Netherlands, as many to France; the remainder will hardly be collected in Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Austria. In regard to Spain and Portugal, we might as well look for them among the Moors and Negroes. Porson. You are too prodigal to Italy and France. Matthiæ, in his preface to the Greek grammar, speaks of Germany, of England, of Holland; not a word of France; the country of Stephanus, Budæus, and the Scaligers. Latterly we have seen only Villoison and Larcher fairly escape from the barbarous ignorance around them. Catholic nations in general seem as averse to the Greek language as to the Greek ritual. Southey. The knowledge of books written in our own is extending daily. Porson. Although the knowledge too of Greek is extending in England, I doubt whether it is to be found in such large masses as formerly. Schools and universities, like rills and torrents, roll down some grains of it every season; but the lumps have been long stored up in cabinets. I delight in the diffusion of learning; yet, I must confess it, I am most gratified and transported at finding a large quantity of it in one place: just as I would rather have a solid pat of butter at breakfast, than a splash of grease upon the table-cloth that covers half of it. Do not attempt to defend the idle and inconsiderate knaves who manage our affairs for us; or defend them on some other ground. Prove, if you please, that they have, one after another, been incessantly occupied in rendering us more moral, more prosperous, more free; but abstain, sir, from any allusion to their solicitude on the improvement of our literary condition. With a smaller sum than is annually expended on the appointment of some silly and impertinent young envoy, we might restore all or nearly all those writers of immortal name, whose disappearance has been the regret of Genius for four entire centuries. In my opinion a few thousand pounds laid out on such an undertaking, would be laid out as creditably as on a Persian carpet or a Turkish tent; as creditably as on a collar of rubies and a ball-dress of Brussels lace for our Lady in the manger, or as on gilding for the adoration of princesses and their capuchins, the posteriors Southey. You and I, Mr. Porson, are truly and sincerely concerned in the loss of such treasures: but how often have we heard much louder lamentations than ours, from gentlemen who, if they were brought again to light, would never cast their eyes over them, even in the bookseller's window. I have been present at homilies on the corruption and incredulity of the age, and principally on the violation of the sabbath, from sleek clergymen, canons of cathedrals, who were at the gaming-table the two first hours of that very day; and I have listened to others on the loss of the classics, from men who never took the trouble to turn over half that is remaining to us of Cicero and Livius. Porson. The Greek language is almost unknown and anteriors of Saint Januarius. OLIVER CROMWELL AND WALTER NOBLE.* Cromwell. What brings thee back from Staffordshire, friend Walter? He represented the city of Lichfield: he lived familiarly with the best patriots of the age, remonstrated with Cromwell and retired from public life on the punishment of Charles. The memorial of my ancestor's virtues I hold in trust for the benefit of our descendants. Noble. I hope, general Cromwell, to persuade you that the death of Charles will be considered by all Europe as a most atrocious action. Cromwell. Thou hast already persuaded me: what then? Noble. Surely then you will prevent it, for your authority is great. Even those who upon their |