ADVENTURES OF BUCCANEERS

Most of us, as boys, have envied the buccaneers.  The greatest of all boys, Canon Kingsley, once wrote a pleasing and regretful poem in which the Last Buccaneer represents himself as a kind of picturesque philanthropist:—

“There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,All furnished well with small arms, and cannons round about;And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free,To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.Thence we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folk of old;Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,Who flog men and keel-haul them, and starve them to the bone.”

“There were forty craft in Aves that were both swift and stout,All furnished well with small arms, and cannons round about;And a thousand men in Aves made laws so fair and free,To choose their valiant captains and obey them loyally.Thence we sailed against the Spaniard with his hoards of plate and gold,Which he wrung with cruel tortures from Indian folk of old;Likewise the merchant captains, with hearts as hard as stone,Who flog men and keel-haul them, and starve them to the bone.”

The buccaneer is “a gallant sailor,” according to Kingsley’s poem—a Robin Hood of the waters, who preys only on the wicked rich, or the cruel and Popish Spaniard, and the extortionate shipowner.  For his own part, when he is not rescuing poor Indians, the buccaneer lives mainly “for climate and the affections”:—

“Oh, sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the roarOf the breakers on the reef outside that never touched the shore.”

“Oh, sweet it was in Aves to hear the landward breeze,A swing with good tobacco in a net between the trees,With a negro lass to fan you, while you listened to the roarOf the breakers on the reef outside that never touched the shore.”

This is delightfully idyllic, like the lives of the Tahitian shepherds in the Anti-Jacobin—the shepherds whose occupation was a sinecure, as there were no sheep in Tahiti.

Yet the vocation was not really so touchingly chivalrous as the poet would have us deem.  One Joseph Esquemeling, himself a buccaneer, has written the history and described the exploits of his companions in plain prose, warning eager youths that “pieces-of-eight do not grow on every tree,” as many raw recruits have believed.  Mr. Esquemeling’s account of these matters may be purchased, with a great deal else that is instructive and entertaining, in “The History of the Buccaneers in America.”  My edition (of 1810) is a dumpy little book, in very small type, and quite a crowd of publishers took part in the venture.  The older editions are difficult to procure if your pockets are not stuffed with pieces-of-eight.  You do not often find even this volume, but “when found make a note of,” and you have a reply to Canon Kingsley.

A charitable old Scotch lady, who heard our ghostly foe evil spoken of, remarked that, “If we were all as diligent and conscientious as the Devil, it would be better for us.”  Now, the buccaneers were certainly models of diligence and conscientiousness in their own industry, which was to torture people till they gave up their goods, and then to run them through the body, and spend the spoils over drink and dice.  Except Dampier, who was a clever man, but a poor buccaneer (Mr. Clark Russell has written his life), they were the most hideously ruthless miscreants that ever disgraced the earth and the sea.  But their courage and endurance were no less notable than their greed and cruelty, so that a moral can be squeezed even out of these abandoned miscreants.  The soldiers and sailors who made their way within gunshot of Khartoum, overcoming thirst, hunger, heat, the desert, and the gallant children of the desert, did not fight, march, and suffer more bravely than the scoundrels who sacked Mairaibo and burned Panama.  Their good qualities were no less astounding and exemplary than their almost incredible wickedness.  They did not lie about in hammocks much, listening to the landward wind among the woods—the true buccaneers.  To tell the truth, most of them had no particular cause to love the human species.  They were often Europeans who had been sold into slavery on the West Indian plantations, where they learned lessons of cruelty by suffering it.  Thus Mr. Joseph Esquemeling, our historian, was beaten, tortured, and nearly starved to death in Tortuga, “so I determined, not knowing how to get any living, to enter into the order of the pirates or robbers of the sea.”  The poor Indians of the isles, much pitied by Kingsley’s buccaneer, had a habit of sticking their prisoners all over with thorns, wrapped in oily cotton, whereto they then set fire.  “These cruelties many Christians have seen while they lived among these barbarians.”  Mr. Esquemeling was to see, and inflict, plenty of this kind of torment, which was not out of the way nor unusual.  One planter alone had killed over a hundred of his servants—“the English did the same with theirs.”

A buccaneer voyage began in stealing a ship, collecting desperadoes, and torturing the local herdsmen till they gave up their masters’ flocks, which were salted as provisions.  Articles of service were then drawn up, on the principle “no prey, no pay.”  The spoils, when taken, were loyally divided as a rule, though Captain Morgan, of Wales, made no more scruple about robbing his crew than about barbecuing a Spanish priest.  “They are very civil and charitable to each other, so that if any one wants what another has, with great willingness they give it to one another.”  In other matters they did not in the least resemble the early Christians.  A fellow nick-named The Portuguese may be taken as our first example of their commendable qualities.

With a small ship of four guns he had taken a great one of twenty guns, with 70,000 pieces-of-eight . . . He himself, however, was presently captured by a larger vessel, and imprisoned on board.  Being carelessly watched, he escaped on two earthen jars (for he could not swim), reached the woods in Campechy, and walked for a hundred and twenty miles through the bush.  His only food was a few shell-fish, and by way of a knife he had a large nail, which he whetted to an edge on a stone.  Having made a kind of raft, he struck a river, and paddled to Golpho Triste, where he found congenial pirates.  With twenty of these, and a boat, he returned to Campechy, where he had been a prisoner, and actually captured the large ship in which he had lain captive!  Bad luck pursued him, however: his prize was lost in a storm; he reached Jamaica in a canoe, and never afterwards was concerned as leader in any affair of distinction.  Not even Odysseus had more resource, nor was more long-enduring; but Fortune was The Portuguese’s foe.

Braziliano, another buccaneer, served as a pirate before the mast, and “was beloved and respected by all.”  Being raised to command, he took a plate ship; but this success was of indifferent service to his otherwise amiable character.  “He would often appear foolish and brutish when in drink,” and has been known to roast Spaniards alive on wooden spits “for not showing him hog yards where he might steal swine.”  One can hardly suppose that Kingsley would have regrettedthisbuccaneer, even if he had been the last, which unluckily he was not.  His habit of sitting in the street beside a barrel of beer, and shooting all passers-by who would not drink with him, provoked remark, and was an act detestable to all friends of temperance principles.

François L’Olonnois, from southern France, had been kidnapped, and sold as a slave in the Caribbee Islands.  Recovering his freedom, he plundered the Spanish, says my buccaneer author, “till his unfortunate death.”  With two canoes he captured a ship which had been sent after him, carrying ten guns and a hangman for his express benefit.  This hangman, much to the fellow’s chagrin, L’Olonnois put to death like the rest of his prisoners.  His great achievements were in the Gulf of Venezuela or Bay of Maracaibo.  The gulf is a strong place; the mouth, no wider than a gun-shot, is guarded by two islands.  Far up the inlet is Maracaibo, a town of three thousand people, fortified and surrounded by woods.  Yet farther up is the town of Gibraltar.  To attack these was a desperate enterprise; but L’Olonnois stole past the forts, and frightened the townsfolk into the woods.  As a rule the Spaniards made the poorest resistance; there were examples of courage, but none of conduct.  With strong forts, heavy guns, many men, provisions, and ammunition, they quailed before the desperate valour of the pirates.  The towns were sacked, the fugitives hunted out in the woods, and the most abominable tortures were applied to make them betray their friends and reveal their treasures.  When they were silent, or had no treasures to declare, they were hacked, twisted, burned, and starved to death.

Such were the manners of L’Olonnois; and Captain Morgan, of Wales, was even more ruthless.

Gibraltar was well fortified and strengthened after Maracaibo fell; new batteries were raised, the way through the woods was barricaded, and no fewer than eight hundred men were under arms to resist a small pirate force, exhausted by debauch, and having its retreat cut off by the forts at the mouth of the great salt-water loch.  But L’Olonnois did not blench: he told the men that audacity was their one hope, also that he would pistol the first who gave ground.  The men cheered enthusiastically, and a party of three hundred and fifty landed.  The barricaded way they could not force, and in a newly cut path they met a strong battery which fired grape.  But L’Olonnois was invincible.  He tried that old trick which rarely fails, a sham retreat, and this lured the Spaniards from their earthwork on the path.  The pirates then turned, sword in hand, slew two hundred of the enemy, and captured eight guns.  The town yielded, the people fled to the woods, and then began the wonted sport of torturing the prisoners.  Maracaibo they ransomed afresh, obtained a pilot, passed the forts with ease, and returned after sacking a small province.  On a dividend being declared, they parted 260,000 pieces-of-eight among the band, and spent the pillage in a revel of three weeks.

L’Olonnois “got great repute” by this conduct, but I rejoice to add that in a raid on Nicaragua he “miserably perished,” and met what Mr. Esquemeling calls “his unfortunate death.”  For L’Olonnois was really an ungentlemanly character.  He would hack a Spaniard to pieces, tear out his heart, and “gnaw it with his teeth like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest, ‘I will serve you all alike if you show me not another way’” (to a town which he designed attacking).  In Nicaragua he was taken by the Indians, who, being entirely on the Spanish side, tore him to pieces and burned him.  Thus we really must not be deluded by the professions of Mr. Kingsley’s sentimental buccaneer, with his pity for “the Indian folk of old.”

Except Denis Scott, a worthy bandit in his day, Captain Henry Morgan is the first renowned British buccaneer.  He was a young Welshman, who, after having been sold as a slave in Barbadoes, became a sailor of fortune.  With about four hundred men he assailed Puerto Bello.  “If our number is small,” he said, “our hearts are great,” and so he assailed the third city and place of arms which Spain then possessed in the West Indies.  The entrance of the harbour was protected by two strong castles, judged as “almost impregnable,” while Morgan had no artillery of any avail against fortresses.  Morgan had the luck to capture a Spanish soldier, whom he compelled to parley with the garrison of the castle.  This he stormed and blew up, massacring all its defenders, while with its guns he disarmed the sister fortress.  When all but defeated in a new assault, the sight of the English colours animated him afresh.  He made the captive monks and nuns carry the scaling ladders; in this unwonted exploit the poor religious folk lost many of their numbers.  The wall was mounted, the soldiers were defeated, though the Governor fought like a Spaniard of the old school, slew many pirates with his own hand, and pistolled some of his own men for cowardice.  He died at his post, refusing quarter, and falling like a gentleman of Spain.  Morgan, too, was not wanting in fortitude: he extorted 100,000 pieces-of-eight from the Governor of Panama, and sent him a pistol as a sample of the gun wherewith he took so great a city.  He added that he would return and take this pistol out of Panama; nor was he less good than his word.  In Cuba he divided 250,000 pieces-of-eight, and a great booty in other treasure.  A few weeks saw it all in the hands of the tavern-keepers and women of the place.

Morgan’s next performance was a new sack of Maracaibo, now much stronger than L’Olonnois had found it.  After the most appalling cruelties, not fit to be told, he returned, passing the castles at the mouth of the port by an ingenious stratagem.  Running boatload after boatload of men to the land side, he brought them back by stealth, leading the garrison to expect an attack from that quarter.  The guns were massed to landward, and no sooner was this done than Morgan sailed up through the channel with but little loss.  Why the Spaniards did not close the passage with a boom does not appear.  Probably they were glad to be quit of Morgan on any terms.

A great Spanish fleet he routed by the ingenious employment of a fire-ship.  In a later expedition a strong place was taken by a curious accident.  One of the buccaneers was shot through the body with an arrow.  He drew it out, wrapped it in cotton, fired it from his musket, and so set light to a roof and burned the town.

His raid on Panama was extraordinary for the endurance of his men.  For days they lived on the leather of bottles and belts.  “Some, who were never out of their mothers’ kitchens, may ask how these pirates could eat and digest these pieces of leather, so hard and dry?  Whom I answer—that could they once experience what hunger, or rather famine is, they would find the way, as the pirates did.”  It was at the close of this march that the Indians drove wild bulls among them; but they cared very little for these new allies of the Spaniards: beef, in any form, was only too welcome.

Morgan burned the fair cedar houses of Panama, but lost the plate ship with all the gold and silver out of the churches.  How he tortured a poor wretch who chanced to wear a pair of taffety trousers belonging to his master, with a small silver key hanging out, it is better not to repeat.  The men only got two hundred pieces-of-eight each, after all their toil, for their Welshman was indeed a thief, and bilked his crews, no less than he plundered the Spaniards, without remorse.  Finally, he sneaked away from the fleet with a ship or two; and it is to be feared that Captain Morgan made rather a good thing by dint of his incredible cruelty and villainy.

And so we leave Mr. Esquemeling, whom Captain Morgan also deserted; for who would linger long when there is not even honour among thieves?  Alluring as the pirate’s profession is, we must not forget that it had a seamy side, and was by no means all rum and pieces-of-eight.  And there is something repulsive to a generous nature in roasting men because they will not show you where to steal hogs.

“The general reader,” says a frank critic, “hates the very name of a Saga.”  The general reader, in that case, is to be pitied, and, if possible, converted.  But, just as Pascal admits that the sceptic can only become religious by living as if hewerereligious—by stupefying himself, as Pascal plainly puts it, with holy water—so it is to be feared that there is but a single way of winning over the general reader to the Sagas.  Preaching and example, as in this brief essay, will not avail with him.  He must take Pascal’s advice, and live for an hour or two as if he were a lover of Sagas.  He must, in brief, give that old literature a fair chance.  He has now his opportunity: Mr. William Morris and Mr. Eirikr Magnusson are publishing a series of cheap translations—cheap only in coin of the realm—aSaga Library.  If a general reader tries the first tale in the first volume, story of “Howard the Halt,”—if he tries it honestly, and still can make no way with it, then let him take comfort in the doctrine of Invincible Ignorance.  Let him go back to his favourite literature of gossiping reminiscence, or of realistic novels.  We have all, probably, a drop of the Northmen’s blood in us, but in that general reader the blood is dormant.

What is a Saga?  It is neither quite a piece of history nor wholly a romance.  It is a very old story of things and adventures that really happened, but happened so long ago, and in times so superstitious, that marvels and miracles found their way into the legend.  The best Sagas are those of Iceland, and those, in translations, are the finest reading that the natural man can desire.  If you want true pictures of life and character, which are always the same at bottom, or true pictures of manners, which are always changing, and of strange customs and lost beliefs, in the Sagas they are to be found.  Or if you like tales of enterprise, of fighting by land and sea, fighting with men and beasts, with storms and ghosts and fiends, the Sagas are full of this entertainment.

The stories of which we are speaking were first told in Iceland, perhaps from 950 to 1100 B.C.  When Norway and Sweden were still heathen, a thousand years ago, they were possessed by families of noble birth, owning no master, and often at war with each other, when the men were not sailing the seas, to rob and kill in Scotland, England, France, Italy, and away east as far as Constantinople, or farther.  Though they were wild sea robbers and warriors, they were sturdy farmers, great shipbuilders; every man of them, however wealthy, could be his own carpenter, smith, shipwright, and ploughman.  They forged their own good short swords, hammered their own armour, ploughed their own fields.  In short, they lived like Odysseus, the hero of Homer, and were equally skilled in the arts of war and peace.  They were mighty lawyers, too, and had a most curious and minute system of laws on all subjects—land, marriage, murder, trade, and so forth.  These laws were not written, though the people had a kind of letters called runes.  But they did not use them much for documents, but merely for carving a name on a sword-blade, or a tombstone, or on great gold rings such as they wore on their arms.  Thus the laws existed in the memory and judgment of the oldest and wisest and most righteous men of the country.  The most important was the law of murder.  If one man slew another, he was not tried by a jury, but any relation of the dead killed him “at sight,” wherever he found him.  Even in an Earl’s hall, Kari struck the head off one of his friend Njal’s Burners, and the head bounded on the board, among the trenchers of meat and the cups of mead or ale.  But it was possible, if the relations of a slain man consented, for the slayer to pay his price—every man was valued at so much—and then revenge was not taken.  But, as a rule, one revenge called for another.  Say Hrut slew Hrap, then Atli slew Hrut, and Gisli slew Atli, and Kari slew Gisli, and so on till perhaps two whole families were extinct and there was peace.  The gods were not offended by manslaughter openly done, but were angry with treachery, cowardice, meanness, theft, perjury, and every kind of shabbiness.

This was the state of affairs in Norway when a king arose, Harold Fair-Hair, who tried to bring all these proud people under him, and to make them pay taxes and live more regularly and quietly.  They revolted at this, and when they were too weak to defy the king they set sail and fled to Iceland.  There in the lonely north, between the snow and fire, the hot-water springs, the volcano of Hecla, the great rivers full of salmon that rush down such falls as Golden Foot, there they lived their old-fashioned life, cruising as pirates and merchants, taking foreign service at Mickle Garth, or in England or Egypt, filling the world with the sound of their swords and the sky with the smoke of their burnings.  For they feared neither God nor man nor ghost, and were no less cruel than brave; the best of soldiers, laughing at death and torture, like the Zulus, who are a kind of black Vikings of Africa.  On some of them “Bersark’s gang” would fall—that is, they would become in a way mad, slaying all and sundry, biting their shields, and possessed with a furious strength beyond that of men, which left them as weak as children when it passed away.  These Bersarks were outlaws, all men’s enemies, and to kill them was reckoned a great adventure, and a good deed.  The women were worthy of the men—bold, quarrelsome, revengeful.  Some were loyal, like Bergthora, who foresaw how all her sons and her husband were to be burned; but who would not leave them, and perished in the burning without a cry.  Some were as brave as Howard’s wife, who enabled her husband, old and childless, to overthrow the wealthy bully, the slayer of his only son.  Some were treacherous, as Halgerda the Fair.  Three husbands she had, and was the death of every man of them.  Her last lord was Gunnar of Lithend, the bravest and most peaceful of men.  Once she did a mean thing, and he slapped her face.  She never forgave him.  At last enemies besieged him in his house.  The doors were locked—all was quiet within.  One of the enemies climbed up to a window slit, and Gunnar thrust him through with his lance.  “Is Gunnar at home?” said the besiegers.  “I know not—but his lance is,” said the wounded man, and died with that last jest on his lips.  For long Gunnar kept them at bay with his arrows, but at last one of them cut the arrow string.  “Twist me a string with thy hair,” he said to his wife, Halgerda, whose yellow hair was very long and beautiful.  “Is it a matter of thy life or death?” she asked. “Ay,” he said.  “Then I remember that blow thou gavest me, and I will see thy death.”  So Gunnar died, overcome by numbers, and they killed Samr, his hound, but not before Samr had killed a man.

So they lived always with sword or axe in hand—so they lived, and fought, and died.

Then Christianity was brought to them from Norway by Thangbrand, and if any man said he did not believe a word of it, Thangbrand had the schoolboy argument, “Will you fight?”  So they fought a duel on aholmor island, that nobody might interfere—holm-gang they called it—and Thangbrand usually killed his man.  In Norway, Saint Olaf did the like, killing and torturing those who held by the old gods—Thor, Odin, and Freya, and the rest.  So, partly by force and partly because they were somewhat tired of bloodshed, horsefights, and the rest, they received the word of the white Christ and were baptised, and lived by written law, and did not avenge themselves by their own hands.

They were Christians now, but they did not forget the old times, the old feuds and fightings and Bersarks, and dealings with ghosts, and with dead bodies that arose and wrought horrible things, haunting houses and strangling men.  The Icelandic ghosts were able-bodied, well “materialised,” and Grettir and Olaf Howard’s son fought them with strength of arm and edge of steel.Truestories of the ancient days were told at the fireside in the endless winter nights by story tellers or Scalds.  It was thought a sin for any one to alter these old stories, but as generations passed more and more wonderful matters came into the legend.  It was believed that the dead Gunnar, the famed archer, sang within his cairn or “Howe,” the mound wherein he was buried, and his famous bill or cutting spear was said to have been made by magic, and to sing in the night before the wounding of men and the waking of war.  People were thought to be “second-sighted”—that is, to have prophetic vision.  The night when Njal’s house was burned his wife saw all the meat on the table “one gore of blood,” just as in Homer the prophet Theoclymenus beheld blood falling in gouts from the walls, before the slaying of the Wooers.  The Valkyries, the Choosers of the slain, and the Norns who wove the fates of men at a ghastly loom were seen by living eyes.  In the graves where treasures were hoarded the Barrowwights dwelt, ghosts that were sentinels over the gold: witchwives changed themselves into wolves and other monstrous animals, and for many weeks the heroes Signy and Sinfjotli ran wild in the guise of wolves.

These and many other marvels crept into the Sagas, and made the listeners feel a shudder of cold beside the great fire that burned in the centre of the skali or hall where the chief sat, giving meat and drink to all who came, where the women span and the Saga man told the tales of long ago.  Finally, at the end of the middle ages, these Sagas were written down in Icelandic, and in Latin occasionally, and many of them have been translated into English.

Unluckily, these translations have hitherto been expensive to buy, and were not always to be had easily.  For the wise world, which reads newspapers all day and half the night, does not care much for books, still less for good books, least of all for old books.  You can make no money out of reading Sagas: they have nothing to say about stocks and shares, nor about Prime Ministers and politics.  Nor will they amuse a man, if nothing amuses him but accounts of races and murders, or gossip about Mrs. Nokes’s new novel, Mrs. Stokes’s new dresses, or Lady Jones’s diamonds.  The Sagas only tell how brave men—of our own blood very likely—lived, and loved, and fought, and voyaged, and died, before there was much reading or writing, when they sailed without steam, travelled without railways, and warred hand-to-hand, not with hidden dynamite and sunk torpedoes.  But, for stories of gallant life and honest purpose, the Sagas are among the best in the world.

Of Sagas in English one of the best is the “Volsunga,” the story of the Niflungs and Volsungs.  This book, thanks to Mr. William Morris, can be bought for a shilling.  It is a strange tale in which gods have their parts, the tale of that oldest Treasure Hunt, the Hunt for the gold of the dwarf Andvari.  This was guarded by the serpent, Fafnir, who had once been a man, and who was killed by the hero Sigurd.  But Andvari had cursed the gold, because his enemies robbed him of it to the very last ring, and had no pity.  Then the brave Sigurd was involved in the evil luck.  He it was who rode through the fire, and woke the fair enchanted Brynhild, the Shield-maiden.  And she loved him, and he her, with all their hearts, always to the death.  But by ill fate she was married to another man, Sigurd’s chief friend, and Sigurd to another woman.  And the women fell to jealousy and quarrelling as women will, and they dragged the friends into the feud, and one manslaying after another befell, till that great murder of men in the Hall of Atli, the King.  The curse came on one and all of them—a curse of blood, and of evil loves, and of witchwork destroying good and bad, all fearless, and all fallen in one red ruin.

The “Volsunga Saga” has this unique and unparalleled interest, that it gives the spectacle of the highest epic genius, struggling out of savagery into complete and free and conscious humanity.  It is a mark of the savage intellect not to discriminate abruptly between man and the lower animals.  In the tales of the lower peoples, the characters are just as often beasts as men and women.  Now, in the earlier and wilder parts of the “Volsunga Saga,” otters and dragons play human parts.  Signy and his son, and the mother of their enemy, put on the skins of wolves, become wolves, and pass through hideous adventures.  The story reeks with blood, and ravins with lust of blood.  But when Sigurd arrives at full years of manhood, the barbarism yields place, the Saga becomes human and conscious.

These legends deal little with love.  But in the “Volsunga Saga” the permanent interest is the true and deathless love of Sigurd and Brynhild: their separation by magic arts, the revival of their passion too late, the man’s resigned and heroic acquiescence, the fiercer passion of the woman, who will neither bear her fate nor accept her bliss at the price of honour and her plighted word.

The situation, thenodus, is neither ancient merely nor modern merely, but of all time.  Sigurd, having at last discovered the net in which he was trapped, was content to make the best of marriage and of friendship.  Brynhild was not.  “The hearts of women are the hearts of wolves,” says the ancient Sanskrit commentary on the Rig Veda.  But the she-wolf’s heart broke, like a woman’s, when she had caused Sigurd’s slaying.  Both man and woman face life, as they conceive it, with eyes perfectly clear.

The magic and the supernatural wiles are accidental, the human heart is essential and eternal.  There is no scene like this in the epics of Greece.  This is a passion that Homer did not dwell upon.  In the Iliad and Odyssey the repentance of Helen is facile; she takes life easily.  Clytemnestra is not brought on the stage to speak for herself.  In this respect the epic of the North, without the charm and the delightfulness of the Southern epic, excels it; in this and in a certain bare veracity, but in nothing else.  We cannot put the Germanic legend on the level of the Greek, for variety, for many-sided wisdom, for changing beauty of a thousand colours.  But in this one passion of love the “Volsunga Saga” excels the Iliad.

The Greek and the Northern stories are alike in one thing.  Fate is all-powerful over gods and men.  Odin cannot save Balder; nor Thetis, Achilles; nor Zeus, Sarpedon.  But in the Sagas fate is more constantly present to the mind.  Much is thought of being “lucky,” or “unlucky.”  Howard’s “good luck” is to be read in his face by the wise, even when, to the common gaze, he seems a half-paralytic dotard, dying of grief and age.

Fate and evil luck dog the heroes of the Sagas.  They seldom “end well,” as people say,—unless, when a brave man lies down to die on the bed he has strewn of the bodies of his foes, you callthatending well.  So died Grettir the Strong.  Even from a boy he was strong and passionate, short of temper, quick of stroke, but loyal, brave, and always unlucky.  His worst luck began after he slew Glam.  This Glam was a wicked heathen herdsman, who would not fast on Christmas Eve.  So on the hills his dead body was found, swollen as great as an ox, and as blue as death.

What killed him they did not know.  But he haunted the farmhouse, riding the roof, kicking the sides with his heels, killing cattle and destroying all things.  Then Grettir came that way, and he slept in the hall.  At night the dead Glam came in, and Grettir arose, and to it they went, struggling and dashing the furniture to bits.  Glam even dragged Grettir to the door, that he might slay him under the sky, and for all his force Grettir yielded ground.  Then on the very threshold he suddenly gave way when Glam was pulling hardest, and they fell, Glam undermost.  Then Grettir drew the short sword, “Kari’s loom,” that he had taken from a haunted grave, and stabbed the dead thing that had lived again.  But, as Glam lay a-dying in the second death, the moon fell on his awful eyes, and Grettir saw the horror of them, and from that hour he could not endure to be in the dark, and he never dared to go alone.  This was his death, for he had an evil companion who betrayed him to his enemies; but when they set on Grettir, though he was tired and sick of a wound, many died with him.  No man died like Grettir the Strong, nor slew so many in his death.

Besides those Sagas, there is the best of all, but the longest, “Njala” (pronounced “Nyoula”), the story of Burnt Njal.  That is too long to sketch here, but it tells how, through the hard hearts and jealousy of women, ruin came at last on the gentle Gunnar, and the reckless Skarphedin of the axe, “The Ogress of War,” and how Njal, the wisest, the most peaceful, the most righteous of men, was burned with all his house, and how that evil deed was avenged on the Burners of Kari.

The site of Njal’s house is yet to be seen, after these nine hundred years, and the little glen where Kari hid when he leaped through the smoke and the flame that made his sword-blade blue.  Yes, the very black sand that Bergthora and her maids threw on the fire lies there yet, and remnants of the whey they cast on the flames, when water failed them.  They were still there beneath the earth when an English traveller dug up some of the ground last year, and it is said that an American gentleman found a gold ring in the house of Njal.  The story of him and of his brave sons, and of his slaves, and of his kindred, and of Queens and Kings of Norway, and of the coming of the white Christ, are all in the “Njala.”  That and the other Sagas would bear being shortened for general readers; once they were all that the people had by way of books, and they liked them long.  But, shortened or not, they are brave books for men, for the world is a place of battle still, and life is war.  These old heroes knew it, and did not shirk it, but fought it out, and left honourable names and a glory that widens year by year.  For the story of Njal and Gunnar and Skarphedin was told by Captain Speedy to the guards of Theodore, King of Abyssinia.  They liked it well; and with queer altered names and changes of the tale, that Saga will be told in Abyssinia, and thence carried all through Africa where white men have never wandered.  So wide, so long-enduring a renown could be given by a nameless Sagaman.

When I was very young, a distinguishedReviewwas still younger.  I remember reading one of the earliest numbers, being then myself a boy of ten, and coming on a review of a novel.  Never, as it seemed to me, or seems to my memory, was a poor novel more heavily handled: and yet I felt that the book must be a book to read on the very earliest opportunity.  It was “Westward Ho!” the most famous, and perhaps the best novel, of Charles Kingsley.  Often one has read it since, and it is an example of those large, rich, well-fed romances, at which you can cut and come again, as it were, laying it down, and taking it up on occasion, with the certainty of being excited, amused—and preached at.

Lately I have re-read “Westward Ho!” and some of Kingsley’s other books, “Hypatia,” “Hereward the Wake,” and the poems, over again.  The old pleasure in them is not gone indeed, but it is modified.  One must be a boy to think Kingsley a humourist.  At the age of twelve or ten you take the comic passages which he conscientiously provides, without being vexed or offended; you take them merely in the way of business.  Better things are coming: struggles with the Inquisition, storms at sea, duels, the Armada, wanderings in the Lotus land of the tropical west; and for the sake of all this a boy puts up good-naturedly with Kingsley’s humour.  Perhaps he even grins over Amyas “burying alternately his face in the pasty and the pasty in his face,” or he tries to feel diverted by the Elizabethan waggeries of Frank.  But there is no fun in them—they are mechanical; they are worse than the humours of Scott’s Sir Percy Shafto, which are not fine.

The same sense of everything not being quite so excellent as one remembered it haunts one in “Hereward the Wake, the Last of the English.”  Kingsley calls him “the Last of the English,” but he is really the first of the literary Vikings.  In the essay on the Sagas here I have tried to show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were actually like.  They caught Kingsley’s fancy, and his “Hereward,” though born on English soil, is really Norse—not English.  But Kingsley did not write about the Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan heroes in “Westward Ho!” in a perfectly simple, straightforward way.  He was always thinking of our own times and referring to them.  That is why even the rather ruffianly Hereward is so great an enemy of saints and monks.  That is why, in “Hypatia” (which opens so well), we have those prodigiously dull, stupid, pedantic, and conceited reflections of Raphael Ben Ezra.  That is why, in all Kingsley’s novels, he is perpetually exciting himself in defence of marriage and the family life, as if any monkish ideas about the blessedness of bachelorhood were ever likely to drive the great Anglo-Saxon race into convents and monasteries.  That is the very last thing we have to be afraid of; but Kingsley was afraid of it, and was eternally attacking everything Popish and monkish.

Boys and young people, then, can read “Westward Ho!” and “Hypatia,” and “Hereward the Wake,” with far more pleasure than their elders.  They hurry on with the adventures, and do not stop to ask what the moralisings mean.  They forgive the humour of Kingsley because it is well meant.  They get, in short, the real good of this really great and noble and manly and blundering genius.  They take pleasure in his love of strong men, gallant fights, desperate encounters with human foes, with raging seas, with pestilence, or in haunted forests.  For in all that is good of his talent—in his courage, his frank speech, his love of sport, his clear eyes, his devotion to field and wood, river, moor, sea, and storms—Kingsley is a boy.  He has the brave, rather hasty, and not over well-informed enthusiasm of sixteen, for persons and for causes.  He saw an opponent (it might be Father Newman): his heart lusted for a fight; he called his opponent names, he threw his cap into the ring, he took his coat off, he fought, he got a terrible scientific drubbing.  It was like a sixth-form boy matching himself against the champion.  And then he bore no malice.  He took his defeat bravely.  Nay, are we not left with a confused feeling that he was not far in the wrong, though he had so much the worse of the fight?

Such was Kingsley: a man with a boy’s heart; a hater of cruelty and injustice, and also with a brave, indomitable belief that his own country and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the quarrel.  He loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies, Spain and the Pope, though even in them he saw the good.  He is for ever scolding the Spanish for their cruelties to the Indians, but he defends our doings to the Irish, which (at that time) were neither more nor less oppressive than the Spanish performances in America.  “Go it, our side!” you always hear this good Kingsley crying; and one’s heart goes out to him for it, in an age when everybody often proves his own country to be in the wrong.

Simple, brave, resolute, manly, a little given to “robustiousness,” Kingsley transfigured all these qualities by possessing the soul and the heart of a poet.  He was not a very great poet, indeed, but a true poet—one of the very small band who are cut off, by a gulf that can never be passed, from mere writers of verse, however clever, educated, melodious, ingenious, amiable, and refined.  He had the real spark of fire, the true note; though the spark might seldom break into flame, and the note was not always clear.  Never let us confuse true poets with writers of verse, still less with writers of “poetic prose.”  Kingsley wrote a great deal of that-perhaps too much: his descriptions of scenes are not always as good as in Hereward’s ride round the Fens, or when the tall, Spanish galleon staggers from the revenge of man to the vengeance of God, to her doom through the mist, to her rest in the sea.  Perhaps only a poet could have written that prose; it is certain no writer of “poetic prose” could have written Kingsley’s poems.

His songs are his best things; they really are songs, not merely lyric poems.  They have the merit of being truly popular, whether they are romantic, like “The Sands o’ Dee,” which actually reproduces the best qualities of the old ballad; or whether they are pathetic, like the “Doll’s Song,” in “Water Babies”; or whether they attack an abuse, as in the song of “The Merry Brown Hares”; or whether they soar higher, as in “Deep, deep Love, within thine own abyss abiding”; or whether they are mere noble nonsense, as in “Lorraine Loree”:—

“She mastered young Vindictive; oh, the gallant lass was she,And kept him straight and won the race, as near as near could be;But he killed her at the brook against a pollard willow tree;Oh, he killed her at the brook, the brute, for all the world to see,And no one but the baby cried for poor Lorraine Loree.”

“She mastered young Vindictive; oh, the gallant lass was she,And kept him straight and won the race, as near as near could be;But he killed her at the brook against a pollard willow tree;Oh, he killed her at the brook, the brute, for all the world to see,And no one but the baby cried for poor Lorraine Loree.”

The truth about Charles Kingsley seems to be that he rather made a brave and cheery noise in this night-battle of modern life, than that he directed any movement of forces.  He kept cheering, as it were, and waving his sword with a contagious enthusiasm.  Being a poet, and a man both of heart and of sentiment, he was equally attached to the best things of the old world and to the best of the new world, as far as one can forecast what it is to be.  He loved the stately homes of England, the ancient graduated order of society, the sports of the past, the military triumphs, the patriotic glories.  But he was also on the side of the poor: as “Parson Lot” he attempted to be a Christian Socialist.

Now, the Socialists are the people who want to take everything; the Christians are the persons who do not want to give more than they find convenient.  Kingsley himself was ready to give, and did give, his time, his labour, his health, and probably his money, to the poor.  But he was by no means minded that they should swallow up the old England with church and castle, manor-house and tower, wealth, beauty, learning, refinement.  The man who wrote “Alton Locke,” the story of the starved tailor-poet, was the man who nearly wept when he heard a fox bark, and reflected that the days of fox-hunting were numbered.  He had a poet’s politics, Colonel Newcome’s politics.  He was for England, for the poor, for the rich, for the storied houses of the chivalrous past, for the cottage, for the hall; and was dead against the ideas of Manchester, and of Mr. John Bright.  “My father,” he says in a letter, “would have put his hand to a spade or an axe with any man, and so could I pretty well, too, when I was in my prime; and my eldest son is now working with his own hands at farming, previous to emigrating to South America, where he will do the drudgery of his own cattle-pens and sheepfolds; and if I were twenty-four and unmarried I would go out there too, and work like an Englishman, and live by the sweat of my brow.”

This was the right side of his love of the Vikings; it was thustheylived, when not at war—thus that every gentleman who has youth and health should work, winning new worlds for his class, in place of this miserable, over-crowded, brawling England.  This, I think, was, or should have been, the real lesson and message of Kingsley for the generations to come.  Like Scott the scion of an old knightly line, he had that drop of wild blood which drives men from town into the air and the desert, wherever there are savage lands to conquer, beasts to hunt, and a hardy life to be lived.  But he was the son of a clergyman, and a clergyman himself.  The spirit that should have gone into action went into talking, preaching, writing—all sources of great pleasure to thousands of people, and so not wasted.  Yet these were not the natural outlets of Kingsley’s life: he should have been a soldier, or an explorer; at least, we may believe that he would have preferred such fortune.  He did his best, the best he knew, and it is all on the side of manliness, courage, kindness.  Perhaps he tried too many things—science, history, fairy tales, religious and political discussions, romance, poetry.  Poetry was what he did best, romance next; his science and his history are entertaining, but without authority.

This, when one reads it again, seems a cold, unfriendly estimate of a man so ardent and so genuine, a writer so vivacious and courageous as Kingsley.  Even the elderly reviewer bears to him, and to his brother Henry, a debt he owes to few of their generation.  The truth is we shouldreadKingsley; we must not criticise him.  We must accept him and be glad of him, as we accept a windy, sunny autumn day—beautiful and blusterous—to be enjoyed and struggled with.  If once we stop and reflect, and hesitate, he seems to preach too much, and with a confidence which his knowledge of the world and of history does not justify.  To be at one with Kingsley we must be boys again, and that momentary change cannot but be good for us.  Soon enough—too soon—we shall drop back on manhood, and on all the difficulties and dragons that Kingsley drove away by a blast on his chivalrous and cheery horn.

Surely it is a pleasant thing that there are books, like other enjoyments, for all ages.  You would not have a boy prefer whist to fives, nor tobacco to toffee, nor Tolstoï to Charles Lever.  The ancients reckoned Tyrtæcus a fine poet, not that he was particularly melodious or reflective, but that he gave men heart to fight for their country.  Charles Lever has done as much.  In his biography, by Mr. Fitzpatrick, it is told that a widow lady had but one son, and for him she obtained an appointment at Woolwich.  The boy was timid and nervous, and she fancied that she must find for him some other profession—perhaps that of literature.  But he one day chanced on Lever’s novels, and they put so much heart into him that his character quite altered, and he became the bravest of the brave.

Lever may not do as much for every one, but he does teach contempt of danger, or rather, delight in it: a gay, spontaneous, boyish kind of courage—Irish courage at its best.  We may get more good from that than harm from all his tales of much punch and many drinking bouts.  These are no longer in fashion and are not very gay reading, perhaps, but his stories and songs, his duels and battles and hunting scenes are as merry and as good as ever.  Wild as they seem in the reading, they are not far from the truth, as may be gathered out of “Barrington’s Memoirs,” and their tales of the reckless Irish life some eighty years ago.

There were two men in Charles Lever—a glad man and a sad man.  The gaiety was for his youth, when he poured out his “Lorrequers” and “O’Malleys,” all the mirth and memories of his boyhood, all the tales of fighting and feasting he gleaned from battered, seasoned old warriors, like Major Monsoon.  Even then, Mr. Thackeray, who knew him, and liked and laughed at him, recognised through his merriment “the fund of sadness beneath.”  “The author’s character isnothumour, but sentiment . . . extreme delicacy, sweetness and kindliness of heart.  The spirits are mostly artificial, thefondis sadness, as appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and people.”   Even in “Charles O’Malley,” what a true, dark picture that is of the duel beside the broad, angry river on the level waste under the wide grey sky!  Charles has shot his opponent, Bodkin, and with Considine, his second, is making his escape.  “Considine cried out suddenly, ‘Too infamous, by Jove: we are murdered men!’”

“‘What do you mean?’ said I.

“‘Don’t you see that?’ said he, pointing to something black which floated from a pole at the opposite side of the river.

“‘Yes; what is it?’

“‘It’s his coat they’ve put upon an oar, to show the people he’s killed—that’s all.  Every man here’s his tenant; and look there! they’re not giving us much doubt as to their intentions.’

“Here a tremendous yell burst forth from the mass of people along the shore, which, rising to a terrific cry, sank gradually down to a low wailing, then rose and fell several times, as the Irish death-cry filled the air, and rose to heaven, as if imploring vengeance on a murderer.”

Passages like this, and that which follows—the dangerous voyage through the storm on the flooded Shannon, and through the reefs—are what Mr. Thackeray may have had in his mind when he spoke of Lever’s underlying melancholy.  Like other men with very high spirits, he had hours of gloom, and the sadness and the thoughtfulness that were in him came forth then and informed his later books.  These are far more carefully written, far more cunningly constructed, than the old chapters written from month to month as the fit took him, with no more plan or premeditation than “Pickwick.”  But it is the early stories that we remember, and that he lives by—the pages thrown off at a heat, when he was a lively doctor with few patients, and was not over-attentive to them.  These were the days of Harry Lorrequer and Tom Burke; characters that ran away with him, and took their own path through a merry world of diversion.  Like the knights in Sir Thomas Malory, these heroes “ride at adventure,” ride amazing horses that dread no leap, be it an Irish stone wall on a mountain crest, or be it the bayonets of a French square.

Mr. Lever’s biographer has not been wholly successful in pleasing the critics, and he does not seem to affect very critical airs himself, but he tells a straightforward tale.  The life of Charles Lever is the natural commentary on his novels.  He was born at Dublin in 1806, the son of a builder or architect.  At school he was very much flogged, and the odds are that he deserved these attentions, for he had high spirits beyond the patience of dominies.  Handsome, merry and clever, he read novels in school hours, wore a ring, and set up as a dandy.  Even then he was in love with the young lady whom he married in the end.  At a fight with boys of another school, he and a friend placed a mine under the ground occupied by the enemy, and blew them, more or less, into the air.  Many an eyebrow was singed off on that fatal day, when, for the only time, this romancer of the wars “smelled powder.”  He afterwards pleaded for his party before the worthy police magistrate, and showed great promise as a barrister.  At Trinity College, Dublin, he was full of his fun, made ballads, sang them through the streets in disguise (like Fergusson, the Scottish poet), and one night collected thirty shillings in coppers.

The original of Frank Webber, in “Charles O’Malley,” was a chum of his, and he took part in the wonderful practical jokes which he has made immortal in that novel.

From Trinity College, Dublin, Lever went to Göttingen, where he found fun and fighting enough among the German students.  From that hour he became a citizen of the world, or, at least, of Europe, and perhaps, like the prophets, was most honoured when out of his own country.  He returned to Dublin and took his degree in medicine, after playing a famous practical joke.  A certain medical professor was wont to lecture in bed.  One night he left town unexpectedly.  Lever, by chance, came early to lecture, found the Professor absent, slipped into his bed, put on his nightcap, and took the class himself.  On another day he was standing outside the Foundling Hospital with a friend, a small man.  Now, a kind of stone cradle for foundlings was built outside the door, and, when a baby was placed therein, a bell rang.  Lever lifted up his friend, popped him into the cradle, and had the joy of seeing the promising infant picked out by the porter.

It seems a queer education for a man of letters; but, like Sir Walter Scott when revelling in Liddesdale, he “was making himself all the time.”  He was collecting myriads of odd experiences and treasures of anecdotes; he was learning to know men of all sorts; and later, as a country doctor, he had experiences of mess tables, of hunting, and of all the ways of his remarkable countrymen.  When cholera visited his district he stuck to his work like a man of heart and courage.  But the usual tasks of a country doctor wearied him; he neglected them, he became unpopular with the authorities, he married his first love and returned to Brussels, where he practised as a physician.  He had already begun his first notable book, “Harry Lorrequer,” in theUniversity Magazine.  It is merely a string of Irish and other stories, good, bad, and indifferent—a picture gallery full of portraits of priests, soldiers, peasants and odd characters.  The plot is of no importance; we are not interested in Harry’s love affairs, but in his scrapes, adventures, duels at home and abroad.  He fights people by mistake whom he does not know by sight, he appears on parade with his face blackened, he wins large piles attrente et quarante, he disposes of coopers of claret and bowls of punch, and the sheep on a thousand hills provide him with devilled kidneys.  The critics and the authors thought little of the merry medley, but the public enjoyed it, and defied the reviewers.  One paper preferred the book to a wilderness of “Pickwicks”; and as this opinion was advertised everywhere by M’Glashan, the publisher, Mr. Dickens was very much annoyed indeed.  Authors are easily annoyed.  But Lever writesut placeat pueris, and there was a tremendous fight at Rugby between two boys, the “Slogger Williams” and “Tom Brown” of the period, for the possession of “Harry Lorrequer.”  When an author has the boys of England on his side, he can laugh at the critics.  Not that Lever laughed: he, too, was easily vexed, and much depressed, when the reviews assailed him.  Next he began “Charles O’Malley”; and if any man reads this essay who has not read the “Irish Dragoon,” let him begin at once.  “O’Malley” is what you can recommend to a friend.  Here is every species of diversion: duels and steeplechases, practical jokes at college (good practical jokes, not booby traps and apple-pie beds); here is fighting in the Peninsula.  If any student is in doubt, let him try chapter xiv.—the battle on the Douro.  This is, indeed, excellent military writing, and need not fear comparison as art with Napier’s famous history.  Lever has warmed to his work; his heart is in it; he had the best information from an eye-witness; and the brief beginning, on the peace of nature before the strife of men, is admirably poetical.

To reach the French, under Soult, Wellesley had to cross the deep and rapid Douro, in face of their fire, and without regular transport.  “He dared the deed.  What must have been his confidence in the men he commanded! what must have been his reliance on his own genius!”

You hold your breath as you read, while English and Germans charge, till at last the field is won, and the dust of the French columns retreating in the distance blows down the road to Spain.

The Great Duke read this passage, and marvelled how Lever knew certain things that he tells.  He learned this, and much more, the humours of war, from the original of Major Monsoon.  Falstaff is alone in the literature of the world, but if ever there came a later Falstaff, Monsoon was the man.  And where have you such an Irish Sancho Panza as Micky Free, that independent minstrel, or such an Irish Di Vernon as Baby Blake?  The critics may praise Lever’s thoughtful and careful later novels as they will, but “Charles O’Malley” will always be the pattern of a military romance.  The anecdote of “a virtuous weakness” in O’Shaughnessy’s father’s character would alone make the fortune of many a story.  The truth is, it is not easy to lay down “Charles O’Malley,” to leave off reading it, and get on with the account of Lever.

His excellent and delightful novel scarcely received one favourable notice from the press.  This may have been because it was so popular; but Lever became so nervous that he did not like to look at the papers.  When he went back to Dublin and edited a magazine there, he was more fiercely assailed than ever.  It is difficult for an Irishman to write about the Irish, or for a Scot to write about the Scottish, without hurting the feelings of his countrymen.  While their literary brethren are alive they are not very dear to the newspaper scribes of these gallant nations; and thus Jeffrey was more severe to Scott than he need have been, while the Irish press, it appears, made an onslaught on Lever.  Mr. Thackeray met Lever in Dublin, and he mentions this unkind behaviour.  “Lorrequer’s military propensities have been objected to strongly by his squeamish Hibernian brethren . . . But is Lorrequer the only man in Ireland who is fond of military spectacles?  Why does theNationpublish these edifying and Christian war songs? . . . And who is it that prates about the Irish at Waterloo, and the Irish at Fontenoy, and the Irish at Seringapatam, and the Irish at Timbuctoo?  If Mr. O’Connell, like a wise rhetorician, chooses, and very properly, to flatter the national military passion, why not Harry Lorrequer?”

Why not, indeed?  But Mr. Lever was a successful Irishman of letters, and a good many other Irish gentlemen of letters, honest Doolan and his friends, were not successful.  That is the humour of it.

Though you, my youthful reader, if I have one, do not detest Jones because he is in the Eleven, nor Brown because he has “got his cap,” nor Smith because he does Greek Iambics like Sophocles; though you rather admire and applaud these champions, you may feel very differently when you come to thirty years or more, and see other men doing what you cannot do, and gaining prizes beyond your grasp.  And then, if you are a reviewer, you “will find fault with a book for what it does not give,” as thus, to take Mr. Thackeray’s example:—

“Lady Smigsmag’s novel is amusing, but lamentably deficient in geological information.”  “Mr. Lever’s novels are trashy and worthless, for his facts are not borne out by any authority, and he gives us no information about the political state of Ireland.  ‘Oh! our country, our green and beloved, our beautiful and oppressed?’” and so forth.

It was not altogether a happy time that Lever passed at home.  Not only did his native critics belabour him most ungrudgingly for “Tom Burke,” that vivid and chivalrous romance, but he made enemies of authors.  He edited a magazine!  Is not that enough?  He wearied of wading through waggon-loads of that pure unmitigated rubbish which people are permitted to “shoot” at editorial doors.  How much dust there is in it to how few pearls!  He did not return MSS. punctually and politely.  The office cat could edit the volunteered contributions of many a magazine, but Lever was even more casual and careless than an experienced office cat.  He grew crabbed, and tried to quarrel with Mr. Thackeray for that delightful parody “Phil Fogarty,” nearly as good as a genuine story by Lever.

Beset by critics, burlesqued by his friend, he changed his style (Mr. Fitzpatrick tells us) and became more sober—and not so entertaining.  He actually published a criticism of Beyle, of Stendhal, that psychological prig, the darling of culture and of M. Paul Bourget.  Harry Lorrequer on Stendhal!—it beggars belief.  He nearly fought a duel with the gentleman who is said to have suggested Mr. Pecksniff to Dickens!  Yet they call his early novels improbable.  Nothing could be less plausible than a combat between Harry Lorrequer and a gentleman who, even remotely, resembled the father of Cherry and Merry.

Lever went abroad again, and in Florence or the Baths of Lucca, in Trieste or Spezia, he passed the rest of his life.  He saw the Italian revolution of 1848, and it added to his melancholy.  This is plain from one of his novels with a curious history—“Con Cregan.”  He wrote it at the same time as “The Daltons,” and he did not sign it.  The reviewers praised “Con Cregan” at the expense of the signed work, rejoicing that Lever, as “The Daltons” proved, was exhausted, and that a new Irish author, the author of “Con Cregan,” was coming to eclipse him.  In short, he eclipsed himself, and he did not like it.  His right hand was jealous of what his left hand did.  It seems odd that any human being, however dull and envious, failed to detect Lever in the rapid and vivacious adventures of his Irish “Gil Blas,” hero of one of the very best among his books, a piece not unworthy of Dumas.  “Con” was written after midnight, “The Daltons” in the morning; and there can be no doubt which set of hours was more favourable to Lever’s genius.  Of course he liked “The Daltons” best; of all people, authors appear to be their own worst critics.

It is not possible even to catalogue Lever’s later books here.  Again he drove a pair of novels abreast—“The Dodds” and “Sir Jasper Carew”—which contain some of his most powerful situations.  When almost an old man, sad, outworn in body, straitened in circumstances, he still produced excellent tales in this later manner—“Lord Kilgobbin,” “That Boy of Norcott’s,” “A Day’s Ride,” and many more.  These are the thoughts of a tired man of the world, who has done and seen everything that such men see and do.  He says that he grew fat, and bald, and grave; he wrote for the grave and the bald, not for the happier world which is young, and curly, and merry.  He died at last, it is said, in his sleep; and it is added that he did what Harry Lorrequer would not have done—he left his affairs in perfect order.

Lever lived in an age so full of great novelists that, perhaps, he is not prized as he should be.  Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, were his contemporaries.  But when we turn back and read him once more, we see that Lever, too, was a worthy member of that famous company—a romancer for boys and men.

Yesterday, as the sun was very bright, and there was no wind, I took a fishing-rod on chance and Scott’s poems, and rowed into the middle of St. Mary’s Loch.  Every hill, every tuft of heather was reflected in the lake, as in a silver mirror.  There was no sound but the lapping of the water against the boat, the cry of the blackcock from the hill, and the pleasant plash of a trout rising here and there.  So I read “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” over again, here, in the middle of the scenes where the story is laid and where the fights were fought.  For when the Baron went on pilgrimage,

“And took with him this elvish pageTo Mary’s Chapel of the Lowes,”

“And took with him this elvish pageTo Mary’s Chapel of the Lowes,”

it was to the ruined chapelherethat he came,

“For there, beside our Ladye’s lake,An offering he had sworn to make,And he would pay his vows.”

“For there, beside our Ladye’s lake,An offering he had sworn to make,And he would pay his vows.”

But his enemy, the Lady of Branksome, gathered a band,

“Of the best that would ride at her command,”

“Of the best that would ride at her command,”

and they all came from the country round.  Branksome, where the lady lived, is twenty miles off, towards the south, across the ranges of lonely green hills.  Harden, where her ally, Wat of Harden, abode, is within twelve miles; and Deloraine, where William dwelt, is nearer still; and John of Thirlestane had his square tower in the heather, “where victual never grew,” on Ettrick Water, within ten miles.  These gentlemen, and their kinsfolk and retainers, being at feud with the Kers, tried to slay the Baron, in the Chapel of “Lone St. Mary of the Waves.”

“They were three hundred spears and three.Through Douglas burn, up Yarrow stream,Their horses prance, their lances gleam.They came to St. Mary’s Lake ere day;But the chapel was void, and the Baron away.They burned the chapel for very rage,And cursed Lord Cranstoun’s goblin-page.”

“They were three hundred spears and three.Through Douglas burn, up Yarrow stream,Their horses prance, their lances gleam.They came to St. Mary’s Lake ere day;But the chapel was void, and the Baron away.They burned the chapel for very rage,And cursed Lord Cranstoun’s goblin-page.”

The Scotts were a rough clan enough to burn a holy chapel because they failed to kill their enemy within the sacred walls.  But, as I read again, for the twentieth time, Sir Walter’s poem, floating on the lonely breast of the lake, in the heart of the hills where Yarrow flows, among the little green mounds that cover the ruins of chapel and castle and lady’s bower, I asked myself whether Sir Walter was indeed a great and delightful poet, or whether he pleases me so much because I was born in his own country, and have one drop of the blood of his Border robbers in my own veins?

It is not always pleasant to go back to places, or to meet people, whom we have loved well, long ago.  If they have changed little, we have changed much.  The little boy, whose first book of poetry was “The Lady of the Lake,” and who naturally believed that there was no poet like Sir Walter, is sadly changed into the man who has read most of the world’s poets, and who hears, on many sides, that Scott is outworn and doomed to deserved oblivion.  Are they right or wrong, the critics who tell us, occasionally, that Scott’s good novels make up for his bad verse, or that verse and prose, all must go?Pro captu lectoris, by the reader’s taste, they stand or fall; yet even pessimism can scarcely believe that the Waverley Novels are mortal.  They were once the joy of every class of minds; they cannot cease to be the joy of those who cling to the permanently good, and can understand and forgive lapses, carelessnesses, and the leisurely literary fashion of a former age.  But, as to the poems, many give them up who cling to the novels.  It does not follow that the poems are bad.  In the first place, they are of two kinds—lyric and narrative.  Now, the fashion of narrative in poetry has passed away for the present.  The true Greek epics are read by a few in Greek; by perhaps fewer still in translations.  But so determined are we not to read tales in verse, that prose renderings, even of the epics, nay, even of the Attic dramas, have come more or less into vogue.  This accounts for the comparative neglect of Sir Walter’s lays.  They are spoken of as Waverley Novels spoiled.  This must always be the opinion of readers who will not submit to stories in verse; it by no means follows that the verse is bad.  If we make an exception, which we must, in favour of Chaucer, where is there better verse in story telling in the whole of English literature?  The readers who despise “Marmion,” or “The Lady of the Lake,” do so because they dislike stories told in poetry.  From poetry they expect other things, especially a lingering charm and magic of style, a reflective turn, “criticism of life.”  These things, except so far as life can be criticised in action, are alien to the Muse of narrative.  Stories and pictures are all she offers: Scott’s pictures, certainly, are fresh enough, his tales are excellent enough, his manner is sufficiently direct.  To take examples: every one who wants to read Scott’s poetry should begin with the “Lay.”  From opening to close it never falters:—

“Nine and twenty knights of fameHung their shields in Branksome Hall;Nine and twenty squires of nameBrought their steeds to bower from stall,Nine and twenty yeomen tallWaited, duteous, on them all . . .Ten of them were sheathed in steel,With belted sword, and spur on heel;They quitted not their harness brightNeither by day nor yet by night:They lay down to restWith corslet laced,Pillowed on buckler cold and hard;They carved at the mealWith gloves of steel,And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred.”

“Nine and twenty knights of fameHung their shields in Branksome Hall;Nine and twenty squires of nameBrought their steeds to bower from stall,Nine and twenty yeomen tallWaited, duteous, on them all . . .Ten of them were sheathed in steel,With belted sword, and spur on heel;They quitted not their harness brightNeither by day nor yet by night:They lay down to restWith corslet laced,Pillowed on buckler cold and hard;They carved at the mealWith gloves of steel,And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred.”

Now, is not that a brave beginning?  Does not the verse clank and chime like sword sheath on spur, like the bits of champing horses?  Then, when William of Deloraine is sent on his lonely midnight ride across the haunted moors and wolds, does the verse not gallop like the heavy armoured horse?

“Unchallenged, thence passed Deloraine,To ancient Riddell’s fair domain,Where Aill, from mountains freed,Down from the lakes did raving come;Each wave was crested with tawny foam,Like the mane of a chestnut steed,In vain! no torrent, deep or broad,Might bar the bold moss-trooper’s road;At the first plunge the horse sunk low,And the water broke o’er the saddle-bow.”

“Unchallenged, thence passed Deloraine,To ancient Riddell’s fair domain,Where Aill, from mountains freed,Down from the lakes did raving come;Each wave was crested with tawny foam,Like the mane of a chestnut steed,In vain! no torrent, deep or broad,Might bar the bold moss-trooper’s road;At the first plunge the horse sunk low,And the water broke o’er the saddle-bow.”

These last two lines have the very movement and note, the deep heavy plunge, the still swirl of the water.  Well I know the lochs whence Aill comes red in flood; many a trout have I taken in Aill, long ago.  This, of course, causes a favourable prejudice, a personal bias towards admiration.  But I think the poetry itself is good, and stirs the spirit, even of those who know not Ailmoor, the mother of Aill, that lies dark among the melancholy hills.

The spirit is stirred throughout by the chivalry and the courage of Scott’s men and of his women.  Thus the Lady of Branksome addresses the English invaders who have taken her boy prisoner:—

“For the young heir of Branksome’s line,God be his aid, and God be mine;Through me no friend shall meet his doom;Here, while I live, no foe finds room.Then if thy Lords their purpose urge,Take our defiance loud and high;Our slogan is their lyke-wake dirge,Our moat, the grave where they shall lie.”

“For the young heir of Branksome’s line,God be his aid, and God be mine;Through me no friend shall meet his doom;Here, while I live, no foe finds room.Then if thy Lords their purpose urge,Take our defiance loud and high;Our slogan is their lyke-wake dirge,Our moat, the grave where they shall lie.”

Ay, and though the minstrel says he is no love poet, and though, indeed, he shines more in war than in lady’s bower, is not this a noble stanza on true love, and worthy of what old Malory writes in his “Mort d’Arthur”?  Because here Scott speaks for himself, and of his own unhappy and immortal affection:—

“True love’s the gift which God has givenTo man alone beneath the Heaven.It is not Fantasy’s hot fire,Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;It liveth not in fierce desire,With dead desire it dock not die:It is the secret sympathy,The silver link, the silken tie,Which heart to heart and mind to mind,In body and in soul can bind.”

“True love’s the gift which God has givenTo man alone beneath the Heaven.It is not Fantasy’s hot fire,Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;It liveth not in fierce desire,With dead desire it dock not die:It is the secret sympathy,The silver link, the silken tie,Which heart to heart and mind to mind,In body and in soul can bind.”

Truth and faith, courage and chivalry, a free life in the hills and by the streams, a shrewd brain, an open heart, a kind word for friend or foeman, these are what you learn from the “Lay,” if you want to learn lessons from poetry.  It is a rude legend, perhaps, as the critics said at once, when critics were disdainful of wizard priests and ladies magical.  But it is a deathless legend, I hope; it appeals to every young heart that is not early spoiled by low cunning, and cynicism, and love of gain.  The minstrel’s own prophecy is true, and still, and always,

“Yarrow, as he rolls along,Bears burden to the minstrel’s song.”

“Yarrow, as he rolls along,Bears burden to the minstrel’s song.”

After the “Lay” came “Marmion, a Tale of Flodden Field.”  It is far more ambitious and complicated than the “Lay,” and is not much worse written.  Sir Walter was ever a rapid and careless poet, and as he took more pains with his plot, he took less with his verse.  His friends reproved him, but he answered to one of them—

“Since oft thy judgment could refineMy flattened thought and cumbrous line,Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,And in the minstrel spare the friend:Though wild as cloud,as stream,as gale,Flow forth,flow unrestrained,my tale!”

“Since oft thy judgment could refineMy flattened thought and cumbrous line,Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,And in the minstrel spare the friend:Though wild as cloud,as stream,as gale,Flow forth,flow unrestrained,my tale!”

Any one who knows Scott’s country knows how cloud and stream and gale all sweep at once down the valley of Ettrick or of Tweed.  West wind, wild cloud, red river, they pour forth as by one impulse—forth from the far-off hills.  He let his verse sweep out in the same stormy sort, and many a “cumbrous line,” many a “flattened thought,” you may note, if you will, in “Marmion.”  For example—

“And think what he must next have felt,At buckling of the falchion belt.”

“And think what he must next have felt,At buckling of the falchion belt.”

The “Lay” is a tale that only verse could tell; much of “Marmion” might have been told in prose, and most of “Rokeby.”  But prose could never give the picture of Edinburgh, nor tell the tale of Flodden Fight in “Marmion,” which I verily believe is the best battle-piece in all the poetry of all time, better even than the stand of Aias by the ships in the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers in the Odyssey.  Nor could prose give us the hunting of the deer and the long gallop over hillside and down valley, with which the “Lady of the Lake” begins, opening thereby the enchanted gates of the Highlands to the world.  “The Lady of the Lake,” except in the battle-piece, is told in a less rapid metre than that of the “Lay,” less varied than that of “Marmion.”  “Rokeby” lives only by its songs; the “Lord of the Isles” by Bannockburn, the “Field of Waterloo” by the repulse of the Cuirassiers.  But all the poems are interspersed with songs and ballads, as the beautiful ballad of “Alice Brand”; and Scott’s fame rests onthesefar more than on his later versified romances.  Coming immediately after the very tamest poets who ever lived, like Hayley, Scott wrote songs and ballads as wild and free, as melancholy or gay, as ever shepherd sang, or gipsy carolled, or witch-wife moaned, or old forgotten minstrel left to the world, music with no maker’s name.  For example, take the Outlaw’s rhyme—

“With burnished brand and musketoon,So gallantly you come,I read you for a bold dragoonThat lists the tuck of drum.I list no more the tuck of drum,No more the trumpet hear;But when the beetle sounds his hum,My comrades take the spear.And, oh, though Brignal banks be fair,And Greta woods be gay,Yet mickle must the maiden dare,Would reign my Queen of May!”

“With burnished brand and musketoon,So gallantly you come,I read you for a bold dragoonThat lists the tuck of drum.I list no more the tuck of drum,No more the trumpet hear;But when the beetle sounds his hum,My comrades take the spear.And, oh, though Brignal banks be fair,And Greta woods be gay,Yet mickle must the maiden dare,Would reign my Queen of May!”

How musical, again, is this!—

“This morn is merry June, I trow,The rose is budding fain;But she shall bloom in winter snow,Ere we two meet again.He turned his charger as he spake,Upon the river shore,He gave his bridle-reins a shake,Said, ‘Adieu for evermore,My love!Adieu for evermore!’”

“This morn is merry June, I trow,The rose is budding fain;But she shall bloom in winter snow,Ere we two meet again.He turned his charger as he spake,Upon the river shore,He gave his bridle-reins a shake,Said, ‘Adieu for evermore,My love!Adieu for evermore!’”

Turning from the legends in verse, let it not be forgotten that Scott was a great lyrical poet.  Mr. Palgrave is not too lenient a judge, and his “Golden Treasury” is a touchstone, as well as a treasure, of poetic gold.  In this volume Wordsworth contributes more lyrics than any other poet: Shelley and Shakespeare come next; then Sir Walter.  For my part I would gladly sacrifice a few of Wordsworth’s for a few more of Scott’s.  But this may be prejudice.  Mr. Palgrave is not prejudiced, and we see how high is his value for Sir Walter.

There are scores of songs in his works, touching and sad, or gay as a hunter’s waking, that tell of lovely things lost by tradition, and found by him on the moors: all these—not prized by Sir Walter himself—are in his gift, and in that of no other man.  For example, his “Eve of St. John” is simply a masterpiece, a ballad among ballads.  Nothing but an old song moves us like—

“Are these the links o’ Forth, she said,Are these the bends o’ Dee!”

“Are these the links o’ Forth, she said,Are these the bends o’ Dee!”

He might have done more of the best, had he very greatly cared.  Alone among poets, he had neither vanity nor jealousy; he thought little of his own verse and his own fame: would that he had thought more! would that he had been more careful of what was so precious!  But he turned to prose; bade poetry farewell.

“Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp,Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway.And little reck I of the censure sharpMay idly cavil at an idle lay.”

“Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp,Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway.And little reck I of the censure sharpMay idly cavil at an idle lay.”

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