LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS.[27]

“Methought all fellowship as nakedWithouten her that I saw once,As a coróne without the stones.”

Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar, before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat. We know without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner. In some of his early poems he sometimes, it is true, falls into the catalogue style of his contemporaries; but after he had found his genius he never particularizes too much,—a process as deadly to all effect as an explanation to a pun. The first stanza of the “Clerk’s Tale” gives us a landscape whose stately choice of objects shows a skill in composition worthy of Claude, the last artist who painted nature epically:—

“There is at the west endë of Itaile,Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold,A lusty plain abundant of vitaile,Where many a tower and town thou may’st beholdThat founded were in time of fathers old,And many another delítable sight;And Sàlucës this noble country hight.”

The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape entangles the eye among the obtrusive weeds and grass-blades of the foreground which, in looking at a real bit of scenery, we overlook; but what a sweep of vision is here! and what happy generalization in the sixth verse as the poet turns away to the business of his story! The whole is full of open air.

But it is in his characters, especially, that his manner is large and free; for he is painting history, though with the fidelity of portrait. He brings out strongly the essential traits, characteristic of the genus rather than of the individual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a countenance that

“There wist no wight that he was e’er in debt,”

the Sergeant at Law, “who seemëd busier than he was,” the Doctor of Medicine, whose “study was but little on the Bible,”—in all these cases it is the type and not the personage that fixes his attention. William Blake says truly, though he expresses his meaning somewhat clumsily, “the characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations. Some of the names and titles are altered by time, but the characters remain forever unaltered, and consequently they are the physiognomies and lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnæus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men.” In his outside accessaries, it is true, he sometimes seems as minute as if he were illuminating a missal. Nothing escapes his sure eye for the picturesque,—the cut of the beard, the soil of armor on the buffjerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of the eye. But in this he has an artistic purpose. It is here that he individualizes, and, while every touch harmonizes with and seems to complete the moral features of the character, makes us feel that we are among living men, and not the abstracted images of men. Crabbe adds particular to particular, scattering rather than deepening the impression of reality, and making us feel as if every man were a species by himself; but Chaucer, never forgetting the essential sameness of human nature, makes it possible, and even probable, that his motley characters should meet on a common footing, while he gives to each theexpressionthat belongs to him, the result of special circumstance or training. Indeed, the absence of any suggestion ofcastecannot fail to strike any reader familiar with the literature on which he is supposed to have formed himself. No characters are at once so broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belonging, some of them, to extinct types, they continue contemporary and familiar forever. So wide is the difference between knowing a great many men and that knowledge of human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and not of observation alone.

It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer’s satire so kindly,—more so, one is tempted to say, than the panegyric of Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force from personal or moral antipathy, and measures offences by some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters over a galling word, and it loves to sayThou, pointing out its victim to public scorn.Indignatio facit versus, it boasts, though they might as often be fathered on envy or hatred. But imaginative satire, warmed through and through with the genial leaven of humor, smiles half sadly and murmursWe. Chaucer either makes one knave betray another, through a natural jealousy ofcompetition, or else expose himself with anaïvetéof good-humored cynicism which amuses rather than disgusts. In the former case the butt has a kind of claim on our sympathy; in the latter, it seems nothing strange if the sunny atmosphere which floods that road to Canterbury should tempt anybody to throw off one disguise after another without suspicion. With perfect tact, too, the Host is made thechoragusin this diverse company, and the coarse jollity of his temperament explains, if it does not excuse, much that would otherwise seem out of keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples withhim.

Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us. There had been nothing like him before, there has been nothing since. He is original, not in the sense that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought and said before, and what nobody can ever think and say again, but because he is always natural, because, if not always absolutely new, he is always delightfully fresh, because he sets before us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper to certain people that it ought to appear. He found that the poetry which had preceded him had been first the expression of individual feeling, then of class feeling as the vehicle of legend and history, and at last had wellnigh lost itself in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature seemed to have passed through the natural stages which at regular intervals bring it to decline. Even the lyrics of thejongleurswere all run in one mould, and the Pastourelles of Northern France had become as artificial as the Pastorals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had been made over into prose, and theMelusineof his contemporary Jehan d’Arras isthe forlorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived thus far in their decrepitude, the monks endeavored to give them a religious and moral turn by allegorizing them. Their process reminds one of something Ulloa tells us of the fashion in which the Spaniards converted the Mexicans: “Here we found an old man in a cavern so extremely aged as it was wonderful, which could neither see nor go because he was so lame and crooked. The Father, Friar Raimund, said it were good (seeing he was so aged) to make him a Christian; whereupon we baptized him.” The monks found the Romances in the same stage of senility, and gave them a saving sprinkle with the holy water of allegory. Perhaps they were only trying to turn the enemy’s own weapons against himself, for it was the free-thinking “Romance of the Rose” that more than anything else had made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us that an allegory is to say one thing where another is meant, and this might have been needful for the personal security of Jean de Meung, as afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. But, except as a means of evading the fagot, the method has few recommendations. It reverses the true office of poetry by making the real unreal. It is imagination endeavoring to recommend itself to the understanding by means of cuts. If an author be in such deadly earnest, or if his imagination be of such creative vigor as to project real figures when it meant to cast only a shadow upon vapor; if the true spirit come, at once obsequious and terrible, when the conjurer has drawn his circle and gone through with his incantations merely to produce a proper frame of mind in his audience, as was the case with Dante, there is no longer any question of allegory as the word and thing are commonly understood. But with all secondary poets, as with Spenser for example, the allegory does not become ofone substance with the poetry, but is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures lose their meaning, as they cease to be contemporary. It was not a style that could have much attraction for a nature so sensitive to the actual, so observant of it, so interested by it as that of Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand at all the forms in vogue, and to have arrived in his old age at the truth, essential to all really great poetry, that his own instincts were his safest guides, that there is nothing deeper in life than life itself, and that to conjure an allegorical significance into it was to lose sight of its real meaning. He of all men could not say one thing and mean another, unless by way of humorous contrast.

In thus turning frankly and gayly to the actual world, and drinking inspiration from sources open to all; in turning away from a colorless abstraction to the solid earth and to emotions common to every pulse; in discovering that to make the best of nature, and not to grope vaguely after something better than nature, was the true office of Art; in insisting on a definite purpose, on veracity, cheerfulness, and simplicity, Chaucer shows himself the true father and founder of what is characteristicallyEnglishliterature. He has a hatred of cant as hearty as Dr. Johnson’s, though he has a slier way of showing it; he has the placid common-sense of Franklin, the sweet, grave humor of Addison, the exquisite taste of Gray; but the whole texture of his mind, though its substance seem plain and grave, shows itself at every turn iridescent with poetic feeling like shot silk. Above all, he has an eye for character that seems to have caught at once not only its mental and physical features, but even its expression in variety of costume,—an eye, indeed, second only, if it should be called second in some respects, to that of Shakespeare.

I know of nothing that may be compared with theprologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” and with that to the story of the “Chanon’s Yeoman” before Chaucer. Characters and portraits from real life had never been drawn with such discrimination, or with such variety, never with such bold precision of outline, and with such a lively sense of the picturesque. His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden and Goldsmith have both tried their hands in emulation of him. And the humor also in its suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy unobtrusiveness, is something wholly new in literature. For anything that deserves to be called like it in English we must wait for Henry Fielding.

Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday, the first who held up a mirror to contemporary life in its infinite variety of high and low, of humor and pathos. But he reflected life in its large sense as the life ofmen, from the knight to the ploughman,—the life of every day as it is made up of that curious compound of human nature with manners. The very form of the “Canterbury Tales” was imaginative. The garden of Boccaccio, the supper-party of Grazzini, and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough thread for their stories, but exclude all save equals and friends, exclude consequently human nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where all men are equal, with souls to be saved, and with another world in view that abolishes all distinctions. By this choice, and by making the Host of the Tabard always the central figure, he has happily united the two most familiar emblems of life,—the short journey and the inn. We find more and more as we study him that he rises quietly from the conventional to the universal, and may fairly take his place with Homer in virtue of the breadth of his humanity.

In spite of some external stains, which those whohave studied the influence of manners will easily account for without imputing them to any moral depravity, we feel that we can join the pure-minded Spenser in calling him “most sacred, happy spirit.” If character may be divined from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, hearty, temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, for this world than the next, but thoroughly humane, and friendly with God and men. I know not how to sum up what we feel about him better than by saying (what would have pleased most one who was indifferent to fame) that we love him more even than we admire. We are sure that here was a true brother-man so kindly that, in his “House of Fame,” after naming the great poets, he throws in a pleasant word for the oaten-pipes

“Of the little herd-groomsThat keepen beasts among the brooms.”

No better inscription can be written on the first page of his works than that which he places over the gate in his “Assembly of Fowls,” and which contrasts so sweetly with the stern lines of Dante from which they were imitated:—

“Through me men go into the blissful placeOf the heart’s heal and deadly woundës’ cure;Through me men go unto the well of Grace,Where green and lusty May doth ever endure;This is the way to all good aventure;Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast,All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast!”

MANY of our older readers can remember the anticipation with which they looked for each successive volume of the late Dr. Young’s excellent series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To most of us it was our first introduction to the highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and Walton. What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us! What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernianamphoræof the Past! No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural to a period when yet reviews were not; and no later style breathes that country charm characteristic of days ere the metropolis had drawn all literary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present, these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved thoroughfares of thought.

Even the “Retrospective Review” continues to be good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine only acquires itsbouquetby age) which pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission to the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy chooses. The years during which this review was published were altogether the most fruitful in genuine appreciation of old English literature. Books were prized for their imaginative and not their antiquarian value by young writers who sate at the feet of Lamb and Coleridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy, were sought, rather than the barren scarcities of typography. But another race of men seems to have sprung up, in whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who substitute archæologic perversity for fine-nerved scholarship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity-shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of Art. They forget, in their fanaticism for antiquity, that the dust of never so many centuries is impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb mellowness of tone from age, and that a baptismal register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;—these quaintfreaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb; in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoüs and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago.

We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, “A book is a book”; from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in which “Bible, large, 1 vol.,” and “Bible, small, 1 vol.,” asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the soleBs in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill up; we cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one bookcase, would have no tomes in it butporphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer new-comers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over again the author’s lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his first appearance after parturition, “as well as could be expected,” a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the “Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry,” or of the “Unities briefly considered by Philomusus,” of which they have never heard and never will hear so much asthe names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman’s library can be complete without; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial-flowers of some passion which the churchyard smothered ere the Stuarts were yet discrowned, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.

It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series. A choice of old authors should be aflorilegium, and not a botanist’shortus siccus, to which grasses are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of the “Library.” We should be inclined to surmise that the works to be reprinted had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix ofEditor. The volumes already published are: Increase Mather’s “Remarkable Providences”; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the “Visions of Piers Ploughman;” the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the “Hymns and Songs” and the “Hallelujah” of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden’s “Table-Talk”; the “Enchiridion” of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston, Webster, and Lilly; Chapman’s translation of Homer; Lovelace, and four volumes of “Early English Poetry”! The volume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the “Magnalia” of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham’s comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury’s “Characters” are interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of foot-notes to the works of better men,—but, with the exception of “The Fair and Happy Milkmaid,” they are dull enough to have pleased James the First; his “Wife” is acentoof far-fetched conceits,—here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney’s game-bag, and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of royal complicity. The “Piers Ploughman” is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of Mr. Wright’s former edition. It would have been very well to have republished the “Fair Virtue,” and “Shepherd’s Hunting” of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his “Hymns and Songs,” whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incorrigible poetasters. If a steady course of these did not bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take this as a sample, hit on by opening at random:—

“Rottenness my bones possest;Trembling fear possessèd me;I that troublous day might rest:For, when his approaches beOnward to the people made,His strong troops will them invade.”

Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David, putting into his mouth such punning conceits as “fears are my feres,” and in his “Saint Peter’s Complaint” makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit’s poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun and misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and wide-orbited metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polemics; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious because no one can be merry in their company,—to rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the fervor of martyrs,—nay, to set them up beside suchpoems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul that open toward the sun’s rising, is to confound piety with dulness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake from the apothecary’s drawer. The “Enchiridion” of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the “Emblems,” and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions,—nor a matter of heartbreak, if it were. Of the dramatic works of Marston and Lilly it is enough to say that they are trulyworksto the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor, as literature, worth the paper they blot. They seem to have been deemed worthy of republication because they were the contemporaries of true poets; and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy their plays on the same principle, the sale will be a remunerative one. It was worth while, perhaps, to reprint Lovelace, if only to show what dull verses may be written by a man who has made one lucky hit. Of the “Early English Poetry,” nine tenths had better never have been printed at all, and the other tenth reprinted by an editor who had some vague suspicion, at least, of what they meant. The Homer of Chapman is so precious a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith’s shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vastplacer, full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry.

Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. Smith’s reprints, we come to the closer question ofHow are they edited?Whatever the merit of the original works, the editors, whether self-elected or chosen by the publisher, should be accurate and scholarly. The editing of the Homer we can heartily commend; and Dr. Rimbault, who carried the works of Overbury through the press, has done his work well; but the other volumes of the Library are very creditable neither to English scholarship nor to English typography. The Introductions to some of them are enough to make us think that we are fallen to the necessity of reprinting our old authors because the art of writing correct and graceful English has been lost. William B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law, says, for instance, in his Introduction to Southwell: “There was resident at Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which] Southwell was in the habit of visiting and providing with religious instruction when he exchanged his ordinary [ordinarily] close confinement for a purer atmosphere.” (p. xxii.) Again, (p. xxii,) “He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued, with very great success, the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly terminated by his foul betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592.” We should like to have Mr. Turnbull explain how theobjectsof a mission could be terminated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mission itself. From the many similar flowers in the Introduction to Mather’s “Providences,” by Mr. George Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a countryman,) we select the following: “It was at this period when, [that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecution, our Pilgrim Fathers, threatened with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dangers of an almost unknown ocean, and threw themselves into the arms of men called savages, who proved more beneficent than national Christians.” To whom or what our Pilgrim Fathersdidsuccumb, and what “national Christians” are, we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. Speaking of the “Providences,” Mr. Offor says, that “they faithfully delineate the state of public opinion two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being an implicit faith in the power of the [in-]visible world tohold visible intercourse with man:—not the angels to bless poor erring mortals, but of demons imparting power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and destroy,”—a sentence which we defy any witch or warlock, though he were Michael Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic aid. On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that “he was one of the first divines who discovered that very many strange events, which were considered preternatural, had occurred in the course of nature or by deceitful juggling; that the Devil could not speak English, nor prevail with Protestants; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil; that medicine drives out Satan!” We do not wonder that Mr. Offor put a mark of exclamation at the end of this surprising sentence, but we do confess our astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of the question, we find, on referring to Mather’s text, that he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other language; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon whose education had been neglected (nottheDevil) could not speak; that Mather is not fool enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Protestants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor that medicine drives him out. Anything more helplessly inadequate than Mr. Offor’s preliminary dissertation on Witchcraft we never read; but we could hardly expect much from an editor whose citations from the book he is editing show that he had either not read or not understood it.

Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic,—not sparing, as we have seen, even Priscian’s head among the rest; but,en revanche, Mr. Turnbull is ultramontane beyond the editors of theCiviltà Cattolica.He allows himself to say, that, “after Southwell’s death, one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and blamably simulating heresy, wrought, with some relics of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the skill of all physicians.” Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors are still secure of a lucrative practice in countries full of the relics of greater saints than even Southwell. That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmacopœia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and however it may gratify Mr. Turnbull’s catechumenical enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integument of his, even at the expense of Jesuits’ bark, we cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero’s life, or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It is possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a necktie only to heretical readers.

We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. Turnbull and Offor for special animadversion because they are on the whole the worst, both of them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offor in particular gives us almost no information whatever. Some of the others are not without grave faults, chief among which is a vague declamation, especially out of place in critical essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither’s “Hallelujah,” for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that “nearly all the best poets of the latter half of the sixteenth century—for that was the period when the Reformation was fully established—and the whole of the seventeenth century were sacred poets,” and that “evenShakespeare and the contemporary dramatists of his age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to the songs of Zion.” Comment on statements like these would be as useless as the assertions themselves are absurd.

We have quoted these examples only to justify us in saying that Mr. Smith must select his editors with more care if he wishes that his “Library of Old Authors” should deserve the confidence and thereby gain the good word of intelligent readers,—without which such a series can neither win nor keep the patronage of the public. It is impossible that men who cannot construct an English sentence correctly, and who do not know the value of clearness in writing, should be able to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old author’s meaning; and it is more than doubtful whether they who assert carelessly, cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature disqualified for doing thoroughly what they undertake to do. If it were unreasonable to demand of every one who assumes to edit one of our early poets the critical acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading, the philological scholarship, which in combination would alone make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to expect some one of these qualifications singly, and we have the right to insist upon patience and accuracy, which are within the reach of every one, and without which all the others are wellnigh vain. Now to this virtue of accuracy Mr. Offor specifically lays claim in one of his remarkable sentences: “We are bound to admire,” he says, “the accuracy and beauty of this specimen of typography. Following in the path of my late friend William Pickering, our publisher rivals the Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been so universally admired.” We should think that it was the product of those presses which had been admired, and that Mr. Smith presents a still worthier object of admiration when he contrives to follow a path and rival a press at the same time. But let that pass;—it is the claim to accuracy which we dispute; and we deliberately affirm, that, so far as we are able to judge by the volumes we have examined, no claim more unfounded was ever set up. In some cases, as we shall show presently, the blunders of the original work have been followed with painful accuracy in the reprint; but many others have been added by the carelessness of Mr. Smith’s printers or editors. In the thirteen pages of Mr. Offor’s own Introduction we have found as many as seven typographical errors,—unless some of them are to be excused on the ground that Mr. Offor’s studies have not yet led him into those arcana where we are taught such recondite mysteries of language as that verbs agree with their nominatives. In Mr. Farr’s Introduction to the “Hymns and Songs” nine short extracts from other poems of Wither are quoted, and in these we have found no less than seven misprints or false readings which materially affect the sense. Textual inaccuracy is a grave fault in the new edition of an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not only liable to this charge, but also to that of making blundering misstatements which are calculated to mislead the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last dozen years among literary sciolists, he says,—“The language used by Wither in all his various works—whether secular or sacred—is pure Saxon.” Taken literally, this assertion is manifestly ridiculous, and, allowing it every possible limitation, it is not only untrue of Wither, but of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The translators of our Bible made use of the German version, and a poet versifying the English Scriptures wouldtherefore be likely to use more words of Teutonic origin than in his original compositions. But no English poet can write English poetry except in English,—that is, in that compound of Teutonic and Romanic which derives its heartiness and strength from the one and its canorous elegance from the other. The Saxon language does not sing, and, though its tough mortar serve to hold together the less compact Latin words, porous with vowels, it is to the Latin that our verse owes majesty, harmony, variety, and the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of six lines from Wither ends at the top of the very page on which Mr. Farr lays down his extraordinarydictum, and we will let this answer him, Italicizing the words of Romance derivation:—

“Her truebeautyleaves behindApprehensionsin the mind, Of more sweetness than allartOrinventionscanimpart; Thoughts too deep to beexpressed, And too strong to besuppressed.”

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works of Marston, (Vol. I. p. xxii,) says, “The dramas now collected together are reprinted absolutely from the early editions, which were placed in the hands of our printers, who thus had the advantage of following them without the intervention of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as possible in their original state, the only modernizations attempted consisting in the alternations of the lettersiandj, anduandv, the retention of which” (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the “alternations”?) “would have answered no useful purpose, while it would have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader.”

This is not very clear; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned foreign societies, and especially ofthe RoyalIrishAcademy, perhaps it would be unfair to demand that he should write clear English. As one of Mr. Smith’s editors, it was to be expected that he should not write it idiomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of bulls and blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the Library was projected. At the top of the same page from which we have made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of “conveying a favorable impressiononmodern readers.” It was surely to no such phrase as this that Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, “Conveythewiseit call.”

A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in two ways: the orthography may in certain cases indicate the ancient pronunciation, or it may put us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of a word among the roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not needful to undertake the reproduction of all the original errors of the press; and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in the editorial department are so glaring, that we are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratulate ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of the Elizabethan type-setters in their integrity, and without any debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying to know that there lived stupid men before our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we demand absolute accuracy in the report of the phenomena in order to arrive at anything like safe statistics. For instance, we find (Vol. I. p. 89) “Actus Secundus, Scena Primus,” and (Vol. III. p. 174) “exit ambo,” and we are interested to know that in a London printing-house, two centuries and a half ago, there was a philanthropist who wished to simplify the study of the Latin language by reducing all the nouns to one gender and all the verbs to onenumber. Had his emancipated theories of grammar prevailed, how much easier would that part of boys which cherubs want have found the school-room benches! How would birchen bark, as an educational tonic, have fallen in repute! How white would have been the (now black-and-blue) memories of Dr. Busby and so many other educationallictors, who, with their bundles of rods, heralded not alone the consuls, but all other Roman antiquities to us! We dare not, however, indulge in the grateful vision, since there are circumstances which lead us to infer that Mr. Halliwell himself (member though he be of so many learned societies) has those vague notions of the speech of ancient Rome which are apt to prevail in regions which count not thebetulain theirFlora. On page xv of his Preface, he makes Drummond say that Ben Jonson “was dilated” (delated,—Gifford gives it in English,accused) “to the king by Sir James Murray,”—Ben, whose corpulent person stood in so little need of that malicious increment!

What is Mr. Halliwell’s conception of editorial duty? As we read along, and the once fair complexion of the margin grew more and more pitted with pencil-marks, like that of a bad proof-sheet, we began to think that he was acting on the principle of every man his own washerwoman,—that he was making blunders of set purpose, (as teachers of languages do in their exercises,) in order that we might correct them for ourselves, and so fit us in time to be editors also, and members of various learned societies, even as Mr. Halliwell himself is. We fancied, that, magnanimously waving aside the laurel with which a grateful posterity crowned General Wade, he wished us “to see these roadsbeforethey were made,” and develop our intellectual muscles in getting over them. But no; Mr. Halliwell has appended notes to his edition, and among them are some which correct misprints,and therefore seem to imply that he considers that service as belonging properly to the editorial function. We are obliged, then, to give up our theory that his intention was to make every reader an editor, and to suppose that he wished rather to show how disgracefully a book might be edited and yet receive the commendation of professional critics who read with the ends of their fingers. If this were his intention, Marston himself never published so biting a satire.

Let us look at a few of the intricate passages, to help us through which Mr. Halliwell lends us the light of his editorial lantern. In the Induction to “What you Will” occurs the striking and unusual phrase, “Now out up-pont,” and Mr. Halliwell favors us with the following note: “Page 221, line 10.Up-pont.—That is, upon’t.” Again in the same play we find—

“Let twattling fame cheatd others rest,I um no dish for rumors feast.”

Of course, it should read,—

“Let twattling [twaddling] Fame cheate others’ rest,I am no dish for Rumor’s feast.”

Mr. Halliwell comes to our assistance thus: “Page 244, line 21, [22 it should be,]I um,—a printer’s error forI am.”Dignus vindice nodus!Five lines above, we have “whole” for “who’ll,” and four lines below, “helmeth” for “whelmeth”; but Mr. Halliwell vouchsafes no note. In the “Fawn” we read, “Wiseneadsuse few words,” and the editor says in a note, “a misprint forheads”! Kind Mr. Halliwell!

Having given a few examples of our “Editor’s” corrections, we proceed to quote a passage or two which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly clear.

“A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap,A button’d frizado sute, skarce eate good meate,Anchoves,caviare, but hee’s satyredAnd term’d phantasticall. By the muddy spawneOf slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesseThat which the naturall sophysters tearmePhantusia incomplexa—is a functionEven of the bright immortal part of man.It is the common passe, the sacred dore,Unto the prive chamber of the soule;That bar’d, nought passeth past the baser courtOf outward scence by it th’inamorateMost lively thinkes he sees the absent beautiesOf his lov’d mistres.” (Vol. I. p. 241.)

In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough:—

“And termed fantastical by the muddy spawnOf slimy newts”;

and

“ ... past the baser courtOf outward sense”;—

but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here deserted by ourfida compagna? Again, (Vol. II. pp. 55, 56,) we read, “This Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his signes to me, and men of profound reach instruct aboundantly; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with signes,” etc. This Granuffo is qualified among the “Interlocutors” as “a silent lord,” and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing. It is plain enough that the passage should read, “a man of excellent discourse, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach instruct abundantly,” etc.

In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer,—“gone before and swept the way.” An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible to English readers, and, if theeditor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own tongue should not be as tough to us as Æschylus to a ten years’ graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to find (as is generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all. But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is in a speech ofErichtho, in the first scene of the fourth act of “Sophonisba,” (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in this shape:—

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