Library Notes Part 5

Rogers, the banker poet, once said to Wordsworth, "If you would let me edit your poems, and give me leave to omit some half-dozen, and make a few trifling alterations, I would engage that you should be as popular a poet as any living." Wordsworth's answer is said to have been, "I am much obliged to you, Mr. Rogers; I am a poor man, but I would rather remain as I am."

Thomson solicited Burns to supply him with twenty or thirty songs for the musical work in which he was engaged, with an understanding distinctly specified, that the bard should receive a regular pecuniary remuneration for his contributions. With the first part of the proposal Burns instantly complied, but peremptorily rejected the last. "As to any remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be downright prost.i.tution of soul." Thomson, some time after, notwithstanding the prohibition, ventured to acknowledge his services by a small pecuniary present, which the poet with some difficulty restrained himself from returning. "I a.s.sure you, my dear sir," he wrote to the donor, "that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savor of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by that honor which crowns the upright statue of Robert Burns' integrity--on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you! Burns' character for generosity of sentiment and independence of mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; at least, I will take care that such a character he shall deserve." His sensitive nature inclined him to reject the present, as proud old Sam Johnson threw away with indignation the new shoes which had been placed at his chamber door. "I ought not," says Emerson, "to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither by comfort, neither by pride,--and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me."

Isaac Disraeli, when a young man, was informed that a place in the establishment of a great merchant was prepared for him; he replied that he had written and intended to publish a poem of considerable length against commerce, which was the corrupter of man; and he at once inclosed his poem to Dr. Johnson, who, however, was in his last illness, and was unable to read it. Coleridge, on being offered a half share in the Morning Post and Courier, with a prospect of two thousand pounds a year, announced that he would not give up country life, and the lazy reading of old folios, for two thousand times that income. "In short,"

he added, "beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year, I regard money as a real evil." Professor Aga.s.siz, when once invited to lecture, replied to the munificent lecture a.s.sociation that he was very sorry, but he was just then busy with some researches that left him no time to make money. There is a familiar story told of Marvell, who is said to have so greatly pleased Charles II. at a private interview, by his wit and agreeable conversation, that the latter dispatched the lord treasurer Danby to offer him a thousand pounds, with a promise of a lucrative place at court, which Marvell refused, notwithstanding he was immediately afterward compelled to borrow a guinea of a friend. Just at the time when the English mind was agitated upon the subject of American taxation, and Goldsmith was most needy, an effort was made to bring him into the ministerial ranks. Dr. Scott was sent to negotiate with the poet. "I found him," said Scott, "in a miserable suite of chambers in the Temple. I told him my authority: I told him I was empowered to pay most liberally for his exertions; and, would you believe it! he was so absurd as to say, 'I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the a.s.sistance you offer is therefore unnecessary to me;' and so I left him in his garret!" Sir John Hawkins one day met Goldsmith; his lords.h.i.+p told him he had read his poem, The Traveller, and was much delighted with it; that he was going lord lieutenant to Ireland, and that hearing that he was a native of that country, he should be glad to do him any kindness. The honest poor man and sincere lover of literature replied that he "had a brother there, a clergyman, that stood in need of help. As for myself, I have no dependence upon the promises of great men; I look to the booksellers for support; they are my best friends, and I am not inclined to forsake them for others." For this frank expression of magnanimity and manly self-dependence, the p.r.i.c.ked Hawkins, and the envious Boswell, speaking of the incident afterward, called Goldsmith an "idiot." Some of Walter Scott's friends offered him, or rather proposed to offer him, enough of money, as was supposed, to enable him to arrange with his creditors. He paused for a moment; and then recollecting his powers, said proudly, "No! this right hand shall work it all off!" Lady Blessington said to Willis, Disraeli and Dr. Beattie being present: "Moore went to Jamaica with a profitable appointment. The climate disagreed with him, and he returned home, leaving the business in the hands of a confidential clerk, who embezzled eight thousand pounds in the course of a few months and absconded.

Moore's misfortunes awakened a great sympathy among his friends. Lord Lansdowne was the first to offer his aid. He wrote to Moore, that for many years he had been in the habit of laying aside from his income eight thousand pounds, for the encouragement of the arts and literature, and that he should feel that it was well disposed of for that year if Moore would accept it, to free him from his difficulties. It was offered in the most delicate and n.o.ble manner, but Moore declined it. The members of 'White's' (mostly n.o.blemen) called a meeting, and (not knowing the amount of the deficit) subscribed in one morning twenty-five thousand pounds, and wrote to the poet that they would cover the sum, whatever it might be. This was declined. Longman and Murray then offered to pay it, and wait for their remuneration from his works. He declined even this, and went to Pa.s.sy with his family, where he economized and worked hard till it was canceled. At one time two different counties of Ireland sent committees to him, to offer him a seat in Parliament; and as he depended on his writings for a subsistence, offering him at the same time twelve hundred pounds a year while he continued to represent them. Moore was deeply touched with it, and said no circ.u.mstance of his life had ever gratified him so much. He admitted that the honor they proposed him had been his most cherished ambition, but the necessity of receiving a pecuniary support at the same time was an insuperable obstacle. He could never enter Parliament with his hands tied, and his opinions and speech fettered, as they would be irresistibly in such circ.u.mstances." Southey was offered by Walter the editors.h.i.+p of The Times, but declined it, saying, "No emolument, however great, would induce me to give up a country life, and those pursuits in literature to which the studies of so many years have been directed." "Will you be created a count? a t.i.tle is sometimes useful," said Louis Philippe to M.

Guizot. The proffered honor was declined, and the king replied, "You are right; your name alone is sufficient, and is a higher dignity."

D'Alembert, when in receipt of but a limited income,--more than half of which he gave away in charity,--declined an invitation of Frederick the Great to reside at the court of Berlin. The Empress Catherine offered him the post of tutor or governor to the czarowitch, with an income of one hundred thousand livres, and on his refusal wrote: "I know that your refusal arises from your desire to cultivate your studies and your friends.h.i.+ps in quiet. But this is of no consequence; bring all your friends with you, and I promise you, that both you and they shall have every accommodation in my power." Still he refused; the "powers and potentialities of the courts and royalty" being insufficient to seduce his independence. Beranger, the "French Burns," the poet of the people, from 1820 to the end of his life called "the real monarch of France,"

had the same proud spirit of independence. General Sebastiani, then minister of war, and dangerously ill, received one day a visit from Beranger. "Ah! my dear friend," said the old soldier to the poet, "I am very ill. Come, my dear Beranger, we must do something for our friends.

I declare to you that I shall not die quietly if I leave you in poverty behind me. Madame de Praslin has a fortune of her own; therefore it will not be doing any injustice to my children. Listen; I have there in my bureau a few small savings, about two hundred thousand francs; let us divide them. It is an old friend, an old soldier, who offers you this; and I swear, on my cross of honor, that no one shall know the pleasure you will have done me in accepting the small present." The poet refused.

Spinoza, at one time, we are informed, did not spend six sous a day, on an average, and did not drink more than a pint of wine in a month.

"Nature is satisfied with little," he used to say, "and when she is content, I am so too." A good friend brought him one day a present of two thousand florins. The philosopher, "in the presence of his host, civilly excused himself from accepting the money, saying that he was in need of nothing, and that the possession of so much money would only serve to distract him from his studies and occupations."

Dr. Johnson contracted an inveterate dislike to sustained intellectual exertion, and wondered how any one could write except for money, and never, or very rarely, wrote from any more elevated impulse than the stern pressure of want. "Who will say," says Richard c.u.mberland, "that Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he had not been pressed into the service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity pointed at his back? If fortune had turned him into a field of clover, he would have lain down and rolled in it. The mere manual labor of writing would not have allowed his la.s.situde and love of ease to have taken the pen out of the inkhorn, unless the cravings of hunger had reminded him that he must fill the sheet before he saw the table-cloth.... He would have put up prayers for early rising, and lain in bed all day, and with the most active resolutions possible, been the most indolent mortal living.... I have heard that ill.u.s.trious scholar a.s.sert that he subsisted himself for a considerable s.p.a.ce of time upon the scanty pittance of four-pence half-penny per day. How melancholy to reflect that his vast trunk and stimulating appet.i.te were to be supported by what will barely feed the weaned infant!" No wonder he so often screened himself when he ate, or, later in life, lost his temper with Mrs. Thrale when she made a jest of hunger!

It is related that soon after the publication of the Life of Savage, which was anonymous, Mr. Walter Harte, dining with Mr. Cave, the proprietor of The Gentleman's Magazine, at St. John's Gate, took occasion to speak very handsomely of the work. The next time Cave met Harte, he told him that he had made a man happy the other day at his home, by the encomiums he bestowed on Savage's Life. "How could that be?" said Harte; "none were present but you and I." Cave replied, "You might observe I sent a plate of victuals behind the screen. There skulked the biographer, one Johnson, whose dress was so shabby that he durst not make his appearance. He overheard our conversation; and your applauding his performance delighted him exceedingly."

"Man," said Goethe, "recognizes and praises only that which he himself is capable of doing; and those who by nature are mediocre have the trick of depreciating productions which, if they have faults, have also good points, so as to elevate the mediocre productions which they are fitted to praise." "While it is so undesirable that any man should receive what he has not examined, a far more frequent danger is that of flippant irreverence. Not all the heavens contain is obvious to the una.s.sisted eye of the careless spectator. Few men are great, almost as few able to appreciate greatness. The critics have written little upon the Iliad in all these ages which Alexander would have thought worth keeping with it in his golden box. Nor Shakespeare, nor Dante, nor Calderon, have as yet found a sufficient critic, though Coleridge and the Schlegels have lived since they did. Meantime," continues Margaret Fuller, "it is safer to take off the hat and shout vivat! to the conqueror, who may become a permanent sovereign, than to throw stones and mud from the gutter. The star s.h.i.+nes, and that it is with no borrowed light, his foes are his voucher. And every planet is a portent to the world; but whether for good or ill, only he can know who has science for many calculations. Not he who runs can read these books, or any books of any worth."

Homer was called a plagiarist by some of the earlier critics, and was accused of having stolen from older poets all that was remarkable in the Iliad and Odyssey. Sophocles was brought to trial by his children as a lunatic. Socrates, considered as the wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and Athenaeus as illiterate. Plato was accused of envy, lying, avarice, robbery, incontinence, and impiety.

Some of the old writers wrote to prove Aristotle vain, ambitious, and ignorant. Plato is said to have preferred the burning of all of the works of Democritus. Pliny and Seneca thought Virgil dest.i.tute of invention, and Quintilian was alike severe upon Seneca. It was a long time, says Seneca, that Democritus was taken for a madman, and before Socrates had any esteem in the world. How long was it before Cato could be understood? Nay, he was affronted, contemned, and rejected; and people never knew the value of him until they had lost him. "The Northern Highlanders," said Wilson, "do not admire Waverley, so I presume the Southern Highlanders despise Guy Mannering. The Westmoreland peasants think Wordsworth a fool. In Borrowdale, Southey is not known to exist. I met ten men at Hawick who did not think Hogg a poet, and the whole city of Glasgow think me a madman. So much for the voice of the people being the voice of G.o.d."

Goldsmith tells us, speaking of Waller's Ode on the Death of Cromwell, that English poetry was not then "quite harmonized: so that this, which would now be looked upon as a slovenly sort of versification, was in the times in which it was written almost a prodigy of harmony." At the same time, after praising the harmony of the Rape of the Lock, he observes that the irregular measure at the opening of the Allegro and Penseroso "hurts our English ear." Gray "loved intellectual ease and luxury, and wished as a sort of Mahometan paradise to 'lie on a sofa, and read eternal new romances of Mirivaux and Crebillon.' Yet all he could say of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, when it was first published, was, that there were some good verses in it. Akenside, too, whom he was so well fitted to appreciate, he thought 'often obscure, and even unintelligible.'" Horace Walpole marveled at the dullness of people who can admire anything so stupidly extravagant and barbarous as the Divina Commedia. "The long-continued contempt for Bunyan and De Foe was merely an expression of the ordinary feeling of the cultivated cla.s.ses toward anything which was identified with Grub Street; but it is curious to observe the incapacity of such a man as Johnson to understand Gray or Sterne, and the contempt which Walpole expressed for Johnson and Goldsmith, while he sincerely believed that the poems of Mason were destined to immortality." The poet Rogers tells us that Henry Mackenzie advised Burns to take for his model in song-writing Mrs. John Hunter!

Byron believed that Rogers and Moore were the truest poets among his contemporaries; that Pope was the first of all English, if not of all existing poets, and that Wordsworth was nothing but a namby-pamby driveler. De Quincey speaks of "Mr. Goethe" as an immoral and second-rate author, who owes his reputation chiefly to the fact of his long life and his position at the court of Weimar, and Charles Lamb expressed a decided preference of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to Goethe's immortal Faust. Dr. Johnson's opinion of Milton's sonnets is pretty well known--"those soul-animating strains, alas! too few," as Wordsworth estimated them. Hannah More wondered that Milton could write "such poor sonnets." Johnson said, "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones." He attacked Swift on all occasions. He said, speaking of Gulliver's Travels, "When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest." He called Gray "a dull fellow." "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people call him great." Talking of Sterne, he said, "Nothing odd will last long. Tristram Shandy did not last." See how Horace Walpole disposes of some of the G.o.ds of literature. "Tiresome Tristram Shandy, of which I could never get through three volumes." "I have read Sheridan's Critic; it appeared wondrously flat and old, and a poor imitation." He speaks of wading through Spenser's "allegories and drawling stanzas." Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, he said, are "a lump of mineral from which Dryden extracted all the gold, and converted it into beautiful medals." "Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting: in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." "Montaigne's Travels I have been reading; if I was tired of the Essays, what must one be of these? What signifies what a man thought who never thought of anything but himself? and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" "Boswell's book," he said, "is the story of a mountebank and his zany." Pepys, in his Diary, speaks of having bought "Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fas.h.i.+on for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies." Scaliger called Montaigne "a bold ignoramus." Paley used to say that to read Tristram Shandy was the summum bonum of life. Goldsmith said its author was a "block-head." Goethe told a young Italian who asked him his opinion of Dante's great poem, that he thought the Inferno abominable, the Purgatorio dubious, and the Paradiso tiresome.

Coleridge, talking of Goethe's Faust, said, "There is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. Moreover, much of it is vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous." "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, is, I think," says Southey, "the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw." Johnson told Anna Seward that "he would hang a dog that read the Lycidas of Milton twice." Waller wrote of Paradise Lost on its first appearance, "The old blind school-master, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man; if its length be not considered a merit, it has no other." Curran declared Paradise Lost to be the "worst poem in the language." When Harvey's book on the circulation of the blood came out, "he fell mightily in his practice. It was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physicians were against him." Who has forgotten the fierce attack of the Quarterly Review on Jane Eyre, in which the unknown author, who was a clergyman's daughter, is p.r.o.nounced "a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of society, a great coa.r.s.eness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion"? "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all," continues the keen-sighted critic, "we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, forfeited the society of her own s.e.x." Schiller's intimate friends decided against the Indian Death Song, which Goethe afterward p.r.o.nounced one of his best poems. When Andersen published his Wonder Stories told for Children, which fixed his place in literature and in popular affection, the reviewers advised him to waste no more time over such work; and he said, "I would willingly have discontinued writing them, but they forced themselves from me."

Warren says that the first chapter of the Diary of a Late Physician--the Early Struggles,--was offered by him successively to the conductors of three leading London magazines, and rejected, as "unsuitable for their pages," and "not likely to interest the public." Scott tells us that one of his nearest friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder, one of the most comprehensive thinkers and versatile authors of Germany, adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles V.

Montesquieu, upon the completion of The Spirit of Laws, which had cost him twenty years of labor, and which ran through twenty-two editions in less than as many months after its publication, submitted the ma.n.u.script to Helvetius and Saurin, who returned it with the advice not to spoil a great reputation by publis.h.i.+ng it. Wordsworth told Robinson that before his ballads were published, Tobin implored him to leave out We are Seven, as a poem that would d.a.m.n the book. It turned out to be one of the most popular. That charming and once popular Scottish story, The Annals of the Parish, by John Galt, was written ten or twelve years before the date of its publication, and anterior to the appearance of Waverley and Guy Mannering, and was rejected by the publishers of those works, with the a.s.surance that a novel or work of fiction entirely Scottish would not take with the public. St. Pierre submitted his delightful tale, Paul and Virginia, to the criticisms of a circle of his learned friends. They told him that it was a failure; that to publish it would be a piece of foolishness; that n.o.body would read it. St. Pierre appealed from his learned critics to his unlearned but sympathetic and sensible housekeeper. He read--she listened, admired, and wept. He accepted her verdict, and will be remembered by one little story longer than his contemporaries by their weary tomes. Moliere made use of a person of the same cla.s.s to criticise his plays. "I remember," says Boileau, "his pointing out to me several times an old servant that he had, to whom he told me he sometimes read his comedies, and he a.s.sured me that when the humorous pa.s.sages did not strike her, he altered them, because he had frequently proved that such pa.s.sages did not take upon the stage."

It would be curious to know how much chance or accident has had to do with even the best of the productions of literature. Wordsworth, in a conversation with one of his friends, gave an account of the origin of the Ancient Mariner. It was written in Devons.h.i.+re, where he and Coleridge were together. It was intended for the Monthly Magazine, and was to pay the expenses of a journey. It was to have been a joint work, but Wordsworth left the execution to Coleridge, after suggesting much of the plan. The idea of the crime was suggested by a book of travels, in which the superst.i.tion of the sailors with regard to the albatross is mentioned. Mark Lemon, it is said, loved to tell an anecdote which related to the period when Hood became a contributor to Punch. Looking over his letters one morning, he opened an envelope inclosing a poem which the writer said had been rejected by three contemporaries. If not thought available for Punch, he begged the editor, whom he knew but slightly, to consign it to the waste-paper basket, as the writer was "sick at the sight of it." The poem was signed "Tom Hood," and the lines were ent.i.tled "The Song of the s.h.i.+rt." The work was altogether different from anything that had ever appeared in Punch, and was considered so much out of keeping with the spirit of the periodical that at the weekly meeting its publication was opposed by several members of the staff.

Lemon was so firmly impressed, not only with the beauty of the work, but with its suitableness, that he stood by his first decision and published it. The Song of the s.h.i.+rt trebled the sale of the paper, and created a profound sensation throughout Great Britain. Scott told Ticknor that he once traveled with Campbell in a stage-coach alone, and that, to beguile the time, they talked of poetry and began to repeat some. At last Scott asked Campbell for something of his own, and he said there was one thing he had written but never printed that was full of "drums and trumpets and blunderbusses and thunder," and he didn't know if there was anything good in it. And then he repeated Hohenlinden. Scott listened with the greatest interest, and when he had finished, broke out, "But do you know that's devilish fine; why it's the finest thing you ever wrote, and it must be printed!" Scott told Leslie that he had known a laboring man who was with Burns when he turned up the mouse with his plow. Burns' first impulse was to kill it, but checking himself, as his eye followed the little creature, he said, "I'll make that mouse immortal!"

"One meets now and then with polished men," says Emerson, "who know everything, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they would?" Wrote Byron:--

"Many are poets who have never penned Their inspiration, and perchance the best; They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend Their thoughts to meaner things; they compressed The G.o.d within them, and rejoined the stars Unlaureled upon earth."

"On my walk with Lamb," notes Robinson, "he spoke with enthusiasm of Manning, declaring that he is the most wonderful man he ever knew, more extraordinary than Wordsworth or Coleridge. Yet he does nothing. He has traveled even in China, and has been by land from India through Thibet, yet, as far as is known, he has written nothing." "My father," said Charles Kingsley, "was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said to possess every talent except that of using his talents." Dr. Johnson lamented that "those who are most capable of improving mankind very frequently neglect to communicate their knowledge; either because it is more pleasing to gather ideas than to impart them, or because to minds naturally great, few things appear of so much importance as to deserve the notice of the public." "Great const.i.tutions," says Sir Thomas Browne, "and such as are constellated unto knowledge, do nothing till they outdo all; they come short of themselves, if they go not beyond others, and must not sit down under the degree of worthies. G.o.d expects no l.u.s.tre from the minor stars; but if the sun should not illuminate all, it were a sin in nature." Rogers said of Sydney Smith (of whose death he had just heard), in answer to the question, "How came it that he did not publicly show his powers?" "He had too fastidious a taste, and too high an idea of what ought to be." Disappointment is often felt and sometimes expressed concerning Coleridge, by those who hear so much of his extraordinary intellect. How could he have done more? His was one of those great, homeless souls which fly between heaven and earth; his language was only partly understood in this world, if wholly in another.

His best utterances were but incoherencies to the human ears that heard them. Stupid John Chester understood them as well as any.

"Vast objects of remote alt.i.tude," says Landor, "must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his claims." "Shakespeare," said Coleridge, "is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation and reading supplied him with the drapery of his figures." "The sand heaped by one flood," says Dr. Johnson, "is scattered by another; but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually was.h.i.+ng the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, pa.s.ses without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare." "Milton is not," says De Quincey, "an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the Paradise Lost is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces." Landor, in his Imaginary Conversations, makes Marvell thus to address Marten: "Hast thou not sat convivially with Oliver Cromwell? Hast thou not conversed familiarly with the only man greater than he, John Milton? One was ambitious of perishable power, the other of imperishable glory; both have attained their aim." Hazlitt and Coleridge being together, some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. Coleridge said "he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster." "A rib of Shakespeare," said Landor, "would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since." Said Goethe, "Would you see Shakespeare's intellect unfettered, read Troilus and Cressida, and see how he uses the materials of the Iliad in his fas.h.i.+on." Said Coleridge, "Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, etc., in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare, with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since." "It was really Voltaire," said Goethe, "who excited such minds as Diderot, D'Alembert, and Beaumarchais; for to be somewhat near him a man needed to be much, and could take no holidays." "To have seen such a man as Dr. Johnson," said Dr. Campbell, "was a thing to talk of a century hence." "Nature," said Heine, "wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe." "Were Byron now alive, and Burns," said Hawthorne, "the first would come from his ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who grew immortal while he stooped behind his plow."

Generally, thought Goethe, the personal character of the writer influences the public, rather than his talents as an artist. Napoleon said of Corneille, "If he were living now, I would make him a prince,"

yet he never read him. "I have often been amused at thinking," says Landor, "in what estimation the greatest of mankind were holden by their contemporaries. Not even the most sagacious and prudent one could discover much of them, or could prognosticate their future course in the infinity of s.p.a.ce! Men like ourselves are permitted to stand near, and indeed in the very presence of Milton: what do they see? dark clothes, gray hair, and sightless eyes! Other men have better things: other men, therefore, are n.o.bler! The stars themselves are only bright by distance; go close, and all is earthy." "There is," says Emerson, "somewhat touching in the madness with which the pa.s.sing age mischooses the object on which all candles s.h.i.+ne, and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers everything touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the Ess.e.xes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets pa.s.s without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player,--n.o.body suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting.

He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two." "The people of Gascony, who knew Montaigne well," says the biographer of the great essayist, "thought it very droll to see him in print. He had to pay printers and publishers in Guienne; elsewhere they were eager to buy him." Horace Walpole heard a sight-seer, on being shown the bows and arrows in the armory at Strawberry Hill, ask the housekeeper, "Pray, does Mr. Walpole shoot?" One of his t.i.tled neighbors told him, that, having some company with her, one of them had been to see Strawberry.

"Pray," said another, "who is that Mr. Walpole?" "Lord!" cried a third, "don't you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?" "Pho!" cried the first, "great epicure! you mean the antiquarian." The only tradition a visitor could gather in Pope's garden at Twickenham was that a fine cedar was planted there by a famous man a long time ago. An elderly, well-to-do inhabitant of Beaconsfield, of whom the same person inquired where Burke had lived, made answer: "Pray, sir, was he a poet?" During a pilgrimage which we are told Rogers and his friend Maltby made to Gerrard Street, Soho, to discover the house once occupied by Dryden, they came upon a house agent, who, scenting a job, eagerly responded: "Dryden--Mr.

Dryden--is he behindhand with his rent?" There is a story of an American who lost his way in the vain attempt to discover the residence of Wordsworth. Meeting an old woman in a scarlet cloak who was gathering sticks, he asked her the way to Rydal Mount. She could not tell him.

"Not know," said the American, "the house of the great Wordsworth?" "No; but what was he great in? Was he a preacher or a doctor?" "Greater than any preacher or doctor--he is a poet." "Oh, the poet!" she replied; "and why did you not tell me that before? I know who you mean now. I often meet him in the woods, jabbering his pottery (poetry) to hisself. But I'm not afraid of him. He's quite harmless, and almost as sensible as you or me." A Prussian staff-officer was quartered in Goethe's house after Jena. This officer, being afterward much interrogated by the curious as to his impressions of the great man, replied "that he had thoroughly tested the fellow and found that he had nothing but nonsense in his head!" Rogers told Leslie that when the Pleasures of Memory was first published, one of those busy gentlemen, who are vain of knowing everybody, came up to him at a party, and said, "Lady ---- is dying to be introduced to the author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pray, let her live," said Rogers, and with difficulty they made their way through the crowd to the lady. "Mr. Rogers, madam, author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pleasures of what?" "I felt for my friend," said Rogers.

No doubt the most genuine and grateful rewards which authors have received were those which came to them as surprises, or in overheard responses, unbidden and natural, from the common heart of humanity. Mrs.

Broderip reports of her father's pleasure in the immense popularity of his Song of the s.h.i.+rt, that "what delighted and yet touched him most deeply was, that the poor creatures to whose sorrows and sufferings he had given such eloquent voice, seemed to adopt its words as their own, by singing them about the streets to a rude air of their own adaptation." Bernard Barton ends a letter descriptive of an endearing girl's village funeral, with telling how "the clergyman, at the close of the service, stated that, by her wish, a little hymn, which was a great favorite with her, would be sung beside her open grave, by the school-children--some five-and-twenty little things--whose eyes and cheeks were red with crying. 'I thought they could never have found tongues, poor things; but once set off, they sang like a little band of cherubs. What added to the effect of it, to me, was that it was a little almost forgotten hymn of my own, written years ago, which no one present, but myself, was at all aware of.'" Goldsmith, in his college career, wrote street ballads, to save himself from starving, sold them for five s.h.i.+llings apiece, and stole out of college at night to hear them sung. "Happy night to him, worth all the dreary days!" exclaims his biographer, Forster. "Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, this poor, neglected sizer watched, waited, lingered there, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly failed. Few and dull, perhaps, the beggar's audience at first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and pa.s.sing from loud to low without meaning or melody; but not the less did the sweetest music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith."

VI.

LIMITS.

Minds, like some seed-plants, delight in sporting; there is great variety in thinking, but the few great ideas remain the same. They are constantly reappearing in all ages and in all literatures, modified by new circ.u.mstances and new uses; though in new dresses, they are still the old originals. Like the virtues, they have great and endless services to perform in this world. Now they appear in philosophy, now in fiction; the moralist uses them, and the buffoon; dissociate them, a.n.a.lyze them, strip them of their innumerable dresses, and they are recognized and identified--the same from the foundation and forever. If a discriminating general reader for forty years had noted their continual reappearance in the tons of books he has perused upon all subjects, he would be astonished at their varied and multiplied uses.

Thinkers he would perhaps find more numerous than thoughts; yet of the former how few. The original thought of one age diffuses itself through the next, and expires in commonplace--to be born again when occasion necessitates and G.o.d wills. At each birth it is a new creation--to the brain it springs from and to the creatures it is to enlighten and serve.

If the writer or speaker could know how often it has done even hack-service in the ages before him, he would repentantly blot it out, or choke in its utterance. In the unpleasant discovery, that indispensable and inspiring quality, self-conceit, would suffer a wound beyond healing.

"The number of those writers who can, with any justness of expression,"

says Melmoth, "be termed thinking authors, would not form a very copious library, though one were to take in all of that kind which both ancient and modern times have produced. Epicurus, we are told, left behind him three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro's own works, that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca a.s.sures us that Didymus, the grammarian, wrote no less than four thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen were wrought up: sound thought and well-matured reflections could have no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier is it to write than to think." "The same man," said Publius Syrus, "can rarely say a great deal and say it to the purpose."

To ridicule the pervading absence of thought in common conversation, the author of Lothair makes Pinto exclaim, "English is an expressive language, but not difficult to master. Its range is limited. It consists, as far as I observe, of four words: 'nice,' 'jolly,'

'charming,' and 'bore;' and some grammarians add, 'fond.'"

Proverbs, old as they are, seem always new, and are always smartly uttered. Sancho Panza is but one of an immortal type, and the proverbs and maxims he was always using are older than the pyramids--as old as spoken language. "The language of Spain," says Bulwer, in Caxtoniana, "is essentially a language of proverbs. In proverbs, lovers woo; in proverbs, politicians argue; in proverbs, you make your bargain with your landlady or hold a conference with your muleteer. The language of Spain is built upon those diminutive relics of a wisdom that may have existed before the Deluge, as the town of Berlin is built upon strata ama.s.sed, in the process of ages, by the animalcules that dwell in their pores." Aristotle was so struck by the condensed wisdom of proverbial sayings, that he supposed them to be the wrecks of an ancient philosophy saved from the ruin in which the rest of the system had been lost by their eloquence and shortness. Pascal conceived that every possible maxim of conduct existed in the world, though no individual can be conversant with the entire series. "There is a certain list of vices committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all authors, which,"

says Sir Thomas Browne, "will last as long as human nature; which, digested into commonplaces, may serve for any theme, and never be out of date until doomsday." A proverb Lord John Russell has defined to be "the wisdom of the many in the wit of one." "The various humors of mankind,"

says the elder Disraeli, "in the mutability of human affairs, has given birth to every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and mourned or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal intercourse of proverbs, from the eastern to the western world; for we discover among those which appear strictly national many which are common to them all. Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from The Mines of the East; like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost t.i.tle-deeds. The vulgar proverb, 'To carry coals to Newcastle,' local and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by ourselves; it may be found among the Persians; in the Bustan of Saadi, we have 'To carry pepper to Hindostan;' among the Hebrews, 'To carry oil to a city of olives;' a similar proverb occurs in Greek; and in Galland's Maxims of the East we may discover how many of the most common proverbs among us, as well as some of Joe Miller's jests, are of Oriental origin. The resemblance of certain proverbs in different nations must, however, be often ascribed to the ident.i.ty of human nature; similar situations and similar objects have unquestionably made men think and act and express themselves alike. All nations are parallels of each other. Hence all collectors of proverbs complain of the difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from those which had crept into the language from others, particularly when nations have held much intercourse together. We have a copious collection of Scottish proverbs by Kelly; but this learned man was mortified at discovering that many, which he had long believed to have been genuine Scottish, were not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek ones; many of his Scottish proverbs are almost literally expressed among the fragments of remote antiquity. It would have surprised him further had he been aware that his Greek originals were themselves but copies, and might have been found in D'Herbelot, Erpenius, and Golius, and in many Asiatic works, which have been more recently introduced to the enlarged knowledge of the European student, who formerly found his most extended researches limited by h.e.l.lenistic lore."

Perhaps the proverb from the apostolical writings in most frequent circulation, is the one which St. Paul has adopted from Menander, and which, as Dean Alford suggests, may have become, in the days of the apostle, a current commonplace: "Evil communications corrupt good manners."

"What stories are new?" asks Thackeray. "All types of all characters march through all fables." "Will it be believed," says Max Muller, in his essay On the Migration of Fables, "that we, in this Christian country, and in the nineteenth century, teach our children the first, the most important lessons of worldly wisdom, nay, of a more than worldly wisdom, from books borrowed from Buddhists and Brahmans, from heretics and idolaters, and that wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India, like precious seed scattered broadcast all over the world, still bear fruit a hundred and a thousand fold in that soil which is the most precious before G.o.d and man, the soul of a child? No lawgiver, no philosopher has made his influence felt so widely, so deeply, and so permanently as the author of these children's fables. But who was he? We do not know. His name, like the name of many a benefactor of the human race, is forgotten."

"Our obligations to genius are the greater," says a British essayist, "because we are seldom able to trace them. We cannot mount up to the sources from which we derive the ideas that make us what we are. Few of my readers may have ever read Chaucer; fewer still the Principia of Newton. Yet how much poorer the minds of all my readers would be if Chaucer and Newton had never written! All the genius of the past is in the atmosphere we breathe at present."

The author of The Eclipse of Faith, in one of his intellectual visions, saw suddenly expunged--"remorselessly expunged"--from literature "every text, every phrase, which had been quoted from the Bible, not only in the books of devotion and theology, but in those of poetry and fiction."

"Never before," he says, "had I any adequate idea of the extent to which the Bible had moulded the intellectual and moral life of the last eighteen centuries, nor how intimately it had interfused itself with the habits of thought and modes of expression; nor how naturally and extensively its comprehensive imagery and language had been introduced into human writings, and most of all where there had been most of genius. A vast portion of literature became instantly worthless, and was transformed into so much waste paper. It was almost impossible to look into any book of merit, and read ten pages together, without coming to some provoking erasures and mutilations, which made whole pa.s.sages perfectly unintelligible. Many of the sweetest pa.s.sages of Shakespeare were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still diviner source. As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally be supposed. Walter Scott's novels were filled with lacunae. I hoped it might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here it was curious to see what strange ravages the visitation had wrought.

Some of the most beautiful and comprehensive of Bacon's Aphorisms were reduced to enigmatical nonsense."

A scholarly article upon Homeric Characters in and out of Homer, published in The London Quarterly, 1857, opens with this pa.s.sage: "To one only among the countless millions of human beings has it been given to draw characters, by the strength of his own individual hand, in lines of such force and vigor that they have become from his day to our own the common inheritance of civilized man. That one is Homer. Ever since his time, besides finding his way even into the impenetrable East, he has found literary capital and available stock in trade for reciters and hearers, for authors and readers of all times and of all places within the limits of the western world. Like the sun, which furnishes with its light the courts and alleys of London, while himself unseen by their inhabitants, he has supplied with the illumination of his ideas millions of minds never brought into direct contact with his works, and even millions hardly aware of his existence."

One of the most eminent platform orators of the time has treated the habit of borrowing, in literature, in a most interesting manner.

"Take," he said, "the stories of Shakespeare, who has, perhaps, written his forty-odd plays. Some are historical. The rest, two thirds of them, he did not stop to invent, but he found them. These he clutched, ready-made to his hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them before from the East. Cinderella and her Slipper is older than all history, like half a dozen other baby legends. The annals of the world do not go back far enough to tell us from where they first came. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dunloch, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct stories.

He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. Even our newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. The tale which Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man writing a letter as follows: 'My dear friend, I would write you more in detail, more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder reading every word.' ('No, you lie; I've not read a word you have written!') This is an Irish bull, still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was the best--of the man who said, 'I would have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle.' That comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greeks stole it from the Egyptians hundreds of years back. There is one story which it is said Was.h.i.+ngton has related of a man who went into an inn and asked for a gla.s.s of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-gla.s.s about half the usual size. The landlord said, 'That gla.s.s out of which you are drinking is forty years old.' 'Well,' said the thirsty traveler, contemplating its minute proportions, 'I think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw.' [The same story is told of Foote. Dining while in Paris with Lord Stormont, that thrifty Scotch peer, then amba.s.sador, as usual produced his wine in the smallest of decanters, and dispensed it in the smallest of gla.s.ses, enlarging all the time on its exquisite growth and enormous age. "It is very little of its age," said Foote, holding up his diminutive gla.s.s.] That story as told is given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born.

Why, all these Irish bulls are Greek--every one of them. Take the Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes and looked into the gla.s.s to see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman that met a friend who said to him, 'Why, sir, I heard you were dead.' 'Well,' says the man, 'I suppose you see I am not.' 'Oh, no,' says he, 'I would believe the man who told me a great deal quicker than I would you.' Well, these are all Greek. A score or more of them, of the parallel character, come from Athens."

The critics and scholiasts would have us believe that "we have no very credible account of Rome or the Romans for more than four hundred years after the foundation of the city; and that the first book of Livy, containing the regal period, can lay claim, when severely tested, to no higher authority than Lord Macaulay's Lays. Livy states that whatever records existed prior to the burning of Rome by the Gauls--three hundred and sixty-five years after its foundation--were then burnt or lost. We are left, therefore, in the most embarra.s.sing uncertainty whether Tarquin outraged Lucretia; or Brutus shammed idiotcy, and condemned his sons to death; or Mutius Scaevola thrust his hand into the fire; or Curtius jumped into the gulf--if there was one; or Cloelia swam the Tiber; or Cocles defended a bridge against an army. We could fill pages with skeptical doubts of scholiasts, who would fain deprive Diogenes of his lantern and his tub, aesop of his hump, Sappho of her leap, Rhodes of its Colossus, and Dionysius the First of his ear; nay, who pretend that Cadmus did not come from Phoenicia, that Belisarius was not blind, that Portia did not swallow burning coals, and that Dionysius the Second never kept a school at Corinth. Modern chemists have been unable to discover how Hannibal could have leveled rocks, or Cleopatra dissolved pearls with vinegar. A German pedant has actually ventured to question the purity of Lucretia."

Hayward (translator of Faust), in his article on Pearls and Mock Pearls of History, says, "We are gravely told, on historical authority, by Moore, in a note to one of his Irish Melodies, that during the reign of Bryan, King of Munster, a young lady of great beauty, richly dressed, and adorned with jewels, undertook a journey from one end of the kingdom to another, with a wand in her hand, at the top of which was a ring of exceeding great value; and such was the perfection of the laws and the government that no attempt was made upon her honor, nor was she robbed of her clothes and jewels. Precisely the same story is told of Alfred, of Frothi, King of Denmark, and of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Another romantic anecdote, fluctuating between two or more sets of actors, is an episode in the amours of Emma, the alleged daughter of Charlemagne, who, finding that the snow had fallen thickly during a nightly interview with her lover, Eginhard, took him upon her shoulders, and carried him some distance from her bower, to prevent his footsteps from being traced.

Unluckily, Charlemagne had no daughter named Emma or Imma; and a hundred years before the appearance of the chronicle which records the adventure, it had been related in print of a German emperor and a damsel unknown. The story of Canute commanding the waves to roll back rests on the authority of Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote about a hundred years after the Danish monarch. 'As for the greater number of the stories with which the ana are stuffed,' says Voltaire, 'including all those humorous replies attributed to Charles the Fifth and Henry the Fourth, to a hundred modern princes, you find them in Athenaeus and in our old authors.' Dionysius the tyrant, we are told by Diogenes of Laerte, treated his friends like vases full of good liquors, which he broke when he had emptied them. This is precisely what Cardinal de Retz says of Madame de Chevreuse's treatment of her lovers. There is a story of Sully's meeting a young lady, veiled, and dressed in green, on the back stairs leading to Henry's apartment, and being asked by the king whether he had not been told that his majesty had a fever and could not receive that morning, replied, 'Yes, sire, but the fever is gone; I have just met it on the staircase, dressed in green.' This story is told of Demetrius and his father. The lesson of perseverance in adversity taught by the spider to Robert Bruce is said to have been taught by the same insect to Tamerlane. 'When Columbus,' says Voltaire, 'promised a new hemisphere, people maintained that it did not exist; and when he had discovered it, that it had been known a long time.' It was to confute such detractors that he resorted to the ill.u.s.tration of the egg, already employed by Brunelleschi when his merit in raising the cupola of the cathedral of Florence was contested. The anecdote of Southampton reading The Faery Queen, whilst Spenser was waiting in the ante-chamber, may pair off with one of Louis XIV. As this munificent monarch was going over the improvements of Versailles with Le Notre, the sight of each fresh beauty or capability tempts him to some fresh extravagance, till the architect cries out that if their promenade is continued in this fas.h.i.+on it will end in the bankruptcy of the state. Southampton, after sending first twenty, and then fifty guineas, on coming to one fine pa.s.sage after another, exclaims, 'Turn the fellow out of the house, or I shall be ruined.' On the morning of his execution, Charles I. said to his groom of the chambers, 'Let me have a s.h.i.+rt on more than ordinary, by reason the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which some observers will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such imputation; I fear not death.' As Bailly was waiting to be guillotined, one of the executioners accused him of trembling. 'I am cold,' was the reply. Frederick the Great is reported to have said, in reference to a troublesome a.s.sailant, 'This man wants me to make a martyr of him, but he shall not have that satisfaction.' Vespasian told Demetrius the Cynic, 'You do all you can to get me to put you to death, but I do not kill a dog for barking at me.' This Demetrius was a man of real spirit and honesty. When Caligula tried to conciliate his good word by a large gift in money, he sent it back with the message, 'If you wish to bribe me, you must send me your crown.' George III. ironically asked an eminent divine, who was just returned from Rome, whether he had converted the pope. 'No, sire, I had nothing better to offer him.'

Cardinal Ximenes, upon a muster which was taken against the Moors, was spoken to by a servant of his to stand a little out of the smoke of the harquebuse, but he said again that 'that was his incense.' The first time Charles XII. of Sweden was under fire, he inquired what the hissing he heard about his ears was, and being told that it was caused by the musket-b.a.l.l.s, 'Good,' he exclaimed, 'this henceforth shall be my music.'

Pope Julius II., like many a would-be connoisseur, was apt to exhibit his taste by fault-finding. On his objecting that one of Michel Angelo's statues might be improved by a few touches of the chisel, the artist, with the aid of a few pinches of marble dust, which he dropped adroitly, conveyed an impression that he had acted on the hint. When Halifax found fault with some pa.s.sages in Pope's translation of Homer, the poet, by the advice of Garth, left them as they stood, but told the peer that they had been retouched, and had the satisfaction of finding him as easily satisfied as his holiness. When Lycurgus was to reform and alter the state of Sparta, in the consultation one advised that it should be reduced to an absolute popular equality; but Lycurgus said to him, 'Sir, begin it in your own house.' Had Dr. Johnson forgotten this among Bacon's Apophthegms when he told Mrs. Macaulay, 'Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing, and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us'?" Boswell once said, "A man is reckoned a wise man, rather for what he does not say, than for what he says: perhaps upon the whole Limbertongue speaks a greater quant.i.ty of good sense than Manly does, but Limbertongue gives you such floods of frivolous nonsense that his sense is quite drowned. Manly gives you unmixed good sense only. Manly will always be thought the wisest man of the two." Corwin, a brilliant wit and humorist of the Sydney Smith stamp, and in his time the greatest of American stump-orators, was often heard to say that his life was a failure, because he had not been, with the public, more successful in serious veins. A friend relates that he was riding with him one day, when Corwin remarked of a speech made the evening before, "It was very good indeed, but in bad style. Never make the people laugh.

I see that you cultivate that. It is easy and captivating, but death in the long run to the speaker." "Why, Mr. Corwin, you are the last man living I expected such an opinion from." "Certainly, because you have not lived so long as I have. Do you know, my young friend, that the world has a contempt for the man that entertains it? One must be solemn--solemn as an a.s.s--never say anything that is not uttered with the greatest gravity, to win respect. The world looks up to the teacher and down at the clown; yet, nine cases out of ten, the clown is the better fellow of the two." Sydney Smith is reported to have said to his eldest brother, a grave and prosperous gentleman: "Brother, you and I are exceptions to the laws of nature. You have risen by your gravity, and I have sunk by my levity." In one of Steele's Tatlers, Sancroft asked the question, why it was that actors, speaking of things imaginary, affected audiences as if they were real; whilst preachers, speaking of things real, could only affect their congregations as with things imaginary. Bickerstaff answered, "Why, indeed, I don't know; unless it is that we actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary." This answer, besides being borrowed by Betterton, has been credited to every famous actor since Steele printed it. Every reader of Charles Lamb remembers his amusing essay on the Origin of Roast Pig. The legend of the first act of oyster-eating is enough like it to remind one of it. It is related that a man, walking one day by the sh.o.r.e of the sea, picked up one of those savory bivalves, just as it was in the act of gaping. Observing the extreme smoothness of the interior of the sh.e.l.ls, he insinuated his finger that he might feel the s.h.i.+ning surface, when suddenly they closed upon the exploring digit, causing a sensation less pleasurable than he antic.i.p.ated. The prompt withdrawal of his finger was scarcely a more natural movement than its transfer to his mouth, when he tasted oyster-juice for the first time, as the Chinaman in Elia's essay, having burnt his finger, first tasted cracklin. The savor was delicious,--he had made a great discovery; so he picked up the oyster, forced open the sh.e.l.ls, banqueted upon the contents, and soon brought oyster-eating into fas.h.i.+on. Nothing, it is said, puzzled Bonaparte more than to meet an honest man of good sense; he did not know what to make of him. He would offer him money; if that failed, he would talk of glory, or promise him rank and power; but if all these temptations failed, he set him down for an idiot, or a half-mad dreamer.

Conscience was a thing he could not understand. Rulhiere, who was at St.

Petersburg in 1762, when Catherine caused her husband, Peter III., to be murdered, wrote a history of the transaction on his return to France, which was handed about in ma.n.u.script. The empress was informed of it, and endeavored to procure the destruction of the work. Madame Geoffrin was sent to Rulhiere to offer him a considerable bribe to throw it into the fire. He eloquently remonstrated that it would be a base and cowardly action, which honor and virtue forbade. She heard him patiently to the end, and then calmly replied, "What! isn't it enough?" Lord Orrery related as an unquestionable occurrence that Swift once commenced the service, when n.o.body except the clerk attended his church, with, "Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places." Mr. Theophilus Swift afterward discovered the anecdote in a jest-book which was published before his great kinsman was born. In Domenichi's Facetiae, and other old Italian books, there is this story of Dante. The famous poet, returning home one day out of the country, was overtaken by three gentlemen of Florence, his acquaintance; who, knowing how ready he was in his answers, they all three resolved, by way of proof, to make three successive attacks upon him in the following manner. The first said to him, "Good day, Master Dante;" the second, "Whence come you, Master Dante?" the third, "Are the waters deep, Master Dante?" To all of which, without once stopping his horse, or making the least pause, he answered thus: "Good day, and good year; From the Fair; To the very bottom." Not unlike this is a story of Henry IV. of France, who was overtaken upon the road by a clergyman that was posting to court; the king, putting his head out of his coach, asked the man in his