Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

warmth of friendship, and his eloquence in expressing it. His early love of Ovid, as a master in poetry, is enthusiastic.

Non tunc Ionio quidquam cessisset Homero,
Neve foret victo laus tibi prima, Maro!

Neve is often used by the moderns for neque, very improperly. Although we hear much about the Metamorphoses and the Æneid being left incomplete, we may reasonably doubt whether the authors could have much improved them. There is a deficiency of skill in the composition of both poems; but every part is elaborately worked out. Nothing in Latin can excell the beauty of Virgil's versification. Ovid's at one moment has the fluency, at another the discontinuance, of mere conversation. Sorrow, passionate, dignified, and deep, is never seen in the Metamorphoses as in the Eneid; nor in the Eneid is any eloquence so sustained, any spirit so heroic, as in the contest between Ajax and Ulysses. But Ovid frequently, in other places, wants that gravity and potency in which Virgil rarely fails: declamation is no substitute for it. Milton, in his Latin verses, often places words beginning with sc, st, sp, &c., before a dactyl, which is inadmissible.

Ah! quoties dignæ stupui miracula formæ
Quæ possit senium vel reparare Jovis.

No such difficult a matter as he appears to represent it for Jupiter, to the very last, was much given to such reparations. This elegy, with many slight faults, has great facility and spirit of its own, and has caught more by running at the side of Ovid and Tibullus. In the second elegy, alipes is a dactyl; pes, simple or compound, is long. This poem is altogether unworthy of its

author. The third is on the death of Launcelot Andrews, bishop of Winchester. It is florid, puerile, and altogether deficient in pathos. The conclusion is curious:

Flebam turbatos Cepheleiâ pellice somnos ;
Talia contingant somnia sæpe mihi.

Ovid has expressed the same wish in the same words, but the aspiration was for somewhat very dissimilar to a bishop of Winchester. The fourth is an epistle to Thomas Young, his preceptor, a man whose tenets were puritanical, but who encouraged in his scholar the love of poetry. Much of this piece is imitated from Ovid. There are several thoughts which might have been omitted, and several expressions which might have been improved. For instance:

Namque eris ipse Dei radiante sub ægide tutus,
Ille tibi custos et pugil ille tibi.

All the verses after these are magnificent. The next is on Spring; very inferior to its prede

cessors.

Nam dolus et cædes et vis, cum nocte recessit
Neve giganteum Dei metuere scelus.

How thick the faults lie here! But the invitation of the Earth to the Sun is quite Ovidian.

Semicaperque deus semideusque caper is too much so. Elegy the sixth is addressed to Deodati.

Mitto tibi sanam non pleno ventre salutem,
Qua tu, distento, forte carere potes.

I have often observed in modern Latinists of the

Martial wrote bad

first order, that they use indifferently forte and forsan or forsitan. Here is an example. Forte is, by accident, without the implication of a doubt; forsan always implies one. latin when he wrote "Si forsan." Runchenius himself writes questionably to D'Orville "sed forte res non est tanti." It surely would be better to have written fortasse. I should have less wondered to find forte in any modern Italian (excepting Bembo, who always writes with as much precision as Cicero or Cæsar), because ma forse, their idiom, would prompt sed forte.

Naso Corallæis mala carmina misit ab agris.

Untrue. He himself was discontented with them because they had lost their playfulness; but their all the elegiac verses that have been written in only fault lies in their adulation. I doubt whether the Latin language ever since, are worth the books of them he sent from Pontus. Deducting one couplet from Joannes Secundus, I would strike the bargain.

Si modo saltem.

The saltem is here redundant and contrary to Latinity.

Southey. This elegy, I think, is equable and pleasing, without any great fault or great beauty.

Landor. In the seventh he discloses the first
Here are two verses

effects of love on him.
which I never have read without the heart-ache :

Ut mihi adhuc refugam quærebant lumina noctem
Nec matutinum sustinuere jubar.

We perceive at one moment the first indication of love and of blindness. Happy, had the blindness been as unreal as the love. Cupid is not exalted by a comparison with Paris and Hylas, thian. He writes, as many did, author for auctor: nor the frown of Apollo magnified by the Parvery improperly. In the sixtieth verse is again

neve for nec; nor is it the last time. But here come beautiful verses:

Deme meos tandem, verum nec deme, furores;
Nescio cur, miser est suaviter omnis amans.

I wish cur had been qui. Subjoined to this elegy are ten verses in which he regrets the time he had wasted in love. Probably it was on the day (for it could not have cost him more) on which he composed it.

Southey. The series of these compositions exhibits little more than so many exercises in mythology. You have repeated to me all that is good in them, and in such a tone of enthusiasm as made me think better of them than I had ever thought before. The first of his epigrams, on Leonora Baroni, has little merit: the second, which relates to Tasso, has much.

Southey. I suspect you will be less an admirer
of the next, on Obitum Præulis Elienses,
Qui rex sacrorum illâ fuisti in insula
Quæ nomen Anguillæ tenet,

Et imprecor neci necem.

Landor. I wish however that in the sixth line he had substituted illa for eâdem; and not on account of the metre; for eadem becomes a spondee, as eodem in Virgil's 66 uno eodemque igni." And sibi, which ends the poem, is superfluous; where he wishes Death were dead. if there must be any word it should be ei, which the metre rejects. The Scazons against Salmasius are a miserable copy of Persius's heavy prologue to his satires; and moreover a copy at second-hand for Ménage had imitated it in his invective against Mommor, whom he calls Gargilius. He begins,

Quis expedivit psittaco suo χαίρε.

But Persius's and Ménage's at least are metrical, which Milton's in one instance are not. The fifth foot should be an iambic. In primatum we have a spondee. The iambics which follow, on Salmasius again, are just as faulty. They start with a false quantity, and go on stumbling with the same infirmity. The epigram on More, the defender of Salmasius, is without wit; the pun is very poor. The next piece, a fable of the Farmer and Master, is equally vapid. But now comes the "Bellipotens Virgo," of which we often have spoken, but of which no one ever spoke too highly. Christina was flighty and insane; but it suited the policy of Cromwell to flatter a queen almost as vain as Elizabeth, who could still command the veterans of Gustavus Adolphus. We will pass over the Greek verses. They are such as no boy of the sixth form would venture to show up in any of our public schools. We have only one alcaic ode in the volume, and a very bad one it is. The canons of this metre were unknown in Milton's time. But, versed as he was in mythology, he never should have written

Nec puppe lustrâsses Charontis
Horribiles barathri recessus.

The good Doctor Goslyn was not rowed in that
direction, nor could any such place be discovered
from the bark of Charon, from whom Dr. Goslyn
had every right, as Vice-Chancellor of the Univer-
sity, to expect civility and attention.

Southey. We come now to a longer poem, and in heroic verse, on the Gunpowder Plot. It appears to me to be even more Ovidian than the elegies. Monstrosus Typhoeus, Mavortigena Quirinus, the Pope, and the mendicant friars, meet strangely. However, here they are, and now come Saint Peter and Bromius.

Landor.

Hic Dolus insortis semper sedet ater ocellis. Though ocellus is often used for oculus, being a diminutive, it is, if not always a word of endearment, yet never applicable to what is terrific or heroic. In the one hundredth and sixty-third verse the Pope is represented as declaring the Protestant religion to be the true one.

Again,

Sub regna furvi luctuosa Tartari
Sedesque subterraneas.

as

Landor. He never has descended before to such a bathos as this, where he runs against the coming blackamoor in the dark. However, he recovers from the momentary stupefaction, and there follow twenty magnificent Horace himself, who excells in this metre, never verses, such wrote in it. But the next, Naturam non pati senium, is still more admirable. I wish only he had omitted the third verse.

Heu quàm perpetuis erroribus acta fatiscit

Avia mens hominum, tenebrisque immersa profundis Edipodioniam volvit sub pectore noctem. Sublime as volvit sub pectore noctem is, the lumbering and ill-composed word, Edipodioniam, spoils it. Beside, the sentence would go on very well, omitting the whole line. Gray has much less vigour and animation in the fragment of his philosophical poem. Robert Smith alone has more: how much more! Enough to rival Lucretius in his noblest passages, and to deter the most aspiring from an attempt at Latin poetry. The next is also on a philosophical subject, and entitled De Idea Platonica quemadmodum Aristoteles intellexit.

This is obscure. Aristoteles knew, as others do, that Plato entertained the whimsy of God working from an archetype; but he himself was too sound and solid for the admission of such a notion. The first five verses are highly poetical: the sixth is Cowleian. At the close he scourges Plato for playing the fool so extravagantly, and tells him either to recall the poets he has turned out of doors, or to go out himself. There are people who look up in astonishment at this archetypus gigas, frightening God while he works at him. Milton has invested him with great dignity, and slips only once into the poetical corruptions of the age.

Southey. Lover as you are of Milton, how highly must you be gratified by the poem he addresses to his father!

Landor. I am happy, remote as we are, to
think of the pleasure so good a father must have
felt on this occasion, and how clearly he must
have seen in prospective the glory of his son.
In the verses after the forty-second,

Carmina regales epulas ornare solebant,
Cum nondum luxus vastæque immensa vorago
Nota gulæ, et modico fumabat cæna Lyæo,
Tum de more sedens festa ad convivia vates, &c.
I wish he had omitted the two intermediate lines,
and had written,

Carmina regales epulas ornare solebant,
Cum, de more, &c.

Et quotquot fidei caluere cupidine veræ. This poem, which ends poorly, is a wonderful work for a boy of seventeen, although much less The four toward the conclusion,

so than Chatterton's Bristowe Tragedy and Ella.

At tibi, chare pater, &c.

must have gratified the father as much almost by the harmony as the sentiment.

Southey. The scazons to Salsilli are a just and equitable return for his quatrain; for they are full of false quantities, without an iota of poetry. Landor. But how gloriously he burst forth again in all his splendour for Manso; for Manso, who before had enjoyed the immortal honour of being the friend of Tasso.

Diis dilecte senex! te Jupiter æquus oportet
Nascentem et miti lustrârit lumine Phœbus,
Atlantisque nepos; neque enim nisi charus ab ortu
Diis superis poterit magno favisse poetæ.

Landor. I find traces in Milton of nearly all the best Latin poets, excepting Lucretius. This is singular; for there is in both of them a generous warmth and a contemptuous severity. I admire and love Lucretius. There is about him a simple majesty, a calm and lofty scorn of everything pusillanimous and abject: and consistently with this character, his poetry is masculine, plain, concentrated, and energetic. But since invention was precluded by the subject, and glimpses of imagination could be admitted through but few and narrow apertures, it is the insanity of enthusiasm to prefer his poetical powers to those of

And the remainder of the poem is highly enthu- Virgil, of Catullus, and of Ovid; in all of whom siastic. What a glorious verse is,

[blocks in formation]

every part of what constitutes the true poet is much more largely displayed. The excellence of of place, and are always to be found wherever Lucretius is, that his ornaments are never out there is a place for them. Ovid knows not what

to do with his, and is as fond of accumulation as the frequenter of auction-rooms. He is playful so out of season, that he reminds me of a young lady I saw at Sta. Maria Novella, who at one moment crossed herself, and at the next tickled her companion, by which process they were both put upon their speed at their prayers, and made very good and happy. Small as is the portion of glory which accrues to Milton from his Latin poetry, there are single sentences in it, ay, single

images, worth all that our island had produced

before. In all the volume of Buchanan I doubt whether you can discover a glimpse of poetry; and few sparks fly off the anvil of May.

There is a confidence of better days expressed in this closing poem. Enough is to be found in his Latin to insure him a high rank and a lasting name. It is however to be regretted that late in life he ran back to the treasures of his

Mærent, inque suum convertunt ora magistrum. The pause at mærent, and the word also, show the great master. In Virgil himself it is impossible to find anything more scientific. Here, as in Lycidas, mythologies are intermixed, and the heroic bursts forth from the pastoral. Apollo could not for ever be disguised as the shepherd-youth, and estimated them with the fondness of boy of Admetus.

Supra caput imber et Eurus

Triste sonant, fractaque agitata crepuscula sylvæ. Southey. This is finely expressed : but he found the idea not untouched before. Gray, and others have worked upon it since. It may be well to say little on the Presentation of the poems to the Bodleian Library. Strophes and antistrophes are here quite out of place; and on no occasion has any Latin poet so jumbled together the old metres. Many of these are irregular and imperfect. Ion Acteå genitus Creusâ

is not a verse: authorum is not Latin.

Et tutela dabit sōlers Rousi

is defective in metre. This Pindaric ode to Rouse the librarian, is indeed fuller of faults than any other of his Latin compositions. He tells us himself that he has admitted a spondee for the third foot in the phaleucian verse, because Catullus had done so in the second. He never wrote such bad verses, or gave such bad reasons, all his life before. But beautifully and justly has he said,

Si quid meremur sana posteritas sciet.

that undiscerning age. No poet ever was sorry that he abstained from early publication. But Milton seems to have cherished his first effusions with undue partiality. Many things written later by him are unworthy of preservation, especially those which exhibit men who provoked him into bitterness. Hatred, the most vulgar of vulgarisms, could never have belonged to his natural character. He must have contracted the distemper from theologians and critics. The scholar in his days was half clown and half trooper. College-life could leave but few of its stains and incrustations on a man who had stept forward so soon into the amenities of Italy, and had conversed so familiarly with the most polished gentlemen of the most polished nation.

Southey. In his attacks on Salmasius, and others more obscure, he appears to have mistaken his talent in supposing he was witty.

Landor. Is there a man in the world wise enough to know whether he himself is witty or not, to the extent he aims at? I doubt whether any question needs more self-examination. It is only the fool's heart that is at rest upon it. He never asks how the matter stands, and feels con

fident he has only to stoop for it. Milton's dough, to the worst, even there. Unless you sign a cerit must be acknowledged, is never the lighter tificate of their health and vigour, your windows for the bitter barm he kneads up with it. and lamps may be broken by the mischievous rabble below.

Southey. The sabbath of his mind required no levities, no excursions or amusements. But he was not ill-tempered. The worst-tempered men have often the greatest and readiest store of pleasantries. Milton, on all occasions indignant and wrathful at injustice, was unwilling to repress the signification of it when it was directed against himself. However, I can hardly think he felt so much as he expresses; but he seized on bad models in his resolution to show his scholarship. Disputants, and critics in particular, followed one another with invectives; and he was thought to have given the most manifest proof of original genius who had invented a new form of reproach. I doubt if Milton was so contented with his discomfiture of Satan, or even with his creation of Eve, as with the overthrow of Salmasius under the loads of fetid brimstone he fulminated against him.

It is fortunate we have been sitting quite alone while we detected the blemishes of a poet we both venerate. The malicious are always the most ready to bring forward an accusation of malice: and we should certainly have been served, before long, with a writ pushed under the door.

Landor. Marauders will cook their greens and bacon, though they tear down cedar pannels for the purpose.

Southey. There is an incessant chatterer, who has risen to the first dignities of state, by the same means as nearly all men rise now by; namely, opposition to whatever is done or projected by those invested with authority. He will never allow us to contemplate greatness at our leisure: he will not allow us indeed to look at it for a moment. Cæsar must be stript of his laurels and left bald; or some reeling soldier, some insolent swaggerer, some stilted ruffian, thrust before his triumph. If he fights, he does not know how to use his sword; if he speaks, he speaks vile Latin. I wonder that Cromwell fares no better; for he lived a hypocrite and he died a traitor. I should not recall to you this ridiculous man, to whom the Lords have given the run of the House . . a man pushed off his chair by every party he joins, and enjoying all the disgraces he incurs. . were it not that he has also, in the fulness of his impudence, raised his cracked voice and incondite language against Milton.

Landor. Are we not somewhat like two little Landor. I hope his dapple fellow-creatures in beggar-boys, who, forgetting that they are in tat-the lanes will be less noisy and more modest as ters, sit noticing a few stains and rents in their father's raiment?

Southey. But they love him.

Let us now walk homeward. We leave behind us the Severn and the sea and the mountains; and, if smaller things may be mentioned so suddenly after greater, we leave behind us the sundial, which marks, as we have been doing in regard to Milton, the course of the great luminary by a slender line of shadow.

Landor. After witnessing his glorious ascension, we are destined to lower our foreheads over the dreary hydropathy and flanelly voices of the swathed and sinewless.

we pass along them homeward.

Southey. Wretched as he is in composition, superficial as he is in all things, without a glimmer of genius, or a grain of judgment, yet his abilities and acquirements raise him somewhat high above those more quiescent and unaspiring ones, you call his fellow-creatures.

Landor. The main difference is, that they are subject to have their usual burdens laid upon them all their lives, while his of the woolsack is taken off for ever. The allusion struck me from the loudness and dissonance of his voice, the wilfulness and perverseness of his disposition, and his habitude of turning round on a sudden and

Southey. Do not be over-sure that you are come | kicking up behind.

QUEEN ELIZABETH, CECIL, DUKE OF ANJOU, AND de la motte fÉNELON.

Elizabeth. You are only nineteen, M. D'Anjou :[ I, as all the world knows, am bordering on thirty. La Motte (aside.) Thirty-nine, that is. (Pretty bordering).

Elizabeth (continuing.) If in fifteen or twenty years, sooner or later, I should haply lose a part of those personal charms which, for the benefit of my people, God's providence hath so bountifully bestowed on me, and which your partial eye hath multiplied; if they should wane, and their power over your gentle heart become fainter. . die I must; die of grief; the grievousest of grief; the loss of your affection.

La Motte (aside.) They have all been gone the best part of the time.

Anjou. Angelic vision! I am unworthy of them; Earth may be so too. Death alone can deprive her of their radiance; but the angels can be happy without them; and mankind hath not so sinned a second time as to deserve a deluge, a universal deluge of tears for which no ark hath been provided.

Elizabeth (to Cecil.) He speaks well, rationally, religiously: but, Cecil! the inches are wanting. Anjou. A few years are as unlikely to produce a change on that countenance of a seraph, as Anjou. Impossible! Such charms perish! wane! eternity is to produce it in my passion. decline! in fifteen or twenty years!

Elizabeth. I can not but smile at you, my sweet

[ocr errors]

cousin! But surely you mock me.

Do my fea

tures (which, alas! like my heart, were ever too flexible) seem to you so settled?

Elizabeth. But the inches! Cecil! the inches! Anjou. I perceive your Majesty has been comparing my stature with my lord Burleigh's. I

Anjou. Not otherwise than as the stars above wish indeed I resembled his lordship in figure

are settled in the firmament.

and dignity. I would gladly be half an inch

Elizabeth. Believe it or not believe it, I have taller. been more beautiful.

Elizabeth. Men never are contented. You are

La Mothe (aside.) No heretic will ever be burnt between five and six feet high. for disputing the verity of that article.

Anjou. More beautiful still? Elizabeth. Ay truly, two years ago. Anjou. Truth is powerful; but modesty is powerfuller. Here indeed Truth flies before her. For this uncourteous speech, thus extorted from me, on my knees do I crave your pardon, O gracious queen! O empress of my heart!

Elizabeth. I increase in glory by that application.

Anjou. I have always heard that the lofty of both sexes love the less in stature, and that the beautiful are partial to the plain.

Elizabeth. Am I plain? false traitor! I could almost find it in my heart to beat you, for changing your tone so suddenly.

Anjou. That gracious glance could heal even wounds inflicted by the rack, and turn agonies into ecstacies. I spake (alas too truly!) of myself. Whatever are the graces which the world sees in my person, I am shorter than several in the courts of France and England. Indeed I never saw so many personable men before, as I have seen about your Majesty.

Elizabeth (aside.) He has caught some of his brother Henry's jealousy : maybe he hath spied at Dudley: maybe he hath heard of the admiral and ..the rest.

Sir! my cousin! they are well enough: that is, they are well enough for grooms, and servitors about the house.

Anjou. Your Majesty is now looking at those unfortunate holes and seams left all over my face by the small-pox.

(Aside.) Eleven inches from six though. Anjou. If my highth is unobjectionable, my heart is quite at ease: for it has been certified to me that the surgeon can render my face as smooth as ..

Elizabeth (aside.) The outside of an oystershell.

Anjou. And should he fail, should he peradventure, my beard in another year will overgrow the marks.

Elizabeth (to Cecil.) Such creatures are usually born with beards from chin to eyebrow, and from eyebrow to nose.

(To Anjou.) Beards so comprehensive add more to majesty than to comeliness.

(To Cecil.) 'Fore Gad! Cecil, I would not have him for a husband, were he ten inches taller, and ten wider across the shoulders. To gratify my beloved people, on whom all my thoughts are bent, I must look narrowly to the succession, seeing that from my body must descend the issue of their future kings. We want the inches, Cecil! we verily do want the inches. My father was a portly man, Cecil! and my grandfather, albeit spare, was wirily elastic. For reasons of state, I would never have my sister Mary's widower. The nation might possibly have been disappointed in the succession, and I should have wasted away among the bleeding hearts of my people. Say something to the man, and let him go. Were there the inches. . but we must not press upon that point.

Cecil. May it please your Majesty, ten or a dozen in highth and breadth would cover a multiElizabeth. Dimples! dimples! hiding-places of tude of sins, and almost atone for the mass. Love.

La Motte! did you not assure me that there is a surgeon in London who can remove them all? La Motte. And most truly. I have conversed with him myself, and have seen many whose faces he hath put into repair. You would believe that the greater part had never had a speck upon them.

Elizabeth. Touch your face? would you let him? would you suffer him to alter one feature, one component of feature, in that countenance? Anjou. My mother has insisted that it might be improved.

Elizabeth. My dear sister the Queen Catarina is the wisest of queens and of women. A mother so perspicacious might espy a defect, when another of equal perspicacity (if any such existed) could ¡find none.

(To Cecil.) What a monkey! How hideous! and how vain! worst of all!

Cecil. His Highness hath much penetration.

Elizabeth. At him upon that!

Anjou. I do perceive there are difficulties; but I humbly trust that none of them are insurmountable.

Elizabeth. Excuse my maidenly sighs, sweet cousin!

La Motte (aside.) No sighs of that description have escaped her since she was fourteen. The first and last of them caught the sails of the High Admiral, and cast him on the breakers.

Anjou. Those tender breathings, most gracious lady, seem to arise from my breast, and to murmur on your lips; those beauteous lips which may soften or shorten the thread of my destiny.

Elizabeth. Faith and troth, Cecil, this rogue duke possesses a vast treasury of jewelled language. The boy is well educated and hath much discernment. It would cost no ordinary poet half a day's labour, and the better part of his ten nails, to have devised what our cousin hath spoken off-hand.

« AnteriorContinuar »