"Those little new-invented things— Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys, So ribbands are and rings, Which all our happiness destroys. Nor God In His abode, Nor saints, nor little boys, Nor Angels made them; only foolish men, Grown mad with custom, on those toys Which more increase their wants to date. . . ."

He found no publisher, and they have been rescued by accident after two hundred years of oblivion. (It appears, nevertheless, that he was a happy man.)

And yet—I repeat—since we respond to it so readily, whether in welcome or in irritation, there must be something in this claim set up for childish simplicity; and I cannot help thinking it fortunate and salutary for us that the Celtic poets have taken to sounding its note so boldly. Whatever else they do, on the conventional ideals of this generation they speak out with an uncompromising and highly disconcerting directness. As I said just now, they are held, if at all, by a long and loose chain to the graven images to which we stand bound arm-to-arm and foot-to-foot. They fly far enough aloof to take a bird's-eye view. What they see they declare with a boldness which is the more impressive for being unconscious. And they declare that they see us tied to stupid material gods, and wholly blind to ideas.

P.S.—I made bold enough to say in the course of these remarks that Euclid's Elements could hardly be improved by writing them out in ballad metre. A friend, to whom I happened to repeat this assertion, cast doubt on it and challenged me to prove it. I do so with pleasure in the following—

[In the original text, there is shown a geometrical diagram which consists of two equally sized circles superimposed so that they each intersect the other's centre which points are marked A and B. The outermost points on the two circles in line with AB are marked D and E. The upper point where the two circles intersect is marked C and an equilateral triangle is shown by joining points A, B and C.]

NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS.

The King sits in Dunfermline toun Drinking the blude-red wine: "O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle Upon a given straight line?"

O up and spake an eldern knight, Sat at the King's right knee— "Of a' the clerks by Granta side Sir Patrick bears the gree.

"'Tis he was taught by the Tod-huntere Tho' not at the tod-hunting; Yet gif that he be given a line, He'll do as brave a thing."

Our King has written a braid letter To Cambrigge or thereby, And there it found Sir Patrick Spens Evaluating PI.

He hadna warked his quotient A point but barely three, There stepped to him a little foot-page And louted on his knee.

The first word that Sir Patrick read, "Plus x," was a' he said: The neist word that Sir Patrick read, 'Twas "plus expenses paid."

The last word that Sir Patrick read, The tear blinded his e'e: "The pound I most admire is not In Scottish currencie."

Stately stepped he east the wa', And stately stepped he north: He fetched a compass frae his ha' And stood beside the Forth,

Then gurly grew the waves o' Forth, And gurlier by-and-by— "O never yet was sic a storm, Yet it isna sic as I!"

Syne he has crost the Firth o' Forth Until Dunfermline toun; And tho' he came with a kittle wame Fu' low he louted doun.

"A line, a line, a gude straight line, O King, purvey me quick! And see it be of thilka kind That's neither braid nor thick."

"Nor thick nor braid?" King Jamie said, "I'll eat my gude hat-band If arra line as ye define Be found in our Scotland."

"Tho' there be nane in a' thy rule, It sail be ruled by me;" And lichtly with his little pencil He's ruled the line A B.

Stately stepped he east the wa', And stately stepped he west; "Ye touch the button," Sir Patrick said, "And I sall do the rest."

And he has set his compass foot Untill the centre A, From A to B he's stretched it oot— "Ye Scottish carles, give way!"

Syne he has moved his compass foot Untill the centre B, From B to A he's stretched it oot, And drawn it viz-a-vee.

The tane circle was BCD, And A C E the tither: "I rede ye well," Sir Patrick said, "They interseck ilk ither.

"See here, and where they interseck— To wit with yon point C— Ye'll just obsairve that I conneck The twa points A and B.

"And there ye have a little triangle As bonny as e'er was seen; The whilk is not isosceles, Nor yet it is scalene."

"The proof! the proof!" King Jamie cried: "The how and eke the why!" Sir Patrick laughed within his beard— "'Tis ex hypothesi—

"When I ligg'd in my mither's wame, I learn'd it frae my mither, That things was equal to the same, Was equal ane to t'ither.

"Sith in the circle first I drew The lines B A, B C, Be radii true, I wit to you The baith maun equal be.

"Likewise and in the second circle, Whilk I drew widdershins, It is nae skaith the radii baith, A B, AC, be twins.

"And sith of three a pair agree That ilk suld equal ane, By certes they maun equal be Ilk unto ilk by-lane."

"Now by my faith!" King Jamie saith, "What plane geometrie! If only Potts had written in Scots, How loocid Potts wad be!"

"Now wow's my life!" said Jamie the King, And the Scots lords said the same, For but it was that envious knicht, Sir Hughie o' the Graeme.

"Flim-flam, flim-flam!" and "Ho indeed?" Quod Hughie o' the Graeme; "'Tis I could better upon my heid This prabblin prablem-game."

Sir Patrick Spens Was nothing laith When as he heard "flim-flam," But syne he's ta'en a silken claith And wiped his diagram.

"Gif my small feat may better'd be, Sir Hew, by thy big head, What I hae done with an A B C Do thou with X Y Z."

Then sairly sairly swore Sir Hew, And loudly laucht the King; But Sir Patrick tuk the pipes and blew, And played that eldritch thing!

He's play'd it reel, he's play'd it jig, And the baith alternative; And he's danced Sir Hew to the Asses' Brigg, That's Proposetion Five.

And there they've met, and there they've fet, Forenenst the Asses' Brigg, And waefu', waefu' was the fate That gar'd them there to ligg.

For there Sir Patrick's slain Sir Hew, And Sir Hew Sir Patrick Spens— Now was not that a fine to-do For Euclid's Elemen's?

But let us sing Long live the King! And his foes the Deil attend 'em: For he has gotten his little triangle, Quod erat faciendum!

[1] This was written some time before the entente cordiale.



MARCH.

How quietly its best things steal upon the world! And in a world where a single line of Sappho's survives as a something more important than the entire political history of Lesbos, how little will the daily newspaper help us to take long views!

Whether England could better afford to lose Shakespeare or her Indian Empire is no fair question to put to an Englishman. But every Englishman knows in his heart which of these two glories of his birth and state will survive the other, and by which of them his country will earn in the end the greater honour. Though in our daily life we—perhaps wisely—make a practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most perdurable claim on man's remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which outlast all phenomena.

The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous bookseller of Charing Cross Road, rediscovered (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet. Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the Republic of Letters under many obligations. To begin with, he loves his trade and honours the wares in which he deals, and so continues the good tradition that should knit writers, printers, vendors and purchasers of books together as partakers of an excellent mystery. He studies—and on occasion will fight for—the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the out-of-door-stall, the 'classic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing. He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature. He has edited James Thomson, him of The City of Dreadful Night. He has helped us to learn more than we knew of Charles Lamb. He has even written poems of his own and printed them under the title of Rosemary and Pansies, in a volume marked 'Not for sale'—a warning which I, as one of the fortunate endowed, intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne.

Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the discovery let us rehearse the few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne. He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight. He wrote a polemical tract on Roman Forgeries, which had some success; a treatise on Christian Ethicks, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was utterly neglected; an exquisite work, Centuries of Meditations, never published; and certain poems, which also he left in manuscript. And there the record ends.

Next let us tell by how strange a chance this forgotten author came to his own. In 1896 or 1897 Mr. William T. Brooke picked up two volumes of MS. on a street bookstall, and bought them for a few pence. Mr. Brooke happened to be a man learned in sacred poetry and hymnology, and he no sooner began to examine his purchase than he knew that he had happened on a treasure. At the same time he could hardly believe that writings so admirable were the work of an unknown author. In choice of subject, in sentiment, in style, they bore a strong likeness to the poems of Henry Vaughan the Silurist, and he concluded that they must be assigned to Vaughan. He communicated his discovery to the late Dr. Grosart, who became so deeply interested in it that he purchased the manuscripts and set about preparing an edition of Vaughan, in which the newly-found treasures were to be included. Dr. Grosart, one may say in passing, was by no means a safe judge of characteristics in poetry. With all his learning and enthusiasm you could not trust him, having read a poem with which he was unacquainted or which perchance he had forgotten, to assign it to its true or even its probable author. But when you hear that so learned a man as Dr. Grosart considered these writings worthy of Vaughan, you may be the less apt to think me extravagant in holding that man to have been Vaughan's peer who wrote the following lines:—

"How like an Angel came I down! How bright are all things here! When first among His works I did appear how their Glory me did crown! The world resembled His Eternity, In which my soul did walk; And everything that I did see Did with me talk.

"The streets were paved with golden stones, The boys and girls were mine, O how did all their lovely faces shine! The sons of men were holy ones; In joy and beauty they appeared to me: And everything which here I found, While like an angel I did see, Adorned the ground."

'Proprieties.'—

That is to say, 'properties,' 'estates.'—

"Proprieties themselves were mine, And hedges ornaments, Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents Did not divide my joys, but all combine. Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed My joys by others worn; For me they all to wear them seemed When I was born."

Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and elaborate edition of Vaughan, which, only just before his death, he was endeavouring to find means to publish. After his death the two manuscripts passed by purchase to Mr. Charles Higham, the well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when a part of Dr. Grosart's library was sold at Sotheby's, Mr. Dobell bought—and this is perhaps the strangest part of the story—a third manuscript volume, which Dr. Grosart had possessed all the time without an inkling that it bore upon Mr. Brooke's discovery, "though nothing is needed but to compare it with the other volumes in order to see that all these are in the same handwriting."

Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them with Vaughan's, and began to have his doubts. Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author be?

Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume of Giles Fletcher's, Christ's Victory and Triumph, which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had appended a number of seventeenth-century poems not previously collected; and to one of these, entitled 'The Ways of Wisdom,' he drew Mr. Dobell's attention as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To Mr. Dobell the resemblance between it and the manuscript poems was at once evident. Mr. Brooke had found the poem in a little book in the British Museum entitled, A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God, in several most Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same (a publisher's title it is likely): and this book contained other pieces in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. Dobell's request, he examined them and felt no doubt at all that the author of the manuscript poem and of the Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings must be one and the same person. But, again, who could he be?

A sentence in an address 'To the Reader' prefixed to the Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings provided the clue. The editor of this work (a posthumous publication), after eulogising the unnamed author's many virtues wound up with a casual clue to his identity:—

"But being removed out of the Country to the service of the late Lord Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he died young and got early to those blissful mansions to which he at all times aspir'd."

But for this sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the clue—that the author of Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman—had only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne. This information was obtained from Wood's Athenae Oxonienses, which mentioned Traherne as the author of two books, Roman Forgeries and Christian Ethicks.

The next step was to get hold of these two works and examine them, if perchance some evidence might be found that Traherne was also the author of the manuscripts, which as yet remained a guess, standing on Mr. Dobell's conviction that the verses in the manuscripts and those in Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings must be by the same hand.

By great good fortune that evidence was found in Christian Ethicks, in a poem which, with some variations, occurred too in the manuscript Centuries of Meditations. Here then at last was proof positive, or as positive as needs be.

The most of us writers hope and stake for a diuturnity of fame; and some of us get it. Sed ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt? "That bay leaves were found green in the tomb of St. Humbert after a hundred and fifty years was looked upon as miraculous," writes Sir Thomas Browne. But Traherne's laurel has lain green in the dust for close on two hundred and thirty years, and his fame so cunningly buried that only by half a dozen accidents leading up to a chance sentence in a dark preface to a forgotten book has it come to light.

I wonder if his gentle shade takes any satisfaction in the discovery? His was by choice a vita fallens. Early in life he made, as we learn from a passage in Centuries of Meditations, his election between worldly prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the chase of fleeting phenomena and rest upon the soul's centre:—

"When I came into the country and, being seated among silent trees and woods and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of Happiness, and to satiate the burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth; in which I was so resolute that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and to feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept of that desire that from that time to this I have had all things plentifully provided for me without any care at all, my very study of Felicity making me more to prosper than all the care in the whole world. So that through His blessing I live a free and kingly life, as if the world were turned again into Eden, or, much more, as it is at this day."

Yet Traherne is no quietist: a fervent, passionate lover, rather, of simple and holy things. He sees with the eyes of a child: the whole world shines for him 'apparell'd in celestial light,' and that light, he is well aware, shines out on it, through the eyes which observe it, from the divine soul of man. The verses which I quoted above strike a note to which he recurs again and again. Listen to the exquisite prose in which he recounts the 'pure and virgin apprehension' of his childhood:—

"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels; I knew not that they were born, or should die. . . . The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . ."

All these things he enjoyed, his life through, uncursed by the itch for 'proprietorship': he was like the Magnanimous Man in his own Christian Ethicks—'one that scorns the smutty way of enjoying things like a slave, because he delights in the celestial way and the Image of God.' In this creed of his all things are made for man, if only man will inherit them wisely: even God, in conferring benefits on man, is moved and rewarded by the felicity of witnessing man's grateful delight in them:—

"For God enjoyed is all His end, Himself He then doth comprehend When He is blessed, magnified, Extoll'd, exalted, prais'd, and glorified."

Yes, and 'undeified almost, if once denied.' A startling creed, this; but what a bold and great-hearted one! To Traherne the Soul is a sea which not only receives the rivers of God's bliss but 'all it doth receive returns again.' It is the Beloved of the old song, 'Quia Amore Langueo;' whom God pursues, as a lover. It is the crown of all things. So in one of his loveliest poems he shows it standing on the threshold to hear news of a great guest, never dreaming that itself is that great guest all the while—

ON NEWS

I.

News from a foreign country came, As if my treasure and my wealth lay there: So much it did my heart enflame, 'Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear, Which thither went to meet The approaching sweet, And on the threshold stood To entertain the unknown Good. It hover'd there As if 'twould leave mine ear, And was so eager to embrace The joyful tidings as they came, 'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place To entertain that same.

II.

As if the tidings were the things, My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure, Or else did bear them on their wings— With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure— My Soul stood at that gate To recreate Itself with bliss, and to Be pleased with speed. A fuller view It fain would take, Yet journeys back again would make Unto my heart: as if 'twould fain Go out to meet, yet stay within To fit a place to entertain And bring the tidings in.

III.

What sacred instinct did inspire My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong? What secret force moved my desire To expect my joy, beyond the seas, so young? Felicity I knew Was out of view; And being here alone, I saw that happiness was gone From me! For this I thirsted absent bliss, And thought that sure beyond the seas, Or else in something near at hand I knew not yet (since nought did please I knew), my bliss did stand,

IV.

But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by: And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was: The Gem, The Diadem, The Ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthly ball; The Heavenly Eye, Much wider than the sky, Wherein they all included were, The glorious Soul that was the King Made to possess them, did appear A small and little thing.

I must quote from another poem, if only for the pleasure of writing down the lines:—

THE SALUTATION.

These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins— Where have ye been? Behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long? Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue? When silent I So many thousand, thousand years Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? Welcome ye treasures which I now receive!

These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole passages in the unpublished Centuries of Meditations which almost set one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of Time?"

I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass. For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a class apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up in this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man (who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of which Robinson Crusoe may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him—though, to be sure, that gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway, resting his case upon—

SONNET CCXVIII.

Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will: And where is Will alive but hath a way? So in device thy wit is starved still And as devised by Will. That is to say, My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal Thou hast; but all that capital messuage Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall. Haply the disproportion may engage The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo! And here revoke all previous testaments: Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents.

After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative.

Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another trouvaille, and one which excited me not a little:—

"Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which I had purchased, I came upon some loose leaves which were headed A Prospect of Society. The title struck me as familiar, and I had only to read a few lines to recognise them as belonging to [Goldsmith's] The Traveller. But the opening lines of my fragment are not the opening lines of the poem as it was published; in fact, the first two lines of A Prospect of Society are lines 353-4 in the first edition of The Traveller. . . . A further examination of the fragment which I had discovered showed that it is not what is usually understood as a 'proof' of The Traveller, but rather the material, as yet formless and unarranged, out of which it was to be finally evolved."

Now—line for corresponding line—the text discovered by Mr. Dobell often differs, and sometimes considerably, from that of the first edition of The Traveller, and these variations are highly interesting, and make Mr. Dobell's 'find' a valuable one. But on studying the newly discovered version I very soon found myself differing from Mr. Dobell's opinion that we had here the formless, unarranged material out of which Goldsmith built an exquisitely articulated poem.[1] And, doubting this, I had to doubt what Mr. Dobell deduced from it—that "it was in the manner in which a poem, remarkable for excellence of form and unity of design, was created out of a number of verses which were at first crudely conceived and loosely connected that Goldsmith's genius was most triumphantly displayed." For scarcely had I lit a pipe and fallen to work on A Prospect of Society before it became evident to me (1) that the lines were not "unarranged," but disarranged; and (2) that whatever the reason of this disarray, Goldsmith's brain was not responsible; that the disorder was too insane to be accepted either as an order in which he could have written the poem, or as one in which he could have wittingly allowed it to circulate among his friends, unless he desired them to believe him mad. Take, for instance, this collocation:—

"Heavens! how unlike their Belgic sires of old! Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold; Where shading elms beside the margin grew, And freshen'd from the waves the zephyr blew."

Or this:—

"To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign, We turn, where France displays her bright domain. Thou sprightly land of mirth and social ease, Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please, How often have I led thy sportive choir With tuneless pipe, along the sliding Loire? No vernal bloom their torpid rocks display, But Winter lingering chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sooths the mountain's breast, But meteors glare and frowning storms invest."

Short of lunacy, no intellectual process would account for that sort of thing, whereas a poem more pellucidly logical than The Traveller does not exist in English. So, having lit another pipe, I took a pencil and began some simple counting, with this result:—

The first 42 lines of The Prospect correspond with lines 353-400 of The Traveller. The next 42 with lines 311-352. The next 34 with lines 277-310. The next 36 with lines 241-276. The next 36 with lines 205-240. The next 36 with lines 169-204. The next 38 with lines 131-168. The next 28 with lines 103-130. And the remaining fragment of 18 lines with lines 73-92.

In other words, The Prospect is merely an early draft of The Traveller printed backwards in fairly regular sections.

But how can this have happened? The explanation is at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered— an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the result delightful, and (when you come to think of it) the blunder just so natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.

Upon this simple explanation we have to abandon the hypothesis that Goldsmith patiently built a fine poem out of a congeries of fine passages pitchforked together at haphazard—a splendid rubbish heap; and Mr. Dobell's find is seen to be an imperfect set of duplicate proofs—fellow, no doubt, to that set which Goldsmith, mildly objurgating his own or the printer's carelessness, sliced up with the scissors and rearranged before submitting it to Johnson's friendly revision.

The pleasantest part of the story (for me) has yet to come. We all know how easy it is to turn obstinate and defend a pet theory with acrimony. Mr. Dobell did nothing of the sort. Although his enthusiasm had committed him to no little expense in publishing The Prospect, with a preface elaborating his theory, he did a thing which was worth a hundred discoveries. He sat down, convinced himself that my explanation was the right one, and promptly committed himself to further expense in bringing out a new edition with the friendliest acknowledgment. So do men behave who are at once generous of temper and anxious for the truth.

He himself had been close upon the explanation. In his preface he had actually guessed that the "author's manuscript, written on loose leaves, had fallen into confusion and was then printed without any attempt at rearrangement." In fact, he had hit upon the right solution, and only failed to follow up the clue.

His find, too, remains a valuable one; for so far as it goes we can collate it with the first edition of The Traveller, and exactly discover the emendations made by Johnson, or by Goldsmith after discussion with Johnson. Boswell tells us that the Doctor "in the year 1783, at my request, marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are only line 420, 'To stop too faithful, and too faint to go,' and the concluding ten lines, except the last couplet but one. . . . He added, 'These are all of which I can be sure.'" We cannot test his claim to the concluding lines, for the correspondent passage is missing from Mr. Dobell's fragment; but Johnson's word would be good enough without the internal evidence of the verses to back it. "To stop too faithful, and too faint to go," is his improvement, and an undeniable one, upon Goldsmith's "And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go." I have not been at pains to examine all the revised lines, but they are numerous, and generally (to my thinking) betray Johnson's hand. Also they are almost consistently improvements. There is one alteration, however,— unmistakably due to Johnson,—which some of us will join with Mr. Dobell in regretting. Johnson, as a fine, full-blooded Jingo, naturally showed some restiveness at the lines—

"Yes, my lov'd brother, cursed be that hour When first ambition toil'd for foreign power,"

And induced Goldsmith to substitute—

"Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour When first ambition struck at regal power,"

Which may or may not be more creditable in sentiment, but is certainly quite irrelevant in its context, which happens to be a denunciation of the greed for gold and foreign conquest. It is, in that context, all but meaningless, and must have irritated and puzzled many readers of a poem otherwise clearly and continuously argued. In future editions of The Traveller, Goldsmith's original couplet should be restored; and I urge this (let the Tory reader be assured) not from any ill-will towards our old friend the Divine Right of Kings, but solely in the sacred name of Logic.

Such be the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer of such words as these—

"A little touch of something like pride is seated in the true sense of a man's own greatness, without which his humility and modesty would be contemptible virtues."

"It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without loving God or man. Love is a transcendent excellence in every duty, and must of necessity enter into the nature of every grace and virtue. That which maketh the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so bitter and comfortless to men, is its death in the separation and absence of its soul. We suffer but love not."

"All things do first receive that give: Only 'tis God above That from and in Himself doth live; Whose all-sufficient love Without original can flow, And all the joys and glories show Which mortal man can take delight to know. He is the primitive, eternal Spring, The endless Ocean of each glorious thing. The soul a vessel is, A spacious bosom, to contain All the fair treasures of His bliss, Which run like rivers from, into, the main, And all it doth receive, return again."

"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."

[1] Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the title, The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society. Later editions dropped the sub-title.



APRIL.

"Thus, then, live I Till 'mid all the gloom By Heaven! the bold sun Is with me in the room Shining, shining!

"Then the clouds part, Swallows soaring between; The spring is alive And the meadows are green!

"I jump up like mad, Break the old pipe in twain, And away to the meadows, The meadows again!"

The poem of FitzGerald's from which these verses come was known, I believe, to very few until Mr. E. V. Lucas exhumed it from Half-hours with the Worst Authors, and reprinted it in that delightful little book The Open Road. I have a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned executor was but dimly aware of its existence. For my part, at this time of the day, I prefer it to his Omar Khayyam—perversely, no doubt. In the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to a few, was a wonder and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other irrelevant persons in the chair, and since his fame has become vulgarised not only in Thames-side hotels, but over the length and breadth of the North American continent, one at least of his admirers has suffered a not unnatural revulsion, until now he can scarcely endure to read the immortal quatrains. Immortal they are, no doubt, and deserve to be by reason of their style—"fame's great antiseptic." But their philosophy is thin after all, and will not bear discussion. As exercise for a grown man's thought, I will back a lyric of Blake's or Wordsworth's, or a page of Ibsen's Peer Gynt against the whole of it, any day.

This, however, is parenthetical. I caught hold of FitzGerald's verses to express that jollity which should be every man's who looks up from much reading or writing and knows that Spring has come.

"Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et favoni Trahuntque siccas machinae carinas . . ."

In other words, I look out of the window and decide that the day has arrived for launching the boat—

"This is that happy morn, That day, long wished day!"

And, to my mind, the birthday of the year. Potentates and capitalists who send down orders to Cowes or Southampton that their yachts are to be put in commission, and anon arrive to find everything ready (if they care to examine), from the steam capstan to the cook's apron, have little notion of the amusement to be found in fitting out a small boat, say of five or six tons. I sometimes doubt if it be not the very flower, or at least the bloom, of the whole pastime. The serious face with which we set about it; the solemn procession up the river to the creek where she rests, the high tide all but lifting her; the silence in which we loose the moorings and haul off; the first thrill of buoyant water underfoot; the business of stepping the mast; quiet days of sitting or pottering about on deck in the sunny harbour; vessels passing up and down, their crews eyeing us critically as the rigging grows and the odds and ends—block, tackle and purchase—fall into their ordered places; and through it all the expectation running of the summer to come, and 'blue days at sea' and unfamiliar anchorages—unfamiliar, but where the boat is, home will be—

"Such bliss Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss."

Homer, who knew what amused men, constantly lays stress on this business of fitting out:—

"Then at length she (Athene) let drag the swift ship to the sea, and stored within it all such tackling as decked ships carry. And she moored it at the far end of the harbour. . . . So they raised the mast of pine tree, and set it in the hole of the cross plank, and made it fast with forestays, and hauled up the white sails with twisted ropes of oxhide."

And again:

"First of all they drew the ship down to the deep water, and fixed the oars in leathern loops all orderly, and spread forth the white sails. And squires, haughty of heart, bare for them their arms,"—but you'll observe that it was the masters who did the launching, etc., like wise men who knew exactly wherein the fun of the business consisted. "And they moored her high out in the shore water, and themselves disembarked. There they supped and waited for evening to come on."

You suggest, perhaps, that our seafaring is but play: and you are right. But in our play we catch a cupful of the romance of the real thing. Also we have the real thing at our doors to keep us humble. Day by day beneath this window the statelier shipping goes by; and our twopenny adventurings and discoveries do truly (I believe) keep the greater wonder and interest awake in us from day to day—the wonder and interest so memorably expressed in Mr. Bridges's poem, A Passer By:—

"Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West, That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding, Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest? Ah! soon when Winter has all our vales opprest, When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling, Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling?

"I there before thee, in the country so well thou knowest, Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air: I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest, And anchor queen of the strange shipping there, Thy sails for awnings spread, thy masts bare.". . . .



"And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless, I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless, Thy port assured in a happier land than mine. But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine. As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding, From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding."

Though in all human probability I shall never be the first to burst into a silent sea, I can declare quite seriously that I never steer into an unfamiliar creek or haven but, as its recesses open, I can understand something of the awe of the boat's crew in Andrew Marvell's "Bermudas;" yes, and something of the exultation of the great Columbus himself!



In a later paper I may have to tell of these voyages and traffickings. For the while I leave the reader to guess how and in what corner of the coast I happened on the following pendant to Mr. Dobell's trouvaille.

It may not challenge comparison with Mr. Flinders Petrie's work in Egypt or with Mr. Hogarth's Cretan explorations; but I say confidently that, since Mr. Pickwick unearthed the famous inscribed stone, no more fortunate or astonishing discovery has rewarded literary research upon our English soil than the two letters which with no small pride I give to the world this month.

Curiously enough, they concern Mr. Pickwick.

But, perhaps, by way of preface I shall remind the reader that the final number of Pickwick was issued in November, 1837. The first French version—which Mr. Percy Fitzgerald justly calls 'a rude adaptation rather than a translation'—appeared in 1838, and was entitled Le Club de Pickwickistes, Roman Comique, traduit librement de l'Anglais par Mdme. Eugenie Giboyet. With equal justice Mr. Fitzgerald complains (The History of Pickwick, p. 276) that "the most fantastic tricks are played with the text, most of the dialogue being left out and the whole compressed into two small volumes." Yet, in fact, Mme. Giboyet (as will appear) was more sinned against than sinning. Clearly she undertook to translate the immortal novel in collaboration with a M. Alexandre D—', and was driven by the author's disapproval to suppress M. D—'s share of the work. The dates are sufficient evidence that this was done (as it no doubt had to be done) in haste. I regret that my researches have yielded no further information respecting this M. Alexandre D—'. The threat in the second letter may or may not have been carried out. I am inclined to hope that it was, feeling sure that the result, if ever discovered, will prove in the highest degree entertaining. With this I may leave the letters to speak for themselves.

(1)

"45 Doughty Street," "September 25th, 1837."

"MY DEAR MADAM,—It is true that when granting the required permission to translate Pickwick into French, I allowed also the license you claimed for yourself and your collaborateur—of adapting rather than translating, and of presenting my hero under such small disguise as might commend him better to a Gallic audience. But I am bound to say that—to judge only from the first half of your version, which is all that has reached me—you have construed this permission more freely than I desired. In fact, the parent can hardly recognise his own child.

"Against your share in the work, Madame, I have little to urge, though the damages you represent Mrs. Bardell as claiming—300,000 francs, or 12,000 pounds of our money—strikes me as excessive. It is rather (I take as my guide the difference in the handwriting) to your collaborateur that I address, through you, my remonstrances.

"I have no radical objection to his making Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman members of His Majesty King Louis XIII.'s corps of Musketeers, if he is sincerely of opinion that French taste will applaud the departure. I even commend his slight idealisation of Snodgrass (which, by the way, is not the name of an English mountain), and the amorousness of Tupman (Aramis) gains—I candidly admit—from the touch of religiosity which he gives to the character; though I do not, as he surmises, in the course of my story, promote Tupman to a bishopric. The development—preferable as on some points the episcopal garb may be considered to the green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail worn by him at Madame Chasselion's fete champetre— would jar upon our Anglican prejudices. As for Winkle (Porthos), the translation nicely hits off his love of manly exercises, while resting his pretensions on a more solid basis of fact than appears in the original. In the incident of the baldric, however, the imposture underlying Mr. W.'s green shooting-coat is conveyed with sufficient neatness.

"M. D—' has been well advised again in breaking up the character of Sam Weller and making him, like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once. Buckingham (Jingle) and Fenton (a capital rendering of the Fat Boy) both please me; and in expanding the episode of the sausage and the trouser-buttons M. D—' has shown delicacy and judgment by altering the latter into diamond studs.

"Alas! madam, I wish the same could be said for his treatment of my female puppets, which not only shocks but bewilders me. In her earlier appearances Mrs. Bardell (Milady) is a fairly consistent character; and why M. D—' should hazard that consistency by identifying her with the middle-aged lady at the great White Horse, Ipswich, passes my comprehension. I say, madam, that it bewilders me; but for M. D—'s subsequent development of the occurrences at that hostelry I entertain feelings of which mere astonishment is, perhaps, the mildest. I can hardly bring myself to discuss this with a lady; but you will allow me to protest in the very strongest terms that Mr. Pickwick made that unfortunate mistake about the sleeping apartment in the completest innocence, that in ejaculating 'ha-hum' he merely uttered a note of warning, and that 'ha-hum' is not (as M. D—' suspects) an English word from which certain syllables have been discreetly removed; that in thrusting his head through the bed-curtains he was, as I am careful to say, 'not actuated by any definite object'; and that, as a gentleman should, he withdrew at the earliest possible moment. His intercepted duel with Mr. Peter Magnus (De Wardes) rests, as I fondly imagined I had made clear, upon a complete misunderstanding. The whole business of the fleur-de-lys on Mrs. Bardell's shoulder is a sheer interpolation and should be expunged, not only on grounds of morality, but because when you reach the actual trial, 'Bardell v. Pickwick,' you will find this discovery of the defendant's impossible either to ignore or to reconcile with the jury's verdict. Against the intervention of Richelieu (Mr. Nupkins) I have nothing to urge. M. D—' opines that I shall in the end deal out poetical justice to Mrs. Bardell as Milady. He is right. I have, indeed, gone so far as to imprison her; but I own that her execution (as suggested by him) at the hands of the Queer Client, with Pickwick and his friends (or, alternatively, Mrs. Cluppins, Mr. Perker, and Bob Sawyer) as silent spectators, seems to me almost as inconsistent with the spirit of the tale as his other proposal to kidnap Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the boot of Mr. Weller's coach, and substitute for his lordship the Chancery prisoner in an iron mask. I trust, madam, that these few suggestions will, without setting any appreciable constraint on your fancy, enable you to catch something more of the spirit of my poor narrative than I have been able to detect in some of the chapters submitted; and I am, with every assurance of esteem, Your obliged servant, Boz."

"P.S.—The difference between Anjou wine and the milk punch about which you inquire does not seem to me to necessitate any serious alteration of the chapter in question. M. D—'s expressed intention of making Master Bardell in later life the executioner of King Charles I. of England must stand over for some future occasion. The present work will hardly yield him the required opportunity for dragging in King Charles' head."

(2)

"MADAME,—Puisque M. Boz se mefie des propositions lui faites sans but quelconque que de concilier les gens d'esprit, j'ai l'honneur de vous annnoncer nettement que je me retire d'une besogne aussi rude que malentendue. Il dit que j'ai concu son Pickwick tout autrement que lui. Soit! Je l'ecrirai, ce Pickwick, selon mon propre gout. Que M. Boz redoute mes Trois Pickwickistes! Agreez, Madame, etc., etc., Alexandre (le Grand)."



I am told that literary aspirants in these days do not read books, or read them only for purposes of review-writing. Yet these pages may happen to fall in the way of some literary aspirant faint on a false scent, yet pursuing; and to him, before telling of another discovery, I will address one earnest word of caution. Let him receive it as from an elder brother who wishes him well.

My caution is—Avoid irony as you would the plague.

Years ago I was used to receive this warning (on an average) once a week from my old and dear friend Sir Wemyss Reid; and once a week I would set myself, assailing his good nature, to cajole him into printing some piece of youthful extravagance which he well knew—and I knew—and he knew that I knew—would infuriate a hundred staid readers of The Speaker and oblige him to placate in private a dozen puzzled and indignant correspondents. For those were days before the beards had stiffened on the chins of some of us who assembled to reform politics, art, literature, and the world in general from a somewhat frowsy upstairs coffee-room in C—' Street: days of old—

"When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek And all the world and we seem'd much less cold And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold. . . ."

Well, these cajoleries were not often successful, yet often enough to keep the sporting instinct alive and active, and a great deal oftener than F—'s equally disreputable endeavours: it being a tradition with the staff that F—' had sworn by all his gods to get in an article which would force the printer to flee the country. I need scarcely say that the tradition was groundless, but we worked it shamelessly.

In this way on January 9th, 1897 (a year in which the Westminster Aquarium was yet standing), and shortly after the issue of the New Year's Honours' List, the following article appeared in The Speaker. The reader will find it quite harmless until he comes to the sequel. It was entitled—

NOOKS OF OLD LONDON.

I.—THE WESTMINSTER SCUTORIUM.

Let me begin by assuring the reader that the Westminster Scutorium has absolutely no connection with the famous Aquarium across the road. I suppose that every Londoner has heard, at least, of the Aquarium, but I doubt if one in a hundred has heard of the little Scutorium which stands removed from it by a stone's throw, or less; and I am certain that not one in a thousand has ever stooped his head to enter by its shy, squat, fifteenth-century doorway. It is a fact that the very policeman at the entrance to Dean's Yard did not know its name, and the curator assures me that the Post Office has made frequent mistakes in delivering his letters. So my warning is not quite impertinent.

But a reader of antiquarian tastes, who cares as little as I do for hypnotisers and fasting men, and does not mind a trifle of dust, so it be venerable, will not regret an hour spent in looking over the Scutorium, or a chat with Mr. Melville Robertson, its curator, or Clerk of the Ribands (Stemmata)—to give him his official title. Mr. Robertson ranks, indeed, with the four pursuivants of Heralds' College, from which the Scutorium was originally an offshoot. He takes an innocent delight in displaying his treasures and admitting you to the stores of his unique information; and I am sure would welcome more visitors.

Students of Constitutional History will remember that strange custom, half Roman, half Medieval, in accordance with which a baron or knight, on creation or accession to his title and dignities, deposited in the king's keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself together with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued— plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral masks of the old Roman families, the respect paid to them by the household, and the important part they played on festival days, at funerals, &c.—that this offering was a formal recognition of the patria potestas of the monarch as father of his people. Few are aware, however, that the custom has never been discontinued, and that the cupboards of Westminster contain a waxen memorial of almost every man whom the king has delighted to honour, from the Conquest down to the very latest knight gazetted. The labour of modelling and painting these effigies was discontinued as long ago as 1586; and the masks are no longer likenesses, but oval plates of copper, each bearing its name on a label. Mr. Robertson informed me that Charles I. made a brief attempt to revive the old practice. All the Stuarts, indeed, set store on the Scutorium and its functions; and I read in an historical pamphlet, by Mr. J. Saxby Hine, the late curator, that large apartments were allocated to the office in Inigo Jones's first designs for Whitehall. But its rosy prospects faded with the accession of William of Orange. Two years later the custody of the shields (from which it obtained its name) was relegated to the Heralds' College; and the Scutorium has now to be content with the care of its masks and the performance of some not unimportant duties presently to be recounted.

A reference from the Heralds' College sent me in quest of Mr. Melville Robertson. But even in Dean's Yard I found it no easy matter to run him to earth. The policeman (as I have said) could give me no help. At length, well within the fourth doorway on the east side, after passing the railings, I spied a modest brass plate with the inscription Clerk of the Ribands. Hours 11 to 3. The outside of the building has a quite modern look, but the architect has spared the portal, and the three steps which lead down to the flagged entrance hall seem to mark a century apiece. I call it an entrance hall, but it is rather a small adytum, spanned by a pointed arch carrying the legend Stemmata Quid Faciunt. The modern exterior is, in fact, but a shell. All within dates from Henry VI.; and Mr. Robertson (but this is only a theory) would explain the sunken level of the ground-floor rooms by the action of earthworms, which have gradually lifted the surface of Dean's Yard outside. He contends the original level to be that of his office, which lies on the right of the adytum. A door on the left admits to two rooms occupied by the nomenclator, Mr. Pender, and two assistant clerks, who comprise the staff. Straight in front, a staircase leads to the upper-apartments.

Mr. Robertson was writing when the clerk ushered me in, but at once professed himself at my service. He is a gentleman of sixty, or thereabouts, with white hair, a complexion of a country squire, and very genial manners. For some minutes we discussed the difficulty which had brought me to him (a small point in county history), and then he anticipated my request for permission to inspect his masks.

"Would you like to see them? They are really very curious, and I often wonder that the public should evince so small an interest."

"You get very few visitors?"

"Seldom more than two a day; a few more when the Honours' Lists appear. I thought at first that your visit might be in connection with the new List, but reflected that it was too early. In a day or two we shall be comparatively busy."

"The Scutorium is concerned then with the Honours' Lists?"

"A little," replied Mr. Robertson, smiling. "That is to say, we make them." Then, observing my evident perplexity, he laughed. "Well, perhaps that is too strong an expression. I should have said, rather, that we fill up the blanks."

"I had always understood that the Prime Minister drew up the Lists before submitting them to Her Majesty."

"So he does—with our help. Oh, there is no secrecy about it!" said Mr. Robertson, in a tone almost rallying. "The public is free of all information, only it will not inquire. A little curiosity on its part would even save much unfortunate misunderstanding."

"In what way?"

"Well, the public reads of rewards (with which, by the way, I have nothing to do) conferred on really eminent men—Lord Roberts, for instance, or Sir Henry Irving, or Sir Joseph Lister. It then goes down the List and, finding a number of names of which it has never heard, complains that Her Majesty's favour has been bestowed on nonentities; whereas this is really the merit of the List, that they are nonentities."

"I don't understand."

"Well, then, they don't exist."

"But surely—"

"My dear sir," said Mr. Robertson, still smiling, and handing me his copy of The Times, "cast your eye down that column; take the names of the new knights—'Blain, Clarke, Edridge, Farrant, Laing, Laird, Wardle'—what strikes you as remarkable about them?"

"Why, that I have never heard of any of them."

"Naturally, for there are no such people. I made them up; and a good average lot they are, though perhaps the preponderance of monosyllables is a little too obvious."

"But see here. I read that 'Mr. Thomas Wardle is a silk merchant of Staffordshire.'"

"But I assure you that I took him out of Pickwick."

"Yes, but here is 'William Laird,' for instance. I hear that already two actual William Lairds—one of Birkenhead, the other of Glasgow— are convinced that the honour belongs to them."

"No doubt they will be round in a day or two. The Heralds' College will refer them to me—not simultaneously, if I may trust Sir Albert Woods's tact—and I shall tell them that it belongs to neither, but to another William Laird altogether. But, if you doubt, take the Indian promotions. Lord Salisbury sometimes adds a name or two after I send in the List, and—well, you know his lordship is not fond of the dark races and has a somewhat caustic humour. Look at the new C.I.E.'s: 'Rai Bahadur Pandit Bhag Rum.' Does it occur to you that a person of that name really exists? 'Khan Bahadur Naoraji ('Naoraji,' mark you) Pestonji Vakil'—it's the language of extravaganza! The Marquis goes too far: it spoils all verisimilitude."

Mr. Robertson grew quite ruffled.

"Then you pride yourself on verisimilitude?" I suggested.

"As I think you may guess; and we spare no pains to attain it, whether in the names or In the descriptions supplied to the newspapers. 'William Arbuthnot Blain, Esq.'—you have heard of Balzac's scouring Paris for a name for one of his characters. I assure you I scoured England for William Arbuthnot Blain—'identified with the movement for improving the dwellings of the labouring classes'—or is that Richard Farrant, Esq.? In any case, what more likely, on the face of it? 'Frederick Wills, Esq., of the well-known tobacco firm of Bristol'—the public swallows that readily: and yet it never buys a packet of their Westward Ho! Mixture (which I smoke myself) without reading that the Wills's of Bristol are W. D. and H. O.—no Frederick at all."

"But," I urged, "the purpose of this—"

"I should have thought it obvious; but let me give you the history of it. The practice began with William III. He was justly scornful of the lax distribution of honours which had marked all the Stuart reigns. You will hardly believe it, but before 1688 knighthoods, and even peerages, went as often as not to men who qualified by an opportune loan to the Exchequer, or even by presiding at a public feast. (I say nothing of baronetcies, for their history is notorious.) At first William was for making a clean sweep of the Honours' List, or limiting it to two or three well-approved recipients. But it was argued that this seeming niggardliness might injure His Majesty's popularity, never quite secure. The Scutorium found a way out of the dilemma. Sir Crofton Byng, the then Clerk of the Ribands, proposed the scheme, which has worked ever since. I may tell you that the undue largesse of honours finds in the very highest quarters as little favour as ever it did. Of course, there are some whose services to science, literature, and art cannot be ignored—the late Lord Leighton, for instance, or Sir George Newnes, or Sir Joseph Lister again; and these are honoured, while the public acclaims. But the rest are represented only in my collection of masks—and an interesting one it is. Let me lead the way."

But I have left myself no space for describing the treasures of the Scutorium. The two upper stories are undoubtedly the least interesting, since they contain the modern, unpainted masks. Each mask has its place, its label, and on the shelf below it, protected by a slip of glass, a description of the imaginary recipient of the royal favour. One has only to look along the crowded shelves to be convinced that Mr. Melville Robertson's office is no sinecure. The first floor is devoted to a small working library and a museum (the latter undergoing rearrangement at the time of my visit). But the cellars!—or (as I should say) the crypt! In Beaumont's words—

"Here's a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate!"

Here in their native colours, by the light of Mr. Robertson's duplex lantern, stare the faces of the illustrious dead, from Rinaldus FitzTurold, knighted on Senlac field, to stout old Crosby Martin, sea-rover, who received the accolade (we'll hope he deserved it) from the Virgin Queen in 1586. A few even are adorned with side-locks, which Mr. Pender, the nomenclator, keeps scrupulously dusted. In almost every case the wax has withstood the tooth of time far better than one could have expected. Mr. Robertson believes that the pigments chosen must have had some preservative virtue. If so, the secret has been lost. But Mr. Pender has touched over some of the worst decayed with a mixture of copal and pure alcohol, by which he hopes at least to arrest the mischief; and certainly the masks in the Scutorium compare very favourably with the waxen effigies of our royalties preserved in the Abbey, close by. Mr. Robertson has a theory that these, too, should by rights belong to his museum: but that is another story, and a long one. Suffice it to say that I took my leave with the feelings of one who has spent a profitable afternoon: and for further information concerning this most interesting nook of old London I can only refer the reader to the pamphlet already alluded to, The Westminster Scutorium: Its History and Present Uses. By J. Saxby Hine, C.B., F.S.A. Theobald & Son, Skewers Alley, Chancery Lane, E.C.



This article appeared to my beloved editor innocent enough to pass, and to me (as doubtless to the reader) harmless enough in all conscience. Now listen to the sequel.

Long afterwards an acquaintance of mine—a barrister with antiquarian tastes—was dining with me in my Cornish home, and the talk after dinner fell upon the weekly papers and reviews. On The Speaker he touched with a reticence which I set down at first to dislike for his politics. By and by, however, he let slip the word "untrustworthy."

"Holding your view of its opinions," I suggested, "you might fairly say 'misleading.' 'Untrustworthy' is surely too strong a word."

"I am not talking," said he, "of its opinions, but of its mis-statements of fact. Some time ago it printed an article on a place which it called 'The Westminster Scutorium,' and described in detail. I happened to pick the paper up at my club and read the article. It contained a heap of historical information on the forms and ceremonies which accompany the granting of titles, and was apparently the work of a specialist. Being interested (as you know) in these matters, and having an hour to spare, I took a hansom down to Westminster. At the entrance of Dean's Yard I found a policeman, and inquired the way to the Scutorium. He eyed me for a moment, then he said, 'Well, I thought I'd seen the last of 'em. You're the first to-day, so far; and yesterday there was only five. But Monday—and Tuesday—and Wednesday! There must have been thirty came as late as Wednesday; though by that time I'd found out what was the matter. All Monday they kept me hunting round and round the yard, following like a pack. Very respectable-looking old gentlemen, too, the whole of 'em, else I should have guessed they were pulling my leg. Most of 'em had copies of a paper, The Speaker, and read out bits from it, and insisted on my searching in this direction and that . . . and me being new to this beat, and seeing it all in print! We called in the postman to help. By and by they began to compare notes, and found they'd been kidded, and some of 'em used language. . . . I really think, sir, you must be the last of 'em.'"



MAY.

I was travelling some weeks ago by a railway line alongside of which ran a quickset hedge. It climbed to the summit of cuttings, plunged to the base of embankments, looped itself around stations, flickered on the skyline above us, raced us along the levels, dipped into pools, shot up again on their farther banks, chivvied us into tunnels, ran round and waited for us as we emerged. Its importunity drove me to the other side of the carriage, only to find another quickset hedge behaving similarly. Now I can understand that a railway company has excellent reasons for planting quickset hedges alongside its permanent way. But their unspeakable monotony set me thinking. Why do we neglect the real parks of England?—parks enormous in extent, and yet uncultivated, save here and there and in the most timid fashion. And how better could our millionaires use their wealth (since they are always confiding to us their difficulties in getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens and endowing them, and so, without pauperising anyone, build for themselves monuments not only delightful, but perpetual?—for, as Victor Hugo said, the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. I doubt it; and experts, who have discussed with me the modern products of the paper trade, share my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public library has been sufficiently exploited, if not worked out. So, you may say again, have free public gardens and parks been worked out. I think not. Admit that a fair percentage of the public avails itself of these libraries and parks; still the mass does not, and they were intended for the mass. Their attractiveness does not spread and go on spreading. The stream of public appreciation which pours through them is not fathomless; beyond a certain point it does not deepen, or deepens with heart-breaking slowness; and candid librarians and curators can sound its shallows accurately enough. What we want is not a garden into which folk will find their way if they have nothing better to do and can spare the time with an effort. Or, to be accurate, we do want such gardens for deliberate enjoyment; but what we want more is to catch our busy man and build a garden about him in the brief leisure which, without seeking it, he is forced to take.

Where are these gardens? Why, beside and along our railway lines. These are the great public parks of England; and through them travels daily a vast population held in enforced idleness, seeking distraction in its morning paper. Have you ever observed how a whole carriageful of travellers on the Great Western line will drop their papers to gaze out on Messrs. Sutton's trial-beds just outside Reading? A garish appeal, no doubt: a few raying spokes of colour, and the vision has gone. And I forestall the question, "Is that the sort of thing you wish to see extended?—a bed of yellow tulips, for instance, or of scarlet lobelias, or of bright-blue larkspurs, all the way from London to Liverpool?" I suggest nothing of the sort. Our railway lines in England, when they follow the valleys—as railway lines must in hilly districts—are extraordinarily beautiful. The eye, for example, could desire nothing better, in swift flight, than the views along the Wye Valley or in the Derbyshire Peak country, and even the rich levels of Somerset have a beauty of their own (above all in May and June, when yellow with sheets of buttercups) which artificial planting would spoil. But—cant about Nature apart—every line has its dreary cuttings and embankments, all of which might be made beautiful at no great cost. I need not labour this: here and there by a casual bunch of rhododendrons or of gorse, or by a sheet of primroses or wild hyacinths in springtime, the thing is proved, and has been proved again and again to me by the comments of fellow-passengers.

Now I am honestly enamoured of this dream of mine, and must pause to dwell on some of its beauties. In the first place, we could start to realise it in the most modest fashion and test the appreciation of the public as we go along. Our flowers would be mainly wild flowers, and our trees, for the most part, native British plants, costing, say, from thirty shillings to three pounds the hundred. A few roods would do to begin with, if the spot were well chosen; indeed, it would be wiser in every way to begin modestly, for though England possesses several great artists in landscape gardening, their art has never to my knowledge been seriously applied to railway gardening, and the speed of the spectators introduces a new and highly-amusing condition, and one so singular and so important as to make this almost a separate art. At any rate, our gardeners would have to learn as they go, and if any man can be called enviable it is an artist learning to express art's eternal principles in a new medium, under new conditions.

Even if we miss our millionaire, we need not despond over ways and means. The beauty-spots of Great Britain are engaged just now in a fierce rivalry of advertisement. Why should not this rivalry be pressed into the service of beautifying the railway lines along which the tourist must travel to reach them? Why should we neglect the porches (so to speak) of our temples? Would not the tourist arrive in a better temper if met on his way with silent evidence of our desire to please? And, again, is the advertising tradesman quite wise in offending so many eyes with his succession of ugly hoardings standing impertinently in green fields? Can it be that the sight of them sets up that disorder of the liver which he promises to cure? And if not, might he not call attention to his wares at least as effectively, if more summarily, by making them the excuse for a vision of delight which passengers would drop their newspapers to gaze upon? Lastly, the railway companies themselves have discovered the commercial value of scenery. Years ago, and long before their discovery (and as if by a kind of instinct they were blundering towards it) they began to offer prizes for the best-kept station gardens—with what happy result all who have travelled in South Wales will remember. They should find it easy to learn that the 'development' of watering-places and holiday resorts may be profitably followed up by spending care upon their approaches.

But I come back to my imaginary millionaire—the benevolent man who only wants to be instructed how to spend his money—the 'magnificent man' of Aristotle's Ethics, nonplussed for the moment, and in despair of discovering an original way of scattering largesse for the public good. For, while anxious to further my scheme by conciliating the commercial instinct, I must insist that its true beauty resides in the conception of our railways as vast public parks only hindered by our sad lack of inventiveness from ministering to the daily delight of scores of thousands and the occasional delight of almost everyone. The millionaire I want is one who can rise to this conception of it, and say with Blake—

"I will not cease from mental fight,"

(Nor from pecuniary contribution, for that matter)

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land."

For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with good intentions. The mischief with them is their lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers will agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than to suppose yourself suddenly endowed with a million of money, and to invent modes of dispensing it for the good of your kind. As a past master of that game I offer the above suggestion gratis to those poor brothers of mine who have more money than they know how to use.

The railway—not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor—took me to pay a pious visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking— especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' on the evening before holidays—of a passage in Izaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton:—

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time—which I therefore thought slow-paced—had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close; not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me—a small boy whom he had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter (I dare say) had forgotten.

"T. E. B."

Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St. Matthew's Church, and characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.

"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were associated with its history . . . 'The only church in Douglas where the poor go'—I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it will continue to be so. . . . I postulate the continuity. . . ."

I quote these words (and so leave them for a while) with a purpose, aware how trivial they may seem to the reader. But to those who had the privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be trivial which they feel to be characteristic and in some degree explicative of the man; and with this 'I postulate the continuity' we touch accurately and simply for once a note which sang in many chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral, nature it has ever been my lot to meet.

Let me record, and have done with, the few necessary incidents of what was by choice a vita fallens and "curiously devoid of incident." The boy was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan Vicarage, near Douglas; the sixth of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots mother and a father whose nobly humble idiosyncrasies continued in his son and are worthy to live longer in his description of them:—

"To think of a Pazon respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as parts of them, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, theirs! Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was 'taking a liberty' if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment that the 'weak brethren' thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they: they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy? God only knows how far down into their depths of misery the sweetness of that delicacy descends. . . . He loved sincerity, truth and modesty. It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present."

Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though of no University, was a scholar in grain; was, for example, so fastidious about composition that he would make his son read some fragment of an English classic to him before answering an invitation! "To my father style was like the instinct of personal cleanliness." Again we touch notes which echoed through the life of his son—who worshipped continuity.

From a course of tuition divided between his father and the parish schoolmaster, Brown went, at fifteen or over, to King William's College, and became its show scholar; thence, by the efforts of well-meaning friends (but at the cost of much subsequent pain), to Christ Church, Oxford, as a servitor. He won his double first; but he has left on record an account of a servitor's position at Christ Church in the early fifties, and to Brown the spiritual humiliation can have been little less than one long dragging anguish. He had, of course, his intervals of high spirits; but (says Mr. Irwin, his friend and biographer) "there is no doubt he did not exaggerate what the position was to him. I have heard him refer to it over and over again with a dispassionate bitterness there was no mistaking." Dean Gaisford absolutely refused to nominate him, after his two first classes, to a fellowship, though all the resident dons wished it. "A servitor never has been elected student—ergo, he never shall be." Brown admired Gaisford, and always spoke kindly of him "in all his dealings with me." Yet the night after he won his double first was "one of the most intensely miserable I was ever called to endure." Relief, and of the right kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in April, 1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still kept and conveyed its peculiar distinction, and the brilliant young scholar had at length the ball at his feet.

"This is none of your empty honours," he wrote to his mother; "it gives me an income of about 300 pounds per annum as long as I choose to reside at Oxford, and about 220 pounds in cash if I reside elsewhere. In addition to this it puts me in a highly commanding position for pupils, so that on the whole I have every reason to expect that (except perhaps the first year) I shall make between 500 and 600 pounds altogether per annum. So you see, my dear mother, that your prayers have not been unanswered, and that God will bless the generation of those who humbly strive to serve Him. . . I have not omitted to remark that the election took place on April 21st, the anniversary of your birth and marriage."

How did he use his opportunity? "He never took kindly to the life of an Oxford fellow," thought the late Dr. Fowler (an old schoolfellow of Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of the University). Mr. Irwin quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to much the same effect. Their explanations lack something of definiteness. After a few terms of private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and there accepted the office of Vice-principal of his old school. We can only be sure that his reasons were honourable, and sufficed for him; we may include among them, if we choose, that nostalgia which haunted him all his days, until fate finally granted his wish and sent him back to his beloved Argos "for good."

In the following year (1857) he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay; and soon after left King William's College to become 'by some strange mischance' Head Master of the Crypt School, Gloucester. Of this "Gloucester episode," as he called it, nothing needs to be recorded except that he hated the whole business and, incidentally, that one of his pupils was Mr. W. E. Henley—destined to gather into his National Observer, many years later, many blooms of Brown's last and not least memorable efflorescence in poesy.

From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate day, by Mr. Percival (now Bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to Clifton College, then a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him into the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. Percival wanted a man to take the Modern Side; and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton—Mr. Wilson (now Canon of Worcester). Mr. Wilson was an old King William's boy; knew Brown, and named him.

"Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly volcanic. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following Term; and, needless to say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest to me ever since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it would be worth a good deal to know, what thoughts were crossing through that richly-furnished, teeming brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with Oriel College in front of him, thoughts of his own struggles and triumphs, and of all the great souls that had passed to and fro over the pavement around him; and all set in the lurid background of the undergraduate life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at Christ Church."

Was he happy in his many years' work at Clifton? On the whole, and with some reservation, we may say 'yes'—'yes,' although in the end he escaped from it gladly and enjoyed his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed formality and routine; he was, as he often proclaimed himself, a nature-loving, somewhat intractable Celt; and if one may hint at a fault in him, it was that now and then he soon tired. A man so spendthrift of emotion is bound at times to knock on the bottom of his emotional coffers; and no doubt he was true to a mood when he wrote—

"I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod, But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still, And gorse runs riot in Glen Chass—thank God!

"Alert, I seek exactitude of rule, I step and square my shoulders with the squad, But there are blaeberries on old Barrule, And Langness has its heather still—thank God!"

—With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay seriousness and on which side humour. Still it was a mood; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':—

"Who would be planted chooseth not the soil Or here or there, Or loam or peat, Wherein he best may grow And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil— The lily is most fair, But says not' I will only blow Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil What rock shall owe The springs that wash his feet; The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil That for his purple radiance is most meet— Lord, even so I ask one prayer, The which if it be granted, It skills not where Thou plantest me, only I would be planted."

"You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian. . . . "I demur to your statement that when you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief. My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary—the one the outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not. . . . The pedagogic is needful for bread and butter, also for a certain form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think."

These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he had the abiding assurance of assisting in a kind of success which he certainly respected. He longed for the day of emancipation, to return to his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was unhappy.

Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How shall I describe him? A sturdy, thick-set figure, inclining to rotundity, yet athletic; a face extraordinarily mobile; bushy, grey eyebrows; eyes at once deeply and radiantly human, yet holding the primitive faun in their coverts; a broad mouth made for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. "There are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty; but the latter are not Rabelaisians. I have an idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter he welcomed as a Godlike function.

"God sits upon His hill, And sees the shadows fly; And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?"

And for that matter, why should not we? Though at this point his fine manners intervened, correcting, counselling moderation. "I am certain God made fools for us to enjoy, but there must be an economy of joy in the presence of a fool; you must not betray your enjoyment." Imagine all this overlaid with a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of the parsonic (he was ordained deacon before leaving Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's orders till near the end of his time at Clifton); add a simple natural piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."

"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875, "especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term. . . . Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention it again. They're all in church. See how good God is! See how He has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially disagreeable people, get caught—and lo! the universe for me!!! me— me. . . ."

I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once fell to me—a blundering innocent in the hands of fate—to put them to severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton—awkward, and abominably conscious of it, and sensitive—I had been billeted on Brown's hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than that he took me into the family circle—by no means an expansive one, or accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders—and for the inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers. . . . "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too, like the most of his countrymen—"jus' the shy "—but with a proud reserve as far removed as possible from sham humility—being all too sensible and far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'" That smile had just sufficient irony—no more.

To this we may add a passion for music and a passion for external nature— external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be present at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of elemental mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power to impart. And yet we are beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was imprehensible—"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile:

"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the time."

Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons will serve. Falstaffian—with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian—with a fiery Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature: all such epithets fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."