'Not one except the Attorney was amused— He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb, So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause, Knowing they must be settled by the laws.'

But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks. Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to have—

'Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee, Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee'?

Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr. Jeremiah Builder—Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that the humour of these typical persons who so swell the dramatis personae; of an Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because we must.

Genuine comedy—the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul-rejoicing incongruity—has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fashions, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool; he is a fool, seised in fee simple of his folly.

Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be 'cross-gartered'; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities—what we call his 'ways'—nay, in the very motions of his back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obsequies. 'But indeed,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone.'

Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the portrayal of the individual, not the type; and though the young man in Locksley Hall no doubt observes that the 'individual withers,' we have but to take down George Meredith's novels to find the fact is otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of Poole is no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with Petruchio: 'Thou hast hit it; come sit on me.' No doubt the task of the modern humorist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out- stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so distinctly the snorting of the engine, and the groaning and the creaking of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize: but what would you? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their qualities.

If, therefore, it be the fact that our national comedy is in decline, we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired, 'Why can we not fly, my friends?' Mr. Snagsby ventured to observe, 'in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, "No wings!"' but he was immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the somewhat heavy-footed movements of our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius who would soar.



CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS.

Why all the English poets, with a barely decent number of exceptions, have been Cambridge men, has always struck me, as did the abstinence of the Greeks from malt Mr. Calverley, 'as extremely curious.' But in this age of detail, one must, however reluctantly, submit to prove one's facts, and I, therefore, propose to institute a 'Modest Inquiry' into this subject. Imaginatively, I shall don proctorial robes, and armed with a duster, saunter up and down the library, putting to each poet as I meet him the once dreaded question, 'Sir, are you a member of this University?'

But whilst I am arranging myself for this function, let me utilize the time by making two preliminary observations—the first one being that, as to-day is Sunday, only such free libraries are open as may happen to be attached to public-houses, and I am consequently confined to my own poor shelves, and must be forgiven even though I make some palpable omissions. The second is that I exclude from my survey living authors. I must do so; their very names would excite controversy about a subject which, when wisely handled, admits of none.

I now pursue my inquiry. That Chaucer was a Cambridge man cannot be proved. It is the better opinion that he was (how else should he have known anything about the Trumpington Road?), but it is only an opinion, and as no one has ever been found reckless enough to assert that he was an Oxford man, he must be content to 'sit out' this inquiry along with Shakspeare, Webster, Ford, Pope, Cowper, Burns, and Keats, no one of whom ever kept his terms at either University. Spenser is, of course, the glory of the Cambridge Pembroke, though were the fellowships of that college made to depend upon passing a yearly examination in the Faerie Queen, to be conducted by Dean Church, there would be wailing and lamentation within her rubicund walls. Sir Thomas Wyatt was at St. John's, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke at Jesus, Giles and Phineas Fletcher were at King's, Herrick was first at St. John's, but migrated to the Hall, where he is still reckoned very pretty reading, even by boating men. Cowley, most precocious of poets, and Suckling were at Trinity, Waller at King's, Francis Quarles was of Christ's. The Herbert family were divided, some going to Oxford and some to Cambridge, George, of course, falling to the lot of Cambridge. John Milton's name alone would deify the University where he pursued his almost sacred studies. Andrew Marvell, a pleasant poet and savage satirist, was of Trinity. The author of Hudibras is frequently attributed to Cambridge, but, on being interrogated, he declined to name his college—always a suspicious circumstance.

I must not forget Richard Crashaw, of Peterhouse. Willingly would I relieve the intolerable tedium of this dry inquiry by transcribing the few lines of his now beneath my eye. But I forbear, and 'steer right on.'

Of dramatists we find Marlowe (untimelier death than his was never any) at Corpus; Greene (I do not lay much stress on Greene) was both at St. John's and Clare. Ben Jonson was at St. John's, so was Nash. John Fletcher (whose claims to be considered the senior partner in his well- known firm are simply paramount) was at Corpus. James Shirley, the author of The Maid's Revenge and of the beautiful lyric beginning 'The glories of our birth and state,' in the innocence of his heart first went to St. John's College, Oxford, from whence he was speedily sent down, for reasons which the delightful author of Athenae Oxonienses must really be allowed to state for himself. 'At the same time (1612) Dr. William Laud presiding at that house, he had a very great affection for Shirley, especially for the pregnant parts that were visible in him, but then, having a broad or large mole upon his left cheek, which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doctor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so.' Thus treated, Shirley left Oxford, that 'home of lost causes,' but not apparently of large moles, and came to Cambridge, and entered at St. Catharine's Hall, where, either because the authorities were not amongst those who esteemed a broad or large mole upon the left cheek to be a deformity, or because a mole, more or less, made no sort of difference in the personal appearance of the college, or for other good and sufficient reasons, poor Shirley was allowed, without, I trust, being often told of his mole, to proceed to his degree and to Holy Orders.

Starting off again, we find John Dryden, whose very name is a tower of strength (were he to come to life again he would, like Mr. Brown of Calaveras, 'clean out half the town'), at Trinity. In this poet's later life he said he liked Oxford better. His lines on this subject are well known:

'Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own Mother-University. Thebes did his rude, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age.'

But idle preferences of this sort are beyond the scope of my present inquiry. After Dryden we find Garth at Peterhouse and charming Matthew Prior at John's. Then comes the great name of Gray. Perhaps I ought not to mention poor Christopher Smart, who was a Fellow of Pembroke; and yet the author of David, under happier circumstances, might have conferred additional poetic lustre even upon the college of Spenser. {255}

In the present century, we find Byron and his bear at Trinity, Coleridge at Jesus, and Wordsworth at St. John's. The last-named poet was fully alive to the honour of belonging to the same University as Milton. In language not unworthy of Mr. Trumbull, the well-known auctioneer in Middlemarch, he has recorded as follows:

'Among the band of my compeers was one Whom chance had stationed in the very room Honoured by Milton's name. O temperate Bard, Be it confest that for the first time seated Within thy innocent lodge and oratory, One of a festive circle, I poured out Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain Never excited by the fumes of wine Before that hour or since.' {256}

I know of no more amiable trait in the character of Cambridge men than their willingness to admit having been drunk once.

After the great name of Wordsworth any other must seem small, but I must, before concluding, place on record Praed, Macaulay, Kingsley, and Calverley.

A glorious Roll-call indeed!

'Earth shows to Heaven the names by thousands told That crown her fame.'

So may Cambridge.

Oxford leads off with one I could find it in my heart to grudge her, beautiful as she is—Sir Philip Sidney. Why, I wonder, did he not accompany his friend and future biographer, Fulke Greville, to Cambridge? As Dr. Johnson once said to Boswell, 'Sir, you may wonder!' Sidney most indisputably was at Christchurch. Old George Chapman, who I suppose was young once, was (I believe) at Oxford, though I have known Cambridge to claim him. Lodge and Peele were at Oxford, so were Francis Beaumont and his brother Sir John. Philip Massinger, Shakerley Marmion, and John Marston are of Oxford, also Watson and Warner. Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne, Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr. Brady—but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of the Psalms, for Brady's colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man. Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wesley, Southey, Landor, Hartley Coleridge, Beddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are names of which their University may well be proud. But surely, when compared with the Cambridge list, a falling-off must be admitted.

A poet indeed once came into residence at University College, whose single name—for, after all, poets must be weighed and not counted—would have gone far to right the balance, but is Oxford bold enough to claim Shelley as her own? She sent him down, not for riotous living, for no purer soul than his ever haunted her courts, but for wanting to discuss with those whose business it was to teach him questions of high philosophy. Had Shelley only gone to Trinity in 1810, I feel sure wise and witty old Dr. Mansel would never have sent him down. Spenser, Milton, and Shelley! What a triad of immortal fames they would have made. As it is, we expect Oxford, with her accustomed composure, will insist upon adding Shelley to her score—but even when she has been allowed to do so, she must own herself beaten both in men and metal.

But this being so—why was it so? It is now my turn to own myself defeated. I cannot for the life of me tell how it happened.



BOOK-BUYING.

The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers' shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy in it, than are to-day to be found within its boundaries. And yet the place 'all unabashed' now boasts its bookless self a city!

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term 'second-hand,' which other crafts have 'soiled to all ignoble use.' But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are necessarily second-hand. The writers of to-day need not grumble. Let them 'bide a wee.' If their books are worth anything, they, too, one day will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation amongst us—the pastrycooks and the trunkmakers—who must have paper.

But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody now buys books, meaning thereby second-hand books? The late Mark Pattison, who had 16,000 volumes, and whose lightest word has therefore weight, once stated that he had been informed, and verily believed, that there were men of his own University of Oxford who, being in uncontrolled possession of annual incomes of not less than 500 pounds, thought they were doing the thing handsomely if they expended 50 pounds a year upon their libraries. But we are not bound to believe this unless we like. There was a touch of morosity about the late Rector of Lincoln which led him to take gloomy views of men, particularly Oxford men.

No doubt arguments a priori may readily be found to support the contention that the habit of book-buying is on the decline. I confess to knowing one or two men, not Oxford men either, but Cambridge men (and the passion of Cambridge for literature is a by-word), who, on the plea of being pressed with business, or because they were going to a funeral, have passed a bookshop in a strange town without so much as stepping inside 'just to see whether the fellow had anything.' But painful as facts of this sort necessarily are, any damaging inference we might feel disposed to draw from them is dispelled by a comparison of price-lists. Compare a bookseller's catalogue of 1862 with one of the present year, and your pessimism is washed away by the tears which unrestrainedly flow as you see what bonnes fortunes you have lost. A young book-buyer might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan his youth, after comparing old catalogues with new.

Nothing but American competition, grumble some old stagers.

Well! why not? This new battle for the books is a free fight, not a private one, and Columbia has 'joined in.' Lower prices are not to be looked for. The book-buyer of 1900 will be glad to buy at to-day's prices. I take pleasure in thinking he will not be able to do so. Good finds grow scarcer and scarcer. True it is that but a few short weeks ago I picked up (such is the happy phrase, most apt to describe what was indeed a 'street casualty') a copy of the original edition of Endymion (Keats's poem—O subscriber to Mudie's!—not Lord Beaconsfield's novel) for the easy equivalent of half-a-crown—but then that was one of my lucky days. The enormous increase of booksellers' catalogues and their wide circulation amongst the trade has already produced a hateful uniformity of prices. Go where you will it is all the same to the odd sixpence. Time was when you could map out the country for yourself with some hopefulness of plunder. There were districts where the Elizabethan dramatists were but slenderly protected. A raid into the 'bonnie North Countrie' sent you home again cheered with chap-books and weighted with old pamphlets of curious interests; whilst the West of England seldom failed to yield a crop of novels. I remember getting a complete set of the Bronte books in the original issues at Torquay, I may say, for nothing. Those days are over. Your country bookseller is, in fact, more likely, such tales does he hear of London auctions, and such catalogues does he receive by every post, to exaggerate the value of his wares than to part with them pleasantly, and as a country bookseller should, 'just to clear my shelves, you know, and give me a bit of room.' The only compensation for this is the catalogues themselves. You get them, at least, for nothing, and it cannot be denied that they make mighty pretty reading.

These high prices tell their own tale, and force upon us the conviction that there never were so many private libraries in course of growth as there are to-day.

Libraries are not made; they grow. Your first two thousand volumes present no difficulty, and cost astonishingly little money. Given 400 pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with this number of books, all in his own language, and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. But pride is still out of the question. To be proud of having two thousand books would be absurd. You might as well be proud of having two top coats. After your first two thousand difficulty begins, but until you have ten thousand volumes the less you say about your library the better. Then you may begin to speak.

It is no doubt a pleasant thing to have a library left you. The present writer will disclaim no such legacy, but hereby undertakes to accept it, however dusty. But good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. Each volume then, however lightly a stranger's eye may roam from shelf to shelf, has its own individuality, a history of its own. You remember where you got it, and how much you gave for it; and your word may safely be taken for the first of these facts, but not for the second.

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence. No other man but he would have made precisely such a combination as his. Had he been in any single respect different from what he is, his library, as it exists, never would have existed. Therefore, surely he may exclaim, as in the gloaming he contemplates the backs of his loved ones, 'They are mine, and I am theirs.'

But the eternal note of sadness will find its way even through the keyhole of a library. You turn some familiar page, of Shakspeare it may be, and his 'infinite variety,' his 'multitudinous mind,' suggests some new thought, and as you are wondering over it you think of Lycidas, your friend, and promise yourself the pleasure of having his opinion of your discovery the very next time when by the fire you two 'help waste a sullen day.' Or it is, perhaps, some quainter, tenderer fancy that engages your solitary attention, something in Sir Philip Sydney or Henry Vaughan, and then you turn to look for Phyllis, ever the best interpreter of love, human or divine. Alas! the printed page grows hazy beneath a filmy eye as you suddenly remember that Lycidas is dead—'dead ere his prime'—and that the pale cheek of Phyllis will never again be relumined by the white light of her pure enthusiasm. And then you fall to thinking of the inevitable, and perhaps, in your present mood, not unwelcome hour, when the 'ancient peace' of your old friends will be disturbed, when rude hands will dislodge them from their accustomed nooks and break up their goodly company.

'Death bursts amongst them like a shell, And strews them over half the town.'

They will form new combinations, lighten other men's toil, and soothe another's sorrow. Fool that I was to call anything mine!

Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London.



Footnotes:

{27} See note to Mitford's Milton, vol. i., clii.

{59} Not Horace Walpole's opinion. 'Sir Joshua Reynolds has lent me Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope, which Sir Joshua holds to be a chef d'oeuvre. It is a most trumpery performance, and stuffed with all his crabbed phrases and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.'—Letters, vol. viii., p. 26.

{65} Howell's State Trials, vol. xvii., p. 159.

{76} In Oxford Essays for 1858.

{79} Lectures and Essays on University Subjects: Lecture on Literature.

{101} "The late Mr. Carlyle was a brute and a boor."—The World, October 29th, 1884.

{102} In the first edition, by a strange and distressing freak of the imagination, I took the 'old struggler' out of Lockhart and put her into Boswell.

{117} Anyone who does not wish this story to be true, will find good reasons for disbelieving it stated in Mr. Napier's edition of Boswell, vol. iv., p. 385.

{159} All the difficulties connected with this subject will be found collected, and somewhat unkindly considered, in Mr. Dilke's Papers of a Critic, vol. ii. The equity draughtsman will be indisposed to attach importance to statements made in a Bill of Complaint filed in Chancery by Lord Verney against Burke fourteen years after the transaction to which it had reference, in a suit which was abandoned after answer put in. But, in justice to a deceased plaintiff, it should be remembered that in those days a defendant could not be cross-examined upon his sworn answer.

{178} Critical Miscellanies, vol. iii., p. 9.

{189} 'I will answer you by quoting what I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius Halicarnassensis I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.' See Lord Bolingbroke's Second Letter on the Study and Use of History.

{204} The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited, with notes and introduction, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger. Three volumes. London: 1883-5.

{218} See Life of Emerson, by O. W. Holmes.

{221} The institution referred to was the Eucharist.

{244} Yet in his essay On Londoners and Country People we find Hazlitt writing: 'London is the only place in which the child grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this kind, which, in the way of childish ignorance and self-pleasing delusion, exceeded anything to be met with in Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, or the Old Comedy.'

{255} This passage was written before Mr. Browning's 'Parleyings' had appeared. Christopher is now 'a person of importance,' and needs no apology.

{256} The Prelude, p. 55.

THE END