Chapter 2

Llaneol, the dilapidated farm-house of the expelled steward, old Bevan, stood beautifully in a wooded glen, watered by a shallow stream, between a brook and river in size. A pretty greensward, of perpetual vivid hue, stretched quite up to the threshold--its "fold," or farm-yard, being small, and situated behind. A wooded mountain rose opposite, topped by a range of many-tinted cliffs, splintered like thunder-stricken battlements, and resembling, in their fretted and timeworn fronts, rich cathedral architecture in ruins. Extensive sheep-walks rose in russet, lofty barrenness behind, but allowing below breadth for venerable oaks, and a profusion of underwood, to shelter the white, but no longer well-thatched, farm-cottage, and screening that umbrageous valley from the colder wind; while the many sheep, seen, and but just seen, dotting the lofty barrier, beautified the scene by the pastoral ideas which their dim-seen white inspired. Only the songs of birds distinguished the noonday from the night, unless when the flail was heard in the barn, through the open doors of which, coloured by mosses, the river glistened, and the green, with its geese, gleamed the more picturesquely for this rustic perspective.

As Winifred was approaching this tranquil vale--her native vale--after an absence at the town of Cardigan, where she had been seeking assistance for her father, with little success, she was startled by the unusual sound of many voices, and soon saw, aghast, the whole of the rustic furniture standing about on the pretty green, her infant play-place; the noisy auctioneer mounted on the well-known old oaken table; even her mother's wheel was already knocked down and sold, and her father's own great wicker chair was ready to be put up, while rude boys were trying its rickety antiquity by a furious rocking.

On no occasion is so much joviality indulged (in Wales) as on that of an auction "under a distress for rent," (which was the case here)--an occasion of calamity and ruin to the owner. Even in the event of an auction caused by a death, where the common course of nature has removed the possessor from those "goods and chattels" which are now useless to him, a sale is surely a melancholy spectacle to creatures who use their minds, and possess feelings befitting a brotherhood of Christians, or even heathens. To see the inmost recesses of "home, sweet home," thrown open to all strangers; the most treasured articles (often descended as heir-looms from ancestors, and therefore possessing an intrinsic value, quite unsuspected by others, for the owner,) ransacked, tossed from hand to hand, and at last "knocked down" at a nominal price--even this is a mournful exhibition. But where the ruthless hand of his brother man has wrested those valuables from their possessor, instead of inevitable death's tearing him from them--where that very owner and his family are present, sadly listening to the ceaseless jokes (thoughtlessly inhuman) lavished by the auctioneer, and re-echoed by the crowd, over those old familiar objects--witnessing the happy excitement of rival bidders, and the universal pleasure over his ruin, like the cry and flocking of vultures over a battle-field, witnessed by wretches still alive, though mortally wounded; what can exceed the shocking transgression of human brotherhood presented by such a scene! A scene of every-day occurrence--a scene never seeming to excite even one reflection kindred to these natural, surely, and obvious feelings--yet one terribly recalling to the pensive observer that axiom, _Homo ad hominem lupus est!_ Doubtless the fraudulent or utterly reckless debtor is, in the eye of reason, the first "wolfish" assailant of his brother. But how many of these familiar tragedies are as truly the result of unforeseen, unforeseeable contingencies, as diseases or other events, considered the visitations of God! One, or two, or three, sick and heavy hearts and wounded minds, in the midst of a hundred happy, light ones, buoyed up by fierce cupidity and keen bargain-hunting, and exhilarated by drink and by fun, and all drawn together by the misery of those outcast few.

Poor Bevan had been taken by surprise in this sudden execution, put in by his treacherous supplanter, Lewis Lewis. But what most excited the anger of his old attached neighbours, was the fact that many of these goods were bought by an agent of Lewis, to finish furnishing his own newly repaired house by the old park wall. Winifred learned that her parents had removed to a friendly neighbour's, at some distance, but suspected the worst--his removal to jail.

Not now the weakness of woman prevailed over her presence of mind, as we have lately seen it do in her interview with a beloved object. She commanded her agitation, so far as to bid for her father's old chair, but in vain; for her timid bidding, faltered from behind a crowd, failed to catch the ear of the jocular auctioneer, (who, in Wales, must always be somewhat of a mountebank,) and the favourite chair was gone at once, after the wheel, and the many old familiar chattels which she saw standing, now the property of strangers.

Events crowded fast on each other, hurrying on that terrible hour in which a revolting act of self-devotion was to render even this domestic horror of little injury to her parents. "I will buy 'daddy' a better chair, or he shall have enough to buy a better, when I am gone," she murmured to herself. For now the rumour grew rife, that Mr Fitzarthur had actually landed, was daily expected; and, in confirmation, she received through a neighbour present, a letter left for her by her father, stating that he had now actually received, under the Nabob's own hand, a proposal of marriage, which the generous old man (who well knew her engagements to another) solemnly charged her to reject, at all hazards to himself. He further begged her to come quickly to the temporary place of refuge he and her mother had found under the roof of a hill cottage, just now tenantless through the death of a relative. Thither, with heavy heart, Winifred hastened by the first light of morning.

"_The_ hill," an expression much in the mouths of Welsh rural people, signifies not any particular one, as it would in England, but the whole desolate regions of the mountain heights; the homeless place of ever-whistling winds, and low bellowing clouds, mingling with the mist of the mountain, into one black smoke-like rolling volume--the place of dismal pools and screaming kites, full of bogs, concealed by a sickly yellowish herbage in the midst of the russet waste, boundlessly wearying the eye with its sober monotony of tint. If a pool or lake relieve it by reflecting the sky, on approach it is found choked all round by high rushes, and shadowed by low strangely-shaped rocks, tinted by mosses of dingy hue; the water that glistened pleasantly in the distance, shrinks now to a mere pond, (the middle space, too deep for bullrushes and other weeds to take root.) The deep stillness, or the unintermitted hollow blowing of the wind (according to the weather) are equally mournful. The rotten soil is cleft and torn into gulleys and small channels, in which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass, straggle silently with a sluggish motion in harmony with the lifeless scene. There, if a weedy-roofed hut do appear, (detected by its thin feeble smoke column) or the shepherd who tenants it should show his solitary figure in the distance, the only upright object where is not one tree-trunk, neither the home of man nor man's appearance lessens the sense of almost savage solitude; the one so lonely, not a smoke-wreath being visible all round, beside; the other, as he loiters by, watching some sheep on some distant bank, so shy and wild-looking, and, to appearance, so melancholy, so forlorn. Meanwhile, as we "plod our weary way," some dip in the wavy round of olive-hued lumpish mountains, or an abrupt huge chasm of awful rocks, each side being almost perpendicular, startles the traveller with a far-down prospect of some sunshiny, rich, leafy, valley region, at once showing at what a bleak elevation he has been roaming so long, and tantalizing him with the contrast of that far, far off, low, luring landscape, rendering more irksome than before the dead, heathery desert, interminably undulating before, behind, and all round him.

The little farm whither old Bevan had retired, stood high in such a desert as this, on the very verge of such a mountain-portal, (a _bwlch_, pronounced boolch, the Welsh call it,) an antique stone cottage, hanging like a nest on one of the side banks, dismal itself, but all that under world of pastoral pleasantness below, in full though dim perspective. A premature decay is always visible on these kind of wild, weather-beaten homes, in the torn thatch; the walls tinged with green, and generally propped to resist the effects of the powerful winds. If white-washed, which they really are, broad streaks of green are visible, from the frequent heavy rains, tinged by the mosses and weeds of the roof. The clouds, attracted by the heights, career on the strong blast, so low and close, as often to shut up the dingy human nest in a dreary day of its own, while all below is blue serene.

To this melancholy abode, its few rustic chattels still standing there, left since the death of its tenant, Winifred toiled up by a steep, wild, but well-known track, but found not father, mother, or living thing, except one, so much in unison with the wild melancholy of the scene, as to exalt it almost to horror. This was a wretched idiot man, dressed in female attire, perfectly harmless, and kept, as a parish pauper, at an adjacent farm. He was noted for fidelity to any one who flattered him by some little commission. This ragged object presented to her the key of the padlock on the door, with the words "gone, gone, gone!" She entered, and found, to her surprise, excellent refreshment provided in the desolate house, evidently but lately deserted. But what riveted her eyes, was a letter to herself in the handwriting of David, but tremulously written, announcing his inability to keep an appointment, (one more!) which they had made, to part for ever--her terrible distress, it will be remembered, on the last occasion, deterring the young man from any further trial of her feelings. He further informed her that Mr Fitzarthur was certainly arrived, and had taken up his temporary abode at the pretty house by the park, designed by Lewis Lewis for his own residence. Moreover, she learned that her father and mother anxiously expected her at that house to which they had removed, but did not reveal that he had _been removed_ in the care of two bailiffs, and the house named was but a resting place in his transit to jail.

When the mind is enfeebled by repeated blows, it often happens that some one, which to others may appear the slightest of all, produces the greatest effect, its pain being quite disproportioned to its real importance. Thus it happened, that, amidst all her trials, Winifred felt the loss of her father's favourite chair as a crowning misery, trivial as was that loss, when hope itself was lost. She had identified that very humble chattel with his figure almost her life long. She almost expected to see the two fair hands (for, truth to tell, the aged steward had never worked hard) on each side, and the venerable kind face projected forwards from its deep concave, arched over that white head, to smile welcome to her even as it stood out on the little green. The intrusion of boy clowns, one after another, into its seat seemed a grievous insult to the unhappy owner, though absent. Yet a sad comfort rose in the thought of her ability to reinstate her father in all his lost comforts, through this terrible marriage. Then she grew impatient in her longing to console him by assurance of this, notwithstanding his generous wish that her hand should go where he knew her heart had irretrievably been given. But these repeated disappointments in finding the parents she longed to fold to her bosom, postponing this little gratification, (the telling him she would repurchase the old family chair,) now quite overcame the fortitude she had till now exhibited. She sate down sick at heart--turned with aversion from the refreshment her fatigue required, and wept bitterly. Superstition, and two mysterious incidents, even while she remained on the hill, if indeed they were more than superstition's coinage, helped to depress her. Just before she reached this forlorn house with the haggard, aged, horrid-looking idiot prowling round it, with his rags fluttering in the wind, she thought that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her some time) studiously avoided direct intercourse with his victim.

The second incident which might have sprung from the dwelling of her mind's eye on the absent features of him, who, it seemed, refused to meet her again, was an apparition, or what she deemed such, of her dear Night-harper! One of those dense flying clouds, so common even at moderate elevations when the mists roll down the hills, suddenly enveloping the lone lofty spot, left but a little area of a few yards for vision, a dungeon walled with fog, which kept circulating furiously on the blast like a great smoke, in continuous whirls. And through some momentary fissure in this white wall, she imagined the pallid and almost ghastly visage of her forsaken lover appeared intensely looking toward her, as she stood on the rude threshold, looking out on the temporary storm that had shut her up. Her vague apprehension of some evil arising to David, her mind's perpetual object, from the man she believed herself to have espied just before, was rarely absent from her thought. Combining the two appearances, she became more and more fancy-fraught, thus confined, as it were, in an elemental solitude of the mountain and the cloud, where, for the present, we leave her, to narrate the fate of her father.

The novel calamity of arrest for debt was borne by the respectable old man, John Bevan, with a patience and dignity that no study of philosophy could have inspired. Though somewhat inactive, he felt that, in the honest discharge of his duty, he stood acquitted in the sight of God, though not in the eye of the law, of all fault, at least of any one meriting the terrible punishment of imprisonment. It was near nightfall when two emissaries of the law appeared, announcing that horses waited at the neighbouring inn to convey him to jail with the first light of morning. The poor old dame, his wife, was not to be pacified by the efforts of the two bailiffs, who executed their commission with the utmost gentleness, by order, as it appeared, of the Nabob himself, notwithstanding that the old man's stern self-denying rejection of his overture for his daughter's hand had determined him to let his agent proceed to extremities. Soothing as well as he could both her grief and her rage--for the latter rose unreflectingly against the mere agents in this grievous infliction--old Bevan smoked his pipe as usual to the end, and then requested permission to take a little walk only to the church, which stood a short way from the solitary house where they surprised him.

"You see I cannot run, for I can hardly walk with these rheumatics, my friend," he observed; "but I have a fancy to visit the churchyard to-night, as it will be moonlight, and we shall be pretty busy in the morning. My dame is gone to bed with the good woman of this cottage, as I begged her to go; so pray let us walk--you shall see me all the while by the moon, without coming into the churchyard with me."

Arrived at the low stone stile, he crossed it by the help of the man, and proceeded alone to the tomb of his old master's grave, surrounded by a rail, with a yew growing inside, marking the site of the ancient family vault. The moon now shining clearly, the bailiff saw him kneel and uncover his head, which shone in its light, in the distance resembling a scull bleached by the wind. He remained a long time in this position, and his murmuring voice was partly audible to the man. At last he returned, thanking him for his patience, and shaking him very cordially by the hand. So touched was even this rugged lower limb of the law by this proof of his affectionate remembrance of his old patron, that he behaved throughout with great courtesy, and even respect. Bevan and his departed master had lived, as has been said, almost on the footing of cronies, a certain phlegmatic ease of nature being the characteristic of both. So proud, indeed, was Bevan of his brotherlike intercourse with the great man, that he made himself for years almost a personal _fac-simile_ of him, even to the cut and colour of his coat, wig, everything; and being a fine specimen of a "noble peasant," externally as well as internally, his assumption of the _squire_ in costume well became his tall figure, mild countenance, (streaked with the lingering pink of his youthful bloom,) and gentle demeanour. A rigid observer might have thought, that to this indulgent but indolent master the poor steward owed his ruin; his habits of "forgiving" his tenants their rent debts so often, having extended themselves to the former, further increased by the strange inattention of the new landlord. The gratitude of Bevan was, however, deserved--for never was a kinder master.

"It is a thing not to be thought," he said, while returning with the man, "that I shall ever come back here, to the old church again, alive or dead; seeing that I am too poor for any one to bring my old bones all the way from Cardigan, to put them in the same ground with _his_, as I did dream of in my better days, and too old for a man used to free air and the hill-sides all his life, to live long in a prison, or indeed out of one--but we must all die. I assure you, my honest man and kind, you have done me good, in mind and body, by letting me take leave of his honour! Well I may call him so, now he is in heaven, whom I did honour when here, from my very heart of hearts; kind he was to me--a second father to my child--God bless him! Sure I am, if he were still among us, how his good heart would melt, how it would _bleed_ for us--for _her_--I _know_ it would." Here the old man sobbed and kept silence a space, then proceeded--"You see how weak old age and over-love of this world make a man, sir. Yet I am content. Next to God, I owe to him whose dear corpse I have just now been so near, a long and happy life,--thanks, thanks, thanks! To both, up yonder, I do here render them from my inmost soul;" and he bared his head again, looking up to the placid moon with a visage of kindred placidity, and an eye of blue lustre, so brightened by his emotion as almost to be likened to the heaven in which that moon shone. "Why should I repine, or fear the walls of a prison, as my passage to that wide glorious world without wall or bound or end, where I hope to live free and for ever, in the sight of my Redeemer, and, perhaps, of him who was Hugh Fitzarthur, Esq., of Tallylynn hall, when here? I hope I am not irreverent, but in truth, friend, I fear I have almost as vehemently longed for the presence of him once more, as for that more awful presence: heaven pardon me if it was wicked! So welcome prison, welcome death! Half a hundred and nineteen years spent pleasantly on these green hills, free, and fresh, and hale, I can surely afford a few weeks or months to a closer place, were it but as in a school for my poor earthly and ignorant soul, to purify itself, to prepare itself for that glorious place, to learn to die."

Next morning the old couple, dame Bevan being mounted on a pillion behind him, proceeded on their melancholy journey. They reached the house by the park, where it was proposed that an interview should take place between the old man and the landlord himself, with some view to arrangement prior to his imprisonment. While they there expect the long delayed comfort of Winifred's embrace, let us return to that good daughter, now more eager to fly to that dreaded suitor, to reverse her father's resolve, to offer herself a victim, than ever she had been to reach that dearer one who had now cruelly disappointed her in the hope of one more meeting--that, perhaps, the last she could have innocently allowed!

The dreaded day of trial arrived. But we must revert to her sad meditations, and wild irresolute thoughts, while shut up by the storm-cloud, and alone, in the mountain house. Doating passion, pain of heart, terrible suggestions of despair, kept altering her countenance as she leaned against the mouldering door-post, imprisoned by the black mists that prevented her safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire, revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she would have rejected as impious, from some immoral man, in dispute, sank deep into her soul, emanating from a heart she loved, through lips that, to her, seemed formed for eloquence as much as love to make its throne.

Wild and tragical modes of reconciling her two furious, fighting, irreconcilable wishes--that of saving her father--that of blessing her lover--began to take terrible form and reality in her mind, as the wind howled, the ruinous house shook, and its timbers groaned, and the blackness of the sky, as the storm increased, deepened the lurid hue of the foul and turbulent fog, (for such the mountain cloud thus in contact with her eyes appeared.) The world, as it were, already left behind, or rather below, the elements alone warring round her, her high-wrought imagination began to regard life and death, and the world itself, as things no longer appertaining to her, except as a passive instrument toward one great object, the preservation of her father's freedom, and, if it _were_ possible, also of her own inviolate person--that person which she had, indeed, most solemnly vowed to one alone, David the Telynwr. Not _to_ him--for her innate delicacy rendered such vows repugnant to her; but alone, by the moon or stars, by the cataract, and in the lonely lanes and woods, she had vowed herself to one alone--had dedicated her virgin beauty (in the spirit of those romances she had fatally devoured) to her "night-harper" with as true devotion as ever did white vestal, at the end of her noviciate, devote herself alive and dead to the one God. Instilled by the touching tone, the wild pathos, the swimming eye of a wayward passionate character, weak, yet bold, of whom she knew almost nothing, this devoted girl yielded up her better reason to his rash innovations in morals, his examples of suicidal heroes, and even _moralists_, among the ancients; and in the wild height, alone, among the clouds, she almost wrought up her fond agonizing soul to a terrible part--the accomplishing her father's preservation, _on her wedding-day_, through the influence she might naturally expect to obtain in such a season, and that done, make her peace with God; and, before night--black pools--rock precipices, fearful as Leucadia's--mortal plants, and even the horrid knife and halter--floated before her mind's eye without her trembling, even like terrible, yet kind, ministrants proffering escape--escape from legalised violation!--escape from _perjury_, to her, the self-doomed Iphigenia! For her morbid fancy, whispered to by her intense tenderness, conjured up that dilemma between faith broken to her lover and abandonment of a dear parent to his fate. Despair suggested that self-destruction itself might seem venial, even before God, when rushed upon as the only alternative to perjury--to prostitution; for such her romantic purity taught her to consider submission to the embrace of any living man except her heart's own--her affianced--"her beautiful!"--her lost!

Such were the feelings under whose influence our humble heroine pursued her mountain journey, of a few miles, to the place of meeting with her parents; and it was probably beneath the roof of the lone cottage in the cloud that, under the same morbid mood of mind, she penned a letter to Mr Fitzarthur, which was afterwards discovered, dated at top "My Wedding Day," containing a passionate appeal on behalf of her father, for a bond of legal indemnification to be executed before night, as a present which she had set her heart on giving her father, as a bridal one, _that very day_. Arrived at the house fitted up for the hated supplanter of her father, "Lewis the Spy," her heart beat so violently before she could firm her nerves to ring the bell, that she stood leaning some time against the wall. This old house was now almost rebuilt, and not without regard to rural beauty, in harmony with the fine scenery of an antique park, with its mossy ivied remains of walls and venerable trees overshadowing it, and was called "The Little Hall of the Park." She sighed deeply as she glanced at its comfortable aspect, remembering how long it had formed the secret object of her mother's little ambition (for the dame had a touch of pride in her composition beyond her ever-contented mate) to occupy that _little_ hall. It seemed so appropriate that the lesser squire--the _great_ squire's friend--should also have _his_ "hall," though a little one!

Indeed, it had been in incipient repair for him, that the old men might spend their winter evenings together at the real hall, divided but by a short path, across an angle of the park, without a dreary walk for Bevan impending over the end of their carouse, with never-wearied reminiscences of their boyhood--when sudden death stopped all proceedings, and left poor Bevan alone in the world, as it seemed to him--"in simplicity a child," and as imbecile in conflict with it as any child.

She nerved her mind and hand by an effort, and rang the bell--(the _bell_, there a modern innovation.) No sound but its own distant deadened one, was heard within; but some dog in the rear barked, and then howled, as if alarmed at the sudden breach of long prevailing silence. Again she rang--again the troubled growl and bark, suppressed by fear of the only living thing, as it seemed, within hearing, alone responded. The situation was very solitary, the only adjacent house, the hall, being yet tenantless, and night was gathering fast; for that storm which had first detained her in the lofty region, (where a darker storm had gathered round her mind and soul,) had desolated the lower country all day, flooded the brooks, and delayed her on the road during several hours.

She fancied a sort of suppressed commotion within, as of whisperings and stealthy steps, and one voice she clearly overheard, but it was not her father's. Whether it was that of Lewis (who, however, was not yet residing there) she knew not, never having heard it in her life; he avoiding, as was stated, direct intercourse with her--disappearing "like a guilty thing" whenever her figure appeared in distant approach. What should this mean? Wild fears, even superstitious ones, of some indefinite ill or horror impending, began to shake her forced fortitude, as she stood, half-fearing to ring again--again to hear the melancholy voice of the dog, as of one lost--to wait--listen--and dream of--David--death--murder--or even worse, till even the giant horror--the jail!--and the white-headed prisoner, shrank before the present ominous mystery--ominous of she _knew_ not what, therefore involving every thing dreadful. Meanwhile, the swinging of the large oak branches in the close of a squally day, their groaning, and the vast glooms that their foliage shed all below, the twilight rapidly deepening into confirmed night, all tended to the inspiration of a wild unearthly melancholy. Suddenly the door was opened, while she hesitated to ring again, and by a _black_ man! Persons of colour are rarely seen inland, in Wales, and Winifred had never visited a seaport of any consequence; so that even this was almost a shock. She quickly, however, guessed that this was a servant of the "Nabob," brought over with him. The man, learning her name, bade her enter, adding, that she would see her father _soon_, but that "massa" was within, settling some affairs with Mr Lewis, and begged to see her. A sort of grim grin, though joined to a deference that seemed, to her troubled and broken spirit, and sunken heart, a cruel mockery, relaxed the man's features, and half shocked, half irritated her. Her spirits, however, rose with the occasion, demanding all her fortitude and all her tact; for now she was to make that impression on this terrible suitor's fancy, through which alone she could work out her father's salvation. In a few minutes more, she stood in the same apartment with her David's detested rival! The embers of a large fire, decayed, cast red twilight, which made it appear already dark without; and there he stood, at the long room's extreme end, between her and the hearth.

To Winifred, the personal attributes of the man, whom in her awful resolve she regarded merely as the instrument of that filial good work, were utterly indifferent; yet she stopped--she shuddered--and trembled all over, as she caught the mere outline of his figure by the fire-light. There he was! to her idea, the embodied evil genius of her family! the sullen apostate from the finer part of love--the victim of satiety, (as rumour said,) the selfish contemner of women's better feelings!--indifferent to all but person in his election of a wife; willing to unite himself with one whose heart and mind were stranger to him, on bare report of her health and beauty, and some slight recollections of her childhood! Seeing her stop, and even totter, he advanced a few steps; but she, with the instinctive recoil and antipathy of some feeble creature from its natural enemy, retreated at his first movement--and, shocked by this betrayed repugnance, he again stood irresolute. Then rushed back upon her heart, with all the horror of novelty, the renunciation of poor David, now it was on the point of being sealed for ever. Now father, mother, all beside, was forgotten--the ghastliness of a terrible struggle within, the stern horror of confirmed despair, began to disguise her beauty as with a death-pale mask--the features grew rigid, her heart beat audibly, her ears rang and tingled, and sight grew dim. She was fainting, falling. Mr Fitzarthur sprang to support her, but putting his arms too boldly round her waist, that detested freedom at once startled her into temporary self-possession, back into life. She gasped, struggled against him, as if she had rather have fallen than have been supported by _him_; and turned to him that white face, white even to the lips, imploringly, where was still depicted her unconquerable aversion. Some astonishment seemed to rivet that look upon his face, but half-visible by the dusky light--astonishment no longer painful, when the Nabob, emboldened, renewed his now permitted clasp, and only uttering "My _dear_! don't you know me?" in the tenderest tone to which ever manly voice was modulated, increased his grasp to a passionate embrace, advanced his face--his mouth to hers, advanced and pressed unresisted--and before her bewildered eyes closed in that fainting fit which had been but suspended, stood revealed to them (as proved by one delighted smile, flashed out of all the settled gloom of that countenance,) as her heart's own David--no longer the night--wandering poor _Telynwr_, but David Fitzarthur of Talylynn, Esq.

The story of the eccentric East Indian may be shortly told. From childhood he was the victim of excessive morbid sensibility, and constitutional melancholy. The jovial habits of his good-natured Welsh uncle were repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for tenderness of his _occult_ nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune--the being wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living world--dog, cat, or owl, whatever chance made his companions. Returning to India, where he had known two parents, to meet no longer the tenderness of even one, the melancholy boy-exile (for Wales he ever regarded as his country) increased in morbid estrangement from mankind, as he increased in years; till his maturity nearly realized the misanthropic unsocial character for which his youth had been unjustly reproached. Though in the high road to a splendid fortune, he loathed East Indian society, far beyond all former loathing of fox-hunters and topers in Wales, whose green mountains now became (conformably to the nature, "_semper varium et mutabile_," of the melancholic) the very idols of his romantic regrets and fondest memory. In India were neither green fields nor green hearts. External nature and human nature appeared equally to languish under that enfeebling hot death in the atmosphere, which seemed to wither female beauty in the moment that it ripened. The pallidness of the European beauties, sickly as the clime, disgusted him--their venality still more. Female fortune-hunters were far more intolerable to his delicacy than the coarsest hunter of vermin--fox or hare--ever had been at his uncle's hall, whom he began to esteem, and sincerely mourned--when death had removed all of him from his memory but his kindness, his desire to amuse him, the "sulky boy," his substantial goodness and warm-heartedness. Knowing that every female in his circle was well informed of his ample fortune, still accumulating, he fancied art, deceit, coquetry in every smile and glance, (for suspicion of human hearts and motives ever besets the melancholic character;) and thus, it was natural that he should sometimes sigh over the idea of some fresh mountain beauty, not trained by parents in the art and to the task of husband-hunting. Even the soft-faced child, just growing into woman, who had held her pinafore for fruit, in the orchard, whose half-fallen apple-tree was his almost constant seat, floated across his vacant, yet restless mind. In truth, when she surprised him in his part of sexton to his owl, she had evinced rather more sympathy than she had admitted to his other self, David the wood-wanderer; and though she had indeed laughed, it was with tears in her eyes, elicited by one she detected in the shy averted orbs of his. Yet was the sweetness of the little Welsh girl left behind, for a long time, even when manhood failed to banish its idea, no more than his statue to Pygmalion, or his watery image to Narcissus. But having no female society, save those marketable forms that he distrusted and despised; yet pining, in his romantic refinement, for _pure_ passion--for reciprocal passion--panting to be loved _for himself alone_, he kept imagining her developed graces, exaggerating the conceit of some childish tenderness toward himself, his position and his nervous infirmity keeping a solitude of soul and heart ever round him, into which no female form had free and constant admission, but that aerial one, the little Winifred, of far, far off, green Wales! The promise of pure beauty, which her childhood gave, his _dream_ fulfilled; and his imagination seized and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps, to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania supervenes--that which consists in the undue mastery and eternal presence of one idea.

Childish and _fugitive_ as it _seemed_, a passion had actually commenced in his _boy's_ heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the same light, fragile, and dreamlike form. Poetry might liken it to the mere frothy foam of the infant cataract, when it gushes out of the breast of the mountain to the rising sun, which, arrested by an intense frost, ere it can fall, in the very act of evanishing, there hangs, still hangs, the mere air-bubbles congealed into crystal vesicles, defying all the force of the mounted sun to dissipate their delicate white beauty, evanescent as it _looks_. The chill and the impenetrability of heart, kept by circumstances within him, such frost might typify--that pure, fragile-seeming, yet durable passion, that snow-foam of the waterfall. True it was that this fantastic fancy had the power to draw him to his Welsh patrimony earlier than worldly ambition would have warranted. But his after conduct--his actual overtures were not so wildly romantic, as might appear from the foregoing narrative; but of this in the sequel.

And where was her father--mother? Why had the law been allowed by this eccentric lover to violate the humble sanctuary of home, at the desolate Llaneol? What was become of the wicker chair? Was the hated Lewis to be maintained in his usurpation of the chair of Bevan's _ancestral_ post of steward, (for his father had been steward to the father of the squire deceased?) Above all, was Dame Bevan to see that home of her heart's hope, the permanent home of the harsh supplanter of her husband? Passing over the affecting scene of poor Winifred's fainting, which drew round her father and mother, and others from below, proceed we to answer those queries and conclude our tale.

When perfectly restored, Winifred, leaning on the arm of her future husband, accompanied her parents down into the comfortable kitchen, where, by a huge fire, stood the veritable wicker chair, familiar to her eyes from infancy, rickety as ever, but surviving its desecration by the boys at the auction; and looking round, she saw standing the whole solid old oaken furniture, coffers, dressers, &c., even to the same bright brazen skillets, pewter dishes, and sundries--the pride of Mistress Bevan's heart, the splendour of better days. Mr Fitzarthur led the old man by the hand to his own chair, his wife to another; and then, having seated himself by their daughter, began, over the fumes of tea and coffee, (the honours of which pleasant meal, so needful after her agitation, he solicited Winifred to perform,) to narrate various matters, which we must condense into a nutshell.

To their surprise and amusement, they now learned that the hated "spy" who had prowled round their folds and fields so long, would resign to Mistress Bevan the house in which they sat, and that atonement made, vanish into thin air--_a vox et preterea nihil!_ being in reality the Proteus-like, mysterious, handsome, though sallow stranger, and no stranger, sitting among them!

We said that Mr Fitzarthur's conduct in espousing this long-unseen mistress of his fancy, was not quite so extraordinary and wild as it appeared. For coming back grown into maturity, and altered by climate in complexion and all characteristics, he found himself quite unrecognised, and conceived the idea of at once reconnoitring his dilapidated estate, and watching the conduct of his long-remembered Winifred. _Two_ disguises seemed necessary toward these two purposes, and he adopted the two we have seen, one on the "hither side Tivy," the other on the "far side Tivy," which his coracle allowed him to cross at pleasure. His close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired--that beauty as fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away.

It was during the alarm of her prolonged fainting, produced by the surprise of this discovery, and the previous agitations, (whereby, perhaps, the prudence rather than the affection of the eccentric lover was impeached,) that her mother, searching her pocket for a bottle of volatile salts, turned forth the letter lately referred to, melancholy evidence of the desperate extremity to which two powerful antagonist passions--love, and filial love--had driven a mind not unfortified by religion, but beleaguered by despair and all its powers, till resolution failed, and peril impended over an otherwise almost spotless soul.

As the old man's affections were not wholly weaned from Llaneol, ruinous as it was, his son-in-law had it restored as a temporary summer residence for the old people, as well as occasionally for himself and his beloved bride.

It hardly needs to be told, that the arrest and its executors were but parts of the delusion, the amount of real infliction being no more than a ride in a fine morning of some miles. Whether the whole, as involving some little added trouble of mind to that whose whole weight he was going so soon to remove, was too severe a penance for the steward's neglect, may be variously judged by various readers. In the halcyon days that followed, Winifred never forgot the place on the Tivy bank where she slept and dropped her book; nor did the happy husband, melancholic no more, forsake his coracle or his harp utterly, but would often serenade his lady-love (albeit his wedded love also) on some golden evening, as she sat among the cowslips and harebells, that enamelled with floral blue and gold the greensward bank of the Tivy, under the fine sycamore tree--the "trysting-place" of their romantic assignations.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Harper.

[21] _St Elian._--A saint of Wales. There is a well bearing his name; one of the many of the holy wells, or _Ffynnonan_, in Wales. A man whom Mr Pennant had affronted, threatened him with this terrible vengeance. Pins, or other little offerings, are thrown in, and the curses uttered over them.

[22] In the "History of the Gwyder Family," it is stated, that some members of a leading family in the reign of Henry VII., being denounced as "Llawrnds," murderers, (from _Llawrnd_, red or bloody hand,) and obliged to fly the country, returned at last, and lived long disguised, in the woods and caves, being dressed all in green; so that "when they were espied by the country people, all took them for the "_Tylwyth Teg_, the fair family," and straight ran away.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

No. VI.

SUPPLEMENT TO DRYDEN ON CHAUCER.

From the grand achievements of Glorious John, one experiences a queer revulsion of the currency in the veins in passing to the small doings of Messrs Betterton, Ogle, and Co., in 1737 and 1741; and again, to the still smaller of Mr Lipscomb in 1795, in the way of modernizations of Chaucer. Who was Mr Betterton, nobody, we presume, now knows; assuredly he was not Pope, though there is something silly to that effect in Joseph Warton, which is repeated by Malone. "Mr Harte assured me," saith Dr Joseph, "that he was convinced by some circumstances which Fenton had communicated to him, that Pope wrote the characters that make the introduction (the Prologue) to the Canterbury Tales, published under the name of Betterton." Betterton is bitter bad; Ogle, "_wersh_ as cauld parritch without sawte!" Lipscomb is a jewel. In a postscript to his preface he says, "I have barely time here, the tales being already almost all printed off, to apologize to the reader for having inserted my own translation of The Nun's Priest's Tale, instead of that of Dryden; but the fact is, _I did not know that Dryden's version existed_; for having undertaken to complete those of the Canterbury Tales which were wanting in Ogle's collection, and the tale in question _not being in that collection_, I proceeded to supply it, having never till very lately, strange as it may seem, _seen the volume of Dryden's Fables in which it may be found_!!"

It is diverting to hear the worthy who, in 1795, had never seen Dryden's Fables, offering to the public the first completed collection of the Canterbury Tales in a modern version, "under the reasonable confidence that the improved taste in poetry, and the extended cultivation of that, in common with all the other elegant arts, which so strongly characterizes the present day, will make the lovers of verse look up to the old bard, the father of English poetry, with a veneration proportioned to the improvements they have made in it." It grieves him to think that the language in which Chaucer wrote "has decayed from under him." That reason alone, he says, can justify the attempt of exhibiting him in a modern dress; and he tells us that so faithfully has he adhered to the great original, that they who have not given their time to the study of the old language, "must either find a true likeness of Chaucer exhibited in this version, or they will find it nowhere else." With great solemnity he says, "Thence I have imposed it on myself as a duty somewhat sacred to deviate from my original as little as possible in the sentiment, and have often in the language adopted his own expressions, the simplicity and effect of which have always forcibly struck me, _wherever the terms he uses (and that happens not unfrequently) are intelligible to modern ears_." Yes--Gulielme Lipscomb, thou wert indeed a jewel.

Happy would he have been to accompany his version of Chaucer with notes. "But though the version itself has been an agreeable and easy rural occupation, yet in a remote village, near 250 miles from London, the very books, _trifling as they may seem_, to which it would be necessary to refer _to illustrate the manners of the 14th century_, were not to be procured; and parochial and other engagements would not admit of absence sufficient to consult them where they are to be found; it is not therefore for want of deference to the opinions of those who have recommended a body of notes that they do not accompany these Tales." Yes--Gulielme, thou wert a jewel.

It is, however, but too manifest from his alleged versions, that not only did Mr Lipscomb of necessity eschew the perusal of "the books, trifling as they may seem, to which it would be necessary to refer to illustrate the manners of the 14th century," but that he continued to his dying day almost as ignorant of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as of Dryden's Fables.

In his preface he tells one very remarkable falsehood. "The Life of Chaucer, and the Introductory Discourse to the Canterbury Tales, are taken from the valuable edition of his original works published by Mr Tyrwhitt." The Introductory Discourse is so taken; but it is plain that poor, dear, fibbing Willy Lipscomb had not looked into it, for it contradicts throughout all the statements in the life of Chaucer, which is not from Tyrwhitt, but clumsily cribbed piecemeal by Willy himself from that rambling and inaccurate one by a Mr Thomas in Urry's edition. Lipscomb is lying on our table, and we had intended to quote a few specimens of him and his predecessor Ogle; but another volume that had fallen aside a year or two ago, has of itself mysteriously reappeared--and a few words of it in preference to other "haverers."

Mr Horne, the author of "The False Medium," "Orion," the "Spirit of the Age," and some other clever brochures in prose and in verse, in the laboured rather than elaborate introduction to "The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, modernized," (1841,) by Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Robert Bell, Thomas Powell, Elizabeth Barrett, and Zachariah Azed, gives us some threescore pages on Chaucer's versification; but, though they have an imposing air at first sight, on inspection they prove stark-naught. He seems to have a just enough general notion of the principle of the verse in the Canterbury Tales; but with the many ways of its working--the how, the why, and the wherefore--he is wholly unacquainted, though he dogmatizes like a doctor. He soon makes his escape from the real difficulties with which the subject is beset, and mouths away at immense length and width about what he calls "the _secret_ of Chaucer's rhythm in his heroic verse, which has been the baffling subject of so much discussion among scholars, a trifling increase in the syllables occasionally introduced for variety, and founded upon the same laws of contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c., as those followed by all modern poets; but employed in a more free and varied manner, all the words being fully written out, the vowels sounded, and not subjected to the disruption of inverted commas, as used in after times." This "secret" was patent to all the world before Mr Horne took pen in hand, and his eternal blazon of it is too much now for ears of flesh and blood. The modernized versions, however, are respectably executed--Leigh Hunt's admirably; and we hope for another volume. But Mr Horne himself must be more careful in his future modernizations. The very opening of the Prologue is not happy.

In Chaucer it runs thus:--

"Whanne that April with his shoures sote The droughte of March hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veine in swiche licour, Of whiche vertue engendered is the flour; When Zephyrus eke with his sote brethe, Enspired hath in every holt and hethe The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, And smale foules maken melodie, That slepen alle night with open eye, So priketh hem nature in hire corages; Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken strange strondes, To serve halwes couthe in sondry londes," &c.

Thus modernized by Mr Home:--

"When that sweet April showers with downward shoot The drought of March have pierc'd unto the root, And bathed every vein with liquid power, Whose virtue rare engendereth the flower; When Zephyrus also with his fragrant breath Inspired hath in every grove and heath The tender shoots of green, and the young sun Hath in the Ram one half his journey run, And small birds in the trees make melody, That sleep and dream all night with open eye; So nature stirs all energies and ages That folk are bent to go on pilgrimages," &c.

Look back to Chaucer's own lines, and you will see that Mr Horne's variations are all for the worse. How flat and tame "sweet April showers," in comparison with "April with his shoures sote." In Chaucer the month comes boldly on, in his own person--in Mr Horne he is diluted into his own showers. 'Tis ominous thus to stumble on the threshold. "Downward shoot" is very bad indeed in itself, and all unlike the natural strength of Chaucer. "Liquid power" is even worse and more unlike; and most tautological the "virtue of power." In Chaucer the virtue is in the "licour." "Rare" is poorly dropped in to fill up. Chaucer purposely uses "sote" twice--and the repetition tells. Mr Horne must needs change it into "fragrant." "In the trees" is not in Chaucer--for he knew that "smale foules" shelter in the "hethe" as well as in the "holt"--among broom and bracken, and heath and rushes. Chaucer does not _say_, as Mr Horne does, that the birds _dream_--he leaves you to think for yourself whether they do so or not, while sleeping with open eye all night. Such conjectural emendations are injurious to Chaucer. We presume Mr Horne believes he has authority for applying "so pricketh hem nature in hire corages" to the folks that "longen to go on pilgrimages"--and not to the "smale foules." Or is it intended for a happy innovation? To us it seems an unhappy blunder--taking away a fine touch of nature from Chaucer, and hardening it into horn; while "all energies and ages" is indeed a free and affected version of "corages." "For to wander thro'," is a mistranslation of "to seken;" and to "sing the holy mass," is not the meaning of to "serve halwes couthe," _i.e._ to worship saints known, &c.

Turning over a couple of leaves, we behold a modernization of the antique with a vengeance--

"His son, a young squire, with him there I _saw_, A lover and a lusty bache_lor_! (aw) (ah!) With locks crisp curl'd, as they'd been laid in press, Of twenty year of age he was, I guess."

Chaucer never once in all his writings thus rhymes off two consecutive couplets in one sentence so slovenly, as with "I saw," and "I guess." But Mr Horne is so enamoured "with the old familiar faces" of pet cockneyisms, that he must have his will of them. Of the same squire, Chaucer says--

"Of his stature he was of _even length_;"

and Mr Horne translates the words into--

"He was in stature of the common length,"

They mean "well proportioned." Of this young squire, Chaucer saith--

"So hote he loved, that by nightertale He slep no more than doth the nightingale."

We all know how the nightingale employs the night--and here it is implied that so did the lover. Mr Horne spoils all by an affected prettiness suggested by a misapplied passage in Milton.

"His amorous ditties nightly fill'd the vale; He slept no more than doth the nightingale."

Chaucer says of the Prioresse--

"Full well she sang the service divine Entuned in hire nose ful swetely."

Mr Horne must needs say--

"Entuned in her nose with _accent_ sweet."

The accent, to our ears, is lost in the pious snivel--pardon the somewhat unclerical word.

Chaucer says of her---

"Ful semely after hire meat she raught,"

which Mr Horne improves into---

"And for her meat Full seemly bent she forward on her seat."

Chaucer says--

"_And peined hire_ to contrefeten chere Of court, and been astatelich of manere, And to be holden digne of reverence."

That is, she took pains to imitate the manners of the Court, &c.; whereas Mr Horne, with inconceivable ignorance of the meaning of words that occur in Chaucer a hundred times, writes "_it gave her pain_ to counterfeit the ways of Court," thereby reversing the whole picture.

"And French she spake full fayre and fetisly,"

he translates "full properly _and neat_!" Dryden rightly calls her "the mincing Prioress;" Mr Horne wrongly says, "she was evidently one of the most high-bred and refined ladies of her time."

Chaucer says, of that "manly man," the Monk--

"Ne that a monk, when he is rekkeless, Is like to a fish that is waterless; This is to say, a monk out of his cloistre. This ilke text held he not worth an oistre."

Mr Horne here modernizeth thus--

"Or that a monk beyond his bricks and _mortar_, Is like a fish without a drop of _water_, That is to say, a monk out of his cloister."

There can be no mortar without water, but the words do not rhyme except to Cockney ears, though the blame lies at the door of the mouth. "Bricks and mortar" is an odd and somewhat vulgar version of "rekkeless;" and to say that a monk "beyond his bricks and mortar" is a monk "out of his cloister," is not in the manner of Chaucer, or of any body else.

Chaucer says slyly of the Frere, that

"He hadde ymade ful mony a mariage Of yonge women, at his owen coste;"

and Mister Horne brazen-facedly,

"Full many a marriage had he brought to bear, For women young, and _paid the cost with sport_."

O fie, Mister Horne! To hide our blushes, will no maiden for a moment lend us her fan? We cover our face with our hands.--Of this same Frere, Mr Horne, in his introduction, when exposing the faults of another translator, says that "Chaucer shows us the quaint begging rogue playing his harp among a crowd of admiring auditors, and _turning up his eyes_ with an attempted expression of religious enthusiasm;" but Chaucer does no such thing, nor was the Frere given to any such practice.

Of the Clerk of Oxenford, Chaucer says, he "loked holwe, and thereto soberly." Mr Horne needlessly adds "ill-fed." Chaucer says--

"Ful threadbare was his overest courtepy."

Mr Horne modernizes it into--

"His uppermost short cloak _was a bare thread_."

Why exaggerate so? Chaucer says--

"But all that he might of _his frendes hente_ On bokes and on lerning he it spente."

Mr Horne says--

"But every farthing that his friends e'er _lent_."

They did not _lend_, they gave outright to the poor scholar.

The Reve's Prologue opens thus in Chaucer--

"Whan folk han laughed at this nice cas Of Absalom and _hendy_ Nicholas."

Mr Horne says--

"Of Absalom and _credulous_ Nicholas!"

He manifestly mistakes the sly scholar for the credulous carpenter, whom on the tenderest point he outwitted! To those who know the nature of the story, the blunder is extreme.

What is to be thought of such rhymes as these?

"And for to drink strong wine as red as _blood_, Then would he jest, and shout as he were _mad_."

"Toward the mill, the bay nag in his _hand_, The miller sitting by the fire they _found_."

"And on she went, till she the cradle _found_, While through the dark still groping with her _hand_."

These to our ears, are not happy modernizations of Chaucer.

Here come a few more Cockneyisms.

"Alas! our warden's palfrey it is _gone_. Allen at once forgot both meal and _corn_."

"Allen stole back, and thought ere that it _dawn_, I will creep in by John that lieth for_lorn_."

"For, from the town Arviragus was _gone_, But to herself she spoke thus, all _forlorn_."

"Aurelius, thinking of his substance _gone_, Curseth the time that ever he was _born_."

"An arm-brace wore he that was rich and _broad_, And by his side a buckler and a _sword_."

"Now grant my ship, that some smooth haven _win her_; I follow Statius first, and then _Corinna_."

Alas! this worst of all is Elizabeth Barrett's! "Well of English _undefiled_!"

In Chaucer we have--

"A SERGEANT OF THE LAWE, ware and wise, That often hadde yben _at the Parvis_."

Mr Horne gives us--

"A Sergeant of the Law, wise, wary, _arch_! _Who oft had gossip'd long in the church porch._"

The word "arch" is here interpolated to give some colour to the charge of "gossiping," absurdly asserted of the learned Sergeant. The Parvis was the place of conference, where suitors met with their counsel and legal advisers; and Chaucer merely intimates thereby the extent of the Sergeant's practice. In Chaucer we have--

"In termes hadde he cas and domes alle That fro the time of _King Will._ weren falle."

Who does not see the propriety of the customary contraction, _King Will._? Mr Horne does not; and substitutes, "since King William's reign."

Of the Frankelein Chaucer says, he was

"An housholder, and that a gret was he;"

the context plainly showing the meaning to be, "hospitable on a great scale." Mr Horne ignorantly translates the words,

"A householder of great extent was he."

In Chaucer we have--

"His table dormant in his halle alway Stood ready covered all the longe day."

The meaning of that is, that any person, or party, might sit down, at any hour of the day, and help himself to something comfortable, as indeed is the case now in all country houses worth Visiting--such as Buchanan Lodge. Mr Horne stupidly exaggerates thus--

"His table with repletion heavy lay Amidst his hall throughout the feast-long day."

In the prologue to the Reve's Tale, the Reve, nettled by the miller, who had been satirical on his trade, says he will

"_somdel set his howve_ For leful is with force force off to showve."

"Howve" is cap--and in the Miller's Prologue we had been told

"How that a clerk had set the wrightes cappe;"

that is, "made a fool" of him--nay, a cuckold. Mr. Horne,

"Though my reply _should somewhat fret his nose_."

In Chaucer the Reve's tale begins with

"At Trumpington, not far from Cantebrigge, There goeth a brook, and over that a brigge."

Mr Horne saith somewhat wilfully.

"At Trumpington, near Cambridge, _if you look_, There goeth a bridge, and under that a brook."

Two Cantabs ask leave of their Warden

"To geve hem leve _but a litel stound_, To gon to mill and sen hire corn yground."

_i.e._ "to give them leave for a short time." Mr Horne translates it, "for a merry round."

In the course of the tale, the miller's wife

"Came leping inward at a renne."

_i.e._ "Came leaping into the room at a run." Mr Horne translates it--

"The miller's wife came _laughing inwardly_!"

Chaucer says--

"This miller hath so _wisly_ bibbed ale."

And Mr Horne, with incredible ignorance of the meaning of that word, says--

"The miller hath so _wisely_ bobbed of ale."

So wisely that he was "for-drunken"--and "as a horse he snorteth in his sleep."

In Chaucer the description of the miller's daughter ends with this line--

"But right faire was _hire here_, I will not lie,"

_i.e._ her hair. Mr Horne translates it "was _she here_."

But there is no end to such blunders.

In Chaucer, as in all our old poets of every degree, there occur, over and over again, such forms of natural expression as the following,--and when they do occur, let us have them; but what a feeble modernizer must he be who keeps adding to the number till he gives his readers the ear-ache. Not one of the following is in the original:--

"At Algeziras, in Granada, he,"

"At many a noble fight of ships was he."

"For certainly a prelate fair was he."

"In songs and tales the prize o'er all bore he."

"And a poor parson of a town was he."

"Such had he often proved, and loath was he."

"In youth a good trade practised well had he."

"Lordship and servitude at once hath he."

"And die he must as echo did, said he."

"Madam this is impossible, said he."

"Save wretched Aurelius none was sad but he."

"And said thus when this last request heard he."

In like manner, in Chaucer as in all our old poets of every degree, there occur over and over again such natural forms of expression as "I wot," "I wis"--and where they do occur let us have them too and be thankful; but poverty-stricken in the article of rhymes must _be he_, who is perpetually driven to resort to such expedients as the following--all of which are Mr Horne's own:--

"Of fees and robes he many had, I ween."

"And yet this manciple made them fools, I wot."

"This Reve upon stallion sat, I wot."

"Than the poor parson in two months, I wot."

"For certainly when I was born, I trow."

"A small stalk in mine eyes he sees, I deem."

"There were two scholars young and poor, I trow."

"John lieth still and not far off, I trow."

"Eastern astrologers and clerks, I wis."

"This woful heart found some reprieve, I wis."

"Unto his brother's bed he came, I wis."

"And now Aurelius ever, as I ween."

"That she could not sustain herself, I ween."

Mr Horne, in his Introduction, unconscious of his own sins, speaks with due contempt of the modernizations of Chaucer by Ogle and Lipscomb and their coadjutors, and of the injury they may have done to the reputation of the old poet. But whatever injury they may have occasioned, "there can be doubt," he says, "of the mischief done by Mr Pope's obscene specimen, _placed at the head_ of his list of 'Imitations of English Poets.' It is an imitation of those passages which we should only regard as the rank offal of a great feast in the olden time. The better taste and feeling of Pope should have imitated the noble _poetry_ of Chaucer. He avoided this 'for sundry weighty reasons.' But if this so-called imitation by Pope was 'done in his youth' he should have burnt it in his age. Its publication at the present day among his elegant works, is a disgrace to modern times, and to his high reputation." Not so fast and strong, good Mister Horne. The six-and-twenty octosyllabic lines thus magisterially denounced by our stern moralist in the middle of the nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them. They were written by Pope in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and gross as they are, are pardonable in a boy of precocious genius, giving way for a laughing hour to his sense of the grotesque. Joe Warton (not Tom) pompously calls them "a gross and _dull_ caricature of the Father of English Poetry." And Mr Bowles says, "he might have added, it is disgusting as it is dull, and no more like Chaucer than a _Billingsgate_ is like an Oberea." It is _not_ dull, but exceedingly clever; and Father Geoffrey himself would have laughed at it--patted Pope on the head--and enjoined him for the future to be more discreet. Roscoe, like a wise man, regards it without horror--remarking of it, and the boyish imitation of Spenser, that "why these sportive and characteristic sketches should be brought to so severe an ordeal, and pointed out to the reprehension of the reader as gross and disagreeable, dull and disgusting, it is not easy to perceive." Old Joe maunders when he says, "he that was unacquainted with Spenser, and was to form his ideas of the turn and manner of his genius from this piece, would undoubtedly suppose that he abounded in filthy images, and excelled in describing the lower scenes of life." Let all such blockheads suppose what they choose. Pope--says Roscoe--"was well aware as any one of the superlative beauties and merits of Spenser, whose works he assiduously studied, both in his early and riper years; but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a _serious_ imitation of him. All that he attempted was to show how exactly he could apply the language and manner of Spenser to low and burlesque subjects; and in this he has completely succeeded. To compare these lines, as Dr Warton has done, with those more extensive and highly-finished productions, the _Castle of Indolence_ by Thomson, and the _Minstrel_ by Beattie, is manifestly unjust"--and stupidly absurd. What Mr Horne means by saying that Pope "avoided imitating the noble poetry of Chaucer for sundry weighty reasons," is not apparent at first sight. It means, however, that Pope _could_ not have done so--that the feat was beyond his power. The author of the _Messiah_ and the _Eloise_ wrote tolerable poetry of his own; and he knew how to appreciate, and to emulate, too, some of the finest of Chaucer's. Why did Mr Horne not mention his _Temple of Fame_? A more childish sentence never was written than "its publication at the present day among his elegant works is a disgrace to modern times, and to his high reputation." Pope's reputation is above reproach, enshrined in honour for evermore, and modern times are not so Miss Mollyish as to sympathize with such sensitive censorship of an ingeniously versified peccadillo, at which our _avi_ and _proavi_ could not choose but smile.

But Mr Horne, thinking, that in this case "the child is father of the man," rates Pope as roundly for what he seems to suppose were the misdemeanours of his manhood. "Of the highly-finished paraphrase, by Mr Pope, of the 'Wife of Bath's Prologue,' and 'The Merchant's Tale,' suffice it to say, that the licentious humour of the original being divested of its _quaintness and obscurity_ (!) becomes yet more licentious in proportion to the fine touches of skill with which it is brought into the light. Spontaneous coarseness is made revolting by meretricious artifice. Instead of keeping in the distance that which was objectionable, by such shades in the modernizing as should have answered to the _hazy appearance_ (!) of the original, it receives a clear outline, and is brought close to us. An ancient Briton, with his long rough hair and painted body, laughing and singing half-naked under a tree, may be coarse, yet innocent of all intention to offend; but if the imagination (absorbing the anachronism) can conceive him shorn of this falling hair, his paint washed off, and in this uncovered stated introduced into a drawing-room full of ladies in rouge and diamonds, hoops and hair-powder, no one can doubt the injury thus done to the ancient Briton. This is no unfair illustration of what was done in the time of Pope," &c.

It may be "no unfair illustration," and certainly is no unludicrous one. We must all of us allow, that were an ancient Briton, habited, or rather unhabited, as above, to bounce into a modern drawing-room full of ladies, whether in rouge and diamonds, hoops and hair-powder, or not, the effect of such _entree_ would be prodigious on the fair and fluttered Volscians. Our imagination, "absorbing the anachronism," ensconces us professionally behind a sofa, to witness and to record the scene. How different in nature Christopher North and R.H. Horne! While he would be commiserating "the injury thus done to the ancient Briton," we should be imploring our savage ancestor to spare the ladies. "Innocent of all intention to offend" might be Caractacus, but to the terrified bevy he would seem the king of the Cannibal Islands at least. What protection against the assault of a savage, almost _in puris naturalibus_, could be hoped for in their hoops! Yet who knows but that, on looking round and about, he might himself be frightened out of his senses? An ancient Briton, with his long rough hair and painted body, may laugh and sing by himself, half-naked under a tree, and in his own conceit be a match for any amount of women. But shorn of his falling hair, and without a streak of paint on his cheeks, verily his heart might be found to die within him, before furies with faces fiery with rouge, and heads horrent with pomatum--till instinctively he strove to roll himself up in the Persian carpet, and there prayed for deliverance to his tutelary gods.

Our imagination having thus "absorbed the anachronism," let us now leave Caractacus in the carpet--while our reason has recourse to the philosophy of criticism. Mr Horne asserts, that in "Mr Pope's" highly-finished paraphrase of the "Wife of Bath's Prologue," and the "Merchant's Tale," "the licentious humour of the original is divested of its quaintness and obscurity, and becomes yet more licentious in proportion to the fine touches of skill with which it is brought into the light." Quaintness and _obscurity_!! Why, everything in those tales is as plain as a pike-staff, and clearer than mud. "The hazy appearance of the original" indeed! What! of the couple in the Pear-Tree? Mr Horne spitefully and perversely misrepresents the character of Pope's translations. They are remarkably free from the vice he charges them withal--and have been admitted to be so by the most captious critics. Many of the very strong things in Chaucer, which you may call coarse and gross if you will, are omitted by Pope, and many softened down; nor is there a single line in which the spirit is not the spirit of satire. The folly of senile dotage is throughout exposed as unsparingly, though with a difference in the imitation, as in the original. Even Joseph Warton and Bowles, affectedly fastidious over-much as both too often are, and culpably prompt to find fault, acknowledge that Pope's versions are blameless. "In the art of telling a story," says Bowles, "Pope is peculiarly happy; we almost forget the grossness of the subject of this tale, (the Merchant's,) while we are struck by the uncommon ease and readiness of the verse, the suitableness of the expression, and the spirit and happiness of the whole." While Dr Warton, sensibly remarking, "that the character of a fond old dotard, betrayed into disgrace by an unsuitable match, is supported in a lively manner," refrains from making himself ridiculous by mealy-mouthed moralities which on such a subject every person of sense and honesty must despise. Mr Horne keeps foolishly carping at Pope, or "Mr Pope," as he sometimes calls him, throughout his interminable--no, not interminable--his hundred-paged Introduction. He abominates Pope's Homer, and groans to think how it has corrupted the English ear by its long domination in our schools. He takes up, with leathern lungs, the howl of the Lakers, and his imitative bray is louder than the original, "in linked sweetness long drawn out." Such sonorous strictures are innocent; but his false charge of licentiousness against Pope is most reprehensible--and it is insincere. For he has the sense to see Chaucer's broadest satire in its true light, and its fearless expositions. Yet from his justification of pictures and all their colouring in the ancient poet, that might well startle people by no means timid, he turns with frowning forehead and reproving hand to corresponding delineations in the modern, that stand less in need of it, and spits his spite on Pope, which we wipe off that it may not corrode. "This translation was done at sixteen or seventeen," says Pope in a note to his January and May--and there is not, among the achievements of early genius, to be found another such specimen of finished art and of perfect mastery.

Mr. Horne has ventured to give in his volume the Reve's Tale. "It has been thought," he says, "that an idea of the extraordinary versatility of Chaucer's genius could not be adequately conveyed, unless one of his matter-of-fact comic tales were attempted. The Reve's has accordingly been selected, as presenting a graphic painting of character, equal to those contained in the 'Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,' displayed in action by means of a story, which may be designated _as a broad farce, ending in a pantomime of absurd reality_. To those who are acquainted with the original, an apology may not be considered inadmissible for certain necessary variations and omissions." For our part, we do not object to this tale, though at the commencement of such a work its insertion was ill-judged, and will endanger greatly the volume. But we do object to the hypocritical cant about the licentiousness of Pope's fine touches, from the person who wrote the above words in italics. Omissions there must have been--but they sadly shear the tale of its vigour, and indeed leave it not very intelligible to readers who know not the original. The variations are most unhappy--miserable indeed; and by putting the miller's daughter to lie in a closet at the end of a passage, this moral modernizer has killed Chaucer. In the matchless original all the night's action goes on in one room--and that not a large one--miller, miller's wife, miller's daughter, and the two strenuous Cantabs, are within the same four narrow walls--their beds nearly touch--the jeopardized cradle has just space to rock in--yet this self-elected expositor of Chaucer is either so blind as not to see how essential such allocation of the parties is to the wicked comedy, or such a blunderer as to believe that he can improve on the greatest master that ever dared, and with perfect success, to picture, without our condemnation--so wide is the privilege of genius in sportive fancy--what, but for the self-rectifying spirit of fiction, would have been an outrage on nature, and in the number not only of forbidden but unhallowed things. The passages interpolated by Mr Horne's own pen are as bad as possible--clownish and anti-Chaucerian to the last degree.

For example, he thus takes upon himself, in the teeth of Chaucer, to narrate Alein's night adventure--

"And up he rose, and crept along the floor, Into the passage humming with their snore; As narrow was it as a drum or tub, And like a beetle doth he grope and _grub_, Feeling his way, _with darkness in his hands_. Till at the passage end he stooping stands."

Chaucer tells us, without circumlocution, why the Miller's Wife for while had left her husband's side; but Mr Horne is intolerant of the indelicate, and thus elegantly paraphrases the one original word--

"The wife her routing ceased soon after that: And woke and left her bed; _for she was pained_ _With nightmare dreams of skies that madly rained._ _Eastern astrologers and clerks, I wis, In time of Apis tell of storms like this_."

Such is modern refinement!

In Chaucer, the blind encounter between the Miller and one of the Cantabs, who, mistaking him for his comrade, had whispered into his ear what had happened during the night to his daughter, is thus comically described--

"Ye false harlot, quod the miller, hast? A false traitour, false clerk, (quod he) Thou shalt be deaf by Goddes dignitee, Who dorste be so bold to disparage My daughter, that is come of swiche lineage. And by the throte-bolle he caught Alein, And he him hente despiteously again, And on the nose he smote him with his fist; Down ran the bloody streme upon his brest; And on the flore with nose and mouth to-broke, They walwe, as don two pigges in a poke. And up they gon, and down again anon, Till that the miller spurned at a stone, And down he fell backward upon his wif, That wiste nothing of this nice strif, For she was falle aslepe, a litel wight with John the clerk," and ...

Here comes Mr Horne in his strength.

"Thou slanderous ribald! quoth the miller, hast! A traitor false, false lying clerk, quoth he, Thou shalt be slain by heaven's dignity Who rudely dar'st disparage with foul lie My daughter, that is come of lineage high! And by the throat he Allan grasp'd amain, And caught him, yet more furiously again, And on his nose he smote him with his fist! Down ran the bloody stream upon his breast, And on the floor they tumble heel and crown, And shake the house, it seem'd all coming down. And up they rise, and down again they roll: Till that the Miller, stumbling o'er a coal, Went plunging headlong like a bull at bait, And met his wife, and both fell flat as slate."

Mr Horne cannot read Chaucer. The Miller does not, as he makes him do, accuse the Cantab of falsely slandering his daughter's virtue. He does not doubt the truth of the unluckily blabbed secret; false harlot, false traitor, false clerk, are all words that tell his belief; but Mr Horne, not understanding "disparage," as it is here used by Chaucer, wholly mistakes the cause of the father's fury. He does not even know, that it is the Miller who gets the bloody nose, not the Cantab. "As don two pigges in a poke," he leaves out, preferring, as more picturesque, "And on the floor they tumble _heel and crown_!" "And shake the house--it seemed all coming down," is not in Chaucer, nor could be; but the crowning stupidity is that of making the Miller meet his wife, and upset her--she being all the while in bed, and now startled out of sleep by the weight of her fallen superincumbent husband. And this is modernizing Chaucer!

What, then--after all we have written about him--we ask, can, at this day, be done with Chaucer? The true answer is--READ HIM. The late Laureate dared to think that every one might; and in his collection, or selection, of English poets, down to Habington inclusive, he has given the prologue, and half a dozen of the finest and most finished tales; believing that every earnest lover of English poetry would by degrees acquire courage and strength to devour and digest a moderately-spread banquet. Without doubt, Southey did well. It was a challenge to poetical Young England to gird up his loins and fall to his work. If you will have the fruit, said the Laureate, you must climb the tree. He bowed some heavily-laden branches down to your eye, to tempt you; but climb you must, if you will eat. He displayed a generous trust in the growing desire and capacity of the country for her own time-shrouded poetical treasures. In the same full volume, he gave the "Faerie Queene" from the first word to the last.

Let us hope boldly, as Southey hoped. But there are, in the present world, a host of excellent, sensitive readers, whose natural taste is perfectly susceptible of Chaucer, if he spoke their language; yet who have not the courage, or the leisure, or the aptitude, to master his. They must not be too hastily blamed if they do not readily reconcile themselves to a garb of thought which disturbs and distracts all their habitual associations. Consider, the 'ingenious feeling,' the vital sensibility, with which they apprehend their own English, may place the insurmountable barrier which opposes their access to the father of our poetry. What can be done for them?

In the first place, what is it that so much removes the language from us? It is removed by the words and grammatical forms that we have lost--by its real antiquity; perhaps more by an accidental semblance of antiquity--the orthography. That last may seem a small matter; but it is not.

There are three ways in which literary craftsmen have attempted to fill up, or bridge over, the gulf of time, and bring the poet of Edward III. and Richard II. near to modern readers.

Dryden and Pope are the representatives, as they are the masters, of the first method; for the others who have trodden in their footsteps are hardly to be named or thought of. Dryden and Pope hold, in their own school of modernizing, this undoubted distinction, that under their treatment, that which was poetry remains poetry. Their followers have written, for the most part, intelligible English, but never poetry. They have told the story, and not that always; but they have distilled lethargy on the tongue of the narrator.--This first method the most boldly departs from the type. It was probably the only way that the culture of Dryden's and Pope's time admitted of. We have since gradually returned, more and more, upon our own antiquity, as all the nations of Europe have upon theirs. Then civilization seemed to herself to escape forwards out of barbarism. Now she finds herself safe; and she ventures to seek light for her mature years in the recollections of her own childhood.

But now, the altered spirit of the age has produced a new manner of modernization. The problem has been put thus. To retain of Chaucer whatever in him is our language, or is most nearly our language--only making good, always, the measure; and for expression, which time has left out of our speech, to substitute such as is in use. And several followers of the muses, as we have seen, have lately tried their hand at this kind of conversion.

It is hard to judge both the system and the specimens. For if the specimens be thought to have succeeded, the system may, upon them, be favourably judged; but if the specimens have failed, the system must not upon them be unfavourably judged, but must in candour be looked upon as possibly carrying in itself means and powers that have not yet been unfolded. But unhappily a difficulty occurs which would not have occurred with a writer in prose--the law of the verse is imperious. Ten syllables must be kept, and rhyme must be kept; and in the experiment it results, generally, that whilst the rehabiting of Chaucer is undertaken under a necessity which lies wholly in the obscurity of his dialect--the proposed ground or motive of modernization--far the greater part of the actual changes are made for the sake of that which beforehand you might not think of, namely, the Verse. This it is that puts the translators to the strangest shifts and fetches, and besets the version, in spite of their best skill, with anti-Chaucerisms as thick as blackberries.

It might, at first sight, seem as if there could be no remorse about dispersing the atmosphere of antiquity; and you might be disposed to say--a thought is a thought, a feeling a feeling, a fancy a fancy. Utter the thought, the feeling, the fancy, with what words you will, provided that they are native to the matter, and the matter will hold its own worth. No. There is more in poetry than the definite, separable matter of a fancy, a feeling, a thought. There is the indefinite, inseparable spirit, out of which they all arise, which verifies them all, harmonizes them all, interprets them all. There is the spirit of the poet himself. But the spirit of the time in which a poet lives, flows through the spirit of the poet. Therefore, a poet cannot be taken out of his own time, and rightly and wholly understood. It seems to follow that thought, feeling, fancy, which he has expressed, cannot be taken out of his own speech, and his own style, and rightly and wholly understood. Let us bring this home to Chaucer, and our occasion. The air of antiquity hangs about him, cleaves to him; therefore he is the venerable Chaucer. One word, beyond any other, expresses to us the difference betwixt his age and ours--Simplicity. To read him after his own spirit, we must be made simple. That temper is called up in us by the simplicity of his speech and style. Touched by these, and under their power, we lose our false habituations, and return to nature. But for this singular power exerted over us, this dominion of an irresistible sympathy, the hint of antiquity which lies in the language seems requisite. That summons us to put off our own, and put on another mind. In a half modernization, there lies the danger that we shall hang suspended between two minds--between two ages--taken out of one, and not effectually transported into that other. Might a poet, if it were worth while, who had imbued himself with antiquity and with Chaucer, depart more freely from him, and yet more effectually reproduce him? Imitating, not erasing, the colours of the old time--untying the strict chain that binds you to the fourteenth century, but impressing on you candour, clearness, shrewdness, ingenuous susceptibility, simplicity, ANTIQUITY! A creative translator or imitator--Chaucer born again, a century and a half later.

Let us see how Wordsworth deals with Chaucer in the first seven stanzas of the Cuckoo and Nightingale.

"The god of love, a benedicite! How mighty and how gret a lord is he, For he can make of lowe hertes highe, Of highe lowe, and like for to dye, And harde hertes he can maken fre.

"And he can make, within a litel stounde, Of seke folke, hole, freshe, and sounde, Of hole folke he can maken seke, And he can binden and unbinden eke That he wol have ybounden or unbounde.

"To telle his might my wit may not suffice, For he can make of wise folke ful nice, For he may don al that he wol devise, And lither folke to destroien vice, And proude hertes he can make agrise.

"And shortly al that ever he wol he may, Ayenes him dare no wight saye nay: For he can glade and greve whom he liketh: And whoso that he wol, he lougheth or siketh, And most his might he shedeth ever in May.

"For every true gentle herte fre That with him is or thinketh for to be Ayenes May shal have now som stering, Other to joie or elles to som mourning; In no seson so moch as thinketh me.

"For whan they maye here the briddes singe, And se the floures and the leves springe, That bringeth into hire rememberaunce A maner ese, medled with grevaunce, And lusty thoughtes fulle of gret longinge.

"And of that longinge cometh hevinesse, And therof groweth oft gret sekenesse, Al for lackinge of that that they desire; And thus in May ben hertes sette on fire, So that they brennen forth in gret distresse."

WORDSWORTH.

"The God of love! Ah, benedicite, How mighty and how great a lord is he, For he of low hearts can make high, of high He can make low and unto death bring nigh, And hard hearts he can make them kind and free.

"Within a little time, as hath been found, He can make sick folk whole, and fresh, and sound. Them who are whole in body and in mind He can make sick, bind can he and unbind All that he will have bound, or have unbound.

"To tell his might my wit may not suffice, Foolish men he can make them out of wise; For he may do all that he will devise, Loose livers he can make abate their vice, And proud hearts can make tremble in a trice.

"In brief, the whole of what he will, he may; Against him dare not any wight say nay; To humble or afflict whome'er he will, To gladden or to grieve, he hath like skill; But most his might he sheds on the eve of May.

"For every true heart, gentle heart and free, That with him is, or thinketh so to be, Now against May shall have some stirring--whether To joy, or be it to some mourning; never At other time, methinks, in like degree.

"For now when they may hear the small birds' song, And see the budding leaves the branches throng, This unto their rememberance doth bring All kinds of pleasure, mix'd with sorrowing, And longing of sweet thoughts that ever long.

"And of that longing heaviness doth come, Whence oft great sickness grows of heart and home; Sick are they all for lack of their desire; And thus in May their hearts are set on fire, So that they burn forth in great martyrdom."

Here is the master of the art; and his work, most of all, therefore, makes us doubt the practicability of the thing undertaken. He works reverently, lovingly, surely with full apprehension of Chaucer; and yet, at every word where he leaves Chaucer, the spirit of Chaucer leaves the verse. You see plainly that his rule is to change the least that can possibly be changed. Yet the gentle grace, the lingering musical sweetness, the taking simplicity, of the wise old poet, vanishes--brushed away like the down from the butterfly's wing, by the lightest and most timorous touch.

"For he can make of lowe hertes highe."

There is the soul of the lover's poet, of the poet himself a lover, poured out and along in one fond verse, gratefully consecrated to the mystery of love, which he, too, has experienced when he--the shy, the fearful, the reserved--was yet by the touch of that all-powerful ray which

"Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"

enkindled, and to his own surprise made elate to hope and to dare.

But now contract, as Wordsworth does, the dedicated verse into a half verse, and bring together the two distinct and opposite mysteries under one enunciation--in short, divide the one verse to two subjects--

"For he of low hearts can make high--of high He can make low;"

and the fact vouched remains the same, the simplicity of the words is kept, for they are the very words, and yet something is gone--and in that something every thing! There is no longer the dwelling upon the words, no longer the dilated utterance of a heart that melts with its own thoughts, no longer the consecration of the verse to its matter, no longer the softness, the light, the fragrance, the charm--no longer, in a word, the old manner. Here is, in short, the philosophical observation touching love, "the saw of might" still; but the love itself here is not. A kindly and moved observer speaks, not a lover.

In one of the above-cited stanzas, Urry seems to have misled Wordsworth. Stanza iv. verse 4, Chaucer says:--

"And whoso that he wol, he lougheth or siketh."

The sense undoubtedly is, "and whosoever HE"--namely, the God of Love--"will, HE"--namely, the Lover--"laugheth or sigheth accordingly." But Urry mistaking the construction--supposed that HE, in both places, meant the god only. He had, therefore, to find out in "lougheth" and "siketh," actions predicable of the love-god. The verse accordingly runs thus with him,

"And who that he wol, he loweth or siketh."

Now, it is true, that, after all, we do not exactly know how Urry understood his own reading; for he did not make his own glossary. But from his glossary, we find that "to lowe" is to praise, to allow, to approve--furthermore that "siketh" in this place means "maketh sick." Wordsworth, following as it would appear the lection of Urry, but only half agreeing to the interpretation of Urry's glossarist, has rendered the line

"To humble or afflict whome'er he will."

He has understood in his own way, from an obvious suggestion, "loweth," to mean, maketh low, humbleth; whilst "afflict" is a ready turn for "maketh sick" of the glossary. But here Wordsworth cannot be in the right. For Chaucer is now busied with magnifying the kingdom of love by accumulated antitheses--high, low--sick, whole--wise, foolish--the wicked turns good, the proud shrink and fear--the God, at his pleasure, gladdens or grieves. The phrase under question must conform to the manner of the place where it appears. An opposition of meanings is indispensable. "Humble or afflict," which are both on one side, cannot be right. "Approveth or maketh sick," are on opposite sides, but will hardly pick one another out for antagonists. "Laugheth or sigheth," has the vividness and simplicity of Chaucer, the most exact contrariety matches them--and the two phenomena cannot be left out of a lover's enumeration.

Chaucer says of his 'bosom's lord,'

"And most his might he sheddeth ever in May"--

renowning here, as we saw that he does elsewhere, the whole month, as love's own segment of the zodiacal circle. The time of the poem itself is accordingly 'the thridde night of May.' Wordsworth has rendered,

"But most his might he sheds _on the eve of May._"

Why so? Is the approaching visitation of the power more strongly felt than the power itself in presence? Chaucer says distinctly the contrary, and why with a word lose, or obscure, or hazard the appropriation of the month entire, so conspicuous a tenet in the old poetical mind? And is Eve here taken strictly--the night before May-day, like the _Pervigilium Veneris_? Or loosely, on the verge of May, answerably to 'ayenes May' afterwards? To the former sense, we might be inclined to propose on the contrary part,

"But sheds his might most on the morrow of May,"

_i.e._ in prose on May-day morning, consonantly to all the testimonies.

Chaucer says that the coming-on of the love-month produces in the heart of the lover

"A maner ease medled with grevaunce."

That is to say, _a kind of_ joy or pleasure, (Fr. _aise_,) mixed with sadness. He insists, by this expression, upon the strangeness of the kind, peculiar to the willing sufferers under this unique passion, "love's pleasing smart." Did Wordsworth, by intention or misapprehension, leave out this turn of expression, by which, in an age less forward than ours in sentimental researches, Chaucer drew notice to the contradictory nature of the internal state which he described? As if Chaucer had said, "_al_ maner ese," Wordsworth says, "all kinds of pleasure mixed with sorrowing."

In the next line he adds to the intuitions of his master, one of his own profound intuitions, if we construe aright--

"And longing of sweet thoughts that ever long."

That ever long! The sweetest of thoughts are never satisfied with their own deliciousness. Earthly delight, or heavenly delight upon earth, penetrating the soul, stirs in it the perception of its native illimitable capacity for delight. Bliss, which should wholly possess the blest being, plays traitor to itself, turns into a sort of divine dissatisfaction, and brings forth from its teeming and infinite bosom a brood of winged wishes, bright with hues which memory has bestowed, and restless with innate aspirations. Such is our commentary on the truly Wordsworthian line, but it is not a line answerable to Chaucer's--

"And lusty thoughtes full of gret longinge."

Is this hypercriticism? It is the only criticism that can be tolerated betwixt two such rivals as Chaucer and Wordsworth. The scales that weigh poetry should turn with a grain of dust, with the weight of a sunbeam, for they weigh spirit. Or is it saying that Wordsworth has not done his work as well as it was possible to be done? Rather it is inferring, from the failure of the work in his hand, that he and his colleagues have attempted that which was impossible to be done. We will not here hunt down line by line. We put before the reader the means of comparing verse with verse. We have, with 'a thoughtful heart of love,' made the comparison, and feel throughout that the modern will not, cannot, do justice to the old English. The quick sensibility which thrills through the antique strain deserts the most cautious version of it. In short, we fall back upon the old conviction, that verse is a sacred, and song an inspired thing; that the feeling, the thought, the word, and the musical breath spring together out of the soul in one creation; that a translation is a thing not given in _rerum natura_; consequently that there is nothing else to be done with a great poet saving to leave him in his glory.

And our friend John Dryden? Oh, he is safe enough; for the new translators all agree that his are no translations at all of Chaucer, but original and excellent poems of his own.

A language that is half Chaucer's, and half that of his renderer, is in great danger to be the language of nobody. But Chaucer's has its own energy and vivacity which attaches you, and as soon as you have undergone the due transformation by sympathy, carries you effectually with it. In the moderate versions that are best done, you miss this indispensable force of attraction. But Dryden boldly and freely gives you himself, and along you sweep, or are swept rejoicingly along. "The grand charge to which his translations are amenable," says Mr Horne, "is, that he acted upon an erroneous principle." Be it so. Nevertheless, they are among the glories of our poetical literature. Mr Horne's, literal as he supposes them to be, are unreadable. He, too, acts on an erroneous principle; and his execution betrays throughout the unskilful hand of a presumptuous apprentice. But he has "every respect for the genius, and for every thing that belongs to the memory, of Dryden;" and thus magniloquently eulogizes his most splendid achievement:--"The fact is, Dryden's version of the 'Knight's Tale' would be most appropriately read by the towering shade of one of Virgil's heroes, walking up and down a battlement, and waving a long, gleaming spear, to the roll and sweep of his sonorous numbers."

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_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work._