Chapter 17

First printed in the _Minstrelsy_. This time the 'history' is authentic enough. It happened early in 1596, when Salkeld, the Deputy Warden of the Western Marches, seized under truce the person of William Armstrong of Kinmont--elsewhere described as 'Will Kinmonde the common thieffe'--and haled him to Carlisle Castle, whence he was rescued--'with shouting and crying and sound of trumpet'--by the Laird of Buccleuch, Keeper of Liddesdale, and a troop of two hundred horse. 'The Queen of England,' says Spottiswoode, 'having notice sent her of what was done, stormed not a little'; but see the excellent summary compiled by Scott (who confesses to having touched up the ballad) for the _Minstrelsy_.

Haribee = _the gallows hill at Carlisle_ reiver = _a border thief_, one of a class which lived sparely, fought stoutly, entertained the strictest sense of honour and justice, went ever on horseback, and carried the art of cattle-lifting to the highest possible point of perfection (_National Observer, 30th May, 1891_) yett = _gate_ lawing = _reckoning_ basnet = _helmet_ curch = _coif or cap_ lightly = _to scorn_ in a lowe = _on fire_ slocken = _to slake_ splent = _shoulder-piece_ spauld = _shoulder_ broken men = _outlaws_ marshal men = _officers of law_ rank reiver = _common thief_ herry = _harry_ corbie = _crow_ lear = _learning_ row-footed = _rough-shod_ spait = _flood_ garred = _made_ slogan = _battle-cry_ stear = _stir_ saft = _light_ fleyed = _frightened_ bairns = _children_ spier = _ask_ hente = _lifted_, _haled_ maill = _rent_ furs = _furrows_ trew = _trust_ Christentie = _Christendom_

XXX

Communicated by Mr. Hunt,--who dates it about 1626--from Seyer's _Memoirs, Historical and Topographical, of Bristol and its Neighbourhood_ (1821-23). The full title is _The Honour of Bristol: shewing how the Angel Gabriel of Bristol fought with three ships, who boarded as many times, wherein we cleared our decks and killed five hundred of their men, and wounded many more, and made them fly into Cales, when we lost but three men, to the Honour of the Angel Gabriel of Bristol_. To the tune _Our Noble King in his Progress_. Cales (13), pronounced as a dissyllable, is of course Cadiz. It is fair to add that this spirited and amusing piece of doggerel has been severely edited.

XXXI

From the _Minstrelsy_, where it is 'given, without alteration or improvement, from the most accurate copy that could be recovered.' The story runs that Helen Irving (or Helen Bell), of Kirkconnell in Dumfriesshire, was beloved by Adam Fleming, and (as some say) Bell of Blacket House; that she favoured the first but her people encouraged the second; that she was thus constrained to tryst with Fleming by night in the churchyard, 'a romantic spot, almost surrounded by the river Kirtle'; that they were here surprised by the rejected suitor, who fired at his rival from the far bank of the stream; that Helen, seeking to shield her lover, was shot in his stead; and that Fleming, either there and then, or afterwards in Spain, avenged her death on the body of her slayer. Wordsworth has told the story in a copy of verses which shows, like so much more of his work, how dreary a poetaster he could be.

XXXII

This epic-in-little, as tremendous an invention as exists in verse, is from the _Minstrelsy_: 'as written down from tradition by a lady' (C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe).

corbies = _crows_ fail-dyke = _wall of turf_ hause-bane = _breast-bone_ theek = _thatch_

XXXIII

Begun in 1755, and finished and printed (with _The Progress of Poetry_) in 1757. 'Founded,' says the poet, 'on a tradition current in Wales, that Edward the First, when he concluded the conquest of that country, ordered all the bards that fell into his hands to be put to death.' The 'agonising king' (line 56) is Edward II.; the 'she-wolf of France' (57), Isabel his queen; the 'scourge of heaven' (60), Edward III.; the 'sable warrior' (67), Edward the Black Prince. Lines 75-82 commemorate the rise and fall of Richard II.; lines 83-90, the Wars of the Roses, the murders in the Tower, the 'faith' of Margaret of Anjou, the 'fame' of Henry V., the 'holy head' of Henry VI. The 'bristled boar' (93) is symbolical of Richard III.; 'half of thy heart' (99) of Eleanor of Castile, 'who died a few years after the conquest of Wales.' Line 110 celebrates the accession of the House of Tudor in fulfilment of the prophecies of Merlin and Taliessin; lines 115-20, Queen Elizabeth; lines 128-30, Shakespeare; lines 131-32, Milton; and the 'distant warblings' of line 133, 'the succession of poets after Milton's time' (Gray).

XXXIV, XXXV

Written, the one in September 1782 (in the August of which year the _Royal George_ (108 guns) was overset in Portsmouth Harbour with the loss of close on a thousand souls), and the other 'after reading Hume's _History_ in 1780' (Benham).

XXXVI

It is worth recalling that at one time Walter Scott attributed this gallant lyric, which he printed in the _Minstrelsy_, to a 'greater Graham'--the Marquis of Montrose.

XXXVII, XXXVIII

Of these, the first, _Blow High, Blow Low_, was sung in _The Seraglio_ (1776), a forgotten opera; the second, said to have been inspired by the death of the author's brother, a naval officer, in _The Oddities_ (1778)--a 'table-entertainment,' where Dibdin was author, actor, singer, musician, accompanist, everything but audience and candle-snuffer. They are among the first in time of his sea-ditties.

XXXIX

It is told (_Life_, W. H. Curran, 1819) that Curran met a deserter, drank a bottle, and talked of his chances, with him, and put his ideas and sentiments into this song.

XL

The _Arethusa_, Mr. Hannay tells me, being attached to Keppel's fleet at the mouth of the Channel, was sent to order the _Belle Poule_, which was cruising with some smaller craft in search of Keppel's ships, to come under his stern. The _Belle Poule_ (commanded by M. Chadeau de la Clocheterie) refusing, the _Arethusa_ (Captain Marshall) opened fire. The ships were fairly matched, and in the action which ensued the _Arethusa_ appears to have got the worst of it. In the end, after about an hour's fighting, Keppel's liners came up, and the _Belle Poule_ made off. She was afterwards driven ashore by a superior English force, and it is an odd coincidence that in 1789 the _Arethusa_ ran ashore off Brest during her action (10th March) with _l'Aigrette_. As for the French captain, he lived to command _l'Hercule_, De Grasse's leading ship in the great sea-fight (12th April 1782) with Rodney off Dominica, where he was killed.

XLI

From the _Songs of Experience_ (1794).

XLII

_Scots Musical Museum_, 1788. Adapted from, or rather suggested by, the _Farewell_, which Macpherson, a cateran 'of great personal strength and musical accomplishment,' is said to have played and sung at the gallows foot; thereafter breaking his violin across his knee and submitting his neck to the hangman.

spring = _a melody in quick time_ sturt = _molestation_

XLIII

_Museum_, 1796. Burns told Thomson and Mrs. Dunlop that this noble and most moving song was old; but nobody believed him then, and nobody believes him now.

pint-stoup = _pint-mug_ braes = _hill-sides_ gowans = _daisies_ paidl't = _paddled_ burn = _brook_ fiere = _friend_, _companion_ guid-willie = _well-meant_, _full of good-will_ waught = _draught_

XLIV

The first four lines are old. The rest were written apparently in 1788, when the poet sent this song and _Auld Lang Syne_ to Mrs. Dunlop. It appeared in the _Museum_, 1790.

tassie = _a cup_; _Fr._ 'tasse'

XLV

About 1777-80: printed 1801. 'One of my juvenile works,' says Burns. 'I do not think it very remarkable, either for its merits or demerits.' But Hazlitt thought the world of it, and now it passes for one of Burns's masterpieces.

trysted = _appointed_ stoure = _dust and din_

XLVI

_Museum_, 1796. Attributed, in one shape or another, to a certain Captain Ogilvie. Sharpe, too, printed a broadside in which the third stanza (used more than once by Sir Walter) is found as here. But Scott Douglas (_Burns_, iii. 173) has 'no doubt that this broadside was printed after 1796,' and as it stands the thing is assuredly the work of Burns. The refrain and the metrical structure have been used by Scott (_Rokeby_, IV. 28), Carlyle, Charles Kingsley (_Dolcino to Margaret_), and Mr. Swinburne (_A Reiver's Neck Verse_) among others.

XLVII-LII

Of the first four numbers, the high-water mark of Wordsworth's achievement, all four were written in 1802; the second and third were published in 1803; the first and fourth in 1807. The _Ode to Duty_ was written in 1805, and published in 1807, to which year belongs that _Song for the Feast of Brougham Castle_, from which I have extracted the excellent verses here called _Two Victories_.

LIII-LXII

The first three numbers are from _Marmion_ (1808): I. Introduction; V. 12; and VI. 18-20, 25-27, and 33-34. The next is from _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810), I. 1-9: _The Outlaw_ is from _Rokeby_ (1813), III. 16; the _Pibroch_ was published in 1816; _The Omnipotent_ and _The Red Harlaw_ are from _The Antiquary_ (1816), and the _Farewell_ from _The Pirate_ (1821). As for _Bonny Dundee_, that incomparable ditty, it was written as late as 1825. 'The air of Bonny Dundee running in my head to-day,' he writes under date of 22d December (_Diary_, 1890, i. 61), 'I wrote a few verses to it before dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688-9. _I wonder if they are good._' See _The Doom of Devorgoil_ (1830), Note A, Act II. sc. 2.

LXIII

This unsurpassed piece of art, in which a music the most exquisite is used to body forth a set of suggestions that seem dictated by the very Spirit of Romance, was produced, under the influence of 'an anodyne,' as early as 1797. Coleridge, who calls it _Kubla Khan: A Vision within a Dream_, avers that, having fallen asleep in his chair over a sentence from Purchas's Pilgrimage--'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereto; and thus ten miles of ground were enclosed with a wall,'--he remained unconscious for about three hours, 'during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than three hundred lines'; 'if that,' he adds, 'can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.' On awakening, he proceeded to write out his 'composition,' and had set down as much of it as is printed here, when 'he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock,' whose departure, an hour after, left him wellnigh oblivious of the rest. This confession, which is dated 1816, has been generally accepted as true; but Coleridge had a trick of dreaming dreams about himself which makes doubt permissible.

LXIV

From the _Hellenics_ (written in Latin, 1814-20, and translated into English at the instance of Lady Blessington), 1846. See Colvin, _Landor_ ('English Men of Letters'), pp. 189, 190.

LXV-LXVII

Of the first, 'Napoleon and the British Sailor' (_The Pilgrim of Glencoe_, 1842), Campbell writes that the 'anecdote has been published in several public journals, both French and English.' 'My belief,' he continues, 'in its authenticity was confirmed by an Englishman, long resident in Boulogne, lately telling me that he remembered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the place.' Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to _Hohenlinden_, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (_Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809) is truly one of 'the glories of our birth and state.' The third (_idem_) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it seem, at least gets rid of the chief who gave a country's wounds relief by stopping a battle, eliminates the mermaid and her song (the song that 'condoles'), and ends the lyric on as sonorous and romantic a word as even Shakespeare ever used.

LXVIII

_Corn Law Rhymes_, 1831.

LXIX

From that famous and successful forgery, Cromek's _Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song_ (1810), written when Allan was a working mason in Dumfriesshire. I have omitted a stanza as inferior to the rest.

LXXI

_English Songs and other Small Poems_, 1834.

LXXII-LXXVIII

The first is from the _Hebrew Melodies_ (1815); the next is selected from _The Siege of Corinth_ (1816), 22-33; _Alhama_ (_idem_) is a spirited yet faithful rendering of the _Romance muy Doloroso del Sitio y Toma de Alhama_, which existed both in Spanish and in Arabic, and whose effect was such that 'it was forbidden to be sung by the Moors on the pain of death in Granada' (Byron); No. LXXV., surely one of the bravest songs in the language, was addressed (_idem_) to Thomas Moore; the tremendous _Race with Death_ is lifted out of the _Ode in Venice_ (1819); for the next number see _Don Juan_, III. (1821); the last of all, 'Stanzas inscribed _On this day I completed my Thirty-sixth year_' (1824), is the last verse that Byron wrote.

LXXIX

Napier has described the terrific effect of Napoleon's pursuit; but in the operations before Corunna he was distanced, if not out-generalled, by Sir John Moore, and ere the first days of 1809 he gave his command to Soult, who pressed us vainly through the hill-country between Leon and Gallicia, and got beaten at Corunna for his pains. Wolfe, who was an Irish parson and died of consumption, wrote some spirited verses on the flight of Busaco, but this admirable elegy--'I will show you,' said Byron to Shelley (Medwin, ii. 154) 'one you have never seen, that I consider little if at all inferior to the best, the present prolific age has brought forth'--remains his passport to immortality. It was printed, not by the author, in an Irish newspaper; was copied all over Britain; was claimed by liar after liar in succession; and has been reprinted more often, perhaps, than any poem of the century.

LXXX

From _Snarleyow, or the Dog Fiend_ (1837). Compare Nelson to Collingwood: '_Victory_, 25th June, 1805,--May God bless you and send you alongside the _Santissima Trinidad_.'

LXXXI, LXXXII

The story of Casabianca is, I believe, untrue; but the intention of the singer, alike in this number and in the next, is excellent. Each indeed is, in its way, a classic. The _Mayflower_ sailed from Southampton in 1626.

LXXXIII

This magnificent sonnet, _On First Reading Chapman's Homer_, was printed in 1817. The 'Cortez' of the eleventh verse is a mistake; the discoverer of the Pacific being NuÒez de Balboa.

LXXXIV-LXXXVII

The _Lays_ are dated 1824; they have passed through edition after edition; and if Matthew Arnold disliked and contemned them (see Sir F. H. Doyle, _Reminiscences and Opinions_, pp. 178-87), the general is wise enough to know them by heart. But a book that is 'a catechism to fight' (in Jonson's phrase) would have sinned against itself had it taken no account of them, and I have given _Horatius_ in its integrity: if only, as Landor puts it,

To show the British youth, who ne'er Will lag behind, what Romans were, When all the Tuscans and their Lars Shouted, and shook the towers of Mars.

As for _The Armada_, I have preferred it to _The Battle of Naseby_, first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both; and, second, because it is so brilliant an outcome of that capacity for dealing with proper names which Macaulay, whether poet or not, possesses in common with none but certain among the greater poets. For _The Last Buccaneer_ (a curious anticipation of some effects of Mr. Rudyard Kipling), and that noble thing, the _Jacobite's Epitaph_, they are dated 1839 and 1845 respectively.

LXXXVIII

_The Poetical Works of Robert Stephen Hawker_ (Kegan Paul, 1879). By permission of Mrs. R. S. Hawker. 'With the exception of the choral lines--

And shall Trelawney die? There's twenty thousand Cornishmen Will know the reason why!--

and which have been, ever since the imprisonment by James II. of the Seven Bishops--one of them Sir Jonathan Trelawney--a popular proverb throughout Cornwall, the whole of this song was composed by me in the year 1825. I wrote it under a stag-horned oak in Sir Beville's Walk in Stowe Wood. It was sent by me anonymously to a Plymouth paper, and there it attracted the notice of Mr. Davies Gilbert, who reprinted it at his private press at Eastbourne under the avowed impression that it was the original ballad. It had the good fortune to win the eulogy of Sir Walter Scott, who also deemed it to be the ancient song. It was praised under the same persuasion by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Dickens.'--_Author's Note._

LXXXIX-XCII

From _The Sea Side and the Fire Side_, 1851; _Birds of Passage_, _Flight the First_, and _Flight the Second_; and _Flower de Luce_, 1866. Of these four examples of the picturesque and taking art of Longfellow, I need say no more than that all are printed in their integrity, with the exception of the first. This I leave the lighter by a moral and an application, both of which, superfluous or not, are remote from the general purpose of this book: a confession in which I may include the following number, Mr. Whittier's _Barbara Frietchie_ (_In War-Time_, 1863.)

XCIV

_Nineteenth Century_, March 1878; _Ballads and other Poems_, 1880. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, to whom I am indebted for some of my choicest numbers. For the story of Sir Richard Grenville's heroic death, 'in the last of August,' 1591--after the Revenge had endured the onset of 'fifteen several armadas,' and received some 'eight hundred shot of great artillerie,'--see Hakluyt (1598-1600), ii. 169-176, where you will find it told with singular animation and directness by Sir Walter Raleigh, who held a brief against the Spaniards in Sir Richard's case as always. To Sir Richard's proposal to blow up the ship the master gunner 'readily condescended,' as did 'divers others'; but the captain was of 'another opinion,' and in the end Sir Richard was taken aboard the ship of the Spanish admiral, Don Alfonso de Bazan, who used him well and honourably until he died: leaving to his friends the 'comfort that being dead he hath not outlived his own honour,' and that he had nobly shown how false and vain, and therefore how contrary to God's will, the 'ambitious and bloudie practices of the Spaniards' were.

XCV

_Tiresias and Other Poems_, 1885. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Included at Lord Tennyson's own suggestion. For the noble feat of arms (25th October 1854) thus nobly commemorated, see Kinglake (v. i. 102-66). 'The three hundred of the Heavy Brigade who made this famous charge were the Scots Greys and the second squadron of Enniskillings, the remainder of the "Heavy Brigade" subsequently dashing up to their support. The "three" were Scarlett's aide-de-camp, Elliot, and the trumpeter, and Shegog the orderly, who had been close behind him.'--_Author's Note._

XCVI, XCVII

_The Return of the Guards, and other Poems_, 1866. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. As to the first, which deals with an incident of the war with China, and is presumably referred to in 1860, 'Some Seiks and a private of the Buffs (or East Kent Regiment) having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning they were brought before the authorities and commanded to perform the _Ko tou_. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head and his body thrown upon a dunghill.'--Quoted by the author from _The Times_. The Elgin of line 6 is Henry Bruce, eighth Lord Elgin (1811-1863), then Ambassador to China, and afterwards Governor-General of India. Compare _Theology in Extremis_ (_post_, p. 309). Of the second, which Mr. Saintsbury describes 'as one of the most lofty, insolent, and passionate things concerning this matter that our time has produced,' Sir Francis notes that the incident--no doubt a part of the conquest of Sindh--was told him by Sir Charles Napier, and that 'Truckee' (line 12) = 'a stronghold in the Desert, supposed to be unassailable and impregnable.'

XCVIII, XCIX

By permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co. _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845; _Cornhill Magazine_, June 1871, and _Pacchiarotto_, 1876, Works, iv. and xiv. I can find nothing about HervÈ Riel.

C-CIII

The two first are from the 'Song of Myself,' _Leaves of Grass_ (1855); the others from _Drum Taps_ (1865). See _Leaves of Grass_ (Philadelphia, 1884), pp. 60, 62-63, 222, and 246.

CIV, CV

By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Dated severally 1857 and 1859.

CVI

_Edinburgh Courant_, 1852. Compare _The Loss of the 'Birkenhead'_ in _The Return of the Guards, and other Poems_ (Macmillan, 1883), pp. 256-58. Of the troopship _Birkenhead_ I note that she sailed from Queenstown on the 7th January 1852, with close on seven hundred souls on board; that the most of these were soldiers--of the Twelfth Lancers, the Sixtieth Rifles, the Second, Sixth, Forty-third, Forty-fifth, Seventy-third, Seventy-fourth, and Ninety-first Regiments; that she struck on a rock (26th February 1852) off Simon's Bay, South Africa; that the boats would hold no more than a hundred and thirty-eight, and that, the women and children being safe, the men that were left--four hundred and fifty-four, all told--were formed on deck by their officers, and went down with the ship, true to colours and discipline till the end.

CVII-CIX

By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. From _Empedocles on Etna_ (1853). As regards the second number, it may be noted that Sohrab, being in quest of his father Rustum, to whom he is unknown, offers battle as one of the host of the Tartar King Afrasiab, to any champion of the Persian Kai Khosroo. The challenge is accepted by Rustum, who fights as a nameless knight (like Wilfrid of Ivanhoe at the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Ashby), and so becomes the unwitting slayer of his son. For the story of the pair the poet refers his readers to Sir John Malcom's _History of Persia_. See _Poems_, by Matthew Arnold (Macmillan), i. 268, 269.

CX, CXI

_Ionica_ (Allen, 1891). By permission of the Author. _School Fencibles_ (1861) was 'printed, not published, in 1877.' _The Ballad for a Boy_, Mr. Cory writes, 'was never printed till this year.'

CXII

By permission of the Author. This ballad, which was suggested, Mr. Meredith tells me, by the story of Bendigeid Vran, the son of Llyr, in the _Mabinogion_ (iii. 121-9), is reprinted from _Modern Love_ (1862), but it originally appeared (_circ._ 1860) in _Once a Week_, a forgotten print the source of not a little unforgotten stuff--as _Evan Harrington_ and the first part of _The Cloister and the Hearth_.

CXIII

From the fourth and last book of _Sigurd the Volsung_, 1877. By permission of the Author. Hogni and Gunnar, being the guests of King Atli, husband to their sister Gudrun, refused to tell him the whereabouts of the treasure of Fafnir, whom Sigurd slew; and this is the manner of their taking and the beginning of King Atli's vengeance.

CXIV

_English Illustrated Magazine_, January 1890, and _Lyrical Poems_ (Macmillan, 1891). By permission of the Author: with whose sanction I have omitted four lines from the last stanza.

CXV