Part 6

When the library of the Baron de Lacarelle came to be dispersed at his death a few years ago, the auctioneer’s catalogue, as issued by Charles Porquet, of the Quai Voltaire, made a volume which, wherever it goes, imparts dignity to human endeavour, and consecrates a virtuoso’s whim. It was but a small library--only 540 books--and to call it well selected would be to abuse a term one has learnt to connect with Major Ponto’s library in ‘The Book of Snobs.’ ‘My library’s small,’ says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, ‘but well selected, my boy, well selected. I have been reading the History of England all the morning.’ He could not have done this in the Baron’s library.

As you turn the pages of this glorified catalogue, his treasures seem to lie before you--you can almost stroke them. A devoted friend, _de la Société des Bibliophiles français_, contributes an ecstatic sketch of the Baron’s character, and tells us of him how he employed in his hunt after a book infinite artifice, and called to his aid all the resources of learned strategy--‘poussant ses approches et manœuvrant, autour de la place, avec la prudence et le génie d’un tacticien consommé, si bien que le malheureux libraire, enlacé, fasciné, hypnotisé par ce grand charmeur, finissait presque toujours par capituler et se rendre.’ This great man only believed in one modern binder: Trautz. The others did not exist for him. ‘Cherchez-vous à le convertir? Il restait incorruptible et répétait invariablement, avec cet esprit charmant, mais un peu railleur, dont il avait le privilège, que s’il était jamais damné, son enfer serait de remuer une reliure de Capé ou de Lortic!’

It is all very splendid and costly and grand, yet still from time to time,

‘From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne,’

there comes the thought of Charles Lamb amidst ‘the ragged veterans’ he loved so well, and then in an instant a reaction sets in, and we almost hate this sumptuous Baron.

Thomson’s “Seasons,” again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old “circulating library” “Tom Jones” or the “Vicar of Wakefield”!’ Thus far, Elia.

Let us admit that the highest and noblest joys are those which are in widest commonalty spread, and that accordingly the clay pipe of the artisan is more truly emotional than the most marvellous meerschaum to be seen in the shop-windows of Vienna--still, the collector has his joys and his uses, his triumphant moments, his hours of depression, and, if only he publishes a catalogue, may be pronounced in small type a benefactor of the human race.

POETS LAUREATE.

About forty years ago two ingenious gentlemen, Mr. Austin, of Exeter College, and Mr. Ralph, a member of the Bar, published a book containing short sketches of the lives of Poets Laureate of this realm, beginning with Ben Jonson and ending with Wordsworth, and also an essay on the Title and Office. It has sometimes been rudely said that Laureates came into fashion when fools and jesters went out, but the perusal of Messrs. Austin and Ralph’s introductory essay, to say nothing of the most cursory examination of the table of contents of their volume, is enough to disprove the truth of this saying.

A Laureate was originally a purely University title, bestowed upon those Masters of Arts who had exhibited skill in the manufacture of Latin verses, and had nothing to do with the civil authority or royal favour. Thus, the famous Skelton (1460-1529) was laureated at Oxford, and afterwards obtained permission to wear his laurel at Cambridge; but though tutor to King Henry VIII., and, according to Miss Strickland, the original corrupter of that monarch, he was never a Poet Laureate in the modern sense of the word; that is, he was never appointed to hold the place and quality of Poet Laureate to his Majesty. I regret this, for he was a man of original genius. Campbell, writing in 1819, admits his ‘vehemence and vivacity,’ but pronounces his humour ‘vulgar and flippant,’ and his style a texture of slang phrases; but Mr. Churton Collins, in 1880, declares that Skelton reminds him more of Rabelais than any author in our language, and pronounces him one of the most versatile and essentially original of all our poets. We hold with Mr. Collins.

Skelton was popularly known as a Poet Laureate, and in the earliest edition of his poems, which bears no date, but is about 1520, he is described on the title-page as ‘Mayster Skelton, Poet Laureate,’ as he also is in the first collected edition of 1568, ‘Pithy pleasaunt and profitable works of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate.’ This title was the University title, and not a royal one.

Spenser is sometimes reckoned amongst the Poets Laureate; but, as a matter of fact, he had no right to the title at all, nor did he or his publishers ever assume it. He is, of course, one of the poetical glories of Cambridge, but he was never laureated there, nor did Queen Elizabeth ever appoint him her poet, though she granted him £50 a year.

The first Laureate, in the modern sense of the word, is undoubtedly Ben Jonson, to whom Charles I. made out a patent conferring upon this famous man £100 a year and ‘a terse of Canary Spanish wine,’ which latter benefit the miserable Pye commuted for £27. From Jonson to Tennyson there is no breach of continuity, for Sir William Davenant, who was appointed in 1638, survived till the Restoration, dying in 1668. The list is a curious one, and is just worth printing: Jonson, Davenant, Dryden, Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Rowe, the Rev. Laurence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, the Rev. Thomas Warton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson.

One must be charitable in these matters. Here are fourteen names and four great ones--Jonson, Dryden, Wordsworth and Tennyson; two distinguished ones--Nicholas Rowe and Robert Southey; two clever names--Shadwell and Colley Cibber; two respectable names--Tate and Warton; one interesting name--Davenant; and three unutterable names--Eusden, Whitehead and Pye. After all, it is not so very bad. The office was offered to Gray, and he refused it. Pope, as a Roman Catholic, was out of the question. It would have suited Thomson well enough, and have tickled Goldsmith’s fancy mightily. Collins died too young.

But Eusden, Whitehead and Pye, how did they manage it? and what in the name of wonder did they write? Eusden was of Irish extraction, but was born the son of an English clergyman, and was like most poets a Cambridge man. He owed his appointment in 1718 to the Duke of Newcastle of the period, whose favour he had won by a poem addressed to him on the occasion of his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin. But he had also qualified for the office by verses sacred to the memory of George I., and in praise of George II.

‘Hail, mighty monarch! whom desert alone Would, without birthright, raise up to the throne, Thy virtues shine peculiarly nice, Ungloomed with a confinity to vice.’

To do Grub Street justice, it was very angry with this appointment, and Hesiod Cooke wrote a poem called ‘The Battle of the Poets,’ in which the new Laureate was severely but truthfully handled in verse not conspicuously better than his own:

‘Eusden, a laurelled bard by fortune rais’d, By very few been read--by fewer prais’d.’

Eusden is the author of ‘Verses Spoken at the Public Commencement in Cambridge,’ published in quarto, which are said to be indecent. Our authors refer to them as follows:

‘Those prurient lines which we dare not quote, but which the curious may see in the library of the British Museum, were specially composed and repeated for the edification and amusement of some of the noblest and fairest of our great-great-grandmothers.’ Eusden took to drinking and translating Tasso, and died at his living, for he was a parson, of Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

Of William Whitehead you may read in Campbell’s ‘Specimens of the British Poets.’ He was the son of a baker, was school-tutor to Lord Lymington, and having been treated at Oxford in the shabby way that seat of learning has ever treated poets--from Shirley to Calverley--proceeded to Cambridge, that true nest of singing-birds, where he obtained a Fellowship and the post of domestic tutor to the eldest son of the Earl of Jersey. He was always fond of the theatre, and his first effort was a little farce which was never published, but which tempted him to compose heavy tragedies which were. Of these tragedies it would be absurd to speak; they never enjoyed any popularity, either on the stage or in the closet. He owed his appointment--which he did not obtain till Gray had refused it--entirely to his noble friends.

Campbell had the courage to reprint a longish poem of Whitehead’s called ‘Variety: a Tale for Married People.’ It really is not very, very, bad, but it will never be reprinted again; and so I refer ‘the curious’ to Mr. Campbell’s seventh volume.

As for Pye, he was a scholar and a gentleman, a barrister, a member of Parliament, and a police magistrate. On his father’s death he inherited a large estate, which he actually sold to pay his parent’s debts, though he was under no obligation to do so, as in those days a man’s real estate was not liable to pay the debts he might chance to leave undischarged at his death. To pay a dead man’s debts out of his land was to rob his heir. Pye was not famous as a Parliamentary orator, but he was not altogether silent, like Gibbon; for we read that in 1788 he told the House that his constituents had suffered from a scanty hay-harvest. He was appointed Laureate in 1790, and he died in 1813. He was always made fun of as a poet, and, unfortunately for him, there was another poet in the House at the same time, called Charles Small Pybus; hence the jest, ‘Pye et Parvus Pybus,’ which was in everyone’s mouth. He was a voluminous author and diligent translator, but I do not recollect ever seeing a single book of his in a shop, or on a stall, or in a catalogue. As a Poet Great Pye is dead--as dead as Parvus Pybus, M.P., but let us all try hard to remember that he paid his father’s debts out of his own pocket.

‘Only the actions of the just, Smell _sweet_ and blossom in their dust.’

PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES.

The best time to study at leisure the habits and manners of the candidate for Parliament is shortly before an anticipated dissolution. Even as once in a series of years the astronomer furbishes up his telescope and observes the transit of a planet across the surface of the sun, so, as a General Election approaches, and when, consequently, candidates are numerous, the curious observer of human nature in all its wayward manifestations hastens to some place where experience has taught him candidates will be found gathered together.

No spot is so favourable for an investigation of this kind as the scene of a contested by-election which takes place when a General Election is at no great distance. The investigation cannot with safety be postponed until a General Election. Then all is hurry and confusion. There is a fight in every constituency. No man can help his neighbour. Everybody is on his own war-path. There is, therefore, no concentration of candidates. They are scattered up and down the land and so flurried that it is almost impossible to observe their humours. To appreciate a candidate properly takes time--a great deal of time. But at a by-election shortly before a General Election candidates are to be found in shoals--genuine candidates who have all gone through the proud process of selection, who enjoy a status peculiarly their own, who have a part to play, and play it with spirit. They hurry to the contest from afar. With what readiness do they proffer their services! Like sea-birds, they come screaming and flapping their wings, and settle down at the same hotel, which for days resounds with their cheerful cries. This is quite the best place to observe them. In the smoking-room at night, after their oratorical labours are over, they are very great, very proud, very happy. Their talk is of their constituencies, as they are pleased to designate the districts which have chosen them. They retail the anecdotes with which they are wont to convulse their audiences. The stories are familiar, but not as they tell them.

What a contrast do these bright, hopeful creatures present to their taciturn, cynical companions!--sombre figures, who sit sucking at their pipes, the actual members of Parliament, who, far from flying joyfully to the field of battle, as the candidate has just done, have been driven there, grunting and grumbling, by the angry crack of the party Whips.

As you listen to the frank, exuberant speech of the candidate, recounting the points he has made during the day, the conviction he has brought home to the waverer, the dilemmas he has thrust upon his opponents, the poor show made by somebody who thought to embarrass him by an interruption, and compare it with the gloomy asides of the member, who, however brave a figure he may have made upon the platform an hour or two before, seems now painfully alive to the inherent weakness of his cause, doubtful of victory anywhere, certain of defeat where he is, it is almost impossible to believe that once upon a time the member was himself a candidate.

Confidence is the badge of the tribe of candidates. How it is born, where it is bred, on what it feeds save vanity, we cannot tell. Figures cannot shake it. It is too majestical to be affected by ridicule. From scorn and brutal jest it turns contemptuously away. When a collision occurs between the boundless confidence of the candidate and the bottomless world-wearied scepticism of the member, it is interesting to note how wholly ineffectual is the latter to disturb, even for a moment, the beautifully poised equilibrium of the former.

‘I always forget the name of the place you are trying for,’ I lately overheard a member, during an election contest, observe at breakfast-time to a candidate.

‘The Slowcombe Division of Mudfordshire,’ replied the candidate.

‘Oh!’ said the member, with a groan, as he savagely chipped at his egg; ‘I thought they had given you something better than that.’

‘I wish for nothing better,’ said the candidate; ‘I’m safe enough.’

And so saying, he rose from the table, and, taking his hat, went off on to the Parade, where he was soon joined by another candidate, and the pair whiled away a couple of hours in delightful converse.

The politics of candidates are fierce things. In this respect the British commodity differs materially from the American. Mr. Lowell introduces the American candidate as saying:

‘Ez to my princerples, I glory In hevin’ nothin’ o’ the sort. I ain’t a Whig, I ain’t a Tory-- I’m just a Canderdate, in short.’

Our candidates--good, excellent fellows that they are--are not a bit like Mr. Lowell’s. They have as many principles as a fish has bones; their vision is clear. The following expressions are constantly on their lips:

‘I can see no difficulty about it--I have explained it all to my people over and over again, and no more can they. I and my constituency are entirely at one in the matter. I must say our leaders are very disappointing My people are getting a little dissatisfied, though, of course, I tell them they must not expect everything at once, and I think they see that’--and so on for an hour or two.

There is nothing a candidate hates more than a practical difficulty; he feels discomfited by it. It destroys the harmony of his periods, the sweep of his generalizations. All such things he dismisses as detail, ‘which need not now detain us, gentlemen.’

Herein, perhaps, consists the true happiness of the candidate. He is the embodied Hope of his party. He will grapple with facts--when he becomes one. In the meantime he floats about, cheered wherever he goes. It is an intoxicating life.

Sometimes when candidates and members meet together--not to aid their common cause at a by-election, but for the purpose of discussing the prospects of their party--the situation gets a little accentuated. Candidates have a habit of glaring around them, which is distinctly unpleasant; whilst some members sniff the air, as if that were a recognised method of indicating the presence of candidates. Altogether, the less candidates and members see of one another, the better. They are antipathetic; they harm one another.

The self-satisfaction and hopefulness of the candidate, his noisy torrent of talk ere he is dashed below, his untiring enunciation of platitudes and fallacies, his abuse of opponents, the weight of whose arm he has never felt--all these things, harmless as they are, far from displeasing in themselves, deepen the gloom of the sitting member, into whose soul the iron of St. Stephen’s has entered, relax the tension of his mind, unnerve his vigour, corrode his faith; whilst, on the other hand, his demeanour and utterances, his brutal recognition of failure on his own side, and of merit in his opponent’s, are puzzling to the candidate.

The leaders of parties will do well if they keep members and candidates apart. The latter should always herd together.

To do candidates justice, they are far more amusing, and much better worth studying, than members.

THE BONÂ-FIDE TRAVELLER.

This thirsty gentleman is threatened with extinction. His Sabbatical pint is in danger. He has been reported against by a Royal Commission. Threatened men, I know, live long, and it is not for me to raise false alarms, but though the end of the _bonâ-fide_ traveller may be not yet, his glory has departed. His more than Sabbath-day journeys in search of the liquor that he loves, extended though they are by statute over three dreary, dusty miles of turnpike, have been ridiculed, and, worse than that, his _bonâ-fide_ character--hitherto his proud passport to intoxication--has been roughly condemned as pleonastic. A pretty pleonasm, truly, which has broached many a barrel. The Commissioners say, ‘We think it would be advisable to eliminate the words _bonâ-fide_. No sensible person could suppose that the Legislature in using the word “traveller” meant to include persons who make a pretence only of being such, and are not travellers really and in fact.’ At present there are two classes of Sunday travellers: there is the real traveller and there is the _bonâ-fide_ traveller. It is the latter whose existence is menaced. The sooner he dies the better, for, in plain English, he is a drunken dog.

The Report of the Royal Commission as to the operation of the Welsh Sunday Closing Act of 1881 has been published, and, as the phrase runs, will repay perusal. It is full of humanity and details about our neighbours, their habits and customs. However true it may have been, or still may be, that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives, it is a libel upon the curiosity of mankind to attribute this ignorance to indifference. No facts are more popular, than those which relate to people’s lives. Could it be discovered how many people prefer tea without sugar, the return would be printed in every newspaper of Great Britain, and be made the text of tens of thousands of leading articles. We are all alike in this respect, though some of us are ashamed to own it. We are by no means sure that the man answered badly who, when asked which of George Eliot’s characters was lodged most firmly in human memories, replied boldly, Mrs. Linnet. Everybody remembers Mrs. Linnet, and grins broadly at the very mention of her name. ‘On taking up the biography of a celebrated preacher, she immediately turned to the end to see what disease he died of; and if his legs swelled as her own occasionally did, she felt a stronger interest in ascertaining any earlier facts in the history of the dropsical divine; whether he had ever fallen off a stage-coach, whether he had married more than one wife, and, in general, any adventures or repartees recorded of him prior to the epoch of his conversion. Then she glanced over the letters and diary, and wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such promising nouns as “small-pox,” “pony,” or “boots and shoes,” at once arrested her.’ How inimitable it is! And yet Mr. Oscar Browning prefers ‘Daniel Deronda.’ It is a comforting reflection that whether you write well or whether you write ill, you have always an audience.

But Mrs. Linnet’s deep-rooted popularity proves how fond we all are of escaping from abstractions and predictions, and seizing hold of the things about which we really feel ourselves entitled to an opinion. Mrs. Linnet would have read a great part of the Report to which I have referred with much interest. It is full of most promising nouns. Mrs. Linnet’s opinion as to a _bonâ-fide_ traveller would be quite as valuable as Lord Balfour of Burleigh’s.

But who is a _bonâ-fide_ traveller? He is a person who seeks drink on Sunday during hours when by law public-houses are closed. He has therefore to make out a special case for being supplied with drink. The fact that he is thirsty counts for nothing. Everybody is thirsty on Sunday. His special case is that he is not a resident, but a traveller, and wants refreshment to enable him to go on travelling. But here the law steps in, ‘big-wigged, voluminous-jawed,’ and adds this qualification--that nobody shall be considered a _bonâ-fide_ traveller who is not three miles away from his last bed. An attorney’s clerk of three months’ standing could have foretold what has happened, namely, that everybody who is three miles from home becomes at once and _ipso facto_ a _bonâ fide_ traveller. You rap with your knuckles at the door of the shut inn; it is partially opened, and the cautious publican or his spouse inquires of you where you come from; you name a city of the plain four miles off, and the next moment finds you comfortably seated in the bar-parlour. Falsely to represent yourself as a _bonâ-fide_ traveller is a misdemeanor, but assuming you are three miles away from home, how can such a representation be made falsely? We are all pilgrims in this world. If my sole motive for walking three miles on Sunday is to get a pint of beer at the Griffin, doubtless I am not a _bonâ-fide_ traveler, but if my motive be to get both the walk and the beer, who dare asperse my good faith? Should I have taken the walk but for the beer, or should I have taken the beer but for the walk? are questions far too nice to be made the subject of summary process.