Part 44 (1/2)

_So from the ground_. ”Faerie Queene,” I, vi, 13.

P. 266. _the secret_ [hidden] _soul_. Milton's ”L'Allegro.”

P. 267. _the golden cadences_. ”Love's Labour's Lost,” iv, 2, 126.

_Sailing with supreme dominion_. Gray's ”Progress of Poesy.”

_sounding always_. See p. 207 and n.

_except poets_. Cf. ”On the Prose Style of Poets” in the ”Plain Speaker”: ”What is a little extraordinary, there is a want of _rhythmus_ and cadence in what they write without the help of metrical rules. Like persons who have been accustomed to sing to music, they are at a loss in the absence of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or rapid movements. The measured cadence and regular _sing-song_ of rhyme or blank verse have destroyed, as it were, their natural ear for the mere characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the sense. I should almost guess the Author of Waverley to be a writer of ambling verses from the desultory vacillation and want of firmness in the march of his style. There is neither _momentum_ nor elasticity in it; I mean as to the _score_, or effect upon the ear. He has improved since in his other works: to be sure, he has had practice enough. Poets either get into this incoherent, undetermined, shuffling style, made up of 'unpleasing flats and sharps,' of unaccountable starts and pauses, of doubtful odds and ends, flirted about like straws in a gust of wind; or, to avoid it and steady themselves, mount into a sustained and measured prose (like the translation of Ossian's Poems, or some parts of Shaftesbury's Characteristics) which is more odious still, and as bad as being at sea in a calm.” Hazlitt's views on this question are peculiar, though his examples are well chosen. The more common opinion is that voiced by Coleridge in his remarks ”On Style”: ”It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre.

For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into sc.r.a.ps of metre.” Works, IV, 342.

P. 268. _Addison's Campaign_ (1705), written in honor of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim, was described as ”that gazette in rhyme” by Joseph Warton (1722-1800) in his ”Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope,” I, 29.

_Chaucer_. Cf. A. W. Pollard's ”Chaucer,” p. 35: ”To Boccaccio's 'Teseide'

and 'Filostrato,' he was indebted for something more than the groundwork of two of his most important poems; and he was also acquainted with three of his works in Latin prose. If, as is somewhat hardily maintained, he also knew the _Decamerone_, and took from it, in however improved a fas.h.i.+on, the idea of his Canterbury Pilgrimage and the plots of any or all of the four tales (besides that of Grisilde) to which resemblances have been traced in his own work, his obligations to Boccaccio become immense.

Yet he never mentions his name, and it has been contended that he was himself unaware of the authors.h.i.+p of the poems and treatises to which he was so greatly indebted.”

_Dryden_. His translations from Boccaccio are ”Sigismonda and Guiscardo,”

”Theodore and Honoria,” ”Cymon and Iphigenia.”

P. 269. _married to immortal verse_. ”L'Allegro.”

_John Bunyan_ (1628-1688), author of ”Pilgrim's Progress” (1678).

_Daniel Defoe_ (c. 1659-1731), journalist and novelist. His masterpiece, ”Robinson Crusoe,” appeared in 1719.

_dipped in dews_. Cf. T. Heywood's ”Ben Jonson, though his learned pen Was dipt in Castaly, is still but Ben.”

_Philoctetes_. The story of the Greek hero who, on the voyage to the siege of Troy, was abandoned on an uninhabited island, is the subject of a play by Sophocles.

_As I walked about_. ”Robinson Crusoe,” Part I, p. 125 (ed. G. A. Aitken).

P. 270. _give an echo_. ”Twelfth Night,” ii, 4, 21.

P. 271. _Our poesy_. ”Timon of Athens,” i, 1, 21.

P. 272. _all plumed_. Cf. 1 ”Henry IV,” iv, 1, 98:

”All plumed like estridges that with the wind Baited like eagles having lately bathed; Glittering in golden coats, like images; As full of spirits as the month of May, And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer; Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.”

_If we fly_. Psalms, cx.x.xix, 9.

P. 275. _Pope Anastatius_. ”Inferno,” xi, 8.

_Count Ugolino_. Ibid., x.x.xiii.

_Ossian_. James Macpherson (1736-1796) published between 1760 and 1765 what he alleged to be a translation of the ancient Gaelic hero-bard, Oisin or Ossian. The poems fed the romantic appet.i.te of the generation and were translated into practically every European language. In Germany especially the influence of ”Ossian” wrought powerfully through the enthusiasm it aroused in the young Goethe and in Schiller. In England, the poems, immediately upon their appearance, gave rise to a long controversy as to their authenticity, Dr. Johnson being among the first to attack the belief in their antiquity. The truth seems to be that, though there really is a legendary hero answering to Ossian, no such poems as Macpherson attributed to him were ever transmitted. The whole work is to all intents the original creation of Macpherson himself. The supposed Gaelic originals, which were published by the Highland Society of London in 1807, have been proved by philologists to be spurious, to be nothing in fact but translations into bad Gaelic from Macpherson's good English. This conclusion is further supported by the ma.s.s of borrowings from the Bible and the cla.s.sics which have been found in ”Ossian.” See J. C. Smart: ”James Macpherson, An Episode in Literature” (1905).

P. 276. _lamentation of Selma_. Lament of Colma in ”Songs of Selma,”