Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley, THE SATYR'S SPEECH, FROM THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS." Thorough yon same bending plain, That flings his arms down to the main, And live! Therefore on this mould Lowly do I bend my knee In worship of thy deity. Belief to that the satyr tells : To this present day ne'er grew, Here be grapes, whose lusty blood The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown See, how well the lusty time Hath decked their rising cheeks in red, Here be berries for a queen, These are of that luscious meat The great god Pan himself doth eat : All these, and what the woods can yield, The hanging mountain, or the field I freely offer, and ere long Will bring you more, more sweet and strong; 'Till when humbly leave I take, Lest the great Pan do awake, That sleeping lies in a deep glade, I must go, I must run, Swifter than the fiery sun. The charming pastoral from whence this beautiful speech is taken, was irrevocably condemned in the theatre on the first and only night of representation; which catastrophe, added to a similar one that befell Congreve's best comedy, "The Way of the World," both authors being at the time in the very flood-tide of popularity, has been an unspeakable comfort to unsuccessful dramatists ever since. I recall it chiefly to mention the hearty spirit with which two of the most eminent of Fletcher's friendly rivals came to the rescue with laudatory verses. The circumstance does so much honour to all parties, and some of the lines are so good, that I cannot help quoting them ; George Chapman says that the poem— Renews the golden world, and holds through all The holy laws of homely Pastoral; Where flowers and founts and nymphs and semi-gods And meadows, nothing fit for purchasers: This iron age (Think of that in the days of James the First!) This iron age that eats itself will never Bite at your golden world, that others ever Ben Jonson, first characterising the audience after a fashion by no means complimentary, says hat the play failed because it wanted the laxity of moral and of language which they expected and desired. He continues : I that am glad thy innocence was thy guilt, Or moths shall eat what all these fools admire. For the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, that mine of superb and regal poetry, I have no room now. They must remain untouched. IX. FASHIONABLE POETS. WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED. It is now nearly thirty years ago that two youths appeared at Cambridge, of such literary and poetical promise as the University had not known since the .days of Gray. What is rarer still, the promise was kept. One of these "marvellous boys" turned out a man of world-wide renown-the spirited poet, the splendid orator, the brilliant historian, the delightful essayist—in a word, Thomas Babington Macaulay, now, I suppose, incontestably our greatest living writer. The other was the subject of this paper. Winthrop Mackworth Praed (I wish it had pleased his godfathers and godmothers to bestow upon him a plain English Christian name, and spare him and me the vulgar abomination of this conglomeration of inharmonious sounds!) Winthrop Mackworth |