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CHAPTER VI.

E had sight of George III. in our last

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We had

chapter, and we shall catch sight of him again from time to time; for he was a persistent lingerer, and a most obstinate liver. glimpses, too, of that cheery, sunny-faced, eloquent, ill-balanced man, Charles James Fox, whom we ought to remember as a true friend to America, in those critical days when taxation was swelling into tyranny. William Pitt, whom we also saw, and to whom we would have been delighted to listen, would never have won greatly upon American sympathies; too cold, too austere, too classic, too fine. Sheridan, on the other hand, would, and did, conquer hearts everywhere; but unfortunately spending his forces in great paroxysms of effort ; one while the greatest comedist, and again the greatest orator, always the greatest spendthrift;

and anon the greatest debtor, who only pays his debts by dying.

Sterne covered better his deficiencies of money and of soul. Who could have put more or truer feeling into the story of the poor ill lieutenant of the inn, whom Corporal Trim (at Uncle Toby's instance) had gone to see, and of whom he makes report? And uncle Toby says he will fetch him home and set him afoot in his regiment.

"Never," says Trim, "can he march." "But he shall march," says uncle Toby. "He will die in his tracks," says Trim.

"He shall not die," says Toby, with an oathwhich oath, says Sterne, the recording angel washed away, so soon as it was uttered. The Rev. Laurence Sterne, it is to be feared, counted too largely upon the swash of such tender recording angels. Only a host of them, with best lachrymal equipment, could float away poor Sterne's misdeeds!

We touched upon the sad life and fate of the marvellous boy, Chatterton-not a great poet, but with an exuberant poetic glow within him which gave new brightness to old Romanticism, and

which kindled in after days many a fancy into

flame

up and down the pages of later and bolder poets. Were his forgeries perhaps instigated by the Ossianic mystification?

Macpherson and other Scots.

I do not know if you have ever encountered the poems of Ossian. They are out of fashion now; I doubt if fragments even get into the school-books ; but some of my readers may remember in a corner of the art-gallery of Yale University a painting, with two life-size figures in it, by Colonel John Trumbulla limp and bleeding, and somewhat dainty warrior, leaning upon the shoulder of a flax-haired maiden; with a little strain from Ossian's Fingal, in the placard below, to tell the story. The mighty Lamderg (who is the warrior) died and Gelchossa (the flax-haired young woman) "mourned three days beside her love. The hunters found her dead." The picture is, I suspect, almost the only permanent mark in America of the amazing popularity which once belonged to the strange, weird, monotonous, gloomy,

thin poems of Ossian. There are descriptions of mountain crags in them, and of splintered pines, of thunder blasts and of ocean hoar; and there are crags again, and bleeding warriors, and flax-haired women; harps, moonlight, broken clouds, and crags again I cite a few fragments:

"The oaks of the mountains fall; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art forever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds and laughest at the storm.

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'Rise, moon, from behind thy clouds! Stars of the night arise, lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the chase alone his bow near him unstrung; his dogs panting around him. The stream and the wind roar aloud, I hear not the voice of my love."

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And yet these poetic flights, which, it would seem might be made up from collective but injudicious use of the Songs of Solomon and the mental exaltations which come from over-indulgence in tea drinking, or other strong waters, were borne, on a swift gale of plaudits in the latter half of the last century all over Europe. Professors of Literature (such as Dr. Hugh Blair) wrote trea

tises upon their fire and grace; such men as Goethe and Schiller were fast admirers; Napoleon was said to be bewildered by their beauty. Of course they had French translation; and there were versions in German, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin. The Abbé Cesarotti, besides writing a dissertation in favor of the authenticity of the Gaelic poems, gave an Italian version (the favorite one of Napoleon) which in parts has a rounded play of vocables that makes one forget all poverty of invention. Thus when Ossian says,

"Thy side that is white as the foam of the troubled sea, when dark winds pour it on rocky Cuthon- "it is rounded by the Italian into this pretty bit of mellifluence :

"Il tuo fianco ch'è candido come la spuma del turbato

mare,

Quando gli oscuri venti lo spingono contro la mormorante Roccia di Cutone

* As a matter of curiosity I give what appears to be the corresponding Gaelic in a couplet of lines, from the version in Rev. Archibald Clerk's Ossian :—

"A's gile na 'n cobhar,' tha sgavilte

Air muir o ghaillinn nan sian."

1. 75, Duan 1, Fionnghal.

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