being desperately in need of a comedy by a new name, decided to produce it. The Honeymoon rivalled Venice Preserved in popularity for about thirty years, and then flickered out of public notice as suddenly as it had leapt into it. It is now gathered to rest along with Talfourd's Ion and Knowles's Virginius. 6 When taste for literary exhumation is strong and critical acumen weak-what happens? The closing years of the century that witnessed the forgeries of Chatterton, and the 'restorations' of Macpherson and Percy, had also to put up with the palpably sham Shakespearean' tragedy of Vortigern. Its author, William Henry Ireland (1777-1835), a barrister's clerk, had already, with the aid of his father, a skilful engraver, produced a volume of forged papers claiming to relate to Shakespeare's career, when, on April 2nd, 1796, Sheridan and Kemble produced at Drury Lane the bombastic 'ancient British' drama called Vortigern, which was stated to have been discovered by Ireland among the other Shakespeare papers. Kemble, as was usual with him in new tragic parts, did not try'; but the piece, though it imposed upon a section of the literary public, would probably not have succeeded in any case, and the fraud was finally traced to young Ireland in Malone's able Enquiry into the authenticity of the Ireland Manuscripts. Incitement to literary forgery was happily but one side of the Shakespearean revival. Apart from the valuable illustrations of Shakespeare afforded by critics such as Steevens and Malone, the movement led to the purification of the stage-texts and, gradually, to the complete banishment from the boards of the travesties by Davenant, Otway, Shadwell, Durfey, Dennis, Lansdowne, Cibber, Colman, and Nahum Tate, whose version of Lear is generally considered to have established a record for bad taste. CHAPTER X. THE POETS. I. The Tradition of Pope. THE middle of the eighteenth century, which has been too often denounced for its deficiency in poetry, literally abounded in poets. The wit of the day was expected to establish his standing, if not by a tragedy, then by a poem in the heroic measure. This understanding gave rise to the performance upon the instrument of Pope of a crowd of rhymesters-a poetical mob. Versifying became, in the words of Lady Mary Montagu, as common as taking snuff (the usual practice of the great ladies of that age). Others compared it with an epidemical distemper—a kind of murrain. The result was the conversion into metrical form of a quantity of raw material, which should have been shaped into periodical essays. In this shape it would have been perfectly innocuous, happily forgotten; as it is, a large proportion of this perfunctory verse constitutes a literary nuisance, like lumber which has gone astray and got into the wrong department of a warehouse. The fact was that Pope had familiarized the heroic couplet to a dangerous The initial difficulty of instruments like the violin or the flute operates to keep sciolists away from the manipulation of them; the comparative simplicity of the piano allures would-be performers, and leads those who are often the merest tyros to imagine they are achieving results. extent. WILLIAM WHITEHEAD-HENRY JAMES PYE. 223 be Similarly, the ease and adaptability of the couplet inveigled a large number of versifiers into imagining that poetry was their appropriate form of expression. At the head of the performers of this class, room may fittingly found for the official versifiers, or poets laureate. The first of these during the Johnsonian epoch, Colley Cibber, is much more intimately connected with the Age of Pope, if only on account of his pre-eminent part in The Dunciad. He was, upon his death on December 12th, 1757, succeeded by William Whitehead.1 Poets Laureate. 'Next Whitehead came, his worth a pinch of snuff, His indifferent Roman Father, a play in the manner of Rowe, appeared in 1750, and his collected Poems in 1754. At his best he approaches Namby-pamby Philips. Whitehead, who had long been an inmate of Lord Jersey's family, died in April, 1784. An epitaph in the style of 'Prince Fred's' does him substantial justice: 'Beneath this stone a Poet Laureate lies, Nor good, nor great, nor foolish, nor yet wise, He was succeeded by Thomas Warton, who died in 1790, and was in turn succeeded by Henry Henry James Pye James Pye, a country gentleman, whose main object in life was to obtain recognition as a poet. He was fitted to shine as a police (1745-1813). 1 The laureate must be distinguished from Paul Whitehead (17101774), a clever but disreputable imitator of Pope, whose Poems, containing The State Dunces (written in 1733) were edited in 1777 by Captain Edward Thompson, author of some sea-songs and shady' light verse. 6 し magistrate, and he did, in fact, write an admirable compendium of the duties of a justice of the peace. If while still of tender years he could have been induced, like Blackstone, to utter a Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse, we should have been spared many examples of 'the art of sinking in poetry.' As a poet Pye sank below Whitehead. His reputed magnum opus was a lengthy epic called Alfred, but the chief event of his laureateship was the commutation of the annual perquisite of a tierce of canary for an annual payment of £27. The appearance of one of his 'birthday odes,' always punctual, patriotic, and crowded with allusions to vocal groves and feathered choirs, is said to have evoked from George Steevens the impromptu Samuel Johnson 'When the Pye was opened The Birds began to sing : The priority given to these laureated scholars in the school of Pope is accorded to their official position. In general influence and importance, if not in actual merit, the first place among the transmitters of the tradition of Pope must be assigned to Johnson. But the difference between the metrical utterance of a Cibber or a Whitehead and that of Johnson is one of degree only, not of kind. Expression in verse was not thoroughly congenial to Johnson. He is conventional without escaping his own particular weakness for ponderous verbiage; and he is often scarcely more sincere in thought than in manner. In his first poem, London, an imitation of the third satire of Juvenal, published in May, 1738, we find the avowed devotee of Fleet Street eagerly adopting hollow sentimental denunciations of the corruption of towns, and singing the praise of an innocent country life. More sincere was his second poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, published in 1749, the same year in which Gray completed his Elegy. Here he gives classical and memorable expression to some of his profoundest convictions. Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature and interwoven with our being.' The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.' Such maxims as these from The Rambler form the subject-matter of the poem, which, as an exercise in Pope's most sententious manner, could perhaps hardly be surpassed. The passage in which he exposes the vanity of the hopes of the young scholar is thoroughly typical: 'Should Reason guide thee with her brightest ray, We perceive at once that Johnson is more of a rhetorician than a poet, and even as a rhetorician he lacks the exquisite point and tact of Pope, and still more the graceful ease and delicacy of sentiment that pervade Goldsmith. Figures of speech are strewn around with profusion, yet his verse is not free from glaring technical defects. The passage above is one huge sentence, half protasis, half apodosis. Q |