and make all thy other friends as happy with thy voice as they are sorrowful to miss it. The little cage thou didst sometime share with us, looks as deficient without thee, as thy present one may do without us ; but-farewell for awhile: thy heart is in our fields: and thou wilt soon be back to rejoin it. Printed and published by JosRPH Äpplevard, No. 19, Catherine-street, Strand. Price 2d. And sold also by A. GLIDDON, Importer of Snuff, No. 31, Tavistockstreet, Covent-garden. Orders received at the above places, and by all Booksellers and Newsmen. THE INDICATOR. There he arriving round about doth ffie, SPENSER. No. LI.-WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th, 1820. ON COMMENDATORY VERSES. WR must inform the reader of a very particular sort of distress, to which we agreeable writers are subject. We mean the not knowing what to do with letters of approbation. During the first æra of our periodical flourishing, we used to sink them entirely, comforting ourselves in private with our magnanimity, and contrasting it with the greedy admission which some of our brethren gave to all panegyrical comers. We had not yet learnt, that correspondents have delicate feelings to be consulted, as well as editors. When this very benignant light was let in upon us, we had to consider the natures of our several correspondents, and to try and find out which of them wrote most sincerely, which would be hurt or otherwise by non-insertion, and which we ought to give way to, as a matter of right on their own parts, as well as of pleasure on ours. We found our scruples wonderfully apt to be done away in proportion to the intelligence and cordiality of the writer. Mere good-nature, with all our esteem for it, we could seldom admit, for obvious reasons; but good-nature and wit in unison, especially if joined with the knowledge of any generous action performed by the possessor, we always found irresistible to our modesty. "In fact, the more honour it did you, Mr. Indicator, the more you were inclined to consult the delicacy of your correspondent?"? Just so. Now if our faculties are any thing at all, they are social; and we have always been most pleased on these occasions, when we have received the approbation of those friends, whom we are most in the habit of thinking of when we write. There are multitudes of readers whose society we can fancy ourselves enjoying, though we have never seen them; but we are more particularly apt to imagine ourselves in such and such company, according to the nature of our articles. We are accustomed to say to ourselves, if we happen to strike off any thing that pleases us,-K. will like that:-There's something for M. or R.-C. will snap his finger and slap his knee-pan at this :— Here's a crow to pick for H.-Here N. will shake his shoulders:There B., ditto, his head :-Here S. will shriek with satisfaction: L. will see the philosophy of this joke, if nobody else does.-As to our fair friends, we find it difficult to think of them and our subject together. We fancy their countenances looking so frank and kind over our disquisitions, that we long to have them turned towards ourselves instead of the paper. Every pleasure we could experience in a friend's approbation, we have felt in receiving the following verses. They are from a writer, who of all other men, knows how to extricate a common thing from commonness, and to give it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and wisdom. We knew him directly, in spite of his stars. His hand as well as heart betrayed him. TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR. CTS Your easy Essays indicate a flow, Dear Friend, of brain, which we may elsewhere seek; In his undying midnight lamp which burned. I would not lightly bruise old Priscian's head, malui denar a But, with the leave of Priscian be it said, The Indicative is your Potential Mood. Wit, poet, prose-man, party-man, translator-yo H -, your best title yet is INDICATOR. The receipt of these verses has set us upon thinking of the goodnatured countenance, which men of genius, in all ages, have for the most part shewn to contemporary writers; and thence, by a natural transition, of the generous friendship they have manifested for each other. Authors, like other men, may praise as well as blame for various reasons; for interest, for egotism, for fear and for the same reasons they may be silent. But generosity is natural to the humanity and the strength of genius. Where it is obscured, it is usually from something that has rendered it misanthropical. Where it is glaringly deficient, the genius is deficient in proportion, And the defaulter feels as much, though he does not know it. He feels, that the least addition to another's fame threatens to block up the view of his At the same time, praise by no means implies a sense of superiority. It may imply that we think it worth having; but this may arise from a consciousness of our sincerity, and from a certain instinct we have, that to relish any thing exceedingly gives us a certain ability to judge, as well as a right to express our admiration, of it. (Anima On all these accounts, we were startled to hear the other day that Shakspeare had never praised a contemporary author. We had mechanically given him credit for the manifestation of every generosity under the sun; and found the surprise affect us, not as authors (which would have been a vanity not even warranted by our having the title in common with him), but as men.. What baulked us in Shakspeare, seemed to baulk our faith in humanity. But we recovered as speedily. Shakspeare bad, none of the ordinary inducements, which make men niggardly of their commendation. He had no reason either to be jealous sor afraid. He was the reverse of unpopular. His own claims were er universally allowed. He was neither one who need be silent about a friend, lest he should be hurt by his enemy; nor one who nursed a style or a theory by himself, and so was obliged to take upon him a monopoly of admiration in self-defence; nor one who should gaze himself blind to every thing else, in the complacency of his own shallowness. If it should be argued, that he who saw through human nature, was not likely to praise it, we answer, that he who saw through it as Shakspeare did, was the likeliest man in the world to be kind to it. Even Swift refreshed the dry bitterness of his misanthropy in his love for Tom, Dick, and Harry; and what Swift did from impatience at not finding men better, Shakspeare would do out of patience in finding them so good. We instanced the sonnet in the collection called the Passionate Pilgrim, beginning inezil on7 970) dosflogorod of el t If music and sweet poetry agree, in which Spenser is praised so highly. It was replied, that minute enquirers considered that collection as apocryphal. This set us upon looking again at the biographers who have criticised it; and we see no reason, for the present, to doubt its authenticity. For some parts of it we would answer upon internal evidence, especially, for instance, the Lover's Complaint. There are two lines in this poem which would alone anuounce him. They have the very trick of his eye. O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies But enquirers would have to do much more than disprove the authenticity of these poems, before they made out Shakspeare to be a grudg ing author. They would have to undo all the modesty and kindliness of his s other writings. They would have to undo his universal cha. racter for " gentleness," at a time when gentle meant all that was noble as well as mild. They would have to find bitterness in the sweet wisdom that runs throughout his dramatic works, and selfishness in the singular and exquisite generosity of sentiment that hallows his more personal productions." They would have to deform and to untune all that round, harmonious mind, which a great contemporary described as the very 66 sphere of humanity;" to deprive him of the epithet given him in the school universality of wisdom liable oilton, "unvulgar*;" to render the to the same drawbacks as mere universality of science; to take the child's heart out of the true man's body; to un-Shakspeare Shakspeare. If Shakspeare had never mentioned a contemporary in his life, nor given so many evidences in his sonnets of a cordial and admiring sense of those about him, we would sooner be lever that sheer modesty had restrained his tongue, than the least approach to a petty feeling. We can believe it possible that he may have thought his panegyrics not wanted; but unless he degraded himself wilfully, in order to be no better than any of his fellow-creatures, we cannot believe it possible, that he would have thought his panegyrics wanted, and yet withheld them.fin It is remarkable that one of the most regular contributors of Com By Milton's nephew Philips in his Theatrum Pretarum. It is an epithet given in all the spirit which it attributes.d mendatory Verses in the time of Shakspeare, was a man whose bluntness of criticism and feverish surliness of manners have rendered the most suspected of a jealous grudgingness;-Ben Jonson. We mean not to detract an atom from the good-heartedness which we sincerely believe this eminent person to have possessed at bottom, when we say, that as an excess of modest confidence in his own generous instincts might possibly have accounted for the sparingness of panegyric in our great dramatist, so a noble distrust of himself, and a fear lest jealousy should get the better of his instinets, might possibly account for this panegyrical overplus in his illustrious friend. If so, it shews how use¬ ful such a distrust is to one's ordinary share of humanity; and how much safer it will be for us, on these as well as all other occasions, to venture upon likening ourselves to Ben Jonson rather than Shakspeare. It is to be recollected at the same time that Ben Jonson, in his age, was the more prominent person of the two, as a critical bestower of applause; that he occupied what may be called the town-chair of wit and scholarship; and was in the habit of sanctioning the pretensions of new authors by a sort of literary adoption, calling them his "sans," and “ sealing them of the tribe of Ben." There was more in him of the aristocracy and heraldry of letters, than in Shakspeare, who, after all, seems to have been careless of fame himself, and to have written nothing during the chief part of his life but plays which he did not print. Ben Jonson, among other panegyrics, wrote high and affectionate ones upon Drayton, William Browne, Fletcher, and Beaumont. His verses to the memory of Shakspeare are a most noble monument to both of them. The lines to Beaumont, in return for some which we have quoted in a former number, we must repeat. They are delightful for a certain involuntary but mauly fondness, and for the candour with which he confesses the joy he received from such commendation. How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse That unto me dost such religion use How I do fear myself, that am not worth The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth! What fate is mine, that so itself bereaves? What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives? When even there, where most thou praisest me, Observe the good effect which the use of the word "religion" has here, though somewhat over classical and pedantic. A certain pedantry, in the best sense of the term, was natural to the author, therefore throws a grace on his most natural moments. and There is great zeal and sincerity in Ben Jonson's lines to Fletcher on the ill success of his Faithful Shepherdess; but we have not room for them. Beaumont's are still finer; and indeed furnish a very complete speci men of his wit and sense, as well as his sympathy with his friend. His indignation against the critics is more composed and contemptuous. His uppermost feeling is confidence in his friend's greatness. The reader may here see what has always been thought by men of genius, |