by side on two chairs covered with the fleece of a sheep, and the priest joined their hands. The marriage contract fixing the amount of the dowry and the mode of its administration was then signed, and a banquet followed, during which five wax candles were burned, while from the walls the waxen masks of the husband's ancestors, decked for the occasion with flowers, looked down from their open cupboards with approval.

called on him loudly by name to answer them if he were yet alive, just as at a funeral of a king of Spain, before the coffin is finally closed, a herald shouts to wake him if he only sleeps. The arrangement of all details of the burial were, as a rule, left to the undertakers, who were in Rome numerous enough to form a strong guild. Though their trade was looked on with contempt, if not with horror, it was sufficiently lucrative, and they were able to Though during the early days of Rome provide all requisites for the ceremony, divorces were very rare, the husband al- which was in its essentials the same for ways had the absolute right to put away his all, however much the pomp might vary wife, just as he had the right to inflict any according to wealth and rank. The burial other punishment on her as on every mem- of a noble was, if somewhat barbaric in ber of his household. The wife was held its details, a picturesque, even an impresin high esteem; she was not, as in Greece, sive ceremony. After death the corpse relegated to the seclusion of the women's was laid out in a bed of state in the atrium, apartment; but the Roman would not ad- with its feet towards the door ready to go mit the possibility of a divided rule. The out thence, there for the last time to rehousehold must have a supreme head, and ceive all who came to do honor to the dethat head was the father. Public opinion, parted. The body was covered with the however, required that he should take the white toga which its owner had worn duradvice of his wife's relatives and of his ing life, and on its brow were placed any own family council before acting, and a wreaths that had been awarded to him for reason must be assigned, though it might distinguished services. On the lips lay a be a slight one. Thus it was admitted that coin to pay the ferryman of Orcus, and on if a wife drank wine without leave, or had the ground beside the bier burned censers the key of the cellar in her possession, of incense. A cypress was placed outside without being able to explain why, the the house door, an emblem of death, to husband was justified in punishing her warn those who feared defilement not to according to the enormity of the offence, or enter. After nine days a herald going even in putting her away. Later on, more through the streets invited all to attend: trivial reasons were held to be sufficient." Lo! a Roman citizen is dead, come, Thus cases are recorded in which a wife was divorced for walking in the streets with a bare head (in modern Rome, it may be observed, wearing a covering on the head in the streets is looked on as a sign of respectability), or for talking in a public place with a freed-woman, or for going to see the games without her husband's leave.

No event in his life was, if one may be allowed the bull, more important to the Roman than his burial. If the body were not buried, the ghost could find no repose, but must wander round the place of death or on the borders of the gloomy Styx. An elaborate funeral was not necessary, three handfuls of dust scattered over the corpse, if nothing more were possible, suf ficed to set the soul free; yet, though the needful was so little, to give a magnificent funeral to the dead was a point of honor to the survivors, and the ceremonies ordained by custom were followed out with scrupulous exactitude. As the man lay dying a relative gave him a last kiss in which to receive his parting breath. The friends then standing round his death-bed |

every man that can, and follow after. He is now being carried out of his house." Then at last the procession, ordered by the officer of the undertaker, passed out from the vestibule into the street. First went singers and musicians with their pipes, sounding the funeral dirge; after them followed a troop of female mourners robed in black, professional wailers pro vided by the undertakers, who expressed by voice and gesture the grief of the family. Then a troop of actors. Of these the chief, imitating the deceased, whom he impersonated in dress and stature, took the place of chief mourner, and seemed to follow himself out to his own burial. With a grotesque mixture of farce and tragedy, he assumed the character of the dead, and even turned his peculiarities into jest. Thus when Vespatian was carried out to burial, and a fellow in the crowd remarked on the extravagance of the funeral, "Give me ten pounds," cried the archimimus, alluding to the dead emperor's reputation for avarice, "and pitch my body into the Tiber without more ado." Following these actors came men carrying tablets in

scribed with the great deeds of the dead; | fame as solid as fame can ever be, in their the battles he had fought, the nations he own day, having been praised by the had conquered. After them came the most praised, and as far as can be seen having striking feature of the procession. The owed this praise to none of the merely exwaxen masks of ancestors, taken from ternal and irrelevant causes-politics, their places on the walls of the atrium, religion, fashion, or what not - from which were worn by men chosen to represent the it sometimes arises, experience in a more deceased members of the family. In a or less short time after their death, the long line swept by the senators, consuls, fate of being, not exactly cast down from censors, dictators, each in his robe of their high place, but left respectfully state, and the triumphator in his gold-em- alone in it, unvisited, unincensed, unread. broidered toga. It seemed as if the dead Among these writers, over the gate of man's ancestors had returned again to whose division of the literary Elysium the earth to do honor to their descendant, and famous "Who now reads Bolingbroke? welcome him to his new abode. Then fol- might serve as motto, the author of "The lowed the bier, draped in cloth of gold, and Village" and "Tales of the Hall" is one carried often by men of note, who thus of the most remarkable. As for Crabbe's showed their respect to the deceased; popularity in his own day there is no missometimes by the relations, as when Me- take about that. It was extraordinarily tellus of Macedonia was borne out by his long, it was extremely wide, it included sons to burial. After it followed the heirs, the select few as well as the vulgar, it was the slaves whom the deceased had freed felt and more or less fully acquiesced in by will, connections, friends, and acquaint- by persons of the most diverse tastes, ances, and others who joined the crowd habits, and literary standards. His was as a token of respect. From the house not the case, which occurs now and then, the procession passed into the Forum; of a man who makes a great reputation in there the corpse was set down below the early life and long afterwards preserves it rostra, from which the heir delivered a because, either by accident or prudence, panegyric of the dead, relating the great he does not enter the lists with his younger deeds of himself and his family. Thence rivals, and therefore these rivals can afford the corpse was carried out of the town to show him a reverence which is at once gate to the family tomb on the Flaminian graceful and cheap. Crabbe won his spurs or Appian way. There the pyre had been in full eighteenth century, and might have built, and the funeral cypresses had been boasted, altering Landor's words, that he planted. The body was placed on the had dined early and in the best of compile; one of the relatives, with averted pany, or have parodied Goldsmith, and face, applied a torch, and the wood flared said, “I have Johnson and Burke; all the up. Gladiators often fought the while, a wits have been here." But when his stuform of sacrifice to the dead, introduced dious though barren manhood was passed, from Etruria, and which gradually devel- and he again began as almost an old man oped into the monstrous massacres of the to write poetry, he entered into full comamphitheatre. petition with the giants of the new school, whose ideals and whose education were utterly different from his. While "The Library" and "The Village" came to a public which still had Johnson, which had but just lost Goldsmith, and which had no other poetical novelty before it than Cowper, "The Borough" and the later tales entered the lists with "Marmion" and "Childe Harold," with "Christabel" and "The Excursion," even with "Endymion" and "The Revolt of Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,* the most grudging, of all

When the fire had burned out, the ashes were quenched, the calcined bones were carefully folded in a black cloth and washed with wine and milk, then dried and placed with perfumes in the urn of marble or alabaster which found its place in the chambers of the family tomb.

E. STRACHAN MORGAN.

From Macmillan's Magazine.
GEORGE CRABBE.

THERE is a certain small class of persons in the history of literature the members of which possess, at least for literary students, an interest peculiar to themselves. They are the writers who having attained not merely popular vogue, but

In 1834, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth wrote to his son: "Your father's works.. will last, from

their combined merit as poetry and truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since the

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the poets of the day towards their fellows, | loves his eighteenth century. But who united in praising Crabbe; and unromantic reads him? Who quotes him? Who as the poet of "The Village" seems to us likes him? I think I can venture to say, he was perhaps Sir Walter's favorite En- with all proper humility, that I know glish bard. Scott read him constantly, Crabbe pretty well; I think I may say he quotes him incessantly; and no one with neither humility nor pride, but simply who has read it can ever forget, how as a person whose business it has been for Crabbe figures in the most pathetic bio- some years to read books, and articles, graphical pages ever written - Lockhart's and debates, that I know what has been account of the death at Abbotsford. By- written and said in England lately. You ron's criticism was as weak as his verse will find hardly a note of Crabbe in these was powerful, but still Byron had no doubt writings and sayings. He does not even about Crabbe. The utmost flight of mem- survive, as "Matthew Green, who wrote ory or even of imagination can hardly get The Spleen,' "" and others survive, by together three contemporary critics whose quotations which formerly made their standards, tempers, and verdicts were mark, and are retained without a knowlmore different than those of Gifford, Jef- edge of their original. If anything is frey, and Wilson. Yet it is scarcely too known about Crabbe to the general reader, much to say that they are all in a tale it is the parody in "Rejected Addresses," about Crabbe. In this unexampled chorus an extraordinarily happy parody no doubt, of eulogy there rose (for some others who in fact rather better Crabbe in Crabbe's can hardly have admired him much were weakest moments than Crabbe himself. simply silent), one single note, so far as I But naturally there is nothing of his best know, or rather one single rattling peal of there; and it is by his best things, let it thunder on the other side. It is true that be repeated over and over in face of all this was significant enough, for it came opposition, that a poet must be judged. from William Hazlitt.

*

Although Crabbe's life, save for one dramatic revolution, was one of the least eventful in our literary history, it is by no means one of the least interesting. Mr. Kebbel's book gives a very fair summary of it; but the life by Crabbe's son which is prefixed to the collected editions of the poems and on which Mr. Kebbel's own is avowedly based, is perhaps the more interesting of the two. It is written with a curious mixture of the old literary state and formality, and of a feeling on the writer's part that he is not a literary man himself, and that not only his father but Mr. Lockhart, Mr. Moore, Mr. Bowles, and the other high literary persons who "assisted him were august beings of another sphere. This is all the more agreeable in that Crabbe's sons had advantages of education and otherwise which were denied to their father, and might in the ordinary course of things have been expected to show towards him a lofty patron

Yet against this chorus, which was not, as has sometimes happened, the mere utterance of a loud-voiced few, but was echoed by a great multitude who eagerly bought and read Crabbe, must be set the almost total forgetfulness of his work which has followed. It is true that of living or lately living persons in the first rank of literature some great names can be cited on his side; and what is more, that these great names show the same curious diversity in agreement which has been already noticed as one of Crabbe's triumphs. The translator of Omar Khay. yam, his friend the present laureate, and the author of "The Dream of Gerontius,' are men whose literary ideals are known to be different enough; yet they add a third trinity as remarkable as those others of Gifford, Jeffrey, and Wilson, of Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron. Much more recently Mr. Courthope has used Crabbe as a weapon in that battle of his with lit-age rather than any filial reverence. erary Liberalism which he has waged not always quite to the comprehension of his fellow-critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen has discussed him as one who knows and date of their first appearance." Between the writing and the printing of this paper, a very different estimate by Wordsworth of Crabbe has been published (for the first time, I believe) in Mr. Clayden's" Rogers and his Contemporaries." Here he argues at great length that

"Crabbe's verses can in no sense be called poetry," and that "nineteen out of twenty of his pictures are mere matter of fact." It is fair to say that this was in 1808, before the appearance of "The Borough" and of almost all Crabbe's best work.

The

poet himself was born at Aldborough, a now tolerably well-known watering-place (the fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in "No Name "), on Christmas eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems have had no hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who main

to

Great Writers: Crabbe; by T. E. Kebbel. London, 1888.

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tained themselves to be at the best Nor- | fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps folk yeomen, and though they possessed in remembrance of Fulke Greville's hera coat of arms, avowed with much frank- oine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather ness that they did not know how they got well for a man of those days), and no doubt it. A hundred and forty years ago they also with a secret joy to think that the last had apparently lost even the dignity of syllables of her Christian name and suryeomanhood, and occupied stations quite name in a way spelt the appellation, fell in in the lower rank of the middle class as love with the boy and made his fortune. tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in But for her Crabbe would probably have the navy or the merchant service, and so subsided, not contentedly but stolidly, into forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, conwas collector of customs at Aldborough, soling himself with snuff (which he always but his son, also a George, was a parish loved) and schnaps (to which we have schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he hints that in his youth he was not averse). returned to the Suffolk port as deputy col- Mira was at once unalterably faithful to lector and then as salt-master, or collector him and unalterably determined not to of the salt duties. He seems to have had marry unless he could give her something no kind of polish, and late in life was a like a position. Their long engagement mere rough, drinking exciseman; but his (they were not married till he was twentyeducation, especially in mathematics, ap- nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we pears to have been considerable, and his shall see, have carried with it some of the ability in business not small. The third penalties of long engagements. But it is George, his eldest son, was also fairly as certain as any such thing can be that though very irregularly educated for a but for it English literature wauld have time, and his father perceiving that he lacked the name of Crabbe. was a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was chosen for him that of medicinewas not the best suited to his tastes or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the customs' warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese," even after he was apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of apprenticeship which taught nothing. But love was, for once, most truly and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and possessed, as far as can be made out, neither of manners nor prospects, he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than himself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps merely in the

There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His son has printed two rare scraps of a very interesting journal to Mira which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather adulatory) to Lord Sherborne, which received no answer. All this has the most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year during which his means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he says himself, fixed by some propitious influence, in some happy moment," on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.

Nothing in all literary history is, in a