sayings about wives and matrimony in Wycherley, Dryden, Vanbrugh, and the other dramatists whose works are a storehouse of wit and humour. But in them the brilliancy of the lightning-flash atones for its occasionally mischievous thunderbolt. Within certain limits, a good deal of truthful invective may be pardoned against evil-minded matrons. 66 The longer I live," writes that bon enfant, our worthy friend Dervaux (a visitor, but not a resident-fellow of Nirgends College), "The longer I live, the more convinced do I feel that Women and Flowers are very much alike. Not only do they look pretty on the parent stalk, and adorn one's button-hole when cropt judiciously, but they are quite as unsatisfactory a few hours later. The Swan,' that divine Williams,' says truly: Lilies, that fester, smell more rank than weeds:"2 of which fact your By the way as shown in our Appendix to Choyce Drollery, 1876, p. 281, George Daniel of Beswick had, before 1647, applied the title of "the sweetest Swan of Avon" to Michael Drayton, not to Shakespeare. This was in his Vindication of Poesie, wherein he gives more praise to Ben Jonson, as "of English Dramaticks the Prince;" but had previously written "to the scene and act Read Comicke Shakespeare" (loc. cit., see p. 852). 2 We are unwilling to impugn the authority of friend Dervaux in Shakespearian matters, knowing that he has been familiar with our old dramatists, and his own modern, from early youth. And he is more than seven. But he has here opened a questio vexata. Did the divine Williams" originate, or merely quote, the lines? Some writers, whose opinion is entitled to respect, our worthy Director especially, declare the contrary authoritatively. We neither refer nor defer to other persons who have tried to measure Colossus with their nail-broad rules; whose judgment is based only on unstopt lines and rhymed syllables, losing everything of poetry: whose self-contradictions and dogmatic limitations have left to "sweet Willy," for the present, the ownership of nine plays, and no more (see Macmillan, cexiii. 202). We prefer Peter Woodhouse's "Flea," of 1605, to any equally vainglorious successor. Both of them believed themselves much mightier than the elephant : Each Beast in his owne cause is partiall, And in his owne conceit, each dwarffe seemes tall. -Democritus his Dreame. But as to the line quoted approvingly in our text. It appears in Shakespeare's Sonnet XCIV., which ends thus, For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; This, and the other Sonnets, surreptitiously obtained, appeared in print no earlier than 1609; but Meres declared, in 1598, that Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets circulated at that time among his friends, no doubt in manuscript. The line also appears in the very interesting play of King Edward III. (which was never included among Shakespeare's works until it was given in Tallis's Illustrated Shakespeare, and then only in a volume of "Doubtful Plays," edited by Henry Tyrrell; n.d. but before 1860: still later, and as forming the sixteenth drama, in the beautiful privately-printed 4to. edition, 50 copies, issued by J. P. Collier, Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth were certainly examples. I like these flower-shows well enough, and your English Girls are the fairest and the purest in creation. But I admire not the full-blown and palpably decaying bunches of petals, into which the most of them degenerate, a few years later. When a woman has fulfilled her vocation, by producing, let us say, three children, or four, she ought to be 'suppressed'; like the guinea-pigs that excited the curiosity of ce cher Carrol's Alice, in Wonderland. When we think of Merrie England, we are compelled to remember your bluff King Hal, of polygamic memory, who in his masterly fashion disposed of superfluous wives, so soon as they became inconvenient. Your worst of historians, Froude, considers it a sort of virtue; but then he holds odd views, and gloats over the slaughter of Mary Queen of Scots, and insults her dead body, as no other man was ever base enough to do."1 and newly completed, Nov. 1877). In Act ii. Sc. 1, Warwick says (in a speech otherwise noteworthy for Shakespearian parallelism) : The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint That is committed in a holy place: Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash : Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds. In 1596 this was anonymously printed in quarto. The close resemblance to Hamlet (e.g. "if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion," ii 2), and other of his plays, can scarcely be accounted for on the supposition that Shakespeare borrowed from this fine drama, when we know that he was already writing, and writing noble poetry. He had to grow and improve, like other men: best at his latest. There is a grievous error in attributing to him a mass of crude material which he did not originate. But the contrary error, in our day, of disputing his claim to almost everything, is surely not commendable. We have hitherto believed the line in question to be Shakespeare's; but we leave the question open for a full discussion hereafter. Perhaps some one will next dispute his claim to the lines which form so striking a contrast to those on the lilies:The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye . . . . Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so; .... Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made. &c.-Sonnet liv. The Court is entirely with you so far, my learned Brother. An eminent Quarterly Reviewer writes, of the passage in question: "But what shall we say to the cruel hatred (we must use plain language) which breathes in every line of the description of her [Mary's] execution? Literature has scarcely an instance of a more shocking abuse of language than the passage where the writer gloats over the poor wreck of humanity, exultingly holds up before us the severed head, dripping with blood, and conveys the inevitable contortion of the muscles of the countenance into a witness and proof of the apparently graceful face of the still-lovely lady being nothing after all, and in reality, but the withered features of a grizzled, wrinkled, old woman' (xii. 340).” He continues, and it seems a pity to allow such amiable reflections to be at the mercy of a perishable unpublished manuscript:"I love to be among children, and feel an ever-increasing affection for pretty girls, until they are fully eighteen. Then, as a rule, I stop. If they be nice specimens, and remain disengaged, or at all events unmarried, they are still objects of interest for five years more; in rare instances for eight, or ten. After thirty, not one in a thousand is worth a bunch of stale radishes. She may be useful to cook our dinners, to nurse other people's children, and, of course, if married, to bring them into the world. Women may also be worth their salt for the washing of shirts, scrubbing of floors, serving behind counters (if only a few of them, and these under surveillance). Also, they can hoe potatoes. With exception of these employments, their continuance in this mortal life is an anachronism and blunder. They continue to be frivolous when they have ceased to be attractive, and they resemble earwigs in being generally disagreeable everywhere, but especially when they attach themselves to one's person. "Half, and much more than half, of the misadventures and troubles of life," he goes on, "are caused by the intrusiveness, the indiscretion, and the petty malignity of women. [This is very shocking to read, and to set up in type, although true.] In all matters of business they are utterly untrustworthy. Their displays of affection are mostly insincere, and, when genuine for the moment, are short-lived and dangerous as the ignes-fatui of a morass. They brought ruin to Man even in Paradise, and they seldom bring anything of good to him in later times. [This begins to be extremely reprehensible.] They are always false to one another; and when not false to us of the other sex, it is merely because we know what they are, and trust them not." With these fixed principles and floating ideas he surveys the world of our past literature in smiling contentment. He feels quite at home in the days of the Restoration. He recognizes the fact (and his own life is blameless, his urbanity to the sex unfailing), that the loose morals of plays and poems were by no means necessarily conjoined with impurity of conduct. Exhilaration of spirits forms an abundant excuse for a few mild indiscretions of phrase; and even the wives of the fie-fie-Poets (Rochester's, for instance) were treated ten times more affectionately by their freely-speaking husbands, than women ever were by the gloomy sectaries: by Milton and Cromwell, or their inferiors among the peevish Puritans. A portrait of Oliver's wife, still extant, is labelled "Protectress, and a Drudge." Of Milton's three wives, the only one who gains a favourable word in his verse is the second: because she was fortunate enough to die within the first year, before he found time to grow weary of her. Even then, it was not until after she had died that he uttered her praise. His housekeeper wife was tolerated, and came in for his money, because she had cooked him nice dinners. Not only a sheet, but an entire volume might be easily filled, if necessary, with specimens of the playful badinage against matrimony, in which poets and prose-writers have indulged from early times, but at none with more frequency and more sparkling wit than during the reign of the last two Stuarts.' We are glad to see, since the above was written in our text, that Robert Roberts, of Boston, the excellent printer and publisher of our three volumes, The Drolleries" of the Restoration, announces that "At some future time I may publish a volume containing the most elegant compliments and the bitterest epigrams which have been written on the fair sex,-not compilations from Byron and Tennyson, but further a-field" (p. 417 of The Apophthegmes of Erasmus, translated into English by Nicolas Udall. Literally reprinted from the scarce edition of 1564. Boston, Lincolnshire, 1877). By the way, the writers of the bitter epigrams have often written also the elegant compliments; for "the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers, is always the first to be touched by the thorns." Not many things were better phrased than Southey's praise of woman, and Sir Walter Scott's in Marmion, which we quoted as motto on p. 880. |