Pp. 351 ff. The Letters of Junius produced in their day a very great sensation, and their fame has been heightened by the mystery surrounding their authorship. Many of the prominent men of the time were accused of writing them, and not a few either shyly admitted or boldly claimed the credit and the infamy. The reason why the real author did not appear and establish his claims was, as De Quincey long ago pointed out, that he could not assert his right to the literary fame without at the same time convicting himself of having made improper use of his official position under the government to obtain the information which made his attacks so effective. Historians of English literature have long accustomed us to believe that these letters depended for their success solely upon their literary style, their bitterness of invective, and their sardonic irony; but, although they are remarkable as literature, the special feature which aroused the fears of the government was the fact that no state secret seemed safe from the author and that he might at any moment reveal matters which it was important to keep unknown. Recent researches have made it practically certain that Junius was Sir Philip Francis, who was a clerk in the war office during the period of the publication of the letters.

The Duke of Grafton was leader of the Whig party and prime minister in 1769. Junius sums up the political situation on p. 352. Lord Bute had been the favorite of George III and exerted enormous influence over him as Prince of Wales an influence that persisted long after he was out of office.

THOMAS CHATTERTON

In

he

Pp. 353 ff. Thomas Chatterton wrote under his own name some poems of great promise for a boy (he was only eighteen when he died), but his most important and interesting poems he pretended not to have written but to have discovered. Most of them, he said, were composed by a monk named Rowley in the second half of the fifteenth century, and had been found by himself among old papers in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol. the present state of knowledge of the English language it is easy for any scholar to see that these poems could not possibly have been written in the fifteenth century. They are full of false archaisms and eighteenth century contractions, and other forms not in early use. Some persons suspected them when they were first produced; but to the majority even of the scholars of that day any imitation of old manuscripts, old writing, and old spelling was good evidence of age, and it seemed absolutely impossible that so young a boy was only twelve or thirteen when he began to produce these poems - could have composed the poems and fabricated the manuscripts. When the imposture was discovered, the critics, making no allowance for its having been the work of a mere child, were filled with high moral indignation, and the poor boy was allowed to starve, until, being able to endure his neglect no longer, he took poison and died. It has been thought strange that the poems written in this "fake" old English are better than those in the English of his own day; but the explanation seems easy psychologically. The imagination of the boy was specially excited both by the idea of the imposture he was carrying on and by the odd forms of words which he used. He felt himself transported to the times and scenes he was trying to reproduce and wrote with the picturesqueness and vigor which belong to such excited states of mind. Professor Skeat, in his edition of Chatterton, changed the old spelling of the poems to modern spelling, on the ground that the boy really thought in eighteenth century English and ought to be so represented. This sounds logical, but really is not. He may have thought thus, but we may be sure that he felt and imagined in these pseudo-archaic forms which made the antique world live again for him. Chatterton's method of old spelling is so simple also that it will give hardly any trouble. His first principle is to double letters as often as possible; his second is not to be too regular even in doing this; his third, to use any genuine old spellings that he happens to remember.

BRISTOWE TRAGEDIE

Sir Charles Bawdin. It has been supposed that the story was suggested to Chatterton by some account of the execution at Bristol in 1461 of Sir Charles Fulford, a zealous Lancastrian. Kynge Edwarde (1.5) is Edward IV; Canterlone (1. 17) is Chatterton's mistake for Cantlow or Cantelowe; Canynge (1. 45) was mayor of Bristol under Henry VI and Edward IV.

THE ACCOUNTE OF W. CANYNGES FEAST

P. 358. Chatterton picked out archaic words from dictionaries and old glossaries, and as he did not know the connection in which they were used, he sometimes made rather ludicrous mistakes. In this poem he makes an unusual effort at archaism and consequently fails oftener than usual.

Sounde, l. 1, cannot be a past participle; Byelecoyle, 1. 2, is a bad spelling of the French name of one of the allegorical characters in the translation of the Roman de la Rose, the name in English being Fair-Welcoming, i.e., Favorable-Reception; doc, 1. 2, cannot be singular; cheorte, 1. 4, properly means "dearness, scarcity," but Chatterton thought it could be used as an adjective meaning 'dear, delicious"; lyche, l. 5, is improperly used for "like" or as"; coyne, l. 7, is used by Spenser to mean food for man; heie, l. 9, is an impossible form for "they"; ha ne, l. 9, is not good English for "have nothing"; echone, l. 11, is wrongly used for "each"; and deene, l. 11, is not proper for "dine." I have passed over some of the minor errors. What Chatterton intended this to mean may be given thus:

66

GEORGE CRABBE

TALES

The Lover's Journey

Pp. 358 f. Cf. Cowper's Task, I, 557-591, for a similar picture of gypsies. Cowper pities them and is not unaware of their picturesque qualities; Crabbe is unsympathetically realistic and throws a stone at each member of the group.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Pp. 359 f. Blake was an artist as well as a poet, and in both characters vision is the quality that distinguishes him — vision of invisible forms and relationships-what Pater calls "preponderating soul." Both his painting and his poetry are full of symbolism, but they represent very different phases of his personality. The pictures are extravagant to the point of madness; the poems, which are so misleadingly simple in phrasing that they have been abused by insertion into school readers, are extraordinarily subtle and elusive. The poet who most resembles Blake in this subtle simplicity is Emily Dickinson. To understand Blake's exquisiteness, compare his "To see the world in a grain of sand" (p. 360) with Tennyson's coarser, more obvious, hence popular, "Flower in the crannied wall," which phrases the same thought.

MINOR SCOTTISH POETS

Pp. 361 f. The Minor Scottish Poets here represented are mainly interesting as a background to Burns. In methods and ideals he was not an isolated phenomenon; freedom and individuality had not perished entirely. In London literary circles and throughout Great Britain wherever people tried to write or to criticise as they thought all "up-to-date" people were writing and criticising, the prevailing fashion of "classicism" was omnipotent. But wherever people wrote for the pleasure of saying a thing as they wished to say it, life, with its old joys and hopes and sorrows and fears and desires, ran fresh and strong, as an immediate fount of inspiration.

ROBERT BURNS

Pp. 362 ff. In reading Burns, it is easy to believe that poetry is indeed a matter of instinct and not of acquirement. On his own ground and in his own tongue, Burns rarely failed to find that

perfect correspondence of sound to sense, that perfect suffusion of thought with emotion, which together create poetry; but as soon as he strayed from his "Scotsdom" in material, attitude, or language, he became commonplace and conventional. Compare, for instance, the last nine stanzas of the Cotter's Saturday Night with those that precede them. Compare the perfection of To a Mouse with the four-stanza lapse in To a Daisy (II. 31–54).

LINES TO JOHN LAPRAIK

P. 364. Lapraik was himself a minor poet as well as a friend of Burns.

THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT

Pp. 365 ff. The scene described is Burns's own home and his father is the Cotter. After his father's death, Burns himself led family prayers impressively, it is said.

Robert Aiken was a lawyer in Ayr, the market town near which Burns was born.

TAM O'SHANTER

Pp. 370 ff. The peculiar quality of this poem is its blending of the humorous and the horrible in a way that is characteristically Scottish.

BONIE DOON

P. 372. The Doon is a little river in Ayrshire near Burns's home. Burns made another version of this poem, more regular and literary and much less beautiful than this.

AE FOND KISS

P. 373. Sent to a Mrs. McLehose, of Edinburgh, with whom he had a love affair just before his marriage with Jean Armour.

BONIE LESLEY

Bonie Lesley was Miss Lesley Baillie, daughter of Mr. Baillie of Ayrshire. He, on his way to England with his two daughters, called on Burns at Dumfries. When they left, Burns accompanied them fifteen miles on their way and composed the song as he rode home.

HIGHLAND MARY

Mary Campbell was a young nursemaid whom Burns met in the spring of 1786. In a time of

reaction against Jean Armour, whom he afterwards married, Burns fell in love with her, and she promised to marry him, but she died in the autumn of that year. Burns never talked about her, but he seems to have felt her loss deeply, and some of his most beautiful poems are addressed to her.

DUNCAN GRAY

P. 374. Cf., for spirit, with Suckling's Why So Pale and Wan? (p. 214, above).

SCOTS WHA HAE

This celebrates the Battle of Bannockburn, fought in 1314, between the Scots and the English. The Scots had been struggling for independence from England since 1296. Their leader, Sir William Wallace, had at first considerable success, but was reduced to fighting a sort of guerilla warfare, and was finally betrayed by one of his countrymen and executed in London in 1305. The struggle was, however, continued by Robert Bruce, who was crowned King; and at Bannockburn he won a victory that made Scotland free and independent until the kingdoms were united under James I (James VI of Scotland), son of Mary Stuart.

The poem is supposed to be spoken by Bruce himself just before the battle, as he stood on the hill where to-day the "bore-stone" is still pointed out as his standard holder. The English attacked from the lower land by the river, where the softness of the ground contributed to their defeat.

A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT

This sums up the democratic attitude which Burns consistently maintained. The ideas which came to practical political expression in the Declaration of Independence and in the French Revo lution were making progress in Scotland and England also.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

THE PREFACE TO THE "LYRICAL BALLADS"

Pp. 376 ff. This Preface was printed with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) and later expanded. By accident, one of the cuts made in our reprint is not indicated; there should be asterisks to indicate an omission on p. 378 b, after the words Milton himself.

In connection with this epoch-making essay, Jeffrey's criticism of Wordsworth's success in carrying out his theory (p. 416), and Coleridge's statement of a view opposed to the theory itself (p. 398) should be read.

The famous Preface is much more than a defence of the particular poems that it introduced; it is a protest against the entire method of the eighteenth century poets, and a statement of the principles which Wordsworth believed should govern poetry, and which his own theory and practice did actually introduce into the work of his contemporaries and successors.

The four points in which Wordsworth regarded his work as fulfilling the essential requirements of poetry are carefully stated in the opening sentence of our selection. The rest of the essay is devoted to explaining, illustrating, expanding, and defending these principles. Particular attention should be given to Wordsworth's note on p. 378, as it shows that he was not unaware or neglectful of the distinction between poetry and non-poetry (science, as he calls the latter) whether in verse or prose. It is in this sense that poetry is to be taken in some of those fine aphorisms which give to this essay so much of its value, as, for example: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science;" and many others. What seems to be lacking in this exposition of Wordsworth's theory and what was sometimes lacking in his practice is that activity of the poet stated by Coleridge in the following terms (p. 399 b): "He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination."

WE ARE SEVEN

Pp. 382 f. In a passage omitted from our reprint of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth explains that he intended in this poem "to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement" by showing "the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion."

Although the theme is also stated explicitly in the first stanza of the poem itself, the poem contains no explicit moralizing, but the poet undoubtedly wished his readers to feel, as did the little girl, that loved ones are not separated from

us, even when their bodies are laid in earth, and their spirits have passed to heaven. There is, of course, no logical transition to this conclusion from the utterances of an ignorant child, but the emotions may make the transition, if they have been sympathetically stirred. The main reason why the poem, for all its popularity, does not rank high as poetry is that it exhibits no "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions," or, to use Coleridge's terms, that the images, thoughts and emotions are not fused by "that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination." In other words we have here perhaps raw materials for a poem, but the poem itself remains unwritten. The prosaic blemishes which Wordsworth sometimes allowed to creep into his poetry may be illustrated by the original form of l. 1: A little child, dear brother Jim."

The verse, appropriately to the subject and material, is simple and familiar, a four-line stanza, such as is used in many ballads, with four and three iambic feet in alternate lines, and with alternate rhymes. The only features worthy of special note are the first, tenth, and last stanzas. The incompleteness of 1. 1 and the lack of rhyme between it and l. 3 - both due to the omission of words from the original line cause this stanza to stand off from the rest of the poem, as the prologue should. The middle rhyme of ll. 37 and 39 is in imitation of many lines in the old ballads and contributes to the inartificiality characteristic of the poem. The extra line in the last stanza gives to it a slower and more dignified movement and causes the reader to reflect upon the story and its implications.

In reading this poem, one is inevitably reminded of the very different attitude toward the loss of a loved one by death expressed in the three poems on p. 386. It is, as has often been remarked, entirely uncertain whether the Lucy of these. poems was a real person, or a creature of the poet's imagination. But certainly the tone of the concluding stanza of each poem suggests that she really existed and that the poems were written before the poet had recovered from the shock of personal loss and while his sensations of bereavement were still in entire control of his mind and heart. This is especially notable in the third poem, where the poet's thought dwells upon the purely physical aspect of death, and he thinks of the beloved body that seemed to defy the forces of change and death as now senseless clay,

"Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees."

EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY, AND THE TABLES TURNED

Pp. 383 f. In a note, Wordsworth tells us that these two poems "arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy." They are companion poems, though they do not present, as the titles might lead one to expect, different phases of the same subject. The tables are turned only in the sense that, whereas in the first poem the poet's friend had expostulated with him, in the second the poet takes his turn; but in both the poet makes his own ideas and attitude prevail.

The subject of both poems is Wordsworth's favorite doctrine of the powerful moral influence of nature of birds and trees and flowers and beautiful streams, of sunrise and sunset and starlight - upon the character of any one who loves these things and lives in sympathetic communion with them. In another beautiful poem (Three Years She Grew, p. 386) he carries the doctrine still further and asserts that grace of form and beauty of face will pass from the graceful and beautiful objects of nature to the child who grows up among them (see especially ll. 19-24 and 29-30 of that poem).

If there is any difference at all between the doctrine set forth in Expostulation and Reply and that in The Tables Turned, it is merely that the influence of nature upon the passive mind is emphasized in the former, while in the latter a more active attitude is suggested by the words "That watches and receives," 1. 32.

LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE

TINTERN ABBEY

Pp. 384 ff. Wordsworth had visited the valley of the Wye, one of the most picturesque spots in England, in 1793 · five years, as he tells us, before the visit in company with his sister recorded in this poem. A little below Monmouth the valley of the Wye contracts and is enclosed by steep, wooded hills. Lines 10-22 (especially 10-11 and 14-16) indicate that he is on the cliffs, with the valley spread out beneath him. The poem is notable not so much because it gives explicit expression to the three phases of the love of nature recognized by Wordsworth, as because it is, in intensity of spiritual emotion, in the novelty and truth of its poetical ideas, and in beauty and suggestiveness of phrasing, one of the most perfect poems ever written. In connection with it, the reader should by all means consult other passages in which Words

worth has dealt with the same themes, notably The Prelude, Bk. I, ll. 401-463; Bk. VIII, ll. 340-356; and The Recluse (cf. especially the extract in this book, pp. 387 f.). It may aid the reader in following the course of the poet's thought to note that ll. 1-22 are devoted to his return to the scene after a long absence; 11. 22-57 express the influence of these beauteous forms in absence upon his feelings and his insight into the meaning of life; in ll. 57-05 he expresses the hope that this visit, by renewing the memories of these forms, may supply "life and food" in future years; II. 65-85 paint his feeling for nature at the time of his former visit (age 23); 11. 85-111, his maturer feeling; l. 111119 tell how his former pleasures revive in the influence of nature upon his sister; in l. 119-134 he prays that this influence may continue, and sets forth the elevating and soothing power of nature; in ll. 134-146 he exhorts his sister to experience all these sweet sensations and store them in memory as antidotes for future sorrows; and in l. 145159 bids her then remember him and his love for this landscape.

1. 29. Why "purer mind”?

11. 25-30. Compare The Reverie of Poor Susan and The Prelude, Bk. VII, especially the last two paragraphs.

11. 38-40. Compare The Prelude, Bks. XI and XIII.

Il. 43-46. Note the mysticism of this passage and compare it with the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, ll. 141-145, and the notes on Tennyson's St. Agnes' Eve.

P. 385. l. 54. hung upon is used rather curiously. It does not mean "depended upon," but "weighed upon."

Il. 93-102. These lines have sometimes been taken as pantheistic, but pantheism was not Wordsworth's creed; they express rather the presence of an immanent deity.

P. 386. 1. 149. past existence refers here to past experiences of this life, not to preëxistence.

LUCY

This and the two following poems form a series devoted to the same person. Cf. what is said about them above in connection with We Are Seven and Expostulation and Reply.

LUCY GRAY; OR, SOLITUDE

Pp. 386 f. Like We Are Seven, this presents a simple story almost without comment. This theme, however, is better suited to the ballad