The Heroine

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Heroine, by Eaton Stannard Barrett
EATON STANNARD BARRETT
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
WALTER RALEIGH
LONDON HENRY FROWDE 1909
OXFORD: HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
'In Glamorganshire, of a rapid decline, occasioned by the bursting of a blood-vessel, Eaton Stannard Barrett, esq., a native of Ireland, and a student of the Middle Temple. He published All the Talents , a Poem, 8vo. 1817.— The Comet , a mock newspaper, 8vo. 1803.—A very pleasing poem intituled Woman , 8vo. 1810.— The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina , 3 vols. 12mo, 2d. edit. 1814. This volume is said to abound in wit and humour.'
Very little can now be added to this obituary notice, which appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine for April, 1820. The young Irishman whose death it records was born at Cork in 1786, received his education chiefly in London, addicted himself to the law, and was early diverted into the profession of letters, which he practised with great energy and versatility. Besides the works mentioned above, he wrote a serio-comic romance called The Rising Sun , and a farcical comedy, full of noise and bustle, called My Wife, What Wife? The choice of this last phrase (sacred, if any words in poetry are sacred) for the title of a rollicking farce indicates a certain bluntness of sensibility in the author. He was young, and fell head over ears in love with cleverness; he was a law-student, and took to political satire as a duck takes to the rain; he was an Irishman, and found himself the master of a happy Irish wit, clean, quick, and dainty, but no ways searching or profound. At the back of all his satire there lies a simple social creed, which he accepts from the middle-class code of his own time, and does not question. The two of his works which achieved something like fame, Woman, a Poem , and The Heroine , here reprinted, set forth that creed, describing the ideal heroine in verse, and warning her, in prose, against the extravagances that so easily beset her. The mode in female character has somewhat changed since George was king, and the pensive coyness set up as a model in the poem seems to a modern reader almost as affected as the vagaries described in the novel. Yet the poem has all the interest and brilliancy of an old fashion-plate. Here is woman as she wished to be in the days of the Regency, or perhaps as man wished her to be, for it is impossible to say which began it. Both gloried in the contrast of their habits. If man, in that age of the prize-ring and the press-gang, was pre-eminently a drinking, swearing, fighting animal, his indelicacy was redeemed by the shrinking graces of his mate.