A Little English Gallery

The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Little English Gallery, by Louise Imogen Guiney
A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
NEW YORK HARPER AND BROTHERS MDCCCXCIV
Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers. ——— All rights reserved.
TO EDMUND GOSSE THIS FRIENDLY TRESPASS ON HIS FIELDS
The studies in this book are chosen from a number written at irregular intervals, and from sheer interest in their subjects, long ago. Portions of them, or rough drafts of what has since been wholly remodelled from fresher and fuller material at first hand, have appeared within five years in The Atlantic Monthly , Macmillan’s , The Catholic World , and Poet-Lore; and thanks are due the magazines for permission to reprint them. Yet more cordial thanks, for kind assistance on biographical points, belong to the Earl of Powis; the Rev. R. H. Davies, Vicar of old St. Luke’s, Chelsea; the Rev. T. Vere Bayne, of Christchurch, and H. E. D. Blakiston, Esq., of Trinity College, Oxford; T. W. Lyster, Esq., of the National Library of Ireland; Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, Esq.; Miss Langton, of Langton-by-Spilsby; the Vicars of Dauntsey, Enfield Highway, and Montgomery, and especially those of High Ercall and Speke; and the many others in England through whose courtesy and patience the tracer of these unimportant sketches has been able to make them approximately life-like.


MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph. If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names.