READINGS WITH MY PENCIL.
NO. IV.
Legere sine calamo est dormire.—Quintilian.
26. "There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric: and pure invention is but the talent of a liar."—Byron, by Moore.
This seems harsh judgment—but is it so, in reality? Ethically, as well as in a mere worldly view, I think it is. "There is nothing new under the sun," and he who tells what is not, lies—under a mistake, or otherwise. All fiction is woven on a web of fact, except the liar's fiction, which is all woof and no web, and so must soon fall to pieces from its own want of consistency. Apropos! I saw a play advertised, within the week, which was announced by the author, as founded neither in fact, fancy, or imagination!
27. "The piety implanted in Byron's nature—as it is, deeply, in all poetic natures," &c.—Moore's Byron.
Devotion arises very naturally from viewing the works of God with seriousness. If Byron had not some holy stirrings of devotion within him, when painting his loveliest pictures, I greatly err in my estimate of human nature. These remained, perhaps, to show him how much he had lost in his misanthropic musings over the dark and gloomy past: and had he followed gently those motions, with which, in thinking of the sublime and beautiful of nature, his mind was visited, it would have but been a compliance with a call from heaven, guiding him to true happiness.
| 28. "Ye that keep watch in heaven, as earth, asleep, Unconscious lies—effuse your mildest beams! Ye constellations!—while the angels strike, Amid the spangled sky, their silver lyres!" Thomson. |
How vividly does this bold but beautiful figure at times come back upon me, when I have been walking at deep midnight—when the stillness that pervaded all around me was so deep and intense as to make me, for very fear of breaking it, restrain my breath: while the fine array of stars was gloriously marshalled in high heaven: the belted Orion—the Serpent showing its every fold between the Bears. Lyra had not set, the Eagle was just on the western edge, and the Dolphin's cluster near its precursor. The Canès, Major and Minor, were bright in the east; nearly over head was Capella, and the Gemini as bright as the prince of the Hyades, Aldebaran. Jupiter lighted his gas-like flame, eastward of Castor and Pollux, and meteors were flitting in various lines across the whole western sky. And again, on some still, clear, fair night—when the blood-red planet, Mars, was high in heaven, and the brighter and purer Jupiter, and the Dogstar were fading in the horizon—how have I stood, listening to nothing, while the hum of the fairies was melting in my ears! For what else can I call that deception of the fancy, or perhaps that real sound from an unknown source, which, in the most profound silence, is still sweetly rising up around us?
29. "Do not we all know that the whig laureate, Tom Moore, actually published in the Morning Chronicle, the substance of conversations which had occurred at the royal table itself, to which he had been incautiously admitted? And that the most pungent and piquant things in * * the Twopenny Post Bag, and the Fudge Family * * *, are derived from information picked up in the progress of social intercourse?"
Blackwood's Magazine for Nov., 1823.
I believe these inuendoes are now beyond all cavil. The excuse of Tom was, that George deserted his party, and that all's fair in politics. Whether or not this were reasonable excuse, casuists may settle; but there is one reflection incident to the anecdote, to which the years 1835-6 has given rise; and this is, how ungracefully looks the Irish Anacreon, after such a well-authenticated charge, in raising a breeze against poor Willis, for repeating what himself had said about O'Connell, as a public speaker merely, at a large dinner party of Lady Blessington's! The mote and the beam!
J. F. O.