Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!”
lines which are every whit as painful to their ears as to ours. I have often wondered how the infant Southeys and Coleridges, that bright-eyed group of alert and charming children, all afire with romantic impulses, received “The Cataract of Lodore,” when papa Southey condescended to read it in the schoolroom. What well-bred efforts to appear pleased and grateful! What secret repulsion to a senseless clatter of words, as remote from the silvery sweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters, as from the unalterable requirements of poetic art!
“And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.”
Ah! unwise little son, to whose rash request generations of children have owed the presence, in readers and elocution-books and volumes of “Select Lyrics for the Nursery,” of those hated and hateful verses.
“Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott,” says Mr. Lang; with “Marmion,” and the “Last Minstrel,” and “The Lady of the Lake,” read “for the twentieth time,” and ever with fresh delight. Poetry came to Scott with Shakespeare, studied rapturously by firelight in his mother’s dressing-room, when all the household thought him fast asleep, and with Pope’s translation of the Iliad, that royal road over which the Muse has stepped, smiling, into many a boyish heart. Poetry came to Pope—poor little lame lad—with Spenser’s “Faerie Queene;” with the brave adventures of strong, valiant knights, who go forth, unblemished and unfrighted, to do battle with dragons and “Paynims cruel.” And so the links of the magic chain are woven, and child hands down to child the spell that holds the centuries together. I cannot bear to hear the unkind things which even the most tolerant of critics are wont to say about Pope’s “Iliad,” remembering as I do how many boys have received from its pages their first poetic stimulus, their first awakening to noble things. What a charming picture we have of Coleridge, a feeble, petulant child tossing with fever on his little bed, and of his brother Francis stealing up, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his side and read him Pope’s translation of Homer. The bond that drew these boys together was forged in such breathless moments and in such mutual pleasures; for Francis, the handsome, spirited sailor lad, who climbed trees, and robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports, had little in common with his small, silent, precocious brother. “Frank had a violent love of beating me,” muses Coleridge, in a tone of mild complaint (and no wonder, we think, for a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it would have been hard to find). “But whenever that was superseded by any humor or circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt.” More contempt than admiration, probably; yet was all resentment forgotten, and all unkindness at an end, while one boy read to the other the story of Hector and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrow in his heart, pacing round his dead comrade, as a tawny lioness paces round her young when she sees the hunters coming through the woods. As a companion picture to this we have little Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing Othello in the nursery, and so carried away by the passionate impulse of these lines,—
“In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,