Had the patronage of the Church never been extended to Herrick, and had he lived on in London, the friend of Jonson, and Selden, and Fletcher, and kind, witty Bishop Corbet, we should have lost the most charming pastoral vignettes ever flung like scattered May-blossoms into literature; but we should have gained drinking-songs such as the world has never known,—songs whose reckless music would lure us even now from our watchful propriety as easily as great Bacchus lured that wise beast Cerberus, who gave his doggish heart and wagged his doggish tail, gentle and innocent as a milk-fed puppy, when he saw the god of wine.
The close of the seventeenth century witnessed a revolution in English poetry, and the great “coming event” of Queen Anne’s Augustan age threw its shadow far before it,—a shadow of reticence and impersonality. People drank more and more, but they said less and less about it. Even in the reign of Charles II., though convivial songs were written by the score, they had lost the ring of earlier days; and we need only read a few of the much-admired verses of Tom D’Urfey to be convinced that periods of dissolute living do not necessarily give birth to sincere and reckless song. In the following century, sincerity and recklessness were equally out of date. Now and then a cheerful outburst, like the drinking-song from Congreve’s “Way of the World,” illumines our arid path, and shows the source whence Thackeray drew his inspiration for those delightful verses in “Rebecca and Rowena” concerning the relative pleasures of Pope and Sultan. Later on, Sheridan gave us his glee in “The Duenna,” and his ever popular toast in “The School for Scandal,” which is not properly a drinking-song at all. Then there came a time when the spurious conviviality of Barry Cornwall passed for something fine and genuine, and when Thomas Haynes Bayly “gave to minstrelsy the attributes of intellect, and reclaimed even festive song from vulgarity.” And at precisely this period, when a vapid elegance pervaded the ditties warbled forth in refined drawing-rooms, and when Moore alone, of all the popular song-writers, held the secret of true music in his heart, Thomas Love Peacock wrote for respectable and sentimental England five of the very best drinking-songs ever given to an ungrateful world. No thought of possible disapprobation vexed his soul’s serenity. He lived in the nineteenth century, as completely uncontaminated by nineteenth-century ideals as though Robinson Crusoe’s desert island had been his resting-place. The shafts of his good-tempered ridicule were leveled at all that his countrymen were striving to prove sacred and beneficial. His easy laugh rang out just when everybody was most strenuous in the cause of progress. His wit was admirably calculated to make people uncomfortable and dissatisfied. And in addition to these disastrous qualities, he apparently thought it natural and reasonable and right that English gentlemen—sensible, educated, married English gentlemen—should sit around their dinner-tables until the midnight hour, drinking wine and singing songs with boyish and scandalous joviality.
The songs he offered for these barbarian entertainments are perfect in character and form. Harmless mirth, a spirit of generous good-fellowship, a clean and manly heart disarm, or should disarm, all moral judgment, while the grace and vigor of every line leave the critic powerless to complain. “Hail to the Headlong,” and “A Heel-tap! a Heel-tap!” are the poet’s earliest tributes at the shrine of Bacchus. He gained a fuller insight and an ampler charity before he laid down his pen. His three best poems, which cannot possibly be omitted from such a paper as this, show how time mellowed him, as it mellows wine. We mark the ripening power, the surer touch, the kinder outlook on a troubled world. Peacock was but twenty-nine when he wrote “Headlong Hall.” He was thirty-two when “Melincourt” was given to the world, and in it his inimitable “Ghosts:”—
“In life three ghostly friars were we,
And now three friendly ghosts we be.
Around our shadowy table placed,
The spectral bowl before us floats:
With wine that none but ghosts can taste
We wash our unsubstantial throats.
Three merry ghosts—three merry ghosts—three merry ghosts are we: