undoubtedly should be returned to the German poet.
In the case of nearly every prolific author some few volumes represent his finest thought. I grant every one has or should have a favorite author, one who stands to him on a higher pedestal than all others,—an author whom he reveres and loves, and who must be read in every line that was the emanation of his brain. But for one to read every page of Thackeray, Bulwer, Goethe, Dumas, and the host of celebrated romancists, poets, essayists, and philosophers, delightful and instructive though they be, is a simple impossibility.
To return to the change in literary taste, and to instance a marked example, consider Wilson, or Christopher North. “Fusty Christopher,” Tennyson termed this pompous arbiter elegantiarum. The tables have been turned since the editor of Blackwood reviled the poet-laureate, and the animus of the criticism on Tennyson might now be applied to its stultified author. What magazine of the present could be induced to publish North’s rhapsodies? An installment would seriously damage The Atlantic, Scribner’s, or even Maga itself. How tiresome his ceaseless alliteration, his deluge of adjectives, his stream of similes, his invective, his bathos!
Many portions of the Noctes, it is true, are marvels of imagination and erudition, and some of his angling conceits are worthy of Norman MacLeod. Others, especially his selections as collected and published by himself under the title of The Recreations, are crusted over with algæ of self-conceit. It is the peacock who consciously struts. Pepys’s reiterated “I” and quaint egotism are never tiresome; Wilson’s pompous first person plural becomes a weariness. They used to give us Baxter’s Saints’ Rest to parse, in the olden school days, and I could not help but think that if the saints had such a horrible time, how fortunate it was we lived in a more advanced period. No doubt the schoolmaster might have given us worse books to parse; and, unquestionably, we should be duly grateful that The Recreations were not included. From the a priori to the a posteriori would have been so much harder sailing! Has not even the long-spun panorama of The Seasons lost something of its charm? Or, rather, should it not be read in an old edition?
Good editions of good books, though they may often be expensive, can not be too highly commended. One can turn to a page in inviting letterpress so much easier than to a page of an unattractive volume. The fine shades of meaning stand out more clearly, and the thought is revealed more intelligibly when clothed in fitting typographical garb. Often it becomes a positive labor to follow many a pleasing author in the small or worn types and poor paper with which the publisher mercilessly thrusts him into the world. The reader has virtually to work his passage through the pages and take frequent rests by the way.
Poor illustrating is even worse. Who may appreciate the beauties of The Talking Oak in the edition where Olivia is portrayed in the act of kissing a giant bole whose girth scarcely equals her own? One must ever afterward associate an oak with a fat Olivia. Apparently the artist never read Sir Thomas Wyatt:
A face that should content me wondrous well
Should not be fair, but lovely to behold,
or William Browne:
What best I lov’de was beauty of the mind,