[113] The doctor was paid 6000l. to prepare the narrative of the Voyages of Captain Cook from the rough notes. He indulged in much pruriency of description, and occasional remarks savouring of infidelity. They were loudly and generally condemned, and he died soon afterwards.
[114] Keats is the most melancholy instance. The effect of the severe criticism in the Quarterly Review upon his writings, is said by Shelley to have "appeared like madness, and he was with difficulty prevented from suicide." He never recovered its baneful effect; and when he died in Rome, desired his epitaph might be, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." The tombstone in the Protestant cemetery is nameless, and simply records that "A young English poet" lies there.
[115] A very clever satire has been concocted in an imaginary history of "a forty-first chair" of the Academy which has been occupied by the great men of literature who have not been recognised members of the official body, and whose "existence there has been unaccountably forgotten" in the annals of its members.
[116] Barham, the author of the Ingoldsby Legends, wrote a similar death-bed lay in imitation of the older poets. It is termed "As I laye a-thinkynge." Bewick, the wood-engraver, was last employed upon, and left unfinished at his death, a cut, the subject of which was "The old Horse waiting for Death."
[117] Since the above was written, many other volumes have been published illustrative of this branch of literature. The Bannatyne and Maitland Club and the Camden and Percy Societies have printed Metrical Romances entire.
[118] This famed lay has been magnificently published in Germany, where it is now considered as the native epic of the ancient kingdom. Its scenes have been delineated by the greatest of their artists, who have thus given a world-wide reputation to a poem comparatively unknown when the first edition of this work was printed.
[119] These early novels have been collected and published by Mr. J. P. Collier, under the title of Shakespeare's Library. They form the foundation of some of the great Poet's best dramas.
[120] They were ridiculed in a French burlesque Romance of the Shepherd Lysis, translated by Davis, and published 1660. Don Quixote, when dying, made up his mind, if he recovered, to turn shepherd, in imitation of some of the romance-heroes, who thus finished their career. This old "anti-romance" works out this notion by a mad reader of pastorals, who assumes the shepherd habit and tends a few wretched sheep at St. Cloud.
[121] Buckingham's style was even stronger and coarser than the text leads one to suppose. "Your sowship" is the beginning of one letter, and "I kiss your dirty hands" the conclusion of another. The king had encouraged this by his own extraordinary familiarity. "My own sweet and dear child," "Sweet hearty," "My sweet Steenie and gossip," are the commencements of the royal epistles to Buckingham; and in one instance, where he proposes a hunting party and invites the ladies of his family, he does it in words of perfect obscenity.