Earl Percy’s lamentation over his enemy is generous, beautiful, and passionate. I must only caution the reader not to let the simplicity of the style, which one may well pardon in so old a poet, prejudice him against the greatness of the thought:
Then leaving life, Earl Percy took
The dead man by the hand,
And said, “Earl Douglas, for thy life
Would I had lost my land.“O Christ! my very heart doth bleed
With sorrow for thy sake;
For sure a more renowned knight
Mischance did never take.”
That beautiful line, “Taking the dead man by the hand,” will put the reader in mind of Æneas’s behaviour towards Lausus, whom he himself had slain as he came to the rescue of his aged father:
At verò ut vultum vidit morientis et ora,
Ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris;
Ingemuit, miserans graviter, dextramqne tetendit.Virg., Æn. x. 821.
The pious prince beheld young Lausus dead;
He grieved, he wept, then grasped his hand and said,
“Poor hapless youth! what praises can be paid
To worth so great?”Dryden.
I shall take another opportunity to consider the other parts of this old song.
Part Two.
—Pendent opera interrupta.
Virg., Æn. iv. 88.
The works unfinished and neglected lie.
In my last Monday’s paper I gave some general instances of those beautiful strokes which please the reader in the old song of “Chevy-Chase;” I shall here, according to my promise, be more particular, and show that the sentiments in that ballad are extremely natural and poetical, and full of the majestic simplicity which we admire in the greatest of the ancient poets: for which reason I shall quote several passages of it, in which the thought is altogether the same with what we meet in several passages of the “Æneid;” not that I would infer from thence that the poet, whoever he was, proposed to himself any imitation of those passages, but that he was directed to them in general by the same kind of poetical genius, and by the same copyings after nature.
Had this old song been filled with epigrammatical turns and points of wit, it might perhaps have pleased the wrong taste of some readers; but it would never have become the delight of the common people, nor have warmed the heart of Sir Philip Sidney like the sound of a trumpet; it is only nature that can have this effect, and please those tastes which are the most unprejudiced, or the most refined. I must, however, beg leave to dissent from so great an authority as that of Sir Philip Sidney, in the judgment which he has passed as to the rude style and evil apparel of this antiquated song; for there are several parts in it where not only the thought but the language is majestic, and the numbers sonorous; at least the apparel is much more gorgeous than many of the poets made use of in Queen Elizabeth’s time, as the reader will see in several of the following quotations.
What can be greater than either the thought or the expression in that stanza,