THE AUTHOR MORALIZES UPON THE VANITY OF FAME; AND WISHES THAT HE HAD BOSWELLIZED WHILE IT WAS IN HIS POWER TO HAVE DONE SO.
Mucho tengo que llorar,
Mucho tengo que reir.
GONGORA.
It is a melancholy consideration that Fame is as unjust as Fortune. To Fortune indeed injustice ought not to be imputed, for Fortune is blind, and disposes of her favours at random. But Fame with all her eyes and ears and tongues, overlooks more than she perceives, and sees things often in a wrong light, and hears and reports as many falsehoods as truths.
We need not regret that the warriors who lived before Agamemnon should be forgotten, for the world would have been no worse if many of those who lived after him had been forgotten in like manner. But the wise also perish, and leave no memorial. What do we know of “Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman and Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol,” whom it was accounted an honour for Solomon to have excelled in wisdom? Where is now the knowledge for which Gwalchmai ab Gwyar, and Llechau ab Arthur, and Rhiwallawn Wallt Banadlen were leashed in a Triad as the three Physiologists or Philosophers of the Isle of Britain; because “there was nothing of which they did not know its material essence, and its properties, whether of kind, or of part, or of quality, or of compound, or of coincidence, or of tendency, or of nature, or of essence, whatever it might be?” Where is their knowledge? where their renown? They are now “merely nuda nomina, naked names!” “For there is no remembrance of the wise, more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is, in the days to come shall all be forgotten!”
——If our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.1
The Seven Wise Men have left almost as little as the Sybils.
1 SHAKESPEAR.
“What satisfaction,” says Sir John Hawkins, “does the mind receive from the recital of the names of those who are said to have increased the chords of the primitive lyre from four to seven, Chorebus, Hyagius, and Terpander? Or when we are told that Olympus invented the enarmonic genus, as also the Harmatian mood? Or that Eumolpus and Melampus were excellent musicians, and Pronomus, Antigenides and Lamia celebrated players on the flute? In all these instances, where there are no circumstances that constitute a character, and familiarize to us the person spoken of, we naturally enquire who he is, and for want of farther information become indifferent as to what is recorded of him.” The same most learned and judicious historian of his favourite art, laments that most of the many excellent musicians who flourished in the ages preceding our own, are all but utterly forgotten. “Of Tye,” he says, “of Redford, Shephard, Douland, Weelkes, Welbye, Est, Bateson, Hilton and Brewer, we know little more than their names. These men composed volumes which are now dispersed and irretrievably lost; yet did their compositions suggest those ideas of the power and efficacy of music, and those descriptions of its manifold charms, that occur in the verses of our best poets.”