——Too wild, too rude and bold of voice!
the skipping spirit, whose thoughts and words reciprocally ran
away with each other; [115]
———O be them damn'd, inexorable dog!
And for thy life let justice be accused!
and the wild fancies that follow, contrasted with Shylock's
tranquil 'I stand here for Law'.
Or, to take a case more analogous to the present subject, 120
should we hold it either fair or charitable to believe it to have
been Dante's serious wish that all the persons mentioned by
him (many recently departed, and some even alive at the time,)
should actually suffer the fantastic and horrible punishments to
which he has sentenced them in his Hell and Purgatory? [125]
Or what shall we say of the passages in which Bishop Jeremy
Taylor anticipates the state of those who, vicious themselves,
have been the cause of vice and misery to their fellow-creatures?
Could we endure for a moment to think that a spirit, like
Bishop Taylor's, burning with Christian love; that a man 130
constitutionally overflowing with pleasurable kindliness; who
scarcely even in a casual illustration introduces the image of
woman, child, or bird, but he embalms the thought with so
rich a tenderness, as makes the very words seem beauties and
fragments of poetry from Euripides or Simonides;—can we [135]
endure to think, that a man so natured and so disciplined, did
at the time of composing this horrible picture, attach a sober
feeling of reality to the phrases? or that he would have
described in the same tone of justification, in the same luxuriant
flow of phrases, the tortures about to be inflicted on a living 140
individual by a verdict of the Star-Chamber? or the still more
atrocious sentences executed on the Scotch anti-prelatists and
schismatics, at the command, and in some instances under the
very eye of the Duke of Lauderdale, and of that wretched bigot
who afterwards dishonoured and forfeited the throne of Great 145
Britain? Or do we not rather feel and understand, that these
violent words were mere bubbles, flashes and electrical
apparitions, from the magic cauldron of a fervid and ebullient fancy,
constantly fuelled by an unexampled opulence of language?
Were I now to have read by myself for the first time the poem 150
in question, my conclusion, I fully believe, would be, that the
writer must have been some man of warm feelings and active
fancy; that he had painted to himself the circumstances that
accompany war in so many vivid and yet fantastic forms, as
proved that neither the images nor the feelings were the result 155
of observation, or in any way derived from realities. I should
judge that they were the product of his own seething imagination,
and therefore impregnated with that pleasurable exultation
which is experienced in all energetic exertion of intellectual
power; that in the same mood he had generalized the causes of 160
the war, and then personified the abstract and christened it by
the name which he had been accustomed to hear most often
associated with its management and measures. I should guess
that the minister was in the author's mind at the moment of
composition as completely ἀπαθὴς, ἀναιμόσαρκος, as Anacreon's 165
grasshopper, and that he had as little notion of a real person of
flesh and blood,
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
[Paradise Lost, II. 668.]
as Milton had in the grim and terrible phantom (half person,
half allegory) which he has placed at the gates of Hell. I [170]
concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite
passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on
poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed
at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic
wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175
most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin'
Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate
spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual,
would shrink from passing the verdict even on the Devil himself,
and exclaim with poor Burns, 180
But fare ye weel, auld Nickie-ben!
Oh! wad ye tak a thought an' men!
Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken—
Still hae a stake—
I'm wae to think upon yon den, 185
Ev'n for your sake!
I need not say that these thoughts, which are here dilated,
were in such a company only rapidly suggested. Our kind
host smiled, and with a courteous compliment observed, that
the defence was too good for the cause. My voice faltered 190
a little, for I was somewhat agitated; though not so much on
my own account as for the uneasiness that so kind and friendly
a man would feel from the thought that he had been the
occasion of distressing me. At length I brought out these words:
'I must now confess, sir! that I am author of that poem. It [195]
was written some years ago. I do not attempt to justify my
past self, young as I then was; but as little as I would now
write a similar poem, so far was I even then from imagining
that the lines would be taken as more or less than a sport
of fancy. At all events, if I know my own heart, there was [200]
never a moment in my existence in which I should have been
more ready, had Mr. Pitt's person been in hazard, to interpose
my own body, and defend his life at the risk of my own.'