Dorothy, gift of God, it was not meant,
That thy bright light should shine upon the few,
Within the straitened circle of thy life;
Failing to reach mankind and represent
His own ideal, manifest in you,
Of holy woman and the perfect wife.”
I was a sonneteer myself, and therefore critical. This effort (was it my uncle’s?) did not seem to me of portentous genius. I hate your sonneteer who has more than two rhymes in his octett. It proves him a coward at the measure, one who is burdened by those shackles in which he should move as skilfully and lightly as a clever dancer bound to the knees on stilts. Those two subdominant rhymes were misplaced; so was the sudden stop in the sixth line, the violent cæsura in the sense, sending a cold shiver through the cultured mind. I did not admire the sestett either in its arrangement, but much liberty has always been allowed in the management of the sestett. For an amateur sonnet, I had read, nay, I will be just, I had written worse.
But whom does this sonnet describe? Dorothy Osborne, who is she? Lady Temple, answers Courtenay, and says little more. But she has written her own life, and painted her own character, as none else could have done it for her, in letters written to her husband before marriage. When I had read these, I pitied the unknown, and forbore to criticise his sonnet. I, too, could have written sonnets, roundels, ballads by the score to celebrate her praise. But I remembered Pope’s chill warning about those who “rush in where angels fear to tread,” and, full of humility I did not apply it to my friend the sonneteer, but—to myself.
These letters of Dorothy Osborne were, at one time, lying at Coddenham Vicarage, Suffolk. Forty-two of them has Courtenay transferred to an appendix, without arrangement or any form of editing, as he candidly confesses, but not without misgivings as to how they will be received by a people thirsting to read the details of the negotiations which took place in connection with the Triple Alliance. Poor Courtenay! Did he live to learn that the world had other things to do than pore over dull excerpts from inhuman state papers? For the lighting of fires, for the rag-bag, or, if of stout paper or parchment, for the due covering of preserves and pickles, much of these Temple correspondences and treaties would be eminently fitted, but for the making of books they are all but useless; book-making of such material is not to be achieved by Courtenay, nay, nor by the cunningest publisher’s devil in Grub Street. Here, beneath poor blind Courtenay’s eye, were papers and negotiations, not about a triple alliance between states, but concerning a dual alliance between souls. Here, even for the dull historian, were chat, gossip, the witty portrayal of neighbours, the customs, manners, thoughts, the very life itself, of English human beings of that time, set out by the living pen of Dorothy Osborne. Surely it was within his power at least to edit carefully for us those letters? Alas, no! All that he can do is to produce a book in two unreadable octavo volumes, and to set down in an appendix, not without misgivings but forty-two of these charming letters.
But I will dare to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all. I cannot, I know, make her glorious by my pen, but I can let her own pen have free play, and try to draw from her letters, and what other data there are at hand, some living presentment of a beautiful woman, pure in dissolute days, passing a quiet domestic existence among her own family; a loyalist, leading, in Cromwell’s days, a home-life of which those who draw their history from the pleasant pages of Sir Walter’s historical novels can have little idea. To confirmed novel readers it will be, I think, an awakening to learn that there was ever cessation of the “clashing of rapiers” and “heavy tramp of cavalry” in the middle of the seventeenth century.