“What ser’es their grammars?

They’d better ta’en up spades and shools,

Or knappin hammers,”

vehemently denounces all Philology as nothing but a sort of man-trap for authors, and heartily dals Lindley Murray for “inventing it!”

It must have been at such a time, that Hilton conceived his clever portrait of C——, when he was “C in alt.” He was hardy, rough, and clumsy enough to look truly rustic—like an Ingram’s rustic chair. There was a slightness about his frame, with a delicacy of features and complexion, that associated him more with the Garden than with the Field, and made him look the Peasant of a Ferme Ornée. In this respect he was as much beneath the genuine stalwart bronzed Plough-Poet, Burns, as above the Farmer’s Boy, whom I remember to have seen in my childhood, when he lived in a miniature house, near the Shepherd and Shepherdess, now the Eagle tavern, in the City Road, and manufactured Æolian harps, and kept ducks. The Suffolk Giles had very little of the agricultural in his appearance; he looked infinitely more like a handicraftsman, town-made.

Poor Clare!—It would greatly please me to hear that he was happy and well, and thriving; but the transplanting of Peasants and Farmers’ Boys from the natural into an artificial soil, does not always conduce to their happiness, or health, or ultimate well doing. I trust the true Friends, who, with a natural hankering after poetry, because it is forbidden them, have ventured to pluck and eat of the pastoral sorts, as most dallying with the innocence of nature,—and who on that account patronised Capel Lofft’s protégé—I do trust and hope they took off whole editions of the Northamptonshire Bard. There was much about Clare for a Quaker to like; he was tender-hearted, and averse to violence. How he recoiled once, bodily-taking his chair along with him,—from a young surgeon, or surgeon’s friend, who let drop, somewhat abruptly, that he was just come “from seeing a child skinned!”—Clare, from his look of horror, evidently thought that the poor infant, like Marsyas, had been flayed alive! He was both gentle and simple. I have heard that on his first visit to London, his publishers considerately sent their porter to meet him at the inn; but when Thomas necessarily inquired of the gentleman in green, “Are you Mr. Clare?” the latter, willing to foil the traditionary tricks of London sharpers, replied to the suspicious query with “a positive negative.”[11]

The Brobdignagian next to Clare, overtopping him by the whole head and shoulders—a physical “Colossus of Literature,” the grenadier of our corps—is Allan, not Allan Ramsay, “no, nor Barbara Allan neither,” but Allan Cunningham,—“a credit,” quoth Sir Walter Scott (he might have said a long credit) “to Caledonia.” He is often called “honest Allan,” to distinguish him, perhaps, from one Allan-a-Dale, who was apt to mistake his neighbours’ goods for his own—sometimes, between ourselves, yelept the “C. of Solway,” in allusion to that favourite “Allan Water,” the Solway Sea. There is something of the true moody poetical weather observable in the barometer of his face, alternating from Variable to Showery, from Stormy to Set Fair. At times he looks gloomy and earnest and traditional—a little like a Covenanter—but he suddenly clears up and laughs a hearty laugh that lifts him an inch or two from his chair, for he rises at a joke when he sees one, like a trout at a fly, and finishes with a smart rubbing of his ample palms. He has store, too, of broad Scotch stories, and shrewd sayings; and he writes—no, he wrote rare old-new or new-old ballads. Why not now? Has his Pegasus, as he once related of his pony, run from under him? Has the Mermaid of Galloway left no little ones? Is Bonnie Lady Ann married, or May Morison dead? Thou vast formed for a poet, Allan, by nature, and by stature too, according to Pope—

“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of Art.”

And are there not Longman, or Tallboys, for thy Publishers? But alas! we are fallen on evil days for Bards and Barding, and nine tailors do more for a man than the Nine Muses. The only Lay likely to answer now-a-days would be an Ode (with the proper testimonials) to the Literary Fund!

The Reverend personage on the Editor’s right, with the studious brow, deep-set eyes, and bald crown, is the mild and modest Cary—the same who turned Dante into Miltonic English blank verse. He is sending his plate towards the partridges, which he will relish and digest as though they were the Birds of Aristophanes. He has his eye, too, on the French made-dishes[12]. Pity, shame and pity, such a Translator found no better translation in the Church! Is it possible that, in some no-popery panic, it was thought by merely being Dragoman to Purgatory he had Romed from the true faith?