‘This work is Nature’s; every tittle in’t
She wrote, and gave it Richardson to print.’
James Montgomery, in a well-turned quatrain, said of Burns that he ‘pass’d through life ... a brilliant trembling northern light,’ but that ‘thro’ years to come’ he would shine from far ‘a fix’d unsetting polar star.’ It will be remembered that, in another quatrain, Lord Erskine besought his contemporaries to ‘mourn not for Anacreon dead,’ for they rejoiced in the possession of ‘an Anacreon Moore.’ James Smith wrote of Miss Edgeworth that her work could never be anonymous—‘Thy writings ... must bring forth the name of their author to light.’ And so on, and so on: the poetry of compliment presents many such conceits.
A treatise, indeed, might be written on the epigraphs in which poets have praised their lady-loves or their friends—from Herrick’s Julia to, say, Tennyson’s General Gordon. Rather, however, let us turn to what the bards have been at pains to say about themselves, recalling, for example, Herrick’s ‘Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste,’ and Matthew Prior’s triplet ‘On Himself.’ Colman the Younger wrote:
‘My muse and I, ere youth and spirits fled,
Sat up together many a night, no doubt;
But now I’ve sent the poor old lass to bed,
Simply because my fire is going out.’
But how inferior is this, both in feeling and in expression, to the dignified epigraph in which Landor celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birthday:
‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.’
In the couplet and quatrain of pure sentiment and reflection, some of the most delightful of our poetry is embodied. Herrick was conspicuously fond of this species of verse, and his works abound in gems of style and fancy, the difficulty being, not to find them, but to select from them. The beauty of one is apt to be rivalled by that of its neighbour. Thus we find on one page:
‘When words we want, Love teaches to indite;
And what we blush to speak, she bids us write.’
And on another:
‘Love’s of itself too sweet; the best of all
Is when love’s honey has a dash of gall.’