‘Jane. He told me he never liked books unless I read them to him. I will read them to him every evening: I will open new worlds to him, richer than those discovered by the Spaniard: I will conduct him to treasures.... O what treasures!... On which he may sleep in innocence and peace.
‘Ascham. Rather do thou walk with him, ride with him, play with him, be his faery, his page, his every thing that love and poetry have invented; but watch him well, sport with his fancies; turn them about like the ringlets round his cheeks; and if ever he meditate on power, go, toss up thy baby to his brow, and bring back his thoughts into his heart by the music of thy discourse. Teach him to live unto God and unto thee: and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.’ II. 54.
We must say we think this Dialogue is written con amore. It is imbued with the very spirit of some of those old writers, where ‘all is conscience and tender heart.’ Mr. Landor’s over-anxious mind reposes on the innocence of youth and beauty, on the simplicity of his subject, on the reverence due and willingly paid, because silently exacted, to age and antiquity! Even the quaintness, the abruptness, the wanderings and the puerility, are delightful, and happily characteristic. While we are in good humour with our author, we will extract another conversation of the same period, and distinguished by the same vein of felicitous imitation, in the sentiment of which we also go along with him heart and hand,—that between Elizabeth and Burleigh, on the trite subject of Spenser’s pension.
‘Elizabeth. I advise thee again, Churlish Cecil, how that our Edmund Spenser, whom thou calledst most uncourteously a whining whelp, hath good and solid reason for his complaint. God’s blood! shall the lady that tieth my garter and shuffleth the smock over my head, or the lord that steddieth my chair’s back while I eat, or the other that looketh to my buck-hounds lest they be mangy, be holden by me in higher esteem and estate than he who hath placed me among the bravest of past times, and will as safely and surely set me down among the loveliest in the future?
‘Cecil. Your highness must remember he carouseth fully for such deserts.... A hundred pounds a year of unclipt monies, and a butt of canary wine.[[16]]
‘Elizabeth. The monies are not enow to sustain a pair of grooms and a pair of palfreys, and more wine hath been drunken in my presence at a feast. The monies are given to such men, that they may not incline nor be obligated to any vile or lowly occupation; and the canary, that they may entertain such promising Wits as court their company and converse; and that in such manner there may be alway in our land a succession of these heirs of Fame. He hath written, not indeed with his wonted fancifulness, nor in learned and majestical language, but in homely and rustic wise, some verses which have moved me; and haply the more so, inasmuch as they demonstrate to me that his genius hath been dampened by his adversities. Read them.
‘Cecil. How much is lost when neither heart nor eye
Rose-winged Desire or fabling Hope deceives;
When boyhood with quick throb hath ceased to spy
The dubious apple in the yellow leaves;