This descant upon one of the most glorious feats of arms that even England has achieved is selected and pieced together from the magnificent verse assigned to the Chorus—‘Enter Rumour painted full of tongues’—to King Henry V., the noble piece of pageantry produced in 1598, and a famous number from the Poems Lyrick and Pastorall (circ. 1605) of Michael Drayton. ‘Look,’ says Ben Jonson, in his Vision on the Muses of his Friend, Michael Drayton:—
Look how we read the Spartans were inflamed With bold TyrtÆus' verse; when thou art named So shall our English youths urge on, and cry An Agincourt! an Agincourt! or die.
This, it is true, was in respect of another Agincourt, but we need not hesitate to appropriate it to our own: in respect of which—‘To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, His Ballad of Agincourt,’ is the poet's own description—it is to note that Drayton had no model for it; that it remains wellnigh unique in English letters for over two hundred years; and that, despite such lapses into doggerel as the third stanza, and some curious infelicities of diction which need not here be specified, it remains, with a certain Sonnet, its author's chief title to fame. Compare the ballads of The Brave Lord Willoughby and The Honour of Bristol in the seventeenth century, the song of The Arethusa in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth a choice of such TyrtÆan music as The Battle of the Baltic, Lord Tennyson's Ballad of the Fleet, and The Red Thread of Honour of the late Sir Francis Doyle.
Originally The True Character of a Happy Life: written and printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the ReliquiÆ WottonianÆ of 1651. Says Drummond of Ben Jonson, ‘Sir Edward (sic) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.’ Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that
He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find, And found them not so large as was his mind;
And when he saw that he through all had passed He died—lest he should idle grow at last.
See Izaak Walton, Lives.
From Underwoods (1640). The first, An Ode, is addressed to an innominate not yet, I believe, identified. The second is part of that Ode to the Immortal Memory of that Heroic Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, which is the first true Pindaric in the language. Gifford ascribes it to 1629, when Sir Henry died, but it seems not to have been printed before 1640. Sir Lucius Cary is the Lord Falkland of Clarendon and Horace Walpole.
From The Mad Lover (produced about 1618: published in 1640). Compare the wooden imitations of Dryden in Amboyna and elsewhere.
First printed, Mr. Bullen tells me, in 1640. Compare X. (Shirley, post, p. 20), and the cry from Raleigh's History of the World: ‘O Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the World hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the World and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched Greatness, all the Pride, Cruelty, and Ambition of Man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, “Hic Jacet.”’
This pair of ‘noble numbers,’ of brilliant and fervent lyrics, is from Hesperides, or, The Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrich, Esq. (1648).
No. 61, ‘Vertue,’ in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, 1632–33. Compare Herbert to Christopher Farrer, as reported by Izaak Walton:—‘Tell him that I do not repine, but am pleased with my want of health; and tell him, my heart is fixed on that place where true joy is only to be found, and that I long to be there, and do wait for my appointed change with hope and patience.’
From The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, printed 1659. Compare VI. (Beaumont, ante, p. 15), and Bacon, Essays, ‘On Death’: ‘But, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis, when a man hath attained worthy ends and expectations.’
Written in the November of 1637, and printed next year in the Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King. ‘In this Monody,’ the title runs, ‘the Author bewails a Learned Friend unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretells the ruine of our corrupted Clergie, then in their height.’ King, who died at five- or six-and-twenty, was a personal friend of Milton's, but the true accents of grief are inaudible in Lycidas, which is, indeed, an example as perfect as exists of Milton's capacity for turning whatever he touched into pure poetry: an arrangement, that is, of ‘the best words in the best order’; or, to go still further than Coleridge, the best words in the prescribed or inevitable sequence that makes the arrangement art. For the innumerable allusions see Professor Masson's edition of Milton (Macmillan, 1890), i. 187–201, and iii. 254–276.
The Eighth Sonnet (Masson): ‘When the Assault was Intended to the City.’ Written in 1642, with Rupert and the King at Brentford, and printed in the edition of 1645.
The Sixteenth Sonnet (Masson): ‘To the Lord General Cromwell, May, 1652: On the Proposals of Certain Ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospel.’ Printed by Philips, Life of Milton, 1694. In defence of the principle of Religious Voluntaryism, and against the intolerant Fifteen Proposals of John Owen and the majority of the Committee.
The Eighteenth Sonnet (Masson). ‘Written in 1655,’ says Masson, and referring ‘to the persecution instituted, in the early part of the year, by Charles Emmanuel II., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont, against his Protestant subjects of the valleys of the Cottian Alps.’ In January, an edict required them to turn Romanists or quit the country out of hand; it was enforced with such barbarity that Cromwell took the case of the sufferers in hand; and so vigorous was his action that the Edict was withdrawn and a convention was signed (August 1655) by which the Vaudois were permitted to worship as they would. Printed in 1673.
The Nineteenth Sonnet (Masson) ‘may have been written any time between 1652 and 1655,’ the first years of Milton's blindness, ‘but it follows the Sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre in Milton's own volume of 1673.’
From the choric parts of Samson Agonistes (i.e. the Agonist, or Wrestler), first printed in 1671.
Of uncertain date; first printed by Watson 1706–11. The version given here is Emerson's (which is shorter than the original), with the exception of the last stanza, which is Napier's (Montrose, i. Appendices). Napier is at great pains to prove that the ballad is allegorical, and that Montrose's ‘dear and only love’ was that unhappy King whose Epitaph, the famous Great, Good, and Just, he is said—falsely—to have written with his sword. Be this as it may, the verses have a second part, which has dropped into oblivion. For the Great Marquis, who reminded De Retz of the men in Plutarch's Lives, was not averse from the practice of poetry, and wrote, besides these numbers, a prayer (‘Let them bestow on every airth a limb’), a ‘pasquil,’ a pleasant string of conceits in praise of woman, a set of vehement and fiery memorial stanzas on the King, and one copy of verses more.
To Lucasta going to the Wars and To Althea from Prison are both, I believe, from Lovelace's Lucasta (1645).
First printed by Captain Thomson, Works (1776), from a copy he held, on what seems excellent authority, to be in Marvell's hand. The true title is A Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650). It is always ascribed to Marvell (whose verse was first collected and printed by his widow in 1681), but there are faint doubts as to the authorship.
Poems (1681). This elegant and romantic lyric appears to have been inspired by a passage in the life of John Oxenbridge, of whom, ‘religionis causa oberrantem,’ it is enough to note that, after migrating to Bermudas, where he had a church, and being ‘ejected’ at the Restoration from an English cure, he went to Surinam (1662–67), to Barbadoes (1667), and to New England (1669), where he was made pastor of ‘the First Church of Boston’ (1670), and where he died in 1674. These details are from Mr. Grosart's Marvell (1875), i. 82–85, and ii. 5–8.
Dryden's second Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day, Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Sound, as it is called, was written and printed in 1697. As it was designed for music (it was set by Jeremiah Clarke), the closing lines of every strophe are repeated by way of chorus. I have removed these repetitions as impertinent to the effect of the poem in print, and as interrupting the rushing vehemency of the narrative. The incident described is the burning of Persepolis.
Written early in 1782, in memory of Robert Levett: ‘an old and faithful friend,’ says Johnson, and withal ‘a very useful and very blameless man.’ Excepting for the perfect odes of Cowper (post, pp. 85, 86), in these excellent and affecting verses the ‘classic’ note is audible for the last time in this book until we reach the Iphigeneia of Walter Savage Landor, who was a lad of seven at the date of their composition. They were written seventeen years after the publication of the Reliques (1765), and a full quarter century after the appearance of The Bard (1757); but in style they proceed from the age of Pope. For the rest, the Augustan Muse was an utter stranger to the fighting inspiration. Her gait was pedestrian, her purpose didactic, her practice neat and formal: and she prosed of England's greatest captain, the victor of Blenheim, as tamely as himself had been ‘a parson in a tye-wig’—himself, and not the amiable man of letters who acted as her amanuensis for the nonce.
Chevy Chase is here preferred to Otterbourne as appealing more directly to Englishmen. The text is Percy's, and the movement like that of all the English ballads, is jog-trot enough. Sidney's confession—that he never heard it, even from a blind fiddler, but it stirred him like the sound of a trumpet—refers, no doubt, to an earlier version than the present, which appears to date from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Compare The Brave Lord Willoughby and The Honour of Bristol (post, pp. 60, 73).
First printed by Percy. The text I give is, with some few variants, that of the vastly better version in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3). Of the ‘history’ of the ballad the less said the better. The argument is neatly summarised by Mr. Allingham, p. 376 of The Ballad Book (‘Golden Treasury,’ 1879).
- skeely
- skilful
- white monie
- silver
- gane
- would suffice
- half-fou
- the eighth part of a peck
- gurly
- rough
- lap
- sprang
- bout
- bolt
- twine
- thread, i.e. canvas
- wap
- warp
- flattered
- ‘fluttered, or rather, floated’ (Scott)
- kaims
- combs
Printed by Percy, ‘from an old black-letter copy; with some conjectural emendations.’ At the suggestion of my friend, the Rev. Mr. Hunt, I have restored the original readings, as in truer consonancy with the vainglorious, insolent, and swaggering ballad spirit. As for the hero, Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby of Eresby, described as ‘one of the Queen's best swordsmen’ and ‘a great master of the art military,’ he succeeded Leicester in the command in the Low Countries in 1587, distinguished himself repeatedly in fight with the Spaniards, and died in 1601. ‘Both Norris and Turner were famous among the military men of that age’ (Percy). In the Roxburgh Ballads the full title of the broadside—which is ‘printed for S. Coles in Vine St., near Hatton Garden,’—is as follows:—‘A true relation of a famous and bloudy Battell fought in Flanders by the noble and valiant Lord Willoughby with 1500 English against 40,000 Spaniards, wherein the English obtained a notable victory for the glory and renown of our nation. Tune: Lord Willoughby.’
First printed by Tom D'Urfey, Wit and Mirth, etc. (1720), vi. 289–91; revised by Robert Burns for The Scots Musical Magazine, and again by Allan Cunningham for The Songs of Scotland; given with many differences, ‘long current in Selkirkshire,’ in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The present version is a rifaccimento from Burns and Scott. It is worth noting that GrÆme (pronounced ‘Grime’), and Graham are both forms of one name, which name was originally Grimm, and that, according to some, the latter orthography is the privilege of the chief of the clan.
First printed in the Minstrelsy. This time the ‘history’ is authentic enough. It happened early in 1596, when Salkeld, the Deputy Warden of the Western Marches, seized under truce the person of William Armstrong of Kinmont—elsewhere described as ‘Will Kinmonde the common thieffe’—and haled him to Carlisle Castle, whence he was rescued—‘with shouting and crying and sound of trumpet’—by the Laird of Buccleuch, Keeper of Liddesdale, and a troop of two hundred horse. ‘The Queen of England,’ says Spottiswoode, ‘having notice sent her of what was done, stormed not a little’; but see the excellent summary compiled by Scott (who confesses to having touched up the ballad) for the Minstrelsy.
- Haribee
- the gallows hill at Carlisle
- reiver
- a border thief, one of a class which lived sparely, fought stoutly, entertained the strictest sense of honour and justice, went ever on horseback, and carried the art of cattle-lifting to the highest possible point of perfection (National Observer, 30th May, 1891)
- yett
- gate
- lawing
- reckoning
- basnet
- helmet
- curch
- coif or cap
- lightly
- to scorn
- in a lowe
- on fire
- slocken
- to slake
- splent
- shoulder-piece
- spauld
- shoulder
- broken men
- outlaws
- marshal men
- officers of law
- rank reiver
- common thief
- herry
- harry
- corbie
- crow
- lear
- learning
- row-footed
- rough-shod
- spait
- flood
- garred
- made
- slogan
- battle-cry
- stear
- stir
- saft
- light
- fleyed
- frightened
- bairns
- children
- spier
- ask
- hente
- lifted, haled
- maill
- rent
- furs
- furrows
- trew
- trust
- Christentie
- Christendom
Communicated by Mr. Hunt,—who dates it about 1626—from Seyer's Memoirs, Historical and Topographical, of Bristol and its Neighbourhood (1821–23). The full title is The Honour of Bristol: shewing how the Angel Gabriel of Bristol fought with three ships, who boarded as many times, wherein we cleared our decks and killed five hundred of their men, and wounded many more, and made them fly into Cales, when we lost but three men, to the Honour of the Angel Gabriel of Bristol. To the tune Our Noble King in his Progress. Cales (13), pronounced as a dissyllable, is of course Cadiz. It is fair to add that this spirited and amusing piece of doggerel has been severely edited.
From the Minstrelsy, where it is ‘given, without alteration or improvement, from the most accurate copy that could be recovered.’ The story runs that Helen Irving (or Helen Bell), of Kirkconnell in Dumfriesshire, was beloved by Adam Fleming, and (as some say) Bell of Blacket House; that she favoured the first but her people encouraged the second; that she was thus constrained to tryst with Fleming by night in the churchyard, ‘a romantic spot, almost surrounded by the river Kirtle’; that they were here surprised by the rejected suitor, who fired at his rival from the far bank of the stream; that Helen, seeking to shield her lover, was shot in his stead; and that Fleming, either there and then, or afterwards in Spain, avenged her death on the body of her slayer. Wordsworth has told the story in a copy of verses which shows, like so much more of his work, how dreary a poetaster he could be.
This epic-in-little, as tremendous an invention as exists in verse, is from the Minstrelsy: ‘as written down from tradition by a lady’ (C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe).
- corbies
- crows
- fail-dyke
- wall of turf
- hause-bane
- breast-bone
- theek
- thatch
Begun in 1755, and finished and printed (with The Progress of Poetry) in 1757. ‘Founded,’ says the poet, ‘on a tradition current in Wales, that Edward the First, when he concluded the conquest of that country, ordered all the bards that fell into his hands to be put to death.’ The ‘agonising king’ (line 56) is Edward II.; the ‘she-wolf of France’ (57), Isabel his queen; the ‘scourge of heaven’ (60), Edward III.; the ‘sable warrior’ (67), Edward the Black Prince. Lines 75–82 commemorate the rise and fall of Richard II.; lines 83–90, the Wars of the Roses, the murders in the Tower, the ‘faith’ of Margaret of Anjou, the ‘fame’ of Henry V., the ‘holy head’ of Henry VI. The ‘bristled boar’ (93) is symbolical of Richard III.; ‘half of thy heart’ (99) of Eleanor of Castile, ‘who died a few years after the conquest of Wales.’ Line 110 celebrates the accession of the House of Tudor in fulfilment of the prophecies of Merlin and Taliessin; lines 115–20, Queen Elizabeth; lines 128–30, Shakespeare; lines 131–32, Milton; and the ‘distant warblings’ of line 133, ‘the succession of poets after Milton's time’ (Gray).
Written, the one in September 1782 (in the August of which year the Royal George (108 guns) was overset in Portsmouth Harbour with the loss of close on a thousand souls), and the other ‘after reading Hume's History in 1780’ (Benham).
It is worth recalling that at one time Walter Scott attributed this gallant lyric, which he printed in the Minstrelsy, to a ‘greater Graham’—the Marquis of Montrose.
Of these, the first, Blow High, Blow Low, was sung in The Seraglio (1776), a forgotten opera; the second, said to have been inspired by the death of the author's brother, a naval officer, in The Oddities (1778)—a ‘table-entertainment,’ where Dibdin was author, actor, singer, musician, accompanist, everything but audience and candle-snuffer. They are among the first in time of his sea-ditties.
It is told (Life, W. H. Curran, 1819) that Curran met a deserter, drank a bottle, and talked of his chances, with him, and put his ideas and sentiments into this song.
The Arethusa, Mr. Hannay tells me, being attached to Keppel's fleet at the mouth of the Channel, was sent to order the Belle Poule, which was cruising with some smaller craft in search of Keppel's ships, to come under his stern. The Belle Poule (commanded by M. Chadeau de la Clocheterie) refusing, the Arethusa (Captain Marshall) opened fire. The ships were fairly matched, and in the action which ensued the Arethusa appears to have got the worst of it. In the end, after about an hour's fighting, Keppel's liners came up, and the Belle Poule made off. She was afterwards driven ashore by a superior English force, and it is an odd coincidence that in 1789 the Arethusa ran ashore off Brest during her action (10th March) with l'Aigrette. As for the French captain, he lived to command l'Hercule, De Grasse's leading ship in the great sea-fight (12th April 1782) with Rodney off Dominica, where he was killed.
From the Songs of Experience (1794).
Scots Musical Museum, 1788. Adapted from, or rather suggested by, the Farewell, which Macpherson, a cateran ‘of great personal strength and musical accomplishment,’ is said to have played and sung at the gallows foot; thereafter breaking his violin across his knee and submitting his neck to the hangman.
- spring
- a melody in quick time
- sturt
- molestation
Museum, 1796. Burns told Thomson and Mrs. Dunlop that this noble and most moving song was old; but nobody believed him then, and nobody believes him now.
- pint-stoup
- pint-mug
- braes
- hill-sides
- gowans
- daisies
- paidl't
- paddled
- burn
- brook
- fiere
- friend, companion
- guid-willie
- well-meant, full of good-will
- waught
- draught
The first four lines are old. The rest were written apparently in 1788, when the poet sent this song and Auld Lang Syne to Mrs. Dunlop. It appeared in the Museum, 1790.
- tassie
- a cup; Fr. ‘tasse’
About 1777–80: printed 1801. ‘One of my juvenile works,’ says Burns. ‘I do not think it very remarkable, either for its merits or demerits.’ But Hazlitt thought the world of it, and now it passes for one of Burns's masterpieces.
- trysted
- appointed
- stoure
- dust and din
Museum, 1796. Attributed, in one shape or another, to a certain Captain Ogilvie. Sharpe, too, printed a broadside in which the third stanza (used more than once by Sir Walter) is found as here. But Scott Douglas (Burns, iii. 173) has ‘no doubt that this broadside was printed after 1796,’ and as it stands the thing is assuredly the work of Burns. The refrain and the metrical structure have been used by Scott (Rokeby, IV. 28), Carlyle, Charles Kingsley (Dolcino to Margaret), and Mr. Swinburne (A Reiver's Neck Verse) among others.
Of the first four numbers, the high-water mark of Wordsworth's achievement, all four were written in 1802; the second and third were published in 1803; the first and fourth in 1807. The Ode to Duty was written in 1805, and published in 1807, to which year belongs that Song for the Feast of Brougham Castle, from which I have extracted the excellent verses here called Two Victories.
The first three numbers are from Marmion (1808): I. Introduction; V. 12; and VI. 18–20, 25–27, and 33–34. The next is from The Lady of the Lake (1810), I. 1–9: The Outlaw is from Rokeby (1813), III. 16; the Pibroch was published in 1816; The Omnipotent and The Red Harlaw are from The Antiquary (1816), and the Farewell from The Pirate (1821). As for Bonny Dundee, that incomparable ditty, it was written as late as 1825. ‘The air of Bonny Dundee running in my head to-day,’ he writes under date of 22d December (Diary, 1890, i. 61), ‘I wrote a few verses to it before dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688–9. I wonder if they are good.’ See The Doom of Devorgoil (1830), Note A, Act II. sc. 2.
This unsurpassed piece of art, in which a music the most exquisite is used to body forth a set of suggestions that seem dictated by the very Spirit of Romance, was produced, under the influence of ‘an anodyne,’ as early as 1797. Coleridge, who calls it Kubla Khan: A Vision within a Dream, avers that, having fallen asleep in his chair over a sentence from Purchas's Pilgrimage—‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereto; and thus ten miles of ground were enclosed with a wall,’—he remained unconscious for about three hours, ‘during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than three hundred lines’; ‘if that,’ he adds, ‘can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.’ On awakening, he proceeded to write out his ‘composition,’ and had set down as much of it as is printed here, when ‘he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock,’ whose departure, an hour after, left him wellnigh oblivious of the rest. This confession, which is dated 1816, has been generally accepted as true; but Coleridge had a trick of dreaming dreams about himself which makes doubt permissible.
From the Hellenics (written in Latin, 1814–20, and translated into English at the instance of Lady Blessington), 1846. See Colvin, Landor (‘English Men of Letters’), pp. 189, 190.
Of the first, ‘Napoleon and the British Sailor’ (The Pilgrim of Glencoe, 1842), Campbell writes that the ‘anecdote has been published in several public journals, both French and English.’ ‘My belief,’ he continues, ‘in its authenticity was confirmed by an Englishman, long resident in Boulogne, lately telling me that he remembered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the place.’ Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to Hohenlinden, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809) is truly one of ‘the glories of our birth and state.’ The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it seem, at least gets rid of the chief who gave a country's wounds relief by stopping a battle, eliminates the mermaid and her song (the song that ‘condoles’), and ends the lyric on as sonorous and romantic a word as even Shakespeare ever used.
Corn Law Rhymes, 1831.
From that famous and successful forgery, Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810), written when Allan was a working mason in Dumfriesshire. I have omitted a stanza as inferior to the rest.
English Songs and other Small Poems, 1834.
The first is from the Hebrew Melodies (1815); the next is selected from The Siege of Corinth (1816), 22–33; Alhama (idem) is a spirited yet faithful rendering of the Romance muy Doloroso del Sitio y Toma de Alhama, which existed both in Spanish and in Arabic, and whose effect was such that ‘it was forbidden to be sung by the Moors on the pain of death in Granada’ (Byron); No. LXXV., surely one of the bravest songs in the language, was addressed (idem) to Thomas Moore; the tremendous Race with Death is lifted out of the Ode in Venice (1819); for the next number see Don Juan, III. (1821); the last of all, ‘Stanzas inscribed On this day I completed my Thirty-sixth year’ (1824), is the last verse that Byron wrote.
Napier has described the terrific effect of Napoleon's pursuit; but in the operations before Corunna he was distanced, if not out-generalled, by Sir John Moore, and ere the first days of 1809 he gave his command to Soult, who pressed us vainly through the hill-country between Leon and Gallicia, and got beaten at Corunna for his pains. Wolfe, who was an Irish parson and died of consumption, wrote some spirited verses on the flight of Busaco, but this admirable elegy—‘I will show you,’ said Byron to Shelley (Medwin, ii. 154) ‘one you have never seen, that I consider little if at all inferior to the best, the present prolific age has brought forth’—remains his passport to immortality. It was printed, not by the author, in an Irish newspaper; was copied all over Britain; was claimed by liar after liar in succession; and has been reprinted more often, perhaps, than any poem of the century.
From Snarleyow, or the Dog Fiend (1837). Compare Nelson to Collingwood: ‘Victory, 25th June, 1805,—May God bless you and send you alongside the Santissima Trinidad.’
The story of Casabianca is, I believe, untrue; but the intention of the singer, alike in this number and in the next, is excellent. Each indeed is, in its way, a classic. The Mayflower sailed from Southampton in 1626.
This magnificent sonnet, On First Reading Chapman's Homer, was printed in 1817. The ‘Cortez’ of the eleventh verse is a mistake; the discoverer of the Pacific being NuÑez de Balboa.
The Lays are dated 1824; they have passed through edition after edition; and if Matthew Arnold disliked and contemned them (see Sir F. H. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 178–87), the general is wise enough to know them by heart. But a book that is ‘a catechism to fight’ (in Jonson's phrase) would have sinned against itself had it taken no account of them, and I have given Horatius in its integrity: if only, as Landor puts it,
To show the British youth, who ne'er Will lag behind, what Romans were, When all the Tuscans and their Lars Shouted, and shook the towers of Mars.
As for The Armada, I have preferred it to The Battle of Naseby, first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both; and, second, because it is so brilliant an outcome of that capacity for dealing with proper names which Macaulay, whether poet or not, possesses in common with none but certain among the greater poets. For The Last Buccaneer (a curious anticipation of some effects of Mr. Rudyard Kipling), and that noble thing, the Jacobite's Epitaph, they are dated 1839 and 1845 respectively.
The Poetical Works of Robert Stephen Hawker (Kegan Paul, 1879). By permission of Mrs. R. S. Hawker. ‘With the exception of the choral lines—
And shall Trelawney die? There's twenty thousand Cornishmen Will know the reason why!—
and which have been, ever since the imprisonment by James II. of the Seven Bishops—one of them Sir Jonathan Trelawney—a popular proverb throughout Cornwall, the whole of this song was composed by me in the year 1825. I wrote it under a stag-horned oak in Sir Beville's Walk in Stowe Wood. It was sent by me anonymously to a Plymouth paper, and there it attracted the notice of Mr. Davies Gilbert, who reprinted it at his private press at Eastbourne under the avowed impression that it was the original ballad. It had the good fortune to win the eulogy of Sir Walter Scott, who also deemed it to be the ancient song. It was praised under the same persuasion by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Dickens.’—Author's Note.
From The Sea Side and the Fire Side, 1851; Birds of Passage, Flight the First, and Flight the Second; and Flower de Luce, 1866. Of these four examples of the picturesque and taking art of Longfellow, I need say no more than that all are printed in their integrity, with the exception of the first. This I leave the lighter by a moral and an application, both of which, superfluous or not, are remote from the general purpose of this book: a confession in which I may include the following number, Mr. Whittier's Barbara Frietchie (In War-Time, 1863.)
Nineteenth Century, March 1878; Ballads and other Poems, 1880. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, to whom I am indebted for some of my choicest numbers. For the story of Sir Richard Grenville's heroic death, ‘in the last of August,’ 1591—after the Revenge had endured the onset of ‘fifteen several armadas,’ and received some ‘eight hundred shot of great artillerie,’—see Hakluyt (1598–1600), ii. 169–176, where you will find it told with singular animation and directness by Sir Walter Raleigh, who held a brief against the Spaniards in Sir Richard's case as always. To Sir Richard's proposal to blow up the ship the master gunner ‘readily condescended,’ as did ‘divers others’; but the captain was of ‘another opinion,’ and in the end Sir Richard was taken aboard the ship of the Spanish admiral, Don Alfonso de Bazan, who used him well and honourably until he died: leaving to his friends the ‘comfort that being dead he hath not outlived his own honour,’ and that he had nobly shown how false and vain, and therefore how contrary to God's will, the ‘ambitious and bloudie practices of the Spaniards’ were.
Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Included at Lord Tennyson's own suggestion. For the noble feat of arms (25th October 1854) thus nobly commemorated, see Kinglake (v. i. 102–66). ‘The three hundred of the Heavy Brigade who made this famous charge were the Scots Greys and the second squadron of Enniskillings, the remainder of the “Heavy Brigade” subsequently dashing up to their support. The “three” were Scarlett's aide-de-camp, Elliot, and the trumpeter, and Shegog the orderly, who had been close behind him.’—Author's Note.
The Return of the Guards, and other Poems, 1866. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. As to the first, which deals with an incident of the war with China, and is presumably referred to in 1860, ‘Some Seiks and a private of the Buffs (or East Kent Regiment) having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning they were brought before the authorities and commanded to perform the Ko tou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head and his body thrown upon a dunghill.’—Quoted by the author from The Times. The Elgin of line 6 is Henry Bruce, eighth Lord Elgin (1811–1863), then Ambassador to China, and afterwards Governor-General of India. Compare Theology in Extremis (post, p. 309). Of the second, which Mr. Saintsbury describes ‘as one of the most lofty, insolent, and passionate things concerning this matter that our time has produced,’ Sir Francis notes that the incident—no doubt a part of the conquest of Sindh—was told him by Sir Charles Napier, and that ‘Truckee’ (line 12) = ‘a stronghold in the Desert, supposed to be unassailable and impregnable.’
By permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co. Dramatic Lyrics, 1845; Cornhill Magazine, June 1871, and Pacchiarotto, 1876, Works, iv. and xiv. I can find nothing about HervÉ Riel.
The two first are from the ‘Song of Myself,’ Leaves of Grass (1855); the others from Drum Taps (1865). See Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, 1884), pp. 60, 62–63, 222, and 246.
By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Dated severally 1857 and 1859.
Edinburgh Courant, 1852. Compare The Loss of the ‘Birkenhead’ in The Return of the Guards, and other Poems (Macmillan, 1883), pp. 256–58. Of the troopship Birkenhead I note that she sailed from Queenstown on the 7th January 1852, with close on seven hundred souls on board; that the most of these were soldiers—of the Twelfth Lancers, the Sixtieth Rifles, the Second, Sixth, Forty-third, Forty-fifth, Seventy-third, Seventy-fourth, and Ninety-first Regiments; that she struck on a rock (26th February 1852) off Simon's Bay, South Africa; that the boats would hold no more than a hundred and thirty-eight, and that, the women and children being safe, the men that were left—four hundred and fifty-four, all told—were formed on deck by their officers, and went down with the ship, true to colours and discipline till the end.
By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. From Empedocles on Etna (1853). As regards the second number, it may be noted that Sohrab, being in quest of his father Rustum, to whom he is unknown, offers battle as one of the host of the Tartar King Afrasiab, to any champion of the Persian Kai Khosroo. The challenge is accepted by Rustum, who fights as a nameless knight (like Wilfrid of Ivanhoe at the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Ashby), and so becomes the unwitting slayer of his son. For the story of the pair the poet refers his readers to Sir John Malcom's History of Persia. See Poems, by Matthew Arnold (Macmillan), i. 268, 269.
Ionica (Allen, 1891). By permission of the Author. School Fencibles (1861) was ‘printed, not published, in 1877.’ The Ballad for a Boy, Mr. Cory writes, ‘was never printed till this year.’
By permission of the Author. This ballad, which was suggested, Mr. Meredith tells me, by the story of Bendigeid Vran, the son of Llyr, in the Mabinogion (iii. 121–9), is reprinted from Modern Love (1862), but it originally appeared (circ. 1860) in Once a Week, a forgotten print the source of not a little unforgotten stuff—as Evan Harrington and the first part of The Cloister and the Hearth.
From the fourth and last book of Sigurd the Volsung, 1877. By permission of the Author. Hogni and Gunnar, being the guests of King Atli, husband to their sister Gudrun, refused to tell him the whereabouts of the treasure of Fafnir, whom Sigurd slew; and this is the manner of their taking and the beginning of King Atli's vengeance.
English Illustrated Magazine, January 1890, and Lyrical Poems (Macmillan, 1891). By permission of the Author: with whose sanction I have omitted four lines from the last stanza.
By permission of Sir Alfred Lyall. Cornhill Magazine, September 1868, and Verses Written in India (Kegan Paul, 1889). The second title is: A Soliloquy that may have been delivered in India, June 1857; and this is further explained by the following ‘extract from an Indian newspaper’:—‘They would have spared life to any of their English prisoners who should consent to profess Mahometanism by repeating the usual short formula; but only one half-caste cared to save himself that way.’ Then comes the description, Moriturus Loquitur, and next the poem.
From Songs before Sunrise (Chatto and Windus, 1877), and the third series of Poems and Ballads (Chatto and Windus, 1889). By permission of the Author.
The Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte (Chatto and Windus, 1886). By permission of Author and Publisher. The ReveillÉ was spoken before a Union Meeting at San Francisco at the beginning of the Civil War and appeared in a volume of the Author's poems in 1867. What the Bullet Sang is much later work: dating, thinks Mr. Harte, from '79 or '80.
St. James's Magazine, October 1877, and At the Sign of the Lyre (Kegan Paul, 1889). By permission of the Author.
St. James's Gazette, 20th July 1888, and Grass of Parnassus (Longmans, 1888). By permission of Author and Publisher. Written in memory of Gordon's betrayal and death, but while there were yet hopes and rumours of escape.
Underwoods (Chatto and Windus, 1886). By permission of the Publishers.
Love's Looking-Glass (Percival, 1891). By permission of the Author.
Macmillan's Magazine, November 1889. By permission of the Author. Kamal Khan is a Pathan; and the scene of this exploit—which, I am told, is perfectly consonant with the history and tradition of Guides and Pathans both—is the North Frontier country in the Peshawar-Kohat region, say, between Abazai and Bonair, behind which is stationed the Punjab Irregular Frontier Force—‘the steel head of the lance couched for the defence of India.’ As for the Queen's Own Corps of Guides, to the general ‘God's Own Guides’ (from its exclusiveness and gallantry), it comprehends both horse and foot, is recruited from Sikhs, Pathans, Rajputs, Afghans, all the fighting races, is officered both by natives and by Englishmen, and in all respects is worthy of this admirable ballad.
- Ressaldar
- the native leader of a ressala or troop of horse
- Tongue
- a barren and naked strath—‘what geologists call a fan’
- Gut of the Tongue
- the narrowest part of the strath
- dust-devils
- dust-clouds blown by a whirlwind
National Observer, 4th April 1891. At the burning of the Court-House at Cork, ‘Above the portico a flagstaff bearing the Union Jack remained fluttering in the air for some time, but ultimately when it fell the crowds rent the air with shouts, and seemed to see significance in the incident.’—Daily Papers. Author's Note.
