evident that the author has studied the methods of 'the excellent Racine,' and has realised 'the perfection of his dramatic art.' There are perhaps too many in view of 'The ostentatious virtues which still press For notice and for praise,' as she says of them, in rebuke and without self-knowledge. But it seemed to her that the Muse, in her time, had drunk deep of some 'delicious ruin,' as she says with a curiously modern choice of epithet, and she prays 'for some balm Of sovereign power, to raise the drooping Muse To all the health of Virtue.' The Muse, quieted by her balm, sinks into a state of very even health throughout these tiny plays, better fitted, as she is aware, for the nursery than for the stage. Her footnote, touching the question, shows foresight and is a permanent lesson. 'It would not be easy,' she says, 'nor perhaps proper, to introduce sacred tragedies on the English stage. The pious would think it profane, while the profane would think it dull.' It is for the supposed dulness that the name of Hannah More is mockingly, but unjustly, perpetuated. She gives one of her Bible kings this expressive line: 'That world, whose gaze makes half the charm of greatness'; and we discover, in another play, a princess thanking her gods that they have made mercy a keen rapture exquisite,' before they imposed it on the virtuous as a duty. There can be no dulness where so alert a psychology is discernible between the sober lines, which are scarcely, all the same, as Johnson said of them, the production of 'the most powerful versificatrix in the English language.' WILLIAM HAYLEY (1745-1820) 1 HAYLEY is known to us now chiefly as a good but unsatisfactory friend to Blake, and for the amusing title of his 'Triumphs of Temper.' In his time he had a serious reputation, which he took with great solemnity. In the very personal preface to his 'Triumphs' he expresses the 'kind of duty incumbent on those who devote themselves to Poetry, to raise, if possible, the dignity of declining Art.' 'I wished indeed (but I fear most ineffectually),' he adds, 'for powers to unite some touches of the sportive wildness of Ariosto, and the more serious sublime painting of Dante, with some portions of the enchanting elegance, the refined imagination, and the moral grace of Pope; and to do this, if possible, without violating those rules of propriety which' did not exclude 'familiar Incident and allegorical picture from affording a strong relief to each other.' What Mr. Hayley could do in the direction of the 'serious sublime' of Dante may be seen in a translation of six lines of the 'Inferno.' Only the first need be quoted: "Through me ye pass to Spleen's terrific dome.' But if we turn to his opinion of 'daring Dante,' we shall be surprised to understand his reason for wishing to share 'some touches,' of one who united 'The Seraph's Music and the Demon's yell.' The definition is unique of its kind. Ariosto's 'sportive wildness' may perhaps be meant to appear where the 1 (1) A Poetical Epistle on Marriage, 1775. (2) An Ode to Cheerfulness, 1775. (3) An Epistle to Dr. Long, 1777. (4) Epistle on Painting, 1777. (5) Poetical Epistle to Admiral Keppel, 1779. (6) An Elegy on the Ancient Greek Model, 1779. (7) Epistle on History, 1780. (8) Ode to Howard, 1780. (9) Epistle to a Friend, 1780. (10) The Triumphs of Temper, 1781. (11) Poetical Epistles on Epic Poetry, 1782. (12) Plays of Three Acts and in Verse, 1784. (13) Poetical Works, 3 vols. 1785. (14) The Happy Prescription, 1785. (15) The Two Connoisseurs, 1785. (16) Occasional Stanzas, 1788. (17) The Young Widow, 1789. (18) An Elegy on the Death of Sir K. Jones, 1795. (19) An Essay on Sculpture, 1800. (20) Triumphs of Music, 1804. (21) Ballads founded on Anecdotes of Animals, 1805. (22) Three Plays with a Preface, 1811. 'cheerful banquet' underground at which very unpleasant persons sit down to 'rich liqueurs' is presented to the shocked heroine. Pope may be responsible for 'The spleenful outrage of the angry peer,' or perhaps when 'The light Serena to the window springs, On curiosity's amusive wings.' But where the attempt to 'raise, if possible, the dignity of a declining Art' is to be found in this mixture of 'familiar Incident and allegorical picture,' is beyond research. Hayley tells us that he has given 'an air of novelty' to his 'Triumphs,' and he introduces his three plays in wouldbe comic verse with the hope that his 'liberal and enlightened readers will look with indulgence on a publication, which arose from his wish to introduce a striking, and he trusted, not a blameless variety into the amusements of English literature.' The novelty of Hayley's humour must, one imagines, have had something to do with some of Blake's best epigrams. Odes and Epistles, Essays in Verse, Sonnets, Songs, and occasional Verses, follow one another with dreary persistence, interspersed with notes longer than the poems, but better reading, and more nearly coming within the limits of that indulgence which he once claimed for 'those pleasing and innocent delusions in which a poetical Enthusiast may be safely indulged.' Hayley was a poetical enthusiast, but remembering with Blake 'the verses that Hayley sung When my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue,' we must conclude that it was not safe to indulge him in his innocent delusions. No one has the right to bore the world, or one great poet, with as little excuse as Hayley. He was a rich man, and, in the days of patrons, the prodigal patron of his own ineptitudes. DIBDIN left an immense quantity of singable songs, not only ballads of the sea, but vigorous, often vulgar, not seldom amusing songs on all kinds of subjects, reminding one at times of George Morland's pictures. It is by 'Tom Bowling' that Dibdin is best known, and there is a good swing in it and some ingenious punning. It is a little self-conscious in its attempt to render a seaman's speech, and is only quite plausible from that point of view here and there. This way of song-writing, the building up, the final clench at the end, the actual rhythm, seem to anticipate some of the later characteristics of Mr. Albert Chevalier's cockney ballads. Dibdin had an illegitimate son, Thomas John (1771-1841), who was an actor and writer of comic plays and songs. JOHN O'KEEFFE (1747-1833) 2 JOHN O'KEEFFE was a copious and outrageous maker of comic plays, operas, and farces, of which it may well be said, in his own words in the refrain of one of his own songs, 'All is puff, rattle, squeak, and ding-dong.' He also wrote poems, which he left as a legacy to his daughter, and they are printed with all his own naïve comments on them. Of 'Bona the Rake; or, The Terrible Bony!' (Bona being Bonaparte) he says: "This poem was with the exception of "War and Peace" (which he invariably called his Sublime Pedestal of Fame), decidedly the author's favourite of all his productions.' He began it, he says, as a song, and it comes finally to be eighty pages in this manner: 1 Professional Life, containing 600 songs, 4 vols. 1803. 2 (1) Dramatic Works, 4 vols. 1798. (2) O'Keeffe's Legacy to his Daughter, being the Poetical Works of the late John O'Keeffe, Esq., the Dramatic Author, 1834. 'Great Constantine Christian-Imperial Premier, Imperial Napoleon now eagles it there.' But his most amusing and in every way best verse is to be found scattered all over the interminable pages of his plays. The prose is not less swift and toppling than the verse, as in this sentence from 'Tony Lumpkin in Town': 'He gaped at the masks, roared most stertorously discordant with the music, overset the pyramids, pocketed the sweetmeats, broke the glasses, made love to an Arcadian dairy-maid, tripped up the heels of a harlequin, beat a hermit, who happened to be a captain of the guards, and gave a bishop a black eye.' Sometimes his verse, for a moment, turns serious, as in the song which begins: 'Beauty in the street is sold, And envy spatters fame with dirt, And one of his metres anticipates a metre used afterwards by Darley and later still by Meredith, where it comes to perfection: 'Fly, fly, refreshing gales, ah gently by me, No news of him I love, oh ne'er come nigh me Refrains of preposterous oddity, not outdone till the time of 'Plop, plop, The barges flop Drip drop,' are to be found in the 'amateur high musical' manner of And better tunes too, as in 'Bounce! 'Hey down, Ho down, Derry derry down, All amongst the leaves so green-O.' |