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in his verse, not the finest, that would have suited ill with a simple and flexible prose, capable of such dark splendours as those two lines of 'Peter Grimes' in which the delirious man, haunted by the sight of the father whose life he has threatened but not taken, says:

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'He cried for mercy, which I kindly gave,

But he has no compassion in his grave.'

What a novelist was lost in the burning of those three novels which were written in the winters in Suffolk, during one or two of those twenty-two years of silence! The third novel, says Crabbe's son in his biography, 'opened with a description of a wretched room, similar to some that are presented in his poetry,' and he remembers that, 'on my mother's telling him frankly that she thought the effect very inferior to that of the corresponding pieces in verse, he paused in his reading, and, after some reflection, said, "Your remark is just.' Whereupon the three manuscripts were burnt.

Perhaps, however, Mrs. Crabbe was right; and this poet with the genius of prose could never have written in prose so well as he wrote in verse. Nature is as capricious in the assortment of tendency and capacity as in the assortment of body and mind. As certainly as we find inner beauty robed in mean flesh, timid souls faltering under fierce beards, and the lees of all corruption under an aspect of lilied candour, so certainly do we find men of genius condemned to labour all their lives at a task which is not their task, and in which they must seem to be no more than half themselves.

1

MRS. MARY ROBINSON (1758-1800) 1

THE Perdita of the Prince of Wales, Mary Robinson, began writing verses in the King's Bench prison at the age of seventeen; she went on the stage, where she was famous, and,

1 The Poetical Works of the late Mrs. Mary Robinson, 3 vols. 1806.

after many conquests and adventures, returned to the writing of verse, and called herself by the name of the English Sappho. It is under that signature that she wrote an ode to Coleridge, in which she says archly:

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'Spirit divine! with thee I'll trace

Imagination's boundless space!'

She had just before sent him another ode, on his latest baby, 'born Sept. 14, 1800, at Keswick, in Cumberland': Derwent, that would be. Not the least ardent or accomplished of her poems was a sonnet sequence: 'Sappho and Phaon, in a series of legitimate sonnets,' where she characterises her 'whose lyre throbbed only to the touch of love' as 'the brightest planet of the eternal sphere.' The subject lends her eloquence, and she bursts out:

'Ye, who in alleys green and leafy bowers,
Sport, the rude children of fantastic births;
Where frolic nymphs, and shaggy tribes of mirth,
In clamorous revels waste the midnight hours.'

She is not always so good, and her attempt at drama, in 'The
Sicilian,' is distinctly amusing. 'He lives! he lives! It is my
Alferenzi!' shouts one character, and another, taking the op-
posite view, believes that Alferenzi is dead.

'I fear he was: most sure I am he died!

His cheek was pale, and petrified, and cold!
But I entreat you let us change the matter,
For 't is a wounding subject.'

Odes overflow the pages, 'Lines to him who will understand them,' perhaps one of those

'whose soul like mine,

Beams with poetic rays divine,'

or Della Crusca perhaps, 'enlightened Patron of the sacred Lyre.' All these overflow with feminine italics and capitals and dashes and notes of exclamation. At times, quieting down, she can characterise those who 'seek fame by different roads' in eight stanzas done after this manner:

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'Ladies gambling night and morning;
Fools the work of genius scorning;
Ancient dames for girls mistaken,

Youthful damsels quite forsaken.'

And in another poem in the same metre she becomes a little bewilderingly personal; for,

'Where conscious Rectitude retires;
Instructive Wisdom; calm Desires;
Prolific Science-lab'ring Art;
And Genius, with expanded heart'

there, on her own authority, Mrs. Mary Robinson also is.

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CRABB ROBINSON tells us in his diary that Wordsworth said to him of Joanna Baillie: 'If I had to present any one to a foreigner as a model of an English gentlewoman it would be Joanna Baillie.' It was this good lady who proposed to herself the aim, in a 'Series of plays, in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy,' to 'add a few pieces to the stock of what may be called our national or permanently acting plays.' She begins with a plan perfectly matured, and reproaches those dramatists who have 'made use of the passions to mark their several characters, and animate their scenes, rather than to open to our view the nature and portraitures of those great disturbers of the human breast, with whom we are all, more or less, called upon to contend.' She had already written some scattered lyrics, some of them, especially those in the Scottish dialect, not without the lyrical touch, and it does not seem to have occurred to her to ask her

1 (1) Fugitive Verses, 1790. (2) Plays on the Passions, 3 vols., 1798, 1802, 1812. (3) Miscellaneous Plays, 1804. (4) Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters, 1821. (5) Poetic Miscellanies, 1823. (6) The Martyr 1826. (7) Miscellaneous Plays, 1836.

self whether such an aim at close truth to nature, and the exclusion of imagination, as she approved of in the writing of moral drama, might not have been better attained in prose than in verse. In one of the tragic plays she does, indeed, with some apology, use prose, and to the advantage of the somewhat melodramatic material, surprisingly direct, and with a certain human feeling in it, which comes to us in the verse, as if disguised under a thin clothing. This fixed, formal study of the passions leads naturally to something too deliberate for drama; passion being too often treated as if it were a form of logic, or followed recognisable rules of human nature. It was a brave adventure, and had many lessons to teach the more fantastic, Germanising dramatists of her time. 'Modern Poetry,' she laments in a preface, 'within these last thirty years, has become so imaginative, impassioned, and sentimental, that more homely subjects, in simple diction, are held in comparatively small estimation.' Throughout we feel and respect the woman's diligent application to a task or mission: the creation of a serious drama, the elevation of the theatre. And what is most surprising, and all that remains interesting to us now, when the plays themselves have dropped quietly out of existence, is to see the practical sense of the conditions of the stage which comes out in preface and foot-notes, really anticipating discoveries which are only now being put into practice. She protests against the footlights, on the analogy of the art of the painter, who, when he 'wishes to give intelligence and expression to a face, does not make his lights hit upon the under part of his chin, the nostrils, and the under curve of the eyebrows.' And, she adds, 'daylight comes from heaven, not from the earth; even within doors our whitened ceilings are made to throw down reflected light upon us, while our pavements and carpets are of a darker colour.' And she imagines, in those days of boxes on the stage, almost the 'mystic gulf of Wagner: 'The front-piece at the top; the boundary of the stage from the orchestra at the bottom; and

the pilasters at each side, would then represent the frame of a great moving picture, entirely separated and distinct from the rest of the theatre.'

1

SIR SAMUEL EGERTON BRYDGES (1762-1837) 1

SIR EGERTON BRYDGES, who must be respected for the editions printed at his Lee Priory Press, in an 'Invocation to Poetry,' which he wrote at the age of twenty, but, twenty years afterwards, still put at the beginning of his poems, represents himself as calling that 'wild maid' to go with him into the woods ('and let not coy excuse thy steps retard') and then falling asleep in her company, and dreaming of 'fame immortal.' The episode seems characteristic; Sir Egerton Brydges always fell asleep when he found himself in the company of Poetry.

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES (1762-1850) 2

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES was born in 1762 and died in extreme old age, a canon of Salisbury, in 1850. His first volume, a collection of twenty sonnets, 'written amidst various interesting scenes, during a tour under youthful dejection,' was pub

1 (1) Sonnets and Other Poems, 1785. (2) Select Poems, 1814. (3) Occasional Poems, 1814. (4) Bertram, 1814. (5) Dunlace Castle, 1814. (6) Fragment of a Poem, 1814. (7) To the Friends and Admirers of Robert Bloomfield, 1816. (8) Verses addressed to Lady Brydges (?). (9) To a Lady, 1817. (10) Odo Count of Lingen, 1824. (11) A Poem on Birth, 1831. (12) Elegiac Lines, 1832. (13) Lake of Geneva, 1832. (14) Human Fate, 1846. (15) Darkness, An Ode, 1870.

2

2 (1) Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a journey, 1789. (2) Verses to John Howard, 1789. (3) Coombe Ellen, 1798. (4) St. Michael's Mount, 1798. (5) The Battle of the Nile, 1799. (6) The Sorrows of Switzerland, 1801. (7) The Picture, 1803. (8) The Spirit of Discovery, 1804. (9) Bowden Hill, 1806. (10) The Missionary of the Andes, 1815. (11) The Grave of the Last Saxon, 1822. (12) Ellen Gray, 1823. (13) Days Departed, 1828. (14) St. John in Patmos, 1833. (15) Scenes and Splendours of Days Departed, 1837. (16) The Village Hymnbook, 1837. (17) Poetical Works, 1855.

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