and second travels abroad with Mary, and to the summer when he sailed up the Thames to its source, the time of his awakening. And in all this, made day by day out of the very substance of its hours, there will not be a single poem in which the occasion will disturb or overpower the poetical impulse, in which the lyrical cry will be personal at the expense of the music. Or, if there is one such poem, it is that most intimate one which begins: 'The serpent is shut out of Paradise.' Is there, in this faultless capacity, this inevitable transposition of feeling into form, something lacking, some absent savour? Is there, in this evocation of the ghost of every thrill, the essence of life itself?

REV. JOHN KEBLE (1792-1866) 1

DEAN STANLEY, wishing to praise Keble, tells us that it was Southey, more than all, who 'kindled his flame and coloured his diction.' The influence of that bad model is indeed visible in much that is rhetorical in Keble. There is something in his best poems which has a neatness of epithet, a personal way of putting piety into verse, by which he may for a moment seem to become a poet. But his piety was no burning flame of a Crashaw, his Anglican mind was tied down from any of the higher flights of religious ecstasy. He can be read, not without respect, sometimes with pleasure, never with satisfied delight.

DR. WILLIAM MAGINN (1793-1842) 2

'BRIGHT, broken Maginn' was in his time a notorious writer of satirical prose and verse; he is remembered now chiefly 1 (1) The Christian Year, 2 vols., 1827. (2) The Psalter, or Psalms of David in English Verse, 1839. (3) Lyra Innocentium, 1846. (4) Miscellaneous Poems, posthumous, 1869.

(1) Homeric Ballads, 1850. (2) Miscellanies, 5 vols., New York, 185557. (3) Miscellanies: Prose and Verse, 2 vols., London, 1885.

CALL ORN

DR. WILLIAM MAGINN

287

because Lockhart, in his epitaph, perpetuated a passing name on the barb of a kindly jest. He was a scholar and a wit, a disorderly, untrustworthy person; his facility was apt to pass into vulgarity, and he has left nothing of really permanent value. But there was hardly anything that he could not do. He invented a ballad metre for the translation of Homer, which no one has quite known whether to take seriously or not; and set Lucian's dialogues, with better skill, into comedies in English blank verse. A few of his short stories are striking: 'The Man in the Bell' is almost like another version of 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' though not so intense in its horror; 'Bob Burke's Duel with Ensign Brady' is a masterpiece of Irish humour. Prose bursts into verse on every page, and his easy, careless, inaccurate mastery of comic metre is marvellous of its kind, and delights us by the mere rollicking sound of it. 'Captain Godolphin was a very odd and stingy man' might be taken for the original of some of the puns and processes of metre in the 'Bab Ballads,' while not even in 'Alice in Wonderland' is there a finer invention of nonsense names than in this refrain:

'Oh! the Powldoodies of Burran,

The green green Powldoodies of Burran,

The green Powldoodies, the clean Powldoodies,
The gaping Powldoodies of Burran!'

Maginn parodied all his contemporaries; and while some, like the venomous onslaught on 'Adonais' and the vulgar travesty of 'Christabel,' are indefensibly brutal, others, without the malice or dullness of these, have a fine humour and insight of their own. He wrote them in English, Latin, and Greek, and his version of 'Chevy Chase' is a piece of delicious dogLatin. I must give Lockhart's epitaph, which is more adequate than any criticism:

'Here, early to bed, lies kind William Maginn,

Who with genius, wit, learning, life's trophies to win,
Had neither great lord, nor rich cit of his kin,

Nor discretion to set himself up as to tin:

So, his portion soon spent, like the poor heir of Lynn,
He turn'd author while yet was no beard on his chin;
And whoever was out, or whoever was in,

For your Tories his fine Irish brains he would spin,
Who received prose and rhyme with a promising grin
"Go ahead, you queer fish, and more power to your fin!"
But to save from starvation stirr'd never a pin.

Light for long was his heart, though his breeches were thin,
Else his acting for certain was equal to Quin:

But at last he was beat, and sought help from the bin
(All the same to the Doctor, from claret to gin),
Which led swiftly to gaol, with consumption therein;
It was much, when the bones rattled loose in his skin,
He got leave to die here, out of Babylon's din.
Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin:
Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn.'

WE are told in the introduction to a volume of poems by John Clare, published in 1820, 'They are the genuine productions of a young peasant, a day-labourer in husbandry, who has had no advantages of education beyond others of his class; and though poets in this country have seldom been fortunate men, yet he is, perhaps, the least favoured by circumstances, and the most destitute of friends, of any that ever existed.' If the writer of the introduction had been able to look to the end of the career on whose outset he commented, he would have omitted the 'perhaps.' The son of a pauper farm labourer, John Clare wrote his earlier poems in the intervals of hard manual labour in the fields, and his later poems in lucid intervals in a madhouse, to which ill-health, overwork, and drink had brought him. In a poem written before he was seventeen he had asked that he might

'Find one hope true to die at home at last,'

1 (1) Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, 1820. (2) The Village Minstrel, 2 vols., 1821. (3) The Shepherd's Calendar, 1827. (4) The Rural Muse, 1835. (5) The 'Asylum Poems' are contained in the Life and Remains of John Clare, by J. E. Cherry, 1873.

and his last words, when he died in the madhouse, were, 'I want to go home.' In another early poem he had prayed, seeing a tree in autumn, that, when his time came, the trunk might die with the leaves. Even so reasonable a prayer was not answered.

In Clare's early work, which is more definitely the work of the peasant than perhaps any other peasant poetry, there is more reality than poetry.

'I found the poems in the fields,

And only wrote them down,'

as he says with truth, and it was with an acute sense of the precise thing he was saying, that Lamb complimented him in 1822 on the 'quantity' of his observation.

No one before him had given such a sense of the village, for Bloomfield does not count, not being really a poet; and no one has done it so well since, until a greater poet, Warner, brought more poetry with him. His danger was to be too deliberate, unconscious that there can be choice in descriptive poetry, or that anything which runs naturally into metre may not be the best material for a particular poem. His words are for the most part chosen only to be exact, and he does not know when he is obvious or original in his epithets. The epithets, as he goes on, strengthen and sharpen; in his earliest period he would not have thought of speaking of 'bright glib ice' or of the almanac's 'wisdom gossiped from the stars.' He educated himself with rapidity, and I am inclined to doubt the stories of the illiterate condition of even his early manuscripts. His handwriting, as early as the time of his first published book, is clear, fluent, and energetic. In 1821 Taylor saw in his cupboard copies of Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Crabbe. And in a printed letter of 1826, addressed to Montgomery, Clare says that he has 'long had a fondness for the poetry of the time of Elizabeth,' which he knows from Ellis's 'Specimens of Early English Poets' and Ritson's 'English Songs.' It was doubtless in Ellis that

he found some of the metres in which we may well be surprised to find him writing as early as 1821; Villon's ballad metre, for instance, which he uses in a poem in 'The Village Minstrel,' and which he might have found in poems of Henryson and other Scottish poets quoted in Ellis. Later on, among some poems which he wrote in deliberate imitation of Elizabethan poets, we shall find one in a Wyatt metre, which reads like an anticipation of Bridges.

Thus it cannot be said that in Clare's very earliest work we have an utterance which literary influences have not modified. The impulse and the subject-matter are alike his own, and are taken directly from what was about him. There is no closer attention to nature than in Clare's poems; but the observation begins by being literal; nature a part of his home, rather than his home a part of nature. The things about him are the whole of his material, he does not choose them by preference out of others equally available; all his poems are made out of the incidents and feelings of humble life and the actual fields and flowers of his particular part of England. He does not make pictures, which would imply aloofness and selection; he enumerates, which means a friendly knowledge. It is enough for him, enough for his success in his own kind of poetry, to say them over, saying, 'Such they were, and I loved them because I had always seen them so.'

Yet his nerves were not the nerves of a peasant. Everything that touched him was a delight or an agony, and we hear continually of his bursting into tears. He was restless and loved wandering, but he came back always to the point from which he had started. He could not endure that anything he had once known should be changed. He writes to tell his publisher that the landlord is going to cut down two elm-trees at the back of his hut, and he says: 'I have been several mornings to bid them farewell.' He kept his reason as long as he was left to starve and suffer in that hut, and when he was taken from it, though to a better dwelling, he