of virtuous distress in humble life, such as might suit it. While attempting to effect this in my closet, I called to my little sister, now Lady Hardwicke, who was the only person near me- I have been writing a ballad, my dear: I am oppressing my heroine with many misfortunes. I have already sent her Jamie to sea-and broken her father's armand made her mother fall sick-and given her Auld Robin Gray for her lover; but I wish to load her with a fifth sorrow within the four lines, poor thing! Help me to one.'- Steal the cow, sister Anne,' said the little Eliza beth. The cow was immediately lifted by me, and the song completed. At our fire-side, and amongst our neighbours, 'Auld Robin_Gray was always called for. I was pleased in secret with the approbation it met with; but such was my dread of being suspected of writing any thing, perceiving the shyness it created in those who could write nothing, that I carefully kept my own secret. "Happening to sing it one day at Dalkeith House, with more feeling, perhaps, than belonged to a common ballad, our friend, Lady Frances Scott, smiled, and, fixing her eyes on me, said, You wrote this song yourself.' The blush that followed confirmed my guilt. Perhaps I blushed the more (being then very young) from the recollection of the coarse words from which I borrowed the tune, and was afraid of the raillery which might have taken place, if it had been discovered I had ever heard such. Be that as it may, from one honest man I had an excellent hint. The Laird of Dalziel, after hearing it, broke out into the angry exclamation of O, the villain! O the auld rascal! I ken wha stealt the poor lassie's cooit was Auld Robin Gray himsell.' I thought it a bright idea, and treasured it up for a future occasion. sel, and I kept my own, in spite of the gratification of seeing a reward of twenty guineas offered in the newspapers to the person who should ascertain the point past a doubt, and the still more flattering circumstance of a visit from Mr. Jerningham, secretary to the Antiquarian Society, who endeavoured to entrap the truth from me in a manner I took amiss. Had he asked me the question obligingly, I should have told him the fact distinctly and confidentially. The annoyance, however, of this important ambassador from the Antiquaries, was amply repaid to me by the noble exhibition of the 'Ballet of Auld Robin Gray's Courtship,' as performed by dancing dogs under my window. It proved its popu larity from the highest to the lowest, and gave me pleasure, while I hugged myself in my obscurity. "Such was the history of the First Part of it. As to the Second, it was written many years after, in compliment to my dear old mother, who said, Anny, I wish you would tell me how that unlucky business of Jennie and Jamie ended.' To meet her wishes as far as I could, the Second Part was written. It is not so pleasing as the first; the early loves and distresses of youth go more to the heart than the contritions, confessions, and legacies of old age. My dread, however, of being named as an Authoress still remaining, though I sung it to my mother, I gave her no copy of it; but her affection for me impressed it on a memory which retained scarcely any thing else. wrote another version of the Second Part, as coming from Jenny's own lips, which some people may like better, from its being in the same measure. I "I must also mention the Laird of Dalziel's advice, who, in a tête-à-tête, afterwards said, My dear, the next time you sing that song, try to change the words a wee bit, and, instead of singing,To make the crown a pound, my Jamie gaed to sea', say, to make it twenty merks; for a Scottish pund is but twenty pence, and Jamie was na such a gowk as to leave Jenny and gang to sea to lessen his gear. It is that line (whispered he) that tells me that sang was written by some bonnie lassie that didna ken the value of the Scots money quite so well as an auld writer And Auld Robin Gray, oh! he came acourting me. My father cou'dna work-my mother cou'dna spin; Itoil'd day and night, but their bread I cou❜dna win; Said, 'Jennie, oh! for their sakes, will you marry me?" My heart it said na, and I look'd for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack; His ship it was a wrack! Why didna Jennie dee? Or wherefore am I spared to cry out, Woe is me! My father argued sair-my mother didna speak. But she looked in my face till my heart was like to break : They gied him my hand, but my heart was in the sea; And so Auld Robin Gray, he was gudeman to me. I hadna been his wife, a week but only four, When mournfu' as I sat on the stane at my door, I saw my Jamie's ghaist—I cou'd na think it he, Till he said, "I'm come hame, my love, to marry thee!" O sair, sair did we greet, and mickle say of a'; Ae kiss we took, nae mair-I bade him gang awa. I wish that I were dead, but I'm no like to Auld Rob maintain'd them baith, and, So much for Auld Robin Gray.' wi' tears in his ee, TITLED AUTHORS. THE KEEPSAKE, FOR 1831. THERE is no publication of the present day which so obviously suggests the title we have chosen, as the volume now before us; because no work with which we are acquainted, professes to rely (so exclusively almost) upon the advantages of aristocratical contributors. We shall proceed, therefore, to examine its contents, under this peculiar distinction; but, at the same time, with a just regard to its claims independently of it. MR. REYNOLDS condescendingly informs us, in his preface, that he has this year admitted into the sanctuary of the Keepsake, "a few anonymous articles for the satisfaction of those who may desire to judge of the merit of a work undazzled by the prestige attached to an illustrious name;" but whether, by an "illustriou name," he means an illustrious literary name, an illustrious hereditary name, or an illustrious money name (such as Rothschild's, for example), we are wholly unable to divine. As the Keepsake, however, is a sort of aristocratic annual, ranking among its contributors, Lords, Honourables, and M. P.s ;-as we cannot recollect any very illustrious names in the unaristocratic republic of letters, that ever graced its pages; and as, moreover, we do not happen, ourselves, to belong to that owlish class of readers or critics, whose eyes would be "dazzled" by any name, we shall venture, in a plain, straightforward, homely manner, to deal with the heads of the Lords, Honourables, and M. P.s, even the same as if they belonged to anonymous shoulders. Pope has spoken of the "mob of gentlemen who write with ease," and having, we presume, surmounted the "prestige of illustrious names," thus castigates the disposition to admire the rubbish of titled authors: What woful stuff this madrigal would be In some starved, hacknied sonnetteer or me;' How the wit brightens, and the style refines! This is sadly, soberly, and disgracefully, the truth. And it springs from that same parasitical pliancy of the judgment, proud to applaud the dull joke of a booby lord, which, when it crawls into the heart, makes it equally ready to pander to the vices of a profligate one. There is the Duke of Wellington, who, we will engage, does not know a spondee from a dactyl, or rhyme from rhythm; yet, were his Grace to favour the world with an epic poem upon his own campaign, he would find hundreds of persons ready to swear, ay, and in print too, upon the faith of their reputation, as critics, that, never since the time of Milton, had so noble a production appeared; forgetting even " Portugal," a poem, by Lord Nugent, ponderous as himself, two pages of which met our eyes only the other day, embracing a lovely stilton cheese. Let it not be supposed we are cynically inclined to derogate from the intellectual pretensions of men who are born rich and great. Far from it. We hope we have a becoming reverence for lord and lady authors and authoresses; and that we can be respectfully delighted with the effusions of the honourable Mr. Inkhorn, or the honourable Mrs. or Miss Pen. Rousseau used to say, he could never find a man's argument bad, whose wine was good; and writers with a rent-roll from a thousand a-year upwards, are not to be confounded with the herd of professional scribblers, from a hundred a-year, down to nothing that comes in periodically, save a few loose guineas now and then, from such periodicals as Blackwood, the New Monthly, and the Royal Lady's Magazine. We do not mean to assert, that our peerage is merely the register of persons known only as the concatenating links of their genealogical chain. The names of Bacon, Clarendon, Herbert of Cherburg, Buckingham, Roscommon, Lansdowne, Shaftsbury, Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Lyttleton, Orford, and about half a dozen more, forbid us to do so. But what are these? The exceptions, not the rule; and, say logicians, exceptio PROBAT regulum. Neither do we mean to assert, that because there have been so few children of genius among the children of hereditary greatness, only those few have actually been born. Heaven forbid we should circumscribe the power of the Deity! We dare say, on the contrary, many a " flower has blushed unseen," and "wasted its sweetness on the desert air." We, however, have to deal with the facts as we find them; and certainly, a very small rosewood book-case, put up in one corner of a lady's boudoir, would contain all the works of titled authors that have survived the authors themselves. The truth is, man is by nature a lazy animal, and hence we suppose the primeval curse, that he should get his bread by the sweat of his brow. Indolence, not labour, is his supreme desire. When he works, it is because he must, and not because he delights in toil. We have had ocular proof that many of Lord Byron's finest compositions owed their existence to the necessities of his pocket; and therefore we did not enumerate him in our list of noble authors, as well as because he became a lord by accident, rather than by birth. Let us then charitably conclude, that if dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, and barons, had nothing to vouch for their rank beyond the parchment on which their patents of creation are engrossed, they would display as much talent as flourishes in the plebeian soil, whence sprang our Shakspeares, our Chaucers, our Miltons, our Drydens, our Popes, our Johnsons, our Barrows, Jeremy Taylors, Tillotsons, Clarkes, Bentleys, &c. &c. &c. And now let us see whether the patrician breed has improved in these our days; let us examine, with an impartial, but just spirit, the pretensions of the "illustrious names" of that illustrious annual, the Keepsake. It is not thought sufficient, we perceive, to affix to each article, in the table of contents, the names of the respective writers; a formidable and ostentatious array of them is separately made, en masse, under the title of "List of Contributors." This list runs thus: Lady Blessington, Lord Morpeth, Lord Porchester, the Hon. George Agar Ellis, the Hon. Charles Phipps, Lord Nugent, Lord John Russell, R. Bernal, M. P., the Hon. Henry Liddell, the Hon. Hobart Cradock, the Hon. Grantley Berkeley—— Let us pause to take breath! With the alteration of a word, we are ready to exclaim, in the language of Faulconbridge, "we were never so bethumped with names since first we called our brother's father dad." What a falling-off, as we read on, and find the list finished with sundry misters and misses of low degree (our friend Theodore Hook among the number), who are thrown into the lot as blessings or makeweights. It is like making but one step from the drawing-room to the garret, or falling asleep in St. James's, and waking in Marylebone parish. Spite of our boast, our eyes are dazzled; our senses are bewildered; we are almost ready to prostrate ourselves in silent adoration before such a gorgeous array of the magnates of the land. But no. We have buckled on our armour-we have bestrid our coal-black steed critic-we have couched our lance, and-sound, heralds, the clang which ushers us to the conflict! Who is he that advances first into the lists, bearing on his 'scutcheon a faded beauty and decrepit beau? The Hon. George Agar Ellis, and he points with an air of triumph to the motto on his shield-" Chesterfield and Fanny." Fanny, blooming fair! Stanhope, the wit among lords, but the lord only among wits! Metaphors, similes, and allegories, are as much in the way of those who are not used to them, as the finery of my Lady Mayoress on the ninth of November. We confess our inability to get on in the inspired mantle of Spencer. It would only trip us up at every step; and therefore we shall lay it aside, before it lays us under the necessity of making an awkward exhibition of our august selves. In plain, sober phrase, then, the Keepsake opens with an article entitled "Chesterfield and Fanny," from the pen of the Hon. George Agar Ellis; written partly for the purpose of instituting a grave inquiry into the moral and historical uses of scandalous anecdotes: and partly to inform the world (see note, p. 4.) that Pope had a house at Twickenham. We are grateful for both. It is important to have the latter fact confirmed by so high an authority; and it is equally important to know that immorality among the higher classes is not peculiar to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It would be unjust, however, to the Hon. George Agar Ellis, to insinuate that he has merely performed these two services. He has done much more. His extensive and recondite reading has enabled him to illustrate his subject by quotations from rare works, such as Warburton and Bowles's edition of Pope, Horace Walpole's Letters, those of Baron de Bielfield, and the writings of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. By the aid of these authors, and two hitherto unpublished letters from Lord Lovell to the Earl of Essex, complaining, very much like a booby, of Lord Chesterfield's superior success with Fanny, to whose favours he also aspired, but in vain, the Hon. George Agar Ellis has contrived to present a very curious history of those two celebrated personages, "Chesterfield and Fanny." We shall be delighted to find, in the next Keepsake, an equally elaborate exposition of the loves of Waller and Sacharissa. At p. 6 the Hon. George Agar Ellis informs us, that in Chesterfield's time (not quite a century ago), "the love of literature, and still more, any talent for it, was so rare an attribute in a man of quality, that Lord Chesterfield stood almost alone as a noble author, and as the Mecenas of all others." We should hardly have expected this to be the case, considering that in the age immediately preceding, and almost treading upon the heels of Chesterfield's appearance, there was such a cluster of noble authors and Mecænases, the pseudo rivals and patrons of the plebeian writers, from Dryden down to Pope. However, the Hon. George Agar Ellis says so, and of course it was so; else we should have been tempted to insist upon a directly contrary conclusion, from pure respect to the aristocracy. When "men of quality" condescend to write for the amusement and instruction of their inferiors, we are aware it does not become the latter to cavil at their lucubrations. We should, therefore, as in duty bound, have abstained from noticing what we are about to do, were it not that we fear the example of great names might have an injurious effect upon little ones. It is with this commendable feeling only that we venture, respectfully, to say a word in behalf of our old friend Priscian, whose head the Hon. George Agar Ellis has broken most unmercifully in more than one instance. For example: Besides, at the time he wrote, the very name of Whitfield and Methodism was a by-word for ridicule. Whitfield and Methodism are not a name, but names. We hope the Hon. George Agar Ellis would not say, "the very name of O'Connell and emancipation was a watch-word for faction." Again: The liveliness and frivolity which is graceful in youth, becomes disagreeable and contemptible in older life.—p. 15. We beg leave humbly to suggest, that this is bad grammar; and though we can put up with bad grammar in noble and honourable authors, we really cannot afford to be equally civil to less exalted writers. Besides, we may judge how the mischief will work, by the examples already before us. Mrs. Shelley (or the author of "Frankenstein," as she prefers to call herself) has a tale entitled "Transformation" in this volume of the Keepsake. It is a wild, ridiculous narrative, told in short sentences and unmeaning words, with rather less than her usual number of negatives coined for the occasion.* But surely Lindley Murray, or Lowth may be bought cheaply enough, to instruct her in the concords, and so snatch her pen from such vulgar blunders as the following. Nay, what must we think of the editor, Mr. Frederic Mansell Reynolds, when he allowed them to escape his own erudite superintendence? I grew a favourite with all; my presumption and arrogance was pardoned in one so young. p. 21. Her's was that cherub-look, those large, soft eyes, full dimpled cheeks, and mouth of infantine sweetness, that expresses the rare, &c. &c.—p. 23. Hope from whom? To whom? From a wandering outcast-to a mighty noble. I, and my feelings were nothing to them.—p. 26. Him, Mrs. Shelley; for "noble" is the antecedent. By the by, while we are noticing this lady's contributions to the Keepsake, we may as well advert to her " Dirge," p. 85, for the purpose of convicting her of a singular plagiarism. The poem itself is so beautiful, and so short-so full of exquisite pathos, and so fraught with meaning-that we shall extract it, both as a gratification to our readers, and the better to enable them to judge of the imitation. This lady has an unhappy predilection for negatives arbitrarily formed, by the addition of less to the primitive word. If she wanted to say that a room was unfurnished, she would write furnitureless—that a house stood alone-it would be neighbourless—that an ancient female went to the grave unmarried-she died husbandless-that a grate was without its usual accessories-it would be pokerless, tongsless, and shovel-less-and so forth. We dare say she mistakes this for a sort of poetical licence in prose. |