NOTES. PAGE 7. - Izaak Walton, by citing "this delightful pastoral song" in The Complete Angler, has made it one of the most popular and familiar of the Elizabethan lyrics. One stanza of his version is here omitted. A singular verb with a subject in the plural, a construction which may puzzle the young reader in the first stanza, was common in poetry and not unknown in prose in Marlowe's time. Marlowe, born 1564, was for a time a student in Cambridge; afterwards an actor and maker of plays. He died, probably in 1593, from a wound received in a brawl. As to his genius and the quality and character of his work, see Lowell's Old English Dramatists. Drayton (see note to page 39 on page 357 of the Fourth of the Heart of Oak Books) says in his elegy addressed to his "dearly loved friend Henry Reynolds " of the poets who had "inrich'd our language with their rhimes": : PAGE 8. "Next Marlow bathed in the Thespian springs Which rightly should possess a poet's brain." "With Wordsworth, Sir Henry Taylor and Mr. Swinburne, with François-Victor Hugo, with Kreyssig, Ulrici, Gervinus, and Hermann Grimm, with Boaden, Armitage Brown, and Hallam, with Furnivall, Spalding, Rossetti, and Palgrave, I believe that Shakspere's Sonnets express his own feelings in his own person. To whom they were addressed is unknown." - Professor Dowden, in The Sonnets of William Shakspere. PAGE 10.. - These exquisite verses are from Maud, Part II., II., i.-v. PAGE 13. 66 'Grasmere, Town End. It is remarkable that this flower coming out so early in the spring as it does, and so bright and beautiful, and in such profusion, should not have been noticed earlier in English verse. What adds much to the interest that attends it, is its habit of shutting itself up and opening out according to the degree of light and temperature in the air.". Wordsworth's note. PAGE 15.in six weeks." "Milton's Life was begun in January, 1779, and finished - Gentleman's Magazine, quoted in Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by George Birkbeck Hill. "The Lives of the Poets made a stir at the time in the world of letters. A cry was raised on more grounds than one against his Life of Milton. 'I could thrash his old jacket,' writes Cowper, 'till I made his pension jingle in his pocket' . . . Notwithstanding these and other complaints of the spirit in which the Lives were written, Johnson's great work obtained an immediate popularity which has continued to our own time, and will certainly continue unimpaired." Cunningham's preface to the Lives. "Last night," wrote Cowper to Mr. Morris, 21 March, 1784, "I made an end of reading Johnson's Prefaces [Lives]. . . . I am very much the biographer's humble admirer. His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but at the same time with a justness of sentiment that convinces us, he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgment. This remark, however, has his narrative for its object rather than his critical performance. In the latter I do not think he is always just when he departs from the general opinion. He finds no beauties in Milton's Lycidas. He pours contempt upon Prior. . . . These are indeed the two capital instances in which he has offended me." Johnson was aware of the disapproval which his Milton called forth. "It will not be unwelcome," he says, in a preface to an Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost, "that a subscription is prepared for relieving, in the languor of age, the pains of disease, and the contempt of poverty, the grand-daughter [Mrs. Elizabeth Foster] of the author of Paradise Lost. Nor can it be questioned that if I, who have been marked out as the Zoilus of Milton, think this regard due to his posterity, the design will be warmly seconded by those whose lives have been employed in discovering his excellencies and extending his reputation." PAGE 43. See note to page 271 on page 351 of the Fifth of The Heart of Oak Books. PAGE 48. -"This poem was communicated to me," says Scott in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, "by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq., jun. of Hoddam, as written down, from tradition, by a lady.” Any person. . . must have observed," writes Hogg in the preface to his poem Sir David Graeme, "what a singular degree of interest and . feeling the simple ballad of The Twa Corbies impresses upon the mind, which is rather increased than diminished by the unfinished state in which the story is left. It appears as if the bard had found his powers of description inadequate to a detail of the circumstances attending the fatal catastrophe, without suffering the interest already roused to subside, and had artfully consigned it over to the fancy of every reader to paint it what way he chose; or else that he lamented the untimely fate of a knight whose base treatment he durst not otherwise make known than in that parabolical dialogue." PAGE 49. "Thomas Carew," says Edward, Earl of Clarendon, in his Life of himself, "was a younger brother of a good family, and of excellent parts, and had spent many years of his youth in France and Italy; and, returning from travel, followed the court, which the modesty of that time disposed men to do some time before they pretended to be of it; and he was very much esteemed by the most eminent persons in the court, and well looked upon by the king [Charles I.] himself. . . . He was a person of pleasant and facetious wit, and made poems (especially in the amorous way), which, for the sharpness of the fancy and the elegancy of the language in which the fancy was spread, were at least equal, if not superior, to any of that time." Clarendon says that "whilst he [Edward Hyde] was only a student of the law, and stood at gaze and irresolute what course of life to take, his chief acquaintance were Ben Jonson, John Selden, Charles Cotton, John Vaughan, Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas May, and Thomas Carew, and some others of eminent faculties in their several ways." Of Carew, Anthony-à-Wood tells us, in Athenæ Oxonienses, that he was "one of the famed poets of his time for the charming sweetness of his Lyric Odes and Amorous Sonnets," and "had his Academical Education in Corpus Christi College, as those that knew him have informed me. . . Afterwards improving his parts by Travelling and Conversation with ingenious Men in the Metropolis, he became reckon'd among the chiefest of his time for delicacy of wit and Poetic fancy. . . . He was much respected, if not ador'd, by the Poets of his time, especially by Ben Jonson." "I was invited yesternight," wrote James Howell from Westminster, on the 5th April, 1636, to Sir Thomas Hawk, "I was invited to a solemn Supper, by B. J. [Ben Jonson], where you were deeply remember'd; there was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial welcome: One thing interven'd, which almost spoil'd the relish of the rest, that B. began to engross all the discourse, to vapour extremely of himself, and, by vilifying others, to magnify his own Muse. T. Ca [Thomas Carew] buzz'd me in the ear that tho' Ben had barrell'd up a good deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the Ethiques, which, among other precepts of Morality, forbid self-commendation, declaring it to be an ill-favour'd solecism in good manners. . . . But for my part, I am content to dispense with the Roman infirmity of B. now that time hath snowed upon his pericranium." PAGE 52. "In our opinion, Mr. Frere's success as a translator of Aristophanes has been greater than might have been reasonably anticipated. . . . All poetical translations from the ancient classical languages are difficult, as the failure of great poets (such as Dryden and Pope), and the rarity of even tolerable success, evince. But a poetical translation of Aristophanes is peculiarly difficult. Comedy is harder of translation than tragedy; it is easier to copy the lofty and serious than the ridiculous and familiar.” Classical Museum, quoted in Memoirs of John Hookham Frere. PAGE 63."Keats certainly had," writes Lowell, in the first volume of his Literary Essays, "more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these latter days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their sovereign eyes, and feels them with their electrified senses. . . . "Keats had an instinct for fine words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic expression than any modern English poet. And by poetic expression I do not mean merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than is commonly supposed in this Ichoice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. This power of language is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants of some word." PAGE 88. "With regard to this ballad as a poem," says Napier in his Memoirs of Montrose, "it is more than sufficient to entitle Montrose to a distinguished niche among the Cavalier poets of the reign of Charles I. . . . Every stanza has something of poetic fire, vigor, originality, and sweetness." The last stanza is usually printed But, if no faithless action stain Thy love and constant word, Upon which Scott remarks (Legend of Montrose, chap. xv.), "This must have been a hasty transcript from memory, or more probably from the bad version in Ritson's Scottish Songs, 1794. No older version that we have seen gives it so. The transposition of the respective attributes of the pen and the sword, is not happy. . Then the idea of a faithless action staining a constant word, is, to say the least, clumsy, and of very dubious sense. 'As ne'er were known,' is a harsh substitute; and 'I'll deck and crown thy head,' is downright murder." The text approved by Scott is here given from Napier's Memoirs, vol. i., appendix, xxxv. "About two o'clock in the afternoon," says the Memoirs of the Most Reverend James Graham, Marquis of Montrose (translated from the Latin by Bishop Wishart of Edinburgh), "Montrose was brought from the prison to the place of execution, dressed in a scarlet cloak trimmed with gold lace: he walked along the street with such a grand air, and so much beauty, majesty, and gravity appeared in his countenance, as shocked the whole city at the cruelty that was designed him; and he extorted even from his enemies this unwilling confession that he was a man of the most lofty soul, and of the most unshaken constancy and resolution that the age had produced. None of his friends and well-wishers were allowed to come near him; and therefore there was a boy privately appointed to take down his last words in short-hand writing. He said: '. . . That what he had done in this kingdom was agreeable to the laws of the country and undertaken in obedience to the most just commands of his sovereign [Charles I.] when reduced to the greatest distresses by his rebellious subjects, who had risen up in arms against him; that his principal study had always been to fear God and honor the king, in a manner agreeable to the law of God, the laws of nature, and the peculiar laws of this country. . . . He desired the people not to impute his present behavior, and that he differed in opinion from them in some things, and did not agree with them in everything, to insensibility, or a sullen pride and obstinacy; for in that he followed the light of his own conscience, as it was directed by the rules of true religion and right reason, pointed out to him by the unerring spirit of God.' "When he had done, he called for the executioner and gave him some money and the history of his wars, and his late declaration being brought to him, tied in a cord, he received them with the greatest cheerfulness and alacrity, and hung them upon his neck, saying: 'That though it had pleased his majesty to create him a knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, yet he did not reckon himself more honored thereby, than by the cord and the books which were now hung about his neck, and which he embraced with greater joy and pleasure, than he did the golden chain and the garter itself when first he received them.'... He was a man, even |