Note Book of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas de Quincey [the reading list .TXT] 📗

original, which indeed he notices slightly as 'repetitions;' and his own Greek version is spirited and good. There, are, however, some mistakes. The second line is altogether faulty;

[Greek: _Choria Mainaliph pant erateina theph
Achnumenos leipon_]

does not express the sense intended. Construed correctly, this clause of the sentence would mean--'_I, sorrowfully leaving all places gracious to the Maenalian god_:' but _that_ is not what Lord Wellesley designed: '_I leaving the woods of Cyllene, and the snowy summits of Pholoe, places that are all of them dear to Pan_'--_that_ is what was meant: that is to say, not _leaving all places dear to Pan_, far from it; but _leaving a few places, every one of which is dear to Pan_. In the line beginning

[Greek: _Kan eth uph aelikias_]

where the meaning is--_and if as yet, by reason of my immature age_, there is a metrical error; and [Greek: _aelikia_] will not express immaturity of age. I doubt whether in the next line,

[Greek: _Maed alkae thalloi gounasin aeitheos_]

[Greek: _gounasin_] could convey the meaning without the preposition [Greek: _eth_]. And in

[Greek: _Spherchomai ou kaleousi theoi._]

_I hasten whither the gods summon me_--[Greek: _ou_] is not the right word. It is, however, almost impossible to write Greek verses which shall be liable to no verbal objections; and the fluent movement of these verses sufficiently argues the off-hand ease with which Lord Wellesley must have _read_ Greek, writing it so elegantly and with so little of apparent constraint.

Meantime the most interesting (from its circumstances) of Lord Wellesley's verses, is one to which his own English interpretation of it has done less than justice. It is a Latin epitaph on the daughter (an only child) of Lord and Lady Brougham. She died, and (as was generally known at the time) of an organic affection disturbing the action of the heart, at the early age of eighteen. And the peculiar interest of the case lies in the suppression by this pious daughter (so far as it was possible) of her own bodily anguish, in order to beguile the mental anguish of her parents. The Latin epitaph is this:

'Blanda anima, e cunis heu! longo exercita morbo,
Inter maternas heu lachrymasque patris,
Quas risu lenire tuo jucunda solebas,
Et levis, et proprii vix memor ipsa mali;
I, pete calestes, ubi nulla est cura, recessus:
Et tibi sit nullo mista dolore quies!'

The English version is this:

'Doom'd to long suffering from earliest years,
Amidst your parents' grief and pain alone
Cheerful and gay, you smiled to soothe their tears;
And in _their_ agonies forgot your own.
Go, gentle spirit; and among the blest
From grief and pain eternal be thy rest!'

In the Latin, the phrase _e cunis_ does not express _from your cradle upwards_. The second line is faulty in the opposition of _maternas_ to _patris_. And in the fourth line _levis_ conveys a false meaning: _levis_ must mean either _physically light_, _i.e._ not heavy, which is not the sense, or else _tainted with levity_, which is still less the sense. What Lord Wellesley wished to say--was _light-hearted_: this he has _not_ said: but neither is it easy to say it in good Latin.

I complain, however, of the whole as not bringing out Lord Wellesley's own feeling--which feeling is partly expressed in his verses, and partly in his accompanying prose note on Miss Brougham's mournful destiny ('her life was a continual illness') contrasted with her fortitude, her innocent gaiety, and the pious motives with which she supported this gaiety to the last. Not as a direct version, but as filling up the outline of Lord Wellesley, sufficiently indicated by himself, I propose this:--

'Child, that for thirteen years hast fought with pain,
Prompted by joy and depth of natural love,--
Rest now at God's command: oh! not in vain
His angel ofttimes watch'd thee,--oft, above
All pangs, that else had dimm'd thy parents' eyes,
Saw thy young heart victoriously rise.
Rise now for ever, self-forgetting child,
Rise to those choirs, where love like thine is blest,
From pains of flesh--from filial tears assoil'd,
Love which God's hand shall crown with God's own rest.'


FOOTNOTES

[1] Memoirs and Correspondence.

[2] '_As a dissyllable_:'--just as the _Annesley_ family, of which Lord Valentia is the present head, do not pronounce their name trisyllabically (as strangers often suppose), but as the two syllables _Anns lea_, accent on the first.

[3] Which adopted neither view; for by _offering_ the regency of Ireland to the Prince of Wales, they negatived Mr. Fox's view, who held it to be the Prince's by inherent right; and, on the other hand, they still more openly opposed Mr. Pitt.


MILTON _VERSUS_ SOUTHEY AND LANDOR.

This conversation is doubly interesting: interesting by its subject, interesting by its interlocutors; for the subject is Milton, whilst the interlocutors are _Southey_ and _Landor_. If a British gentleman, when taking his pleasure in his well-armed yacht, descries, in some foreign waters, a noble vessel, from the Thames or the Clyde, riding peaceably at anchor--and soon after, two smart-looking clippers, with rakish masts, bearing down upon her in company--he slackens sail: his suspicions are slightly raised; they have not shown their teeth as yet, and perhaps all is right; but there can be no harm in looking a little closer; and, assuredly, if he finds any mischief in the wind against his countryman, he will show _his_ teeth also; and, please the wind, will take up such a position as to rake both of these pirates by turns. The two dialogists are introduced walking out after breakfast, 'each his Milton in his pocket;' and says Southey, 'Let us collect all the graver faults we can lay our hands upon, without a too minute and troublesome research;'--just so; there would be danger in _that_--help might put off from shore;--'not,' says he, 'in the spirit of Johnson, but in our own.' Johnson we may suppose, is some old ruffian well known upon that coast; and '_faults_' may be a flash term for what the Americans call 'notions.' A part of the cargo it clearly is; and one is not surprised to hear Landor, whilst assenting to the general plan of attack, suggesting in a whisper 'that they should abase their eyes in reverence to so great a man, without absolutely closing them;' which I take to mean--that, without trusting entirely to their boarders, or absolutely closing their ports, they should depress their guns and fire down into the hold, in respect of the vessel attacked standing so high out of the water. After such plain speaking, nobody can wonder much at the junior pirate (Landor) muttering, 'It will be difficult for us always to refrain.' Of course it will: _refraining_ was no part of the business, I should fancy, taught by that same buccaneer, Johnson. There is mischief, you see, reader, singing in the air--'miching malhecho'--and it is our business to watch it.

But, before coming to the main attack, I must suffer myself to be detained for a few moments by what Mr. L. premises upon the 'moral' of any great fable, and the relation which it bears, or _should_ bear, to the solution of such a fable. Philosophic criticism is so far improved, that, at this day, few people, who have reflected at all upon such subjects, but are agreed as to one point: viz., that in metaphysical language the moral of an epos or a drama should be _immanent_, not _transient_; or, otherwise, that it should be vitally distributed through the whole organization of the tree, not gathered or secreted into a sort of red berry or _racemus_, pendent at the end of its boughs. This view Mr. Landor himself takes, as a general view; but, strange to say, by some Landorian perverseness, where there occurs a memorable exception to this rule (as in the 'Paradise Lost'), in that case he insists upon the rule in its rigor-- the rule, and nothing _but_ the rule. Where, on the contrary, the rule does really and obviously take effect (as in the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'), there he insists upon an exceptional case. There _is_ a moral, in _his_ opinion, hanging like a tassel of gold bullion from the 'Iliad;'--and what is it? Something so fantastic, that I decline to repeat it. As well might he have said, that the moral of 'Othello' was--'_Try Warren's Blacking!_' There is no moral, little or big, foul or fair, to the 'Iliad.' Up to the 17th book, the moral might seem dimly to be this--'Gentlemen, keep the peace: you see what comes of quarrelling.' But _there_ this moral ceases; --there is now a break of guage: the narrow guage takes place after this; whilst up to this point, the broad guage--viz., the wrath of Achilles, growing out of his turn-up with Agamemnon--had carried us smoothly along without need to shift our luggage. There is no more quarrelling after Book 17, how then can there be any more moral from quarrelling? If you insist on _my_ telling _you_ what is the moral of the 'Iliad,' I insist upon _your_ telling _me_ what is the moral of a rattlesnake or the moral of a Niagara. I suppose the moral is--that you must get out of their way, if you mean to moralize much longer. The going-up (or anabasis) of the Greeks against Troy, was a _fact;_ and a pretty dense fact; and, by accident, the very first in which all Greece had a common interest. It was a joint-stock concern--a representative expedition--whereas, previously there had been none; for even the Argonautic expedition, which is rather of the darkest, implied no confederation except amongst individuals. How could it? For the Argo is supposed to have measured only twenty-seven tons: how she would have been classed at Lloyd's is hard to say, but certainly not as A 1. There was no state-cabin; everybody, demi-gods and all, pigged in the steerage amongst beans and bacon. Greece was naturally proud of having crossed the herring-pond, small as it was, in search of an entrenched enemy; proud also of having licked him 'into Almighty smash;' this was sufficient; or if an impertinent moralist sought for something more, doubtless the moral must have lain in the booty. A peach is the moral of a peach, and moral enough; but if a man _will_ have something better--a moral within a moral--why, there is the peach-stone, and its kernel, out of which he may make ratafia, which seems to be the ultimate morality that _can_ be extracted from a peach. Mr. Archdeacon Williams, indeed, of the Edinburgh Academy, has published an _octavo_ opinion upon the case, which asserts that the moral of the Trojan war was (to borrow a phrase from children) _tit for tat_. It was a case of retaliation for crimes against Hellas, committed by Troy in an earlier generation. It may be so; Nemesis knows best. But this moral, if it concerns the total expedition to the Troad, cannot concern the 'Iliad,' which does not take up matters from so early a period, nor go on to the final catastrophe