BOOKS WE THINK WE HAVE READ. There are essentials of respectability which we all assume about our neighbors (and ourselves), as, that they (and we) do not lie, "unless they be so disposed or it stands them in good stead," are no cowards, except for reasons that Falstaff might approve, do not pay less than a weekly minimum to the laundress, feel no temptation to put their table-knives where Germans are supposed to put them, and are not ignorant of certain books. Not without indignation we often detect a neighbor coming short in one or other requirement; more in sorrow than in anger we now and then have to confess the same of and to ourselves. Shortcomings of the literary kind differ somewhat from the rest; they are oftener realized, but the pang is less acute; custom stales it; we get to know the flash of self-reproach followed by the swift relieving thunder of good resolution, which so habitually rumbles away into ineffectual silence that anything but vanum fulmen is something of a portent. Still, it is with a genuine shock of vexed surprise that we surrender again and again the comfortable conviction that we have read all that decency requires of an educated man, and plead guilty to Mr. Frederic Harrison's indictment, "the incorrigible habit of reading the little books." Gigadibs, the literary man, may be presumed safe against such shocks; the great books are very much his stock-in-trade; if he neglects them, he soon finds himself hampered at every turn, dare not hazard some telling allusion for fear of a blunder; but alas for the rest of us! the little books, and the illiterate pains and joys of living, are too engrossing. Some sociable athlete of five-and-twenty remarks that it is a queer thing, but up to fifteen he was so devoted a reader that he could never be got out of the house. His literature now is the Sporting Life; it is queer: credimus quia impossibile; yet a doubt will lurk whether the pages of "Robinson Crusoe," if he should turn them, would not prove for him fuller of novelty than reminiscence. Here Mr. Froude on Bunyan, and you conclude that nearly as many people have read the "Pilgrim's Progress" as have read Genesis and the Gospels; but we suspect Mr. Froude of having credited his own reading to a multitude as fictitious as Macaulay's schoolboy. A Sunday afternoon paternal reading of the fight with Apollyon, dimly recalled, and assisted by the familiar sound of the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair, suffices to give a sort of vicarious title good enough for us, till one day, stranded bookless in an inn, we learn under compulsion that the Interpreter's House and the Delectable Mountains and the Valley of Humiliation are in truth unknown regions to us; the man who hailed a new book's advent by taking down an old had reason, we reflect; at least this larger air, this naive simplicity, may be as healthy a change from magazines and problem plays as the holiday jaunt, which has brought us ac quainted with it, from the Stock Exchange. You cannot remember a time when the tilt against the windmills was not part of your consciousness, and have lived perhaps with an engraving of the Knight and the shepherds, or Sancho and the Duchess; it surely is absurb to suppose that you have not read the book-when you have so often excused yourself, too, for ignorance of some pedantic allusion by saying that it is so long since you did so; and yet- -? It is easiest for these assumptions to be made about the books which are luckless enough to appeal to youth as well as to maturity; luckless, for nothing can save them, once stamped juvenile, from being taken as read. What, read what we may have read before? Forbid it, spirit of the century! If Homer is cognizant of our England, how must he hug himself for his happy thought of writing Greek, not English; else had his been among the boys' books, and his "fit audience, though few," among the elders had been fewer. Mention of green spectacles, a popular ditty about Olivia, a hazy memory of 'fudge," do for the "Vicar" what a breakfast-table discussion of egg-cracking, and a newspaper reference to Laputa or the Struldbrugs, do for Gullivermake us believe we have had out of them what is to be had; and "Tom Jones" belongs to the same category. But the books which children can enjoy are not the only ones to which the delusion attaches. We are angry if any one doubts our intimacy with Shakespeare. But what proportion of the "educated" know the sonnets or the less read plays? To have turned half-a-dozen sonnets into elegiacs and skimmed a pamphlet on Mr. W. H. and Thorpe is not to have read the sonnets; the plot and the names of Valentine and Proteus, retained from Mary Lamb, are sorry spoils from the "Two Gentlemen of Verona." And boyhood's wholesome indifference to artistic canons about a whole with beginning and middle and end may have left us in the practical belief that the two books of the "Paradise Lost" under which we suffered at school comprised, in a philosophic sense, the entire work; we have never looked on "Milton's Adam when he awoke, child and man at once," but we have been in company with Satan and Beelzebub, and to disclaim having read Milton would be mere punctilio. The au Well, perhaps, the authors have no ground of complaint; the testimony to their greatness is the very fact that they have drawn their characters in lines firm and broad enough to be so well known that we scarce need to go to the originals. thors on their Parnassus may well be content; but we below are fools if we are content for our part to give them our empty worship without enjoying the good gifts they proffer. Among these gifts are treasures new and old: much that is new to us we shall not fail to find literary fame that has stood the test of time does not lie. Such new wealth needs not to be recommended; but a special charm clings to the old, to the incidents and characters that we knew before in some sort of reproduction. What more delightful than to find yourself face to face in Berlin, say, with the Van Eyck "man with a pink" whose black and white counterfeit has been upon your walls for years? So it is when Fag's transference of kicks is known again in Sancho's pronunciation lesson, Mrs. Malaprop in Dogberry, and Acres' courage in Sir Andrew's. But if we like to find the original, even when the copy is from a master-hand -and Sheridan is no vulgar plagiarist-how much more when all we have else is the poor thin outline of common talk? And now a word upon the way to enjoy the books that we affect to have read, or have read with the half-reading of childhood. They are not of the kind that cry aloud to be swallowed, they "are to be chewed and digested;" finish them at a sitting, and you feel that you have been a spendthrift and a glutton. Happy is the man who can take them as relish with breakfast bread and butter, or noonday bread and cheese; those bovine products seem to fill the blood with a bovine, browsing humor, apt for chewing the cud. Don Quixote shall last you on such terms for a month or two. The elastic scheme, that might have shrunk to one volume, or stretched to twenty, you know before; excitement is not in question; no tossing off of ardent spirits, but the connoisseur's deliberate rolling in the mouth of some old vintage; the most poignant emotion a mild regret that Sancho's gift of Solomon-judgment should meet such poor requital, the cream of knighthood be worsted at last. in fair encounter, and Dulcinea keep her mysterious nonentity to the end. We had designed to say more than will allow us of this greatest of the unread. It is churlish to end a feast of delight and say no grace, to close a book whose every page is luminous without an effort to spread the light; "something may be said or written a word be spoken-that may help, in some infinitesimal proportion," not the fame of the famous, but the knowledge of the halfknown. space It may be something for the timid undertaker of stories long and old to be assured that here is no fine scheme tailing off in the sequel into monotony and weariness. The material of all sorts is as inexhaustible as the amazing flood of Sancho's proverbs, which are more apposite than the fastidious Don (who "must sweat, as if he were delving, to speak but one and apply it properly") will allow. Master ànd man develop as we read, the Knight from unconscious to conscious humorist, from his simple self to Cervantes and himself in one, the squire from butt to buffoon and from buffoon to Solomon; yet neither so that the earlier elements evaporate. And the bond between them is ever stronger and easier; the double workings of self-delusion are its core, and the juxtaposition has all the effect of the twin-plots of Shakespeare: Gloster is but another spelling of Lear; and if the knight-errant can admit that Dulcinea's qualities and existence may be imaginary, yet all the time hold her sacred, the squire on his lower plane can accept as very truth the juggling metamorphosis to a skipping wench of which he knows himself the author. Charming is the mingled pride and tenderness with which each comes to regard the other's strength and weakness. Yet, O flower of chivalry, was it well done to permit, nay, to entreat, that another's back should bear the lashes of disenchantment? And, thou that didst so revere thy lord's wisdom, was it fit that thou shouldst lay him on his back to save thine own? Like master like man once more. To conclude is hopeless: we must break off, and trust our problematic converts to complete the eulogium for themselves. -The Spectator. * NEW TESTAMENT FOR AN EMPRESS. The poorest can now buy the New Testament in English for a nickel and yet-strange contrast !perhaps the most sumptuous copy of the New Testament in existence is that splendid edition de luxe presented to the dowager empress of China on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, the presentation having been made in due form by the British and American ministers. The book is a royal quarto volume, 2x10x13 inches in size and was manufactured by the Presbyterian press and Canton silversmiths. It has silver covers, embossed with bamboo and bird designs, and is printed on the finest paper with the largest type, and with a border of gold encircling each page. It was encased in a solid silver casket, ornamented with symbolic designs, the whole weighing 101⁄2 pounds, and upon the cover of the casket there is a gold plate which relates that the book is the gift of the Christian women in China. Not long after the presentation of this magnificent volume the eunuchs were sent from the palace to the book-store to ask for a common copy, so that the empress and her ladies might compare the two texts. Surely the circulation of such a book is one of the wonders of the world! "Age cannot wither, nor custom stale, its infinite variety." * AT THE TOMB OF CARLYLE. Hail and farewell! for thee, pathetic ghost, The doors of the great darkness are unbarred— The darkness that the Gods of silence guard : Oh! tell us, Pilgrim, what we yearn for most, How fares it with the pale, evanished host? Wear they for garment yet the shadow unstarred— The shadow of night with all its music marred? Say, are they darkling down the Stygian coast? Nay, bind with double-dark the perilous theme, Lest we could not the fateful tiding bear: Some longer yet we need the world-old dream To shine along the sea-reefs of despairThe starry dream that, all dark travels done, Sweet Love will crown all sad hearts with the sun. CHARLES EDWIN MARKHAM, in Californian, August, 1881. POETS ON THEIR OWN POEMS. Some years ago, before most of the great poets were dead, I conceived the idea of making a volume of selections from their poems, the poets themselves to do the selecting. This, I confess, was not so much because I thought that they would be the best judges of their work, but because of the novelty of the idea, and because the volume could not but have a certain unique value. The poets responded courteously to my call, but not as eagerly as the cynic might imagine. Some of them almost declined at first to accept my invitation to immortality, and only by hard coaxing did I induce them to respond. What I asked them was to name four or five of their poems that they thought best represented their muse. Not their "favorite," because I did not suppose that they had favorites, but I wanted them to be satisfied with the selections in the book, and I could think of no better way of getting at this desired end than the one I proposed. I shall not quote from all the letters that I received; that would make a 'book, and this is merely an article. I will only give a few extracts from the letters where they seem to me to be particularly characteristic. To make them alphabetically, Matthew Arnold was the first poet to respond to my call. Either he did not understand my request or he begged the question. "I cannot," he wrote, "undertake to select the three or four poems of mine most likely to suit the general public in America. All I can say is that the poem most liked by the public here is, I think, 'The Forsaken Merman;"" so this is the only one of this poet's poems printed in my book. Sir Edwin Arnold wrote: "It is very difficult for me to say by what poems I would be represented. I forget what I have written-being a most careless author in this respect, seldom preserving a copy of my own books." He asked me to make the selection, stipulating, however, that "He and She" be included. another letter he named "A Home Song," "The Rajah's Ride," and "A Serenade." Our own Mr. T. B. Aldrich wrote: "If I were to select four lyrics from the writings of that middle-aged young poet whom you mention in your note, I should take 'On Lynn Terrace,' 'Identity,' 'Prescience,' and 'Unsung.' If I wanted his best sonnet, I'd take 'Sleep.'" But in I don't know just how I got it into my head that Mr. John Burroughs was a poet, unless by much reading of his prose; but I wrote to him for his selection, and he thought that I was "poking fun" at him. "When and where have you read any poems of mine?" he asked; but he confessed to a little one, printed years ago in the Knickerbocker Magazine, and republished in Whittier's "Songs of the Centuries." It is called "Waiting," and a very pretty poem it is. The late Mr. H. C. Bunner wrote that I asked him an embarrassing question. "But if you want to know by what I should desire to be reprepresented as a writer of verses, I will name 'The Way to Arcady,' and let it go at that. Only, I pray you, don't use any of my light and humorous iniquities. I would fain put them behind me." I need hardly say that his wishes were respected; nor need I add that he could scarcely have made a better choice. The late George William Curtis seemed to be almost as much surprised as Mr. Burroughs that I had his name among my poets. "How you must delve in obscure literature," he wrote, "to know that I ever wrote verses! I never did write many, and you can put all your selections from my lyre upon a page." He then named some lines that had found their way into Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," and added, "I send also some lines to Theodore Winthrop which I wrote in June, 1861, sitting on Grymes's Hill, where we used to sit together, looking at the ocean." Now, both are dead, the brave young soldier who died for his country, and the equally brave writer, who did battle with his pen and served his country just as devotedly and died when he could least have been spared. Mr. Austin Dobson thought that I could make a better selection than he could; but as that would have been against the design of my book, he kindly selected "Good-night, Babette," "The Dead Letter," "The Sick Man and the Birds," "The Ballad of Prose and Rhyme," "A Ballad of Queen Elizabeth," and "The Paradox of Time." "Forty years ago," wrote the late Charles A. Dana (this was in 1885), "I wrote perhaps eight or ten sonnets and short poems. The whole of them would not fill two columns of The Critic. I had once manuscript copies of them, and lost them, and I could not possibly reproduce them. Three or four maintain a dodging existence in collections of verse, where they owe a place to the kindness of friendly hearts." Most of these were published in the Dial and the Harbinger. I hunted them up and found them. "One of them," wrote Mr. Dana-"I can't remember its title-began, 'Utter no whisper of thy human speech;' that was written at Brook Farm." I found it and have it in my book. It was called "Eternity." Mr. Edmund Gosse was good enough to get Browning for me. He doubted his ability to succeed when I asked him, but he won a victory, for of all men Browning was the least likely to bother himself with anything of that sort. He did it, however, and most gracefully, as the following letter shows. It is dated 13 Warwick Crescent, and reads: MY DEAR Gosse: "Your poems of moderate length, which represent the writer fairly:" if I knew what "moderation" exactly meant, the choice would be easier. Let me say-at a venture-lyrical, "Saul " or " Abt Vogler;" narrative, "A Forgiveness;” dramatic, “Caliban upon Setebos; " idylic (in the Greek sense), “Clive." Which means that, being restricted to four dips in the lucky-bag, I should not object to be judged by these samples-so far as they go, for there is somewhat behind still! "Of my own 'stuff,' as Matthew Arnold would say," wrote Mr. Gosse, "print, if you please, 'Lying in the Grass,' 'To My Daughter,' 'The Mænad's Grave,' 'Timasitheos.'" Dr. O. W. Holmes said: "If I named a few pieces they would be 'The Last Leaf,' 'Old Ironsides,' among the earlier ones, 'The Chambered Nautilus,' and 'The Voiceless."" Mr. Bret Harte, then United States Consul at Glasgow, suggested "An Idyl of the Road" and "Wind Over the Chimney," as he called it, though in his published poems it is called "What the Chimney Sang." He considered them characteristic of his work. He said that I might take the "Heathen Chinee," as it is called, if I wanted to, but I did not. Colonel John Hay's letter is marked "confidential," for which I am very sorry, as it is particularly characteristic and amusing. There was no one who helped me more in getting up my book than the late Arthur Locker-Lamson. He not only sent me a list of his own poems, but he enabled me to get a selection from the late Lord Tennyson, who was even harder to induce to go into an anthology than Mr. Browning, much less to take an interest in the making of one. Of his own poems Mr. Locker-Lamson selected "An Invitation to Rome," "The Unrealized Ideal," "To My Grandmother," "Beggars," and "At Her Window." Mr. Andrew Lang wrote: 'I cannot pretend to say which of my lines are most representative, and much prefer, like the cabman, to 'leave it to you.' I have a sneaking liking for 'Alma Matres,' but no one can be a judge of his own attempts." In another letter he mentioned, besides this, "Twilight on Tweed," "Homer," and "Romance," adding, "I feel uncomfortable at these scraps being in the same volume with real poets. I only aim at versifying, and make no pretense of poetry." Certainly Mr. Lang has the modesty of the true poet. Poor, dear Mr. Lowell misunderstood the number of poems that I asked for, and thought that I said. forty-five, so he sat down and wrote me out a list of that many titles. He was in Boston when my first letter reached him, and he wrote, "The list of my offenses is at Southboro.' The truth is, I have no choice, but 'hate 'em all without distinction.' Really, you must put 'em into a hat (if you can borrow one), and take 'em out by lot." Women did not wear hats as commonly in those days as they do to-day, and I suppose he thought that I wore a bonnet. His final selection was for "A Parable,' "The Present Crisis, 'What is so Rare as a Day in June," "The Courtin'," and an extract from "The Commemoration Ode." Mr. R. H. Stoddard wrote: “Let us talk, not write. I hate pot-hooks." And so we talked, and he named "Abraham Lincoln," 99.66 "Songs Unsung," "The Flower of Love-LiesBleeding," and "The Flight of Youth." The late Robert Louis Stevenson, then at Bournemouth, wrote: "No, I find that I cannot select any of my own verses. I have tried, and it won't do. I like the trio 'Northwest Passage' in 'The Child's Garden.' That for a first. But I can say no more." Mr. Stedman thought that I showed tact in "consulting the poets as to selections." He advised me not to use such pieces of his as "Pan in Wall Street," "Toujours Amour," etc., as they were "too hackneyed." Then he names me a list from which I chose and submitted to him for final approval. It was "The Discoverer," "The Hand of Lincoln," "Kearny at Seven Pines," "The Lord's Day Gale," "Mine," "The Old Picture Dealer," and "The World Well Lost." J. G. Whittier wrote that he scarcely remembered what he had written, and that he had no time just then to look over his verses, but he did mention, "The Slave of Martinique," "The Two Angels," "The Pageant," and "My Playmate." I confess that I was put in a rather embarrassing position by Mr. Swinburne's selections, which his friend Mr. Theodore Watts (this was before he added Dunston to his name) was kind enough to get for me. They were too long to go into my book and leave room for any others, so I was obliged to use heroic measures and leave them out, much to my annoyance, for the book hardly seemed complete without him. What he selected were "Hymn of Man," "Hertha " (in "Songs Before Sunrise”), "Off Shore," and "By the North Sea." In looking over my letters I am shocked to find how many of the poets have joined the majority. -JEANETTE L. GILDER, in The Outlook. * THOSE BOOKS OF MINE. Ah! well I love those books of mine That stand so trimly on their shelves; With here and there a broken line For "quartos" jostling modest "twelves," A curious company, I own; The poorest ranking with their betters, If I have favorites here and there, That this I take, and that refuse; To mar my quiet lucubrations. I call those friends those quiet books, Of all the friends I ever knew THE ARCHEOLOGY OF NURSERY CLASSICS. It will be a sorry day for the rising generation if those nineteenth-century realists who are continually clamoring for "Facts! facts!" succeed in banishing from juvenile literature all the dear, more or less imaginative tales and rhymes which have been the joy of whole armies of little men and women for many a century past. "Down with all fairies and hobgoblins," they cry; "Santa Claus is a myth designed to fill the youthful mind with falsehoods and foster unbelief; and Mother Goose is a nursery witch who deserves to be burned at the stake." Heaven defend the poor children from such iconoclasts! For, Heaven knows, the prosaic side of life comes soon enough, and more than dolls are found to be stuffed with sawdust. Surely we need not begrudge our boys and girls the few radiant years when bright Fancy spreads her enchanting glamour over land and sea,-when, for them, the moon is really made of green cheese, each flower is home of a dainty fay, and the genial spirit of Christmas love and good will is personified in the person of a generous old gentleman who owns the fleetest racers on record. Parents, however, who have any qualms of conscience on the subject may satisfy themselves by remembering that most of the fables and "Melodies" have a substratum of truth underlying them, while others boasted a lengthy and distinguished pedigree long before that good old lady of Boston town, Dame Goose-or Vergoose, as was her proper cognomen-crooned to her children and grandchildren the rhymes and ditties learned during her own childhood in the English fatherland over the water, which her printer son-in-law preserved by gathering them into a volume published under the title "Songs for the Nursery, or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children; Printed by T. Fleet at his printing house, Pudding-Lane, 1719. Price two coppers," and with a long-necked goose with open mouth for frontispiece. Since then antiquarian societies have not considered the origin of these fantastic verses beneath their attention, but have devoted to them much research though I believe they have decided it was purely accidental that in 1697, twenty-two years before the American nursery classic appeared, Charles Perrault published in France a collection of French fairytales as the "Contes de ma Mére l'Oye" ("Tales of my Mother Goose'). Collin de Plancy thus explains the adoption of this name: "King Robert II. of France took to wife his relative Bertha, but was commanded by Pope Gregory V. to relinquish her and to perform seven years of penance for marrying within the forbidden degree of consanguinity." He was excommunicated, and shortly after a child was born to the royal pair-a lusus naturæ resembling a deformed duck or goose. The king, struck with horror, immediately repudiated Bertha, and subsequently wedded one Contance, the daughter of a Count of Toulouse. Now, the divorced wife was reported to have a foot shaped like that of the hissing fowl, so the credulous populace bestowed upon her the nicknames of "Goose-footed Bertha" and "Queen Goose." From this, then, arose among the French a proverbial saying that any incredible tale belongs to the time when "Queen Bertha spun," and they call such a fable one of Queen Goose's or Mother Goose's stories." In all the vignettes, too, which illustrate the first editions of Perrault's "Contes de ma Mére l'Oye," the garrulous dame is represented as using a distaff and surrounded by a group of children whom she holds entranced by her wondrous recitals. It is extremely doubtful, however, if our poetess laureate of the nursery ever even heard of her French counterpart, and the fact is introduced here only as a curious coincidence. Certain nursery rhymes Mr. Halliwell classes together as historical. Among these appear— What is the rhyme for porringer? The King he had a daughter fair, And gave the Prince of Orange her— which is believed to have been written on the occassion of the marriage of an English princess with the young Prince of Orange; and Little General Monk There fell a hot coal, And burnt in his clothes a hole; referring to George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who was a famous parliamentarian general during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and later noted for the part he took in bringing about the restoration of the Stuarts. Another, which with some slight and vulgar variations appears in "The Jacobite Minstrel," isWilliam, Mary, George and Anne, Four suc' children had never a man. They put their father to flight and shame, And called their brother a shocking bad nameand is evidently a hit at William III. and George, Prince of Denmark. Old King Cole was, likewise, a very ancient British sovereign who flourished in those dark ages about the third century, when fact and fancy seemed so bewilderingly commingled. That he was a "merry old soul" we can well believe, and it may have been within the great earthwork or amphitheatre still shown at Colchester as "King Cole's Kitchen" that he retired to take his ease, calling for his bowl, and calling for his pipe, and calling for his fiddlers three. This receives more credence when we note that very early editions read |