fruit, proclaims the plunderer to have been up in the tree. It happens, indeed, that the sentiment of anger is occasionally softened by a sense of the ridiculous. One adventurer has no sooner packed up his little bundle of pillage, than he is waylaid by a fierce contemporary on the opposite side. Then begin the clamour, the reproach, and the struggle. Pamphlets are hurled; satirical blows are showered; the quarrel waxes furious: "Collecti flores tunicis cecidere remissis." The assertion of Bacon, that the most corrected copies of an author are commonly the least correct, may advantageously be stamped as an introductory motto for every copy of Shakspere. VIII. TASTE PUTS AN AUTHOR IN A PROPER LIGHT. A GOOD reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting and magnifying the page. It was a pleasant sarcasm of Selden, that the alchemist discovered his art in Virgil's golden bough, and the optician his science in the Annals of Tacitus. When juries of Taste are thus empanelled, an author may fairly claim a right of challenge. Passion and self-love corrupt verdicts. What judge would Milton have been of Cowley's discourse upon Cromwell? Calvin, breathing flames and threats against Servetus, found a heresy in every line of his treatises. Trublet had a contemporary whose periods of contradiction came round in their order. To-day Corneille was despicable, to-morrow the prince of poets. It is not enough for a reader to be unprejudiced. He should remember that a book is to be studied, as a picture is hung. Not only must a bad light be avoided, but a good one obtained. This Taste supplies. It puts a history, a tale, or a poem, in a just point of view, and there examines the execution. It causes the reader to forget himself; his own century vanishes. He goes out of the familiar into the heroic; rides with the Cid; laces the helmet of Surrey; and flings himself among the magnificent knights of Tasso. His pulse beats with every impulse of delight and sorrow; he braves the tempest with Lear, endures the picturesque torments of Dante, and sinks into delicious dreams in the Castle of Indolence. These are some of the pleasures of a poetical faith, which every accomplished reader encourages. In a theatre a candle is the sun, and a painted cloth stands for Venice. The credulity of Taste gives the like help to the illusions of authors, and never sits down in the same temper to the wonders of Camoens and the statistics of M'Culloch. If an architect were to fix a ladder against a cathedral window on a dull November day, and break up with sharp scrutiny the crimson dress and giory of the saint, the artist's powers would disappear. Colour and expression are gone. The maker of the window never contemplated such an ordeal. He who disregards the object and the character of a book, inflicts on its writer an equal wrong. Consider Spenser. He calls his Faëry Queen a perpetual allegory, or dark conceit. It should be read under the bright play of the moral, which is the sun to the window. In censuring the obscurity of the poem, we forget that its illumination is coloured. It is the lustre of a ruby, not a crystal. Each thought is tinged by the allegory into a hue of imagination, as the sun in the cathedral is dyed by the glass into stains of amethyst and emerald. The critic who decomposes a stanza into common sense, is the architect spelling out upon his ladder the wonders of the window, instead of gazing up to it from the dim choir, when summer or autumn lights bathe the faces and the drapery from behind. It No window gives all its splendours at once. must be visited often. A morning or afternoon gleam sheds a different tincture. Moonlight wakes a solemn charm of its own. Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. The conjecture had only a poetical boldness, which supposed that a student might linger over Shakspere, dwelling upon him line by line, and word by word, until the mind, steeped in brilliancy, would almost scatter light in the dark. Whoever has spent many days in the company of choice pictures, will remember the surprises that often reward him. When the sun strikes an evening scene by Both, or Berghem, in a particular direc tion, the change is swift and dazzling. Every touch of the pencil begins to live. Buried figures arise; purple robes look as if they had just been dyed; cattle start up from dusky corners; trunks of trees flicker with gold; leaves flutter in light; and a soft, shadowy gust-sun and breeze together-plays over the grass. But the charm is fleeting, as it is vivid. In a few minutes the sun sinks lower, or a cloud rolls over it; the scene melts, the figures grow dark, and the whole landscape faints and dies into coldness and gloom. Life has its gay, hopeful hours which lend to the book a lustre, not less delightful than the accidents of sunshine breathe upon the picture. Every mind is sometimes dull. The magician of the morning may be the beggar of the afternoon. Now the sky of thought is black and cheerless; presently it will be painted with beauty, or spangled with stars. Taste varies with temper and health. There are minutes when the song of Fletcher is not sweeter than Pomfret's. The reader must watch for the sunbeam. Elia puts this difficulty in a pleasant form, and shows us that our sympathy with the writer is affected by the time, or the mood in which we become acquainted with him :-"In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faery Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons? Milton almost requires a solemn service to be played before you enter upon him." Only a zealot in Political Economy begins Adam Smith before breakfast; and he must be fast growing be numbed in metaphysics who wishes Cudworth to come in with the dessert. A celebrated author is reported to have said, "I know not how it is, but all my philosophy in which I was so warmly engaged in the morning, appears like nonsense as soon as I have dined." Perhaps Ariosto selected an unpropitious hour when he presented his Orlando to the Cardinal D'Este, and was startled by the inquiry of his Eminence, "Whence had he gathered such a heap of fooleries? " The man of taste, therefore, will choose his book, so far as he may, according to the season and his own disposition at the moment; waiting for the rays that occasionally dart from it, in some happy transparency and warmth of the mind, as the lover of pictures looks for the flush of sunset on the canvas. By degrees he comes to know that every writer makes a certain demand upon his reader. This is emphatically true of those inquiries or conIsolations which concern the soul. That ancient Master who always rose from his knees to his pencil, suggests the tone of mind. The serenity of Wordsworth's grandest verse is not for him who receives a box of twenty new volumes every week; but for the serious, musing man, who sits at his own door, and "Like the pear, That overhangs his head from the green wall, D |
