Chaucer was born about 1328, and died about 1380; and although he had, both in Scotland and England, contemporaries and immediate successors, no one of them can be compared with him for a moment. The "Moral Gower" was his friend, and inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a sparkle of his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and good spirits. Occleve and Lydgate followed in the next generation; and although their names are retained in literary histories, no line or sentence of theirs has found a place in human memory. The Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour, who although deficient in tenderness and imagination, deserves praise for his sinewy and occasionally picturesque verse. "The Bruce" is really a fine poem. The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James Douglas is a very perfect, gentle knight. The old Churchman had the true poetic fire in him. He rises into eloquence in an apostrophe to Freedom, and he fights the battle of Bannockburn over again with great valour, shouting, and flapping of standards. In England, nature seemed to have exhausted herself in Chaucer, and she lay quiescent till Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt came, the immediate precursors of Spenser, Shakspeare, and their companions.

While in England the note of the nightingale suddenly ceased, to be succeeded by the mere chirping of the barn-door sparrows, the divine and melancholy voice began to be heard further north. It was during that most barren period of English poetry—extending from Chaucer's death till the beginning of Elizabeth's reign—that Scottish poetry arose, suddenly, splendidly—to be matched only by that other uprising nearer our own time, equally unexpected and splendid, of Burns and Scott. And it is curious to notice in this brilliant outburst of northern genius how much is owing to Chaucer; the cast of language is identical, the literary form is the same, there is the same way of looking at nature, the same allegorical forests, the troops of ladies, the same processions of cardinal virtues. James I., whose long captivity in England made him acquainted with Chaucer's works was the leader of the poetic movement which culminated in Dunbar, and died away in Sir David Lindsay just before the noise and turmoil of the Reformation set in. In the concluding stanza of the "Quair," James records his obligation to those—

"Masters dear, Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate Of retorick, while they were livand here, Superlative as poets laureate Of morality and eloquence ornate."

But while, during the reigns of the Jameses, Scottish genius was being acted upon by the broader and deeper genius of England, Scotland, quite unconsciously to herself, was preparing a liquidation in full of all spiritual obligations. For even then, in obscure nooks and corners, the Scottish ballads were growing up, quite uncontrolled by critical rules, rude in structure and expression, yet, at the same time, full of vitality, retaining in all their keenness the mirth of rustic festivals, and the piteousness of domestic tragedies. The stormy feudal time out of which they arose crumbled by process of gradual decay, but they remained, made brighter by each succeeding summer, like the wildflowers that blow in the chinks of ruins. And when English poetry had become artificial and cold, the lucubrations of forgotten Scottish minstrels, full of the touches that make the whole world kin, brought new life with them. Scotland had invaded England more than once, but the blue bonnets never went over the border so triumphantly as when they did so in the shape of songs and ballads.

James IV., if not the wisest, was certainly the most brilliant monarch of his name; and he was fortunate beyond the later Stuarts in this, that during his lifetime no new popular tide had set in which it behooved him to oppose or to float upon. For him in all its essentials to-day had flowed quietly out of yesterday, and he lived unperplexed by fear of change. With something of a Southern gaiety of spirit, he was a merrier monarch than his dark-featured and saturnine descendant who bore the appellation. He was fond of martial sports, he loved to glitter at tournaments, his court was crowded with singing men and singing women. Yet he had his gloomy moods and superstitious despondencies. He could not forget that he had appeared in arms against his father; even while he whispered in the ear of beauty the iron belt of penance was fretting his side, and he alternated the splendid revel with the cell of the monk. In these days, and for long after, the Borders were disturbed, and the Highland clans, setting royal authority at defiance, were throttling each other in their mists. The Catholic religion was yet unsapped, and the wealth of the country resided in the hands of the nobles and the churchmen. Edinburgh towered high on the ridge between Holyrood and the Castle, its streets reddened with feud at intervals, and its merchants clustering round the Cathedral of St. Giles like bees in a honeycomb; and the king, when he looked across the faint azure of the Forth, beheld the long coast of Fife dotted with little towns, where ships were moored that traded with France and Holland, and brought with them cargoes of silk and wines. James was a popular monarch; he was beloved by the nobles and by the people. He loved justice, he cultivated his marine, and he built the Great Michael—the Great Eastern of that day. He had valiant seamen, and more than once Barton sailed into Leith with a string of English prizes. When he fell with all his nobility at Flodden, there came upon Scotland the woe with which she was so familiar—

"Woe to that realme that haith an ower young king."

A long regency followed; disturbing elements of religion entered into the life of the nation, and the historical stream which had flowed smoothly for a series of years became all at once convulsed and turbulent, as if it had entered upon a gorge of rapids. It was in this pleasant interregnum of the reign of the fourth James, when ancient disorders had to a certain extent been repressed, and when religious difficulties ahead were yet undreamed of, that the poet Dunbar flourished—a nightingale singing in a sunny lull of the Scottish historical storm.

Modern readers are acquainted with Dunbar chiefly through the medium of Mr. David Laing's beautiful edition of his works published in 1834, and by good Dr. Irving's intelligent and admirable compacted "History of Scottish Poetry," published the other day. Irving's work, if deficient somewhat in fluency and grace of style, is characterised by conscientiousness of statement and by the ripest knowledge. Yet, despite the researches of these competent writers, of the events of the poet's life not much is known. He was born about 1460, and from an unquotable allusion in one of his poems, he is supposed to have been a native of the Lothians. His name occurs in the register of the University of St. Andrews as a Bachelor of Arts. With the exception of these entries in the college register, there is nothing authentically known of his early life. We have no portrait of him, and cannot by that means decipher him. We do not know with certainty from what family he sprang. Beyond what light his poems may throw on them, we have no knowledge of his habits and personal tastes. He exists for the most part in rumour, and the vague shadows of things. It appears that in early life he became a friar of the order of St. Francis; and in the capacity of a travelling priest tells us that "he preached in Derntown kirk and in Canterbury;" that he "passed at Dover across the Channel, and went through Picardy teaching the people." He does not seem to have taken kindly to his profession. His works are full of sarcastic allusions to the clergy, and in no measured terms he denounces their luxury, their worldly-mindedness, and their desire for high place and fat livings. Yet these denunciations have no very spiritual origin. His rage is the rage of a disappointed candidate, rather than of a prophet; and, to the last, he seems to have expected preferment in the Church. Not without a certain pathos he writes, when he had become familiar with disappointment, and the sickness of hope deferred—

"I wes in youth an nureiss knee, Dandely! bischop, dandely! And quhen that age now dois me greif, Ane sempill vicar I can nocht be."

It is not known when he entered the service of King James. From his poems it appears that he was employed as a clerk or secretary in several of the missions despatched to foreign courts. It is difficult to guess in what capacity Dunbar served at Holyrood. He was all his life a priest, and expected preferment from his royal patron. We know that he performed mass in the presence. Yet when the king in one of his dark moods had withdrawn from the gaieties of the capital to the religious gloom of the convent of Franciscans at Stirling, we find the poet inditing a parody on the machinery of the Church, calling on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and on all the saints of the calendar, to transport the princely penitent from Stirling, "where ale is thin and small," to Edinburgh, where there is abundance of swans, cranes, and plovers, and the fragrant clarets of France. And in another of his poems, he describes himself as dancing in the queen's chamber so zealously that he lost one of his slippers, a mishap which provoked her Majesty to great mirth. Probably, as the king was possessed of considerable literary taste, and could appreciate Dunbar's fancy and satire, he kept him attached to his person, with the intention of conferring a benefice on him when one fell vacant; and when a benefice did fall vacant, felt compelled to bestow it on the cadet of some powerful family in the state,—for it was always the policy of James to stand well with his nobles. He remembered too well the deaths of his father and great-grandfather to give unnecessary offense to his great barons. From his connexion with the court, the poet's life may be briefly epitomised. In August, 1500, his royal master granted Dunbar an annual pension of 10 pounds for life, or till such time as he should be promoted to a benefice of the annual value of 40 pounds. In 1501, he visited England in the train of the ambassadors sent thither to negotiate the king's marriage. The marriage took place in May, 1503, on which occasion the high-piled capital wore holiday attire, balconies blazed with scarlet cloth, and the loyal multitude shouted as bride and bridegroom rode past, with the chivalry of two kingdoms in their train. Early in May, Dunbar composed his most celebrated poem in honour of the event. Next year he said mass in the king's presence for the first time, and received a liberal reward. In 1505, he received a sum in addition to his stated pension, and two years thereafter his pension was doubled. In August, 1510, his pension was increased to 80 pounds per annum, until he became possessed of a benefice of the annual value of 10 pounds or upwards. In 1513, Flodden was fought, and in the confusion consequent on the king's death, Dunbar and his slowly-increasing pensions disappear from the records of things. We do not know whether he received his benefice; we do not know the date of his death, and to this day his grave is secret as the grave of Moses.

Knowing but little of Dunbar's life, our interest is naturally concentrated on what of his writings remain to us. And to modern eyes the old poet is a singular spectacle. His language is different than ours; his mental structure and modes of thought are unfamiliar; in his intellectual world, as we map it out to ourselves, it is difficult to conceive how a comfortable existence could be attained. Times, manners, and ideas have changed, and we look upon Dunbar with a certain reverential wonder and curiosity as we look upon Tantallon, standing up, grim and gray, in the midst of the modern landscape. The grand old fortress is a remnant of a state of things which have utterly passed away. Curiously, as we walk beside it, we think of the actual human life its walls contained. In those great fire-places logs actually burned once, and in winter nights men-at-arms spread out big palms against the grateful heat. In those empty apartments was laughter, and feasting, and serious talk enough in troublous times, and births, and deaths, and the bringing home of brides in their blushes. This empty moat was filled with water, to keep at bay long-forgotten enemies, and yonder loop-hole was made narrow, as a protection from long-moulded arrows. In Tantallon we know the Douglasses lived in state, and bearded kings, and hung out banners to the breeze; but a sense of wonder is mingled with our knowledge, for the bothy of the Lothian farmer is even more in accordance with our methods of conducting life. Dunbar affects us similarly. We know that he possessed a keen intellect, a blossoming fancy, a satiric touch that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then we have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderful contrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, the freedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the "Flyting" and the "Lament for the Makars," there is difficulty in making one's ideas of him cohere. He is present to the imagination, and yet remote. Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are separated from him by centuries, and that chasm we are unable to bridge properly.

The first thing that strikes the reader of these poems is their variety and intellectual range. It may be said that—partly from constitutional turn of thought, partly from the turbulent and chaotic time in which he lived, when families rose to splendour and as suddenly collapsed, when the steed that bore his rider at morning to the hunting-field returned at evening masterless to the castle-gate—Dunbar's prevailing mood of mind is melancholy; that he, with a certain fondness for the subject, as if it gave him actual relief, moralised over the sandy foundations of mortal prosperity, the advance of age putting out the lights of youth, and cancelling the rapture of the lover, and the certainty of death. This is a favourite path of contemplation with him, and he pursues it with a gloomy sedateness of acquiescence, which is more affecting than if he raved and foamed against the inevitable. But he has the mobility of the poetic nature, and the sad ground-tone is often drowned in the ecstasy of lighter notes. All at once the "bare ruined choirs" are covered with the glad light-green of spring. His genius combined the excellencies of many masters. His "Golden Targe" and "The Thistle and the Rose" are allegorical poems, full of colour, fancy, and music. His "Two Married Women and the Widow" has a good deal of Chaucer's slyness and humour. "The Dance of the Deadly Sins," with its fiery bursts of imaginative energy, its pictures finished at a stroke, is a prophecy of Spenser and Collins, and as fine as anything they have accomplished; while his "Flytings" are torrents of the coarsest vituperation. And there are whole flights of occasional poems, many of them sombre-coloured enough, with an ever-recurring mournful refrain, others satirical, but all flung off, one can see, at a sitting; in the few verses the mood is exhausted, and while the result remains, the cause is forgotten even by himself. Several of these short poems are almost perfect in feeling and execution. The melancholy ones are full of a serious grace, while in the satirical a laughing devil of glee and malice sparkles in every line. Some of these latter are dangerous to touch as a thistle—all bristling and angry with the spikes of satiric scorn.

In his allegorical poems—"The Golden Targe," "The Merle and the Nightingale," "The Thistle and the Rose"—Dunbar's fancy has full scope. As allegories, they are, perhaps, not worth much; at all events, modern readers do not care for the adventures of "Quaking Dread and Humble Obedience"; nor are they affected by descriptions of Beauty, attended by her fair damsels, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasance, and Lusty Cheer. The whole conduct and machinery of such things are too artificial and stilted for modern tastes. Stately masques are no longer performed in earls' mansions; and when a sovereign enters a city, a fair lady, with wings, representing Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud and recite a poetical address to Majesty. In our theatres the pantomime, which was originally an adumbration of human life, has become degraded. Symbolism has departed from the boards, and burlesque reigns in its stead. The Lord Mavor's Show, the last remnant of the antique spectacular taste, does not move us now; it is held a public nuisance; it provokes the rude "chaff" of the streets. Our very mobs have become critical. Gog and Magog are dethroned. The knight feels the satiric comments through his armour. The very steeds are uneasy, as if ashamed. But in Dunbar the allegorical machinery is saved from contempt by colour, poetry, and music.

Quick surprises of beauty, and a rapid succession of pictures, keep the attention awake. Now it is—

"May, of mirthful monethis queen, Betwixt April and June, her sisters sheen, Within the garden walking up and down."

Now—

"The god of windis, Eolus, With variand look, richt like a lord unstable."

Now the nightingale—

"Never sweeter noise was heard with livin' man, Nor made this merry, gentle nightingale; Her sound went with the river as it ran Out throw the fresh and flourished lusty vale."

And now a spring morning—

"Ere Phoebus was in purple cape revest, Up raise the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine In May, in till a morrow mirthfullest.

"Full angel-like thir birdis sang their hours Within their curtains green, in to their hours Apparelled white and red with bloomes sweet; Enamelled was the field with all colours, The pearly droppis shook in silver shours; While all in balm did branch and leavis fleet. To part fra Phoebus did Aurora greet, Her crystal tears I saw hing on the flours, Whilk he for love all drank up with his heat.

"For mirth of May, with skippis and with hops, The birdis sang upon the tender crops, With curious notes, as Venus' chapel clerks; The roses young, new spreading of their knops, Were powderit bricht with heavenly beriall drops, Through beams red, burning as ruby sparks; The skies rang for shouting of the larks, The purple heaven once scal't in silver slops, Oure gilt the trees, branches, leaves, and barks."

The finest of Dunbar's poems in this style is "The Thistle and the Rose." It was written in celebration of the marriage of James with the Princess Margaret of England, and the royal pair are happily represented as the national emblems. It, of course, opens with a description of a spring morning. Dame Nature resolves that every bird, beast, and flower should compeer before her highness; the roe is commanded to summon the animals, the restless swallow the birds, and the "conjured" yarrow the herbs and flowers. In the twinkling of an eye they stand before the queen. The lion and the eagle are crowned, and are instructed to be humble and just, and to exercise their powers mercifully:—

"Then callit she all flouris that grew in field, Discerning all their seasons and effeirs, Upon the awful thistle she beheld And saw him keepit with a bush of spears: Consid'ring him so able for the weirs, A radius crown of rubies she him gave, And said, 'In field, go forth and fend the lave.'"

The rose, also, is crowned, and the poet gives utterance to the universal joy on occasion of the marriage—type of peace between two kingdoms. Listen to the rich music of according voices:—

"Then all the birds sang with voice on hicht, Whose mirthful soun' was marvellous to hear; The mavis sang, Hail Rose, most rich and richt, That does up flourish under Phoebus' sphere, Hail, plant of youth, hail Princess, dochter dear; Hail blosom breaking out of the bluid royal, Whose precious virtue is imperial.

"The merle she sang, Hail, Rose of most delight, Hail, of all floris queen an' sovereign! The lark she sang, Hail, Rose both red and white; Most pleasant flower, of michty colours twane: The nichtingale sang, Hail, Nature's suffragane, In beauty, nurture, and every nobleness, In rich array, renown, and gentleness.

"The common voice up raise of birdes small, Upon this wise, Oh, blessit be the hour That thou was chosen to be our principal! Welcome to be our Princess of honour, Our pearl, our pleasance, and our paramour, Our peace, our play, our plain felicity; Christ thee comfort from all adversity."

But beautiful as these poems are, it is as a satirist that Dunbar has performed his greatest feats. He was by nature "dowered with the scorn of scorn," and its edge was whetted by life-long disappointment. Like Spenser, he knew—

"What Hell it is in suing long to bide."

And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, where the burden is the shortness of life and the unpermanence of felicity, his satiric rage breaks out in single lines of fire. And although his satire is often almost inconceivably coarse, the prompting instinct is healthy at bottom. He hates Vice, although his hand is too often in the kennel to pelt her withal. He lays his grasp on the bridle-rein of the sleek prelate, and upbraids him with his secret sins in language unsuited to modern ears. His greater satires have a wild sheen of imagination about them. They are far from being cold, moral homilies. His wrath or his contempt breaks through the bounds of time and space, and brings the spiritual world on the stage. He wishes to rebuke the citizens of Edinburgh for their habits of profane swearing, and the result is a poem, which probably gave Coleridge the hint of his "Devil's Walk." Dunbar's satire is entitled the "Devil's Inquest." He represents the Fiend passing up through the market, and chuckling as he listens to the strange oaths of cobbler, maltman, tailor, courtier, and minstrel. He comments on what he hears and sees with great pleasantry and satisfaction. Here is the conclusion of the piece:—

"Ane thief said, God that ever I chaip, Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip, But I in hell for geir wald be. The Devil said, 'Welcome in a raip: Renounce thy God, and cum to me.'

"The fishwives net and swore with granes, And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes; They gave them, with ane shout on hie. The Devil said, 'Welcome all at anes; Renounce your God, and cum to me.'

"The rest of craftis great aiths swair, Their wark and craft had nae compair, Ilk ane unto their qualitie. The Devil said then, withouten mair, 'Renounce your God, and cum to me.'"

But the greatest of Dunbar's satires—in fact, the greatest of all his poems—is that entitled "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins." It is short, but within its compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The pictures rise on the reader's eye, and fade at once. It is a singular compound of farce and earnest. It is Spenser and Hogarth combined—the wildest grotesquerie wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet conceives himself in a dream, on the evening preceding Lent, and in his vision he heard Mahoun command that the wretched who "had ne'er been shriven" should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout present themselves; "holy harlots" appear in their finery, and never a smile wrinkles the faces of the onlookers; but when a string of "priests with their shaven necks" come in, the arches of the unnameable place shakes with the laughter of all the fiends. Then "The Seven Deadly Sins" begin to leap at once:—

"And first of all the dance was Pride, With hair wyld back and bonnet on side."

He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire.

"Then Ire came in with sturt and strife; His hand was aye upon his knife;"

and with him came armed boasters and braggarts, smiting each other with swords, jagging each other with knives. Then Envy, trembling with secret hatred, accompanied by his court of flatterers, backbiters, calumniators and all the human serpentry that lurk in the palaces of kings. Then came Covetousness, with his hoarders and misers, and these the fiends gave to drink of newly-molten gold.

"Syne Swearness, at the second bidding, Came like a sow out of a midding:"

and with him danced a sleepy crew, and Belial lashed them with a bridle-rein, and the fiends gave them a turn in the fire to make them nimbler. Then came Lechery, led by Idleness, with a host of evil companions, "full strange of countenance, like torches burning bright." Then came Gluttony, so unwieldy that he could hardly move:—

"Him followed mony foul drunkart With can and callop, cup and quart, In surfeit and excess."

"Drink, aye they cried," with their parched lips; and the fiends gave them hot lead to lap. Minstrels, it appears, are not to be found in that dismal place:—

"Nae minstrels played to them but doubt, For gleemen there were halden out By day and eik by nicht: Except a minstrel that slew a man, So to his heritage he wan, And entered by brieve of richt."

And to the music of the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil is resolved to make high holiday:

"Then cried Mahoun for a Hielan Padyane, Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, Far north-wast in a neuck; Be he the coronach had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took. Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook. The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smorit them with smook."

There is one other poem of Dunbar's which may be quoted as a contrast to what has been already given. It is remarkable as being the only one in which he assumes the character of a lover. The style of thought is quite modern; bereave it of its uncouth orthography, and it might have been written to-day. It is turned with much skill and grace. The constitutional melancholy of the man comes out in it; as, indeed, it always does when he finds a serious topic. It possesses more tenderness and sentiment than is his usual. It is the night-flower among his poems, breathing a mournful fragrance:—

"Sweit rose of vertew and of gentilnes, Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes, Richest in bontie, and in beutie cleir, And every vertew that to hevin is dear, Except onlie that ye ar mercyles,

"Into your garthe this day I did persew: Thair saw I flowris that fresche wer of dew, Baith quhyte and reid most lustye wer to seyne, And halsum herbis upone stalkis grene: Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of rew.

"I doute that March, with his cauld blastis keyne, Hes slane this gentill herbe, that I of mene; Quhois pitewous deithe dois to my hart sic pane, That I wald mak to plant his rute agane, So comfortand his levis unto me bene."

The extracts already given will enable the reader to form some idea of the old poet's general power—his music, his picturesque faculty, his colour, his satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to form any very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the most part occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve him from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although the writer is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, his personality is not made clear to us. There is great gap of time between him and the modern reader; and the mixture of gold and clay in the products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and coarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and nobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have been transmitted to us along a line of ancestors. Five centuries share with us the merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and intellectual purity—although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheen before we hand them on to our children—are no more to be placed to our personal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's epigram, Marlborough's battles, Burke's speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution. The English duke is not the creator of his own wealth, although in his keeping it makes the earth around him a garden, and the walls of his house bright with pictures. But our inability to conceive satisfactorily of Dunbar does not arise from this alone. We have his works, but then they are not supplemented by personal anecdote and letters, and the reminiscences of contemporaries. Burns, for instance,—if limited to his works for our knowledge of him,—would be a puzzling phenomenon. He was in his poems quite as spoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so wide an area, they appear so contradictory, they seem often to lead in opposite directions. It is, to a large extent, through his letters that Burns is known, through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which imbedded themselves in the memories of his hearers, from the recollections of his contemporaries and their expressed judgments, and the multiform reverberations of fame lingering around such a man—these fill up interstices between works, bring apparent opposition into intimate relationship, and make wholeness out of confusion. Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides. With Dunbar there is nothing of this. He is a name, and little more. He exists in a region to which rumour and conjecture have never penetrated. He was long neglected by his countrymen, and was brought to light as if by accident. He is the Pompeii of British poetry. We have his works, but they are like the circumvallations of a Roman camp on the Scottish hillside. We see lines stretching hither and thither, but we cannot make out the plan, or divine what purposes were served. We only know that every crumpled rampart was once a defence; that every half-obliterated fosse once swarmed with men; that it was once a station and abiding-place of human life, although for centuries now remitted to silence and blank summer sunshine.



A LARK'S FLIGHT

Rightly or wrongly, during the last twenty or thirty years a strong feeling has grown up in the public mind against the principle, and a still stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punishments. Many people who will admit that the execution of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, just enough, sincerely doubt whether such execution be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly certain that it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators. In consequence of this, executions have become rare; and it is quite clear that many scoundrels, well worthy of the noose, contrive to escape it. When, on the occasion of a wretch being turned off, the spectators are few, it is remarked by the newspapers that the mob is beginning to lose its proverbial cruelty, and to be stirred by humane pulses; when they are numerous, and especially when girls and women form a majority, the circumstance is noticed and deplored. It is plain enough that, if the newspaper considered such an exhibition beneficial, it would not lament over a few thousand eager witnesses: if the sermon be edifying, you cannot have too large a congregation; if you teach a moral lesson in a grand, impressive way, it is difficult to see how you can have too many pupils. Of course, neither the justice nor the expediency of capital punishments falls to be discussed here. This, however, may be said, that the popular feeling against them may not be so admirable a proof of enlightenment as many believe. It is true that the spectacle is painful, horrible; but in pain and horror there is often hidden a certain salutariness, and the repulsion of which we are conscious is as likely to arise from debilitation of public nerve, as from a higher reach of public feeling. To my own thinking, it is out of this pain and hatefulness that an execution becomes invested with an ideal grandeur. It is sheer horror to all concerned—sheriffs, halbertmen, chaplain, spectators, Jack Ketch, and culprit; but out of all this, and towering behind the vulgar and hideous accessories of the scaffold, gleams the majesty of implacable law. When every other fine morning a dozen cut-purses were hanged at Tyburn, and when such sights did not run very strongly against the popular current, the spectacle was vulgar, and could be of use only to the possible cut-purses congregated around the foot of the scaffold. Now, when the law has become so far merciful; when the punishment of death is reserved for the murderer; when he can be condemned only on the clearest evidence; when, as the days draw slowly on to doom, the frightful event impending over one stricken wretch throws its shadow over the heart of every man, woman, and child in the great city; and when the official persons whose duty it is to see the letter of the law carried out perform that duty at the expense of personal pain,—a public execution is not vulgar, it becomes positively sublime. It is dreadful, of course; but its dreadfulness melts into pure awfulness. The attention is taken off the criminal, and is lost in a sense of the grandeur of justice; and the spectator who beholds an execution, solely as it appears to the eye, without recognition of the idea which towers behind it, must be a very unspiritual and unimaginative spectator indeed.

It is taken for granted that the spectators of public executions—the artisans and country people who take up their stations overnight as close to the barriers as possible, and the wealthier classes who occupy hired windows and employ opera-glasses—are merely drawn together by a morbid relish for horrible sights. He is a bold man who will stand forward as the advocate of such persons—so completely is the popular mind made up as to their tastes and motives. It is not disputed that the large body of the mob, and of the occupants at windows, have been drawn together by an appetite for excitement; but it is quite possible that many come there from an impulse altogether different. Just consider the nature of the expected sight,—a man in tolerable health probably, in possession of all his faculties, perfectly able to realise his position, conscious that for him this world and the next are so near that only a few seconds divide them—such a man stands in the seeing of several thousand eyes. He is so peculiarly circumstanced, so utterly lonely,—hearing the tolling of his own death-bell, yet living, wearing the mourning clothes for his own funeral,—that he holds the multitude together by a shuddering fascination. The sight is a peculiar one, you must admit, and every peculiarity has its attractions. Your volcano is more attractive than your ordinary mountain. Then consider the unappeasable curiosity as to death which haunts every human being, and how pathetic that curiosity is, in so far as it suggests our own ignorance and helplessness, and we see at once that people may flock to public executions for other purposes than the gratification of morbid tastes: that they would pluck if they could some little knowledge of what death is; that imaginatively they attempt to reach to it, to touch and handle it through an experience which is not their own. It is some obscure desire of this kind, a movement of curiosity not altogether ignoble, but in some degree pathetic; some rude attempt of the imagination to wrest from the death of the criminal information as to the great secret in which each is profoundly interested, which draws around the scaffold people from the country harvest-fields, and from the streets and alleys of the town. Nothing interests men so much as death. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale it. "A greater crowd would come to see me hanged," Cromwell is reported to have said when the populace came forth on a public occasion. The Lord Protector was right in a sense of which, perhaps, at the moment he was not aware. Death is greater than official position. When a man has to die, he may safely dispense with stars and ribbands. He is invested with a greater dignity than is held in the gift of kings. A greater crowd would have gathered to see Cromwell hanged, but the compliment would have been paid to death rather than to Cromwell. Never were the motions of Charles I. so scrutinised as when he stood for a few moments on the scaffold that winter morning at Whitehall. King Louis was no great orator usually, but when on the 2d January, 1793, he attempted to speak a few words in the Place De la Revolution, it was found necessary to drown his voice in a harsh roll of soldiers' drums. Not without a meaning do people come forth to see men die. We stand in the valley, they on the hill-top, and on their faces strikes the light of the other world, and from some sign or signal of theirs we attempt to discover or extract a hint of what it is all like.

To be publicly put to death, for whatever reason, must ever be a serious matter. It is always bitter, but there are degrees in its bitterness. It is easy to die like Stephen with an opened heaven above you, crowded with angel faces. It is easy to die like Balmerino with a chivalrous sigh for the White Rose, and an audible "God bless King James." Such men die for a cause in which they glory, and are supported thereby; they are conducted to the portals of the next world by the angels, Faith, Pity, Admiration. But it is not easy to die in expiation of a crime like murder, which engirdles you with trembling and horror even in the loneliest places, which cuts you off from the sympathies of your kind, which reduces the universe to two elements—a sense of personal identity, and a memory of guilt. In so dying, there must be inconceivable bitterness; a man can have no other support than what strength he may pluck from despair, or from the iron with which nature may have originally braced heart and nerve. Yet, taken as a whole, criminals on the scaffold comport themselves creditably. They look Death in the face when he wears his cruelest aspect, and if they flinch somewhat, they can at least bear to look. I believe that, for the criminal, execution within the prison walls, with no witnesses save some half-dozen official persons, would be infinitely more terrible than execution in the presence of a curious, glaring mob. The daylight and the publicity are alien elements, which wean the man a little from himself. He steadies his dizzy brain on the crowd beneath and around him. He has his last part to play, and his manhood rallies to play it well. Nay, so subtly is vanity intertwined with our motives, the noblest and the most ignoble, that I can fancy a poor wretch with the noose dangling at his ear, and with barely five minutes to live, soothed somewhat with the idea that his firmness and composure will earn him the approbation, perhaps the pity, of the spectators. He would take with him, if he could, the good opinion of his fellows. This composure of criminals puzzles one. Have they looked at death so long and closely, that familiarity has robbed it of terror? Has life treated them so harshly, that they are tolerably well pleased to be quit of it on any terms? Or is the whole thing mere blind stupor and delirium, in which thought is paralysed, and the man an automaton? Speculation is useless. The fact remains that criminals for the most part die well and bravely. It is said that the championship of England was to be decided at some little distance from London on the morning of the day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out on the scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner if the result had yet become known. Jack Ketch was not aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take place so inconveniently early in the day. Think of a poor Thurtell forced to take his long journey an hour, perhaps, before the arrival of intelligence so important!

More than twenty years ago I saw two men executed, and the impression then made remains fresh to this day. For this there were many reasons. The deed for which the men suffered created an immense sensation. They were hanged on the spot where the murder was committed—on a rising ground, some four miles north-east of the city; and as an attempt at rescue was apprehended, there was a considerable display of military force on the occasion. And when, in the dead silence of thousands, the criminals stood beneath the halters, an incident occurred, quite natural and slight in itself, but when taken in connection with the business then proceeding, so unutterably tragic, so overwhelming in its pathetic suggestion of contrast, that the feeling of it has never departed, and never will. At the time, too, I speak of, I was very young; the world was like a die newly cut, whose every impression is fresh and vivid.

While the railway which connects two northern capitals was being built, two brothers from Ireland, named Doolan, were engaged upon it in the capacity of navvies. For some fault or negligence, one of the brothers was dismissed by the overseer—a Mr. Green—of that particular portion of the line on which they were employed. The dismissed brother went off in search of work, and the brother who remained—Dennis was the Christian name of him—brooded over this supposed wrong, and in his dull, twilighted brain revolved projects of vengeance. He did not absolutely mean to take Green's life, but he meant to thrash him within an inch of it. Dennis, anxious to thrash Green, but not quite seeing his way to it, opened his mind one afternoon, when work was over, to his friends—fellow-Irishmen and navvies—Messrs. Redding and Hickie. These took up Doolan's wrong as their own, and that evening, by the dull light of a bothy fire, they held a rude parliament, discussing ways and means of revenge. It was arranged that Green should be thrashed—the amount of thrashing left an open question, to be decided, unhappily, when the blood was up and the cinder of rage blown into a flame. Hickie's spirit was found not to be a mounting one, and it was arranged that the active partners in the game should be Doolan and Redding. Doolan, as the aggrieved party, was to strike the first blow, and Redding, as the aggrieved party's particular friend, asked and obtained permission to strike the second. The main conspirators, with a fine regard for the feelings of the weaker Hickie, allowed him to provide the weapons of assault,—so that by some slight filament of aid he might connect himself with the good cause. The unambitious Hickie at once applied himself to his duty. He went out, and in due time returned with two sufficient iron pokers. The weapons were examined, approved of, and carefully laid aside. Doolan, Redding, and Hickie ate their suppers, and retired to their several couches to sleep, peacefully enough no doubt. About the same time, too, Green, the English overseer, threw down his weary limbs, and entered on his last sleep—little dreaming what the morning had in store for him.

Uprose the sun, and uprose Doolan and Redding, and dressed, and thrust each his sufficient iron poker up the sleeve of his blouse, and went forth. They took up their station on a temporary wooden bridge which spanned the line, and waited there. Across the bridge, as was expected, did Green ultimately come. He gave them good morning; asked, "why they were loafing about?" received no very pertinent answer, perhaps did not care to receive one; whistled—the unsuspecting man!—thrust his hands into his breeches pockets, turned his back on them, and leaned over the railing of the bridge, inspecting the progress of the works beneath. The temptation was really too great. What could wild Irish flesh and blood do? In a moment out from the sleeve of Doolan's blouse came the hidden poker, and the first blow was struck, bringing Green to the ground. The friendly Redding, who had bargained for the second, and who, naturally enough, was in fear of being cut out altogether, jumped on the prostrate man, and fulfilled his share of the bargain with a will. It was Redding it was supposed who sped the unhappy Green. They overdid their work—like young authors—giving many more blows than were sufficient, and then fled. The works, of course, were that morning in consternation. Redding and Hickie were, if I remember rightly, apprehended in the course of the day. Doolan got off, leaving no trace of his whereabouts.

These particulars were all learned subsequently. The first intimation which we schoolboys received of anything unusual having occurred, was the sight of a detachment of soldiers with fixed bayonets, trousers rolled up over muddy boots, marching past the front of the Cathedral hurriedly home to barracks. This was a circumstance somewhat unusual. We had, of course, frequently seen a couple of soldiers trudging along with sloped muskets, and that cruel glitter of steel which no one of us could look upon quite unmoved; but in such cases, the deserter walking between them in his shirt-sleeves, his pinioned hands covered from public gaze by the loose folds of his great-coat, explained everything. But from the hurried march of these mud-splashed men, nothing could be gathered, and we were left to speculate upon its meaning. Gradually, however, before the evening fell, the rumour of a murder having been committed spread through the city, and with that I instinctively connected the apparition of the file of muddy soldiers. Next day, murder was in every mouth. My school-fellows talked of it to the detriment of their lessons; it flavoured the tobacco of the fustian artisan as he smoked to work after breakfast; it walked on 'Change amongst the merchants. It was known that two of the persons implicated had been captured, but that the other, and guiltiest, was still at large; and in a few days out on every piece of boarding and blank wall came the "Hue and cry"—describing Doolan like a photograph, to the colour and cut of his whiskers, and offering 100 pounds as reward for his apprehension, or for such information as would lead to his apprehension—like a silent, implacable bloodhound following close on the track of the murderer. This terrible broadsheet I read, was certain that he had read it also, and fancy ran riot over the ghastly fact. For him no hope, no rest, no peace, no touch of hands gentler than the hangman's; all the world is after him like a roaring prairie of flame! I thought of Doolan, weary, foot-sore, heart-sore, entering some quiet village of an evening; and to quench his thirst, going up to the public well, around which the gossips are talking, and hearing that they were talking of him; and seeing from the well itself IT glaring upon him, as if conscious of his presence, with a hundred eyes of vengeance. I thought of him asleep in out-houses, and starting up in wild dreams of the policeman's hand upon his shoulder fifty times ere morning. He had committed the crime of Cain, and the weird of Cain he had to endure. But yesterday innocent, how unimportant; to-day bloody-handed, the whole world is talking of him, and everything he touches, the very bed he sleeps on, steals from him his secret, and is eager to betray!

Doolan was finally captured in Liverpool, and in the Spring Assize the three men were brought to trial. The jury found them guilty, but recommended Hickie to mercy on account of some supposed weakness of mind on his part. Sentence was, of course, pronounced with the usual solemnities. They were set apart to die; and when snug abed o' nights—for imagination is most mightily moved by contrast—I crept into their desolate hearts, and tasted a misery which was not my own. As already said, Hickie was recommended to mercy, and the recommendation was ultimately in the proper quarter given effect to.

The evening before the execution has arrived, and the reader has now to imagine the early May sunset falling pleasantly on the outskirts of the city. The houses looking out upon an open square or space, have little plots of garden-ground in their fronts, in which mahogany-coloured wall-flowers and mealy auriculas are growing. The side of this square, along which the City Road stretches northward, is occupied by a blind-asylum, a brick building, the bricks painted red and picked out with white, after the tidy English fashion, and a high white cemetery wall, over which peers the spire of the Gothic Cathedral; and beyond that, on the other side of the ravine, rising out of the populous city of the dead, a stone John Knox looks down on the Cathedral, a Bible clutched in his outstretched and menacing hand. On all this the May sunset is striking, dressing everything in its warm, pleasant pink, lingering in the tufts of foliage that nestle around the asylum, and dipping the building itself one half in light, one half in tender shade. This open space or square is an excellent place for the games of us boys, and "Prisoner's Base" is being carried out with as much earnestness as the business of life now by those of us who are left. The girls, too, have their games of a quiet kind, which we held in huge scorn and contempt. In two files, linked arm-in-arm, they alternately dance towards each other and then retire, singing the while, in their clear, girlish treble, verses, the meaning and pertinence of which time has worn away—

"The Campsie Duke's a-riding, a-riding, a-riding,"

being the oft-recurring "owercome," or refrain. All this is going on in the pleasant sunset light, when by the apparition of certain waggons coming up from the city, piled high with blocks and beams, and guarded by a dozen dragoons, on whose brazen helmets the sunset danced, every game is dismembered, and we are in a moment a mere mixed mob of boys and girls, flocking around to stare and wonder. Just at this place something went wrong with one of the waggon wheels, and the procession came to a stop. A crowd collected, and we heard some of the grown-up people say, that the scaffold was being carried out for the ceremony of to-morrow. Then, more intensely than ever, one realised the condition of the doomed men. We were at our happy games in the sunset, they were entering on their last night on earth. After hammering and delay the wheel was put to rights, the sunset died out, waggons and dragoons got into motion and disappeared; and all the night through, whether awake or asleep, I saw the torches burning, and heard the hammers clinking, and witnessed as clearly as if I had been an onlooker, the horrid structure rising, till it stood complete, with a huge cross-beam from which two empty halters hung, in the early morning light.

Next morning the whole city was in commotion. Whether the authorities were apprehensive that a rescue would be attempted, or were anxious merely to strike terror into the hundreds of wild Irishry engaged on the railway, I cannot say: in any case, there was a display of military force quite unusual. The carriage in which the criminals—Catholics both—and their attendant priests were seated, was guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets; indeed, the whole regiment then lying in the city was massed in front and behind, with a cold, frightful glitter of steel. Besides the foot soldiers, there were dragoons, and two pieces of cannon; a whole little army, in fact. With a slenderer force battles have been won which have made a mark in history. What did the prisoners think of their strange importance, and of the tramp and hurly-burly all around? When the procession moved out of the city, it seemed to draw with it almost the entire population; and when once the country roads were reached, the crowds spread over the fields on either side, ruthlessly treading down the tender wheat braird. I got a glimpse of the doomed, blanched faces which had haunted me so long, at the turn of the road, where, for the first time, the black cross-beam with its empty halters first became visible to them. Both turned and regarded it with a long, steady look; that done, they again bent their heads attentively to the words of the clergyman. I suppose in that long, eager, fascinated gaze they practically died—that for them death had no additional bitterness. When the mound was reached on which the scaffold stood, there was immense confusion. Around it a wide space was kept clear by the military; the cannon were placed in position; out flashed the swords of the dragoons; beneath and around on every side was the crowd. Between two brass helmets I could see the scaffold clearly enough, and when in a little while the men, bareheaded and with their attendants, appeared upon it, the surging crowd became stiffened with fear and awe. And now it was that the incident so simple, so natural, so much in the ordinary course of things, and yet so frightful in its tragic suggestions, took place. Be it remembered that the season was early May, that the day was fine, that the wheat-fields were clothing themselves in the green of the young crop, and that around the scaffold, standing on a sunny mound, a wide space was kept clear. When the men appeared beneath the beam, each under his proper halter, there was a dead silence,—every one was gazing too intently to whisper to his neighbour even. Just then, out of the grassy space at the foot of the scaffold, in the dead silence audible to all, a lark rose from the side of its nest, and went singing upward in its happy flight. O heaven! how did that song translate itself into dying ears? Did it bring, in one wild burning moment, father and mother, and poor Irish cabin, and prayers said at bed-time, and the smell of turf fires, and innocent sweethearting, and rising and setting suns? Did it—but the dragoon's horse has become restive, and his brass helmet bobs up and down and blots everything; and there is a sharp sound, and I feel the great crowd heave and swing, and hear it torn by a sharp shiver of pity, and the men whom I saw so near but a moment ago are at immeasurable distance, and have solved the great enigma,—and the lark has not yet finished his flight: you can see and hear him yonder in the fringe of a white May cloud.

This ghastly lark's flight, when the circumstances are taken in consideration, is, I am inclined to think, more terrible than anything of the same kind which I have encountered in books. The artistic uses of contrast as background and accompaniment, are well known to nature and the poets. Joy is continually worked on sorrow, sorrow on joy; riot is framed in peace, peace in riot. Lear and the Fool always go together. Trafalgar is being fought while Napoleon is sitting on horseback watching the Austrian army laying down its arms at Ulm. In Hood's poem, it is when looking on the released schoolboys at their games that Eugene Aram remembers he is a murderer. And these two poor Irish labourers could not die without hearing a lark singing in their ears. It is nature's fashion. She never quite goes along with us. She is sombre at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.

There is a stronger element of terror in this incident of the lark than in any story of a similar kind I can remember.

A good story is told of an Irish gentleman—still known in London society—who inherited the family estates and the family banshee. The estates he lost—no uncommon circumstance in the history of Irish gentlemen,—but the banshee, who expected no favours, stuck to him in his adversity, and crossed the channel with him, making herself known only on occasions of death-beds and sharp family misfortunes. This gentleman had an ear, and, seated one night at the opera, the keen—heard once or twice before on memorable occasions—thrilled through the din of the orchestra and the passion of the singers. He hurried home, of course, found his immediate family well, but on the morrow a telegram arrived with the announcement of a brother's death. Surely of all superstitions that is the most imposing which makes the other world interested in the events which befall our mortal lot. For the mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worth of this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through the sweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the hour being somewhat late, she opened it in astonishment, and was still more astonished to hear him on entering abuse Scripture-reading. He behaved altogether in an unprecedented manner, and in many ways terrified the poor girl. Ultimately he knelt before her, and laid his head on her lap. You can fancy her consternation when glancing down she discovered that, instead of hair, the head was covered with the moss of the moorland. By a sacred name she adjured him to tell who he was, and in a moment the figure was gone. It was the Fiend, of course—diminished sadly since Milton saw him bridge chaos—fallen from worlds to kitchen-wenches. But just think how in the story, in half-pity, in half-terror, the popular feeling of homelessness, of being outcast, of being unsheltered as waste and desert places, has incarnated itself in that strange covering of the head. It is a true supernatural touch. One other story I have heard in the misty Hebrides: A Skye gentleman was riding along an empty moorland road. All at once, as if it had sprung from the ground, the empty road was crowded by a funeral procession. Instinctively he drew his horse to a side to let it pass, which it did without sound of voice, without tread of foot. Then he knew it was an apparition. Staring on it, he knew every person who either bore the corpse or walked behind as mourners. There were the neighbouring proprietors at whose houses he dined, there were the members of his own kirk-session, there were the men to whom he was wont to give good-morning when he met them on the road or at market. Unable to discover his own image in the throng, he was inwardly marvelling whose funeral it could be, when the troop of spectres vanished, and the road was empty as before. Then, remembering that the coffin had an invisible occupant, he cried out, "It is my funeral!" and, with all his strength taken out of him, rode home to die. All these stories have their own touches of terror; yet I am inclined to think that my lark rising from the scaffold foot, and singing to two such auditors, is more terrible than any one of them.



CHRISTMAS

Over the dial-face of the year, on which the hours are months, the apex resting in sunshine, the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger of time does not travel with the same rapidity. Slowly it creeps up from snow to sunshine; when it has gained the summit it seems almost to rest for a little; rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow. Judging from my own feelings, the distance from January to June is greater than from June to January—the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems longer than the period from Midsummer to Christmas. This feeling arises, I should fancy, from the preponderance of light on that half of the dial on which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with the half on which it seems to be travelling downwards. This light to the eye, the mind translates into time. Summer days are long, often wearisomely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a little bar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle. Usually one has less occupation in summer than in winter, and the surplusage of summer light, a stage too large for the play, wearies, oppresses, sometimes appalls. From the sense of time we can only shelter ourselves by occupation; and when occupation ceases while yet some three or four hours of light remain, the burden falls down, and is often greater than we can bear. Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of those endless summer twilights. A space of light stretching from half-past 2 A.M. to 11 P.M. affects me with a sense of infinity, of horrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do. I feel that for too long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster. Twilight is always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and these midsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovely change, they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that in the brain they beget strange thoughts, and in the heart strange feelings. We see too much of the sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering evening light, with its suggestions of eternity and death, which one cannot for the soul of one put into words, is somewhat too much for the comfort of a sensitive human mortal. The day dies, and makes no apology for being such an unconscionable time in dying; and all the while it colours our thoughts with its own solemnity. There is no relief from this kind of thing at midsummer. You cannot close your shutters and light your candles; that in the tone of mind which circumstances superinduce would be brutality. You cannot take Pickwick to the window and read it by the dying light; that is profanation. If you have a friend with you, you can't talk; the hour makes you silent. You are driven in on your self-consciousness. The long light wearies the eye, a sense of time disturbs and saddens the spirit; and that is the reason, I think, that one half of the year seems so much longer than the other half; that on the dial-plate whose hours are months, the restless finger seems to move more slowly when travelling upward from autumn leaves and snow to light, than when it is travelling downward from light to snow and withered leaves.

Of all the seasons of the year, I like winter best. That peculiar burden of time I have been speaking of, does not affect me now. The day is short, and I can fill it with work; when evening comes, I have my lighted room and my books. Should black care haunt me, I throw it off the scent in Spenser's forests, or seek refuge from it among Shakspeare's men and women, who are by far the best company I have met with, or am like to meet with, on earth. I am sitting at this present moment with my curtains drawn; the cheerful fire is winking at all the furniture in the room, and from every leg and arm the furniture is winking to the fire in return. I put off the outer world with my great-coat and boots, and put on contentment and idleness with my slippers. On the hearth-rug, Pepper, coiled in a shaggy ball, is asleep in the ruddy light and heat. An imaginative sense of the cold outside increases my present comfort—just as one never hugs one's own good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortune which has overtaken others. Winter has fallen on Dreamthorp, and it looks as pretty when covered with snow as when covered with apple blossom. Outside, the ground is hard as iron; and over the low dark hill, lo! the tender radiance that precedes the morn. Every window in the little village has its light, and to the traveller coming on, enveloped in his breath, the whole place shines like a congregation of glow-worms. A pleasant enough sight to him if his home be there! At this present season, the canal is not such a pleasant promenade as it was in summer. The barges come and go as usual, but at this time I do not envy the bargemen quite so much. The horse comes smoking along; the tarpaulin which covers the merchandise is sprinkled with hoar-frost; and the helmsman, smoking his short pipe for the mere heat of it, cowers over a few red cinders contained in a framework of iron. The labour of the poor fellows will soon be over for a time; for if this frost continues, the canal will be sheathed in a night, and next day stones will be thrown upon it, and a daring urchin venturing upon it will go souse head over heels, and run home with his teeth in a chatter; and the day after, the lake beneath the old castle will be sheeted, and the next, the villagers will be sliding on its gleaming face from ruddy dawn at nine to ruddy eve at three; and hours later, skaters yet unsatisfied will be moving ghost-like in the gloom—now one, now another, shooting on sounding irons into a clear space of frosty light, chasing the moon, or the flying image of a star! Happy youths leaning against the frosty wind!

I am a Christian, I hope, although far from a muscular one—consequently I cannot join the skaters on the lake. The floor of ice, with the people upon it, will be but a picture to me. And, in truth, it is in its pictorial aspect that I chiefly love the bleak season. As an artist, winter can match summer any day. The heavy, feathery flakes have been falling all the night through, we shall suppose, and when you get up in the morning the world is draped in white. What a sight it is! It is the world you knew, but yet a different one. The familiar look has gone, and another has taken its place; and a not unpleasant puzzlement arises in your mind, born of the patent and the remembered aspect. It reminds you of a friend who has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, in whom there is much that you recognise, and much that is entirely strange. How purely, divinely white when the last snowflake has just fallen! How exquisite and virginal the repose! It touches you like some perfection of music. And winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles. Pluck a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what a jeweller he is! How he has silvered over the dark-green reticulations with his frosts! The faggot which the Tramp gathers for his fire is thicklier incrusted with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls. Go into the woods, and behold on the black boughs his glories of pearl and diamond—pendant splendours that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt into tears and fall but to congeal into splendours again. Nor does he work in black and white alone. He has on his palette more gorgeous colours than those in which swim the summer setting suns; and with these, about three o'clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking his red hot ball of a sun in the very midst; and a couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen, and the flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you can see the black skeletons of trees scribbled upon the melancholy glory. Nor need I speak of the magnificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre blue, crowded with star and planet, "burnished by the frost," is glittering like the harness of an archangel full panoplied against a battle day.

For years and years now I have watched the seasons come and go around Dreamthorp, and each in its turn interests me as if I saw it for the first time. But the other week it seems that I saw the grain ripen; then by day a motley crew of reapers were in the fields, and at night a big red moon looked down upon the stocks of oats and barley; then in mighty wains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, leaving a largess on the roads for every bird; then the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacks stood around the farm-houses, hiding them to the chimneys; then the woods reddened, the beech hedges became russet, and every puff of wind made rustle the withered leaves; then the sunset came before the early dark, and in the east lay banks of bleak pink vapour, which are ever a prophecy of cold; then out of a low dingy heaven came all day, thick and silent, the whirling snow,—and so by exquisite succession of sight and sound have I been taken from the top of the year to the bottom of it, from midsummer, with its unreaped harvests, to the night on which I am sitting here—Christmas, 1862.

Sitting here, I incontinently find myself holding a levee of departed Christmas nights. Silently, and without special call, into my study of imagination come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, brooched and gemmed with frosts. Their numbers I do not care to count, for I know they are the numbers of my years. The visages of two or three are sad enough, but on the whole 'tis a congregation of jolly ghosts. The nostrils of my memory are assailed by a faint odour of plum-pudding and burnt brandy. I hear a sound as of light music, a whisk of women's dresses whirled round in dance, a click as of glasses pledged by friends. Before one of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made grave, on which the snow is lying. I know, I know! Drape thyself not in white like the others, but in mourning stole of crape; and instead of dance music, let there haunt around thee the service for the dead! I know that sprig of Mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst! Under it I swung the girl I loved—girl no more now than I am a boy—and kissed her spite of blush and pretty shriek. And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in hand, over which blue tongues of flame are playing, do I know—most ancient apparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night. Back to very days of childhood am I taken by the ghostly raisins simmering in a ghostly brandy flame. Where now the merry boys and girls that thrust their fingers in thy blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also would I drape in black raiment, around thee also would I make the burial service murmur.

Men hold the anniversaries of their birth, of their marriage, of the birth of their first-born, and they hold—although they spread no feast, and ask no friends to assist—many another anniversary besides. On many a day in every year does a man remember what took place on that self-same day in some former year, and chews the sweet or bitter herb of memory, as the case may be. Could I ever hope to write a decent Essay, I should like to write one "On the Revisiting of Places." It is strange how important the poorest human being is to himself! how he likes to double back on his experiences, to stand on the place he has stood on before, to meet himself face to face, as it were! I go to the great city in which my early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim. The only thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connected with myself. I don't think this passion of reminiscence is debased by the slightest taint of vanity. The lamp-post, under the light of which in the winter rain there was a parting so many years ago, I contemplate with the most curious interest. I stare on the windows of the houses in which I once lived, with a feeling which I should find difficult to express in words. I think of the life I led there, of the good and the bad news that came, of the sister who died, of the brother who was born; and were it at all possible, I should like to knock at the once familiar door, and look at the old walls—which could speak to me so strangely—once again. To revisit that city is like walking away back into my yesterdays. I startle myself with myself at the corners of streets, I confront forgotten bits of myself at the entrance to houses. In windows which to another man would seem blank and meaningless, I find personal poems too deep to be ever turned into rhymes—more pathetic, mayhap, than I have ever found on printed page. The spot of ground on which a man has stood is for ever interesting to him. Every experience is an anchor holding him the more firmly to existence. It is for this reason that we hold our sacred days, silent and solitary anniversaries of joy and bitterness, renewing ourselves thereby, going back upon ourselves, living over again the memorable experience. The full yellow moon of next September will gather into itself the light of the full yellow moons of Septembers long ago. In this Christmas night all the other Christmas nights of my life live. How warm, breathing, full of myself is the year 1862, now almost gone! How bare, cheerless, unknown, the year 1863, about to come in! It stretches before me in imagination like some great, gaunt untenanted ruin of a Colosseum, in which no footstep falls, no voice is heard; and by this night year its naked chambers and windows, three hundred and sixty-five in number, will be clothed all over, and hidden by myself as if with covering ivies. Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.

This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. The smith's hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle is at rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces—the latter a little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; in the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers—and took their places decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the beautiful prayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at any other period. For that very feeling which breaks down at this time the barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and man, strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the worshipper of to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest in their graves. On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a kinship with the devout generations who heard them long ago. The devout lips of the Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur; along this road of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead, our brothers and sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as ours at present approach Him. Prayers over, the clergyman—who is no Boanerges, or Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted, pious man, the whole extent of his life from boyhood until now, full of charity and kindly deeds, as autumn fields with heavy wheaten ears; the clergyman, I say—for the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and one must double back to secure connexion—read out in that silvery voice of his, which is sweeter than any music to my ear, those chapters of the New Testament that deal with the birth of the Saviour. And the red-faced rustic congregation hung on the good man's voice as he spoke of the Infant brought forth in a manger, of the shining angels that appeared in mid-air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took its station in the sky, and of the wise men who came from afar and laid their gifts of frankincense and myrrh at the feet of the child. With the story every one was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the persuasive melody of the reader's voice, it seemed to all quite new—at least, they listened attentively as if it were. The discourse that followed possessed no remarkable thoughts; it dealt simply with the goodness of the Maker of heaven and earth, and the shortness of time, with the duties of thankfulness and charity to the poor; and I am persuaded that every one who heard returned to his house in a better frame of mind. And so the service remitted us all to our own homes, to what roast-beef and plum-pudding slender means permitted, to gatherings around cheerful fires, to half-pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the dead and the absent.

From sermon I have returned like the others, and it is my purpose to hold Christmas alone. I have no one with me at table, and my own thoughts must be my Christmas guests. Sitting here, it is pleasant to think how much kindly feeling exists this present night in England. By imagination I can taste of every table, pledge every toast, silently join in every roar of merriment. I become a sort of universal guest. With what propriety is this jovial season, placed amid dismal December rains and snows! How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom everything is turned topsy-turvy, and who hold Christmas at midsummer! The face of Christmas glows all the brighter for the cold. The heart warms as the frost increases. Estrangements which have embittered the whole year, melt in to-night's hospitable smile. There are warmer hand-shakings on this night than during the by-past twelve months. Friend lives in the mind of friend. There is more charity at this time than at any other. You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the half-benumbed musicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any other time you would consider their performance a nuisance, and call angrily for the police. Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless grates, come home at this season to the bosoms of the rich, and they give of their abundance. The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his Christmas feast. Good feeling incarnates itself in plum-pudding. The Master's words, "The poor ye have always with you," wear at this time a deep significance. For at least one night on each year over all Christendom there is brotherhood. And good men, sitting amongst their families, or by a solitary fire like me, when they remember the light that shone over the poor clowns huddling on the Bethlehem plains eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition of shining angels overhead, the song "Peace on earth and good-will toward men," which for the first time hallowed the midnight air,—pray for that strain's fulfilment, that battle and strife may vex the nations no more, that not only on Christmas-eve, but the whole year round, men shall be brethren owning one Father in heaven.

Although suggested by the season, and by a solitary dinner, it is not my purpose to indulge in personal reminiscence and talk. Let all that pass. This is Christmas-day, the anniversary of the world's greatest event. To one day all the early world looked forward; to the same day the later world looks back. That day holds time together. Isaiah, standing on the peaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires and the desolations of many centuries, and saw on the horizon the new star arise, and was glad. On this night eighteen hundred years ago, Jove was discrowned, the Pagan heaven emptied of its divinities, and Olympus left to the solitude of its snows. On this night, so many hundred years bygone, the despairing voice was heard shrieking on the Aegean, "Pan is dead, great Pan is dead!" On this night, according to the fine reverence of the poets, all things that blast and blight are powerless, disarmed by sweet influence:—

"Some say that ever 'gainst the season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike; No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm: So hallowed and so gracious is the time."

The flight of the Pagan mythology before the new faith has been a favourite subject with the poets; and it has been my custom for many seasons to read Milton's "Hymn to the Nativity" on the evening of Christmas-day. The bass of heaven's deep organ seems to blow in the lines, and slowly and with many echoes the strain melts into silence. To my ear the lines sound like the full-voiced choir and the rolling organ of a cathedral, when the afternoon light streaming through the painted windows fills the place with solemn colours and masses of gorgeous gloom. To-night I shall float my lonely hours away on music:—

"The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving: Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

"The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament: From haunted spring, and dale Edged with poplars pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent: With flower-enwoven tresses torn The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn.

"Peor and Baalim Forsake their temples dim With that twice-battered god of Palestine; And mooned Ashtaroth, Heaven's queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine! The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn, In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.

"And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol, all of blackest hue: In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king In dismal dance about the furnace blue: The Brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste.

"He feels from Juda's land The dreaded Infant's hand, The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne: Nor all the gods beside Dare longer there abide, Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine. Our Babe to shew His Godhead true Can in His swaddling bands control the damned crew."

These verses, as if loath to die, linger with a certain persistence in mind and ear. This is the "mighty line" which critics talk about! And just as in an infant's face you may discern the rudiments of the future man, so in the glorious hymn may be traced the more majestic lineaments of the "Paradise Lost."

Strangely enough, the next noblest dirge for the unrealmed divinities which I can call to remembrance, and at the same time the most eloquent celebration of the new power and prophecy of its triumph, has been uttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be termed a Christian poet. It is one of the choruses in "Hellas," and perhaps had he lived longer amongst us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains. Of this I am certain, that before his death the mind of that brilliant genius was rapidly changing,—that for him the cross was gathering attractions round it,—that the wall which he complained had been built up between his heart and his intellect was being broken down, and that rays of a strange splendour were already streaming upon him through the interstices. What a contrast between the darkened glory of "Queen Mab"—of which in afterlife he was ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression of opinion—and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this triumphant poem!—

"A power from the unknown God, A Promethean conqueror came: Like a triumphal path he trod The thorns of death and shame. A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim Which the orient planet animates with light. Hell, sin, and slavery came Like bloodhounds mild and tame, Nor prey'd until their lord had taken flight. The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While blazon'd, as on heaven's immortal noon, The Cross leads generations on.